Books Do Furnish A Room

Abyssal

A fellow traveller in Vanuatu last year recommended a travel writer to me, suggesting Benedict Allen’s Into The Crocodile's Nest (about New Guinea).  I couldn’t easily obtain that one, so I read Into The Abyss, about a trip by dog sled up the Chukchi peninsula in the extreme east of Siberia, part of Roman Abramovitch's Chukotcka province.   He had the eventual aim of crossing the Bering Strait on the ice, alone, to Alaska - something that had only been done in the myths and stories of the locals, though no-one doubted that he had been possible in the old days.  I confess I was very disappointed, especially as I’d heard the author speak extremely entertainingly at a London Library event a few months before.  I am interested in the Arctic, and this was the kind of trip to capture my imagination, but I found the whole book too inward looking, too disjointed and inconsequential, and too padded with snippets and snatches of history, other people’s writings, memories from utterly different trips.  It was, for me, a pot pourri without enough of a unifying theme.

And yet, there was much to enjoy.  There pungent comment about the Soviet abuse of the native dwellers in these remote lands, about Inuit culture, and about the political prisoners that were sent here.  There is human warmth, much traveller’s frustration, and the occasional drama.  I found it half a book, missing much of the detail and narrative of his trip, and loaded down with semi-philosophical musings about danger and survival; and there was too much about totally unconnected events in New Guinea, or with Scott and Amundsen in the Antarctic.

Allen's relationship with his dogs is central to the book - the humans he encounters are often caricatures, and increasingly he finds them a hindrance and a burden, especially when they get very drunk - all too often.  But he grows closer and closer to his dogs, half savage as they are, and that's a redeeming feature in anyone!  By the way, he learned to drive a dog team well enough to go out alone confidently, and he did get about a third of the way across the Bering Strait.  But by then, he had got lost a couple of times, and decided to turn back before the lack of ice forced the decision on him.  What he would have done in Alaska, with no entry permit and a team of Russian dogs, is anyone’s guess!

Two different thrillers

Before The Fact by Francis Iles (also writing as Anthony Berkeley), and The Man Who Sold Death by James Munro are both decidedly old-fashioned, but in utterly different ways.  They were published in 1932 and 1964 respectively, and both are completely dislocated from modern conventions of crime writing, although the modern psychological thriller is discernible in the Iles, and the brutal, super-charged action hero in the Munro.  Harriet Devine wrote a fascinating review of Before The Fact on her blog, and I came across the Munro through the quiet but stimulating pages of Slightly Foxed.

In Before the Fact, we know from the first line that Johnny Aysgarth, Lina's feckless husband, is a murderer, although it takes a long time to find out who his (first)victim was.  She leaves him, finds a decent man, but throws him over, and goes back to him, only to discover – telegraphed slightly, to say the least – that his next victim is herself.  In The Man Who Sold Death, a working class boy, thrown up without a role in life after the war comes to an end, puts his violent skills to arms running to Algeria, makes a lot of money, and is being hunted by French extremists who hate him for having helped the separatists.  He has to kill them before they kill him; fortunately, he is able to do this while serving his country through Department K, an "unacknowledged part of MI5" (clear reminders of Creasey, of whom I wrote not long ago).

There can be little doubt that Before the Fact is the more accomplished of these books by a country mile; it is better written, it has both a more interesting and a more plausible premise, it breaks new ground (as far as I know) in the plot, and achieves a degree of uncertainty about the outcome until late in the book.  It is a shame, then, that I prefer The Man Who Sold Death, which for all its unreality and slightly chilling violence, tempered by unbelievable redeeming love, seems to me a more honest book.  It sets out to tell an exciting story of murder and mayhem, in which the good bad guy comes out on top, killing the bad bad guys and serving his country as well, and getting the girl – and that’s what it does.  It really is the most awful tosh!  You like it, fine.  You don’t like it, you go elsewhere.  It’s all one to Munro.

Whereas Before The Fact sets out to be chilling, a psychological thriller and a study in love under pressure.  At first, it’s engaging enough – though pretty snob ridden and cliché driven – but one thing lets it down, and that’s the heroine.  Lina is just so wet; she’s supposed to be intelligent, but she can’t see what’s under her own eyes, again and again; she’s completely unable to make a decision; and she is a naive poltroon who is unable to save herself when she knows the danger.  Sure, there are women (and men) like that, but of few of them are we told how clever and modern and independent they are.  I think Iles just couldn’t make his mind up, and the failure to draw Lina at all convincingly strikes a fatal blow at this book.  Interestingly, Francis Iles apparently called this “a detective story for women”, which may explain the difference between Harriet’s review and mine!

Harriet - we may disagree about this book, but this review compares Iles to Tolstoy and Flaubert!  I think you and I might be able to agree that he's not quite in that class!

Never mind the rain

You are sick of my prejudice about Thomas Hardy!  But here is a poem which captures a certain rural stoicism about the rain - not that they had any choice - and one person who does not notice even that it is raining, for the most final reason of all.  It's presumably set in nineteenth century Dorset, but the characters and their roles have an almost medieval feel about them.  (My illustration is the wildly inappropriate A Sudden Shower Over Ohashi and Atake, by Utagawa Hiroshige, a Japanese master print maker of the nineteenth century too, but a world and more away).  This is Thomas Hardy's Autumn Rain Scene.

There trudges one to a merry-making
With sturdy swing,
On whom the rain comes down.

To fetch the saving medicament
Is another bent,
On whom the rain comes down.

One slowly drives his herd to the stall
Ere ill befall,
On whom the rain comes down.

This bears his missives of life and death
With quickening breath,
On whom the rain comes down.

One watches for signals of wreck or war
From the hill afar,
On whom the rain comes down.

No care if he gain a shelter or none,
Unhired moves on,
On whom the rain comes down.

And another knows nought of its chilling fall
Upon him at all,
On whom the rain comes down.

Two cultures: Jacob Bronowski

I posted recently on C P Snow's Two Cultures essay from 1959, and promised to return to the masterful treatment of the issue by Jacob Bronowski.  He is most famous for the wonderful BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and there are two clips here, on the dangers of absolute knowledge and on how knowledge is gained in the same way in painting and physics.  Watch them if you can - Bronowski is a compelling presenter - but be warned the first one may make you weep (in memoriam GHJ).  But also well worth reading - and not at all technical or intimidating - are two books of essays or lectures - The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye.

In The Visionary Eye, Bronowski argues passionately that reasoning and science are not different activites from imagining and creating:

Reasoning is constructed with moveable images just as certainly as poetry is ... We do great harm to children when we accustom them to separate reason from the imagination ... For imagination is not confined to wild bursts of fantasy.  Imagination is the manipulation inside the mind of absent things, by using in their place images or words or symbols.

In The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Bronowski takes two sentences, one from the arts and one from the sciences, and compares them, so that we can see what the differences really are.  One is from Blake:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

And the other is a statement of Newton’s law of gravitation, that the gravity between any two objects is proportional to their masses divided by the distance between them squared – one of the fundamental propositions of the universe:

G = kmm’ / r²

What is the difference, what are the similarities between them?  Bronowski argues that the differences are threefold, but the similarities still very great.  They are both general statements of wide application, telling us something important and widely applicable, and they are both bold statements which required imagination and creativity to forge.  But, he says, everyone knows what the Blake means, and knows exactly – your exactly may be different from my exactly, but we are each assured of understanding the real meaning completely; but although it is apparently more precise, more  definite, the gravity equation is taken on trust by most of us (stand fast Dark Puss).  Second, the Blake is only an affirmation and a conviction, it is not, even in principle, susceptible of proof as the equation is.  But the third difference is the key one: the grammar of the Blake allows other similar sentences, such as

A Robin Red breast in a Box

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

or

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Mankind in a Rage.

 

The first doesn’t rhyme, and the second is distinctly different in meaning, as well as scanning less well; but they mean something, and they mean something quite close to the original.  But

G = kmm’ / r³   or  S = kmm’ / r²

just don’t mean anything at all – they’re not true – they’re just not allowed.

For anyone who is not a scientist (or, indeed, for anyone who is) who is interested in the passionate humanism of a man who loved the arts and the sciences, thought them one facet of a human whole, and thought them - and all knowledge - forces for good if humbly considered, I cannot recommend Bronowski too highly.

Wanted

Tommy Brue is a very English banker, running a small and failing bank in Hamburg.  Issa Karpov is a Chechen; he may be a terrorist, or a refugee.  The two of them come together in a complex post-Cold War novel, linked by the attractive human rights lawyer, Annabel Richter, who has taken up Issa’s case.  A Most Wanted Man is typical John Le Carré – or typical of his post-Smiley writing;  there is a fierce and burning anger at the abuse of human rights by the supposedly liberal governments of Europe and America, a passionate denunciation of double standards, and of American heavy handedness and intolerance, and a jolly good fast moving yarn, complex and full of human interest, lively characters and acute observation.  Many of Le Carré’s later books have major characters burdened by father figures who have in some way betrayed their children – rogues and failures of every description – and here, two for the price of one, both Issa  and Tommy Brue have fathers they wish to renounce.

While Brue is trying to come to terms with his deceased father’s flirtation with dirty money coming across the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Soviet Union, and with the multiple dislocations in his family life (his daughter by his first marriage is estranged, he realises he should never have left his first wife, and his second wife is visibly leaving him), he is drawn more and more into an affectionate regard for the lawyer representing Issa and late in life, suffers some sort of apotheosis, regretting past entanglements, and looking at the end of his life for something truer, something you might even call love.

On the other side (skip this paragraph to avoid major plot spoiler) is the volatile, brilliant, forceful Bachmann, a spy, but a liberal defender of liberty at odds with his masters and with the American (and, Le Carré charges, the British)  methods and attitudes.  He is “the man who makes the weather”, and he reminds me of Kurtz in Little Drummer Girl (the best, oh the very best of Le Carré’s post Smiley novels, possibly the best espionage novel ever), all energy and passion and rule-breaking creativity.  He fights against the odds, but he is gaining ground – he has made the breakthrough – he convinces the sceptics, but in the end cannot deliver.  The disappointment is intense, angry, and you share it with Bachmann, Issa and Brue, vicariously provoked by the words of one of the agents who have smashed the liberal, human-rights crockery, and are taking Issa off to a fate beyond our ken, but probably Guantanamo:

Justice has been rendered, man ... justice from the fucking hip ... no crap justice ... no fucking lawyers.

This is a wonderful novel, and I recommend it warmly.  It has all the old Le Carré magic, and is a shining example of his success in freeing himself from the Cold War idiom, and in perpetually creating new characters, rather than carrying on remorselessly with the brilliant George Smiley in his old age.  If you know Le Carré, you should read this; if not, you could start with this, or Little Drummer Girl, or return to early glories with Tinker, Tailor.

Indian rain

By a special request of one of what Walter Scott would call "my Northern readers", this week and next feature poems about rain.  This is a rather exotic one, almost it seems, a prose poem - or at least a poem with extensive prose features.  Nevertheless, I find it attractive, both as an evocation of fierce rain and the fiercer threats of the sky that the weather can only get worse.  And it is also a poem about borders, and about constraint:  the child cannot go out, the cow is tied, the fishes have escaped, the water is escaping, the stranded passenger is trapped the other side of the river, even the wind is captured by the bamboo.  This is Rabindranath Tagore's The Rainy Day:

Sullen clouds are gathering fast over the black fringe of the
forest.
O child, do not go out!
The palm trees in a row by the lake are smiting their heads
against the dismal sky; the crows with their dragged wings are
silent on the tamarind branches, and the eastern bank of the river
is haunted by a deepening gloom.
Our cow is lowing loud, tied at the fence.
O child, wait here till I bring her into the stall.
Men have crowded into the flooded field to catch the fishes
as they escape from the overflowing ponds; the rain-water is
running in rills through the narrow lanes like a laughing boy who
has run away from his mother to tease her.
Listen, someone is shouting for the boatman at the ford.
O child, the daylight is dim, and the crossing at the ferry
is closed.
The sky seems to ride fast upon the madly rushing rain; the
water in the river is loud and impatient; women have hastened home
early from the Ganges with their filled pitchers.
The evening lamps must be made ready.
O child, do not go out!
The road to the market is desolate, the lane to the river is
slippery. The wind is roaring and struggling among the bamboo
branches like a wild beast tangled in a net.

Strangers and Brothers: The Masters

"I hereby announce to you a vacancy in the office of Master."

The fourth novel in C P Snow’s magisterial sequence, The Light and the Dark, painted on a broad canvas, and while it dealt principally with one man, set him against the turbulence of the 1930s and the prosecution of war over some eight years.  The fifth, The Masters, is quite different: it covers a span of just a few months in 1937, and is set within the closed community of a small Cambridge college.  It might not have such wide appeal, but it is an endearing study of a small group of human beings trying to reconcile their differences over the simple matter of electing a new Master for the college when the previous one is struck down by cancer.  The passions, motivations and weaknesses of these dozen or so men may come from a small, select and exclusive society, but they mirror those you will find in any club, charity, or parish council, they are even the same as you find in Westminster or on Capitol Hill.

The human passions are laid delicately bare, and the mix of personality and politics is revealing; Snow – like Hullah, of whom I have written recently! – sees far into men's minds and their real motives, and is uncompromisingly honest, though never brutal (indeed, often sympathetic and understanding), about what he finds.  All sorts of other themes impinge on this story, and on its main characters, and the small and closed world is representative of the larger one.  Lewis Eliot is mainly observer in this novel, rather than protagonist, and Snow uses him to see around an issue and a man.

The two candidates are opposites: conservative and progressive; one from the arts, one a scientist; one a warm and vigorous personality with great insecurities, the other a cold fish with no doubts but a top class academic reputation.  The college is split, with only one or two votes in doubt, and the human passions are laid bare - barer and rawer, perhaps, for being set against the mellow stone and ancient rituals.  However, this is a small and private study of human temptations and sorrows: with the war, the scene is about to become grander, wider, again, as Snow adjusts to the atomic age in the next novel.

 

Henry James' stories

A Penguin volume of four short stories (a different volume is shown in Books 2009; it has many more stories, but lacks The Last of the Valerii) has been instructive; the four of them – The Last of the Valerii, The Real Thing, The Lesson of the Master, and Daisy Miller - vary considerably in length, and the latter two, at least are more novellas than short stories.  I am a great lover of the short story, and although it seems to me that there are few principles defining what is and is not such a story, one of them (apart from mere length) should be a single narrative stream, however complex the actual story may be.  When I find the latter two stories are around 70 pages, a doubt is raised!

The Last of the Valerii is on  a common theme – I can think of stories by Kipling, Buchan, and Huxley which use it, and doubtless there are others – but still a compelling one.  A newly wed couple retreat to the husband’s ancestral house outside Rome, and Martha, the new American wife, careless of tradition and desperately in need of something to do, starts archaeological investigations in the grounds.  A Roman goddess is discovered, and quickly usurps the husbands affections, and even his interest and vitality.  A marble statue, two thousand years old, and missing one hand, rots his soul and draws him away from his wife and threatens even his sanity and his life.  Apart from Martha, no-one is surprised or even troubled; this how things are, these are the old forces that you cannot use and discard as you will, this is a price some men must pay.  The writing is quiet, measured, unexciting, but the story is troubling: even when the goddess is buried again, the peace and harmony of the status quo ante is not quite restored.

The next two stories were less satisfying.  The Real Thing is a slighter piece, the story of an artist who finds that for illustrating books, a couple of poor, socially insignificant shop workers make better models for his middle and upper class characters – and are more personally engaging, too – than a couple who are undoubted the “real thing”, although they have fallen on hard times.  The artist’s evolving relationship with this couple is sensitively and finely drawn, as he eventually realises that he cannot use them, however much he wants to help.  The Lesson of the Master is a rather precious piece about a young novelist who, on the advice of a revered older writer, gives up his love affair in order to concentrate on writing his masterpiece; after much turgid prose and tedious psychologising, he returns from a long stay abroad to find that “the Master” has married the lady he loved.  Really, a mannered piece of social trivia worth a tenth of the space.

But the final story in the book, Daisy Miller, is much more pleasing.  Daisy Miller is an American, young, attractive and innocent, whose travels in Europe are marked by social naivety and light, flirtatious approach to everyone she meets who might be fun.  She goes alone where she ought not, she befriends an Italian her fellow Americans fear is a fortune hunter, and she alienates her own community in Rome.  She is watched at a distance by Winterbourne, another American who is a little older and wiser than her, and who has lost half his heart to her – but not all his sense.  All ends tragically – she succumbs to and dies of a fever, and he tells his aunt, who had refused to meet her, that she had been right all along in warning him that he was too innocent and would regret taking up her acquaintance: "I was booked to make a mistake".  It is an amusing and affecting story, with a lightness of touch and a percipience which is missing from some of the other pieces in this volume.

Blinding light

Up unusually early recently, and just caught this brilliant morning sunshine on books in the study, chopped up dramatically by a wooden blind.

 

New York, city of glass

Quite by chance, I saw a laudatory review of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy in The Times a couple of months ago, and it intrigued me enough to borrow the first novel in the series from the library – City of Glass.  My ignorance is a wide and deep sea, and I knew nothing at all about Auster, and had no idea what to expect.  Perhaps a gritty, ultra-realistic New York homicide, a kind of East Coast Marlowe?  Or an elegant, sophisticated urban mystery, an urbane parody of the Grand Manner?  Well, no.  Not quite.  Not at all, in fact.

City of Glass is a very unusual novel – I think it's a crime thriller, but labels seem to lose relevance when you talk about this work – and it left me by turns amused, intrigued, frustrated and surprised.  I wasn’t left with any great sense of understanding achieved at the end, and I don’t (yet?) know if the irresolutions in my reading will be addressed in the two later novels, Ghosts and The Locked Room.  The main character is Quinn, a moderately successful writer of crime novels, who begins to be plagued by telephone calls for one Paul Auster (!), apparently a successful detective.  He points out that he is not that detective, and knows nothing of him, but he is eventually compelled to investigate, and does, in fact, become a detective just for this one case. 

One very sad exchange - not relevant to the main story - occurs when he sees a woman in a railway station reading one of his books.  In answer to his enquiry, she says "I've read better and I've read worse"; bad enough, but he persists, and asks why she carries on reading if she doesn't like it - probing the sore tooth - and she replies (oh heartbreak for any booklover):

"I don't know."  The girl shrugged once again.  "It passes the time, I guess.  Anyway, it's no big deal.  It's just a book."

At one level, he is clearly a very unsuccessful detective, because he becomes obsessed with the case, but loses the man he is supposed to be watching.  Later, he resorts to living rough to watch over someone, and yet fails t save them, and ruins his own life and health as well.  Or does he?  To say that the ending is enigmatic is to understate the case to the point of absurdity – at no point in the book, do you know, really, who he is – who the real Auster (who  he meets) is, or whether he has averted the disaster that you fear all through the book.  The problem is a Boojum, and is terrifies and then fades away.

The writing is tremendous, and you keep reading, expecting clarity to break in at any moment, but it never does.  You doubt your sanity, you think that maybe you’ve misunderstood the whole book, you worry over missed clues and wasted minutes.  And I still don’t know what the book is about.  But read it if you like a thriller or a crime story, and won’t mind being as puzzled at the end as you were in the middle!

Question: will I read the two follow-on novels?  And will they explain what I have been reading in City of Glass?

American π

3.142 .. and so on, forever - the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference, or π (pi).  We were plagued by this little chap at school, or we revelled in it, in the strange inexplicable precision of a number which never has an end.

These musings are inspired by Marcus du Sautoy's Sexy Maths article in a recent edition of The Times.  He talks about a whole range of pi things, noting that today is pi day, when mathematicians eat lots of pies to celebrate!  The article is quite fun, talking about the importance of pi in mathematics, but also about odd ways to calculate pi - including throwing a needle on to a sheet of paper where the lines are separated by the length of the needle (the proportion of times the needle ends lying across a line is 2 divided by pi).  But he also tells you that we (you? me?) know the value of pi to a trillion digits - and what use is that exactly, when a mere 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of the visible universe to the accuracy of a single hydrogen atom?

And why "American" pi in my title?  Well apart from the bad cinematic reference, the day for celebrating pi is taken from the first three digits of the number itself, so March 14.  In England, it would have been the third of the fourteenth month (oops), or the 31 April (oops again).  Curiously, mathematicians use this day to celebrate, but engineers - who du Sautoy says don't care about accuracy so much (?) use 22 July, after the fraction 22/7, a workaday substitute for pi in basic calculations.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us

D H Lawrence is so well known as a novelist - though rather over-rated, I fear - that we tend to forget his poetry, some of which is magnificent.  One of my favourites is Snake, but here - in echo of Rilke's angels a few weeks ago, is a poem about a man who has "come through"; what has he come through, do you think - life itself, the winnowing of the sheep and the goats, or a smaller more personal crisis, such as the fear of death in the early morning?  This is not a typical poem of Lawrence's, but well worth a little attention.  Here is D H Lawrence's Song of a Man Who Has Come Through:

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

Strangers and Brothers: The Light and the Dark

C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series reaches an early climax of intensity in this, the fourth novel in the series.  The Light and the Dark has at its centre a number of personal dramas – Lewis Eliot’s unhappiness, for example, or the long and painful illness and death of the Master of a Cambridge college, but the dominant theme is the unhappiness and despair of the talented Roy Calvert.  Eliot and Calvert, who knew each other in early manhood, are both junior fellows of a small Cambridge college, and close friends.  Eliot is unhappily married, but is otherwise a straightforward, solid, sensible citizen, and an anchor for the brilliant but depressive – indeed, occasionally maniacal – Calvert. (The illustration is Paul Hogarth's cover for the Penguin edition of the late 1970s).

Roy Calvert is an attractive character, exceptionally gifted (his particular interest is in deciphering early manuscripts in unknown Middle Eastern languages), and a magnet for women.  But he is broodingly unhappy and occasionally utterly depressed and suicidal, and prone to fits of extreme insomnia, violent and uncontrollable outbursts.  For all his talent, his teasing and lightness of character – he clearly takes full advantage of his relations with women – means he is not popular with the older, crustier members of college, though he can show exceptional and sustained kindness to a colleague in distress – Eliot, the dying Master’s wife, a remote and difficult colleague whose son disappoints him.

The novel runs from the difficult years of pre-war, when left and right were perhaps more bitterly and fundamentally estranged than at any point in recent political history, through to the years of the Battle of Britain.  Roy tries to deal with his unhappiness in several different ways: with love affairs, with friends, with a fruitless search for religious faith.  None works.  Two women in particular love him, but although he eventually marries one of them, you are left in no doubt that the peculiar circumstances of the marriage are dictated not by his love but his compassion.  His search for faith – as perhaps all conscious searches of the sort are – was doomed to failure, and while his friends love him and depend on him, they cannot support and sustain him in the darkest days.

Eventually, his work takes him to Nazi Germany.  This is entirely natural, as Berlin is a great centre for his area of study, but it leads to an attraction to fascism and an immense strain with his left-leaning friends in England.  He tries to convert Eliot, too, in one of the unhappiest passages between them, but fails, although the reader gets an unusual insight into the formidable power of pre-war fascism to attract and subvert a certain class of Englishman.  This leads to a bizarre and dangerous episode later, during the war, when an attempt is apparently made to involve him in spying for Germany, involving a long and complex and dangerous trip into the heart of Europe in the middle of war (in neutral territory only), a wondrous window for Eliot and Calvert on normal, civilised life, with food, lights and theatres.  Once war has broken out, however, Calvert sees that fascism is as false a god as any other, and he serves with distinction in intelligence, later insisting on transferring to the RAF, where he has realised his chances of survival are lowest.  The end is inevitable, tragic, and empty. 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark ...

Sweet land of liberty

I fell in love with Garrison Keillor’s timeless, almost soporific prose, so perfectly matching his voice (or should that be the other way round?), through Radio 4.  If you know The Prairie Home Companion, you will already be a fan; if not, you really must try some (there's a link further down, a more serious thoughtful piece).  I immediately went out and read Lake Wobegon Days, and enjoyed it immensely – the self regarding, small minded but still wise voices of small town America; the humour, conscious by Keillor but all too often unintentional by his marvellous characters; the joy and the sympathy in every word.  A colleague in a small town north of Chicago alerted me to the existence of tapes of the radio broadcasts, and I was hooked.  The book was marvellous, but the voice was almost perfect ... here are the traditional start and ending of his broadcasts: 

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon ...

... That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

Sadly, although I have enjoyed much by Keillor since, the standard has not been maintained; he has all too often failed to “capture that first fine careless rapture”.  Liberty returns once more to Lake Wobegon, and to a favourite theme, the 4 July parade, and the infamous difficulties of the “living flag”, with most of the population wearing a red, white, or blue cap in order to recreate the star-spangled banner; sadly, the small population and the number of participants required means that there is almost no audience!  Over the years, the parade has got bigger and brasher, and last year was on national television, further inflaming the rivalry between the small town traditionalists and the make a splash patriots. The man at the centre of this is Clint Bunsen who chooses to have a mid-life crisis and an extra-marital affair over the months of the parade’s preparation.

Frankly, I enjoyed this, but I was still disappointed.  There are some great lines, and some marvellous scenes – Clint’s wife holding up his mistress with a gun at the height of the festivities is one, and the apparent act of cunnilingus by a Senator on a local beauty (on national television, again – and she’s actually Clint’s mistress) is sidesplitting  - and absolutely clean, family fun, too, by the way.  I feel the magic is a bit diluted; but for long time lovers of Lake Wobegon, there is still much to enjoy; but if you’re yet to be converted, get yourself a tape of the News From Lake Wobegon from Prairie Home Companion, or read Lake Wobegon Days.

A border raid

I have a taste, probably a slightly depraved one in some purists' eyes, for border ballads - that is, the rough folk ballads of the border between Scotland and England.  This is a particularly famous one, telling the story of a border ruffian, one Kinmont Willie, who is arrested by "the false Lord Scroope" who has crossed illegally from England to capture him.  There is peace of a sort between the English and the Scots at the time (13 April 1596 - this is a real historical event), but the Scottish lord, Buccleuch, determines to re-capture him, which he does in a raid of extraodinary boldness.  The whole ballad is too long to quote here, but here are two extracts.

The first tells of the news being brought to Buccleuch, and his anger; the second is after the recapture, when the rescue party swims a turbulent river to escape Scroope.  It is not great poetry, but he has enormous energy and vitality, and there are some great passges of verbal skill (though also, some of rather pathetic rhyme filling, too).  The language is not as difficult as it looks, the obvious meanings are the right ones, on the whole! This is the anonymous Kinmont Willie:

Now word is gane to the bauld Keeper,

In Branksame Ha' where that he lay,

That Lord Scroope has ta'en the Kinmont Willie,

Between the hours of night and day.

He has ta'en the table wi his hand,

He garr'd the red wine spring on hie;

"Now Christ's curse on my head," he said,

"But avenged of Lord Scroop I'll be !

"O is my basnet a widow's curch?

Or my lance a wand of the willow-tree?

Or my arm a ladye's lilye hand?

That an English lord should lightly me.

"And have they taen him Kinmont Willie,

Against the truce of border tide,

And forgotten that the bauld Bacleuch

Is keeper here on the Scottish side?

"And have they een ta'en him Kinmont Willie

Withouten either dread or fear,

And forgotten that the bauld Bacleuch

Can back a steed, or shake a spear?"

"O were there war between the lands,

As well I wot that there is none,

I would slight Carlisle castell high,

Tho it were builded of marble-stone.

"I would set that castell in a low,

And sloken it with English blood;

There's nevir a man in Cumberland

Should ken where Carlisle castell stood.

"But since nae war's between the lands,

And there is peace, and peace should be,

I'll neither harm English lad or lass,

And yet the Kinmont freed shall be!"

… ... ...

We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,

When a' the Carlisle bells were rung,

And a thousand men, in horse and foot,

Cam wi the keen Lord Scroope along.

Buccleuch has turned Eden Water,

Even where it flow'd frae bank to brim,

And he has plunged in wi a' his band,

And safely swam them thro the stream.

He turned him on the other side,

And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he:

"If ye like na my visit in merry England,

In fair Scotland come visit me!"

All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope,

He stood as still as rock of stane;

He scarcely dared to trew his eyes

When thro the water they had gane.

"He is either himsell a devil frae hell

Or else his mother a witch maun be,

I wad na have ridden that wan water

For a' the gowd ill Christentie."

A cunning novel

Robertson Davies is an author who has never, in spite of high praise and great popularity, really got the attention he deserves.  I think his novels vary a bit in quality, but the Deptford trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders) or the Salterton trilogy (Tempest Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties) are extremely fine – and each novel can, incidentally, easily be read on its own.  So I was pleased to discover a Robertson Davies new to me recently, The Cunning Man, and I read it with great enjoyment. Apparently, its the second of an uncompleted trilogy - the first was Murther and Walking Spirits - but I read it as a stand alone work.

Like many of his novels, it is set largely in Canada (mostly Toronto, though there is an early passage in Sioux Lookout, a remote settlement a long way from metropolitan pleasures), with a short passage, during the Second World War, in Europe.   The central character is a doctor, Jonathan Hullah, and its themes are the getting of wisdom, and the need for a holistic, humane approach to everything we are and do.  Hullah trains as a doctor, but he takes an interest in Indian magic and healing, and he has read Freud with wise and humane scepticism.  He gives up career medicine in a big hospital, prompted by his experiences of healing men with shell shock and extreme nervous disorders, and sets up on his own with a rather fierce Swedish nurse in a converted stable behind a big house in which live two English women, lovers, vaguely talented, and a wonderfully outspoken foil (sometimes through the medium of quite superb letters from one of them) for Hullah’s low-key, cautious approach to everything except his work.

His diagnostic technique is to listen to his patients, an experience some of them have never had; he smells them, and looks at them, and talks to them, and cares about them (though that does not stop him being, sometimes, bored by them!); he gives them massage, and medicine, and time.  And he becomes wise in their eyes – though how wise, they would not want to know, for he sees further into their souls than they would find comfortable.  But he fails in love; and he sees a murder committed and does not realise.  Here is the story, and it is magical, compelling, wise and human: read it and be blessed, briefly, with an understanding and tolerance for your fellow man.

And Then There Was No One

There’s self-conscious and parody, then there’s this!  And Gilbert Adair's Then There Was No One uses some reasonably familiar tropes to create a detective story with a difference: the novelist meeting the detective he has created, fictional detectives coming alive, corny fictional endings from fiction coming alive (in another piece of fiction).  Adair uses his own real novels as fictional constructs, and the line between fiction and fact becomes incomprehensibly fractured.  Personally, I found it all too mannered, although often amusing, and would find any more of this style really quite fatiguing.  (My views may be influenced by having read, unwittingly, the third novel of a trilogy first).  But to a true aficionado of the genre – and I confess myself one – there is a real pleasure in spotting the references, meeting heroes old and new and seeing the ending becoming clearer and clearer – but always being wrong.  Also, for me a winning point, the fictional hero, Gilbert Adair (and presumably his creator, the genuine Gilbert Adair) has a healthy contempt for Agatha Christie. 

The book is set in Switzerland, where a Sherlock Holmes literary convention has been established in a town near the Reichenbach Falls.  A mystery guest arrives, and turns out to be a novelist who has been hiding from threatened assassination (not from Islamic extremists, but from the rich far right in America) following outrageous public comments on the Twin Towers disaster.  He is murdered, and his killer is only unmasked after a baffling and surreal series of false trails and a liberal sprinkling of literary clever-cleverness.  A pleasure for Holmes fans is that Adair has reconstructed some of the “missing” stories, and he reads to the conference, and to us, a story called The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which, somewhere in the Holmes canon is referred to as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.  Here it is – and quite fun it is, too.

Women reading: March

The March painting on my Women Reading calendar  (see also 1st of each month since) is Carl Vilhelm Holsoe's Girl Reading At a Sunlit Window.  Holsoe was Danish, and lived between 1863-1935, although I cannot find a date for this particular painting.  

 

What is she reading?  A novel, I think, not a letter or a book of devotion;  I think she is a modern young woman, serious and reflective, reading the best books of her generation, not frivolous or idling - there's no sexuality or mischief here.  So, from my extensive knowledge of Danish literature, I offer the following suggestion - Niels Lyhne, by the novelist and poet J.P. Jacobsen (1847-1885),which was published in 1880, and which apparently inspired (among others) Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the composers Delius and Schoenberg. 

According to one (anonymous) review I found on the web, "Niels Lyhne recounts the life of a poet, emphasising the influence of experience on psychological development and examining philosophical issues: the nature of reality, atheism, creativity and love. It is a dense narrative, striking at times in its richness of physical detail, although the prose, which occasionally sparkles, is baroque and at times rococo. The book's appeal to early modernists and champions of realistic fiction is understandable, but this modern reader found that the characters never developed into living creatures and with few exceptions were too obviously created and manipulated to address the author's aesthetic and philosophical concerns."

It's available in Penguin classics - maybe we ought to read it? (Do let me know if you have, of course!)