A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

A Civil Contract

 by Georgette Heyer, first published 1961

All of Heyer’s Regency novels are simple escapism; this one is certainly that, but at the same time it gives readers a lot to think about. The theme could be stated quite simply as “Romantic love versus matrimonial love”.

Adam Deveril, an officer in Wellington’s army, in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Julia Oversley, has just succeeded to his father’s title of Viscount Lynton, and finds himself overwhelmed by his late father’s massive debts. In order to provide for his family and save Fontley, the family home, he marries the plebeian Jenny Chawleigh, daughter of a very wealthy banker. The book follows their first year of married life, up until the Battle of Waterloo (18th June 1815).

As in all Heyer’s books, the research is impeccable. From Adam’s colonel in the 52nd Regiment, to the exact day and time when the news of Waterloo reached London, from the behaviour of the Prince Regent to the fashions of the day in hats and dresses, the details are reliable and accurate.

The other very enjoyable feature that this book shares with other Heyer novels is the excellent writing. Not a single sentence jars; plenty of them are memorable. In A Civil Contract, perhaps more than in any of her other books, Heyer sets herself to give a very complete picture of the main characters in the book.

Adam is a gentleman through and through: his character traits are loyalty, chivalry, honesty, a sense of humour, and strength of character (he holds out in support of Wellington against surrounding friends who are Whigs). Fastidious, even finicky, reserved, he retires behind “an impenetrable barrier” when displeased or upset. He is deeply attached to Fontley; he loved soldiering, but turns out to be a farmer at heart. He loathes accepting gifts – either from Lord Oversley or from Mr Chawleigh.

He feels a romantic love for Julia; over the course of the book he develops a solid matrimonial love for Jenny. Having taken the decision to marry her, he commits himself fully to his marriage. Right from the start, as soon as they were married, “He did pity her, and forgot his own aching heart in the need to reassure her.” Later on, Julia suggests that since they both still love each other, they could have an affair: he rejects the suggestion out of a sense of honour, and loyalty and compassion for Jenny. We witness his feelings develop from his reply to Julia’s question “ ‘Can you be happy?’ A tiny headshake answered her”, through “he had grown to be fond of (Jenny) — so fond, he realized, that if, by the wave of a wand he could cause her to disappear he would not wave it”, to “ ‘I do love you, Jenny,’ he said gently. ‘Very much indeed — and I couldn’t do without you’.” By the end of the book he has recognised what Julia’s father, and Adam’s friend Brough, had seen clearly from the start: that Julia and he would have been very badly suited.

Jenny’s character includes common sense, generosity, and strength of character. She is well-educated and intelligent; loving, forthright, blunt, understanding, and perceptive. We discover that she has been secretly in love with Adam ever since she first met him the year before. She is “unromantic”; “a round, rosy face remarkable only for its determination”. “The trend of her mind was practical; she entered into married life in a business-like way; and almost immediately presented the appearance of a wife of several years’ standing. She quickly discovered, and never forgot, his particular fads”. She sets herself to make Adam comfortable by creating a welcoming, well-cared-for home and being constantly even-tempered and undemanding – though being pregnant, and unwell, causes a considerable change in her behaviour!

The other really remarkable character is Jenny’s father, Mr Chawleigh. He is rough, generous, vulgar, too old to learn, sharp, decent, honest, and bullying. He is ambitious for Jenny to enter high society, but not for himself: he recognises that he would only appear ridiculous among “the nobs”. Adam says to Jenny at one stage, “I think there can be no more generous persons alive than you and your father.” Adam and Mr Chawleigh have several clashes, but in the end, recognising how totally different they are, they each learn to respect and even admire the other. Adam reflects about Chawleigh that “He did not know that the things he said were unpardonable, or that self-control in moments of stress was incumbent on him. He had fought his way up in the world with no other weapons than his hard head and his ruthless will. He was brutal but generous, overbearing yet curiously humble, and he gave way to his emotions with the ease of a child.”

Sacred Tears by Rod Grigson

Sacred Tears by Rod Grigson

(Authorhouse, 2013)

Having the opportunity of reading a draft of a book that has not yet been published means you are conscious of reading in two different ways – firstly, as a draft, weighing it up and seeing what is good and what could be improved; and secondly, as a book, in terms of plot, characters, style, etc. You realize what hard work it is to write a whole book! Just to do all that writing, and keep all the different elements of the plot in one’s head at the same time!

Descriptions

The descriptions are really striking and in many ways better than the action. Especially the food – the tea, the roti, etc. The author would certainly also make a good restaurant critic!

Characters

All the characters spoke in exactly the same way. Nadim, Samir, David…, all have the same voice. The women in particular, Priyani, Danika, and the others, are all exactly the same, there is nothing to tell them apart. Yet they are supposed to be from different backgrounds and cultures. Also, when they meet, they just make friends, carry on as if they’ve known and trusted each other all their lives, and that’s the end of the story. Very unrealistic indeed. Plus David and Priyani falling in love, Samir and Danika… both couples made for each other, all settled in no time, no kind of development.

Publishing

Most of us came to the conclusion that the book is so long, and gives such vivid pictures of some episodes, that it would actually make a good film – in fact a better film than book, in many ways.

Plot

Good story. Completely convincing (unlike The Olive Grove or The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) – this is someone who really does seem to have experienced what he is writing about first hand, both David’s life in Sri Lanka and Sami’s guerrilla fighting in Beirut and Sri Lanka. From the problems and the way they tackle them, right down to Asilin’s coconut-scraper (which almost all of us picked on for special note!).

Style

A lot of the book reads very well, but many other parts of it are very badly written. It needs a thorough re-write (sorry!) for punctuation and grammar, which is often poor (particularly the absence of commas), and, even more importantly, for the very amateur-sounding explanatory sentences and clauses right the way through. Not the fact that sentences are almost always short and simple, or the frequency of one-sentence paragraphs, in the actual narrative: those are the way this kind of book should be written, because they convey the protagonists’ level of thought effectively. The parts that need re-writing are the sort of sentence that occurs on virtually every page, that suddenly bring the movement of the narrative to a grinding halt – to take one example completely at random:

David looked across at the Colonel waiting for permission to speak. The Colonel nodded his head signalling David to begin. (p. 349)

This revising should be done not by the author, but by someone who has professional experience in writing, editing and proof-reading. It would be really worth it – though it would cost a fair amount of money.

Detail

The wealth of detail is brilliant, but this too slows up the whole story. It seems to move so slowly that most if not all readers soon started speed-reading or skimming through the book, rather than reading every page properly.

Title

None of us could explain the title of the book. The only part it seemed to be relevant to was the massacre at the Temple.

Episodes

David and Charmaine (Chapter 4). This episode showed a relationship that was totally typical of the difference in attitudes between men and women. “What they had suited David perfectly.” But as soon as Charmaine realised that that was all he wanted, that he was not interested in any kind of commitment, let alone in marrying her, she broke off the relationship and went to Australia. Unlike David, she had seen their relationship as implying, and leading to, genuine commitment. I’m not suggesting any change is needed here, though it could be interesting to bring out the difference between the way David saw Charmaine, and the way he saw Priyani, even if he didn’t reflect on that difference himself.

Father Daniel (or Daniels) and chastity (Chapter 8): “chastity is a choice, there is nothing in God’s law that forbids us to have wives.” But Catholic priests in general, and Jesuits in particular as members of a religious order, take a solemn vow of celibacy. Is Father Daniel/s supposed to have somehow forgotten it, or convinced himself that it doesn’t matter? Has he been set a bad example by other priests and has he not had anyone to put him straight? Is he not in contact with any of his superiors? Something more needs adding here.

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.

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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