In transitiontranslationinterpretation

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Arthur C. Clarke Award, Harry Josephine Giles, Maureen Kincaid Speller

I was pleased that Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award. For one thing, at some point during the final months of her life Maureen read the book and was impressed. Secondly, it is formally innovative, more so than any other book I can remember being in contention for the Clarke Award, and I firmly believe that such literary experimentation should be celebrated and rewarded.

But it is only now that I have read the book myself. Despite the relatively few pages, and the high percentage of white space per page, it is not an easy book to read.

As probably everybody knows by now, it is structured as a series of poems written in the Orcadian dialect:

“I sayed tae see wiss at wir best,
no this,” he says. Noor wis waatched
the meeteen, takken notts. Sheu laaghs,
“It’s better than a research committee.”

Each poem is accompanied on the same page by a prose translation into standard English:

“I said to see us at our best, not this,” he says. Noor had watched the meeting, taking notes. She laughs. “It’s better than a research committee.”

But that is to make the whole thing way too simple, and I deliberately chose a relatively straightforward example. Even here there are things to pay attention to. There are two near-identical words with very different meanings, for instance: “wiss” is translated as “us” while “wis” is translated as “had”. Though elsewhere in the novel you will encounter “wis” being translated as “was”, which suggests it is a form of the verb to be, though not necessarily always the same form. The other thing to note is that Noor is a visitor to the space station, so her speech is rendered in standard English. Even this can be deceptive, as your eyes suddenly light upon familiar spellings it can feel as though the whole poem is suddenly opening up to you, becoming accessible. It isn’t.

The problem is that translation is a creative act. It is not simple substitution. As the use of “wis” to mean either “was” or “had” in the above passage indicates, there is never a precise match between words in two different languages. Even languages as close as Orcadian and English can differ in subtle and often not so subtle ways. Take, for instance, the translation that Giles offers for the very next verse after the one quoted above:

Eynar’s head is throbfestering from ringcirclebanging, crowdquarrellurching debate.

The equivalent line on Orcadian is:

Eynar’s heid is tiftan fae ringan and rallyan debate.

So we might conclude, for instance, that “tiftan” could be rendered as either “throbbing” or “festering”, while “ringan” and “rallyan” each have three possible translations. Giles’s habit of running the alternative translations together both emphasises the point and confuses the issue further. After all, throbbing and festering are not synonyms for each other, so which we choose is going to affect the thrust of the entire sentence. There is, of course, the further issue that there are several other synonyms for both throbbing and festering which might, by implication, come into play here. Given that we don’t have the clue that pronunciation might provide, since that avenue is closed to us (unless we are lucky enough to hear Giles, or another Orcadian, read the work aloud), our only guide in making the choice is context. But context doesn’t really help here, since the collision of throbbing and festering takes us straight into two other congeries of not-entirely-synonymous words. In fact in this one sentence we are looking at something like 18 possible readings, and that is assuming that we don’t take into account other possible alternatives for the words on offer.

Sometimes the choice doesn’t matter, or at least it doesn’t seem to. But that’s not always the case. And anyway, can we safely assume that the word choices we make are not just what we would expect to find, and that another choice, which may feel more awkward to the ears of a native English speaker, might not be more appropriate or more revealing?

What we are offered in the English passages, therefore, is not a translation of the Orcadian. It is an opportunity for interpretation, but with no way of knowing how reliable our particular interpretation might be.

At its simplest, therefore, the novel tells us one story in Orcadian and another story in English. We expect one to be a translation of the other, so we expect them to be forms of the same story. But how do we know? And in fact, even assuming that the English resonates with the Orcadian, the multiplicity of choices we have to make in simply reading the English tells us that we are never reading exactly what the Orcadian is saying to us. And that very multiplicity of choices suggests that rather than two versions of something like the same story, what we encounter is in truth an almost infinite variety of versions.

I don’t, therefore, really know what I read. It was thrilling for what it was doing, and even more for what it was making me do. But what it was remains obscure. Two visitors arrive on a wheel-shaped space station somewhere out in the galaxy, a place as distant, as in-turned, as distinct as the Orkney Islands. Here we encounter the trappings of isolated life: tentative romances, tedious local bureaucracy, petty secrets, local rituals and almost orgiastic dances. There is an ordinariness but an inwardness in all we see. And yet what gives life to the station and what threatens it lies outside, in the silent, deadly ocean of space. Just as the Orcadians live and die by thrusting their frail craft out onto the raging sea, so these Orcadians make their living by sailing out into space to harvest wrecked craft and the mysteries of the deep. Here, the thing harvested is known simply as Light, an everyday thing except in deep space where the only light is artificially generated. Light is the essential element in sight, yet when the creatures of Light invade the great wheel they are unseen by its inhabitants.

It is a mysterious story, one whose greatest emphasis is upon the mundane, and whose most science fictional elements are, contrary to the normal practices of the genre, the things least seen, least explained, least rationalised. It is, we must remember, a poem in the original Orcadian, and poetry often progresses by mood, by allusion, by symbol. Story presented through such a mechanism does not work in the way of the usually plain prose of most science fiction. And the prose we have here is less reliable, less accessible simply because it leaves the reader with assumptions to make, choices on offer, that can drastically change the very thing we are reading.

Stories are made up of words, but here the words are not whole, not complete, not reliable. So what does that make of the story?

Dark and Bright

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Charles Oman, David M. Perry, Edward Gibbon, Henry David Thoreau, Kenneth Clark, Matthew Gabriele, Richard Overy, Sir Edward Grey, Thomas Hobbes, William Ker

When, late last year, I was reading The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry, I was very discontented with the book, as I said in my summary of the year’s reading. I felt I was being shortchanged: it was poorly written and it felt poorly argued. For instance, it was obvious, from the title onwards, that the book had been written in opposition to the notion of the Dark Ages, yet it never once discussed the idea of the Dark Ages. So it was only today, reading a book about the interwar years (The Morbid Age by Richard Overy), that I discovered that The Dark Ages as a name for the late-classical and early-medieval period is only common in anglophone historiography. The term was, apparently, first used in Henry Hallam’s History of England in 1837, but it only really became a commonplace at the end of that century when it was used as the title of two popular works, one by Oxford professor Sir Charles Oman in 1893, and one by the philologist William Ker in 1904. Overy does not (at least so far as I have got) make the connection, but I wonder if this apocalyptic sense that the end of a civilisation is marked by a descent into darkness lay behind Sir Edward Grey’s famous remark to the journalist, John Alfred Spender, on the evening of 3rd August 1914, the day before war was declared: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Overy also notes something that you would look for in vain in Gabriele and Perry’s book: that most historians today have been trying to “consign the Dark Ages to the historical waste-paper basket”. After all, one wouldn’t want to get the impression that Gabriele and Perry aren’t actually breaking new ground.

My problem with all this is that, at no point, is it clear what is meant by “Dark”, or, indeed, what is meant by “Bright”. In fact, The Bright Ages opens with an account of a church at Ravenna which is lovingly described in terms of the way gold and mosaics are used in such a way as to catch and refract the light, so you might be forgiven for thinking that “Bright Ages” means they had light. Wow, I’d never have guessed. Were the dark ages dark because, in Edward Grey’s terms, someone had turned out all the lamps?

But Overy’s account of the origins of the term “Dark Ages” sheds light on the question (if you’ll pardon the expression). The way British historians, or more precisely English historians, who grew up in the great days of Victoria’s empire regarded the matter, the dark ages began when the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain. From the perspective of one great empire looking back upon another. the retreat from Britain was the end of empire. The fact that the Roman Empire, in one form or another, continued for more than 1,000 years after this moment is irrelevant. To the Victorian imperialists, Britain’s empire was the natural and inevitable successor to Rome. The two empires were seen in the same light: as the bringers of civilisation, as the guarantors of order and rationality, as the creators of laws and mighty buildings and great armies. All who fall under the sway of such an empire should be grateful for all the glories that it brings to them. And so the retreat of that empire could only mean an end to glory, an end to civilisation.

Oh the imperialists knew – for they had all read Gibbon – that the Roman empire had survived long after the retreat from Britain. But they also knew, thanks to Gibbon, that those long ages were a decline, a fall. Besides, how could an empire truly be great if it had abandoned Britain? And because they looked at the Roman Empire and saw Britain, just as they looked at the British Empire and saw Rome, so they shuddered at the thought of all the glories of empire being lost. Surely that must be the end of civilisation, for without the wise rule, the imperial might, the laws and arts and social organisation imposed by empire how could civilisation survive? There could only be darkness.

