My second read for #ReadingRhys week was Good Morning, Midnight, a novel exploring the same kinds of themes as her first novel Quartet which I reviewed earlier this week. Published more than ten years after Quartet, it shows Rhys still concerned with the fate of the single, lone woman, vulnerable and isolated.
Good Morning, Midnight is every bit as affecting and powerful as Quartet, for the life Rhys portrays is bleak. Here is the world of the dispossessed, the powerless, the damaged and those who damage. It is a world of shabby, colourless rooms in hotels where no one would stay if they had any other choice.
Our narrator is Sophie (Sasha) Jansen, a woman a little older than Marya in Quartet, she has returned to Paris from London. She has failed at a series of unsatisfying jobs since leaving her former profession of mannequin. Early in the novel we witness Sasha abruptly leave her job as a shop assistant in a dress shop. She seems powerless to stick up for herself, walking away with barely a murmur. Everything she might say remains locked inside.
“You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there’s no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word.”
Now she is considering drinking herself to death and dying her hair blonde.
Sasha’s room is a sad, dispiriting place. Her neighbour who strides around in a long white dressing gown un-nerves her, but really this room so representative of her life, is just one in a long series of such rooms. Needing to appeal to friends in England for money, the fur coat she wears the only sign of better times.
“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.”
Sasha’s story moves back and forth in time, her perspective shifting from her time in London to her time in Paris, from the time she was married, to the time she is alone again. Her life in Paris moves between a variety of cafes and bars, places where she is known, some she wants only to avoid, and places where she encounters the men with who only succeed in making her lonelier than ever. We find her sobbing in public, uncomfortable in the presence of strangers. Yet her position toward the bottom of this society lends her an empathy with the dispossessed or vulnerable people she meets. Perhaps in them she recognises something of herself.
“My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don’t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren’t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don’t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won’t, and so on.”
From the start we sense a tragedy lurking in the past, and a hopelessness in her future, Sasha is a woman who is lost, she feels out of step with society. Continually telling herself that she must do this or that in order to be like everyone else, she manages nevertheless to be always out of step with the society she sees around her. The men she meets now or has in her past are men who can only ever hurt her. Men like her husband Enno, and drifters like the gigolo and the Russian artists she encounters.
In many ways Good Morning, Midnight hasn’t very much in the way of plot, but it doesn’t really require one. Rhys’s portrayal of desolation is tinged with dark humour, but it is the hopelessness which remains. Sasha is one of the faceless members of society that those whose lives are going well don’t really notice, she exists only on the edges.
As with Quartet I found Rhys’s depiction of a broken woman to be brutally poignant. Sasha’s voice is cynical and immediately chilling.
Strangely, perhaps I finished this novel sitting in a café bar alone, eating my evening meal and waiting for friends (I was early, I always am). It was a suitable place, although the novel itself ends – for me at least – with a shudder, that may haunt me for a little while.
I’ve loved reading all of the reviews and reactions. Rhys is one of my favourites and I could hardly ever find anyone who was familiar with her work (other than Wide Sargasso Sea). I couldn’t resist ordering some more of her books (I already have a bit of a collection) and her biography ‘The Blue Hour’ after this #ReadingRhys week. It may be too late for participation, but it’s something to look forward to for the rest of the year, right?
Oh yes, I think you have some wonderful reading ahead of you. The Blue Hour will be fascinating look forward to hearing about it.
Marina, despite best endeavours I’ve read a lot of Rhys books – and books about her – for this initiative but still a few to get through so absolutely yes! Somethings to look forward to reading for rest of year and beyond as many I will revisit.
I have more added to my wishlist to inspire my future reading as well.
That is a wonderful finish to your review, Ali, a fine example of the power of the best writers to somehow reach a hand from the pages of their book, and squeeze our hearts.
Oh absolutely Jean Rhys certainly knows how to do that.
The lone woman, vulnerable and isolated; the world of the dispossessed, the powerless, the damaged and those who damage. Yes, this is classic Rhys territory, and I love how you’ve captured it in your review. Another reader (Max, I think) commented earlier on Rhys’ ability to expose the lottery of life. It came to mind again as I was reading your last quote. Wonderful review as ever, Ali – thank you for these contributions to #ReadingRhys.
Yes the lottery of life is a perfect description of what Rhys portrays. Thanks for co-hosting this Jacqui, I so enjoyed seeing so much love for Jean Rhys novels this last week.
There seems to be an underlying bleakness to a lot of Rhys’ work, though this sounds poignant and moving. Lovely review Ali.
Thank you. I think the bleakness runs through much of her work judging by what I have read and the reviews I have been reading this week.
So bleak, indeed – reminds me a bit perhaps of later Anita Brookners? Well done for getting two in for the week and spreading the Rhys word a bit further.
I think Brookner is sad rather than Bleak personally but there are similarities. Brookner characters are usually wealthier having resources that Rhys characters don’t. It might be quite fascinating to examine their work together.
Great review Ali – particularly how the book resonated with you. I think Rhys’s women are such outsiders, and their lives *are* bleak – but she writes about them so well.
She does, I love her writing it did resonate, I think it is very cinematic. I am always interested in the outsider in literature.
Ends with a shudder? Now thats something which has got my attention
Well I shuddered and I think most readers would.
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This sounds like an interesting follow up to Voyage in the Dark, in terms of its correlation to Jean Rhys’s life as well. I won this one so have it on the shelf to read at a later time, they are short books, but a lot to absorb and I found they leave a melancholic feeling that I wouldn’t want to indulge too often.
That said, I’m intrigued by Wide Sargasso Sea, which seems to be the one novel that was written from a place of courage and indignation, defending a fellow countrywoman, locked up in an attic, little understood, except by people like Jean Rhys, who knew what it would have been like to have left the Caribbean to come and live in England.
There is a melancholic feeling, yes, I felt that too. I really want to read Voyage in the Dark now and her short stories. Wide Sargasso Sea is an extraordinary novel – it’s tone is a bit different there is vibrancy and colour. Though the central character is still at the mercy of decisions made for her by men. Societal factors are also key in that novel.
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