Something New

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

            “THE BURIED CITY – Unearthing the Real Pompeii” by Gabriel Zuchtriegel (English translation by Jamie Bulloch) First published in English in 2025.

It may seem odd that I am here reviewing in my “Something New” section a book that was published last year and that has already been widely read in many English-speaking countries; but then I had only recently came across it. It was given to me as a present by a very generous person and I read it over the days after Christmas. Whenever I think of Pompeii and Vesuvius, I remember a number of things. From my father’s shelves when I was young, I read the heroic story Pliny the Younger told of [his uncle] Pliny the Elder, who bravely attempted to rescue people fleeing from the catastrophe when the volcano exploded. It came up again when I was learning Latin at secondary school. Later, complete and unabridged, I read to my children [when they were young teenagers] Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular 19^th century novel The Last Days of Pompeii. They found much of it to be very silly – and so did I – but some parts of it were engaging. And of course as a kid I saw a couple of Hollywood-type films that were based on the novel. Now I understand that Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative had little to do with what really had happened to Pompeii. Some years later, when I was in Italy, I twice visited Pompeii – the first time on my own, the second with my wife. Though we spent a whole day walking among the ruins, we were aware that it would take very many weeks to see everything that could be seen in Pompeii. One amusing moment came when an Italian guide proudly told a group of tourists that a certain house was the house that “Bulwer” had described. The tourists scratched their heads, not having the least idea of whom “Bulwer” was, which probably shows that Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel is rarely read now.

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

            So much for my musings. Let’s get to The Buried City. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, an archaeologist, is German by birth but Italian by having been naturalised. He is a polymath speaking many languages, including Italian, and he knows the ancient Greece and Latin languages thoroughly. UNESCO has declared that Pompeii is now a World Heritage Site, and Zuchtriegel is now the official director of Pompeii and its environs. In his forward, he talks of those tourists who come to Pompeii merely to “tick off their bucket lists” and of thieves who try to steal antiquities to sell to the rich. Such people do not understand what Pompeii was before Vesuvius destroyed it in 79 A.D. Zuchtriegel says that too many archaeologists become obsessed with the minutia of the sizes of pillars, while he himself is more concerned with how ordinary people lived in ancient Pompeii.

            More than anything, he says, “Pompeii offers us a unique profile of a provincial city in the ancient Roman world. With its houses, shops, bakeries, brothels, pubs, fountains and cemeteries (which in antiquity always lay outside the city walls) Pompeii is an immeasurably rich source for archaeology.” (p.20) He also notes that “On the day that Mountain Vesuvius erupted the city was frozen, so to speak, offering a unique opportunity  for modern  archaeology to plunge into the ancient world.” (p. 21). Stones [lapilli] rained down on the day of disaster, fumes suffocated people trying to reach the sea, buildings were crushed as were the people within. There had been a major earthquake in Pompeii seventeen years before the great blast of 79 A.D., but nobody worried about it and there were no attempts to alert the city to what could possibly happen.

Zuchtriegel makes it clear that Romans followed and copied Greek art. In fact at one point he notes that Pompeii did not ever have the best art work. He says that ancient Rome, Capua and Verona had more great art works than Pompeii ever had, and they had larger arenas.  He spends some time examining the famous copy of the statue of the Greek god Apollo and its connection with Greek culture. Sensuality and eroticism were displayed in some of the houses of the rich. Zuchtriegel spends some time with freaks and hermaphrodites as they were depicted in Greek tales. Wealthy people’s walls were painted with images of Greek fables and the doings of the Greek gods, sometimes dealing with rape or violence but just as often dealing with images of serenity or weddings. One house, excavated in the early years of archaeologism [in the late 19^th century] was named as the House of the Vetti, generally interpreted as a brothel. Wealthy people also had slaves, and the prostitutes were slaves. Slaves could be freed sometimes, but often this would simply mean that an old slave was of no worth anymore and the freed slave was left in poverty and would have nowhere to go.

Having explained all of this, Zuchtriegel notes that in the last years of Pompeii there was a god that was very popular. This was the Greek Dionysus. But he also notes that the very ground Pompeii was built on was originally Etruscan land, and the Etruscan gods were related to nature and agriculture. There were many rituals that had been carried through to the late years of Pompeii. He then returns to the state of the city as it now is. Among other things, some of the ruins were destroyed during the Second World War due to American bombing near to Naples. For a long time there were misunderstandings about the meanings of some buildings that had been buried in the 79 A.D. earthquake. For example, one building that was dug up by amateur archaeologists in the early 20^th century, became known as the Villa of Mysteries because it looked dark and there was a long frieze whose meaning was difficult to understand. Could it have been the site of a forbidden cult? But it is now understood that there was no mystery at all. The villa, as it originally stood, was open to the passing public, there were no orgies taking place in it, and the images on the wall had to do with celebrations of a wedding.

It is in the last parts of The Buried City that Gabriel Zuchtriegel goes back to what actually happened when Pompeii was almost obliterated. He likes to show how ordinary people – not just the rich – were going through the streets of the city just before the sky fell in. One example was a chariot that has only recently been dug up by modern archaeologists. Only parts of it survived, but it was clearly being driven on its way to some ordinary event.  Zuchtriegel also often reminds us that those who lived in the most horribly cramped quarters were the poor people – who made up most of the population – and the slaves. As he sees it, the most important people in Pompeii were the poor and the slaves who kept the city running. They were the ones who drove carts bringing into the city the food that came from the fields and the fishing boats, cooked and produced meals, looked after the children of rich etc. Yet they had to live in the worst houses.

Regrettably, says Zuchtriegel, despite all the help of the police, there is still in Naples the Camorra – the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia -  which illegitimately raids parts of Pompeii, stealing antiquities and selling them to the rich in the black market. But things are now being tightened. There is the frequently-asked question “How many people lived in Pompeii at the time it was destroyed?” Answers range from 40,000 to 20,000, but one also has to be aware of the fact that the rural areas, which brought in grain, stock and milk, should also be seen as part of Pompeii. At an odd point, too,  Zuchtriegel says that Pompeii was probably economically declining in the years before its ruin. Apparently more local farmers now raised grapes as wine became most important… but this meant that grain had to be imported from different countries – like Egypt  - at great price.  

I regret to say that I found the last section of The Buried City to be the least interesting. Zuchtriegel speaks of the difficulties he had before UNESCO made him the official supervisor of Pompeii and environs. He says that there was a campaign against him when some Italian professors thought he was too young for the job. After this he talks of the things he has inaugurated, such as getting troops to play ancient plays in the ancient arena of Pompeii. He also campaigns for schools to get more young people to come from Naples and be aware of the important site that is so near to them. And of course he and his fellow archaeologists continue to dig. There is much more to find. Interestingly, he spends a little time critiquing Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. He notes that much of the novel turns on a young Christian woman and some other Christians who are in danger of being persecuted. Zuchtriegel does remind us that Nero did persecute Christians in Rome as scape-goats for the great fire. But, he says, there is no evidence that any Christians lived in Pompeii.

And here is an interesting fact. After the destruction of Pompeii, Romans quickly understood that Pompeii could not be rebuilt. It was really only in the 18^th century that Pompeii began  to be examined by early archaeologists. He adds an afterword about what work is being done… a never-ending story.

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 ago. 

“THE DOUBLE TONGUE” by William Golding (published in 1999)

William Golding died in June 1993. A Publishers’ Note (by Faber and Faber) tells us that Golding had written two drafts of his last novel and he was about to write a third draft when he died. The title The Double Tongue was chosen by the publishers out of many titles that Golding had considered. Inevitably there are some things missing in the text we now have, especially in Chapter 4 where much of an important conversation between two major characters is apparently missing. Surprisingly though, I found this novel to be one of the clearest and most readable of his novels. Golding is, as he had been many times before, wrestling with either the idea of God [or gods] or the idea of atheism.

Golding was always interested in Classics [i.e. Ancient Greece and Rome]. The Double Tongue is set in ancient Greece, but it is Greece in its declining era. Rome is gradually becoming the dominant force in the Mediterranean countries, perhaps about 300 BC. Arieka is a young peasant Grecian girl. Her father wants to get her married and is willing to pay the dowry. A young man is willing to marry her, but she will have none of it and runs away. She is forced back… but the young man has lost interest in her. Arieka does not like boys and young men. So, after much anger from her father, she is put in front of Ionidies, who is in charge of finding young women  who will be assistants to the Pythia of Delphi – that is, the Oracle or soothsayer at Delphi who is supposed to answer difficult questions put to her by troubled people. The Pythia has long been revered at Delphi, although academics in Athens are now very sceptical about her powers, although country people still rely on her.

So Arieka is taken to Delphi by Ionidies, who on the journey gives her some points about all the parts of Greece that are now being taken over by Romans – such as Sicily. When they get to Delphi,  Ionidies introduces her to the library that is held in the Pythia’s domain. Arieka is quickly interested in reading and is gradually immersed in reading... so much that over the years she herself becomes a true scholar. Perhaps more importantly, she is first introduced to the Pythia, a fat, old and blind woman. There is always a young woman who will become the next Pythia after the current Pythia dies. The Pythia tells Arieka that there is a woman waiting to be Pythia; and then after that woman Arieka will be Pythia – so she is in effect Number Three, at first admired for what they think is her country simplicity.

Areika, female, not interested in men, is [as William Golding frames her] almost like a nun, but she is very inquisitive. Ionidies is a high priest in charge of giving prayers to the god Apollo . But he says his aim is to revive the glory of Athens… the Athens that used to be of philosophers… and Ionidies admits that, like many philosophers, he is really an atheist. He does not believe in the gods. He explains that in older times, the Pythia would answer questions in clasic lordly hexameters for important people who had real problems to solve. Now, in a Delphi that is decaying, the only people who come to the Pythia for advice are simple farmers and peasants who ask about trivial things… and more and more, the people most likely to come to Delphi are tourists who are there only out of curiosity.

The old Pythia dies. There is a new Pythia. So Areika is second in turn. For all her piety, she is beginning to loose her faith after all of Ionidies’ talk about the charlatan oracles there now are. [And it is at this point that  - in Chapter 4 - we do not get what was probably going to be an important conversation between Ionidies and Areika about gods or no gods. My guess is that this was going to be the most difficult for Golding to write, it being such a formidable topic.]

The next Pythia dies… and so Areika is now the Pythia. But more than ever, Roman rule is taking over. Certainly many still cling to the old gods and Greeks still speak Greek [in their many dialects], but many are also learning Latin. And while Areika goes through all the ceremonies that she is obliged to undertake, she finds that only a few come for worship. There are three days when  the Pythia can be the Oracle giving advice. Many ask pointless questions and on the last day hardly anybody comes. Later, Areika has a long conversation with many of the visitors – mainly tourists – including Phoenicians, Macedonains,  Romans and others and is aware that there are many gods she has never heard of.  In conversation, many say that Greece had never been united and has always been a collection of cities bickering with one another. How feeble a thing it now is.

There is a festival – a sort of carnival – and the Pythia becomes less and less important. One of her subordinates suggest to her that they could make a lot of money by trickery…. And she is distressed.

Now at last, she has come to believe that “the trouble with the old gods is that if you put them together they fight… You can’t get anywhere with a bunch of gods because you are looking in two directions at once and stuck.” She now comes to believe that there must be only one definitive god. The Pythion [the home of the Pythia] is literally falling apart. The roof will soon fall down. So she goes to Athens [now a free city under Roman protection] seeking for money to repair the roof; but in Athens she is seen merely as an oddity even if a very few still worship her; and in Athens there is much decadence. She returns to Delphi. The roof has fallen down. Only some of it has been fixed. She is now even more sure that the gods are not real and she no longer communicates with the gods. When, in later years, she is about to die, she asks that her headstone have carved on the stone only four words – "To the Unknown God". 

What is Golding doing here? Most obviously he is reminding us that cultures, societies and whole nations can come and go over hundreds of years. The Greece he depicts is dying, despite all the glory of its past. At the same time he is, as always, being ambiguous about God or gods or atheism. Arieka in the end hopes for the unknown god – only one God. Is this a matter of faith or a hope for universal acknowledgment of the one true god… or, as an atheist would say, is this all wishful thinking?  Certainly there is chartlatan-ism in many religious communities, but then at the same time this is true of many atheists. Who can really be sure there is [or isn’t] a one true God? Yet, like it or not, religions and gods of many sorts have existed since human beings had began to think. A force greater than us rules the universe.  We look up to it. Meanwhile, Arieka’s hope is heartfelt. She has gone from belief to scepticism to hope… like any thinking person.

Foot Note: What does the given title The Double Tongue mean? It could mean many things, but I interpret it as referring to a habit the old Oracles had. When asked really thorny questions, they would deliberately give incredibly ambiguous answers.

 

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.   

                                                          DRIVELLING TRIPE

Many years ago in the Stone Age, when I was a rookie high-school teacher in my first school – an upper-class school -  my boss told me which novels I should teach to what was then called Form Six – a senior class. It was a boys school, and the novel I was given was Wuthering Heights. I diligently read it and took notes and read what academics had to say about it and prepared my lessons carefully including what the boys’ homework would be and what kind of tests I would give them. Finally, well prepared, I walked into the class. To their credit, the boys were well-behaved and we ploughed our way through the novel over three weeks with brakes to deal with other English-language work. But when we got through both the novel and all the essays the boys had done, I gave one lesson in which the boys were allowed to say what they really thought of Wuthering Heights. Some were quite positive, but saying that they thought some of the characters were extreme and their behaviour was almost hysterical. Some said that they found the nineteenth-century language difficult to follow. And though they didn’t say it, it was clear that it was not a novel that adolescent boys could really like. To put it brutally, they seemed to be saying it was something that adolescent girls would be more likely to enjoy.

