Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

I’ll come to the actual novel in a moment. Before I do, I’d like to take a look at the two covers above. Which of the two do you prefer? If it’s the one on the right, then I’m afraid that we shall have to agree to disagree. It’s a shame I couldn’t find a clearer image online, but actually, I suppose it’s not too bad, part of a uniform set of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels reissued a few years ago. Certainly, I like it more than the cover of The Blue Flower, which is a horrible digital image. This at least is an image of something which is actually real, even it misrepresents the contents on sale in the shop of the book’s title, which are modern hard and paperbacks from the 1950s. These look like Victorian books, in rather poor condition too from the looks of the spines. Paperbacks, of course, don’t convey the sense of knowledge and timelessness that we get from an old decaying hardback. What I really dislike about the most recent editions is the wide expanse of blank space with which they frame their single images. The cover from the earlier edition (the edition I’m thankful to say mine was) presumably comes from a time when book publishers routinely put works of art on the covers of their books. A practice which now seems confined to lines of classic fiction. Although even there, Vintage appear to have broken with convention.

The cover here, a detail from the painting Cicero Reading, makes some of the same associations as the later image. It’s not a dogeared paperback with a cracked spine he’s reading. It’s also an image of antiquity, both the Classical past of the real Cicero and the Italian Renaissance when that past was rediscovered and the painting from which the detail comes. It conveys powerfully a sense of leisure and wealth. Not wealth in the sense of financial wealth, although of course that is present, and is often the only thing which permits a person to enjoy the leisure depicted, but also a sense of cultural wealth. The wealth that comes from being able to appreciate art and literature, to discriminate, to possess taste. So often in the humanist culture which has developed since the European Renaissance we seem to frame this inheritance explicitly in terms derived from the culture in the Italian states in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

I think I’ve mentioned covers once or twice before on this blog. And no doubt I shall continue to do so. Clearly, it goes without saying that anyone who doesn’t judge a book by its cover, for whom that isn’t part of their response to a book, is missing out, is something of a fool. And this cover does resonate with some of the themes of this short novel, since the bookshop and the values it represents is ultimately driven out of the East Anglian village of Hardborough, to be replaced by an Arts Centre.

The first of Penelope Fitzgerald’s books I read was The Blue Flower, her last. I can't improve on A.S. Byatt's blurb, ‘A masterpiece. How does she do it?’ Since then I’ve worked my way back through the other historical novels that make up the second half of her fiction writing career, and now I’m starting on the novels written out of her autobiographical experiences. No doubt I shall end with her very first book, The Golden Child, before moving onto the biographies. Although this isn’t, perhaps, explicitly an historical fiction then, it still feels very clearly set in its historical moment of 1959. Early on there’s even a rather pompous bank manager who opines about the, ‘vastly different world which the 1960s may have in store for us.’ More subtly there are references to the devastating floods of 1953 which the official post war memory supposedly blotted out, a marvellous evocation of children receiving their 11-plus results in which we are suddenly privy to what success or failure is going to mean to an entire generation once their lives have played out, and of course the publication of Lolita is an important plot point. Even more subtly than that, there’s possibly even a hint of the way in which the whole post-war project failed in the political machinations which ultimately drive out Florence Green. Like Florence, Mrs Gammart is an incomer to the village of Hardborough, but also a meddler, someone who likes to impose her views on others, and the closest the novel has to a villain.

As ever with Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing there’s an elusiveness to it, so much packed into such a short space. You have to keep your wits about you, else you’ll miss important action, since it’s often elided, or occurs between scenes. And she has a wonderful ability to sum up a character and their history in only a single line, whilst still somehow respecting a sense of the mysteriousness of human beings. On Florence Green, we’re memorably told on the first page, ‘She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to self-preservation.’ It generalises from the specificity of the character in a way which is almost aphoristic. I particularly liked the line about Mr. Brandish, the aged aristocratic figure whom the sly narrative voice informs us in some way is Hardborough through his aristocratic and family connections – the fact that as far as the rest of the village is concerned, he’s always been there – and whom Florence somehow befriends despite their only meeting the once: ‘Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity’, which captures a certain lost aristocratic grandeur. Of course, ultimately that was displaced by the Mrs. Gammarts of the world.

England, c. 1399-1422.

English inns had the reputation of being warm and welcoming: foreign visitors commented that (amazing as it might seem to us) hostesses greeted guests with kisses.

Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages

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.

*

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.

*

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.

Quotes...Rabindranath Tagore

But life does not cease to flow. It goes on as usual. The sun will rise tomorrow, and even the smallest of chores will not be overlooked.

Rabindranath Tagore, Choker Bali

A (by now, somewhat belated) New Year's Resolution

I was going to say I'd try and write a post for this blog once a week, but by this point I've already failed that one. I've never been very good at making (never mind keeping) New Year's Resolutions. When I look at some of the bloggers I follow, I feel genuinely impressed by the amount they manage to write for their blogs, and can't help wondering where I'm going wrong. No, I think if I am to make a resolution, it should be to stop stressing when I don't have the time or the energy to write something. I've no idea if anyone is even reading this. Even my wife seems to have lost interest! Nobody is putting any pressure on me to write anything for this blog. I'm not going out of my way to get attention. And I've got enough challenges in the rest of my life away from this blog. So really, I should just concentrate on writing when I can, and enjoying it when I do.

Still, there are a few things I wanted or meant to write about last year:

Marina Warner, The Lost Father: A truly magnificent historical fiction which, in it's final few pages undermines the very notion of historical fiction, of history as a stable narrative. The romantic fiction of an Italy which was still mired in a peasant culture, or a politically committed narrative of left wing agitation? In trying to tell her a story of her family's history, the narrator finally ends up stranded between the two, uncertain if everything she's written, which constitutes the bulk of the novel's telling, is just gilding a fiction, the story her mother preferred over what may have actually happened. It was one of the best novels I read last year, and these few words barely scratch the surface of what makes it so great. Even if it is a romantic fantasy, it still contains plenty of the changing social history of the lives of ordinary women in Italy over the 20th century, as well as Felliniesque fantasy, and a language which is as stoical and resilient as the lives of the characters it describes. The past feels more real than the present day framing sequences.

*

Alan Wall, China. I actually started a post on this, back in September, and I still intend to finish it. Soon, I hope.

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Caryl Phillips, A New World Order & Cambridge: The introduction to Phillips' collection of journalism is fascinating, seemingly as it is coming out of a cultural moment before the twin towers fell in New York. Looking over the various events and cultural figures covered in his book, Phillips imagines a future when the migrant, the stranger, the other is instinctively accepted and acknowledged as an equal. The 'New World Order' of his title. A cautiously optimistic vision of the positive side of globalisation. Without digging it out of the pile I can't check the exact reference, but I hope I'm not misrepresenting Phillips. He doesn't seem like a writer who ever settles for the easy or complacent answer, and I'm sure he expressed what I'm trying to express with more nuance than my clumsy attempt at paraphrasing. Thinking about the last decade or so, it's hard to escape the conclusion that things haven't quite worked out like that. Certainly in this country migrants have become the favourite bogeyman of the right and a fair chunk of the left. Married to an immigrant who was born outside the EU, I know from first hand experience just how hard the political establishment wants to make it for such people to settle here, even if they're married to a British citizen. We're probably (hopefully) in a far more fortunate position than many, and yet it still feels like we're currently running along a bridge as it crumbles behind us, desperate to reach safety.

Another theme which emerges from a number of these pieces is that of identity and its relationship with roots. Phillips rightly objects to a British cultural identity which would exclude him and others from a similar or parallel background. The book is organised in a way which reflects his own personal sense of his divided roots, slpit between Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and America. It's a neat retort to a British national identity which is in any case so often unstable. The only point I found myself wanting to make in response is that it is possible to feel excluded from a British identity even if you're white and come from a family which has lived in Britain for centuries. For whatever reason, I've never had a sense of roots or continuity within my own family. If I look at the photos of my grandparents in middle age for instance, I only feel a distance of the historical moment they were formed by and lived in. I've finally reached a point in my life where I feel I could actually speak to my parents and both sides would be able to hear the other. Only one of them is already gone, and the other very ill.

And if I look to literature for a cultural identity, I still feel excluded there, even if literature is really the only home that I have. Perhaps it's simply because I've lived in the North of England for most of my life, and perhaps its because of the books I happened to bumped up against as a reader, which is always partly down to chance. My first loves were science fiction and fantasy, but whatever genre you read, the bulk of our literature here, whether popular or literary has come from the South East of England, particularly London. Yes, I know we've had regional fiction since at least the 18th century, but that in itself makes my point. In the ways in which it's produced and sold to a reading public, its structured and related to its opposite, the metropolis, London.

