More books I have read

'Briefly, a Delicious Life' by Nell Stevens

It’s 1838. The narrator is the ghost of a young girl, Blanca, who died in 1473 at 14 years old. Blanca died in childbirth, after becoming pregnant by a novice monk of a similar age. After she died, Blanca expected to meet the ghosts of other dead people, but she never has. She amuses herself by going inside the heads of the living and rummaging around in their pasts. (She has discovered that she can also see into their futures – but tries to stop herself doing this.) She has spent most of her time since death around the Charterhouse at Valldemossa, the monastery in the remote Mallorcan hillside village where she lived and died.

The story opens when Blanca sees what appears to be two men kissing in the garden of the abandoned monastery. One of the men turns out to be a woman, though apparently called George. This is George Sand, a successful writer who has come to Mallorca from Paris with her two children and her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, seemingly with the intention of improving everyone’s health. Things don’t actually work out that way. The winter in the remote hillside region turns out to be brutal and the village more or less cut off. The locals are hostile to the family, partly because they assume Chopin’s coughing and general air of ill health indicates TB (it’s never clear whether it actually does or not), partly because George and her daughter wear trousers, partly because it gets around that George and Chopin are not in fact married. The woman employed to cook for them fleeces them at every opportunity, pinching portions of their food for herself and watering down their milk. The villagers are reluctant to sell to them and charge them way over the odds for food and transport. The family don’t exactly help themselves by seemingly making not much effort to participate in the life of the village, including not turning up to Sunday Mass. I felt a bit sorry for the driver who loses his carriage in a flood after George has intransigently insisted on being driven back to the village from Palma despite having been warned about the poor weather conditions. As a reader, you do wonder why on earth George and Chopin didn't draw a line under the venture sooner than they did, particularly after the village children set upon George's daughter Solange with rocks - in the event it's only when the villagers come to the monastery with flaming torches that it occurs to George that it's not really working out.

It’s a lovely story and Blanca’s ghost is a most appealing character. Blanca has reached the conclusion that her “in between” state – clearly dead, disembodied but not seeing the ghosts of other dead or apparently being admitted to any kind of afterlife – must be a bit of a glitch that’ll be rectified in due course. She imagines that heaven, when she’s eventually admitted, will involve “a lot of good seafood and gentle harp music of the kind I had never actually heard while alive”. When the family returns to Paris at the end of the novel, Blanca, who has developed an attraction to George, goes with them, seeming to have realized that not much is going to change vis à vis her afterlife and she might as well effect a change of scene for herself.

George Sand was the pen name of Aurore Dupin. Her Wikipedia entry currently notes that she “is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era”. Sand evidently grew up in the countryside but moved to Paris after the breakdown of her marriage, where she took up trouser-wearing and cigar-smoking in addition to novel-writing. Sand did spend a winter in Majorca with Chopin and her children, detailed in her book A Winter in Majorca. It looks from Google Maps as though her country home in central France is now a museum.

Briefly, a Delicious Life was published in 2022 and was Nell Stevens’ debut novel.

‘The New Long Life’ by Andrew J Scott and Lynda Gratton

Subtitled ‘A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World’. The focus is on the challenges posed by both technological advances and increased longevity. Longevity was evidently addressed in Scott and Gratton’s earlier book The 100-Year Life (which I haven’t read) and they claim to have found, in discussing the issues around it, that these also raised a lot of questions relating to technology.

The authors define “social ingenuity” as a new form of human ingenuity, required by advances in technology and in the expected human lifespan. Technological advances, they argue, initially cause disruption and require social ingenuity to get over. They state that this need for social ingenuity is their motivation for writing this book. We need to see the consequences of technological ingenuity, and the advances that have resulted in longer lifespan, as opportunities not risks. Scott and Gratton introduce a cast of personas – “everybodies” – which they use to illustrate the need for social ingenuity.

The authors suggest a need to move from a three-stage life (education-work-retirement) to a “multistage” life. They discuss the demographic transition that many countries have experienced whereby both mortality rates and fertility rates have fallen, leading to older people forming an increasing proportion of the population. If we’re to exploit the gains of longevity, the authors argue, we have to adjust our perspective on ageing and what we think of as old. They argue that there is a need for corporate practices to catch up with the multistage life, breaking the link between age and stage: i.e. the idea that you join a company after leaving university, get a series of promotions if you’re good enough; be winding down in your late 50s/early 60s. People will need more education as they live and work for longer and it will need to be spread out, rather than front-loaded. Education needs to be something people can access in their sixties as easily as in their twenties.

This was an interesting read. The personas were a neat idea though I wish they had been made more use of – having been introduced, they are then only mentioned briefly throughout the rest of the book. The idea of a midlife MOT, apparently suggested in a 2017 review of the UK state pension age, is interesting, as was the idea of the benefits of compounding as not only related to money: investing in your health etc. The suggestion in the chapter “The Government Agenda” of protecting the worker not the job, was interesting, the argument being that it’s not good for the economy to impose rigid rules on companies to project existing jobs from new technology, but that workers should be supported to get alternative jobs via re-education and training programmes. Also, if we need people to stay working for longer, then simply raising the retirement age isn’t enough in itself; it has to be done in conjunction with policies aimed at supporting older people to stay working. (I also liked the description of generational labels such as “millennial” as a “demographic version of astrology”.)

The authors claim that we’re currently – the book was published in 2020 – living through a period where the gap between technological and social ingenuity is widening, though I’d guess that worries about the effect of technological advances on people’s jobs has been around at least since the Industrial Revolution, the development of the power loom being a case in point. I seem to recall that learning about this sort of thing was one of the things that put me off taking History as an O-level subject, but I was young and foolish then and would of course find such things much more interesting now.

‘Lessons’ by Ian McEwan

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

Lessons covers most of the lifetime of Roland Baines, starting from his arrival in England from Tripoli with his parents in 1959, aged 11, to start at boarding school. The story is set against a backdrop of significant world events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Chernobyl disaster; the Eastern Bloc; the fall of the Berlin Wall; more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pivotal to the course of Roland’s life is a teenage involvement with his school piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. The “affair” with Cornell resulted in neglect of his schoolwork and a distancing from his peers, feeling himself way beyond them in terms of life experience. (“He believed he had entered a transcendent state that most of them would never know. Schoolwork he could sort out later. He believed he was in love.”) Roland fails all his O-levels; he is accepted into the school sixth form after a teacher advocates for him, but he again falls under the influence of Cornell, who tells him to leave school and move in with her; once he arrives at her house she locks his clothes in the shed and compels him to live in pyjamas, effectively confining him to her house. Their involvement ends when Cornell suggests they get married, which seems to trigger something in the sixteen-year-old Roland and he demurs, resulting in her throwing him out.

The experience with Cornell seems to have far-reaching consequences for Roland’s subsequent relationships. A string of initially promising relationships end when the women break up with him. His wife Alissa deserts him and their infant son, leaving a note saying that it was for the best. It’s only relatively late in his life that he finally marries his friend and long-time on/off girlfriend Daphne, though Daphne dies of cancer not long afterwards. It is implied that he is sexually over-demanding, though the exact nature of his issue is never made explicit; there’s a reference to “his problem, the old one. He couldn’t help himself. [Daphne] had said in a tight voice that he could and must.”

Roland writes poems, and seems to have had aspirations to be a serious poet, though he never achieves the literary success he would have liked – he has the occasional poem published, writes articles for in-flight magazines, writes verse for a friend’s greetings card business. (Ironically, his ex-wife Alissa does become a successful novelist, and her writing talent seems to enable him to forgive her.) In his middle years he makes his living playing the piano in a hotel bar. Roland agonises a lot, and is plagued by worry that he hasn’t achieved anything (“Nothing achieved”), though he is clearly a talented man, musically gifted (while at school, he was lauded as an extremely promising young pianist, though this early promise went the same way as the rest of his school career) and apparently a good enough tennis player to be able to coach the game. This is also dismissing his success as a father to his son Lawrence and stepfather to Daphne’s children and, towards the end of the novel, as a grandfather. Like his own father, Roland is a better father than he is a husband/boyfriend.

This was the first McEwan I’ve read, but I will probably read more. Mum and Dave have both read several of his novels. Mum isn’t a big fan of them, finding his protagonists frustrating; certainly I was sometimes frustrated at some of the decisions Roland makes, but I found him on the whole a sympathetic character. Themes that run through the book are decisions and their consequences, and the range of possibilities depending on choices made and not made; at one point, Roland ruminates over “single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array”. Later in his life he seems to make peace with his choices – as is, perhaps, the way of things.