HG Wells, The Door in the Wall, and MR James, Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book

These days, I tend to organise books alphabetically and by genre, which probably makes me sound more anal than I really am (most other things I just throw on the floor). But when I was a youngish teenager, I loved the kind of look you see in the house style mags, with books arranged by size and colour. Some publishers were decent enough to collaborate with me on this. Two of my favourites were Picador, with their fabulous white spines producing a nicely understated block of elegance on my shelves, and Penguin, whose books in those days – I’m talking late 60s, early 70s here – were about as rigid in their colour scheme as the original Model Ts. Orange for general fiction, blue for non-fiction (but they were Pelicans, so didn’t really count) and grey for modern classics. I don’t know what year the original style – graphic with horizontal bands of colour and white on matt card – was replaced by a more contemporary (and now, inevitably, more dated) photographic style, but I had examples of both in my collection, rigorously divided for purely aesthetic reasons into two separate groups. Among my favourite modern classics were the Evelyn Waugh novels in the first style, with drawings by David Gentleman*. Everything I read by authors like EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and a host of others, I read in editions that looked like this, the beautiful balance of grey and white, the elegant typeface called Joanna and the work of Eric Gill, before his toppling, later replaced by Helvetica. The Modern Classics had pretty much cornered the market in what felt like the great modernist tradition of English fiction; and not only English, I’m sure I read André Gide in these editions, and Thomas Mann. I used to wonder what it took to be seen as a Modern Classic. DH Lawrence wasn’t necessarily (but Isherwood usually was and so, inexplicably, was Galsworthy). William Golding yes, George Orwell no. Stevie Smith no, Carson McCullers yes. Some interesting editorial choices were clearly being made.

And that’s still the case with the very stylish grey-and-white new series of Penguin Mini Modern Classics, brought out to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original selection. Waugh isn’t there, and neither is Huxley, but Henry James and Virginia Woolf have both made it through, along with a number of writers whose reputations have been made, or re-evaluated, since 1961. The two books I’ll be taking a look at are both very much on the outer edges of modernism, and I’m not sure that either of them appeared in the original series. (I do have a well-thumbed copy of MR James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in Penguin, but it’s bog-standard orange). I suspect they’d both have been seen as rather old-fashioned 50 years ago, perhaps more so than they do now.

Both groups of stories were written and published around the end of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, and their authors were near contemporaries, although Wells lived ten years longer than James, only dying in 1946. The stories are interesting for what they have in common and for what distinguishes them from each other. The Wells mini classic contains three stories, all quite different. The first, The Door in the Wall, is a neatly written, rather touching parable about the conflict between worldly aspiration, and another less tangible life in which such aspiration counts for nothing, a life that exists beyond the wall. The story ends ambiguously, with the reader left in two minds as to whether the protagonist finally passes through the door into the mysterious garden behind it, although it’s clear that Wells recognises the fascination exerted by the sense of potential elsewhere the door represents, and is on the side of the imagination. The only problem is that the garden feels as though it’s been imagined by someone who’s spent too much time in the land of faery invented by Edward Burne-Jones. There’s a pre-Raphaelite decorative tweeness about the description of the place that reduces the overall power of the story.

The second in the group, The Sea Raiders, is much more effective. Essentially, it’s a monster story, with vile creatures dragging themselves up from the deep to… well, you can guess the rest. It has all the pseudo-scientific trappings we’ve come to expect from the genre, which may be old hat now, but certainly wasn’t at the time. And it does have some particularly effective touches: the point at which the creatures make ‘a soft purring sound to each other’ I found surprisingly chilling, in the way that much of MR James is, and for similar reasons. The notion of ‘marvelling at the shrillness and variety’ of a man’s voice as he’s devoured is also likely to remain with me for a while.

The final tale, The Moth, reminded me of Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, if only because it deals with bitter rivalry and revenge. It’s a cautionary tale, and great fun to read, and once again it plays with the science/supernatural interface, possibly to the detriment of the former, which seems to offer little more than a petard by which its practitioners can most easily hoist themselves. Like the other two stories in the book, the world its protagonists inhabit is middle-class, political or academic, and essentially male, and this is one of the aspects they share with the MR James collection. They’re also, like James’ stories, extremely readable.

As a group, the MR James volume shows more coherence than The Door in the Wall, if only because two of the stories share their protagonist. Dennistoun (as in ‘Let us call him Dennistoun’) is the archetypal James hero, a Cambridge fellow with an interest in antiquarian objects and ecclesiastical history. In both of the stories that feature him, the action revolves around an image; in the first, a ‘sepia drawing … representing, one would say at first sight, a Biblical scene’, but that, on closer inspection, reveals the presence of a ‘being that crouched’; in the second, the mezzotint of the title is the bearer of horror, with its image of a creature whose lower jaw was ‘shallow, like a beast’s…’ When people talk about James, they tend to emphasise the weirdly disturbing ordinariness of his horror, the twisted sheet in Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, for example, but these two could have walked, or crawled, straight out of a Stephen King novel. The piebald long boy in Lisey’s Story comes from the same dark place. What makes them so creepy, because they are creepy, is the conviction that, as someone says in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, they are ‘drawn from the life.’ How this is done within the story isn’t explained, but the understated authority of the narrating voice, the dry and dusty precision of it, acts as a constant guarantee.

The other two stories in this small book operate in a more typically (MR) Jamesian way. In The Rose Garden the shock is not in what’s seen, but in its incongruity, and the same is true of the final tale, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, where the vividly imagined but entirely unreal creatures of the first two stories are replaced by nothing more sinister than wood that feels like wet linen and a cat where it shouldn’t be. James is at his best when he uses the technique Isherwood attributed to EM Forster: ‘The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down…’ My favourite James story, one that isn’t in this collection, is called The Treasure of Abbot Thomas; it contains what is for me the most effective example of this technique. Here it is:

Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt–yes–more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evidently part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could, I pulled it to me, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than I had expected. As I pulled it towards the entrance, my left elbow knocked over and extinguished the candle. I got the thing fairly in front of the mouth and began drawing it out. Just then Brown gave a sharp ejaculation and ran quickly up the steps with the lantern. He will tell you why in a moment. Startled as I was, I looked round after him, and saw him stand for a minute at the top and then walk away a few yards. Then I heard him call softly, “All right, sir,” and went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck.

I mentioned King earlier and he’s a writer who’s learnt a great deal from James, as have most modern writers of horror from Lovecraft to Adam Nevill; one of the things they’ve learnt is that people don’t always deserve what they get. In two of these four tales, the horror simply happens. Even in the other two, the moral comeuppance feels arbitrary and wilful, and anything but theologically sound. Which makes MR James a more disturbing, and subversive, writer than he might at first appear.

*This should be Quentin Blake, of course (see below), but I’ll leave the link. I like David Gentleman.

Next time, it’s thumbscrews…

Writer, blogger, jogger, cook and author of soon-to-be-published Minding My Peas and Cucumbers, Kay Sexton has done me the great honour of reviewing Any Human Face (still available at all good booksellers, although you may have to insist) and of asking me, with her customary intelligence and acumen, a few questions about writing, book covers and, er, sex. So, as interviews go, it’s pretty comprehensive. It will also tell you what the connection is with this picture, of an installation by Italian artist, Fabio Mauri, as well as explaining the title to this post.

You can find both the review and the interview here.

Niall Griffiths, The Dreams of Max and Ronnie, and Gwyneth Lewis, The Meat Tree

Some years ago, Canongate began to publish a series of re-workings of the world’s great myths. It was a good idea, and it’s produced some interesting and surprising works, among them Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith, a startlingly resonant retelling of a relatively little known group of Celtic tales. Seren Books is now doing something similar. Fittingly enough, as a publishing house that specialises in English writing from Wales, it’s cast its net close to home and hauled in the Mabinogion, along with a group of writers with Welsh connections. I first read the Mabinogion during an early Tolkienesque phase some forty years ago, and remembered very little of it apart from a woman made of flowers, which inspired, in its turn, Alan Garner‘s wonderful novel, The Owl Service. Books lead on to books. I would probably never have picked it up again if Seren hadn’t sent me the third and fourth in the series of new books based on the original tales. So I’m doubly grateful, because the book behind the series is well worth reading in its own right. It’s a fascinating mix, as these things tend to be, of fantasy and politics, and one of its main functions seems to be to establish the specialness of the place and people it describes. It’s a foundational work, like any body of myth worth its salt, a powerful cocktail of naming and genealogy and marvels, with just enough history stirred in to stiffen the brew. But it’s also an unexpectedly knowing work, aware of its effects, playful and not without its own satirical take on mediaeval chivalry and its ideological underpinning.

That Niall Griffiths is more than aware of this aspect of the work can be seen from his choice of stories to retell in The Dreams of Max and Ronnie. The two sections draw on later tales in the original collection, The Dream of the Emperor Maxen and Rhonabwy’s Dream. The former tale, despite being based on the actual historical figure of Magnus Maximus, has the stuff of fairy tale, as the emperor dreams of a long and typically magical journey that leads him to a maiden whose beauty is no easier to gaze on than the sun ‘when it is at its brightest and most beautiful‘. Waking from his dream, he is desolate with love, neglecting his duties as emperor. Finally, he sends out messengers, who find the peerless maiden in Wales (well, it is the Mabinogion) and greet her as Empress of Rome. Understandably, she demands to see Maxen himself. Maxen conquers Britain to reach her and, to win her hand, agrees to the maiden’s rather onerous demands (the Island of Britain for her father, various islands for herself and a string of forts, with annexed highways). This is the point at which the story originally ended. In the extended version, Maxen is ousted from his role as emperor after seven years. He hurries back to Rome, lays siege to the city and eventually retakes it with the help of the maiden’s brothers, who receive an army as reward. The brothers spend the next part of their lives conquering lands and castles and cities, killing all the men but leaving the women alive.  Finally, one of the brothers decides to settle down with his followers in a conquered land. In order to preserve their language, they cut out the tongues of all the women there. And on that rather gruesome note, the story ends. As a whole, it’s an interesting descent from the tropes of fable to a gory – and apparently unrelated – bit of misogynistic Realpolitik, in which the oneiric superlatives of the original dream are soon replaced by the clash of armies and a striking metaphor about the dangers of cultural assimilation, and how to avoid them.

Rhonabwy’s Dream, on the other hand, is entirely devoted to the dream and is more complex – and intriguing – as a result. Three soldiers find themselves obliged to take shelter in a decidedly non-chivalric smoke-blackened hovel, with a piss-covered floor and an old hag feeding a fire. The building contains a yellow ox-skin, which will bring good luck to whoever sleeps on it. And this is where Rhonabwy sleeps, and dreams. It’s an extraordinary dream, about conflict, and meta-conflict, in which violence and the formal strategies of a board game called gwyddbwyll are folded into each other. It’s a powerful, densely-told tale, made all the more memorable – ironically, perhaps -by a disclaimer at the end that a tale so complex can no longer be told without the use of a book,

‘because of the number of colours on the horses, and the many unusual colours both on the armour and their trappings, and on the precious mantles and their magic stones.’

Griffiths devotes more space to his retelling of the second of these tales, which he places first in his book. I think it’s the right decision to have made, and certainly his version is a hard-hitting and disturbing tale in its own right. It seems to me that the reworking of myth can be done in two basic ways. You can explore what makes it essential by finding some new way of stripping the body bare – something Gwyneth Lewis does, to great effect, in The Meat Tree – or you can take its basic structure as a mannequin to be clothed in a brand-new suit of meanings, with the underlying structure providing the archetypal underpinning required. Griffiths goes for the second option in both his stories. In the first, Rhonabwy, now Ronnie, is a modern-day soldier who rolls up with two other soldiers at the flat of Red Helen, ‘a woman made of dough and with hair the colour of a wound‘. Due to be sent back to Iraq, they’re looking for a final bit of fun, which Red Helen provides. In these opening pages, Griffiths takes the language of myth and subverts it, much as the original tale subverted the language, and setting, of chivalry. Ronnie drops a tab and soon after falls asleep on a ‘blanket yellow in colour and decorated with images of smiling moo-cows’. According to Helen, it’s a lucky blanket. And so Ronnie sleeps, and dreams. Griffiths follows the structure of the original closely, finding ironic contemporary counterparts for each of its details with imagination, wit and a sort of controlled rage at the state of modern Britain, in which the representation of valour has been delegated to a certain tattooed footballer, who shall remain nameless. Griffiths points his finger at the various follies of the world we live in, notably its tendency to the mindless worship of power, perhaps less subtly than the original, but that’s only to be expected, as the success of the retelling depends on the – basically anti-mythical –  precision of its focus. The only major deviation from Rhonabwy’s Dream comes at the very end. But I’ll let you discover that for yourselves.

The modern version of the second dream is shorter, but operates in a similar fashion. Instead of replacing the knights of old with squaddies, Griffiths recasts his tale in a world where Cardiff gangsta Max, aka the Emperor, ‘sells illicit drugs and stolen goods‘ and spends his evenings in a nightclub called Rome. He’s a dangerous, powerful man, used to getting what he wants, so when he dreams of a woman – ‘She was Beyoncé, Alesha Dixon, Lisa Maffia’ – he wants her too. In his reworking of this story, Griffiths is more selective, but the effect is equally striking. What’s remarkable in both these pieces, apart from the way they bend the earlier works to their purpose, is the way Griffiths takes what he needs from that earlier language, of chivalry, and works it into a newer more debased language, contaminating the latter and allowing it to be contaminated back. Neither language – and neither concept of authority – emerges unscathed.

In The Meat Tree, Gwyneth Lewis takes on perhaps the most well-known of the tales in the Mabinogion, essentially because of its most arresting image, that of a woman being made of flowers. It’s surprising to find, when reading the tale, that this transformation takes place towards the end of the story, after a lot of other magical business has already been carried out. Indeed, the driving force behind the entire tale is that of supernatural transformation. It’s a further reminder of the licence given to myth that a story that forms part of a national mythology should take bestiality, incest and some pretty awful parenting techniques in its stride, but there you go; the past, as they say, is a foreign country, even if it does, in this case, resemble an episode of True Blood. What Lewis has done, though, is remind us that the past is not nearly as foreign as we might like to think, and she’s done this by setting her own reworking of the story in the future, 200 years from now, and on a spaceship somewhere close to the Mars Outer Satellite Orbit. The original tale had a cast of, if not hundreds, a good dozen (not counting transformations); the retelling is more economical, with the number reduced to two: an elderly male Inspector of Wrecks on his last mission, and his younger female assistant, on her first. They’ve been sent to investigate what appears to be a ‘bog-standard rudimentary Earth vessel’. But all is not what it seems, as they discover when, in order to find out exactly what happened on board the derelict ship, they reactivate its virtual reality game system. Like Griffiths, who replaces the gwyddbwyll of the legend with a computer game called, more graphically, Killzone, Lewis is attracted by the opportunities virtual reality games offer. But she takes the opposite tack to Griffiths, using the game, and the way in which her two protagonists interact within it and towards each other, as a way of interrogating the very essence of the original myth, without sacrificing one jot of readability in the process. It’s a work of great intellectual vigour and emotional honesty, warning us of the very real power of tales as it captures us in its own, not always benevolently. At one point, the female protagonist thinks, ‘I’m caught up in a work of art that doesn’t have my welfare at heart‘, and there’s a sense in which this is true of The Meat Tree, if, by welfare, we understand the providing of consolation. More deeply, of course, it’s absolutely concerned with the imagination, which is anything but consolatory. In her illuminating afterword, Lewis, herself a highly regarded poet, says:

‘I believe that poetry itself is one of the earliest technologies and the imagination is a form of virtual reality…. I particularly wanted to look at the shadow side of the creative mind, the way in which it can consume as well as generate.’

It would be hard to imagine two books more different than these, nor more successful in achieving their aims. I’m looking forward very much to reading the rest of the series.

Clare Dudman: 98 Reasons for Being

Last September, I was invited to take part in a book-lovers’ week in Catalonia, as one of four guest authors. (And if you think you’d enjoy a week in a manor house in a beautiful part of northern Spain, eating extremely well and talking about books and life in general with a lovely bunch of people, I suggest you contact 7 Day Wonder yourself.) While I was there, I was lucky enough to meet two of the other writers, Ann Cleeves and Adam Nevill, but the fourth, Clare Dudman, had already left when I arrived. This was a pity, because I was very impressed by her novel A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, set in the first Welsh colony to be established in Patagonia. It’s a book that combines research and imagination to great, and frequently deeply moving, effect, and it made me want to read more of her work.

I decided to start with the intriguingly titled 98 Reasons for Being. The novel is set in Frankfurt in the mid-19th century and tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Hannah Meyer, who is admitted to the town’s asylum after having been diagnosed as a nymphomaniac. The asylum is run by Heinrich Hoffman, now remembered primarily as the author of Struwwelpeter. The novel begins with Hannah’s arrival at the asylum and describes the course of treatment prescribed for her by Hoffman, who becomes increasingly involved in the case, at a professional and personal level. It was a period in which notions of madness, its cause and treatment, were unsettled and it’s to the novel’s credit that the disagreements of the time, between those who believed that insanity had a purely physical cause and those who considered it to be a sort of moral disorder, are presented with such vividness, although this won’t surprise anyone who’s read the author’s most recent book, where fact and fiction are woven together with similar artistry. Some of the fictional ‘extracts’ ostensibly taken from contemporary documents that are used to introduce the chapters are worth reading in their own right, as insights into the beliefs and prejudices that animated the period. The descriptions of some of the cures adopted – ranging from the application of leeches to that of electrodes – are particularly graphic, and their inefficacy only seems to reinforce Hoffmann’s own bitter observation towards the end of the novel:

All I can do is watch as the people I am trying to save perish before my eyes.

This isn’t always the case, of course, although the novel does have its fair share of casualties, despite the efforts – not always consistent – of Hoffmann and his assistants, whose own lives provide a fascinating backdrop to the main story, as well as a sense of depth to the cramped, institutional but nonetheless recognisably human world the book creates. One of the assistants, Hugo, says, at the end of the novel:

I thought I knew the difference between a mad man and a sane one. And there isn’t. We are, all of us, mad … and all of us sane.

This might make the book’s achievement seem a little too easily won, but it shouldn’t: the conflict between what we mean by sanity and insanity is anything but clear-cut, as Dudman makes clear in her presentation of the central character. To give too much detail here about Hannah’s cure would be to give the game away, so I’ll just say that one of the many strengths of the novel is the way in which her story is presented, through inner monologue and in her relationships with both the other patients and the staff. It’s a story that touches, inevitably, on the social condition of Jews in 19th century Germany, but also on ideas of family, sexuality and the role of women, as well as, in an interestingly prescient way, the power of the talking cure.

One of the other great pleasures of the book is the links it makes between Hoffmann’s experiences and Struwwelpeter, the poems and illustration of which are used to conclude several chapters of the book and to throw back light on what they contain. The final section makes particularly neat use of Hoffmann’s double role as scientist and teller of tales, a double role that Dudman also seems to have made her own.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

It seems a bit churlish to follow my last, fairly negative review with another one – although Ishiguro‘s work generally and this novel in particular have been sufficiently praised by enough people for one small dissenting voice not to matter that much – but I found Never Let Me Go frustrating on a number of counts, some technical, if you like, and some not. Technically, I was struck over and over again by the sheer dullness of the language. Much has been said about the masterful way Ishiguro deploys a limited vocabulary and stylistic range to reflect the damaged nature of his narrator, but it seems to me that, once again – because this is a feature of much of his writing – the author has tried to make a virtue out of the endemic flatness of his prose. If this were the case in one novel, or even two, it might be easier to attribute to authorial intention. And it’s certainly true that, in the three novels of his that I’ve read, the narrator is someone whose personality is damaged in some way. But it seems to be true of all his work, which makes me suspect that the clichéd blandness and boneless, repetitive syntax are pretty much all that Ishiguro does. Emotionally scarred narrators are no excuse: there must be – damn it, there are! – numerous ways of writing about, and out of, damage without using language that operates at the level of a rather dispirited Christmas round robin, as it does in this book.

The second source of technical frustration is Ishiguro’s use of a sort of cataphoric narrative device to move the story on, with the narrator saying something like ‘that time with the tree, doll, tape, etc.’ and then telling us what happened that time with the tree, doll, tape, ad infinitum. Used sparingly this technique can be very effective. In this novel, it’s practically the only method the author uses to advance the tale, and it gets particularly irritating well before the end, as well as failing in its purpose, which is surely to encourage the reader to find out just what did happen next. Too much ellipsis produces, in this reader at least, a sort of curiosity fatigue, as well as feeling, well, clumsy.

My final quibble, and it’s a big one, has to do with the general air of resignation that hangs over the book and others by Ishiguro. He’s best at loss, captured in a forlorn, stiff upper lip sort of way, ideally in a grey, rainy landscape that saps any energy the characters (or reader) might have. His books are contrived to ensure that the prevailing mood is a low-level whinge, what my mother used to call grizzling, whatever the subject. Nuclear attack, WW2, class warfare (and the lack of it), cloning for spare part surgery; no matter how appalling the central issue of the book may be, the only mood possible seems to be one of tearful, perhaps rueful acceptance. I know that literature isn’t supposed to be a weapon for change (although I’d like to thank it could be, used properly), but the refusal of the novel and its characters to even consider the possibility of resistance becomes as implausible, to me, as the passivity of the butler in The Remains of the Day. I can’t help but feel that Ishiguro actually values these qualities as having a sort of moral stature simply because they persist, and allow the status quo to persist. He strikes me as a deeply reactionary writer, and I find this uncongenial.

Nicholas Mosley: The Hesperides Tree

I first came across Nicholas Mosley‘s work when I read Hopeful Monsters some years ago. I was deeply impressed by the book, not only by its range of intellectual reference, which includes politics, biology, genetics and physics (cue walk-on part for Albert Einstein), and its geographical and temporal scope – the novel takes in whole swathes of Europe and northern Africa during a substantial chunk of the last century – but also by its technical innovations, undercutting naturalised stream of consciousness techniques with a constant, and artful, use of the initially distracting signalling devices, ‘I thought’, ‘I wondered’ ‘I said’, etc., at least partly to highlight the extent to which these acts so rarely coincide. At the start of the novel, this, like the use/non-use of the question mark, can feel like a trick; by the end, it’s become – ironically – as naturalised in the reader’s mind as the conventions it replaces, while remaining an effective shorthand for emotional/intellectual ambivalence. In terms of scope, the ambition of the novel made the kind of impression on me that Paul Verhaeghen‘s Omega Minor did more recently. It’s a large book in every way, fully deserving of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, which it won in 1990, and unjustly neglected since. It’s to the credit of the Dalkey Archive Press that both Mosley’s and Verhaeghen’s books are available today.

So I was delighted to see a pristine hardback copy of his 2001 novel, The Hesperides Tree, in a local charity shop for only £1.49. The novel has several things in common with Hopeful Monsters; despite being shorter, it has the same intellectual cross-disciplinary ambition, this time throwing genetics, mythology, information technology and terrorism of both the Irish and the middle Eastern variety into the mix, not to speak of the same stylistic features: the repeated use of verbs of consciousness, an idiosyncratic use of punctuation. It’s full of action, and event, and slightly out-dated relevance, like the millennium bug. So why is it such a dreadful disappointment?

The novel is a first person narrative, ostensibly by an eighteen year old man, the son of a psychotherapist and documentary maker. Except that it isn’t. There isn’t a single point in the book at which the voice is convincingly that of a young man at the end of the twentieth century, regardless of his background. I’m not asking that it be typical, or representative in any way, simply that it sound authentic. It doesn’t even have that creaky, slightly embarrassing air of an old man imitating his grandchildren. It’s just the slightly hectoring, slightly dotty, frequently faux-naif, voice of, well, the author, presumably. It’s no surprise that the only part of the novel not written from the viewpoint of the unnamed protagonist – a longish manuscript produced by his mother, describing her relationship with the powerful father of one of his best friends, a laughably unbelievable gay hacker (and don’t get me started on Stanislaus) – should sound exactly the same as the rest of the novel, down to the last worn-out narrative device, the last ‘I thought’ followed by a dash.

The plot’s absurd as well, but that’s hardly the point. Plots needn’t be plausible to do what they’re designed to do. (Though it’s odd that someone with the background of Mosley should fail so dismally at producing a picture of the rich and powerful, the movers and shakers, that doesn’t feel as if a Heat writer were having a stab at parodying Aldous Huxley.) And it might be claimed that my stubborn need for a convincing voice, or voices, and for dialogue that sounds as though it might actually have been uttered by human beings, rather than the single monotonous voice of the book’s author, is nothing more than a bourgeois clinging to the traditional novel, whatever that is. According to the narrator, who switches from studying biology to literature: “literature seemed to treat humans no differently than science did; as characters predestined to behave in the way they did, very occasionally happening by chance to change, but with no awareness of autonomy. Their brains produced no more than a stream of consciousness or rather unconsciousness because they contained no feel of how humans might be creative. Thus literature became a chronicle of humanity’s oddities and crimes and follies, peopled by characters with no virtue except that of being quaint. This was decked out indeed often enough in glorious or subtle language which gave the impression of empowerment; but there was little feel of this in the characters portrayed.”

Well, this is nonsense, and obscenely so in a novel whose characters aren’t sufficiently realised to achieve quaintness, never mind creativity. The love interest, which takes up much of the book, involves a young Irish woman whose capacity for wide-eyed philosophical whimsy is, alas, as great as that of the narrator, and a lesbian feminist who nonetheless finds our young man not only worth getting a leg over but also suitable father material. The descriptions of love are mawkish and the sex scenes downright hilarious. I’d say that the women characters were particularly offensively portrayed if it weren’t for the even more excruciating presence of that gay chum, “like some sort of tattered eagle on its rock”. Early on in the novel, the author, sorry, the young narrator, says: “Language seems a bit out of its depth when it tries to say how things might be right.” He should try reading a few more books; I’m sure I’m not the only one who could provide a list of novels in which what might constitute the good, or the right, is addressed with considerable skill and grace (see the object of my last review for an example). In the case of this novel, language seems pretty much out of its depth when it tries to do anything other than be tritely vacuous and portentous. Oh dear.

Damon Galgut: The Good Doctor

The Man Booker Prize is a mixed blessing. Certainly, from the point of view of someone who writes novels, the publication of the long list is one of those little disappointments that enliven, and embitter, the literary year, providing – at best – a spur to fail better, as Beckett might have said, although probably in a nobler context. On the other hand, it also encourages one to read authors who might not otherwise be read – in my case, Howard Jacobson and Damon Galgut. I’ve been reading Jacobson the columnist for years and always found him refreshingly complex when compared with the simplistic approach of, say, Johann Hari, but I’d never tried a novel before this year. Galgut, on the other hand, I’d never heard of and might not even have bought if Book People hadn’t offered all six shortlisted books for £30. Well, I’m glad I did. Of the two novels I’ve read so far, Galgut’s made by far the deeper impression, which isn’t to say that The Finkler Question didn’t engage and entertain me. But the test of how much an author has grabbed you may be the time it takes you to seek out something else that he or she has written. And on that reckoning Galgut wins hands down.

The Good Doctor is a beautifully paced, sparely written analysis of post-apartheid South Africa, set in a neglected rural hospital in what had once been a homeland and is now more or less abandoned, other than by sporadic attempts by the military to reduce crime in the area. But it’s also the story of a conflict between two ways of understanding change and the possibility of change. I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about personal and political responsibility, and one of the strengths of Galgut’s work, in both this and In a Strange Room, is that it takes on the full ambiguity of what these involve. The contrast between the young idealist, Laurence, whose sense of the individual is subservient to his need for action, and his conviction that such action is both necessary and worthwhile, and the narrator, Frank, weary and compromised despite himself and his better instincts, is drawn with understanding and a ruthless, attentive delicacy. It’s hard not to take sides, and even harder to feel comfortable with the side taken, to such an extent that the good doctor of the title might be either Laurence or Frank. There’s a moment towards the end of the book when the two men, who share a room in the hospital, find themselves occupying each other’s beds: ‘We were in the wrong beds, but somehow that didn’t feel so strange.’

The book’s particularly effective – and I suppose this is unavoidable – when it addresses race. Frank’s relationships with Maria, a black woman who runs a ramshackle shop filled with items for tourists, and with his superior at the hospital, Dr Ngema, lay bare the way colour continues to define individuals, regardless of status. But the most haunting single scene for me is that in which Frank’s father, a successful medical entrepreneur-cum-media figure, insists that his ageing black maid take out a bowl of dying flowers from the room.

‘You’re dropping petals, Betty. All over the place. Please… Please…’

And the old lady in the nice blue uniform set the dying flowers down and got on to her knees. She started crawling across the floor, picking up bits of flowers as she went.

‘There, Betty,’ my father murmured, pointing patiently, ‘…there…another one there…’

A seed, a shine, a glow; thoughts on Edwin Morgan

Not so much thoughts, perhaps, as a sort of memory. Edwin Morgan came to read for Blue Room, the poetry society John Wilkinson, Charlie Bulbeck and I ran in Cambridge in the early 1970s. Assiduous readers of this blog will already know that one of my duties, apart from booking rooms and making coffee, was to – how can I put this delicately? – meet the erotic needs of some of the visiting poets. (You can find more about this extra-curricular activity in the Cambridge Literary Review and Jacket.) I remember the general feeling that Morgan might be the third element in my literary-cum-sexual hat-trick, so it was odd to read in the recent obituaries (this one by Ben Myers) that he didn’t come out until much later. I was already a fan of his work, which struck me as both witty and wise, and my copy of From Glasgow to Saturn, with its glossy canary yellow cover, was one of my favourite collections throughout my student years and beyond. Among other things, he was the only concrete poet who seemed to me to make a case for concrete poetry deserving a a wider readership than one restricted to a group of practising adepts. I don’t remember meeting him before the reading, which was both polished and intimate, but I do remember our holding a sort of post-reading party in my room, and Morgan sitting in the single armchair the room provided, rather shy and benign, and no more interested in having sex with me than I was with him. I continued to read him, with pleasure, and was sorry to see he’d died, but this post was actually triggered by a review in the Guardian a few weeks ago now of a final collection, entitled Dreams and other Nightmares, published by Mariscat Press (and currently unavailable from Amazon). The title of this post is Morgan’s wonderful gloss on a tear, quoted in the review. It’s a fine perceptive piece, but what stopped me in my reading was a small section from a poem called “Skins”.

The bodies we don’t know

don’t know each other or themselves.

We introduce the stranger to the stranger.

Reading this, I had the oddest sense of loss, and envy, as though one of those strangers should have been me.

Top ten books written by women about gay men

Some of the best books to have been written about the male gay experience in the past hundred years have been written by women. Here are ten of my favourites. (And it would be considerably more difficult to find ten books about lesbians by male novelists that weren’t salacious or simply puzzled. I wonder why?)

1. The Persian Boy: Mary Renault

The second of Mary Renault’s extraordinary trilogy about Alexander the Great, this one tells the story of the conqueror’s adult years from the viewpoint of his Persian slave, Bagoas, captured, transformed into a eunuch and given to the young Macedonian warrior-king, with whom he falls slowly, and despite himself, in love. Renault takes a minor character in historical terms and weaves a tale of passion and heroism that says more about individual pride and the battle it fights with devotion, power and the responsibility it brings, and the sheer force of naked ambition against a resisting world than any other novel I can think of. It’s also made me cry more often than any other book, and in a wider variety of places, including a stolen Mini in Cornwall and a second-class railway carriage between Milan and Venice.

2. Brokeback Mountain: Annie Proulx

This one comes close to The Persian Boy in its unfailing ability to reduce me to tears, although they’re rawer and angrier than those evoked by Renault’s novel. It’s difficult now to separate the original story from the film, but the punch of the written word is harder, and bruises more deeply, than even that of Ang Lee’s great adaptation. It’s a story about love, about love against the world and about the ways that love can make both heroes and cowards of us. The conflict between the two men at its heart is implicit in their names, which give both men the lie: Jack Twist, who never wavers, whose love for Ennis is constant and insistent; Ennis Del Mar, who refuses to adapt, sea-like, who refuses to go with the flow. I can’t take a shirt off a hanger without welling up. It’s also taught me the hardest lesson of all: What can’t be cured, must be endured.

3. The Last of the Wine: Mary Renault

I know, this is the second Renault, but, believe me, I am trying to keep things under control; I could have filled this list with her work. (Don’t even mention The Praise Singer!) The Last of the Wine is set in Athens against the background of the Peloponnesian War. Socrates and Plato are peripheral figures to the action, which centres on the adventures, and misadventures, of Alexias and his lover, Lysis, but central to the sense of both this and the subsequent book, The Mask of Apollo. Renault takes on the big issues – love, freedom, responsibility – in all her work, and nowhere more effectively than in this one, where she has some difficult things to say about democracy and its limitations.

4. Memoirs of Hadrian: Marguerite Yourcenar

What makes this book so good is that Yourcenar’s decision to occupy the mind and voice of Hadrian never smacks of ventriloquism, and, to my ear, never rings false. Tone-perfect, the letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, another philosopher-emperor (briefly seen in the bodily form of Richard Harris at the start of Gladiator), narrates the life of Hadrian, ruler, architect of Rome’s (and, in my opinion, the world’s) most wonderful building, the Pantheon, and modest enough to attribute the work to someone else, lover, protector and distraught survivor of Antinous, the classical world’s most gorgeous golden lad, immortalised in a hundred statues, a man even Plato might have been proud of. It’s a book that describes a man, but also an age.

5. The Catch Trap: Marion Zimmer Bradley

Mists of Avalon is an extraordinary book, as are many of Zimmer Bradley’s science fiction novels, but she can also set her work in less distant times and places, as this novel, now sadly out of print, makes clear. Set in a travelling circus in the 1950s, the novel’s a saga about family, work and love. It’s fascinated by the details of circus life, communicating that fascination powerfully to the reader, but at the heart of the novel is the issue of personal responsibility and gay identity. It’s a brave novel, with two brave men at its heart, and not only because it faces square-on the seduction of a fourteen-year-old boy in a realistic, non-judgemental way. It also has a brilliant walk-on part for a Hollywood actor who may be a thinly disguised Rock Hudson. Or could that be Roddy McDowall?

6. As Meat Loves Salt: Maria McCann

An extraordinary book, set in the English Civil War, and one of the best examples I know of that rare creature – a novel that thinks its way into another mindset entirely. It also has the courage to cast as its central figure a man who is unaware just how unpleasant and pathologically unstable he is. No novel does sexual obsession better than this one, and the fact that there is no name for what its hero feels, and no way of defining it other than in the language of revelation, only makes it more claustrophobic. It’s also, although perhaps it shouldn’t be, a very sexy book indeed. All of which makes The Wilding, McCann’s second book, pace Richard and Judy, an even bigger disappointment.

7. The Front Runner: Patricia Nell Warren

Paul Newman is supposed to have bought the option on this, as a follow up to Butch Cassidy and The Sting, but Redford thought it might damage his macho image and the film was never made. Redford’s loss, Gyllenhaal’s gain, although the climate in Hollywood in the 1970s may have been a little less ready for overt homosexuality than it was thirty years later. It’s a great book, though, adult, realistic, erotic, a book that opened out ways of being gay that weren’t otherwise available in mainstream fiction. It’s a book that modern-day sports fans and sportsmen – with the noble exception of Gareth Thomas – could still profitably read. Free copies at the London Olympics, anyone? (By the way, the cover reproduced here is the one I first bought, years ago. Memories of a time when the male body was a rare sight…)

8. The Talented Mr Ripley: Patricia Highsmith

No one does amorality better than Highsmith, or embodies it more effectively than her greatest protagonist, Tom Ripley.  What she gets so perfectly is the ambivalence between wanting someone and wanting to be someone, between desire and usurpation. Ripley isn’t content to fall in love with Dickie Greenleaf, or even admit the truth of this to himself, other than as a sort of aspiration to what the other man has, and is. And possession, for Ripley, is ten-tenths of the law, even if it means the death of the loved one. It’s not Mary Renault, or Yourcenar come to that, but it’s a powerful gay theme and one that’s explored, albeit obliquely, in the next book on my list.

9. Interview with the Vampire: Anne Rice

The book that convinced me I didn’t need to write my own gay vampire novel when I first read it, almost immediately after it came out (what drew me to it, I wonder now). No one seemed to understand more clearly than Rice what it meant to live as an outsider, forced to live beyond the boundaries of society through a twist of fate, and to slowly learn how to relish the freedom and lack of societal constriction that exclusion gave. It was allegory, I knew that, or thought I did, but most of the vampires were also, just to make things clear, gay as well. A difficult path for a young man, both victim and avenger, unchained spirit and utterly dependent on the other for sustenance – still, it seemed like a good idea when I was a callow youth, fresh out of full-time education, hungry for blood…

10. The Cutting Room: Louise Welsh

This is just the kind of stuff I like, both dark and thoughtful, set not in New Orleans or the backstreets of revolutionary Paris, but in modern-day Glasgow. The brilliantly-named Rilke (Duino Elegies?) finds himself enmeshed in a web of deceit, murder, pornography; just the job for a hard-drinking, hard-living, tough as nails, gay auctioneer… The book’s violence is anything but gratuitous, and its study of why and how one man avoids intimacy makes for compelling reading.  As someone who’s also used the crime genre to speculate on sexual loneliness and violence (that’s right, obligatory plug for Any Human Face), I’m very impressed by Welsh’s take on both.

Top ten books set in Rome

Book Depository used to have a weekly post called Tuesday Top Ten. I thought it would be fun (and useful) to pick out my top ten books set in Rome. Unfortunately, Book Depository decided to discontinue their Tuesday Top Ten, leaving me with my list and nowhere to put it. So, in a spirit of practicality and bitter revenge, I thought I’d put it on my own blog, with one or two additions. Here it is.

Charles Lambert has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. Like the ten books below, his new novel, Any Human Face, just happens to be set in Rome.

1. The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius
In his lives of the first dozen Caesars, Suetonius laid the foundations, and provided the dirt, for much historical fiction about the rulers of imperial Rome, including the two Claudius novels by Robert Graves, who translated the Penguin edition. This book made a worryingly deep impression on me as a thirteen-year-old, but that’s material for another post. Supremely readable and often shocking, at its best the book feels like an inspired collaboration between Lytton Strachey and Kitty Kelley.

2. Coriolanus – William Shakespeare
Often considered a minor Shakespearean tragedy, and certainly less read and performed than the great five, this is my personal favourite. It’s devoted to one of history’s most sublime bully boys, successful soldier and less successful senator, and refreshingly – as tragic Shakespearean heroes go – almost entirely unreflective. At heart, Coriolanus was as contemptuous of public opinion as most modern-day politicians, though rather less careful of his own safety, and infinitely less hypocritical. The fact that I still love the play is proof that studying Shakespeare at school (and being taken to see it performed at Stoke’s theatre in the round) is not the kiss of death it’s reputed to be.

3. Autobiography – Benvenuto Cellini
The best example of real-life picaresque I know, from a period when artists were more likely to die in prison or tavern brawls than in their own beds. Cellini’s vivid account of his travels, artistic commissions, love affairs and acts of murder pulls no punches, and the sections set in Rome are among the best. And let’s face it, pace Tracey Emin (I’m thinking tents here – don’t ask), it isn’t every artist-cum-goldsmith who can conjure up enough demons to fill the entire Colosseum. And his Perseus (see left) has got to be the hottest Renaissance nude of them all, even without the rather suggestive positioning of his sword on the cover of this edition.

4. The Italian – Ann Radcliffe
Ann Radcliffe never set foot in Italy, but that’s all to the good – the slightest touch of authenticity might have stifled her wild and wonderful imagination. This novel, which winds up in the Roman prisons of the Inquisition, is as labyrinthine in its plot as the prisons themselves. Written in angry response to that other great Gothic novel (which, to be perfectly honest, I prefer), The Monk by Matthew Lewis, The Italian is Radcliffe’s dark, occasionally ludicrous but always gripping masterpiece. And talking of weird and wonderful novels, why isn’t Jan Potocki‘s The Manuscript found in Saragossa much better known?

5. Daisy Miller – Henry James
Henry James often returned to Rome, as a visitor, temporary resident and writer. In The Portrait of a Lady, the capital is portrayed at its ‘tortuous and tragic’ best, but his most poignant vision of the city is the one presented through the eyes of Daisy Miller, an ingenuous and ultimately tragic American girl who falls victim to her own desire for experience. One of James’ great themes, that of the life unlived, finds its freshest and most appealing form in this short work.

6. The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone – Tennessee Williams
Lush, passionate, decidedly non-PC when it comes to sexual politics, this tale of a rich widow seeking solace, and finding humiliation, in the arms of an attractive young Roman, is probably the only fiction by Tennessee Williams that bears comparison with his plays. William’s usual themes – solitude, desire, betrayal, physical beauty, despair – are reworked in the setting of post-war Rome, where boys were for rent (see below) and aging countesses pimped for them. And if you’ve never thrown your keys down from a window you should definitely read this book. If you have, it might be wiser to avoid it.

7. A Violent Life – Pier Paolo Pasolini
The second of Pasolini’s two great Roman novels– the first was Ragazzi di Vita (currently, shamefully, unavailable in English!) – A Violent Life portrays the world of Mrs Stone from the bottom up, so to speak, recounting the adventures of the young Tommaso Puzzillo, as he struggles to survive in one of the degraded outskirts or borgate of the city. Tommaso thieves and whores to scrape together a living, before doing time, contracting TB and achieving an all-too-brief redemption through his involvement in the Italian Communist Party. The harsh truth of postwar pre-boom Italy, described by a master, whose sympathies were always with the born-to-lose, and whose presence in today’s Italy, an Italy he predicted with horrible accuracy, is sorely missed.

8. The Public Image – Muriel Spark
Spark spent part of the 1960s in Rome, and set this novel – one of only two of her books to be shortlisted for the Booker prize – in the city. The action takes place in the world of Italian film-making, with the shadow of La Dolce Vita lurking behind Spark’s pitiless, hilarious and startlingly prescient examination of celebrity. I wonder what Annabel Christopher, the heroine, would have made of Katie Price. Inexplicably, the book is currently out of print. So, even more inexplicably, is Spark’s hilarious, shocking The Takeover, set just outside Rome, in Nemi. Where’s a good publisher when you need one?

9. The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
This book starts off in Holland and comes to its mind-blowing, death-defeating climax in Jerusalem. But, for me, the heart of the action takes place in Rome, at the Holy Stairs beside St John Lateran, normally climbed by pilgrims on their knees. It’s an extraordinary metaphysical romp, taking in Judaic mysticism and friendship, World War 2 and contemporary politics, that makes Foucault’s Pendulum read like Swallows and Amazons. Sadly, Mulisch died last month. It won’t do him much good, but let’s hope that his death brings new readers to his work, not only The Assault, his best-known work, but also the decidedly odd, and intriguing, Siegfried.

10. When We Were Romans – Matthew Kneale
As unreliable narrators go, children are ideal; they’re observant but ingenuous, and have their own agenda, which rarely coincides with that of the adults around them. The Rome of Kneale’s young narrator and his anxious out-of-work mother is one I recognize uncomfortably well, but it’s also freshly worked by the slant of the instantly likeable nine-year-old Lawrence who, like me, is a Tintin fan and fascinated by ancient Rome. Maybe he should read Suetonius (see above). Thinking about it, maybe not.