Red Earth and Pouring Rain

'Brave child,' Hanuman said. 'Fearless.' When I told Saira that he had said this, she had a question for him.

'Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.'

'Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.'

'When are we happy?'

'When we desire nothing and realise that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.'

'What is regret?'

'To realise that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.'

'What is sorrow?'

'To long for the past.'

'What is the highest pleasure?'

'To hear a good story.' 

Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (6)

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Although Neil Gaiman has published a number of books written specifically for children, this is obviously not one of them. Yet one of the things which really fascinated me about this novel is it's connection to children's fiction. It's not only written from the point of view of a child, it also feels like it's structured like a children's story. In the interview included at the back of the book, Gaiman notes himself that while previously he's always had a instinctive awareness of what kind of audience he's writing a particular book for - whether for children or adults - in this case he initially found himself unsure and had to consider which audience he was writing for.

Perhaps I'm over-reaching here. The narrative viewpoint is actually a little more complicated, since it's presented as the memories of a nameless, adult narrator, who comes across the farm in rural Sussex which he used to live near to as a boy in the aftermath of his father's funeral. And plenty of adult books have been written from the point of view of a child - just think of Dickens. Still, Gaiman manages to capture the perspective of the little boy so successfully, and the fantastic events he encounters do feel like could they easily slot alongside such classic English fantasies as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series.

One thing which many children's fantasies have is a villain who is clearly an adult, and who in some ways represents the threat to children which can be represented by the adult world. The character which the novel's magical villain Ursula Monkton most reminds me of is the Other Mother in Coraline, a novel which was written and published for children. There's also something to her of J.K. Rowling's Delores Umbridge from the fifth Harry Potter book. The threat which all three of these characters represent is surely very similar. They're all in the position of authority figures - teacher, mother, nanny - but they're also clearly 'wrong'. They represent a perversion of the authority which a child instinctively ought to be able to trust. This is made most clear at the point when Ursula is pursuing the narrator across a rainswept field at night and is described as representing, 'the adult world with all its power and all it's secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.'

That's a brilliant description, and it also gets at why this isn't really a book for children. It's all in the telling of the tale. As Gaiman himself notes, this is a book which is partly about the 'powerlessness of being a child'. I don't imagine that's something very many children need to be reminded of, but I can imagine it's something a lot of adults all to often forget very easily.

*

The other thing I noticed, and perhaps this is only because the next book I've chosen to read is the English edition of The October Country, is just how clear a debt Gaiman owes to Ray Bradbury's work. He's talked in more than one place about its influence on him, so I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise to me. The thing is, although I was familiar with his name from early adolescence, I only discovered Bradbury's work for myself as an adult when I finally sat down with a copy of The Martian Chronicles and realised what I'd been missing. So it's only now that I can see how not only Gaiman, but many of the  science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I loved as an adolescent and since were all clearly influenced by him. Even J.G. Ballard, a writer who you would think was almost a polar opposite in terms of the interest and focus of his work, owed something to Bradbury's work in his early stories.

There's also the magical Hempstock family, who certainly have something in common with Bradbury's Elliot family, even if it's not a direct influence (there's also the influence of Pratchett's witches, and probably umpteen other things I'm missing), here transplanted to the rural Sussex of Neil Gaiman's childhood. Something of the rhythm of the half sentence I've quoted above also seems to show the influence of Bradbury's linguistic tumbling. I imagine that it's an influence which has been subsumed very early on, so that it's probably something which even Gaiman himself doesn't always recognise. After all, it's also a very Gaiman sentence!

Mahanagar, and some of Satyajit Ray's English critics

Seeing Mahanagar for the first time

So, last weekend, I placed my ongoing education in Hindi cinema to one side and we watched another film by Satyajit Ray: Mahanagar, otherwise known in English as 'The Big City'. Actually, that's probably the one real weakness of a film which is otherwise a masterpiece. Madhabi Mukherjee gives a luminous performance as the housewife who goes out to work as a salesgirl in defiance of her conservative in-laws in the Calcutta of the early 60s. It was Ray's first film to be set entirely in the contemporary city in which he was born and grew up, and whilst there is some attempt to film the streets of the city, including a masterful final shot in which husband and wife disappear into the crowded street - a quintessential image of modernity, balanced between anxiety and hopefulness - it's mostly a film defined by its interiors, where presumably it was much easier to film.

Everything I know about Ray's career suggests that he was always, or mostly always, working with relatively limited financial means, which might have hindered his ability to film more exteriors. Or perhaps it was down to the simple inconvenience of filming amid the bustling city (which could be the result of either technological or financial considerations). The film only really suffers in this respect in that we don't get much of a sense of what Arati is like as a salesgirl. We're certainly told that after only a few months she's excellent at her job, but we never actually see any evidence of that after a couple of scenes on her first day. No matter, the film is still a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

In fact, the more films I see by Satyajit Ray - and I admit, I've still only seen a handful - the more I find to like about his work. For me, he was clearly a master, one of those filmmakers whose work you don't just admire, but also find you love, even feel some sort of personal connection to - not that I imagine I can really articulate just what that is exactly, especially in this case! I'm not simply bowing to critical consensus which acclaims him as a master of world cinema - Ray's work means something to me which is more than just the intrinsic quality of the films of a great filmmaker.

Becoming more familiar with Ray's work

Now, given that his work emerged from a cultural context which is far removed from my own, I'm sure that there are nuances which I'm missing out on. But since I've seen the wonderful Indian film critic Jai Arjun Singh make much the same argument on the basis that he's not Bengali, what hope do I have? One advantage I have though is that although her family background is Punjabi, my wife was born in Calcutta, and speaks Bengali. So, as she also does with the Hindi films we watch, she can correct the subtitles when they aren't quite accurate, and explicate details of the context I would otherwise either miss or even completely misinterpret. A point I'll come back to below.

As I slowly start to see more of his films - I've also read a collection of his stories - there's something else I'm also starting to realise: that, for all his success with Western film critics and cineastes, his work has often been misunderstood or, worse even, patronised. From the very beginning of his career as a filmmaker, his work appears to have suffered from these sorts of preconceptions. In a really good piece about Ray for the African magazine Cityscapes, Arjun Singh points out:

In a perceptive 1962 essay about a later Ray film Devi (The Goddess), the American critic Pauline Kael noted that some early Western reviewers had mistakenly believed Ray was a “primitive” artist and that Apu’s progress over the three films in some way represented the director’s own journey from rural to city life. Indeed, the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of Apur Sansar that while Ray handled village life well enough, he was “not up to” telling the story of a young writer in a city, which is “a more complex theme” – the implication being that rural stories were somehow truer both to Ray’s own life experience and to the Indian condition in general.

('Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray')

Ironically, this actually resonates with the famous criticism - quoted in a review by Salman Rushdie, included in his Imaginary Homelands collection - from the actress Nargis Dutt, after she became an MP, that films like Pather Panchali appealed to Western critics and viewers because it represented India as characterised chiefly by it's rural poverty: 'That is the image that they have of our country and a film that confirms that image seems to them authentic. ...What I want is that if Mr. Ray presents Indian poverty abroad he should also show "Modern India".'

Now, obviously, no filmmaker should be free from criticism, but this strikes me as a rather ludicrous judgement. Perhaps it's an easy judgement to mock, since do we really think that the judgements of politicians on art can really be trusted? Even if, in this instance, they were previously a famous actress? In fairness, The Apu Trilogy with which he established his reputation, is probably still his best known work. But in the 25 years between Ray's first film and early 1980, when the interview from which the Nargis quotations are taken took place, plenty of Ray's films were set in and concerned with modern India: Mahanagar is only one example. At the beginning of 1980, his recent films at that point included the magisterial Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) which, while it was hardly modern - set in 1856 - does feature aristocrats for all of it's significant Indian characters. Later the same year he released Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds), his second children's fantasy about the lovable duo Goopy and Bagha. More than any other major filmmaker with whose work I'm familiar, the subject matter of Ray's films seems to have been enormously varied in both time and social scale. Admittedly, the Goopy and Bagha films don't appear to have traveled much outside of India, perhaps because they didn't easily fit into Western critics' views of Ray as the great humanist neorealist. If so, then more fool the critics of yesteryear.

More engaged, but arguably more problematic, is the judgment of David Thomson found in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. I remember when I showed my wife his piece on Ray from the fourth edition of the book, she was rather cross at how much she felt he appeared to misunderstand Ray. Having seen a little more of his work now, I'm beginning to see why.

A close-reading of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film entry

I can't have seen more than Shatranj Ke Khiladi, and perhaps Pather Panchali, when I first read Thompson's entry. Even at the time, I remember being rather put out by it, if only because I already knew that Ray was 'one of the greats of world cinema'. I was also then still inclined to take the judgments of the critical consensus for what constitutes the 'canon' of great works rather more for granted than I would now. This goes both ways: I was reading bits of David Thomson's book when I found it in a bookshop because I knew this was supposed to be a great book on film. I got the fourth edition for a Christmas present shortly after it was published, and probably did use it as something of guide for what I needed to watch (and I've still probably only seen perhaps a fraction of all the films I wanted to see back then), and what films I should admire.

And Thomson is a good guide to American cinema especially - both classic and more recent - as well as French cinema, and the post-war flowering of European art and Japanese cinema. Now of course, I can admire Thomson's work without necessarily agreeing with all of his critical judgements. To be fair, in "Have You Seen?", his more recent book of a thousand films you really should see, Thomson is rather more generous to Ray in his descriptions of the films he includes. In his piece on Charulata, he suggests that, 'The Western viewer may be inclined to think of Chekhov (or Renoir), but I'm sure that we need a better knowledge of Tagore to see where it all comes from.' I'm bothered by that 'we', if only because I do have some knowledge of Tagore's work. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907 for goodness' sake! His work is surely not that obscure, with enough available in English translation if you want to familiarise yourself with him.

But still, I think that's broadly a fair judgement. Ray appears to have based the majority of his films on prior literary works, and Tagore was a writer whose work he returned to throughout his career. So a familiarity with Tagore's writing is certainly going to help, but more broadly, his suggestion underlines the simple difference of cultural context. There, at least, Thomson is open to the problem. He's acknowledging the distance between himself and the culture in which Ray lived and made his films. In his earlier piece, partly perhaps as a result of attempting to summarise the work of a whole career in just over half a dozen paragraphs, he makes much more sweeping judgements.

He begins with a comparison with Truffaut, since both are 'thought of as disciples of Renoir, and directors with unusual tenderness for their own characters', and yet Truffaut apparently walked out of Pather Panchali, 'wearied of so much precise care'. It's this phrase 'precise care' which gets to the heart of Thomson's issues with Ray's work. As a critic, for all that he is probably one of the best that there is on the inherent limitations of film compared with the depth of insight and technique available to literature, Thomson is still opposed to any film with a form which suggests that films are 'versions of theatre or literature'. He's impatient with moralising and earnest middlebrow films, and suspicious of directors - especially 'arthouse' filmmakers - who appear to demonstrate too much of what we might term 'good taste'.

Thomson certainly doesn't dismiss cinematic beauty, but he has a clear dislike of directors who display too much precise control of the cinematic image. As he argues specifically about Ray, 

... the warmth of his literary conception is as undeniable as a remorselessly tasteful sense of composition. The camera is all too easily the tool of pictorialism and Ray had inbred reluctance to broach that persistent calm. ...His own interest in music and painting adds to the feeling that sheer good taste is eliminating flavour.

Now, one doesn't have to agree with Thomson's argument about Ray's handling of the cinematic image. But it's still a perfectly reasonable criticism for him to make. He makes broadly the same argument about such different filmmakers as Tarkovsky ('The perfection has something monstrous about it... For this viewer, there is something tyrannical about it that spurs irreverent thoughts of resistance.'), James Ivory ('...decent, diffident, tasteful... The loveliness of Merchant-Ivory gives me the creeps'), and Krzystof Kieslowski ('Those films seem to think they're perfect, and I want to scream.') All of whom have directed films I personally have loved; perhaps my taste in films is rather more middlebrow than I would like to admit!

Still, however much one might wish to disagree with Thomson here - or perhaps you think he's right in his judgement - it's a critique which is attentive to the films themselves, rather than a misrepresentation of Ray or the context in which his films were made. And not just a misrepresentation of Ray, but also Truffaut. Thomson's description of the French director's walk out of Pather Panchali appears to be rather disingenuous when compared with the description of the same incident provided by Gilbert Adair in his book Flickers: Truffaut actually walked out because he, '...[didn't] want to see a film about Indian peasants'. He was bored not with the form, but with the subject of the Ray's film. I can even almost sympathise with him there, since I rather imagine that peasant life is often rather boring; that's surely part of the reason why middle and upper class intellectuals (from Tolstoy to John Berger) have wanted to idealise it. Obviously though, I don't agree with the rather racist manner in which he appears to have expressed the sentiment, suggesting that it's specifically Indian peasant life which is unworthy of his (Western) consideration.

But that is the central issue I think I'm circling around in this post: the gap between the Western viewer - whether that's an eminent critic, or an ordinary viewer, or just me - and the Indian filmmaker, in this case, Ray. Of course, any work, whether literature, or film, or any art really, is going to contain elements which are particular to the culture from which it originates - an element of difference which is only going to become more apparent the more removed it is from the viewer's own context. I'm really only stating a truism here. That's surely part of the attraction of such work, but it also then becomes incumbent on you as a viewer to work a little harder to comprehend the unfamiliar context. Of course, one can avoid this by appealing to the universal elements of a work, which is how I understand most of the earliest Western admirers of Ray's films wanted to interpret them. As Robin Wood apparently put it, 'Ray's films usually deal with human fundamentals that undercut all cultural distinctions.'

Thomson then, is perhaps to be applauded for not giving in to the prevailing Western tendency to universalise Ray's work when attempting to interpret it. In his opening paragraph, he warns that the appreciation of Ray's work in the West, and specifically the idea that he was 'a director worthy of A Passage to India...relies on an essentially patronising British view of India'. Only of course, to then go on and be equally condescending to him throughout his own piece. Presumably Thomson thought he was producing a fair minded piece, but it feels rather like a neat rhetorical trick: covering your tracks by criticising others for what you're about to do yourself.

Context is introduced through a series of rhetorical questions:

But what is an Indian film? Was Ray the West's notion of the worthy Indian artist? How did he relate to the vast, seething, naive but censorious cinema for the Indian masses? How far did Ray seem to be working in one of the most agonised and contradictory countries in the world?

Which are all fair questions to ask, even if the last does rest on a rather stereotyped image of India as 'agonised and contradictory'. Yet Thomson never displays any real knowledge of or interest in Indian cinema which was made for the 'masses'. In all 960-odd pages of his Biographical Dictionary, Ray is the only Indian figure to appear, apart from the actor Sabu, whose career was in any case almost entirely in American and European films. The context of Thomson's book includes none of the Indian cinema against which he is explicitly comparing Ray's films here.

