The Fourth Estate; by Jeffrey Archer.

Archer has some tried and true plot development lines, and this one uses the line of two very similar and yet different rivals rising to the top of their shared professions and diverse lives. This time there is the added spice of thrills about persecution of Jews and occupied lands in Europe during WWII years, but only as a background for one of the protagonists. Having begun thus for him though, later one is made to question if the deliberately more ludicrous and repugnant persona of this one should be ascribed to some vestige or more of antisemitism on part of Archer. After all the other man is not better morally or ethically, in spite of his far more secure and princely upper class status prior to his father's death. The last line might make him cute in that he repeats his boyhood defense, but he is not above stealing from the pension fund of his employees, merely late in realising it can be done to his own interests.

So the saving of one man while the other drowns might too be ascribed to the antisemitism of the author and the world he has observed rather than a greater guilt of the one that does not survive so well. One might question his life, especially in that he never seems to have found time to inquire if his family survived, in spite of being in a position of power during his Berlin years. But again, one is not quite sure after finishing it that this is not merely the bias of the author and not necessarily a true portrayal of anyone, much less someone typical.

Enjoyable in the general re media barons and their lives, their rise and travails, it does leave some questions and loose ends. Perhaps a sequel is thought of for some point of time in future.

The Eleventh Commandment; by Jeffrey Archer.

Archer begins this writing about the unwritten eleventh commandment which is generally followed as most important for politics and politicians, diplomats etcetera - thou shalt not get caught - while going on about business of assassinations in other countries, toppling their governments and generally keeping them unsettled, since fair means are difficult to fight with and wiping another's line easier than drawing a longer one for oneself.

Only Archer could, however, go into this dirty politics game and make a story so very enjoyable, not by skipping the politics or the terror and the very true gory parts but by making the human element more important. He gives the reader not only a glimpse into a very dirty game, but gives them heroes and villains, and a wish that an assassin would survive because he is after all innocent, nay, a hero. His funeral brings one real disappointment and then there is the typical Archer twist that leaves one happy and smiling before closing the book, even though not all - in fact none of - the truly dirty people are dead yet. They are doing quite well, as they do in reality.

And then one realises he has left the door open for a sequel! Would be nice if he did take it up and wipe the floor with the dirty people, and let good guys win, wouldn't it! It might not happen in reality, but one is after all reading a story and this is where one can make it happen, expects it to happen ultimately, else one could read and newspaper and forget literature! And so one awaits a sequel with Dexter and Zerimski finished.

But meanwhile one is quite happy that he has allowed love and friendship and heroes and heroines to win silently in this - for most part.

Perhaps his best after As The Crow Flies and A Matter of Honour,  and a bit in tradition of the latter, what with the suspense and murders and so forth with a happy ending brought about nevertheless. 

Monday, December 23, 2013.
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Best Kept Secret (Clifton Chronicles): by Jeffrey Archer.

They already have a son, and hope to be united in marriage, but are they related through a common father? One expects this these days to be simply and privately solved in an hour or so by medical procedures, but those days before DNA tests were possible much less common, it was a matter for courts - and that is a surprise until one realises quite how complicated the issue is.

It is far more important for the people concerned whether they can marry and if the son is not labeled born of incest, but there is more to it, since the will of the grandfather who founded the estate and the shipping corporation that the eldest son shall inherit the whole, and the law of the land too goes in generally for the elder son inheriting the title albeit in that case it has to be the legitimate one.

So the drama begins where the previous part left it off, is the couple related already; and the issue is to be decided by the parliament of UK, as most issues that are not satisfactorily solved by courts do. Again, in this case the people concerned are mostly selfless and care only for the good of the whole family, but the public is involved!

From this - the vote goes with need of the one single person presiding to vote to break a deadlock, described by the author in his usual way keeping one breathless - to the brilliant son of the brilliant couple growing up and getting into scrapes, and the uncle meanwhile in scrapes of his own that are more evoking of pathos rather than an amusing chuckle, and then too there is the little sister (daughter of the deadbeat dead father, aunt to the little boy) found and adopted into the family; very engrossing, but it goes further.

Adventures of the boy where he is quickly out of his depth, and the various elders involved quickly and silently to not merely get him out of it safely but to have the profit of it all for the nation, it becomes slightly reminiscent of an earlier work of the author where a similar young man out of his depth in Switzerland had a previously brilliant (but now a mere bank employee) roommate come to his aid unexpectedly, and so on to a thrilling chase that solved satisfactorily.

Here it is satisfactory in that part albeit slightly less thrilling and more concerning for the boy, but the whole thing twists and turns unexpectedly towards the end with the father of a schoolmate involved in a sinister way. Archer leaves the reader hanging in suspense at the end as usual in the series, so one expects the next part impatiently.

Three Novels of Love (The Dark Flower, Beyond, Saint's Progress); by John Galsworthy

The Dark Flower:-

The dark flower as a concept used in the title and elsewhere in the work by the author is symbolic of passion, not represented by any particular flower but by the dark colour representative of the dark area where a person's reason and other sights of consciousness fail to guide one, and a dark force pulling and pushing one takes over.

Galworthy here takes stages of an artist's life, symbolised by three seasons (he refrains from exploring winter as a season for passion, leaving one to imagine that one is finally settled into one's marriage and not available any more for passion outside it), and the passion is of the variety not likely to come to a happy solution all around, hence dark all the more.

Over and over there is characterisation of English life as that bound by "good form" when freed from other bindings such as those of religion, and thus not allowing the freedom one speaks of or assumes for a person and especially an artist or thinker when it comes to passion.

The tale begins with an involvement of spirit between young Mark Lennan and his teacher's wife Mrs. Stormer whose husband, a don at Oxford, is far too dry and intellectual to answer his wife's needs of love and adoration but is rather more likely to deal with it by humour and standing aside in spite of awareness of it. Sylvia, the young fair girl Mark has protected and known since his childhood, solves the dilemma for the older woman (who is really young by the standards of today but was a century ago looking at her last chance for romance, passion, beauty in life at mid thirties), by simply coming to her attention as a younger person on the horizon who might not be an equal opponent but is simply younger.

Mark is not involved with Sylvia romantically yet, and goes on to become an artist, and happens to subsequently meet and become involved deeply with a young married woman desperately unhappy in her marriage in spite of wealth and respectability, with most of the involvement consisting of an innocent - by today's standards - togetherness and a passionate awareness of one another that is clear to everyone around. With a husband who is just as passionately in love with the wife as Mark being in the picture, and violently jealous one at that, it is bound to end in a separation, and one expects a chase when the young woman in question make sup her mind to go away with Mark. But the end of this part comes rather suddenly and shocks one, being so at odds with what generally one is led to expect of an English spirit. Then again, of course, the husband is characterised long before that by the wife's uncle musing about his being an adopted heir to his father and hence an unknown factor, unlike Mark whose very deep propriety in his following the form is observed and satisfactorily so by the uncle.

The autumn chapter brings a stormy turmoil of an involvement with an illegitimate daughter of a schoolmate to Mark's life and threatens to destroy the peace of his now wife Sylvia's life and mind, and while he is tossed about in this storm seemingly far more, the concern and responsibility for Sylvia who is more than only a wife but rather the innocent person he is used to protecting since she was small, brings him to port to safety. The end is abrupt, since one is rather led to expect a chapter on winter, but perhaps the author could not imagine passion in winter and made subtle allusions to Sylvia asleep by fire to indicate that would be the winter of life of Mark Lennan.

A slight lessening of quality of Galsworthy comes about by the usual excuse to the passion inappropriate to age being led by the woman in question, and while it might be likely in the first it is a very transparent excuse in the last, a bit reminiscent of the far more unpleasant Nabokov. It is always possible of course, only, with the striking beauty of the young girl in question, one wonders if it is due to her being an illegitimate and therefore hidden daughter of a not very high caste English man that she is thrown on the society of a man in his mid forties and being the one to take a lead in the affair, declaring her passion and holding on and so forth rather than being one to be surprised by his declaration of love and considering it for reasons of her situation in life. It does not quite fit except as an excuse for his passion to be reconciled with his status - he cannot offer her marriage and a safe home and respectability, being married - and thus must be propositioned rather than the one to lead. Thin excuse, at that.

Spring and Summer are haunting parts, with autumn rather more troublesome and stormy with one wishing he would sooner come to his senses. Perhaps it could not be otherwise in any way, but with quality of Galsworthy's works in general one goes in expecting him to do better, and is a bit disappointed. Still, all in all perhaps it forms a work preparatory for the far more satisfying and wonderful Forsyte Saga and Forsyte Chronicles, and perhaps it ought to be read before them, not after.

Monday, October 21, 2013
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Beyond:-

Reading Galsworthy brings a kaleidoscope effect after a while with themes and characters familiar yet not quite the same, and of course the every living beauty of countryside.

In Beyond he centres it on the father and daughter duo, the daughter born of love and claimed jealously by the father post death of the mother and the husband of the mother, with great care to avoid any blame for the mother but only until he could claim the daughter. The theme explored is love and marriage, togetherness and solitude, in marriage and in a live in situation.

A virile male might corner a young woman as a great serpent would a rabbit, and gain her hand in marriage or her body for his pleasure, but love is another story. If she is not in love with him, all the social propriety and financial security and all her compliance with his needs will yet not make him happy; nor will another younger woman with all her beauty and her being desperately in love with him if he is not in love with her.

Gyp's father is able to live on his memories of the only love he ever had, Gyp's mother, whom he saw but rarely during the one short year they had together; his life is devoted to his daughter and he is happy in his memory of his love, his integrity and faith with his love and his creed, his utter love for his daughter.

Gyp has inherited the integrity and the nobility of character, and the immense capacity for intense love, but love has its own life and cannot be summoned like water on tap. She is cornered and unable to escape the attentions of the handsome artist Fiorsen, but with all her will to go forth is still unable to love him, and is only able to comply with his needs and take care of him and home. This is not good enough for the artist who knows what love is and knows too that the wife does not quite love him, he does not have her heart. His dalliance with a beautiful young dancer brings danger and shame to the women and no solution for him, either, until it is too late for him to have another option - and even then it is a falling backward into something available rather than appreciation of what he has or had.

Gyp finds love unexpectedly after she has left her husband for sake fo protecting their daughter - the husband couldn't care less for anyone other than Gyp, and not only antagonises her relatives and what few friends she might have, but is callous enough that he terrorises their daughter and hurts her physically while she is still a baby - and Gyp lives in an era when separation was social stigma enough, divorce difficult and often impossible if the partner did not comply. She realises her love is all to her, is fortunate enough to be given her daughter back after being kidnapped by the husband to blackmail her into returning, but the interlude of her bliss with love is short lived albeit as deep and complete as her father's.

It is not that the man who loves her is short of courage to love, or any the less in love, or likely to tire of her, or any of the possible dire disturbances to love and bliss whether marriage is possible or not. It is that even with the best of all circumstances - her father supports her socially, she cares not a fig for other society, she is financially independent, they live in seclusion in country and he works three days a week in town - still, there are other possibilities of a wedge, and he is young enough to not avoid it soon enough.

As the author clarifies, the distant cousin is familiar enough that her society is not avoided before it is too late and not close enough to be a sisterly repugnant association, and while Summerhay sees the justice of Gyp's need of him avoiding the cousin and other such temptations, he does not see how he can or why he should, since his love and faithfulness are entirely with Gyp, the love of his life.

This tragedy could in life draw on and exhaust the people concerned; the author's narrative turns to another twist reminiscent of Summer part of The Dark Flower, and Gyp remains the fortunate tragic heroine albeit not quite as artificially forced so as Anna Karenina - she has read it and cannot understand why Anna is unhappy due to social stigma and forced reclusion status, she is all too happy to be not required to be social and to comply with necessities of formality, happy to be with her love and with nature, books, music, and her daughter. She thinks unhappiness of Anna Karenina is forced as moral lesson to comply with social need, and in this she is not incorrect. But life and love and one's nature is another story, and such happiness or love as one may find might be disturbed by a thousand factors in as may ways, albeit it has little to do with being married or single or living together in perfect situation where only the two people matter.

One keeps being reminded of various other works of the author, and the similarity of characters or their situations - Soames and Fleur of Forsyte Saga and its sequel, Charwell sisters of Forsyte Chronicles, Summer part of The Dark Flower, and bit of The Country House as well, with a ghost of Irene in background (art, music, taste, integrity of a sort, passive softness, ...) - and yet here too the characters and their story do manage to make a mark individually.

Monday, November 11, 2013.
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Saint's Progress:-

Galsworthy touches real ground of the time and place in this work more than his usual - which is beautiful dreamy landscapes and problems of heart, of individual travails of love, and of individual rights, especially those of women, and conflicts thereof with social norms and rules. All of which appears here too, in a central way and surrounding every character, every other problem. But the main theme is something we all are familiar with - the devastating and at the same time liberating effect of the first world war on lives, especially in Europe.

The first and foremost effect was the growing awareness amongst the young who paid the greatest price for the war with their lives and love and marriages and more, of future and children and limbs and lives disrupted, that one really could not trust norms of expectations any more, one could not trust time and social rules and life, and life was to be snatched here and now whatever way possible. Young people refused long engagements and if they did not, often they paid the price with the boy dead and the girl left alone for life. Lucky were the brides that conceived before their men went to the war. Not so lucky were everyone else.

So young couples denied a quick marriage could part with death looming, or snatch a few moments of love before that, and the latter resulted in what the then society stupidly called war babies. Babies and innocent no matter what and in this situation so were the parents, and the real guilt of stupidity lay with those elders that refuse to let them marry before the boy went to the war. Young were correct in this and the elders wrong in every way.

This work is about the devastating effect of just such a situation on a family and other people related one way or another to it - the young girl in love and the young boy about to leave for the war in a couple of weeks, the priest father of the girl who considers a quick marriage unwise and refuses to consider it and expects them to come to their senses and wait, the death of the boy very soon in the trenches and the pregnancy of the girl (who is wisely pointed out by a cousin that this means she has not lost her love after all, and has him with her as the child), the effects of this on the girl and much more so on her father the priest who is the titular saint that progresses from refusal to see facts and horror of the situation to fierce protective attitude for his daughter and her baby son, to more.

Nature's beauty here is not missing, but rather more of London in wartime than of English countryside, the usual favourite of Galsworthy. And he shows his mastery in this too, with poignancy of the story reflected in the moonlit Thames and the dark parks and the flowering trees of London.

Monday, November 16, 2013.
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Saints Progress; by John Galsworthy.

Galsworthy touches real ground of the time and place in this work more than his usual - which is beautiful dreamy landscapes and problems of heart, of individual travails of love, and of individual rights, especially those of women, and conflicts thereof with social norms and rules. All of which appears here too, in a central way and surrounding every character, every other problem. But the main theme is something we all are familiar with - the devastating and at the same time liberating effect of the first world war on lives, especially in Europe.

The first and foremost effect was the growing awareness amongst the young who paid the greatest price for the war with their lives and love and marriages and more, of future and children and limbs and lives disrupted, that one really could not trust norms of expectations any more, one could not trust time and social rules and life, and life was to be snatched here and now whatever way possible. Young people refused long engagements and if they did not, often they paid the price with the boy dead and the girl left alone for life. Lucky were the brides that conceived before their men went to the war. Not so lucky were everyone else.

