Everbody's a critic, but nobody like to be criticised. That's true of everyone - it's not surprising that the occasions people find most stressful and uncomfortable involve exposure to the judgement of others - job interviews and appraisals, marriage proposals, acting auditions. It's not something we get much better at over time - most of what we might consider to be maturity and contentment lies in gathering around ourselves sympathetic family and friends and avoiding challenges to our self-image and self-worth.
But with some activities, this exposure comes with the terrtitory - publishing creative work is one of them: there will be reviews and comments, and these will be hard to deal with, since they may attack your core identity and beliefs. So what can you do?
1 Don't react
It is natural to feel hurt. And natural to want to retaliate. Literary history is strewn with the dead and wounded from intemperate responses to criticisms. Although theoretically there may come a time when you might be able to calmly and rationally debate the merits of the review with its author, that time is not now. Leave it.
2 Use the buzz
The emotional impact of being criticised can be devastating. The urge to react arises from the complex mixture of energy, defensiveness and aggression - you want to prove them wrong. This is an opportunity, used well- an opportunity to get on with doing something else, something you had put to one side when you were feeling complacent. Success (at something else) is the best revenge.
3 Own the pain
Writers are often advised to ignore bad reviews. It's hard to do. There is no way to avoid the loss you have incurred - the fantasy that your work will be universally praised and admired has been brutally falsified. That's gotta hurt. Don't be surprised when it does. The pain will fade (the scars remain).
4 Respect the critic
Back at Stage 1, a typical response is to say that the reviewer knows nothing of your work, or the genre, or writing in general. How many books have they written? (annoyingly, the answer is usually 'several'). A test for whether you are ready to move on is to think about your critic. Is their judgement usually sound? If so, is it just because it affects you that you are discounting it? If you would have been glad to get their praise, you must credit them with some powers of discrimination. So you should be open to the idea that they have a point.
5 Find the positives
We do not read carefully when we are reading reviews. The criticisms leap out of the page at us, while praise goes unnoticed or unremembered. Once you are ready to accept the critic's opinion, re-read the review. It may well be less damning than you had thought - it may even be, on balance, positive. In which case you should be glad you hadn't given in to the idea of sending them a death threat when you first read it.
6 Grow from the negatives
Praise tells us to keep on doing what we're doing. You can argue that it is therefore unnecessary - we would probably carry on anyway. What is hard is to be self-aware enough to recognise the need for change. Luckily, other people will tell us to change. Not in so many words, and not nicely. And maybe their advice is wrong - they may not know enough about you to devise a programme of improvement. But one thing is clear - negative criticism is a good cure for complacency. And pretty soon we'll be thinking about new stuff, the next book, rather than living off the glow from the last one.
And that's all there is to it. It may still sound a bit negative, but I hoep it is more useful than the conventional mantra of 'what do they know?', 'genius is never recognised', 'I'm in the wrong gang' with which writers seek to comfort themselves.
Martin Locock
Postscript
You're probably wondering. Yes, I had a bad review. It told me I needed to check and edit my work properly. I knew that already, but had forgotten.
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Poetry reading: Angela Gardner and Keri Finlayson, 10/11/09, National Library of Wales
Keri Finlayson and Angela Gardner's poetry reading was held under the title 'Other places'.
Keri read poems from her collection Rooms, exploring an incident in her grandmother's past in which she had fallen in love with one of a visiting cinema crew. The poems are rooted firmly in the place and landscape of a Cornish fishing village, while playing with concepts of freedom, art and reality. The between poem narrative was simpler and clearer than the poems, which at times became exercises in polysyllabic reference.
Angela drew her poems from Views of the Hudson, and art gallery notes (from Foame ) and new poems from a recent stay in Ireland. Lacking the strong narrative of Keri's work, these proved more diffuse in effect although more perceptive and analytical. Her re-told fairy tales from Perrault are deeply troubling - a Freudian nightmare.
Keri read poems from her collection Rooms, exploring an incident in her grandmother's past in which she had fallen in love with one of a visiting cinema crew. The poems are rooted firmly in the place and landscape of a Cornish fishing village, while playing with concepts of freedom, art and reality. The between poem narrative was simpler and clearer than the poems, which at times became exercises in polysyllabic reference.
Angela drew her poems from Views of the Hudson, and art gallery notes (from Foame ) and new poems from a recent stay in Ireland. Lacking the strong narrative of Keri's work, these proved more diffuse in effect although more perceptive and analytical. Her re-told fairy tales from Perrault are deeply troubling - a Freudian nightmare.
Poetry reading: Patrick Jones, 4/2/2010
Patrick Jones is not T S Eliot, nor was meant to be. His forebears are the punk poets and ranters of the early 80s, bringing a passion a political agenda to their poetry, more suited, as Patrick said, to the pub than the National Library of Wales. There is little room for nuance in his work: his views are clear on his ex-partner (bad), current partner (good), religion (bad), tolerance (good) and Tony Blair (bad). One of the problems with this black-and-white approach is that if you don't agree with his stance there is little to enjoy in his words. Technically, he relies mainly on repetition and alliteration to elevate his words above prose. He has a tendency to use out-dated rhetoric - when he argues that we close hospitals but pay for wars, he echoes the Thatcherite era of major cuts in public services. Whatever New Labour has been guilty of (discuss), it must be admitted that the only reason it has closed hospitals is to open new PFI-financed ones down the road, and while this may not have been perfect it is not the attack on people's welfare he implies. His best poem by far was a simple, quiet poem about his father's shed, that managed to illuminate the man and the poet's relationship to him, in a moving way. As he rightly says, we modern fathers have done lots of things better than our elders, but we haven't got sheds.
His poetry collection Darkness Is Where the Stars Are achieved notoriety on publication as a result of extreme Christians (an oxymoron, as Patrick said) protesting against blasphemy. He noted the thorny question about freedom of speech; to me the best position is that people can say what they like, as long as their audience can say what they like too. The audience at the Library reading was good-natured and mainly positive, responding with greater warmth to the personal poems and story-telling than to the polemic. Poetry with strong politics is hard to get right, and it may be that his views (however strongly expressed) are no more coherent than mine, or anyone's. If he wants to say that Wales has a moral duty to welcome and care for refugees from torture and repression in their homeland, which needs little argument, does that not also imply endorsement of intervention in their homelands to protect the whole population? In which case shouldn't he be supporting action in Afghanistan? I don't have any simple answers, but then I don't make my political musings the core of my poetry.
His poetry collection Darkness Is Where the Stars Are achieved notoriety on publication as a result of extreme Christians (an oxymoron, as Patrick said) protesting against blasphemy. He noted the thorny question about freedom of speech; to me the best position is that people can say what they like, as long as their audience can say what they like too. The audience at the Library reading was good-natured and mainly positive, responding with greater warmth to the personal poems and story-telling than to the polemic. Poetry with strong politics is hard to get right, and it may be that his views (however strongly expressed) are no more coherent than mine, or anyone's. If he wants to say that Wales has a moral duty to welcome and care for refugees from torture and repression in their homeland, which needs little argument, does that not also imply endorsement of intervention in their homelands to protect the whole population? In which case shouldn't he be supporting action in Afghanistan? I don't have any simple answers, but then I don't make my political musings the core of my poetry.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Martin Amis: a guide for new readers
Martin Amis [MA] has managed the difficult feat becoming a Grand Old Man of English letters without relinquishing his status as its enfant terrible. He ignites controversy on an equal opportunities basis, offending the right, the left, feminists, the religious, anti-War protestors; he has always felt that a writer's job was to be honest about his thoughts and emotions, without considering whether they are wise, popular or acceptable, based on his assumption that others secretly share his views, sometimes rightly, sometimes not. But the political froth of press coverage would not occur without the underlying awareness that he was a, if not the, great literary novelist of our days.
Such a reputation is a little hard to explain. He is usually considered to have written a maximum of three great books; his plots are makeshift, founded on melodramatic devises such as lost letters, misassigned parentage, coincidicne and motiveless malice, overlain by post-modern tricksiness; his characterisations are vague, arbitary and slapdash, his interest in psychology limited; his vocubulary wilfully obscure. But what he dos have is a voice. It is distinctive - ranging from high to low registers, from slang to literariness, with a complete assurance, almost an arrogance - a poet of the modern world, alive to the existential anxieties of urban living, and the helplessness of facing impending armageddon, nuclear, terrorist or natural.
What follows is an attempt to capture for new readers the merits and faults of his works, without becoming too embroiled in plot summaries. I have tried to avoid spoilers.
Where to start: Money, The Information, London Fields
NOVELS
The Rachel Papers
Attitudes to The Rachel Papers depend critically on the reader's opinion of Charles Highway, the upper middle class prig whose uneasy transition from schoolboy to student it follows. Many find his naivety, faux sophistitication and self-centredness repellent. But there are two aspects of the book that rescue it from being solely of biographical or period interest: the accurate depiction of how the adult world, with its baffling motives and petty crimes, appears monstrous to those in the process of joining it, and a running theme contrasting experience with expectations derived from literature, an implicit critique of the Great Tradition as a guide to life.
On returning home after three months:
MA rebukes Literature for failing to reflect the reality of life, and implies a manifesto for greater honesty in fiction.
Dead Babies (aka Dark Secrets)
Dead Babies is an attempt at a rounded novel with multiple characters with names and back stories and motivations, and all that stuff, and real, however improbable, plot. The action follows housemates in the Oxfordshire countryside as, over the course of a sex- and drugs-filled weekend, their personal anxieties and conflicts reach a terrible climax, in a pattern familiar to any viewer of Big Brother. The characterisation is thin, especially of the women, who remain stubbornly lifeless; the show is stolen by the horrible Keith Whitehead, short, fat, horny and common, a fictional precursor to both Keith Talent in London Fields and Clint Smoker in Yellow Dog. MA's distinctive language shows through, in such coinings as street sadness and cancelled sex, and there are moments of profound emotion, such as the discovery of park bench graffiti where, partly erased by the latest 'K fucks J', the earlier 'W loves M' survives. The fictional universe has moved on from The Rachel Papers: this is expliclitly set in the near-future, and there is a magic realist acceptance of the fantastical as normal.
Success
Success explores the role of nature and nurture in the development of character by contrasting the fortunes in adulthood of common Terry Service and his adopted brother Gregory in the social, sex and work lives. MA uses unreliable narrators to distort a narrative of the illusion and reality of success. Terry's deadening environment of office politics is well invoked, as is the paranoia of the late 70s hanuted by change and unemployment.
Other People
Other People: A mystery story follows an amnesiac, Mary Lamb, through a nightamre landscape in which she has to re-learn the function and import of everyday objects while dealing with sinister and oblique human contacts. Even after all this time and trouble, the book is considered by many to be MA's worst. As a technical exercise in Martian poetical imagination it has some merit, but it fails as an attempt to dramatise a moral tale.
Money
Money: A Suicide Note is MA's best novel. John Self's exploration of fleshly delights is unsullied by culture or civilisation until his attempt to become a film director provides an expensive education.
(longer account in prep)
London Fields
London Fields is a sprawling Dickensian description of modern London in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse, drawings its cast from the criminal underclass to the wealthy Clinches. The plot, like Dickens', tends to the programmatic, the absurd, and the coincidental, relying, at a critical point, on an educated and intelligent person's igorance of the significance of the name Enola Gay. A writer returns to London, his childhood home, to die, and intends to fulfil his destiny by observing a murder involving a willing murderee, a murderer and a foil. throughout the novel there are hints of an inevitable fatal confrontation in international politics. Keith Talent is a would-be darts champion, his desire to be 'onna TV' leading him to neglect his moe uual activities of petty theft, violence and indiscriminate sex. Nicola Six is, perhasp, the archetypical Amis woman, an unbelievable male fantasy of eroticism, dispassionate pragmatism, and the elaborate manipulation of her swains. Cultured, unsqueamish and determined, she plans to destroy Guy Clinch for the sake of it. Guy, meanwhile, rattles round his large house, and spends much of his time coping with his hideously demanding son whose destructive powers are beyond any defence. His beautiful wife, Hope, is helpless; her elegance and efficiency is completely unappealing to Guy, who prefers the prospect of sordor. The book is enjoyable as a series of vignettes although it lacks coherence and credibility as a whole; the style is crisp and lively urban poetry.
Time's Arrow
Time's Arrow is a technical tour de force, while also being something of a trial to read. Its narrative conceit is to tell the strory in reverse order, paragraph by paragraph, applaying a mirror reflection to morality, so that the Nazi doctor whose life it recounts starts in comfortable obscurity in an American hospital, making the well sick, before leading back to the Holocaust and the resurrection of the dead on an industrial scale. The weakest part is the early life- we are left little the wiser about what makes a monster.
The Information
See my account here.
Night Train
In Night Train , Mike Hoolihan is a police (she's also female, and a recovering alcoholic), investigating the murder of the astrophysicist daughter of the retired police chief. MA writing a pllice procedural set in America - if that sounds a bizarre prsopect, well, yes, you're right. MA seeks to submerge his distinctive style beneath an adopted narrative voice, but neither the mystery nor the treatment justify the attempt. Night Train is usually held to run Other People close for the title of worst MA novel.
Yellow Dog
Yellow Dog received a pasting from reviewers on publication, almost as if jealous rivals had been waiting for a chance to finally put the boot in. MA confess that the novel represent a jittery attempt to respond to the fallout of 9/11 and what it ahd told us about violence. There are five strands to the story, varying in interest, complexity, and craftmanship.
The most perfunctory follows a widow and her husband's coffin on final flight home against the increasing malevolence of chance and weather. Others cover: a fictional version of the Royal family, capturing the surreal tedium of anachronistic feudal duty and deference; Xan Meo, successful actor, whose head injury forces him to re-learn how to be a man, commenting on sex and social roles, to end preaching the feminist messge that men should 'give the girls a go', sufficiently patronising to annoy those who might agree with the sentiment; gangster Joseph Andrews, from retirement in las Vegas, hoping to return to the old country to die; and Clint Smoker- a journalist working at a tabloid newspaper completely cynical about its readers and the stories it invents to amuse them- sex-obsessed, impotent, ugly, endowed with miniscule genitalia, who develops a text message relationship with the mysterious k8.
Of these, the royals and Clint work; the others are let down by failures in tone and credibility.
House of Meetings
See my review here.
Such a reputation is a little hard to explain. He is usually considered to have written a maximum of three great books; his plots are makeshift, founded on melodramatic devises such as lost letters, misassigned parentage, coincidicne and motiveless malice, overlain by post-modern tricksiness; his characterisations are vague, arbitary and slapdash, his interest in psychology limited; his vocubulary wilfully obscure. But what he dos have is a voice. It is distinctive - ranging from high to low registers, from slang to literariness, with a complete assurance, almost an arrogance - a poet of the modern world, alive to the existential anxieties of urban living, and the helplessness of facing impending armageddon, nuclear, terrorist or natural.
What follows is an attempt to capture for new readers the merits and faults of his works, without becoming too embroiled in plot summaries. I have tried to avoid spoilers.
Where to start: Money, The Information, London Fields
NOVELS
The Rachel Papers
Attitudes to The Rachel Papers depend critically on the reader's opinion of Charles Highway, the upper middle class prig whose uneasy transition from schoolboy to student it follows. Many find his naivety, faux sophistitication and self-centredness repellent. But there are two aspects of the book that rescue it from being solely of biographical or period interest: the accurate depiction of how the adult world, with its baffling motives and petty crimes, appears monstrous to those in the process of joining it, and a running theme contrasting experience with expectations derived from literature, an implicit critique of the Great Tradition as a guide to life.
On returning home after three months:
"It seemed I'd been away for years. No, not years. Days? No, not days. It seemed I had been away for three months."
MA rebukes Literature for failing to reflect the reality of life, and implies a manifesto for greater honesty in fiction.
Dead Babies (aka Dark Secrets)
Dead Babies is an attempt at a rounded novel with multiple characters with names and back stories and motivations, and all that stuff, and real, however improbable, plot. The action follows housemates in the Oxfordshire countryside as, over the course of a sex- and drugs-filled weekend, their personal anxieties and conflicts reach a terrible climax, in a pattern familiar to any viewer of Big Brother. The characterisation is thin, especially of the women, who remain stubbornly lifeless; the show is stolen by the horrible Keith Whitehead, short, fat, horny and common, a fictional precursor to both Keith Talent in London Fields and Clint Smoker in Yellow Dog. MA's distinctive language shows through, in such coinings as street sadness and cancelled sex, and there are moments of profound emotion, such as the discovery of park bench graffiti where, partly erased by the latest 'K fucks J', the earlier 'W loves M' survives. The fictional universe has moved on from The Rachel Papers: this is expliclitly set in the near-future, and there is a magic realist acceptance of the fantastical as normal.
Success
Success explores the role of nature and nurture in the development of character by contrasting the fortunes in adulthood of common Terry Service and his adopted brother Gregory in the social, sex and work lives. MA uses unreliable narrators to distort a narrative of the illusion and reality of success. Terry's deadening environment of office politics is well invoked, as is the paranoia of the late 70s hanuted by change and unemployment.
Other People
Other People: A mystery story follows an amnesiac, Mary Lamb, through a nightamre landscape in which she has to re-learn the function and import of everyday objects while dealing with sinister and oblique human contacts. Even after all this time and trouble, the book is considered by many to be MA's worst. As a technical exercise in Martian poetical imagination it has some merit, but it fails as an attempt to dramatise a moral tale.
Money
Money: A Suicide Note is MA's best novel. John Self's exploration of fleshly delights is unsullied by culture or civilisation until his attempt to become a film director provides an expensive education.
(longer account in prep)
London Fields
London Fields is a sprawling Dickensian description of modern London in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse, drawings its cast from the criminal underclass to the wealthy Clinches. The plot, like Dickens', tends to the programmatic, the absurd, and the coincidental, relying, at a critical point, on an educated and intelligent person's igorance of the significance of the name Enola Gay. A writer returns to London, his childhood home, to die, and intends to fulfil his destiny by observing a murder involving a willing murderee, a murderer and a foil. throughout the novel there are hints of an inevitable fatal confrontation in international politics. Keith Talent is a would-be darts champion, his desire to be 'onna TV' leading him to neglect his moe uual activities of petty theft, violence and indiscriminate sex. Nicola Six is, perhasp, the archetypical Amis woman, an unbelievable male fantasy of eroticism, dispassionate pragmatism, and the elaborate manipulation of her swains. Cultured, unsqueamish and determined, she plans to destroy Guy Clinch for the sake of it. Guy, meanwhile, rattles round his large house, and spends much of his time coping with his hideously demanding son whose destructive powers are beyond any defence. His beautiful wife, Hope, is helpless; her elegance and efficiency is completely unappealing to Guy, who prefers the prospect of sordor. The book is enjoyable as a series of vignettes although it lacks coherence and credibility as a whole; the style is crisp and lively urban poetry.
Time's Arrow
Time's Arrow is a technical tour de force, while also being something of a trial to read. Its narrative conceit is to tell the strory in reverse order, paragraph by paragraph, applaying a mirror reflection to morality, so that the Nazi doctor whose life it recounts starts in comfortable obscurity in an American hospital, making the well sick, before leading back to the Holocaust and the resurrection of the dead on an industrial scale. The weakest part is the early life- we are left little the wiser about what makes a monster.
The Information
See my account here.
Night Train
In Night Train , Mike Hoolihan is a police (she's also female, and a recovering alcoholic), investigating the murder of the astrophysicist daughter of the retired police chief. MA writing a pllice procedural set in America - if that sounds a bizarre prsopect, well, yes, you're right. MA seeks to submerge his distinctive style beneath an adopted narrative voice, but neither the mystery nor the treatment justify the attempt. Night Train is usually held to run Other People close for the title of worst MA novel.
Yellow Dog
Yellow Dog received a pasting from reviewers on publication, almost as if jealous rivals had been waiting for a chance to finally put the boot in. MA confess that the novel represent a jittery attempt to respond to the fallout of 9/11 and what it ahd told us about violence. There are five strands to the story, varying in interest, complexity, and craftmanship.
The most perfunctory follows a widow and her husband's coffin on final flight home against the increasing malevolence of chance and weather. Others cover: a fictional version of the Royal family, capturing the surreal tedium of anachronistic feudal duty and deference; Xan Meo, successful actor, whose head injury forces him to re-learn how to be a man, commenting on sex and social roles, to end preaching the feminist messge that men should 'give the girls a go', sufficiently patronising to annoy those who might agree with the sentiment; gangster Joseph Andrews, from retirement in las Vegas, hoping to return to the old country to die; and Clint Smoker- a journalist working at a tabloid newspaper completely cynical about its readers and the stories it invents to amuse them- sex-obsessed, impotent, ugly, endowed with miniscule genitalia, who develops a text message relationship with the mysterious k8.
Of these, the royals and Clint work; the others are let down by failures in tone and credibility.
House of Meetings
See my review here.
There is now a podcast The Amis Papers looking at each book in turn.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre: book review
I have been following Goldacre's column in the Guardian and latterly his blog for a couple of years now, since it is usually the best source of sensible information on any news story that touches on science, technology or medicine. I was fearful that the book might have shared the blogs slightly smug and inward-looking style ('we're clever people and we know everything'), but in fact it is well-written, coherent, and engaging, written in a light and chatty style.
There are extended accounts of the bizarre history of some recent media panics (MRSA, MMR, Dore, and fish oil), but more importantly, the science and 'science' of these stories is examined forensically, so that the reader learns to interpret news stories critically: what does "50% reduction" mean in this situation, what's the sample size. This is worthy and important and should (in time) change the way that news media present their accounts (I have already noticed a survey fatigue, where all involved seem happy to accept their spurious basis).
Perhaps the two most interesting chapters, though, are those on the placebo effect and on our perception of risk. I hadn't known, for example, that painkillers work better if they are packaged better and have been advertised, but it is true. The moral and practical implications of trying to deliver Evidence Based Medicine when this sort of placebo effect can dictate success or failure are a challenge. The chapetr on risk demonstrates at length how bad people are at distinguishing between chance events and patterns, between causation, correlation and coincidence, and how unreliable their accounts of their experiences can be, thanks to selection bias. This important factor explains why people sincerely believe things in the absence, or the face, of objective evidence, whether it is the Bridgend suicide 'cluster', electromagnetic sensitivity, or the Loch Ness Monster.
It should be noted that Goldacre does not adopt a hectoring tone: he argues that these are universal, human, traits; he just wishes us to be aware of them so that we can monitor our belief formation. He notes, for example, the tendency of people to use the limited evidence that moderate drinking is better for your health than teetotalism as a justification for their immoderate drinking. This is why factoids like 'red wine is good for you' are so powerful: there is so much contradictory advice out there that, as Paul Simon said, 'a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest' (an observation, incidentally, that is so perceptive and well-expressed that on its own should preserve his reputation for millenia).
The most contentious part of the book deals with the media and how they report science stories; Goldacre tries to explain why nonsense science so often trumps proper science in media coverage. He suggests that the fault lies with humanities background of most journalists, who find the science impenetrable and feel free to choose the wildest and most exciting of the opinions they are offered. Here he may be wrong, insofar as he assumes that science suffers alone. The sad truth is that the media deals badly with all areas of specialist endeavour. An archaeologist told me recently about press coverage of a Neolithic find; it was dated to 3000 BC, 5000 years ago; in print it became 3000 years old. I wasn't surprised: to the non specialist, it was simply 'very old'. There is an interesting question about how far journalists are to blame in not understanding or whether they undertsand adequately but dumb stories down because their readers won't need or want accurate details. This pervades serious newspapers: strange health advice is dished out in the supplements while in the main paper things are more rational. But perhaps we get the news coverage we deserve: if you want to depress yourself, look at the 'most read stories' list on the BBC News pages.
Goldacre believes that all media, and especially serious newspapers, are engaged in a project to educate and inform their readers; but they aren't. They are there to entertain, mainly: hence the celebritisation of news, with the daily updates of Pete Docherty's battle with drugs, and battles with photographers. But even in the old days, there was a strong vein of cynicism and philistinism in journalism: the attitude that the contents didn't need to be true, just true enough.
Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable and inspiring: the way he benourages the reader to engage with the primary sources should be enough to balance the increasing inaccuracy of the media as reliable informants.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Good writing and bad sex
It has become a habit of lazy book reviewers to throw in a statement that some of the writing in the work under discussion would be a candidate for the Literary Review's Bad Sex In Literature award. What they often mean is that it is badly written from start to finish, including the sex bit, which isn't the same thing. But I'm not sure whether the criticism is entirely justified: there are good reasons why writing about is hard [hur hur hur] - difficult; unintentional humour is one of them.
More generally, though, there is the question of credibility. Novelists can tell me any sort of nonsense about the workings of the Moscow underground system or the administrative records of a police investigation and I will believe them as long as it sound as if they know hwat they are talking about. I've been told that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a completely unreliable guide to motorcycle maintenance. But if someone is writing about an area of which I have experience, I can check whether they are not just plausible but authentic. So a different level of scrutiny is applied.
There is a problem here for the writer writing for the naive reader: it will be assumed that any experience described realistically must be real. Kingsley Amis admits to abandoning a novel with a first-person gay narrator because he didn't want his readers to speculate about the extent to which it was true. This seems a bit bizarre: one assumes that Thomas Harris is not suspected of being, or even wanting to be, a cannibal.
Then there is the question of language. Preferred terminology for body parts depends on the writer's (and reader's) age, gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation etc; use of what seems natural for the writer may have an adverse impact on some of his or her readers. For example, Martin Amis' reputation a a misogynist writer incapable of creating a convincing female character may be partly derived for his preference for terminology which is typically male (it is also partly derived from his inability to create convincing female characters: it is notable that the two most fully realised, Nicola Six in London Fields and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train, are cop-outs because Amis explicitly says that they are 'male' psychologically).
And there is the wider question of the extent to which one wishes to be seen to be writing pornography. Somewhat bizarrely, 40 years after the Chatterley trial, using Lawrence's terms in literature would be seen as rude if no longer shocking. To retreat into medical terminology runs the risk of making the act of love sound as exciting as a computer program. Since sex is 90% imagination and 10% friction [source unknown], most of the time writing is about the quality of the activity as it is experienced, and is as much about emotion and attitude as it is about mechanics. This is I think why so much writing about sex is flagged as being bad, in the sense of pretentious or over-ambitious. Even clever writers like Nick Hornby these days steer clear of anything hinting at high style: simple words in simple order are the norm. Purple prose is something of an endangered species in modern literature (with good reason, of course).
There is a danger, though, that being overcritical of the attempts to address the subject will lead to the easily-swayed from avoiding it altogether, leaving us with a mechanical prudishness at the core of fiction. Sex is important as a way of revealing character and a way of communicating mood, and on the whole writers should be encouraged to attempt its description, even if some are bound to fail.
More generally, though, there is the question of credibility. Novelists can tell me any sort of nonsense about the workings of the Moscow underground system or the administrative records of a police investigation and I will believe them as long as it sound as if they know hwat they are talking about. I've been told that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a completely unreliable guide to motorcycle maintenance. But if someone is writing about an area of which I have experience, I can check whether they are not just plausible but authentic. So a different level of scrutiny is applied.
There is a problem here for the writer writing for the naive reader: it will be assumed that any experience described realistically must be real. Kingsley Amis admits to abandoning a novel with a first-person gay narrator because he didn't want his readers to speculate about the extent to which it was true. This seems a bit bizarre: one assumes that Thomas Harris is not suspected of being, or even wanting to be, a cannibal.
Then there is the question of language. Preferred terminology for body parts depends on the writer's (and reader's) age, gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation etc; use of what seems natural for the writer may have an adverse impact on some of his or her readers. For example, Martin Amis' reputation a a misogynist writer incapable of creating a convincing female character may be partly derived for his preference for terminology which is typically male (it is also partly derived from his inability to create convincing female characters: it is notable that the two most fully realised, Nicola Six in London Fields and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train, are cop-outs because Amis explicitly says that they are 'male' psychologically).
And there is the wider question of the extent to which one wishes to be seen to be writing pornography. Somewhat bizarrely, 40 years after the Chatterley trial, using Lawrence's terms in literature would be seen as rude if no longer shocking. To retreat into medical terminology runs the risk of making the act of love sound as exciting as a computer program. Since sex is 90% imagination and 10% friction [source unknown], most of the time writing is about the quality of the activity as it is experienced, and is as much about emotion and attitude as it is about mechanics. This is I think why so much writing about sex is flagged as being bad, in the sense of pretentious or over-ambitious. Even clever writers like Nick Hornby these days steer clear of anything hinting at high style: simple words in simple order are the norm. Purple prose is something of an endangered species in modern literature (with good reason, of course).
There is a danger, though, that being overcritical of the attempts to address the subject will lead to the easily-swayed from avoiding it altogether, leaving us with a mechanical prudishness at the core of fiction. Sex is important as a way of revealing character and a way of communicating mood, and on the whole writers should be encouraged to attempt its description, even if some are bound to fail.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
The War of Wars by Robert Harvey (Constable): Book review
This is an ambitious work of military and political history, recounting, as its subtitle says 'the epic struggle between Britain and France, 1793-1815'. But in addition to providing a narrative over its 800 pages, Harvey has an agenda: the resurrection of the style of historical analysis in which the determining role of inspirational leaders is acknowledged.
Harvey's canvas is broad, so that battles and whole campaigns have to be dealt with briefly. He is much more interested in the mechanics and social politics of naval warfare; Nelson is perhaps his favourite hero, and the book loses much of its impetus after Trafalgar had won the sea war. Minor land battles become a bare litany of x thousand lost, giving no feel for their significance or differentiation. Although writing for a general reader (p. 1), he assumes great familiarity with the participants; 'the most famous cavalry charge in history' (by Murat at Eylau) (p. 436) merits a single sentence. His account of the Russian campaign of 1812 is vastly inferior to Tolstoy's.
But it is the heroes that matter to Harvey. He attacks what he calls the 'Napoleon myths', that he was either a tyrant or a political genius; even his military skill is considered to be limited to movement and energy, and only consistently effective in his early career. But Wellington, Nelson, Sir John Moore and others are also treated in the same way: Harvey assumes that they are geniuses, and then turns to biography to explain their lapses of judgement, rather than allowing them to have good and bad days like the rest of us. He also expects that great leaders should be good people, and feels he must apologise for or excuse their political and personal failings, rather than treating them as irrelevant.
The book is hardly light reading; there is a lot of repetition (so that the comparison of the more sanguine actions with those of WW1 appears at least 5 times) and some irritating stylistic habits: he is clearly one of those who learned that split infinitive is a barbarism, but did not learn to avoid equally inelegant alternatives. There are also a surprising number of solecisms and typographic errors, such as 'rebounds to his credit'.
In the end, Harvey does not quite make his case: the book would have been better, and shorter, if he had restricted his scope to the key events and avoided the temptation to essay biographies of the principal players, tracking Napoleon's love life or the social difficulties of Nelson, which are tangential to the result.
Harvey's canvas is broad, so that battles and whole campaigns have to be dealt with briefly. He is much more interested in the mechanics and social politics of naval warfare; Nelson is perhaps his favourite hero, and the book loses much of its impetus after Trafalgar had won the sea war. Minor land battles become a bare litany of x thousand lost, giving no feel for their significance or differentiation. Although writing for a general reader (p. 1), he assumes great familiarity with the participants; 'the most famous cavalry charge in history' (by Murat at Eylau) (p. 436) merits a single sentence. His account of the Russian campaign of 1812 is vastly inferior to Tolstoy's.
But it is the heroes that matter to Harvey. He attacks what he calls the 'Napoleon myths', that he was either a tyrant or a political genius; even his military skill is considered to be limited to movement and energy, and only consistently effective in his early career. But Wellington, Nelson, Sir John Moore and others are also treated in the same way: Harvey assumes that they are geniuses, and then turns to biography to explain their lapses of judgement, rather than allowing them to have good and bad days like the rest of us. He also expects that great leaders should be good people, and feels he must apologise for or excuse their political and personal failings, rather than treating them as irrelevant.
The book is hardly light reading; there is a lot of repetition (so that the comparison of the more sanguine actions with those of WW1 appears at least 5 times) and some irritating stylistic habits: he is clearly one of those who learned that split infinitive is a barbarism, but did not learn to avoid equally inelegant alternatives. There are also a surprising number of solecisms and typographic errors, such as 'rebounds to his credit'.
In the end, Harvey does not quite make his case: the book would have been better, and shorter, if he had restricted his scope to the key events and avoided the temptation to essay biographies of the principal players, tracking Napoleon's love life or the social difficulties of Nelson, which are tangential to the result.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Kingsley and the Women: review of Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis (Cape, 2006)
Modern biographies thrive on revelation, but there is little that is new in Leader's monumental study. This is hardly surprising, since Amis's life has already been well documented in his 1200-page Letters, edited by Leader, Martin's Experience, his own Memoirs, Eric Jacob's biography, compiled shortly before Amis's death, and in various autobiographical articles, supplementing the fictionalised life traceable in the fiction. Leader discusses the problem, and concludes that there remains something to be said of man and works, mainly because it is now possible to fill out the partial views which KA stamped on accounts of his life.
Thus although in late Amis there is much allusion to Hilly or Hilly-type figures, it is refreshing to hear directly from her descriptions of the chaotic, energetic, doomed marriage of the 1950s (previously she was best represnted as a sort of voice off in the footnotes of the Letters). Similarly Elizabeth Jane Howard emerges with more credit here than Kingsley post-divorce ever allowed her, although Leader seems colder to her than to Hilly.
The book's chapter are arranged chronologically, although the works are dealt with out of sequence. The earliest chapters are the best, telling a relatively unknown story, and expertly sewn together from autobiography, letters, others' testimony, and the two fictional accounts of the period from The Riverside Villas Murder and You Can't Do Both. In later years, domestic drudgery and tedious infidelity takes over, interestingly paralleling the novels but otherwise sparse in incident. Although it is not intended as a critical study (Amis's claim to be a titan of 20th-century literature is assumed), there are perspicuous summaries of most of Amis's works (including a good account of the poetry and high praise for Take a Girl Like You, The Old Devils and The Alteration). At times the pace is breathless: the later years are padded out with accounts of sales fugures and advances, mainly of economic interest, and it is in general hard to establish how well Amis was appreciated by his reviewers and audience.
This breathlessness extends to the larger questions raised by Amis and his politics. Two pages are spent discussing Amis's views on race, which isn't much. It would have been more honest to set out clearly that Amis was, in public writing, anti-racist, outspokenly so, and that there was a tension between this and his views as expressed in conversation or correspondence with his cronies. Similarly, Amis's anti-semitism is shown as mild but definite, despite the fact that well into the 1960s he would treat the prejudice as a sure sign of dullness. Perhaps this is partly a reflection of his experience of ageing as the process by which we turn into our parents. But as Leader does point out on numerous occasions, Amis's political views were emotional and illinformed, unlike his views on literature. But there remains the truth that in later years Amis was as famous for his opinionated journalism as for his more nuanced fiction, and he can hardly complain that he is taken at his word. It is, though, hard to take too much notice of the late 60s hippy-hater who had turned his early 60s Cambridge house into a proto-squat of rolling bacchanalia of sex and drugs.
And what of feminism? Amis lived through the raging sex war of the 70s, taking much of it, with good reason, personally. Looking back now, it is notable that the virtues he praised in women: of straightforwardness, honesty, and disdain for conventional morality, were those advanced by his foes.
Leader's prose is serviceable but indistinctive, giving the frequent quotations from Amis and Larkin a shocking comparative verve. The sad theme running through the second half of the book is the problem of Sally: while Philip and Martin emerged from their disrupted and unconventional childhoods intact, she did not; it is hard to read of her alcoholism and death without asking (as Leader does) who is at fault. Not that this type of question is likely to lead to resolution. It seems hardly necessary to lay this at Amis's door, since Leader shows that he had alaready suffered fear, doubt and remorse about this as about much else. Amis was better at analysing his flaws in his fiction than in correcting them in his life, but that is hardly surprising.
This is not the place to start for those new to Amis: they should read his fiction first, then his Letters. But this account raises a series of questions about the novels, while also showing how the latterday Colonel Blimp had started as a radical who instinctively sided with the unprivileged, the dispossed and the powerless.
Thus although in late Amis there is much allusion to Hilly or Hilly-type figures, it is refreshing to hear directly from her descriptions of the chaotic, energetic, doomed marriage of the 1950s (previously she was best represnted as a sort of voice off in the footnotes of the Letters). Similarly Elizabeth Jane Howard emerges with more credit here than Kingsley post-divorce ever allowed her, although Leader seems colder to her than to Hilly.
The book's chapter are arranged chronologically, although the works are dealt with out of sequence. The earliest chapters are the best, telling a relatively unknown story, and expertly sewn together from autobiography, letters, others' testimony, and the two fictional accounts of the period from The Riverside Villas Murder and You Can't Do Both. In later years, domestic drudgery and tedious infidelity takes over, interestingly paralleling the novels but otherwise sparse in incident. Although it is not intended as a critical study (Amis's claim to be a titan of 20th-century literature is assumed), there are perspicuous summaries of most of Amis's works (including a good account of the poetry and high praise for Take a Girl Like You, The Old Devils and The Alteration). At times the pace is breathless: the later years are padded out with accounts of sales fugures and advances, mainly of economic interest, and it is in general hard to establish how well Amis was appreciated by his reviewers and audience.
This breathlessness extends to the larger questions raised by Amis and his politics. Two pages are spent discussing Amis's views on race, which isn't much. It would have been more honest to set out clearly that Amis was, in public writing, anti-racist, outspokenly so, and that there was a tension between this and his views as expressed in conversation or correspondence with his cronies. Similarly, Amis's anti-semitism is shown as mild but definite, despite the fact that well into the 1960s he would treat the prejudice as a sure sign of dullness. Perhaps this is partly a reflection of his experience of ageing as the process by which we turn into our parents. But as Leader does point out on numerous occasions, Amis's political views were emotional and illinformed, unlike his views on literature. But there remains the truth that in later years Amis was as famous for his opinionated journalism as for his more nuanced fiction, and he can hardly complain that he is taken at his word. It is, though, hard to take too much notice of the late 60s hippy-hater who had turned his early 60s Cambridge house into a proto-squat of rolling bacchanalia of sex and drugs.
And what of feminism? Amis lived through the raging sex war of the 70s, taking much of it, with good reason, personally. Looking back now, it is notable that the virtues he praised in women: of straightforwardness, honesty, and disdain for conventional morality, were those advanced by his foes.
Leader's prose is serviceable but indistinctive, giving the frequent quotations from Amis and Larkin a shocking comparative verve. The sad theme running through the second half of the book is the problem of Sally: while Philip and Martin emerged from their disrupted and unconventional childhoods intact, she did not; it is hard to read of her alcoholism and death without asking (as Leader does) who is at fault. Not that this type of question is likely to lead to resolution. It seems hardly necessary to lay this at Amis's door, since Leader shows that he had alaready suffered fear, doubt and remorse about this as about much else. Amis was better at analysing his flaws in his fiction than in correcting them in his life, but that is hardly surprising.
This is not the place to start for those new to Amis: they should read his fiction first, then his Letters. But this account raises a series of questions about the novels, while also showing how the latterday Colonel Blimp had started as a radical who instinctively sided with the unprivileged, the dispossed and the powerless.
Monday, January 08, 2007
The Dagenham code*: review of Yehuda Berg's The Power of Kabbalah
Some modern systems of belief are explicitly new: Scientology was created by L. Ron Hubbard; others claim continuity with past traditions, such as the wicce. Yehuda Berg places Kabbalah somewhere in between: he presents its teachings as a body a secret knowledge which has been the preserve of a tiny obscure and misunderstood Judaic sect for at least 2,000 years, but which has only recently been publicised to the wider world as a tool for personal growth, accompanied by the contemporary trappings of bookshops, specially endorsed substances and products, and celebrity advocates like Madonna, her husband Guy Ritchie and her onetime lover Sandra Bernhardt. The book is written in a lively and clear style, and starts with a section debunking the misconceptions that have accumulated about Kabbalah, before looking at the drivers of human behaviour. There follow sections on Kabbalist cosmology, cross-referenced to contemporary scientific theories which parallel or confirm its model, a section on meditation and the power and meaning of the Hebrew alphabet, and a series of appendixes including a history of Kabbalah. Although the book is probably not designed to produce this effect, it creates in the reader a shift from neutral acceptance towards increasing skepticism and irritation. The first principle he cites is that there should be no coercion in spirituality, and he hopes that the accuracy of his depiction of the world should convince the reader of the validity of the cosmological model underlying it, which is a good place to start, although this obscures the extent to which his views are reliant on authority and revelation as their source.
Understanding oneself
The key argument in Berg's analysis of behaviour is that most people live humdrum lives only rarely reaching transcendence: he argues that these moments of transcendence are a connection with another realm of being, and occur when we act in line with our core identity. He suggests that the reason many people feel dissatisfied is because they misunderstand their nature and desires, becoming focused on the wrong goals (for example stating their goal as "becoming a millionaire" rather than "being financially secure": the former becomes a treadmill, possibly doomed to unfulfilment; the latter is a state of mind and could be achieved by anyone). He gives some good advice here about how to achieve a better state of mind while living in the world by changing one's attitude. He firmly discourages the culture of blame or guilt: it is a person's own responsibility to sort out their life. More questionable is his attitude to rational thought: his advice is to go with intuitions and to distrust rationality. I am unconvinced that people in general, or particularly people with problems, are over-reliant on thought, and his testimony from scientists which is supposed to support his argument fails to do so, since what is recounted is a series of cases where the scientists, having rationally defined a problem, have then intuited a solution, subsequently confirmed by rational thought. This is not a transferable model for personal lives, whatever he says. Perhaps more dangerously, he also says that when in times of doubt, trust in the certainty of Kabbalah is the best response; he presents a complex and unconvincing example of a businessman who suspects he is being defrauded by one of his salesmen: he denies all the apparent evidence, and is rewarded by it not being as bad as others feared. The danger here is that Berg is giving licence to anyone who gets into a state of denial that they are right, not wrong.
Science proves Kabbalah right
Berg likes science, or at least he appeals to it often as a source of credibility, although he is sometimes naive, saying for example that "a burning candle emits no light against the backdrop of a brilliant sunlit day" (p. 68), a piece of reasoning on a par with the lodgings landlady who closed the curtains on bright winter days because the sunshine put the coal fire out. Similarly, he uses the term 'selfish gene' (p. 111) to mean a gene that makes people selfish, a complete misunderstanding of Dawkins' concept. This becomes a serious problem when he cherry-picks scintific theories to demonstrate that Kabbalah got it right:
It would therefore be unwise to argue that modern science has confirmed Kabbalah's cosmology: the most that could be claimed is that some modern theories fit some interpretations of Kabbalah.
Meditation and the Hebrew alphabet
The recommendation of meditation as a way of improving one's sense of well-being is hardly revolutionary, any more than a doctor's prescription of more exercise and less alcohol. Clearly, the ritual of meditation (in the sense of the regular conscious application of time and thought to one's mental life) yields benefits to many. The approach recommended by Berg is in many ways simialr to the Taoist I Ching: to focus on the pictogram of a Hebrew name of God, related to a phrase or purpose, eg 'to remove egomania', with a short passage of advice. Berg might be expected to argue that such meditation makes people feel better, or perhaps evene changes them in some way to make them into better people. But he goes a step further, and argues that meditation can cause miracles. He relies on the evidence of Dr Spokojny, who recounts two cases where his use of Kabbalah has proved efficacious where his medicine hasn't. Dr Artur Spokojny is a Harvard-trained MD who now has his own Total Healing practice. He oversaw experiments on Kabbalah-blessed water:
The full evidence for these claims, as for the ER miracles, has not yet been presented to the world.
Theology of Kabbalah
Although the 'theory' of Kabbalah is not presented clearly as a single body of belief by Berg, some elements stand out:
History of Kabbalist thought
His brief summary of history starts with the 'Book of Abraham' written before most the Bible, a book known only to Kabbalists; Moses then wrote the Pentateuch, encoding within them Kabbalah knowledge. He then has Pythagoras as a Kabbalah devotee, although Josephus' version (97 AD) of what he says Hermippus of Smyrna says about Pythagoras is not so specific, and in general Pythagoras' number mysticism is different to that of Kabbalah and sourced from Egypt and Assyria, if anywhere. Plato and Aristotle are also roped in on the basis of what Dr Seth Pancoast says (this is the Seth Pancoast who
Authority and evidence
Regardless of the coherence of the body of belief that Berg presents, there remains a fundamental issue of epistemology. How can Berg know that there are 10 dimensions or that reincarnation happens? The answer has to be that for every belief not susceptible to direct verification by our senses or minds, we must rely on what we have been told. And so despite the initial gestures towards confirmation by experience, Kabbalah is reliant on two bodies of authority: written texts and interpretation.
As a result, Kabbalah is out of step with more modern cults, since it requires belief in Holy Writ. Berg makes many mentions of the Bible without gloss: his US readers probably read this as their Bible, although the Jewish Bible is meant; he argues against literalism in interpreting it, presumably expecting his audience to be of fundamentalist tendency. But in Kabbalah the Bible contains God's word, but encrypted. Kabbalah also requires the acceptance of two further holy works, the books of Abraham and Zohar, neither of which is known elsewhere.
Further than this, though, Kabbalah's validity relies on the work of its interpreters: if Berg and his father and their predecessors are wrong, their beliefs are wrong.
Thus the pantheistic almost godless cosmology with the individual's mind at its centre that Kabbalah appears to be at first glance is actually a scripture- and revelation-driven set of specific beliefs requiring faith in a Hebrew God and a complex interpretation of His works.
Further reading
In the course of researching this review, I came across various strange stories, including:
The Strange Case of Supernatural water (Kabbalah water proposed as a cure to citrus canker in Florida)
Red String to protect you from the evil eye
Psionic Kabbalah Manifesting Capsule
Madonna breaks bones in fall despite wearing Kabbalah bracelet
Jerry Hall renounces Kabbalah after pressure to fundraise
Celebrities linked to the Kabbalah Center
* 'Dagenham' is known to Londoners as the District Line underground station two stops beyond Barking.
Understanding oneself
The key argument in Berg's analysis of behaviour is that most people live humdrum lives only rarely reaching transcendence: he argues that these moments of transcendence are a connection with another realm of being, and occur when we act in line with our core identity. He suggests that the reason many people feel dissatisfied is because they misunderstand their nature and desires, becoming focused on the wrong goals (for example stating their goal as "becoming a millionaire" rather than "being financially secure": the former becomes a treadmill, possibly doomed to unfulfilment; the latter is a state of mind and could be achieved by anyone). He gives some good advice here about how to achieve a better state of mind while living in the world by changing one's attitude. He firmly discourages the culture of blame or guilt: it is a person's own responsibility to sort out their life. More questionable is his attitude to rational thought: his advice is to go with intuitions and to distrust rationality. I am unconvinced that people in general, or particularly people with problems, are over-reliant on thought, and his testimony from scientists which is supposed to support his argument fails to do so, since what is recounted is a series of cases where the scientists, having rationally defined a problem, have then intuited a solution, subsequently confirmed by rational thought. This is not a transferable model for personal lives, whatever he says. Perhaps more dangerously, he also says that when in times of doubt, trust in the certainty of Kabbalah is the best response; he presents a complex and unconvincing example of a businessman who suspects he is being defrauded by one of his salesmen: he denies all the apparent evidence, and is rewarded by it not being as bad as others feared. The danger here is that Berg is giving licence to anyone who gets into a state of denial that they are right, not wrong.
Science proves Kabbalah right
Berg likes science, or at least he appeals to it often as a source of credibility, although he is sometimes naive, saying for example that "a burning candle emits no light against the backdrop of a brilliant sunlit day" (p. 68), a piece of reasoning on a par with the lodgings landlady who closed the curtains on bright winter days because the sunshine put the coal fire out. Similarly, he uses the term 'selfish gene' (p. 111) to mean a gene that makes people selfish, a complete misunderstanding of Dawkins' concept. This becomes a serious problem when he cherry-picks scintific theories to demonstrate that Kabbalah got it right:
- he is happy to parallel Kaballah's creation with scientific Big Bang, although the newer concept of a steady state universe of cycles of Big Bangs and Big Crunches doesn't fit at all
- he is happy to say that matter is of dual nature like electrons and protons, ignoring the existence of neutrons which undermine such an argument
- he is happy to link the 10 'dimensions' of the Kabbalah universe with the 10-dimensional space of superstring theory, but igonres other string theory elements proposing 11 or 46 dimensions, or the metatheory M theory that proposes 4 branes and 11 dimensions (not that I'd claim to know what this means)
It would therefore be unwise to argue that modern science has confirmed Kabbalah's cosmology: the most that could be claimed is that some modern theories fit some interpretations of Kabbalah.
Meditation and the Hebrew alphabet
The recommendation of meditation as a way of improving one's sense of well-being is hardly revolutionary, any more than a doctor's prescription of more exercise and less alcohol. Clearly, the ritual of meditation (in the sense of the regular conscious application of time and thought to one's mental life) yields benefits to many. The approach recommended by Berg is in many ways simialr to the Taoist I Ching: to focus on the pictogram of a Hebrew name of God, related to a phrase or purpose, eg 'to remove egomania', with a short passage of advice. Berg might be expected to argue that such meditation makes people feel better, or perhaps evene changes them in some way to make them into better people. But he goes a step further, and argues that meditation can cause miracles. He relies on the evidence of Dr Spokojny, who recounts two cases where his use of Kabbalah has proved efficacious where his medicine hasn't. Dr Artur Spokojny is a Harvard-trained MD who now has his own Total Healing practice. He oversaw experiments on Kabbalah-blessed water:
'"We have reversed entropy and reversed the second law of thermodynamics," contended Dr. Artur Spokojny, a cardiologist who oversaw the independent lab tests [on behalf of the Kabbalah Center]'.
The full evidence for these claims, as for the ER miracles, has not yet been presented to the world.
Theology of Kabbalah
Although the 'theory' of Kabbalah is not presented clearly as a single body of belief by Berg, some elements stand out:
- the key commandment that one should love thy neighbour as thyself
- the 10 commandments, on the other hand, are a misunderstanding and do not apply
- reincarnation and multiple lives happen
- the Devil is real and the world is full of temptation and evil
History of Kabbalist thought
His brief summary of history starts with the 'Book of Abraham' written before most the Bible, a book known only to Kabbalists; Moses then wrote the Pentateuch, encoding within them Kabbalah knowledge. He then has Pythagoras as a Kabbalah devotee, although Josephus' version (97 AD) of what he says Hermippus of Smyrna says about Pythagoras is not so specific, and in general Pythagoras' number mysticism is different to that of Kabbalah and sourced from Egypt and Assyria, if anywhere. Plato and Aristotle are also roped in on the basis of what Dr Seth Pancoast says (this is the Seth Pancoast who
"extended this thinking in his Blue and Red Light: or, Light and its Rays as Medicine (1877), in which he cautioned against “light quacks” even as he claimed to have cured Master F., an eight-year-old paraplegic, after only a week under red glass, and Mrs. L., a 32-year-old widow suffering from severe sciatica, after only three sittings in a bath of blue light." (Cabinet Magazine).The only surprising inclusion in later history is Isaac Newton, who again was interested in number mysticism and theology but is not normally included amongst followers of Kabbalah. The surprising omission is the tedious visionary Nostradamus, who Berg doesn't mention.
Authority and evidence
Regardless of the coherence of the body of belief that Berg presents, there remains a fundamental issue of epistemology. How can Berg know that there are 10 dimensions or that reincarnation happens? The answer has to be that for every belief not susceptible to direct verification by our senses or minds, we must rely on what we have been told. And so despite the initial gestures towards confirmation by experience, Kabbalah is reliant on two bodies of authority: written texts and interpretation.
As a result, Kabbalah is out of step with more modern cults, since it requires belief in Holy Writ. Berg makes many mentions of the Bible without gloss: his US readers probably read this as their Bible, although the Jewish Bible is meant; he argues against literalism in interpreting it, presumably expecting his audience to be of fundamentalist tendency. But in Kabbalah the Bible contains God's word, but encrypted. Kabbalah also requires the acceptance of two further holy works, the books of Abraham and Zohar, neither of which is known elsewhere.
Further than this, though, Kabbalah's validity relies on the work of its interpreters: if Berg and his father and their predecessors are wrong, their beliefs are wrong.
Thus the pantheistic almost godless cosmology with the individual's mind at its centre that Kabbalah appears to be at first glance is actually a scripture- and revelation-driven set of specific beliefs requiring faith in a Hebrew God and a complex interpretation of His works.
Further reading
In the course of researching this review, I came across various strange stories, including:
The Strange Case of Supernatural water (Kabbalah water proposed as a cure to citrus canker in Florida)
Red String to protect you from the evil eye
Psionic Kabbalah Manifesting Capsule
Madonna breaks bones in fall despite wearing Kabbalah bracelet
Jerry Hall renounces Kabbalah after pressure to fundraise
Celebrities linked to the Kabbalah Center
* 'Dagenham' is known to Londoners as the District Line underground station two stops beyond Barking.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The heart of darkness: Review of Martin Amis, House of Meetings
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Amis is unafraid of the big issues. His obsession with politics, totalitarianism and corporate evil is sometimes interpreted as a bid for greatness, for respect; more likely it arises from a lively moral sense, triggered partly by concern for his burgeoning family, and partly from a feeling that in comparison to modern history the domestic arrangements of middle class Londoners are trivial as a topic.
House of Meetings takes Amis back to Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, and the corrosive effects of Stalin on his subjects. Unlike the broad factual account given in the earlier Koba the Dread, here he provides a narrative of a single family's experience as they attempt to live ordinary lives while being bent out of shape by the demands of the state. The anonymous memoirist who tells the story is met first as an angry dying man, touring the ruins of the Arctic labour camp in which he had been imprisoned; he writes a letter to his stepdaughter explaining his life, describing his loss of conscience. There follows a vivid description of life and death in the Gulag of the 1940s, whence he had been sent following the War, in which he had raped and fought his way into Germany. His uneasy accommodation with camp life is then disturbed by the arrival of his half-brother, Lev, and the news that Lev has married Zoya, a Jewess they both had pursued in their youth. The brothers fight to survive the camp as its regime changes following the death of Stalin, culminating in the provision for conjugal visits in the House of Meetings. Lev's assignation with Zoya leaves his spirit broken, and much of the rest of the book comprises speculation as to the cause. They are eventually released and find themselves marginalised under the Brezhnev regime; Lev chooses moral rectitude and material squalor; the memoirist material wealth, travel, and a series of unsatisfactory love affairs, culminating in the post-glasnost torpor of a society that believes so little in its future that people are reluctant to have children.
Thus the story is that of the nation, in microcosm. In Koba the Dread, Amis took care to show that Stalin was merely the most extreme and arbitrary tyrant produced by October: here, it would appear that Stalin was the sole cause of all woe. It was Stalin's camps that denatured his citizens, rendered them fearful, untrustworthy, and brutal. Nevertheless, Amis argues that the danger from the Russians is different in kind, not scale, from that of present-day Islamists, as represented here by the Chechen attack on School No. 1.
A conventional narrative structure would expose the unbalanced nature of the treatment: the memoirist's shifts in time and focus, and the giving and withholding of confidences, force the reader to grant him a hearing. They do, however, lead to a sense of anticlimax, since the impact of the camp section leaves the post-release saga as a minor addendum, echoing the exhaustion of the brothers. The plot is almost absurdly melodramatic, with its twins, death-bed confessions, and letters from the dead.
This would matter less is the characterisation of the memoirist was clearer. The descriptive style throughout is vintage Amis: clear, startling, elegant, poetic (contact with English culture is unconvincingly explained by the plot). The tension between this tone and his actions is an unresolved issue: we are perhaps half convinced by the evocation of what it feels like to kill, in the wild days when he takes the breakdown in order in the camp to murder the hated informers; but we are unconvinced by the interior view of the rapist, at either end of his life.
Amis expects his readers to know a lot of Russian history; he provides footnotes to identify Russian presidents, referred to by the memoirist by unfamiliar names, but does not elucidate the political developments for those unversed in the country's tragic arc.
But to write an encycopledic narrative would have taken a book much bigger than these 200 pages, which share with the short stories of Heavy Water an inexplicable luminosity, a subtle charge that leaves them resonating in your mind long after you have finished. A similar effect is derived from reading Time's Arrow, and of all Amis's works, it is that first-person narrative, of the other great European tragedy, which is closest in tone to this. A serious book for serious times.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Review of Martin Amis: The last days of Muhammad Atta
Martin Amis was born to inhabit the post-9/11 world. His earlier works are rendered numinous by the sense of imminent apocalypse, the feeling that civilisation's grip on survival may slip at any moment. Amis's response has been almost personal, as if he specifically were targeted; the scrappy narrative of Yellow Dog is disordered by the viscerality of his emotion, disarming his critical intelligence. As James Thurber wrote, in the happier and more carefree days of 1930s Europe: "He had always feared that something like this would happen to him, and now it had". So it is no surprise to find that five years on he is still focused on terror and its agents; the question is whether he has been able to apply analysis beyond emotion and narrative.
The Last Days of Muhammad Atta is a longish short story, filling a gap in the real chronology of the attacks with a visit to a dying imam to collect a bottle of holy water. It is based largely on reality, so much so that arguing about what 'really' happened becomes a legitimate critical stance. But since it is also an interior monologue of someone now dead, it also is, emphatically, a fiction.
Most is based on inference. Amis has described the moral revolt of the body, the physiological resistance to ethical sickness, previously, in Time's Arrow, and it seems reasonable that Atta might suffer similarly. In trying to present the thought-processes of a terrorist, Amis is exploring the big question: Why? How could humanity do such things?
From a UK perspective, there is a long tradition of not caring very much about motivation. The tedious horrors of the IRA bombing campaign awakened no desire to know why they were doing it; a dismissive shrug implied that they must, for whatever reason, like doing these things. This may have been partly ignorance: few would have responded to a set of grievances which started in 1690, or 1649, or maybe back in 1167. But it was also the product of a determination that anyone resorting to violence should lose the right to be heard (so much so that the government had to consistently mislead parliament by denying that it was, in fact, negotiating with the terrorists while stating publicly that it would under no circumstances do so). Even 7/7 was met with bewilderment rather than curiosity. Things seem to be changing now: the recognition that there is a vast pool of ill-will rising slowly to the boil is spreading.
Even so, Amis is perhaps wrong to assume that his readers are as interested in 9/11 as he is; certainly his casual mention of the 'muscle Saudis' relies on too much detailed knowledge (the phrase seems to be one of his coinage): not everyone knows or cares too much about what happened, even if their geopolitical concerns leads them to be interested in consequences.
In some ways, Amis cheats, since he does not provide an insider's account of religious fanaticism tied up with modern technology; rather his exemplar is a steely nihilist who has rationally identified jihad as the only contemporary cause worth following. In tone, Atta sounds most like the blandly certain figure of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; and of course this is a reminder that nihilism is not new, going back at least 150 years.
Nor, of course, is zealotry. Although the story only shows the fanatics through the distorting contempt of Atta, this is little loss, since we know zealots, we've done zealots. They are hardly a new phenomenon. Even the suicidal element is not completely new: in the past, nationalists have been pleased to praise those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, either on an individual basis, as soldiers, or on an industrial basis, like the kamikaze pilots.
So perhaps the problem Amis is picking at is not a problem at all; or only a practical problems: people behave in this way, as they have before. How to stop them? It depends on what made them that way. Atta is presented as a sociopath: his world is without laughter, or music, or love, or sex, or passion: the closest he comes to enjoyment is in spite and certitude; if one were to ask what radicalised him, one would have to ask a psychologist, not a politician.
He story has some epistemological flaws: on a couple of occasions, the author reminds the reader of what followed Atta's death (hardly necessary in any case, but in any case unknowable to Atta). There is one clear error: Amis says Atta knew that the steel would buckle, the towers would collapse. He probably didn't, since the architects who designed it didn't know; and there is an army of conspiracy theorists willing to argue that the steel did not in fact buckle, and demolition charges were needed to make it do so. It is more plausible that Atta's sacrifice was made in the expectation that the crash would be gesture, a ruthless, potent, symbol of the illusory nature of the West's invulnerability, rather than large-scale slaughter.
The story is plotted as a circle, a circle of hell, in which Atta is doomed to relive this day, with its petty and great punishments, for ever. This is a plot Amis has used before, in his earlier short story Denton's Death, itself a macabre reworking of Kingsley Amis's short short story Mason's Life. The question of justice hangs over the whole enterprise, of sufficient or appropriate punishment. Theologians across the centuries have found it easier to excuse the suffering of the righteous (since it is good for the soul, or because they have sinned) than the flourishing unpunished of the unrighteous. Amis feels that mere extinction is insufficient punishment, a feeling with popular support, although he might be surprised to find himself agreeing with those who say 'Death is too good for him'.
Although it may not be Amis's intent, his portrayal of Atta as a banal, limited, troubled individual humanises him: these are not monsters. If they were, the action required would at least be clear. But life is not as simple as that.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
The revenger's comedy: interpreting The Information by Martin Amis (1995)
I
The plot of The Information is essentially simple; Richard, unsuccessful novelist and book reviewer, attempts to wreak revenge on his friend Gwyn, unaccountably successful novelist. Richard enlists the aid of Scozzy, a self-styled wild boy and drug dealer, to deliver physical punishments escalating in seriousness; after a tour of America in which Richard’s unsellable unreadable novel literally threatens the life of Gwyn and himself by causing a near-crash in a light plane, their relationship changes, and Gwyn loses the inhibitions resulting from his previous envy of Richard. Scozzy’s assaults prove counter-productive: only Richard suffers.
Even in this bald summary, it is clear that the book is much more than the story of two men, although you wouldn’t know this from the reviews it received at the time. This may have been because those reviewing it in Little Magazines were being cautious, since the book is scathing about the quality of British reviewing and questions the entire edifice of modern literary journalism.
II
The rivalry between Richard and Gwyn had a real-life equivalent in the friendship and sporting contests between Julian Barnes and MA which had run from their student days into adult life. Although MA has argued often that it is the job of writers to invent their fictions, he has often used real life as a source, in The Rachel Papers (teenager attending crammer school to get into Oxford), Success (art gallery assistant), Dead Babies (weekend of disasters with various friends and couples), and Money (screenplay writing in America). Since in The Information almost all description adopts the viewpoint of Richard, it is easy to assume that he represents MA (there are short passages where the narrator shifts to cover Scozzy and Gwyn, and MA appears speaking for himself briefly). This lazy equivalence is perhaps justified by MA’s ascription to Richard of his own experiences, including being given a set of bound volumes of the little magazine when he left, and seeing someone reading his book on an Underground train.
The book proved prophetic in its treatment of the other characters: the Julian Barnes friendship ended in the gap between Amis finishing the draft text and its being published, as a result of MA’s decision to drop Pat Kavanagh, Julian’s wife, as his agent. Agents too, particularly lazy agents, have a hard time in the book, particularly Gal Aplanap. MA does not reveal how much he drew on this event in finalising his text, but the rivalry, and its revelation as being not friendly but unfriendly, is structural. So much so that it seems legitimate to wonder whether the strength of Barnes’ reaction was partly in response to what must have read like a barely-veiled critique of his person and work (although it is doubtful that anyone would call his novels unliterary, Flaubert’s Parrot was nominated for a Booker prize, after all).
So rivalry is a theme, but not the main one. Richard himself says so: “Gwyn didn’t do it. The world did it.” (p. 140). It takes him a long time to realise that his campaign against fate is therefore aimed at the wrong target.
III
The novel ends with a paragraph which has been criticised as being meaningless or pretentious; but it provides, through back-references to previous events, an abstracted argument, a summary of ‘what the novel is trying to say’ (although Richard gives such questions short shrift: ‘It’s not trying to say anything. It’s saying it. […] It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn’t put it any other way’. (p. 340).
The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. [1] Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. [2] Every morning, we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. [3] Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. [4] Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. [5] Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. [6] The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. [7] And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night. [8]
1 The Man in the Moon appears on p. 476 The Man in the Moon dates back to the time when humanity thought itself the centre of the universe; as we get older, we move towards knowing that we are temporary and unimportant; and we know we get older because policeman, doctors, professors even, look young.
2. Tempus fugit. Who has ever needed a skull as a memento mori? Who could forget?
3 This sentence appears on p. 197. We live with decay and dissolution; time’s arrow only points one way.
4 The critic is mentioned on pp. 432 and 476; he has lost his place in the world, his purpose, sidetracked by excess, and no longer matters to anyone.
5 The nun appears on pp. 213, 221 and 413. Why should anyone beware a nun? Partly because they act as a warning: they leave noone behind; but mostly I think because they know something. They already know the information, and accepted it: they are stronger than you.
6 The man at the callbox has cropped up on pp. 46 and 447-8. He is the man without home or family, desperately phoning around to find someone so that he doesn’t have to face death alone.
7 The planesaw whines on p. 172, as one of the urban sounds (although there is no such thing as a planesaw), reflecting the absence of community, the lack of fellow-feeling characteristic of modern life.
8 This sentence appears on p. 452.
It is clear from this analysis that the paragraph is carefully written, and, since it runs through the book, it follows that the novel as a whole is, too. Its style is a little flashy, but that is compensated by sentences, whole pages, of such beauty and clarity that the reader pauses in astonishment. This does some violence to credible characterisation, unfortunately: it is hard to believe that someone who thinks and speaks as eloquently as Richard does should write novels whose highest praise was that ‘nobody was sure they weren’t shit’, and it is notable that dim bland Gwyn and mad Scozzer share a common interior language with Richard, and MA.
IV
So what is the information? The more astute of the reviewers says that it is death, but they are wrong. If the novel were about death, it would treat it more seriously: Anstice and Richard’s doctor are despatched quickly, simply, as jokes. Demi’s father, whose gradual decline in a rotting mansion is described, parodying Catholic Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, is also killed in a sentence. It is not death as such; the information is the knowledge of one’s own mortality. The world is telling you to start saying goodbye, to prepare in the face of inevitable, increasing humiliation.
Without blunting the force of this message, MA does suggest what can help in this task: love, children, and humour; throughout the book, these are quietly advanced as moral markers, good in themselves, and signifiers of goodness. Gwyn’s novels are shown to be bad partly by being humourless; Gwyn’s refusal to have children defines him as bad; Gwyn’s turning away from love is his badness. Because of this, MA is able to end his novel with Richard in what by any objective standard is a worse place than where he started, but being credibly happier all the same.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Da Vinci Code reviewed
"With a fragmented plot that is less plausible than a Harry Potter movie, it combines the historical seriousness of Monty Python's Life of Brian with the deep emotional characterisation of the Wacky Races"
Martin Kemp, The Guardian, 22/5/06
Yes, but he doesn't say whether he likes it or not.
Actually I think part of my antipathy to Dan Brown and all his works derives from the strong impression that Henry Lincoln's 1974 TV documentary The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil left upon me as a teenager: its tortuous search through hidden symbols and codes seemed astounding. Where I think the bats entered the belfry was in the later incarnations of the story in which we were expected not only to admire such stuff but to actually believe it was true.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Fact and fiction and the Da Vinci code
The recent Court case between Dan Brown and authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is quite funny, really. The Bloodites claim he copied their book from his book. But they seem to have forgotten something. Dan Brown's book is a novel. It's fiction. It's made up. (I agree it's a little confusing that he says at the start that it is all true: a little post-modern prank, I think). But to say that his fiction rips off their book is to admit what they would usually try desperately NOT to admit, that THEIR book is fiction, made up, a story, NOT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Because if their work was sober fact, that inspired someone else to write a novel, they would have no case, since copyright protection excludes creative works. Unless their lawyers decide to prove that Dan Brown's work is also sober fact. Now that might be worth watching, like his book might be worth reading. Oh. No it's not.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
The poetry of acceptance (Book review)
Poetic Acceptance by Erin Monahan (2005, Meeting of the Minds Publications , Pittsburgh PA, USA, $10, 30pp)
through anger, to the acceptance of her title, shown to be not some unconsidered optimism but an accommodation of reality which allows for both grief and future happiness.
The term 'Internet poetry' sprang into existence as a pejorative, and is felt by some to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The explosion of post-anything forums, like the earlier vanity press anthology scams, has shown that the previous restrictions on publication by economics and reasons of space was keeping out not a small pool of competent but ignored poets, but a mass of would-be poets without either something to say or the means with which to say it. Interestingly, this has been recognised by the online poetry community, which is beginning to establish ground rules of literacy and coherence, to the annoyance of those who feel that poetry is self-expression which need take no notice of the views of readers.
But quality will prevail. One of the virtues of the internet is that it allows people's work to be judged on its merits, without preconceptions about whether it ought to be good or important. Another virtue is the possibility of fine-tuning from user feedback, so that confusions and complexities can be resolved dynamically before the poem reaches its final form.
Monahan is a beneficiary of both these factors. Her education was cut short by early marriage and motherhood, but she was inspired to return to writing poetry after the post-natal death of her child, and she has developed a distinctive style of allusive, emotionally-tough, short narrative poems, derived from her experience. The title of her collection reflects her moral stance: she realises that the world is not perfect, and there is no other, but aims for an equanamity of spirit through active engagement with it. This is not to say that her poems are doom-ridden or depressive; quite the opposite. Although she references the Beat poet Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath, she establishes a distance from despair and sorrow, through a forward-looking enjoyment of life in the moment. Thus "Saturday Morning Flea Market" describes a shopping expedition in simple terms, but manages to define a moment of luxuriating in the exotic appeal of foreign things and words; "Anchored" recounts a moment of reflection:
"Karma kills / like broken air conditioners and broken / hearts".Other poems deal with love, sex, and lust: in "Absentia", she says
"There is an absence / in the room tonight- / it is the want / of your lips on mine", closely allied to her explorations of the connections between words and feelings (From "Permanent": "I suppose it's all about / being needed").
But the core of this collection is the series of poems addressing the death of her child. These display a range of approaches and responses, from her anger at her mother's Christian platitudes ("Mother's love", perhaps more shocking in the God-fearing USA), bleak despair ("Free": "There were: / no miracles/ in the desert"), to comfort in fantasy ("Fantasia": "She smiles in rock-crystal / and giggles on the breeze"), and closure ("Wisdom": "You were never in pain"). In 'Time: A study in grief', the longest, most ambitious, and best poem in the collection, she traces her reactions from (literal) speechlessness:
"Now there is nothing/ and it's too much, / everything, and not nearly enough / at the same time, and the words / come out wrong, because there are / no words at all."
through anger, to the acceptance of her title, shown to be not some unconsidered optimism but an accommodation of reality which allows for both grief and future happiness.
Monahan's work reflects the development of her skills as a poet to set out her responses to personal tragedy but is not limited to the ghetto of therapeutic writing. Her poetry is funny, sexy and clever, and deserves to reach a wide audience.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Martin Amis in "Yellow Dog is good!" shock
Well, not quite. Over at the Martin Amis discussion forum, which contains, or rather consists of, outpourings of bile by ex-Amis fans (see it at AmisWeb), there is one strand that attempts to stick up for Amis and his work. I will join this lone voice of support, in a way.
Yellow Dog does have severe problems. The main plot is driven by the London underworld, much as appeared in The Information (to supposed comic effect) and London Fields, but the sub-Eastender argot fails to convince, even if it's right (and I decline to believe that A is any more likely to know than I am). The banality of evil is sometimes worth pointing out, but this is just the banality of banality. The plane-crash/comet sub-plot feels tacked on, as does the reportage on the pornography industry, which he claims to find shocking even though in Dead Babies, 25 years ago, he professed to be unshocked by worse. At the core of the novel we are asked to accept that a New Man can be re-engineered into an Old Asshole by being hit on the head, and can then get better.
But when I was reading it last year, there were two other things that rang absolutely false: the tabloid-footballer sub-plot and the home-life-of-the-royals. These I think can reasonably be written up now as prescient. The Wayne Rooney-Colleen saga which has dominated the Sunday papers for the last 6 months is following Amis' script to the letter: Rooney goes off the rails, Colleen stands by him, he goes off the rails, she chucks him out, they reunite for the kids, my booze and birds hell... And the royal wedding raised precisely the awkward questions that turning off the queen's life-support did, with the papers unsure which line to take.
So he gets the press right: MA is Clint Smoker!
Yellow Dog does have severe problems. The main plot is driven by the London underworld, much as appeared in The Information (to supposed comic effect) and London Fields, but the sub-Eastender argot fails to convince, even if it's right (and I decline to believe that A is any more likely to know than I am). The banality of evil is sometimes worth pointing out, but this is just the banality of banality. The plane-crash/comet sub-plot feels tacked on, as does the reportage on the pornography industry, which he claims to find shocking even though in Dead Babies, 25 years ago, he professed to be unshocked by worse. At the core of the novel we are asked to accept that a New Man can be re-engineered into an Old Asshole by being hit on the head, and can then get better.
But when I was reading it last year, there were two other things that rang absolutely false: the tabloid-footballer sub-plot and the home-life-of-the-royals. These I think can reasonably be written up now as prescient. The Wayne Rooney-Colleen saga which has dominated the Sunday papers for the last 6 months is following Amis' script to the letter: Rooney goes off the rails, Colleen stands by him, he goes off the rails, she chucks him out, they reunite for the kids, my booze and birds hell... And the royal wedding raised precisely the awkward questions that turning off the queen's life-support did, with the papers unsure which line to take.
So he gets the press right: MA is Clint Smoker!
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Writerly concerns
Kingsley Amis was very critical of Tony Powell's habit of including swathes of his life, thinly disguised, into his novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, saying "Doesn't he know that novelists are supposed to make stuff up". It must have been strange to have been a friend of Powell, and to know that what you said one year would be there in print the next, along with his commentary on what he thought and what he thought you thought; the same would apply to Galsworthy/Forsyte, Henry Williamson/Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight. It's odd that KA should have been quite so critical, since he is quite autobiographical himself. This is partly style: KA makes things sound like they are drawn from experience, inviting you to believe that they are non-fiction
Even if someone is willing to invent things, they will be interested in things that are close to them. This is partly why there are so many more accounts of the problems that a householder has with cleaning staff that accounts of cleaners' problems with householders. And hence, a lot of books about writers. It may not be pure laziness, though. Writers know about words, and care about words (or at least they ought to). They will therefore wish to have their characters say things or think things using a rich vocabulary; they will also want them to say things about other books and poems. And here comes the issue with credibility.
I started reading a detective novel recently, with a title taken from T S Eliot. Oh, I thought, this writer reads! The detective was soon revealed as a matter-of-fact gruff Northern lad who had left school at 16 but who nevertheless spent his evenings reading Eliot and listening to classical music. Hmm, I thought- no reason why not, but... Then we met the next major character, who had a similar background; in her case, she had retired, and now spent her time reading French poetry and listening to opera. At this point, it lost me, since their cultural activities seemed to reflect the preferences of the writer rather than the characters. Because the reason they have been assigned these attributes is to allow the writer to comment and quote as he wishes.
The problem is that these days the canon has exploded. Rumpole of the Bailey may have existed as someone who stomped around court reciting the great 19th century poems, but what would his modern version recite? Auden? Eliot? Larkin? Lennon/McCartney? The canon used to have (or be given) a moral weight: you ought to know these, even if you don't. Nowadays people pick up what they want, and switch from Jane Austen to Discworld at will. This is good. But it's bad news for writers, because they can no longer assume that an echo of a Shakespeare sonnet, or a pun on a Dickens book title, will be understood by their readers.
Even if someone is willing to invent things, they will be interested in things that are close to them. This is partly why there are so many more accounts of the problems that a householder has with cleaning staff that accounts of cleaners' problems with householders. And hence, a lot of books about writers. It may not be pure laziness, though. Writers know about words, and care about words (or at least they ought to). They will therefore wish to have their characters say things or think things using a rich vocabulary; they will also want them to say things about other books and poems. And here comes the issue with credibility.
I started reading a detective novel recently, with a title taken from T S Eliot. Oh, I thought, this writer reads! The detective was soon revealed as a matter-of-fact gruff Northern lad who had left school at 16 but who nevertheless spent his evenings reading Eliot and listening to classical music. Hmm, I thought- no reason why not, but... Then we met the next major character, who had a similar background; in her case, she had retired, and now spent her time reading French poetry and listening to opera. At this point, it lost me, since their cultural activities seemed to reflect the preferences of the writer rather than the characters. Because the reason they have been assigned these attributes is to allow the writer to comment and quote as he wishes.
The problem is that these days the canon has exploded. Rumpole of the Bailey may have existed as someone who stomped around court reciting the great 19th century poems, but what would his modern version recite? Auden? Eliot? Larkin? Lennon/McCartney? The canon used to have (or be given) a moral weight: you ought to know these, even if you don't. Nowadays people pick up what they want, and switch from Jane Austen to Discworld at will. This is good. But it's bad news for writers, because they can no longer assume that an echo of a Shakespeare sonnet, or a pun on a Dickens book title, will be understood by their readers.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Dylan writes!
I got Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles Volume One, for Christmas, having restrained myself from buying it when it came out in the autumn. Given his track record (musical and non-musical) and his recent erratic form, I feared the worst. But it turns out that, no, it is not as bad as it could easily have been, nor as bad as might reasonably be expected, nor even good considering remembering his past has never been one of his interests or strengths and writing prose didn't suit his style; no, it's actually good full stop. He writes tangentially and episodically, concentrating on establishing the mood of a particular time and place economically. He describes the Minnesota communities' repsonse to fallout shelters: "But salesmen hawking the bomb shelters were met with expressionless faces".
His account of songwriting and recording is prosaic and matter-of-fact (and unenthusistaic compared to his treatment of books and people); you can see in his description of the New Morning and Oh Mercy! sessions his growing frustration that the sounds they were making were getting further away from the sounds he had envisioned, and that he, as well as his critics, was unhappy with the final result. So, surprisingly, the book takes a dip in interesty the closer it comes to "the work".
The only groanworthy moment is the appearance of Bono and the two-page eulogy Dylan gives to Bono's genius, knowledge and wisdom. But as Dylan says himself, noone should rely on his judgement! Otherwise, it's clear that, despite fears to the contrary, he is still sane and capable.
Whether Volume Two will cohere as well as this does is doubtful, since it will inevitably cover better-documented parts of his life, and will also have to deal with a lot of touring and recording, but I'd recommend Volume One to anyone with an interest in Dylan.
His account of songwriting and recording is prosaic and matter-of-fact (and unenthusistaic compared to his treatment of books and people); you can see in his description of the New Morning and Oh Mercy! sessions his growing frustration that the sounds they were making were getting further away from the sounds he had envisioned, and that he, as well as his critics, was unhappy with the final result. So, surprisingly, the book takes a dip in interesty the closer it comes to "the work".
The only groanworthy moment is the appearance of Bono and the two-page eulogy Dylan gives to Bono's genius, knowledge and wisdom. But as Dylan says himself, noone should rely on his judgement! Otherwise, it's clear that, despite fears to the contrary, he is still sane and capable.
Whether Volume Two will cohere as well as this does is doubtful, since it will inevitably cover better-documented parts of his life, and will also have to deal with a lot of touring and recording, but I'd recommend Volume One to anyone with an interest in Dylan.
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