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.

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

 

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. 

                           

 

Something New

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

“EMPATHY” by BRYAN WALPERT (Makaro Press, $40)

I have a big problem when I come to Bryan Walpert’s excellent novel. I read and enjoyed Empathy when I was holidaying in Australia, but when I got back to New Zealand I found that I was well behind the pack. Every N.Z. book-reviewer had said what they thought of Empathy, and I was almost at a loss to say anything new. For that reason I will be relatively brief.

 First a synopsis. David Geller is a widower looking after his teenage son Finn and his teenage daughter Gemma. They are bright kids. David is a high-school teacher, teaching science. His father Edward, also a widower, lives with the family. He is a professor dealing especially with chemicals. Edward has gone missing. It seems he is either lost or has been kidnapped, but when David makes enquiries nobody can say where he is – not even the laboratory where Edward works. But in a flashback, we are told that Edward was working on making perfumes. Edward notes: “Olfaction is chemical… The olfactory system is linked to limbic and paralimbic structures. What that means is that smell affects emotions. Empathy has a cognitive side – that is, understanding how someone feels – manifested in what is called the ‘theory of mind’, the ability to imagine what another person might be experiencing and thinking. But scents engage instead the emotional side of empathy – a sense of co-experiencing the feelings of others. Other studies suggest that the link between odour and empathy arises from common neural pathways that involved the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex and the madiodorsel thalamus. Smell through the right nostril correlated better with empathy than through the left.” [p.93] So what is empathy? Usually it means understanding, or trying to understand, how other people feel; and wishing to help them. But Edward realises he has created a perfume that could cause harm…. And then he has gone missing.

But this is only part of the dramatis personae. Alison Morris is working for a company, looking for  a new perfume… she has heard of Edward’s findings. Alison’s partner is Jim. Jim and his buddy Eli are into gaming. They are working on a video game called EmPath. Unlike other video games, this one does not revel in violence, but encourages players to negotiate with people in a peaceful way. At first Jim and Eli seem to be on to something and ready to make a fortune… but the game becomes unpopular, Jim’s supposed buddy Eli has done a bunk and Jim is left bankrupt as he cannot pay all the people who had funded his work.  To the close reader, this is an early warning that some people only claim to be empathetic – or that one can be easily be taken in by a smooth talker. Alison sees she and Jim really need money. Alison thinks more about the missing Edward’s findings. She wonders if there is any way she can benefit from them. She is able to find a vial of Edward’s latest perfume, realising that it is dangerous. But more sinister people are interested in the potion. Yes, there are more characters in the novel and yes, there are more twists, some dealing with real violence, but my code is firm: Do not give away all the twists and surprises in a new novel that the author had planned.

If we think this sounds merely a thriller, we are wrong. What makes this novel really sophisticated is Walpert’s being able to present what could be called a thriller, but he has the nous to also deal with real issues – one being the whole idea of empathy itself, and the misuse of science. Here members of corporations jockey for prestige,  often ignoring what is good for the public. What happens to be fashionable is not necessarily good  Consumers are sold supposed novelties as “new” when they rarely are… and when it comes to perfumes, they are concocted in a brew of many drugs of which the public is not aware.

I have only one small quibble with Empathy. After some violence, I think the denouement is a little glib – too easy perhaps. But that is a small matter.  Over the last twelve months I have written about the three best novels to come out of New Zealand. They are Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt, Becky Manawatu’s Kataraina, and now Bryan Walpert’s Empathy . Walpert’s  novel is informed by science, understands how science can be misused, knows the stresses families go through, and sees the limitations of empathy itself. Certainly a book for grown-ups

Something Old

 

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.     

“THE SCORPION GOD – Three Short Novels” by William Golding (First published in 1971)

 

Three novelle by William Golding were published together in one volume as The Scorpion God in 1971. They are The Scorpion God, Clonk Clonk, and Envoy Extraordinary. Envoy Extraordinary had been published earlier in a magazine in 1956. All three novelle are set in ancient times and in some way all are fables, as was the case in most of Golding’s earlier novels. However while two of these fables are serious, Envoy Extraordinary is more-or-less jocular. Later Golding turned Envoy Extraordinary into a play called The Brass Butterfly.

The Scorpion God is set in Egypt in very, very ancient times – about 3,000 B.C. Great House, meaning the Pharaoh, has to prove his strength regularly every seven years, or else the great river [the Nile] will not rise and the land will become barren. But he is ageing and is now clearly losing the ability to fulfil his ritual duties. His son, the prince, has to become a God and is referred to as a God. But the prince is very young [not yet a teenager] and does not want to become a God. Nor does he want to go through the ritual of marrying his sister Pretty Flower. Knowing he is ageing, Great House remembers that an earlier Pharaoh poison himself so that he could become immortal in the after-life. Should he do the same? But there is a character commonly called The Liar – a sort of court jester, but far more caustic – who knows more. Others do not believe him when he says that the land in which they live is only a small part of the whole world, and he speaks of mountains covered in snow. The river not only rises but it overflows. The Liar has to escape when he almost takes Pretty Flower as his wife. He is able to get through the deluge. Only on the very last page [p.62 in the copy I have]  does one of the soldiers chasing him gives the title of this novella. He describes The Liar as “Bleeding inside. He stings like a scorpion.” In the skies of ancient Egypt, there was a constellation known as the Scorpion, a violent god.

What exactly is Golding doing in this tale? It is known that he spent some time studying ancient Egypt in order to make his story credible, but there must be more to it than merely giving us an image of an ancient society far away. Like his novel The Inheritors, he is insisting that human behaviour is fairly consistent  - there is always ritual of some sort, there are always people who rebel against the status quo [The Liar] and such people are often threatened for seeing the world in a new way -  and there is always the threat of human violence.  Yet at the same time, there is a yearning for a force greater than human beings. Call it God if you will, but there it is.

            Clonk Clonk is a very different kettle of fish. As in The Scorpion God, Clonk Clonk had a profusion of characters with strange names, but even more so – and sometimes they are confusing, especially when one character is given many names. In Clonk Clonk there are characters with names like Bee Woman, Beautiful Bird, Stooping Eagle, Charging Elephant, Rutting Rhino etc. etc. The time is distant primeval times, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I have checked some pundits who assume that the story is set in Mesopotamia or on an island. But it is clear that the setting is somewhere in Africa, and as the society in question depends on warm pools (where they can clean themselves) it is clear that this part of Africa is in a volcanic area. For food, the men go hunting with their spears. The leopard is the animal they most hate. They pride in wearing leopard skins and putting up on poles leopard skulls. Meanwhile the women look for edible vegetation, prepare meals, and give birth. There are two main characters. The woman Palm is given many names. She is the woman who has the right to give names to new-born children and she has a role almost like a midwife. She longs to have children. She is something of a philosopher. She often refers to The Sky Woman – in other words the Moon – but she is beginning to understand that the Moon is simply another thing in the sky, not all mighty. Nevertheless she is fervent in keeping the right rituals. Much of the story takes place in moonlight. The other main character has become mockingly known as Chimp, because he failed to do well in one hunt and was injured.  In complicated ways, and to Chimp’s surprise, after much mocking him, Palm ritually takes him as her mate…. And she explains how men and women interact… at least that is how I interpret it. Once again, as in The Scorpion God , Golding explains the novelle’s title Clonk Clonk at the very end of the tale when Palm says “My ankle says clonk” adding “And I go clonk inside”. This suggests that she is pregnant, to her delight.

            Naturally Golding is considering the nature of human beings as they were and in many ways as they always will be, even after eons. Palm is acting as one who challenges what is taken for granted, and at least questions the environment she lives in. And the final pairing of Palm and Chimp have a tone of festivity. Human life goes on, harsh or sweet.

            So we come to the last novelle Envoy Extraordinary, which is partly tongue in cheek. As I noted above, this was written some years before the other two novelle. We are in ancient Rome. There are some political problems because the Emperor does not get on with his heir apparent, and this leads to some comedy and rivalry. But this is not the core of the tale. The Emperor’s confidante is an ingenious Greek, Phanocles, who is an inventor. Phanocles has persuaded the Emperor that the foreign idea of cooking in a [sort of] pressure-cooker is the best way to produce meals. Then Phanocles comes up with his brilliant idea of making use of steam to power ships. [At this point, although Golding never discusses it, it is true that in ancient Greece, some savants had worked out that steam could be used to make things move… but they never went further than using steam as a toy.] So Phanocles sets about creating a steam-ship, with paddle-wheels… It more-or-less works. Phanocles declares “I am altering  the shape of the world… there will be no slaves but coal and iron. The ends of the earth will be joined together”. But his hubris over runs him. There are problems, not only in the ship’s structure, and many explosions happen,  but sailors rebel. Even the slaves who row the ships rebel, asking what work will they be made to do if they were not in ships. Phanocles boasts that his ship will be faster than any other ship and will defeat any enemy fleet. But one bright person says “Suppose the enemy gets his own thunder-machine?” Reluctantly, the Emperor has to stop his friend Phanocles from going any further; and steam-ships are forbidden. But they remain good friends, walking in the Emperor’s garden, talking about philosophy and poetry… and [once again] William Golding waits until the very end when he tells us why this tale has its name. The Emperor  - discreetly wanting to get rid of him – he tells  Phanocles “I shall make you Envoy Extraordinary and  Plenipotentiary… I want you to go to China.” [Again for the record, ancient Rome vaguely understood there was a vast country in the Far East, but that was about as much they knew about it.]

