Of Corelli's Mandolin and Animal Farm

Two books I’ve just finished reading very recently, and two books I have mixed feelings about. The first I started reading about 8 days ago, found the beginning a little dry but nonetheless gave the plot a little time to bloom before I contemplated casting it into the furnace, and on reflection I’m glad I did. I’m always suspicious when I hear about a book being declared a “modern classic” because that usually means there’s going to be a lot of undertones and allusions and secret messages, etc.

But I, being the devilishly handsome and charitable guy that I am, gave it a whirl and, tantamount to my suspicions, the book left me feeling slightly empty and with a quizzical look ‘pon my face. It’s like being fed a great meal free of charge (or 80p, to be exact), only to discover that after you’ve downed the last bite, a bitter, metallic aftertaste sets in.

So let’s bring all and sundry up to speed. Corelli’s Mandolin centres predominantly around Pelagia, a young, beautiful Grecian woman living with her father, the prestigious Dr. Iannis, in their modest house on the Ionian island of Cephalonia. Set just before the start of the Italian and German occupation of the island during World War 2, the unusually well-education Pelagia finds herself infatuated with local illiterate fisherman Mandras who, in an effort to prove himself worthy of her love, runs off to fight in the war where he serves as what I might describe as a partisan-cum-mercenary.

Meanwhile, the jovial Captain Antonio Corelli arrives as part of the infamous Acqui Division and is billeted in Dr. Iannis’ house where, after some subtle but non-resistant inhospitality and aggression, the two parties eventually come to gradually respect each other. Inevitably, Pelagia and Antonio fall in love against the backdrop of a war that’s slowly coming closer to home, culminating with the ruthless, coincidental and áromantic machinations of both the Nazis and the oppressing hand of fate.

The chronology is mostly linear, with occasional dips into the past via the letters of Carlo, apparently the lovechild of Goliath and Athena, whose hulking corpus of manly flesh somewhat ironically desires that of a homogenous mate. The narrative focuses mainly on Pelagia from the third-person omnipresent perspective, although occasionally the scene shifts to Antonio, Dr. Iannis, Mandras, the Nazis, and one particularly concise entry by the forlorn Pelagia in the first-person.

I have to say, I was very impressed by the book, what with the exuberant use of language that at times felt like sucking on a sweet made out of pure sugar and Prozac and the message it brings across. And then I got to the end.

You see, Mr. De Bee (as you shall be known in this address), not only does the ending of your book conform to that of a pseudo-Shakespearian tragedy, but it is pointless, unnecessary and the slightest bit far-fetched. I firmly believe that it’s not what written that counts, it’s what’s read, and what I chose to do was, after finishing the last 50 pages of the book, crack a mallet against my skull and immediately forget them. That way I could make up a much better ending. I’ll also have you know that I have no intention of reading Birds Without Wings.


Now, Animal Farm. I actually had to keep a pan by my side as I was reading this book to stop all the excess irony and satire from dripping onto the floor. A novel which, if you know the history, pretty much just depicts the Stalinist movement throughout the late 1920s and early ‘30s, but does it in a way so apt and with such good narrative that you can’t help but love it. Plus it has anthropomorphised farm animals, which amused me to no end :).

I won’t go too much into the plot on this one because it’s only 100 pages long, and if you really can’t be assed to read something that short, you probably wouldn’t even be reading this right now. One thing I do love however is how the “government” manipulates language to suit its purpose and how the subtle changes it introduces over time turns society into what the populace were originally rebelling against in the first place, albeit with a much harsher régime in power now.

It shows how easily the commonfolk can be deceived, taken advantage of and basically used by the totalitarian government in charge (perhaps foreshadowing Orwell’s later magnum opus Nineteen Eighty-Four). A very good read for any young Anarchist, or perhaps just someone who likes to read good books. In other words, probably about 23% of the general population.

I would go onto rant about how books have been somewhat neglected as a medium in recent years, outside of schools and workplaces, and supplanted as a means of popular entertainment by obtuse and plentiful television claptrap, but the Jeremy Kyle Show’s on.

I wonder if being a hypocrite is in itself a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy if you’re karma levels are gear towards the negative side. I mean, look at “family values” Republicans. Maybe I should go out, smash a brick through the window of an orphanage and declare that I’ll remain chaste until I’m married.

Today is Saturday.

There’s an interesting thing about Saturday, and I’m not talking about the wild parties that many youths more sociable than I attend, fraternising with their young compatriots and idling away the their free time in a manner much more fun but as equally unproductive as mine. I mean its etymology.

The word “Saturday” dribbled down into Modern English from its Old English cognate “Sæternesdæg", known in the romantic world of the time as “dies Saturni”; literally, “Saturn’s Day”. It is the only day of the week in the English language named after a mythological figure from Roman lore as all the others derive from German polytheism. In Icelandic it’s called “laugardagur”, or “washing day”.

Throughout most of the civilized world, “Saturday” usually means rest, socialising, catching up on housekeeping, engaging in pastimes or drinking beer. I would even go so far as to say that the word encapsulates a very loose meaning of freedom, with connotations that lend happiness to the recipient sure of its impending arrival. In Judaism, Saturday is the Holy Day; the Sabbath; Shabbat. Fittingly it is also a day of rest, albeit one that evokes different feelings when the name is heard.

What Saturday generally means to me can best be analogised by walking down a long corridor to open a closet door, and when you finally do open it the vast and tumultuous boredom casts itself down upon you, leaving just enough time to pick up the pieces and put them back in the closet in time for the next walk.

Saturdays are boring, and despite the fact I know that, the Friday hype never fails to escape me. Maybe it’s because, for all its boredom, Saturday still trumps the pentweekly excursions to school where, in between drinking in the syllabus and contemplating the nature of the existence of such establishments, I have only the ironic joy of looking forward to Saturday to keep my mind in one piece. Or perhaps at peace.

Y’know what would be a better name for Saturday? Limboday. In fact, the whole 2-day weekend should be called that; limbo. The name accurately depicts the unscheduled, unproductive and unordered structure between those 5 days of routine and work. Except that wouldn’t hold up to those who do structure and order their limbo.

It occurs to me that the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side” is never more appropriate when describing school. I, like almost every other schoolchild in the past 70 years, frown upon my set school tasks during those 30 weeks of routine and order, yearning for my extended limbo in the summer, and when the beast finally rolls around I soon grow tired with the monotony of rise-shower-eat-sleep. I wish massage parlours were free.

The connotations of the word “Saturday” give credence to the theory that it should be the day where we feel most free. I find this to be untrue. I can only feel like a slave handed from one master to another when the fetters of rising early and forcing myself to assimilate information of dubious usefulness are replaced with those of boredom, a master of frustratingly benign motivations. Doing things you do not like incurs annoyance, but boredom is a sure-fire way to drive oneself mad.

It seems, contradictory to my earlier statement, that I am of two minds, about Saturday at least. I love/hate it, and it’s this love/hate that annoys me. From a more apathetic standpoint, I can see that the boredom Saturday inflicts on me is, in fact, almost entirely self-inflicted, and then I face the problem of whether to blame myself for that, my situation or my society, or a combination of all three and in which ratios, trying to decipher which is cause and which is effect, or perhaps it is the self-fulfilling prophecy of accepting the effect and allowing the cause to run its course with no motivation on my part to spark an intervention, and if that’s true, who do I blame for that? You are what you eat, and what you are is a healthy combination of what you’re made of and how society moulds your malleable clay into an ever-changing figure with a few discernable, unrelenting features.

I am a clay, and I am being moulded. I cannot change that, because to let the sculptors hands relinquish their grip on me would cause the clay to fall back in its original animalistic state, and I can take comfort in metaphors if nothing else. In my eyes, there’s something too sexual about the thought of a sculptor and clay, so I don’t take any comfort in that. One I do take comfort in is “all good things must come to an end”, because it evokes, to quote an unknown, “the sublime beauty of impermanence”.

Well now that shit just sounds gay.

I hunger.

The Handmaid's Tale

Insofar as my male brain permits such thoughts, I’ve seldom thought about the concept of feminism. Not for lack of trying mind, but to me the word sounds almost naughty, like an upper-class euphemism for a broad lesbian subculture involving police hats and pony whips. On a slightly more serious note, it makes me think of over enthusiastic fifty-something women chanting about how any sentence in which the word “women” is not immediately followed or preceded by the phrase “integral part of our society” (with the permissible inclusion of the word “are”) is an affront to half the world’s population and a deftly chauvinistic statement leaked from the lips of a half-baked redneck who couldn’t start a fire if he rubbed both his nuts together under the desert sun.

Having said that, if The Handmaid’s Tale is what one might call a feminist book, then my deluded opinion may be somewhat abated. At least in the long term. But this book is hard to classify; some people choose not to preclude it from the genre of science fiction (no, no aliens, no spaceships, stop it. Seriously.) while others, the author herself included, choose to label it as “speculative fiction” which, for all its ambiguity, is perhaps a more accurate title.

The book depicts (?) an unnamed protagonist, later known by the patronymic slave name “Offred” (Of Fred) whose physical appearance, in the 312 pages of the book, is a pithy, one-line statement about halfway through, quoted as "I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes". There’s some explanation at the end as to why there’s such a sparse account of her person, and indeed of the disjoined narrative too, but despite the fact – maybe because of the fact - that she’s so anonymous, I can’t help but feel drawn to her. It’s just that.

Allow me to elaborate by using an example my old English teacher used. In an impersonal situation in which two people are getting to know each other, when one leans back on a chair, the other leans forward. When one leans forward, the other draws back. I suppose that’s subject to personal character traits and general feelings toward the other person, but I still find it to be true. Nietzsche would disagree.

The setting takes place in what can accurately be described by anyone of a sane mind as a dystopia. The assassination of the President and Congress results in a powerful religious sect gaining power and imposing its lifestyle on the rest of the population; ordered familial structure, communities without violence, laws and morals based on strict, biblical teachings from the Old Testament. A society in which there is no imperfection, because imperfection does not exist. It has been eradicated. People are happy because we tell them they are happy. This is how people should live. (This is all links to my theory that what is perfect about perfection is that it is imperfect)

Offred is one of many “handmaids”, a euphemistic term for a concubine, a young, fertile woman given to man and woman of higher caste as a vessel for carrying babies in order to support the population of this loony bin (apparently in the future birth rates have decreased dramatically and only 1 in 4 children are born healthy – the rest are “shredders”). She relates to us via dubious chronology certain events of her life, most of which taking place while in the possession of Commander Fred (get it yet?), while others take place during her childhood, teenage years or at the re-educational Red Center.

She implicitly describes how oppressed women especially are in this new society by telling of her daily routine, which involves always travelling with a partner (to “police each others’ actions”), never being allowed out of the community, forced sexual intercourse, involuntary transfers to another man when she is unable to bear the previous one children, and of sweet little anecdotes of her former life. That, while being far from perfect, is something that tugs her heart strings and she often breaks into a solemn, melancholic yearning for that familiarity back with abrupt topic changes and explicit emotive language.

The ending caught me off guard, to be honest. The book moves at a slow, almost leisurely pace (although admittedly this changes in the latter half of the novel) and I was genuinely caught off guard by what the author did there. What I like about this Margaret Atwood is that she leaves just enough to the imagination to leave you questioning (what they do the “unbabies”, the masked men on the Wall), while providing enough to keep you satiated. Or at least I did think that, until the end.

The topics explored in the book are somewhat controversial when you dissect them, but are mostly philosophical philandering and “What If?” scenarios. The totalitarian theocratic government that rules the population with an iron fist is something that has happened in the past, but the fact that it occurs now on American soil is disconcerting to the average Western reader. We read about societies like these that have long since passed into the annals of time, or about societies in the Middle East that oppress women and have strict laws that are upheld vigorously, but this hits a lot closer to home. A scary thought indeed.

But still, I haven’t even mentioned what the two most important themes are yet. It’s never said that they are, and to another maybe they aren’t, but from what I picked up from the book you’d have to be of a very different mindset to not proclaim them as the two most key elements in the novel. You see, the protagonist is stripped of her former life, her former name, all her former titles and responsibilities and placed into an entirely new setting. In context, it sounds horrible, but millions of people have gone through the exact same thing, whether through immigration or involuntary resettlement, and many of those people have been able to build up from that, a new life, a phoenix from the ashes.

They do it because they have freedom.

They do it because they have love.

When you are deprived of these things, you are deprived of your humanity. You become an animal in a cage that needs not affection, but food, minerals, instruments of life to keep your blood flowing, to keep the mitochondria in your cells respiring. Our main character has neither, she bravely clings onto memories that fade more and into the Forgotten by the day; a subservient but rebellious women who is haunted by a lack of love (manifested in the form of her lost loved ones?) and the oppression of a patriarchal regime.

And, as in the fairy tales as in the history books, humanity prevails in the face of adversity. The happiness of the sentiment that statement might encapsulate is varnished by accounts of humans standing up to oppressors and tyrants, slaves against masters, weak against strong, but undermined by the knowledge that it’s humans standing up to humans, and any damage against our race is entirely self-inflicted, like an alcoholic on a mid-week binge.

I don’t believe in karma, or ying-yang, at least not individually. Some people live chaste and modest all their lives only to wind up with cancer or solitude as their retribution. Some people live like kings of old in all manners of amoral and malevolent ways and are rewarded with women, money and power by their hatred sown.

If this tangent makes no sense to you, then I blame you not, but everything written is what I’ve derived from what I feel to be my interpretation of the book. A devout male who happens to be an agnostic myself, its feminist undertones and religious overtures made it, ironically, a lot more interesting to me, so I can do naught but recommend it to all and sundry, especially those like me and especially those with an interest in dystopic, sci-fi, romantic or feminist themed books.

Love, freedom aaand...chocolate. And sex. Hmm, maybe you could mix all four together. Is this what God thinks?!