Something New

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

“HOME THEATRE” by Anthony Lapwood (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ30) ; “ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND POLICY IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND” Edited by Maria Bargh and Julie MacArthur (Auckland University Press, $NZ89:99)

 

There’s a major problem when it comes to reviewing collections of short stories – the reviewer is often tempted to give a string of synopses covering every story, but without making it clear what the overall tone and worth of the collection is. As you may know from some earlier postings on this blog, I’ve often been guilty of doing this.

I can easily avoid the problem by telling you straight away that Anthony Lapwood’s debut collection is at once outstandingly good and often tinged with a sense of melancholy. Rather than dragging you title by title through the whole collection, I’ll begin by looking in detail at what I think is Lapwood’s very finest and most accomplished tale.

The longest story in Home Theatre, “Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest” comes in at just under 50 pages, approaching the length of a novella. It has at once the broad perspective of a novel and the tightness of a short story. Bryce, an unhappy and disillusioned high-school teacher of Biology, is in a state of prolonged grief after the death of his wife. Lapwood does not simply state this fact, but dramatizes Bryce’s grief in terms of the disturbing dreams he has. Not quite nightmarish but deeply upsetting, they convey sheer desolation and the sense of loss; and Lapwood has the skill to weave them seamlessly in and out of the narrative. “Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest” gives a very vivid sense of the high-school, its staffroom gossip and pecking order, and all the irritations of both staff and schoolboys that exacerbate Bryce’s condition. The tale does not leave Bryce in isolation – the physical education teacher, the woman who seems to take a concerned interest in Bryce, the music teacher and the peremptory principal are all clearly characterised. The physical tattiness of both the school environment and Bryce’s urban apartment weigh us down like a bad conscience. Above all this, there is the psychological trauma – almost a nervous breakdown – brought on by Bryce’s awareness that he is gradually forgetting who and what his wife was; and with such thoughts come a crushing sense of loneliness, guilt and alienation from the world. With its fine attention to detail (clearly the fruit of close observation) this story really is a story, a narrative that moves on to unexpected events which are there for the reader to find. I do not think this is merely a good story. With its empathy, precision, tight structure and rich characterisation, it is a great story.

On the strength of “Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest” alone, Lapwood establishes himself as one of our best storytellers. But in saying this, I am not dismissing the other twelve stories that make up Home Theatre. There is much to savour and ponder in them too.

The whole collection has specifically Wellington settings. Most stories are linked in one way or another to a run-down Wellington apartment block  - the “home theatre” of the title - where at least some characters live. Most of them are people in straitened circumstances, people who have come down in the world, people who are desperate and can support themselves only in such a seedy low-rent building. You will note that there are some recurring characters who have a greater or lesser role in some stories. An astronomer from the Carter Observatory, called Ashton, appears a number of times. Some of the shorter stories are more-or-less realistic accounts of people in the apartment – the slacker who wants to work so long as it doesn’t require effort (“Jobs for Dreamers”); the single mother battling with an infestation of ants (“They Always Come for the Sweet Things”); the woman stuck in the apartment building’s clunky old lift (“It’s Been a Long Time”); the nagging that can go on between tenants in an apartment block (“Being Neighbourly”). But, as part of the blurb says, this is a “genre-bending collection”. Lapwood jumps into fantasy as often as he offers hard realism – but his fantasy is not gratuitous. These stories say as much about the human condition as the realist ones do.

Time travel is one element of fantasy, thrust at us in the opening story “The Source of Lightning” in which a time-traveller from the future (self-styled “chrononaut”) is stuck in a time loop in present day Wellington, having to play the same day over and over. This is not a mere riff on Groundhog Day. In fact its ethos is more like the classic film version of Frankenstein, in which repeated images of lightning suggest an energising, vivifying force. Lightning gives light as in the beginning of all things… and this train of thought links the story to another, “The Universe for Beginners”, a non-fantasy story in which a broken family visits an observatory where an exhibition on the Big Bang and Black Holes suggests a symbolic connection with the beginning and outcome of this broken family. Pushing further into fantasy, Lapwood’s eeriest story “The Ether of 1939” is set in a 1930s radio factory which is in what will one day become the tatty apartment block we have already visited. Lapwood is clearly aware of popular pseudo-scientific theories some people still held in the 1930s about radio waves interfering with the “ether”, or even being a medium connecting us with ghosts or the afterlife. That was how miraculous radio seemed to some at the time. But as in “The Source of Lightning” and “The Universe for Beginners”, this is not frivolous. In depicting a man and his environment in 1939, then connecting him with the first story in this collection, Lapwood is making implicit commentary on how mores have changed over more than 80 years.

One element in a number of stories is the homosexual condition. It is suggested in the opening story “The Source of Lightning”. It is understated in the not-quite-fully gay relationship of two young men in “Journey to the Edge”. There is a minor sub-plot about homosexual schoolteachers in “Provided with Eyes, Thou Departest”. But most importantly there is “The Ether of 1939” where a homosexual man in 1939 hears magically, through his radio, voices from the 21^st century suggesting how different attitudes towards gay men will be in the future.

And then there are even more perplexing ideas on how we communicate, or don’t communicate, with each other; and how uncertain our perception is. “The Difficult Art of Bargaining” has a deeply-unreliable narrator and suggests a degree of self-deception as much as deception practised on others. “A Spare Room”, one of Lapwood’s most-carefully-structured stories, really shows the total lack of communication between two people who think they are discussing the same issue – on the one side of the desk, the woman asking if she can have a larger apartment; and on the other side of the desk the bureaucrat whose mind is on other things.  As for the story which closes this collection, “Blue Horse Overdrive”, it brings us to territory where the  physical touches upon the psychological. Has the narrator, a rock singer, experienced some sort of hallucination, or has he simply seen objective reality? There is a fruitful ambiguity to this story, where the might of state-of-the-art medical practices (MRI brain scans) are pitted against subjective experience.

Despite my best efforts, I see I’ve lapsed into marching you through every title in the book. Sorry. Pensive, thoughtful and often melancholy as many of these stories are, Anthony Lapwood has created a whole world in this collection, with credible and believable characters even when presented in fantasy, with much room for thought, with close observation of human nature and with a fine sense of structure. An outstanding collection in every respect.

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

 

It sounds like something out of Monty Python to say “and now for something completely different”, but it’s quite a leap to move from a collection of short stories to a textbook for undergraduates on a specialised subject. But here I am moving from Anthony Lapwood’s Home Theatre to Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Maria Bargh and Julie MacArthur. Why did I read this academic work? Because I am interested in environmental matters in terms of sustainability, conservation and the preservation of endangered species. I’m very grateful to Auckland University Press for sending me a copy.

 Environmental Politics and Policy is a symposium of 18 detailed and referenced essays. Some of the essays are by single authors; some are co-written. There are 26 contributors in all, and it is interesting to note that women dominate – to be precise there are 19 women contributors and 7 men. Most of the authors are academics in the fields of law, Maori studies, ecological studies and politics, but some are journalists and activists in the field of conservation. Activism is encouraged. Between essays there a notes on “How to draft a submission”, “How to write a brief policy”, “How to write a press release” and of course “How to organise a protest”.

Without criticising the contents of this book, I do have to admit that reading my way through it over some weeks was a bit of a chore. It wasn’t the style in which it was written – there is not too much academic-speak, though inevitably some specialised vocabulary has to be explained. The trouble was the repetition. The same keys keep getting struck. In essay after essay we are told about the difference between Maori law and customs, and the law as set out by the government and governmental agencies. Repeatedly, too, we are told of the evils of colonialism, which brought the degradation of waterways, quality of land and habitats for indigenous species. Perhaps undergraduates, moving through the text over a whole semester, would not so readily notice the repetition. I, reading it over a few weeks, did notice.

In their introductory essay, the editors Bargh and MacArthur condemn neoliberalism, question “liberal capitalist states”, declare that the text “takes a systemic and holistic view” of the environment [that vague word “holistic” is always a problem for me] and, bowing to the Treaty of Waitangi, tell us that “biculturalism is a foundational aspect of Aotearoa, even while we recognise the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural composition of New Zealand society”. Well and good, except that there is a real tension between a bicultural concept and a multi-cultural reality. Their mode of thinking is reinforced by Professor Margaret Mutu’s essay “Environmental Ideas in Aotearoa” which is basically a primer on Maori words pertaining to legality and power, and which then becomes a polemic about the primacy of Te Tiriti o Waitangi – the Maori language version of the treaty – as the only legitimate version, and that therefore the concept of Maori sovereignty is still valid.

Continuing on the more polemical side of things, Elisabeth Ellis’s “Theorising Environmental Politics” argues that  European traditions – mainly beginning with that villain John Locke – separated nature from humanity and prioritised human needs over the whole environment. Nature itself was undervalued, and viewed as a commodity rather than a Ding an sich. Hence we should return to an indigenous way of being part of nature, and not exploiters of nature. Similar polemical arguments are found in Rod Oram’s essay “Regenerative Economics” which condemns market-driven economics and classic capitalism for ruining the environment; and in Maria Bargh and Tame Malcolm’s “Te Taiao and ‘Biodiversity’ ” which tells us that conservation and protection of species should be based on Maori criteria; and in the co-authored “Social Movements and the Environment”, where capitalism and colonialism are once again the villains and a “masculinist ideology” has driven much of the physical exploitation and degradation of the New Zealand environment. I could quote more essays in this vein, but I think you get the drift.

I’m afraid that at a certain point I find myself asking such questions as – if forms of capitalism, neoliberalism and colonialism are the great polluters, then how do you account for the huge and unchallenged environmental degradation wrought by Marxist states like the old Soviet Union and Mao’s China? I admit at once that this is the sort of Tu Quoque (or Whataboutery) argument which I have condemned before on this blog; and it may well be true that both capitalism and socialism or Marxism have an equally horrendous record in environmental matters. But at the very least I am pointing out that fingering only capitalism and neoliberalism makes for a very lop-sided critique.

And here is a further (and probably more contentious) objection. Repeatedly Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand tells us that the environment should be managed in a more pre-colonial and dominantly Maori way. Isn’t this simply an appeal to Arcadianism? Too much history has happened to rescind all the systems we now have relating to the environment. By all means clean the waterways [NB Jacinta Ruru’s essay on freshwater was apparently written before the controversy over “Three Waters” began], restore and de-pollute the wetlands, protect and ensure the proliferation of endemic species – but can you cancel that awful colonialist phenomenon of electricity (and all its generation) that lights and heats our homes? Approximately 5,000,000 people now live in New Zealand. In his essay “Farming and the Environment: The Long Legacy of Colonialism”, Hugh Campbell makes some valid points about the disappearance of forests and the polluting bovine run-off caused by farming. But when he sneers at the old “pastoral hegemony”, is he envisaging another nation-wide system to feed 5,000,000 people? To be curt, pre-colonial methods, catering for a much, much smaller population with distribution limited to small localities, wouldn’t do the trick.

In sum, Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand is an enlightening work when it deals with historical and environmental realities, but becomes strident when it pushes an ideology. Janine Hayward’s “Toitu te Whenua: Land, Peoples and Environmental Policies 1840 to 1980” is an excellent and orderly account of the impact of human beings on New Zealand since the 13^th century. It looks in detail at the loss of Maori land since the beginning of Pakeha settlement and takes the story up to the foundation of the Waitangi Tribunal. Valentina Dinica’s “Theorising Environmental Policy” is a very methodical work, categorising attributes of environmental problems and categorising the “actors” (interested parties) in framing environmental policies. Dory Reeves’ “Cities and Urban Planning” discusses crisply how urban planning can be harnessed to an environmentally sustainable future. And I don’t think anyone could plausibly refute the essays I haven’t mentioned concerning climate change, the impact of fossil fuels, and the oceanic pollution of plastics.

Long story short? Given that it is aimed at undergraduates, Environmental Politics and Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand will generate much discussion. But I also hope it will generate some challenges and arguments.

 

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 four or more years ago.     

“SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM” by T.E. (Thomas Edward) Lawrence. (Completed 1922; first published in a very limited edition in 1926; first pubic edition 1935)

 

 

 

            Read carefully this paragraph  which opens Chapter 56 of Book Five of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

            “ Now I had been four months in Arabia continually on the move. In the last four weeks I had ridden fourteen hundred miles by camel, not sparing myself anything to advance the war; but I refused to spend a single superfluous night with my familiar vermin. I wanted a bath, and something with ice in it to drink: to change these clothes, all sticking to my saddle sores in filthiness: to eat something more tractable than green date and camel sinew. I got through again to the Inland Water Transport and talked like Chrysostom. It had no effect so I became vivid. Then, once more, they cut me off. I was growing very vivid, when friendly northern accents from the military exchange floated down the line: ‘It’s no bluidy good, sir, talking to them fookin water boogers.’ ”

I take this paragraph to be typical of T.E. Lawrence’s prose style. There is some hard, sordid reality in the mention of hunger, the saddle sores, the filthy clothes and the vermin. This is credible and probably truthful. But there is also the self-praise and false modesty. He tells us he has ridden fourteen hundred miles “not sparing myself anything to advance the war”, and apparently he is capable of speaking like Chrysostom, although this reference could, like so many of Lawrence’s historical or pseudo-Classical references, be a “camp” joke to please fellow Oxonian readers. But it will serve to impress, as erudition, any of the hoi-polloi who might be reading. As for the hoi-polloi, well, they’re there to be caricatured, aren’t they? I understand that “bloody”, “fucking” and “buggers” were words that would have been difficult to publish in 1926. But Lawrence is signalling the inferior status of the “friendly northern accents” when he purports to report the words as “ ‘It’s no bluidy good, sir, talking to them fookin water boogers.’ ” Our social inferiors are good for comic effect, right? And we can always impress them by using recherche words. Why “vivid” instead of “livid”, by the way?

 

 

Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935) is a very contested book now. Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence apparently took copious notes during his Arabian service in 1917-18 and claimed he had worked them up into a full book by 1920. But, so the story goes, he lost most of this manuscript on a train so he had to begin again. (There is no real evidence that this “lost” manuscript ever existed.) He completed this overlong book in 1922, and allowed a very limited edition to be printed in 1926; but it was not released to the general public. Instead, by 1928, he produced a very much abridged version called Revolt in the Desert, which was published for the general public. The full text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published publicly only in 1935, a few months after the 46-year-old Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident. Its title is essentially meaningless, but is the type of title that appealed to Lawrence because it produced a spurious sense of gravitas. It is a quotation from the Biblical Book of Wisdom wherein “Wisdom has built her house on seven pillars”. Lawrence was going to use the title for a planned earlier book, when he was a rookie archaeologist and before he was involved in the war. It was going to be about seven great ancient Middle Eastern cities. That book was never written, so he carried this irrelevant title over to his war book. He tries a little feebly to justify it, as when the last Book of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is called “The House is Perfected”, concerning the capture of Damascus and the defeat of Turkish forces. It baffles me how on Earth anyone, even then, could have considered anything to have been “perfected”, what with the chaos and the endless disputes that followed the taking of Damascus. But, given that Seven Pillars of Wisdom is subtitled  “A Triumph”, Lawrence wanted to give his book a triumphant ending.

With an introductory chapter and then 10 “Books”, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an unnecessarily long work – running to over 700 pages in the fat de luxe editions, but running to only 560 pages in the 1976 edition I bought years ago: an unabridged edition with smaller print and more lines per page. In his ten “Books”, Lawrence gives a narrative that runs from the first suggestion that an “Arab revolt” could help the British army in fighting the Turks, to the taking of Damascus when the whole war was nearly over. In between there are Books on blowing up railway lines (especially Books 3 and 8); the taking of Aqaba in Book 4; a campaign using Arabs around the Dead Sea, which was ordered by the British General Edmund Allenby, in Book 7; and the way Lawrence’s Arabs were largely used as a diversion when Allenby’s regular forces advanced in Books 8 and 9. One gets used to Lawrence’s sometimes eccentric – or archaic – spelling. Aqaba is “Akaba”, Bedouins are “Beduins” and Beirut is “Beyrout”. But these might have been standard spellings at the time.

Now why am I examining this particular book?

Because, as so often with these “Something Old” sections of my blog, it has sat unread on my shelves for years and I decided finally that I should either crack it or throw it out.

In Lawrence’s lifetime, Seven Pillars of Wisdom was praised by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves and Winston Churchill as a true epic bound to become a classic. But it is very hard to see it in those terms now, not only because of Lawrence’s strained and pompous language, often indulging in unnecessary archaisms, but because of the way history has shown us that we now have to interpret very differently the political, social and nationalist topics that Lawrence touches upon. And we are more aware of Lawrence’s curious temperament and often his economy with the truth.

One major problem is Lawrence’s deeply-embedded racism. We are aware that many of his characterisations of other ethnicities were simply the standard attitudes of Europeans at the time he was writing. Even so, Lawrence’s racial prejudices are so strong that they distort his whole attitude towards the events he claims to be reporting. One lesser prejudice – but still notable – is his typically English dismissive attitude towards the French, as drawn in his dealings with the French Colonel Bremond, where he says that “the two races worked ill together on a great undertaking” (Book 2, Chapter 21); or where he blames the French and their military supremo Foch for the static trench warfare and its meat-grinder in Europe’s Western Front, claiming this “would not represent the British attitude” (Book 3, Chapter 33) – a rather clumsy way of extricating England from its own complicity in the nature of the war.

More pervasive, however, are his frequent slurs on non-Europeans. Syrians are “an ape-like people having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow” (Introductory Book, Chapter 4). He claims that half of Turkish prisoners taken by British forces had “unnaturally acquired venereal disease” and were habitual buggers (Introductory Book, Chapter 6). He tells us gleefully that many solitary Arab shepherds “turned dangerously savage, more animal than man, haunting the flocks, and finding the satisfaction of their adult appetites in them, to the exclusion of more licit affections.” (Book 3, Chapter 34). His general characterisation of the Bedouins [the very people he is supposedly helping to liberate from Turkish rule] is very dismissive: “They are absolute slaves to their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars of tobacco…. Their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation…If forced into civilised life they would have succumbed like any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation.” (Book 3, Chapter 37). He encounters a Syrian and characterises him as being “of the queasy Syrian race; jealous; hostile to merit, or to its acknowledgement”. (Book 4, Chapter 40). In Book Five, Chapter 58, Lawrence classifies all the tribes and ethnicities of the Middle East, speaking contemptuously of some of them.

Most notorious, however, is his rant about black Africans in Book 3, Chapter 29, where he writes “Something hurtful to my pride, disagreeable, rose at the sight of these lower forms of life. Their existence struck a servile reflection upon our human kind: the style in which a God would look on us; and to make use of them, to lie under an avoidable obligation to them, seemed to me shameful. It was as with the negroes, tom-tom playing themselves to red madness each night under the ridge. Their faces, being clearly different from our own, were tolerable; but it hurt that they should possess exact counterparts of all our bodies.” This is effectively a refusal to accept Africans as fellow human beings; and Lawrence’s statement that it “hurt” him to know Africans shared the same biological reality with Europeans shows us the depth of his neuroses. [For the record, the African-American novelist James Baldwin quoted these phrases – with justifiable disgust - in his long essay about American movies The Devil Finds Work]. In spite of his pretensions to be liberating Arabs, Lawrence still speaks in the voice of an imperialist, basically seeing all non-European tribes and peoples as his inferiors. Perhaps one could read the same dismissiveness into a sequence (Book 5, Chapter 63) where Lawrence claims to have had an epiphany as he listens to an old Arab man praise the love of God, and Lawrence reacts with surprise that an Arab can relate God with love. The narrowness of his vision has deprived him of the awareness that other peoples have systems of thought and belief as complex as his own.

If chronic racism turns this book into a museum piece rather than a living text, we are also aware of a strong strain of bad faith in Lawrence’s writing. In May 1916, before Lawrence was involved in his Arabian campaign, English and French diplomats has signed a secret agreement commonly known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. The agreement was ratified by cabinet ministers of the English and French governments. It set out the two countries’ real war aims in the Middle East. France would control Lebanon and Syria while England would control Palestine and all of Arabia, allowing Britain to take all the oil which it sought. (Tsarist) Russia was also promised some spoils by the agreement. The idea of Arab independence was not on the cards. This secret agreement was first made public at the end of 1917 by Russia’s new Soviet government, who hoped to embarrass the Western allies. Although he repeatedly denies it, Lawrence was fully aware of the Sykes-Picot agreement before he even began on his enterprise of stirring the Arabs into revolt. In other words, he was aware, even as he was inciting his Arab forces to fight for their liberation, that England and France already had in place their scheme to carve up the Middle East between them.

At various points in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence rather unconvincingly pleads his innocence. His Introductory Chapter claims “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make the likeness of the former world they knew.” But remember, this is an ex post facto claim, written after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. Lawrence claims to have believed that “the vigour of the Arab Movement would prevent the creation – by us or others – in Western Asia of unduly ‘colonial’ schemes of exploitation.” (Book 2, Chapter 21). In Book 4, Chapter 48 he shows that he was fully aware of “a treaty… by which France, England and Russia agreed to annex…. promised areas [i.e. areas promised to the Arabs] and to establish their respective spheres of influence over the rest…. I could see that if we won the war the promises to the Arabs were dead paper. Had I been an honourable adviser I would have sent my men home, and not let them risk their lives.” But he then claims “In revenge I vowed to make the Arab Revolt the engine of its own success… and vowed to lead it so madly in the final victory that expediency should counsel to the Powers a fair settlement of the Arabs’ moral claims.” So, he ingeniously claims “the issue of the fraud was beside the point.” In Book 6, Chapter 81 he manages to block out the reality of what he is doing so that he can pretend he is not working in the interests of British (and French) colonialism:  “When necessary, I had done my share of proselytizing fatigues, converting as best I could; conscious all the time of my strangeness, and of the incongruity of an alien’s advocating national liberty. The war for me was a struggle to side-track thought, to get into the people’s attitude of accepting the revolt naturally and trustingly.  I had to persuade myself that the British Government could really keep the spirit of its promises.” He admits his military failures at the end of Book 7, Chapter 90, adding how fatigued he was by “the rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind’s habit: that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress: with behind it a sense that the ‘promises’ on which the Arabs worked were worth what their armed strength would be when the moment of fulfilment came. We had deluded  ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply.” One discovers that much of Book 9 is taken up with his misgivings and disillusion, frequently seeing himself as a fraud… and by this stage in his stretched narrative admitting that the war against the Turks was overwhelmingly won by the regular British and Commonwealth armies, and not by his small and relatively peripheral Arab force. “Among the Arabs I was the disillusioned, the sceptic, who envied their cheap belief,” he says in Book 9, Chapter 99. “Yet I cannot put down my acquiescence in the Arab fraud to weakness of character or native hypocrisy: though of course I must have had some tendency, some aptitude for deceit, or I would not have deceived men so well, and persisted two years in bringing to success a deceit which others had framed and set afoot,” he says in Book 9, Chapter 100.

Much of this reads as public breast-beating, to absolve himself from the fact of having knowingly misled his Arab followers with an idea of Arab independence which he knew would not be fulfilled. 

 

If his deep racism and his bad faith are what most alienate the modern reader from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, there are other major problems. Lawrence has a tendency to praise himself while pretending to be modest – “backing into the limelight” in effect. A typical example is at the end of Book 7, Chapter 86, where he is talking about a skirmish which he and his forces had won: “Headquarters loved it, and innocently, to crown the jest, offered me a decoration on the strength of it. We should have more bright breasts in the army if each man was able without witnesses, to write out his own despatch.” Note how he brushes off as a “jest” having been given a medal, the better to show how little he cared for decorations… but [his real aim] he has still told us that he won a medal.

With one exception, there is little real humour in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, apart from accounts of crude horseplay and Lawrence’s joshing with Arab troops. The exception is in Book 6, Chapter 78 where Lawrence tells us that he failed to blow up a train and then had to stay in place, pretending to be an Arab peasant and in full sight, as the train rolled past him with Turks waving in a friendly way as they passed, rather than shooting him. Yes, it is funny although of course it is also self-praising – here is Lawrence the Englishman with his sang froid, stoically riding out the moment when he should have been a sitting duck.

Or did he so behave? For there are many stories he tells that sound very like fiction. Take the very implausible tale he spins in Book 4, Chapter 53 of somersaulting over his camel in the midst of a skirmish and lying calmly where he fell, reciting a poem. Sometimes, too, he appears to tell a detailed story to disguise a failure. In Book 2 Chapter 26, he tells us of the impressive column of various tribes he had assembled, all swearing fealty to Feisal, the man whom he had picked out as the most capable leader of a potential Arab revolt; but he uses this event – the gathering of the tribes -  to make excuses for arriving late to what was supposed to be a combined operation with the navy against the Turks. Because Lawrence’s contingent was late and did not turn up to the confrontation, the whole enterprise was carried out by the navy on its own. The reader is also often aware of how “performative” [to use a modern term] is so much that Lawrence narrates. He tells the story of how, in order to prevent a blood feud,  he had to kill an Arab who had killed somebody from another tribe [this episode was played up in David Lean’s often purely fictitious film Lawrence of Arabia]. But read Lawrence’s account of this execution (last paragraph of Book 3, Chapter 21) and you see he concentrates on himself and his feelings – a piece of sheer theatricality.

Warfare is always a bloody affair and always involves violence and murder. It is certainly true that, in the Middle East in the First World War, Turkish forces committed atrocities. Lawrence records one in Book 4 Chapter 52, where Turks cut the throats of old men, women and children whom they found in an otherwise deserted village. The problem is, though, that there is a distinct element of sadism in some of Lawrence’s own actions, involving what amount to atrocities in two cases. In Book 4, Chapter 51 he writes in a flippant tone about allowing the mutilation of a herding boy, who might have given the alarm to the Turks, when his men crossed the boy’s fields. He does nothing to restrain the Arabs, who are presumably under his leadership, when they massacre men and women after a train has been derailed. (Book 5, Chapter 66) Most egregiously in one case he personally permitted the killing of prisoners. Taking a Turkish position “by my order, we took no prisoners, for the only time in our war.” (Book 10, Chapter 117). Early in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence remarks “I hated responsibility… in all my life objects had been gladder to me than persons, and ideas than objects”. (Book 2, Chapter 17). Doesn’t this at once suggest somebody indifferent to other people?

And now we come to the element in this narrative which makes elderly colonels harrumph and get angry at the thought that such matters should be mentioned in relation to that great icon Lawrence of Arabia. It is quite clear that Lawrence’s sexual tendencies were homosexual – a matter in itself which should no longer be seen as a moral fault. I do not write this as a matter of idle speculation. I am here considering what Lawrence’s own text either says or implies. And in considering his sexual orientation, I can only conclude that in Lawrence’s particular case his homosexuality also involved a degree of paedophilia and certainly some sadomasochism. Readers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom will know that it is prefaced by a poem (actually a prose statement by Lawrence teased into a “poem” by Robert Graves). The “poem” is addressed to “S.A.” who has almost certainly been identified as the adolescent Arab boy Selim Ahmed who was part of Lawrence’s Arab entourage. Consider if you will the lines “Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, / Our brief wage / Ours for the moment.” I won’t insult you by spelling out what this means.

Lawrence has a predilection for telling us about the homosexual habits of young Arab men. In Book 1, Chapter 1 Lawrence refers to Arabs who refuse to use “public women” to slake their lust “our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies… Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort.” Note their male bodies are “clean” as opposed to the bodies of women. And again, do I really have to spell out the meaning of “supreme embrace”?

In Book 4, Chapter 40, Lawrence speaks of two young Arabs in his entourage thus: “They were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent, they were hot and unashamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation, like marriage.” So obviously, selon Lawrence,  marriage (between men and women) is less spiritual than – and therefore inferior to – relationships between men.

As for sadomasochism, consider Book 6, Chapter 80. It gives a detailed account of Lawrence, caught out in a spying mission, being tortured and nearly raped by a Turkish Bey and his men. Lawrence does not say that he was anally raped. That was something he claimed privately in a letter to George Bernard Shaw’s wife, but obviously he decided to keep this detail from readers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Even so, there is an odd sadomasochist twist to this chapter. He says he was kicked, beaten and otherwise tortured. But when a corporal had him down and kicked him “I remembered smiling at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me; and then he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin.” Getting an erection while being beaten up - isn’t this almost a textbook example of sadomasochism?

It would take a psychiatrist to unpick all the curious kinks there were in Lawrence’s psyche. There is a curious dichotomy in him of “purity” and willed degradation, and despite his masochistic tendencies he had a curious horror of being touched. As he says in Book 8 Chapter 97: “When combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand, I was finished. The disgust of being touched revolted me more than the thought of death and defeat: perhaps because one such terrible struggle in my youth had given me an enduring fear of contact: or because I so reverenced my wits and despised my body that I would not be beholden to the second for the life of the first.”

By now, if you are not yet asleep, you will note that I have marked T.E.Lawrence as a racist, a man working in bad faith, a boaster pretending to modesty, a potential sadist and a man with a deeply-troubling sexual identity. But before you cry “foul”, please note that I am drawing all these conclusions from Lawrence’s own words. If you wish to dispute what I’ve said, then I invite you to read all of Seven Pillars of Wisdom yourself and check the evidence, tedious though reading the book is.

Yet after the aforementioned things I have said, I still acknowledge that, for all his flaws and probable untruths, Lawrence did achieve something and did help create a force that had a small but interesting part in the defeat of what remained of the Turkish Empire. Bear in mind too that in 1917-18, when all his interactions with Arabs took place, he was only in his late twenties. It is extraordinary that such a young man and a foreigner was able to gather together the Arab force he did.

It is fair to notice, too, that he does not praise only himself. He acknowledges other people involved in the war in the Middle East. In early sections of the book, he thanks many British officials and soldiers who formulated the idea of an Arab revolt before he was involved in it, and he does note that the strategy of blowing up Turkish railway lines was already in place before he himself adopted that strategy. In Book 5 he gives credit to two sergeants, an Australian called Lewis and an Englishman called Stokes, for their major role in an attack on a Turkish train. And especially in Book 5, Chapters 60 and 61 he gives accounts of other explosives experts who contributed to disrupting Turkish lines of supply. He also shows awareness that the war in the Middle East was won by British and Commonwealth troops, especially in the last book, Book 10. Lawrence’s Arab followers did sabotage work in the later stages of the war (cutting telegraph wires; blowing up bridges) but they were merely auxiliaries to Allenby’s forces, and RFC aircraft carried out the most important bombing raids. Nearly always, he speaks in admiring terms of General Allenby, although this may have been in the interests of getting approval for his work. (Allenby was still very much alive when Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published. He died in 1936, one year after Lawrence died.) In Book 6, Chapter 81, Lawrence says that for him, Allenby’s entering the Jaffa Gate (in Jerusalem) “for me was the supreme moment of the war.” In Book 5, Chapter 56, Lawrence writes a positive assessment of Allenby when he met first him, though he does interestingly admit that in assessing Lawrence “Allenby could not make out how much [I was ] was genuine performer and how much charlatan.” Many others have had the same uncertainty about Lawrence ever since.

Also, despite all his evasions and literary dandyism, he does produce some convincing reportage of travel, as in the account of a hard desert journey (Book 4, Chapter 42); or the sequence, on the road to Aqaba, of eating greasy rice, freshly-killed onyx and antelope flesh (Book 4, Chapter 46). Likewise, he does note some of his military failures, especially in Book 6 (“The Raid Upon the Bridges”) where he focuses on a failed attempt to blow up bridges that would have prevented any tactical Turkish retreat and that would have allowed Allenby’s forces to trap the Turks earlier. And, perhaps most refreshing of all, in Book 4 he does admit that the taking of Aqaba was essentially a walk-in upon a small Turkish garrison - quite unlike the heroic image of an Arab horde galloping from the desert to the sea, as seen in David Lean’s spectacular movie.

How does history now judge Lawrence’s actions? Ambiguously, I would say. In some ways he was courageous, in others devious and disingenuous. With regard to the historical results of his actions, it is hard to see that he improved the Middle East in any way. As for Seven Pillars of Wisdom itself, it is no classic but a document of its time whose historical truths have to be picked out from a mess of pretentious prose, much obfuscation, a muddled and overlong narrative, and the author’s sense of self-importance.

I wish you luck if you try to read it.

 

 

 

Something Thoughtful

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

                                       FINGS AIN’T WOT THEY USE’TA BE

 

32 years ago, we moved into the suburban house where we still live. It’s a two-storey house with a very high gable, and big enough to accommodate our larger-than-average family. But there were two things we didn’t like about it.

One was the fact that an open balcony allowed rainwater to drip into the dining room below – so we promptly had the balcony covered by a glass structure which turned it into a conservatory.

The other problem was the dark olive-green colour in which the house was painted, and the fact that the house clearly hadn’t been painted for many years. Paint had peeled off and you could see the original primer in some places. So my plucky wife and plucky I set about painting it – first the sanding, then the priming, then first coat followed by second coat. At my age now, it amazes me that we did all this, especially as we spent half the time balancing perilously on extension-ladders with a big drop beneath us. But despite painting the upper storey, we simply could not reach the very high gable, so there remained a tatty dark olive-green patch at the very top. Otherwise, we had transformed the house with a very much paler green paint.

About fifteen years ago, we decided it was time to paint the house again, but this time we knew we were no longer cut out for balancing on long ladders. We paid to have the house water-blasted, then we painted the lower storey. But for the upper storey we hired professional painters. Unlike us, they could reach the apex, so the last trace of dark olive green was obliterated. But these professionals still relied on long extension ladders to reach the heights, with much skilful balancing and daring feats of reaching as far as a ladder-borne arm could reach. We were glad not to be up there.

This year, we decided it was time to have the house repainted again, always choosing the same pale green tint that we chose 32 years ago. And here it proves that fings ain’t wot that use’ta be. Under current health and safety laws, painters can no longer balance on long ladders to paint upper storeys. Scaffolding has to be used. So after the water-blasting and before two professional painters arrived, in came a crew of scaffolding men who surrounded the house on all sides with heavy scaffolding.

I won’t say it was exactly like a siege, but when I looked out my study windows I could see new elevated walkways just below my nose. We had to carefully manoeuvre our way between heavy piping to get through both back and front doors. This was particularly tricky when coming home at night. As for our elderly cat, now teetering on the edge of feline senility, she went berserk, meowing even more pitifully than she usually does these days, at the sight of her house being deformed by this additional structure. One day she ran away. The next day she was seen sneaking along the fence-line in the back yard and looking suspiciously at the house that was not as it should be. Finally she settled for spending whole days squeezed behind an armchair in my study, her favourite skulking place when there is an electrical storm. She had somewhere to block out the thought of this horrible domicile transformation.

The painters did an excellent job. The exterior of the house has been renewed. We haven’t yet decided if we will ever have it painted again. The scaffolding was taken down in remarkably short time – but a very large part of the bill we paid went on the scaffolding. I’m still teetering on a mental ladder, trying to balance current safety rules against the additional costs that they require. But I suppose house painters don’t deserve to die of falls.

 

Something New

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

“THE FISH” by Lloyd Jones (Penguin Books, $NZ36) ; “GRAND – Becoming my mother’s daughter” by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin Books, $NZ35) 

 

Question: When is a fish not a fish?

Answer: When it is a symbol of… something, but I know not what.

In Lloyd Jones’ latest novel The Fish, we are presented with a very real New Zealand family into which is inserted an element of fantasy, or perhaps an element of nightmare.

Like nearly all Jones’ novels, The Fish is told in the first person by (in this case) a narrator who is never given a name.

Let’s call him Narrator.

Late in the novel Narrator says he is in “late middle-age” and perhaps we could see all his memories as retrospective, but the tale begins in his childhood. When Narrator is nine years old, his grown-up sister Carla is hustled off to Sydney for reasons the little boy doesn’t understand. From childhood to young adulthood, Narrator writes to Carla, seems to idealise her, and believes she has a glamorous career as a model.

Quite different is his other sister who is also never given a name. She is aggressively fixated on sex. Other sister at one point taunts the little boy Narrator with her naked body, and little boy Narrator is also drawn into seeing a couple shagging in a car. He has a primitive understanding of what sex is about. Other sister leaves home and lives in a caravan in a caravan park. Other sister entertains many men in her caravan.  She also, later in the novel, becomes a “boat girl” (prostitute working the wharves), takes drugs, blacks out and at various times is institutionalised. In Narrator’s mind there is clearly a dichotomy of idealised sister far away, and degraded (or degrading) sister nearby. But most important about other sister is that from one of her boyfriends (or clients?) she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Fish. She is thenceforth called only “Fish’s mother” by Narrator.

What is Fish? We are told that he has scales and gills and protuberant eyes and a blubbery mouth, can swim far and fast and leaves a horrible fishy smell wherever he goes. At least so we are told by Narrator. But as Fish grows up, we are also told that he can ride a bicycle, dance (if ineptly), do gymnastics, sort-of read and write, can sit transfixed by television like any other boy, play chess brilliantly and later is adept at running a scrap yard.

So is Fish fish or…um… flesh?

The whole concept of Fish troubles me. I can accept the transformation of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa into an insect because he so fully becomes an insect (see my take on Metamorphosis elsewhere on this blog). But Fish is never quite one thing or the other. Narrator’s flawed-but-forbearing parents see Fish as somewhat strange but treat him as a human boy and adolescent. Other people in the novel react in the same way. So what is Lloyd Jones attempting to achieve by creating this very ambiguous character?

I thought I had sorted out this problem in the earlier parts of the novel. As I interpreted it, the presentation of Fish really represents older siblings (or in this case a young uncle Narrator) and the way they often react to babies or younger siblings. After all, babies are smelly especially when their nappies are changed, they make a lot of noise, they might seem strange to children as they feed at a mother’s breast, they disrupt an older child’s accepted dynamic of family life and – perhaps worst of all – they take up a lot of the attention that the older child might have expected to be his. They are, to the child, alien, as if they were another species. If seen in these terms, then very, very unreliable Narrator is the envious child who has an extreme form of sibling rivalry (even if he is an uncle) to the point of referring to Fish as “it” and refusing to give Fish’s mother a name. Given that the story is set in the 1950s and 1960s, Narrator’s attitude could also have been influenced by the whispering of his parents about the fact that (oh, the shame!) Fish was born out of wedlock.

My theory seemed a very good one and of itself made a coherent story. But it simply can’t hold for the rest of the novel where, right up to the time when Narrator is a university student, Fish remains Fish or “it” and Fish’s mother remains Fish’s mother. Only very late in the day does Narrator accept Fish’s given name Colin.

So what is Fish and what is the point of Fish? In fact, does the author himself know?

The Fish is laced with stories related to the sea, to coasts and to mythological sea creatures. Narrator’s family live near the sea and often walk on the sand dunes. Narrator is given a copy of Moby Dick when he is a child. Later Narrator reads Robinson Crusoe to Fish. Fish’s mother runs away and Fish does a lot of swimming in his quests to find her. In the 1960s, there is a bizarre scene where Narrator’s parents visit leader-of-the-opposition Norman Kirk seeking police help in finding their missing daughter. There is a single death by drowning in the family, and to cap it all there is a long narrative of the 1968 sinking of the Wahine and many deaths by drowning. Through Fish, are we being asked to consider the nature of sea creatures and thus to consider the limitations of us human beings? I don’t know. Does Lloyd Jones?

Some of Jones’ familiar preoccupations are here. As in his autobiographical History of Silence, there are the strained relationships within a family – and I note that Narrator, as a child, loves bouncing a ball off a wall, just as young Jones apparently did. Narrator is also a youngest child, as Jones was. As in his Hand-me-down World, there are the problems with communication, like Narrator’s letters to his sister Carla and her letters back, and like the difficulties in communicating with Fish. Communication can also be deceptive, for as he matures Narrator discovers that his sister Carla is not the paragon he thought she was, that she might be living by “professional boyfriending” (i.e. prostitution) and that much she has written to him is false. And of course there are references to the power of story-telling and literacy and reading – the core concepts of Jones’ Mister Pip. How autobiographical are the following statements by Narrator? : “I was nine when I wrote my first letters. And sixteen when I stopped for good. But I didn’t stop writing. I don’t think I could have if I wanted to. It would have been like and order to stop breathing….”. And “It is here that I have come to make a start on writing a story. I am not sure what it is about. Is it about a freak or about concealment or shame?” (p.119) Self-referencing though it is, the last sentence here almost forces us to choose the latter option. “Concealment and shame” was what fuelled History of Silence.

Crowded with ideas and images though it is, I found The Fish to be a muddled work where the author seemed not to have found the particular target he wanted to hit. Allegory? Satire? Fantasy? Social comment? They’re all over the place.

 

Footnote: As a rule, I consider only the book itself that I am reviewing, and pay no attention to what other reviewers are saying. However, I was struck by the review of The Fish that Paula Morris wrote for Newsroom (28 February 2022). On the whole, she appeared not to approve of the novel. She was very astute in pointing out the novel’s many anachronisms for a story set in the 1950s and 1960s and she spent some time noting all the mythological sea-creatures references Jones deployed (more than I had noticed) as well as suggesting more relevant mythologies that Jones could have referenced. She also suggested that there was a misogynistic streak in the novel, given that all the women characters are presented negatively (including patient Mum who seems to lose her mind). She might have a point there. 

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

I’m not unique in noting that confessional and very personal memoirs by women are a current trend in New Zealand publishing. In the last two years alone, I have reviewed on this blog Caroline Barron’s Ripiro Beach (about medical trauma), Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book (about family trauma) and  Rosetta Allan’s Crazy Love (thinly disguised as a novel, but an autobiographical account of the author’s wilder youth and her most challenging dilemma as an adult.)

            There are now many others of similar genre.

Best known in New Zealand as a radio broadcaster, Noelle McCarthy takes a rather different approach in Grand – Becoming my mother’s daughter. True, there is a running battle between daughter Noelle and mother Caroline (or Carol), who is generally called Mammy. But this is as much love-hate as anger. It comes to a sort of reconciliation and the author’s admission of how much she herself is like her mother. This is not a memoir that beats up parents.

Grand is structured as a series of Noelle’s childhood, adolescent and early-adult memories fired by the news that Mammy is dying of cancer but refuses radiation therapy or chemo. Noelle hops on a plane in New Zealand and rushes back to Cork in Ireland, her original home, so that she can connect with Mammy while she can. And the memories flow as we hop between “present” and past.

What’s soon clear is that Mammy had more trauma in her life that her daughter did. Mammy had two children out of wedlock – one possibly the result of rape -  in an age when such birth was shameful (in many countries, not just in Ireland). One child died shortly after birth and the other was adopted out. This was before Mammy married a steady man and had four more children, the eldest being Noelle. Of Mammy, Noelle comments “Day by day, she is a mother of three, then four, children, married and decent. But there is nothing she would hold her tongue about when drinking” (p.31) And obviously one thing that Mammy often laments in her cups is the loss of her first two children.

The McCarthy family did not live in dire poverty. Father was a plumber usually in work and making respectable earnings, somewhere in the upper working-class or lower middle-class bracket. Things were sometimes strained. Even so, Noelle was able to get into a high-school that mainly took in the daughters of the wealthy, and she sometimes felt barbs of snobbery. She was invited into her classmates’ prize homes, but was encouraged by Mammy never to invite girls back to her own modest home. It would be too shaming. Despite this, Noelle flourished in the school which taught a solid syllabus and she excelled in public-speaking competitions. Later she made it into university, got a Bachelor degree, but then lost interest in study and never completed the thesis that would have earned her an M.A.

As for her rebelliousness in adolescence, it was a run of minor or foolish misdemeanours. One or two episodes of shoplifting. Getting drunk with her schoolmates. Getting so blotto at one party that she threw up. And of course first sex.

            But the main issue is the ongoing struggle between strong-willed, devoutly Catholic mother and strong-willed daughter. Born in the 1970s, Noelle McCarthy was not of an older  Ireland where clergy were dominant. There’s no clerical scandal in this memoir and Noelle respects her mother’s religion, and of course is part of it, even if she gradually moves away from it. What divides them is alcohol and her mother’s over-use of it. When her husband is at work and not available for baby-sitting, Mammy regularly drags her children along to pubs,  drinks heavily, and often makes a fool of herself. At home her drinking leads her to shout angry rants or lachrymose wailing over her lost children. On one occasion Noelle has a physical fight with Mammy to prevent her going to a school event when she thinks Mammy’s public drunkenness would shame her. The teenaged daughter often pours mother’s booze down the sink and in one case smashes a bottle. Rows ensue.

            There are other things daughter sees as provocation. Mammy has the habit of buying her inappropriate presents. She also has the habit of scouring charity shops for things she doesn’t need, in effect filling the house with junk.

            It isn’t as if Mammy is totally unhelpful. Mammy had training as a nurse. When, at 13, Noelle begins to menstruate, Mammy gives her appropriate advice on the use of tampons instead of the old sanitary pads. When, after casual sex, young Noelle fears she has been impregnated, Mammy gives her advice of contraception.

            After walking away from university studies Noelle meets a New Zealander who encourages her to emigrate. She leaps at the opportunity and doesn’t see Ireland again for another 20 years. Within three years of landing in New Zealand, after waitressing and working for student radio, she snags a good position in broadcasting, hosting an afternoon show. [I remember enjoying on air her cheerful and forthright Irish voice.] But she also parties, parties, parties in Auckland, stays out at night drinking, wakes up most mornings hungover and becomes a serial drunk. Her drinking gets reported in the gossip columns. She knows she’s losing it when her laptop goes kaput because of all the red wine she’s spilt over the keyboard and she gets nervous twitches while broadcasting. She loses her job as a broadcaster.

Irony of ironies, she realizes she’s become just like the mother whose boozing embarrassed her. Finally admitting she herself is an alcoholic, she dries out, but it takes six months before she feels healthy again. She says “People think that when you stop drinking , things get better. They don’t. They get worse to begin with. Of course they do. I am bare, flayed, missing a layer.” (p.147) She signs on to Alcoholics Anonymous and follows its 12-step programme for a decade.

And there’s another way she feels more like her mother. She has gone through various lovers.  (She’s of a generation where, for some, serial cohabitation is the norm.) But now, when she plans to go on a date, she reflects “I’m admitting I want this: a partner, a home, a family eventually. I used to look down on people who dared to work towards this stuff. I laughed at everyone who was unironic about all the things that adult life requires: showing up for someone else, being faithful, paying taxes….” (p.162) In straightening out, she meets and marries a nice guy called John and they have a baby girl when she is 37. She now has the responsibilities of a mother. Just like her mother.

The bland synopsis I have given you is only a raw outline of Grand – Becoming my mother’s daughter. The book is more complex and nuanced than I might have suggested. Noelle McCarthy’s siblings (a sister and two brothers) are given minor roles. Her father gets some display and it is clear there was some trauma in the lives of her father’s parents, including a suicide. Aunties and uncles and old family friends buzz in and out of the narrative in their garrulous Irish way. But McCarthy is very focused on the mother-daughter dynamic. It takes more than realising she is her mother’s daughter for Noelle to be reconciled with Mammy. Even when she returns to Ireland as Mammy is dying, sparks still fly between them. Only when Mammy dies do tears fall and Noelle realizes what she has lost.

Grand is lively, vivid and exuberant in its prose. Its language and precise recording of detail catch the smells and sights of Cork and bring to life family gatherings and barneys and clannishness. We know what sort of food they eat, what sort of sweets the kids are given, what state the house is in, what the family’s codes and inherited catch phrases are. Noelle McCarthy gives the specifics of time and place and behaviour. She writes fluently. She is never short of words. I want to avoid ethnic stereotypes, but this is close to the confident Irish speaking known as blarney. There is a refreshing honesty to it. A grand read.