            Golding is here basically having fun. There is that matter of hubris which he deals with in his novel The Spire – the man who is arrogant enough to think he knows better than the common crowd and the experts. But equally he is also suggesting that science takes a long time to develop… and science is sometimes misused. “Thunder-machines”, as one character calls them, could be far more destructive than what already existed. And surely warfare as we now know it is far more destructive than it ever was. As for the Emperor’s sending his friend off to China, I am sure Golding is nodding to the fact that in many ways ancient China was more sophisticated than most of Europe.  

            A bad tempered footnote: When I write about books, I read those books carefully. You do not have to agree with my verdicts; but I do not pretend to have read books that I have not read. I say this because increasingly I find students tend to look up precis and “notes” rather than sitting down and reading the book they are supposed to be studying. As you may be aware, “humanity” teachers at universities are finding it difficult to get students to read long books. What such students do not know is that the “notes” they often use are very simplified and erroneous. Example: Last week I ran (on line) into a hack telling students that  Golding’s novella Envoy Extraordinary was about a British official making a mess of things in Africa. Good luck to the students who use such information in an exam.

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.  

                                                THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY                               

I hate to say this, but it is clear that the word “empathy” has become a buzz-word and often means next to nothing.

Officially empathy means [or is supposed to mean] looking after other people, seeing other people’s point of view, sharing their feelings and perspective, understanding problems other people have, and helping them when they are in need. That is real empathy. Apparently some people seem to think this term is a recent thing, a break-through of understanding and psychology. But the same ideas have been around for centuries. “O wad some Power the giftie gie’ us / to see oursels as thers see us” as Robby Burns wrote. An old Christian prayer says “There but for the grace of God go I”, meaning that we should be aware of other people’s misfortunes and help them out. Others have turned it to “There but for fortune go I”  And of course we are often asked to “Walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes”.

But having noted this, the fact is that the term empathy now is often misused. The assumption is that the whole world will be a wonderful place if we only just agree on everything and be nice – real empathy, right? But that is not how the world works and that is not how human beings behave. Totalitarian states claim to be looking after everybody – so long as nobody disobeys… or else. Smooth politicians say they know what is good for everyone, but of course their opposition says otherwise. People, for all manner of reasons, disagree. Real democracy means allowing for dispute. Empathy might understand how other people are feeling… but their feelings may be nonsense.

Extreme empathy may lead to misjustice. A murderer and rapist may have committed many crimes. His life story may be one of poverty, a bad up-bringing, lack of education and no real understanding of the law. If you have any empathy you will understand why and how this criminal has become what he is. In fact you might begin to side with him [and this has happened in a number of well-known cases]. And here we go down the slope of sentimentality. Your empathy should also extend to the victims of crime. Indeed empathy over used can lead people to lose all proportion of what is not good for you. On top of this, there is the fact that many people are unreliable. XYZ may well be charming, apparently honest, and therefor trustworthy. You believe you have found somebody who is truly empathetic. But XYZ might in fact be taking advantage of you naivete. Good manners, smooth speaking and being agreeable do not necessarily make honesty. It is easy to pretend to be empathetic.

I am NOT therefore saying that we should be suspicious of everybody and always  question their motives. The world would be a very grim place if we did. There has to be faith in others or there would be no society at all. But as the word  “empathy” is now over-used, it has come to mean a vague lovey-ness, wanting to assume there is no real evil in the world.

I suggest that we set the word aside for a while, and replace it with the more robust word “compassion” … when it is appropriate.     

 

Something New

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

“It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka Press, $NZ25); “No Good” by Sophie van Waatdenberg (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99); “The Venetian Blind Poems” by Paula Green (Cuba Press,  NZ$20)

In this sixth collection, Nick Ascroft continues to write ironically, often tongue-in -cheek, sometimes flippant, but usually making acute observations on the mores and habits of  us human beings – as well as sometimes writing autobiographically.  He dedicates this collection to “For all the dead”. Ascroft very occasionally writes in traditional forms, such as the poems “Dire Dairy” and “Pig Magnet”, with their neatly blocked stanzas; but his habitual style is a sort of free-poetry in which he sometimes writes either lists or questions. And once or twice he deliberately writes in doggerel.

