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When I first read Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen’s ‘Seven Gothic Tales’ back in my early twenties they had quite an impact on me, so I was a bit miffed forty years on to find how much I had forgotten of them. The most powerful of the stories, ‘The Monkey’, I’d forgotten completely, whereas the one I’d enjoyed most at the time, ‘The Dreamers’, now seemed a little too ‘Gothic’, although still a thrilling read. It is also the only story of the group that is (nominally) set in Africa in what is a very Eurocentric book.

But what an odd book this is! Published in 1934, set in the early 19^th century harking back to the 18^th, it is almost as though the First World War and ensuing modernist revolution has never happened, save for the deep seam of nostalgia and lost Romanticism. Although Blixen officially wrote the stories when she permanently returned to Denmark from Kenya, I can’t believe that they weren’t recited, written, written, recited (all those stories within stories) the many long evenings with or without company she spent in her stately colonial redoubt on her coffee farm (no electronic distractions). The very fact they were written in English is testament to this; she had spoken nothing else for seventeen years. Like Conrad and Nabokov, Blixen’s English is not entirely natural, but unlike them, she aims for a refinement and purity rather than a virtuosic verbosity, at one with her aristocratic ideals. She puts everything she wants to into these tales, they are her own private creative fantasy for her own entertainment before others, and the odd conjunctions and anachronisms arising from her individual indulgences are a large part of their originality and charm.

It was that originality that struck me most that first reading, and this time as well. I could see how Blixen had borrowed from Hoffman and Stevenson, and probably Poe, she might have read Poe in Baudelaire’s translation, but it seems to me that none of these writers contain the psychological depth and complexity of Blixen, so we can assume that the modern psychological novel, James certainly, has also had an influence. And Shakespeare, of course, who she references continually. But why are they ‘Gothic’ and what does this mean? Without trotting out the usual bells and whistles readers bring to mind when they think of Gothic Lit., and certainly most of those are here (an actual ghost appears and chats in ‘The Supper at Elsinore’ which seems entirely natural in context), beyond the merely sensational and melodramatic, what is fascinating about the Gothic is how it was used as a device to show and discuss the subconscious. Well before Freud tried to pin them down, the Romantic poets and the Gothic novelists extensively evoked subconscious urges in metaphor and symbol. It’s the underlying power in works such as ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, and so too in these stories. And you can’t pin them down here, because they are the stories themselves, so as you read, the writing is always radiating various possibilities of meaning.

Has this book dated? In terms of sexual mores, yes, certainly, one aspect that will put off some modern readers, but all Blixen’s values are of a piece, bundled up with her personal (feudal) aristocratic take on the world, specific modes of behaviour with God at the top and a descending order of being. Although the money for the farm came from her side of the union with Baron Blixen, Karen Blixen went to Africa partly so she could be an aristocrat, even a ‘noble’. Her marriage gave her the title, and colonial Africa gave her the castle and the serfs, and also many opportunities for noblesse oblige. By our post-colonial lights, this is all wrong, and anyway it was never going to last, that’s largely what ‘Out of Africa’ is about, but Africa allowed Blixen to live the way she felt she ought to live, what she was born for, and that view of life and its values are embedded in these tales.

Uppermost is honour, acting honourably, or failing to. ‘The Old Chevalier’ as a young chevalier treats a prostitute as a princess and so she briefly becomes one, whereas the young soldier in ‘The Monkey’ practically rapes an innocent to force her into marriage to hide his homosexuality, and with this act releases physical evil into the world. The differing settings/societies Blixen presents are all elaborately coded, characters wear many masks; they deceive others, or, as in ‘The Poet’, deceive themselves. The reader is often second guessing (what is really going on here?) giving the stories at times the tension of a thriller, as for example in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’ where the final revelation, like a modern detective story, evokes a sort of existential despair. And I really never did work out what was going on in ‘The Roads around Pisa’ which presented to my mind like one of those Celtic patterns, always elaborately turning in on itself.

Endlessly fascinating and compelling, escapist but also genuinely disturbing, there is nothing quite like ‘Seven Gothic Tales’, well nothing I’ve come across. Do yourself a favour and curl up with this book one dark and stormy night, or even one bright and sunny day.

On page 158 of my edition of Ingmar Bergman’s novel, ‘The Best Intentions’, Bergman quotes a short note from his paternal grandmother’s diary, Sept. 1912: ‘Henrik came with his fiancée. She is surprisingly beautiful and he seems happy. Fredrik Paulin called in the evening. He talked about tedious things from the past. That was inappropriate and made Henrik sad’. This is preceded by an eleven page scene which is built, imagined, from this note giving substantial proof, if any were needed, of Bergman’s great powers of dramatic invention. And so the entire novel. As Bergman explains in his prologue, he was compelled to write ‘The Best Intentions’ after coming across a box of old family photographs. This, with a few diary entries, is the basis of this recreation, or reclamation, of his parents’ early courtship and marriage. But despite the biographical frame, Bergman, as in his films, does not hold back, freely showcasing a sequence of vivid and intense scenarios that may or may not have corresponded to what really happened, but I suppose, in the faith that he delivers to the reader, and presumably to himself, the general truth of the business.  

Bergman often wrote novelistic treatments prior to making a film but he also states in his prologue: ‘This book has not been in any way adapted to the finished film’, an award winning feature for which he wrote the screenplay but did not direct. He wants us to accept the book as it stands which we probably would not do without his comment, not only because of the later film, but also because the way this story is presented. Firstly, there are the authorial intrusions, such as above, which give a partial post-modern effect, the text commenting on itself. Fortunately in these Bergman does not offer alternative versions, which I feel would damage the integrity of the story he tells, although he and we are always aware that this is only one possible telling and events could not have occurred exactly this way. Secondly, much of the text is presented as a play script, with the various characters’ names in bold before their speeches and directions for delivery of those speeches in parentheses. Personally, I did not find this disruptive, but quickly accepted it like subtitles in a foreign film. In accordance, the prose passages are in present tense and with the combination here, the story often ‘leaps’ from the page. Although this is probably more due to content than form.

The content. The opening scene sets the pace with a tragic and irreconcilable stand-off between Bergman’s father and his father. Both are shown as impossible passionate men, although later in the novel we do see some reason for what seems to be Henrik’s unreasonable intransigence. And this is largely Henrik’s story, Bergman trying to understand and come to terms with his own father, and this first impression, not contradicted but developed throughout the novel, is of a man whose innate high principles act as a kind of obsession. He is such a dominant figure not because of any overweening or charismatic personality, but simply through the depth of his own spiritual and personal convictions. You can’t get around them and neither can he. For a man of God, he finds it very difficult to forgive, and throughout the novel one gets the impression that Bergman is trying very hard to forgive him. Maybe that is the reason for the book.

For novelistic balance, it’s just as well that his wife, Anna, proves to be pretty much of the same mettle. The couple’s coming together, their fierce clashes and harmonies and deep love for one another makes for an extraordinarily intense and dramatic experience. With so many fatuous and crappy ‘great love stories’ forever around in book and on film, it is something of a revelation to come across the real thing.

Subsidiary characters, the individually realised scenes and surroundings, times and places, are all intricately wrought, although Bergman does tend to focus almost exclusively on individuals. He takes us back into another world, of religion and duty and tradition, but we note the various ways in which that world still impacts on our own. And no matter how different all the rules and regulations, we also note how much human passions are an abiding constant.

All up, I thought ‘The Best Intentions’ a great read and I recommend it unreservedly.

Mercury Review Nov 2019

Shirley Hazzard’s final novel, ‘The Great Fire’, (U.S. National Book Award, Miles Franklin Award, 2004), took twenty years for her to write, so perhaps unsurprisingly, for what is an average sized book, it is packed with incident, character and detail; this reader lost his way from time to time, not that I would venture this as a criticism, more of a sign of the author’s ambition to leave no stone unturned. Hazard here is consciously, almost publicly, creating her testament, the ‘War and Peace’ for her times: the tumultuous ruinous mid-twentieth century.

In a passage from Hazzard’s 1970 novel, ‘The Bay of Noon’, Italian film-maker, Gianni, describes marble workers in the Carrara quarries that Michelangelo sourced: ‘those men… have an existence that has nothing to do with ours. It’s as if they’re at work on the mountains of the moon’. Historical novels seem to me to fall broadly into two camps: escapist indulgence, or the past as a revealing cipher for the present. Hazzard gives us here, in a way, both types. The background, post-second-world-war Asia and England, with flashbacks to the War, is vivid, real and gripping, and we think but for a roll of time’s dice, this could have been us. But the main story, the foreground tale loosely binding it all, is little more than a girlish adolescent fantasy romance, completely out of place in such sophisticated and adult surrounds.

Jane Austen’s novels also present female fantasy in a realist setting, but the grown-up humour and satire mostly offset the disjunction. Hazzard is not ironic and her ‘Great Fire’, I assume, refers equally to love and war. The girlish romance is as real, as significant, in its own way, as Hiroshima. Can Hazzard really mean this? Her preceding novel, the acclaimed ‘The Transit of Venus’, was basically an exploration of the agony of sexual love, and remembering some of the intense passages of that book, I saw that Hazzard does indeed take love very seriously. If you don’t have it, life is not worth living.

So, to the fantasy object, with the distinctive name of Aldred Leith, who has been funded by a dying French officer to wander at will around East Asia gathering material for a book. Whilst in Japan, he becomes besotted with the fifteen-year-old daughter of an Australian medical officer, variously described as a ‘changeling’ and a ‘mermaid’. She, Helen, is besotted in turn with the battle-hardened warrior with his scars and medals, twenty plus years her senior. You get the picture. She is an intellectual and cultural paragon who reads Chateaubriand and Gibbon with her dying invalid brother described by a former tutor as ‘a literary man at the age of ten’! The rationale connect is the ‘high culture’. Like Henry James, Hazzard openly thinks people of ‘high culture’ are special and belong together in their special world, a prejudice that constantly grates throughout this book.

Which brings me, as a little aside, to Helen’s parents, the brutish and uncultured Driscolls (the father is particularly nasty). Here, and elsewhere, Hazzard fully unloads on what she refers to as ‘the antipodean male’ and Australian middle-class suburban life generally. Now I’m sure there were plenty of brutes in the Australian army and the fifties in a land so far away from European culture no doubt seemed in many ways restrictive for a young ambitious blue-stocking.  But living and publishing in the same city as the young Hazzard were poets such as Kenneth Slessor, and post-war, novelists such as Patrick White. Australia in fact had a rich mid-century literary culture. Hazzard was only a schoolgirl but still, by 2004 she might have updated her perspective.

Then there’s the locale. I grew up in the same area as Hazzard, the lower North Shore of Sydney which she remembers as a benighted wasteland and I remember as a kind of childhood paradise. I didn’t read books because I was out in the bushland and the sun and the sea. Despite development (middle-class long gone), much of Mosman, where Hazzard went to school, remains spectacularly beautiful, but she seems blind to it all. Although curiously, I believe, in her descriptions of the Bay of Naples in ‘The Bay of Noon’, Hazzard unconsciously transfers her memories of Sydney Harbour.

 

Although her snobbery is intrusive, she is aware of it (sometimes proud of it) and does a little rear-guard: one of Leith’s close confidants is both Australian and cultured (although he also disdains Australia), Peter Exley. Exley (a character similar to Leith), is the centre of a very well fleshed-out sub-plot set largely in Hong Kong which is almost like a separate novel, and a good one. Here is a post-war world of dislocation, peoples, cities, nations, adrift, the necessity and impossibility of action and decision against the various ways the historical cards might play out, which we, with hindsight, know and back-project. Much of this is powerful and moving, and while I find it difficult to swallow the characters of Leith and Helen, all the minor figures here and elsewhere are wonderfully sharp. The shifting colonial scenes also give ample opportunity for Hazzard to exercise a waspish wit.

Back to that ambition. As Thomas Hardy stands behind ‘The Transit of Venus’; in ‘The Great Fire’, probably partly because of the setting, the tutelary God is Joseph Conrad. Like Conrad, Hazzard is very aware of her language, and so are we. The writing from beginning to end is dense and high-toned, every sentence must pull its weight, and I found myself having to ‘unpack’ the odd one. This density, at times, as with Conrad, can impede narrative flow. Although Hazzard has exciting stories to tell, at times so concerned is she with literary ‘excellence’, she forgets about pace and tone. On the upside, there are many superb and incisive descriptions that I’m sure will remain with me. Dialogue is a further problem; people speak as Hazzard writes, the conversations are far too aphoristic and lyrical to be credible. Symbolism too, is often overdone, for example the antipodean cringe becomes the ‘great south wound’.

But after all the wonderful writing on war and war’s turmoil, at the end we must return to the lavender romance. What is between these lovers seems insubstantial and undefined, partly because consummation occurs after the novel’s close, but also because we never see a real relationship develop. For what one would imagine to be a very awkward coming together, everything is solemn and sententious, and all is immediately understood in this meeting of true souls. The sustained seriousness spills over into melodrama: the demure young virgin in the tower, the noble warrior brushed with tragedy. For a moment Mills and Boon seems as close as Conrad.

Readers might disagree with this judgement, but for me, here is a very fine novel marred by mawkishness and snobbery. But, still, don’t be put off. There are great things in ‘The Great Fire’ and it is definitely worth your time and attention.

 

 

In ‘The Known World’, Edward P. Jones creates, as per his title, a complete little world, Manchester County (fictional), in pre-Civil War Virginia, but also occasionally projecting, with his wide cast, right up into the present day. The achievement of this―the back-stories, interaction and balancing of the many characters―bolstered by accomplished prose, is no doubt part of what won Jones the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, Publisher and Books Critics Circle Award, and 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I’m supposing the other part had to do with the ethical heft of his subject matter: an examination of how slavery distorts and degrades a society beyond moral repair. In a situation where men can own other men wholly, good men end up doing bad things, and bad men the unspeakable.

Not that slavery is anything unusual in human affairs, presently thriving as ever in the Middle East and North Africa (which established networks serviced the American South), and elsewhere throughout the world. Mid nineteenth century, when the novel is largely set, Russia was also a slave economy, although skin colour was not a factor and emancipation eventually meant integration, which has not occurred in the United States, still bedevilled by racism.

It’s a pleasure to read a modern novel that has a compelling purpose; in so much contemporary literature, skill and erudition seem disproportionate to any impact or lasting effect. Of course this work is historical, but because of the persistence of racism, the resonances carry through and present hatreds are given cause and shape. Have a good look at how it all started, says Jones, little wonder we have these big problems today. And it’s salutary to have one’s eyes opened, to be jolted from comfortable middle-class complacencies and observe in close detail a ‘functioning’ society, comprised of people like you and me, so utterly cruel and inhumane.

The first big moral shock in the book, cannoning through to the end, is of a black man, a former slave, owning other blacks as slaves. As a non-American reader, I had no idea that this happened or could happen―I remember being astonished years back that native Indians kept black slaves when I read William Faulkner’s story ‘Red Leaves’―and what this shows is that this particular form of human degradation was regarded as completely normal throughout the ante-bellum South. Anyone who could, should own a slave. Why not? This slave owner dies at the opening unleashing a gradual breakdown of all kinds of order, culminating, in a sense, with the (spoiler alert) upright Christian sheriff of the area gratuitously shot dead by his own deputy and cousin. This is really the end, Jones seems to be saying, with any possibility of justice completely blown away. Between these two bookends we are witness to all types of appalling abominations, par-for-the-course then and there, presumably.

So, an admirable achievement, this novel, and highly praised and prized all round, still I would like to take issue with Jones’s overall approach. Some of the critics naturally compare ‘The Known Word’, given its length and scope and general realism (there are a few discordant ‘magic realist’ touches), to the great nineteenth century novelists, Tolstoy, Hardy, Elliot etc. where moral purpose is conjoined to a broad and detailed portrait of a society. And in one specific Jones uses the same device as Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace’, giving most characters a single personal trait, gesture or act or marking, so that we can recognise them when they re-appear in the canvass.

But Tolstoy’s huge novel, with its cast of hundreds, is actually a story of a handful of people, two linked families with Pierre as the go-between. Intimately drawn figures set in a broad landscape. Jones takes a more ‘Brechtian’ approach, giving almost equal weight to his large number of protagonists. The effect, which I’m sure is intentional, is, like Brecht’s ‘alienation’, a distancing one. Jones is more concerned to show us the ‘scene’, rather focus too much on any personal drama. The whole picture is what the book is about, the society of slavery, rather than the personal turmoil of any Pierre or Dorothea or Tess.

This works for a while, but what I found as I progressed was that I started to lose interest; the ‘alienation’ was working all too well. I struggled against this, with such worthy material, but still had to push myself to finish. And this was simply because it wasn’t anyone’s particular story, but everyone’s. I wanted someone, or a couple of souls, closely known and felt, to carry me through this hellish journey with them. A human failing maybe, but there I was at the close suitably shocked and enlightened, but not moved. Jones had engaged me morally and intellectually, but not vitally. Consider: if, say, Tess’s own plight moves me deeply, I then become personally enraged considering the wider injustices that as a working-class woman she is forced to suffer because of the society in which she lives. The old Aristotelian identification. And surely, one assumes, this is the sort of response Jones is seeking.

A common critical failing to fault something for what it lacks, but with such a big complicated work, I think that perhaps Jones, in his earnestness and ambition, has not taken into sufficient account his readers and their natural desires. After all, you’d really prefer they’d be reading ‘The Known World’ than ‘Gone with the Wind’.

 

 

 

Ninety-per-cent of William Golding’s ‘The Inheritors’ is told from a Neanderthal point of view, that is a literal not a figurative Neanderthal, as imagined by the author, but this novel is really about us, Homo Sapiens. Golding’s general estimation of ‘Wise Guy’ in this follow-up to his first publication, the hugely successful ‘Lord of the Flies’, seems not to have improved. His little band, who are not like Neanderthals actually would have been―hardly behind us with their own tools and culture, and of course now we know that ancestral Europeans even enjoyed some Neanderthal nookie―are a sort of sub-human ape, with basic communication skills and limited sense of a past tense. But the qualities Golding has endowed on this tribe, presumably the last of its kind, are a sort of inverse to the things he doesn’t like about us, and maybe himself.

Golding served throughout World War Two so his ‘vision’ in ‘Lord of the Flies’, of a group of ‘civilised’ boys degenerating into savagery in a post-atomic-holocaust world, seems an unsurprising formulation from what he had suffered and witnessed: culturally and technically sophisticated nation states indulging in a barbaric blood-bath, the second within a few decades. And he, by necessity, an active agent in that.

Whereas his Neanderthals are peaceful and caring, largely vegetarian―they only eat meat killed by others―communicating in telepathic ‘pictures’, with few words, as though the development of language itself might be a curse, a slightly odd view for a writer. Family bonding is the most important thing in their lives, therefore they worship a female God, ‘Oa’, as the original source of family. They respect and learn from their elders, they revere their dead. They’re far too nice, and so you know, as a consequence, doomed to be wiped out, by us.

Without any spoilers I can confidently leave readers to imagine what inevitably occurs when a tribe of Homo Sapiens wanders into their territory. And here Golding provides some brilliant observations of just how strange we, as a race, might appear to others. Notably, it is our decadence, our sense of sin, that most sets us apart from the primal innocents spying through the foliage. We drink and fight and kill and fornicate without really giving a damn, all quite beyond Neanderthal comprehension. Look through these eyes and see what evolution has finally produced, says Golding, this plague on the natural earth. Probably just as well he himself died before being party to the present accelerating outrages to our planet and its denizens.

I increasingly found this book hard going. Golding is not a ‘kill your darlings’ writer, certainly not here anyway, with his endlessly languid descriptions of the natural landscape that have little connection to plot and motive and unnecessarily clog up the narrative. Also point-of-view is mostly through the alpha male, Lok, who is not very bright, even for a monkey. Lok spends a lot of page time describing the goings-on of the new men in detached observations that are difficult for the reader to piece together. He doesn’t understand much of what they’re doing, so neither can we, and this quickly becomes boring.

Also, in some defence of our kind, the ceremonial bacchanals/orgies observed by Lok and his consort Fa perversely show the beginnings of religion and culture. There is a somewhat wayward but nevertheless continuous line from a hopped-up shaman prancing around in a deer-hide to, say, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, or even the great tradition of English prose which includes a small distinguished niche for Mr. William Golding. It hasn’t been all bad.

Jeremiahs, even powerful ones, sour quickly. Say your piece and leave your audience reeling. This is not a long book, but still, I feel the important messages are dulled by Golding’s writerly ambitions. A fascinating overall concept, and brilliant and powerful in parts, ‘The Inheritors’ turns into one of those ‘worthy’ novels, definitely worth reading, but you’ll be hanging out for the end. The end, admittedly, is very good.