Murphy in Never too Late to Read Classics

Jan 13, 2012 Antonomasia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: j, london, decade-1930s, 2015, 1001-books, ireland

[4.5] Nine years ago, I was in love with someone whose favourite book was Murphy; this copy was from a second hand bookshop en route between our flats. (He was one of those people who never lends anything, and in any case I wouldn't have been able to read and return it in good time, as this time that year I was embarking on months of convalescence following a very severe bout of flu.) It was never my intention to leave it quite this long, but - as per an old comment - whenever I picked it up, I [4.5] Nine years ago, I was in love with someone whose favourite book was Murphy; this copy was from a second hand bookshop en route between our flats. (He was one of those people who never lends anything, and in any case I wouldn't have been able to read and return it in good time, as this time that year I was embarking on months of convalescence following a very severe bout of flu.) It was never my intention to leave it quite this long, but - as per an old comment - whenever I picked it up, I found the first couple of pages too depressing.

Honestly, what was I reading? Must've made some skewed assumptions, for different stuff was happening on the paper this time. And Beckett is not the writer I thought he was, a minimalist miserablist - my only previous experience being a not-very-careful teenage reading of Waiting For Godot whilst standing in a library, it being too short to waste a loan on. I was reminded of none so much as Pynchon: the black humour, the ridiculousness, the near-farcical caper, the breadth of vocabulary... this required even more frequent looking-up than Pynchon as Beckett's very fond of obscure uses of fairly common words, as well as his rare archaisms and classicisms (Joycean to those who've read him more recently, no doubt). A spideysense of more to a sentence often proved right: consulting the barely adequate ereader dictionary, and looking through definitions, would reveal an unusual or more precise meaning, or perhaps that an etymological root had been engaged in furtive wordplay with something else nearby. Impressed, I was alright. (Why can we still not get the Shorter Oxford, never mind the full thing, as an optional booster for these gadgets? c.35% of the terms I tried to look up whilst reading Murphy were not in the Concise as found on Kindle.)

Why (2) isn't Murphy found on some of those lists of Great London Novels? Not that I've done a comprehensive survey as research for this post, mind. Murphy's questionable progression from the 1930s boardinghouses of SW10 and then - with paramour Celia - N7, and on to work in one of those outer-North-London psychiatric monstrosities as later chronicled by Iain Sinclair and Will Self ... not to mention the wanderings of so many named streets and tubes and markets, and the Mary Poppins-in-negative interludes of kite flying in Hyde Park - this is what The London Novel is made of, surely. There are chapters set in Ireland too, which in the eyes of some may disqualify it, but Murphy's atmosphere of grubby, fray-cuffed, straitened, eccentric London bedsitland is exquisitely done if you have affection for that setting. Description of the way light comes through the windows of a dingy flat over a day's course may not be adjectivally conventional description, yet - or so - it pins it utterly.

I long had a bad habit, a faulty reflex, almost, of looking for a person in their favourite books and films (more so when it was someone I fancied, a elusive sprite, than a long-standing close friend who could simply be asked). This wouldn't always work, I realised as I got older. Not everyone's favourite things are favourites because of a deep identification. And even where someone does identify, it won't be with every aspect of a work or character - so a person who doesn't know them well could misunderstand and missassume all over the shop. Perhaps you actually won't see how them something is until you've known them a good while. (Seven years it was, mostly the long-distance friendship of the afterwards, and it was me who stopped it - there was a veiled reference in my post about The Ice Palace.) And I can't remember when this strange wish of finding someone in a book was so fully rewarded; a remarkable correlation of traits between unusual people, one real, one made up by a very clever Irish bloke in the 1930s. It would be indecent to write it all up in public, but I consider it incumbent on me to spare the (theoretical??) embarrassment of someone unknown to you by clarifying that the similarities to Murphy don't include penchants for self-bondage or astrology. Curiously or not, there are a handful of other things that feel more *me* than *him*; some always were, some changed - and as for those shared, I now understand Murphy's love of introspection more than I would have nearly a decade ago.

The character of Murphy is, of course, ultimately mocked here (his Cartesian dualism is as much nonsense as that theory always is) and the book's peculiar personal history may give me more affection for it and all its characters than might otherwise make sense. (Given its absurdist intellectualism, I can understand those who don't find it very human.)

This is very close to 5 stars - just some scenes of grimness mean I hold back on that last little bit - as the confluence of extreme cleverness and silliness and darkness and resonance is very much a winner. And if I didn't have an even more absurd number of other books already, I'd be wanting some more Beckett, please, with a tentative view to joining Fans of. ...more

26 likes · Like · see review