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Literary separations – children with vanishing mothers

La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman (Penguin, Random House)

Sal, Mick Kitson (Canongate)

The Girl in the Tower, Katherine Arden (DelRey)

How to write for, of and about children and young people in an increasingly dysfunctional world? Finding a balance between an adult sounding narrative voice (and character arc) to make a book of interest to as wide a readership as possible  and yet maintain a sufficiently age appropriate voice is a difficult task. Then too how to write parents? Our world of parenting is becoming savagely complex like some sort of demented computer game with so many traps  one wonders who would ever want to start playing. Many writers with child protagonists in their stories avoid parents altogether by using orphans, or they turn parents or other carers into wicked stepmother style clichés in order to exaggerate a malign influence.  I have just polished off three books which in their different ways grapple with these issues.

The Book of Dust, Volume One. La Belle Sauvage. Philip Pullman

This first volume is intended as a prequel by Pullman to the His Dark Materials trilogy but I found I couldn’t live it or believe in it the same way as the original books.  The plot is based around unprecedented rains which have caused the Thames to burst its banks.    This saga which picks up the story 10 years before the beginning of Northern Lights concerns the trials and tribulations of one Malcolm Polstead as he attempts a journey by boat – through the inundated landscape which was once Oxford towards London – to protect baby Lyra from the forces of the scary sounding Consistory Court of Discipline and other baddies who are chasing them.

Against this post-apocalyptic background, sinister forces gather and only poor Malcolm is there to sort it all out. Like some sort of Blyton-esque adventure on steroids, he and his friend Alice get into increasingly surreal scrapes and escapes from witch haunted islands, a graveyard, a masque in a grand house where the intrepid heroes go to beg food but find themselves utterly invisible to the assembled gathering. A good metaphor at least for how young people are treated in 21st century society.

But here was the problem for me.  That Malcolm at the age of 11 (or it may be 12) comes across as an insufferable know it all who never puts a foot wrong.  Fortunately for him, his friend Alice gets taken along on the journey so he doesn’t actually get to change Lyra’s nappies himself.  Heroes don’t change nappies, do they?

The second book is Sal – the debut novel of Mick Kitson. Sal (short for Salmarina) is a 13 year child from a highly abusive and dysfunctional family background. She finds herself on the run with her ten year old sister, Peppa, and the two are forced to live wild in a forest in Galloway, at least for as long as it is feasible to do such things in the 21st century where every bus ticket is a digital footprint and every visit to town an occasion for surveillance.

Sal is much influenced by, and no mean interpreter of, the SAS survival handbook, building shelters, fires, trapping rabbits and generally, well, surviving.   Both this novel and Pullman’s use the trope of taking the child/adult heroes and heroines outside of the real world – or at least a recognisable everyday version of it – and casting them into situation where they must survive by their own wits and largely without assistance from outside sources.

This is nothing new in literature, for children who must constantly refer back to some adult for instructions don’t make very interesting protagonists.  But author Jenni Fagan points out in her review of the Kitson book[i] that there is another angle to this separation of children from the adult world and one that does not relate to narrative convenience. That is children or young adults are finding ways to separate themselves from a world that neither understands nor seeks to protect them. Fagan notes too that 4.1 million children live in poverty in the UK.[ii]  That’s 30% or 9 out of every class of 30. Child poverty is a form of abuse is it not? Even if it is a systemic one rather than a familial.

Fictional representations of mothers are not faring well in these particular novels.  Malcolm Polstead’s mother is a homemaker, a bringer of ample puddings and comfort.  Sal’s mother on the other hand is a drunk, a bringer of random men home at odd times of the day and night, one of whom turns out to be an abuser.  Both women exist at either end of the cliché spectrum and neither is a fully developed character.  Women are not stereotypes guys. It really is time for authors to give up reaching for the lazy allusion shelf of puddings and vodka bottles when writing mothers.

The Girl in the Tower, Katherine Arden

has an intrepid young heroine called Vasya who has been cast out of her home and is alone or almost alone. As this is Russian folktale territory, there is no SAS survival handbook.   Instead Vasya has the assistance of a frost demon who can make fires from snow and diamond like ice combs and knives and who brings food when she runs out.  Such a demon we should all have.  She also has a talking horse called Solovey with a weakness for porridge laced with honey, all so exquisitely drawn that it really doesn’t seem like cheating.   In order to survive her chosen life of travel, Vasya has to pretend to be a man.  Plus ça change. But this is a great story with lyrical descriptions of a frozen, semi-mythical Russian forest, perhaps long since eradicated.

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/14/sal-mick-kitson-debut-review-sisters-children-runaways Accessed May 2018

[ii] http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

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Eleanor Oliphant is completely magic realist

Gail Honeyman. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Harper Collins 2018

This deceptively simple narrative charts the rise and rise of a thirty year old woman from somewhere she didn’t know she was, to somewhere she didn’t know she needed to be. I’m trying not to give the plot away but the book primarily concerns itself with skewering our 21st century culture of not giving a damn.

The Eleanor in question is a thirty year old office worker who appears out of step with the modern world to a startling degree. She doesn’t even own a mobile phone at the beginning (although, phew! she does by the end). The book sections are divided into ‘Good Days’ and ‘Bad Days’ and ‘Better Days’. It is slowly revealed throughout the course of the narrative just how bad the bad days were for our poor heroine and why she behaves somewhat oddly. There is a distressing backstory which slowly reveals itself, but this is not at all a distressing or depressing book. Upbeat rather with its message that even if you are falling apart from loneliness you can still be fixed.

Within the pages of this fixing there is a degree of magic realism. Eleanor makes a friend along the way who appears well cut out for Sainthood. Influenced and quoting from Olivia Laing’s fast-becoming-iconic study of loneliness The Lonely City

‘…the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents.

Surprisingly this is a page turner – with a twist at the end which I half saw coming. I finished it over two days of rain and snow in a half–empty hotel near Caernarvon, waiting to attend the harp festival.

This is a book to curl up with and if you are feeling a tiny bit sorry for yourself it will magic you better. Indeed you cannot help but compare yourself with Eleanor and feel better – unless your backstory is even worse than hers. In which case dear reader you are much to be pitied.

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Teaching the unimaginable: the role of poetry in remembrance of the Holocaust

Recently attending a Remembrance Day service I was struck by the speech given by the local vicar who asked the gathering whether we thought we took our freedom for granted? Of course we take our freedom for granted if we are lucky enough to be free.   If we have never known what it is not to be free. Can we imagine soldiers coming to our homes, dragging members of our family away, looting and burning? No-one who has not directly experienced such things can really imagine it.

How then do we teach the unimaginable? For teach it we must.

An item which appeared in the Museums Journal (November 2017) refers to Holocaust remembrance and discusses the Museums of 21st century will interpret this subject. The article starts with a description of two televisions screens in the V&A in London relaying testimonies from Holocaust survivors:

“We always say never again, but it happens all the time. Not for nothing does one say that history repeats itself.”

Education is a vital part of breaking the chain of history repeating itself yet a report by the 2015 Holocaust Commission apparently concluded that teachers are confused about how to teach the holocaust with many schools avoiding the topic.

With the voices of the remaining holocaust survivors being stilled by time it is vital that we continue to find ways to educate and warn new generations of the horrors of genocide. Not only the Jews but Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, history’s whole list of Chamber of Horrors murderers that gained power in the 20th century and held on to it long enough to cause the deaths of millions of innocent people of whatever race or creed, all this has to continue to be taught.

One of the usual ways ‘into’ studying the history of genocide is to look at the political, economic and cultural factors that were in play at the time. In many ways these are incidental factors, not reasons at all. There are never any reasons, or rather there is only one reason, that such horrors can occur – it is the same reason that nuclear weapons continue to exist despite that many people alive today witnessed reporting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is almost not enough to stop people killing each other although that would be a great start. The challenge is to stop them wanting to. We have not yet achieved that.

Yet we continue to try. Music art and poetry find a way into places that don’t seem accessible through purely intellectual means.

Holocaust poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) wrote probably the most famous poem to come out of the Holocaust – ‘Todesfugue’ – death and music combined. There were indeed orchestras in the death camps. Celan’s poem was apparently so shattering when read in his own voice (according to his biographer John Felstiner[1]) that even those with no German understood – not ‘the gist’ that oh so useless word – but the agonizing heart of it.

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Paul Celan (1920-1970)

 

In 21st century Britain do we think of poetry as decorative? Therapeutic? Inessential? Difficult? Perhaps all of those things to some extent. In Stalin’s Russia there were no such doubts. Reading Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam wife of the murdered poet Osip Mandelstam it is clear that poetry was a game played for the highest stakes.

The freedom of artists is the first thing to go in a dictatorship. In Russia, during Stalin’s era, the role of the poet was to tow the party line. Failure to do so was a deadly business. Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) effectively signed his own death warrant with a poem about Stalin. Twelve lines was all it took.

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Mandelstam was arrested, but was not executed immediately. He was sent into exile for years, accompanied by his wife Nadezhda; much of this time was spent in Voronezh. He continued to the end to be hounded for his failure to take ‘an official line’ in his poetry and eventually was rearrested, dying years later in a transit camp waiting to be shipped to the Siberian camp at Kolyma or some such hell on earth.

While Paul Celan survived the holocaust in terms of years he drowned himself in the Seine in 1970, a victim of ungovernable trauma in a mind which had witnessed too much that could never be unwitnessed. Poetry, Celan said, could retrieve the German language from the abuses of the Nazis:

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language remained, not lost yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.[2]

The poems of the holocaust are not just survivor or victim stories written in poetic form.

Teaching poetry fulfills the double function of filtering the unimaginable through language and the language of experience. Experiences evolve – we cannot showcase human experience only through artefacts in museums however horrific those artefacts may be.

It is difficult to freeze events in time. There is always a before and an after. A possibility of prevention and a possibility of re-enactment.  Of history repeating itself.  The best art drills down through time and concentrates intensity of lived experience, getting to its humanist core. The best poetry holds up a mirror and shows us ourselves stripped of political expedience and economic relativism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] J. Felstiner. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Yale University Press (New Haven and London: 2001)

[2] Introduction by J. Felstiner. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence. Trans. Christopher Clark. Ed. Barbara Weidemann. The Sheep Meadow Press (New York, 1995)

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Whether or not Androids dream of electric sheep has become completely irrelevant: A review of Blade Runner 2049. Dir. Denis Villeneuve

In 1982 Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’) was unlike anything that had been seen before. The sets of a post-apocalyptic world with its flying cars and worries about replicants was visionary; yet despite the fact that the world had only a few decades previously engaged in two major wars followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such scenes of our planet where the natural world had been entirely destroyed still seemed part of some impossible future. Didn’t it?

So the original film operated as a warning yes, but one which centralized its concerns around artificial intelligence and, oh dear, what if the robots (replicants) got cleverer than us? That would never do, we’d better try and kill them all off.  About the environment, the images spoke for themselves. There was nothing more that needed to be said other than ‘this will happen if we take no steps to prevent it.’

The same day that I saw Blade Runner 2049 in October 2017, the Guardian newspaper published a shocking report that flying insects numbers – once thought so numerous – have undergone a dramatic reduction as much as 75% in the last 25 years.   This is an ecological catastrophe. One scientist is quoted as saying: “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life and are currently on course for ecological armageddon.”[1]

Sound familiar?

North Korea is sending missiles over Japan on an almost monthly basis; we have climate change, poisoned air, melting ice caps, species extinctions on a scale never before known.   Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world so beloved of film-makers is not some incredibly far off thing it is here with us now, breathing hellfire, brimstone, CO2 and diesel particulate matter down our necks. Yet the response of the film makers is same old, same old.   What if the replicants could give birth. They might be more successful than humans. We’d better kill them all off.  Aaarrggh! Hello!!

What if the replicants cared more about the planet than humans? Well, we don’t know the answer to that one because no-one asks. By the time we get here to the time of the new film, there isn’t much planet left to care about. But things are not all bad – there are still plenty of women around, although they are mostly prostitutes, holograms or psychopaths.

There is a Bond style baddy who seems to have no eyes (considering he bought up the bankrupt Tyrell Corporation with all its robotics and cybernetics and considering they can make good looking robots like Ryan Gosling) you would think someone would take pity on the baddie and find a set of eyes somewhere.

Not that Blade Runner 2049 isn’t a ‘good’ film. In some respects, it is.  My point is that this film is looking in the wrong place. Worrying about who is human and who is not and whether this test or that test will identify ‘true’ humanity. It is too late for that.  True humanity concerns itself with wisdom, courage and compassion. Considerations of what it means to be human and who dreams about what are no longer relevant unless someone develops androids that can breathe poison and live underwater. And that still will not save the flying insects. Or the rest of us.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers

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Poetry in a time of data

Brains are amazing things. Far more so than we can yet fathom or understand. In Buddhist theory, the sixth layer of consciousness assimilates all the ‘data’ we receive from the five senses.   Thus, for example, in order to differentiate a strawberry from the white, china bowl on which it sits, or the table that supports the bowl etc we can access this realm of the mind which ‘understands’ the difference. But when we wish to describe what we see – to make textual art out of an emotional response – we have only language available to us. Language, words, pictures, images.

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Language vast and generous, all encompassing. Is it not the soil out of which civilisation grows? Perhaps. But like the soil, language is subject to erosion, both natural and unnatural. Words fall out of use or morph into new words all the time and in itself this is normal and not particularly sinister. However, it becomes sinister when this form of ‘language creep’ is extreme in sidelining an entire and vital aspect of human existence – in this case I am talking of the natural world.

In his superb book _Landmarks_(Penguin, 2016)  (p3) naturalist Robert Macfarlane relates the following story:

“A sharp eyed reader of the new edition to the Oxford Junior Dictionary noted that a considerable number of words used to describe the natural world had been deleted. The deletions included: _acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, mp3 player and voice-mail.

> When Vineeta Gupta, then head of children’s dictionaries at OUP was asked why the decision had been taken to delete those words, she explained that the dictionary needed to reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood.”

How tragic this is. That contemporary children have no experience of acorns and buttercups so no point in using the words. This seems to be extraordinary back to front thinking. It is most likely that children will learn the substituted computer-style words by the daily dose of internet to which life is now exposed but if acorn, adder and ash are rarer commodities and not to be found so much in inner cities, it seems to me that is not a reason to delete the words but rather twice the reason to incorporate the words in the dictionary.

Chatrooms and cut-and-paste are now in our DNA. Sadly the OJD Editor was confusing the information function of language with the emotional engagement function of language, with its qualities of poetic inheritance, its assimilation of history.

Certainly there are aspects of human experience that defy articulation whether the vision of a sunrise across wheat fields language is not the be all and end all of communication but a poet will certainly struggle without it! If children are being deprived of language to describe the natural world they will in turn have no terms of reference to become nature poets.

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This decision was apparently not taken on the basis that such phenomena have physically disappeared from the environments – which thankfully they have not (yet) – but based on the fact that many children today live in urban environments which means they are no longer likely to come into contact with cygnet, beech or kingfisher and so don’t need to know about them!

How will tomorrow’s poets describe the natural environment if they have no language to do so? Tomorrow’s environmentalists are todays children – those very ones who the OUP editors don’t feel need to recognize beech, alder and adder. The question of how those concerned with loss of species and habitat destruction will recognise such losses without terminology for the natural world.     We need language for the existence of things, in order to recognise loss. It is not possible to save a buttercup if, linguistically, the little yellow meadow flower no longer exists.

Joni Mitchell famously sang ‘they took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum’… . Museum pieces can be overlooked, irrelevant things – perhaps less so post Neil McGregor – but still many are just things until they have a narrative attached to them. For this we need language, history, cultural references, comparative functions, analytical resources.

We hope neither the natural world nor the language we use to describe it will be relegated to the status of museum piece. No-one will knowingly pass a law putting trees in a museum, but the sidelining of the natural world is coming anyway; by urbanisation, by obsession with economic models of society, by addictions to technology, and by ‘language creep’. Or perhaps ‘language loss’ creep.   Did you notice how many hours of airtime, rhetoric, baby-bouncing-on-knee time were given over to discussion of climate change during the recent election campaign?

I believe the problem is not one of political will. Does any well meaning politician actually want the planet to disintegrate? Most will work out that they will naturally vanish along with the rest of us. But politicians are just human beings and the pressures of office must be huge. It is always tempting to think that someone else will deal with it, or somehow the problem will go away.

Young people feel alienated from the existing systems of representation and who can blame them since those systems of representation seem bent on excluding whole groups of our society, especially the young. It is these younger generations that are those most at risk of ‘language loss creep’. In a time of mass ‘data’ and ‘communications’, in a time of NSA surveillance and Edward Snowden when we all suffer from information overload, we actually seem to understand less and less.

The point is that writers are needed more than ever to keep the natural world in focus for potential readers. Prose writers yes, but I believe it will fall to the poets to guard the language of the natural world that is needed to give voice to the history of and need for continued work on preservation, and to fight, if necessary short-termism and vested interests. This is not just complaint about red, blue, yellow or green! It is about a universal spirit. If none of the parties are voting for the planet, the planet will not vote for the parties. It is left to poets to do so.

What other language is being or already has been lost through this form of abandonment? This is not a simple question when the term ‘language’ has many meanings? Even computer code is a magical language. It makes things happen.

But computers  cannot save the human habitat. Only humans can do that and in this poets have a vital role.

I posted this yesterday and this morning awoke to a review of a new book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris called The Lost Words on this very topic.  It seems the author agrees with me on the poetry aspect, as this is a book for young readers with poems and beautiful illustrations.  Although Mr. Macfarlane says they are not poems, they are spells:

 

When wren whirrs from stone to furze the air around her

slows,

 

Mmm! Sounds like poetry to me.  Ok, spells then.

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris is published by Hamish Hamilton on Thursday, 5th October 2017.

 

 

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My Cousin Rachel (2017) Dir. Roger Michell

In appearance the settings for the film – Florence and Cornwall – the interiors of the house etc all seem pitch perfect as do the script and the finely judged acting from Sam Claflin and Rachel Weisz.  We do not know what Rachel looked like but she could have looked exactly like this other Rachel. In short, it is beautifully shot with elegant Cornish panoramas, lonely rainswept beaches, impeccably clad gentleman on highly groomed horses, all laced with a liberal quantity of servants and picturesque stable lads.

So far so good. But Daphne du Maurier’s book is a complex work to bring to the screen; much of the ‘plot’ is internalized and much of it hinges on paranoia or suspected paranoia. It would be an achievement to pull off a film version without resorting to one or two little dramatic ‘interventions’ and those can easily upset the delicate ecological balance of the work.

While Rachel certainly has her own voice (unlike du Maurier’s other famous creation Rebecca de Winter) we do not hear much of it. The book is weighed down with the male narrative gaze, with male desire both sexual and for financial control. In so many ways Rachel appears not to have an opportunity to respond; or maybe she has opportunities but deliberately chooses not to take them. Or her responses appear ambiguous. It depends who you believe. Most of what we know about her we know from something a man has said. This is the master craft of the novelist.

This to me is where the film – despite strong central performances – errs. It tries to explain things which the book leaves open to the reader’s conjecture. What is the cause of Ambrose’s death? Brain tumour say the Florentine lot (of which Rachel is one). Poisoning, writes Ambrose in letters found after his death. So where are the instruments of poison? Laburnum seeds? Where is all the money going? Why does Philip mysteriously become ill after Rachel’s arrival. What the heck is she putting in those tissanes? All mysteries aimed at making us think Rachel is potentially wicked (fantastic cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ by sorry not sure who  played over the film trailer on the internet sadly doesn’t seem to have been used in the film).

But if Rachel is potentially wicked she is also a woman alone in the world who found herself ‘married to a stranger’ when Ambrose became ill and had to find her own way. As Sally Beauman points out in her introduction (Virago, 2003) laburnum seeds are a red herring. The real poison being examined by Daphne du Maurier in this novel are how whole lives, whole societies have been and continue to be defined by male authority. Perhaps the temptation to shout this from the rooftops overcame the film Director. Is it not 2017? Are there not thirty years solid of feminist literary interpretation coursing through the bloodstream of the land?

In the film although Philip hunts for Laburnum seeds in Rachel’s bedroom he does not appear to find any. In the book he does. There is no suggestion in the book that Rainaldi (Rachel’s lawyer, adviser and ‘friend’) is homosexual.   The fact that the film insists on this point makes us less inclined to suspect Rachel of an affair.  Was I being asked to consider Rachel a victim of a patriarchal gig? That is not I feel how the author would have seen her.

 

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Poetry makes everything happen

A review of Larchfield

by Polly Clark

Not only do we have Terence Davies film of Emily Dickinson as well as a film about Neruda, the excitement of new letters by Plath making headline news and now a young W.H. Auden is brought compassionately to life in the pages of Polly Clark’s novel Larchfield.

The name is taken from a boy’s public school in Helensburgh on the West Coast of Scotland where the young W.H. Auden taught for two years in his twenties, after leaving Oxford. It is not a posting the young poet much relishes.

“It’s not his choice exactly. His trust money is about to run out, and he needs a job. His friend Cecil Day-Lewis has nominated him for this post of schoolmaster at Larchfield, though he has no experience of teaching and a severe mistrust of the school environment.”

The book covers his life during these two years partly on a fictional and partly factual basis, showing how Auden fares in the run up to the second world including visiting his University friend Christopher Isherwood in Berlin where the two have a frightening encounter with blackshirts.

 Christopher Isherwood and Wystan Auden
photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 6 February 1939

Alongside this historical narrative, is a modern story in which the protagonist is a young woman called Dora, whose life so far has consisted of a PhD, a job offer at a University publishing house as a lexicographer and the beginnings of a career in poetry, finds herself married, pregnant and moving to Helensburgh very near the school where Auden taught. As she unpacks her belongings in her new home, a divided house ironically entitled ‘Paradise’, she places her small volume of published poetry on the shelf and prepares to adjust to a very different life.

But that adjustment is hard

Things quickly fall to pieces as they can do when a new baby arrives. To add to her problems the neighbours in the flat upstairs start acting up horribly and Dora becomes isolated, stressed and depressed. Finding solace in Auden’s poems and in tracing details of his life she decides to pay a visit to the site of the old school at Larchfield and so the mystery begins.

The gate was tall and wrought iron, with the name Larchfield looped in gold. Ivy crept along the front of the building, and the tall windows looked out over a Helensburgh that was essentially unchanged in appearance since his time. She could imagine the poet emerging from the stone porch, the sounds of children.

The book is based on the author’s real experience. Indeed it is hard to see how this book could have been written without that experience so genuinely is the suffering of the young female protagonist felt.

The novel treads a high wire act between the real, the  possible and the imaginary; what is imaginary in the mind of an unhappy and isolated young woman with no visible means of support other than a well-meaning but absentee husband may be real.  As real as the feelings of loneliness and otherness which everyone can experience to some degree.  The book also – dare I say it – deals with the redemptive power of poetry.  That one can run and run.  But the only person who is qualified to say if poetry redeems is one who feels him/herself redeemed by it.

The author says:

“Some years ago I moved to Scotland. I seemed to ignite anti-English feeling wherever I went, I couldn’t drive and became very isolated.

“When I had a baby, my ruin was complete. That’s when I first read ‘The Orators’ by Auden — and this poem changed my life.

“It’s a thrilling meditation on paranoia and repression, set in Helensburgh.

“I set about recreating Wystan Auden, from his notebooks, biographies and artistic details in ‘The Orators’, and paired him with Dora, my modern-day woman losing her mind in the suburbs.

“Finding human connection to Auden in our shared place of Helensburgh saved me.

The theme of isolation continues in Auden’s part of the narrative.

“And the future? What of it? He cannot imagine a future where he fits.”

Auden finds himself alone, both as an Englishman and as a new school teacher. When he tries to protect one of the youngsters at the school form the routine and institutionalised abuse that was part of the public school system at that time, he finds that his compassion is easily and wilfully misunderstood.

Auden was a homosexual at a time when to be so was a criminal offence. He was also just another lonely young man. Lonely enough to cast a message into a bottle and toss it into the sea in the hope someone would find it. In the book someone does, but perhaps it is not the someone any of us expect.

As Dora is friendless, most of her story is internalised and the author occasionally makes us doubt her as a reliable narrator.  This acutely reflects how other characters around Dora are doubting of her. If enough people doubt us, then do we not begin to doubt ourselves? Is this kind of mistreatment an all too common form of abuse of women? And is it often perpetrated by other women in positions of power over new mothers?   One of the ideas lying behind the novel is to point up a general failure of society to even recognise let alone deal with the fact that the shock and trauma of childbirth – even a medically ‘normal’ childbirth which Dora’s is not – can last for years. Decades even.

Larchfield is at its most disturbing as a picture of the pressure placed on vulnerable young mothers to conform to some hypocritical health visitor’s idea of happy families, pointing up that the borderland between protection of the child and abuse of the parent is a line which is disastrously ill defined in modern day Britain.

However this is not at all a depressing book – quite the opposite it is a hopeful book – by a writer who thoroughly understands that life can be lonely and difficult, but it can also come liberally laced with snatches of sublime poetry.

 

 

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A Quiet Passion. Directed by Terence Davies. Film Review

 

Film Review. A Quiet Passion. Directed by Terence Davies

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the American poet Emily Dickinson appealed as a subject to this particular Director who, like the poet, struggles to get to the truth of the human condition– truth is an idea which Dickinson laboured for in her life and in the poems themselves. The two things were not distinct.  Where and what is this truth? Does it lie in the immortality of words?   If so which words and at what time? It is easy with the wisdom of hindsight to label the immortals – much harder to spot them in the context of their time and place.

Emily Dickinson (1830 to 1886) Photo  Amherst College Library

The film makes the point that Emily Dickinson had 11 poems published during her lifetime. Immortality comes later. But it comes at a price.

This is not a film about a particular artistic career since it cannot be said that Dickinson had one although she produced a considerable body of work with which mankind has spent the last hundred and fifty years trying to catch up. It is a film of ageing, sickness and death, the role of religion, or not, and trying to make art in the middle of it all. Or rather out of it all.  From a devout family, Emily questioned religion openly which led to some antagonistic exchanges both with the Principal of Holyoke Seminary and her father. However the film’s insistence on Emily being the only student in her year to be labelled ‘without hope’ is based on accounts which have since been questioned and which do not accord with Seminary records.

The outdoor scenes of the film take place in the garden of the house at Amherst, Massachusetts (the poet’s home is now a Museum) the beautifully tended garden makes a ravishing backdrop for the scenes of dialogue that take place, especially with the parasol bearing, wide-gowned ladies’ fashions of the mid-19th century. Most of the film’s action takes place indoors, however, quite claustrophobically so for Dickinson herself was reclusive.   The film does not really answer the question why, although there is an implication that grief over her father’s death is a root cause.

For me, the film felt overlong and carried its ‘measured’ tones to extreme. The poet’s sister Lavinia (played by Jennifer Ehle) spends her whole life weeping or involved in damage limitation exercises over the offence that Emily’s rigorous truth seeking sometimes causes amongst their neighbours and friends. Other times the two girls are mopping brows or entertaining the vicar’s wife to tea. But this would be no doubt how their lives were lived. There are conversations about gender that feel too modern for the film’s mid-nineteenth century setting while Emily’s friend Vryling Buffam overdoes the witty repartee – no-one speaks like that all the time. In parts the film is quite gruesome to watch, with lengthy scenes of illness and fitting. (This Director has history on not sparing the viewer the unwatchable, as for example scenes of domestic violence in his previous film, Sunset Song).

The problems of the film lie in trying to create a life lived mostly in the mind, at a time when a literary career for a woman or indeed any creative outlet beyond the realm of the domestic, was unlikely. This is where the great sadness of the film lies. There is a poignant moment when Emily is informed by one of the servants that her bread has won second prize in a competition at a local show. ‘Oh.’ She responds. ‘Second prize.’ As a woman she is destined to come second, not even (in her own mind) sufficiently attractive to gain a husband. There is one affecting scene when the poet sitting alone in her room at night, imagines some traditionally dark handsome man, a Mr. Rochester, coming up the stairs and opening the door to her room.

Was it a conscious choice to seek no husband or family or her own? In the film Emily says she could imagine no life away from her family. She knows that to be a wife would restrict her poetry  even further, commenting that her father permitted her to write during the night hours which no husband would allow. But did she consciously make the  choice beween art and earthly desires or is that an inescapably romantic idea liberally laced with rose-tinted spectacles?

Is 1100 poems a fair exchange for a life lived in seclusion with neither husband nor children? The question cannot be addressed to or answered by a modern feminist. The question can only be addressed to the poet herself.  If Dickinson came back would she have an answer even now? Of would she say if there is only immortality on offer, then immortality will have to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Min Jin Lee. Pachinko, Apollo (2017)

It took me a while to work out what Pachinko was –some kind of gambling involving machines? Of course if I had taken the trouble to look it up I would have found that it’s an arcade game similar to pinball, thus making the book’s title a metaphor both for a means of earning a living (ie running the arcade) and the great pinball machine of life where we all think the chances of winning are as good as the chances of losing. But I was too busy reading to stop and go to Wikipedia so I got right through nearly to the end of the book before I worked it out. It made no difference to my enjoyment of the writing.

The story is of a family from Korea who suddenly find themselves living in Japan – or trying to – just before the outbreak of the second world war.   A cross-generational saga which starts in a poor boardinghouse in Busan, Korea, in 1910 and ends in Tokyo in 1989 in very different circumstances.

Image result for Pachinko, Jin Min Lee

Left alone with her mother after her father’s death, Sunja has to work hard to help her mother run the boarding house but things go wrong (don’t they always) after she meets a man in that most romantic of all arenas, the fishmarket:

Her shopping route didn’t vary from what she had been taught by her mother and father: first, the fresh produce, next, the soup bones from the butcher, then a few items from the market ajummas squatting beside spice filled basins, deep rows of glittering cutlass fish or plump sea bream caught hours earlier – their wares arrayed attractively on turquoise and red waxed cloths spread on the ground.

Sunja of course meets many obstacles on this journey. As well as being Korean, she is (of course) female but yet needs to work. It is a substantial read in all respects, coming in just under 500 pages but I found myself reading quickly, compulsively even, in two days. Min Jin Lee’s great strength as an author is to produce sympathetic characters so that the reader really cares what happens to them.

One of the issues at the heart of the story is how Koreans were viewed at that time by some of the Japanese people with whom they were trying to rub along – which it is fair to say was not always with the greatest sympathy, facing as they did restricted employment opportunities and hostile attitudes. This is a story of overcoming those things or of trying to. It’s a story of sticking to your principles. Of making the best. Of battling on. It is a story which asks whether we can come through anything regardless of the cost, or whether sometimes the accounts just pile up too high.

If I have any criticism at all it is that some of the characters seem almost too upright and stoical – perhaps a little saintly even? The book asks (with great relevance to today’s precarious politics in the West) what it means to belong to one nation or race and whether that sense of belonging comes only from the outside, ie from other people’s perceptions of us. What lengths will we go to in order to fit a preconceived mould, and does it ever wholly work? Can we still lead lives of grace, regardless of how others behave towards us? If these questions on seem to border on the ethos of Christianity perhaps they do. Are the chances of winning as great as the chances of losing. Or has someone fixed the pinball machine?

An altogether engrossing read.

 

 

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Just about managing …

 

And on the first day we say:

He who told lies about Europe

shall be raised up, while she

who told the truth about

the cost of one’s trousers

shall be cast down

On the second day we shall

make a third runway; place

another million planes in

a toxic sky.

Minions shall chain themselves

to railings and lie down on

the M4 but we persist.

On the third day we shall

cross the big water to visit

the rooster that crows and crows

…and crows.

On the fourth day we shall not

Once more unto the breach or

close up the wall with our English dead

but take a different approach.

 

The fifth day we reserve

for mental health problems.