Something New

N0TICE FOR READERS - REID'S READER WILL BE TAKING A SUMMER BREAK. WE WILL RESUME AT THE BEGINNING OF FEBRUARY 

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.

 

 

 

Something Thoughtful

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

                                             SO I WENT TO THE MOVIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something New

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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