Review-a-thon: Bone, Blankets, and The Finishing School

Posted on | May 12, 2010 | 17 Comments

In the aftermath of consecutive Angela Carter month and Persephone Reading Week, I have a lot of blogging to catch up with.  I have a few weeks’ worth of reviews to be scheduled and haven’t yet reviewed those books read during the read-a-thon that I participated in early April.  This post is actually micro-reveiws of three of my read-a-thon reads, to allow me to catch up that little bit sooner; the top book in the photograph, the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, I shall review separately as I want to devote a post to that one and my re-read of Black Venus during the read-a-thon has already been covered. Those were the two books that I started the read-a-thon with and the short stories (Carter) were a struggle to focus on and rather time-consuming before moving onto the play, which was far better-suited to read-a-thon conditions.

Following the play, I moved onto a novella (yes, I attempted to squeeze as many literary forms into the read-a-thon as possible and missed the novel itself), The Finishing School by Muriel Spark. I’ve been on something of a Spark kick this year and have a further four of her novel(la)s lined up on my immediate to-be-read -albeit mental- pile.  The Finishing School was less satisfying than my previous -and more recent- reads, Memento Mori (which is already a strong contender for my favourite read of the year) and The Girls of Slender Means; it was  last work published two years (2004) before death and may offer more in re-reading but immediately was lacking in comparison to Memento Mori and The Driver’s Seat, which are, in my opinion, Spark’s masterpieces.

The Finishing School is about a creative writing finishing school run by Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina Parker, on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.  Rowland is struggling with his latest novel whilst teaching aspiring writers; he discovers that one of their students, Chris, who is only seventeen, is also writing a novel and that it and he display extraordinary promise.  Rowland becomes professionally jealous  of the younger man’s talent and obsessed with Chris, putting himself, his marriage and the school at risk.

[O]f all the pupils Chris caused Rowland the most disquiet.  He was writing a novel, yes. Rowland, too was writing a novel, and he wasn’t going to say how good he thought Chris was.  A faint twinge of that jealousy which was to mastermind Rowland’s coming months, growing in intensity small hour by hour, seized Rowland as he looked.

This is a curious novella but very effective in its description of jealousy and how insane with envy people can become, driving them to do crazy things and destroy those around them, including themselves.  Spark does get under the skin of the situation and encapsulates in a short amount of pages the madness of Rowland.

It was mainly, at this moment, a question of trying to keep Rowland’s state of mind from running away with itself.  Chris, only Chris?  Was Rowland an unconscious homosexual?  It would be strange if this were so, considering the very perceptive views of life that he held in all other respects.  To be sexually jealous over a man or a woman was something Nina understood, but jealousy over a book, a work of art, a piece of writing…  That was indeed a fact she was trying to swallow.  Rowland was simply going mad with jealousy about the writing of novels.

Early on in the novella I was reminded of Polly of Novel Insight’s feature, Things I Learn From Books; in The Finishing School I learned the etiquette of eating asparagus in England (like Spark herself, I am Scottish but living in England; I also love asparagus but never eaten it in the way described).

Listen: when you eat asparagus in England, as everyone knows, you take it in your fingers, but the secret of exquisite manners with regard to asparagus is to eat it held in your left hand.  Got it?

As my eyes grew more tired and my brain turned to mush, I moved to graphic novels, which are an effective use of time and do seem to involve less concentration simply because there are less words to grapple with on the page when all you want to do is sleep.  I started off by reading Bone: Out of Boneville by Jeff Smith, the first volume in the successful Bone comic series.  Bone has been on the periphery of my consciousness for a while now and I borrowed it last-minute from the library as I knew it would definitely be read during the read-a-thon; I enjoyed it and now have the second volume, The Great Cow Race lined up to read.  I don’t have anything more really to offer other than it is an original premise, it’s very much an on-going story (hence the second one being picked up), and to learn more please read the Wikipedia article linked to or this insightful and enthusiastic review (of the series) by Nymeth of Things Mean a Lot.

Speaking of Nymeth, she and Aarti of Book Lust posted an outstanding co-review earlier this year of Blankets by Craig Thompson.  Blankets seems to have blown up across the blogosphere in the last six months or so and I had requested it from the library (it’s a very expensive graphic novel, mainly because of its length at close to 600-pages) around the same time as reading that review; it then languished on my library pile until the read-a-thon came around.  In the closing two hours of the read-a-thon (after I had slept for around four hours), I read Blankets in one sitting and found it just as touching and profound as the reviews I had read of it  had made it sound.  Blankets is a graphic memoir of Chris Thompson’s childhood and adolescence, focusing on his first experience of love in the background of a strict Christian upbringing.  I find it curious that most of the graphic novels that I have read (Persepolis and Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi;  The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel) have all been memoirs; I don’t read memoirs in any other form and it is interesting that the medium of graphic novels allows their stories to be told and for me to enjoy them.  In my opinion the combination of visual story-telling and subtle narrative heightens the tenderness of this story, a story that otherwise may not have had the same impact; comparatively, a graphic novel such as Maus is less intense because of its form but both suggest that the graphic novel medium is the most accessible -as well as the most touching- form for memoirs.

The same week as the read-a-thon I attended this quilts exhibition at the V&A museum, which deepened my appreciation for Blankets.  A patchwork quilt is a real labour of love and Craig is touchingly presented with one by his girlfriend Raina, with whom he has a bittersweet relationship.  The blankets of the title also refers to blankets of snow and connotes images of comfort, of being tenderly blanketed, or of blank canvases -in art, writing and life.  Blankets is tender, moving, and highly recommended.

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A book blog written by a reader who enjoys The Beatles and who is not wholly averse to hardbacks.

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