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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
JUST DISCOVERED THIS DESCRIPTION FROM SOMEONE ON-LINE
While it’s not true to say I made heavy weather of Doting, I found myself increasingly puzzled by it. The dialogue often seems inconclusive. Characters talk past each other, sentences aren’t finished, and there are cultural allusions that are, for an Australian reader in the C21st century, just out of sight. The characters know what the other is thinking, but we don’t. Or not quite.
So the novel seems lightweight, as the blurb at Goodreads implies:
‘Written almost completely in dialogue, Henry Green’s final novel is a biting comedy of manners that exposes the deceptive difference between those who love and those who “dote.” Arthur Middleton is a middle-aged member of the upper-middle class living in post-World War II London with his wife. Stuck in a passionless marriage, Arthur becomes infatuated with Annabel, a much younger woman. Their relationship sets into motion a series of intertwining affairs between five close friends less concerned with love than with their attempts to keep the other lovers apart.’
I shall endeavour to stick with it, better than I did with LIVING. I hope it turns out to be as important as LOVING, CONCLUDING and BLINDNESS have proved to be for me.
If it’s not in elided dialect, I shall be more open to its tantalising. So, I hope to join the dots of DOTING below, as I read it………..
It starts with Mr Rock’s goose from CONCLUDING?
“So they were three in full evening dress apart from Peter’s tailored pin stripe suit in which, several weeks later, he was to carry a white goose under one arm, its dead beak almost trailing the platform, to catch the last train back to yet another term.”
I am enormously captivated already! The limelight cabaret, the adolescent girl on stage in salacious act, a man juggling and in the audience the parents (one called Arthur and the other Diana) and their youthful son Peter and the latter’s not yet or not really a girl-friend called Annabel from college? We learn a lot from innuendo. And watching other characters being watched by these main characters so far. The comestibles. And looking into Annabel’s teeth to test for ‘trench mouth’. Masterful strokes of high literature.
Read up to: “The writer’s day is never done, you mean?”
‘“So you consider I’m just being childish!” she [Annabel] cried out [to Arthur], with a sweet expression of despair. “How then shall I ever explain? No, it’s simply that you’ve no right to feel depressed, the happiest married couple in London and a lovely son whilst look at me, I’ve absolutely nothing, hopelessly in love with someone [a chap called Shone] years younger than I am who’s still at that beastly St Olaf’s, me who’ll probably never get married, ever!”’
This and more to be learnt or relearnt and adjusted about these characters through dialogue, and the mating systems of their News cinema times, the age gap between Annabel and Arthur (Peter’s father married to Peter’s mother Diana), and the meeting of eyes as pre-mating and dating as pre-doting? Annabel’s request, and Arthur’s answer…in where I have read up to: “‘Let’s talk of doting. Tell me how you first met Diana.’ / ‘At a Hunt Ball,’ he told her, plainly reluctant.”
Read up to: “Soon after this he paid the bill and left without arranging to meet again.”
Me likewise with this book?
Read up to: “‘I will, if I may,’ he replied as he raised his hat.”
Much is learnt from dialogue (e.g. ‘Well, I once ate a green fig looked precisely like Dad’s face.’) featuring Annabel about her nearly estranged parents, and Peter and his more loving parents, and Annabel’s subtly incremental relationship with an older man such as Peter’s father, Arthur, as well as with Peter himself and with two other men or schoolboys, including the difference between ‘doting’ and ‘loving’, and there is also a hot curry and saffron rice in an Indian Restaurant – one of the earliest in England, I would guess – whereby the sweet (dessert) ‘looked like little dog’s turds, under the pink paper carnations…”
More dialling dialogue for the ringing tones of plot. Will anyone answer for it? The sense of middle-aged Arthur’s description to 19 year old Annabel of when she was aged six aloft on the roof of a rabbit hutch, and he had grabbed her by the ankle sock. Now we wonder where the blurred borderline is between his attitude to someone as a child then as a woman. And Arthur and Annabel later deploying an obsession with each other as filtered by the dialogue from separate meetings with confidantes.
The next section seems pivotal, from talk of servants, or lack of, and war rations, to…well, if I told you what happened it would spoil the plot!
In fact, I shall enjoy reading the rest of it in private, because there is not much to be gained from publicly real-time reviewing such a plot, and I hope you have already gained what I see as its intrinsic characteristics. (Bombs versus disease, and Ligottian anti-natalism, I have myself yet to see.) And I shall soon start reading PARTY-GOING here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/party-going-by-henry-green/