Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog

The Collector by John Fowles

2012-02-01T21:49:00.003Z

John Fowles’s The Collector dates from 1963 and in some ways it is dated. In characterisation, in particular, its central characters are, to a large extent, archetypal sixties sorts. Given that one of them kidnaps and imprisons the other in a cellar this may seem an unusual – and provocative – suggestion but, for all Frederick Clegg’s weirdness, he is at core just a typical, inadequate social misfit of the sort commonly found in 1950s and 1960s literature. In the 70s, the type became bastardised and cheapened into simple buffoons, caricatures of their more philosophically rendered postwar predecessors. And Miranda, the girl who is imprisoned by Clegg, is a bright, almost independent gel, the sort who in those heady years of the 1960s are beginning to throw off the shackles of sexist society and will pave the way for the feminists of the seventies and eighties and the free spirits of the nineties and noughts but who are at that point still, fatally, trapped in a kind of middle class, straight-laced sense of the order of things. So we have archetypes, characters who are products of their time. And therefore, you might suppose, the events of this novel couldn’t happen today.

But they could, and this is what makes Fowles’s novel so frightening, and so special.

Frederick Clegg, a City Hall clerk and butterfly collector, wins the football pools and realises that with his new-found wealth he can live a new life. He has become obsessed with a young art student, Miranda Grey but, lacking any social abilities, is unable to do anything to engineer any sort of communication between them. Rather, in the manner of his collecting of defenceless butterflies, he decides to capture and imprison her. This he does, showing meticulous attention to detail and a facility for planning that would be impressive were it not being put to such malign purposes. His belief is that, if only Miranda can come to know him, she will realise what a good and honest person he is, how much he is devoted to her, and she will naturally grow to love him, too. It is, of course, a hopelessly impossible notion, a lunatic dream, but Clegg believes in it completely. And his love for her is genuine, too, albeit in a twisted, stuntd way. Even as the days and weeks of the imprisonment go by, and the situation deteriorates, he cannot quite relinquish hope that she will come to her senses and see the beauty of his nature and prostrate herself before his undying love.

The first section of the story is told by Clegg himself, in a chillingly dispassionate voice, like the overseer of some minor experiment of no great consequence to anyone but himself. Of his captive, despite his real and heartfelt obsession for her, he can permit no genuinely human feelings: he seems incapable of seeing her as a living entity in her own right, rather than as a totem of his own misguided feelings. She is doubly trapped: literally so in her sealed cellar, and mentally so through Clegg’s inability to perceive her as anything other than the chimera of fractured love he has turned her into. You fear for the girl.

The second section is told through Miranda’s diary of her captivity and, through this, the terrifying and desperate nature of Clegg is fully revealed. He adores her but cannot express love. He wants her but cannot bear intimacy. He is stunted in every imaginable way. For Miranda, a bright, intelligent, questing young woman on the verge of a fulfilling adult life, this containment by a man so dull, so soulless, in a world that is lifeless, stultifying, hopeless, is too much to bear. She craves escape but Frederick, for all his lunacy, is not given to carelessness. She feigns illness. Finally she really succumbs to illness but Frederick at first will not, then cannot do anything to help her. The reader can only observe, helpless and dismayed, as events take their course.

The final section, a short and chilling coda, is told by Clegg again. And in this, finally, the truest reflection of his nature is revealed to us. Innocents beware, there are among us people of unspeakable cruelty.

There is, throughout The Collector, a philosophical and psychological quest for understanding of human nature. The two protagonists, captor and captive, master and slave, are trapped in what can only ever be a danse macabre because no dance of life is available to them in which they could each participate. One cannot exist without the other – Miranda ponders at one point what would happen to her if he died and realises that she, too, would die – but nor can they ever happily co-exist. They are incompatibles manacled together by the vagaries of life and tragedy is the only possible outcome. Clegg is simultaneously sexually attracted to and repelled by Miranda. She wants to understand him but craves escape. Both of them are trapped in an impossible existence. Neither is capable of finding release. We are in a world of terrible isolation and dangerous incomprehension, ensnared between good and evil.

Fowles once declared – but later renounced it as an unfulfilled hope – that he wished to alter the society in which he lived. In this, he is therefore the opposite of a writer like Cormac McCarthy, for whom “the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

Although McCarthy and Fowles could, then, be said to reside at opposite poles in their perception of human nature, experience nonetheless draws them closer together. In the end, both writers would probably ascribe to Nietzsche’s observation:

For every strong and natural species of man, love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger, affirmative acts and negative acts, belong together. One is good on condition one also know how to be evil; one is evil because otherwise one would not understand how to be good.

In the claustrophobic cosmion of The Collector we begin to see some of what McCarthy hints at in his dismissal of the prospects of improving the species, and we understand the duality that is at the core of all of us. This is why The Collector remains a terrifying and worrying book: because Frederick Clegg exists and must exist. What’s more, he exists, in some small way, in all of us. But so, too, does Miranda.

Uncle Charles Principle

2012-01-31T21:39:00.003Z

I've written before about this, but I was working with a group of learners tonight and it came up again.

The Uncle Charles principle is a particular occurrence in Point of View when the POV effectively slips out of omniscience into the particular, subjective view of a character.

It was so named by the American critic Hugh Kenner after Uncle Charles in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. In the opening of part two of the book, Joyce writes:

"Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse...."

Another critic objected to this as poor language, citing the word "repair" as archaic and pompous. Exactly, said Joyce. This is exactly the sort of word that Uncle Charles would use, and it is therefore entirely appropriate. In other words, it is as though the narration is now coming through Uncle Charles.

Another example can be found in Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield:

Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting–from nowhere, from the sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again.

That "Dear Little Thing!" is clearly Miss Brill speaking, but it isn't in quotes. For the moment the narrative has slipped entirely into her point of view.

Cormac McCarthy, of course, takes this to extremes, as he does with most things, particularly in Suttree which is full of instances when the third person narrative not only adopts the Uncle Charles principle but actually steps entirely into the first person, and the omniscient narrator and the main protagonist, Suttree, become one. Yet another twin for that most reluctant of twins, Buddy Suttree. In this example, Suttree is shown some old photographs of long lost kin and the experience is so traumatic we are drawn into his own, horrified thoughts, so that by the end of the passage we are in first person:

She came with the tea, a tall vase full, chocked with ice, a curl of lemon. He ladled sugar in. Between the mad hag’s face and this young girl a vague stellar drift, the wheeling of planets on their ether trunnions. Likeness of lost souls haunt us from old chromos and tintypes brown with age. Bloodless skull and dry white hair, matriarchal meat drawn lean and dry on frail bone, a bitter refund ashen among silk and lilies by candlelight in a cold hall, black lacquered bier on sawhorses wound with crepe. I would not cry. My sisters cried.

It's a hard technique to get right. Suttree is a masterpiece of writing.

Cormac McCarthy film script

2012-01-29T15:39:00.002Z

Well, he has a habit of surprising people. We've been patiently waiting for the publication of his next novel, The Passenger and, instead, Cormac McCarthy has submitted to his publishers a spec film script.

And the surprises continue. It has a contemporary setting, apparently, which is most unusual for McCarthy. Only The Sunset Limited has a contemporary setting. And it has two female lead characters, which is unheard of in McCarthy. (Apparently, The Passenger will also have a strong female lead; perhaps McCarthy is finally finding his feminine side...).

McCarthy has a mixed record with film scripts. The Gardener's Son, on HBS many years ago, was scripted by him and is a fine piece. Cities of The Plain, however, started as a film script and it wasn't too good. And the film script version of No Country For Old Men is simply risible.

Burns Day

2012-01-25T20:10:00.000Z

Robert Burns's birthday today.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

Genre and literary fiction

2012-01-11T19:19:00.004Z

In a recent journal article, Andrew Hoberek discusses genre fiction and literary fiction, and a tendency, in recent times, for the latter to reclaim the ground of the former. There is, he suggests, a return to genre fiction, and he cites examples of McCarthy’s No Country and The Road, plus the work of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead and even Pynchon (his latest, after all, not specifically mentioned by Hoberek, is a stoner crime novel, not only a genre novel, but a sub-genre novel).

This move, Hoberek suggests is a return to the pre-modernist canon of literary respectability, and it may even call into question how separate these two literary histories are:

From Henry James, the twentieth century, and eventually the creative writing program, inherit a commitment to both realist representation and continual stylistic innovation. What gets lost is the ability of a writer of James’s stature to pen something like The Turn of the Screw (1898), let alone the even more insistently generic fictions of James’s contemporaries like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson – lost, that is, until the recent embrace of genre models by authors nonetheless committed to their status as writers of serious fiction.

There is an implicit criticism here of MFA programs. I think there’s a lot in that – there is undoubtedly a certain style of writing that is instantly recognisable as being produced from the MFA cauldron - overwritten, overstylised, somewhat predictable. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. The fault may originally lie in the programs but the remedy must come from the writers - who should, of course, insist on setting their own course. And the way that McCarthy, Chabon et al have produced their own individualistic work, not tied by convention or expectation, is presenting a lead.

How to freak out a librarian

2012-01-11T19:19:00.001Z

William Gibson on writing

2012-01-05T20:44:00.003Z

This is from an interview in the New York Times with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer:

About how he has written so many books, he says: “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

I think the man is correct. There's not really any other way to be a writer than to write.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000Z

Hope you had a good Hogmanay and have a fine new year.

Search engine queries

2011-12-29T17:22:00.002Z

It’s always interesting to see what search engine queries have brought people to this blog. For a long time I was getting hits for “busty ephemeral woman” which made no sense to me. This, though, seems to have fallen out of fashion of late – that’s ephemerality for you, I suppose.

A strikingly consistent theme appears to be students who are looking for a way not to have to bother reading books for themselves.

in cosmopolis does eric packer have a breakdown while cutting his hair
Google: how does the novel cosmopolis end
Google: what two times do father and son wrestle in A silver Dish
Google: was "intruder in the dust" written in first person
Google: how does gap creek end

Others just type their class questions in verbatim in the hope that the web will spew out their essay for them:

WHAT DOES "WHY SHOULD WE BUILD OUR HAPPINESS ON THE OPINIONS OF OTHERS, WHEN WE CAN FIND IT IN OUR OWN HEARTS" MEAN?
What are two themes in Ron Rash's Saints at the River?
comment on narrative technique in james fenimore cooper's the last of the mohicans
Google: does the use of collage work in the indian uprising
Google: what does thelma j. shinn mean by characters are the physical grotesques and physical afflictions

This one even leaves in the question number:

4. Describe the personalities of Deanna and Eddie In the Prodigal Summer

And this one, I suspect, is the title and course number of one reader’s new class:

Google: articulate art 7030

Sometimes, you simply can’t understand why a particular search would have returned this particular site as a possible answer.

Bing.com: geological pseudomorphosis
Bing.com: SW1P 3DW mobile phone store in London
Google: "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia" analysis
Google: barn owl eros poem

Occasionally you get some queries that are quaintly stream-of-consciousness in their use of language:

what all terrible things were done to african americans because of recism
what do you think cormac mccarthy believes is to be made of suttree when all is said and done

Some are pleasingly honest:

Google: the sense of an ending don't understand it please explain

I love the postmodernist possibilities arising from the mash-up of structuralism and transcendentalism suggested by these similar enquiries:

Google: barthe of the scrivener story
Google: barthes by the scrivener

Likewise, a humourous novel death-match appears to have been lined up in this query:

confederacy of dunces vs catch 22

And finally, the simply baffling:

Google: adrian has sex with veronica's mother?

I know that this relates to Julian Barnes’s The Sense of and Ending, but is this the best constructed query the searcher could think of?

Slim Slow Slider

2011-12-17T18:06:00.003Z

I've been listening to Astral Weeks a lot recently. I lost my copy ages ago and finally found it (inside another CD box), and every since I've been making up for lost time by playing it again and again.

It's a magnificent album. Every track is superb. The last track, though, is a marvel. Slim Slow Slider is a slice of horrible beauty. As a conclusion to a complex album it couldn't be better. It's also, I suspect, a brilliant example of ex tempore storytelling. Certainly, the recording of the album was done in a freeform way, with Morrison allowing his musicians to follow his lead.

Slim Slow Slider is a song about a lost love. But it morphs into something very dark, and we realise the girl in the song is using drugs. Near the end, Morrison sings "I know you're dyin' babe, and I know you know it too." It's a remarkable shift, but entirely fitting. It flows perfectly from the music. Immediately, there is a great depth to the song. And, having given us that shattering conclusion, the song ends, amost literally with a shudder. The music rumbles to a halt. It is a perfect ending.

Apparently, when recording this ending, it went on for ten minutes or so, but it was all cut in the editing process. A good thing, too. It is the best ending of any song I know. It is horrifying.

More Hitch

2011-12-16T17:57:00.003Z

Here's Hitch, in Letters to a Young Contrarian:

we are mammals, and the prefrontal lobe (at least while we wait for genetic engineering) is too small while the adrenaline gland is too big [to be able to change human nature for the better]. Nonetheless, civilisation can increase, and at times actually has increased, the temptation to behave in a civilised way. It is only those who hope to transform humans who end up burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.

Nothing else to add to that.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T17:46:00.003Z

I'm not much of a one for idols (Donald Duck and Oscar Matzerath excepted) and nor am I one to follow role models, but Christopher Hitchens would come close. Professional contrarian, he simply argued what he argued, with eloquence and reasoning and knowledge, and refused to bow to convention or the accepted wisdom or the shrill voices of authority. Even when he was wrong, as he often was, at least he was engagingly wrong. In a bland world of Camerons and Milibands (and increasingly, alas, Obamas), we need more Hitchenses, not fewer.

He'll be up there now on a cloud, telling God he's a figment of his own imagination...

Vermeer's Women

2011-12-06T18:01:00.005Z

I often write critically on here of a strand of modern English literature, exemplified by On Chesil Beach or The Sense of an Ending, which is small in scale and pores over the detail and ramifications of what may appear to be minor incidents or episodes. It’s a mostly unfair criticism, I concede: to criticise for being small in scale a novel which deliberately sets out to be small in scale is a fallacious argument. The approach of such novels is clear: the authors aim to examine, in almost forensic detail, small events or individual characters, and from that exploration to extrapolate some wider meaning. It’s a valid approach. It’s not my preference, but that’s beside the point.

I was put in mind of this at the weekend when I visited the superb exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Vermeer’s women: secrets and silence. The storytelling power of the paintings in this exhibition is immense: one looks at these paintings and is filled with wonder, with questions, with a longing to know more, to enter that world and experience what the people in the paintings are experiencing. All of it is done on a small canvas – often literally so, Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, in particular, is little more than a foot square. The paintings depict small moments, with very few characters, offering tantalising glimpses into another world.

There is much that storytellers and, in particular, short story writers, can learn from these paintings. Their intimacy helps to etablish such a bond with the viewer that the characters of the individuals come across clearly. One looks, for example, at the young girl in The Lacemaker, bent over her craft with a look of intense concentration, and sees immediately what is important: her hands, beautifully in focus, working on the intricate detail of her work, and the luminous, almost abstract tangle of threads with which she is working. Nothing else matters in this scene, and Vermeer therefore blurs it, relegates it to the background. His – and therefore our – concentration on the story’s core is total.

And these paintings tell stories. But they don’t do it in a flat, obvious, two-dimensional way. There is nothing predictable in the scenes depicted by these master storytellers of the past. Rather, a ravishing sense of mystery pervades them. Nothing is ever straightforward. What is in the letter the young girl is reading in Gerard ter Borch’s Young Woman with a Glass of Wine, Holding a Letter in her Hand that makes her so despondent?

Exactly who or what is the child outside the window in Jacobus Vrel’s Woman at a Window, Waving at a Girl? Is it a ghost? Or simply a child playing? The alacrity with which the woman has arisen, as suggested by the curious angle of her chair, suggests something more sinister, but we simply don’t know.

It is mysterious, thought provoking. Often, what look like straightforward domestic scenes are not. Further examination suggests a subtext we don’t know and can only guess at.

This is the stuff of short stories, the gradual revelation of some hidden truth, the realisation that what is happening off the page is as important as what is on it. Think of Hills Like White Elephants, for example, with its never explicitly mentioned subtext of the girl’s abortion. Or Flannery O’Connor’s repeated search for redemption in her stories. Or the relationships between fathers and sons in A Silver Dish.

The paintings in this exhibition are the forebears of our modern short stories. They are beautifully enigmatic. The exhibition finishes in mid-January: go along if you can.

Busy, busy, busy

2011-12-06T17:59:00.003Z

I can't believe it's about six weeks since I returned from the States. Where has the time gone? The day after I returned I started teaching a night class and that took up much more time than I realised. And I'm still trying to work my way through the research material I gathered in the US. So reading? Haven't had time. Things are beginning to calm down, so with luck I'll get some books read soon...

Jackie Leven

2011-11-18T17:43:00.002Z

We've lost a few Scottish music greats this last little while - John Martyn, Gerry Rafferty, Bert Jansch, Stanley Robertson, Jim Reid, Alasdair Gillies.

Now Jackie Leven has died. A cruelly underrated singer-songwriter, he at least managed to live a very, very, very full life before succumbing to cancer. A great talent.

The Coward's Tale by Vanessa Gebbie

2011-11-16T19:35:00.002Z

Vanessa Gebbie and I narrowly overlapped in Alex Keegan’s Boot Camp for writers, Vanessa just leaving as I arrived. We’ve corresponded off and on since then, on this blog or on hers, and I’ve read a lot of her short fiction over the years. The Coward’s Tale is her first novel.

Claire King, in her interview with Vanessa, recommends the novel’s “careful untangling of cause and effect.” Just so. And the cause and effect which is untangled spreads over years, and across generations, and into the lives of an entire town. The Coward’s Tale is an evocation of time and place, a study of guilt and responsibility and an exploration of families and community. And holding all of this together is a meta-narrative about stories and storytelling. This latter point, which gradually gains in importance as the novel proceeds, becomes central to its conclusion.

The core of The Coward’s Tale is an accident in the Kindly Light Pit in Wales one September morning, in which a large number of the local men are killed. Anywhere, this would be a disaster; in such a small, tightly-knit community, the repercussions are grave and long-lasting. The event itself, though, takes place largely off-stage. The facts of the terrible day are gradually revealed to us through the main narrative, which concerns men and women descended from the victims of that disaster, people who are still, two generations on, profoundly affected by it.

The device which connects the two timeframes is the beggar Ianto Passchaendale Jenkins, a survivor of the disaster who is tortured by guilt and convinced that he is, as his father had forewarned, a coward. This coward, a gentle and genial soul, is a storyteller, and in return for a toffee he tells his stories of the men and women whose lives were ruined by the disaster, tells of the pain and despair, how that pain and despair was transmitted across generations, and how it shapes the life of the town yet. His principal audience is Laddy, a young boy sent to the town to live with his grandmother while his parents negotiate a protracted separation. Lies and truth inform Laddy’s values, define the poles of his moral compass. Gradually, through Ianto’s stories and the light they shine on the people around him, he begins to learn about human nature.

The stories that Ianto tells are fantastic ones, richly inventive, pleasingly strange. We have a woodwork teacher who obsessively carves wooden leaves, trying to make one which will float on an up-draught; there is Half Harris, “born twice”, presumed dead at birth and buried in a shallow grave, only to be dug up again by his mother and found to be alive; and the undertaker and deputy librarian following a straight line from the back of the pub all the way through the town; a window in a derelict chapel which is cleaned with fallen leaves each autumn by succeeding generations of one of the victims of Kindly Light; poor Batty Annie with her net, trying to catch the essence of her long-dead child; and Ianto himself, troubled, pained, a much better human being than he seems prepared to accept.

All of this could easily descend into whimsy, the sort of high imagination and grand plotting that eventually came to give magic realism a bad name. But Vanessa Gebbie has laboured long over The Coward’s Tale – more than five years, apparently – and has polished it into something rich and worthwhile. The stories, the tales of these families, come together in a powerful way. Again and again we see the legacy of pain visited on future generations: Icarus making his wooden leaves because his father, and his grandfather before him, declared that only when he makes one which floats can a man truly call himself a carpenter; Factual Philips, the deputy librarian, echoing the strident seriousness of his father and grandfather by ensuring that young boys do not play in his library; Baker Barnes, a chiropodist still living in the old bakery abandoned by his grandfather, the original Baker Barnes who was so affected by Kindly Light that he could never bake again; and so on. The traumas experienced by the town in the disaster ravel around it through succeeding years, binding three generations into a web of silent pain.

But breaking through the silence is Ianto Passchaendale Jenkins, the storyteller. He tells his stories and finds a ready audience in young Laddy. With great humour, he reveals the pains of the locals and, gradually, those inherited memories begin to ease. Baker Barnes learns to bake; the descendent of the thief Billy Little finds atonement; Factual Philips closes his library and enjoys himself. This is the act of telling as catharsis; the town is beginning to rediscover itself, its peace, a sense of equilibrium. But more than this: Laddy, Ianto’s audience, is writing down the tales, memorialising them and, in the process, releasing them from the active, living memories of the descendants, allowing those people to finally break free from the tyranny of family history. An oral memory kept by Ianto is written down by Laddy and, in this, one wonders whether this boy, the scribe of their history, stands closer to the author than even the author realises. The novel cycles to a fine climax with the tale of Ianto Jenkins himself, told by the most unlikely of storytellers. In the process, another barrier is breached by the power of communication, and it is this insistence on shared experience, on mutual understanding, which becomes the lasting memory of a very fine novel indeed.

Because of my own circumstances, studying American literature, I don’t read a lot of British fiction. My perception, almost as an outsider, is that the view of some critics that the English novel is small and insular and lacking in ambition is probably correct. Certainly, the strain exemplified by On Chesil Beach or The Sense of An Ending suggests a particular, miniaturist approach to the business. Such novels are Vermeer-like, aiming to cast a light on the general by obsessive examination of the specific, burrowing ever deeper into a single story, an isolated moment, in search of meaning. It is an approach that can be beautiful, for sure, achingly so, but it can never hope to reflect the ragtag boisterousness of human community. For that, we need a Breughel, a visionary who sees the totality of a scene and catalogues it for us, warts and piss and all. Vanessa Gebbie’s vision is undoubtedly Brueghelian: she captures an entire community and makes it live. There is a robustness about this novel that is very impressive. Its humour is bold and finely tuned. This author cares about her characters and they become real in her hands. There is certainly no lack of ambition here. If the English novel is indeed small and insular, long live the English-Welsh novel, because The Coward’s Tale is most definitely not that.

All I want for Christmas is...

2011-11-10T07:00:00.001Z

1. To learn how to fry an egg without turning it into scrambled egg.
2. To have those three days back from September when I was laid up in bed with something unspecified, so that I can do something more useful with them.
3. Not to receive any socks, pants, vests, scarves, gloves or Parker Pens.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
4. A ticket to the 2012 Scottish Cup Final, featuring the mighty Perth St Johnstone and the losing finalists.
5. The Passenger to finally appear in print.
6. Planxty to reform for one final concert, ideally at Beverley Folk Festival.
7. Home for Christmas by my old online writing pal Cally Taylor, published today.
Congratulations on book number two Cally...