Of course, this is a white man's lament, even if I may have an ancestor who came from Ethiopia. I couldn't compare whatever sense of loss or absence I possess with the far more challenging experience of growing up in Leeds as a black man of Caribbean descent in the 1970s. I grew up in a later decade, part of the dominant culture.

Cambridge is the fiction to go alongside the non-fiction, colliding a young woman out of Jane Austen with the degrading reality of slavery, the exploitation on which much of prosperous British 18th century society was built. It's mostly narrated from her perspective, but also in the voice of the educated slave Cambridge who comes to fascinate her but whose fate ultimately alienate her from any chance of seeing the slaves as fellow human beings. It was probably impossible for a woman of her background in the 18th century to make such a leap, but you can see the beginnings of such a struggle between the lines of her writing. Phillips is scrupulous fair to both his narrators. His Austen-like protagonist isn't uniquely horrible, although she can be unpleasant at times, and Cambridge isn't unrealistically heroic. They're both people living in circumstances not of their choosing, trapped by the attitudes bred in them by their historically contingent experience. This isn't a fiction which looks back on the past merely to moralise about it, because what would be the point of that? I think most people who might read a literary fiction about slavery have probably already made up their minds on the issue. The climatic moment of violence employs EM Forster's Marabar Caves device to depict the clash between the two cultures, left deliberately vague. Neither perspective allows us a clear view, so we're left suspended with a vision of people who have all been brutalised by a cruel social reality.

It's probably not ironic that I remember Cambridge's name over hers when his name is the title of the book. Of course, Cambridge isn't his name. Or rather it's only one of the names he possesses during his narrative.

*

The Box of Delights. Appropriately, I rewatched the BBC adaptation from 1984 in the run up to Christmas, this time in the company of my wife. When I first watched it as an adult a few years ago I was a little disapointed, able to see all the faults, but perhaps because I was watching it with my wife, this time I found myself enchanted anew.

If I had to make a list of the half dozen or so things that formed me and my tastes when I was growing up, this would be on my list. You see what I was saying above? It's English, and despite the exterior scenes being filmed in Scotland, it's cultural setting is clearly the South East of England. As a child I was enchanted. As an adult I can see the story doesn't really hang together, being a jumble of magical scenes and stuff which never really coheres into a consistent plot. It's full of this 'stuff which kids will like'. A car which transforms into a jet. Magical flight and transformation. Mythical beings. All of which makes sense of the ending which so many people seem to see as a disapointment. If it feels like a dream then perhaps it's only right and proper that Kay Harker should awake at the end. It's the second of two stories John Masefield wrote about the character (the first, The Midnight Folk wasn't made into a radio and TV show that marked the imagination of generations, and I've not read it either), so perhaps his awakening from at the end is also a waking into adulthood, leaving magic and wonder behind.

But does the lack of coherence matter? For me as a child (and now as an adult), what holds my attention is the feel of the magic. His brief meeting with the Roman soldiers adds nothing to the plot, but its necesary because Kay is encountering the matter of Britain in his dreams and travels, and you wouldn't have had the British Empire without the experience of the Roman one. The fact that the police inspector is so unrealistically useless is simply part of the charm. The special effects may feel clumsy and dated, but that's all to the good. If they really are remaking it as a film, then you just know the special effects will make extensive use of CGI, and they will almost certainly fail to capture the ellusive quality of the magic which they managed in 1984. The animation has a painted, even sensuous quality. The talking animals, the existence of which Kay accepts without much surprise, are clearly people in cumbersome masks. It all points towards the theatrical quality which so much British TV used to have. Dressing up and putting on a play. I rather miss all that. And Patrick Troughton is Cole Hawkins. They can't improve on that.

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Edmund De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes. A friend was raving about this a few weeks before Christmas and then the following week at work I had to catalogue about 60 or so books relating to Japanese art and culture. I lost count of the number of times I must have typed the word 'netsuke'. So clearly the world was pushing me to make this the book I read next. And it really is worth raving about, a beautifully written account of the different times and places this collection of 250 netsuke occupy as it is passed through five generations of the Ephrussi family. I was impressed by his refusal of nostalgia, the easy miteleuropean fantasy of a lost inheritance which the story could so easily have been. Yet a real anger still comes through in the account of what has been lost and stolen.

The narrative repeatedly bumps up against antisemitism. First, it's Charles Ephrussi's experiences in turn of the century Paris, when all his former friends turn on him following the Dreyfuss affair. Even the fact that Charles is apparently viewed as the lesser of the two models for Proust's Charles Swann from A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by some scholars starts to have the whiff of anti-semitism once you see the evidence laid out. The story then moves to Vienna between the wars when the collection is given as a wedding gift to Victor. And we all know how that story eventually ended. The collection was only saved by an extraordinary act of bravery performed by one of their former servants under the very noses of the Nazis. By this point in my life I've read and seen more than enough about the Nazi period of twentieth century European history. I've even visited the Holocaust museum in Israel. And reading about it yet again still has the power to shock. Even in the present, when De Waal arrives in Vienna to carry out his research he notes that the synagogue is being guarded because of feared attacks following the recent election in which the far right party did well. That story didn't end in 1945.

De Waal completely transforms his family saga through his attention to objects, these beautiful things which passed through so many hands, and which have survived the destruction wrought by history. its a privilaged family, both in the fantastic wealth they once possessed and the rich objects they owned, and in the artistic links to poets and painters, the references in Proust and Musil. It's a form of privilage, art, which is never lost even when the wealth is gone. His grandmother may have lost everything, but she still had her correspondence with Rilke, her knowledge and taste. These are the things which make privilage feel innate.

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.

This Weeks Comics

Actually, by this point The Winter Men appeared some years ago. It's probably superior to any of the comics I might have bought in the past few weeks. Haven't managed to get to the comic shop for a while. Another Amazon review:

Brett Lewis & John Paul Leon – The Winter Men 

“My little friends, I thought I would have more time to tell you how thing ended up. But perhaps for now I will just tell you the good parts..."

For anyone following this when it was originally serialised, it must have seemed unlikely that it would have ever reached the end. Originally supposed to run for a full 8 issues, it was bounced from one DC comics imprint to another, subject to delays, cut down to 6 issues, then struggled to publish a total of 5 issues before the final extra sized special appeared over two years later. Presumably as a result of all these behind the scenes wranglings, the final chapter in this volume feels rather compressed, the exquisite pacing on display elsewhere dropped in the rush to get the story over as elegantly as possible in the space remaining. Just the good parts...

Kris Kalenov, the central character and narrator in many tightly packed caption boxes, is a recognisable type in these sorts of stories. The lone man, weighed down by some unconfessed violent past, capable of more feeling than he allows the world to see, unexpectedly honourable, and who is caught up in a series of ever escalating events, manipulated by others.

"Like many Russians, I was meant to be poet. But one does not eat good intentions. So...I have become some other things."   

One of the most striking things about this comic is its language, which wonderfully evokes the landscape of post-soviet Russia through its cadence and inflection. I've no idea if Russians actually talk like they do in The Winter Men, but writer Brett Lewis has clearly done his research, and it certainly feels authentic. Especially as the narrative sometimes feels less interested in the post-Watchmen superhero plot with which it is ostensibly concerned (most particularly in that awkward final chapter), and more with bleakly funny anecdotes of daily life. In this respect the strongest chapter in the whole book is probably the fourth, where we simply follow Kris and his compatriot Nikki the Gangster on their ordinary 'biznis' over the course of a single day.

What draws your attention to the language is not just how fine it is, but also the fact that there's so much of it, piled up in multiple caption boxes. There's a density of information both verbally and visually on almost every page with usually as many as 6 or more panels. That none of this ever becomes excessive or overwhelming is equally a testament to the layout and design by John Paul Leon with his wonderfully gritty and expressive artwork. The detail with which he overloads his pages perfectly complements the dialogue's verbosity in constructed an overcrowded landscape for the characters to inhabit and move through. And then in the odd scene where dialogue does fall away, he's equally capable of carrying the full force of the narrative.

Given its troubled production schedule, it seems only too appropriate that the collected edition already appears to be out of print. Although it was probably the superhero element that got it published in the first place, that's actually the weakest element of the book, but only really takes over in the flawed final chapter. It works far better in the early chapters where it functions more as a metaphor for Soviet nostalgia. Otherwise, The Winter Men is a fascinating and bleakly funny portrait of post Soviet Russia and violent men which is worthy to sit next to Jack Womack's Let's Put the Future Behind Us, another American book which is both fascinated and appalled by the complex reality of a country struggling to comes to terms with its Soviet past and a present of capitalism and brute market forces.

I wanted to place this here, next to my last post on LeCarre, because although The Winter Men is a very different kind of work, it shares a few things in common with LeCarre's general worldview and approach. Brett Lewis is similarly attentive to the rhythms of speech deployed by his violent characters.

A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.

That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.


Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.