Lorna Sage, again

Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (ed. Sharon Sage & Vic Sage)

Can a collection of book reviews ever be moving? Obviously, I don't mean to doubt that an individual piece can't be moving in it's own particular way, but can the book as a whole? In any case, corralling a series of ephemeral reviews into a coherent book is already a somewhat quixotic task to start with, made doubly so if, as in this case, it's posthumous. Since it's the person of the author which is the only thing which conveys any kind of coherence on the book in the first place. It's for this very reason, I imagine, that so many such collections subdivide their reviews into sections organised by theme. We have six sections here, but since they included the dates of original publication I decided to read the book against itself, starting in the early 70s and finishing with the final few posthumously published reviews. Whichever way you read it, there's a sense of anticlimax involved. It's just another review, the author cut off in mid flow.

The only collection of this sort which I can remember working as a coherent book is Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, which works by placing his initial reactions to the fatwa in the final section. In this way it creates a sense of narrative, the fatwa marking an end to a particular period in both Rushdie's life and the wider culture of which he was a part. Which, in retrospect, it clearly did.

There's a few book reviews, a few encounters with the canon, but most of Lorna Sage's reviews were of academic works, or else, particularly later in her life, obituaries. Her attention, consequently, is often focused on ideas and theory. Reading it in chronological order, you do get a sense of the change and shifts in academic fashions, particularly in regards to feminist theory. If I find the book moving, it's probably because of this partly hidden narrative that I found within the text. Because it does chart a movement away from the certainties of the world of post-war England that Lorna Sage memorialised so eloquently in Bad Blood. A considerable amount of her work was on Angela Carter's writing. Like her, Lorna Sage died too young (57 to Carter's 52), and their reviews share a sense of humour. Humour used strategically, to make an important point.

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So it's also a narrative that I'm imposing on the text from without. Post-war England, I'm coming to realise, really is my personal land of lost content. The arcadia I only just missed out on through the misfortune to have been born just a little too late. Of course I might know intellectually that it was far from a perfect moment in our history, as no era is ever perfect, and in any case it contained within it the seeds for it's own dissolution. This is a wholly emotional pull, although the recent documentary The Spirit of '45 (which I've not actually seen) perhaps shows that I'm not alone in feeling this.