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.

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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.

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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.

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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