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.