On 14^th August 1947, the British colonial authorities, bowing to the will of religious pressure groups, partitioned British India to create the state of Pakistan.  Then at midnight the same day, India gained independence from Britain. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born on the stroke of that midnight. The stories of India and Saleem then continue in parallel up until the 1970s.

It’s tricky to sum up such a massive multi-layered story, but I think the Beatles might help:

“It’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.”

Salman Rushdie’s advice in Midnight’s Children would be:

“It’s a fool who thinks that the world can be brought together by dividing it up.”

The novel opens with an account of the meeting of Saleem’s grandparents.  His grandfather is a doctor, who attends a young woman called Naseem, whose protective father only reveals portions of his daughter for examination through a hole in a sheet.  The doctor falls in love with each piece of his partitioned patient and ends up marrying what seems to be a complete woman.  But she is not complete. Her rigid, intolerant outlook means that as a person she is herself something of a hole in a sheet, uninterested in the entire picture. Eventually, Nassem’s borders shrink in upon her until she really only has her kitchen and pantry left.

But Midnight’s Children is not a simple morality tale about seeing the big picture.  Along with illustrating the destructiveness of partition, the book also accepts that the hole in the sheet has value.  There’s the example of a painter who in a futile attempt to include the whole of life in his art made his pictures ever bigger.  This is never going to work.  An artist has to find the whole in a small part.  He has to take a vast sheet and cut a tiny hole in it.  So no simple moral there then. You have to allow in things that confuse the picture.

I started Midnight’s Children aware of its daunting reputation, but I was soon laughing at Saleem’s often hilarious scrapes. Midnight’s Children is profound and complex, but also light and humorous. This contrariness is what you’d expect from a book that doesn’t believe in bringing people together by driving some of them out. The book invites you in, welcoming human foibles and variety in all its forms. Food recurs often in the book, particularly pickle, which of course is a blend of ingredients left to marinade together. Midnight’s Children is a massive jar of pickle. Tasting it, the diner might well decide that people should live together in the same way.

Call My Agent is a French drama series, set in a Paris actors’ agency, called ASK. The series had 24 episodes broadcast between 2015 – 2020 and is now available on Netflix. It is hard to write about the series without revealing a few plot details – don’t read on if that is a problem.

So I have reached the end of series 1 and I loved it.

What intrigues me, apart from the great acting and locations, is the way Call My Agent reflects on the role that acting and fantasy play in life. The agents act as go-betweens, linking reality with the pretend world of film. They are gatekeepers, facilitators, therapists, working to smooth that difficult relationship between the two realms. Fittingly in their unique position, the agents combine fiction and reality in their own lives. The staff at ASK are usually acting a role in some way. The first episode opens with the arrival in Paris, of Camille, a young hairdresser from southern France, who dreams of a job in films. She talks to Mathias, an agent at ASK, who seems to be connected with her in some way. Within a few episodes we learn that Camille is actually Mathias’ daughter, the result of a brief affair, which Mathias wants to keep secret. Immediately there is acting, in the way father and daughter try to hide their relationship. Sent on her way with some money and advice that the film business is not to be recommended, a demoralised Camille runs into another agent, Andréa, at the ASK reception desk. Andréa, finding herself in sudden need of an assistant, conducts a brief interview and makes the impulsive decision to recruit the youngster, who is in the right place at the right time. This sets off a series of situations where both Mathias and Camille have to do a lot of acting to keep their secret.

And that’s only the start. Let’s take the agent Andréa, for example, who in many ways I find the show’s most interesting character. She has contrasting elements to her personality. In some ways she is a sleek, tough, business woman. But this side of her coexists with a wild, hard-partying, seductress. Andréa struggles to balance the differing aspects of her personality. Is one side more real than the other? You might think that the smooth business woman is an act, with the wild child as her reality. But the real Andréa is actually both of these roles. She is an agent in the middle trying to keep each side happy.

Mathias himself is similar to Andréa in the way he has two sides to him, a ruthless business side, and a well-hidden softer side. Like Andréa, he is an agent negotiating the relationship between two roles. Then there’s Gabriel, nice chap and caring agent, who has a weakness for telling people what they want to hear. This lands him in scrapes when different people operate on different versions of the truth. Gabriel’s assistant, Hervé, is always ready with tricks to help his boss bend the truth – often with mixed results. Arlette, now getting older, her energies flagging, calls herself an “impresario” in the hope that this gives the illusion that she is grander than a mere agent. Arlette has a truth-telling terrier dog who has a knack for revealing deception by attacking the trousers of human deceivers. Sofia the receptionist, and aspiring actress, slips her own resumé into submissions to casting directors. When Gabriel ticks her off for pretending to be an ASK client, Sofia furiously responds, by reminding Gabriel of all the tricks she has pulled on his behalf in keeping actors happy. And hanging over the whole series is an audit by play-it-by-the-book tax inspector, Colette, who reprimands the agency for its poor accounting, the way staff treat company money as their own, and a nonexistent division between personal lives and work. And yet, even Colette, whose life seemingly runs along such straight lines, has two sides to her. She is like Andréa in reverse, with a buttoned down character dominant, hiding a carefully controlled sensuous side. Fittingly she has an affair with Andréa. Even a tax inspector becomes an agent balancing roles.

And that brings us to the end of the first series, a wonderful story about fiction and reality. And this isn’t just an abstract game for actors. After all, out in the wider world a lot of people seem to be having trouble reconciling reality and illusion.

I am very much looking forward to the next three series.

Oh, and by the way, if you are a literary agent reading this, please give me a call.

Sons and Lovers was D.H. Lawrence’s third novel, published in 1913.

This was a tricky one for me. I reached the end and wondered what it had all been about. I mean I could see what it was about in terms of the story – a middle class woman accidentally marries a miner, falls out of love with him, and then turns her frustrated love on her two sons – so that the young men become so fixated and dominated by their mother that they are unable to form healthy relationships with women of their own age. But beyond that, what was it about? Suffragettes are mentioned, but it didn’t seem to be about the role of women. Politics and miners’ strikes are mentioned, but the book isn’t about those things either. It was all just background detail to this unsettling account of mother attachment.

And yet it was a powerful story… In the end, trying to make sense of it for myself, Michael McIntyre popped into my head. Yes, Michael McIntyre, the comedian, who mines his own life, and the life of those around him, for comedy. Embarrassing details of going to the toilet in the middle of the night, for example. And of course now that Michael has said it, the audience know exactly what he means.

With Sons and Lovers is that D.H. Lawrence almost ends up doing the opposite. The show that results from Lawrence’s material is less funny than Michael McIntyre’s, and less likely to give that feeling of recognition. All the hectic fluctuations between love and hate, the unhealthy mother fixation, the emotional cruelty, the transference of personal emotional issues on to someone else. I could see D.H. on stage at the Apollo, looking around for recognition in his audience, and having to say:

“Just me then?”

Of course it wouldn’t just be him. Lawrence said the book reflected “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England”. But even so, I think he is describing extremes of experience, rather than overlooked familiar aspects of life. It is hard to immediately recognise much of what Lawrence is writing about. I was looking in on a situation, with some degree of horror.

On the up side, Sons and Lovers is a good novel in the way it presents life as too messy and indefinable to easily conform itself to neat “issues”. The issue of women’s rights for example is there in the book, but it’s set against complex power dynamics in relationships which can show women possessing a profound measure of control over men. Novels present messy, contradictory lived experience which can’t be easily placed in neat boxes. I didn’t feel this book was about anything, except the messy business of life as seen through the specific situation of these characters. And that was fair enough.

Creepy as I sometimes found the book, I told myself that one of the reasons you read is not to see your own experience but to see other people’s, and gain a wider perspective.

What3words is a location app, dividing the Earth’s surface into 3m x 3m squares each with a unique three word code. I downloaded the app and found myself loving its word combinations. They meant something very specific, at the same time as reminding me of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse. So, out on bike rides, I started collecting word codes hoping to make them into a poem. Here, after much rewriting, is the result, using places I rode through, combined with other places around the world. What3words is designed to reach someone wherever they are. I hope this poem reaches you, whatever your three word location happens to be!

What3words

I stopped at a cafe where I found capers.anchovies.nuance

There I sat sticking words.together.sounds, moody with sleepy.stop.salience

Using slick.laptop.glue

As if I were a cars.varying.guru

Now that it’s written I send out my latest.scrap.invite

To arrive.train.alight

In my opinions.nest.igloo

My scrap invite goes out over grass.parade.hint

Happy.stomp.hills

And walks.factories.print

Through a field.readjust.fiction

Around the golfer.tree.diction

And via a wowed.blank.tone

And a balloon.patio.phone

I will give you a call and bring you gearbox.dispenser.home

“We’re all the same you know, that’s the joke.”

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is John Le Carré’s 1963 novel about the Cold War, as fought by the secret services of Britain on one side, East Germany and Russia on the other. Well, I talk of sides, but that isn’t really accurate. You’d think it would be clear which side was which, seeing as there’s a great big Berlin Wall between them, topped with barbed wire, swept by search lights, guarded by soldiers. Ironically, the book shows that one side is much the same as the other. It is difficult to work out who is working for whom. Spies double cross their governments, though that treachery might be loyal service in disguise. Both sides use the same ruthless methods.

There is a curious use of the word “same” in the novel. It crops up a lot. Have a look at page 12 – when Control is talking to our world-weary spy protagonist, Alec Leamas. The word “same” appears nine times. And then through the book, it’s there repeatedly – 57 times in all. I counted them! Same even appears on the very last page, referring to steps on a ladder over the Berlin Wall. Same, same, same. That got me thinking – when we find the same cold on both sides of the wall, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that the cold is everywhere, and there is no coming in from it.

But there is warmth in the book, personified in certain individuals, particularly in the figure of Liz Gold, a lovely, caring women Alec Leamas meets while working in a library. She is nurturing, sensible and kind, the moral compass of the book really. Consider Elizabeth Gold’s name. Gold has all sorts of positive connotations of warmth and happiness. Then again, don’t you think gold sounds so much like cold? It’s sounds almost the SAME! If the cold is everywhere, maybe the warm is too.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a fascinating book, a compelling spy story hiding all sorts of subtlety, like a cold war cypher. It is certainly true that readers can make a pessimistic interpretation. John Le Carré, by all accounts was himself a pessimistic and troubled man. Nevertheless, there is something in his book, a suggestion that while we are out in the cold with no possible hope of relief, warmth is never far away.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, published in September 2020, is set in a kind of parallel world. This takes the form of a series of vast, interconnecting halls on three levels stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions. The lower levels of “the house” are washed by ocean waves, the upper levels obscured by cloud, the mid levels habitable, at least if you know how to fish, and burn dried seaweed to stay warm.

I read this book two ways. The first involves the way people, self-regarding as always, tend to see their own affairs reflected in the world around them. The house appears to judge those within it through the action of natural events, rewarding those it favours and punishing those it doesn’t, mostly through the occurance of floods. This reflects the way many societies have viewed nature. The ancient Egyptian civilisation, for example, had priests whose job it was to intercede with the gods to make sure the Nile flooded regularly and replenished the soil.

From this point of view I thought the scenario of Piranesi, an entire world built as a reflection of humanity’s doings, was as silly as expecting Egyptian priests to really control flooding with their prayers.

