Living in the Past

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Sarah Moss

Back in 1978, I remember watching a BBC television series called “Living in the Past”. In it, a group of volunteers spent a year living in a recreated Iron Age settlement. It was the first time I came across the phrase: experimental archaeology. (By this time I had long since read The Kon-Tiki Expedition and The Ra Expedition, but it would be some years later before I associated those adventures with experimental archaeology.)

I mention this only to suggest that there is nothing new in the idea of living in an Iron Age roundhouse. The various couples in the BBC series were not archaeologists themselves, but nor were they playing with the idea of being pre-Roman Britons. The programme showed it to be an often harsh and miserable existence. One family left part way through when their child fell ill, but everyone else stuck with it to the end. And if I remember rightly, there was a follow-up programme in which all of the participants insisted that they had learned from the experience.

Above all, it was not a game.

Which is where I start to have problems with Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. It is a highly-praised book, and I can understand and appreciate why that should be so. And yet I kept running up against doubts and questions.

The setting is an exercise in experimental archaeology that has been set up by a professor and three of his students. Also taking part in the exercise are a working class family, Dad, a bus driver who prides himself in being an enthusiastic and reputable amateur when it comes to ancient British history, his wife, and their daughter, Sylvie, who is the narrator. That’s rather too small a group to recreate Iron Age living, but it is just about acceptable for dramatic purposes.

The problem I have is that at no time do we get any notion of what the archaeologists are doing there. There is no aim to the experiment, and there has been no preparation for the experiment. When the students are sent out to forage for food, they have no notion of what foods might be found, or what might be edible and what poisonous. And the same goes for the professor, who has not prepared either his students or himself, and who seems to have no idea what he is doing from one moment to the next. As the supposed expert – he is, after all, teaching a course on experimental archaeology – it is as if he has suddenly found himself dumped in the Iron Age with no idea what to do next.

And because he is clearly not taking any of this seriously, neither do the students. They are all playing at the Iron Age, and by extension they are all playing at archaeology, even though for all four of them that is their chosen profession.

The only one taking any of this serious, and this is of course the point of the book, is Dad. Through him, of course, both Mum and Syl take it seriously, but only because they are terrified of Dad. And Dad is living in the past in more senses than one. He is the old-fashioned northern working class patriarch who rules his family by intimidation and violence. He is ready in an instant to thrash anyone who lapses from his strict and absolute rules. He is a monster, and far and away the most vividly drawn character in the novel. (But then, monsters do tend to leap off the page, don’t they?)

While the focus is on these three – horrific Dad, Mum cowed to inertia, and Syl more alert to what might trigger Dad’s violence than to anything else around her – the novel is chilly, sharp and powerful. But it needs the others. Or rather, it needs two of the others, the two male students are largely undifferentiated extras there to bulk out a scene as necessary. In the first place, it needs Molly, the careless, sybaritic student who gradually comes to realise what tortures, mental and physical, Syl is enduring. Molly is bright, mercurial, a flashing contrast to the dark, foreboding bulk of Dad.

But it also needs the Prof, because he is the one who enables the climactic expression of Dad’s violent and controlling nature. But the Prof is a non-entity, he has no character, at no point do we get any glimpse of why he is doing anything or what he thinks is going on at any point.

The purpose of experimental archaeology, particularly of the living-in-the-Iron-Age type, is practical. How did they live? How did they do that? What was it like? But at no point does this particular exercise in Iron Age living consider such questions; Syl has learned hard lessons, and so knows how to gather burdock roots and bilberries for the group to eat, but even such essential practicalities seem of little interest to anyone else. But rather, Dad’s madness (is he mad? We are not told, but there is surely something not quite sane about him) quickly steers the professor and his male students towards that bugbear of archaeological interpretation: ritual. They construct a ghost wall, a wicker fence adorned with skulls to frighten away the enemy. And after that, Dad convinces them to take the next step, the sacrifice, the bog body, and nobody cries halt, nobody says that is not why we are here. And yet we have to take Dad’s domination over the Prof as a given, because we never see it in action. And because we never understand the Prof, we never understand why events might follow this path.

The only other book by Sarah Moss I have read is her first novel, Cold Earth, a book with which I was considerably less enamoured than most other people seem to have been. I like Ghost Wall much more than that, but it is still a novel that feels as if something is missing, a little extra depth, a little extra solidity.

Little and Black

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Edward Carey, Esi Edugyan

My leisure reading this year, as an escape from the science fiction I’m contractually obliged to read, has been roughly split between spy fiction and historical fiction. Of the latter, two books stand out not because they are among the best of the bunch, although they are, but because there is a curious congruity between them.

One is set in the late-18th century, the other in the early-19th century. Each consists of a first person narrative by a child who is alienated from their society by reason of their person: one is female, of stunted growth and ugly; the other is black with a disfigured face. Each gains their eventual status by ability in art and interest in science.

The novels are both named for their narrators. Little by Edward Carey is the story of Anne Marie Grosholtz, born in poverty in Alsace in, as the first sentence of the novel tells us:

the same year that the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Minuet for Harpsichord, in the precise year when the British captured Pondicherry in India from the French, in the exact same year in which the melody for ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ was first published.

That enjambment of oddly disconnected detail is typical of Carey’s distinctive style. I have read and enjoyed two of his novels before this, Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva, and though this new novel doesn’t have the same perverse air of unreality the writing has much the same curious quality. In this instance, though, the novel cleaves close to historical reality. Little Marie, who never grows above five foot, goes while still a young child to work as a housekeeper for an eccentric doctor in Berne. She becomes interested in his work, and through her preternatural abilities as an artist starts to make a contribution to his work in the study of body parts. So much so that she goes with him when two visitors, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Louis-Sebastien Mercier, persuade him to go to Paris. She plays a part in helping Doctor Curtius in setting up a business displaying wax heads of famous Parisiens. For a while Marie is taken up by one of the minor princesses in the Royal Family and spends a year living in a cupboard at Versailles. Then comes the revolution; Marie barely survives, and after struggling to pull together what remains of her and Doctor Curtius’s business, she eventually leaves for London. There, at some point after the end of the novel, she will become Madame Tussaud.

It’s a marvellous novel, full of curious details, vivid characters, snappy lines, all helped out by Marie’s own line drawings as provided by the author himself. Although this is a fairly straightforward historical novel it still has an air, familiar from Carey’s other novels, of being situated at a slight angle to reality. Yet at the same time it conveys absolute conviction, you get a sense that the young Madame Tussaud must have been exactly like this.

The other novel, which seems to parallel Little, is Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. Like Carey, Edugyan has written a couple of novels before this, though in this case I haven’t read them. I get a feeling that I should.

Also in apparent parallel with Little, the blurb on the back of my copy of Washington Black says “Inspired by a true story”. This, however, is the only reference to such a “true story” anywhere in the book. There is no author’s note to provide context, no hint of such a story in the acknowledgements, none of the quoted reviews make any reference to such a source story; so I really don’t know what to make of this claim. I am inclined to doubt it, though that does nothing to gainsay the quality of the novel.

Washington Black is ten when the novel opens, which makes him a few years older than Marie, but he is even more disadvantaged: he is a slave on the Faith Plantation on Barbados. At the time, around 1830, slavery on the sugar plantations of the British West Indies was even harsher than in the southern states of the USA, and Faith Plantation has just been taken over by a new owner who is particularly harsh. But Edugyan doesn’t spend too much time spelling out the familiar iniquities of slavery. The new owner’s brother, a tall, thin man known as “Titch”, has also arrived. He has a sort of soft, liberal sensibility that makes him uncomfortable about slavery, though he doesn’t act on this discomfort. However, Titch is also a naturalist and would-be inventor, and his latest invention is a balloon-powered flying craft. Wash, small and light, would be an ideal assistant in his experiments. The fact that Wash is sharp, a quick learner, and has untapped artistic ability, cements the relationship, particularly when an accident with the gas being used for the balloon explodes and permanently disfigures Wash’s face.

When a visitor to the plantation commits suicide in Wash’s presence, Wash knows that as a slave he will get the blame regardless of what actually happened. So he and Titch escape aboard the flying craft, which almost immediately ditches in the middle of a storm. There begin a series of highly coloured picaresque adventures, aboard ships on illicit business, encountering the underground railroad in Virginia, being chased by a slave catcher, heading deep into the Arctic wastes where Titch wanders off alone into the snow. Edward Carey’s novel sticks pretty close to historical reality, but the way that the language is used suggests a heightened reality; Esi Edugyan writes a careful, factual prose, but the story she tells is full of the wild action, coincidences, chance meetings and extravagant settings of an early-19th century melodrama. In both cases, I find it fascinating that the style and the story seem at odds, yet work so well together.

At a later stage in the novel, Wash falls in with a noted naturalist and his beautiful daughter. Wash’s ability as an artist earns him the chance to illustrate the naturalist’s new book, and his interest in science helps him devise a way in which an exhibition of sea creatures can be staged in which the creatures are live rather than dead. It was at this point that I found myself wishing that, like Carey, Edugyan had found some way to include Wash’s drawings in the book.

Washington Black was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a worthy honour that I don’t begrudge it in the least; Little seems to have slipped by almost unnoticed, though I think it is at least as good a novel. Together, the two make for an intriguing and remarkably satisfying pairing.

Cloak and Dagger

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Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes

There is a line that has appeared on the cover of just about every Helen MacInnes novel I have ever seen. It comes from a Newsweek review:

Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

I’m not so sure about Greene, I’ve not really read enough of his “entertainments” to know how valid the comparison might be. But Ambler!

There is a pattern that recurs in most, though not all, of the spy stories by both Ambler and MacInnes. The central character is an amateur, often a journalist or a writer of some sort, caught up unexpectedly in events way outside their normal experience. These events are usually triggered by a chance encounter, escalate at a rate that does not allow the protagonist time to get away, and despite being an amateur the protagonist proves to have reserves of ingenuity that makes him (always him) an effective player in a dangerous game. The drama plays out far from the protagonist’s familiar home territory, and there is usually a journey of some sort central to the action that keeps everyone off balance.

Let us take, for example, one novel by each that I happen to have read recently. Neither is among the best known examples of their work, but they are both typical of their author’s storytelling.

Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger (1937) was his second published novel (Ambler’s own preferred title, Background to Danger, is, I think, better). It is the story of Kenton, a freelance journalist, travelling around Europe in 1936. In Nuremberg he loses all his money playing poker dice and has to get a train to Vienna where he hopes to find an old acquaintance who might be persuaded to lend him more cash. But on the train he runs into Herr Sachs who claims to be a Jew escaping the Nazis, and persuades Kenton to smuggle an envelope of what he claims are bonds across the Austrian border in exchange for cash. But before Kenton can return the envelope Sachs is killed, and Kenton is framed for the murder. Kenton then finds himself caught in a spy game between a wily Russian agent and a ruthless representative of a British oil company.

Snare of the Hunter (1974) is, on the other hand, a relatively late work by Helen MacInnes (her first novel had appeared in 1941, so she was a pretty close contemporary of Ambler). This is the story of David Mennery, an American music journalist, who, years before, had briefly befriended a Czech girl, Irina. Now Irina has escaped to the West, and because he once knew her David is recruited to help her on her journey across Austria and into Switzerland where she can be reunited with her father, a famous author in exile. But Irina’s escape has been facilitated by her ex-husband, a powerful figure in the Czech secret service who wants to use Irina as a way of getting to her father.

Though separated by nearly 40 years, there are familiar patterns in both works: David and Kenton play much the same role, with similar competence, and the drama is largely played out in the course of a journey. (There is no journey in another Ambler from the same time, Epitaph for a Spy, but the setting is a small hotel in the south of France and all of the characters are there at the mid-point of a journey.)

Of course there are differences between Ambler and MacInnes. For MacInnes the protagonist is always a hero figure, noble, bold, in the right; though she practically always includes a traitor among those close to the protagonist upon whom he must depend. For Ambler, on the other hand, the protagonist is not morally pure, he is an ambiguous figure who learns resolution only in the face of the danger he encounters. On the other hand, once he has worked out who he can trust, those characters remain trustworthy throughout the novel.

Both writers set their work in relatively exotic European locations; Ambler tending towards Eastern Europe and Turkey, MacInnes preferring glamorous places such as Paris, Saltzburg, Malaga and the Greek Islands. But the location was intimately tied to the romance of MacInnes’s work and she included lots of confident local knowledge in her often extensive scenic descriptions. Ambler didn’t really care that much for landscape, and his  scene setting could often be quite perfunctory. There is, for instance, no sense of France in Epitaph for a Spy.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is philosophical, or at least political. For MacInnes her early novels, written during and just after World War II, invariably featured Nazis as villains; but once the Cold War got started her villains were always of the left: any communist was bad, any fellow traveller was bad, anyone whose politics were left of centre was a fool who unwittingly aided bad people. Ambler was considerably less clear-cut in his choice of villains. In novels like The Mask of Dimitrios or Uncommon Danger the villain acts as an agent for big business, because it is business that shapes European politics more than anything else. Because international business is more corrupt and villainous even than the Nazis, the good guys tend to be on the left. I suspect that Uncommon Danger is one of very few British spy novels in which the Soviet spy is a hero. By the mid-Fifties, Ambler had become less comfortable with communism, and the Russians started to become the villains, but he was never as vehemently anti-left as MacInnes always was.

Ambler’s novels are shorter and tighter: he tends to get down to plot as quickly as possible, and spends little time on extraneous details that might decorate that plot. MacInnes is more expansive, her novels tend to be considerably longer than Ambler’s. She likes to take time setting the scene and situating her characters very precisely in their landscape, she also tells a romance as much as a drama. Nevertheless, MacInnes owes a clear debt to Ambler, both are exploring a common model of the cloak and dagger tale.

Pantglas

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Owen Sheers

Pantglas means “The Green Hollow”. It is one of the names, along with Hafod Tanglwys and Bryn Golau, for that part of South Wales where the Taff is joined by its tributary, the Fan. It is best known as the mouth of the Fan, or Aberfan.

I had just turned fourteen at the time. During the summer, despite my growing dislike of football, I had watched England win the World Cup while we were on holiday in Newquay. Over the following years I watched with absolute fascination the developing Apollo programme that would, in less than three years, land a man on the moon. Both of these events have their tangential part to play in the story. But in between came those devastating black and white images. We didn’t yet have BBC2, so we didn’t yet have colour television, but that was probably just as well. The images from Aberfan deserved to be in black and white; I’m not sure they could be understood or fully appreciated any other way.

The coal tips that surrounded the village had been raised above groundwater that the National Coal Board consistently denied existed, though the villagers had played in those streams for generations. There had been reports that the spoil tips had been seen to move, but officially this hadn’t happened, and besides it would be far too expensive to move the tips, probably more expensive than the mine was worth. And the early part of that October had been wet, a lot of rain had fallen.

Just after nine o’clock on 21st October 1966, with a sound like thunder, the coal tips slid inexorably down the hillside and buried the local school, where the last school day before half term had just begun. 116 children died, along with many of their teachers and several others. They were buried alive under slag, under thick black mud, mud that couldn’t be dug out because as soon as one spadeful was lifted, another poured in to take its place. 

Fifty years on, the film of antlike figures, miners and army and civil servants and shopkeepers and farmers and anyone who happened to live within reach of Aberfan moving across a black landscape that seems monstrously inhuman is still vivid in my memory. I was the same age as some of those victims.

I didn’t set out to buy a book about Aberfan. I’m not sure I really wanted to read a book about Aberfan. But I  love the novels and plays of Owen Sheers that I have read; I account him one of my favourite poets, yet I have never read a book of his poetry. So, in a bookshop in Caernarfon, I picked up what seemed to be his latest slim volume, The Green Hollow. It was only as I read it that I realised what it was I was reading, and by then it was impossible to put down.

It started out as a BBC drama-documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the disaster. Here it is presented as a verse play, based on the testimonials of survivors and imaginative reconstructions of the words of some of the victims. 

The book is in three parts, ‘Children’, ‘Rescuers’ and ‘Survivors’. The first part follows a group of children and their parents as they wake that morning (something in the rhythm of the words at this point reminded me of the opening of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas) and set out for school. It’s a mixture of the usual (plans to go and see a film or watch a football match, the ordinariness of stopping in a sweetshop along the way) and the aspirational (dreams of being an astronaut). 

The second part is the testimony of those who worked, desperately, hopelessly, to rescue the children. The medical student who had been on his way to a family christening, the young journalist on his way to what initial reports said was an outhouse collapsing at a school, the bank clerk in his best suit, the mayor’s secretary who found herself drafted in to go door to door and ask if there were any children who weren’t home. In Wales at that time the practice was to draw the curtains when there had been a death in the family; at one point the journalist realised that every house in the street had their curtains closed. Perhaps the most affecting moment came when rescuers got into one more or less intact classroom and found the teacher, a one-time rugby star who had been drafted in only a few days before as a temporary replacement for a teacher who had had a heart attack, obviously trying to protect his huddled class of wide-eyed, wide-mouthed children. Every one of them was dead.

The final part is the testimony of residents of Aberfan in 2016, some survivors and some of their descendants. In some ways this is a feel-good story, the town pulled together and most of the surviving children did quite well for themselves. But the shadow, the hollow eyes, the ghosts never go away. The past is ever present. And along the way we learn that after the tribunal that blamed no-one, prosecuted no-one, forced no-one to resign, the National Coal Board inspected the remaining tips at Aberfan and declared they were safe and there was no need to remove them. It took the formation of a local committee, and the sort of direct action that included sacks of slurry on the Welsh Secretary’s doorstep, before the tips were eventually removed. In a development that seems particularly Welsh, once the committee had been successful the members formed themselves into a male voice choir. The choir is still going.

The Green Hollow is an odd book, falling somewhere between oral history and epic verse, but it is one of the most powerfully affecting things I have read for a very long time.

Barry Unsworth, Mooncranker’s Gift

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Barry Unsworth

I first encountered the work of Barry Unsworth when I read Stone Virgin. I cannot now remember why I picked it up, perhaps a review, but I loved the book. Something about the mood, the tone of voice, the atmosphere, captivated me. I went back and picked up his earlier, Booker-shortlisted Pascali’s Island, and then bought most (though I have recently learned, not all) of the books he published subsequently. These include his Booker Prize winner, Sacred Hunger, The Ruby in her Navel, which I happen to think is the very best thing he wrote, and, of course, his last novel, a sort-of sequel to Sacred Hunger, The Quality of Mercy. When he died, less that a year after that novel came out (on the same day that Ray Bradbury died, as it happens, prompting one American commentator to say that Bradbury invented the future, and Unsworth invented the past), I made a promise to myself that I would read, or in most cases re-read, all of his novels and write about them. Circumstances get in the way, but as we were preparing for our holiday this year, Maureen asked me to recommend something for her to read. I thought she would really enjoy The Ruby in her Navel, and while I was taking that off the shelf for her I thought that it was maybe time to pick up one of the Unsworth’s I’ve not previously read for myself. Which is how I came to read Mooncranker’s Gift.

Mooncranker’s Gift was his fourth novel, which makes it the earliest of his books I have yet read, it was also a book or two before he turned to the historical novel, which is where he was at his absolute best. The contemporary novels of his that I have read have never quite hit the spot in the way that his historical writing did. On the other hand, Mooncranker’s Gift is largely set in Turkey, as is Pascali’s Island, and he is at least as good at evoking a foreign setting as he is at evoking an historical setting. If this suggests a certain ambivalence about the book, well that’s fair enough: there are moments of beauty and moments of dazzling writing that clearly herald his finest work; but at the same time there are clumsy moments that suggest a writer still awkwardly learning his craft.

There is also an uncertainty about what he is doing with the novel. It is, in part, a rather crude 1960s sex comedy (the novel was first published in 1973), and both the sex and the comedy require a sprightliness that is not really Unsworth’s natural style. But intimately interweaved with this is a meditative work on guilt, corruption, and the distinction between love and desire. This is something that Unsworth is considerably better at, and it is in these passages that you get a glimpse of the writer he would become. The trouble is that this thematic heart of the novel requires a much better story to bear it up.

Mooncranker is a one-time academic turned television personality who is now an alcoholic has-been making a living touring obscure parts of the world to deliver lectures on his past glories. He is a pathetic, self-obsessed figure who has practically no awareness of what is going on around him in the world. He is in Istanbul when young Farnaby encounters him. Farnaby is someone who has never quite worked out what he wants to do with his life and is currently living in Istanbul to research aspects of Turkish history in which he has no interest whatsoever. Farnaby had met Mooncranker ten years before, when Farnaby was just 13 years old and living with his aunt and uncle while his parents divorced. He had, at more or less the same time and with the same excessive enthusiasm, discovered religion and masturbation. 

He had also discovered Miranda, a friend of the family who was a year or two older than he was. They partnered each other successfully at tennis, explored the grounds, and started hesitantly developing a relationship. Then Mooncranker appeared on the scene. Mooncranker also has his eye on Miranda, and for him young Farnaby is just a nuisance who is in the way. At one point Mooncranker gives Farnaby a crucifix, which turns out to be composed of sausage meat wrapped in white bandages, and which quickly begins to decay in the summer heat. I was, I confess, never entirely convinced of either the gift, which seemed particularly ludicrous, or of Mooncranker’s exact motives at this point. It is a significant moment that shapes Farnaby’s future, it is the moment that the entire plot hinges upon, and it made no sense to me. 

Be that as it may, the stinking, rotting crucifix is apparently enough to destroy Farnaby’s religious belief and allow Mooncranker to walk off with Miranda.

Now, ten years later, when Farnaby reluctantly meets Mooncranker at his uncle’s behest, he finds a broken figure so far gone with alcoholism that his memory has been largely destroyed. He has no notion who Farnaby is. He clearly needs hospital treatment, and Farnaby finds himself in the unwelcome position of having to get him into a hospital and keep him company there. In one of his more cogent moments, Mooncranker begs Farnaby to go and find his secretary who has recently left him. Farnaby is minded to turn the request down, until he learns that the secretary is Miranda.

She, it turns out, has gone to a spa hotel in the mountains of Anatolia. Farnaby follows her there, and a little later Mooncranker discharges himself from hospital and travels there also. What follows, pretty much the whole of the second half of the novel, is also the best part of the book. There is some bravura comic writing when the various residents of the hotel take to the pool in the twilight and snatches of disconnected conversations twist in and around each other for page after page. There’s a remarkable sense of place as various characters explore the mountains behind the hotel with their ruins of former civilisations. There is rather crude sex comedy as the various guests try to get laid with varying degrees of success. And there is a complex examination of belief and trust that suggests something of what Unsworth would become.

It is not, I suppose, a bad book; but it is not a place to start one’s reading of Barry Unsworth.

The Moon and the Other

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Ian McDonald, John Kessel

I wrote this review sometime last year, but so far as I am able to tell it was never published. So I’ve decided to put it here:

We begin with the title. John Kessel has already written several stories featuring the matriarchal Society of Cousins on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men”, went on to win the James Tiptree Award. That story took its title from a book that played a significant part within the story. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that this novel-length work in the same setting (though some years later) also takes its title from a book featured within the story.

In this instance, the book within a book is something that was written after a mysterious youthful episode by one of the novel’s central characters. That book was called Lune et l’autre, and Kessel’s title here is a literal translation. But in the original French, Lune et l’autre is a pun, L’une et l’autre, which we might colloquially render as “one or the other”. In English, the pun is lost, but the spirit of the pun, the issue of choice that it represents, informs the whole book.

(Parenthetically, it is also worth noting that Lune et l’autre was the title given to a French collection of Kessel’s four previous stories of the Society of Cousins, so the repurposing of that title here has yet more layers to it: homage, wordplay, not to mention a nightmare for future bibliographers.)

But let us consider more carefully what the title tells us about this book. The moon, yes, has been a familiar setting for science fiction since the days of Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin, but for practically all of that time the moon we have seen has been a single place, a unified polity; if there is a moonbase, a lunar society, then it is all under one central government. But of late, where we see the moon presented declaratively in a title, in Ian McDonald’s Luna, for example, the moon is far from unified. And that is also the case here. Aside from the Society of Cousins, at least half a dozen other independent, self-governing communities on the moon are mentioned. And though there is an over-arching Organization of Lunar States, these polities are far from unified in their background, beliefs or governance. The moon here in the title, as in McDonald’s diptych, signifies a place of division rather than unity.

If the moon provides the setting, however, it is the second element in the title that provides the plot. Because throughout the novel we are confronted with different understandings of what the other might be. In the quietus of the novel’s coda, the one and the other are seen to come together in a marriage, but that is a rare show of understanding and commonality in a novel in which the one and the other are perpetually at odds with each other. Indeed, one of the issues that confronts the reader is deciding what, in this context, the other might be. The other is, of course, the outsider, the rival, the threat, the one who is not like us, and the novel is crowded with contenders for that role. Indeed, one of the things that the novel insists upon is that everyone is the other to someone.

Thus, on one level, the Society of Cousins is the other. The Society started in California as a utopian movement, but has now been established on the moon for many decades. It is a society in which women, specifically a Council of Matrons, rule, while men are denied the vote. Sex is liberally available and men are valued members of society, they just have no say in its governance. But this social structure is anathema to the other lunar states, where men are in the ascendant, and which are dismissed by the Cousins as the patriarchy. So, to the other communities on the moon the Society of Cousins is looked on as the other, a curiosity, a disturbance in the status quo, perhaps a threat. The other states are not exactly uniform; the one we see most of, for instance, Persepolis, is a liberal Islamic democracy modelled on pre-Revolutionary Iran, but that religious strain is not found elsewhere. Nevertheless, these states are united in their dis-ease in the face of institutionalized female rule, and so one of the novel’s plot strands involves the establishment of a commission by the Organization of Lunar States ostensibly to examine the position of men in the Society of Cousins, really to provide an excuse for the OLS to take over the Society, and secretively to act as a cover under which enemies of the Cousins might smuggle in the means to launch an attack.

All of which might provide the most dramatic moments in the novel, but it is hardly the most important plot element. The Society of Cousins is, inevitably, far less utopian than it might have set out to be. It may be more peaceful than other states, but not by much, and at a cost of resentments and dissension that are now coming to the surface, and incidentally playing into the hands of the OLS. For instance, the distrust that the Cousins feel for everyone outside their literal bubble (the Society of Cousins is established within a dome, unlike some of the other lunar communities which are established underground) leads at one point to them removing every scientific paper published within the Society from all public channels, which in turn fuels the OLS suspicion that the Cousins have developed a secret weapon. There are reform movements that are becoming ever more radical in their rhetoric, causing the Matrons to become more determinedly conservative, while an extremist Spartacist movement is turning towards sabotage. The cross-currents of these political tensions produce a variety of others. The reformers demanding votes for men are largely women, who thus put themselves at odds with their own society. Men are automatically others within this society, but en masse they are divided between those who demand equality and those who are happy with the way things are.

These political tensions are personified on the individual level by the novel’s three central characters. Carey, the author of Lune et l’autre, is a one-time sports hero and a member of the leading families in the Society of Cousins (despite its self-image, this is still a society of hierarchies). In most respects he is happy with his place in society, except when it comes to his son. Social practice among the Cousins is for girls to leave the family home early to learn independence and authority, while boys are retained within the family and in a sense infantilised by continued mothering. Any child of a liaison is automatically the responsibility of the mother, fatherhood has no legal status. But Carey wants to be a father to his son, wants to take on the rights and responsibilities of that role, and his legal challenge over the issue becomes a catalyst for the reform movement, even though he resists all attempts to recruit him into the campaign.

Mira is another at odds with her own society, in her case her rather formless resentments have their origin in her sense of guilt over the death of her younger brother some years before. She makes angry, polemical videos, issued under the nom de guerre of Looker, which are appropriated by the reform movement even though she herself resists any active engagement with the movement. She is an on-again, off-again lover of Carey, but testifies against him in his fatherhood hearing. None of the characters in the novel are one-dimensional mouthpieces for a singly position or perception, but even in these terms Mira is a mass of contradictions. She is other to those closest to her, and other to herself, but this does make her far and away the most interesting character in the book.

The final member of the triumvirate is Erno. Once a member of a radical movement in the Society of Cousins, he was involved in a terrorist act that unwittingly killed his own mother, and as a consequence he was exiled. Since then he has drifted from state to state, taking on a variety of menial roles, living hand to mouth, and moving on usually just one step ahead of the law. Then, in Persephone, an accident that severs his hand also gives him an opportunity to marry into the richest family on the moon, and to establish his own successful biotechnology business. As an outcast he is perpetually the other, and his experience of the patriarchy from the bottom has made him increasingly sympathetic to the Cousins. When he unexpectedly finds himself on the OLS commission to investigate the Society of Cousins, he is in an awkward position somewhere between his fellow commissioners who have made their minds up even before they arrive at the Society, and the Cousins who still regard him with hostility because of his earlier crimes.

This is an extraordinarily subtle novel. Characters act wrong-headedly for the best of reasons, or act sensibly for the worst of reasons. Our sympathies are directed towards the Society of Cousins only because its innumerable faults and flaws are clearly displayed. No individual or group acts according to a simple, straightforward motivation. Those whose desires and actions place them most firmly on one side or another, actually want nothing to do with either side. Violence does not work, except that violence may be the only way to end an impasse. It is a novel filled with contradictions, because it is a novel about the other, and everyone is the other.

Oblong

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Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, William Boyd

William Boyd, of course, would never think of giving one of his books such a dull title. Would he? But several times during the course of his new collection of short stories, The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, one or other of his characters will have written a novel, or a film script, or some such endeavour, called Oblong. It is clearly a joke, but not a very funny one.

The real joke is that Oblong would probably have been an appropriate title for the collection. It would, at least, suggest something of the continuity between the stories that he seems to be striving towards but signally fails to achieve.

These are, after all, virtually without exception, stories about novelists, film makers, art dealers, or would be members of such professions. Boyd has, himself, of course, experience in all three areas, so there is an insider feel to much of what we get here. But insider feel alone is not enough.

I hold Boyd in high esteem, he has remained one of the most consistent and reliable of the novelists of that generation. While some of his contemporaries, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, have become dull or irrelevant or self-satisfied, his work has tended to remain fresh, engaging, and well worth reading. Some of his novels (I would pick The New Confessions, The Blue Afternoon, Any Human Heart, and Sweet Caress) are, I think, particularly good. What makes them good is that Boyd is interested in story; there is always a strong plot thread running through his work which keeps us interested in the drama of what we are being told. Which may be why he is also so effective as a screenwriter and even as a director. The cross-over effect is obvious in his fiction not in the usual way, the jump cuts and dialogue that can make so many recent novels read more like film scripts, but in the way he focuses, the way small things acquire significance.

Unfortunately, he has never carried those talents into his short fiction (there is one exception in this collection, but it is an odd exception and I will come to that later). This is the third or fourth of his five short story collections that I have read (if I read On the Yankee Station it was so long ago that I have forgotten all details, hence the hesitation; the collection, The Dream Lover, I know about only because it is listed with his other works in this volume, I don’t recall ever even seeing a copy). And I think the fact that I persist is a perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience: I always expect better of Boyd, I am always disappointed.

Boyd simply seems to have forgotten the importance of story in stories. Instead he indulges in some overly familiar formal literary experimentation. One story of a relationship is told backwards from break-up to first meeting, adding nothing to the countless times we have seen exactly the same thing before. There’s a story told in diary entries, in which each of the diarists witness the same event, interpret it differently, and never fully understand what actually happened. Another story is told entirely through unsent letters. Actually this one is curious, an opportunity missed. Epistolary fiction is, of course, just about as old as English Literature, so the fact that the letters are unsent seems like a novelty, giving vent to rage and frustration. However, so much of the short fiction here is built around that good old typically English emotional experience, embarrassment; so if the letters had been sent the story could have acquired another emotional level as the author then rowed frantically back on his accusations and self-justifications. Maybe not; my thoughts turned this way only because I found the unsent letters themselves so unsatisfactory as a story.

When he is not playing with form, Boyd’s stories tend to be concatenations of vignettes that are vaguely linked without ever really seeming to form a whole. The prime example here is the longest piece in the book, the novella, “The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth”, which describes a series of brief encounters over two years in the life of a young woman. Bethany drifts from boyfriend to boyfriend, doomed to be disappointed by each one in turn and head back home to mother. She drifts from dead-end job to dead-end job, usually acquired through her mother who seems to be extraordinarily rich and well connected (this is not unusual, most of the stories are about rich and well-connected people, or people who move freely in such circles; it is an achingly middle class book). She drifts from artistic aspiration to artistic aspiration: at various times she is going to be an author, an actress, a photographer, a singer, without ever making much effort to pursue these aspirations. And at the end she drifts away from the story, and we re left to wonder what that was all about.

Occasionally, Boyd seems to respond to some atavistic memory that there is supposed to be story in here somewhere. Thus in “Humiliation” a novelist gets revenge on the critic who savaged his latest book by feeding the critic a tainted oyster, which somehow feels more petty than dramatic.

In all of this, Boyd remains a fine writer. On a sentence-by-sentence level the work is engaging; the problem is that the sentences don’t seem to add up to anything. But there is, as I said, an exception: the very last piece in the book, a novelette called “The Vanishing Game: An Adventure …”, which, after what had gone before, I fell upon with cries of joy (so one does vaguely wonder whether the contrast makes it seem more, but I dismiss such thoughts as irrelevant). The story begins, oddly enough, with a quotation from Isaac Asimov; I wouldn’t have Boyd pegged as an Asimov fan, and there is certainly nothing science fictional in this or anything else he has written.

This is, in all honesty, a piece of nonsense that never quite makes sense, but it is also a story of constant action and intrigue somewhat in the manner of The Thirty-Nine Steps. The narrator is a second rate actor who makes a living appearing in cheap action films where he is usually the one who gets bumped off. He has been burgled, his car has been damaged, and his latest audition has turned into a fiasco. Then he is offered £1,000 in cash to drive a car up to a remote village in Scotland. He is happy to accept the offer, but ten suspicious things start to happen. He spots the same hitchhiker at different points along the journey; he realizes he is being followed by a mysterious black car; and so on. Then, when he gets to the place where he is supposed to make his delivery, he finds the woman who hired him apparently dead, though her body has disappeared by the time he gets the police to the spot. What follows is a fast-paced adventure set in a bleak Scottish moor. What makes the story is that the way he responds to each new threat, and the complicated plans he puts into effect to solve the puzzle are all derived from the cheap thrillers he has appeared in. The effect is both ludicrous and gripping, in fact the whole thing would make a good comedy drama for TV; indeed, I wonder if it wasn’t originally pitched as such. It is not as subtly done as the spy novels he has written, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, and the resolution doesn’t quite work, yet the story stands head and shoulders above everything else in this collection precisely because it is a story.

Reprint: Political Future Fiction

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Allan Reeth, Arnold Bennett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ford Madox Hueffer, G.H. Davies, George Chesney, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, Kate Macdonald, Richard Bleiler, Robert Cole, Samuel Barton, Una L. Silberrad

This was a review essay I wrote for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol 26, issue 1, 2015, of the three-volume Political Future Fiction: Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Fiction under the general editorship of  Kate Macdonald:

Reprint: Azanian Bridges

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Nick Wood

I read Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood very early in 2016. I thought then, and continue to think now, that it was one of the best novels of the year. I wrote about it as part of the Shadow Clarke project, but this was my earlier review for Vector 284, Summer 2016:

Reprint: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

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Adolpho Bioy Casares, Andrew Hurley, Anthony Kerrigan, Dave Hutchinson, Emir Rodriguez Monegal, James E. Irby, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo

Continuing my endeavour to get everything that has appeared in print online, this is my In Short column for Vector 282, Summer 2016: