Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

I read this very well known and loved, Gone with the Wind - published in 1936, for the very first time just recently and I am glad I did - all 1,000 plus pages of it. It is a very exciting story , very well written backed by incredible research and based around personal background knowledge. It is peopled by several memorable characters , with a mighty setting around a great historical event which all makes for a tale on a grand scale. For me however the most outstanding and enthralling aspect of it all is the fictionalised historical background to the Amrerican Civil War from the point of the view of the South and in particular the aftermath Reconstruction period and its affect on Southern society. This was a part of this terrible war history that I was ignorant about . I am sure we are getting a very Southern view of this period from Margaret Mitchell , a proud and biased Southener, nevertheless it is fascinating one and has made me more aware of the background and some of the differences, sensibilities and perceptions in US Society even today.

Margaret Mitchell obviously knew this society so well - and even though she was writing about an earlier generation -it reads , in some ways, like a personal account of these happenings. The background detail of the society is incredibly strong . The desciptions and insights into Plantation life and the City of Atlanta are engrossing. All the prejudices about race, the impossible ideal of the southern white belle , the southern white male who must bear arms and fight to defend his and his family's honour against lesser mortals and northeners at any time , the fearful Ku Klux Klan - are so clearly and powerfully displayed in this story. The film was very good , followed the story quite well but it didnt really bring out the points about Reconstruction, Racism and and the Society mores near as well as in the book. Apparently this was a deliberate decision by Director Selznick- the racism and Southern bias was just too mush for his and Hollywood's sensibilities - the film came out in 1939 and was an instant success as was the book. We know Margaret Mitchell took 10 years to write it and that she published no other novels. The sales and the film made her very wealthy.

Re the characters one could go on and on about them - Could someone like Ashley really exist outside Scarlet's imagination ? Is Melanie too good for words? I understand that most young American women of the 50s and 60s considered Melanie was the main heroine to be admired and emulated whereas recent surveying in US schools has young women choosing Scarlett as their favourite and most admired character in the book. Margaret Mitchell is said to have thought Melanie was the main heroine - the perfect example of Southern womanhood - but I suspect Scarlett developed a life of her own for the author. For me, some of the very best minor characters are the white older dowager Women of Atlanta society - they are drawn affectionately by Mitchell - warts and all and are essential to the "feel" of the place. The sad racism means that none of the black characters can be believed - charicature and stereotyping are the norm .

My main thought is that one can enjoy and read this for the excitment and grandeur of the story and the clever writing however a current day reader gets most from it as as a major social and historical novel giving special insight into the regional mindset of some folks in the Southern (Dixieland) States of America. I think it is well worth reading. I would be delighted to hear from others about their experiences of reading it recently or years ago.

“Truth” by Peter Temple

Readers who first came to read Peter Temple through his very popular and lyrical “Broken Shore” may be a little surprised with “Truth” – I am one of those - I was surprised that is -but then not disappointed.

“Truth” features Inspector Villani, chief of the Victorian homicide squad who was a Melbourne based senior colleague of Joe Cashin in the earlier, novel which was set in a sylvan Victorian country setting. This one by contrast takes place almost wholly in the urban setting or at least it feels like that.

It is a tough uncompromising style of cop novel. There are a couple of gruesome murders being investigated by Villani and his squad. Along the way there are several compromising issues and incidents involving the inspectors and their seniors. Villani himself, is faced with leadership issues, moral questions and a series of major personal versus career crises – with his wife, daughters, brother and father for starters. It is realism plus and all takes place over a relatively short period of a week or even less It is packed with detail brought out with terse dialogue and in depth backgound detail - a movie almost in the making I think.

On the dialogue which is a special feature of the novel’s style – one cannot help but note how terse and realistic and probably authentic it is. I found I needed to read very carefully to keep up with what was going on in the different scenarios and to understand the conversations between the police especially. Temple makes no compromises - he has said that he likes to challenge the reader and indeed he does. You have to literally sit in on conversations – and work out was has gone on before between the conversationalists; fill in the dots; remember earlier references – a sort of literary and concentration puzzle - I think rewardingly so. Apparently his American publishers have requested and are getting a 200 words plus dictionary for the book in order to clarify the Victorian police patois for fans there. In this book especially Temple does remind us of some of the very best of American detective and thriller writers. I wonder, is Melbourne the new crime capital of the world?

