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.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (5)

Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

This is one children's book that I know I did try to read when I actually was a child. I forget how old I was exactly, but I know that I was already aware that this was a 'classic', and that therefore it was something I ought to read. Alas, I gave up after only a few chapters, finding it rather boring.

As a consequence, I didn't watch what is apparently a much loved and fondly remembered adaptation for the BBC in 1989. I think one of my brothers must have done, because I do have several memories of scenes from it: a sunlit garden verging on something paradisal, and a young friend to enjoy it with.

In fairness to my younger self, I can understand why I might have found it rather boring. There's very little in the way of plot. Sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle because his brother has measles, young Tom finds himself able to slip back in time when he crosses the threshold of the backdoor at midnight when the unreliable grandfather clock strikes thirteen. Their flat is part of what was formerly a country house in the late 19th century, and it is the lost garden to which he returns each night. What follows is more a series of episodes strung together, as Tom explores the garden and in the process befriends a lonely young girl, Hatty, one of only two people who are able to see him. In the 19th century past, Tom appears as a ghost, unable to leave any mark on the world in which he finds himself. With effort, he's even able to push his way through doors.

The transition back to the past is evoked manner a marvellously eerie manner. We do eventually find a sort of explanation for it, but it's one which is satisfactory only in purely emotional terms. It's simply the narrative means by which two lonely individuals are able to meet and play together, alleviating some of their unhappiness. And that play is threatened not only by the end of summer, but by the fact that Hatty grows older throughout their meetings. Tom never returns to the same time, but drops in on Hatty as grows into adolescence. The later times to which he returns are not the paradise of summer, but an icy winter wonderland of the great frost. Hetty is not only older, but Tom is gradually growing less distinct for her. Several images of the 'thinning' of fantasy to evoke her transition into adolescence. Ultimately we're left with a sense of loss, but it's a very appropriate sense of loss for a children's fantasy since it's only the loss of childhood play which we all experience.

Since that narrative of loss is tied to the transition between an 'aristocratic' 19th century garden and post war reality in which Tom lives, in which the garden has been built over, it's not surprising that some critics have complained that the book idealises that world as a 'lost paradise', obscuring the reality of poverty found elsewhere in Victorian society. It's a view which I have some sympathy with, especially nowadays when we have a popular culture which contains more than it's fair share of representations and pastiches of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorianism is an actual thing, an object of academic study.

On the other hand, I'm a little suspicious of critics who criticise fictions for what they don't contain.  Nor am I convinced that a fictional representation of the Victorian period which does acknowledge the horrors of poverty can't also be idealising. And I'm not sure that the 19th century world to which Tom travels is quite as idealised as some appear to think.

Hatty is an orphan, having been taken in by a considerably unsympathetic aunt who clearly resents the presence of a poor relation in her home. She's left out of the games of her three older cousins, only one of whom appears to have any real sympathy for her. Hatty is eventually lucky; she meets a farmer who is successful and prosperous, and who provides her with everything she could want during their married life together. But it's easy to imagine that life might gone very differently for her if she hadn't been fortunate enough to meet her farmer. And the loss of the garden is explained not simply as the fault of modernity, but as a result of the failure in business of Hatty's cousins who gradually have to sell off their land, eventually losing everything. It's not simply an idealised world that we're presented with here, but rather its a world which is contingent, lodged in time.

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Time slip fantasies appear to have been a popular mode in post war children's literature. Perhaps some of the impulse was a desire to escape from what was perceived as a drab post war world. The feeling of just stepping through a door to enter a vanished past literalises the nostalgic motive in a way which is also very moving. I do wonder too if the engagement with the Victorian past is not also down to the fact that in 1958 the Victorian world must have still felt very close. One consequence of two world wars and an intervening economic slump is that the pace of building would have slowed. There would was less desire or ability to replace older buildings. It was the modernist planners of the 60s and their successors who really began that process. So in 1958, many more people than nowadays would have lived in places which were surrounded by fragments of the Victorian past. Not that that has entirely vanished, even now.

It's something which I recognise and feel quite strongly myself, because I grew up in old houses. Ironically, this was because of a grandfather clock which my parents owned, and consequently all the houses we lived in required ceilings which where tall enough to accommodate the clock. Hence they were all houses built in the later 19th / early 20th century. I suppose now I would see that as a privilege, although at the time of course it seemed perfectly normal. And perhaps it was only because I was a child, but the past could feel very close.

A rather naughty book cover...

Is it wrong for me to like this cover as much as I do? Yes, I know that it's objectifying the girl in the picture, but something about the way in which she's looking back at us over her shoulder with a little half smile cuts against that somewhat. Whilst the story which the cover explicitly illustrates, 'Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere' is hardly free from such issues, it's conclusion does at least undercut some of the narrator's assumptions. The girl with the most attractive figure is, predictably perhaps, the one who cares least about her appearance, and who finally catches him with a geniune love potion to match his X-Ray Specs.

Really, whatever issues I might have with the gender relations present in Finney's stories, they seem so much of the time in which they were written, as to feel almost harmless. Boyish, really. And the most problematic story in this respect, 'The Coin Collector', contains something which is certainly relevant to my suposedly more enlightened self, with it's narrator whose wife complains that he enjoys reading rather too much. Redolent of a nostalgia that I recognise from Ray Bradbury as well as from the author of Time and Again, Finney finds a number of variations on the idea of travelling through time, with the 1880s appearing most frequently as the Eden that his characters most long for. Other stories feature a prisoner on death row managing to free himself through the magic of painting an opening door on his cell wall ('Prison Legend'), or a mysterious balloon ride through night time San Francisco which unleashes something hidden within the two protagonists ('The Intrepid Aeronaut'). The most moving story is probably the last, 'The Love Letter', in which lovers communicate across time through letters, but are never able to meet until the modern New Yorker finds the grave of the women from 1882 he fell in love with through a few letters.

I remember that day and all those long ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia. Already the sky was a hard hot blue, the air shimmering with sun. The grass under our bare feet was faded and dry and the tree locusts were sawing their wings for yards and blocks and miles around us.

'A Possible Candidate for the Presidency'

Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (1)

I was in such a hurry to grow up. At least in some things. By about 9 I was reading The Lord of the Rings and haunting the adult fantasy/science fiction shelves of the library. I wanted to read adult books, or so I believed. Like many, for a long time I confused adolescence with maturity. Of course, I now know that there are many books written for children which are far more mature, more literary, than many of the books I must have found in that library section. I know that I read all ten volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s ridiculous Mission: Earth books. The one positive I can take from those is that it meant I knew who L. Ron Hubbard was when a scientologist approached me in the middle of Brighton attempting to recruit me.

Consequently, I know I missed out on many of the classics of children’s literature. Several writers I came across in childhood have been renewed discoveries in my late teens or adulthood: Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner. I can remember my father reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to my brother and me. I must have read it and reread it by myself. We saw a theatre adaptation at the little local theatre. Yet I never got more than a few pages into the sequel. That and everything else Garner wrote was a discovery made at university.

One of the qualities that I think makes both Sutcliff and Garner great is that neither of them seem to be writing down to their audience. That their work is marketed to children feels largely accidental. These are the books they’d be writing whatever category their work was placed in. Of course, they also come from a generation when the commercial categories for children’s fiction, although some way along, were still partly in a process of formation.

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Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Over Stone. That sense of a genre still in formation is similarly present in the first of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. The sense of the fantastic is present almost from the start, lurking in the background of an apparently realistic account of a family holiday to Cornwall, in which a middle class family who all speak in complete sentences are dropped into a rural landscape in which everyone speaks in dialect. Even the discovery of a fantastic treasure map doesn’t immediately trip things into the fantastic, and by the finish the supernatural elements have only started to emerge into what was an essentially realist narrative, if verging on the fantastic. I assume later books in the series have more magic, but this is still a wonderful depiction of what magic is. Not a violation of the material world, but a subtle adjunct to it.

Clearly, Susan Cooper had no plans for a series when she started the novel. She says herself it was only as she began the second in the sequence that she knew it would be a series of five books. That uncertainty gives the storytelling a wonderful looseness. A feeling that the narrative could spin off in any direction if only they hadn’t found that map… And like Garner and Sutcliff, she doesn’t write down to her audience. There’s an insistence on the detail of the landscape in which the story takes place, likely the product of a writer living in America and looking back with fondness to the place she’s since left, which also creates a wonderful sense of solidity to the place in which these fantastical goings on are occurring. The portrait of the small seaside town and its inhabitants, the hills and lanes, is one of the things which lingers most. It grounds the fantasy, and enhances the feeling of magic in the story. Which is enhanced by Michael Heslop’s scratchy illustrations.

Yes, I would have loved this if I’d read it as a kid. It’s exactly the kind of fantasy I loved. A holiday and a treasure hunt turning into a real adventure. The past as a source of mystery and danger. Of course, as an adult, there’s the odd element I could perhaps do without. The scene early on which leads to their discovery of the map, where they’re playacting a narrative of explorers in a jungle rehearses every racist cliché of fearsome natives you could hope to find. Even this almost feels innocent though. That’s exactly the sort of game we did act out when we were kids, isn’t it? We didn’t know enough to know we were being offensive.

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Phillip Pullman, The Scarecrow and His Servant. Almost in a reverse to Susan Cooper, where the supernatural emerges into the real world, in Phillip Pullman’s ‘fairy tale’ the real world emerges into the fantasy. According to Pullman, this is the fourth of his stories he designates ‘fairy tales'. All of them take place in a landscape which is already familiar from fairy tale, but personally I felt this at least was closer in spirit to an 18^th century picaresque. And the law case over a contested inheritance feels straight out of a 19^th century novel. That might be the point though. Pullman’s fantasy never really takes us that far away from the real world.

I seem to remember when it came out that someone had absurdly suggested that the characters in the story could be read as a parody of the relationship between George Bush and Tony Blair. The scarecrow is obviously foolish, but essentially loveable. The relationship with Jack, his servant, is surely the model of the wiser underling and his master which ultimately derives from Roman comedy. It’s a fictional trope. And what they’re faced up against are commerce and political corruption which would destroy the landscape and drain its wells because they can only see it as a material thing to be exploited. It’s the real world we’re all faced with, a tragedy which we’re all to some extent implicated in. This is a comedy though, so here there is ultimately a happy solution.

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Despite my rush to grow up (which in any case ended up taking rather longer than it does for many people), I don’t think I ever quite stopped reading children’s fiction, especially if writers I liked – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville – would write books for children as well as adults. Obviously, I haven’t read that much modern children’s fiction. I’ve read Harry Potter and (clearly) Phillip Pullman, but then everyone has read them, Lemony Snicket and Holly Black.

If I’m currently more interested in reading books that I could have read as a child, this may only be the product of nostalgia. Certainly, when faced with the hideous computer generated art on the covers of the most recent reprints of Susan Cooper’s books, I opted instead to track down older copies from the 1980s, the copy I could have read when I was a child, with painted covers which are far more suited to the narrative’s charms. I also fell prey to one of the problems inherent in some old books. About half way through reading it, the spine broke and the first half of the text broke away from the glue attaching it to the spine. It upsets me that this damage should have occurred from reading it, but since I refuse to acquire any form of electronic reading device such as ebook or kindle (even if I could afford one), then I’m going to have to accommodate myself to such accidents.

The Scarlet Pimpernel...& the pleasures of cheap print.

Sir Percy Blakeny, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was, in this year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty. Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking, but for a certain lazy expression in his deep set blue eyes, and that perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly cut mouth.

It's seems silly to criticise Baroness Orczy for demonising the French revolution and idealising the aristocracy. That's surely what you would expect from a novel like this. And the writing seems to anticipate such criticism somehow. There's an arch tone of voice, particularly in the earlier chapters, a theatricality throughout, particularly in the hero's impossibly successful disguises, which alerts you to the fact that this is history as a charade, as costume drama. The climax strains credulity with the stupidity of the French revolutionary soldiers. The twenty strong 'League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' are all noble young men enjoying themselves, just as they would at hounds, or some similar sport, performing their daring exploits largely for the fun of it. It's history played as a game.

Being familiar only with a vague outline of the character, it was interesting to see just how much of the story is actually more a romance, concerned far more with the feelings of Lady Blakeny than anything else, for all that it contains it's fair share of adventure.

I almost certainly wouldn't have read it if I hadn't come across a cheap paperback from the 60s in a charity shop, with a wonderful painted cover. The kind you don't really get anymore. The vivid red of the Pimpernel's coat dominates the composition. The materiality of the text added to the nostalgia of the story's love of the aristocracy. Compare Baroness Orczy with Sabatini. If it came to the quality of the writing I'd probably choose Sabatini over Orczy. He's got just a better command of language. Yet my copy of Captain Blood is the most recently republished Vintage edition. It's wonderfully designed, but the form doesn't match the charm of the adventure story. It should be old, preferably printed in a time before I was born, because that's where the adventure story belongs for me. It's surely for precisely that reason that the British covers to the Captain Alatriste series evoke older pulp conventions. Form matches content, only it can never quite match the real thing because it's too obviously the product of nostalgia. The old pulp covers weren't trying to evoke anything, other than attempting to sell you the book. Trying to evoke the idiom is fine, but there's always an air of self consciousness about it. This 1960s cover for The Scarlet Pimpernel simply is.

I'm also fascinated by the other titles recommended at the back. I've never read Naomi Mitchison or Geoffrey Trease, but both sound intriguing. Clearly there was this whole tradition of historical fiction which has rather faded from view now, perhaps through the rise of a more self-consciously meta fictional historical fiction over the last thirty years. I'm not talking about historical romance here, which has clearly continued to flourish despite whatever literary fashion might have to say. I'd put Henry Treece in the same grouping, a writer I have read.

Best of all though is the description quoted for Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets and Valerians, quoted from The Observer:

Four children (Mother dead, Father in India). Scholarly bachelor uncle decides - with aid of wise old gardener-factotum - to educate them. But beware of Lion Tor, and the mist when it takes strange shapes over Weeping Marsh. And where is Lady Valerian's lost explorer husband?

I love the peremptory tone of it, the faint echo of the opening of Bleak House. The assumptions of the reviewer. It comes straight out of the Empire. "Thrilling stuff" no doubt; you needn't read the book, just let the breathless précis do all the work of the story.

I've always loved these advertisements for other other writers, other books, which used to appear in the back of the book. The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished. It's something else I don't think we get so much any more, unless it's adverts for more books by the same author as the book you've just finished reading.

The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished reading. Or the book you're still reading, if you've flicked to back while still only half way through. It's the promise that this wonderful adventure that is reading and that is never going to end.

"...the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.": John LeCarre & George Smiley

John Le Carre has himself rather given the game away, apparently suggesting that his most famous character, George Smiley, would now be "keeping bees somewhere" in retirement. Smiley may exist at the centre of Le Carre's masterful depiction of the shadowy world of the British Intelligence community, a depiction often praised for it's accuracy and realism, but Smiley's fictional existence seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes, whose fictional retirement Le Carre consciously alludes to, or Hercule Poirot. Characters who exist somewhere outside of history, subject to revised time lines, never really aging. Although we do finally get that in The Secret Pilgrim, written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a fictional summing up of the period, of the kind of spy stories which could be told then, and of the depressing reality which for Le Carre always lies behind any fanciful depiction of the world of espionage. With the Cold War over, critics seemingly thought Le Carre had lost his great subject (and that may be true for all I know), but it was certainly appropriate that it should have marked the final appearance of his signature character, one final performance before the curtains were closed on that moment of history.
Yes, I am a fan, ever since I was dazzled by Alec Guiness in one of the BBC's handful of contributions to the claim of 'Greatest TV Show'. They did a follow up, adapting Smiley's People, when for budget reasons they couldn't make The Honourable Schoolboy, which I've still never seen. No, after seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time, I turned to Le Carre's original novels. Alighting first on a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in which Smiley only has a cameo), before backtracking to the very beginning and working my way through, concentrating on Smiley and the boys in the Circus, one of Le Carre's wonderful coinages for secret service slang. With my eagerness to read every thing Smiley appears in, I missed that The Russia House is actually a Circus novel too, connected by the character of Ned in The Secret Pilgrim, so I ended up reading those two the wrong way around.

First appearing in two rather conventional whodunits, Smiley has only minor roles in Le Carre's following two novels as he established himself as a major writer of espionage fiction, before eventually reemerging in Tinker, Tailor at the centre of the 'Karla' trilogy. The whodunnit plot is transposed from the quest to catch a murderer to a need to discover the double agent within the service (the 'mole', another Le Carre coinage actually appropriated by the real secret service), 'Karla' the ultimate nemesis, head of the Soviet service, an obvious double for Smiley who haunts the narrative, only occasionally glimpsed. The final novel in the sequence, Smiley's People, like The Secret Pilgrim, always seemed to me to be taking place in a narrative space located somewhere 'after', a belatedness, as if all of the previous conventional narratives of spy fiction have already taken place, leaving only a sense of loss which haunts both novels. The waste of the secretive world.

Given my regard for the TV Tinker, Tailor, it's perhaps not surprising that I wasn't initially overly bothered about seeing the new film. It's not that I resented their making a new version, more that I just couldn't see the point, when we've already got an adaptation which is pretty much perfection. And with seven hour-long episodes in which to elaborate the complex plot, two hours would inevitably squeeze the narrative. But we purposefully took a needed day off on Wednesday and ended up catching an early evening performance. It's a testament to the director and screenwriters that the narrative never feels cramped. Many of the fabulous cast are largely reduced to little more than cameos, yet all manage to impose themselves on the material. It's clear who everyone is from even the smallest scenes. And the set design is immaculate in it's evocation of the vanished post war world of the early seventies.

In fact, I'd suggest it's almost too immaculate. It's a film that almost feels as though it's been directed by its main character. Everything, every lingering camera movement is so precise, the gloomy cinematography just so. Important scenes are often elided, seen only obliquely, the faces of several characters remain hidden from the viewer. Everything feels so very controlled, buttoned down. Compare one adaptation with another, and it's clear that for the TV series, made in 1979 only a few years after the novel was written, it simply can't be nostalgic for the Cold War period since for its makers and audience the Cold War was present day reality. I'm old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War period, born in the same year the TV series was produced, my brother and I were woken up in order to be sat down in front of the TV footage when the Berlin Wall fell. "Watch this! It's History!" we were admonished. The film captures something of my imaginings of the period just before I was born. Growing up there were enough reminders of it around, particularly in official buildings, whereas the TV series just is the time before I was born.

In fact, the film is haunted by that earlier adaptation (really, how could it not be?). It borrows some of the alterations to the novel's plotting, whilst adding a few of it's own. As good as Gary Oldman is as Smiley (and he is excellent), he's not who I would have chosen for the role. It's a trivial thing, but he's just too tall, whereas the character of the novels and Alec Guiness's performance is short and a little fat, dressed in clothes which never quite fit him. Oldman looks a little outsize at several points, where Alec Guinness' Smiley disappears into himself, rather like a mole (the animal) at times. And Oldman surely borrows from Guinness for aspects of his performance and speech patterns. Which is not to say that he doesn't bring things to the character which are absent from Guiness's earlier performance. I read somewhere that Le Carre himself has observed that he gives a much clearer sense of the cruelty Smiley is capable of, his rather passive aggressive nature.

What I love about Smiley is that sense of buttoned down emotion. It's that peculiar kind of Englishness which celebrates failure and buried feelings. Which is also what elevates him slightly into the realms of the fantastic: his complete devotion to his work, the contradiction of a person who is brilliant in one aspect of their life and a failure in another. For The Spectator Smiley is a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man", an obvious allusion to the infidelities of his beautiful, aristocratic wife Anne. It's a rather reductive and stereotypical evaluation of masculinity, indicative of a stereotypical heterosexual panic about definitions of maleness. And Smiley is a very unsexual character, contrasted with the predatory and bisexual Bill Hayden, modeled on Kim Philby, who cuckolds Smiley. Arguably, in their different ways, the sexuality of both characters is threatening to the sort of rhetoric the Spectator is displaying.

A more charitable reading of the Spectator quote would be that the secretive world of espionage is destructive of any human relationship. It's a theme which runs through much of Le Carre's Cold War fiction, and interestingly it's also what the film adaptation plays up. That it is more explicit about the homosexuality of several characters is no doubt a sign of the respective eras in which their adaptations were made. But the film's makers go further, portraying Smiley's trusted Lieutenant Peter Guillam as a gay man who late in the narrative brakes off what appears to be a loving relationship in order to protect himself in the secretive world in which he opperates. It's certainly in keeping with what little I know of the world of British intelligence which, like the theatre, appears to have been something of a haven for gay men pre-Wolfenden and legalisation. But it also makes the narrative focus much more about the spy's personal lives.

In the TV series, Smiley's cuckoldry is an open secret, everyone eludes to it, but nothing is stated. Nothing is even seen until Ann returns to him for a final scene in which Smiley attempts to confront his wife with her infidelity with Bill Hayden. In the film we have several flashbacks to a perfectly tacky early 1970s works Christmas party, in which Smiley spy's as a peeping tom on Ann and Hayden. Another flashback gives him a near confrontation with Hayden in which Smiley arrives back from Germany to find Hayden in his home, almost catching the erring pair. Far more emphasis is laid on the friendship between Hayden and Jim Prideaux through the repeated appearance of a photograph of the two of them in younger days that by the end it almost feels more like a love story which dare not speak its name than a spy story.

It's interesting. This is one of the great English Cold War novels, and I can't help but feel that the film subtly depoliticizes it. Whilst the earlier TV adaptation can't be nostalgic for the Cold War, that isn't to say that it isn't nostalgic for another earlier period of Britain's history. When Smiley visits Connie Sachs in the TV series Beryl Reid has a line where she laments her 'boys' who were raised to rule an empire. The TV series is in part an imperial lament, if far from an uncritical one, since these are real live 'boys' who are getting hurt as a consequence. In the film, Kathy Burke does suggest things were simpler during the Second World War, but the empire goes unmentioned. Her most memorable line is when she mischievously suggests to Smiley that she feels rather 'unfucked' whilst two undergraduates are making out on a sofa in the room next door. More sex, and less politics.

One of the changes I really liked was the scene where Smiley tells Guillam about his one meeting with their ultimate enemy, the Soviet spy chief Karla years previously in Delhi. In the TV series we get yet another flashback, with Karla played by a silent and impassive Patrick Stewart. In fairness, this was some years before he was Jean-Luc Pickard, but I never quite understood why they had such a major Shakespearean actor in such a tiny role. I think I understand it now. It's a tiny role, so it needs a well known actor than at least many of the audience will be familiar with in order to give the character solidity. In the film, Karla is an absent ghost, haunting the narrative. Oldman however narrates Smiley's slightly drunken account of his meeting with Karla in a powerful scene, but we remain in the narrative's present, the camera fixed on his attempt to act out their absent encounter. There is a flashback, but it only gratuitously reveals to the audience something hidden from the characters, that Karla was present at the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux with which the story opens, revealed only through his still possessing the lighter which Ann once gave to Smiley. It heightens the doubling of Smiley and Karla which is present in the novel, but still denies him any real presence.

I don't think any of this is wrong. The destruction of human relationships which Le Carre's fiction finds the world of espionage guilty of is ultimately a criticism of that world. For Le Carre, politics often feels like little more than an excuse for people to behave wickedly. The makers of the film aren't betraying the novel. It's just an interesting change of emphasis, reflective perhaps that now we are more nostalgic for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War (not that Le Carre's depiction of the Circus ever really gives us moral certainties), than we are for a lost empire. But it also reflects a modern tendency to privilege personality and personal feelings over politics. The only real misstep in the film is the final scene where Smiley finally sits down triumphantly as the new Control, contrasted with a montage of the film's minor characters who have all lost something. Where in the TV series it was nothing more than an administrative meeting in which Smiley softly informs his chastened colleagues that he will now be taking over as 'acting head' of the Circus, here it's transformed into a victory. This is a subtle betrayal of Le Carre's fictional world, where any victory ultimately feels like failure.

If I compare the two adaptations and still come out thinking that the one is a masterpiece whilst the other is just a really well made film, then that's also because I think that it gets the balance between the personal and political right. Perhaps at the end of the day it only comes down to the fact that I saw the TV series first. Still, I'm glad I saw the film, and I'll be delighted if it's success means we get adaptations of the other two volumes of the trilogy. The BBC couldn't afford the cost of filming in Hong Kong for the The Honourable Schoolboy. And I really must get around some day to watching the BBC's Smiley's People. I've read a few of Le Carre's non-Circus novels. His most autobiographical, A Perfect Spy, is as good as if not better than the 'Karla trilogy'. It's themes of nostalgia and betrayal are in a similar orbit. I've not yet read enough of his post-Cold War fiction to know if Le Carre lost his great subject with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even if he did, then he still created one of the great fictional characters reflective of that era. I think that's more than most writers manage.

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.

This Weeks Comics

The Rocketeer Adventures #2

I'm unfamiliar with Dave Stevens' original comics, apart from what I've read about them here and there, although now that they've all been collected into a handsome hardback I may get hold of it some day, funds permitting. Inspired by 1930s pulp adventure fiction and Saturday matinee serials, the appeal is mainly the artwork and the nostalgic creation of an earlier fictional milieu. Dave Stevens seems to be one of a number of comics artists who emerged in the 70s and early 80s whose wrok self-conciously harks back to earlier pulp traditions. A whole raft of stuff about which I am largely ignorant except through its recycled imagery. And frankly, I imagine this is an instance where I'd prefer reading the pastiche to the original. I'd put Stevens next to people like Howard Chaykin or Mike Kaluta, artists whose work similarly invokes and appropriates from older pulp fictions, if for different ends.

The Rocketeer seems to be aiming at little more than entertaining its readers. As is usually the case with tributes of this nature, it's the art which makes the biggest impression. Chris Weston, Darwyn Cooke, Gene Ha: how could it not be visually ravishing? That looks to be the main point of the appeal of Dave Stevens' original comics. Which is not to say that there was anything particularly bad about the writing. Darwyn Cooke, writing for his own art, makes probably the best stab at it, representing his 8 pages as the latest episode in a long running movie serial. It's both a homage to some of the character's original inspirations, and a nod to the way that such adventure characters seem to operate in an eternal present. The story's climax is merely the end of this episode's cliff hanger: Holy Moley!! Will our courageous couple escape? Join us next week for Episode Seven: Nazis in the Hospital!

It's always Nazis of course.

Cooke's story is also the one which is most guilty in objectifying the female lead. Then again, she is modeled after Bettie Page, so it must be a temptation that is hard to resist. Throughout, we are repeatedly invited to lasciviously gaze at and fetishesize her appropriately period style underwear:

This is mirrored by our Saturday matinee lead Cliff Secord who ends up clinging onto the jacket his girlfriend has ended up wearing and enjoying the view of her underwear:

It's not subtle, or even especially politically correct, but it's something that feels hard to get especially worked up about. It's of a piece with the narative's depiction of the past, a point which is underlined in Cooke's story when he presents it as a fragment of a a larger serial. These stories aren't set in the real past of the 1930s but rather in a simulacrum created from memories of 1930s pulp adventure serials. It's the past as a child's playground. And is there anything more childish than a suposedly adult male getting exited by the glimpse of a girl's knickers?

Alias the Cat

Appropriately perhaps, this week I also read Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat. My knowledge of American underground cartoonists is woefully small, but it's not an area of comics that I've ever had much interest in. On the basis of this, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and a couple of other short pieces I love Kim Deitch's work. Alias the Cat was originally serialised as three issues of Stuff of Dreams, which might be the more apposite title since that's what the comic is really about: Stuff. The cultural detritus left behind from earlier eras of popular culture. Spinning out of an apparently autobiographical tale of obsessive ebay hunting the narrative transforms into a fantasy of early twentieth century popular culture where the borders between dream and reality become permeable.

Kim Deitch would hardly be alone amongst alternative cartoonists in expressing a cultural nostalgia. Nostalgia rooted in the objects which have been left behind by earlier cultures seems to be central to the work of many of the most prominent underground and alternative cartoonists, from Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, Seth and Ben Katchor. However, in a piece written for the Comics Journal website just this week, Deitch denies that he is a nostalgic person. Yet at the same time, he writess of a feeling of being "born in a world of great popular culture already in decline". It could be that Deitch disavows nostalgia in his article because of a general cultural trend which has tended to dismiss nostlagia as something weak and trivial. We live in a culture which for a variety of reasons tends to privilage the present over the past in terms of its importance for our culture. I suspect that this isn't the case here. As far as these things can be determined, Deitch strikes me as a 60s radical and liberal, given the underground comics scene in which his work originally appeared. And if he feels popular culture was already in decline when he was born, then presumably that decline has gone on unabated.* Or perhaps for whatever reason he just doesn't think of himself as a nostalgic person, for all that the past, and the cultural products of the past, is at the centre of so much of his work.

Personally I suspect there's more than one way to define an emotion as complext as nostalgia, and that the quote above does capture a nostalgic quality. If you're privilaging an aspect of the past over what's available in the present then surely on some level you are partaking of a discourse of nostalgia? Certainly, Deitch's work has a complex relationship with both the past and the cultural objects which his work fetichesizes. Alias the Cat exposes a fantastical secret history of exploitation and oppression which has produced such cultural artifacts and is part of their meaning. Deitch's art, which possesses a stiff but appealing blocky quality, also treats everything the same. The past and the present, whether it's a real past, a drawn past or an imagined past, are all presented on the same level with nothing to distinguish between them. The past isn't a playground in Deitch's work, or not just a playground, but something real, connected to the present, both cosy and threatening.

* On the other hand, in at least one interview I found online, published around the time of the publication of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), he was also overwhelmingly positive about the quality of then current alternative comics, seeing them as superior to the general quality of the original undergrounds. Whatever I might get from his work, the man himself is clearly no simple nostalgic.

This Week's Comics

Well, I didn't manage to make it into a regular feature, but I don't think I wanted to anyway. This is actually last week's comic, but I only picked it up on Thursday with this weeks comics.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' series of interlocking crime stories is one of my favourite comics currently being published as a serialised narrative. In practically every interview with him that I've read Ed Brubaker appears to like to point out one of his favourite themes, the relationships between between parents and children, dysfunctional familes. In the afterword printed in the back of this issue he tells us that this particular story came to him following his own father's death. Appropriately enough perhaps, it's the death of the protagonist's father which prompts Riley Richards' return to the small town of his youth from the nameless noir city where all of Criminal's narratives take place.

Brubaker is self conscious enough about his favourite themes, and Criminal is equally self conscious in the way it situates itself within the crime genre, with the slightly too obvious title, the 'pulp fiction'-like covers of Sean Phillips, and the articles spotlighting particular works of crime and noir fiction which appear in the back of each issue. The title of this story is equally self conscious in it's allusion to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. It also alerts us to one the story's themes of nostalgia (which Brubaker also helpfully points out for us in his afterword).

What interests me most is the way in which Brubaker and Phillips chose to visually depict the nostalgia which afflicts Riley as he returns to the small town of his youth. Various flashbacks puncture the issue's story, drawn in a style which appears to be lifted from Archie comics. As capable an artist as Sean Phillips is, he doesn't quite manage to appropriate the wholesome aesthetic that even someone like myself who has never read an issue of Archie would associate with that line's comics. This isn't entirely inappropriate since the youthful events that Riley pines for are far from the innocent escapades found in Archie. And it underlines just how innocent was the teenage sex and drug taking that we see, effectively contrasted with the more sordid contemporary reality found in the city depicted on the first tier of page two.

It also gives a tactile quality to Riley's nostalgia. By giving the images of the past an aesthetic which is so distinct from the present it becomes a self conscious appropriation of that nostalgia, which is further ditanced for the audience on the very first panel of the story's first page with a caption which locates the story's present not in our present but in 1982. It's also interesting because it's a device Ed Brubaker has used before. Published by Vertigo between 2000 and 2001, Deadenders is an odd series whose various elements didn't quite gel, only lasting for 16 issues. Consequently the last 4 become rather rushed after the leisurely pace of the preceding issues in a rush to give the series' overarching story a reasonably fitting conclusion. Brubaker's stated aim for the series was to try and create a series which would work in a similar way to Jamie Hernandez's work where there might be several main characters, but the story could be free to drop in on and follow other characters within the same world. It followed the adventures of a group of mod bikers within a post apocalyptic future America, slowly revealing the reasons for the mysterious cataclysm which has afflicted their world.

The last issue, in which the cataclysm unravels and something like our reality is restored, makes similar use of Archies aesthetic as the realistic teenagers we've followed over the previous 15 issues are transfigured into new characters with a new contemporary past. This may be a little unclear as I don't currently have access to the comic in question since most of my comics are in storage and I can only go on memory. The final pages find one of the characters driving one night and discovering some record he only vaguely remembers along with a vinyl player (even in 2001, a vinyl record player was an object which explicitly referenced the past). As he plays one of the records something of the past is mysteriously evoked, a past which is both the narrative we've seen in the previous 15 issues and an unseen past of the newly created character. The past is figured as an untouchable, even unknowable absence, referenced only by cultural fragments such as a vinyl record.

Which of course, it always is. That's why nostalgia can be so painful. I've only read a portion of Ed Brubaker's comics, but what I have read seems to have an ambiguous relationship with the past. One of his earliest pieces, the short 'An Accidental Death' which was serialised in Dark Horse Presents features a character looking back on the tragic events which occurred in his childhood. It's clear that this tragic occurrence has in some way scarred his present day narrating self, and the telling of his story is in no way cathartic. In different ways, his earlier Vertigo comics, Prez: Smells Like Teen President and Scene of the Crime both demonstrate an ambiguous relationship with the cultural legacy of the 1960s.* The relationship between generations may be an acknowledged preferred theme, but the various stories which have so far been published under the Criminal banner seem to be more marked by the depiction of characters unwilling or unable to escape their differently troubled pasts. This might be nothing more than a noir staple, and to a degree that's exactly what it is, but another theme that comes through prominently in many of Ed Brubaker's interviews is a somewhat complicated relationship with his own past. As a teenager he was something of a thief and drug addict who narrowly escaped prison. It was this he says which straightened him out. It's clearly left it's mark on him.

I don't generally favour biographical readings. They can be briefly illuminating, but rarely get at what's so fascinating about a particular work. It does interest me that there is a recurrent pattern hear. Brubaker is also fully aware of how seductive nostalgia can be, and the appropriation of Archie's aesthetic seems bound up with this seduction. It makes the past both tactile and distant. In the final pages of Criminal: The Last of the Innocent #1 Riley Richards falls asleep on the couch in his childhood home after reading a bunch of his old comics. His dream self floats through the idealised vision of his past, before he wakes to the realisation that the solution to his present day problems is to murder his wife. It might be a noir staple of the morally compromised protagonist wanting to kill the wife he no longer loves, and no doubt there will be complications in future issues. It's never that easy. We're being warned here.

*Interesting that these comics were published at the company built on the success of Alan Moore and which has published so many comics by Grant Morrison, both of whom have a much more celebratory view of the 60s and its cultural inheritance.

15/5/2011

Notes

1) Finally saw Lagaan yesterday afternoon. I can remember when it was released in Britain; a film which seemed to capture its moment and reach an audience that wouldn't normally be attracted to Bollywood cinema. It's a really enjoyable movie, in that cartoonish way that in my admittedly limited experience seems to be characteristic of a lot of Bollywood cinema. And it had an interesting subtext beyond the obvious (the Eevil British Empire!), although I'm not sure you'd be able to see that without an Indian explaining the references as you watched. What I found really interesting was a comparison I saw with a film made about 5 years later, Rang De Basanti, which would have been the very first Bollywood film I saw if only the DVD hadn't screwed up 15 minutes before the end. Both films star Aamir Khan, and in different ways draw upon colonial Indian history to try and say something to India's present. And both films contain the trope of a white English women educating young Indian men, which is...interesting.

