A Christmas Carol and Other Writings by Charles Dickens, introduction & notes by Michael Slater

⭐⭐⭐⭐

This Guardian article on Dickens and Christmas nudged me into re-reading A Christmas Carol. The introduction to this Penguin edition even starts with the same anecdote, about the costermonger's daughter who asked “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

I rarely re-read books, not least because there are too many classics I wish I'd read, and which I haven't yet read once, to launch myself into a project of re-reading. But also because I know that re-reading is more time-consuming both to do and to write about, because it's not just about the book and the current reading experience, but a reconsideration of what I'd previously got out of the story. (This post is, for the moment, just about A Christmas Carol and not the other Christmas Writings. People's appetite for Christmas material is probably already waning on 4th January, and I don't expect to finish this whole collection by Twelfth Night.)

The early pages of A Christmas Carol remained so familiar that I thought it might be basically impossible to review the book. It was simply itself and that's how it was. Goodness knows how many times I'd read them when I was growing up - I'd been given two different editions as presents before the age of ten, and would have opened and browsed them frequently. The only surprises were that some of Scrooge's anti-Christmas rants were genuinely funny, and that he was suffering from a cold throughout proceedings. However, I found it less familiar once I hit Stave Two, and more possible to think about it as I would another book, although every now and again, there were occasional sentences that had resounding familiarity from childhood, because they'd just got into my head, like "who and what are you?" or because they were probably captions to illustrations in other editions.

It was hard to tell whether this is an effect of my own early habituation to the text, or if I was spotting genuine influence at work, but there is a tone here which seems like the essence of British children's writing, especially, though not only, children's fantasy writing, and fantasy stories which aim to have cross-age appeal. Did Dickens essentially invent it? Or did he simply popularise it so that almost everyone since has been influenced via his work? Probably its greatest contemporary exponent is Neil Gaiman - including with that storyteller voice and occasional authorial breaking of the fourth wall that has become connected with the trust many readers have in his public persona (a clause which I feel could be saying equally about Dickens or Gaiman). I don't read much in the way of contemporary children's or YA, but it's also the tone A.L. Kennedy was going for in her Little Prince spin-off, The Little Snake, which I read a few months ago.

Often the sentences seemed astonishingly modern - noticeably more of them would work in contemporary writing than would sentences from, for example, Henry Fielding, written a century earlier. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Carol which has led a huge readership and reuse, often unwitting, of many of the phrasings. I did not find myself struck by modernity of wording in the same way when I read the less popular Hard Times a couple of years earlier. But just when I was marvelling at all this, of course there would come along some paragraph really quite antiquated and tangled to 21st century ears, showing that this is indeed still a work of 1843.

What never would have occurred to me as a kid is that Scrooge is essentially forced through a rapid course of psychotherapy in order to effect personality change - only he didn't seek it out himself. (Did Freud read much Dickens?) Its transformative outcome in either three days or one, depending how you measure time in the book, is one that promoters of accelerated programmes like the Hoffmann Process can probably only dream of. He is made to examine how the past made him who he is, including a number of painful moments which reawaken a dormant capacity for a variety of emotions; he is shown the adverse effects he has on others, and his separation from what are considered healthy social norms; and then to reinforce it all, just in case his repentance - to use a term from religion that would have been recognisable to early Victorians - is not yet deep and sincere, he is forced to look in the eye the probable future consequences of his current way of life. His response to the final Spirit is basically the idea of psychological integration: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."

The main, intended, message of A Christmas Carol is one of charity, and, ultimately, in tandem with Dickens' other works, the need to improve economic equality. However, I think that alongside this it also ends up showing lavish material consumption (via spending rather than hoarding of money) as a sign of being good-hearted. (Picking out unhelpful influences I absorbed from books and films when I was younger is, for me, an inevitable part of revisiting them. In some cases these influences occurred because I didn't properly understand the wider context or social norms beyond the work, but in the case of A Christmas Carol I think it's something the text in its many forms has actually put into the wider Anglo-American culture. 'Moderation in all things', or lagom to use the Swedish term increasingly fashionable in English, is not what it's about.) Whilst Scrooge is possibly malnourished himself, living on gruel to save money, Scrooge's nephew's house evidently has more than anyone could ever need. Bob Cratchit definitely needed a substantial pay rise and decent heating at work. (Which I think of all the more keenly knowing some of my own ancestors were unhealthy Victorian clerks, and another a milliner like one of the daughters.) But his Christmas dinner sounds very nice as it was - and would he have even been able to cook that giant turkey? Would the local ovens have had space for a thing like that, which would have normally been bought by a wealthy household? Would it have cost them more to cook and delayed neighbours' dinners by taking up communal oven space? I guess in an age of extreme wealth inequality there is lavishness and there is poverty, and Dickens' own life story had a hand in how he showed this. Issues of the later 20th and 21st century - of prevalent commercial and media pressures to overconsume leading to stress and overspending, and of ecological depletion - were certainly not on the radar of the Hungry Forties, when mouthwatering accounts of mountains of food could provide thrills and comfort to poorer readers who were scraping by, much as the Cratchits were. Slater's introduction refers to real letters readers sent to Dickens also saying how much they loved the scene of the family's dinner. Which, it’s interesting to see, includes a Christmas pudding cooked in the laundry copper - would that affect the taste? (I assume the name 'Cratchit' is supposed to have a scraping-by sort of sound and perhaps to echo Tiny Tim's crutch, but its echoes of 'crotchety' and 'crabbit' mean it also sounds ill-natured in a way that emphatically does not suit Bob and his family.)

The abundance of works like this one, showing great positive change in difficult people, can also lead to frustration over the years, as one gradually discovers that, in the reality of adult life, people do not necessarily change and 'grow' as much as would be helpful - but that is hardly peculiar to A Christmas Carol.

However, in terms of evaluating A Christmas Carol by modern mores, I suppose one can't much fault Dickens on healthy eating! Often in the 19th century, meat and carbohydrates were valued over vegetables, which could be seen as a food for the poor. (No sprouts to spoil the Cratchits' dinner!) Yet a paragraph this ecstatic about veg and fruit (Dickens even sexualises it somewhat) could only fit these days into food or travel writing; anywhere else it would sound like a parodic escape from a public health campaign - normally it is cakes and chocolate that are extolled this way:
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

The notes in this edition seem very good. There is very little in the way of material so obvious it's patronising, and only a couple of things missed out which could have done with notes: " a twice-turned gown" and " like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" (in 2018 the combination of lobsters and basements made one think of Jordan Peterson fans; goodness knows what greater significance it had in 1843).

Something I keep mulling over more generally about Dickens is how he was, in his day, so effective in his social reform agenda, and so well-loved by readers, whereas fiction doing the same now - not least because he's done it before - easily comes across as either mawkish, or written by and for a particular small audience (which has in the past couple of years come to be called 'liberal elites'). As far as I can work out, reasons for this on a larger scale would have included the reform-mindedness of some 19th century parliaments, the prevalence of some strands of Christianity, and the abundance of cheap energy fuelled industrialisation which required better education and thereby societal participation of workers. Whereas nowadays many people are aggrieved about declining standards of living, making them feel, en masse, less inclined to share, and the economic underpinnings have a different trajectory. (Not that Dickens didn't have opponents, of course. The introduction mentions that the Westminster Review condemned him, in June 1844, for his ignorance of political economy and the ‘laws’ of supply and demand: ‘Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them – for, unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without – is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight [by Dickens].’ But this was a predictable reaction from Utilitarian extremists. ('Utilitarian extremists' seems somehow an absurd phrase now, if utilitarianism is an abstract idea from introductory philosophy courses, but evidently they were a thing!) Yet although the sight of the poor was surely more familiar to the wealthy of the 18th and 19th century than to their 21st century contemporaries in many western cities, people were shocked by reports on working and living conditions - Earlier in the year [1843] he, like Elizabeth Barrett and many others, had been appalled by the brutal revelations of the Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission set up by Parliament.. Were many shocked this way, or were plenty of others inured? There was evidently some shift of ideas and sentiment which I've not really read about, and of which Dickens was no doubt part - it was not just underlying economic factors, even if they are the growth medium - which made those with power gradually start caring more and doing more. The biggest change was the post-WWII welfare state, but there was a broad trajectory of improvement over the century or so before that. Something I'd like to read more about.

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What Christmas is as We Grow Older is a short piece Dickens wrote in 1851 at the age of 39. The introduction explains the background: for some years Dickens had been struggling with memories of family members and friends who had died, and he had started to find Christmas increasingly sad because of this. This article is a kind of resolution in which he concludes that it is fine and right to think of them as well as of those present, and to remember youthful ambitions unfulfilled as well as enjoying what is happening now. (Although probably the latter had been easier for him, as a successful man.) It mirrors the integration he'd written about Scrooge experiencing, but after he'd had more struggles of his own that marred his wish to find Christmas special. It shows how much death it was normal for someone of that age to have experienced at that age in the Victorian era (very different from now, though I thought of one good friend who, quite recently, at the same age, lost a much-loved parent), and that regardless of its being a universal experience then, and despite Dickens' religious belief, it was still a struggle. I'm sure this is the sort of writing that makes some people scoff at Dickens' sentimentality (the bit about child angels especially); and I couldn't help but speculate that it might have annoyed people who knew the less pleasant sides of Dickens' character - yet overall I found the piece incredibly moving; it instilled a sense of reverence, and before the end I cried in a way few books have ever provoked (not just welling up a bit, the actually-need-a-handkerchief sort) and couldn't read anything else straight afterwards.

(Read Dec 2018 - Jan 2019; reviewed January 2019. The review on Goodreads.)

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize

⭐⭐⭐⭐½

This was lovely, and I think it suffers, poor thing, from miscategorised expectations. A lot of 21st century readers approach it as A Booker Winner, but seen that way, by readers who are seeking out old Booker winners, it may seem inconsequential - to quote Warwick's (a Goodreads friend) review of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, "teetering on the edge of tweeness". However, if it were placed alongside the likes of Persephone Books, it would fit perfectly among their collection of escapist, elegantly written realist works by mid-20th century British women writers, "neither too literary nor too commercial", or "quality middlebrow": comfort reading from a lower-tech, slower world. But more down-at-heel than the typical upper-middle-class setting of Persephones. This was something I'd been looking for anyway - reaching for a description a couple of months ago I'd said "like Barbara Pym but grittier"… Offshore is also more eccentric.

It's a world with characters like this:
"Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning."
But it also undercuts some of the pretensions of the conventional world of well-off land-dwellers:
"The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew."
and the bohemians themselves:
"Like many marine painters he had never been to sea."
and has awareness of the ways people may feel about their circumstances:
‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in being poor,’ said Heinrich. ‘Yes, there is,’ Martha replied, with a firmness which she could hardly have inherited either from her father or her mother, ‘but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go and look at things.

It even has the occasional inadvertantly amusing double-entendre that adds entertainment value to many vintage books.


Offshore has the comforting feeling of "a children's book for adults", set in the romantic but grubby world of Thames houseboats, in which everyone is escaping in one way or another from conventional lifestyle, and has "the curious acquired characteristics of the river dwellers, which made them scarcely at home in London’s streets". Its shabby-genteel 1960s setting, which could have been any non-wartime decade from the 20s to the 80s, felt like the world of many books I read as a child and teenager. And as in all those stories found in kids' books, of children having adventures unsupervised by parents (a few of which actually happen in Offshore as well), there are among these grown-ups the scattier people and the sensible ones who look after them. This houseboat world is one which appealed to me when I was younger, before I realised that living in small cramped spaces with things sliding about on surfaces, wouldn't be idyllic, even if I stopped being a martyr to motion sickness. No matter how much I badgered for a barge holiday as a child, we never went on one: quite right, as I would have spent the week literally puking and whining, and it would have been a stressful waste of money and time off. However, it was a joy to experience houseboat life second-hand via Fitzgerald's characters. She had lived on a barge herself and uses many technical terms for parts of the boats; she manages to make boat life picturesque (and picaresque) to read about, whilst not concealing the inconveniences, making it, rightly, something many would want to hear about, whilst showing why plenty of people wouldn't want to live it themselves:
"All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’"

I loved the way that, near the beginning, a guided tour is overheard describing the boats as an "artist's colony" - although in fact only one resident is an artist, as is so very much the way with real-life bohemias I've encountered. Among the others are two financially secure chaps with, or retired from, office jobs who just prefer barge living to houses. There's a rent boy named Maurice, no doubt after the E.M. Forster novel published a few years before Offshore. (As I'd only got round to watching A Very English Scandal - considered one of the best TV programmes of 2018 - a few days before reading this, I kept hearing Maurice as a more grounded version of Ben Whishaw's Norman Scott). Nenna is a quondam classical musician, sweet but generally hopeless at life skills - in a way an attractive middle class woman could still just about carry off back then - separated from her equally incompetent and disorganised husband; her two daughters are exactly the sort of clever children that fans of books like this one would have wanted to be friends with when *they* were kids themselves - though to older eyes, one has taken on rather a lot of codependent / young carer characteristics.

Alan Hollinghurst's introduction explains that the book is set in the early 1960s, although when characters venture out to the King's Road, it becomes a blended, dreamlike version of the whole 60s in which preteens are excited to buy cheap Woolworths cover versions Cliff Richard records, while hippie boutiques waft incense. There are little details about the era otherwise rarely heard, like the late opening times of the fashionable shops:
‘I should like to visit a boutique,’ said Heinrich. ‘Well, that will be best about five or six, when everybody leaves work. A lot of them don’t open till then.’

How the market for a marine painter has dwindled since the 1920s and 30s: "After the war the number of readers who would laugh at pictures of seasick passengers, or bosuns getting the better of the second mate, diminished rapidly."

I had thought a fashion for interest in the 18th century was an 00s thing, but perhaps the revival started earlier: "The brewers to whom it belonged, having ideas, like all brewers in the 1960s, of reviving the supposed jollity of the eighteenth century"

London has changed so much in certain ways:
‘42b Milvain Street, Stoke Newington.’ ‘In Christ’s name, who’s ever heard of such a place?’ (Did that already sound comical in the late 70s?)
and so has Britain:
‘You don’t have to stay there! There’s plenty of jobs! Anyone can get a job anywhere!’

These were common types of shop on the Kingsland Road, which wouldn't be seeing gentrification for another 45 years or so: "Radio shop, bicycle shop, family planning shop, funeral parlour, bicycles, radio spare parts, television hire, herbalist, family planning, a florist" … was this the early-60s equivalent of listing vape shops, nail bars, those places that sell mobile phone covers and suitcases, charity shops and bookies - or something more local and specific?

Commuting from Northampton was already going on, although not for cash-strapped young professionals desperate for a toehold on the property ladder, and who can only dream of these hours:
Oh, a gentleman’s county,’ Pinkie replied, wallowing through his barrier of ice, ‘Say Northamptonshire. You can drive up every morning easily, be in the office by ten, down in the evening by half past six.

Fitzgerald has a good understanding of Catholic schools and the ideas learnt there:
"It came to her that it was wrong to pray for anything simply because you felt you needed it personally. Prayer should be beyond self, and so Nenna repeated a Hail Mary for everyone in the world who was lost in Kingsland Road without their bus fares."
It wasn't difficult to believe (as some schools did far worse) that praying publicly for certain pupils and their families happened then. Martha's instinctive affront at this, a sense of strong boundaries she has developed despite, or somehow in response to, her muddled family life, made me think again about something - indignation about knowing one is being prayed for - that I'd seen as a feature of the New Atheist movement.

In a conversation between a sixth-form age boy and an eleven-year-old developing a crush on him (the one part of the book which would be frowned on today), Fitzgerald's 1995 historical novel The Blue Flower is prefigured: "you are like the blonde mistress of Heine, the poet Heine, wenig Fleisch, sehr viel Gemüt, little body, but so much spirit’. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek"


If I'd read Offshore in my teens I suspect it would have stayed with me as a favourite in a rosy glow, alongside similar books like Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer, with the perfect balance of cosy and slightly but discreetly unsuitable, books I probably wouldn't dare re-read now in case they weren't as good as I remembered. It was still lovely to read now, although not such an event, and shows a bohemiana akin to that which overwhelmed me with nostalgia in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987), one almost gone now, apart from a few ageing survivors, due to astronomical property prices and the need to spruce everything up for social media. For a while I thought I was going to be disappointed by the ending, though it seems to have worked out reasonably well - however Offshore does suffer a little from the idea that it's more 'literary' to have a partly inconclusive ending. These days it would seem braver, with growing respect for genre in the literary world, to go ahead and write a neater ending in a story like this one, which would suit it - unless planning a sequel (which if this were a recent film, it would surely get) - but that wasn't how things worked 40 years ago.

(Read Dec 2018, reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.)

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, tr. Simon Armitage

⭐⭐⭐⭐
I read Simon Armitage's translation (published by Faber & Faber in the UK, and Norton in the US), and the introduction and notes by Helen Cooper from the Oxford World's Classics edition, after also looking at those by Bernard O'Donoghue in the Penguin Classics edition.
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I'd half forgotten about Gawain and the Green Knight - and I'd definitely forgotten it was set over Christmas and New Year, until I heard this mid-December episode of In Our Time. As I thought during the programme how bored I now was of Simon Armitage - he's become a very regular fixture on BBC arts shows in the last few years - I didn't expect to end up reading his translation of Gawain. But I looked at a couple of others and they seemed too formal and RP. The poem's northernness (or perhaps more precisely north-west-midlandness) is one of the most distinctive things about it, and is what makes it different from other 14th-century English works like The Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, and I wanted that to be evident in the translation. Although the beginning of Armitage version didn't have as many dialect words as I'd hoped (nor did it in the full poem), you can hear an accent in it if you're looking, the way you can't in the Penguin or Oxford translations.

However, he says about the translation, "the often-quoted notion that a poem can never be finished, only abandoned, has never felt more true. Even now, further permutations and possibilities keep suggesting themselves, as if the tweaking and fine-tuning could last a lifetime" - and a new revised edition was published in October 2018, so there may even be more dialect in it now.

And - its other great advantage I only fully realised after starting to read it properly - Armitage's version uses alliteration like the original, rather than blank verse or a rhymed meter. One edition's introduction explains that Germanic languages frequently use alliteration as a poetic device, whereas romance languages use rhyme. I love alliteration, but it's kind of uncool: done to excess (and excess is easy to do with alliteration) it can seem like the dad-dancing of English wordplay. (Is that anything to do with its being an older, pre-Norman component of the language?) It was perhaps my favourite aspect of Armitage's Gawain, seeing, for the first time, alliteration used in such quantity and so well, and utterly *allowed*, and never once with a need to cringe.

On the appearance of the Green Knight at Camelot:

The guests looked on. They gaped and they gawked
and were mute with amazement: what did it mean
that human and horse could develop this hue,
should grow to be grass-green or greener still,
like green enamel emboldened by bright gold?
Some stood and stared then stepped a little closer,
drawn near to the knight to know his next move;

Gawain's adventures on the journey northwards in winter:

Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face-to-face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.
Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves,
here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags,
or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar.
Hard on his heels through the highlands come giants.
Only diligence and faith in the face of death
will keep him from becoming a corpse or carrion.

It brings home how bloody cold a medieval winter felt, with so many fewer hopes of getting warm than we have.

And the wars were one thing, but winter was worse:
clouds shed their cargo of crystallized rain
which froze as it fell to the frost-glazed earth.
With nerves frozen numb he napped in his armour,…

So in peril and pain Sir Gawain made progress,
crisscrossing the countryside until Christmas
Eve…
---
Now night passes and New Year draws near,
drawing off darkness as our Deity decrees.
But wild-looking weather was about in the world:
clouds decanted their cold rain earthwards;
the nithering north needled man’s very nature;
creatures were scattered by the stinging sleet.
Then a whip-cracking wind comes whistling between hills
driving snow into deepening drifts in the dales.

It's clear how exhausting a journey through this was, with rest and recuperation much needed, and no shame in the knight lying abed while the lord went out hunting.

“You were weary and worn,
hollow with hunger, harrowed by tiredness,
yet you joined in my revelling right royally every night.

What a contrast Christmas was with the rest of winter under these conditions:
And with meals and mirth and minstrelsy
they made as much amusement as any mortal could,
and among those merry men and laughing ladies
Gawain and his host got giddy together;
only lunatics and drunkards could have looked more delirious.
Every person present performed party pieces
till the hour arrived when revellers must rest,

(Which may have been later than you'd think; A Tudor Christmas, which I read a couple of weeks earlier, stated that in 1494, Henry VII processed at 11pm after mass on Twelfth Night.)

As with all good long poems, there are a handful of lines that don't work, but those that do outweigh those that don't sufficiently to make the off-notes negligible.


Needless to say, all this left me with renewed respect for Armitage, and I enjoyed watching this documentary in which he visited the likely locations the Gawain-poet thought of as he was writing. Lud's Church in North Staffordshire, the probable site of the Green Chapel, really did look like somewhere a high-fantasy film hero would fight a pivotal battle with a monster (or maybe they just filmed it well to make it look that way). If you also remember Armitage from the 90s Mark Radcliffe Radio 1 show, you will probably enjoy the soundtrack too.


Armitage's edition has a short - and interesting - intro, but if you want the best historical background info, the Oxford edition is the place to look, at Helen Cooper's introduction and notes. (The Penguin Bernard O'Donoghue version doesn't have nearly as much.) Info like this was exciting (to me at least) after having heard several briefer, less detailed histories of the text:

the precise detail of this location may however represent the origin of the scribe who copied the poems into the manuscript rather than of the poet himself, who certainly came from the same region but may not be possible to locate with quite the same degree of exactness.

The Wirral was notorious as a refuge for outlaws though the comment here on the wildness of its inhabitants could also be a joke against the poem's first readers since Gawain is travelling into their own home territory. This is, however, the dangerous past, not the familiar present. (So the Liverpool jokes have an ancient history…)

Other highlights included various estimates of when wild boar became hunted to extinction in England; the ranked, and also gendered, classification of hunted beasts; when carpets were probably introduced by Eleanor of Castile; mini-biographies of candidates for the authorship and dedication; the influential coterie of Cheshiremen around Richard II in the 1390s; and that Gawain was part of an Alliterative Revival in poetry, all known works written "in the north or west of England or in southern Scotland".


For a long time I was not all that interested in reading Gawain because I'd never found chivalric culture very interesting and couldn't help but imagine it taking place in the sanitised scenes of Victorian Gothic revival paintings, even though they were obviously hundreds of years later. Not only did I enjoy the alliteration and the descriptions of the winter weather and its effects in the poem, but it helped me start to see chivalry in a different context: grittier, for want of a better word, and part of what seems to have been a confusing, demanding and perhaps sometimes contradictory set of social standards for medieval nobility which I'd actually like to know a bit more about (but paper-length rather than book-length).

The only reason for giving 4 stars rather than 5 is the known fault with the original, that the purported plot by Morgan Le Fay, as explanation for events, is unconvincing. Otherwise, the poem ends with a beautiful and unexpectedly moving final line, as if it were a prayer; although the story is playful and mythical, this reminds the reader of the religion at the heart of medieval life.

(read Dec 2018, review Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.)

A Tudor Christmas by Alison Weir & Siobhan Clarke

⭐⭐⭐
I don't think I'd previously read Alison Weir, bestselling popular historian of the Tudors, and if I had, it was over 25 years ago. When I was younger, I was obsessed with 16th century England and also studied it formally. If I was going to read any more about the period these days, it would usually be something specialist. After seeing a positive post about this Christmas book from Roman Clodia, a longtime Amazon reviewer and Goodreads friend who is, I think, a literature academic, I thought it worth a look. Via Netgalley I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook from the publisher, Jonathan Cape / Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
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I'd have loved this book as a Christmas present when I was growing up. (Even if there is more about Henry VIII's court and less about Elizabeth than I'd really have liked.) The combination of Tudors *and* lots of British Christmas-related historical customs and factoids would have seemed perfect. It's stuff I've gleaned over the years from many separate books, TV documentaries and articles, all in one place. At its best it's the sort of popular history that would work as text in an Usborne (or these days Dorling Kindersley) book.

It is mostly very cosy (if you are the sort of person who finds history cosy in the first place): plenty on Yule-log fires, evergreen decorations, communal revelry and the evolution of the Christmas pudding.

However, in some chapters, the info on royal customs and court etiquette may be excessively detailed for those without a particular interest. Unsurpisingly, given Alison Weir's specialism in pop-history of Henry VIII and his wives, there is a lot in the book about royalty, and rather less for those interested in the middlin' sort and the poor. For other readers, the quantities of meat and hunting in the food chapters may be somewhat unpleasant, and may find that their sentiments chime with one unnamed contemporary's phrase that "the beasts, fowl, and fish come to a general execution". (But, as I reminded myself it's probably still fewer creatures than go on the collective national table now, with twenty times as many people eating, even if 21st century Christmases do leave the likes of larks and wrens alone and usually base the main meal around one turkey per gathering.)

There is also considerably more than you might expect about the Jacobean. James I was enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas, an attitude which was welcome in England, unlike in Scotland, where celebrations were increasingly prohibited from the 1560s onwards and remained unpopular with the Kirk no matter what the King said. (See, for example, Hutton's Stations of the Sun for further details, because A Tudor Christmas does not have much on Scotland.) As Weir and Clarke say of one Jacobean broadside, "It may post-date the Tudor era, but little had changed between 1603 and 1625, and it certainly captures the essence of a Tudor Christmas."


The quantity of poems included in the book was a delightful surprise, and although my copy is only a Netgalley e-ARC, and this is a book which suits hardcopy / coffee-table browsing, I suspected when I read it in mid-December that I'd be looking back at the poems over the Christmas period. Most are by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) - I had no idea he wrote so many Christmas poems. There are a number of Shakespeare excerpts, although not the one which has long been my favourite Christmas verse of this era - even if the double entendre does sometimes get a little wearing - When icicles hang by the wall. (There are quite a few online recordings of it sung to Vaughn Williams' tune, but they are all frustratingly and absurdly operatic in style, very much at odds with its folky communal subject.) My dream book on Tudor Christmas would be a big fat social-history elaboration of what Christmas was like for the kind of workers described in that verse, probably by Ruth Goodman and Ronald Hutton - however I'm not entirely sure there's a whole book's worth of hard evidence to base it on.

I can't help thinking of this as a book suited to bright kids and teens, or to casual browsing for adults, as the scholarship could be a bit better (research can be top-notch regardless of writing style) and I see it as the sort of history which you start out with, and then gradually learn later that not everything was exactly as it says. I would say for bright pre-teens with advanced reading ages, as well as teenagers, but there are one or two passing references that conservative parents might mind - though not my own friends who have kids, or our parents 30-odd years ago who let us free range among the bookcases at home. It's the kind of book I'd have enjoyed looking through from about age 8 onwards - it has too few pictures to have been really interesting before that - and understanding more of it year on year as I re-opened it each Christmas.

There's a bit of repetition and sometimes the themed chapters means the book goes back and forth in history in ways that feel a tad disjointed - but I can't think of a better structure either, and you wouldn't notice if you didn't read the book quickly cover-to-cover. There are a handful of questionable assumptions about the origins of customs. There are, of course, no footnotes. And the bibliography could be better: some decent stuff, but also some a bit old, and a few too many other popular histories which themselves don't use footnotes (some fairly recent such as Ian Mortimer's), meaning that speculation may end up replicated as if it were fact.

There are times when a little elaboration would have added interest rather than complication:
"According to legend, when enemies met under mistletoe they had to lay down their arms and observe a truce until the next day" (Which legend, found where?)
"The Church was well aware of the pagan connection with evergreens, and in some countries such decorations were banned, but not in England" (Which countries?)
The apparent contradictions between midwinter as a spiritually dangerous time when ghosts walked, and a specially time specially protected by Jesus' birth could have been broken down better. (Although there is undeniable appeal to phrasings like this: "the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest at the time of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and that spirits could walk the earth" showing part of the allure of the early modern period in being different enough from our own time to be fascinatingly different and alien, yet also with recognisable similarities in some customs and behaviour.)

In a book which has so much to say about minutiae of court etiquette, a few words could have been spared to explain that some surviving (later) Norse ideas include interpolations from Christianity, as this unsourced one presumably does: "Norse tradition had it that at Yule, the god Woden, the lord of magic and healing, came down to earth on his eight-legged horse called Sleipnir."
Or, closer to the Tudor period, that the enforcement, and effectiveness of enforcement, of prohibitions on various public sports and games was often limited.
The Green Man is a nebulous figure, with many interpretations based on a sort of mystical free-association; I'm not sure if this sort of thing has a place in a history book with no further info:
"the ancient legendary fertility figure of the Green Man, or ‘Ing’, who represents rebirth. The symbol of Ing is the boar, and in ancient times, a boar’s head was traditionally served on a bed of greenery on Midwinter Day."

However, there are also occasions when the authors debunk popular misconceptions, for example, Elizabeth I's order that everyone should eat goose at Christmas to celebrate the victory over the Spanish Armada. This was repeated, for example, by a Harrods manager speaking in an otherwise pretty good BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and Christmas that was repeated this year. "as the Armada was won in August, it is unlikely that Elizabeth ever gave such an order; she would have known that her poorer subjects could not have obeyed it, as goose was an expensive luxury."


There is plenty of fun material here as well, among the less well-known stuff, and it can easily be made multimedia, for want of a better word. Anyone who read A Tudor Christmas this year and also watched the BBC televised church service from Oldham on Christmas Day will have seen a revival of the child bishop tradition, albeit conducted in a more sensible for the 21st century, and more egalitarian, as it was a girl not a boy. There is a video of the est.1344 procession by the Worshipful Company of Butchers - not using a real boar's head in 2014, a stylised model one. If desired you can listen to music, such as William Byrd's Out of the Orient Crystal Skies, described by the authors as "one of the finest musical pieces of the English Renaissance". The writers anticipated endeavours to use the book interactively - they advise companionably at the beginning that recipes "may not appeal to a modern palate, some ingredients are not easy to come by, and quantities may be gargantuan!". Before considering trying them, it might help to look at bloggers' attempts at these historical and literary dishes, for example Perdita's warden [pear] pie from A Winter's Tale: one; two. (Neither is quite GBBO presentation standard but very interesting nonetheless.) Others try out old games, such as shove groat. And in the 21st century, the popularity of hoodies must make hoodman-blind easier than it had been at any time since the medieval: "people turned their hoods back to front, or pulled them forward over their eyes, then chased the other players until they caught one. That person became the next hoodman."


It was interesting from a personal perspective to find myself with more understanding and sympathy for Puritans than I used to have - especially compared with pre-university days when I read only popular histories like this, and Puritans were baddies in boring clothes. I've still regularly used 'puritan' as a perjorative in matters of prudery and language, but in material terms, for environmental and social equality reasons I am totally on board with disapproval of overindulgence, inessentials, the replacement of items that still work or are fixable, and so forth. On a felt level, I realised I found Puritans very relatable - their motivations are just different and their zeal for criticism and change encompassed some things which I consider good.

Such as, for example, the Twelve Days of Christmas, around which the book's chapters are rather delightfully structured. This gives space for discussion of customs which are passed over in other popular histories, including those for Holy Innocents on the 28th and the feast of Thomas a Becket on the 29th. Since childhood it has bothered me that the twelve days are no longer observed: I could never understand why a Catholic school which recognised Epiphany nevertheless started its winter/spring term before 7th January. (Whilst I had to concede that recognising the solstice would never be their thing.) And these days, modern green or left wing forms of material 'puritanism' take as evils overconsumption, overproduction and overwork, so a bit *more* holiday, not less, is good (provided it's not used for long-haul holidays and shopping till you drop) - in contrast to the early modern religious puritan who felt that people needed to work more. It would no doubt be a popular idea with quite a lot of people, like the participants at the end of another BBC programme shown in the last few days, the Victorian Bakers Christmas special. Unfortunately it's a luxury available largely to those who can arrange their annual leave thus and who also have the stamina to manage with less rest at other times of year, or to the better-off self employed in occupations that give scope for it. (It was nice to notice a couple of days after reading this book that George Monbiot had said on his Twitter page that he was staying offline until 7th January.) Although the length of observance in some parts of the country indicates that extended Christmas celebration co-existed alongside work. Not only did a few areas of England keep decorations up until Candlemas, "Some kept open house from Martinmas (11 November) to Candlemas (2 February), welcoming friends and visitors and mitigating the privations of the winter months for the poor who came to receive their charity."

This is an appealing book to browse and to have around at home, and is to be taken in very much the same way as many TV documentaries - not 100% correct, but often enough to be worthwhile, and an interesting and friendly presence. (Some Amazon reviews mention that the physical book is smaller than they expected, however.) If you want a more detailed and referenced take on the same subjects, have a look at Hutton's Stations of the Sun or The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700.


(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)

The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Ashley Jackson

[3.5] If you are actively interested in the British Empire and current historical approaches to it, this is as good a place as any to start, and it contains a lot of useful information. But if you aren't especially keen on the topic in the first place, the broad, generalised overview of events in the central chapters, with too few specific examples and anecdotes, seems unlikely to spark overwhelming enthusiasm. For something more lively also involving British historians, you could listen to the several In Our Time episodes about empire and its legacy.

I read this book in two halves, more than six months apart. During the first half, it was serving as my introduction to some aspects of the topic; when I read the rest of it today (including restarting chapter 4), there was very little which I hadn't heard before. It is not one of those VSI books that takes an interestingly unconventional approach, and that still has plenty to offer the non-beginner, but it is a useful refresher due to its fairly comprehensive coverage. Nor does it neglect the cultural aspects of imperialism, whether in Britain or its effects on people in colonised areas, for example quoting Nelson Mandela: "The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture."

The coverage of concepts of empire, both the British Empire and empires in general, in the early chapters, is useful, and introduces ideas that readers new to the subject probably won't have picked up elsewhere, such as classifications of different types of dominions, and the range and percentage of global natural resources in the pre-WWII empire, things more systematically understandable in writing than in a documentary voiceover,

During the 'Rise and Fall' chapter (4), the potted history of events, I craved interesting details, and in their absence found myself understanding why, when I was younger, I considered most history between 1603-1945 (with the possible exception of the English Civil War) to be dull, and ignored it when I could. The chapter's most interesting points were IMO: starting British Imperial history with English medieval incursions to Wales and Ireland; the reminder that Pax Britannica meant peace between the great powers (it's always said these days anyway that it was obviously not peace for those living in colonised areas); the Crimean War as an imperial war, trying to stop Russia gaining a foothold in the Mediterranean, and part of the fighting over the lands of the declining Ottoman Empire (because of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War has remained famous in Britain among those who were not taught imperial history at school in the 1980s and 90s, with its wider context often unclear - and 19th century Russia is too little thought of as an imperial power because its conquests were contiguous); and the post-WWII idea of Portugal as a particularly backward colonial power, meaning that not being like the Portuguese government was among Britain's many motivations for withdrawing from its colonies in such a hurry in the late 1940s, 50s and 1960s.

I enjoyed the historiography chapter a lot more, because, well, historiography. And also more detail. (Beginners without an academic history background may be less keen of course.) It barely touches on the work of some major historians, but in a general introduction for the public and other beginners, it probably is fair to mention the likes of Niall Ferguson and Linda Colley several times, as they feature in the British media more often than many academic big names - although so does Catherine Hall, who only gets one mention. It could say more about history written outside the UK, although as this book was published in 2013, it pre-dates the splash made by Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.

The final chapter addresses a thorny question which, as Jackson says, many academics would rather ignore, but one which does interest the public: was the legacy of empire good or bad overall? It's an accomplished piece of writing, addressing many aspects on either side, essentially finding them indivisible, but leaning mildly towards an assertion that the bad aspects should not be forgotten. It's a position which is less radical than plenty of contemporary historians, but which might also be considered too radical and overly PC by staunch fans of Niall Ferguson and other conservatives. It is predicated on norms such as global trade and technological developments being broadly good for humanity - so anti-capitalists may find some aspects do not meet their expectations - and it does not explore the environmental impact of empire on non-human nature (by no means a settled question; for instance Amitav Ghosh suggested in The Great Derangement that it may have even slowed environmental damage and pollution by restricting the development of industry on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century). It shows how the international world system still uses many concepts originating in 18th-19th century European empires, and very briefly touches on the pervasiveness of the imperial legacy via the popularity of sugar, cotton and chocolate, the question of whether empires may be better for religious freedom and some minorities than nation states (c.f. Romans, Ottomans) and the new colonialism of China via soft power and the purchase of land in Africa and other locations - interesting subjects covered in more depth in other publications. However, its pitch, and its determination to show both sides of the argument seems ideal for a varied general audience, which of course will not only be white British readers and conservative anglophiles, but people with ancestry from colonised areas, and a global readership including countries such as India.

(finished Nov 2018, reviewed Nov 2018. The review on Goodreads.)

Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

A 1981 Booker-shortlisted novella, which I read for the upcoming forum book tournament Mookse Madness 2019, scheduled for March.

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The premise befits a nice Sunday evening TV drama - London, 1949: a young writer takes a job as secretary to an eccentric association of minor aristocrats working on their autobiographies - but it soon becomes apparent that this is more discomfiting than cosy. This happens with Muriel Spark books: I expect and want them to be cosy, and then they're not.

Fleur, the narrator, is very interesting, as are the varied responses to her in other reviews - among them 'likeable', and 'unreliable' (in the literary sense). She's strangely unsettling, and part of that is that she also isn't as unsettling as you sometimes expect she may become. In the first couple of chapters, I had déjà vu - perhaps I had read a few pages of this standing in a library or bookshop in the 90s - and I kept thinking how, as a teenager, I'd might have taken Fleur's opinions as right all round and to be emulated. Now I could see that she coded, sometimes, as intended to be unlikeable - yet she never actually became nefarious. In the end I concluded she was a type of spiky individual I like and when I meet one, I'm so glad to find someone who agrees with me about xyz and who doesn't fit in in certain ways I recognise, and sometimes tries to play the game, sometimes not. (‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’ …To show her I was a woman…) But on the other hand it's probably best that with them I never talk about abc, because we'd definitely disagree, and that I don't confide about anything that sounds a bit soft. She was another of these characters, like Gretel in this year's Booker shortlisted Everything Under, whom I'd perhaps prefer to talk to than read about within the confines of the novel. Fleur seems so real in her unstereotypical personality, which itself has twists and turns compared with most literary characters who seem cardboard cutouts by comparison: sometimes she's kind when you hadn't expected it, and just when you figured she's actually really nice after all, she says something catty. This is how people are in real life, not in books, perhaps especially when young and still figuring things out.

Yet she is also a notably unrealistic device of 1980s metafiction - a loud, raucous context (alongside Martin Amis) in which I never would have thought, of my own accord, to place this tale of more-or-less genteel machinations. (It's only a few open references to bodily fuctions and sex that indicate it wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s; otherwise it feels very much of that era.) Understanding, via the introduction by Mark Lawson (in the 2007 Virago edition), that there are 'autobiographical associations' lurking in the novel made me more interested in Muriel Spark as a person. I've never especially liked Lawson on TV and radio, but here, without his broadcast manner or the glibness of newspaper columns, it became apparent that he has some good insights into literature. There is plenty explained here which I wouldn't have spotted otherwise, as I've only read two or three books of Spark's previously and had read very little about the woman herself. If I'd ever known she was Catholic, I'd forgotten, and because I was used to seeing her defined foremost as a Scottish writer, had no idea that back in the 70s she'd been seen as one among Britain's major Catholic novelists of the 20th century, along with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. (I'd tended to bracket Burgess with Ballard instead, as one with an interest in the shock of the new, whilst Waugh and Greene, it's easier to understand grouped together.) David Lodge, too, is mentioned, for metafiction, though Catholics were also a feature of several of his novels.

I love the book's milieu of shabby-genteel bedsit life and full time work with strange characters, which feels far more realistic than most contemporary books about young writers. Regardless of the non-existence of internet, this is still way realler now than Tao Lin or Sheila Heti. (Where are all the great new novels in which authors house-sit and work in temp admin jobs, and pare down that online grocery order to as little as possible over the minimum £40?) Spark's phrase for these circumstances "on the grubby edge of the literary world" also gives me the pithy description I'd been needing for Vernon Subutex - which I've been reading slowly for the last couple of weeks - vis a vis the music world. Fleur has a tacit self-assurance which is unaffected by the differences in wealth and class she encounters at work; there's no reason to believe she isn't English, but this kind of confident semi-detachment from English social structures strikes me as characteristic of educated Scots people, perhaps especially of an older generation. This attitude, and the setting made me want to love the book, although the narrative was too unsettling for that. It was hovering at 3.5 stars a lot of the time - I just don't love 'unsettling' the way some readers do - but the final pages had the warmth I'd been foolishly wanting, and so up it bumps to 4.

This, in its recent Virago edition is my least favourite cover among books I've read this year.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (audiobook)

[4.5] I listened to the UK audiobook read by Jeremy Northam.

How else could this have been written? The central narrative of Homage to Catalonia was like glimpsing a platonic ideal of non-fiction reportage: the definitive, the default - which must be because Orwell has become an (the?) exemplar of good English style, filtered into countless other things I've read, from books to below-the-line newspaper comments. (Sometimes I can see the lineage: a friend whose writing sometimes sounds like Hitchens, and Hitchens was inspired by Orwell - but mostly it's just everywhere.) I hadn't read a full book of Orwell's since my teens, either, so in that way too, it was revisiting something so familiar it must have been resident, quiescent in my subconscious.

It seemed to have the perfect balance between being about the writer, and about the 'important things' the book is supposed to be about. And of course he is a first-hand participant, by actually fighting in the war, in a way that few modern non-fiction writers are - and he was an experienced writer before he set out, unlike most memoirists. He mucks in, yet mentions human frailties: a dislike of mountains and a sensitivity to cold (linked?), and a loathing of rats that grows and, as millions will have realised before me, must have inspired Room 101. (A term which unfortunately makes me think of Paul Merton and the TV series first, and 1984 second.) He is sometimes very thoughtful - making an apology to readers who'd written to him about his last book, and whose letters had been taken during a raid on his hotel in Spain before he could reply - yet no paragon. He occasionally enjoys writing graffiti like a teenager, not a man of 33. His account of being hospitalised with a 'poisoned hand' is intriguing in its reflection of another time's attitudes and processes, in the way he doesn't consider it terribly serious, although it does require hospital, and is in outcome, a correction to those who assume that the death toll before antibiotics was 100%.

Political analysis is mostly in the long appendices at the end, about 25% of the book, which even Orwell advises skipping if you are not interested. These appendices have not stood the test of time, as explained here by a contemporary historian - and the level of detail is beyond what most readers will need now if they are not taking a course about the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, I found it impossible not to respect Orwell's intention to explain, and to be loyal to the group he had fought with. (And his negative experiences of the Spanish communist party also help make sense of his writing Animal Farm at a time when many British socialists were still enamoured of the Soviets.) Even if the analysis of the Barcelona fighting has its problems, his intimations of international war turned out to be right. His sense that Spain could only have a dictatorship after the civil war, even if the republicans won, cannot be tested, but it’s eerie to read now.

The main book was more of a narrative memoir than I had assumed, with most analysis left to the end. And there was unexpected dry humour - although such may be the way of war stories, humour as coping mechanism - and Northam's reading brought this out without ever overplaying it.
They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin's pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.
During the same episode, among the driest, darkest sentences of humour I've ever encountered: This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.
Another favourite subtly gave a fascinating picture of British political alignments of 1936:
the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler.
That harks back to a time when appeasement policy was forseeable (and in effect was already being used towards Spain, under the guise of neutrality) - but less so Winston Churchill as PM and war leader, and Powell & Pressburger's refashioning of the Colonel Blimp stereotype into a patriotic wartime drama, no longer just the military Gammon of his day.

Orwell’s first-hand experience gives the potential for humour alongside serious coverage in a way that a political book of the day, or a history book, would not. And it also means more emotional involvement. His accounts of life in the trenches were occasionally harrowing to an extent for which I was not prepared. For the first time I understood what this - admittedly sponsored – study about audiobooks and emotion was getting at. I’ve also been listening to long audiobooks about Russians under Stalin, and British women in the Second World War, both of which quote individual testimonies, but here the duration of involvement with one account gave it a different dimension. (It was good to have experienced this, but I am not looking for such an emotive experience with audiobooks, so I will be careful about whole-book first-person narratives in future.) His bursts of anger, about men he knew who had died, didn’t always flow perfectly with the rest of the narrative, but they made it all the more human, and even better for it.

Being there on the ground, and writing in book form months later rather than a news reporter’s regular dispatches, meant he could give a medium-term overview of a type rarely heard by the general public about events this long ago. Of, for instance, the changes in manners and atmosphere in Barcelona in the months either side of his frontline service: he arrives to a remarkable experiment in socialism in which formal forms of address have been dropped and the attitudes of waiters are not deferential; and only months later, in a city that had been surprisingly comfortable and insulated away from the front, more traditional ways have begun to reassert themselves. Six months earlier, looking like a proletarian was what made you respectable and kept you safe; later it could be a risk.

The contrast between England and Spain - and especially that between the life a ‘lower upper-middle class’ Englishman (as Orwell elsewhere described his social standing) had been prepared for, and the conditions of the Spanish Civil War – is a recurring theme explored with a greater self-awareness and openness than plenty of contemporary popular travel writers would manage, who wouldn’t explicitly warn: beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. I wondered if to some foreign readers he seemed to go on about England and Englishness too much, but to me it seems a necessary part of his exploration of why he finds things different, and of how he works out how to behave and survive under these conditions. He refers more than once to grappling with, and learning to disregard, an underlying belief that “they couldn’t arrest you unless you broke the law”, as happened in England. (Or perhaps as applied to men like him in England. It reminded me a little of a sheltered posh student discovering that drunk and disorderly was something that could actually apply to him too – although Orwell, being rather older and wiser, twigs well before it’s too late.) This being the 1930s, one can’t entirely escape essentialism and the idea of national characteristics, but what there is of it is based on real experience and observation, explained in detail. And any disgust at ‘backwardness’ is about the conditions people have to endure, for example in jails whose conditions were, he considers, last seen in Britain in the 18th century, or for peasants having to make do with a harrow made of wooden boards and flint, like something out of the later stone age, and which makes him look more kindly on industrialism.

Something in Homage to Catalonia, perhaps this observation of conditions and necessary behaviour, and awareness of one’s own position without spending excess time on deprecating it, gave me the sense that this would have been a good book to have absorbed before going on a student gap year to some troubled part of the world. (Perhaps more so before the social media boom where one hears about everything anyway.) There is some deep sense of how to cope and how to think in here, and immersion in a book narrating thought processes can inculcate them in a way a couple of sentences of direct advice can’t - a book about things that are almost certainly far worse than what you’d ever encounter, but which, similar to Ivan Denisovich could seem like a sort of toolkit for surviving things that seem difficult after a sheltered early life. I suppose the way I keep referring to students reflect my feelings that this is a book that should have been read earlier in life. Not that it doesn’t still have a lot to interest someone older as a memoir of immersion in historic events, and of another time, 80 years ago, when it was even more the case that “You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent”, but the adventure and bravado, and realism and dumb luck of it all seem not merely interesting, but actually potentially illustrative and useful for teenagers and twentysomethings.

But what a thing this is to read in autumn 2018:
And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way… to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface … all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by…
There are different concerns now about what is looming, but loom it does, and the safe, ensconced plushness, the feeling it's impossible bad things could happen, is part of why.


The reading, too, worked excellently. Northam was a recognisable name, an actor whom, in my teens, I saw in a stage play and, to stave off potential boredom rather because of any overwhelming interest, decided to fancy for the duration and a few weeks afterwards. In the past ten years or so, I'd noticed that he had been in various things on TV, but I was never interested enough to watch them. Here, like, or perhaps because of, Orwell's words, he seemed to be nothing at all to do with that actor from my teens, but a definitive/default male Radio 4 voice. (An anonymous one, rather than a recognisable classic like Brian Perkins.) A voice that could have been on there 20 or 30 years ago announcing the time and imminent programming, rather than someone you'd notice for their accent and as a mark of modernisation. It is an RP accent which does not tend towards the distractingly old-fashioned (now heard as affected) Mr Cholmondley-Warner type (which the real Orwell, for all I know, may have had, what with being born in colonial India in 1903) but which is classic and un-modern enough that it fused with the narrative until I felt I was hearing a story told by an Englishman who'd actually been in Spain the 1930s. (Really, though a voice of an actor who, when I was growing up, might have played a young man in some drama set in the 1930s.) The reading was practically faultless and strangely believeable as the voice of someone who'd written the words; the only slip I noticed was one of emphasis in mentioning Penguin Library books: the stress fell as if they had been borrowed library books, rather than purchased paperbacks, published by a particular imprint. I only really remembered I was listening to an actor when the Irish accent put on for brief conversation with a comrade was better than I think the average author would have done, and in the highly entertaining shifts of tone and volume in one scene in which a succession of people whisper to, and outright tell, Orwell that he must "get out" of a hotel where he has been staying, due to a raid. I must try and listen to Northam's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier as this is now what George Orwell sounds like in my head, and there is no good reason I never finished that book.


(listened and reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.

Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.

In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.

The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)

There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.

The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.

I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.

(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

So it turned out that I was going to get round to reading more Sebald (after Austerlitz, over three years ago), and it was going to be this one. And, unlike Austerlitz, which is incontrovertibly a novel, to read this was to experience the ur-text of what's meant by Sebaldian: vast, controlled digression, the lists, the descriptions, melancholic polymathic butterfly flitting from global to local history; travel writing, memoir, nature, biography (especially of fellow eccentrics with diverse interests: he begins and ends with Sir Thomas Browne). Not long ago I watched the film Patience (After Sebald) and in it, I think it was Christopher Maclehose recounting a conversation with Sebald, during which they discussed which topic categories his book would be given in publishing databases, and WGS said "I want all the categories!"

At first it seemed like it would be impossible to say anything about Sebald other than to link to the long, nineteenth-century-scholarly strings of topics that makes each chapter title on the contents page, and some quotes to show facets of his style, how these subjects are handled. But soon I realised how remarkably he has been integrated into literary culture over the last twenty years. It first and most strongly struck me in reading his numinous, heightened descriptions of natural phenomena: they reminded me of similar lightning flashes in a friend's writing - a friend who hasn't even read Sebald, albeit plenty of authors probably influenced by him. And Sebald, like DFW, is one of the foundations of the contemporary okaying of digression. Never mind the beginning of "creative non-fiction". There didn't seem anything so very unusual in writing this way, reading it in 2017; permission to go on like that is already assumed. But it would have been revolutionary to encounter twenty years ago. His influence is widely acknowledged in certain literary quarters, but I think it goes wider than supposed; he's almost a transitional figure between the esoteric and highbrow and the literary-mainstream, especially seen as such by those who haven't read him, but he's also present in thousands of essays and reviews and articles online and in newspapers and magazines, by people who may never even have thought of picking up one of his books.

And an appropriately-titled, saturnine creature this one is. There is ample death and melancholy here, alongside the ethereal and intellectual; it is elegantly gothic, but no room for trailing velvet garments on a trek across the countryside; with my hat in my hand and my rucksack over my shoulder, I felt like a journeyman in a century gone by, so out of place that I should not have been surprised if a band of street urchins had come skipping after me or one of Middleton's householders had stepped out upon his threshold to tell me to be on my way.

I don't actually have to mention every major topic in the book, or give it proportionate space. Obviously - because this isn't an eve-of-publication press review - but failure to realise I could ignore bits of it was one of the reasons I've been sitting at this window looking at two paragraphs, typing almost nothing else in it for a week. I'm going to end up concentrating on what I liked best, so overall the post might sound like five stars, when there were distinct reasons for that missing star. A few of those overly-fanciful old-fashioned judgements and effect-cause connections that work great when you're reading and writing outright fantasy, but I do tend to cringe at the silliness when it's couched inside more-or-less realism. (And yes, that includes the bits about what Belgians look like, and rural people and visitors.) And the history: it's part of what people read Sebald for, but there are big chunks of stuff here - about the last days of Imperial China, or the Second World War - which are quite well known already, and by which I'm not sufficiently fascinated to revel in another classic narrative-style rehash. Nor did it increase my interest in Joseph Conrad, though it is rather fascinating that he started teaching himself English using the local newspapers of Lowestoft. It's all quite beautiful, the [silk] web by which these interlock with the other topics - just could have done with fewer pages on them. (It often felt as if he included every possible tangent, but near the end he missed a trick by mentioning Rendlesham Forest's strangeness without going near the whole "British Roswell" business, which would have also connected perfectly with the abandoned defence works at Orfordness.)

Though one feature of the war is retold inventively by a gardener, in that feature of Sebaldian style I'd shorthanded in my head as "said Austerlitz", and which a couple of days before writing this paragraph, I read Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to an old edition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - found in Arguably - delineate as long and quite grammatical addresses that would be unthinkable in real life...however, in a book the solilioquy is not to be despised as a means of elucidation. (I'm fascinated by the construction of these soliloquies. Did Sebald take notes? Can't imagine him with a dictaphone. Did he later show the subjects and ask them if the rewrite reflected their meaning? I couldn't not.)

There are many more obscure subjects on which I did learn something from The Rings of Saturn. Roger Casement, merely a name mentioned occasionally in the news when I was growing up, and now I can't understand why he isn't a great hero to so many of those who criticise colonialism: someone - a gay man - who had a modicum of power in the Imperial civil service who really did try to do something about the abuses in the Congo, Peru, Colombia and Brazil, and would not be mollified by flattering "promotions" to other locations or appeased by a knighthood, whose story shows how large a system it was and how difficult it was really to help. As with the story of the Miners' Strike, where I've only realised in adulthood how biased the 1980s BBC take was, a version I'd once absorbed as definitive truth, the saga of Casement's embroilment in the Irish independence movement and downfall reads now like one who had a just cause and laudable motives, even if some of the means might have gone too far at times. Such is the way causes can be portrayed differently by history once they are no longer dangerous hot buttons.

Similiarly, some of the most memorable characters were people who were only marginally familiar. Such as Edward FitzGerald, nineteenth century translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, born to a local gentry family, an early vegetarian, who despised his peers' enclosing of the countryside and lived modestly as an eccentric recluse for the rest of his life after the death of the male friend whom, it seemed, he had loved unrequitedly for many years. I last read The Rubaiyat - in FitzGerald's version - in my teens, and after the following, I half long to re-read it, half fear that it couldn't possibly live up to Sebald's paean: a colloquy with the dead man [the author of the poem, not the friend] and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history.
Another small tragedy of nineteenth-century lost love features Chateaubriand and Charlotte Ives, who could have been together if only French Catholics were able to divorce in the late 18th century. Both examples returned me to the suspicion that people harboured these old loves for so long (and not being against the idea as many modern people are, I've tried it and found it doesn't naturally sustain for more than about three or four years) partly because it was culturally acceptable and normal - one would not be discouraged from it so much or told to get over it - also because there was much less distracting stimulation in the world (in general, but also no films featuring actors and actresses one might crush on as a transitional recovery), and as the population was so much smaller, and with less social moblity, there was a far lower chance of ever again happening on someone else who felt so right.

Other "characters" I'd never heard of before. There were Ashburys, a family of impoverished Anglo-Irish aristocrats stuck in their unsaleable, crumbling home (like the real-life, no-happy-ending version of I Capture the Castle) where Sebald once stayed as a paying guest; I shivered in recognition of how they lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up. And, like another writer of psychogeographic melange who emerged in the south eastern quadrant of England in the 1990s, Iain Sinclair, Sebald peppers his works with casual mentions of other writers of his acquaintance - spoken of with as much reverence as one might an aged Bloomsbury emeritus - whom I'd never heard of before, feeling as if I was reading a work from some parallel universe. (Or possibly they're the same esoteric crew, shared, and I'd forgotten the names in the years between.) As ever, I wondered if these people were actually famous in corners I didn't know, or whether it was closer to my own esteem for the writing of certain friends who don't put their work forward overmuch, which no-one will convince me isn't vastly better than screeds of stuff that's widely praised, whether by newspaper reviewers or by hundreds or thousands of online Likes and followers.

Perhaps it's inevitable that among the grab-bag of topics infused in Sebald's work, one settles on favourites with which one already has an affinity. Many of mine are about landscape and loss or the passing of time.

Occasionally, the narrative is simply in the present time, with such descriptions of walks as to make one almost gasp in envy. I think you have to have spent hours walking alone in countryside to know what he means; one feels and notices far more intently then, than when distracted by the presence of companions, focused more on maintaining a semblance of symbiosis with them than on the place itself and its effects. No coincidence that most contemporary nature writers walk alone – yet until these became popular I felt it was an unusual thing to do. Some of those writings can feel redundant at times when one can wander on foot and in head oneself - but certain paragraphs of Sebald are so beautiful as to be necessary regardless and in addition; he adds so much:

Beyond the maze, shadows were drifting across the brume of the heath, and then, one by one, the stars came out from the depths of space. Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw that, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves.

There's so much hidden in this following little paragraph about windmills - even knowing intellectually that Norwich was once England's second biggest city and the region abustle with commerce, the idea seems otherdimensional. It's hard to imagine now, I was once told by someone who could remember the turning sails in his childhood, that the white flecks of the windmills lit up the landscape just as a tiny highlight brings life to a painted eye. And when those bright little points faded, the whole region, so to speak, faded with them.

Dunwich is the central emblem of this awareness of nature and impermanence - as it was a memento mori to the Romantic poets who visited the ruins - and more relevant than ever as the world gradually wakes up to the probable flooding of metropolises as large as New York, never mind Hull, as sea levels gradually rise; it illustrates the pattern by which such things are expected to take place, in fits and starts of storms. The long quote is in comment 1; when Sebald hits his stride, you want to marvel and include everything.

In Dunwich, humans, Canute-like, tried to defy the sea. Another marvellous set-piece of writing (also below) tells of how active destruction, in the form of fire, is indivisible from human civilisation.

And for what terrible triviality they destroy. I very much enjoyed, though never, ever, envied, the author's account of staying in the awful sort of old British three star (?) hotel that proved why Fawlty Towers was closer to documentary than anyone would wish. Certainly these places abounded in the 80s and 90s, but now have perhaps been displaced by Travelodges and the like, whose supermarket homogeneity is simply, sadly, more comfortable than enduring the following:
after hunting pointlessly through the register on the reception desk, handed me a huge room key attached to a wooden pear...
shortly afterwards brought me a fish that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years. The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it... [actually, this, sans chips, sounds like some of the microwaved suppers I was served at home in my teens] Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was a hideous mess once the operation was over. The tartare sauce that I had had to squeeze out of a plastic sachet was turned grey by the sooty breadcrumbs, and the fish itself, or what feigned to be fish, lay a sorry wreck among the grass-green peas and the remains of soggy chips that gleamed with fat. I no longer recall how long I sat in that dining room with its gaudy wallpaper

Sebald can occasionally be funny, and food en route is one of the topics that brings out this humour (of the smile rather than LOL variety). I bought a carton of chips at McDonald's, where I felt like a criminal wanted worldwide as I stood at the brightly lit counter, and ate them as I walked back to my hotel. He's so right about the searchlight quality of the brightness of those places... and he, who knows whether deliberately or unwittingly, brings out the absurdity of the guilt every middle-class intellectual must be duty-bound to experience on walking into such a place.

In the film, and I am still searching for this moment, as it's basically impossible to put delicately in any other words apart from those used, without sounding like a petulant teenage vegan, one of the commentators feels that - although, as I discovered, these photos are not beside one another in the book, and nothing is said to this effect in print - Sebald wants us to consider some similiarity between the vast hundred-year old catches of herring and images of slaughter in the Second World War. His accounts of the seemingly limitless abundance of herring plundered to scarcity by earlier twentieth-century fishermen, succeeded by polluted seas and deformed fish, took me back to last year's Booker longlist, with The North Water on early Victorian whaling, and The Many's eerie representation of near-dead Cornish seas; if the latter's author hasn't read Rings of Saturn, I'd be very surprised - though given what I said about how Sebald has permeated the culture...
Humans are destructive fuckers, basically, is what a lot of The Rings of Saturn boils down to, although some individuals also create great beauty. The book's alpha and omega, Thomas Browne, has a melancholy view of human life which might be considered unseemly in a contemporary doctor, but at a time when one more often than not couldn't cure people, merely a bumbling witness to decline and suffering, how could it be anything other than the perceptive realism of experience. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day.... The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

Returning to the destructiveness of nature itself, one of the most revelatory accounts for me was of the 1987 hurricane. I was a kid living further north at the time and didn't see the extent of destruction in the Home Counties. I was quite disappointed it was nothing more than a big gale, no fun - but Sebald makes it sound heartbreaking in a way I'd never conceived of, and transmits a vivid fear that I'd long since stopped associating with an old worn-out news story. Long quote, again, in comment 1. (Props to Sebald for never once mentioning Michael Fish, ignoring the unwritten law that the blasé weatherman must appear in any account of that night.)

[I've struggled ridiculously to finish this post beyond the first two paragraphs, barely read anything for a week because I felt I ought to stare at the screen for untold hours get this written first, and it became a goal beyond reason to manage it; I know there's no real necessity for anyone in the world that this piece of writing exists on a GR server. I still can't think of a conclusion because the procrastination imp in my head isn't having it, and you probably know by now whether you're interested in this book, if you didn't already, so I'll just leave it here for now.]

(read & reviewed March 2017;