Sales of George Orwell’s novel 1984 are apparently increasing in response to events in the United States. Orwell’s Doublethink and Two Minute Hate readily lend themselves to parallels with “alternative facts” and the whipping up of hatred against perceived “others”. But it’s not only a writer like Orwell who we can turn to for enlightenment. Any writer with a eye to human nature could help us. I’d like to refer you, for example, to Booth Tarkington, Princeton Graduate and author of the novel The Magnificent Ambersons. Wealthy, patrician, conservative Tarkington seemingly has little in common with Orwell; but yesterday I read the section in The Magnificent Ambersons where Eugene Morgan tries to help his daughter understand the characteristic combination of arrogance and inability to accept criticism. Eugene’s observations will strike a chord with any number of contemporary American journalists:

“That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.”

Since the earliest days of organised human society, people have recognised the value of a leader who does little.  One of Aesop’s Fables dating from the sixth century BC, has advice for a populace who think a strong leader is the answer to their problems.  In The Frogs Who Demanded a King, a group of frogs irritated at their disorganised manner of life, ask Zeus to provide them with a king.  In response, Zeus throws a lump of wood into the frog’s swamp.  The noise scares the frogs, who hide beneath the mud. Eventually realising the lump of wood is not actually doing anything, they emerge from their hiding places, sit on their king and complain to Zeus.  This time Zeus sends a water dragon as the frog king, who proceeds to eat all his subjects.

Many leaders, particularly in Britain, have tried to be a lump of wood rather than a water dragon.  Queen Elizabeth I, one of the country’s best-known monarchs, was famous for doing as little as she could get away with, particularly with regard to warfare.  Later in history, this policy of calm inaction would become the guiding philosophy of the British monarchy. Queen Victoria was the first officially non-active constitutional monarch.  Her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, tutored her in this policy; and Melbourne himself – as Dorothy Marshall has written – “had the capacity to do absolutely nothing unless driven, and then do as little as possible.”  Melbourne worked in a tradition set by Robert Walpole, the man often seen as Britain’s first Prime Minister, who with his “calculatedly uneventful administration,” dominated Parliament for twenty years through the 1720s and 1730s.

In the subsequent history of British prime ministers, there are many examples of wise attempts to do as little as possible.  Henry Addington, prime minister 1801 – 1803, provides one telling example.  After peace negotiations with France failed in May 1803, Addington followed the safe but unspectacular course of doing nothing.  Napoleon’s army was sitting in France ready to invade, but if it tried to do so, the Royal Navy was waiting for them.  If only Britain could continue to do nothing, then Napoleon’s army sitting around on the French coast would be defeated either by disease and indiscipline; or by lunging over the Channel in frustration, straight into the waiting guns of British ships. Waiting made perfect sense, but was not popular. Addington’s term did not last the year.

Perhaps Addington made a mistake in failing to combine his non-action with fighting words.  However, even fighting-talk prime ministers are not as active as they seem once you get passed all the words. Winston Churchill might appear to provide definitive active leadership, with his blood curdling speeches of resistance in 1940. In reality, he wisely left most of the actual running of things to others.  The occasions when he interfered did not tend to go well.  It was fortunate, for example, that Air Chief Marshall, Hugh Dowding, talked Churchill out of sending the RAF to its destruction in the Battle for France.  Only because of Dowding’s actions did Britain have the aircraft to allow Churchill to make his famous speeches during the Battle of Britain.

Wisdom coming down to us from the sixth century BC is more relevant than ever.  Political leadership is often at its best in providing a calm centre as King or Queen Log, rather than contributing to the chaos as King or Queen Water Dragon.  The frogs should be careful what they wish for.

Animal stories; I was suspicious.  Then, after inconveniently having an idea for a story about dogs, I decided to have a look at them.  Animal stories have a very long history.  Aesop’s Fables, a collection of sixth century BC short stories, one-liners and aphorisms, is full of animal characters – hens laying golden eggs, hares racing tortoises and so on.  The animals lend an elemental quality to the stories – the sense that earthy, fundamental truths are under discussion.

Fittingly for stories about fundamental truths, it seems that during the evolution of the Fables, the original characters switched from gods to animals.  Some Aesop scholars think this may have happened to make the spiritual world of gods more accessible to an earth bound readership.  Some of the Fables actually involve mythic animals, which exist halfway between the world of gods and man – the halcyon bird for example.

This sense of the elemental and the spiritual continues in animal stories today.  There are of course children’s stories, in which authors such as Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne explain down to earth truths through rabbits, bears, kangaroos and pigs. At the literary end of the scale, you have a story like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, about a pet dog who regresses to its original wolf nature.  Jack London sets out to explore basic themes of life, death and survival.  There is also that characteristic spiritual quality, where animals are close to gods.  Buck the dog actually becomes a god to the indigenous Indians of the valley where he takes up residence with his wolf companions.

Thinking of a modern take on animals inhabiting the realm of the gods, there is the interesting case of the dragon.  The dragon is similar to a halcyon bird in that both are mythical creatures, sitting halfway between the earthbound world and the fantastical godly realm. Dragons play an important role in the hugely successful books of Tolkien.  They also reappear in more recent fantasy fiction by, for example, George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb or Patrick Rothfuss.  Patrick Rothfuss is especially interesting in this regard, since his dragons move closer to the status of earthbound animals, with a Latin name and reasonable explanations for their fire breathing abilities.

Animal stories today continue to fulfill the role they played thousands of years ago, revealing basic truths, and bringing the world of spirit and fantasy down to earth.

In modern fiction, the rules of point of view are generally strict.  You either write in the first person – “I did this, I looked at that,” and keep to it throughout; or you write in the third person, through a particular he or she, with only sparing excursions to the viewpoints of other characters.  

But there are writers who don’t do this, and Katherine Mansfield is one of the best when it comes to clever use of changing point of view.  Sent by her prosperous New Zealand family to a finishing school in London, she was meant to imbue a smattering of literature suitable for a polite young lady.  Unfortunately she developed a genuine passion for books and art.  Returning to New Zealand in the early 1900s she became unmanageable, had a few lesbian affairs, and ended up living a Bohemian life back in London.

This is by way of introduction to a striking use of point of view I have just come across in a Katherine Mansfield short story called At The Bay.  Early in the story we join Stanley Burrell who has got up early, and is off for a swim in the sea before work.  We quickly  see that Mr Burrell is a stuffy character who likes everything just so. He doesn’t want to be disturbed in his swim by the easy-going Jonathon Trout.   Point of view flits around between the two men, until Stanley goes grumpily back to his house and moans about not finding his bowler hat and walking stick in their rightful place.  We see him from Aunt Beryl’s point of view, only to be dragged back into Stanley’s panicky mind as he searches for hat and stick.

Then he finally leaves for work.

“The relief, the difference it made to have the man out of the house.”

I felt the relief in switching to the perspective of Beryl and then to that of the serving girl Alice.

For most writers switching point of view creates confusion, and interferes with the process of getting involved with a character.  Remarkably, Katherine Mansfield actually disregards this rule to increase involvement, to experience the relief of a sudden liberation from a certain way of looking at the world – as she herself experienced in breaking from her finishing school education. She makes you realise that sometimes people see the world not through their own eyes, but through those of someone more dominant.  When that person leaves, the world looks different.

It does make you wonder whether our intolerance of alternative view points in fiction reflects a certain Stanley quality in us all.

 

As America inaugurates its new president I’ve been reading Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence.

The month of January takes its name from the Roman god Janus. If you’re feeling confused at the beginning of the new year, then Janus is the god for you. In Roman mythology he was the ruler of both endings and beginnings. Just for good measure Janus was also in charge of transitions, of the middle ground, between such opposites as barbarism and civilisation, city and countryside, or youth and adulthood. So you could say he was in charge of everything.

Out with the old, in with the new, business as usual – it was all the same to Janus.

Janus was not the senior god of the Roman world, but he was perhaps the most powerful. He had to be called upon at the beginning of every religious service involving any other god. After all he ruled gateways, including the door through to the godly realm. Whether you are dealing with endings or beginnings or anything in between, January is named after a god who kept an eye on all those things, and treated them just the same.

Happy new year

 

 

 

As 2016 ended, I decided to read Ernest Hemingway’s famous book about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom The Bell Tolls.  On the first page, he quotes those famous lines from John Donne:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.

In 2016, as part of a worldwide trend towards division, the UK was a clod washed away by the sea.  Teresa May has since told us to be unified, but at what stage does a group of people become unified?  At what point do borders truly reflect the oneness of the people within them, so that they can say, “this is who we are”?

Reading Hemingway I would say, never.

The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, who in an earlier life taught Spanish at an American university.  Now like many other idealistic young men in the 1930s, he has joined the International Brigade of volunteers fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.  He has gone behind enemy lines to help a partisan band of republican Spanish.  Finding a situation that is not exactly black and white, he reflects on how hard it is to find unity amongst people:

“Of course they turned on you.  They turned on you often, but they always turned on everyone.  They turned on themselves.  If you had three together two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other.”

That is the reality of people living together.  There is no final cohesive unit of humanity.  People chase after a secure sense of identity when such a thing does not exist.

The book pulls apart all the usual ways people consider themselves to be together.  National identity means nothing; comrades in a life or death struggle seem just as likely to shoot each other, as they are to shoot at the enemy.  Even an individual seems divided.  Robert Jordan has many arguments with himself.  But set against all this are moments which can only be described as transcendent in the unity they describe. These blissful interludes involve a love affair between Robert Jordan and Marie, a young woman the partisan band have rescued from fascist captors during a raid on a train.  The pressure of the situation drives these two together, so that in them we see the other side of the coin. Unity can exist in division.

In a world that wants to divide itself in pursuit of identity, For Whom The Bell Tolls should be required reading.

 

 

I’ve just finished the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s famous dystopian novel published in 1985.  Once I recovered sufficiently to think straight, I decided that, for me, the Handmaid’s Tale is about fundamentalism. It describes a society which thinks that certain truths do not change, as though you can brush your teeth and drink orange juice just afterwards, and the orange juice will always taste like orange juice.

Religious zealots have taken over the government of America.  They respond to the ills of modern western life, both moral and physical, by creating a society of merciless rigidity.  A falling birth rate has resulted in the creation of a caste of women called Handmaids, used by powerful men to bear children for them.  The narrator is one of these unfortunate women.  From her perspective, little things we take for granted look very different.  For example, she plays a secret game of Scrabble. While for us Scrabble is harmless fun, in the dark Handmaid future, such apparently spurious ways to pass the time are outlawed. Scrabble is a forbidden pleasure, akin to drug taking.

For the Handmaid, telling a story becomes, like Scrabble, something dangerous.  Telling a story is about communication, something that can only happen when there are different points of view to share.  In the Handmaid’s world there is only one point of view, that of the government.   For them orange juice always has to taste the same, whether you’ve brushed your teeth or not. So there are no books and no writing.  Books suggest that there are other equally valuable truths out there.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascinating, scary and all-encompassing meditation on social ills, with the book itself becoming part of the struggle it describes. It deserves its status as a modern classic of speculative fiction.

 

Neuromancer is a genre defining book, written at a time when computer technology was about to change the way people lived.  1982 saw the standardisation of the Internet Protocols, which gave the potential for world wide proliferation of computer networks.  1983 saw the introduction of Apple’s Lisa, the first commercial personal computer to use a “graphical user interface”, the now familiar visual way of interacting with a computer using icons, menus and windows. Then in 1984, Ace Books published William Gibson’s Neuromancer, imagining a future where computer users can enter a shared “matrix” of linked data, which opens up in a visual way.

This is a historic book capturing an important moment in the development of world changing technology.  It is written in a visual style, like a comic in words.  However, this comic is a tough read, densely written with sudden jumps between scenes, often over the course of a short sentence.  These scenes can be in the real world, in the matrix world, or in a combination of both. It is impossible to skim read.  By the same token you also have to just let the writing open out in front of you.  If you want to know exactly what is going on at all times, this will be a frustrating book.

So is it a good book?  While Neuromancer may have captured a moment in history, when people began to interact widely and visually with computers, it is inevitably less successful in viewing the future.  There are so many anachronisms – pay phones, floppy discs, space stations with magazine stands and libraries of books.  Imagine a space ship full of glossy magazines and books straining into orbit when you can just send up weightless data to a screen.  The story involves data thefts – an idea which has a modern feel – but this involves hackers shutting down security systems in a physical building, so that people can get in there and steal a CD.

Sill, in making a judgement we should bear in mind that science fiction does not so much reveal the future as use a futuristic scenario to tell us about ourselves in the here and now.  That is where the real quality of Neuromancer lies.  The story portrays people with vast ambitions to develop human potential in partnership with computer technology.  But there is some wonderful, subtle imagery suggesting a kind of Buddhist stillness in this bewildering, violent, flashy, fast moving future.  For example, the magazine stocked space station, the setting for the story’s second half, contains a city built on the vast, curving inner surface of a hollow sphere.  There are two main roads in this city, a ring road called Rue de Jules Verne, and a road running across the length, called Desiderata.  If you go far enough around the Rue de Jules Verne, you will only ever come to Desiderata from one side or the other.

Desiderata is of course a prose poem written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. The tone of the poem is revealed by its opening sentence:

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.”

Go far enough around the science fiction circle of Jules Verne and you will only ever come back to the peace and acceptance of Desiderata.  This is the vision I found interesting, the stillness combined with all the disorienting action.  For me this nuanced view of human development constitutes the lasting quality of Neuromancer, allowing us to overlook details about pay phones and magazine stands in space.

Some of the most successful science fiction has gone back to the past in imagining the future.  2001 a Space Odyssey starts in the earliest days of human history before catapulting out to a space station in Earth orbit.  Jurassic Park brings back dinosaurs. Then of course, there’s Back to the Future.

J.G Ballad’s story The Drowned World is an archetypal story of the future that includes a vision of the past.  The sun has become hotter, creating a flooded, tropical Earth.  The climate has returned to a state that prevailed during the Triassic period.  Human survivors of this watery apocalypse find themselves drifting back in dreams to an earlier incarnation of life on Earth.  Life has a buried memory of all that has gone before, and those buried memories begin to emerge during sleep.

This is a great premise for a story that can range from past to future.  I would also say that the idea has biological accuracy. I once read a book by the evolutionary theorist and writer Lynn Margullis tracing the echoes of ancient life in our own cells.  She points out, for example, that the salt balance of human tissue fluids mimics the salt balance of the ancient ocean from which life first emerged onto the land.  (See Microcosmos by Lynn Margullis for more.)

So this is a fascinating scenario for a book, which in many ways is poetically explored.  There are a few downsides, however. The dialogue between the characters can be that of “British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s”, as Martin Amis puts it in an introduction.  The middle part of the story, centred on an evil looter, also becomes very conventional – the rescue of a damsel in distress trapped in the bad guy’s lair.  The damsel herself is vapid and lifeless, trying to hang on to the superficial cosmetics of her former self, even as she sinks into her Triassic dreams. All of the characters, for that matter, are somewhat two-dimensional.

Then again, Ballard is a clever writer who uses conventional structure while giving it a twist. The conventional part of the story coincides with people trying to hang onto a world that has gone – during a section when the evil looter drains part of flooded London.  In this way it’s as if the creaky old world emerges from the flood in hackneyed old plot devices. As for the characters, Will Self makes an interesting suggestion in an essay written for the reissue of The Drowned World in 2013.  Self writes that Ballard is not creating characters in the normal sense, with backstories designed to make us identify with them and read on. Instead, these are archetypes of people responding to change.  Some are vigorous in their resistance, wanting to hang onto what they know.  Others are accepting, waiting to see what the new situation will bring. The damsel in distress is a combination of these reactions. In that sense The Drowned World is more of a myth or a fairy story than a novel, despite aspects of the novel that are straight out of the Ian Fleming style of writing.

I don’t know if I buy this idea entirely, but I buy it enough to see that this is a fascinating book, interesting more for what lies beneath the water than for what floats on the top.