Beth Prince has always loved fairytales and now, aged twenty-four, she feels like she's finally on the verge of her own happily ever after. She lives by the seaside, works in the Picturebox - a charming but rundown independent cinema - and has a boyfriend who's so debonair and charming she can't believe her luck! There's just one problem - none of her boyfriends have ever told her they love her and it doesn't look like Aiden's going to say it any time soon. Desperate to hear 'I love you' for the first time Beth takes matters into her own hands - and instantly wishes she hadn't. Just when it seems like her luck can't get any worse, bad news arrives in the devilishly handsome shape of Matt Jones. Matt is the regional director of a multiplex cinema and he's determined to get his hands on the Picturebox by Christmas. Can Beth keep her job, her man and her home or is her romantic-comedy life about to turn into a disaster movie?

World Book Night 2012

2011-11-09T18:19:00.004Z

I've just seen the titles selected for World Book Night 2012. They are:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Vintage)
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks (Little, Brown)
Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Transworld)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Harper Collins)
The Take by Martina Cole (Headline)
Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell (Harper Collins)
Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (Penguin)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Penguin)
Room by Emma Donoghue (Pan Macmillan)
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Little, Brown)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
Misery by Stephen King (Hodder)
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (Transworld)
Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Quercus)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Pan Macmillan)
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Vintage)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O?Farrell (Headline)
The Damned Utd by David Peace (Faber)
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (Transworld)
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (Penguin)
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (Vintage)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (Vintage)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Transworld)

That strikes me as a very odd list. Pride and Prejudice? That book has probably done more to ruin good reading habits than any other book. How many schoolchildren, especially boys, have been forced to read that bloody book at just the wrong moment in their lives and have thereby formed a negative view of reading? It's the last book you'd want to be promoting in this sort of event. Likewise Dickens. Those aren't entry level books. It's simply muddle-headed to put them in this sort of promotion.

And as for the others, I fear there are far too many "book club" titles like The Time Traveller's Wife and Room and Small Island and The Book Thief, which you see multiple copies of in every charity shop on the High Street. I'm somewhat ambivalent about WBD anyway - I don't think there's much to be gained by giving the impression that books can be considered a free commodity to be given away in their thousands - but this list doesn't help to enthuse me.

Making tracks

2011-10-29T02:33:00.004+01:00

Amazingly, three and a half weeks in the US have gone, and it's time to make tracks back to Blighty. It's been a lot of fun, but back now to an English winter...

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

2011-10-27T03:48:00.002+01:00

I remember once writing a story in Boot Camp that I was very pleased with. It resembled a swinging sixties movie – multiple viewpoints, dizzying jumps in perspective and point of view, narratives all over the place, timeframes all but unfathomable. Anyone familiar with the Boot camp environment will readily anticipate the beasting that story got. And rightly, too.

I was put in mind of this by Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is a rollicking yarn and highly entertaining, finely written and beautifully characterised but, my God, it chooses a convoluted way to present itself. Firstly it’s narrated by two people, the eponymous Parrot and Olivier, the former a nineteenth century jack-the-lad with a distinct skill for engraving and the latter a hilariously haughty remnant of the ancien regime, Olivier de Garmont. Now there’s nothing unusual about this: contrasting narrators have a long and noble history. But, in addition to this, Carey chooses also to switch about his time frames so that, for example, we have been with Parrot for some considerable time in America before we realise that between then and the time we had previously seen him, in England, he had been not only in France but had spent seven years of penal servitude in Australia. Overall, it works, but nonetheless the playing about with timeframes feels a trifle tricksy to me – postmodern experimentation for the hell of it. I don’t think the novel needs it.

However, let’s not quibble. This is great entertainment. Of the two mains, the first to attract is undoubtedly Parrot, the put-upon, lowly English boy who has a talent for engraving and forgery that is greater than even he realises. He is a free spirit and witty and, despite his youth, a bit roguish. In comparison, Olivier de Garmont is a horrendous snob, scion of a family devoted to the French royalty throughout the periods of tyranny, but not a boy or man given much to bravery or thoughts of anyone other than himself. It is to Carey’s credit that, by the end, we have come to like this difficult, arrogant man. So much so, in fact, that it comes as a relief when the increasingly fractious and self-pitying Parrot’s sections of the novel conclude and we can return to the French master and his increasingly complex travails.

The two men, reluctant master and even more reluctant servant, are despatched, for mostly political reasons, from France to America, ostensibly to make a study of the American management of penal institutions. Garmont, born into a life of indolent luxury, is incomprehending of the brash new Americans, with their grand ideas and obsession with making money. He is a man lost, far removed from anything which he can understand or respect or aspire to. And then he meets Amelia Godefroy, an American gal with stunning good looks, a forthright nature and the temperament of a minx. He falls in love. His life changes. That is one of those cliches of romantic fiction, of course, but in this case it is true: Amelia does change Olivier, but not in the way either he or we might expect. It makes him a grander person. Still impossible, of course, still congenitally unable to see anything from another’s perspective, but nonetheless slightly, movingly, humbled.

This is a very funny book. The interplay of the two characters, so different, initially so antipathetic, is wonderfully done. Of course, over time, they come to an accommodation that is almost affectionate. It works very well. Garmont softens, his experience in America instilling in him an unexpected regard for the possibilities of democracy. But only to an extent, of course: a complete transformation in a man so steeped in privilege and class would be impossible. Accordingly, near the novel’s end, this is brilliantly and hilariously drawn out when what otherwise could have been a mawkish reconciliation scene is rendered both funny and poignant by onrushes of Garmont’s overweening sense of entitlement, much to the indignation of the newly landed Parrot.

At times Carey uses the novel to make cheap pot-shots at American culture, using the benefit of anachronism to plant prophetic statements into the mouths of his protagonists. But he’s an Australian living in New York, so I guess he’s allowed. And some of those comments are telling. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but it contains inherent dangers. And, since the novel is intended to be an improvised account of the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, that seems a worthy avenue to explore.

I just wonder whether it needed such a tortuous narrative form?

Attention to detail

2011-10-25T03:21:00.003+01:00

The one place you really want attention to detial is at a tattoo parlour.

Texas wildlife

2011-10-25T03:18:00.003+01:00

The birds are kind of intimidating here in Texas...

It kindly stepped out of the way for me, but if it hadn't I was quite prepared to climb off the road myself to get past...

And the Booker winner is...

2011-10-19T03:29:00.003+01:00

Congratulations to Julian Barnes on winning this year's Booker prize.

Readers of this blog will know I wasn't (and am still not) of the opinion that this is prize winning literature.

I have two big reservations. Firstly, a plot development which is absolutely crucial is, in my opinion, an absolute clunker. The main character is left something highly personal in a will. This is such a strange thing it makes one ask questions. But if one does ask the crucial question there is really only one answer, and it ruins the ending. I saw the ending a mile off.

Secondly, the character of the female lead is beyond strange. She acts in such an irrational way it completely pulls me out of the fictive dream. Her behaviour is so far from reasonable it simply doesn't work. Remember, the events which brought about the situation that informs the novel's conclusion happened many years before. So she's not suffering from shock. No, she does not strike me as in any way a credible character.

It's a pity, because there's some beautiful writing in The Sense of an Ending, as you would expect from Julian Barnes. He really ought to have won it for Arthur and George, the year the prize disappeared up the pompous arse of John Banville.

Storytelling

2011-10-17T03:46:00.002+01:00

This is Woody Guthrie's The Ballad of Tom Joad, based on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:

Although Steinbeck appreciated Guthrie's abilities, on the subject of this song he is reported as saying: “Took me years to do Grapes of Wrath and that little squirt tells the whole story in just a few stanzas.”

It's hard not to be sympathetic with Steinbeck. This song is simply remarkable in the way it distils a huge novel into a mere six or so minutes. In this, Guthrie's effort is similar to those nameless singers who gave us the legacy of the muckle sangs, the big songs in the folk repertoire. Listen to The Ballad of Tom Joad, and then to some of the muckle sangs like Glenlogie,or Tam Lin and you can see the same literary skill at work. These are the product of genius. The concision is extraordinary.

There are only two flaws in Woody's song. Firstly, the lack of Ma Joad. She is the absolute centre of the novel, but she only appears in passing in the song. That's probably not surprising, however, because I suspect the character of Ma Joad was far before her time. Indeed, Steinbeck intended Tom Joad to be the central character of Grapes of Wrath, not Ma, but it was she who stole the novel: women weren't meant to be the dominant ones in the 1930s (and have things changed that much? Probably not) but this woman simply burst through the novel and took it over.

And secondly, that ending. How could you not include the ending, when Rose of Sharon, previously a petulant, selfish, self-absorbed child, becomes a figure of salvation, a woman of honour, a beacon of hope. It is an extraordinary scene, and it should have been included.

Of course, Woody based the song on John Ford's film rather than Steinbeck's novel, and he probably never read the novel. I haven't seen the film so I don't know if that ending is reproduced in it. Anyone know?

Space and signs

2011-10-17T00:22:00.001+01:00

Two things about America - wide roads and lots of advertising hoardings.

Texas morning

2011-10-17T00:21:00.000+01:00

Ever get the feeling you're being watched?

2011-10-17T00:20:00.002+01:00

Huck Finn - alive and fishing

2011-10-17T00:18:00.001+01:00

The new Murakami

2011-10-15T06:05:00.004+01:00

After reading the absolutely dreadful After Dark, and before that the pretty awful Kafka on the Shore, I promised I wouldn't read any more Haruki Murakami. But I'm a recidivist, I admit it. His new novel, in three volumes, comes out this week and I'm itching to get at it. I'll have to wait, though, since I'm in the States at the moment and, even if it's published here at the same time, I don't think I want to carry it all the way back home with me. So why am I so interested?

Well, I absolutely adored A Wild Sheep Chase when I first read it. Admittedly, when I re-read it I wasn't so enamoured, but I'm happy to stick with my first emotional response to it. And Norwegian Wood was beautiful, heartbreaking. And when I first read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle I was gobsmacked. The second time I read it I still thought it was amazing. That's the benchmark. And that's why I was so hugely disappointed by Kafka on the Shore, which read like a nobody trying to write like Murakami. And After Dark, similarly, was like someone trying to re-write Norwegian Wood.

So can he do it again, or will he still be stuck in Murakami-pastiche-land, complete with cats and wells and an enigmatic girl/woman and temporal disturbances and Japanese recipes? The sheer scale of 1Q84 makes me hopeful that this will be something meaty.

There's an interview with him in the Guardian today. There are a couple of interesting points:

To Murakami, built like a little bull, [writing is] a question of strength. "It's physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong."

I think there's something in that. My writing tutor, Alex Keegan, has always forced on his students the mantra of write, write, write. Murakami wrote this 1000 page novel in 3 years. That's a slog. Most aspiring writers simply couldn't come close to it. It's hard work, writing. And Murakami goes on:

"Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It's a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door. So it's literally physical strength to open and shut the door. So if I lose that strength, I cannot write a novel any more. I can write some short stories, but not a novel."

This is more than simply the hard graft of writing. This is about opening yourself up to what it is you want to write about, or what you need to write about. Going back to AK, he talks about the sentinels, those parts of your subconscious defence mechanisms which try to stop you from probing the stuff you really need/want to explore. This is the same concept as Murakami's big, heavy door. How much do you want to let go? That's the really big question for a writer. How much of a risk do I want to take? The big risk-takers could become great writers. Those who don't take the risks probably won't.

Drought, what drought?

2011-10-09T22:48:00.003+01:00

The easy answer to the drought which has beset Texas for the past five months: send a Scotsman there on holiday. The night before I arrived the rains began...

Big place, Arkansas

2011-10-09T22:45:00.002+01:00

Taken from a Greyhound bus (in which I had the pleasure of spending 25 long hours...):

Our friend Sut?

2011-10-09T22:40:00.005+01:00

Outside the bank in Knoxville, home of Buddy Suttree, fisherman:

Bert Jansch

2011-10-05T19:34:00.002+01:00

Bert Jansch has died. A giant of British folk music, it's hard to estimate how influential he was. A superb guitarist, a singular singer.

This was the best song on his last album, recorded back in 2006.

States-ward

2011-10-04T20:23:00.002+01:00

Heading off in a couple of days to the US for three and a half weeks. Kicking off in Knoxville for a couple of days and then heading down to deepest Texas for the rest of the time. Hope the fires have gone out down there... I'm aiming to resist the temptation to buy a stetson, and cowboy boots are definitely out - not with my feet...

Reports as and when, I expect.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

2011-10-04T20:15:00.002+01:00

Modernism, eh, what’s it all about? For Marinetti art is violence, cruelty and injustice. Fellow Futurists Zdanevich and Larionov described painting as the newsman, recording the ephemeral change of us all. For Eliot, the poet must remove his own personality from the work. Kandinsky the expressionist accused people of being blind and resistant to the new. Ortega y Gasset wanted the dehumanisation of art. Max Nordau said we were in the middle of a severe mental epidemic, with “clubs of suicides” in every city. For Rimbaud, the poet was the thief of fire and language contained everything. All of them fighting against something, all of them seemingly standing outside everything. After all that, that forced and enforced and forceful alienation, what is left of art, literature, the mimetic interpretation of human life? Is the human still there, beneath the stylisation, the despair, the isolation? Or is modernism a self-fulfilling prophesy of human loss and fractured community?

Modernism seems to be characterised by a surfeit of straining. Everything must be presented in terms of the battle between life and art, or life and death, or nature and humanity, or nature and religion or something-this and something-that. Modernism is life made binary, and within the limiting poles of that binary reduction, emotion is rendered into struggle. Fear in a handful of dust, a crowd flowing over London Bridge, so many undone by death, so many.

Some of that can be seen in the works of Nathanael West, and yet, for me, he transcends the limitations of other modernist writers. How? I’m not sure, but I think it is by his insistent satirical bent. There is nothing arch about his satire. It hasn’t mutated into the tedious knowingness which blights post-modernism, for example. Nor, for all the violence in his novels, is there outright cruelty in the satire. And there is, above all, something human about it: his characters, grotesques and caricatures though they may be, devoid of rational thought, unable to see beyond their own limitations, still somehow manage to feel human. You care about the almost catatonically passive Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust. You probably shouldn’t, but you do. Likewise Faye Greener, who appears to have few redeeming features other than her great beauty, but who still instils in the reader something more than mere priapic desire. Where, in other modernist works, characters become subsumed within the debased culture which is being examined, so that they become as flat and debased as that culture itself, in Nathanael West’s fiction his characters seem to be on lonely crusades for something – decency perhaps, hope, aspiration. And the reason that happens, I think, is the insistent humour which pervades the work, humour derived from the author as narrator but also from the characters as protagonists. West, like James Purdy, is simultaneously funny on different levels.

Oddly, though, a bald summary of the plot would not give the impression of a humorous novel. Rather, it would suggest a novel of great loneliness, of fractured ideals and ambitions. Individually, the characters are a ragbag of losers: Tod Hackett is an artist who struggles between the naturalism of his training and a sense of “moral indignation” which he wishes to portray, in the manner of Goya or Daumier, through works like the apocalyptic Burning of Los Angeles. He is hopelessly in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring but failed actress, luminously beautiful but impossibly vacuous, reduced, finally to prostitution. Her father is Harry Greener, another failed actor, hamming his way through life as a door-to-door salesman, whose best performance may or may not be the heart attack he may or may not be experiencing. Homer Simpson is an accountant whose connection with reality appears to have been severed, whose idealism and naivety makes him the perfect foil for charlatans and neer-do-wells. We also have Texan Earle Shoop, a man short of intelligence or charisma or charm; Abe Kusich, a dwarf with a vile temper and tendency to repel those who wish to help; and Miguel, the Mexican with criminal leanings, taking advanatage wherever possible, drawing Homer and Faye among others, under his spell. As you see, then, not an impressive array of characters. The community of broken dreams and broken people in The Day of the Locust is as extreme as may be found anywhere in fiction. I began by asking if modernism is a self-fulfilling prophesy of human loss and fractured community. Well perhaps. The end of The Day of the Locust gives us:

all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super "Dr. Know- All Pierce - All" had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.

It is not a great stretch to see, from this, a descent into Nuremberg and its rallies, or to extend into the future and see, once the dance is over, the nothingness of McCarthy’s The Road. So am I arguing that this is a pessimistic novel, that its message is one of unmitigated despair? No. I don’t believe that, and I don’t feel it when I read Nathanael West. Why is that?

There is a sense of pathos running throughout the novel. You don’t pity the characters, as such – that would be distancing, creating a barrier between them and the reader. But a generalised sense of pity, or regret, or basic sadness seems to infest them, and their humour and the humour that surrounds them becomes bittersweet, poignant. While laughing at the situations, you wish they weren’t so; while enjoying the characters, you wonder how they could get more pleasure frohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifm life if they could step outside their illusions. You cannot help these people but, given the chance, you might wish to try. It is the Pinnochio principle, perhaps. These puppets want to be real and that, the only real thing about them, is what makes them so endearing.

And here, West turns some alchemical magic on the reader as well, because we become complicit in the characters’ dreams. They won’t change: West knows that, we know that; like Jacques the Fatalist, whatever plot diversions life may throw at them, they will finally veer back on to the same, lonely by-road down which they were always destined to travel. That is the way of all of us, perhaps, but, through his sad and lonely characters, Nathanael West allows us the luxury of dreaming otherwise, if only for a little while.

Adam, One Afternoon by Italo Calvino

2011-09-29T17:48:00.004+01:00

Adam, One Afternoon is a collection of short stories by Italo Calvino. The early stories are whimsical, mostly light, but as the collection goes on they grow gradually darker. An almost bucolic peace gives way to war and war ushers in a sense of harshness, of difficulty. Later, the wartime scenarios disappear, but that sense of harshness remains.

Most of the stories are based on Calvino’s experiences in the Second World War, in which he fought for the partisans of the Garibaldi Bridgade against the Germans. The stories, written early in his career, are largely neo-realist: Calvino described neo-realism as a “literature of war” and the collective voice of a generation, those brought up under the influence of Fascism and, later, the Second World War.

Nonetheless, he states that his work is derived from images rather than ideas. And, certainly, the stories in Adam, One Afternoon are strikingly visual. Most are essentially fairy tales. Themes and ideas are recycled, giving the individual stories a sense of cohesion. For example, in the title story animals are collected and given as presents, in The Crow Comes Last animals are shot one by one, while in Animal Wood they appear unexpectedly but people intercede to prevent them being shot. The same subject matter, woven differently.

Thre is something vaguely unsettling in the way that in stories which are essentially fantastic or whimsical a sense of realism breaks through while, in the neo-realist work, a sense of the fantastic may still pervade. It gives a sense of ethereality to the work, neither realist nor fantastic, but occupying its own, unique ground. Accordingly, we often see action through the eyes of a child, or someone otherwise an outsider, not cognisant of the political nature of the bloody events that unfold. Always, an otherworldy sense seems to pertain.

The final story, The Argentine Ant, the only one of substantial length, is almost magic-realist in its depiction of ants overwhelming a family and their house. It is beautifully written in a plain style which neatly counterpoints the oddity of the story. And, like so many of the stories here, it ends with a glimpse of the infinite.

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

2011-09-28T17:35:00.003+01:00

Rose Mae Lolley was a character in Joshilyn Jackson’s first novel, gods in Alabama. As sometimes happens to writers, a seemingly minor character suddenly takes on a life of his or her own and the author can’t escape them. It usually happens within the same novel – witness Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, who ended up its principal character although that role was meant to be played by her son Tom. In this case, Rose Mae’s true story only revealed itself to the author much later, hence the new novel, Backseat Saints, which attempts to explain why the feisty young girl who played an incidental role in the first novel was quite so odd.

Jackson is on record as being a fan of Flannery O’Connor – to the extent, she says, that she made Rose Mae Roman Catholic in tribute – and one can certainly see the influence. This is southern grotesque-lite, though. That’s not to say there isn’t extreme violence in Backseat Saints, because there’s plenty of it, and it’s particularly nasty, too, but what is missing is the spiritual intensity, the haunted and haunting search for redemption and grace which echoes through O’Connor’s humorous prose. I don’t intend that as a criticism of Jackson (or as praise for O’Connor), because I think Jackson is a highly talented writer, but if people approach this expecting O’Connorish insight, they will not get it.

Rose Mae is a confused and unhappy person. As an eight-year-old child, her mother fled her abusive husband, leaving Rose Mae behind. Rose Mae becomes the surrogate punchbag, before escaping herself as soon as she is old enough. As well as the physical damage, however, there are emotional scars, the result of which is that Rose May meanders down Route 66, seeking out one abusive partner after another. Something inside compels her.

She hits the jackpot with Thom Grandee, a Texan football jock whose initial charm conceals a furious and violent temper. They marry and Rose Mae becomes Ro Grandee: almost literally so – in her near psychotic state she becomes a new person, and the real Rose Mae is submerged beneath Ro, who is a chilling mixture of would-be perfect wife and out-of-control trouble-seeker. It is a dichotomy that is all too familiar in women who find themselves in such positions. They seem to need the edge, the danger, the erotic charge set off by these abusive relationships, but finally, always, an end is reached which goes far beyond any complicit agreement and they are overwhelmed by the violence. It is a vicious spiral from which it is desperately difficult to escape. Any outsider will be nonplussed by why women (and sometimes men) stay in such relationships, but evidence show that they do, time and time again. Accordingly, Ro lives a life of marital bliss punctuated by hideous violence, regularly ending up in hospital, where she is warned by the nurse that the next time could be the last. The reader comes to believe this could be true.

Although that sounds like a grim premise for a plot, Backseat Saints is a fast-paced, highly entertaining and often very funny read. It is painful, certainly, but gripping too. After a tarot reading by what appears to be a gypsy fortune teller, Ro is warned that she will have to either kill her husband or be killed herself. She tries to do so and fails. Her life begins to unravel. The trail of chaos leads her back to her home in Alabama, to her father, her real self, the truth of the violence that smoulders within her. She takes to the road, both in flight and in search. What she discovers changes everything.

Backseat Saints is a good book. I could do without every female character ending up a victim of abuse in some way – that is overegging it, I fear, making the plot appear contrived at points and, in a way, lessening the impact of the genuinely awful violence that does occur. What particularly appeals to me about the novel, however, is the way that, although it begins as a study of domestic violence, it gradually broadens impressively into a wider analysis of family relationships in general. The central relationship here is not between Ro and her husband. I won’t say more than that to save spoiling the plot, but it is a brave leap, and one which could easily have gone disastrously wrong. Jackson gets it right.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

2011-09-26T18:18:00.003+01:00

The Grapes of Wrath divided opinion when it was first published. Some declared it a masterpiece, others dismissed it as crude propoganda. Charles Angoff, in his contemporaneous review, noted:

There should be rejoicing in that part of Hell where the souls of great American imaginative writers while away their time, for at long last a worthy successor to them has appeared in their former terrestrial abode. With his latest novel Mr. Steinbeck at once joins the company of Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Norris, and easily leaps to the forefront of all his contemporaries. [The Grapes of Wrath] has all the earmarks of something momentous, monumental, and memorable: universal compassion, a sensuousness so honestly and recklessly tender that even the Fathers of the Church would probably have called it spiritual; and a moral anger against the entire scheme of things that only the highest art possesses.

High praise indeed, it wasn’t all uncritical acclaim: the novel was banned in Kansas and in Kern County, California (location of the Weedpatch camp in which the Joads stayed in the novel). In St Louis not only was it banned but the librarian was ordered to burn copies that had already been purchased. H. Kelly Crockett, a student in Oklahoma at the time of the novel’s publication, recalled in an article twenty years later that a common criticism of the novel at the time was that it was propogandist and, once the situation that had called into being the events it portrayed had been overcome, it would be read merely as a historical curiosity. Crockett’s conclusion, after twenty years, was that this had proved not to be the case and the novel retained its literary power. Seventy-plus years on, is that still the case? The fortunes of any novel wax and wane, and such is the case for The Grapes of Wrath. A largely positive review by Edward Galligan of the 1989 fiftieth anniversary reprint still balked at “purple prose, melodramatic plotting, and sentimental thinking,”, and enough “hamminess” to make us “gag at the prospect of rereading it.” Today, then, while Steinbeck is still read, it is mostly Of Mice and Men, while The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps out of favour. I would suggest that, for all the novel’s faults, this is a pity.

Frank Eugene Cruz suggests that most criticism of the novel categorises it in one of four ways – as a story of migration, a recasting of Christian themes and motifs, a work of social protest or a powerful, sentimental epic. And the latter three representations are, in part, responsible for some of the ambivalence with which we tend to confront the book today. The Christian moralising and socialist rhetoric which some discern in it are too didactic: and it is true that, at times, Steinbeck batters us with his message where some subtlety would have been more effective. The unfairness, for example, of the way the farm owners used the surplus of men to drive down pay does not become any more unfair because we read of it three or four or five or six times: it was unfair the first time and the reader could have been trusted to intuit that. And the sentimentality that gives rise to Edward Galligan’s gagging at the prospect of re-reading it is certainly an issue. But, nonetheless, I would argue that The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel.

What makes it so, for me, is the interconnectedness of those different categories that people ascribe to it. It is all of the things that people have described it as, but it is all of them in combination. If it can be read as a Christian narrative, then it is a highly political Christian narrative, as Stephen Bullivant demonstrates when he points to the novel’s connection of being a “red” with Jesus Christ, in the form of Jim Casy. Similarly, Stephen Railton suggests that Steinbeck’s use of Christianity, in the form of Casy, is a way of insinuating a revolutionary vision of militant socialism. Railton appears to posit this as a criticism, but for me the way the novel gives religious ideas political resonances is one of its great strengths. In any case, politics and religion are backdrops in the novel – essential, unavoidable, but backdrops nonetheless – and the central message is neither purely political nor religious, but rather about the nature of humanity and the need for community. And that transcends everything.

While there is a strongly religious element to The Grapes of Wrath, it is not straightforward. Stephen Bullivant notes a letter from Steinbeck to his editor in which he states that he wants “all all all” the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to be printed at the start of the novel. The repeated alls demonstrate that he is adamant on the point and Bullivant therefore makes a study of the complete song in order to understand why. He notes particularly the final verse:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make me free,
While God is marching on.

Bullivant is drawn to the third line, noting that, in religious terms, the concept of dying “to make men free” is novel. Martyrdom, in the Gospels, is a transcendent event rewarded by personal salvation; “making men free” suggests more of an immanent event. Such notions, of course, would have appalled social conservatives such as Eric Voegelin or Leo Strauss, suggesting, for them, the hubris of mankind, but there is nothing hubristic about The Grapes of Wrath. Far from it, there is a deep note of pessimism sounding throughout it. It may be replete with Christ figures – Casy, Tom, even Rose of Sharon – but the freedom granted by Jesus’s death is still, in Steinbeck’s vision, a highly qualified one.

Tamara Rombold gives a persuasive account of inversions of the Bible story throughout The Grapes of Wrath, from the superb depiction of drought in the first chapter (an inversion, she argues, of the Creation story) to Exodus (unlike the Israelites who were spared the plagues, the Oklahoma drought blights everyone), to Moses in the bullrushes (Rose of Sharon’s baby cast dead into the water) to the final scene, after the apocalypse of the flood, with Rose of Sharon in the barn with the starving man, reminiscent of Isiaiah, and the New Heavens and the New Earth.

Rombold then draws on Jim Casy’s soujourn in the wilderness “like Jesus”, in which he realises the call of a new spirit, which he calls love. She makes persuasive allusions to Casy’s Christ-like behaviour in his arrest and death scenes. Curiously, though, she makes no mention of probably Casy’s most important speech, just prior to his death. In this, Casy himself makes an inversion of Jesus’s walk into the wilderness. The truth isn’t in the wilderness, says Casy, it is here, in the community, among the people. This is where he finds his soul. An this resonates clearly with Tom, of course, because it forms the basis of much of his later conversation with Ma Joad (and this exchange is related by Rombold), in which he reveals his intention to leave and follow Casy’s example, leading the community against the travails forced on them by the system. Thus, we have in Casy and Tom, two representation of Jesus. Casy, the pure-of-heart lover of humanity, a man who dies for his beliefs, is an earthly Jesus figure, preaching virtue and honesty and decency. Tom is at once his disciple and a symbol of the risen Christ, the one who is “with you always, even unto the end of the world” as it is written in Matthew. Or, as Tom says to Ma:

"Then it don't matter. Then I'll be aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where- wherever you look. Whenever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. If Casey knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an' I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build - why I'll be there."

Casy, then, can be seen as Jesus, while Tom is Christ. And the gospel they preach is a radical one. As Casy says to Tom:

"There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things people do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say . . . What is this thing called sperit? ... It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust sometimes - an' I want to make them happy - maybe it's all men an' all women we love; Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."

For all that, though, I don’t believe The Grapes of Wrath should be read as a Christian novel. It is, if anything, a humanist novel. There are clear Christian resonances, and central characters may be comparable with Christ-figures, but that is because the fundamental tenets of Christian religion such as fairness, sense of community and so on, borrowed as they are from pre-Christian Platonic thought, are equally relevant to modern humanist belief. And so you might consider the novel christian, in the sense of evoking an ideal of human decency, but not Christian, as in following the doctrinal beliefs of any Church of Christ. As Casy says, “Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” Thus, the titular grapes of wrath are not those of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the spirit inside man which will rise against oppression and exploitation. Casy is no longer a Preacher of God but remains, throughout, a preacher of men for men.

Similarly, despite its sometimes overwhelming didacticism, in the end The Grapes of Wrath is not a political novel either. Politics is simply a by-product of Steinbeck’s true interest, which is human nature and human beings, the human community. In the 1930s, the prevailing difficulties which beset humanity were political, and that is therefore what he wrote about. It is Ma Joad who makes one of the novel’s most telling points: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody.” And earlier, she says: "I'm learnin' one thing good. Learnin' it all a time, ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help – the only ones."

Warren Motley, writing in 1982, complains that much of the novel’s critisism until then had focused on Casy and Tom as the core of the film and that the central role of Ma Joad in explaining the family’s gradual realisation of the need for community and cooperation is underplayed. I would agree, and I suggest that Ma Joad is one of the great characters of American fiction. She develops throughout the novel and her gradual assumption of both actual and moral control over her family is beautifully drawn. She is superb. Motley draws on the writing of Robert Briffault to explain the sense of matriarchy as exemplified by Ma Joad’s growing sense of authority over her clan as defining a relationship of cooperation, as opposed to the typical patriarchal relationships based on power. And it is through this that one can sense a note of optimism in a largely pessimistic book. "Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on."

And what a wonderful rallying cry that is.

Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner

2011-09-21T19:40:00.003+01:00

Intruder in the Dust begins with a curious incident in which sixteen-year-old Charles “Chick” Mallison, a local boy and nephew of lawyer Gavin Stevens, is rescued after falling into an icy creek. His rescuer is Lucas Beauchamp, the black grandson of Carothers McCaslin, a white land planter and patriarch of the McCaslin family. He puts the boy into dry clothes and gives him his own supper, and thereafter the two find themselves embroiled in a peculiar game of one-upmanship. Realising the food was Lucas’s, and therefore nigger food, and recognising the “nigger smell” in the house, Chick does not wish to be beholden to a black man and tries to pay for the food with a handful of coins. Lucas refuses to accept and there is a stand-off before Chick lets the money fall from his hand to scatter on the floor. Angrily, Lucas orders him to pick it up and Chick and his black friend, Aleck Sander, do so in cowed submission. Chick now feels, however, that he has ended up the loser in the exchange and defeat consumes him to the extent that he saves his money for months to buy Lucas’s wife, Molly, a silk dress. He is now satisfied he is no longer in debt to a black man but is soon trumped when Lucas responds by sending him a gallon bucket of fresh homemade sorghum molasses.

It is only at the novel’s conclusion that the full import of this humorous interlude becomes clear. It is a metaphorical replay of the racial tensions attendant in the South, the refusal of the white man to afford the black man the dignity of equality. Chick, still a child, parrots the words he hears around him: “If [Lucas] would just be a nigger first, just for one second, one little infinitesimal second,” he concludes, it would be easier to deal with him. In this way, Chick is complicit in extending the mores and customs of the old South into a new generation. By the novel’s conclusion, however, when he has learned to think for himself and reach independent judgements, such notions have been banished from his mind. At that point, Lucas and Chick enjoy a light-hearted discussion in which their mutual trust and admiration is clear. The boy Chick, symbolic of a new age, has matured and thrown off the ways of the past.

If all that sounds horribly naive, then be assured that there is tremendous depth and subtlety to Intruder in the Dust, certainly more than Faulkner has sometimes been given credit for. Taken individually, some of the characters might come close to being stock, but the interplay between them most certainly isn’t.

Lucas Beauchamp is what would have been called at the time an uppity nigger, and like many an uppity nigger his fancy ideas (for which, read a refusal to consider himself in any way inferior to the white folks around him) has plunged him into trouble. Specifically, he is arrested for the murder of a white man – and not just any white man, but Vinson Gowrie, one of the notorious Gowrie clan, “brawlers and foxhunters and whiskeymakers” who are feared throughout the county. A lynching is the most likely – indeed, possibly the only – outcome. Lucas is spared that fate, however, by an improbably (in the sense of heroic, not poorly characterised) resolute defence by the “little driedup wizened stonedeaf” old constable, Skipworth, who handcuffs Lucas to the bedpost and watches over him till Sheriff Hampton can arrive.

Lucas calls for Gavin Stevens to act as his lawyer and insists he will pay. Stevens, although a liberal, immediately assumes Lucas is guilty and doesn’t even allow him to speak, telling him instead that he should plead guilty and, because of his age and good character, he may get sent to the penitentiary instead of being hanged. Given this lack of support from his lawyer, it is not surprising, then, that Lucas turns not to Stevens, but to his nephew Chick for help. He reveals to the boy that Vinson Gowrie was not shot with the 41 Colt which was in Lucas’s possession when he was apprehended. The only way of proving this, however, is to dig up the body. Prisoner and boy make a compact, and at this moment the novel’s moral journey is set in train. Chick is accompanied on his dangerous mission by his friend, Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham, an eccentric old woman who was a childhood friend of Molly Beauchamp, and who hears Chick’s story and instinctively believes it to be true. “Lucas knew it would take a child – or an old woman like me [to reveal the truth],” she says, “someone not concerned with probability, with evidence.” Together, they dig up the grave and find it is occupied, not by Vinson Gowrie, but by Jake Montgomery, his erstwhile business colleague who, unknown to Gowrie, was cheating on him. They re-bury the body and contact Sheriff Hampton to explain what they have discovered. The sheriff orders an exhumation and this time finds the grave empty.

The plot unfolds as a literary murder mystery, in which the murderer is finally revealed to be Vinson’s own brother, Crawford. Instantly, the moral fervour of the lynch mob dissipates into something like embarrassment. What we are left with is an analysis of the racial tensions of the South in the 1940s and a debate on how and how fast to ensure integration. Those are complex questions, and Faulkner’s novel is suitably complex in its analysis.

As Doreen Fowler has noted, Stevens’ softly softly approach to racial integration corresponds to some extent with Faulkner’s own public utterances and this has led some commentators to speculate that Stevens can be read as Faulkner’s spokesperson. Fowler takes issue with this and so do I. By the novel’s conclusion, Stevens’ position is clearly portrayed in a less positive light than Chick’s. He was convinced, without any evidence, remember, of Lucas’s guilt. He is a good man though not necessarily a good lawyer, and he has a tendency to declaim higher truths without ever quite acting in a way to suggest these truths are part of the blood and bone and sinew of his moral being. This is not a man, perhaps, who would ever die for a cause. It might also be noted that in an earlier appearance, in Faulkner’s 1942 story collection, Go Down, Moses, he is seen running from the grieving circle of Beauchamps mourning the death of Mollie Beauchamp’s grandson. He is a man of words, then, but not necessarily a man of action. It is true that in public Faulkner urged a similarly cautious approach to integration, but these calls operate at a political or oratorical level, as represented here by Stevens: it is at the community level, however, in the life and soul and blood and toil of the people of the southern communities, that the real work of integration must take place. And that will be achieved, as we learn through the maturation of Chick as the story unfolds, by the people themselves, at a momentum they can maintain.

Thus, it is Chick who presents the moral centre of the novel. In helping Lucas, he goes from being a peevish child acting out the received wisdom of his parents’ generation towards a state where he views events with complete objectivity and decries what he sees. Stevens may be eloquent, but Chick is passionate. The distinction is instinctive. Stevens has taken a intellectual approach to the question of race and reached a logical conclusion that existing ways are wrong. They must be changed, he concludes, and things will change, “but it won't be next Tuesday.” This element of equivocation is absent from Chick, whose understanding of the need for equality appears to grow from a moral sense within him. Chick perhaps senses that Stevens’ approach, a gradual process of legalised equality, will never overcome the ingrained prejudice of the people he has witnessed in the ugly lynch mob: the typical liberal approach of attempting to drive societal change through legislation is doomed to failure because it presupposes that everyone can be made to think in the same, liberal manner. Chick recognises from the twisted anger in the faces of the lynch mob that this is an impossible dream.

And this is what the novel is concerned with: exposing the ghosts of the South’s racist past, revealing how they still held a malign sway over the lives of the population and the moral judgements of the community. Lucas Beauchamp would have been lynched purely because he was a black man who found himself in a particular situation.

However, although it is wrong to assume that Stevens is the author’s proxy in the novel, then it is equally wrong to think that Chick is. It would be a serious misreading of the novel to depict Chick as some sort of hero of mankind leading us to a new dawn of community and brotherly love. His may be the vision of natural justice, but remember it is only carried out through the bloody-mindedness (not to mention downright illegality) of the actions of Sheriff Hope and lawyer Gavin Stevens. As Ticien Marie Sassoubre notes, together they are complicit in “exhuming a body, hiding Lucas at the sheriff’s house, [and] entrapping the real killer” in order to protect Lucas.

Therefore, it may be that the noble triumvirate of old woman and black and white boys may be the ones who could cut through the “facts” and see the truth, but they would have been powerless to stop the lynch mob.

What we see, then, is an alliance of Stevens, Sheriff Hampton, Chick, Aleck Sander and Miss Haversham combining to rescue Lucas Beauchamp. And this is the central point of the novel: it is only a combination of law and community, force and will, experience and willingness, that can overcome the racial tensions which are so entrenched in southern communities. There is no individual hero of Intruder in the Dust, there can be none: without any one of the central characters, Lucas would have died. Instead, they work together and Lucas Beauchamp goes free. And it is worth, at this point, comparing Intruder in the Dust with another classic of pre-war southern society, To Kill A Mockingbird. At first sight, Gavin Stevens may be no Atticus Finch. He may share the same high-blown rhetoric, but does he have Atticus’s moral integrity? Perhaps not, but remember this: Lucas Beauchamp is freed in Intruder in the Dust but, for all Atticus Finch’s integrity and brilliance as a lawyer, Tom Robinson dies.

So it is a combination of people and circumstances and beliefs which can effect change. Moreover, it is clear that the beliefs of a new generation do not mysteriously appear, fully-formed and immediately comprehensible, out of nowhere. As philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy notes, “While this life stretches from the cradle to the grace the life span of an inspiration reaches from the middle of one man’s life to the middle of the life in the next generation.” This is the true message of Intruder in the Dust. Stevens may not have had the moral strength to act out his beliefs, but near the end he makes an important observation to Chick: “Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your pic¬ture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.” There is a preachiness of tone here which is typical of Stevens, but it is a noble sentiment all the same and one which, one feels, the boy Chick is ready to assume and develop in a way that is beyond his uncle. Stevens may say it: Chick may do it. Humans develop across generations and no generation, in itself, can effect profound change.

Best simile ever?

2011-09-20T20:37:00.001+01:00

The war twisted closely round and round in those valleys like a dog trying to bite its tail.

Italo Calvino. Fear on the Footpath.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2011-09-19T21:02:00.003+01:00

Memory and its fallibility is at the core of Julian Barnes’s novella The Sense of and Ending. Nothing can ever be fixed – not public history, not private biography, not truth, not emotion. Nothing is known for certain. Known knowns, in Rumsfeldian derivation, are nothing of the kind.

Tony Webster, the first-person narrator of the story, is one of a triumvirate of self-satisfied, clearly bright boys in the 1960s whose cozy world is forced to expand to include a fourth, altogether stranger, definitely brighter, boy called Adrian Finn. Where they have read Russell or Wittgenstein, Adrian has read Camus and Nietzsche, where Tony thinks a poem is about a barn owl, Adrian concludes it is about Eros and Thanatos, sex and death. By virtue of his intelligence Adrian becomes the de facto leader of the group and the newly constituted quartet go through school engaging in pretentious intellectual debates in which things are “philosophically self-evident”. The absolute certainty that teenagedom bestows is, for the boys, all-encompassing. Even their History teacher is cowed, telling Adrian that when he retires in five years time, he will provide Adrian with a reference for the job, if he wants it.

The boys grow up, go to university (different ones, Adrian to Cambridge, Tony merely to Bristol) and inevitably the bonds of friendship weaken. Tony takes up with a humourless girl called Veronica who takes him home to her charmless family (father a drunk, brother arrogant, mother strange) and their relationship appears to be as devoid of love as it certainly is (to Tony’s chagrin) of sex. They split up. They have sex. They split up again. Adrian writes to Tony to say that he and Veronica have begun seeing one another and hoping that Tony doesn’t object. Furiously, but somewhat inconsistently for such an equivocal character, Tony does object. He writes to say so, finishes his studies (a 2:1, steady from this steadiest of Eddys) and goes to America for six months. When he returns, he discovers that Adrian has committed suicide, leaving behind an eloquent suicide note explaining that he had not asked for life and had made the philosophical decision to renounce the gift. Tony regards this as heroic.

At this point the novella moves into the present, with Tony a retired, divorced, balding plodder through life. What follows is a slow unfurling of the past. A plot McGuffin is thrown in – Veronica’s mother dies and leaves Tony £500 and Adrian’s diary. This immediately begs one howlingly obvious question that would appear to have only one possible answer, but the reader is advised not to spend time thinking about it because to do so ruins the twist in the ending, which I’m afraid I found utterly predictable.

Before we reach this point, however, we are given a tour of the more outlandish behaviour characteristics of the seriously dysfunctional. All one can say about Tony and Veronica is that they deserve one another: two human beings less able to master the art of communication it is difficult to imagine. Veronica sets up a meeting, listens to Tony expatiate and walks away without a word. She takes him to an obscure location and confronts him with what appears to be a care-in-the-community day outing and when he, not unreasonably, appears uncertain as to the point of this, she accuses him of understanding nothing. She is so taken with this accusation she hurls it at him at every subsequent opportunity.

Perhaps I’m unfair on Barnes. Perhaps it is unfortunate that I’ve read this meditation on age and understanding and forgiveness in such close proximity to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, an altogether weightier work which also ponders those same questions. But The Sense of an Ending has been nominated for The Man Booker Prize. Indeed, it is the bookies’ favourite. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead. Barnes should not win the Booker for The Sense of an Ending. It is a decent book, but it is in no way special. I don’t believe it represents the best in current fiction. It doesn't even represent the best of Julian Barnes.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

2011-09-16T10:06:00.003+01:00

The setting of Marilynne Robinson's second novel is Iowa in 1956, specifically the small town of Gilead, a place that, even in the old-fashioned environs of the 1950s midwest, has slipped behind the times. "It's just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station, which is pretty well gone to weeds now." John Ames is its Congregationalist preacher, 77 years old, the third generation of his family to fulfil the role. Ames has been diagnosed with angina pectoris and is convinced of, if not resigned to, his imminent death. The novel takes the form of an extended letter to his six-year-old son, a child who, if Ames’s medical prognosis is correct, is destined to grow up largely without his father. The letter, then, is Ames’s attempt to form a connection with his boy, a connection that will only be consummated in a future he cannot share, a connection through which he will describe the man he is to the man his boy will become. Fathers and sons, then, connectedness, the human family through generations, this is what Gilead is about.

The letter begins as a record of “begats”, the family history, the chronicle of generations of fathers and sons (women do not feature prominently in Gilead; for the distaff narrative one must turn to Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping). Thus, we are introduced to his larger-than-life grandfather, a one-eyed Civil War firebrand who ran with John Brown and was active (violently so) in the abolitionist cause on the dangerous Iowa-Kansas border. Ames’s own father grows up in the shadow of this man, his father, and reacts against him in the way children do, by taking an opposite, equally strident point of view and becomes an avowed pacifist. He abhors the idea of men of God entreating people to fight and kill and be killed, however valid the cause. When he discovers the old man’s pistol he buries it, digs it up and buries it again, then digs it up again and destroys it before throwing it in the river. Nothing is strong enough to wash away the taint that pistol represents on his moral vision, no gesture will suffice. And yet he takes his own son, John Ames, on a pilgrimage to discover the grave of the old man, a complex inter-relationship of generations and beliefs and loyalties. Or, as Ames says in his epistle to his own son, the fourth generation, “A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” Elsewhere, he despairs, “We live in the ruins of the lives of other generations.” When, finally, they find the old man’s grave, overgrown and abandoned, Ames is not surprised to see that it looks “like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire."

So this is a novel about fathers and sons, but it is more than that and, accordingly, Ames’s letter to his son becomes more than just a litany of begats: in its pages, history and present, disappointment and hope, nature and faith, death and life begin to meld as Ames reaches out to the man he will never know. Facing mortality, he is much given to thoughts of what is to come, but he cannot take leave of the beautiful world he inhabits, is reluctant to leave behind his wife and son, is protective, jealous, proud of them. He does not want to leave. He does not want to be left. It is the most basic equation and the most basic human emotion there is, and it boils down to the simple but unfathomably complex concept of love. Ames, though he would probably be embarrassed to admit it, is a man in love.

And so he ponders questions of life and death, metaphysics, theology. This is a deeply spiritual book but its religion is a human thing or – if that may be a theological non-sequiteur – perhaps that is to say that while its religion is focused on the Creator it does not overlook the Created. Where, for example, Flannery O’Connor’s obsessive quest for grace tends to flatten human aspiration into something plain and painful, John Ames comes to see human life as beautiful, a thing to be treasured. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life,” he writes near the novel’s conclusion, “every one of them sufficient.” And of death, that unknowable passage which exercised such a hold over O’Connor, Ames writes:

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

It strikes me that O’Connor would recognise and empathise with those words, and yet they are materially different from the sentiments displayed in her own works. It is the notion of “humanly speaking” that does it. If sorrow is, indeed, the greater part of the substance of human life, for O’Connor that sorrow would define it; for Ames, and for Robinson, perhaps, it encloses it. There is a difference.

That difference is reflected in the central relationship of the novel, which at once is and is not a father and son relationship: it is between Ames and Jack, the prodigal son of Ames’s lifelong friend, Robert Boughton. Jack was christened (by Ames himself) John Ames Boughton, in honour of the two men’s friendship, and recognising the fact (as it seemed then, Ames’s first wife and his daughter having already died) that Ames would not have offspring of his own. Although he could not articulate why, his great friend’s gesture of friendship in naming his child thus was as troubling as it was complimentary. And that unease did indeed portend their future relationship because Jack, a difficult boy, a troublemaker, a free spirit seemingly troubled in life, began to exert a baleful influence on Ames’s existence. He would steal items from the preacher’s house, only to return them later. He would break in to the house frequently. He would never apologise. A crisis was reached when the boy Jack fathered a child by a local girl and neglected his parental responsibilities: for Ames, who had lost his only child, such dereliction of paternal duty was sinful. Early in the novel we understand that Jack left home many years before and had subsequently been out of contact. He did not even attend his mother’s funeral. Suddenly he returns, and Ames is suspicious, protective of old man Boughton, whom he does not wish to see hurt, and wary of the young man’s potentially malign influence on his own wife and son. They endure a tortuous new relationship. They edge around one another, frequently upsetting each other without knowing why or how, failing to understand each other’s motivations and aspirations.

Thus, while Ames’s journal began ostensibly as a series of begats, a record for his son of his own history and that of his family, it is Jack who comes to dominate it. In this way, Robinson reflects on the nature of human community, human communication, human frailty, the capacity and absolute requirement for love. If there is to be sorrow, it is enfolded in love.

John Ames is a remarkable creation. Despite his protestations that he “appreciate[s] a joke as much as anybody” he is not possessed of a sense of humour. When he relates a childhood prank in which girls put boiled eggs under a neighbour’s setting hen he notes, “What the point was I never knew.” (For all that, though, his characteristically deadpan narration of an incident in which a horse falls into a tunnel dug by locals from the dry good store to the livery stables is one of the funniest things I’ve read all year: it is funny precisely because its narrator is not.)

Ames is, moreover, a man of great piety and a stoic defender of faith, a dry, equanimous fellow who tries to see the best in everything. None of this – humourlessness, devotedness, placidness – would ordinarily make for good fiction: where is the conflict, where is the tension? This even-handedness does, of course, reveal a flaw. In a perfect counterpoint to the violent approach of his one-eyed grandfather towards emancipation of slaves, Ames’s seems largely oblivious of the racism attendant in the burning down of Gilead’s only Negro church and the subsequent eradication of black people from the town. This man with a full complement of eyes, this man of sensitive disposition, a man of placid even-handedness, seems not to see what is happening or realise the sociological import of the church burning or recognise the nascent Civil Rights movement it prefigures. Every good man, Robinson suggests, is imperfect in his own way.

And this is the strength of John Ames as a fictional character: he is real, he is mortal, he is flawed. He wants and hopes. He is not wholly an innocent: “We humans do real harm,” he writes at one point. “History could make a stone weep.” But this will not make him bitter: through it all, he wants to appreciate life in its glory. Reflecting on his seventy-six years, he writes, “I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort – grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace." While relating his family’s past, he insists on looking forward. “Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief,” he tells his son. “You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.”

This positive approach is severely tested by the re-emergence of Jack. Ames’s life has been carefully moulded: he has spent his entire existence in Gilead; the fruits of that existence are in the attic, in the 2500 sermons he has written and presented over his career, each one (except one, a pacifist sermon during the war which, to his regret, he did not deliver) preserved as a record, or a monument, or an explanation. He has his new family, and the hope for the future, even if it is a future from which he will be excluded. But Jack, with his insistent probing on the existence of God and predestination and perdition, threatens to shatter the calm he has created. Gradually, however, a reconciliation is reached, and a beautiful one it is. In an emotional climax, Jack and Ames come together, achieve a degree of understanding. For the religious minded, one might say they each reach a state of grace. For the non-religious, it might be characterised as love. The two ideals may not be so far apart. As Ames says, "Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." In this sense, perhaps, the novel isn’t about grace, it is about forgivenness; the former is situated in the beyond, the latter in the present. In Robinson’s view, of course, the one will lead to the other, but its simple beauty strikes, too, a strongly secular note of human beauty. An absolutely stunning passage brings this out:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely.

The first sentence is a secular paean, at once beautiful and sad. It broadens into a Christian evocation of God as being beyond everything, but immediately reasserts the beauty of the earthly present. And then that final, glorious sentence is as powerful an evocation of humanity as I’ve ever read. Love and grace, so inextricably linked, form the absolute bedrock of this novel. There is a purity in Robinson’s vision. For me, a non-believer, it seems to reside in her notion that while, for a Christian, the transcendent beyond is the perfect state to which we all aspire, the notion of grace is nonetheless very much an earthly gift, and a gift of great beauty. For Flannery O’Connor, grace seems only attainable as a matter of transcendence and the present is therefore fit only to be discarded. This seems to miss much that is human, and that muchness, as Ames demonstrates, is love.

Dresden, Tennessee by Carolyn Slaughter

2011-09-14T17:30:00.003+01:00

Dresden, Tennessee by Carolyn Slaughter, is an ambitious psychological study of memory and guilt, both inherited and assumed, and what happens to private grief when public moments intrude. It’s certainly a brave novelist who would use the bombing of Dresden as their moral and historical backdrop after Kurt Vonnegut’s use of it for Slaughterhouse-5, although Dresden, Tennessee is entirely different in tone and approach from Kilgore’s masterpiece.

Kurt Altman is a man in crisis. He is a second-generation German immigrant whose mother was trapped in Dresden during its carpet-bombing by the British at the end of the Second World War. Kurt has suffered catastrophic memory loss and is prone to panic attacks. On a plane to Memphis he finds himself beside a woman who, in those fortuitous circumstances which only attend in fiction, is also a second-generation German immigrant and an expert in psychology. Even more fortuitously, she quickly develops an attraction to Kurt.

This sounds flippant, and in a way it’s meant to. Dresden, Tennessee is a good book, dealing with worthwhile subject matter, but the central details of its plot are ridiculously slight. It’s all too pat, too plotted, too contrived. Not only is Hannah German, she’s a German Jew, so able to both empathise with and analyse Kurt’s inherited guilt over his Nazi father. Not only is she a psychologist, she is a business psychologist, trained to spot fraudsters and psychopaths in business: and Kurt, we discover, was in business in his previous life, so she is doubly adept at analysing his troubles. On other words, she can understand him in every way. She is him turned inside out. If only life worked like this: if only, for every broken, frightened, damaged yin there was a dynamic, understanding, complementary yang just waiting to conjoin with it and lead it out of crisis and into salvation. If only every psychotic episode by every mentally ill person could not only be accepted, not only be understood, not only be helped, but actually be used in order to bring that person into the loving embrace of human companionship, then the world would be a beautiful place. But that isn’t the case. Mentally ill people are too frequently ignored, avoided, viewed with fear, disgust, incomprehension. In truth, Hannah would have run a mile from Kurt the moment they descended from the plane in Memphis. She certainly wouldn’t have ended up in his loving embrace within hours and, because of that, there would have been no novel. And, despite Dresden, Tennessee’s strengths, it cannot overcome that fundamental flaw.

Because this is fiction, so Herr Yin and Fraulein Yang travel through the outer reaches of Kurt’s psychosis in search of truth. What is the catastrophic event he is burying beneath this amnesiac episode? What is the linkage with the fate of his mother in Dresden? How is it that Kurt has come, in the words of one character, “to be carrying some of his mother’s history”? The novel is entirely readable, thoroughly enjoyable and, as it progresses, it develops a dreamlike connection between the past and the present which works most effectively. Indeed, when it is rooted in fable the novel is at its most engaging. It is in its presentation of reality that it misfires.

The Booker shortlist 2011

2011-09-10T17:52:00.002+01:00

Well, what to make of this year's Booker shortlist:

Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
Carol Birch - Jamrach’s Menagerie
Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan - Half Blood Blues
A D Miller - Snowdrops
Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English

There is much discussion about the obscurity of the authors. Only Barnes is truly well known. Two of the books are first novels. I think it's a pretty brave list - marketing it is going to be a challenge - but it's better than a list of the usual suspects.

There's a mightily curious comment on it by Paul Bailey in The Guardian, in which he takes vicarious offence on behalf of gay writers for the snubbing of gays in the list. For the life of me I can't think why an author's sexuality should make any difference to whether a book is shortlisted for a national prize. I didn't even know Philip Hensher was gay, and I don't care either. It's irrelevant.

Michael Stern Hart

2011-09-10T17:48:00.003+01:00

Michael Hart has died. He was the founder of Project Gutenberg, which makes freely available classic texts. I use Project Gutenberg all the time and am immensely grateful for his vision.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

2011-09-01T20:36:00.004+01:00

In the first thirty or so pages of Steppenwolf the narrative is presented from three different viewpoints: those of the Steppenwolf himself, the nephew of the woman with whom he lodges and an anonymous psychoanalytical treatise outlining details of the Steppenwolf’s condition. This narrative fragmentation serves as an introduction to the novel’s primary preoccupations: the divided self, human consciousness and its travails, the possibility (or impossibility) of reaching an accommodation between the individual and society; and, finally, the desirability (or otherwise) of suicide as a means of closure.

The introduction, penned by the unnamed nephew, sets the scene by depicting Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, as an oddity, an outsider who makes no attempt to assimilate himself into polite society. The narrator is simultaneously attracted and repulsed by Haller, but certainly he appears not to understand him. This brief narratorial intervention, not subsequently repeated, serves to establish an objective view of Haller as an outsider before we are taken into his thoughts. More than this, though, when we are first privileged into the thoughts of Haller himself, the preceding, alternative, view creates an ambiguity in the reader which essentially mirrors the confusion in Haller’s own head caused by his schizophrenic division of himself into Haller, man of reason, and the Steppenwolf, manifestation of the savagery within us all.

Thus, we have quickly established the novel’s central premise, the man of society wholly alienated from it and wrestling with the animalistic spirit within him. In the early scenes of the novel we follow Haller as he flows discontentedly through a world from which he feels apart. Then, inexplicably, he is drawn to a sign advertising the Magic Theatre, “not for everyone”, “for madmen only”. Haller is immediately intrigued. It is now that he is given a copy of the treatise which appears to describe him and his condition perfectly. Steppenwolves, it suggests, “have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement were the wolf and man in Harry.” He is in need of loneliness and independence, it concludes. He seeks to renounce either the man in him or the wolf, one or the other.

The next night, against his better judgement, Haller attends dinner with an old friend, a professor, and disgraces himself through his conduct. It is his “leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world, and a complete triumph for the Steppenwolf.” This represents the nadir of Haller’s alienation because, unable to face the prospect of going back to his lodgings (and the prospect, therein, of suicide), he stops at an inn and is immediately engaged in conversation by an enigmatic woman. There is an instant connection between them, which comes as a considerable surprise to the reader, given the depths of isolation from polite society in which Haller has so far been portrayed. Clearly, this woman is going to have a significant impact on Haller, and on the progress of the novel.

So it turns out. She is called (or perhaps isn’t, it is Haller who suggest it to be her name) Hermine. On their second meeting she sets out her conditions: he will obey her without question; he will fall in love with her; he will kill her. The Steppenwolf, finally given a reason to exist, or at least to defer suicide, accepts these conditions. The novel’s progress is established. Haller, a man who detests modernity and its corrupt, baleful ways, who hates jazz and demi-mondaine fripperies, is drawn by this irresistible woman into the very society he abjures. He learns to dance. He even dances in public. He is introduced to a beautiful girl, Maria, with whom he begins an affair. With Hermine’s close friend, Pablo the saxophonist, he experiments with alcohol and drugs. Henry Haller begins to discover himself. The Steppenwolf, that divided element of existential despair within him, begins to dissipate.

The novel builds to a climax at a masked ball, for which Hermine has coached Haller in a number of dance steps. The novel now enters a wholly fantastic episode, in which Hermine appears in the guise of an old, male friend of Haller’s, then as a black Pierrette with white painted face. Finally, Haller is introduced to the Magic Theatre itself, in which the divisions of his soul are fully revealed. As he moves towards self-realisation, towards a dance with the immortals, his experiences in the Magic Theatre – essentially a series of hallucinations – reinforce the message established throughout the novel, that consciousness is not premised on a single self, that there is, in fact, no such thing as a single self, nor even a binary divided self but, rather, each of us is composed of hundreds, thousands of selves, each independent, each assuming ascendancy or regressing into silence as appropriate, each growing and developing over the course of our lives.

Steppenwolf, then, is a fictionalised account of the Jungian psychoanalytical concept of individuation, whereby an alienated individual may finally attain some accommodation with himself through confronting the archetypes which manipulate his conscious and, particularly, subconscious processes. In Haller’s attempts at self-knowledge there is, in fact, something optimistic, even transcendent, but it depends on how one approaches the text. This, I suspect, is why the novel’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed to such an extent over the years: the novel is focused strongly on the individual and his or her role in society; this role has changed a number of times since the First World War and still evolves constantly. Although Haller does, indeed, manage to reconcile the conflicting aspects of his personality, it is still not sufficient to wreak the necessary change in him. Something remains lacking, as it does for others of Hesse’s characters. Joseph Knecht, in The Glass Bead Game, ultimately fails to embrace existence outside the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of Castalia. Emil Sinclair, in Demian, does manage to free himself from the shackles of the bourgeoisie, but that novel’s ambivalent ending, in which Emile effectively melds with the self of his mentor, Demian, is not, at least for this individualist critic, wholly optimistic or satisfactory. And, in Steppenwolf, Harry Haller still cannot, quite, piece together the fragments of his psyche into something recognisable and worthwhile. Thus, any optimism which exists in Steppenwolf must be tempered by a strong degree – one which runs through most of Hesse’s work – of doubt.

Hesse’s professed aim in Steppenwolf, although he complained that this was neglected in critical analyses of the novel, was to offer a humanistic rebuttal of suicide as a means of escape and, instead, to reinforce the possibility of redemption. He insisted that "the story of the Steppenwolf, though it describes an illness and a crisis, does not describe one that leads to death and decline but rather the opposite – to recovery." Given that the novel is significantly autobiographical – for Harry Haller read Herman Hesse – one might certainly hope for such an optimistic outlook, but it is not difficult to see how the novel has been so differently interpreted over the years. Haller’s expedition through the Magic Theatre appears to resolve far from satisfactorily. In each of the rooms he enters he is set tests which he fails – spectacularly, fatally so in the final instance – and any self-revelation which ensues appears to be contingent at best. The game must begin again, he concludes, but while that may be feasible for the immortals who circle around Haller (and, throughout his life, around Hesse himself) this is not an option that time and fate and fatality offers us poor bloody infantry of humanity.

And so, at the novel’s conclusion, the reader is left in a curious limbo. Hesse has undoubtedly opened up the prospect of redemption for his troubled character, but we have no way of knowing whether Haller will ultimately be able to reach it. Which, perhaps, in the troubled times in which Hesse wrote the novel – Weimar Germany in the late 1920s – is as much as could be hoped. And how much things have changed in the intervening eighty-plus years would open an interesting debate.

The new atheism

2011-08-27T18:18:00.003+01:00

Interesting article by James Wood in today's Guardian about the way fiction can be used to examine questions of religion and God. It makes the point that Dawkins et al are so strident in their atheism there is no place for nuanced discussion. Fiction, meanwhile, allows more complex debate on some of the issues. I don't think Woods says anything particularly new or striking, to be honest, but it raises some decent questions.

I'm amazed that a run-through of writers who use fiction to air religious debates does not include either Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy, both of whose work is shot through with a Catholic analysis of modernity and the difficulties of redemption and grace therein.

For me, the article really gets interesting when discussing Rowan Williams' suggestion that religious metaphors (the Virgin birth etc) allow an "event" or "space" in history in which man can pause to understand the hidden truths. I'm not a believer, but I think this is a powerful argument and there is much to commend it. Frustratingly, the article ends here and doesn't go into more detail. Whether you believe in God or not, or any other deity, or any other supernatural explanation of our existence, it is still true that there is a "beyond", about which we cannot ever know anything. In narrow terms, that would encompass the time before your birth and after your death: you will never be able to understand what happens beyond those poles. And, in broader human terms, the same poles exist, for the time before time and the time after time, whether that is the Christian eschaton or something different. The metaphors, or myths, that Williams alludes to are the only possible way we can ever explore these questions. The sterility and dogmatism of the new atheists' stance allows for no such contemplation, which is unfortunately blinkered.

Google recognises Borges

2011-08-24T18:12:00.003+01:00

Have you seen today's Google heading? It celebrates the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges. Quite fitting, really. The internet is the closest we've come to the Library of Babel - not only everything ever written (or at least, we're getting there) but every version of it, with organisations like the British Library saving caches of web content continuously. We haven't quite mastered producing every possible variation of every story yet, but give us time...

Most overrated books

2011-08-24T17:43:00.004+01:00

Here's another summer filler, Slate's look at the most over-rated books. Not really any great surprises - the ones people usually think are over-rated are the difficult ones that take getting into, hence Ulysses, Under The Volcano, The Sound and the Fury et al.

I don't know, it's difficult. I think I'd have to go for the collected works of Ian McEwan. He started out as a dazzling stylist, but with the suspicion of more style than substance. Latterly, he's descended into middle-aged dreariness. And for a single book, I'd have to say Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, in which he tried (bravely) to do something different and made a complete hash of it. But when he sorted the technique, in When We Were Orphans, it works brilliantly.

As a school, I find the current crop of Irish literary types insufferable. Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, John Banville - all that florid language, all that horrible over-writing.

Sloppiness

2011-08-23T17:52:00.002+01:00

A full review of Don DeLillo's Point Omega is below, but here are another couple of examples of, frankly, sloppy writing. Remember, this is a 117 page novella. You could proof read it in a couple of hours. How did these slip through?

There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God.

On a mission from God? That's Elwood in The Blues Brothers. DeLillo is reportedly a film fan, so he must surely know the line - it's repeated enough in the film - "We're on a mission from God."

It was like hearing that the earth had shifted on its axis, spinning night back into budding day.

The earth shifting on its axis is a monstrous cliche. A quick google of the phrase - the earth had shifted on its axis - brings up 19,000,000 hits. Even putting it in inverted commas - thus only bringing up hits with that exact formulation of words, including the pluperfect tense, brings up over 1000. Good writers shouldn't be using cliches like that.

The more I think about it, the more I get the feeling Point Omega is a quickly trotted-out piece of flimflam. Editors, you see, whatever happened to strong editors?

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

2011-08-22T19:06:00.004+01:00

What happens to a writer as he ages? His style, his preoccupations? Philip Roth, of course, is famously enjoying an indian summer. In music, Johnny Cash did it, too, with his American Recordings I-IV, and Ali Farka Toure’s stupendous final album, Savane, recorded while he was enduring his final illness, is transcendently life-affirming. Beryl Bainbridge got better and better. Others? Bellow pared his style down. We will need to see, from Cormac McCarthy’s next novel, The Passenger, whether the transition into sparseness seen in No Country For Old Men and The Road is the result of the waning of an old man’s powers or the opening of a final, great chapter. And Paul Auster, as I’ve said before on this blog, is a man from whom we enjoy diminishing returns with each passing novel. Don DeLillo may not be quite in that state of terminal decline but I wonder, with Point Omega, whether we have seen a decisive turning point.

The basic plot, as you would expect from a 117 page novella, is slight. Jim Finley, an experimental film-maker, wants to make a single take movie focused wholly on one man talking uninterruptedly. That man is Richard Elster, a neoconservative academic recruited into the Bush administration to give it some well-needed intellectual rigour. In that, he singularly fails, being inadept at politics and proving an ineffectual yes man. The two men retreat to the Californian desert to discuss the project. Or perhaps not. After some weeks no decision has been made and the film looks increasingly unlikely to be made. Interrupting the men’s isolation is Elster’s daughter, Jessie, a mysterious young woman who soon equally mysteriously disappears. This narrative is bookended by an unknown man’s visit to an exhibition in MOMA in 2006 of Douglas Gordon’s 24-hour video installation of Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s original is shown at two-frames per second. In the middle of this section, although we don’t know it then, Finley and Elster make an appearance, and further linkages between the main narrative and the bookends, more subtle, emerge as the novel progresses.

The two men’s sojourn in the desert mimics the slowed-down action of Psycho. They are removed from the rest of world, almost from reality itself, and work themselves into an almost intimate routine of slowness and deliberation. They discuss the Iraq War. They medidate on time and reality, on Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, that moment when consciousness reaches its highest level of material complexity. They do all of this very slowly. In crisp, clean prose. “With lots of dialogue.” “Much of it sophistic to the point of meaningless.” “Indeed.” “Slowly.”

DeLillo has been in the process of paring down his style ever since the sprawl that was Underworld. Succeeding novels have been getting shorter and terser. The Body Artist was another novella, and another meditation on ageing. Cosmopolis revolved largely around a massive traffic jam. Falling Man was a (too) short evocation of 9/11. With Point Omega DeLillo has surely reached the end of the line, unless he aims to become a short story writer or a poet. What’s left out in minimalist writing, of course, is often what is most important. Think Beckett, think Godot. But for that to work the words that remain have to lead the reader/viewer, however obliquely, to the source of the missing words. The suggestion must be given of a hidden mass behind a screen, and not only that, but some sense of its potential meaning. In Point Omega there is a plethora of intellectual winking and nudgery, suggestions that in the careful elision just made resides the true message of the story. Nonetheless, the feeling persists that, unlike DeLillo’s previous works, this time there is really nothing behind the screen. Undoubtedly, there is form and style and elegant philsophising, beautifully rendered, but does it mean anything? And if it does, does anybody care?

This becomes increasingly apparent in the first Psycho scene. All is uncertainty. Some examples: “In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was just seeing too much.” And: “How long would he have to stand here, how many weeks or months, before the film’s time scheme absorbed his own, or had this already begun to happen?” The message is clear: we are in unreliable narrator territory here, his point of view deliberately vague. But still the hints keep coming. “Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor’s eyes? Or did the actor’s eyes seem to be searching him out?” Or “He understood for the first time that black and white was the only true medium for film as an idea, film in the mind. He almost knew why but not quite.” And: “He didn’t know if this made the slightest sense.” And: “The meaning of this escaped him. He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him.” All of these examples come within six and a half pages. We get it, Don, we really do. But no, there’s more: “The original movie was fiction, this was real. Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not.” By this stage, it is hard to ignore the gnawing suspicion that the emperor is naked. At some point, all of this literary fooling has to lead somewhere, but, alas, it never does.

I get the feeling, reading reviews of this novel, that critics are frightened of DeLillo’s reputation and of Point Omega’s slightness. The most common word in these reviews is “but”, that little get-out conjunction with which critics can point out the novel’s faults – “little happens”, “in keeping with the new aesthetic of incompleteness”, “hypnotic, if sometimes baffling”, comedy that “deliberately removes the laughs”, a character who is “flat, and yet like us”, a “a forlorn counterattack against plot, cause and effect, and the near-universal sense that tiny moments matter less than grand narratives”. What we have then are negatives immediately turned into positives. They’re like the over-eager school teacher writing scrupulously fair and wholly inaccurate report cards on the dim children in class. They are furiously justifying what, in the work of a different writer, they would be criticising. BUT this is DeLillo, they're saying, so it’s deliberately stylised, it’s “devastating slow motion”, it’s art, it’s intellectual, it’s philosophy, man, “the action is in the dead spots”. Well, I don’t care who wrote this next passage, it is simply juvenile:

“Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That’s what’s out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction.”

Further, these critics delight in taking quotes from the novel and using them to justify their own cleverness in sticking with the novel. James Lasdun, for example:

"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw." The line, from Don DeLillo's new novel, is about a man watching Psycho slowed to a 24-hour running time, but it could also serve as a fairly accurate description of how it feels to read DeLillo himself these days, now that he has entered what appears to be a definitively "late" period in his work.

Hermione Hoby, in The Guardian, gives us:

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at." It's a neat description of the novelist's task, too – to scrutinise those things that "shallow habits" overlook.

Matthew Sharpe, in the LA Times, invents a criticism and then invents dullards who would make it, suggesting they would criticise Point Omega for not being Underworld – and then dismisses these straw men for missing the point. He goes on:

"Suspense is trying to build but the silence and stillness outlive it." This could describe the methodology of "Point Omega."

A magisterial turning of a negative into a positive, simply because – well because it’s DeLilllo, ain’t it?

This is the sound of critics applauding what they dare not criticise, for fear of being thought not to have tried hard enough, or suspected of being careless, even – whisper it – a bit stupid. Well call me lazy, call me careless, call me stupid, but Point Omega is the emperor’s new clothes, a meditation on time that reveals precisely nothing except that – hey, things happen and you can’t stop them and then you die. If Cheech and Chong made those same points they would be treated with the contempt they deserve, but because it’s DeLillo, because it’s served up in beautiful, limpid prose, nobody dares to mention to the emperor that we can see his ass cheeks quivering.

What is particularly galling is that all this stillness and silence and lack of suspense is served up to provide an analysis of the US government’s use of extraordinary rendition, that bland, almost meaningless neologism designed to shield us from the truth of state-sponsored, outsourced torture. The emotional intensity of Point Omega is incommensurate with the activity it is critiquing. I’m not calling for table-thumping anger, but an old man contemplating his navel as his daughter disappears is simply inadequate. No account as bloodless as this will ever come close to presenting the true horror of extraordinary rendition or the intellectual bankruptcy of the Bush administration. It’s like trying to put out a fire with a fart. And on that scatalogical point, let me conclude with a typical Point Omega-type paragraph:

Fundament. A basic tenet, base, support, understructure. Eerie depths. I am transcending all direction inward. I am tunneling, upward, a mass, coiled, wet, moist. Somehow comforting. Warm, rustic, sustaining. Teilhard de Chardin sat in this very spot once. He wrote a haiku. He saw the complexity of consciousness here. He saw the cyclical beauty of life through death, alchemical aliment, perception of transmutation. He tried to understand time and motion. And indeed the whole of my consciousness is here and now present in this brown peristaltic motion, ideas in transience. The slow rush of history as we approach one another. Some kind of meditative panic. And by the time I reach past the colon into the small intestine, the large intestine, I am acutely aware I am slightly older. And rather smellier. But it is vanity to imagine otherwise. I am reaching that terminal point. Who knows how far we are from perfection. It may take a long time but one day we will see the ideal turd. Because this is the story of the artist and his solitary journey up his own perfect, puckered ass.

The March by EL Doctorow

2011-08-19T17:50:00.003+01:00

The march in question in EL Doctorow’s fascinating novel is that taken by 60,000 men of the Union Army led by General William Tecumseh Sherman in November and December 1864, on which he laid waste parts of Georgia, destroying Atlanta, then turned seaward, leaving behind a trail of devastation as he marched through South Carolina and into North Carolina, ending with the capture of Savannah on December 21st.

The novel is strong on character, driven as it is by a series of interlinked narratives featuring a wide range of individuals. Will and Arly, condemned men given an unexpected pardon, appear initially to be there to provide some comedic interludes but their stories become gradually dark, ultimately poignant. Southern gentility is represented by contrasting women, the grieving, Alzheimer-suffering Mattie Jameson and Emily Thompson, a prim but vibrant young woman who is a much better human being than she seems to realise. General Sherman himself is a major character, a man of irascible nature and restless movement but, increasingly, someone beset by guilt and the nature of goodness and the need for small acts of humanity amid the great act of war.

The two most important characters, for contrasting reasons, are the army surgeon, Colonel Wrede Sartorius, and the miscegenate daughter of Mattie Jameson’s landowning husband, the slave girl Pearl. Pearl, as her name suggests, is almost white and, indeed, passes as such through most of the narrative, although to do so affords her considerable angst: can she really be free, she argues to herself, when she is living such a lie. Nonetheless, Pearl is the moral compass of the novel.

Accordingly, it is only really Pearl and her husband-to-be, Stephen Walsh, a somewhat naive but likeable Irish-American, who really seem to have any future at the novel’s end. They are seen moving towards Washington, to a new life. The remaining characters, in contrast, are either dead or (in the case of Emily Thompson, who departs the narrative half-way through and doesn’t return) unresolved, or, like General Sherman, have reached the zenith of their existence and are condemned only to live out their final years in a nothingness of regret.

If a negative is to be directed at this novel, it would be that, perhaps, Pearl is just too good. There is about her characterisation the whiff of white liberal guilt. It isn’t exactly patronising, as it can be in some of the more insufferable works of leftist revisionism, but nonetheless it feels over-compensatory. No-one is as perfect as Pearl.

Certainly not perfect is Dr Wrede Sartorius, a fascinating, complex, troublesome character. He seems to be much misread by many critics of this novel, such as Stephen Amidon, who believes Sartorius is close to representing its authorial voice. Absolutely not. Or John Wray in the Washington Post, who suggests Sartorius is “almost incidental”, or Walter Kirn, who dismisses him with the single adjective “stoic”. On the contrary, Sartorius is central to the narrative, and he is a dazzling creation, neither good nor bad, but demonstrating strong characteristics of each pole. Not for nothing does prim Emily Thompson fall for him (and endure perhaps the most peculiar loss of virginity in all literature). Not for nothing does, first General Sherman, and then Abraham Lincoln himself, see in Sartorius something great. For he is great, a truly great surgeon, a man who has turned the butcher’s craft of limb amputation into a fine art. But once he has finished his work he turns, the patient is forgotten, coldness subsumes the moment. In his quest for knowledge, Sartorius becomes something other, some cold simulacrum of a man. He is a man of science, a rationalist. Notably, he is European, one of the old civilisation, a product of the Age of Reason. He finds the barbarity of war is compensated by an enriched opportunity to practice: “Apparently he was alone in considering this American Civil a practicum.” Most significantly, he takes a patient, Albion Simms, on the march although he knows it is not ethical to do so and will certainly result in his death, because he wants the opportunity of learning something about the brain. Perhaps the most telling summation of his character comes through the thoughts of the infatuated Emily: “Wrede Sartorius, the man to whom she had given herself, was not a doctor. He was a magus bent on tampering with the created universe.”

In this, there are powerful resonances with judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Sartorius is no monster, let us be clear, but he is from the same stock as the monstrous judge. Just as the judge seeks to improve his esoteric knowledge, reading “news of the earth’s origins” in ore samples or carefully drawing a Spanish suit of armour and then destroying the original so that no-one else may see it, so Sartorius seems bent on knowledge for the sake of knowledge. He is frustrated that his improvements and suggestions are ignored by the army, but still he seeks to further advance his rationalist gnosis. In so doing, without even realising it, he becomes increasingly distanced from those he is working to protect. Thus, disconnection, the removal of society from society, becomes a major motif in the novel.

This motif is most powerfully portrayed, however, by Sherman’s march itself. A massive, vital, awful thing, it is conjured in visceral detail. It is a “floating world” that consumes as it advances, leaving behind detritus and despair. It becomes a unique entity, a lifeforce in itself, the conjunction of war and society, man and death. “War is God,” said judge Holden, but in The March, war is all – life, death, love, community. War is history, the future, the present: and it is especially that, especially the everlasting present. And it is this which gives remarkable depth to the novel.

But if the march portrays the implacable universality of war’s horror, it is the fate of Albion Simms which illuminates its personal tragedy. Albion Simms is the patient whom Dr Sartorius will not leave behind because he wishes to study him. Simms is a Union soldier with a spike through his brain but apparently unaffected by it in any way other than having no absolutely no residual memory. By the time he finishes a sentence he has forgotten how it began. Take this excruciating passage:

What did you call me?
Albion. That is your name.
That is my name?
Yes.
What is my name?
Albion Simms. Have you forgotten?
Yes. I have forgotten. What have I forgotten?
You knew your name yesterday.
Is this yesterday?
No.
I have forgotten yesterday. My head hurts. What is this that hurts?

Simms becomes agitated. “Are you crying?” Sartorius asks. “Yes,” he replies. “Because it’s always now. What did I just say?” Sartortius ponders this and muses to himself, “it’s always now for all of us... But for you, a bit more so.” And this takes us to the crux of the piece: this eternal now, this hellish moment from which there is no escape. And, crucially, it is the man of science, of the enlightenment, the man who tends his patients with extreme care and skill, yet shows no emotion towards them, who elucidates this monstrous point.

Simms’ is a truly desperate situation, a living hell of the immediate present. And this is mirrored, in fact, throughout the novel, in which, unusually for a historical novel, there is sparse context: the causes of the war and the implications of slavery are loosely touched upon, but it is the catastrophe of the moment which is all-important in The March.

And this gives the chilling metaphysical drive of the novel: people, in this instance the soldiers of both armies, plus the civilians caught up in their assault and the slaves freed into a void of uncertainty, are forced to live in a perpetual moment. There is no possibility of reflection, no option to the future, no comfort of the past; only a relentless, uncaring, unwielding march of the present into the present from the present. Aboriginal Australians talk of an everywhen, a concept alien to the western, chronologically-tuned consciousness. In it, each and every moment exists concurrently. In their mythology, it is a wonderful thing, a connection through time and space between ancients and the living, something to be cherished and nourished. In The March it is Hell.

It is the same hell as that endured by the Joads and the Wilsons in The Grapes of Wrath, by Suttree in the depths of his Knoxville despair, by Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, or Dr Thomas More in Walker Percy’s Love Among The Ruins. And if that suggests a strangely ecumenical hell, so be it. Haze and More were driven by their respective authors’ strong Catholicism, while Buddy Suttree is an existential man in crisis in a world where religion exists but God does not; and the Joads and Wilsons, for all their desire for Casy’s preaching, ultimately stand aside from Christian dogma. It is hard, perhaps, to see more different characters than these. Nonetheless, they are, indeed, all bound for the same hell, to that place in human existence where the strict metre of time triumphs over the human spirit and where circumstance prevails over hope to such an extent that it might have been better never to have hoped at all. This is the trouble with eschatology: it either ends in something or it ends in nothing, and neither option seems especially desirable. In order to understand religion you have to be able to pull out from the personal into the perspective of the eternal; but to understand humanity you have to telescope straight back in, observe close up those inevitable moments that shape us, that form our own, personal eschatologies; but be able to observe, too, the memories of the past and the hopes of the future that make us what we are. This is when everywhen can become a beauteous thing. Common eschatology, meanwhile, offers nothing but a linear progression from genesis to eschaton, whatever that may be. It is the monster of Haze Motes’s madness, the Joads’ poverty, Suttree’s isolation, General Sherman’s brutal March, progressing through moments of the present, on and on, onwards, onwards, infesting the whole of the psyche until nothing exists but that brute truth, leaving no culture, no love, no memory, no hope. It is human beings losing touch with their humanity. Albion Simms, with his doleful fate, is an astonishing literary creation, and a portent of what might befall us if, in a drive for perfection, either human or divine, we lose touch with our essential humanity.

War is hell, war is god, war is all, war is what? General Sherman, at battle’s end, as he pitches his tent in the woods one last time before the journey to Washington for the victory parade, realises that their civil war, “devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.”

Moments then: moments proceeding, never ceasing, driving us to the end.

Sartre on Faulkner

2011-08-04T22:07:00.004+01:00

Jean-Paul Sartre on William Faulkner, 1952:

This "man" we discover - in Light in August - I think of the "man" of Faulkner in the same way that one thinks of the "man" of Dostoevsky or of Meredith - this divine animal who lives without God, lost from the moment of his birth, and intent on destroying himself; cruel, moral even in murder; then miraculously saved, neither by death nor in death, but in the final moments which precede death; heroic in torment, in the most abject humiliations of the flesh: I had accepted him without reservations. I had never forgotten his proud and threatening face, his blinded eyes. I found him again in Sartoris. I recognized the "somber arrogance" of Bayard. Yet I can no longer accept the "man" of Faulkner: he is an illusion. Just a matter of lighting. There is a certain formula: it consists in not telling, remaining hidden, dishonestly secretive, - telling a little.

Hmm, I think there's something in that. I'm reading my way through Faulkner slowly - he's not a writer you can read quickly, after all, and I'm finding it very rewarding. But, equally, I'm finding the fierce pull of blood is just as often a push of blood.

And, a propos another writer, for "the man" read "the kid".

The Jargon of the novel

2011-08-02T19:05:00.002+01:00

Here's an interesting article, looking at the way novelists use certain phrases or configurations that aren't common in spoken language. A new variation on the cliche, I suppose. They're using computers to track the use of phrases such as "bolt upright" or the proximity of various nouns - hair, teeth, lips etc - to "brush" and so on.

No surprises, I guess: it's the first thing you have to train yourself out of when you start writing, the mimicking (consciously or unconsciously) of other writers, the careless grabbing at stock phrases, descriptions etc.

Using the "search programs and files" function on my PC I've just searched for "bolt upright", and I'm appalled that it appeared in no fewer than five stories, although all of them were early attempts, mostly before my time in Alex Keegan's Boot Camp, where such mistakes are picked up quickly. Interestingly, though, it also picked up a mention in the screenplay for No Country For Old Men, which I have a copy of on my hard drive, plus Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Then I checked "lips brushing". It's difficult to be precise because there were a few stories with different drafts, but I counted NINETEEN different stories. I'm appalled at that, I have to be honest.

So, have a go. See how you do.

The United States of Writers

2011-07-30T18:14:00.003+01:00

This is an interesting idea, guaranteed to raise arguments. Publishers Weekly has attempted to determine which U.S. states have the strongest literary tradition. To do this they've selected one singular writer to carry the flag for each of the fifty states. Check their selections here.

Cormac McCarthy for Rhode Island? I know he was born there, but he left at a pretty early age, and his writing is so bound up with place, notably Tennessee and New Mexico and Texas, that it seems unfeasible not to include him there. No surprises with Flannery and William Faulkner. I think Walker Percy could have been in with a shout in Alabama - Harper Lee only wrote the one book, after all. No Don Delillo in New York? I think there are so many New Yorkers they ought to have broken the state down further.

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

2011-07-29T17:52:00.003+01:00

I came across Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South in a second-hand book shop and was immediately drawn to it. The author of True Grit? A comedy? I hadn’t even realised that Charles Portis had written anything other than True Grit and, if he had, I would have expected more of the same. So I was curious.

You could argue there are strong similarities: protagonist has something taken from him and sets off on a chase to retrieve it, undergoing picaresque adventures along the way in the company of fellow oddballs. Yes, that sounds like Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. And yet The Dog of the South is about as different from True Grit as it’s possible to be. Where True Grit is all buttoned-up Calvinist stoicism (albeit with a blackly humorous edge), The Dog of the South is a spaced-out study of sheer eccentricity, its protagonist a weird, almost autistic obsessive and his companions a collection of losers, dead-beats, fantasists and deficients. But – the key question for a humorous novel – is it funny? Hell, yes.

One day, Ray Midge’s credit card, Ford Torino and wife Norma are stolen by his friend – Norma’s ex-husband, Guy Dupree, whom Ray has just bailed out of jail where he was being held on a charge of threatening to kill the president. Of the three thefts, it is the loss of the Ford Torino that hurts Ray most. Subsequent credit card statements afford him a digital replay of the fleeing couple’s journey southwards to Mexico and into Latin America, giving him a vicarious overview of each stopover, meal, item of expenditure. Unable to bear the loss of his beloved Torino, he determines to follow them and retrieve it. His wife as well, perhaps, if circumstances allow, but the car remains his primary objective.

The story is told in the first-person by Ray. He is a journalist, or at least he was: he has quit in order to return to college. He is also a fan of military history, one of those people whose hobbies assume overwhelming importance. He is a man given to obsessive behaviour, with a peculiar outlook on life. A man given to exclamation marks! Because life is either black and white or it makes no sense! Indeed, Ray’s grasp of reality at times seems shaky. Watching a Johnny Weismuller film under the misconception that it is one of the Tarzan series, he is baffled by the fact that Tarzan seems to be working as a coast guard in Louisiana and everyone is calling him Dave. ‘A clever wrinkle,’ he thinks, Tarzan must be working on ‘undercover business,’ but nonetheless he waits impatiently for the jungle scenes to arrive. Which, of course, they don’t.

Ray is a remarkable creation, a genuine eccentric, a one-off. There is something of Ignatius J. O’Reilly in him, a complete inability to perceive himself as other might, but without O’Reilly’s overweening self-confidence. There is certainly something of Candide about him, an innocent abroad in a world that moves too quickly for him to comprehend. His tendendency to worry about anything and everything is like something out of Woody Allen, while his compulsive behaviour, his inability to put things into perspective recall Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. His failure to see the world from anyone’s point of view but his own is pure Bartleby and his innocence and lack of worldliness give him the same vital appeal as Huck Finn.

Ray sets off from home in Little Rock in Dupree’s battered Buick, following the credit card trail into Texas and onto Mexico. There, broke, he meets Dr Reo Symes, the owner-occupier of the Dog of the South, a nicely painted but not very mobile bus. Symes needs to travel but, with the bus irreparably damaged, he has no vehicle; Ray has a vehicle but no money with which to buy fuel: an agreement is reached, and Symes bankrolls their journey into British Honduras, where Ray believes Dupree and his car (and wife) have gone.

If Ray is a wildly inventive comic creation, Dr Symes makes him appear bland. He is a modern-day snake-oil salesman, debarred from practicing medicine because of his overwhelming (and, despite the evidence, continuing) faith in a miracle cure for arthritis. He is also fleeing creditors in relation to a gloriously failed vanity publishing venture. He conducts his life according to the teachings of John Selmer Dix, a thrusting salesman whose manuals on selling technique Symes somehow manages to read as primers for life. And Symes’ own primer for life dictates that he should move into real estate, to which end he is now hurrying to Belize to find his mother and persuade her to turn over the family property and wealth to him. Disaster ensues.

It takes courage and skill to write a novel in which insanity infests both main characters. Even in Catch-22, Yossarian is an approximation of normality, while the afore-cited Confederacy of Dunces has the almost rational Myrna Minkoff to act as a counterfoil to O’Reilly. But, in The Dog of the South, Portis takes matters even further: no-one in this novel appears to be remotely in possession of their faculties. That Portis gets away with it is testament to his writing abilities.

Underneath the humour, of course, there is a point. This is a serious book masquerading as whimsy. The main characters, wildly different, nonetheless share certain characteristics which, through their exaggerated forms, combine to throw a light on the rest of us and our own little preoccupations and hopes and fears. In Ray, we have a man who is obsessive, who worries over pointless detail, who relates events with painful, sometimes pointless, exactitude. He is restless, always seeking to get it right, to make things right, to live in a world where things are habitually right. Thus, he is always in search of something, some measure of control through which he can slow down the world and adapt it to his tastes and preferences. And, similarly, Dr Symes’s obsession is with the salesman Dix, the man who has, Symes believes, decoded life and living, has found the elusive key to everything. And so both of them are in pursuit of the impossible. They are searching for an ideal, like John Grady Cole in All The Pretty Horses, like Ahab in Moby Dick, like Bartleby.

Like all of us, really.

Bigger Trees Near Warter (2)

2011-07-28T19:32:00.002+01:00

A while back I posted on the monumental David Hockney painting Bigger Trees Near Warter which was on display at York Art Gallery. Well, it's on tour, and it's now at my local gallery, the Ferens in Hull.

It's remarkable how different it looks in this location. The painting is made up 50 different canvases, all painted en plein and placed together into one giant landscape, depicting a stand of trees near Warter, a small place not too far from here. In York, the fifty were displayed along one massive wall in a straight line. That gave an impression of massive size. It was quite an overwhelming experience.

At Hull, they didn't have a wall long enough to accommodate all paintings in a straight line of ten by eight panels. So what they've done is to turn the last two columns on either side at 45 degrees. The difference is amazing. It loses some of its massive size, some of that overwhelming sense of awe you feel in front of the York hanging. But, instead, you get an extraordinary feeling of involvement. It's like the painting is wrapping itself around you. It's as though you are actually standing in a clearing, with all these trees around you.

I don't know which I prefer. There are pros and cons for each. But I do find it amazing how different the experience is depending on the way the painting is hung.

Go and visit. It's well worth it.

E-books - the future?

2011-07-26T20:19:00.002+01:00

This is an exciting project. Gollancz, who were massive publishers of science-fiction back in the 60s and 70s, are bringing back 1000s of long out-of-print titles as ebooks. This is a fantastic idea, and exactly what I think ebooks are great for: making available titles that can otherwise only found through serendipity while rummaging through second hand book shops. I was never a huge fan of SF, though when I was at school a few of my friends were, and some of the authors mentioned in the list - Algis Budrys, EE "Doc" Smith, Clifford D. Simak et al - were regularly pitched to me as classics I ought to be reading. And I note, too, that Tim Powers is on the list. It's inexplicable to me why so few of Tim Powers's books are still in print. The man is a superb writer, and it's great to think that his backlist will become available again.

