In which Netty discovers that all that glitters is not The Golden Notebook …

I’ve never written a book – well, nothing that has ever seen the light of the day (and for that, dear friends and family, you should be eternally grateful). However, I imagine that for those who have, there can be few things more irksome than having your work misinterpreted.

Now, I’m not saying that the late Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is not a feminist tract of some distinction. Of course it is. If you’re going to bang out a 600-page tome on women who are independent on the financial, political and sexual fronts and get said tome published on the dawn of the sexual revolution (The Golden Notebook was first released in 1962), well, you’re just asking for it, right?

I have surmised, throughout the years, that is best not to read the introductions, etc, before delving between the covers, and so it was again in this case – although Lessing’s slightly cantankerous 1971 preface referenced what I had already worked out for myself, although in my case I have the benefit of reading The Golden Notebook in 2014, with five decades of ensuing progress and tumult in hindsight. So the things that probably most stood out to the 1960s reader – namely sex and Communism – were met with a yeah, so? from me. To me – and to Lessing, obviously irked that readers were latching on to the (not so salacious) sex scattered throughout – the core of the book is mental illness in its myriad forms. And also writer’s block.

More on this later.

The book’s achingly post-modern structure (which wouldn’t have been at the time) did not annoy me, although I am glad I resisted my initial thought that I would read each separated section as a whole (as I did – and got some flak for having done so – with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas). That approach would not have worked here, instead resulting in considerable misunderstanding and head-scratching. The Golden Notebook is, effectively, six books in one – or perhaps five books, and a novella.

Free Women introduces the reader to writer Anna Wulfe and her long-time friend, theatrical actress Molly Jacobs. The women, both divorcees and single mothers of one in their late thirties, are – in the context of 1950s England, the decade across which the novel is set – worldly gals, monetarily independent and politically far-left wing, being ex-members of the British Communist Party. While they are nowhere near the realm of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”, they freely take lovers – although not without emotional consequences (and also, oddly, with no references to contraception – or none that I recall, at any rate).

Wulfe, who has a daughter Janet, aged around seven as the book commences, has for some time coasted on the success of her novel Frontiers of War, a fictionalised account of her time as a young woman in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), set during the latter stages of World War II. (Iranian-born Lessing herself resided there as a young girl; one assumes a certain amount of fictionalisation of Lessing’s own life, with Wulfe perhaps serving as her alter ego.) Wulfe dismisses queries of a follow-up, but in reality she is suffering severe writer’s block, which she tries to ease through the simultaneous keeping of four notebooks – black for writing, red for politics, yellow for relationships, and blue for everyday existence. Obviously the material overlaps and the notebooks feed into each other. Early on it becomes apparent that the yellow notebook is recording, in fictionalised form, using the nom de plume Ella, Wulfe’s affairs – particularly with Michael (Paul) and later with Milt (Saul). There are four sections comprising Free Women and each of the notebooks (which are presented with very brief notations, as per a work of non-fiction) before the golden notebook and the final section of Free Women.

I suppose whether or not you like this book is whether or not you like, or can relate to, or can empathise with, or can stand (and by those last 100 pages, she was severely pushing my boundaries) its main protagonist. I didn’t much like Anna Wulfe as a character (although she’s more fun in her younger guise, trapsing around colonial-era South Africa with her wild and woolly posse), but I could empathise with her and her situation, if not the soul-destroying relationships with awful men (particularly Milt/Saul. Dear lord, that one – documented in the final instalment of the blue notebook, and reprised in the golden notebook – almost did me in. Seriously, at more than one stage I yelled out loud, “Ferfuckssake”, and once I even hurled the book to the floor, contemplating if I could bring myself to finishing it). Wulfe heavily, if not always willingly, relies on her shrink (Mrs Marks/Mother Sugar), but the years seemingly bring her no closer to self-realisation. Only, the golden notebook suggests, the cataclysm of one of the most hideously needy, co-dependent relationships ever committed to ink can do that.

Which brings me back to what I felt was the true heart of the novel – that it is the catalogue of one modern woman’s breakdown. As per Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises – “How did you go bankrupt?”/“Gradually, and then suddenly” – so too is the process of Wulfe’s mental disintegration. So horrendous are the descriptions of her emotional madness in the final blue notebook that it is truly a painful thing to bear witness to the character (?) hitting absolute rock bottom. Which then leads to a final pulling together of all the novel’s various threads, which for me was achieved in a less-than-satisfactory manner that I felt was a slight letdown. But hey, after almost 600 pages, well …

Of course, just because a novel is “worthy” doesn’t necessarily mean you should read it. I didn’t love The Golden Notebook, but I think it is right up there in classic feminist literature – because even though Lessing didn’t set out to write such a book, by default she did – and that takes nothing away from its true intent. This is one to be shelved next to Greer’s The Female Eunuch and De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – and Plath’s The Bell Jar. Embrace the cunt and the craziness, and apologise for neither.

In which Netty peers into The Magic Toyshop …

You can never read enough books, so in addition to Andy and Netty’s Reading Challenge (and another book blog waiting in the wings; stay tuned), I am also in a book group. The premise is that each member gets to choose a book when it comes our turn, every couple of months or so. I mention that here because our current mission is to “choose a book you loved when you were 12”. A fascinating concept, but in reality a difficult exercise. Loved it back then, all those years ago, but what of now?

I am not a parent, nor have I consistently had dealings with young children, thus there has been little reason for me to revisit the books of my youth. I reread Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last year for Andy and Netty Revisited (see our March 2010 archive if you’re curious), but perhaps that example is the exception rather than the norm; a timeless classic that transcends age. Ditto for the Dr Seuss books, which I have collected both as a child and an adult.

And then there’s fairytales …

I have been thinking about fairytales a lot since reading Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, which is essentially a fairytale for adults. I know as a young child I consumed these as my staple reading diet, but I don’t ever recall having been overly frightened by the concepts therein. Which is ironic, because as an adult looking at the likes of Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, et al, well – there’s some pretty heavy, psychologically compelling stuff going on in there, culminating always in the eternal battle between good and evil.

Carter, who was 27 when The Magic Toyshop – her second novel – was published, apparently baulked at the description of her work as “adult fairytales”, despite literally reworking fairytales into her own fiction, translating those of others, and editing a couple of volumes of them. This is only the second Carter book I have read; I tackled Fireworks, a collection of her short stories, about 20 years ago, but don’t recall having been terribly impressed by it. But Carter’s literary reputation is fierce and her work demanded having another go at it. Which brings us here.

Funny that in Andy’s blog he mentioned his initial grave misgivings about Toyshop, because I was thinking exactly the same thing as I ventured into the opening pages (as in, ‘Geez, Andy is going to kill me for this’.) Funny also that at about the same time I was also thinking, ‘Geez, this would make a really good, interesting, intelligent read for a tweenie-teen’. Uh … wrong on both counts. Unlike, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, I reckon you could possibly do some real damage gifting this to your 10-year-old niece …

The Magic Toyshop is told from the perspective of its young English protagonist Melanie, the 15-year-old daughter of a privileged background. Her parents have left their three children – Melanie’s quiet, model-boat-building brother Jonathon and rambunctious five-year-old sister Victoria – in the care of their housekeeper Mrs Rundle while they are in the United States. Home alone while Mrs Rundle and her siblings are out shopping, Melanie intercepts a telegram bearing the news of the death of her parents in a plane crash; she blames it on an incident from the previous night where, moon-struck, she dons her mother’s wedding dress and ventures into the gardens, only to take fright and rip the garment to shreds trying to get back into the house.

Her mother’s estranged brother Philip sends word via the family lawyers that he will assume responsibility for the children, whereby they are despatched to London by train. Waiting to collect them are Finn and the fiddle-playing Francie, the young (probably late teenage or early 20s) brothers of Philip’s wife Margaret. Thus Melanie is sucked into the vortex of the Flower-Jowle household, over which their tyrannical uncle rules with an iron fist, terrorising his downtrodden, mute wife and her brothers, especially Finn, his toymaking apprentice.

Melanie struggles to come to terms with her new, frugal life in a house devoid of the creature comforts she had previously enjoyed and taken for granted. Her schooling abandoned, her uncle puts her to work as a sales attendant in his toyshop. Already battling with her burgeoning sexuality, she is both attracted to and repelled by Finn, especially after he takes her to a park and kisses her. Otherwise her mundane, stifling life in the household continues until she discovers her uncle’s other passion – besides the toys he carves, he also performs puppet shows for his family. But a pivotal incident at the first performance witnessed by Melanie and her siblings sets in train events that lead to the novel’s final, shocking denouement.

The most striking thing about this novel is its originality and cleverness. It takes the skeleton of the fairytale formula and imposes onto it its own, unique plot. It’s also exquisitely conjured, drawn and realised. And for all the often-unrelenting grimness, there is the deft use of subtle humour; robust and almost caricature-like for Mrs Rundle, gentle and tragic for Aunt Margaret. And in the character of Melanie, Carter has crafted a young fictional heroine for the ages. As Britney would say, not a girl, but not yet a woman – and with all the expected fables and flaws. This book was published in 1967, during the first wave of feminism, which is imbued in both its pages and in the different facets of its major female characters.

The Magic Toyshop was made into a film, scripted by Carter and directed by David Wheatley, in 1987. It’s not a movie I will be seeking out; sometimes I feel it’s better to keep a book in your head, rather than give in to someone else’s visual reimagining of it. I hope not to wait another 20 years, however, before sitting down with my next Carter book. As I’d long suspected, she was definitely worth giving another go. Hell, I might even reread Fireworks.

PS: Just in case you were wondering, after giving it much thought – and first discarding the Nancy Drews and A Woman of Substance-type potboilers I devoured back in the day – I settled on selecting Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising as the “book I loved when I was 12”. I remember it as supremely dark, fantastical, supernatural. Here’s hoping it lives up to expectations.