Ian McEwan quote

"If we leave the remembering to historians then the struggle is already lost. Everyone must have a memory, everyone needs to be a historian. In this country, for example, were in danger of losing hard-won freedoms by dozing off into a perpetual present."

Ian McEwan, The Ploughman's Lunch (1983)

Books (2)

I imagine individual books of series must be harder to review more than a few times. Part of the attraction and pleasure of any series is surely the sense of repetition. Going in, you mostly know you're going to meet familiar characters, since that's how most series are constructed. Or even just the familiarity of an author's style and way of seeing the world.

Ian Rankin, Black and Blue

I first heard about Ian Rankin a bit before he got quite as famous and successful as he now has. It was probably an article written on the cusp of that success, as he was about to break through to wider attention. And from the article, it sounded great. I never read a great deal of crime fiction when I was growing up. Probably the first crime series I read was James Sallis' Lew Griffin novels which have a somewhat oblique relationship with the genre, being much more about the character of the detective and his memories of events and less uninterested in things like the crime or indeed plot. If Lew goes out to find a missing person for example, he doesn't always find them.

But Rankin sounded worth investigating. Crime fiction, yes, but somehow a modern Scottish Balzac (not that I've ever read Balzac, mind). Dutifully I started at the beginning with the first and found myself rather disappointed. Rankin has admitted himself that he never intended to write crime fiction, rather falling into the series after he wrote the first one, and he took rather a while to find his feet with the series. By his reckoning, it wasn't until Let it Bleed, the seventh in the series, that he'd served his apprenticeship and started to become more ambitious with what he was trying to do. From the outset though, he'd been able to provide perfectly serviceable plots and genre entertainment. Almost from the beginning, he's pushing the series in a direction which will allow him to give a more comprehensive and political picture of modern Scotland, from the depths to the heights. Rebus is more a collection a traits than a character, as are most successful genre heroes, but the familiarity which comes from spending time with the same character gives him a life (it's the Sherlock Holmes effect). Rankin clearly likes his leading men to be older and disillusioned. I've also read his early spy novel, Watchman, which feature a very similar hero.

No, the problem I had was the quality of the writing. Rankin is a solidly realist writer, which you expect in crime fiction, but there's little of the lyricism or obsession that I've found in the best crime fiction I've read. There's something almost casual about his often workaday prose. He's gotten better by Black and Blue, certainly. The first 50 pages or so feel like a tribute to the manic intensity of James Ellroy, but after that the writing settles down. With a lot of crime fiction I feel it's the opening and the investigation which are the most interesting parts of the book, and here Rankin uses the investigation to give a broad ranging picture of Scotland's oil industry which are some of the most interesting parts of the book. The conclusion to these things always leave something wanting, the destination is never as interesting as the journey. Here the culprit is caught some way before the end of the book, partly in order for Rebus to have a final near miss with Bible John.

The inclusion of this real historical serial killer from Scotland's past is certainly audacious, but ultimately seems to point up the weakness of Rankin's method. It works at first, as we're introduced to him  through the third person narration. We've no idea who this character is which effectively generates the tension over what he's doing in the story and what's going to happen. In a nice bit of misdirection, the one time he actually meets Rebus we don't know who he is either, appearing under a completely different name. Rankin sensibly doesn't have Rebus actually catch him. He almost does, but Bible John ultimately disappears from the narrative just as he did from history. It makes it all too solid and actual though. Rankin doesn't know who Bible John actually was. There are suspects for the real killer, but like Jack the Ripper, his real identity is ultimately lost to history. Compare Rankin's approach to Grant Morrison and Daniel Valley's Bible John: A Forensic Meditation, serialised in Crisis magazine 20 years ago, and it seems wanting. for Morrison, Bible John become a creature of myth, and his narrative widens into an intense and hallucinogenic exploration of the nature of evil. Ultimately Rankin's Bible John is a fantasy of the super smart serial killer, a figure which dominated so much fiction of the 90s (Seven has a lot to answer for) and now feels like a rather sick and unreal character type. Not Rankin's fault if he was writing at the beginning of such a trend I suppose, but when it feels like such an adolescent trend anyway, you wonder why anyone would bother. I could of course be wrong, but I sense he had the idea for including Bible John in his novel without having any clear idea of what to do with him.

I've read 8 of Rankin's Rebus novels now and I'm not sure how many more I'll read. They aren't bad, far from it, but don't ever quite escape the mundanity of their conception. Seeing the obvious riff on James Ellroy in Black and Blue's opening sections, and Ellroy's own endorsement of Rankin's writing, a comparison might be in order. He's less sentimental than Ellroy, but Ellroy is more compelling in his obsession. As the series goes on, the novels become longer (a common occurrence it seems) and it starts to feel as though they aren't worth the effort.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money

A while before I read this, a very dear friend had told me how good it was, and how appropriate it was that it appeared in 2007 just in time for the crisis which engulfed our financial sector. The second of the Discworld novels to feature the lovable conman Moist Von Lipwig, this time he's put in charge of the city of Ankh-Morpork's central bank. Ranged against him are the aristocratic Lipwig family who used to own the bank and are attempting to rest back control. As with any Pratchett novel the enjoyment comes in the variety of comic invention displayed in the plot's ramshackle arrangement of comic episodes, although this isn't perhaps his most successful in that regard. What's most interesting is how it addresses present day concerns, as my friend rightly pointed out. Certainly it was nicely timed in its publication. The idea that money is only a concept and not actually real isn't exactly a new one, but it's certainly got some relevance to our country's current financial state. The Guardian's reviewer claimed that it contains a 'a startlingly savage attack on the greed of privatisation'. I wonder how relevant it really is, though?

More than in the previous Moist book (Going Postal) the main character is a bundle of contradictions, a self-reflective conman who is fully aware of the effect of his actions on others. Outside of the fantasy of the Discworld his contradictions would unravel. At several points when he sees the lower middle class shop keepers who want to invest their money in the bank he has made newly successful, he becomes reflective on both his own lower middle class origins, and also how dependant such people are on powerful figures like himself. In at least one Sam Vimes novel, the now ennobled commander of the City Watch was prone to almost identical reflections. It's the sentimental reflection of the self made man, and the presence of such reflections in two such different characters suggest that it reflects something of Pratchett's own genuine feelings about his own success and distance from his origins. There's always been something rather sentimental at the heart of Pratchett's vision, and as the series has progressed and developed into a series with designs on the real world outside its pages, its hard not to feel that it's also become something of a vehicle for the author's personal expression.

What I find it odd though, is that the villains are explicitly identified as members of the aristocracy, the Lavish family, who are opposed to the jumped up tyrant of the city, Vetinari. That the villains are the aristocracy no doubt goes in hand with the series' original premise to debunk the conventions of fantasy. Kings and princes are not inevitable or needed, we can manage quite well without such privileged characters. Discworld has always been opposed to unearned privilege. Does it attack privatisation then? Well, Vetinari and Moist certainly want to keep it out of the hands of the Lavishs, but the solution seems to be a kind of fantasy equivalent to the 'Big Bang' that convulsed the City of London in 1986. Arguably that financial deregulation is part of what has led to the current economic predicament. That too was seen as an attack on unearned privilege and the old boy's network. The most powerful people of today, the villains who are responsible for the financial crisis aren't aristocrats, they're people very like Moist and Vetinari. And Vetinari is still a tyrant. He still holds all the power in this fantasy city. Put a blonde wig on him and might we not see the face of Margaret Thatcher staring back at us?

Books

Before I started this blog, I was posting the occasional review on amazon. I even had the idea that I'd review every book I read, which is rather silly. I even kept notes on a few! If you really did that you'd soon found you were losing time when you'd rather be reading. Quite apart from all the other pressures on one's time. What was meant to be a pleasure would soon become a chore.

As well as all that, I realised I was missing the sense of a conversation that I saw on the blogs I followed. Not only in comments, but simply in the way that the run of posts gradually build up a composite picture. It becomes a conversation with oneself, although hopefully one that is not too self indulgent.

Of the few reviews I did write, I was happy with only a few of them. Still I might put a few up here. In the meantime, here are a few books that have stayed with me.

Primo Levi, Collected Poems

Collected, but not quite complete. The very first thing I ever read by Primo Levi was quoted on the back of the sleeve to the Manic Street Preachers' second album, Gold Against the Soul. 'The Song of Those Who Died in Vain' is still one of the most powerful pieces of political poetry I know, but it's not included in the edition of Levi's collected poems I own. Doing a little digging, it looks like there was a second edition which added a few other pieces, no doubt including the one from the Manics' sleeve.

Of course, It's impossible to separate Levi from the experiences of the Holocaust which were so central to his identity as a writer. Several of the earliest poems directly reference that experience, and even in a later poem we see the past encroaching on a present day rumination. He was about far more than that however. He was also a scientist, and many of his poems demonstrate a lyrical appreciation for the material world. His repeated references to 'Human seed', a seeming archaism, bring to mind a vision of human beings as part of a web of history which both greater than any individual and also present within everyone. It's an immensely elegant and restrained vision of all that exists beyond politics. We should always remember that Levi was not only a great historical witness, but also a great writer.

Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in its Third Year

With its portrait of seventeenth century fanaticism it would be easy to find a contemporary resonance and lesson for the present in Bennett's novel. But that seems far less important compared to the language which takes on the rhythms of seventeenth century prose without ever lapsing into archaisms, or the moving portrait of an entirely loving marriage, or its depiction of the past in which the past is respected as the past. All of the characters here live entirely within their own time. Our hero, John Brigge, never becomes a mouthpiece for the author or a modern character ahead of his time. Which is not to say it isn't a political book. It's a Tragedy, in which the desire for order and security and the imposition of their values by an elite within the town, which is intended to secure that order, only serves to bring about a breakdown of order and the town's community.

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level

Something I repeatedly heard when I was in India was how since the economy was liberalised and opened up to foreign investment in the early 90s money has been drawn upwards. Proper regulation should have been put in place in order to stop the abuses and graft perpetrated by elites and the growing disparity between rich and poor. Which is rather what Neo-Liberalism has done everywhere it's been put into practice. And of course, some people have benefited in India from the influx of foreign capital investment and break up of government monopolies, just as there may have been some positive benefits in Britain. And Neo-Liberalism isn't precisely the target of Wilkinson and Pickett's book. Their concern is simply with inequality and the effects it has on societies, building on a lot of research from the last 10 years. But it's hard not to apply their message to the biggest creator of inequality in our present: Neo-Liberalism. What their book shows is that what has been done to Britain and America and many other countries over the last thirty years was not only morally wrong, but also incredibly stupid, and we're still paying for those mistakes.

Either shortly before or after I read The Spirit Level I read a short piece in The Times in their 'Thunderer' section in which the journalist writing the piece complained that such a popular book was wrong to complain about 'growth' when the benefits which economic growth brings are so obvious. I remember correctly, the example she used was her sister's tomatoes. It's called the 'Thunderer' after all, so I suppose you shouldn't expect reasoned argument, but it might be nice if people actually read the books they criticise, since at several points the authors explicitly state that they are not specifically targeting arguments for economic growth and the changes of the last thirty years. Of course, whether they know it or not, that is the inescapable conclusion. The question I always want to ask is 'economic benefit for whom? Who benefits exactly?' If you're insisting that people should allow themselves to be exploited for the benefit of the very rich, you might want to explain why.

And one I've just finished:

Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel

I'm not sure if I didn't want to like this book rather more than I actually did.

It's interesting to see that she trained as a Jungian psychologist. I know very little about Jung's theories, but came across references to his work recently when I was researching an introduction I gave for Derek Jarman's film Caravaggio. I'm thinking particularly of the mysterious scene towards the end of the film where the young Caravaggio witnesses his older self as Christ in a painting he will go on to paint. I don't think that Vickers' novel achieves quite the same intensity of feeling, a feeling which I can only label 'religious', although there's nothing orthodox about it. Despite her admission in the reissued novel's introduction that novels shouldn't be reduced to simple messages about how to live, there's something that's rather too certain about her calm and fluid prose. It's ultimately a very kind book, building to a rather moving climax. No doubt that's part of the reason for the word of mouth success it apparently achieved, but somehow it doesn't always quite match the keenness of some of it's insights. It may acknowledge the darker, more brutal aspects of life, yet still feels rather too easy in its conclusions.

15/5/2011

Notes

1) Finally saw Lagaan yesterday afternoon. I can remember when it was released in Britain; a film which seemed to capture its moment and reach an audience that wouldn't normally be attracted to Bollywood cinema. It's a really enjoyable movie, in that cartoonish way that in my admittedly limited experience seems to be characteristic of a lot of Bollywood cinema. And it had an interesting subtext beyond the obvious (the Eevil British Empire!), although I'm not sure you'd be able to see that without an Indian explaining the references as you watched. What I found really interesting was a comparison I saw with a film made about 5 years later, Rang De Basanti, which would have been the very first Bollywood film I saw if only the DVD hadn't screwed up 15 minutes before the end. Both films star Aamir Khan, and in different ways draw upon colonial Indian history to try and say something to India's present. And both films contain the trope of a white English women educating young Indian men, which is...interesting.

2) Whilst hunting for Spearhead from Space photographs I found a really interesting blog post about the serial, which contextualised the story in terms of its production history and contemporary culture. It's interesting to hear that the BBC were considering cancelling the show in 1969 after Patrick Troughton finished his run. Not the first time that would occur. The decision to exile the Doctor to earth was also part of an overall aim to bring a stronger element of realism to the show, an element which was replaced in the following season with a more 'comic book' approach. I was particularly taken with this section which grounds the shows themes in the late 60s/early 70s:

"Gradually, as Season 7 progresses, it offers a reflection and commentary on the legacy of Wilson’s ‘white heat’ and on Tony Benn's then role as Minister of Technology (arguably symbolised throughout Season 7 in all the various factories, installations and special projects used for good or ill).

"With this theme also comes an acknowledgement of the rise of new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, the impact of economic and industrial recession with their resulting strikes and blackouts, the rise of corporate culture and the loss of Empire. This is all seen through the refractive mirror of an alternative, future Britain with its own space programme, research into nuclear power and drilling projects as emblematic of a still thriving world power.

"That view also coincides with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s best-seller of 1970, Future Shock. He suggested society was being so rapidly restructured, emerging as it was from the industrial revolution and hurtling towards, and transforming into, a ‘super-industrial’ society, that it would leave major casualties in its wake. People would be overwhelmed by such progress, and this technological, biological and social acceleration would leave them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – the 'future shock' of the book’s title. Holmes's use of plastic as a symbol of this feeling of being overwhelmed by modernisation, of the synthetic in contrast to the real, the obsession with inanimate objects given life, is expressed in both Auton stories through the mass production and commodification of plastic goods and the use of 'new techniques' in manufacturing.

"The new realism ushered in by Holmes's story and Sherwin's vision for the series also see a number of characters, usually the victims of attack, enter a realm of hysteria where their states of mind become subjected to unmanageable fear or emotional excesses. We can correlate Toffler’s ‘future shock’ and the symptoms of "shattering disorientation" in Spearhead From Space with the much revered high street attack from the Autons, the hunting down of Ransom and the Auton attack on Seeley’s cottage as the best examples of how the theme of ‘domestic terror’ operates in the programme, creating unease, dislocation and stress in an everyday location and thus making it extraordinary. 

"The fear of invasion, possession and death is not only more firmly embedded into an earthbound setting but also mines the inner fears, troubles and preoccupations of the British citizens of the Seventies. At the time there was much concern about the rapid changes to society, science and technologies out of control, mistrust of politicians and bureaucrats, worries about industry, jobs and the environment as well as class and gender divisions. Spearhead offers an overt representation of the ‘other’ in the physical form of monsters from outer space walking down the high street and through their appropriation of familiar materials, objects and their control of people."

(from cathoderaytube)

3) Kundera's nostalgia is interesting because his disdain for much of present day culture has a far more clear eyed and rational feel to his arguments than any simple reactionary. Yet, take the quote I put up the other week. Try a thought experiment. Imagine someone born in Britain in 1800, who may have lived 65 years and died in 1865. In that stretch of time such an individual would have lived through rapidly increasing industrialisation, the crowning of Victoria, the death of the Queen's consort, the year of revolutions in 1848, and goodness knows what else that I can't remember of the history of the first half of the 19th century. In other words, such a person would indeed have lived through more than one historical period. Dickens, who lived a very similar stretch of time, from 1812 to 1870 can certainly be said to have done. His later novels bear considerable witness to that. George Eliot's later novels demonstrate a similar change in their depiction of provincial England coming into contact with the wider national stage. So I wonder, is it only our nostalgia which assumes the past to have been far more static than it was? Our nostalgia which compresses the differences between different periods which would have been so much more apparent to those people who were living then.

4)

"Walk and talk, talk and walk; that was his new job. As he went along the street, he put his hand on anything it could reach. A fore hydrant, a railing, a kid's head became so many markers along his route"

Francois Truffaut, "A Portrait of Humphrey Bogart" (1958)

" One of the fine moments in 1940's film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign"

Manny Farber, "Introduction", Negative Space (1971)

5) I'm fascinated by this review by John Clute of a new collection of uncollected, mostly early stories by Joan Aiken:

"Almost all the stories assembled in The Monkey's Wedding...flow with a porcelain lucidity and gaiety that manifests the high energy of Aiken's early prime, and also because they are not only about Ago, but were written then: deep in the world of England just before the Beeching cuts began to poison the wells of community. The crystal-clear but flowing joie de vivre of the book—eight of the tales included here empolder courtships, most ending in marriages—comprises an epithalamium to wells of doing and saying and living not yet half-dead with drought. Some are fantasy; some are comedic within narrower frames. None seem specifically written for children: but almost nothing she ever wrote barred any reader from entering. A bit like A. E. Coppard or H. E. Bates but immensely faster, Joan Aiken caught and coiled the land of her birth into tales told: tales that fabulated England into a Matter that seemed unkillable.

"To read these stories now is to see that something happened."

He articulates, far more succinctly than I could manage, my own sense of what has been lost. Something is always happening.

Spearhead from Space

A notable story for the introduction of the Autons, one of the Doctor Who’s most famous monsters, as well as for the fact that it was entirely recorded on location, with no video interiors within the confines of the television studio, as a result of strikes at the BBC (it’s also presumably the reason why we never see a TARDIS interior, because they wouldn’t have had access to the sets). As the sleeve-notes to the DVD correctly note this gives the story a unique feel in the series’ history. The use of location filming and real locations grounds it in a far more real world. What really interests me is the elements that make up the reality depicted in this story.

I seem to remember years ago reading in SFX magazine that the ‘comedy yokel’ was something of a staple of the Jon Pertwee era of the show. In the first moments of this story we’re introduced to just such a figure, a character, a poacher, who seems straight out of an English rural novel, or the popular stereotype of D.H. Lawrence as meteorites crash in Epsom, shortly followed by the TARDIS, looking incongruous surround by the forest. As someone who was born in 1979, I find myself wondering how representative this character could have been of life in 1970. Really, I have no way of knowing, although I doubt such characters as a poacher and his wife would ever have been able to afford such a prosperous looking cottage, and I feel fairly confident in suggesting that rural life in 1970 probably did have greater continuity with the world described by someone like Lawrence than to what you could find in our own time. It still feels like a cultural stereotype though, a pastiche of an older reality, although there’s still a moment in a later episode where the wife of our rural stereotype faces off against one of the Autons with her husband’s shotgun where the look of panic on her face has the sense of something real.

For those that care about such things, the dating of the UNIT stories is famously screwed up. It’s not actually mentioned in this particular story, but at some point it was decided that they should be set in 1980. Only when a retired Brigadier reappeared in a Peter Davison story in the mid 80s, the dates given would seem to place the stories in the 1970s contemporary with when they were made. It’s rather sweet the way some fans have apparently come up with theories to account for such discrepancies in-story. Personally I’m in agreement with those who have started to argue for multiplicity when dealing with these science fiction universes. The history of something like Doctor Who now stretches across such an array of stories in a variety of different media that constructing a coherent narrative is surely impossible.

Presumably for reasons of budget there was never any effort to ‘place’ the stories in an imagined future of ten years hence in terms of what we see of fashions and such like, so it makes far more sense to see them as set in the 1970s. At one point General Scobie vioces his assumption about the advantages of a fully automated factory, “robots can’t go on strike I suppose”, referencing both the reason for the story’s being on film and locating it clearly in its contemporary reality. A fear of 'plastic people' with its associations of conformity and dehumanisation feels peculiarly late 60s (Plastic People  was the title of a song by Frank Zappa and The Kinks sang about a Plastic Man). Placing the Autons in what would have been the audience's present is surely part of their effectiveness as monsters, locating horror within the everyday as shop dummies come to stumbling life. UNIT themselves though seem to belong in an earlier time than the 70s. You could easily see them as plucky Brits in some random film of World War II that turns up on a Sunday afternoon or Bank Holiday. This element of the past is further emphasised in the first couple of episodes by the strange hospital which appears to be a retrofitted country house, the sort of location that mentally belongs in World War II or even the previous War and their immediate aftermath.

And then there’s the Doctor himself of course, outfitted as an Edwardian Dandy, and borrowing a car that even in 1970 must have seemed antique, as well as the many science fiction elements. The whole narrative becomes a patchwork, or bricolage of these disparate time periods, which is surely appropriate in a series about a time traveller, even if the Doctor has been exiled to a particular time and place. Although there is still the eventual uncertainty of precisely when it is he’s been exiled too... But that is information which can only be supplied from without the story's frame. From outside the story we bring our own assumptions about the time and the reality in which the story is located. So that, watched here and now, in the present of 2011, the plastic special effects, swirly graphics, Radiophonic Workshop music, which were once intended to evoke the 'future', now seem to be inescapably tinged with nostalgia, a part of the viewer's past.

Old British Stuff in Bombay

What's in a name?

Bombay, because that's the name my wife insists on. The change of name to Mumbai occurred sometime in the early nineties I think, a rather obvious post-colonial reaction. "Let's change a name left over from the British Empire for something more 'Indian'." Not that everyone seems to be aware of the change. The nurse who gave me my injections before we left wasn't aware that Bombay and Mumbai were the same place. To be fair, she also said she's never visited, so why should she know? It seems a reasonable mistake to make about a country that's so far away. More interesting is the way for people who live there, the two names seem to be interchangeable, as though 20 years haven't quite managed to erase the older name.

According to my wife, they should have stuck with the older name anyway, for all its supposed imperialist associations. Without the British, there would be no Bombay. The city is built around a bay and islands which were originally little more than swamp, although I think there were still a number of fishing villages. It was claimed by the Portuguese who then gave it to the British as a wedding gift. Seeking to obscure the rather unattractive aspects of this gift, they named it (in Portuguese) "Good bay", which was then anglicised as Bombay. It was the British whose engineering and land reclamation projects transformed the place into the beginning of the huge urban environment that it's since become. The name Mumbai comes from a Hindu goddess who was associated with a village further up the coast which has now been swallowed up by the spread of the city, but which had nothing to with the original islands which became Bombay.

This at least is the story as I understand it. There's actually very little of the city that could be termed 'Old British stuff' since so much of it has been built and developed since Independence, but we saw some of it in the oldest part of the city which we were able to visit one day. I must admit that I love that style of architecture, whatever it's associations with colonialism and imperialism. Then again, without the history of the British Empire and the association between our two countries, would I have ever met my wife? It feels silly to put it like that, when we're talking about something which is history. I don't, so far as I know, have any ancestors who were involved in the British Empire beyond presumably enjoying something of the economic prosperity it must have brought to the home country. And I'm a good left wing liberal, so of course I don't approve of imperialism, but I'm becoming increasingly aware that on a personal level, the meetings between the different cultures must have been far more complex than someone like myself might instinctively suppose. That after all, is part of what William Dalrymple was trying to show in his book White Mughals.

But then again, we're part of a different story anyway. We met at a British University and are part of a more modern movement of people around the globe. Well, she is at least. I still live in the same city in which I've lived for the past twenty years. And more importantly, we're our own story. Just us.

Horn OK Please

If I say that I found Bombay to be hot and very crowded, I wouldn't be making a very original observation. So many conversations involved complaints about the traffic (which has of course gotten so much worse) or the weather (and we British think we talk about the weather a lot!). We were there for a wedding, so I didn't really get to see very much of the city, which isn't after all much of a tourist city anyway. My first Indian wedding and it was my own! I won't therefore say very much about it because that's personal. What did strike me were the commonalities I could see. In the humanities we're, rightly I think, taught to be suspicious of universals, but that doesn't mean that they can't be found. Clearly, wedding photographers are going to be really annoying wherever you are. Although to be fair, it's their job to take good pictures, so maybe that's unavoidable. More seriously, the vows (which were in Sanskrit, so I suppose I could have agreed to anything!) as far as they were explained to me, seem very similar to what we would agree to in a ceremony in the Church of England. To love and protect. Care for each other. Share all we have. Honour and obey (okay, that's been dropped from the C of E, and I don't really expect her to anyway). Really, what else are they going to be? What else is a marriage about, wherever you're from? Of course, the outward form of the ceremony is very different...

But that's what Bombay was like. Different of course, but also familiar. As a long time enthusiast for the novels of Charles Dickens, I could see something of the city he wrote about in Bombay far more than I ever have in modern day London. The again, whilst Dickens is firmly associated in our minds now with the mid-Victorian city he himself always remained attached to an earlier city, so much of which had disappeared by the middle of the nineteenth century. His later fiction is mostly either explicitly set in the past or else it overlays the city of his boyhood onto the rapidly changing present. That's what we saw in Bombay: a rapidly changing city, with whole streets transformed or newly driven through what were previously slums. And extremes of wealth and privilege jammed next to poverty (which, to be fair, can still be seen in modern day London). My Dad made another interesting comparison, to Bristol where he grew up in the 1950s. People live outside, in a way that we used to do in Britain, before poverty was drawn inside by the attractions of television. And yes, we did see poverty, mostly through the closed window of an air conditioned car. If it's worse than what you can see on the streets of Britain, that's only because there are more children. And it is saddening, heart breaking at times, but it's also frightening how quickly you can become used to it.

Too obvious

In trying to write about India and some of my impressions, I wonder if I haven't ended up focusing on the obvious stereotypes. The Empire, poverty, etc. We were also there for the Cricket World Cup and witnessed some of the attendant celebrations. I certainly didn't intend to do that when I started writing this piece.

Or else I've ended up talking about home, but perhaps that's something you do when you go travelling, or even just spend time people who are visiting from abroad (I know a lot of foreign students studying in England and it's easy to find yourself talking about cultural differences). The differences and similarities become an obvious point of comparison.

Partly, it's because the things that made the greatest impression on me - our wedding, the new family I'm now a part of - are private and I don't want to write about too much that's personal on this blog. So I fall back on trying to frame things in a more general, if cliched, framework. I was there for less than a month after all, and inevitably you visit a place with unspoken assumptions. Nor did I really visit any of the obvious tourist parts of India, apart from a few days in Jaipur. Mostly I was in an ordinary part of a working city, surrounded by people going about their daily lives and general business. It's beautiful, yes, in a way, because I'm someone who's always found beauty in urban landscapes, but that's always been a problematic beauty.

Rushdie and Kundera

I made the comparison with Dickens above, but I could have just easily made the same point about Salmon Rushdie's fiction, since Bombay is clearly his city, or at least it was in his earlier novels (I've read nothing he's written since The Moor's Last Sigh). Perhaps it's just that there's something rather Dickensian about his fiction. I do also feel as though I understand Rushdie a little better since I've seen a few Bollywood films, and yes, his fiction clearly owes something to this city. Reading Milan Kundera's Encounter over the last few days, I was especially struck by the points he makes about exile. It was similar to a point Rushdie also makes in one of the reviews collected in Imaginary Homelands. Responding to Geoff Dyer's first book about John Berger he points out that whilst Berger has always paid attention to the experience of migrating labourers, he fails to acknowledge the full complexity of the experience of migration. Berger always sees it as an essentially tragic experience, a loss of one's homeland. Rushdie, like Kundera, points out that exile and migration can be a liberating experience. Of course, Kundera, for all that he was fleeing totalitarianism in the mid-1970s, was still, like Rushdie, something of a privilaged migrant. It's still true though, we do all carry our homelands within us.

Books read during the trip:

George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, because what else would you want to take to India with you than a Victorian classic of English provincial life?

Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof. One of my wife's favourites when she was growing up. It was the copy she won at the age of 12 that I read. A incredible novel of adolescence, all the more incredible because it was written by an author who was an adolescent at the time. Also interesting to read in conjunction with Rumor Godden's fiction. For her India is something which is foreign to her characters, something overwhelming. Whereas for Ruskin Bond it's precisely that sense of being overwhelmed by the life of India which his characters want to be a part of. The world is the means of discovering themselves, from which there is ultimately no way back.

J.L. Carr, What Hetty Did. Another tale of an adolescent escaping from an intolerable home life. I don't quite agree with the journalist quoted on the back cover copy; I did occasionally feel the 72 year old author behind her words, but Hetty is still a marvellously engaging creation, a wonderful example of spoken English.

Tim Pears, In the Place of Fallen Leaves. That rarest of things, English magic realism.

Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life. Not so interesting for his critical insights (although they are there), but rather for the passion Truffaut brought to the watching of films. Similar to David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Cinema it becomes a kind of refracted autobiography, inspiring the reader not only to go and watch more films, but also to pay better attention.

Films seen whilst on board the plane:

Mike Leigh, Another Year. Where Ruskin Bond finds a metaphor for life in the river, Mike Leigh finds one in an ordinary suburban allotment. Utterly inspiring.

Red, because I like Warren Ellis' grumpy old men. Adapting a short work, the script does a very effective job of preserving his caustic voice. It's still rather irritating though that out of our 4 or 5 heroes, the only one who dies is the one black man (Morgan Freeman), and the only one who gets injured is the one woman (Helen Mirren, clearly having a ball).

Milan Kundera Quote

"The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proced from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than a human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man's grasp, and the continuity, the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart."

Milan Kundera, Encounter