2) Whilst hunting for Spearhead from Space photographs I found a really interesting blog post about the serial, which contextualised the story in terms of its production history and contemporary culture. It's interesting to hear that the BBC were considering cancelling the show in 1969 after Patrick Troughton finished his run. Not the first time that would occur. The decision to exile the Doctor to earth was also part of an overall aim to bring a stronger element of realism to the show, an element which was replaced in the following season with a more 'comic book' approach. I was particularly taken with this section which grounds the shows themes in the late 60s/early 70s:

"Gradually, as Season 7 progresses, it offers a reflection and commentary on the legacy of Wilson’s ‘white heat’ and on Tony Benn's then role as Minister of Technology (arguably symbolised throughout Season 7 in all the various factories, installations and special projects used for good or ill).

"With this theme also comes an acknowledgement of the rise of new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, the impact of economic and industrial recession with their resulting strikes and blackouts, the rise of corporate culture and the loss of Empire. This is all seen through the refractive mirror of an alternative, future Britain with its own space programme, research into nuclear power and drilling projects as emblematic of a still thriving world power.

"That view also coincides with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s best-seller of 1970, Future Shock. He suggested society was being so rapidly restructured, emerging as it was from the industrial revolution and hurtling towards, and transforming into, a ‘super-industrial’ society, that it would leave major casualties in its wake. People would be overwhelmed by such progress, and this technological, biological and social acceleration would leave them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – the 'future shock' of the book’s title. Holmes's use of plastic as a symbol of this feeling of being overwhelmed by modernisation, of the synthetic in contrast to the real, the obsession with inanimate objects given life, is expressed in both Auton stories through the mass production and commodification of plastic goods and the use of 'new techniques' in manufacturing.

"The new realism ushered in by Holmes's story and Sherwin's vision for the series also see a number of characters, usually the victims of attack, enter a realm of hysteria where their states of mind become subjected to unmanageable fear or emotional excesses. We can correlate Toffler’s ‘future shock’ and the symptoms of "shattering disorientation" in Spearhead From Space with the much revered high street attack from the Autons, the hunting down of Ransom and the Auton attack on Seeley’s cottage as the best examples of how the theme of ‘domestic terror’ operates in the programme, creating unease, dislocation and stress in an everyday location and thus making it extraordinary. 

"The fear of invasion, possession and death is not only more firmly embedded into an earthbound setting but also mines the inner fears, troubles and preoccupations of the British citizens of the Seventies. At the time there was much concern about the rapid changes to society, science and technologies out of control, mistrust of politicians and bureaucrats, worries about industry, jobs and the environment as well as class and gender divisions. Spearhead offers an overt representation of the ‘other’ in the physical form of monsters from outer space walking down the high street and through their appropriation of familiar materials, objects and their control of people."

(from cathoderaytube)

3) Kundera's nostalgia is interesting because his disdain for much of present day culture has a far more clear eyed and rational feel to his arguments than any simple reactionary. Yet, take the quote I put up the other week. Try a thought experiment. Imagine someone born in Britain in 1800, who may have lived 65 years and died in 1865. In that stretch of time such an individual would have lived through rapidly increasing industrialisation, the crowning of Victoria, the death of the Queen's consort, the year of revolutions in 1848, and goodness knows what else that I can't remember of the history of the first half of the 19th century. In other words, such a person would indeed have lived through more than one historical period. Dickens, who lived a very similar stretch of time, from 1812 to 1870 can certainly be said to have done. His later novels bear considerable witness to that. George Eliot's later novels demonstrate a similar change in their depiction of provincial England coming into contact with the wider national stage. So I wonder, is it only our nostalgia which assumes the past to have been far more static than it was? Our nostalgia which compresses the differences between different periods which would have been so much more apparent to those people who were living then.

4)

"Walk and talk, talk and walk; that was his new job. As he went along the street, he put his hand on anything it could reach. A fore hydrant, a railing, a kid's head became so many markers along his route"

Francois Truffaut, "A Portrait of Humphrey Bogart" (1958)

" One of the fine moments in 1940's film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign"

Manny Farber, "Introduction", Negative Space (1971)

5) I'm fascinated by this review by John Clute of a new collection of uncollected, mostly early stories by Joan Aiken:

"Almost all the stories assembled in The Monkey's Wedding...flow with a porcelain lucidity and gaiety that manifests the high energy of Aiken's early prime, and also because they are not only about Ago, but were written then: deep in the world of England just before the Beeching cuts began to poison the wells of community. The crystal-clear but flowing joie de vivre of the book—eight of the tales included here empolder courtships, most ending in marriages—comprises an epithalamium to wells of doing and saying and living not yet half-dead with drought. Some are fantasy; some are comedic within narrower frames. None seem specifically written for children: but almost nothing she ever wrote barred any reader from entering. A bit like A. E. Coppard or H. E. Bates but immensely faster, Joan Aiken caught and coiled the land of her birth into tales told: tales that fabulated England into a Matter that seemed unkillable.

"To read these stories now is to see that something happened."

He articulates, far more succinctly than I could manage, my own sense of what has been lost. Something is always happening.