There are some major things that preoccupy Ascroft – death and sorrow; the awareness that life is short; the gradual decay of the human body; how the human brain works; and the attractions and pitfalls of sex. Only one poem, “Pig Magnet”, could really be called heroic – a long poem about the difficulties of getting his son to school via bus and the different moods that were felt in the ride  – but even here there is much irony.

How are the pitfalls of love and sex represented in this collection? The poem “The Centaur for Women” is introduced as  “… a 1990s fillum / featuring Al Pacino / as a blind centaur. / Whenever his nostrils / fill with the stench / of Gabrielle he neighs / a wild: Hooh-ah! Hoo-ah…” (the title parodies the Al Pacino’s film “Scent of a Woman”). The idea is that men are predators, easily aroused like centaurs and wildly preying on women…. yet often their conquests leave them. And in the poem “Dire Diary” there is a sense of scepticism about sex and love with lines like “Love is for young people with its / self-deceit and cross purposes. A young man in /  love may make us feel a bit sick, but the crush of / a middle-aged man makes us wince.” Yet the same poem gives us a credible analysis of love is seen by somebody who has had troubles with love. And “Which 1990’s Pin-Up Is Our Future Husband?” mocks teenagers [girls] who used to make a cult of apparent heart-throbs.

Death and human decay are addressed in many ways. “It’s What He Would’ve Wanted” where, tired of this common cliché, Ascroft verbally riots with one-liners about the many ways one could be buried or cremated.  “Fair-Weather Friend” is a kind of elegy for a dear friend; and “Pastiche for Mum”, which Ascroft says he read at his mother’s funeral, is a fond collection of odd things she used to do, presented jocularly. As for “Poem for Your Funeral 5”, it is more than flippant, and it is deliberately presented as doggerel in full thus: “When this guy lived he was a pain. / But now he’s dead and down the drain. / He used to drone, each story long, / how he was never in the wrong. / But now he’s dead, the bucket kicked, / his eyes look like eggs Benedict. / His lips are still. He can’t be heard. / And so I get the final word.”

And what of the general human condition? We are, suggests a poem, the “Beast That Needs to Be Tamed”. Sometimes we know that our mentality may be confused. The poem “Do You Hear Yourself?” has the line “There is something / you are unaware of your unawareness.” The poem “Another Poem with a Feather” could be despairing; and “Another Poem With a Found Father” concludes with the line “Another poem as useless at music as a penny whistle.” But then the body is as trying as the mind and the body gradually decays as it ages. Remembering this, there is a brief comment called “Old Farts” which is literally about old people farting. “Do You Wish to Continue?”, a poem made up of 12 questions, contains such lines as “Do you wish to continue squirming like a mortal?” And as one would hope, Ascroft has sone straightforward satire, as in “Dress Code” and “Opulence” wherein pretentious people try to keep up with what is fashionable; and “Bad Cookbooks”, a collection of 44 one-liners, laughing at, or being disgusted by, revolting meals.

This is a very varied and very readable collection. And though the poems about death could be seen as disrespectful, they are clearly telling us that death is inevitable no matter how we try to ignore it.

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No Good is Sophie van Waatdenberg’s debut collection of poetry, although many of her poems have featured in AUP’s New Poets in 2019. She lived and wrote for much of her lived in the U.S.A. and I believe [I could be wrong] that her parents came from the Netherlands. Her parents feature often in this collection. Waatdenberg’s style is in part almost classical. She writes in neat stanzas, preferring to produce either couplets or 14-liners which are almost sonnets. Her imagery sometimes borders on the surreal. More than anything, though, her No Good is a self-examination, or if you prefer, a psychological journey. Why did Waatdenberg call her collection No Good ? People who are depressed often feel, irrationally, that they are “no good” and much of this collection is built on that mood. Towards the end of the collection, we are given the poem that gives the title, “The Getting Away”. It reads in part “I’m moving out. Everyone does it. / Everyone turns their dining tables upside down/ to remove the legs.  Down the road, far from your life,/ opposite direction: I’m taking the nail scissors / and the best green leaves.   I’m ready for nothing, / smallhanded, tricked.  I’m rotten and roiled / and no good, truly – truly no good at all.”  Yes, there are moments of joy and desire, but the negative mood is always ready to jump out.

No Good is presented in three sections, and I’ll do my usual system of giving you a sort of synopsis.

First section Sophie van Waatdenberg opens with the “Poem in Which I am Good”, in which she asserts that she can be positive about her life, even if people she loved have died or disappeared and “Everybody I love will live forever”. Following this are poems about adolescent awkwardness; about childhood sharing a bedroom with a young man who “knew a lot / about philosophy, and he knew I thought philosophy was difficult / if not unnecessary…” and had eccentric and annoying attitudes.  There is uncertainty about her sexuality in “Hymn to Twee Possibility” as she considers a film about lesbians.  She and the people with whom she consorts are involved in raising crops and living simply where [in the poem “Propagate the ZZ Plant”] “you are doing such a good job for me / green monster of staying alive. All my friends / have left me to grow farms of their own…/…The rain is fat / like a grandmother’s kiss and we can’t go out / to be loved by anybody.”  As in so many of her poems, one has to ask if this is a metaphor for loneliness rather than a literal account of raising crops. Later she says “How can I spend life with myself…I do not want anyone to love me./ But then they don’t, why don’t they?” She seems to commit herself to being a lesbian, but even here she is ambiguous.

Second Section comprises 16 poems called “Cremation Sonnets” in which “my father was beautiful. His tipped chin / and factual smile, his elbow…”.  Her poems are not of rebellion against her parents, but chastises herself, telling us that she “took up swearing, walked home alone at night / with great cowardice” and also “How can it be my fault to get things wrong? / You died and I loved you, my life was over.”  In another context she asks “To where is your body going / and in what vessel?” This lament is not only for her father but perhaps also for others [it is not clear], but surely she is referring to her father when she writes “And every night and I mean every night / you’d tuck me in, grip the steel / of my wobbling bed and kiss me / how the Dutch do, thrice.”  There is much sense of guilt about family and perhaps of having lost their religion.

Third Section is made of ten poems of different moods. “Love Poem” is about her teenaged intimate love with another girl, presented as a happy memory. But also there are poems about being second best (the poem “Love Practice Weekend Four”); self-consciousness about eating (the poem “Doce”) and other showing how difficult it is to navigate personal relationships.

One can’t help admiring how candid her work is, but it is gruelling.

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Written in two halves, Paula  Green explains in her Endnote that the first, “The Venetian Blind Poems” was inspired when she had to be in hospital going through therapy and medicine to right a rare form of blood cancer. The second, “The Open Window”, has to do with how she saw the world when she was once again at home.  Each of these many poems is brief, making a statement, falling into revery.

“The Venetian Blind Poems” get their name from being in hospital where “The grey harbour slips through Venetian slats” and “I invent a sweet soundtrack to match / the harbour stripes” and “the world arrives in skinny bands”. There is the pain of her situation; and the drowsiness and lack of focus that comes with infusions she has to have; and some foods she is given are not really palatable. But in all this she gradually comes to appreciate more language and literature and “Living the moment is my way / of inhabiting the serene Lake of Good Thoughts”. Among other things, she appreciates some of the nurses and staff who look after her. She listens to podcasts of children’s stories. She dreams of plants and flowers and other soothing things; but she does have a “morphine nightmare” and “some days the pain is so / intense, like a clinging dressing / gown..” Yet after much trauma, she can face the day and like it.

“The Open Window” is placed in a very different mood. Here we can “Look at the wildflowers in the long grass / Look at the blue umbrella dripping spring / Look at the green hills and the kereru in the cabbage tree.” We see more clearly what is worth looking at, feeling at, liking at things that make life worth living, especially when we were younger… indeed images of childhood…. Or is this mere a fantasy? There are ideas of climbing mountains and “The mountain sleeps / but soon it will whisper / me awake with comfort chants.” Perhaps this section is dealing with recovery and getting used to the normal, although this is as much revelling in small and even mundane things when “We bake bread and we eat / We breathe and we feel” and “I am thinking after a bone marrow transplant. / I measure the world differently / today I watered the garden for the first time.” Often she refers to New Zealand women she knows who are poets, as she is, and lands where there is “…the sweet Lake of Calm…the rock of Contemplation… the river of Self Awareness… the Ocean of Belonging…”

Could all this be called confessional poetry? Not really. Even though much of this collection deals with very personal things, it looks closely at moods and dreams that are universal and it works towards a sense of calmness, even overcoming prolonged  trauma.