Synopsis

Synopsis: Jono reads the classics so you don't have to
Have you ever noticed that reading classic novels can be quite heavy going? You want to make an effort but the olde world language, the turgidity of the content or the sheer block of time you require to knock it off just gets in the way of you doing the deed. Well, I've made the effort and I can save you a bit of time... quite a bit of time. On this page you'll find a synopsis of each of the classic novels I've read recently. I hope you'll walk away edified.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

As a child Moll is abandoned by her mother and grows up in a work house but receives the patronage of a rich family after declaring her quaint ambition to be a gentlewoman. They take her in and, by the by in a riot of hormones, she succumbs to the attention of both of the boys of the house. I say succumbs as an obvious euphemism. Long story short, she marries the younger and has a couple of children, which is all well and good until he dies a few years later. The family take in her children and she's off on her way. She marries again to a ratbag who buggers off on her. She marries again to another bloke which raises more problems because although he loves her, whisks her away to his plantation in America, has a couple of children with her and treats her like a princess, he turns out to be her brother. Obviously the marital situation cannot stand, so Moll returns to England on the hunt for another husband. During this time she 'succumbs' to the attention of a married man before she hooks up with a banker. She cannot marry the banker because he hasn't obtained a divorce from his previous wife who has run off with some other bloke. She promises to marry him when he gets the paperwork sorted but in the meantime while on a jolly to Liverpool she hooks up with another bloke who marries her under the misguided pretence that she is rich (which she isn't and makes no move to dispel this notion). After the nuptials he discovers she isn't and they go their separate ways, he to become a highwayman and she to marry the banker. But there's a spanner in the works in that she's pregnant by her 'Lancashire husband' and has to go through the motions of pregnancy and farming the child out to a foster family. All the while she is keeping the banker at arms length so he can't find out, but once she has the adoption sorted she accepts his very generous offer of marriage. She has some more children by the banker so now the running total is about ten including ones from her previous marriages and various other encounters. All is peachy until the banker commits sideways when his clerk embezzles all their money. Moll is left to fend for herself by becoming a thief of some renown. She gets rather good at this caper until she gets caught after about ten years. She gets found guilty and has her sentence of hanging commuted to transportation to America. Lo and behold, who else is on the same prison ship but her highwayman husband and they settle down on a plantation. Out of curiosity she also looks up her family to find that her husband/brother is senile and blind but she has a strapping young son who goes beyond the call of duty to look after her.


The original title of the book was: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Who was Born in NEWGATE, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent, by DANIEL DEFOE. Says it all really, but I reckon a snappier title like Moll Flanders - trigamous, thieving shag machine would have sold more copies 330 years down the track.
This was also made into a bodice-ripping movie that was well worth a watch.



The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Henchard is buggering up his life. He pisses his money away and blames his wife on his inability to gain employment as a hay-cutter. In a fit of drunken pique, he sells his wife to a passing sailor and spends the next twenty years in sober penitence. Sobriety seems to agree with Henchard and he becomes a well-off hay merchant and is elected mayor of Casterbridge but wacky chaos is just around the corner when his wife and daughter return to find him after the sailor who purchased her is lost at sea. Henchard is delighted to have her return and she forgives him for selling her. In order to preserve his position they hold a fictional wedding and he formally adopts his daughter who labours under the belief that the sailor was her real father. As this is happening Henchard employs a traveller named Donald Farfrae who has a revolutionary idea to transform the hay business. Henchard doesn't like that Farfrae is macking on his daughter and fires him. Farfrae goes into competition with him and pursues her no further. The plot thickens when Henchard's doxy from Jersey turns up intent on pinning Henchard down with marriage. It doesn't hurt that she's now loaded either. Henchard, being Henchard, buggers things up with his jealousy when she develops a thing for Farfrae. Long story short, Henchard embarks on a hate campaign against Farfrae at the expense of his business. Henchard loses his business, the mayoralty, his house and eventually his daughter when the doxy dies and Farfrae marries her. He also has to go cap in hand to Farfrae for a job at his old business but gets the arse when he betrays Farfrae in a fit of jealousy. Henchard also really loses his daughter when he finds a letter from his late wife saying that his real daughter died in childhood and the new girl is actually the sailor's daughter. He dies penniless, heartbroken and the lesson is that jealousy and drunkenness do fuck all for your long term self-esteem.


Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Bathsheba Everdene tries desperately hard not to be a slag, however she initially spurns the advance of the bloke she eventually marries, Gabriel Oak - a shepherd, farmer, simple country boy and general stalwart of Wessex farming life. Prior to their marriage she recklessly leads on her neighbour, Farmer Boldwood, who is a bit of a nutter who becomes obsessed with her. She spurns him and ends up marrying a local rake, Sergeant Troy. He's a right bastard (he promises to marry Fanny, a servant girl, but on their wedding day he deliberately goes to the wrong church and she dies broken-hearted. Troy also blows most of Bathsheba's money at the races and treats her like the trollop she is) but has the common decency to fake his death and bugger off. Novels being novels, Troy comes back a couple of years later and Boldwood shoots him. Boldwood jailed, Oak acts upon his long held love for Bathsheba, moves in and the ones that are left alive live happily ever after.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
Lady Constance Chatterley tries desperately hard not to be a slag but with her husband, Clifford, unable to function from the waist-down, she embarks upon an affair with first a self-absorbed Irish writer named Michaelis and then with the game-keeper, Mellors. They fornicate and Constance wrestles with her conscience. Her conscience continually comes off second-best and she becomes mildly irritated when, despite not being her intellectual equal, Clifford finds some success as a writer. "Bollocks." thinks she, "Why didn't I get around to doing that." She is further irritated when her wifely duties of looking after Clifford are usurped by the housekeeper, Mrs Bolton. Constance gets pregnant but Clifford doesn't mind as long as he gets an heir. On a quick trip to Italy to find a more appropriate person to have an affair with, Constance shags a married gondolier. When she gets back Mellor's estranged harridan of a wife turns up and blows the gaffe about their affair and Constance asks for a divorce. Oddly, Clifford must have been into the pills because he refuses. As the novel ends everyone is waiting to see what happens but you can imagine that they all live unhappily ever after.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Honestly, Madame Bovary... what a slag. Doctor Bovary's first wife dies, which is okay because he doesn't like her terribly much anyway. The future Mme Bovary is a simple farm girl who wants all the trappings of high society. She marries the poor Dr Bovary and proceeds to work his sorry fingers to the bone in pursuit of being surrounded by nice things. Nice things turn out not to be enough as she embarks upon an affair with first a local clerk and then a local farmer. Farmer shags her and then dumps her. Clerk adopts a more circuitous route, soaking up her time in a nearby town and, indirectly, her money. However, she does not help herself by getting herself in hock with a local shitweasel pawnbroker to support her predilection for fine clothes, jewels and miscellaneous paraphernalia. This winds up bankrupting both husband and wife. Monsieur Bovary only learns of the depth to which he is in debt after she conveniently has a nervous breakdown and then mercifully dies. He dies shortly after, leaving their child an orphan. No-one lives happily ever after. What a bitch.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyen
Ivan Denisovitch is an inmate in a 1950's Russian gulag during winter. A winter that is completely unlike what we're used to in the South Island of New Zealand: seriously cold, that is you put your hand on something and when you take your hand off it you leave your skin behind. The idea of Russian literature leads you to imagine a dire dirge, however the story is compulsively readable and I found it to be rather uplifting. Ivan's life is a series of small victories from waking up in the morning, having a two minute lie-in, hiding a slice of bread in his arse-crack for downing later to last thing at night when he gets in from a hard day building a factory out of bugger-all. It doesn't sound like a formula for a nail-biter, but it really strips back the reader's perception of 'want' and 'need'. You need calories, you want a biggish tv. Ivan D needs a slice of sausage and a good pair of boots for day to day survival, he wants to go home and spend time with his family (if he can remember them at the end of his spell of imprisonment. You can't help but feel for the poor bastard at the end of the day. 


A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius J. Reilly is a self-obsessive, fat, feckless, flatulent, unemployable hypochondriac. When he causes his witless mother to lose control of her car she finally orders him to use his MA to go and get a job. Ignatius doesn't like the idea as he is already busy alternately writing a stream-of-consciousness masterpiece and masturbating furiously. However, Ignatius finally gets the message and seeks employment in a clothing factory office. He is eventually fired after he attempts to lead a worker's revolution which fails at the final hurdle when everyone involved reaches the conclusion that he is a self-obsessive, fat, feckless, flatulent, unemployable hypochondriac. His next foray into employment is as a hotdog salesman, but as he is more inclined to eat the hotdogs than sell them it ends up costing him more than he earns. It doesn't matter anyway as he is fired before having to fork it over. In the background of all this is the quest of Patrolman Mancuso to finally arrest someone by hovering around a public toilet in a variety of disguises; Burma Jones who only works as a janitor in a nightclub to avoid being arrested (again) for vagrancy; and Myra Minkoff, Ignatius intellectual foil and paramour who whisks him away just before the ambulance arrives to have him committed.

Animal Farm by George Orwell
You really ought to get off your arse and read this book. However, the story goes that a bunch of farm animals get together an form a conspiracy to take over the farm that they live in. Their charismatic leader (Major the pig) creates a utopian vision involving all animals as equals, uniting with hard work but dies three days after their revolution. His leadership mantle is taken on by two other pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, who seem all chummy and nice but turn out to be real bastards who begin a power struggle. Napoleon takes away a litter of puppies for 'education' and trains them to be his attack dogs. He uses them to chase Snowball away and subsequently blames any failures on the farm as Snowball's clandestine sabotage. Napoleon also holds a number of purges of the animals who he suspects to be supporters of Snowball and he develops human traits such as walking on two legs, drinking whisky and doing deals with local farmers. In the end Napoleon represents all of the things the animals rebelled against initially and it becomes impossible to tell which are the pigs and which are the human beings. The book is an analogy of communism and a commentary of its ultimate futility. It also provides the very valuable lesson that pigs are bastards and deserve to be eaten. Yum. I like ham. 

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