Books Do Furnish A Room

Lord of the Dance: TK

Opening in Venice, perhaps around the mid 1950s, Temporary Kings, the eleventh novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, is immediately more spacious, more relaxed, than previous novels.  Both the setting and the action is more modern, more cosmopolitan, though not without disturbing hints of darker forces beneath – such as threatening relations between East and West.  Nick is in Venice for a literary conference, and meets new characters but also, as always, links backwards in time to understand more of Trapnel, Widmerpool, and others he has known – and known of – all his life.  Understanding grows, but the questions multiply as well; but as new themes are introduced, you also know that the story will not be finished, ever – or rather that you will not be here for the finish.  Your regret at planning to leave early, so to speak, is added to by the regret of others leaving, early as it seems.  But the book is not melancholy, just comprehending and knowing the limits to comprehension.

·     “Do you think the soubrette is his mistress, or his great-granddaughter?  ... They seem on very close terms.  Perhaps both.”

 

·     “Why do the British always ask [about a man’s background]?”  “One of our foibles.”  “That’s not what Americans do.”  “But we’re not Americans.  You must humour our straying from the norm in that respect.”

 

·     [A committed admirer of the USSR on modern art at the Venice Biennale]:  “I can guarantee that the only sanctuary from subjectless bric-à-brac here will be in the national pavilions of what you no doubt term the Iron Curtain countries.”

 

·     “... he remains essentially American in believing that all questions have answers, that there is an ideal life against which everyday life can be measured ...”

 

·     “Well, I mustn’t waste the whole morning coffee-housing on this vile instrument [the telephone]”

 

·     Reunion dinners, to the point of morbidity, gave the chance of indulging in ... reminiscent scrutinies.

Yawar Fiesta

When planning my trip to Peru last Christmas, I was recommended to read Yawar Fiesta by Jose Maria Arguedas.  At the time, I was unable to find it in English, but I put it in the London Library suggestions book and, lo and behold, here we are, in a version translated by Frances Horning Barraclough.  It’s quite a short novel, some 150 pages, but clearly packed with intense emotions.

It starts with a careful, and quite fascinating, account of an Indian town, Puquio, in a remote area of Peru, explaining how it is laid out, and who lives there.  This may sound pedestrian, but the population is full of conflict, between Indians, mestizos (mixed race people) and those mainly of Spanish stock.  The tale is told of where the power is wielded and how, and how the rural Indians were driven off their grazing through bad law and a compliant church, reinforced with violence and brutality.  The prose is simple, sharp, and brilliantly captures the attitudes and motivations of individuals and groups in plangent, slightly bitter words.

Then the central government moves to ban bull-fighting.  The main part of the novel is an account of how all these different groups react to this, and how it affects their relations with each other. The Yawar Fiesta of the title is the "bloody fiesta" in which bull fighting  of a particularly bloody sort is both the central part of the "fun" for all, but is also a competition between the various parts of the town.  In the end, a bull of magical reputation, Misitu, is captured in the mountains and brought to the town, where both the traditional Spanish style bullfight, and a more brutal local version take place.  The town throughout is fierce, savage, uncompromising - but these latter pages are very strong meat indeed.  I found them compelling but distasteful, and the picture of the relations between classes became increasingly hard to follow and confusing - though this was partly rooted in the reality Arguedas is describing.

This is not an easy book to read; partly the material is intrinsically remote from our experience, and the issue an incomprehensible one for most of us.  But it is lively and powerful, and I wish I'd read before travelling to Peru.  But I think it would be easier if the translator had translated everything, rather than leaving Spanish and Quechua word scattered through the text, to be interpreted with footnotes and a glossary.

Lord of the Dance: BDFAR

As I progress through Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, arriving at Books Do Furnish A Room marks a crucial stage of the journey.  First, the war is in the past, with its heavy load of external events and inevitable tragedies – though all the war novels are also intimate and funny; but perhaps more importantly, the pace slows.  We have roughly one book each decade after the war, compared with three, and a good part of a fourth, covering only six years or so.  And finally, the main protagonist Nick and his peers are showing signs of settling down, readjusting after the war and accepting that they are older and occasionally wiser now they are in their forties or more.  The last three books are just as wise and perceptive as the earlier ones, but there is maturity, judgement, experience and tolerance which belongs to the characters and not just to the author.

For me, of course, Books Do Furnish A Room is particularly poignant, named as it is after this blog.  And as I read it, I found it a veritable feast of insight, laughter and understanding.  The pattern of the dance is not yet clear, but more and more of the earlier movements are making sense, while more new ones crowd in thick and fast, here simplifying or resolving, here confusing or alarming, and here laying the ground for future exploration and resolution.  And finally, this novel is an absolute treasure trove of quotations I felt I just had to give you – so I have split this post into two!

·     Returning to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition.

 

·     ... that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders. 

 

·     [Jeavons on marriage] “I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way.  Married couples usually do. ... People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other.”

 

·     Camel Ride To The Tomb [a tour operator’s cry in Egypt, and the title of X Trapnel’s novel] ... Camel Ride To The Tomb ... I grasped immediately that’s what life was.  How could the description be bettered?  Juddering through the wilderness on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely yet truly stated.

 

·     The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters.  It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

 

·     Accidents will happen even with the best regulated secret police.

 

·     ... he belonged to a generation which continued to use that excellent masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first name smothered all subtleties of relationship.

 

·     “[Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy] Rather a morbid subject.” ... He may have thought reading or writing equally morbid, whatever the content.

Lord of the Dance: MP

The Military Philosophers is the third war novel, and the ninth overall, in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time.  Nick Jenkins has not had an interesting war up to this point, although it has made interesting reading, suffering boredom and despair in gloomy surroundings without action or danger.  That all changes in this book, when he finds himself and begins in one sense to enjoy the war, and to do something useful and for which his talents are fitted.  There is some danger, from bombs and the V2, but a great deal of human interest, with a notably international face.  I have written about this novel before, of course, but here are the finds of the 2010 reading.

• I gave up further talk.  Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse ... It occurred to me - one never feels older than in the middle thirties - that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me.

• Until you have met Blackhead, the word "bureaucrat" will have conveyed no meaning to you.

• Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most a parade of it.

• Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom ... But it was already November.  There can have been no blossom.  Blossom was a mirage.  Autumnal sunshine, thin, hard penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion, kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage.  What you see conditions feelings, not what is.

 

Under the Banyan Tree

I reviewed The Man Eater of Malgudi recently.  It didn’t quite work for me, though it had charm and I could appreciate Narayan’s skill and perceptiveness.  I thought his style might work better for me in short stories, a genre I often enjoy, and I found I was not mistaken when I read Under The Banyan Tree.

His style is quiet, lapidary, and understated.  His subjects are human fear, fancies and foibles.  And although his subject matter is alien to me – merely in that I do not know India and the Indians at all well – his story telling style is intuitive and appealing.  The first stories I read were about children and their relationships with parents, especially their fathers:  for example, A Hero is about Swami, a young boy who could not conquer his fear of the dark, and was compelled by his father to face it, torn from the comfort of a light and his grandmother’s closeness.  This results in an attempted burglary being foiled – but far from making the boy brave and his father happy, it merely restores the status quo ante, the father unable to criticise his son after such an event.  Cliché is turned aside, the expected subverted.

Another story, Nitya, concerns an eponymous young man, whose hair is to be shaved off in observance of a vow his parents made when he was a baby.  An argument, intransigence, then a long and uncomfortable journey is followed by moments of farce when the family arrives at the village where the appropriate temple is; they cannot get in, there is no music.  But all this is sorted, and all is ready – except the boy, who eventually, after some spirited argument on both sides, simply runs off to catch the bus home.

Another fine example is Old Man of the Temple, a ghost story without terror, just a little puzzlement on both sides.  A late drive home results in an encounter with a ghost, long ago ruler of some tiny kingdom.  Conversation at cross purposes establishes the two mingling realities, and the ease of death achieved for one, and a safe but late journey home for the other.  Such a story sounds nothing, and indeed it is written with a quiet certitude that this is really how the world works, and you know that: but maybe, your interest will be piqued, even by something so unexceptional.  But in the reactions of the traveller, his driver and the ghost is all human vanity and loss.

In short, these are stories well worth reading, but do not expect fireworks; expect a thoughtful, careful writing, fine perception of the mind beneath the face and the words, and a gentle humour.

Man-eater!

Have been reading R K Narayan recently, both some short stories and the famous - almost, to a certain group of aficionados, the iconic - The Man-Eater of Malgudi.  There is a tiger in this story, but that isn't the man-eater.  It is instantly clear that you are in the hands of a man of great talent, and a man who has thought deeply and seen inwardly a great deal.  And yet, and yet ...

Malgudi is a small, archetypical Indian town, and the main character of the book, a small time (and rather unbusinesslike) printer called Nataraj exists in a small, comfortable way there, totally absorbed in the trivia of his work and his tea drinking visitors.  He is utterly ineffectual, and while this gives him charm - and perhaps the love of the gods, who can tell - it can be frustrating for the active reader, who longs to shake him and tell him to pay attention, and to get a grip.

But Nataraj doesn't, and so he finds himself unwilling to turn away Vasu, a circus strongman turned taxidermist, who proposes himself as a lodger, albeit one who brings worry and even fear rather than rent.  Vasu creates all sorts of difficulties for Nataraj, culminating in his threat to kill a temple elephant that Nataraj has been the means of saving from illness.  Needless to say, the elephant is spared, and justice done, although unofficially.  Nataraj, amongst others, is suspected of a serious crime, and even he seems to doubt his innocence or his friends' loyalties in this difficult period: I saw myself as others saw me and was revolted by the picture. 

But all is well, and the printing - a special magenta colour is used on fruit juice labels to provoke thirst - goes on as we leave our hero restored to the bosom of his wife and the chatter of his good for nothing friends.  This is all supposed to be very funny, and I could see that it was - but somehow it didn't really make me laugh, and indeed at times I found it tiresome.  I don't quite know why was this was, unless I must put it down to my slight prejudice against fiction from or about India (I know, I know, this is a ridiculous and unfounded prejudice).  Perhaps you will get the joke - I think Narayan is worth the effort, and I will read the short stories, and be interested to see what Cornflower has to say about another Malgudi story, The Painter of Signs.

Lord of the Dance: SA

In The Soldier's Art, Nick Jenkins knows despair.  This is the second of the three war books from Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time, but there is no war in it - just the bleakness of life working in a dead end job under Widmerpool's obsessive military bureaucracy, and the comedy of being a living, observing being.  General Liddament is a joy, as is our first view of Finn (VC), and the blitz evening in London, with its tragedy, ignorance and superficial gaiety, is a an absolute masterpiece. Here is what I wrote about it last time through, and here are a few apercus from this reading:

I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings of life; but then, plenty of actors have little enough.

"Told me you were a reader ... didn't you?"   "Yes, I am.  I read quite a lot."    I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications.  At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward - in contrast to love - is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

(on Browning's Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came) Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.

Guernsey Potato Society and Literary Peel Pie (or something)

Oh dear, oh dear.  This book – properly The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Marie Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows – has received nothing but acclaim, often from serious figures like the book critic of Marie Claire.  But it’s all feel good froth, a fine idea sweetened into indigestibility and extended to twenty or fifty times its natural length.  There is a very serious issue at the heart of it, the occupation of the Channel Islands by the German Army in the second world war, and in particular the bravery and ill-treatment of one young woman in a Nazi prison, but it’s surrounded by this froth – a little like finding the plans of Dachau in a book of knitting patterns.