And when he does address popular Hindi cinema elsewhere, you almost wish Thomson hadn't bothered.  In "Have You Seen?" he picks out Khuda Gawah (God is My Witness), seemingly more or less at random, hardly bothering to describe it beyond noting that it stars the 'vacuously pretty' Amitabh Bachchan (quite possibly the oddest way to describe the 'Big B' that I've come across), and instead using it as the peg on which to hang his broader thoughts and opinions about Indian cinema. He makes at least one half decent point, linking the melodrama of so much of Bollywood's output with the 'great melodramas of Stroheim, Borzage, Murnau, Stahl, Sirk and so on'. But he still displays his lack of knowledge when he suggests that the label 'Bollywood' includes '...not just condescension but the recognition of a kind of unduly sweetened melodrama with censorship, of profusion and excess with an odious daintiness of ultimate moral character, that seems painful and constricted compared with our own great tradition of melodrama.' Because of course, the great American directors never had to cope with censorship, or were ever guilty of 'excess'. In any case, isn't 'excess' part of the attraction of melodrama?

Fair enough, one can't be knowledgable about everything. But then if you want to make an explicit comparison with popular Indian cinema (i.e. Bollywood), then you need to give some sense that you know something about what you're referring to. It's certainly not enough to write something as vague as, 'In the eighties, he was hindered by poor health, and left exposed by the variety of Indian cinema', when just about every commentator on Hindi cinema will tell you that the eighties were probably the lowest point in the quality of Bollywood's output (and I know my wife would also include a fair chunk of the output of the nineties in that dismissal). It's not the director whose limitations are exposed here, it's the critic's.

Thomson's other major complaint about Ray's work is that 'while there is genuine and very moving pain in his work there was not a great sense of India's turmoil'. He praises a film of the early seventies, Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), for precisely this: 'For the first time, Ray made a connection between the individual and the national plight.' In contrast, the subsequent Shatranj Ke Khiladi represented a 'step backwards - into the safer, academic prettiness of the past', with 'color, and the starry participation of Saeed Jaffrey and Richard Attenborough.' It's this that explains Thomson's repeated comparison with Chekhov, who 'wrote country-house plays in the years before the Revolution. But Chekhov seems to feel external breezes, while Ray's world too often closed in on itself.' Perhaps we can call it the 'Salman Rushdie syndrome', the expectation that an Indian artist, whether in prose or in film, should address themselves to the national situation. For sure, that's an important subject, for a filmmaker of any country, but it's also true that no artist should be confined to any particular vision. In any case, I don't know if this argument really holds up if you consider the films.

I've yet to see Ashani Sanket, so am currently unable to say if Thomson's is a fair judgement on the film's achievements, but I do think he misrepresents Shatranj Ke Khiladi. To start with, there's also the 'starry participation' of actors from the popular Hindi cinema. Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan (Gabbar Singh from Sholay plays the King of Awadh!), and the most famous actor of all, Amitabh Bachchan, provides the voiceover at the film's opening. More importantly, I see nothing 'cozy' about a story set in in India in 1856. The sense of irony which contrasts two chess obsessed noblemen with the annexation of Awadh by the British East India company is doubly so when one considers not just what is presented on the screen but the also the significance of the date. All of these characters, even the British, are standing on a precipice in the light of what was to occur in the following year. 'External breezes' of the hurricane lurking just off stage are surely present for any knowledgable viewer.

I've already noted that Mahanagar is a little 'closed in', with most of the action taking place in a series of interiors, but it it hardly 'closed' to history. Arati's Anglo-Indian colleague Vicky, and the prejudice she faces from their boss, represents the legacy of the British Raj in a manner which in the telling is marvellously understated. Really, how could a story about a wife going out to work in order to supplement the family's income in the face of opposition from the more traditionally minded members of the family not be representative of a wider social changes affecting the country in which it is set? It's not even a circumstance which is unique to India. The changing roles of women are found in every country as it makes the transition to modernity. And this is clearly an issue with which the film grapples. The opening credits appear over a shot of that symbol of modernity, represented by a trolley pole of a moving tram sparking as it runs along an overhead cable. Equally, with the final shot of Arati and her husband disappearing into the crowded streets of Calcutta - surely one of the finest endings to any film - we're left balanced between a paradoxical mixture of hopefulness and trepidation which is surely quintessentially modern.

*

The really frustrating thing about Thomson's piece is that there's the kernel of a decent critique to be made here, if only it weren't beyond him. Ray was himself condescending towards commercial Indian and genre cinema, concerned with positioning his own work in opposition as a superior kind of cinema. He was rooted in a classical literary culture. And he wasn't representative of the whole of India, because what filmmaker is? Sadly, Thomson just isn't able to make the critique he clearly wants to make. For that, you need to turn to someone like Arjun Singh, whose piece not only acknowledges the ways in which Ray wasn't the 'quintessential Indian filmmaker' of Western critics' imagining, but is also able to explore the ways in which Ray's work contradicts his own expressed aesthetic preferences.

Of course, even when Western critics do take Ray at his own word, they're still liable to get things wrong.

With friends like these...

Early on in Mahanagar, following her decision to look for a job, there's a brief scene in which Arati signs the printed letter of application which her husband has written for her. She checks the spelling of their name with him, is their name spelt with a 'j' or a 'z'? Whilst watching this, my wife pointed out to me that this alludes to the fact that there is no 'z' sound in Bengali. She's asking her husband about it because she's spelling her name in English script.

Ah, thought I - in fact, I mentioned it to her at the time - to a Western viewer like me, that would just look like she was uneducated. Her husband has to write her letter of application, because she's basically uneducated; she can't even writer her own name. In fact, as is made clear at several points in the dialogue, her education had reached the end of her first year in college. Presumably she left university at the point at which she got married. But we'd see this emblematic scene, and draw the wrong conclusion.

Sure enough the esteemed film critic Philip French only went and proved me right! In a piece written just a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the film's re-release, he describes Arati as 'uneducated'. French knew Ray - he even helped Ray with the casting of Richard Attenborough in Shatranj Ke Khiladi - and his review is filled with his admiration for the filmmaker. So it feels rather mean to knock his writing like this - like I say, I'm sure I would make the same mistake without my wife's help. But it does display a lack of attention, as also when he summarises the story, '...But the household desperately needs more money to keep going, so, patronisingly and ever in charge, Subrata finds an advertisement for a sales job that might suit Arati, writes the application letter and sends her off for an interview.' Actually, the desire to find a job first comes from Arati, in the face of the  household's economic difficulties. It's somewhat to his credit as an indulgent husband who professes to be a 'conservative', that Subrata doesn't stop her, but instead encourages Arati in her quest for work outside the household.

As much as Madhabi Mukherjee clearly deserves all the plaudits that have surely come her way for her performance, and as much as Arati is clearly the character at the centre of the film, there is also something enormously affecting about Anil Chatterjee's Subrata, who goes through just as many changes as does his wife over the course of the movie. He's decent enough, not only to encourage her in her desire for work, but also stands up to his parents' evident disapproval. He's not quite as conservative in his character as he wants to believe. It's only after she gets her job and starts to become successful, that he panics about what they have set in motion. He desperately tries to find a second job in order that Arati can resign from the job which is beginning to give her a real sense of satisfaction, only to collapse into near despair once he loses his own job with the collapse of the bank for which he works. What's really nice about Ray's slow pace is that we also get a proper sense of how much Subrata loves his wife throughout the film, despite the values he professes to believe in at it's beginning. Really, this is a young man who, initially at least, really doesn't know himself very well, protected by the contours and assumptions of the society in which he lives. By the finish, he's come to not only rediscover the love he obviously feels for his wife, but also discovers a new sense of respect for her which is genuinely moving.

Different contexts

French finishes his piece with a description of what must be a treasured photo: an image of Ray and Akira Kurosawa, deep in talk in front of the Taj Mahal. It's a resonant image of two great filmmakers of 'world cinema'.

I noted in an earlier post that I first encountered Ray's films in the context of a course I took as an undergraduate on post-war world cinema. He was the only Indian on the list, just as Kurosawa was the only Japanese filmmaker on the list, which gave us a series of representative films and their directors from most of the important moments of international post-war cinema as generally defined by the critical consensus. My recollection is that the lecturer was actually really good at placing each film and it's maker in their historical contexts, but I think the presence of Ray on the list was mostly down to his presence on the international film scene, and his links with neorealism as defined by the famous story of his inspiration to make his first film after his viewing of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (there's surely grounds for thinking that film must rank as one of the most influential in the entire history of cinema - predictably, David Thomson has his issues with it, of course!)

If I studied Ray now, there's part of me that would really like to see him placed on a course devoted to Indian cinema more generally. I'd love to see Pather Panchali on a course alongside other significant Indian films from the 50s. Things like Mother India, Pyaasa, Devdas, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. You'd need more, but could finish it with Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and Kabuliwala (1961), pushing just into the beginning of the 60s. Produced by Bimal Roy (who like Ray, was also also influenced by Bicycle Thieves) and also adapted from Tagore, Kabuliwala would also work as a really interesting comparison with Ray's own dedication to Tagore's work.

I'm not trying to claim that this is the only way to understand his work. I don't want the context of a work to ever be used as a way of walling something off, as if to suggest that you'll never understand Pather Panchali without detailed knowledge of Bengali peasant life. However, I do think critics should take more care, when making pronouncements on a filmmaker who is working in a context with which they are unfamiliar. One of the problems with 'world cinema' as a concept is that it risks (or risked?) flattening out the local contexts which produced the films in question. One of the tasks of criticism is surely to reverse that flattening. In any case, knowledge of the context can only enrich our understanding of art. Which is about as prescriptive as I'm prepared to be at this point.

Another quotation

Paul is a bureaucromancer — his obsession is with bureaucracy, and his magic consists in changing the world by filling out and filing bureaucratic forms. He can access any data that has been collected bureaucratically, by the government or by private businesses. He can pull papers out of thin air, fill then up with forms, checkboxes, and specifications, and by signing the papers conjure what he has written into objective effect. This is because Paul’s philosophy of life — his all-consuming obsession, in fact — is to see bureaucracy as the cornerstone of civilisation, as humankind’s unique tool for fending off violence and oppression, for establishing the very possibility of safety, stability, and comfort, and for making fairness and equality at least thinkable and potentially obtainable. This is quite wonderful, because it encapsulates an idea which goes against all the assumptions of our age. If there is one thing that everyone in our neoliberal age hates, it is bureaucracy. Everyone from Rand Paul to David Graeber detests it. Politicians always loudly oppose it. Leftists want to hang the last bureaucrat along with the last billionaire, or the last priest. The Tea Party sees it as a scourge to be eliminated. So-called “centrists” or “moderates” are mealy-mouthed about it, just as they are mealy-mouthed about everything — but they still insist on getting rid of it, as much as they ever insist on anything. Modernist literature, from Kafka on down, figures bureaucracy as the central scourge of 20th- (and now 21st-) century life. FLEX is nearly the only contemporary book I have ever read that supports bureaucracy, and even celebrates it. 

Now of course, the deep hypocrisy, or “dirty little secret” of our age is that in fact it runs entirely on (disavowed) bureaucracy. Reagan and Thatcher introduced massive levels of it, precisely as a means of destroying the welfare state, of “deregulating” various institutional practices, and of promoting “efficiency” and “competition”. (We get a lot of this in academia in particular, where things more and more turn upon various mechanisms of supposedly objective assessment, of quantification, etc.). All large corporations are heavily bureaucratised, and perform the very sort of central planning that was ritualistically denounced as an obscenity when governments tried to practice it. Big Data is not just a consequence of computational technology per se, but precisely of the bureaucratisation of it. 

Steven Shaviro

Yes, look at me, all Walter Benjamin-esque in my last post, juxtaposing two quotations in order to make a critique about a book. If not easier, then certainly something which is quicker to write. I always wanted to make quotations a part of this blog - similar to a commonplace book - but it's not really worked out as successfully as I'd hoped. The blog is mostly written to please myself, but I'd hope it was at least of some interest to others if you come across it.

And now, here's another quotation, from Steven Shaviro's review of Ferrett Steinmetz’s novel FLEX, a novel which I confess I haven't read. Shaviro it seems to me makes a really insightful point here about the reality of bureaucracy in modern life, which in my view at least chimes perhaps somewhat obliquely not only with my last post, but also with another recent post where I tried to make a point about two of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels.

My next post will hopefully be somewhat more substantial than these last couple. Or else it won't.

Martin Amis, Success

1990 UK tv serial (1977-8). BBC TV….Most episodes written Wilfred Gretorex (1921-    ), who devised the series, or Edmund Ward. 

…Reflecting the fears of the middle classes in the 1970s, this serial, set in a socialist UK of 1990, warns of what could happen if the welfare state continued in its present direction. The country is run by the PCD, an all-powerful bureaucracy that incorporates the trade-union movement within its machinery; the only people free of its control are a select elite possessing Privilege Cards. The story concerns the efforts of a lone journalist ([Edward] Woodward) to outwit the system in such ways as helping people to escape to the USA, still a bastion of freedom.

John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)

We’re getting taken over - that’s for sure, also. Everyone is a bit sweaty at my work these days. We’re all having a bit of a bad time these days. It now looks as though we will be obliged (I expected this) to affiliate with the Union, regularising staff rates of pay, holidyas, office hours, luncheon vouchers, going to the lavatory, etc. In return, the office will enjoy considerable increases of salary and proportionate rationalisations of personnel. 

It’s a nervous time for all of us here. This is is not a bad office, but at the moment it has a bad feel. Disgruntlement hangs in the air; it hangs in the air like migraine. …There are no new jobs and nobody wants to go looking for them. Nobody wants to go. (And it seems that we can’t protect each other. If we were in the Union we would be able to, but you can’t get organised until you get organised.) 

Martin Amis, Success (1978)

It's great to be Punjabi!

It's a complaint I've seen frequently made in the context of African music or literature: simply, that to ascribe a single cultural identity to an entire continent that is the size of Africa is cultural blinkered at best, and outright racist at it's worst.

My ongoing education in and enjoyment of Hindi cinema (or Bollywood, as it is now popularly known) is teaching me something very similar about India. India at least, is a single nation, unless you want to include Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of the 'single nation' which was broken at the original moment of Independence/Partition in 1947 (but that is to be far more politically contentious than I either wish, or even feel qualified to be here). Yet, it's also a collection of federal states, all with their particular individual cultures and languages, a palimpsest of the many different cultures and rulers that have existed in the subcontinent. It's sobering to think that the only language which is spoken across the entire subcontinent is English. Indeed - and enough people have told me this, so I take it to be true - despite efforts on behalf of Hindi, it's still not really spoken in the South of the Subcontinent, seen as a cultural imposition in a way that English is not (and English is after all the international language of the world - business, academia, etc.).

It may only be an inadvertent consequence of the particular writers I've read, but I realised a while ago that, aside from R.K. Narayan, all of the Indian writing I've read comes either from the North, or else from Bombay. Is this just a consequence of the particular books which are available to me, especially in Britain? I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but one of the unfortunate consequences of the rise of Indian writing in English over the last few decades is that it has also flattened our view of the subcontinent. Arguably Rushdie's real lasting influence after his Booker win with Midnight's Children was not his style of magic realism, but rather his concern with Indian history and politics, and the sense that the Indian nation could be encapsulated entire in Very Big Books.

Bollywood of course, is only one particular film industry in India. As an arthouse film enthusiast, the first Indian filmmaker I encountered was naturally Satyajit Ray. When I first saw The Chess Players and Pather Panchali as an undergraduate, as far as I was concerned I was watching 'Indian' cinema. I knew that his work was different from Indian popular cinema (if I even had much of an idea of what that is at that point), but that was only because all arthouse cinema is culturally positioned adjacent to more popular work. And from what I understand, Ray was also a filmmaker who was concerned to position himself as very different from the majority of cinema produced in India (whether this was because he knew that he had a substantial audience abroad, or for reasons of cultural snobbery, I don't rightly know; likely it was some combination of the two). Now of course, I would contextualise his work as part of Bengali cinema, even though I've still seen very few Bengali films.

Right, this is a much longer preamble that what I intended to write, when all I really wanted to do was post a couple of videos! Like humour, cultural and regional stereotypes are one of the hardest things to translate. So I'm very lucky to have the Punjabi girl I'm married to sitting next to me when I watch some of these films, as she can explain cultural nuances and stereotypes when Bollywood uses them. And the more I see, the more I'm starting to recognise. Something I have noticed is the presence of Punjab. Part of this is probably down to the presence of so many Punjabis in the industry both in front of and behind the camera. Or so I am told this is the case. The presence of song and dance numbers in Bollywood films - one of the main things which signals 'Bollywood' to foreigners like me - may even be down to the use of musical numbers in traditional Punjabi theatre. When sound arrived in Hindi cinema, they were the natural people to employ in the industry, since they already had a strong tradition of acting, and so the theatrical traditions were also imported into the new sound cinema (no doubt the actual history is a lot more complicated than this). Of course, we used to have musicals in English language cinema too, and that was probably a similar theatrical influence from Broadway to Hollywood. It just wasn't part of the whole of the English language theatrical tradition (which means we have some missed opportunities; just imagine Jimmy Cagney's gangster films with added musical numbers - White Heat with songs! - you can't tell me it wouldn't have been awesome!).

One of the commentators on the second video below complains about all the Punjabi references in contemporary Hindi cinema, which potentially fails or slights audiences from other backgrounds that Hindi cinema should(?) also be serving. It doesn't strike me as an entirely unreasonable complaint, although it feeds into the idea that Hindi cinema is the Indian 'national' cinema, responsible for representing the entire nation in a way that other Indian regional cinemas are not expected to do. But on the other hand, I'm married to a Punjabi girl, so for me personally, I'm happy to go along with songs which celebrate Punjabi wedding songs:

Or which appears to amount to little more than 'Being Punjabi is awesome!':

Shot in a single take!

Human Voices

"...a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from..."

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices 

The BBC as it is? As it once was? As we'd like it be, or believed it was? It's that note of an 'amateur theatrical company' that nags at me, the sense of the BBC as a quality repertory theatre.

Of course, theatrical rep has gone the way of all things, or at least had to transform itself in order to survive, losing many of it's original qualities, the BBC now feels more like any other corporate institution.

And of course, like any institution, it always had it's faults. It's idealisation was always in the eyes of those of us who beheld it. Something which is only magnified when one is looking back or remembering, as is inevitable when one thinks of those magnificent, 'stagey', multiple camera dramas which are no longer produced (the style relegated to sitcoms and soaps), but which you could still just about grow up on in Britain when I was a child.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that what most struck me when I was reading this was that, like The Golden Child, this is a novel about an institution. It strikes me that there aren't very many novels like that, or that it's possibly even something which the novel finds very difficult to do, because of the need to focus on individuals in any type of story. Where institutions do appear in most narrative fictions, it's either part of the background, against which the individual character is defined and stands out. Or alternatively they are a part of a paranoid reading of the world which is crushing our individuality, whether successfully (e.g. 1984), or not (e.g. every story in which a brave hero fights against the system).

Any yet much of modern life is arguably defined by institutions, both good or bad, public or private, which serve to regulate life in one way or another. In both of these novels we have an ensemble of characters united only by the fact that they work for an institution (British Museum/BBC). Their relation to each other is exactly that of work colleagues, something most adults have some experience of, assuming they've ever had a job. Although individual characters come to dominate the narrative of both novels a various points, the narrative is never really *about* them.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and have missed all the many other works which do this, but I suspect not. There are certainly novels of individual characters' experience of working for institutions (I'm thinking here of something like Michael Bracewell's wonderfully melancholy Perfect Tense, but no doubt there are plenty other examples), but that's not exactly what I'm describing here. In that kind of narrative the individual is still right at the centre. Here it's the institution which occupies the narrative centre, with various individual experiences making up a composite portrait of what that institution is like, and what it means.

I imagine that comedy might be the best way to tell that kind of story. And in addition, that it can't be an easy type of story to write. But then Penelope Fitzgerald was one of our greatest writers.

The Dog-Lover's Guide to the Russian Revolution

Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dog's Heart

I'm more of a cat person myself.

Like surely everyone, my first encounter with Bulgakov was the magisterial The Master and Margarita. It's one of those works which swamps everything else it's author wrote (see also: Joseph Roth's Radetzky March), which makes it easy to then neglect everything else that author has produced. It's partly simply a matter of length. There's a cultural prejudice that we seem to be suffering from to an even greater extent in our present times which equates the significance of a given novel to it's length. It's partly a simple matter of the time which you inevitably need to put in to reading a novel. Something which is hundreds of pages long will inevitably take us all longer to read than a shorter, more compact work. So the tendency is surely to try and justify the effort we have to put it into our reading. It's also clearly a matter of fact that many of the greatest works of literature are actually very long (although that's partly down to the fact that the economic conditions under which many 19th century novels were produced under encouraged length; although the conditions are obviously very different, it does feel as though there has been a similar pressure to produce novels of length in America and Britain and no doubt elsewhere since at least the 1980s). But it's also simple prejudice, related perhaps to the similar prejudice which sees comedy as inherently inferior to more 'serious' drama.

A Dog's Heart is great comedy, filled with a raucous laughter. Our hero Sharik is transformed, Frankenstein-like, from a homeless 'shaggy-haired devil' of a mutt into an equally disreputable dog-human hybrid, when an experimental Doctor, Philipp Philippovich, who is interested in the science of rejuvenation. the experiment involves the transplantation of testicles and a 'pituitary gland' from a recently deceased human.

You can probably guess how it turns out. Shari retains something of his dog-like nature, causing endless trouble by continuing to chase after cats and gorging himself on food. He also confounds the Doctor's attempt at civilising him. And not only that, but this is a tale which takes place in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Philipp Philippovich has managed to hold on to his entire apartment through the patronage of patients who are high up within the new establishment, but is still in constant dispute with the newly installed housing committee, who naturally want to take away some of his rooms in favour of the newly identified 'proletariat'. In turn, they attempt to adopt the newly human Sharik as one of their own, only for him to confound their ideology, pointedly refusing any suggestion that he might on behalf of the new Soviet state in favour of his own needs and desires. He's a creature of pure individuality who mocks equally both sides of the ideological divide. While normality may eventually be restored - as it always is in this kind of story - what really makes this story work is it's telling, switching between Sharik's slangy, first person narration and a more straightforward account in the third person, full of an antic energy. 

Currently reading

First Terry Pratchett, and now this.

Whilst America had Anne Rice, we had Tanith Lee. Unlike Rice, and unlike writers such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman whose work also can also be described in terms of sharing an aesthetic with her work, Lee never had the kind of popular success which might have buoyed her up commercially when fashions changed. She was a deeply romantic writer, whose concerns and style seem rooted in the genre landscape of 70s and 80s commercial fantasy fiction (and what other era/area of the publishing industry could have accommodated her incredible productivity?).

And her concerns seem to have been pretty constant through everything she wrote: often youthful protagonists, concerned with issues of personal growth or metamorphosis; vivid settings, which variously drew on standard genre tropes or twisted historical landscapes or myth or fairytale, and which often feel more like stage settings for her characters' inner dramas; plotting that often has more the quality of a dream than anything so prosaically mundane; an unconventional approach to ethical issues and concern with her characters' sexuality; and a prose style which was evocative, opulent, overwhelming - and at times, yes, somewhat purple in it's excesses.

It was this latter which captivated me when I first encountered her writing as a teenager. I'd be willing to bet that - apart that is from the restructuring of the publishing industry which saw saw the gradual narrowing and even disappearance of the mid list in the 90s, confining so many of the more interesting genre writers to smaller, independent publishers - it was perhaps this more than anything else which saw the eclipsing of her reputation with major publishers. Modern genre writing seems to favour a kind of prose which is more functional, more conversational with less flourish and style, probably thanks to the influence of film and television. Indeed, as I've said, purple prose was always a trap Ms. Lee risked, and occasionally fell prey to, not that that ever bothered me, since it was that opulence which attracted me in the first place.

When I finally encountered actual decadent writing a few years later, I remember several short stories from an anthology of female decadent writing which I read during my undergraduate degree which felt as though they could even have been written by her. And like so many decadents, she seems to have been obsessed with beauty. So many of her characters are extravagantly beautiful, always in some way above or cast out from the common herd. Central characters included not only aristocrats, but even Gods. (Again, this is perhaps another way in which she was somewhat out of step with modern culture, an era in which even our elites wish to clothe themselves with the language of equality).

Not that she ever really celebrates or idealises any kind of authority and hierarchy. Rather, where they appear in a story, these archaic power structures are accepted as a part of the world in which her characters live and have to negotiate. Patriarchy is always suspect. I'll never forget her story 'The Devil's Rose': the absence of any overt moralising of its telling and its lush, decadent prose, not only makes the final twist all the more horrific, but demonstrates even more effectively the callousness of a certain kind of predatory masculinity that is so easily romanticised.

*

So, currently, I'm reading an early work, a collection of the somewhat clunkily named Four-BEE novels, Don't Bite the Sun, followed by Drinking Sapphire Wine - the first British edition which combined them after their initial American publication. The text is littered with plenty of future slang from it's post apocalyptic world in which humanity is confined to three cities, taken care of by robots, and allowed to indulge themselves in any way they like. If they die, a new body will be supplied, so characters change not only faces, but also their gender, only 'tending' to either male or female out of personal preference (the covers of not only my, but of all, editions that I've found online obscure this point by over emphasising the femininity of the main character). It's a flamboyant brightly lit future which surely has something in common with 70s glam. The characters frequently take ecstasy pills - it's weirdly prescient for science fiction which seems blithely unconcerned with any notion of futuristic prediction. Rather the tropes of science fiction are deployed for their sensuous pleasure.

It's a vision of paradise in which our narrator is coming to realise the extent to which humanity is actually imprisoned by this superficially paradisiacal artificial environment. By the end of the first volume at least, she's come to make some kind of peace with her world - there are epiphanies along the way, but no delusions about finally breaking free from this artificial paradise in some way (the way we might expect this sort of story to go). Beneath the sprightliness and narrative propulsion - plenty happens, but for little ultimate purpose, and our central narrator ends up largely back where 'she' started out from - there's quite a knowing comment about the compromises modernity forces us to make. It will be interesting to see where the second volume takes the story.

Post-War Arthuriana

Henry Treece, The Great Captains

Chronologically, this is the final volume of what has been called Henry Treece’s ‘celtic quartet’. Although the novels can certainly be made to fit into an overarching narrative and chronology, I’m not aware of any evidence that they were composed as such. It feels more like the creation of Jim Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock when they were first discovering them in the 1950s as they were originally published. Moorcock went on to produce introductions for all four novels in the handsome editions Savoy Books produced when they republished them in the late 70s/early 80s. Still, if that was what it took to get the novels back in print and successfully marketed, then who am I to argue.

And seriously, if you’re going to acquire these novels, then these are the editions to get. Not only do you get the pleasure of Moorcock’s introductions, but also evocative covers from one Michael Heslop, and interior illustrations from the great Jim Cawthorn. Both illustrators feel like they belong to the tail end of that great tradition which stretches back to the nineteenth century. The sort of illustration work that makes you look at most of their modern equivalents and just despair.

And the only way you will acquire any Treece novel nowadays (unless there’s any still lurking in a dusty library corner; assuming there are any dusty library corners left for them to lurk in that is) is second hand, since sadly all his work appears to languishes out of print. A committed romantic in a time when that doesn't appear to have been particularly fashionable (only, is it ever especially fashionable? - the immediate post War period actually saw a flowering of (neo-)romanticism; it was only by the 50s following the end of rationing that it fell out of favour). If any of his work is known at all now it’s the historical fiction, especially his Viking stories, which he produced for children. But he was also a poet and critic, and produced a handful of historical novels aimed at an adult audience. In his introduction to The Great Captains, Moorcock contrasts him with contemporaries such as Alfred Duggan and Robert Graves. Where Graves’ historical fiction is still in print (if only thanks to the successful BBC adaptation of I, Claudius), both Duggan and Treece seem to have been left behind by fashion.

We don’t have to agree with all of Moorcock’s polemical assertions to feel that this is a real shame, since Henry Treece was clearly an excellent writer of historical romance. He gets the mindset of men who lived in a world whose reality still contained mysticism and magic as part of its fabric in a way that few others appear to, at least to my knowledge. These aren’t fantasies exactly. Where magical occurrences do occur, they can easily be rationalised as fantasies of perception. But for the characters who experience them, lacking the capacity to perceive such rationalisations, and living in societies that are governed by myth and ritual, magic is the only plausible explanation.

In his own introduction to his work, Treece is concerned to present this particular fiction as a form of historical truth, arguing that it is as accurate as he could make it. From the bibliography he supplies at the end of the book, Treece was clearly as well read in the period as it was possible to be in the mid-50s when he produced his Arthurian tale. He dismisses Malory as a ‘biased knight’ and positions his work as a corrective to writers such as Tennyson, ‘throw[ing] off all the later accretions of legend and later poetry,’ and appealing to the ‘Court of History.’

Which to me, all rather misses the point. No doubt the stories of King Arthur could have their origin in a real tribal chieftain who lived in post-Roman Britain. My admittedly somewhat limited understanding is that we have to rely more on archaeology than on textual sources for our knowledge about the period, and that as a consequence there is much that we still don’t know about what actually happened in that period of British history. But surely, when it comes to a story like Arthur - one which, like the story of Robin Hood, has been retold so many times - whatever truth which may have first given rise to it, surely the point of the story, for us as modern subjects, is the myth? It’s hard to see what value there is in the comic deflation of the notion of the round table which occurs at one point: nothing more profound than a bleak joke on authority as Arthur and his leaders argue about who should precede who. The narrative voice even pulls back to let us know that this is the event which future generations will eventually misinterpret. Both the myth and the comic deflation are fiction, so why should it matter which we give primacy to?

Seen in this light, The Great Captains seems like a text which has been produced by a sensibility which was at least partly formed by post-War experiences. Greece himself served as an intelligence officer with R.A.F. Bomber Command, so whilst he certainly wasn’t fighting in the front line so to speak, he still clearly experienced the War. If the post-War period was not a period amenable to romanticism, then that was likely due to the experience of the War and it’s aftermath, and the realisation of just what morally corrupted romanticism could lead to. The gritty immediacy which he brings to his depiction of violence in this world seems as much redolent of post-War exhaustion with conflict as it does with his obvious desire for fidelity to a realism of the period of post Roman Britain. One of my favourite moments in the novel depicts Arthur's first successful battle. After considerable attention is paid to the build up before battle, a marvellous depiction of the tension felt by men who are about to go into battle, we then cut straight to the aftermath of battle, starting with a meditation on the point of few of one of the dead men whose body is lying on the battlefield.

The claim to historical accuracy is buttressed by the 'realism' of Treece's telling of the story. And as I said above, that is one of the attractions of his work, just as it is with the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, who also wrote her own version of Arthur. As have many others - a common desire for writers in the twentieth century seems to be the same as Treece's: to provide a more historical, more ‘realistic’ depiction of the Arthurian world.

And yet, for all his criticism of Malory and Tennyson, Treece’s version of Arthur feels equally romantic in some ways. From his first appearance in the text, in which he is successfully ploughing a field with two bulls, Artus the Bear as Treece calls him, seems positively super heroic. He's an epic slightly unbelievable, epic figure, who throughout the narrative he is constantly proving himself through acts of strength and leadership. Eventually, because this is the story, he's brought down through his own self deception over a woman. Our final sight of him, long after his successes in battle and loss of his queen, is as a figure finally brought low by old age. Ultimately, he's a properly tragic figure.

*

I find myself wondering if the 'realism' of it's telling isn't actually supporting the novel's romantic elements. When I began writing this piece, I hadn't realised I was writing something which would so easily jibe with my earlier piece. Of course, The Great Captains is not a secondary world fantasy, but the appeal to history, which I am taking to include a more 'realistic' telling of a story which contains strong elements of romance (not only the magic, but also it's tragic end), seems to serve  similar function to the appeal to realism that many of George R.R. Martin's fans seem to make about his work. It's a way of taking a story which contains elements we might now find embarrassing or problematic, or which has been idealised in some way, and making it work in a way that supposedly allows us to take those same elements more seriously. Many of the ideals which motivate Treeece's characters are ones which I, as a twentieth / twenty-first century vaguely left leaning liberal would likely find abhorrent if I encountered them in the real world. Yet they still feel authentic in the world which is depicted in The Great Captains.

(And on reflection, perhaps the realism also undercuts the ideals for which they are supposedly fighting. Treece's Arthur never really appears to achieve a stable success until after his tragedy has occurred. Before that point he's merely leading what is clearly an unstable coalition of competing tribal forces. Almost as soon as he achieves his first military successes he begins to unravel through his pride and self-deception. The values of the characters are viewed with dispassion, and the tragic nature of the story means that it can hardly be said to celebrate those values.)

Since I've not read Martin's work I can't take this insight to what feels like it's proper conclusion and say why Treece's approach works for me whilst A Song of Ice and Fire fails for me, if I even would say something as categorical as that where I to read or watch it. One crucial difference for me which I can say is that Henry Treece was not writing fantasy, but historical fiction, and that does seem to make a difference for me when I'm trying to think about these issues. As violent as his story is at times, there's never any feeling that the narrative is revelling in the violence it depicts. In dwelling far more on both the fear and consequences of violence, yet frequently avoiding its actual depiction, Treece's novel never avoids the issue of just how violent the culture and warfare of post-Roman Britain would be, but it does avoid a self-conscious celebration of that violence.

It's probably unfair of me to single out Martin's work for this kind of criticism, and not simply because I haven't read his books or watched the TV show which is being adapted from them. But also because so much of our popular culture of the last few decades seems to make this error of revelling in gratuitous depictions of violence. I don't think it's confined to works of genre fantasy. It almost certainly includes things which I've enjoyed in the past. We all have our particular lines to draw when it comes to the issue of the depiction of violence, and I doubt that many of us are especially consistent.

"The wind blows from the east...

"The wind blows from the east bringing an acid hail that falls from the leaden sky. The air stutters tic tic tic tic, rattle of death-watch beetle on sad slate roofs. The swan of Avon dies a syncopated death. Ashes big as snowflakes fall, black frost grips July by the throat. We pull the velvet curtains tight over the dawn, and shiver by empty grates. The household gods have vanished, no one remembers quite when. Poppies and corncockle have long been forgotten here, like the boys who died in Flanders, their names erased by a late frost which clipped the village cross. Spring lapped the fields in arsenic green, the oaks died this year. On every green hill mourners stand, and weep for The Last Of England." 

Derek Jarman, Kicking Against the Pricks

...the curtain falls

"I wanted to hold on, just a little longer, to my last act. A premonition of pain made me delay; the pain that comes after the drama, when the bodies have been carried from the stage and the trumpets are silent and an empty day dawns which will dawn again and again to make mock of our contrived finalities." 

Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Whilst everyone else was seemingly getting themselves upset in some way over The Buried Giant, I finally got around to reading The Unconsoled. It's a novel which appears to have a somewhat contradictory reputation, it's dream logic and narrative dislocations appearing understandably jarring to some after his first three short, apparently realist texts. It was James Woods, was it not, who described it as 'inventing it's own category of badness'? Equally hyperbolic were all those words are quoted on my edition, proclaiming it some kind of masterpiece. And I've also seen it both described as overlooked in academic analyses of Ishiguro's fiction, and damned for being exactly the sort of anti-realist text that academics are going to like.

This latter judgement at least was not exactly my experience. I came to Ishiguro through my parents' bookshelves. He was a favourite of my Dad's, although I can't remember ever discussing with him what it was he liked so much about his work. I, on the other hand, with a degree in English Literature behind me and a return to academia in my future - had I but known - stumbled with this one. I'd devoured his first three books, but failed to get more than a few pages into this before giving up in exasperation. I didn't get far enough to make any judgement on it's quality. So much for any pretensions I might have to literary appreciation, over and above my dad's 'common reader' reaction!

Reading it all these years later, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards my younger self, although I do rather wish I could advise him to not be quite so impatient! The Unconsoled is a book which requires some patience I feel, although obviously everyone will have their own reactions. Not so much for it's length, although it is a long novel, but because it seems to take time to adjust to its skewed vision of the world. By his own acknowledgement, Ishiguro is far from the most stylish of writers. There's little metaphor or simile in his writing, but an earnest fastidiousness which appears to be reflected in narrators who are frequently attempting to maintain some measure of dignity amidst the chaos of lives caught in historical situations which frustrate such attempts.

Here, our narrator is Ryder, a world famous pianist, who arrives in an unnamed European city in the wake of some undefined catastrophe. His role is either to give a musical performance or possibly a lecture instead, which will provide some positive summing up of the city's recent past and current needs. That uncertainty is typical of a text which is constantly unsettling any stable sense of reality: locations are connected to each in an impossible, dream like manner. Taking place over a handful of days, each section of the novel begins with Ryder waking. Here, the normal order of things is reversed, with waking signalling a re-emersion into the dream.

Time stretches so that a conversation which could logically occupy only a few minutes instead fills multiple pages of lengthy exposition, exposition which often seems focussed on seemingly trivial matters, matters which are taken with utmost seriousness by everyone. Ryder himself is plagued by memories of his parents in England, who may or may not be about to arrive in the city themselves, and may or may not have his own family who live in the city. He repeatedly comes across people from his past, however impossible their presence might seem. Honestly, it's hard to think of any novel which manages to mimic the logic of dreams quite so effectively.

Published in 1995, it would be easy to peg the crisis the city has experienced in its recent past to the ending of communist rule in Eastern Europe just a few years before, but like so much in this novel, this is never explicitly confirmed. It speaks to a general ambivalence about memory found not only here, but in all of Ishiguro's work that I've read. Remembering is never simple for his characters; memory reveals all of the many compromises and failings which have occupied their lives. They are all, perhaps 'unconsoled' in some way.

The logic of dreams which structures the narrative also leads it inevitably towards the surreal. One of my favourite moments is from late in the book where Ryder witnesses the bizarre 'dance of the porters', narrated with a deadpan earnestness that is by turns comic in it's situation and chilling in it's consequences. In fact, that could work as a fair description for a lot of the way the narration of this novel works. There is comedy throughout but it's so well suppressed that it could be easy to miss. Equally there's also a real sadness here, mainly concerned with the expectations of others, whether that other is a lost love or disappointed parents.

Ironically, because I've read somewhere that part of Ishiguro's intention with this novel was to write an 'international novel', and moreover a novel which is set in Eastern Europe, but I find myself wanting to class it as an example of 'English surrealism'. Certainly there's little of the 'mocking stance' which Rhys Hughes identifies with the genre, but there is a concern with 'the Show', even if in this case, it is a Show which doesn't actually go on. If the narrative functions as a dream, then it is clearly an anxiety dream, in which Ryder is forever being interrupted and distracted from whatever purpose he is engaged upon - in one case even physically unable to speak. The performance which he is so intent on giving never actually occurs, except for a single practice session in a dilapidated, isolated cabin, where he is overheard by only a single person. I've seen this scene described as an example of a 'nihilistic aesthetics', and which mocks any attempt to impose a politics upon art. Which is certainly a persuasive reading, but it's also rather comic, isn't it? In some respects, it's only the elegance and poise of Ishiguro's style which ensures we can overlook the comedy of this novel, the sheer absurdity of most of it's action.

And it's incorrect perhaps to say that 'the Show' doesn't go on. There's a curious gaiety to the final scene on a tram in which, having been finally abandoned by Boris, the little boy who may be his son, Ryder finds himself unaccountably weeping. The sadness present throughout the novel has finally penetrated his restrained surface. But then it's pointed out by one of the other passengers that there is a sumptuous buffet present on the tram, and that however bad things are, he should eat and carry on with things. And so, as it does for all of us, no matter how awful things can get, 'the Show' ultimately carries on...

english Kafka?

"He didn't feel that he had been tried and found wanting, rather that he had not been tried and had no idea of whether he was wanting or not." 

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

[It perhaps goes without saying, that by this point, we are well past the point where a comparison to the works of Kafka really makes any sense. We even have an adjective, which can sometimes feel as though it's also a label for a whole raft of work which likely has actually little in common with the work of the great Czech writer. There is nothing obviously or overtly Kafkaesque about the work of Penelope Fitzgerald, yet here we have a sentence which seems close in some ways at least to the comedy and absurdism, a sympathy with failure entirely lacking the comfort of sentimentality, that we find in Kafka. Unless I'm mistaken. It's been so long since I last read Kafka, back in my days of being a Serious Young Man.

[Yet recall that Kafka loved the novels of Charles Dickens (was Amerika not at least partly intended to be a rewrite of Martin Chuzzlewit?). And, if I may be excused a detour here, wasn't Jane Austen a favourite of Edward Gorey? It's not that we need foreigners to point this out, but I think that many admirers of these canonical English authors can perhaps easily miss the abyss which yawns beneath the tightly held social worlds depicted in their fiction. We can sometimes mistake for safety what is actually extremely precarious. Menace is after all rarely far from comedy, but it's so easy to overlook. Penelope Fitzgerald certainly understood that. And, even in an early, deliberately comic novel such as this, she has the capacity to make you weep.]

I Shall Wear Midnight

"And what are my weapons? she thought. And the answer came to her instantly: pride. Oh, you hear them all say that it's a sin; you hear them say it goes before a fall. And that can't be true. The blacksmith prides himself on a good weld; the carter is proud that his horses are well turned out, gleaming like fresh chestnuts in the sunshine; the shepherd prides himself on keeping the wolf from the flock, the cook prides herself on her cakes. We pride ourselves on making a good history of our lives, a good story to be told." 

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

Currently reading...

"We think that the head is important, that the brain sits like a monarch on the throne of the body. But the body is powerful too, and the brain cannot survive without it." 

I Shall Wear Midnight

He was so prolific that it was easy to take his work for granted. Other than Michael Moorcock, there's probably been no other living author who's been as important to me, and yet I don't think I quite realised that before last Thursday's news. I can be very slow sometimes.

But ask me to pick a favourite of his books now, and I couldn't do it. It isn't simply that the Discworld is significant for me more as a series, rather than as any individual book. Besides, it isn't simply one series. It's a setting in which multiple series are braided together.

No, rather than any particular book - although for sure they varied in quality - if asked for a favourite I'd say it was a particular character. And I suppose I'd very obvious in my choices: Sam Vimes, perhaps. Definitely Granny Weatherwax.

I may well be mistaken in my surmise, but I always imagined that Tiffany Aching was a response to Pratchett's having developed Granny Weatherwax's character as far as she could go. Having a new character learning to be a witch meant that the world of witchcraft that he'd developed all became new. It also meant that the threats Tiffany faced felt genuinely menacing, which no longer really felt possible with Granny Weatherwax. Pure speculation on my part of course.

Anyway, I'd judge that I'm about half way through I Shall Wear Midnight right now, and I'm loving it as much as I ever loved one of his books. A comforting read, balanced by a sure awareness of the perils and moral choices that the world presents us all.

I'm also struck by how English it is. In constructing the Discworld, Pratchett borrowed from all sorts of places, cultures past and present, but the landscapes he repeatedly returned to all seem to belong to England. The world of the Chalk is clearly a rural English setting not that far removed from Hardy's Wessex. He was a very parochial writer in some ways.

And so I've set myself a reading goal for the next year. It was after I'd read Lords and Ladies I think, that I stopped reading Terry Pratchett's work. It was what I now think of as my 'grumpy teenager phase', when I convinced myself I was uninterested in some of the things I'd loved not long before and instead preferred to read work that was violent and gritty. Part of growing up perhaps is realising that comedy is often a far more 'realistic' representation of the world than is work which is self-consciously dark and unpleasant.

When I eventually came to my senses (at least, regarding the merits of Terry Pratchett's work), I decided to start at the beginning with The Dark Side of the Sun, and then read through everything in the order in which it was published, finally reading the one or two that I'd missed when I was younger, and eventually (or so I imagined) catching him up. Which I never quite managed to do.

So I'm going to catch up with him this year. It's not the reason for achieving this goal that I would have liked, but that's life. According to wikipedia, there's one, final Tiffany Aching book to appear in September, so I should hopefully be able to read the remaining books in time for the appearance in paperback of The Shepherd's Crown. There aren't that many, especially because I'm not including the science fiction series he wrote with Stephen Baxter. It just doesn't seem like the kind of sf that appeals to me, although you never know. I will read the two collections of shorter work though, so there's still a few to go. But I'll take them slowly, because I really don't want to reach the end.