Review: Megan Hunter, The End We Start From

The publicity departments of corporate publishing like to decorate book covers with the Ooohs! and Aahs! of the great and the good, sometimes without much thought about what they say or imply. I drew attention to the dangers in my review of Alex Preston’s In Love and War (reviewed 8 January 2017). Megan Hunter’s book is covered with nine puffs on the outside and twenty four on the inside; among those on the outside, there is this from Hannah Kent (of Burial Rites – reviewed here very favourably on 7 June 2014):

Extraordinary …. I read it in one sitting.

Well, yes, how can one not? This first novel may have been fattened to 128 pages of text and 16 of end materials pages on heavy duty paper, but it is comfortably under 20 000 words long (on page 102, for example, there are just 80 words but I am reckoning an average of 150). The average reader will get through in under two hours, between dinner and bedtime. It is only remarkable to read something at one sitting when it keeps you up past bedtime and even into the small hours. Of course, there are novels which are impossible to read at one sitting, like the one I reviewed yesterday: Jane Eyre is well over 200 000 words long and that is twenty hours plus of reading time.

Nowadays, what with electric light and social media, few people are willing to devote ten or a dozen evenings after work or after the children have gone to bed to read just one novel, but with a book which takes only one evening, I reckon you are in with a better chance. The secret of success is to print the long short story or the novella on thick paper, to give the illusion of substance.

The End We Start From has a stripped-down plot: Woman has Baby (as Private Eye reports when royal babies are born) and at the same time The Great Flood submerges London, forcing mother and baby and car-driving partner to flee north to Scotland. Partner goes missing on the way as civil order breaks down and people start to fight each other lethally for food and accommodation. The Flood subsides, mother and baby return, find partner, and story closes as baby takes his first steps in the brave new post-flood world. I understand it is called cli-fi:  climate fiction but that must be a close call in this case because there is as much here about breast feeding and nappies as about floods.

It is clever and readable with nicely weighed sentences. The author understands that you can leave things to the reader’s imagination since we have all read about flood disasters, about refugees, and about the war of all against all which develops as people struggle for survival. Hunter even dispenses with names for her characters – they just get initials: the baby is Z. You can’t get much more stripped down than that.

Review: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

I read this over a weekend when many of my fellow Ruritanians (and dare I say, most of them female) were transfixed by the wedding of Meghan Markle and Harry Wales(or Mountbatten-Windsor, I'm not sure which is correct). That piece of live costume drama was but one more on-schedule production from the House of Windsor, the latest addition to our Ruritanian cultural world which fills the leisure hours of its subjects with sit coms, rom coms, and costume dramas heavily dependent on out-of-copyright Victorian triple-decker novels, like the one I was reading while others were viewing a marriage made in Hollywood. 

Jane Eyre gives us the phrase Reader, I married him - in my edition, you wait until page 544 to get that.

There must come a time, even in demented Ruritania, and perhaps even within the next hundred years, when all but a few antiquarians tire of nearly all these Victorian novels, at least in their original written form. The accomplished descriptions of nature, the carefully painted human physiognomies, the long set-piece speeches, the heavy stamp of moral rectitude, all of which fatten up the volumes, will cease to charm. The books just go on for so long. People will settle for adaptations which play fast and loose with the originals. The story of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester cut down would do nicely for an overwrought opera, the arias and duets set against a background of a very energetically pumped wind machine. The madwoman in the attic could be filmically Gothed-up to the n^th  degree and still legitimately claim fidelity to the original.

Even now, these triple-deckers are no longer read and studied for literary merits which may in any case often strike one as limited (Jane Eyre does go on and on and on). They are read now for the scope they provide for ideological contestation. You can be of the party of Jane, the party of Mr Rochester, the party of the madwoman in the attic, even I suppose the party of Rosamund Oliver, though not the party of St. John. Indeed, confronted by St. John’s attempts to induce Jane to marry him, there can scarce have been a modern reader who has sat through it without mounting anxiety    (literary merit there) and a desire to shout for the whole valley to hear Tell him to fuck off! (and there). What Victorian readers exclaimed, I have no idea, but clearly many felt the same way. That is part of the novel’s achievement, though it would be hard not to be persuaded against a St. John who is capable of saying things like this, "As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will be to me invaluable" ( p 488). But when St John goes off from her rejection saying "that he had nothing to forgive" (p 495), Jane comes out with a startling sentence, "I would much rather he had knocked me down" (p 495) which  jumps out from the page to close a chapter.

Nowadays, you are already free to read the novel as anachronistically as you like; no one is going to stop you annexing it to some favoured cause though most of them will be marked Feminist and given good grades accordingly. However, the essay by Elaine Showalter which closes the edition I have read is really very weak; it is not so much a structured piece of criticism, feminist or otherwise, as a rather random (and even desperate) assembly of remarks pointing off in wildly different directions. Most notably, it does not engage with the core of what the book is “about”: the development of the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester in which both change and develop so that Jane becomes less priggish and prudish (at the end, she is even the coquette sitting on Rochester’s lap, teasing him) and a chastened  Rochester sheds the vanity of seeking to refashion Jane outwardly into a bejewelled vision fit for a sultan’s eye.

Review: John le Carre, The Looking Glass War

This novel was first published in 1965 and the publishers call it “The Fourth George Smiley Novel” though Smiley is really rather peripheral. What is central is an extended tale of bureaucratic bungling, of rigid incompetence, of naivety and self-satisfaction. Except for Avery, who is given le Carré’s own 1965 age of thirty-four, the main characters are older men who have lived through the war, reckon themselves to have had a good war, and do not think they have anything new to learn. It’s still toe-curling to read le Carré’s acid depictions of what they get up to. 

At the centre of it at all, there is Military Intelligence’s project to put an Agent over the border into East Germany to check for a suspected (on very little evidence) missile base and to report back to temporary Base camp over the border in West Germany using a heavyweight crystal radio and morse code. Throughout the novel, if something can go wrong, it goes wrong. A courier and the inserted Agent are both killed.

So the author gets us into a state where we go on reading in a state of horrified incredulity. His characters, for example, think themselves quite above keeping a secret, to be shared only on a need-to-know basis. They are animated by the spirit of a gossip shop; a brothel would exercise more discretion. I was reminded of a story I was once told (by Robert Silman around 1970) of self-assured surgeons who regarded themselves as so much above the ordinary run of mortals that they felt free not to wear surgical masks when working at the operating table.

The novel is dated in an interesting way. I imagined the manuscript given to a present-day London editor. They would either reject it outright or there would be angry Microsoft notes in red all the way through. The novel runs on national, racial, gender, class, you-name-it, stereotypes which all add up to a dreadful picture of Political Incorrectness. A modern editor would hold their nose and turn the whole thing Bland. It would create a very interesting contrast. Le Carré, an angry young man if ever there was, does not mince words and that is the passion of the book; as a politically correct novel, it would have no life to it.

Review: Neil Badmington, The Afterlives of Roland Barthes

Advice to writers:

1.      If you want to be remembered for the works you have signed off on – the works which have been printed – then make damn sure to burn all your drafts, notebooks, lecture notes, correspondence, shopping lists. That way, readers have no choice about what to read - and nor do the professors.

2.      If you want to be remembered for your work, and think you are in with a chance of being remembered, then make sure you file all your drafts, notebooks, lecture notes, correspondence, shopping lists. It will guarantee you at least academic attention for even those who claim to be against biographical approaches believe that the unpublished stuff will prove (richly) inter-textual with your printed words.

Roland Barthes died at sixty five after a traffic accident so you could say he didn’t live to decide between the two options. Though he once said that he only wrote to order (Je n’écris que sur commande – I am afraid that is from memory; I can’t give the source), it seems that was very untrue. He wrote all the time and he left behind a great deal of unpublished handwriting, much of it since published. Neil Badmington examines and deploys some of it in this interesting and readable book.

In the opening two chapters, he makes out a good and probing case for the inter-textuality between the mourning diary which Barthes kept for two years after the death of his mother in 1977 and published with some controversy in 2009, and his signed-off for publication book on photography La Chambre Claire, written in the same period. Theorising about photography goes hand in hand with finding ways to both put away and memorialise his mother.

