Finding love (and having lots of sex) in Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet is actually sexual innuendo that you can mime with a tongue and a glance at your lady parts. Ahem. In case anyone wondered. Structured in three parts, it is a bildungsroman following Nancy Astler through three relationships and six career changes (oyster girl, dresser, performer, “renter”, kept mistress, housekeeper/babysitter), because every relationship deserves a new career. It makes for an absorbing read that dwells especially with great tenderness on Nancy’s formative years and first love, and paints a rich picture of an imagined London in the 1890s — one in which a lesbian community thrives, albeit in the undercurrents, because London is colourful and vast enough to accommodate the unconventional. As a bildungsroman however, Nancy’s character feels too heavily guided by instinct to yield development at a satisfactory enough level.

[some spoilers, if you don’t want to know who she ends up with]

I loved Part I — Nancy’s intense infatuation with Kitty is rendered in so precious a way that anyone who has been — tentatively! doubtfully! — in love would feel for her, for the utter admiration she expresses for Kitty, for her acceptance of undertaking the load of unrequited love as long as she is spending her time by Kitty’s side. The darker side of being a lesbian is also to wrestle with the default assumption that other people are attracted to the opposite sex, intensifying the anxiety of infatuation. But also: the selflessness of Nancy’s love, that is willing to upend life as one knows it, with no expectation of return! To the extent of lacking self preservation, Nancy’s selflessness stands steady through the book, most notable in the absence of resentment towards Zena, despite the heinous circumstances Zena leaves her in. I think it is this trait that makes her eventual match more right than the previous two — her acts of service for Florence, even before she realises her feelings for her, find an equal in Florence’s kindness.

Nancy’s tendency of self immolation is perhaps also the driving factor for what looks like a life driven by reaction, empty of forward-planning, because to do that you need a stronger conception of your self and goals that set your desires against another’s. The only decision she makes, that doesn’t feel like it was done in the heat of an impulse, is the one at the end when she rejects Kitty, and it was only at that point when she realised that Florence was not just a stand-in for Kitty. I.e., without that external impetus, she would have just gone on thinking she was still hung up over her first love! Nancy never attempts to process her feelings to find closure, or make any sort of resolution that is not a result of someone else’s will. It is this absence of concrete decision-making that makes Tipping the Velvet ultimately unsatisfying in its depiction of a process of growth; that lone decision at the end is too little and flimsy to stand as significant change.

As a sexy novel: part II is there for your prurient curiosities, involving strap-on leather dildos, and gives you a sense of being exclusively included in the seamy underside of a city that you can believe exists even as you have never been privy to. The world-building, the gliding prose, and the preciousness of first love make this a 4/5 for me.

Rating: 4/5

— Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Waters, 1998)

Fire and Hemlock: Epic hero-ing in modern day England

Fire and Hemlock starts with Polly in the present, struck suddenly by the sense that she has replaced her past with another set of memories. She then sets about recollecting what she thought actually happened, back from a decade ago at the age of ten. While playing pretend with her childhood friend and climbing fences illegally into people’s homes, she finds herself mistaken as a guest at a funeral, where she meets Thomas Lynn, who will feature significantly in her process of coming-of-age.

The book took a while to get into — the perspective of a ten-year-old girl thinking up stories about heroes killing dragons does not make for the most appealing hook. I don’t think it’s because of the made-up stories, but more due to a lack of trust in where the narrative was going (inherent suspicion of a [non-introspective] child’s perspective?).

Yet in weaving Polly’s day-to-day life (school, troubles at home with divorced parents and resentful mother, the on-off nature of her friendship with Nina, a harbour of a home with her grandmother who provides a steady, reliable guardianship) with the more bizzare elements of her meetings with Thomas, where their imagined stories start happening in what has been an ordinary universe thus far and a pervasive feeling of vague danger or dread creeps in, Jones does a solid job in making the fantastical accepted. I mean this in the sense that you are pulled along in a certain surreality — as in a dream there is no question of it making sense or not (hence not just a matter of a suspension of disbelief); you take events as they are. It reminded me of the way I felt while reading Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

Having said that, I really didn’t get a good grasp of the events during the climax; the solution of the riddle, if you will, the way to out-maneuver a malevolent entity’s traps, as in a (non-Disney) fairy tale. Some level of vagueness is necessary to create that dream-like mood, but I felt that the balance could have been pushed a little further towards clarity. I wish I understood better what the sacrifices Laurel desired were for, and how the negotiation worked in terms of exchanging one soul for another. I also didn’t feel that there was enough to go on for Polly’s supposed infatuation; did not feel the gravity of the act of betrayal she committed — rendered in mystical terms of a ritual, with no real sense on the part of the reader of the implications/intentions/wrongness of the act (and it must be grave, because the whole venture of saving almost collapsed from it). These factors undermined for me the catharsis that should have been wrought from Polly’s process of realisation and going forth on her heroine’s journey. On top of that, there is that sense of discomfort at having a romance of sorts inserted at the end between our main protagonist, whom we’ve begun knowing as a child, and Thomas, whom we’ve been seeing through Polly’s eyes as someone significantly older.

I wonder if the stakes could have been raised higher to strengthen the sense of a mythic tale and deepen the process of growth for the characters, while still retaining that delicious sense of a fantastical reality.

Rating: 3.5/5

— Fire and Hemlock (Diana Wynne Jones, 1985)

A communist spy confesses in The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer is a scintillating read, having for its narrator a Communist spy with impeccable wit and a sense of irony so dry it will catch fire in the most humid of Vietnamese weather. It definitely brims with style. Yet I am not sure I am convinced by the climax it arcs towards, the “confession” tortured out of him reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984‘s own confession scene.

Chronologically, The Sympathizer starts from the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, as the General that the narrator works for and spies on prepares to abscond to America following the fall of Saigon to communist forces. It isn’t an easy read — most of it is told as an autobiographical recount after the fact, with dialogue presented as statements rather than verbal action enclosed by quotation marks, and given the narrator’s intellectual bend, interspersed with metatextual reflections that never allow the reader to immerse comfortably in the narrated circumstances. It’s also about a lot of things: political ideology (although less than you might expect), brotherhood, displacement, non-belonging, guilt over complicity in racism against your own race, guilt over murder.

How does one maintain sanity through a war, in which you are both sides at once? For the narrator, whom we only know as Captain, it was with his sense of irony, in seeing both what things purport to mean, and what they really mean, and finding the black humour in it. Yet in America, faced with a paranoid General determined to test his loyalty, an overwhelming feeling of alienation and purposelessness in a foreign land, and a loss of emotional support from his bosom friend and fellow communist Man, the Captain finds himself clinging to the one person he knows does matter: Bon, the last member of the trio and a brother despite their difference in ideology, and makes a blind decision to follow him back towards Vietnam and certain death.

So far so good — even as this makes for an increasingly sobering read as the Captain spirals further into a kind of despair. The book does an excellent job rendering the immigrant community’s frustration at being relegated to menial or service jobs, their desperation for any sign of home, predominantly food, their sense of isolation, their attempts to adjust to life in America — and unease when they do adjust, because it signifies a distancing from their roots. It is from the capture of the Captain and the rest of the suicidal anti-communist squad (who are on this mission largely because of a loss of meaning and debilitating feelings of powerlessness outside of their roles as soldiers) by the communists that the narrative thrust became less satisfying for me.

Spoilers: In terms of the communists’ motivations, knowing that the Captain was ostensibly one of them, even as his conviction was wavering, what was the function of the confession? There was a sense that the emotional stakes were being driven up; a repressed memory of a torture of a communist was uncovered, with the Captain a coward of a bystander who did not prevent the act. This was one of the aims of the confession, but not the ultimate one — when the Captain broke, it was in recognising a philosophy of nihilism, and this was the answer that finally satisfied the Commissar.

Our commandant was a man who didn’t get the joke, and people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed. They are the ones who say nothing with great piousness, who ask everyone else to die for nothing, who revere nothing.

But isn’t this a little too in-your-face — that war is driven mostly by those with flat certainties, and is senseless whichever side you are on? My main discomfort with the narrative is my sense that the ending tried to tie things up in too naked a fashion, and the intensity of the action was amped up for the sake of it.

In summary: The Sympathizer is smartly written, yet in a way that is too self-aware to be touching for me.

Rating: 4/5

— The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015)

A love for the universe in Cosmos

Cosmos is a joyous romp through space and time; genuine wonder at the beauty of galaxies, the music of spheres, the mountain of history it took to get us to the knowledge we possess about the universe today. It is not so much a science book as it is a book about everything, giving us much-needed context on the scale of things — how vast a universe measured in light years, how temporary a human lifespan, how microscopic the building blocks of matter — and how splendous the whole concoction: tiny electrical forces of push and pull holding together entire galaxies, and creating beings capable of marvelling at it all.

I especially enjoyed the chapters bringing me to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, and allowing me to bear witness to the birth and death of stars. Venus: a hellish place with 480°C surface temperature and 90 atmospheres of surface pressure, and an eternal rain of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere which never reaches the surface due to the high temperature. Mars: open bodies of water are impossible because the pressure is too low to keep it from boiling. Jupiter: a failed star radiating light in the infrared spectrum, big enough to contain a thousand Earths. And stars: their gravity brings particles close together for nuclear forces to overcome the natural repulsion between protons and electrons, fusing hydrogen particles together to form helium and giving off gamma photons in the process. When all the hydrogen is fused, the mass of the star determines its eventual fate into black dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. Along the way, the methods that astronomy has developed, like astronomical spectroscopy, to deduce these faraway conditions, and the expeditions — including the failures — to these planets for verification.

Of noteworthy mention is Sagan’s inclusion of the process of arriving at our present conclusions, as he briefly presents a history of mistaken beliefs continuously corrected by scientific inquiry. What this serves to reinforce is the idea that what we know about the world is subject to change — but this is beautiful because we, coming later on the timeline of human civilisation, can still contribute to this giant repository of knowledge.

Science is not just a pure pursuit of knowledge; it is very much affected by prevailing systems of power and beliefs. Sagan synthesizes thousands of years of (mostly Western) civilised history to present an argument for the causes of the acceleration and deceleration of the rate of scientific discovery. A great scientific boom occurred around the 5th to 6th century BC in Ionia, with the seeds of thought for a world formed not by Gods but by natural processes, the establishment of medical tradition (Hippocrates), the conception of the atom (Greek for unable to be cut), and many more, because, Sagan believes, it was comprised of a group of islands with no single concentration of power to enforce social and intellectual conformity. Diversity is the key ingredient to progress, providing a healthy cross fertilisation of ideas. Yet its reliance on the slave economy led to a lack of impetus for advancing technology, as well as an increased disdain towards manual labour, which was placed in opposition to spiritual pursuits, associated with the so-called elites. Ironically, Pythagoras and his followers, with their belief in pure theory unsullied by the world, contributed to the demise of progress, and would later influence a Christianity that suppressed free thought in order to maintain its hold on power.

I found the last couple of chapters — arguments for the possibility of life elsewhere, and a warning against self-destruction through war — less satisfying than the rest of the book, as it wades into social science territory that comes off less as condensed material than as simplistic models. I raised my eyebrows at Sagan’s summary of a James W. Prescott’s findings — cultures lavishing physical affection on infants and allowing expression of sexual activity in adolescents are disinclined to violence — which Sagan proffers as the solution to world peace. While well-intentioned, it does not stand up in the strength of its argument to the rest of the book, and would perhaps have been better left as a couple of concluding paragraphs painting our possible paths: humanity annihilated through nuclear wars, versus the continued potential for awe at the worlds left for us to discover.

This is a book in love with the universe; you will come off it with a renewed sense of wonder, and a growing curiosity for all things space and quantum.

Rating: 4.5/5

— Cosmos (Carl Sagan, 1981)