Dominion and Lilly Aphrodite

After a long spell of re-reading (I always find that satisfying and comforting to know what I’m letting myself down into) I am now having a blitz of reading new-to-me stuff. There was ‘Dominion’ by C.J.Sansom which upset me. That’s the first time I have read a ‘what if’ novel. Robert Harris’ ‘Fatherland’ didn’t appeal although now I think I might give it a go one day. I think there’s another name for them but can’t be bothered to look it up right now. The re-write of history; the Other Path. In my terms the ‘What If’ book. Dominion left me a bit shaky with my pacifist outlook. A capitulation treaty with Hitler containing the promise that Britain wouldn’t be invaded avoided the loss of life in war, but it meant a gradual nazification of the country. The deportation of Jews continued and people grew increasingly aware of  their eventual fate. It spawned a Resistance movement and subsequent loss of civilian life along with a substantial loss of freedom at every level.  

What I’m slightly ashamed to say pleased me most about it, because I have  been increasingly aware of the Scot's dislike for the English and the martyr complex that has stood them in such good stead for nearly 500 years, was Sansom’s postscript to the book in which he declares his dislike of the growing trend for Nationalism in the world, specifically in his own country, Scotland. He points to the Scots who, refusing to fight with the English in WW2 left for Ireland; they were to become the core of the SNP that is now fighting for independence and were essentially fascists. He clams Alex Salmond is a man without policies except those that look good, promise much and are likely to swing emotions next year. Whether he can follow through with them if the time arrives is really not important. Independence is the magical New World Scotland in which all will be very, very well.

Of course, if they get independence and it goes belly up they will still be able to blame Westminster so that’s OK. Nothing lost.

The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin came my way accidentally. I wouldn’t have picked it up in a bookshop because the choice of cover and the title signal chic-lit to me quite loudly. I suppose the publishers thought it stood a better chance of selling to the unwary who actually wanted a nice restful cheery read. It’s a first novel. . Anyway, I’m very glad a Writer’s Group member brought it along to use for an ‘erasure’ exercise. For this form of self expression a newspaper, magazine, or book that can be destroyed is necessary. Across a chosen page most of the text is blacked out leaving a few carefully chosen phrases. It’s effective and satisfying but as with most of the exercises I get distracted and this time it was the book itself that I picked up with the intention of willfully defacing that held me so, as usual, I produced nothing to read out at the end of the hour. 

Yesterday and today I've read it between mundane tasks and spending time with my grandson. It kept me awake fro 3.30 this morning so I’ll be useless by 3.30pm. that’s the plus side of old age and retirement. Doesn’t matter.

Set in Berlin, the protagonist Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is born as the new century starts. For two thirds of the book I was slightly troubled by how little I knew of Lilly who at three is standing outside an orphanage with her suitcase. She leads a rather terrible life in grey shapeless clothing, a cot that looks exactly like the other sixteen or so in the room, cold institutional housing and cold nuns who treat their charges with indifference if not harshness. through it all Lilly drifts, becomes the ‘perfect orphan,’ makes one mistake which  results in the closing of the only shelter she and a growing number of parentless children have ever known. She makes one friend, equally wounded by life but harder and brighter, at least to begin with. This friend, Hahnne, I could visualise much more clearly than Lilly.  I’m not saying Lilly is two-dimensional, just that she remains insubstantial for me until later when, to get the grumbling out of the way, her face is her fortune. How interesting it would be to have a novel in which the heroine was not beautiful with perfect skin (her hands remain delicate even after all the laundry and scrubbing she has to do as a servant from the age of twelve. Not so convincing that.)

The real protagonist is perhaps Berlin itself in the 1920’s, after the defeat of WW1 and the terrible consequences of total financial collapse. By the last third the walls of propriety and social form are falling away fast. Sickness, poverty, decay, are dissolving reality into an Escher nightmare. People run from the madness in the streets to the fantasy world of cabaret, stage, cinema. This part is about cinema. It gives some satisfying insight into the vision of the earliest cinematographers and the new art form. It could, they thought, give people a new way of communicating and a new insight into their own emotional lives. They saw it as genuinely influential and they were right.

There are some memorable lines: 'the silence that listens to itself' was one. And I understood better what Lilly means to the novel when I read what one of her admirers says about her:

'There was something about her that was arctic. No, that's not what I mean at all. She was warm: she had this way of looking. a kind of animal. no, sexual intelligence. It's hard to explain. It was as if she was both very young and very old, vulnerable and yet aloof. If I sound confused, contradictory, then I am. I don't know what she had, but as soon as I saw it I wanted her. She was the face, if you can imagine it, of Berlin at that particular moment in history.'