Readings 2K9: First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

by Eric McCormack

It’s a pity that this book isn’t as interesting as its title. It’s not terrible; it’s the story of a boy born in Scotland, orphaned at a young age, who ends up travelling a fair part of the world and seeing some strange things before his story is wrapped up in Canada in his middle age. It’s an odd structure. The first two thirds or so are extravagant, set in exotic locales, featuring almost Gilliamesque oddities; the last portion is stripped of wonder and charm, livened only by an odd dream and a perhaps-supernatural vision of blackness. It’s clever, but makes the whole feel false. The two parts don’t coexist comfortably within one tale.

The problem may simply be the blandness of the narrative voice. McCormack chose to make his main character tell his tale in a very prosaic voice; there’s a reason for that, as we discover when we find out who he’s telling the story to, and why. But it doesn’t do the actual story any favours. There’s an absence of atmosphere that the story perhaps needed; lacking that atmosphere, the extravagances of the early parts never come to life, never catch fire, and end up even less substantial than they were presumably meant to. It’s a book that balances wonder against the quotidian, and tips the scales in favour of the quotidian.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a Canadian novel. It’s a decent example of the sort of tropes one thinks of when one thinks of CanLit — an erudite wander through a colonial culture’s history and literature; a tendency to flee the fantastic in favour of a bleaker realism (superficially bleaker, at least; one suspects that CanLit is more comfortable with the narrower bounds of realism). It’s a short and not terrible book; but, like much CanLit, not in the end terribly interesting.

Readings 2K9: Soon I Will Be Invincible

Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

One of the charming and exasperating features of the comics field, and especially of the super-hero comics field, is the weird intertwining of both wildly inflated claims of value and self-loathing put-downs. So comics are both an outlaw medium that is the bane of the censor, and also just trash not worth keeping or re-reading. Comics are a neglected art-form with its own geniuses, and also the lowest rung of the pop-cultural ladder, schlock cynically ladled out to kids who don’t know any better. You can make a case for either set of arguments; what’s always impressed me about people in comics is how they can go from one set to another within a single paragraph. 

One could argue that this is a fundamentally adolescent mixture of arrogance and angst, reflecting both the young age of the medium and the target audience of its most commercial forms. I wouldn’t necessarily be convinced of this argument, but I can see it being made. I mention it because it seems relevant to Austin Grossman’s super-hero novel, set in his own world with his own characters, a daring imaginative enterprise that refuses to take itself seriously. Or, more precisely, refuses to wholly believe in itself; refuses to engage with its own imagination, falling back on unconvincing irony and affectless characters.

I should note, despite the above comment, that this isn’t a bad book. It’s the story of a super-villain, Doctor Impossible, and his attempt to get revenge on his arch-enemy, CoreFire, and, yes, to become invincible (though one suspects, based on the book, Grossman's mixed up the definitions of "invincible" and "invulnerable"). Alternating with Impossible’s point of view is that of new super-hero Fatale, recently recruited to the world’s premier super-team, which has dedicated itself to hunting down Impossible and bringing him to justice for the murder of CoreFire — for, to Impossible’s chagrin, it appears somebody else has killed off his nemesis. The story unfolds neatly, though Fatale’s point-of-view proves somewhat unnecessary, and the plot strands, loose throughout the book, don’t quite dovetail strongly enough. The ending generally is something of a problem, with a dea ex machina and expository anti-climax slipping into easy parody. Still, Grossman clearly knows his genre tropes.

It’s with the exploration of those tropes that the book disappoints. For Grossman, the experience of adolescence is the key to the genre; specifically, the super-hero story becomes a parody of high school, with heroes as jocks beating up nerdy villains. Questions of good and evil are secondary; this is not a book particularly interested in morality. Or in the cosmic sublime. Its sensibility is mundane, for all that it plays with superficially imaginative elements.

The problem, though, isn’t its quotidian and reductive approach to super-heroes; it’s the flatness of its metaphorical high school. That is, the problem isn’t the prevalence of adolescence, it’s the lack of credit Grossman implicitly gives adolescents. There’s no depth to these characters; no sense of real issues, real problems, of the process of growth and maturation. One of the female heroes is bulimic, which is a nice touch, but nothing's done with it. You don't have to spend a lot of time around actual teenagers, or in an actual school setting, to realise how much is lacking in this book.

That issue aside, certain problems of believability arise in Grossman's book. Is Doctor Impossible genuinely brilliant? He doesn’t sound like it, or behave like it. If he is hyper-intelligent, why does he act so foolishly? He’s physically humiliated by another villain after going to a villain hang-out; it’s impossible to imagine a major villain in an actual super-hero comic (Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom) suffering so, in part because they’d be intelligent enough — have enough common sense — to prepare. If you’re going to a location filled with physically dangerous villains, ensure you can deal with it. Basic logic, right? But if Doctor Impossible thought things through, Grossman wouldn’t get the scene he wanted. 

Now, Impossible ends up beaten up by the other villain, not killed. And in general, there’s a notable absence of death or substantive destruction in the book. This not only makes it difficult to take seriously, it goes against the grain of almost every super-hero comic for the past forty years. For at least that long — and arguably since the advent of Marvel Comics in 1961 — super-hero books have been about the illusion of realism, convincing the reader that the events in the book are grittier, more emotionally true, more adult and less kid stuff, than anything before. Of course most of the time this isn’t true, and wouldn’t necessarily be any good if it were; the point is that the genre is at its most adolescent in its striving to be taken seriously, and in the way that striving manifests. Had Grossman realised it, his book might have had a greater sense of depth; in any event, he doesn’t seem to have noticed this, and the book rattles along, slipping into parody and out of it again.

Generally, there’s a problem here with the fundamental ordinariness of sensibility on display in the book. We’re told several times how one of the heroes, Elphin, is a hero out of legend; we don’t get that sense from anything she says or does. Her dialogue is, if anything, notably uninteresting. It’s true that super-heroes are a pop phenomenon, but still at their best they transcend the mundane, and capture something imaginative. That never happens here. The book never touches the freewheeling imagination you need to mimic the best Marvel and DC books. Lacking any operatic emotions, any real sense of heroism or villainy, that lack of imagination is a killer.

Again, this isn’t to say that the book is unskillful. The prose is very slick, and within its limited tonal range it modulates itself quite nicely. And Grossman clearly has thought about his heroes and their nature, the key importance of their physical bodies in their powers and origins. He works thankfully unobtrusive Freudian touches into their stories — with parents absent, surrogate figures from an earlier generation of heroes are given mythic airs. It’s a clever, and convincing, bit of analysis.

The book is interesting, no doubt. But I can’t say that it becomes anything more than that. It’s not one of the best prose super-hero books I’ve read — not as good as Elliot S! Maggin’s Superman books, not as good as the best of the George R.R. Martin-edited Wild Cards anthologies, not as good as the surprising short fiction anthology Who Will Save Us Now? But it’s not a bad book. It does what it wants to do, and does it well. I just can’t help but feel that its sights were set too low; that there was a failure of sensibility, a failure of conception, somewhere along the line. Had it been more parodic, its failure to grasp what is most powerful in super-hero books would have been more acceptable. As it is, I can only say: it’s all right, if you like that sort of thing.

Readings 2K9: Crimson Shadows

Crimson Shadows

The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1

When I was younger, I had a vague idea of Howard as a would-be tough guy, cranking out stories about barbarian hard men, militaristic and formulaic wish-fulfilment. There’s some truth to that image, but much that is wrong. And much that is left out; Howard seems to have suffered from clinical depression, for example, which shaped his life and his approach to the same. He knew and wrote about actual tough guys and guys who simply wanted to be tough; but although he believed the barbarian in humanity would ultimately triumph, he didn’t necessarily see it as a good thing. Howard, in short, was a much more fascinating figure, and fascinating writer, than I had supposed.

It helps, in reading this collection, that the key wrongness in the way I thought about Howard was the word “formulaic”. Howard occasionally wrote to formula, but he wasn’t formulaic that I can see; he made the formulas his own. And, frankly, much of the formula that we do see in his writings came about because he wrote material from which formulas were later derived; thus Kull, and Conan, and the barbarian swordsmen who followed. Howard wrote other kinds of fiction as well, much of it represented here — or, more precisely, he wrote in many different settings, though the adventure-fiction structure and tone was almost always the same, occasionally leavened by a greater sense of humour. But always there is a strong structure, always (even in the most comedic of stories) the almost homicidal sense of violence ready to burst out at any moment, always the swift relentless motion of the story ever onwards to bloody climax.

Technically, Howard could write taut, dramatic tales; often he didn’t reach this standard, but this book does a good job of selecting some of his most compelling work. You can feel the compulsions bubbling under the surface of the stories here, especially in his dark ages tales about Bran Mak Morn and the Picts. Howard researched his stories, and was strongly inspired by his sense of history — by the pseudo-Darwinian narratives of races rising and falling, of history as a tale of peoples climbing some evolutionary scale and then collapsing into nothingness. As I said, Howard believed the barbarian would triumph in the end; it’s a sort of historical nihilism, matching his Weird Tales companion H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism.

Like Lovecraft, Howard was a racist, but for the most part that’s not directly reflected in these stories. Howard’s framework for thinking about races and peoples is clearly here, and, as in the case of Lovecraft, clearly influencing the kinds of fantasies and stories he imagines. It’s sublimated racism, in other words, which in this volume does not, by and large, break the surface. Gender politics, of course, is something else, and that — no surprise — is where Howard is weakest. 

The value of a book like this is in the way it makes a case for Howard, for all his flaws, as a writer worth taking seriously. That is, it presents Howard as somebody with a native sense for words; it makes a strong case for his ability to construct a sentence, to make it do what he wanted. The poems it presents are decent examples of what I mean — not vastly sophisticated, ballad-like, perhaps vaguely similar to Kipling or Chesterton (the latter of whom was a particular favourite of Howard’s), tremendously successful at stirring emotion or images in the mind of the reader. The point is not that Howard was a craftsman; he was, but my point is that he had something more than that.

This is not a perfect book, as Howard was not a perfect writer; but then he never had a chance to reach what for most writers would be considered maturity. It’s tempting to wonder whether it’s not time for a full-scale re-evaluation of Howard’s work. Lovecraft is, I think, becoming increasingly acceptable as a canonical writer; I think generally there’s a greater interest in American pulp writers. Could Howard be rescued as a writer worth studying? Maybe; maybe not; either way, he’ll be a writer worth reading, and a writer who will be read for a very long time. Books like this make the case that that’s a good thing.

ByattBlogging Postscript: On Histories and Stories

This is a collection of lectures on the topic of storytelling. As with much of Byatt’s writing, it’s interesting both in its own right as criticism, and in what it says about her particular creative projects.

The first chapter, for example, is a consideration of the historical novel — how it has been viewed, examples of what has been done with the form, and what makes it important, especially in Britain. Byatt is strong on the value of historical fiction: “the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language, to keep past literatures alive and singing, connecting the pleasure of writing to the pleasure of reading.” The next chapter extends this discussion of the variety of pasts being created, and the voices being created; the ventriloquism which brings a past to life. (It is no surprise that Peter Ackroyd is discussed at length here.)

The next chapter considers the meta-narratives which frame a writer’s understanding of the world; Christianity, Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolutionary theory, the definitions of the world of which the writer is a part. Taking evolutionary theory as perhaps the most important for the present day, Byatt identifies a trend to the investigation of natural history, the discussion of the animal world, in several key (to her) novelists. This ends up as a consideration of Victorian thought and art, in the course of which Byatt discusses her own work in Angels & Insects. The book is discussed even further in the next chapter, which is about research and precision and, inevitably, language. Rather tenuously, Byatt links fiction’s alleged turn towards scientific accuracy with history and criticism’s turn towards ‘artfulness’. That’s arguably fair enough in the case of non-scholarly history, but much of academic history of the past generation or two has been marked, I think, by a move away from narrative. And to prove her point in terms of criticism, Byatt cites the puns found in a book by the critic Mary Jacobus; but the passages Byatt quotes seem merely trite, forced attempts to move from one subject to another or meaningless — perhaps anachronistic — attempts to avoid coming to grips with the writers Jacobus is trying to discuss.

In fairness, Byatt’s take on Jacobus is far from unmixed. But then she contrasts Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Melville and Poe, and I’m not sure she does the latter writers justice. Byatt specifically discusses colour symbolism — black and white — in these writers, and I’m not entirely convinced by her summation of their work. The symbolism is too uneasy, too multifarious, to be convincingly described or dismissed in a few sentences. (It probably doesn’t help that I thought Beloved was good, but not great.)

At any rate, Byatt then turns back to her own work, and it’s fascinating observing her discussion of her working procedure. She convincingly describes some of the moments of revelation common to writing — the points when suddenly things come together, and you realise you’ve become aware of something you’ve known all along. The points when something finds its voice, finds its form.

Which then leads into a chapter on storytelling and form, and European traditions with regard to story. Byatt here makes a firm distinction between tales, the romance tradition, and the novel, which is fair enough. But her discussion of storytelling involves, always, either classic stories — The Arabian Nights, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa — or self-consciously literary fiction: Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter. I found myself wishing that she’d move beyond this frame of reference to consider the output of Carter’s colleague Michael Moorcock, whose work covers a wide variety of storytelling forms — such as the pulp novel. What I mean is that I found myself wondering why, if Byatt wanted to talk about storytelling, she didn’t turn to the most prolific source of stories in the contemporary world — popular fiction, which, especially in the form of fantasy, is not only close to fairy-tale and myth in its plot structures, but also comes in a range of sophistication. Moorcock alone has written both potboilers and formally ambitious fantasy fiction; why not look at these things?

Byatt makes an interesting point in this chapter that tales have to do with death — or the avoidance of same. The story, she points out, is immortal; it outlives both reader and writer. It’s a good insight, but when Byatt goes on to try to contrast the tale with the literary story she runs into problems, and I think in part it’s because she’s missing a term in her argument; without the popular story, she can’t make things cohere. It’s no help that some her readings here are suspect; she refers to Tolkien, implicitly, as lacking “social density”, which suggests that she has not read The Lord of the Rings very closely at all (or else that she needs a more intuitively obvious phrase than “social density”). Byatt does, at the end of the chapter, bring in Terry Pratchett, and even calls him “one of the great modern storytellers”; one wishes she was able to present something of the context in which he writes, in the way in which she’s able to get across something of the intellectual background common to writers like Calvino and Calasso.

A chapter on “Ice, Snow, Glass” then follows, apparently because the book has reached a point at which an excursion into sheer symbolism is appropriate. Byatt considers this imagery in various writers and works, many of which have haunted her fiction even as the images of ice and glass have. Again, this piece is fascinating as a window onto Byatt’s own writing.

The conclusion, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” is about The Arabian Nights, and its manifestations in writers like Proust and Rushdie. It’s a brief meditation on storytelling, the endless immortal death-challenging urge. It’s a nice coda, a subversion of the idea of endings; a justification of storytelling and life against destruction and death. It’s the proper way to conclude the book, an ending about endings and stories that do not end. If the book has begun with sophisticated modern and postmodern takes on the novel, it must end here, with pure romance, with tales interlinked with tales — in a structure more complex, told often with language more elaborate, than the literary novels with which this volume began. Byatt has worked her way back to the ocean of story (to borrow a term from another vast collection of narratives), and so we are released, as her critical writing ends, to find our way ourselves back into the fictions which she has just discussed; perhaps with better understanding, perhaps more aware, at any rate made joyful at, the freedom of all fictions.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

Readings 2K9: Crooked Little Vein

Crooked Little Vein

by Warren Ellis

This is not, in an absolute sense, a good book. The characters are stock and underdeveloped. The plot is episodic. The lead character wraps up his problems with help from minor characters who are introduced out of nowhere, by chance and not by any natural evolution of the plot. That wrapping-up still doesn’t make sense in the context of the plot up to that point (we have to assume that a character consistently depicted as being above the law is going to be taken down by the LAPD). Basically, the structure of the novel is rudimentary, an excuse for a series of sardonic riffs on the theme of the perversity of the modern world.

They’re good riffs, though. Whether that’s enough depends on what you want out of the book. This is essentially an exercise in style, and certainly as style it’s flashy and funny. It’s the kind of short, fast read you can take between longer and heavier novels, and feel refreshed. If that’s what you want, here it is. Hey, I enjoyed it.

The story is simple: a down-at-heels private eye gets hired by the shadow government of the United States to find the secret Constitution, which has the magic power of resetting society’s clock back to the eighteenth century. According to the secret government, the perverts on the internet are getting out of hand, and the reset button must therefore be pushed. The private eye sets off on an odyssey across the United States, and soon meets up with a sexually voracious sidekick who promises to be his guide through modern degeneracy. Not that she really does much guiding; it’s a linear story, through a series of, basically, odd sexual activities and fetishes. The book is short enough that it doesn’t quite get repetitive, but there’s nothing particularly insightful about the presentation of the sex, nothing clever done with the fetishes; they’re just there, a novelistic equivalent of a freak show.

There’s not much of a theme in the book. The main characters quickly decide that the present day, in all its freakishness, is better than the way things were, and decide to double-cross their employers. This would be more convincing if the characters — or the novel — displayed a greater understanding of the way things were, or more thoughtfully contrasted then and now. Come to that, the understanding of the present day seems oddly rudimentary; the conclusion of the book suggests that The Internet Will Save Us All, which comes off as about as facile as it sounds.

All in all, there’s a sense that the book is a cleverly-disguised lecture, or, more precisely, a disguised editorial. It’s entertaining, but light on drama and depth. It’s quick and funny, and if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get.

Readings 2K9: April summation

The Friends of the Westmount Library had their biannual book sale on the weekend of April 25th. Here’s what I found there:

Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan, editors — The Locus Awards

Hal Duncan — Vellum

Austin Grossman — Soon I Will Be Invincible

Eric McCormack — First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

Blake Morrison — The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Robert Payne — The Fathers of the Western Church

Arthur Quiller-Couch — Selected Short Stories

Diane Setterfield — The Thirteenth Tale

Tom Shippey — J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Robert Silverberg — The Gate of Worlds

Milton Singer, editor — Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes

All of which means that I’ve added more books to the apartment this month than I read. I also bought Crooked Little Vein earlier this month, so I added twelve books in total. I read ten over the course of the month, but only five of those were books I had here rather than taken out from one library or another. So seven books up in total.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Wahoolazuma!

One of the few pleasures of being young in the 1980s was the thrill that came from wandering into a comics shop when the new comics came out. In those pre-internet days, you had no idea what the hell you were going to find. Similarly, if you went to another city and found a comics store you’d never seen before, you had the chance not only to pick up back issues not available in your home town, but also to be exposed to a new selection of titles. This mattered, because in the heady days around the alt-comics explosion of the mid-80s, all kinds of oddities flourished. Most of these books were awful, some were good, one or two were excellent, and many were just plain weird. One thinks of George Alec Effinger’s Neil & Buzz in Time and Space, or Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse — I don’t know how to begin describing these things.

Even the popular books were almost self-consciously odd; I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Really? And the more self-consciously artistically ambitious books were also made out of unexpected materials: Cerebus, combining parody of old Marvel Conan comics with the Marx Brothers and Canadian politics; or Love & Rockets, mixing magic realism and women’s wrestling and punk and Archie comics. But the point is, whatever the level of artistic or commercial success, you just had no idea what you’d find on a store’s shelves — you’d see some fifth-generation Elfquest knock-off beside a sensitive and realistic story of a young boy in the Depression wandering the country with a tramp calling himself the King of Spain, or a cheap comics bio of a heavy metal group beside a wise-ass story about Christ returning to earth to fight the world’s only super-hero, the Anti-Christ. I’m not saying the comics field was producing better material then than now, only a wilder mix of things; and, somehow, the fact that it was all contained within a single store — that comics specialty stores were the only place you’d find them, mixed in with Marvel and DC on the one hand and The Comics Journal on the other — gave this disparate collection of stuff a sense of unity, of cohesion.

It’s this latter point, I think, that distinguishes comics-as-they-were from the webcomics field of the moment, which is the closest area I can think of to something like the weirdness of the comics field of the 80s. There are a lot of different webcomics out there, covering a ridiculously wide range of genres; but without the store as a place where these things are all physically gathered together, the feel, to me, is much looser. Then again, it may be only that so far webcomics haven’t yet come up with an Alan Moore or a Love & Rockets; a creator or a work that hits the heights of artistic and formal ambition. At any rate, if such a person or creation exists, I’ve not heard of them yet. One assumes it’s only a matter of time.

But if the current era doesn’t have quite the same creative feel of the years past, it does have this going for it: masses of material, from that time and others, are coming back into print (which was certainly a characteristic of times gone by; classics weren’t easily available. Curiously, although this was obviously a hardship in many ways, in some ways it might actually have been useful — not everything hailed as a classic can survive a close look with older and wiser eyes). So this extended trip down memory lane is all by way of trying to begin talking about Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, which is now being reprinted by Dark Horse, along with all-new material. 

Very roughly, it’s the story of a society of anthropomorphic beans living in a wonderland-like secondary world — simpler than Alice’s wonderland, the sense of the Beanworld as a place which operates by its own rules of logic and character is still vaguely similar. Much of the story of the comics had to do with various members of the Beanworld — its hero Mister Spook, or its artist Beanish, or its scientist Professor Garbanzo, for example — trying to solve some riddle of the Beanworld’s nature or exploring the world in some new direction. With, always, further riddles appearing once one was solved.

The Beanworld has its own logic, but it also has its own feel. It’s a little like what one thinks of as an underground comic, especially in its early issues; but it’s also gentler, Seussian, and more mythic. The first couple of issues, among the nine collected in the first reprint volume Wahoolazuma! (a cry of joy in the Beanworld), have a satirical tone which is immediately abandoned — for the better, as the book actually gets deeper and more involving without it.

Reading Tales of the Beanworld — now just Beanworld, in its new edition — is like nothing else I know. Not only like no other comics experience, but no other experience overall. It’s gentle, but also ominous, in the way a fairy tale is ominous. It’s vaguely like a computer game, as actions have consequences and the world is built on interlocking riddles; but it’s more organic than that, and the characters are stronger. But then again, those characters are archetypal, as in a folktale. But then on the other hand, the vocabulary and sometimes imagery is more modern than that.

So Beanworld is a mix of a lot of things, and the result is something wholly individual. Something compelling, too; it had been years since I’d read an issue of Beanworld — years since a new issue had been published — but everything came back as I read the collection, in a way that’s unusual with old comics. The thing sticks in the mind.

Some of that may just be due to Marder’s way with craft. Beanworld is in a lot of ways a simple book, literally suitable for readers of any ages, but the comics storytelling is very clever, notably in terms of the Marder plays with page layouts and panel transitions. It’s incredibly clear work, which is impressive given that Marder’s laying out the workings of a world pretty far removed from common experience.

In the end, perhaps the most impressive thing about Beanworld is the sense that it’s managed to find a way to do without conflict as a drive for narrative. It’s vaguely like a really good Hayao Miyazaki film, where the more you learn about what’s happening and why, the more you come to realise that apparent conflicts are simply reflections of a lack of understanding; that, in fact, things are unfolding as they should, and our own slow increase of awareness is itself a part of that unfolding process. At its best, this sort of story is involving, teaching us perhaps something about ourselves that can’t be got at in any other way. Beanworld is in that class of stories; it operates at an almost preconscious level. It bills itself as “A Most Peculiar Comic Book Experience”, and it is that. It’s also a valuable one, and one I’m glad to see back on shelves.

ByattBlogging: A Provisional Conclusion

Any assessment of a living writer’s accomplishment must be at least in part provisional. Still, when dealing with a body of work like A.S. Byatt’s — eight novels, five short-story collections, and one book of paired novellas — it should be possible to make at least a few observations.

Certainly one can spot recurring motifs. Texts, interleaved into a main text; stories-inside-stories. A concern with women’s roles and the place of women in society over the past fifty years (a concern I have perhaps not highlighted enough in these posts).  Zoology, particularly in the later novels but also present in The Game, her second book (and it is interesting that the zoologist Simon Moffit, from that book, is mentioned towards the end of Byatt’s most recent novel as well). Fantasy, or fairy story, either as a form in itself or as a contrast to a realist work which contains the fantasy as a fiction. A concern with story and storytelling; with the nature of reality. A distrust of theory, and of facile attempts to explain the world. Scandinavia and Scandinavians; as characters, typically male, usually helpful or admirable. Quakers and Quakerism. A concern with the life of the spirit, a search for something resembling God, a modernist deity. A concern with character, and the form of the novel. A recurring interest in certain writers, including Proust, Tolkien, Tennyson, Milton, George Elliot, the Brontës. A concern with painting and visual art, especially Matisse, luxe, calme et volupté. The south of France as a place of light and of enlightenment. The university as a haven for the intellect, a model of reason and a vital element in society. Colours: red and white, green and gold, or else blue and white, gold and silver — linking characters and situations. Mythic images, especially females: the Medusa, Venus Anadyomene, Proserpina.

There’s a lot in there, but over the thousands of pages of Byatt’s books they become recognisable touchstones — enough to create a world, enough to populate it, enough to give it an identity without seeming enclosed. For all the list of motifs above, Byatt is still capable of being surprising; every new book seems to bring in some new concern, or else amplify an existing concern in a surprising way. Crucially, she develops her ideas, her themes, her images, in not only innovative but consistently intriguing ways. They’re like gears, in a sense; they interlock, turning as the pages go by to fit together in new configurations. 

This is quite necessary, I think, for Byatt’s is not primarily a narrative art. Her novels in particular are not hesitant about interrupting their narrative drive to give the gist of a character’s speech on a technical issue of biology or philosophy. They earn the title “novel of ideas”, but at the expense of the forward motion of story. This is much less the case with Byatt’s short fiction, which tends to be focussed on the tale and its telling. In a way, her novels are like her short fiction expanded with more character detail and digression — there is more in them, but more does not necessarily happen.

What makes them compelling, even vital, is not the ideas as such, though; it’s their expression. Byatt is attentive to words, their roots and their development. From this interest she has crafted a powerful style. It’s not based on intricate sentence structure; she rarely tries to dazzle the reader with page-long sentences. Instead, she has developed a language based around hard nouns and precise adjectives. Her narrative voice, her vocabulary, had a clarity to it that compels the reader’s attention. For me, an unfortunate side-effect is that she has not yet found a voice in the first-person (unless one counts the apparently-autobiographical short story “Sugar”) which reads as strongly as her third-person fiction.

Her character-work generally is above reproach. That she thinks about her characters in depth, and their relation to the world around them, is obvious. It’s something that’s been a constant since Shadow of the Sun, her first book. In that book, the story seemed to move fitfully between pages-long character analyses; since then, Byatt has become much better at working her character description into the unfolding tapestries of her stories. At the same time, her characters seem more prone to come alive, to do things that surprise themselves and the reader, and perhaps even the author. Most important, Byatt’s routinely capable of creating interesting, lively personalities who can carry a novel, or indeed several novels.

I’ve read that Byatt doesn’t like her four-book series — The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman — to be described as the Frederica Potter quartet. But it is Frederica who is the most vivid character in these books, the most alive and the most constant. She is what most clearly defines them for the reader; intelligent, strong-willed, highly sexual, unafraid, working through a society not always congenial to a woman who is any of these things much less all of them. In any event, these books stand out the most in Byatt’s bibliography to date; obviously her longest work when viewed as a unit, they also contain some of her best writing, and some of her most experimental. The last of them, at this moment, is her last major long work. They are, all in all, a good display of her characteristics; they are what she is, as a writer. With the quartet now finished, it will be fascinating to see where she goes from here; how will she change?

Paradoxically, despite a notable lack of jokes or obvious humour in her books, I think it’s possible to view Byatt as a comic novelist. There is a warmth to her writing, for all its ruthless clarity. There is bemusement and invention. There is a constancy of tone, in other words, which is engaging and generous. There’s an optimism about the human condition, married with a real concern about the effect of humans on the planet around them. Byatt is a writer with real concerns, then; but, primarily, she is an artist with a passion for language. It is this which makes her worth reading. Worth thinking about and writing about. She is a writer from whom it is capable to learn much, about language and imagery and structure; she is also a writer who it is interesting to follow across the course of her career. I don’t see any reason to expect that to change in the future.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 14: The Little Black Book of Stories

Byatt’s most recent collection of short fiction covers a wide range in its five tales. Not all of them are explicit fantasies, but all of them play with genre and with what is beyond the real. There’s also an element of darkness to them; hence, perhaps, the blackness of the book. 

“The Thing in the Forest” is the story of two girls, evacuated during the Second World War to a house in the country, from which they will be sent on to foster homes; so it begins like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The girls go exploring, and see a hideous monster in the forest. Life goes on. The girls join their foster families, get sent back to their homes, their fathers die and decades later their mothers follow. By this time one of the girls, Penny, has gone on to university and become a psychologist who works with autistic kids; the other, Primrose, has become a nanny to the kids in her community, a caregiver and tale-teller. The two women meet each other back in the country, back in the house to which they were evacuated (where they see a book identifying the monster they saw as a folkloric local dragon); later, first Primrose and then Penny investigate the forest for some sign that can explain the experience of their youth.

The key to this story seems to be the different paths the two women take in life, and then their different reactions to the woods. The point is to compare and contrast; Primrose is inspired as a writer, learning about languages and finding names, while Penny goes further, challenging the boundary of what is the real world and what belongs to the sphere of dreams. But it is Primrose who gets the last word, turning their experience into art, making dreams into language.

“Body Art” is superficially more realistic. A doctor, Becket, at a hospital, St. Pantaleone’s, meets a young art student at Christmas; she’s helping to decorate the wards. The story follows his interactions with her, and with Martha Sharpin, an art historian involved in the administration of the hospital on behalf of one of the institutions which fund it; the hospital has the materials of an artistic and anatomical collection in its basement. So this is another of Byatt’s stories which focus on visual art.

It also, as in her story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, embroils art with the contrast between the active and contemplative life. Martha, unsurprisingly, is Martha; the student, Daisy, is the unexpected Mary — a botched abortion having left her supposedly unable to bear children, it is described as a “miracle” when she conceives Becket’s child (Becket, incidentally, is a lapsed Catholic, who at one point sees his ex-wife on television playing in — what else? — a Beckett play. It may be significant that he works at a place named for a Commedia character, two different kinds of absurdity; more likely, it’s a symptom of a clash between a godless cosmos and one with some sort of meaning to it). The title of the story nods to the use of art; art and body are united in a number of ways, from the hospital’s collection, to Daisy’s work, to Daisy’s body piercings, to a suggestion by another artist to make art from blown-up x-rays. The ending is surprisingly inconclusive, except in that Martha takes charge; she will be a part of the lives of Daisy and Beckett as they go forward. 

“Stone Woman” is remarkably straightforward; after the death of her mother and an unspecified abdominal surgery, a woman, Ines, slowly metamorphoses into stone. She meets an Icelandic sculptor, who takes her back to his home; the story, it turns out, has been about her finding the strength to go off with the trolls who haunt Iceland — to abandon all that she formerly knew, all that she had been. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of “The Next Room” in Sugar and Other Stories; a mother’s death frees an elderly woman to find her true path. But here she’s not alone; here it’s clear that she’s becoming something new, something grand, something monumental. This is a beautifully-written fantasy, with the inevitability and grandeur of continental drift.

In some ways, “Raw Material” is the most intriguing of these stories: a failing novelist, Jack Smollett, is teaching a Creative Writing class to adults at an arts centre, when he is impressed by — creatively revitalised by — the work of one of his students, a very elderly women who writes detailed, introspective recollections of the domestic chores of decades past. His other students aren’t as impressed, and criticise her harshly; he sends her work off to a contest, which it wins (ironic, as Jack imagines himself being in some way judged by her), but before he can tell her this he finds that she has become the victim of violence, deriving from some unknown past wrong. The other students are secretly happy; they have written stories about murder and violence, and are happy to see that their world has caught up to the writer of elegant slice-of-life recollections.

What’s interesting here is Byatt’s use of a strong prose style as a symbol of both physical and mental cleanliness. Smollett thinks to himself of clichés as a stain, contrasting with the theme of cleanliness in his student writer, Cicely Fox. In the end, her concern with cleanliness may be a function of repressed guilt — there seems to be some connection between her and the woman who ends her life — but it remains as an ideal; and ideal style, in contrast to the trite horrors and slack adjective-filled style of the other students.

If “Raw Material” is the most fascinating of these tales from the point of view of Byatt’s perspectives on prose and style, “The Pink Ribbon” is perhaps the most emotionally immediate. An elderly man is caring for his wife, who lost her mind long ago; he meets a younger woman, who turns out to be his wife’s ghost, or fetch. She instructs him on what he must do. It’s the only story I can think of that balances references to The Aeneid with references to the Teletubbies.

For all the strong emotional material in these stories, Byatt resolutely avoids wringing extra tension out of them. Her style is spare, in a sense pure. She also avoids many of her usual tropes; some appear — a reserved Scandinavian male here, the intense description of a piece of artwork there — but on the whole this collection is filled with new images, new symbols. It’s a strong book, and very promising for Byatt’s future writing as she moves on from the conclusion of her Potter quartet.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging Bonus: Potter vs. Potter

Well, not really. More like ‘Potter-maker versus Potter-maker’. In 2003, A.S. Byatt, creator of Frederica Potter (and family) wrote an article criticising the Harry Potter series of books, at that time five books in. I though it’d be worth looking at here, insofar as the piece got Byatt a certain amount of notoriety. Some commentators were eager to make her out to be a snobbish member of the literary élite, decrying popular fiction just because it was popular. This, of course, was a profoundly idiotic reaction. 

To begin with, in the same article in which she criticises J.K. Rowling, Byatt praises Terry Pratchett, not exactly the act of a dyed-in-the-wool snob. More crucially, the snob argument is an ad hominem attack, which is usually made by somebody losing a debate. Whether Byatt is a snob or not, it shouldn’t invalidate the critical points she makes either way. If you believe in the distinction between good writing and bad, then the article should stand or fall on the strength of the argument it presents. If you don’t believe in that distinction, then you have several thousand years worth of human aesthetic reaction to language to explain away; you’re also in fundamental opposition, I think, to several major elements of Byatt’s philosophy.

So what exactly did Byatt say in her Potter article? This, I think, is where the article becomes interesting. It’s uncharacteristically slipshod in its construction, and in its thought.

Byatt begins by asking why children like the Potter books so much, and then why adults like them. Her argument to the first question: “they are written from inside a child’s-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology.” As will soon become all too clear, I don’t agree with this statement. But never mind that; Byatt believes that this answer precludes, for some reason, adult appreciation of the books — she doesn’t explain why — and that there must be another reason why adults read Rowling.

(I might as well note here that I can enjoy the Potter books, though I wouldn’t say that they’re particularly good except in certain specific limited ways. I think the plot mechanisms and riddles are ingenious and clever. I think the prose is weirdly readable in a way I can’t explain — it’s literally more difficult to lift one’s eyes from the page than to slide them sideways over the text. And I think that the structure of most of the books, following the school year through, is attractive; the seasons and holidays give Rowling a basic skeleton to follow for each book. For me, the last book, in which she abandoned the school and the school-year structure, was far and away the worst of the seven. If I had to say why I think kids enjoy the books so much, I’d say it’s probably a mixture of the easiness of the texts, the outsized characters — not unlike Silver Age Marvel Comics — and the way the common childhood experience of going to school becomes the whole basis for a fantasy and a magic world.)

Byatt tries to justify her statement about child psychology by the use of Freud, a difficult trick these days. Byatt complains that while the earlier books present a preadolescent “latency-period” fantasy, Order of the Phoenix fails to translate that fantasy into a convincing portrait of adolescence. Which is true enough, but is surely a problem in the earlier books as well; by fifteen, as Harry and his friends are in the fifth book of the series, most kids are well into adolescence.

Let me skip back a bit. Byatt argues that the Dursleys, Harry’s adoptive family, represent, in a Freduian decoding of the stories, Harry’s real family — the world of reality, as distinct from the fantasy-world of Hogwarts. “The Dursleys are his true enemy,” Byatt says. “When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.” 

It’s sadly ironic that Byatt, who mocked the metaphors of Freudian thought in her novels, sees no difficulty in applying its comfortable theories to another text. Probably more importantly, one is also uncomfortably aware that she’s misreading the text at issue in at least two crucial ways. One, the Dursleys have at least some clue as to Harry’s importance; they fear and hate him, for all that he’s effectively sworn to protect them — Marvel Comics, once again — and those emotions are explicitly tied into their actions and dialogue in the framing sequences of the books. Two, the Dursleys are as much a fantasy as Hogwarts; they’re caricatures. To treat them as in any way “real”, much less a “real” fantasy, is about as difficult as treating, well, Hogwarts as a real educational system. The idea of reality is embodied by one about as much as another.

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.” This is true, but so what? Every secondary world, including Tolkien’s, derives from pre-existing sources. Byatt seems to be trying to say that the patchwork in this case is unconvincing, or perhaps that it does not rise above its sources. It’s a viable point, but it needs to be supported. 

The closest she comes to this that I can see is to say that “Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.” I can’t see why this statement would apply to children any more or less than it would to adults. In either case, it seems to me an issue of temperament — not everyone has the same “power of fantasizing”. “Derivative narrative clichés” (which sounds redundant) work with children because they don’t have the same experience with cliché that adults do; they encounter them for the first time.

“The important thing,” Byatt tells us, “about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines.” To me, this is where the article really falls down; the statement is not only untrue, it’s a howler. Or, put another way, it’s only true if you’re very selective about who you call a “fairy story writer”. If you’re prepared to eliminate many modern fantasy writers — Michael Moorcock, say, or China Miéville — then maybe you can make the statement work. Though I frankly have no idea how you get around Frank Baum. 

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” This is a hell of a statement to make, but set it aside for a moment. “Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family,” Byatt continues, again displaying a breathtaking ability to ignore the text she’s supposed to be analysing — by Order of the Phoenix it’s very clear that the whole magical society’s in danger — and then goes on to say “So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.” If this is so, the question still remains as to why Rowling happened to hit that combination just right when no other author in recent decades has managed the trick. What is it that makes the Harry Potter books so different?

Not only do I think this is a poor analysis of Harry Potter’s appeal, but it also seems to me logically confused; Byatt seems to be arguing that children who like Potter follow “soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip”. Which seems unlikely. That’s without even getting into the question of what she means by “TV cartoons” — I can easily think of a number of Japanese cartoons, and even some American cartoons, which seem to me to be more valuable and imaginative than the Harry Potter books; whereas Byatt’s implication seems to be that the Potter books work because they’re more imaginative than the cartoons. (I would agree that there’s a lack of the numinous in the Potter books, but I think that’s a function of the limitation of Rowling’s writing talent, not necessarily of the nature of the story.) 

Weirdly, Byatt claims that “These are good books of their kind.” Her problem is a suspicion that people derive from them mainly comfort, with none of the “compensating seriousness” of writers like Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Ursula K. Le Guin. This seems to me to be an odd way to read books, and not much to do with what Byatt then goes on to find in these writers: “a real sense of mystery, powerful forces ... we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled.” This is I think a good sentence, and a good assessment of the experience of reading Cooper, Garner, and Le Guin. What she’s talking about is, basically, numinousness again. 

I’d agree that there isn’t much of this in the Harry Potter books, but, again, I think that’s a function of Rowling’s lack of talent, not of something inherent in the structure of the story or in the nature of Rowling’s invention. “Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds,” argues Byatt. “It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.” But had Rowling more of a knack for atmosphere, that patch of forest would have the danger, the resonance, Byatt is missing; I think that’s what Rowling was trying for in her depiction of the forest. Put bluntly, I think Byatt is talking here about something caused by a lack of skill, and ascribing it to a defect of invention.

(Before I continue, I also have to express my disagreement with Byatt’s opinions about “regression”. She observes that “In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 ‘best reads,’ more than a quarter were children’s books,” and concludes from this that “We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I’m ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.” Restful for some, perhaps; for others, it’s perhaps not particularly noticeable. The idea of returning to a preadolescent state as “regression” seems problematic; who’s to say that it’s not actually a healthy step up? In up and down worlds, up and down are equivocal; one person’s regression is another’s growth. Byatt seems to recognise this herself: “If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for.” But then, part of my dissatisfaction with the article is this sort of equivocation. For example, the BBC survey she cites seems to me to be undermined later in the article when she observes that “A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.” There’s no need to go on about “comfort” when this characterises common reading experience. If people haven’t lived in a book as adults, of course they’ll pick their childhood favourite as their best read.)

Parallelling her comments on reality shows and the like, Byatt goes on to say that Rowling “speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.” I don’t agree with these statements. It seems to me to be fatuous to suggest that a basic human experience is not present in the current generation of adults. It seems even more fatuous to suggest that “inhabitants of urban jungles” are in some way emotionally stunted because they live in cities instead of ... well, what? Deep wilderness? Farmland? The “real wild” has been dwindling in Britain for centuries; I don’t know how much of what a Canadian would think of as wilderness was present in that island even a hundred years ago. Finally, the statement about the ersatz seems logically unfounded to me — if your imagination only has the ersatz to work with, won’t that strengthen the imagination? More crucially, the kind of sense Byatt’s talking about here — of numinousness, of mystery, of magic — seems to me not to be dependent on external training, but on inborn nature; this, though, is a position that seems to me incapable of proof or disproof.

Byatt’s next-to-last paragraph seems to me to simply be incoherent. Adults reading Rowling revert to a childlike state in so doing, she tells us, then switches topics to note that many people haven’t “lived in a book” since they were children, a sad side-effect of English classes. If adults are able to live in books, one might reasonably ask, doesn’t that say something in favour of the books that do draw them in? Rather than answer this question, Byatt says: “But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.” I will say that Byatt mentioned Blyton and Heyer previously in the article. Beyond that, I cannot see how these statements logically follow any point Byatt’s made. I’m not sure they even follow each other — she seems to be saying ‘once, nobody reviewed Blyton or Heyer, who are bad writers, just as now they don’t review Terry Pratchett, who’s a good writer.’

Byatt begins her next, final, paragraph by saying “It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon.” I presume she doesn’t mean Pratchett writing amazing sentences. It seems that she doesn’t mean the lack of reviews for him either. It’s hard to see what she does mean; the paragraph is simply an attack on relativistic cultural studies, except that it’s not. Cultural studies are said to have a “leveling effect”, and to be “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.” But then: “There is nothing wrong with this,” she says. But then again: “it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's “magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”” 

It’s as if the incoherence and equivocation that’s been at work all through the article bubbles to the surface here, and the conclusion of the essay is lost in a swamp of dithering. It’s a pity. Had the article been as denunciatory as Byatt’s critics suggested, it could have been genuinely interesting on a critical level. Had it been more interested in what the Harry Potter books really were, and how fantasy really worked, it might have been a useful examination of fantasy fiction. As it is, it seems only confused, unsure how to really grapple with its subject, slipping away whenever it gets close to a definitive statement.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 13: A Whistling Woman

Fittingly, the book begins with an ending. Agatha Mond reaches the end of the fantasy story she’s telling to her daughter Saskia and Frederica Potter’s son Leo; the children are outraged, demanding to know more. It’s a clever way to open the final book in the Potter quartet, and foreshadows a book structured around an artful series of anti-climaxes. In turn, this is an odd structural reflection of a major theme: otherness, the reflection. The thing, and the anti-thing.

On a story level, A Whistling Woman nominally follows Frederica Potter through her developing career as a television personality — she is the anchor of a show called, appropriately, Through the Looking-Glass — while she also deals with ongoing love affairs and the mothering of Leo. Practically, though, Frederica is on the periphery for much of the book. Instead, much of the book is filled with the story of Josh Lamb, née Joshua Ramsden; he is a Manichean visionary who sees sheets of blood overrunning the world. He’s also an intensely interesting figure, a true charismatic; he brings together Gideon Farrar’s Children of Joy and Paul Ottokar’s mystic Quaker group the Spirit’s Tigers. But one theme of the book is the absence of easy faith in the modern world, the need to doubt, the impossibility of returning to old ways of thinking; we know he and his flock will come to no good end.

A major sub-plot in the book is the interplay between a university in Yorkshire and an anti-university which springs up in the town nearby — in fact, on the land where Lamb and his group will ultimately find a home. Lamb’s Manichean thought provides a structure by which to understand the anti-university, an angry, stinking lot which produces no good and only threatens the destruction of the Body-Mind conference the main university is hosting. For Lamb, creation is divided into realms of light and darkness, one (despite the apparent mixed metaphor) a mirror image of the other. So the anti-university is an uncreative parody of the real thing, whose liberal Vice Chancellor underestimates their radicalism; he is himself too good a moderate liberal to understand the dangers of extremism.

If this sounds like a very conservative imagining, well, it is. None of the students, in either the university or the anti-university, are shown as minds worth reckoning with (unless you except some of the graduate students, who we know as characters from earlier books and who are essentially apolitical). The university is shown as caring and humane to a fault in its dealing with the anti-university, which itself is irrational and violent. The deck is stacked, and convenient as it may be for the story, I found it a major flaw in the novel’s construction; it falls flat as satire because it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration of reality, so much as the writer deforming reality in a convenient way.

The title of the book comes from a saying quoted as an epigraph (along with a passage from Alice in Wonderland about Alice’s identity as a girl or a serpent, and a passage from Marvell’s The Garden comparing the soul, freed of the body, to a silver-winged bird) claiming that “A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen / Is neither good for God nor Men.” If part of the book has to do with the various problems with God in the modern world, much of the rest of it — along with the other Potter books — has to do with issues of female identity and expectations of proper behaviour foisted on women. At the same time, the novel links women and hens through a series of images and verbal play (Men, by extension, are, well, cocks. Which itself plays into a subtheme of the book in which a romantically-rejected scientist examines the utility, or lack thereof, of males and sexual reproduction); Frederica holds a “hen party” on one of her TV shows which is actually a parody of real hen party; the farm on which Lamb’s group eventually settles frees the hens formerly kept there, with mixed results. Oh, and there are also semi-monstrous Whistlers, whistling harpy-like figures, in Agatha’s fantasy, who end up as helpful figures when properly approached; winged, they are halfway between earth and air, belonging to neither, choosing to forego mates either human or fowl, but, perhaps, partaking of the nature of those other winged humanoids, the angels.

So, as with most of Byatt’s books, this is a novel dense with images and significance; symbols cluster, and link each to each in unexpected ways. And sometimes take on multiple levels. Lucy, the woman who owns the farm where Lamb and his group end up, joins them after a tragedy mirroring Lamb’s own past; she becomes his follower, and she herself owns a lamb which believes it’s a dog, so: Lamb has a Lucy who has a little lamb.

Certainly the book gains a lot by playing with perspectives. We see Frederica finding her way on her TV show; we see her broadcast with the other two women, then we see another broadcast with two males, a superficially more intellectual program (but we are encouraged to wonder how much of this is actually display by the men for Frederica’s benefit). In the next chapters, the book then moves back to show us what’s happening with another group of characters; we end up seeing Frederica’s broadcasts through their eyes. Then Byatt does the same, following yet another set of characters, and showing us their reaction to the broadcasts. In each case significant correspondences are found; intentionally or not, the characters react to the broadcasts as though they had something to say about their own lives, as though the TV was somehow oracular. 

This is literalised by Josh Lamb, who looks for visions in the snow of dead channels. He finds one, a terrifying hallucination in which he is brought down among the dead, a Blakean experience out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; but where real-world experience is something shared among different characters, albeit seen from individual perspectives, the visionary experience is by definition singular. Reality, then, emerges from multiplicity, not from individual charisma; while two scientific observers are present in Lamb’s group, they see events differently — one is clear-eyed and reserved, but one has bought into the hope of vision, and loses his sense of events as a result.

Similarly, one of the actual climaxes of the book comes at the Body-Mind conference sponsored by the university, an image of multiple voices uniting. It is also a chance for Byatt to allow her characters to expound on symbolically-resonant ideas for several pages. This works because, in this book as in the previous Potter books, much of the movement in the novel is a function of the ideas it contains. So even though the story may come to a halt for pages in order to enunciate ideas, it works. The story is there, in part, to get the ideas out. The important contrast in this particular case is with the anti-university, which essentially opposes all ideas, and all enunciation.

Byatt stands foursquare behind the university, traditional education, rote learning. Frederica’s son cannot learn to read until he is weaned off the easy-going educational approach which encourages him to go at his own speed; he must be taught phonics. The appreciation of rote learning, of the power that comes with mastering something in the mind, is linked with memory; as a contrast, Josh Lamb thinks he remembers his past, but his recollections are filled with lacunae.

There’s an elegaic yet hopeful tone to the book; a sense of change. Not the revolution desired by the various utopian groups — which is in a sense the end of all changes — but the evolution (a key word, given the book’s zoological preoccupations) of ideas and of science. The development of new ways of looking at the world; new ways to diagnose what is around us. The movement from the first book to the fourth is a movement of ideas, a movement of metaphors; Frederica thinks about metaphors, about the way they changed in history — and that in itself is a metaphor for the change of ideas and images from the 50s through the 70s: metaphor a metaphor for metaphor.

How does it fit with its predecessors in the quartet? The four books strike me as remarkably unified, in tone and conception. The balance of character, story, and ideas are the same in each book, and in all these things each book builds on the one preceding. The use of overlapping temporal perspectives means they fit together with some intricacy, gaining power from the understated sense of a whole life, its shape an inevitability and yet somehow an accident.

Taken all in all, the Frederica Potter books are a success. They’re not particularly dramatic in any traditional sense, but the interplay of ideas and perspectives is made to have its own quiet fascination. Byatt’s sense of intellectual history, both of the eras she writes about and of the eras which gave birth to them, gives a sense of moment to the progression of time, and the development of character and language and science. 

Ironically, these books are in some ways about the ascendance of television, from the tiny black-and-white presentation of Elizabeth II’s coronation to the colourful, monstrous glass box which came to dominate society. Ironic, not only because the nature of TV is inherently opposed to the structural form of the novel in general and these novels in particular, but because in the years immediately following the publication of the last of the books, we are seeing the end of TV’s reign. The internet has replaced television as the most ubiquitous of media. Who will miss it? In a way, the nature of these books makes them an intriguing project for the internet age; their density of symbol seems to cry out for annotation. The images act as non-technological hyperlinks, associating ideas and characters, and await only some future indexer to identify them all.

Still, when all’s said and done, these books are about Frederica Potter, oddly contradicting Byatt’s own statements about the nature of the novel; she has spoken about preferring multi-centred novels, but while individual books may have other characters who can stand as contrasting centres, overall there’s no doubt Frederica’s is the dominant personality. An interesting personality, too, driven by intelligence. There’s almost a sense in which the books perhaps don’t give her a chance to really demonstrate all that she is, or could have been; but then that’s the nature of life for many people. The fact that Frederica has enough in her life for four books is a sign of her vitality — vitality which animates the books, and which gives us reason enough to keep turning pages when the smoothness of the prose and the fascination of the ideas aren’t enough. For all that character, in certain ideological circles, is suspect, it is Frederica who makes these novels a success; or, more precisely, it is in the creation of her that they are most memorable.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 12: The Biographer's Tale

You could look at this book as a departure for Byatt, or as an experiment in voice. It’s told in the first person, by a male protagonist, and the voice of the book follows from that, using the language that’s natural for the narrator. You could also look at it as a self-satire, Byatt’s own parody of Possession. Like that book, the hero is a scholarly male who becomes sceptical of literary theory; who tries to uncover the truth about the life of a dead writer; who finds love during the course of his journey; and who learns to focus on the world of physical fact rather than on scholarly theory. Like Possession, the book is stuffed with other texts, providing other perspectives on the novel’s themes. Unlike Possession, though, the protagonist fails in his quest; rather than become a poet, he abandons writing for the tangible world of things, threatened as it is by human agency; and rather than find love once, he finds it twice.

The tone is different, too. It feels like a satire; Possession, of course, consciously modelled itself after a romance, which almost by definition makes that book ripe for satire. The Biographer’s Tale deals with things like sex and money in a way that’s not so much clear-eyed as perhaps corrective. So the main character doesn’t begin with a girlfriend supporting him. Sex isn’t the end of the story, it’s something that happens along the way, and not always at obvious points. And new texts or diaries or letters aren’t conveniently found to answer questions or suggest new ones.

The Biographer’s Tale is harder to like for all these reasons, but also for deeper reasons as well, I think. The language of the book isn’t as rich as Possession, or most of Byatt’s other work, and while there’s a gain in terms of the depth of character presented, there’s a loss of linguistic felicity which probably wasn’t worth the sacrifice. This was a characteristic of Byatt’s first-person short story “Jael” as well; I can’t help but wish Byatt had tried for the best of both worlds, creating a character who reveals himself or herself through the use of a rich style. Still, at a deeper level, I think The Biographer’s Tale suffers because, hand-in-hand with the (relatively) emptier style, there’s also less going on than in Possession; less incident, less imagery, less variety of character, less thematic richness. The book is still too varied to really gain the intensity of a stripped-down vision, though. In all, it feels like an interesting experiment, but one which, at least in part, never quite comes off.

This is not to say that it’s a bad book, or an uninteresting one. Byatt still layers in a number of clever ideas. Phineas Gilbert Nanson, a postgraduate English student, decides to give up his current scholarship in favour of producing a biography; he ends up choosing to write about Scholes Destry-Scholes, the biographer of a Victorian traveller, romancer and translator named Elmer Bole. So the book, Phineas’s journal, is an autobiography of a would-be biographer of a biographer of a translator — although Phineas resists, for as long as he can, the idea that he’s writing an autobiography. 

Phineas fails to write his biography, unable to gather enough primary source material to unlock the life of the mysterious Mr. Destry-Scholes; he finds other consolations, and ends up moving away from writing to focus on “the too-much loved earth” that “will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it.” Phineas’s rejection of theory leads him to the concrete; no longer thinking of a work of literature as a self-contained structure leads him to focus on language’s inability to completely capture the thing-in-itself, and thus to move beyond language. Presumably, this is reflected in the way Destry-Scholes is a kind of layer between Phineas and Elmer Bole, whose own name identifies him, basically, as a tree, a part of the natural world.

Phineas’s somewhat half-hearted efforts to learn about Scholes Destry-Scholes (School Destroy Schools? Schools Destroy Souls?) lead him to three documents which seem to hint at a work or works Destry-Scholes was planning before his untimely death in the Maëlstrom. They’re fragments of writings about Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen (men interested, in one way or another, with the definition and classification of reality, the depiction and nature of character). Phineas also meets Destry-Scholes’s niece, and finds a set of index cards holding fragments of other texts; also 366 marbles (one, I imagine, for each possible day of a year) and a list of names which may go with the marbles — though each word may fit several marbles, and each marble may fit several words; so names and the things named have a slippery relationship.

Phineas also starts a relationship with another woman, a bee taxonomist named Fulla Biefeld. The novel builds a strong case for the importance of Fulla’s research, for her subject, but Fulla herself never comes alive. We don’t understand what it is that attracts her to Phineas. Nor, for that matter, so we understand the attraction he has for Vera Alphage, Destry-Scholes’s niece (whose name, I suppose, may mean something like “true letter-eater”). At any rate, Phineas continues to sleep with both women through the book, not bothering to inform either one of the other’s existence, not unlike Elmer Bole, who also maintained two households.

If the two-timing makes Phineas sound like an unattractive character, one can only say that this fits the characterisation the book gives us. He’s not particularly intelligent, not particularly good with words, not fast on his feet, not perceptive, not particularly driven or competent at what he chooses to do, not particularly empathic, and lacks a considerable amount of self-knowledge. In other words, he has few definite, positive qualities, for good or ill. It’s a coherent picture, but not, on the whole, either sympathetic or interesting.

The novel could overcome this if its ideas were interesting, or were dramatised in an interesting way; personally, I found that neither was the case. There’s a series of reference to the body, which seems to look ahead to Phineas’s choice for a world of things, and to fragmentation, which seems to be a commentary on the book’s form. These images don’t seem to combine with the felicity with which Byatt usually links her symbols; an early nod to Frankenstein is a good start, but the end of the book suggests merely that the world is full of variety and interest, to much to fit into a coherent order. This may be so, but the fatal weakness of The Biographer’s Tale is that it doesn’t convince us of this fact. For all Phineas’s desire to move beyond writing, the only way for literature to look beyond literature is to succeed as literature. The Biographer’s Tale, while interesting, while not without grace notes, does not. It’s worth reading, but I can think of no way to consider it as other than a minor work in Byatt’s bibliography.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 11: Elementals

It’s difficult to find a literal meaning to the title of this short story collection. The significance seems to be that the characters in these stories have to do with elemental forces, but in at least one case, “Jael”, the story is about a character evading her realisation of the elemental significance of her actions. It could be said to investigate characters who are out of their elements, but then again “A Lamia in the Cevennes” doesn’t really fit that pattern. Some of the stories are fantasies, some are not. 

Perhaps the closest one can come is to say that the stories involve stripping the characters down to some core element, some key aspect of what they’re about. That’s a good dramatic principle, and it does fit with the six stories in the book. But then the subtitle is “Stories of Fire and Ice”, and ice isn’t really an element, and anyway on a literal level the statement is inaccurate — not all the stories are about ice and fire. So whatever meaning we get from the phrase must derive from an interpretation we put over the story. It may be as meaningless a phrase as “fairy story” was on the Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye collection. Or it might refer to the meeting of opposites, which is a theme we might be able to find, or imagine, in many of these tales.

The first story in Elementals is “Crocodile Tears”. Superficially, it seems simple: a woman, Patricia, loses her husband unexpectedly, and the shock leads her to step away from her life up to that point and flee to the south of France, to Nîmes, where she meets a Norwegian fellow-tourist, Nils, also fleeing loss; the two gradually restore each other to something approaching normal life. The artistry here is in the way the plot of the story is handled, the delicacy of the language, the closeness of observation.

Also, of course, the complexity of the symbol-structure in which the characters move. Bullfighting, a preoccupation of Nîmes, is linked to ceremony, to rites and mysteries, and then debunked. The warmth and sun of the south is contrasted with the Norwegian cold, and both those things are unified by Nils’s theory that Valhalla was a mythic recollection of a Roman arena. Perhaps most structurally significant, a Norwegian folk-tale Nils retells, in which a man is helped three times by the ghost of a man whose burial he ensures, is reflected in the events of the story, as Nils three times saves Patricia’s life from half-aware suicide attempts. Time is significant; the opening of the story tells us “Patches of time can be recalled under hypnosis”, referring to the experience of looking at pictures in an art gallery; Patricia is looking at a dandelion clock when she has her last words with her husband; later, she reads Proust (in a city on a plain) and a guidebook in the Place de l’Horloge.

The title refers literally to crocodiles, a recurrent decorative motif of Nîmes, we’re told. It was a sacred beast to the Egyptians, and crocodile mummies are seen in a museum. Patricia remembers a line her husband once delivered on stage: “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.” So the crocodile is a sign, perhaps, of the union of two dissimilar things. And water, in fountains, in the source of the water which underlies the city, is another recurring image; so Patricia wanders in the Jardin de la Fontaine, where there is a crocodile made of bronze plants. This is the core of the story, I think: dissimilarities united.

“A Lamia in the Cevennes” is almost the opposite; characters here do not necessarily unite, and are better for it. A painter in the Cevennes finds a Lamia, a magical snake-like beast, in his swimming pool; the Lamia consents to model for him, if he will kiss her and turn her human and be her lover. But this is not what the painter wants, and he postpones this destiny until it is no longer a threat.

This story doesn’t have quite the emotional weight of “Crocodile Tears”; it’s too wry. It is quite effective on its own terms, though. Byatt has a real talent for fantasy; her style gives these stories a grounding in reality which makes them live. This is another tale which touches on the importance of Matisse, of luxe, calme et volupté, but that ideal works here in a way it didn’t always in The Matisse Stories, because the painter, Bernard Lycett-Kean, seems to embody those virtues, to consciously make them a part of his life and work, in a way that the quieter Matisse Stories did not as effectively dramatise. Bernard insists on the primacy of his art, giving up the magic of the Lamia and its love to focus on his painting; and he is, in a way, rewarded for it — at the end of the story, his creativity finds a new focus, leaps from one subject to another. It’s a story about the magic inherent in the world, and the depiction of that magic, the freedom of spirit that allows an artist to move from one theme to another (in a way that Robin Dennison could not, in “Art Work”).

It’s tempting to view “Cold” as the central story of the collection. It’s another fantasy, and certainly one in which ice and fire are dominant. A princess is born; at puberty she turns out to be an icewoman, who needs cold to survive. But when a competition is held for her hand, the prince who wins her heart comes from a desert country. How will she survive in her lover’s arid kingdom? As it turns out, by the power of art, by his ability to remake the world in a new medium, to create a space for her to live and imagine: “We can make air, water, light, into something both of us can live in,” he says, and the ‘we’ seems to me important; again, two dissimilar things find their union.

The prince, Sasan, is a glassmaker; in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, Byatt told us that the magic of glass lies in the way in which it unites all the elements in one form. So it is here, as Sasan creates models of the Tree of Life to impress Fiammarosa, the ice Princess. As glass was important in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, it’s tempting to think that glass and fantasy have some connection for Byatt — glass as magic, glass as a way to recreate the world in art. But then again, glass has had similar meaning for her in other stories as well; one thinks of the glass serpent in The Game.

“Baglady” is the shortest story in the book. The wife of a businessman visiting the Far East goes with the wives of her husband’s colleagues to a high-class shopping mall; she loses track of time, loses her purse, loses her identification. She’s left hoping her husband will come for her, for if he does not she will either be locked in the mall forever, or else evicted to join the “human flotsam and jetsam, gathered with bags and bottles around little fires of cowdung or cardboard” which she has glimpsed earlier in the story. It’s a story about an aging woman; “Time has passed at surprising speed” once the main character, Daphne, enters the mall. Bit by bit, she loses her identity, who she thought she was; it is stripped from her, as though time was moving at a super-accelerated rate. 

The story is vaguely reminiscent of “Loss of Face”, from Sugar and Other Stories, in that it’s about a well-off Western woman facing a cultural divide with the Far East. Two dissimilar things. But this is a simpler, terser, story; there is no potential point of connection here. Indeed, the Good Fortune shopping mall has something sinister about it; it is likened to Aladdin’s Cave, which we might remember was originally the haunt of thieves. As Daphne’s panic mounts, she finds that it “extends maybe as far into the earth as into the sky”; there is something hellish here — shopkeepers are “watchful in their cells”, “fire-escape-like stairways” lead back into mall corridors. Daphne ends the story alone, threatened by a policeman, sans watch, sans purse, sans everything; stripped to some elemental essence of who she is, able only to sit and wait and hope that her husband will come, unable to imagine escaping Good Fortune.

“Jael” is a story of treachery. The main character recalls drawing the Biblical story of Jael, who led the Canaanite Sisera into her tent before killing him in his sleep; she recalls her childhood at school, where she committed an act of treachery she can’t let herself remember; she is betrayed in the present, as her assistant schemes to displace her from her job as a director of television commercials. The lead character fears being judged, even for minor and unknowing transgressions; she has convinced herself that her childhood act of violence, which had repercussions she did not intend, is only a fiction. The result is that she’s locked herself into a cycle of treachery, of betrayal and being betrayed.

Unusually, this story is told in the first person. Byatt captures her character’s voice, but at the expense of her usual precision of prose. Still, it’s a worthwhile endeavour, as we learn to question everything the character says, to consider how her memory is betraying her, how she betrays herself. Her tragedy is that, shallow as she is, she isn’t shallow enough to work in television — perhaps her brief touch with the elemental character of treachery, much as she might try to hide it from herself, has given her too much depth. A far cry from her assistant, Lara, who “lives in a world of interactive computer-generated gladiators, bomb-lobbers, kamikaze scantily-clad dolls, headsmen with swords and laser duellists”. 

The last story in the collection, “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, returns to Byatt’s concern with painting. A cook in an upper-class household, Dolores, is brilliant at her job, an artist, but unhappy in her place, angry at being below her mistress in the social scale. Her friend Concepción tries to console her, to remind her of her status; Concepción’s friend, a young painter (who we might eventually conclude is Diego Velázquez, from which we could deduce this is 17th-century Spain), asks them both if he may paint them, put them in the scene from the Gospel of Luke of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. They agree, and to Concepción’s surprise, although the painting shows that Dolores is unattractive — hard and unlovely, she is caught as though in the life — still Dolores is delighted by it, and so the three of them sit down to eat together.

In the Gospel story, Martha, serving dinner, demands that her sister Mary cease listening to Christ to help with the dinner, only to be gently rebuked by Christ. Martha thus became the image of the active life, Mary of the contemplative. So in the story Concepción asks Velázquez if Dolores should not be content and submissive; Velázquez says no, that Dolores investigates the nature of things in food as he does in oil, and that the world is not divided between servants and masters so much as it is between the inquisitive and the incurious. “The Church teaches that Mary is the contemplative life, which is higher than Martha’s way, which is the active way,” he says. “But any painter must question, which is which? And a cook also contemplates mysteries.” His painting unites them all, active and contemplative, and so they sit down together to the meal; but more even than this, his painting of Dolores’s anger dispels it — “The momentary coincidence between image and woman vanished, as though the rage was still and eternal in the painting and the woman was released into time.” It’s a powerful note on which to end the collection.

This may be Byatt’s strongest collection of short fiction overall. It’s more diverse than Sugar and Other Stories, structurally and dramatically; there’s a greater range of characters, style, and situation. It seems to me to be perhaps less united but more thought-through than The Matisse Stories. There’s almost a sense of liberation to the collection, as though dealing with elemental subjects frees Byatt in some way to more daringly investigate her favourite themes. She takes some risks here, does some uncharacteristic things, working with fantasy and first-person perspectives, and by and large they pay off handsomely.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.