Tag Archives: Novel

Colm Tóibín’s Mary’s Testament

Posted on 24 Dec 2012 | 3 comments

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (Picador 2012)

1tm Last Christmas I read The Book of Rachael, Leslie Cannold’s debut novel about an imagined sister of Jesus. This year veteran novelist Colm Tóibín speaks in the voice of Jesus’ mother.

The Book of Rachael wasn’t completely satisfying as a novel, but it painted a convincing picture of what it may have been like to be poor or outcast or female in Jesus’ times, and entered convincingly into a world view where tales of miracles could be true without being true as we understand the word.

The Testament of Mary has different fish to fry – my trouble is I can’t tell what those fish are. There are passages that are pretty well straight retellings of incidents from the Gospel of John: the raising of Lazarus and the ecce homo. Other familiar scenes – the crucifixion, the miracle at Cana – are recast in ways that in effect claim that the Gospel is lying. For most of the book I felt I was reading notes towards a novel, something that would be fleshed out once a bit more research could be done, and a few crucial decisions made: is Mary’s son a charlatan followed by desperate misfits, and if so how does that fit with his bringing a corpse back to life? why are the Romans and ‘the Elders’ intent on killing him and all his followers, and in that context why does the head Roman try to save him? why have Mary flee the scene of the crucifixion before the actual death – might there be a less crude way of saying that the Gospel of John isn’t historically accurate?

I suspect that the heart of the piece is in something Mary says to the unnamed man who explains to her that Jesus died to save the world: ‘when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.’ I read this as an emphatic repudiation of a 1950s Irish Catholic world view, and I go, like, ‘Whatever!’

It’s not a novel. It’s not an informed engagement with the gospels – it seems to assume, for example, that John’s gospel claimed to be a historical rather than a theological document. It’s not effective as polemic, because the thing it opposes is presented as arbitrary and fanatical. I don’t know what it is. Maybe Colm Toíbín felt that it was important to show his colours in the current struggle between fundamentalism and science, etc. OK, it does that – but I’m surprised the commissioning editor didn’t return the manuscript with a note: ‘Needs more work.’

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The Book Group climbs Venero Armanno’s Black Mountain, plus sonnet #4

Posted on 8 Nov 2012 | Leave a comment

Venero Armanno, Black Mountain (UQP 2012)

Before the Book Group meeting:
A hasty read of this book’s cover blurb led me to expect a kind of fictionalised misery memoir cum migration tale, a book where a second or third generation Australian explores his European heritage:

Beginning in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago … Based on factual events … Italy … rural fringes of coastal Australia … a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.

There are elements of misery memoir: in the most powerful and memorable part of the book the main character, Cesare Montenero, is sold as a child into virtual slavery to work in Sicily’s sulphur mines in the early 20th century. But Cesare’s story is told in the literary equivalent of found footage, and the sulphur mines account for only 40 of the 200 or so pages of the found manuscript. A 30-page prologue has already set some creepy, horror-genre expectations, so that one’s antennae are out for hints of the darker, weirder underlying story. It’s hard to say much more without giving stuff away, but there are plenty of pleasing twists and turns. I’m glad I didn’t read any reviews beforehand, as one of the book’s pleasures is in the way appearances turn out to be deceptive, the ground shifts constantly under your feet, you can’t really be sure what kind of book you’re reading.

I enjoyed it, but can’t say I found it satisfactory. Too often I became aware of the plot mechanics, that someone was making it all up. A gauge of my lack of engagement is that I kept wanting to have a conversation with the copy editor: ‘If we’re going to opt for the US practicing,’ I wanted to ask her/him, ‘why not consistently use US spelling, like sulfur?’ Or, ‘Are sure you shouldn’t have queried whether resiled to should have been resigned to?’ There are more such moments, and the fact that I noticed them may say more about me than the book, but it does indicate I was less than fully engrossed.

After the meeting:
This was an unusual meeting. The group had been going for exactly 10 years last night, so there was much taking stock and reminiscing, and passing on of lore to those of us, like me, who weren’t there at the start. But our in-house facilitator made sure we each had a moment to give our personal take on this book, and uncharacteristically a consensus emerged: the book was OK, no one hated it, but all but one of us found it fairly ho-hum. The sulphur mine section got a general thumbs up – one chap had read the book a while ago and had trouble remembering anything else about it. And, as someone said, we enjoyed the brothels of Paris. But, while I think we all read to the end, the overarching plot failed to impress. Most of us didn’t feel the sulphur mines and the brothels to be integrated, so when those parts came to an end, the wheels of the plot had to start from a virtual standstill. The one person who had a different reading argued for a deep thematic coherence, but I won’t say more because it really is a book that can be spoiled by too much being given away.

And the obligatory sonnet:

Sonnet 4:
Ten years and more than 60 books
discussed by us (and mostly read) –
by builders, architects, home cooks
and sundry ageing chaps, well fed
each time in mind and body. Park,
Malouf, McEwan, Stead, Houellebecq,
Coetzee (twice), White, Ghosh (a naval
title), Falconer, Miéville:
We all loved Tolstoy. Tsiolkas split us.
Tonight: Armanno, reminiscence,
but mostly – here’s the Book Group’s essence –
not so much a tute on lit as
time for sharing – hip, hooray-able –
lives and minds around a table.

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Hilary Mantel brings up the bodies

Posted on 15 Jul 2012 | 10 comments

Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate 2112)

20120704-175516.jpg I’m probably the only person of my generation whose grasp of what it was like to live in the courts of the Tudors comes mainly from an article written for The School Magazine by award winning children’s novelist and occasional commenter on this blog, Cassandra Golds. ‘The Princess in the Tower’ focused on Elizabeth, imprisoned during the reign of her half sister Mary, but there’s a memorable paragraph . It likens the court to a jungle where elegant people circled each other like wild beasts, seeking the advantage. Sadly, I’m writing this far from home, so can’t give you a quote. (Cassandra, if you read this, maybe you could add one in the comments section?) [Added later: Cassandra has commented with the passage which is even more apposite than I had remembered. Thanks, Cassandra.]

Even more than Wolf Hall, to which it’s a sequel, Bring up the Bodies validates that image in its portrayal of the court of Henry VIII. But at its heart there’s Thomas Cromwell, no wild beast but a methodical tactician, serving the king and good of the kingdom, receiving insults with apparent stolidity but forgetting nothing, keeping his own counsel, taming some beasts and destroying others.

I was reading this in a cafe in Goreme in Cappadocia, when an Australian woman (the cafe offered a decent flat white, much sought after by Australian coffee drinkers) called from several tables away.

Australian flat-white-drinking woman: ‘How are you finding that? I loved Wolf Hall but I found that one a bit hard to get into.’
Me: I’m loving it. I think it’s miraculous the way she gets right inside the minds of people from that time.
Australian flat-white-drinking woman’s grey-haired male companion: it’s all in the mind.
Me: Um, yes.
AFWDWGHMC: It’s past lives.
Me: Oh, you think Hilary Mantel was there in a past life.
AFWDWGHMC: Not just her, everybody.
Me: Well, that’s a conversation stopper if ever I heard one. (I didn’t say that, I just wish I had.)
AFWDWGH: She’s written another book, you know, a nonfiction book called Anne Boleyn, Witch.

So there you are. If anything was going to make me believe in past lives, it might well be this book. And if Hilary Mantel has written that nonfiction book, I wish she had spent the time on the next novel about Cromwell. It’s not that I want to see him get his comeuppance, as of course he will. I just want more of him. And I worry about his sweet, naive son Gregory.

PS: I read this in Turkey, among relics of rulers at least as much at the mercy of their whims as Henry Tudor. I wonder how English history might have gone if Henry could have had a harem. Surely if he had four wives at a time the need to have a son might have been less desperate. Mostly I didn’t take the book on outings, preferring to take thinner volumes. But here I am, reading it in the queue to see the treasures in Topkapi Palace.

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Neal Stephenson’s Reamde

Posted on 25 Jan 2012 | 2 comments

Neal Stephenson, Reamde (William Morrow / Atlantic Books 2011)

At 1044 pages, this is to a normal novel what The Wire or The Sopranos is to a feature film. Characters who loom large in the first couple of hundred pages are killed as summarily as any TV character whose actor has had a better offer. New characters turn up who come from whole other continents. Plot strands that appeared to be central are apparently resolved after a mere 350 pages, and, to mash my metaphors a bit, other strands arise from the ashes and shards that remain of them. As the action moves to a new location, that location is described in loving detail, usually over a couple of pages. Yet, with all those shifts of direction and detailed evocations of place, the narrative stays gripping.

