Something New

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

  “FLESH” by David Szalay [Jonathan Cape publishers; $NZ38:00]

 

            When the Booker Prize is announced, many literate readers rush to the book shops hoping to find a new masterpiece. Sometimes they are rewarded with an outstanding novel, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is still regarded as “the Booker of Bookers”. But let’s be honest. Sometimes the winner is a dud, leaving reviewers scratching their heads. This year, the Booker was won by David Szalay, still a youngish man, born in Canada with a Jewish mother and a Hungarian father, raised in England, went to Oxford and now [says the blurb] lives in Vienna. He has written five previous novels, but now comes Flesh. And, as usual, some reviewers proclaim it as a masterpiece while others think it is appalling. Let me be neutral at first as I dive into the book.

            Running to 349 pages, Flesh begins as a shocker. In Hungary, Istvan is a teenager – all of fifteen. He is seduced by a woman about forty who makes use of him when her husband is not around. She bonks him this way and that way and her over him and him over her and under the bed and over the bed and in positions you’ve never heard of and really kinky stuff. This means that the first thirty pages read like sheer pornography. Dear reader, it is not a novel to give to your nice granny for Christmas.  Anyway, naïve teenager Istvan thinks he has found the love of his life; so he gets a big shock when the woman tells him to get lost as her husband comes back. She has really used him as a sex-toy. Istvan finds it hard to believe. In a scuffle on the stairwell he shoves the husband down the stairs. The husband hits his head and is killed. Istvan, being a juvenile, is not locked up in jail but it sent to a reform school for three years.

So what do we, as readers, immediately understand? That, in Istvan’s mind,  love is less important but sex [i.e. bonking] is necessary, or at least that is the way Istvan sees it. And that being the case, women are mainly there to be used. They are flesh only. I read it, that is why the novel is called Flesh. Men are also to be used to, but only when they can help him get ahead. No softness in the eye of a cynic.

            I will deliberately give you a very brief synopsis only as this long story unravels. Being out of the institute for young offenders, Istvan gets a boring job, tries to get girls, doesn’t really get anywhere, and finally joins the army.

He’s in the army for five years, on N.A.T.O’s peace-keeping missions. He sees a mate getting badly hurt. Along comes a sort of battle fatigue. How does he deal with this? Taking illicit drugs of course, and with his mate chasing available girls [okay – young women, but you know what I mean].  He’s left the army. Where can he find a job? He goes to London and gets a job as a bouncer at a sleazy strip-joint in Soho.

Dead end, right? Nope. Because fortuitously novelists can create events that will keep the protagonist going. Istvan, now a strong and muscular man and capable of fighting, rescues a man who is being beaten up by thugs.

The man – Karl Nyman – happens to be a multimillionaire. Nyman pays professionals to show Istvan how to deal with polite society in London, how to fend off thugs, and in effect how to become Nyman’s body-guard. Nyman also makes Istvan his wife’s chauffeur. She is called Helen. Nyman and Helen have a little son called Thomas.

Behind Nyman’s back, Helen and Istvan begin to have an affair. More bonking and bonking and bonking. And Nyman the tycoon, who can pull strings where money is concerned, becomes racked with cancer. And goes to hospital. And dies. And Helen and Istvan marry and then have a baby called Jacob.

So Istvan is now a wealthy, flashy entrepreneur and property developer, almost top of the crowd. But there is one major snag. Young Thomas, son of Nyman and Helen, is now a pot-smoking, drugs-injecting student at Oxford. He always hated Istvan and he now understands that, according to a trust, all Nyman’s money should really come to him and not be wasted by Istvan and….

Oh stop, stop, stop!!

I have gone as far as I can because, as I have often noted, I do not give away how newly-minted novels end. And I have ignored what nuance and subtlety there is in this novel.

First, I think we are meant to see Istvan as a man who had in part been warped by his adolescent experience. He might have begun thinking he had found something vaguely like love, but his experience soured him, not helped by his further experience in the army. Yet he is not wholly insensitive. He gradually likes his little boy Jacob, although the little boy doesn’t entirely like him.

Second, in the passages where Istvan is making money, being the tycoon, dealing with other property developers in London and going to extravagant parties, David Szalay is clearly showing us the sheer nastiness of the crass upper-classes. Like mere sex, making money has little to do with real love. Yet at the same time, we can understand that Istvan in a way, coming from an impoverished  background, at least tried to climb the greasy pole, tryed to get to the top…. But again, hasn’t David Szalay made it a little too easy to get him to the top, what with the woman [Helen] who neatly puts him in her bed? Contradictions, contradictions.

Flesh is written throughout in the present tense. The language is largely simple. Many pages are written in a series of statements [sentences] rather than in paragraphs. As for Istvan, he has a very limited vocabulary. When he speaks he says little more than “Yeah” and “Okay”. For many, this will make for an easy read. I have found some reviews that see Istvan as a macho man and the epitome of such men. Surely there are such men and Flesh could be read as a kind of documentary.

As I said at the beginning of this review, some people have hailed Flesh as a work of brilliance; and others wonder why this year’s Booker judges bothered with it.

 

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.      

            “THE PAPER MEN” by William Golding ( Published 1987)

William Golding wrote The Paper Men in1987, after he had written Rites of Passage but before he had decided to write two more seafaring novels Close Quarters and Fire Down Below which later were put together as an omnibus called To the Ends of the Earth. The Paper Men is very, very different. Over it looms the idea that "vanity, all is vanity" as the Bible says, and an awareness that only by mental pain and struggle will one understand what the real meaning of life is. Who are the "paper men"? They are writers - novelists, historians, journalists, academics -who hope they will be remembered or win prestige. Golding had already won his Nobel Prize in 1983 when he wrote The Paper Men, and he obviously knew a great deal about how publishers behave, how novelists create characters, and how there were academics who wanted to pick apart his works and perhaps misunderstood what he had written.

Written in the first person, The Paper Men is narrated by Wilfred Barclay, a well- known and admired novelist. Approaching his 60's he is a heavy drinker and a lecher. His marriage is falling apart. His wife Elizabeth has been keeping all his papers and letters in boxes. An annoying American academic, Rick L.Tucker, wants to get hold of Wilfred's papers as he aims to make his name by writing a biography of Wilfred; but Wilfred loathes the idea of somebody writing up his life. Rick goes so far as looking into Wilfred's rubbish-bin to find things Wilfred may have written. They have a [drunken] brawl. But, becoming aware of Wilfred's philandering, and hearing too much of a woman called Lucinda, Elizabeth finally divorces him.

Cut loose, and now in his 60's, he still wants to chase women. but he finds he's not good at it. He begins to wander on his own in Europe. For some time he has an affair with an Italian woman. but he gets annoyed with her when she proves to be religious and she follows the word of Padre Pio with his stigmata. He scoffs at such nonsense and moves on. His moods are not improved by going to conferences about literature, which he finds to be pompous and pointless - critics who talk about novels but have never written a novel themselves. His own books are still highly esteemed, but he is now an alcoholic, his mind often filled with what can only be called nightmares.

Some years go by. He goes to Switzerland and books into a prestigious hotel, the Weisswald, high up in the snow-covered mountains. and he is accosted by Rick L. Tucker, who is now a professor in a minor university in the U.S.A. and who is escorted by a young woman [his wife], Mary Lou, who majored in flower-arranging and in Wilfred Barclay's works. [And, dear reader, you can smell here the disdain William Golding has for American universities.] Tucker pleads to be allowed to read all Wilfred's papers, which are still being held by Wilfred's ex-wife, and he once again pleads to become Wilfred's authorised biographer. Running through Wilfred's head are memories of all the women he had bed... and young Mary Lou looks interesting. When Wilfred is drunk on brandy, Tucker tries to get him to sign a note saying he will allow him to have access to all Wilfred's papers and works. It doesn't work. Later the tempting Mary Lou also tries to get him to allow Tucker to write a biography of Wilfred. Again, no dice. But Wilfred again becomes the lecher. He invites Mary Lou to his balcony, where she can see the beauty of the stars in the clear night. He puts his arm around her... and she leaves the room. His mind bubbles with brandy. He has incoherent dreams.

 Tucker invites Wilfred to take a walk along a steep track where the snow is high and there is impenetrable fog. Holding on to a rail, Wilfred walks ahead, in his mind thinking about writing a novel ridiculing Tucker. And the rail he is holding collapses. He plunges down, clinging to rocks and roots, in peril of falling to his death. It is Tucker who pulls him up and saves him. Wilfred is grateful for only a short time and again thinks of writing something denigrating Tucker. He goes onto more benders and wanders from place to place. He wants to know about this man called Halliday whom Tucker had so often mentioned.

Wilfred goes to Greece but is harassed by a boring queer man whom he used to know. This bore tries to gossip, but it is inane and Wilfred understands how empty some people are. Where is his purpose in life? Once again, Wilfred cannot settle down anywhere. He goes again through Italy and Sicily and finds himself drinking more coffee than alcohol. He stumbles into a dark church where he has a sort of fugue, a wild dream of all he should have known about life. A breakdown follows and he is in hospital... and concludes "Not. Sin. .I Am.Sin"... meaning sin is an idea but sin is within us.

So more years go by. Wilfred  has become fatter and his body has decayed as he still drinks too much and he wanders aimlessly around Europe. He has lost the ability to be a lecher. After all these years, he meets Tucker again at Weisswald. Tucker has lost Mary Lou  to another man, Halliday. Wilfred and Tucker walk along the track that they had once walked, but this time the weather is clear and with no fog. But there is no real compromise, and Tucker says that Halliday had said that he [Tucker] should be the man to write Wilfred's biography. And at this point Wilfred rages to Tucker about all the people who are after him. Half drunk, he rants to Tucker "Think Rick, all the people who get lice like you in their hair, all the people spied on, followed, lied about, all the people offered to the great public - we'll all be revenged on the whole lot of them, ha et cetera..." [Pg. 152].

In his mind, Wilfred travels, crossing valleys and mountains and having what can only be called a greater fugue. He dreams, having nightmares, and lands in Rome. Does he taste religion in Rome? Or, in the fugue, is he categorizing religion with science and psychology and philosophy.

He goes back to England and visits his ex-wife Elizabeth. She makes it clear that he has always been narcissistic, thinks only of himself and had never been able to get on with other people. He has never taken seriously how other people think.

. . . And so comes what can only be called farce. Wilfred goes to a club in London that he used to frequented ... and Tucker catches up with him, self-confident that Wilfred will sign a note saying Tucker can write the biography of Wilfred. But in the same club there are frivolous writers who barge in drunk, and Wilfred refuses to sign Tucker's note in such company... and there is a riot in which they and the rowdies are kicked out. And Wilfred says he hates London anyway.

So he returns to his old home. His ex-wife Elizabeth has just died. His daughter is selling the fanily house... and now does Wilfred understand that life can only be understood when we have gone through suffering, pain and loss; and understanding that other people are needed in life. After Elizabeth's funeral, Wilfred accosts the Anglican priest who had presided. Wilfred says "You will find this difficult to believe but I suffer with the stigmata. Yes. Four of the five wounds of Christ. Four down and one to go. No. You can see the wounds, unlike with poor Padre Pio. But I assure you my hands and feet hurt like hell – or should I say heaven?" And so he continues for a while, bantering with the parson. But looking back through his life, there have been real wounds in his mind - all the things he should not have done.

He burns all his letters and all the boxes, so there will be no biography of him.... But as is often the case, William Golding ends this novel in an ambiguous way. Does Tucker, his life-long hope of being a biographer gone, stalks Wilfred and shoot him dead... or is this another of Wilfred's dreams? 

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *   *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

Now, dear reader, you are shouting at me because I am once again giving you nothing but a synopsis of The Paper Men when I should have given you a critique. Be patient then please.

First, I would say that the language Wilfred Barclay uses is often confusing, very much as was the case with William Golding's novel Darkness Visible. Once again I have to use the word cryptic, but in this case the main character is balancing his sceptic, rational (and often angry) views with his growing belief in some force greater than reason. In other words, something like God. No, I'm not making this up. Despite his atheist father, in his later years Golding saw himself as Christian, though he did not subscribe to any particular denomination even though for years he taught in an Anglican boys' schools. Note in this novel the references to Padre Pio and the churches in Italy.

Second, The Paper Men was written after Golding had won his Nobel Prize, and he was getting mighty sick of having academics and others knocking on his door or asking if they could have an interview or maybe even asking if they could write his life story. At the same time, he took a shine to a young American woman who wanted to write his biography. He was in his seventies. They did not have an affair, but his wife politely asked her to go away. She went. [This I know from a B.B.C. documentary in which Golding's daughter discussed the situation.] Much of the thrust of The Paper Men is Golding's disgust at the way journalists, academics and others misunderstood what his novels were really about. By the way, in the novel Wilfred Barclay says he hates London. This was what Golding also thought. He much preferred the small towns and rural areas - and of course sailing.

 

Something Thoughful

  

                                IN MEMORY OF IAIN SHARP 

Scottish born, Iain Sharp came to New Zealand when he was seven. He was a poet, a scholar, a very good speaker and great company. Never one to ever get into a fight, he always spoke softly even when he discussed issues that were regarded as dynamite by some people. He was very generous and very thoughtful. After complications, he died at the age of 72 in January of this year. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the people who were to speak at the memorial gathering in Nelson, where Iain and his wife Joy had been living for seven years. What follows is what I said.

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *. *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *                     

 

I’m not very good at ad-libbing, so I apologise for reading what I am going to say about Iain.

In the early 1970’s we were both studying in the same English Department at the University of Auckland, but I think we both barely noticed each other. It was only some years later that I got to know him well.

Often I would meet him in Ellerslie in Auckland near the Harp of Erin where he lived with his mother Catherine.  His mother was a very strong, forthright character, who wouldn’t take any nonsense in the best Scottish way. My wife Gabrielle thought she was great, but she tended to call me “Knockolass”  - so “Knockolass” I was. 

It was very good all those years as I got to know Iain when he was a librarian dealing especially with manuscripts in the Auckland Central Library. He was very erudite, especially about literature, and had an excellent grasp of New Zealand history, both Maori and Pakeha.   I knew he was a hard working person, but when he had time off, I would invite him to have lunch with me in a café and have a nice long chat about this and that … and he then would have to run back to work. Naturally the chat was often about books and how good or bad they were, only occasionally disagreeing. I never did persuade him the Joseph Conrad was the greatest novelist of the 20^th century because he was able to direct me to other novelists that he had read and I hadn’t.     Back then I was a film-reviewer and had to go to the movies all the time, good or bad though they were. When I took him he could be quite critical. I remember he particularly hated the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, noting the film was both pretentious and had a bad actor in the leading role. We was right.

He was for a long time in charge of the Sunday Star Times literature section, and he was very generous in sending books to me for review. In fact he sent so many to me that sometimes I used a pseudonym.  He was happy to go along with that. Iain was very scrupulous about reviewing. He wrote a very detailed article in a magazine about how cowardly most New Zealand book-reviewers are when it comes to New Zealand books, because most are afraid that they might bump into New Zealand authors whom they had reviewed. Again, I agreed.

When Iain and his wife Joy got together, they were a perfect couple. Gabrielle and I sometimes visited them and sometimes they visited us. They were very interested in our larger-than-normal family.  When they moved to Nelson we twice stayed with them. They were, as you might expect, very courteous hosts.   Iain still had his gentle Scottish lilt way of speaking and he was very good at never losing his cool.  He had a great sense of humor, he never raised his voice and, even if the word is now out-of-date, it’s fair to call him a gentleman in the true sense of the word.   

 

Something New

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

“ATTENTION – Writing on Life, Art and the World” by Anne Enright (Jonathon Cape, $NZ40)

 

Ann Enright is Irish and very much a feminist. She has written eight novels, three collections of short stories as well as a book about motherhood. She has won the Booker Prize and gained many other awards in Ireland. She works in the media in Ireland, where she is widely known and read. She also has a big audience in the U.K., America and other English-speaking countries. Now in her sixties, she has decided to put together some of the essays and criticism that she has written over the years. So most of Attention is made up of the essays she had published earlier in London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and other similar outlets. In some respects, Enright could be seen a model of the “new” Ireland, where the Catholic Church is no longer dominant, the country is largely urban and younger people have very different attitudes from their forbears. Enright makes it clear that she is a Dubliner, a city woman, and not too concerned with the rural lands.

Attention is divided in three sections: Part One Voices, which is a series of critiques of other writers’ work : Part Two Bodies, mainly about women, men, sex and mores: and Part Three Time, about anecdotes of her own life. I have to admit that I found the Time part to be the dullest of the three parts. But let us get to the meat.

Voices. True to her feminism, Enright begins with the fact that until very recently, novels written by women could be rejected by publishers, while the same novels could be accepted by other publishers if they were presented with a masculine name. Then her opening essay I Stab and Stab emphasises how difficult it can be when a writer is belittled and made to feel that writing is of no importance. This, she says, often happens when male writer tends to dominate female writers. Enright’s example is the early life of the [now famous] Australian novelist Helen Garner. Using Garner’s diaries, Enright shows how Garner’s partner (also a novelist) bullied her to the point where she had to leave him, get a life of her own, and finally was able to have the time to write.          Oddly enough, and I think a little out of place, comes the essay Priests in the House, mainly an account of her forebears in the early 20^th century and their poverty, but noting all the priests who were part of her larger family.          In 2020, Enright was asked to write an introduction to James Joyce’s Ulysses, because it was nearing the centennial of the first publication of Ulysses [in 1922]. As a feminist, she is very ambiguous about the way sex is presented in the novel and almost says that Joyce was coming close to being a pervert. But she also praises the way Joyce depicts the Dublin that was and Joyce’s ability to pluck out hypocrites… so in the end she still sees Ulysses as a great novel, for all its flaws. [For the record, you will find my own very different critique of Ulysses on this blog.]           The next essay is a critique called Lessons from Angela Carter. Carter was one of the people who had tutored Enright when she was a student and they got on well together. But as in her view of Ulysses, Enright was sceptical and ambiguous about much of Carter’s work. While praising some of Carter’s work, she tells us about Carter’s obsession with sadistic ideas… even if she did write well.         Continuing her essays about other authors, Enright’s essay Eyes That Bite deals with Toni Morrison and her novel The Bluest Eye. Enright declares that she read some of Morrison’s works when she was younger and did not really understood them; but only later did she realise what Morrison was saying. She remembers particularly the passages about young girls and women being ridiculed or bullied.         She Never Left is written in memory of Edna O’Brien. It is in fact an obituary. Enright was recalling the days when O’Brien’s novels were banned in Ireland and she remembers how much she enjoyed reading them when she was younger. She also presents O’Brien as a country woman whose work always went back to villages and fields.      Quite different is her review of the works of John Mc.Garhern under the heading The High  Irish Style. Her review is a strange balance. On the one hand she condemns the puritanism of Ireland as it was and the mistreatment of sex that Mc.Garhern wrote about; but on the other hand she notes that Mc.Garhern himself had his own severe oddities and in his novels he was callous when dealing with women.      Quite different is her essay In Search of the Real Maeve Brennan. Brennan lived most of her life in New York and wrote short stories, mainly for the New Yorker. She died many years ago. Only recently have her stories been published in book form and are now being read in Ireland.          Surprisingly, her final essay about authors is a largely ambivalent view of a much-admired Canadian author. Alice Munro’s Retreat considers her work in the light of Munro’s husband who was, apparently, a sexual predator and who may have sexually abused one of Munro’s daughters… but Munro stuck with her husband… although, says Enright, she now sees how often Munro’s later works often deal with sexual abuse.

Bodies, the second part of this collection, deals with, first, the mistreatment of children as it was in Ireland, and then the whole idea of sex.        The first of this section is also what became the most the most notorious story in Ireland. Enright calls this essay Antigone in Galway, referring to the girl who was sacrificed in the ancient Greek play, and suggesting that young women and children were treated badly in care. She gives the essay the sub-title “The Dishonoured Deal of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home” Here she is dealing with (a.) The Magdalen Homes into which young and adolescent girls, who were regarded to be promiscuous, were put in. They were made to work under the supervision by nuns without any pay. Many of the girls and young women were kept in the “homes” until they died. (b.) Even worse were “homes” that were run by nuns who took in “illegitimate” new-born children… and research recently showed that many hundreds of new-born died early and were buried without names. Also, there was the trading of new-borns who could be adopted out… at a price. Enright was of course not the first to write about this – it made headlines around the world.     Next essay Time for Change is simply her approval of abortion becoming legal in Ireland, though her arguments in favour of abortion are somewhat vague, perhaps trying to sooth those who don’t approve of abortion.          Difficulties with Volkswagen  is the name of a lecture she gave to a room of obstetricians and gynaecologists  about giving birth [she has two – now adult – children].  She begins by showing how classical novels tend to become coy, or worse, when it comes to birth. They do not write about how women feel when it comes to birth… and moving on from this, she does not only describe how she felt when she was giving birth, but she asserts that in birth a woman becomes categorised. [BTE, the essay is called Difficulties with Volkswagen because her father and men of his age used to use that phrase whenever problems about giving birth were discussed.]      Monsters of #Me Too is a straight-forward account of rape and harassment of women by thugs giving examples in Ireland. Her most clear warning is that some men feel they have the right to harass women.       Unruly Bodies deals with women and their doctors when it comes to pain, sometimes brushed off pain as a delusion, others knowing that pain is real.       Finally there is On Consent. She deals with a new sort of feminist who, in novels, says that its O.K. to have wild sex and not having consistent partnership.

            Time. As I said that the beginning of this review, I have to admit that I found the Time part to be the dullest of the three parts. There is nothing particularly bad about these memoirs, but nothing sparkling. So I’ll deal with them briefly. Dublin Made Me is a nostalgic memory of what Dublin used to be. Oh Canada is about her time in Canada when she was an adolescent student there. Beckett in a Field is about a performance of one of his plays which she saw in the windy west of Ireland.    There is a little squib about Addictions. Take This Waltz is an anecdote about visiting Vienna for a writers’ evening. Listen to Haloise raises the problem of how you should deal with children who want to be religious when you are agnostic… and she admits that she still has a tiny little bit of religion in her. House Clearance has her looking over her parents’ house when they are gone, and she recalls all those things there that brought her up. Finally there is The Husband, a travel diary of a jolly cycle journal in Italy they had when they were both older.

            Yes, I know that all have given you is one long synopsis, and I should have analysed her work more carefully. I do know that her writing can be variable, sometimes coherent, sometimes calling in recherche words, but not too many. No, I do not agree with everything she has written, but then a wise man once said that if two people agree on everything, then one of them is doing no thinking.  She has given us a clear idea of how Ireland is now.

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.      

              “FIRE DOWN BELOW” by William Golding (published in 1989)

 

So after Rites of Passage and Close Quarters we come the third and final part of the trilogy, Fire Down Below, even though William Golding had originally not meant to write a trilogy at all. But here it was, now best known in an omnibus as To the Ends of the Earth. The situation is as it was in the first two novels. Edmond Talbot narrates the whole story though once again [as in Close Quarters] most of the idea that he was writing to send to his wealthy godfather has been ditched. Only towards the very end of Fire Down Below does Talbot revert to using a more formal style. So we are simply getting a first-person narrative.

There are three major threads that run though this novel.

First there is Talbot’s maturing when it comes to seamanship. After all, he is not a sailor but an aristocratic young man on his way to an official position in Australia. In the course of the voyage he, for the first time, with the help of Lieutenant Charles Summers,  learns how to climb at least part of the way up a mast. He learns how fickle the winds can be as they near the southern oceans. He becomes more aware of how unstable the old ship can be; and from lieutenants, midshipmen and common sailors he hears ideas about what is wrong. At one point he is allowed to join the night-watch and sees the ocean by moonlight, which almost knocks him into a poetic fugue. Indeed this makes him once more to think of young Marian, Miss Chumley. He hears long conversations about the system of “dead reckoning” and the new systems of navigation. When the ship comes near to Antarctica, Talbot thinks he is seeing the dawn rising… only to be told that the ship is heading for titanic ice. The ship is in peril. There is panic among the passengers and among some of the seamen too. Only by careful seamanship and the orders of Captain Anderson does the ship avoid sinking… and in telling you this I have brought you to later incidents in the novel.  After the escape from ice, the rest of the novel is plain sailing towards Australia – indeed, Golding hurries things along so that the last chapters hastily bring us to Sydney Cove.

Second there is the problem of Lieutenant Benet. As was made clear in Close Quarters, Benet had become Captain Anderson’s favourite, with his knowledge of new machines and ideas. The mainmast had been broken in a gale. Various ways were suggested to fix the mainmast. Benet knew the most recent science, and worked out a system of using hot iron and wood to force the broken mast together. This involved fire in the lower decks. [hence the novel’s title Fire Down Below]. When the work was over, the ship moved at a faster pace. Talbot’s friend Lieutenant Charles Summers remains sceptic and worried how long it would be before the ship would sank. Captain Anderson eventually calls Summers out for spreading such ideas. Then there is the ongoing animus between Lieutenant Benet and Talbot. As was made plain in Close Quarters, Talbot dislikes the half-French Benet with his poetry and his sophistication when it comes to intimate things. More than anything, though, Talbot believes that Benet has not told him all the truth about Miss Chumley, whom once again he idolises. What Benet tells him what he knows, it is ambiguous at the best - but Talbot still thinks Benet is slandering the young woman. In fact, at one point the two almost come to blows as both of them had come up with the idea of using hammocks to calm passengers when the sea was particularly rough. 

Third there are Mr. Prettiman and his partner  Miss Granham. They were introduced to us in Rites of Passage, wherein Mr. Prettiman showed himself to be an atheist, a free- thinker, and who was eccentric enough to try to kill an albatross to prove that it was mere superstition to believe that shooting an albatross would bring bad luck. Prettiman is apparently in very ill health and confined to his cabin. In a struggle, Talbot and Benet fall over Prettiman’s bed and harm him so badly that Miss Granham curses Talbot and says he has killed Prettiman… but later, Talbot comes to talk with Miss Granham. With Captain Anderson presiding, Prettiman and Granham are married… and later, Talbot comes to talk often with Prettiman, who lectures on Talbot’s priviledges and how the common people suffer and the evil of power. They bandy Greek and Latin epigrams, for Prettiman may be a commoner but he is well read. Prettiman is going with his wife to Australia to set up a utopian colony where there will be free thinking and no hierarchy.  In all this, naïve though he may be, Talbot perhaps for the first time in his life discovers that there can be a scale of beliefs quite different from his own. And gradually Prettiman restores his health… but, in a later conversation, Lieutenant Charles Summers speaks with Talbot and points out all the evils of the French Revolution and radicalism with which Prettiman has been polluted

The ship reaches Australia. They come to Sydney Cove… and here Golding almost stoops to neat melodrama. When passengers and all cargo have left the ship and the ship is decommissioned, the old ship catches fire, in which Charles Summers dies… even though Talbot tries to rescue him. [Was this caused by Benet’s infernal machine which Summers detested?? Just a thought.] And then Golding gives us a sort-of happy ending. Miraculously, Lord and Lady Somerset turn up with Miss Chumley. They have been to Calcutta…. And after some time working in Australia, Talbot gets married to Miss Chumley in India. Coyly, Golding [or perhaps Talbot who is supposed to be narrating all this] tells us that good stories have to have happy endings, referring to the likes of Jane Austen.

For the record, I have to note that this synopsis misses out many characters in the novel, but if I were to deal with all of them, this would be an extremely long synopsis.

At which point, I alert the reader who has to consider the dreaded “unreliable narrator”. The three novels are, after all, narrated by Edmond Fitz Henry Talbot. In his preface to To the Ends of the Earth, Golding remarks that Talbot is “an intelligent but brash and optimistic young man”. The “brash and optimistic” part means that Talbot is naïve about some issues. Near the end of the novel, Talbot proclaims that he will forever admire England and in conversations with Lieutenant Charles Summers he lauds the idea that the gentry and the aristocrats are the only ones who should hold power. At the very end of the trilogy, he is on his way to having a rotten borough. This does not mean that he is a bad person. It means he was brought up in the gentry and speaks as a man of his time and class. Going along with this there is in him a streak of xenophobia. He obviously hates the French – partly because the Napoleonic Wars are in progress -  but this flows over when he encounters Lieutenant Benet and they quarrel over Miss Chumley, and he more-or-less sides with Summers over the possible danger of Benet’s machine down below. He has missed the daring of the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, although Prettiman talks naively of a Rousseau-ish Utopia he is going to set up in Australia, he does say some truths about poverty and the misuse of the law which Talbot hears and ponders… but he quickly manages to brush them out of his mind. Unreliable? Certainly. But how else could an English squire think in the early 18^th century? 

 

Footnote: Back in 2006, the B.B.C. produced a three-hour-long version of the whole trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, neatly divided into three separate parts Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below. Benedict Cumberbatch played the leading role as Edmond Talbot. Having read the three novels, I was able to catch up with the series. It certainly gives a real sense of the peril of seafaring in the early 19^th century, the cramped quarters, the sordor  and lack of hygiene, the segregation of the upper-class and the poorer emigrates, and the severe discipline imposed by the captain and the lieutenants. Having said that though, as is always the case when novels are turned into films, much of the nuance was lost. The complicated conversations between main characters were boiled down, some events were glossed over and the ending was quickly rushed through. A very good primer for William Golding’s work, very watchable, but not the real thing.

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 WHAT IS CHRISTMAS?

            So what is Christmas?

            For the sceptic, it could mean just another gimmick to sell goods and make profits for corporations – all that tinsel, those cheap toys that will be forgotten in a few days, the schmaltzy sentimental music played in shops and malls, people making money, the fat man dressed as Santa saying Ho Ho Ho and asking children what they want for Christmas. Noise.

For parents with young children it could mean the anxiety of wondering if you bought the right thing for this child or that, and didn’t it cost too much for this child and not so much for that, and won’t they start squabbling? And for poorer parents, how can we afford the money to make a special Christmas dinner for all those in-laws who might be expected to turn up.

             Could it mean loneliness? Grandma is now in a “home”. Sorry grandma. I hope you liked the card we sent, but we couldn’t see you at Christmas because we promised the kids that we’d go to Surfers Paradise at Christmas. We’ll try to ring you.

What is it for the pedant? You do know, don’t you, that nobody knows when Jesus Christ was born and the early Christians simply took over the pagan Roman festival of Saturnalia for the ending of the year. Really you should read some more books about this. And what about all that snow nonsense at Christmas? Look, if Jesus lived at all, he would have been born in the Middle East, which is pretty dry at the best of times. So all that stuff about snow was made up in the northern part of Europe and now we are stuck with snow and jingle bells; and anyway in Europe it is only a version of old pagan rituals that were around before Christians were around.

What is Christmas for the English? It is mince pies and and plum pudding and Dickens’ story of Scrooge and its all good for the kiddies and  - well – we don’t really go to church but it’s part of our heritage… and even England’s number-one atheist Richard Dawkins got upset when stores in London had images of Islamic ideas but no Christmas images. Well, I mean, he said he likes carols and Christmas trees [that German invention] but of course he does not believe in Jesus… well it’s just our heritage.

And yes, it is true, that in other countries in Europe they too now have similar attitudes now, whether they say Joyeux Noel or Frohe Weihnochten, Feliz Navidad, Buon Natale or as many other countries as you can name.

So after all this, what does Christmas mean? The name itself means Christ’s Mass, a ceremony gathering believers. That it happens sometime in December is not important. What is important to believers is that Christ was born and so here is a date on which it can be celebrated. Yes, of course good will and generosity are abundant among non- believers, but without this essential idea there would be no one day in which much of the world would be able to celebrate, enjoy company, get together with family and friends and sometimes neighbours, and put aside quarrels… at least that is what we hope. And it’s okay to have a Christmas tree.

                           HAVE A HAPPY CHRISTMAS

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.