kens-blog

Mating season

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:09:47 +0100

A wonderful, sunny spring morning - so I decided to check the seagull habitat on our roof before the mating season begins in earnest next month.

Herring gulls (on the endangered list in the UK) nest in profusion on the rooftops of Hastings Old Town, and our house does not escape. Each year we usually have two resident pairs: one nesting between the chimney pots of the bigger, higher chimney, and the other in the roof valley in the lee of the rear chimney. It's this latter that cause the problems.

Two or three years ago, we had a roof leak. As bad luck would have it, the water dripped through the ceiling right onto my sleeping head in the bedroom below. What you might dub a wake-up call. It had been caused by rainwater backing up into the eaves as a result of the build-up of nesting debris in the gully. Since then, I've taken the precaution of climbing up there every year for an inspection.

Herring gulls mate for life and pairs nest and breed annually between April-September in the UK. They typically lay between 2-3 eggs though rarely do three chicks all survive. In between breeding seasons, according to my herring gull bible, the classic study The Herring Gull's World (Niko Tinbergen, 1953), they disperse into winter flocks, perhaps flying inland. In spring, the pairs return to the breeding ground, encountering and recognising each other visually and aurally. My perception, however, is that many of the Hastings birds actually hang around like moody teenagers all winter.

That said, I find on opening the Velux window in the roof which gives me access to the valley that no gulls are yet in residence here. However, a pair ensconced between the pots of the upper chimney start shrieking immediately upon my emergence, setting off answering screams across the Old Town. Meanwhile, three or four flies clustering around the inside of the window within the attic are immediately released.

Although there are no nesting birds here yet, there is evidence of previous activity. The lead-clad gully is clogged with deposited debris. Some obvious seagull acquisitions - fragments of fishermen's ropes and nets, small bones - but mainly a heap of muddy soil. I can't figure out how the birds transport it here, if indeed that is what they do. So I set to work to remove it with brush and shovel, an awkward job, depositing it shovelful by shovelful into the plastic basin inside the attic. Meanwhile, the gulls on the other chimney have soon got used to me, settling down to watch me with their little yellow eyes. And at last the gully is cleared for the free flow of rainwater - for a while.

Soon, the gulls' world will go crazy again. Mating, laying, screaming, shitting, feeding the offspring that grow with alarming speed from tiny fluffy brown balls into gawky, full-size flapping things by the end of August. They mark out our springs and summers with untiring precision.

Unknown countries (9): The Prestige

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:47:40 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

I need to be careful discussing Christopher Priest’s The Prestige (1995). This is one book where any detailed discussion of the plot risks spoiling a first-time read; it’s not so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit.

The novel concerns two 19^th century stage magicians, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, whose bitter rivalry has tragic consequences that still reverberate a century later. This is a class as well as personal struggle, in that the former comes from an aristocratic background and the latter is working class. The plot focuses on a particularly spectacular illusion developed by Borden, in which the conjuror appears to be in two places almost simultaneously, and on Angier’s desperate efforts to emulate this, which have extremely strange results.

The narrative begins in the present day, with a reporter, Andrew Westley, discovering, while investigating a Californian religious sect, the Rapturous Church of Christ Jesus, that he may be a descendant of Alfred Borden. This opening section is a little contrived (it is omitted, along with the entire contemporary strand of the narrative, in Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film); and the religious cult is something of a red herring, although the rumours that its erstwhile leader had the gift of appearing in two places at once is a significant clue as to what is to come. The theme of doppelgangers is introduced early on with the adopted Andrew Westley’s strange conviction, in the absence of any evidence, that he is one of a pair of identical twins.

You might say it’s a theme of re-doubling: there are two protagonists simultaneously at war with and aiming to emulate each other, and each protagonist appears in the course of his stage work to split himself into two.

Priest’s handling of the theme is, in effect, a brilliant conjuring trick in itself. Throughout the narratives that follow – that of Borden, of Angier’s great-grand-daughter, and of Angier himself – there is concealment but no deception. That is to say, the only thing preventing the reader from guessing what is actually going on is the author’s cunning manipulation of his/her attention; but the clues are all there in the narrative. As Borden’s narrative asserts near the outset: “Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life.”

In other words, there is no actual “magic” involved. Just as the contemporary stage illusionist Derren Brown insists, while emulating the feats of self-professed mediums and mind-readers, that he has no occult powers and his tricks are just that – tricks – so Priest does not stray into the territory of supernatural fantasy to account for the events he describes. However, at the risk of splitting hairs, he does venture into science-fiction. Rupert Angier invokes the help of the (real life) scientist and pioneer of electricity, Nikola Tesla, in trying to emulate his rival’s illusion “The New Transported Man”; and the technological solution arrived at is, shall we say, an imaginary technology.

That said, the trickery is all in the deception that constitutes fiction itself, whether dealing in fantastic or realistic content. It is the very deception that troubled Daniel Defoe’s Protestant conscience right at the start of the novel’s development – and which still causes some to mistrust fiction today. It’s the trickery of making stuff up.

Along the journey towards the rather terrifying dénouement, Priest inserts sly jokes and fancies. One that amused me, as a fellow Hastings resident, was the introduction of a character called Robert Noonan as an amateur conjuror and early mentor of Alfred Borden. Robert Noonan was in fact the real name of Robert Tressell, a famous Hastings denizen and the author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

But on the whole, though multi-dimensional, The Prestige is not a baggy thing: it is plot-driven and tautly plotted at that, and it is this, rather than its fantastic content, that drives it in the direction of genre. All the more remarkable then that it won, not just the World Fantasy Award but also the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. I shall have more to say about the fraught relationship of genre and “mainstream” fiction in my summing-up.

Two more things to say here. First, the title. Within the novel, this is explained as being the third and final stage of a magic trick. The first is the setup, in which what is about to be performed is explained, and sometimes the audience invited to inspect the apparatus. Then the performance. And finally the effect, or the “prestige”: the rabbit appearing from the hat “can be said to be the prestige of that trick”.

In an interview, the author has subsequently claimed he invented this. Far from being a word used by magicians for centuries, he says, “its use as a magical word only goes back to 1995. I made the whole thing up. It has entered magicians’ language already.”

He claims he was searching for a title to follow his previous successful novel, The Glamour, and because “prestige” seemed close to “prestidigitation” the coincidence (he was already planning a book about magicians) was too good to miss, and therefore he deliberately redefined the word.

But when I went to the first dictionary to hand, a 1972 edition of Chambers, I found “prestige” already defined as “n. orig. a conjuring trick, illusion; glamour…”! So there’s a bit of double-bluffing going on here. It’s probably truer to say that Priest has subtly shifted the meaning to refer exclusively to the outcome of the trick; which has a particular and horrid relevance at the outcome of the plot. I can’t say more for risk of spoiling.

Last, the film. It has a stellar cast: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johannson, Michael Caine, Andy Serkis and a well-disguised David Bowie as Tesla. Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter, his brother Jonathan, have completely reconstituted the plot to suit the particular illusionistic possibilities of film. It’s worth watching, but if you haven’t seen it yet, read the novel first.

Next episode – Discussion & conclusions

Unknown countries (8): Perdido Street Station

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:45:28 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

Many years ago, I used to read a lot of SF and then I got bored with it and stopped. When I started browsing for it again on the shelves of new and second-hand bookshops (ah! remember when it was so easy to do that? real bookstores with real books!), there were a few names that were new to me, one being China Miéville. Strange name. I thought he was a woman at first. It turns out he is the offspring of Sixties hippies who thought “China” was cool. He also appears to be an ex-public-school Trotskyist (but I won’t hold that against him) (note to US readers: “public” here of course means “private”) who has actually stood for the UK Parliament, for the Socialist Alliance. And he has a PhD in international law.

Miéville, by his own account (see the opening exchanges of this interview), is an unashamed genre writer. Successful genre writers for a generation have been recognisable for their paperbacks being marketed in uniform designs with embossed metallic lettering. There was a period when Martin Amis was being given this treatment, which only goes to show that publishing promoters are sometimes clever enough to understand there are cool kudos to be had (and therefore profit to be made) from pretending not to be “literary”. Though it probably wouldn’t work for Henry James.

Some writers try to straddle the marketing divide in what I believe to be unsatisfactory ways. Iain Banks flips over into SF by the expedient of inserting a middle initial M into his name. Miéville, however, in a later passage in the interview I’ve referenced above, takes a more integrated view of his aesthetics (and in this is probably closer to, say, Doris Lessing, who clearly doesn’t care which niche she’s marketed into), averring that it would be “the Holy Grail” to “write the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde”.

Does he pull this off in Perdido Street Station (2000)? Not quite, but this is a book of considerable originality whose mise-en-scène is disturbingly unforgettable.

There are a few reference markers. Miéville’s acknowledgements include thanks to the memory of Mervyn Peake. Followers of English fantasy typically divide into enthusiasts for Tolkien and for Peake. I guess the latter is seen as grittier, more avant-garde, more political, less nostalgic. Miéville’s invention of the city of New Crobuzon (and the world of Bas-Lag in which it is set) has obvious affinities with Peake’s Gormenghast. It is a dark, urban, Gothic, grotesque world; the place names, for instance, are recognisably English inventions, but baroque and grimly comic: Murkside, Griss Fell, Bonetown, Skulkford, Petty Coil, Kinken, and the rivers that trisect the city, the Tar and the Canker.

Having said that, I must point out there are some Tolkien-like features. Like The Lord of the Rings, the book begins with a map. Yes, you can follow the action through all the sites mentioned above and more via the impressively complex plan of New Crobuzon. I’m a sucker for that. Also, the monsters in the book – that is, the most terrifying of several different kinds of monster – the Slake Moths – are dark presences in the sky with the uncanny fascination of Tolkien’s Nazgul or Dark Riders. And, while, the book lacks any cosy remembered homeland like the Shire, it is populated, like The Lord of the Rings, by humans as well as humanoid hybrids and even stranger beings who unite in a campaign to defeat overwhelming evil. It is true that “good” doesn’t triumph in any facile way, but then that’s sort of true for Tolkien’s trilogy as well.

Those hybrids: there are cactacae (cactus-like humanoids, originally from a desert environment), vodyanoi (humanoids with amphibian characteristics), garudas (bird-like humanoids with the power of flight – the narrative is sparked by the plight of one of these, who has been deprived of his wings for an unspecified crime), and a myriad of sub-human but sentient creatures. The protagonist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, whose scientific investigations at the behest of the stricken garuda trigger a chain of disastrous events, has a girlfriend called Lin who’s a Khepri: a being with a woman’s body and an insect’s carapace for a head (what my more politically incorrect student chums decades ago would have regarded as the utimate paper-bag job).

Whether this menagerie in the end better recalls Max Ernst or Star Trek, there is a contemporary, even political edge to all this which Miéville exploits cleverly. The most obvious fact here is that it’s the city itself that is the most palpable and powerful presence in the novel. You can almost smell it. The second most obvious fact is that this is a grotesque depiction of London. The map clearly has the shape and feel of London, with the river running through it roughly west to east, a Parliament building stuck right on that river, right in the middle, and a criss-cross of railway lines. Yes, this is an SF novel with railways, another fact that delights me. It recognisably intercuts with that sub-genre of SF known as steampunk, deploying as it does Victorian steam engines, mechanical/analogue computers that become sentient, and alternative science (techniques that appear magical allow the powers that be to punish transgressors by modifying their physiologies in radical and grotesque ways – yet powered, heavier than air flight seems to be unknown). Mervyn Peake was a pioneer here too.

The humans – recognisably white, middle-class folk – run this impossibly diverse, multicultural city, exploiting the other species (“xenians”), who tend to live in ghetto-like districts, often specialising in doing the dirty jobs. Lin, like many of her khepri kin, works as an artist, using the exudations of her own body as materials – I get the strong impression that her spiritual home is Hackney. In one memorable episode, the amphibian vodyanoi, who of course work as dockers, stage a strike which is brutally put down by the government. There are numerous tour-de-force set-pieces like this, but the problem is that they are poorly integrated into the narrative.

This is the main criticism of this otherwise impressive piece of writing. The rendering of this infernal world in all its detail, with its complex power-structures, is, one suspects, the author’s chief delight, and he luxuriates in his own prose, which is, I have to say, over-reliant on my least favourite literary trope, the simile: in the space of little more than a page, for example, we have “thin windows like arrow-slits”, “the militia’s hub, the Spike, that punctured the earth like a concrete thorn in the heart of the city”, a dirigible that “flapped and lolled and swelled like a dying fish”, “slate roofs hunching like shoulders in the cold, rotten walls”.

And beyond this inferno, he hints at even worse places: when the government are casting about for help in ridding the city of the deadly Slake Moths, they timidly summon the Ambassador from Hell, who, it turns out, is too scared of these monsters to offer assistance. This is a good joke, but once again it’s a set-piece not strictly relevant to the plot – which, once the major threat is established, turns into a bug-hunt, albeit one with unexpected twists. At the end, little has changed – a difference from The Lord of the Rings, actually.

Miéville has set further novels in the world of Bas-Lag. The danger with this, I fear, is that the shock of this fictional world is liable to diminish the more it is described. With important elements left to the reader’s imagination – is it an alien planet, a parallel world or a scenario of the far future? – it is scary precisely because, as in a nightmare, anything may be possible. As more is described, the possibilities are one by one closed off.

Also, as further novels are added to the series it becomes more and more just another fantasy franchise – and so, however much he may defend genre, it may be that Miéville’s wish for his writing to be considered more “seriously” has compelled him to set his current novel, The City and the City in a more realistic, contemporary fictional world – albeit one with a metaphysical dimension. So when I return to this author, this is the book I shall investigate next, to see whether he is closer to his “Holy Grail” of combining fantasy writing with serious literary groundbreaking.

Next episode – Christopher Priest: The Prestige

Unknown countries (7): Uncle Silas

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:15:01 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is principally known these days as a writer of ghost stories. In particular, the classic “Green Tea” has been anthologised countless times.

No doubt this has coloured public perception today of his novels, but it is the case that they are not supernatural fantasies. In her 1946 introduction to the novel in question, Elizabeth Bowen (herself a literary novelist in the vein of Henry James with a minor sideline in ghost stories) calls Uncle Silas (1864) a “romance of terror”. She goes on to suggest: “Uncle Silas was in advance of, not behind, its time: it is not the last, belated Gothic romance but the first (or among the first) of the psychological thrillers.”

Not that the Gothic trappings are not there. The protagonist, Maud Ruthyn, is a veritable damsel in distress. The only scion of the Ruthyns of Knowl, “of a very ancient lineage”, she lives alone with her father (apart from a panoply of servants, of course) in a gloomy mansion next to a gloomy wood and family mausoleum. Her father, whose health is poor, is attended by a mysterious Mr Brierley, later referred to as Dr Brierley, “a tall, lean man, all in ungainly black”, said to be “a great conjuror among the Swedenborg sect”, according to one of the servants. There are hints of ghosts, and much is made of a locked oak chest in which her father keeps secrets.

But many of these foreboding details turn out to be either red herrings or not at all what they appear. Brooding somewhere offstage is the enigmatic personage of Uncle Silas, to whose care her father has entrusted Maud in the event of his death. Silas Ruthyn, whom she has never met, has a bad reputation; many years previously, he was acquitted of a murder, though held by many to have been guilty in fact, and has lived in seclusion ever since. Her father’s motive in entrusting his daughter to his brother is to salvage the family name by making public that trust. Maud is warned against Uncle Silas by her cousin, the irrepressible Lady Knollys, but, out of devotion to her father, pays little heed.

Uncle Silas doesn’t actually make an appearance until halfway through the novel that bears his name. But before that, we are introduced to possibly the most unpleasant and certainly the most memorable character in the book, Maud’s French governess Madame de la Rougierre. Dislike is mutual between the governess and her charge. Maud’s complaints about this sinister woman, whose motives for her strange behaviour are unclear, are rebuffed by her father – but eventually he is persuaded to dismiss her after a particularly egregious transgression. We have, however, not seen the last of her.

Then Maud’s father dies, and she is shipped off to live with her Uncle Silas. Her cousin Monica Knollys desperately tries to persuade her not to go, but she is resolutely loyal to her father’s wishes. Here, as later in the novel, Le Fanu’s skill is subtly deployed. The book is narrated in the first person by Maud, whose character is a complex blend of occasional shrewdness, steadfast honesty and utter naivety. Thus, we see events unfold through her eyes and yet Le Fanu hints at possibilities Maud herself is scarcely aware of. Lady Knollys appears to be in cahoots with the Swedenborgian Dr Brierley, which raises suspicion about their motives in dissuading Maud from going along with her late father’s wishes; and yet at the same time, as readers, we are made to tear our hair in frustration at Maud’s rashness in entrusting her own future to the unknown Uncle Silas, who has possibly committed murder in the past, and who has a financial stake in her demise.

Le Fanu cunningly subverts readers’ expectations constantly. We might expect from the build-up that Bartram-Haugh, Silas’ residence, will turn out to be a forbidding Gothic pile, a Bluebeard-style castle in which Maud will meet her fate. Well, there is horror to come, but at first it is almost idyllic. Silas’ young daughter, Maud’s cousin Milly, turns out to be her perfect playmate: a solitary child like Maud herself (although she has an evil older brother, who will play a part in the drama to come), but as exuberant as Maud is reserved; half-educated and yet full of wit and natural charm.

Silas himself is something else. Psychologically tormented, terminally ill, almost ghostly in appearance, he keeps to his room, and, like Marlon Brando in certain scenes of The Godfather, is scarcely ever depicted except in cloistered half-light. Elizabeth Bowen asserts, correctly I think, that Le Fanu doesn’t quite manage to make Silas big enough to justify his build-up; and in the event, as a villain he is, according to her, “most nearly played off the stage by Madame de la Rougierre” – whose re-entry into the plot is one of Le Fanu’s most brilliant and terrifying pieces of writing.

Once again, supernatural events are hinted at – the death for which Silas once stood accused took place in a room in this house – but as ever, the horror turns out to be entirely driven by human perversion. Yes, this is “horror” in its modern sense, not traditional Gothic. We are in the territory, not of Mrs Radcliffe, but of Alfred Hitchcock.

This investigation purports to examine the use of the fantastic in fiction, and also as a by-product the ways in which such use pushes the fiction into genre. From this point of view, Uncle Silas interests me greatly. It is quite clear that Le Fanu’s ghost-story credentials have heavily influenced the way his novels, which constantly hint at the fantastic without actually delivering fantastic events in the way expected, have been marketed over the years. This doesn’t just affect the choice of cover image on modern paperback editions or which shelves they are slotted into in bookstores. It was a contemporary issue for Le Fanu himself, whose preface complains about his practice being labelled as “sensational fiction”. He wishes his novels to be compared to those of Sir Walter Scott, in which bloodshed and suspense are integral, but which in his day were allotted the allegedly superior status of literary fiction.

Having said that, it seems to me that, while Scott’s tales of derring-do are not quite so highly regarded these days as they once were, Le Fanu speaks to our time more clearly. Paranoia is one of the great themes of our day, and it is there in abundance in Uncle Silas. Who exactly is on whose side, and why? What exactly is going on? The author keeps the uncertainty going almost to the end, and even then some questions are not resolved. While slipshod execution may account for some of the latter – for example, the way it is never made clear how long Madame de la Rougierre and Uncle Silas have collaborated and for what reason, or the perfunctory way Milly is disposed of into a “happy ever after” marriage at the end – some of that unresolvability is a presage of modern sensibilities.

The sometimes dark humour is another such presage. In the prologue to his book Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006), the poet Gavin Selerie speculates that macabre and grotesque humour seem characteristic of Anglo-Irish literature: “it runs in a line from Swift through Jonah Barrington to Samuel Beckett”. I would concur with this insight. There’s a thread connecting Uncle Silas not only to Psycho but to The Unnameable.

Next episode – China Miéville: Perdido Street Station

Bill Griffiths on Radio 3

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:11:56 +0100

Yesterday (Wednesday 3 February) I travelled to BBC Broadcasting House in London to record an interview with the redoubtable Ian McMillan for Radio 3's The Verb about Bill Griffiths' Collected Earlier Poems. The poet Sean Bonney was also interviewed about what Bill had meant to him. I hope they'll also be broadcasting a snippet of Bill reading from a CD I took in.

We talked a bit about how Bill was just getting known towards the end of his life for his work on Geordie pit dialect - indeed, Ian revealed that they were going to have him on The Verb in 2007, but his untimely death intervened. However, I made the point that as a poet his public profile is still in no way commensurable with his achievement. This is something we're hoping to remedy with the Reality Street collection, which is the first to put Bill's poetry into chronological context - an achievement for which we have Alan Halsey to thank.

The programme is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 5 February at 21:15 GMT, and is available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for a week thereafter.

Unknown countries (6) : After London

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:56:30 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

I’d heard of Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London, or Wild England for a while before I got round to reading it. Given that this is meant to be one of the great ur-texts of the English Catastrophe tradition – it is granddaddy, whether authors or readers are aware of it or not, to Ballard’s The Drowned World, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and recent popular TV series or movies such as Survivors or 28 Days Later – tracking down a copy was surprisingly hard.

The only edition I could find was published by The Echo Library, an outfit that has seized on the digital revolution to market print-on-demand paperback reprints of out-of-copyright classics.

A word first on this edition, for which the word execrable is scarcely adeqate. It might be expected (though the book wasn’t especially cheap) that frills like a scholarly introduction would be skipped. What I wasn’t prepared for was an exceedingly ugly, functional, generic text-only cover, and inside, a text that had clearly been downloaded from the Gutenberg Project or a similar online source and dumped on the page unedited in Times Roman. Thus, page numbers remain centred at the top of each page (even on title pages), margins are narrow and the text measure uncomfortably wide, and no attempt has been made to convert generic quote marks to smart quotes, double hyphens to en or em dashes, nor to correct the occasion glitches that creep into any scanned text. Even _italics_ are left in plain-text unformatted mode. Horrible.

The book deserves better. Richard Jefferies, born to a farming family in Wiltshire in 1848, wrote extensively on rural life and the natural world. His last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is set on a farm and has an unusual, episodic structure.

After London is also unusual. It falls into two parts. The first, “The Relapse into Barbarism”, is by far the better, being an extraordinary account and description, purportedly written in the far future, of an England that has been hit by an unexplained catastrophe. As I’ve already mentioned, the mysterious disaster that befalls the nation is, like the unidentified city, a staple of many later fantastic narratives. In addition to the novels and films mentioned above, I am reminded of Peter Greenaway’s early feature-length film The Falls, which consists of case studies of the inheritors of a future world devastated by a “Violent Unknown Event” – which has had magical consequences. And outside of the English corpus, there is of course Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with its forbidden “Zone”, patrolled by armed guards, where again a mysterious catastrophe has taken place that is never explained, but which renders the landscape – devastated and returned to nature – into a site of possibly supernatural or extra-natural power.

The post-apocalyptic England described in the thirty pages of “The Relapse into Barbarism” has something of the feel of the Zone, in that it is a site of human devastation reclaimed by nature; while the treatment, an imagined encyclopaedia entry of the future, has affinities with the mode of Peter Greenaway’s film. Five chapters describe in loving detail the “Great Forest” to which southern England has returned, the wildlife in it, the feral humans that inhabit it, the “invaders” who have attempted to re-establish a rudimentary civilisation – and “The Lake”: the great inundation that has evidently overwhelmed London as well as other major towns and cities. Whether this disaster is natural or man-made is not here explained.

After this scene-setting, the second and longer part of the novel, “Wild England”, is initially a bit of a let-down. It is the narrative of Sir Felix, eldest son of Baron Aquila, one of the war-lords in post-apocalyptic, feudal England. His siblings are eager hunter-killers, but he is a bit bookish. Unfortunately, no books are being currently written, and few survive from the past.

Disappointed in love, Felix determines to set forth and explore the world. To this end, he builds his own canoe with sails and ventures onto the Lake. He is captured by the brutal army of another war-lord, a king whom he tries to impress with his erudition and technical know-how. He narrowly evades execution and escapes to regain his vessel and sail on.

Here’s where it gets interesting again. Asleep at the tiller, he finds himself on awakening in an immense expanse, far from any sight of land. The wind has failed. Paddling the canoe, he reaches and passes a series of islands, and then encounters a faint yellow mist, and the water starts to turn black. He lands on a black shore in a red sunset. He is in a nightmarish world of skeletal remains of beings and buildings turned to salt on a reddish ground covering that is “liquid, unctuous and slimy, like a thick oil”. Black coins lie scattered. “The deserted and utterly extinct city of London was under his feet,” is the conclusion Felix arrives at. Here, all is poison, and he must escape if he is not to succumb to it. It’s not unlike the Mordor of Tolkien’s imagination: a Hell in which “Ghastly beings haunted the site of so many crimes, shapeless monsters, hovering by night, and weaving a fearful dance.”

Leaving phosphoric footmarks behind him, Felix manages to escape, once again regaining control of his canoe.

In the remainder of the narrative, he encounters a tribe of forest dwellers, and uses his technological know-how to improve their defences against rival tribes. They want to make him their king. Fearing the imprisonment that this dubious honour entails, he departs hurriedly, making his way westward through the forest where he hopes to be reunited with his lady love.

Jefferies’ writing varies wildly in quality. Describing the natural world – the behaviour of ducks on the great Lake, the sights and sounds of the forest – it has a magical quality. But when he turns to human relations, or needs to move the narrative on, it becomes perfunctory at best. I get the peculiar sense of an experimental writer trying to get out from under the literary conventions of the novel, but not knowing how to, lacking the context for it.

The dialogue is particularly dismal. England may have reverted to barbarism, but it isn’t really clear why it’s also reverted to the locutions of Maloryesque cod-mediaevalism: “And pray, sir knave”, and the like, is how these folk address each other. It’s not surprising that Jefferies only sustains dialogic episodes for so long before hurriedly advancing the narrative again, almost as though this were the treatment for a film, rather than a novel. Perhaps he was a scriptwriter before his time. The jump-cut would have suited him.

In between his early years in Wiltshire and his latter ones in Sussex, Jefferies lived for a while, and attempted to earn a living from his writing, in two suburbs of London: Surbiton and Eltham. I don’t know what bad experiences he had there, but he sure does take his revenge on the metropolis. The nightmare world of the former London, with its crumbling relics, ghostly fires and apparitions, is unforgettable. Nowhere does the novel explain exactly what crimes have caused such dire punishment, although there’s a strong hint that pursuit of wealth has something to do with it.

In conclusion, the book is an oddity. It would be inaccurate to describe it as a neglected classic. It is certainly neglected, but it has deep flaws. Yet it also contains the seed of much to come in the field of apocalyptic literature and drama, not to mention today's ecological concerns. To what extent it has had a direct effect on future writers and film-makers, as opposed to working as a folk memory or contributing to the zeitgeist in indirect ways, I wouldn’t like to say.

Next episode – J Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas

Interlude on e-books

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:51:56 +0100

We interrupt this series to pose a question.

Recently, a couple of authors who have Reality Street books forthcoming have enquired about e-book versions of their published work. Am I planning to make such available? Or if not, do they retain the right to do so?

The answer to the first question is that I haven't given it much thought, but a moment's reflection suggests that there isn't (yet) a history of readers willing to pay for e-book versions of small press poetry collections and works of imaginative writing of the sort that Reality Street publishes. There are of course plenty of websites where you can download poetry collections for free (there's one of mine available). And it has in fact occurred to me that it would be a good idea to make available online free downloads as a taster for new Reality Street books, particularly if they are first collections or works by authors who don't have an extensive track record.

But paid-for poetry e-books? Well, the world is changing fast, the technology is improving all the time and soon there will be some consensus on formats, so who knows? I'm still sceptical.

If anyone has any views on this, please respond. If you don't have my email address, you can use the Reality Street contact page - or simply use the "comments" feature.

After London next.

Unknown countries (5): The Unconsoled

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:39:30 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

This is the one that surprised me most out of the eight – and in a favourable way.

The book had lain on the shelves here unread for ten years. To be honest, I’d never had any great desire to get started on it, or on any other book by Kazuo Ishiguro. Nor had I seen the 1993 film made of his earlier Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day. Reviews used words like “masterful”, “restrained”, “heart-rending”. It was a Merchant-Ivory production. About a butler and a repressed love affair in a country house before World War 2 – say no more.

Ishiguro, Japanese-born but UK-resident since the age of six, came to prominence as one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury’s pioneering Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. His first two novels had Japanese settings. He was touted as one of the “Best Young British Novelists” by Granta. He’s got an OBE.

The back cover blurb of my copy of The Unconsoled (1995) says “Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then … he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.”

The unnamed city, loss of memory – those familiar defamiliarising literary tricks once again. We might expect the protagonist of this first-person narrative to undergo some kind of existential crisis, to ponder the meaning or the meaninglessness of life, to meet with an epiphany of some kind. But this book is much, much weirder than that. And I hate to use the word “restrained” in other than a pejorative way, but in this case the restraint with which the dream-like narrative is handled is what makes it weird (and, indeed, truly dream-like).

Dreams do not commonly have especially fantastic content. Their strangeness usually derives from small displacements in the banalities of everyday life, rather than phantasmagoria – displacements that are taken to be normal within the course of the dream and only seem odd on waking. We converse with friends and family who happen to be dead; we venture out in the street naked. The narrator of The Unconsoled is roused from his bed and, with only the vaguest of briefings, persuaded to address a few words to a group of dinner-jacketed guests in a hotel restaurant. He stands up to speak. “I suddenly became aware that my dressing-gown was hanging open, displaying the entire naked front of my body.” But nobody appears to notice.

This is only his first evening – the narrative takes place over a period of three days – but already he has had a bewildering number of calls on his attention. No sooner has he arrived by taxi at the hotel than the elderly porter, Gustav, is engaging him at great length on the subject of luggage-carrying techniques; a young apparatchik, Hilde Stratmann, informs him that “everyone” is honoured by his visit, which according to her will incorporate “important social functions” as well as a performance – while neglecting to actually give him a schedule; the hotel manager, Mr Hoffman, makes him promise to inspect two books of cuttings about himself which has been compiled over many years by his wife; and Mr Hoffman’s son, Stephan, a fledgling pianist who expects to be playing in the same concert that Thursday, asks if he will spare a few minutes to listen to him run through his piece.

In the hotel bar, Gustav accosts him again with a long-winded plea for him to intercede with his daughter, Sophie, from whom he is estranged. Ryder agrees to meet her and her young son Boris in the Hungarian Café that very evening. Bizarrely, it appears gradually over the course of the novel that there is some past history between the narrator and and the increasingly annoying Sophie, but he expresses little surprise at this.

Over the next couple of days, the narrator is beset from all sides by people beseeching favours. He accedes to all requests blankly, even when they interrupt compliance with the previous request. A “Mr Brodsky” is mentioned in hushed tones: another musician, who has had a scandalous past but is also meant to be giving a comeback performance on Thursday. He is taken to a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it seems to be a version starring Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. He is driven for miles in the middle of the night in his dressing gown to give the talk mentioned above; but it turns out to take place in the restaurant of the hotel he started out from. The city appears to be experiencing some kind of cultural impasse, which some expect him to resolve.

In one particularly strange sequence, when two journalists meet him for a photo-shoot in front of the “Sattler building” – which has a local iconic significance that is never explained, but is not good news for him – they talk about him disparagingly in his presence (“Schulz warned me what a difficult shit the guy is”), before turning to him and addressing him in flattering terms – and he reports the conversation blandly, without comment.

Over the course of this long novel, the events and characters interweave, but, though themes emerge, the threads are never quite tied. As the time of the concert approaches, Ryder becomes obsessed with the idea that his parents are about to arrive in the city (from England?) and witness his performance. He is anxious to be reassured that Mr Hoffman will look after them, but is generally completely passive in the face of increasingly bewildering events, including the inscrutable relationship with Sophie and the possibly autistic Boris.

The description of the concert itself is a surreally comic tour-de-force. Mr Brodsky is hampered in his performance, as his leg has been amputated following an accident – except that it is revealed that the leg that was cut off was actually a wooden leg anyway. Nobody seems any more interested in Ryder’s own performance, after all, than they were in his half-naked speech in the restaurant.

Only towards the end does Ryder express mild annoyance under the extreme pressures to which he has been subjected. “’The catering this morning has been appalling,’ I said coldly, before hurrying off.”

Characters die, are reconciled and then fall out of reconciliation again, come up against bitter disappointment; old schoolfriends of Ryder's suddenly appear for no reason, but nothing is revealed, and, as in Seinfeld, there is “no hugging, no learning”. The narrator ends up alone on a tram circling the city endlessly, evidently having forgotten his parents, as well as Sophie and Boris (who disappear from view), quite happy after all because a sumptuous buffet breakfast is being served on the vehicle. He has no insight into his condition and appears to have no interest in acquiring any insight.

The narration and dialogue are unrelentingly bland, and somehow, as in the Kubrick film Ryder is taken to see (albeit some alternate-universe version of it), this only serves to point up the extraordinary strangeness of the events of the narrative, as though they are taking place off-stage and far away. It's an affectless melodrama that dissipates like the dream it resembles, leaving only an unsettling lack of consolation.

Next episode – Richard Jefferies: After London, or Wild England

Unknown countries (4): The Possibility of an Island

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:09:01 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

I knew a bit about Michel Houellebecq, the supposed bad boy of French letters. How he was prosecuted unsuccessfully for racism for asserting in his 2003 novel Platform that Islam was the stupidest religion. How he hated his mum and his mum hated him. That he’d written a book about H P Lovecraft. His repudiation first by French leftist writers’ circles and then by the political right too. His penchant for inserting a character called “Michel” into his own fiction (much as Paul Auster and Martin Amis create avatars of themselves in theirs – and in fact Houellebecq’s literary persona seems to have been designed to out-Amis Amis, another writer bent on annoying Muslims etc).

But I’d never actually read him. I selected Possibility of an Island (2005) for this series because of its fantastical content: it spans a thousand years, alternating between the narrative of Daniel, a successful comedian playing on outrage (a thinly veiled self-image, as it happens) and his cloned “neohuman” successor(s) who live without companions (save for a beloved dog, Fox) in future compounds secured against the prevailing barbarism. And also because I was curious about him; a writer capable of incensing so many people could surely not fail to be interesting.

Well, to cut to the chase, I was grievously disappointed. I was prepared for delicious outrage, but not for the novel to be quite so dull and, in some respects, so inept.

The trajectory from Daniel, or “Daniel1” to the solitary clone at the far end of time, “Daniel25”, is facilitated by the protagonist’s involvement with a radical cult obsessed with cloning, the Elohimites. They are apparently based on the real-life Raelian sect, believers in divine astronauts, with whom Houellebecq briefly flirted. They are seriously into free love, which suits the protagonist fine, and in thrall to their leader, “the prophet”, a Santa Monica resident who avails himself of all the luxury commodities and free pussy at hand: standard religious cult stuff.

Daniel’s extreme wealth and notoriety as a comedian (a show entitled “We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts” is his greatest hit) make him an ideal celebrity recruit and ambassador for the cult. He has by now left his long-term partner and there are pages and pages of description of strings-free and frankly improbable fucking with a much younger woman, Esther. The affair with the Elohimite Church appears to end disastrously with a bloodbath on the Canary Islands. But the Elohimites survive under a new leader to take over the world with their programme of suicide and resurrection as neohumans by means of cloned DNA. This process, which involves a period during which the cult’s only rival is a resurgent Islam, is narrated rather perfunctorily as reconstructed history by Daniel25.

Character development is, I believe, rather an overrated quality in novels, particularly when, as in much contemporary English fiction at any rate, it ousts other qualities: wit, ideas, adventurous writing, imagination. But if you are constructing a fiction in which the central character moves towards a point of despair that results in his suicide you do need to convey something of the psychological truth that would lead a reader to empathise, and Houellebecq never comes remotely close to doing that, nor does he create any other credible characters that would act effectively as mirrors to the protagonist. The companionless clone, Daniel25, ironically, seems more human than his original predecessor.

Ever since Cervantes and Swift, satire has been an important aim of fantastical writing, and there is some intent here to satirise the superficial, empty world of celebrity-worship we currently inhabit, and its strange co-existence and clash with fundamentalist religion. In the novel’s far future, Western civilisation’s only remnants are isolated clones who never meet, and only ever communicate, sporadically over long distances, through their computer keyboards, while savages eat each other in the wilderness outside. This could have been a cutting verdict on the future of our virtual world of text messaging, FaceBook, Twitter and (yes!) blogging, but the opportunity is fudged by the author.

Similarly, the frequent goading references to Islam are only ever titillating, when there could have been some good material here to explore around rival approaches to death, resurrection and apotheosis. But that would entail taking such questions seriously enough to interrogate them.

It may be that Gavin Bowd’s English translation has to take some of the blame for the general clunkiness of this novel; I regret that my French isn’t good enough to enable me to read the original. But it’s hard to know, in any language, quite how to take Daniel1’s last reported words, which give the novel its title; at the end of a poem to his young lover, Esther:

    …And love, where all is easy,
    Where all is given in the instant;
    There exists in the midst of time
    The possibility of an island.

There could be an interesting ambiguity here. Is the “possibility of an island” a wish for solitude? Or a desire for the chimeric “love, where all is easy”? Are they in fact the same – a masturbatory self-love? Not for the first time, porny satire and bourgeois kitsch appear to inhabit the same space. I think the author gives himself away here.

Next episode – Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled

Unknown countries (3): The Man Who was Thursday

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:08:54 +0100

This is an investigation of eight novels incorporating the fantastic, with a view to drawing some conclusions about the place of speculation in fiction.

Terrorism isn’t something that was invented on 11 September 2001, nor even thirty years before that in Northern Ireland. A hundred years ago, terrorism obsessed the Western world much as it does today. The bogeymen in those days were not Islamic extremists but revolutionary anarchists. Dynamite was the weapon of choice.

Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907, but set in 1886) is of course the great novel on this theme. G K Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday (1908) is a more fantastical and satirical treatment of the same.

In a backchannel response to my last post, Paul A Green writes:

I was raised in a Catholic family where GKC was highly regarded - my late father remembered listening to him on the wireless in the 30s, and my godfather thought he ought to be canonised, the jolly patron saint of paradoxes and warm beer.

Sharing Paul’s Catholic upbringing but lacking a literary family, I was only vaguely aware of him, though I do remember an aunt (heavily into Agatha Christie) recommending the Father Brown stories. Those, and the poem “The Rolling English Road”, which I dimly recall having to learn at school, without any understanding of it, are all I ever knew. Yes, “jolly” is the word. Or “cosy”.

Those Father Brown mysteries tend to turn on the famous “paradoxes” – bon mots wittily resolving a pair of opposing terms in unexpected, or perhaps predictably unexpected ways. “An artist is identical with an anarchist,” opines Gregory the poet in the opening pages of TMWWT. “The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.” The pre-echo here of Stockhausen’s famous comment on 9/11, that it was the greatest work of art by Lucifer, is hard to miss.

Gregory has “dark red hair parted in the middle … literally like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture”. Paul reminds me that, before he became a Catholic, Chesterton was an aesthete, even a would-be decadent, of the ilk of the writer who later became his godless counterpart and epigrammatic rival, Oscar Wilde. (It would not be hard to construct a paradox involving those two writers.)

Gregory meets Syme, “a poet of law, a poet of order … a poet of respectability”. They argue. Syme asserts that Gregory’s anarchism is mere posture. Gregory determines to show him this is not so. He takes him for supper in a London pub – where, having sworn him to secrecy, the table at which they are seated begins to revolve and descend into the bowels of the earth, revealing an underground chamber stocked with “the eggs of iron birds” – bombs!

Being a poet of law and order, and having given his word, Syme cannot denounce his new friend. But there is a further twist: Syme reveals himself as a detective pretending to be a poet (though even more secretly he’s also “a poet who had become a detective”). And now, suddenly, Gregory’s anarchist friends arrive. For fear of his life, Gregory cannot reveal Syme’s real identity, even when Syme unexpectedly moves to oppose Gregory’s election as “Thursday” and to propose himself instead. He persuades the anarchists to put him forward as their representative to the council of seven who run the anarchism business in London, each of whom bears the code name of a day of the week.

So far, so absurd, but there’s more to come. The anarchist council meets, not in secret, but for breakfast on a balcony in full view of Leicester Square. Paradoxically, it is their very ostentation that protects them. They are presided over by the huge presence of “Sunday”. They plan a major political assassination in Paris over their bacon and eggs. But Sunday, the President, reveals there’s a traitor in their midst. Syme again fears for his life, but it is Tuesday who is denounced.

And so over the next few chapters there is excitement and ever so slightly tedious mirth to be had, as one by one other members of the anarchist council are revealed to be detectives. Syme ends up in France trying to prevent the President from carrying out his dastardly deed with a band of dastardly Frenchmen. At this point, the novel turns into boys’ own fantasy, with a touch of militant Christianity: Syme carries a lantern against the anarchic hordes with a cross carved on it.

With his fellow detectives, Syme returns to London to confront the President in Leicester Square. “What are you?” he demands. Sunday retorts: “You will understand the sea, and I shall still be a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.” At that, the “monstrous man” swings himself over the balcony and drops down into the square. There follows a mad pursuit; the President rides an elephant escaped from London Zoo, leaving enigmatic messages behind him. The detectives engage in a metaphysical discussion about what he represents. He means something different to each one, a sort of uncertainty principle; he eludes them all.

Chesterton’s conclusion is surprisingly equivocal; it is, in fact, the ultimate paradox. There is no victory of order over anarchy, of the police over criminality, or of God over Satan, but those opposing principles are revealed as interdependent. The President is the embodiment of both Order and Anarchy. That revelation is experienced as liberation. It’s more Buddhist than Catholic, more Blake than most people’s idea of Chestertonian cosiness.

What interests me about this – and it’s at the core of what interests me about fantastical literature, regardless of the particular iconography or philosophical underpinnings – is that it’s the unknown that’s at the centre of the novel. Chesterton acknowledges this, though for him it’s an awful truth that quickly dissipates. The subtitle is, after all, “A Nightmare”. The later Chesterton at any rate hopes to wake from it. But the unknown remains behind the gentle English Catholicism; it is the ultimate enigma that won’t ever quite go away.

Next episode – Michel Houellbecq: The Possibility of an Island