Neal Stephenson is the man who raised the info-dump to the level of an art form. In the climactic battle scene, for instance, when two sets of jihadists are shooting it out with a heterogeneous collection of good guys, he pauses to notice that when machine-gun bullets hit the walls of a log cabin, the freshly exposed wood shows up starkly blond against the weathered outside wood. And elsewhere in the same battle, a character has time to reflect that one’s mental functions are less sharp when one is burning fat than when burning carbs. But there are none of the spectacular digressions of earlier books – no lectures on Babylonian mythology, nanotechnology, computer cryptography, advanced mathematics, or the fashions of the court of Charles the Second of England.

If you haven’t read any Neal Stephenson, I wouldn’t recommend starting with this. Snow Crash is a fabulous cyberspace thriller; Cryptonomicon goes deep into Second World War cryptography and modern electronic security; The Diamond Age is set in a world where nanotechnology is achieving wonders, yet has at its heart a book for small children (and a small child who reads it); The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) is a rollicking picaresque novel and also a fictionalised account of the dawn of capitalism, the Enlightenment and the scientific age. Compared to any of them, Reamde is just a thriller.

But it’s wonderful, improbable fun. You can get an idea of the plot from this little ‘story so far’ passage from page 827 (you need to know that T’Rain is a massively popular and profitable multi-user internet game, and it may help to know that Seamus is a semi-disgraced but still potent US secret operative and ‘these three’ are all in their early 20s and not generally inclined to risky living):

Seamus had no idea what level of precautions was appropriate here. Apparently these three had left half of the surviving population of China seriously pissed off at them, as well as making mortal enemies with a rogue, defrocked Russian organised crime figure. In their spare time they had stolen money from millions of T’Rain players, created huge problems for a large multinational corporation that owned the game, and, finally – warming to the task – mounted a frontal attack on al-Qaeda.

I confess that my enthusiasm was beginning to flag in the prolonged climactic battle, where not a lot was happening besides stuff blowing up and people shooting at each other, but generally this was an excellent summer, even all-of-summer, read. And what if my teetering To Be Read pile is calling me to  a world history of genocide, a revisionist account of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the next Book Group title? Neal Stephenson is a major Guilty Pleasure, and I am unrepentant.

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Ruby Blues in the car

Posted on 9 Jan 2012 | Leave a comment

Jessica Rudd, Ruby Blues (Text 2011)

This was our read-aloud on the car trip from Melbourne to Sydney, and it served well enough. I had a sinking feeling at first, as I was required to deliver a number of strained comedy routines that didn’t quite work, but by about page 20 I found I was laughing aloud quite a lot. It’s a genre piece, chick lit: much description of clothes and make up, a touch of Feminism 101, quite a bit of embarrassment of the heart and loins (I was reminded of Marieke Hardy’s TV creation Laid). The eponymous Ruby is the chief adviser to an Australian Prime Minister whose popularity is plummeting, and the chick lit adventures are supplemented by a plot involving political intrigue and blackmail, which manages – just – to provide a central thread.

One of the selling points of this book is that the author is Kevin Rudd’s daughter. This creates an expectation that though it’s manifestly fiction, the book will build on insider knowledge. Well, I wouldn’t put much store by such an implied promise. For example, fairly early on someone reminds Ruby that she has to prepare the PM’s briefings for Question Time, and 30 minutes later she has the folder ready. Um, without wanting to make too much of it, I’ve heard the odd anecdote from a PM staffer, and I’m pretty sure that job takes something closer to four hours. And Ruby’s intern- assistant Bettina, the source of most of the laughs, is a vastly improbable creation.

That, plus little things like poignant being used by Ruby, presumably with Jessica’s approval, where in English we would say pertinent, and a stretch towards the end where nothing is happening except some characters renting fancy dress, makes me slow to recommend the book. But we did laugh. And we did read the whole book, which is more than I can say for AC Grayling’s Descartes, a much more substantial text that just couldn’t keep the driver awake and was discarded after about 30 pages.

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LoSoRhyMo #6: Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall

Posted on 10 Nov 2011 | Leave a comment

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010)

The Book Club (the one where we swap books and keep discussion of them to a minimum) has introduced me to many writers and kinds of writing that I wouldn’t have sought out otherwise. Thanks to it I’ve read excellent books I might have prejudged as boring (an engrossing biography of a World Bank CEO comes to mind). But there have also been books the lender thought were brilliant that stank in my nostrils. By page 34, I was thinking By Nightfall might be about to join Philip Roth’s The Humbling as one of my stinkers (though nowhere near as pungent as that). Two characters’ visit to the Metropolitan Museum on page 34 came close to tipping the balance:

… Peter and Bette walk together through the Great Hall at the Met, grand somnolent portal into the civilized world. Why deny its satisfactions – its elephantine poise, its capacity to excite the very molecules of its own air with a sense of reverent occasion and queenly glamour and the centuries-long looting of five continents. The Hall receives with a vast patience. It’s the mother who’ll never die, and right up front are her votaries, the women of the central kiosk, elderly for the most part, kind-looking, waiting to offer information from under the enormous floral arrangement (cherry blossoms, just now) that festoons the air over their heads with petal and leaf.

This is by no means uncharacteristic of the prose – the pages are littered with such unmurdered darlings. But Cunningham wrote the novel The Hours, the basis for the excellent film of the same name, so I read on. A couple of bedtime reads and a long walk with the dog took me to page 167. I still wasn’t engrossed, but I was planning to read the remaining 71 pages (yes, I was counting pages) to see what Michael Cunningham would make of the (to me) unpromising narrative. Then I was chatting to someone and outlined the story so far – see Sonnet 6 below – and realised I just didn’t care. I read somewhere recently that one of the rules of writing a novel is, ‘Cool stuff now, cooler stuff later,’ that is, ‘Don’t save all your cool stuff to the end – you know it’s coming, but the reader doesn’t.’ There’s probably lots of cool, subtly nuanced stuff towards the end of this book. And maybe what I’ve read is cool to a certain sensibility.

Sonnet 6: The story up to the point where I stopped reading
Our Peter’s life is fairly flat.
He loves his wife, they do sex well
enough, they’re faithful, and that’s that.
Their daughter doesn’t even yell.
His gallery in NYC
is testing his integrity.
The Hirst shark (symbolising death)
is at the Met. But soon a breath
of something new arrives: the younger
brother of his wife, who’s hot,
and often naked, stirs erot-
ic yens in Pete. This new-found hunger
leads to reams of introspection
and one psychoanalysed erection.

I peeked ahead after I wrote that.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Peter does kiss Mizzy, his brother in law, which seems to lead to a lot more introspection and a little conversation. My guess, based on a skim of the last pages, is that it all turns out satisfyingly inconclusive in the end.

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LoSoRhyMo #5: Leslie Cannold’s Book of Rachael

Posted on 9 Nov 2011 | 2 comments

Leslie Cannold, The Book of Rachael (Text 2011)

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year I embarrassed myself and Leslie Cannold, author of this book about an imagined sister to Jesus, by singing her a snatch of Dory Previn:

Did he have a sister, a little baby sister,
 Did Jesus have a sister?
 Was she there at his death?

I was expecting to find in the novel the kind of revisionist pleasure provided by ‘Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister‘ (the link takes you to the song on YouTube). But it turns out to be quite a different beast: it doesn’t so much ring changes on the biblical story as set out to imagine what life would have been for a spirited young woman in the time of Jesus, using the biblical story as a kind of baseline. There is some revisionism, of course: the virgin birth is explained – almost incidentally – by the familiar Roman soldier story; as a young man, Joshua/Jesus comes home late at night smelling of alcohol and women; and there’s an excellent account of the raising of Lazarus. But the aim isn’t to debunk or mock.

