READING CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS BY SALLY ROONEY

 

Sally Rooney is the most acclaimed Irish novelist working today. Her books receive extensive favourable reviews. They are translated into many languages and read by thousands of people. She features in leading international news and cultural outlets and her interviews are widely read, circulated and quoted from. 

Following a stellar academic and debating career at Trinity College Dublin, her practice as a novelist and screen writer has grown steadily. She has written three acclaimed novels, one of which, Normal People was successfully adapted for the screen, while another, Conversations with Friends, is set for a screen release in 2022. Her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was written while she was a fellow at New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Colson Whitehead was previously a fellow.

The publisher’s blurb on the inside the cover of Faber and Faber’s 2017 edition of Conversations with Friends advises that it can be read either as a romantic comedy or a feminist text. I finished it just before Christmas, as news came of the death of American writer, academic and feminist, bell hooks, who, as well as powerful work on race, gender, class and capitalism, produced a number of telling insights into the nature and practice of love, including

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. 

Putting Rooney’s novel down, I was struck by how apt bell hooks’ aphorism was for Frances, who narrates the novel. I didn’t find much love in the novel, though there is desire and sex, joyless most of the time. The word ‘hate’ features throughout, with Frances and her friends hating pretty much everything in their lives and, most particularly, themselves. 

The word ‘nice’ features throughout as well. But the word that has the most force in the book, perhaps even more than ‘hate’, is the word ‘rich’. Everyone is either rich or concerned about who is rich. One character is described as having ‘a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical’. 

No one laughs.

On page 153, Frances says 

I hate that woman

about the rich British woman who owns the French beach house, where Frances is staying.

At the bottom of page 158, when Frances and Nick are in bed together and all the others are asleep, I read

I laughed and so did he. Although were were laughing about the impossibility of our relationship, it still felt nice. 

Frances lives in three pre-Covid bubbles; firstly, with other Trinity College students, all excelling in their courses, who spend their time competing rather than chatting when they are conversing; secondly, with her separated parents, based in Mayo, in the west of Ireland, comprising a hard-working mother and a drunken wastrel of a father who, though he loves Frances, sometimes neglects to forward the allowance which keeps her going in an uncle’s apartment, twenty minutes walk from college; thirdly, with Melissa and Nick, a married couple, ten years older than Frances, marked as rich, working professionally as an essayist-photographer (Melissa) and an actor (Nick), and Bobbi.

To a person, all of the characters are hard to stick. They exist at various points on an obnoxious scale, running from ‘complete pain’ to ‘tiresome’.

Frances is closest to her fellow-student, Bobbi, who is brilliant and rich, and with whom she shares an on-off relationship as friend and lover.

Once the world of the novel (middle-class Dublin, with a nod to an outlier-land in the West) is established, the action centres on who will develop a sexual relationship with whom. Bobbi with Melissa? Frances with either Melissa or Nick? The heterosexual option is taken with Frances and Nick embarking on an affair, which they strive to keep secret from Melissa and Bobbi, despite enjoying trysts and overnights together under the others’ noses.

There is some sex, but not much action otherwise. There are house-parties and dinner-parties. A trip to France, to a house owned by the woman with the moneyed British accent, Melissa’s patron, is a minor calamity, reminiscent of English mid-twentieth century social-comedies by Waugh and Powell, but without the laughs. 

The following dialogue appears in the Channel 4 tv adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.

Everybody seems to know everybody else.

Well, they do. That’s just the way it is. 

It could be applied to the world of Conversations with Friends, with a shift to 21^st Century Ireland where class divisions are less blatant, though nonetheless present.

The prose is praised as precise, which, at times, means ‘banal’. Chapter 31, the last, opens on page 311 with

The following week my phone rang.

Communication-at-a-distance devices are prominent throughout the book. The friends are best kept apart, except for sex, rows and huffing. Chapter 31 can be read as a précis of the entire novel. It is a dialogue between Frances and Nick, during a hiatus in their affair. The lovers are in different locations in Dublin city centre. Frances is outside a bookshop, beside Trinity College, where she had been browsing new fiction titles. There are a number of possible echoes from Rooney’s own life in the book.

Nick is in a supermarket. He means to contact Melissa, his wife, but mis-dials. Frances phones him back. The conversation is stilted and aching. It rocks back and forward on the see-saw of submission-dominance, which is the engine of all the relationships in the novel. This may be Rooney’s essential offering. 

The chapter ends with a submissive line from Frances

Come and get me, I said.

Or perhaps it’s a line showing dominance, by delivering an order?

Either way, I was left with a sense that the relationship will putter along for a round or two more, until Frances gets involved with lovers her own age, while Nick loses his good-looks and drifts into middle-age as a spent actor. Perhaps he will go on to enjoy a mid-life career on tv as a drink-fuelled police Lathario, continuing, as it were, ‘to have it both ways’.

I took a straw pole of other readers, as I was nearing the end of the book. I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying it. I felt I was the wrong age (I’m a working OAP) and perhaps the wrong gender, though I don’t usually depend on such categories when I read a book. Anyone can read a Sara Paretsky or a Nadine Gordimer.

My sister, an avid reader of fiction and self-described as a middle-aged mother, said that the friends reminded her of people she knew in college, who were so self-absorbed and out of touch with reality that she just couldn’t like them. A mid-fifties doctor, also an avid reader, said she couldn’t stick the book, but her teenage son read it and enjoyed it. The doctor was happy if it was the sex scenes that held him, as his reading habit had lapsed since he finished the Harry Potter series. A twenty-eight year old male podiatrist (I see a number of medics) loved the book and can’t wait for the tv adaptation.

It may be an age thing.

I still couldn’t decide if I enjoyed the book, though I read it to the end. I struggled with the pained dependencies and the strained interactions. The truculence and petulance on all sides annoyed me. No one took pleasure in the bounty they enjoyed. 

The self-hate burns from page 181, as Frances takes one of her periodic reviews of her naked body in a mirror.

For a while I just stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.

Frances is distracted (saved?) by a distant friend, this time a missed call from her father. The famous words of Philip Larkin underpin the scenes with Frances’ parents - 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 

Her reactions to them produce more truculence and petulance. A telling comparison between the state of Frances’ room in Dublin and her father’s house in Mayo – disarray, uneaten meals, rubbish and unwashed dishes – underlines the continuing generational line.

Frances’ behaviour is tolerated by others because she is described as either ‘talented’ or ‘brilliant’. These words serve the same purpose as the word ‘rich’. They are shields behind which obnoxious behaviours hide. 

Frances is diagnosed for endometriosis, an often debilitating condition of the tissue of the womb. She collapses and is hospitalised. She hates the medics and is convinced they hate her.

By the end of the book I realised I had been reading a coming-of-age dirge. A series of low notes, not even a scale, are struck in the opening chapter, when Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa at a literary event and go back to her house, where Nick serves drinks. The same notes play throughout, without much variation or development. 

Or love. 

I return to the late bel hooks.

Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.

Sally Rooney is illustrating bel hooks’ point, perhaps.

Coda: Sally Rooney is a member of the Irish Writers’ Union, consistent with her stance on solidarity. I am a long-standing member of www.irishwritersunion.org, a community for writers to gain support, advice and encouragement. Writers of any practice and status can be part of a union. If you are a writer, consider joining the writers’ union where you live. 

Conversations with Friends; Sally Rooney, Faber and Faber, London, 2017

A Dance to the Music of Time; Anthony Powell, TV miniseries, 1997

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118297/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WATCHING THE POWER OF THE DOG

 

We are in Montana, ably played by the high plains of Aotearoa (New Zealand). On an isolated cattle ranch, in 1925, four people – two brothers, a woman and her teenage son – bring us a story of repression and freedom, darkness and light, sex in all its confusions and little of its pleasures. It is a small story condensed into a huge space of vivid, soaring peaks, stunning clefts in high ravines and opaque interiors, laden with heavy, black furniture.

The interiors are dark and cold. The exteriors are light and exhilarating, even when snow dusts the mountains. Terrific tracking shots flip views of the mountains and people with blank walls, indicating that what we see includes what is hidden and what we can’t see remains present. Siting the camera inside a cavernous stable and showing us the folds and clefts of the sunlit mountains, while silhouetting two men, is one of many searing images in the film.

A bevy of cowboys carry a baby grand piano into a baronial ranch house which stands isolated in the prairie, prominent as an unforced error. We are in Jane Campion territory, visually and narratively, with a tip of the hat to E. Annie Proulx. The film itself is burdened with visual and narrative metaphors. The story is told by sweeping through open spaces, then focussing on intimate glades and pools, always bright and seductive. The narrative turns on the tension created in the dark interiors of the ranch house, the stable, the brothel and the hearts of all four protagonists.

The piano being carried into the house is the movement of the story from light to dark, from the potential for the satisfaction of desires to the dominance of repression and violence, underlined by the failed attempt to play The Radetzky March. Campion’s choice of this piece of music fastens the film to male boorishness, as expressed in empires and war.

A woman fails to play the march at a stifling dinner party organised by her husband, to wed himself to the state’s establishment, by hosting the Governor. The party flops. The woman, formerly a piano-player in silent-film cinemas, collapses into herself. She gulps down a garish cocktail and sets out on the path to becoming a drunken hysteric.

She is tormented. Her chief tormentor is her brother-in-law, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), the younger brother of her husband, George Burbank (Jesse Plemons). Phil is the uncouth. George is the couth. Their fragile bond, running the ranch and sharing a bed, is severed when George decides, without preamble, to ‘take a wife’.

We first meet the brothers on one of their cattle drives to the rail-head, where their stock will be forwarded to the cities for slaughter and consumption. Dangers fester on the range, including from diseased animals. Anthrax stalks the valley.

In classic images of the Western USA of the late 19^th century, we see cowboys in leather chaps and broad brimmed hats, smiling and wiping their sweat, before falling on their chicken dinners and later roistering to the rafters with the denizens of the brothel next door.

All but Phil and George. 

Phil harasses the young waiter, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose widowed mother Rose (Kirsten Dunst) runs the restaurant. He brutally mocks the boy’s artistic flourishes and quiet manner. The cowboys pick up his mocking. Phil is their range-toughened leader. They call the boy ‘nancy.’ Phil disdains the company of women in the brothel and wanders the upstairs corridors, calling for his brother. The film’s engine is sex and desire as expressed in repression and cover-up.

Meanwhile, George has gone ‘a-courting’ with Rose. He finds her crying in the kitchen, pained to see her son traduced and hurt. George lays a hand on her shoulder in one of the film’s most gentle scenes. When he later serves salads to a party of guests, who are surprised to see the well-known rancher take on such a domestic role, we once again drive towards the out-working of desire.

George, as played superbly by Jesse Plemons, may be the film’s hero, if it is possible to name any character as such. In an achingly beautiful scene, Rose and he, returning from their honeymoon, stand facing the great mountains. She attempts to teach him to dance. He falters. He breaks away and starts to cry, emotionally overwrought. He explains that he is happy to no longer be alone.

Phil, the younger brother, is never anything but alone. We learn, almost as an aside, that he is a Harvard-educated classicist. He is also an accomplished musician, excelling on the banjo. His cover may include ‘playing’ at being a cowboy. 

When in the midst of his fellow cowboys, he holds himself aloof. They party with the women. He goes upstairs alone. They horse about in the river, naked and beautiful on a summer’s day. He rides by and goes to his private glade, where he strips to pleasure himself using the wine-stained napkin he lifted from the restaurant and which he teased the teenager for carrying in a simpering manner.

When Peter, the teenager, comes upon him and upon his collection of physical health magazines, which include black and white images of male nudes, the film shifts gear and gallops towards the development it was set on from the outset: the bringing together of Phil and Peter. 

The pommel of a saddle is pertinently portrayed and lovingly caressed. A cigarette is exchanged in the classic film-trope of a sex act. The braiding and plaiting of a rawhide rope is used by Phil to bind Peter to him, an echo of the way he was bound to his heroic mentor from the ‘old days’, Bronco, with whom he bundled (naked?) in order to survive a winter’s night among the high peaks.

When Peter, sitting with Phil under an isolated haystack, a perfect location for a love-tryst, deftly and dispassionately dispatches an injured rabbit, Phil is not alone in sensing that the story may not conclude as it might have seemed it would. The teenager is a trainee surgeon. He knows how to cut. And he made a vow to save his mother.

The film has already gained numerous awards. It is likely to feature in all the Oscar lists. The principals perform well and embody the film and its themes. The other cast members are set well-back and are no more than cyphers for maleness, family, power and commercialised sex.

Does the film resolve into a cosy, heterosexual, domestic outcome, affirming the traditional nuclear family, albeit one spancilled by a tragic legacy?

It has stayed with me. It has drawn these words from me. I am glad I watched it. 

The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion (Netflix)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10293406/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Peter Bradshaw review in The Guardian (London)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/17/the-power-of-the-dog-review-jane-campions-superb-gothic-western-is-mysterious-and-menacing

The Radetzky March

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebe0Z7k6YdA

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

READING WILDE IN READING

 

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,

At seven all was still,

But the sough and swing of a mighty wing

The prison seemed to fill,

For the Lord of Death with icy breaths

Had entered in to kill.

The Lord of Death roamed Reading Gaol when playwright and celebrity Oscar Wilde resided there, as punishment for loving a man poetically, physically and publicly. Rail travellers had spat on him as he stood on the platform before he began his journey to Reading, in the cast-iron manacles of a convict.

I travelled the same train, un-manacled, in the company of family members, all of whom I love publicly, one of them poetically, others with fatherly and grandfatherly tenderness.

We strolled the banks of the Kennet, beside Reading Gaol and I thought of Oscar.

I read aloud from his famous ballad.

I know not whether laws be right,

Or whether laws be wrong;

All that we know who lie in gaol

Is that the wall is strong:

And that each day is like a year,

A year whose days are long.

We know now that the law which convicted the playwright was wrong, so we, the humans who live in these regions, changed it. 

But walls remain strong and days continue long, for many.

A lone swan cruised the Kennet, then glided under an office block and away. A grand-daughter pottered and tottered. A mother scampered to keep her safe. 

I read verses to the woman seated askance upon a love-seat, set under the prison walls.

But though lean Hunger and green Thirst

Like asp with adder fight,

We have little care of prison fare,

For what chills and kills outright

Is that every stone one lifts by day

Becomes one’s heart by night.

Then we walked on, through the ruined Abbey, which monarchs built, then tumbled. The stones their subjects lifted remain, humanly shaped and elegant in their desolation. We walked into Forbury Park, inviting in the chilly Autumn sunlight. A grotesque cast-iron lion stood high upon a pedestal, on which were etched the names of local lads who had perished in the imperial war in Afghanistan in the 1800s.

Lads who were loved and who themselves loved, until tossed into the growling maw of war.

We walked on. 

There is no glory or joy to be had in cast-iron manacles or war memorials. 

Coffee, cake, conversation, the smile of a child.

Petty things, perhaps, might yet save us from further immolation.

For they starve the little frightened children

Till it weeps both night and day:

And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool, 

And gibe the old and grey,

And some grow mad, and all grow bad,

And none a word may say.

It is a season of war refugees. Of children drowning, not smiling. Of screams and wailing, not conversation. Of cold briny suffocation, not coffee. Of death, not cakes.

It is always such a time. Boats collapse in short spans of water as great cargo and passenger crafts plough past. Follies of Empire repeat and persist. 

The brackish water that we drink

Creeps with loathsome slime,

And the bitter bread they weigh in scales

Is full of chalk and lime,

And Sleep will not lie down, but walks

Wild-eyed, and cries to time.

Stephen Fry, with an excerpt from The Ballad of Reading Gaol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQK0aWpAPY

Afghan war memorial in Forbury Gardens, Reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbury_Gardens#/media/File:Forbury_Gardens,_Reading.jpg

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

DESPOTISM 2 DECENCY 0

It’s been a bad week for Decency in the league of world affairs, finding itself on the end of a two nil thumping at the hands of Despotism.

Decency went one down on 7^th October when the UN Human Rights Council voted not to renew the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (GEE). The Group examined human rights abuses and other atrocities being committed in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, leading the charge for Despotism, increased its lobbying efforts in state capitals around the world and undermined support for the GEE and succeeded in getting rid of it.

This result promotes impunity for war criminals and other violators of international law who drive the conflict in Yemen. Itwill lead to further devastation and loss of life for Yemeni citizens.Getting rid of the GEE green lights actions that condemn millions in Yemen to violence and death. Brutal attacks continue against civilians throughout the country. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in coalition with United Arab Emirates, is the lead actor in these attacks, as well as the Ansar Allah (Houthi) armed group. 

Saudi Arabia wanted rid of the GEE because a recent report highlighted a lack of political will amongst the parties to the conflict and the international community to cease violations of international law. This drives actions delivering civilian harm and broader human suffering within Yemen. 

Reports from Yemen tell of at least 233,000 deaths, including 102,000 as a direct result of hostilities and 131,000 from indirect causes, such as conflict-related famine, and the destruction of health services and infrastructure. Over 400,000 Yemeni children are at risk of dying of starvation and malnutrition and 16.2 million people face acute food insecurity. Yemen is heading towards one of the largest famines in modern history. Attacks on homes, schools, hospitals, civilian infrastructure and humanitarian aid provide compelling evidence that targeting and starving Yemenis is a widespread method of warfarein the country.

The votes at the UN Council went 21 against renewal of the Group’s mandate, 18 for, with 7 abstentions. Scanning the list of abstaining countries, as well as those who voted against, indicates the strength of diplomatic and economic clout Saudi Arabia, its allies and associates, wield in the world. It is time for states like Japan and others who abstained on this issue to step up and demonstrate they are committed to upholding international law and protecting the people of Yemen.

Saudi Arabia is among the world's biggest military spenders, along with the United States of America and China. It received half of all US arms exports to the Middle East in the past five years. What makes the Saudi Arabia regime different from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is simply its trade in oil and armaments. 

A second strike for Despotism doubled the deficit suffered by Decency in the same week. A financial consortium from Saudi Arabia bought the English Premier League Club Newcastle United. This was easily achieved because many clubs in the league are already own by international consortia, often with dubious financial and political records. The city of Newcastle in the north-east of England is ripe for picking off by the fund because of the collapse of old industries which sustained the population, such as ship-building and coal mining, without meaningful economic regeneration by the UK and other investors.

Saudi Arabia deviously formulated an investment fund that it claims is not run by the state. The Premier League accepted this formulation, even though the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is a Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It’s a bit like saying that a forthcoming commercial festival is not Christmas, but yes, Santa is in charge.

Football supporters in Newcastle are delighted, mainly at being rid of the club’s (smaller-scale) despotic previous owner. Their much loved club has now joined the ‘big league’. The investors will plunder it for soft-power and social capital, while acting like Victorian mill magnates doing good works.

Two nil for Despotism, then. Decency took a beating. Still the game continues.

Who’s supporting Decency?

Mwatana for Human Rights (Yemen)

https://mwatana.org/en/renew-the-gee/

Table of votes:

https://www.facebook.com/mwatanaen/photos/a.656100531156024/4177863622313013/

Newcastle Football Club bought by Saudi Arabia Fund:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2021/oct/08/saudi-takeover-of-newcastle-leaves-human-rights-to-fog-on-the-tyne

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter