A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, tr. Natasha Randall

[4.5] Each time I've started reading A Hero of Our Time - and there have been three or four - it's been tremendous fun. This is partly due to the playful self-awareness and utterly modern attitude of the second and third sentences, which shine through in every translation I've tried, and in this version mention:
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.

I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].

Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)

Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.

The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )

As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.

In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.

LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)

Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.

The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.

The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.

Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?

A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.

(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène, tr. Sarah Adams

aka Just Like Tomorrow. This novella about a Paris-based teenager of Moroccan heritage is taught in schools (as another Goodreads reviewer notes, it's a French A-Level text in England), and could be seen as gritty YA. But unusually - perhaps uniquely - for a YA book, it was longlisted, back in 2007, for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the precursor to the current format of the Booker International.
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[3.5] In translation, it's a very easy read, though for someone recently finished French GCSE (the exam for 16 year olds which is followed by A-level), the slang will take some getting used to. Subject-wise, it technically has that realist 'worthiness' characteristic of the IFFP - it's narrated by an impoverished French-Moroccan teenage girl living on a tough estate on the outskirts of Paris - but it's not in the least dry, so 'worthy' wasn't an adjective that occurred to me while I was reading. This book didn't exist when I was doing A-levels, but Kiffe Kiffe plus an older classic would be a better choice than two of the latter, and certainly gives a less rarefied, and more modern view of France than the likes of Marcel Pagnol.

It's also potentially educational in that there's a lot to look up about French pop culture of the late 90s and early 00s, the sort of casual references you might get IRL: e.g. saying someone looks like a certain daytime TV presenter. (The book makes sense without knowing all these references, but I enjoy finding out this sort of stuff. If you like to look things up as you go, it means that this otherwise very straightforward book might not be the most convenient read for public transport.)

Narrator Doria's voice may grate for some readers (and the ending is perhaps a bit too neat in that YA way). I have never understood why so many older child and teenage narrators pepper their stories with "I wish [really bad thing] would happen to [so and so]". I don't remember thinking this about more than one or two people (and it's not like I was having a great time socially or at home), and I can't ever remember other kids saying it. In books I've read in adulthood, I've usually thought of it as lazy shorthand for a more inchoate childish and youthful dissatisfaction, but as Faïza Guène wrote this when she was still a teenager herself, and she grew up on an estate like Doria's, where many people have far greater material hardship than most of my old classmates, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt in the way that I wouldn't to a well-meaning middle-class 45 year old trying to write the same character.

Some contemporary readers may feel that a certain plot point needs more exploration and discussion, especially for teen readers: when Doria decides she fancies a boy who, a few weeks / months earlier kissed her without her consent, and whom she had previously found quite repellent - and it's clearly presented as a good thing by the end of the book. It struck me how this wouldn't have seemed anything remarkable in fiction, or a magazine anecdote, 20 or even 10 years ago - although by then a similar reaction to being 'ravished' would have been considered off, and bad writing, by many. One could now consider it as a reaction shaped by Doria's dysfunctional family background - which must have been pretty bad as the family had a social worker (although perhaps France allocates them when things are less bad than UK threshholds) - or a lingering subconscious effect of the patriarchal culture she is in many other ways managing to shake off. It's also an example of a popular trope of the 90s and 00s, the nerd gets the girl. But to make it just about the character neglects changing general norms - which have possibly changed more among the young and among Anglo-American liberals than elsewhere. And I find it very interesting as an example of inner emotions changing rapidly - seeing in action the stuff covered by the scholarly field of the history of emotions I referred to the other day in reviewing Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home. It was sad to see how often Doria referred to commercial women's magazines as ways she and others learned about life and relationships (and to shape their views of what was and was not appropriate to feel and do) but also sadly accurate for pre-www girls who had negligible useful support from people they knew. I was kind of glad magazines have waned, but on the consumerism and fashion front, they seemed quite benign compared with what you hear about Instagram and teens now.

I found Kiffe Kiffe really interesting. Contemporary fiction about immigrants, and about poorer people (who aren't struggling creatives) in other European countries is something I've long wanted to read more of, but not much is translated. (And when it is, it's rarely as approachable as this.)

(read and reviewed August 2018, the review on Goodreads.)

Elefant by Martin Suter, tr. Jamie Bulloch

New in English in 2018, in translation from Swiss German, this light speculative fiction adventure - about a genetically engineered miniature pink elephant and the homeless man who stumbles on him - may appeal to fans of Jonas Jonasson and Frederik Backman. I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook from Netgalley and the publisher, Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins UK.

[3.5] A light read narrated in a tone similar to The Hundred Year Old Man and A Man Called Ove. The first protagonist on the scene, Schoch, a middle-aged alcoholic homeless on the streets of Zurich, is from the same curmudgeonly stable of characters, who, in their real life incarnations, might not be so likeable - but are made sympathetic, and sometimes endearingly comic, by that children's-book-for-adults authorial voice.

As is typical with novels like these, Elefant takes the reader on a caper through various locations, situations and occupations many people have hardly ever thought about - although here several of them have to do with elephants and/or genetic engineering. (I don't think I've read such detail about the collection of semen from domesticated animals for artificial insemination since James Herriot books - but here the tone isn't laugh-out-loud awkwardness; now, it's decades later and a different species. A matter-of-fact clinical tone subtly communicates a sense of it and other artificial reproduction procedures as demeaning and tragic for the animals.) Seriousness is generally offset soon enough, though, by likeable or picaresque characters, or the outright endearing. (I've had to watch videos of baby elephants to try and see some of the cutest behaviours described - I particularly like this one.) And there are bumbling chases and stakeouts that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s British farce. Perhaps the cosiest, most escapist aspect of the novel is in the first two thirds, where several chapters evoke the joy of living alone in a big comfortable house with a sociable pet, and reading a lot. These are scenes to revel in and to curl up in. A nice detail was that we don't get lovely descriptions of snow scenes in winter - I wondered where they were in December chapters, as I'd been looking forward to them - but using that old friend of the Eng Lit student, pathetic fallacy, 'unnatural' out-of-season blizzards, and the longed-for Christmas-card scenery, arrive in late May.

There are underlying values in the book which to some, probably seem so normal as not to be noticeable, especially to Continental Western Europeans in late middle age and older. (The author is 70, and Elefant was first published last year.) Some of these will, and some won't, go down well with others... Refugees are basically good and should be helped, especially if they are nice people and share the values of your country (the just-post-Second World War generation taking this as more of a given than many younger centrists and conservatives); genetic engineering feels wrong and unnatural on a gut level and could have worrying repercussions; there's something satisfying about formerly well-off people who fell on hard times getting restored to their (rightful?) station; and China is supplanting America as a certain kind of antagonist: a big unethical corporate threat that's increasingly over here (also makes a work more saleable to Americans...). Very EU values, especially if considering the EU as neoliberal - although it's actually a Swiss-German novel. The prevalence of wealth in the culture - especially later in the book - is very Swiss, and especially very Zurich, as I understand from my Goodreads friend Warwick, who lives there. Homelessness is apparently not visible as it is in UK cities. With the range of centres and soup kitchens available to Schoch and his comrades through the day, it's perhaps evident why. It's a level of service that suggests Swiss cities may be among the easier places in the world to be street homeless, better at any rate than contemporary Britain, especially as this provision is combined with a basic benefit rate of 986 CHF per month for a homeless person, equivalent at current exchange rates to slightly more than 10 weeks' worth of UK Jobseeker's Allowance (although Suter doesn't give details of the criteria).

Homelessness, alongside genetic engineering and elephant behaviour, are subjects on which Suter has done his research, including with people who have first-hand knowledge, as the acknowledgements explain. It's a shame that a few clangers, mostly, but not all, on other topics, remain in this edition. It doesn't tally with a vet's scientific knowledge that his biggest fear about genetic engineering would be infectious diseases that targeted specific human racial groups. Did that really get past the geneticists who read the manuscript? Or was that included later or despite them? How are all these vets moving into exotics practice from other specialties with such ease? Is it less of a big deal in some countries than in the UK? Did no-one at all try to correct a character's saying that not eating meat helped save the ozone layer?? (Rather that reduce carbon emissions or climate change.) Someone with opinions on animals as strong as hers these days seems likely to be vegan, not only vegetarian - but that would have meant that Suter wouldn't have had the opportunity to write about so many traditional Swiss dishes containing cheese. Why does an intelligent Burmese man who's been living in Switzerland for about 20 years still have such poor English? (The answer does seem too likely to be stereotyping.) And why would he name an elephant in Hindi when he talks to the animals in Burmese?

For me, these points didn't impinge too much on the narrative as a whole - Elefant is decent light / comfort reading and frequently made me smile - and I don't, in any case, expect popular fiction to be flawless. (It's an unexpected surprise if it doesn't have any errors, stereotypes or plot-holes.) I keep wavering between rounding down to 3 stars (which wouldn't reflect how much I enjoyed stretches of the book, on a scale with my other ratings) and 4 stars (which I feel a bit guilty about, because of the stereotyping of Kaung, and the way the wheels of the plot are oiled by the 'goodies' turning out to have connections and lots of money. Although the latter, especially from a UK/US perspective, also just reflects hard facts of life in which private charity is becoming increasingly important as state provision declines - having the authorities sort everything out, as happens in plotlines of some Nordic works, seems ever more distant and utopian.)

The novel also left me impressed with the versatility of translator Jamie Bulloch - the other of his translations I've read was the tense German modern classic [book:The Mussel Feast|16138043], which has a markedly different style. It was great reading a translation into British English, as so many UK publishers commission or reprint American ones these days.

Elefant won't appeal to everyone: it hasn't got a lot to offer to readers who only go for the highly literary or experimental, and others may think its political underpinnings leave something to be desired. But, although whimsical, it thankfully isn't as cheesy as the current UK cover's tagline suggests ("true friends come in all shapes and sizes"); and if you like the Jonasson type of caper novel for an occasional break , or just because, it may be worth a look.

(read and reviewed August 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

The first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Sabrina reminds me a lot of The Killing. Forbrydelsen, that is, the Danish original. I've never seen the American adaptation, and never previously wished I had. Like the first series of Forbrydelsen, Sabrina examines in deep detail the effects of one young woman's murder on those around her, rippling out to those a degree or two removed, and then into the media and the political landscape. But it's very American: resolutely unglamorous, uncool middle-American, where nearly everyone is slightly overweight and not noticeably fashionable - maybe wearing Walmart clothes - lives in featureless modern housing and works in equally blank, soulless offices. Life lived to the sound of aircon hum under polystyrene-panelled ceilings and clicks on clickbait, a state-of-part-of-the nation novel. There are slankets and vertical blinds. His wife left after “she said I was detached and oblivious”. It’s a reflection and image of white middle-America in the late 2010s, the way The Simpsons used to be in the 90s – grown anhedonic, wired, tired, crueller and more paranoid, turned inward.

So after that paean, why only 4 stars? WTF? I’m just not that keen on the art style. I’m fussy about that with graphic novels and comics, and with the 'big' subject matter and high production values, I'd have liked more detail and realism. On the plus side, though, the rounded, almost childlike friendliness of it conveys how comfortable parts of America are with mile upon mile of buildings that would depress many Europeans, with things like the place of the military in US society, and with shock-jocks – and the paucity of detail and shading communicates the flat bleakness of normality, and of existing - just being not fighting - through shitty circumstances. (Two big half-page detailed panels stood out: one of a kindergarten - a page in a children’s book a character opens - and one of an auto sales lot. Another page from the same children’s book produced a fascinating sense of uncanny-valley dislocation, showing a spot-the-difference that has 25 differences instead of the stated 20, and two panels of animals at a dancing lesson where a lion looms, with unspoken sense of threat, over a mouse who’s apparently meant to be an equal, and not prey.)

Drnaso is really good on other types of detail. It’s not often in books that characters talk about things like getting a second opinion from dentists, or a trivial entertainment news story, without it leading to or meaning anything else. This is real, mundane existence trundling on, while not too far away, someone else is shattered by a life-defining event. Some things just seem better delivered visually: the simplicity of 11.34 on a clock owned by a character who works a back shift and has just got up; we see a holiday happening rather than reading one of the many hackneyed ways it could be verbalised. You can show the layout of websites the reader may recognise, and it seems undeniable that panels better evoke the state of being tired in half-light and clicking on stupid shit, and for a longer duration, than most novelists (other than maybe Tao Lin) would bother with. The art style really seems to come into its own here, as part of the cocooned feeling people have when they do such things.

It was around pp.70-80 when I felt real heft from this book; it had been seeming pretty clever, but then, something was sealed in the way it addressed what happened when the videotape of Sabrina’s murder surfaced: the local journalists, middle-aged and totally uncool but professional and human, the police interactions with the characters, and details like the unstereotypical realness of a landlord who wore shorts.

The only drawback was that, a bit later, it didn't really match the verbal and emotional urgency of real-life accounts of being caught up in conspiracy theories, like the account by the father of one of the Sandy Hook children. Or was that due to Calvin's personality and occupational experience? (Also, I wasn’t sure if Calvin would really be able to get the Special Investigations job after this happened. Would he not be too high a risk because of the intense scrutiny from obsessives? I would have liked it to have been explained if it didn’t matter.)

But if real-life conspiracy theory shows say things like the fictional Albert Douglas radio programme does here, then Drnaso just made me totally grok why people - people like a few friends of friends, former acquaintances and so on, not just ‘random idiots’ - fall for these things. At time of writing, I’ve never heard more than a two-minute clip of stuff like Alex Jones, focused on a contentious issue. Not all this preamble about the state of the world that would appeal across the political spectrum, and which you’d have to be doing really, really well in your life, and be at least semi-detached from the news, not to agree with at least somewhat… I’m nodding along and nodding along and only when he says the bit about the [US] government carrying out 9/11, or inventing shooting incidents, do I reject and switch off. And if the verisimilitude of the show Drnaso has created is anything like that of the online articles here, some of the real presenters must be very much like that.

Sabrina feels very very real, yet always manages to swerve being too ‘on the nose’, to mix metaphors. The closest to that Drnaso gets is when characters, having hoped for some distracting TV pabulum, end up switching on to (sod’s law; bleary, fatalistic sod’s law) a news item about the 9/11 museum, and a senior staff member at the exhibit says: “we want guests to leave with an increased sense of the value of a human life, that each one is important and won't be forgotten”… but then it’s only become even blunter to show this because of American policy and events that happened in the last few months, since the book was written.

Even if, like me, you don’t really like much of the American culture served up wherever you look, I think there’s something valuable in Sabrina: the tendencies of the media and the online world shown here are becoming almost global. Or maybe it’s even good because of not liking it, because it illustrates where all this stuff is coming from, the heart of a white Americanness that’s implicit background in that Hollywood blockbuster or New York literary novel: the Joe Averages in the flyover states who are the market or the silent cultural antagonist, but rarely talked about (at least for foreigners) in a way that is unvarnished but also, because of using fewer words and not referring to anyone’s voting habits, basically respectful.

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I wanted to write about Sabrina as a work in itself, unconnected to its Booker longlisting. Quite apart from the fact that the reviews on Goodreads will probably stay online considerably longer than the 2018 Booker Prize longlist is of interest to anyone other than a handful of geeks, Drnaso cannot be blamed for creating a work that isn’t up to Booker standards, as some posts do. A literary novelist publishing in Britain would always have it in mind. But a graphic novel has never been longlisted for the Booker before. (Although I consider that, like a female Doctor Who, it was well overdue - something some of us expected to happen quite some time ago, given prior discussions in the media*.) So it probably never would have crossed a graphic novelist’s mind to have a Booker-type set of expectations in mind. I think it’s unfair to star-rate Sabrina using its Booker Prize appropriateness as a criterion, although ranking it in the longlist as a separate exercise is an entirely different matter.

The Booker should be introducing readers to the work of authors that will wow them. I'm not quite as bowled over by Sabrina as I was by Paul Beatty's The Sellout or Richard Powers' Orfeo but it is very very good, and I'd certainly read more by Nick Drnaso if I had the opportunity.

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


* Postscript with further explanation: in 2013, the chair of that year's Booker judges and one other said that they would welcome graphic novels and would have been happy to list one if they had found one good enough. As far as I'm concerned it's been pending since then. And as far as Doctor Who is concerned, I read something as a kid in the 1980s which suggested that there would be a female Doctor sooner or later, and it seemed like a matter of course, not least because a female prime minister was all I was old enough to remember at that point. So it seemed bizarre that people still thought there was anything odd about this recently. It's impossible now to trace where I read it (I thought it was the Radio Times) but it may have been extrapolating from a 1981 interview in which Tom Baker said “Well, you’re making an assumption that it’s going to be a man.” Or perhaps someone in the media had a tip about the behind the scenes discussions from 1986, which came to light in 2010.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. A first for a verse novel?


I bloody love long narrative poems, and I wish there were a lot more modern novels in this form. Not sure why I find poetry faster to read - know it isn't the case for everyone. For me, it goes straight into the veins, and it omits the extraneous, leaving only the most vital impressions. Or maybe it's the presentation: shorter lines and more white space on the page make it visually easier to take in.

It was the form that made me keen to read this, but the US setting held little interest. If a prose novel about a demobbed Canadian serviceman adrift in post-WWII America had been longlisted for the Booker, I'd have been in no hurry to get round to it. And if The Long Take had been set anywhere other than North America, I could have seen myself giving it five stars.

