The Scarlet Pimpernel...& the pleasures of cheap print.

Sir Percy Blakeny, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was, in this year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty. Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking, but for a certain lazy expression in his deep set blue eyes, and that perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly cut mouth.

It's seems silly to criticise Baroness Orczy for demonising the French revolution and idealising the aristocracy. That's surely what you would expect from a novel like this. And the writing seems to anticipate such criticism somehow. There's an arch tone of voice, particularly in the earlier chapters, a theatricality throughout, particularly in the hero's impossibly successful disguises, which alerts you to the fact that this is history as a charade, as costume drama. The climax strains credulity with the stupidity of the French revolutionary soldiers. The twenty strong 'League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' are all noble young men enjoying themselves, just as they would at hounds, or some similar sport, performing their daring exploits largely for the fun of it. It's history played as a game.

Being familiar only with a vague outline of the character, it was interesting to see just how much of the story is actually more a romance, concerned far more with the feelings of Lady Blakeny than anything else, for all that it contains it's fair share of adventure.

I almost certainly wouldn't have read it if I hadn't come across a cheap paperback from the 60s in a charity shop, with a wonderful painted cover. The kind you don't really get anymore. The vivid red of the Pimpernel's coat dominates the composition. The materiality of the text added to the nostalgia of the story's love of the aristocracy. Compare Baroness Orczy with Sabatini. If it came to the quality of the writing I'd probably choose Sabatini over Orczy. He's got just a better command of language. Yet my copy of Captain Blood is the most recently republished Vintage edition. It's wonderfully designed, but the form doesn't match the charm of the adventure story. It should be old, preferably printed in a time before I was born, because that's where the adventure story belongs for me. It's surely for precisely that reason that the British covers to the Captain Alatriste series evoke older pulp conventions. Form matches content, only it can never quite match the real thing because it's too obviously the product of nostalgia. The old pulp covers weren't trying to evoke anything, other than attempting to sell you the book. Trying to evoke the idiom is fine, but there's always an air of self consciousness about it. This 1960s cover for The Scarlet Pimpernel simply is.

I'm also fascinated by the other titles recommended at the back. I've never read Naomi Mitchison or Geoffrey Trease, but both sound intriguing. Clearly there was this whole tradition of historical fiction which has rather faded from view now, perhaps through the rise of a more self-consciously meta fictional historical fiction over the last thirty years. I'm not talking about historical romance here, which has clearly continued to flourish despite whatever literary fashion might have to say. I'd put Henry Treece in the same grouping, a writer I have read.

Best of all though is the description quoted for Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets and Valerians, quoted from The Observer:

Four children (Mother dead, Father in India). Scholarly bachelor uncle decides - with aid of wise old gardener-factotum - to educate them. But beware of Lion Tor, and the mist when it takes strange shapes over Weeping Marsh. And where is Lady Valerian's lost explorer husband?

I love the peremptory tone of it, the faint echo of the opening of Bleak House. The assumptions of the reviewer. It comes straight out of the Empire. "Thrilling stuff" no doubt; you needn't read the book, just let the breathless précis do all the work of the story.

I've always loved these advertisements for other other writers, other books, which used to appear in the back of the book. The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished. It's something else I don't think we get so much any more, unless it's adverts for more books by the same author as the book you've just finished reading.

The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished reading. Or the book you're still reading, if you've flicked to back while still only half way through. It's the promise that this wonderful adventure that is reading and that is never going to end.

This Weeks Comics

Actually, by this point The Winter Men appeared some years ago. It's probably superior to any of the comics I might have bought in the past few weeks. Haven't managed to get to the comic shop for a while. Another Amazon review:

Brett Lewis & John Paul Leon – The Winter Men 

“My little friends, I thought I would have more time to tell you how thing ended up. But perhaps for now I will just tell you the good parts..."

For anyone following this when it was originally serialised, it must have seemed unlikely that it would have ever reached the end. Originally supposed to run for a full 8 issues, it was bounced from one DC comics imprint to another, subject to delays, cut down to 6 issues, then struggled to publish a total of 5 issues before the final extra sized special appeared over two years later. Presumably as a result of all these behind the scenes wranglings, the final chapter in this volume feels rather compressed, the exquisite pacing on display elsewhere dropped in the rush to get the story over as elegantly as possible in the space remaining. Just the good parts...

Kris Kalenov, the central character and narrator in many tightly packed caption boxes, is a recognisable type in these sorts of stories. The lone man, weighed down by some unconfessed violent past, capable of more feeling than he allows the world to see, unexpectedly honourable, and who is caught up in a series of ever escalating events, manipulated by others.

"Like many Russians, I was meant to be poet. But one does not eat good intentions. So...I have become some other things."   

One of the most striking things about this comic is its language, which wonderfully evokes the landscape of post-soviet Russia through its cadence and inflection. I've no idea if Russians actually talk like they do in The Winter Men, but writer Brett Lewis has clearly done his research, and it certainly feels authentic. Especially as the narrative sometimes feels less interested in the post-Watchmen superhero plot with which it is ostensibly concerned (most particularly in that awkward final chapter), and more with bleakly funny anecdotes of daily life. In this respect the strongest chapter in the whole book is probably the fourth, where we simply follow Kris and his compatriot Nikki the Gangster on their ordinary 'biznis' over the course of a single day.

What draws your attention to the language is not just how fine it is, but also the fact that there's so much of it, piled up in multiple caption boxes. There's a density of information both verbally and visually on almost every page with usually as many as 6 or more panels. That none of this ever becomes excessive or overwhelming is equally a testament to the layout and design by John Paul Leon with his wonderfully gritty and expressive artwork. The detail with which he overloads his pages perfectly complements the dialogue's verbosity in constructed an overcrowded landscape for the characters to inhabit and move through. And then in the odd scene where dialogue does fall away, he's equally capable of carrying the full force of the narrative.

Given its troubled production schedule, it seems only too appropriate that the collected edition already appears to be out of print. Although it was probably the superhero element that got it published in the first place, that's actually the weakest element of the book, but only really takes over in the flawed final chapter. It works far better in the early chapters where it functions more as a metaphor for Soviet nostalgia. Otherwise, The Winter Men is a fascinating and bleakly funny portrait of post Soviet Russia and violent men which is worthy to sit next to Jack Womack's Let's Put the Future Behind Us, another American book which is both fascinated and appalled by the complex reality of a country struggling to comes to terms with its Soviet past and a present of capitalism and brute market forces.

I wanted to place this here, next to my last post on LeCarre, because although The Winter Men is a very different kind of work, it shares a few things in common with LeCarre's general worldview and approach. Brett Lewis is similarly attentive to the rhythms of speech deployed by his violent characters.

A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.

That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.


Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.

Honourable schoolboys...(more on Le Carre)

I've long thought that The Honourable Schoolboy must be the perfect title for a Le Carre novel. At least it was for that period of his career when he was addressing both the Cold War and the post imperial decline of Britain. When Smiley takes charge of the Circus at the beginning of the second novel of the 'Karla' sequence he's a positive force for change coming in and shaking things up in an institution previously in decline, a metaphor for just what Le Carre imagined the British state then needed (of course, the new broom for the malaise of British politics in the mid-70s eventually turned out to be Thatcher, a solution which I don't imagine Le Carre liked very much).

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson suggests of the actor James Fox that he 'has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class'. So many of Le Carre's characters seem to come from a similar place, that hinterland between the upper middle class and the actual aristocracy. They're people you only have to look at to know they've been to the right schools, even if it's only a minor public school. The kind of sad and faded institution featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, clearly drawn from Le Carre's own experience of teaching at such an institution. It's more than that though, they're also characters marked by their schooldays, the way that some of us are. You could look at most of the cast of Tinker, Tailor and easily slot them into suitably cliched roles at their schools. 'The best days of my life...' is a cliche that conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps it's a consequence more common for those who have attended public schools, a form of institutionalism.

It's interesting to note that the two characters clearly marked as coming from a different cultural place are Ricki Tarr, a working class thug eventually manipulated by everyone, and Toby Esterhase. Esterhase's name may link him with the real life aristocratic Esterhazy family, but he's still obviously not quite 'one of us', the weak link in the upper circle who run the Circus in Tinker, Tailor. Marked as an outsider because of his foreignness. Ricki Tarr is a character that the new film definitely gets better than the old BBC series, if only because Tom Hardy is just better in the role than Hywel Bennett was back in 1979.

It was the casting of Colin Firth which put me in mind of the David Thomson quote above. Watching the trailor, because I knew the story and characters, I could guess exactly who was cast as who. The casting of Firth as the bisexual, upper class traitor Bill Hayden is almost too obvious. Perhaps you can't associate him with the upper class in quite the same way as Thomson does with James Fox, but coming after I last saw him as King George in The King's Speech, it has a fascinating echo. King George must now rank as one of his defining roles, along with Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Both characters are representative of a British establishment, fundamentally honest, patriotic, upstanding. It's fascinating to place this portrait of corrupt Englishness against these two earlier roles, have them echo each other, the contrasting surfaces of the British establishment.

a find at work

And what a wonderful find!

I currently work part time for a bookseller, sometimes packing books, and sometimes cataloguing them. On Wednesday I was mostly working on the category of rural homes and country houses. Most of them are coffee table books really. Stuffed full of pictures of luxury homes you'll never be able to afford. Aspiration-porn. Interiors art-directed to within an inch of their life.

But this? This is a coffee table book with pretensions. It's a tour of the English country house, including the former homes of famous people from history such as Jane Austen. It's littered with literary quotations, many assigned pride of place on their own page.

And the cover? Whoever art-designed this is some kind of genius. The animals sitting down to enjoy their wine and food amid aristocratic squalor. Clutter. It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as Lewis Carroll. The Goons. The Beatles when they went psychedelic. The Bonzos. Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht. English Surrealism.

Quotes...Thomas More

Writing in 1516, Thomas More gets to the heart of one of the major problem with our country's present political life:

So there you have a group of people who are deeply prejudiced against everyone's ideas, or at any rate prefer their own. Suppose, in such company, you suggest a policy you've seen adopted elsewhere, or for which you can quote a historical precedent, what will happen? They'll behave as though their professional reputations were at stake, and they'd look fools for the rest of their lives if they couldn't raise some objection to your proposal....And yet we're quite prepared to reverse [the] most sensible decisions. It's only the less intelligent ones we cling on to like grim death. I've come accross this curious mixture of conceit, stupidity, and stubborness in several different places. On one occaison I even met it in England.

Utopia, trans. Paul Turner

"...the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.": John LeCarre & George Smiley

John Le Carre has himself rather given the game away, apparently suggesting that his most famous character, George Smiley, would now be "keeping bees somewhere" in retirement. Smiley may exist at the centre of Le Carre's masterful depiction of the shadowy world of the British Intelligence community, a depiction often praised for it's accuracy and realism, but Smiley's fictional existence seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes, whose fictional retirement Le Carre consciously alludes to, or Hercule Poirot. Characters who exist somewhere outside of history, subject to revised time lines, never really aging. Although we do finally get that in The Secret Pilgrim, written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a fictional summing up of the period, of the kind of spy stories which could be told then, and of the depressing reality which for Le Carre always lies behind any fanciful depiction of the world of espionage. With the Cold War over, critics seemingly thought Le Carre had lost his great subject (and that may be true for all I know), but it was certainly appropriate that it should have marked the final appearance of his signature character, one final performance before the curtains were closed on that moment of history.
Yes, I am a fan, ever since I was dazzled by Alec Guiness in one of the BBC's handful of contributions to the claim of 'Greatest TV Show'. They did a follow up, adapting Smiley's People, when for budget reasons they couldn't make The Honourable Schoolboy, which I've still never seen. No, after seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time, I turned to Le Carre's original novels. Alighting first on a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in which Smiley only has a cameo), before backtracking to the very beginning and working my way through, concentrating on Smiley and the boys in the Circus, one of Le Carre's wonderful coinages for secret service slang. With my eagerness to read every thing Smiley appears in, I missed that The Russia House is actually a Circus novel too, connected by the character of Ned in The Secret Pilgrim, so I ended up reading those two the wrong way around.

First appearing in two rather conventional whodunits, Smiley has only minor roles in Le Carre's following two novels as he established himself as a major writer of espionage fiction, before eventually reemerging in Tinker, Tailor at the centre of the 'Karla' trilogy. The whodunnit plot is transposed from the quest to catch a murderer to a need to discover the double agent within the service (the 'mole', another Le Carre coinage actually appropriated by the real secret service), 'Karla' the ultimate nemesis, head of the Soviet service, an obvious double for Smiley who haunts the narrative, only occasionally glimpsed. The final novel in the sequence, Smiley's People, like The Secret Pilgrim, always seemed to me to be taking place in a narrative space located somewhere 'after', a belatedness, as if all of the previous conventional narratives of spy fiction have already taken place, leaving only a sense of loss which haunts both novels. The waste of the secretive world.

Given my regard for the TV Tinker, Tailor, it's perhaps not surprising that I wasn't initially overly bothered about seeing the new film. It's not that I resented their making a new version, more that I just couldn't see the point, when we've already got an adaptation which is pretty much perfection. And with seven hour-long episodes in which to elaborate the complex plot, two hours would inevitably squeeze the narrative. But we purposefully took a needed day off on Wednesday and ended up catching an early evening performance. It's a testament to the director and screenwriters that the narrative never feels cramped. Many of the fabulous cast are largely reduced to little more than cameos, yet all manage to impose themselves on the material. It's clear who everyone is from even the smallest scenes. And the set design is immaculate in it's evocation of the vanished post war world of the early seventies.

In fact, I'd suggest it's almost too immaculate. It's a film that almost feels as though it's been directed by its main character. Everything, every lingering camera movement is so precise, the gloomy cinematography just so. Important scenes are often elided, seen only obliquely, the faces of several characters remain hidden from the viewer. Everything feels so very controlled, buttoned down. Compare one adaptation with another, and it's clear that for the TV series, made in 1979 only a few years after the novel was written, it simply can't be nostalgic for the Cold War period since for its makers and audience the Cold War was present day reality. I'm old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War period, born in the same year the TV series was produced, my brother and I were woken up in order to be sat down in front of the TV footage when the Berlin Wall fell. "Watch this! It's History!" we were admonished. The film captures something of my imaginings of the period just before I was born. Growing up there were enough reminders of it around, particularly in official buildings, whereas the TV series just is the time before I was born.

In fact, the film is haunted by that earlier adaptation (really, how could it not be?). It borrows some of the alterations to the novel's plotting, whilst adding a few of it's own. As good as Gary Oldman is as Smiley (and he is excellent), he's not who I would have chosen for the role. It's a trivial thing, but he's just too tall, whereas the character of the novels and Alec Guiness's performance is short and a little fat, dressed in clothes which never quite fit him. Oldman looks a little outsize at several points, where Alec Guinness' Smiley disappears into himself, rather like a mole (the animal) at times. And Oldman surely borrows from Guinness for aspects of his performance and speech patterns. Which is not to say that he doesn't bring things to the character which are absent from Guiness's earlier performance. I read somewhere that Le Carre himself has observed that he gives a much clearer sense of the cruelty Smiley is capable of, his rather passive aggressive nature.

What I love about Smiley is that sense of buttoned down emotion. It's that peculiar kind of Englishness which celebrates failure and buried feelings. Which is also what elevates him slightly into the realms of the fantastic: his complete devotion to his work, the contradiction of a person who is brilliant in one aspect of their life and a failure in another. For The Spectator Smiley is a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man", an obvious allusion to the infidelities of his beautiful, aristocratic wife Anne. It's a rather reductive and stereotypical evaluation of masculinity, indicative of a stereotypical heterosexual panic about definitions of maleness. And Smiley is a very unsexual character, contrasted with the predatory and bisexual Bill Hayden, modeled on Kim Philby, who cuckolds Smiley. Arguably, in their different ways, the sexuality of both characters is threatening to the sort of rhetoric the Spectator is displaying.

A more charitable reading of the Spectator quote would be that the secretive world of espionage is destructive of any human relationship. It's a theme which runs through much of Le Carre's Cold War fiction, and interestingly it's also what the film adaptation plays up. That it is more explicit about the homosexuality of several characters is no doubt a sign of the respective eras in which their adaptations were made. But the film's makers go further, portraying Smiley's trusted Lieutenant Peter Guillam as a gay man who late in the narrative brakes off what appears to be a loving relationship in order to protect himself in the secretive world in which he opperates. It's certainly in keeping with what little I know of the world of British intelligence which, like the theatre, appears to have been something of a haven for gay men pre-Wolfenden and legalisation. But it also makes the narrative focus much more about the spy's personal lives.

In the TV series, Smiley's cuckoldry is an open secret, everyone eludes to it, but nothing is stated. Nothing is even seen until Ann returns to him for a final scene in which Smiley attempts to confront his wife with her infidelity with Bill Hayden. In the film we have several flashbacks to a perfectly tacky early 1970s works Christmas party, in which Smiley spy's as a peeping tom on Ann and Hayden. Another flashback gives him a near confrontation with Hayden in which Smiley arrives back from Germany to find Hayden in his home, almost catching the erring pair. Far more emphasis is laid on the friendship between Hayden and Jim Prideaux through the repeated appearance of a photograph of the two of them in younger days that by the end it almost feels more like a love story which dare not speak its name than a spy story.

It's interesting. This is one of the great English Cold War novels, and I can't help but feel that the film subtly depoliticizes it. Whilst the earlier TV adaptation can't be nostalgic for the Cold War, that isn't to say that it isn't nostalgic for another earlier period of Britain's history. When Smiley visits Connie Sachs in the TV series Beryl Reid has a line where she laments her 'boys' who were raised to rule an empire. The TV series is in part an imperial lament, if far from an uncritical one, since these are real live 'boys' who are getting hurt as a consequence. In the film, Kathy Burke does suggest things were simpler during the Second World War, but the empire goes unmentioned. Her most memorable line is when she mischievously suggests to Smiley that she feels rather 'unfucked' whilst two undergraduates are making out on a sofa in the room next door. More sex, and less politics.

One of the changes I really liked was the scene where Smiley tells Guillam about his one meeting with their ultimate enemy, the Soviet spy chief Karla years previously in Delhi. In the TV series we get yet another flashback, with Karla played by a silent and impassive Patrick Stewart. In fairness, this was some years before he was Jean-Luc Pickard, but I never quite understood why they had such a major Shakespearean actor in such a tiny role. I think I understand it now. It's a tiny role, so it needs a well known actor than at least many of the audience will be familiar with in order to give the character solidity. In the film, Karla is an absent ghost, haunting the narrative. Oldman however narrates Smiley's slightly drunken account of his meeting with Karla in a powerful scene, but we remain in the narrative's present, the camera fixed on his attempt to act out their absent encounter. There is a flashback, but it only gratuitously reveals to the audience something hidden from the characters, that Karla was present at the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux with which the story opens, revealed only through his still possessing the lighter which Ann once gave to Smiley. It heightens the doubling of Smiley and Karla which is present in the novel, but still denies him any real presence.

I don't think any of this is wrong. The destruction of human relationships which Le Carre's fiction finds the world of espionage guilty of is ultimately a criticism of that world. For Le Carre, politics often feels like little more than an excuse for people to behave wickedly. The makers of the film aren't betraying the novel. It's just an interesting change of emphasis, reflective perhaps that now we are more nostalgic for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War (not that Le Carre's depiction of the Circus ever really gives us moral certainties), than we are for a lost empire. But it also reflects a modern tendency to privilege personality and personal feelings over politics. The only real misstep in the film is the final scene where Smiley finally sits down triumphantly as the new Control, contrasted with a montage of the film's minor characters who have all lost something. Where in the TV series it was nothing more than an administrative meeting in which Smiley softly informs his chastened colleagues that he will now be taking over as 'acting head' of the Circus, here it's transformed into a victory. This is a subtle betrayal of Le Carre's fictional world, where any victory ultimately feels like failure.

If I compare the two adaptations and still come out thinking that the one is a masterpiece whilst the other is just a really well made film, then that's also because I think that it gets the balance between the personal and political right. Perhaps at the end of the day it only comes down to the fact that I saw the TV series first. Still, I'm glad I saw the film, and I'll be delighted if it's success means we get adaptations of the other two volumes of the trilogy. The BBC couldn't afford the cost of filming in Hong Kong for the The Honourable Schoolboy. And I really must get around some day to watching the BBC's Smiley's People. I've read a few of Le Carre's non-Circus novels. His most autobiographical, A Perfect Spy, is as good as if not better than the 'Karla trilogy'. It's themes of nostalgia and betrayal are in a similar orbit. I've not yet read enough of his post-Cold War fiction to know if Le Carre lost his great subject with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even if he did, then he still created one of the great fictional characters reflective of that era. I think that's more than most writers manage.

Mum's Books...Ian McEwan's 'On Chesil Beach'

I know that Mum did read this one because it was for her book group. I vaguely remember her talking about the group's reactions, although not much of what she actually said. It was a group of women who could all remember what 1962 was actually like. I think that Mum liked it, although with a few reservations.

At that point I think I was feeling pretty disillusioned about Ian McEwan's work. I love some of it. The first collection of short stories, The Cement Garden (also an excellent film, which I saw several years before I'd read a word of McEwan's writing), The Innocent, and Enduring Love are all worth reading. The Child in Time is inconsistent, but still has excellent individual scenes (I'd also already encountered an exploration of David Bohm's ideas of the implicate order in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man which made it feel somewhat less impressive). That's just it though. Taken as a whole, despite his reputation as one of English literary fiction's great talents, he's just a wildly inconsistent writer. Amsterdam starts fairly impressively but then descends into silliness after about two thirds of the way through. That it's just about the worst prize-winning novel I've ever read was useful in that it helped me finally see the extent to which literary prizes have rather less to do with celebrating quality than with selling books. And Saturday was such a bad book that even the positive reviews put me off reading it. Atonement was better, but also felt a little like McEwan retreating into a kind of greatest-hits of Englishness: the country-house narrative, the blitz, retreat in the Second World War.

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."

McEwan's fiction has often concerned itself with a single unexpected life-changing event. A very short novel On Chesil Beach narrates in at times minute detail the wedding night of young couple Edward and Florence and the lives which have brought them to this moment. It's set seemingly very deliberately in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse began. A strategy which reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, a time similarly on the brink of transformation, one which will completely eradicate the world which the novel's characters take for granted. Their approaches are very different though. Fitzgerald's narrative voice is suffused with the commonplace, illuminating the society of pre-revolutionary Russia through rapid accumulation of small details and the tragi-comic story of English printer Frank Reid and his domestic troubles. Everything is implicit. The Russian Revolution is never mentioned, but for the reader it looms over the novel's action. We know that nothing of this will last, soon to be obliterated by the larger historical forces.

By contrast McEwan's narrative voice is always at a distance from the characters, constantly placing their story in ironic relationship to history. From the novel's opening line, their sexual difficulties are placed squarely in the context of their time, which is contrasted with the cultural changes which are about to overwhelm the world that has formed them. I can't help but feel that this risks being a little condescending. They're described as being 'trapped' by history at one point, but surely, isn't everyone? Certainly some of the difficulties between these two fictional newlyweds and their inability to communicate properly with each other - they're essentially strangers to each other despite clearly being 'in love' and intimate - seem to lie in the fact that they grew up in the immediate post war period. Their lives would undoubtedly be different if they'd been born later, but again, isn't that true for everyone? We may now live in a period which is bombarded with sexual imagery, sometimes enough to give one the impression that everyone else must be having sex all the time. There surely must be something inherently wrong with you if you're at a period of your life when you aren't having sex, or if you're one of those people who just isn't interested in it. Even so, I'm sure it's still quite easy to reach one's early twenties still as a virgin, as Edward and Florence do. And although we might think of our culture as more liberated now, I wonder if it can't be just as repressive. At least in some ways. I'm sure that sexless marriages existed in the past, and I see no reason to assume that they would necessarily have been unhappy ones. I think the pressures exerted by our culture would actually make it far less likely for such a marriage to be successful now. Although at least asexual people must now be able to find likeminded souls via the internet. Honestly, I sincerely wish such people every happiness.

Which meandering has all rather taken me rather far from McEwan's novel. It's probably the best thing he's written since Enduring Love. The distanced narrative voice never gets in the way of the emotional kick that his brief fiction provides. There's something delightful in his description of their 'innocent' courtship. The secrets they're both hiding from each mean that neither one is entirely innocent as their disastrous wedding night unfolds. You want to forgive them both for what happens and the sadness which results. The brief sketch of the lives which follow their wedding night suggests that while they are both fairly successful professionally, but also somehow unfulfilled. I don't really see how this means that they have 'dropped out of history' as McEwan's sonorous narrative voice seems to suggest. Possibly he intended their disastrous night to be somehow emblematic of that moment before the 60s began, but they seem rather more particular to me. Their conflicts and difficulties occur within a sharply realised post war Britain, but then so did so many other lives. We don't make the historical moment we find ourselves within, and our lives aren't emblematic of anything. They're just our lives. In my experience life-changing experiences are usually far more gradual than McEwan's fiction often suggests, but that doesn't mean that our lives don't alter in ways we could never have predicted. But they're also our lives, lives that no one living before or coming after us could have lived. And McEwan is quite right, they can always be changed by simply doing nothing.

India...R.K. Narayan

R.K.Narayan - The Painter of Signs

Another amazon review:

A beautiful, simply told story that conjures up the sights and sounds of a small town in the midst of change. Ah Raman! What a wonderful character! Torn between the competing demands of his traditional mother and the progressive, demanding Daisy. It might seem perverse to compare him to Dostoevsky's unnamed Underground man, but he really does seem to be part of the same dynamic. A passionate, intelligent man whose education has separated him from the social world within which he finds himself within. Where Dostoevsky is trapped by his circumstances, living within a heightened expressionistic world, Narayan's subtle comedy finds a solution for Raman by, as Monica Ali's helpful and perceptive introduction makes clear, opening him out to a reception of the world where he is no longer able to judge, but must accept and can be a part of. It's a subtle and hopeful celebration of the communal world, as represented by the small town of Malgudi. A wonderful little book.

I came across this is in the Blakehead, a vegetarian cafe and discount bookshop, one of many businesses which is now no longer with us thanks to the combined incompetence of the banking industry and our elected politicians. I'd been discussing Narayan with my wife an evening or so before, so it was a synchronicity which I appreciated (it's not the first such experience I've had where I have a particular author in my head whose work I then unexpectedly find in a charity or discount bookshop).

If I'm gradually becoming more interested in reading more Indian literature (whether that's in translation or an Indian English langauge writer), then obviously that's because I'm now a part of an Indian family through my marriage. Before I met my wife, apart from Rushdie I think I'd read no more than a few novels by Anita Desai and The God of Small Things (which it turns out we both disliked!). Some Rudyard Kipling and Forster's A Passage to India and William Dalrymple's White Mughals, although obviously that's all coming at India from the 'other side' so to speak. The former colonial rulers. I'd seen a few films directed by Satyajit Ray. Black Narcissus. India and Indians must have been a presence within some of the fiction I read and had read to me when I was younger, much of which I've doubtless forgotten. At least one of Willard Price's Adventure series of novels is set in India as are a few of George MacDonnald Fraser's Flashman novels. Tintin? That cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days with animals, definitely. Willy Fogg marries an Indian princess, doesn't he? Well, as far as I'm concerned, so did I!

I can still remember a scene in an episode from Jimmy McGovern's Cracker where Robbie Coltrane is questioning a young black girl. I'm paraphrasing the dialogue from long-a-go memory, but it's something like, "You tried to go out with white boys, didn't you? But they just wanted to talk about the 'Black experience', and what it means to be 'Black' in England, whereas you just wanted to talk about David Beckham and music and clothes" The ever tactful Fitz. I understand the point he's making though. And I know that my wife has had at least one well-meaning but ultimately incredibly patronising middle class white male flatmate who somehow felt that he had to apologise for the British Empire. Well, we are in academia... I would certainly hope that I've never been guilty of such a patronising attitude, although of course we've had our conversations about India, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest of it. Well, we're academics aren't we! But one never knows.

Graham Greene famously said about Narayan's work that, "Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." It's quoted on the back of plenty of editions of his novels. Undoubtedly he was being sincere, and he did a lot to assist Narayan in acquiring publishers at the beginning of his career. For me though, what I found with this novel at least is how being an Indian doesn't feel all that different from being an Englishman. The feelings of Raman are entirely explicable to me. He's a character with whom I found it almost too easy to identify with. Of course, the cultures which formed us are very different, but I wonder if what it means to be a human in any culture might ultimately be very similar.

Toru Dutt...The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers

Judging a book by its cover

One of a number of books I picked up during the extended death rattle of our local Borders. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to this exactly. Turu Dutt is not a writer I'd ever heard of before. Something about the cover, Renoir's Two Girls Reading in the Garden. There are whole swathes of art history about which I know little, so I'm actually more familiar with some of the films of his son, but this is a lovely picture. Idealised certainly. A picture of how we want to imagine reading. I like that there are two of them pictured, an act which is often seen as solitary (and usually is in my experience) becoming a communal one.

It's not a bad choice of cover for the novel, since it's a picture which is French and also one that was painted in 1890, about a decade after the novel's composition. Mademoiselle D’Avers, whose diary and narrative voice constitute the bulk of the novel apart from a final epilogue which switches to an omniscient narrator, is hardly solitary - she interests herself in everyone around her - but the form of a diary isolates her for the reader. Her simple language is very effective in creating a gentle narrative flow which carries you along. It's an novel of adolescence, frequently rooting it's scenes in a lucidly described natural world. Mademoiselle D'Avers is a kind hearted person, deeply pious, and perhaps as a consequence misses important information about the web of relationships in which she finds herself when it's all fairly obvious to the reader. Her rural idyll also encompasses madness, jealousy, murder, sickness and death. Which is not to say that isn't an optimistic book, suffused as it is with a gentle and kindly Christian faith.

It's also one of those books which is interesting as much for its author as for its story. Toru Dutt as her name implies, was not French, like every character who appears in her novel, but Indian. Its funny to imagine how this book ended up in our Borders, published by Penguin India and with a price in rupees on the back cover. Both of the novel's introductions (there are two, one for this edition, and one which was attached to the novel on it's original publication in France in 1878) push for a biographical reading, a reading which is not unconvincing. Toru Dutt set her fiction in France, and her other possibly uncompleted novel written in English in England, because it was only in the West that she could imagine the freedom for her heroines to choose who they loved. Even in a liberal family such as the one to which she belonged, the women where prevented from going into society in contrast to what they experienced in the West. Written in secret, her novels were only discovered after her early death at the age of 21, prepared for posthumous publication by her loving father.

The more you read about Toru Dutt, the more romantic a figure she becomes. Both of her siblings died young, with all of her literary work (she was also a poet, translater and writer of critical essays) produced within only a few short years before her own young death. Her family apparently lived for a time in both France and England, her father only deciding against settling there because of the illness of his children. Judging by the quotes from her letters included in the novel's 1878 edition she appears to have strongly identified herself with France and the French nation. She's clearly significant as an author simply because she came first. Author of one of the first Indian English poems, the first novel in English by an Indian woman, and the first novel in French by an Indian of either gender. The latter, The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers, is particularly fascinating because she wasn't the product of French colonization, but of English. G.J.V. Prasad, author of the novel's modern introduction, sums it up well when he describes it as a 'unique product of the colonial encounter', written in French during British dominance of India, a Christian novel written by an author who was born as a Hindu (Toru's family converted when she was 6), a French novel that her father dedicated to the English Viceroy of India. The many layers here are fascinating for the way it inevitably complicates the idea of the colonial encounter. Here in the West (and in academia!) it's routinely imagined as the simple encounter between a single self and other. An author such as Toru Dutt and her various imaginative identifications complicates that rather naive assumption.

What's most fascinating to me is how utterly she seems to vanish into France in her novel. There's the odd wrong note, such as when Mademoiselle D’Avers comments that the count, the man with whom she is in love with for the first half of the novel, is clearly of noble birth because of his pale skin, a sentiment more pertinent to the society Toru Dutt was imaginatively trying to leave. Otherwise it feels entirely of France to me. The novel it brings to my mind is one written more than thirty years later, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. It's a unfair comparison really, since I don't think it's nearly as good as that French classic, but both novels are stories of adolescence. They both present the reader with a seemingly idyllic, placid surface which obscures a more troubling reality. Perhaps that's a good description of the move from childhood to adolescence?

I suppose that I'm fortunate that those two girls caught my eye! Partly perhaps because the novel borrows the form of a diary, I found myself reading it mostly as a few pages a time in between attending to other things. It creates a real sense of intimacy. Toru Dutt is clearly more knowing than her protagonist, which might give pause for too much enthusiasm for any biographical reading. Despite the sometimes dark events which surround the protagonist, and its tragic ending, what the novel leaves behind is a feeling of Mademoiselle D'Avers' kindness.

This Weeks Comics: Top Ten

What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?

In imitation of the poll conducted every ten years by the BFI's Sight and Sound, group comics blog The Hooded Utilitarian recently hosted a similar post for comics. Like many, I didn't contribute. Wouldn’t want the attention to be honest. I can understand some of the antipathy some bloggers and commentators have for the blog. General host Noah Berlatsky often produces trenchant critiques, with little respect for the general canon of comics which has been constructed over the past few decades, and posters on the blog such as Caro and Domingos Isabelinho have their own very specific agendas about comics. But I rather like the confluence of disparate and competing voices the site contains. I think in some ways I might respect a critic more in some respects if they dislike (even aggressively dislike) a work that I like. I don’t have to agree with everything they see, but I can respect them as someone who has their own opinion.

Anyway, here are my ten, in alphabetical order so as to avoid privileging one over the other in a top ten. I love then all equally.

Raymond Briggs - Ethel & Ernest

Eddie Campbell - 'Alec' autobiographical strips

Glenn Dakin - Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Violent Cases

Tom Hart - The Sands

George Herriman - 'Krazy Kat'

Jamie & Gilbert Hernandez - Love & Rockets

'Ilya' - The End of the Century Club

Frank King - 'Gasoline Alley'

Alan Moore & Jim Baikie - 'Skizz' (2000AD)

It goes without saying that this could easily be a completely different selection on a different day. It’s a fairly quick selection largely off the top of my head, as I suspect were many of the lists supplied in HU’s poll. And it’s weighted towards things I discovered when I was at school and university (the exceptions would be Frank King and Herriman). I’ve chosen 'Skizz' over any of Alan Moore’s more famous works because it was first comic written by him that I read, collected in a single issue of The best of 2000AD. An issue I’m sorry I no longer possess; it got thrown out along with a good many other in my mid 20s (some of which I’ve since replaced).

A couple of things I notice from this list. Firstly, just like Hooded Utilitarian’s eventual overall top ten, and like many of their contributed lists, all are works created by men. This isn’t a conscious prejudice against comics produced by women on my part. It’s likely as much down to me gravitating towards the comics I first fell in love with. Still, there are no superheroes, which is pleasant. I didn’t consciously exclude anything, and almost included Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol. But given my general feelings about the genre at the moment it still feels pleasing. My list leans much more towards ‘slice of life’, although that’s a term I find rather simplistic. There’s fantasy at the edges of several of my choices, but all are ultimately concerned with the representation of reality. 'Skizz' is obviously science fiction, but even in that there’s attention to the real in its depiction of working class life in the mid-80s in Birmingham.

Besides my unconscious gender bias, there’s also no Manga, and no European comics. Again, that's certainly not a concious prejudice. If we divide my list by nationality then we have 4 from America and 6 from Britain, although perhaps Violent Cases is an anomaly with its lyrically evoked memories of Al Capone. It still feels a very English work however. I actually rather like that bias. Part of the reason I settled on this particular title for my blog was because that was one of the things I wanted to focus on here. ‘Old British Stuff’ for want of a better description! And yet it hasn’t quite happened that way. It isn’t that I don’t love a lot of American culture. It’s almost possible to have grown up in this country since the Second World War and not love plenty of American culture since we’re inevitably so exposed to it. I’ve had a number of partly planned posts in my head since before I started this blog, but these things seem to have a life of their own. I think it’s partly because I’ve written quite a few comics posts focusing on weekly releases. So it feels nice to find that there’s a preponderance of British comics on this list.

"Never Been in a Riot"

presumably the guardian thinks its the fault of the tories and mail thinks its the fault of foriegners and melanie phillips thinks its the fault of the bbc and computer games. i have absolutely no intention of adding my voice to the storm of bullshit and anyway i wouldn't be able to make myself heard if i did 

the life and opinions of Andrew Rilstone

Not perhaps the most insightful thing written on the events of the other week but I can certainly emphasise with the sentiment. Inevitably, we all have our reassuring narratives to explain the causes of the riots.

I've seen a few things written on Facebook by both friends and friends of friends which I've had to restrain myself from responding to. It's not that I don't have my own prejudices about what's happened and the causes of what's happened. I just didn't want to get into pointless arguments. So many people on all sides have already made up their minds, and it's rare I think that much good will come from engaging with strangers on the internet, even if I can think of what seem like perfectly reasonable rebuttals of their positions.

Of course, I did mentally write a few responses.

I don't like violence. I'm a middle-class white person with a privileged education who was raised by parents who strongly discouraged any displays of violence in their sons (we were even forbidden toy guns). Which might explain why I've been attracted to so much violent entertainment over the years (although that's also partly the way I think our popular culture has gone, for better or worse). Still, most of the people involved in the rioting are probably the sort of person I'd cross the road to avoid. The sort of person I'm glad I don't have to be around in my daily life. But still, I won't demonise them and I have a lot of sympathy for the anger about social iniquity which is clearly part of the reason behind the trouble, whatever some on the right would like to claim in dismissing this as simply criminality or mindlessness. For sure, that must be a part of it. But it doesn't wholly explain it, and I don't know where you'd draw the line between criminality and all the other, equally plausible reasons.

I think my strongest, most overwhelming feeling was just how little surprise I felt. I read somewhere that both the TUC and Nick Clegg had predicted potential trouble in reaction to the government's current policies, so I know I wasn't alone. It just felt very predictable, even if the actual causes of the riots and their spreading to other cities include a multitude of factors beyond the economic. Which isn't to defend it, just to acknowledge that these things don't happen in a political and cultural vacuum.

I think what underpins my antipathy with so much of the rhetoric expressed by politicians and commentators is the almost wilfull ignorance and refusal to even try to place events in context. They don't know their history. Of course they don't! David Barker, Emeritus Professor at Leeds put this very succinctly in a letter published by the Guardian:

For many years I taught a final-year undergraduate course on the uprisings of the peasants and artisans that swept across large parts of 17th-century France. Buildings were attacked, their contents pillaged, crops destroyed and occasionally a perceived oppressor was killed. Had my students explained it all by simply invoking feral criminality they would have failed.

My own academic research is a slightly different period, England in the late 16th, early 17th centuries, but I'd made exactly the same association before I came across David Parker's letter (helpfully quoted on Facebook by several friends). A point I've come across in my reading seems to be that incidences of social disorder and rioting in early modern society were an instinctive form of protest on the part of the powerless, a means to articulate their grievances and even to 'negotiate' with their social superiors. Perhaps it's easier to make such a judgement when the events are centuries in the past. Or perhaps it's that the distance more easily enable them to be placed in context. I don't really imagine that early modern rioting was any less violent than what we saw this last week. There's no reason to suppose it wouldn't have been worse. And attacks on property and looting has probably always been a part of it.

What's also always been present is people who want to demonise those who threaten the social hierarchy. I'm thinking here particularly about a ballad I've written about in the chapter I'm currently engaged with. It appears in a collection called 'Strange Histories', written by the Weaver and ballad author Thomas Deloney. The earliest extant text is from 1602, although there's reason to believe there was an earlier edition. Personally I would favour the early to mid 1590s as the likely dating of its first publication, but that inevitably remains personal speculation.

I think many people who don't study the period in any great depth forget not only how violent that time was (as any time before the invention of a modern police force must have been) but also how politically and economically troubled the period of the 1590s was. The period when Shakespeare was first establishing himself as a writer of note and when so many classics of English Literature were being written. An aging queen, inflation, poor harvests, an increase in the numbers of the poor, popular discontent about the presence of so many foreigners in the country. I often think the 1590s must have been a pretty hellish time to be alive in England. So what if the greatest dramatist English literature has seen was producing great works for the stage if you couldn't find enough to eat?

The ballad I have in mind, whenever it was actually written, is a history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Most of the details are derived from Holinshed's Chronicle of English history. It's probably easiest to show what I want to say if I just quote a bit from my chapter in progress:

The rebels are repeatedly represented in unflattering terms. Just over half of the ballad is taken up with describing the violence of the rebels in terms which explicitly condemn them. They are “rude disordered franticke men” (52) responsible for releasing prisoners (22-24, 61-65), intimidating priests (53-54), murdering such figures of authority as the Lord Chauncelor and the Lord High Treasurer (45-7), burning lawyers’ books (33-4), destroying records (58-60) and attacking property. Attributing the motivation of the rebels to ‘envie, malice, and dispighte’ the ballad precludes the possibility that there could be any justice to their complaints. Their rebellion is stigmatized as a violent affront to social hierarchy and monarchical authority.

Excuse the academic language. Hopefully quoting myself doesn't appear too self indulgent. It's my blog after all! The numbers are line references, and I've also taken out a quotation. It's not describing an early modern riot of course, it was history for Deloney and the audience for whom he was writing, but it was probably written at a time when there were riots occurring. It wasn't easy to write about contemporary political events at this time. Deloney actually got into trouble in 1596 over a ballad he'd authored for precisely those reasons. So it's about a historical event but it could also be read as a response to contemporary political events.

As far as I can tell, the actual details the ballad records aren't inaccurate. This was a violent revolt. Which is precisely the problem with so much of the rhetoric which has surrounded recent events. It's always easier to demonise people than to try and understand them. You could take Deloney's rhetoric out of this ballad, modernise the spelling, and would it look that different what what many are saying about the looters? It's not just that riots are always violent, that their causes are always rooted in a complex political, cultural and economic context. It's also that there's always someone around who will demonise the rioters, even if it's more than a century after the events occurred.

Disraeli

It is these institutions which make us a nation. Without our Crown, our Church, our Universities, our great municipal and commercial corporations, our Magistracy, and its dependant scheme of provincial polity, the inhabitants of England, instead of being a nation, would present only a mass of individuals governed by a metropolis, whence an arbitrary senate would issue the stern decrees of its harsh and heartless despotism.

Benjamin Disraeli, 'Vindication of the English Constitution'.

Geoffrey Hill quote

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

 Geoffrey Hill

A.S.Byatt review

I am going to try and get all these amazon reviews up here eventually. Here's A.S. Byatt and how not to write a historical novel. Something's buggered up the formatting here.

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book 

It might be a little unkind, but turning to the ‘Acknowledgements’ listed at the back, and a certain amusement can be had from the way seemingly everyone is thanked for having ‘sent books’. Can it be that the reason this large, compendious novel ultimately feels slightly unsatisfactory lie with the fact that it owes far more to books than it does to life? This is of course one of the perennial problems for any author of historical fiction. The reading of history and documentary evidence is surely necessary simply in order to get the facts right? But when it starts to swamp the fiction, it risks choking the life out of the story, whatever the writer’s gifts. Here the novel’s narrative voice repeatedly steps back in order to narrate the historical events surrounding the lives of its many characters, or simply to indulge in luscious description of the many beautiful art objects with which the narrative is studded. A.S. Byatt has always had a powerful descriptive gift. But amidst all this description, all this history, it can sometimes feel as if the characters are getting a little lost, especially when there are so many of them.

The novel takes us from June 19th 1895 through to May 1919, following the intertwined lives of two artistic families and their many acquaintances. The chapter titles – ‘The Golden Age’ is naturally followed by ‘The Silver Age’ which of course gives way to ‘The Iron Age’ – run the risk of making the history feel retrospective. We already know how this story ends. The Edwardian age dies in the carnage of the First World War, and an era of history which was actually riven by social discontent acquires a golden haze. But of course, nobody ever knows they’re living in a golden age, and moreover those who do think they are often seem to be deluding themselves, a point which the novel’s narrative voice at one point attempts to make explicit. But the narrative drive often seems to undermine such insights, and the book is occasionally guilty of such sillinesses as for example when one character assures another that of course Peter Pan will be beloved for generations. 

The First World War, the history we already know, looms over everything. It’s a period of history that was not only been much written about at the time, but also revisited by many later writers of fiction, so that it can come to seem over familiar. We’ve seen so many of the tropes of mud and disillusionment so many times by this point. Here though the relatively brief final section in which we see so many of the character whom we have been following over the novel’s course quickly dispatched amidst the horrors of the Great War remakes these cliches. The length of the novel actually works in its favour here, because by that point we feel we know these characters so well.

And it can start to feel churlish to be criticising a book for being its length and ambitions. Minor failings can surely be forgiven when there are so many riches on offer. The large cast deftly handled. The powerful sense of place(s). A.S. Byatt’s typically wonderful descriptive gifts and facility for pastiche. The juggling of ideas. This is a novel with a thesis, about the potential hazards of art, about childhood and the changing ways in which it was understood in the Edwardian period, which is of course our culture’s inheritance. But really there’s just too much stuff here, so that it can occasionally feel somewhat disjointed. The material on the Suffragettes for instance which comes late in the narrative is as powerfully and effectively written as everything else in the book, but it feels disconnected from much of the rest of the book’s narrative, as if it’s been included only because presumably it ought to be addressed in a fiction about the Edwardian period. Too often the novel devolves into a kind of high class soap opera, with endless talk from characters whom seem ever slightly too self conscious about who they are and their personal beliefs.  Too many of these characters feel too well defined, too easily fitting into a type or a social class. It’s all deeply felt, yet curiously, there’s too little life and too little respect for the way in which people are often mysterious, not only to other people, but also to themselves.

Which is a real shame. Ambition is to be applauded, and A.S. Byatt can be so good. This feels like it could have been such a great novel, and at times it is, but as ultimately it feels as if her ambition has gotten the better of her here.

I started this review, and then substantially rewrote it, and I still didn't feel like I said everything I wanted to. A bit like the novel I was trying to review, I had too much to say perhaps. I also find something a little snide, even pompous, about my tone of voice. It's really not a wholly successful book, but still, I can't deny that I had a lot of pleasure in reading it. As I said, the length of the novel does sometimes work in it's favour. I particularly remember the scene where a group of the younger characters go for a weekend trip in the countryside. They do it twice. The first time is an idyll. The sun shines, everyone gets on with each other, they go swimming, it's a lovely moment of happiness. Then, a few pages later, they're returning the next year, and of course it's completely different. It rains, everyone's miserable, they fail to recapture that golden moment. It speaks to some of the novel's major themes but I'm also glad that she put it the scenes in because of how well she captures that feeling of a simultaneous disappointment at one's failure to recapture a particular moment and the embarrassment of the knowledge that it was probably foolish to think you could.

Something else I noticed was the presence of a 'Lawrentian' artist figure, actually modelled on Eric Gill I think. This is a recurrent figure in her early fiction. I'm thinking of the father in her first novel The Shadow of the Sun, and Frederica and Stephanie's father in the Quartet.* In my head it connects with something about Angela Carter, I was interested to read here that they became friends after a rather combatative first encounter. They must be near contemporaries, with similar interests in history and fairytales, although despite the similarities, in many ways occupying very different literary spaces. Both clearly had a complex relationship with the work and ideas of D. H. Lawrence. In Angela Carter's case that comes through most clearly not in her fiction but in several of her essays. I suspect any writer of that generation who went through an English degree at a British University. The influence of F.R. Leavis. I sometimes wonder if every writer of that generation isn't in some way reacting against the influence of Lawrence. Just look at Ian McEwan's early work. And then you've got a more recent writer like Geoff Dyer, who's younger, but who still I'd place at the tail end of the post war period because of his education (getting to Oxbridge thanks to the 11-plus), and who reveres Lawrence as one of his literary idols.

I recently finished The Game, another early novel. Two sisters, one an Oxford Don, the other a popular novelist, trapped in a destructive relationship based on events of their childhood. Literalist critics might try and related this to the supposedly fractious relationship between Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble, but it's clear from one of the epigraphs and sereval references throughout the text that it's really about the Brontes' joint imagination. I was interested to see her describe this as 'absolutely appalling' in that interview. Like most people I suspect, when I first encountered the Bronte's and the story of their childhood I found it incredibly romantic, desirable even, although again like most people I hardly think myself and my siblings could have sustained such a joint imagination. Which is perhaps just as well. It is a romantic story, but it's also appalling.

I read a lot of A.S. Byatt's fiction in my mid-twenties. I found a stack of her books in Oxfam a while back, ones I didn't read back then, and will gradually get around to them. She's another writer I feel that I appreciate more now that I'm older and on the other side of a very difficult period of my own life. Anthony Burgess said about Still Life that it conveyed an 'extraordinary compassion', and I don't think I could improve on such a description.

*And thinking about it, there is here again an example of the advantage of a large canvas in the way the rather frightening and domineering figure in The Virgin in the Garden becomes more sympathetic, even pathetic, later on. His children are older and no longer so intimidated by him, he's been left behind by the flow of history. Just as I suppose D.H. Lawrence has by this point.

This Weeks Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2: 1969

Moore wants to challenge the popular view of history where it consists of easily identifiable reference points and narratives normally determined by the buying habits of the middle class. In Century history is instead portrayed as a vast, messy splurge, with too many moving parts to be easily reduced into stable, and resultantly dominant, narratives. The guy can’t show free love without showing the non stop woman and Vril show – we’re always asked to accomodate both. Like an endlessly edited and re-edited Wikipedia article you have all these different conversations running at the same time and it gives a really fascinating overview, a highly complex overview, of the culture at the time the comic’s set. 

Amy Poodle from the Mindless Ones blog

 I love the Mindless Ones and their inspired critical takes on comics. One of the blogs that made me want to start my own.

Haven't yet had the chance to read the comic myself.

Postscript (8/8/11): When I finally did read it the following day, my first response was that this must be one of the best things I've read about the 60s. And maybe it isn't quite that good. I've read a fair bit about the 60s by this point if I think about it, but it's still pretty damn good.

Of course, when we say the 60s, we're only really talking about a specific strand of the culture of the 60s. The confluence between the new pop music, youth culture, the occult and the counter culture. Which was I think really only 'the 60s' for a relatively small group of people. It's interesting how, as the series has progressed, the appropriations from (mostly) popular culture of the era at hand have become less focused on interrogating the texts themselves and more about a commentary on the culture and the time of which those texts were a part. As fun and exciting as the first two League adventures were, the series has become a lot richer. Also, if the various online responses I saw to the Black Dossier are anything to go by, much more concerned with Britain's twentieth century culture. More insular. Perhaps a response to Alan Moore's well publicised spat with DC. Who knows. It's interesting that the series has developed this way.

This Weeks Comics

Daredevil #1

I've read enough shitty superhero comics by this point. Actually, I've not read too many, because I've never been the biggest fan of superhero comics. Apart from reruns of the Adam West Batman tv show when I was a kid, my first introduction to superheroes was Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns when I was a self important teenager. And Zenith, which I encountered with 'Phase IV', the story's climax, during the brief period when I was a regular reader of 2000AD. It was only through following the work of the British writers I liked - Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Warren Ellis - that I came to superheroes. Over the last 10 years I've grown to like the genre, when done well. And when drawn well. I've put up with too many badly drawn superhero comics because I was following the writing. I don't doubt that a good superhero comic takes some effort to write well, but at the same time by this point I'm not looking to superheroes for more than colourful adventure.

The writing here, supplied by Mark Waid - a writer whose name I've come across often enough, but whom I've never read apart from his collaboration on 52 - provides a perfectly serviceable plot and dialogue. It's nothing special, but at this point it's just setting up a new status quo following whatever happened previously in the title. He has fun with the fact that everyone seems to know Daredevil's identity, which is the sort of thing that could quickly become tiresome, but is okay for now.

Yes, I've heard about Frank Miller's famous run on the series, and I've read his and David Mazzucchelli's Daredevil: Born Again, another book whose strength lies less with the writing, but have otherwise never gotten into the character. I've glanced through the odd issue in the last decade. I'd dismiss it as being mired in pointlessly gloomy noir stylings if that didn't describe a fair few comics I've read and enjoyed over the years.

But what really got me to buy this was the art. The two page spread up above, which I saw in a preview, is what got me to buy. Marcos Martin's inventive layouts, creating a fully immersive world, which actually feels close to New York in the summer. The bright colours add to the mood, a stark contrast with my earlier impression. Yes, it's idealised, but that fits with the relaxed style of the story. The main story is actually drawn by Paolo Rivera, who if anything has an even better grasp of anatomy and movement than Martin, if less flashy page layouts. Honestly, all superhero comics should be held to this level of craft.

Wolves

A limited edition of 1000 copies of a story which was originally published in a Japanese anthology. Becky Cloonan is again, an artist whose name I recognise, but whose work I've never  encountered before now. A brief tale set in an anonymous medieval setting of a lone hunter's encounter with a werewolf, this works through the visceral intensity of Cloonan's art. It's beautiful at depicting small movements, the layouts and pacing creating a tragic intensity within it's brief span. A lovely little book.

Postscript:

On reflection, and this shouldn't be of interest to anyone but myself, I think I'm currently going through a period of general dissatisfaction with superheroes. Looking at the planned reboot for DC in a few month's time, there's not much that really interests me. I love a lot of Peter Milligan's work, but he can be wildly inconsistent sometimes and in any case nothing is going to make me read a Red Lanterns comic. Ho hum.

Overheard in my dentist's waiting room...

...I wasn't really paying attention, but I was sitting in waiting room where the receptionists and one of the dental nurses were chatting. The bit which stuck in my mind was a point one of them made about a friend who works in the NHS who has seen a great deal of change over the years, but the younger people who are coming into the service now are lucky because they've not got that experience. Consequently, they understand the need for 'change', because that's what we need, 'change'. It's inevitable. It has to happen.

I honestly don't intend to sound snide or superior here, because I'm sure that I'm just as if not more guilty of voicing thoughtless political rhetoric at times, but I found this weird bit of cognitive dissonance fascinating. It's been nagging at the back of my head for the last couple of days. She didn't specify what this 'change' which is so necessary actually is, but that seems particularly common when the word 'change' is used in modern political discourse. Tony Blair was particularly guilty of this, rarely defining for us why the change his government was intending to bring about was really quite so vital.

Indeed, I would respectfully suggest that a major problem with much of our public services at the moment is the 'change' which has been thrust upon them over the last 30 years. Honestly, can we not have some relief from 'change' now? Is it not exhausting when such 'change' is often so unnecessary? So costly. So utterly destructive of what used to be good about our public services. Which is not to say that no change is ever positive, or that there is some idealised golden age in the past to which we can aspire, even reach. There isn't and we can't. But it is to say that any changes made to institutions ought to be considered on their own merits, and that there are plenty of things which don't, or indeed didn't, need to change.

What struck me was the way that such unthinking rhetoric manifests itself in our language. I'm not saying this woman I overheard was foolish. Rhetoric of this type, rhetoric which seems almost designed to preclude thought or reflection, is so easy to internalise.

Americana

I posted the following as a review on amazon last October:

Horse Opera

David Thomson, White Light

Writing about the films of John Ford in His Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues about Ford's use of Monument Valley:

"...there is a lust for epic, clichéd panoramas, which forgets or forsakes the real meaning of that location - as geology, for its natives, and for the rest of America living on the edges of the empty quarter, witness, walking, riding, living, and being there, patient enough to see through the first spectacle. It also requires a study of its culture: what it has meant to, say, the Navajo, the Hopi, Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Edward Curtis. Ford's eye refused to contemplate history or responsibility."

The 'irresponsible' filmmaker Ford gets a walk on part in this tricksy, fanciful novel, as does his most famous actor John Wayne. As does Willa Cather. As do a whole host of folks. As in Suspects, his earlier `movie-novel', White Light is fiction functioning as film criticism, and for me the better novel. Where Suspects constructed a nightmare alternative history of America through the interconnected biographies of characters all drawn from film noir, White Light draws on only a handful of classic westerns, mixing both some of their characters and the children of their characters with some of the real life figures who stalked the West. Thomson helpfully provides a glossary of all of these figures drawn from history for any of us who might be struggling to distinguish reality and fantasy. Which is precisely the place his novel occupies: the gap between the real West and the fantasy constructed from all of the stories that have been told about it.

Most especially the films. The various stories contained in White Light don't often take the action to Monument Valley, but the profusion of character and story seems designed to attempt something of what Thomson calls for above in its treatment of the American West. Not only does the action look away from such iconic locations, but equally away from such famous stories such as the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the shooting of Billy the Kid, mentioned on the back cover, but which are only ever seen from off to one side, rather than placed in the centre. Thomson's characters are never in the heart of the action, but off stage so to speak. The mythical events happen largely without their help. Like all of us, they are part of an audience. However, they are also intimately involved in constructing an image of the West, whether as pulp author or photographer. Even Mathew Garth, who in Howard Hawk's Red River was actually involved in a cattle run which helped shape the civilising of the West, and whose repeat of that journey in later life occupies a long section of the novel, is here seen only as a figure damaged both by his past and his mythic status.

Thomson's view of the old American West is caustic, but also elegiac. It's never quite clear what has been lost in the civilising of the American West, but that's also true of many of the greatest westerns. It seems that even a writer as subtle and elusive as Thomson is constrained by the myth, for all his efforts to deconstruct it. Which might explain why this is a novel and not formal film criticism: it exists within that tension between reality and myth.

I mostly agree with myself there. White Light is a beautiful book, and a lot of it's power lies in that tension between the myth of the Western and the reality of America's past. Whether Thomson intended it or not, it does contain a strong streak of nostalgia for a time which I can only imagine was often brutal, certainly incredibly hard for many of the people who lived then. When I was younger I had little interest in the Western as a genre, but I've seen my share of films by now. And I've read Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy and Blood Meridian, which have always struck me as being firmly based within the genre. However powerful and beautiful McCarthy's writing undoubtedly is, I still find something troubling about his aesthetic. It goes to the heart of that tension between myth and reality because McCarthy's fiction is engaged with a romantic picture of the past which seems very dependant on violence. It's as if only in extreme violent situations do we become fully alive. Which to me is just macho bullshit, frankly. I imagine he'd also be easy to parody - his writing is far to manly to use any punctuation other than the full stop! - but I also think I'm probably being far too simplistic here. None of that accounts for the hypnotic power of his language, his unpunctuated sentences rolling out like the epic landscapes through which his characters so often travel. And the past that he writes about was incredibly violent. He hardly idealises that violence he depicts but rather presents it in a very matter of fact way. This is simply a depiction of what happened, for all McCarthy's aesthetic.

It is a problem though. In the final book of the Border trilogy the life of the ranch is overshadowed by the presence of the atomic bomb. The ranch is on land which is to be used for an atomic test site, an event which occurs outside of the book's narrative. The bomb is easy to read as a symbol for modernity. It's modernity which overshadows and threatens the dissolution of the life of the ranch. Still, however repugnant one might find modernity, and I've certainly got some sympathy for such a view, that hardly excuses romaticisising a past that was often a struggle against poverty and hardship. I know it's hardly the sort of life I would even be equipped for, let alone want to live.

It's a tension that even appears in documentary. I've just finished watching a series of three films made by the musicologist, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen. Cohen is clearly an important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s whom I've previously never heard of before. The three films are That High Lonesome Sound (1962), focusing on the banjo player and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, The End of an Old Song (1972), focusing on the unaccompanied singer Dillard Chandler, and Sara and Maybelle (1981), featuring two of the 'original' Carter family. Sara and Maybelle, the shortest of the three films is mostly assembled from photographs and a performance of several songs filmed at the Newport Festival in 1967. It feels odd to describe them as members of the 'original' carter family, since when is a family ever 'original'. To be part of a family is to be part of a continuum, one which stretches into both the past and the future. 'Original' here is a marketing tag, reflecting how much this successfull showbiz family has been transformed into a commercial entity, something which is underlined by the inclusion of a number of their records in the film's collage of photographs and ephemera. It's interesting that these are the actual records, the material object, as opposed to the record sleeves.

Sara and Maybelle is the most conventional of the three films, focused solely on the performers, where the earlier films are much more interested in situating the musicians at their centre in their particular social worlds in the early 1960s, bringing in other performers and footage of the landscapes within which they lived. According to Wikipedia Roscoe Handler subsequently went on to have a career performing within the folk revival, similar to many folk singers discovered around the time, whereas Dillard Chandler has little interest in performing at festivals and on the radio. He lived until 1993. Both of these films are incredibly beautiful with their silvery black and white photography. There's no sync sound, so the combination of image and sound creates a dreamy abstracted atmosphere, enhanced by the way in which the camera is never quite steady, frequently drifting off to observe a detail of the landscape or room. It's a compelling vision which underscores how the music seems to emanate from the past. I also strongly suspect that the aesthetic of these films had an influence on the fabulously titled Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus which similarly creates a composite picture of music of a much more modern American South, rooting the music in the culture as a kind of palimpsest.

Again from Wikipedia, in making the film about Dillard Chandler, John Cohen apparently intended to "debunk stereotypes of Appalachian folksingers being merely the preservers of traditional British and Scottish ballads, with few modern influences or styles", arguing that "much of his work bore more resemblance to the struggles of modern life than to Old World storytelling". Which makes his choice of title rather intriguing. This is not only an 'old' song, but one which has reached it's end, strongly suggesting that we are witness here to the end of a tradition. A tradition with its roots firmly in the past. The film's titles make the connection with Cecil Sharp's collecting in the Appalachians earlier in the century (Sharp apparently collected songs from serveral of Chandler's relatives) and suggest there may be no one surviving who can sing these old songs the way Chandler can. Towards the end of the film there's a moment where Chandler's singing is drowned out by contemporary rock and roll from the nearby jukebox. The presence of radio and recorded music as some form of threat to older musical cultures is present in both of these films, for all that they are situated in the present.

There's an element of nostalgia in both of these films, but what mitigates this is the respect for the hard lives these people live, which is precisely the quality that can be found in so much folk music. Nothing here idealises the past. It presents the past both as it was and as it is. Because we are always remaking the past, whether it is an individual or collective past. Perhaps instead of 'nostalgia', 'elegy' is the word I really want here.