Gene Wolfe quote

Inspired by the sense of theatre I have often been forced to cultivate, I raised my arms, spread my hands, and gave them my blessing, telling them to be kind to one another and as happy as they could. That is really all the blessing we godlings can ever give, though no doubt the Increate can do much more. 

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (7)

So, first of all, lets take a quick look at the cover, illustrated by one Janina Ede, an artist with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar:

I really don't have very much to say, other than, isn't it just gorgeous? The sort of neo-romantic illustration that feels very tied to its period. Or so it seems to me, at least. Also the sort of illustrative tradition which has been largely replaced by computer generated imagery. It's gorgeousness is added to for me by the fact of my copy being such a beaten up second hand volume. It's very materiality redolent of an older period of publishing children's literature.

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Unlike some of Penelope Farmer's other books, Charlotte Sometimes is still in print, if only because of the song it inspired by Robert Smith. It's actually the second of two sequels to the earlier The Summer Birds, although chronologically the second of the sequence. I'm fairly sure I may have encountered her work in my first year of secondary school; a later novel, Thicker Than Water, sounds familiar from it's description. Unlike Tom's Midnight Garden, with which it has features in common, this is not a book I even tried to read as a child, but certainly it's one that I wish I'd read.

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It's another timeslip tale from post-war England. It gives me the sense I might be on to something in my earlier post when I tried to suggest that the past - or in the case of Tom's Midnight Garden, specifically the Victorian past - must still have felt 'close' to many people in the period in which this type of story appears to have been so popular. In the sense at least that so much more of the material fabric of the Victorian period must have remained visible than it does now after so much redevelopment of British cities. It was in the post-war period that saw the large scale destruction of much of this materiality through redevelopment, in addition to the scar that bombing during the war had already left on many of our cities.

Penelope Farmer's beautiful, subtle novel doesn't go back quite as far as that, but the transportation of it's heroine to the end of the First World War literalises this sense of the nearness of the past through it's means of timeslip. Charlotte only needs to sleep in a particular bed in her boarding school dormitory in order to switch places with Clare, another young girl at school in 1918, towards the end of the War, and whom she physically resembles. Each night the two girls find they switch places. Consequently each of them has to navigate a social environment which is subtly unfamiliar, highlighting the changes between the past of 1918, and the present of the late 60s that Charlotte longs to return to once she finds herself trapped in the past. Since the novel is told entirely from Charlotte's perspective, we only hear Claire's voice through the entries in her diary which she leaves for her replacement, but while the social world and rituals of a school enables them to survive, both girls clearly struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar time in which they find themselves.

Looked at over literally it feels just a little unlikely that a bed would really survive four decades of use and still be residing in the same room, but that enables the book to achieve the little narrative suspense it has. Whilst the room in which the bed resides is a dormitory in Charlotte's time, in 1918, Claire and her younger sister Emily are sleeping in a sick room, before they move to the stern foster home they were supposed to be have been billeted with initially. It's this move which traps Charlotte and Clare in the wrong time periods, necessitating Charlotte breaking into the school, which she still attends as a day girl, in order to sleep in the bed and be returned to her own time.

The sister of one of the girls, Emily quickly realises that her sister is being replaced every other day. One of the things which is most fascinating about the novel is the sense in which much of our identity is socially created through the pressures and expectations of the people surrounding us. The author has apparently related this uncertainty of identity to her own experience of being a twin, but it doesn't feel nearly so specific as that. Surely most of us run up against this at some point in childhood, the realisation that you are expected by family and friends to behave in certain ways, and hold particular interests, because that's what they've always expected from you. It's an almost existential moment, the realisation of just how hard it can be to change oneself in the face of others' expectations.

The choice of 1918, towards the end of the war (victory is announced late on in the narrative), that Charlotte travels to, also feels unusual. When depicted in fiction, or at least this is my sense, the home front of the First World War is usually seen from the point of view of the returning soldier on leave, unable to make those he's returning to understand precisely what he is experiencing in the horror of the war. Inevitably perhaps, if the focus of most fiction of the war is concerned with the experience of the soldiers. Here, we see something very different, the experience of all those ordinary civilians left behind, making do in a depleted world, ground down by years of a conflict which is taking place elsewhere. The closest the narrative comes to the experience of the soldiers is a long line of returned injured men derailing from a hospital train, beautifully illustrated by one Chris Connor.

In this, the illustrations are a fair match to a narrative which is concerned with small moments of individual perception and ordinary life, and with a sense of a lived past, which is still, just, even without the magic of a time-slip, able to be glimpsed in the world of the late 60s. Right at the end, a passage illuminates this feeling beautifully:

The bus went by modern, noisy roads. But when it came to the river and crossed over the bridge into the town, just for a moment, looking down the river, Charlotte could almost have believed it was the past, 1918, again. The pigeons and ducks and gulls there looked no different, nor did the faded, once elegant buildings with their elaborate cornices. The stucco was cracked, the gardens full of weeds, just as they had been then, after four years of war.

It's hard to imagine that you could make such a comparison these days. The houses would all have been restored, the gardens no doubt better maintained in preparation for some national gardening competition, the village likely a dormitory town for the city of London. The school might not even be a school any more, but perhaps converted in to some other use. The village would look 'old', but remain only a simulacrum of a past that we might imagine could once still be fully experienced.

