Book 7 - Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

In last week’s book Tim Parks asked the question whether we read to be of our time or to know more of the past or other places. It is rhetorical question as we all read different things for different reasons but it made me think that this week’s book should be something from the past and that I should read to notice some changes in attitudes from a previous era.

Rogue Male was published in 1939 and is the first person account of an accomplished, aristocratic, English huntsman,  who seemingly on a whim, decides to stalk a European leader (Hitler). The question of whether he actually means to assassinate him is left slightly ambiguous at first (though we later learn that he had good reason for wanting to do so) but the point is moot as he is discovered before he could fire and is captured. He is interrogated and tortured quite badly before being thrown over the side of a cliff to make it look as if he died accidentally. But he survived the fall and, using the cunning he had as a huntsman, managed to hide whilst they searched for his body and then escape on a boat down river. Once back in England, though,  he was not safe as agents were still in active pursuit. He was unable to escape unnoticed and was forced to kill one of them, which meant that he was being hunted by both the police and the foreign secret service. But it was an agent who tracked down his hideout in Dorset. He the huntsman became the hunted by someone who was as skilled as himself. He is cornered and trapped in an underground lair and although things seem to be totally hopeless he manages to fashion a weapon with which he can kill his pursuer. After that he escapes and is able to travel abroad and start a new life with a new identity, in South America.

As you can tell from the synopsis, it it a neat tight plot and the thing clips along at a good pace - there is after all a reason why it is seen as a classic thriller - but it is much more cunning than that. There are all sorts of ellipsis where you have to go back to work out exactly what happened and there are all sorts of themes about cover, hiding, concealment, man as animal, instincts and knowing yourself. It is interesting, for example, that our hero only really gets to consciously understand his motive towards the end, after being questioned by his pursuer.

But I am partly reading this for the attitudes of its time and it is rich in examples. In the foreground there is the premise of a huntsman. The whole practice of stalking big game, as a skilful, solitary pursuit that engages all the senses and a deep knowledge of the natural world, is something from a past era. We know engage with the wild in a different, more limited way. We have to find other ways to get in touch with our animal self. For our huntsman hero, he had that knowledge because of what he did, who he was.

“ This was the reasoning of a hunted beast, or rather, it was no reasoning at all. I don’t know if a sedentary townsman’s mind would have worked in the same way. I think it would if he had been badly enough hurt.  You must be hurt badly to reach the stage of extinction where you stop thinking what you ought to do and merely do it.”

But merely doing it was also a model of how one behaved.”like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and and disbelieve in cold blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anybody else.” This is part of the national character myth of the English gentleman that was potent until the latter part of the Twentieth Century. A myth that had us believe there was an innate superiority that would always enable us to triumph in the end through instinctive knowledge and basic judgement. We were proud to be empirical and not think too much but underlying it there was a form of stoicism. The famous stiff upper lip, that can rarely be seen anywhere in contemporary society. Of his initial interrogation by the security forces our hero says: “I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless” What wonderful understatement! Other details of the interrogation are dribbled out later on but there are no descriptions. As a buttoned up English gentleman of the time he takes it on the chin:

“I hold no brief for the pre-war Spartan training of the English upper class - or middle class as it is now the fashion to call it, leaving the upper to the angels - since in the ordinary affairs of a conventional life it is not of the slightest value to anyone: but it is of use on the admittedly rare occasions when one needs a high degree of physical endurance … We torture a boy’s spirit rather than his body, but all torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit. I was conditioned to endure without making an ass of myself. That is all I mean by detachment.”

I must admit that I am attached to this idea of the English gentleman hero. I was bought up on in all the books I read as a child, Biggles stories and the like. Reading Rogue Male was in some ways comforting because it reminded me of the pleasures I had with those stories when younger, when everything seemed bigger, bolder and brighter. But I can only now read it as my older self and now I get the pleasure from other details  in the writing and the way themes are slipped in. Like, for example, the earlier quote about ‘the reasoning of a hunted beast’  there is the phrase about reaching ‘the stage of extinction’ and it is something to bear in mind when you read a story of covering up and trying to disappear.

Date of first publication
1939

Link to last book

I am going to abandon the idea of the randomness for the moment and play a game of consequences, just to see where it leads. I read this book because of a question in the previous book about reading to find out about the past

Book 6 - Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From

I picked this up in the LRB Bookshop and was hooked by the short introduction which seemed to speak directly to my concerns about  what I am doing here:

“And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times and other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision the world or challenge it?”

These are questions I ask but I have no real answers. I cannot tell you precisely why I am writing this blog apart from a general idea that it is important to pay attention and the best way to pay attention to  know that when you are finished you will have to recollect enough to be able to write something (no matter how short or trivial). Am I any nearer finding answers to questions about why and how we read after reading the book? Not really.  Perhaps they are questions without definitive answers. Nevertheless the questions are worth raising, the style is engaging,  and the insights show you things you hadn’t noticed before or help you extend thoughts you might previously have had. (Damn I’ve just broken one of the rules of the blog and made some sort of reviewerly judgement. I will let that pass for the moment but with instructions not to let it happen too often).

The book is a collection of columns written for the New York Review of books and so the essays are discrete, although linked by his concerns as a writer, translator, teacher. They are loosely grouped under four headings: the world around the book,the book in the world,the writer’s world, and writing across worlds but there are a number of common threads and throughout there is an attention to the use of language.  How that might resonate differently in different cultures is one of common themes. More works than ever are being translated and literature is increasingly globalised. This might seem to be straightforwardly a good thing to open knowledge of the wider world, but it comes at a cost. Culturally specific, idiosyncratic writing that can only be fully appreciated if you get the references can be marginalised. Writers might go wider rather than deeper and style will suffer in a broader market, where less can be taken for granted and more has to be explained. A flatter world.  Rudyard Kipling wrote differently when his audience was confined to English people living in India, who knew the local culture, to when his fame was widespread. Also expectations can be come rigid and works outside the style can be neglected. South America has been strongly associated with magical realism but it is a big continent and others write in a different way and but it is more difficult for them to get a hearing.

These are interesting points about commercial pressures and the business of writing, that have escaped me as an outsider. But what I really like in these essays are the details and the way he looks at the mechanics of a text, for example the weight of particular words and why translation is so difficult.

“Lawrence comments: ‘They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts the were frightened.’ A recent Italian edition the book offers a version that, translated back into English, would give, ‘They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid’. Experimenting over the years I’ve realised that if I ask a class of student to translate this into Italian about half will introduce that ‘but’. It appears to be received wisdom that pone doesn’t laugh when one is afraid. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.”

I took the point about the ‘but’ but the thing that really interested me was the difference in weight between being frightened and being afraid: the degrees and types of fear and how you can be frightened of or by something but you can only be afraid of. But the bigger thing was the introduction of ‘burst out’ into ‘They both laughed’.  If you burst out laughing it tends to be spontaneous and carefree and so that ‘but’ in the passage becomes necessary.

I love chewing on these details when they are pointed out to me but I must admit if I had been reading the text by myself it would have all slipped by. That is the thing: mostly when I read it is like a stream. But sometimes you need a reminder to pause to look more closely at the details and there can be as much pleasure in unravelling a sentence, a word, a tone, as there is in enjoying a well worked plot. This weeks book has been a good reminder.

Date of publication
2014

Randomness factor

None really, except that I only came across it because it was displayed in a bookshop. It is though relevant to the act of reading and hence this blog

Book 5: Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

After two books written 80 and 50 years ago I thought I ought to try something more recent, so off I went to the library to choose something from the ‘Hot Picks’ table. Hot Picks are current, popular books, only available for one week, with no renewal (most libraries do this but the name might vary; in Hampshire it’s called ‘Fast Back’, which sounds more like a car). Once I saw these short stories by Hilary Mantel on the table it was an easy choice because I knew what I would write about, even before I opened the cover.

I would start with the outrage its publication caused in most of the press. How offended they were at the the very idea that not everybody venerated the ex Prime Minister, whose status of heroine saviour they assumed to be universally acknowledged. Saying this was not so and even contemplating an assassination was somehow extra disrespectful because she had recently died. One Thatcher’s old advisors, Tim Bell ( a man of such moral nicety he has been prepared to represent the brutal regime in Uzbekistan) made some barmpot suggestion that the police ought to look into the fantasy murder. The flurry of outrage would have rewarded a little examination. But perhaps the funniest thing was that the Daily Telegraph bought the rights for the book, pre publication, presumably without knowing what the title story was about. They dropped it and it was then taken up by the Guardian.

Then I would haved linked to a previous controversy stoked in the same papers about something Mantle wrote, or rather said, in a lecture, entitled ‘Royal Bodies’ . It is actually an interesting and thoughtful piece abut how we look at monarchy, especially the women,  both at present and in Tudor times. However it was read only as an attack on Kate Middleton rather than the expectations of her role:

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.

Such extracts were highlighted to provide fodder for the papers, phone-ins and politicians who could proclaim how disgraceful it was that someone could say such things when everyone knew Kate was perfection itself.How, with this fake controversy only a year old could the Daily Telegraph think that the next Mantel book would necessarily be safe for their readers? That must just have assumed that she was still stuck in Tudor times.

Anyway I picked up the book expecting to expand on the theme but a book of short stories is an unpredictable thing. Here there are ten different tales just like some old  LPs and just like an album you might not like the title track best. Here the story that interested me most was the opening one (again think how many albums open with the strongest song).

It is called ‘Sorry to Disturb’ and the reference at the back says it was first published  as ‘Sorry to Disturb: a memoir’ in the London Review of Books in 2009. However the LRB archive gives it the title ‘Someone to Disturb’, which is actually a more interesting title as it has a slight ambiguity:  it could refer to the person who was disturbing or the person vulnerable to disruption, which is apt as the story is about vulnerability. However we have lost the subtitle and we are now no longer sure whether it is a memoir, fictionalised memoir, or fiction.

We know it is about someone who was living in Saudi Arabia, trapped at home whilst her husband was out at work. Someone who was muzzy with drugs that also cause psychotic incidents, and someone who wrote a novel and had it accepted for publication during the course of the story. These things are all part of Hilary Mantel’s biography. Whether the visit and subsequent contact with Muhammed Ijaz happened - who knows. It doesn’t matter. It’s a story. What it shows is the effect of being trapped inside a house, with activity overlooked, and severe restraints on the way a woman is meant to behave.  Such constraints lead to a debilitated of a sense of self and in the end she is incapable of cutting herself free from the attentions of the unwanted visitor and has to rely on her husband to write a letter.

It is a creepy, sad tale that has the feeling of unreality, as if it doesn’t quite make sense.  This is acknowledge near the end:

“Even after all this time it is hard to grasp exactly what happened. I try to write it as it occurred but I find myself changing the names to protect the guilty. I wonder if Jeddah left me forever off kilter in some way, tilted from the vertical and condemned to see life skewed.”

It was this story that got me thinking the most.

Date of publication
2014


Random Factor:
Library ‘Hot Pick’