Five Quarters of the Orange is the third novel in Harris’s food trilogy – the first two being Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. The reviews for the novel suggest it is by far the darkest of the three books. I had not read Harris before, so my reading of Five Quarters is not informed by any knowledge of the phenomenally successful novel Chocolat. I have almost no memory of the film, I’m not even sure if I actually saw it (all I remember is that it has something to do with Johnny Depp, hand-made chocolate, and a French village). At the time, I dismissed the film (and the book) as sentimental. I never picked up a Joanna Harris novel. There’s a lesson here – never judge an author by their Hollywood make over. Five Quarters of the Orange is beautiful, dark, complex, bitter; an historical novel with a contemporary strand, it is so far beyond sentimental that when the (minor) happy ending comes, it is a welcome relief.
 
The complexities of family life are a familiar trope for any novelist, most novels deal with the family in one way or the other, and this novel is no exception. What I loved about Five Quarters is how unlikeable this family is, particularly the women; the more noble acts of redemption, forgiveness, and atonement, usually performed by women, are for the most part absent in Five Quarters. It was a welcome relief to me, to read a story about morally ambiguous women, bitter women, who cannot forgive, who cannot love, who hate as much as men do, who aren’t the catalyst for change, or the moral compass of the family, or even the traditional matriarchal figure, though with all that cooking, they might appear that way at first.
 
 
Framboise Dartigen, the protagonist of the novel, is both a fierce nine-year-old girl during the Occupation and a fierce sixty-five-year old woman in present day France. After a fifty-four-year absence from the village of her childhood, she has returned, under a different name, to reclaim her mother’s farm, and to open a crêperie, where she will cook her mother’s recipes. None of the villagers know she is the daughter of Mirabelle Dartigen, and it is clear from the outset that they must never find out, though it is unclear to the reader why. Food takes centre stage in the book, but Harris doesn’t write about food in a romantic way — I was afraid that she would but that isn’t the case. For Harris food is much more than a pleasant diversion or a sensual experience: food is memory, food is history, food is family, food is complicated, food is dangerous. Food is not straightforward, cooking is almost a political act, both within the family and in the village.
 
Mirabelle Dartigen names all of her children after her own recipes – Cassis for her blackcurrant tart, Reinette for her greengage tart and Framboise after her raspberry liqueur. But this naming is not twee, it is Mirabelle’s way of binding her children to what remains of the damaged heart of this family, the cultivation and production of beautiful food. Growing, cultivating and cooking food keeps life moving and keeps the relationships between the children and their mother intact. This is even more important in this family because nothing else is working between this mother and her children, nothing else is growing between them.  Mirabelle is opaque and brittle, prone to outbursts of violence, brought down by migraines. There is also something more sinister in her psychological make-up, something hinted at but never explained. Framboise’s father died when she was seven, an unexplained death at war, and she feels little grief at his death, and retains few memories of him, aided by her mother’s drive to forget:
 
“My mother never spoke of him after his death. It was as if Father had never lived with us at all. The farm went on without him, if anything with even greater efficiency than before. We dug up the rows of Jerusalem artichokes, which only he had liked, and replaced them with asparagus and purple broccoli, which swayed and whispered in the wind.” [1]
 
Framboise, Cassis and Renette all run wild, aided by their mother’s tyranny, a negative force which makes them seek comfort and shelter outside of the house. Framboise meets her mother’s anger with defiance, and after being subjected one too many times to her mother’s punishments, she works out a way to use her mother’s one weakness against her. Mirabelle’s weakness is invoked through Framboise’s cruel and deliberate use of a certain food against her mother. Whether it’s the physical absence of one parent and the emotional absence of the other that pushes the children out, into the woods, into the river, or just the natural curiosity of children, their wanderings get them tangled up in the adult world of the village, with its shifting, shadowy alliances. Harris never really tell us who in the village is really with the Resistance (rumours abound) who the real collaborators are and who are simply, easily tarred with that brush —  all we know is that the Germans are a day to day reality, as is the black market, and everyone is trying to survive, to get by. The children, Cassis and Renette first, and then Framboise, find themselves slowly but inexplicitly drawn to a young German soldier called Tomas:
 
 
“Tomas was one of us. He was able to reach us in a way no-one else did. It was nothing as obvious as our mother’s indifference or the loss of our father, or the lack of playmates or the privations of war. We were barely aware of those things ourselves, living as we did in our savage little world of the imagination. We were certainly taken by surprise at how desperately we needed Tomas.” [2]
 
Slowly, the novel draws all of its narrative strands together, and like all good novels you can see the convergence occurring, but you don’t exactly know how all of these things will come together, or where. Some readers have expressed annoyance at the parallel narrative, preferring the war story to the present-day story, but I think that’s a dislike of complication, not a fault of the novel. Framboise’s past can only be understood in relation to the present, and any forgiveness, any atonement (as undramatic as this turns out to be, and Harris handles this beautifully) can only be enacted once Framboise has all the pieces of the puzzle. There is a strong echo of the great child-centric novels in Five Quarters, in particular To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout and Framboise are both independent girls in small conservative towns, both are changed forever by dramatic adult events they unwittingly find themselves caught up in. Scout is a much more likeable child. Her adult self, is a female version of her father, Atticus. Framboise is a much more complicated character and to my mind, more interesting. There is a lot of freedom for Framboise in Harris’s book, but Framboise pays a much greater price for her freedom than Scout does.
 
Five Quarters of the Orange is a well-crafted book. The natural world, the world of the village, the Dartigen farm are all rendered beautifully. You need to pay close attention to the complicated plot, quite a bit of attention as the story moves backwards and forwards in time, minor characters are as important as major characters, and Harris doesn’t spell things out for you. In other words, this is a book for an adult reader, you have to work hard, but the work is worth it. It is a beautiful novel.

 
 


[1] Harris, Joanna. Five Segments of the Orange. Black Swan. Random House. London. 2001. p. 56

[2] Harris, Joanna. Five Segments of the Orange. Black Swan. Random House. London. 2001. p. 158

                                              
 
Andrew O’Hagan is one of those writers I have been collecting for a long time, but until recently I had only read his fourth novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (published in 2010) and his most recent novel, The Illuminations (published in 2015). In 2011, O’Hagan travelled to Western Australia to participate in the Perth Writers Festival. He also gave the closing address. I was in the audience that night. When O’Hagan stepped out onto the stage in an impeccably tailored blue suit there was an audible intake of breath from both male and female members of the audience. He was very, very handsome. There is no other way to describe him. His speech was too, and I encourage you to take half an hour, make a cup of tea, and listen. It is a far-ranging speech, discussing notions of the West, both in a local sense (for O’Hagan, the west coast of Scotland, for his audience, the west coast of Australia) and in a global sense (the decline of the West, our legacy of imperialism and colonialism). In his speech, O’Hagan returns again and again to the notion of literature as an empathic and inherently political art form. For him, such “acts of the imagination can be the best offence to tyranny.” Novels, at their best, are concerned with “the small business of life standing in for the universe.” [1]
 
O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, published in 1999, is all about “the small business of life.” The New York Times critic Jeff Giles rapped him smartly over the knuckles for this:
                       
Characters in novels are hopeless – they’re constantly repeating
mistakes made by other characters in other novels. Will these people ever learn? Has nobody in a novel ever read a book? [2]
 
I can only assume that Giles is being facetious here. What he means is that O’Hagan doesn’t impress him, that Our Fathers is a bad novel and I disagree, as did Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books. Our Fathers is a good novel, a great first novel. O’Hagan’s writing reminds me of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens. For all of these novelists, for O’Hagan, the sufferings of the family are the sufferings of the world. It is worth noting that Our Fathers was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999.
 
O’Hagan’s fictional family, the Bawn family, hail from the south-west of Scotland, from Ayrshire. Several family members lead the charge for better housing for the working classes. Euphemia Bawn is the fictional equivalent of Mary Barbour, the working-class woman who lead the Great Women’s Glasgow Rent Strike of 1915, fighting against overcrowding, evictions and unscrupulous landlords. Euphemia’s son Hugh also becomes a social reformer. Hugh dedicates his working life to finding a solution to Glasgow’s tenements. He has a visionary’s belief in the high-rise tower block. He imagines them as clean, affordable homes with beautiful views, he imagines ordinary people living high above ordinary cares and concerns, he imagines working class cathedrals of light and air. Forty years after these tower blocks have been built, there is very little left of Hugh’s Utopian vision. Hugh is an old man dying in one of the tower blocks he designed, and the tower blocks themselves have become dilapidated, miserable places, rife with vandalism and violence. Hugh’s grandson Jamie, now living in Liverpool, returns home to see his dying grandfather for the last time. Jamie has continued in the family business, but he is an expert in the demolition of tower blocks. He is literally destroying his grandfather’s vision.
 
O’Hagan’s working-class voice is filtered through lyrical prose and this is the kind of writing that I really love:
 
The train was enfolded in darkness. The burning train, the field out there; the tadpoles alight in their pools.
     Paisley then Johnstone. The farms of Wester Gavin and Newton of Belltrees. The train was a strip of yellow light. It shook up the moss and Herb Robert, and running at speed on the wires above, it rackled the moor, and lifted the wind to the rowan trees. A furrow of broom and bracken fern lay snug at the waist of Lochwinnoch.
    Up and down the empty aisle, a bottle of Irn Bru. [3]
 
Jamie Bawn is the narrator of the story, but it is as much Hugh’s story as it is Jamie’s. Not content to leave us with the image of a bitter old man on his deathbed, O’Hagan returns us to  Hugh’s origin story, his apprenticeship at the feet of older working-class men, his belief in Socialism as the only real alternative to Communism or Fascism, his dedication to finding a way forward for working class families. We also hear about Jamie’s childhood, his alcoholic and violent father (Hugh’s son), Jamie’s long-suffering mother. This all sounds pretty grim and it is here that I must hand over to Hilary Mantel, and her comments on the response to O’Hagan as part of the Booker Shortlist:
 
It is an old British folk custom to intensify the hysteria by convening a guest panel of authors in the TV studio, to trash and mangle the shortlisted entries. But this year, Channel Four decided to replace them with a “People’s Panel,” a gaggle of amateurs who would trash and mangle in a less practised, articulate way. “Bleak” was the word the People’s Panel used of Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Our Fathers: “bleak” and “bleak” again. [4]
 
Personally, I did not find Our Fathers bleak – Dickens and Dostoevsky are bleak. Perhaps if you had a childhood far away from working class life you might find Our Fathers bleak. But for those of us who grew up working class, the return to Jamie’s childhood is not bleak – it is more (well, it was for me) a fierce illumination of childhood:
 
My body was pleased to outgrow that boy. At times you forget him, the person who lived in this skin. You find a nick on your thumb. An overlaying of white tissue, like anaglypta. You remember the story of a boy who once cut his finger on a rock. You hear something of his voice.  You think of his books and his pencils. You remember the way he looked out through his eyes. And then you see they are your eyes too. Your vision clears. You were that boy. Every room of his house is here. You can never demolish him. He will never leave. Unless you find yourself leaving yourself. The boy is not back there in Ayrshire; he’s here. He is always here. [5]
 
Our Fathers is a book about masculinity, about fathers and sons. There is no escape from the complexities and contradictions of the working-class man. If I have one gripe about this book it’s O’Hagan’s women. I would have liked to have had more of Euphemia Bawn’s story, much more, if only because she was such a huge influence on Hugh’s life. While Jeff Giles complains that Jamie’s mother is a stereotype, I know she isn’t as I have known so many women like that, caught in those circumstances, and I think O’Hagan writes Jamie’s mother beautifully. Jamie’s girlfriend however, is not much of a character at all. Jamie has to have a girlfriend so we can see that he struggles with intimacy (and fair enough after his childhood) but Karen has no agency of her own, she could be any woman at all. Having said all of this, I need to say that O’Hagan’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe in Maf the Dog is utterly, utterly brilliant.
 
Our Fathers ends with a quote from Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (which I won’t spoil by quoting here) and it is the perfect end for a novel which speaks so movingly about the tangled threads of work, family, aspiration and politics in working class life.
 


[1] Andrew O’Hagan. Closing Speech. Perth Writers Festival. 2011. ABC Radio National. Broadcast 11th March 2011.  http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/2011-03-11/3002808
 

[2] “What Goes Up.” Jeff Giles. New York Times. October 3rd, 1999.

[3] Andrew O’Hagan. Our Fathers. Faber and Faber. London. p. 57

[4] Hilary Mantel. “A Legacy: Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan. “New York Review of Books. December 16. 1999. New York.

[5] Andrew O’Hagan. Our Fathers. Faber and Faber. London. p. 57

 
Robinson’s prose displays the greatest reverence for the ordinary since the work of Virginia Woolf.  Robinson insists that we see the beauty of this imperfect world. For her, the point of existence is to love this world’s imperfect human beings, no matter how difficult that proves to be. Reviewing Housekeeping in 1981, Anatole Broyard remarked,

It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration. [1]

Robinson’s novels speak not of the transcendental, but of the incandescent.[2] God may be in His Heaven, but we are not. For now, there is only the world, and the people within it. I read Gilead when it first appeared in print (I still have a proof copy), then I read Housekeeping, and much later, Home. Lila is Robinson’s latest novel (published in 2014). A new novel by Robinson is like a new symphony by a great master; you don’t want to hurry the listening, you don’t want to be in the wrong mood when you begin. Going back to John Ames and Lila, back to the town of Gilead after all this time was a little difficult – traces of Gilead and Home remain in my memory, but not much specific detail, just that kernel of truth a great novel leaves you.
Gilead is an epistolary novel – one long letter from the Rev. John Ames to his small son, to be read, we assume, when Ames is long dead and his son is a young man. Gilead helped me write my epistolary novel Letters to the End of Love – as did Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. It is the cadence of Gilead I remember the most, John Ames’ voice lifting into the air, entering my consciousness.

In Lila, Ames’ much younger wife (who has a fairly secondary role in Gilead) is the main protagonist. We are given the story of her life before her marriage to Ames, and it is a life of deprivation, poverty, and abandonment. Lila would have been dead many times over but for two pieces of luck – a woman called Doll stole her out of her impoverished home, and in doing so saved her life – and her chance meeting with John Ames, when she sheltered in his church from the Gilead rain.

The narrative of Lila moves back and forth between Lila’s past and her present; between her years on the road with Doll and her eventual marriage to Ames (a man over thirty years her senior). Ames’ happiness with his wife and child that he speaks of at length in the novel Gilead has not happened yet – Lila is set before the child is born. Lila does not know if she will stay with Ames, even after she becomes pregnant, even after she has the baby. Lila is an elliptical being, orbiting people and places from a safe distance, never staying too long, never putting down roots, always wandering.

Barely literate, Lila copies out texts from the Bible in an attempt to understand them. This doesn’t mean she isn’t intelligent. Her intelligence comes from her experiences, not from education (either secular or religious); what beauty she has found in her life comes mostly from nature. Lila’s voice is not unlike the voice of Celie in The Color Purple - a poor, rural, female voice moving through a world that is cruel and harsh, holding onto something outside of piety and religion which just might be God as nature. For both Lila and Celie, the love of another human being liberates them; but it is a strange experience and not without fear or trepidation.
Robinson shows us the world in the most lyrical way without sentimentalising it. Her fiction is informed by her Calvinism but her prose is not religious propaganda by any stretch of the imagination – this is no mean feat in a world where proselytising has all but replaced any mystical or philosophical discussions of religion in public life.  In a 2008 Paris Review interview, Robinson was asked if she considered herself a religious writer:

I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not. [3]

The tenets of Western religion hold very little attraction to me. Yet when Robinson speaks of family, of duty, of religion and of God; I want to listen. I can only guess that it is the beauty of her prose that draws me in, and the empathic nature of her work that makes me stay. The love I have for Robinson’s work is not unlike my love for the music of Gillian Welch; another body of work steeped in religious tradition which offers a spiritual experience to all comers. No one is a stranger.  
 
[1] Broyard, Anatole.  “HOUSEKEEPING. By Marilynne Robinson” Books of the Times. New York Times. New York.  January 7th, 1981
[2] Leise, Christopher.  “That Little Incandescence: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Studies in the Novel. Vol. 41 No. 3(Fall, 2009).  North Texas UP. p. 362
[3] Marilynne Robinson. The Art of Fiction No. 198. Paris Review. Issue 186. Fall 2008. New York.

We all have them, those books we haven't read. If you're like me, there is a certain guilt about not quite getting to them, or half reading them, then being distracted by another book and never returning to the first one, and there you are, feeling guilty again. I have never been able to let myself become a fully fledged book collector, a person who buys books for the joy and pleasure of the objects themselves. Will these books ever be read? One day, perhaps. But I have never been that person. The luxury of buying books, the ability to buy books seems such a privilege to me that I have always been driven by a little voice saying, "Make sure you read them, make sure you look after them, don't just let them collect dust in a corner." But, of course, the buying has outpaced the reading and here I am, lurking daily past a full bookshelf of books that I have not read. So I figure it's time to do something about it. Of course the obvious question is, what to read first? I've decided to leave that up to chance, as I am overwhelmed by the choice. So I've colour coded the books and devised a simple system to choose one to read - I will pick a random colour and a random number - whatever book that happens to be on the shelf (for example, Green book Number 8) that is my book to read for the month.

So, armed with a pack of Derwent coloured pencils and a pack of cards, I chose at random one colour and one number. This was the result: the first book I will read, Book No. 170, is Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Expect a review soon.