Trains, Janes and Automobiles: Variations on a (Jane) Eyre

I haven't quite finished Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy, but I wanted to write this now (just in case I'm reading the book's signals wrong and it doesn't follow through on its line of flight from Jane Eyre). Gemma is an orphan raised and then cast out by her aunt, schooled at a brutal boarding school, then hired as au pair to a motherless child in an isolated great house. Eighteen and starved of affection, she is swept off her feet by her wordly, wealthy employer, only to have their hasty wedding halted by a revelation that causes her to flee -- almost to her death. Cared for by a rural family, she is torn between a desire to make a life for herself and the memory of passion.

Livesey follows the characters and plot of Jane Eyre almost every step of the way. The book is particularly good at taking small incidents and themes from Charlotte Bronte's novel -- the significance of birds, questions of faith, the chain of abandoned or badly-cared-for children -- and expanding them. Relocated to post-war Scotland, Livesey's Jane -- Gemma/Jean -- finds herself astonishingly close to the poverty and limited options of Bronte's Jane. But Livesey is also careful to note what has changed, and how the world around Gemma is changing. There are professional women (a vet, a chemist), as well as many kinds of teachers, farmers and housekeepers. There are also women artists -- a musician and a potter -- living the lives that women like the Brontes carved into public consciousness.

Gemma, like Jane, encounters the kindness of strangers, but -- unlike Jane -- through these strangers her world expands. Not (so far) to the missionary fantasy of St. John Rivers (yup, the bit of Jane Eyre everyone forgets or passes over, myself included), but through education, local history and botany, and through Gemma's own story. Her mother was Scottish, her father Icelandic, and she spent her childhood in a fishing village in Iceland before being brought back to Perth by her uncle. So encoded in Gemma's story from the start is flight: travel, escape, freedom, migration. This gives the book a lightness and sense of possibility other than the romantic myth with which Jane Eyre is primarily identified: "Reader, I married" the Great Man, and moreover, the Great House.

Gemma traverses Scotland by train, bus, ferry, van, car and foot; Jane Eyre, too, is a great walker (and occasional user of the post-chaise), but Gemma's journeys take the central place of Jane's relationship to Rochester's house, Thornfield Hall. Instead of the Gothic romance of Bluebeard's Castle -- seductive for all its dangers -- Livesey offers a feminine On the Road, a peripatetic tale of bus stations, cheap hotels, Teddy boys, fish and chips, and sea-sickness. Exploring the heart of a novel about a woman who longs for a home, she finds a new story: a woman who realises that home can be (and has been, for her) a prison; that a home where she is mastered is no home. That she can move.

Livesey's not the first to uncover this taking-flight of Jane into the Eyre. Siobhan Dowd's Solace of the Road tells an even more modern story, of a fourteen year old girl called Holly Hogan who runs away from her foster home in London in an attempt to return to her lost mother in Ireland. Taking only a wig, a copy of Jane Eyre and a nom de voyage, Solace too meets kindness and cruelty (both new and remembered), good luck and awful accidents. Postmodernly, she muses on the resonance of her fate with Jane's, drawing on her knowledge of the only school book she'd ever liked to understand her own journey, especially when she separated from her possessions and stilled by missing a train.

As its title suggests, the sensation of movement offers solace -- at the very least, the solace of choosing to leave a situation, choosing a goal and aiming for it. In Livesey's and Bronte's novels, walking is a solace in itself, both the movement of the body and the opportunity for solitude and observation. Modern transport extends that solace, enabling Gemma/Jean and Holly/Solace to travel farther (and faster) than Jane: not only around the country, but into themselves and their futures.

"anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough" [AL Kennedy]

Thanks, AL Kennedy. The Blue Book pretty much cancelled me. With its sleight-of-hand whereby a seeming cynicism, all-pervasive, is turned into bittersweet sensation, the absoluteness of open emotion. No, not sleight-of-hand: that's to slight the magic. Beth, the protagonist, loves the word 'prestidigitation', and Kennedy, I suspect, does too: loves it as a diversion from what she's really doing. "Look, all hands/no magic," The Blue Book says. Fiction is just cold reading, performed chillingly in interstitial chapters that address "you," building up a portrait of the reader through small ephemera that seem impossibly accurate -- until you read a description of how Arthur (Art, haha) and Beth use informers and cold reading to build similarly accurate (because close observation marks us all, generically, human) pictures of the audiences for their psychic shows.

But Kennedy's a Penn-and-Teller of a magician: even as she appears to unfold the secret of the trick, shaming the reader for being gulled and the writer for gulling, she recuperates that shame by finding, in it, a necessary generosity, large and stunning. A final reveal that Kennedy's bone-deep irony and bitterness (as exemplified by her endlessly readable columns on writing and politics for the Guardian) are manifestations of a skinning, shredding love. She lurves humans, she does. To which she responds: "No, I don't. I don't love humans. And if you tell anyone, I'll kill you." [A for Anyanka, anyone?]

Almost impossible to read, The Blue Book: I can't imagine what it was like to write (and I don't have to: what the columns don't cover, the book describes -- as having fingers in the guts of the grieving). Kennedy's advice to would-be fake psychics - "anyone can do it, if they want to be peculiar enough" - is, I think, also her advice to writers. It's a bloody peculiar thing to do, make up lives and codes and patterns, lead the reader by the nose, for their own good. And then there's that "enough," referring to both "want" [if they want it enough] and "peculiar" [to be peculiar enough]. In each case, the word is an empty silk top hat with a rabbit (not) in it, the opposite of what it seems. Enough means "there is no enough." Not in a Zen "there is no spoon" way. In the sense that anyone reaching into that peculiar space will - must - find that the limits and boundaries keep falling away.

Which is why, despite being over-awed by the majority of the book to the point of burning my manuscript and keyboard, I found the very end made me go: huh. It was the second such 'huh' in as many days, the first belonging to Meg Rosoff's There is No Dog, a book that answers one of life's most pressing questions: is God a spoilt, sex-obsessed eternal adolescent boy (who happens to be very, very good-looking and occasionally inspired)?. The book's answer is 'yes and no', and it's absolutely brilliant. Like The Blue Book (oddly, Rosoff's book is also blue -- night sky in the UK edition, summer's day in the US), There is No Dog is about authorship and authority (and Rosoff writes just as well as Kennedy about the impossibilities and painful peculiarities of authorship on her blog), about taking dazzling narrative leaps, and about how absolutely amazingly amazing sex is. Well, desire. It has more testicles and wanking (or, curiously, "wanting" according to my spellcheck) than an episode of the In Betweeners, but it can't find a way out of the conundrum of desire -- either God's desire for Lucy, which causes the weather to go haywire (phew, not global warming then, off the hook for that one), or Lucy's desire for the eminently unsuitable Bob (God's actual name), which causes her to lose a capybara. No-one else even likes Bob -- Kennedy's Beth finds that her father feels likewise about Art.

And yet each novel offers Romantic Lurve as the Solution: coupling up being, apparently, as good as it can get. Lucy sees the Error of her Ways as far is Bob is concerned, but there is (of course) the Better Bet waiting to Complete Her. And Beth hardly marries Art in a flourish of tulle and confetti, but the end of the book uses the reader's hope to bring them together. Or rather, to hold them in a limbo that is only possible because it is suffused with our hope for their togetherness, tempered by the knowledge that they have each done Terrible Things. This is a problem. And there it was again last night at the end of Miranda July's The Future.

What I love about all three of these works (The Blue Book, There is No Dog, The Future) is that they ARE peculiar enough, as peculiar as the world is and in love with that peculiarity. And I love that all three of them are about hesitancy, complexity, doubt, multiplicity, indeterminacy and really, really great sex. Let's hear it for female desire and amazing depictions of orgasmic embodiment. But… but… but… is what lies beyond orgasm really, only, ever able to be: waiting. For him to come and find you. Really? I'm all for vulnerability, openness, companionship and even (I have problems with the word and its history of asymmetry and violence) love, but I feel like there's a dual, interrelated problem here: neither the novel nor love is peculiar enough.

To deal with the peculiar -- the particular, individuated, sui generis -- is to deal with the shift in the word's meaning, its encoding that whatever is remarkable and particular to a person/situation/place/object is deemed to be an enormity: that the individuated (not in the sense of individualised trainers), the contortions of a specific psyche, the instances of a history and their working-out, needs must be socially conformed. The novel as a form trembles on the cusp of the Enlightenment argument for individuation and utilitarian/economic arguments for the mass. It serves both tyrannical masters. Characters must be peculiar - but that peculiarity has to be either condemned or smoothed out. Kennedy is a genius of the peculiar: her short stories often leave me gasping at their intensity of intuition.

But the novel (and the novelistic narrative film) is resolutely not a peculiar form: no time-based narrative really can be, unless taken totally apart and restructured according to other, rigorous rules. At first, I thought The Future was making these new rules -- in relation to films such as Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann, which is similarly concerned with wayward dailiness whose cyclicity cuts against the linearity of cinematic time; or Sally Potter's Tango Lesson, which uses the temporality and hapticity of dance to create an unusual rhythm that twines, thyrsus-like, around the forward movement of the narrative -- but it abandons or unravels them.

What derails The Future, There is No Dog and The Blue Book is the insistence of coupled love as closure. This is not peculiar. It's neither particular nor strange. It's normative. It conforms (to) the novelistic shape of narrative, trapping its characters, foregoing larger questions of responsibility and forgiveness, questions about authorship in fact. All three texts hold up their injured paws at the end and ask us to love them -- for all their flaws and failures and half-starts and lack of finesse, which is peculiar and which draws me to these particular artists (artists of particularity). But to love these books (and their authors) all the same: to look away, to be sleighted. To love the form, even as we've been shown its foibles and failings. To love its reliance on (and our [manufactured] desire for) closure -- even as each text works towards openness, that expectation is invoked and so The Future feels hesitantly, indecisively unfinished rather than open; There is No Dog has its romantic ending by deus ex machina (in a new sense, but still); and The Blue Book asks its reader to become Art, and thus to be a figure of desire -- and then to desire.

There are other ways, I think: they're rare and complicated and perhaps too peculiar for anyone not peculiar enough. Charlotte Brontë's last novel Villette chooses a deeply perverse form of waiting-that-is-not-waiting, a wild temporal and affective leap, that perhaps explains why the novel is not as popular as Jane Eyre, which delivers: "Reader, I married him" (although Canadian poet KI Press has a terrific sequence in Spine that explores the odd taste left in the mouth by that marriage). Reviewing Arrietty for Eyewear, I suggested that

Arrietty doesn’t give the audience what it wants, but what it needs. Rather than a closing a satisfying narrative about how non-human Others (toys, pets) should love (ie: submit adoringly) their human masters and conform to a human-shaped world, as the third Toy Story film did relentlessly, the end of Arrietty opens out into risk, an unfamiliar gesture for a children’s film. Arrietty lights out for the territory.

That movement towards freedom (independence within relationality) is a movement towards the peculiar, towards a space in which to be individuated without being isolationist. Anne Carson, who says she wants to be "unbearable," produces that space for her protagonist Geryon, at the end of Autobiography of Red -- and in the epilogue interview with Stesichorus/Gertrude Stein, who speaks about the vocation of peculiarity as an unblinkingness. That painful difference again: Kristin Hersh talks brutally about it in today's Guardian, about whether making music is worth the elation, depression, possession she experiences.

Maybe, brought up in the Messianic tradition of Judaism, in which waiting for Him is all, I hate it particularly -- and find that model infuses so many Western texts. Both the waiting and the satisfaction, which is another form of waiting (happily ever after, really? Surely not. Surely just waiting for another in the catalogue of Terrible Things that make up the shape of narrative). I like endings that are beginnings: open, ecstatic. Endings that leave behind the lack that the story sets out the start: I want this. I don't get it. Fine: I'm free of wanting. That's a story of creativity too: I want to make this. I don't make it perfectly. Fine: I'm free of wanting to make it. It's made. It's gone. Paradoxical Undressing suggests that Hersh makes/records music in order to be free of its wanting, its demands on her. For music, we could put: love, humanity, the form, creativity, this one person, whatever. But at the end of the interview, she suggests something, an ending, peculiar enough:

"But what if we die?" she says. "What if we die and there's music everywhere?" And she laughs at what a great cosmic joke that would be.

What if, at the end, the desire that has hounded us -- the writing, the loving, the person -- is just "everywhere"? What if the bond of demand is relinquished, if we go into that which we want and wants us, but without want?

I don't know how to write that kind of ending: elsewhere in the interview, Hersh suggests such an ending is suicidal. But when I read those lines, I know that's what I want to find/to write. And so begins the Buddhist conundrum of not wanting to not want. Enough/not enough.

Sensitive Modernism, Part II (sort of): Lost Girls

in which I don't really talk about modernism, but do continue to talk about girl heroines -- not least because I'm re-reading Jane Eyre.

Which is not my favourite Charlotte Brontë novel. Like Adrienne Rich, I love Villette, and I've recently started to wonder if that's because it's set in a school -- and also features far less romantic swooning. My favourite bit of Jane Eyre covers Jane's early years at Lowood and I'm always strangely disappointed when they're over and it's off to Thornfield. Villette is the school novel plus (or ne plus ultra), because the heroine, Lucy Snowe, is young enough to be a student (almost) and yet has the independence of being a teacher (sort of). It's hovery and liminal and all about how learning to write essays in German makes you sexy.

Which is not to say that academic smarts are the only kind of good I look for in a feisty protagonist. Lucy's brains are combined with a wily and resilient ability to stand up for herself while appearing meek and mild: in the end, like the Mounties, she (almost) gets her man, and - more importantly to me - certainly gets a room of her own. She's also, unusually for the female protagonist of a Victorian novel, a traveller, even if she only gets as far as Brussels.

That wildness and mobility is rarely given to female protagonists before the twentieth century, and even now in books, girls tend to stay at home while boys roam; in fact, all five books on this year's Carnegie list are about wandering lads. That's why I was so struck by three YA books that I read recently: Siobhan O'Dowd's gorgeous Solace of the Road (reviewed by Bookwitch), The Beguilers by Kate Thompson, and Celia Rees' gripping The Stone Testament.

Last first: I picked up The Stone Testament because I was charmed and compelled by Rees' previous novels - Witch, Sorceress and The Wish House - for their bold protagonists whose voices remain etched on my mind. The Stone Testament is different because it has multiple protagonists (sometimes inhabiting different personae) whose voices criss-cross, which is something that I generally enjoy in a novel -- but I felt lost here, not least because I missed the strength and credibility that the single narrator gave to her earlier books (OK, Sorceress has two, but one is a frame narrative and the other a continuation from Witch, so it seems more balanced and coherent).

That's one of the strengths of Kate Thompson's writing as well, and I liked Rilka, the defiantly different heroine of The Beguilers. The pre-technological culture that Thompson imagines reminded me of Ursula Le Guin's current Annals of the Western Shore series and of Lois Lowry's Giver trilogy: it is deceptively attractive in its simplicity, but socially rigid. So Rilka, who knows her own mind and doesn't fit in, would win the sympathy of any reader even if she didn't set herself an impossible task. The gorgeous fable-like feel of the story gets a bit lost in detail when Rilka's quest reaches its climax, and the ending seemed pretty short shrift to me -- perhaps if the idea had been able to expand into a series, like Lowry's or Le Guin's, its emotional richness could have been played out. And I would have returned to hear more of Rilka's voice as she addressed herself to solving problems by looking from the outside in.

Rees' young protagonists are in the same position, and I did like them exactly for their wits. They were rebels with a cause; Rees cleverly shows how Kris's street smarts -- his knowledge of how to navigate his estate both socially and geographically, for example -- become essential in saving the world. Like Will in His Dark Materials, Adam, Zillah and Kris are all young people with experience beyond their years, gained from lives that seem like fictional inventions but represent the experiences of thousands of adolescents: all of them have lost their parents, all of them navigate dangerous worlds where no-one cares for them. Kris and Zillah have both lived on the streets; Zillah has survived a war in another country and become an illegal immigrant in the UK. These are lives that fascinate me, and I felt that Zillah's story was lost amidst the epic world-saveage.

Not so Holly Hogan's in Solace of the Road. Holly -- who becomes Solace when she puts on a wig stolen from her foster-mother -- is girl after J.T. Leroy's (or Kathy Acker's) heart, an adolescent Genet pickpocketing her way across England and Wales to catch the ferry home to Ireland. Possessed of an immense imagination and a skin so thick it's cracking, Holly is a magnificent creation whom O'Dowd coolly parallels with that other courageous orphan, Jane Eyre. Holly's reading the novel in school (well, when she goes to school) and doesn't think much of the wimpy heroine. Holly would have married Rochester for the money, and never would have left her jewels on the train. But the further she travels, the more like Jane she becomes.

Holly also crosses paths with Pullman's Lyra Silvertongue; like Lyra, Holly spends her day in Oxford visiting a museum (which, she concludes, is full of dead things) and at the cinema, as well as lying and charming her way around the city. She is as much out of the world of colleges and students as Lyra is out of place amidst the hot dogs and buses. Like Lyra, she finds that lying extravagantly about her parents and her past carries her a long way on her quest -- but only so far. When facing death (like Lyra in The Amber Spyglass), she finds the courage to tell the truth from her heart, and is released.

There's a delicate and fascinating conversation going on between Solace and HDM (Oxford is also where David Fickling, editor to both Pullman and O'Dowd, has his office), about fantasy and reality, but also fantasy and realism. Like Lyra, Holly finds that God exists only in people -- but her journey is entirely in the world as we know it. Or rather: the world that she lives in, of foster homes and care-babes, is one that we might read about in the newspaper and tut-tut over, but most readers are more likely to visit Svalbard than come into contact with it. So it's equally distant, and yet it's right here. Holly Hogan doesn't kill God, or catch a Beguiler or save the world; she doesn't even marry Mr. Rochester. She just gets her own shit together. It's as hard as all the other tasks combined, and it's exciting and page-turning in the telling. She's a classic Lost Girl, a wanderer and speaker in tongues, a ducker and diver, a thinker and thriver.

It's unbearably sad that there will be no more tales of Holly Horgan: not because the novel's a stand-alone, but because of Siobhan O'Dowd's untimely death in 2007. As well as being a compassionate, resilient and intelligent writer, she brought these qualities to her work with English PEN, particularly as founder of the Readers and Writers programme, which reaches out to readers in every corner of society -- bringing Jane Eyre to today's Lost Girls and listening to the stories they have to tell in return.