Familiar territory

Tags

Bram Stoker, Margaret Atwood, Roger Allam, Simon Russell Beale, William Shakespeare

The most recent books read for my two U3A book groups are both oddly familiar and oddly unfamiliar.

One was Dracula by Bram Stoker, which is one of those stories every single one of us knows even if we have never opened the book. Even small incidents from the book seem familiar, such as the arrival of the Demeter at Whitby (though how many of us realise that it is based on a real incident involving the arrival at Whitby of a Russian ship called the Dmitri?).

But the novel seemed like it should have been particularly familiar to me because I know I read it myself many years ago, and indeed I remember hating it. And yet the moment I opened the book I was in unfamiliar territory. The names of the characters (or at least most of them) were familiar, but there were other key players in the drama that I would swear I had never encountered before. Did the book I once read really begin with solicitor Jonathan Harker making his way to visit an important client in Transylvannia? Transylvannia, yes, that’s one of the things we know without ever reading the book; but the journey meant nothing to me. And the loneliness of Dracula’s castle, the sense of imprisonment, felt like something I should have remembered.

Then there’s Renfield! Endless films and comedy skits and the like have taught me to see him as the Count’s creepy assistant, but here he is a rather pitiable inmate of an insane asylum drawn to Dracula by a curiously disturbing mixture of desire and dread.

And how did I not know that the novel’s strange hero figure, Van Helsing, had a first name? Indeed, that he was called Abraham, Stoker’s own name. Is there a significance in this? And what a curious character he is, the man of science who turns out to have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Balkan folklore, and access to a veritable warehouse stuffed full of sanctified communion wafers. From his knowledge and preparedness, one would think he had already had multiple encounters with vampires, though there is nothing to suggest this. Meanwhile the posse of amateurs who join him in this campaign seem to have far more understanding of, and reliance on, modern science.

These, and other disconnects from what I remember, or from what I was anticipating, made Dracula feel new. But that seems only appropriate. Because despite the emphasis on the past, on superstition and the supernatural, what leapt out for me was that this is very much a novel about the modern. It’s there in the technology, the use of telegrams and typewriters and recordings. It’s there in the attitude towards science, the use of blood transfusions and psychiatry. Above all, it’s there in the characters: Mina, far and away the most interesting character in the book, is what would, a few years later, have been called a New Woman, and very likely a suffragette. For a female character in a late-Victorian novel she is strong-willed, independent, and effective. She contrasts remarkably with the other major female character, who is very much what you would expect of a Victorian heroine, demure, reliant on others (particularly men), a figure to whom things happen rather than someone who makes things happen. Lucy, one suspects, is drawn from the novels Stoker read; Mina, perhaps, is drawn from the actresses that Stoker encountered in his day job.

The second novel is familiar and unfamiliar in a different way: because I know the story, but I have never previously encountered this telling of it.

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is one of a series of books commissioned to update the plays of Shakespeare. The play in question is The Tempest, one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. I well remember seeing the wonderful Globe production with Roger Allam as Prospero, probably the best version of the play that I have seen; and we also saw the most recent RSC production with Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, which felt as if it was overtaken by its own technology though it is perhaps closer to the staging Felix in the novel would prefer. It’s a play open to all sorts of interpretations, some better than others.

Atwood’s version is set in contemporary Canada. Her Prospero, the far-from-happy Felix, is the obsessive creative director of one of those annual small town theatre festivals. But he is so caught up in what we should call the magic of the theatre, planning an extravagant production of The Tempest, that he remains blissfully ignorant of the machinations of his second-in-command, who, with the help of an ambitious local politician, eventually topples Felix from his post. Felix retreats to a backwoods hideaway, where he communes with the ghost of his recently-dead daughter, Miranda. Years pass, and eventually Felix lands a job at the local prison, staging plays with the inmates. When he learns that the two men responsible for his downfall will be visiting the prison, he hatches a plan for revenge by staging his long-delayed production of The Tempest.

The back story and set-up is the weakest part of the novel, but once we get Felix and his inmate/actors planning their production, the story really catches fire. And when the avatars of Alonso and Antonio arrive at the prison they are detached from their entourage and swept into their own private, hallucinatory performance of the play. What we get, therefore, is a triple vision. One the one part there is Shakespeare’s play; alongside this, there is an analysis of the play given while Felix is training and rehearsing his players; and thirdly the events of the novel echo the events of the play. The result is complex and prismatic, and not always successful. As I said, the long introductory section is far and away the weakest part, but once in the prison the structure of the novel really starts to work. But the best bit comes at the end, when Felix leads his actors on a debriefing of their performances. The inmate chosen to play Caliban gives a long, bravura account of what comes after the play closes, when he imagines Caliban exacting a brutal revenge on everyone else in the play.

I’ve only read a handful of things by Atwood, and my response to her work is mixed. Some things have been excellent, some have made no impact on me one way or the other. This turned out to be one of the more memorable works, though I suppose it is not exactly clear whether this is down to Atwood or to Shakespeare.

Noises off

Tags

Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, Hedwig Höss, Martin Amis, Rudolf Höss

Zone of Interest begins, for a seemingly inordinate length of time, with a black screen and a formless drone music. But when the music stops and the screen clears we are in an idyllic setting: trees, bushes, a sparkling clear stream in the middle ground, and in the middle of all this green a small group of people mostly in white. Their whiteness, and the fact that they are people, makes us focus on the group. But we don’t go close, we can’t really make out what they are doing, we can’t hear what they are saying. Perhaps a family group, a picnic? Someone is splashing in the river, some of the men seem to be preparing to swim, the women and the youngest children are gathering things together and heading off towards the left. When the camera finally drifts away from this scene we see what seems to be the entire group making their way through dense undergrowth. Yet still we are not close to these people, still we are not required to pay attention to anything they might be saying. We guess, and it will soon be confirmed, that among this group are the central figures of this film, but we can’t identify them with any certainty. Indeed, if this opening tells us anything, it is that these people are unimportant, that we should not pay too much attention to them.

Rather, what struck me about this opening was the colour. The whiteness of the people is supposed to be symbolic of purity, but that is not how I interpreted it. Because the people are diminished by the setting in which we see them, and that setting is green. Indeed it is impossible to count how many shades of green are displayed by this crowd of trees and bushes. And green is the colour of life, of freshness, of rebirth. Against that backcloth, the people are not white but colourless, a gap, an emptiness in this profusion of life and growth. I already knew, from the posters for the film, how visually important the green lawn up against the wall of the camp was. Green: we never see inside the camp (other than the anonymous roofs of a few buildings and, of course, the chimneys), but I will lay odds that green is not a colour that was seen much inside the camp. This opening emphasis on green, therefore, is potent precisely because it makes us pay attention to absence, to what is not being shown in the film.

And this is a film that is all about what is not on the screen.

The other thing that this opening tells us about how to watch the film is also referred to above, when I say that we are not required to pay attention to what the characters say. There is, so far as I remember, no major element in the film revealed through dialogue. In fact the sheer banality of most of what is said is a large part of the point of the film. Writing about Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt talked of the banality of evil, and this film, concentrating on someone a few rungs lower down the extermination ladder, seems like a literalization of that perception. We see a prisoner deliver a large black bag to the house; it is taken off him wordlessly, no thank you, nothing, his presence is not acknowledged. There is a local Polish girl who works as a servant in the house, again she never receives a thank you, in fact practically the only time she is spoken to is when she is admonished. They live in a silence that excludes everything around them, except there is no silence, as I will mention later.

The house is quite large, fitting for their status, but in terms of decor and furnishings it is nothing special, a rather dull suburban home because these are rather dull suburban people. Only its location makes it special. The bag that the prisoner delivered contains a selection of clothes which the lady of the house and her close friends share out between them; a stylish gown, a long fur coat. These have presumably been confiscated from new arrivals at the camp; everything that these people have to give them an appearance of glamour or stylishness is stolen from the prisoners. The fur coat has a ripped seam that will need to be repaired, presumably where its original owner tried to secrete some valuables.

The woman is Hedwig Höss, the wife of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. They are dull, ordinary people with nothing of interest to say. They owe their position to Rudolf’s willingness to carry out the ruthless dictates of the regime without anything that comes close to a qualm. Their house, with its garden tended by anonymous prisoners, its lawn and pool, are all that really matter to them. When Rudolf is transferred to Oranienburg outside Berlin, Hedwig chooses to stay at Auschwitz because she values the house and, presumably, the status it confers. It is said that one of the reasons Höss was transferred is because he was having an affair with one of the communist prisoners. This is alluded to when we see a drab-looking girl in prison uniform come into his office and begin to take off her shoes, then later Höss goes to a washroom and very carefully begins to clean his genitals. But the film makes no explicit link between this incident and the transfer. Höss is, if anything, more alive when we see him talking to a couple of engineers about a new design of the crematorium which would allow the ovens to be in constant operation.

