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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

Tag Archives: reading report

The “Self-Invented Man”: Debunking a Victorian Hero

04 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographies, book review

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Henry Morton Stanley, reading report, Victoriana

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Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley John Bierman (Sceptre, 1990)

Abandonment, rejection, betrayal. These were the themes that haunted the inner life of the swaggering, assertive little man known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley… For Stanley, a mere mask was insufficient protection; he fabricated for himself a suit of armour, which it has taken almost a century to penetrate. (Opening paragraph)

Henry Morton Stanley was famously the journalist who “found” the missionary explorer David Livingstone. He is a classic subject for the debunking-a-Victorian-hero genre, because – if Bierman is to be believed – Morton was a compulsive liar, a storyteller who invented versions of his life to suit his purposes.
I’m only part-way through the book, but want to offer some initial reactions to its first part, “Self-Invented Man”. The book was a serendipitous find in a booksale; I was only vaguely aware of Stanley as a historical figure, but I am fascinated by the possibilities of Victorian biography. It exists outside the lifespan of anyone alive today (bar the handful of people born before 1900), so it is an archival genre of biography, yet it almost feels in touching distance: the world of the Victorians was a world my grandparents were familiar with, even if they didn’t directly live in it.

Bierman writes well, with requisite wit. He has just the right tone to write Stanley’s story. He has also chosen a fascinating subject.

The gift Stanley left his biographer was an autobiography and other writings which are demonstrably false. Early sections of Bierman’s biography read as an extended commentary on Stanley’s autobiography. A key passage of Stanley’s account is presented and then debunked. As one example, Stanley presents himself as a youthful hero in the children’s workhouse, standing up to the tyrannical master, a rebel campaigning for justice. Bierman finds a contradiction in Stanley’s own account – why, then, was Stanley left in charge of the other children when the master was away? – and deploys corroborating evidence (interviews with other inmates, the workhouse records themselves) to argue the reality was that Stanley was actually the teacher’s pet.

Unlike a biography I recently finished (that of South Australian author, Matilda Evans) Bierman has a wealth of material to work with, and I find the debunking process gripping. The contradictions and fabrications in Stanley’s account reveal so much about the subject’s character and the age in which he lived.

The choice of subject is surely paramount for the biographer. There are so many historical figures who cry out for attention, and yet before embarking on a biography of them, the question probably has to be: what traces have they left behind? What raw materials are there to work with? (Unless, perhaps, the greatest biographer can coax blood from a stone and produce a great biography of a subject who has left little behind. It would have to be a convincingly and fascinatingly speculative account.)

Reading Bleak House

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

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Bleak House, Charles Dickens, ebooks, reading report

All my reading friends will disown me, because I am enamored with ebooks. I love being able to read Dickens in bed – for free – without breaking my wrist. I love being able to flick between it and Eminent Victorians without changing books. I am lazy.

I’m amazed by the sophistication of Dicken’s narrative voice – I was expecting his narrative technique to be so primitive, yet I find a variety of voices and how convincingly he can write through the eyes of a young woman (Esther).

About 120 pages in, it’s interesting how episodic it is as a novel; I know Charles is in control, but he just keeps parading all these zany characters in front of the reader, characters who will have a small role in the overall plot, but not a significant one. He is psychologically profound, although a little overblown, as he skewers the crimes of the charitable of his day.

The book shop : like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies

26 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, books, quotes

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reading report

Halfway through, I  am entranced by Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking. Take this passage about a bookshop:

Arriving at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment…
(p. 81)

Strangely enough, I abandoned Henry James’s The Ambassadors for her book. One day perhaps I’ll have the patience, the sharpness of mind to untangle James, to keep him afloat in my mind. I do not in any way deny his genius.

Back to Jones’s passage. I find the weight of new books published overwhelming (the pressure to keep up? I don’t even pretend). And this passage captures some of that experience for me. And then there’s that experience of going back to a book I know when I’m in a bad reading patch.

Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s From This Day Forward

29 Monday Dec 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, book review

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Christian writing, reading report

A memoir of her marriage. In several ways I’m enjoying it, but the first section is awkward. It is too anecdotal; the contrast with the immediacy and feeling of the second section is stark. She’s too removed from the events of the first section and she’s telling it like a grandmother to her grandchildren.

What’s more, she has this habit of defanging whatever she says, reducing it to nothing, explaining it away, leaving me saying ‘why’d you mention it in the first place?’. Eg:

Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken solider or sailor, but I would just smile and move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was aways somebody else to say, “Is he bothering you?” (p. 36)

Dreadful writing. I believe in you, Madeleine, I believe you’re going to wipe away the bad memory of this sentence and ones like it.

A penchant for dissatisfaction and Lionel Shriver’s brilliance

01 Tuesday Jul 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, book review, life, link, writing

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donald shriver, lionel shriver, reading report

I will need to elaborate on Lionel Shriver’s brilliance at some time. She’s about the most quotable writer I’ve ever read. After being very impressed by We need to talk about Kevin, Post-birthday world has lines on almost every page that I feel like writing down. She has this acute insight into the details of life, and it’s this which can truly set a writer apart.

Not just the details either – an ability to observe and describe emotional states. To see what we all experience but don’t realise.

A couple of weeks ago she wrote an excellent column about her father for the Guardian where she talks of their mutual penchant for dissatisfaction – ‘great when you’re young; at 80, it’s self-destructive’. How true. How disturbing. (Maybe it’s half my problem. I need to get over the dissatisfaction that drove me through my teens and early twenties. Because IT DOESN’T WORK when you hit late twenties.)

I wonder how her father feels about her writing so candidly about him while he’s still alive. Ten years ago I would have written with this openness. Maybe even five years ago. But I’ve become much more guarded the last few years.

I don’t think she’s candid out of naivety, like I was. I genuinely thought that if I was open and honest to the world, they’d repay me with my kindness. Then I met some formidable people who taught me otherwise.

I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver’s father because he’s a theology scholar. One of these few places where my polarity of interests – theology and literature – meet, besides in me.

Here and there and everywhere.

20 Sunday Apr 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, reading, this blog

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Arabian Nights, G.K. Chesterton, reading report

First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone – I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century – that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

 

Randolph Stow

02 Saturday Feb 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, book review, reading

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Randolph Stow, reading report

I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.

His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.

I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?

A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.

Atonement part two – a reading report

17 Monday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

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Atonement, Ian McEwan, reading report

I’ve just finished re-reading part two of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Having got of prison early in exchange for enlisting, Robbie’s in the midst of wartorn France, with death and atrocities all around him. He’s retreating to the coast and trying to focus on Cecilia waiting for him across the channel.

It’s a strange juxtaposition after the single atrocity in the midst of the civilisation of the manor in the first section; McEwan never takes us quite where we expect.  

Towards the end of the section is the key to the connection:

But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no-one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there wasn’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts… You killed no-one today? But how many did you leave to die?(261)

The tide of blood in war, the constant atrocities, drown out that one atrocity, that one event that changed everyone’s lives back at the manor. When we learn, later on, that it’s Briony writing this, the juxtaposition of her crime and the war might make us think her innocent by comparison. Or at least dilute the magnitude of what she did. (Of course, she can’t forgive herself that easily but she’d like to.) 

I found this part less compelling, less insightful than the first part, but then the first part is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

Atonement part one – a reading report

15 Saturday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

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Ian McEwan, reading report

Spoiler alert

Few books make me feel so deeply as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve just finished re-reading the first part, and I’m devastated again.

As the party waits for Robbie to return and be arrested, we watch it through Briony’s eyes and it’s so very frustrating because I long to know about Cecilia’s rage at her note being shown around to everyone and her passion for Robbie. I long to know what Robbie is thinking. Such a heartbreaking scene: him coming out of the mist at dawn having found the lost boys, expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead this stony faced line of people waiting with angry hatred for him.

And in feeling so angry at Briony, we forget the worst sin committed here: Paul Marshall’s rape of Lola and then the cowardly warmongering snob’s silence as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. What an evil human being! This novel affects me so much that I hate him as I read, I hate the way he’s got between Cecilia and Robbie, the way he’s destroyed Robbie and Lola’s lives.

McEwan casts this villian so well by giving Marshall plausible pomposity and this delicious detail of him being the gleeful inventor of that disgusting counterfeit – compound chocolate – and his desire for war so that the demand for his chocolate increases.

McEwan is a writer who has such superb control and pacing. He knows how to create narrative hunger in the reader, and yet once he’s done this, he also knows the precise speed at which to release details to us to keep us enthralled and desperate for more.

Some people I respect a lot find the first part slow and boring. I wonder if this is because their experience of the world is too different to McEwan’s. For me, McEwan so precisely gets to the experience of being alive when he talks of his characters’ motivations and thoughts that I don’t mind if a perfectly ordinary day occurs. However, I also am always aware that some menacing event that’s about to change everyone’s lives is hanging in the air.

200 pages into Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind

30 Friday Nov 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

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Paul Auster, reading report

I wonder if my problem’s with the translation. I won’t ever know, because I never intend to learn Spanish.I like the themes of lost books, secret libraries and adolescence.  I love this mysterious figure of an obscure failed novelist named Julian Carax, whom a handful of fans obsessively seek. The book  feels like it belongs to the same family as some of my favourite books – Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, Nicholas Christopher’s A Trip to the Stars.

But I’m ambivalent about the writing. It constantly lapses into cliches and figures of speech. The characters seem to go around with smirks on their faces, making self-deprecating or ironic comments that aren’t even interesting. At one point the landlady keeps on saying ‘You’re a devil!’ in an affectionate way, and it grated on me.

 It’s headed for a 7 out of 10.

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