To be honest I didn’t know much about Marian Keyes until I read a review of her new book Again, Rachel and realised that I’d missed out on her best selling 1998 book, Rachel’s Holiday.  Both sounded interesting so I bought downloads.

I thought Rachel’s Holiday, nearly a quarter of a century on, might feel dated but not a bit of it. The issues are timeless and apart from the absence of mobile phones (Rachel could really do with one) you hardly notice.

Rachel is an archetypal unreliable narrator. She is a drug addict but spends most of the novel trying to convince herself and the reader that she isn’t. She is now in a no-frills rehabilitation centre paid for by her long suffering family. The sad tale of how she got there is unwound in a series of flashbacks as she remembers her past.

Rachel and her friend Brigid have gone from their native Dublin to New York for work – and an exciting life. Looking past what Rachel tells us we can see that Brigid, while good for a laugh, is gradually building a career. But Rachel swallows and sniffs  every drug she can lay hands on, drinks very heavily, has sex with almost any man she meets and goes to work (low grade jobs in motels) only when she’s on her feet. She continuously undervalues herself and has no self-respect whatever.  Eventually she meets a man named Luke Costello – kind, tender, sexy and not a druggie which means she has mixed feelings about him. When he calls time she realises that she was in love with him. She is angry, confused and very difficult to live or deal with.

Keyes is good at characterisation. The people Rachel meets – and eventually bonds with – at the rehab centre are beautifully drawn from the extraordinarily perceptive (Sister) Josephine who leads the group sessions to the charismatic (or is he?) Chris to Rachel’s room mate who hides her problems behind clothes, perfume and make up.

Somehow when Luke and Brigid turn up to give “evidence” and make Rachel face the truth in a devastating group session, you know that if they’ve travelled 3,000 miles to do this then they evidently care very much about her and want to help her. So perhaps, you think – we’re heading for some sort of happy ending. No spoilers.

Many reviewers have dubbed this a comic novel but that’s far too simplistic. Yes, as in life, there are funny moments and Rachel is herself good company and funny. But there’s a lot of depth to this novel too. It explores the nature of  addiction and studies the psychology of people who overeat, become alcoholic, compulsive gamblers or whatever so often rooted in childhood experiences. And it stresses the concept of an addictive personality which once “cured” of one addiction often simply transfers it to another substance or habit.  It’s also a hopeful story. Life at the rehab centre seems grim … but it works and Rachel makes some real friends.

I shall wait a few weeks and then read the sequel which, apparently, shows us what Rachel is doing and where she is now.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Flames by Sophie Haydock

Well it’s always been controversial. Nabokov’s famous 1955 story about a middle aged man’s obsession with pubescent or pre-pubescent girls was turned down by several publishers who, presumably,  wouldn’t touch the subject matter. Amongst the ignorant, crass teenagers I mixed with in my youth it was bandied about gleefully as a “dirty” book so of course I read it eagerly but was disappointed. It’s a complex, highly literary work and, with hindsight, at 15 or whatever I wouldn’t have understood it on any level.

Humbert Humbert – his double name mirroring his duallty – is a self confessed paedophile. He refers openly to his pederosis.  His narrative is presented as a memoir to be presented in court so the reader knows almost from page 1 that he doesn’t escape his fate  although the crime isn’t actually the one the reader long assumes. He’s a scholar and linguist so his testimony is shot through with understated references and word play. Rereading it now, I ache to share it with an A level class so that we could unravel it together. No 21st century examining board is likely to set it, though.

Humbert courts and marries Charlotte Haze because he wants her daughter – the titular Lolita, whose real name is Dolores. After Charlotte’s death he takes Lolita on a year-long motel tour of America, requiring sex from her constantly and getting it  with various degrees of un/willingness. His “nymphet”, aged 12 at the start, ricochets from being a child who wants ice cream soda in every drugstore to a young woman experimenting with her own sexuality and power – and back again, many times.  There’s nothing straightforward about her.

The descriptions of his lust are utterly revolting – as the narrator knows they will be as he recounts in immense detail what he calls “my miserable story”. In some ways he’s the classic unreliable narrator but in other ways his account is searingly, disturbingly reliable – unless we are to suppose that he’s fantasising when he he tells us – in his wordy way – that, for example, he performed cunnilingus on his “pubescent concubine” before calling the medical services when she was taken ill. Within the confines of the novel I think he’s telling the truth because he is obsessed (and mentally diseased?). One half of him knows that what he is doing is both illegal and immoral – they’re on the run after all  – while the other half regards his life with Lolita as perfectly normal which is why he’s explaining it so earnestly.

And that’s the really remarkable thing about this novel – the way Nabokov has got into the mind of this complex character and made him arguably plausible and certainly fascinating.  He’s a verbose man too who can casually use words such as “adumbrated” and “viatic” and refer coyly to asking a pre-Lolita target to hold “in her awkward fist the sceptre of my passion” (a reference I would definitely have missed at 15). He often speaks in French too.

The real miracle to me is that Nabokov’s mother tongue was Russian, and English – as with Joseph Conrad – was his second language. His family left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power and he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge before eventually setting in America. He wrote novels in Russian, published translations and taught Russian literature in universities. His first novel in English – The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – was published in 1941. It stuns me that anyone can have written this startlingly original novel, let alone someone working in a second language.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes

There are two series of books I’ve always intended to read one day (unlike Lord of the Rings which I decided long ago I wasn’t going to trouble myself with.) One is Marcel Proust’s  A la Temps Perdu – roughly translated as In Search of Lost Time – and the other is Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Projects comfortably postponed to extreme old age when I might not be able to get out much? Perhaps not. When a dear friend was dying of cancer a few years ago she said: “You always think that when you get some hideous wasting disease you will read Proust and Powell  but then when it comes, the morphine means you can’t concentrate for five minutes so you don’t”.

So with that thought in mind – and with my health and faculties happily intact –  I have now read the first novel in Powell’s opus magnum: A Question of Upbringing which was published in 1951.  As well as the obvious whiff of Brideshead, it reminds me of Jane Austen without most of the wit, spliced with CP Snow whose first novel in the Strangers and Brothers series was published, eleven years earlier in 1940 – and I have read all the latter several times because I wrote a college dissertation on Snow when I was 21.

Three young men: narrator Nicholas Jenkins, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham are at an Eton-like school in the 1920s where they try to avoid the strictures of the house, whose master is bloodless man named Le Bas. Also around is another boy Kenneth Widmerpool. Eventually Jenkins and Stringham “go up to the university” as entitlement to Oxford is referred to. They visit each other’s families, Jenkins spends one summer in France to improve his French and they are taken under the wing of a don named Sillery. Everyone knows everyone else in these privileged circles and it’s odd, I am writing this on the day when I heard comedian/actor/writer Katy Brand talking to Michael Berkley on Radio 3’s Private Passions. She said  that, going to Oxford in the 1990s from a comprehensive school she found this clubbiness based on long established ties quite hard to adjust to. And that was 40 years after the publication of this novel and 70 years after it was set. Is it different now?

The novel is really a comedy of manners in which people fence round each other especially where mothers, sisters and female companions are concerned. And as they’re sometimes staying in disparate groups in large houses waited on by servants it was that which reminded me of Jane Austen although her point of view is always waspishly feminine and Powell’s Jenkins is unapologetically male. The story about picking up two girls from the roadside in Templer’s car which he then crashes, for example, is all about men and their reactions.

It was the university lunches and political manoeuvring and manipulation which screamed CP Snow at me – such a closed world concerning itself obsessively with things which don’t in the scheme of things matter much although there’s romance in all those courtyards, stairways and shabby rooms. And I enjoyed Moffet, Stringham’s college servant, who insists on lining the latter’s ivory elephants up the wrong way.

I’m not sure whether I shall plough on with the other eleven novels in Dance to the Music of Time which span the rest of the century – I probably will at some point because I’m curious to see where it goes. Proust meanwhile is surging his way up my TBR list.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov