Book reviews: George Orwell and Muriel Spark

Reviewing all the books I read in a year is a nice record of my reading habits but hard to keep up with the amount of books I seem to get through! Without further ado, here are the latest two to be reviewed…

Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark

Animal Farm, by George Orwell
First published by Secker & Warburg, 1945
This edition published by Penguin, 1973

Books that were on the school curriculum suffered as much as I did from forced reading. I still shudder when thinking of metaphysical poetry, for example. But slowly I am returning to the fiction made dusty in classrooms, and this is one of them – George Orwell’s ‘fairy story’ of a tainted revolution.

The book’s premise is achingly simple and oh-so clever. The animals stage a coup and drive out the farmer, proposing to work for themselves. Their success hides the fact someone has to be the leader, a mantle assumed by the pigs, and over time a terrible transformation takes place.

This is the sort of fairy story of which the Grimm brothers would have been proud. Each animal has a role that reflects our society – whether it is the honest everyman of Boxer the horse or the blind obedience of the sheep. It’s not a mirror one cares to linger in front of for too long in fear of what you may see.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
First published in Great Britain by Macmillan, presume 1961
This edition published by Penguin, 1969

This is a fascinating story of a woman teacher desperate to make an impression, to appear cultured and charming, and the impressionable girls who she taught at school. We are told early on that one of ‘the Brodie set’ betrayed her by bringing about her dismissal as a teacher. But which one?

Is Miss Jean Brodie in her prime? You’d never know from the prose. It’s only repeated about a hundred times, but Muriel Spark likes to hang tags on her cast of characters and invokes them with nearly every mention. In this way the characters become slightly two-dimensional as we only ever see one trait – Sandy’s small peering eyes, Rose ‘famous for sex’. But knowing one trait opens our eyes to details that surround the characters - 1930s Edinburgh, the era preluding the Second World War.

The novel unfolds making good use of prolepsis / flash forward – this technique allows us to know events before they happened and gives a sense of fatality to the story even before we pass the first chapter. But what we lose with suspense we gain with attention to detail, and try to pick up on clues as to why the story unfolds like it does. At first Miss Brodie’s influence over ‘her girls’ seems beneficial but as they grow older it is revealed as manipulation.

Incidentally, great cover, isn't it? It shows Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie in the 1969 film, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Contractions in Dialogue

Popping in very quickly as today I have a day off ‘real’ work to do what I like to think of as my personal real work – work on my novel. As per, sometimes my body forgets that these days off are not proper days off and likes instead to lie about slovenly and watch random television. I have to bribe it with biscuits to sit here and write/redraft. And today would be the day when I have no chocolate whatsoever and am reduced to eating biscuits from the back of the bread bin. Yup, the Biscuits That Taste Forgot.

I still eat them though.

Today one of the things I am checking within my novel is the dialogue. What I am looking out for is things like ‘I am’ rather than ‘I’m’ – when speaking, unless there is a reason to say it precisely, mostly folk would use a contraction and say ‘I’m taking the dog for a walk’ rather than ‘I am taking the dog for a walk’. The latter brings a whole new stress to the tone of the dialogue – if you say it out loud it sounds like the person speaking is highly exasperated with the person asking, i.e.

Parent (asking even though is watching teenage son fixing dog leash to dog): What are you doing?
Teenage son: I am taking the dog for a walk. (Optional ‘durr’ on the end.)

It is more natural to use contractions within dialogue – it’s for it is, I’m for I am, that’s for that is, etc. I’m taking advantage of a quiet house to declaim my dialogue to the cats (they are thrilled) so I can listen to my speech. The trick is reading aloud exactly what I have written and not what I ‘think’ I have written!

Business Speak

I bloody hate it. Here are my pet peeves:

Elevate. What am I, a lift? This just means asking someone higher up, which leads us to:

The food chain. Nice. This is the sort of thing mentioned by people who rate themselves as sharks or tigers as opposed to plankton. No one would rate themselves as plankton. Even plankton itself, if it had an option, probably wouldn’t rate itself as plankton. People that use ‘the food chain’ often also use:

Cascade. E.g. cascading information up and down ‘the food chain’. (Although usually 'down' as, from what we have seen above, folk who use this like to think of themselves as sharks rather than mere worker plankton.) Whenever I hear the word 'cascade' I wonder what happened to the word ‘tell’? How about ‘distribute’? But people like to cascade information in relation to:

Forward Planning. How can planning be anything other than forward? Backward planning doesn’t really work. I wish I could backward plan not to have drank quite so much on Saturday night but wishing it won’t make the Day of Woe (Sunday) go away. This is also linked in with:

Pre-planning. Please don’t ever go there, either. A plan before the plan? Purlease. Although maybe they are making sure they are:

Sweating the Asset. What a pretty picture this conjures in my mind. A big hairy sweaty ass (arse). Thanks for that. When it comes to assets, people may also think about:

Leverage. For the love of plain speaking, why can’t folk say they are going to ‘use’ or ‘take advantage’ of their contacts as opposed to ‘leveraging’ them? Leverage sounds like something people do with a crow bar. Although when it comes to plain speaking, it appears business speak folk do not have:

Visibility. Used in sentences such as ‘I don’t have visibility of that issue/email/system/thing.’ Actually means ‘I don’t know’. Whenever someone says they don’t have visibility, my head will automatically translate this to mean they know nothing at all about anything. This will be further reinforced if they proceed to:

Speak in abbreviations. WTF?

Any more for any more?

Resolutions, of sorts

And so she’s back!
From Lanzarote!
She swam in the sea
And it really wasn’t grotty
I should have packed my second sun-dress
I should have drank Sangria 'til I was sick
If I’d known for just one second
I’d be back so very quick!

My word. Holidays just fly, don’t they? I managed to read two books from my enormous pile (okay, that was a tad ambitious) and made the mistake of starting the whopper book breezeblock, Stephen King’s Under The Dome, on the last day. This meant I have been glued to it ever since – folks, it is a good one. I barely noticed the plane ride. This is the book I wanted Duma Key to be. Anyway, there shall be more of it in a review when I get my act together (looks under chocolate wrappers for Act; finds it cowering away with mahoosive To Do list).

Mahoosive. Anyone remember that word from school? A cross between massive and...hm. Moose? Yes, that was it. Our school had such a way with words. I remember one of our teachers, a youngish chap but not young enough to be down with all the slang, flying into our classroom to ask us what ‘chief’ meant when aimed as a verbal arrow. We laughed, told him it wasn’t complimentary, and he went flying out of the classroom again in a rage.

Where was I? Ah yes. Act. I made a list (and I am checking it twice) full of things I need to crack on with, and most of it involves actually writing something. I feel like I have reverted into being a person with ideas for stories without actually committing them to paper/screen/software programme. This makes me a very sad girl indeed, so I am full of new resolutions to widen the cracks of space around full-time work so I can drip-feed in some stories. That is, if I can stay out from Under the Dome long enough.

What was the last book you fell into?