The Dog-Lover's Guide to the Russian Revolution

Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dog's Heart

I'm more of a cat person myself.

Like surely everyone, my first encounter with Bulgakov was the magisterial The Master and Margarita. It's one of those works which swamps everything else it's author wrote (see also: Joseph Roth's Radetzky March), which makes it easy to then neglect everything else that author has produced. It's partly simply a matter of length. There's a cultural prejudice that we seem to be suffering from to an even greater extent in our present times which equates the significance of a given novel to it's length. It's partly a simple matter of the time which you inevitably need to put in to reading a novel. Something which is hundreds of pages long will inevitably take us all longer to read than a shorter, more compact work. So the tendency is surely to try and justify the effort we have to put it into our reading. It's also clearly a matter of fact that many of the greatest works of literature are actually very long (although that's partly down to the fact that the economic conditions under which many 19th century novels were produced under encouraged length; although the conditions are obviously very different, it does feel as though there has been a similar pressure to produce novels of length in America and Britain and no doubt elsewhere since at least the 1980s). But it's also simple prejudice, related perhaps to the similar prejudice which sees comedy as inherently inferior to more 'serious' drama.

A Dog's Heart is great comedy, filled with a raucous laughter. Our hero Sharik is transformed, Frankenstein-like, from a homeless 'shaggy-haired devil' of a mutt into an equally disreputable dog-human hybrid, when an experimental Doctor, Philipp Philippovich, who is interested in the science of rejuvenation. the experiment involves the transplantation of testicles and a 'pituitary gland' from a recently deceased human.

You can probably guess how it turns out. Shari retains something of his dog-like nature, causing endless trouble by continuing to chase after cats and gorging himself on food. He also confounds the Doctor's attempt at civilising him. And not only that, but this is a tale which takes place in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Philipp Philippovich has managed to hold on to his entire apartment through the patronage of patients who are high up within the new establishment, but is still in constant dispute with the newly installed housing committee, who naturally want to take away some of his rooms in favour of the newly identified 'proletariat'. In turn, they attempt to adopt the newly human Sharik as one of their own, only for him to confound their ideology, pointedly refusing any suggestion that he might on behalf of the new Soviet state in favour of his own needs and desires. He's a creature of pure individuality who mocks equally both sides of the ideological divide. While normality may eventually be restored - as it always is in this kind of story - what really makes this story work is it's telling, switching between Sharik's slangy, first person narration and a more straightforward account in the third person, full of an antic energy. 

Currently reading

First Terry Pratchett, and now this.

Whilst America had Anne Rice, we had Tanith Lee. Unlike Rice, and unlike writers such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman whose work also can also be described in terms of sharing an aesthetic with her work, Lee never had the kind of popular success which might have buoyed her up commercially when fashions changed. She was a deeply romantic writer, whose concerns and style seem rooted in the genre landscape of 70s and 80s commercial fantasy fiction (and what other era/area of the publishing industry could have accommodated her incredible productivity?).

And her concerns seem to have been pretty constant through everything she wrote: often youthful protagonists, concerned with issues of personal growth or metamorphosis; vivid settings, which variously drew on standard genre tropes or twisted historical landscapes or myth or fairytale, and which often feel more like stage settings for her characters' inner dramas; plotting that often has more the quality of a dream than anything so prosaically mundane; an unconventional approach to ethical issues and concern with her characters' sexuality; and a prose style which was evocative, opulent, overwhelming - and at times, yes, somewhat purple in it's excesses.

It was this latter which captivated me when I first encountered her writing as a teenager. I'd be willing to bet that - apart that is from the restructuring of the publishing industry which saw saw the gradual narrowing and even disappearance of the mid list in the 90s, confining so many of the more interesting genre writers to smaller, independent publishers - it was perhaps this more than anything else which saw the eclipsing of her reputation with major publishers. Modern genre writing seems to favour a kind of prose which is more functional, more conversational with less flourish and style, probably thanks to the influence of film and television. Indeed, as I've said, purple prose was always a trap Ms. Lee risked, and occasionally fell prey to, not that that ever bothered me, since it was that opulence which attracted me in the first place.

When I finally encountered actual decadent writing a few years later, I remember several short stories from an anthology of female decadent writing which I read during my undergraduate degree which felt as though they could even have been written by her. And like so many decadents, she seems to have been obsessed with beauty. So many of her characters are extravagantly beautiful, always in some way above or cast out from the common herd. Central characters included not only aristocrats, but even Gods. (Again, this is perhaps another way in which she was somewhat out of step with modern culture, an era in which even our elites wish to clothe themselves with the language of equality).

