I used to write without fear. I didn't know what I didn't know. Like a child playing in front of the open grate, mesmerised by the flames and warmth but unprotected by a fire guard, I would write until I was roasted on one side, with nobody to pull me away. Partly this was because I didn't know any different; I'd always written - since being a child - and since nobody had took much interest in it, then why should they take much interest in warning me off? During my twenties I wrote a couple of novels, a number of short stories; beginning to photocopy them for distribution to a few friends, occasionally getting a poem or story published. This didn't happen until my late twenties by which time I was probably unteachable, caught in my own bad habits.
I began to take things more seriously: first a competition entry; then sending off to agents and others. I applied, and finally got on, an M.A. I still wrote with abandon, why shouldn't I? The fear came slowly, I think. Not the course, or my tutors or my fellow students - more the work was to blame. This new novel was different somehow. It could burn me. It could take me places I wasn't keen on going. It was more than a story. More than a tall tale. Slowly, I burned, slowly I moved away from the flame, put precautions in place. Then the writing world, which I'd known of, but never had much of an entry-point to, seemed ever nearer, and I approached that equally without fear. Beware of sabre-toothed tigers! At some point I began to write out of terror rather than unaware of the terror.
The fear was helpful. It kept my words under constant surveillance, it made me aware of their limitations; it made me think of what I needed to do to make them better. Fear made me a better writer. It made me a slower writer, it made me a more scared writer. Yet, the old fearlessness somehow remained. It would take a late night session; a glass or two of wine to intervene. But I'd trained myself to write breathlessly, fearlessly and that training held me in good stead. Only in the morning would I wonder what I'd done - think about this other fearless self that wrote at night and left something that I could only wonder at in the sober morning. Then the fear helped, I suppose, it clarified the confusions of the night before, it worked into the detail of the fearless work. At least sometimes: other times it stopped me. It stopped me from following through on the idea or the piece.
Time went on. I am older. I am a curator of old work now, as much as writer of new work. That was a different me, I think, that fearless one. It is better to be terrified; and to make sure things are perfect before you show them around; before you consider their vulnerability - yet I need the fearless writer to write the damn thing in the first place; the fearless me was the one that got to the end; the terrified writer is needed to look on this work with horror and make it approach some kind of completion. The fear has exactly the same role as my lack of it once had. It is to enable.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Do Movies Make us Culturally Lazy?
Last week I went to the cinema twice; first to see "A Taste of Honey", a film that is over 50 years old, and then to see the freshly pressed "The Great Gatsby." Suitably the first was in the grand surroundings of Stockport Plaza, and the second in the Dolby-enhanced experience zone of our local multiplex. I saw the latter in 2D, as 3D hurts my eyes, but the cinema was nonetheless full.
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
I mention this because I rarely go to the cinema these days. Not purposely, but amongst everything else its gone down my list of priorities. Besides, big TVs means that missing a film on the "big screen" is no longer the disaster it used to be. There may well be something about the falling off in quality of cinema - but I kind of don't necessarily buy that. The latter experience left something to desire. The multiplex had a small bar area with seats that had seen better days and lukewarm white wine; the first fifteen minutes of the film had large groups of people arriving late to find their seat; and, like most contemporary movies, Gatsby passes the 2 hour mark.
Yet cinema has proven remarkably resilient - albeit if the experience seems primarily aimed at a teenage/early 20s audience - with popcorn, and an adjacent Nandos. The films match this of course. There can be times when I've wanted to go and see a film but there's nothing on other than kids movies. (Its a bank holiday on Monday, I should probably have saved Gatsby for then.) Our art house cinemas are as likely to show a Tarantino as the "new" Tarantino, though festivals offer some hopes, though "catch it or miss it."
I love film. I used to sneak out of sixth form when I had a free afternoon and pop to an afternoon showing at the Cannock Classic, a three mile walk from school. The film club at university was the best and cheapest education I received in my first year at that institution. The video shop provided access to a smorgasbord of movies: from trash to classics (and sometimes they were both.) Yet at some point I kind of stopped going to films. The "must see" movies I haven't seen - whether its "Prometheus" of "Avatar." I catch things occasionally years afterwards on TV. I feel I've seen Harry Potter though I don't think I've caught more than a whole film.
It is, I think, easily to get culturally lazy through cinema. Partly as a shorthand for what other people are watching/seeing. The meme about "I've never seen Star Wars" shows our shock when people have opted out of this mainstream culture (and when did "cult" science fiction become necessarily ubiquitous?) - but also, and here's the rub, out "star" culture, our "celeb" culture, is primarily focussed on the beautiful people in the movies. Twas ever thus, I guess. Warhol understood: with his screen tests and his Factory "stars" - but he made unwatchable movies. The great artform of the twentieth century reduced to material...
...and I'm at one with thinking it is a great art form. Its certainly influenced by writing as much, if not more than novels have. I've written poems about cinema; and I still feel about the medium in a way that - even in the age of the HBO boxset, in itself a new "artform" - I've never felt for TV. Partly its the sort of films I've liked: noir is a genre that exists more on film than in books. You don't get noir on stage, that's for sure.
But "liking" a film is the easiest thing in the world it seems. The money spent is astronomical. Even now Goldman's warning that "nobody knows anything" is shown in the failure of something like "John Carter" (SF adaption - start of a new franchise - surely a winner?) or the unexpected success of the "The Artist". Yet a few days after seeing Gatsby, its Fitzgerald's prose that still shimmers, rather than Luhrmann's surfaces. I thought the film was thoroughly entertaining, surprisingly close to the book; but all of that effort and that's it a memory to be replaced - for most of the audience - by the new Star Trek movie or whatever big film is next. De Caprio, a good actor, is trapped in modern cinema as other good actors like Christian Bale or Ryan Gosling often are.
The Review Show was pretty dismissive of Gatsby the film, because it failed to get under the book. Would it ever be able? Great books rarely become great movies - though people try. This version of Gatsby was neither revolutionary or reverential. It worked best when it was more the former, and its a good modern movie, yet some well known in the source material that it was never in danger of celluloid overwhelming it.
Part of the reason I rarely go to the cinema is a social one of course. Two hours spent not talking to the person you went with! Catching up with particular friends too rarely these days, we tend to want to spend the time. But there's something I else I think. A list of the 100 best films of all time and I'll have only seen half - there's still time of course, but I've a pile of DVDs of classics and non-classics. I guess I've seen enough - just as I speak to people who feel they've read enough novels. As a creative practitioner do I want art that entertains or enriches? I can learn quite a lot from the structure and style of a great movie that might translate somehow into fiction - but many mulitplex films aren't that complex. The more complex narratives of the Sopranos or Fringe or The Wire seem to repay us more for the investment of time: movies are all about bang for the buck.
But if there is something "culturally lazy" about watching films I think its more to do with the Hollywood blockbuster as its evolved than something in the medium. These movies are such big events: the sequels create a narrative that feeds through from children's toys to pop culture parody (e.g. Spaced) to creating our own personal cultural signature. It becomes easy to fit in when everyone knows who Spiderman is. (Far easier than knowing who Fellini is.)
What place do movies play in the culture now? Where rock stars have faded in their excess, movie stars remain paramount in our celebrity culture - but the films themselves are more than that - they are so often cultural battering rams. Whereas a song or poem or a novel can still come from nowhere, a film - with its multi-million budget, its A-list stars, its billboards and trailers - can sometimes seem to scorch the cultural earth beneath it. Of course, the bigger the film the bigger the success, the less cultural impact it might really have - yes, you can see it three, four, many more times, but box office is primarily about reach: how many millions of people have been drawn into the cinema.
I was surprised as an adult rewatching "Jaws" and seeing "Saturday Night Fever" for the first time, how gritty those movies were. Like a book that surprises, they are still nuanced, despite the big set pieces that everyone remembers.
Some of my best artistic memories are seeing movies. "Breaking the Waves" at Brixton Ritzy on my own in 1996 after I'd just moved to London - what an overwhelming movie that was; "Reservoir Dogs" at the Cornerhouse; years before (not a great film - but a great day, I was in Manchester for the anti-Clause 28 march) "Sammy and Rosie Got Laid"; "Vertigo" at the Lumiere St. Martin's Lane, in 70mm; "Blue Velvet" for the first time at Lancaster university cinema club.... though sometimes I've seen favourite films on TV, even in the black and white portable in my old teenage bedroom. I'm sure there are lots of great movies out there even today; from all over the world; but wonder as well if they're a little drowned out by the loud culture of the blockbuster; of the sequel. Will I ever see the lovely Spanish film "Solitary Fragments" again? A split-screen movie about the Madrid bombings I accidentally caught at the Viva! Spanish film festival. Or what about "Target" that brilliant b-movie, "Targets" featuring Boris Karloff and directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Will Hollywood ever make a film as perfect again as "Once Upon a Time in the West?"
I began this blog post with a provocation - wondering if film culture - the multiplex showing the next Star Trek sequel or whatever - was the worst kind of culture; its sheer excessive professionalism drowning out everything else - yet there's something to be said for the craft and intelligence that goes into even the dumbest movie. Luhrmann overplays the symbolism in "Gatsby" but I can't help but be impressed by the zoom in and out of the New York apartments. One wonders at the utter pointless spectacle of the party scenes - everything over the top, but little different at heart than last Saturday's "Eurovision" song contest in Sweden, or the set-pieces of the Olympic opening ceremony. Was it really a surprise that we got one of our most imaginative film directors to direct that live event?
My real concern is that there will be more column inches for big blockbuster movies this year than for every book, poem, play that is out there - and something "little" - like "A Taste of Honey" was "little" (though how large were its concerns, wonderfully, achingly large....) cannot hope to compete in this world. The "shock of the new" that came briefly with the Dogme directors; or with Tarantino; is now subsumed into the whole mad machinery it takes to make a major movie. In a world of "franchises" the first casualty often seems story - with plots turning on the needs of the special effects makers rather than the other way round. An endless stream of Star Wars movies, or a reboot of Star Trek look like having none of the inventiveness that's there in J.J. Abram's small screen "Fringe." For British movie makers, films only seem to get a green light when they are picking up on a tabloid worthy subject - such as Winterbottom's life of Paul Raymond. Film has always been a magpie looking for the best source material - but sometimes it feels like books are being written as film treatments first.
I've lost my thread: I guess I'm trying to say that the most thrilling things I've seen lately have been live events one way or another - and its been a long time since I felt compelled to go see a new movie. Probably my loss, of course, and I'm sure there are some great films out there. Just not sure when I'll get around to them...
Friday, May 17, 2013
Time to appraise late-period Fall?
Just over a decade ago the Fall appeared to be in a sorry state, close to terminal decline. After the excellent "The Unutterable" album, released on yet another obscure label, a disastrous tour had led to a major line-up change - not for the first or last time - cancelled or aborted gigs, and even a certain distancing from their number one supporter John Peel. Between 1998 and 2003 the Fall failed to come in for a session. Whether or not their live unreliability at this point or the lack of coherent management was to blame, who knows? The band that let out "Are you are missing winner?" was as brutally incoherent a combo as he'd ever assembled. Though it contained somewhat astonishing covers - Leadbelly, Iggy Pop and R. Dean Taylor - the rest of the album was hamfisted - the worst selection of original songs that had ever come out under the Fall name.
Yet if long-term Fall watchers had become worried that this was the start of a terminal decline it wasn't so. Endless touring had enabled them to road-test new songs that two years after "winner" were a world better. The first signs of this were on the 2003 Peel session, and the much-delayed new album "The Real New Fall LP (formerly Country on the Click)" was a massive return to form. It also included as close as the Fall would get to a hit these days, "Theme from Sparta FC" which got used on Football Focus every Saturday whilst the results were coming in. Despite the usual travails - an injury to Smith that had him in a wheelchair by the following year the sense was that the Fall were on a roll and as good as they'd ever been. Always playing the majority of their set from the last couple of albums, it was a relief when the weaker songs from before "TRNFLP" had been dropped and new songs such as "Blindness" and "What About us?" entered the set. First appearing in the odd interim release "Interim", this messy set of outtakes and live tracks is a crucial document in someways, bridging their two finest albums of the century. Those two tracks were on their final Peel session, for by the time I got to see them at the Manchester Bierkeller in the autumn, John Peel was dead. "Fall Heads Roll" was even better than the previous album, probably their best album of the century, yet even it doesn't really showcase the power of the band at this time. The call and response of "What About Us?" often followed on closely by classic "Wrong Place, Right Time" with the audience taking the microphone, showcased a band that was reinvigorated.
It wouldn't or couldn't last of course - and halfway through the next American tour his band left. Like an ageing soul singer, he carried on regardless, his local support band becoming a "pick up band" for him It took a while for a new record however, and yet "Reformation Post TLC" is actually a double album - some long krautrock type tracks alongside the usual mix of rockabilly and alt.country. His wife Elena Poulou the one constant during the decade, oddities such as "The Wright Stuff" where she sings lead vocal, are added to the Fall's repetoire of unexpected tricks. Always at least partially an electronic band, "Reformation Post TLC" reaffirmed that side of the band's sound for the first time since "The Unutterable" albeit more Krautrock than Chemical Brothers. Its one of their least essential albums, the band an interim solution - good musicians mostly, but lacking a sense of feel. Yet the most obvious statement of electronic Fall came in 2007's other album, the excellent "Tromatic Reflexxions", which was released under the name Von Sudenfed - a collaboration between Smith and Mouse on Mars. The oft-quoted "if its me and your granny on bongos, its the Fall" clearly didn't apply here - yet it remains the most successful of Smith's offshoot projects.
The next record "Imperial Wax Solvent" was rawer and more coherent than the previous record, its probably the strongest album of the band of Greenway/Spurr/Smith/Poulou/Melling which would continue through until at least the new 2013 album "Re-Mit." The album made the top 40, after all, their first album to do since Top 10 "The Infotainment Scan" in 1993. Maybe it was the sad death of Peel, or possibly the increased "legend" status of Mark E. Smith (including the writing of the autobiography "Renegade") - but the Fall seemed bigger than ever, and he soon signed up for a proper tilt at the big time, joining major-indie Domino for "Your Future, Our Clutter." They'd also put out the Von Sudenfed album. A second top 40 hit followed and the album included at least one all-time Fall classic in "Bury Parts 1 and 2" where Smith intones "I'm from Bury." Yet seeing them in 2009, the band were sturm und drang than I'd remembererd: heavily dependent on a heavy bass and with an almost heavy-rock (or at least 70s rock feel to them.) "YFOC" was a darker album and the usual inconsistencies live - Smith abandoning the stage half way through songs, or being drunk, or fiddling with the amps, seemed to have become part of the show. A certain type of Fall fan revelled in the uncertainty - yet this record and the following "Ersatz GB" were somewhat hard to love.
For quite a while the Fall's writing technique has seen his various musicians come up with jams, songs, backings, and Smith has gone away and decided which ones to use and write lyrics for. Each of the last half dozen albums has had at least a couple of new classics, but whereas "Sparta FC" and "Blindness" amongst others were good enough to leave us no longer in awe of the great tracks of previous decades, only "Bury" from the last two or three albums has the same lustre. The new album "Re-mit" is again a more electronic record: here its Poulou lo-fi keyboards which have more of a dominance. The sound is experimental and esoteric, and there's a case to be made that its their best record since "Imperial Wax Solvent". Yet I'm struck by comparing it with the "Fall Heads Roll" and "The Real New Fall LP". These high points haven't been matched since. What we are maybe seeing is not a real dimming of the Fall, but a decade where he has had two bands: that first one, which left him in the lurch in America, and the one he's been with since. The everpresence of Poulou alongside Smith has created some coherence - yet this band's set, made up almost entirely of recent songs, with a couple of old crowdpleasers, is not amongst the best the Fall have ever had.
"Re-mit" though offers a new "remit" I think - less about the rockabilly riffs and more about a somewhat caustic electronic melange, it hints at the margins of the Fall's sound over the years. How does a Mark E. Smith grow old? His voice becomes growlier, yet its still quite sprightly on "Sir William Wray" and the remarkably odd "Hittite Man." The mix of caustic commentary (LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy gets the kicking this time round), and Lovecraftian mysticism, seems better for being coated in a patina of cheap electronica. Its short 40 minutes still finds space for the meandering solo track "Pre-MDMA years" one of the (increasingly infrequent) Smith interludes that in this appearance comes as a welcome reminder of how consistent his vision has been despite the many inconsistencies along the way.
I've not seen this band since a rather disappointing Manchester Academy some six months before "Your Future, Our Clutter" came out - yet hearing the tape of that gig, it was more about the Academy's muffling sound and the uncertain meandering of Smith that night.They are still playing live in a small town near you - and chances are that you won't hear anything as old as "Reformation Post TLC" never mind things from previous incarnations (though "Mr. Pharmacist" and "White Lightning" have proven resilient crowdpleasers). The run from "The Real New Fall LP" to "Re-mit" is quite a remarkable one for a band who seemed a spent force only a couple of years before. The modern record industry hasn't been kind to a band like the Fall. No room for singles or E.P.s where they once did some of their more interesting work, and yet the remorseless album-tour grind doesn't seem that kind to them either. Like in the mid-90s, their last three or four albums have been a mixed bag, the latest dozen songs or so from the kitbag, that's all. Whether or not "Re-mit" is the end of a particular era, the start of another, or just another step in the road is hard to tell. Late Fall? He could have another thirty years in him yet.
There's a case to be made for the 21st century Fall as being as vital as previous versions - and certainly not any kind of retro act. The plethora of line-ups and the plethora of record labels haven't helped the casual Fall fan make sense of it all -go into the Fall selection in a record shop, and old albums jostle with the new; random compilations next to unecessary live releases. The thread of Peel sessions came to an end - and as far as I know the BBC hasn't invited them back in the door since - so those career spanning compilations "The Peel Sessions" and "50000 Fall Fans Can't be Wrong" haven't been joined by a good recent compilation. Where would you draw the line anyway? The things that many people love about the band are songs from a different life that Smith probably hasn't much thought about in twenty years or more. Yet the 21st century Fall is quite a robust outfit even so; even though there are different versions of it. He's talked about his many line up changes seeing him as seargent major dragooning the cadets into some kind of order; and there's something in that I think. Whereas previous bands might have been special forces, parachuted into enemy lines, this version of the Fall seems more of a combat unit, benefiting from their close comradeship over four or five albums, and battling resiliently to stay fit and focussed in the inhospitable terrain of the contemporary music scene.
That they still have more cultural capital than most bands is clear - and I'm reading at "Prole Art Threat - Poems for the Fall" next Thursday at the Lass O'Gowrie in Manchester.. To paraphrase one of his best loved songs: he is (still) not appreciated, but we're trying.
Yet if long-term Fall watchers had become worried that this was the start of a terminal decline it wasn't so. Endless touring had enabled them to road-test new songs that two years after "winner" were a world better. The first signs of this were on the 2003 Peel session, and the much-delayed new album "The Real New Fall LP (formerly Country on the Click)" was a massive return to form. It also included as close as the Fall would get to a hit these days, "Theme from Sparta FC" which got used on Football Focus every Saturday whilst the results were coming in. Despite the usual travails - an injury to Smith that had him in a wheelchair by the following year the sense was that the Fall were on a roll and as good as they'd ever been. Always playing the majority of their set from the last couple of albums, it was a relief when the weaker songs from before "TRNFLP" had been dropped and new songs such as "Blindness" and "What About us?" entered the set. First appearing in the odd interim release "Interim", this messy set of outtakes and live tracks is a crucial document in someways, bridging their two finest albums of the century. Those two tracks were on their final Peel session, for by the time I got to see them at the Manchester Bierkeller in the autumn, John Peel was dead. "Fall Heads Roll" was even better than the previous album, probably their best album of the century, yet even it doesn't really showcase the power of the band at this time. The call and response of "What About Us?" often followed on closely by classic "Wrong Place, Right Time" with the audience taking the microphone, showcased a band that was reinvigorated.
It wouldn't or couldn't last of course - and halfway through the next American tour his band left. Like an ageing soul singer, he carried on regardless, his local support band becoming a "pick up band" for him It took a while for a new record however, and yet "Reformation Post TLC" is actually a double album - some long krautrock type tracks alongside the usual mix of rockabilly and alt.country. His wife Elena Poulou the one constant during the decade, oddities such as "The Wright Stuff" where she sings lead vocal, are added to the Fall's repetoire of unexpected tricks. Always at least partially an electronic band, "Reformation Post TLC" reaffirmed that side of the band's sound for the first time since "The Unutterable" albeit more Krautrock than Chemical Brothers. Its one of their least essential albums, the band an interim solution - good musicians mostly, but lacking a sense of feel. Yet the most obvious statement of electronic Fall came in 2007's other album, the excellent "Tromatic Reflexxions", which was released under the name Von Sudenfed - a collaboration between Smith and Mouse on Mars. The oft-quoted "if its me and your granny on bongos, its the Fall" clearly didn't apply here - yet it remains the most successful of Smith's offshoot projects.
The next record "Imperial Wax Solvent" was rawer and more coherent than the previous record, its probably the strongest album of the band of Greenway/Spurr/Smith/Poulou/Melling which would continue through until at least the new 2013 album "Re-Mit." The album made the top 40, after all, their first album to do since Top 10 "The Infotainment Scan" in 1993. Maybe it was the sad death of Peel, or possibly the increased "legend" status of Mark E. Smith (including the writing of the autobiography "Renegade") - but the Fall seemed bigger than ever, and he soon signed up for a proper tilt at the big time, joining major-indie Domino for "Your Future, Our Clutter." They'd also put out the Von Sudenfed album. A second top 40 hit followed and the album included at least one all-time Fall classic in "Bury Parts 1 and 2" where Smith intones "I'm from Bury." Yet seeing them in 2009, the band were sturm und drang than I'd remembererd: heavily dependent on a heavy bass and with an almost heavy-rock (or at least 70s rock feel to them.) "YFOC" was a darker album and the usual inconsistencies live - Smith abandoning the stage half way through songs, or being drunk, or fiddling with the amps, seemed to have become part of the show. A certain type of Fall fan revelled in the uncertainty - yet this record and the following "Ersatz GB" were somewhat hard to love.
For quite a while the Fall's writing technique has seen his various musicians come up with jams, songs, backings, and Smith has gone away and decided which ones to use and write lyrics for. Each of the last half dozen albums has had at least a couple of new classics, but whereas "Sparta FC" and "Blindness" amongst others were good enough to leave us no longer in awe of the great tracks of previous decades, only "Bury" from the last two or three albums has the same lustre. The new album "Re-mit" is again a more electronic record: here its Poulou lo-fi keyboards which have more of a dominance. The sound is experimental and esoteric, and there's a case to be made that its their best record since "Imperial Wax Solvent". Yet I'm struck by comparing it with the "Fall Heads Roll" and "The Real New Fall LP". These high points haven't been matched since. What we are maybe seeing is not a real dimming of the Fall, but a decade where he has had two bands: that first one, which left him in the lurch in America, and the one he's been with since. The everpresence of Poulou alongside Smith has created some coherence - yet this band's set, made up almost entirely of recent songs, with a couple of old crowdpleasers, is not amongst the best the Fall have ever had.
"Re-mit" though offers a new "remit" I think - less about the rockabilly riffs and more about a somewhat caustic electronic melange, it hints at the margins of the Fall's sound over the years. How does a Mark E. Smith grow old? His voice becomes growlier, yet its still quite sprightly on "Sir William Wray" and the remarkably odd "Hittite Man." The mix of caustic commentary (LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy gets the kicking this time round), and Lovecraftian mysticism, seems better for being coated in a patina of cheap electronica. Its short 40 minutes still finds space for the meandering solo track "Pre-MDMA years" one of the (increasingly infrequent) Smith interludes that in this appearance comes as a welcome reminder of how consistent his vision has been despite the many inconsistencies along the way.
I've not seen this band since a rather disappointing Manchester Academy some six months before "Your Future, Our Clutter" came out - yet hearing the tape of that gig, it was more about the Academy's muffling sound and the uncertain meandering of Smith that night.They are still playing live in a small town near you - and chances are that you won't hear anything as old as "Reformation Post TLC" never mind things from previous incarnations (though "Mr. Pharmacist" and "White Lightning" have proven resilient crowdpleasers). The run from "The Real New Fall LP" to "Re-mit" is quite a remarkable one for a band who seemed a spent force only a couple of years before. The modern record industry hasn't been kind to a band like the Fall. No room for singles or E.P.s where they once did some of their more interesting work, and yet the remorseless album-tour grind doesn't seem that kind to them either. Like in the mid-90s, their last three or four albums have been a mixed bag, the latest dozen songs or so from the kitbag, that's all. Whether or not "Re-mit" is the end of a particular era, the start of another, or just another step in the road is hard to tell. Late Fall? He could have another thirty years in him yet.
There's a case to be made for the 21st century Fall as being as vital as previous versions - and certainly not any kind of retro act. The plethora of line-ups and the plethora of record labels haven't helped the casual Fall fan make sense of it all -go into the Fall selection in a record shop, and old albums jostle with the new; random compilations next to unecessary live releases. The thread of Peel sessions came to an end - and as far as I know the BBC hasn't invited them back in the door since - so those career spanning compilations "The Peel Sessions" and "50000 Fall Fans Can't be Wrong" haven't been joined by a good recent compilation. Where would you draw the line anyway? The things that many people love about the band are songs from a different life that Smith probably hasn't much thought about in twenty years or more. Yet the 21st century Fall is quite a robust outfit even so; even though there are different versions of it. He's talked about his many line up changes seeing him as seargent major dragooning the cadets into some kind of order; and there's something in that I think. Whereas previous bands might have been special forces, parachuted into enemy lines, this version of the Fall seems more of a combat unit, benefiting from their close comradeship over four or five albums, and battling resiliently to stay fit and focussed in the inhospitable terrain of the contemporary music scene.
That they still have more cultural capital than most bands is clear - and I'm reading at "Prole Art Threat - Poems for the Fall" next Thursday at the Lass O'Gowrie in Manchester.. To paraphrase one of his best loved songs: he is (still) not appreciated, but we're trying.
Monday, May 13, 2013
30 Years of the Smiths
"Hand in Glove", the first single by the Smiths came out 30 years ago today. I know this because I was at Stockport Plaza where Stockport Film Festival put on a great afternoon event. A showing of "A Taste of Honey" was preceded by a discussion with the music critics Mick Middles and Len Brown about their memories of the Smiths.
For those who don't know the connection its an interesting one. For Shelagh Delaney, the young Salford woman who wrote "A Taste of Honey" in 1958 was an inspiration for Stephen Morrissey. The line "I dreamt about you last night" from "Reel Around the Fountain" comes from the film, and the song "This night has opened my eyes" was a retelling of the story. Delaney was also one of the Smiths' many "cover stars."
Its 30 years since "Hand in Glove", yet that was released only 23 years after the film of "A Taste of Honey." Yet I think its fair to say we're more in the world of Morrissey and the Smiths, than the early 80s were in the world portrayed by Delaney. Though the demographic at Stockport today was around my age or older, there were quite a few younger people as well - and one old gentleman who was clutching a photograph of himself, as he was one of the urchines featured in the film. "They picked me because I was scruffy, whilst all the rest of my classmates were too tidy," he said, remembering.
And here's the connection, I think. For The Smiths, though instantly popular, spoke clearly and loudly to anyone who was an outsider - and that was the message of "A Taste of Honey." The articulate Delaney thought she could do better in depicting real life than the Terence Rattigan play she'd seen. In an age of "angry young men" and "kitchen sink dramas" "A Taste of Honey" still stands out as radical. Her heroine, Jo, is no victim, even though her life is grim. There's a hope and a tolerance here that speaks of a community spirit that was difficult but genuine.
As well as the film, we had a short video montage of "Hand in Glove", an interview with Morrissey from the 90s where he endearingly talks about his love for singers such as Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black. "Cilla Black broke up the Smiths," he said, half-jokingly, referring to their final recording, a cover of her "Work is a four letter word." Also, a short film, called "Unloveable", where an American Smiths fan comes to Manchester to see Salfords Lads' Club, the Kings Road, Southern Cemetery and the Moors, and is taken for a ride (literally and figuratively) by a Morrisseyesque stranger. Best of all, and coming before "A Taste of Honey," a short film about Delaney's Salford, which was filmed by Ken Russell for "Monitor" in the early 1960s. Delaney is a delight in this - and the pictures of a poor but thriving Salford, are contrasted with the bleak new housing estates that people were being relocated to. There's so much of post-war social history in this documentary fragment and "A Taste of Honey" itself; something that flows into the work of The Smiths.
But its also much more than "social history." Like so many great artists Morrissey made us see the mundane in different ways. The stealings from Oscar Wilde or Delaney; the references to the Moors murderers; the tongue-in-cheek but seriously meant ethical politics of "Meat is Murder" or "The Queen is Dead" speak of an outsider viewpoint that wasn't about "coming out" or being part of a "cult" but about allowing and enabling individuals to be outsiders. Jo and her mother in "A Taste of Honey", her black sailor lover, Jimmy, and her gay friend Geoff, are equally outsiders - and the connections become clearer.
I was also interested in how we choose to remember our social and cultural histories. A reminder that the Smiths were a "student band" even if Morrissey and Marr were never at university, that was their natural constituency - so a particular type of outsider. No wonder Tony Wilson never signed them - he preferred the boys in the gang mentality of the Happy Mondays. Yet, the Smiths, at least before the legal fallouts, were a tight-knit group. Only afterwards did we realise the band had internal troubles or that their lack of a manager led to them absorbing all the pressures of their success. Middles and Grant made the point that the Smiths were very different than the music around them at the time - and that's key I think. Also, the sixties wasn't really a touchpoint in the early 80s: the punks had dismissed the Beatles and the Stones; whilst the new music was all electronic instruments and production. A jangly guitar band that echoed the Byrds or the Hollies was not what the music industry was looking for; so of course they were immediately what it needed.
In many ways the politics of their songs was a personal one - so though Morrissey was a great lyricist, you could be a young David Cameron and think this is for you; at least if you didn't look too deeply. I remember that the NME and others tried to instigate a new movement of so-called "handsome bands" of which the Smiths were at the Vanguard. With the notable exception of James, all the bands that Morrissey favoured, came to very little. His own tastes were too esoteric, too uniquely his. And through this personal mythos he created something that had not a little success.
The world we see in that Salford film or in a "A Taste of Honey" would have been pretty recognisable to someone in the days between the wars, or even earlier; yet that world - of full employment, working class culture, ships on the Manchester ship canal - had changed massively by the eighties, not always for the better. This is pre-Beatles Britain, a time, in some ways, of innocence. Its fascinating that a great British film like this, filmed in part in Stockport, can draw a big audience over 50 years after it was filmed, at least partly because of a young man from Stretford who made it part of his legend 30 years ago.Its important that he could find inspiration, not just from the otherworldy New York Dolls, but from something that spoke to him from his own background. I guess that's what we found in the Smiths as well; a poetry of the mundane.
Both Delaney and Morrissey seem to be outsiders who succeeded because their vision wasn't exclusive: but was actually as relevant or more relevant than the so-called mainstream of the day. Delaney's a world away from Rattigan's drawing room dramas; whilst the world according to Morrissey seems to have a relevance that few of us will find in Duran Duran's hedonistic "Rio" for instance.
If the theatre workshops of the late 50s gave Delaney her chance; it was the DIY culture of punk that opened Morrissey's eyes. Where the outsider connects with the hidden stories of others, there is always the possibility of a change in the culture, more a shudder, perhaps than a seismic quake, but significant nevertheless.
For those who don't know the connection its an interesting one. For Shelagh Delaney, the young Salford woman who wrote "A Taste of Honey" in 1958 was an inspiration for Stephen Morrissey. The line "I dreamt about you last night" from "Reel Around the Fountain" comes from the film, and the song "This night has opened my eyes" was a retelling of the story. Delaney was also one of the Smiths' many "cover stars."
Its 30 years since "Hand in Glove", yet that was released only 23 years after the film of "A Taste of Honey." Yet I think its fair to say we're more in the world of Morrissey and the Smiths, than the early 80s were in the world portrayed by Delaney. Though the demographic at Stockport today was around my age or older, there were quite a few younger people as well - and one old gentleman who was clutching a photograph of himself, as he was one of the urchines featured in the film. "They picked me because I was scruffy, whilst all the rest of my classmates were too tidy," he said, remembering.
And here's the connection, I think. For The Smiths, though instantly popular, spoke clearly and loudly to anyone who was an outsider - and that was the message of "A Taste of Honey." The articulate Delaney thought she could do better in depicting real life than the Terence Rattigan play she'd seen. In an age of "angry young men" and "kitchen sink dramas" "A Taste of Honey" still stands out as radical. Her heroine, Jo, is no victim, even though her life is grim. There's a hope and a tolerance here that speaks of a community spirit that was difficult but genuine.
As well as the film, we had a short video montage of "Hand in Glove", an interview with Morrissey from the 90s where he endearingly talks about his love for singers such as Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black. "Cilla Black broke up the Smiths," he said, half-jokingly, referring to their final recording, a cover of her "Work is a four letter word." Also, a short film, called "Unloveable", where an American Smiths fan comes to Manchester to see Salfords Lads' Club, the Kings Road, Southern Cemetery and the Moors, and is taken for a ride (literally and figuratively) by a Morrisseyesque stranger. Best of all, and coming before "A Taste of Honey," a short film about Delaney's Salford, which was filmed by Ken Russell for "Monitor" in the early 1960s. Delaney is a delight in this - and the pictures of a poor but thriving Salford, are contrasted with the bleak new housing estates that people were being relocated to. There's so much of post-war social history in this documentary fragment and "A Taste of Honey" itself; something that flows into the work of The Smiths.
But its also much more than "social history." Like so many great artists Morrissey made us see the mundane in different ways. The stealings from Oscar Wilde or Delaney; the references to the Moors murderers; the tongue-in-cheek but seriously meant ethical politics of "Meat is Murder" or "The Queen is Dead" speak of an outsider viewpoint that wasn't about "coming out" or being part of a "cult" but about allowing and enabling individuals to be outsiders. Jo and her mother in "A Taste of Honey", her black sailor lover, Jimmy, and her gay friend Geoff, are equally outsiders - and the connections become clearer.
I was also interested in how we choose to remember our social and cultural histories. A reminder that the Smiths were a "student band" even if Morrissey and Marr were never at university, that was their natural constituency - so a particular type of outsider. No wonder Tony Wilson never signed them - he preferred the boys in the gang mentality of the Happy Mondays. Yet, the Smiths, at least before the legal fallouts, were a tight-knit group. Only afterwards did we realise the band had internal troubles or that their lack of a manager led to them absorbing all the pressures of their success. Middles and Grant made the point that the Smiths were very different than the music around them at the time - and that's key I think. Also, the sixties wasn't really a touchpoint in the early 80s: the punks had dismissed the Beatles and the Stones; whilst the new music was all electronic instruments and production. A jangly guitar band that echoed the Byrds or the Hollies was not what the music industry was looking for; so of course they were immediately what it needed.
In many ways the politics of their songs was a personal one - so though Morrissey was a great lyricist, you could be a young David Cameron and think this is for you; at least if you didn't look too deeply. I remember that the NME and others tried to instigate a new movement of so-called "handsome bands" of which the Smiths were at the Vanguard. With the notable exception of James, all the bands that Morrissey favoured, came to very little. His own tastes were too esoteric, too uniquely his. And through this personal mythos he created something that had not a little success.
The world we see in that Salford film or in a "A Taste of Honey" would have been pretty recognisable to someone in the days between the wars, or even earlier; yet that world - of full employment, working class culture, ships on the Manchester ship canal - had changed massively by the eighties, not always for the better. This is pre-Beatles Britain, a time, in some ways, of innocence. Its fascinating that a great British film like this, filmed in part in Stockport, can draw a big audience over 50 years after it was filmed, at least partly because of a young man from Stretford who made it part of his legend 30 years ago.Its important that he could find inspiration, not just from the otherworldy New York Dolls, but from something that spoke to him from his own background. I guess that's what we found in the Smiths as well; a poetry of the mundane.
Both Delaney and Morrissey seem to be outsiders who succeeded because their vision wasn't exclusive: but was actually as relevant or more relevant than the so-called mainstream of the day. Delaney's a world away from Rattigan's drawing room dramas; whilst the world according to Morrissey seems to have a relevance that few of us will find in Duran Duran's hedonistic "Rio" for instance.
If the theatre workshops of the late 50s gave Delaney her chance; it was the DIY culture of punk that opened Morrissey's eyes. Where the outsider connects with the hidden stories of others, there is always the possibility of a change in the culture, more a shudder, perhaps than a seismic quake, but significant nevertheless.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Ever since her first novel "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" Kate Atkinson has managed to write novels that are both artistically and commercially successful. She's always been interested in genre - as the stories within stories of "Human Croquet" show as much as the Jackson Brodie crime novels that she has been writing for the last through years - but also in unusual structures. That first Brodie novel, "Case Histories" was about the juxtaposition of seemingly distinct stories. One connecting thing between the crime fiction and her other novels has been a constant exploring of the messiness of life, particularly of families, of which she is perhaps our best chronicler.
"Life after Life" is her first non-Brodie novel for a few years and its a triumph. Ursula is born on a snowy night, but is strangled by her umbilical chord, and the doctor and midwife arrive too late to save her. The novel is over on the first page, except its not, for Ursula - "my little fox" her father calls her - has a second chance, and another, and another - life after life after life. In this ingenious novel of starts and endings, Atkinson plays around with the might-have-beens, the accidents that mean we might not survive beyond a particular unlucky incident. Ursula, slowly becoming aware of her "deja vu," accidentally or purposefully alters her history. Around her are a large middle class family, and there story is told from before the first world war until the 1960s. A story of a century of tumult, where Ursula and her siblings, her aunt and friends are to play pivotal roles. Her unlikeable brother Maurice gets a top job at the ministry, Ursula a more lowly one. Her father is a solid, kind banker, her mother Sylvia, a bright woman who gets increasingly angry and frustrated by the life she has been given, the downsizing of the family fortune after her father died leading her to always regret the loss, rather than revel in what she has: the strong family based around a lovely house that they name Fox Corner.
This is the southern middle class life of "Howard's End", perhaps the constant touchstone for a certain kind of English novel. Like in that book, this class have their own familial connections with Germany, a closeness that will be ruptured in a century of two great wars. Into this bigger story, Ursula's part slowly becomes clear. A summer visit to the Brauns gets her close to Eva, the daughter who will one day be Hitler's mistress. For like Stephen King's recent time travel novel, Atkinson wants to do much more than untangle a life of many second chances. King had to consider the possibility of an altered history where Oswald doesn't kill Kennedy; for Atkinson, and Ursula, the possiblity that she might alter the course of history and kill Hitler before he comes to power is an equally powerful possibility.
Yet though this second story - again, foretold in the first few pages of the novel - helps deliver the book's forward tension; it is in Ursula's life and family that Atkinson concentrates our interest. This is a book about the affirmation that a life should be lived, regardless of the bigger stories that can consume many lives. As we move seamlessly between different epochs, Ursula's life becomes more than its fractures and by the Second World War, she becomes one of the many stories of Londoner's battling against the might of the Luftwaffe, either (in one scenario) as an air warden or (in another) as a worker within the ministry. Her love affairs; the relationship with her scatty but lovely aunt Izzy; and the claims on family that periodically draw her back to Fox Corner, are all deftly worked into the tapestry of the novel.
There's an effortlessness about the construction which has always been one of Atkinson's key strengths. The joy of reading her is not in the withholding of what to come, but in the guessing what will come next. Her Brody novels frequently didn't need much working out; but the pleasure was in the way she engages us in her characters. She remains one of our best writers about people, and it seems to me that it is in many ways a more successfull book than, for instance, the similarly scaled "The Strangers Child." Always a joy to read, in "Life After Life" we're pleased to re-encounter the bigger canvasses of her early novels, for enjoyable as her detective stories were, the demands of the genre always seemed to hem her in a little. In "Life after Life" she is gloriously unhemmed. I knew from the structure that it was worth waiting till I had a good long period to read this long novel, and I was right to wallow in it. The multiple starts and endings work best when encountered in quick succession and I think the book would lose some of its power if read slowly or over a long period. So engaging is it that you'll not want to put it down anyway.
The only part of the book I had my reservations about was the one story that dominates at the centre - which I wonder whether was the starting point for the novel. For at the heart of "Life after Life" is another novel set in the days of the London Blitz. She writes well on this; her stories are very human ones, so well have we got to know Ursula, but so familiar is the British story here - from sitcoms to novels set in and around the war - that we don't really get anything new. Its a period that invites cliche, even when, as here, the characters are so well-formed, and the stories so believable. For the war has within it a million tragedies. In this context we see that Ursula's multiple endings are as nothing to the randomness of a bomb falling at a particular time and place. We are all survivors of our own lives, and that survival is what makes us human - we learn from our mistakes - but what of those who are cut short by their mistakes or worse, the grander mistakes of history?
As the last memories of the Second World War fades, it becomes history, a place for imagining, rather than one for remembering. For me it was the least successful part of the novel, not because its badly written or uninteresting, but because its a story that's been told in so many ways. Like in other alternate histories, Atkinson has found an ingenuity in retelling the story, but is interested in a single life - that of Ursula - and what might become of it through life's many twists and turns rather than the reshaping of world histories.
Its something of a tour de force, but eminently readable - that reminds us that over a writing career of nearly two decades, Atkinson has rarely failed to disappoint. A lovely, powerful, inventive novel that I'd highly recommend.
"Life after Life" is her first non-Brodie novel for a few years and its a triumph. Ursula is born on a snowy night, but is strangled by her umbilical chord, and the doctor and midwife arrive too late to save her. The novel is over on the first page, except its not, for Ursula - "my little fox" her father calls her - has a second chance, and another, and another - life after life after life. In this ingenious novel of starts and endings, Atkinson plays around with the might-have-beens, the accidents that mean we might not survive beyond a particular unlucky incident. Ursula, slowly becoming aware of her "deja vu," accidentally or purposefully alters her history. Around her are a large middle class family, and there story is told from before the first world war until the 1960s. A story of a century of tumult, where Ursula and her siblings, her aunt and friends are to play pivotal roles. Her unlikeable brother Maurice gets a top job at the ministry, Ursula a more lowly one. Her father is a solid, kind banker, her mother Sylvia, a bright woman who gets increasingly angry and frustrated by the life she has been given, the downsizing of the family fortune after her father died leading her to always regret the loss, rather than revel in what she has: the strong family based around a lovely house that they name Fox Corner.
This is the southern middle class life of "Howard's End", perhaps the constant touchstone for a certain kind of English novel. Like in that book, this class have their own familial connections with Germany, a closeness that will be ruptured in a century of two great wars. Into this bigger story, Ursula's part slowly becomes clear. A summer visit to the Brauns gets her close to Eva, the daughter who will one day be Hitler's mistress. For like Stephen King's recent time travel novel, Atkinson wants to do much more than untangle a life of many second chances. King had to consider the possibility of an altered history where Oswald doesn't kill Kennedy; for Atkinson, and Ursula, the possiblity that she might alter the course of history and kill Hitler before he comes to power is an equally powerful possibility.
Yet though this second story - again, foretold in the first few pages of the novel - helps deliver the book's forward tension; it is in Ursula's life and family that Atkinson concentrates our interest. This is a book about the affirmation that a life should be lived, regardless of the bigger stories that can consume many lives. As we move seamlessly between different epochs, Ursula's life becomes more than its fractures and by the Second World War, she becomes one of the many stories of Londoner's battling against the might of the Luftwaffe, either (in one scenario) as an air warden or (in another) as a worker within the ministry. Her love affairs; the relationship with her scatty but lovely aunt Izzy; and the claims on family that periodically draw her back to Fox Corner, are all deftly worked into the tapestry of the novel.
There's an effortlessness about the construction which has always been one of Atkinson's key strengths. The joy of reading her is not in the withholding of what to come, but in the guessing what will come next. Her Brody novels frequently didn't need much working out; but the pleasure was in the way she engages us in her characters. She remains one of our best writers about people, and it seems to me that it is in many ways a more successfull book than, for instance, the similarly scaled "The Strangers Child." Always a joy to read, in "Life After Life" we're pleased to re-encounter the bigger canvasses of her early novels, for enjoyable as her detective stories were, the demands of the genre always seemed to hem her in a little. In "Life after Life" she is gloriously unhemmed. I knew from the structure that it was worth waiting till I had a good long period to read this long novel, and I was right to wallow in it. The multiple starts and endings work best when encountered in quick succession and I think the book would lose some of its power if read slowly or over a long period. So engaging is it that you'll not want to put it down anyway.
The only part of the book I had my reservations about was the one story that dominates at the centre - which I wonder whether was the starting point for the novel. For at the heart of "Life after Life" is another novel set in the days of the London Blitz. She writes well on this; her stories are very human ones, so well have we got to know Ursula, but so familiar is the British story here - from sitcoms to novels set in and around the war - that we don't really get anything new. Its a period that invites cliche, even when, as here, the characters are so well-formed, and the stories so believable. For the war has within it a million tragedies. In this context we see that Ursula's multiple endings are as nothing to the randomness of a bomb falling at a particular time and place. We are all survivors of our own lives, and that survival is what makes us human - we learn from our mistakes - but what of those who are cut short by their mistakes or worse, the grander mistakes of history?
As the last memories of the Second World War fades, it becomes history, a place for imagining, rather than one for remembering. For me it was the least successful part of the novel, not because its badly written or uninteresting, but because its a story that's been told in so many ways. Like in other alternate histories, Atkinson has found an ingenuity in retelling the story, but is interested in a single life - that of Ursula - and what might become of it through life's many twists and turns rather than the reshaping of world histories.
Its something of a tour de force, but eminently readable - that reminds us that over a writing career of nearly two decades, Atkinson has rarely failed to disappoint. A lovely, powerful, inventive novel that I'd highly recommend.
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Golden Ages exist alongside Humdrum Times
Asked on twitter whether we'd know if we were living through a golden age....
I was thinking about this with all the Thatcher-fanfare. I grew up with a wealth of cultural opportunities - I really did. NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror competed for my attention (lets not forget Smash Hits, Flexipop and Zig Zag among others). Post-punk, goth, new wave, new romantic, electro, rap, reggae, NWOBHM, industrial... a whole load of musical genres spoke of the fluidity of the age. This wasn't the downbeat message of Tory Britain or the legacy of the late 70s, this was a newness. I didn't think it was a golden age at the time, because I just assumed that there would always be that excitement...
Similarly, in film and TV: we had the launch of C4, and whole new strands of programming as a result, as well as the home video, which allowed us to sample all kinds of films, and record our favourite programmes for relistening. The 4-track recorder put recording tools in my 18 year old hands; and if we computing was still nascent, the iconography of the video game was already well established, so that TV shows like Max Headroom and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed genuinely now. In fiction, not only Douglas Adams, but Iain Banks was creating a contemporary narrative that appealed. Stephen King was still at his best ("Christine", "Pet Sematary", "The Body"), and his earlier books were widely available. "Money" "Blood and Guts in High School" and "Cities of the Red Night" and "The Place of Dead Roads" came out just before I started University and I would read these classics not long after their publication.
I think the early 80s was a bit of a golden age - the explosion of creativity that came with punk leading to many different things - and new technology, from VHS to 4-track to early computers and affordable synthesizers bringing culture (and counter culture) even into a small art-free village twenty miles from Birmingham. None of this, of course, was helped by Thatcher or the Tories, much of it - low art, I guess - antithetical to their view of things. Or maybe, everyone's late teens is a golden age?
Did I at the time know it was a golden age? I don't think so - and, here's the rub, I was very much a consumer of it, rather than an active participant. There wasn't a lot of space in my University or in the wider world for suburban teenagers who thought they could write a bit. You had to be American or in London or in a whole different millieu to "make it." I scrubbed a way at fanzines and college magazines, at 4-track recordings, and handwritten poems, but without, I have to say, much in the way of a peer group.
That's what interests me about now - for if I said there's a clear distinction between the arts of then and now its that the internet in particular, but also the rise in participatory arts, has enabled a lot of writers, artists, musicians to go beyond their group of friends and put things out more publicly. Ironically, at the same time that this is happening, the mainstream media (and mainstream institutions: bookshops, HMV, universities) pretty much ignores what's going on. DIY culture may have begun as a web-infused space, but its now happening at a "pop up" near you. These scenes are rarely "public" because the one thing they haven't got is a marketing and publicity budget. It is word-of-mouth, or the networking of individuals that draws people in. But this is only as it should be. Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth may be the big sell at this year's Manchester International Festival, but its grassroots stuff such as the 247 Festival that surely create the cultural vibrancy...and if not leading to the next Shakespeare, may at least provide an opportunity on which the next Branagh can cut their teeth.
A "golden age" probably needs audience as well as practitioners - and perhaps, those few individuals who lift or get lifted above the scene which spawned them. That's yet to happen I think. Mainstream still looks to Oxbridge before it looks to the 3 Minute Theatre in Afflecks palace for instance. Chris McCabe's "Shad Thames, Broken Wharf" or Lars Ilyer's "Spurious" seem to me to have a better chance of being talked about in a decade than more mainstream works. Had we been going to literary nights in the Bowery with Kathy Acker and Dennis Johnson in the late seventies; fetching up at CBGBs to see Blondie and Television, would we have known that this was the golden age?
And I'm biased here of course: the literary works are odd things - happening in the oddest of places. "Scenes" are more closely allied with music or film - where you need different people to gather together. Yet there's something else as well, and this is perhaps where we are falling short, or yet to make the mark. There are plenty of good, competent books, plenty of nicely written short stories - but I'm not seeing that much in the way of the innovative, or the unusual. A "scene" has the advantage of drawing people in - even those outsiders whose work doesn't fit a prevailing mode - but it can also create a flattening; a desire to please, hoping for laughter, hoping for applause.
Artistically, I think these are good times, but there's still tinder here waiting for a spark - nostalgia too often rules - the old institutions are a bit impervious as ever, and nobody's got the money to build new ones; the audience is ourselves, and needs to be widened. Golden ages exist alongside humdrum times after all, and its not always easy to see where the one finishes and the other begins.
I was thinking about this with all the Thatcher-fanfare. I grew up with a wealth of cultural opportunities - I really did. NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror competed for my attention (lets not forget Smash Hits, Flexipop and Zig Zag among others). Post-punk, goth, new wave, new romantic, electro, rap, reggae, NWOBHM, industrial... a whole load of musical genres spoke of the fluidity of the age. This wasn't the downbeat message of Tory Britain or the legacy of the late 70s, this was a newness. I didn't think it was a golden age at the time, because I just assumed that there would always be that excitement...
Similarly, in film and TV: we had the launch of C4, and whole new strands of programming as a result, as well as the home video, which allowed us to sample all kinds of films, and record our favourite programmes for relistening. The 4-track recorder put recording tools in my 18 year old hands; and if we computing was still nascent, the iconography of the video game was already well established, so that TV shows like Max Headroom and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed genuinely now. In fiction, not only Douglas Adams, but Iain Banks was creating a contemporary narrative that appealed. Stephen King was still at his best ("Christine", "Pet Sematary", "The Body"), and his earlier books were widely available. "Money" "Blood and Guts in High School" and "Cities of the Red Night" and "The Place of Dead Roads" came out just before I started University and I would read these classics not long after their publication.
I think the early 80s was a bit of a golden age - the explosion of creativity that came with punk leading to many different things - and new technology, from VHS to 4-track to early computers and affordable synthesizers bringing culture (and counter culture) even into a small art-free village twenty miles from Birmingham. None of this, of course, was helped by Thatcher or the Tories, much of it - low art, I guess - antithetical to their view of things. Or maybe, everyone's late teens is a golden age?
Did I at the time know it was a golden age? I don't think so - and, here's the rub, I was very much a consumer of it, rather than an active participant. There wasn't a lot of space in my University or in the wider world for suburban teenagers who thought they could write a bit. You had to be American or in London or in a whole different millieu to "make it." I scrubbed a way at fanzines and college magazines, at 4-track recordings, and handwritten poems, but without, I have to say, much in the way of a peer group.
That's what interests me about now - for if I said there's a clear distinction between the arts of then and now its that the internet in particular, but also the rise in participatory arts, has enabled a lot of writers, artists, musicians to go beyond their group of friends and put things out more publicly. Ironically, at the same time that this is happening, the mainstream media (and mainstream institutions: bookshops, HMV, universities) pretty much ignores what's going on. DIY culture may have begun as a web-infused space, but its now happening at a "pop up" near you. These scenes are rarely "public" because the one thing they haven't got is a marketing and publicity budget. It is word-of-mouth, or the networking of individuals that draws people in. But this is only as it should be. Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth may be the big sell at this year's Manchester International Festival, but its grassroots stuff such as the 247 Festival that surely create the cultural vibrancy...and if not leading to the next Shakespeare, may at least provide an opportunity on which the next Branagh can cut their teeth.
A "golden age" probably needs audience as well as practitioners - and perhaps, those few individuals who lift or get lifted above the scene which spawned them. That's yet to happen I think. Mainstream still looks to Oxbridge before it looks to the 3 Minute Theatre in Afflecks palace for instance. Chris McCabe's "Shad Thames, Broken Wharf" or Lars Ilyer's "Spurious" seem to me to have a better chance of being talked about in a decade than more mainstream works. Had we been going to literary nights in the Bowery with Kathy Acker and Dennis Johnson in the late seventies; fetching up at CBGBs to see Blondie and Television, would we have known that this was the golden age?
And I'm biased here of course: the literary works are odd things - happening in the oddest of places. "Scenes" are more closely allied with music or film - where you need different people to gather together. Yet there's something else as well, and this is perhaps where we are falling short, or yet to make the mark. There are plenty of good, competent books, plenty of nicely written short stories - but I'm not seeing that much in the way of the innovative, or the unusual. A "scene" has the advantage of drawing people in - even those outsiders whose work doesn't fit a prevailing mode - but it can also create a flattening; a desire to please, hoping for laughter, hoping for applause.
Artistically, I think these are good times, but there's still tinder here waiting for a spark - nostalgia too often rules - the old institutions are a bit impervious as ever, and nobody's got the money to build new ones; the audience is ourselves, and needs to be widened. Golden ages exist alongside humdrum times after all, and its not always easy to see where the one finishes and the other begins.
Friday, April 26, 2013
BOYB in Manchester
10 days after its announcement, 3 of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists came to the Anthony Burgess centre in Manchester to read to a reasonable crowd. The book itself is a handsome, massive thing, worth comparing its heft with the slimmer 1983 original. With either novel extracts or occasional stories from the 20 authors, plus some spiritedly conceptual author photographs, and with an introduction from Granta editor John Freeman it feels more like a "taster" menu than a coherent feast. One of the prevailing puzzles of the publishing industry is how slow it takes for books to make it from author to list - so half a dozen profiles talk about an extract that is from a "novel published in 2014." That said, it would probably take till then to read the published novels by the 20 on the list.
Manchester's "three" were Adam Foulds, Stephen Hall, and Xiaolu Guo, who all gave short readings then were interviewed by Granta's online editor Ted Hodgkinson. In some ways, you begin to see the futility of the exercise. All three writers have much to recommend them, but are so different in backgrounds, style and aspirations as to make any connections hard to fathom. They responded gamely to the questions; but finally fell down when asked about their fellow contemporary novelists. Guo said she didn't read contemporary fiction, as there was so much older stuff that she needed to catch up on. Foulds said it was probably not a good thing for writers to read too many of their contemporaries, before realising the absurdity of this, and mentioning that he "read all the time," and Hall was just pleased to be here.
Foulds new novel is another historical affair. I much enjoyed his Clare/Tennyson novel "The Quickening Maze" and the extract from his new book, full of his precise, evocative descriptions, is set in the Second World War, as a soldier leaves home to finally end up in Sicily. Lines like "we were listening to the wireless" seemed a bit phoned in, but he's a tricky writer, adept at atmosphere and unspoken connection, and extracting something from a new novel may have been not that easy to do. His interest in a very English history (he has also written about the Mau Mau rising) rather than contemporary Britain, intrigues me; it felt that he was looking for stories that resonate. Such a displacement is particularly true of Xiaolu Guo, who has been prolifically published in both Chinese and English, and is also a film-maker. She read a piece from her first novel - written nearly two decades ago - to highlight her interest in being between two languages. It came out of her being unhappy with the English translation of her first novel, and she decided to do it herself.
She felt that this displacement was a key part of her writing, but at the same time, disavowed the idea of the "immigrant" writer. There is no need to think that way, she felt, in a world where people frequently a nationality different from where they now live. Stephen Hall is in some ways the most interesting writer on the Granta list because of his interest in the trickiness of the novel form. The new book he previewed has two parallel stories and he gave us a choice - the one that is set the day after tomorrow, or the one in the 1850s. Both are extracted in the Granta book; you have to turn it upside down and change direction to read the second story.
In his introduction John Freeman shows some chutzpah in, pace Bellow, beginning "I am an American, Cleveland born" and there does seem an air of the transatlantic NY-LON line about this Granta selection. I think our Granta crew were all catching the train back to London after the reading for instance. Its strange, for as an advocate of American fiction for so long, I'm feeling for the first time a bit of a disjuncture between the two countries and traditions now in a way that I haven't in the past. This might be a good time for British fiction, though as the Granta list shows, "British" is more a flag of convenience when it comes to these selections of late. Like the English Premier League there's now more imports from further afield than from, say, Northern Ireland and Scotland.The merits of the list will be debated here and elsewhere over time. As one of the judges is quoted as saying in the introduction, that its an unreal way of reading, reading 150 novelists "under 40". Writers missing the cut off included "young Turks" like Mieville and McCarthy (and there's a notable cluster of writers in their late 30s in the list) inevitable in a decade-apart survey. More strange, I felt, was the focus, still, on the "novel" and the "novelist" - if anything is breaking down over the next few years, its that description I think. Guo is a film-maker; Hall (like Naomi Alderman, also on the list) contributes to video games.
Freeman has just announced he is returning to New York (somewhat oddly for an editor, to teach creative writing.) The size of this Granta collection means that he may well have to pay excess baggage. I'm looking forward to reading the selections, but also some of the novels. Any taster menu should lead you onto things you haven't tried but hope to enjoy.
Manchester's "three" were Adam Foulds, Stephen Hall, and Xiaolu Guo, who all gave short readings then were interviewed by Granta's online editor Ted Hodgkinson. In some ways, you begin to see the futility of the exercise. All three writers have much to recommend them, but are so different in backgrounds, style and aspirations as to make any connections hard to fathom. They responded gamely to the questions; but finally fell down when asked about their fellow contemporary novelists. Guo said she didn't read contemporary fiction, as there was so much older stuff that she needed to catch up on. Foulds said it was probably not a good thing for writers to read too many of their contemporaries, before realising the absurdity of this, and mentioning that he "read all the time," and Hall was just pleased to be here.
Foulds new novel is another historical affair. I much enjoyed his Clare/Tennyson novel "The Quickening Maze" and the extract from his new book, full of his precise, evocative descriptions, is set in the Second World War, as a soldier leaves home to finally end up in Sicily. Lines like "we were listening to the wireless" seemed a bit phoned in, but he's a tricky writer, adept at atmosphere and unspoken connection, and extracting something from a new novel may have been not that easy to do. His interest in a very English history (he has also written about the Mau Mau rising) rather than contemporary Britain, intrigues me; it felt that he was looking for stories that resonate. Such a displacement is particularly true of Xiaolu Guo, who has been prolifically published in both Chinese and English, and is also a film-maker. She read a piece from her first novel - written nearly two decades ago - to highlight her interest in being between two languages. It came out of her being unhappy with the English translation of her first novel, and she decided to do it herself.
She felt that this displacement was a key part of her writing, but at the same time, disavowed the idea of the "immigrant" writer. There is no need to think that way, she felt, in a world where people frequently a nationality different from where they now live. Stephen Hall is in some ways the most interesting writer on the Granta list because of his interest in the trickiness of the novel form. The new book he previewed has two parallel stories and he gave us a choice - the one that is set the day after tomorrow, or the one in the 1850s. Both are extracted in the Granta book; you have to turn it upside down and change direction to read the second story.
In his introduction John Freeman shows some chutzpah in, pace Bellow, beginning "I am an American, Cleveland born" and there does seem an air of the transatlantic NY-LON line about this Granta selection. I think our Granta crew were all catching the train back to London after the reading for instance. Its strange, for as an advocate of American fiction for so long, I'm feeling for the first time a bit of a disjuncture between the two countries and traditions now in a way that I haven't in the past. This might be a good time for British fiction, though as the Granta list shows, "British" is more a flag of convenience when it comes to these selections of late. Like the English Premier League there's now more imports from further afield than from, say, Northern Ireland and Scotland.The merits of the list will be debated here and elsewhere over time. As one of the judges is quoted as saying in the introduction, that its an unreal way of reading, reading 150 novelists "under 40". Writers missing the cut off included "young Turks" like Mieville and McCarthy (and there's a notable cluster of writers in their late 30s in the list) inevitable in a decade-apart survey. More strange, I felt, was the focus, still, on the "novel" and the "novelist" - if anything is breaking down over the next few years, its that description I think. Guo is a film-maker; Hall (like Naomi Alderman, also on the list) contributes to video games.
Freeman has just announced he is returning to New York (somewhat oddly for an editor, to teach creative writing.) The size of this Granta collection means that he may well have to pay excess baggage. I'm looking forward to reading the selections, but also some of the novels. Any taster menu should lead you onto things you haven't tried but hope to enjoy.
Friday, April 19, 2013
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
"The Teleportation Accident" is a long, ribald shaggy-dog story that is both about that simplest of stories - boy chases girl - and something a little more ambitious: the way that we experience the times we live in. The protagonist, a German set designer called Egon Loeser (the "loser" reference isn't a coincidence), it tired of Berlin in the early 30s, utterly oblivious to the rise of the Nazis and wondering whether he will ever get laid again. Meeting the unfortunately named Adele Hitler, he becomes infatuated, but too late, for she has already gone off with a British novelist, a comic version of Christopher Isherwood, who has already riled Loeser by fictionalising the story of a 17th century set designer, Adriano Lavicini, that Loeser was slowly turning into a a play. The Teleportation device of the title is either a wooden contraption for quickly moving characters across stage without the audience realising it, or an actual teleportation device. In many ways, this ambivalence is the novel's real strength, as the shaggy dog story sees the teleportation device appearing at different places in history - and therefore maybe it is real after all?
Not that Beauman particularly cares, for this is an apparatus for him, just as much as it is for Loeser/Lavicini in their plays. The "accident" sees Lavicini's device exploding on stage, killing a large number of the audience and devastating the theatre its in. Flash forward a few hundred years and is the same thing about to happen in in 1940s Los Angeles? The novel plays around with this "steampunk" apparatus at will, occasionally forgetting it entirely, but coming back to it towards the end. The novel's main structure is picaresque as Loeser, never at home wherever he sits, moves restlessly from late Weimar German, to pre-war France, to Los Angeles on the edge of war. The narrative style shifts as well. From the excellent first section which richly satirises Isherwood's Berlin novels; to a slightly leaden Paris episode where Loeser gets involved with an American con artist, that's like a cut price "A Moveable Feast", to a Chandler-esque Los Angeles, where he rocks up for the remainder of the book.
The problem is that as inventive as these are, what begin as enjoyable riffs become entangled in the shaggy dog plotting that never entirely convinces. Whereas the Berlin sequence has a real tension, as the young horny Loeser wilfully ignores the growing Nazi presence, the Paris sequence is just a comic turn, as Loeser helps an American con man sew "monkey gonads" onto unsuspecting rich women's necks, in the hope for longer lives. The American section, which takes up so much of the book, quickly becomes loose, somewhat nonsensical and paranoid, where a vast cast of characters - including quite a few displaced Berliners - role in and out of an overly complex story that sees Beauman losing his way somewhat. The riffs and the clever-clever juxtapositions from earlier in the novel are buried under pages of crass dialogue and over-exposition. By the time Loeser meets Adele again (she's sensibly changed her surname) both him and us have lost interest. Loeser's main interest now is recovering a dirty book that he lost on the way over; meeting his hero the novelist Stent Mutton; and somehow staging his Lavicini play at long last.
There's much to praise in the novel, but there's also so much slackness (and some woeful editing at times) as Beauman gets tied up in knots with the ridiculousness of his plot. The characters we meet in Los Angeles are all grotesques, and maybe this is the J.K.Rowling generation coming of age, but its as if he can't resist any half-hearted joke, or possible digression that comes along. The irony about the breakneck speed and confidence of his writing, is that it doesn't stop to realise how leaden it has become.
New characters come in and take over the narrative and the book feels like a series of long shorts hung together - a bit like Adam Robert's adolescent steampunk comedy "Swiftly" - by an almost random picaresque. Compare with the brilliant "The Sisters Brothers", and Beauman's book feels adolescent, rushed, and trying too hard to please. It's been well received, and for a certain type of reader wanting something that fills that previously unfilled need for something that's both Pynchon and Python, I guess I can see the appeal. Oddly enough, for all its pyrotechnics, the writing is somewhat old-fashioned. At times it comes across like one of the hoary seventies comedies by Guy Bellamy (or even Leslie Thomas' ribald The Virgin Soldiers) albeit with a baroque imagination which is all Beaumans. In the L.A. segment it hardly comes close to the brilliance of James Robert Baker's "Boy Wonder" and "Fuel Injected Dreams" though it attempts something of their wild brio.
The ending(s) when they eventually come, are a bit of relief, and rescue the novel somewhat from its own failings - offering several conclusions to the story that tie things up or make some kind of sense. There's enough in the book to make you think that Beauman is making some comments on our sense of history, the McGuffin that is the Teleportation device, offering an excuse for any numbers of fractures in the narrative, even as he tells the story somewhat straight. More a smorgasbord than a coherent meal, his appearance on Granta's Best of Young British novelist lists is perhaps more surprising because of riffiness of his prose, which disappointed me, than the fecundness of his imagination, which - one feels - employed in shorter doses will come up with much to recomment it in the future.
Joe Dunthorne liked it a lot more than I did, if you want to find an alternate view.
Not that Beauman particularly cares, for this is an apparatus for him, just as much as it is for Loeser/Lavicini in their plays. The "accident" sees Lavicini's device exploding on stage, killing a large number of the audience and devastating the theatre its in. Flash forward a few hundred years and is the same thing about to happen in in 1940s Los Angeles? The novel plays around with this "steampunk" apparatus at will, occasionally forgetting it entirely, but coming back to it towards the end. The novel's main structure is picaresque as Loeser, never at home wherever he sits, moves restlessly from late Weimar German, to pre-war France, to Los Angeles on the edge of war. The narrative style shifts as well. From the excellent first section which richly satirises Isherwood's Berlin novels; to a slightly leaden Paris episode where Loeser gets involved with an American con artist, that's like a cut price "A Moveable Feast", to a Chandler-esque Los Angeles, where he rocks up for the remainder of the book.
The problem is that as inventive as these are, what begin as enjoyable riffs become entangled in the shaggy dog plotting that never entirely convinces. Whereas the Berlin sequence has a real tension, as the young horny Loeser wilfully ignores the growing Nazi presence, the Paris sequence is just a comic turn, as Loeser helps an American con man sew "monkey gonads" onto unsuspecting rich women's necks, in the hope for longer lives. The American section, which takes up so much of the book, quickly becomes loose, somewhat nonsensical and paranoid, where a vast cast of characters - including quite a few displaced Berliners - role in and out of an overly complex story that sees Beauman losing his way somewhat. The riffs and the clever-clever juxtapositions from earlier in the novel are buried under pages of crass dialogue and over-exposition. By the time Loeser meets Adele again (she's sensibly changed her surname) both him and us have lost interest. Loeser's main interest now is recovering a dirty book that he lost on the way over; meeting his hero the novelist Stent Mutton; and somehow staging his Lavicini play at long last.
There's much to praise in the novel, but there's also so much slackness (and some woeful editing at times) as Beauman gets tied up in knots with the ridiculousness of his plot. The characters we meet in Los Angeles are all grotesques, and maybe this is the J.K.Rowling generation coming of age, but its as if he can't resist any half-hearted joke, or possible digression that comes along. The irony about the breakneck speed and confidence of his writing, is that it doesn't stop to realise how leaden it has become.
New characters come in and take over the narrative and the book feels like a series of long shorts hung together - a bit like Adam Robert's adolescent steampunk comedy "Swiftly" - by an almost random picaresque. Compare with the brilliant "The Sisters Brothers", and Beauman's book feels adolescent, rushed, and trying too hard to please. It's been well received, and for a certain type of reader wanting something that fills that previously unfilled need for something that's both Pynchon and Python, I guess I can see the appeal. Oddly enough, for all its pyrotechnics, the writing is somewhat old-fashioned. At times it comes across like one of the hoary seventies comedies by Guy Bellamy (or even Leslie Thomas' ribald The Virgin Soldiers) albeit with a baroque imagination which is all Beaumans. In the L.A. segment it hardly comes close to the brilliance of James Robert Baker's "Boy Wonder" and "Fuel Injected Dreams" though it attempts something of their wild brio.
The ending(s) when they eventually come, are a bit of relief, and rescue the novel somewhat from its own failings - offering several conclusions to the story that tie things up or make some kind of sense. There's enough in the book to make you think that Beauman is making some comments on our sense of history, the McGuffin that is the Teleportation device, offering an excuse for any numbers of fractures in the narrative, even as he tells the story somewhat straight. More a smorgasbord than a coherent meal, his appearance on Granta's Best of Young British novelist lists is perhaps more surprising because of riffiness of his prose, which disappointed me, than the fecundness of his imagination, which - one feels - employed in shorter doses will come up with much to recomment it in the future.
Joe Dunthorne liked it a lot more than I did, if you want to find an alternate view.
Friday, April 12, 2013
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
I'm late to the party with reviewing Alison Moore's debut novel "The Lighthouse" which received so much praise last year and was shortlisted for the Booker. Not for any reason, as I've liked Alison's writing since first reading her in Nightjar Press's pamphlet series, but I've finally got round to it.
It's a short novel but in no way feels slight, its circular narrative reminding me a little bit of Sebald's circumnavigation in "The Rings of Saturn." In this novel Futh, a middle aged man with a Germanic surname, is going on a walking tour of the Rhine, catching a ferry over and having his bags transferred from guest house to guest house as he completes a lonely week's holiday. We meet Futh on the ferry over. He's middle aged, somewhat self-preoccupied and not very good with people. Moore has created a very believable protagonist, and throughout his journey we are given flashbacks of his life and its key moments. Bullied by his father after his mother left them (because she found her husband boring), his own childhood was a typically circumscribed one. Moore is brilliant at the deadness of so much suburban life, where, unable to leave the place you grew up, you can never get more than a few miles away from the people you were at school with or neighbours with. His best friend Kenny moves away when his parents split, and Kenny's mother becomes close to both Futh and his father. There is always an undertow of bleak sexual tension in this novel, as characters are unable to love or to hate properly, but are also unable to break away. This might sound dispiriting but it comes with such a layer of unrealised hope that one reads each short chapter almost breathless with the sadness of it all. Futh, a kindly man, wrecked in many ways by the circular nature of his life - from his broken home, to his now ended marriage - gives a fellow passenger a lift to Utrecht as its on his way. These brief encounters with strangers on the road give an added frisson to the novel, for one is never quite sure what will happen next. Futh travels with the suitcase he took on his disastrous honeymoon, a silver lighthouse-shaped perfume container that reminds him of his mother, and a packet of condoms that he knows will remain unused.
He remembers an earlier trip with his father - taken when Futh was twelve and his father was in his forties - and his memories of the different women that he picked up each night and shagged in the bathroom whilst his son tried to sleep in the hotel bedroom. Yet we are not totally enclosed with Futh's memories, for there is the parallel story of Ester, an ageing hotelier who sleeps with her guests in the hope of getting a response from her violent husband. Moore is brilliant on the accumulation of small details to sketch out believable lives, the switching back between present and past handled deftly. Her prose is forensic in its detail, unshowy, but never afraid to pull out and emphasise the symbolism that is at the novel's heart - whether its Futh's father's anecdotes about lighthouses or memories of watching movies and eating popcorn. Like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, life is seen here as a tapestry of key memories. If there are the occasional missteps (Futh's father is a chemistry teacher so would he really be so disdainful of his son's job creating artificial scents?) they are so slight as to hardly matter. I believed in the whole cast of characters through a few deftly told details. Though, like a lot of contemporary novels, Moore shares with a sense of impending doom, there is no authorial withholding as there is in the first person narratives of "The Sense of an Ending" or "The Gathering", rather we are prompted to think that this apparently mundane holiday by a sad man in his fifties has meaning.
Whereas so many first novels show promise, "The Lighthouse" has rightly been lauded because it fulfils it. Saying anymore about the plot would be a terrible spoiler, but like previous reviewers, I can only say that its well worth your time - but short as the novel is, you'd do best to savour it.
It's a short novel but in no way feels slight, its circular narrative reminding me a little bit of Sebald's circumnavigation in "The Rings of Saturn." In this novel Futh, a middle aged man with a Germanic surname, is going on a walking tour of the Rhine, catching a ferry over and having his bags transferred from guest house to guest house as he completes a lonely week's holiday. We meet Futh on the ferry over. He's middle aged, somewhat self-preoccupied and not very good with people. Moore has created a very believable protagonist, and throughout his journey we are given flashbacks of his life and its key moments. Bullied by his father after his mother left them (because she found her husband boring), his own childhood was a typically circumscribed one. Moore is brilliant at the deadness of so much suburban life, where, unable to leave the place you grew up, you can never get more than a few miles away from the people you were at school with or neighbours with. His best friend Kenny moves away when his parents split, and Kenny's mother becomes close to both Futh and his father. There is always an undertow of bleak sexual tension in this novel, as characters are unable to love or to hate properly, but are also unable to break away. This might sound dispiriting but it comes with such a layer of unrealised hope that one reads each short chapter almost breathless with the sadness of it all. Futh, a kindly man, wrecked in many ways by the circular nature of his life - from his broken home, to his now ended marriage - gives a fellow passenger a lift to Utrecht as its on his way. These brief encounters with strangers on the road give an added frisson to the novel, for one is never quite sure what will happen next. Futh travels with the suitcase he took on his disastrous honeymoon, a silver lighthouse-shaped perfume container that reminds him of his mother, and a packet of condoms that he knows will remain unused.
He remembers an earlier trip with his father - taken when Futh was twelve and his father was in his forties - and his memories of the different women that he picked up each night and shagged in the bathroom whilst his son tried to sleep in the hotel bedroom. Yet we are not totally enclosed with Futh's memories, for there is the parallel story of Ester, an ageing hotelier who sleeps with her guests in the hope of getting a response from her violent husband. Moore is brilliant on the accumulation of small details to sketch out believable lives, the switching back between present and past handled deftly. Her prose is forensic in its detail, unshowy, but never afraid to pull out and emphasise the symbolism that is at the novel's heart - whether its Futh's father's anecdotes about lighthouses or memories of watching movies and eating popcorn. Like "rosebud" in Citizen Kane, life is seen here as a tapestry of key memories. If there are the occasional missteps (Futh's father is a chemistry teacher so would he really be so disdainful of his son's job creating artificial scents?) they are so slight as to hardly matter. I believed in the whole cast of characters through a few deftly told details. Though, like a lot of contemporary novels, Moore shares with a sense of impending doom, there is no authorial withholding as there is in the first person narratives of "The Sense of an Ending" or "The Gathering", rather we are prompted to think that this apparently mundane holiday by a sad man in his fifties has meaning.
Whereas so many first novels show promise, "The Lighthouse" has rightly been lauded because it fulfils it. Saying anymore about the plot would be a terrible spoiler, but like previous reviewers, I can only say that its well worth your time - but short as the novel is, you'd do best to savour it.
Literary Idol, Book Factor....BOYB
Its a big week in the literary calendar. Before X-Factor, before Pop Idol, there was the Best of Young British Novelists, celebrated every ten years since 1983 with a special edition of Granta - in itself a reason for this particular prize to continue, as it makes a lovely book. The 2013 list will be announced on Monday with the launch of a special edition of Granta. There's a Manchester launch next Thursday at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation next Thursday. Obviously we don't know who will be reading, but I'm looking forward to it.
Nice article on the BBC about this week's list. Granta has used the idea beyond these shores in recent years, best of young American novelists, best of young Brazilians... but its the British one that matters. This is a test the pulse of British literature. Amongst those writers who might have a few books behind them (e.g. Gwendoline Riley) and are still under 40, there will be others who may be yet to burst forth, lying in manuscript somewhere in a London agent/publishers desk. That "London" I use advisedly, as I hope that in the first list to have come of age in the era of blogs that there will be a widening of the net, though if anything the literary scene (or at least the officially sanctioned one) is more London-based and flavoured than ever.
Its rather odd that Granta has been the place for this as over its history Granta has often been a little bit sniffy about fiction, preferring reportage for much of the 80s and 90s than making things up. On the "reality hunger" argument Granta always used to be very much on the David Shields side of the argument. I would say that's changed a little over the last two or three years. Recent Grantas have been big, dynamic affairs and have been actively recruiting new and younger authors such as Jon McGregor and Evie Wyld into their pages; though I imagine there will be a few on the list who have never graced its pages before.
So Granta hasn't given up on fiction - and BOYB novelists represents that. commitment. Though its not without problems. Ironically the BBC article mentions Alison Moore, a debut novelist for Salt last year who made the Booker shortlist. Alison was born in 1971, so just outside of the cut-off point for the list. Young is relative. Since 2003 there has been a massive increase in the number of creative writing courses in the UK, and that must surely feed through into the list. Then there's that blog culture. Will any 3AM Magazine alumni make the list, for instance? I'm sure the Granta list will have a few surprises, a few new names, a few predictables, and is generally for the good - though I think they may have harder job than their predecessors in taking the temperature of literature. Part of it is Granta itself, which has quite a prescriptive view of fiction at the best of times; a hangover from a culture where literature was more important than it is now. Yet from blogs to the "The White Review" there's a vibrancy about that culture at the moment that seems stronger than it was in 2003. That list was filled with thirty-somethings, (though 25 year old Adam Thirlwell could make it two lists in a row...) and in Peace, Barker, Mitchell, Kennedy and Litt had five of the most important novelists of the last decade.
Literary fiction, whether we call that a genre (as Paul Magrs did) or simply a list of what's good, is important to the culture; and like with music or poetry, there's a professionalism and competency about so many writers these days that is probably as good as at any time in history. Whether we have writers who are able to dominate the culture is another thing entirely, and to be honest, I don't know any writers who even think that way. The desire is to write good books and hope someone likes them. If the Barnes-Amis-Rushdie generation had a swagger and an ego to go with it, the writers I know are remarkably sanguine about their reputation. John Freeman, Granta's editor says, somewhat ominously that "my own preference is for novelists who can tell big stories, which sounds easy, but in my experience is as rare as the long-whiskered owlet." It would be interesting to ask him, once the list is announced how many of the twenty are telling "big stories" - as in the encomium's on the list there will be a sense that this is a generation with stories to tell and ways of telling it that are the equal of the last three lists. Writers aren't pack animals however; there's only one David Peace, one Nicola Barker, after all. My own preference is for writers who might conceivably be doing something with the language, and have something to say about our contemporary world. I imagine that there will be a bit of both on the list when its announced.
Nice article on the BBC about this week's list. Granta has used the idea beyond these shores in recent years, best of young American novelists, best of young Brazilians... but its the British one that matters. This is a test the pulse of British literature. Amongst those writers who might have a few books behind them (e.g. Gwendoline Riley) and are still under 40, there will be others who may be yet to burst forth, lying in manuscript somewhere in a London agent/publishers desk. That "London" I use advisedly, as I hope that in the first list to have come of age in the era of blogs that there will be a widening of the net, though if anything the literary scene (or at least the officially sanctioned one) is more London-based and flavoured than ever.
Its rather odd that Granta has been the place for this as over its history Granta has often been a little bit sniffy about fiction, preferring reportage for much of the 80s and 90s than making things up. On the "reality hunger" argument Granta always used to be very much on the David Shields side of the argument. I would say that's changed a little over the last two or three years. Recent Grantas have been big, dynamic affairs and have been actively recruiting new and younger authors such as Jon McGregor and Evie Wyld into their pages; though I imagine there will be a few on the list who have never graced its pages before.
So Granta hasn't given up on fiction - and BOYB novelists represents that. commitment. Though its not without problems. Ironically the BBC article mentions Alison Moore, a debut novelist for Salt last year who made the Booker shortlist. Alison was born in 1971, so just outside of the cut-off point for the list. Young is relative. Since 2003 there has been a massive increase in the number of creative writing courses in the UK, and that must surely feed through into the list. Then there's that blog culture. Will any 3AM Magazine alumni make the list, for instance? I'm sure the Granta list will have a few surprises, a few new names, a few predictables, and is generally for the good - though I think they may have harder job than their predecessors in taking the temperature of literature. Part of it is Granta itself, which has quite a prescriptive view of fiction at the best of times; a hangover from a culture where literature was more important than it is now. Yet from blogs to the "The White Review" there's a vibrancy about that culture at the moment that seems stronger than it was in 2003. That list was filled with thirty-somethings, (though 25 year old Adam Thirlwell could make it two lists in a row...) and in Peace, Barker, Mitchell, Kennedy and Litt had five of the most important novelists of the last decade.
Literary fiction, whether we call that a genre (as Paul Magrs did) or simply a list of what's good, is important to the culture; and like with music or poetry, there's a professionalism and competency about so many writers these days that is probably as good as at any time in history. Whether we have writers who are able to dominate the culture is another thing entirely, and to be honest, I don't know any writers who even think that way. The desire is to write good books and hope someone likes them. If the Barnes-Amis-Rushdie generation had a swagger and an ego to go with it, the writers I know are remarkably sanguine about their reputation. John Freeman, Granta's editor says, somewhat ominously that "my own preference is for novelists who can tell big stories, which sounds easy, but in my experience is as rare as the long-whiskered owlet." It would be interesting to ask him, once the list is announced how many of the twenty are telling "big stories" - as in the encomium's on the list there will be a sense that this is a generation with stories to tell and ways of telling it that are the equal of the last three lists. Writers aren't pack animals however; there's only one David Peace, one Nicola Barker, after all. My own preference is for writers who might conceivably be doing something with the language, and have something to say about our contemporary world. I imagine that there will be a bit of both on the list when its announced.
Monday, April 08, 2013
Now is not the Time for Your Tears.
Margaret Thatcher has died, aged 87, after a stroke. She had her final days and weeks in a subsidised suite of rooms at the Ritz, which seems only fitting. Even a couple of years ago I'd have thought of having a drink to her passing, but now, well, rest in peace, Margaret - your crimes are history now; and we're too busy fighting the disastrous policies of your Conservative party successors. Too much of my adult life has been under a right wing prime minister, and it's rarely a pleasant time; and one wonders why, when apparently, according to all the encomiums, Thatcher "made Britain great" again. I've never bought this idea, at least partly because it assumes that Britain all felt the same about her - yet in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and much of the North this "greatness" was sucked away by her policies, rather than increased.
I saw Gordon Brown just before the last election and he gave a great speech listing all Labour's achievements, from civil partnerships, to peace in Northern Ireland to new schools, and reduced waiting lists. Sure he ignored the authoritarianism, the laxness of the financial regulation and the Iraq war, but there was plenty here to be proud of - real achievements. Listening to Thatcherites speaking there's nothinig other than generalisations, as if Britain would still be in 1979 if she hadn't been in power - ignoring the modernisation that has happened in countries across Europe without having the wrecking ball of Thatcherism.
Her "achievements" are all in negatives - opposing the miners, winning the Falklands war (after prev. removing the battleship that was patrolling the South Atlantic), liberalising the city (that worked well didn't it?), selling off council houses (and that!) The only building projects I associate with her era are Canary Wharf (which lost its backers millions) and the Eurotunnel (ditto). Even things I agreed with, such as longer licensing hours and shops being open on Sundays, aren't so much about reversing the unions, but reversing a Churchillian sense of a state at war. All of her liberalisation projects seem to have merely stacked money in the hands of the speculators and unbalance the economy in favour of the south of England. Maybe I'm forgetting things, but I can't remember a single thing that made life better for me, my family and friends. The idea that the unions would have held Britain to ransom in the 80s is a myth, did it happen elsewhere in a much more militant Europe? No, of course not. Even her "rebate" from Europe had much less effect than the need for the wasted north to access structural funds during the 90s and 00s... finally providing some of the infrastructure that she'd left to the "market." Her immediate legacy was the limp administration of John Major who gave us the millennium dome, greenlighted a toll motorway and privatised the railways - none of which are unalloyed triumphs, even if New Labour foolishly went along with all three.
Visit France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, anywhere in Northern Europe and you'll wonder what was so special about the British "miracle" - these competitors, often with left wing or even communist governments, are more educated, more productive. That the south of Europe is in dire recession now is for following the same liberalisation of banking and property markets that Thatcher also followed. Economically her solution has proven a disaster that keeps on giving; there's not a single bit of social legislation that she wouldn't have instinctively have opposed. I don't deny her historical importance, or that she was a leading figure on the world stage - her character is not in doubt, it is her judgement that I reject. Her successor David Cameron and his chancellor are currently doing their best to demonise many of the British people whilst wanting "Britain" to be great - and its exactly the same confidence trick as Thatcher's governments played on us. Divide and rule. Had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown been more sceptical about her achievements then their own negative lists might have been a little bit shorter - their achievements came from the left not the right. Following a couple of weeks when that truly great leader, Nelson Mandela, has been in hospital in his nineties, it is worth remembering that Thatcher the world statesman called him as a terrorist (so much of her family and friend's business interests were based in the corruption of apartheid) and Chile's Pinochet a friend.
Yes, the Baroness is now dead, and for those who loved her, that is sad, but as Bob Dylan once wrote, for the rest of us, now is not the time for your tears.
I saw Gordon Brown just before the last election and he gave a great speech listing all Labour's achievements, from civil partnerships, to peace in Northern Ireland to new schools, and reduced waiting lists. Sure he ignored the authoritarianism, the laxness of the financial regulation and the Iraq war, but there was plenty here to be proud of - real achievements. Listening to Thatcherites speaking there's nothinig other than generalisations, as if Britain would still be in 1979 if she hadn't been in power - ignoring the modernisation that has happened in countries across Europe without having the wrecking ball of Thatcherism.
Her "achievements" are all in negatives - opposing the miners, winning the Falklands war (after prev. removing the battleship that was patrolling the South Atlantic), liberalising the city (that worked well didn't it?), selling off council houses (and that!) The only building projects I associate with her era are Canary Wharf (which lost its backers millions) and the Eurotunnel (ditto). Even things I agreed with, such as longer licensing hours and shops being open on Sundays, aren't so much about reversing the unions, but reversing a Churchillian sense of a state at war. All of her liberalisation projects seem to have merely stacked money in the hands of the speculators and unbalance the economy in favour of the south of England. Maybe I'm forgetting things, but I can't remember a single thing that made life better for me, my family and friends. The idea that the unions would have held Britain to ransom in the 80s is a myth, did it happen elsewhere in a much more militant Europe? No, of course not. Even her "rebate" from Europe had much less effect than the need for the wasted north to access structural funds during the 90s and 00s... finally providing some of the infrastructure that she'd left to the "market." Her immediate legacy was the limp administration of John Major who gave us the millennium dome, greenlighted a toll motorway and privatised the railways - none of which are unalloyed triumphs, even if New Labour foolishly went along with all three.
Visit France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, anywhere in Northern Europe and you'll wonder what was so special about the British "miracle" - these competitors, often with left wing or even communist governments, are more educated, more productive. That the south of Europe is in dire recession now is for following the same liberalisation of banking and property markets that Thatcher also followed. Economically her solution has proven a disaster that keeps on giving; there's not a single bit of social legislation that she wouldn't have instinctively have opposed. I don't deny her historical importance, or that she was a leading figure on the world stage - her character is not in doubt, it is her judgement that I reject. Her successor David Cameron and his chancellor are currently doing their best to demonise many of the British people whilst wanting "Britain" to be great - and its exactly the same confidence trick as Thatcher's governments played on us. Divide and rule. Had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown been more sceptical about her achievements then their own negative lists might have been a little bit shorter - their achievements came from the left not the right. Following a couple of weeks when that truly great leader, Nelson Mandela, has been in hospital in his nineties, it is worth remembering that Thatcher the world statesman called him as a terrorist (so much of her family and friend's business interests were based in the corruption of apartheid) and Chile's Pinochet a friend.
Yes, the Baroness is now dead, and for those who loved her, that is sad, but as Bob Dylan once wrote, for the rest of us, now is not the time for your tears.
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Writing the "I" in Contemporary Fiction
Does fiction have a role to reflect the times? Not just the physical reality of the times, but its language, its undercurrents? Are we even aware of the fundamental shifts that take place from time to time and begin to distance us from our parents, our grandparents, the forgotten ancestors?
We are living through an unprecedented period of peace in the west, however much that is down to outsourcing any wars since 1945, and so the real traumas of our lives are not pitted against a national tragedy. The financial crisis seems somewhat existential, though, with the cuts coming through to welfare this week, in the UK at least (and already in Greece, Cyprus, Ireland) they are being tangible, as our dependence on a monied world (or a debt-based world) seems now total. When we've had something of a natural disaster (the Icelandic ash cloud) or a man-made one (the truckers strike) the fragile supply chains of late capitalism are laid bare. We hear in the news that we are two weeks away from gas shortages, but its not like any of us, on this cramped island, have the wherewithal to live long without our regular incomes.
This is part of a wider pattern where late capitalism is no longer content with the movement of goods, labour and money but is in some ways creating an industrialisation of private space and private life. From dating sites to internet pornography; from labour saving devices to a new domestic class: personal trainer; sandiwch maker; the web of transactional demand is necessary to feed the supply industries.
How does a fiction work in this context? I think we have to look back a little. A lot of this is about the unique role that fiction has in terms of art in showing consciousness. For of all the art forms it is the one that most often, and for longest, has tried to show us how we think. We may see - as Harold Bloom did - that Shakespeare teaches us how to be human; but though we know what Hamlet or Othello or Lear is thinking through the sleight of the soliloquy, we don't really know why they are thinking that. Shakespeare gives us action predicated not so much on emotion (which I'll come back to) as on base instincts and desires. For Othello "jealousy" is an actual thing not a feeling, and in the politically-charged scenarios of Shakespeare's staged worlds, these headline emotions are behind so much of the play's dynamism. There's not a massive distance here from mummers plays with depictions of human venalities in life-like forms; obviously what Shakespeare does with this is far more; but he is restricted by the show of the stage; so that our soliloquy's are examinations of action and motive - character is action in Shakespeare. Whether it is later in James, who used the phrase, is another matter.
The novel came of age in the 18th century and there's something of Shakespeare's layering of societal corruptions on the morality plays of the age in the (im)moral fables of Fielding or Defoe. They have no doubt about the Fall of man (or woman), but the consciousness we see in Tom Jones or Moll Flanders is a winning one, that wants to excuse their venality (if that's what it is) through circumstances. "I'm bad, but I didn't mean to be," seems to be our new found sense of self. If a Shakespearean hero's fall is pre-ordained by the deadly sins, by fate; for Moll Flanders it is an accident of circumstance. The 18th century hero(ine) is prone to regret, but also to ask for forgiveness. It is an interesting reductionism of the Christian compact. That man is born with original sin, and so rather than try and live a good life, is undoubtedly going to live a bad life, but in the living will grow wiser. The 18th century writers were men (and women) of the real world and their characters reflect that. Again though it is action rather than thought that determines character. Moll Flanders tells us she is a bad woman but wishes she wasn't. The moralists of the time could condemn her actions, whilst real people would recognise themselves and their friends in her justifying of her situation. In a less fevered sense this is the lessons of "Pride and Prejudice" as well. Characters don't purport themselves well, whilst at the same time aiming at being beyond blemish (for reasons of "reputation") yet have the capacity to change. That Elizabeth Bennet's sin seems smaller than the priggish Darcy's is part of the comedy of manners, and the reality of the times - where a person's individual thoughts were less important than their institutions.
Where the individual's consciousness is in contrast with the age's, then the conflict appears - and in many ways the Victorian novel reflected this. George Eliot lived in "sin" and wrote as a man; so her own life was a radical one for the times yet her characters also have to face the consequences of their choices. The good doctor Lydgate in "Middlemarch", and the serious Dorothea, both marry badly out of a misplaced sense of their own consciousness. Lydgate fancies himself a man of science rather than of fashion, Dorothea as acetic rather than the sensualist she is. The Victorian novel gives us consciousness and consequence, and the two have to run their course - unable to shift the times or society they live in. The utopianism of a 19th century hero is simply about rising beyond their original class: so an orphan becomes a Lord; or a beggar picked off the streets of Liverpool ends up ruling the family he was brought into.
A consciousness that was less societally restricted could only be found elsewhere. Perhaps this is the utopianism of William Morris's "News from Nowhere", or more likely in the enclosed worlds of the school in Jane Eyre of The Way of All Flesh. Modernism gave us a consciousness that was able to exist outside of the restrictions of society. Partly this was because of a changing world - and "modernisation" created educated archetypes who had no place in the world. Thus the narrator of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" would have been a priest or an academic in a previous age, but as a precarious writer, slipping down the food chain, all he is left with is a sense of self. A hundred years later J.M. Coetzee would speak of the same hopelessness in apartheid South Africa with his "Life and times of Josef K." This uncoupling of the "hero" of a novel from societal norms is exacerbated during the early 20th century. I think its also a result of the more capital driven society and urbanisation and its consequence.
For Conrad travelling down into "The Heart of Darkness" the soul of man could be exposed only through some kind of extremis; yet Woolf proves in Mrs. Dalloway that the same journey can take place purely through consciousness and during the inauspicious day planning a party. The autobiographical heroes of "Sons and Lovers" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" want more - they want to change the(ir) world as you might expect from writers emerging from the working class and Ireland. The reality of consciousness is being explored elsewhere as the emergence of Freud's theories gives the "mind" a substance that religion had previously given to the "soul." Character was no longer a moral quality so much as a mental one. Later, we'd find it was a chemical one - in the lost souls of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" perhaps.
That a writer like James might imagine what its like to be a young woman is partly a result of this better understanding of our consciousness as no longer being just a social construct or a moral one. The mind itself, of which we all possess one, is the factory of ourselves. Shakespeare's unfathomable Iago and the flawed Othello seem to be ahead of their time - maybe Iago is a sociopath and Othello autistic?
What modernism provided was a sense that the mind was as fertile a location to explore as the Congo or the drawing room. The world after the First World War was one that how little our individual desires actually meant - not because of some social construct - but because of the social destruction that a mechanised warfare brought with it. Those other "ordering systems" of fascism and communism had a similar dim view of the self. Consciousness was barely allowed in these belief systems - and the "I" was distrusted as autobiography - and autobiography was proof of what you were, a Jew, for instance, or against the regime. The distrust of the "I" in fiction made its way into America's post-war paranoia and the crimes of McCarthyism where the formulisation "I am not and have never been a communist" was given the status of holy writ.
No surprise then that our trust in consciousness in fiction, the role of the "I", changed again in the 1940s and 1950s. The new "I" was a rebellious loner. An "outsider" in Camus or a "catcher in the rye" according to Salinger or a rolling stone, gathering no moss in Kerouac. This template feeds into writers with an eye on the societal. For Portnoy it is sexual gratification, against the wishes of his religion; for Augie Marsh it is seeing the world different than his family do. The generational and societal changes of the 60s, as well as the enduring American myth of self-creation feed into any number of fictions. In Britain the writing is less certain of being able to change things, but as equally aware that your own personal desires are more important than the restrictions that work or family want to put on you. Cinema with its external focus on its Alfie's, its Poor Cows, has no problem with pretending it can see what we're thinking but is less inclined to this than even in Shakespeare's day; and the "I" is therefore now one that has a Micheal Caine or Clint Eastwood or Dustin Hoffman as a stand-in, whether as "everyman" or one-off. Fictional delusion comes in - the ego, if you like - in the fantasy novels of the period, where an individual can change themselves and the world, either through a roll of the dice ("The Dice Man") or the creation of a religion ("Stranger in a Strange Land.")
Female and gay emancipation created other kinds of "I". The multiple strands of "The Golden Notebook" allows Lessing to give us different layers of self - as a woman can share a hidden consciousness with the reader. In the sociopathic "The Collector" Fowles gives us narrators who we believe whilst they are speaking, but who act as convincers, con artists to our understanding. The consciousness can lie; even to itself - after all, how else can we do such terrible acts?
In the 40 years since Watergate I wonder whether our protagonists can now believe in being able to change the world any more than being able to change themselves. There are, it seems, fewer Holden Caulfields or Portnoys or rather the validity of self has itself become a commodity. The late 70s coming to consciousness of the Stepford-wives like witches in "Witches of Eastwick" feels more like a metaphor than a reality. By "London Fields" or "American Pastoral" the uncertainty of what an "I" actually means is compounded by characters acting as in-novel surrogates in order to tell the story. The author, embedded with his battalion has abandoned "I" for his character's thoughts and wants it to act as a direction-finder for a collective modern consciousness: or rather - "this is the world as I see it."
The internet has changed things again, for the physical "I" is no longer necessary the feelings of the character but some kind of construct. When a character is in the midst of the action of their own life they only seem able to tell us it now as a story, as a construct. The holding back (the "false memory") you find in Anne Enright's "The Gathering" or Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending" for instance. Yet American writers, assailed with so much information, are almost unable to write character now without an intrusion of the whole world. Like Conrad having to send his characters into an extreme place to discover who or what they are, the contemporary writer almost needs to find an isolation zone: a hospital bed ("Girlfriend in a Coma"), death ("The Lovely Bones") or war ("The Yellow Birds") to actually think and feel anything real. For the young or new writer coming up the tendency is to circumvent all this worry and just write in the present tense. Consciousness as sensation. Not "I am..." so much as "this is happening to me."
What does consciousness now mean? We kid ourselves if we think we have the freedom of some of our previous generations - for freedom means change and for too many people life is now about a certain unchanging tension. Will our job/relationship/fertility last? We can no longer go "on the road" or slip into Tangiers or Mexico, because everywhere is exactly the same as where we are. We are being told what to think based upon the detritus of news stories and extreme lives on Jeremy Kyle. Our personal life, and therefore our consciousness, is seeping into the public domains via Facebook and Twitter.
In this world I'm suspicious of using the "I". It is no longer the authorial-biographer of the modernist; nor is it the voice of a character in a malleable situation. "I" has become a construct of "stuff" that may or may not be about the individual character. Too many books - even by great writers like DeLillo - are unable to distinguish one consciousness from another, like we are all parts of a bigger creature. This is not so unusual. Shakespeare would have recognised it, but felt it was an irrelevance, because the influences on our lives - jealousy, envy, fear, ambition - were so much stronger than what we actually "feel"; James would have fretted, wondering how to make sense of a senseless world, and probably finding, as many of our contemporary novelists do, solace in constructed worlds: workplaces, cities, virtual environments. The contemporary "I" seems to have more in common with the way Burroughs uses it - as a camera on a stick prodding anywhere into human existence - or as in early Gibson, as a node on the network.
When our existence is an IP address what is it that we actually feel? I'm not seeing the fictions that are addressing this.
We are living through an unprecedented period of peace in the west, however much that is down to outsourcing any wars since 1945, and so the real traumas of our lives are not pitted against a national tragedy. The financial crisis seems somewhat existential, though, with the cuts coming through to welfare this week, in the UK at least (and already in Greece, Cyprus, Ireland) they are being tangible, as our dependence on a monied world (or a debt-based world) seems now total. When we've had something of a natural disaster (the Icelandic ash cloud) or a man-made one (the truckers strike) the fragile supply chains of late capitalism are laid bare. We hear in the news that we are two weeks away from gas shortages, but its not like any of us, on this cramped island, have the wherewithal to live long without our regular incomes.
This is part of a wider pattern where late capitalism is no longer content with the movement of goods, labour and money but is in some ways creating an industrialisation of private space and private life. From dating sites to internet pornography; from labour saving devices to a new domestic class: personal trainer; sandiwch maker; the web of transactional demand is necessary to feed the supply industries.
How does a fiction work in this context? I think we have to look back a little. A lot of this is about the unique role that fiction has in terms of art in showing consciousness. For of all the art forms it is the one that most often, and for longest, has tried to show us how we think. We may see - as Harold Bloom did - that Shakespeare teaches us how to be human; but though we know what Hamlet or Othello or Lear is thinking through the sleight of the soliloquy, we don't really know why they are thinking that. Shakespeare gives us action predicated not so much on emotion (which I'll come back to) as on base instincts and desires. For Othello "jealousy" is an actual thing not a feeling, and in the politically-charged scenarios of Shakespeare's staged worlds, these headline emotions are behind so much of the play's dynamism. There's not a massive distance here from mummers plays with depictions of human venalities in life-like forms; obviously what Shakespeare does with this is far more; but he is restricted by the show of the stage; so that our soliloquy's are examinations of action and motive - character is action in Shakespeare. Whether it is later in James, who used the phrase, is another matter.
The novel came of age in the 18th century and there's something of Shakespeare's layering of societal corruptions on the morality plays of the age in the (im)moral fables of Fielding or Defoe. They have no doubt about the Fall of man (or woman), but the consciousness we see in Tom Jones or Moll Flanders is a winning one, that wants to excuse their venality (if that's what it is) through circumstances. "I'm bad, but I didn't mean to be," seems to be our new found sense of self. If a Shakespearean hero's fall is pre-ordained by the deadly sins, by fate; for Moll Flanders it is an accident of circumstance. The 18th century hero(ine) is prone to regret, but also to ask for forgiveness. It is an interesting reductionism of the Christian compact. That man is born with original sin, and so rather than try and live a good life, is undoubtedly going to live a bad life, but in the living will grow wiser. The 18th century writers were men (and women) of the real world and their characters reflect that. Again though it is action rather than thought that determines character. Moll Flanders tells us she is a bad woman but wishes she wasn't. The moralists of the time could condemn her actions, whilst real people would recognise themselves and their friends in her justifying of her situation. In a less fevered sense this is the lessons of "Pride and Prejudice" as well. Characters don't purport themselves well, whilst at the same time aiming at being beyond blemish (for reasons of "reputation") yet have the capacity to change. That Elizabeth Bennet's sin seems smaller than the priggish Darcy's is part of the comedy of manners, and the reality of the times - where a person's individual thoughts were less important than their institutions.
Where the individual's consciousness is in contrast with the age's, then the conflict appears - and in many ways the Victorian novel reflected this. George Eliot lived in "sin" and wrote as a man; so her own life was a radical one for the times yet her characters also have to face the consequences of their choices. The good doctor Lydgate in "Middlemarch", and the serious Dorothea, both marry badly out of a misplaced sense of their own consciousness. Lydgate fancies himself a man of science rather than of fashion, Dorothea as acetic rather than the sensualist she is. The Victorian novel gives us consciousness and consequence, and the two have to run their course - unable to shift the times or society they live in. The utopianism of a 19th century hero is simply about rising beyond their original class: so an orphan becomes a Lord; or a beggar picked off the streets of Liverpool ends up ruling the family he was brought into.
A consciousness that was less societally restricted could only be found elsewhere. Perhaps this is the utopianism of William Morris's "News from Nowhere", or more likely in the enclosed worlds of the school in Jane Eyre of The Way of All Flesh. Modernism gave us a consciousness that was able to exist outside of the restrictions of society. Partly this was because of a changing world - and "modernisation" created educated archetypes who had no place in the world. Thus the narrator of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" would have been a priest or an academic in a previous age, but as a precarious writer, slipping down the food chain, all he is left with is a sense of self. A hundred years later J.M. Coetzee would speak of the same hopelessness in apartheid South Africa with his "Life and times of Josef K." This uncoupling of the "hero" of a novel from societal norms is exacerbated during the early 20th century. I think its also a result of the more capital driven society and urbanisation and its consequence.
For Conrad travelling down into "The Heart of Darkness" the soul of man could be exposed only through some kind of extremis; yet Woolf proves in Mrs. Dalloway that the same journey can take place purely through consciousness and during the inauspicious day planning a party. The autobiographical heroes of "Sons and Lovers" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" want more - they want to change the(ir) world as you might expect from writers emerging from the working class and Ireland. The reality of consciousness is being explored elsewhere as the emergence of Freud's theories gives the "mind" a substance that religion had previously given to the "soul." Character was no longer a moral quality so much as a mental one. Later, we'd find it was a chemical one - in the lost souls of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" perhaps.
That a writer like James might imagine what its like to be a young woman is partly a result of this better understanding of our consciousness as no longer being just a social construct or a moral one. The mind itself, of which we all possess one, is the factory of ourselves. Shakespeare's unfathomable Iago and the flawed Othello seem to be ahead of their time - maybe Iago is a sociopath and Othello autistic?
What modernism provided was a sense that the mind was as fertile a location to explore as the Congo or the drawing room. The world after the First World War was one that how little our individual desires actually meant - not because of some social construct - but because of the social destruction that a mechanised warfare brought with it. Those other "ordering systems" of fascism and communism had a similar dim view of the self. Consciousness was barely allowed in these belief systems - and the "I" was distrusted as autobiography - and autobiography was proof of what you were, a Jew, for instance, or against the regime. The distrust of the "I" in fiction made its way into America's post-war paranoia and the crimes of McCarthyism where the formulisation "I am not and have never been a communist" was given the status of holy writ.
No surprise then that our trust in consciousness in fiction, the role of the "I", changed again in the 1940s and 1950s. The new "I" was a rebellious loner. An "outsider" in Camus or a "catcher in the rye" according to Salinger or a rolling stone, gathering no moss in Kerouac. This template feeds into writers with an eye on the societal. For Portnoy it is sexual gratification, against the wishes of his religion; for Augie Marsh it is seeing the world different than his family do. The generational and societal changes of the 60s, as well as the enduring American myth of self-creation feed into any number of fictions. In Britain the writing is less certain of being able to change things, but as equally aware that your own personal desires are more important than the restrictions that work or family want to put on you. Cinema with its external focus on its Alfie's, its Poor Cows, has no problem with pretending it can see what we're thinking but is less inclined to this than even in Shakespeare's day; and the "I" is therefore now one that has a Micheal Caine or Clint Eastwood or Dustin Hoffman as a stand-in, whether as "everyman" or one-off. Fictional delusion comes in - the ego, if you like - in the fantasy novels of the period, where an individual can change themselves and the world, either through a roll of the dice ("The Dice Man") or the creation of a religion ("Stranger in a Strange Land.")
Female and gay emancipation created other kinds of "I". The multiple strands of "The Golden Notebook" allows Lessing to give us different layers of self - as a woman can share a hidden consciousness with the reader. In the sociopathic "The Collector" Fowles gives us narrators who we believe whilst they are speaking, but who act as convincers, con artists to our understanding. The consciousness can lie; even to itself - after all, how else can we do such terrible acts?
In the 40 years since Watergate I wonder whether our protagonists can now believe in being able to change the world any more than being able to change themselves. There are, it seems, fewer Holden Caulfields or Portnoys or rather the validity of self has itself become a commodity. The late 70s coming to consciousness of the Stepford-wives like witches in "Witches of Eastwick" feels more like a metaphor than a reality. By "London Fields" or "American Pastoral" the uncertainty of what an "I" actually means is compounded by characters acting as in-novel surrogates in order to tell the story. The author, embedded with his battalion has abandoned "I" for his character's thoughts and wants it to act as a direction-finder for a collective modern consciousness: or rather - "this is the world as I see it."
The internet has changed things again, for the physical "I" is no longer necessary the feelings of the character but some kind of construct. When a character is in the midst of the action of their own life they only seem able to tell us it now as a story, as a construct. The holding back (the "false memory") you find in Anne Enright's "The Gathering" or Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending" for instance. Yet American writers, assailed with so much information, are almost unable to write character now without an intrusion of the whole world. Like Conrad having to send his characters into an extreme place to discover who or what they are, the contemporary writer almost needs to find an isolation zone: a hospital bed ("Girlfriend in a Coma"), death ("The Lovely Bones") or war ("The Yellow Birds") to actually think and feel anything real. For the young or new writer coming up the tendency is to circumvent all this worry and just write in the present tense. Consciousness as sensation. Not "I am..." so much as "this is happening to me."
What does consciousness now mean? We kid ourselves if we think we have the freedom of some of our previous generations - for freedom means change and for too many people life is now about a certain unchanging tension. Will our job/relationship/fertility last? We can no longer go "on the road" or slip into Tangiers or Mexico, because everywhere is exactly the same as where we are. We are being told what to think based upon the detritus of news stories and extreme lives on Jeremy Kyle. Our personal life, and therefore our consciousness, is seeping into the public domains via Facebook and Twitter.
In this world I'm suspicious of using the "I". It is no longer the authorial-biographer of the modernist; nor is it the voice of a character in a malleable situation. "I" has become a construct of "stuff" that may or may not be about the individual character. Too many books - even by great writers like DeLillo - are unable to distinguish one consciousness from another, like we are all parts of a bigger creature. This is not so unusual. Shakespeare would have recognised it, but felt it was an irrelevance, because the influences on our lives - jealousy, envy, fear, ambition - were so much stronger than what we actually "feel"; James would have fretted, wondering how to make sense of a senseless world, and probably finding, as many of our contemporary novelists do, solace in constructed worlds: workplaces, cities, virtual environments. The contemporary "I" seems to have more in common with the way Burroughs uses it - as a camera on a stick prodding anywhere into human existence - or as in early Gibson, as a node on the network.
When our existence is an IP address what is it that we actually feel? I'm not seeing the fictions that are addressing this.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Sad news about Iain Banks
The news that Iain Banks has cancer and has possibly less than year to live is very sad. He's older than I realised - 59 - but still, its no age. He was a writer you expected to carry on forever, mixing his mainstream and SF novels for another twenty years or more; but now it looks like "The Quarry" will be his last. I first encountered Banks, as many did, with "The Wasp Factory." I was at the airport on the way to Australia in 1985 and saw the arresting cover and read the blurb on the back and was instantly intrigued. I bought the novel and read it over the coming weeks on the other side of the world.
It remains a captivating book, a modern "Lord of the Flies", but uniquely speaking to my own generation. I wouldn't have guessed that Banks was a decade and a half older than me, as "The Wasp Factory" despite its Scottish island setting resonated strongly with me. I devoured his next few novels, only "Canal Dreams" being a bit of a duffer, and two in particular, the family saga "The Crow Road" and the rock and roll story "Espedair Street" joining that debut in my list of favourites. Its fair to say I liled Banks most when he was at his most macabre and most Scottish. Also, whilst most of his contemporaries seemed to write about a Britain I hardly recognised, his characters drank and smoke and listened to the Pixies. He always was a rock and roll novelist at heart - and there haven't been many of those in English letters. If I grew out of him after the mid-90s, it was perhaps my changing tastes rather than anything else. I've never read his much admired SF books, but perhaps I will find the time at some point.
Banks always seemed to be one of our own, a provincial novelist who had worldwide acclaim and vaulting ambition, and a world away from literary London. I can't be the only writer who aspired more to Banks than to Amis and his ilk. He's had a bit of acclaim over the years, but from interviews I've read with him, he's always been far more interested in a dialogue with his readership than fancy gongs. Outside of the SF he's not a genre writer but he's always written books that have a certain noirish brio, and have felt of the real world even when they are flights of fancy like "The Bridge".
So here's a writer I've followed since the start saying his last farewells, and it seems that as well as being a tragedy for his friends and family its a tragedy for literature. I can only hope his remaining time is as good as it can be.
It remains a captivating book, a modern "Lord of the Flies", but uniquely speaking to my own generation. I wouldn't have guessed that Banks was a decade and a half older than me, as "The Wasp Factory" despite its Scottish island setting resonated strongly with me. I devoured his next few novels, only "Canal Dreams" being a bit of a duffer, and two in particular, the family saga "The Crow Road" and the rock and roll story "Espedair Street" joining that debut in my list of favourites. Its fair to say I liled Banks most when he was at his most macabre and most Scottish. Also, whilst most of his contemporaries seemed to write about a Britain I hardly recognised, his characters drank and smoke and listened to the Pixies. He always was a rock and roll novelist at heart - and there haven't been many of those in English letters. If I grew out of him after the mid-90s, it was perhaps my changing tastes rather than anything else. I've never read his much admired SF books, but perhaps I will find the time at some point.
Banks always seemed to be one of our own, a provincial novelist who had worldwide acclaim and vaulting ambition, and a world away from literary London. I can't be the only writer who aspired more to Banks than to Amis and his ilk. He's had a bit of acclaim over the years, but from interviews I've read with him, he's always been far more interested in a dialogue with his readership than fancy gongs. Outside of the SF he's not a genre writer but he's always written books that have a certain noirish brio, and have felt of the real world even when they are flights of fancy like "The Bridge".
So here's a writer I've followed since the start saying his last farewells, and it seems that as well as being a tragedy for his friends and family its a tragedy for literature. I can only hope his remaining time is as good as it can be.
Monday, April 01, 2013
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
What we want most from art about war is some telling of truth, whether thats the exact truth of what happened, or the emotional truth. In the modern world of the professional soldier it is ever less likely that we will have writers as witnesses, so to some extent, "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers, who has an MFA in poetry and was also a soldier in Iraq, is welcome for that alone. The book has been highly lauded, winning the Guardian first book award and being shortlisted for the National Book Award in the USA.
"The Yellow Birds" is a short, poetic novel that tells a simple story about three soldiers in Iraq in 2004, following on from the U.S. invasion. The narrator, Bartle, meets the younger, smaller Murphy at basic training and takes him under his wing; both are part of a squad whose sergeant Sterling is a war-worn veteran. The novel is told in fragments, as Bartle skirts around the defining action of his time in Iraq. We already know that one of them, Murphy, won't survive and Bartle questions whether or not you can actually tell in advance. For Sterling it is more simple than that; he feels that Murphy is doomed almost as soon as he joins up. Sterling's lack of sentimentality contrasts with Bartle's surfeit of it. Narrating after the fact, this is not an average inarticulate soldier, but a poet-narrator. Whether in Iraq or back home in Richmond, Virginia, Bartle cannot describe a scene without it taking on a poetic hue. Yet the brutality of war is far from poetic. The "action" moves back and forth with the scenes in Iraq the strongest in some sense, but also the most senseless, as we are always only seeing a microcosm of war; a particular sorty in the town of Al Tafar, that sees the Americans take a part of the town only to be pushed back. Theirs is a dangerous war, this is before the "surge" that saw Al-quaeda pushed back, so we're here in the aftermath of the Bush/Cheney disaster - the invasion "won", the "peace" being lost on a daily basis. It seems to be a close cousin to the film "The Hurt Locker" in that, along with so many war stories since "Platoon", the desire is to show it like it is, rather than explore the broader context.
For Bartle there is only confusion, and he is a narrator who wrestles with it as he tells his story. Murphy, we know, is doomed, but what is particular tragic about this death? We only find out towards the end, and all three men are doomed in their own way as a result of one of them dying. Yet to what extent is this a typical story or a fantasy is not clear? Powers avoids the forensic telling of his war, though its impossible to totally forget the horrors, yet it is not so much Bartle's poetic descriptions as his sidling away from the truth of his own story that frustrate. By the end I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be thinking. For this seems less a book about this particular war than about young men struggling with their own inadequacies. A scene in a German brothel sees Sterling predictably in the role of a woman-beater, whilst Bartle shies away from his own desires. He's a particularly unreliable narrator, yet wanting us to believe and sympathise with him. One can't get away from the book's centreing on the experience of the soldiers themselves in Iraq. A translator is shot and not mourned, and worst of all, Sterling kills a man just because he's a witness to their cover-up. The first person narrative means that we never get anywhere near the truth of the "incident" described, and I guess Powers is trying to find a way into the "heart of darkness" of war as its experienced by the average soldier. Yet there's a self-aggrandisement about Bartle's story that doesn't work for me. This one story doesn't feel typical of the war as a whole; more it seems a little bit of an existential quest for meaning in a situation where there clearly is none. I'm reminded of the moral questions Wilder's "The Bridges of San Luis Rey" - is there a reason that one person dies and another one doesn't? After beginning the story by telling us that there isn't, in Murphy's tragedy Bartle then gives us a story where there is a reason why. Like "Saving Private Ryan" the idea of one story working for all has a narrative drive to it but excludes a wider political sense.
For me, it is not the choice of material, or the nature of the telling that disappointed about "The Yellow Birds" but Powers' much praised prose. For there is a blandness and a sameness to his writing that seems increasingly to be the stock-in-trade of a certain kind of American fiction. You could transplant a paragraph from any part of the novel and apply it to a different landscape, a different novel - a scene never takes place without nature offering some kind of supporting cast of characters, an egret flying low or a particular sensation caused by the sun on the trees. Such continual pathetic fallacy wears the reader down after a while. Ironically in his close control of this story telling there seems to be a lack of genuine observation. I'm no wiser about Iraq or Richmond. Even where the scenes call for action, there's an inertia to this kind of writing, the retrospective telling offering only a partial glance of what we are seeing.
"The Yellow Birds" clearly has to be seen as the novel it is rather than the one it isn't, so though we can't judge it on its apolitical nature, we surely can judge it on the emotional story that it tries to tell; and with its obfuscatory structure and its over emphasis on stock description it felt overwrought and at times sentimental. Like "The Hurt Locker" we see an individual who now only makes sense in the theatre of war; yet is this enough? I'm thinking of Andre Dubus's short stories and how much more real his characters are. Is there something purely existential about the contemporary experience - with its distant enemy, its dubious politics and its hi-tech weaponry? Reading A.L. Kennedy's "Day" or the sniper scenes in David Rose's "Vault" I felt much closer to the truth of that older war than I ever do in Powers' debut.
"The Yellow Birds" is a short, poetic novel that tells a simple story about three soldiers in Iraq in 2004, following on from the U.S. invasion. The narrator, Bartle, meets the younger, smaller Murphy at basic training and takes him under his wing; both are part of a squad whose sergeant Sterling is a war-worn veteran. The novel is told in fragments, as Bartle skirts around the defining action of his time in Iraq. We already know that one of them, Murphy, won't survive and Bartle questions whether or not you can actually tell in advance. For Sterling it is more simple than that; he feels that Murphy is doomed almost as soon as he joins up. Sterling's lack of sentimentality contrasts with Bartle's surfeit of it. Narrating after the fact, this is not an average inarticulate soldier, but a poet-narrator. Whether in Iraq or back home in Richmond, Virginia, Bartle cannot describe a scene without it taking on a poetic hue. Yet the brutality of war is far from poetic. The "action" moves back and forth with the scenes in Iraq the strongest in some sense, but also the most senseless, as we are always only seeing a microcosm of war; a particular sorty in the town of Al Tafar, that sees the Americans take a part of the town only to be pushed back. Theirs is a dangerous war, this is before the "surge" that saw Al-quaeda pushed back, so we're here in the aftermath of the Bush/Cheney disaster - the invasion "won", the "peace" being lost on a daily basis. It seems to be a close cousin to the film "The Hurt Locker" in that, along with so many war stories since "Platoon", the desire is to show it like it is, rather than explore the broader context.
For Bartle there is only confusion, and he is a narrator who wrestles with it as he tells his story. Murphy, we know, is doomed, but what is particular tragic about this death? We only find out towards the end, and all three men are doomed in their own way as a result of one of them dying. Yet to what extent is this a typical story or a fantasy is not clear? Powers avoids the forensic telling of his war, though its impossible to totally forget the horrors, yet it is not so much Bartle's poetic descriptions as his sidling away from the truth of his own story that frustrate. By the end I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be thinking. For this seems less a book about this particular war than about young men struggling with their own inadequacies. A scene in a German brothel sees Sterling predictably in the role of a woman-beater, whilst Bartle shies away from his own desires. He's a particularly unreliable narrator, yet wanting us to believe and sympathise with him. One can't get away from the book's centreing on the experience of the soldiers themselves in Iraq. A translator is shot and not mourned, and worst of all, Sterling kills a man just because he's a witness to their cover-up. The first person narrative means that we never get anywhere near the truth of the "incident" described, and I guess Powers is trying to find a way into the "heart of darkness" of war as its experienced by the average soldier. Yet there's a self-aggrandisement about Bartle's story that doesn't work for me. This one story doesn't feel typical of the war as a whole; more it seems a little bit of an existential quest for meaning in a situation where there clearly is none. I'm reminded of the moral questions Wilder's "The Bridges of San Luis Rey" - is there a reason that one person dies and another one doesn't? After beginning the story by telling us that there isn't, in Murphy's tragedy Bartle then gives us a story where there is a reason why. Like "Saving Private Ryan" the idea of one story working for all has a narrative drive to it but excludes a wider political sense.
For me, it is not the choice of material, or the nature of the telling that disappointed about "The Yellow Birds" but Powers' much praised prose. For there is a blandness and a sameness to his writing that seems increasingly to be the stock-in-trade of a certain kind of American fiction. You could transplant a paragraph from any part of the novel and apply it to a different landscape, a different novel - a scene never takes place without nature offering some kind of supporting cast of characters, an egret flying low or a particular sensation caused by the sun on the trees. Such continual pathetic fallacy wears the reader down after a while. Ironically in his close control of this story telling there seems to be a lack of genuine observation. I'm no wiser about Iraq or Richmond. Even where the scenes call for action, there's an inertia to this kind of writing, the retrospective telling offering only a partial glance of what we are seeing.
"The Yellow Birds" clearly has to be seen as the novel it is rather than the one it isn't, so though we can't judge it on its apolitical nature, we surely can judge it on the emotional story that it tries to tell; and with its obfuscatory structure and its over emphasis on stock description it felt overwrought and at times sentimental. Like "The Hurt Locker" we see an individual who now only makes sense in the theatre of war; yet is this enough? I'm thinking of Andre Dubus's short stories and how much more real his characters are. Is there something purely existential about the contemporary experience - with its distant enemy, its dubious politics and its hi-tech weaponry? Reading A.L. Kennedy's "Day" or the sniper scenes in David Rose's "Vault" I felt much closer to the truth of that older war than I ever do in Powers' debut.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Entertaining Strangers by Jonathan Taylor
There's an unnamed subgenre of English literature which revels in the quirky, and centres itself on flawed and fascinating characters - there's something of the music hall about it, a memory of Punch and Judy, as much as the 18th century archetypes you find in Fielding and (especially) Sterne. There's always something quite theatrical about it, and not surprisingly the actor Paul Bailey and the wonderful Angela Carter come to mind when thinking of more recent precedents. I'm reminded of this picking up Jonathan Taylor's recent debut novel "Entertaining Strangers," which throws us into the life of Edwin Prince at the moment when the mysterious narrator, "Jules", arrives unannounced on his doorstep.
Jules is welcomed - if that's the right word - into the house that Prince shares with his Landlady, a virtually squat-like hovel where the main characters come and go in a twilight world of hangovers, confused sexual liaisons and personal obsessions. For Prince is an eccentric of the first order. Obsessed with the cultural significance of ants, a Withnail-like auto-didact reading out half-remembered tracts of philosophy whilst listening at great volume to the far watermarks of 20th century experimental music. As Jules relates life in the Prince household the cast of characters expands, with Prince only reluctantly giving any explanation of how he relates to an ex-wife (never named), a psychologically disturbed brother, a hated and downtrodden mother, and other "strangers" such as the pub's poet laureate, Edwin's only friend. Taylor's novel hints at something broader beneath its comic monologues, for Jules is haunted by impossible memories of smoke and fire relating to the sacking of Smyrna in 1922, when the allied ships looked on from the bay as the Armenians and Greeks on the shoreline were left to burn with the city.
Prince is a modern grotesque, an out-of-place loner who, nonetheless, is attractive enough in his erudite obsessions to gather round him a group of (mainly) women who either want to bed or mother him or both. Set in a highly specified 1997, but in a non-specific East Midlands town (presumably Loughborough), the novel's a mostly funny, but occasionally sombre fable of curtailed and unstable lives. There's a grubby sadness to Prince - a recognisable model of the highly-strung obsessive who would probably be a Professor of something or other had he managed to scrape through his degree, but instead ends up running a pre-internet chat line called "Encyclodial" answering callers randomw general knowledge questions. All of this is seen through the eyes of Jules, who slowly but surely turns into an unlikely "guardian angel" for Edwin. This mysterious waif has her own secrets, that are at the heart of the books unravelling mysteries; but despite her mysterious nature she is a welcome narrator, giving us Edwin's life unadorned, but sympathetically. The chapters are often prefaced by "ant facts" for Edwin's obsession is with ants and how much better they are than humans. In a drab small-town world that rarely goes beyond the cramped littered living room or the far-from-gastro local pub this is a book of light comic magical realism set in the unpromising terrain of mid-90s Britain.
At times, the riffs go on a bit too much, with large extracts from "ant" literature or verbatim conversations, and you realise that the stuff of this somewhat theatrical novel is mostly to be found elsewhere in our cultural life these days - in the lodging house absurdities of "Spaced" or before that "Rising Damp." Set in the first days of the Tony Blair government, the characters are oblivious to the world around them, struggling with the dank everyday nothingness of British provincial life, where casual sex, familial violence and constant alcohol are the only drivers. Taylor, who has previously published a family memoir, is at his best when describing this drab tableaux, whilst whisking the reader along with a promise of something deeper - relating back to the horrors of the Armenian genocide? How does the past impinge on the present? There's darkness here, but its told with an eye on the audience, I think, so has some of the surface brio of Zadie Smith's "White Teeth", whisking us through its non-events, rather than wanting to go too deeply into the world he's describing. The tight cast and use of a narrator who is not so much disinterested as distant from the world she's describing make it an easy novel to read though there are times when the scenes are a little too drab or too repetitive to really engage the reader, and I found myself skipping a few sections. Though Edwin is a great creation, the other supporting characters are ciphers in a way - there is good reason for this I think, since it is through their relationship to Edwin that Jules sees them all - and for a book so heavy on dialogue, some of it is a little stock, a little sitcom - again, something that occasionally marred "White Teeth."
That said, Taylor successfully gives us a British family saga of sorts that is viable without a cast of thousands or the upper (or even middle) classes. If there's something kitchen-sink drama about its setting, the higher aims, and the links to the massacre at Smyrna are skilfully entwined, so that the book is elevated somewhat above its domestic setting. The title "entertaining strangers" is an accurate one, for that is what Edwin does in both ways - he lets Jules into his house, but he also "entertains" her and us.
Jules is welcomed - if that's the right word - into the house that Prince shares with his Landlady, a virtually squat-like hovel where the main characters come and go in a twilight world of hangovers, confused sexual liaisons and personal obsessions. For Prince is an eccentric of the first order. Obsessed with the cultural significance of ants, a Withnail-like auto-didact reading out half-remembered tracts of philosophy whilst listening at great volume to the far watermarks of 20th century experimental music. As Jules relates life in the Prince household the cast of characters expands, with Prince only reluctantly giving any explanation of how he relates to an ex-wife (never named), a psychologically disturbed brother, a hated and downtrodden mother, and other "strangers" such as the pub's poet laureate, Edwin's only friend. Taylor's novel hints at something broader beneath its comic monologues, for Jules is haunted by impossible memories of smoke and fire relating to the sacking of Smyrna in 1922, when the allied ships looked on from the bay as the Armenians and Greeks on the shoreline were left to burn with the city.
Prince is a modern grotesque, an out-of-place loner who, nonetheless, is attractive enough in his erudite obsessions to gather round him a group of (mainly) women who either want to bed or mother him or both. Set in a highly specified 1997, but in a non-specific East Midlands town (presumably Loughborough), the novel's a mostly funny, but occasionally sombre fable of curtailed and unstable lives. There's a grubby sadness to Prince - a recognisable model of the highly-strung obsessive who would probably be a Professor of something or other had he managed to scrape through his degree, but instead ends up running a pre-internet chat line called "Encyclodial" answering callers randomw general knowledge questions. All of this is seen through the eyes of Jules, who slowly but surely turns into an unlikely "guardian angel" for Edwin. This mysterious waif has her own secrets, that are at the heart of the books unravelling mysteries; but despite her mysterious nature she is a welcome narrator, giving us Edwin's life unadorned, but sympathetically. The chapters are often prefaced by "ant facts" for Edwin's obsession is with ants and how much better they are than humans. In a drab small-town world that rarely goes beyond the cramped littered living room or the far-from-gastro local pub this is a book of light comic magical realism set in the unpromising terrain of mid-90s Britain.
At times, the riffs go on a bit too much, with large extracts from "ant" literature or verbatim conversations, and you realise that the stuff of this somewhat theatrical novel is mostly to be found elsewhere in our cultural life these days - in the lodging house absurdities of "Spaced" or before that "Rising Damp." Set in the first days of the Tony Blair government, the characters are oblivious to the world around them, struggling with the dank everyday nothingness of British provincial life, where casual sex, familial violence and constant alcohol are the only drivers. Taylor, who has previously published a family memoir, is at his best when describing this drab tableaux, whilst whisking the reader along with a promise of something deeper - relating back to the horrors of the Armenian genocide? How does the past impinge on the present? There's darkness here, but its told with an eye on the audience, I think, so has some of the surface brio of Zadie Smith's "White Teeth", whisking us through its non-events, rather than wanting to go too deeply into the world he's describing. The tight cast and use of a narrator who is not so much disinterested as distant from the world she's describing make it an easy novel to read though there are times when the scenes are a little too drab or too repetitive to really engage the reader, and I found myself skipping a few sections. Though Edwin is a great creation, the other supporting characters are ciphers in a way - there is good reason for this I think, since it is through their relationship to Edwin that Jules sees them all - and for a book so heavy on dialogue, some of it is a little stock, a little sitcom - again, something that occasionally marred "White Teeth."
That said, Taylor successfully gives us a British family saga of sorts that is viable without a cast of thousands or the upper (or even middle) classes. If there's something kitchen-sink drama about its setting, the higher aims, and the links to the massacre at Smyrna are skilfully entwined, so that the book is elevated somewhat above its domestic setting. The title "entertaining strangers" is an accurate one, for that is what Edwin does in both ways - he lets Jules into his house, but he also "entertains" her and us.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Coming up...
Time for one of my round ups... as its another busy literary week coming up....
Monday, Lead Poets regular meet up in Chorlton, with Lindsey Holland as one of the guests
Wednesday, Rosie Garland's debut novel, the Palace of Curiosities, winner of the Mslexia prize, is being launched at Manchester Waterstones at 7PM. Also that evening, Bad Language returns at the Castle.
Thursday, launch of BOMP 3 (AKA Best of Manchester Poets 3) with myself and a cast of thousands.
Friday...time to head to Liverpool if you're around on Good Friday, where Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping support the award-winning Whistle, a poetic performance by Martin Figura.
And Saturday, the Cornerhouse hosts Enemies of the North - a brilliant line up of experimentalists.
Monday, Lead Poets regular meet up in Chorlton, with Lindsey Holland as one of the guests
Wednesday, Rosie Garland's debut novel, the Palace of Curiosities, winner of the Mslexia prize, is being launched at Manchester Waterstones at 7PM. Also that evening, Bad Language returns at the Castle.
Thursday, launch of BOMP 3 (AKA Best of Manchester Poets 3) with myself and a cast of thousands.
Friday...time to head to Liverpool if you're around on Good Friday, where Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping support the award-winning Whistle, a poetic performance by Martin Figura.
And Saturday, the Cornerhouse hosts Enemies of the North - a brilliant line up of experimentalists.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
On Thom Gunn
"Around 1960, it sometimes seemed as if all the poetry being written in England was being produced by a triple-headed creature called the "Larkin-Hughes-Gunn" " said Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry Since 1945, "...it is Gunn whose reputation has worn least well." With all three dead, the distinction between the reputations of the first two and the third is pronounced. There is no biography for Gunn, and his books seem out of stock, yet "The Man with the Night Sweats", published in 1992 was, along with "Angels in America" and the movie "And the Band Played On" one of the earliest key pieces about the AIDS epidemic. Here we have a writer who, dying in 2004, was still writing valid work half a century after he'd burst onto the scene with the undergraduate work of "Fighting Terms", yet less than a decade after his death he seems to be unread or unvalued. It's time I think for a reappraisal, for of the three poets mentioned, he may well not have had the greater gift than Larkin but he certainly had a greater range, and the emotional hole at the centre of much of Hughes' work (until "Birthday Letters" at least) is not an accusation that you can level at Gunn, though like both these poets he was meticulous in keeping a distance between the self and the poem.
Reading various bits of critical analysis it appears that Gunn did the unforgivable sin of British writers, by moving to America early, and then staying there. Its an interesting variation on the cultural cringe. We accept Eliot, Pound, Plath as American writers who have become British and enhanced our poetry; yet when Auden or Gunn or Spender goes the other way, the critical consensus is that their work is less important. Yet how can this be? The second half of the century was determinedly American. Moreover, whereas as other British poets either embraced the lessons of Eliot and Pound (Sweeney, Bunting, Raworth) or created their own limited acceptance of free verse forms (Heaney, Hughes, Raine) fed through their own personal mythos, Gunn only slowly moved away from the metrics that he'd discovered in the Elizabethans, and which rung in his own head. Going to America, didn't make him American, at least not immediately.
That Gunn felt happier personally in America, I don't think there's any doubt, he went not just for love (his partner was American) but also security - being gay in the UK in the the 1950s wasn't easy. Yet also here was a young, vibrant writer who could embrace all America had to offer - seeing in the Beats a kindred spirit even if his own poetry was far more formal and had a muscularity (or stiffness, depending on taste) that there's often lacked. A biography of Gunn would be useful in many ways, but not least to understand how the various tribes of poets interacted during those three decades of change, the 50s, 60s and 70s. I feel there's a partial picture - New York Poets, travelling Beats, Ginsberg at the Poetry International, St. Mark's Poetry Project etc. How does Gunn, an out gay man, an academic, a careful writer and a careful reader who would later choose an exemplary selection of Pound for Faber, despite them being so very different as writers, fit into this world?
I go back to the poems. The Collected goes up to and includes "The Man With the Night Sweats." more judicious selection chosen by August Kleinzhaler shows no falling off a quality. It seems right to start with that late work.
"I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet"
There's the formal structure, the light rhymes, yet Gunn never seems stymied by form, it's always malleable in his hands, the rhymes are under emphasised. In just a few words he sets up the short poem brilliantly, the narrating "I" both in the past and the presence - the present reality of waking up cold contrasted with a vivid life, and the plague of AIDS is put to bed in just a few sharp phrases, for few diseases attack the body quite so visibly as AIDS, with the breaking down of the immune system leading to diseases such as cat flu, and sarcomas that would be highly unusual in young men. This is recent history, and Gunn was one of the earliest writers to address the plague from seeing so many men he knew succumb to it. Here as well, Gunn's methods serve him well, I think, for in many ways his poetry echoes pre-19th century forms and writers - and a medieval disaster such as the AIDS epidemic requires a slightly wearier form.
"As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off."
The final two lines are almost Biblical, but are also direct and powerful. Its an important poem that is the start of this sequence of poems, an In Memoriam, not just for one man, but for a generation. Here he has learnt from his American counterparts, for these intimate poems are also public poems, these are the "best minds" of Gunn's generation, and they are suffering.
"Qualities in his verse which once seemed to exist in an asethetic vacuum now serve an urgent purpose," writes Alvarez in the New Yorker in 1994, "...the restraint has something difficult to restrain - pity (for his friends), fear for himself."
So is this the case and if so how did we get here? His first collection "Fighting Terms" was the only one written whilst he lived in Britain. They are dynamic, purposeful poems but it is his second collect "The Sense of Movement" written whilst on a Creative writing scholarship in America, where he comes into his own. The opener, "On the Move" (aka "Man, you gotta go") is an observational nature poem about biker gangs. He manages to evoke a spectacle with its dust, its smell and its noise, whilst remaining a distance. This is a poem about Hells Angels that begins with "The blue jay scuffling in the bushes..."
Then:
"On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt - by hiding it, robust -
And almost hear a a meaning in their noise."
This is written in the late 1950s. Gunn is 30. "Blackboard Jungle" "Heartbreak Hotel" and "On the Waterfront" have assailed British and American youth; "On the Road" and "Howl" have only recently been published. Or look it another way: the bestselling records in Britain in 1958 are by the Everly Brothers and Connie Francis, Larkin is writing "the Whitsun Weddings" and John Masefield is poet laureate. What a strange world to land these poems in. Several years before Larkin mentions, sardonically, the Beatles, there is a poem called "Elvis Presley."
Each book after "The Sense of a Movement" gives a slightly different Gunn, progressing, but loosening only so far. By "Moly" he is talking about LSD trips in poems like "At the Centre," "What is this steady pouring that/Oh, wonder/ The blue line bleeds and on the gold one draws..." and going to see Jefferson Airplane at the Golden Gate Bridge ("The music comes and goes on the wind/ Comes and goes on the brain." Maybe, we think, Gunn is the wrong poet to be writing about this, though it's his experience. After all, its not quite as strong as "Remember what the doormouse said;"Feed YOUR HEAD..." Poetry was beginning to find a way to write this way.
He seems to have continued to write at a similar pace throughout his life - "Jack Straw's Castle" is something of an attempt to create a mythos that is part-British, part-American. Jack Straw as remembered leader in the Peasant's revolt, as English pub name, as Grateful Dead song, and as the phrase more common to Americans, "man of straw." He would release only two collections in between 1971's "Moly" and 1992's "The Man with the Night Sweats" so may well have been both absent and somewhat forgotten. He was more than likely living his life, in what was a very new age for a gay man. In the Paris Review interview he explains that "I live with some other men in a house in San Francisco. Somebody once said, Oh, you’ve got a gay commune. I said, No, it’s a queer household!—which I think was a satisfactory answer. Right now there’s only three of us there. There were five—one of them left and one of them died of AIDS. But we really fit in well together. We really do work as a family; we cook in turn, stuff like that." It was that different life that fed the heartbreak of "The Man with the Night Sweats."
I brought up Gunn in a discussion at my North West Poets meeting, and perhaps for the first time at these meetings, there was some dissension about a poet's worth, though I hopefully encouraged people to read him again. I think what it is is that the prevailing "I am" of late 20th century verse is still there in the system of people's reading and we can't yet read the period historically. I think in 50 years it might seem less puzzling that a writer born in the late 1920s, harked back to early forms, wrote formally, used rhyme, and yet could find time for both the tutorship of the anti-modernist Yvor Winters and the beat poet Alan Ginsberg. For, in Britain at least, there has been a reluctance to go down a purely modernist route - so that we can have well-loved rhymers like Wendy Cope; and formal free versers like Heaney or Armitage; yet Gunn - in his forties at the time of his LSD experimentation with "Moly" - was somewhat out of time, his own poetic structures struggling a little with the freedom of the times, even though his approach was certainly a valid one. Larkin had virtually given up writing verse, (and would certainly have disdained LSD, Jefferson Airplane and the bath houses of San Francisco as he disdained everything else about the modern world), whilst Hughes was at the height of a personal mythos that created the bleak misanthropic "Crow" before reversing into the underwhelming poetry of his Laureate years, before the final triumph of "Birthday Letters."
Though accepting that Gunn's work is not always as strong as my favourite poems, overall he seems to be a more than minor poet, with a consistency of method and content across several decades that - as if often the case - was both in and out of fashion. Michael Schmidt, in his "Lives of the Poets" quoting Gunn's Winters poem talks about how "Rule or Energy Gunn later recasts as definition and flow. Rule provides a structure or system in or through which the enegy can flow...you can't have one without the other."
And it is this, I think, which makes Gunn a poet worthy of rediscovering for a contemporary poet, because he was both a poet of the Movement, and distant from it; both British and American; liberated (in both his love life and poetry) and restrained (ditto). In negotiating the need to find an individual voice we also have to be willing to learn from extant models. Easy to do bad Heaney or bad Pound, less easy to identify the models from the 20th century and earlier which can help that individual voice.
Gunn was an important and well-regarded figure for much of his life time, but if someone with a Faber collected running to hundreds of pages can be seen as "neglected" he does seem to be, a little. I can also see why, in some ways, as his particular style doesn't fit with prevailing winds. The late twentieth century has so often been defined by decades and styles, rather than a continuum. Generational change was measured in half-decades rather than longer; yet I think that may have changed now - we are longer-lived, we are global. The transmission mechanisms (whether for infectious diseases like HIV or for ideas) are much quicker in a global world - but that also, paradoxically limits this idea of "generational change" for everything is here at once - sometimes in the same city. The idea of a "poetry of a decade" - Spender/Auden/Macniece in the thirties, the Movement poets in the fifties - seems a little redundant in careers that span forty years, and where the reception of, say, a Heaney collection, hasn't changed much in that time. Gunn was a fifties poet that didn't fit in even then, and his best work may have been scattered over four decades or more, culminating with that 1992 collection. Seen from this perspective we have to look at poets outside of their times, outside of their movements, as historical figures now, rather than memories. In this sense he stands up; the lineage with much older poetries seems clearer; and the possible connections with future poets and poetry - though never certain - is at least plausible.
Was he a public poet, like the Elizabethan's he admired, reporting on a scene like in "On the Move" or a personal poet post-Lowell, describing his own feelings? Both and neither of course - for "On the Move" has, to my mind a distilled energy - not the deep immersion of "the New Journalism", whilst the poems in "Man with the Night Sweats" is the better for its forensic nature. In the notes at the end of the collected Gunn gives the names of the men whom these poems are about. It is "for my record if for no-one else's because they were not famous people." Such fastidiousness is at one with his writing, and I feel we are the better for it.
I'd suggest you read the Paris Review interview here.
You can read some of his work here
And August Kleinzahler's Selected is a cheap and well chosen collection, with a useful introduction here which includes poetry that appeared after the "Collected Poems".
Reading various bits of critical analysis it appears that Gunn did the unforgivable sin of British writers, by moving to America early, and then staying there. Its an interesting variation on the cultural cringe. We accept Eliot, Pound, Plath as American writers who have become British and enhanced our poetry; yet when Auden or Gunn or Spender goes the other way, the critical consensus is that their work is less important. Yet how can this be? The second half of the century was determinedly American. Moreover, whereas as other British poets either embraced the lessons of Eliot and Pound (Sweeney, Bunting, Raworth) or created their own limited acceptance of free verse forms (Heaney, Hughes, Raine) fed through their own personal mythos, Gunn only slowly moved away from the metrics that he'd discovered in the Elizabethans, and which rung in his own head. Going to America, didn't make him American, at least not immediately.
"I admired a lot of American poetry in free verse, but I
couldn’t write free verse. The free verse I tried to write was chopped-up
prose, and I could see that was no good. Then I thought of ways in which I
could learn how to write in something that was not metrical, that did not have
the tune of meter going through it. Once you’ve got the tune in your head it’s
very difficult to get it out," he told the Paris Review in 1994.
That Gunn felt happier personally in America, I don't think there's any doubt, he went not just for love (his partner was American) but also security - being gay in the UK in the the 1950s wasn't easy. Yet also here was a young, vibrant writer who could embrace all America had to offer - seeing in the Beats a kindred spirit even if his own poetry was far more formal and had a muscularity (or stiffness, depending on taste) that there's often lacked. A biography of Gunn would be useful in many ways, but not least to understand how the various tribes of poets interacted during those three decades of change, the 50s, 60s and 70s. I feel there's a partial picture - New York Poets, travelling Beats, Ginsberg at the Poetry International, St. Mark's Poetry Project etc. How does Gunn, an out gay man, an academic, a careful writer and a careful reader who would later choose an exemplary selection of Pound for Faber, despite them being so very different as writers, fit into this world?
I go back to the poems. The Collected goes up to and includes "The Man With the Night Sweats." more judicious selection chosen by August Kleinzhaler shows no falling off a quality. It seems right to start with that late work.
"I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet"
There's the formal structure, the light rhymes, yet Gunn never seems stymied by form, it's always malleable in his hands, the rhymes are under emphasised. In just a few words he sets up the short poem brilliantly, the narrating "I" both in the past and the presence - the present reality of waking up cold contrasted with a vivid life, and the plague of AIDS is put to bed in just a few sharp phrases, for few diseases attack the body quite so visibly as AIDS, with the breaking down of the immune system leading to diseases such as cat flu, and sarcomas that would be highly unusual in young men. This is recent history, and Gunn was one of the earliest writers to address the plague from seeing so many men he knew succumb to it. Here as well, Gunn's methods serve him well, I think, for in many ways his poetry echoes pre-19th century forms and writers - and a medieval disaster such as the AIDS epidemic requires a slightly wearier form.
"As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off."
The final two lines are almost Biblical, but are also direct and powerful. Its an important poem that is the start of this sequence of poems, an In Memoriam, not just for one man, but for a generation. Here he has learnt from his American counterparts, for these intimate poems are also public poems, these are the "best minds" of Gunn's generation, and they are suffering.
"Qualities in his verse which once seemed to exist in an asethetic vacuum now serve an urgent purpose," writes Alvarez in the New Yorker in 1994, "...the restraint has something difficult to restrain - pity (for his friends), fear for himself."
So is this the case and if so how did we get here? His first collection "Fighting Terms" was the only one written whilst he lived in Britain. They are dynamic, purposeful poems but it is his second collect "The Sense of Movement" written whilst on a Creative writing scholarship in America, where he comes into his own. The opener, "On the Move" (aka "Man, you gotta go") is an observational nature poem about biker gangs. He manages to evoke a spectacle with its dust, its smell and its noise, whilst remaining a distance. This is a poem about Hells Angels that begins with "The blue jay scuffling in the bushes..."
Then:
"On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt - by hiding it, robust -
And almost hear a a meaning in their noise."
This is written in the late 1950s. Gunn is 30. "Blackboard Jungle" "Heartbreak Hotel" and "On the Waterfront" have assailed British and American youth; "On the Road" and "Howl" have only recently been published. Or look it another way: the bestselling records in Britain in 1958 are by the Everly Brothers and Connie Francis, Larkin is writing "the Whitsun Weddings" and John Masefield is poet laureate. What a strange world to land these poems in. Several years before Larkin mentions, sardonically, the Beatles, there is a poem called "Elvis Presley."
Each book after "The Sense of a Movement" gives a slightly different Gunn, progressing, but loosening only so far. By "Moly" he is talking about LSD trips in poems like "At the Centre," "What is this steady pouring that/Oh, wonder/ The blue line bleeds and on the gold one draws..." and going to see Jefferson Airplane at the Golden Gate Bridge ("The music comes and goes on the wind/ Comes and goes on the brain." Maybe, we think, Gunn is the wrong poet to be writing about this, though it's his experience. After all, its not quite as strong as "Remember what the doormouse said;"Feed YOUR HEAD..." Poetry was beginning to find a way to write this way.
He seems to have continued to write at a similar pace throughout his life - "Jack Straw's Castle" is something of an attempt to create a mythos that is part-British, part-American. Jack Straw as remembered leader in the Peasant's revolt, as English pub name, as Grateful Dead song, and as the phrase more common to Americans, "man of straw." He would release only two collections in between 1971's "Moly" and 1992's "The Man with the Night Sweats" so may well have been both absent and somewhat forgotten. He was more than likely living his life, in what was a very new age for a gay man. In the Paris Review interview he explains that "I live with some other men in a house in San Francisco. Somebody once said, Oh, you’ve got a gay commune. I said, No, it’s a queer household!—which I think was a satisfactory answer. Right now there’s only three of us there. There were five—one of them left and one of them died of AIDS. But we really fit in well together. We really do work as a family; we cook in turn, stuff like that." It was that different life that fed the heartbreak of "The Man with the Night Sweats."
I brought up Gunn in a discussion at my North West Poets meeting, and perhaps for the first time at these meetings, there was some dissension about a poet's worth, though I hopefully encouraged people to read him again. I think what it is is that the prevailing "I am" of late 20th century verse is still there in the system of people's reading and we can't yet read the period historically. I think in 50 years it might seem less puzzling that a writer born in the late 1920s, harked back to early forms, wrote formally, used rhyme, and yet could find time for both the tutorship of the anti-modernist Yvor Winters and the beat poet Alan Ginsberg. For, in Britain at least, there has been a reluctance to go down a purely modernist route - so that we can have well-loved rhymers like Wendy Cope; and formal free versers like Heaney or Armitage; yet Gunn - in his forties at the time of his LSD experimentation with "Moly" - was somewhat out of time, his own poetic structures struggling a little with the freedom of the times, even though his approach was certainly a valid one. Larkin had virtually given up writing verse, (and would certainly have disdained LSD, Jefferson Airplane and the bath houses of San Francisco as he disdained everything else about the modern world), whilst Hughes was at the height of a personal mythos that created the bleak misanthropic "Crow" before reversing into the underwhelming poetry of his Laureate years, before the final triumph of "Birthday Letters."
Though accepting that Gunn's work is not always as strong as my favourite poems, overall he seems to be a more than minor poet, with a consistency of method and content across several decades that - as if often the case - was both in and out of fashion. Michael Schmidt, in his "Lives of the Poets" quoting Gunn's Winters poem talks about how "Rule or Energy Gunn later recasts as definition and flow. Rule provides a structure or system in or through which the enegy can flow...you can't have one without the other."
And it is this, I think, which makes Gunn a poet worthy of rediscovering for a contemporary poet, because he was both a poet of the Movement, and distant from it; both British and American; liberated (in both his love life and poetry) and restrained (ditto). In negotiating the need to find an individual voice we also have to be willing to learn from extant models. Easy to do bad Heaney or bad Pound, less easy to identify the models from the 20th century and earlier which can help that individual voice.
Gunn was an important and well-regarded figure for much of his life time, but if someone with a Faber collected running to hundreds of pages can be seen as "neglected" he does seem to be, a little. I can also see why, in some ways, as his particular style doesn't fit with prevailing winds. The late twentieth century has so often been defined by decades and styles, rather than a continuum. Generational change was measured in half-decades rather than longer; yet I think that may have changed now - we are longer-lived, we are global. The transmission mechanisms (whether for infectious diseases like HIV or for ideas) are much quicker in a global world - but that also, paradoxically limits this idea of "generational change" for everything is here at once - sometimes in the same city. The idea of a "poetry of a decade" - Spender/Auden/Macniece in the thirties, the Movement poets in the fifties - seems a little redundant in careers that span forty years, and where the reception of, say, a Heaney collection, hasn't changed much in that time. Gunn was a fifties poet that didn't fit in even then, and his best work may have been scattered over four decades or more, culminating with that 1992 collection. Seen from this perspective we have to look at poets outside of their times, outside of their movements, as historical figures now, rather than memories. In this sense he stands up; the lineage with much older poetries seems clearer; and the possible connections with future poets and poetry - though never certain - is at least plausible.
Was he a public poet, like the Elizabethan's he admired, reporting on a scene like in "On the Move" or a personal poet post-Lowell, describing his own feelings? Both and neither of course - for "On the Move" has, to my mind a distilled energy - not the deep immersion of "the New Journalism", whilst the poems in "Man with the Night Sweats" is the better for its forensic nature. In the notes at the end of the collected Gunn gives the names of the men whom these poems are about. It is "for my record if for no-one else's because they were not famous people." Such fastidiousness is at one with his writing, and I feel we are the better for it.
I'd suggest you read the Paris Review interview here.
You can read some of his work here
And August Kleinzahler's Selected is a cheap and well chosen collection, with a useful introduction here which includes poetry that appeared after the "Collected Poems".
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