British Novel Week 8

The book for the final week of the British Novel is At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. The author spent 5 years writing At-Swim. According to Gass's introduction, it was a book that Joyce loved and Hitler hated. According to Anna Clissman, At-Swim is an anti-novel if you rely on the following definition by M.H. Abrams: "... a work which is deliberately constructed in a negative fashion, relying for its effects on omitting or annihilating traditional elements of the novel, and on playing against the expectations established in the reader by the novelistic methods and conventions of the past." The narrator of the story, who is never given a name, is a university student who spends more time in his room, sleeping and writing than he does at the university. The narrator is writing a story with Trellis has the main character. Trellis, the owner of a public house, also spends more time sleeping and writing than attending to business. He, too, is writing a novel. So, we have stories within stories which made for some slow reading. This book was probably the most difficult and the least favorite of the 8 books I have read for this course.

British Novel Week 7

This week's novel is Brighton Rock by the English author and playwright Graham Greene. The novel opens with the line "Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours..." Greene himself states that he began the book as a "detective story" but that "the first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story." Greene employs the third person omniscient point of view in this novel. The view shifts among a selected number of characters. As the story progresses, tension builds. The death of Hale at the beginning of the novel sets a series of events in motion. Ida, a companion with Hale just before his death cannot accept that he died without anyone asking why. She becomes his avenging angel. Members of a small time mob commit more murders in an attempt to cover up their involvement in Hale's death. Rose, an unsuspecting waitress becomes the center of focus for both a mob member and Ida who is running her own investigation on Hale's death. This novel has suspense, death and pits good against evil. The novel was made into a movie in 1947 and again more recently with a 60's setting. The movie would be worth seeing based on the suspenseful story line in the novel.