And so we believed, right up through my school years and beyond. I remember when my own doubts about this dominant narrative first began to develop. It was in 1969, when I was watching the first episode of Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. Here was the period of darkness, of the uncivilised, between the death of one civilisation and the (literal) rebirth of civilisation with the renaissance. And yet, we were seeing exquisite carvings in wood and ivory, complex narratives carved into stone monoliths, gloriously illustrated manuscripts, magnificent buildings that employed extraordinary technological innovations like arches, spires and flying buttresses, all the invention of these supposedly uncivilised ages. It seemed to me that to dismiss the makers of these artworks as uncivilised was stupid. And wasn’t this also the age of Beowulf, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which I read not long after) and the medieval Mystery Plays which fed directly into the theatrical flowering of the later Tudor period. Maybe Gabriele and Perry weren’t too wide of the mark by beginning with that church in Ravenna.

By what measure, then, was this a “dark” age? Was it dark in the same way that a black hole is black, that light could not escape from it. But that late-classical, early-medieval period is not exactly a mystery, and wasn’t even when Hallam coined the term “Dark Ages”. For goodness sake, between 1776 and 1789 Edward Gibbon had published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes, the vast majority of which is concerned precisely with this period of supposed darkness. There is plenty of light flooding out from those centuries in the form of chronicles and sagas and romances and church records and manor rolls and accounts left by travellers and inscriptions and all sorts of other ways that people found to tell the story of their lives and times. There is plenty of primary material to draw upon, enough at least for us to relate the lives of named individuals with at least as much detail and reliability as we relate the lives of figures from classical history.

Well then, is “dark” perhaps a moral judgement? Was this just a particularly nasty and brutish time? Perhaps, but then, when isn’t? “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire and in the time of Henry David Thoreau just as much as they did under the Anglo-Saxon kings or under Charlemagne. Life is as likely to be “nasty, brutish and short”, in Thomas Hobbes’s term, in medieval Italy or in Victorian London. And yes, the so-called dark ages were times of frequent and brutal warfare, but again, when isn’t? The century and a bit of the Hundred Years War probably had fewer casualties in total than the four years of the Great War. And while early medieval war leaders weren’t particularly careful with the lives of non-combatants that got in their way, and there were plenty of massacres of Moslems during the various crusades, and of Jews in, for instance, medieval York, you’d still have to go a bit to match the sheer brutality of the Armenian genocide, the holocaust, the Soviet famines, or China’s Cultural Revolution in our so much more civilised 20th century.

Dark, then, in the sense of a lack of learning? Not really. The Athenian age of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle didn’t really survive the emergence of the Roman Empire, but that doesn’t mean that philosophy disappeared. In the same way, the early-modern philosophical flowering of Descartes and Hobbes and Locke didn’t continue at the same intensity as the 17th century reached its end. There was learning during the early-medieval, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, so it was no more an intellectual wasteland than any other period. The influence of the church was stultifying, but there have always been orthodoxies (Stalinist Russia, Maoist China) to there is nothing uniquely “dark” in that. And besides, the ideas of Greek science and philosophy survived and were developed in the Moslem world, and filtered through into Christian Europe throughout the period; it wasn’t a sudden flood of new learning that came in with the Renaissance.

Or does “dark” just represent the absence of empire? So it would seem.

Love and Death

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Christopher Lee, David Kynaston, George Harrison, Ian Fleming, James Bond, John Higgs, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Pete Best, Ringo Starr, Stu Sutcliffe, The Beatles, Tony Sheridan

In the most recent part of his major postwar history of Britain, On the Cusp, David Kynaston notes that on Friday, 5th October 1962, (which is, incidentally, not quite two weeks after my tenth birthday) two significant cultural events occurred. “Love Me Do”, the first single by The Beatles, and Dr No, the first film in the James Bond franchise, were both released. Actually, neither of those statements is quite correct. The Beatles, then consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best, had earlier recorded a single, “My Bonnie”, as the backing group for Tony Sheridan while they were in Hamburg, the single was released and largely unnoticed in 1961; and and a television dramatisation of Casino Royale had been broadcast on American television in 1954 with Barry Nelson playing Bond. But in essence it is true: “Love Me Do” was the first Beatles recording with Ringo Starr, and Dr No was the first James Bond feature film.

For Kynaston, the events of 5th October 1962 effectively provide the climax for his book. But for John Higgs, it is the starting point. The full title of Higgs’s book, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche, pretty well sums up everything in this work. Neither of these beginnings were particularly auspicious. The Beatles had been turned down by most British record labels, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether a band that had a cult following among Liverpool teenagers could turn that popularity into national success, especially when you consider, as one producer told them while rejecting the band, that guitar bands were already a thing of the past. And the James Bond novels had not exactly been setting the literary world alight since Ian Fleming started churning them out in 1953. As one critic rather waspishly but accurately declared, they were about sex, snobbery and sadism, and it was only when President Kennedy declared that he enjoyed them that they began to sell in significant numbers, which is what prompted one film company to take a chance on filming Dr No. If the dice had fallen only slightly differently, 5th October 1962 would have been just another blustery and unmemorable day.

As it was, however, the two works released on that day changed the British cultural landscape forever, and continue to have a profound effect. Consider, 58 years after the death of Bond’s creator, how many column inches are being taken up with arguments about who might take on the role for the next film in the sequence. Consider, 52 years after the Beatles disbanded, how much screen time was taken up showing and reshowing Paul McCartney’s headline performance at last year’s Glastonbury Festival (and, too late for the book, of course, as I write this The Guardian is reporting that the National Portrait Gallery is about to host an exhibition of photographs of the Beatles taken by Paul McCartney in 1963-64). They are still, you might say, in our ears and in our eyes.

Given the subject matter, Higgs inevitably has to deal with the cultural impact of his two subjects. But he does so without much obvious enthusiasm, and nothing much in the way of a critical vocabulary. He tends to deal in broad generalisations: X is now generally regarded as one of the weakest films in the franchise, Y is still loved by fans today. It tells you nothing.

But Higgs has a different subject in mind. He wants to present Bond and the Beatles as representatives of two conflicting aspects of the British psyche. The Beatles represent love, Bond stands for death. It’s okay as far as it goes. There’s an interesting thesis to be wrung out of this, but I don’t think Higgs does the wringing. The book is facile: I kept thinking that’s the kind of thing I might write if I had a thorough knowledge of the Beatles and the James Bond films, and I had done a little dipping into popular books on social history and psychology. It’s readable, it holds together, it keeps hammering home its central idea, but it never feels like you are getting below the surface.

Mostly he wants us to believe that Bond and the Beatles are two sides of the same coin. So there is never a chapter about the Beatles that passes without some reference to Bond; there is never a chapter about Bond that passes without some reference to the Beatles. He makes great and repeated play of the fact that Help! was the Beatles playing at James Bond, and the fact that Paul McCartney recorded the theme of a Bond film. But mostly these cross-references seem like little more than coincidences (Christopher Lee being a Bond villain and appearing on the cover of Band on the Run generates a whole chapter), or the sort of cross-contamination that is probably inevitable in a relatively small cultural pool. All too often I felt that the link he was trying to make between the two was awkward and forced: yes you might suggest that the Beatles doing this echoes Bond doing that, but I can, without effort, think of a dozen other cultural echoes that are clearer and more pertinent.

We are left with a slight popular book that is entertaining in its way, though I doubt that anyone with more than a scanty knowledge of either Bond or the Beatles would be surprised by anything they encountered here. There is something worth exploring here, but it needs a better, deeper, more thoroughly researched book than this one.

Desperate fun

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Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Kate Atkinson

I am wary of doing this. It seemed like a good idea last year. I would write a blog post about every book I read, which didn’t seem especially difficult or problematic. And, indeed, it started well; I kept up with the project until well into March. But then, in March, things fell apart. No, I don’t think there is a connection, but, well, there is that twisting thread of doubt that starting this same thing all over again can only be tempting fate.

And then there is the other problem: reading. Let’s put it this way, back in my late teens, in the two or three years before I went to university, I kept a list of the books I read. Those lists have long gone, but I know I was regularly getting through 200 books a year back then. How? Today I cannot begin to imagine how I ever found the time. I don’t think I ever came close to matching that score in all the decades since then. Though at the same time, up until lockdown I was consistently getting through 70+ books a year. Again, I now find it hard to imagine how I could do that. Lockdown knocked me back psychologically, and the number of books I was reading tumbled year on year. And then the horrors of last year completed the hatchet job on my psyche. In the last two years together I read fewer books than I would regularly manage in a single year before the world fell apart.

As I start to reinvent a way of living following Maureen’s death, I have begun to learn how to read for pleasure once more. But that doesn’t mean that reading is again quick and easy. Far from it. Reading a book, even when I am enjoying it, is still a painful and laborious process. As I write this, January is just over three weeks old. In that time I have been reading three books simultaneously, a fairly normal practice for me. One of those books, Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, I finished Sunday, exactly three weeks after I first picked it up. I will be writing more fully about it below, but suffice it to say it is a book I enjoyed, a book that I found to be a real pleasure, where I seemed to be turning the pages eagerly to continue with the story. Another time, another me would have devoured that book in a matter of two or three days at the most; but no, 21 days! Why was it so hard? I don’t know, but the problem lies in me not the novel. A second book, which I began on the same day as the Atkinson, I will finish today (probably before I finish writing this post). That one is non-fiction, but not hard, not particularly demanding. Again, in more normal times another, earlier me would have taken a week at most to read it. But the third book, sitting downstairs on the coffee table in the lounge even as I write this, I began reading back in, I think, November. It is, in truth, a book I admire more than I like, but it is not a hard book, it is a book I want to read, yet in three months I have advance little more than 100 pages into the book.

Why do I find it so hard to read? It is not that I don’t enjoy reading; on the contrary it gives me immense pleasure. It is not that the books themselves are difficult to read; the Atkinson, as I say, is an unalloyed pleasure, she is easily one of my favourite writers and this is a superb example of her craft. It is not that I don’t have the time; quite the opposite, I often have more time than I know what to do with. But when I settle down with a nice cup of tea in one of the tub chairs in the bay window downstairs, I am strangely reluctant to pick up a book to read. Once I get over that initial obstacle I read with pleasure, though not so quickly as I used to. But that obstacle is real and persistent. I can sit for ages with the book within reach and not pick it up. It is something of a cliché that writers will find any excuse to avoid sitting down at an empty page or a blank screen, but these days I find it much much easier to start writing than to start reading. It shouldn’t be that way. I know it is wrong, but that is the way my mind is working, or perhaps more accurately, how my mind is not working. What do I fear in the books? What taboo do I break when I turn the page? It is, I know, somehow connected to the psychological damage of lockdown followed by Maureen’s illness, followed by her death. But I don’t know how it is connected, and I don’t know if there is a way through this tangled labyrinth. I don’t know if I can find the way out, or even if there is an out to be found.

But I persist with the labour of reading, because that is the nourishment my mind craves. And it is supposed to be fun. It is fun. Isn’t it?

---

Ma Meyrick. You can’t read much about those frenetic, jazz-filled days of the 1920s in London without coming across her. And she keeps cropping up. She has a supporting role in one episode in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for instance. And now here she is again, at the tremulous heart of Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety. Those titular shrines are the nightclubs owned by Ma Meyrick, here renamed Nellie Coker.

Back in the 70s and 80s, when I was first getting into British fandom, any alcohol-fuelled get together, at a party, a bar, or a convention, would be greeted by cries of “fun, desperate fun!” It was a cry that always struck me as rather sad: any fun that is desperate isn’t likely to be fun. But desperate fun seems to epitomise those frantic years between the end of the First World War and Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919 and the Wall Street Crash in 1929. They were years in which the Bright Young Things felt as though they had been born again, having escaped the horrors of trench warfare while the effects of those horrors were all around them in the injured beggars they saw in the streets, in the way that women of a certain age vastly outnumbered men of that same age, in the memorials to the dead that were springing up in every town and village. They had a new lease of life, even though there was a widespread sense (that a number of the Bright Young Things probably believed as well) that they didn’t deserve it, that they had failed in life somehow by not being in the trenches.

They celebrated this ambivalent escape with bright clothes, short skirts, bobbed hair, loud music, sex, and alcohol. It was an age of excess for those rich enough to indulge and young enough to partake. You see it here in a chapter set in a wild party where everyone dresses up as infants and behaves like children, except for the vast quantities of alcohol consumed. It is a party that recalls similar scenes in Brideshead Revisited and some of the early Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. [And as a totally irrelevant aside, writing that made me think that Agatha Christie, despite her youth when she began The Mysterious Affair at Styles, created old detectives, Poirot already retired, Marple already old; these were not people to participate in, or even fully understand, the excesses of the generation in which Poirot at least initially found himself.] The fun, the brightness, the freedom were desperate because there was still a sense of darkness from the past, and because, I think, they felt it was temporary, that they could not long escape those same shadows, those same trenches.

Ma Coker’s empire of nightclubs was the very locus of that desperate fun. Stumble down a staircase from the street, pay the entrance fee, sweep aside a curtain, and suddenly you were in a different world. It was a world of glitter and glamour, where dance bands played brightly even when a fight broke out, where pretty young women would dance with you for a small fee, where illicit alcohol and drugs were readily available, where you could mingle with the rich and famous, with royalty and with gangsters. After the too recent horrors this was all you wanted of the world, a place where the bright lights chased away the poverty, the industrial unrest, the grime and violence and dullness waiting just up those stairs, just outside in the narrow, ill-lit streets. That Ma Coker’s empire was itself sleazy and criminal and dangerous was irrelevant, it was the illusion that mattered.

Atkinson captures those contradictions beautifully, all through the differing characters of Ma Coker’s family, and those that circle around them. Like Kate Meyrick, Nellie Coker was the lone indomitable head of a large family whom she was grooming to inherit her empire. Or to be precise, it was the daughters who were going to inherit. Her eldest son, Niven, had been in the trenches, it had changed him, and though the family were still family, he stood apart from them and from the business empire. The younger son, Ramsey, had also been changed by time abroad, but in his case it was in a Swiss sanatorium, and now his engagement with the business is vague and ineffectual, and his real interest is in becoming a novelist, though he has no discernible literary ability.

The Coker family, the central importance of Nellie and her four daughters, epitomise something important about the novel: this is a world in which women dominate. All the strong central figures, even apart from the Cokers, are women. There is Freda, the waif-like young woman who comes to London seeking stardom on the stage but ends up dancing in one of Coker’s clubs. There is Florence, the clumsy, unimaginative friend who comes to London with Freda, then disappears into the mysteries of those dark streets. And above all there is Gwendolen. Liberated by an unexpected inheritance, she quits her job as a librarian in York and comes to London, supposedly to seek the daughter of a friend, Freda, but really in search of excitement, which she finds variously as a police spy and as the manager of one of Nellie’s clubs. Around these figures dance (and a maypole dance in which Freda once performed in a stage show in York is a repeated figure throughout the novel) a variety of other strong, independent women. There is Freda’s first landlady, a procuress and abortionist; there is the woman with whom Freda had once modelled knitwear and who is now a prostitute who gives Freda a home; there is Nellie’s cell mate at Holloway who has her own criminal network; and there are the “forty thieves”, a loose affiliation of pickpockets and bag snatchers who are not above a little violent mayhem when needed.

Against these women, the men tend to be villains (the corrupt policeman and the gang leader who both, separately, plot to oust Ma Coker and take over her business), victims (the society gossip columnist who meets a grisly and unexpected fate), or hapless onlookers (the unhappily married police inspector who is tasked with rooting out police corruption and who is working with Gwendolen in the hope of finding out why so many young girls are turning up dead in the Thames, but who proves to be ineffectual and unable to control events).

It is a large cast, and to accommodate them there is a large number of intersecting story lines than make for a very complex plot, made the more complex by Atkinson’s delight in shifting the viewpoint character from chapter to chapter (and sometimes within a chapter), plus her liberal use of cliffhangers. Because timelines and stories intermingle so intricately there are moments when, for instance, a minor character expresses sadness at what has happened to X, though it is another two chapters before the focus shifts back to X and we learn what prompted this sadness. The stories we are told are various. There’s a romance (though it would not be quite right to describe it as a love story), there’s mystery (as we try to sort out what has happened to the various missing girls), there’s intrigue (how will the different plots against Ma Coker play out, and how will she respond to them?), there’s coming-of-age (both Freda and Gwendolen grow into roles they could never have expected to play before coming to London), there’s even a ghost story (Nellie Coker is followed throughout by the ghost of a girl she had killed). But it would be wrong to describe the novel as any of these things. The many different stories, just like the many different characters, are just brush strokes delineating a rich, complex, and convincing portrait of one segment of London society at a key moment in the middle of the 1920s.

I find it hard to explain why I find Atkinson’s writing so compelling. The prose isn’t particularly lush, with grace notes that make you stop just to appreciate the beauty or the strangeness of a phrase, yet neither is it spare and precise and purposeful. It works, I think – and this feels like a rather graceless way to describe something that is full of grace – because it has a job to do, and it does that job well. It has a story to tell that is complex and yet never confusing. It has characters to introduce and manipulate yet it does so in a way that makes them feel drawn from life. It has a scene to set that is vivid, colourful, and feels as though you could step into it alongside the characters and witness it through the eyes of the time. It doesn’t race along, it takes its time, and yet it never relaxes its grip on you. It is prose you can relax into, confident in what it is doing, in the effect it is generating. It is simply a pleasure to let her tell you a story and know you believe her, know you trust her.

It helps, of course, that there is an air of tragedy about the book. A tragedy that seems inherent in the time and place: the darkness is too recent and it doesn’t feel like it can be truly over, there is another darkness waiting to return, to reclaim the world, hovering just beyond what we can sense. And for all the artificial gaiety, the desperate fun, there is still an underlying awareness that it cannot last forever. And so you keep reading, aware of the shadow, needing to know who will fall victim to it and who will not. The characters are too well drawn, you are invested in them, you know that doom awaits, but you need to know what doom and who will it claim, who will emerge into the light. With such a large cast you know that some endings will be tragic, some will be happy, but you also know how smoothly Atkinson can whip the rug from under your feet. And she does, of course, and there are tragedies, though not what you expected, and there is happiness but not necessarily what you anticipated. And in the end it just feels like the inevitable consequence of this particular time, this particular place.

And after all that it feels like I ripped through the book in no time, even though it took three weeks.

Memories of a year I’d rather forget

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books of the year, Maureen Kincaid Speller

Well I suppose there’s one bright thought: 2023 cannot be worse than 2022. Frankly, when you have experienced the death of the one person who means more to you than anyone else ever could, it is hard to imagine how things might go further downhill from there. The great demons of our existential despair – death, disease, destitution – seem pretty tame in comparison to the psychic pain I have endured, and continue to endure. I mourn Maureen, and I will surely do so for the rest of my life, but at the same time, to honour her memory, to honour everything that our life together meant to us both, I have to start finding some way back into life. At the moment – baby steps – I am doing that mostly through small routines, small habits.

One such fairly meaningless little habit that I have maintained every year for longer than I care to count, is my New Year practice of recording all of my reading and writing of the previous twelve months. Even this bears testimony to the wretched character of the year. 2020 and 2021, the years of pandemic and lockdown and the psychological dis-ease that swept over us all, had seen the number of books I read fall off a cliff. From well over 70 books read in 2019 (a fairly typical year), the number plunged to less than 60 in 2020, and less than 40 in 2021. 2022 was supposed to be different, in earnest of which I set out to write here about every single book I finished, a practice I was able to maintain until March.

But the world changes in a moment, a second can mark the irreparable transition from one reality into another. One morning in March Maureen turned her head and there was a sharp crack in the neck. That was the first indication we had of the cancer that had already spread from her breast to her bones and her liver. The next six months was a descent into hell, hopes raised and dashed, cancer retreating and returning, other infections cruelly weakening her so that by the end she was too weak to take the chemotherapy that might have extended her life. She died in September, and during that stretch from Spring to Autumn I continued to read, but not much and it was an almost insuperable labour, and though I dutifully noted each title as I finished it, there are books in there that I barely remember. And since then, the final quarter of the year? I have continued to struggle with reading. I have written reviews, most of which are quite substantial (though I can make no claims for their quality), but it is only now, in the last week or so of the year, that I am beginning to rediscover how to read for pleasure.

So this year the total of books finished is roughly the same as last year, though the bulk of that reading came in those first three months when the world still seemed normal.

In some ways, I suppose, it should have been a triumphant year. I actually had two books published, which hasn’t happened before and is unlikely ever to happen again. Yet when they did appear, I barely even noticed. The first, Brian W. Aldiss, part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series from University of Illinois Press, arrived during the period when Maureen was at home, in a hospital bed set up in the dining room. I was expecting this one to be controversial, it offers a measured take on his work, praising some and criticising others, and I anticipated that the Aldiss acolytes would condemn the fact that it did not offer unalloyed praise. As it was, the response has been more positive than I predicted, though I was struck by the fact that the two reviews by women that I have seen both pick up on what I call his “priapic masculinity”. One of those reviews, by the way, appeared in the TLS, the first time I’ve been reviewed there which was quite a thrill, though by the time that appeared Maureen was in a care home and I wasn’t really paying that much attention. The second book, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion, part of the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon series, arrived when Maureen was in the care home, though I was able to show it to her. Anecdotally it seems to be quite well received, but I’ve seen no reviews so far. And frankly I wasn’t in any sort of state where I could do anything to promote it. I was proud of the book when I wrote it, now it’s just too associated with a bad time.

And that was nearly the sum total of my writing to appear this year. The only review published was this one, written in 2021; none of the things I’ve written this year have so far appeared. There was one essay I put on this blog, “A Taxonomy of Reviewing“, which was something that had been on my mind for a long time. For a while it seemed to attract some attention, but as is the way of things it has since faded from view.

As for my reading, well, as I say, it started optimistically enough …

1: Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton, an account of the division of Berlin after the Second World War, leading up to the Berlin Airlift. I wrote about it here.

2: April in Spain by John Banville, another of his crime novels that would, until recently, have appeared under the Benjamin Black name. I wrote about it here.

3: The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee, a curious but rather charming historical novel about New York that I wrote about here.

4: On the Cusp by David Kynaston, the latest volume in his magisterial Tales of New Jerusalem sequence, though this one concentrates on just a few months in one year, 1962. It was the year I was ten, as I say here.

5: The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan. In previous iterations if this post I would highlight in bold those books that seemed to me particularly significant. It didn’t seem appropriate this year, but any other time this would certainly have been in bold, as I say here.

6: I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes, which I wrote about here.

7: Maigret by Georges Simenon, which I also wrote about here.

8: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is one of those big, important books whose importance is not one whit diminished by the fact that I don’t always agree with it. I wrote about it here, and also here.

9: Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve. I’ve been finding myself returning again and again to an interest in art, particularly 20th century British art, and this is one of the best books I’ve encountered on the subject, as I explain here.

10: Cecile is Dead by Georges Simenon.

11: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan. The second of her books I read this year, and the second that would have been shown in bold in another time. I wrote about it here, but this was where the world went wrong. Everything read after this point was intermittent, and I was able to write about none of them (except for those, later in the year, where I produced reviews).

12: The Cellars of the Majestic by Georges Simenon.

13: The Judge’s House by Georges Simenon.

14: Signed, Picpus by Georges Simenon. While Maureen was increasingly unwell at home, but before she went into hospital for the first time, I would often read to her. What I read was these four Maigret novels, from Cecile is Dead to Signed, Picpus. Now, I remember nothing about them, I could not distinguish one from the other to save my life. We enjoyed them at the time, that is all I know.

15: Witcraft by Jonathan Ree. I referenced this book in the second piece I wrote about The Dawn of Everything, and said I would write at length about the book later. That, now, is not going to happen. But anyone with an interest in the history of British philosophy should read this book, it is endlessly fascinating.

16: Home is the Hunter by Helen MacInnes. This is, so far as I am aware, the only play that Helen MacInnes wrote, and the only thing not set in the contemporary or near-contemporary world. It is, in fact, a comedy that usurps the common story told of the return of Odysseus to Ithaka, and it played with time sufficiently for me to suggest to John Clute that I write an entry on it for the SF Encyclopedia.

17: The Schirmer Inheritance by Eric Ambler. No, sorry, my mind is a blank. I like Ambler and I’m pretty sure I enjoyed this when I read it, but I have no memory of the story whatsoever.

18: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr. Was this the one set on Cuba? These are good books, well written, tightly plotted, it seems wrong that this has so thoroughly and so quickly fled my memory.

19: Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon. By now, Maureen was in hospital, and as it turned out I wouldn’t read to her again. She had already read this, so I picked it up in order to keep up with the series. Not one of the really good ones, I’m afraid.

20: American Stutter 2019-2021 by Steve Erickson. Maureen gave me this, not quite the last book she gave me but close. It is Erickson, of course I was eager to read it, and it is typically excellent, an idiosyncratic personal account of the politics at the end of the Trump era. I wish I had read it in better circumstances, I would have had so much more to say.

21: Checkmate to Murder by E.C.R. Lorac. Maureen came across this somehow, and I read it out of curiosity. Lorac (a pseudonym, it will surprise you to learn) wrote a whole string of crime novels around mid-century. A number of them have been republished by the British Library, I’m not sure I would have bothered. The writing is pedestrian and the plotting lame.

22: The China Governess by Marjory Allingham. To make up for the dull taste left by Lorac, I turned back to Allingham. This is another of her stories set in a small social circle, this time one with money. It is not among her best, I think, but it is so much more satisfying than the Lorac.

23: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. During the weeks when she was at home during the summer, Maureen got all of the Night Watch novels that we didn’t already have. She really enjoyed them, and at her insistence I tried this one. I can appreciate why people like them, but it doesn’t really work for me. But that is something I have found with practically everything by Pratchett that I’ve read. I can sit back and recognise how good they are technically, but I’ve never really been able to immerse myself in them.

24: The Club by Leo Damrosch. The Club was a prototypical gentleman’s club founded in 1764, mainly as a device to lift Samuel Johnson out of one of his depressions and which continued for several decades. It’s members included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joseph Banks and others. In other words, it is a remarkable cross-section of the literary and political world of the late 18th century. A fascinating subject for a book, you might think, and that is indeed what this volume purports to be. Except it isn’t. Damrosch uses the Club as an excuse for one more book about Dr Johnson and James Boswell (who wasn’t even invited to join the Club until nearly ten years after it was founded). There are rather grudging chapters that divert our attention to others – Reynolds, Garrick, Gibbon – but he quickly get back to telling us about Johnson and Boswell. Indeed most of the book hardly even mentions the Club. The style is journalistic, not always convincing, and mostly concerns the individual endeavours of the various members while telling us next to nothing about how the Club operated and any sense of collective endeavour associated with it. It is a big, well-reviewed and ultimately disappointing book.

25: While We Still Live by Helen MacInnes. Maureen had been giving me a MacInnes book every birthday and Christmas for some years, and she had completed the set, in a uniform Titan edition, just before she fell ill. This one was an early novel written during the war about Polish resistance to the initial Nazi invasion. It had been initially published as While Still We Live, a line from the Polish national anthem. I first encountered it, back in the 70s, as The Unconquerable. The latest Titan reprint has opted for a slightly distorted and clumsier version of the original title. It is the longest book she wrote, and you can tell it’s early (the immediacy of the parts of the book set just before the invasion make me wonder if it wasn’t the first thing she tried to write, a novel perhaps put aside for what would be her first published novel, Above Suspicion), it reads like an apprentice work, over-long, unsteady in its pacing, and definitely getting more dramatic as it progresses.

26: Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest. I reviewed this, and conducted a parallel interview with Chris, for Interzone. I’m not sure when it is due to appear, but I certainly haven’t seen it yet.

27: Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis. Around the time I started reading this, Maureen had been rushed back into hospital with pneumonia; by the time I finished she was being transferred to the care home where she would spend the last weeks of her life. Not ideal circumstances for reading about someone I consider a comic genius. But this is certainly an excellent biography.

28: Space for Peace by Richard Howard. Throughout those last weeks, whenever I needed to leave Maureen’s room while she was attended by the care assistants or the psychiatrist or the doctor or what have you, I would be sitting in the lounge making notes about this book, and the next one on the list, for reviews that were already over-due. This is a book about Bob Shaw and James White, considering them more from the perspective of Irish literature than British science fiction. An interesting take, if not always convincing. I reviewed it for Foundation.

29: The Rise of the Cyberzines by Mike Ashley. This was the book I was reading when she died. It is the final volume in Ashley’s five-volume history of sf magazines. I have issues with the whole series, and this volume exemplifies them all. It is valuable as a data set and terrible as a history. But I had the chance to express all that in a long review for SF Studies.

30: Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes.

31: The Hidden Target by Helen MacInnes. The last two Helen MacInnes novels that Maureen had collected for me, and basically all that I was capable of reading in the weeks immediately after her death. They are both relatively late works, so not novels I had encountered during my binge-reading of MacInnes back in the early 70s, but they are both good examples of her style.

32: The War of Nerves by Martin Sixsmith. I suppose this is where I, very tentatively, started reading for pleasure again. But it was tentative and, with the exception of a couple of review books, my taste led me instinctively to non-fiction. This is one of those areas of 20th century history that I have found myself coming back to again and again, often in very different aspects. I first got interested in the Cold War through my interest in espionage, but that led me to deception, and through that to the way culture was was shaped, sometimes deliberately, by government agencies and by those things that were commanding popular attention. Hence Louis Menand’s The Free World, which I read last year. This feels like something of a companion volume, a look at the Cold War years from a psychological perspective. It is particularly interesting in its discussions of the way both East and West consistently misread the fears and intentions of the other side. There were occasions when you sense that if one side or the other had only begun to pay attention to what was motivating the other side there wouldn’t have been a Cold War at all.

33: Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson. Let me explain: I really like Hutch’s writing, and the Fractured Europe sequence is, I believe, one of the most important text’s in contemporary science fiction. And this late addition to the sequence is, in some ways, one of the best. So it will demonstrate something of my mental state when I say that I began reading this in the middle of October (probably around the time of the funeral), and only finished it late in November. Yet in some ways I felt I was racing through it, I was so caught up in the story. I reviewed the novel for Locus.

34: The World Set Free by H.G. Wells. Another review, this one for the BSFA.

35: The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. In a sense this doesn’t belong on the list since I didn’t actually finish it. My copy of the book (an American first edition hardcover) turned out to have a signature missing, 16 pages absent from the book, which meant I was lacking the majority of the last chapter and the opening of the Epilogue. But by the time I discovered this, I had so many arguments and frustrations with the book that I couldn’t be arsed to contact the publisher for a complete edition. In a sense this is trying to do for medieval history what The Dawn of Everything was doing for ancient history: challenging accepted views and suggesting that we need to look at the so-called Dark Ages with new eyes. Now I am up for this approach, I am very sympathetic to the aim of this book, but … and it is a very, very big BUT … it is so clumsily done. They don’t spell out the analyses they are arguing against, and they counter these analyses with broad generalisations rather than well presented research. The quality of the writing is – shall we be polite – poor. And all too often I found myself unconvinced by arguments I wanted to believe. What they are arguing in this book is, I think, correct, it’s just that we need a far more thorough and systematic presentation of that argument.

36: The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture by Mark Bould. The title is almost longer than the book, which is very short, really just an extended essay. It is also the best thing I have read by Mark, and I was crying out for more, more, more. At some point during the last months of her life, Maureen read this and raved about it, and she was right. I have a feeling that ideas from this book will pervade my thinking for some time to come.

37: Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism and all that Jazz by Kevin Jackson. The last book of the year, finished in the early evening of the last day of the year, and the first of my Christmas presents to myself. We seek patterns, it’s one of the ways we try to make sense of the world, and one of the patterns we look for is a starting point. In truth, to say X began then is usually wrong, things tend to evolve over time, but there are moments when things seem to come together in a significant way. The windy October day in 1962, for instance, when the first Bond movie and the first Beatles single were released on the same day. Or, 40 years earlier, when Modernism took root. Oh Modernism wasn’t born in 1922, there are traces of it back into the previous century, and the First World War played a major part in its development, but 1922 was the year it all seemed to come together, forging a way into public consciousness and creating a template that others would follow. 1922 was the year when Ulysses by James Joyce, “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence, Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence were all published, when the BBC was founded and broadcast radio began, when Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago and became a star, when the Irish Free State was formed and the civil war began and W.B. Yeats became an Irish Senator, when Andre Breton began the movement that would become surrealism, and more and more and more. This book is a day-by-day record of that year: it is light, engaging, opinionated, sometimes wrong (the hero of Agatha Christie’s second novel was not “Hercules Poirot”), often funny, and always readable. I’m a sucker for the sorts of coincidences that turn up on every page, and boy did 1922 seem to attract coincidences, a century later we have seen nothing on a par with the intellectual and creative ferment of that year.

And that is it. 2022 is over, 2023 has now begun. And speaking personally it could not possibly be as bad as last year. So we head on into the sunrise and try to be optimistic.

A Web of Absence

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nina allan

When I read Nina Allan’s latest novel recently, I noted that her work occupies two worlds, one is our everyday reality and the other is somewhere or somewhen else. We doubt this other world, but not sufficiently to dismiss it out of hand. There is an ambivalence which leaves the reader uncertain what to trust.

It is a delicate balancing act, but one that Nina Allan treads with remarkable aplomb. And it invariably leaves me wondering whether I am in fact reading mainstream fiction or genre fiction. No, that’s not quite right, better to say: it leaves me wondering whether I should read the work as mainstream fiction or as genre fiction. What matters in her work is not what the fiction is doing, but the perspective from which the reader approaches the fiction.

And now I have read The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories, which is, frankly, the best collection of short fiction I have read in years. There isn’t a dud here, but I remain uncertain what I have actually read. Turn to the back of the book and read the details of where these stories first appeared: Interzone and Clarkesworld and tor.com and so on. From the credits these are without exception science fiction or horror or fantasy or some such permutation of the fantastic. Yet I don’t believe I can read any of these stories as science fiction or fantasy or what have you. Oh the genre elements are there, but as a decorative detail hung in the background; what is in the foreground, what makes these stories what they are, is a strong sense of the psychological cost of living in quotidian reality. The genre doesn’t matter, we may be reading of a post-apocalyptic future or a landscape with fairies, but that is never what the story is about; what matters is the sense of reality.

The two worlds I talked about in relation to the novel are here, in practically every one of these stories. And what makes the story genre (if we are to approach it from that perspective) is invariably part of that second world, the world of doubt and uncertainty.

One of the things about stories is that they necessarily condense things that might otherwise be dissipated across the greater length and scope of a novel. You can see the shapes more clearly. So as I was reading these stories I became aware that my suggestion of two worlds was really too simple a reading of the work. The extra thing I noticed was that there is always an absence: somebody or something is missing from the protagonist’s picture of the world. More often that not that absence is family: there are missing parents through this book, but also siblings, friends, lovers. And the second world, the thing that promises to take the protagonist out of mundane reality, is connected with this absence, a way of coping with it. It is where the absent person has gone, or how they might be remembered. It is a place of doubt but also of hope, but it is a place that can never be reached, often because it is symbolically the place of death. Or perhaps it would be better to say it is the place where death would be if there were any certainty in this life. In “The Gift of Angels: An Introduction”, for example, the protagonist is a 50-odd-year-old science fiction writer, but the absence is his mother. When the protagonist was a child, she was part of what was meant to be the first manned expedition to Mars, but all communication with the ship was lost shortly before they were due to land on Mars. It is assumed she is dead, it is assumed they all died, but we don’t know; they may be there, still, just silent. And she is not the only character in this collection who is assumed to have died, but without anyone knowing for sure.

“The Gift of Angels: An Introduction” is a sequel of sorts (there are several stories in this collection that share characters and references without specifically continuing the same story) to the title story, which is, to my mind, perhaps the best story here. “The Art of Space Travel” is a perfect example of the generic ambiguity of these stories, and of the role that absence plays in the psychological reality we explore. At first blush, this seems perfectly science fictional (the story first appeared at tor.com): we are some way in the future. Years ago, the first manned flight to Mars was destroyed, perhaps by terrorist action; now, years later, a second expedition is being planned. Except that all of that is largely irrelevant to the story. The setting is a Heathrow hotel where two members of the Mars crew will be staying for just one night on their way to the launch facilities. The two crew members are celebrities, and so the hotel is besieged by cameramen and journalists. But none of this is centre stage, our attention is on Emily, the young woman who is in charge of the housekeeping staff at the hotel. There are two absences in her life. One is her mother, Moolie, who has dementia, which is a great demand on Emily’s life, as Moolie gradually withdraws from this reality. The second is the father Emily has never known. When younger, Moolie was a scientist peripherally involved with the first Mars mission, and there is a suggestion that the father might have been one of the astronauts who died, or at least one of her colleagues. The Mars mission, encapsulated in a book Emily has had since infancy called The Art of Space Travel, becomes the second parallel reality that helps her cope with the absences in this reality. The truth, of course, turns out to be rather more mundane than Emily might like, but that is often the way in Allan’s fiction as the non-mundane fades from view.

Much the same can be said for the other story that vies for my attention here, “The Science of Chance”. The setting is Moscow in an alternate reality in which an atomic bomb was dropped on the city during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, many years later, the city is pretty much back to normal when a child is discovered standing outside a subway station that miraculously escaped destruction in the bomb blast. The child cannot or will not speak, and the only clue to her identity is a purse she clutches ferociously, and which contains nothing but an old newspaper clipping. The clipping dates from just before the bomb, and by following up on it the investigator begins to sense that the child has actually slipped through time from the moment of the explosion. The absence in this story is, of course, the loss of an entire world that might have been had the bomb not fallen, and the child as a revenant from that world-changing moment is the secondary reality. Of course the truth is much more mundane, but we sense that giving up on this dream of a secondary reality is harder than facing up to the absence in quotidian reality.

Tempting as it might be to go on about how much I love each of the other stories in turn (I was particularly struck by “Heroes”, Microcosmos”, and “A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky’s lost movie Aelita“), I will resist that temptation. But there is one last thing: what’s with all the spiders? They play a significant role in at least two of the stories here, “A Thread of Truth” and “Four Abstracts”, and I remember quite a few years ago when I was asked to blurb Allan’s novella, Spin, which also has an arachnid fascination. Someday I must find out what’s going on here.

In the beginning

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Adam Smith, David Graeber, David Hume, David Wengrow, Francis Bacon, George Berkley, J-J. Rousseau, John Locke, Jonathan Ree, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

Let me cast my mind back a few weeks to when I was reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I persist in thinking that this is a fine and important book, despite the comment my post attracted (which I deleted) from some right-wing troll whose main beef with the book seemed to be that Graeber had written an article saying that the pandemic should be the springboard for a major change in society. Yes, well, I happen to agree with Graeber on that, and I remain unutterably sad and angry at the speed with which our serially incompetent politicians set the new normal as being exactly like the old normal, except worse.

Anyway, that aside, I said at the time that the book was at its best when it was raising doubts and questions and hesitations, and at its worst when it was being every bit as dogmatic as the people it criticised. One of the problems I couldn’t articulate came right at the start of the book, their particular origin story, if you like. They started with European Enlightenment ideas about the origins of society building on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes (“nasty, brutish, and short”) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“noble savage”). These ideas became a fixed view of how society developed that continue to plague theoretical work in anthropology and archaeology to this day.

Now, that last part may well be true, and the legacy of Hobbesian and Rousseauvian thought may be as toxic as they say. But I felt dissatisfied with their characterisation of Hobbes and Rousseau and their contemporaries without quite being able to put my finger on why.

However, I am currently reading Witcraft by Jonathan Rée. This is a big, marvellous, contextualizing history of philosophy in Britain from Bacon to Wittgenstein, and I really wish I had had the book 50 years ago when I was trying to study philosophy, it would have made a lot of sense of a lot of things. I will be writing about the book at greater length at some point, but that may be some months away; I’m only 200 pages into the book and I feel like I’ve barely begun.

The point is that I am currently revisiting a period in philosophy that was at the core of one of the first courses I took: the period from John Locke through George Berkley to David Hume and Adam Smith, essentially the period when British epistemology really took shape. One of the things that Rée makes clear is the historical perspective in this new philosophy that began with Bacon. There is a consistent quest to get to the origin of everything. It is there in Descarte’s cogito ergo sum, the attempt to strip away everything to get to the origin of our being; Locke was building on a similar idea with his tabula rasa, the proposal that our mind is a blank slate until experience starts to give us the wherewithal from which to build ideas.

Reading this, revisiting these ideas, I suddenly realized why I had been discontent with the first chapter of The Dawn of Everything. In anthropological and archaeological terms it may have been a perfectly fair reading, not so much of Hobbes and Rousseau but of the aftermath of their work. But in philosophical terms it was wide of the mark. What they were doing was part of the philosophical movement of the time. The quest for the origin of human identity, marked by the cogito and the tabula rasa, but common to most philosophical writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, was commonly extended to all aspects of human life. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke effectively extended the idea of the tabula rasa, the blank starting point upon which everything learned has to be written, to human society. Hobbes was doing the same; his “nasty, brutish and short” characterization of early humanity is like the Cartesian cogito: stripping back all the accretions of modern life in order to identify what, at base, is human society. The images of early human society – hunter-gatherer becoming herder becoming farmer becoming city dweller – that you find in Hume and Smith as well as Hobbes and Rousseau, was a thought experiment. It wasn’t, this is how things started, so much as, this is what you are left with when you strip away what we know as civilization. Just as, for Descartes and for Locke, the mind is empty until it is filled, so society is empty until it is filled.

This is what Hobbes and Rousseau were writing about. They were not laying out a plan for how the evolution of society had to happen, they were presenting a schema for examining what lay under the political nature of their contemporary English and French society. If subsequent anthropologists and archaeologists took this as a plan for how the past actually worked, they were wrong; and if Graeber and Wengrow thought this was what Hobbes and Rousseau thought they were doing, then they were wrong also.

The measure of all bulk

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Ben Nicholson, Cedric Morris, Christopher Neve, David Bomberg, David Jones, Edward Burra, Eric Ravilious, F.L. Griggs, Graham Sutherland, Ivon Hitchens, Joan Eardley, John Craxton, John Nash, John Piper, L.S. Lowry, Mary Potter, Paul Nash, Robin Tanner, Sheila Fell, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert, William Townsend, Winifred Nicholson

The enormous matter of landscape is the measure of all bulk, the floor on which we crawl.

I love this book. It is perhaps the best book about painting I have read, although in truth I haven’t read that many. I want this book beside me, or rather I want the author of this book beside, as I go around a gallery, explaining to me what I am seeing, what I am feeling.

Or maybe not, since Christopher Neve does quote, with approbation, Ben Nicholson saying that he does not like to talk in front of paintings, because it interrupts what the pictures are saying. But then, before this book, I’m not sure I really appreciated what the pictures were saying.

The book is Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting by Christopher Neve. It originally came out in 1990, but this is the revised 2020 edition, with additional content on Sheila Fell.

Sheila who?

Let me introduce you to this book. I like looking at pictures, but there has never been one type or school of art that I have been particularly drawn to. But over the last few years I have found myself more and more attracted to British landscape painting of the 20th Century. This started with a special delight in the pictures of Paul Nash and then spread from there to his brother John, their contemporary Eric Ravilious, and a few of their contemporaries. What I found in this book was how little I know of their contemporaries.

A Landmark, L.S. Lowry

Jagged Rocks under Tryfan, John Piper

What you find in this book are short essays on some 20 British painters. Besides the Nash brothers and Ravilious, there are some painters whose work I am reasonably familiar with (Stanley Spencer, David Jones – though mostly as a writer; I have been meaning to read In Parenthesis since I came across the old Faber edition in my teens, though I still haven’t got around to it – and L.S. Lowry – though I know him for his brilliant cityscapes, there is a landscape from 1936, “A Landmark”, reproduced in this book, that I had never seen before and that I find astonishing), and others whose name I recognize without really knowing anything of their work (Walter Sickert, Graham Sutherland, Winifred Nicholson, Edward Burra). But the book is mostly taken up with painters whose names I have never heard and whose work I have never seen (F.L. Griggs, Robin Tanner, Cedric Morris, William Townsend, Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Potter, David Bomberg), and my immediate and heartfelt response is: why have I never seen these paintings before. There is also one brief essay, “Melancholy and the Limestone Landscape”, that deals with a bunch of artists not otherwise covered, though the essay is not always about melancholy, or about limestone. Given how evocative the other essays are, this left me wanting more: what would it have been like if Neve had written at length about John Craxton or John Piper?

North Devon Landscape, David Bomberg

Aspatria under Snow, Sheila Fell

The essays are short, passionate, poetic, full of a deep love for the artists and their work. Many of them are based on conversations with the painters (Neve seems to have known most of them), but they are not interviews. The voice we hear is Neve’s throughout. He writes about how the paintings were made (Bomberg continuing to paint outside even when it was raining, Eardley perched on a precarious path above the seascape she painted so often, Sheila Fell unable to get away from the Cumberland village of Aspatria where she grew up, Ivon Hitchens crouching down so the scene was viewed through the uprights of grass stalks) and the techniques used. But mostly he talks about how the artists responded to the landscapes they painted, how the viewer responds to the pictures they see, how the choice of colours affected they way they saw things. It is brilliant stuff, you see the paintings as if they are fresh, still wet from the paint brush.

I admit, the first chapter, on Paul Nash who is perhaps the painter I know best in this collection, didn’t really seem to work for me. But the next chapter, on Ravilious, left me almost in tears at the end. And suddenly the language was speaking to me. Suddenly this was the best, perhaps the only way to write about painting.

Bathampton, Walter Sickert

Grey Day, Joan Eardley

What is the use, Alice said, of a book without pictures. Well there are pictures here, nicely reproduced on glossy paper. They are small, of course, because this is only a small paperback book, so the details aren’t always as vivid as they might have been. The extraordinary blotchy and somewhat unnatural colours in Sickert’s late painting of Bathampton, for instance, feel as though they should be massive so that you can drown in the colour. And the dark seas of Joan Eardley’s Catterline are possibly murkier than they might be if you were standing in front of them in a gallery. But my main complaint is that there are only 30-odd of them. Only. There should have been hundreds of them, huge, so that every painting Neve mentions, even in passing, you can see what he sees, feel what he feels.

This is a book to make you want to see paintings, because you’ve never seen them like this before.

People are Strange

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David Graeber, David Wengrow, J-J. Rousseau, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes

What do we have in common? We are living beings, with a measure of self awareness (most of us). We have a head, trunk, four limbs (most of us). We have language (most of us), though the languages are so diverse that they are generally mutually incomprehensible. Does any of that make us alike? Politically, culturally, socially, we are individuals; our tastes and interests and inclinations may overlap with other individuals, but rarely align exactly. We do not agree. On anything.

And we know this. It is built in to the way we operate. Politically, democracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed we wouldn’t need to vote on things. Politically, autocracies are built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed one strong leader wouldn’t need to impose his will on the masses. Hell, the fact that we have politics at all is built on the idea that we disagree; if we agreed, we wouldn’t need politics.

And everything else that goes to make us social animals, everything that shapes the world we have made, we ways we choose to live our lives, is built upon a foundation of disagreement, difference, strangeness. Laws, fashion, architecture, advertising, religion, art, language, cuisine – all are marks of difference. Where there is unity, it is imposed, it is artificial, or it is temporary.

This is what Thomas Hobbes meant when he insisted that, before the advent of government, people lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. He was wrong, of course. He was looking at the past through too narrow a focus, imagining that without the imposed artificial unity of “government” other kinds of unity, of social cohesion, were not possible. And as for the kind of top-down, autocratic government he favoured, the less said the better. But for now let us just consider that nasty, brutish and short remark: because this remark still tends to shape the way we consider the distant (and sometimes not-so-distant) past.

We are civilized. Our immediate ancestors were slightly less civilized, or at least enjoyed the fruits of a slightly less civilized political, social and cultural landscape. Our more distant ancestors were quite a bit less civilized. And the earliest ancestors we might choose to contemplate were little better than brutes. Civilization is evolutionary, everything is getting better and better. Everything was always and inevitably building towards the top of the heap where we now find ourselves. Think of it the way Victorians saw Britain as the crowning glory, the natural and indisputable end point of our evolution from Darwin’s apes.

And civilization is technological. The waymarkers on our social and cultural ascent are the inventions we made along the way: fire and agriculture and writing and gunpowder and the printing press and the internet. Look how much stuff we have now; we must be so much better than those who don’t have all this stuff. We forget that the ancient Greeks had steam power, they just didn’t see any use for it other than magically opening and closing temple doors; the Incas had the wheel, there are any number of them on exquisitely made children’s toys throughout the Andes, they just didn’t use them for transport. Stuff doesn’t really measure much, it’s just more and more things we can use or not as we see fit.

We are different. We do things differently, we think differently, we have different goals and different ways for reaching those goals. So why do we assume that human society has followed exactly the same evolutionary path wherever it has developed? It’s the story you get time and time again, there are nuances, variations, depending on which historians you read, but it’s a pretty simple story: first there were hunter-gatherers, then we invented agriculture, then cities developed, and from these grew states, and voila, here we all are today. And as a corollary, those societies that we encounter, in Amazonia or Central Africa, that are still basically hunter-gatherers, are clearly more primitive. It’s why Europeans felt justified in displacing Native Americans: they didn’t have cities, so they are clearly not as civilized as us. It’s why Israelis feel confident in displacing Arabs from their lands, because Arab agriculture is less developed. Its why logging companies feel confident in displacing nomadic societies in the Amazon, because the company is feeding the ever-hungry maw of a far more advanced society. And in Africa, Australia, across Asia the evolutionary tale is just a slightly more sophisticated version of might is right.

And yet … If our civilization has reached an evolutionary peak, why are we so dissatisfied? Why do we feel we have lost something: freedom, perhaps? Why do we feel inequality is growing?

This last question is the starting point for what I feel may be one of the most important books I’ve read in an awful long time: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

(One qualification: when I say “important” I emphatically do not mean that I think it is always right, that I agree with it. Indeed the whole point of the book is to make us question, to say, in the words of the old song, “It ain’t necessarily so”. And that applies to the book itself. When it raises questions, I applaud wholeheartedly; when it, very occasionally, makes dogmatic statements, I hesitate, I think “hold on, maybe not”. To give one, relatively minor, example: when discussing the so-called agricultural revolution, they mention an idea that one researcher has proposed, that wheat domesticated humankind. This they dismiss, quite airily, on the grounds that it takes human intentionality to domesticate anything. Yet I read this passage soon after watching a David Attenborough documentary in which he showed leafcutter ants in the jungle removing a particular type of leaf and carrying them to an underground fungus. The fungus rewarded the ants by secreting a liquor which the ants relished. When the fungus wants a different type of leaf, it changes the liquor, which cues the ants to seek out a different tree. Now it is not clear whether the fungus has domesticated the ants to fetch the leaves it craves, or the ants have domesticated the fungus to give off the liquor they crave, but it is clear that some sort of cross-species domestication has happened here without the necessity for any human intentionality. So, on reading that passage in the book my immediate reaction was to cry: “No!” But that is the beauty and the importance of the book: it is about questioning, about not accepting received ideas, and that includes questioning the book itself.)

So Graeber and Wengrow begin with a question about inequality. They trace this back to the Enlightenment, that curious moment in European history when ideas about the relationship between the individual and the state, about liberty, and about the relationship between the wellbeing of the individual and the growth of technology, all changed. It is a period whose origins can be traced back to the new philosophy of people like Descartes and Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, but which really came into its own during the 18th century leading up to the French and American revolutions, both of which owe their impetus and their guiding spirit to Enlightenment thinking. The ideas about liberty and inequality that emerged in this period seem to be connected to ideas that came into Europe through contact with certain Native American peoples. Graeber and Wengrow specifically concentrate on Kandiaronk, a Huron-Wendat leader whose ideas were disseminated through Europe at this time. But the Enlightenment response to these ideas, particularly as they were expressed by people like Rousseau, tended to suggest the superiority of the European over the “noble savage”; and these ideas informed, and continue to inform, the standard archaeological and anthropological response to the past. The record of the past is of interest in how it grew into modern European civilization; and to the extent that it doesn’t do that, then either the interpretation is wrong or the facts are of no interest. It is quite disturbing how many eminent scholars right up to the present day are quoted expressing exactly that notion.

The problem is that more and more archaeological and anthropological discoveries seem to contradict the standard narratives. But these are two fields that tend to be very focussed on their particular areas. An archaeologist working in Mesopotamia is unlikely to be very aware of anthropological findings from Meso-America. So discoveries that reinforce each other, or that contradict each other, aren’t always noticed. And when they are noticed, the author is likely to be dismissed as a crank. Graeber and Wengrow therefore began this enterprise simply as a way of drawing together theories and discoveries from across the board to satisfy their own curiosity; it only gradually turned from that into the book I have just read.

And it does represent a radical revision of everything I thought I knew about the past. For instance, there is an idea they call “schismogenesis” which suggests that social structures are deliberately set in place as the opposite of what a neighbouring society has adopted. Thus on the west coast of North America there were slave-holding societies bordering societies that emphasised the freedom of every individual member; it isn’t clear which came first, but it seems that one society was deliberately set up because of distaste for the way the other society operated. This is something that contradicts the standard anthropological narrative that societies emerge in response to circumstances rather than as a result of deliberate intent by its members.

Another standard narrative has it that the move to agriculture leads to hierarchies as people are in a position to accumulate wealth and hence power, which in turn leads to the growth of cities. But there are a host of discoveries that contradict each and every one of the assumptions in this narrative. Including evidence of societies that tried agriculture and abandoned it to return to hunter-gathering, and cities that seem unconnected with either hierarchies or agriculture. Patriarchy comes off particularly badly in this book (and they don’t even mention recent discoveries of warrior burials where the warrior in question is a woman). Minoan Crete, for example, has no signs of defensive walls around its cities, unlike the near-contemporary Mycenaean society in mainland Greece. The murals in places like Knossos show bare-breasted women, but naked men, and the women are invariably shown larger than the men. In any other society of a similar vintage, murals that show large male figures are universally considered to be showing kings or other important leaders; so there is no reason to assume the same is not the case in Knossos. And the so-called throne room at Knossos is arranged not for kingly display but as a council chamber where everyone can see everyone else. Meanwhile analysis of the goods Crete is known to have traded with Egypt and the Near East tend to heavily feature things like cosmetics. All the evidence seems to point to Minoan Crete being a peaceful, female led society. But its not the only one, there are similar findings in North America and Mesopotamia among others.

And there is so much more. Too much, almost; there were moments when I was losing track of all that was going on. Cities that seem to be structured on egalitarian lines, with all homes the same and with no palaces or temples. The notion of play-kings, which I found enchanting but I’m not sure I understood it fully. Societies that moved between settled and nomadic depending on the season, and had different leaders and different laws for each situation. Societies in which the king had absolutely no authority. Societies in which captives were either adopted into the tribe or killed gruesomely depending on whim. And more and more and more.

The book is rich, wonderful, questioning, unsettling. Apparently, before David Graeber’s death, it was intended that this would be the first part of a trilogy. We can only hope that David Wengrow has enough material to continue with the project.

And also …

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Georges Simenon, Helen MacInnes

I knew, from the moment I decided to write up every book I read in this blog, that there would be some books where I didn’t have much to say. That’s okay, I thought, I can do a short entry, or I can cover two or three books in a post. These are two books I enjoyed, though I wouldn’t way either of them is particularly special.

First up is I and My True Love by Helen MacInnes. I like Helen MacInnes. I enjoyed her books when I was first into a spy novel jag back in the 1970s, and I am enjoying them again now since I rediscovered them a few years ago. They are substantial paperbacks, around 400 pages in most cases, yet I find them a very quick read. There are quite a few I’ve got through in just a day. They are colourful, usually stuffed with local colour, romantic in mood, cleverly constructed, marred if anything by an unthinking prejudice against anything on the political left. If you encounter anyone in her novels who sympathises with the left they are either a fool or evil. In the main they are a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours.

Most of her books were spy stories in one for or another. Brave men and resourceful women coming together in a desperate battle with Nazis in the early novels, communists in the later ones. The hero and heroine are always attractive, and having overcome the odds they get together at the end. But one or two of her novels dispensed with the spy plot and just told a straightforward romance. This one sits oddly in between. It tells of an unhappily married Washington wife who meets up again with the foreign diplomat that she had an affair with ten years before, and the book is basically about if and how they can get together. Except that the husband is something in American intelligence, the foreign lover is from Czechoslovakia, and someone has been leaking secrets to the Czechs. In fact the spy story aspect is downplayed so that you hardly notice it for most of the novel, as if MacInnes hadn’t quite decided what sort of novel she was writing. And unusually, indeed uniquely among those of her books I’ve read, it all ends unhappily.

The book has its interest, but it is undemanding and far from being one of her best.

The other recently read novel is Maigret by Georges Simenon. We’ve been reading the Maigret novels in sequence, and this represents a strange hiatus in the canon.

The first Maigret novel, Pietr the Latvian appeared in 1931. The 18th novel, Lock No.1, appeared two years later in 1933. In that novel, Maigret announced that he was retiring. The following year, 1934, there was a solitary Maigret novel, this one, just called Maigret. This was the first time that the name of the character had appeared in the title, though many of the later novels would take the form, Maigret and … What is interesting is that this is the last Maigret novel for nearly a decade, the next one, Cecile is Dead, appeared in 1942 during the German occupation (a time when Simenon’s behaviour was questionable at best).

Maigret is living in retirement in the country when his nephew, a rather incompetent police inspector, is arrested for murder. Maigret returns to Paris to investigate. To be honest, this is far from being one of the better Maigret novels. Without the resources of the Quai des Orfevres, the story mostly proceeds by luck rather than detection. And we know who the baddy is from quite early on, so the only real tension is how the pieces are going to fall out to allow Maigret to get his man.

There is a real sense that Simenon, like Conan Doyle before him, had had enough of his creation. I suspect he wanted it to end with Lock No.1, though even that novel feels like he was running out of steam. There is something almost inert about this novel, maybe it was a contractual obligation because it certainly has none of the sharpness or the invention of the earlier novels. It is going to be interesting to see whether, after a lay-off of eight years and with the intervention of a war, Simenon is able to rekindle his interest. There are, after all, another 55 novels to come.