Emojis

This is one of those posts where I am going to try and work out a train of thoughts as I write, which is a bit of a high-wire act (two metaphors for you there, one dead, one ailing). Written language started with pictures - man (person), antelope, water, food, etc. My guess is that these symbols once introduced (together with the appropriate materials for recording them, cave walls having their limitations) were quickly and very widely adopted. Hierogylphs are essentially these ideographs - symbolic pictures representing at first things, and then later more abstract concepts such as actions. From here the development of written language with letters representing sounds may have been quite a leap, but an inevitable one. There are whole libraries worth of study on this topic, so I am not going to embarass myself by trying to summarise this evolution, but wanted to introduce some thoughts about the direction of language today, as influenced by the introduction of emoticons and emojis. 

Because there is an argument, which I wanted to test, that emojis represent a reversion of language back to its earlier origins, a degradation of the complexity of writing to drawing. Pictures with their limit range of meaning are in this context replacing words. Emojis can have a range of meaning depending on the context within which they appear, but they hardly have the subtly of the tens of thousands of words in the English language, nor are they likely to be as dynamic and fluid in their meaning. We have already seen some wit translating the Bible into cockney - will an emoji version be long in following? Probably not, which probably means that the range of meaning we can convey in these symbols is so profoundly limited that they will not replace words. Probably. Will people communicate solely in emojis in future, the written equivalent of grunting at one another? Written language started as drawings - is it reverting back to its origins?

On the whole I think not. There's no evidence that emojis are anything other than a fun way of supplementing short written messages, often in a clever way, breaking out of the tyranny of 26 characters. A winky face can make the ironic tone of a message clear in a much simpler way than laboriously spelling it out. One to watch - will these symbols begin to proliferate and intrude into more formal contexts, outside the setting of texts and emails, and increase in volume and complexity, or have they found their niche?

George Gissing – New Grub Street – 1891

Gissing isn’t really read very much today. His novels – or at least some of them – are still in print, but I doubt if he makes his way onto many syllabuses or reading lists. Certainly I would not be reading him now if ‘New Grub Street’ hadn’t appeared on the Guardian’s best 100 list. Does that really matter? There is a relentless Darwinism at work in determining what books are read and which are forgotten, and if Gissing is steadily dropping out of sight it is probably for a good reason.

‘New Grub Street’ tells at considerable length the story of a small group of lower middle class but educated people trying to make a living from professional writing. Some write novels, others articles for publication, reviews, and short stories. All are utterly obsessed with their financial situation.

“Poverty is the root of all social ills; its existence accounts even for ills that arise from wealth. The poor man is a man labouring in fetters. I declare there is no word in our language which sounds so hideous to me as “Poverty”” (page 33)

George Orwell, in an article about Gissing which ironically was probably written simply to keep the writer’s income flowing, claimed that we had “very few better novelists”, although he does go on to say that “His prose, indeed, is often disgusting”. Disgusting is a bit strong, but clumsy, undoubtedly. Take this sentence for example:

“Fixed in his antipathy to the young man, he would not allow himself to admit any but a base motive on Milvain’s side, if, indeed, Marian and Jasper were more to each other than slight acquaintances; and he persuaded himself that anxiety for the girl’s welfare was at least as strong a motive with him as mere prejudice against the ally of Fadge, and, it might be, the reviewer of ‘English prose’.”

But it’s not all stodge – some of the descriptive writing, of which there is admittedly little, is very well put, as in here when he describes one of his younger female characters:

“So exquisitely fresh in her twenty years that seemed to bid defiance to all the years to come”. (70)

There is a relentless focus in ‘New Grub Street’ on money – who has how much, what interest can be expected from savings, how much an article of novel might bring in, and so on, at extraordinary length. Rarely a chapter goes by when money, and its absence, is not the focus of the narrative. Even when ostensibly the story moves on to a discussion about relationships, these are determined solely in respect of the relative wealth of the participants. Creative endeavour can only be measured by the income it generates. Despite the grinding poverty that most of the characters suffer, the distinction between this group of people, who earn their living, such as it is, by writing, and the social group immediately below them who work for a living, is preserved at all cost. One character, Edwin Reardon, is actually left by his wife because he proposed to take a clerical post, rather than continuing to try to earn a living by writing novels.

New Grub Street is a depressing place to be. One writer dies of a consumptive-like illness which is not specified by is clearly derived from years of poverty; another commits suicide when the failure of his magnum opus becomes apparent, a third marries purely for money and social advancement, abandoning a young woman as soon as her inheritance falls through. It’s not just the world of writing that Gissing is condemning, but the society in general - Reardon, the one person who throws it all in and gets a proper job suffers just as badly as the rest.

A novel about writing is bound to break the narrative fourth wall from time to time. It is obvious at points that Gissing is writing from personal experience about trying to earn his living. The scenes where Reardon suffers horribly from writer’s block also have a poignancy suggesting Gissing had probably suffered similarly, as well as having felt the pain of having to write for payment by the page. But overall it is hard to feel too much sympathy for most of his cast of characters, and I feel no compulsion to seek out any of Gissing’s other novels for now. Just to end with one of my favourite quotes from an Amazon reviewer of ‘New Grub Street’. Missing the point with uncommon accuracy – “It's not funny at all”

 

 

1984 - George Orwell - 1949

When I re-read a novel (as here) for the umpteenth time, I always look carefully for things I have forgotten or overlooked the last time. It's surprising what you miss - I wrote about this here a while back. The first thing that struck me about '1984' is what a brilliant opening it has. Not just the extraordinary first line - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" - but the opening chapter. Orwell packs so much into these few pages it positively fizzes - Big Brother, the anti-sex league, the two minute hate, the Ministry of Truth, doublethink and newspeak. It's such a detailed and comprehensive evocative of the new world we are plunged into that it is shocking.

Orwell was the first writer who spoke to me personally through his works, and I absorbed all his novels, even those he wrote simply for financial reasons, and would have been happy to have seen pulped, as well as his journalism, letters, and anything else available. So making a dispassionate judgment about 1984 is impossible, and I am not even going to try. Orwell's fierce intellect shines from every line - this has to be the most quotable novel ever written, particularly when you think that it was not written as a series of epigrams (unlike, say 'Dorian Gray') but as a dystopian horror story. The concepts that Orwell develops in this novel have become part of our popular and political culture - 'Big Brother' for example, as a short-hand phrase to describe the over-intrusion of the state into our private lives, (as well of course as a reality TV gameshow). 1984 is a passionate warning cry against the evils of totalitarianism. 

But, and there is always a but, post-war ration starved Britain had already rejected the hopelessness of '1984'. In electing a Labour Government with a mandate for radical change, they had decided that they didn't have to settle for the permanent rule of the party, and that things didn't always have to be dreary and hard. The proles had rejected the lie of the ruling class that things can never get any better. Orwell seems to have completely missed that sense of optimism. Winston Smith believes that if there is hope, it is with the proles, the working class. But the proles of 1984 are so easily distracted by pulp fiction, machine produced porn, and a fake lottery that there is never any prospect of them organising and gaining a class consciousness which would allow them to "rise from slumber, in unquenchable number". By 1949 the Attlee Government was clearly struggling - was that really the time to warn of the risks of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe?

I can't find the faintest trace of hope in 1984. Some readers claim the post-script essay on the introduction and development of Newspeak suggests IngSoc did not last, but that seems clutching at straws. By the end of the main novel, Winston is broken, looking forward to the bullet in the back of his head as a mercy. There is no suggestion that the future holds anything but the stamping of a boot on a face, forever.

Eton-educated George, or should that be Eric, was always a stranger in the slightly smelly, uncomfortable world of the working class. His sense of alienation from the working class - even, one could argue, his submerged class hatred - is vivid in 1984. They are an utterly alien species, with goldfish like memories, no class consciousness, and representing nothing of value. Winston is amazed at their stoicism, as well as their ability to reproduce so prolifically - Orwell shares similar sentiments in, for example, 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. If the proles are the only hope, then there is no hope. I appreciate I am criticising '1984' for not being a socialist manifesto, when of course it was never intended as such. But it handed a potent weapon to the critics of socialism, and all Orwell's subsequent comments about the intention of his writing had little impact on the perception that he was a trenchant critic of English Socialism. Which is a pity, because there are few writers in the twentieth century who wrote as interestingly or as well as Orwell on social issues.

The History of Mr Polly - H G Wells - 1910

Most Victorian novels were about prosperous people. Yes, they sometimes had money worries, but they weren't urban working class. Dickens changed all that, and people from all parts of the class spectrum became suitable subjects. However, the petit bourgouise, the shop keeping class, technically bosses in that they were self employed, but dirt poor nonetheless, were largely ignored. That changed with the Grossmiths' 'Diary of a Nobody' in 1892, and 'The History of Mr Polly' is an early entry in this 'little man and his troubles' or 'white collar' genre.

'Mr Polly' opens with him sitting on a stile, grumbling. He hates his life. He doesn't love or particularly even like his wife, he finds his job as a shopkeeper dull and unfulfilling, and he mourns the absence of any romance or culture in his life. He also suffers horribly from chronic indigestion, representative of his dissatisfaction with life. The first half of the novel is a flash-back from this point, chronicling how he has always felt this way, more or less, and how he reaches this nadir. He settles on suicide as the only logical escape, and having made that decision implements his plan quite calmly. Inevitably he botches the job, and in the process burns half his street down. Ironically this provides him, in the form of insurance money, an escape route, and he runs away. The final section of the novel sees him settled as a handyman at a country pub, living a bucolic but largely culture-free lifestyle that seems to suit him. This life is threatened by uncle Jim, the nephew of the landlady, a thug who menaces her for money. Polly discovers the hero inside himself, stands up to Uncle Jim, and in comic bumbling fashion defeats him.

Polly is quite an engaging anti-hero. He reminded me of Anthony Burgess's Enderby, one of my comic legends. He has a kind heart, and does his best to avoid causing harm. he takes the hardships in life as they come, and looks for pleasure in small things. He has a way of mangling the language which is intended as humorous, and which just about manages to raise a smile. Despite his ineptitude in most things, somehow he manages to come out on top. Some of the set-piece scenes in the novel, such as his father's funeral, where remote relatives descend on the wake and have a great day insulting one another, are enjoyable. If one looks hard for more serious themes, such as any traces of Wells' Fabianism, they can be found, but the novel is not openly political. The main 'message' of Mr Polly's history is that one should be true to oneself:

"when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary"

Mr Polly didn't have such a terrible life. While slowly going bust in his shop, he didn't suffer the privations many people experienced, and enjoyed many of the comforts of his Edwardian idyll - an idyll that was to be lost forever just a few years after this novel was published.

Time and Time Again - Ben Elton - 2015

Time travelling. Could there be a more tired, worn-out plot line than time travelling? If 50 years of Dr Who hasn't explored every single crevice and wrinkle of the multiverse, Ben Elton decided to give it a go. And for 95% of the book he very nearly gets away with it.

Hugh Stanton, ex-special forces, and recently widowed, is asked by his old Cambridge history professor for a Christmas drink. Here he is inducted into a secret society preserving the mystery of time travel, and in fairly quick order he is off to 1914, to save Franz Ferdinand, and kill the Kaiser. We all by now know enough about chaos theory to know that the chances of it all going smoothly are slim, and sure enough, despite mission being (sort of) accomplished, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and things start to go pear-shaped.

Elton has clearly done a lot of research into the origins and causes of the first world war, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Sarajevo and the events of the day of the assassination are recreated faithfully and realistically, as Stanton casually stalks Gabriel Princip.

In telling a time travel story the reader is invited to accept one huge implausibility. Having done so, with however much pseudo-scientific hoopla to provide a veneer of credibility, we then reasonably expect that the rest of the story will have an internal coherence, complying with the rules of common sense and order. So when Stanton is propositioned by a young woman on the train to Berlin, who proceeds to sleep with him at the first opportunity, something that in 1914 would have surely been pretty exceptional, alarm bells start to ring. This character, Bernadette, an Irish suffragette, is there to provide romantic interest and an opportunity for Elton to contrast 21st century social and sexual attitudes to those of 100 years earlier. It's all a bit worthy and predictable.

Stanton is incidentally a rubbish time-traveller - he can't avoid using 21st century slang, for example, and his lover stumbles across his laptop and guns.

The novel has some interesting things to say about history. When considering the question "if you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?" (Stanton actually changes two things, but that's being picky) Stanton's history professor proposes two alternative positions - either history is about individuals and the choices they make and the things they do, or it isn't. if the latter is right, intervening in Sarajevo in 1914 will have little or no impact on the broad sweep of history. Elton proposes a third choice - that people can make a difference - Gabriel Princip clearly did for example - but chaos theory then kicks in, and the world can be dramatically different from just one simple action. Ray Bradbury did this so much better in 'A Sound of Thunder' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder) to which this and all subsequent time travel stories owe a debt. If we can't know whether our intervention will make things better or worse, then probably best to leave well alone, is the overall point being made. The problem with this analysis is that it doesn't just apply to time travellers - it could equally apply to those of us living today. It's an argument for political inactivity. For what it is worth, while Franz Ferdinand's assassination was clearly the trigger for world war one, my view is that the European powers had been shaping up for a fight for a long time - hence the arms race - and if the assassionation had been prevented another reason would have come along soon enough.

At the end, the novel implodes in on itself, collapsing under the weight of its absurdities. (Avoid this next bit if you don't like spoilers). We are asked to believe that Stanton is only the most recent in a long line of travellers returning to correct the future, each making it that little bit - or in Stanton's case a hell of a lot - worse. We are asked to accept that each Master of Trinity would open Newton's "this is what you need to know to travel in time" letter from 300 years previous, successfully form a secret society of supporters to organise the trip, that each time traveller would succeed in their mission, realise that things had not gone as planned, write a letter to the future warning them, but that none of these letters would be found. As usual, unless you skate over the timey-wimey stuff pretty quickly, the ice cracks and you fall in.

Elton writes well, and his short chapters and frequent changes of focus keep the reader engaged, even when we have a pretty good idea where it is all going. The desire to frustrate that predictability leads Elton up some dead ends but does ask an entirely reasonable question - given that the 20th century ended with the end of totalitarianism across almost the entire world, civil liberties making progress in most countries in a way Edwardians would find hard to believe (actually, time travellers from the 1970's sometimes find it hard to believe) and technology that is as close to witchcraft as make no difference - why would we change anything? He invites us to consider whether the world wars and the Holocaust were the price of all this progress? I don't accept that for one second,  nor that we are now living in the 'best of all possible worlds' century, but it's a question worth asking.

Joy in the Morning - P G Wodehouse - 1946

I had a fairly strong reaction when I last read some Wodehouse, and I suspect my record of the event is intemperate. Having calmed down I returned to ‘Joy in the Morning’ determined to be fair minded. In that same spirit of fairness I ought to acknowledge that Wodehouse has some heavy-weight admirers whose opinion I have rarely had occasion to doubt. Douglas Adams no less is quoted on the cover of this Arrow (2008) edition saying “Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever”, and Stephen Fry is on the frontispiece describing Wodehouse as the “funniest and finest writer”. High praise indeed.

Written in the early 1940’s during Wodehouse’s internment in France and Germany during the second world war, this novel tells in Bertie Wooster’s first person narrative the story of his adventures at his uncle’s country home in Steeple Bumpleigh, or in Wooster’s words “the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy… is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.  The Guardian’s recent review described the novel as “both an elegy and an encore” – an elegy for a lost Edwardian Britain, and an encore because this is very familiar ground – Wodehouse recycled this very limited set of characters and situations endlessly. “

‘Joy in the Morning’ (and in my head I keep mixing this title up with ‘Morning Glory’ which is something entirely different) is a ‘greatest hits’ selection of comedic situations: the imposed engagement; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. The novel also contains an element of self-justification for Wodehouse’s involvement in what some considered war crimes, namely broadcasting on German radio from Berlin. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”

Despite my best intentions I did find myself laughing out loud at some passages. Wooster is such an idiot. But overall the novel is not a success. It is over-long and predictable. Wodehouse claimed to work tirelessly on his plots, and farce well done does require tight plotting in order to be plausible, but the plotting here is a mess. It depends on people behaving in ways that are more than just ridiculous but utterly unbelievable: schoolboys burning houses down, successful businessmen agreeing to conduct private meetings at a fancy dress ball, policemen leaving their uniforms on the riverbank while taking a dip in the river, and so on. The resulting comic situations lose a lot of their impact when they are set up so clumsily – we know Wooster is going to lose an important birthday gift brooch, that Jeeves is going to come up with a cunning plan to rescue the situation, that the imposed engagement will fade away by the end

Wodehouse may have been a collaborator, and may have romanticised a lost Britain that depended on a rigid class system that virtually enslaved the working class to preserve the privilege of a small minority, but he could turn a phrase, for example “There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

Wodehouse is adept at using the gap between Wooster’s weaknesses, his village idiot view of the world and reality, to comic effect; many of them are having an affectionate nod towards Shakespeare:

 “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

“She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”

“You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything.”

The bromance between Wooster and Jeeves is as strong as ever, and even in this strangely sexless world, in which all a chap ever wants is to avoid being ensnared by an eligible young woman (what possible reason could Wooster have for not wanting to get married or be involved with any of the women who circle around him?) is quite touching. Jeeves and Wooster are only going to be apart for a few hours, but still say a tearful goodbye:

 “We part, then, for the nonce, do we?'

'I fear so, sir.'

'You take the high road, and self taking the low road, as it were?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I shall miss you, Jeeves.'

'Thank you, sir.'
'Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?'
'The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.'
'It's the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don't mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?'
'Not at all, sir.”

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - 1955

‘Lolita’ is not an easy book to review. Perhaps more than any other novel that I have reviewed on this blog thus far, ‘Lolita’ comes with a burden of critical responses that make it hard to see the novel for itself. It is an elusive text at the best of times, with its classically flawed narrator, constantly challenging the reader to ask whether Humbert’s words can be taken at face value, as they rarely can. ‘Lolita’ has lost none of its power to shock, even after the passage of more than fifty years since it was published, possibly gaining even more potency as our awareness of child sexual abuse has increased.

So I think I ought to start on safe ground, with a summary of the events and characters of the novel itself. The narrative is told as a recollection of events by the narrator, Humbert Humbert. An introductory chapter purporting to be by the book’s editor, but in fact forming part of the narrative, sets the scene – this is Humbert’s jail-cell confession, written shortly before his death. As with Nabokov’s earlier work, ‘Pale Fire’ there is a significant and palpable gap between the narrator’s view of events, and that of the reader’s, and it is navigating that gap that makes reading ‘Lolita’ both challenging and rewarding.

Humbert is a predatory paedophile, who after a period of grooming establishes a sexual relationship with his orphaned step-daughter, Dolores. It is significant that her name is not Lolita – this is a label given her by Humbert, as part of his attempt to erase her individuality and to control her. It is representative, if you will, of his abuse.

Nabokov set himself a huge challenge here – how to portray a monster through his own eyes, without utterly repulsing the reader. And make no mistake, Humbert is repellent. His abuse of Dolores is charted with euphemisms which do little to disguise the nature of the abuse. Some reviewers and critics (and to be clear, this is not an academic work, so I am not going to provide references to support this claim – assume when I write things like this I simply mean “stuff I have read on the Internet”) fall for Humbert’s version of events, and portray Dolores as the under-age predator, sexually precocious beyond her years, and responsible for seducing poor, vulnerable Humbert. The term ‘Lolita’ has over the years been used generically in this manner, which is a pity, because it should mean “victim”. Indeed, in most popular culture representations of Lolita she is portrayed in Humbert's terms - sexually precocious, mature, even provocative. I even read one review online which suggested that ultimately the great achievement of this novel is that it makes the reader “fall in love” with Humbert, and that it is a love story. I recognise I am taking a very moral tone here, but part of the reason for keeping this blog in the first place was to chart my authentic reactions to what I read.

What might be interesting would be to give Lolita back her voice. Not as an imaginative exercise, but simply to look at what she says, as recorded by Humbert, but without his commentary. In the first part of the novel Lolita is only glimpsed, and is almost completely silent. When she is collected from camp by Humbert following her mother’s death, she has a few lines, but these are mainly every day observances. Of her thoughts on her abuse we have scarcely half a dozen lines, including (and to be clear, this is not an exhaustive list of her comments, but I think quite representative):

Before Humbert begins to rape her:

“Don’t drool on me. You dirty man” (130)

“Look, let’s cut out the kissing game”

“Lay off , will you”

And after the attacks begin:

“You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me? I ought to call the police and tell that you raped me. Oh you dirty, dirty old man.” (159)

“Can you remember, you know….the hotel where you raped me”.

"An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her" (159)

While you could expect Humbert to do everything possible to avoid this self implication, Nabokov has him implicate himself time and again. He is fully aware that he has no defence to his actions, and that Lolita is far from a willing accomplice, nor partially responsible for the crimes, as some commentators (see above) would have it. Apart from her age, and the significant age gap between them, he is a twice married man, and her step-parent, in loco parentis. He bribes her with clothes and treats, and finally pays her per sexual transaction. He threatens her with entry into the care system if she reports his attacks. He attempts to render her unconscious with sleeping pills in order to facilitate his attacks. None of this is consensual, even were consent to be possible.

“Eventually she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hiding place, which I never discovered, but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical programme. (209) With this clear illustration that even delusional Humbert realises his attacks are nauseating, can critics still describe this as a love affair? (I have found one reference to the magazine 'vanity Fair' describing 'Lolita' as "the only convincing love story of our century".)

“She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident ‘what d’you think you are doing?’ was all I got for my pains. To wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would - invariably, with icy precision - plump for the former” (Nabokov, 166).

Some kind of normality settles on their existence as Humbert and Dolores restlessly criss-cross the country, always on the move to prevent her from making any friends or appealing to anyone for help. But Humbert lets slip that Dolores never comes to terms with the tragedy of her situation, her captivity:

“I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep”. (199) Is this the behaviour of a young women enjoying the company of her older lover, (as Humbert would love it to be, but cannot persuade himself it is) or that of a deeply traumatised hostage?

‘Lolita’ is an extraordinary novel, written in a complex, allusive and elusive style which almost demands a re-reading. Its subject matter makes it hard to read at points, and I found myself immune to the charms of the monster that is Humbert Humbert. You have to admire Nabokov’s bravery in tackling what remains a taboo subject, and doing so by rejecting an easy stereotypes. In looking for a key to understanding this novel, a fruitless search I know, I keep coming back to the author’s post-script, where he describes the germ of the novel. A newspaper story told of an experiment where a chimpanzee was taught to draw, and eventually drew the bars of its cage. We can ignore the reality of the chimp’s life, but when given the ability to communicate it is the thing it draws. Lolita was caged, imprisoned by Humbert, and deprived of a voice, and we can catch glimpses of the horror of her situation all the more vividly because we see them through the soft-tinted lens of Humbert’s perspective.

 

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)

One of my reasons for exploring the Guardian's 'best 100 novels written in English' list is to try and find some hidden gems - books that I have not come across before that are really worth reading. Poe's only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' meets only one of these criteria - I had not heard of it before - and now I know why.

The novel is an adventure story, following Pym as he stows away in a ship, running away to sea against his father's wishes. He is aided by a friend, one of the crew members, and plans to reveal his presence when the ship is past the point of no return. However, a mutiny spoils this plan, and he has to remain hidden, without help from his friend, for a long time. His privations are detailed in the first person narrative in considerable, not to say tedious, detail. Finally he emerges from his hiding place, and helps in a counter-mutiny. Having secured control of the ship Pym and friends are immediately struck by a storm, which rages for days, leaving them with very little food or drink, and their ship a wreck. Again Poe details the long days of surviving on the wreck - this is actually a very short novel, but it certainly didn't feel it while reading - until they finally resort to cannibalism, choosing one of their number to eat by lots.

Finally rescued, Pym joins another ship voyaging to the southern seas. Previous voyages of exploration are recounted in yet more detail. The purpose of all this detail is presumably to give the narrative a sense of realism, although I found the various adventures completely unconvincing. While stowed away on his first ship, for example, Pym is joined for several days by his pet dog, who his crew-member friend just happened to take along with him. Despite the ship having been taken over by the mutineers the dog at no point barks or otherwise makes his presence know. As soon as the storm arrives the dog stops being mentioned, presumably thrown overboard.

The voyage ends in the discovery of a mysterious island group deep in the Antarctic, when the rest of the group apart from Pym and a friend are massacred by duplicitous natives. Escaping from the island by canoe, Pym travels south towards the pole, when the novel ends abruptly with the appearance of a mysterious figure.

I've read incomplete novels where the author died mid-composition that end with more coherence and naturalism than this. It just stops, and it is obvious that the author, having reached a word count (or equivalent) thought "that will do" and moved on. The "editor's" postscript (which incidentally is not included in the kindle version of the novel I initially read, which is really irritating) is a fig leaf that does nothing to compound the absurdity of the ending.

I look for at least one of the following in any novel: characterisation, a decent story, some interesting use of language, or some ideas. Poe provides none of the above. Pym himself hardly emerges from his narrative at all - we really have no idea what he is like, other than extraordinarily lucky in surviving his various in extremis situations, which of course we know he does from the novel's ludicrous subtitle. (Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.) The story is extremely episodic and predictable, a loosely connected series of incidents. The language is inoffensive, at best, and the only idea worthy of the name is the suggestion that the south polar regions might lead to undiscovered continents, peoples, and species. I am a little more sympathetic to this final point - the world was still being explored in the 1830's, and new species being found, so this wasn't as ludicrous as it sounds.

Poe introduces some classic elements of gothic horror into the narrative - cannibalism, pirates, a ghost-ship, entombment, and so on, but ultimately the novel is as spooky as a Halloween costume in June.

I'm not alone in finding this all quite ridiculous. In an introduction to the novel, Jeremy Meyers wrote that Poe’s choice of the incomplete journal form “allows Poe to disguise and excuse his own inability to control the plot and complete the novel.” Poe himself called it a “very silly book.” Indeed. I don't know whether the unhappy experience of writing this novel led Poe to concentrate on poetry and short stories, but it is probably a good thing if it did.

The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson – 2015

Many books are commissioned, but few as nakedly as this – Bryson openly admits that it was his editor’s idea to revisit the places he passed through for his earlier, and hugely successful, 'Notes from a Small Island' on the twentieth anniversary of the first book. Bryson has little interest in the idea, but has to make a living, and there are worse ways of doing so than this. In case we were in any doubt that this is a Notes Mark 2, the subtitle rubs the point in. As a result it is unavoidably obvious that Bryson is on auto-pilot for much of this book, going through the motions in a fairly loveless way.

Notes Mark 1 had a certain charm. It showed the newly arrived Bryson falling in love with 1970’s UK, rather remarkably given the many things he found profoundly wrong with the country, from its racist television programmes to its appalling customer service. A lot has changed since Notes Mark 1, and while Bryson clearly realises that revisiting the poorly remembered scenes of his first trip round the country is a mistake, he does it anyway. At least, he takes the trip after a fashion, although the visits to various locations are completely haphazard, fitted in around his busy schedule of readings and family commitments, giving the book a very fragmented flavour.

Some reviewers have been appalled at Bryson’s grumpiness at what he finds, and they have a point. But Notes Mark 1 found much to be grumpy about first time round, and the second time round the block he finds many things much improved. Inevitably much has also deteriorated, and many of Bryson’s complaints will be familiar – poor customer service, the loss of individual high street shops, green belt development, and so on. If this was all the book consisted of – a long whine about how things were so much better in the good old days – then I doubt I would have ever made it to the end, completist though I am. (Word doesn’t recognise that word, which is strange as it is in lots of online dictionaries. Go away red-underlining. Clicks ignore. That’s better). But happily there is more. Bryson has a wide range of anecdotes to tell about the places he visits, and some of these are entertaining and informative. I suspect his working method is something along the lines of telling a researcher he is going to Telford (or wherever) the following week, and asking them to come up with some interesting “QI” style facts about the town and its inhabitants, which he can then discover on location.

Now here is something slightly interesting – the American version of this book has a different subtitle, to whit “Adventures of an American in Britain”. This is wrong in several ways – Bryson isn’t an American, having taken British citizenship recently as explained in the book. He certainly doesn’t have any adventures – unless you call walking rainy streets looking for something to do, finding a discarded newspaper in the corner of a dingy backstreet pub, flicking through it, giving us one or two headlines, then retiring for a curry somewhere, adventurous. Bryson does little to disguise the fact that he often finds the whole exercise quite boring, and wishes it were over and he could go back to his family.
In between all the nonsense, Bryson occasionally has something interesting to say about the changes he sees in the country, best described here:

“It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself.”

Well said – only disappointing that he doesn’t follow this through to its inevitable conclusion about the way money is spent in this green and pleasant land.

There are also occasional glimpses of genuine wit, even if these stand out by their isolation, such as:

“According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.”

I'll keep reading Bill Bryson, because I always feel slightly virtuous when doing so, but I am not sure I am ever going to enjoy him in the way I did when we were both a bit younger.  

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman -

Among the candidates for award for the best opening line to a children's novel, this has got to be in with a shout:

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. if it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to the house to do , and both the blade and the handle were wet."

Pretty chilling stuff. 'The Graveyard Book' opens with the murder of the parents and sister of a young child, Bod (short for Nobody) who escapes the attacker and ends up in a graveyard. Here he is protected, and eventually brought up by, the ghosts and other phantasmical creatures that live there. I have read that this book draws inspiration from Kipling's 'The Jungle Book'. That makes sense - young child brought up by non-humans, gradually comes into contact with the outside world and learns its strange ways, all the while menaced by the killer who claimed the lives of his family, and finally getting his revenge. But to be honest the parallel was not all that obvious when reading this book. Gaiman may borrow the structure of 'The Jungle Book', but he makes the material entirely his own. In part that comes from the supernatural element, which he has a lot of fun with. All the ghosts are introduced by their gravestone inscriptions, ("She sleeps, aye, yet she sleeps with angels" or simply "son of the above") and their lives and deaths all form part of their characters. But Gaiman also adopts a much darker tone for the novel - whether it be in the real menace provided by the murders of Bod's family, the repeated further attempts on his life, or the sad fate of some of the graveyard's inhabitants.

'The Graveyard Book' will appeal most to pre-teens with a taste for the macabre and supernatural, but there is plenty of interest for all readers, not least (in this Bloomsbury edition) the wonderful illustrations by Chris Riddell. Personally what I enjoyed most, and what I suspect was the original inspiration for the novel, was the extraordinary sense of place. The graveyard itself is really the central character of the book, and Gaiman recreates and imagines it in wonderful detail - I find it hard to imagine that it is not based on a real location. Some novels start with a location, a setting, which then become the backdrop for a series of adventures. In using this approach, in which the majority of the events of the novel are set within the confines of the graveyard itself, Gaiman ran the risk of the whole thing becoming quite claustrophobic, but overcomes this by breaking free from time to time, and by exploring the graveyard itself as if it is Bod's whole world. Because he spends all his time with ghosts, Bod is utterly unafraid of death, and sees nothing to worry about in the fact someone is determined to murder him. The other principal achievement of the novel is in its creation of a set of villains - the Jacks of All Trades - a sinister, other worldly conspiracy - that are genuinely scary.

The Call of the Wild – Jack London – 1903

‘The Call of the Wild’ follows the adventures of Buck, a St Bernard/Collie cross. Buck is stolen from his Californian home, and sold to fuel the need for sled dogs in the Yukon as part of the 1880s gold rush. Buck goes from being a relatively pampered pet to being a possession, to be used and treated as a commodity, beaten close to death, worked even closer. London was a socialist and had first hard experience of the privations of the Yukon and the brutal treatment of animals, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the story is more than just about dogs. 

Aren’t there clear parallels between the way Buck is broken and abused, and the treatment of slaves in America? I’m not suggesting the novel is a metaphor or parable – it could just be a story “about dogs” (I often check the Amazon reviews on books I am planning to write about, to get a feeling for the overall response, and see if there’s anything significant I have missed. One reviewer for ‘The Call of the Wild’ claims to have been disgusted upon finding out that the novel was “about dogs”, which I have to say I found wonderfully dumb) – but London’s political background suggests that his sympathy for the literal underdog extended beyond animals.

Buck is trafficked together with other captured and bought slaves, sorry dogs, to the Yukon, where he is savagely beaten until the fight goes out of him. He learns his new role chained to the straps of a sled. He is given bare rations, and slowly finds a place in the pecking order amongst the team. Once his job is done he is casually discarded, bought at a discount because he is no longer needed, and once again placed in chains. He finally finds an owner who treats him with love, but this relationship ends brutally, and Buck surrenders to the primal instincts he has been fighting for some time, and gives in to the ‘call of the wild’, becoming leader of a wolf pack.

This is not a story for animal lovers, or at least not those with any trace of sentimentality. Dogs die throughout the book, often killed by Buck himself, but also in a wide variety of other manners. Dogs are portrayed as fierce animals, following instincts derived from their days as man’s earliest companion, when the world was much darker and more dangerous. The novel of course anthropomorphises Buck, giving him human feelings and thoughts, and an understanding of the world far beyond what any pet would ever actually have, but he remains an animal, killing when he has to, and following his instincts – well, almost all his instincts - London understandably doesn’t goes down that road!

At just over 100 pages long this is a short adventure story that can be read in an afternoon or less. The Yukon is captured realistically through Buck’s eyes, and there is a wide cast of characters – I particularly enjoyed the stupid family who ignore the advice of experienced trappers and disappear through a hole in the ice, as we knew they would. The novel is carried forward at a frenetic pace, and the exercise of seeing the world through an animal's eyes is well done. But at the end of the day this is just an adventure story, and I suspect London wrote books other than 'Call' more appropriate for adult readers. Whether I will seek them out is another matter.