However, there was another aspect of the book that made me think again. The central character, known as “Piranesi,” emotional and mysterious though his bond with the house may be, is also a scientist. By close observation he knows when high tides will occur, and when they will pose danger by washing through the habitable part of the house. So when a dangerously high tide appears to help Piranesi, while thwarting his enemies, that is just a reflection of his understanding of tides, rather than any mystical judgement by the house. Piranesi really is in tune with the house, but he achieves this not with prayers and mysticism, but through close observation and note taking.

So the book is about the relationship of rationality and irrationality, or art and science if you like. Getting to the house involves a bit of mystical setting aside of rationality, but once there, what seems to be mysticism is actually the result of careful study.

Piranesi is an interesting and imaginative book, with an engaging central character. It’s actually a mystery story, which even involves a police character who helps unravel the puzzle of how Piranesi ended up in the house. At a time when society seems to be struggling with irrational ideas, this is a timely reflection on how people think about the world around them.

Conspiracy theories and disinformation are rife. Many of the reasons for this come up in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show – which I watched the night before the storming of the United States Capitol. This is an odd sci-fi story, involving an orphaned baby, Truman Burbank, who is adopted by a television studio and placed unknowingly in a reality show where everyone else is an actor.

Conspiracy theories make people feel important. They are about having “special knowledge” ignored by most people. This sets the believer apart as one of the chosen few who really knows what’s going on. No need to go to university for years, and then spend a long time gaining expertise in a job, to end up in a position of eminence. You can get all that by simply believing that the world is flat, or that the American election was stolen. The reasons people believe in conspiracy theories are complex, but I think you can say generally that a frustrated desire for prestige is often involved. Conspiracy believers are unwilling to achieve prestige in the normal, laborious way. They seek a short cut to self importance. It’s like choosing to steal a car rather than waiting to earn the money to buy one.

Truman Burbank grows into adulthood unaware of the true nature of his life. But then a number of production mishaps on the show start to make him suspect something is going on. He feels that he is living in a world focused entirely on himself. Clearly this suggests that he is very important. He has to try and square this feeling with the fact that he also seems to be an ordinary man.

Truman’s efforts to escape his false existence come to a climax in a sailing voyage across the “ocean” towards the limit of his world. And fittingly, his odyssey takes place on a flat Earth which really does have an edge. His boat bumps into the outer wall of the huge Truman Show studio. Truman disembarks, and walks around the sea’s margin, while the show’s director seemingly talks to him from the sky. We see the prestige which this closed world confers on Truman. He walks on water while God speaks to him from the heavens. God – that is the director – calls on Truman not to leave the show. It is so tempting to stay there and remain at the centre of things. But beyond the door lies the real world, and the woman who once broke the rules by loving Truman for himself and not because she was an actress following a script. Truman stands at an exit door in a painted sky, and debates with himself what to do. Finally he makes the decision to leave, cheered on by his audience. But his exit also results in the loss of his fame and importance. Truman’s glorious denouement coincides with two security guards reaching for a TV guide, to help them decide what to watch next. So you can see why some people hang on to their illusory beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence against them.

I think The Truman Show is a lesson in humility. We all have to accept that knowledge is hard won. Truman nearly drowns on his hazardous voyage to the edge of his world. He really has to work for what he knows. And his moment of triumph, ironically, is the moment he realises that everything doesn’t revolve around him. To truly appreciate the world, we have to stop telling ourselves that we are at the centre of it.

What Maisie Knew is a 1897 novel by Henry James, about a young girl, tossed around between two parties in a vengeful divorce. They fight over custody of Maisie, and fight just as hard when each parent thinks they are being expected to spend too much time with the child. Then there is a sub plot of nannies and guardians who themselves have affairs with each vile parent, and with each other – and fight over Maisie!

This plot sounds like a kind of nineteenth century version of Dynasty. The tone of the writing, however, is very much nineteenth century literary fiction. The story is told from the point of view of Maisie, who is both confused by the machinations of adults, and able see through the self-serving fictions adults cook up to make themselves look good. We see events through Maisie’s eyes, but rather than the narrative voice remaining with her, we hear instead the tone of a world-weary, adult with literary pretensions. So the viewpoint and the voice make for an odd mixture, a combination of the innocent, and the knowing, which is fitting for the book’s preoccupations.

This is a very artful book, reflecting on the contradictions of knowledge and deception, innocence and experience. As just a brief example – Maisie always sees the best in everybody, which is a lovely quality. But admirable though this quality is, it has the practical effect of making her believe in whoever she is with at any particular moment. Her guileless effort to be loyal to everyone, can also have the appearance of flighty disloyalty.

A number of reviews of the book are included at the end of the Penguin edition. One from the Manchester Guardian of 1897, concludes by saying:

“It is undoubtedly a work of art, but hardly one you would like to hang on your walls.”

I think this sums it up. What Maisie Knew is a very clever book, but is by no means an easy and relaxing read. The world of childhood only comes to us through the voice of an adult, who loves his long sentences and even longer paragraphs. This is a children’s book for the sort of adult who is willing to suffer for their literary rewards

The Rainbow is D.H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel about three generations of the Nottinghamshire Brangwen family, covering a period from around 1840, to the early 1900s. 

It was banned in Britain soon after publication, and would not be available for eleven years. D.H. Lawrence remained a controversial figure right up until 1960, when Penguin faced a public prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act following the release of their unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Maybe the 1960s is a good place to start this review, since Lawrence was very in vogue then, what with his reputation for the free expression of love, commitment to personal development, and a sense of the mystical value of nature. It was all very modern. So, how does Lawrence, the rebellious early twentieth century hippy, portray in The Rainbow that period of time when the modern world came into being?

The first part of The Rainbow focuses on the traditional ways that people have indulged their mystical leanings, which after all were not invented in the 1960s. Will Brangwen, for example, has a vague, highly emotional, religious enthusiasm, centred on church architecture and religious paintings. Meanwhile, Anna, his wife, pokes fun and points out logical pitfalls. The “lamb of God” comes in for a lot of snark. We don’t really get the feeling that traditional Christianity is the way to go for the forward-looking seeker of enlightenment.

Later in the book, we see people trying something more up-to-date. Compared to a traditional rural society centred on the local church, modern society based on vibrant cities and the wonders of science, might offer new hope for people to develop themselves and lead fuller, more meaningful lives. Young Ursula Brangwen certainly hopes so. She leaves the village where she grew up, heads to the town of Ilkeston, and then to university in Nottingham, with dreams of following her own independent path as a teacher. However, teaching at a tough school soon brings Ursula’s high hopes crashing down. The reality of her work is training children to accept the regimentation necessary to work in factories and offices. It’s a brutal business for all concerned.

So finally we follow Ursula through the most famous section of The Rainbow, where she tries to find something bigger than herself in the glories of nature. There is much lyrical writing about moonlight and rainbows, all of which Ursula celebrates with a kind of wild euphoria. I think we can feel that as far as D.H. Lawrence is concerned, this is the most real spirituality available to people. But we also see that even this path has its drawbacks, leading to embarrassments – and unplanned pregnancies – once the heat of the moment has worn off.

The book in the end doesn’t really have a philosophy of free love or individual freedom, or anything else you can embrace as a cause in the 1960s sense of university sit-ins or demos. In fact, The Rainbow is more of an exploration of different approaches to finding something meaningful, where upsides are balanced against downsides. Nothing is really a final answer, and nothing is dismissed out of hand. Will does find a transcendence in his church architecture even though his lamb of God is a joke. Ursula’s school is horrible, but on her last day the other teachers buy her a present, and reveal themselves as human beings doing their best. Maybe if there was a clear answer, this might only serve to reduce the value of an endless search, which of course the rainbow comes to symbolise.

