Transcription

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Kate Atkinson

I finished Kate Atkinson’s new novel, Transcription, last night, and I’m trying to work out why I like her work so much. I only discovered her work with Life After Life, and that and its sequel, A God in Ruins, feel as though they belong to one side of the trajectory of her career. But that’s not really the case, because the Jackson Brodie detective novels like Case Histories don’t really feel as though they belong on the same trajectory as, for instance, Human Croquet. Except they do, and the sudden shift into spy fiction with Transcription is part of the same pattern. It’s not a case of trying to make every novel different from the last; there were, after all, four Jackson Brodie novels, and Life After Life and A God in Ruins form an intricate and intriguing dyptych. I think the thing that makes her work so interesting is that she goes where the story takes her, but where it takes her isn’t all about story.

Let me try and explain. Case Histories is a crime story, how could it not be with a detective as the central character; multiple crimes form the thread from which the novel depends, and the progression towards a resolution of these stories is what keeps us turning the page. But crime and detection are not central to the novel, but rather stands at an oblique angle to the intersecting lives and fascinating characters caught in the drama. It is a novel that steps willingly and knowingly into genre (she does not cheat, she does not belittle, she does not treat genre disdainfully as something that she doesn’t have to treat seriously), but it is also a novel of character, a novel of social satire, a mainstream novel. Both the genre story and the mainstream perspectives are complex and satisfying, but in different ways; it treads the divide between the two with a confidence that gives full measure to both.

Life After Life is not science fiction. But the demands of story mean that she can only tell the story using a science fictional device, which she does with the same confidence and seriousness that she treated the crime genre in the Jackson Brodie novels.

And the same is true of Transcription. It is a spy story, that is the line upon which everything in the novel hangs. And it gives full worth as a spy story, with secrets and betrayals, and half-understood hints, and a twist at the end that I did not see coming but that is perfectly in keeping with everything we have read to that point. And yet our attention is firmly upon characters who are deftly and vividly drawn, and glimpses of life in wartime London and at the postwar BBC that are startlingly effective. You read for the spy story and get social realism as a bonus, or you read for the social realism and get a gripping spy story to hold your attention. It is the way her fiction operates as both genre and non-genre writing at exactly the same time that is the central joy in reading her work.

There’s a lovely moment in Kate Atkinson’s “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel which illustrates what I mean about going where the story takes her. She describes how the idea for the novel was generated by the release of MI5 documents to the National Archives concerning a World War II agent known as “Jack King” who posed as a Gestapo agent in order to infiltrate fascist circles in Britain and as a result neutralized virtually every fifth columnist in the country. “Jack King” was later revealed to be an apparently insignificant bank clerk called Eric Roberts. That, and Atkinson’s fellow feeling for the “girl” who would have typed out the hundreds of pages of transcriptions of Jack King’s meetings with would-be German spies, was the core of the novel. Then Atkinson adds: “I hadn’t intended to have the BBC in the novel at all, least of all Schools Broadcasting, but … somehow the ‘two great monoliths’ seemed to belong shoulder to shoulder on the same pages.” (331-32) This actually signals a profound shift in the story, because the incidents that drive the novel are all within the wartime MI5; but the focus and the revelations are all within the postwar BBC.

Transcription is the story of Juliet Armstrong, a seemingly naive young woman who is recruited by the security services at the start of World War II and finds herself transcribing the meetings with unknowing fascist sympathizers conducted by “Godfrey Toby”. She has a crush on her immediate boss, Perry Gibbons, without realizing he’s homosexual; she has doubts about “Mr Toby” when she sees him meeting with a sinister-looking figure; she is given the additional task of infiltrating a fascist group around a socialite called Mrs Scaife which results in mass arrests but causes the death of Mrs Scaife’s maid who had helped her; and the machiavellian figure at the top of the MI5 section she works for proves to be a Kim Philby figure. After the war, she is working as a producer for BBC Schools Programmes when she runs into Mr Toby again, only he doesn’t seem to recognize her. Then she starts to receive threatening letters, MI5 puts pressure on her to use her flat as a safe house, and the Czech refugee she houses goes missing. And as things start to fall apart, her wartime experiences are suddenly cast in a very different light.

Okay, that’s enough. There’s a good story here whose twists and turns deserve to be unravelled at the slow pace Kate Atkinson employs. Besides, the real pleasure of the novel stems from the rich array of characters whose lives intersect with Juliet’s, both in MI5 and at the BBC.

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folk rock

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Al Stewart, Aleister Crowley, Amazing Blondel, Beatles, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Cecil Sharp, Danny Thompson, Davy Graham, Donovan, Ewan McColl, Fairfield Parlour, Fairport Convention, Ghost Box, Jackson C. Frank, Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Magna Carta, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Paul Simon, Pentangle, Planxty, Ralph McTell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rob Young, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicol, Steeleye Span, Terry Cox, The Dubliners, The Spinners, Vashti Bunyan, William Blake

I grew up with folk-rock, that curious hybrid which took (so-called) traditional tunes and added rock instrumentation. For a decade or more throughout the 1970s, the most-played record I owned was Basket of Light by Pentangle, one of the first folk-rock outfits (though I’ve never been convinced that the term rightly applies to them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee certainly came from the folk tradition, but what Danny Thompson and Terry Cox brought to the mix was more a jazz infusion than a rock sound). And then there was Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention, which certainly was folk rock, and Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, which always sounded to me like an outfit that wasn’t really convinced by what they were doing and thought the rock stuff was a little infra dig. Anyway, by the time they got to All Around My Hat and the abysmal Rocket Cottage, they had pretty much given up on being anything but a pop group.

There were others, of course. One of the things that first drew Maureen and I together was that I was the only other person she’d met who knew who Mr Fox were. But those three, Pentangle and Fairport in their pomp, with a little bit of Steeleye on the side, were the great triumvirate of folk rock. There were a couple of live albums by Fairport, Live at the LA Troubadour and Full House, that you don’t seem to get any more. There’s a version of Full House that has been released, but it’s not quite the same as the original; Simon Nicol’s version of “Matty Groves” is different, and the original was superior (in the original, Nicols sang: “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck the floor”; the other version, more familiar but less dramatic, goes “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more”). But those albums were ones I always listened to with amazement, even though it would be many years before I ever saw a Fairport line-up on stage.

I had grown up on the Beatles, (I was 11 when I watched their first ever appearance on British television), and my musical taste continued to be informed by what were then known as beat groups. So I never had any particular interest in or liking for the old finger-in-the-ear traditional singer, but when the folk song and the rock music merged, suddenly my ears pricked up. For a while my record collection held some real oddities (anyone remember Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Amazing Blondel? No, me neither, not any longer.) but as the folk-rock wave of the 70s began to recede, my tastes began to shift back to the rockier side of things. Though with some variations: the astonishing and idiosyncratic songs on Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens and Sandy, certainly had a folk heritage, but they were hardly what I’d call folk songs, and the new direction they were opening up was one I was very interested in pursuing.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to talking about Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. I was drawn to the book because it is largely a history of British folk rock, and in so far as that is what the book is, it’s a good book. Unfortunately, Young tries to cast his net wider than that, and that bit is problematic.

He starts with a chapter about Vashti Bunyan, which is a mark against him right from the beginning. Really! Surely, she had the most anaemic singing voice ever recorded, and her album, Just Another Diamond Day, justifiably sold about 20 copies. But in the decades since then, she has somehow been transformed into an iconic figure in the history of British folk music. I don’t understand this, but Young is far from the only person to put her up on that pillar. This chapter does tell us some things about Young’s book. In the first place, when it comes to actually writing about music, Young is crap. But then, there are very few people who are able to write well about music, though not many of them reach for the sort of extravagant and laboured metaphors that Young employs. In the second place, Young is largely uncritical: if the song or album or group can be squeezed into his history, then it is by default good. Okay, as the book goes on there are a couple of albums which he doesn’t greet with unalloyed praise (Rocket Cottage, of course, being one), but this is not exactly a work of criticism. Thirdly, the book is only accidentally about folk music; the clue is in the sub-title, “Visionary Music”, though he never actually explains what visionary music is, and for much of the book he blurs the boundaries so that folk rock is inevitably equated with visionary music. So Vashti, setting off in her gypsy caravan for Donovan’s Scottish island, which he has already left, is of interest because she is visionary rather than because she is a folk singer.

Now it is when we come to that term, “folk singer”, that things become interesting. Leaving Vashti to wander off stage, never to return, Young now goes back in time to the early collectors, Cecil Sharp, the Child Ballads, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and so on. This is where the book becomes interesting, because you start to realize how problematic the whole thing is. The whole collecting thing was tied up with a strand of late-19th century nationalism that echoed similar movements in Europe, and therefore inevitably has a rather dubious right-wing vibe. It was also rather indiscriminate, the collectors picked up on anything that grizzled country folk liked to sing, whether traditional ballads or music hall songs or something they had extemporized themselves, but because of where they came from they were all deemed authentic. “Authentic” became a nonce-word that plagued folk music for decades after, everything was geared to digging back to find the most ancient and therefore most authentic version of every song. The truth is that there is nothing authentic about folk music: tunes are remembered and forgotten, lyrics get changed constantly, lines are misremembered and new lines are cobbled together, and one set of words could be put to a different tune then the words would be changed to fit the tune. But for the panjandrums of Cecil Sharp House, the songs were set in stone, their authenticity an earnest of their importance. By the 1950s, Ewan McColl (or Jimmy Miller from Salford, as he was originally) was so insistent on authenticity that singers at his folk club had to employ the accent of whichever region the song had been collected from. Folk music was associated with various popular, left-wing causes, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in the 1930s, the Aldermaston Marches in the 1960s, and yet the traditionalists were extraordinarily authoritarian.

The guitar, for example, was not an authentic instrument, and so it didn’t start to creep into the folk music scene until the late-50s and 60s. But the young masters of the guitar who came on the scene around this time, Renbourn and Jansch, Davy Graham, and so forth, began to change the scene. They brought a more fluid, fluent style to the traditional songs they played; they began writing their own pieces in the style of their vamped-up traditional songs; and they were listening to other popular music around at the time. After all, if guitars aren’t common in your chosen area of music, who do you listen to for techniques and ideas? The folk guitarists who came on the scene in the early-60s brought influences from jazz, from classical music, and from rock ‘n’ roll; and in time they brought in electric guitars.

One of the things that comes across in the longest and best part of the book is how eclectic folk music became between the mid-60s and the mid-70s. Failing rock groups reinvented themselves as folk groups; most of the drummers who played in folk groups had originally started in rock bands. The folk musicians were listening to jazz and classical and rock; rock musicians were listening to folk; and from all of this new hybrids emerged. And thus were born Fairport and Pentangle and their ilk.

So far, so good. This is, of course, a partial account of British folk music during the period. There is no mention, for instance, of groups like The Spinners, The Dubliners or Planxty, though they were all very successful (The Spinners never seemed to be off British television screens throughout the 60s). No mention, either, of other performers who arose on the folk scene, like Al Stewart or Ralph McTell, even though these would go on to have very successful careers in ways that played very adroitly with the borders between folk and rock. And though there are nods to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank, the ways that the British folk scene interwove with the American folk revival of the 50s and 60s isn’t really developed. Nor, given the whole issue of authenticity that plagued folk music, is there any real discussion of whether folk musicians who wrote their own songs (which is the case with practically all of the performers I’ve mentioned so far, including the austere Ewan McColl) could be said to be part of the folk tradition. Can things like “Pentangling” by Pentangle or “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” by Sandy Denny really be considered folk songs? And if so, what is it that makes them folk?

But we come back, yet again, to that subtitle: “Visionary Music”. It is undefined; sometimes it means a songwriter who read William Blake, sometimes a song that refers to the landscape, sometimes a piece that pays homage to Aleister Crowley, sometimes it seems to be just a band that Rob Young happens to like. And over the course of the book, it transmutes into something called “acid folk” (don’t ask, I’ve no idea), or psychedelic folk (ditto); and by the end of the book he’s talking about obscure experimental musicians whose work, so far as I can see, bears no relationship to folk in any way. Which is another problem with the book, it is unfocussed, the subject drifts. It may be that those who like Ghost Box will find the final chapters of the book enthralling, but for me they have moved away from the area I was particularly interested in. Which to my mind makes the book over-long (660-odd pages) and rather bitty.

But the bits that I was interested in are very good indeed.

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.

A History of Literary Criticism

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D.A. Miller, Eve Sedgwick, F.R. Leavis, Frank Kermode, Frederic Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, I.A. Richards, Isobel Armstrong, Jacques Derrida, Joseph North, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton

Okay, the first thing I need to say is that I am an amateur at literary criticism. I did not study English Literature (or English Language, come to that) beyond O-Level. Everything I have picked up about it is self-taught, with all the randomness and happenstance that implies. My reading on the subject has been undirected, so there are major figures in academic literary theory (Leavis, Fish, Deleuze) that I have not read at all, and others (Kermode, Eagleton, Barthes, Jameson) where I have read at best one or two works. This is not special pleading: I am comfortable with literary criticism in practical terms, if not always in theoretical terms. I practiced close reading before I actually encountered the term; and when I first heard about Historicism, or perhaps New Historicism, I thought that chimed with my own approach to the subject, until I realized that my approach seemed to be diametrically opposed to theirs (I look at the history as a way of understanding the literature that emerged from it; Historicists, at least as interpreted by Joseph North, look to the literature as a way of understanding the history).

Anway, I’ve been reading Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North in the hope that it might help to fill in some of the immense chasms in my knowledge of the subject. (I must, for example, read up more on Historicism/New Historicism, if only to see if North is correct in his interpretation.) I was, in the end, disappointed, frustrated and excited by the book.

Let’s start with the disappointments: the sub-title is, to say the least, misleading. That it is short (217 pages) does not equate with it being concise; it is more polemical than political; and though it is arranged in roughly chronological order, it is not exactly a history. As a general rule, histories become fuzzier as they come closer to the present: distance tends to make it easier to shape the narrative and arrive at an analysis. North’s narrative becomes longer, more detailed and sharper the closer it comes to the present. The more historical aspects of the book, in other words, serve mostly as a setting for the polemical arguments about the state of academic literary studies over the last ten or twenty years.

North is a polemicist, he has a particular argument to make; in outline, he argues that in each stage of its history, literary criticism as practiced in Anglo-American universities has started on the left and moved steadily to the right. I don’t really know if he is right or wrong in this (in most instances, I only have North’s word to go on), but the polemical argument overwhelms the history. His chapter on “The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm”, for instance, consists of him laying out what he sees as wrong with the positions of certain key Historicists and Contextualists, without ever actually laying out in clear terms what those positions are or how they were arrived at. (My interpretation of North’s interpretation of the Historicist position, for example, is entirely gleaned from reading between the lines; you won’t find a statement to that effect actually in the lines.) Now he may be right in his critique, but without providing, if you’ll pardon the term, an historical context for the position, it is hard to see how accurate or effective a critique it is.

You will note, also, my remark about “Anglo-American universities”. The focus of the book is that narrow. Every critic dealt with at all substantially is either British or American (there may be a Canadian in there, but I’m not aware of any Australians; but they are anyway all anglophone). A couple of non-anglophone theorists (Foucault, Derrida) are mentioned in passing, others (Jakobson, Barthes) are not mentioned at all; which means that the so-called “Theory Wars” do not put in an appearance, structuralism and deconstruction play no part in this story of literary criticism. Though to be fair, Marxism hardly appears; I think the word “Marxism” only occurs in quotations from somebody else. And when I read about Historicism, the name that keeps cropping up is Stanley Fish, but he is entirely absent from North’s index. My knowledge of the history of literary criticism is partial, full of holes, but I struggle to fit what I do know into the story being told here.

But that is because, as I have suggested, that this is less a history than a polemic. North believes that I.A. Richards was the greatest thing that ever happened to literary criticism, but his immediate successors misinterpreted his arguments or took his ideas in inappropriate directions; and their successors did the same, and so on. Every generation or so, someone tries to come up with a radical new paradigm, usually something that can be aligned with contemporary political thinking, Keynesianism with the New Criticism, neo-liberalism with the Historicists/Contextualists, and so on. But these radical shifts in the paradigm then suffer the same processes of misinterpretation and misdirection, and they are anyway never radical enough to go back to Richards. And right now the most interesting critical thinkers (Isobel Armstrong, Eve Sedgwick, D.A. Miller) are showing discontent with the current paradigm without quite getting their acts together enough to establish a new paradigm.

I don’t know the work of Armstrong, Sedgwick or Miller, or the others he quotes here, so I don’t know if North’s selective quotations really provide an accurate impression of their work. Because North’s notion of concision is to assume that his readers are already intimately familiar with every writer he quotes, and therefore do not need a precis of their work or any sense of their context. Similarly, in what he tells us is meant to be a popular work, he litters his sentences with often impenetrable jargon. So what was meant to be a concise work turns into a long, hard slog.

As I said, this “Concise Political History” is actually none of these things. And yet, there is an excitement in reading someone so madly, and maddeningly, committed to an idea; there’s an excitement in seeing literary criticism (or at least a particular subset of literary criticism) provoking such political enthusiasm; and there’s an excitement in discovering so many new (to me) thinkers whose work might, in time, inform my own. Above all the experience of reading this book, the disagreements, the hesitations, the doubts, has forced me to think more closely and in a different way about the subject, and that in itself is perhaps the most exciting thing of all.

Eric and Tirzah and Helen and Diana

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Andy Friend, Barnett Freedman, Cecelia Dunbar Kilburn, Diana Low, Douglas Percy Bliss, Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, Eric Ravilious, Helen Binyon, John Nash, Paul Nash, Peggy Angus, Percy Horton, Phyllis Bliss, Thomas Hennell, Tirzah Garwood, William Rothenstein

I like the watercolours of Eric Ravilious, there is something both precise and haunting about them. So I was happy to come across Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend while we were on holiday in Wales. It purports to be a group biography of a bunch of artists who came together at the Royal College of Art just after the First World War under the inspired leadership of Sir William Rothenstein and the teaching of Paul Nash. The core group consisted of Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Enid Marx, Douglas Percy Bliss, Percy Horton, Peggy Angus and Helen Binyon, with others, notably Tirzah Garwood (who became Tirzah Ravilous), Thomas Hennell, Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn, Diana Low (with Helen Binyon, one of Ravilious’s mistresses), and of course John Nash, taking an increasingly prominent part in the narrative. But in fact it doesn’t really work as a group biography, because they weren’t really a group. They were a very talented generation of artists who came of age at roughly the same time in the fervid post-war world, and who all to some extent fell under the influence of the Nash brothers. They were also to benefit from Rothenstein’s profound belief that commercial art and design were at least as important as fine art, and also from his energetic promotion of their art, putting them forward for murals, posters, book designs and the like. In fact, come to think of it, Rothenstein was the glue that held the group together, and should in some ways have been the central figure in the story, so it is sad that he disappears for the bulk of the book. But then, others that we might expect to be important in a group biography also disappear for much of the time, notably Freedman, Bliss and Horton. Yet this is only to be expected, given that it is obvious that Friend is only really interested in Ravilious, and those who disappear from Ravilious’s immediate circle simply disappear from the narrative. Or mostly; Enid Marx hardly remained close to Ravilious, but Friend keeps switching the story back to her, as if he suspects there might be a more interesting life to pursue here, if only he knew how to do it.

Portrait of Eric Ravilious by Phyllis Bliss

Portrait of Tirzah Garwood by Phyllis Bliss

What we have, then, is a biography of Eric Ravilious, with an occasional sideways glance at whoever is in his immediate circle at any particular time. Which is a pity, since some of these were curiously interesting characters. Thomas Hennell, for instance, spent time in a mental hospital, then wrote an extraordinary book about the experience, was encouraged by friends (including Ravilious) to develop his talents as an artist, became a war artist in World War II, notable for his work in France and the Low Countries after D-Day, then went to the Far East “where he was murdered on 5 November 1945 while sketching during civil disturbances in Surabaya,” a throwaway remark that demands a much fuller story.

Before this book I knew about the work of Ravilious and the Nash brothers, and I had heard of Edward Bawden, but the other names meant nothing to me. It may be because they specialized in areas other than fine arts, of course. Enid Marx went into fabric design, and those of us of a certain age probably know her work without knowing it, because she designed the fabrics used in London Underground trains certainly into the 1960s and I think beyond. Barnett Freedman made his name in designing posters, again often for London Underground. Helen Binyon, with her twin sister Margaret, wrote a series of children’s books, and also specialized in puppetry. Douglas Percy Bliss, who, interestingly, worked in camouflage design during the war (another story I’d love to hear more of), went on to be head of the Glasgow School of Art, while Percy Horton was Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford University. Illustrious careers all, but not ones likely to have swum into my purview.

Barcombe Mill Interior by Tirzah Garwood

Of the others, though: how had I not come across Tirzah Garwood? There is a watercolour she did in 1927, “Barcombe Mill Interior”, that is, I think, the equal to any her husband produced, and far superior to the work he was doing at that time. And there were superb woodcuts, every bit the equal of those Ravilious was doing. I find it interesting that some of the most exciting art shown in this book is in the form of

Island by Eric Ravilious, which to my mind shows the influence of Paul Nash very clearly.

woodcuts, a form that most of the featured artists took up though they tend not to celebrated elsewhere as much as their paintings were (I don’t remember any woodcuts by Paul Nash in the book about him I read a little while ago, but there are some lovely examples included here.) Of course, Tirzah Garwood, like several other women in this book, had the disadvantage of being female and therefore not getting the attention from the art world that her work deserved. She largely stopped producing art when she married Ravilious, except for paper marbling that she took up at that time; she returned to art only after Ravilious was killed in 1942, with a series of late paintings with an almost fairytale feel, before dying of cancer in 1951.

Nocturne, Bristol Docks by John Nash

And

Paddle Steamers at Night by Eric Ravilious

then there is Ravilious. There is a remarkably generous selection of his work shown throughout the book, alongside pieces by the rest of the group. What they show, without Friend ever really spelling it out in his text, is how much Ravilious owed to Paul Nash in both his woodcuts and his watercolours. Though later I suspect that John Nash became a somewhat bigger influence on the watercolours, (the two images from Bristol Docks were painted at the same time, the two men sitting side by side), especially when the two men started going on painting trips together. Both, for instance, have an interest in heavy machinery, ships at anchor, abandoned farm machinery and so on. But Friend doesn’t exactly dwell on things like influence or technique, none of the technicalities of the work, although the work that all of these artists chose to pursue was highly technical in nature. The

The Ste Cecile Cafe by Helen Binyon

incredibly light and airy copper engravings produced by Helen Binyon set against the darker and heavier copper engraving,

Redcliffe Road by Edward Bawden

“Redcliffe Road”, by Edward Bawden, look like two different media, and a sentence on how their techniques differed would have been very welcome. And there were technical issues with a mural Ravilious painted that meant it had to be retouched not long after it was finished, but we don’t learn in detail what those issues were. Instead, Friend pays more attention to the various sexual infidelities of his cast. This seems to have been the archetypal, often lampooned, artistic milieu of easy virtue. Ravilious was married to Tirzah, but had long-lasting affairs first with Helen Binyon then with Diana Low, neither of which had any enduring effect on the marriage, and the two women remained close friends with Tirzah

The Westbury Horse by Eric Ravilious

throughout. Meanwhile Diana’s husband welcomed Ravilious as a friend and seems to have been happy to invite Ravilious to stay knowing the affair was going on. A curious menage, therefore, but to me rather less interesting than the art. Or maybe that’s just the way Friend writes about it. One of the things I’ve noticed in so many of the art books I’ve been reading over the last few years is how poorly they are written. There’s a flatness of tone even when describing the most glorious of pictures. And the facts of the life, or lives in this case, are recounted in a sort of dull monotone. This is not a book you would read for the pleasure of reading, but oh the pictures.

Me, talking, again

https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-308-paul-kincaid-ken-macleod-and-the-works-of-iain-m-banks/

Me, talking

The Clarke Award and Me

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Amitav Ghosh, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan McCalmont, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Megan AM, Nick Hubble, Thomas Pynchon, Vajra Chandrasekera

This is the introductory piece I wrote for the Clarke Award Shadow Jury:

I’ve written about all of this before, how I was there when the Arthur C. Clarke Award was created, how I’ve judged it and administered it, and edited the anthology. There’s nothing new to add, except for one memory: the first time I ever saw a bookshop display devoted to the Clarke shortlist, it was in Seattle.

That is how I want to see the Clarke award continue: that international status, that sense of being central to the entire conversation about contemporary science fiction.

I believe, devoutly, that the award should be controversial, that it should engender debate. In the early years, the Award got a lot of flack for shortlisting mainstream writers rather than the familiar genre names. Giving the first award to Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale was dismissed as pretentious, as the judges sucking up to the literary establishment; though we see now that it is a novel that has endured. At the time when Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass won the award over Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, I heard people complain that there wasn’t even a rocket ship on the cover (in fact, none of the books on that year’s shortlist had a rocket ship on the cover). After that, the proudest moment in my engagement with the Clarke Award came in the year that Amitav Ghosh won for The Calcutta Chromosome. After the announcement of the award, I had people come up to me and say: “I thought that was just the Clarke Award being pretentious again. Then I read the book and … you were right!” Not long after I finally stood down from the Clarke Award I was amused that the judges were being criticised not for including mainstream fiction, but for omitting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

That is what makes the Clarke Award great. The fact that it doesn’t conform to genre stereotypes, the fact that it bucks the trend, the fact that it regards science fiction as the broadest of broad churches, and will look anywhere within that spectrum for the best. And that restless, wide-ranging aspect of the award is what gets people arguing about it. And that argument is good, not just for the award itself (though it does keep the award alive in people’s minds), but for science fiction as a whole. Because the more the Clarke Award challenges our expectations, the more it opens us up to an ever wider, ever changing sense of what science fiction is and can be.

Let’s face it, the biggest debate within science fiction at the moment is the debate surrounding the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and that debate is all about narrowing science fiction. The Puppies want to enclose and limit the genre, restrict it to a narrow spectrum that resembles the science fiction they remember from the 1950s: overwhelmingly masculine, almost entirely American, distinctly technophiliac, and ignoring the literary changes that have occurred within the genre over the last half century. This is science fiction that repeats what has gone before, that depends upon its familiarity; this is science fiction that is not going anywhere new. Okay, some work that fits within this spectrum can be interesting and important, but it cannot be, it should not be, the whole of science fiction. The best way to counter the Puppies’ argument is with the sort of expansionist, innovative, challenging argument about science fiction that has traditionally been associated with the Clarke Award.

The way I see it, a lively debate is essential for the health of the Clarke Award, for science fiction in Britain, for science fiction throughout the world. I want to encourage that debate and to be a part of it. It is time to demonstrate once again that the very best science fiction, the science fiction that is worthy of a place on the Clarke Award shortlist, is the sort of science fiction that shocks us with its novelty. And if that shock doesn’t generate argument, then the Clarke Award is failing, and science fiction is failing.

We’re all written similar pieces. So far you can find pieces by Megan AM; Maureen Kincaid Speller; Jonathan McCalmont; Nick Hubble and Vajra Chandrasekera, with the rest to come over the next few days. There was no collusion in any of this, but there is an awful lot of overlap in our thinking about the award. Believe me, it is making the Shadow Jury a very interesting experience.

Out of Silence: 2016 in Books

Okay, 2016 was a bad year, in many more ways than I would care to enumerate. But on a personal level, it was a year in which silence seemed to fall, as if I became both deaf and mute. Not literally, I hasten to add, but metaphorically: I seemed to lose the ability to read and to write.

Joy through weakness

There is an excellent article by Neal Ascherson in the current issue of The London Review of Books (17 November 2016) which chimes with some of the ideas I started to put down in my last post here. “England prepares to leave the world” (such an apposite title) reminds me of something I’ve been thinking, in a rather inchoate way, over the last few months: all of the current shenanigans over Brexit are the result of weakness, not strength. The government is weak, and all of the political parties in Britain are weak, and everything that is happening in British politics at the moment is the result of a desperate effort to hold on rather than anything serious, thought-through and controlled.