Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.   

 “OUTCAST – The Extraordinary Life and Death of Etienne Jean Brocher” by Brian Stoddart (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ 35.00)

 

            In 1896, a married couple Mr and Mrs Jones were murdered in Petone in the Hutt, just a little north of Wellington. Stephen Bosher came to their house to collect some goods, but when he knocked on their door there was no reply. He asked a woman he knew, Mrs. Atkinson, to help him wake up the Joneses. She quickly found that there was a back door. Bosher said he had never known there was a back door. She went in, and found the Joneses, dead, their necks slashed by a knife. They alerted the police. The police brought in many officers, searched around the house and raked through the town, apparently incompetently. They could find no trace of anybody who might have been the culprit. When questioned, Bosher was able to explain to the police what he had been doing for the last few days, and his movements when the murder had happened. The police found him credible. Bosher said that he had seen two tramps lingering about the Joneses store the previous night, and he was able to describe them. The police did catch up with the tramps whom Bosher had described, but it was quickly proven that they had not committed any crime. There was a drunken young man, Jim Shore, who had got into a brawl in a local pub, and for a while newspapers suggested that he could have committed the crime. But then a better policeman got to work, a real detective, Peter Pender, who was able to gradually pull apart Bosher’s narrative. It became more and more probable that it was Bosher himself who had committed murder; and as his life was made known, Bosher was not whom he seemed to be. French born, he was Etienne Jean Brocher.

            All this we learn in the first part of Brian Stoddart’s non-fiction story Outcast. Does that mean that Stoddart has simply given us the story of a murder? Not a bit of it. Brian Stoddart’s aim is to tell us the whole story of Etienne Jean Brocher’s life. He does so by scrupulously using police files, newspaper reports, what was said at the bench and in trial, and accounts of the many crimes Brocher had committed.

            Born in 1857 in France on a border with Switzerland, Etienne Jean Brocher came to New Zealand as a teenager. He worked as a labourer in the South Island. His first [petty] crime was theft, for which he was fined. He did time in the Lyttelton  jail. Moving to the French settlement in Akaroa, he married Josephine Libeau, got on well with the people of Akaroa, and was almost seen as a model settler. But he found it hard to find work. He tried to be a photographer, but he got few appointments. So he abandoned his wife and child, left all his debts behind him, and headed for Sydney. Later he went back to France. He was to tell tall-stories about his life in France, but the fact was he committed crimes in France and [according to what was then French law] he had not done his Military Service… So, as a known criminal, he was put in the army, but in the toughest battalion in Algeria, the Bat.F. [French Battalion], known to be made of thugs and criminals. In comparison, the rough men in the French Foreign Legion were gentlemen. When he’d done his time [five years], he made it back to Akaroa. He lied about working on a ship which had run aground, and had taken all his assets with it. He claimed [untruthfully] that he had been wounded in the riots in Paris just after the Franco-Prussian War; but he said this because he had been involved in a criminal enterprise and he had been slightly hurt. He moved up north to Wellington and in 1892 he married Mary Ann Reece, without noting that he was officially already married. The record called him John Nathan Stephen Bosher. He joined the Salvation Army and, surprisingly, he proved to have great skill in playing instruments in their band… but he had hardly enough money to feed his wife and child.

            Now suspected as a murderer, the police ramped up their examination of Bosher’s house and they kept finding many incongruous things… and all this time Jim Shore, brawler  and drunkard, was still locked up in jail. The police were able to bring Bosher’s first wife, Josephine Libeau, up from Akaroa, who showed that Bosher was a bigamist. So Bosher was on the way to face a trial for bigamy and possibly a trial for murder. The bigamy was easily proven. Finally on 11 January 1897 he faced the Magistrate’s Court, which was simply to assess whether there was sufficient evidence to send Bosher to trial. However the magistrate was very biased and little had time for the defence. What many people found odd was that Bosher, even though  he was facing death, throughout the examinations he was neither angry nor aggressive, but was quiet, reposed, and sometimes laughed. Brian Stoddart notes [p.126] “Those behaviours  would surely attract commentary now, because, as a general reading suggests, he might well have suffered from some form of  anti-social personality disorder, as indicated by: a bloated  self-image; a highly developed sense of his own significance; little or no empathy for those he dealt with; constant disregard for the social rights of others; observing social norms only when it suited his purposes; a long-term disregard for the rights and feelings of others and at the expanse of his own condition, needs and demands.”

            And at this point, dear readers, I’m going to annoy you by not giving you all the details that follow. The fact is, Brian Stoddart makes it clear that the moment Etienne Jean Brocher went to trial in the Wellington Supreme Court, he had little chance of being acquitted. The judge was biased against foreigners anyway, and whenever the defence pointed out flaws in the prosecution’s arguments, the judge would draw into question what the defence had said. Stoddart never says that Brocher was innocent, but he also makes it clear that there was no definitive clue or discovery that could really damn him. Still, Brocher went to the gallows and a sadistic hangman. At the most, the outcome was ambiguous.

Brian Stoddart looks closely at the attitudes of New Zealanders in the 1890s with all their prejudices and all the sensationalism of the newspapers. He also examines the very-upper-class who were the judges - and the politicians of the time who often shaped popular views, including their comments on people at trial. And he tells us, in great detail, what happened to all the people who were involved in the case – the wives of Brocher, the police officers, the bench, the hangman,  In effect, Stoddart gives us a panorama of part of New Zealand.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.      

“CLOSE QUARTERS” by William Golding (published in 1989)

 

As the second of part of what was to become a trilogy, Close Quarters has a very different style from Rites of Passage. It is still told in the first-person by Edmond Talbot, but it has almost thrown away any idea of his writing a journal for his aristocratic grandfather. Only at the very end of Close Quarters is the journal mentioned, where there is some talk about having his journal sealed up in a trunk should the ship sink. Given that Golding had taken up a new style, we no longer have all the flourishes of Latin and Greek that pretentious Talbot had used in Rites of Passage. As a result, Close Quarters is far more easily read. Of course there are many terms used that would be alien to most modern readers, but they tend to be terms related to the craft of seamanship and they are explained; and there is some of the badinage that the upper-classes use when they are chattering at dinner, and some of the slang of the sailors. Rites of Passage left Captain Anderson’s ship in the middle of the ocean, less than a third of the way to Australia. Golding [or rather Talbot] hastily wraps up Close Quarters with a “Postscriptum” which more-or-less resolves some of the problems that have arisen, and apologises for not concluding the whole tale. He pompously tells us that he might probably continue his story later.

Anderson’s ship is a very old ship, originally a warship, even though its task now is to take emigrants to Australia. The ship still had gun-ports, cannons, powder and shot. But even by early 19^th  century standards, the ship has many flaws, which become more obvious as the novel continues. Of course (minus the parson Colley) the same characters are the same people as they were in Rites of Passage, although Edmond Talbot is still sometimes haunted by the death of Colley, and later chooses to move into the cabin where Colley used to sleep. There is also the mysterious disappearance of Talbot’s servant Wheeler who seems to have fallen into the sea… until he is later picked up by another ship, after being three days alone in the ocean, and resumes working as Talbot’s servant. There is the ongoing problem of Lieutenant Deverel, who is at odds with Captain Anderson. Deverel not only drinks too much but he was not on watch when he should have been, and did not prevent the crippling of the ship when one of the masts fell apart in a storm. Anderson wanted to clap Deverel in irons.

But the most important thing is the appearance of another ship in the ocean. Mist surrounds them. Could the ship coming towards them be a French warship? There is panic. Some of the passengers become hysterical. The gun-ports are opened. The cannons are readied…. And then it turns out that the ship, the Alcyone, is an English ship bound for India and with the news that Napoleon is defeated, the war with France is over, and the two ships join together to celebrate. But the most important fact – at least where Golding’s story is going – is that in the moments of panic, Edmond Talbot has accidentally smashed his head against a beam in the cramped quarters of the gun-port. He becomes disoriented, weeps sometimes and has many illusions buzzing though his head. When wealthy aristocratic people come aboard from the Alcyone, and there is a celebration and a party on the deck and when the upper-class people have a feast, Talbot finds himself falling in love with a young woman called Marian, also called Miss Chumley, ward of Lord and Lady Somerset. In his mixed illusions, he sees her as his ideal, the perfect young woman, something out of a dream [even though she is a giddy teenager]. He thinks he could marry her. He even says he will jump ship and go to India with her even though she is a giddy teenager. But he is brutally pushed away by her wards. Even when she has gone with the Alcyone, he dreams of her and (here come the flourishes of Latin and Greek) he tries to write classical poems about her… but he is no good at it.

This whole section of the novel is really the heart of the story. Remember that in Rites of Passage, Talbot was the man had no qualms of violently (virtually) raping an eager prostitute. Now his mind is going to the other extreme, idealising a young woman whom he does not really understand or know. This is where Golding is at his best, showing how the mind can be moved and contorted by physical trauma. Golding moves intelligently almost into the field of psychology. Ultimately, Talbot seems to come to his senses when a new officer onboard, Lieutenant Benet, who was swapped from the Alcyone to Anderson’s ship, suggests to Talbot that young Miss Chumley may have seen some unseemly things in Lady Somerset presence. And to make matters worse, it was the raffish Lieutenant Deverel who was the one swapped over to the Alcyone, most likely to chase any young woman available. Talbot’s delusions fade away. He is cured... or at least he seems to be. Nothing romantic here…. But when Talbot is sick, he is still fed opium, a common 19^th  century cure, and this can often make his brain buzz. [And, as we are to see in the following novel Fire Down Below, Talbot is to continue his obsession for Miss Marian Chumley.]

 Lieutenant Benet is of French origin - his father had escaped from the excess of the French Revolution - and Benet is an excellent seaman, also interested in new ideas about navigation and machinery. Benet quickly becomes the favourite of Captain Anderson, to the annoyance of both Talbot and Lieutenant Summers. A true Englishman, Talbot dislikes Benet's writing of poetry and also his knowedge when it comes to savour faire in intimate matters. Talbot suspects he knows more about Miss Chumley than he is saying.

If all this is the most important sequence in the novel, there are other intriguing moments, especially chapters in which some of the officers, and some of the passengers, want to persuade Captain Anderson to change course and call into a harbour for repairs, because the ship often seems unstable and in peril of  falling apart. Much of this fear is partly caused by the possible damage that could be done by the drag-rope, which the sailors haul to clear off seaweed, which seems to be pulling thing off the keel. More vivid though, are the moments [especially in Chapter 13] when the ship rolls and sea-sickness is injuring nearly everybody aboard. Thus we fully understand that 19^th  century voyaging could be very miserable – and frightening. And yes, I forgot to tell you that Wheeler commits suicide with a bunderbuss. Why? Was he afraid of drowning shoud he were to be alone in the ocean once again? 

Footnote 1: Golding often deals with social classes.  It is rampant in the chatter of the upper class among the captains and the aristocrats as they eat their feast in a special dining room. At the very beginning of Close Quarters, there is a discussion Talbot has with Lieutenant Summers, who had risen from the ranks. They both agree, naturally, that only the best people – meaning the upper class -  should be the only ones to rule. One says that he will rise by seeking out a rotten borough. Talbot sees this as reasonable. This was some years before the rotten boroughs were abolished; and of course it was very many years later that the suffrage was expanded. Talbot, at the end of the novel, tells Summers that he is a good friend… even if he had risen from the ranks.

Footnote 2: Once again, Golding gives the title of his novel is a sort of pun as he did with Rites of Passage. Passengers naturally have “close quarters” literally, because they are squeezed  into very small cabins. But in much of the novel, there are two ships joined together at “close quarters”. And there are also the “close quarters” when Talbot tries to woo Miss Chumley.

 

 

 

Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

                                             SO I WENT TO THE MOVIES

            I know that you like me to give my opinions on what is wrong with the world, and what I think of the arts and how people should drive more carefully and the failures of many politicians and problems overseas; and my chief entertainment is reading and writing. But the fact is that, like you, I get much of my entertainment from television or the movies [o.k., picture-theatres or the cinema if you prefer]. So recently, my wife said let’s go to our local bijou picture-theatre and she booked us to see three films in the British and Irish Film Festival. We saw one on Friday early evening, one on Saturday afternoon and one on Sunday night. A very busy weekend.

            So, purely to amuse you, I give you a review of all these the films we saw.

            Friday, Jerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man, a documentary about one of the leaders of Sinn Fein in Northern Island [sometimes mis-called Ulster when part of Ulster is in the Republic of Ireland]. The film puts together interviews he gave over a number of years. He is an old man now and in some ways mellowed. To his credit he does acknowledge that the I.R.A. sometimes committed murder and he does agree that at least some English envoys did attempt to bring peace to this torn territory. But he makes a very strong case about his own republican views. Many newsreels and television documentaries do show the brutality of the British Army as they dealt with what were essentially Catholic ghettos, the fact that the official police in Belfast and elsewhere were always Protestant only, and walls were [and still are in some places] put up to segregate people. Much of this film we watched with horror, as any sane person would. Well worth seeing if ever it comes up again.

Saturday, The Choir, an amusing film written by Alan Bennett. The year is 1916. The First World War is raging in France.  In a northern English town, some soldier boys are coming home maimed and some are about to be sent off. The Mayor and corporation are getting ready for their yearly choir performance. They usually choose something by Handel, but the only conductor they can get [played by Ralph Fiennes] points out that Handel, and any composer they can think of, is German. Mayor and corporation won’t have that. So they decide to perform Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, though some are annoyed that the libretto was written by a Catholic [the Cardinal Henry Newman]… and might I pedantically add that Elgar was also Catholic, but apparently they didn’t know that. Anyway, most of the film is jolly enough with all the problems of getting the choir together, some romantic goings on, some saucy [maybe too much].  Always bear in mind that this is a work of fiction. There is [and was] no town with a name like this one. And I can be grumpy about two major things. One – as the story goes, the choir dress up as wounded and maimed soldiers wrapped in bloody bandages when performing, showing how horrible the war is… and if you believe any such event happened in 1916, you must be off your rocker. Two – in a brief visit, Edward Elgar is presented as a pompous twit, which I regard as a cheap insult. On the whole though, an entertaining film, even if the town looks too idyllic to be true.

And after two watchable films, there came a clanger on Sunday. The theatre was packed – mainly with older women who had probably come to see Emma Thompson – you know, that English woman who can do Shakespeare, can perform genteelly in many English films and even in some comedies. So they came to see Dead of Winter. But that was not what they got. Here was Emma Thompson performing with a broad American accent [or was it meant to be Canadian?] in what turned out to be not only a very violent thriller, with much gunfire and chases in the wilderness and over the ice lake. Implausible enough, but even more so were the many episodes wherein Ms. Thompson gets caught, gets tied up, gets threaten with death… and miraculously is able to free herself and win another day. Toward the end, not only I but other members of the audience started to laugh at what was meant to be a thriller. I couldn’t help seeing it as one of those old-time serials, where the hero turns up at the last moment and saves the day. Real twaddle.

What compensated us, a week or so later, was seeing David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky’s documentary about the artist Caravaggio, which carefully looked at his life and carefully examined nearly all his work. A breath of fresh air, especially in contrast with the largely sensationalist film about Caravaggio made by Derek Jarman some years back.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.     

“BONFIRES ON THE ICE” by Harry Ricketts ( Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25);  “GIVING BIRTH TO MY FATHER” by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00)“DANCING HEART” by Jan Kemp (published by Tranzlit, Germany); “IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD” by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99)  

 

To refer to Harry Ricketts as a seasoned poet is an understatement. So far he has produced eleven collections of poetry plus a book of “Selected Poems”. Regrettably, I have reviewed on this blog-site only a handful of his poetic works, and these reviews were very brief -  his “Just Then”  was, more than anything, jocular and seeded with literary criticism .          “Winter Eyes” , which I saw as showing how older age was coming on but presented by a very urbane wit. And quite apart from his poetry there are the many biographies and other academic works he has published.

Ricketts’s latest work, Bonfires on the Ice, also deals with ageing, with literary references and with wit – very much Ricketts’s style. The title poem “Bonfires on the Ice” is a potpourri of well-known phrases written by earlier poets. The title “Bonfires on the Ice” comes from Rudyard Kipling – not surprising as Ricketts wrote a biography of Kipling.

Unlike many poets, Ricketts presents his poems clearly in different categories. The first section deals with becoming old, loss of friends and dying itself.  Thus he remembers eccentric people in “Aro St. Again”. “Remembering Lauris” appears to be sort of elegy for Lauris Edmond. “Card for Brian” is about an old friend. “He was…” tells us of his great-great uncle who appears to have been a rapscallion. Personally, I am not up enough with 1970s punk music, so I am not sure if Ricketts is for real or has his tongue in cheek when he writes an obituary for “Johnny and the Spasmodics”. “Tangle” moves more soberly into the inevitably of loss. Most important, though, are the last three poems in this section. “Pink Blanket”, ‘Last Day” and “Irregular Villanelle for My Mother”. They are all about the loss of his mother.

The second section, “Down There on a Visit”, is presented in seven pages of couplets. It is a very engaging personal account of visiting the south part of the South Island. I admit to greatly enjoying it, partly because he covers territory which I visited years ago and again more recently. Call it nostalgia on my part. Note too that Ricketts has not given us picture postcards. Admiring the many things he saw, he also suggests the negative things in his journey.

Okay, age, death and travel -  but it is academe that has occupied much of Ricketts’s life. In “The Lecture 3” he says “I’m counting down the lectures / I’ll never give again” and sees how students reacted – sometime negatively. He refers to another poet, Philip Larkin, in “Another Footnote to Larkin” which reads in full “And it’s not just your mum and dad; / lovers, school too, fuck you up. / This is the deal, and Gray might add: / none drinks from Life’s unpoisoned cup. / But if we hand the misery on / from self to others every day, / there’s this to say (Larkin again) we should also be kind while we may.” “Esprit d’escalier” suggests a sort of feud between Ricketts and another academic over how they had interpreted poetry related to the First World War. “The Literary Life 2” examines standard ideas on how to write – or write about poetry and poets. And, again dealing with the type of thing in which an academic would delight, there is “Famous First Words”, where the opening words of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are called to order [and might I add that I was always sceptical about the truth of Tolstoy’s opening words.] Ricketts does deal with the matter of climate change, but in an almost jocular way in “Villanelle for Gaia”. More forceful is “The Song Sings the News of the World”, written for an event with music and chorus. It ends with the chants “the Song sings of the broken lands / the Song sings of the poisoned  sea /  the Song sings of heads in the sand /  the Song sings  of you and me /  the Song dreams of a world of green /  the Song imagines what still might be.” Rousing stuff if you were there.

“The Stella Poems”  are 15 poems about a fictious character, Stella, daughter of a German father, she living in Wellington. In a note, Ricketts says that in some ways Stella is his alter ego. Stella’s family came from Germany. They were immigrants. In some ways  Ricketts too was an immigrant, still being essentially English. The development  of this sequence shows young Stella moving eventually into middle age and older age. It is something like an elegy.

I wallowed in the fifth section of this collection when I came to “A Weakness for Westerns”. Ricketts, when young, had a love-hate attitude towards Westerns. Exactly how I reacted to Westerns when I was a kid. Ricketts seals his love-hate by then writing “B Movie”, in which he gives us his cowboy version of Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” [Memo to Ricketts: I’ve long believed that Browning’s poem is at least as brilliant as T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” so, please, I hope you weren’t knocking the guy.] “The Chemical Life” – apparently referring to the medicine older people have to take – presents an ageing couple who long for the past when it comes to taste. It begins with the words “Each day we practise a kind of magic, / trying to make today resemble / yesterday…” before the speaker sits down and reads a novel by Anthony Trollope – soothing Victorian literature. “Hope” is a little jingle of which Spike Milligan would have been proud. It reads in full thus “Hope is a grey warbler / that whistles down our street, / the tune is thin and sweet, / but always on repeat.”

Finally, with much esprit, Ricketts presents his “The Green Christmas Game”, which is his version  of the medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, except that his 19 stanzas are all limericks.

I’ll make something clear – I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, though I am aware that the tone is often donnish i.e. I am the type of reader who enjoys reading classic literature and I can therefore pick up [probably smugly] all the references to specific poems that Ricketts makes. But this will not be to taste for everyone. 

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            Five years ago Tusiata Avia launched her The Savage-Coloniser Book, a very angry collection of poetry about the evils of European colonisation in the Pacific. There are some angry poems in Giving Birth to My Father too, but not many. Her tone is now very different. Almost the length of a novel, it is about personal things, family, community, her connections with Samoa and above all the importance of her deceased father, Namulau’ulu Mikaio Avia. She says she has spent eight years preparing this book.

The first section of this collection is labelled  “This is how it was supposed to go”.  Her father’s funeral should have been performed the traditional Samoan way for a high chief, with an orator speaking, all rites observed, and his body laid out for three days in his house. But, as the second section says, “This is how it went”. It is not the seemly funeral she had hoped for. In her grief, she calls out what she sees as the near-hypocrisy of some of the mourners who claim to have admired her father, but who simply want to show their own importance. Distant cousins smother her. In anger she says “I see myself a raging Jesus / upturning their usury table, / driving them all out of the temple of my father’s body.” As for giving birth to her father, she sees him leaving where “I think about you in labour that night / birthing yourself out of this world / your pains coming faster and faster”.

Is she perhaps really overwhelmed by her sorrow? She spends much time thinking of the positives and the achievements of her father. There is a real sense of the life of her father in the years when he was a young man, living and working in the South Island, carefully learning the English language and fishing “in the cold waters of the Waimakariri”, as well as looking after his family and being a great musician playing many instruments. There were some tragedies like the death of “my baby brother with the big eyes”, yet the family holds together.

But throughout Giving Birth to My Father there is a sense of being caught between two different cultures. There is the tension of living in New Zealand and then meeting relations in Samoa who have mores which are different from hers. At one point she brashly declares  “being in Samoa is much the same as being dead, when you come back from Samoa you are often someone else”. In the poem “Samoan was my father’s mother tongue” she gives a reminder of how she had to learn the Samoan language fully only when she was a mature adult  - and when her own daughter was learning the language.

Apart from the odd jab, there is little rancour in Giving Birth to My Father. There is an affirmation of father and family, pride in being Samoan, awareness of living in two cultures and the inevitable tragedy of death. It is a very rewarding collection in many ways. 

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            Jan Kemp’s Dancing Heart is sub-titled “New & Selected Poems 1968- 2024”. The poems were selected and edited by Jack Ross. Kemp now lives in Germany with her German husband, a professor. Many of her new poems refer to the European scene and to classic situations..

The first 32 pages are new poems called “Dancing Heart.” In these, there is an acute awareness of becoming older, and some of her first poems in this selection say so. Thus the poem “Forest burial” wherein “We’ll sink before AI / is rife, we’ll have / known human lives. / And human love”.   And in the poem “Shedding” she tells us it is  “Time soon to start shedding” and giving things away. The poem “Crater” begins “A Week ago / on the crater’s edge / I looked down & saw / endless nothingness / & death”. But there is some hope in older age with poems about love and friendship and in one of her best poems “Anima mundi” she salutes the glories of nature where “I have my own cathedral here - / the nave-like path / leads through sunlit trees / where light filters / as through green, stained- glass windows.” Kemp often tries to work out some sort of belief. Could it be love itself? Or could she be trying to work out a sort of home-made religion? At any rate she sometimes quotes the Bible and wonders about it, as she did in some of her earlier collections where Dante often turned up. But she stoutly rejects any particular religion.

Those are the new poems. The rest, taking up most of this volume, are the eight collections Kemp wrote earlier, going back to the 1970s as selected by Jack Ross. These are “Against the Softness of Women” (1971 – 1974); “Diamonds and Gravel” (1975 – 1978) ; “The Other Hemisphere” (1980 – 1990”); “The Sky’s Enormous Jug” (1968 – 1998) ; “Only One Angel” (1991 – 2001) ; “Dante’s Heaven” (1999 – 2005) ; “Voice Tracks” (2002 – 20120); and “Black Ice & the Love Planet” (2012 – 2019” ). Of course there is every so often concern for the status of women, but she is more interested with intimacy, love, various countries, religion, beliefs  and nature. Most important, she has the great merit of writing clearly and without the pretentious vocabulary that plagues many academics or younger poets.

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            Emma Barnes’s “ If We Knew How We Would” warns us in a sort of preface that “this book deals with themes of suicide, grief and depression” and also says “particularly avoid the middle section if you aren’t up to this content.” This is almost a provoking “dare”. Even so, Barnes does indeed deal with important things – especially intimate things. The focus is on the human body and the human creatures that we are. The poem “I am a circle” says “You can see I am one thousand years old in a body made of all the decisions of ancestors and the cold crush of time.” Determinism is there. Throughout, this collection is made of prose poetry, presented in solid blocks of print. And nearly all of the poetry is told in the first person. Is this collection near to being confessional? Maybe. At any rate, much of Barnes’s life seems to be made bare. In a long collection Part One, “In Our Hands”, appears to chronical the break-up of a couple who knew each other contentiously. One poem named “Chain of connected resentment” suggests fearsome love-hate. Part Two, “If We Knew How To We Would”, deals with deep depression and thoughts of suicide. And Part Three, “The Truth” analyses the body itself, with the poem “One metre” telling us “I am just cells layered like lacquer, like resin, like subcutaneous fat.” While often coming near to despair, Barnes buoys us up with unexpected imagery and fast moving one-liners – bracing, even if the subject is often sombre.

Something New

   We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.   

“RITES OF PASSAGE” by William Golding (First published in 1980)

 

 

            When some readers hear of William Golding’s Rites of Passage they immediately think that it is part of a trilogy, as it was followed by Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1998). The second and third novels continue the story of early-19^th-century English people emigrating to Australia. Only when the three were published did Golding say it was a trilogy and only then were the three novels presented together in one fat book called To the Ends of the Earth. Golding, an officer in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, was always interested in the sea and it would seem that novels about the sea were just what he would deal with. But the fact is that Golding didn’t originally mean to write a trilogy.  As he says in the foreword to To the Ends of the Earth, he had no intention of writing two more novels after he had written Rites of Passage. Only later did he consider putting them together as one. So I am here reviewing Rites of Passage, the novel as it originally was. The term “rites of passage” usually refers to going through ageing and problems as one grows up; but the title Rites of Passage has an obvious pun. The passengers have paid their passage and there are literal rites pertaining, in this case, to religion or rather the objection and mockery of religion.

            The novel is written in the first-person by Edmond Talbot, a young man who has aristocratic connections and who is on his way to take up a position in the government in Australia. His narrative is given to us by the journal which he is writing for – he says – to amuse his wealthy godfather. We are soon made alert to the fact that Edmond Talbot is often supercilious or flippant, regards himself as important and is appalled by many of the people who surround him on the ship – not so much as the sailors but as the lower classes. Social class is clearly one of the main points Golding is making in this novel. Yet despite his snobbery, Talbot is always able to present himself politely to his inferiors. He seems a perfect gentleman.  

One of the first things that nauseates Talbot as he boards the ship is the stench and foul quarters which he is given… but it is no worse than where anybody else is bedded. At first Talbot also has to come to terms with severe sea-sickness. This is a novel built on historical reality, not on the romanticism about sailing ships in the 19^th century that often plagues romantic novels with jolly jack-tars, their daring and similar fantasies. The context of those braving the sea are aware of France, the recent French Revolution and occasional skirmishes in the distance…. And some radical ideas have come from France.

In many respects, Rites of Passage is about a “ship of fools” - characters with their own ambitions, deceptions and delusions. Much of the first part of the novel has Talbot meeting people and their oddities. There is, for example, Mr. Prettiman, a rabid atheist who detests religion, his obviously adopted radical ideas, and wants to shoot an albatross to prove that it is superstitious to believe that shooting an albatross will bring bad luck. There is Miss Granham, a stern governess angered by the frivolity of the mess [i.e. where they are fed] and tending to agree with Prettiman. There is a drunkard who sees himself as a great painter and knows a little about medicine, but he is useless when he is needed [the ship has no doctor]. There is a discreetly-run brothel near to Talbot’s quarters… and one of the women available is a fading belle whom Talbot gets to call “Zenobia”; and whom at one point he more-or-less rapes… with her permission. And then of course there are the crew. Talbot gets to know a very junior officer Tommy Taylor, who shows Talbot how the sails are set and other things of which the ship is made. Among other senior officers are Deverel, a very aggressive man in many ways; and Charles Summers, who is painfully aware that he has risen from the lower ranks and who often almost challenges Talbot about his almost-lordly status. Because of his aristocratic status, Talbot is accepted into the senior officers’ mess and later is welcomed into the captain’s quarters.

But the most important characters in the novel are Talbot himself, the ship’s captain, Captain Anderson, and the parson Reverend Robert James Colley. Indeed they take over most of the second half of the novel.

Captain Anderson is repeatedly annoyed by Colley. The parson first violates the rule that only the captain and his officers can come to the bridge, the upmost deck.  Anderson allows Talbot to come onto the bridge because Talbot is an aristocrat… but Colley is a mere parson. In a conversation, Anderson reminds Talbot that the great Captain Cook never had a parson on any of his many long voyages, because they were bad luck; and he himself says that parsons tend to believe they are more important than they are. Anderson bursts with rage when, without permission, Colley comes to the bridge. After some brusque conversation, and much anger, Anderson gives Colley permission to have a short religious service in one of the messes. But clearly Anderson now sees Colley as his enemy. Colley is irritating and endlessly tries to button-hole and talk to the captain.

The Reverend Robert James Colley is an incredibly naïve person. He is awkward, young and immature. He takes it for granted that people would respect him because he wears the right garments that a parson should wear and he believes he has the right to spread the gospel. But most passengers are indifferent and the sailors and crew are outright hostile.

Comes the crisis. Colley is roughly dealt with when there is the traditional “crossing the line” [crossing the equator] ceremony. Colley is made a fool of, ducked under water again and again, dragged around and loudly laughed at by a large audience, sailors and emigrants. He is completely humiliated. Colley later tries to appeal to Captain Anderson. The captain seem to make mildly soothing words, but much worse is to come. Later, a group of sailors grab Colley, force him to down bottle after bottle until he is roaring drunk, and then push him onto the a deck where many people are watching. Colley staggers around, only half dressed, shouting out incoherent things about how he loves everyone and finally he pisses in public. He almost falls over before he is taken to his berth…. where he pines, refuses to come out from his room even though Talbot and a senior officer try to reason with him, is overcome with shame, sleeps, excretes until his bedsheets are foul…and eventually dies. And by this time Talbot’s sense of right and wrong, his consciousness, has grown. He is no longer the haughty young man he was.

But there is a problem, never clearly resolved. Did the captain incite the crew to treat Colley the way they did? And did the sailors not only publicly humiliate Colley, but did they also “misuse” him physically… meaning in effect, buggering him [also known as sodomy], violating his anus.? This is of course feasible because buggery was [and in some places still is] common with sailors world-wide. [If you are annoyed by this comment, please remember it was Winston Churchill who described the old 19^th century navy as “rum, sodomy and lash”.]

At this point in the novel we suddenly have a new narrator. Talbot finds papers that Colley had written – his own journal - and it takes up 50 pages of the text. Colley is writing to his chaste sister back in England. He is amazed by the wonders of nature in the voyage and sees them as the wonders of God. As Talbot reads, we hear Colley’s naivete. He really does not understand how to deal with people. He thinks the best of people who in fact despise him. He believes that Talbot is a good Christian… but we know that this is only because Talbot has been polite to him … and maybe also because Colley assumes that aristocrats and their offspring must be honourable  people. Golding is once again drawing our attention to the power of class.  The epitome of Colley’s naivete comes when he believes that Talbot is going through a crisis of faith like the “enthusiastic” Wesleyans, because he hears Talbot groaning and sighing in the cabin near to his… when Talbot is in fact groaning and sighing because he is having sex with a prostitute.

There has to be an enquiry as a passenger has died. It is held in the officers’ mess, Captain Anderson in charge with Talbot part of the enquiry. One by one, some sailors and some officers are called in to be asked if Colley was killed by rough handling. For a while most of the enquiry is ready to claim that Colley had died of a “fever”… but buggery was mentioned clearly by Captain Anderson after one sailor, who was called in, almost suggested that buggery was involved in the humiliation of Colley. But when questioned, he says that the captain should look to the officers. The implication was obvious … so Anderson promptly rules and writes in his official papers that Colley died of a “fever”. Pragmatism over-rules the truth. The captain reads the given words when Colley is buried-at-sea. Talbot is left to know that injustice has been done, but he does some more thinking. And he hears the jargon of the sailors, as they speak, with laughter, of “giving a chew”. Could it be that drunken Colley had, in his stupor, “chewed” a sailor - in other words, practised fellatio. And as he thinks of Colley, Talbot has learnt that a man can die of shame. In some ways, Talbot has grown up to messy reality. He sits down and writes a letter for Colley’s sister, telling her what a noble and good her brother was. Lies come in many versions, don’t they?

Golding is, once again, dealing with the flaws – or sins - of human beings. In this case, there is the tyranny of class, the injustice of the law, the barbarism of behaviour, and how naivete can be destructive.

All of this is synopsis. But I have some troubles with this novel, even if Golding’s story is a good one. My problem is with the first-person narrative. Golding has scrupulously written the text in Regency language, which means that Talbot writes in a patois that is often alien to most modern readers… and to show what an intelligent man he is, Talbot often throws in the odd Greek or Latin word to show how erudite he is. Further, there is the improbability of what he writes to his grandfather in his journal. Would he really write to his godfather about his sexual events with whores? Maybe he would, after all as he wrote that he would tell his godfather everything. Maybe aristos might have written to each other that way. But the first-person narrative falls apart when Golding has to switch to Colley’s narrative, as if Golding could not create one narrator who had the perception to understand what and how his characters thought. Still, I would at least say that this is an interesting novel, and certainly one that gives us an honest account of what life was like in sailing ships two-hundred years ago – mainly uncomfortable and often sordid.

Footnote:  On my shelves I have a copy of C.K. Stead’s Shelf Life, his collection of some of the reviews he has written over the years. He wrote about William Golding’s Rites of Passage in 2014, which was some years after Golding had won his Nobel Prize. On the whole, Stead was very positive about Rites of Passage, welcoming Golding’s honesty about how life was on ships 200 years ago. But he ended his review by telling us that Golding wasn’t really worthy of a Nobel prize. Chacun a son gout I guess.

Something Thoughful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.     

                                         WHY DO THEY MAKE THEM SO LONG?

Consider the way films were presented to viewers many years ago. First there would be some “shorts”. Then there might be an interval. Then there would be the main feature. The main feature would usually be about one-and-a-half hours long – in other words about 90 minutes.  In those 90 minutes the detective would have solved the mystery; or the comedians would have had the last laugh; or the good guys would have defeated the bad guys in the city or in the Wild West; or tears had been shed before romance triumphed; or Hammer Horror was giving us the creeps in Transylvania; or there were fantasies in outer space; or even, occasionally, there would be earnest films about injustice and righteousness (The Grapes of Wrath, 12 Angry Men etc.). And, if you were lucky, there were foreign films, showing us that the whole world did not revolve round America and England. Bravo those French, Italian, Russian, Japanese  etc. films if you were sophisticated enough to catch them. Having “serials” were strictly for kids, and they had really died out once television had come along. Sure, every so often there would be a long blockbuster film, running to two, three or even more hours – Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, the Russian Ivan the Terrible films and others. But on the whole, feature films remained about 90 minutes long.

But now, films as shown in picture theatres [or, if you prefer, “movie houses” or “the cinema”] are no longer the main medium for entertainment. The picture theatres are still there, though they no longer play “shorts” before the main feature – even though here in New Zealand, we are sometimes tortured by having to watch miles of advertisements before the film begins. And as television has taken over, stories have  become longer and longer. In fact they have often become tediously long.

Item: I genuinely liked most of a recent television series called The Residence, a tongue-in-teeth romp wherein a detective is trying to find out who killed somebody in the White House. All good fun, many interesting eccentric characters  [including the detective] and finally discovering who the murderer was. But here is the problem. The tale was stretched over many episodes… meaning there had to be much padding and repetition, including a whole flashback taking up the detective’s earlier life. To watch the whole thing would take up about seven hours or more.  Years back in movies, a detective film – even a comical one – would have polished off the whole story in about good old 90 minutes.

Now why should this be so? Partly, I suppose, because there are now people who like to “binge” on TV series. Partly because sponsors want to keep watchers on their channel. Partly because its easier to turn on and off a series at your will when you are watching at home. And partly because there is the matter of familiarity. This, I believe, works in situation comedies, where the same comedians turn up like next-door neighbours; but it does not work in anything more serious. Personally, if I want to watch fictitious crime stories on television,  I want to see them resolved in one hour.  I know I will be reminded that ongoing series where written  by the likes of Dickens… but that will lead me into a completely different fugue.  

Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“OBLIGATE CARNIVORE and other stories” by Stephanie Johnson (Published by Quentin Wilson, $NZ35) ;  “THE ELEVENTH HOUR”  ” by Salman Rushdie (Published by Jonathan Cape, London; in New Zealand marketed by Penguin, $NZ38)

 

            Reviewing a collection of short stories is very like reviewing a collection of poetry. Some of the stories [or poems] will be outstanding, some will be amusing, some will be frightening, some will be forgettable and a very few will be profound. Stephanie Johnson has so far published 16 novels  (two of them published under a pseudonym), two works of non-fiction, two collections of poetry and three collections of  short stories. Obligate Carnivore and other stories is her fourth collection of short stories. It contains 27 stories and of course it is impossible for me to give an account of all of them. So first let me state the obvious: Stephanie Johnson’s writing is still in top form. She gives us us a variety of genres, ideas and a well-used wit when it is needed. She can be scathing sometimes, but only when she really has to. In short, she knows what she is doing. I will not attempt to make comments on all the stories in this collection. In fact, while I read with pleasure all of Obligate Carnivore and other stories, I have decided to deal here with only the first half of this collection.

            So here are some things you will find.

There are some tales set in Australia, a country with which Stephanie Johnson is well acquainted.  Set in  Australia are “Blue Zone” which shows wealthy Kiwis and others in Australia showing their complacence about their country and their own crassness. “Is She Where” is a sad story of a man who can’t deal with courtesy.  “Bear” concerns an Aussie academic, getting old and losing the taste for chasing women at academic gatherings

Away from Oz, Johnson often makes use of ambiguity, the best example being “Eruera und Ich” in which we are forced to question the value of a sort-off hippy-ish life. And there is a similar ambiguity in the way she deals with “My Lady’s View, 1972”,  a tale about pot-smoking women when they were younger.

There are sad tales of old age and dying in “Ground Bones” and in “Institutional Memory” which has a foolish old man still trying to be a rake when he’s really past it.

And of course there are the serious things – the profound things in fact. Without giving away all the details, “Paternity” it is a very persuasive tale of “soft” racism which can seep into the minds of people who believe they are upright and honest. “Shell Piano” is a fantasy about Katherine Mansfield attempting to write a full-length novel as tuberculous meningitis gnaws at her. The sad fact is that she never wrote a full novel, and that is the sorrow of it. There is deep irony in “The Sensitive Reader” – suggesting that, in literature, being too sensitive can destroy the colour of writing. Then there is “The New Zealand Experience”, written in the first person, longer than most stories in this collection. It begins as a rollicking  story of two young cocksure men (one Australian, one American) who buy a crappy van and try to explore New Zealand while doping themselves up. All good fun until it turns to something very sinister. Once again, there is much hard irony here, especially when these two travellers make all sorts of flippant and  condescending comments about the country they chose to explore.  And just to put the cream on the cake, let me tell you about the protagonist – the main character as shown on the cover of this book  - the Obligate Carnivore. It is at once funny and horrifying – in fact its outcome is sheer grand guignol, which will appal some readers and make others laugh. Dare I say that I am always on the side of the cat.

And that, I repeat, is only half of this collection.

Foot Note: For the record you can find on this blog reviews of Stephanie Johnson’s novels “The Open World” , “The WritingClass” , “The Writers Festival”  and the non-fiction “West Island”  a very interesting account of New Zealand writers, poets and other artistic people who emigrated to Australia. One of my favourite books.

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Why is Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of stories called The Eleventh Hour?  It is because “the eleventh hour” in our life is when we become aware that life is short. After all, when the twelfth chime strikes, we die. So here there are stories featuring old age. The Eleventh Hour is made of two short stories and three novelle.

A short story called “In the South” opens the book. In the southern part of India, two old men live next door to each other and often quarrel with each other, but only gradually do they understand that they really need each other…or at least one of them does.  Of  course you wouldn’t expect an acerbic writer like Salman Rushdie to present all this as sweetness and light, but it is a realistic image of what old life can be. And concluding the book, there is the short story  “The Old Man in the Piazza”, this time set in Italy. An old man, who enjoys sitting in the piazza, begins to be seen as a sort of wise man who can answer every question and give people advice… not that he himself believes that he is really all that wise. We come to understand that words are very limited things. At least, that is what I think Salman Rushdie was suggesting.

And between these two short stories, there are the three novelle one set in India, one set in England, and one set in America – in other words, the three countries Rushdie knows best.

“The Musician of Kahani”, set in India, is the real highlight of the book – very readable and, in its own ironic way, very funny. India has been decolonised and is no longer part of the British Empire… but some conservative Indians still pine for the older days and still insist on using the Anglo street-names that are now supposed to be defunct. Meena has married an old academic, Raheen. But it takes a long time before they give birth to their one-and-only child, Chandni. Chandni turns out to be a musical prodigy – in childhood she can play perfectly on the piano works by Beethoven, Mozart and all the classics; as well as becoming an expert in playing the Sitar. She becomes a phenomenon. She is known world-wide… and of course people want to exploit her. I will go no further in this synopsis for fear of spoiling the jokes that come. Suffice it to say that a popular sportsman wants to marry Chandni, and the planned wedding allows Rushdie to satirise the crassness of Bollywood-style wedding; and in the character of Raheen he chortles at all the gullible people [academics included] who fall for money-making gurus. And even Chandni’s final revenge in really a great joke. Rushdie is not ridiculing the Indian nation, but like all the real satirists, he is ridiculing what is extreme or foolish.

“Late” is set in England – specifically in the university of Cambridge. It is a ghost story but, as it develops, it is ultimately a very didactic one. A young Indian scholar, Rosa. has been given the task of going through the papers of the late S. M. Arthur, who was best known for a novel he had written set in India. I thought this novella would deal with the clash between the values of a young Indian woman and the values of a deceased old English man. But that is not where it goes. S. M. Arthur appears [as a ghost] to Rosa, and tells of how he had been misused because he was homosexual, not only at Cambridge but when he was working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War… by which time, you will understand that Rushdie has created an amalgam of E. M. Forster and Alan Turing. So the sorrow was that he was never given freedom and honours when homosexuality was still a crime. Only when he was long dead did he get given, late, the honours he deserved. Hence the title “Late”. Okay, all in a good cause, but apart from some amusing tales about snobbery at the college, “Late” is too much like a lecture, but it is an interesting read..

And so to “Oklahoma” which is [obviously] set in the U.S.A. Some Europeans settle in  America. They make themselves erudite and like talking about Kafka and James Joyce and other worthies. The story is supposed written by a man called Mamouli Ajeeb… and there is a manuscript about a man fearing madness… and there is a lost uncle who might have gone to Oklahoma. Dear reader, though there are some interesting flashes in this novella, I think that in this one Rushdie overreaches himself, getting into the land of cryptic.

Footnote: Some comments. I’ve noticed that Salman Rushdie often refers to films he likes and remembers, and this happens in different parts of The Eleventh Hour. I have very mixed feeling about his works. You can’t help admiring a man who was hounded by fanatics who called fatwa on him and set out to murder him.  He had to go in hiding for over a year… and when he was able to come out again, he was almost murdered and knifed, losing one of his eyes. I aways admired his greatest book Midnight’s Children and I still do. But even while reading his memoirs of his time in hiding, Joseph Anton,  I saw an awful lot of egotism in his writing… and in his Fury , he does seem to be settling scores with people.