Something New

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

“MY GORBALS LIFE” by Allan Gilfillan McLachlan (published by Sheena Ross Publishing, $NZ30); “ADVENTURES OF A COUNTRY VET” by Rory Dean (published by Harper-Collins, $NZ39.99)

            What exactly was (and possibly is) the Gorbals? It was the poorest, roughest, most deprived part of the city of Glasgow, a slum of slums. They were not unique in Britain. Think of the awful tenements in Dublin that Sean O’Casey used to write about. Think of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, and George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier (all reviewed on this blog) which deal with awful slums in London, up North and Paris. But the Gorbals really seems to have been the pits. 

            Born in 1938, Allan Gilfillan McLachlan (he had the same name as his father and grandfather) must now be in his mid-80’s. He tells us of his life from birth to the age of about 10, so this is mainly in the war years, but it is also a story of childhood. And he sets out by telling us in detail how bad the Gorbals was. His family lived in a one-room tenement which had one only tap for water and one gas-mantle to give light  (later they changed it for one single light bulb). The only lavatory was outdoors and shared with the near neighbours. Soot and smoke from near factories smothered the area. Rats were all over the place and often had to be hunted in droves. Middens (rubbish heaps) were communal, collected erratically by the city’s municipal horse-drawn garbage-men. Not at all a healthy place - indeed downright unsanitary. In one chapter he writes about how common it was for children to get boils and the primitive ways their parents dealt with it.

Yet soon in his story he tells us “Although we lived in what was probably one of the toughest neighbourhoods in the western world, if not the toughest at that point of time, the majority of tenement dwellers were decent folk, who lived a blameless and industrious life, fighting hard to keep their homes clean, despite major difficulties, and doing their best to ensure that their families grew up, as untainted as possible by the awful living conditions , which everyone had to contend with on a daily basis.”

As it was the time of war his father – a labourer – went off to war in 1941, by which time young McLachlan had two younger siblings and his mother was left to look after the bairns. The father was apparently a bit of a brawler. In the army he was first a private then promoted to sergeant, then demoted to private again for insubordination, then promoted to sergeant again, then going through the same process a number of times etc. A rough diamond to say the least. But he was good to his wife and bairns, so a good father even if he drank too much and never earned much money. Meanwhile, McLachlan’s home was dominated by women, his mother and a tribe of grandma and aunties [who lived in other tenements]. McLachlan emphasises the community spirit there often was, not to mentions the bawdy songs that even the women sang. But it was wartime and their area was bombed (the Luftwaffe were aiming at the nearby factories). Half of their roof was smashed in and took weeks getting mended. Then there were the inadequate bomb shelters, crowded and badly constructed. Down the streets, railings were pulled down to give the iron for military use.

Most of what follows, though, is about how the Gorbals’ kids amused themselves – most often in street gangs, having fights where they acted out the type of things they saw in the local tatty picture-theatre which showed westerns and adventure stories and serials of Flash Gordon etc. (The kids would riot and almost smash up the theatre if the film was a soppy one). There were some accidents and emergencies about a hand that than been badly crushed. The only reason McLachlan sometimes went to Sunday School was to get some badges to wear; and later he went to the Band of Hope (a Christian meeting for children) only because the kids were rewarded with a bun. Most often McLachlan tells us how much he came to hate church and God (sounding to me a bit like Billy Connolly). Anyway Hogmanay was more important than Christmas. We also hear of both the good and the bad teachers he had as a kid – one being a tyrant and one a sweety who encouraged him, especially because he was the youngest boy in his class.  Things changed a bit when Dad returned after the war – when he became a bus conductor  - and there was the sad story of the one pet dog they had for a short time, which got sick and had to be put down.

It’s also clear that there were happy times in more salubrious places. Once they holidayed near Loch Lomond. He had a nice rural break staying with his grandmother at Dumfries. And his school sent him for three months to a health farm where the air was fresh and the lakes and trees were exciting. All this is interesting to a boy with plenty of scally-waggery and boyish .

A highly readable book, if a little repetitive. I do have some quibbles though.  McLachlan writes in standard English, but when it comes to dialogue – when parents and kids are speaking – then we get thick Glaswegian Scottish, which sometimes has to be decoded. More important, though, as he is recalling things that happened when he was very young, how much are things he writes of are family legends or things that he really saw? Did her really have an uncle who was a con-man and was able to steal the winnings of a gambling game? Was he really one of the kids who broke into a Home Guard Shelter and steal live bullets? How well do you remember things that happened when you were four, five or six? I wonder.

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

 

After the Gorbals, it’s a breath of fresh air to read something about the fresh outdoors – literally - not that I’m belittling the tales of grime and urban poverty you’ve just read about. Rory Dean’s Adventures of a Country Vet is subtitled “True stories from the horse’s mouth”. Rory Dean is also a Scot by birth and raising. He studied  to be a veterinary surgeon  at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh. For six months he came to New Zealand to learn field work in Canterbury, but did much of his early practical work in rural England, especially around Somerset and Devon. In 2015 he settled in New Zealand for good. He now lives in Kaipara, in Northland, with his dogs Scrappy and Alfie.

When I picked up this book, I immediately thought its title was pointing to the kind of  comfy James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small thing that we used to enjoy on television. But Rory Dean was ahead of me. Early in his book, he admits that when he was a youngster, he was delighted by Herriot’s tales of being a vet in the Yorkshire Dales. But real work as a vet is not always that comfy. Yes, there are funny moments and moments when things go wrong, but there are also tales of hard work and loss.

To give you the nature of the book, the best I can do is to give you examples of the types of difficulty Dean had to face.  Helping a cow to give birth outdoors in a snowstorm. Having his faithful dog Scrappy – a fox-terrier - saved from nearly being blinded by battery acid. And later having to pull out a hook embedded in Scrappy’s mouth when the dog had eaten some of a fish Dean had just landed. On a night-time dash, having to help right a car that had rolled over with two drunkards in it. In England he was required to test herds of cattle for signs of tuberculosis. This was a chore. But in one case he was about to anaesthetize a cow which was apparently mortally sick – but which turned out to be as robust as normal, and happily stood up and walked away to eat more grass. In New Zealand a hunter’s dog was gravely wounded by a wild pig. There was fear that the dog’s central organ was ruptured; and it took two separate careful bouts of surgery to recover the dog’s strength. Getting head-butted by a deer when he was in the process of removing its antlers. Up in Northland, Dean had to deal with a wounded dog belonging to a rather shady couple. He suspected that the dog had been injured in a fight with another dog that had been brought in by the couple’s drug-dealer, but he had no certainty about this. And of course there are tales of pregnent cows that just wouldn’t couldn’t push that calf out. There are many, many more stories more that I could list.

Dean’s style is breezy but he never pretends that being a vet is easy. Often he reminds us of the stench of poo in barns and other places where animals need to be healed or helped or put down. As for the methods vets use, the drugs and skills that are required, Dean is far more explicitl than Herriot ever was.

The blurb on the book tells me that some proceeds from the book go to the Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust. Working in rural areas, Dean often learnt that there were many people who had skipped how to read when they were skipping school. The Trust is there to help them.

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.  

“LES CONQUERANTS” by ANDRE MALRAUX  (published in the original French in 1928; published in English in the 1950s as “The Conquerors”)

                                     Malraux when a young author in the 1920s
 

            Those who regularly read this blog will be aware that I have a particular interest in French literature (as well as English, American and other literatures of course). In fact I have written on this blog so many reviews of the works of Honore de Balzac that I have got sick of writing about him. And many readers have got sick of him too. So when I turn to another well-known French novelist, Andre Malraux, I assure you that I am writing about a very different kettle of fish. Georges Andre Malraux (1901-1976) had parents who didn't really like the name Georges and they dropped it early in his life. He wrote only five novels, but he wrote many dozens of non-fiction works, mainly about art (especially Asian art) and politics. His most famous novel is La Condition Humaine, more widely read than all his other novels. He won many awards in France, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and was a number of times nominated for the Nobel Prize - but he never won it. He is esteemed by some as a man of action. He flew fighter-planes against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was part of the Resistance in France in the Second World War. But he was [and still is] a very controversial person in France. Leaving hard socialism behind him, he allied himself with General de Gaulle towards the end of the Second World War. In due course, when de Gaulle became president, Malraux was made Minister for the Arts and Culture. From the left, many negative books about him have been written in France since he died.

            As I’ve often said, I sometimes choose “Something Old” books to review because they have sat naggingly unread on my shelves and I want to stop them nagging. I read - with difficulty - the famous La Condition Humaine years ago but had forgotten most of it and I have some other novels by Malraux on my shelves. So for the next five or six postings, I will deal with Malraux’s four best novels [not his non-fiction] and with what other people have written about him.

            Some biographies falsely say that Malraux’s first novel was La Tentation de I’Occident, published in 1926. But this is not really true. La Tentation de I’Occident is a polemic, presented as a conversation between a Chinese man and a European man weighing up their different cultures. Its basic idea was that (post-war i.e. after the First World War) Europe was exhausted and had lost faith, while China and the East had yet to fulfil their destiny. Much dialogue is there but it is not really a novel. It was published serially as essays and “think pieces”.

 

            So to Malraux’s first real novel Les Conquerants published in 1928. It is a very political novel and is still much prized by left-wing readers and even by some Communists, although if they read it more carefully they would realize that Malraux is very ambiguous in his politics. Les Conquerants could mean the European colonialists who had conquered empires in Asia (especially the English, French and Dutch). Or it could just as well refer to the feuding Chinese political factions that went to war with one other, each seeking dominance  – in other words, conquerors. The novel is set in Canton in China in 1925. The Boxer Rebellion and China’s emperor are long in the past. China is now a republic inaugurated by Sun Yat-sen, whom both the Kuomintang [Nationalist] and the Communists revere. But Sun Yat-sen has died . And in China there are still the remnants of petty warlords trying to dominate distant regions. The Kuomintang are allowing Communists to join them, but there are tensions between them. Chiang Kai-shek is accepting arms and other help from Stalin. He is also becoming a dictator.

            Andre Malraux narrates the story in the first person – the voice of a European. Some have taken this to be the voice of Malraux himself, and maybe he hoped that readers would take that to be the case. But the fact is that when he wrote the novel, Malraux had himself been to China only on two very brief visits. He knew very well South-East Asia [Indo-China], hanging out especially in Hanoi in what was then a French colonial possession. His novel was written from his very. brief exposure to China, his knowledge of history and what he had picked up from newspapers and other information.

            So to a synopsis. The Comintern [the international Communist Party, organised by Russia] want to prevent British goods coming through Hong Kong and flooding the markets at the expense of Chinese goods and their workers. Many Chinese agree with this idea. Most of the Kuomintang disagree and this gives the dominant Kuomintang military figure Chiang Kai-shek the opportunity to call on European help. There are also protests against the “Bund” in Shanghai, which allows Europeans to have privileges and work Chinese as coolies and cheep labour. In this novel, Chinese see the British as the most villainous of European interlopers. In Hong Kong and in the “Bund”, the British can try Chinese in British courts. But Malraux is not so naive as to think that only the British exploited China; and his unidentified narrator makes some harsh comments about French colonisers too.

            In the midst of this tension, there is a major strike in Canton, encouraged by the Communists, which Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang tries to put down. But the strikers hold out for nearly 30 months. Much of the novel charts the progress of the strike and how violence increases. Many pages are spent in conversations about how a major Communist uprising could improve China. Many pages are spent on strategy, and on using propaganda to bring the proletarians to the Communist cause. We are given bulletins, month by month, of how the strike is getting on and how many people have died. There is much blood spilled.

            All this may sound very impersonal, and indeed the novel is very impersonal. But there are some outstanding [fictitious ] characters. Very violent is Tang, a former warlord who has become a strike-breaker and general thug. More important are two European  characters, Garine and Borodine – both Communists but with very different temperaments. Garine has some Russian forebears, but was raised and mainly lived in Switzerland and was not in Russia at the time of the Russian revolution. He wants to have an all-out Chinese revolution… in effect being an idealist who does not grasp the fact that revolutions cannot succeed by one single push. Yet he is still a pessimist. [Some critics have suggested that Garine is in part based on Malraux himself.] Quite different in temperatment is Borodine, a Russian who dutifully  follows orders as given by the Comintern. He organizes propaganda in China and, on the orders of Stalin, he wants to make a compromise with the Kuomintang, meaning that his strategy would be to gradually and bit-by-bit infiltrate the Kuomintang with Communists until it could be taken over.  [By the way, Mao Tse-tung – or Mao Zedung if you prefer – is hardly mentioned in this novel as he was not yet a major figure.] Early in the novel, there is a conversation in which both Garine and Borodine are compared . Garine is characterised thus: “C’est un homme capable d’action. A I’occasion” - while Borodine is said to attract  “revolutionnaires professionels, pour que la Chine est une matiere premiere.”

            It is ironical - and Malraux must have been aware of it - that in this novel the major characters are European, Garine, Borodine and the anonymous narrator ; while the Chinese are mainly an anonymous proletarian mass. Les Conquerants sold very well in France when it was first published. It was seen as contemporary reportage. But it was banned in Russia and was also banned in Mussolini’s Italy. Totalitarian states tend to shut down books that raise complex issues. In France, some Communists where interested by the novel, but others damned it for including a wish-washy comrade like Garine who wasn’t following the party line.

            Although Les Conquerants is overwhelmingly a chronicle of events and is concerned with politics, it is written in clear and very readable prose. This, as you will soon discover, is not the case with Malraux’s next novel La Voie Royale, which is over-cooked with description and often crumbles into vague and unreadable prose. Too much preciosity, mon ami. It has been suggested that La Voie Royale was in fact written before Les Conquerants, as it concerns events that happened in Malraux's life before he became very interest in China. But this idea has been debunked.

    On the whole, Les Conquerants is really a prelude to Malraux's best-known novel La Condition Humaine (published in 1933) which is also set in China during massive unrest. Malraux wrote La Condition Humaine  after he had at last really saw China in detail.        

Footnote: My “Le livre de poche” edition of Les Conquerants adds a postscript which Malraux wrote twenty years after the novel was first published. By then, the Chinese Civil War was being won by Communists led by Mao Tse-tung, and Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were driven to Taiwan. And Malraux was moving away from his earlier very left-wing views.

 

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.  

                           MY FAVOURITE PLACES IN NEW ZEALAND

In an earlier posting called The Auckland I Used To Know, I said that I am an Aucklander through and through. But I also made it clear that I am not parochial. I do not criticise or belittle other New Zealand cities or towns and locations, and there are many such which I have explored and enjoyed.

Sure there are many beaches around Auckland where one can swim in the summer, and west of the city there are the Waitakere ranges where often I used to tramp between Huia and Muriwai. But when I go up north of Auckland into Northland, there is also much beauty. Opononi with its wild waves and formidable sand-bars. Going further up, the forest with Tane Mahuta, the biggest kaori tree in the country. Going even further north, there is Dargaville. Please to not laugh when I mention this town. If you go up the hill nearby, near a settlers museum, there’s the majestic view of the river winding its way leisurely to the sea. And the last time we drove down from Dargaville, we took a side road and had a good look at the Maungaraho Rock, dominating the nearby countryside [I wrote about this on my blog The Charisma of a Rock]]. Of course I have to admit that I am biased about Northland, because it’s where one of my daughters lives and we love visiting her in her rural area.

But to other places far from Auckland.

I spent most of a year lecturing at the University of Otago and I loved Dunedin’s compact nature, its interesting city centre and its delightful culture in having so many bookshops and enthusiastic groups offering poetry nights and plays. At least that was how it was when I experienced the city. As for the nearby beaches, cold though they were, it was bracing to walk along St Kilda or St Clair and sometimes pass a barking seal  … even if the lower part of the city is sometimes plagued by flooding.  

I spent a full year in Wellington when I was awarded the Stout Fellowship. Again, even if some Wellingtonians can be condescending and haughty because they live in the capital, I again enjoyed a rich culture and delighted in the fact that about half of Wellington was hidden away in the hills. I do not mean this as a snide comment. I mean that the isolated towns that are part of the city are almost like villages in themselves… and in these little enclaves things seem less hurried than they were in the centre of the city. Pity that the airport is such a limited one in size. But again, I like The Hutt… because one of my sons lives there.

I will not criticise Christchurch too much, because it would be nasty to say negative things about a city that has gone through so much, especially the earthquakes. For various reasons, although I have been there many times, I never had to stay in Christchurch for long. There’s the city’s great Hadley Park and its botany and the colonial buildings that are now being restored, though as an Aucklander I sometimes felt disoriented by the fact that the city is built on such flat territory. Where are the hills, dammit ? Of course you could point to the nearby Port Hills, but its not the same as living in a city [like Auckland] where there are many small hills to climb. I admit that the last time I saw Christchurch was before the great earthquake and of course it is a pity that the Anglican Cathedral and the Catholic Basilica are not what they were.

As for Hamilton – yes, a  popular sneer says that it’s on its way to becoming a colony of Auckland. Sorry Hamiltonians, but it’s a fact that very many work in Auckland but sleep in Hamilton - even if it means one-and-a-half-hours drive each way. So for them Hamilton becomes a dormitory suburb of Auckland. Anyway, having visited Hamilton often and often, I like the place – the river running through, the daring art-works, the friends I made there when I tutored at the University of Waikato for a while, and the famous Gardens – even if non-Hamiltonians now have to pay to see it …and, of course, the fact that part of my family lives in Hamilton.

I could say much more about other towns and cities in New Zealand that I love. Going down to “The Mount” and holidaying in Papamoa. Old-fashioned Nelson, warmed for us by the fact that good friends of ours live there. New Plymouth and Whanganui with their excellent art galleries. That one and only visit we had to Gisborne…                               Oops! I’m beginning to sound like a travel-agency brochure. There are many other places in New Zealand that I love. And of course I’ve judiciously not mentioned all the dull, run-down or unwelcoming places.  But I come back to the fact that I am not parochial. There’s too much to like and admire in this country to think that way.

But I’m still at heart an Aucklander.