I haven't read anything about Robin Robertson yet; it would be interesting to learn why a Scottish poet chose to set a long work there. I have a hunch that the protagonist, Walker, was one of those characters who appears to a writer from the subconscious: a British writer's use of Dad's Army names Walker and Pike for characters who bear little resemblance (other than Pike's youth) to their sitcom namesakes feels like the product of a dream.

The Scottishness of Nova Scotia, where Walker grew up, was a revelation, full of shielings and strathspeys and slaters. (The last of course being a better word than the standard English, reflecting the creatures' hard, flat dark-panelled appearance; 'woodlouse' has always sounded like it ought to mean another, leggier, creepy-crawly.) The place felt Scottish or British even without dialect words: at first in the nostalgic passages about nature, I thought Robertson was writing about Scotland, perhaps from a different viewpoint, maybe his own, and perhaps we would hear later in these sections about the writing process. (There turns out to be no such meta content.) He is at his most vividly poetic and metaphorical when writing about animals and nature - these are largely asides in this book, such as the spider that winches itself from the lampshade in Walker's apartment: were I to read more of his work, it would be nature poetry I'd look for first.

Thank you to this thread for a couple of insights. Firstly, putting me on the alert for elements of contemporary relevance; what jumped out at me, as if it had been highlighted, was the homelessness problem in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and characters' criticism of the government and media being more concerned with Russians it said Russians rather than Soviets) and McCarthyism than with the housing shortage. A modern feature of the narrative, when set against 1940s attitudes and writing, is that characters are never explicitly described by their race: there were once or twice names that might be Latin, or Native American, and characters who were explicitly stated to be black only once it came up in conversation, in both instances due to racists. (This approach seeks to transmit a sense of comradeship between men in the story as veterans and/or as homeless, regardless of colour, and to imply Walker's progressive outlook, in contrast with some of his contemporaries.) Secondly, a point which is a spoiler if you enjoy working out conundra while you read - but as I read a good chunk of The Long Take whilst I had a headache so bad it hurt even to put my head on a pillow, and could not have read anything very complex, it was simply useful: that Pike is probably more than one person. I would add that I think he only becomes so in the final chapter, 1953. As Walker's mental state deteriorates, Pike becomes a generalised identity he maps on to various antagonists.

The story sometimes felt nebulous, but the final chapter (about 1/3 of the book) pulled it together - and retrospectively it became increasingly obvious that this randomness and half-rootedness, interspersed with episodes of purposefulness, had always reflected Walker's state of mind, as trauma seeped in, even when intrusive memories of horrific army experiences were not at the forefront of his memories. I hadn't bonded with the book until that final third; what led me to was seeing the trajectory of how Walker worked with a group of disadvantaged people with whom he felt an affinity, only to later find his own situation deteriorating so that he gets closer and closer to becoming one of them; to being on the other side of the desk, object not subject. A revelation during that chapter also explains certain points earlier in the story. Though are we meant to be sure that Walker did those things - or to wonder if he imagined them in his traumatised state?

But The Long Take is not all psychological drama. It's immersed in the culture of its time. There is jazz. And it is a paean to US film noir of the late 1940s and 1950s, set alongside the messy real lives of some of the men who watched it in movie theaters, and witnessed it being filmed in the streets where they went about their daily lives. It is suffused with references to favourite scenes (the 'long take' is from Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy aka Deadly is the Female), and characters are described as looking like actors of the period. (And at least one, from a 1958 film seems to denote a lapse of time once years stop being mentioned explicitly.) If you like these films this book will probably be rather amazing. I've hardly seen any of the films referenced, yet something is still added in the general understanding, as they conjure visuals for Walker's story in trenchcoat-clad black and white, and in the symbiosis between man and city, Walker disintegrating as 1950s LA becomes less human in scale, more corrupt and more corporate. (I could imagine just how much I'd love an equivalent prose-poem shot through with cinematic movements I know well, such as French New Wave, or British films of the 1960s and 70s. Or, for that matter, classic Ealing films being made on the other side of the Atlantic contemporaneously with these noirs.)

It is an impressive work in pulling together, as poetry and narrative, elements of this era that the public rarely regards together. The modern idealisation of the Greatest Generation, bulldog spirit and so forth disregards the extent to which the war was traumatic for many, and that not everyone could keep calm and carry on, no matter how much they wanted to. Noir and jazz, still seen as epitomes of cool were created against this backdrop. The death of Charlie Parker, born the same year as the protagonist, is starkly announced to make his and the reader's blood run cold. This is echoed (two years) later with the bombshell news "Bogart is dead", like another big bump downwards in Walker's trajectory: an end of an era and an icon of always keeping it together under pressure. In a very subtle way, using history, cinema and music, Robertson appears to be looking at the demands on men to keep up a façade, and how things may be when they can't. (The white men in the book are dealing with war trauma, the black men with that and racial violence.) But interpretation is optional here: this is a story so fully about itself and its setting (absolutely no sledgehammers here) that it also doesn't have to be anything else.

(read & reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

the eminent Indian novelist's 2016 book about literary fiction's failure to address the enormity of climate change and environmental damage

This extended essay is both huge in scope - giving detailed attention to topics from the Victorian view of nature as reflected in Madame Bovary to the Chinese industrial revolution of the 11th century, to the forecast effects of sea-level rise on Mumbai and New York - and very narrow in its ultimate focus, which is the culture of "literary fiction", i.e. the Booker-and-broadsheet-review sort, more so than the experimental oddities popular in vocal circles of GR. If you enjoy seeing the results of a polymathic mind at work - even if you aren't especially into books about environmental issues and/or have reservations about litfic - this would be a satisfying novella-length read.

Literary Fiction
Last year, I became frustrated whilst involved in frequent discussion about litfic, how utterly separate it seemed from the topic I was reading most about in non-fiction, climate change. (And Richard Powers' reported novel-in-progress, about trees, was nowhere near publication.) So this book came along at just the right time. However, because Ghosh is himself so enmeshed in the litfic fraternity, he doesn't have, or rather doesn't transmit, a sense of how small a field it is in sales and readership terms, or in the eyes of the many readers who have other preferences, and oddly never even alludes (for his focus on literary is implicitly related to cultural prestige) never alludes to the more experimental and highbrow, as if litfic were the apex and not seen as a dull middlebrow by some who prefer more obscure or trashier works, or both. (On Goodreads, various readers of experimental fiction mingle in the best-reviewer rankings with readers of popular genre novels; litfic has always seemed to less prominent on here and more the province of the newspapers).

I also thought he neglected to address the partisanship, over a century old, about political and issue-led fiction versus the aesthetic, artistic and amusing. (There are frequent skirmishes over the topic on Goodreads, framing it as an either/or; a false dichotomy in my view, many of the most interesting novels managing to incorporate both.) However, it was refreshing that Ghosh did not delineate everything in the same old terms - because he is calling for both more realism about the issue of climate change in literary fiction and for greater attention to the fantastical and non-human, as is found in folktales from times when human life was more directly subject to nature. It felt as invigorating as a new paradigm. But because his argument is quite subtle, it could quite easily read to the art-for-art's sake team as entirely a denigration of their viewpoint. That isn't helped by his rather sweeping, example-free statements about Modernism and its focus on language and human internality, and less on politics, as being even more pronounced than those of recent litfic. These rang hollow to me because, since I became aware of Ghosh's book nearly a year ago, by far the best example of serious fiction I've read which fulfils its suggested remit is the section 'Time Passes' in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a holiday home is abandoned for years, encroached upon by animals and plants, whilst its upper-class intellectual owners are affected by the First World War. It shows that the experimental may be an easier place to introduce the non-human and the slipperiness of a material reality once assumed to be secure than is yet another realist novel about infidelity in Hampstead.

For the benefit of those who view issues in fiction as oppositional to aesthetics, Ghosh could have emphasised more that contemporary literary fiction frequently features other sociopolitical topics, especially class and wealth divisions between people, and experiences of war, but that climate change, and nature as a force to which humans are subject (other than via common serious diseases such as cancer) is distinctively missing. (A point which, as I read The Great Derangement, I realised was the source of my frustration mentioned above.) Experimental fiction may be less inclined to foreground "issues", but they are often present in the background, perhaps in characters' living conditions.

Yet when one is hanging out in [online] crowds in which literary fiction is the favoured form, Ghosh's critique of its neglect of a major issue of our time and of imminent times, and especially of how this indicts its claim to seriousness when other topics are addressed over and over, is absolutely relevant; I wanted to nag some people to read this book even before I'd looked at anything more than the Amazon preview.

A common response to mentioning the lack of reference to climate change in litfic - whether among people I know, or among BTL Guardian commenters - is to just read SF instead FFS. (Here is a good recent article about climate change in fiction including SF.) The neglect of the issue is seen by some friends as merely one symptom of litfic's backwaterish irrelevancy and dullness outside the newspapers-and-prizes merry-go-round. It is indeed a form with a far smaller audience and a diminishing contribution to the wider cultural conversation compared with what it had in, for example, the 1950s and 1960s. Its genre-snobbishness (although this I see far more among GR hardcore-experimentalist circles now, as litfic readers, writers and critics who grew up on comics hit their 40s and gain significant influence) looks particularly archaic and ridiculous when compared with film. Among cineastes, it's form and presentation that counts towards respect, no topics circumscribed, and there is plenty of arthouse SF. (Perhaps proportionally more than experimental speculative fiction in book form?) Yet literary fiction does still count as both measure of and signal to what does or should really matter to the broadsheet-inclined audience, which includes the political classes and other significant decision makers. If Ghosh thinks the near-absence of climate change in literary fiction is symptomatic of society's unwillingness to face up to the future and the effects of its own actions - noting that future settings are as uncharacteristic of litfic, just as much as historical fiction is a staple of prize longlists - I would say that, as other forms have addressed it more, it is perhaps more related to the neglect of it, and to general short-termism and unwillingness to seriously contemplate what will happen, among the comfortable chattering classes. (My view may be skewed because, over the past year, I have returned to reading more about the environment than I had for over a decade, but it does seem as if there are more serious stories getting more public attention now than there used to be, even a couple of years ago.) Ghosh notes that in 2015, two highly significant international documents about climate change appeared: the Paris Agreement, and the papal encyclical Laudato si' - whilst the Booker longlist was entirely devoid of the subject. (I would argue that the following year's [book:The North Water|25666046], however, does address human despoliation of the environment in a historical setting.) Anna's excellent review of this book explains other reasons why literary fiction matters specifically in covering this topic, including its artistic approach.

Ghosh sees the situation of "serious fiction" as flowing from Enlightenment and C19th views of nature, in which nature was (surprisingly to us now) seen as stable, ordered and subject to only gradual change. (An opposition of catastrophism versus gradualism, in which the former was seen as primitive, existed in geology from Lyell's time, and was still around among 1980s doubters of the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction.) This sense of stability in nature mirrored the increasing stability of western bourgeois life as industrial society grew up and medicine advanced, such stable lives being seen as ideal subject matter: Emma Bovary's love of melodramatic romances and foolish rejection such stability, being quoted in support. (However, this idea was there in the novel at least a couple of hundred years earlier, with Don Quixote, written when modernity was emerging, but life (including Cervantes' own) was still highly turbulent. Is that because it's a bourgeois idea? Because a certain leaning towards the 'prosaic' is inherent in the novel?) And given the reservations many people I know have about the middlebrow, middle-classness of literary fiction, this aspect of the critique, of the subgenre being too concerned with stable bourgeouis life, was an easy sell.

Between 2012-2016, when the online social justice movement was at its height, among my frustrations with it was the total neglect of environmental issues in favour of aggressive minutiae of identity politics. Ghosh agrees; however, he seems not to have noticed that the idea of 'speciesism' was, recently, slowly gaining ground in some quarters of it, and the way this ties in with the rise of veganism. (As a Guardian reader, my current impression from the paper is that about 30-40% of people are now vegan, not, what, 1-2%... that's how prominent it's becoming. And that another 10% are trying obsessively to avoid buying plastic.) One of the book's big questions - how will people in a future, climate-changed world view literature of the C20th and early C21st? - parallels the social-justice reading of older fiction. Assuming that book distribution, leisure time and literature study are still as plentiful as today (I really don't think it will be in 150 years, and probably sooner), I would think that, as with slavery and casual racism and sexism in books from our past, some readers will see resource profligacy and obliviousness to this to be defining features of these novels, reasons why they should be consigned to the sidelines, whereas many others will see them as unfortunate, with plenty else to enjoy in the stories regardless. (And surely some will wish they were living in times of such everyday luxury - a decadence cult.)


Asia & Climate Change
Ghosh critiques the idea that Asian countries are entirely [future] victims of climate change, in a complex argument. He mentions that western environmentalists, such as Naomi Klein, neglect to mention imperialism as a cause of climate change alongside capitalism itself. Or rather, of the particular patterns of climate change which are occurring now. Essentially, he considers that imperialism may have delayed significant climate change, but that colonial powers are still significantly responsible for global environmental changes as they are experienced.

Major Asian countries had industrial expansions and extractive industries that are little known to the average Westerner. I managed to do a whole history degree - albeit not very recently - without having heard of the Chinese industrial revolution of the C11th; it led to significant deforestation and, once coal was discovered, its adoption as a fuel in some areas. However, as the deposits were not very accessible with medieval technology, topography meant that large-scale fossil-fuel based indistrialisation didn't begin in medieval China, and instead had to wait until Europeans started it in the C18th.
Most accounts of the history of oil trace its initial drilling to the C19th USA; however, many countries used oil on a smal scale where local deposits (little understood) were available; and the Burmese had been using oil with the widest-spread trading network Ghosh suggests that nineteenth century Burma would have been the world's first petrostate if it had not been crushed by British colonial wars. India, for a while, developed a formidable shipbuilding industry and copied British-built steamships. However, the Empire stymied this by banning Indian-built ships from its ports. So, had history progressed only slightly differently, global industry would have had rather a different distribution - and carbon emissions would have been much higher, much earlier. (Ghosh considers there to have been two significant eras for emissions: the West in the early twentieth century, and Asia in the 1980s onwards, the latter although it was not so densely industrialised, had a huge impact due to sheer human numbers.)

A signficant difference from the West was that in major Asian countries, there was always greater opposition to industrialisation from religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism) and from public intellectuals. Nineteenth century novels may sometimes lament the coming of the railways and the changes they wrought to the countryside, but no-one truly influential spoke up against industrialisation itself as opposed to, say, conditions in factories. However, as colonial powers packed up and went home, political leaders became keen to start trying to catch up with the West; Gandhi, before his assassination, was accused of trying to hold India back - and Chinese Communism pushed religious belief to one side in favour of punishing regimes of agricultural and industrial progress.

Ghosh considers that on balance, the West still owes the rest of the world, including Asia, for damage wrought by climate change, but that Asia in particular is not purely a victim.

A Dystopian Future
Ghosh has a particularly gloomy view of the future. (Is that why he's frustratingly blase about the issue of individual action versus collective action, assuming they are an either/or, and that readers aren't going to be rolling their eyes at his international arts lifestyle living - and evidently flyinh quite frequently between - New York and India? I posted more about this subject here.)

The outright collapsitarian vision - whilst alarming to some - has a strong element of freedom to it, and for physically tough people with certain viewpoints, it may even be invigorating. But the world envisaged here, dominated by the politics of the armed lifeboat has no such primitivist, libertarian appeal. Delineating plausible and pessimistic reasoning for military planners' careful study of climate change, he considers how climate change and the instability it will wreak to be an excuse for increasing authoritarian militarisation, especially of countries that are likely destinations for millions of refugees from regions stricken by famine and unbearable heat. The countries where the refugees originate may, in turn, have punitive policies of their own, introduced to appease Western powers. The poor everywhere, but especially those in the Global South, end up worse off than ever. (I think this increased authoritarianism is, very sadly, more plausible in densely populated countries like Britain, whereas the US is more spread out and contains many recalcitrant armed citizens - it does seem more likely to fragment and collapse.) There even appears to be an implication that some actors in the deep state may not want to do much to mitigate climate change, precisely because they see global turbulence as an opportunity to strengthen their stranglehold, which is considerably more depressing than, as usual, assuming they only care about making money in the short term. Ghosh tries to end the book on a sudden hopeful note, that current youngsters and the literature they have yet to write, may help to create a better world than that. He also has high hopes for world religions becoming ready-made pressure groups for lowering carbon emissions (no mention of the Catholic neglect of population as an issue). I was reminded of Mark Lynas' Six Degrees and his description of the illogically optimistic conclusions many authors add to their environmental books because they feel they should. With a little more creative vision, and more words, that conclusion could have sounded more convincing and inspiring to action - as otherwise it doesn't sound like Amitav Ghosh wants to join Dark Mountain just yet.

There may be a few flaws in this book, but it's an original and interesting melange of topics. The issue it addresses with literary fiction may seem minor to some - especially those who don't read much litfic - but some of us, at least, had been frustrated by it already. Ghosh is saying something that needed to be said: how can this subgenre claim such seriousness and weight and relevance when it has its head in the sand? However, will many dedicated readers of literary fiction actually take a break from novels to read this critique?


(read and reviewed July 2017; the review, comment thread - and dozens of quotes and status updates - 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; BlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest