Books Do Furnish A Room

Snake

This poem takes me straight back to school, where it was probably the first 'modern' poem I had come across - ie, it doesn't rhyme regularly in stanzas of equal length.  My ideal of poetry then was Tennyson (and why not, indeed), and I was ready to be contemptuous of D H Lawrence's The Snake. Partly that was precocious (and priggish) poetical purity, partly it was referred embarrassment from his erotic reputation.  But in fact it caught my imagination, and it chimed with two other things I read at about the same time - Gerald Durrell's books, including his account of growing up in Corfu; and George Orwell's essays, where Shooting an Elephant describes some similar emotions about feeling forced to kill to demonstrate your courage.  Lawrence is not as fine a poet as Orwell is an essayist (few, in the modern era, can write as clean and pure a prose as Orwell at his best).  But this is still very fine, very thought provoking - and has a nicely humourous and human element too - he's in his pyjamas, and we all know how brave we would have been if we'd been properly dressed!

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Book of sand

I turned yesterday to one of my greatest favourites, for small delicate pieces to read while feeling sorry for myself with a lergy and no voice (and for Lindsay not to have a voice, believe me, that's serious - talking is what I do!).  Small and delicate, but far from trivial, because I picked up Borges' The Book of Sand.  I'll just touch on two of these netsuke.

First, Ulrike:  four pages of exquisite love agony; "My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing."  An elderly academic is offered a single day of love by the Norwegian Ulrike, and this touching story is written with prose as quiet and as perfect as the snow that falls in the story.  There is a joke from Schopenhauer, a reference to York's turbulent history and a half dozen other enriching ideas.  There is joy, tragedy, inevitability and serendipity, all mixed, but all seeming to be part of an inevitable whole.  "To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected.  The miracle has a right to impose conditions."  And later, in the bedroom, with reference to the Nibelungenlied which they have been discussing: "Ulrike had already undressed...There was no sword between us.  Time flowed like the sands."

The title story, The Book of Sand, is quite different.  A man buys from a traveller a book which turns out to have no first page, no last page, and an infinite number of pages - he never sees the same page twice.  Borges calls this an inconceivable concept, though he seems to have conceived and described it with ease.  He hopes that the stories create "dreams which go on branching out in the hospitable imaginations" of the readers.  All Borges does is describe the buying of this book and his despair at at finding it so imcomprehensible.  It bears obvious formal comparison with The Library of Babel, about a library with all possible books in it (not in this collection), and creates a similar alienation: "the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself."

There are other fine stories in this collection, each a little jewel.  If you do not know Borges, imagine discovering bitter chocolate for the first time, rich and sad.

The pictures, by the way, are from my recent trip to Namibia - the dunes at Sossusvlei.

Maupassant

I recently read some of Maupassant's short stories, a first venture for me.  The short story is very hard, and I think fails to give satisfaction more often than the novel (though not so often as poetry).  But when it achieves greatness, it is very compelling, it is like holding a jewel in your hands rather than admiring a fine view.  And yet the finest short stories grasp the world in little space, and capture time and the heart in a single twist of writing.  I am a great lover of short stories of all kinds, and they have the great practical advantage of readability when time or energy is lacking, and I am very happy to read the genre in many forms - crime, the (long) prose poem, the (short) novella, the fable, and the drama.

In the collection I read, the ones that stood out were Maupassant's flagship story, Boule de Suif, the savage  Mademoiselle Fifi, the odd and worried Miss Harriet, the philosophical Claire de Lune and the bizarre and unlikely, though very sad, Useless Beauty.  The themes seem varied, but they are all set in late nineteenth century France, often provincial, and often framed by the Franco-Prussian war, which bit into the French soul as the Vietnam War did into the USA's.  They are written with great distance, often taking the form of stories told by someone else, and they are characteristically unresolved, leaving many questions answered.

Well, I am hampered by my constitutional inability to read French, but I enjoyed them, but found them a little without passion.  I also found them utterly of one voice - so I rapidly became slightly bored at the emotional flatness, and the boredom and the bleakness.  But they are strongly written, and although they seemed to me entirely without frills or decoration, there are made of wrought iron - strong, graceful almost in spite of themselves, but without lightness, joy or esprit.  They are hammered out of words, and one has a real sense that the sentences have been worked at, again and again. I might read more Maupassant, but I'm not champing at the bit!

As any reader of this blog knows, the greatest short story writer of them all is Rudyard Kipling, but a close neighbour of Maupassant's on the shelf, Somerset Maugham, takes some beating too.  This is a form which doesn't get the attention it deserves, so I might make it a theme of a few postings over coming weeks. 

Oliver and Prejudice

My other two big novels in the past week have been Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Although they have little in common, I am treating them together as my reactions to them, and my attitude before reading, were so very different. 

The Austen I have known well, almost intimately, for years - I cannot remember a time when I did not like Austen, and although P&P has often not been my favourite, I have always loved it - especially for Mr Bennet, and Elizabeth herself, who is the Austen heroine we all want to fall in love with us - Jane Bennet is lovely but tame, and Fanny Price is insipid.  Emma is an interfering, petulant spoiled princess - though the heroine of Persuasion might be fun to know too.

But while early introduction to Austen worked wonders, it had the opposite effect with Dickens.  I had enjoyed Christmas Carol and a compendium of my mother's called The Humour of Dickens, so tackled him with gusto at too young an age - and my more maturer (though no less judgemental) years found him vulgar, melodramatic, chaotic and overblown.  All this is true of course, but maybe it's besides the point?  Anyway, I decided to revisit him through Oliver Twist, which, I am ashamed to say, I had never opened!

Well, on these most recent readings, I had great pleasure, and not a few surprises, in both novels.  I started the Austen with pride in my own knowledge of the book, and a strong prejudice that I would enjoy every word.  In fact, I was rather impatient with it for fifty pages or so, though the comfort blanket surrounded me soon enough, and I thoroughly enjoyed all the later passages.   But I think I read the novel differently than ever before, being more sensitive to Darcy's change of feelings about Elizabeth, which are actually signalled very early.  I still have little sympathy for Charlotte's decision to marry Mr Collins, but I understand her skilful management of him more and more!

And I approached the Dickens with exactly opposite feelings - thinking I knew nothing and almost expecting to not enjoy it.  In fact, like Hamlet it is "full of quotations", and I recognised a lot of characters and incidents.  It was a little hard to get into for me, but its a rollicking good story anf I soon got absorbed and enjoyed the middle passages much more than I expected - and it is very funny, in lots of ways on lots of levels.  However, I got bored with the mass of necessary coincidences necessary to work the plot to its sentimental and melodramatic conclusion, which seemed rushed.  Is it more than Jeffrey Archer with a conscience?  Yes, of course, it's magnificently written, but it's too sickly a mixture for my (sometimes) austere palate.

A Forsaken Garden

This week's poem is a little unusual for me, since I am not really very fond of Victorian poetry (with many many exceptions, notably the arch technician, Tennyson).  But this poem, Swinburne's A Forsaken Garden, captures my imagination in many ways.  First, its very beautiful, especially the first stanza.  In some ways, I wish he'd stopped there!  Second, this was revolutionary when first produced, but has quickly become very old hat - both poetically and philosophically.  Third, I spent a lot of time on the west coast of Scotland at the time I first came across the poem, and I just enjoyed the literal significance of the first four lines.  Read it aloud, slowly, and her the music.

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-birds's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die - but we?"
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And for ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end  -but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

Mavala Shikongo

I have read three meaty novels in the past week - and I will post on all three over the next few days, but am starting off today with Peter Orner's The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, continuing a Namibian theme which I hope is not becoming too boring.

In fact, this is a novel of wide resonance, written by an American and containing many themes which will be recognised by anyone familiar with a hot, hard country, where despair and disintegration lurk around the corner, if they are not already present; and others which are familiar to any country in which a war has ended with an uneasy division of the spoils, and an uneasy reconciliation between the parties. Orner has spent a lot of time in Namibia, and has a fine way with words. His chosen technique is unusual - he has written a book of 306 pages, made up of 155 chapters - yes, 155 chapters, some of them only a sentence or two long. Although many characters speak in the first person, and others are described, much of the narrative is sustained by an American volunteer teacher at a very remote and desolate school north of Windhoek, one Larry Kaplanski.

But the central character is Mavala herself. Her "second coming" is not, in any sense, either religious or redemptive, but it certainly has a powerful effect on the tight, disfunctional and overwhelmingly male community. She fought in the war - but doesn't talk about it (she's not a man, is the explicit message, and men talk up their deeds - she doesn't need to) and she comes to teach. She's beautiful, remote, and self contained; then she disappears and reappears a few weeks later with her illegitimate son she had left with a trusted friend or comrade. Chance brings her and Larry together, and he tries to reach out to her, only to be told: "don't think about me - I'm finished with that - finished with being thought of." But you can't help it, any more than you can not think about thirst on a hot day - and the simile of desire is quite deliberate, though the book is very far from being overtly sexual. Of course, he does think about her, and the effects of that are an important part of this book, and I won't spoil it for you. But the rich cast of characters contains all sorts, and they each add their own dimension: the almost brilliant, the hen pecked, the sexually frustrated, the dead enders - and the stories they tell and retell to define themselves and what it is to be alive, and what it is to miss out on life. Although the author is male, the male characters are far from heroic, although they have their virtues; but the women, including Mavala, have great strength and clearly the author's sympathy. In many ways, this is about strong women - three different types of strength, I would say - force, God, and domestic care - in a world of weak men. Let me offer you a couple of examples of Orner's writing:

The teacher, on his reading" "History, at night, by torch, is the guiltiest of pleasures. Turn the page and there's always more mayhem."

The amateur writer, on his new play: " Finished? Finished? There is no finished. There is only surrender."

Or someone struggling to write a letter with a difficult message: "Why are there so many words in my head and none on the page?.

These are all serious, portentous examples, but the book is full of humour and human joy as well. It's an unusual novel, and a powerful, compelling read. I have read nothing else of Orner's, but I will seek him out now, and you might wish to do the same.

Busy old foole

Now Friday brings you a metaphysical poem, John Donne's The Sun Rising.  It's metaphysical, certainly, in its main conceit, and in the imagery of the final stanza.  But so colloquial, vulgar and joyous as well, and - once you've grasped his point a few lines in - quite saucy too.  Here is a lord of language, enjoying his mistress almost as much as he enjoys writing about her.

        BUSY old foole, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
        Late school-boys and sour prentices,
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

        Thy beams so reverend, and strong
        Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
        If her eyes have not blinded thine,
        Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
    Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

        She's all states, and all princes I ;
        Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
        In that the world's contracted thus;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere

Not Hereros but heroes

As part of my pre-reading for a trip to Namibia, I have found Bridgman's Revolt of the Hereros absolutely fascinating.  The Herero people were pastoralists, great lovers and managers of cattle, who lived in central and northern Namibia (though it was, at the time I shall be talking about, the emergent German colony of South-West Africa).  The Germans stumbled into empire, and weren't really prepared for it.  But eventually, they left the coast, and started to exploit the grasslands of the central plateau for cattle raising, which brought them into conflict with the native inhabitants, particularly the Hereros.

After years of semi-legalised theft and increasing impoverishment, the Hereros rebelled in 1904; with other tribes, notably the Hottentot, joining in later, the conflict lasted for three years.  This was a major tragedy and a major war that is little discussed: 60,000 Hereros may have died in the fighting, in internment camps, and from disease and malnutrition, and the Hottentots lost 2000 men also, as did the Germans themselves.  The German army was psychologically and militarily ill-equipped for this war, thinking they only had to deal with ignorant savages, whereas of course it was they who were the ignorant savages.  A clever guerrilla war - though advantage was not pressed home effectively - gave the Hereros the upper hand for months, while Berlin fumed,  Eventually, German tactics became  more and more brutal and more and more troops were consigned to the theatre - with the explicit aim, openly endorsed by military and civilian alike, of wiping out the Hereros.  Sadly, they were successful: a few individuals survive, but no effective tribe or culture.  It was, even by the standards of nineteenth century Africa, a bloody and unhappy event.  In modern terms, this was ethnic cleansing: memorials in Windhoek to German victories must leave a very sour taste to native Namibians today.

Dwem index

My selection of eight books for the traditional desert island, which I called Lindsay's Canon, scored high on the dwem index – dead white European males – and I gave myself the challenge of finding a more diverse group of eight writers I’d genuinely be happy to be marooned with.

The original group consisted of Borges, Homer, T S Eliot, Jane Austen, Kipling, Donne, Le Carre and Anthony Powell, which scores a massive 28 on the index (one point for each characteristic, with a maximum score for all eight books of 32).   Only Le Carre is alive, only Austen is female, and only Borges is non-European (and that’s only just true) and not white.  I felt I had to consider Eliot an European through his own choice to work and write in England.  While not accepting for a moment any intrinsic virtue for a writer in being female, non-white, non-European or even (only qua writer) alive, I thought I’d try and do better.  Bearing in mind that I had to have read and enjoyed them – not just heard of them – and that they should stand much re-reading, this is what I came up with:

·        Robertson Davies  The Deptford Trilogy:  Davies is a fine, slightly old fashioned novelist who I much enjoy. He has a habit of writing trilogies, in which three novels are closely connected and mutually enriching, rather than being essential sequences to each other.  The first novel of this trilogy, Fifth Business, is particularly fine – and I recently also enjoyed Tempest-Tost, the first novel of the Salterton Trilogy.

·        Margery Allingham  Sweet Danger:   Perhaps the finest writer of the great era of crime writing; Sayers can be as good but is affected and her hero is too perfect for words; Ngaio Marsh is funny and clever, but looks very period and patronising now; and Agatha Christie couldn’t write.  But Allingham has a delicate touch, a wonderful eye for character and place, almost Dickensian in its intensity and vigour – and her heroes are very engaging.   She describes the police – who are effective and central in many of her books, not bumbling amateurs as so often in this period – much more realistically than any of the others.  And she tells a super story - this is one, Tiger in the Smoke is another.

·        Mary Wesley  The Vacillations of Poppy Carew:   A very funny writer who is a constant inspiration to me – she is one of the few writers left who started writing at an age greater than I have so far reached!!  I feel that many consider this fiction for a female audience, a kind of very superior chick lit, but I think her perceptiveness, her joie de vivre and her lovely style make it better than that.

·        Orhan Pamuk  My Name is Red:   This is a fantastic novel, but I have found other writing by Pamuk, notably Snow, very heavy going.  He writes wonderfully, with great intensity, and is unafraid to tackle very difficult and politically sensitive issues, such as militant Islam or the Kurdish question.  I read My Name is Red in Istanbul, where it's set: a fabulous murder mystery is set in a much broader, deeper novel about the nature of power and patronage, and uses the debate over painting – to continue with the old Persian techniques of miniature painting, or to adopt techniques from the west such as perspective and realistic portraiture – to carry a wealth of fascinating detail and discussion.

·        Gunter Grass  Tin Drum:   A little old fashioned now, but still immensely evocative and mocking of the crazy pre-war years in Germany, although Grass’s liberal credentials have been slightly sullied in recent years.  Some of his other novels, especially The Flounder, which is a feminist cookery book in disguise, are also very fine.  However, he can be a bit bizarre on first reading – you need time to “tune in”.

·        Tom Stoppard  Arcadia:   The ultimate wordsmith, great fun to see on stage, but even better to read and savour.  It’s very hard to pick a favourite Stoppard, but this or The Invention of Love, a very moving play about A E Housman, are probably mine.

·        Kazuo Ishiguro  A Pale View of Hills: Ishiguro is a perceptive novelist of, typically, gentle sadness and regret.  His works are beautiful but might, after much re-reading, lose their lustre, I fear.  This novel, and The Remains of the Day with its splendid portrait of the butler regretting his past, but without really realising it, are the ones I am most likely to want to read again.

·        Seamus Heaney  District and Circle:  I needed a poet, and Heaney is my choice for the challenge he always poses, the strength and vigour of his lines, but also for his accessibility.  His poems have a physical presence which I find very sympathetic, as in these lines from The Blackbird of Glanmore:

"Hedge-hop, I am absolute

For you, your ready talkback,

Your each stand-offish comeback,

Your picky, nervy goldbeak -

On the grass when I arrive,

In the ivy when I leave."

Still precious few women, and they’re mostly white, but five of them are still alive and three are non-European. This list scores 20 out of 32, a marked improvement, though I find it much less comfortable to think that they might be all I had through a prolonged isolation.  I could do much “better” by choosing works I’ve read and enjoyed but which I personally don’t expect to revisit very often – such as Toni Morrison, for example.  On my desert island, I might have to adopt Disraeli’s tactic: “When I want to read a novel, I write one”!

I’m sure there are people out there who think I’m missing great candidates (and I’m sure they’re right), so please tell me.  Harriet Devine should easily be able to offer me eight female writers, for example, or Equiano some African ones!

Old men know

Friday's poem is very brief today, but extremely poignant.  It's Ogden Nash's Old Men, and it has all his economy with a bitterness which is more acute in contrast to his normal humour.  I had one friend who was so affected by it, she literally wouldn't let me recite it, interrrupting or shouting over me in order to stop me finishing.

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

Lost in a good book

Have been reading another Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book, which is another fanciful literary thriller.  The heroine, Thursday Next, has a slightly wild existence, which I guess is fair enough when you go home one evening and find that your husband has been killed thirty years before (in an accident when he was two months old) in a parallel universe and nobody has any memories of him except you - he simply no longer exists.  If this sounds like sci-fi, it's not.  It is an engaging literary fantasy - and to get her husband back, Thursday - has to release a criminal who is imprisoned in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, as his gang have the key to her husband's release.

She has lots of adventures, including going into great Expectations to correct an error that Dickens made, meeting and working with Miss Havisham , who has a penchant (outside her own novel, of course) for driving fast cars very dangerously!  It's very amusing, full of little touches and nice language which keep you amused, and is excellent train or plane reading.

A couple of examples to give you a flavour  - two very junior operatives in the literary intelligence agency are called Kannon and Foddre, and when they're killed on duty, they're replaced by Lamb and Slaughter; when catching the gravitube through the centre of the earth to Sydney, the bored announcer apologises that the schedule is running late, and also apologises that, due to an unforeseen clerical error, there will be a delay in providing an excuse.  The Crimean War is still going on, Swindon is where it's at, cool and trendy, and the big sport is croquet, whose practitioners are mega-personalities.  It's really quite high class nonsense!

Arrangement for shelves and books

How do you arrange your books, I was asked?  Well, there is always some pragmatism – what fits where, et cetera, but in an ideal world, I keep literature and fiction (separately) in alphabetical order; history is in rough chronological order; and maps are grouped by country and continent.  Other stuff – literary criticism, science, philosophy, natural history, travel  - are grouped together and ordered by alphabet or chronology or geography as seems convenient.

But there are a lot of puzzles remaining, some of which I will never satisfactorily solve, and some to which my answers will doubtless enrage some of you.

·        Whether, and if so how, to distinguish between literature and fiction? I do, but my rationale is very suspect.  I instinctively feel that Jane Austen and Agatha Christie are different things, so I create two categories.  But in fiction goes some very fine writing – Michael Innes, Margery Allingham, Philip Pullman – which is clearly superior to some of the so called serious fiction.  But in literature I have John Le Carre, whereas almost all the other thrillers, murder mysteries, spy stories are in fiction.  I then have the most difficult category of all, authors whose output is split, such as G K Chesterton, whose Father Brown stories are in fiction, but whose other novels are in literature.  I know it doesn’t make sense, but I’m not reconciled to having them all in one mass.  The only vaguely acceptable solution might be to split by genre, but that means putting Umberto Eco and Wilkie Collins with C S Forester and Ruth Rendell, which doesn’t seem right.  Anyway, I know where everything is, and it roughly fits on the shelves allocated at the moment!

·        Poetry and drama – should it be separate; I used to do this, but what to do with Homer, who is often translated into verse and often into prose?  And I hate to split an author who writes both, like Kipling or Chesterton or Borges.

·        Translations and adaptations; Homer is again the problem – when to file under ‘H’ and when under the translator’s name?  Pope, Logue and Baricco all merit this question.

·        Outsize books – you can’t just put everything in the right place – I have huge editions of Cervantes and Eliot, for example, which would just waste space.  Frankly, I tend to be pragmatic, and see how many big books are on a shelf together – and all the really outsize books are just on the bottom shelf with the most rudimentary sorting  - art, poetry, birds, and Doonesbury (the only cartoons in the house).

·        Double stacking – never!!

·        Which comes first, volume one or volume two?  I sort left to right, Dickens before Eliot – but when you have a multi-volume work, starting with volume one seems logical, but the book loses its coherence – the first page of volume 1 is next to the last page of volume 2, instead of vice versa.  So I, following the practice in some ancient libraries, put the volumes together as a complete book, and keep that relationship intact on the shelf, meaning that volumes run right to left – but a bookworm munching through from the beginning of volume one will eat all the pages in the correct order until the very end of the last volume!!

Apologies to all the librarians out there suffering from apoplexy or worse!

Holiday reading

Planning my reading for a major holiday is always difficult.  Before I go, I want to read about the country, and when I actually travel, I want to have reference books (guides, maps, bird books - although I realise not everyone regards the last as essential), local colour - whether it be fiction or non-fiction, and some escape reading for tired moments.  Always, my eyes are bigger than my reading capacity or my luggage, and heart breaking decisions have to be made.  The trip I'm thinking about at present is to Namibia, though it's weeks away, and I've accumulated at least some (too many!) of the necessary books.

Above are the bare essentials - though I may be tough on myself and leave the guide to South Africa - I'm only going to be there three days and I will be with friends who live there.  But the bird book alone weighs 2 lbs!  Below are the results of a raid on the London Library, which has all sorts of magical things tucked away in odd corners.  I've got the three Bushmen books I posted on a few days ago, including Laurens van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari, a history of an anti-German revolt by the Herero people of (what is now) northern Namibia in 1904, and two volumes of the Proceedings of the Van Riebeeck Society (just amazing to find these up a thousand staircases in the Library, one of them last taken out in 1981) publishing the journals of travellers and missionaries from 1724, 1761, and the mid-nineteenth century.

Finally, I have ordered a few more specifically Namibian books - two novels and a book about the conservation of the black rhino.  And (really finally) I shall take a couple of old favourites from my own shelves, or buy cheap editions of them with a view to abandoning them en route - you may be able to see that I can't travel without the blessed Jane.  What I actually take will be decided the evening before my flight (or possibly the next morning) - and if any of them are of particular interest, I will post separately about them.  I don't read every word of all these of course - I'll pick up the more arcane books while the kettle is boiling, or over breakfast, or in bath or bed, and I'll skim, dip, and browse: often this will make me read the book properly, but with a lengthy academic book, or the prosy memoirs of a C19th missionary, it's often enough to get the mood and flavour.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

This Friday's poem is John Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci.  When I was young, I read this poem very literally, as  of a cruel and remote woman - still strangely attractive - whom the knight had the misfortune to fall in love with ("Boy - never use a preposition to end a sentence with!").  Now, there are a dozen Freudian interpretations, but the easiest and most satisyfing is probably to see love itself as so demanding as to be cruel and wonderful at the same time.  La Belle Dame is love itself, whether for a man or a woman.  Lack of love, or loss of love, is just as cruel, of course, but while that is very much part of the nostalgic troubadour spirit which Keats evokes, it is a subject for another day!

'O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
            And no birds sing.

'O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
            And the harvest 's done.

'I see a lily on thy brow
    With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
            Fast withereth too.'

'I met a lady in the meads,
    Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
            And her eyes were wild.

'I made a garland for her head,
    And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
            And made sweet moan.

'I set her on my pacing steed
    And nothing else saw all day long,
For sideways would she lean, and sing
            A faery's song.

'She found me roots of relish sweet,
    And honey wild and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said,
            "I love thee true!"

'She took me to her elfin grot,
    And there she wept and sigh'd fill sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
            With kisses four.

'And there she lulled me asleep,
    And there I dream'd—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
            On the cold hill's side.

'I saw pale kings and princes too,
    Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—"La belle Dame sans Merci
            Hath thee in thrall!"

'I saw their starved lips in the gloam
    With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
            On the cold hill's side.

'And this is why I sojourn here
    Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
            And no birds sing.'