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.)
2 January 2019
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.
---
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.)
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.
---
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.)
29 December 2018
Heat & Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1975 Booker Prize joint winner, and when I started it, the shortest Booker winner I hadn't yet read.
⭐⭐½
An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.
Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.
Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.
There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.
No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.
Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.
Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.
Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.
When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."
A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."
One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.
I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.
I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
⭐⭐½
An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.
Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.
Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.
There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.
No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.
Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.
Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.
Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.
When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."
A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."
One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.
I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.
I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
26 December 2018
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.
----
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.)
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.
----
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.)
Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg, tr. Eliza Marciniak
This short Polish autofiction was longlisted for the 2017 Booker International Prize, although I had wanted to read it since I first heard of it the previous year.
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Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."
But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.
Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.
I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.
And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.
There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.
Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.
As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.
Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."
I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.
(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
----
Wioletta Greg's writing owes a fair bit to Bruno Schulz… but Schulz's stories are wonderful and so is this: often charming and adorable, yet with dark currents running through it. It's not quite so verbally acrobatic, but still full of enthralling descriptions of the narrator's eccentric family, and life at home and in the immediate environs. I'm guessing native readers of Polish might be more used to this sort of thing, given Schulz's centrality to literature in Poland. Olga Tokarczuk said in a recent interview [I wrote most of this post in late October or early November, just after I read the book] he "raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language."
But, as an English-language reader who has nowhere near exhausted what's available in translation from Poland, this Schulz-influenced style delightful and novel. I was already predisposed to be interested the book, being near the author's age and having heritage from the south of Poland, but the style of writing on top of that made it one of my favourite reads of the year. Any cultural references were a joy to look up, knowing they were things I'd have also heard of in childhood had I lived in, or maybe just spent more time in Poland myself; I recognised a few items as souvenirs, and I felt nervous on Wiola's behalf when she submitted an unintentionally-suspicious painting to a Communist children's art competition.
Whether this small semi-autobiographical book is a novella in sequential snapshots (I prefer to see it that way) or a short story collection, it shares something else with Schultz's first collection. Both volumes have delicious, appetising titles in Polish that reflect the almost edible quality of the cosiest and most beautiful moments of the narrative, but in English, have been retitled in a way that suggests something horrorish. Cinnamon Shops v The Street of Crocodiles; Unripe Fruit v Swallowing Mercury. I would say inexplicably, except that I'd guess English-language publishers of the 1960s thought Cinnamon Shops sounded girly or Christmassy, where they saw the market for East European literature as masculine and serious, and certainly not seasonal. I wondered what the process for this book might have been. Did someone think that Unripe Fruit was an icky title in English for a book about a pre-teen and teenage girl, even though the author chose it herself and the protagonist actively rejects unwanted incursions on her sexuality? It's a translated literary novella rather than a book likely to get the attention of the sort of Twitter mobs that pick over every choice of word by Neil Gaiman. (The title of another story, Sour Cherries would have suited the book rather well too, for its combination of appetitising-and-not, and especially its Polishness, but I guess that would have had similar implications about a young woman if the translator and/or publisher were approaching the title from that same angle. Instead, in English it has been retitled according to the most traumatic story in the book, an event by which I think it's evident that Wiola-the-protagonist would not define herself.
I needlessly put off reading Schultz for maybe 20 years, assuming the content quite different from what it was; whilst not scary, something that wasn't my idea of fun: jagged Buñuel-esque surrealism in which pedestrians were bitten by crocodiles. But it only took me about 18 months from publication to read Wioletta Greg's book, as I had read the beginning of it when it was first released and previously liked her writing in online literary journals.
And 2018 was a better time to read it: I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much, or in the same ways, had I read it as part of the 2017 Booker International longlist. I found it a more feminist work than many novels that are explicitly described as such. Gregorszewska takes a style of idyllic reminiscence about growing up strongly associated with male authors, and includes as brief incidents starting periods, and sexual assaults by adult acquaintances, the sort of thing which often get chapters or whole books to themselves dwelling on them with much commentary. (To me the assaults seemed bizarrely many, but the many #metoo accounts of the past year or so indicate that hers probably wasn't an unusual experience. And besides, this was a country in which girls had traditionally married earlier on average than in Western Europe and so may have been viewed as sexual earlier on by more people.) In tone the book is also similar to Cider With Rosie: broadly idyllic, but actually doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of life at the time, including poor housing conditions and human behaviour. Adolescent Wiola goes on with her life in many ways as she had as a child less subject to norms of femininity: the narrative integrates starting her periods in what I felt was a subtly very effective way: it's not a weird thing that seems to make her feel different or even think that she should feel different; she just keeps living and acting much as she pleases, and doing tomboy activities like going about the countryside collecting scrap metal for a school project. Unlike in the reminiscences of older female authors I seem to recall reading when I was younger - but whom I couldn't now specify - it never separates her from tearing about the countryside, or from a sense of her own story and not being beholden to others which historically one saw more often in narratives of growing up by respected male authors. Nor does she even have to discuss this. She just does. Likewise she gets on with other things in life despite being somewhat disturbed by the assaults (the effects are shown by actions rather than introspective writing) and she is entirely absorbed in various projects and other events. I really liked the way Wiola is obsessive about collecting, whether for herself or for school projects, in a way I could strongly relate to, but which popular culture often associates with boys and men.
There are many ways in which to the British reader, the levels of technology make it seem like the story is set decades earlier than the 1980s. (Although it is not surprising if you saw Poland just after the fall of Soviet communism, when horses and carts went about the roads in some areas routinely, whilst in the UK they'd have seemed like apparitions, or wanderers from the set of a costume drama - and dusty slum villages that were like something from a news item filmed in Romania, or outside Europe.) Kids in their early teens still have outdoor and cooking skills worthy of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton protagonists. However, glue-sniffing was evidently a problem common to Western and Eastern Europe back then; it was kind of strange seeing what I had thought of as a British social problem of the 1980s pop up in the midst of this half-mythic world - although it is also part of the novel's trajectory, in which modernisation gradually changes the world of Wiola's village , and she becomes less sheltered in her teens.
Unlike in a lot of Polish literature, there's no hint of racial issues being handled with attitudes any different from those in Western Europe, perhaps because Wiola's father likes to talk about his Sinti heritage, and the family was slightly disadvantaged by this under the Communist regime.
As in several of the Central/ East European novels I've read over the past few months, the grandmother is an almost folkloric being and embodiment of ancient ways. Wiola's grandmother wears seven skirts, hosts feathering evenings - where local old women pluck feathers for home-made pillows and quilts - makes traditional dishes such as buckwheat blood pudding and sour rye and potato soup, and puts a red blanket on the bed of an ailing child to draw out the fever. Meanwhile, Communist woman is encouraged to be a worker equal to men, as evinced by Wiola's mother's job making paving slabs at the start of the book.
Her grandfather, an old maker and mender of stoves, is benign and more practical and measured than the narrator's father, an amateur taxidermist and genial, ramshackle eccentric, who is the presiding spirit of the book (just as Bruno Schulz's father is in his first collection).
"He showed me a different kind of geometry of the world, where boundaries are not marked by field margins overgrown with thistles and goosefoot, by cobbled roads, fences or tracks trodden by humans, but instead by light, sound and the elements."
Conflict is usually in the background so that the narrative often retains its picturesque quality despite events:
"my father took over the running of the farm and, to my grandmother’s dismay, began to introduce reforms, gradually turning our homestead into an unruly and exuberant zoo"
and
"since his return from military detention, Dad had been living in two houses: one was a stone ruin wobbling unsteadily over its limestone foundations, while the other, which for years had been forming in his head, was a clean brick house with central heating, an attic scented with resin and a shiny bathroom tiled from floor to ceiling."
However, there is grit too when necessary:
"All that was left of the half-mile of bunting were muddy shreds soaking in the ditch next to empty vodka bottles and cigarette ends."
some of it of the sort you'll recognise if you know less glamorous side of the countryside: "the bones of a rusty harrow protruded from under a tarpaulin among young nettles."
I've rarely encountered a book which contains so much loveliness whilst also not shying away from very unpleasant aspects of life, and I am very impressed by this combination of romanticising-and-not. I was always going to have something of a soft spot for it - if it had been from almost anywhere else I might never have read it due to the English title - but my expectations were surpassed, and I'm glad to see that the sequel, the better-named Accommodations is out in English next year, even if, so far, only a US publication is evident.
(read Oct 2018, review finished Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
23 December 2018
Bride & Groom by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio
This is the second novel from Alisa Ganieva, a Moscow-based Dagestani author in her 30s, to be translated into English by Carol Apollonio and published by Dallas-based Deep Vellum (whose cover designs I love). It was released in Russian in 2015 and in English in 2018.
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I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.
Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.
I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)
It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.
The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.
The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.
Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.
Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
----
I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.
Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.
I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)
It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.
The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.
The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.
Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.
Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
6 December 2018
Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne
Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018 - but a novel I wanted to read regardless, as I'd been excited about it since I first caught sight of it in early 2017 as an upcoming translated title.
-------
While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.
It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.
There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.
I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.
The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.
I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.
And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.
I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.
About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”
Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.
Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)
(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
-------
While I was in the middle of Vernon Subutex One, a book called Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel appeared in my Goodreads feed. (Thanks Kris.) Vernon Subutex has a strong claim to that subtitle too. In English it's so far been pigeonholed as translated literary fiction about the state of modern life / Western Europe / France / Paris (depending how specific you think its types are), and its Booker International shortlisting cements this - but just as much as being a perceptive take on contemporary society and politics, it faces up to the mythology and glitter of rock and indie as things that belong to the past and the middle-aged, that mass youth culture now has other foci, and many 20th century rock legends and their hangers-on are dead, or suited and booted with sensible jobs and nuclear families, or Peter Pans (of various genders) with levels of financial security ranging from the pampered, to the destitute like the titular former record-shop owner. So Vernon Subutex is also a book / series for people who love reading about the faded glamour of music scenes, and who don't follow translation prizes. It is so much on point about the pop-culture of different age groups that I still can't believe it was first published in 2015 and hadn't just been written a few months ago, as voters tired of - the obviously unmentioned - Macron, from the politics to the fashion (my note says about one female character's wardrobe "man-repeller Cos type clothing as favoured on Mumsnet" although I didn't record the page number that would have helped in quoting Despentes' own description). It would probably also be of interest to those who've enjoyed British topical political novels like Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion, as a similar bulletin from across the Channel.
It's a cartoonish, slangy satire in a 1990s style, but its caricatures are sharper, its characterisation deeper and the observations more true than in 90% of that stuff. I felt as if Despentes had lived as most of these people (and met the rest). It somehow romanticises less than most music books, whilst still being as cool as the best of them. (The blurb's cheesy wording doesn't reflect the understanding of subcultures inside the book, nor is it even wholly accurate about the plot.) It may be told via multiple characters, like a lot of 2010s literary fiction, but it's in close third-person rather than first, and the present-day story progresses chronologically. As long as you can deal with a lot of characters having equal importance, it's more straightforwardly readable and less experimental than might be expected from its current positioning in English. It didn't feel like anything that would be on one of those longlists. It was a bunking-off, guilty-pleasure kind of book I might read instead of anything I *should*. Except the writing, especially the inner life of most characters, is way too good and too convincing for any so-called guilt to come into it. People are just atypical enough to be convincing, for instance, Vernon weirdly finds coke relaxing.
There were a handful of things that perhaps could have been handled better - although as this is only part one of a trilogy, there's plenty of scope for further developments in later books. Recently-deceased rock star Alex Bleach - videos of whom are the novel's mcguffin - was black, yet there's nothing about him as a black artist, or how his stage name, and his cultural positioning identical to that of a white rock star relate to that (the name must be a comment in itself), and his social circle doesn't seem to include any other black people - his friends who appear in the book seem to be mostly white, with a few middle-eastern /Muslim. The novel's observation of political change references the growing acceptability of the far right, especially among the young, for instance, a biography of Bleach is probably "too middle-class hipster for the baby fascists of her generation". I'm not sure whether it's meant to be a close reflection of contemporary Paris or about a slightly different fictional version, just a little more dystopian from the reality where you can still find a homeless person sleeping in your app-hired electric car - but if it's the former, it doesn't have anything about a similar growth in socialist and far-left politics. The character I found least convincing was Patrice, a recently-separated domestic violence perpetrator who puts up the sofa-surfing Vernon for a while. It's possible I'm relying too much on stuff from psychology textbooks in this, but I also haven't knowingly met anyone who contradicts the idea that the high level of self-awareness and honesty, and lack of grandiosity, displayed by Patrice wouldn't co-exist long-term alongside his severely abusive behaviour, because if he were really that aware - and he's not written like someone kidding himself - he would have been able to reform himself more. He would have worked better written in distant third-person, with some of the insights into his behaviour coming from an omniscient narrator rather than from his own thoughts.
I occasionally had doubts about the 5-star rating; it started out as a book I wished I could have written, then at times it was too much, too much like eating some once-favourite treat I didn't now love as much as I used to, and for a while I only read 50 pages every few days. But towards the end, I was impressed with almost everything from the depiction of Vernon's decay (the specifics of which has unfortunately become blended in my memory with the later stages of the fall from prosperity of the title character in 19th-century Polish novel Marta, which I finished a few days later) to the aptness of references such as crap right-wing scriptwriter Xavier's interest in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle - whose politics were similar to those of Subutex's far-right characters and whose most famous work The Fire Within is somewhat echoed in the wanderings and descent of Vernon.
The French original of Vernon Subutex is packed with Parisian slang which was essentially untranslatable to English, as mentioned in this interview with translator Frank Wynne. Something has, in a way, been lost in translation, but, whilst never overegging it, Wynne has produced an English version in a register recognisable and credible, alongside all the reference-dropping (like the character who stole CDs using the method she saw in Christiane F) to anyone who used to read the British music press while it was still decent, and who remembers the work of punkish younger novelists of the 1990s - and as the focal characters are now in their 40s and 50s, Vernon reckons that if someone still listens to Tricky that probably means they're okay, this is a great fit for their heyday, people like the former rock girlfriend who reckons that if the menopause is as tough as they say, she might go back on hard drugs. The novel's interest in understanding all sides, humanising all characters equally, whether they are homeless or far right or trans or devoutly muslim or an ex-porn star or a comfortable middle-class straight couple with kids, is also perhaps more characteristic of this generation's attitudes than of Millenials and Gen Z, of people formed by a different time, when the tail-end of the post-war consensus, and post-modernism, was the order of the day. The trilogy has been compared by its French fans to the work of Zola and Balzac - two writers I've still not read; in the last few months, I've been finding this to be a major gap due to their influence on the classic Polish literature I've been reading - and now on Vernon Subutex.
I would love to see a review of Subutex by Nick Lezard, quondam book critic and writer of columns on middle-aged, middle-class poverty and near-homelessness in the New Statesman - although maybe he'd find it uncomfortably close to the bone, as Vernon's inertia, probably masking low-grade depression, is similar. From the poignant and ruthless years of attrition of a record collection once thought a permanent part of one's identity, as it's listed for eBay sale to buy basic consumables like food, to the weird gulf between who you know and the state of your own life, and the sort of welfare-state fails that left-leaning Brits like to think still don't happen on the Continent, and material artefacts of the rise and fall of personal circumstances like "the goose-down quilt he'd been lugging around since he was 30", Despentes is doing her absolute damndest to get it through to comfortable liberal readers that this stuff isn't nearly as far away from them as they'd like to think: even if you haven't started falling through the safety net, it probably is happening to someone of your acquaintance, and even to people you once admired.
And unlike so many commentators of this age, writing about and for their peers, there's also respect not dismissiveness, just as much for anyone else in the fast-moving cynical entertainment world of this book, for the younger generation on its own terms, here via a venial film director: his own daughter got it into her head to be a "YouTube Beauty Vlogger"… to his shock he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload "make-up tutorials" that get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. This is typical of the way a lot is packed in: two characters' perspectives are elucidated simultaneously, whilst saying something kind of soundbitey about the present and moving the story forward. The buzz of every minute of being a twentysomething in the capital who knows quite a few of the right people, while trying to meet more, is vividly alive in the story of up and coming music writer Lydia Bazooka and it made memories of 00s East London flash before my eyes.
I've never read Despentes before (or especially wanted to before I first heard about Vernon Subutex) but vaguely knew of her by repute since Baise-Moi. As a result of enjoying VS1, have looked at a few interviews and other books of hers. Wynne described her as "ornery" and she seems even more so now that her non-fiction writings don't fit with the prevailing trends in late-2010s feminism, especially among younger women who are reacting against the prevalence of online porn (concern about internet porn is referenced here by an ex-porn-star character's idly daft book idea) - and her apparent advocacy of political lesbianism in one interview seemed to puzzle a young journalist. (Apologies if I misinterpreted this reporter.) Her most consciously transgressive move in this book is possibly an FTM character who transitions for somewhat non-standard reasons. Vernon Subutex himself may be a straight man, and the book's characters of various sexualities and genders, so it's not lesbian-focused like some of her earlier work, but there are a number of countercultural lesbian characters, one of whom also appears in Apocalypse Bébé. The sexuality of the formidable homeless Olga is unstated, but she reminded me of a more realist version of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry.
About a month ago in the Times, an article by Laura Freeman asked Is there a great Brexit novel?. My impression is that most literary 'Brexit novels' already published are going for easy wins with a Remainer audience, and are therefore low on social and political complexity. Freeman described something along the lines of what I hoped to read - but which will evidently take longer than two and a half years to emerge, perhaps much longer:
How would Dickens, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Gissing and Orwell have dealt with Project Fear, enemies of the people, the end of experts and the modern Circumlocution Office that is the Department for Exiting the European Union? ... There is something distasteful about that Welsh novelist — a personification of smuggery — in Cusk’s Kudos, repeating the old canard about prospectless leavers being “turkeys voting for Christmas”. A Dickens or an Orwell would ask: “Why vote leave? Why remain?” Today’s novelist howls: “Why, why, why?”
Despentes is not responding to a single political earthquake as are Brits writing about Brexit, or Americans about the Trump presidency, but to shifting trends. She gives considerably more space to one side of aggressively polarised politics than the other (the side on which her audience is less likely to be found, I assume) - but she comes closer to presenting an equivalent panorama of views and characters than anything of which I'm currently aware in English, other than perhaps Byers.
Needless to say, I am looking forward to the next instalment (its character list has already been useful while reading part one) and hope it maintains the momentum and quality of the first. In presenting (Even if reading over this post, as with many of my other 5-star reviews, makes me wonder if liking a book this much results in a fannish babble unlikely to convince others, because some works you simply *get* beyond anything that can be justified with quotes - or you don't.)
(read Nov 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
2 December 2018
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.
Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..
I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.
Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)
The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.
There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.
I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.
The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.
Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)
(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)
A very 00s, pre-recessionary book. I daresay that's part of the reason for its recent success in the world of English-translated literary prizes. It must be a break from current political stresses for many judges and readers, evoking a liberal prelapsarian time when it never occurred to middle-class frequent travellers with an internationalist outlook that not everyone aspired to or admired their way of life - and when there weren't the grinding financial worries that would emerge for so many in the Global North shortly after its 2007 publication. A time when it didn't seem entirely silly to say: "Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep." In this book from over ten years ago. it is still possible to feel that, when travelling, one is off the radar, inbetween real life and real places: there isn't the always-on wifi and the expectation of being in touch 24/7. Its contemporary elements include, subtly or overtly the travel subculture and its attitudes, things like They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. - although unlike many of the travel culture's real-life proponents, Tokarczuk does occasionally mention the environmental impact of flying.
Many of Flights' characters evoke British political writer David Goodhart's frequently cited concept of "anywheres" versus "somewheres" (an explanation for Brexit and similar political shifts). This book is all about "anywheres":
Mostly wealthy tourists, Americans, Germans, Brits, and also those who had lost – in the free flow of money, which they let guide them – any and all defining traits. They were simply attractive, healthy, moving with unsummoned ease from language to language.
In the book's take on 'travel psychology', there are three progressive phases of psychological development in the traveller growing used to waking up away from home - starting with the assumption that one is at home, through the bewilderment at 'I don't know where I am' - to the enlightened ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where I Am,’ it makes no difference. I’m here..
I was fortunate to read Flights late in the year - not in the spring at the time of the Booker International list - and thanks to earlier GR reviewers went into it forewarned about inaccuracies, both those that are strongly contradicted by personal experience, such as the alleged absence of the over-40s from tourist hostels, and errors of factual knowledge across domains including physics, neurology and history. This meant that I always read any unfamiliar, apparently-factual material with some scepticism. I looked up things at times to check, but was not always sufficiently invested in the book to do so thoroughly. (There are stories and passages in Flights which are too much like bog-standard English-language litfic about middle-class families. As one of those readers who likes translated fiction to introduce a little strangeness to English and to fiction, and who reads it to get away from that sort of mundane contemporary British or American novel, this was not my sort of thing. [Have been trying to remember where I got that 'strangeness' from - thought it was a Tim Parks article but searching suggests not.] Although I enjoyed Flights to an extent that would merit 4 stars, the factual errors mean it gets no more than 3. Its reach is polymathic, but it stands up poorly against major 'encyclopaedic' novels that contain significantly fewer mistakes (although it's rare one of these books is found to have none, once let loose for a few years on a reading public with specialist degrees in many subjects. Paid reviewers in the press ought to have the job of thoroughly checking such material in novels they cover, but sadly this doesn't seem to be done.) It is disappointing, too, when there are readers who seek encyclopaedic novels by erudite women, not to be able to recommend this one more strongly due to the number of mistakes. If the 'factual' material were coming from a character's stream of consciousness, it could be fitting (although the errors should really be indicated in some way for the benefit of readers who wouldn't know or check) as there is a Jungian / 'woo' inflection to the book at times, and sometimes a chatty, vague style, which would sit well with half-remembered impressions of facts read years ago.
Tokarczuk has described Flights as a 'constellation novel', probably a new term in English, although the novel of fragments or volume of linked short stories is not a new form. If you enjoy noticing when apparently unrelated books you've read recently mention the same obscure fact, event or motif, you will likely get some fun out of Flights. Its ostensibly separate stories and passages - a mixture of apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, contemporary and historical fiction, jottings and epiphanies - are pulled together by similar minor connections. It's inevitably linear on the page (and it would be intriguing to hear how Tokarczuk decided the order for the pieces), but in ideaspace it has the shape of a 3D network diagram, with links between multiple nodes. On a small scale it is like an internet, although the web is only a minor feature in Flights. (An early internet /hypertext novel, 253 by Geoff Ryman (1998) - which I enjoyed more than most people on GR - also took the theme of travel, specifically a London Tube journey and its passengers: the loose structure and sense of movement associated with travel evidently suits these unconventional formats.)
The most apparently impressive connection made in the book is perhaps fictional: that an Italian soprano who sung at Chopin's funeral (his heart having already been removed to be taken to Poland) was also in Vienna during the 1848 revolution in which Angelo Soliman's body, stuffed for display without his consent, was destroyed. I can find nothing about 'Graziella Panini' outside references to Tokarczuk's book - though if someone reading this post has a biography of Chopin which goes into detail about his funeral, they may be able to check if she was mentioned. This string of events is connected to the book's other major theme, anatomy. It is not one I enjoy or find pleasant - but Flights did at least, unlike any other work previously, prompt me to think more rationally about why that might be, when I agree with people knowing and learning it as a topic, and also about its importance in the history of medicine - even if it is not in anatomy but in physiology where advances are still obviously required to understand medical phenomena.
There is some that tinge of exoticisation / orientalism, here of various Asian and North African settings, which is quite common in East European literature (e.g. Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai) and less examined than it would be in British or North American literary fiction of the same vintage - part of a culture in which this is not discussed and flagged up to the same extent, and where these writers are already notably more liberal than average for their countries.
I once planned to read Tokarczuk's books in English in chronological order. And so far I've read two of them in reverse chronological order - which provided the unexpected fun of spotting motifs from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) emerging in Flights two years earlier. There is the 'invisbility' and anonymity of older women: For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’; vegetarianism and environmental issues (although Tokarczuk is a member of the Polish Green Party, so these may be perennial in her books); canine [wolf] headed persons reported by early travel writers; and most copiously, an unconventional detective story.
The detective story was the main element that motivated me to keep going enthusiastically through the book; anticipating a resolution near the end (having looked at chapter titles) sustained my interest and goodwill towards the rest of the narrative. And then there wasn't one! This is actually flagged up in Flights' UK blurb, but I hadn't read it properly. It meant that, although these days, in Kunicki's shoes I probably would have let the absence go, assuming a decent store of prior trust and goodwill, I found myself empathising with his frustration and nagging, because I'd read about ¾ of the bloody book waiting for this information too. I was fed up with the narrative for the next several chapters but was eventually back on board after some apposite lines quoted near the beginning of this post.
Whilst it's necessary to have some alertness to notice the connections between stories or vignettes in Flights, most of the pieces of writing are not as intellectually dense as I'd assumed from others' reviews of the book. Some GR posters have said Drive Your Plow is an easier book than Flights, but I would say it is a similar level of difficulty, wearing its learning more lightly but with plenty to uncover for those who've read relevant material (one GR friend pointed out connections to Derrida, which I never would have noticed). Plow is more focused and tightly constructed, and better for it IMO. Flights, like the later book, has paragraphs of intense observation and philosophical musings, although here, there are more of them, and their failure / fancifulness rate is higher. Similarly, there are passages of gorgeous description in Flights - the chapter on plastic bags, described as if they were a species, is outstanding and perversely beautiful - but also some which are a little flat compared with those in the shorter novel. I still find Olga Tokarczuk very likeable: I just wish this book had had more editing, especially fact checking when it was first published. (Factual errors are generally not altered for translation, especially not in fiction.)
(Read Nov-Dec 2018, reviewed Dec 2018. The review and discussion thread on Goodreads.)
23 November 2018
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.)
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.)
21 November 2018
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.
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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.
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