Mostly, what we see is everyday stuff with nothing of any import happening. Officers gather to wish Höss a happy birthday. Höss rides the few yards from his home to the camp upon his beloved horse. Hedwig’s mother comes to visit, and wonders whether one of the camp inmates is a posh Jewish woman she used to know and didn’t like. Children play in the garden and pool. Höss goes fishing in the river. The dialogue is as everyday as the events we witness. But that is not where our interest lies. Because although we see nothing of the camp beyond the upper stories of a couple of nondescript buildings, and smoke rising from a couple of chimneys, the camp is ever present, and it is the noise of the unseen camp that is the focal point of the film. Always present but never acknowledged, there is shouting, screams, gunshots, and various other noises. These are indistinct, when there is shouting we can never tell what is being shouted, but it never goes away. It settles over the tidy suburban life of the household just as, we imagine, ash from the constantly belching chimneys settles over the washing hung out on the line. When Hedwig’s mother visits, she wakes in the night to noises that sound louder and more threatening than ever (I thought for a moment that it was the sound of battle, but the internal chronology means this must have been the summer of 1943, far too early for Russian forces to have started approaching Auschwitz). In the morning, she has left before anyone else in the household has risen. This is the only acknowledgement in the film that anyone in the household is even aware of the immediate, looming presence of the camp. What we see in the film is people choosing to ignore; what we hear on the soundtrack is what they are ignoring.

One final point: the film takes its title from a novel by Martin Amis, but it is not the film of the novel. I dislike Amis’s writing, so I haven’t read the book and probably never will. But I checked it out when I knew I was going to see the film. Amis does not use the real names of Höss or his family, and the novel concerns a fictional affair between Hedwig and another officer. None of this appears in the film; so far as I can see, only the setting and the title derive from the novel.

And the film spells nothing out. There is, towards the end, a brief glimpse of women cleaning exhibits in the Auschwitz Museum, but otherwise there is no reference to after the war. The household right against the wall of the camp is the entire universe, without beginning or end. We learn, only after returning home to do some research, that Rudolf Höss was hung in 1947, that Hedwig lived into her 80s, that their youngest child, seen only as a baby in the film, has publicly bemoaned the fact that modern Germans cannot celebrate Nazism. Perhaps there is no end, perhaps there is no after.

What strange secret

Tags

Alasdair Gray, Bernard MacLaverty, Emma Stone, Iain Brown, Mark Ruffalo, Mary Shelley, Robbie Coltrane, Sandy Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Yorgos Lanthimos

It begins:

Like most farm workers in those days my mother distrusted banks. When death drew near she told me her life savings were in a tin trunk under the bed and muttered, “Take it and count it.”

No, in truth it begins:

MINISTER: We are here to commit to the tomb the body of Archibald McCandless: good doctor, loving father, devoted husband …

No, again no, it begins:

A woman in a vivid blue dress, a blue that forces itself upon you so you cannot escape the sense of colour. For a moment she stand there against an indeterminate background. Then she falls forward. Our perspective shifts, and we see her tumbling from a high bridge into a raging river.

They are telling different stories, but they are all the same story. The first extract is from a book entitled Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer. The book was published subsequent to the doctor’s death in 1911. The second extract is from a screenplay written in 1993. According to the script, the opening scene is set in GLASGOW NECROPOLIS 1914, or, more specifically as the credits roll and the camera pulls in, INT. BAXTER MAUSOLEUM 1914. The third and final passage is a description of the opening moments of a film made by a Greek director and released in 2023.

These are various iterations of the story Poor Things, the sixth novel by Alasdair Gray which was originally published in 1992. It emerged from a dream, which Gray describes thus: “I woke one morning remembering a dream. In the dim back room of a Glasgow tenement I watched a young woman who sat before a window, staring out at children playing in a back green. Someone beside me said, ‘She won’t be able to think until she remembers enough things to think with.’ And I knew the young woman had the brain of a newly-born baby.” (A Gray Playbook, 2009; p228) Perhaps the most striking aspect of the story, the fact that the woman had received the brain of her own unborn child, was in fact suggested by Gray’s fellow novelist, Bernard MacLaverty.

From the moment he wrote it, Gray was convinced that Poor Things would make a good film. Even before the novel was published he sent copies of the manuscript to Robbie Coltrane, Iain Brown, and Sandy Johnson. As it turned out, Coltrane was not interested in the idea of playing Godwin Baxter, but Brown and Johnson were certainly interested in, respectively, producing and directing the film. They even secured funding from the Scottish Lottery Fund, though not enough to actually get the film into production. The novel was successful enough that two American companies tried to buy the film rights, but when directed to Brown and Johnson they lost interest in the deal. However, Brown and Johnson had still not secured the funding they needed when Gray included the screenplay he had written in his 2009 collection of plays.

However, the same year that A Gray Playbook was published, the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos visited Gray in Glasgow with the idea of acquiring the rights. By this time, the idea of the Brown and Johnson film seems to have been abandoned, and Lanthimos was able to secure the rights. He turned seriously to the project after the success of his film The Favourite in 2018. Emma Stone, one of the stars of The Favourite, was involved in the project right from the start both as the leading actor (Bella Baxter) and as the producer. If Lanthimos was even aware of Gray’s script he seems to have decided to ditch it early on. Practically the only thing that carries over from one script to the other is Gray’s insistence that some scenes should be in black and white and others should be in colour.

Other differences, and there are many: Lanthimos changes the name of McCandless, from Archie to Max. Though I suppose this is part and parcel of the film distancing itself from all that is Scottish. The only two Scottish references I noted were Baxter (Willem Dafoe)’s peculiar accent, which seems to veer somewhere between Scotland and Ireland; and Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo)’s mad highland fling when he is attempting to disguise Bella’s extraordinary dance. In one detail, the film is actually closer to the novel than the screenplay is, since both first introduce Wedderburn visiting Baxter on business: in the screenplay Wedderburn is first encountered in a lunatic asylum (a scene that comes much later in the film), because this sets up Wedderburn as the narrator of the travel scenes. But the film has ditched the sense that Gray’s story, in both versions, is made up of multiple narratives. And there is Baxter’s extraordinary face, a concatenation of cuts and sutures and distortions that only seem to emphasise the carved aspect of Dafoe, and that instantly calls to mind Frankenstein’s creation. But while the screenplay describes Baxter’s appearance as grotesque, this seems to relate more to body shape than his face, though in the novel he is monstrous, with a voice that could perforate eardrums.

But Baxter’s face is part of the best thing about the film. I can’t remember the last time I felt so enthralled and excited by the look of a film, the set design, the costumes, the make-up. Everything about it is designed to dazzle the eye, to be vivid in its very unreality. The novel and the screenplay are both very firmly set in a particular time, midway, as Gray puts it, “between the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 and my birth in 1934.” (A Gray Playbook, p228) But the film? When is that? There are suggestions of the late-19th century, but there are costumes that would never have been worn then, there are devices that never existed, there are buildings that owe far more to 21st century imagination than they do to 19th century architecture. This is a neverland, in keeping with the goose-headed dog or pig-headed fowl. In Gray’s work the different voices are all unreliable narrators; here everything we see emphasises unreliability.

And yet always it is the same story, or at least close enough in its broad strokes as to make no nevermind. The monstrous and brilliant surgeon Godwin Baxter, familiarly and significantly called “God”, has taken a pregnant young woman who killed herself, and has implanted the brain of the baby in the head of the woman. Her original identity a mystery, she is now known as Bella Baxter, and must learn everything a child must learn, how to operate the body, how to construct words, how to deal with the world. Baxter’s assistant, Archie/Max McCandless falls in love with Bella, but she is swept away by the flamboyant Duncan Wedderburn, who takes her across Europe and initiates her into sex. But she is growing all the time, and as she learns about the world so she gets the better of Wedderburn. Eventually she returns to McCandless, but their wedding is interrupted by Aubrey (or in the film, Alfie) Blessington, the controlling husband of the woman Bella had once been. But Bella again triumphs, and all ends happily.

Details along the way differ, but all together this is an extraordinary film of a novel that clearly deserved such a visualisation. A few pages earlier in A Gray Playbook, Gray included extracts from his storyboard for another of his novels that had never been filmed (again the producer was Iain Brown, the director was Sandy Johnson, and the finance was never raised). That storyboard was for Lanark, his first and greatest novel. Could we, dare we hope, that Lanthimos might next turn his attention to Lanark?

There and Then

Tags

David Kynaston

To be honest, I can’t remember what it was that made me want to read the first volume of David Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem. The whole sequence is meant to be a social history of Britain from Attlee to Thatcher, told primarily through diaries and newspaper clippings and the like. The first volume, Austerity Britain, effectively told the story of the post-war Labour government from 1945 to 51, so it ended a year before I was born. And the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative rather put me off. But there was enough of interest that I came back for all the subsequent volumes. Two volumes ago, in Modernity Britain, there was a reference to the coloured South African cricketer, Basil D’Oliveira, who was brought over to this country and played, first of all, for a small Lancashire League side, Middleton, before moving on to make a splash in county cricket. And I was there. That first match he played for Middleton. The ground was five minutes walk away from home and my father took me. It was the first and only time I have been to watch cricket, and I don’t think D’Oliveira appeared at all during the day we were there. But at least I was there, at something that appeared in the history books. And, of course, predictably if perhaps selfishly, the more these books dealt with things I witnessed or remembered, the more they spoke to me.

The last volume, On the Cusp, covered a few short weeks in late 1962 leading up to the day in October when the first Beatles single, “Love Me Do”, and the first Bond film, Dr No, were both released. The new volume, A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65, is back to the familiar longer timespan, beginning in early October 1962, a few days after the release of the Beatles single, and ending in late January 1965, a few days after the funeral of Winston Churchill. Actually, the very last incident mentioned in the book was on the Saturday after Churchill’s funeral, when Stanley Matthews, already over 50, played his last professional football game for Stoke. That, as Kynaston astutely notes, was as much a sign of the end of an era as Churchill’s departure. One of the joys of Kynaston’s books is that he pays at least as much attention to sport, music, and what people were watching on television – why on Earth were Dixon of Dock Green and The Black and White Minstrel Show so consistently popular? I watched them and hated them both! – as he does to politics and industrial relations and the stuff that made the front pages of the newspapers.

I had my tenth birthday in late-September 1962, only a couple of weeks before Bond and the Beatles burst onto the scene. By New Year 1965 I was 12, in grammar school, and I had read several Bond novels and owned a couple of Beatles EPs. They were the years in which I became ferociously interested in the world around me. I read a couple of newspapers (my father took the Daily Mail and the Manchester Evening News, so I would certainly have read both of those, and I occasionally saw others) and followed the television news. I listened to the radio avidly, because it was virtually the only way I could keep up with the excitement of pop music, but it was the Light Programme in those days, some years before it transformed into Radio One, so as often as not it was a diet of Two-Way Family Favourites and Workers’ Playtime and stuff like that, the things I wanted to hear still tended to be a bit of a rarity.

But the news, yes; and what news it was. They were the years of Profumo, and Kennedy, and Mods and Rockers at Brighton, and “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”, and Wilson’s incredibly narrow first election win. They’re all here, of course they are. Virtually every page elicits a response of: “God, I remember that.” It’s strange, when you look back at the photographs in the book, just like when you come across old film from the period on Youtube, it comes across as dingy, grim, yet that’s not how I remember it at all, it felt at the time to be full of colour and life and excitement. And somehow Kynaston’s book, the judiciously chosen extracts from the diaries of ordinary people, manage to capture that sense of colour and excitement far better than the photographs of the time ever do.

This was my world, I was there and then, and impatient to be old enough to get out into all that was happening. And now I’m impatient for the next volume.

The benediction of the neon light

Tags

Barbara Kingsolver, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald

My reading of late has mostly consisted of a mishmash of reviews, essays and interviews in preparation for my book on Pavane, though I have also written one review for Interzone. But in among it all I have been keeping up with the reading for my various University of the Third Age book groups. After the, shall we say, disappointment of the last one, I am pleased to say that the last few I’ve read have all been so much better. In fact they act as a sort of intermittent history of American fiction over the last century. So, in order of publication though not in the order I read them, we begin with some of the first stirrings of the modern in American letters: Summer by Edith Wharton.

Now, although there are several books by Wharton my my shelves, I’ve never actually read anything by her before, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I think I was anticipating something that echoed the manners, and the locutions, of the late Victorian age. And to an extent, that is what I got; but only to an extent. Summer was first published in 1917, her only significant book to appear during the war years. But the war is not present here, it’s a novel that looks back to the social mores of the pre-war years. So much so, in fact, that the occasional appearance of trains or electric lights feel like intrusions from a different world. The setting is a remote New England village, one street, a church at one end, a handful of houses, no shops, a place mired in the past.

Our protagonist, Charity, was brought as a child from an even more remote place up on “the Mountain”, no place name, no further characterisation, a nameless cluster of broken down shacks inhabited by outcasts. Charity was rescued from there (that, at least, is how her rescuers would phrase it) and has been brought up by one of the most prominent men in North Dormer, a name that signifies the dormancy of life here. But Charity is discontent with her life of relative privilege: she hates the village, she hates her life, she hates everything around her; she longs, although she would never think to phrase it like this, for the modern. Except she doesn’t know what the modern is, and probably wouldn’t really want it if she found it. Then a young architect from the big city arrives for the summer. She is swept off her feet, they become lovers, she becomes pregnant, but he is betrothed to someone else and in the end cannot marry Charity (though Wharton has the grace to suggest that he regrets this, and had been looking for a way to break off the engagement; there are no real villains in this novel).

All through the novel, old-fashioned, small-town morality sounds like a bass note through everything we read. Charity’s guardian, Royall, once tried to force himself on her in her bedroom but she managed to push him away, and later he is seen in the company of prostitutes. We hear repeatedly of women who have fallen, in that Victorian sense, how they are cast out by the polite ladies of North Dormer, though we also learn that they make enough from their trade to care for their illegitimate children. And it seems to me that sex is a more accepted part of daily life than might have been usual in a novel from a decade or two earlier. And there is a hint of the modern also in the indeterminacy of the characters. Nothing is baldly stated, there is constant havering, hesitations, possibly this or possibly that.

It’s a very short novel (only 150 pages in the edition I have), but the slow pace of Wharton’s often meandering sentences makes it seem much longer. Although the story feels modern, the writing doesn’t seem to have entirely shaken off its Victorian progenitors. But a few years down the line we come to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and here the prose grips me from the very first lines. This feels like a fully modern novel, not just in the story it tells, the world it portrays, but in the language used in the telling.

Actually, if you had asked me at the beginning of the year whether I had read Tender is the Night I would have answered, unequivocally, yes. I have, after all, read The Great Gatsby several times, a novel that thrills me each time I revisit it, and I have also read his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon which seems to me almost as great as Gatsby. Other than that I have read a bunch of his short stories, and one other novel, which did not grab me, and which I would have sworn was Tender is the Night. But the moment I opened this novel I realised that was not the case. In fact the distinctly unsatisfactory novel I read, however many years ago, was probably The Beautiful and the Damned. Because Tender is the Night turns out to be damned near as good as Gatsby. [Though from the moment I learned we were due to read Tender is the Night have have been inescapably earwormed with Jackson Browne’s song, “Tender is the Night”, which, other than the title, bears no connection to Fitzgerald’s novel; though it did give me the line I have used as the title for this post.]

The two central characters of the novel (though they don’t actually come into focus until several pages into the book) are Dick and Nick Diver, a happily married couple who are living an idyllic life on the French Riviera of the 1920s. But we meet them at the exact mid-point of their lives together, and we slowly come to realise that they are moving in diametrically opposite directions. Nicole had suffered mental problems when she was younger. The couple met at an exclusive Swiss sanitorium where Dick was a brilliant young psychologist at the start of what promised to be a glittering career. But it didn’t work out that way. Dick found himself unable to live up to the promise of his early career, eventually becoming dependent on alcohol. Nicole, meanwhile, becomes steadily stronger, more able to look after herself, and eventually leaves Dick as his decline becomes precipitous.

The trigger for this switch in fortunes (though there is a sense of inevitability about it all) is the arrival in the south of France of a young American film star. She develops a crush on Dick, seen at first at his heartiest, devil-may-care best, though she eventually drifts out of the picture. And around them a large cast of characters drift in and out of focus. There is a vivid scene where several characters visit the war graves, though none of them actually took part in the war. There is a moment at a railway station where someone is shot and killed, though it is just an incident in the background that has no impact on the story. There are other moments like this: the modern world, violent and inexplicable, is moving all around them and they cannot be entirely detached from it.

The book is a tragedy, it has that inevitable fall from grace that is the mark of all tragedies, yet for the longest time it doesn’t feel tragic. It is a world of sunshine, of happy characters, of bright and sparkling parties. Which makes the tragedy as it develops all the more affecting. As good as Gatsby? I don’t know, but it held me in a grip that delighted me (though I think that others in the book group were less happy with its tone and the arc of the story).

Third, and by far the most recent of this bunch, is The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. As with Wharton, Kingsolver is a writer whose books grace my shelves, though I have never read her before. I may have to correct that.

This is a big book, 600-odd pages, though I read it in little more than the time it took me to read the Wharton. Kingsolver’s prose is clear and vivid and carries you along, though it helps, of course, that the novel engages with a period and with characters, that I find fascinating.

Our central character, Harrison Shepard, is, we gather fairly quickly, someone who became a prominent author and who has now, it would seem, died. His “stenographer”, as Harrison always refers to her, has gathered together his diaries in order to write the story of his life. But there are a lot of tricky things in that seemingly simple enterprise. For a start Harrison had once begun an autobiography, and the first chapter we encounter here is his rather novelistic account of his early years. But he was always a reluctant autobiographer (so much so that his diaries always refer to himself in the third person, and the word “I” is not to be found there), and he gave up the enterprise when the second volume of his diaries was found to be missing. The “stenographer”, Violet, is going against his express wishes. Although the second volume of his diaries came to light after his death, another volume was deliberately destroyed, and at one point he sets out to burn all of his diaries. This is a life on edge, a life with which the central figure seems to be remarkably reluctant to engage.

In that first, novelistic, chapter he recounts how, as a child swimming off an island in Mexico, he encounters an underwater cave which leads him into a hidden lagoon. The cave he calls a lacuna, it is the first and far from the least important of the lacunae that crop up all the way through the book. There are missing diaries, there are things unsaid, there are gaps of all sorts. At one point Harrison, the novelist, states that the most important part of any story is what is not made explicit, and similarly the most important part of anyone’s character is what is not said, what is kept hidden. Gaps and secrets and things hidden are what propel this whole rather wonderful novel.

Harrison is the child of an American father who wants nothing to do with him, and a golddigging Mexican mother whose constant quest for the next sugar daddy takes her steadily down the social ladder. Except for a brief period at an American school during the great depression when, reading between the lines (inevitably) he has his first homosexual experience, Harrison is brought up in Mexico. Though he always has an inclination to write, he learns to cook and starts to make a living doing that. He uses his skills at mixing dough to make plaster for Diego Rivera who is working on one of his murals. Through that connection he finds himself drawn into the Rivera-Frida Kahlo household, fascinatingly portrayed as a place of near-continual warfare. Later, when Trotsky arrives in Mexico, he joins that household as both cook and typist and occasional translator. He is there when various attempts are made on Trotsky’s life, culminating, of course, in the successful murder.

In the confusion following the assassination, Kahlo helps him get out of the country by giving him the job of escorting her paintings to an exhibition in New York. When America gets into the war, that experience earns him a job supervising the evacuation of pictures from Washington galleries to relative safety in North Carolina. He settles in North Carolina, where he meets Violet, and after the war he starts to write historical novels set in Mexico. These prove to be an immediate and unexpected success, and for someone who dislikes drawing attention to himself, he finds himself in the spotlight. This turns nasty when postwar American paranoia sets in. Because his job evacuating pictures was theoretically for a government department, he attracts the attention of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

The first half of the novel, up until the assassination of Trotsky, is consistently gripping. But once he escapes to America the pace drops notably, in fact for a while it feels like two totally unconnected novels have been jammed together. But once the UnAmerican Activities investigation comes into play, suddenly all the previous events, and in particular all the gaps, the lacunae in Harrison’s life, become darkly meaningful. What follows in the last third of the novel is an extraordinary account of paranoia, national madness, vindictiveness, and all the ills that afflict the American psyche. It is a stunningly vivid, disturbing, almost surgical evisceration of all that is sick in the American political mind (references to contemporary politics are, I am sure, not accidental).

And that is that for the month. I lose track of which books I am reading for U3A, so for the moment I have no idea what comes next. But then, I have an essay and two reviews to write, not to mention a lot more reading for the Pavane book, so where the reading is going to take me next I have no idea.

Cliche redux

Tags

John Boyne, Peter Kemp

Time to catch up with more reading for my University of the Third Age book groups. And the first novel across my desk is All the Broken Places by John Boyne. It’s the sequel to his bestseller, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Indeed, so insistent are the publishers (Penguin) on us knowing this that the running head on every page of the Kindle edition I’ve been reading declares: “All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”, after all, they wouldn’t want us to forget this salient fact.

As it happens, that enticing tag-line, almost the subhead of the novel, bears no attraction for me since I have never read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I never had any interest in reading it, and after ploughing through this sequel I have even less interest. Given how massively popular that earlier book was, I suspect that my views on this sequel are going to be out of step with the rest of the book group when we come to meet next week.

The novel is told in the first person by Gretel, the (fictional) daughter of the (fictional) commandant of Auschwitz, and the older sister of the boy who was at the centre of the previous volume. And yet my sense is that we see everything from outside. At various points during the course of the story she is careful to tell us that she feels guilt, shame, fear, and various other emotions. Yet if she didn’t make a point of telling us we wouldn’t know. We are told what is going on, but we never see, sense, feel what she sees, senses, and feels. Emotions are things to be mentioned unemotionally, much as you might discuss the colour of a wall, they fill in the background but they don’t shape the foreground. Gretel’s voice is the voice of a dispassionate author working out what to put his character through next.

And what do you put the character through? Why, let’s plot out all the cliches between Auschwitz and today. Because Gretel, when we meet her, is in her nineties, hale for her age and definitely compos mentis (any loss of mental vigor would make her too complex a character for the author to contemplate). Each part of the book is told in alternating chapters, one set in the present of the 2020s, and the other taking us in stages through her postwar life.

In the past, Gretel and her mother flee to Paris in the aftermath of the war following the death of her father. So what do we know about postwar Paris: well, there are all those well-known images of women having their heads shaved for collaborating with the enemy, so of course that happens to Gretel and her mother. Except that was a punishment primarily for women who had slept with the enemy, I’m not sure that women who actually were the enemy would have been treated the same way. More likely they would have been delivered to Nazi hunters, shunned by the community, or simply killed; but these options don’t allow for the story that follows so let’s shave their heads, and after that, well, they’re just free to walk away. As so often in this novel there’s a big scene then immediately fade to black and shift to sometime later. These climactic moments have no consequences.

Next we shift to Australia, where Gretel has moved to start a new life. Only here she runs into one of the guards she knew at Auschwitz. One of the issues I have with the book is that throughout, even into the present-day sections, it is assumed that Gretel is in peril simply because of who her father was. I don’t buy it. She was 12 when she fled Auschwitz; I can’t see the postwar authorities holding her responsible for what happened in the camp, particularly when we know that the children of senior Nazi figures went on to live reasonably comfortable and unbothered lives in postwar Germany, even when they continue to espouse the political views of their parents. But no, Boyne insists that she would be held guilty by association; indeed one of the repeated patterns of the book, the structure upon which the whole novel depends, is that Gretel does not so much feel guilt as have guilt imposed upon her by anyone who knows anything about her past.

So from Australia she moves again, to London in the early-50s. Here she meets and falls passionately in love with David, only David is predictably Jewish and the moment he gets an inkling of her past he ups and moves to New York the next day. In the over-emphatic melodrama of the novel, that is perfectly rational behaviour.

But she meets David’s best friend, Edgar, and the two fall in love and have a long, happy marriage. Edgar, of course, is a highly acclaimed historian of the holocaust. How his academic interests and his marriage intersect is far too complex a situation for Boyne to explore. So now we shift to the present where Gretel lives in a posh London apartment worth millions. Across the hall is a woman suffering the onset of dementia that Gretel has befriended and looks after (the belated revelation of Heidi’s connection to Gretel is just one of too many moments when the machinery of the plot creaks and groans outrageously). A new family move into the flat below Gretel’s, and she finds herself drawn into their lives, particularly when she begins to realise that the wife and child are both being violently abused by the father.

The last book I read, Retroland by Peter Kemp, contains a long discussion about how child abuse has become a cliche for the ills of the past, and here it is again in all its artificial glory. In The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas the horror of Auschwitz was symbolized by the deaths of two boys, Gretel’s brother and one of the inmates. So how better to mirror that story and assuage Gretel’s on-again, off-again guilt than have her step in to save a child being abused? The moment I recognized what was going on (believe me, Boyne is not exactly subtle, so recognizing what was happening within about five seconds of first meeting the boy did not take a high degree of astuteness) my immediate thought was: how predictable. Thereafter it was all a matter of ticking boxes.

The flatness of the prose, the lack of any psychological insight, the paint-by-numbers plotting … it’s not a demanding read, which may explain why it is so popular; but it certainly won’t be demanding my renewed attention anytime soon.

Chris

Tags

Christopher Priest, Leigh Kennedy, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan

The 1976 Eastercon was held in the rather grim surroundings of Owen’s Park student accommodation, Manchester. It was my third convention and I still wasn’t used to the fact that mere mortals could mix freely with actual authors. So I was very nervous approaching a small group in the bar. My target was a tall, thin guy wearing blue denim jacket and jeans and smoking with a long cigarette holder (later in the convention, Lee Montgomerie would win the fancy dress for the best costume as an author; she was wearing almost exactly the same outfit). This was Christopher Priest and I had just bought the paperback of his latest novel, The Space Machine. I asked for an autograph. He pointed to someone at the other side of the bar. “See that guy? Andrew Stephenson. He did the illustrations. Why don’t you get him to sign it?” To this day, that paperback is one of the few Chris Priest novels I own that isn’t signed by the author.

Later that day I was standing at the back of a programme item. Chris was on the panel, smoking with that long holder, and I began to notice the wild figure of 8 shape that the glowing end of the cigarette was making, and I realised his hand was shaking. He was more nervous than I had been.

Years go by. A BSFA meeting in London at a pub near Hatton Garden. I’m propping up the bar with Chris. I mention that I’ve just reviewed his latest novel, The Glamour, and I thought it was really good except that the ending didn’t quite work. Two days later I receive a thick envelope in the post. It was the typescript for a revised ending of The Glamour, the first of countless revisions of the novel that was so good but so impossible to end.

A couple more years: I meet Maureen, she moves in with me. One day I returned home from work and Maureen said: “You’ve had a phone call. It was Chris Priest. I said you were out, and he said, is that Maureen? I didn’t think he knew who I was.” At that point I’m not sure she’d read anything by him, but from that moment she was a fan.

Of course I recommended that she should read The Affirmation, it is a novel I have returned to so many times and it is fresh and different every time. She read it, looked puzzled, and declared “There’s a big black hole in the heart of Chris Priest.” Sometime after, we’re at a small convention. I’m chatting with Chris at one side of the bar and Maureen is chatting with Leigh at the other. I mention the black hole comment, and Chris turns and yells across the bar, “Sorry, Maureen!”

When Maureen and I were getting married, I asked Chris to be my best man. He agreed, on condition that he didn’t have to make a speech. That was fine, of course, because it wasn’t going to be that kind of wedding. But years later, when I decided it was finally time for me to stop working for the BSFA, the BSFA decided to make a small presentation to me at that year’s Eastercon, and there Chris finally gave his long-delayed best man speech.

I’m skipping so much, of course. Maureen and I going over to Hastings; Chris and Leigh and the kids coming over to Folkestone. For a while Chris and Leigh ran a small writers’ workshop in Hastings with people like Chris Evans and Liz Williams and I was invited to join. One of the workshops was scheduled on my birthday, and during a break in proceedings, Chris beckoned me into his study. There he handed me a big pile of paper. “Thought you might like to see this, its the manuscript of my next book.” I turned the pages, and that was how I discovered that The Separation was dedicated to me. I still think that was one of my best birthday presents.

When Chris and Nina got together, the visits continued, including several days at their rather remote home in Devon. That was when I discovered Chris was a slave to the satnav, including almost driving into a river at one point because the satnav said that was the way to go. Somewhere there is a photograph from that trip of Chris and me toiling up a slope; Maureen and Nina had effortlessly bounded up the slope some way ahead of us. It is, I think, the only photograph of the two of us together, and right now I can’t lay hands on it. That was practically the last time Maureen saw Chris and Nina; when, shortly afterwards, they moved up to Bute, Covid and sundry other obstacles prevented us getting to see them.

When I came to write my book on Chris I was nervous. I’d written about him a lot before then, of course, reviews and interviews and a couple of essays. But to date The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest is the only book I’ve written whose subject was still alive at the time. He was supportive, though, and when I sent him the first draft we was careful to comment only on matters of fact. He said nothing about my analysis, whether or not he agreed with me.

The last time I saw Chris was last March, when I finally got to visit Bute. He looked older, much more frail than I remembered, but I put that down to age. The mind was still as sharp as ever, his conversation still as caustic. When I left we were planning to get together again this summer. It was much later in the year that I first found out about the cancer. He died yesterday; apparently it was peaceful at the end.

I miss him.

Looking backwards

Tags

A.S. Byatt, Alasdair Gray, Ali Smith, Angela Carter, Barry Unsworth, C.J. Sansom, Charles Dickens, David Mitchell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Swift, H.G. Wells, Hilary Mantel, Iain Banks, J.L. Carr, Jeanette Winterson, Jim Crace, John Banville, Josephine Tey, Kate Atkinson, Lindsey Davis, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, P.D. James, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Peter Kemp, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ronald Wright, Salman Rushdie, Sarah Moss, Sarah Perry, Steven Saylor, Toni Morrison, Walter Scott, William Boyd, William Golding

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I like books about literature, about literary history, and about literary criticism. So I was always going to be the target audience for Peter Kemp’s Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction. And I am glad I picked it up. I do have probably as much in the way of gripes and criticisms as I have praise for the book, but that is almost inevitable in a work like this. But in the main I found it an exhilarating romp through primarily English fiction since about 1970. That starting date is arbitrary, and not really explained, but it does give us a half-century of literature to consider, and I suppose it means Kemp gets in ahead of what is likely to be a rush of books in the next couple of years that will be looking back at the first quarter of this century, or perhaps starting in 1975 to compare the last quarter of last century with the first quarter of this, or even more expansively perhaps considering the century from 1925. I don’t know about you, but I’m already getting a vague sense that the 1920s are starting to crop up in books more frequently than I remember, though that could just be the direction my own interests take me.

The first thing to be said about Retroland is that the sub-head is irrelevant. There are a lot of novels covered in this volume, so it is diverse in that sense, but the book is not about diversity, it is not about the dazzle. Kemp has a theme, and the book focuses narrowly on how the fiction of the last half-century has stuck to that theme, explored it and played games with it. Which in a very real sense is the opposite of diversity.

Kemp’s theme is history, and his thesis is that the novelists (at least the British novelists) of the period have overwhelmingly turned to the past for their subject, their inspiration, or their model. Kemp’s focus on this is so narrow that any writer (by which I mean mainstream novelist, I will come later to discuss Kemp’s engagement, or lack of it, with genre fiction) who deals exclusively with the present (Ali Smith, Iain (no-M) Banks) does not appear in the book, which can rather skew the perspective. But okay, I will concede the point, since so many of the contemporary novelists that I return to again and again (Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Sarah Perry, Graham Swift) do turn frequently, sometimes exclusively, to the past.

There is, of course, an issue here that I don’t think is adequately addressed in the book; two issues, in fact. The first is: what does it mean that so many contemporary writers have turned to the past in this way? Are they saying that today can only be thoroughly understood by examining yesterday? Are they saying that the ills of today have their source in the wrongs of yesterday? Or, by contrast, are they saying that the well-formed past holds up a mirror to the ill-fared present? I don’t know, but Kemp has so much ground to cover that he must perforce spend more time on the ways the past is addressed and not on why it is so addressed. But then there’s another issue that only occurred to me as I was writing this: is the past really a phenomenon peculiar to post-1970 fiction? Let’s face it, British writers (and something like 90% of the writers covered here are British) have been writing about the past since at least Walter Scott. Dickens was an historical novelist, so was Stevenson, so were heaven knows how many others. How many of the interwar crime novelists (Dorothy L. Sayers) infused their work with references to the Great War; or turned even further back (Josephine Tey)? So, are we talking about a mode that fell out of fashion only to become prominent again after 1970, or something that had always been there? The answer to that question would change our perspective on the works considered here, but I’m not sure the question is even asked.

Yet, although I was aware of these niggles, they didn’t bother me as I was reading the book, I was too caught up in the narrative. Now a book of this nature inevitably comes down to lists, and there are a lot of them spread through the book. When you are reading such lists your mind inevitably snags on the names that are missing, and these clearly indicate gaps in the author’s knowledge. In one list there is an allusion to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, but neither she nor the book are named anywhere in this volume; so he knows of the book but is not familiar enough with it, or anything else by Atkinson, to recognise how she fits within his thesis. In a chapter devoted to updatings of the story of Frankenstein there is no mention of Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, indeed Gray appears nowhere in the book which seems to me like a fatal shortcoming. But no one can read everything, be aware of everything, and Kemp covers a lot of ground, writers I like and writers I have never previously heard of. So yes, there are writers I would have thought central to the thesis that are absent, but that hardly undermines what the book does achieve.

And the lists, let’s face it, are not the be-all-and-end-all of the book. Far more interesting and valuable are the longer, more considered, more detailed accounts of particular authors or works. I can hardly fault him here, for he takes us into the work of writers I rate highly (David Mitchell, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, William Golding, Angela Carter, and a writer he returns to several times and who is, I feel, one of the very best novelists of the last half-century, Barry Unsworth) or whose work I’ve only dipped in to and feel I need to study more (J.L. Carr, Toni Morrison, Jim Crace, Sarah Moss). It’s a book that makes you excited about books, there’s a feast of stuff here I want to grab immediately and read all at once.

Not that Kemp is uncritical; far from it. You can tell his favourites (Unsworth, A.S. Byatt), but he is not afraid to turn a sharp critical attention upon writers usually considered critical darlings. Salman Rushdie: “For an author who attaches such significance to storytelling, Rushdie is curiously inept at telling stories.” Jeanette Winterson: “Amid a jumble of researched scientific data that characters reel out, the basic lineaments of Mary Shelley’s Gothic fable — science over-reaching itself, hubris hideously punished, malformed loneliness tragically wreaking havoc — get peculiarly garbled.” Margaret Drabble: “This dismissal of psychological fiction and Freudian thinking comes strangely in a trilogy whose most pervasive character is a psychiatrist.” There are skewering one-liners all through the book which contribute immensely to its liveliness, the sense that some great novelists and some not-so-great novelists are producing work that we really should be paying attention to, and conversely that there are supposedly great novelists who should be paying more attention to their work.

Peter Kemp is a reviewer for the Sunday Times and the author of books on Muriel Spark and H.G. Wells, a background which, you might think, might open him to writing that doesn’t follow a straightforwardly realist model. And it does, but not in the way you might think. The second of the five parts that make up this book concentrates on the fictions that show how an individual’s past shapes their present. One of the examples of this motif is the way childhood trauma, and particularly child abuse, are repeatedly shown to lie behind the darkness in a character. He presents several fictional examples of this, but as I was reading it I kept thinking how frequently I have seen this pattern in crime fiction, it is, for instance, a regular feature in John Banville’s Benjamin Black novels, and yet neither Black nor crime fiction more generally feature among his examples. Crime fiction does appear in the book, but usually in other forms, the historical crime fiction of C.J. Sansom, Steven Saylor, or Lindsey Davis, for example.

Unexpectedly, science fiction fares better. But that is partly because so many otherwise mainstream novelists have ventured into the form. And where science fiction does appear it is usually from writers not normally identified as science fiction authors: Martin Amis, P.D. James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter. He is never dismissive of sf, and it clearly forms part of his overall vision of literature, but you get a sense of unease when he ventures into the territory. He spends some time discussing Ronald Wright’s updating of The Time Machine, A Scientific Romance (and he is clearly besotted with Wells’s original), but his reading of the book felt slightly off to me. He is outside his comfort zone, but at least he is willing to give it a go.

There is, I am sure, no such thing as a perfect book about literature. Any such book depends upon the taste and interest of the author, and a reading list that can at best only be partial. Though I suspect that it is such partiality (in both senses of the word) that is what makes these books interesting to me. And this is a pretty good example of the form.

By chance …

Tags

Ali Smith, Irene Nemirovsky

… the first two books I finished this year were novels I read for University of the Third Age book groups, neither of which, in the end, I was able to attend because of this damnable cold. It will get better, I’m sure, I just wish it would hurry up about it.

Anyway, the two books were works I would never have got around to reading on my own. They are books I was aware of, in each instance I remember them coming out and each receiving warm praise. So they were on my radar, just never a high priority. U3A made them something to pick up immediately, and I am glad of it. They are both books I am delighted to have read.

The first, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, was written during the early years of the Second World War, but only discovered many years later, and it wasn’t published until 2004. I remember the fuss when the English translation came out. Wikipedia suggests that it was intended as a sequence of five novels, but I’m not so sure of that. I suspect it is far more likely that it was meant to be one book in five parts. The first two parts, the only ones to have been completed and published, are both rather short for standalone novels, and her intention for the two final parts (which she didn’t even get close to planning) seems to have been that they too would have been relatively short. Only the middle section, “Captivity”, which she plotted but did not write, seems to have been long enough to stand as a novel in its own right. But we’ll never know; she had only written the first two parts, “Storm” and “Dolce”, when she was arrested and disappeared into Auschwitz, never to be heard from again.

One of the things that fascinates me about the work is its structure. If, as I assume, it was always intended as one book in five parts, then just as the title informs us, its structure is that of a suite. In music, a suite consists of a set of musical pieces brought together as one composition. It’s a form that you might also find in art (think how the three images of The Garden of Earthly Delights stand as one picture); in film think of the 1945 film, “Dead of Night”); in television, of course; in poetry (what is “The Waste Land” but a suite?); but it is not so common in fiction. Usually multi-part works (The Lord of the Rings, A Dance to the Music of Time) tend to be one story divided up. The closest I can think of are what, in science fiction, we call the “fix-up” or, more elegantly, the “mosaic novel”, such as Pavane.

Of course, it is possible that if the later parts of Suite Francaise had been completed, it might have drawn together into one coherent story. But that is not what we have been left with.

The first part, “Storm”, shifts restlessly between multiple characters as they panic and flee Paris ahead of the German invasion in 1940. They are all ill-equipped, mentally as well as practically, for the experience, and while one or two die along the way, by the end of the story most of them have given up and quietly returned to the city. “Dolce” is very different: although one or two of the characters appeared in the background of “Storm”, here the focus is narrow, on just a few people in a small rural village with German troops billeted upon them. As a portrait of the French experience of defeat, the inability to accept defeat, the conviction that there is no reason why their comfortable life should be disrupted in any way, the novel is compelling and engaging. It is also possibly the most sarcastic novel I have read in ages. The portrait of the refugees is bitingly funny, we see people in extremis, reduced to desperation, and yet we feel no sympathy for them because we have seen how petty and narrow and selfish these people are.

The second of these two novels is The Accidental by Ali Smith, another writer I knew about but had never read (there are too many Ali’s, too many Smiths, in contemporary English mainstream fiction, which one is it we are talking about, which one is it we are reading?). Ali Smith has won multiple awards, this novel picked up both the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Award (or so it says on the cover; Wikipedia says she was only shortlisted for the Orange), and yet to date nothing had made her stand out from the crowd enough for me to want to pick up one of her books. And this particular novel: a dysfunctional family on holiday in Norfolk encounters a strange woman who has a life-changing effect upon each member of the family in turn. That’s almost a cliche in English fiction right now. It’s not so long, for instance, since I read Sarah Perry’s first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, in which a stranger moves in on a dysfunction group of people in a remote country house. Going further back, things like Brideshead Revisited tell pretty much the same sort of story. There were more than enough reasons for this not to rise to the top of the pile.

But then you start reading and … I was captivated from the start. It begins: “My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town’s only cinema”, a brutally unsentimental way to talk about one’s conception. We have no clue who is speaking, though this voice reappears several times through the novel telling the insistent story of a life shaped almost entirely by the cinema. Later this voice (unnamed, unidentified) tells us “I was born just short of a century after the birth of the Frenchman whose name translates as Mr Light”, who is, of course, Lumiere. She (I say “she” because unless this voice belongs to the author (actually born 1962) it is most likely the intruder, Amber, though this makes her a little older than I would have guessed from the novel) is thus the product of the entire history of film, a being of light, imagination, deception. Yes, I think it must be Amber.

Yet in some ways this is the least distinctive of the voices that make up the novel. The focus shifts between the viewpoints of the Smart family. Astrid, the thirteen-year-old daughter who is dissatisfied with everything and really just wants someone to take her seriously. Magnus, her older brother, who led a charmed life until he got involved in a prank that led to the suicide of a fellow pupil; as the novel opens he is contemplating suicide himself. Michael, their stepfather, and English lecturer whose academic career is imperilled by his philandering. And Eve, their mother, distant, uneasy, author of a moderately successful series of books that she isn’t interested in continuing. When Amber appears, everyone thinks she is there at the behest of someone else. She takes Astrid shoplifting, she fucks Magnus, she teases Michael and she irritates Eve, and as you expect in a novel like this she both heals and harms the family. Until they return from holiday to find that their home has been stripped, even the carpets and furniture have gone.

All of this is conveyed in broken sentences, unexpected bursts of poetry, bitter allusions and adolescent dreams. It is a sour novel filled with life, and as with the Nemirovsky, I’m really glad to have come to read it.

A year in books

Tags

books of the year

I’ve been doing this now for more years than I care to remember. Sometime around the last day of the old year or the first day of the new year I put up a list of everything I have read over the preceding twelve months. There was a time when I would even single out the books I considered particularly good, though I have lately fallen out of that habit.

This is a practice that goes back decades. Way back in my teens I used to make a list of every book I read in a year. There was at least one year then when the total came to over 200. These days I can’t even manage a quarter of that. For the longest time I did better; around the time I started this practice (back in the dear dead days of Livejournal) I would average 70 to 80 books a year comfortably. Those totals were almost certainly connected to the fact that I was spending as much as four hours a day commuting, an ideal opportunity to get through multiple books a week. When I stopped working, and therefore stopped commuting, my reading time fell precipitately. Of course, around the same time was when I started writing books myself, and that, believe me, drains away the time you have to read for yourself. And over the last few years in particular other things, real life and real death, intervened also, and for several years it has been a struggle to read as many as 30 books in a year.

This year, unexpectedly, and for the first time in over five years, I actually managed to read a little over 40 books. Put like that, it doesn’t sound like much, but believe me it feels like a massive advance.

For a while I did try to write here on this blog about each new book as I finished it, so long as I wasn’t writing about it for review elsewhere. So what follows will mostly consist of links to other places. But I ran out of impetus on that around the end of October, so the links will disappear for the final pieces. For the record, I’ve been having building work on the house. It is still going on, though hopefully it will finish early in the new year, but it has meant that for much of the year there have been other people in the house, along with noise and disruption and the like, which has not always been conducive to either reading or writing. So whether the new year will prove even more productive in terms of reading is something I’ll have to wait until next December to find out.

Anyway, for the record, this is what I have read in 2023:

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson: she has become one of my very favourite writers, and this is a wonderful novel that I wrote about here.

Love and Let Die by John Higgs: the first single by the Beatles, “Love Me Do”, and the first James Bond film, “Dr No”, were both released on the same day, Friday 5th October 1962. John Higgs tries to build an elaborate cultural history of Britain over the last 60 years on the back of this, though as I say here I found it less than convincing.

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles: the winner of the Clarke Award, and a somewhat unexpected choice, which was precisely what attracted me to the book. I wrote about it here.

Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke edited by Paul March Russell and Andrew M. Butler: I was at the conference in Canterbury that gave rise to this collection of essays. There was a lot of interesting stuff discussed there, and I reviewed the book for BSFA Review 20, Spring 2023.

Love Chronicles of the Octopodes by Karen An-Hwei Lee: a science fiction novel written by a poet who, frankly seems far more invested in Emily Dickinson than she is in science fiction. So it is a curious book, but an interesting one, as I hope I conveyed in my review for Strange Horizons.

Hopeland by Ian McDonald: the first of the big novels of the year, which I reviewed for Interzone 295, September 2023.

The Romantic by William Boyd: Boyd is one of the handful of writers I’ve been following ever since I first discovered his work. His novels can be very different in subject and approach, but that is part of the interest. I wrote about this one here.

The Morbid Age by Richard Overy: anyone who has followed these posts over the years will know that I am fascinated with British social history, especially of the twentieth century. This is an excellent account of the interwar years, and though I haven’t written specifically about this book at any length, it did inspire this post and, rather more obliquely, this post.

The Singularities by John Banville: I discovered Banville’s work with his second or third novel, and have been addicted to his work ever since. I remember seeing him speak once when he said that all of his work was part of one greater story, and that impetus is becoming more explicit in his recent books, such as this one which I wrote about here.

All These Worlds by Niall Harrison: okay, it has been an excellent year for sf non-fiction, beginning with this great collection that I reviewed for Interzone Digital.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli: There is a passing reference to this book in the second of the two posts I linked to under The Morbid Age above, and that, alas, is the only place I wrote about this book. We have several books by Rovelli, but this is the first one I’ve got round to reading; it won’t be the last. It provides an historical and social context for the development of the idea of quantum physics in the early years of the last century, and that actually proves to be an excellent way of explaining the science.

Conquest by Nina Allan: it has been a tight contest, and there are still 2023 novels I’ve not yet got around to, but for me this is the novel of the year. I reviewed it for Interzone 295, September 2023.

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid: this is one of the few occasions when I watched and enjoyed a television series and was therefore tempted to read the source novel. The series was interesting because it dealt with a subject I find interesting, popular music in the 1970s. In the series the band was presented very much as Nicks/Buckingham era Fleetwood Mac (though my preference was always for the earlier Peter Green era), but there was much more general stuff about the music business that fascinated. The novel, as is usually the case, was not quite the same. It was a very easy book to read, it felt even more romantic than the TV series, and the structure and character of the band was different. But it was still pleasant, and right now I am feeling seriously tempted to go back and watch the series again.

The This by Adam Roberts: What! I didn’t write about this novel when I read it? How is that possible? I can only assume that my thoughts about the book were too inchoate to put down immediately, and then the opportunity passed. To be honest I went into it expecting something more along the lines of The Thing Itself, the subtle way that earlier novel played with the philosophical notions behind it. This was less subtle, and I didn’t find myself intellectually or emotionally drawn into the working out of ideas in the same way. There is something almost crude in the slam-bang presentation of the set-up, and by the end of the novel I found myself caring less and less how the thing worked out.

Airside by Christopher Priest: okay, I’m a sucker for Priest’s fiction, there have been books I’ve enjoyed less than others, but there’s none that I’ve found to be actively bad. That said, there has been over the last ten years or so an unexpected rush of books, and some of them have indeed felt more rushed than others. But this feels like something he’s been working towards for some time, the best of these late-period books. I wrote about it here.

Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison: another of the stunningly good non-fiction books to appear this year. After a couple of false starts I managed to write about it here.

The Near Future in Twenty-First Century Fiction by David Sergeant: this is one of those peculiar academic texts that I seem to come across more and more these days, mainstream academic literary criticism dealing with a non-mainstream subject, with all the clumsiness that tends to imply. I came across the book in a TLS review, suggested that it might be a good subject for Foundation. I wrote the review back in the middle of the year, but I don’t think it has been published yet.

Critical Revolutionaries by Terry Eagleton: I am not always in sympathy with Eagleton, but I am very interested in the history of criticism, and this is an account of the five greats of mid-century British criticism: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis, and Raymond Williams, and as an introduction to their work it serves its purpose well. I wrote about it here.

Babel by R.F. Kuang: okay, this was the novel everyone was talking about, like Kuang was the second coming and this book single-handedly lifted fantasy to a new realm. And it’s about translation, and its about Oxford, so I gave it a try. And as I make clear here, I really didn’t like it.

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner: this was not quite the last thing Maureen wrote, but it was the last piece published in her lifetime, and it is a good way to go out on a high. It took me a long time to get the courage to read the book for myself, and when I did I found that I didn’t really have that much to add.

Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers: I first encountered the Welsh writer, Owen Sheers, with his first novel, Resistance, and since then I’ve read a second novel by him and two of his plays. But he is primarily a poet, so I thought it was time to try some of his poetry. And this collection is fabulous, as I say here.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron: the first of his Slough House novels, which I’d been hearing about for some time. Then the television dramatisation came along, and the praise ramped up exponentially. Well I finally watched the first two series over Christmas, and they are excellent, largely because of how faithful they are to the novels, but I won’t be watching further series until I have first read the books. Anyway, this was my first encounter with Jackson Lamb and his cohorts, and I am hooked.

A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller edited by Nina Allan: I know, I’m prejudiced, but I do honestly think that (even against the stiff competition of Niall Harrison and M. John Harrison) this is the best work of sf non-fiction to appear this year. It is sharp, perceptive, engaging, frequently very funny (I have long envied Maureen’s ability to write serious criticism that is funny at the same time), and as I say in this brief mention, her voice rings loud and clear from every page.

Storyland by Amy Jeffs: one of the things I’ve been doing this year is starting to sort through our books. For all sorts of reasons a large number of our books and many of our shelves are inaccessible to me at the moment, but there are several random piles of books around the house, and to be honest in many cases I don’t know whether the books were mine or Maureen’s, whether they were bought or came in for review or acquired some other way. This was one of them, and as I say it was quite enchanting in its way.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk edited by Jared Shurin: and big is the operative word, an inordinately large part of my summer was taken up with reading the book in order to write this review for Locus.

Promise by Christi Nogle: a collection of short stories by a writer new to me, though I certainly wouldn’t be averse to reading her again. My review appeared in Interzone Digital.

Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst: I’m not sure that this collection of essays really knew what it was doing. There are some good pieces here and some that are very much not good, as if the contributors had no clear idea of what the collection was all about. Another book I reviewed for Interzone Digital.

Retromania by Simon Reynolds: another of those books that had been on Maureen’s shelves for ages though I had no idea why she would have any interest in the book. And indeed I was three quarters of the way through the book before I discovered one of her areas of interest, as I try to explain here.

Nervosities by John Madera: I’ve known John Madera for years without ever meeting him. Our first encounter began when he invited me to be part of what was then a group blog, Big Other, through it has since become an online magazine of experimental writing. This is his first collection of short fiction. It isn’t published until 2024, but I got an advance glimpse of the book, which I wrote about here.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron: and surely I am not the only one to think immediately of deadlines; these books are about many things, not least a metaphor for the dismal state of Britain, but among other things they are spy novels about writing spy novels. This is one where the television dramatisation differs from the original novel, particularly in the ending, and there are details all the way through that didn’t make it onto the screen, like the suggestion that one of the slow horses at Slough House is an informer for MI5, though all of these are part of the way Herron builds up the idea that the whole world is built on deception. This was the first of the books I read on my Danube cruise, and the place where my resolution to keep writing about books in this blog began to crumble. But at least I did write about it here.

Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson: my second Atkinson book of the year, and her first collection of short stories in something like twenty years. The stories are all linked, though you don’t notice that for a long time, and most of them have an element of the fantastic. I wrote about it here.

The Lock-Up by John Banville: and my second Banville of the year. But this is one of his crime novels. I am fascinated by Banville’s turn to crime. There has often been crime in his fiction, but since they were written in the oblique, allusive manner of any of his other books they didn’t feel like crime fiction. When he did start to write out and out crime stories they appeared under the name Benjamin Black, although right from the start it was acknowledged that this was Banville. The subject matter was the sort of stuff that would appear in Banville’s novels, often the malign influence of the Catholic church on Irish politics and society in the 1950s, but the prose was different, precise, matter of fact, direct. In time, these crime novels, often featuring the pathologist Quirke, would become a major part of Banville’s output. And then what seemed like a new crime series, featuring the Protestant Inspector Strafford in Catholic Ireland, began to appear under Banville’s own name. But this wasn’t a new departure, Quirke was still there in the background, and this third in the series is labelled “A Strafford & Quirke Mystery”. This time an apparent suicide is revealed as a murder that involves antisemitism, the lingering after-effects of World War II, and of course the power of the church. And I find these books every bit as compelling as the more familiar Banville novel.

Disruptions by Steven Millhauser: another of my favourite writers. I just love the way he distorts the everyday in what seem like perfectly normal New England towns, often slipping into the fantastic in a way you barely notice. I wrote about him, along with Atkinson, here.

Masques of the Disappeared: 1971-2023 by Judith Clute: there is one of Judith’s etchings hanging in my front room, so positioned that it is the first thing you see when you enter the room. The actual picture was Maureen’s choice, but I was more than happy to go along with it. I love her artwork because I always find it disorienting and thought provoking; what is the reality captured in these pictures; and the figures within them, who often stare boldly out of the frame, what reality are they seeing? It seems to me criminal that we have had to wait so long for a book that gathers together her work, so this is welcome if belated. I’ve written a short review of the book for Interzone Digital, though I don’t think it has been published yet.

Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute: this is, I think, an important book, but it is not a very good one. It is poorly written and ill-structured, chronology is haywire so it is often impossible to work out the sequence in which things happen, and Caute has a habit of dropping in names and events without explanation so the significance of events is not always clear. For example, one of the names that recurs throughout the book is Director of MI5, Roger Hollis, though he never once mentions the allegations (by Chapman Pincher and Peter Wright among others) that Hollis was himself a Soviet spy. What the book does is lay out in detail the unredacted details from files that MI5 kept on individuals, particularly individuals on the left. It is true that some of these individuals were indeed working for the Soviet Union, but most weren’t (and the most notorious spies, such as Anthony Blunt, barely even rate a mention here) It is clear that, even at the height of the Second World War, you were far more likely to earn an MI5 file if you were on the left than if you were an out and out Nazi. Throughout the period covered in this book, from the formation of MI5 in the First World War to the mid-60s, any involvement in a protest movement, particularly an anti-war movement, was seen as de facto work for a foreign power. A surprising amount of the content of the files is based on gossip, for instance Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop was considered so unquestionably suspect that anyone whose name was simply mentioned in reviews of their early productions, or in newspaper reports of events connected to the Theatre Workshop automatically received an MI5 file.

Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley: a book I reviewed for Interzone, though the review has not yet appeared.

Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley: due to be published in 2024, but I received an advanced copy which I reviewed for Interzone, though as yet the review has not appeared.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh: one of the things that happened during the cruise in October was that my fellow passengers kept insisting that I should get involved with U3A, the University of the Third Age. I’d never even heard of it before, but it appears to be a loose connection of local organisations devoted to various educational opportunities for retired people. Anyway, I did contact the local set-up and I’ve just started with them, taking on a course on philosophy, a current affairs discussion group, and two book groups (not sure if I’ll keep up with both). Only one book group has met so far, and the object of discussion was Scoop, which has been on my shelves forever, but I’ve not read it before. I was surprised how bad I found it: the humour is forced and over-emphatic, the language is horribly racist, and most of the characters were so over the top as to be unbelievable. There were contemporary comic writers who were much lighter on their feet, and many of Waugh’s contemporaries opposed the sort of racism expressed here. So I was very disappointed with this book (though the discussion in contrast was lively and interesting).

Firmament by Simon Clark: another of those books that has been hanging round on unregarded piles for some time. I think this is a book I once got for Maureen, she had started it but never finished. It is a popular science book on how weather works, which was really fascinating. Interesting to learn that when Admiral FitzRoy published the very first weather forecasts in The Times in 1861 he was actually breaking the law against witchcraft. Apparently any supposed prediction of the future was considered witchcraft because it was prophecy; that law was not repealed until the 1950s.

Felicie by Georges Simenon: since I had been reading the Maigret novels aloud to Maureen, I stopped reading them when she died. This was my tentative return, and it was good. I particularly like the interplay between Maigret and the quick-witted young woman, Felicie, who becomes his way into solving the crime.

The Culture: The Drawings by Iain Banks: I suppose some arrogant part of me had imagined that someone might think to ask me to review the book, but no one did, so I ended up buying it for myself. In the end I’m not sure it is of any interest except to the fanatics. The drawings are crude, blocky, lacking in detail, and since they were originally done in pencil they haven’t always reproduced as well as they might. The interest actually lies in the scribbled numbers that surround the drawings: Banks’s estimates of size, weaponry, and complement for each ship. Though I’m not sure the numbers always make sense.

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter: somewhere we have a couple of books by Porter that Maureen liked but that I’ve not read. But this one looked interesting. It is really no more than a novelette at most, very short, very spare. It is a description of seven last (fictional) paintings by Bacon contemplated but not executed while he was dying in Spain. Memories, dreams, encounters with the sister nursing him, all flow together in a way that resembles the distortions of Bacon’s work. I’m not sure I understand it all (there are references, like some of the references within his actual paintings, that I just didn’t get), but I found myself engaged and enthused by it all. So now I need to find where those other Porter books have hidden themselves away.

And that’s it, I think. I am not far enough advanced with any of the four books I am currently reading to expect that any will be finished before the end of the day, the end of the year. So they will have to wait for the next one of these posts. Still, for me that’s a goodly number of books that hopefully bodes well for the future.

Other than reading, I’ve done a lot of writing this year. There’s at least a dozen reviews for different publications, plus one or two other pieces. Again that gives me a sense of getting back on the horse that threw me last year. Though this isn’t all plain sailing. Back in October I signed a contract for a book on Pavane by Keith Roberts. Now Pavane is a book I love, I’ve written about it before though not at such length, and I have a fairly clear idea of the things I want to cover in my book. Moreover, I have been wanting to write a book about Roberts since at least the 1990s, and this is the first time the opportunity has come my way. And yet, I just can’t get myself started. I’ve written half a dozen books now, but it feels as though I have forgotten everything about how to do it. After tomorrow, once the year has properly started, I must force myself to begin. But the very prospect is too daunting for words. This time next year we’ll know whether I succeeded or not, but right now I have my doubts.

Meanwhile, I am giving a keynote address at a conference on Billion Year Spree in mid-January; I am taking part in an event about Iain Banks in mid-February; and for once I’ll be going to the Worldcon in Glasgow (though so far I’ve not seen anything about how to volunteer for the programme, or even about hotels, all stuff for me to negotiate when I get a chance). So it is looking like it could be a busy year.