Isobel Colegate, The Summer of the Royal Visit

Allow me to begin with a digression about Gosford Park. Whilst it’s certainly a great film, it has one major flaw. No, I’m not referring to Stephen Fry’s inspector, although his performance does feel feel like a major tonal misjudgement with the rest of the narrative. An intrusion into this naturalistic and closely observed world of a character who surely properly belongs in a parody of Agatha Christie. In fact, I’d argue that it almost manages to unbalance the rest of the film. No, the film’s real major flaw is retrospective: the boost that it appears it gave to the career of Julian Fellowes. I’ve read somewhere that little of his actual script survives, that it was used primarily as a basis for the improvisations of the cast. If that is the case, then we should be grateful that the producers engaged the services of Robert Altman, giving the ageing American filmmaker the opportunity to produce a final late (almost) masterpiece.

Nevertheless, Fellows’s script shared in the adulation - didn’t it win awards? - and now we have Downton Abbey. Personally I’d thought that Downton Abbey was nothing more than recycled story lines stolen from Upstairs, Downstairs, only this time from the point of view of the masters. A waste of my time, so I’ve not bothered to watch it. Only a lot of people appear to have latched onto Isobel Colegate’s 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, as a source, taking it as a guide to work out what might happen in future episodes (although surely the end is easy to predict; the aristocracy declines and the house is now administered by the National Trust, assuming it wasn’t demolished after the Second World War. In other words, History happens, despite whatever the nostalgic longings of the creators and audience might wish for). The Shooting Party has recently been republished as a Penguin Classics, with an admiring introduction from Fellowes (Fellowes seems to have a sideline in providing introductions to books which can be made to fit into his idealised reactionary view of an idealised British past), although I think I’m correct in saying that he hadn't actually had read the book when he created Downton Abbey.

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The Shooting Party was itself made into a film in 1985 - in outline it sounds very like that ur-text of the country house narrative, Le Regle de Jue - and won awards. It’s clearly the work of hers which is going to be remembered before the rest of her work. My paperback of her later 1991 novel already advertises itself on the cover as being by the ‘Author of…’. No doubt because of the film.

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“I can do all sorts of voices. I’m virtually a ventriloquist.”

What I wasn’t expecting to find when I started reading The Summer of the Royal Visit was such a visionary novel. A novel which is much closer in feel to the writing of Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt than the kind of historical fiction with which I was mentally associating her work. It makes me eager to actually read The Shooting Party, and wonder what kind of novel I’m going to find.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t provide plenty of the pleasures of historical fiction. There’s plenty of finely judged detail of the past. We’re in a period which is towards the end of Victoria’s reign, in a provincial city which is now a faded reflection of its former glory. I take it to be Bath, with the references to the healing waters, but it’s only ever referred to as ‘the City’, or else more intimately as ‘our City’. Two larger entwined public events overshadow the narrative: the royal visit of the title in which Victoria blesses the opening of a new library and presides over a royal procession through the City, and an architectural competition over the design for a new hotel which is at least partly intended to revive the fortunes and reverse the decline of the City.

In the foreground we have a varied cast which includes the dignitaries and provincial nobility of the City, retired soldiery, a deceitful scholar engaged in a study of the Druids, a theosophist, a priest struggling with his faith, and a youthful poet who is suffering from consumption.

Described like that, it might easily sound as though many of the characters are all late Victorian cliches. There’s something in that I suppose, although Colegate is careful not to simply give in to cliche. Her consumptive poet, Peter Tilsley, dies before producing any work of significance. Yet far from being an undiscovered genius, a Keats at the other end of the century, we're explicitly told that his work is mostly sentimental and without a great deal of merit. He’s actually the type who longs to produce work of real visionary quality, but who simply lacks the talent. We can say that all great writers start with the longing to be a writer, but there must be as many (if not more) who have the same longing but are never able to achieve their ambitions. Sometimes this will be because they are unable or unwilling to put in the work required, but as often it must be because they simply lacked the necessary talent.

But in many ways, these are as much our ‘cliches’ of the Victorian past, an attempt to rediscover the doubt and sexuality that we imagine must have lurked behind the stiff facade of Victorian culture as it's come down to us. The pieces that novelists of the time were unable (or unwilling) to include. The central character in the novel (if it can be said to have one) is one Stephen Collingwood, a priest who has buried himself in his vocation following the death of his wife in childbirth, but finds himself unable to properly connect with the impoverished parishioners among whom he lives, and finds himself doubting his faith.

There’s also a modern narrator providing us with the story the story. A retired historian, he’s a familiar figure from works such as Graham Swift’s Waterland and Maureen Duffy’s Capital, equally visionary novels with ambiguous claims on history. Remaining nameless throughout, he intrudes at various points to discourse on both the past and his late twentieth-century present. His motives for researching this tale of his city stem from his reaction against the contemporary political situation of the world; he is “…simply looking for someone who went this way before me and left a sign on the wall beside the road.”

Ever so quietly then, this is a profoundly anti-Thatcher novel (it was published in 1991, after all). It speaks for the value of community, a value which is extended to all. It's not at all the kind of reactionary nostalgia which produces a work like Downton Abbey, but a novel that digs into the late Victorian past, exposing its nerve endings and moral failings. In fact, much of the material feels like it could  easily belong in an up to date novel about the contemporary early nineties, only displaced back a century or more. One of the secrets lurking behind the Victorian facade is the abuse of children, an issue that became incredibly prevalent in various parts of 90s culture. Arguably we still have a culture which is obsessed with childhood, for better or worse.

The other aspect of 90s culture, which we seem to have moved past in some ways as it's simultaneously become a part of the cultural air, is the popular desemination of post modernism. The winning hotel design for instance, first seen in a vision from the novel’s fake psychic, Madame Sofia, consists of, "Portals and porticos, arches, window on window, an immense thing, and then we have turrets and lookout posts and what can seem to be an little houses from Simla on the roof.” No doubt this is a parody of late Victorian eclecticism, but in it’s profusion of details and borrowed influences, it also feels inescapably postmodern. Elsewhere the city is repeatedly likened to a stage set.

The are no grand narratives. Nothing is certain here. We might even define it as a kind of ‘radical’ nostalgia.

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In theory (and goodness, hasn't post modernism generated a lot of theory!), post modernism elides any stable difference between the present and the past. I don't feel that that has ever been my experience though. The proliferation of pastiches and knowingly fake histories that postmodernism has produced seems rather to serve to reinforce a huge distance between the present and the past. It's a very discomforting sensibility.

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I’ll leave you with our narrator’s lovely, melancholy consideration of history's losses:

You can’t teach history for thirty years and be against change; equally you can’t help noticing that it nearly always brings loss as well as gain. The ratio is hard to determine afterwards and almost impossible at the time. 

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Actually, no, one more thing which I haven’t managed to fit into the main body of my review. Partly because I find it so confusing.

This is also a novel which is concerned to reclaim and acknowledge the visionary aspects of Victorian culture (hence the theosophist, Madame Sofia, and the research into Druids).

But this also creates a problem, in the character of Petchumah, the South Indian wife of Wilf, the retired soldier with whom Stephen Colegate lodges. The novel is clearly acknowledging the reality of Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that I think is often overlooked: the relationships which occurred between soldiers and women from the cultures they were ostensibly oppressing. It's not a meeting of equals between the two cultures, rather it's an acknowledgement of the messiness of humans, the fact that people can't be fitted straightforwardly into a convenient cliche. Consequently, Petchumah has been brought back to our cold island. We hear little of her own voice; mostly, she's talked about by other characters, including her husband. Neither of them are principal characters in the text. But I still feel that her presence in the text is one of its strengths, because it jars nicely with our  typical stereotype of what late Victorian reality and culture was like.

Like everyone else in the town she is viewing the royal procession, accompanied by her husband, Peter Tilsley and Stephen Colgate. As the monarch passes, Peter’s enthusiasm gets the better of him, and the writing rises to a genuinely visionary pitch:

Petchumah, so pushed forward, put her hands together in her traditional greeting and bowed her head in homage. The black-clad figure turned, leant forward, seemed to speak; the royal hands - both royal hands - were half outstretched. In this small northern city the might and mystery of India, the gardens, the temples, palaces, the tiger-haunted forests, the snow-covered hills, the stone-carved elephants four thousand years old, the sacred rivers, the merciless deserts, the ancient cruel gods, bowed in homage in the person of Petchumah in her cerise and blue and silver sari before the plump elderly widow of German extraction into whose slightly protuberant eyes an extraordinary tenderness had come. Again and again Petchumah made her obeisance. Again and again the palms, the plains, the crowded bazaars, the ancient suffering, the distant wisdom based themselves, and the outstretched hands seemed to wish to bless, and the royal lips when they moved to say - or at least Peter said that was what they had said - ‘Beloved India.’

It’s really hard to know quite how to take this passage, to understand what’s going on here. India is reduced to a series of familiar cliches (and it all sounds like rather a lot to place on the shoulders a poor single individual too). At the same time, Victoria’s mystique is punctured. Throughout her appearance in the novel the Queen's magnificence simply dazzles all of the residents of the City with whom she comes into contact. Here, we see her as she was, the elderly woman who would have much preferred to stay hidden away in mourning and had to be forced to engage with her subjects. At the same time, any safe notion of Englishness is complicated by the noting of the Queen’s ethnicity. So, seriously, what the hell is going on here? There’s undoubtedly something deeply offensive about it. But it also feels like an extraordinary balancing act? The writing is genuinely stirring, if also somewhat mystifying.

If anything, it feels as though the writing has got out of control of the author here. The novel contains several other genuinely visionary moments which are much more successfully achieved.

But it also alerts us to a potential pitfall of the visionary mode: it all depends on just whose vision you’re in.

Paul Magrs - Marked for Life

Start with details which take me back, which situate the novel in time and place. It was the 90s:

Mark wanted to explain to her: It's not a joke, love. This is where you begin to be catered for. Your Local Education Authority takes pains to shoehorn you from this point on; starting with this desk and this chair, horizons to suit your current size. Later there'll be free school dinners, field trips, exams, then either a student grant or a flat of your own. Sally had turned up her nose, burst into tears.

They were outside the subdued window display at Woolworth's and Mark gave a slow twirl.

Iris put the telly on. Christmas programs, Something brash on ITV, foreign cartoons on Channel Four, opera on Two, and on One a sit-com Christmas special shot abroad. 

Nobody has a mobile phone, either.

Written only twenty years ago, and yet it almost feels like ancient history.

So, by this point, I've now read what feels like a reasonably representative spread of Paul Magrs's work. And they're all firsts of one kind of another: his first effort to write Doctor Who (The Scarlet Empress); his first Effie and Brenda novel (Never the Bride); and now this, his first first, if you like. His first novel, and the first of his Phoenix Court trilogy. A series which appears to be linked as much by setting as by recurring characters; the place name Phoenix Court is never mentioned in his debut, suggesting that the succeeding books came more as an afterthought - what do I do next? - rather than stemming form any fully formed plan at the outset.

But to come back to where I started, this feels very much a novel of the 90s, not just in it's details, the time in which it's set, but also in its politics, in the way it's an utterly queer book, with a climax that ends with a happy family which is constructed rather than natural.

But to back track again: the title refers to Mark, tattooed from head to toe, who - thanks to a major traffic accident involving his lover Tony - ends up married to Sam. Sam has a lover, Bob, a policeman whom she also met as another consequence of that accident in which her best friend died. When Tony, who was thought to be in prison, sending provocative letters to his former lover, kidnaps Sally - Mark and Sam's daughter - everyone's lives end up being thrown into the air to reassemble in a slightly different form form by the novel's finish.

The attitude reminds me a little of what I find in Pedro Almodovar's films. Not just the queerness. The resilience: no matter how painful the events a character goes through, ultimately they'll survive, and pick themselves up. Also involved are Sam's mother Peggy and her lover Iris Wildthyme. Iris, of course, went on to reappear in Magrs's Doctor Who work - a source of irritation to some fans from what I can gather - before spinning off into her own line of fiction. Playful and mischievous, there she's a self-conscious parody of the Doctor, described by Philip Sandifer as an archetypal fag hag. Here though she's a much more Rabelasian figure, a one time novelist who boasts of being hundreds of years old. Her age roots this very modern story in an older landscape - rural and cyclic - buried beneath our ragged modernity. Iris is not a time lord here - the model is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, explicitly referenced in the text - although she does have 'capacious' pockets, a legacy of a childhood spent reading Target novelisations, which Magrs acknowledges in his afterword to The Scarlet Empress.

Less camp, more queer. Although arguably those are related concepts? I can't claim to be an expert. But yes, as I've said already, this is a very queer book. Mark's marriage to Sally is described as a second coming out. Iris is a character who seems quite determined to transcend any boundaries she encounters, whether we believe her stories or not. There's more magic elsewhere in the narrative. Since Mark last knew him, Tony has become invisible. The magic realism feels representative of the queer lives at the novel's centre. As I understand it, Queer politics and theories appear to contain a utopian element, which can feel both inspiring as well as difficult to reconcile with ordinary lives. Here the magic, the queerness, is rooted in a very mundane North of England, and somehow things do work out. Which is just lovely.

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It was the 90s: I've said somewhere else on this blog that I've come to realise recently how the culture of the 90s was deeply pessimistic, a landscape of serial killers and child abuse and other horrors. But I'm also now coming to realise how it was also a culture marked by a self conscious hedonism, and of an opening to difference: what I've recently seen described as the 'hope of a cosmopolitan and syncretic civilisational politics'. Undoubtedly this also gave rise to a fair amount of silliness and dubious propositions or beliefs, but I'm now realising that I miss that hope. It would be nice to think there was something positive we could salvage from that decade.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Possibly the hype with which it's publication was accompanied is one of the reasons why I avoided White Teeth at the time, although friends lived near to the area of London in which it's set. Finally getting around to reading it all these years later, I'm reading it from another vantage point again, from the other side of the barrier that it confronts in it's narrative of the intertwined histories of three families of different racial backgrounds in post-war Britain. I'm married to a woman who grew up in a different country, whose skin is a different colour to mine, part of an Indian family which stretches half way around the world, just as she is now part of an English family which is stretched across England and Wales. I'm part of the 'multicultural Britain' of which lazy journalists claimed the book was a celebration. Not that I ever walk around thinking about myself in such terms, because how ridiculously pretentious would that be? If I ever reflect on my marriage, it's first and foremost to acknowledge how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful person. Where she was born, where I was born, are irrelevancies.

Whether that actually has much effect on my reading experience I'm not really sure. In fact, White Teeth rather took me back to the time it was published. Even the RRP (£6.99) on the back of the edition I picked up from a charity shop reminds me of an earlier time in the history of the British publishing industry, when I began buying books rather than getting them from the library, when books weren't so expensive. That period towards the end of the nineties for a few years when it was somehow 'cool' to be Indian. As though that was something which counts as a choice. More accurate perhaps to say that it was a moment when certain TV programs, films, books and music were considered to be cool because they could be defined as 'Indian'. Bollywood was filtering through into popular conciousness, even if most people still hadn't actually seen a Bollywood film. We got the stereotype though. We had a generation of British Asians who'd grown up in this country, some of whom, like anyone else, were now producing culture which reflected their experiences. Actually, you could say that it was part of a trend which started earlier, as far back as the early eighties. And of course, this was a very muddled sense of what 'Indian' actually means, since alongside such things as Bend It Like Beckham, Goodness Gracious Me and Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha', it included East is East, a film about a British Pakistani family living in Bradford in the seventies. It's not wrong exactly, since 'India' is a name for both the country and the sub continent of which that country is the largest part, but it does feel entirely in keeping with that old British assumption, 'Oh, they're all the same!' Zadie Smith makes a joke out of this general confusion with her book's Asian family coming from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal), part of the novel's general theme of the indeterminacy of national or cultural roots, their unreliability as a guide for the present.

White Teeth was definitely positioned by cultural commentators as being a part of that moment, the author herself rapidly placed on a pedestal, and the book quickly adapted into a TV series I never watched. It's perhaps no surprise that her follow up was a novel about the culture of modern celebrity and then after that she moved to America both literally and metaphorically (her third novel, On Beauty which transplants Howard's End to the American Midwest). And of course, none of these things were exactly 'Indian'. Goodness Gracious Me flopped when it was shown in India, because it was essentially British humour. Many of the jokes depended on the negotiation with the dominant white British culture.

Of course, Zadie Smith isn't Indian either, born to a Jamaican mother and white British father (and as far as I can tell from the interviews I've read, she identifies herself as black and British). Perhaps my memory is somewhat at fault here, but if commentators did position the book within a narrative where it might not quite belong, you can see why, when the character who comes to dominate the novel's multiracial cast is the 'Bangledeshi' Samad Iqbal. A genuinely moving portrait of an immigrant to Britain who is terrified of being swamped by the people and the culture of his new country, a neat reversal of the common complaint often heard from this country's white racism. Both stylistically and in terms of subject matter with a focus on immigration, Zadie Smith is obviously stepping somewhat in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie, which will no doubt also have helped the identification, although her style is equally indebted to Martin Amis. But it's also obviously, confidently her. Never swamped by any obvious influence.

Reading Zadie Smith's interviews I found I really warmed to her as a person. She comes across as very likable, also curious and detirmined. All admirable qualities of course, but part of it may also simply be my age. I'm in my early 30s now, and so far I've read nothing by an author younger than me (Gwendoline Riley was born the same year, so is probably a few months younger); little enough by authors who might be just a few years older. So Zadie Smith is (almost) my contemporary. The viewpoint the novel has on the 80s - a decade I both grew up in, and of which I have read a good many fictional representations - especially the scenes set in school, is one I recognise more than any other. It's an odd way to judge a novel's success, especially since I went to very different schools at the opposite end of the country, but there's a personal closeness here at times. White Teeth is hardly an autobiographical text, but she's clearly used some of her own memories for the texture of the world as the narrative comes nearer to the present. Obviously Irie Jones isn't Zadie Smith, but she shares the author's heritage. What I've read Zadie Smith describe as her desire to possess an English literary culture from which she felt excluded is metamorphosed into her character Irie Jones' desire for the middle class culture of the Chalfens, the characters who are the novel's broadest caricatures. She's hardly the first writer to reflect how intimately bound up this country's literary culture is with class. Nor is it an anxiety which is exclusively felt by working class individuals.

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Whilst I was reading it, my wife kept asking me why the book was called White Teeth. I couldn't answer her really, and the novel never really gives us a clear answer, beyond using it as a metaphor for chapter titles. If I had to guess I'd say that put crudely our teeth are the one bit of us which is the same colour no matter what the colour of our skin. More interesting is the way it's employed as a metaphor for exploring the personal histories of several of her characters, and the intersections of those histories with larger national histories. Christening these chapters the 'root canal' for the character concerned makes an obvious point. I've never experienced a root canal, but I understand they're supposed to be painful, and so it proves here. History is always something traumatic, something which the novel's ending, flashing forward to the eve of the millenium, seems to offer some hope for a respite from. The ending feels rather rushed (oddly, given the novel's length!), appearing to suggest that finally we can escape our personal and national histories, and might be the least satisfactory part of the book. Not that Zadie Smith suggests such an 'escape' is at all easy, given the traumas her characters are subject to, but it's a hope which seems peculiarly typical of the nineties to me.

By which I mean, the culture of the nineties in Britain, as I'm coming to understand it, was one marked by a deep anxiety about the past. The past became something which was both recycled endlessly in popular culture, largely as pastiche, and also something to be feared. We were a culture which had successfully triumphed over History, which may help to explain why towards the end of the decade we elected a reactionary government which was in constant denial of its past as a left wing political party.

In itself though, the desire to escape from the suffocation of the past is one with which it is easy to feel sympathetic. The suspicion towards history which the novel articulates at various points is not a wholesale rejection of history, but it does suggest that it is generally untrustworthy. It's hard though to see as it were, what comes next, to see the point we might reach supposing we can escape our histories. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why we need fiction. So the ending feels a little rushed and unsatisfactory, but otherwise this is a magnificent romp through post-war British history. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it!