a masterpiece...

...because I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about how good this book is.

I have a vague memory of hearing that Lorna Sage won the Whitbread prize for autobiography for her memoir Bad Blood, probably when the paperback came out later that year. No doubt the story attracted more attention since she died only a week after it won. I see also that a few years later there a posthumous publication of her selected journalism, an honour I think can have been accorded to few academics who aren't Frank Kermode. No doubt her publisher was attempting to feed the interest generated by that memoir for a writer whose other writings were chiefly academic.

I shouldn't sound so snarky. This really is one of the finest books I've read in some time. I'm fairly sure I remember encountering her Women in the House of Fiction during my undergraduate degree. I don't think that will have been the reason why my mother bought her memoir though. In fact, I'm not sure if she ever read it. I've been noticing it on her shelves for a while now.

Almost the first thing which attracted me was brief excerpted the reviews just inside the front cover. They're almost as fascinating as memoir they advertise, and perversely perhaps, it's a few of these reviews I want to address here.

An unnamed writer from the Guardian sententiously opines "Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be...", a sentiment which, as someone who grew up in what was largely a very happy family I can't help but find rather insulting. Of course we had our difficulties, and of course I'm not so naive as to believe that all families are happy or 'safe'. I know several people whose experiences put the lie to that. But this is as insulting a prejudice as the Daily Mail assumption that all families are sacrosanct and special. You can't make such a sweeping a generalisation about an cultural institution which exists in so many different forms, and which everyone belongs to in some way or another. And it's not really the story that Lorna Sage tells. She describes her difficult relationships with her parents and grandparents with scrupulous clarity, but what also comes through is a love for these eccentric individuals. Whatever else they were, they were also her family, and she is equally conscious of what she has inherited from them. There seems very little bitterness, something a few of the other reviewers comment on, although Marina Warner also feels happy to label it a picture of a 'childhood hell'. That 'Bad Blood' of the title seems like a source of pride and creative energy as much as it might be intended as a badge of shame.

Rachel Cusk, writing for the Evening Standard, voices another unexamined prejudice when she claims 'This "memoir" has all the qualities of fiction'. Which is, quite clearly, also rubbish. The qualities it possesses are those of any stunningly written book, but these are not qualities which are the sole purview of fiction. There are a great many works of art found within non-fiction forms. Appropriating a book like this to the category of 'fiction' with Rachel Cusk's scare quotes makes a mockery of literary categories and privilages fiction in a way which is more than a little silly.

More silliness comes from Jonathan Raban, himself responsible for more than a few works of art within non-fictional categories, who wants to make a monument out of Lorna Sage's book: 'What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever been on the run'. It's interesting to think about this quote in the context of recent remarks by the Midsommer Murders producer who claimed that his show was 'the last bastion of Englishness'. The assumption in both cases is that there is a single, easily reducible 'England' that we can all agree on. On the contrary, I think that Englishness, like any national identity, is multiple, and no, that's not just because I'm an academic and 'multiple' identities is a fashionable term. It could be a fashionable term for all I know, but fashionabe or not it just seems to me to be self evidently true. The North is distinct from the South. Town is different from country. London is different from York. The Lake District is distinct from the Cotswolds, which is distinct from the Yorkshire Moors, which are distinct from the East Anglian Fens. Yet all of these landscapes and places are identifiably English to me.

At least Jonathan Raban doesn't try to claim that it is something which should be protected in some way. And Lorna Sage is exceptional at placing her story in its historical context. Appropriately for the literary critic she was, her childhood association with a local farmer leads to a subtle disquistion on Hardy and the farming life and culture which was (is) perenially in decline. Her story is one of post war social mobility, and it doesn't stop at its end, when she acknowledges that it was her daughter who became the future in the 60s. This is a narrative I've heard before, in autobiographical writings from Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Alan Bennett, Derek Jarman and others. I imagine that might be what attracted my Mum to it, because it's even, just about, my parents' story. They were born later, in 1950 and 51, and reached university at the tail end of the 60s, but I still feel theirs is a part of that same post war narrative. But each story is distinct, belonging to that person alone. If books were Lorna Sage's passport out of her family and social environment, as Marina Warner's excerpted review suggests, then it was a passport freely given to her in childhood. The changes British culture was undergoing at that point allowed a very clever girl to succeed where previously she might not have done, which is not to deny her agency in her own narrative. It's just to acknowledge, yet again, that we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing.

It's also a narrative that I feel has now become much harder to occur. For a variety of reasons, education no longer seems to carry the authority it once did. Everything is much more utilitarian now, and many of the post war gains have been eroded over the last 30 years. It's one of the reasons I find this period of British history so fascinating. It was far from a perfect time, because no time is perfect, but there was something positive in the culture then (although I would struggle to articulate just what precisely that is) which I wish hadn't been so willfully discarded.

Black Narcissus

"She was fond of these people. She could not remember when it was that she began to think of them as people; not as natives, persons apart, but as people like themselves, and she was beginning to see with their eyes. Ayah's brown hands carrying a bowl of water no longer seemed alien, but, rather, her own hands stretched out to take it seemed insipid."

I have no idea if Rumer Godden is a name which appears within discussions about post-colonial literature. It's not my field after all. Without checking though, I have a feeling that there probably hasn't been too much academic writing about her work. She wouldn't seem to fit into any obvious syllabus or academic paradigm. Her earliest fiction appearing in the 1930s, she wasn't a late modernist. Nor has her fiction achieved the fame of Kipling or Forster, so I imagine she's the sort of writer post-colonialists would probably overlook in favour of writing from formerly colonised subjects. Which I wouldn't argue with necessarily.

Not that all of her writing belongs in such a potentially limiting pigeon hole, but this novel certainly does. Adapted by two of Britain's greatest filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1947, it's jewel-like colour achieved through Technicolor and the genius of Jack Cardiff, in many ways it's a very odd film. David Thomson describes it wonderfully as "that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns". Reading the novel, even when it's been some years since I last saw the film, it's hard not to hear the actors' voices in my head, with so much of the film's dialogue lifted straight from the book.

Sister Clodagh leads a group of nuns in to a remote part of the Himalayas, in an attempt to found a nunnery in a palace which used to be used as a harem by a previous ruler of the area. The blurb on the inside page of my copy describes it, in rather over the top fashion as an "...evil haunted palace...". A supernatural explanation is occasionally gestured at, most clearly towards the end of the novel by the current General of the area towards the novel's close, but even he is far too subtle to fall into such a clear cut explanation. It's not ever quite clear what happens to this isolated group, as they slowly lose their grip on their identities. Sister Clodagh, at the book's heart, is plagued my memories of her Romantic past in Ireland. These come upon her unbidden, triggered by people and things in her present in a manner which is almost Proustian but is far less fussily conveyed.

Of course, to describe them as isolated is somewhat ridiculous. They are surrounded by people, by the natives, who are for the most part an undifferentiated mass, even in some cases where they are named. We are allowed into the thoughts of only two of the Indian characters, and then only briefly, one of whom is desperately trying to be more 'European'. Our point of few is firmly with the British, who mostly fail to understand the people by whom they are surrounded. And yet the presence of the 'natives' and of the mountain and the air is constantly hovering over the narrative. The Generals English advisor, the unkempt Mr. Dean, is supposed to have gone native, we're told so at several points, and yet he repeatedly refers to the local people there as savages and children. He's like a cuddlier Mr. Kurtz.

If the climax of the novel represents a tragedy, which in many ways it clearly does, its partly a failure of communication. The failure of these people to coexist with a place where they don't belong. In her introduction to another of her books, Rumer Godden describes India in an idealised manner, "Indians do not change; their clothes and customs are timeless". Now, as it happens, I shall be going to India next week, to visit my wife's family, and I highly doubt that the country I shall experience a small part of will be exactly unchanged or 'timeless'. In the three and a half years since my wife last visited, some things will have changed for her. Part of what changed India was the presence of the British, a presence which produced a writer such as Rumer Godden. Was she saw as timeless had already changed, because everywhere does. Yet, alongside this somewhat patronising attitude, there's also a respect for the people as they are. As Sister Clodagh starts to realise, these are people just like oneself, but it occurs to me that that is a recognition which only makes others more mysterious. If you regard someone as part of a mass, however you manage that, then they are simple to understand, because you're fitting them to a prearranged pattern. To see somebody as an individual, as a person, is to admit that you don't understand them. They have an interiority which you don't have access to, and part of the violence of colonialism is that that it denies that fact. Even in as apparently mild a novel as this, which never directly addresses the subject, just as it never really directly addresses anything, which is one of its strengths as a novel. All of its characters are the products of colonialism, whether its Mr. Dean who 'goes native' but still stands apart and in some way looks down upon the native people who surround him, the Young General who wishes to become 'European', or Sister Clodagh, whose memories of Ireland eventually reveal her as Anglo-Irish, playing with the 'Irish children' but set apart in another colonised landscape.

I think can I understand why this book might have appealed to Michael Powell, a High Tory, who nevertheless filmed an Indian set story entirely in England, principally on Alfred Junge designed sets in order to better keep control of the colour. As the Wikipedia entry for the film shows, the final scene, which magically depicts the beginning of the monsoon as the nuns abandon the Himalayas, has been interpreted by critic Dave Kehr as 'a last farewell to their fading empire', resonating with the fact that the film was released only a few months before India achieved Independence. But the novel already represented a respectful retreat, the General is sorry to see the Nuns leave, because that's the only solution Rumer Godden can envisage to the difficulties raised in her fiction. Its doubly sad, obviously because of the tragedy with which the novel climaxes, but also with the sadness of people failing to understand each other.

"No, I am not Prince Hamlet..."

I was re-reading 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufock' yeststerday morning just before I left for work. As you do. It's a poem I've always loved, but what really struck me this time was just how funny it is. Of course, Raymond Chandler makes fun of the lines about the women quoting Michelangelo at one point in The Long Goodbye, but I think he must have missed the point that the poem itself is comical. It's hard to pin down just what the humour is precisely. It read like a self dramatising performance. I remember reading somewhere that Eliot was prone to representing himself as a old man even when he was still young, and there are repeated references to aging, but isn't that often a youthfull attitude? For myself at least, I know that I was a lot more upset about growing old before I turned 30 than I have been since.

If it put me in mind of anyone else, I think it was probably Morrisey, back in his heyday with The Smiths, whom I haven't listened to in an age. There's a similar self dramatisation at work, and the humour feels the same, so subtle that it could easily be missed, a delicate balancing act. It's a wallowing in misery and self conciousness whilst simultaneously laughing at oneself.

"Heaven knows I'm miserable now..."

Birthday post

32 years old today!

"...with all the books and all the records of your lifetime..."

Currently doing a fair bit of sorting out, which is one of the reasons I've not being able to blog as much as I'd like to just recently. It's always interesting what you turn up when you have a proper sort out or move house. The things you'd forgotten you had. The things you don't even remember owning. The things you're relieved to see again, glad that you didn't get rid of them during the last sort out you had. One of the things I came across the other day was my old diary, which of course I do remember keeping.

Looking at the entries (I was always carefull to date every entry I made) I see that I must have kept it for a period of roughly 8 years, from shortly after I began my Undergraduate degree, through to 2005, when I think I finally stopped as I'd mostly lost interest in keeping it. The gaps between entries became longer and longer. Maybe I'd finally run out of things to say. Seeing the length of some of the entries I made I can only wonder that I had the time to write so much. And what exactly did I find it so necessary to write about at such length? Memories, daydreams, quotidian day to day stuff which I always wanted to make significant. Which I suppose it was for the person living it. I also collected quotations, and selotaped in pictures and pieces torn out of newspapers. It was something of a scrapbook. And I wrote about the books, comics, music and films that inspired me, which is what I want to try and write about in a more structured way here.

I don't think of this blog as a substitute for that diary. I know that there are people who keep personal blogs, which is something I don't fully understand. Not that I'm critical of the desire to record personal details in such a semi-public forum, it's just not one that I share. Although obviously, as the entries about one's personal taste mount up and the style of your writing becomes familiar to your readers, I'm sure that something of a sense of the person writing a blog must come through. By its very nature blogging feels slightly informal which encourages that personal feel.

Not that I imagine I have any readers at this point! I'm not even sure if I want any. In my first post I described this online space as semi-public, which is how I still tend to think of it. It's personal, but also available to anyone who comes across it. Which at least answers the question I could never quite answer when I did keep a diary, of who I was writing it for.

Shakespeare quote

"Poor Shakespeare sometimes gets a bad reputation, praised too often for his poetry and great insight into humanity's soul rather than for his career-long commitment to shock tactics and cheap sensationalism."

                                                                             James Oliver

(I've never seen Theatre of Blood. From the description, it sounds like the sort of thing Mark Gatiss could have included in his History of Horror)

This Week's Comics

2/3/2011

I might try and do this as a regular feature, but I'm not really sure weekly serialised comics always deserve the chatter that often seems to surround them as individual issues. And I have a few ideas for several series of posts that will probably be more interesting to write. For me at least. But I feel inspired to do it for this week at least, and it's something I might at least do on a semi-regualar basis. Anyway, my thoughts on the comics I picked up from my local comic shop this week:

5 Ronin #1

Marvel seem to be doing this a bit of late, taking their regular characters and reimagining them in alternative time periods or genres. In this case it's 17th Century Japan, which is surely obvious from the title. It feels very similar to what DC used to do with their interminable series of Elseworlds, where the new setting often functioned as little more than a background for the same old origin story to play out for usually either Batman or Superman. Which is not to say that some of them couldn't be entertaining, but it often depended on what prior interest you had in the setting.

I picked this up on the strength of the fact that it's written by Peter Milligan, who on the evidence of this first issue at least appears to be doing a reasonably interesting job of reinterpreting Marvel heroes - Wolverine in this first issue - in the chosen setting. There's one moment that is particularly wonderful, evoking a genuine folktale-like magic. And in a neat reversal, the rationalising explanation which appears only a page or two later doesn't undermine the sense of mystery. A reinterpretation of 'the man who can't die' that doesn't rely on fantasy, for all that the explanation offered is a rather unlikely one, actually seems more magical in the context of Marvel comics.

The art by Tomm Coker is suitably moody and evocative in depicting landscape and atmosphere, but falls down a bit with rather stiff figure drawing and in his depiction of action.

The First Wave #6

A mini-series originally designed as an introduction to Brian Azzarello's reimagining of old Pulp characters, but subject to a number of delays, and now finally finishing just as the DC have apparently announced that the line is to be shut down. The art seems particularly rushed, with the addition of a second inker in Phil Winslade, but Brian Azzarello provides a suitably pulpy and grandiose finale with an ending that obviously leaves open the possibility of more stories which we'll now never see. I've not been reading any of the other First Wave books, the books this series was supposed to be introducing, although I'm interested in getting hold of the issues of The Spirit written by David Hine who I've recently rediscovered through his work on Shaky Kane's marvellous Bulletproof Coffin.

Joe the Barbarian #8

Many of my favourite comics bloggers display a great deal of love for the work of Grant Morrison, and that frankly, is one of the reasons why they're favourite bloggers of mine! I've come across a fair bit of carping online about this series, but apart from the fact of the delays, can't see much to complain about myself. This has been a fantastic comic. Sean Murphy's incredible art has of course been a revelation, helped no doubt by Dave Stewart's typically sympathetic colours. The story too, as simple a fantasy/adventure comic as it was, has been thoroughly entertaining. Yes, it does feel a bit as if Grant Morrison has reigned himself in a bit, attempting to tell something a little more 'traditional' than he has sometimes done in the past, but I loved this. This extra sized finale wraps everything up in fine style, wringing something genuinely emotional from the tropes it's mainpulating. The return of Jack, the rat whose apparrent death I was practically in tears over only a couple of issues previously, was particularly heartwarming for me. The whole issue felt heroic!

Oscar winning

The King's Speech (dir. Tom Hooper)

One expects a film like this to sentimentalise the monarchy. That's part of the point, to provide a comfortable picture of an episode of the past. Why it got made. And on that basis I found it largely enjoyable. The moment where Berty shouts out "I have a voice!" was one I found particularly moving, with Geoffrey Rush's tender reply "Yes, you do." It's such a slight narrative, with larger historical events going on in the background, and that moment for me generalises the King's own particular dilema. We all have a right to our own voice.

Well, I never said it wasn't sentimental.

What I hadn't realised though, until I read Christopher Hitchens piece on Slate was just how historically dishonest the film is. Not inaccurate, but dishonest. I'm not especially knowledgeable about the politics and events of the 1930s, but I know enough to bring some of that knowledge to my viewing of the film. I knew that Edward VII and Wallis Simpson were at the very least broadly sympathetic to Hitler and his beliefs, if not closet Nazis. So, watching the film I think inserted that knowledge into my viewing, giving ot a background that film largely avoids, apart from a brief allusion to Wallis Simpson's fault of having previously had an affair with the German ambassador. And that's framed more in terms that scapegoat Mrs. Simpson as sexually louche, careless with the boundaries of both the British nation and the aristocratic class into which she is attempting to marry. The fact that the ambassador is presumably a Nazi is overlooked, which might of course have been how the Royal Family at the time would have viewed such an affair, but surely an intelligent film made in 2011 ought to be able to find a way to present such information to it's audience.

Even knowing as little as I do, the appearance of Winston Churchill at Balmoral still seemed out of place.I suppose the historical Churchill could have been there, but he just seemed to suddenly pop up out of nowhere, a comfortable figure from the British past who can act as a safe historical marker for the period (we all know he hated the Nazis!), and offer wise advice to poor old Berty. By this point, besides Elizabeth I, Churchill is probably one of the most well known personages from British history. It also probably didn't help that, amidst all the great performaces the film is littered with, there's something not quite right about Timothy Spall's Churchill. To be fair, he's not exactly given a lot to do, and by this point surely labours under the weight of everybody else's Churchill, but it still feels less like a performance and more like an impersonation. So to learn that, contrary to the film's depiction, Churchill was a supporter of Edward VIII right up to the abdication was rather disheartening. I assume that for the historical Churchill this was a question of supporting the principal of the monarchy. It's just depressing to see the past misrepresented like this. And it elevates, yet again, a Prime Minister who was far from perfect.

The film also conveniently overlooks the fact that George VI was actually an appeaser. Now, personally I can actually feel some degree of sympathy for those who argued for appeasement in the 1930s. Obviously, History has proven them wrong, but I feel it's too easy to condemn people who were living in the aftermath of World War I. We shouldn't underestimate the way in which that conflict has been remembered. Even today, the Great War still casts a shadow over how war is represented. As Geoff Dyer and Paul Fussell have shown, it was a conflict which was as significant for the ways in which it was remembered as for the actual events, terrible as they were. So, even they were obviously wrong, I can find some sympathy for those men who argued for appeasement. To the film's credit, it does give Stanley Baldwin a very dignified resignation. Although this too might be a distortion, it's one I can forgive because it stands as representative of something many people at the time must have felt. It feels honest somehow, despite it being factually wrong. As well, in a time with a political culture where it's almost impossible to imagine such a thing happening, it aids the film nostalgia in depicting a politican resigning, in a dignified manner, on a point of principal. But the film still avoids tainting the character at it's centre with that failed policy. War is coming and Berty must simply step up and do his duty.

So what we're left with is yet another fable of Our Finest Hour, even if it's a fable seen aslant. The real story, as ever, is both more complex and more interesting. And what's good about the film is a complexity. The history it misrepresents is mostly kept in the background. What's in the foreground is a complexity of human relationships, family relationships, and the friendship between these two very different men, which is rendered so well by two marvelous actors. And what I loved almost more than the acting and the characters, was the film's tangible rendering of the shabby fabric of 1930s Britain. The tatty walls of Logue's office and the sagging armchair are almost too perfect. In a manner similar to the way that the famous London fog could envelop the city at the time - which the film also gives us at one point! - the exquisite depiction of a faded bedraggled 1930s England almost overpowers the drama at the film's heart. There's still much I want to admire about the film, because whilst it might sentimentalise the monarchy and be historically dishonest, the story at the forefront is still very moving.