I also liked the personal dilemmas Villani faced in this fast paced story involving his daughters, his superiors, his lover and especially with his father. The father is an idiosyncratic character who will not leave his semi rural property with the advent of nearby bushfires. Villani senior’s sons – the chief inspector and his doctor brother are involved in a remarkable series of scenes on this theme towards the end of the book. So there is plenty of personal, family interest throughout the novel along with the action. Villani is a well-drawn successful career policeman and maybe the authenticity of the writing holds up best in encapsulating for the reader what it is like to “live” an intense career like this. I think this is a very fine thriller which meets the criteria for being a work of literature.

What is the “Truth” herein? - Varied I think. The quickly realised truth at the end is a little stunner but then the realism of the book has conditioned you for it.

Faye

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall was the 2009 winner of the Man Booker Prize, probably the most prestigious award for novels in the English speaking world. Unlike many winners of the award, it is not a dauntingly challenging work, demanding dedication and concentration from the reader. Wolf Hall, though a book of 650 pages, is acccessible and readily enjoyable, whilst being intelligent and stimulating.

It is an historical novel, set in one of the most colourful and dramatic periods of English history, the years 1529 to 1536 during which Henry VIII divorced Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, and during which the English Church broke with Rome. The cast is a large one, though rarely confusing, and a very wide range of social settings and types of people appear. But at the centre is Thomas Cromwell, a man of humble origins who rose during this period to be the king's most trusted adviser, and the possessor of great wealth and influence. The novel is recounted in the third person, and usually in the present tense, and we encounter Cromwell in a wide variety of situations, and intereacting with everyone from the king to labourers and people on the fringes of society.

Mantel creates an attractive Cromwell. He is a man of affairs and no otherworldly saint, but he is a loyal servant first of Cardinal Wolsey and then of the king, a good friend, an often compaasionate opponent, a devoted family man, generous to the underdog. He is the most competent of men, a lawyer, administrator, and financial manager of immense skill, a competent linguist in several languages, but also able to turn his hand to cooking a splendid dinner or shoeing a horse. Perhaps as a central figure Cromwell is a bit too perfect, but Mantel is very skillful in making a somewhat unlikely hero attactive to the reader.

Mantel's skill in evoking early Tudor England is immense. She clearly has done extensive reaearch, but her learning is worn lightly, and the world she creates is fascinating, vivid, and convincing. There is no sense of anachronism: one does not have the sense here, as often with historical novels, that some of the characters have twentieth or twenty-first century mindsets inside clothing from centuries past. The language is modern but not jarringly so: the reader is not challenged by any of 'ye olde Englishe speeche'. It is, however, not always easy to know who is speaking. Mantel avoids guidelines of the 'Cromwell replied' kind. The reader will probably find it useful to assume that he' normally means Cromwell.

Modern attitudes to Thomas Cromwell have probably been shaped in large part by Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, which commenced life as a radio play in 1954 but is better known in the 1960 stage version and the 1966 film. In Bolt's work Cromwell is an unscrupulous and ruthless opportunist who contrasts with Thomas More, the saintly martyr for freedom of conscience. There is evidence (including an interview available on YouTube) that Mantel set delibertely about presenting a diametrically opposite view. Her Cromwell is clearly a true 'man for all seasons'; her More, though achieving a certain dignity as his end (which is also the end of the book) approaches, is a shabby, mean-spirited, cruel, religious fanatic. He is probably the closest thing to a villain in Wolf Hall , which generally allows its characters to speak for themselves, and to engender in us some sympathy for their situation and point of view.

It has been suggested that Mantel uses the freedom of the novelist to shed new light on the history of the period, but her work is of course not history, and leading Tudor historian David Starkey has described it as 'tosh'. Certainly not all historians views Cromwell so sympathetically. Past generations admired him as an important creator of the early modern English administrative system and as a man who did much to make England Protestant, but more recently he has been widely viewed as vicious, unscrupulous and cruel, and outraqesously avaricious.

Mantel is said to be working on a follow-up novel dealing with the remaining years of Cromwell's career (which of course ended on the executioner's block, like that of so many who served Henry VIII). This reader looks forward to it with eager anticipation.