Miss Pulkinhorn, by William Golding

Analysis

Another analysis

BIOGRAPHY

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. His father was a teacher, but the family was very poor. Nevertheless, they were able to pay his studies in a grammar school and then at the university.

He worked as a teacher like his father before him. He got married and had two children. During the WWII, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer and commanded a ship, although he didn’t belong to the ruler classes.

All his life he was disappointed with the humankind and said “men produced evil as bees produced honey”, and that he lived under (not in) the British class system and that this system was indestructible. This is more or less the message of his most famous book, Lord of the Flies. The novel narrates how a group of educated children gets stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, where all the adults die. They try to organize a society to survive on the island, but they fail because of a disagreement between them that drives them to war and to a regression to savagery.

At the beginning, the book (under the name of Strangers from Within) was rejected by the publisher, but then, after some changes in the text, was accepted. It was published in 1954.

The Spire, published in 1964, is about the construction of a spire on the Salisbury Cathedral. The dean is obsessed with the spire, but the cathedral doesn’t have any foundations, and his stubbornness will destroy human lives around him.

Rites of Passage, which got the Booker Prize in 1980, tells the story of Edmund Talbot, a man sailing to Australia during the Napoleonic time. Edmund Talbot keeps a journal where he records the life on the ship. But, if at the beginning the passage is amusing, it soon becomes cruel because the sailors bully another passenger, Reverend Colley.

William Golding got the Nobel Prize in 1983, after an unexpected and even contentious choice. Other nominees were Claude Simon, Anthony Burgess, Graham Green, and more.

He died at 81 in Cornwall.

SUMMARY

Sir Edward, the organist of a cathedral, tells us the story of two sanctimonious people: Miss Pulkinhorn, a bigoted old woman, and a sincere devotee (and perhaps mystic), lunatic old man.

Miss Pulkinhorn watches the behaviour of all people who goes to church, because she thinks that everybody is a Pharisee. According to the organist, she wants to punish one way or another everybody, even himself; and he feels a bit relieved when he is made Sir, because then he knew she couldn’t do any harm to him. But her worst enemy is the fervent old man; she is envious and thinks that he is a hypocrite because he goes to church three times a day to pray ecstatically in front of the Sacrament. She wants to give him a lesson, to punish him for his supposed fake piety.

By the way, you must know that the Sacrament is the holy Host, the bread that means Jesus's body, and that it is kept in a kind of cupboard called sanctuary with a candle near it; if the candle, or light, is lit, then the Sacrament is there; if not, the candle is put out.

One day, Sir Edward has to go to the cathedral to leave a note giving instructions to his substitute because the next day he is going to London. He almost forgot and went there very late. In his way there, he crossed paths with a priest (the precentor) who was carrying the Sacrament to give Canon Blake the last rites, because he was agonizing.

Inside the church, there were only two people more, the verger (or sacristan) Rekeby, who was checking that all things were all right, and Miss Pulkinhorn, all the time spying. After a while, the devout old man entered the church. This time he was late because he had met a poor man and had given him his jacket and shirt, in a kind of charity work; so he was beaming when he kneeled to pray in the chapel of the Sacrament. But the verger, in his round to check the things, saw that the candle of the Sacrament was on, but he didn’t see the old man, because he was in the back of the chapel. However, the Sacrament wasn’t there, and Rekeby thought the precentor had forgotten to blow the candle out; so he put the light out. Now the old man realized that he was praying to the void, and he felt so frustrated that he had a fit: he laughed and cried, went away and collapsed near the door. The organist and Rekeby heard his cries and went to help him; they carried him to the verger’s cottage, and from there he was taken to the hospital, where he died some days after. Meanwhile, Miss Pulkinhorn was still inside the church, but she didn’t come to help.

But, how was it possible the light was on if the Sacrament wasn’t there? The organist suspected that Miss Pulkinhorn lit it after the precentor had put it out when he went away with the Host to Canon Blake. But she made a mistake: as she saw the old man wasn’t coming, although he was always punctual, she thought he wouldn’t come at all and was going to put the candle out again, when she met Sir Edward and couldn’t do it and had to go by.

Sir Edward believed she wanted to chastise the old man, showing him his piety was a fake. But he didn’t say anything and kept watching her from the distance. Miss Pulkinhorn had to know of Sir Edward suspicions, because the evening of the events they saw each other inside the church. However, she went on attending the church with the same stiffness and affected righteousness as ever.

The time passed, until one day, all of a sudden, Miss Pulkinhorn approached Sir Edward and told him that her conscience was perfectly clear. Nevertheless, she died seven days after.

QUESTIONS

-What are the thirty-nine articles?

