Something New

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something New

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something Thoughful

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

                                         WHY DO THEY MAKE THEM SO LONG?

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

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

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

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

Something New

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

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

 

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

            So here are some things you will find.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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.     

“DARKNESS VISIBLE” by William Golding (First published in 1979)

There was a long hiatus in William Golding’s work. He had published his three novelle under the title The Scorpion God in 1971, but then eight years went by before his next novel, Darkness Visible, appeared. In an interview [available on line] his daughter said that Golding worked and re-worked this novel very carefully. It is clear that he was once again dealing with the problem of evil, or if you prefer sin, just as he had done in his earliest novels. The very title tells us what he is doing. The phrase “darkness visible” comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost where Milton is describing Hell. Read carefully, we see evil all the way through Darkness Visible, countered only by a few who are righteous. Darkness Visible is his most metaphysical novel. It was applauded by reviewers when it was first published, winning a prestigious prize. But it was, and is, a difficult novel to read. Darkness Visible is presented in three different parts. When I first read it, I thought it was really three separate stories. Only in the last part did I understand how the novel binds together as one narrative. As the novel was written in the 1970’s, when censorship was loosening up, Golding for the first time occasionally has characters saying words like “fuck” and has some detailed sex-scenes, though there is nothing joyful about them.

So to one of my laborious synopses

PART ONE – MATTY

During the Blitz on London, when the firemen are desperately trying to put out fires as the bombs fall, out of nowhere walks a young child – a boy who is scorched and deformed by the fire. Some of his skin has been burnt off and he looks almost grotesque. He is given a name but gradually he becomes known as Matty. He is sent to an old-fashioned boys school, always set aside from others because he is so unusual. A teacher called Mr. Sebastian Pedigree teaches Classics and likes telling the boys about “Greek love” [i.e. homosexuality]. Mr. Pedigree is clearly a pederast [obviously William Golding gave the character the name Pedigree because it is close to Pederast.] Mr Pedigree likes taking individual boys into his study for extra tutoring. Some boys like him. Others are wary of him. In a tragic situation, one boy dies. For his misuse of boys, Mr Pedigree is sent to prison, cursing young Matty for catching him out…. And in this first chapter we are aware of evil and perhaps sinfulness. The opening sequence about the Blitz reminds us of the horror and destructiveness of war, made by human beings; while the sequence of the boys school tells us of the abuse of the innocents.

Matty is given a job at an ironmonger’s factory. In fact he has little work to do there, apart from delivering items - but he is treated well. Now a young teenager, he is attracted by a girl at the counter selling artificial flowers, but with his shyness and his deformed face he does not make any contact with her. He takes to walking and understands how cruel life can be. He goes into a deserted church and, with his deformed face, he will never be loved by a woman. He weeps, but he knows that this is reality.

In young adulthood, he migrates to Australia in the hope of never having to deal with the likes of Mr. Pedigree again. [For the record, William Golding spent some time in Australia before he wrote this novel…. and the Outback is like the wilderness of the Bible.] Matty is now always asking himself “Who am I?”. He goes through the Bible and then asks himself the deeper question “What am I?” And this in turn leads him to how different he is to other people. He asks “Am I only different from them by face?” Could it be that he too is a morally flawed creature? In Australia he makes a living doing odd jobs, moving north to the hotter parts of Australia. He gets lost in the Outback, almost dies, is noticed first by an Aborigine and fully rescued by an Aussie stockman. He becomes an eccentric – a sort of hermit seen in the park, preaching – still clutching his Bible… and finally he ships back to England. The imagery as such that he is almost like John the Baptist, although Golding never overtly uses Christian images.

Years have gone by. Far from the Blitz, England is now in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Mr Pedigree has come out of jail… then gone back in again… then come out again.. He is now an old pathetic man, trying to haunt public lavatories and he gets into trouble. And Matty returns…

And we now get passages from the journal Matty has been writing. He sometimes sees himself as 666 – the Beast. He – like everybody – has a core of evil. But he now sets the Bible aside and listens to the voices in his mind as he feels some remorse for the way he dealt with Mr. Pedigree. After all, his turbulent  thoughts seem to have reached some form of calm. He knows what evil is; but as he works peacefully as a school’s groundsman he also think of redemption.  Can the evil be redeemed?

 PART TWO – SOPHY

Mr. Pedigree is still around. He is caught out stealing books in the children’s section of a bookshop. But that is only a small event in this section of the novel – which is why I at first thought this second part of Darkness Visible had nothing to do with the first part.

The Stanhope family are upper-class. When they were young, the Stanhope girls Sophy [Sophia] and Toni [Antonia] were admired as well behaved little children… but now Mr. and Ms. Goodchild , the people who run the book store, regard them as haughty and negative. What they do not known is how disorderly the Stanhope house is. The girls have to live away from the main part of the house. They don’t really have a mother. Their father has had mistresses and has settled with a woman the girls call “Winnie”. Making matters worse, there is strong sibling rivalry between Sophy and Toni.  Sophy is always annoyed by the fact that Toni is faster with witty words. Toni is better-looking than Sophy is. Toni is brighter in company and seems to do better in school. So Sophy drives on resentment. She spitefully leaves nasty things about.  She alerts Toni and their father that “Winnie” has been sleeping with another man. The father, from this point, relies on a series of women only. His hedonism is clear. Sophy gradually begins to see that Toni is not as clever as she seemed. Puberty comes along. Toni is indifferent about it. Sophy is enraged by it. But it is Toni who gets duped by one man, and then Toni is caught up in very dodgy people, taking her overseas and being involved in terrorism. And Sophy, just out of curiosity, decides to try sex. She takes a random man, loses her virginity in a car [this is where William Golding has some effing-and-blinding and graphic details]… but she feels nothing at all. Then she has sex for money with an old man. She has become totally impassive.

Men are to be used. She lives a while with a prim man, who almost expects her to marry him. But she’s not interested in sex anyway and she’s bored with him. She eventually slaps him off. She spends time cruising around bars and discos [remember this is the early 1970s]. She thinks she has a mate of sorts, a real thug called Gerry who lives by theft. She enjoys some of the criminality. But she is soon bored by this life, she suggest that they could make much money by kidnapping the son of a very rich man… but it comes to nothing… and all her plans are pointless. There is a sense of the  pointlessness of her life. She finally confronts her father, wanting him to explain why things have gone so badly for both of the sisters. There seems to be no real explanation.

So where is the sin that we saw in the first part of this novel? First we have seen human-made war and pederasty. Now we see despair, impassivity, envy and crime. Of course you could blame the upbringing that Sophy and Toni had gone through, but there is something more profound than that. So we come to some sort of answer…

PART THREE – ONE IS ONE

… which I will deal with briefly.  At the bookshop, there is sometimes a gathering of people who regard themselves as intellectuals. Sometimes they come together in what amounts to being a sort of séance. One of the group is Edwin Bell, who had been in the boys school when Matty was there… And at a certain time a man butts in and starts talking about religion. Clearly this is a sort of avatar of Matty. He disappears. Old Mr Pedigree also reveals who he is, upsetting Edwin Bell. Matty turns up again in another form and chastises pederasts, being backed up by Edwin and a person called Sim….

… but in his journal Matty writes “What good is not directly breathed into the world by the holy spirit must come down by and through the nature of men. I saw them, small, wizened, some of them with faces like mine, some crippled, some broken. Behind each was a spirit like the rising of the sun. It was a sight beyond joy and beyond dancing. Then a voice said to me it is the music that frays and breaks the string.” He now does not chastise the fallen but looks forward to redeeming and curing them. He has made it clear to himself that evil is born within us and our origins, but we must repair the string. By the time Mr Pedigree talks directly to Matty, it is obvious that Matty is the human consciousness – or a kind of angel.

I admit that I found the last section of Darkness Visible to be almost cryptic. I also admit that I did not fully understood all the conversations that characters spoke. Maybe somebody could untangle them for me. I do not think that William Golding was pessimistic in presenting us with so much evil. It is a reality after all. And in the end he is suggesting that we human beings are the ones who have to steer the worst of us into being something better.

Footnote: Just a suggestion here.  Most of the novel is set in the 1970’s. I wonder if Golding, now ageing, presented the environs and the city so negatively because he was reacting to new mores that were alien to him. Just a thought.

 

Something Thoughful

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

ON BEING HARRASED BY MAURICE SHADBOLT

            Whenever I am sitting in my living room and I look through the window towards down the street, I find myself being harassed by Maurice Shadbolt.   There he is with his thick spectacles, his moustache and his nose – at least that is the way I have seen him in  photographs. I have no particular interest in the late novelist Maurice Shadbolt, but his presence can be unnerving. The fact is, of course, that I am not seeing a man at all. I am looking at a tree down the road and I can see boughs and large twigs crossing one another and making what seems to be the face of a man – a particular man.

            Making faces out of things that are not faces is a very old phenomenon, probably going back to primeval times. Imagine our distant forebears making their way through a dense forest when they see a giant looking down at them. It takes them some time to realise that they are really looking at a tree – and the odds are they would then make the tree into some sort of god. After all, when the wind blows, the tree moves and its arms display their psithurism with all their hushing. Isn’t it talking?

We shouldn’t ridicule these ancient beliefs. Only a few generations past, it was common for people to amuse themselves by looking at “pictures in the fire”. As they gathered near the fire, the coal would burn, the smoke would rise, and images – including faces – would appear. Of course they were merely playing a game, but it did show how our vision could deceive us.

Then there is the matter of distance that deceives us. In the early 20^th century, there were still people who believed that there were canals on the planet Mars. Such ideas have long since been debunked, partly because better telescopes now exist and the planet has been scanned at close quarters.  Even so, we earthlings can often have wrong perspectives when we look at something in the distance. Well do I remember walking the length of a long shore, and seeing a large tent in the distance… and when I got there, it turned out to be a large rock.

So… I do not take the image of Maurice Shadbolt too seriously… though I do wish he would go away.