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

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"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.

RIP Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015

"Thank you for all the clever silliness, Terry Pratchett."

- a friend, posted on Facebook, which I think sums it up as well as anyone could 

My Facebook feed is already filling up with friends' tributes. Because those are the kind of friends I have.

Bugger. Not that we all didn't know it was coming of course.

I think I was just about the right age, and reading the right sort of fiction, to catch on to Terry Pratchett's work a few years before he became a phenomenon. Not that I begrudged it, in the manner that you're supposed to when a favourite band or writer becomes massively successful after a smaller, cult success when you were one of the ones who knew about them before everybody else.

And besides, there were plenty of others who knew how good he was long before I did. And plenty more who probably never read a word he wrote.

I am ridiculously poor at updating this blog with anything like the kind of regularity I would like, but I have managed to write about Terry Pratchett's work twice. On both occasions, I founds things in it which I had problems with. In the second piece I almost put in a note saying something to the extent of, "Look, honest, I do actually really like his work!" But hopefully that was obvious. I mean, you wouldn't read that much of a highly prolific author's work if you didn't fundamentally love it.

Discworld are some of the books that made me. He's a profoundly comforting writer. And I honestly don't mean that as a slight. We need writers which provide comfort. I've always loved just spending time in his imaginative world. And neither is this to say that there wasn't also profound comedy and good sense about the world present within his work. And silliness, too. Mustn't forget that. He was one of the greats, someone whose work is part of who I am.

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This may be a statement of something which to others is just the bleeding obvious, but it only occurred to me fairly recently: the realisation that the authors you grow up reading, that mean so much to you, helped to form who you are, even might be part of the reason why reading and literature is such a major part of your life: they're all from earlier generations. They may in fact already be long dead in fact, but living authors, when you're a child or an adolescent, they belong to your parents' generation. Or might in fact be older still. So, barring tragic accidents, you are going to outlive them.

Like I say, this might be obvious to most, but it struck me a while back. However much those writers which you discover in adulthood mean to you - and I don't think I've never stopped discovering new writers; at least, not yet - there's always something special to those you discovered in early adolescence, which will never be replicated.

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So farewell Terry Pratchett. Thank you for all the joy. And all the clever silliness.

"...all that had been simple, unquestioned and changeless changed."

Attia Hosain, Phoenix Fled

A few more points:

- Firstly, it seems that I was right. There's an interview with Attia Hosain from 1991, where she says that she 'did not read much about Urdu literature except when I had to', and was 'totally influenced by the West'. So in her introduction to Virago's 1988 reissue, Anita Desai is constructing a rather facile opposition between India and 'the West' in emphasising the supposed influence of Urdu literature on her work.

- In my previous post I suggested that these stories were 'works of memory'. It is interesting that Attia Hosain produced so little fiction. Her other published work consists of a single novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and a cookery book, Cooking the Indian Way (in collaboration with Sita Pasricha), which I imagine must have seemed terribly exotic when it appeared in 1967! There are lots of reasons why an author only publishes one or two works, and Attia Hosain did leave behind more stories, and an unfinished second novel. She was also a broadcaster and journalist, but her son Waris does suggest there may be more to her literary silence following the publication of her novel.

According to her biography she was producing stories as early as the late 30s. It's not clear if that includes all of the stories that were published in Phoenix Fled. Several of them were clearly written after 1947, since they reference the violence of Partition. It's the appearance of the collection in 1953, 5 or 6 years after she made the decision to remain in England rather than move to Pakistan, that I'm trying to construct this narrative around. Ultimately, it's a question of biography, which I don't have quite enough information to answer. Still, whenever they were actually written, they were at least published in 1953. For any reader then or since, these are stories of a world which was and is located in the past. The act of publication works as the means of recuperation.

- As I've alluded to above, the historical moment which separates the past that these stories depict from the present of the 50s in which they first appeared as part of a book is not just Independence in 1947, but more significantly, the violence of Partition which accompanied it. Since reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns a while back, I've become interested in this notion that in the north of India in particular, despite the huge differences between the two faiths, there was actually a comfortable mixing and sharing between the cultures of Hindus and Muslims, a shared culture that was to a large extent ripped apart and destroyed in the aftermath of Partition. And that there were Muslims who believed in this shared culture and were consequently opposed to the creation of Pakistan. Especially nowadays, I don't imagine that it's a voice which is often heard in either India or Pakistan.

The two stories which reference the violence do so obliquely. It's so subtle in fact, that I even had to reread the final few pages of the title story just to work out what was happening: it ends with the beginning of an act of violence, which is clearly the horrors of Partition. More effecting still is the bleak narrative of a young girl in the pertinently titled 'After the Storm'. Her account of what she has experienced emerges in fragments as she struggles to describe her experience. Experience which, mercifully perhaps, she appears unable to fully comprehend. The narrator who is encouraging her to talk similarly looks away from what is being described: the central moment of historical and personal trauma can't be faced directly.

- One final point, one I'm not sure that I know how to fully articulate: it's been strange to read this collection in the same week that also saw the transmission of the harrowing documentary 'India's Daughter' about Jyoti Singh, a film which I've not been able to get out of my mind since I saw it on Wednesday night. I suppose there's little which directly links them, other than my encountering both in the same week. Both are stories which have come out of India, separated by decades, the one fiction, the other tragically, horrifically real. Many of Attia Hosain's stories are concerned with women's experience of a deeply patriarchal culture, and it's difficult not to find the concerns of these very different works resonating together in my mind.

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...and here's a wonderful connection between things I'm interested in: her son, Waris Hussein, was director for the first four episodes of Doctor Who, as well as a later serial 'Marco Polo'. He seems to be an interesting person in his own right, but of course, it's being the very first director of Doctor Who for which he'll always be most remembered. I love his own memories of it:

"[I was] a graduate from Cambridge with honours, and you're directing this piece about cavemen in skins...I thought, 'Where have I landed up in my life?'"

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On the face of it, it seems such a delightfully odd juxtaposition. Stories of pre-partition feudal North India, and the first story of what now seems to be an almost quintessentially English science fiction show for the BBC. The Sceenonline profile argues for a consistent interest in 'female psychology' throughout Waris Hussain's work. Certainly what I've read of his mother's work suggests a concern with the roles available to women within a feudal patriarchal society.

In her introduction to my edition, Anita Desai tries to make a connection with the Mughal school of miniature painting and the influence of Urdu. This feels rather a stretch to me - a touch of exoticism for a Western audience that is being reintroduced to an Indian author - but even allowing for that, there's surely equally a modernist influence. A concern with the confrontation between an older feudal India and modernity. These are also works of memory, describing a world which by that point no longer existed - written after Attia Hosain decided to remain in England following Partition in 1947. So the bridge between tradition and modernity, which I'm rather artificially setting up here with my somewhat comical juxtaposition, was present in her life.

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Other family connections: her niece is the Pakistani author and journalist Muneeza Shamsie, and her great niece the novelist Kamila Shamsie. Quite a family!

I'm reminded of something I once read in an interview with Martin Amis, when he was promoting his autobiography. Part of the the inspiration for writing Experience was that he wanted to record his relationship with his father. This fact, two successful writers in the family, one the parent to the other, was a 'special case'. Even at the time, I thought this was off. Just of the top of my head I could think of Dumas pere et fils. Now I can see how his claim is part of the romanticising of the writing life. As though plenty of people don't follow their parents into similar or related careers.

And what about siblings? The Brontes? A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Vidia and Shiva Naipaul? Or is it only parents and children that count. The literal act of generation paralleling the metaphorical one of literary production.

It's also about opportunity. How many writers had parents who nursed ambitions, but never made it into print? Or who might have done once or twice? Or worked in journalism? How many mothers or grandmothers had gifts for storytelling, but never even dreamed of making it into print? So yes, I think it's a rather gendered claim which sees only certain kinds of writing, of literary art, as worthy of importance.

As so often with Amis, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd been a bit less impressed with himself, he'd have been a better writer.

Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy

"The Lenin Library in Moscow doesn't close until ten in the evening. For me this is a sign of civilisation. I was working on the ground floor, between two bookcases full of old books with green and red bindings, next to a window which looked out on to a park..." 

Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy, Nella Bielski (trans. John Berger & Lisa Appignanesi)

[I would have liked to find a more appropriate picture to illustrate the quote, but it was the best I could do from a few minutes googling. Besides, I rather like it for some reason.

[The novel takes the form of a monologue of a middle aged woman, while she sits in a Moscow hospital next to her mother, who is dying of cancer. Written in the late 70s - like her author she's part of a generation that was evacuated to the Urals during the Second World war, and has since survived the death of Stalin, Khrushchev, and has now reached the point where the Soviet system was starting it's slow decline into obsolescence. Her account of her life circles around the figures of her absent husband, a Frenchman who has recently left her, her young daughter, her parents, the life she and her friends have managed to live in spite of all the political repression they faced under Communism. It's concerned principally with all that's left over, with all that can't be accounted for by any ideology.]