Notes on Recent Reading 41 (McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim)

The Stones of Florence (McCarthy)

     McCarthy provides a pleasantly idiosyncratic account not only of the art that makes the city such a popular destination and of the city’s history, but also of the Florentine character in the mid-twentieth century. Offsetting the oh-so-aesthetic sensibility Tuscany often inspires, she makes a point of the region’s practicality, business sense, and even plainness in contrast to the sensualism of Venice. She creates a vivid sense of fifties Florence, still under the war’s shadow, bustling with Vespas and equal measures of pride and irony.
     Her freshness and vinegar are physic to the viewer who has ever felt that Botticelli, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi can be a bit sweet. In a certain mood Pater’s enthusiasm can be off-putting. It is then that McCarthy’s acerbic comments are particularly welcome. Florence attracts enthusiasts; it is refreshing to have this account by a cynical and sharp-eyed intellectual.
     The Stones of Florence reads as though it was a weaker sequel to her excellent Venice Observed. Nonetheless, the book deserves a place in the libraries even of those who are not travelers.


An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

     J. B. Priestley practiced a profession virtually obsolete today; he was a man of letters, the author of at least twenty-eight novels, as well as books of short stories, and a good many plays and films and four books of literary criticism aimed not at specialists, but the general reader. He wrote English Journey, a road book worthy of being placed next to Jack London’s The Road, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Responsible in addition for a number of works on history and politics, autobiography, and essays, he was an exemplary hard-working professional writer.
     He is most remembered today for one play of enduring popularity, a favorite of community theater, An Inspector Calls, written rapidly as a bit of agitprop as WWII ended and first performed in Moscow. The play’s success in repeated revivals by companies of all sorts is not due to its tendentious theme, however, but rather to its disguise as a conventional mystery story.
     The genres are not mixed without hazard. The trajectory of the unfolding of the inspector’s indictment is so clear that the viewer has little doubt what will happen by the end of the first scene. Lacking opportunity to surprise expectations in the main line of the story, he resorts to a switcheroo or two at the end instead.
     When Mr. Burling wonders why he put up with the inspector’s accusatory behavior and his independence from any legal forms, the audience is likely to wonder with him. Having been simply enough amused to watch the working out of a pattern clear from the start, they may have neglected to worry about realism. By the end of the play we are to accept the supernatural when it appears the inspector is not a regular police agent at all. Unconcerned with making arrests, he is nonetheless devoted to tending to the moral order. Once the resemblance to Everyman emerges, realism is no longer relevant. When the Burlings realize that it is possible that the various incidents for which they feel culpable may have involved not one woman, but many, this cleverly mirrors the thematic implication that they play is not about a single egregious case of persecution, but about the capitalist system.
     All very well, but why, then, does the final telephone call occur, letting them know that an inspector is on his way. Is what they had just experienced happening again? Is it happening now for real whereas it was before a phantom summoned up by a family full of guilty consciences? Is it all of a sudden about one woman again? What is going on? But before one can think, the curtain has fallen.


Prince of Monkeys (Ehirim)

     Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel provides an overview of Nigerian life during the nineties, and the picture is disturbing, even tragic. The plot concerns the emergence into adulthood of his protagonist Ihechi and his circle of school friends in a profoundly corrupt society. The bleak depiction of Nigeria is intensified by the older characters’ memories of the Nigerian Civil War.
     The middle class Ihechi is anti-colonialist, yearning for a distinctly African form of communalism, leading him and his set to idolize Fela. Yet he is as scornful of the Ifa orisas to which his mother is devoted as he is to the Anglican Jesus. Given the political theme, the horrifying ending is perhaps inevitable, as each individual comes to grief, doomed simply for having independent judgment and conscience.
     The lurid character of the final scene is of a piece with the over-striving of some of the prose. Ornamental alliteration or figures of speech that seem to be for show alone occasionally distract the reader, but it is in a way exhilarating to see style and rhetoric for their own sake. Very likely West African fancy for oratory in the days before literacy influences even this young writer. The ample use of proverbs is without a doubt traditional (and European ones sneak in as well).