I am more doubtful about the third chapter which criticises the usual suspects: the biographical fallacy (“biographers write the obituary of textuality” p 76), the illusion that the signifier can be a transparent vehicle for expression (“The signifier has no magic, no future, if it has a signified which is guaranteed by an individual” p 76), and so on. But there are paradoxes lurking here. If the author is dead, if writing is the destruction of every origin, then why is it important to assemble into one category all and only the words penned by one individual, Roland Barthes? Surely, that just is a biographical principle of classification. Likewise, why are both structuralists and post-structuralists, modernists and post-modernists, so keen that a novel should be written by just one person? Why do jointly authored novels just not cut it? 

In relation to painting, a related question would be this: Why are we so troubled by the idea of the perfect forgery? If only ‘text’ matters, then the fact that something is a forgery does not matter at all. In relation to film, why do we classify and write about them by their directors, even if we say we no longer believe in auteurism?

Roland Barthes was a very close reader of texts, very obviously so in his S/Z which Badmington invokes in his last chapter reading of Alfred Hitchock’s film Under Capricorn. But there is a paradox, or at least a puzzle, here too. I think it was Roger Scruton who said that S/Z reads like a very traditional explication de texte. It is not a new idea that a text may suggest more than it seems to state, or even alternatives to what it states, that it may in this way be more open than critical attempts to close it assume. There are various ways of theorising this, including most simply the psychoanalytic way which tells us that the unconscious finds its way unbeknown to us into what we write. Other ways point to our unavoidable dependence on signifiers which have histories and structural ramifications vaster than we can ever take account of. And so on. Sometimes we let a line stand in a text precisely because we do not know quite what it means, but it sounds (or looks) good. And our readers may agree and the game commences.

Barthes appreciated such ways of thinking not least because there was a part of him which had hankered after system and science and even closure – as is obvious in such works as Elements of Semiology, the long essay on classical rhetoric, the abortive doctorate on the fashion system, and so on. But he couldn’t complete the systems to his satisfaction(and saw that the whole project was maybe misguided) and he could not resist a digression. When he gave a seminar, he didn’t use standard lecture notes; he used small cards (fiches) which had the advantage that he could always pause between cards and digress or invite a question and either way, ensure that no one was bored.

*

As a Leverhulme European student, the reviewer attended Roland Barthes’ 1971-72 seminars at L’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. His most recent work which involves reference to Barthes is Prose Improvements (2017). 

Fake Words: Problems of Transliteration from Russian and Ukrainian

The late Fred Halliday – a Professor who once warned the London School of Economics against entangling itself with the Gaddafi regime – thought that the role of diasporas in the politics of their homelands is always negative. The idea is expressed in a posthumous collection of his essays, Political Journeys (Saqi 2011). Diasporas, especially moneyed ones, adopt a proprietorial attitude towards a homeland to which they have little or no intention of returning, whether the land is Armenia, Ireland or Israel. Diaspora organisations use their influence to support hardline positions against local politicians when those are inevitably tempted to pragmatic adjustments aimed at making peace with neighbours who, in the diaspora view of things, are supposed to remain enemies forever.

When it comes to soft power, to culture rather than guns, diasporas unite around traditionalist, conservative positions. Culture is something to be upheld and to remain the same, brought out for high days and holidays but otherwise preserved in a well-funded museum. Living cultures, of course, change all the time and those who inhabit them are lax about the boundaries between their own and those of their supposed enemies.

In Ukraine, for example, inhabitants are frequently polled and asked to identify themselves as either Ukrainian or Russian speakers and willingly do so. However, those who thus identify themselves are very often found mixing the two supposedly distinct languages, with or without awareness of what they are doing. This may well be true for a majority of the population, though those who are formally classified as speakers of a mixed language, labelled Surzhyk, are counted at between 10 and 20 % of the population. I think there is little doubt that is an under-estimate.

Left to their own devices, most speakers gravitate towards mixing and that is something language purists cannot tolerate. In France, the Academie Française fights an unending rearguard action against it.

In relation to Ukrainian, diasporas, notably in the USA, are on permanent alert to ensure that in writing about Ukraine, English language authors transliterate from good Ukrainian versions of words rather than equivalent but bad Russian ones. Thus it is that we have come to write about Kyiv not Kiev. If you don’t want to annoy your Ukrainian friends, but want to keep life simple, you can get by with a very simple App which converts the G in your translation to H and O to I, and so on. So Kharkov (a transliteration from the Russian version of the city name) becomes Kharkiv and the place name ending which indicates a town goes from –gorod to –horod. The list isn’t that long. 

The trouble with this way of trying to keep your friends happy is that you may end up using words which are not simply anachronistic but, worse, may never have been used by anyone until linguistic ideologues armed with their App inserted them into the pages of Wikipedia and other online sources. An ideologue and still less an App does not recognise that the road to error is paved with the mechanical application of things which may be good enough for everyday rules of thumb but not for more serious calculation.

Early on in her book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine (2017), Anne Applebaum mentions the well-known fact that “John Hughes, a Welshman, founded the city now known as Donetsk”, about the spelling of which there seems to be no argument, and goes on to say that it was “originally called ‘Yuzivka’ in  his honour” (p 9).

Oh no, it wasn’t! Hughes had been invited to the Donbass [Ukrainian Donbas] by Russia’s Tsarist government in 1869. It was no modest undertaking that was projected: Hughes formed an English company to raise three hundred thousand pounds for the construction of an iron smelter, a rail-producing plant, the development of coal mines, and the building of a long branch railway line to connect to the main Russian network. All this is documented in fascinating detail in Theodore H. Friedgut’s two volume work, published in 1989 and 1994 by Princeton University Press, under the title Iuzovka and Revolution, transliterating from the Russian Юзовка the name of this company town named after its founder. The Iu  at the front can be replaced by Yu to avoid the un-English feel of the former, but what tells us that this is a Russian word is the O in both the Russian original and the English transliteration.

Iuzovka or Yuzovka was briefly called Trotsk [after Trotsky] in 1923 though even now that’s hard to document, was officially renamed Stalino in 1924, and converted to Donetsk in 1961. I don’t think anyone ever called it Yuzivka. Yuzivka is an invention. It’s a fake word and to use it anachronistically is to allow a historical falsification. But when I googled Yuzivka I got 17 500 results, slightly ahead of Yuzovka, well ahead of Iuzovka. The ideologues have been very busy. It’s rather as if Flemish nationalists had gone through the Internet converting all occurrences of the very old French-speaking city name Liége into Luik which is what road signs in Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium now call it, sometimes to the confusion of naïve foreign motorists (they confused me first time I tried to drive there).

In a historical work to use Iuzovka / Yuzovka does  not suppress the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian identity; it reflects the fact that in the period of its existence until its name was changed, Iuzovka / Yuzovka was an overwhelmingly Russian town, planted in the Donbass by the Imperial government and built and managed by foreigners, of whom there were many. Hughes himself died in St Petersburg in 1889, but he was only there because he was negotiating deals for the Iuzovka plant.

Only by acknowledging that they did things differently in the past, even named differently, can one then go on to consider how the inhabitants of Iuzovka related to the surrounding and undoubtedly Ukrainian countryside. Friedgut is blunt:

“The nearby Ukrainian peasants were not on the best of terms with the mining settlements and viewed them as foreign both ethically and ethnically…. The relatively few Ukrainians employed in the mines and metallurgy works were also embroiled in ethnic tensions despite their acculturation to the dominant Russian milieu of the region” (volume 1, page 208)

“The separation of Russians and Ukrainians remained throughout the entire period [1869-1924]. Until the Soviet regime brought him by force majeure, the Ukrainian peasant was least inclined to enter the mines or factories as a hired worker, and first to leave it in time of crisis. His ties to his village were strong and directly at hand.  The Donbass thus remained within the Ukraine but not of it” (vol 1, page 331)

There was never a Ukrainian Yuzivka, only a Russian Iuzovka, and that is one reason why we have a problem still today, not only with names but with the guns of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Review: Sara Baume A Line Made By Walking

This is very good. There is really no plot, but right through I wanted to keep reading. It’s true that I did not read it as a novel but rather as an autobiography recollected – that is, crafted – in tranquillity. There is an enormous amount of skilful, talented crafting here. There is also a lot going on and any summary will be partial: a young woman holed up in her late grandmother’s isolated bungalow going through a nervous breakdown or, at least, a long episode of serious depression which makes isolation less of a challenge than human contact, less of a challenge than human intercourse. There is no sex and that is very striking and when it is alluded to, it appears only in the context of violence or the threat of violence: being followed, being stalked, being attacked. There is some use of alcohol to escape and consistent use of the natural world both as a thing to think the depression and sometimes overcome it. An obvious compare & contrast book to read beside this one would be Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (reviewed here on 19 September 2016  ).

The author makes use of two devices which are played off against the main narrative. Frankie (the narrator) photographs animals dead in the garden or at the roadside and each of the ten chapters is titled for the dead animal whose photograph appears somewhere in the chapter pages: Robin, Rabbit, Rat, Mouse, Rook, Fox, Frog, Hare, Hedgehog, Badger - the usual cast of roadside fatalities.  I have my doubts about this. Modern digital printing allows for small grey and white images to be inserted into text (usually as 600 dpi jpg’s), at no extra cost,  rather than separated out onto expensive gloss paper photograph pages. I don’t think these thumbnail snaps work very well, in this book or in others I have looked at, and it may be that Baume’s descriptions would have sufficed – or worked better - without the inevitably disappointing grey-scale photographs themselves. Baume somewhere rightly remarks that making it bigger does not make it art, but in the case of photographs I don’t think you can appreciate them as thumbnails. Miniatures almost certainly do not work as art – that is why museums of miniatures are museums of curiosities rather than museums of art.

Her second device, very impressively deployed, is to find an art work – usually a work of conceptual art – which relates to a theme, a topic she is discussing and to list and thumbnail- describe the work in a separated paragraph which always begins with a formulaic phrase on the pattern of  Works About Killing Animals, I test myself: …

 Some of these works are well-known like Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) or Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967), but most are more obscure. Though Baume at the end of the book (pages 303- 307) urges us to go to the works ourselves, I suspect she has actually and accidentally already illustrated the weakness of conceptual art: that you don’t have to see it, experience it, to respond to it. You just need a description – you just need the Concept which it was designed to illustrate. Conceptual art is basically illustration of an idea, and that is its weakness and banality as art; its realisation (often elaborate and costly, as well as fugitive) is pretty much irrelevant. We can all debate the Concept all night with only a nod to the work which illustrated it. There is really no need for us to confront the work itself, if indeed it exists to be confronted anywhere. Frankie/Baume effectively says as much herself:

Works about Time, I test myself: Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. A 24-hour film, a collage of extracts… Each extract represents a minute of the day .. I have never seen it for real. Right the way through from beginning to end. I don’t imagine many people have. Nevertheless, I love this piece. I love the idea. (p 181)

Actually, you don’t love the piece if you haven’t seen it. And it would almost certainly be a waste of your time to watch it. When back in 1997 London’s Tate Gallery screened Gillian Wearing’s Sixty Minutes it would have caused a log-jam in the gallery if visitors had paused for sixty minutes to watch it. The gallery correctly assumed that everyone would give it at most a few minutes, to get the general idea, and then move on. I only had to sit cross-legged on the floor (no seats provided) for 17 minutes to outlast any other visitor in that period by at least ten minutes. What would we say about a commercial cinema film which could not hold its audience for more than a few minutes at most after which they would all leave because they had got the general idea?

Put differently, Baume could simply have made up the majority of pieces to which she refers, and in a work of fiction, who could object to that?  There would have been no loss of idea.

Review: Kelley Swain, The Naked Muse

This is a readable, gently written and gently paced book which spins off reflections on painting and (briefly) photography from the writer’s own experience of working as a life model. That experience is reflected upon in more depth and from more angles than I would have imagined possible and strikes me as a considerable achievement.

The author does have to navigate a particular context which I suspect imposes some restraints on the narrative. She is still young (born 1985) with a world of family, friends, boyfriends and an ex-husband. She wants to write about  life modelling experiences in identifiable environments – one assignment sees her employed for a month long course in Bruges and the narrative around this is central to the book. I think that this inflects the narrative towards modesty and positive assessments. 

We get something on the erotic charge in art but not much about erotica and its relation to the over-arching genre of art and we get a rather awkward passage (pages 58 – 61) about submissiveness and restraint. The problems arise from having chosen straight autobiographical narrative and would be eased by moving towards fiction or towards hard-edged social science. But then we would not have the book we have here.

I noticed a couple of proofing slips; “Holland and the Netherlands” (page 48) should read “Belgium and the Netherlands”.