The Olive Grove by Deborah Rohan

The Olive Grove – a Palestinian Story, by Deborah Rohan. London: Saqi, 2008.

This book will leave the reader wanting to do some research and find out more about Israel/Palestine, to get a larger picture of the rights and wrongs. It is hard to be sure which parts of the book are historically accurate, and which are fiction; a lot of background knowledge would be needed to be able to sort it out. The book does not actually claim to be history, but a fictionalised account of one family’s story – though my library, interestingly, has it firmly in the “History” section, and large parts of the book are devoted to people explaining Palestine’s situation, and its causes, to one another at length.

To start on a positive note, this book is a good read: the story is engaging and claims one's interest. However, it is not good literature. Some of the incidents, and many of the characters’ reactions, seem stilted and contrived. The prose is patchy at best, often hopelessly awkward, and sometimes the author simply can’t work out the structure of her own sentences, as on p. 97: “He had repeatedly blamed himself for Hagop’s departure on his own need to have tobacco.” Rohan also has the widespread American habit of using the first word that comes to mind, without checking what it really means. E.g. “languish” when she really meant “pause” or simply “lie”: again and again, “Haniya languished in the doorway”, “olives languished on a plate”. Or “donned”: “Raji spotted the soldiers donned in red and white headdresses”. There are plenty of other examples.

It does not convey the reality of Palestinian life and culture, or make the Palestinian character come alive – rather than being a “Palestinian Story”, as its subtitle claims, it’s a family story, and the family is an American one with Palestinian bits added on for decoration. All the characters are drawn as Americans, which comes across as completely out of place – e.g., on p. 66, Hagop the Armenian says to Kamel who is reproaching himself for leaving Hagop to be attacked by two Turks, “Don’t do that to yourself, Kamel. Things happen. You were there for me.” This is a late-twentieth-century American talking, not an early-twentieth-century Armenian. The whole atmosphere of the book is very Western. There is scene after scene of the Moghrabi children playing, which can end up being merely tedious; the author was presumably trying to build up a picture of family life in Palestine, but lacked the skill to do it successfully. A much better picture of another culture is achieved in Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, poorly written though it is.

The action in The Olive Grove is slow and often plodding. Even when Kamel is in prison, there is not much of a feel of what it is like because only the most obvious and superficial, almost clichéd, details are given. Fair enough, the author was re-working what she had been told by Hamzi, and maybe didn’t have very much to go on – but did she try to find out? The reader repeatedly wonders whether Rohan had done any investigation or information-gathering at all – did she have any idea of the real scene in a Palestinian refugee camp? She talks about the stench – but then Hamzi got used to it, and that is all. She doesn’t explain how these destitute people could find money to buy his cigarettes, yet he seems to have supported himself by selling them.

A question about the Moghrabi family which does not seem to be explained in the book is why they were not practising Muslims. The reader also notices that the Moghrabis do not represent the majority of Palestinians, in that they are a rich family, and even in exile in Lebanon, after their money has run out, they are still only relatively poor – they never live in the refugee camp themselves.

The Palestinian people in the book appear too perfect, and the Jewish people and others are demonized.  It could be a good book for softening attitudes towards Islam, but leads one to dislike the Jews intensely – though it does distinguish between (bad) Zionists and “good Jews”, in the person of Rabbi Moussa.

Other “good” characters in the book are the Arab Christians who hid and protected their Jewish or Palestinian neighbours at the risk of their own lives.  Dr White, the American director of Hamzi’s school in Lebanon, championed Hamzi and tried to help his Palestinian pupils react positively instead of going for retaliation and revenge.

The book raises the whole question of Jewish identity, how it comes to be wrapped up with that particular piece of land – the Promised Land – and the question of anti-Semitism and the results of the Second World War. If the Palestinians are actually Philistines, then their claim to that land goes back even further than the claim of the Jews does – though the Jews’ claim is not based on antiquity so much as a God-given promise. However, the Jews in Israel appear to be Zionists first and worshippers of God only a very poor second, if that. The book does not mention the fact that Jews and Palestinians are, by all accounts, very closely related, but this is a fact that it is important to bear in mind.

Readers who come to this book knowing nothing about the British in Palestine will be shocked at how they behaved, not only on the large scale, but also in the story of Lieutenant Bainbridge and Mahmoud’s and Kamel’s rifle (which ends on pp. 280-1). The picture is of arrogant British supremacy: “I want your property and I am stronger than you, so I’m going to have it.” In dealing with the situation in Palestine after the Second World War, the British clearly did not know what they were dealing with. They were seriously to blame for this, because they should have taken pains to find out since they had assumed responsibility for the country. They made and broke promises to both sides, both the Jews and the Palestinians.

It is also clear that the UN is at least as much to blame for the situation of Israel/Palestine as the British.

The same achingly desperate story of wrongs could be written and told by a Jewish family. Stories of atrocities by Palestinians are part of what every Jewish person knows. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that this book was written in America for Americans, who are used to Israel being “right” because the US supports it (not the other way round). Do we get a slightly more balanced picture in the UK? At least we hear a lot more from the Palestinian side. Neither side (taken as a whole) can ever see that two wrongs don’t make a right. However, Kamel and Hamzi are “enlightened” Palestinians and can see it more clearly than most. Although they don’t often make the international news, there are people on both sides who are working to unite the two communities at the local level, just as there were people doing the same in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles.

Finally, there is an absolutely amazing episode on pp. 420-431. Fifty years on, Hamzi, with his adult daughter, goes back to Israel-Palestine on a brief visit from America. They go to his former family home and find it is a café, owned by a Palestinian. When he tells the owner, George, who he is,

George’s face grows ashen. He stands up, nods an ‘excuse me’ to Ruba, and leaves the room. Moments later he returns, holding a set of keys. ‘Please, sir, the restaurant is yours.’

‘What? I don’t understand.’

‘If you have returned to your home, after these many years, I will gladly turn over my business to you. I do not wish to prosper from anyone so hurt by the Israeli occupation. My family could not flee. For many years we suffered, but at least we had the good fortune to remain in our country. Now we are allowed to run our own businesses.’ He nods his head again. ‘Consider the restaurant yours.’

Hamzi has to refuse, of course, since he is only being allowed into Israel on a short tourist visa. Did the author (and did Hamzi himself) see that this episode was an astonishing mirror image of the whole miserable question that lies behind the book? After many years of bitter exile, the Jews came back to what had once been their homeland. The present inhabitants, the Palestinians, who had a perfect legal and historical right to the land, could either welcome them as long-lost brothers and hand over the land to them,… or resist them bitterly. The Jews could have treated the Palestinians as friends and neighbours, each side aiming to share generously and equably and treat the other with humanity, fairness, and compassion. But because each side saw the other from the start not as brothers but as enemies – invaders, occupiers – the story of Israel/Palestine has been tragic from the start and continues to be one of hatred and killing, with no real solution imaginable even now.

Tara Road by Maeve Binch

Maeve Binchy, Tara Road

The discussion about Tara Road focused mainly on four points: Characters; quality of writing; what value there might be in reading a well-told story with bad morals; and whether we would recommend it to other people. It’s only fair to say that opinions on all four points were very diverse! What follows is a bit of a summary, leaving out all the debating.

The characters provided plenty to talk about: everybody disliked and despised Danny Lynch for his all-round cheating – basically the person he was in love with was himself –, and Rosemary Ryan for pretending to be Ria’s friend while having an ongoing affair with her husband; it was hard to understand how anyone could be so steely and selfish.

Some people thought Ria was excellently drawn and others felt she was too naïve to be true; it was noticeable that the house-swap enabled her to change conclusively and face life in a way she had never done before.

For more than one reader, the catastrophically inappropriate schoolboy Brian was a favourite. Colm Barry was intended to be a sympathetic and attractive character, but there was too much missing that one would want to know about him, as though time or space constraints had forced the author to leave, or cut, parts of the story out.

At least one reader felt that all the older-generation Irishwomen – Nora Johnson, Danny’s mother, Martin Moran’s mother – were depicted as poor-spirited and bitter. We talked about that generation of Irish people – women – in Catholic parishes in England: a generation of talented women, hard workers, unbelievably generous with their time and efforts, who have found that there is no-one to take over from them because their children, the next generation, are totally different and have no intention of following in their footsteps in any way at all.

The question arose of why Danny turned out the way he did: was it because his parents seemed incapable of family relationships and had no “parenting skills” whatsoever, and so he had had no proper family upbringing?

It was felt by some that the characters were shallow stereotypes, a neatly-chosen range of stock figures with which to decorate the stage, and that there was simply not enough depth in them to make a satisfying read.

The quality of writing: like all Binchy novels it’s popular fiction. It makes exciting reading, and Binchy manages to keep all the characters before our eyes, with short episodes, conversations and events, moving rapidly from one to another all the time. 

The introduction of Marilyn, and her story, halfway through the book, is very well done indeed by means of the telephone conversation.

The mirroring between Ria and Marilyn is too obviously contrived for art: each simultaneously goes through a sense of anger towards the other, and then each simultaneously discovers a highly significant fact about the other’s life, which she realises she can never tell the other about; each then reacts by feeling protective and positive towards the other.

On the other hand, there are sentences here and there throughout the book where the reader feels, “She just dashed this down meaning to go back and write it properly later, but then forgot…” Plus what we said about   the character of Colm Barry above.

Why read a book like this – easy reading, good story, about people with really bad morals? For people who read it uncritically, just for entertainment, there is a lot in it that would be really harmful, simply because it presents really wrong choices and situations as ordinary – the way everyone lives, the things everyone does. So people are helped to accept and do these things themselves and never see anything wrong with them. That is the way immoral literature, at the highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow levels, has been working for the last century or so, and has done a huge amount of harm to society.

But if you read Maeve Binchy critically, it can, we thought, be very useful too. In the first place, it helps to put ourselves in the places of the many people we know who do live in that way and understand where they are at. Secondly, you can ask yourself, “At this point, this person made a really bad choice. What would have been a good choice for him or her to make? What could have helped him or her to make it? What would have been some likely results?” A very useful exercise indeed in many ways!

Would we recommend this book to anyone else, and if so, to whom and what for? It turned out that none of us would recommend it just as a good read. It would be an entertaining and relaxing book to read, for instance, while convalescing - but there are plenty of other books which are equally entertaining, more relaxing, better written, and without the unpleasantness of this one. It has its usefulness only as a critical teaching tool in the right hands.

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

This book produced predictably divided opinions among Woodlands book clubbers. The notion of Death as narrator, and his view of human life, is quite extraordinary. It is very cleverly done, and not overdone.
What is notably missing from the book is any answer to the question of where Death takes the souls once he has taken them from their bodies. He just takes them. No idea of life after death; God is as much of a mystery to Death as to the most ignorant agnostic. And then somehow Death has a conversation with Liesel after her own death, looking back on her life! The author, for all his cleverness, has not really thought things through properly.
Apart from Liesel, Max and Rudy, people were much impressed by Hans Hubermann and, of course, the really surprising transformation of Rosa.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Monday 11^th June 2012

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003

People found this book a very compelling read. Some were surprised that it is a children’s book as they were not sure what children would make of it. It certainly helps one to understand a bit better when people look odd or behave oddly.

Some days before the meeting, Ranmali sent round a link to an online questionnaire pointing to certain character features on the Asperger’s Syndrome / autistic spectrum. The website makes it clear that many people who do not actually suffer from those disorders can have plenty of these features. Sure enough, Helena, Ana and Irene all found they had scores of between 24 and 32 – relatively high! Introduction and link copied at the end of this post.

Notes and reflections stemming from our discussion:

Christopher needs to work by rules – loves mathematics and science; when Rhodri asks how he’s doing, ‘I said “I’m doing very well, thank you,” which is what you are supposed to say.’ He wants there to be rules for understanding human facial expressions, and cannot deal with metaphors – and so dislikes and despises them; dislikes novels.

No understanding of love at all. “I know Father loves me because...” and a check-list. When he becomes afraid of his father, he works out that he will have to go to his mother after discounting other possibilities on his list, not because he loves her; he cannot respond to her when she wants to hold his hand.

He sees people – his parents, Siobhan – in totally utilitarian terms, as people who are, or are not, useful to him. When he gets exam panic, “I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army Knife, but there wasn’t anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army Knife except the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my Swiss Army Knife he wouldn’t be my invigilator for the rest of the exam.”

His happiest dream is a world without any human being except himself, and possibly other people like him, where everyone else has died or been killed.

He wants to reduce everything to something that works by rules and is therefore intelligible – his mind, other people, and the universe; and concludes that belief in God is just stupidity.

Haddon is a professed atheist. He has said that Christopher isn’t meant to be autistic or Aspergers Syndrome, specifically. To a believer, it seems as though Christopher is a portrait of what happens to people who close their minds to the spirit.

Both his parents really love him. His father is determined to rebuild their relationship no matter how long it takes. His mother, although she walked out, is constant in writing to him even though she never gets a reply. The spelling mistakes in her letters make you feel you know her. She doesn’t handle Christopher well at all (and recognises this). His father handles him much better (and recognises it, because ‘we’re not that different, me and you’).

There is a lot of irony in the book in that Christopher describes his father’s reactions and behaviour without any understanding of what he is feeling, but the reader understands Ed and suffers with him.

--

Take The AQ Test
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

Dr Thorne, by Anthony Trollope

Tuesday 8th May 2012

We discussed Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope. Two things were highlighted particularly: money and humour.

Trollope's novel shows how money counted for absolutely everything in the society he was describing - because Miss Dunstable was extremely rich, she was fêted and courted by the noble families of the country despite her plebeian birth. Once Mary Thorne was known to have inherited Roger Scatcherd's wealth, she was instantly a perfect wife for Frank Gresham, even though she was illegitimate, and she is graciously and even obsequiously received by his mother, the aristocratic Lady Arabella. This is highlighted  all the more by the snobbishness and pretentiousness of Lady A and her high-born connections, who had previously banished Mary from Greshamsbury in case she should "ensnare" Frank.
The humour in the book was enormously appreciated by most, though not all, readers. Trollope pokes gentle fun at himself as author, at us his readers, and most of all at his characters. He convinces you that he really enjoys writing, whether or not that was really the case. Most obvious, of course, are the silly names he invents - the political agents Mr Nearthewinde and Mr Closerstil, the venal publican Mr Reddypalm, the awful Doctor Fillgrave, and more. But Trollope has plenty of much more subtle humourous touches.
The characters are very distinct from one another and very convincing. Even Mary, who in some respects is too good to be true, has plenty of backbone and stands up for herself in speaking with Lady Arabella - perfectly politely and respectfully, but very firmly as well. Frank is a very nice but very spoilt boy at the beginning of the book - on his twenty-first birthday - and in the course of the next two years or so he really grows up, taking command of his own life in a very determined way. Some people's absolute favourite was Miss Dunstable. She is not in any way overwhelmed by all the adulation she receives, is sick and tired of men proposing to her simply because of her wealth, but still manages to be polite and friendly. She is older than Frank, understands him completely and likes him very much, and will not allow him to propose to her as he has been virtually forced by his aunt to do. Miss Dunstable urges him to be true to himself and to Mary Thorne no matter what. And this despite the fact that, as she confesses to Mary much later, she herself finds him very loveable.

Brixton Beach by R. Tearne, William Wilberforce by W Hague, and list

Feb-March 2012: Brixton Beach, Roma Tearne

We had a brilliant meeting about Brixton Beach, further enhanced by a delicious lamb curry with dhal, and illustrated books, old and new, about Sri Lanka, brought along by Ranmali.

The characterisation is excellent, the different people in the book are well-rounded, convincing characters whom you feel you have actually met. Most striking of all were the descriptions of the beauty of Sri Lanka / Ceylon, especially the sea, with the light and the colours. It didn't come as a surprise that the writer is also a painter. People also liked the descriptions of eating and the different types of food, which Ranmali was able to explain. She herself was very struck by seeing in print, for the first time, things that she had always heard - anay, "men!" for "mate", and others.

What some people really disliked about the book was the fact that it went from one tragedy to another. Every time you thought that there was a chance of things working out well for someone, wham! down came the next disaster. It wasn't at all clear why Tearne had called the different sections of the book 'Bel Canto', 'Paradiso', 'Inferno', 'Purgatorio', and 'Bel Canto' again, because the disasters occur throughout. It is not a book to read if you are feeling down. We discussed the question of the Buddhist world-view, which might have been the reason why the characters seemed to do nothing to try and improve a bad or hopeless situation, when they could have taken action to change things. The saddest part was Alice's marriage - both of them wanted it to succeed but they didn't work at it and the result was the marriage fell apart.

Bee was a general favourite, and his relationship with his wife Kamala was beautiful, based on real understanding, acceptance, and friendship, that had matured into love. Both of them were sincerely good people committed to each other, and to trying to help those in need. Janake too was a realistic, lovely, caring person. A striking thing was the representation of the Sea House as a living person, and then, after the assassinations, as a dead one.

Dec2011 -Feb 2012, William Wilberforce, William Hague

Although I don't think any of us had actually got to the end of the book, everyone had got a lot out of it. One bookclubber asked whether Hague could have reduced the background content by 10 – 20% and without losing the book's significance, so that the book could be read in a reasonable amount of time?

People were really enthused about WW's character: his honesty and integrity first of all, and his charm and gift for friendship, and his persistence: the fact that although he kept on getting beaten, he never even considered giving up. And he didn't do it out of natural stubbornness - he really suffered over the way that people who'd been captured as slaves were being treated, year after year, and was determined to help them. We wondered someone with his gifts, principles and determination could have the same effect on Britain today - what he did was comparable to campaigning for a reversal of the abortion laws now. Today's media, of course, is a factor that didn't exist in his time.

We also liked the bit about how he got swamped with letters and never actually got to the end of answering them because he wasn't business-like about it at all!

A really good thing about the book was that the author is someone who's been in Parliament all his life so he knows exactly what he's talking about - what it's like, what the issues are, how it worked then as well as now.

We needed the historical background filling in to understand the situation WW and Pitt were in - the ongoing state of war against France, the huge amounts being paid by Britain to other countries just to keep them in the fight, and the fear of a revolution in England like the French one.

We had a long and interesting digression about slavery today. Apparently the second largest "business" in the world today in terms of money is slavery and people-trafficking! And unlike the 18th century it is completely invisible. That would be another field for a "modern Wilberforce" to work on.

September-October, The Translator, Daoud Hari

July-September 2011, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows; AND I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

June-July 2011, The House of Special Purpose, John Boyne

March-May 2011, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

February- March 2011Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua

February-March 2011 Silas Marner, George Eliot

Jan-Feb 2011 The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery