1066 quote

The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.

1066 And All That, Walter Caruthers Sellar & Robert Julian Yeatman

"Going native..."

This must be what Grandmother called 'Going Native'. She thought that being foreign was a crime, or at least some sort of illness that you could catch by being out in the sun too much, or eating olives. 'Going Native' was giving in and becoming one of them. The way to not go native was to act exactly as if you were at home, whcih included dressing for dinner in heavy clothes and eating boiled meat and brown soup. Vegetables were 'unwholesome', and you should avoid fruit because 'you don't know where it's been'. That had always puzzled Daphne because, after all, how many places could a pineapple go?

Terry Pratchett, Nation

a footnote to my previous post

This quotation comes from a review of Jeremy Paxman's recent series, Empire. My wife and I caught the first few episodes before we left for India before Easter. It may not have been a perfect show, and Michael White's review reminds me that it may have had more problems that I remember either of us noticing at the time, but one real positive about it was that they didn't edit the opinions of Indian woman whose family came to Britain after they were expelled from East Africa in the early 70:. "We were better off when the British were in charge." Now she might be wrong about that, and I certainly don't think I agree with her, but that isn't really the point. The point is simply that this is a real opinion held by at least some former colonial subjects, and that I don't think we should avoid that or dismiss it as 'false consciousness'. I'm sure there must have been some British who missed the Romans when they left all those centuries ago. This is not, I hasten to add, to argue in favour of empire, or to think, like some Edwardian Fabians did, that an empire which is good for all, subject peoples as well as rulers, is an actual possibility. It is simply to argue for the complexity of real, lived experience, which so easily gets overlooked in our rush to pass judgement.

But now that the British empire is safely in its grave – for almost 50 years now — it's time we got a better grip on it, instead of being torn between Telegraph-esque sentimentality, snarling leftie loathing and the faint embarrassment (can that really have been Grandpa patrolling the Suez canal?) that is probably the response of most people. Fact is that, as usual, there was good and bad, heroism and sacrifice, greed and brutality – much as there would have been if no British soldier's boot had touched the local soil.

There would also have been fewer canals or railways – just as colonial Britain ("Britain was Rome's Afghanistan," says naughty Cambridge professor Mary Beard) plunged into post-imperial disorder after the legions went home but lived off its Roman roads for 1,400 years. The graffiti Paxo reported from British mandate (1919-48) Palestine says it all. "Tommy, go home" underneath which a British soldier – a Tommy in the jargon of the time — had scrawled: "I wish we fucking could." 

Well, they did go home and in a hurry, leaving the British with a lingering taste for what Tony Blair called "liberal intervention" and others call sucking up to the Americans. Paxo played with the theme, let's hope he explores it further in future episodes – and tries to explain how uncertainty about British identity – specifically English identity – are a legacy of empire. 

But it's wrong to suggest, as Paxman did, that the British stumbled on empire via the treaty of Paris in 1763, not least because it had been amassing outposts for 150 years by then and was – thanks to the treaty of Paris — about to lose its first (American) empire. If Paxo mentioned the extraordinary East India Company which ran India before 1857 I must have missed it.

He didn't mention inter-racial marriage – William Dalrymple's White Mughals is very good on this – before High Victorian morality put a stop to it or why the British army fetched up in Cairo in 1882 (it was to protect the Suez canal which the French built and the British bought), let alone exactly WHY Egyptians still come to Britain expressly – so he said – to spit on the grave of the late Evelyn Baring ("Over Baring" to his critics) who ran British Egypt from 1883 to 1907. Baring wasn't the only one with a low opinion of foreigners.

Michael White, from The Guardian

Sherlock Holmes vs. the Evil Empire!

Holmes of the Raj, by Vithal Rajan

Now, this is a fantastic idea. In fact it's such a good one, that Vithal Rajan wasn't even the first to have it. Take the popular character of late nineteenth-century fiction with whom we're all familiar and confront him with the realities of the British Empire. The Empire which hovers somewhere in the background of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. Of course you can say that many of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories feature no reference to the Empire, but enough of them do, and in any case, they were adventure stories written at the height of Empire in this country. The attitudes of imperialism, in the self confidence the characters exude, is a part of the narrative of Sherlock Holmes.

*



And a quick look at Wikipedia reminds me that, in an episode which Julian Barnes fictionalised a few years back, Conan Doyle, if not his character, had a very real encounter with a half-Indian lawyer George Edalji, whom he defended against the prejudices of the British police and helped to exonerate.

*

Confronting his famous character with the Empire seems like a telling of a story that Conan Doyle didn't, probably couldn't, get around to telling himself. Like I said, it's so good that someone already got their first. Andy Lane's Doctor Who novel, All-Consuming Fire, which not only mashes up the those two great British characters, but also Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos as well just for good measure, appeared in 1994 as part of Virgin's line of New Adventures published after the original series of the show ended. Now, I've not read All-Consuming Fire, but I did read a review just a few weeks ago on Philip Sandifer's magnificent TARDIS Editorum blog. Philip Sandifer, one of those bloggers who puts my meagre efforts to shame, has an often political take on the show and it's many spin offs. In this instance it sounds as though a political take would be pretty hard to avoid. From his account, it appears that the book is thoroughly aware of the problematic nature of some of the material it's mashing up. All too aware of the many abuses carried out by the British in our Empire, Andy Lane goes out of his way in his book to point out that he, through the mouthpiece of the Doctor, really doesn't approve of the British Empire. Which is problematic for several reasons, mainly because the book is apparently incredibly bad at representing the culture of the people the Empire is oppressing in India, mixing up the principles of Hinduism and Islam for instance, and often rather trite.

Again, like I say, I've not read Lane's book, although for all it's faults, it does sound like it might be worth tracking down. But I have had Vithal Rajan's book sitting on my shelves for a few months and this long preamble serves to give the reason why I chose to pull it off the shelves and read it next, because I thought that an Indian author's take on the same idea might well be more interesting. Written in a good approximation of Conan Doyle's style, the six stories, with five set in 1888 and the last under the shadow of a future war in 1913, send Watson and Holmes helter-skelter across the subcontinent, along the way encountering just about everyone who will have a future role in the independence movement. Or if not them, then their parents. As well, there are plenty of historical British characters, famous and otherwise, and not only Kipling, but analogues (the supposed originals on whom the author based his stories) of two of his most famous characters. If you don't know who everyone is, then there are helpful end notes, a device which reminds me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of novels.

Like Flashman, part of the joke comes from the reader knowing more than the characters who, leaving aside the implausibility that anyone travelling through India in 1888 would encounter such a disperate group of famous people from history like that, obviously have little idea of just how important some of these people are going to turn out to be. So for example, when the Prince of Wales is saved from a tiger by an Indian, the end note helpfully informs us that this man is the father of the man who will eventually write the Indian constitution. It's an at times affectionate ribbing of History. Not always so affectionate of course, when in the last story when Holmes and Watson foil a plot within the British military to discredit and murder a good number of the independence movement. But essentially, this is a very lighthearted set of stories. Holmes' detection often goes on in the background while Watson idles, giving us a frequently delightful travelogue, conveniently giving us a very full picture of all walks of life in British India. Again, it's not all that different from what MacDonald Fraser does in Flashman, his character's retrospective perspective allowing him to give us an incredibly detailed and well researched picture of the people and places amongst whom he travels.

Whilst there are jokes at the expense of the British - one of my favourites comes early on when they're told their driver will understand them if they just speak slowly and loudly - it's difficult to say that it's anti-British. Certainly not in the way that it sounds as though Lane's book is, the author indulging in a kind of overcompensation, apologising to the point of obsequiousness about something which our ancestors did. Funnily enough, that's not disimilar to something which actually happened to my wife not long after she arrived in Britain. Her British, white, liberal housemate felt the need to apologise to her for everything the British empire did in India. At some length.

And whilst in his review, Philip Sandifier criticises All-Consuming Fire for awkwardly grafting on it's social conscience about the horrors of British imperialism, he clearly wholly agrees with the sentiment:

But there’s a problem underlying all of this, and the book is aware of it. It’s 1994 now, and we’re all pretty much awake to the fact that the Victorian era consisted primarily of horrifying colonial impulses. It’s difficult to justify an unambiguous embrace of the Victorian in the mid-90s. And when you add Lovecraft, infamously racist dick that he was, you end up deeper in the weeds. And so the book, quite rightly, displays a social conscience. But there’s something… difficult about it. For instance, the scene where the Doctor yells at the villain, proclaiming, “you will be spreading death and destruction across the cosmos! The British Empire is based upon oppression and slavery. You offer not the hand of friendship but the jackboot of tyranny! I shall prevent your plans!” This is not wrong as such, but there’s something painfully awkward about it. And it’s far from the only moment like that - Benny refusing to help a beggar in India because, as she muses, “there were tens of thousands of people in Bombay. I couldn’t help all of them. That was the true evil. Not Daleks, not Hoothi. Poverty and powerlessness.” Again, true, but with a sort of painful facileness. I could cite more, but the point is, I think, made. 

And there's a problem here with this review too. It's all in that 'primarily'. As someone in the comments section pointed out, it all depends on how you look at it. For that commentator, the Victorian era was a time of great social progress. But if we narrow our focus just to the British in India, was the experience of the Indian people 'primarily' oppression and slavery? Before anyone reading this now tries to accuse of me of claiming that the British empire was a 'good' empire, the way I know some people do (just look at some of the scorn which has been heaped on those Kenyan men who have recently been granted permission to bring their case for compensation over the torture they suffered at the hands of British soldiers during the Mau-Mau uprising), that's not what I'm about to claim. I just think it's...more complicated than that. More nuanced. I'm as white and liberal as I suspect are Andy Lane and Phillip Sandifer and my wife's somewhat foolish former housemate, but I can't really accept such a simplified view anymore. Yes, it's my wife's fault, the influence of a trained historian. Undoubtedly, the British in India, throughout the empire, did some truly reprehensible things. In one story in Holmes of the Raj our heroes encounter a famine which has been if not manufactured, then certainly exacerbated by the British government's insistence on the doctrine of free trade. It's only through the actions of a British governor who goes against the order of his government and persuades a native merchant to help him who is able to get some famine relief to the local people. Really, aside from imperialism, the real evil in these stories appears to be free trade and those who unthinkingly espouse such an ideology. Plus ca change.

It's complicated though. The British government is the clear villain of this particular tale: British policies clearly lead to the deaths of many people. Yet the 'hero', if I can call him that, the character who at any rate does the most to help the people under his rule, is a British man. And then there's Holmes, who explicitly identifies himself as an agent of the British government, whose orders are the only reason he and Watson are actually in the country at all, but who otherwise does everything he can to help the native people whom he comes into contact with, and with whom he clearly has real sympathy. In both cases, you can argue that these are an idealisation by an Indian author, Holmes was never quite so sympathetic in Conan Doyle's original stories. Then again, you might ask why he goes to the trouble to include so many sympathetic British characters in his fiction. Why he might trouble not to depict British India as a hell of 'oppression and slavery'.

I've compared this book to Flashman a few times already, and I think one last comparison will draw out the point I'm trying to make here. MacDonald Fraser was, by his own admission, an imperialist. In his view the British Empire was predominantly a force for good which did much to spread ideals of democracy, science, education, etc. around the globe. It's not such an uncommon view, although not perhaps a very common one in my social circle. Yet as a writer and historian (his end notes show just how meticulous his research was for all his Flashman books), he had a basic honesty and clear sighted view of humanity that consequently his novels give a pretty damning view of 19th century British imperialism, almost in spite of themselves. In effect, Vithal Rajan comes at it from the other side. It's pretty clear where his sympathies lie, but at the same time he allows that India wasn't perfect before the British arrived. The Hindu caste system is shown to be hidebound and in need of reform. And some British individuals did good for the communities in which they found themselves. We see this in one story when Watson almost diagnoses the source of malaria, which nicely stands as an image for the material improvements of the country for which the British were responsible.

It's not that I think any good that the British did in India somehow excuses all the wrong we did. I don't believe that that kind of moral equivalence can ever exist. Which is why I dislike the use of the word 'balanced' in this context, one we see so often used by apologists for imperialism. Another term that irritates is 'realism', because that suggests we can somehow find a moral point which lets imperial aggressors off the moral hook. The victims of imperialism still exist, and the perpetrators of such crimes should be held to account, even if that can only be achieved via the history books. On the other hand, we also shouldn't ignore the existence of positive things which may have occurred, if only accidentally, because of the encounter between coloniser and colonised. The British presence in India was a history which occurred over centuries, and the British Empire was different things in different times and places. If people are complicated, then so I think are the empires they create. And if the Victorian era was a time of progressive movements as well as cruel oppression, then I strongly suspect that many such movements and beliefs were inspired or provoked by the experience of being in or ruling an empire. In which case, without the empire, would they have ever existed? The term I would prefer in this context is the one I applied to MacDonald Fraser above: 'clear-eyed', because it suggests an awareness of all the ways in which reality, however uncomfortably, doesn't fit into our neat ideological boxes.

*

A cursory look at Wikepedia also shows me that Conan Doyle also wrote a pamphlet in support of the Boer war. And a few years later wrote another denouncing abuse in the Belgian Congo. Clearly an early example of 'their empire was worse than ours'. So he wasn't perfect. For all the ways in which Doyle was progressive, he was clearly also capable of possessing unthinking imperialist assumptions. Which is one reason why it's so pleasing when a writer like Vithal Rajan comes along and corrects him in such a playful fashion.

Gilbert Adair quote

And there is, present in this film, as in the shot I have selected from it, the trope, the behaviourable motif, or whatever one cares to call it, that has above all others remained with me from a lifetime of viewing Satyajit Ray's work: I mean the amazing absense in his films of meaningful ambulation. Ray's characters, his male characters mostly but by no means exclusively, are so very horizontal! Horizontal from the heat, to be sure, as from the tetchy, fly-ridden ennervation that it enduces, but horizontal, too, as if in their very souls. They seldom walk. They never run. Ray almost always portrays them limp and languorous on a couch, fanning themselves if no servant can be mustered to fan them.

Gilbert Adair, writing about Jalsaghar [The Music Room], Flickers

This Week's Comics

Batman, Inc. #0

Recently, I've been observing something of an online critical backlash against Grant Morrison, directed both at his work and his person. He's always had his critics of course, for a supposed obscurity in his writing. This though, is clearly different, since it's coming from people who have been fans of his work in the past, who in some cases still purchase and enjoy his work. The tipping point was clearly the publication of Supergods, his quasi-autobiography/history/eschatology of the superhero genre, in which, in contrast to anything that I've ever read on the subject, he chose to defend the actions of the company which became DC in their success in taking the rights to Superman from the character's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. What's made it worse has been his generally dismissive attitude towards anyone who has made the opposing point of view (the generally accepted view that Siegel and Schuster were, like many others since in the comics industry, ripped off by an uncaring company). In interviews he comes across as basically uncaring, shrugging: 'I wasn't there. I get on with the people who work at DC now. They've always been good at paying me on time. How can I be held accountable for any of this?' Well, you could start by owning the opinions which you published in a book, or else acknowledge that you might have got something wrong.

Whilst, like many, I might have been disappointed in Morrison's expressed opinions, and feel that they don't seem to fit with the image of the counter-cultural author who once wrote The Invisibles, it's also chimed with a general indifference I've been feeling towards the superhero genre as a whole. As I think I've said in an earlier blog post, apart from the Adam West Batman tv series I watched as a kid, I didn't really start reading superhero comics until my late teens, early twenties, as I followed the work of the British writers I'd first encountered in 2000AD. I was always sort of interested in the genre, but never wholly committed. It's only really in the last seven years that I've read more, partly because of the influence of some of the comics blogs I've followed. Partly because individual comics issues are cheaper as an individual purchase than a more expensive graphic novel (which is now the general format for most comics published outside the genre), even when that's work which I find more satisfying, and partly because the writers I've followed and enjoyed have written more superheroes. I've never followed individual characters, but I have followed specific creators, and no writer is going to be so consistent that you'll love all their work (even Alan Moore nods). Grant Morrison has probably been the biggest offender in that regard, almost all of whose work over the last decade has either been filtered in some way through the genre, or else directly situated in it. Of all the creators whose work I've followed, he's also one of the hardest I've found to avoid that feeling that I need every last thing he's published.

A few months ago, we moved out of my Dad's home (the family home I'd been living in for most of my life up to this point, even if it was across several different residences). The only thing we've not been able to fit into our little flat has been my comics collection. It's currently being stored in two different places, but the move also inspired me to consider whether I really need all of them and whether some of it couldn't be sold off. A more permanent cull of this collection than those I've managed in the past (the cull is something I have the impression that many long term comics collectors periodically indulge in). It would be a reconsideration of just how much enjoyment I really got out of some of the comics I'd bought if I hadn't already made up my mind on that question: my previously alluded to disenchantment. Boredom might be a more accurate term. So many of the comics I want to get rid of are superhero comics. Alongside this, with more bills to pay, there were also obvious financial considerations. I dropped several titles from my standing order a few months back. The only mainstream American superhero titles to survive the chop where Grant Morrison's current two titles, but then I dropped Action Comics too when I realised I just wasn't enjoying it very much. Written in that breathless style Morrison perfected back when he was writing JLA, it also felt somehow drawn out, taking too long to tell a rather simple story.

And then we come to Batman, Inc., the reason I started writing this piece. The title which was promised to consist of the final wrap-up of the epic ever-evolving story Morrison has been telling over the course of multiple titles for the last however many years. This, a special prequel issue which is part of a line wide stunt imposed on all DC comics for this month, has disrupting a narrative which has already been subject to various disruptions and delays. The title, 'Brand Building', gives a clear indication of the story's point of view. The global franchise of Batmen Bruce Wayne has instituted is clearly defined as a 'good' corporation. Just as an abstract term that's interesting, because such a formulation clearly defines all (most?) corporations out here in the real world as somehow 'bad'. Even before the main titles in the comic however, we get the line which enraged me.

Page 4: Bruce Wayne is addressing his board of directors and invites Lucius Fox to justify the funding of a group which, if considered within a real world logic, has a questionable legality. Fox acknowledges that: 'Some of you [have] voiced concerns about the idea of funding vigilantism...but think of these as Wayne security personnel working alongside the police.' Of course, here in the real world, we already have such privately financed groups. It's the private security industry, and it is, frankly, evil, a product of a neo-conservative culture and ethic which personally I find utterly poisonous. Of course, Batman, Inc. is a 'good' corporation, so nothing to worry about there. And obviously, within the context of a fantasy, I don't. In which case, it's probably best not to consider the real world implications, unless you have more considered point to make about the nature of that fantasy.

I also didn't like the art particularly. Don't get me wrong. Frazer Irving is obviously talented, a slight stiffness in his figure work amply compensated by a fantastic design sense and imaginative use of colour. Especially since he started using computers more, he's deployed a far more adventurous use of colour than most colourists of superhero comics. The problem I've always had with his work is that it somehow feels just a little too slick, a problem which has only increased with his increased reliance on computers in the composition of his pages. There's some beautiful work here, but it also feels rather weightless, with backgrounds reduced to geometric shapes. It seems entirely of a piece with Morrison's corporate superheroes. In both writing and art, this comic feels airless, void of anything approaching real life.

Perhaps it might be argued that 'real life' is something which one shouldn't go looking for in a superhero comic. An argument with which I'm not wholly unsympathetic! And to be fair, Morrison has always placed his own artistic credo firmly in opposition to any facile realism. But then, that's not what I'm talking about. The superhero comics I've always enjoyed, and still can enjoy, all have some modest connection with the real world, whether in setting or character, or else in the ideas and moral conflicts which animate it. Shrill didactism can even be a virtue in such a context. I've seen parts of Marc Singer's recent study of Morrison's work, but the argument he sees embedded in it, a balancing between on the one hand a totalitarian collectivity and on the other an excessive romantic idealism is one which very clearly relates to the real world. Similarly, blogger Andrew Hickey's reading of the end of The Return of Bruce Wayne as a metaphor for the ideal of a communal resistance to individual despair is one which, as someone who has experience of depression, is one which I find inspiring. More inspiring, if I'm honest, than I found the actual comic.

Batman, Inc. #0 felt like a perfect example of what Mark Fisher has described as 'capitalist realism'. Morrison's writing has always had an ambivalent relationship to modernity, critiquing it at the same time as it revels in a certain decadence. In the last few years, that revelling seems to have transformed into a wholesale endorsement of capitalist and corporate culture, as his work has become much more inward looking in it's focus on nothing beyond introverted superhero continuities. I can't say where the change began exactly. I've not read Supergods, but I have flipped through it, and the bit which stuck in my mind was the point where he bought his first Armarni suit. About 1999-2000, if my memory serves, when he realised that the way our culture was going was becoming 'more corporate', and he felt the need to change his style in line with that. And The Invisibles does after all end with King Mob in 2012, happily ensconced within the walls of his corporate kingdom.

Of course, times change, people change. The narrative of an arty working class guy becoming hugely successful in his chosen artistic field and then having his later work or pronouncements disappoint his middle class admirers is one which is now at least as old as The Beatles by this point, and is hardly a major concern. My disenchantment here isn't solely down to a feeling that Morrison's work has changed, because in some ways I do think he is consistent with some his earlier work. Work which I still appreciate. It's also, as I noted above, that I've changed. I just can't be bothered with following these comics anymore when I find I get so little pleasure out of them. Not the things of childhood, but those of too long protracted adolescence. Yes, those I can do without now.

Addendum (14/11/12):

A few weeks ago I read a very good piece on the arguments around the rights of Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, which unusually, does a good job of respecting both sides of the story and, whether or not you agree with all of the writer's conclusions, does a good job of showing that both of these creators were far from the innocents duped by an evil corporation that they've so often been portrayed as. That's not to say that they weren't exploited to some extent, but just to acknowledge that sadly they probably did have some complicity in their own exploitation. Which does actually seem somewhat typical of how these kinds of situations occur.

So, the typical 'fan version' of the story, which even appeared in a disguised form in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and which I certainly always assumed to be basically true if I ever gave much thought to it, may actually be wrong. The truth of what happened could well be more in line with how Grant Morrison appears to have characterised it in Supergods. Or at the very least, there's good reason for believing so, but I don't think that really excuses much of his attitude as it came across in his interview. What pissed me off was the way he refused to be held to account for things he'd written and published in a book. His dismissal of the people who'd expressed displeasure about it, implicitly characterising anyone who might want to criticise him as petty and naive. Underneath the humour with which he expressed it, it was a really superior, sneering attitude, which does feel very much at odds with the egalitarianism I've taken from so much of his work. Was I mistaken? Or has he, like so many before him, been seduced by his own success?

So yes, the more I've thought about this, the more I think we have every right to be disappointed in Morrison for his currently expressed attitudes.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (2)

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Silver Branch

The second book in the trilogy 'Three Legions', which I can still remember coming across more than once in my school library. I think I may even have tried to start reading it, but didn't get very far into the first book. It was a copy of the third book in the sequence, The Lantern Bearers, a present in childhood which for some reason I held onto and finally read either during or just after university. So I've encountered them out of order, but really that hardly matters. This isn't much of a trilogy at all, each book taking place at different periods in Roman British history, with little to connect them other the odd subtle link, members of the Aquila family and a silver dolphin seal ring. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia, you can see the series carries on well past this supposed 'trilogy', past the departure of the Roman legions from British shores, up until the Norman conquest, and elsewhere even spinning off into Arthurian fantasy. I shall enjoy following this saga further, as Rosemary Sutcliff really is one of the finest historical novelists I've come across.

It was a rather pompous review of Hilary Mantel's recent Thomas Cromwell novels by James Wood which helped me put my finger on just why Sutcliff's fiction is so successful. I say the review is pompous, because historical fiction, in his words, 'a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness', is a genre he clearly looks down upon. This is his accounting for Hilary Mantel's success:

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

But that surely, is the measure of success of a great deal of historical fiction? Having so little time for the genre, Woods compares Mantel's achievement to the work of Peter Ackroyd and Susan Sontag. Now, I'm unfamiliar with Susan Sontag's fiction, but I've read a lot of Peter Ackroyd's work, and it seems to me that he is engaged on an entirely different project, his approach to historical fiction being that of a lively pastiche, enjoying the feel of the language. They are entirely literary games, but then he, like I imagine Susan Sontag, is writing historical fiction post-The Name of the Rose, which might be seen as the marker for the new type of historical fiction which started to be written in the 80s. I wish I'd kept a link to the academic book I found online which delineated this tradition of a 'new historical fiction'. The point I think is that it encompassed a new self-consciousness about narrative, and particularly about language. Hence the profusion of literary pastiche. Of course, this development occurred alongside the development of modern 'literary' fiction, with which it shares many characteristics.

Which isn't to say that people didn't carry on writing the older type of historical fiction, particularly in the genres. We even had the creation of the historical crime story. It's just to note that there's nothing 'mysterious' about Hilary Mantel's achievement. It's exactly the same kind of achievement you can find in a novel published for children in the late-1950s. I've no idea if Rosemary Sutcliff's fictional representation of Roman Britain is true exactly, even if I went through and checked every little detail against the known archaeological and historical facts. But it feels true, as if this must be how it felt to be alive at the time, because all of the human motivations and feelings feel wholly recognisable.

What I also recognise is the time in which it was written. These 'Roman' novels are a portrait of an empire in decline written by the subject of another empire also in the process of decline. A theme which becomes more prominent in The Lantern Bearers is the need to preserve the 'light' of civilisation against the darkness of the surrounding barbarism, is introduced here through the character of the self-proclaimed British emperor Carausius, whose motivation for his declaration is precisely that: a self-conscious attempt to halt, if only temporarily, a slide from civilisation into barbarism. It should come as no surprise that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a book on Rudyard Kipling, and counted him as a major influence.

*

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

When my wife read the Over Sea, Under Stone, she described it to me as like The Famous Five crossed with The Lord of the Rings. A description I loved. She then proceeded to read the entire series over the course of the last week.

In contrast to the first book, here we're thrown into the magic world underpinning the real one within the first twenty pages or so, as Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, quickly learns that he is in fact one of the 'Old Ones', a secret society of immortal beings who protect the world from the forces of the 'Dark'. The main action of the book can easily be reduced to a kind of 'schooling of a sorcerer' as Will learns of his secret heritage through a series of infodumps and collects a series of plot-coupons which will preserve the world for the forces of light until the next time the Dark attacks. That it doesn't feel shcematic is entirely to the credit of Susan Cooper's ability both to tell a story and root it in a richly imagined world.

Whilst the Light is characterised by a patchwork of characters drawn from myths which have attached themselves to the British land - Merlin, Herne the Hunter, Wayland the Smith, even Arthur (or so I assume; he isn't named here, presumably to reappear later in the sequence?), the Dark is largely amorphous, a mysterious threatening entropic force. The characters we meet who are on the side of the Dark only serve it, they don't embody it in the way that those of the light appear do. The character who comes closest to such a role is the mysterious 'Dark Rider' who appears as a Mr. Mithothin (or, 'Myth'-o-thin, embodying the entropic quality of the Dark).

As with the earlier book, there's a wonderful sense here of another world existing behind the cover of the world we see in front of us every day. Here though, we get to see what that world actually looks like, with it's surreal trips into the past. Again, it's not just myth, but the presence of the past which is impinging on the present. I love how so much of this sense of the numinous appears to be conveyed through music. There's so much music in this book: carols (it is set at Christmas), church music, a setting of A.E. Housmann, Greensleeves (which seems to be related to the mysterious tune Will hears at moments of greatest significance), even the Hunting of the Wren. The use of music matches the way in which, whenever magic appears in the narrative, Cooper's writing becomes diffuse, in contrast to the rootedness in a realistic sense of place and character she employs elsewhere. The picture of what's going on becomes a little unclear, like a half remembered song.

*

I know from a piece I read in Alan Garner's essay collection The Voice That Thunders, that one of the common experiences shared by all of the writers who came to prominence in the golden age of children's fiction in the 60s and 70s is that of having grown up with the experience of the Second World War. Certainly, there is something of the spirit of the Blitz in the way in which the Dark is presented:

He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it. 

...He saw a time when the first great testing of the light came, and the Old Ones spent themselves for three centuries on bringing their land out of the Dark, with the help in the end of their greatest leader, lost in the saving unless one day he might wake and return again.

My wife (the medieval historian in the family) tells me that the imagery of waves of ships comes straight from Bede and Gildas. I don't doubt that you're right about that my dear, it's clearly an echo of the popular image of the Viking raids, but I also think that such imagery must have seemed particularly apt to someone who had lived through the Second World War as a child and to a readership growing up in it's aftermath (and in Britain the aftermath of the Second World War lasted well into the 60s; in fact, in some ways, culturally we're still living in that aftermath). The evil that the Dark represents is never explicitly defined, allowing it carry a multitude of metaphorical possibilities.

As well as World War Two, they also belonged to the generation which grew up celebrating Empire Day, before it was superseded by Commonwealth Day. They belonged to the last generation for whom the British Empire was an inescapable fact, part of the furniture which made up the cultural background. Will's older brother Stephen is in the British navy, stationed out in the West Indies, where he meets a magic foreigner who gives him one of the essential items Will needs to complete his quest. It's a very odd moment. I mean, what on earth is an avatar of Herne the Hunter doing there? It feels like a somewhat clumsy attempt to make a story which is otherwise intensely focused on the matter of Britain a little more universal.

In the imagery Susan Cooper deploys above, she's also using essentially the same symbolism as Rosemary Sutcliff. Civilisation is the 'light' which has to be protected against the Dark. And these quasi-aristocratic Old Ones are born not made, defending a light which is centred on this island nation. It's appropriate that there's a degree of Royal symbolism floating about the narrative. Which is not to say that it doesn't also complicate and simple assumption about the definition of the British nation and forces of the Light. Arthur, assuming it is he, is described by Merriman as 'part-Viking', suggesting a mingling of the native and foreign. And the forces of the Light aren't always kind. The figure of the Walker, condemned to walk through the centuries because he betrayed his master's trust, is hugely sympathetic; his actions, his choice of the dark, the result of the way his trust had been abused by his former master.

That ultimately, is what is so refreshing about Cooper's conception of the Dark. It is, ultimately, always a matter of choice, not something which is intrinsic to an invading race or person. In time, the invader's settle down. Evil is contingent.

Some reflections on Realism & Fantasy

Perrault's consumate craftsmanship and his good-natured cynicism (and 'Puss in Boots,' or the Cat as Con Man, is a masterpiece of benevolent cynicism) are not qualities much present in twentieth-century children's literature, which tends to concentrate on the nourishing of a rich, imaginative life. But perhaps the very need for a rich imaginative life is an indication that the circumstances of real life are unsatisfactory.

Angela Carter, The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, "Afterword"

I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth - history. 

I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.

Geoff Ryman, Was

Pankaj Mishra quote

Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the "third world", multiculturalism, the immigrant condition – whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe's post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

Pankaj Mishra, reviewing Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton in The Guardian

Harlan Ellison quote

We have only to look around us, at the fissures in the rock-wall of our times, to know that we have created for ourselves a madhouse of irrationality and despair. The lunacies of our world erupt daily like boils on the diseased body of civilisation. Is it, hopefully, the reawakening of conscience, or, more likely the refracted pain of denying our souls? 

Alienation.

The keyowrd so easily bandied by sociologists and inept novelists alike. The explanation for racial strife, random violence, mass amdness, the rape of our planet. man feels cut off. He feels denied. he feels alone. He is alienated.

Harlan Ellison, All the Sounds of Fear

'A cliched view of India...'

Another amazon review, from about two years ago:

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Failures...

Geoff Dyer's fiction has never been much concerned with plot. The opening of the second part of his latest attempt pokes fun at this tendency, observing that the phone call which sets in motion the chain of events could have been much more dramatic, could have in fact lent "narrative causality...albeit of a not very novel kind", but is instead only a call from an editor at a perfectly respectable time in the afternoon. Nor has he ever been much interested in character, although previous novels such as The Colour of Memory and Paris, Trance at least made an effort at creating individual characters with at least some semblance of independence from the author. Here there is less of a gap. Jeff is almost Geoff, clearly an extrapolation of parts of his author, although "Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently so at any rate," as he puts it in an afterword. So too is the unnamed narrator from the second half, whose narrative voice is so close to his author's that I'm sure I spotted lines reused from Geoff Dyer's own journalism. 

No, the element of fiction Dyer is most interested in lies in the variations, the cultural observations which arise from interacting with both the many writers and artists with which the text is littered, and from a confrontation with a finely observed sense of place. He is most concerned with developing and defining his own particular sensibility, and I suspect a reader's enjoyment of his work will largely depend on their response to that sensibility, one which glories in having taken a life off, and enjoys both the consequent happiness and unhappinesses, the resultant contradictions. There can't be a modern English writer who is quite so in love with the idea of failure. Out of Sheer Rage concludes with the salutary reminder that all such works, studies of the life and work of D H Lawrence and the like, are really nothing more than a means of avoiding confronting the depression he claims to have experienced during the writing of the book. And his earlier fiction, particularly Paris, Trance, similarly celebrates the personal failures of their characters, although in a more lyrical manner. Pleasure is only a means of avoiding the emptiness which underlies everything, and sometimes the pleasure can even reside in giving up and letting go, or at least in the desire to do so. 

He is also, it has to be said, an extremely funny writer.

A fairly short review. If I remember correctly, it was a book for which amazon already had a good number of reviews. I've got a much longer review of Working the Room, which goes into more depth about what I like and dislike about his writing. Hopefully get around to finishing it one of these days.

I notice that my review, such as it is, doesn't mention anything about his depiction of India. The title of this post comes from a piece about looking at all of his work which I think was published around the publication of his most recent collection in the States. I'm unable to find it now, and frankly, can't really be bothered. So I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the general criticism, which I think at least one or two of amazon's reviewers also made, is that the depiction of India is rather stereotyped, full of cliches.

Well, maybe, it's nearly two years ago since I read the book myself, so it's difficult for me to comment. I do though have a memory of reading out a few particularly funny bits to my wife where he describes Varanasi (which she has visited herself) and the part where he compares Hindu mythology to Marvel comics, and she found them all really funny. I think sometimes we can be a bit over sensitive to criticism of a foreign country which someone who actually grew up there just won't see. Or perhaps his depiction of Varanasi really is insulting. Certainly I don't think 'Death in Varanasi' contains anything nearly so insulting as the claim made by one amazon reviewer that the narator of the story is 'going native'. Now that is insulting.

Thinking about colonialism in Robert Silverberg's 'Downward to the Earth'

It's slightly ironic perhaps that the book I was reading whilst writing my previous few posts was Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel which is explicitly engaged with issues of colonisation in it's depiction of the alien planet Belzagor and it's sentient alien species the Nildoror and the Sulidoror. Since any consideration of fiction written by British writers about India is in some sense going to be related to issues our history of colonialism in the country. Even Mark Tully's book, in it's autobiographical introduction, contrasts his own position with that of the British who served in the army of clerks which administered the Raj. It was published soon after he left employment with the BBC, so it's understandable that he might have wanted to have set out his reasons for staying in the country rather than returning to Britain, a situation analogous to those British subjects who chose to stay on in India after 1947.

I've read little of Robert Silverberg's work to date, but from reading Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree years ago, around the time when I still thought of myself as primariliy a reader of science fiction, I know that the best period of his fiction was between 1967 and 1976, when he transformed himself from a writer of competent adventure fiction into a much more 'literary' writer, often exploring themes of alienation. 'Sombre period Silverberg' as Aldiss and Windgrove dub it. Both Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Wikipedia essentially concur with such a view. It's clear from the dates that the beginning of this 'classic period' of Silverberg's fiction coincided with the heyday of science fiction's New Wave. Like Ursula LeGuin, I don't see Silverberg as part of the New Wave exactly, rather they existed more in parallel. In their work, we still have all the old genre stand-bys: spaceships, alien planets and races, lasers, robots, but depicted with a more literary quality of language than most earlier writers in the genre achieved.

In some ways, whilst this begins as a novel explicitly engaged with colonialism, it then becomes something else. It takes place in a world in which it is already implicitly assumed that colonialism is inherently wrong; the human colonists have already withdrawn from the alien world after they discovered that the alien elephants they had exploited were actually sentient. Yet references to Kipling and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the fact that it was a private company engaged in the exploitation of the planet's sentient alien species clearly allude to the way in which the history of imperialism is intimately bound up with that of capitalism, all suggests that the novel is engaged with metaphors for real world colonialism.

Yet there's something inherently problematic about using science fiction in such a way, and Silverberg is sensible enough to include a critique of this in an aside within the novel itself when a rather unpleasant human tourist suggests that there was a difference between the colonisation of Africans and that of aliens who mostly resemble elephants. The problem with using science fiction metaphors to engage with real world problems is that it's also a largely realist genre, where within the context of the narrative the alien planet is a real place. Certainly, any novel which is so indebted to the classic tropes of science fiction's previous era is going to have a similar problem. The alien jungle in which most of the narrative of Downward to the Earth takes place is depicted with a marvellous fecundity, replete with images of body horror and of overflowing alien life. As far as the narrative is concerned, it's a 'real' place. World-building is a large part of the appeal of any science-fiction.

The problem with attempting to map the exploitation of alien species onto real world colonisation is that the victims of human imperialism and colonialism didn't belong to another species, but were other humans. Obviously, there's an equally long history of racial and cultural 'othering' which continues to this day and has served to justify our histories of imperialism and colonialism. Many of the victims of colonialism are reduced to the status (literally as well as metaphorically) of animals, but that's also a historical process, one which is done to people who actually belong to the same species, differing only by the colour of skin, language or culture. Which is why such a process has to be carried out, to obscure the basic fact that we all belong to the same species and that there's rather more ways in which we resemble each other than those in which we differ. That is a little harder to sustain when your alien looks like an elephant.

Another related problem with this trope is that it can result in a form of wish fulfilment, most recently seen in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the alien species has access to some kind of transcendent mystical power which ultimately defeats the invading humans (which raises a further question of why this force only intervenes when things have got into a particularly poor state for the 'good' aliens; if it was there all along, then why didn't it intervene earlier?). Obviously you can fight your way out of an empire, history gives us plenty of examples of that, but reducing such a conflict to the status of an (all too literal) deus ex machina does tend to be rather insulting to the real world suffering of people engaged in such conflicts in both the past and the present (this is why I like Caitlin Kiernan's reading of Avatar: she elides any metaphorical weight of human colonisation and reads it as the purely misanthropic idealisation of the natural world taking its revenge on exploitative humanity; it's still a form of wish fulfilment, but one entirely in keeping with the logic of the invented world).

It's probably a little naive to assume that a private company would just pack up and desist from exploiting profitable resources simply because they've discovered that an alien species is sentient, as has apparently occurred before the beginning of Silverberg's novel, but then as I observed up above, the issues of colonialism are something of a feint, as the novel climaxes in something which, whilst wholly in keeping with the reality of the world in which the narrative occurs, is also purely metaphorical, speaking in a language of Biblical cadence to a yearning for transcendence and a meeting between opposites which is unexpectedly lovely and hopeful. And perhaps that does finally hold out something to the real world: a hope for a way in which we might begin to heal some the wounds left by our history.

The Heart of India, by Mark Tully

When I alighted on this wonderful book in the little bookshop which is only a few steps away from the flat in Bombay in which my wife grew up, she promptly informed me of just how respected and much beloved a figure Mark Tully is in India. I already knew about him though, because he's pretty well respected here too. I'm sure that I have a memory of my Mum giving my Dad a copy of Ram Chander's Story as part of a Christmas present, one of those old Penguin 60s (a concept which now seems faintly embarrassing, a bite size book for those who no longer have the time to read a full book; Mum gave me a few as presents too). Mark Tully was a writer worthy of respect because of his sympathetic insight into a foreign culture. A great journalist. And according to Wikipedia, he resigned his post with the BBC after an argument with John Birt. Truly, he must be one of the angels!

And you're not going to see much argument with such a view from me in this post. I thought these nine stories of rural life in eastern Uttar Pradesh were fantastic. As he makes clear in his introduction to the book, Tully's one work of fiction has its roots in the same journalistic practise as all his other work. They grew out of this journalistic (self-) assignment when he realised that he needed to change more than names in order to protect some of the people he interviewed during his research. In this case, his specific interest was a desire to examine the impact of the changes India has been undergoing over the past few decades on the country's rural villagers, his choice of material partly inspired by the experience of a friend of his, Madhukar Upadhaya, who celebrated the 125th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth by repeating one of his great symbolic protests against the British, the Dandi salt march. According to Tully, about the villages he passed through (the same villages as did his illustrious predecessor), his friend informed him that 'The old village ways are dying out and nothing is replacing them.' On that basis, you might assume that these stories would contain a lament for the past, perhaps even a subsumed Western liberal guilt that it is Westernisation which is bringing about such changes, but that would be to misread the point I think both Tully and Madhukar are making. The problem is not that the old ways are dying out, but rather that there is 'nothing' to replace them.

In setting out his various reasons for choosing to set his stories in the eastern half of Uttar Pradesh, Tully makes it clear that it is because too many changes have already taken place in the western half, and that 'Not enough...' change has taken place further to the East in Bihar. So he's not harking back to any imagined golden age in the past, because some change is undoubtedly for the better, although of course some of his characters do so. Which is surely a very ordinary reaction to coping with changes in the society within which one finds oneself, when those changes have a direct effect on the life you are trying to live. It's a nostalgia which occurs to characters who are either sympathetic or unsympathetic, whilst other characters never experience such a feeling. The past is never privileged as better. Tully responds to the material of his stories then, not as a moralist, but as a journalist. As a writer, one might say. He's interested in the experience of change in itself and how it's effecting people at all levels of Indian rural communities for both good and ill.

If Tully has any ideological point to make with his stories then, it's a purely literary one. His complaint in the introduction is that much of the best known Indian writing of recent decades has concentrated on the urban middle-class and ignored the plight of villagers. He mentions no names here, but I assume that the target of his complaint is the mass of Indian writing in English that has become so prominent since the success of Rushdie.

Which is interesting in itself, since Tully a writer who, for all that by this point must have spent the majority of his life in India, and was even born in Calcutta, apparently still regards himself as a British writer. It's clear from his writing that his intended audience is a British one who may be unfamiliar with some of the details of the culture about which he writes. So on the very first page of the opening story, we have an exchange such as this:

One young man, whose hair had been stained even blacker than usual, said, 'Now we've got to sing the faag of Krishna. After all, that's what Holi is about: Braj, the home of Lord Krishna.'

Another, wearing a cotton cap with 'Happy Holi' embroidered on it, laughed and said, 'Yes! Let's celebrate Krishna. He stole the clothes of the milkmaids while they were bathing at Vrindavan. Let's celebrate that.'

There's an attempt to mask the fact that this dialogue is just information for a foreign audience, that it's something no rural Indian would actually say on Holi, by the use of the words 'After all...,' indicating to his supposed audience that he's just telling them something they all know, but with the second speaker replying with just more information, it just feels clunky. There's a similar moment in a later story where an experienced, urban undergraduate discusses the concept of 'Eve teasing' with her roommate who is a sheltered, rural girl. Again, it's 'clunky'. It just doesn't quite feel right, breaking the air of vermisilitude the stories achieve so effectively in other respects, because occasional missteps such as this aside, these are otherwise excellent stories. I particularly liked the way a number of the stories would begin with one character who would then be forgotten as the story followed the consequences set in turn by their actions, almost like a daisy chain structure. It's a wonderful fictional take on the links connecting people within any complex society, giving a real sense of the size of India's society within quite a small space.

So it's interesting then that he identifies his literary rivals as a group of writers from his adopted country (many of whom actually seem to live abroad, writing about an India which is 'back home'). It's also absolutely right though, since apart from the known facts about the author's biography, these are Indian stories, about Indian characters and situations, with an Indian writer (Prenchand) as their author's acknowledged model. Part of Tully's fictional response to the welcome he feels he has received from the country is to write about India without any British presence in his narratives. It's a growing interest of mine: by this point I've got a growing shelf of unread Indian fiction and non fiction, by both Indian and non-Indian writers. And as I read more Anglo-Indian fiction, I may find other examples of English writers who achieve a similar feat, but I suspect that most are in some way or other concerned with writing about British people in India, even if India was home for them. It's understandable, and a perfectly valid subject of course, one which many Indian writers have also engaged with, but it's great to see a writer who identifies himself as British deciding to do something else.

In contrast then, whatever his intended audience might be, Mark Tully is interested not in the relationship between India and somewhere else, but in India as it is, the rural India he has researched and experienced. He's apparently proud of the fact that friends have told him that all of them have the feel of authenticity, that they all depict situations which could have happened, precisely as he depicts them. Personally, I think he should be equally proud of the fact that they also have the imagination of great fiction, going beyond reality in the way in which all good fiction does.

"India always changes people"

"Edward Said was right!"

Or so a friend responded when I joked on Facebook that visiting India had inspired a greater appreciation of Cricket, and a liking for tea, so clearly by visiting the country, I am becoming more English. Obviously, I'm defining 'English' here in terms of a rather dated cliche, but that's the joke. It's one we all recognise. We define our national identities and stereotypes in opposition to others, which strikes me as a fairly obvious observation, but perhaps it was new when Edward Said first made it (clearly, I really need to finally get around to reading Orientalism). My wife reminded me of my joke when we were discussing the line 'India always changes people', and Prawer Jhabvala's presentation of India in her 'Passage to India'-type narrative. In a few trivial ways, India clearly has changed me! And of course, marriage has changed me too.

I think the line jumped out at me, even when it appears on only the second page, because it seems so at odds with what is the largely disillusioned, 'matter of fact' tone of voice in which the novel is narrated. It's that tone of disillusionment which makes me find the novel's depiction of India so potentially iniquitous. And besides her pregnancy, something which after all can just as easily take place anywhere else, it's hard to see how the narrator's experiences in India have changed her. Possibly it's a fault of the retrospective tone in which her experiences are inevitably cast by the first person narration, but there's no sense that she is looking back on an earlier self from a now changed vantage point. She seems just as spoilt and self enclosed a person at either end of the book.

But the 'India always changes people' line did resonate with what I think is now a somewhat dated Western ideal of India. The idea that it's all 'like, really, really spiritual, yeah?'. The ideal which drove young people in the 60s and 70s to follow the hippy trail, an ideal which was still current when I was growing up (my wife tells me that the ridiculous 90s Britpop band Kula Shaker were really popular in India, which just makes me cringe). I'm being unfair here perhaps, since it could be a genuine attempt to come to terms with another culture or spiritual tradition, but there is obviously a side to this which is just incredibly patronising. Westerners vacationing in a foreign culture which supposedly has access to something more 'spiritual' than we have here.

But there's also that other side which probably goes right back to the 19th century if not further, which is bound up with the ways in which many British discovered that they loved the people and places they found (it was William Dalrymple's White Mughals which first made me aware that the relationships between the British and the subject people they eventually colonised were a lot more complicated that a simple view of the British rise at it's imperial height would lead one to suspect). It's an ideal which relies on the very size of the country, against which the individual self becomes swallowed up. It's partly the very size of the country and the presence of so many people which defeats Rumer Godden's community of nuns. Yet it doesn't have to be threatening. For the hero of Ruskin Bond's A Room on the Roof, it's exactly that sense of size which is so appealing. The vastness of the land and its culture into which he is escaping allows him a partial freedom from his prior identity and role in the oppressive British community.

I would think it's an ideal which still has some currency, although these days it's one which has at the very least been partially replaced, by the ideal of the country as an economic powerhouse, one of those 'Asian' economies from which the Tory right think in this country now seem to think we can learn from so much (even as they simultaneously overlook the fact that all of these Asian economies also have much more powerful states than we do in Britain). It's just as reductive stereotype of course, as any image of a nation inevitably is, but it's interesting that it's one which equally relies on a sense of size, whether that's the number of people, of resources, of economic growth. It's always larger than our small island.

Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

I've still only read two novels by R.K. Narayan. My first encounter with him is described here, and whilest I certainly enjoyed it and liked many things about it, I don't think I was quite as taken with it as I thought I might be when I sat down to read the opening pages. My second encounter, The Man-eater of Malgudi, was read in India, at my in-laws' flat in Bombay, last Easter. I don't really imagine that it was the experience of reading him in India that made the difference. After all, the suburbs of modern bombay are a world away from the sleepy small town in Southern India where most of Narayan's fiction takes place. And it's basically the same plot, with a 'weaker', gentler character been taken advantage of by a more aggresive character before the status quo is restored. Of course, I don't mean to underplay the subtlety and depth of both books.

Something that struck me in the appreciate introduction from Pico Iyer (wonderfully, and cheekily titled 'Midnight's Uncle'), and which will explain why I've started this post by refering to a different writer from the post's title, was his joky aside that Narayan was writing 'Long before the Booker prize seemed to be an Indian colony...', an assumption about the Booker which I'm sure I've seen elsewhere. Only, if you look at the actual list of Booker prize winners, after the epocal victory of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, we had to wait over 15 years until 1997 for the next Indian winner, since when, we've had two more. It's certainly an impressive number if compared to the literatures from the rest of the Commonwealth, and in fairness to Iyer, he appears to have written his piece in 2009, when there had been two Indian winners in three years, but four winners out of 30 years still sounds a little like hypobole.

Interestingly, if we look at the list of winners before Rushdie, from 1969 to 1980, there are three winners which are works by 'British' authors set in India, and concerned with the legacy and the realities of British colonialism in India. No wonder the prize aquired something of a reputation for indulging in post-colonial guilt and self-flagellation.

Heat and Dust. It's a marvelously evocative title, isn't it? The coupling of those two elements conjours up a hazy image of India's past under the British Raj, an image which is assisted by my edition through the choice of period photograph for it's cover illustration. Of course, this is an historical fiction which has now itself been historicised, the mid-70s vantage point from which it is told now as much a part of history as the 1920s it looks back upon. In it's confrontation of the clash between India and Britain in the context of the Empire and it's aftermath, it's twin narratives clearly intended as a microcosm of wider relationships, it's perhaps a little unfair to say that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gets around the difficulty of avoiding privilaging one culture over another by making nearly all of her characters equally unlikeable. So, most of the Indians appear to be fraudulant and coniving, the English characters either arrogant or gullible.

Yes, it's a little unfair, but not entirely inaccurate. In a nice note, our unnamed narrator, visiting India to trace the history of her step-grandmother who absconded with an Indian Nawab back in the 1920s, acknowledges that there wasn't actually anything particularly special about Olivia. Superficially, she might appear more sympathetic than the other British inhabitiants of 1920s Satipur, able to see through the lies the British characters use to justify their pressence in the country, but ultimately she is little more than a rather spoilt, bored young woman. Only I'm not sure that our nameless narrator is really much more appealing. Mirroring her grandmother's story, she also falls pregnant, following an affair with Inder Lal, an Indian clerk whose house she rents a room from, and who struggles with his mother's choice of a wife who is somewhat less deucated than him. Despite his betrayal of his wife in their affair, he actually remains one of the more appealing characters in the book. At least he has some life to him, with his worries about his work and his marriage, in contrast to the books rootless cosmopolitan narator, who lacks not only a name but also any visible means of economic support, and who views everyone she meets with the same kind of mildly patronising superiority. It's also not entirely clear why it's so important for her to be in India, since it appears that she learns all of her Olivia's story from her grandmother's letters and ends by acknowledging that there's no way she can learn of what happened to Olivia after she left her husband for the Nawab's court and family.

As evocative as it is, is the title entirely fair? Googling for information about Amit Chaudhuri a while back, I came across an interview in which he complains about this very title as representative of a totalising, even patronising view of India in historical fiction about the Raj, whereby this huge country, containing a vast range of different landscapes and cultures within it's borders, is reduced to a few comfortable cliches. He has a point. India in this novel is a land of widow burning and fraudulant gurus. Satipur may be a real place, but the choice to set the narrative their (literally, the town's name is 'place of Sati', the custom of widow burning which wasn't very widespread until the british decided they needed to suppress such a barbaric custom). It only seems to emphasise Prawer Jhabvala's attempts to produce a story which is emblamatic of both India as a whole and of the colonial relationship between Indians and the British.

In which case, I can't help feeling the story is perhaps to slight, too glib, to support such a metaphorical weight. True, she has no time for cliches. There's nothing romantic or enobling about the cross-cultural relationship. For the Nawab, it's just the actions of a bored, spoilt young man who is used to always getting what he wants. A point which is underlined by the pressence of another Westerner, the homosexual Harry, who is unable to adjust to the climate, also present at the Nawab's court. He's also a prolifigate bankrupt, whose small kingdom is ultimately taken under British control. The young man following the hippy trail in the 1970s whom the narrator also becomes involved with in India ends up hating the country and everything he feels it represents. Beneath the elegantly written surface, there's something really quite savage here, close to misanthropy even. Which is bracing, and does perhaps capture something of the Raj and its legacy quite effectively.

I certainly don't regret reading it, even if the writing does contain such inanities as 'India always changes people', a cliche about India which I think has been held by many British over the years (see Black Narcissus for another example), one which was at the heart of the hippy dream about India in the 60s and 70s and which is skewered mercilessly along with everything else. It's difficult to know how to take this, since it occurs within the main text. Does Prawer Jhabvala intend her readers to find her nameless narrator contemptible? I don't think all readers would find her so unsympathetic as I do, and there's little to indicate this narrator should be taken as unreliable. It's not that kind of book. But not only does she lack a name, we actually learn very little about her. She tells us about the people she meets and places she visits, but little about herself beyond the bare fact of her family relationships. Consequently, she comes to feel as though she's a partial stand in for her creator, her opinions on India derived from her, an author who can presumably tell us about the country with authority, married to an Indian and living in Delhi for so many years. Like I say, ultimately, I found I wasn't entirely convinced. It's picture of the country feels a little too pat in it's unrelenting negativity, as bad in some ways as the colonial mindset Prawer Jhabvala is trying to critique. It's not that she describes anything which couldn't, or hasn't occured, just that it seems to leave a little too much out.

Unpacking my Library...

...yes, I am!

A few more thoughts on adventure stories...

Thinking about Leigh Brackett's heroes, I might say that however disillusioned they often find themselves at the end of their adventures, their heroism resides in their capacity to remake the world in which they find themselves for the better. Or perhaps that's putting it too strong. Saving a world doesn't automatically improve it, which is why many adventure stories can be read as in some ways fundamentally reactionary. Sometimes Brackett depicts failure, and whatever her heroes' success, their achievements are always within worlds which are subject to history. It's explicitly stated in at least one story that the romantic world of Mars in which their adventures take place is slowly dying. Over a period of centuries, even millenia, this landscape will disapear. Innocence is already lost.

But think about this more generally. All the various permutations of adventure stories that I've read by this point. Success or failure, it's always an isolated individual who is at the centre of the narrative. Part of the promise of an adventure story is that individuals can save their worlds, even improve them, making their worlds more just. Thinking about heroism in the real world, it's easier to see how seductive such a vision is. Not to take anything away from the heroism that exists, but most heroism occurs within social structures. The heroism of soldiers or firemen  for example, is intensely social. Their professions place them in situations where heroism is possible, which is obviously less open to those of us who spend most of our days in an office. Which is not to say that heroism isn't found in other places. For some of us, ordinary life can require quite astonishing acts of bravery, and that's not to be slighted. Still, the kind of heroism that's celebrated in adventure narratives is rarely performed by romantic individuals here in the real world, where it is more likely to be the work of capable professionals who are trained to perform such acts.

If our sensibility is essentially romantic however, then living in a modern world which is currently largely run for the convenience of an essentially sociopathic elite, and in which heroic action can feel severely limited, the appeal becomes obvious. Think about the words which are used to justify the way the world is at present. So often we seem to be told we must be 'realistic', of the need for 'efficiency'. It's also a concious disavowel of romanticism and fantasy. At several points in reading Leigh Brackett's stories, I was reminded of the work of Graham Greene. Greene's characters are found in a world which is closer to the real (which is no doubt why some would argue his work is more mature), but I don't see how his dissillusioned characters are any less romantic. It's just that they exist in a world in which the kind of heroism available to those in a story by Leigh Brackett is no longer possible. That's what happens to heroic action in a world which is realistic.

In all likeliehood, individual heroism of the kind celebrated by adventure fiction has always been a romantic fiction, which might explain why the best of these kind of stories seem to belong to the past, either through their setting, or because that's when they were written. By their very nature perhaps, many adventure stories are looking backwards to a remembered past. As I noted in my previous post about adventure stories, adventure stories promise is a vision of freedom, a freedom from modernity. Which is not to say that the form is automatically reactionary. My admittedly limited awareness is that these days we don't seem to be able to do adventure stories, at least in the more high profile examples of the form where they're hedged about with irony in one way or another. A proper adventure can contain irony, but it still needs to be told straight.

Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.