A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe #Classic

For the first half of this year, I was avoiding plague literature, like the plague! 

But since reading Camus' The Plague during August, I seem to be verging on obsession. What are the signs, I hear you ask? First up, how many people do you know, who take plague literature with them on a holiday to the beach?

I did.

For a week at the beach in September, I packed Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars, Katherine Anne Porter's short story collection Pale Horse Pale Rider and Barbara Tuckman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Enough said!

I think if I had read A Journal of the Plague Year prior to 2020, I may have found the story a bit difficult to follow and maybe even a bit dull with its attention to detail, death lists. laws and regulations. (See Nick @One Catholic Life who read this in 2017 and said, 'Not a bad read, but not something that I plan on rereading again'). However, reading it whilst in the middle of an actual pandemic, has been another experience entirely!

Like my reading of Camus, I was particularly fascinated by the thoughts and feelings and actions of other people throughout history, in coping with plague events.

Once again, it is all there, for us to see (and learn from), if only we would look. 

Everything we are going through right now, has been gone through before. The people just wore different clothes!

With all our wonderful advances in technology and science, we still make the same erroneous assumptions, the same mistakes are made and we go through the same psychological trauma. 

Happily, the same causes for celebration and hope also reoccur with every plague. The hero helpers, the medical staff, and the carers. The law makers who take the time to get it right, who regulate for the common good yet find a way to act humanely and kindly to individuals, the regular folk who do they right things and make personal sacrifices for the greater good. Every time, there are more of these than of the others who rebel, deny or ignore.

My reading of A Journal of the Plague Year was about finding the common experiences.

The rather shambolic structure of the book, can be seen to reflect the chaotic nature of the plague. The fears, the rumours and the disbelief that spread, as the plague approached, the changing laws and (dis)information as the first cases were diagnosed, the grief, loss and suffering that ebbed and flowed with hope and relief at different times. Defoe describes it all, in great detail, several times!

A lot of the rambling style is taken up with the numbers game. 

Just as we watch the daily news and listen to regular updates about how many people were tested today, how many positive cases, how many deaths, how do we compare to other states and other countries, in 1665, they had the Parish Bills posted on the local church board and Bills of Mortality. Defoe tracked the Plague through the various boroughs and counties of England and he also listed the various trades and jobs adversely affected by the Plague. 

The city of London is a central player in this story. Defoe did a lot of research to accurately recall the layouts of streets and shops during this time. His character walks the streets and describes what he sees. This was not an easy thing to do. The streets of the city were crowded, confusing and dirty. And everything changed, the following year, in 1666, when the Great Fire of London gutted most of central London. Defoe had to work on memory and old reference books to bring pre-1666 London to life again. 

Below, I've included a number of quotes, that show the progression and common experiences, as I saw it, during my read.

• We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things...handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true Account of it, and several Counsels were held about Ways to prevent its coming over; but it was all very private.
• it was rumour'd that an order of the Government was to be issued out, to place Turn-pikes and Barriers on the Road, to prevent Peoples travelling; and that the Towns on the Road, would not suffer People from London to pass.
• that the best Preparation for the Plague was to run away from it.
• I enclin'd to stay and take my Lot in that Station in which God had plac'd me.
• Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face.
• the shriecks of Women and Children at the Windows, and Doors of their Houses.
• already People had, as it were by a general Consent, taken up the Custom of not going out of Doors after Sun-set.
• It was a very ill Time to be sick in, for if any one complain'd, it was immediately said he had the Plague.
• it was most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate, and so few People to be seen in them.
• The Apprehensions of the People, were likewise strangely encreas'd by the Error of the times...the People...were more adicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales.
• These Terrors and Apprehensions of the People, led them into a Thousand weak, foolish, and wicked Things.
• the people, whose Confusions fitted them to be impos'd upon by all Sorts of Pretenders, and by every Mountebank.
• the Physicians...to their Praise, that they ventured their Lives so far as even to lose them in the Service of Mankind; They endeavoured to do good, and to save the Lives of others.
• Every visited House to be...marked with a red Cross.
• Every visited House to be watched...the shutting up to be for the space of four Weeks after all be whole.
• That no Hogs, Dogs, or Cats, or Tame Pigeons, or Conies, be suffered to be kept within any part of the City.
• no wandring Begger be suffered in the Streets of this City, in any fashion or manner, whatsoever.
• That all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, singing of Ballads, Buckler-play, or suck like Causes of Assemblies of People, be utterly prohibited.
• That all publick Feasting...and Dinners at Taverns, Alehouses, and other Places of common Entertainment be forborn till further Order and Allowance.
• This shutting up of houses was at first counted a very cruel and Unchristian Method, and the poor People so confin'd made bitter Lamentations.
• But it was a publick Good that justified the private Mischief.
• many Families foreseeing the Approach of the Distemper, laid up Stores of Provisions, sufficient for their whole Families, and shut themselves up.
• this Necessity of going out of our Houses to buy Provisions, was in a great Measure the Ruin of the whole City.
• the Misery of that Time lay upon the Poor.
• the Danger of immediate Death to ourselves, took away all Bowels of Love, all Concern for one another.
• I must acknowledge that this time was Terrible, that I was sometimes at the End of all my Resolutions.
• Perfumes...Aromaticks, Balsamicks, and Variety of Drugs, and Herbs; in another Salts and Spirits, as every one was furnish'd for their own Preservation.
• the danger of Relapse upon the whole City, and telling them how such a Relapse might be more fatal and dangerous than the whole Visitation that had been already.
• in what manner to purge the Houses and Goods, where the Plague had been.

In the appendix of my 2003 Penguin Classics edition, I was reminded that the plague bacillus was not discovered by science until 1894 during the Hongkong epidemic of that year. Until then, the plague was believed to be an airborne disease. 

We now know that the plague was spread by the fleas found on black rats. The bacillus can actually survive in textiles and faeces for up to a year in warm, damp places. 

There are three types of plague - bubonic, pneumonic (or pulmonary) and septicaemic.

The note is made that 'people rarely communicated the disease to each other (except through the coughing of those with pneumonic plague), but in a flea and rat ridden culture, that is almost beside the point.'

Defoe did a brilliant job of bringing to life this time in history. The despair and fear was palpable, the confusion and hopelessness felt real, almost too real, during this time. The people of London were brought low and wondered what they had done to deserve this fate. Yet, Defoe was determined to show us, that it is, in fact, our community, and our desire to live a good collective life, that can save us all in the end.  

One can only imagine what was felt, by the good citizens of London, to have their year of plague followed by a cataclysmic fire. We can take heart from the fact, that those before us, have survived and thrived much worse that a year of coronavirus. This too shall pass.

Previous Plague/Pandemic Reads: 

• The Plague | Albert Camus
• The Stand | Stephen King
• Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood
• Year of Wonders | Geraldine Brooks
• The Pull of the Stars | Emma Donoghue
• A Journal of the Plague Year | Daniel Defoe

Current Plague Reads:

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century | Barbara Tuchman (non-fiction)

Up Next:

• Intimations | Zadie Smith (non-fiction)
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider | Katherine Anne Porter

Plague/Pandemic Books On My Radar:

• Station Eleven | Emily St John Mandel
• Blindness | José Saramago
• The Last Man | Mary Shelley
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World | Steven Johnson (non-fiction)
• Nemesis | Philip Roth
• Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Years of Rice and Salt | Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Dog Stars | Peter Heller
• The Children’s Hospital | Chris Adrian
• Severance | Ling Ma
• The White Plague | Frank Herbert
• The Passage | Justin Cronin

Girl, Woman, Other | Bernardine Evaristo #BookerWinner

I'm still trying to catch up on posts leftover from my magnificent Christmas reading binge.

Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel by Bernardine Evaristo is the final one. It is certainly not the least though. In fact, it very nearly overtook The Yield as my favourite book for 2019.

What stopped it from doing so?

Mostly time.

I have lived with and loved The Yield for many months now. It's wonderfulness has been a part of me for a much longer period of time than Girl, Woman, Other. It also has the advantage of being home grown. Poppy's very special Indigenous language dictionary is another stand out feature that I think about often.

But this is about Girl, Woman, Other and it definitely deserves it's own time in the sun to shine.

The twelve interconnected stories about growing up, living, working and loving in London by mostly black British women of various ages, had me hooked from the very first voice, Amma. Via these women, Evaristo talks about feminism, double standards, gender, racism, sexism and ageism.

The twelve chapters read like twelve separate portraits, with Evaristo revelling in the characterisations of each and every one. Her loose-flowing poetic prose was full of vitality and complexities. I was engrossed by each and every story, not wanting them to end, but then getting caught up in the next biography and wondering how they might interconnect.

The diversity and otherness suggested by the title, was explored on many levels. Part of my enjoyment came from reading such a fresh perspective and experiencing a reality different to my own. Note to self, read more diversely in 2020 (most of my 2019 reading was Australian and Indigenous).


Evaristo, herself, said:

I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well.

Finally, I will tackle the co-winning of the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. I have read both and enjoyed both, but Girl, Woman, Other is by far the richer, more interesting and certainly the more original of the two. Labelling a book 'the best novel of the year', obviously leaves things very open to individual interpretation, but to my mind, Girl, Woman, Other stands head and shoulders above any of the others shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and deserved to win in it's own right.

Facts:

• Joint Winner of the Booker Prize 2019
• Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019
• Named one of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2019

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

Hamish Hamilton | Penguin Australia

In 1989 Saul Adler (a narcissistic young historian) is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. He is apparently fine; he gets up and goes to see his art student girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. They have sex then break up, but not before she has photographed Saul crossing the same Abbey Road. Saul leaves to study in communist East Berlin, two months before the Wall comes down. There he will encounter - significantly - both his assigned translator and his translator's sister, who swears she has seen a jaguar prowling the city. He will fall in love and brood upon his difficult, authoritarian father. And he will befriend a hippy, Rainer, who may or may not be a Stasi agent, but will certainly return to haunt him in middle age. 

In 2016, Saul Adler is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. He is rushed to hospital, where he spends the following days slipping in and out of consciousness, and in and out of memories of the past. A number of people gather at his bedside. One of them is Jennifer Moreau. But someone important is missing. 

Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy's electrifying new novel examines what we see and what we fail to see, until we encounter the spectres of history - both the world's and our own.

This is my second Deborah Levy story, so I now know that this style of writing - the slightly off-kilter structure, narration and characters combined with oodles of symbolism and mythology - is her usual way of telling a story. However, The Man Who Saw Everything isn't haunting me (yet) the way that Hot Milk still does, three years later.

Spectres of the past, though, are a big part of this story with personal and European histories haunting the daily lives of our characters. These ghosts of the past didn't get under my skin, like they did in Hot Milk. I suspect the reason lies in the face value issues on display in each book - Hot Milk was a mother/daughter passive/aggressive thing; The Man Who Saw Everything was more father/brother/son stuff with a narcissistic, self-absorbed narrator. Mother/daughter angst will always resonate here.

Saul is an historian of totalitarianism and the psychology of male tyrants. His research project is about the cultural resistance to Nazism in the 1930's. It is 1988, one year prior to the Wall coming down, when he leaves London (via Abbey Road) to go to East Berlin to work. He seems incredibly naive and light-weight to be tackling such a heavy topic.

His thoughts seem to be caught up in light-weight matters like tins of pineapple, photo shoots and who to kiss next. For Saul it is all about him. How he looks to others and what others think of him. His relationships are messy and confusing. He's aware of the Stasi and that they are probably watching him move around East Berlin, yet he is painfully careless with his actions and words.

Levy deliberately throws in the occasional confusing phrase or comment to make us wonder when or who is telling us this story and what is their purpose. Is this a rewriting of history, a whitewash? Or is this an attempt to uncover a truth?

I did not want to know, as well as wanting to. I could not break into her thoughts and feelings. Or my own, I could not break in.

Mostly though, this first half is a relatively straight forward Cold War drama which suddenly shifts in the second part, to 2016 Brexit London. Saul has been involved in a second accident on the Abbey Road crossing, this time more seriously. He is in hospital, coming out of a coma, surrounded by a confusion of visitors, real and ghostly.

I suspect this section is deliberately confusing for all of us. Was the 1988 story a dream? Has Saul been in a coma for 28 years? Or was he revisiting old haunts trying to piece together the story of how he ended up where he found himself in 2016? We all tell ourselves stories to make our lives more habitable. These stories are not only reinterpreted by our present understandings but our present is also influenced by our beliefs about our past. Levy seemed to enjoy poking holes into Saul's preferred story, until he was forced to face the inconsistencies. For a while anyway.

Sadly, for Saul, he failed to recover any degree of self-awareness. All his relationships continue to be messy and fraught with cruel comments and actions. Perhaps the damage of his childhood ran too deep. The early death of his mother combined with a strict disciplinarian, distant father and an elder brother who bullied him. Saul's fluid sexuality from a young age that only alienated his more conservative father and brother even more. They all processed their grief differently, but in ways that hurt each other - forever. 

Saul, our extremely unreliable narrator, was not the man who saw everything, Far from it. Saul could barely see anything beyond the end of his own, very pretty, nose. The man who saw everything was Walter Müller.

He was always looking at me and I think he could see everything that was good and bad and sad in me.

In 1988, Walter was smitten and then deeply hurt by Saul's careless love. He kept a safe distance thereafter, yet couldn't escape completely. Their lives were irrevocably intertwined and Walter was very, very careful to never reveal the full extent of their ongoing connection. Protecting others from the damage that Saul could do, became Walter's modus operandi.

Saul's Stasi report concluded with the phrase 'he is harmless to other people.' Walter, however, declared that this was false - he was, in fact, VERY harmful to others.

It is only as you make your way through the second part of the story that you begin to see all the red herrings and foreshadowing that Levy left behind in the first. It's like a puzzle that shifts and changes shape as you put it together. Saul is enigmatic to the end. A mystery unto himself and to others.

We are haunted by our past - individuals as well as countries and continents. Marx and Stalin continue to haunt the GDR and Russia. Hitler's actions haunt people all around the world to this day. We are also haunted by pop culture. The Beatles music is everywhere and lives inside all of us. Images also haunt us, whether it's four men crossing a road on an album cover, or scenes of the Wall coming down in 1989 or photographs of the Holocaust survivors being liberated from the camps. The images have become part of our collective memory, even if we weren't there to witness it ourselves.

Which brings me to book cover choices. The Australian cover heads this post. I'm fascinated how and why different countries get very different covers. The Bloomsbury and Canadian versions remind me of the US cover for A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I love the Portuguese version that clearly relates to the fateful crossing of Abbey Road. One, less sympatico Goodreads reviewer said, So, this is a novel about how some people need to be more careful crossing roads. This cover would be perfect for them!

Bloomsbury

Hamish Hamilton | Penguin Canada

Relógio D'Água Editores Portugal

It's not only Abbey Road that features in The Man Who Saw Everything. One of the characters loves the Beatles song Penny Lane. It was only towards the end of the book that I began to realise that some of the lyrics was interwoven into the story - the barber and the nurse spring to mind - a reread would be necessary to spot them all, I suspect.

In 2009, McCartney reflected:

"Penny Lane" was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew ... I'd get a bus to his house and I'd have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story. (source)

If you're planning on reading this book soon, here are the lyrics to take with you:


Penny Lane | The Beatles | 1967

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he's had the pleasure to have known
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
The little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a mac
In the pouring rain, very strange

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back

In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass
And in his pocket is a portrait of the queen
He likes to keep his fire engine clean
It's a clean machine

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
A four of fish and finger pies
In summer, meanwhile back

Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout
The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway

In Penny Lane the barber shaves another customer
We see the banker sitting waiting for a trim
And then the fireman rushes in
From the pouring rain, very strange

Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and meanwhile back
Penny lane is in my ears and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies
Penny Lane

Epitaph Philosophy:

I'm always fascinated by the epitaphs chosen by authors to lead us into their stories. Given Levy's penchant for symbolism, I wanted to unpack what she might have been trying to tell us with the two epitaphs at the start of The Man Who Saw Everything.

• Karel Teige, The Shooting Gallery | 1946

Poetic thought, unlike rootless orchids, did not grow in a greenhouse and did not faint when confronted with today's traumas.

Teige was an avant-garde Czech 'agent provocateur and seismograph, at once provoking action and debate and yet simultaneously reacting with the utmost sensitivity to the shifting political spectrum of his time.' (Kenneth Frampton, Introduction, Karel Teige / 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde | 1999)

He was an editor, writer and artist during the 1920's and 30's. He was a Marxist, but not the card carrying kind. After the 1948 takeover by the Communists, he was not considered to be toeing the party line. Teige was denounced and forbidden to publish or speak out.

Sadly, it would seem, that Teige did in fact, succumb to the traumas of his time, as all reports claimed that he died a 'broken man' in 1951.

It looks like poetic thought can be a as fragile as an orchid. Though, here we are, over fifty years later, still able to read his words, despite the secret police claiming to have destroyed all his papers.

• Susan Sontag, In Plato's Cave | On Photography | 1977

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Sontag also claimed that the proliferation of photographic images had developed a 'chronic voyeuristic relation' within people. I wonder what she would think of the selfie?
She also believed 'that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other'. Was Jennifer merely having a conversation about the nature of beauty as she claimed, or was she trying to capture the real Saul? Perhaps she wanted to show Saul how others saw him or maybe she was objectifying him?

In 2003, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, where she revised some of the opinions she had expressed earlier. She was now concerned that 'people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs ... that the photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture'.

Saul definitely had trouble remembering what was real, what was imagined or what he wanted to be true.

Favourite Quote:

I have sex all the time but I don't know if it's the sex I had thirty years ago or three months ago. I think I have extended my sexual history across all time zones, but I did have a lot of sex before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. After that it's a blur but I think I had less sex in social democracies than I did in authoritarian regimes.

Facts:

• Shortlisted 2019 Goldsmith Prize
• Longlisted 2019 Booker Prize
• My 2016 Hot Milk post.