Eric Ambler - The Levanter

Another review from amazon:

Eric Ambler – The Levanter

Perhaps this is only my own ignorance of the genre, but an unreliable narrator is not something I would have expected to find in a spy story. Not that this is exactly what we get, but still, the competing perspectives of the three narrators in this novel mean that central protagonist Michael Howell is nicely de-centred, and we quickly learn that we shouldn't quite trust his opinion of himself. For despite what the back cover would have us believe, he is not really apolitical, being complicit with Syrian government officials long before the mechanics of the novel's plot involves him with Palestinian terrorists. 

Nor is this exactly a spy story either, with the spies largely kept to the margins of the narrative, the focus remaining on Michael Howell, for whom the text is an attempt to exonerate himself from charges his unwilling involvement has brought about from the international community, and on the terrorist leader Ghaled. Ambler's depiction of Ghaled has the feel of an authentic portrayal of a fanatic, a man who despite his devotion to his political cause is also clearly guilty of overweaning pride and arrogance, not only a terrorist, but also a manipulative gangster. He is neither a monster, but nor is there any attempt to 'explain' his murderous actions by resort to cheap psychologising. 

Whilst Ambler is excellent at maintaining the ambiguity of his characters, and in conveying the details of Howell's business dealings, Arabic society and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as it then was in ways that rarely feel forced, if I have one criticism it's that I didn't get much of a feel for the various locations where the story takes place. The cover of No Exit Press' edition is wonderfully evocative, but some of that was missing from a narrative which is otherwise a little terse, detail being conveyed as much through dialogue as through sometimes rather plain description. This could of course be considered a strength. Ambler has little time for cheap exoticism, but is instead chiefly concerned with the morality and actions of his deeply flawed central character, and with how Howell contrives to deal with the intricate trap which he has found himself in.

An interesting novel, which shows how Ambler was as much interested in probing the subtleties of character and motive as he was in composing a thrilling narrative.

Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

This is another review I originally wrote for amazon. A happy book:

Tove Jansson – The Summer Book

The eternal moment

It’s a small point perhaps, but the publishers of this marvellous, slippery novel would have us believe that the two characters at the story’s heart ‘while away a summer together’. Yet in fact, if we examine the openings of the early sections we find that it really takes place ‘One time in July...’, ‘One morning before dawn...’, ‘One Saturday...’, and most tellingly ‘One summer...’. All of the novel is like this, existing in the moment, describing not one, particular summer, but simply ‘summer’. It is the experience of being on the island during the summer for these two emotionally tightly bound characters. The story never really goes anywhere, very little ‘happens’, we are merely shown the ordinary day to day lives of little Sophia and her grandmother, and their connection with the tiny world within which we see them, and consequently of course, so much ‘happens’. Other characters might occasionally impinge onto this idyllic edenic world, but almost the only speech we hear is from the two at the centre of the story. Thus, Sophia’s father, about whom we hear a great deal, and who is presumably there with them on the island for much of the story, is never heard to speak.

This is a masterpiece, a healing book, one of the few works of literature I’ve encountered which, despite the darkness which lurks at the edges of the narrative such as the death of Sophia’s mother which is alluded to once and then never mentioned again, actually seems to describe happiness.

A minor play?

Another review originally written for amazon. Bennett is something of a hero:

Alan Bennett, The History Boys

A minor play?

Not quite forty years on from Forty Years On, Alan Bennett returned to the subject of a school and education in a play that seems to have acquired a great deal of affection from its audience. Where the school in his earlier play was an unreal place, a model for the wider English society Bennett was mocking, The History Boys takes a more realistic approach to its subject(s). Personally, I’ve always regarded The History Boys as a minor work. Against that, I must admit that I also believe the strength and emotional power of much of Alan Bennett’s work derives from the fact that it is so often in a minor key, frequently focussing on apparently mundane and constricted lives. In contrast, the film of The History Boys (which I enjoyed) seems all to ready to settle for sentimentality. Bennett’s wit and humanity is much in evidence, as in all his work, but it seems marred by a sentimentality he avoids elsewhere. This might in part be simply down to the mechanics of film. Matched with appropriately wistful music, Richard Griffiths’ delivery of the line “Pass it on, boys, pass it on” can’t help but raise a tear. And the central argument around which the narrative is constructed, that the kindness and teaching methods represented by Hector are under threat from the more utilitarian and aggressive approach favoured by Irwin and the Headmaster is a difficult one to make in terms of a play without falling prey to sentimentality, for all that Bennett consciously avows any nostalgia for his own schooldays in his typically lengthy introduction to the playtext.

Reading the play text, it’s particularly interesting to see what was cut, and what was changed. The film elides the flash forwards to Irwin’s later career, leaving it as simply a rueful acknowledgement of where he went after his teaching, which is probably a change for the better. Also improved is (ironically, given my comments about the sentimentality of the film) the happier ending granted to Posner. The play is harsher, but oddly less convincing. It’s also a very gay play, which is again slightly unconvincing, but also rather sweet. It doesn’t quite ring true for me. Dakin seems largely unconcerned about Posner’s obvious desire for him, whilst they all seem to regard Hector’s indiscretions as little more than a minor inconvenience. I went to a relatively liberal school in the 1990s, and I don’t believe the sixth formers I knew would have been so accepting of either an obviously gay teacher or homosexuality in general. On the other hand, an American friend has described his own school experiences to me as “We were a very gay year!”, so who knows. In the context of the work of a writer who, on the evidence of his autobiographical writing and occasional public remarks has apparently struggled somewhat with publicly acknowledging his sexuality, now appears happy to write a play which is so openly concerned with both a gay man and a gay teenager is rather moving. The play’s treatment of some of its homosexual characters feels freer and more open than any of his past work.

Is it a bad play? I find that I don’t care. Whatever its faults of sentimentality and nostalgia, the play is still angry about many of the right things, funny, and despite it all, intensely moving. Minor work or not, I love this play.

Michael Hoffmann - Twentieth century German Poetry: An Anthology

Another review I wrote for amazon. I can remember being reasonably pleased with how this one turned out.

Michael Hofmann – Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology

Poetry/History

An interesting choice of cover, especially given the editor and translator Michael Hofmann's praise for German poetry in his introduction on the grounds that so much of it addresses the world outside rather than being confined to the ivory tower. Certainly the twentieth century has marked German history in a number of ways, of which the Berlin Wall is one of the clearest symbols. Being one of those many English people who are mono-lingual and therefore dependant on translators, Michael Hofmann has become a translator I feel I can trust (although here he also reprints translations by other hands), one who possesses both the skill and taste for the works he translates, as is evident from his nicely polemical introduction. 

If I have one criticism of this volume, it would be that that's all we get in the way of critical apparatus. Some of the poets I've encountered before, but many are previously unknown, and a little more biographical information on each poet than just their dates would have been a real help, especially in the later part of the book when Germany was divided (there's that wall again!). It's usually not too difficult to work out which side of the divide individual poets found themselves, but especially with poets represented sometimes by only a single poem, it can sometimes feel as if they are emerging from a void, with only Hofmann's introduction for guidance. 

That aside, this is a magnificent collection, which whets one's appetite for more, especially of those poets who are sometimes sparsely represented. Surely evidence of a task successfully achieved. And it provides plenty of justification for Hofmann's provocative claim that Germany was one of *the* places for poetry in the twentieth century. I wonder if that is a claim which will stand up over the course of the twenty-first. It is of course very difficult to surmise from such a brief survey, and even the best critic is going to miss important work, especially when it is that published nearest to one's own time, but I couldn't help feeling the weakest, or perhaps just the least significant, work in this collection came from the most recent poets. Which connects with that interesting choice of cover. Perhaps that wall, that history, was an important spur to great work which is now past.

It's not the things of childhood, it's the things of adolescence I'd like to put behind me

No doubt I should have posted an end of year round up on favourites of the year just past, but we're a few days past the beginning of the year, have reached twelfth night in fact, with the tree and decorations coming down, so I think I'll dispense with that for this year and indulge in a little more rueful solipsism.

Two more reviews I wrote for amazon a while back, in lieu of actual content:

Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz – Elektra: Assassin

This must be the stupidist, most tiresome comic I've read in a long time. Painted comics were something of a fashion from the late-80s through mid-90s, but few of them hold up now. Most come off as pretentious. Bill Sienkiewicz is better than many perhaps, but his exaggerated expressionistic figures and murky palette aren't to my taste. Also, he doesn't seem particularly capable at depicting action, which is rather unfortunate given this is a comic obsessed with action and violence. Perhaps that's just the paint, as his subsequent pen and ink work on the early issues of the late 80s Shadow comic is far more dynamic. Frank Miller drowns typically trite (g)libertarian politics and shallow satire with gonzo sci-fi ultra violence and disjointed storytelling to little effect. For years, ever since I read (and loved) The Dark Knight Returns I've been hearing how great this book is, but it really isn't. It felt like a chore to get through, which is really not what an over the top action epic about a psychic ninja should feel like.

I really didn't like this, did I? On Facebook a few days ago, I saw a friend of a friend criticising The Dark Knight Returns and other works by Miller for his art. Which is not the obvious criticism I would think of making about his work. His main failings surely are as a writer. The few times I've tried to read any of his Sin City work, I've found myself repelled by the awfulness of the poorly written hardboiled noir cliches. I don't even like The Dark Knight Returns anymore. It's currently up for sale on amazon, if anyone else wants it.

Ian Watson – Space Marine

It's difficult to imagine that Ian Watson didn't have tongue firmly in cheek when writing this gloriously trashy extravaganza. Reading like an amalgamation of different bits of the then current Warhammer 40,000 universe circa '91 (Necromunda, Space Marines, Tyranids, Squats etc.), the narrative seems to take a perverse delight in coming up with ever greater excess with which to confront its thuggish protagonists, climaxing with an absurd scene of self mutilation. 

Despite what we might believe when we're 13, the gothic future of total war and nihilistic fascism that is Warhammer 40,000 isn't especially profound, and Ian Watson's hyperbolic prose seems perfectly suited to simultaneously indulging and sending up the absurd machismo of its characters. Don't get me wrong, I did love this book! If I describe it as adolescent that's meant as a compliment! By the time it was originally published, I think I'd already lost whatever passing interest I'd had in the games it was inspired by, but the universe the games designers came up with within which to set their games was still fascinating. I never read this at the time, but picked it up recently in Oxfam. Reading it now, I can't help but take it mainly as a horrible black joke on the fictional Warhammer universe, and by extension on the adolescents who enjoyed it. It's as if it's saying, "This is the world you find such fun: And it's meaningless! And it's really stupid!"

With both of these reviews, I remember being somewhat out of step with what all the other reviewers on amazon were saying. Of course, we're all entitled to like things in our own ways, but it's still hard to imagine anyone missing the tone of Ian Watson's contribution to the world of Warhammer 40,000. In his own words, he apparently had 'enormous mad fun in broodingly, Gothically, luridly going over the top', when writing this and his Inquisition War books. Clearly though, within the context of the game world, there are readers who take the kind of fascistic machismo the Space Marines represent entirely at face value. Which is a little scary in some ways. To be fair, when I was 12, I'm sure that I didn't notice the extent to which Watson was non-too subtly just taking the piss out of the world he was being paid to write about, but that's ok. I was 12 at the time.

I'm currently just over 40 pages into Swastika Night, Katharine Burdekin's 'what if Hitler won the war' dystopia from 1937. The introduction makes great play of comparing her novel to Orwell's 1984, a reasonable comparison, but there are other useful comparisons we can make. Her medieval Nazi future history also reminds me of the childish world of Warhammer 40,000. The text draws a comparison with the militaristic world of Sparta, underlining the point that the critique contained in her novel is directed not only at Nazism, but at a larger culture of masculinity and violence. I don't think I'm the first to notice that at the heart of this game world - a world which after all was designed solely as a landscape within which there would be constant war, thus justifying the table top conflicts its consumers reenact - is something deeply unpleasant, redolent of many of the worst aspects of humanity.

*

...and here I'll continue to chart my disillusionment with the work of Grant Morrison

These fragments would appear to have themes in common.

In the recently published Batman, Inc. #6 our hero singlehandedly fights an entire building of his enemy's foot soldiers, whilst the voice Talia, his former lover and leader of the global terrorist organisation Leviathan gloats to him over a hidden microphone. There's a clear class argument being made. Bruce Wayne is criticised for his 'patronising attempts to elevate the poor', whilst Talia herself gives such people a 'purpose' through providing 'guns and slogans to chant'. The use of Talia and Leviathan has very obvious real world analogues. Talia is never given a clear ethnicity or religion, but it's clear that the character is descended from Sax Rohmer's villain Sumuru. Her villainy is elided with an identification with an ill defined 'East' as well as her femininity. It's not much of a stretch to compare her global criminal/terrorist empire Leviathan to the fantasies many commentators have indulged in about Al qaeda.

Talia's final threat presents Batman with a typical villain's dilemma, ordering him to choose between saving a city (Gotham), or his son, (Damian), but who cares about that. It's all part of the typical superhero narrative. What leaped out at me though was the language in which her threat to Gotham was framed: 'When the global economy shifts. The 21st century belongs to me. ...The U.S. economy will stagger and fall.' So, the threat is explicitly framed in economic terms, entirely in line with hysterical right wing fears about the so called decline of 'the West'. This is a superhero narrative explicitly in defence of Western hegemony and crudely defined economic power. Obviously, Morrison places this in the mouth of a villain, so perhaps his intention is to parody such hysterical rhetoric. Certainly, much of Morrison's work has displayed an ambivalence to established hierarchies and power structures. This isn't The Invisibles, though, and I'm finding little sense of irony here. For all his undoubted narrative flair, this is still a relatively straightforward superhero adventure, in which Talia has been labelled a villain in a largely uncomplicated manner. The threat to Gotham only really works if on some level we can take it seriously. Perhaps Morrison will complicate some of this as his extended run on the character seems to be finally reaching some kind of conclusion, but it strikes me that it is actually nothing more than yet more evidence for how Morrison's creative vision has been subsumed by modern corporate rhetoric and ideology. After more than 5 years, I'm not going to give up on his Batman story now, which has certainly had it's moments, but I think I will be glad when it's finally over.

'A cliched view of India...'

Another amazon review, from about two years ago:

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Failures...

Geoff Dyer's fiction has never been much concerned with plot. The opening of the second part of his latest attempt pokes fun at this tendency, observing that the phone call which sets in motion the chain of events could have been much more dramatic, could have in fact lent "narrative causality...albeit of a not very novel kind", but is instead only a call from an editor at a perfectly respectable time in the afternoon. Nor has he ever been much interested in character, although previous novels such as The Colour of Memory and Paris, Trance at least made an effort at creating individual characters with at least some semblance of independence from the author. Here there is less of a gap. Jeff is almost Geoff, clearly an extrapolation of parts of his author, although "Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently so at any rate," as he puts it in an afterword. So too is the unnamed narrator from the second half, whose narrative voice is so close to his author's that I'm sure I spotted lines reused from Geoff Dyer's own journalism. 

No, the element of fiction Dyer is most interested in lies in the variations, the cultural observations which arise from interacting with both the many writers and artists with which the text is littered, and from a confrontation with a finely observed sense of place. He is most concerned with developing and defining his own particular sensibility, and I suspect a reader's enjoyment of his work will largely depend on their response to that sensibility, one which glories in having taken a life off, and enjoys both the consequent happiness and unhappinesses, the resultant contradictions. There can't be a modern English writer who is quite so in love with the idea of failure. Out of Sheer Rage concludes with the salutary reminder that all such works, studies of the life and work of D H Lawrence and the like, are really nothing more than a means of avoiding confronting the depression he claims to have experienced during the writing of the book. And his earlier fiction, particularly Paris, Trance, similarly celebrates the personal failures of their characters, although in a more lyrical manner. Pleasure is only a means of avoiding the emptiness which underlies everything, and sometimes the pleasure can even reside in giving up and letting go, or at least in the desire to do so. 

He is also, it has to be said, an extremely funny writer.

A fairly short review. If I remember correctly, it was a book for which amazon already had a good number of reviews. I've got a much longer review of Working the Room, which goes into more depth about what I like and dislike about his writing. Hopefully get around to finishing it one of these days.

I notice that my review, such as it is, doesn't mention anything about his depiction of India. The title of this post comes from a piece about looking at all of his work which I think was published around the publication of his most recent collection in the States. I'm unable to find it now, and frankly, can't really be bothered. So I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the general criticism, which I think at least one or two of amazon's reviewers also made, is that the depiction of India is rather stereotyped, full of cliches.

Well, maybe, it's nearly two years ago since I read the book myself, so it's difficult for me to comment. I do though have a memory of reading out a few particularly funny bits to my wife where he describes Varanasi (which she has visited herself) and the part where he compares Hindu mythology to Marvel comics, and she found them all really funny. I think sometimes we can be a bit over sensitive to criticism of a foreign country which someone who actually grew up there just won't see. Or perhaps his depiction of Varanasi really is insulting. Certainly I don't think 'Death in Varanasi' contains anything nearly so insulting as the claim made by one amazon reviewer that the narator of the story is 'going native'. Now that is insulting.

A.S.Byatt review

I am going to try and get all these amazon reviews up here eventually. Here's A.S. Byatt and how not to write a historical novel. Something's buggered up the formatting here.

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book 

It might be a little unkind, but turning to the ‘Acknowledgements’ listed at the back, and a certain amusement can be had from the way seemingly everyone is thanked for having ‘sent books’. Can it be that the reason this large, compendious novel ultimately feels slightly unsatisfactory lie with the fact that it owes far more to books than it does to life? This is of course one of the perennial problems for any author of historical fiction. The reading of history and documentary evidence is surely necessary simply in order to get the facts right? But when it starts to swamp the fiction, it risks choking the life out of the story, whatever the writer’s gifts. Here the novel’s narrative voice repeatedly steps back in order to narrate the historical events surrounding the lives of its many characters, or simply to indulge in luscious description of the many beautiful art objects with which the narrative is studded. A.S. Byatt has always had a powerful descriptive gift. But amidst all this description, all this history, it can sometimes feel as if the characters are getting a little lost, especially when there are so many of them.

The novel takes us from June 19th 1895 through to May 1919, following the intertwined lives of two artistic families and their many acquaintances. The chapter titles – ‘The Golden Age’ is naturally followed by ‘The Silver Age’ which of course gives way to ‘The Iron Age’ – run the risk of making the history feel retrospective. We already know how this story ends. The Edwardian age dies in the carnage of the First World War, and an era of history which was actually riven by social discontent acquires a golden haze. But of course, nobody ever knows they’re living in a golden age, and moreover those who do think they are often seem to be deluding themselves, a point which the novel’s narrative voice at one point attempts to make explicit. But the narrative drive often seems to undermine such insights, and the book is occasionally guilty of such sillinesses as for example when one character assures another that of course Peter Pan will be beloved for generations. 

The First World War, the history we already know, looms over everything. It’s a period of history that was not only been much written about at the time, but also revisited by many later writers of fiction, so that it can come to seem over familiar. We’ve seen so many of the tropes of mud and disillusionment so many times by this point. Here though the relatively brief final section in which we see so many of the character whom we have been following over the novel’s course quickly dispatched amidst the horrors of the Great War remakes these cliches. The length of the novel actually works in its favour here, because by that point we feel we know these characters so well.

And it can start to feel churlish to be criticising a book for being its length and ambitions. Minor failings can surely be forgiven when there are so many riches on offer. The large cast deftly handled. The powerful sense of place(s). A.S. Byatt’s typically wonderful descriptive gifts and facility for pastiche. The juggling of ideas. This is a novel with a thesis, about the potential hazards of art, about childhood and the changing ways in which it was understood in the Edwardian period, which is of course our culture’s inheritance. But really there’s just too much stuff here, so that it can occasionally feel somewhat disjointed. The material on the Suffragettes for instance which comes late in the narrative is as powerfully and effectively written as everything else in the book, but it feels disconnected from much of the rest of the book’s narrative, as if it’s been included only because presumably it ought to be addressed in a fiction about the Edwardian period. Too often the novel devolves into a kind of high class soap opera, with endless talk from characters whom seem ever slightly too self conscious about who they are and their personal beliefs.  Too many of these characters feel too well defined, too easily fitting into a type or a social class. It’s all deeply felt, yet curiously, there’s too little life and too little respect for the way in which people are often mysterious, not only to other people, but also to themselves.

Which is a real shame. Ambition is to be applauded, and A.S. Byatt can be so good. This feels like it could have been such a great novel, and at times it is, but as ultimately it feels as if her ambition has gotten the better of her here.

I started this review, and then substantially rewrote it, and I still didn't feel like I said everything I wanted to. A bit like the novel I was trying to review, I had too much to say perhaps. I also find something a little snide, even pompous, about my tone of voice. It's really not a wholly successful book, but still, I can't deny that I had a lot of pleasure in reading it. As I said, the length of the novel does sometimes work in it's favour. I particularly remember the scene where a group of the younger characters go for a weekend trip in the countryside. They do it twice. The first time is an idyll. The sun shines, everyone gets on with each other, they go swimming, it's a lovely moment of happiness. Then, a few pages later, they're returning the next year, and of course it's completely different. It rains, everyone's miserable, they fail to recapture that golden moment. It speaks to some of the novel's major themes but I'm also glad that she put it the scenes in because of how well she captures that feeling of a simultaneous disappointment at one's failure to recapture a particular moment and the embarrassment of the knowledge that it was probably foolish to think you could.

Something else I noticed was the presence of a 'Lawrentian' artist figure, actually modelled on Eric Gill I think. This is a recurrent figure in her early fiction. I'm thinking of the father in her first novel The Shadow of the Sun, and Frederica and Stephanie's father in the Quartet.* In my head it connects with something about Angela Carter, I was interested to read here that they became friends after a rather combatative first encounter. They must be near contemporaries, with similar interests in history and fairytales, although despite the similarities, in many ways occupying very different literary spaces. Both clearly had a complex relationship with the work and ideas of D. H. Lawrence. In Angela Carter's case that comes through most clearly not in her fiction but in several of her essays. I suspect any writer of that generation who went through an English degree at a British University. The influence of F.R. Leavis. I sometimes wonder if every writer of that generation isn't in some way reacting against the influence of Lawrence. Just look at Ian McEwan's early work. And then you've got a more recent writer like Geoff Dyer, who's younger, but who still I'd place at the tail end of the post war period because of his education (getting to Oxbridge thanks to the 11-plus), and who reveres Lawrence as one of his literary idols.

I recently finished The Game, another early novel. Two sisters, one an Oxford Don, the other a popular novelist, trapped in a destructive relationship based on events of their childhood. Literalist critics might try and related this to the supposedly fractious relationship between Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble, but it's clear from one of the epigraphs and sereval references throughout the text that it's really about the Brontes' joint imagination. I was interested to see her describe this as 'absolutely appalling' in that interview. Like most people I suspect, when I first encountered the Bronte's and the story of their childhood I found it incredibly romantic, desirable even, although again like most people I hardly think myself and my siblings could have sustained such a joint imagination. Which is perhaps just as well. It is a romantic story, but it's also appalling.

I read a lot of A.S. Byatt's fiction in my mid-twenties. I found a stack of her books in Oxfam a while back, ones I didn't read back then, and will gradually get around to them. She's another writer I feel that I appreciate more now that I'm older and on the other side of a very difficult period of my own life. Anthony Burgess said about Still Life that it conveyed an 'extraordinary compassion', and I don't think I could improve on such a description.

*And thinking about it, there is here again an example of the advantage of a large canvas in the way the rather frightening and domineering figure in The Virgin in the Garden becomes more sympathetic, even pathetic, later on. His children are older and no longer so intimidated by him, he's been left behind by the flow of history. Just as I suppose D.H. Lawrence has by this point.

Americana

I posted the following as a review on amazon last October:

Horse Opera

David Thomson, White Light

Writing about the films of John Ford in His Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues about Ford's use of Monument Valley:

"...there is a lust for epic, clichéd panoramas, which forgets or forsakes the real meaning of that location - as geology, for its natives, and for the rest of America living on the edges of the empty quarter, witness, walking, riding, living, and being there, patient enough to see through the first spectacle. It also requires a study of its culture: what it has meant to, say, the Navajo, the Hopi, Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Edward Curtis. Ford's eye refused to contemplate history or responsibility."

The 'irresponsible' filmmaker Ford gets a walk on part in this tricksy, fanciful novel, as does his most famous actor John Wayne. As does Willa Cather. As do a whole host of folks. As in Suspects, his earlier `movie-novel', White Light is fiction functioning as film criticism, and for me the better novel. Where Suspects constructed a nightmare alternative history of America through the interconnected biographies of characters all drawn from film noir, White Light draws on only a handful of classic westerns, mixing both some of their characters and the children of their characters with some of the real life figures who stalked the West. Thomson helpfully provides a glossary of all of these figures drawn from history for any of us who might be struggling to distinguish reality and fantasy. Which is precisely the place his novel occupies: the gap between the real West and the fantasy constructed from all of the stories that have been told about it.

Most especially the films. The various stories contained in White Light don't often take the action to Monument Valley, but the profusion of character and story seems designed to attempt something of what Thomson calls for above in its treatment of the American West. Not only does the action look away from such iconic locations, but equally away from such famous stories such as the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the shooting of Billy the Kid, mentioned on the back cover, but which are only ever seen from off to one side, rather than placed in the centre. Thomson's characters are never in the heart of the action, but off stage so to speak. The mythical events happen largely without their help. Like all of us, they are part of an audience. However, they are also intimately involved in constructing an image of the West, whether as pulp author or photographer. Even Mathew Garth, who in Howard Hawk's Red River was actually involved in a cattle run which helped shape the civilising of the West, and whose repeat of that journey in later life occupies a long section of the novel, is here seen only as a figure damaged both by his past and his mythic status.

Thomson's view of the old American West is caustic, but also elegiac. It's never quite clear what has been lost in the civilising of the American West, but that's also true of many of the greatest westerns. It seems that even a writer as subtle and elusive as Thomson is constrained by the myth, for all his efforts to deconstruct it. Which might explain why this is a novel and not formal film criticism: it exists within that tension between reality and myth.

I mostly agree with myself there. White Light is a beautiful book, and a lot of it's power lies in that tension between the myth of the Western and the reality of America's past. Whether Thomson intended it or not, it does contain a strong streak of nostalgia for a time which I can only imagine was often brutal, certainly incredibly hard for many of the people who lived then. When I was younger I had little interest in the Western as a genre, but I've seen my share of films by now. And I've read Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy and Blood Meridian, which have always struck me as being firmly based within the genre. However powerful and beautiful McCarthy's writing undoubtedly is, I still find something troubling about his aesthetic. It goes to the heart of that tension between myth and reality because McCarthy's fiction is engaged with a romantic picture of the past which seems very dependant on violence. It's as if only in extreme violent situations do we become fully alive. Which to me is just macho bullshit, frankly. I imagine he'd also be easy to parody - his writing is far to manly to use any punctuation other than the full stop! - but I also think I'm probably being far too simplistic here. None of that accounts for the hypnotic power of his language, his unpunctuated sentences rolling out like the epic landscapes through which his characters so often travel. And the past that he writes about was incredibly violent. He hardly idealises that violence he depicts but rather presents it in a very matter of fact way. This is simply a depiction of what happened, for all McCarthy's aesthetic.