It’s a novel made up of letters, and the first and most damning criticism of them is that  - apart from the really dark material of a couple of them – they would be indistinguishable in voice: luckily, the sender and the addressee are on every one, or I’d have got completely lost.  Second, the main character (Julia), a rather vapid female writer of a trivially amusing wartime newspaper column, is exactly what she does not want to be and (I think) exactly what the authors don’t want her to be, a disorganised, sentimental lady of small talent and big hopes.  Take this, for example, in one of her early letters:

I am reading ... Mrs Montagu.  Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? “My dear Jane, everyone is born with a vocation, and yours is to write charming little notes.”  I hope Jane spat at her.

Witty, nicely put.  But how obvious is it that Julia thinks she is not so trivially a writer: and how obvious the book makes it that she is exactly that.  Julia seems older to me than we know she must be; she is meant, I think, to be middle twenties or a little older, worried about being on the shelf, and she comes across as a small town lady d’une certaine age.  The whole feeling of the book is of middle class mothering, like being embraced by an overweight but cheerful aunt with a floral pinny and flour in her hair.

So why did I read it right through?  Well, I was on a plane.  And, to be fair, it’s nicely written, and some of the letters are very fine.  Some of the Guernsey characters are amusing, though they sometimes jaywalk on to the dark side of the line dividing “character” from “caricature”.  But the plot is as obvious as a striped wallpaper pattern, and the whole thing would have made a charming column or two in Country Life or The Lady.

Lord of the Dance: ALM

On with the dance!  fatigue is forbidden, pinching slippers and drooping eyelids must be forgotten - here is the next partner on your card; she's young and beautiful and exciting, and we'll be At Lady Molly's until the dawn, courtesy of Anthony Powell and his Dance to the Music of Time.  See here for my last thoughts on this lovely novel, and below for the snatches of insight and laughter that caught my eye this time round.  Here Widmerpool falls in and out of an engagement with the fearsome Mrs Haycock, the General psychologises, and Nick meets her, Isobel.  Wonderful, wonderful.

... there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

Life is full of internal dreams, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.

Women will show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.

Marriage ... is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will.  Its orbit is not to be charted with precision, if misrepresentation and contrivance are to be avoided.  Its facts can perhaps only be known by implication.  It is a state from which all objectivity has been removed.

What was it Foch said?  War not an exact science, but a terrible and passionate drama?  Something like that.  Fact is, marriage is rather like that too.

As an unmarried man, I perhaps have chosen oddly, but somehow these fragments, which I have shored against my ruins, capture something of the spirit of relationships I observe and hear about, though I am equally convinced that nobody can understand a marriage unless they are inside it, perhaps not even then.  But as for entering the wedded state, Nick has a wonderful experience, captured in the moment of meeting Isobel.

Lord of the Dance: AW

The Acceptance World is the third of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence, with its twin themes of St John Clarke's secretaries, and Nick's relationship with Jean, one immensely funny and a window into the heady arts-politics misture of the period, the other charming, stringently observed and heartening (we don't often hear of Nick enjoying himself or success, though we know we does).  Just a few lines would justify (if justification were needed) the re-reading:

... an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is.  Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle.

...nothing in life is planned - or everything is - because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

There is always a real and an imaginary person one is in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other.

I reflected [  ] how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander.  All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

Lord of the Dance: BM

On to volume two of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time,  which is one of my favourites - A Buyer's Market (link to my earlier piece, where you will find the book's final, wonderful paragraph, about how unsuspected events can suddenly take on importance, and we go "uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity").  This is a fine book, very largely set over a single evening - dinner, a dance, then an unplanned visit to a slightly louche party, and it has the funeral seduction too.

A couple of lines which stood out this time:

...certain acquaintances remain firmly fixed within this or that person's particular orbit; [  ] "people choose their friends" is true only in a most strictly limited degree.

...

I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting,for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play:  a profession or calling being, according to that concept, [   ] something entirely different from "spare time".  That illusion [  ] was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments.  As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact,draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; [  ] nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common: while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

 

 

. 

I am the Lord of the Dance

After a break last year, when I read C P Snow, I have returned to my traditional New Year reading (a little late, becasue I have been away), and will be reading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time again this year.  I will not bore you all by reviewing each volume again, just giving a link to my previous version - but I will allow myself the odd illustrative quotation.

The first volume, of course, is A Question of Upbringing.

"Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.  At that period love's manifestations are less easily explicable than they become later: often they do not bear that complexion of being a kind of game, or contest, which, at a later stage, they may assume.  Accordingly, when I used to consider the case of Jean Templer, with whom I had decided I was in love, analysis of the situation brought no relief from the uneasy, almost obsessive thoughts that filled my mind ..."

...

Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused.  Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.

The way of three hundred and sixty and one

I read Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go for the first time in 1987 – and as far as I recall, have not read it again until last week.  It is a slight novel in terms of pages, just 140 or so, but is a compelling and delightful study of glory and mortality.  Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, was a journalist by profession, but wrote novels and essays all his life; he was born in 1899, and started writing in 1925, with Izu Dancer.  Other books of his available in English are Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, both well worth reading. 

The Master of Go was published in 1954, but only appeared in the West in translation in the 1970s; it is not really a work of fiction, but a shosetsu, a piece written as fiction which is broadly non-fictional in material.  This book is an account of a real championship game of Go in 1938, when “the invincible Master” was defeated.  So one or two details are changed – names, for example, and the treatment is entirely fictional in the sense that there is no adducing or weighing of evidence, merely the viewpoint (often ambiguous and questioning) of the author himself. 

Kawabata regretted the passing of the old Japan, with its courtesies and etiquette, its elevation of graceful and noble pastimes and arts to philosophies and indeed he way of life of a gracious, dedicated group of connoisseurs; that regret is encapsulated in the figure of the old Master, invincible, remote, of the old order, as he is weakened by ill-health, rules and usages which he does not understand or approve of, and the energy and directness of a young challenger, the ruthless yet reverential Otaké of the Seventh Rank.  Kawabata charts the match carefully, illuminating it with dry comments about the game, the garden outside, the moods and appearances of the contestants, the conflicts and struggles that lie beneath the obvious conflict on the Go board. The Master’s defeat is inevitable - the old order yieldeth place to the new – yet it does not seem that way; but in the end autumn passes, the snows arrive.  The Master died a year or so after the match; Kawabata died in 1972, by his own hand.

A parallel event in our lifetimes might be the Fischer-Spassky chess match in Reykjavik in 1972, though I have seen no account of it that comes anywhere near the breathtaking beauty of this book.  The match becomes compellingly interesting to millions who do not normally have any interest in the game, cultures are in flux, philosophy challenges philosophy, personal disagreements become symbols of greater changes in the wider world.  But in The Master of Go, you definitely do not need to understand the game itself, a strategic game based on placing white and black stones on a squared board in extraordinarily complex and subtle ways (my title refers to the 361 points (19 squared) on which the stones can be placed).  What you need to know, Kawabata tells you – and he covered the original match for his paper, so is well used to conveying the drama and tension to an audience which does not know the details of the game.

It is hard to convey the nature of this book; it is very beautiful and very moving; it is intensely elegiac and yet celebratory of the beauty of the game, the culture of Japan, and the intensity of the great Master.  It is a wonderful read, and makes me want to go to Japan at once and learn the game, to realise myself beyond the body and the mind.

The tangerine groves were beautiful in the hills, and down at the coast the bitter oranges were turning gold.

Stories of the revolution

Serendipity led me to the terrible news, a collection of short (sometimes very short) stories of the years of and just after the Russian Revolution, edited and translated by Grigori Gerenstein - and published in 1991, fifty years after most of the stories were written.  I didn't pick up this volume with any great expectations, just interest, but it turned out to be well worth while.  To start with, there is an introduction by John Bayley, and one by the translator - they are both well worth a read in their own right, explaining that that ,any of the stories are by authors who were suppressed or ignored by the Soviet authorities, and that many of the works have been rescued from near oblivion - certainly none of these have been translated into English before.

Grigori Gerenstein's introduction ends with these words:

We're not in the theatre, comrades!  The blood is real, and the pain is real, and the madness is real.

And John Bayley's final paragraph ends thus:

...there [may be] no special point in life except living itself, so you had better just get on with it. We are back with  ... the simple truth of the Russian proverb, Harder to live a life than cross a field ... In their stimulating and unpredictable way all these stories are witnesses to that truth, and to the folly of a new system and a new God which tried to make it seem so simple.

From those brief extracts, you will quickly have gathered that these stories show a dark and frightening side of life, and as their main subject is the awfulness of the world and the impossibility of living a rational, loving, productive life, neither the gloom nor the collection's title is unreasonable.  But there are also fine comic moments, sometimes dark, sometimes just absurd.  And the stories vary enough that, reading them straight through, you are continually stimulated and challenged in unexpected ways, something which is sharpened by the brevity of these pieces - in a slim volume of 170 pages, there are 33 stories, each with a title page and a biography of the writer - so many of the offerings are only two or three pages long.

The authors include well known names like Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov, but there are many names which are completely new to me and some are apparently almost unknown to specialists, so there's real interest in reading this collection.  There are stories of bureaucratic bungling, of infestations of rats, of life in a lunatic asylum, of a village finding then losing a dead body, of families abandoned by men who reject the institution of marriage, and so on. 

But there is also Lev Lunts' The Outgoing Letter N37, a comic masterpiece about a bureaucrat who has the idea of turning recalcitrant peasants, under hypnosis, into useful farm animals.  After some thought, he decides that good men should not be punished, but could be turned into paper - so a General in the army, for example, would have cartloads of paper which would require no feeding, could be easily transported, and could then be turned back into people for a battle.  He experiments on himself, and becomes "outgoing letter N37", complaining about the inedibility of a potato ration.  He becomes the file copy, is worried about being in the wrong place, dare not turn back into a man as this would leave the office short of a copy of this letter, and is them maltreated and finally meets a fate which all schoolboys will think of!

This is a lively and vigorous collection of stories; I commend them to any one interested in early twentieth century Russia, and in the genesis of the great Soviet protest literature.

Dreaming of the Islands

From the bookshelf at the lodge where we were staying on Lewis, I have been reading Iain Crichton Smith’s The Dream (one of his poems was up here last Friday). It's an account of a young married couple in Glasgow, both from the island of Raws, although they met in an art gallery, in Glasgow.  They have very different memories of their island upbringing: she is angry and bitter at her loveless rearing by a religious bigot of an aunt who reminded her every day that she was illegitimate, ungrateful, and probably bound for hell, and who stopped her gaining any pleasure or friends from her life; understandably, she fled this existence as soon as she could, and continued to be haunted by the otherness her aunt had always seen in her.  He, on the other hand, had a happy upbringing, full of love and friends, and enjoyed his childhood as some kind of elysium to which he would like to return and on which he draws continually.

He teaches Gaelic at university – language, literature, and cultural context, and one day it comes to him that he’s really wasted in Glasgow and should return to the islands, so that he can help give Gaelic a future, rather than continually living in the past, as in literature lectures and the forced ceilidhs of Glasgow exiles. She is horrified by this idea, and the book is a study of how they debate – or avoiding debating – this issue, and how they eventually resolve it.  It’s a short, powerful book, with a strong poetic feel to, both in the prose of the text and the frequent references and quotations to poetry and song.  It’s not exactly about language, but it does focus on the role of language in making a culture and making individuals – but book is much less dry and forbidding than this might suggest – in fact, it’s lively and vigorous, and I really rather enjoyed it. 

Spirits on the moors

Neil Gunn is a writer I only seem to read in Scotland – originally on holiday north of Ullapool, and recently on Lewis.  This time, it was a re-reading of Second Sight, set in a Highland shooting lodge sometime in the 1930s.  There is a small party of visitors, chief among them the impressionable or sensitive Harry, and the slightly irritating and cockily rationalistic Geoffrey.  Among the stalkers are Angus and Alick, and it is their activities and perceptions which play a powerful part in our understanding of the main characters.

The action starts as Alick and Harry are returning from a day’s stalking, and Alick “sees” four men carrying a shrouded body.  His fear and strain are obvious to Harry, who manages to make him tell what he has seen, including the names of the four men who are carrying the body.  Harry tells his companions, but only in general terms, keeping to himself the knowledge  of the four men’s identities, which point to either Geoffrey or Harry himself being the corpse.  Geoffrey belittles the idea roundly and – whether you believe in second sight or not – emerges as a rather sanctimonious and irritating man.  From then on, there are two themes in the book, developing together and intertwined.

The first is the discussion of second sight, especially in the context of the decline of Scottish Gaelic culture; this is sometimes amusing, when it demonstrates the relationships – occasionally rather strained – in the shooting lodge, but also occasionally a little tedious and overdone.  The second theme is the stalking and killing of the top stag of the forest, King Brude.  This is written with tremendous force and imagination, and scenes of coming of the hill in thick fog, or Geoffrey – with the long suffering Angus - being a poor sportsman and going for the king when his stalker has led him to another stag, are very vivid.  In both cases, talk from the stalkers’ and servants world informs our understanding of what is happening elsewhere – and we learn that there is little the stalkers and Mairi, who waits at table, don’t know about their so called betters.

Eventually, after rather too much clever talk by silly people, Harry and one of the young ladies fall in love, King Brude is stalked and missed, stalked and killed in unfortunate circumstances, and the prophecy of the second sight is tested to the full .. but I won’t tell you about the outcome, as I think it would spoil what is, at least in parts, a bit of a thriller.  Gunn has a fine reputation among Scottish writers; for my taste, he can be too artificial and too discursive, but there is little doubt that his descriptive powers when unloosed on his beloved Scotland are formidable indeed.

Lanterns on their Horns

Beautiful Books has sent me Radhika Jha’s new novel, Lanterns on their Horns.  It’s not exactly what I’d normally read, but it sounded quite intriguing (and it had a lovely cover – no danger of anyone thinking I was reading chick-lit or airport pulp).  I found the early pages a bit confusing, as character after character is introduced without being much developed, and there is one early appearance which seems to lead nowhere.

But it's also engaging: the main early theme is of a young idealistic man who wants to help the poor villagers of rural India through improving their cows through artificial insemination.  The local authorities deny that there are any poor, and the headman of Nandgaon, the chosen village, has prospered for years through cutting his village off from new ideas and relying on the old traditional ways, dispensing a beneficent but absolute authority, tempered by his own personal generosity.  But Manoj Moshra is determined, a determination which is strengthened by his chance encounter with a beautiful western blonde with whom he had an afternoon fling, and through the guilt of living off his wife’s generous dowry, which has come to him through an arranged marriage.

Manoj inseminates a poor junglee cow in Nandgaon with the sperm of a mighty European bull, and a strong but ugly calf is born.  The villagers are worried – why is it ugly, how did the cow become pregnant without being mounted by a bull, will the bad luck of the owners (the man a simpleton, the woman the daughter of a suicide and worse, educated).  The emphasis now turns to the village of Nandgaon, and in particular to the headman or Patel, who has tried to use his personal wealth to keep the village well looked after, his own authority to dispense good tempered justice, and his own influence to rebuild the village across the river, away from the road and all evidence of modern development.  Against this natural authority, the simpleton Ramu and his energetic, clever wife Laxmi mount an almost invisible and sometimes unconscious challenge; when their cow is inseminated by Manoj, this leads to plentiful milk, relative riches, and in due time, to a powerful and imposing bull, all threats to the established order.

Their luck is begrudged by some, envied by others, but they are generous and gradually, especially after the village falls on hard times, more and more people come around to their way of thinking – or rather, to hers – all he wants to do is love his cows and be with them in the forest.  Children are educated, even the girls, and money begins to trickle into the village.  The headman falls on hard times, and in a passionate sexual battle between his lead cow, Nandini, and their bull, Shambhu, village leadership is won and lost.

This book has a great deal going for it: it is well written, and captures the beauty and some of the chaos of India quite brilliantly.  I am glad an Indian wrote it – albeit one who now lives in Tokyo – because on occasions, it borders on the patronising, with its portrayal of post colonial bureaucrat wallahs, and of stupid, ignorant villagers.  It would not have been easy for an English writer to get away with this, and quite rightly too.  And I found the basic story full of interest, and the portrayal of village life, with its numerous hidden jealousies and pettinesses, very engaging; she captures well the complexity and the challenges of a very simple life; and her portrayal of the greedy and the ignorant in the nearby town is amusing and pointed.

But there are disappointments, too.  First, this book just goes on too long – it’s 550 odd pages, and it just doesn’t need to be; much of the detail and the narrative is superfluous and the point, already well made, could be left to speak for itself more often.  And it leaves a lot of intriguing trails unexplored – who is the idealistic European who is so important in setting Manosh on his life’s work, and who excites his lust?  Where does she go after page 10?   And why is the idealist Manosh such a mean spirited, whore hunting, bootleg drinking little tick?

I wouldn’t want these criticisms to put off readers who are attracted by a more than commonly understanding novel of rural India.  It really is very well worth reading, and there is enough variety and narrative drive to engage and arouse your interest; my disappointment arises because I feel that this is a good book, but Radhika Jha so nearly wrote a really fine one.

Coetzee and Dostoevsky, Masters of St Petersburg

Before my recent trip to St Petersburg, I found several interesting books to read – but one of them didn’t get read, either before or during my visit.  This is J M Coetzee’s The Master of St Petersburg (1994), which I read – wildly inappropriately – in Florence, city of angels.

The story opens with a man called Isaev visiting St Petersburg to clear up the affairs of his son, Pavel Alexandrovich.  There is something odd, something strained and un-natural about the relationship with the young man for whom he grieves so bitterly and so passionately, and gradually we learn that Pavel is not his son, but his stepson, and that he may have been involved in a revolutionary organisation.  Did he commit suicide?  Have an accident?  Was he killed by the police?  Further complexity develops as it emerges that the man is not Isaev at all, but Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, a writer living in Germany, already with Crime and Punishment (1866) behind him, although Coetzee develops Dostoevsky slightly unhistorically in places.

Fyodor Mikhailovich seems to believe that his son will speak to him, but that to hear his voice – which may not come from at all an expected source – he must open himself to others, finding sexual solace with his son’s landlady, freeing a trapped dog, giving a beggar a bed for the night.  He justifies this by remembering that Pascal said we should embrace everyone, only then can we be sure that the One for whom we are waiting will not slip by unnoticed. 

He puts off return to Dresden and his wife, and gradually becomes more and more embroiled with his landlady and her daughter, with the revolutionary Nechaev and his acolytes, and with the forces – strong but not always admirable – of law and order in the shape of the thoughtful and courteous Maximov.  All this time – several weeks – he has not written anything.  We understand he is too diminished, too anguished, by Pavel’s death.  Then he reads his son’s papers, and finds there pain and truth, but also an unfinished short story, jejeune but with promise.  Then, Fyodor Mikhailovich starts to write again, fluently, powerfully, and uncompromisingly, about the apartment he is living in and the people he is meeting – we hear of The Apartment and The Child, (which I cannot find that the real Dostoevsky wrote) - written without compromise, without hesitation or change, and without remorse.

“They pay him lots of money for writing books”, said the child, repeating the dead child.  What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

This is a fine novel by Coetzee, one I enjoyed all the more from recognising some of the places from my recent visit.  But it is well worth reading without that, and makes me remember that I must read more Coetzee than I have – only [check] The Life and Times of Michael K, Booker prize winner in 1983.  It is a very different narrative from Mann’s Dr Faustus, with which it shares one central idea, that genius is paid for very terribly, as it focuses on one set of events, not a whole biography, but the two books are also alike in their reflecting the personal drama with violent public events.

One day

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich was almost a cult, certainly a set text of liberal values, in the Cold War.  Published in 1962, I read it at school when I was sixteen or so (about 1972) as a description of the contemporary Soviet Union.  In fact, though it might have reflected some aspects of that time very well, it was much more based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in one of Beria’s ‘special’ camps in Karaganda in Kazakhstan in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  He was released on Stalin’s death, but although this story was published with Khrushchev’s consent, he was deported after the European publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, eventually returning to Russia twenty years later.

Re-reading One Day after about thirty-five years, I was struck by the fact that I enjoyed it and raved about it as a teenager.  It focuses very much on the little things of life – getting some food, how to keep your boots dry, staying warm when being frisked for smuggled goods, how to keep your food parcel to yourself – and these don’t seem the kind of things to appeal to me when I was so much younger.  I suppose I was much more caught up in the bigger picture – man’s inhumanity to man, the denial of free speech, and the spiritual and economic poverty of communism. 

 

What I had completely forgotten that the One Day (and it is literally a single day, from reveille to lights out) is actually a pretty good one by camp standards.  All through the book, you are told about he ceaseless struggle to get enough food, to stay warm, to avoid the brutality of the guards, that the get out of perspective what is a bad day.  At the end, about to fall asleep, Ivan Denisovich puts you right, as he enumerates the events of the day (or some of them, I have edited a bit, to shorten it, and to obviate the need for explanations in some cases):

 

Shukov (Ivan Denisovich himself) went to sleep fully content.  He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner …  and he hadn’t fallen ill.

 

A day without a dark cloud.  Almost a happy day.

 

There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch … the three extra days were for leap years.

 

This is a fine book, written by a brave man.  In both respects, it reminds me of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man about surviving Auschwitz, and  also of J M Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K about survival of a black man in apartheid South Africa, which seems to me a deliberate, careful tribute to Solzhenitsyn.  All three books are marvellous, powerful, compelling  - and shaming - reads.

Smiley and Charlie

Regular readers will know of my esteem for John Le Carré, novelist who uses the spy story has his chosen vehicle.  While in the country over recent weeks, I have been slowly watching the BBC dramatisations of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People  on DVD, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley – unhappy, podgy, a man who found much of life, including love, rather bewildering, yet is the master spy of his generation.  The BBC versions are not absolutely true to the texts, but they are very true to the spirit, and I loved them, partly for their 1970s London, and partly for Smiley’s gentle ruthlessness.  If you’re planning any wet afternoons soon, I do recommend them!

 

 

And here are the credits for the BBC's Smiley's People, amazingly atmospheric even before the story begins:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-fq_Vhl0zs.

But no DVD can compare with the text, so I took great pleasure in re-reading Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, an espionage thriller set across Europe, but in a different context, that of Israeli intelligence agencies against the Palestinian struggle.  The initially unwilling spy in this case is Charlie, actress, rebel, redhead, and the story of her recruitment, her mission, and her relationship with Gadi, her agent runner, is truly wonderful.  Sometimes ‘serious’ readers can be snobbish about detective or spy fiction – this is the book they should read.

Werewolves and other human beings

Just read A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin.  Published in 1998, this is a collection of short stories by an author of whom I was completely ignorant – but whom I think I shall read again if opportunity offers.

 

Initial impressions are – in the title story – of a dark and brooding Russianness, based in a forbidding landscape and a sense of alienation, but this rapidly gives way to a quite different mood.  To say that a group of werewolves create a lighthearted or joyful atmosphere would be to exaggerate, but there is a certain moody levity which I found appealing.  And the second story, Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream has an opening line to die for:  “Perestroika erupted into the public lavatory on Tverskoy Boulevard from several directions at once.”  This is the amusing and confusing story – part political parody, part fantasy – of a toilet attendant who is a serious philosopher, although sadly attracted to solipsism – and she discusses her thoughts with the similarly talented attendant in the men’s toilet next door.  Her neighbour tells, when asked, “the mystery of life” (sorry, she whispered it, so I can’t tell you) – to which her response was, while laughing, “What, is that all”.

 

Or, another wonderful opening line, this time from the story Tai Shou Chuan USSSR: “As everyone knows, our universe is located in the teapot of a certain Lui Dunbin, who sells trinkets at the bazaar in Chanyan.”  As you can imagine, these are whimsical, philosophical tales, making mock of the Soviet tyranny and bureaucracy (and all others), and gently – and sometimes not so gently – affirming the strength and humour of the individual survivor.

W H R R

W H R Rivers (or Captain Rivers during his Army experience) will be a familiar figure to readers of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye In the Door, and The Ghost Road.  As Barker makes clear throughout, Rivers is a real character, a psychologist and clinician of distinction; in the third novel, it becomes clear that he is first and foremost an ethnologist, specialising in the tribal societies of the Solomon Islands.  I thoughtthe Rivers passages by far the most interesting parts of the three novels, with brilliant dialogue between him and his patients, and compelling and intense descriptions of his Solomon Islands experience illuminating the savagery and psychological disturbances of the First War, so I borrowed Richard Slobodin’s 1978 biography of him (simply called W. H. R. Rivers), which is fascinating reading (though, as a contribution to the Columbia University Press’s Leaders of Modern Anthropology Series, it clearly focuses more on that part of his life than on others).

Frankly, in itself, it's not an exciting read, but Rivers is quite a man and the book (just republished) is well worth a look.  He's older than I thought from the novels, he was born in 1864, so was already 50 when the First World War started, and he began to treat nervous patients - which, no doubt, accounts for the wisdom, tolerance and humanity that comes across so well in the Barker novels.  He died in 1922, at St John's College, Cambridge, an extremely popular man, but one who never married, and indeed, as far as Slobodin can find out, never had much of an emotional life of any sort.  He was a pioneering medic, interested in psychology and psychiatry, but also becoming a major figure in ethnology and social studies.  One of his great interests was in the nature of perception of feeling  how you feel pain - such as a pinprick - and how accurately if you can't see it being applied - very relevant to an extended scene in The Ghost Road.

He was particularly noted for his accounts of the Solomon Islanders - his The Funeral of Sinerani, an account for a Cambridge University magazine is reprinted in full in Slobodin, and is a marvellous account of the funeral of a very young girl, who had to be "married" to a three year old boy before she could be cremated - and shows the practical nature of these people, adapting and forcing the ritual as they went along.  It is briefly described, too, in his most famous ethnological work, The Todas, and here's a flavour:

The child was about two years old and had not yet been betrothed, but as soon as she was dead it was arranged that she should marry her a little boy about four years of age, the son of her mother's brother, and this boy occupied a prominent position among those taking part in the funeral rites. Owing to the marriage of the dead child to this boy, the dead child would come to be one of his clan, the Keadrol, and there seemed to be no doubt that, according to strict custom, the

funeral should have been held at the funeral place of this clan.

Kuriolv, however, arranged that the funeral should take place

at Kurkalmut, the funeral place for women of the Kuudrol,

but as the girl did not properly belong to this clan the funeral

hut was not erected within the circle of stones at this place,

but outside it.

… the buffalo which had been caught by the Taradr men was

being taken to the place appointed for its slaughter by the

side of the funeral hut. The people had great difficulty in

making the buffalo move, and at last it lay down on a boggy

piece of ground, and the efforts of all failed to make it go

further. The diviners, Midjkudr and Mongudrvan, were then

called upon to ascertain the cause of the obstinacy of the

buffalo … the buffalo was thus family property, it should go to the sons, and ought not to be killed for a daughter.

Then after being swung over the flames as usual, the body was placed

on the pyre. [There then should be a “dry funeral” a couple of weeks later. But …] Less than half an hour later, and long before the body could have been consumed, the tnarvainolkedr began, and passed

off without any special incident. Another buffalo was caught

and killed and laid by the side of a mantle containing hair

which had been cut from the head of the dead child by

Keinba. The mantle should also have contained a piece of

skull, but the body had not been sufficiently consumed to

procure this, and so the hair alone was held to be sufficient.

By the way, his full name was William Halse Rivers Rivers.  Why the double Rivers -no one knows, maybe just an error by the registrar!

 

Diffugere nives

A terrible pun to start off – “the snows are all fled away” from Horace’s famous ode, merely to mark the end of my reading of C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, eleven full length novels spanning British life and politics from just before the 1914-18 war  until the 1970s.  I have written about all the individual novels over the past few months – see the C P Snow tab under “categories” – and I do not propose to reprise them now.

 

But I did want to attempt some overall evaluation.  The first point is that re-reading these novels – for perhaps the third or fourth time – was in no sense drudgery or a burden, even though there must be over 3,500 pages or so.  This may have been because I spread them out over several months, always allowing a fortnight or so to elapse between novels, which gave me a chance to read something else, and to tune into a different locale and a different chronology.  They were a delight, and I recommend them warmly; they can easily be read as independent novels (especially, I judge, The Masters and The New Men), but they gain immeasurably in richness by being read as a sequence.

 

They are warm, disconcertingly honest, and very knowledgeable and wise; they occupy a different social milieu to Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, a more robustly workaday one, more concerned with the tasks and enterprise of power and the struggle to form and manage relationships, and less with Powell’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of power and love.  Both are acute social and personal observers, though Powell is clearly the finer writer and the more easily applicable to different periods and different personalities – though Snow has his strengths here too.  Powell’s style is quite different, as well – more light and allusive, while Snow is normally a more “straightforward” writer, both in terms of plot construction and prose, though anyone who thinks this is an easy matter of “writing down what happens” has clearly not tried it!

 

Finally, a word about Snow’s other books.  There are other novels, few of which I have read – but there are two crime novels, too, both well worth reading.  Early in manner – a writing finding his feet – is Death Under Sail, an enjoyable mystery on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads; it is slightly old fashioned, and has a few lively characters who perhaps veer too close to caricature.  But A Coat of Varnish is much more assured, a formidable novel about a brutal murder in an affluent but declining square in west London; the violence breaks through the thin coat of varnish which is all that civilisation is, covering and hiding our animal natures.  Soon, you know who the murderer is – but can the police prove it?  And what does this sudden irruption of violence mean for the serenity and security of the people who live in the square? – a fine murder thriller, worthy of the top shelf.

Strangers and Brothers: Last Things

The final Strangers and Brothers novel, the eleventh, is Last Things.  It does not represent an end, except the gradually slowing down and relaxing of Eliot’s active life – though he is still happy and amused, and very active, right at the very end – but a whole series of new beginnings, as later generations take over, and his and his wife’s sons leave home, both in ways which challenge their parents’ love and understanding.  But Last Things does deal with the eponymous eschatologies (illustrated in the four corner roundels in Bosch's wonderful picture) - for example, Lewis loses friends to death, and comes very close himself when his heart stops under anaesthetic, an event which leads to a conversation between Eliot, a robust unbeliever, and Wilfred, a local priest.  After they have been discussing death for some time, Eliot steadily saying he remembers nothing of his ‘death’, he asks Wilfred about the other three items in the list of four last things;  the priest replies:

Lewis.  I expect you'd prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn't you?  I'm not sure that would be an improvement, you know.  But if you like I'll say that you've made your own heaven and hell in your life.  And as for judgement, well, you're capable of delivering that upon yourself.  I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.

Often in Strangers and Brothers, the action has been centred on other people than Eliot; like Nick in A Dance To The Music of Time, he is an observer and commentator.  But unlike Nick, he is always somewhere in the action, and often at the very centre.  But in The Sleep of Reason, he becomes largely an observer, and in Last Things, he is almost completely passive, watching the efforts of the younger generations (in the mid 1960s) to break free of their parents’ legacy and enter political debate on meaningful, sometimes violent terms, and suffering his own medical problems.  He and Margaret, his wife, are caught up in the matrimonial and employment difficulties of their children and their friends’ children, they lose their own friends to death – out of reach abroad in two cases – and can do nothing except love and support each other with a wry commentary on events and personalities.

The race has been run, the baton passed, and a wonderful series of under-regarded novels has come to an end.  These eleven novels are not the most sophisticated or modern novels you can find in English, but they are real, honest, and unflinching in dealing with some of the major issues that worried man and women over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and the other issues which – quondam and futurus – will never go away as long as men and women draw breath.  Read them if you can, they are well worth the effort, and as a bonus you see into the mind of one of the unsung heroes of Britain in the last century.

Strangers and Brothers: The Sleep of Reason

After the reality of the Second World War, and the struggle of nuclear weapons, as well as the more personal tragedies of Roy Calvert and Lewis Eliot’s first wife, Sheila, it’s perhaps hard to imagine that there are darker moods to come in Eliot’s journey through life.  But C P Snow’s penultimate Strangers and Brothers novel, The Sleep of Reason, is dark indeed: dark in fact – he is threatened with blindness – and dark in metaphor – as he is drawn into a horrific child killing.  But, as always, one of the great messages is that life goes on, creating warmth and joy with the same indiscriminate abandon as the horror, and often at the same time.  (The title of the book comes from the Goya etching, "The Sleep of reason Produces Monsters").

Eliot is retired and happy (“call no man happy until he is dead”), but embroiled in the myriad complexities of a full life – worrying over how will his children manage as they move from school to university, the death of his saint-like father, and dealing with his ill and acerbic father in law, observing the emotional affairs of the generation (or two) behind him, and trying to steer a reactionary colleague away from some disciplinary stupidities at the university in his home town in the Midlands.  There are many, many strands to this book, as to all the others, but two stand out.

First, he wakes one morning to find a dark curtain over one of his eyes, a physical threat and an clear allegory for the difficulties in understanding the motivations of others.  He has an operation for detached retina, and is confined to the dark while he recovers – a physical stillness and a sensory deprivation which he finds frightening, intolerable, and which proves useless, as the operation fails. He is fortunate, and gets some valuable sight back, but the threat of being cut off, and the warning of old age and death is upon him.  But the real darkness is one of understanding – he has the reputation, and the pride, of being able to see further through a millstone than most – and he is then precipitated into a ghastly story.

Two women, lesbians clearly, and one of them his teenage friend George Passant’s niece Cora, are suspected of carefully plotting to abduct, torture and then kill a young schoolboy.  This is a modern theme, perhaps, but the novel was published in 1968 and was set in 1963 – and Hindley committed her crimes in 1963-65 (though her lover, also guilty of complicity in her crimes, was a man).  (As with Powell, the gap between setting and writing has necessarily to diminish as each seeks a complete chronicle of his times).  He can do nothing, he has no role in the events, but he agrees to meet Cora before and after the trial, and to attend the trial itself to accompany and support Passant.  In the end, Passant cannot take it, and absents himself, and Lewis bears the burden almost alone, although various family members and friends ensure he is never completely by himself. 

In spite of the horror, the horror, the book contrives to move with an easy and assured grace, and finds ways of going on and going forward even in the darkest moments.  Throughout, the teasing and sceptical love of his wife and son Charles keep open another vision of the world – a world which is seriously flawed, and in which one must play a remedial and possibly radical role – but also a world in which no one man has to shoulder the burdens of all mankind.  Reason sleeps, but will wake again.

A Russian Faust

For years, the name Mikhail Bulgakov has floated around the edge of my reading; curiously, for someone who loved Russian literature in my youth, I had never made the attempt to read him.  But last week, to grips with The Master and Margarita, and a chthonic struggle it was too.  There was the normal difficulty with names – I often find names difficult to remember in complex plots, but in Russian novels, with the changes between the surname and the personal and patronymic, the challenge is greater – and Bulgakov piles it on with an enormous cast of characters, flying hither and yon at great speed.

The setting is theatrical, dramatic, and fast moving, but the opening gives little warning of this.  Two literary characters are conducting a desultory and rather pretentious conversation, when they are joined by an odd man, who seems to know almost everything, including the existence of the devil, and the impending  - and totally unexpected – death of one of them.  His death, and the antics of the stranger and his companions, set off a manic chain of events across Moscow and beyond, including black magic, a witches’ sabbath, several personal disasters and embarrassments, all within a breakneck narrative which can hardly contain them.

The mysterious stranger, of course, is the Devil, and his companions include a black cat and a naked redheaded witch.  One of their victims ends up in  a madhouse, where he meets a man who calls himself the Master.  The Master had written a novel, but had fallen into madness and despair when it could not be published (it is clearly full, like The Master and Margarita itself, of anti-Soviet satire).  The Master doesn’t seem especially saintly, but his love for young woman called Margarita is the central theme of the book: through routes devious and chaotic, they earn their freedom (and happiness?) through serving the Devil – Margarita acts as the Devil’s hostess at a witches’ ball, and they are granted a long and peaceful life in a secluded cottage somewhere off inter-galactic highway 7 (Moscow to Gehenna) right at the end of the book.

So the traditional Faust story is turned on its head rather, and the chaos surrounding the Devil often doesn’t seem evil, just a case of tricks and stratagems which often punish the hypocrites and minor criminals that abounded in the fabric of everyday Soviet life.  I found it very compelling, mainly through a pressing desire to know what happened next, but I did not find it either coherent or easy to follow.  Nor did I find it hilarious, another common reaction: yes it was certainly often amusing, but it was for me a thing of shreds and patches, wonderful and bizarre, brilliantly satiric and bumbling slapstick, by turns.  I suspect that this is a novel much better read in the original: certainly the language, as well as the plot, was sometimes tortured and difficult.

Peace on earth - war in the mind

The final novel in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is The Ghost Road, which I bought for 20 pence from a stall in a Dorset town square.  You may recall that I enjoyed the first one – Regeneration – a great deal, the second – The Eye In The Door – much less, though always impressed by the skill with which she capture Rivers’ relationships with his psychiatric patients, and the superb dialogue.  Well, The Ghost Road is another fine novel, closer to the first in feeling and style (with one key exception), and I was very pleased to read it.

Rivers is still practising at a hospital in London, but much of the action takes place on the Western front, where Billy Prior has returned, in spite of his poor physical and mental health, and where his self awareness – aroused through his consultations with Rivers - is illuminating and despairing.  He is joined by keen young greenhorns, and by Wilfred Owen, whose death, very shortly before the armistice is one of the fading notes of the trilogy.  Rivers himself has a succession of difficult and unhappy patients, riven by shell shock and deeper neuroses, and always finds a way to assert their and his humanity in a way which sheds a little light, even a little humour, into the darkest corners of their selves.

But the astonishing part of this novel, and a new departure, is the extended reference, through flashbacks and dream like memory sequences, to Rivers’ ethnological explorations as a young man in the Pacific islands of Eddystone and Simba in the western Solomons, which gave me a strong and reverberant connection to my own trip to Vanuatu last year, and my reading of the books of Tom Harrisson.  These islands, and Rivers' interest in the dangerous, the tabu, and the sacrificial, form a powerful of echo of both the physical events in the mire of France, but also to the shadowy but resilient forces in his patients’ minds – and in all our minds, too.  Here, Rivers is led into understanding by the witch doctor Njiru, just as he leads others into understanding in his clinic years later.  For example, he is privy to the death of the chief Ngea, the temporary immural of his wife, the way the society reclaims her - though without the traditional capture of a skull, now outlawed by the British - and the placing of the Ngea's skull in the newly built skull house. Finally, he and Njiru together hold the skull of Homu, the greatest of the skull hunters, "the most precious object in the world".  He learns how a man's fears and beliefs position him in the world, often in a way the world and he find uncomfortable, dangerous, miserable  but how they can also do the opposite.

Rivers is an astonishing character, but not at all an unbelievable one, and his strength of mind and his insight is seen in the smallest ways as well as the largest.  For example, he cures a military officer of hysterical paralysis through an extraordinary ritual of drawing on his legs, moving the ‘tidemark’ each day, forcing the paralysis to retreat then abandon the leg altogether, in spite of the patients extreme scepticism.  “I suppose I’m meant to be grateful”.  “No”.  In that “no” is all his understanding, all his humanity, all his generosity.  In France, his patient Prior follows his own reactions, both mental and physical (he has stress induced asthma), and concludes, in a letter to Rivers, that:

My nerves are in perfect working order.  By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it. Test Passed?

I was not convinced by all of these three novels, particularly The Eye in the Door, and I found the gluttonous and wanton sexuality of some of the characters a messy and distasteful distraction from the real story.  But they are all worth reading, this one most of all, for Rivers alone.

Warm hearts and cold seas

MacDonald Harris’ The Balloonist has been on my list of books to find and read for some time, ever since I read the high praise given to it by Philip Pullman - he says "it's leisurely, it's subtle and reflective, it's funny, it's accurate and fascinating about the technical business of flying balloons and meteorology and the mysteries of early radio; there's a love story that is tender, sexy and ridiculous all at once".  While I enjoyed Harris’ Screenplay , I wasn’t completely bowled over – but this one was meant to be his masterpiece.  So I was very pleased by a kind friend tracked it down and gave it to me as a very undeserved present, and I read with enormous interest, and growing involvement.

It’s about a balloonist (no!) who is clearly part of the inspiration for Lee Scoresby in Pullman’s own Northern Lights, but who is very different in all sorts of ways.  The book opens in America, but much of the action is in Paris, with brief scenes in Italy and Sweden, but the heart of it is over the Arctic ice.  It is a tremendous novel of much ingenuity, passion for unattainable goals, love and humour – and a very final double tragedy: an outrageous but unknown and uncelebrated success, and death.

In America, the Swedish balloonist, Gustav Crispin, is experimenting with methods of being able to steer a balloon.  Short of giving it a power source and propellers and rudders, the only real way of doing this is to seek out air currents moving at different directions at different heights – which can be effective, but only in a limited way – gentle adjustments, in my two flights’ experience, rather than total steering control.  But at the time, they were not dealing with hot air balloons, in which altitude control is very easy, but with hydrogen or helium balloons, where altitude could only be lost by releasing gas, or gained by abandoning ballast – both of which were very finite options!  In spite of these limitations, Gustav thinks on the grand scale – he wants to go to the North Pole in a balloon, and when he eventually does set out on this expedition, the amount of luggage he takes – as well as two companions – is quite extraordinary, much of it made of heavy wood, glass or brass.

But before he embarks on his final trip, he studies in Paris, where he meets the elusive and demanding Luisa, who insists on learning his trade.  In fact, she distracts him terribly, and he embarks on a serious emotional bad trip, which is charged with illicit sexuality and la vie bohème.  He also meets her brother Theodor, who eventually becomes a key, if enigmatic, part of the plans for the final heroic flight.  Passionate relationships, deeply regretted but unswervingly indulged, do not prevent the great day dawning, and he sets off to the North Pole, managing to steer a little but trusting greatly in God and the winds.

The tumultuous heat of the Empire bed in the yellow room is replaced by the unforgiving white and cold of the Arctic, and if you believe his own calculations – Harris, it seems to me, leaves us in genuine doubt – they do make it to the North Pole.  But there is no evidence of their success, and they are eventually forced to face a fierce battle for survival rather than a triumphant return to civilisation.  A fine, compelling book, full of many different emotions and challenges.  "If we are betrayed, it is only by ourselves".

Strangers and Brothers: Corridors of Power

C P Snow, in his preface to this book, somewhat ruefully presumes he has the right to use his own cliche, since the phrase "corridors of power" is undoubtedly his invention.  It's a happy one, too, with its suggestion of power directed and yet trammelled, and an undeniably appropriate one for those of us who work in Whitehall or in Washington, since a feature of all bureaucratic buildings of any age seems to be the corridor.  It takes you in a direction over which you have little control, it suggests secrets off to the right and the left, it imposes itself on you, it un-mans you.

This is a particularly compelling volume.  Lewis Eliot is now a senior mandarin, and becomes closely connected with Roger Quaife, a young minister determined to break the orthodoxy of British great power thinking and (eventually) get rid of the nuclear deterrent.  It is a fascinating point in British political history - the Suez adventure splits British society, not absolutely on the expected lines, and Britain is painfully coming to terms with the notion that it is no longer a great power - an adjustment that many would say is not yet complete.  An American academic is forced, reluctantly, to point out that against American power, nothing Britain can do matters a hill of beans.  And it is clear, "among all sensible men", that if if the deterrent is not abandoned now (1956), it will be soon, a view which has proved astonishingly deceptive.

The novel has plenty of points of interest: there is much grey politics, the careful manoeuverings of politicians and civil servants; there is a clash of loyalties, across family and patriotism; there is the old, grand tradition of politics in fierce contact with the new, raw mood of modern times; there is the shock of hearing that Quaife is risking his political career, his chance of delivering the policy in which he passionately believes, and his adored wife, all for "a young woman" who loves him - a woman without a political instinct in her body, but who loves him; there is the play of scientist and civil servant.  And there is Lewis Eliot himself, moving easily between the politicians and the scientists, between the new men and the old guard, making friends with whom he disagrees and respecting though not liking some of those with whom he works most closely.

This is a novel - I give nothing away, since Snow is always very realistic and we all know the history of the anti-deterrent movement - about failure.  But it is a failure touched with nobility, and with greatness - and, as always, it is a failure not of policies or institutions, but of people.  "We talked as though the future was easy and secure, and as though [our children's] lives would bring us joy".  But you cannot help feeling richer for it; you cannot help feeling that Snow has taken the back off the Whitehall clock and - for just one minute on one issue - you really understood how it all worked.  A wonderfully convincing and compelling read. 

Strangers and Brothers: The Affair

Like Homecomings, this novel is on the small scale, and Lewis Eliot is personally closely involved, though he is not the main focus of events.  The Affair returns to the small Cambridge college of The Light and The Dark and The Masters, but has no sexual subject: the word “affair” is a reference to the Dreyfus affair, of which this  is a modern reinterpretation on a modest scale.

An unattractive personality, morose and paranoid, Howard is a junior Fellow of the college thrown out for scientific fraud in his research.  Doubts arise about the evidence, and life in college becomes very tense for all, especially as there is another Mastership election in the offing.  Political division deepens between those who believe there has been a miscarriage, and those who feel the whole matter has been looked at thoroughly and should now be allowed to rest – and while the reader’s sympathies in a judicial sense are likely to be with Howard, his ingratitude to those helping, and his general grumpiness and sense of persecution, make this hard to maintain.

Much of the interest centres around the personalities of Howard and his wife Laura, good looking and utterly committed to proving his innocence.  In their pursuit of justice, they are blind to the best way forward, and reluctant to take advice.  They leave Eliot feeling useless and unwanted, exactly at the time he has the ability to really make a difference to their cause: “No one likes to be treated as a vacuum inhabited solely by himself”.

Strangers and Brothers: Homecomings

After the making of the atomic bomb, the Strangers and Brothers series returns to the more intimate focus in Homecomings, in which Lewis Eliot is the central character (something Nick Jenkins in the Powell sequence never is).  This starts well before the war, and goes on after it has ended – covering several years, then, which have already been the subject of The Light and The Dark and The New Men, but concentrating on a completely different subject, though often touching on key moments in those books.

Lewis Eliot has married out of despair, a beautiful woman he has loved desperately, but whose illnesses and lack of love for him are ruining both their lives.  He tries to leave, but fails.  He sacrifices his career for her, and his spirit is nearly broken.  Eventually, while he is enjoying a cheerful night out with colleagues, she commits suicide.  He is thrown into a form of despair, but there is also much relief mingled in it.  He reduces his life to essentials, work, work, and more work, keeping up a basic social life and living in unattractive digs with a lazy and over-inquisitive landlady.

By chance, two years after Sheila’s death, he meets and gradually falls in love with Margaret, rather younger than him, but intelligent, amusing, and attractive.  The affair develops rapidly, but he is unable to fully enter the relationship, preferring to deal with difficulty – Sheila’s suicide, the death of his friend Roy Calvert – alone, without sharing.  Eventually, she leaves him, marries another man and has a child.  He is cast down once again, the more desperately for having come so close to real happiness – but they meet again, a couple of years later.  The second half of the novel tells how they deal with their reignited love, tempted by infidelity, thinking of a new start, burdened by loyalty to her husband Geoffrey and their son.  It also tells of Lewis’ emotional maturing, and how he copes with the realisation that he cannot always cope alone.

Snow is full of pithy observation, especially about how human beings behave and how they explain and justify their behaviours, but I particularly liked this remark of Margaret’s father, the left wing art critic, Austin Davidson:  “All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part”.

Floundering among the recipes

Gunter Grass, apart from being a fine novelist of the rumbustious left in post war German – a modern Rabelais, but one concerned about the environment, civil rights, women’s issues, and the political fate of Gdansk (Danzig) – was also fond of his food.  Many of these themes come together in The Flounder, which I read during a period of late teen / early twenties infatuation with Grass (which started with The Tin Drum, which I still think an astonishing book, an energetic fantasy, full of mockery of the Nazis, and stuffed with wonderful images).  The German title apparently means "flatfish" or even "turbot", but the book is known in English as The Flounder, and my photograph is of the eponymous species.  It is a novel rooted in the period - the radicalisation of normal political discourse, the cold war, aggressive feminism - but it is still well worth a read today.  It's full of humour, and full of recipes (and quite a lot of politics, and of sex, too)!

The flounder is male, and he comes out of the sea to lie with his mate, a cook who has many different incarnations over the centuries of North German history - and at the same time, is the nine month story of Ilsebill's (the latest incarnation of his woman, originally called Awa) pregnancy.  If that sounds complex and portentous, I've given quite the wrong impression - it's a very serious novel, but to read, it's actually a bit of a romp.  The flounder is a symbol of male domination, of knowledge used for the sake of his own sex, and Awa (who, in neolithic times, had three breasts) starts as matriarch and leader of a society in which the men were soft, childish and obedient.  She braves the gods to collect fire (in her "pouch" - short detour on the origin and function of the clitoris), which initially reinforces her dominance, but leads to the ability to smelt metal and make weapons - the start of male dominance, war and death.

The recipes are great - and there are dozens of them, and dozens of stories about food, too.  The insemination was preceded by shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, for example, and similarly robust recipes sprinkle the book, always with some historical or political significance.  A favourite example is from the seventeenth century when Agnes (ie, Awa or Ilsebill) cooked goose giblets with turnips and "barley, caraway seed, marjoram and a little henbane to ward off plague".  You might not want to cook many of these recipes, but I assure you, you'll enjoy reading about them!

 

 

Strangers and Brothers: The New Men

I warned you at the end of The Masters that the scale was about to change, and in The New Men we are back to the large canvas of the novel before The Masters, The Light and the Dark.  But whereas that dealt with the fate of one man, painted against the approach of war and the early years of conflict, with political division at home and horrors abroad, The New Men deals with a new class of frightfulness – the realisation by good, decent scientists that a bomb of unimaginable power could be created.  This is about the dawn of the atomic age, and the pressures on men to make something utterly horrible for what they hoped were good reasons, and the pain and guilt and anger they felt when the bomb was used.  In addition, there are several enthralling human stories, and a significant espionage sub-plot.  All in all, The New Men is a very modern book in terms of content, though its reserved style, and the rawness of war and excitement of scientific discovery, make it old fashioned in feel.

Lewis Eliot, at the beginning of war, is transferred to the Civil Service (as was Snow himself), the highest of all possible callings.  He became a private secretary to a Minister close to scientific research, and was involved very soon with the realisation that making an atomic bomb was possible.  Such efforts were made by most scientists, because they – and only because – they feared Germany would get it first.  Gradually, the truth dawned that Britain, however brilliant, was playing second fiddle to the Americans with their vastly superior resources.  Gradually, it also became clear, to the scientists’ horror, that the bomb might actually be used – The New Men looks at the personal struggles of the scientists, each eager for advancement and fame, and their struggles with their consciences, and their efforts – futile as we all know – to stop it.

As ever, Snow is fascinated by the personalities and the emotions, and the way these men deal with failure, with a spy in their midst, and with the competition for honours – not to mention the danger of radiation sickness when something goes wrong.  In The New Men, they have success, but they come a frustrating second, and they see their genius used in a way which we can all understand all too well.  Later in life, he wrote a very readable popular account of some of the great men in twentieth century physics (he was a physicist himself), called simply The Physicists.  In spite of the horror of the bomb, this was the supreme age of physics, the period when physics became the queen of the sciences, and when it really looked, briefly, as if we might understand everything, even to uttermost depths.  That, of course, was an illusion, but Snow’s scientists in this book are only too well aware of the fragility of their technical and human knowledge.

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.

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.

 

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?

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 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.

Bang, bang, bang, goes the farmer's gun

I have long resisted reading John Updike's Rabbit books, I know not why, because I have greatly admired other books of his - notably Memories of the Ford Administration.  But I was persuaded by a chance sighting of Rabbit, Run in a bookshop, and I was part way though it when he died a few weeks ago.  This meant there was a lot of critical and adulatory writing around, which was both helpful and a little off-putting:  I felt I really had to like him, now that he had died and everyone was saying how wonderful he was.  He claims the echo of the traditional English song was accidental, but it's so appropriate, I include a link so you can hear it.

"Rabbit" is the nickname of Harry Angstrom, high school hero for his basketball skills, but an aimless small town misfit once he leaves school - but one with a wife (bored and alcoholic), child, a low boredom threshold and high sexual needs.  He walks out, and the great ignominy of his flight is the fact that he gets lost, retraces his tracks and goes to earth not in the sunny south, but in his own town in Pennsylvania.  He's not an inspiring character, and throughout the book he shows a propensity to run away from his responsibilities, repent without quite knowing what that means, and run away again -sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.

Set in the spring of 1959, you think at first it's going to be a road movie, so to speak, but when he gets back to his home town, Rabbit stays there - but just not with his wife.  He makes a profession of running away - originally from wife, children and home (more than once), then from a prostitute he's been living with, then later from his parents and parents in law, and indeed from anyone who he has a duty to or could help him.  He runs from a job, from responsibility, from boredom, from almost anything that might tie him down - but when he's free, he doesn't know what to with his freedom, and creates another trap for himself.

Two minor figures became important to me: first, the pastor Eccles, who really does try to help him, and with whom Harry (Rabbit) has some great conversations, often, bizarrely enough, on the golf course.  The other great character is the acerbic Mrs Smith, a widow for whom Harry does gardening for a while.  She has a stimulating, amusing, malicious take on the world, and she hates - but really hates - rhododendrons (which makes her my friend, for sure).  The book ends on an indeterminate note, with more running, and rejection; the message seems to be that Rabbit has irretrievably lost his way, just like middle America as a whole.  I don't buy that, of course, and nor does Updike, as I think we'll find out in future Rabbit books!

Updike famously said:  "The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.  An outsiderish literary stance is traditional ... ".  I don't know exactly what that means, but I intuit something of it; in any event, it's clear to me that Updike, who takes a very "insiderish" stance, succeeds with aplomb.  Rabbit, Run was not always a comfortable read, but I'll be back in due course for Rabbit Redux.

The Eye In The Door

Pat Barker's  The Eye In The Door is the second novel in her Regeneration trilogy, the first volume of which, Regeneration, I found very impressive - it's reviewed here.  The fact that five months have passed tell you something - that I was just nervous that the second novel wouldn't maintain the standard, perhaps, or just that I've  read more than I want about the 1914-18 war.  And I was slightly disappointed, I'm afraid, although it's clear this is still a very accomplished novel, and one which has moments of great intensity and a visceral, physical quality - and moments, too, of febrile social madness.

So what disappointed me?  Well, for a start, it opens with a not very graphic but sordid and unpleasant episode of sodomy between two officers, and I didn't find that a welcoming theme!  Then, there is much less of Sassoon and Owen, two of the major characters of Regeneration - and men in whom, both as characters and as real poets, I can feel real interest.  The leading characters of The Eye In The Door are less attractive and less absorbing - and one of the main characters, Billy Prior, is a poor thing, unhappy, torn between loyalties, following his insatiable and wide ranging sexual appetites while progressively falling apart psychologically.  Army psychiatrist, William Rivers, is here again, and he is again impressive and compelling - and his conversations with his patients are, as in Regeneration, marvellous pieces of writing: probably in both books the main joy of the writing.

But in spite of my doubts, this is still well worth reading.  Apart from Rivers, who is enough to justify reading this novel, there are convincing accounts of the tense local relations between patriots and conscientious objectors, of paranoid and shrill upper- and middle-class patriots who saw treason and corruption everywhere, and a major theme of injustice and false imprisonment of a woman who had allegedly, and ridiculously, been accused of plotting to assassinate Lloyd-George.  There's plenty of narrative interest, some fine writing, and a compelling picture of a stressed and insecure society at a turning point in its fortunes, and even some resolution for those who like their stories to have endings!  I will probably read the third novel, The Ghost Road, because some say it is the best of the trilogy - but again, I don't feel ready yet.

Miss Dobson

Courtesy - as is often the case nowadays - of 99 pence of expenditure at the local Oxfam, I have just re-read "the incomparable Max"'s only novel, the 1911 frivolity Zuleika Dobson.  And if Max Beerbohm can be called just "Max", I can call the lovely Zuleika (a tautology, that's what the name means) just "Miss Dobson".  This is a book I first read when probably rather drunk with the idea of Oxford, and his is certainly a book to get drunk on.  It is a fantasy, set in the mythical Oxford college of Judas (I wonder how many made up Oxford colleges there are in popular literature?), of a second rate female conjurer who is utterly bewitching and utterly heartless.

She turns the heads of everybody in the university, most notably that of the nonpareil Duke of Dorset, who is ineffably conceited, rich and talented, and who is the social mark af all the university.  I don't suppose there is anybody who doesn't know the plot, so I won't be spoiling it if I tell you he determines to sacrifice himself in the Isis during eights week (translation, in the River Thames where it runs through Oxford, after the summer inter-college rowing races).  His suicide is followed by hundreds of others, and Oxford is deserted as a result - she takes a few hours to reflect and regret, and sets out for Cambridge.

I loved this thirty years ago, and I could love it still now, it is written with such panache, such confidence, and such imagination - except that it is really a little long.  The idea is marvellous, but a hundred or so pages would have done nicely, and it is well over twice that length. But if you don't know it, it's well worth a look, although you mustn't think that Oxford was ever at all like this!  But the scenes in which the gods rather regret releasing the two black owls which presage the death of a member of the Duke's family, and so grant his every whim in recompense, are masterly; he only thinks that a certain cloud would be a little further left to be placed to best advantage, and lo!, it is so.  And the sangfroid with which the Duke, only an hour before his suicide, orders the family tomb made ready and pays his landlady's bill, stopping to check most carefully before he hurls himself to his death, is tremendous.

In fact, the only thing I can't really forgive either Max or the Duke is that, thanks to his ill-timed plunge into the Isis, Magdalen (my own college, as you may have guessed) were bumped by Judas and ceased to be head of the river.  This is unthinkable - Magdalen was the power on the river at that time - the 1908 Olympic coxless four was entirely drawn from Magdalen and won gold; and 8 of the 9 members of the Gold medal winning 1912 Olympic Eight were also from Magdalen - and the idea that they were deposed by a fictional college is plain silly!

Strangers and Brothers - order, order

There has been some confusion over the C P Snow Strangers and Brothers sequence, as they appear in different orders (only the early ones) in different places.  So, for the record, here is the full list in the order I find most satisfying, with the date of publication in brackets, and the dates of the action following (my estimates, I think, I've taken them from an old notebook (1982) and didn't note a source).  You can see that the first four all overlap to some degree, but that thereafter a number of others overlap slightly. 

Someone has asked me about getting hold of these books.  There should be no problem at all - there are lots in print, and there are literally thousands of Snow's books on Abebooks - and five of the series at 99 pence in my local Oxfam shop! 

Time of Hope (1949)  1914 - 33

George Passant (aka Strangers and Brothers) (1949)  1925 - 33

The Conscience of the Rich (1958)  1927 - 33

The Light and the Dark (1947)  1935 - 43

The Masters (1951)  1937

The New Men (1954)  1939 - 47

Homecomings (1958)  1938 - 51

The Affair (1960)  1953 - 54

Corridors of Power (1964)  1955 - 59

The Sleep of Reason (1968)  1963 - 64

Last Things (1970)  1964 - 68

When I've finished the entire sequence, later in the year, I'll briefly review his entire writings, and suggest some other reading.  I'm taking it slowly, and have only read four so far this year, so the eleventh will probably be somewhere around April, or even May.

Strangers and Brothers: Conscience of the Rich

The Conscience of the Rich is the third book in C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence, and is an illuminating and moving one.  Published in 1958, it looks back at London in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  Lewis Eliot is trying to work out a career in London as a barrister, amid many distractions, including a painful love, severe poverty, and friends in trouble in his home town, Leicester.  He makes friends with Charles March, another young barrister, proud hope of a rich Jewish family with strong traditions.

There are many delightful things in this book, but few can match the dazzling skill with which Snow portrays Charles' father, Leonard March; he is a proud, sometimes irascible man, deeply fond of his two children, but completely out of touch with their aspirations in politics, in careers, and in love.  And he is given to great rambling stories of the family, where non-sequitur is piled upon irrelevance until he triumphantly brings the tale - amongst the laughter of his children and friends - to a glorious conclusion.  And Lewis notices wealth and what it can do - the Marches have a man in to wind the clocks once a week - and starts as a junior figure who, because of his personal qualities and later his professional skill, becomes central to the March family.

For these are times of turmoil.  A whiff of political scandal touches a connection of the family, and the left, to which Lewis, Charles and his sister and others are passionately devoted, forces a conflict with the family.  And events in Germany mean that being Jewish is suddenly a burden, suddenly it is something that the Marches and families like them have to be measured against, have to take account of; to use a word which would achieve a terrible significance after the war, they cannot be unbelastet or unencumbered any longer.  And both the children, Charles and his sister Katherine, break away from the family in ways which Leonard and his peers find very difficult, difficult even unto the death of the spirit.

The politics of the inter-war period is the scourging, ripping tide of this book, but the young men and women are several boats afloat, swirling wildly, trying to steer a course but not wholly in control - and unable, unwilling to stay in safe harbour - but deeply hurt by the places they end up.  Careers, marriages, politics, personal relationships of all kinds, that is the heady mix of this book.  It's a fine read, although not entirely a comfortable one.  The final words, as Mr March sees off guests from a dinner party in which all the pain of his family problems has been apparent, are as much about the European situation as they are about a lonely and sad old man:

Standing at the corners. I stamped my feet, waiting for a taxi.  Through the bare trees of the garden, I could see a beam of light, as the door of Mr March's house opened, letting out some more of his guests.  Soon the party would be over.  He would test the latches and switch off the lights: then he would be left in his own company.

Birthday Boys

Beryl Bainbridge is not a novelist I often read, in spite of her obvious quality, and even though I read An Awfully Big Adventure with great delight when it came out.  But Sara Wheeler mentioned her book about the Scott expedition several times in her book on Antarctica, and I determined to read it.  The Birthday Boys is well worth seeking out; it’s small but perfectly formed.  In fewer than 200 pages, she tells the story of the Scott expedition all the way from the UK and the voyage south, to the Pole and disaster.  She does this in five episodes, temporally distinct, and each narrated by a different member of the team – Taff Evans, scientist Edward Wilson, Scott himself, Birdie Bowers, who hardly felt the cold, and ‘Titus’ Oates.

She captures brilliantly the foibles and strengths of each, and has a wealth of learning lightly worn to illustrate their role in the human drama they enacted; each sheds light on himself, and on the others.  ‘Taff’ Evans is a hero to himself and Scott, but unloved by the others, and Birdie and Scott himself both rouse very real ambivalence in other members of the party.  You cannot read much about Antarctica without feeling pressure to take sides between Scott and Shackleton  - Scott the heroic failure, who came second in the race to the Pole he affected to despise and failed to get himself or his team home; Shackleton, whose explorations did not get him near the Pole or across the continent as he dreamed, but whose concern for his men and whose brilliant leadership and physical and mental resilience kept every single man alive.  Me, I’m a Shackleton man: the trip across the ocean in an open boat, and the crossing of the South Georgia mountains, is one of the great achievements – and I cannot forgive Scott his decision to rely on ponies and tractors, not dogs, against all advice, to add an extra man to the Pole party when the logistics – already stretched enough – were designed for four.  He was, no doubt, by the standards of his time, a great man, and his wish for his brilliant son  – “Make the boy interested in natural history; it is better than games” – bore remarkable fruit.

But back to the novel!  The five voices are all subtly different, and each contributes to your understanding of the others, and of the party as a whole.  In particular, Scott himself and Birdie Bowers become etched clearly – though I cannot really tell how fairly – Scott declining in esteem as the whole picture becomes available, and Bowers – rather criticised by the first narrator, Taff Evans - growing in stature all the time.  I enjoyed this aspect of the book, but two other characters were also very attractive – Wilson the scholar (Uncle Bill), and Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a minor figure in this book, but the subject of a whole book, much admired, by Sara Wheeler – Cherry). 

 

There is inevitably much description of hardship and the cold, but also much of the stoical and understated way in which these extraordinary men approached the task – especially their self deprecation and humour.  A highlight is the description – in the voice of Lt Birdie Bowers – of the expedition by three men (himself, Wilson and Cherry) to the rookery of the Emperor penguins, a tale of hardship, sacrifice and discomfort that can hardly be imagined – and all not in self preservation, or for glory, or the search for a Grail, but a desire to collect – for good scientific reasons – the eggs of this remarkable bird (which was wrongly thought at the time to be particularly primitive and therefore something of a link between reptiles and birds)!  (The penguins in the picture are king penguins - I didn't get anywhere near an emperor!) The other passage which deserves particular note – mainly because it was touching when I had feared it might be maudlin or ridiculous – was Oates’ tragic and heroic end; the last words of his tale are the last in the book: “And, oh, how warm it was.”

A wonderful novel in its own right – well worth reading, with or without an interest in Antarctica.

Strangers and Brothers: George Passant

This novel, George Passant, was originally known as Strangers and Brothers, a title that was later appropriated for the whole series.  And although now regarded as second in the sequence, in many ways it sets the scene for the themes that were to develop over the twelve novels – interpersonal relationships developing in the context of complex social, economic and political developments  - developments which engaged the interest and the passion of the young people in both Leicester and London with a passionate intensity that remains unmatched in modern times, in terms both of its sophistication and energy. 

The novel is set in the period 1925-33, a small period within the wider scope of Time of Hope.  Most young people were, of course, on the left, though this ranged from a mild desire to relax social relations and move towards more distributive economic policies all the way to Communism and the desire for revolution, violent if necessary.  At the same time, people remained as concerned as ever with status, getting on, and finding partners for life and for work.  This is the backdrop to George Passant; the eponymous hero is energetic, committed to social and political change, and working towards it through working with young people to help them, first through education (classes at night school) and then in a looser social grouping which talks and dreams, but which may have a harder core of political toughness – and certainly serves as the recruiting ground to satisfy some of George’s more conventional appetites – sex and money.

The idealism of George and some of the others comes into conflict with the local authorities, and also within the group with the harder headed and more cynical aspirations of men like Jack Cotery.  There is the whiff of scandal, of fraud, and eventually a court case.  Throughout, Lewis Eliot is moving away yet remaining strongly tied to “the group”.  He moves away to London, his career begins to develop, and he is growing physically and emotionally distant; but he owes much early support to George, and to his friends, and cannot break.  He has love troubles of his own, and a growing distaste for the way some people in George’s group are behaving – but he has to support them, a support which is deep in his heart but which is in tension with new loyalties and new demands in London.  Even after all his troubles, George is an inspiration: "He could still warm himself and everyone around him with his own hope."

This is not my favourite novel of the sequence, but it is very good, especially on the stultifying small town dogmatism and closeness of the 1920s, and it paints warm and realistic portraits of men and women on both sides of the debate.  Snow has a warm understanding of what motivates and drives his characters, and is there in their minds.  Here themes are developed which will carry through all the novels, leading up to arguments about the war with Germany, the use of the bomb, and the failure to build a new Jerusalem in the 1950s and 60s – and about people’s continuous attempts  - often futile or thwarted – to be happy or at least at ease with their lives. 

Strangers and Brothers gave Philip Snow the title for his engaging biography of C P Snow, which is called Stranger and Brother, well worth a read if you enjoy the novels.

Wolf Solent

I have been long familiar with the name of John Cowper Powys, but never actually read anything by him.  When I recently bought a property in Dorset, I became aware that he had a strong Dorset connection, having lived outside Dorchester for  couple of years and written a very odd personal diary, mainly concerned with his turbulent marriage and the health of his wife.  I didn’t find it particularly interesting – having picked it up with a view to learning more about Dorset life between the wars – but looking over his entries in the library catalogue, I couldn’t resist Wolf Solent.

This is both the title of the book, published in 1929, and the name of its hero.  It is a name that demands attention, and it’s only fair to say that the man behind the name deserves a lot of attention, and provides a lot himself, being decidedly a narcissistic type.  It’s a daunting book, running to a good 640 pages, and being full of dense prose and intense self-conscious moralising.  It all starts when Solent decides, at about the age of 30 or so, to break out of his dead end London life and make a new start in Dorset, unfortunately in an area full of the ghosts of his family’s colourful and controversial past. 

In a recent newspaper article, Philip Pullman praises Powys highly, but The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble says "Much controversy centres on Powys' stature as a novelist.  Some regard him as unjustly neglected, an arresting and major novelist, while others find his talent spurious and verbose."  I was therefore prepared for anything!

When Solent arrives in Dorset, he immediately runs into deep waters, complex family situations with a ghastly reek of incest, psychological disturbance, and shameful histories.  These link up with his own father's past, and are echoed by his own sexual cravings and disloyalties.  All this, of course, is covered in a rather prudish yet painfully explicit way, and a great deal of time is spent exploring - both in the third person and in Solent's head - the mythical, psychological and emotional  background.  At the same time, Solent is not without interest in the outside world, mainly the rural world, although he views this in a way which is both a semi-religious understanding of nature as a part of a universal expression of the All, and as a clear metaphor for sexual longing.  Indeed, his descriptions of the Dorset countryside are unique, compelling and full of historical and social power, far from the vapid musings of Hardy in the same country.  Pullman remarks that "Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance."

Let me give you an example or two.  First, here is Solent on his way home in the dusk (note the self absorption, the sexual conjuring of fern-fronds, and the use of "furtive" to describe his inner life):

... as he watched the horizon in front
of him grow each moment more fluid, more wavering;
as he saw detached fragments of the earth's surface
hill-curves, copses, far-away fields and hedges blend
with fragments of cloud and fragments of cloudless
space, it came over him with a mounting confidence that
this wonderful country must surely deepen, intensify, en-
rich his furtive inner life, rather than threaten or de-
stroy it. ... Wolf felt the familiar mystic
sensation surging up even now from its hidden retreat.
Up, up it rose, like some great moonlight-coloured fish
from fathomless watery depths, like some wide-winged
marsh-bird from dark untraverscd pools ! The airs of this
new world that met its rising were full of the coolness of
mosses, full of the faint unsheathing of fern-fronds.
Whatever this mysterious emotion was, it leaped forward
now towards the new element as if conscious that it
carried with it a power as formidable, as incalculable, as
anything that it could encounter there.

Or here, his peculiar relationship with his mother, dependent and antagonistic, develops into a fierce quarrel, which - when she has got her way through emotional blackmail - she allows to lapse, and restores harmony:

It was his mother who broke the spell.  She raised her hands to his head and held it back by his stubbly straw-coloured hair, pressing, as she did so, her own tear-stained cheeks against his chin, and finally kissing him with a hot, intense, tyrannous kiss.

This is pretty overwhelming in even small doses, but sustained in this hyper-active, almost fugitive way at such length, I found myself in the "spurious and verbose" camp, and thought it almost literally unreadable.  Although I wanted to know what happened to the main characters, in particular, how Solent would resolve the problem of loving two very different women, and I enjoyed much of the social and rural description (there is no doubt that Powys has an acute eye), I found myself skimming over the page after page of this glutinous writing.  In the end, I passed on to more rewarding reading, and I cannot honestly recommend this to the modern reader.  That said, I see in Waterstone's great piles of a new paperback edition, so someone obviosly thinks very differently!

Strangers and Brothers: Time of Hope

The first novel in C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is Time of Hope, although it was not the first to be written; it describes the early life of Lewis Eliot, the central figure of the sequence, although he is often observer and reporter as well as main protagonist; he is not the anonymous, almost reclusive observer and analyst that Anthony Powell makes Nick Jenkins, for example.  Eliot is a highly autobiographical figure, though his life diverges significantly from Snow’s on occasion - so they were both born in lower middle class families in Leicester, but Snow became a scientist, but makes his leading figure a barrister.  Published in 1949, it covers an extended period in Eliot’s life, from about 1914, just before the war started, when Eliot is about nine, until he is 28, in 1933 – though we will visit parts of this period again in the sequence.  (The cover design shown here is by David Gentleman).

This is an interesting novel, though I personally find the first half, when the pace is slower and more considered, more interesting than the later passages.  Snow is very good on the small family issues – the pride of the family in being a step or two better off than others, and the consequent shame of bankruptcy; the portrait of a too domineering aunt and a too complaisant father; the exaggerated emotions of childhood – grief at his mother’s death, humiliation in front of other boys; and the sexual and professional frustrations of adolescence.  Snow shared much of this himself – and although he came to make his mark as fellow of a Cambridge college, novelist, member of the House of Lords, and junior member of the Government in the 1960s, he remembers it well.

His approach to a long sequence of novels is quite different to Powell’s.  He is a lesser novelist, of course, but not an inconsiderable one, and certainly a more traditional teller of stories.  But the sequence did not start here, and it is probably easier to read the Snow novels completely independently of each other than it is the Powell.  Indeed, it is not always easy to decide what is the best order to read them in.  I personally, just by chance, started with The Light and the Dark, which is the first of the sequence written, but normally placed fourth in the order.  So this novel has some odd features; the first is that there are at least two themes in it which are surprisingly sketchily developed – George Passant’s career and legal difficulties, and Charles March’s struggle with his family – and you are bound to think, why are these mentioned at all, if we are not to hear more?  The answer is, of course, they are expounded at full length in “later” novels, and not to include them here would have been incomprehensible in the light of what was to follow.

But this is a novel about a young man making good, though with real difficulties – financial, professional, and especially sexual and matrimonial.  And his cup does not run over – he becomes aware that  his career, though perfectly respectable, is slowing, and his private life becomes a cross which he feels unable to bear or to discard:

I had longed for a better world, for fame, for love.  I had longed for a better world; and this was the summer of 1933.  I had longed for fame: and I was a second rate lawyer.  I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.

It is at times very moving, and it is, I think, a fine portrait of the period.  I would encourage you to read Snow, and I think you’ll enjoy this, but I might suggest that newcomers – if they can bear the thought of not reading the books in sequence – might start elsewhere (recommendations in later posts!).

Superstar Tycho

A fascinating article about Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in The Times last week.  Apparently, in November 1572, he noticed a change in the constellation of Cassiopeia - an entirely new star, bright but short lived.  This turns out to have been a supernova exploding, the first time this had been noticed.  Although the star was no longer visible by March 1573, scientists have, almost incredibly, just recently confirmed his sighting by analysis of "light echoes" - light from the original explosion still bouncing around the universe.

In the context of a recent plea on the Cornflower blog for some literary science, this reminded me of a fine novel I read many years ago, John Banville's Kepler.  Kepler, the man who sorted out the pattern of the planets' orbits around the sun, was a pupil of Brahe's, and this novel is an interesting portrait of them both, and of the passion for understanding that drove them in unpropitious times.  It's the best book of Banville's that I've read, and I recommend it, even to those without scientific interests or knowledge. 

Finally, since I know this item will be of interest to Dark Puss, a physicist who is a regular commentator on this blog and on Cornflower, here is a picture of his anti-cat, Pale Puss.

Screenplay

I read an enthusiastic column by Philip Pullman in a newspaper a few weeks ago about the novelist MacDonald Harris, of whom I confess I had never heard.  Philip Pullman (the link takes you to an interesting essay on Harris by Pullman, on Normblog) especially recommended The Balloonist, which I was unable to find.  In a different article, Pullman says:

Why he isn't better known I simply don't understand, because he's outstandingly good...If I have to restrict myself to one novel (and it is difficult) I'll nominate The Balloonist - an adventure story, told in the first person, about an expedition by balloon to the North Pole in 1897. It's leisurely, it's subtle and reflective, it's funny, it's accurate and fascinating about the technical business of flying balloons and meteorology and the mysteries of early radio; there's a love story that is tender, sexy and ridiculous all at once (ringing any bells, readers of Northern Lights and the others?!).

But I did manage to get – from the London Library, of course - another of his books, Screenplay.  First published in 1983, it has a much older feel to it than that, and although my initial impressions were not entirely favourable, I found it intriguing and far enough off the beaten track to make me keep reading.  The main character, who tells the story in the first person, is a man named Alys, the over indulged and rather solitary child of rich and beautiful parents who is left alone at the age of eighteen when his parents are killed in a train crash.  The novel is the story of his  rather solitary life, and the two emotional encounters which enrich it, although in a rather odd and mutually challenging way.

Alys lives in a private road in Los Angeles, built in the 1920s, and something of a an island of space, gentility and leafiness surrounded by the modern city by the time he is alone in the 1970s.  He pursues his interests - vintage cars, early music, and early film, not to mention self adoration - until a mysterious visitor, Julius Nesselrode, arrives and announces himself as Alys' boarder.  Who he is, and whether he succeeds in getting Alys into the pictures, are the emergent themes of the book - but to tell you would be to give away too much of the plot.

And whether either his love for Moira, pure and on a pedestal, or his more modern, sceptical, humourous relationship with Belinda, is ever to be consumated, that, too, you will need to read the book to find out.  But between Moira and Belinda, he finds happiness of a sort - warm, comfortable, but clearly temporary - although he pays a striking price for it; and he has lots of mild adventures on the way. The themes of this book are in a way quite mediaeval, and in other areas in reminds me of Dorian Gray, with its emphasis on Alys' youth and beauty.  I enjoyed it, and I'll probably look out The Balloonist in due course, but it's an interesting novel, and quite a fun one, rather than a great one.