An unfinished 'review'

My first post of the year, in February no less, and it's a fragment of something which I never finished. And now I never will, because it's opening section refers to contemporary events which are now no longer current.

I've put 'review' in scare quotes in the post title, because I'm not sure how many of the posts on this blog could really be described very accurately as 'reviews'. Or even if that's what I'm intending to write. I do worry that some of what I write is little more than a conversation with myself, and will hold little interest to anyone reading. But then I don't have much sense of an audience for this blog ('Hi!' if you are actually reading), and I don't think I post frequently enough to actually attract much of an audience.

Part of the reason why I don't post as much as I'd like is because I've increasingly found that should be relatively short appreciations become much longer pieces in the writing, taking up more time than I can really devote to them. That's certainly part of what happened here; I barely even start to talk about the book.

Still, I think I am trying to engage with an important point here, however ineptly. It's an idea which I've often come across, that the person of an author - whatever unpleasant opinions they may hold, or whatever unsavoury things they've done - should make no difference to one's appreciation of a work. In principle I agree, and it's surely necessary up to a point. But the experience of encountering a work where we know something about the person who created it will surely always colour our responses. And as a consequence, we might refuse to read something, or listen to a particular band, or watch a tv show or film. It's not that I think that's somehow wrong or even right, it's just inevitable, part of the filter we use to navigate the culture which is available to us.

So, anyway, for what little it might be worth:

William Mayne – A Game of Dark 

The decision to read some writers, whether we like it or not, make moral demands upon us. Of course, in principal, I agree with the proposition that creative works should exist independently of the people who create them. The fact that you disapprove of the behaviour of any particular writer shouldn’t automatically disbar them from writing a novel you consider to be a masterpiece. It should never be a reason not to read an author.

In practise, however, I don’t think it’s nearly so simple. We all make such decisions, and provided we don’t attempt to make this into a grand principal, disapproving of others for enjoying a work we have forbidden ourselves for whatever reason, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. These are personal decisions we make for ourselves, one of the many ways in which we decide what we’re going to read, or listen to, or watch. 

Until a friend posted a link to a news story about the singer, I’m not sure I’d even heard of the band lostprophets, but I can well imagine that many fans are revaluating their relationship with the band’s music. For all that that seems unfair on the other musicians involved who have committed no crime. I’ve made a couple of similar decisions just recently. When I heard of how Noel Fielding had inspired an incident of cyber bullying on twitter which led to a young woman attempting to take her own life. And recently the comics blogosphere has been made aware of writer/artist Brian Wood’s repeated sexual harassment of women at comics conventions. In both cases, the individuals only compounded things through their responses. Noel Fielding deleted his incriminating tweets, whilst Brian Wood issued a poor apology which failed to even address all of the complaints against him. 

So I’ve gotten rid of my Mighty Boosh DVDs, but on the other hand I’m still reading the Conan the Barbarian comic which Brian Wood is writing. I’ve actually given some thought to this, justifying it to myself that I’ve liked much of the art on the series, as well as his writing, and besides, there’s only a few issues to go. Yes, it’s a pretty mealy mouthed justification, but then who, apart from myself, am I trying to justify these decisions to? I don’t pretend to be morally spotless, and if I wanted to find a reason for not reading something, I’d be much better off looking at the text. 

I’m not comparing the behaviour of any of these individuals, or explicitly judging one worse than the other. In practise any such decision is going to be taken in isolation, partly effected by other considerations. Perhaps I just don’t like The Mighty Boosh as much as I thought I did when I first saw it? Perhaps as a man I just don’t believe or value the complaints of a woman making claims of sexual harassment? Well, actually I do, and if I am going to read the last few issues of his Conan series, then I’m still not going to seek out any of Brian Wood’s work in the future without feeling rather ashamed of myself. It’s probably fortunate that I’m not interested in many of his other comics anyway.

These are individual decisions I’m making. In both cases, it’s really only my own choice that they call for an ethical decision in the first place. I could just ignore these issues if I wanted, and I don’t think that would make me a bad person. So my opening sentence is incorrect. Books only make demands upon us through their contents. The specific acts of any writer only affect us if we come to know about them, if we allow them to do so. In practise, it’s messy, because while we most likely read plenty of books written by people we disapprove of, it’s only when we come to know about specific things, or specific statements, which cross what for us is a line on acceptable behaviour, that we’re going to want to make such a choice.

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William Mayne is another writer I never encountered as a child, but The Game of Dark certainly fits fairly comfortably alongside the kind of children’s fantasy I did enjoy. As far as I can tell from a brief survey of amazon, all his work is now out of print, so anyone reading him now, as an adult, is going to have to go looking for his work, and is almost certainly going to know about the nature of his crimes before they read, or even re-read anything he’s written. Clearly a collective decision has been taken between publishers, librarians and parents, and given the nature of his crimes, that’s not at all surprising. 

I picked this up in a charity shop for 50 pence, but of course I knew who he was when I did so. Obviously, nobody with any conscience could approve of the crimes for which was convicted, so if we read a book by him, then we’re choosing to not make an ethical decision. Assuming there’s an ethical decision to be made. It’s not as though a book can have this effect. The fact that he’s now dead somehow makes this easier. 

If I had tried to read The Game of Dark when I was a child, I do wonder if I would have finished it.

And there I broke off.