According to Mark by Penelope Lively, author of the Booker Prize Winner for 1987 Moon Tiger http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/10/moon-tiger-by-penelope-tiger-ten-out-of.html - 10 out of 10

 According to Mark by Penelope Lively, author of the Booker Prize Winner for 1987 Moon Tiger http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/10/moon-tiger-by-penelope-tiger-ten-out-of.html

10 out of 10

 

 

According To Mark is a splendid, miraculous work of fiction, shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize – won by the equally resplendent Hotel du Lac http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/01/hotel-du-lac-by-anita-brookner.html by another female Magister Ludi, Anita Brookner – for all the best reasons, this being an erudite, challenging, captivating, elating story of love, in fact we could count about four or more such tales

 

Mark Lemming is arguably the main character of the narrative, albeit if this were a motion picture and we would nominate it for the most important awards, then we would have to ponder on where we would place Gilbert Strong, Diana Lemming, or Carrie Summers, the others will certainly take the supporting roles, which are equally relevant and make or break a saga…the example of Dame Judi Dench keeps coming to mind and her exulting presence in Shakespeare In Love http://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/2017/07/note-on-shakespeare-in-love-written-by.html they have counted the few minutes it took the female actor to get the Oscar and other trophies for her astounding performance

According To Mark is a Strong indication that we see portions of the novel through his eyes, or through a double lens, because evidently this a figment of the imagination of glorious Penelope Lively, and we also have explanations on the role of the Supreme Being: ‘the novelist has an infinity of choices, He chooses what is to happen, to happens, and in what way he will relate what happens, the picture he constructs is complete on its own terms…when he says this is the story and the whole story we must accept it…perhaps novelists are the only people telling the truth’ concluding hence that the writer is god

 

We have here a complex structure, where we enter the life of Mark Lemming, who is a biographer and thus he, in his turn is trying to understand, write about Gilbert Strong, a deceased writer, whose network of friends, lovers, antagonists is hard to put together so that future readers have an accurate fresco, mural, whatever the right description would be of the history of a figure that is most often elusive, different personages give conflicting accounts of the character of the luminary, and to make things worse, Strong has tried to present his own version, eliminating letters, portions of diary that he apparently, or clearly had not wanted a future biographer (and Lemmings is sure that the protagonist of his present work had known there would be interest in his life) to access, something that becomes rather personal.

We have hence different layers, timeframes, for together with the life of the Strong personage, we have access to what happens to the other figures – let us think of Umberto Eco and his insight- ‘The person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards” – Penelope Lively makes the difference between the novel, where the author has the liberty to skip over parts of the lives of the personages, as opposed to the biographer, where silences are sometimes equivalent to failures, periods for which there is no record, account, what happened to the subject is unknown

 

The hero travels to Dean Close, where Gilbert Strong used to live, and this is where he meets Carrie Summers the granddaughter that now runs a Garden Centre with her gay partner, Bill, a young woman that is self-effacing, has had a rather difficult childhood, since her mother, Hermione, was not a good parent, dragging her child along on her endless travels, making her witness to her numerous escapades, and neglecting her education entirely…At the age of nine, the girl could not read and after becoming literate, she does not get acquainted with any of the major writers, with perhaps a few exceptions.

However impossible it looks on the face of it – and let me enhance this, in my opinion opposites may attract sometimes, not enough to make a ‘golden rule’ of it, but anyway, when too different, people do not get along well in the medium or long term…this is the subject of longer, philosophical debate in a book by our greatest philosopher, well, together with Andrei Plesu and Gabriel Liiceanu, Constantin Noica http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/02/povestiri-despre-om-de-constantin-noica.html who took on proverbs and explained why they are silly, perhaps noxious even – the erudite, sophisticated Mark Strong falls in love – now there is another invitation here to speculate on what is love and the difference between it and infatuation, physical attraction and other feelings – with the simple Carrie.

 

The young woman is not his type, indeed, she is the antithesis of what the cultured biographer admires, a highly educated woman, in contrast with the ignorant Carrie, who has not heard of, well, anyone of importance in high culture, with a few exceptions, and the relationship, if one is about to be explored, looks doomed…nonetheless, I felt somehow that I wished them to be together, and in the cliché manner of ‘they lived happily together forever after’ – if we arrived at this point together, assuming there is ‘we’, and somebody is still out there, reading this, a spoiler alert might be needed, however convoluted this scribbling is, which means someone would not understand what I am getting at, what the heel am I talking about, and there it is, Mark and Carrie may have something in store for the reader, but then, as anticipated, they may not be the perfect fit, if I were young and met some dashing young woman, who is into kickboxing, manele, Trump and other crap things, I would appreciate her looks, but then would be aghast at her thinking (if we could call it that) and realize that this is a nonstarter…actually, it could be a case where you do share a few interests, political views and still be world apart, as I am with my spouse, who sees me as the ultimate badass eejit, the archetypal loser

Diana Lemming is another intriguing personage, somehow objectionable to begin with, after all, she stands in the path to happiness of the favorite couple, Romeo and Juliet of rural, contemporary England (Carrie is closer to the innocent, naïve and ignorant sixteen years old, or was she just fourteen, of the best known [these days it is different, I realize now, after putting this oxymoron down]  love story in the world) with time, Diana becomes an impressive, strong, lucid, munificent, resilient, intelligent, erudite, towering figure, she is just one example of the magnificent talent that Penelope Lively has, giving the reading public access to wonderful, if fictional friends, unforgettable twists, resplendent characters that make me do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world