-Do you like visiting churches? Is there any you liked best? Is there anyone you remember because of something curious or interesting?

-Have you sung in a choir? Can you tell us your experiences with singing?

-How religious is Sir Edward?

-In your view, what was Miss Pulkinhorn’s cause of death?

-There’s the moon acting upon the characters. Do you think stars, planets and constellations have any influence in our lives?

VOCABULARY

chapter, what with, rubric, flat, buns, shoddy, ambulatory, sat out, instep, enmeshed, smouldering, curdles, steel-sheer adamant, decani, chantry, stumps, spell, close, turned up, flue, cantered, cheapened, precentor, pyx, aumbry, guttered out, anthem, rush-bottom

A Family Supper, by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on the 8th of November 1954. He went to live in Great Britain in 1960, when his father began to research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. As a boy, Kazuo enjoyed television, Westerns and spy stories, and wrote easily without entertaining any serious ambition of becoming a writer.

The great creative awakening of his adolescence came at the age of 13, when he discovered the songs of Bob Dylan. He spent the next years learning to play guitar, writing songs and studying the work of Dylan, Cohen... and other singer-songwriters of the time. After graduating in 1973, he took a year off to travel around the United States and Canada, and to make the round of record companies with demos of his songs, but these efforts were unsuccessful.

Although he still planned a career in music, Ishiguro studied literature and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating, he moved to London. He supported himself by working in a homeless shelter in Notting Hill. While working at the shelter, he also met a young social worker, Lorna MacDougall. They fell in love and married in 1986.

Early novels

Ishiguro went to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in England. He began writing full-time following the success of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which it is a first-person narrative of a Japanese widow living in England.  Ishiguro’s next novel was An Artist of the Floating World (1986). These two novels reflected on life and culture in post-World War II in Japan. However, for his next novel, he wanted to write for an international audience. So he chose an iconic British character known throughout the world: the English butler. The themes of guilt and regret are seen in the butler’s lost chance for love in The Remains of the Day (1989). This novel won the Booker Prize for fiction (1989), a prize dedicated to the best novel published in the United Kingdom and written in English. The novel was adapted to a film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. 

 

Later Work

Ishiguro continued to experiment with different genres and styles in his subsequent novels, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000). Taking the leap to science fiction, Ishiguro wrote a tale about genetic engineering and human cloning in Never Let Me Go (2005). Although he’s best known for his novels, Ishiguro has also published a collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), and several screenplays, as The White Countess (2005).

His most recent book, The Summer We Crossed Europe in The Rain (March 2024), is a collection of lyrics written for the jazz singer Stacey Kent. Ishiguro and Kent have been friends and collaborators for a long time, and he wrote lyrics for a handful of songs on Kent’s Breakfast on the Morning Tram.

Ishiguro has won many awards, perhaps most notably the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he is a British citizen and lives in London with his wife and his daughter Naomi, who is also an author and published the book Escape Routes.

 

SUMMARY

This is the story of a Japanese family. The protagonist is a young man who returns to Tokyo from California to visit his father and his sister, Kikuko. At the beginning, the protagonist describes “Fugu”, a type of poisonous fish and its dangerous properties, if you don’t prepare it correctly. He tells us how his mother died two years ago because she ate “Fugu” prepared by a friend. When his mother died, he was living in California and he didn’t attend the funeral.

The son’s father picks him up from the airport and tells him the circumstances in which his mother died. His father is a very intimidating man, and he is proud of the pure samurai blood that runs in his family. He is a man who values a traditional family and is very strict. He and his son don’t have a good relationship; for this reason, the son did not return to his country until two years after his mother’s death. While they are waiting for the arrival of Kikuko, they talk a little about his father’s business partner, Watanaba, who killed himself and his family after the firm’s collapse, because he didn’t wish to live with the disgrace.

Soon after, Kikuko arrives. She is a student in Osaka. Despite the fact that the brother is much older, the siblings had always been close. They decide to go for a walk in the garden, while their father prepares the supper. Kikuko smokes a cigarette and tells him about her boyfriend and his plans for them to hitch-hike in America; she also tells him that their mother always blamed herself for him leaving Japan, that she thought she hadn’t raised him correctly. They have an open conversation, talking about their lives, childhood and recalling events like when he thought there was a ghost living in the garden near the well.

After this, the father calls Kikuko into the kitchen and tells her to help him with the final preparations of the supper. Then the father takes his son to another room to discuss his regrets about how he raised his children and how he should have been a more attentive father.

