It's funny how one's reading organises itself into unexpected patterns. A while back, I was enthusing over The Italian Boy, about grave-robbing and body-snatching in 19th-century London. And a while before that, I was impressed by Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien is set in the late 18th century, and deals, amongst other things (the Irish oral tradition; the circuses and freakshows of Enlightenment London; anti-Irish prejudice; symptoms of syphilis; the going rate for medical experimentation upon paupers; child prostitution) with the Giant, and with a medical gent who wants his bones.
This was a slow read for me, in the way that tourists walk slowly down certain streets: I kept pausing to admire sentences. "In the day the city's noise swamps it, but in the watches of the night you may hear the crack as my bones break free of their moorings, and the slap of the tide beaches against my liver."
Mantel has taken the true story of the 'Irish Giant', Charles Byrne, who came to London in 1782 to exhibit himself as a curiosity, and died there a year later, and woven other stories, literally and figuratively, around it. (The historical Byrne -- the surname is an anglicised form of O'Brien -- "may," says Mantel, "have been mentally retarded.") Her Giant is a gentleman, a bard in the Irish tradition, always ready to cheer his friends with a tale drawn from the inexhaustable wealth within his head; a wealth half-inherited from the poets at Mahoney's, half-invented. He goes to London to seek his fortune, for there's none to be found in Ireland. With him go Jankin, Pybus and Claffey, his friends; in charge of the party is Joe Vance, who becomes the Giant's agent, and finds them all lodgings, a maid-servant, a printer of hand-bills.
London's thronged with curiosities: a pig that can count, a Tartar horseman (his father's from Dublin), fire-eaters, black men, painted men. London's full of the poor: the pauper who charges eightpence for anatomist John Hunter to take a sample of his syphilitic chancre, the young girl who, when asked her name, says, "Bitch. We are all Bitch, to the English." To this seething rackety mix come the four Irishmen -- Pybus frightened of stairs, which he's never seen before -- and soon enough they find places for themselves.
The Giant tells his tales, and the tales (a grotesque version of Snow White, a multitude of variations on the tale of an honest man, an honest woman, duped by the Fair Folk) pale before reality. At first, the gentry had paid half a crown to see him, to hear him spin new stories about himself, but gradually trade dies off.
John Hunter broods in his dissecting-room, sending out resurrection men with the same instructions I've read about in The Italian Boy: hooks and crowbars, wooden shovels, don't steal their clothes. "Avoid those with noxious, offensive tumours, for they sting the students' fingers ... Be advised that for the corpses of young children I pay by the inch. For the first foot, one shilling. Thereafter, ninepence an inch."
It's a melancholy tale, of loneliness (Hunter as much as the Giant), of the loss of innocence, of the ugly underbelly of the scientific, clear-sighted, realistic Enlightenment.
"Your memory fails?"
"Everything fails, sir: reason, and harvests, and the human heart."
Sunday, March 12, 2006
#18: Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro
It's always interesting to read mainstream fiction that deals with genre themes. Never Let Me Go is on the shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. "The year's most extraordinary novel," according to the Sunday Times.
I tried very hard not to read reviews of it before reading the book itself, and I would strongly suggest that you do the same, dear reader. At least part of its impact depends on the gradual revelation of that genre theme.
If you haven't read the book, please note that this review contains spoilers.
Are you sitting comfortably? &ly;g>
Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate world: "England, late 1990s", it says on the frontispiece (would a genre novel feel that necessary?) but this is an England where the post-war boom, the brave new world, channelled its scientific endeavours into different areas. This is a novel about cloning: no, a novel about clones. It might be a novel about what it is to be human: it might be a novel about a love triangle. It might be a novel about oppression, or fate, or free will.
Kathy is a carer. She's looking back at her school years, spent at Hailsham -- a country boarding school, it seems, where the students were encouraged to be artistic and to express themselves. Gradually, Kathy's narrative focusses on two of her classmates, Tommy and Ruth. It's a wonderfully discursive narrative, with the rhythms and digressions of true reminiscence: oh, such-and-such a thing happened, but then to understand that you need to know about the thing that happened before, and when I last saw Tommy he said he thought that ...
There's a deceptive simplicity to the prose, as though it's the actual narrative of someone who isn't used to writing, to the lyrical uses of words. The school scenes are claustrophobically full of the melodrama of school life: cliques and outsiders, rumours about the teachers, students seeing things they shouldn't see and then drawing erroneous conclusions from them.
The revelations are gradual and subtle. The children, the students, have a purpose in life. Some of the teachers are repulsed by them, the way people are repulsed by spiders. (At one point I wrote in my notebook, "They're not human.") The students are not like normal people in the outside world, and there's a wistful sense of any exposure to normal life being a special treat. They don't have parents. They are, apparently, sterile. Their art is important, because it might show their souls.
Very little actually happens: in one sense, it's a tale about the rumour of a happy ending that proves to be false. The more I think about this novel -- and especially the ending -- the more I wonder if, after all, Kathy doesn't have a soul: if she is drawn to Ruth, and especially to Tommy, because they are more human than she is.
I'll be thinking about this book for a while, I can tell: trying to put my finger on why it works, and on why it feels so different to any of the genre novels I can think of that deal with the theme of cloning.
I tried very hard not to read reviews of it before reading the book itself, and I would strongly suggest that you do the same, dear reader. At least part of its impact depends on the gradual revelation of that genre theme.
If you haven't read the book, please note that this review contains spoilers.
Are you sitting comfortably? &ly;g>
Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate world: "England, late 1990s", it says on the frontispiece (would a genre novel feel that necessary?) but this is an England where the post-war boom, the brave new world, channelled its scientific endeavours into different areas. This is a novel about cloning: no, a novel about clones. It might be a novel about what it is to be human: it might be a novel about a love triangle. It might be a novel about oppression, or fate, or free will.
Kathy is a carer. She's looking back at her school years, spent at Hailsham -- a country boarding school, it seems, where the students were encouraged to be artistic and to express themselves. Gradually, Kathy's narrative focusses on two of her classmates, Tommy and Ruth. It's a wonderfully discursive narrative, with the rhythms and digressions of true reminiscence: oh, such-and-such a thing happened, but then to understand that you need to know about the thing that happened before, and when I last saw Tommy he said he thought that ...
There's a deceptive simplicity to the prose, as though it's the actual narrative of someone who isn't used to writing, to the lyrical uses of words. The school scenes are claustrophobically full of the melodrama of school life: cliques and outsiders, rumours about the teachers, students seeing things they shouldn't see and then drawing erroneous conclusions from them.
The revelations are gradual and subtle. The children, the students, have a purpose in life. Some of the teachers are repulsed by them, the way people are repulsed by spiders. (At one point I wrote in my notebook, "They're not human.") The students are not like normal people in the outside world, and there's a wistful sense of any exposure to normal life being a special treat. They don't have parents. They are, apparently, sterile. Their art is important, because it might show their souls.
Very little actually happens: in one sense, it's a tale about the rumour of a happy ending that proves to be false. The more I think about this novel -- and especially the ending -- the more I wonder if, after all, Kathy doesn't have a soul: if she is drawn to Ruth, and especially to Tommy, because they are more human than she is.
I'll be thinking about this book for a while, I can tell: trying to put my finger on why it works, and on why it feels so different to any of the genre novels I can think of that deal with the theme of cloning.
#17: Call Me Elizabeth -- Dawn Annandale
Call Me Elizabeth is the story of a woman who, burdened with debt (and with a number of emotional issues) decides to resort to prostitution to preserve her comfortable family life and pay school fees for her six children. Problems dealt with -- the financial ones, at least -- she calls a halt to her 'suspender years', making sure she has enough money in the bank to tide her over for a few months until she's worked out what to do next. (As far as I can tell from her website, she's now making a career out of speaking and writing about her experiences.)
As titillating soft porn goes, this isn't even on the starting line: there is barely a mention of what 'Elizabeth' actually does. Most of the book consists of anecdotes about her driver (happy to take her to the all-night Tesco's between jobs) and her pimp ("you do know you have to fuck them, darling?"), and glimpses of domestic life, interspersed with passages in which she rationalises her choices. Despite the description on the back cover of 'a bright, witty and highly-educated woman', 'Elizabeth' doesn't come across as particularly intelligent. She seems overwhelmingly normal: reads John Grisham, works as a legal secretary, flirts with a fellow-commuter. She buys her underwear in Marks and Spencer. She makes mistakes.
It never seems to occur to her that people might be suspicious of her lifestyle. At one point her former mother-in-law sets a private detective onto her; the new man in her life, to whom she's consistently lied about her employment, finds out where all the money comes from; someone checks up on her via her National Insurance number. And yet she leaves notebooks and bank statements lying around in her kitchen.
She is lucky: amongst her first few clients are a doctor (who opens her eyes to the health risks she faces) and a security consultant (who gives her some tips about protection and self-defence). Despite being badly in debt, she has funds available to buy new shoes, new underwear, cab rides from the West End to the leafy suburbs of Kent. (It says on the back cover that her children are 'going without the bare essentials', but this only seems to be true if you count shop-bought fairy cakes, and a puppy.) There's a certain lack of humour to her account, but perhaps that's to be expected. And there is never any hint that she enjoys her work.
Everyone's luck runs out sometimes. Some bad things happen to 'Elizabeth'. Whether it's her background, her determination or some inner resilience, she copes with them very well. Too well, perhaps: I can't help wondering if some of those bad nights come back to haunt her now. But it's only when she falls asleep at the wheel, driving home at 6am one morning, that she finally decides to stop immediately.
It's an indictment of the building societies and banks with which she held accounts that things were allowed to get so very bad: there's no mention of their contacting her to discuss matters, and she doesn't seek help from any of the agencies that exist to help those in debt.
The book isn't especially lyrical or well-written but it's a compelling read. I'm not sure I'd like 'Elizabeth' in real life, but there's something admirable in her determination, whether or not you believe that prostitution is morally and ethically wrong under any circumstance.
As titillating soft porn goes, this isn't even on the starting line: there is barely a mention of what 'Elizabeth' actually does. Most of the book consists of anecdotes about her driver (happy to take her to the all-night Tesco's between jobs) and her pimp ("you do know you have to fuck them, darling?"), and glimpses of domestic life, interspersed with passages in which she rationalises her choices. Despite the description on the back cover of 'a bright, witty and highly-educated woman', 'Elizabeth' doesn't come across as particularly intelligent. She seems overwhelmingly normal: reads John Grisham, works as a legal secretary, flirts with a fellow-commuter. She buys her underwear in Marks and Spencer. She makes mistakes.
It never seems to occur to her that people might be suspicious of her lifestyle. At one point her former mother-in-law sets a private detective onto her; the new man in her life, to whom she's consistently lied about her employment, finds out where all the money comes from; someone checks up on her via her National Insurance number. And yet she leaves notebooks and bank statements lying around in her kitchen.
She is lucky: amongst her first few clients are a doctor (who opens her eyes to the health risks she faces) and a security consultant (who gives her some tips about protection and self-defence). Despite being badly in debt, she has funds available to buy new shoes, new underwear, cab rides from the West End to the leafy suburbs of Kent. (It says on the back cover that her children are 'going without the bare essentials', but this only seems to be true if you count shop-bought fairy cakes, and a puppy.) There's a certain lack of humour to her account, but perhaps that's to be expected. And there is never any hint that she enjoys her work.
Everyone's luck runs out sometimes. Some bad things happen to 'Elizabeth'. Whether it's her background, her determination or some inner resilience, she copes with them very well. Too well, perhaps: I can't help wondering if some of those bad nights come back to haunt her now. But it's only when she falls asleep at the wheel, driving home at 6am one morning, that she finally decides to stop immediately.
It's an indictment of the building societies and banks with which she held accounts that things were allowed to get so very bad: there's no mention of their contacting her to discuss matters, and she doesn't seek help from any of the agencies that exist to help those in debt.
The book isn't especially lyrical or well-written but it's a compelling read. I'm not sure I'd like 'Elizabeth' in real life, but there's something admirable in her determination, whether or not you believe that prostitution is morally and ethically wrong under any circumstance.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
#16: Jack Maggs -- Peter Carey
I was in love with this novel by the time I'd read the first chapter: I very nearly got up early this morning to finish it, because I was so eager to find out how Carey would tie up all the threads. It's a post-colonial take on Dickens' Great Expectations. If I'd known that, I would never have bought it. I don't much care for Dickens, though now I find myself strangely inclined to (re?)read Great Expectations, which I don't think I ever finished when forced to tackle it at school.
Other people have discussed the intertextuality at considerable length: there's a good essay here
The novel is set in London in 1837. Jack Maggs is a convict, secretly returned from Australia to find his son, Mr Henry Phipps. Phipps is away from home, and so Maggs gains employment (one can't really say he seeks it) at the house next door, in the employ of Mr Buckle, former vendor of fried fish who has come into a Great Good Fortune. Mr Buckle has guests to dinner, that first night, and one of them is the celebrated author Tobias Oates. Jack Maggs is overcome by an old affliction; Oates hypnotises him; and one by one Jack's secrets are brought out of his mind and into the open, gradually revealing a past that is both murkier (in the sense of lack of clarity) and cleaner (in the sense of sin and morality) than one might expect.
A confession: I seem to have developed an interest in criminals named Jack, and this one is no exception. Jack Maggs is an utterly compelling character. He's competent, clear-minded and mature: he may be the most honest person in the book. He is no stranger to violence, but doesn't rely on it. There's a darkness to him, but he is surprisingly kind to others. He is literate, and intelligent, and has learnt to live with his past, and with his affliction -- a tic doloreuse that 'slapped his face like a clawed cat', that under Oates' mesmerism and Magnetism assumes the form of a blond soldier.
Tobias Oates is clearly based on Charles Dickens, just as his career was beginning to take off. Jack Maggs is a lighter view, a reinterpretation, of Magwitch from Great Expectations: Phipps is a nastier version of Pip. Carey's description of the gradual transformation of Jack, in Oates' eyes, from chance encounter to Character, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel. Looking at the charred corpse of a dead child, Oates has an epiphany about the fate of his Character. All his investigations of the Criminal Mind -- for which he turns to Jack, a very susceptible hypnotic subject, though it's hard to find anyone entirely innocent in the whole of the novel -- are made with a view to their eventual use in his great novel. It's clear that the novel will be written: equally clear, as events progress, that Oates's interest in an unbiased depiction of the Criminal Mind is being warped by his increasing intimacy with Jack Maggs.
At the end of the novel Jack Maggs, it's clear that Oates is no longer privy to news of actual events: his novel, The Death of Maggs, is not published until after the death of its original inspiration, and is markedly different. And there's much in Maggs' tale that eludes Oates, or that he dramatises beyond recognition. Carey recounts a key incident in Maggs' history by including a chapter of Oates's opus, but none of the characters except Maggs himself, and possibly -- eventually -- Mercy the maid, are in a position to fit this chapter into the tale that Maggs has been constructing in his letters to Henry Phipps.
For a character who's often referred to as 'the convict', and seen by those around him as a dangerous criminal, Jack's a surprisingly mild and good-natured individual. Around him are played out a portfolio of 19th-century hypocrisies: adultery, homosexuality, fraud, murder, suicide, pregnancy out of wedlock, abortion, child prostitution ... Jack's early life (found by mudlarks under London Bridge, reared by a red-headed abortionist named Mary Britten, sent down chimneys at the age of five) has a sort of innocent charm to it beside the middle-class deceptions of Buckle, Phipps and Oates. He's been punished for his crimes -- in the harsh school of the penal colony in Sydney -- and seems a reformed character. Though he is certainly guilty of crimes during the course of the novel, his motivation is not straightforward, and the provocation extreme and intimate. Jack Maggs is the victim, now: his treasures, his secrets, are stolen away.
It's a novel about children, and especially lost children. Easy enough to work that, too, into the post-colonial angle: Jack Maggs, fostered by Ma Britten (as transparent a personification as you could wish) returning to his homeland, only to find it a city of dreadful night (though, to be fair, there are daffodils in window-boxes, and blossom on the pear-tree, too). It's time for Jack to become a lost child himself, to step away from the mother who made him a criminal and condemned him to suffer in Australia. It's time to forget the baby in the ditch, the son who won't see him, the pregnancy that threatens a marriage.
I hadn't read any of Peter Carey's novels before, but the dry humour, the gentle mockery, the eye for detail (Oates keeps Jonathan Wild's death-mask in his study; Jack takes four heaped spoons of sugar in his tea; Buckle is most insulted by Jack's remark that no burglar would expect good silver in a house with Trafalgar Doulton on the table), the vivid, and often resonant, turn of phrase (a 'mob of foreign sailors made ... a dense and rum-sour knot') -- all incline me to read more of his work.
You can read the first two chapters online. Probably better than my typing up excerpt after excerpt ...
Though Dickens and his characters have all been disguised -- and in many cases reinterpreted -- surely this is a kind of literary fan-fiction, an attempt to rewrite, reshape, another author's creation.
My copy, Faber and Faber, has Julia Margaret Cameron's Iago on the cover: Amazon don't seem to stock it, but it's a new edition. Bad glue, though: had fallen apart after being read in front of the fire!
Other people have discussed the intertextuality at considerable length: there's a good essay here
The novel is set in London in 1837. Jack Maggs is a convict, secretly returned from Australia to find his son, Mr Henry Phipps. Phipps is away from home, and so Maggs gains employment (one can't really say he seeks it) at the house next door, in the employ of Mr Buckle, former vendor of fried fish who has come into a Great Good Fortune. Mr Buckle has guests to dinner, that first night, and one of them is the celebrated author Tobias Oates. Jack Maggs is overcome by an old affliction; Oates hypnotises him; and one by one Jack's secrets are brought out of his mind and into the open, gradually revealing a past that is both murkier (in the sense of lack of clarity) and cleaner (in the sense of sin and morality) than one might expect.
A confession: I seem to have developed an interest in criminals named Jack, and this one is no exception. Jack Maggs is an utterly compelling character. He's competent, clear-minded and mature: he may be the most honest person in the book. He is no stranger to violence, but doesn't rely on it. There's a darkness to him, but he is surprisingly kind to others. He is literate, and intelligent, and has learnt to live with his past, and with his affliction -- a tic doloreuse that 'slapped his face like a clawed cat', that under Oates' mesmerism and Magnetism assumes the form of a blond soldier.
Tobias Oates is clearly based on Charles Dickens, just as his career was beginning to take off. Jack Maggs is a lighter view, a reinterpretation, of Magwitch from Great Expectations: Phipps is a nastier version of Pip. Carey's description of the gradual transformation of Jack, in Oates' eyes, from chance encounter to Character, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel. Looking at the charred corpse of a dead child, Oates has an epiphany about the fate of his Character. All his investigations of the Criminal Mind -- for which he turns to Jack, a very susceptible hypnotic subject, though it's hard to find anyone entirely innocent in the whole of the novel -- are made with a view to their eventual use in his great novel. It's clear that the novel will be written: equally clear, as events progress, that Oates's interest in an unbiased depiction of the Criminal Mind is being warped by his increasing intimacy with Jack Maggs.
At the end of the novel Jack Maggs, it's clear that Oates is no longer privy to news of actual events: his novel, The Death of Maggs, is not published until after the death of its original inspiration, and is markedly different. And there's much in Maggs' tale that eludes Oates, or that he dramatises beyond recognition. Carey recounts a key incident in Maggs' history by including a chapter of Oates's opus, but none of the characters except Maggs himself, and possibly -- eventually -- Mercy the maid, are in a position to fit this chapter into the tale that Maggs has been constructing in his letters to Henry Phipps.
For a character who's often referred to as 'the convict', and seen by those around him as a dangerous criminal, Jack's a surprisingly mild and good-natured individual. Around him are played out a portfolio of 19th-century hypocrisies: adultery, homosexuality, fraud, murder, suicide, pregnancy out of wedlock, abortion, child prostitution ... Jack's early life (found by mudlarks under London Bridge, reared by a red-headed abortionist named Mary Britten, sent down chimneys at the age of five) has a sort of innocent charm to it beside the middle-class deceptions of Buckle, Phipps and Oates. He's been punished for his crimes -- in the harsh school of the penal colony in Sydney -- and seems a reformed character. Though he is certainly guilty of crimes during the course of the novel, his motivation is not straightforward, and the provocation extreme and intimate. Jack Maggs is the victim, now: his treasures, his secrets, are stolen away.
It's a novel about children, and especially lost children. Easy enough to work that, too, into the post-colonial angle: Jack Maggs, fostered by Ma Britten (as transparent a personification as you could wish) returning to his homeland, only to find it a city of dreadful night (though, to be fair, there are daffodils in window-boxes, and blossom on the pear-tree, too). It's time for Jack to become a lost child himself, to step away from the mother who made him a criminal and condemned him to suffer in Australia. It's time to forget the baby in the ditch, the son who won't see him, the pregnancy that threatens a marriage.
I hadn't read any of Peter Carey's novels before, but the dry humour, the gentle mockery, the eye for detail (Oates keeps Jonathan Wild's death-mask in his study; Jack takes four heaped spoons of sugar in his tea; Buckle is most insulted by Jack's remark that no burglar would expect good silver in a house with Trafalgar Doulton on the table), the vivid, and often resonant, turn of phrase (a 'mob of foreign sailors made ... a dense and rum-sour knot') -- all incline me to read more of his work.
You can read the first two chapters online. Probably better than my typing up excerpt after excerpt ...
Though Dickens and his characters have all been disguised -- and in many cases reinterpreted -- surely this is a kind of literary fan-fiction, an attempt to rewrite, reshape, another author's creation.My copy, Faber and Faber, has Julia Margaret Cameron's Iago on the cover: Amazon don't seem to stock it, but it's a new edition. Bad glue, though: had fallen apart after being read in front of the fire!
#15: Outcast -- Rosemary Sutcliff
Somehow I missed this until now, despite having been a Sutcliff fan for thirty years or more (I remember avidly rereading The Lantern Bearers at primary school) and actually owning a copy of the book for some time. I suspect our local libraries didn't have a copy; or perhaps I was put off, as with Warrior Scarlet, because of the non-Roman setting. Though it is a Roman novel, even if Beric is more Tribe than Rome.
I don't think it's one of Sutcliff's stronger books. The plot is a catalogue of catastrophes: shipwreck, bad harvests, casting-out, press-gang, slavery, frying-pan to fire, highway robbery, the galleys, Romney Marsh. There isn't much room for happiness in Beric's life, though even at the nadir of his tale he's capable of loving another, and avenging his friend in a grand, dramatic and ultimately doomed fashion. Only luck, and the tides in the Channel, preserve him and carry him to somewhere that he can find a place for himself, a home, a sense of belonging. (A recurring theme in Sutcliff's novels, but it feels slightly artificial here, as though it's hammered home with one blow too many.)
There are a couple of loose ends, and a couple of plot threads that could have done with some expansion. At least one, the mutual regard between Beric and his employer's daughter, may be a case of Sutcliff writing for an older audience she trusts to read between the lines. We're told much more about the strength of the bond than is ever actually shown.
But I did like the book very much. Every time I read a new Sutcliff novel (a rare pleasure, these days, but there are actually quite a few I've missed) I am struck by the quality of her descriptive writing; every time I reread a Sutcliff novel, I'm struck by descriptive passages so familiar that I realise I've been emulating her style!
He watched the water swinging in, greening as it shallowed, laced and curdled and frilled with foam, with a clap and a delicate curl-back onto itself as it met the flat surface of a rock, creaming up in shades of white; then draining out again with a shrill hush over the shingle.
I don't think it's one of Sutcliff's stronger books. The plot is a catalogue of catastrophes: shipwreck, bad harvests, casting-out, press-gang, slavery, frying-pan to fire, highway robbery, the galleys, Romney Marsh. There isn't much room for happiness in Beric's life, though even at the nadir of his tale he's capable of loving another, and avenging his friend in a grand, dramatic and ultimately doomed fashion. Only luck, and the tides in the Channel, preserve him and carry him to somewhere that he can find a place for himself, a home, a sense of belonging. (A recurring theme in Sutcliff's novels, but it feels slightly artificial here, as though it's hammered home with one blow too many.)
There are a couple of loose ends, and a couple of plot threads that could have done with some expansion. At least one, the mutual regard between Beric and his employer's daughter, may be a case of Sutcliff writing for an older audience she trusts to read between the lines. We're told much more about the strength of the bond than is ever actually shown.
But I did like the book very much. Every time I read a new Sutcliff novel (a rare pleasure, these days, but there are actually quite a few I've missed) I am struck by the quality of her descriptive writing; every time I reread a Sutcliff novel, I'm struck by descriptive passages so familiar that I realise I've been emulating her style!
He watched the water swinging in, greening as it shallowed, laced and curdled and frilled with foam, with a clap and a delicate curl-back onto itself as it met the flat surface of a rock, creaming up in shades of white; then draining out again with a shrill hush over the shingle.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
#14: The Shadow of the Wind -- Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I'm having difficulty in pinpointing the reason, or reasons, for my lack of enthusiasm.
The plot's an effective blend of Victorian melodrama and an understated, po-mo knowingness: conflation of author and character, a novel about ... but let the book describe itself.
"... about accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."
That's the narrator, Daniel, explaining mysterious events to the girl he loves: who says, with more honesty than devotion, "you sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel."
The novel takes place in Barcelona, in the 1950s -- I read it there, having asked friends to recommend a good Spanish novel set in the city I was about to visit for the first time -- and Barcelona, "a faraway city trapped between a crescent of mountains and a sea of light, a city filled with buildings that could exist only in dreams", is as much a character in the novel as its setting. Indeed, the city came to life, in the pages of this book, more than did some of the characters. I was immediately engaged by ex-tramp, ex-mental patient Fernan, but Daniel's father was seldom more than a shadowy outline in the background: his passivity made me sad.
I wonder if the reason that The Shadow of the Wind didn't draw me in was the quality of the translation. It was translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert Graves, and there's a poetic quality to the prose: but it feels stilted in places, as though it's lost a certain colloquial quality, and much of its humour, in translation.
Or perhaps it's that I read it in determinedly sunny and cheerful modern Barcelona, rather than the grimy, oppressed city oppressed by Franco's secret police, where nobody is safe and corruption is rife. It's not a cheerful setting: Zafón evokes it convincingly.
There's a lot that I did like about The Shadow of the Wind: Victor Hugo's pen; 'a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things he would be unable to discover otherwise'; Julian Carax, the absent author at the heart of the mystery, and his warped sense of humour; and the description of Sagrada Familia as 'a cathedral ... that sounded like a large hair comb made of melting chocolate.'
The plot's an effective blend of Victorian melodrama and an understated, po-mo knowingness: conflation of author and character, a novel about ... but let the book describe itself.
"... about accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."
That's the narrator, Daniel, explaining mysterious events to the girl he loves: who says, with more honesty than devotion, "you sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel."
The novel takes place in Barcelona, in the 1950s -- I read it there, having asked friends to recommend a good Spanish novel set in the city I was about to visit for the first time -- and Barcelona, "a faraway city trapped between a crescent of mountains and a sea of light, a city filled with buildings that could exist only in dreams", is as much a character in the novel as its setting. Indeed, the city came to life, in the pages of this book, more than did some of the characters. I was immediately engaged by ex-tramp, ex-mental patient Fernan, but Daniel's father was seldom more than a shadowy outline in the background: his passivity made me sad.
I wonder if the reason that The Shadow of the Wind didn't draw me in was the quality of the translation. It was translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert Graves, and there's a poetic quality to the prose: but it feels stilted in places, as though it's lost a certain colloquial quality, and much of its humour, in translation.
Or perhaps it's that I read it in determinedly sunny and cheerful modern Barcelona, rather than the grimy, oppressed city oppressed by Franco's secret police, where nobody is safe and corruption is rife. It's not a cheerful setting: Zafón evokes it convincingly.
There's a lot that I did like about The Shadow of the Wind: Victor Hugo's pen; 'a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things he would be unable to discover otherwise'; Julian Carax, the absent author at the heart of the mystery, and his warped sense of humour; and the description of Sagrada Familia as 'a cathedral ... that sounded like a large hair comb made of melting chocolate.'
Saturday, February 25, 2006
The New Dark Ages
This essay first appeared in The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology edited by Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler (Serendip Foundation, 2006)
"It was summer evening daylight out there, but so cold you looked for frost on the grass ..."
Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love is the first in a series that consists, to date, of three novels (the second and third, Castles Made of Sand and Midnight Lamp, also take their titles from songs by Jimi Hendrix), with a further two volumes projected. It's set at the dawn of the new dark ages, a dystopian future England that's chronologically close enough to happen within the lives of many of its readers. The Gulf Stream has switched itself off, and the climate is colder and wetter than it's been for centuries. The population has peaked and is in decline. The Union has been dissolved – thus England, rather than the United Kingdom. The Royal Family has fled to warmer climes. There's civil war in Yorkshire, and French fighter jets are flying low over Ilkley Moor: they make a sound like tearing silk. Eco-terrorists have napalmed the wheatfields of East Anglia, and bombed the motorways. The Celtics are practicing animal sacrifice, or maybe something worse. The Prime Minister is a pierced and mohawked raver with far-right tendencies and cunning advisors, and the Minister for Gigs habitually appears in public in the guise of a living Halloween decoration, his face concealed behind a digitally-generated skull mask, rosy with blood.
Dystopia or Utopia? The latter for some of the characters, and perhaps for admirers of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, the counterculture, or the quintessentially postmodern art of the remix. This is a future that embraces the wonderful and the weird, that picks up on a multitude of pop-culture fantasies, late-night reorderings of the British political system, classic songs and neo-mythic resonances: runs with them all, recreates and recasts them and presents the results with a flourish and an elaborate bow. Gwyneth Jones – better-known for complex, intense science fiction, her novels often having a pronounced feminist stance – is the court jester of Camelot who leads her readers a merry romp through the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Ramayana, via magical technology and Clarke's Law, round and round King Arthur's Table, and upward and inward towards a promised Nirvana, a Holy Grail, which remains just out of sight, tantalisingly unattainable, throughout Bold as Love.
This is a future where the Oasis song 'Wonderwall' is as much a classic as 'Hey Jude': where a rock star can become Dictator – Ax Preston, lumbered by his father with the forename 'Axl', after the lead singer of rock band Guns'n'Roses, won't accept any other title – and can turn an economic and social catastrophe around into a green revolution founded on countercultural ethics. "We'll give them rock'n'roll for heavy medication, voluntary work as routine antidepressants ... As we all know only too well, human beings will do any fucking thing, no limit, if it is seen to be normal and taken for granted, and the role-models say it's okay."
It's a precarious peace. There are no easy answers here: there may never be easy answers, in the Bold as Love future, for the problems which Jones imposes on her characters, and Bold as Love is only the beginning of the story. But Ax Preston's solution works for most of the people, most of the time. Under his rule, England becomes a haven of peace in an increasingly violent, war-torn Europe. Catastrophe after catastrophe – superstorms, two bad winters, a refugee armada from Europe that's nearly half a million strong, not to mention scandal and corruption (and worse) within the government – is averted, or dealt with, or simply survived. What does not destroy us makes us stronger.
This is a future made possible by the Band-Aid generation and 'the day music changed the world': it's founded less on the idealistic dreams of the hippie generation than on the positive actions of those who've used popular music to raise funds, attract attention to a cause, make a difference. It's not all sweetness and light and cheering crowds. Jones portrays a future England in which Tony Blair's vision of a right-on Labour government, hobnobbing with rock stars and talking to the disaffected young, has gone nightmarishly wrong.
It all starts at an LSE thinktank, where Home Secretary Paul Javert has gathered together a group of counter-culture celebrities to ask them their views on the future of Britain. In doing so, he sows the seeds of his own destruction: before the year is out, Javert will fall before Saul Burnet (alias Pigsty) and his thugs. Later, in the 'Disney version' concocted by government and media for the masses, Pigsty will take office as President, with the Counter-Cultural Movement (CCM) firmly in control of England by Dissolution Day, when the United Kingdom is dissolved after three centuries of union. The new dark ages have begun, with Pigsty's minions committing reassuringly bloodless atrocities – smashing supermarkets, bombing motorways, destroying GM crops – in a green Blitzkrieg. And three individuals, brought together by the CCM, are sizing one another up, learning one another's limits and skills and hopes and fears.
Fiorinda is a rock'n'roll princess, unacknowledged daughter of an ageing rock icon, grimly determined to achieve fame in her own right. Sage is a eurobillionaire recording artist, a groundbreaker of Jones' innovatory IMMix – a technological son et lumiere which marries techno music and spectacular visual displays that play on the brain's ability to see what isn't there. Ax Preston's career, to date, is that of a serious musician who's achieved success despite himself, and has a reputation for political involvement. This unlikely trio is the focus of Bold as Love, playing out a classically tragic romance against the backdrop of a dark future.
The book is not just dark on the political front. It opens with a chapter entitled 'The Saltbox', which, when published in Interzone #169 (July 2001), provoked accusations of obscenity: Jones was accused of inciting paedophiles, and was reported to the police. No action was taken. The chapter, described by its author as a 'dark fairytale', focuses on sexual abuse, though without sensationalism or prurience. ('He took her in his arms and carried her off to his own room, which was sumptuous, but she didn't get a chance to take much in'; that's as close as it comes to a sex scene.) What happens to Fiorinda scars her for life: it also prefigures more horrific events later in the novel. Pigsty's Government ultimately falls, not because of his revolutionary policies or because of the eco-terrorism carried out by a 'barmy army' of young men who've finally found a cause to fight for, but because his darkest secret is uncovered. A survivor of abuse himself, Pigsty has perpetuated the cycle, and children have died. A kind of vigilantist justice is served on Pigsty, but Fiorinda makes it clear that this solves nothing, that it's just more of the same. Legislation doesn't work, violence doesn't work: the only solution is to mend what is broken.
The story so far may seem firmly rooted in present-day Britain: indeed, it could be argued that Jones' near-future England is already closer, in the sense of 'more probable', than it was at the book's publication in 2001. The cult of celebrity is on the rise: the popular press, at least, seems ever more set on uncovering the rot at the heart of the socio-political system, every week bringing a fresh exposé of some public figure's secret shame. Some parts of Bold as Love may already be out of date – Railtrack no longer exists, for example – but the novel's setting is an England furnished with recognisable landmarks. Buckingham Palace has been reinvented as the Insanitude nightclub. The same high street names ("Asda? You mean Walmart!") persist.
But this is not our England. This is a future where the world is becoming stranger. Boots the Chemist and Sainsbury's have survived the worst of the mob violence: however, Boots is selling cantrips, and you can buy magic in Sainsbury's. Fiorinda, much to her own disgust, has emergent magical powers: a substantial thread of the plot concerns her reluctance to use, or even admit to, these, and their nature remains unexplored in Bold as Love. "Magic has no place in a civilised society," she says contemptuously, but society is no longer so very civilised, and strange times bring strange gifts. Technology – at least in England, which is very much the focus of Bold as Love, though later novels pan out to show more of the world – is in decline, and the peak of civilisation seems to have passed. Magic is no replacement, being too unpredictable and non-linear and unexpected, but it is nevertheless on the rise, though initially its effects seem small and insignificant.
Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that England has been isolated from the rest of the world by the Ivan/Lara virus, a hybrid computer virus that has surpassed the wildest dreams of its creators – unknown to one another until the crisis – and infected networks all over Europe. It's a virus capable of destroying modern civilisation, far beyond the intentions of either virus-writer, and like a plague epidemic it has to be stopped. The Internet Commission decides to "cut the undersea cables, fry the earth stations, police the ionosphere": the result is a clear-water firewall around Europe, as thorny as the briars in a fairytale, quarantining the infection until the networks can be rebuilt. And no infrastructure capable of that project has survived the events of the last few years.
Entirely isolated from new technology, as well as from cultural and social influences, the Matter of Britain – well, England – seems bleak. But Ax Preston, Dictator, has unwavering faith in his people, and his friends, and the brave new world that is taking shape under the benevolent anarchy of the Rock'n'Roll Reich. Some technology has survived, or remained, and a whole new science is being developed by a middle-aged Welsh-Indian biologist, Olwen Devi, and her Zen Self team – a science that uses human metabolic power, and is based on the synchronicity between Self and the World. "When technology – applied science – becomes magical, what does magic become?" Olwen asks Ax, but Ax has no answer for her.
Magic has no place in a civilised society. But magic, and the technology that mimics it, is intrinsic to this fantastical future rooted in 'a once and future landscape of meres and marshes and hilltop towns'. That phrasing is surely not accidental ('once and future' echoing the title of T H White's Arthurian tetralogy ), for Ax, at least, knows which myth he's living. In one of his band's earliest videos, he pulled a sword from a stone: later in the series, he throws the Sweet Track Jade (a ceremonial stone axe from the Neolithic period) into the sea, and half-expects to see an arm clad in white samite rising from the waters to catch it.
The historical Arthur (if indeed he was ever more than a patriotic myth) was likely a post-Roman dux bellorum, war-leader – a title bestowed by Olwen Devi upon Ax at their first meeting – who united the remains of Romano-British civilisation against barbarians and marauders from over the sea. It's a role that Ax accepts reluctantly after Pigsty's demise. Throughout his time as Dictator, he's firefighting: "if we can just get through this part," he says, again and again, as though repetition of this mantra will confer success. Ax is a dreamer, and he dreams of keeping the lamps lit, breaking on through to the other side, making this turning-point in England's history the beginning of a new kind of civilisation – one based on the selfish/selfless hippie ideals of his father's generation – rather than a plunge into the Dark Ages. (It's not by chance that there's a map of fifth-century Europe, reshaped by the fall of the Roman Empire, pinned on the wall at the Insanitude.)
If Ax is Arthur, then Fiorinda is his Guinevere: a girl who grows up all unknowing of her magical heritage, who's cheated and used and abused, but who rescues herself and reclaims her birthright, and in the process becomes not only a figurehead but a paradoxically barren mother to a nation. And Sage, who first appears in opposition to Ax but later finds himself in harmony with Ax's ideas (and strangely fascinated by the man himself), is surely Lancelot, right down to his helpless protective love for Fiorinda. But if Sage is Lancelot, the strong right arm in battle, he also embodies some aspects of Merlin – the wise counsellor, the keeper of sacred knowledge, and the master of illusion. Sage's IMMix productions, displayed before an enraptured audience of drunken revellers, are no less a magical spectacle than any of the magical visions with which Merlin entertained Arthur's court at Christmastide.
Olwen Devi is another candidate for the Merlin role, and her sweetly transcendent Zen Self is a finer Holy Grail than any of those to be found in formulaic fantasy quests. (Though is the Ring on her finger, an interface to the AI Serendip, a nod to Tolkien's fantasy classic?) There are three queens, too, though they appear first, in a setting that prompts Fiorinda to think of them as the witches from Macbeth, as a Goddess-triumvirate of witches; they may also manifest as the three Eyes (a post-Motown vocal trio). Other characters slip into and out of mythological stereotypes: Allie Marlowe as a kingmaker to rival Morgan le Fay, whose less malevolent sorcery is mirrored in Ann-Marie's comfortably claustrophobic New Age magic.
There's much more in the mix, from pop culture to the real classics. Chip and Verlaine, Fiorinda's charmingly naïve champions, like the thought of themselves as Merry and Pippin. The music journalists who cover the Rock the Boat tour, when the refugee armada is welcomed to Humberside with free festivals and holiday-camp accommodation, are Mulder and Scully. Indian mixmaster Dilip casts the Triumvirate as characters from the Ramayana: Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. Fiorinda's likened to Shakespeare's Titania – with Ax, presumably, as Oberon, and Sage as trickster-spirit Puck – and sometimes, whether she's consciously playing the role or not, to Titania's real-world analogue, the first Queen Elizabeth:
The Arthurian echoes are the strongest, though, for they're picked up and amplified again and again. The dishes at Goonhilly Earth Station – mute and dead after the Internet Commission's draconian action – bear the names of Guinevere and Lancelot, Merlin and Arthur and Uther. Sage's retreat in Cornwall (Tyller Pystri, 'the magic place') is just up the road from Tintagel.
Ax Preston acknowledges the Arthurian myth, and plays on it when necessary, but he doesn't allow it to limit him. Mixed-race himself – with the heritage of bullying and implicit racism that his dark skin provokes in small-town England – he refuses to perpetuate the outdated and unworkable myth of an Anglo-Saxon England. His audacious solution to the 'problem' of Islam – the civil war that's broken out in Yorkshire, with the Islamics not at all sure that they want to be part of the new England – is to declare his Islam, to become a Muslim. It's not an empty gesture, and he is fortunate to engage the interest and sympathy of Sayyid Muhammed Zayid, de facto leader of Muslim Yorkshire. More, it's a sign of solidarity, not only with the rebel Muslims, but with everyone who's felt excluded by the Caucasian elements of English society.
The Arthurian myth is just one of several underlying myths that influence, but do not shape, Bold as Love. As the first in a series, the novel can't be expected to provide much in the way of resolution. The final chapter does not feature an apocalyptic battle, or a happy ending, or any kind of quick fix: rather, it focuses on Ax's inauguration as Dictator.
The Inauguration takes place at a set-piece rock festival, a spectacular celebration-masque that might be read as self-indulgent if this were truly the end of the story. Here Jones throws together, in a literal mix, mythology and rock'n'roll and magical technology in a neat summation of everything that's been lost, and everything that remains. England has held its ground: the Counter-Cultural Movement has survived the extremes of its beginning in that LSE think-tank, and the atrocities, crimes and abuse that marred its first years. England has survived, and though it's no longer a world power – economically, politically or culturally – it is once more at peace. The peace may be precarious, but it's built on solid foundations that borrow from socialism, philanthropy and age-old belief systems, all shot through with magic and mayhem and joie de vivre. The future may not be bright, but it's unlikely to be dull. And, as the new era of benevolent Dictatorship dawns after a stormy night, it's very clear that there's more to come: that this is merely the end of the beginning.
"It was summer evening daylight out there, but so cold you looked for frost on the grass ..."
Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love is the first in a series that consists, to date, of three novels (the second and third, Castles Made of Sand and Midnight Lamp, also take their titles from songs by Jimi Hendrix), with a further two volumes projected. It's set at the dawn of the new dark ages, a dystopian future England that's chronologically close enough to happen within the lives of many of its readers. The Gulf Stream has switched itself off, and the climate is colder and wetter than it's been for centuries. The population has peaked and is in decline. The Union has been dissolved – thus England, rather than the United Kingdom. The Royal Family has fled to warmer climes. There's civil war in Yorkshire, and French fighter jets are flying low over Ilkley Moor: they make a sound like tearing silk. Eco-terrorists have napalmed the wheatfields of East Anglia, and bombed the motorways. The Celtics are practicing animal sacrifice, or maybe something worse. The Prime Minister is a pierced and mohawked raver with far-right tendencies and cunning advisors, and the Minister for Gigs habitually appears in public in the guise of a living Halloween decoration, his face concealed behind a digitally-generated skull mask, rosy with blood.
Dystopia or Utopia? The latter for some of the characters, and perhaps for admirers of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, the counterculture, or the quintessentially postmodern art of the remix. This is a future that embraces the wonderful and the weird, that picks up on a multitude of pop-culture fantasies, late-night reorderings of the British political system, classic songs and neo-mythic resonances: runs with them all, recreates and recasts them and presents the results with a flourish and an elaborate bow. Gwyneth Jones – better-known for complex, intense science fiction, her novels often having a pronounced feminist stance – is the court jester of Camelot who leads her readers a merry romp through the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Ramayana, via magical technology and Clarke's Law, round and round King Arthur's Table, and upward and inward towards a promised Nirvana, a Holy Grail, which remains just out of sight, tantalisingly unattainable, throughout Bold as Love.
This is a future where the Oasis song 'Wonderwall' is as much a classic as 'Hey Jude': where a rock star can become Dictator – Ax Preston, lumbered by his father with the forename 'Axl', after the lead singer of rock band Guns'n'Roses, won't accept any other title – and can turn an economic and social catastrophe around into a green revolution founded on countercultural ethics. "We'll give them rock'n'roll for heavy medication, voluntary work as routine antidepressants ... As we all know only too well, human beings will do any fucking thing, no limit, if it is seen to be normal and taken for granted, and the role-models say it's okay."
It's a precarious peace. There are no easy answers here: there may never be easy answers, in the Bold as Love future, for the problems which Jones imposes on her characters, and Bold as Love is only the beginning of the story. But Ax Preston's solution works for most of the people, most of the time. Under his rule, England becomes a haven of peace in an increasingly violent, war-torn Europe. Catastrophe after catastrophe – superstorms, two bad winters, a refugee armada from Europe that's nearly half a million strong, not to mention scandal and corruption (and worse) within the government – is averted, or dealt with, or simply survived. What does not destroy us makes us stronger.
This is a future made possible by the Band-Aid generation and 'the day music changed the world': it's founded less on the idealistic dreams of the hippie generation than on the positive actions of those who've used popular music to raise funds, attract attention to a cause, make a difference. It's not all sweetness and light and cheering crowds. Jones portrays a future England in which Tony Blair's vision of a right-on Labour government, hobnobbing with rock stars and talking to the disaffected young, has gone nightmarishly wrong.
It all starts at an LSE thinktank, where Home Secretary Paul Javert has gathered together a group of counter-culture celebrities to ask them their views on the future of Britain. In doing so, he sows the seeds of his own destruction: before the year is out, Javert will fall before Saul Burnet (alias Pigsty) and his thugs. Later, in the 'Disney version' concocted by government and media for the masses, Pigsty will take office as President, with the Counter-Cultural Movement (CCM) firmly in control of England by Dissolution Day, when the United Kingdom is dissolved after three centuries of union. The new dark ages have begun, with Pigsty's minions committing reassuringly bloodless atrocities – smashing supermarkets, bombing motorways, destroying GM crops – in a green Blitzkrieg. And three individuals, brought together by the CCM, are sizing one another up, learning one another's limits and skills and hopes and fears.
Fiorinda is a rock'n'roll princess, unacknowledged daughter of an ageing rock icon, grimly determined to achieve fame in her own right. Sage is a eurobillionaire recording artist, a groundbreaker of Jones' innovatory IMMix – a technological son et lumiere which marries techno music and spectacular visual displays that play on the brain's ability to see what isn't there. Ax Preston's career, to date, is that of a serious musician who's achieved success despite himself, and has a reputation for political involvement. This unlikely trio is the focus of Bold as Love, playing out a classically tragic romance against the backdrop of a dark future.
The book is not just dark on the political front. It opens with a chapter entitled 'The Saltbox', which, when published in Interzone #169 (July 2001), provoked accusations of obscenity: Jones was accused of inciting paedophiles, and was reported to the police. No action was taken. The chapter, described by its author as a 'dark fairytale', focuses on sexual abuse, though without sensationalism or prurience. ('He took her in his arms and carried her off to his own room, which was sumptuous, but she didn't get a chance to take much in'; that's as close as it comes to a sex scene.) What happens to Fiorinda scars her for life: it also prefigures more horrific events later in the novel. Pigsty's Government ultimately falls, not because of his revolutionary policies or because of the eco-terrorism carried out by a 'barmy army' of young men who've finally found a cause to fight for, but because his darkest secret is uncovered. A survivor of abuse himself, Pigsty has perpetuated the cycle, and children have died. A kind of vigilantist justice is served on Pigsty, but Fiorinda makes it clear that this solves nothing, that it's just more of the same. Legislation doesn't work, violence doesn't work: the only solution is to mend what is broken.
The story so far may seem firmly rooted in present-day Britain: indeed, it could be argued that Jones' near-future England is already closer, in the sense of 'more probable', than it was at the book's publication in 2001. The cult of celebrity is on the rise: the popular press, at least, seems ever more set on uncovering the rot at the heart of the socio-political system, every week bringing a fresh exposé of some public figure's secret shame. Some parts of Bold as Love may already be out of date – Railtrack no longer exists, for example – but the novel's setting is an England furnished with recognisable landmarks. Buckingham Palace has been reinvented as the Insanitude nightclub. The same high street names ("Asda? You mean Walmart!") persist.
But this is not our England. This is a future where the world is becoming stranger. Boots the Chemist and Sainsbury's have survived the worst of the mob violence: however, Boots is selling cantrips, and you can buy magic in Sainsbury's. Fiorinda, much to her own disgust, has emergent magical powers: a substantial thread of the plot concerns her reluctance to use, or even admit to, these, and their nature remains unexplored in Bold as Love. "Magic has no place in a civilised society," she says contemptuously, but society is no longer so very civilised, and strange times bring strange gifts. Technology – at least in England, which is very much the focus of Bold as Love, though later novels pan out to show more of the world – is in decline, and the peak of civilisation seems to have passed. Magic is no replacement, being too unpredictable and non-linear and unexpected, but it is nevertheless on the rise, though initially its effects seem small and insignificant.
Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that England has been isolated from the rest of the world by the Ivan/Lara virus, a hybrid computer virus that has surpassed the wildest dreams of its creators – unknown to one another until the crisis – and infected networks all over Europe. It's a virus capable of destroying modern civilisation, far beyond the intentions of either virus-writer, and like a plague epidemic it has to be stopped. The Internet Commission decides to "cut the undersea cables, fry the earth stations, police the ionosphere": the result is a clear-water firewall around Europe, as thorny as the briars in a fairytale, quarantining the infection until the networks can be rebuilt. And no infrastructure capable of that project has survived the events of the last few years.
Entirely isolated from new technology, as well as from cultural and social influences, the Matter of Britain – well, England – seems bleak. But Ax Preston, Dictator, has unwavering faith in his people, and his friends, and the brave new world that is taking shape under the benevolent anarchy of the Rock'n'Roll Reich. Some technology has survived, or remained, and a whole new science is being developed by a middle-aged Welsh-Indian biologist, Olwen Devi, and her Zen Self team – a science that uses human metabolic power, and is based on the synchronicity between Self and the World. "When technology – applied science – becomes magical, what does magic become?" Olwen asks Ax, but Ax has no answer for her.
Magic has no place in a civilised society. But magic, and the technology that mimics it, is intrinsic to this fantastical future rooted in 'a once and future landscape of meres and marshes and hilltop towns'. That phrasing is surely not accidental ('once and future' echoing the title of T H White's Arthurian tetralogy ), for Ax, at least, knows which myth he's living. In one of his band's earliest videos, he pulled a sword from a stone: later in the series, he throws the Sweet Track Jade (a ceremonial stone axe from the Neolithic period) into the sea, and half-expects to see an arm clad in white samite rising from the waters to catch it.
The historical Arthur (if indeed he was ever more than a patriotic myth) was likely a post-Roman dux bellorum, war-leader – a title bestowed by Olwen Devi upon Ax at their first meeting – who united the remains of Romano-British civilisation against barbarians and marauders from over the sea. It's a role that Ax accepts reluctantly after Pigsty's demise. Throughout his time as Dictator, he's firefighting: "if we can just get through this part," he says, again and again, as though repetition of this mantra will confer success. Ax is a dreamer, and he dreams of keeping the lamps lit, breaking on through to the other side, making this turning-point in England's history the beginning of a new kind of civilisation – one based on the selfish/selfless hippie ideals of his father's generation – rather than a plunge into the Dark Ages. (It's not by chance that there's a map of fifth-century Europe, reshaped by the fall of the Roman Empire, pinned on the wall at the Insanitude.)
If Ax is Arthur, then Fiorinda is his Guinevere: a girl who grows up all unknowing of her magical heritage, who's cheated and used and abused, but who rescues herself and reclaims her birthright, and in the process becomes not only a figurehead but a paradoxically barren mother to a nation. And Sage, who first appears in opposition to Ax but later finds himself in harmony with Ax's ideas (and strangely fascinated by the man himself), is surely Lancelot, right down to his helpless protective love for Fiorinda. But if Sage is Lancelot, the strong right arm in battle, he also embodies some aspects of Merlin – the wise counsellor, the keeper of sacred knowledge, and the master of illusion. Sage's IMMix productions, displayed before an enraptured audience of drunken revellers, are no less a magical spectacle than any of the magical visions with which Merlin entertained Arthur's court at Christmastide.
Olwen Devi is another candidate for the Merlin role, and her sweetly transcendent Zen Self is a finer Holy Grail than any of those to be found in formulaic fantasy quests. (Though is the Ring on her finger, an interface to the AI Serendip, a nod to Tolkien's fantasy classic?) There are three queens, too, though they appear first, in a setting that prompts Fiorinda to think of them as the witches from Macbeth, as a Goddess-triumvirate of witches; they may also manifest as the three Eyes (a post-Motown vocal trio). Other characters slip into and out of mythological stereotypes: Allie Marlowe as a kingmaker to rival Morgan le Fay, whose less malevolent sorcery is mirrored in Ann-Marie's comfortably claustrophobic New Age magic.
There's much more in the mix, from pop culture to the real classics. Chip and Verlaine, Fiorinda's charmingly naïve champions, like the thought of themselves as Merry and Pippin. The music journalists who cover the Rock the Boat tour, when the refugee armada is welcomed to Humberside with free festivals and holiday-camp accommodation, are Mulder and Scully. Indian mixmaster Dilip casts the Triumvirate as characters from the Ramayana: Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. Fiorinda's likened to Shakespeare's Titania – with Ax, presumably, as Oberon, and Sage as trickster-spirit Puck – and sometimes, whether she's consciously playing the role or not, to Titania's real-world analogue, the first Queen Elizabeth:
"About four hundred and thirty years ago, another Armada set out to invade our country ... That summer, people told the queen of England she should stay indoors, hide behind bodyguards, for fear of the mob. People have been saying the same to me. Well, I'm not the queen of England, I'm just a singer with a rock'n'roll band. Hey, let tyrants fear."
The Arthurian echoes are the strongest, though, for they're picked up and amplified again and again. The dishes at Goonhilly Earth Station – mute and dead after the Internet Commission's draconian action – bear the names of Guinevere and Lancelot, Merlin and Arthur and Uther. Sage's retreat in Cornwall (Tyller Pystri, 'the magic place') is just up the road from Tintagel.
Ax Preston acknowledges the Arthurian myth, and plays on it when necessary, but he doesn't allow it to limit him. Mixed-race himself – with the heritage of bullying and implicit racism that his dark skin provokes in small-town England – he refuses to perpetuate the outdated and unworkable myth of an Anglo-Saxon England. His audacious solution to the 'problem' of Islam – the civil war that's broken out in Yorkshire, with the Islamics not at all sure that they want to be part of the new England – is to declare his Islam, to become a Muslim. It's not an empty gesture, and he is fortunate to engage the interest and sympathy of Sayyid Muhammed Zayid, de facto leader of Muslim Yorkshire. More, it's a sign of solidarity, not only with the rebel Muslims, but with everyone who's felt excluded by the Caucasian elements of English society.
The Arthurian myth is just one of several underlying myths that influence, but do not shape, Bold as Love. As the first in a series, the novel can't be expected to provide much in the way of resolution. The final chapter does not feature an apocalyptic battle, or a happy ending, or any kind of quick fix: rather, it focuses on Ax's inauguration as Dictator.
"The office of dictator was instituted around 501BC to meet a crisis in the state of Ancient Rome that was beyond the control of the two consuls: a short-term constitutional appointment ... Modern usage finds the name tarnished and sinister. We all wish that he'd let us call him something nice, something anodyne and comfortable, like 'President'. But these are not anodyne, nice or comfortable times. Ax is right to make us face the reality of our situation. We've come much closer to the brink of anarchy than the other nations of Britain, but ... we've held our ground."
The Inauguration takes place at a set-piece rock festival, a spectacular celebration-masque that might be read as self-indulgent if this were truly the end of the story. Here Jones throws together, in a literal mix, mythology and rock'n'roll and magical technology in a neat summation of everything that's been lost, and everything that remains. England has held its ground: the Counter-Cultural Movement has survived the extremes of its beginning in that LSE think-tank, and the atrocities, crimes and abuse that marred its first years. England has survived, and though it's no longer a world power – economically, politically or culturally – it is once more at peace. The peace may be precarious, but it's built on solid foundations that borrow from socialism, philanthropy and age-old belief systems, all shot through with magic and mayhem and joie de vivre. The future may not be bright, but it's unlikely to be dull. And, as the new era of benevolent Dictatorship dawns after a stormy night, it's very clear that there's more to come: that this is merely the end of the beginning.
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