'The Horror. the Horror'

Perhaps it’s the encroaching senility one starts to suspect as the memory finds it hard to drag up once familiar words; perhaps it’s the memento-mori of a deforming, never to be straightened, finger on an increasingly inefficient hand: Maybe it is just excessive experience and a corrupted world.

Whatever it is, my recent re-reading of Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ has left me a little stunned.

Leopards might not change their spots – but works of literature can certainly change their meaning.

Once this was a stylish novel of superior language use, playing with the genre of spies and flooring the ‘le Carrés’ of the future before they even put pen to paper.

Well defined major characters and good descriptions – Dickensian almost but nodding to the modern.

This time it was a vicious (as only humour can be vicious) satire on certainties and politics.

In a world of ocean sized deceit, where atrocities and terrorism originate in ones friends and where one does not really know ‘the enemy’, small lives are wrecked leaving little flotsam to wash ashore.

Winnie, whose story this is, is as tragic a figure as you will find in any ‘Bodice Ripper’ – she marries, for the sake of her family, the safe middle class man who lodged with her mother; her mother leaves in order to safeguard the prospects of an idiot son; the son, brother to Winnie, is hardly noticed by Verloc, double agent for a seedy government, until he is pressured to breaking point by an enthusiastic know-nothing (young, First Secretary, Mr Vladimir).

No one is to blame – next to nothing happens, but a devastating hole is cut out in the reader’s faith in the essential goodness of the universe.

The terror comes with the realisation this is our world – this is the manipulation of modern governments and those agencies set up to protect us – Nothing has changed: If anything, it is more like this than it was at the time of writing.

Shakespeare Experience: Shakespeare Geek goes pimp!

Shakespeare Experience: Shakespeare Geek goes pimp!

Just a bit of fun!

Links to links to links.

Somewhere there is a connection out to a serious blog.

Books-on-the-Go

(Update)

Several Books-on-the-Go at the moment - and a couple finished and waiting for processing!

Most surprising for me is Conrad's 'The Secret Agent'.
I'll give a full review at a later date (- I've set the reading of it as an exercise for a student and don't want to give too much away).
I've only re-read the first couple of chapters and I either hadn't realised the humour before - or had forgotten it.
Maybe I've become more sensitive to issues of weight too - the description of the 'agent' is pretty damning - the word 'pig' was used!

As I type there is a Shakespeare to be worked on - Henry VI part III. (It's next to the computer, glaring at me with an accusatory eye!)
I am slowly going through the History Plays in the order they were thought to have been written - and this is, perversely, the second. I've decided to use the Penguin Shakespeare edition - as this seems a sound work throughout.

The third book I am working on is a 'request': Virginia Woolfe's, 'The Waves'.
Many consider this to be her masterpiece - and although I might prefer 'To the Lighthouse', I ain't going to pooh-pooh the experts.

I've just finished another fantasy - in the Fforde, Thursday Next series, and I feel an excursion into the world of essays coming on (bit like the reaction to a suspect oyster).

Reprobates of the World: UNITE!

You have nothing to loose but your shillings!

Came across this looking for an alternative to El Prat - and not disappointed.

A bit of a mix between fantasy and horror - twinges of King in there: And the sort of tramp you'd expect to find in waiting for Godot.

I also had certain doubts as to the political correctness of certain elements - distinctly racist touches I thought - but then dismissed them as irony - and then thought about whether they actually were ironic.

Not a belly laugh but certainly amusing - especially when you get to my age and start identifying with some of the more reprobate characters! Omally and his friend, Pooley, lead the sort of drunken existence that is the dream of many respectable males but which is impossible to sustain without serious damage to ones health and family.

(Does make you wonder about male fantasies and their (our) grasp on reality - and wonder if women can really appreciate the need for the innocent bonding of extreme alcohol abuse.)

Be warned though: Pre-decimalisation money (and I loved it).

With books that become films it is easy to loose track of the original intent.

I suspect that is what has happened with Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Over on the OU/BBC discussion board, there’s a classic case – the French have re-titled the film and at least one person has gone along with it.

I’ve not yet seen the cinema version and have only just read the book – it is quite stunning.

The title reflects something that isn’t fully revealed until the last section – and I don’t see how it could work on film – it is such a literary device that the impact and the ‘revelation’ would require some fairly fancy filmic devices to make it work. It reminds me a little of ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’ – in terms of transferability.

This could account for the title change – and makes me suspicious of the film – have they missed the point?

Another element that is un-filmable for me is the description of the British debacle at Dunkirk.

My father was in the B.E.F. that went over early in the war only to be evacuated from the beaches, and, for the first time in my life, I have a sense of what it must have been like – and what it must have meant to him – from a fictional work.

No amount of documentary footage, no Hollywood style film, no fancy computer animations and sound effects could give me the shocking bitterness, the sense of failure, the almost absurd visions of the soldiers and civilians in France at that time.

A clear example of fiction being truer than fact.

Which brings me to a final aspect which I think un-filmable: The exploration in the book of the craft of writing and the nature of the novel.

To some extent all novelists (at least the good ones) are forced to consider what they are doing when they write – when they ‘fictionalize’ (if such a word exists). The choice of printed narrative as opposed to some other genre, is a conscious one.

Ian McEwan has made the foundation of his story the act of fictionalization.

"Is he trying to Atone for something?" one is tempted to ask!

Needful Things

I can’t say I enjoyed this book: I was hooked by the strong narrative line and read it rapidly; I was fascinated by the dreadful logic of the chain of events; I was disturbed by the believability of the actions of the humans: But enjoyment – No.

Stephen King manages to mix the fantastical with the mundane – evil, personified in a grotesque, with the ordinary, petty trials and tribulations of small community life.

It is a critique of that small community which lies at the heart of this book – and it is the insight Mr. King has into the workings and motivations of the human decision making process which allow him to so believably destroy the fragile bonds which maintain such communities.

The book has its fair share of action and blood, explosion and bullet – but the real horror is the gullibility of the people, the ease with which deceit can be foisted on them and the tenacity with which they hold on to that deceit.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I can say it was well worth reading – and that I took a lot from it. I certainly will read more of Mr. King’s works, but I think I want to visit sunnier climes first – maybe a simple murder yarn?

Wiki: Needful Things

Bleak House (2)

As if on cue: The weather, after a month of people killing heat-wave, turns to rain - persistent and misery inducing.

In Bleak House, the weather is as bad.

We are still following events through the eyes of Esther, who seems to be developing into ‘our heroin’. She wakes and is induced to go for a walk thought the foggy, early morning streets around the Chancery – with the inevitable accompaniment of the slightly-lacking people she seems destined to pick up on her way through life – Miss Jellyby to the forefront.

After the equally inevitable reminders of Miss Jellyby’s mother’s negligence, and heavy indications that ‘the wards in the case’ are getting on rather more strongly than distant cousins need to fulfil family duty, up pops the mad woman.

We are not destined to learn her name – she is the ‘little old woman’ she is ‘our hostess’, she is ‘the lodger’; she is the great anonymous: Details, if ever known, now lost and only to be revealed on ‘Judgement Day’.

Another unknown is presented to us in Nemo – advertising on the door of the shop above which the old lady lives where there is a difficulty gaining entrance.

What isn’t kept long from us is the landlord and shop’s owner, Mr Krook. (Crook for bent and deformed? Or crook for criminal?)

We soon lean what is either ignored in t.v. adaptations or passed quickly over – he is the second Chancellor! And proud of it.

Surround by endless papers in dusty, fading piles; unknowing, uncomprehending what he has or what its value; holding on, not selling – accumulating the detritus of other people’s lives.

Suddenly, that most powerful of Dickensian tools, the physical description, so attractive to designers yet so inaccessible visually, clicks in – the shop is a metaphor – chaos and confusion - physical, mental, moral, spiritual; with a bent old cipher sitting enthroned in the centre.

Guard to this treasure house is the most vicious cat in literature.

Up in the lodger’s rooms we discover a barren place with captured birds – again, not the pretty yellow canaries tweeting careless of their captivity, so beloved of the filmmakers – dusty, nearly dead things the RSPCA would instantly prosecute you for – and gas out of their misery.

The camera lens can only capture what it sees, it fails to grasp the multi-layering that comes with the multi-perspective a good novelist can give.

Esther’s ‘Morning Adventure’ in this New (if not brave) World bruises through a thuggery of words that are only more numbing because of the naiveté of the narrator.

The day progresses and we move into sunlight and refreshing air as the three young people continue their journey to start residence at Bleak House.

It is a tiring journey but the natural optimism of Esther shines through – and we eventually enter the most un-bleak of houses. Mr Jarndyce awaits – an old man terrified of thanks and totally incapable of accepting other people’s faults.

He is a stark contrast to Krook but Dickens makes an intriguing parallel in the settings where we find these two: Irregularity. Bleak House might be, in Esther’s words, “Delightfully irregular,” but there is no doubt in the reader – all is not well.

Like Krook, Mr Jarndyce is in a physical and, by implication, moral and psychological maze. Esther has not only been thrust into it, but is soon given the keys and made housekeeper.

Another odd aspect of Mr Jarndyce is his ability to bring the weather indoors. The closest expression of disapproval and unpleasantness he is capable of is to comment on the direction of the wind: “From the east,” gives Mr Jarndyce, “an uncomfortable sensation.” One suspects the sensation, originating in the foibles of humanity he refuses to recognise, is the source of his meteorological observations. By the end of this chapter, in fact, a full-blown gale is being summoned.

Resident at Bleak House is Mr Harold Skimpole, the personification of innocence and childlike understanding according to both himself and Mr Jarndyce. Others might, after hearing the tale he tells of his employment in Germany, suspect a lazy good-for-nothing exploiting consciously the weakness of others. Esther and Richard soon fall victim to him, being forced to hand over money to prevent Skimpole being hauled off to gaol – and it is Mr Jarndyce’s discovery of this which prompts his tempestuous predictions.

As expected though, Esther signs off her shift as narrator with a, and “. . . hopefully to bed.”

But Dickens has not done with us – bookend like, the omniscient persona of ‘our author’ returns to give a little coda on ‘The Ghost’s Walk’.

This is a deceptive title. Superficially it is the thrill seeking description so beloved of the tour guide – for, what is the content of this chapter but a guided tour of Chesney Wold, Lady and Baronet Dedlock’s sodden country house in Lincolnshire?

Mr Guppy, from London, suggesting a higher legal status than his lowly clerkdom, gains access with a friend, and is shown around the house by the housekeeper’s protégé, Rosa. They are accompanied by the housekeeper’s grandson who is visiting and who provokes in Rosa a beauty intensifying self-consciousness that doesn’t escape the notice of Mrs Rouncewell, grandmother and solid feature of the house.

Guppy notices a portrait the likeness in which he feels to be familiar, but he cannot, for the moment place. It is of the present Lady Dedlock, but Mr Guppy has never seen her.

The tour concludes, as always, with a view over ‘The Ghost’s Walk’ – a terrace with the sort of less-than-respectable history guaranteed to thrill the respectable, rising middle-class viewer of country houses.

Once Guppy has been shown out by a young gardener, Mrs Rouncewell, widowed some time ago and with two sons, one gone bad, the other risen and grandson producing, reveals more of the true nature of the walk.

Some long dead Dedlock, cursing the family, walks the Walk whenever disaster and disgrace is coming to the proud family. The sound of her footsteps, despite loud-ticking musical clocks, will be heard, through the beat and the notes, as Rosa now hears them, and as Lady Dedlock claims to have heard.

Is he ghost’s walk the terrace? No, it is the sound produced by that wonderfully Dickensian touch-of-the-gothic, predicting the final humbling of an over-proud house. It is the unendurable, to Lady Dedlock, dripping of the rain.

(A little late publishing, but read on time!)