The Booker longlist

2011-07-26T18:52:00.002+01:00

This year's Booker longlist has been announced:

• Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child
• Stephen Kelman Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• AD Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• DJ Taylor Derby Day

There was a time when I'd read the majority of the writers who were nominated for the Booker - not necessarily the nominated books, but at least something by them. Now I'm getting to the stage when I can't even recognise half of them. I know I do tend to concentrate a lot on US literature, but even so this strikes me as a slightly obscure list.

I am interested in DJ Taylor's Derby Day, though. I haven't read him, but my partner has, and this novel is apparently inspired by William Frith's painting Derby Day. Frith did some superb panorama paintings, encompassing enormous groups of people from all walks of life. Derby Day is one such. Another was The Railway Station which is in the Walker Art gallery in Liverpool, and which would also be a fantastic basis for a novel.

I read a review of the Barnes this week and it does sound intriguing, though I was massively put off when I read it being compared to On Chesil Beach.

If my life depended on it I'd struggle to force myself to read any more of that drearily contrived Irish lyrical style - Banville, Enright, Barry et al, so I'll certainly give On Canaan's Side a miss. And I've never finished an Alan Hollinghurt yet, so I doubt I'll experiment with The Stranger's Child.

Other than that, I have embarrassingly little to say about anything else.

Famous for the wrong book

2011-07-22T17:34:00.003+01:00

An interesting blog piece over on the Guardian looks at authors famous for the wrong book.

I'm not sure I agree with many of his conclusions. I think, when he's talking about Captain Corelli's Mandolin, John Self may be thinking of the film adaptation, which is lousy. The novel is pretty good. I have a tremendous fondness for the early de Bernieres novels, especially Don Emmanuel, while Senor Vivo has the most outstanding (and upsetting) piece of writing I've ever read, but the Latin American trilogy are magic realist novels and at the moment magic realism is out of fashion because - well, anything is possible in it. It's an easy cop out for an author. Captain Corelli was de Bernieres' first straight novel and it stands up well. It's just a simple truth that Penelope Cruz will fuck up any film adaptation of a novel (All The Pretty Horses, anyone?). Mind you, de Bernieres' next novel, Birds Without Wings, is simply unreadable.

Vonnegut - yes Cat's Cradle is better than Slaughterhouse-5, but much better? I don't think so. Kurt's just Kurt, and let's be grateful for that.

Catch-22 is the only Joseph Heller I've read, so I can't comment on him. I suspect I may not be alone in that, either, which tells its own story.

Ishiguro - The Unconsoled genuinely is unreadable. It is simply awful. The idea is strong - narration so unreliable it embraces the impossible. Surrealism on the page. But the delivery is so laboured, the characters so tedious, the set-up so dull that I found it impossible to get further than half way. The best Ishiguro, by a country mile, is When We Were Orphans. That's the one where he learned from his mistakes in The Unconsoled and got the style right. The last fifty or so pages are just wonderful.

William Golding - I'd agree with virtually any of his novels over Lord of the Flies, though I may just be jaundiced by having studied it to death at school. But Pincher Martin and The Inheritors are both outstanding novels, in a different class from LOTF.

Who else? I have to mention Cormac McCarthy, I guess. Blood Meridian is not his greatest work, it's Suttree. John Updike - the Rabbit books are generally considered his best, but for sheer emotional pull I can't get The Poorhouse Fair, his first novel, out of my head. Toni Morrison? She hasn't written a good novel yet so it's impossible to say. Jean-Jacques Rousseau for The Social Contract or Confessions? Reveries of a Solitary Walker is one of the greatest pieces of autobiography ever written.

I expect there are others.

William Etty: art and controversy

2011-07-19T20:30:00.005+01:00

This fascinating exhibition is currently running at York Art Gallery. William Etty RA was a York-born artist (1787-1849), and his statue (in need of a bit of love and attention) stands outside the gallery which is currently holding this major exhibition of his work.

The paintings themselves are fine, but the exhibition is primarily of interest as a document of social history. Etty's work was, at times, highly controversial. His devotion to the female nude gathered him plaudits and criticism in equal measure. This was a period when the female nude was not at all uncommon in art, but a strict iconography was in place to ensure that nothing too lascivious was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Etty's work often crossed the line of respectability.

The paintings in this exhibition represent, in equal measure, Etty's triumphs and critical failures, paintings of female nudes which were highly praised for their 'voluptuous beauty' or damned for their 'voluptuous excesses'. Voluptuous appears to be a highly charged word in this era, either wonderfully good or horribly bad, depending on, it seems the girth of the women or the extent to which they appear to be enjoying themselves. Too much of that and the paintings are dismissed as being bad for morality. It is a curious society, indeed, which considers a painting of two naked men fighting each other to the death to be morally uplifting while one of a young girl dancing happily on her own is condemned as a work of depravity.

But the most extraordinary thing about these painting is that, to modern eyes, it is almost impossible to discern which ones are examples of high morals and which of low morals, or why. My partner and I ended up playing a game, trying to guess for each painting whether the critics' reaction, as described in the painting's commentary, would be positive or negative. Mostly, we got it wrong.

The first painting in this post, Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret, is apparently wholesome and suitable for letting the servants see. The second, Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm, is apparently lascivious.

They both seem to be rather fine, if very stylised, female nudes to me.

But it's a very good exhibition, worth a visit. Just one criticism: the lighting is pretty poor. There are a couple of paintings behind glass which it's all but impossible to actually see because of the glare.

Ottilie Patterson

2011-07-09T15:03:00.002+01:00

Ottilie Patterson has died in a care home in Scotland. What a voice, what a singer.

The person who posted this on You Tube seems to think it's Bessie Smith, but this is Ottilie.

I've seen Chris Barber's Jazz Band a couple of times, but I never got to hear Ottilie sing live. I would have loved the chance to hear that spine-tingling voice close up.

The Oxford comma

2011-07-03T14:29:00.002+01:00

It's unusual for grammar to be in the news, but there's a bit of a fuss at the moment about the Oxford comma which, it has been reported, is about to be abandoned by Oxford. As it turns out, the story isn't quite so clear cut, but that hasn't stopped a Twitter backlash. I'm rather fond of the Oxford comma, but grammar seems to bring out the pedantic worst in a great many people.

Anyway, the fuss reminded me of a story I had published a few years back in Defenestration, a rather good ezine. This is it:

Four horsemen of the apostrophe

It has been reported that the Oxford comma may be about to become extinct. The last known sighting was in a reprint of the works of Alfred, Lord, and Tennyson, and doubt reigns as to whether this was, in any case, merely a typographical, historical, and literary error.

A spokesman for Pedants Anonymous said: "I think the last time one was seen was back in the days of bakelite radios, ration books, and black, and white televisions."

Aldus Manutius Jnr., editor of "Inferred and Implied Fusspottery", concurred. "I think what is happening is that the Oxford commas are being kidnapped to be re-used in completely spurious plural form's. It's diabolical. The perpetrators should be hanged by their possessive pronouns and have rotten tomato's, fish, and chip's pelted at them."

Concern has also been raised over the long-term viability of the semi-colon. Mister Manutius continued: "Once, it had a rich and varied life, it was used in long, compound sentences, it was used to link two independent clauses with no connecting words, this helped to make the meaning clearer. They were seen the length and breadth of the country, in Lands' End, Cornwall, John o Groat's, Highland, and every town, hamlet, and village, in,between."

His hand's shaking and sobbing, he continued, "It is inevitable that the colon will follow suit. What will happen is this, it will be replaced by a sloppy, comma. We will completely forget that colon's have four uses, to introduce list's, separate related sentence's, commence quotations' or introduce appositives. And lets face it, even I don‟t know what those last one's are any more. It make's you weep."

At this point, Mr Manutiu's began to break down, much like his grammer. And speling. And, like, everything man. He raised a hypothetical glass to the influence's in his life, his parents, Big Bird and Joseph Conrad. Much good they did him, he thought. Issuing a clarion call for clarity he continued "woman without her man is helpless. And you cant say clearer than that."

"I would question that," replied his wife. "Except I gather there are question mark's about the future of question mark's because of the idiotic use of the Australian raised inflection at the end of sentence's? Suggests question mark's where there shouldn't be? Render's them meaningle'ss?"

"Whatever" said sadly Aldus Manutius.

In a final blow for grammarians, pedant's, and bureaucrats' everywhere, it has been reported that; because of the spread of chatrooms: speech mark's are also on the verge of extinction.

Mr Manutius was unable to comment directly, but is reported to be mad, furiou's, and livid.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

2011-06-23T21:49:00.002+01:00

It’s not often I agree with Michiko Kakutani, but when she calls Inherent Vice ‘Pynchon-lite’ she has it about right. That’s not to say it’s lightweight or inferior, but more that it seems to exist in its own amiable bubble, occupying territory somewhere between thriller fiction and 1960s counter-culture nostalgia. It’s part Gregory McDonald’s Fletch series, part Jim Rockford and part Hunter S. Thompson. To be sure, the novel does approach some typical Pynchon questions, but the overall sensation is still of Pynchon-on-vacation-with-his-feet-up-by-the-pool. Or maybe not. I still haven't decided.

But this begs the principal question: we know that Pynchon is a great literary novelist, but can he produce the goods within the context of what really is a humorous thriller? We know he is a great pastichist, of course – Mason and Dixon and Against the Day most recently – but can he hack it in the genre world normally occupied by Michael Connelly or Carl Hiassen. The answer, in the end, is no.

There’s much to enjoy in Inherent Vice. In particular, there are some wonderfully crazy set-pieces and the stoner dialogue is cringingly funny – "You are one crazy white motherfucker." "How can you tell?" "I counted." And the scene where three of them sit watching a “programme” on a television still wrapped up and unplugged, and don’t want to give up until ‘they’ve seen how it ends’ is howlingly good. But as a thriller, which is what should be driving the heart of the novel, the problem is that it’s not especially thrilling. The plot – a missing mafioso-type being hunted by the Feds, the LAPD and our investigator-hero, the pot smoking and acid munching Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, meanders along in an almost entirely tensionless way and the denouement, when it arrives, is a bit of a shoulder-shrug of indifference. It could do with some of the menace of Chinatown or the grit of Chandler or the intricacy of Michael Connelly’s plotting. For sure, the plot is convoluted, but not in a way that intrigues.

The novel is set in the post-Manson era of ‘circa 1970’, specifically the winter of 1969 and summer of 1970. It’s a fascinating period of history, the end of the dream, the summer of love brought to a shattering conclusion by political assassinations (MLK in April 68, Bobby Kennedy in June 68), the Tate murders (August 69), Altamont (December 69) and and the festering sore of Vietnam. Doc, the owner of “Location, Surveillance, Detection”, or “LSD Investigations” (ah, Pynchon, he loves his verbal humour) is largely oblivious of such concerns, wafting about as he does in a haze of pot-induced amnesia. This, of course, is a wonderfully funny inversion of the usual Columbo-type memory man who traps his criminal by remembering every tiny shred of evidence and turning it against him. Doc, on the other hand, has only the dimmest recollection of his most recent activities. Ultimately, though, he turns out to be more competent than his habitual demeanour would suggest.

His ex, Shasta Fay, embroils him in the central drama when she asks him to investigate a plot being hatched by the wife of her lover, Mickey Wolfmann, a local bigwig with shady connections. Wolfmann is subsequently kidnapped, with Doc left unconscious in a compromising position at the scene of the abduction. He is picked up and questioned by his old sparring partner, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen. Sub-plots are developed: Coy Harlingen, the maybe not-so-dead musician; Japonica, the stoner rebrobate with the parents from hell; the Golden Fang, a shady organisation that seems to be either a dentists’ conglomerate or something more sinister; FBI agents who seem as interested in Doc as they do in Mickey Wolfmann; and more. So far, so good: a tight, interesting plot with plenty scope for development.

From here, though, the narrative becomes overwhelmed by Pynchon’s attempts to establish the world as a paranoid place of conspiracy and confusion. The trouble with depicting stoners in novels is exactly the same as dealing with them in real life: for a while, their spaced-outness is amusing, but after a while it becomes tedious, and ultimately an absolute pain in the neck. Pynchon’s drop-outs are attempting, in their out-of-it way, to warn us of something sinister in the turnings of the world, but ultimately we tune out of them as readily as they tune out of society.

This is a pity, because Pynchon weaves some great material into the narrative. The Manson murders are a recurrent theme, as are Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. What we have, then, is a United States that has lost its way, indeed some sense of its dignity and innocence. I have a little difficulty with this, I have to say: it seems a pretty willful overlooking of, say, 1950s McCarthyite paranoia or 1850s Manifest Destiny’s Indian genocide.

But perhaps that’s unfair: rather, it could be argued that, like Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon routinely sets his novels at periods of rupture, where society is changing, not usually for the better, where dreams and aspirations are being lost to paranoia and darkness. This is Pynchon’s rage against the dying of the cultural light: in Inherent Vice, he is asking us to view Doc Sportello as the spirit-of-the-sixties ascendant, some form of alternative-reality triumph of the dream they dreamed in that beautifully naive summer of love. And that’s a noble enough aspiration.

Mike Waterson

2011-06-22T17:37:00.004+01:00

A couple of days ago I wrote about Mike Waterson being extremely ill. Mike died at 3.00am this morning. A true giant of English music has gone, but he was also a completely ordinary man. He had no pretensions, he just wrote and sang his songs, and they will live on.

Increasingly, I am feeling privileged and hugely fortunate to have attended the Watersons concert in Hull last August. It was the last great celebration of that great musical family in Mike's lifetime.

Great chat up lines in literature (3)

2011-06-22T17:33:00.003+01:00

It's coincidence that all three entries in this irregular series are by Dostoevsky...

Prince Myshkin is asked by Mrs Epanchin and her three daughters to tell them what he can read in their faces. He does so, in typically Dostoevskian fashion:

1. “You, Adelaida Ivanovna, have a very happy face; it is the most sympathetic of the three…. You are simple and merry…”

2. “You too, Alexandra Ivanovna, have a very lovely face; but I think you may have some secret sorrow. Your heart is undoubtedly a kind, good one, but you are not merry. There is a certain suspicion of 'shadow' in your face, like in that of Holbein's Madonna in Dresden.”

3. “As for your face, Lizabetha Prokofievna, I not only think, but am perfectly SURE, that you are an absolute child — in all, in all, mind, both good and bad - and in spite of your years.”

The best is reserved for Aglaya. He is coaxed: "But she's pretty, prince, isn't she?" He replies:

4. "Most wonderfully so," said the latter, warmly, gazing at Aglaya with admiration. "Almost as lovely as Nastasia Philipovna, but quite a different type."

What a line. Almost as lovely as somebody else, but not quite... Guaranteed success...

Close reading

2011-06-19T11:21:00.003+01:00

I've not been posting much recently, nor reading much in the way of new fiction. I'm concentrating heavily on some close readings of Cormac McCarthy, Dostoevsky and William Faulkner and while it's a fascinating process, it doesn't necessarily make for very interesting blog posts. I have just finished Pynchon's Inherent Vice, though, so I'll be doing a review of that in a few days. And I'm also wrestling with the Book of Job. A most peculiar piece of work, I have to say.

A Bunch of Thyme

2011-06-19T10:54:00.004+01:00

A bit of a strange experience yesterday, at the Beverley Folk Festival. We went to the first screening of a DVD recording of a concert by The Watersons last year at Hull Truck Theatre. Now, of course, we were actually at that concert - I wrote about it here - so we were watching something we'd already attended.

There was a real sense of fin de siecle about watching it. Since the concert, Norma Waterson has been seriously ill. Indeed, she spent eleven weeks in intensive care. Her husband, Martin Carthy, was meant to introduce the film yesterday (and appear in concert later), but he, too, was ill and couldn't attend.

And Mike Waterson, I understand, is ill again. He was frail at the concert and his health has since deteriorated. The last time I talked to him, a couple of years ago, was about ten yards away from the room we were in for the screening, in the corridors at the back of the main stage where the Watersons had just been performing.

Overall, watching the film, it just felt like the ghosts of the past were circling. The Watersons' final two songs, too, were devoted to time and its passing. Firstly, a beautifulfuneral song from Staithes, written to be sung as a body is lowered into the ground, with the haunting refrain, "goodnight, goodnight, goodnight". And secondly, which I wrote about in my original blog on the concert, Norma's astounding interpretation of A Bunch of Thyme.

As the song says, Time brings all things to an end.

Biutiful

2011-06-13T19:10:00.003+01:00

I watched this on the plane a few weeks ago. It's not the best environment to watch a film, admittedly, but I was pleased to get the chance to see it because I came across one of the screenwriters on another forum a while back and I was curious to see what the film was like.

I suppose my reactions are mixed. Javier Bardem (who played Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, of course) is simply stunning. It is an extraordinary performance from an actor who has a mesmerising screen presence. He plays a man who is dying of cancer. If I'm honest, the depiction of the cancer's ravages is wholly unconvincing, seeming to consist almost exclusively of making him feel tired. The truth is a lot grottier and grittier than that. But nonetheless, Bardem invested his character with a stunning depth of emotion.

My main difficulty with the film is that it is simply so unremittingly bleak. There is no let-up. A couple of scenes display a relative lightness, most notably the one when the family are reunited and eating around the dinner table; but overall the film offers no escape from the brutality of life in modern-day Barcelona. This is the sort of critique of modernity that allows for no redeeming qualities. We just have greed and corruption and pain and death, and whenever goodness does break out - Bardem's character is symbolic of that - it fails to achieve any lasting impact. There is a school of thought that seems to revolve around the notion that everything to do with modern life is vile, and Biutiful comes close to inhabiting that territory.

One final observation which struck me concerns Cormac McCarthy. I know the screenwriter in question is a reader of McCarthy, and it shows in this film, in the bookends (filmends?) in which Bardem's character, Uxbal, has a spiritual/mystical experience. I'm afraid these don't work at all for me. They are clunky and out of sympathy with the rest of the film. The idea is alluded to in a few scenes, notably in the discussion with the old woman about the spirits of the dead, but the climax, in which Uxbal's father is "going on before" into another realm, like Sheriff Bell's father in No Country For Old Men, feels contrived. The scenes at the beginning and end are trying to turn the film into a theological/philosophical analysis of "the beyond", the realm outside our human comprehension. That's okay, I have no problem with that; but that is not what the rest of the film is about.

Martin Rushent 1948-2011

2011-06-07T21:21:00.002+01:00

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, when I was first getting into music, I would guess about 60% or 70% of my record collection was produced by Martin Rushent. He was responsible for work by Buzzcocks, Altered Images (ah, Clare of my youth), Human League, XTC, Generation X, Pete Shelley (Homosapien - I haven't heard that album in years) and a host of others. The only clunker I can think of is The Associates' Perhaps, one album of theirs I really disliked. Rushent straddled punk and the synth-led new romantic eighties period.

In particular, he was responsible for the first three Stranglers albums - still the only ones worth listening to, in my opinion. Theirs was a phenomenal sound, built round the stunning keyboards of Dave Greenwood and the hypnotically powerful bass of JJ Burnell, which was used as a lead instrument in a way I'd never heard before. I've got the original white seven inch version of Walk on By that came with the first pressings of the Black and White album, and I must have played this song hundreds of times, sometimes on repeat. Rushent's production on those three albums is amazing. He helped create a unique sound.

Some books

2011-06-05T11:33:00.004+01:00

Boston Public Library has an impressive collection of literary criticism. Oh, to have these in my library...

Boston Public Library Lending Library

2011-06-04T18:00:00.008+01:00

More from Boston Public Library, this time from the lending library.

It's big...

I have to be honest and say it looks rather old-fashioned. Lots of brown, lots of old looking bookshelves, very formal. This is the kind of library and lay-out I started out in back in the eighties.

And the other thing I noticed is that they have a large stock, and tehy do not seem to weed it much. There are lots of very old looking books, rebinds in plain covers, which you just don't see in the UK any more. Once upon a time I would have written this as a criticism but not any longer. I think it is a strength. The best way for libraries to compete with Amazon, Abe, et al, is not to compete with them. Rather, they should play to their strength, which is a back catalogue of out-of-print books. But in the UK we are throwing them all out. Boston has the right approach.

This is their collection of the Best of American Short Stories - and I can guarantee that there is no possibility of anything so comprehensive in any UK library.

Ah, the shelving trolley. Very relaxing, shelving...

More Boston Public Library

2011-06-02T21:26:00.006+01:00

The courtyard:

John Singer Sargent mural:

The function room (this can be hired out for parties - what a party...)

Mark Twain

2011-06-02T21:20:00.002+01:00

In Boston Public Library

Boston Public Library

2011-06-02T19:31:00.005+01:00

As an ex-librarian, I generally look in on libraries wherever I am, and how could I not in Boston, the oldest public library in the US?

This is the reference section. Pretty impressive...

The gallery:

The reading room:

The central staircase:

Now here's a shelf-full of books:

This last one is now my wallpaper on my laptop.

More later.

The volcano

2011-05-23T19:45:00.002+01:00

Well, remarkably enough, for the second year in a row my trip to the States is in jeopardy because of a bloody Icelandic volcano. You couldn't make it up... Humberside Airport isn't affected yet, but it's the next stop down from Scotland, so the cloud is probably on its way.

If not, with any luck I will be Stateside this time tomorrow.

70

2011-05-23T10:14:00.004+01:00

70 appears to be a popular age. Mr Dylan is also 70 this week.

This is Leo Kottke speaking about meeting Dylan. Leo is the best guitarist I've ever heard, and he has a wonderful, lugubrious stage presence. I saw him about fifteen years ago, and I'd love for him to come back over this way again.

And while we're on Leo, here he is with one of the strangest, most hypnotic songs ever. I think it should be required listening for every aspiring writer. It is a superb example of both establishing voice and using language in unexpected, lovely ways. I've probably posted this before, but it's worth listening to over and over.

Martin Carthy

2011-05-23T09:56:00.000+01:00

Martin Carthy was 70 this weekend.

Censorship

2011-05-21T18:45:00.000+01:00

Interesting days regarding censorship. The internet is making it more and more difficult. The nonsense we're experiencing in the UK over super-injunctions is proving that. A famous footballer is now suing Twitter for revealing his name. Of course, nobody is allowed to say who he is. It must remain a complete mystery.

But I think we'd better watch what happens with the internet. I suspect in twenty years time we may look back on these halycon days when anything went and people could write and read what they wanted. It's bringing down governments, it's refusing to allow the privileged the secrecy they do not deserve, it's making people equal. I can't see it lasting like this. Expect a clamp-down

A famous footballer

2011-05-21T18:44:00.001+01:00

This is a footballer called Ryan Giggs. Approaching the end of his career, he has been a wonderful player

Roth's Booker

2011-05-19T17:49:00.004+01:00

Philip Roth has been awarded the International Booker Award for his body of work. Hard to argue, you'd think, given his career and the highlights contained within it, particularly at the start and the end.

But not so. Booker has a tradition of controversy, and here we are again, with one of the judges resigning over the award. Carmen Callil is the founder of Virago Books and deserves tremendous credit for that - it's an imprint that has rescued many deserving writers from deleted obscurity. But her views here are difficult to accept.

It's a case of "emperor's new clothes", she argues, suggesting that Roth will be unremembered in 20 years time. Well, given that his career has already spanned 50 years and two of his early novels, in particular - Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint - are still regarded as major works, it's hard to see that prediction proving to be true.

He goes on and on about the same subject in every book she argues. Well, that 'something' is, if anything, the human condition, so it's a pretty weighty subject to cover, and surely worthy of serial attention. If you're going to dismiss Roth on those grounds you have to dismiss Dostoevsky, too, amongst others. Melville. Faulkner. McCullers. And on.

And what makes Roth's continued examination of the same themes so interesting is that he does so through the prism of his own experience. So what we read in late Roth is not the same as we read in early Roth. His latest works are extraordinary pieces. He could not have written Everyman at the age he wrote Portnoy. No person could. We are experiencing life through his oeuvre, unfolding and inevitable and unstoppable. That is a wonderful experience to be able to expose yourself to.

A worthy winner, I would say.

Arse about face

2011-05-10T19:32:00.003+01:00

How's this for recognising a difficult problem and coming up with absolutely the wrong solution.

Anish Kapoor is protesting about the treatment of Ai Weiwei, who is being held by the Chinese without trial and has not been seen for some time. A difficult circumstance, to be sure. Kapoor's response?

The Turner Prize-winning artist said that, while some European foreign ministers had voiced concerns, more must be done.

Kapoor has also called on the art world to unite, adding: "Perhaps museums and galleries across the world should be closed for one day."

Right, so to respond to a repressive act by a repressive regime his response is - to stop doing something? Surely, in order to show solidarity with an artist held by the authorities for no good reason, the proper response should not be to prevent the enjoyment of art, but to stimulate it? On a given day, perhaps at a given time, everybody should be encouraged to enter a museum or gallery in support of Ai Weiwei. Surely that's a much more powerful and, above all, positive message?

Donald Duck and The Last of the Mohicans

2011-05-05T13:22:00.001+01:00

Well, sort of...

It’s a pretty sudden shift, going straight from reading The Last of the Mohicans (1826) into Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009). From historical romance to stoner comic thriller in one move – it calls for some major recalibration of the brain’s interpretative functions.

And it just shows what an extraordinarily versatile medium the novel is. Ostensibly the same, but different in every regard.

The main character getting arrested on suspicion of murder, phoning his lawyer, only to find him stoned and obsessing over Donald Duck’s grooming regime – (“Shaving his beak - what else is Daisy making him do?”) – is a memorable image in anyone’s book, but since said Donald is one of my heroes, it made me roar with laughter.

How different from dear, dead Cora…

The end is nigh

2011-05-04T20:43:00.004+01:00

Also via Dangerous Minds, the end of the world is nigh:

I'll be seriously irritated if it is, because I'm due to fly out to the States three days later...

Vonnegut on the simple shape of stories

2011-05-04T20:37:00.004+01:00

This is fun.

It really is simple, this writing lark...

via the wonderfully eclectic Dangerous Minds

James Fenimore Cooper, Cormac McCarthy and American Exceptionalism

2011-05-03T20:38:00.003+01:00

There is little point in writing a full review of The Last of the Mohicans because it is so well known and has been so much written about that, frankly, I would have nothing new to say. In any case, I wasn’t reading it for the sake of the novel itself, but rather in order to understand its place in the development of the American novel. Having finally read The Last of the Mohicans I can now understand why Blood Meridian, a book of which I have been and will continue to be critical, had to be written.

Cooper’s novel demonstrates a strong ambivalence about native American Indians. There is admiration of some American Indian traditions, as exemplified by the “silent Warrior” and “cunning hunter” motifs which are prevalent throughout the novel, while Chingachgook and Uncas, the last two Mohicans, are clearly defined in heroic mode. But even the Huron enemies, for all their cartoonish depiction as savages and godless heathens, are at times given similarly positive characteristics. Their skill in hunting and tracking is celebrated. Their mastery of their landscape is praised.

Of course, they cannot be allowed to succeed, because they are savages, and Cooper’s novel is an early exemplar of a strain of American exceptionalism. Therefore, his description of the Indian foes veers between this immense natural intelligence and utter stupidity. In terms of writing craft this is incompetent: Cooper’s characters are puppets who react one way in a certain situation and in an entirely different way in another, according to the requirements of the plot. Thus, Magua, the great leader of the Huron, allows himself to be tricked and captured in a way that even a gauche ingenue of twelve years of age would be embarrassed to admit to.

But this is not what primarily interests me. The Last of the Mohicans is a badly written novel (although not as bad as it may appear - some of its apparent deficiencies are nothing more than the ephemeralities of changing tastes and sensibilities) and there would be little to be gained by exploring its weaknesses in detail. In any case, (and thanks again to Court for pointing me towards it), Mark Twain has already done a much better job than I could of Cooper criticism. What interests me most is the way the novel grapples with this question of American exceptionalism and its consequences.

American exceptionalism is not as straightforward as is often implied, at least on this side of the Atlantic, where we tend to view it as the American presumption of American superiority. The Puritan settlers were the first exceptionalists, whose exceptionalism was based on the premise that they and God and New England had been brought together in furtherance of the creation of a new Eden. This initial strand of religiously based exceptionalism was the first and possibly strongest. Later, a more naturalistic exceptionalism, based on the independent spirit of frontiersmen and of the wilderness itself, came to prominence. In this way, American exceptionalism developed through the secularisation of America’s core mythologies. But, again, this is not a straightforward or neat or linear narrative, because manifest destiny, that close cousin of American exceptionalism which came to prominence in the 1840s and 1850s, is deeply rooted in notions of divine providence. Its basis is as much religious as it is secular.

In various ways, then, American exceptionalism has shaped American consciousness for the past three hundred years but, in attempting to understand it, I think we need to appreciate that it is not as simple as the usual definition of white men being charged by God to exercise his will by taming and populating the heathen wildernesses of the west. If that were the case there would be a simple supplanting of one tradition with another, and all vestiges of native American consciousness would be removed. I suspect some will argue that this is exactly what did happen and will go further and describe the events of the 1840s and 1850s as virtually genocidal. I don’t wish to debate that in historical terms because I do not know enough about it, but what interests me is the extent to which, whether consciously or not, a strong strain of native American thought and belief has been replicated in the modern American psyche.

This is what we see in The Last of the Mohicans with its celebration of Indian forest craft. The silent warrior, working alone, demonstrating remarkable skill, entirely self-reliant, as depicted in the Indian characters, both “good” (Uncas, Chingachgook) and “bad” (Magua), has become a staple of American popular culture. Think John Wayne. Think Dirty Harry, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Denzel Washington in The Book of Eli. You can certainly trace their lineage back to the American forefathers who arrived in Boston and started building their new Eden on hard work, perseverance, skill and religious observance, but you can also clearly see it in the American Indians they so bitterly opposed. Thus, there seems to be this ambivalence at the heart of American culture. Cooper’s cartoon Indian savages are depicted as manifestations of evil, and yet they are also invested with those very attributes that Americans hold dear. It’s a curious contradiction. It is generally supposed that the myth of American exceptionalism began to overshadow, and finally suffocate the Native American traditions. However, I’m not sure there is such an easy division; rather, there seems to have been a kind of parasitic symbiosis at play.

Perhaps, then, this notion of American exceptionalism is less rooted in Christianity than is supposed, and more connected with a spirituality which is still transcendent but more natural. Hawk-eye, in an argument with David, makes the following statement:

“I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlement, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and that the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of One he can never equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power".

David is appalled by this. He clings to his Christian faith and, in particular, the ‘beautiful simplity of revelation’ which can only be approached by penetrating ‘the awful mystery of the divine nature.’ Hawk-eye, a self-proclaimed ‘warrior of the wilderness’, is scornful of David’s academic approach. He has no need of books because the truth is “open before your eyes” – that is, it is revealed in the wilderness surrounding them. This begins to chime with some of Cormac McCarthy’s thought in Blood Meridian, the ‘optical democracy’ of the natural environment, its ‘neuter austerity’, ‘mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament'.

Where The Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian differ, however, is in their approach to modernity and human (that is, technological) progress. McCarthy is broadly hostile, while Cooper remains imbued with the early pioneers’ faith in the future. An important symbol of this is Hawk-eye’s gun, so vital it even has a name, ‘Killdeer’. Hawk-eye’s brilliance with this implement (horribly exaggerated, of course, another fatal weakness in Cooper’s writing) is clearly counterpointed with the superb tracking and natural skills of the Indians: each is a master of their craft, each is presented as someone to be admired, their skill something to aspire to. And what better symbol is there of human technological progress, in all its brilliance and potential for evil, than the gun? And what more American? In his shooting duel with Magua, Hawk-eye claims that whichever proves to be the best marksman will be, by default, the “better man”. Note, that is not better shot, but better man, full stop. Therefore, through the symbol of Killdeer, Cooper is making a natural god of rationalism, reason, the progress of technology, while at the same time that symbolism is explicitly linked with tradition and nature. This is something McCarthy does not do: on the contrary, his novels offer increasingly insistent critiques of modernity and its consequences. Cooper's approach points to an ambiguity at the heart of America relating to modernity and tradition, progress and conservatism, technology and agrarianism. Indeed, there is something of the Janus in the American’s ability to look in both directions at once. In The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s philosophy is an uncomfortable melding of the most positive forces of both native American Indian beliefs and westernised modernity. The result is this peculiar notion of American exceptionalism. McCarthy, blind to tradition and refusing to conform to established mythologies, will have none of it.

Therefore, there are no noble savages or stout defenders of Christian righteousness in Blood Meridian. There is no good and bad, no battle between cultures or for beliefs. The future is unordained and it is unlikely to be wholesome. In Blood Meridian there is simply death and destruction. In that brief period in history, McCarthy is telling us, and in that location, while searching for its new Eden humanity lost its humanity. And that is the inherent danger of American exceptionalism.

Roy Flatt

2011-04-29T08:29:00.004+01:00

I've mentioned on here a few times that I became a librarian because when I was a boy my local librarian sometimes wore a kilt and wellies at work, and I wanted a job where I could do that. There was more to it than that, of course. I distinctly remember being greatly impressed when I asked him for books on ancient Egypt and he took me directly to the appropriate shelves. And the way he could rifle through the old Browne tickets and find my reader's card was memorable.

That librarian's name was Roy Flatt, and I'm saddened to read that he has recently died. I never did get round to emulating his sartorial approach, but I may just appropriate his answer for preferred leadership style.

The Best of Beryl

2011-04-19T19:23:00.003+01:00

Tonight, Man Booker will award the Best of Beryl award for the best of the five novels that Beryl Bainbridge had nominated for the Booker Prize. To the competition's shame, she never won it. In either an act of atonement or a shameless marketing gimmick, they are selecting from her five nominations for a special award to mark the oeuvre of this singularly English writer.

Actually, I think it would be much more funny if, say, Margaret Drabble won it and poor old Beryl came second again. I think that would have made her roar with laughter too...

If I had to choose, it'd be The Bottle Factory Outing, though I think An Awfully Big Adventure will win.

Update: Master Georgie wins. It was beaten in the original Booker by McEwan's Amsterdam, so I am fairly happy with that. It's a better book than Amsterdam.

Children and Indians in McCarthy and James Fenimore Cooper

2011-04-18T12:35:00.003+01:00

The fate of children in the novels of Cormac McCarthy is not generally advantageous. They seldom survive. In Outer Dark, the offspring of Rinthy and Culla is killed by Harmon and the Triune. Suttree’s son dies. Blood Meridian is awash with the blood of slaughtered children. In The Road one is eaten. The common thread is the lack of sentimentality with which McCarthy describes their fates. He doesn’t labour to describe the brutality or the unique horror of such a crime. He doesn’t attempt to explain the impact on the other characters. All of this increases the power of the passages. By not describing, he forces the reader to picture the scene.

It is interesting to compare McCarthy’s technique with James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans. Consider this scene:

The savages now fell back, and seemed content to let their enemies advance without further molestation. But, as the female crowd approached them, the gaudy colors of a shawl attracted the eyes of a wild and untutored Huron. He advanced to seize it without the least hesitation. The woman, more in terror than through love of the ornament, wrapped her child in the coveted article, and folded both more closely to her bosom. Cora was in the act of speaking, with an intent to advise the woman to abandon the trifle, when the savage relinquished his hold of the shawl, and tore the screaming infant from her arms. Abandoning everything to the greedy grasp of those around her, the mother darted, with distraction in her mien, to reclaim her child. The Indian smiled grimly, and extended one hand, in sign of a willingness to exchange, while, with the other, he flourished the babe over his head, holding it by the feet as if to enhance the value of the ransom.

"Here -- here -- there -- all -- any -- everything"! exclaimed the breathless woman, tearing the lighter articles of dress from her person with ill-directed and trembling fingers; "take all, but give me my babe"!

The savage spurned the worthless rags, and perceiving that the shawl had already become a prize to another, his bantering but sullen smile changing to a gleam of ferocity, he dashed the head of the infant against a rock, and cast its quivering remains to her very feet. For an instant the mother stood, like a statue of despair, looking wildly down at the unseemly object, which had so lately nestled in her bosom and smiled in her face; and then she raised her eyes and countenance toward heaven, as if calling on God to curse the perpetrator of the foul deed. She was spared the sin of such a prayer for, maddened at his disappointment, and excited at the sight of blood, the Huron mercifully drove his tomahawk into her own brain. The mother sank under the blow, and fell, grasping at her child, in death, with the same engrossing love that had caused her to cherish it when living.

Horrible, to be sure, but for me the drama of the scene is diluted by the excursion into analysis of the woman’s sensibilities. The invocation of God as witness removes the immediacy of the moment, and the love that the woman feels for her child, as strong in death as it was in life, would be more powerfully felt if it was left unsaid. What is happening is that Cooper is lifting the reader out of the immediate narrative by an omniscience which is unnecessary and intrusive. The true horror is felt when the reader feels as though he is there observing. Something of that connection is lost when the woman’s thoughts, which the reader-observer cannot know, are brought into the narrative.

There then follows a massacre, as the Indians go on the rampage. Again, it is instructive to compare McCarthy and Cooper. This is the attack on the camp in Last of the Mohicans:

At that dangerous moment, Magua placed his hands to his mouth, and raised the fatal and appalling whoop. The scattered Indians started at the well-known cry, as coursers bound at the signal to quit the goal; and directly there arose such a yell along the plain, and through the arches of the wood, as seldom burst from human lips before. They who heard it listened with a curdling horror at the heart, little inferior to that dread which may be expected to attend the blasts of the final summons.

More than two thousand raving savages broke from the forest at the signal, and threw themselves across the fatal plain with instinctive alacrity. We shall not dwell on the revolting horrors that succeeded. Death was everywhere, and in his most terrific and disgusting aspects. Resistance only served to inflame the murderers, who inflicted their furious blows long after their victims were beyond the power of their resentment. The flow of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of a torrent; and as the natives became heated and maddened by the sight, many among them even kneeled to the earth, and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide.

And this is Blood Meridian:

Already you could see through the dust on the ponies’ hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of unifrom still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat work backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

The tendency to judge is strong in the Cooper. Magua’s whoop is “appalling”, the yells of the Indians are like nothing human, they are “raving savages” who “hellishly” drink the blood of their vanquished. There is no doubt here where the poles of right and wrong reside. And again, as with the appeal to God in the previous scene, there is a precise correlation with Christian judgement, with the horrific sounds bearing comparison with the Last Trump at Armageddon. The same can be seen in the McCarthy, but to a lesser extent. Again, the Indians’ yells are barbarous. But, while Cooper is at pains to describe their godlessness, McCarthy’s Indians are instead grotesques. The scene is “death hilarious” and the Indians are even compared to clowns: this juxtaposition of terror and childish entertainment is particularly chilling. Where Cooper described the Indians’ screams invoking terror “little inferior” to the Last Judgement, McCarthy goes even further, describing the sight of the Indians as “more horrible” than the Christian hell. But in this description, McCarthy is not being judgemental in the way that Cooper is. In Last of the Mohicans, we are being directed by Cooper to view the scene in a particular way. There is nothing of this proselytising in Blood Meridian. The action is described as it happens and the only response we are invited to share is the sergeant’s helpless “Oh my god.”

There is nothing the reader can do but agree.

Special edition of Hyperion on James Purdy

2011-04-15T17:08:00.002+01:00

Many thanks to Rainer, who left a comment on one of my reviews of a James Purdy novel, alerting to me the special edition of Hyperion Writers' Journal dedicated to Purdy. This is a fantastic resource. I've only dipped into some of the papers included, and I'm looking forward to reading them all in detail.

The more I think about Purdy (and I do, frequently, his writing keeps coming back to me), the more I think he is a neglected genius. When I'm done with my PhD I aim to make a fuller study of his work, and I'm really pleased that the Nietzsche Circle, publishers of Hyperion, have produced this special edition.

It is also a wonderful website, and as an amateur dabbler in Nietzsche, I'm much looking forward to browsing further.

But encouraging news on censorship

2011-04-13T18:14:00.003+01:00

The top ten books most challenged in American libraries is the troubling story in my previous post, but here's good news to counter it:

Only 13$ of Americans in a new poll have said they supported a bowdlerised version of Huckleberry Finn in which Twain's use of "nigger" is replaced by "slave" and "injun" is also expunged.

It baffles me how people can accuse Huck Finn of being racist. Presumably the claim is being made by people who haven't actually read it, but just know that the "n" word is used and immediately jump to conclusions.

But 87% have rejected this ridiculous pandering to witless criticism.

America's Most Challenged Books

2011-04-13T17:32:00.004+01:00

Once again, the American Library Association has produced a list of the books most frequently challenged in US libraries by people seeking to have them banned.

The top ten is:

1. "And Tango Makes Three" by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2. "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Offensive language, Racism, Sex Education, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence

3. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: Insensitivity, Offensive Language, Racism, Sexually Explicit

4. "Crank" by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit

5. "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group, Violence

6. "Lush" by Natasha Friend
Reasons: Drugs, Offensive Language, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group

7. "What My Mother Doesn’t Know" by Sonya Sones
Reasons: Sexism, Sexually Explicit, Unsuited to Age Group

8. "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: Drugs, Inaccurate, Offensive Language, Political Viewpoint, Religious Viewpoint

9. "Revolutionary Voices" edited by Amy Sonnie
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit

10. "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Religious Viewpoint, Violence

Brave New World? You couldn't make it up, could you? Wanting to ban a book in which books are banned. Why not add Fahrenheit 451 to the list as well?

As ever, it would be good if American readers of the blog visited their local libraries and requested some of these titles, to ensure they get bought and circulated.

Librarians are not censors. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of our profession.

Idealism in The Glass Bead Game

2011-04-13T12:22:00.002+01:00

This is from Robert Galbreath's analysis of Herman Hesse and the politics of detachment:

But there is also an agonized optimism to his thought and a devotion to the ideals of peace and humanity which demand to be related to real life. Although many readers misinterpreted his novels, the books yield innumerable examples of Hesse's emphatic rejection of escapism in all forms: escape into pure instinct, into childhood innocence, into utopianism and aestheticism, into ivory-tower academicism, and action for its own sake.

I find this an interesting quote because I may have been (may still be) one of those who is thus misinterpreting Hesse. ‘Agonised optimism’ is an elegant and accurate phrase. I can think of no better way of summarising the conclusion of Demian, for example, or of the death of Knecht in The Glass Bead Game. I find that optimism refreshing. It is so rudely absent in much modern literature, which appears to revel in the gnostic travails of humanity and the encroaching destruction of civilisation. Hesse and Thomas Mann are beacons of hope amid so much darkness of spirit.

But a rejection of escapism? I find that more difficult to accommodate, given Hesse’s work. The key here, for me, might be a comparison of the roles in Joseph Knecht's life of Father Jacobus and the Elder Brother. Father Jacobus is a man of the world, a spiritual man – a Benedictine monk – who nonetheless understands how to engage in politics and how important politics is in everyday discourse. Despite his faith, he is Thomas Mann's Settembrini without the naivety, a liberal man of culture and cunning. The Elder Brother, however, is steeped in Chinese philosophy and is set on a hermit’s life of mystical search for self-revelation. This, of course, is touched on in far greater detail in Hesse’s earlier work Siddhartha.

Which of these two, Father Jacobus or the Elder Brother, is predominant in shaping the thoughts and beliefs of Knecht? It is an important question because, if Knecht is the spiritual centre of The Glass Bead Game, then the route he takes towards his own moment of self-knowledge is therefore one of the most significant messages of the novel. Is he guided by outward, embracing, political and social discourse, as exemplified by Jacobus, or by inward, almost solipsistic self-reference, as with the Elder Brother? I know I am crudely caricaturing their positions, particularly the Elder Brother, but I do so for a purpose. And the answer to my question is, inevitably, both, to varying degrees. But it is the degree which bothers me. Too much of the Elder Brother, and what I see is, indeed, a retreat into escapism. We see it, too, in Siddhartha. We see it, to a qualified degree, in Demian.

While I can certainly see that The Glass Bead Game, in particular, can be read as a rejection of escapism – utopianism, aestheticism, ivory-tower academicism – I’m not sure Hesse’s oeuvre as a whole can be read quite so straightforwardly anti-escapist. That may be my ambivalence about eastern-style medidative contemplation, but the more Knecht bends towards the teachings of the Elder Brother, the less anchored in reality and the more escapist I see the novel. This is mirrored, too, in the non-Castalian sections of the novel, in which the key message seems to be removal of the self from the day-do-day worries of the world as the sole means of achieving understanding.

I cannot accept this position. It is suggesting that the outside world is fine as long as it does not impinge on the inner world of the contemplative mind. This is a refined variation of solipsism. It is something which does - and should - appeal to younger people, still setting out in life and moulding their views, but should it form a template for human interaction? Indeed, how can it, since it appears to eschew interaction?

So, I'm curious, am I, as Galbreath suggests many do, misreading The Glass Bead Game?

3-D Movies

2011-04-11T20:08:00.003+01:00

I've never seen one. Never thought I'd be bothered, either.

I expect Pina won't show in any cinema within a hundred miles of me, but if it does I'll aim to get to it. I know absolutely nothing about dance, modern or otherwise, and as a rule have little interest, but I've always made an exception for Pina Bausch, whose work I've always found simply extraordinary. She died last year, far too young, just when Wenders was about to begin filming Pina. Because of her death, he had to change his plan completely. This is the result, and I think it will be brilliant.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

2011-04-09T16:24:00.003+01:00

In his contemporaneous review of The Glass Bead Game, Werner Vortriede suggested that, because of its length and because of Hesse’s age, it might be considered his last will. If it is not quite that, it certainly seems reasonable to reflect that it is a summation of Hesse’s life and thought. The Glass Bead Game is a humanist commitment to the vitality of everyday existence, a plea that learning and knowledge do not become ends in themselves but are harnessed to the furtherance of human society. Hesse describes the vision as encompassing ‘wise men and poets and scholars harmoniously building the valued and vaulted cathedral of Mind.’ A cathedral, then, something to be venerated, but a cathedral to enterprise, functional, reflecting the currents of human endeavour.

The Glass Bead Game of the novel’s title is, it initially appears, the ultimate achievement of human culture. The novel takes place some four or five hundred years in the future, in a world that has passed beyond what is described as the feuilletonistic age (that is, our own current society) in which war and conflict have predominated, and in which culture is trivialised and coarsened. The action is set in the broadly mid-European country of Waldzell, a secular state enjoying peace and prosperity. In particular, it focuses on Castalia, a pedagogical province where the academic pursuit of pure knowledge has become an aesthetic discipline, personified most significantly by the Glass Bead Game. This, although its precise nature is never fully explained, is a philosophical game in which glass beads are used to demonstrate the progress of the players through the days during which a game may take place. The goal is to find interconnectedness in the realms of arts and knowledge – the precise mathematical notation of a Bach fugue or Chinese influences in music and literature and so on. It calls for remarkable and wide-ranging cultural knowledge and an ability to make and demonstrate subtle connections. Essentially, it is an attempt to discover a grand unified theory. Games are played according to strictly prescribed rules, and are comprehensible only to a limited number of trained experts. These players are revered for their erudition and remain cloistered within the community of Castalia like medieval monks in a monastery, under the leadership of the Magister Ludi, the Master of the game. This pursuit of cultural perfection, then, has become a secular religion. And in all of this, it is music which is pre-eminent, the masterful art form from which everything else takes shape and meaning. Thus, our first introduction to Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel, a young man who will rise through Castilian society to become Magister Ludi, is as a child learning from the Music Master and showing, from this early age, a remarkable aptitude and sympathy for music.

If all is peace and tranquility in the post-feuilletonistic age, and if the elite of human society is free to ruminate on the creation of aesthetic perfection through the Glass Bead Game, one might assume that the future vision being created by Hesse is therefore one of utopia. It is, though, far from that. Castalia is a state in decline and it remains, moreover, largely ignorant of the fact, even denying it when confronted with the truth in Joseph Knecht’s letter of resignation. Castalia, then, is reduced to stasis, a state going nowhere, achieving nothing. Perhaps, an idealist might argue, such a state of affairs is sufficient if it ensures contentment, wealth, peace for the inhabitants, some Benthamite idyll of the greatest good for the greatest number. But how does one judge what represents the greatest good for the greatest number? Do we mean those people living in the here and now? Or those to come? If what you are doing now, while creating an environment of stately comfort for the majority, will nonetheless undoubtedly lead to decay and downfall at some stage in the near future, can this action still be categorised as the greatest good for the greatest number? Hesse’s novel firmly answers in the negative.

Castalia may have overcome the Feuilletonistic age, but to what end? It has become a dry, sterile, solipsistic world, inward and devoted only to the glorification of art, dismissive of history, politics or anything of practical value. This is not, surely, something to be aspired to? And, furthermore, let us examine its approach to the arts, because it reveals a decidely unartistic, uncreative approach. Invention is deprecated, innovation is a foible only of the young and naive. True art, for the Castalian, does not involve creation as we would understand it: it is merely a form of intellectual exegesis, making connections, drawing parallels, using one form to shed light on another. But nothing is created as a result, only a game, mimesis. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, with no end product and no aspiration. That is not art, that is not culture, that is not the free enunciation of the human spirit. Further, this husk of creativity is presided over by a self-selecting elite, far removed from the interference of non-Castalians. That is nothing short of cultural despotism: Castalia, then, is a future-world fascist state in which all creative thought is restricted and channeled into official forms. It is a mirror of the Fascist world Hesse inhabited while he wrote The Glass Bead Game, in which the Nazi weltanschauung and its glorification of myth is replaced by the pointless glorification of art: a mirror, but the reflection is equally vile.

In the novel, then, we follow Joseph Knecht from being a frightened but hopeful child falling under the spell of the Music Master through to his assumption of the great office of Magister Ludi, the culmination of his aspirations. His journey is not straightforward and, along the way, he encounters wise and able men who will greatly inform his future career. Doubts settle in his mind. While still a young student he confronts Plinio Designori, the son of a wealthy industrialist who, because of his family’s standing, is being educated in Castalia. An outsider, he is highly critical of Castalian ways and the two boys engage in lengthy philosophical debates and finally, through their confrontations, become friends. Later, Knecht makes a pilgrimage to visit the Elder Brother, a mystical hermit steeped in Chinese philosophy, from whom Knecht begins to learn self-knowledge and transcendence. On an ambassadorial trip to the Benedictine monastery in Mariafels, Knecht encounters Father Jacobus and is confronted by the narrowness of Castalian vision, the shortcomings of their renunciation of history as any meaningful field of study, their insularity and consequent naïve vulnerability to the machinations of the rude world beyond. His doubts increase.

The Music Master and the Elder Brother are, in complementary ways, Knecht’s guides to spiritual peace and understanding; Plinio Designori is his link to the real world; Thomas van der Trave, Knecht’s predecessor as Magister Ludi, is his guide to the ways of Castalia and the dignified performance of civic duty. By comparison Fritz Tegularius, the wayward Nietzschean outsider, shows Knecht that there is an alternative to the stultified, tradition-bound ways of Castalia, a free-thinking but highly dangerous, possibly mad, approach to life and order. While those in Castalia deprecate such activity, Knecht accepts, even encourages it. He is of Castalia, but not wholly subsumed by it. And this sets the template for all of his relationships, while making inevitable his eventual renunciation of high office and retreat into real life.

Thus, Knecht stands at the centre of a series of binaries – Castalia and the world, the Glass Bead Game and realpolitik, secular reason and religious observance, pedagogy and pragmatic action, teachers and students, servitude and mastery, self and others, inwardness and outwardness, yin and yang, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Castalian – and western – society tends to exaggerate these binaries, forcing them to stand in opposition to one another. This is the way to dogma, Hesse warns. In the case of Castalia it will lead, as Knecht comes to realise, to its inevitable decline, divorced as it is from reality. For the real world, brute forces – military or economic – stand isolated from the culture that can be derived through an understanding of aesthetic beauty. Secularity loses an element of grace, while monastic life underestimates the importance of the human. Individuation at the expense of connection with society leads, as with the Elder Brother, in his remote hermitage, to meaningless isolation. Knecht, placed between these binary opposites, cognisant of the strengths and weaknesses of each, comes to understand how a path may be established which avoids their extremes and instead achieves a state of harmony.

It is Father Jacobus, however, who is the key to the novel. The knowledge which
permits Knecht’s ultimate leap in understanding is initially latent, undeveloped. It is through Father Jacobus that Knecht truly comes to understand that the rarefied study of aesthetics and art, divorced from realpolitik, can only end in terminal decline, while pragmatism is the key to understanding how true harmony must be achieved by the synthesis of the discrete world views offered by Castalia, the monastery, the world and the searchers for self-knowledge. Without Father Jacobus, it is likely that Knecht would have remained a successful Magister Ludi for the rest of his days, presiding unknowingly over the decline of the organisation he loved. Instead, he renounces his magistracy and, in so doing, saves both Castalia and himself.

Essentially then, the novel revolves around the need to ‘know thyself’, the continuous, often painful, always difficult process of attaining self-awareness. This can only be achieved, Hesse argues, through disicplined discipleship under sages who can teach the way to enlightenment, and through consequent renunciation of all but the intellectual pursuit of self-knowledge. It is an ascetic life, to be sure. Thus, Knecht believes himself to be following his calling throughout his career, devoting himself first to the Music Master, learning at the feet of the Elder Brother, Father Jacobus, the Magister Ludi and so on, all the while progressing seamlessly through the echelons of Castalian society. But this, he finds, is not his destiny, this is not his road to self-awareness. On the contrary, all the trappings of office, the strictures of rigid Castalian life, they serve only to obscure from Knecht his true purpose. And that, he realises finally, is to teach, to pass on the harmonious understanding of life and existence to a new generation, to boys as yet untouched by formal learning and discipline. It is now that Knecht finally reaches some accommodation with his own self and reaches a degree of serenity. In the process, his demeanour changes from polite servility into equally polite assurance. He outgrows Castalia, the Glass Bead Game, the cloistered life of aesthetic reason.

In the end, Knecht gives up the sterility of Castalia as, one feels from the outset, this free-thinking man would inevitably have had to do. He does not turn, however, to the world of the religious order in Mariafels and to the implicit suggestion of politicking that underlies organised religion. Instead, he decides to leave for the real world and do something useful, worthwhile, but still in keeping with his temperament, training and background. He agrees to act at personal tutor to the troublesome son of his old friend Designori. Thus, this, the main section of the novel ends with another master-pupil relationship, this time with Knecht as the master. Or is he?

The novel is in five parts, of which the first is the longest and most important. The style of this first part is a challenge, but one which Hesse manages superbly. It is written in a deliberately dry manner, mimicking academic prose and thus always remaining objective and restricting itself entirely to facts. Given this approach, it is inevitable that a certain distancing must be effected between the reader and the protagonist and, it is true, Joseph Knecht, although evidently a good man, does not endear himself to the reader. There is, in his asceticism, something remote about Knecht. And yet, by the end of the Knecht section, Hesse has managed to bring out his essential humanity to the extent that we feel comfortable in the presence of Joseph Knecht. It is an impressive feat of writing.

The remainder of the novel is given over to “writings” by Knecht himself, in which he imagines himself to be a character from a different age and society. In this way, the novel tells four stories relating four reincarnated lives of the same man, Joseph Knecht. In each, what is most important to the human soul and human destiny is the transference of knowledge, understanding and wisdom from person to person, generation to generation. Knowledge can only come from within, but that knowledge can only be released from without.

In truth, these latter stories have nothing of the power of the main narrative, and there is a sense of repetition in them, the feeling that we are being unnecessarily lectured by an author who has already eloquently made his point. But the first part of The Glass Bead Game is an astonishing piece of literature.

Voice in Last of the Mohicans

2011-04-07T20:35:00.003+01:00

I'm reading Last of the Mohicans at the moment and finding it a bit heavy-going. It was published in 1826 and the prose is ponderous. I don't mean long and convoluted - I like that, and I'm prone to it myself, if I'm honest - but rather it's so flatly descriptive, emotionless.

It struck me, while I was reading it, how much influence the modernist movement has had - much more than we probably realise day-to-day. At one point, when they first hear the sounds of approaching Indians, the two women are described thus:

Cora set the example of compliance, with a steadiness that taught the more timid Alice the necessity of obedience.

It's hard to imagine a more bloodless way of describing two young women trying to remain composed in the presence of looming danger. But that's to our modern ears. We're used to getting into the heads of characters, even in omniscient narration, and even if sensationalism is not being called for.

And partly, perhaps, this is because we have become so used to the Uncle Charles principle in fiction, in which we're taken into the head and thoughts of the character through the omniscient narration adopting the tone and mood of the character in question. In the original Uncle Charles example, from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we are told that Uncle Charles "repaired" to the outhouse. The pompous and overblown verb "repair" gives a sense of the character and so we view what's happening partly from his point of view.

In Cooper's prose, that cannot happen. We are told absolutely from the outside, from the objective view of someone who wasn't there. That feels almost alien in today's literature, where we would expect, without falling into didacticism or sensationalism, to nonetheless be given an impression of the reaction of the characters.

The flatness of the style takes some getting into.

Simone de Beauvoir on Samuel Beckett

2011-03-31T19:00:00.003+01:00

Simone de Beauvoir, writing about Beckett:

As for Beckett, his way of emphasizing the dark side of life is very beautiful. However, he's convinced that life is dark and only that. I too am convinced that life is dark, and at the same time I love life. But that conviction seems to have spoiled everything for him. When that's all you can say, there aren't fifty ways of saying it, and I've found that many of his works are merely repetitions of what he said earlier. Endgame repeats Waiting for Godot, but in a weaker way.

Man Booker International Prize

2011-03-31T17:52:00.002+01:00

The shortlist has been announced for the Man Booker International Prize. The Man Booker Prize is the annual award for British and Commonwealth writers, for best novel of the year. It usually affords a bit of fun, with huffs and fall-outs among the jury common.

This is an international version, but it covers an author's entire body of work. It's an oddity, to be sure. I'm ambivalent about prizes at the best of times - how can you compare one piece of art against another? Once you start bringing cultural differences into it, plus the need to consider an author's whole oeuvre, it becomes impossible.

And, really, on what level can you compare, for ecample, Marilynne Robinson and Philip Pullman? Their worldviews are at such odds it becomes impossible to make any sort of literary judgement without some element of spiritual sensibility entering the discussion. To put it bluntly, what atheist is going to rank Robinson higher than Pullman, and what Presbyterian will prefer Pullman to Robinson? And, in any case, should they? Supposing it was possible to define some measure of purely literary worth: would there be any point? Robinson and Pullman each have their perspectives on mythology and spirituality, and these are crucial elements of their fiction. Without it, their work would be shorn of much of its power. So pitting them against each other is simply pointless.

Other than that, the list smacks of decision by committee. A couple of Asians, some Europeans, Americans but not too many, nowhere dominating. It's a major surprise there's no Latin American, even if they are out of fashion at the moment. Personally, I would remove Anne Tyler, who is a good novelist but scarcely in the same league as the others, and insert a Latin American, presumably Garcia Marquez. Any list of greatest living authors that doesn't include the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude is pretty flawed.

A Cool Million by Nathanael West

2011-03-29T17:37:00.002+01:00

In 1939 Nathanael West wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published.’ This was no great exaggeration: to be frank, in his own (short) lifetime he was barely read. And yet, in response to one of my reviews of an earlier West novel, Jim H commented that West is an extremely influential novelist. And that's absolutely true. The more one reads West, the more one realises exactly how influential he has been on writers for the past sixty plus years. It is a remarkable turnaround.

The time when West was writing was one of depression but one, also, of clearly approaching turbulence, especially from Europe. It was, too, a time when the European novel was in the ascendancy and, with it, a different mood was being fostered in the arts: broadly speaking, we might be considering the late flowering of high modernism, with all its studied seriousness. And, at the same time, this was increasingly a political era. In that context, West’s peculiar novels were overlooked, their deceptive simplicity and barbed naivety not given the recognition they deserved, their political meaning underestimated. The existential theatre of the absurd, as depicted by Camus or Mann or Hesse, was an intellectual environment; its satire was concomitantly elevated, focused more on social criticism than comic technique. The 1930s depression occasioned much soul-searching in American society, saw lurches both left-ward and right-ward. It promulgated a social-realist approach to literature and, at the same time, a retreat into the pastoral. Such an environment was not conducive to sly, formally inventive prose like West’s. It wasn’t until after the second world war, with the emergence of the 1950s anti-war novels – Vonnegut, Heller etc, the peak of the southern grotesque, Cold War standoffs that led Philip Roth to protest the death of the novel because novelists couldn’t compete with reality, the Civil Rights movement and the birth of 1960s counterculture, that satire took on (once again) the slapstick, wise-cracking, anti-establishment dimensions that we encounter so strongly in the work of Nathanael West.

So there’s a pleasing circularity to it, a curious symbiosis. West influenced those who came after – Vonnegut, Pynchon, Hawkes, Purdy, Barthelme etc – but it was they who permitted West’s work to be understood for what it is. The successors opened the way for better understanding of the master.

A Cool Million is a political novel, in the sense that it targets a political establishment which is corrupt and racist, bullying and philistine, but its strangeness left the political movement largely nonplussed. It is a novel of the end of the American dream. It is Candide recast for twentieth-century America, the destruction of an innocent by a system he simply cannot comprehend. Lem Pitkin is a simple, if not simple-minded, boy who is torn apart – literally so, he is systematically divested of body parts – teeth, eye, thumb, scalp, leg – with painful regularity as he seeks to make his fortune and lay claim to that mythical, tarnished dream of American wealth and happiness. In doing this, West explains, his intention was to ‘rewrit[e] the Horatio Alger myth – from barge boy to president of from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in one generation.’

It is hard to tell whether one likes or dislikes this novel. It is a peculiar, hallucinatory experience. The cartoonish humour is, at once, wickedly funny and horridly cliched, bluntly didactic and acutely observant. One either rides with its eccentricity or is made sea-sick by it. I think, in the end, its success revolves around the extent to which you think West is offering the reader any sense of hope; indeed, whether it can be inferred that West himself possessed any of that virtue.

The relentlessness with which Lem’s picaresque life unfolds in succeeding disastrous set-pieces does become wearying, and before long what initially seemed like highly effective satire-dressed-as-whimsy loses both its humour and its impact. In that, it's a bit like Vonnegut when he's off-form. Lem is a construct, completely empty, devoid of any emotion or knowledge or feeling other than the quest for the American dream. He is completely passive. His life happens to him. He dies. From that point of view, A Cool Million is probably the least successful of West's novels.

By the end of the novel, Lem is embroiled in a Fascist organisation which is taking over America under the charismatic leadership of Shagpoke Whipple. Inevitably, he dies and, as a final ignominy, is resurrected posthumously as a hero of the fascist state. Thus, as David Galloway noted in 1964, West is warning that the inevitable result of the rupture of the American dream is a descent into fascism. Civil and labour unrest, dissatisfaction with the the system – ‘Wall Street and the international bankers’ – would announce itself through extremism and violence.

The difficulty in this is that it is unclear where the alternative lies. West gives us an array of characters of varying degrees of awfulness, but nowhere is there someone on whom we may affix some sense of moral responsibility. I do not like critics who dismiss books on the grounds that ‘there are no likeable characters’: such analyses are trite and pointless. And yet, in this case, it does present an issue with the novel: where is there any alternative to the dismal fascism that West portends? One might expect, at the very least, such an alternative should be observable through its absence, but it is difficult to argue even that with A Cool Million. Once you satirise everything, the point of the satire is lost (Percival Everett take note). Nonetheless, you may argue, a warning is still a warning, and it is not the role of the Cassandra to suggest a solution to the problem, only to warn of its impending genesis. Maybe. But remember here that the problem West warned against – the rise of American fascism – didn’t materialise.

Not yet, the ghost of Nathanael West may perhaps be whispering. Not yet.

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2011-03-28T17:31:00.003+01:00

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a gambler. Like most gamblers, he found himself in serious debt. Hence The Gambler, which he wrote (actually dictated) within twenty-six days in 1866 in order to meet his publisher’s deadline, which failure would have occasioned crippling financial penalties. Art mirroring life.

As someone with no interest in gambling, nor any comprehension of or sympathy for the psychological impulses that lie behind it (that being one of the more positive side-effects of Calvinism), I was doubtful whether The Gambler would hold much interest for me but, such is Dostoevsky’s brilliance as a novelist, even minor works like The Gambler remain gripping. And, in one respect, it strikes me as positively a major work. In it, Dostoevsky’s focus is principally on the City of Man, rather than the preoccupation with the City of God which suffuses Crime and Punishment, Devils and The Brothers Karamazov. What we have, then, is man and his foibles, man broken by his weaknesses, a searing secular analysis of human failure. Thus, it may lack some of the theological and emotional sweep of the great novels, but that is not to say it is ephemeral or slight. Rather, it may be argued that in The Gambler Dostoevsky more successfully approaches questions of morality and human love precisely because he does not bind such material in portentousness. Sometimes, it is easier to apprehend the City of God by ignoring it; there is sufficient activity in the City of Man, moral and immoral, good and evil, to establish a valid metaphysical standpoint.

The primary subject matter of the novel is, of course, gambling. But The Gambler is about much more than that. Gambling for money becomes a metaphor for gambling with life, for the search in each of us for something beyond the inevitable pull of mortality or the strictures of morality or society, or the balm of common-sense or the false comfort of romantic love. The novel takes the form of diary extracts by a young man named Alexei Ivanovich. Alexei is a tutor in the employ of a Russian general, and this entourage has arrived in Roulettenburg, in Germany, a place renowned (and named) for its casinos. Alexei Ivanovich, miserably in love with Polina Alexandrovna and searching for some meaning in life, grows increasingly certain that his fate is bound to the roulette tables.

Time and again, Alexei has the opportunity to triumph – indeed does triumph, at one stage winning 200,000 roubles. But triumph is transitory. Within each triumph is the seed of its ultimate destruction. We are not even talking here about hubris, simply the ineluctable notion of time and its cleansing effect on the human pysche. Alexei Ivanovich’s ruination is depicted through his addiction to gambling. Notably, however, he is not the first character in the novel to be so afflicted: that dubious state belongs, instead, to the General’s mother, Antonida Vasilevna, whose fatal attraction to the roulette wheel is relayed in two magnificent scenes, one as comedy, the other, inevitably, as tragedy. This merely sets the scene, however, showing us that the capacity for foolishness and intemperateness resides in all of us.

But it is Alexei Ivanovich specifically who is key to Dostoevsky’s message. His addiction and subsequent ruination goes far beyond routine foolhardiness. In his quest for satisfaction at the roulette table he is demonstrating the loss of his self, of his soul, of any sense of meaning. Moreover, there is a hideousl inevitability about it. “I knew for certain,” he writes, “that I should not leave Roulettenburg unchanged, that some radical and fundamental change would take place in my destiny; so it must be and so it would be.” This sets up Alexei Ivanovich for an existential battle he is wholly unequipped to win. He is gambling everything on mere chance just as – in Dostoevsky’s world view, at least – modern man, divorced from God, presumes that existence can be remain a game of luck and fortune without responsibility or devoid of consequence.

This desperate battle with the roulette table is mirrored throughout by Alexei Ivanovich’s doomed attraction to the beautiful but manipulative Polina. There has always been some speculation that much of The Gambler is autobiographical and that, in particular, the character of Polina is based on Appollonaria Suslova, a femme fatale with whom Dostoevsky had a torrid affair in 1863 (three years before The Gambler was written and during the period when his addiction to gambling was at its peak). Although there may be a degree of truth in this, D.S. Savage, writing in 1950, is right to point out that Polina is not merely a caricatured femme fatale, nor is the novel as straightforwardly autobiographical as has been suggested. Any such interpretations are understandable, however. The first great set-piece in The Gambler (and probably the funniest single episode in all of Dostoevsky and proof that this miserabilist has a keen sense of the comic) begins when Polina persuades Alexei to demonstrate his love for her by playing a ludicrous prank on a pompous German baron and his wife and, in so doing, greatly insulting them. Alexei does so, to disastrous effect, ultimately losing his position as tutor. But, Savage reminds us, we are receiving these views of Polina through the distorted vision of the man who is in her thrall, the unreliable narrator Alexei. And, Alexei admits, “Polina was always an enigma to me.” Most significantly, though, in the end it is not Polina who is responsible for Alexei’s ruin, but the truly femme fatalistique Mlle Blanche de Cominges. And, indeed, Mlle Blanche is really only the implement of his ruination: rather, it is Alexei Ivanovich himself who is ultimately responsible.

Alexei Ivanovich, in his devotion to the roulette table, believes in the truth of chance. And, through that belief, he is revealed to believe in nothing. He is a lost soul who loses all: love, status, wealth, self. His unrequited love of something becomes, instead, a requited love of nothingness.