Now I was not so naïve as to be unaware that some of the boys would have resorted to cheat-cribs – Coles Notes,  Monarch Notes etc. – those pamphlets that used to tell lazy readers everything about the plot, the characters, the ideas etc. of a novel without having to actually read the novel itself. [At university I knew enough students who had the same idea]. But back when I was teaching schoolboys, there was not yet the plague we now have where lazy both students and school boys-and-girls simply look up their computer to be told everything they need to write what are supposed to be essays. But I digress…

Years later, I read once more Wuthering Heights. And guess what?  I found myself agreeing with the boys I had taught. Please do not immediately assume that I am some sort of male chauvinist. Wuthering Heights is still very popular with many younger women, but I have read enough articles and essays by women who have damned it and seen it as romantic nonsense at its worst. Perhaps teenage girls will be enthralled by the idea of Cathy and Heathcliff running around together in the moor, but the fact is that Heathcliff is a thug, Cathy is gullible and her romantic vows mean nothing… and if you read the whole novel, you will learn that they mess up the lives of the younger generation that comes after them. The fact is, I think Emily Bronte was a much lesser author that than her sister Charlotte. Yes, Jane Ayre,  Villette, and even Shirley have their moments of melodrama [“Reader, I married him”] . But at least Charlotte Bronte tried to deal with reality and she fought a good fight for the status of women – she was an early feminist.  Emily, though she had some bright moments, was a fantasists.

Now why on earth have I bother you with all this?

A new film version of Wuthering Heights has just been released (put together by Emerald Fennell; Margot Robbie as Cathy, Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff) . I have not seen the film and, being a good reviewer of films, I do not make comments about films that I have not seen.  But I am aware that many reviewers have damned this new film for being very different from the novel. Of course all film adaptations of novels simplify the original novel, but apparently this particular film goes far away from the original novel altogether. Apparently lots of sex, some sadism, bad casting. Naturally those who have never read the novel think this is hot stuff and the reviewers who have never read the novel say you should ignore the “purists”  [meaning those who know the novel]. One reviewer, writing for a perfectly intelligent magazine, wrote a very positive review of the film, but she mentioned that she had never read the novel. She had only heard about Wuthering Heights because she knew the pop song Kate Bush wrote and sang in 1978.

All of which leads me to the obvious. The semi-literate or the never-readers often think they know all about a classic novel because they saw the movie version of it. Nine out of ten times, the movie has little to do with the novel.

Let’s look at some examples. I looked up Wikipedia [yes I do that sometimes] and I was told that over the years Wuthering Heights has been turned into a film over 19 times; there have been 10 full-length television versions of Wuthering Heights; there have been five television versions that were presented as serials; the novel has been twice turned into an opera and of course the novel has many times been acted on the radio. Of the 19 film versions, Wikipedia notes that they included Indian Bollywood versions, a Japanese version, and a Filipino version.

As it happens, over the years I have seen five film versions of Wuthering Heights and one or two B.B.C. television versions. But there are only four that stand out to me – not because they are great but because they are in their own ways odd. First there is the 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon – decent enough, but sweetened-up and notorious for dealing with only the first half of the novel. In 1988, there was the  French version of Wuthering Heights called Hurlevent  starring Juliette and Ralph Fiennes. Good casting but …um… not very English. There was, in 1970, quite a good version with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marsh, but not outstanding. In fact the only one that really stood out for me was a film that you have probably never heard of. The film Abismo de Pasion [The Abyss of Passion] – a version of Wuthering Heights in Spanish - was directed by Luis Bunuel, the Spanish director whose career had begun  with surrealism. He stuck with what was either very realist or very crazy. Abismo de Pasion is both – what is sordid and how crazy the main characters are, Cathy and Heathcliff, really tearing each other for no real purpose. Yes indeed, that is really all they do in the novel, although even Luis Bunuel also skipped second half of the novel.

Naturally, I have offended some readers who have read the novel Wuthering Heights and love it. Sorry, but I am not of that clan. Crudely joining the boys a taught so long ago, I can’t help remembering how they sometimes referred to Wuthering Heights as Drivelling Tripe.

And do remember that film versions of novels are never like the original novel.

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.