Not that she ever really celebrates or idealises any kind of authority and hierarchy. Rather, where they appear in a story, these archaic power structures are accepted as a part of the world in which her characters live and have to negotiate. Patriarchy is always suspect. I'll never forget her story 'The Devil's Rose': the absence of any overt moralising of its telling and its lush, decadent prose, not only makes the final twist all the more horrific, but demonstrates even more effectively the callousness of a certain kind of predatory masculinity that is so easily romanticised.

*

So, currently, I'm reading an early work, a collection of the somewhat clunkily named Four-BEE novels, Don't Bite the Sun, followed by Drinking Sapphire Wine - the first British edition which combined them after their initial American publication. The text is littered with plenty of future slang from it's post apocalyptic world in which humanity is confined to three cities, taken care of by robots, and allowed to indulge themselves in any way they like. If they die, a new body will be supplied, so characters change not only faces, but also their gender, only 'tending' to either male or female out of personal preference (the covers of not only my, but of all, editions that I've found online obscure this point by over emphasising the femininity of the main character). It's a flamboyant brightly lit future which surely has something in common with 70s glam. The characters frequently take ecstasy pills - it's weirdly prescient for science fiction which seems blithely unconcerned with any notion of futuristic prediction. Rather the tropes of science fiction are deployed for their sensuous pleasure.

It's a vision of paradise in which our narrator is coming to realise the extent to which humanity is actually imprisoned by this superficially paradisiacal artificial environment. By the end of the first volume at least, she's come to make some kind of peace with her world - there are epiphanies along the way, but no delusions about finally breaking free from this artificial paradise in some way (the way we might expect this sort of story to go). Beneath the sprightliness and narrative propulsion - plenty happens, but for little ultimate purpose, and our central narrator ends up largely back where 'she' started out from - there's quite a knowing comment about the compromises modernity forces us to make. It will be interesting to see where the second volume takes the story.

Post-War Arthuriana

Henry Treece, The Great Captains

Chronologically, this is the final volume of what has been called Henry Treece’s ‘celtic quartet’. Although the novels can certainly be made to fit into an overarching narrative and chronology, I’m not aware of any evidence that they were composed as such. It feels more like the creation of Jim Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock when they were first discovering them in the 1950s as they were originally published. Moorcock went on to produce introductions for all four novels in the handsome editions Savoy Books produced when they republished them in the late 70s/early 80s. Still, if that was what it took to get the novels back in print and successfully marketed, then who am I to argue.

And seriously, if you’re going to acquire these novels, then these are the editions to get. Not only do you get the pleasure of Moorcock’s introductions, but also evocative covers from one Michael Heslop, and interior illustrations from the great Jim Cawthorn. Both illustrators feel like they belong to the tail end of that great tradition which stretches back to the nineteenth century. The sort of illustration work that makes you look at most of their modern equivalents and just despair.

And the only way you will acquire any Treece novel nowadays (unless there’s any still lurking in a dusty library corner; assuming there are any dusty library corners left for them to lurk in that is) is second hand, since sadly all his work appears to languishes out of print. A committed romantic in a time when that doesn't appear to have been particularly fashionable (only, is it ever especially fashionable? - the immediate post War period actually saw a flowering of (neo-)romanticism; it was only by the 50s following the end of rationing that it fell out of favour). If any of his work is known at all now it’s the historical fiction, especially his Viking stories, which he produced for children. But he was also a poet and critic, and produced a handful of historical novels aimed at an adult audience. In his introduction to The Great Captains, Moorcock contrasts him with contemporaries such as Alfred Duggan and Robert Graves. Where Graves’ historical fiction is still in print (if only thanks to the successful BBC adaptation of I, Claudius), both Duggan and Treece seem to have been left behind by fashion.

We don’t have to agree with all of Moorcock’s polemical assertions to feel that this is a real shame, since Henry Treece was clearly an excellent writer of historical romance. He gets the mindset of men who lived in a world whose reality still contained mysticism and magic as part of its fabric in a way that few others appear to, at least to my knowledge. These aren’t fantasies exactly. Where magical occurrences do occur, they can easily be rationalised as fantasies of perception. But for the characters who experience them, lacking the capacity to perceive such rationalisations, and living in societies that are governed by myth and ritual, magic is the only plausible explanation.

In his own introduction to his work, Treece is concerned to present this particular fiction as a form of historical truth, arguing that it is as accurate as he could make it. From the bibliography he supplies at the end of the book, Treece was clearly as well read in the period as it was possible to be in the mid-50s when he produced his Arthurian tale. He dismisses Malory as a ‘biased knight’ and positions his work as a corrective to writers such as Tennyson, ‘throw[ing] off all the later accretions of legend and later poetry,’ and appealing to the ‘Court of History.’

Which to me, all rather misses the point. No doubt the stories of King Arthur could have their origin in a real tribal chieftain who lived in post-Roman Britain. My admittedly somewhat limited understanding is that we have to rely more on archaeology than on textual sources for our knowledge about the period, and that as a consequence there is much that we still don’t know about what actually happened in that period of British history. But surely, when it comes to a story like Arthur - one which, like the story of Robin Hood, has been retold so many times - whatever truth which may have first given rise to it, surely the point of the story, for us as modern subjects, is the myth? It’s hard to see what value there is in the comic deflation of the notion of the round table which occurs at one point: nothing more profound than a bleak joke on authority as Arthur and his leaders argue about who should precede who. The narrative voice even pulls back to let us know that this is the event which future generations will eventually misinterpret. Both the myth and the comic deflation are fiction, so why should it matter which we give primacy to?

Seen in this light, The Great Captains seems like a text which has been produced by a sensibility which was at least partly formed by post-War experiences. Greece himself served as an intelligence officer with R.A.F. Bomber Command, so whilst he certainly wasn’t fighting in the front line so to speak, he still clearly experienced the War. If the post-War period was not a period amenable to romanticism, then that was likely due to the experience of the War and it’s aftermath, and the realisation of just what morally corrupted romanticism could lead to. The gritty immediacy which he brings to his depiction of violence in this world seems as much redolent of post-War exhaustion with conflict as it does with his obvious desire for fidelity to a realism of the period of post Roman Britain. One of my favourite moments in the novel depicts Arthur's first successful battle. After considerable attention is paid to the build up before battle, a marvellous depiction of the tension felt by men who are about to go into battle, we then cut straight to the aftermath of battle, starting with a meditation on the point of few of one of the dead men whose body is lying on the battlefield.

The claim to historical accuracy is buttressed by the 'realism' of Treece's telling of the story. And as I said above, that is one of the attractions of his work, just as it is with the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, who also wrote her own version of Arthur. As have many others - a common desire for writers in the twentieth century seems to be the same as Treece's: to provide a more historical, more ‘realistic’ depiction of the Arthurian world.

And yet, for all his criticism of Malory and Tennyson, Treece’s version of Arthur feels equally romantic in some ways. From his first appearance in the text, in which he is successfully ploughing a field with two bulls, Artus the Bear as Treece calls him, seems positively super heroic. He's an epic slightly unbelievable, epic figure, who throughout the narrative he is constantly proving himself through acts of strength and leadership. Eventually, because this is the story, he's brought down through his own self deception over a woman. Our final sight of him, long after his successes in battle and loss of his queen, is as a figure finally brought low by old age. Ultimately, he's a properly tragic figure.

*

I find myself wondering if the 'realism' of it's telling isn't actually supporting the novel's romantic elements. When I began writing this piece, I hadn't realised I was writing something which would so easily jibe with my earlier piece. Of course, The Great Captains is not a secondary world fantasy, but the appeal to history, which I am taking to include a more 'realistic' telling of a story which contains strong elements of romance (not only the magic, but also it's tragic end), seems to serve  similar function to the appeal to realism that many of George R.R. Martin's fans seem to make about his work. It's a way of taking a story which contains elements we might now find embarrassing or problematic, or which has been idealised in some way, and making it work in a way that supposedly allows us to take those same elements more seriously. Many of the ideals which motivate Treeece's characters are ones which I, as a twentieth / twenty-first century vaguely left leaning liberal would likely find abhorrent if I encountered them in the real world. Yet they still feel authentic in the world which is depicted in The Great Captains.

(And on reflection, perhaps the realism also undercuts the ideals for which they are supposedly fighting. Treece's Arthur never really appears to achieve a stable success until after his tragedy has occurred. Before that point he's merely leading what is clearly an unstable coalition of competing tribal forces. Almost as soon as he achieves his first military successes he begins to unravel through his pride and self-deception. The values of the characters are viewed with dispassion, and the tragic nature of the story means that it can hardly be said to celebrate those values.)

Since I've not read Martin's work I can't take this insight to what feels like it's proper conclusion and say why Treece's approach works for me whilst A Song of Ice and Fire fails for me, if I even would say something as categorical as that where I to read or watch it. One crucial difference for me which I can say is that Henry Treece was not writing fantasy, but historical fiction, and that does seem to make a difference for me when I'm trying to think about these issues. As violent as his story is at times, there's never any feeling that the narrative is revelling in the violence it depicts. In dwelling far more on both the fear and consequences of violence, yet frequently avoiding its actual depiction, Treece's novel never avoids the issue of just how violent the culture and warfare of post-Roman Britain would be, but it does avoid a self-conscious celebration of that violence.

It's probably unfair of me to single out Martin's work for this kind of criticism, and not simply because I haven't read his books or watched the TV show which is being adapted from them. But also because so much of our popular culture of the last few decades seems to make this error of revelling in gratuitous depictions of violence. I don't think it's confined to works of genre fantasy. It almost certainly includes things which I've enjoyed in the past. We all have our particular lines to draw when it comes to the issue of the depiction of violence, and I doubt that many of us are especially consistent.

"The wind blows from the east...

"The wind blows from the east bringing an acid hail that falls from the leaden sky. The air stutters tic tic tic tic, rattle of death-watch beetle on sad slate roofs. The swan of Avon dies a syncopated death. Ashes big as snowflakes fall, black frost grips July by the throat. We pull the velvet curtains tight over the dawn, and shiver by empty grates. The household gods have vanished, no one remembers quite when. Poppies and corncockle have long been forgotten here, like the boys who died in Flanders, their names erased by a late frost which clipped the village cross. Spring lapped the fields in arsenic green, the oaks died this year. On every green hill mourners stand, and weep for The Last Of England." 

Derek Jarman, Kicking Against the Pricks

...the curtain falls

"I wanted to hold on, just a little longer, to my last act. A premonition of pain made me delay; the pain that comes after the drama, when the bodies have been carried from the stage and the trumpets are silent and an empty day dawns which will dawn again and again to make mock of our contrived finalities." 

Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Whilst everyone else was seemingly getting themselves upset in some way over The Buried Giant, I finally got around to reading The Unconsoled. It's a novel which appears to have a somewhat contradictory reputation, it's dream logic and narrative dislocations appearing understandably jarring to some after his first three short, apparently realist texts. It was James Woods, was it not, who described it as 'inventing it's own category of badness'? Equally hyperbolic were all those words are quoted on my edition, proclaiming it some kind of masterpiece. And I've also seen it both described as overlooked in academic analyses of Ishiguro's fiction, and damned for being exactly the sort of anti-realist text that academics are going to like.

This latter judgement at least was not exactly my experience. I came to Ishiguro through my parents' bookshelves. He was a favourite of my Dad's, although I can't remember ever discussing with him what it was he liked so much about his work. I, on the other hand, with a degree in English Literature behind me and a return to academia in my future - had I but known - stumbled with this one. I'd devoured his first three books, but failed to get more than a few pages into this before giving up in exasperation. I didn't get far enough to make any judgement on it's quality. So much for any pretensions I might have to literary appreciation, over and above my dad's 'common reader' reaction!

Reading it all these years later, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards my younger self, although I do rather wish I could advise him to not be quite so impatient! The Unconsoled is a book which requires some patience I feel, although obviously everyone will have their own reactions. Not so much for it's length, although it is a long novel, but because it seems to take time to adjust to its skewed vision of the world. By his own acknowledgement, Ishiguro is far from the most stylish of writers. There's little metaphor or simile in his writing, but an earnest fastidiousness which appears to be reflected in narrators who are frequently attempting to maintain some measure of dignity amidst the chaos of lives caught in historical situations which frustrate such attempts.

Here, our narrator is Ryder, a world famous pianist, who arrives in an unnamed European city in the wake of some undefined catastrophe. His role is either to give a musical performance or possibly a lecture instead, which will provide some positive summing up of the city's recent past and current needs. That uncertainty is typical of a text which is constantly unsettling any stable sense of reality: locations are connected to each in an impossible, dream like manner. Taking place over a handful of days, each section of the novel begins with Ryder waking. Here, the normal order of things is reversed, with waking signalling a re-emersion into the dream.

Time stretches so that a conversation which could logically occupy only a few minutes instead fills multiple pages of lengthy exposition, exposition which often seems focussed on seemingly trivial matters, matters which are taken with utmost seriousness by everyone. Ryder himself is plagued by memories of his parents in England, who may or may not be about to arrive in the city themselves, and may or may not have his own family who live in the city. He repeatedly comes across people from his past, however impossible their presence might seem. Honestly, it's hard to think of any novel which manages to mimic the logic of dreams quite so effectively.

Published in 1995, it would be easy to peg the crisis the city has experienced in its recent past to the ending of communist rule in Eastern Europe just a few years before, but like so much in this novel, this is never explicitly confirmed. It speaks to a general ambivalence about memory found not only here, but in all of Ishiguro's work that I've read. Remembering is never simple for his characters; memory reveals all of the many compromises and failings which have occupied their lives. They are all, perhaps 'unconsoled' in some way.

The logic of dreams which structures the narrative also leads it inevitably towards the surreal. One of my favourite moments is from late in the book where Ryder witnesses the bizarre 'dance of the porters', narrated with a deadpan earnestness that is by turns comic in it's situation and chilling in it's consequences. In fact, that could work as a fair description for a lot of the way the narration of this novel works. There is comedy throughout but it's so well suppressed that it could be easy to miss. Equally there's also a real sadness here, mainly concerned with the expectations of others, whether that other is a lost love or disappointed parents.

Ironically, because I've read somewhere that part of Ishiguro's intention with this novel was to write an 'international novel', and moreover a novel which is set in Eastern Europe, but I find myself wanting to class it as an example of 'English surrealism'. Certainly there's little of the 'mocking stance' which Rhys Hughes identifies with the genre, but there is a concern with 'the Show', even if in this case, it is a Show which doesn't actually go on. If the narrative functions as a dream, then it is clearly an anxiety dream, in which Ryder is forever being interrupted and distracted from whatever purpose he is engaged upon - in one case even physically unable to speak. The performance which he is so intent on giving never actually occurs, except for a single practice session in a dilapidated, isolated cabin, where he is overheard by only a single person. I've seen this scene described as an example of a 'nihilistic aesthetics', and which mocks any attempt to impose a politics upon art. Which is certainly a persuasive reading, but it's also rather comic, isn't it? In some respects, it's only the elegance and poise of Ishiguro's style which ensures we can overlook the comedy of this novel, the sheer absurdity of most of it's action.

And it's incorrect perhaps to say that 'the Show' doesn't go on. There's a curious gaiety to the final scene on a tram in which, having been finally abandoned by Boris, the little boy who may be his son, Ryder finds himself unaccountably weeping. The sadness present throughout the novel has finally penetrated his restrained surface. But then it's pointed out by one of the other passengers that there is a sumptuous buffet present on the tram, and that however bad things are, he should eat and carry on with things. And so, as it does for all of us, no matter how awful things can get, 'the Show' ultimately carries on...

english Kafka?

"He didn't feel that he had been tried and found wanting, rather that he had not been tried and had no idea of whether he was wanting or not." 

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

[It perhaps goes without saying, that by this point, we are well past the point where a comparison to the works of Kafka really makes any sense. We even have an adjective, which can sometimes feel as though it's also a label for a whole raft of work which likely has actually little in common with the work of the great Czech writer. There is nothing obviously or overtly Kafkaesque about the work of Penelope Fitzgerald, yet here we have a sentence which seems close in some ways at least to the comedy and absurdism, a sympathy with failure entirely lacking the comfort of sentimentality, that we find in Kafka. Unless I'm mistaken. It's been so long since I last read Kafka, back in my days of being a Serious Young Man.

[Yet recall that Kafka loved the novels of Charles Dickens (was Amerika not at least partly intended to be a rewrite of Martin Chuzzlewit?). And, if I may be excused a detour here, wasn't Jane Austen a favourite of Edward Gorey? It's not that we need foreigners to point this out, but I think that many admirers of these canonical English authors can perhaps easily miss the abyss which yawns beneath the tightly held social worlds depicted in their fiction. We can sometimes mistake for safety what is actually extremely precarious. Menace is after all rarely far from comedy, but it's so easy to overlook. Penelope Fitzgerald certainly understood that. And, even in an early, deliberately comic novel such as this, she has the capacity to make you weep.]