It is a problem though. In the final book of the Border trilogy the life of the ranch is overshadowed by the presence of the atomic bomb. The ranch is on land which is to be used for an atomic test site, an event which occurs outside of the book's narrative. The bomb is easy to read as a symbol for modernity. It's modernity which overshadows and threatens the dissolution of the life of the ranch. Still, however repugnant one might find modernity, and I've certainly got some sympathy for such a view, that hardly excuses romaticisising a past that was often a struggle against poverty and hardship. I know it's hardly the sort of life I would even be equipped for, let alone want to live.

It's a tension that even appears in documentary. I've just finished watching a series of three films made by the musicologist, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen. Cohen is clearly an important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s whom I've previously never heard of before. The three films are That High Lonesome Sound (1962), focusing on the banjo player and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, The End of an Old Song (1972), focusing on the unaccompanied singer Dillard Chandler, and Sara and Maybelle (1981), featuring two of the 'original' Carter family. Sara and Maybelle, the shortest of the three films is mostly assembled from photographs and a performance of several songs filmed at the Newport Festival in 1967. It feels odd to describe them as members of the 'original' carter family, since when is a family ever 'original'. To be part of a family is to be part of a continuum, one which stretches into both the past and the future. 'Original' here is a marketing tag, reflecting how much this successfull showbiz family has been transformed into a commercial entity, something which is underlined by the inclusion of a number of their records in the film's collage of photographs and ephemera. It's interesting that these are the actual records, the material object, as opposed to the record sleeves.

Sara and Maybelle is the most conventional of the three films, focused solely on the performers, where the earlier films are much more interested in situating the musicians at their centre in their particular social worlds in the early 1960s, bringing in other performers and footage of the landscapes within which they lived. According to Wikipedia Roscoe Handler subsequently went on to have a career performing within the folk revival, similar to many folk singers discovered around the time, whereas Dillard Chandler has little interest in performing at festivals and on the radio. He lived until 1993. Both of these films are incredibly beautiful with their silvery black and white photography. There's no sync sound, so the combination of image and sound creates a dreamy abstracted atmosphere, enhanced by the way in which the camera is never quite steady, frequently drifting off to observe a detail of the landscape or room. It's a compelling vision which underscores how the music seems to emanate from the past. I also strongly suspect that the aesthetic of these films had an influence on the fabulously titled Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus which similarly creates a composite picture of music of a much more modern American South, rooting the music in the culture as a kind of palimpsest.

Again from Wikipedia, in making the film about Dillard Chandler, John Cohen apparently intended to "debunk stereotypes of Appalachian folksingers being merely the preservers of traditional British and Scottish ballads, with few modern influences or styles", arguing that "much of his work bore more resemblance to the struggles of modern life than to Old World storytelling". Which makes his choice of title rather intriguing. This is not only an 'old' song, but one which has reached it's end, strongly suggesting that we are witness here to the end of a tradition. A tradition with its roots firmly in the past. The film's titles make the connection with Cecil Sharp's collecting in the Appalachians earlier in the century (Sharp apparently collected songs from serveral of Chandler's relatives) and suggest there may be no one surviving who can sing these old songs the way Chandler can. Towards the end of the film there's a moment where Chandler's singing is drowned out by contemporary rock and roll from the nearby jukebox. The presence of radio and recorded music as some form of threat to older musical cultures is present in both of these films, for all that they are situated in the present.

There's an element of nostalgia in both of these films, but what mitigates this is the respect for the hard lives these people live, which is precisely the quality that can be found in so much folk music. Nothing here idealises the past. It presents the past both as it was and as it is. Because we are always remaking the past, whether it is an individual or collective past. Perhaps instead of 'nostalgia', 'elegy' is the word I really want here.