Trust me. My opinion is impartial, so you can. That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t have partiality, as in things that are to my taste. I’m partial to books about Shakespeare, for instance, and to narratives that engage me emotionally. But that kind of partiality is not that same as being actually biased. And when we read book reviews, especially those in the national press, it is difficult to find an impartial reviewer.
Recently I read How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. I chose to read it because I read a good review, which told me it featured Shakespeare and was touching, in The Guardian. I often find myself sharing the opinions of journalists who write for that newspaper. However, what I forgot is that book reviews tend not to be written by professional journalists but by other authors, and it’s not always clear whether or not they know personally the author whose work they review.
I am not suggesting that Hermione Eyre, who wrote the review for How to Stop Time in the Guardian (you can read it here), either intended to misinform her readers or is a friend of Haig, but she is a novelist herself. Even if she isn’t his friend, she is aware that she will find herself in a similar position at some time, being assessed by one of her fiction-writing peers. Her review may be coloured by this. Equally, she may be merely polite. Anyway, after I’d read the book, I thought her review was a bit on the kind side, given that she said it was ‘hard to resist’. Now I look once more at what she wrote, I realise she was being subtler than I realised. She said it was at times ‘lightly-sketched’ (code for badly written?) and that ‘Haig isn’t bogged down by period details’ (in other words, is being historically illiterate). I didn’t spot those caveats when I first read her review but I agree with them now.
My point is that a blog such as this – written by someone whose livelihood does not depend upon the good offices of editor or fellow critics/authors – is more likely to tell you the unvarnished truth.
Having said which, How to Stop Time isn’t actually bad, it’s just disappointing. It tells the story of a man who lives for several hundred years, moving from the Early Modern period to the modern day without, once he has achieved maturity, noticeably aging. As you might expect, perhaps, he meets along the way a number of very famous people (who also tend to be mainly writers) such as Shakespeare and F Scott Fitzgerald. So far, so predictable. The twist is that our protagonist is one of a number of such men and women who are part of a secret society. The book is uncertain whether or not it is the touching tale of our hero’s coping with longevity while searching for his similarly-long-lived daughter, with whom he lost touch back in the days of playing the lute at the Globe Theatre, or some Dan Brown type conspiracy caper, with a cardboard cut-out villain almost as fully developed as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code. Either way, I lost interest. (I finished the book but partly wished I hadn’t started.)
However, sometimes reading a slightly less than satisfactory book can send you to one that’s better; I recall that reading an odd novel about E M Forster’s love for an Indian bus conductor prompted me to read A Passage to India, which has to be one of the best books I’ve read. When thinking about How to Stop Time I was reminded of what I’d heard about Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, which is that it’s about a character who lives from Renaissance times to the present – well, the present when it was published in 1928 – and that there was another particular twist to which I’ll come in a moment. Consider this a spoiler alert.
So I read Orlando.
Now, this I do recommend – it’s clever, it’s original, it engages the emotions. OK, it isn’t a weepie, that’s not what I mean, but you care, just as the author quite clearly cared. So much so, in fact, that it was called at the time, the ‘longest love-letter in history’ and that by the son of the woman to whom this love letter was addressed. Orlando is dedicated to, and is a fantasy about, Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was in love. And here is the other twist that I said I’d mention: the main character starts life as a man, an Elizabethan lord, in fact, and round about half way through the novel, while he is an eighteenth century ambassador in Constantinople, he becomes a woman. (The pronouns change accordingly.) Neither this nor her remarkable longevity is explained, but what each allows the author to do is to explore gender and societal attitudes to men and women across the ages in a wry, and sometimes justifiably angry, commentary running alongside the narrative. There’s so much here to enjoy – such a contrast to Haig’s book. The writing is rich and full of imagery, sometimes a little too much so, admittedly, but always with a slight ironic undercutting awareness of its own absurdity. The sideswipes at hypocrisy and pomposity are brilliant and witty. The literary historical characters are there, of course, as always – Orlando befriends Pope and Dryden at one point – but not in the simplistic way of How to Stop Time. Woolf has something to say about them.
This isn’t quite what I’d come to expect of Woolf – I’d read her Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves and I knew her as a fully-fledged modernist: complex and difficult to read but with a wonderful insight into the way in which people experience life moment by moment while at the same time remembering everything that brought them there. Well, there is a fair bit of that in Orlando but it’s much easier to read; it doesn’t have the same ‘stream of consciousness’ style and it’s much more obviously funny.
So, as I’m impartial, you can trust me when I suggest a) don’t bother with How to Stop Time and b) do read Orlando.
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