Bluffing The Greats
Illustrations Carolyn Ridsdale
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
What to say:
More skilfully constructed than sister Emily’s gripping-but-ludicrous Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre is a thoroughly modern book with a strident feminist message, despite having been written under the (male) pen name Currer Bell.
What happens:
A plain but intelligent governess who has endured an abusive upbringing falls for her employer before discovering that he’s harbouring a secret, namely his previous wife, who is locked in the attic. Awkward, yes, but not insurmountable.
Message:
‘It’s grim up North’, as some in England say, but a strong-willed girl can win respect through work.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy (1869)
What to say:
The seventh longest novel ever written has a seriously chatty narrator, who frequently charges off-topic into lengthy discourses on the nature of power and popular history. Skip through discreetly.
What happens:
Lots. Big picture: Russia is holding firm against Napoleon’s advances through Europe. Up close, we’re probably most concerned with awkward Pyotr ‘Pierre’ Bezukhov as he inherits vast wealth, parties, marries a slattern, fights, joins the Freemasons then marries again.
Message:
Four volumes plus an epilogue? Someone needs to invent the e-reader, fast.
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
What to say:
The ultimate novel of the American Jazz Age, ‘Gatsby’ is a cocktail of excess, status anxiety and crazy dancing. Albeit a cocktail you wouldn’t be allowed to drink: it’s set during Prohibition, remember.
What happens:
World War I veteran Nick Carraway rents a small house next door to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a New York millionaire who throws parties in the hope of winning back sophisticated and otherworldly beauty Daisy. In the end, Daisy reveals her inner ugliness by committing a hit and run that leaves the victim dead by the roadside.
Message:
The American Dream has a dangerous dark side. Also: please drive carefully.
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
What to say:
Arguably the greatest 19th-century French novel – although, frankly, the tunes don’t match up to Les Misérables - Madame Bovary caused a scandal for its steamy depiction of sex-in-the-provincial-village and landed Flaubert in court, charged with obscenity.
What happens:
Rural doctor’s wife gets ideas above her station, embarks on a mammoth shopping spree then breaks her marriage vows with two cads. Bankrupt and disgraced, she swallows arsenic like one of her literary heroines.
Message:
Women: beware soft furnishings, expensive shoes and slick men. And reading.
Max Havelaar
by Multatuli (1860)
What to say:
Scandalising Dutch society, this damning exposé of harrowing conditions in the colonies prompted welfare reform in Java and continues to inspire the fair trade movement today. Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer went so far as to call it ‘the book that killed colonialism’.
What happens:
Multatuli (aka Eduard Douwes Dekker) vividly recreates his own experiences as a Dutch civil servant in Indonesia via the hero of the title, who rails against the exploitation of the local population working on coffee plantations and ends up a penniless outcast.
Message:
Exploitation is a bitter brew.
The Trial
by Franz Kafka (1925)
What to say:
The inconsistencies in Kafka’s unfinished German-language novel only add to its evocation of the absurdity that thrives in totalitarian and overly bureaucratic systems.
What happens:
Josef K. awakes one morning to find he’s been arrested and charged with an unspecified crime. He spends the rest of the novel at odds with a remote and inaccessible authority before being executed unceremoniously via a stab to the heart.
Message:
Try to keep on top of your parking tickets and hope for the best.
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens (1861)
What to say:
Dickens’ penultimate book began as a serialised work in a failing magazine called All The Year Round, of which he was editor. ‘Expectations’ really turned things around.
What happens:
An anonymous benefactor pays for narrator Pip, a provincial, marsh-dwelling orphan, to ascend the social ladder and become a gentleman in London. This appears to be great news because Pip has long had his eye on the privileged Estella, adopted protégée of the bitter Miss Havisham. But things don’t work out entirely as planned.
Message:
Never forget where you came from, especially if that’s a muddy bog.
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe (1958)
What to say:
Nigerian author Achebe’s elegant riposte to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which had documented African natives from the white coloniser’s perspective.
What happens:
Okonkwo, an alpha male in the village of Umuofia, has grown fond of his adopted son Ikemefuna and yet – not wanting to appear cowardly like his own father – he participates in the child’s killing when the village oracle demands it. Then the title does its stuff: another, accidental, killing results in Okonkwo being exiled, and when he returns, he finds the village in the thrall of zealous European missionaries.
Message:
Trying to avoid turning into one’s parents can be counterproductive.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
What to say:
Don’t you just love a bit of magical realism? Admittedly, Márquez’s habit of jumping back and forth through time doesn’t make for the easiest of reads. But it did win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What happens:
Lots of stuff, to seven generations of the Colombian Buendía family, in no particular order. Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía and his cousin, Úrsula, fall in love and marry, without their families’ permission, before founding a utopian but ill-fated city called Macondo. Everything and everyone may or may not exist.
Message:
People and places are always controlled by their pasts.
