The Tower of London Remembers

We're currently drowning in cultural representations of the First World War.

Actually, no, a complaint probably isn't the best way to frame this.

(And I certainly wouldn't wish to align myself with the Michael Goves of this world!)

But it's the image which my mind immediately jumps for when I think about it. With the anniversary of the start of hostilities this year, it was inevitable that many people would wish to commemorate it in some way. And I don't wish to suggest that such work isn't worthwhile.

Quite apart from anything else, a friend has got his first television role as an actor in a BBC production which will be showing later this year.

Still, thinking specifically about the BBC project of which that drama is a part, a season of programming which is running over the next four years, the largest project the BBC has ever engaged in: there's something a little bit off about it isn't there? The huge resources, the attention paid to all aspects of the conflict (or the attempt to do so at any rate). Something about it puts me off.

It's partly to do with the way in which the First World War has been remembered. It's the suffering of the ordinary soldier in the trenches which has been made the central image of how the conflict has been memorialised. Too much attention on this central fact feels like it runs the risk of becoming prurient, of taking that experience for granted. There's a crucial aspect of respect which is found in any worthwhile representation of the First World War.

And the War is a major part of the culture of the last century anyway, as both subject and backdrop, that the extra, excessive attention being given to it now almost seems unnecessary. Poetry of the First World War was some of the first, grown up, poetry I ever encountered, at primary school. The conflict is now, incontrovertibly history - no one who fought in the trenches is still alive - and yet still it seems like a central event in the culture of the century which followed. It's why it still feels why the fight over how the conflict should be remembered still feels important. In comparison, the way in which the Second World War is memorialised feels as if it is far more settled. Not that there aren't arguments to be had over it, but they seem less central to it's representations. Where the first War has been defined and memorialised in terms of the suffering of ordinary soldiers in the trenches, the second has been defined as the defeat of an enemy, Nazi Germany, a victory of which few would challenge the justice. It's easier to see Second World War as a good or just war (however you wish to define, or question, such a term) than it is the First. Britain did eventually win the First World War, but the victorious battles haven't lasted in our cultural consciousness alongside the battles of which nobody 'won', achieving little more than a senseless loss of life.

I might well be wrong here of course, but assuming we can even imagine what the television culture of 2039 is going to look like, do we really imagine that the BBC will lavish such attention on the  anniversary of the conflict we'll be remembering then? It will surely be remembered differently.

So something about it bothers me, even if I can't quite put my finger on what it is here. And even though I appreciate much of the work which is concerned with representing the War. So when my wife told me that she wanted to see the Tower of London ceramic poppy field when we were down in London a few weeks ago, my initial reaction  was rather dismissive. It felt gimmicky, precisely the kind of memorialising I would prefer to avoid.

Anyway, I was wrong. It's utterly magnificent. It shouldn't work, yet somehow, faced with the reality, these massed ranks of delicate, beautiful works of art, it achieves something extraordinary. The meaning is obvious: the tension between the delicacy of the ceramic poppies - so much more delicate than a real flower - and the heavy destructiveness of the machinery that destroyed the bodies of so many millions. That it's obvious does nothing to diminish it's power.

Photographs can't really do it justice. It has to be seen.

All the books that stayed with me...

It's the meme (although I hate that term) which has been going around on Facebook:

"List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way, not to over-think the process, not to worry over whether they are the 'right' books... just books that had an effect on you, for better or worse."

Any arbitrary limit will inevitably force you to leave out choices you would have included on a different day if your mind had landed on them first. I tried to approach it as a list of the books which I feel had the largest role in forming who I now am, the books which, for better or worse have had the biggest influence on my taste and the values/things which are most important to me.

Anyway, this is my blog, so I can include as many choice as I want.

C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia

Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blood Feud

Michael Moorcock, the Elric of Melnibone series
Michael Moorcock, Casablanca

Jeff Noon, Vurt
Michael Moorcock, The Cornelius Quartet
William Blake, 'London'
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying'

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems
Alan Garner, The Stone Book Quartet

Alan Garner, Strandloper

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Richard Calder, Dead trilogy

Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

Elizabeth Young, Pandora's Handbag
Alan Bennett, Writing Home

A.S. Byatt, Possession

George Orwell, Essays

Geoff Dyer, Anglo-English Attitudes

John Berger, To the Wedding

R.K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi

William Dalrymple, City of Djinns

A total of 23 authors. Several appear more than once because their work is that important. Also, they're mostly men, which is a little annoying. Some other observations: it's mostly work from the last century. More significant: The Tempest aside, there's no poetry. Something about my imagination seems to respond more to prose for some reason.

What I do like is the sense of a hidden autobiography below the surface of the list. Of course, it leaves out as much as it includes.

Edited on 1st October, 2014

Oh, for goodness' sake, this is getting ridiculous! No wonder the original challenge specified that you shouldn't spend too long thinking about it. Otherwise you could drive yourself to distraction, attempting to list everything. Before I know it, I'll have listed half the contents of my library.

The whole point of such an exercise is that it's governed by whim. You can't include everything, no matter how many choices you allow yourself. Anyway, now there's another woman on the list and a little bit of poetry. Choices that should have come to mind the other day when I put this up. There will be others, but they will not be posted here, or the exercise will become completely ridiculous.

And honestly, outside the realms of Facebook, why should anyone else care?

George Mackay Brown, Vinland

Earlier this year my life was rather dominated by the Vikings. Hah!

My wife is an early medievalist, a specialist on the Viking diaspora. Consequently, at the end of April, I was driving her and a colleague around parts of North Yorkshire as part of a research trip. They needed a second driver and none of the rest of the team could drive. We made what I can only describe as a fantastic discovery, as we still need to keep it a bit secret, and as a result the team very kindly invited me to the end of project conference at which the find was unveiled to an academic audience. As a result of being around half a dozen experts on the subject, I got something of a crash course on Viking culture, immigration and assimilation. Obviously I've also picked up plenty here and there from my wife over the last 4 years or so, but this was much more concentrated. And being out in the places where they arrived and settled, listening to the bunch of them discussing the material, you could almost see the past coming to life before you.

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Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown appears to have drawn on the history of the islands for much of his work. Here, in a novel written towards the end of his life, he tells the story of the life of a fictional Orcadian man, Ranald Sigmundson, set in the 11th century. The writing owes much to the example of Norse sagas. There's a swiftness to the telling, and little concern for the interiority of any of the characters. We learn about their thoughts and feelings almost exclusively through what they choose to divulge. The stripped down language took a little getting used to at first - it's not simple by any means - but the result is a pure, elemental language entirely in tune with the harsh lives of its characters and their world, balanced between the 'pagan' Viking past and their Christianising present.

The title comes from the voyage which occurs in the earliest section in which Ranald, having abandoned his rather abusive father midway through his first voyage - and just before his father and his crew are drowned in a violent storm - joins another crew led by the famous Leif Ericson, the first European to reach what is now North America. The stay only a short while after, repelled by the native people of the land. After their return to Europe, Ranald joins another crew lead by one Hakon Treeman, and his travels eventually take him to the Norwegian court before he returns to Orkney to settle down. Thereafter the story focuses on his attempts to raise a family and increase the prosperity of his farm, whilst being occasionally drawn into the political machinations of the sons of Sigurd Hlodvirsson, Earl of Orkney. After one such encounter Ranald becomes thoroughly disillusioned with politics, drawing more and more into himself, until he eventually isolates himself in a remote cottage on his property, obsessing over religion and an escape from the difficulties of the world around him. The novel encompasses a single life, with all it's hardships and disappointments.

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Two things stood out for me in particular, especially given the nature of our conversations the other month. Firstly, 'Viking' is clearly not presented as an ethnic or cultural identity, in line with the stereotypical view of the Vikings our culture still appear to possess. It's a role that Scandinavians may choose to take on, and by the time of the story, 'Viking' raids are a practice which has largely been outlawed. It's equivalent to being a pirate. At one point, after Hakon Treeman is murdered, the remaining crew members debate among themselves whether they should become Viking, and eventually decide not to because of the risks which the role involves. It feels in line with the findings of the 'revisionists'.

Secondly, I was really struck by the way in which the world is connected up. Certainly, it's hardly as connected as our world now, is but people seem to think nothing about getting on a boat and travelling sometimes vast distances. As the story develops it becomes more and more confined to the family farm on Orkney, but it never feels isolated from the outside world. There are strong and functioning cultural, trading and political links between the islands and Norway, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland. The Viking world is, as my wife would put it, a functioning diaspora.

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Digging around online, I found several reviewers suggesting that the encounter with the native American tribe is unrealistic, and that the novel treats them in rather 'new age' fashion as noble savages, living in harmony with nature. I'm not sure that I agree. Leif and Ranald both conceive of the native Americans as such terms, but that is clearly presented as their belief. The tribes people we see in 20 pages or so of the novel in which they appear are completely unknown to the Scandinavian voyagers. There is the beginning of communication between the two groups before the possibility of harmony is destroyed by the actions of the Scandinavian man, Wolf, who loses his nerve and kills one of the tribesmen. Thereafter the native Americans are just as violent as their Scandinavian opponents in their attempts to repulse the people who have revealed themselves to be aggressors. The tragedy of this sequence, and what seems to stay with Ranald throughout his life, is the loss of the chance of understanding these people who were so very different from the Scandinavian and Christian culture Ranald has grown up within.

It links with his disdain for the political leaders whose actions seem to do little more than sow division. In contrast, Ranald is a decent man who does all he can to help the community of small cottagers who are his dependants. His success and prosperity as a farmer never encompasses a compassion for those for whom he is responsible. It may be a mistake to criticise the depiction of the native Americans as idealised, when from our own point of view the life of the Orcadian farmers is similarly pre-lapsarian. Based on small communities of farmers, their lives are just as 'close to nature'.

By the end of his life, for Ranald, Vinland is no longer the place he visited, but has become a metaphor, a land which is more akin to heaven. He dies dreaming of a ship. A ship of death, as D.H. Lawrence similarly puts it in one his final poems.