...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.]

I Shall Wear Midnight

"And what are my weapons? she thought. And the answer came to her instantly: pride. Oh, you hear them all say that it's a sin; you hear them say it goes before a fall. And that can't be true. The blacksmith prides himself on a good weld; the carter is proud that his horses are well turned out, gleaming like fresh chestnuts in the sunshine; the shepherd prides himself on keeping the wolf from the flock, the cook prides herself on her cakes. We pride ourselves on making a good history of our lives, a good story to be told." 

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

Currently reading...

"We think that the head is important, that the brain sits like a monarch on the throne of the body. But the body is powerful too, and the brain cannot survive without it." 

I Shall Wear Midnight

He was so prolific that it was easy to take his work for granted. Other than Michael Moorcock, there's probably been no other living author who's been as important to me, and yet I don't think I quite realised that before last Thursday's news. I can be very slow sometimes.

But ask me to pick a favourite of his books now, and I couldn't do it. It isn't simply that the Discworld is significant for me more as a series, rather than as any individual book. Besides, it isn't simply one series. It's a setting in which multiple series are braided together.

No, rather than any particular book - although for sure they varied in quality - if asked for a favourite I'd say it was a particular character. And I suppose I'd very obvious in my choices: Sam Vimes, perhaps. Definitely Granny Weatherwax.

I may well be mistaken in my surmise, but I always imagined that Tiffany Aching was a response to Pratchett's having developed Granny Weatherwax's character as far as she could go. Having a new character learning to be a witch meant that the world of witchcraft that he'd developed all became new. It also meant that the threats Tiffany faced felt genuinely menacing, which no longer really felt possible with Granny Weatherwax. Pure speculation on my part of course.

Anyway, I'd judge that I'm about half way through I Shall Wear Midnight right now, and I'm loving it as much as I ever loved one of his books. A comforting read, balanced by a sure awareness of the perils and moral choices that the world presents us all.

I'm also struck by how English it is. In constructing the Discworld, Pratchett borrowed from all sorts of places, cultures past and present, but the landscapes he repeatedly returned to all seem to belong to England. The world of the Chalk is clearly a rural English setting not that far removed from Hardy's Wessex. He was a very parochial writer in some ways.

And so I've set myself a reading goal for the next year. It was after I'd read Lords and Ladies I think, that I stopped reading Terry Pratchett's work. It was what I now think of as my 'grumpy teenager phase', when I convinced myself I was uninterested in some of the things I'd loved not long before and instead preferred to read work that was violent and gritty. Part of growing up perhaps is realising that comedy is often a far more 'realistic' representation of the world than is work which is self-consciously dark and unpleasant.

When I eventually came to my senses (at least, regarding the merits of Terry Pratchett's work), I decided to start at the beginning with The Dark Side of the Sun, and then read through everything in the order in which it was published, finally reading the one or two that I'd missed when I was younger, and eventually (or so I imagined) catching him up. Which I never quite managed to do.

So I'm going to catch up with him this year. It's not the reason for achieving this goal that I would have liked, but that's life. According to wikipedia, there's one, final Tiffany Aching book to appear in September, so I should hopefully be able to read the remaining books in time for the appearance in paperback of The Shepherd's Crown. There aren't that many, especially because I'm not including the science fiction series he wrote with Stephen Baxter. It just doesn't seem like the kind of sf that appeals to me, although you never know. I will read the two collections of shorter work though, so there's still a few to go. But I'll take them slowly, because I really don't want to reach the end.

RIP Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015

"Thank you for all the clever silliness, Terry Pratchett."

- a friend, posted on Facebook, which I think sums it up as well as anyone could 

My Facebook feed is already filling up with friends' tributes. Because those are the kind of friends I have.

Bugger. Not that we all didn't know it was coming of course.

I think I was just about the right age, and reading the right sort of fiction, to catch on to Terry Pratchett's work a few years before he became a phenomenon. Not that I begrudged it, in the manner that you're supposed to when a favourite band or writer becomes massively successful after a smaller, cult success when you were one of the ones who knew about them before everybody else.

And besides, there were plenty of others who knew how good he was long before I did. And plenty more who probably never read a word he wrote.

I am ridiculously poor at updating this blog with anything like the kind of regularity I would like, but I have managed to write about Terry Pratchett's work twice. On both occasions, I founds things in it which I had problems with. In the second piece I almost put in a note saying something to the extent of, "Look, honest, I do actually really like his work!" But hopefully that was obvious. I mean, you wouldn't read that much of a highly prolific author's work if you didn't fundamentally love it.

Discworld are some of the books that made me. He's a profoundly comforting writer. And I honestly don't mean that as a slight. We need writers which provide comfort. I've always loved just spending time in his imaginative world. And neither is this to say that there wasn't also profound comedy and good sense about the world present within his work. And silliness, too. Mustn't forget that. He was one of the greats, someone whose work is part of who I am.

*

This may be a statement of something which to others is just the bleeding obvious, but it only occurred to me fairly recently: the realisation that the authors you grow up reading, that mean so much to you, helped to form who you are, even might be part of the reason why reading and literature is such a major part of your life: they're all from earlier generations. They may in fact already be long dead in fact, but living authors, when you're a child or an adolescent, they belong to your parents' generation. Or might in fact be older still. So, barring tragic accidents, you are going to outlive them.

Like I say, this might be obvious to most, but it struck me a while back. However much those writers which you discover in adulthood mean to you - and I don't think I've never stopped discovering new writers; at least, not yet - there's always something special to those you discovered in early adolescence, which will never be replicated.

*

So farewell Terry Pratchett. Thank you for all the joy. And all the clever silliness.

"...all that had been simple, unquestioned and changeless changed."

Attia Hosain, Phoenix Fled

A few more points:

- Firstly, it seems that I was right. There's an interview with Attia Hosain from 1991, where she says that she 'did not read much about Urdu literature except when I had to', and was 'totally influenced by the West'. So in her introduction to Virago's 1988 reissue, Anita Desai is constructing a rather facile opposition between India and 'the West' in emphasising the supposed influence of Urdu literature on her work.

- In my previous post I suggested that these stories were 'works of memory'. It is interesting that Attia Hosain produced so little fiction. Her other published work consists of a single novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and a cookery book, Cooking the Indian Way (in collaboration with Sita Pasricha), which I imagine must have seemed terribly exotic when it appeared in 1967! There are lots of reasons why an author only publishes one or two works, and Attia Hosain did leave behind more stories, and an unfinished second novel. She was also a broadcaster and journalist, but her son Waris does suggest there may be more to her literary silence following the publication of her novel.

According to her biography she was producing stories as early as the late 30s. It's not clear if that includes all of the stories that were published in Phoenix Fled. Several of them were clearly written after 1947, since they reference the violence of Partition. It's the appearance of the collection in 1953, 5 or 6 years after she made the decision to remain in England rather than move to Pakistan, that I'm trying to construct this narrative around. Ultimately, it's a question of biography, which I don't have quite enough information to answer. Still, whenever they were actually written, they were at least published in 1953. For any reader then or since, these are stories of a world which was and is located in the past. The act of publication works as the means of recuperation.

- As I've alluded to above, the historical moment which separates the past that these stories depict from the present of the 50s in which they first appeared as part of a book is not just Independence in 1947, but more significantly, the violence of Partition which accompanied it. Since reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns a while back, I've become interested in this notion that in the north of India in particular, despite the huge differences between the two faiths, there was actually a comfortable mixing and sharing between the cultures of Hindus and Muslims, a shared culture that was to a large extent ripped apart and destroyed in the aftermath of Partition. And that there were Muslims who believed in this shared culture and were consequently opposed to the creation of Pakistan. Especially nowadays, I don't imagine that it's a voice which is often heard in either India or Pakistan.

The two stories which reference the violence do so obliquely. It's so subtle in fact, that I even had to reread the final few pages of the title story just to work out what was happening: it ends with the beginning of an act of violence, which is clearly the horrors of Partition. More effecting still is the bleak narrative of a young girl in the pertinently titled 'After the Storm'. Her account of what she has experienced emerges in fragments as she struggles to describe her experience. Experience which, mercifully perhaps, she appears unable to fully comprehend. The narrator who is encouraging her to talk similarly looks away from what is being described: the central moment of historical and personal trauma can't be faced directly.

- One final point, one I'm not sure that I know how to fully articulate: it's been strange to read this collection in the same week that also saw the transmission of the harrowing documentary 'India's Daughter' about Jyoti Singh, a film which I've not been able to get out of my mind since I saw it on Wednesday night. I suppose there's little which directly links them, other than my encountering both in the same week. Both are stories which have come out of India, separated by decades, the one fiction, the other tragically, horrifically real. Many of Attia Hosain's stories are concerned with women's experience of a deeply patriarchal culture, and it's difficult not to find the concerns of these very different works resonating together in my mind.