When the food is ready, the father encourages the son to eat a lot of the fish that he and Kikuko have prepared. During the meal, the son discovers a photograph on the wall with an old woman in a white kimono. His father reveals that it’s their mother, who resembles the ghost he used to see when he was younger. After the meal, Kikuko prepares some tea while the son and his father speak about the son’s future plans.

The story ends with a peaceful supper and a serious dialogue. The father expresses his hope that his children will come back home to live with him.

 

Some Reflections

It is possible that the father has made a decision: to repeat his partner’s actions. Perhaps he realizes that he could no longer manage the situation and decides to commit a form of suicide, and his children don’t know anything about it.

I think that the author wants to show how rebellion is an escape from social conventions and family expectations. Japanese culture puts a lot of pressure on children. They are usually raised very strictly, and we begin to understand why the protagonist left Japan and his family. Now his younger sister intends to do the same as her brother did in the past.

 

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about the poisonous fish “aranya” they fish in Blanes?

-What do you think it happened to the protagonist’s mother?

-What is it for you, the “honour”? Was Watanabe a man of principle? What is your opinion of the celebrated sentence “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.”?

-In your view, what was the ghost in the well or in the garden?

-According to your opinion, why did the son go back to Japan?

-What is the meaning of the mother’s picture in the story?

-What do you think it’s going to happen after supper? Why?

 

VOCABULARY

gutting, haunted, swayed, giggle

Analysis

The Demon Lover, by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabet Bowen at the Wikipedia

(We had a previous entry about Bowen, so I have copied some paragraphs.)

Elisabeth Bowen was an Irish-born author, but she did her literary activities within a cultural club in London called The Bloomsbury Group, which had its headquarters in the neighbourhood of the British Museum and whose most famous members were the writer Virginia Woolf and the economist John M. Keynes (whose main idea was that the government had to intervene in the economy to correct the bad effects of the capitalism).

She was born in Dublin in 1899 and spend her childhood in a big country house with a large park. Her family belonged to the Anglo-Irish class that had dominated Ireland for centuries. Her novel The Last September deals with the situation of her class during the Independence War and the Irish Civil War. When she was seven, she went to live in England, where she studied. When she was 24, she married and published her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, that was a great success and encouraged her to go on writing. From then on, she wrote a book every year and a lot of book reviews.

Her stories are usually about the upper class, and she writes in a sophisticated style.

But Bowen isn’t very well-known here: in Catalan you aren’t going to find any translation, and there are only some of these books in Spanish. If you want to find her works in the library, click here.

The Demon Lover

The short story that we’re reading has autobiographic details because during the World War II she worked in London for the War Ministry. In the title we find the word demon; this word has the meaning of "evil spirit", but is also a variant of daimon, that only means "spirit". So, we don't know exactly if the lover is bad or not. The story is about a (happily?) married woman during the Blitz. She had a boyfriend in the WWI, but he was reported missing or dead, and she forgot him. But now, after 25 years, she got a suspicious letter. Could it be from her old boyfriend saying that he wants to fulfil the promise of marrying her? This boyfriend, what kind of person/being was/is he?

The Demon Lover: audio

The Demon Lover Study Guide

The Demon Lover: summary, characters, analysis

Presentation (minutes 00-3.30)

The Demon Lover, (but a very free and enlarged adaptation, minutes 00-52)

QUESTIONS

Which are the first hints of the Blitz?

Why do you think the woman is prosaic?

Why is a “tenseness preceding the fall of the rain” before she read the letter?

Why did she look at the mirror after reading the letter?

Why did she look at it “stealthily”?

Describe the protagonist.

What was the effect of the raining when he opened the chest?

What did she remember best from their last meeting (a physical mark)?

Why did she wish him already gone when they were saying goodbye?

Describe the boy.

Describe their last meeting.

Was she really in love with him? How do you know?

Tell us about Mrs Drover’s life after discovering her fiancée was missing or dead.

Why was she “unable to be with her back exposed to an empty room” and preferred to “sit against the wall”?

A crisis is mentioned: what crisis is it?

Why did she decide to take the objects she had come to fetch and not to run away immediately?

“She tugged at the knot she had tied wrong”: what is its connotation?

What are her feelings now about her old fiancée?

When she is in the point of leaving the house, what reassures her? And in the street? And what scared her before leaving?

Why does the narrator use this expression: “a hinterland of deserted streets”?

What was the appointed time?

What details suggested us that her old fiancée was the taxi driver?

Some people say the story means that “we are always tied to the past”. What is your opinion?

VOCABULARY

boarded up, contemptuous, bedspring, flicker, foresworn (forsworn), plight your troth, (without) stint, score, desuetude, rally, fumbling, to be in a mood, tread, creek, pant, issue, perambulator (pram)

The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse