Book 11 - Cheryl Strayed, Wild:a journey from lost to found

Wild starts dramatically when, 38 days into her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed knocks one of her boots down a steep mountain slope into the forest canopy below. In shock and anger she throws the other one after it. “What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore and I could take no mercy on it.”

At that point, only a couple of paragraphs in, I worried. “Orphan?” You cannot call the remaining boot an orphan - it makes no sense. Things did not look good; could I trust the writer not to over write? But breathe in - relax - let go of hasty judgements - don’t let the grumpy old man out of his box. All you have to do is read one word after another to see how far you will get - just like going for a walk. In the end I was glad I did as I finished the book with enthusiasm. I’m a sucker for stories of redemption and this is good because it focusses on one event: a journey of courage and endurance; a period of withdrawal from normal life, which allowed wounds to heal and a life to be reset.

When she made the journey Strayed was 26 and it had been 4 years since her mother died. The use of orphan to describe the boot was a link to herself. After her mother died she had drifted around, useless, unable to keep the remaining family (two siblings and a step dad) together, pushing away her husband so they divorced, falling into using heroin. It had become unbearable. By chance she saw a book on the Pacific Crest Trail, something she was unaware of, and something grabbed her imagination. Her subconscious was telling her what she needed. Without ever having backpacked before (as opposed to day hikes) she decided this was something she had to do. It might have seemed remarkably foolhardy but from where she was what was there to lose?

The story of her preparedness, is nuanced. It is easy to get the impression she was clueless but this is not the case, it is just that before doing it she did not know all of what would be involved. She was not an urban softie who thought it sounded like a neat idea she could do on a whim. She had been bought up in the countryside and knew the outdoors. She also had the guide to the trail and thoroughly planned her route and what would be involved, to the extent that she prepared supply boxes and gave them to a friend to post to various pick-up points along the way. It was not a matter of waking up one summer morning and wandering off - if nothing else she had to work hard to save money from her waitressing job. It was a thought out plan. On the other hand she had not been on a backpacking trip where you have to carry everything with you and what that would mean in terms of strength and speed. The book is about how she coped with that and learnt to know what she was doing. Just by carrying on she became more able to carry on.

It is not a book about how to walk a long distance trail, though you will learn quite a lot from it (especially the need to pack as light as possible!). It is really about how it is possible to do something because you feel you have no alternative and that you simply must, even though it might be overwhelming. In the motel, at the very beginning of the walk, she packed her bag for the very first time and found that she could not lift it to sling it over her shoulders; she had to crawl into it and lever herself upright. She then wondered how she was going to walk for a hundred days with that load but that did not stop her. She walked out of the room and began - because there was no other way.Once you are in the wilderness there is no other way. You have to go on. You have only your own physical reserves and the pace you can walk. There are on other aids and if you are alone there is none else you can turn to in tight moments. You must find extra resources from within. This she did and the reward at the end was knowing she had those resources.

One of the reasons I like the book is that it is not overwritten (as I thought it might be at the beginning). It is well written and it doesn’t make too many claims for the transformative effects of what happened (though the transformations are there). She does not say she became a new person, or was reborn, instead it is more about finding the person she was before she became lost after her mother’s death. I was worried that it might be a bit New Agey but it is not,  though there are a couple of New Agey encounters. This is good, I like my literature to keep in touch with the earth even if the subject is essentially emotional. It may overtly be about walking but really it is about walking as a way into emotional truth. As she said to one of the people she met:

“Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack” I said to Albert when we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”
He gave me a weak smile and nodded [Albert was suffering with a stomach bug during this encounter]  “By the way” I said “I wanted to tell you - about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died - she was only 45  and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten off track. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me to find my centre, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hans, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.
“Well, you've got your bearings now, haven’t you? he said, and sat up, his face lighting up despite his nausea.

That is also something that should be mentioned about this story. It is not just about her being alone and finding herself. She met many wonderful people who offered help and support. It is a story about decency.

But back to the beginning and that boot. The scene is true and a tease. True because it happened and she had to walk for a stretch in tapped up sandals but also a tease because the boot loss was not absolute. The boots were had been too small and messed up her feet. Other people had told  her her they were too small but her thinking was that she couldn’t do anything about it because she didn’t have the money, until someone told her that the shop she bought them from, REI, had a total satisfaction guarantee, and if the boot were wrong they would change them. They actually mailed her, free of charge,  a new pair, a size bigger, which she picked up later. A little amazing story, within the bigger amazing story and a reason, perhaps, why the boots deserved to become a character in their own right.

Date first published
2012

Link to last book

Professional cycling, among other things, is about long distance endurance and the will to carry on. This is another take on that spirit from someone who is not an exceptional athlete.

Book 10 - Ellis Bacon & Lionel Birnie (eds), The Cycling Anthology vol. 5

I have a good local reason for reading The Cycling Anthology: editor Lionel Birnie lives a few miles up the road, in Harpenden. A combination of cycling and localism is irresistible.

The idea is simple: allow cycling journalists to wander the byways of the sport rather than being restricted to the main highways of race reports, big names and doping. It pays off because there are so many rarely told stories both from cycling’s history and amongst today’s peloton (there might be a limited number of winners, who are the focus of our attention, but there are so many other stories).  Also I believe that, in the English speaking countries at least, in a golden age of cycling writing. As the sport has moved from an obsession for slightly cranky enthusiasts to something more widely recognised, there has been a chance to explain to a new audience the current workings of the sport and the glories of past heroes. It’s as if members of an underground clique have emerged, blinking, into the daylight to find that people are ready to listen to what they have to say. Now any self respecting bookshop has a shelf of good book. Cycling is cool, cycling is increasingly middle class, to be cool you have tone informed, and so there is a demand for literature

This book, or should I say these books as we are at number five in the series, are probably aimed at the enthusiast. In the beginning they were sold through cycling shops and were a bit outside the mainstream but they have obviously crossed over, as they are now published by Random House. So what do you get?  In the current edition there are ten articles, half of which are related to the Tour de France and of the rest most are historical: cycling in World War One, the search for a past rider, the history of an old team. Eight of the authors are British, one is French and one American. As with any collection, there are hits and misses. I don’t want to dwell on pieces I didn’t like so well. (Oh OK then - I wasn’t that impressed by a piece on panache that where the writer was not really sure what it meant but whatever it was it could never apply to Thomas Voeckler - that just seemed a bit mean). Instead I will mention a couple of the stories that really caught my eye. The first was about the Linda McCartney cycling team from the 1990s who talked a good match, promised to challenge at the highest level and wore the badges of big money sponsors, but collapse when the talk was shown for what it was - just talk. There was no big money, the team was run by a fraudster and sponsor’s names had been used without agreement. There were good riders and but no infrastructure to support them. Promises and dreams, promises and dreams and many of us sporting romantics are prone to fall for them. The interesting thing though, is that only a few years later many of the same promises were made by British Cycling when they formed Team Sky but this time it was organised, managed and funded, and it succeeded.  Reading the story Linda McCartney just hammers home the message that to succeed you need the right structure and proper management. You can’t wing it and hope things work out in the end, or rather you probably can for a short time but eventually things will fall apart. Going back to the previously mentioned article, it could be said that Linda McCartney had a certain amount of panache because they had victories in spite of their flakiness but Sky don’t have panache because they are more calculating. Doing things properly sometimes means you lose the love.

The other article I particularly liked is about Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet who was in charge of the Tour de France for just one year. What a weird story it is. From 1903 to 1986 only three people had run the race: the first was Henri Desgrange, the founder, after the war it was taken over by his deputy Jacques Goddet, who was joined in 1962 by Félix Lévitan, who looked after the financial side. When they left, after some scandal about the cross subsidising of a failed Tour of America, it was thought a fresher, more businesslike approach was needed and, for whatever reason, they appointed Naquet-Radiguet, who had no previous connection with the sport. The outsider, coming into a set-up that had been running in its own way for decades, with his own ideas, is a classic recipe for jealousies, politicking and turmoil (think only of the succession of long term football managers like Alex Fergusson or Matt Busby). And so it was, Naquet-Radiguet lasted only one year. But, and to my mind this is a very big but, he should be given the credit for setting up the most exciting finish in the race’s history. He didn’t like the tradition of the last day being a procession and thought it should be raced until the end. he shook things up with a final time trial on the Champs Elysées. As it so happened, in 1989 the two leaders were close enough for this to matter and for there to be an outside chance it might change the result. Laurence Fignon led Greg LeMond by 50 seconds, which should have been enough but you never know, especially as Fignon did not seem to be as focussed on the disciplines of time trailing as LeMond. His pony tail flapped out behind him, causing an increase in drag (LeMond wore an aero helmet), he was  on the drops (LeMond had aero bars). Small things matter and LeMond won by 8 seconds - the smallest margin there has ever been, and probably ever will be. Brilliant. If that was Naquet-Radiguet legacy than that would have been enough but he saw that the race needed to adapt to the modern media and sharpen its image. Something his successors have been successful in doing ever since.

The Cycling Anthology doesn't have a theme and one article doesn't lead into another; they all stand alone. But these two essays are linked in that they both deal with times of transition. Linda McCartney happened at a time when British cycling was emerging from its old isolationist, amateurish ways and embracing the sport with a new attitude. A transformation which would eventually lead to the development of champions. Naque-Radiguet was about a change from the old guard and some of its old ways. Times of transition are hard on the people involved but usually throw up good stories. The cusp is an interesting place to be.

P.S. By coincidence the pieces I have highlighted were written by two of the three hosts of The Cycling Podcast, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe (the other host is Richard Moore). If anyone has the slightest interest in professional cycling I would thoroughly recommend it.

Date of publication
2014

Book consequences

At first sight there might seem little connection between this week and last: cycling and a polemic about the virtues of working with your hands but there is a clear link. The bike is wonderful because it is one of the few remaining machines where all the working parts are in clear view and you know how it is meant to work. It is something you can take apart and put back together again, something you can understand. It is the exactly what Matt Crawford was talking about

Book 9 - Matthew Crawford, The Case For Working With Your Hands

“He picked up a chunk of wood and, putting it to the lathe, worked a foot pedal and held a sharp, bent knife to the rapidly revolving wood. With surprising speed he cut the outer shape of the bowl; then, taking a different knife, he cut out the inside as you might cut the inside of a turnip. The bowl was roughly finished.
‘It wants titivating up of course,’ he explained, ‘and the inside will make another smaller bowl.’
The alder sapling sprang back, vibrating: a clumsy, primitive, marvellously efficient invention, and in it - and many more now lost to us - the secrets of those beautiful handcrafts of antiquity which remain to astonish us and to confound our modern machinists.
‘Boys won’t learn this now,’ he said ‘It’s not as easy as it looks, and unless you learn when you’re a lad you can never catch the knack of it.’

That was H.V. Morton, in last week’s book, describing the work someone he described as the last bowl turner in England. Using a lathe and methods dating back to Anglo Saxon times it seemed like the end of a line, but sometimes things die off only to be revived slightly differently.  There is now a growing interest in recovering ancient crafts both out of curiosity, an attempt to reconnect with history, and as an antidote to the modern sedentary/virtual world.  Rediscovering the feeling of making something by hand is an experience to be valued. Here is an example of a bowl making course you can go on to be part of the tradition.

This leads directly on to this week’s book in which Matthew Crawford examines why he has found more satisfaction and even mental stimulus in manual labour than knowledge work. As someone with a PhD who has earned a high salary at a think tank and given it up to open a motorcycle repair shop, he is placed to make this comparison like few others. It is not about the mysticism of high end craftsmanship but is instead about everyday trades like an electrician or a motor mechanic. However many of the satisfactions of a craftsman and tradesman are shared, such as: control over what you yourself are doing, an objective standard to know if you have done a good job, and the feeling of doing something useful.

His thesis is that modern knowledge work is as alienating as the labour described by Marx, whereas skilled manual worker (i.e. outside the factory) actually has more autonomy. They make their own judgements of the physical world, using the evidence of hand and eyes, guided by knowledge and experience. It is same sort of encounter with the natural world as gave rise to natural science. The carpenter for example learns the characteristics of types of wood and their fitness for different tasks, he also learns the general skills of angles, what is plumb, load baring and stability. This is aside from his ingrained physical skill in executing the task. In early Western tradition sophia (wisdom) meant skill and you can see the connection. But we have now lost the concrete sense of the original and put more of our eggs into the theoretical basket.

If we accept this how should we see work? Not only should we value the practical, we need to  look again at offices and see what a person has to do to be connected to a task in a way that makes them feel useful. Directly useful, not as part of an amorphous team effort. It is about individual agency. But this is not happening,  the social river is rushing in the opposite direction. Higher academic qualifications are increasingly being demanded just to get on the the ladder and checklist, plans and inspections constrain the practice of professionals. Personal qualities are emphasised rather than specific skills. This book raises its skinny fist at that trend.

But is this trend new or has it just grown bigger and more rigid? This quote from Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption) suggests our ways of thought don’t change much.

“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussion has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatise on the basis of a few observations”

I think that describes the problem with most of what I read on social media!

But this quote goes to the heart Crawford’s argument about skill and why it needs to be celebrated: skill = the ability to see. More than once the author says that a more experience mechanic has often pointed out something that was right in front of his face but which he lacked the knowledge to see. The raw sensual data is the same but without a framework of meaning features become invisible.

“The cognitive psychologist speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate … in the real world problems do not present themselves unambiguously. Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you might be mistaken. this is an ethical virtue.
Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly and this requires a kind of unslelfing. “Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue”  … This attempt is never fully successful because we are preoccupied with our own concerns. But getting outside her head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanics task too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.” This is the exhilaration the mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of a problem…
Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility .. our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.”

I can nod along with this and lament the conditions of the modern workplace but the theoretical passages are not what is most vivid about this book. For me it comes to life when it describes his own practical experiences. I loved the way he described the problems he had fixing an old Honda and felt it fitting that a book that extols the virtues of the practical is actually at its best when directly describing it.

Date of publication
2009

Link to last book

The description of a disappearing craft leads naturally to a book that propounds the virtues of trade work.

Book 8 - H V Morton, In Search of England

I chose this book because I thought it would tell me about England between the wars and be a link with the descriptions of the Dorest countryside in ‘Rogue Male’.  It might have been written a decade earlier but there would still be similarities. That was the idea and it seemed good at the time. But I picked it up, read a few pages, put it down and thought I would have to write a post on why I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing wrong with not finishing a book. It is a strange sense of duty that tells you to struggle on, when you are getting nether enjoyment or edification. It does you no good and it certainly doesn’t accumulate you any celestial points. (Tim Parks dealt with this eloquently in ‘Where I’m Reading From’  where he recounts a letter of appreciation from a fellow author who finished by saying that it hadn’t read the last fifty pages because at that point the novel seemed satisfactorily over). But this book was not satisfactorily over, it had not satisfactorily begun. I didn’t want to continue because I had taken against the narrator. I didn’t like the blustering, breezy tone, the patronising way he described others, his attitude to women and the alarm bells that rang in my head when a sentence in the introduction talked of an average city family disappearing into ‘racial anaemia’. A travel book is a trip and if you need to like, or at least trust your companion. So I put it down.

But it seemed a bit week to give up so easily, I thought I ought to try again, just to be sure. and the second time, for whatever reason, I found it more amusing than irritating and was happy to continue. Instead of thinking of the author as some golf club boor, I saw him as a mixture of Mr Pooter and Mr Cholmondley-Warner - in other words a comic creation.

I took out the binoculars and saw a gallows standing up there, a mark for several counties, firm and unmistakable, as if ready for a hanging.
A gibbet!
Before climbing up the steep road I thought that I would ask a few questions. I stopped a labourer on a bicycle.
‘What is that on the hill?’
‘Gallows’ he said suspiciously.
‘Who was hanged there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘When was it last used?’
‘Dunno.’
Have you ever heard any story about it?’
‘No.’

Before I had thought this a piece of nonsense. Now I found it funny. And the breeziness of the prose which before seemed bluff I now saw as narrative drive. Now I am half convinced that some of the humour is intentional:

[another casual conversation, this time on Plymouth Hoe about Drake and the Armada]
‘I would rather have lived in that age than any other,’ said my companion. He was a frill-looking man, as frail looking almost as Nelson.
‘The world must have seemed such a big place then. If one could have gone with Drake in 1577 in the Golden Hind!’
‘Ah! Now the Mauritania is due tomorrow!’
‘Yes’ he sighed.
‘How,’ I said ‘would you like to have burnt up Vera Cruz, to have sacked the churches, and driven the natives below the hatches, and the held a church parade?’
‘Splendid!’ He whispered ‘That was the spirit of the time … Well, I must be going home.’
He said good night and I watched his lank, dyspeptic, blood-thirsty figure fade into the distance.

As I read on I became more aware of other virtues. There are interesting anecdotes from the past and myths associated with some of the ancient buildings. Morton also has a good eye and can write fine descriptive prose:

A curious characteristic of English scenery is its ability to change itself in a distance of a few miles. Towards Devon the rugged Cornish rocks give way to a smoother, more comfortable countryside, a holier, less disturbing vista of green and red fields.
‘In England once again!’ I whispered as I saw a real Devon man ploughing a field, the colour of red ochre where the earth was newly turned and of cocoa where the sun had dried it. A different country.

I like that detail of the colour of the soil.

But the book is not a report of the nation in 1927. Instead it is a romance - a longing for the tales of the past, of King Arthur and Saxons. It is infused with a particular myth of rural Englishness that has all but died out now (except in the collective imagination of UKIP). Perhaps the myths have a particular potency because of the time the book was written,  only a decade after the end of the Great War. After all the destruction, keeping hold of a picture of what was worth fighting for would have been a pressing concern.

So in the end the book was worth reading but I know that whatever the ironical distance I maintained I still found the underlying attitudes of the author uncongenial. It cannot be shrugged off by saying he was a product of his time and our attitudes have moved on and he must be cut some slack. There is still something a bit off, especially when he talks about women. Nevertheless it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is still quite a lot of fun to be had

Date of first publication
1927

Link to last book

Rogue Male contained good descriptions of the English countryside between the wars. This follows on.

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’