I enjoyed the book. There isn’t any plot in the traditional sense. It’s a family saga, where people grow up, have love affairs, endure black moods, interspersed with joyous interludes, get married, have children, who then go through the same process, each generation trying to find meaning in its own way. The writing style is often over-heated, but there is a surprising amount of humour – all those digs involving the lamb of God, for example. There is also a lot of thought to set against the emotion. And as I say, the final feeling is not of answers, but of continuing questions, which I suppose is how a book written in 1915 is still able to remain relevant many years later. The rainbow has become a visual representation of different points of view rather than prescription, and that’s how it works in the hands of D.H. Lawrence.

Tropic of Cancer is a notorious novel from 1934 by the American writer Henry Miller. Banned on grounds of obscenity, it was not published in the United States until 1961.

When I read the book, it made me think, ironically, of Netflix comedy Emily in Paris. Oddly for a country which makes such a big deal of freedom, America is in many ways a morally conservative, sometimes puritanical country. This gives humour to Emily’s situation, where a poised, self-possessed young woman from Chicago collides with louche Parisians. Tropic of Cancer is a similar idea, only taken to much more of an extreme. The American in this case is Henry Miller – yes the narrator has the same name as the author. He is vaguely a writer, sometimes a proof reader, occasionally a teacher of English, who leaves his marriage in America to try and find artistic freedom in the hedonistic environs of Montparnasse. Henry might not be self-controlled like Emily, but he is the product of a relatively repressed culture crashing into a society that is altogether more rakish.

How does this American do? Well it’s all pretty chaotic, and with a crazy book I think it helps to make sense of it in terms of other things. So moving on from Emily in Paris, I also found myself reminded of the Rocky Horror Picture Show where alien Frank N. Furter flees his home planet and comes to Earth, hoping to do whatever he likes. But after a while, even having fun becomes hard work. At one point a disillusioned Frank moans: “It’s not easy having a good time. Even smiling makes my face ache.” There is a lot of that in Tropic of Cancer.

Tropic of Cancer basically has two modes. There’s the relatively straight-forward and frequently hilarious approach of sections describing Henry’s dealings with friends and acquaintances. My favourite is the one where he meets a turbulent Russian princess trying to make it as a film star. The second Tropic of Cancer mode is a stream of consciousness style, where reflections and opinions tumble along wild tangents. These segments are by turns poetic, incomprehensible, and smug. There’s the feeling that if you are not suffering, or living in poverty, or having extreme relationship dramas, you are not really getting through to the truth of things. I admit I sometimes found this attitude tiresome and weirdly snobbish in an inverted sort of way – though I got the point that being too comfortable might not be the most creative way to be.

Giving a book like this a star rating is not easy. You can imagine what Henry Miller would think of star ratings: drink in hand he would declare five stars to be “a brilliant constellation, in a night hung close, dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac, an infinitude of emptiness.” This is a book that wants to get away from easy categories of good and bad, worthwhile and worthless. So rather than passing judgement, I can only really go with my personal reaction, which is – very funny in parts, sometimes moving, often distasteful, and perhaps misguided in believing that if something is miserable, dirty and horrible then it must be true. Didn’t Keats say that beauty was truth? So that’s at least one person who thinks that a disgusting flat, filled with bed bugs and drunk people is not necessarily the last word in veracity. From a writing point of view the book is well crafted, which is part of the irony of Tropic of Cancer. It might seem as though the author is throwing down the first thing that comes into his head, in a mad burst of creative abandon; but our narrator Henry Miller also talks of revisions and drafts, which tells us that his writing freedom is hard won. Henry works as a proof reader, and you don’t get to be one of those without understanding that writing takes work. Fittingly, the free-form but crafted writing of Tropic of Cancer is just like many other ambivalent liberties explored in the book. As you escape, there is always a kind of equal and opposite reaction to bring you back again – which even in its frustrations, can be oddly reassuring. But you will have to look hard for the reassurance. Henry Miller’s instinct is to be miserable.