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Paddy Doyle's 'The God Squad'. Some Reflections.

28/5/2017

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The God Squad, in which Paddy Doyle recounts his life up to his eventual marriage, was first published in the late 1980s. Doyle, who later became a prominent advocate for disabled people’s rights, describes the book as being about ‘a society's abdication of responsibility to a child.’ 

His mother died when he was four years old and not long afterwards his father hanged himself. He has a young sister who is also taken into care elsewhere and they meet rarely until they are older. His only other relatives are a single uncle and an elderly aunt, who feel unable to look after him, and so he is put into an ‘industrial school’ run by nuns. (Industrial Schools were set up in the UK, of which Ireland was then a part, in the Victorian period, and they persisted in Ireland after independence even though they were abolished in the UK in 1933). The regime there was harsh (as was often the case then, and not only in Ireland) and the head of the school, Mother Paul, does not believe in sparing the rod. While at the school he develops what is later diagnosed as a progressive neurological condition. He is transferred to a local hospital, then to one further away when his condition continues to baffle his doctors, and later still to another where he undergoes several operations. Only towards the end does he find himself on a ward with other children until he is eventually placed in a school where he can resume his education and make friends.

Apart from his time in the Industrial School he is not overtly badly treated, except perhaps by omission, and he remembers some of the doctors and nurses (both nuns and lay staff) with affection. His misery now has more to do with the series of operations he has to undergo, his loneliness compounded by the absence of other children. The story is sad enough as it stands, but I was surprised by this blurb in later editions of the book.
Paddy Doyle's prize-winning bestseller, The God Squad, is both a moving and terrifying testament of the institutionalised Ireland of less than fifty years ago, as seen through the bewildered eyes of a child. During his detention, Paddy was viciously assaulted and sexually abused by his religious custodians, and within three years his experiences began to result in physical manifestations of trauma. He was taken one night to hospital and left there, never to see his custodians again. So began his long round of hospitals, mainly in the company of old and dying men, while doctors tried to diagnose his condition. This period of his life, during which he was a constant witness to death, culminated in brain surgery at the age of ten - by which time he had become permanently disabled.

I saw no mention of sexual abuse, nor any suggestion that his condition was the result of his time at the Industrial School, in fact the eventual diagnosis of a progressive neurological condition belies the assertion. The inference that he was somehow dumped at the hospital is also a little wide of the mark. He was referred to the hospital in the same way that any child would have been, then or now.  Nor does the blurb give any hint of the many kind doctors and nurses (both lay and religious) he encountered, or the efforts they made to give him some happy moments. The nearest to a fearsome person we see is the matron who will not let him keep on the ward the budgerigar the nurses bought him for his birthday. Instead it is taken to the ward sister’s office and he is allowed to go and see it there. If this was cruelty then we are even crueller now. I have worked on a ward (and as a volunteer I still do) and there is no way a budgerigar would be allowed on a surgical ward, even in the ward sister’s office.  

 The Therapeutic Care Journal, in an article dated 1st August 2010, also makes an interesting point about the Industrial School. 'In reading this book one has to remember the social context at that time. Ireland was a poor country, and few people were well off. If the children had been at home instead of in the Industrial School, they would still have had plain food and got a walloping for their misdeeds.'

So why the over-egging of the pudding in some of the promotional blurb? It seems that by the time later editions came out sexual abuse and cruel nuns had become all the rage, so a best seller had to be promoted in this way for the titillation of a new target market. You would certainly never guess that one of the two people he came to love the most during his hospital period was a young nun. There is another ‘terrifying testament’ here, and that about the liberties publishers can sometimes take when promoting a book.

And yet he was often lonely, afraid and craved the company of children of his own age. I suspect that part of the problem was Ireland’s size and relative poverty at the time. With a population little more than one twentieth the size of the UK’s, the Irish Republic of the 1950s and early 60s would have been hard pressed to provide the kind of treatment required in a hospital specifically for children. They simply did not run to anything like Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. This is something he later campaigned to redress.

One of the things that disturbed Paddy most, perhaps in retrospect, was the lack of information given to him about his parents, and his uncle only provides it after Paddy is well into adulthood. A couple of reviews I have read blame it on the nuns (naturally), as though there was some kind of conspiracy. Yet even when he is at the Industrial School Paddy is allowed to go on holiday to his aunt's (a visit that is cut short after an incident involving his bowels and a shifting chamber pot) and his uncle remains in intermittent contact and sometimes takes him out. Maybe they thought he was too young to be told that his father had hanged himself, and would the doctors and nurses in the hospitals to which he was sent have known much about his background, much less the details of how his parents died? Nowadays they would make it their business to know, but in the days before computer records they may not have had easy access to much information beyond his medical notes. 
  
The story does have a happy ending. Paddy had (and still has) a fulfilled life and has a wife and children, though the last part of the book relating his marriage and the acquisition of their first home seems a little brief and rushed. Maybe his agent or publishers did not see any point in wasting too much time on the more cheerful aspects of his life, given that they seemed to have made the decision to aim it at the misery market. 

There are a few niggles. Would a four, five or six-year old really remember fairly long and detailed conversations? I suppose we have to allow some poetic licence and trust that the gist is accurate  if not the detail. Following on from that is another question. Most writers tailor their work to a potential audience, or at least to a publisher. Is a disabled writer above that sort of jiggery-pokery or is he as capable of the same tricks as the rest of us? I think we know the answer, but perhaps only a mischievous person would pose the question.  



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When nuns were the goodies...
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Anita Brookner. Some practical difficulties.

16/2/2017

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My admiration for Anita Brookner and her incisive writing style is no secret, but there are some aspects of her work that niggle. I am not referring to the most common complaints: that her characters are all similar sorts of people; that they live in similar areas; that their lives are often bland. My issue concerns her implausibility when it comes to everyday practical matters. She sometimes seems to live in a world where nothing works in quite the way it does for the rest of us.
   Several of her characters, for example, find themselves looking for flats at some stage. Do they go to estate agents and visit a selection of properties, as mortals do, before making up their minds? Is a mortgage ever required? Do the purchases take months while surveys are completed, leases examined carefully for nasty clauses and completion dates negotiated by all parties in the chain? Hardly.
​  This example from
Leaving Home is fairly typical. Having been left some money after her mother’s death, Emma Roberts decides to buy a flat. Unusually for a Brookner character, it does occur to her to visit an estate agent (they usually don’t seem to know what to do until a place presents itself) but there the real world ends. One of the young women at the agency wants to sell her own flat and Emma arranges to visit. There follows one of the quickest property purchases in history (with the possible exception of The Next Big Thing, where the central character views, buys and moves into a property within three days). This exchange takes place within minutes of Emma's arrival at the flat.
  ‘I love it. How much do you want for it?’
  She named a sum I thought astronomical and which I automatically accepted…. When I saw her begin to waver I reached into my bag for my chequebook and wrote her a cheque for the full amount…. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I told her. ‘It won’t bounce’.
  No such thing as exchange of contracts and completion dates in Bookner’s world. And it’s a mystery why anyone would think the seller needed reassurance about the cheque when she is the one still possession of the property and the Land Registry has not yet been notified, but by then the transaction is so implausible that another layer of disbelief can hardly make much difference. Are the technicalities really unknown to Brookner? Is she so set on exquisite writing and exploring the minds of her characters that she really can’t be bothered to make the humdrum things in life sound remotely convincing?
  This odd disconnection with reality also shows in her handling of time. In Incidents on the rue Laugier, for instance, time jumps ten years so that the later decades are out of hilter with the characters’ ages (I checked this several times and remain convinced it isn’t possible). And while Christmas may start earlier than it used to, it still seems highly unlikely that a hotel would have Christmas decorations up in the middle of October as is the case in Look at Me. That is not the only timing problem in Look at Me. Frances Hinton begins her friendship with James Anstey in October and it comes to its cruel end just before Christmas. Yet the development of the relationships between this shy couple seems to take  much longer than that, indeed there is a period when they don’t meet for a couple of weeks and several other events, weeks apart, also take place in that narrow time frame.
​  As with time, so with distance. James regularly walks Frances home after their restaurant meals with the others in the group, after which he walks back alone (he explicitly says he walks). Yet Fran lives in Maida Vale, while James and the restaurant appear to be west of centre. This would involve a walk of at least five miles, ten for James. This hardy couple regularly do all this after a day’s work and a night out. And how much time for sleep can poor James manage?


Such oddities are not unique to Anita Brookner. I suspect that these unconvincing moments may have something to do with the loneliness (or at least the aloneness) of being a novelist. There can be inconsistencies and even impossibilities we don't notice ourselves, and we all sometimes need someone else to point out the parts that somehow don’t seem right. I suspect well-established writers are sometimes intimidating to editors, who then stick to looking for typos and grammatical points. That really seems to be the only explanation for some of the jarring bits that slip through, though we don’t know what discussions and possible arguments that may have taken place behind the scenes.
​
It makes me grateful for our little writers’ group in my town, where each other’s work is read and pitfalls pointed out. The advice can be taken or not, but it is useful to have other opinions. There is always the temptation to be defensive and we all feel we must know our own intentions best, but I have found that, after due reflection if not at the time, there is some merit in most (well, some) of the advice given and the points made.


None of this detracts from the joy of Brookner’s prose, but there are moments when I think some of her characters might have been a little more convincing if their world worked more like the real one.
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This is so not Brookner
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Witness for the Prosecution. Who murdered Agatha Christie's story?

9/1/2017

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PictureLove's young dream they were not..
There are spoilers here, but after nearly a century since publication, not to mention the plays, films and TV versions that have been made in that time, there can be few Christie devotees who are unaware of the ending. If you are not familiar with the story you may prefer not to read this, or else do so after reading the short story (which is on Amazon Kindle for 99 pence in the UK and 99 cents in the US). My purpose in writing about the story here is to compare the liberties taken in the dramatizations.  
  
Transferring novels and short stories to stage and screen can be a risky business even for those who are attempting to be faithful to the original. For longer novels such as War and Peace, Les Misérables and Middlemarch, the main difficulty is usually centred on how to condense them without losing too much. There will always scope for criticism of how the dramatists went about this. For short stories, however, the problem can be is reversed, and it becomes more a question of how much can be added while maintaining the spirit and intention of the author.
 
Witness for the Prosecution was first published in the early 1920s and would take up around twenty-five pages in a standard paperback. The story is simply told, and as in all whodunnits (though this could be more accurately described as a did-he-do-it) the answer does not come until the end, in this case the very last couple of words. At the centre of the story is young Leonard Vole (we are told he is thirty-three), accused of murdering Emily French, an elderly lady forty years his senior who had befriended him. Mr Mayherne is the solicitor who is called in to defend him. After initial doubts, Mayherne becomes convinced of the young man’s innocence.  Vole tells Mayherne that Romaine, his devoted wife, will confirm that he was at home with her when the murder took place. After initially appearing to agree that he was at home, Romaine turns against her husband (though by then it has been revealed that they were not legally married as Romaine has a husband in an asylum in Austria). It seems that she cannot forgive him for his infidelities, and not only refuses to back up his story, she becomes a witness for the prosecution.
 
Mayherne is devastated, as the case against Leonard Vole now seems overwhelming. Emily’s maid, Janet McKenzie, swears he was in the house at around the time of the murder, and now Romaine asserts that he arrived home a little later with blood on his shirt. What’s more, the maid insists Leonard knew that Emily had written a will leaving almost everything to him, a knowledge Leonard denies. Then, during the course of the trial, Mayherne receives a mysterious note telling him to visit an address in the East End where he will learn something about Romaine Vole. Although doubtful, he keeps the appointment in the dark, squalid room. The wretched, drunk, scarred woman he sees there offers to sell him letters written by Romaine to ‘Max’, her secret lover. In the letters she reveals her plan to lie about Leonard not being at home when he said he was, and in effect frame him for the murder. The trial resumes and Mayherne produces the letters while questioning her. Faced with them, she breaks down and admits she wrote the letters and that Leonard was with her at the time of the murder. He is found not guilty, while she must expect a jail term for perjury.

Some time later Mayherne meets Romaine by chance. She reminds him she was an actress and reveals that she had been the old hag from whom he had purchased the letters, imitating her voice to prove it. She explains that nobody would have believed her, Leonard's lover, if she said he was at home, which is why she became a witness for the prosecution so that she could then be discredited. Her time in jail was worth it if it meant she could save his life. Here is how the story ends.
  ‘I still think,’ said little Mr Mayherne in an aggravated manner, ‘that we could have got him off by the – er – normal procedure.’
    ‘I dared not risk it. You see, you thought he was innocent – ‘
    ‘And you knew it? I see.’
    ‘My dear Mr Mayherne,’ said Romaine, ‘you do not see at all. I knew - he was guilty.’

There have been several dramatizations, the most famous being the 1957 film (base on the West End Play of 1952) starring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and, as the barrister, Charles Laughton. In 1982 another film was made starring Beau Bridges, Diana Rigg and Ralph Richardson, though the script was broadly the same as the 1957 one. The play and the two films derived from it have some minor alterations, though at the end there is a significant addition. After the trial is over and the public have left the court, the barrister encounters Mrs Vole (not called Romaine here) who tells him of her trick. As they are speaking Leonard enters, followed by a young woman who kisses him ostentatiously. It transpires she is his lover. In a fit of Dietrich-style rage Mrs Vole seizes the dagger that had been an exhibit in the trial (though in the original story the victim had been bludgeoned to death) and stabs him in the stomach. He obligingly dies instantly. ‘She didn’t murder him, she executed him,’ proclaims Charles Laughton, and begins to prepare the case for her defence. It seems that in the Fifties a murderer could not be seen to have got away with it.
 
The play and films also make Mayherne a Barrister rather than a solicitor, and give him a different name, though as a tilt to the original there is a Mr Mayhew in the team. In their quest for famous actors the films also age Mr and Mrs Vole. Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich were well past their thirties, in fact poor Power was almost literally at death’s door, dying the following year.   
 
The most recent version was made by the BBC for its 2016 Christmas Agatha Christie drama. In terms of accuracy it starts well. It reverts to the original early Twenties period, Romaine gets her proper name back (though Mayherne becomes Mayhew, which looks like change for change’s sake), and the Voles are young again (sorry, Marlene). But then it starts to go in a different direction and the additions and alterations come thick and fast. Not only do the Voles get younger, so does the victim, and the old lady in her seventies becomes a middle-aged good-time gal. There are some hints of the original story: according to Christie, Emily had eight cats, and one is included here (and a very significant part it plays), though the fortune for which Emily is murdered is much enhanced. According to Christie she lived fairly frugally in Cricklewood, whereas here she lives riotously in Holland Park and leaves enough for the Voles to spend the rest of their days in swanky hotels, and that after they had given a cut to Mayhew. The First World War and the young men sacrificed in it were mentioned in the original story, but here those couple of sentences are turned into a whole new co-plot, as Mayhew’s wife cannot forgive him for coming home from the war while their son did not. In the original story he had a dry cough, whereas here he never stops coughing, a condition brought on by poison gas in the trenches.
 
The biggest deviation of all, however, must be the arrest and execution of the hapless maid, Janet McKenzie, who was assumed to be the murderer after Leonard was acquitted. It was Mayhew who pressed the case against her, and his reputation and wealth was much increased by his supposed genius. Later he is astonished to meet the just married Voles in a seaside hotel in France, where they reveal the truth about the evidence given at Leonard’s trial. This means that not only did a guilty man go free (as in the original) but an innocent woman was hanged. (This twist is more than an added bit of macabre entertainment, as it alters Romaine's character. Christie's Romaine had been hopelessly in love with a wrong'un, but not wicked.) Another blow awaits Mayhew, as his wife makes clear that she never will forgive him for their lost son and can never be intimate with him. And so the stage is set for yet another tragedy, and the original punchline of that twenty-five page story is buried even deeper.
 
My request to future dramatists is not to try to fit stories into a specified time slot regardless of their length. The consequent additions or subtractions can only destroy the original story and turn it into something never intended by the author. But then, I suppose it's ultimately all about bums on settees.


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Lots of added trouble in the BBC 2016 version!
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Is Literature going the same way as TV soaps?

16/7/2016

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Fifty or sixty years ago TV was generally considered a Bad Thing by teachers and parents who wanted their children to succeed in life, a distraction preventing  them getting on with their homework and reading improving books. There were even some parents who refused to have a television in the house, and when they finally cracked they were at pains to stress (though their noses grew a couple of inches as they said it) that they only bought a TV for the news and current affairs programmes. They were right to be worried, but it turned out that TV could be like a car: dangerous in the hands of the reckless but useful for getting from A to B. It could even be useful for educational purposes and for widening children’s horizons.
 
Had it not been for a TV serial adaptation of Oliver Twist when I was ten, I might never have read Dickens. I was so haunted by the story that I borrowed the book, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was serialised the following year I read that book too. More disturbing for the adults around me was my fondness for Coronation Street, which began around that time. There were other soaps but the early critic in me spotted that this was different. This was real drama, alive, witty and somehow true. In those days there were tragedies alongside the humour but plots rarely strayed too far beyond the plausible. Because it was a soap it was often sneered at by the pretentious, but later the merits of those early Coronation Street years have been widely accepted, and several leading UK dramatists have willingly acknowledged their debt to its creator, Tony Warren.
 
Competition is usually a good thing as it keeps creators on their toes, but it was to be competition that would destroy the unique charm of Coronation Street. Other soaps came onto the scene and, because they did not possess the skill to transfer the humour and pathos of everyday life into entertainment, they opted for big bangs and extremes instead. The likes of Brookside and later EastEnders brought a different kind of soap, where gangsters, cruelty and murder, even mass murder, became regular story lines. As the audience received ever more nastiness they came to need a bigger and bigger fix. Coronation Street was forced to adapt and all but destroyed its essence in the process. Blood now regularly flows on those same cobbles where Elsie Tanner and Ena Sharples once had their magnificent slanging matches.
 
And it now seems to me that literature could be going the same way as the extreme takes over from style as a measure of merit, indeed I have heard disturbing reports of aspiring writers being encouraged to forget individual style and go for what agents want, which seems to be very plain writing and ever more ludicrous story lines. Three or four times recently I have come across people in writers groups who have been on some writing course or other where they have been virtually forbidden to use any formula or syntax that supposedly violates the norms expected in particular genres. Not that all advice should be ignored, but does a warning about too many adjectives and adverbs really have to translate into a cull of most adjectives and adverbs?  Perhaps those who run these courses (assuming they do know something about literature) do not mean such strictures to be taken literally, but some of the more timid punters who have paid for the advice seem to think they must follow such rules to the letter. Their timidity is understandable, given the difficulty of getting anything published, but in literature to stifle one’s style can involve stifling one’s art.
 
But, I have been told, I don’t understand the ‘genre fiction’ industry. Uniformity of style (ie one that caters for the lowest common denominator, most likely aged about fourteen) is a prerequisite. Plain cooking is the order of the day when it comes to the writing, ever more dramatic plots are what count. A disaster that wipes out a whole galaxy has got to be better than one that merely wipes out a planet, beautiful or original writing just doesn’t come into it. And there could be some truth in that. An accomplished and original  writing style cannot be summed-up in a one-page synopsis (which is what an agent really likes), whereas the destruction of the universe can be.



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What George Eliot did for us.

21/4/2016

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  My first foray into George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was when I had to read Silas Marner as part of my O-level course in my mid-teens. While even then I recognised her writing as more refined and indeed charming (not that I would have used the word ‘charming’ then) than other Victorian novelists I had read, it did not change my life in any way.
  Then came my A-levels and I had to read what initially seemed like the impossibly long Middlemarch. As I ploughed through the first hundred pages, dismayed that there were another six hundred to go, something happened. It happened gradually, perhaps taking a further hundred pages, but it finally dawned that I was enjoying the best novel I had ever read. By the end of it I was fairly sure that it was also probably the best novel I ever would read. Nothing has happened since to make me change that opinion.
  The story itself, which has four interconnected pairs of main characters and a host of supporting ones, could easily be dismissed as a soap, which in a sense it was. So was much of Dickens. Yet Eliot goes deeper into the souls of her subjects than any major novelist until then. In this novel 'stream of consciousness' was born, those inner thoughts and fears that make it impossible not to have some sympathy even with seemingly unattractive people. We recognise their inner turmoil, their fear, even their loneliness, as our own. It is not done perfectly – later writers such as Anita Brookner were to build on it (albeit with less interesting characters) and bring it closer to perfection, but it was Eliot who broadened the horizon for future English novelists.
  The idealistic young Dorothea Brooke has to be seen as the main character, followed closely by her love interest, Will Ladislaw (who soon edits a newspaper supporting electoral reform), but by the time she realises she loves him she is already married to the much older, ailing, humourless and seemingly asexual academic Casaubon, whose tragedy lies in his realisation that the scholarly work to which he has devoted his life has been disproved by others and can never be finished. Casaubon fortuitously dies half way through, though his will stipulates that Dorothea can only inherit his estate if she does not marry Will. Meanwhile Dorothea is working closely with Lydgate, an equally idealistic young doctor, to help enlarge the local hospital, a project to which she gives generously. While not engaged in trying to set up this early local health service, Lydgate courts and marries the spoilt and frivolous Rosamond Vincy, who in her own pretty way is one of the most grotesque women in English literature. She does not understand her husband’s idealism, gets him into debt with her extravagance and eventually succeeds in ensuring he reverts to rich patients so that he can keep her in the manner she expects. Then there is Bulstrode, a pious banker and leading light in the community (or a saintly killjoy, as another character describes him). Yet Bulstrode has a dark secret from his past, one that threatens to destroy his reputation and eventually explodes like an 1830s Watergate (for the story is set forty years earlier than its publication, so it was an historical novel even when it was written).
  But haven’t we seen many similar stories since? Haven’t we seen many TV series with similar characters? Probably, but we have never seen the inner workings of their minds like this, and they certainly hadn’t seen it in the early 1870s when Middlemarch was published. George Eliot pushed the boundaries and, although she did not know it, wrote a Twentieth Century novel when the Nineteenth Century was still only two-thirds of the way through.
  I remember the exact point when, at seventeen, I realised this was a novel like no other. It’s the part where Harriet Bulstrode (the polar opposite of Rosamond) finds out about her husband’s shady earlier life which is now becoming public knowledge.  
 
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonour as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
  But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her - now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap…

  If ever our own relationships are going through a rocky patch, we could probably do worse than read that.



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Les Misérables. Things you won't know if you haven't read the book.

4/4/2016

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  I first read Les Misérables when I was fourteen and finished it when I was fifteen. Four years ago, a glutton for punishment, I read it again. By the second time I had seen a couple of film/TV versions and, of course, the musical, and I was curious to go back and check how they compared with the original.
  When I first heard it had been turned into a musical I was sceptical about how they could possibly fit such an immensely long and meandering novel into three hours. On one level they don’t. The essentials are there, albeit slightly altered as is the way with dramatisations. Madame Thénardier, for instance, was dead by the time of the 1832 events on which the second half of the musical centres, and the earlier vicissitudes of Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, and a host of other characters are much abbreviated. There are also many characters that just don’t appear in the film and stage versions.
  In the novel Hugo treats us to long discussions, theological, philosophical and political. We are even given about a hundred pages on the Battle of Waterloo – what Napoleon was thinking, what Wellington was thinking, what some of the other players were thinking. Even later on, when Jean Valjean carries the unconscious Marius through the sewers, there are thousands of words about the history of the Paris sewers, with comparisons to those of London for good measure. In exile in the Channel Islands when he wrote the novel, Hugo sometimes takes the time to relay amusing little snippets he has read in The Times. On several occasions Jean Valjean also has plans to escape to England, but events always intervene.
  Although much of the novel could easily be scrapped without injury to the plot, its length does at least help Hugo flesh out the characters in a way that allows readers to understand their (and Hugo’s) thinking. On stage the characters are largely one-dimensional but the book paints a totally different picture, where motives are mixed, where noble revolutionaries can sometimes also be spoiled brats with their own agendas (in that respect times have not changed). The very man who abandoned Fantine was also a verbose pub revolutionary dazzled by his own purity of purpose. The establishment and Church come in for criticism, yet they include among their number well-meaning and sometimes saintly figures, such as the kindly bishop who protects Jean Valjean, and the nuns who run the hospital Jean Valjean set up in his wealthy manufacturing period. Louis Philippe, the king at the time of the 1832 disturbances, is portrayed in a relatively good light, someone who wanted the best for everyone but could not reconcile the irreconcilable. Marius’s very reactionary grandfather turns out not to be quite such a bad old cove in the end, and even Javert, that seemingly heartless upholder of the law, is explained as someone who lacks imagination but whose sense of duty is utterly sincere.
  Hugo was a great admirer of Dickens, which may not have been an entirely good thing as his more Dickensian-style characters are just too grotesque to be plausible. The Thénardiers have no redeeming features and just when you think they couldn’t get any worse, they do. And like Dickens, his story is stuffed with ludicrous coincidences. One or two might be possible, but this is taking liberties. Javert constantly has occasion to run into Jean Valjean in whichever part of France he happens to be, as does Thénardier. The two smaller abandoned boys who are looked after by the slightly older abandoned boy, Gavroche, are actually his brothers (though none of them know that) and all three of them are the offspring of the Thénardiers.
  Yet for all that the novel is rightly a classic and, coincidences and some unlikely characters aside, Hugo avoids a few pitfalls evident in some modern novels. Many Catholics-turned-freethinkers today would probably be reluctant to acknowledge the good as well as the bad in the religion they had abandoned, and his insights into the ambiguous workings of the idealist mind may have been ahead of their time.



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Death of Anita Brookner. A sad day.

16/3/2016

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The death of Anita Brookner has just been announced. This is something I wrote about her recently on the History and Literary Stuff page of this site.




My love affair with Anita Brookner

Yes, you read that correctly, though you would be right in thinking that I don't mean a love affair in the usual sense. Even so, some might be surprised that I should talk about her in such a way, even figuratively. We have little in common apart from living in London for most of our lives, though even then there is a difference. Nearly all of Anita Brookner's characters live in central London, mostly in suitably snooty areas, whereas I was brought up in the suburbs. Nor can I imagine her being the first person to call if I fancied a jolly evening in a pub or indeed in a restaurant, given that so many of her characters seem to be borderline anorexic and usually go to bed early. Most of them are seemingly insipid and lonely women, and the few male characters are pretty much like the women except with trousers on. The charge that her characters and stories are mostly very similar also has some truth, at least on the surface. They do occasionally venture out of London, usually to Paris or expensive locations in Switzerland or the South of France (apologies if I have overlooked any who went to Benidorm or Orlando, though I doubt if I have), but there is no sense that they are there to enjoy themselves. 
  So why does she get under my skin? Why have I read all her novels, avidly waiting for the next to come out?
  It's the writing, of course: that perfectly pitched prose that analyses, dissects and bores into the soul, producing insights into how our minds work that few other writers have matched. There is also immense humour, though this may be missed by those who aren't strong on irony or understatement and can only recognise screwball comedy or its literary equivalent. 
  Such writing can be difficult for those who are new to her, though once they get the hang of it many are hooked. The opening of Strangers is fairly typical:
     Sturgis had always known that it was his destiny to die among strangers. The childhood he remembered so dolefully had been darkened by fears which maturity had done nothing to alleviate. Now, in old age, his task was to arrange matters in as seemly a manner as possible in order to spare the feelings of those strangers whose pleasant faces he encountered every morning — in the supermarket, on the bus — and whom, even now, he was anxious not to offend.
  He lived alone, in a flat which had once represented the pinnacle of attainment but which now depressed him beyond measure. Hence the urge to get out into the street, among those strangers who were in a way his familiars, but not, but never, his intimates. He exchanged pleasantries with these people, but had learned, painfully, never to stray outside certain limits. The weather was a safe topic: he listened carefully to weather forecasts in order to prepare himself for a greeting of sorts should the occasion arise, while recognizing the absurd anxiety that lay behind such preparations, and perhaps aware that his very assiduity counted against him, arousing irritation, even suspicion. But codes of conduct that had applied in his youth were now obsolete. Politeness was misconstrued these days, but in any event he had never learned to accommodate indifference. Indifference if anything made him more gallant, more courteous, and the offence was thus compounded. And these were the people he relied upon to see him out of this world! Exasperation might save him, though that too must be discreetly veiled, indulged only in private. Hence the problem of finding fault with those whose job it would be to dispose of him.
 
Someone who was having difficulty getting into Brookner asked me which one he should try first, and after some consideration I plumped for Fraud, which has all the usual components but has more sympathetic characters than many of the others. We are also taken into the minds of several characters: the lonely middle-aged Anna, the elderly and formidable Mrs Marsh and Lawrence Halliday, Anna's unhappily married love interest. She had been disappointed that he chose the flashy and spoilt Vickie over her, and we are told about the time she learned of their engagement:
  In the drawing-room she had switched on a single lamp, and then switched it off again: it seemed to her appropriate to sit in the dark, and she had allowed herself this little touch of drama. Besides, she could see quite well in the light of the street lamps, and she was not going to exaggerate her hurt. It was not yet despair. She recognized the rules of the game, saw that in any contest the more brightly coloured of the species would carry off the prize. Simply she was sorry that Lawrence had succumbed to so obvious a woman: she thought less of him for that. Vickie with her permanent air of excitement and suspicion, her urgent little body, her impermeable self-confidence, her air of conveying her understanding of a man's needs, her own greediness . . . Lawrence had looked  hapless as he told her of his plans, almost a victim, as if he were sorry for what he was doing, but was in no way able to change his mind, having been taken over by a will greater than his own.
  My one criticism of Brookner is that she probably overdoes the introspection, beautifully crafted though it is. I think a writer, like a good cook, should try to serve up a balanced meal. At least Fraud has a plot to drive it along and there is a rare hint of a happy outcome even if we are left to speculate about if and when that will be.
  Hers is a difficult style to emulate, not that anyone should try too hard to copy the style of another writer. Read enough good writers' work and there is a chance that our own writing will improve, and those little tricks that we find intriguing may, just may, come through - alongside a few tricks of our own.

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It all started with Richmal Crompton...

10/3/2016

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...Or rather her creation, William Brown (or 'Just William' as some people called him, though in fact that was simply the title of the first book in the series). I say 'her' but, in common with many of her readers, I was not aware for some time that she was female. The name Richmal didn't help. To me it conjured up a schoolmaster, complete with the scholastic gown many of our teachers wore in my all-boys grammar school.  I was also surprised, when I discovered the truth, that a woman should have had such an insight into the working of boys' minds, especially as she had never had children of her own and had been a teacher in an all-girls school.
  The William series were not the first books I had read, of course, nor the first to capture my imagination. In primary school I had been familiar with other characters such as Worzel Gummidge  and a host of children's books popular at the time. As it was a Catholic school I was also encouraged to read a series known as 'Vision Books' about saints and missionaries in different eras, not all of them as dry as you might imagine, though all of them extolled the virtues of martyrdom or at least self-sacrifice and they did not steer clear of sticky ends: we were familiar not only with Thomas More's demise on the block but also with Edmund Campion's more lingering hanging, drawing and quartering. It goes without saying that our view of Elizabeth I's reign was very different from that of our Protestant friends. Another book that stands out from those early years was Ian Serraillier's The Silver Sword about three children who escape from their home in Warsaw when their parents are being arrested by the Germans. We actually acted out a few scenes from that, and one of my first theatrical lines, aged about eight, was 'Open in the name of the Gestapo!' (eat your heart out, Herr Flick!). 
  Yet all these early forays into literature were quickly forgotten when I discovered William. It started during my first few weeks at grammar school when I began reading the books on the bus to school (or rather two buses each way, as it was a long journey from Stoke Newington to Highgate). My friend, Les (still a friend to this day), the only one in my year who had to make the same journey, was also a fan, and he piqued my interest by telling me the plots of the stories I had not read. It helped that William was our age, wore a similar school uniform, also hated Latin (though he did not appear to have been caned as I was for failing to conjugate verbs properly), sometimes had ham-fisted schemes to make the world a better place and, above all, was surrounded by a cast of eccentric adults.
  There were also some differences. The first books of the series were written in the 1920s, and William and his friends were from a fairly wealthy background. During the course of the series (the last books were written in the 1960s, and Richmal Crompton died in 1969) his family actually become less obviously wealthy. In the 1920s they had a cook, a maid (maybe more than one) and a gardener, all of whom offer William occasion for sport. By the Second World War they appear to have dwindled to a housekeeper and by the sixties there are no servants in evidence at all. This is, of course, a reflection of the social changes that occurred during the early and mid twentieth century. Throughout it all William remains about eleven, and his long-suffering parents do not age, nor his elder brother and sister, Robert and Ethel, both of whose comic and usually disastrous amorous pursuits drive some of the plots along. There are also a series of eccentric adults who come in and out of the stories. Mad majors, fake clairvoyants, potty writers and pretentious avant-garde artists are brought down to earth and occasionally helped by William. These characters, along with the writing style, sometimes give the books a surprisingly adult feel, and certainly many adults have been tickled by them. For example, is it a coincidence that the vegetarian group who move briefly into the village in the 1930s are led by an old duffer who bears a remarkable resemblance to George Bernard Shaw?
  The most famous eccentrics in the series are probably the Botts, a Cockney couple who had once run a corner shop and who became rich after they accidently created a delicious sauce which became a commercial success. They move into the Hall, the largest house in the village, and Mrs Bott is acutely aware that, despite her wealth and philanthropic endeavours, the neighbours look down on her. It is their seven-year-old daughter, Violet Elizabeth, who gives William and his gang ('the Outlaws') the most grief. She is always intruding into their macho pursuits and famously threatens to 'thcream and thcream and thcream till I'm thick' unless they obey her commands. It is fortuitous that Violet Elizabeth was created by a woman: a man would probably not have got away with it. And yet there is another girl, Joan, whom William likes very much. For all practical purposes she is part of the gang and actually rescues William from a couple of scrapes.
   For me the most important thing about the William books was that they made me want to write. They were an introduction to intelligent fiction, the bridge between children's and adult literature. Today, alas, they are more intelligent than some 'adult' fiction.  
    
The reproduction  below is from one of the books written in World War II. With invasion likely and air-raids a fact of daily life, it looks as though Joan is going to be sent away to a school in a safer part of the country. What can William do about it? 

The illustration is by Thomas Henry, who created the pictures for all but the last few of the books. The visual image of William and the other characters was shaped by him as much as by Richmal Crompton. Strangely, they only met once, and that very briefly.


Picture
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