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock - 1818

'Nightmare Abbey' is probably as heavy-handed a piece of satire as you will find in the whole of literature. Neither nightmarish - there are none of the traditional characteristic features of gothic fiction - nor set in an abbey, this short novel is partly a thinly disguised portrait of some of the romantic poets of the time, and partly a pastiche of their works.

It is tedious in the extreme. Some of this is deliberate - in parodying cloying philosophical nonsense it is hard to avoid writing philosophical nonsense. The trick is I suspect in providing just the right amount. There's little or no characterisation here - all the characters are cyphers - Mr Lackwit, Mr Toobad, or the Reverend Mr Larynx. There's also little or no narrative. The characters assemble in the abbey, which is really a moated country home on the remote Lincolnshire coast, where Scythrop Glowry, (admittedly, a pretty magnificent name) falls in and out of love as eligible females are paraded before him. Even Robert McCrum in choosing this novel for his list of 100 best novels in English for the Guardian in 2013 describes the plot as "cardboard-thin". This is because the novel is simply a vehicle for Peacock's friendly commentary on the lives and love affairs of the romantic poets. It may have had them rolling in the aisles in the early nineteenth century, but surely quickly lost its humour in a decade or two, and today provides many tumbleweed moments. Only one comment hit a chord; when, for the umpteenth time Mr Flosky, a friend of Mr Glowry senior is pontificating on his obscure theories, the narrator notes that he "suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense".

The narrative voice is deeply cynical. Romantic relationships are purely commercial - "marriage is a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows upon his ticket the better" - and married life is a burden - "Mr Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for every one in it led the life of a dog". Jane Austen wrote about relationships and courtships with a similar scepticism, but her characters are far more three dimensional and believable, and if you want a light-hearted commentary on the gothic novels of the period 'Northanger Abbey' is an infinitely better choice. That this novel squeezed out 'Lord of the Rings', the Gormenghast books, and others from the Guardian's top 100 novels makes its inclusion all the harder to understand.

Standing for Something - Mark Seddon - 2011

This book is a curious combination of political biography, and a rage against Blairism. As the former it is a mess; as the latter it is powerful and persuasive.

The political biography parts of the book, scattered throughout without any apparent structure whatsoever, whether chronological or otherwise, are written in a gossipy, laddish way, and consists almost entirely of anecdotes in which Seddon meets someone famous. These read like jotted down notes, and suffer greatly from lack of context - Seddon was largely an observer of events, rather than a participant. Even though he was a member of Labour's NEC for eight years, he is the first to admit that during that period the NEC was neutered and largely irrelevant. His anecdotes are all quite slight, and have a half remembered vagueness that suggest he didn't keep diaries.

But I don't want to spend too long on what is wrong with this book, because when Seddon starts writing about the failures of the Blair/Brown coup of the Labour Party, and the political betrayals, some of which he clearly feels very personally, the book acquires an authenticity and passion. He has genuine insights into where Labour lost its way, and how it might recover its radical roots. For example:

"My hunch is that Labour will eventually be re-radicalised in opposition. It won't take long before the howls of anger and pain from those at the sharp end - Labour's natural constituency - will be heard as the coalition cuts bite ever deeper. And this time the newly insecure and visibly more impoverished middle classes, those who work for less pay and pay more in taxation in an intended decade long Tory attempt to claw back the deficit, will become more and more angry. Whereas a quarter of a century ago it was working class jobs that were going in their hundreds of thousands, by the end of the first decade in the twenty-first century middle-class jobs had become increasingly casualised." (251)

"And as the first decade of the twenty-first century ended it was fast becoming apparent that the ordinary people of these islands were being forced to pay in their jobs and taxes for the greed of the bankers, the industrialisation and pauperisation of an economy" (257)

Obviously this was written in 2011 or 12, long before the end of the coalition and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, but I am fairly sure I know who Seddon will be cheering on now, albeit from the New York sidelines.

P.S. I did say I wanted to avoid spending too long on the negatives, but I don't at the same time want to self-censor. The editing of this book was really poor. Here's one example:

"'Greeting Marra' was his opening gambit before heading upstairs to plan our trip on an Eastern Counties double-decker bus to the sleepy Essex port of Wivenhoe, where coal was being landed. Our first outing as flying pickets, in an Eastern Counties double-decker bus, ended comically with us getting lost on the way..." (131/132)

Two sentences, both mentioning the same trip on the same bus, probably written a different times, and then stitched together without anyone noticing the repetition. This happens quite a bit. Also wearying was the staleness of some of the language:

"The expenses scandal crossed a new Rubicon"; "the icing on the cake was provided by the Murdoch media, which had managed to cast its baleful spell over the political class"; "Standing for Something finally opens the lid on the New Labour years, casting light into dark places"; all tired clichés from page 2 - on the following page "leading lights", "warts and all", "behind the scenes" (twice) and "rubber stamping" all jumped out, or rather limped out as I got increasingly frustrated with the important but poorly expressed thoughts Seddon or his editor were trying to convey. Of course look back through these blogs and you will find worse and more, but then I'm not a professional journalist, and don't enjoy the benefits of an editor (except the occasional glance over the shoulder).