The novel is Ernest Hemingway's The sun also rises, his first. I had read For whom the bell tolls, A call to arms, and The old man and the sea many years ago and enjoyed them, as much for their realistic reporting as for their novelistic qualities.
The sun also rises is about a group of young affluent Americans living in Europe between the world wars. The title is a literal translation of a French phrase: Le soleil aussi se leve, with the implication that with each change in circumstances people go on making the same old mistakes, and the sun just keeps on rising exactly the same.
You keep hoping that Mike will sober up and make a decision about his planned marriage, that Cohn will stop following the heroine around like a puppy-dog, that she will not fall madly in love with the next handsome man she meets. But none of these things happen, and although the characters move out of Paris to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls, a new location doesn't mean new behaviours.
"Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose" is also a theme of the other book: Roland Perry's The queen, her lover and the most notorious spy in history. The main character is Queen Victoria, but the book is really a history of the private lives of the Royal Family from 1835 for about 100 years.
After Princess Victoria has an affair with a handsome young Guards Officer in her teens, she is married off by her family to Albert. After Albert's death, and the death of her lover, she meets John Brown and has a relationship like Lady Chatterley (remember the film, Mrs Brown, with Billy Connolly). Later still, after Brown dies, she falls for an Indian language teacher.
The Family seems to alternate between characters like Victoria who can't get enough sex but still make a positive contribution in other ways, (Edward VII, Edward VIII) and strait-laced people like Albert, (George V, George VI) who have a different set of positive qualities and weaknesses.
Victoria and her eldest daughter Vicky (mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II) maintained a massive correspondence for many years, building up an archive of thousands of letters, sometimes as many as four in a day. Vicky had them stored in her home in Germany, but wanted them returned to Britain because they were thought to be extremely dangerous if they became public knowledge.
This is where the spy comes in, being commissioned to retrieve the letters after World War II and enable them to be kept safe on British soil.
What Hemingway observed in his young compatriots in Paris in the twenties, Perry seems to find also recurring in the Royal Family over a century and more. A fascinating comparison!
You keep hoping that Mike will sober up and make a decision about his planned marriage, that Cohn will stop following the heroine around like a puppy-dog, that she will not fall madly in love with the next handsome man she meets. But none of these things happen, and although the characters move out of Paris to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls, a new location doesn't mean new behaviours.
"Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose" is also a theme of the other book: Roland Perry's The queen, her lover and the most notorious spy in history. The main character is Queen Victoria, but the book is really a history of the private lives of the Royal Family from 1835 for about 100 years.
After Princess Victoria has an affair with a handsome young Guards Officer in her teens, she is married off by her family to Albert. After Albert's death, and the death of her lover, she meets John Brown and has a relationship like Lady Chatterley (remember the film, Mrs Brown, with Billy Connolly). Later still, after Brown dies, she falls for an Indian language teacher.
The Family seems to alternate between characters like Victoria who can't get enough sex but still make a positive contribution in other ways, (Edward VII, Edward VIII) and strait-laced people like Albert, (George V, George VI) who have a different set of positive qualities and weaknesses.
Victoria and her eldest daughter Vicky (mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II) maintained a massive correspondence for many years, building up an archive of thousands of letters, sometimes as many as four in a day. Vicky had them stored in her home in Germany, but wanted them returned to Britain because they were thought to be extremely dangerous if they became public knowledge.
This is where the spy comes in, being commissioned to retrieve the letters after World War II and enable them to be kept safe on British soil.
What Hemingway observed in his young compatriots in Paris in the twenties, Perry seems to find also recurring in the Royal Family over a century and more. A fascinating comparison!
No comments:
Post a Comment