Wartime Ladies
Toni Morrison + Transcription + Delayed Rays of a Star
Dear Reader,
It’s been far too long since I wrote and I’m here at my desk, in the dead of the night, because I’m determined to end this strange and terrible week on a good note. If there was ever a time to remember the power of narratives, surely it is now when we are told tales and kept from hearing voices.
I’m not sure if this newsletter is looking different in your inbox since I’ve jumped ship to a new platform, but if it is, fear not. Nothing has changed as far as you’re concerned. These newsletters remain free and they will continue to be sporadic and wordy. In fact, they might actually end up being a little more sporadic than normal since I’ve got a lot of reading homework, having said yes to being on the jury for a prize. This is not just because I’m procrastinating on writing the next book, but also because I got excited at the thought of reading a selection of Indian books that came out last year (for free!) and it seemed like a good exercise. At present, the book I’m reading is about as pleasant as exercise minus the endorphin rush.
But never mind that.
Toni Morrison passed away on August 5. She was 88 and had lived a full, wonderful life. From a child who grew up reading Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy to becoming the author who brought “black girl magic” to bookshelves all around the world (after publishing her first novel at the age of 39!), Morrison’s life is such an intricate tapestry of challenges and triumphs. For a lot of us, Toni Morrison was the first black author we read properly. I was a teenager when she won the Nobel Prize and suddenly, her books were everywhere. I remember picking up The Bluest Eye and within a few chapters, I felt as though the reality around me had rearranged itself. In these pages was a world that no one had told me existed and because of the complex, glistening magic of her prose, I knew it was a privilege to be able to witness it. Until I’d read Morrison, I didn’t realise how much music and poetry could be created out of simple words. The words on the page? I could hear them, their melody. The torment and despair that she was describing? I could feel it on my goosebumped skin. Years later, I remember hearing Morrison for the first time — that slow, deliberate, lilting music of her everyday speech — and knowing at a visceral level that if there is such a thing as an angel, they must sound like Toni Morrison.
There’s no reason to feel sad Morrison’s gone, especially since she had been ailing in recent years. The last thing I want to imagine is a frail Toni Morrison, unable to step our or speak up, but I was still heartbroken when I found out she’d passed away. At that moment, it felt as though a little bit of grace had wisped its way out of the world. Fortunately, on YouTube, Toni Morrison’s still standing.
If you haven’t read her works, I’d highly recommend The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula and Song of Solomon as starting points. Or just Google her quotes. There’s enough wisdom there to guide us through lifetimes.
§Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Juliet Armstrong is a transcriptionist with the MI5. It’s World War II; spies and plots lurk in every corner; and the ordinary turns extraordinary in the blink of an eye. Juliet’s job is to listen to all that’s being said in the next room, where double agent Godfrey Toby is extracting information from people (mostly women) suspected of being Hitler sympathisers, also referred to as the fifth column.
When Juliet is selected by her boss Peregrine ‘Perry’ Gibbons to spy on someone, she realises she’s remarkably good at fabricating a life and making the artifice feel real. However, this is true of almost everyone in Transcription. Toby’s real name is John Hazeldine. Gibbons has a secret identity of his own. Especially because of the distrust-riddled times the novel is set in, practically every character in the book has secrets and protective layers of fiction to protect themselves from scrutiny and judgement. The ones who are straightforward and transparent don’t survive very long.
Skipping between different time periods — the novel spans from 1940 to 1981 — Juliet’s story is layered with intrigue and danger. One of my favourite episodes in the book is one in which Juliet goes to the address that she remembers was Toby’s during the war. Now a young woman lives there with her children. She doesn’t know anything about the previous owners, but she cheerfully invites Juliet in for a cup of tea. The whole time Juliet is filled with questions and a nervy anxiety that seems like paranoia. Except when Juliet goes back to the address, the house is empty and a kindly old man tells her no one has lived there for months.
For all the menace, mystery and danger that lurks in Transcription, it’s also very funny because Atkinson gives her heroine a delightful and dry sense of humour. The wit is as much a survival mechanism for Juliet as it is a way of keeping the reader on their toes. While she does rush a little when she’s tying up the last of the loose ends, for most part, Transcription is thoroughly satisfying as a spy novel. It’s got all the tricks of the trade, but is told from a perspective that is rarely present in the genre — that of a woman. Usually, women hover at the fringes of these stories, but Atkinson brings them front and centre in Transcription.
History geeks will know that a lot of what Atkinson writes in Transcription is true. The fifth column is not a myth (as the FT article I’ve linked to above will tell you). Atkinson writes in her author’s note at the end of Transcription:
“The transcriptions themselves, apart from the odd direct quotation, are my fabrications, but they mirrored the real ones very closely as far as subject matter, patterns of speech and so on are concerned. The biscuit intervals and social chat and technical hitches, even the iron crosses, are authentic, as are the endless ‘inaudible’s. … Many of the technicalities of BBC recording are … not necessarily entirely accurate or contemporaneous (but near enough). I am fiction’s apologist.”
I love that last line. If you like spy novels, I would highly recommend this one.
§Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe
In 1928, at a party in Berlin, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took this photo of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl:
This moment in the ballroom, when the paths of the three actresses intersected before splitting into very different trajectories, is the starting point for Delayed Rays of a Star. Marlene would go on to find fame and success in Hollywood before spending her last years as a reclusive diva in Paris. Anna May, the first Chinese-American film star, would make history but also find herself chafing against the restrains of racist stereotypes and conservatism of American and Chinese societies. Leni would thrive in Nazi Germany as Hitler’s filmmaker of choice and then struggle for decades (she died at the age of 101) to convince people she was an apolitical artist. Read a couple of sentences, and you’re transported to a brightly-light film set in Hollywood; inside the barricaded Paris apartment where an ageing diva watches Casablanca on TV; to the office in the ministry of propaganda where the Doctor is pouring himself a drink; to a truck in which a group of gypsies are singing defiantly as they’re taken to a concentration camp.
Koe’s novel tracks an elegant path through Hollywood, Nazi Germany, art, love, racism, glamour and ambition. Every character in this novel is looking for something and each of them is wittingly or unwittingly a storyteller, determined to craft their own narrative in defiance of their circumstances. Most of them struggle to find a sense of belonging and end up being disruptive because they just don’t fit into established social categories.
True to history but also lavishly imagined, Delayed Rays of a Star is magnificent and probably my favourite read of the year so far. Koe does a fantastic job of giving every character — even the minor ones — a distinctive voice. Very occasionally, her prose feels laboured. Most of the time, it’s like cut glass crystal being held to the light — precise, perfectly-carved with flashes of brilliance. She also deserves a big round of applause for how she doesn’t let the times in which the book is set overwhelm the story. The events of the novel happen in turbulent periods like the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and a postcolonial Europe that is navigating its way between liberal multiculturalism and deep-rooted racism. History is ever-present in Delayed Rays of a Star, but it doesn’t overwhelm the fiction. I particularly loved how Koe brought the protests at Tiananmen Square into the novel through a character who is Chinese, but unaware of what has happened because she’s been trafficked out of China. When she does return to Beijing some time later, she can’t believe such a massacre could have taken place. It reminded me of this piece about the great act of “foregettance” that China has carried out.
The book is evenly divided between the three stars, but for me, Leni’s track felt the most forced and Anna May was the weakest link. You don’t really get a sense of how much of a trailblazer Anna May Wong was from Delayed Rays of a Star, which focusses more on what defeated the actress rather than emphasising her achievements. Marlene with her bisexuality, determination and cackling laughter is the most charismatic. (I wasn’t surprised to find out later that Koe had a poster of Marlene Dietrich on her wall as a kid.) She’s electric and Koe taps into something special when she shows Marlene’s unflagging determination to create an illusion of glamour around herself.
For all the light, wit and flirtation that twirls through Delayed Rays of a Star, this is a heartbreakingly sad book. And yet, for all that goes so terribly wrong for the minor and major constellations in the novel, it’s also strangely triumphant.
§The Sexual Life of English by Shefali Chandra
In case you got excited because of the word “sexual” is in the title, calm down. This is the academic kind of sexual, which means the book cheerfully bandies about words like “psychobiological”, “phallogocentric”, “normativity” and “prolegomena”. The good news is while there is a lot of word salad in these pages, Chandra’s also offering a really interesting analysis of how English became an Indian language.
Chandra’s point is that English lost its foreign sheen because it was made local in a very specific way — by British India’s English-educated men teaching the language to their wives and daughters. For her analysis, she focuses on Bombay and Poona between 1850 and 1940, where Indians gained the power to direct English studies for themselves and how it was controlled by men (mostly upper caste Hindus). Chandra argues that while English did unleash gender trouble and anxieties about vernacular cultures being wiped out, the English-educated Indian male did manage to eventually neutralise its disruptive effects.
But before that happened, there was much concern about what learning English and the ways of the West would do to women. Women were the boundary between English and non-English languages. The prevailing belief among upper caste Hindus was that mothers should only know the mother tongue and focus on domesticity. Learning English would put a strain on them and surely we do not want to strain women since they have the task of bearing children (I’m not kidding. Learning English was actually described by one person as a physical strain that only men should have to suffer. Never mind that women were often being starved, beaten and regularly used as free domestic labour. Let’s not put her through the strain of getting an education in English.)
In 1886, Narayan B. Kanitkar wrote the play Taruni Shikshan Natika, in which a group of women’s single-minded pursuit of an English education drove them to prostitution and extramarital affairs. The play was a hit, by the way. Essentially, Kanitkar’s point was that English diverted women from marriage, domesticity and motherhood. “A new generation of hipless, breastless women is coming to the forefront in America and Europe”, wailed one gent in the early 20th century while warning against teaching Indian women English literature. Another distressed critic wrote in a Gujarati newspaper, arguing against women giving examinations and pursuing education seriously, “Simple Gujarati is quite enough. Why then should we have the superintendence of European Christian ladies? … These girls, instead of living quietly with their husbands, will desire to make slaves of them.”
Eventually, however, with ‘good’ Indian men deciding what is acceptable in school and college curricula, and ‘good’ Indian women learning English (and not turning into sex workers), the foreign language is domesticated. A growing number of women didn’t topple the social order once they were allowed to access an education in English. Instead, they used English to conform to the existing caste order and gender stereotypes. Through their memoirs, letters and other writings, English became yoked to Indian womanhood. It was not that these women weren’t disruptive. Many of them were and they took steps that rattled the bars of social convention at the time. However, most of the time, they were only as disruptive as the men in their lives would let them be.
Once I’d got the hang of the polysyllables, The Sexual Life of English proved to be a really absorbing read. Not exactly easily accessible, but if you’re interested in cultural theory, this one’s very interesting.
That’s it from me for now. Thank you for reading.