Babe in Arms

This week Radio 4 are broadcasting the five short stories commissioned by Readers' Groups in the West Midlands (courtesy of the West Midlands Readers' Groups Network). Listen out at 3:30 pm each day! I think the Mil Millington story commissioned by Babe in Arms will be on Friday, but that would be only if they broadcast them in the order they were recorded in. And also listen in on Thursday morning at 11:30 to a documentary about the whole commissioning process.

Our last meeting was held on 6th March at 11:15am. We discussed The Colour by Rose Tremain. It is the story of an English family moving to New Zealand in the 1860s during the gold rush, and attempting a new life there on a small farm.

Although the subject matter didn’t on the face of it do much for the general readership of Babe in Arms, this book was universally popular (so you can like books you feel obliged to read!).

I had never read anything by Rose Tremain, and didn’t know much about her or the kind of fiction she writes. Only one other member of the group had done so, she had read Restoration, twice. It seems that you’d be hard put to pigeon hole Rose Tremain, but also that meticulous research is a given in her writing.

I was all set not to like The Colour (this is obviously a bit of a theme with me). The blurb on the back seemed to be setting us up for a saga of the blockbuster variety. I’m not a huge fan of historical novels anyway, they can be heavy on detail, and light on something like character development…you get the impression that the writers are loath to let even an hour of research go unused in their novel, but with The Colour nothing felt extraneous to the story, everything had its place, and the details were just there to get you even more immersed in an extraordinary ordinary story.

The two main characters, Joseph and Harriet are a newly married couple trying to live as English farmers in the South Island of New Zealand. Their marriage of convenience served for both of them to make a new start in the new world, and at the beginning it looks like it could work; they are even mildly attracted to each other. But then Joseph succumbs to the temptations of filthy lucre as he finds a few slivers of gold.

His desperation to find gold contrasts with Harriet’s wish to experience nature and love and with her ability to content herself with little. Her affair with a Chinese man who is regarded as an oddity by the gold diggers, brings her all kinds of riches, both real and metaphorical, far beyond what her husband considers her capable of achieving, and as everyone agreed it was a lot more romantic and a lot less sordid than the affair Joseph conducted in the same place with a young boy.

Even though Joseph does make enough to go home with, it is no satisfaction to him, and he is revealed gradually throughout the novel as suffering from a guilty conscience. In fact I think he’s one of the most unsympathetic characters I’ve encountered in fiction in a while. His habit of covering his wife’s face with his hand while making love was just one of his many unappealing characteristics; he was a flawed, selfish, unlikeable character, the product of good, honest, gritty writing. A more wishy-washy author would have had us sympathise with him, but Tremain brought out in me an understanding of the primitive instinct of the other gold prospectors to steer clear of someone so obviously bad news (slightly disturbing).

There’s a touch of magical realism in the story of a grander more successful English couple and their ailing son who has a mental bond with his Maori nurse Pare. Pare is introduced as being superstitious, but as the story goes on the line between real and not so real becomes more indistinct, and so she seems to live in a different place to the English settlers.

There are some truly touching scenes in the book; the early death of Beauty the cow got everyone weeping; I was touched by the death of Joseph’s mother (more so than the others), and also by the powerful image of the cob house disintegrating, what a metaphor!!

For May we are reading The White Masai by Corinne Hofmann.

On April 3rd we are having a visit from a Birmingham-based author, Will Buckingham, who will talk to us about his novel Cargo Fever. There are extra copies of this book now available in the library; they’re behind the desk especially for Babe in Arms readers, and I have a copy that someone else is reading, but can lend to anyone who wants it when she’s finished. It promises to be an interesting discussion. Here’s a link to his blog by the way:

www.willbuckingham.com/blog

as you’ll see, he’s just finished another novel, so he deserves a nice trip to leafy Leominster!!

Firstly I should apologise for the lateness of this blog…teething babies and cranky laptops have sent me back to the 20th Century. Since we’ll be having a meeting later this week I’ll keep this one brief (especially while the baby’s asleep and the laptop’s working).

Our February meeting occurred on the first Thursday of the month and that is how it shall be from now on. We now meet in the morning at 11:15, known more for bright eyes and bushy tails than the tantrums and sugar lows of the afternoons.

In February we discussed Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Not everybody got to finish it, but of those that did, it was generally agreed that the ending was the weakest thing about it, letting down what was otherwise an entertaining and thought provoking read. This isn’t to say that views on the book were the same across the board. I found it a bit of a page turner, and read it fairly quickly, but some other readers found the prose a bit dry and didn’t feel motivated to keep reading. The death of the main character Nazneen’s baby for example, affected people differently; I felt traumatised by it and thought it had been well-treated by the author but some were put off by the way Ali moved on swiftly in time from the event. For a group of people brought together because of our small children and babies, it was a poignant discussion to have early on a Thursday morning.

The views were mixed as well on the inclusion in the story of darker elements of Nazneen’s upbringing in Bangladesh, for example the story of the man hanging from the tree was disturbing for some readers and its place in the story in general was questioned. For some this illustrates the story of the girl who was left to her fate, an example of how people become what they are told they are, and so Nazneen lets fate and life buffet her in various directions and even over continents and into a marriage then an affair, until the unfortunate Hollywood ending when she starts to take life into her own hands. (I should point out here that we were happy at how things worked out at the end, but that it didn’t really seem believable in terms of the rest of the story).

For me the story and character that had most resonance was that of Nazneen’s sister Hasina, whose effervescent and complex life defied any ending, happy or sad. The stylistic device of two sisters, one pushing against fate and being overwhelmed by it and one letting it buffet against her and eventually coming out on top worked for me, and I liked the neatness and symmetry of the characters.

The hapless Chanu deserves a special mention too, for pure comedy, perfect comedy with a dash of sadness and regret thrown in.

The overall reaction to Brick Lane was positive, but a more luke-warm positive that I was expecting, given its general popularity. It’s good but not as good as it could be.

Our book for discussion in March is The Colour by Rose Tremain.

More news anon.