It’s years since I read any theology, apart from Tissa Balasuriya’s Mary and Human Liberation. Leslie Cannold’s approach to the biblical narrative goes quite a bit beyond Balasuriya’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, and she certainly doesn’t take up his vision of Mary (here called Miriame) as a revolutionary figure. I doubt if many scholars would take seriously the book’s version of how Joshua came to go on his preaching mission (he was looking for a woman who was pregnant to him, who had been consequently sold into prostitution by her father). It’s clear from this and other examples that this is not an attempt at historical excavation. Such pernicketiness aside, I don’t think I’ve ever read an account of the Jesus story that brings home more clearly what it meant to be poor or outcast or female in those times. That was the main pleasure of the book for me, rather than an engagement with the characters, who never quite came completely to life, despite even the scattering of cheerful sex scenes. Still, the pleasure was considerable.

But it’s November, and a sonnet is compulsory, even though it may create even more embarrassment all round than an off-key rendition of Dory Previn:

Sonnet 5: Where were the women?
 These days I think of the Last Supper
 and wonder where the women were
 when Jesus foretold in that upper
 room his foes would soon bestir
 themselves and take his life. Who cooked
 and shared that meal, were overlooked
 by gospels and two thousand years
 of art and preaching? More than spears
 such silence pierces the hearts
 of half the world. Oh they were there,
 not just their sinful, perfumed hair
 or veils, or wombs and other parts.
 They've always held up half the sky.
 Their absence is a stupid lie.

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The book group, The Life and Malcolm Knox

Posted on 27 Oct 2011 | Leave a comment

Malcolm Knox, The Life (Allen & Unwin 2011)

Before the Book Group met: I knew The Life was about a surfer, based to some extent on a real person (as spelled out in an interesting article by Nick Carroll here). I knew that it also drew on Malcolm Knox’s own fairly recent experience as a surfer. Now, unless you count the pleasant and instructive experience of copy-editing a book of essays on surfing and surf culture a couple of years ago, the closest I’ve been to riding a surfboard is to have broken a wrist the first time I rode downhill on a skateboard. Oh, and Peter Drouyn was two years behind me at boarding school, and I once had a friend who said things were gnarly. So no matter how many people recommended The Life, I would have given it a miss, as I have Tim Winton’s Breath, if it wasn’t for the Book Group. And so but yeah I have yet another reason to be grateful to the group.

I’m writing this a day after finishing the book [and about a month before the twice postponed meeting], and the voice of Dennis Keith – DK, the narrator and main character, who occasionally starts a sentence with a string of conjunctions a bit like the last sentence in my first paragraph – is still echoing in my head. He’s a wonderful character, overweight, approaching 50, living with his mother, socially incompetent and suffering from some kind of mental chaos. But once he was the world champion surfer, a genius on the waves. A double tale unfolds – the story of events leading up to his mental implosion 30 years earlier, and what transpires after the arrival of a young woman he calls his BFO – short for Bi Fricken Ographer. There’s a central love story and a violent death, but the main power of the book for me is in the world created in its language, and though I gather there’s some controversy about the way DK is recognisable in the surfing community as a version of a still-living surfing legend, for outsiders like me there’s a feel of authenticity that probably has something to do with not having moved too far from actual history.

After the group: We met last night. Malcolm Knox is a friend of one of our members, and came to the meeting as a special guest.  As a result, we stayed pretty much on topic all night, even though two of us, who arrived late, had been to the annual opening to the public of the Egyptian Room of the Petersham Masonic Hall, which would usually have been a major distraction from the book of the night.

One of the guys has been a keen surfer all his life, and knows an awful lot about the parts of the real world that the novel relates to. Others have done some surfing. To most of us the surfing world was pretty much a closed book. We’d all enjoyed the book, and I think it’s true to say that we all loved the chance to talk about it with the author. He was completely useless when asked to clarify the ending – he’s written a version where the end was clear, but it didn’t work because DK could never have got things that clear in his head, so he had to rewrite it to its present opacity. Sadly, this means that he doesn’t know who dunnit any more than any careful reader. Apart from that, he seemed happy to be quizzed about the process of writing, and rewriting, about the thinking behind a number of key decisions, about anything at all really, and we were pretty happy to do the quizzing.

Even though I count a number of brilliant writers among my friends, I’m still a boy from North Queensland who didn’t meet a Published Writer until I was 20 years old (the poet R D Murphy, aka Brother Elgar FMS), and I was very impressed by Malcolm’s generosity in joining us like this. He said he feels a sense of responsibility – if people are prepared to read his books the least he can do is sit down and have a meal with them, and anyhow he’d rather talk to eight people who have actually read it than 300 who’ve come to his talk at a festival because they couldn’t get into the one they really wanted. I hope he enjoyed the evening as much as I did.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

Posted on 4 Oct 2011 | Leave a comment

Philip Roth, The Humbling (Jonathan Cape 2009)

I love Philip Roth’s prose, the way it seems to just flow directly from somewhere inside him, like lava or blood, yet always with extraordinary control of nuance. I haven’t read enough of his novels to know if The Humbling is representative of what he’s writing these days, but I do hope it’s not. I also hope the book isn’t a fictionalised representation of his current state of mind. Simon Axler, the hero, is a great stage actor who has suddenly lost his ability to act, and the agony of his loss is conveyed with such poignancy that it’s hard not to think Roth has been there, or has at least fantasised such a loss for himself.

What does a great artist do in such a situation? Well, first he doesn’t kill himself, then he commits himself into a psych hospital, then he’s discharged and after a while either kills himself or doesn’t (he does make a clear choice, I’m trying not to be too spoilerish). And that’s the whole story. Except for the second act where he falls in love with a much younger woman and has lots of increasingly exotic sex with her.

I believed in the despair. I accepted the falling in love. The specifics of the sex felt like an older man working hard to imagine how the young folk these days do stuff, what with all that queer theory and non-binary approach to gender they’re always going on about. Or maybe I was just embarrassed.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is to be announced in a couple of days and Philip Roth’s name is being mentioned again. If he gets up it won’t be on account of this book, but maybe it will cheer him up.

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Edwina Shaw’s Thrill Seekers

Posted on 28 Sep 2011 | 1 comment

Edwina Shaw, Thrill Seekers (Ransom 2011)

This is a Cutting Edge title – part of a ‘gritty’ Young Adult series from Ransom Publishing UK. A gang of Brisbane children progress from mucking around in Oxley Creek to more risky adolescent thrills. In what might seem a standard children’s or YA literature trope, the father of the main characters dies in the first chapter, and their mother is pretty much lost in grief and alcohol. In what follows the young people go more and more out of control. There’s an awful lot of flagon wine (‘goon’) and marijuana, a range of other drugs, quite a bit of violence, some awful sex and a lot of wretchedness. The most vulnerable character goes horrifyingly, dangerously mad*. At the end there is a glimmer of hope.

That might make it sound like one of those ‘problem’ books for young readers that periodically stirs up the moral panic merchants. And maybe it is, but it’s a book with a lot of integrity. It treats its difficult subject matter without romanticising it, and without moralising. It resonated strongly with elements of three excellent books I’ve read recently: the dangerous play of Watch Out for Me, the heartbreak of After Romulus, the drugs and risk taking of The Life (blog entry to come when the Book Group meets), and the madness/psychosis/mental illness of all three.

Really, though, I can’t even pretend to write a sensible review, because the author is my eldest niece. It’s not that I worry I’ll seem nepotistic, and it’s absolutely not a matter of being tactful – as in, ‘I’m sure the target audience will love it.’ I can say up front that it’s a terrific book. But you know, even though Edwina is a mature woman, mother of two, teacher of yoga, blogger, disciplined writer, wise and warm lender of support to other writers including myself, she is still inseparable in my mind from the person whose exultant joy at being able to crawl I had the privilege of sharing more than forty years ago, and even though I know this book is fiction my avuncular heart recoils from following that cheerful little girl into these dark places.

Versions of some of the chapters have been published as short stories. You can read some of them online here and here. That last one didn’t make it into the book, and confirms my sense that, if anything, the world of the book has grown less harsh on its transition from book for general readership to a YA title.
——
* I’m deliberately saying ‘mad’ rather than ‘mentally ill’ or whatever . Raimond Gaita writes with characteristic acuteness about this kind of language in After Romulus (pages 71 to 74). Referring to the lines from King Lear, ‘Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’ his discussion ends:

Lear’s cry is not heartrending because he suffers ‘social stigma’. And it would not move us as it does had he said, ‘Oh, let me not fall into bipolar disorder.’

Edwina’s story of Douggie includes the social stigma, but it also takes us into, using Gaita’s words again, ‘the unique terror that the word madness conveys’.

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