So young couples denied a quick marriage could part with death looming, or snatch a few moments of love before that, and the latter resulted in what the then society stupidly called war babies. Babies and innocent no matter what and in this situation so were the parents, and the real guilt of stupidity lay with those elders that refuse to let them marry before the boy went to the war. Young were correct in this and the elders wrong in every way.

This work is about the devastating effect of just such a situation on a family and other people related one way or another to it - the young girl in love and the young boy about to leave for the war in a couple of weeks, the priest father of the girl who considers a quick marriage unwise and refuses to consider it and expects them to come to their senses and wait, the death of the boy very soon in the trenches and the pregnancy of the girl (who is wisely pointed out by a cousin that this means she has not lost her love after all, and has him with her as the child), the effects of this on the girl and much more so on her father the priest who is the titular saint that progresses from refusal to see facts and horror of the situation to fierce protective attitude for his daughter and her baby son, to more.

Nature's beauty here is not missing, but rather more of London in wartime than of English countryside, the usual favourite of Galsworthy. And he shows his mastery in this too, with poignancy of the story reflected in the moonlit Thames and the dark parks and the flowering trees of London.

Villa Rubein and Other Stories; by John Galsworthy.

Villa Rubein:-


Villa Rubein seems to be an early work of Galsworthy, with Tyrol rather than England as the background. He attempts to write characters and families more cosmopolitan European than purely English, but it is more halfway than successful an attempt, and other than a few mixed dialogues - chiefly from the stepfather to the main female the story centres on - it amounts to a caricature of the said stepfather who is only good enough to bluster and really neither commands love nor respect from his stepdaughter or her maternal relatives whose house he lives in, nor at that much from his own daughter who is much younger, except as a matter of duty taken for granted.

There is portrayal of beauty of country and nature here too that blooms so very much through his later works, the latter being mostly of English countryside, but here the portrayal falls very short of how very beautiful Alps surroundings generally can be. Galsworthy truly belongs to England and does not quite flourish elsewhere.

Here the central theme is young love and art vs money, business vs career of vocation, work vs life assured with inheritance, and again it seems he tried it out first in this and later developed it into various other works. One surprising declaration and admission here is of the fact that it is those that have made money that care for it far more than those who have chosen to work for a living in a career of art due to a spiritual need of working for art. It is but logical that this be so, since one that makes money does not do so by a couldn't-care-less attitude towards money but only with great devotion of time and spirit towards earning and saving it, and while it is a fact perhaps known in life to all, it is but hardly ever admitted so in most works of literature in so matter of fact a way, refreshing in its simplicity.

Most different from his other works however - other than the placing out of England - is the little more explicit mention of the happenings of the time. Galsworthy is so given to love and beauty of nature and satirical portraying of upper caste England that one tends to almost forget he lived in an era of tumultuous happenings and thinking, when old traditional castes and their hold was not merely being questioned as in England but was elsewhere being violently rocked and even thrown away, and here one gets a glimpse of a character involved in past in a movement that shapes his life and endangers his love, even though the mention of the movement and its actual facts is left only to be guessed at by the reader familiar with history of the times. All very tangential and elusive, but still, it is there unlike his other works.

Monday, November 18, 2013.
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My Father

Man of Devon:-


Love is a much used and little understood reality, with various people experiencing perhaps different things and in attempting to identify the beautiful yet terrifying mystery seek to give it a known name.

Not so Pasience, whose name is really Patience but pronounced and spelt in an original way from times before English language got uniform spellings due to print - (although, for that matter, accents and diction and entire dialects differ still across the small nation, and even more so through the rest of the English speaking world, evidence of George Bernard Shaw's witty truth casually given in his Pygmalion as description of US and Britain being two nations separated by a common language - and who encountering a York accent for the first time has not been baffled?) - Pasience who is young, restless, talented at playing violin that she makes sing her heart's music, spirited, and without a woman's guidance or a father's stronger protection or even company of her own age, so that she is eager to experience life beyond what is known to her in her grandfather's company. When she meets men, she has no mysterious veil over her heart, only a yearning for she knows not what, world, life, and she chooses that man amongst all that she sees - she has more than one choice, and young males with varying prospects that are confronted with her are all alike under her spell so she really has her choice of those around - she chooses not the one that is likely to give her all she wishes but one that promises the adventure, lacking the wisdom and guidance to see the difference.

A marriage so made in haste can end in any number of good or bad ways, or mediocre as most unfortunate marriages do anyway. Here the tragedy is partly due to times and rest spurred on by the youth of the girl who has only an old grandfather to look after her and to guide and contain her vital spirit.

As usual Galsworthy treats readers to beauty of the surrounding country, this time the land and coast and sea at Devon. It must be a hard heart that reads this and won't wish to see it for oneself and experience the beauty so hauntingly portrayed here.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013.
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A Knight For My Mother:-


(Thursday, November 21, 2013)

One is reminded of the prelude to the film Gone With The Wind as one reads this - not due to any possible similarity, which there is none, but the spirit of the central character (not the protagonist) of this story that is celebrated in that prelude, about gentlemen and code of conduct.

A man may be a soldier all his life, and unable to find employment, with starvation to death a real possibility that is avoided only by an ex comrade of a way of yore - and here is a real connection with Gone With The Wind, that particular war in the life of this gentleman from South Carolina happens to be the Civil War in US - and a chance encounter with such a comrade who happens to be English meeting and saving his life in London, and giving him a partnership in a business suited to both, a shop selling equipment related to - and a training school attached to the shop, training people in - fighting.

It is love that brings him down, and what is more love for the daughter of his partner, not due to opposition of the father or unwillingness of the young girl, but far more complex. And this is where Galsworthy excels, in bringing our ways of youth, love, passion and complications thereof. The young wife strays to a young stranger who is a student of the school, elopes with him, and the gentleman can only let her be. She comes to grief, the young man having left her and the childbirth taking her life.

And the gentleman, having lost his business due to his partner being cheated, and almost all his money too, is now living in penury because he is supporting the young daughter his wife died after giving birth to, struggling to send her half his income every year and living the life of a gentleman the best way possible to him without money. It is the taste and the code that are paramount.

And it is the code that he follows to the end of his life.

Saturday, November 23, 2013
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To My Brother Hubert Galsworthy
Salvation of a Forsyte:-


Forsytes have been connected to the Villa Rubein story with the business partnership of a Forsyte (James, the father of Soames?) with Nicholas Treffery, in a way the hero of Villa Rubein what with his nightlong ride to rescue the love of life of his niece from her stepfather's threat of setting police on him.

Now, the connection is via a passion of Swithin, twin of James Forsyte, for a young Hungarian girl when he himself is not quite young, and having never been social or charming or attractive, is no great catch either. But the girl is young, and generous and sincere as youth will be when encountering someone who is attracted to one, and this is her great fault and reason for downfall. If only she were grown up or knew in some other way that the way to secure respect for herself is to be less generous, less caring of someone else's pain or any feelings, she might have had a different and perhaps safer life. Then again, it might have led to Swithin marrying her and perhaps she escaped the deadly boredom of a Forsyte clan life by being herself, young and sincere and natural as a flower.

Swithin cannot help his own passion, and goes after her when her father has taken the family off for a return to his country from Salzburg where they met, but then has a typical Forsyte moment - of an indignation that perhaps her family intends that he marry her, which he finds is quite unnecessary and out of the question, especially since she is not only without a dowry (it goes without mention here but is a silent factor in all dealings of Forsyte with the family) but has also "yielded to him".

Needless to say he, like most males before and since, does not see that the "yielding" on her part implies he was a thief and an attacker that she fell prey to, rather than looking at it as her gift of love to his passion; he assumes - like most males before and since - that it is his birthright to so take advantage of a woman or girl however young and innocent, and that he therefore is free of any need or obligation to marry her.

That he thereby forfeits any possibility of a future of a life for himself does not occur to him either then or until perhaps the very moment of his death, perhaps not then, but so it is. He lives - and dies - alone, attended only by his valet, never mind the huge clan and daily visits by his twin brother, and recalls on his deathbed the love he escaped by literally running away from it. He closed all possibilities of opening his heart to love ever after when he did that, and became a fossil of a Forsyte prototype instead of allowing love in his life and blossoming.

Thus do one's own choices make for rewards or otherwise of one's own.

Monday, November 25, 2013
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To My Sister Mabel Edith Reynolds
The Silence:-


Galsworthy in this last offering to his family, this time for his sister, tells a tale about a world of mostly male endeavours of yore, although it is difficult to imagine even a century later that it would have changed much in that, and gives a glimpse of a world partly changed in that the colonial era is no more, but largely still the same in that while men do the work of the gritty sort and other men must manage not only the work but the men that do it, their thoughts and feelings taken into account as much as their living and working conditions for the betterment of the place, and yet make a profit for the shareholders of the company, all the while also writing as copiously to the bosses as they might desire to maintain the myth that they too care and have a hand in the day to day welfare and management of the work and the men.

It is this last bit, the writing and pretending, that the Cornishman central to the tale cannot abide, and his reluctance to do so that they won't let be, never mind he has turned the mines from desolate vacant bleak place to thriving glamourous place to be and paying a whopping twenty percent for the company at that, and managing all sorts of trouble single handedly on the paltry salary of a manager - paltry compared to the men who pay him and dictate his terms, certainly. When finally forced to do so he obliges with a lengthy missive and snaps.

This tale is told sensitively through a childhood friend of the manager who visits him occasionally in course of his own work, and to emphasise the sensitivity of it all, there is the oblique connection to Forsytes - who symbolise the moneymaking trade and industry caste of England and indeed of Europe - with the sensitive Old Jolyon Forsyte on the board of the company, refraining from the badgering of the manager who excels at his work but not at kowtowing to the bosses.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013.
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Villa Rubein; by John Galsworthy.

Villa Rubein seems to be an early work of Galsworthy, with Tyrol rather than England as the background. He attempts to write characters and families more cosmopolitan European than purely English, but it is more halfway than successful an attempt, and other than a few mixed dialogues - chiefly from the stepfather to the main female the story centres on - it amounts to a caricature of the said stepfather who is only good enough to bluster and really neither commands love nor respect from his stepdaughter or her maternal relatives whose house he lives in, nor at that much from his own daughter who is much younger, except as a matter of duty taken for granted.

There is portrayal of beauty of country and nature here too that blooms so very much through his later works, the latter being mostly of English countryside, but here the portrayal falls very short of how very beautiful Alps surroundings generally can be. Galsworthy truly belongs to England and does not quite flourish elsewhere.

Here the central theme is young love and art vs money, business vs career of vocation, work vs life assured with inheritance, and again it seems he tried it out first in this and later developed it into various other works. One surprising declaration and admission here is of the fact that it is those that have made money that care for it far more than those who have chosen to work for a living in a career of art due to a spiritual need of working for art. It is but logical that this be so, since one that makes money does not do so by a couldn't-care-less attitude towards money but only with great devotion of time and spirit towards earning and saving it, and while it is a fact perhaps known in life to all, it is but hardly ever admitted so in most works of literature in so matter of fact a way, refreshing in its simplicity.

Most different from his other works however - other than the placing out of England - is the little more explicit mention of the happenings of the time. Galsworthy is so given to love and beauty of nature and satirical portraying of upper caste England that one tends to almost forget he lived in an era of tumultuous happenings and thinking, when old traditional castes and their hold was not merely being questioned as in England but was elsewhere being violently rocked and even thrown away,  and here one gets a glimpse of a character involved in past in a movement that shapes his life and endangers his love, even though the mention of the movement and its actual facts is left only to be guessed at by the reader familiar with history of the times. All very tangential and elusive, but still, it is there unlike his other works.

Beyond: by John Galsworthy.

Reading Galsworthy brings a kaleidoscope effect after a while with themes and characters familiar yet not quite the same, and of course the every living beauty of countryside.

In Beyond he centres it on the father and daughter duo, the daughter born of love and claimed jealously by the father post death of the mother and the husband of the mother, with great care to avoid any blame for the mother but only until he could claim the daughter. The theme explored is love and marriage, togetherness and solitude, in marriage and in a live in situation.

A virile male might corner a young woman as a great serpent would a rabbit, and gain her hand in marriage or her body for his pleasure, but love is another story. If she is not in love with him, all the social propriety and financial security and all her compliance with his needs will yet not make him happy; nor will another younger woman with all her beauty and her being desperately in love with him if he is not in love with her.

Gyp's father is able to live on his memories of the only love he ever had, Gyp's mother, whom he saw but rarely during the one short year they had together; his life is devoted to his daughter and he is happy in his memory of his love, his integrity and faith with his love and his creed, his utter love for his daughter.

Gyp has inherited the integrity and the nobility of character, and the immense capacity for intense love, but love has its own life and cannot be summoned like water on tap. She is cornered and unable to escape the attentions of the handsome artist Fiorsen, but with all her will to go forth is still unable to love him, and is only able to comply with his needs and take care of him and home. This is not good enough for the artist who knows what love is and knows too that the wife does not quite love him, he does not have her heart. His dalliance with a beautiful young dancer brings danger and shame to the women and no solution for him, either, until it is too late for him to have another option - and even then it is a falling backward into something available rather than appreciation of what he has or had.

Gyp finds love unexpectedly after she has left her husband for sake fo protecting their daughter - the husband couldn't care less for anyone other than Gyp, and not only antagonises her relatives and what few friends she might have, but is callous enough that he terrorises their daughter and hurts her physically while she is still a baby - and Gyp lives in an era when separation was social stigma enough, divorce difficult and often impossible if the partner did not comply. She realises her love is all to her, is fortunate enough to be given her daughter back after being kidnapped by the husband to blackmail her into returning, but the interlude of her bliss with love is short lived albeit as deep and complete as her father's.

It is not that the man who loves her is short of courage to love, or any the less in love, or likely to tire of her, or any of the possible dire disturbances to love and bliss whether marriage is possible or not. It is that even with the best of all circumstances - her father supports her socially, she cares not a fig for other society, she is financially independent, they live in seclusion in country and he works three days a week in town - still, there are other possibilities of a wedge, and he is young enough to not avoid it soon enough.

As the author clarifies, the distant cousin is familiar enough that her society is not avoided before it is too late and not close enough to be a sisterly repugnant association, and while Summerhay sees the justice of Gyp's need of him avoiding the cousin and other such temptations, he does not see how he can or why he should, since his love and faithfulness are entirely with Gyp, the love of his life.

This tragedy could in life draw on and exhaust the people concerned; the author's narrative turns to another twist reminiscent of Summer part of The Dark Flower, and Gyp remains the fortunate tragic heroine albeit not quite as artificially forced so as Anna Karenina - she has read it and cannot understand why Anna is unhappy due to social stigma and forced reclusion status, she is all too happy to be not required to be social and to comply with necessities of formality, happy to be with her love and with nature, books, music, and her daughter. She thinks unhappiness of Anna Karenina is forced as moral lesson to comply with social need, and in this she is not incorrect. But life and love and one's nature is another story, and such happiness or love as one may find might be disturbed by a thousand factors in as may ways, albeit it has little to do with being married or single or living together in perfect situation where only the two people matter.

One keeps being reminded of various other works of the author, and the similarity of characters or their situations - Soames and Fleur of Forsyte Saga and its sequel, Charwell sisters of Forsyte Chronicles, Summer part of The Dark Flower, and bit of The Country House as well, with a ghost of Irene in background (art, music, taste, integrity of a sort, passive softness, ...) - and yet here too the characters and their story do manage to make a mark individually.

The Freelands; by John Galsworthy.

Galsworthy, amongst other worthy intellectuals of the day -such as George Bearnard Shaw - realised all too well the economic and social questions of the day, and caste system of the European continent was one, land and its ownership and usage towards luxuries of the owners detrimental to the general populace of the land and the world on a larger scale being one of the chief keys of the problems, with attitudes of those in power in dire need of change, conscience and consciousness of rich and poor alike in dire need of light being a factor such intellectuals could do something about. So they, in general, and Galsworthy in particular, wrote about it. Freelands is centred on this question, the very title and the name of the upper caste landowner family or clan telling us of the issue and its importance.

It is not that easy when most rich won't give up their privilege for sake of betterment of the poor, and most poor cannot afford even a peaceful strike, is the reality now as it was then. It is not easy to change the minds and attitudes, to wake up the power of the populace, and more. Power and energy of youth is needed, but it is sacrificed easily and blindly by those in power and blamed by the powerless for the consequences of the heavy handed and expected retaliation of power against poor hapless.

Blossoming of young, of love and consciousness, of waking up to the light and to realities of life under easy circumstances is not easy; under such struggle that needs one's life's blood it is life threatening unless there are enough caring and understanding elders who would act promptly.

The questions discussed here are mentioned elsewhere, in second part of Forsyte Chronicles (sequel to to Forsyte Saga) for example, where it is a bit more macroscopic view and from the point of view of upper caste and its exemplary behaviour along with the obligations inherent in being upper caste, and this latter takes a larger stage in the third part of the Forsyte Chronicles. In the Freelands the point of view is from an intellectual of the upper caste and centre stage is given to those in tune with land, nature, poor, in spite of being of the upper caste. Here the author can deal with the problems in their more dire nature.

The Dark Flower: by John Galsworthy.

The dark flower as a concept used in the title and elsewhere in the work by the author is symbolic of passion, not represented by any particular flower but by the dark colour representative of the dark area where a person's reason and other sights of consciousness fail to guide one, and a dark force pulling and pushing one takes over.

Galworthy here takes stages of an artist's life, symbolised by three seasons (he refrains from exploring winter as a season for passion, leaving one to imagine that one is finally settled into one's marriage and not available any more for passion outside it), and the passion is of the variety not likely to come to a happy solution all around, hence dark all the more.

Over and over there is characterisation of English life as that bound by "good form" when freed from other bindings such as those of religion, and thus not allowing the freedom one speaks of or assumes for a person and especially an artist or thinker when it comes to passion.

The tale begins with an involvement of spirit between young Mark Lennan and his teacher's wife Mrs. Stormer whose husband, a don at Oxford, is far too dry and intellectual to answer his wife's needs of love and adoration but is rather more likely to deal with it by humour and standing aside in spite of awareness of it. Sylvia, the young fair girl Mark has protected and known since his childhood, solves the dilemma for the older woman (who is really young by the standards of today but was a century ago looking at her last chance for romance, passion, beauty in life at mid thirties), by simply coming to her attention as a younger person on the horizon who might not be an equal opponent but is simply younger.

Mark is not involved with Sylvia romantically yet, and goes on to become an artist, and happens to subsequently meet and become involved deeply with a young married woman desperately unhappy in her marriage in spite of wealth and respectability, with most of the involvement consisting of an innocent - by today's standards - togetherness and a passionate awareness of one another that is clear to everyone around. With a husband who is just as passionately in love with the wife as Mark being in the picture, and violently jealous one at that, it is bound to end in a separation, and one expects a chase when the young woman in question make sup her mind to go away with Mark. But the end of this part comes rather suddenly and shocks one, being so at odds with what generally one is led to expect of an English spirit. Then again, of course, the husband is characterised long before that by the wife's uncle musing about his being an adopted heir to his father and hence an unknown factor, unlike Mark whose very deep propriety in his following the form is observed and satisfactorily so by the uncle.

The autumn chapter brings a stormy turmoil of an involvement with an illegitimate daughter of a schoolmate to Mark's life and threatens to destroy the peace of his now wife Sylvia's life and mind, and while he is tossed about in this storm seemingly far more, the concern and responsibility for Sylvia who is more than only a wife but rather the innocent person he is used to protecting since she was small, brings him to port to safety. The end is abrupt, since one is rather led to expect a chapter on winter, but perhaps the author could not imagine passion in winter and made subtle allusions to Sylvia asleep by fire to indicate that would be the winter of life of Mark Lennan.

A slight lessening of quality of Galsworthy comes about by the usual excuse to the passion inappropriate to age being led by the woman in question, and while it might be likely in the first it is a very transparent excuse in the last, a bit reminiscent of the far more unpleasant Nabokov. It is always possible of course, only, with the striking beauty of the young girl in question, one wonders if it is due to her being an illegitimate and therefore hidden daughter of a not very high caste English man that she is thrown on the society of a man in his mid forties and being the one to take a lead in the affair, declaring her passion and holding on and so forth rather than being one to be surprised by his declaration of love and considering it for reasons of her situation in life. It does not quite fit except as an excuse for his passion to be reconciled with his status - he cannot offer her marriage and a safe home and respectability, being married - and thus must be propositioned rather than the one to lead. Thin excuse, at that.

Spring and Summer are haunting parts, with autumn rather more troublesome and stormy with one wishing he would sooner come to his senses. Perhaps it could not be otherwise in any way, but with quality of Galsworthy's works in general one goes in expecting him to do better, and is a bit disappointed. Still, all in all perhaps it forms a work preparatory for the far more satisfying and wonderful Forsyte Saga and Forsyte Chronicles, and perhaps it ought to be read before them, not after.

The Country House; by John Galsworthy.

One reads The Forsyte Saga trilogy, and wants more, and goes on to search out the rest of the tale about the characters one is so involved in by now, Irene and Jon most of all. Irene remains elusive and if anything more so than through the first trilogy, but one gets more of people related to Forsytes, and of beauty of England and some insights of social life and political state of the country and the world of that era. One finishes Forsyte Chronicles, three trilogies, nine books each of which is further three parts, and two in each trilogy connecting the parts. And one wants more. So one goes on to other writings of Galsworthy.

And one is not disappointed. Only, rather than go forth, one gets a view, an insight into how Forsyte Saga and Chronicles came to be the finished, polished, elusive portraits of the time and life veiled with a very English poetic mist wafting over the whole tale.

The Country House is set as the title would tell one in a country house, primarily, and the village life in general of that time, the mindsets still entrenched in the traditions and caste system of that time and place, but the people evolving at their own speeds of comfort.

A woman unwilling to live with her husband is at the centre of this work, with the peripheral people vivid as usual with the author. How her decision to separate affects people, how her involvement impacts on them, how they deal with the questions of divorce and involvement and questions of whether a woman may leave her husband and still be respectable, is the work.

There is the rector who is unable to deal with his wife's tenth confinement and the question of whether she will survive it, and with her contempt and pity for him hidden well until her moment of agony when she still smiles at him and tells him to go for his usual walk - and he never connects it in his conscious mind to his condemnation of the woman divorcing her husband for moral reasons. The opposite are the squire and his wife and son, each of whom deals with the same woman in a different way, but more humane and more civil. And the heartening part is, the husband she separated from is not automatically held up as free of guilt and full of innocence - rather, everyone including the rector is quite honest about how he is no better than the wife but merely has more rights to possess the woman since he is the man.

This admission of the skewed basis therefore makes them able to look at the whole question in a more honest way, and to go as far as he or she might with comfort with one's inner core, into the question of a woman's being a person in her own right rather than a mere possession and chattel bound and branded by her husband's right to her.

Not that these questions are now universally solved to satisfaction of justice much less satisfaction of everyone, especially those not willing to grant a personhood of a woman, but that era was the beginning of such questioning and thought in Europe. Tolstoy solved it by having Anna Karenina miserable with her choice of going away with her lover, unable to love her daughter by her lover, pining for the son she has by the husband she is unable to live with, and unable to feel secure in her love, committing suicide at the end symbolic of her choice of love over respectability of unhappy marriage stifling her heart - the choice that was a social suicide for her.

Galsworthy is kinder and more honest in that he does not attempt to satisfy all regressive or closed minds, much less authorities of the kind that attempt to rule personal lives by impersonal laws same for all, but rather shows a whole spectrum of people that deal with these questions in different ways, thus freeing the reader to think and feel and explore one's own heart and mind and thought, while looking at the portrayal by the author.

Yayati: by V.S. Khandekar.

Incidentally the work Yayaati or Yayati is from a story in the great original ancient timeless Sanskrt epic Mahaabhaarata by Paaraashara Vyaasa.

Twists and turns, a little of chance and a little of fate, much more of human characters shaping lives of everyone around with their emotions and actions, follies and greatness.

One of the many, many subplots in the original greatest work ever, by the greatest writer ever, Paaraashara Vyaasa, here given in another language by a competent writer (any more epithets would require a string of those for the original one, and one falls short) as it has happened in other cases, other subplots of the great epic retold by other recent writers. Fascination for the original, and the eternal nature of its truths, is the foundation and the core key to the whole series of such works and their success.

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Begun in the war between Gods and their opposite side the Asuras, this tale - as most parts of Mahaabhaarata do - continues with effects and consequences into human society at more than one level and more than one generation. Unlike the common misconception (story of lust) this story is about pain suffered for no fault of ones own, resulting loss of sweetness, ego, desperation for love, revenge and repentance, lightness of spirit and pride, and so forth - interplays of various human faults and travails.

Kacha came to Shukra Muni (Muni - sage, great learned teacher, someone with knowledge devoted to knowledge and spiritual matters), to learn from him the knowledge that Gods needed to defeat Asuras, but he had to be disguised as a Braahmana - if he admitted to the truth of his being a Kschatriya, he would be refused by the great teacher who belonged to the Asura side, since the knowledge would then be certain of being used against Asuras.

The young and vulnerable daughter of Shukra Muni, Devayaanie, fell in love with him and Kacha played along so as to not rock the boat prematurely. When he spurned her after being found out (since he was discovered to be too tough and resilient physically to be a Braahmana) she was devastated. Her close friend, princess Sharmischtha, perhaps unaware of how hurt she was, played a prank on her along with her friends and Devayaanie was left in water without any clothes on shore after their bathing together, the friends having left with laughter and her clothes.

A king of the realm, Yayaati, arrived soon after on the scene and helped her out, having heard her cry for help; she then informed him that since he had taken her hand under the circumstances and according to the code of chivalry in India then observed, he was obliged to marry her, and he agreed, with no shortage of pleasure since she was attractive and spirited.

Father of Shramischtha, the king of the region, on the other hand, was obliged to make amends for his daughter's thoughtless folly in putting Devayaanie in this predicament - all the more since it need not have ended as well as it did. Devayaanie asked that the princess be given to her as a personal servant for life, not free to have a life of her own until Devayaanie so pleased. This was done, Sharmischtha repentent and her father only relieved the punishment or amends was this easy. (If it were his kingdom or his daughter's life that were asked for, he would have to comply according to the code of conduct.)

Yayaati the easy going king, Devayaanie the proud and upright queen who was a Braahmana woman and hence unused to the Kschtriya easier life and mindset, and the ever watchful Shukramuni to see that his daughter was not ever disrespected again - this did not exactly make for domestic felicity and when Yayaati happened to see the servant, Sharmischtha, who was not only beautiful and well behaved as a princess born and brought up but also softer due to her repentence and status, he fell in love, as did she.

The queen never discovered this until she saw the proof of their liaison, a child. Her wrath brought her father and he cursed Yayaati the adulterer with untimely old age forever. When repentence of the guilty male was enough to melt his heart, he was given one solution - if any young man were willing to exchange his youth with the king's old age, this was possible as long as the king wished to enjoy youth.

Devayaanie's sons along with all other men refused, unwilling. The only young male willing to agree with all his being to such an exchange was Pururawaa, the son of Sharmischthaa. And having enjoyed youth for long Yayaati gave it back to him, with much more - all his love and his heat's blessings, which Pururawaa proceeded to make good use of. According to the code, he was judged the best candidate to inherit the responsibility of his father's kingdom and became the king. (Kingship was not necessarily bestowed on sons, either, but on the best person for the role, chosen by king and - or - agreed generally by the people of the realm.)

"Yayaati" is One (male) Who Has Suffered Pains. The word is related to Yati, which means One (male) Who Goes Through Pains Of His Own Willing Decision, For Sake Of Spiritual Achievement. (The latter word has been used wrongly by western observers and travellers for sightings of unidentified human like creatures in Himaalayaa who have characteristics human but are most likely to vanish when sighted; this characteristic fits very well the possiblity that they in fact are men meditating in regions where they are unlikely to be disturbed by lesser humans.)

Shukra Muni was the one who in wrath called Yayaati "a man who went astray in his lust"; but it is far more complex than that, and he realised this too, which is why he gave a way out of his curse at all.

Pururawaa went on to be one of the great kings in the Mahaabhaarata tradition, an ancestor of the princes of the main story.

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The original work of which this is based on a small story therein, Mahaabhaarata in Sanskrt by ancient sage and poet Paaraashara Vyaasa, is one of the few works that deserve well over five stars - but then it is also one of those that are beyond most readers' capacity to grade, and one can only be grateful if one is able to read it (in any language) and see the beauty and depth therein.
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Sunday, July 18, 2010
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A magnificent disaster : the failure of Market Garden, the Arnhem Operation, September 1944; by David Bennett.

It is difficult to describe in short the whole humongous war machine and the excellent men that came together in the fight for survival of humanity on one side, with glory of one nation out to conquer civilisation on the other. Cornelius Ryan has attempted that in his several excellent books on various parts including A Bridge Too Far about Operation Market Garden to control bridges across Rhine and especially the one at Arnhem. This book by David Bennet is about Operation Market Garden, with more research work about various parts of the action - British, Canadian, Polish, U.S., German.

The entire plan was ambitious and not impossible but only practical with some guaranteed miracles, and much of men were lost in the process. Was it all for the glory of one prima donna, is not clear.

This is what they did, this is how they fought and died so we can live as free men and women, and it is worth a look or more, several looks, reads.

Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass; by Isak Dinesen.

Even more than the spectacular film made on the book, this book grips one - and that is saying quite a lot.

This writer wrote about her own life in this one, the part she went out and lived in Africa, and one is filled with admiration for her courage, her growth and her perception, and her ever standing for what is just and right, which she did often at the risk of loss of status (which those days - and even now - is often be-all and end-all for most people - they consider what is necessary to be perceived as socially as the most important factor in decisions).

Karen went against much of conventions including those of colonial masters society then, and this woman again and again broke out against conventions and well trodden paths like a tremendous torrent bursting out through rock to find its way over more rocks.

In a Sunburned Country; by Bill Bryson.

Bill Bryson gives a detailed description of Australia, history, geography and much novelty thereof, with his journey through the continent described relatively briefly (unlike to boring infochannel documentaries where one wishes there was less of the narrator's back or face or whatever and more of the landscape) and there are a lot of anecdotes to enjoy, from funny to astounding to proving the uniqueness of the country.

Few things are as informative and this too about a huge country that is also a continent - and it is enjoyable too, as this writer generally is. It is amazing how much one does not know about Australia, and that is not about one person or so, it is about the rest of the world and even Australia.

There is the sheer huge number of species of dangerous insects and snakes and scorpions and so forth crawling around everywhere, that the continent proliferates with. New ones get discovered all the time, too, what with the interior of the continent being too dangerous to live or settle most of the places or even to travel except with a lot of luck.

The size of the continent can be judged by the fact that not only there are various animals that escaped or were let loose and are alive and well after several years or decades or so without humans being aware of them - animals like camels, no less, and others of various sizes - but in fact more.

At one point there was an atom bomb that went off in the middle of the continent - and no one knew until some organisation proudly owned up.

And then the prime minister of the nation who was lost while going on a walk. He fell into the ocean.

For more of such various interesting bits, one has to read the book.

Devdas by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay (Sarat Chandra Chatterjee).

A decent young man and a caring, but self respecting, young woman - and a feudal society where he has no means of supporting her if his family would not have it and so lacks courage to elope with the woman he loves, so he does the decent thing and instead tells her he never saw her as a lover, a mistake he repents forever while throwing away his life. Wealth comes but is too late, and is of little use when love is lost.

(Wednesday, August 27, 2008.)
(Friday, September 18, 2010.)
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Paro, the love of his life, sees her loss when she sees him throwing himself away in drink and dissipation, sheer depression and inability to get past loss of her, pretty much a boat that has lost its sails and sailor and is at mercy of all winds and waves, and hears him telling her that if only she had been there she could have taken care of him and his household, his home, his mother who is at mercy of the other - the only now that he is alone - daughter in law, and he would have been free to not worry.

She reflects on the irony of caring for the widower she married, along with his grown up children who have come to respect and admire her for her virtues of patience and caring and selflessness, and all the while letting the people she cared for be left to mercy of fate.

She makes him promise he will come to visit her marital home - it is large enough to accomodate any number of relatives, servants and guests, as old well to do homes did - so she could care for him. One has to admire the sheer certaintly of her virtue she has, that there is no concern about anyone holding her in suspicion if this ever came to pass, and indeed she had established her own persona, her virtue and her clear conscience in her home by her life there being one of faultless exalted kind that even her much older husband respects her for.

But life takes its own course and she is immersed more and more in the day to day affaires of the household, and with no news of her older concerns they are sort of veiled and remain behind her everyday awareness. When he does arrive at her doorstep, finally, to fullfill his promise to her - he could have come earlier but has his self respect too, about being ill in her home and recovering, so he would rather throw away his life until it is too late to recover and the promise is fulfilled only in name - he is then too ill, dying on her doorstep outside the gates.

It has a haunting quality, the last few hours of his life when he is lying there, dying, and she keeps on waking up, hearing in her sleep her name he keeps of whispering and and going to the terrace wondering who is calling her. She keeps on being disturbed through the morning until she accidentally hears about the details of the guy who died outside the gate - it is too late then, to see him, even though she tries, running in desperation and throwing the household in turmoil to see her sedate usual self behaving in sounusual a manner. The villgers outside the gate have already taken him away for cremation.
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It is almost as if the writer was unconscious of what came through while he merely wrote the tale of an unfortunate man. For it is not just about loss of love that might mean loss of a future, a life that could have been, loss of the persons that were separated. Which is tragedy enough.

The last few hours of Devdas's life while he whispers her name again and again and she wakes up from her sleep hearing someone calling her, but is unaware of what might be going on right outside her own gate, has the quality of a truth of a higher plane. Thus might one lose one's own soul while one got busy with worldly care and lost track of that which one had brought with one's birth from above.
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I have heard many quote the facile summing up of Devdas, about comparison that men easily might make between the two women in his life. And I find it short sighted. This is not a story about ego vs love, one woman losing the latter for the former and the other the reverse.

Paro took much from her love of childhood as her parents did from his wealthy parents, the neighbours in village they lived in, but being told by him that his parents were right about not wishing to step down in matters of forming relations with a lower class family - not a serious caste difference but one of class, that is, of money, which came to replace the older and more benevolent system in that it was more snobbish and had no values to go with it - could finally not overcome the slight to her parents, her family by her love.

By the time he arrived to repent and offered to make it work, it was too late, and he assumed all he had to do was to express his wish to her parents - which was the last straw and she boiled over with indignation. She told him off, in no uncertain words, that her parents knew better than to leave her at mercy of so weak a character, and they mattered, and their submission to his will was by no means a guarantee as he assumed. And moreover they had prestige of their own too, she informed him, indignant at his remark in his letter about their lowering their status by this marriage. As a matter of fact they had easily found her a match far wealthier than his family, which was only a proof in her eyes that her family had no reason to feel low in comparison.

Self respect, not ego, was what this was about, when she told him off. That he could have in spite of that tried to make her parents and his agree to their marriage escaped his notice, and he satisfied his injured ego with hurting her, and giving up rather than carrying out his promise of a sincere attempt to make the two families see reason in the matter and make it happen. His love was sacrificed at the alter of his class and the ensuing ego of the family that he shared - and his temper.
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The other woman did not, could not have had an ego, in the profession that she was in, due to whatever circumstance - she and others in her profession have it hard enough to have self respect, or indeed even a sense of self, if they are not of a low consciousness, and this woman was awakened from her stupor of everyday life into her self by the disdain this man of clear conscience made clear to her. She longed for his respect and love and in the process her life is cleansed of the muck her profession throws at her. She transformed herself, but was not above setting up shop again when needed to find him when he was lost, and that did not bind her again to the profession either - she gave up all to live in a small village in a very simple lifestyle earning much respect from the villagers that knew her for her true self.

In the final hours Devdas confused her face with his mother's in his unconscious state, and becoming aware of that fact, did not think it was incongrous to confuse the two supposed extremes, a revered mother and a common courtesan. This, for the culture this story belongs to, where mother is an extremely revered persona and the Divine is seen as The Mother, is testimony indeed to the clear souls and the relationships.

(Friday, October 24, 2008).

(Monday, September 20, 2010).

Daughters of Shame; by Jasvinder Sangheera.

I began after finishing the first one - Shame - in two days, and this one naturally takes off with a flying start. Every one goes to heart. One wishes one could do something, even if it is only to hold the hurt little ones and reassure them.
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It took a couple of days longer to finish this one, since it gets rather oppressing to realise it is all quite so ubiquitous - a systematic physical and emotional and in fact every other form of abuse of daughters geared towards using them as currency to keeping up one's own social prestige. Young girls somewhere around their teens, from as early as preteen to as late as early twenties, are held hostage to the concepts of honour that involve a slavery or worse for the women concerned, with no concern for their mental or emotional or often even physical well being and the only concern being to hand them over and to make them docile and servile to the men who own them in a farce of a marriage.

These forced relationships are really not marriages, they are a male bound (in his ownership of her) to a woman, often as young as fourteen and expected to be a robot in her compliance with the expectations of her from everyone including in offering no resistance to rape by the husband (he has often no concept of any other form of a relationship with a wife), with both cheated of any possible joy or love in the relationship and in fact in life. There are frequent enough instances of the young wife's father offering to murder her if she is unwilling to allow a consummation of a forced marriage. And all this in a community that claims to give rights to women what with a formality of a consent asked in public at the wedding, which often is given on threat of murder ensuing non compliance from her of course.

These girls, even when they grow up in UK going to schools there with the local population, are not really familiar with any other world than the one the community forces on them what with rules of behaviour pertaining to all spheres of life, and they have a window in the schooling years to a better world with more freedom - albeit with dangers too, but then freedom with dangers is better than dangers guaranteed at home! But even when they have a courage and spirit to try to take a flight to a better life, often what cripples them is this very inability to connect to any other life when the old life steeped in the community is cut off from them.

And why should the community be cut off if they do attempt a better life? It is because in the communities - not all Asians, but those from a particular region in Asia, and of some but not all religions in those parts - the possibility of a daughter or a woman with any choice, any possible better life is simply unthinkable. Not that men of the community benefit in this, and one has to question who does. After all a family with a mother and wife unhappy and daughters disallowed to blossom cannot possibly be happy, they just don't know any different. And people who are not happy at home are easier to control.

So the mores imposed like a poisonous weed flourish to the extent that when a girl, a young woman leaves a home in fear for her life and in protest against a forced marriage, often with as honourable a wish as an aspiration to education, she is hunted out again and again until she gives in - and the whole community is a part of it until she is unable to find any solace in familiarity of the world she has known by meeting any people of her own community even when they are strangers. Even a person working for governmental institutions in UK who are supposed to help her and protect her might find his (or her) loyalty to the community override the work ethic, and inform on her, resulting in her being hunted out by those intent on kidnapping and - or - murdering her. Emotional blackmail is used successfully too, and some women do cave in after a while.

All this if the young one escapes in the first place. Until Jasvinder Sanghera started educating the police and schools and other institutions of UK that could and should help and protect the young in the immigrant communities of the nation about the issues involved, and pointed out that being sensitive to culture difference was resulting in murder and kidnapping and rapes and general abuse of the young British Asian girls, there was really no way for them to escape, no route as such. Often they did go to teachers and police, but with no help forthcoming.

Now, there is a growing lot of institutional help what with a growing awareness about the issues, and hopefully there will be a growth in the enlightenment of the general community too, resulting in more education and benefit for everyone, with a better quality of life.

Marriages can be arranged without being forced, Queen Victoria was key in arranging her children's and grandchildren's marriages with holidays arranged so the young could meet and be familiar - just an example.

In the world wide expatriate community rooted in India the "arranging" merely amounts to the young ones being free of concern for hunting out and wooing their partners until their education and career concerns are at a stage satisfactory enough to find a partner, and the family along with the various other routes used by dating agencies in the world - advertisements, marriage agencies, websites now - help to locate possible choices.

Often a young person looks at the data selected for him or her with a few candidates shortlisted from the few hundred or so responses, there are meetings arranged where the young have a conversation with some privacy and might judge how they feel, and each has a possibility of saying if they wish to proceed to be engaged (which is when they get to meet more, but still on relative privacy, chaperoned by a member or few of either family or both).

In effect, this amounts to either person being as well educated and able to pursue his or her career as the family and the circumstances afford, all things considered. Hence the wide spread progress in the majority of people with roots in India, with excellence in education and career being a foundation considered important.

And it does help when one is not supposed to deviate from those aims while still young, not worry about being popular or learning to use cosmetics or being with fashion. One might do it a bit but it is far from a stigma to be plain, simple and good at academic and other achievements - on the contrary. In addition, often someone who finds love is able to deal with it, since such a concept is not considered evil but merely something the family has to deal with on par with any other way of finding a partner.

The key difference of the two pictures, of course, is - education, career, choices, and a help with finding a partner rather than the family forcing one at a young age out of a good life into a bed with an unwanted stranger against one's protests and in fear for life.

And the most major key difference is the concept of family and woman, with a forced marriage being based on no recognition of individual, considering everyone as a property of the family, and any individual choices being threatening to the honour of the family. This idea of the honour being so fragile as to be threatened by a blossoming of the family is the root of all the evil described here.

In the wider Asian community rooted in India, honour is neither so fragile nor dependent on the living death of the family and women - on the contrary. It is the growth and blossoming of the family - including the women - with education and achievements and careers and progress that is key in the wider community, these essentials replacing the killingly misplaced concept of honour that are used in forced marriages.

There can be no honour in forcing a woman to marry, (or even a man unless he has played with a woman or raped her - and even then it is no good for her - ) - much less in abusing and kidnapping and having her raped by the officially designated person in the name of one's own prestige in the community. Such a concept makes one a slave owner and one's family robots, no more.
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At one point there is a further analysis of the situation of immigrants, with some commonalities to the general migrants around the world (including the various colonial rulers through the ages in lands far away from their roots) but with some frightening consequences in this case.

The immigrants in UK, even those of Asian origin and even those that speak a particular language or two that are related to one another really, are further divided by one important difference - that of religion. And while two out of the various different religions in this context have a concept of "honour" about ownership of daughters to such an extent they would rather hunt out a woman and murder her, there is one that allows, indeed takes pride in its tradition of, easy divorces. This usually does not in practice result in a freedom for a woman although in theory that is the idea - in practice it results in the woman being cast aside as soon as her forced husband has achieved his aim of getting a legal status his own to settle in UK. Then he is free to bring another bride from back home, one unable to speak English, with no ties and no support for her in UK. And thus the community grows - grows as immigrants growing further apart from the ambient society even as they grow in number. And in this lie the roots of much of the disturbance plaguing the world today.

These immigrants have no ties to the land they live in, have little or no intention of being connected much less absorbed or even a part of a salad bowl. All the pain and travails of being far away from one's emotional roots are translated thus into a hatred of the very society they clamour so much to be legally a part of, with marriages paving a way as a ladder to climb from being an Asian to a UK citizen.
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Other parts of the community, those without easy divorces, have had ties to other just as horrible ways to take their pain and hatred out on another part of the world - back home, in fact, with much pain inflicted in attempt to carve out pieces of a land they left behind; they do not and never did intend to return, of course, merely to attempt a show of what they could do. The talk of a separate homeland goes on still amongst these migrants to faraway lands while back home it has gone away, it never was a real possibility there with the community so very widespread as to make it another farce.

Those immigrants, with no easy divorces allowed in their faith, instead resort to killing the daughters that do not comply with being objects traded for prestige. ...............................................................................................


Again, majority of the world wide population with roots in India have not so much fear or aversion to being integrated into the ambient society where they live, however gently - most migrants do not easily give way to losing their own culture, and indeed flourishing of such cultural gardens is a key to growth of nations that are not xenophobic. But they do accept the children growing up abroad with them as part of the nations they have migrated to and while they might impart their cultural values and attempt to keep in touch with relatives back home or fellow immigrants around, marriages are not forced and education a matter of pride as is any other achievement, and of course careers.

Marriages of children with local population or other immigrants (not of one's own culture but those of roots far away) do happen and are accepted, and attempts are made sincerely to make things work. In fact often enough a first generation immigrant ends up marrying a person from the place he or she has been living in, and such marriages are accepted too, and often work quite well.

Which is not to say things are all perfect in one community or another - only, that the practices of one or two of the communities of the general "Asian" immigrants in UK are far from ubiquitous of the region of their origin as a whole.
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In fact, the people mentioned in this book, with forced marriages and abuse and rapes and killings and kidnappings in name of prestige (I don't, really don't think it is honour in any way for anyone, it is only prestige and status!) - they remind me of another set of migrants, those of Asians in US (which there means orientals, that is, mostly with roots in China and related lands).

Chinatowns in US have long had the notoriety of being difficult for the local or state or any other agencies in the country to deal with, and there is generally little protection for the people being smuggled in and trafficked as labour or white slaves.

The difference is, in UK they do it to their own daughters and wives and family members. Not just fellow community members, as in Chinatowns of US, but actually their own blood - daughters and sisters and nieces - and life partners.

And often sons too.
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(Friday, April 17, 2009)