"The Sealed Letter" by Emma Donoghue

By the author of the breathtakingly brilliant and bestselling Room.

Based on a real-life divorce case in Victorian London, this is the story of 'Fido' Faithfull, a spinster proprietor of a printing press active in the 'womanist' movement, and her best friend Helen, wife of Admiral Codrington. After seven letterless years Helen returns from Malta with a young naval officer in tow; soon we discover that they are having an affair. But then the Admiral begins to suspect. What is the truth and who is telling it? Every character has a reason to tell lies; nothing is simple in this beautifully crafted tale. Donoghue's tale is full of contradictions: Fido, heavily asthmatic, smokes; she is strong in support of female rights and yet she is appalled by adultery. Everyone has secrets; this is a world in which truth, even perjury, is of less consequence than respectability. Just as steam trains with open carriages run in tunnels beneath the streets of London, so unquenchable passion surges beneath the surface of elegant matrimony.

To encapsulate this she uses one very striking (perhaps obvious) metaphor. The father tells his daughters: "There's a house in Bayswater that's only a false facade, constructed to cover a railway tunnel ... It looks more harmonious that way, I suppose. Otherwise people walking down that street would suddenly glimpse a train rushing past their feet."  The unspoken message is that respectability is a necessary facade built to cover our underground passions, otherwise people walking down the street would be frightened. Of course, already at this point Helen and Fido (with Helen's boyfriend) have travelled on the Underground railway. Symbolic!

One of the striking things about the way this book is written is its use of the present tense.

Lots of lovely lines:

• “The skin-tightening sensation of encountering a friend who is no longer one.” (p 6)
• “You’re not the stuff of a chapter ... several volumes at least.” (p 10)
• “The phrases are delivered with the sort of rueful merriment, as if by an actress who knows herself to be better than her part.” (p 10)
• “If one get paid for one’s work, one knows somebody wants it.” (p 31)
• “Prigs are the worst of women; all that prudery hides lust for power.” (p 35)
• “Haven't the years done anything to soften you two to each other? 
•         Oh you innocent ... that's not what the years do.” (p 38) 
• “The problem with deterrence is that it can only be inferred, not proved. It's like having some fat porter outside with a pistol in his greatcoat ... who shakes himself awake when you open the door, to assure you that since breakfast his presence has kept a dozen murderers from garotting the whole family!” (p 82) 
• “The happiest marriages are made up of three parties.” (p 116)
• “He's weeping like a child, weeping for all the times over the years that he's shrugged instead.” (p 128)
• “I'm not managing to plan anything: I'm running and leaping and tripping like some hunted rabbit!” (p 137)
• “The machine rolls on but squeals, the little screws are starting to loosen and pop out.” (p 144) 
• “Helen is fallen: that odd word always makes Fido think of a wormy apple.” (p 230)
• “Really bad women can move from vice to vice, like butterflies in a flowerbed.” (p 352)

But most of all, fantastic characters trapped in insoluble dilemmas. I turned the pages! October 2017; 464 pages

"From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

This graphic novel is a fictional account of Jack the Ripper. It favours the theory that the assassin was Sir William Withey Gull, a royal surgeon, who was recruited (by Queen Victoria herself in this story) to silence a group of prostitutes who were blackmailing the Crown because they knew that Victoria's grandson, heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor Edward ('Eddy') had secretly married and had a daughter by a girl who worked in a sweet shop in Cleveland Street, later to be the scene of the famous male brothel allegedly frequented by Prince Albert Victor and investigated by Inspector Abbeline who also investigated the Ripper murders. Apparently painter Walter Sickert knew everything.

The book also lays heavy stress on Gull alleged membership of the Freemasons, on the supposed occult significances of the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, many of which are in the vicinity of the murders, and it introduces a science fiction element with Gull's spirit traversing the fourth dimension and inspiring Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, not to mention (going backwards in time) Gull appearing as a scaly fiend in a vision to William Blake.

It is an immense sweep. I was happy to take it all on board although this might have been because I have read most of the major source books including the outstanding novel Hawksmoor by the brilliant and prolific Peter Ackroyd; Ackroyd's masterful biography of William Blake, and Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution. Without such a thorough grounding I might have become quickly lost; Moore provides extensive notes for the general reader.

Even with the notes I feel that the scope of the book was its downfall. There was a moment when Walter Sickert delivered the baby daughter of prince and shopgirl to the shopgirl's parents, said girl having been incarcerated in a mental asylum. At this point the grandfather confesses to incest with his daughter. This takes several frames, a tiny fraction of the book, amounting to perhaps a few paragraphs in a novel. One would have thought such a potentially major sub-plot deserved a little more (If the grandfather not the Prince was the father of the shopgirl's daughter then the child is not a royal bastard and perhaps less drastic action might be taken). Alternatively, leave it out entirely. This sort of occurrence left a feeling that this work was just looking at the surface of a story which had potentially a great deal more; it felt shallow and unsatisfying.

I suspect it is my own inability to properly appreciate the visual arts that makes me fail to recognise that the cartoon drawings add value. I suppose that they help to add an air of menace to the whole book but I would have preferred the potential for rich description that a traditional novel might have offered. Mea culpa for being such a words man.

Is this a Gothic work? Of course it has many of the classic Gothic elements such as horribly killed corpses, dark places, and even a ghost. The secret brotherhood (in this case the Freemasons) reminds one of the controlling Catholic priests in The Monk. It also incorporates science fiction which has been suggested as the new Gothic. The idea of a monster preying on women is very reminiscent of Dracula. But does this book have any of the thresholds and their transitions that have been suggested as characteristics of Gothic literature? There is the chapter of Gull spiritually  travelling through space and time but this is scarcely fundamental to the story. There are two worlds, that of mundane Victorian London and the symbolic and spiritual Masonic London that exists in Gull's mind. This is an important theme and I suppose that if Gothic literature is equated with conspiracy theories this makes the work essentially Gothic.

My favourite line:

• Policeman talking about one of the butchered women: "makes you think there's naught to us but shit and mincemeat". This reminded me of remains of the corpse after the bombing in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: "the by-products of a butcher's shop"

Alan Moore also co-authored graphic novel V for Vendetta.

October 2017; a lot of pages

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

Portrait of Aldous Huxley

A classic dystopian novel, BNW is fundamentally a satire. I found the humour rather obvious and heavy-handed but a lady at my Eastbourne Central U3A group has convinced me that the book’s much funnier than I had seen: she quoted in particular the scene from the first page when the Director, described as having “a long chin and big, rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips” is talking to students who take down his words “straight from the horse’s mouth”. That’s funny. But he says it twice, so it still isn’t very subtle.

Perhaps the best bit of the book is the irony in which Huxley proposes a dystopia in which everyone is happy. Babies are hatched, genetically manipulated and brainwashed into five castes, the clever alphas and the sub-human epsilons who do the donkey work, but are quite content. Everyone belongs to everyone else and everywhere there is guilt-free promiscuous sex. There is no disease. There is no ageing. People work, play, and take soma, the wonder drug that just keeps them happy with no ill effects. The missing ingredient, for John the Savage, and for Helmholtz, is the opportunity for artistic freedom. At the climax of the philosophical debate, dissatisfied because “nothing costs enough here”, John claims this right. The World Controller responds: “you're claiming the right to be unhappy ... Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” (Ch 17) And John says ‘yes’. 

I think that is the kind of response that an Eton-educated, privileged member of the intellectual elite might make; I’m not sure that a member of the underclass would be so sure.

It isn’t really a novel. The only character who has internal conflicts is Bernard, who is a brilliant portrait of a weak, vacillating man who wants to have his cake and wants to eat it too, just like the rest of us. The ‘hero’ John the Savage faces conflicts too, but they are between what he wants and what the world will allow him to do; he scarcely has a recognisable character arc and certainly the book does not conform to the classic pattern of a tragedy. This is much more a ‘novel of ideas’, which is to say that it is fundamentally a fictionalised work of philosophy, like A Socratic dialogue, or like Candide. 

So the message is to the forefront and the message is a critique of society and a warning that, if the trends the author perceives are to continue, then the consequences will be unpleasant. So first it is important to consider the context in which the novel was written.

The contexts

Sexual promiscuity

The 1920s, which followed the slaughter of the First World War, which destabilised the old social order, was widely seen as a time of sexual promiscuity.

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928 and suggested the Samoan sexual mores were considerably more relaxed, especially in its toleration of adolescent promiscuity, than in Europe of the time. This book was a best-seller and was a key anthropological text for many years. Is it not ironic that the sexual promiscuity of the civilized world BNW is derived from the sexual promiscuity observed by ‘savages’ on an island?

Marie Stopes published Married Love, a best-selling book advocating, among other things, birth control, in 1918. She was accused of being a ‘Neo-Malthusian’ by a male doctor who opposed birth control and fought a controversial libel case against him in 1923, losing in the House of Lords in 1924. 

One of the key tensions in the book is the mismatch between Lenina and John. As Margaret Atwood says: the love affair between the Savage and Lenina is doomed because she wants sex for fun and he wants love and a real relationship. 

The title of the work is from lines spoken by Miranda in the Tempest when, having been brought up on an island where the only two males are her father and Caliban, an ogre, she first sees eligible men and falls in love at first sight with the male beauty of Ferdinand. John’s understanding of love is shaped by Shakespeare: when he sneaks into Lenina’s bedroom and watches her sleeping, he quotes Troilus talking about his adoration of Cressida and Romeo speaking about Juliet. (Ch 9) After watching a porn ‘feely’ film starring a black man (as the villain, natch) he remembers Othello. But why should Shakespeare’s view of romantic love (which was in his day the rebellious response to the orthodoxy of arranged matches as evidenced in many of the plots, in particular R&J) be the paradigm?

Huxley also wrote Ape and Essence (taking this title from a line in Measure for Measure, a play largely about sexual morality) about a post-nuclear-holocaust society in which sex has been harnessed entirely for the service of breeding; there are still orgies in the five weeks of the annual breeding season (males who can’t control themselves at other times are castrated).

Bolshevism

Upper class Britain in the 1920s was terrified of Bolshevism. The Russian Revolution was in 1917 and had been followed by British forces invading Russia to try to foment a counter-revolution. The General Strike took place in 1926 when upperclass volunteers conspired to defeat the workers. The names derived from the socialist revolutionaries (Bernard Marx, Lenine Crowne) and BNW emphasis on ‘stability’ may reflect these fears. 

Aldous Huxley was, of course, an Old Etonian (as was George Orwell, Huxley returned to Eton to teach for a year and Orwell was in Huxley’s French class) and this is a book (like 1984) in which an upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ male writes about a world created for upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ males (at least, in 1984, Winston Smith observes the ‘proles’ and even envies their ‘freedom’). In 1984, a book by the ‘Trotsky’ character (Goldberg?) states that a revolution is an opportunity for the middle class to replace the ruling class in the name of the working class; that the working class never gain power but only ever change their masters. BNW is just such a book.

Are there any books from this period written by lower class people about lower class people? Walter Greenwood published Love on the Dole in 1933 (BNW was written in 1931 and published in 1932, 1984 was famously written in 1948).

Economics

At the other end of the spectrum, the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s saw the Wall Street Crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression. Having initially spoken the Brave New World line in praise of the beauty of Lenina, John the Savage later uses it ironically two more times, and both times he is triggered by the sight of the clones. The book itself starts with the assembly line production of humans. They are created and conditioned to fit the assembly-line systems of production, a system invented (in 1913) by Henry Ford who also invented the Model-T Ford car, giving the book its religious focus: 

• “Standard men and women; in uniform batches. ... Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines! ... The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.” (Chapter 1).

One of the key features of the BNW society is also the insistence that everyone keeps on consuming (no-one mends clothes anymore). Capitalism needs continual growth in order to survive: “old clothes are beastly,' continued the untiring whisper. 'We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending” (Ch 3)

Eugenics

Huxley is living in an age when eugenics was seriously being considered, and not just by Hitler, and when it was seriously believed that genetic racial differences justified social stratification. Eugenics was a word coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1883; he believed that the British upper class owed its position to superior genes. TH Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, was grandfather of Aldous. A Eugenics Institute at UCL was first led by Galton and, following his retirement in 1907, by statistician Karl Pearson who believed in creating ‘a homogeneous white race, whose fertility shall markedly dominate that of the black’ and in discouraging reproduction among ‘the unthrifty … the mentally defective’ and ‘the criminal, the tramp and the congenital pauper’, insisting that the right to live did not confer the right to reproduce.

Marie Stopes was in favour of eugenics, warning against a "vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who ... populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and ... are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality.”

In the USA, in 1906 Kellog founded an institute to promote eugenics in the US: various states promoted forcible sterilisation of those deemed unfit, such as lunatics, and even forced euthanaisa (one mental institution put TB germs into the milk the patients drank, reasoning that those genetically immune would survive; the death rate was 30 to 40%. 

These were mainstream scientific views and are scientifically justified in the sense that if it is possible through selective breeding to create animals that are better in specific ways (eg racehorses that are faster, sheep that are woollier etc) then it should also be possible for humans though it may be morally indefensible. In BNW Huxley points out the possibility of using Eugenics to make assembly-line production even more efficient.

Relativity

The golf in BNW is played on a Riemann surface. Riemann was a mathematician who developed non-Euclidean geometry in 1854, in effect extending geometry from flat to curved surfaces. This became important following Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1915 which showed that space-time has curvature imposed upon it by mass. One presumes that this is what made Riemann’s work known to Huxley.

What aspects make us aware that Huxley is dealing with a dystopia?

The epigraph at the start of the novel is in French and quotes Nicolas Berdiaeff, (Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev who was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922): “Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive? … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivèe rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins “parfaite” et plus libre.” which can be translated as “Utopias appear to be much more achievable than previously thought. And we currently find ourselves faced with a much more agonizing question: How to avoid their definitive realization? … Utopias are achievable. Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less ‘perfect’ and freer society.”

The Outsider

Both Bernard (through nature, or at least the error while he was being developed) and John the Savage (through nurture) are outsiders. They have both been rejected by the societies in which they have grown up. 

“The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone.” (Ch 4)

Our Ford

Apart from the obvious word play (the use of the phrase ‘Our Ford’ as opposed to the Christian ‘Our Lord’, the description of Mustapha Mond, the “Resident Controller for Western Europe, one of the Ten World Controllers”, as “his fordship”), there are the religious Ts (crosses with their top cut off, representing, presumably, the ‘model-T- Ford car) and the confusion between Ford and Freud as “for some inscrutable reason” [and that’s irony!] Ford is said to have called himself “whenever he spoke of psychological matters”

‘Brave New World’

The title of the book is taken from The Tempest. They are quoted by John on three occasions ( chap 8, Chap11 and Chap 15). What are the differences in interpretation?

Chapter 8: The Savage, John, is hoping to go to the BNW. He has also fallen in love at first sight with Lenina. So he is using Miranda’s words in a hopeful, optimistic sense. Miranda, bedfazzled by the beautiful young men among the shipwrecked crew, says: ‘Oh wonder! /How many goodly creatures are there here! /How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, /That has such people in’t.’ to which her father Propsero retorts ‘’Tis new to thee’. He, of course, knows that these creatures are from the old world, and that they are his enemies. He knows the wickednesses of the old world. Both Miranda and John are naive innocents.

Chapter 11: Bernard takes John to a factory where all the workers have been bred for the precise task required (including left-handers where left-handedness is needed) and John repeats: ‘Oh brave new world, /That has such people in it’: This time it is in a clearly ironic context because, almost immediately, “the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.”

Chapter 15. Immediately following his mother’s death, John again encounters a horde of clones. “Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. ... 'How many goodly creatures are there here!' The singing words mocked him derisively. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world...' ... 'O brave new world, O brave new world...' In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. 'O brave new world!' Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. 'O brave new world!' It was a challenge, a command.” He now sees the phrase as a challenge and throws all the soma being handed to the clones out of the window, provoking a riot.

The debate

The main theme of the novel is summarised in the debate between Mustafa Mond and John.What are their opposing points of view and do you have any sympathy for Mond’ s ideas?

The preliminary arguments are given in the conversation between MM and John and Bernard and Helmholtz in Chapter 16:

• “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; ... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.” (Ch 16)

• “stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.” (Ch 16)

• “An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work--go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized--but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle--an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,' the Controller meditatively continued, 'goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles” (Ch 16)

• “The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” (Ch 16)

• The workers don’t find their work awful. “On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't.” (Ch 16) Of course, no-one actually asks the epsilons. This argument seems dangerously like the one I heard made in favour of people in Gambia being contented with the squalor of their lives because they didn’t know any different.

• The key requirement of a government is stability: “We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.” (Ch 16)

• But MM admits that the fundamental reason is that capitalism depends upon consumption: “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.” (Ch 16)

• “The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.” (Ch 17)

• “industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.” (Ch 17)

• “'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.” (Ch 17)

Common themes for dystopian novels

• 1984 by George Orwell: The little man against a Big authoritarian society. The complacency of the rulers who assume that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. The rebellion of the individual against the collective.

• Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley: set in a post-nuclear apocalypse world and presciently preaching against environmental catastrophe, A&E portrays a world in which gamma rays have made all but a despised minority 'on heat' only for a five week window every year; those males who are permanently randy are castrated. The Belial-worshipping society is communist-authoritarian and babies born with more than the usual number of disabilities (thanks to gamma rays) are killed as infants just before the next round of copulation. The religion is devil-worship on the grounds that the devil is in all of us as clearly evidenced by the way mankind repeatedly self-destructs. The themes of an authoritarian society (in this case a hierocracy) and the manipulation of the sex-drive are reminiscent of BNW. There is also a message that individuality must be crushed: "If a machine is fool-proof, it must also be skill-proof, talent-proof, inspiration-proof. Your money back if the product should be faulty and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality." The title comes from another Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure: “But man, proud man, /Drest in a little brief authority, /Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d; /His glassy essence, like an angry ape, /Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, /As make the angels weep.” M4M, of course, is about the hypocrisy of the lords of society punishing inappropriate sex (and the fascinating concept of the Duke who, like God, set up the imperfect world, departs to see what happens, and returns at the end to condemn.

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

• The Book of Dave by Will Self

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall

• The Kids of God by Dave Appleby: a rather imperfect authoritarian society where control and domination is fragile and crumbling.

Are all dystopias necessarily totalitarian? Most modern dystopias written in the western world, or influenced by western mores, seem to assume that freedom, at least artistic freedom, is good, control is bad. And yet the alternative is anarchy.

The only anarchic dystopia that I can think of is that in Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.

The third alternative?

AH in his 1946 foreword to BNW says that he should have offered the Savage a third alternative “the possibility of sanity ... in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community, economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative.” 

According to wikipedia: Henry George was a theorist whose best-selling and hugely influential book ‘Progress and Poverty’ showed how technological and social progress could exacerbate poverty. For example, if public services are improved, land and natural resources  become more valuable. Those who own these resources therefore seek higher returns. Speculation drives up the price of land faster than wealth can be produced and therefore the wealth left over to pay for wages is reduced. This results in businesses at the margin failing, resulting in a depression causing unemployment. His solution was to tax everything freely supplied by nature but held as private property; he believed this would be sufficient to make other taxes unnecessary and provide limitless investment in public services as well as a basic income. 

Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist who believed that the hallmark of a successful society (as observed in animals and pre-industrial societies) was mutuality and co-operation as opposed to the competition advocated by social Darwinists. He therefore proposed an economic system based on mutual exchange and voluntary cooperation. 

Quotations

• “That is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.' (Ch 1: spoken by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning)
• “Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work-tables.” (Ch 1)
• “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green ... and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.” (Ch 2)
• “Home, home--a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells. ... And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)... brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, 'My baby, my baby,' over and over again. 'My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps...' ... Our Ford--or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters--Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers--was therefore full of misery; full of mothers--therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts--full of madness and suicide.” (Ch 3)
• “every one belongs to every one else” (Ch 3)
• “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.” (Ch 3)
• “Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” (Ch 4)
• “The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them.” (Ch 5) Presumably the ‘little death’ is a translation of the  French phrase ‘petite mort’ which is used as a euphemism for orgasm.
• “Murder kills only the individual ... Unorthodoxy ... it strikes at Society itself.” (Ch 10)
• “That young man will come to a bad end,' they said, prophesying the more confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the end was bad.” (Ch 11)
• “a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing.” (Ch 11)
• “Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose--well, you didn't know what the result might be.” (Ch 12)
• “It was the sort of idea that might easily de-condition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes--make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.” (Ch 12)
• “as I make the laws here, I can also break them” (Ch 16)
• “you can't make tragedies without social instability” (Ch 16)
• “a philosopher [is] ... a man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth.” (Ch 17)
• “At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.” (Ch 17)
• “You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.” (Ch 17)

Reread April 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Time Machine" by H G Wells

This classic of science fiction was published in 1895 (according to wikipedia; my edition says 1898).

The Time Traveller (we never know his name, indeed the only names we are given throughout are of "Filby, an argumentative person with red hair" (p 1) and Weena, the TT's love interest of the future) discusses theories of time travel with sceptical friends, including the narrator. Inviting them to dinner he arrives late and very dishevelled; he changes and insists on eating (a brilliant bit of making the reader wait just when the tension is at its height) before telling his story.

He says he travelled forwards in time to the year 802,701. Here he met the Eloi, delicate descendants of mankind who play in the meadows and live an incurious, fruit eating life. Soon he discovers that underground dwell the Morlocks, pale, with large red eyes that can see in the dark. The Morlocks prey on the Eloi, indeed it may be that the Eloi are kept like cattle for the Morlocks to eat. The TT theorises that the Eloi descended from the aristocrats and the Morlocks from the working classes, driven underground. But the Morlocks have stolen the Time Machine and the TT has to recapture it. In the battle to do so Weena dies.

Presumably this is an allegory of the afterlife (literally after the Time Traveller has lived, at least on Earth). The Eloi are the dwellers in the Edenic Elysian fields of heaven; the Morlocks are the devils in their subterranean hell.

The TT, reunited with his Machine, travels forwards to a future when tidal drag has stopped the rotation of the earth, when the sun is swelling into a red giant, and when the seashore is populated by giant crabs and octopuses. Then he returns to the present.

But they don't believe him. The next day, in an attempt to secure proof of what he has seen, the TT sets off again. He never returns.

Wells writers a simple straightforward story to illustrate his theories of social Darwinism: that we shall evolve to reflect the way we are. He achieves suspension of disbelief by having one central unlikelihood (time travel) bolstered by a great deal of mundane realism, such as the dinner party guests and the manufacture of the machine and the buildings in the world of the Eloi.

A classic frame structure: the bulk of the story is the Time Traveller's account of his adventure but it is both topped and tailed by the unknown narrator.

Is this in the Gothic tradition? According to Aguirre (2008; p 2) Gothic literature abounds in liminality, as does science fiction. Perhaps the perceived incoherence between science and fiction predisposes one towards liminality. Wisker (2007; p 412) describes both thresholds: "doorsteps or windows through which you do or do not invite the ghost or vampire” and zones: “the liminal spaces of existence, hovering between being and unbeing, dead and undead." (Aguirre, M., 2008. Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction. Gothic Studies, 10(2), pp. 1. Wisker, G., 2007. Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic. Pedagogy, 7(3), pp. 401-425.) This suggests that the Gothic element is the crossing of the threshold between the everyday mundane world and the world of dreams and nightmares. It isn't really about the tunnels (though that is a clear element in Gothic literature, for example in The Monk by Matthew Lewis, the Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, (A Sicilian Romance by Anne Radcliffe). The crossing of the threshold is, of course, a necessary structural element in much science fiction: what is the TARDIS of Doctor Who but a Time Machine (and don't forget all those endless corridors!)?
Aguirre also says (pp 2 - 3) that "Gothic can be said to postulate two zones: on the one hand, the human domain of rationality and intelligible events; on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous which transcends human reason (but which may not be supernatural). These are separated by some manner of threshold and plots invariably involve movement from one side to the other - a movement which, most often, is presented as a transgression, a violation of boundaries." (Aguirre 2008; p 2-3) No violation as such in the Time Machine (although the Time Traveller does pay for the Travel with his life) but the cotrast between the everyday world of eating dinner and the Time Traveller's adventure world is phenomenal.

Aguirre also claims (p 5) that narrative forms of Gothic literature often involve a labyrinth (provided by the underground passages of the Eloi) and a tale within a tale. Looks a pretty convincing case for placing this book within the tradition of Gothic literature.

Selected quotes:

• "night followed day like the flapping of a black wing." (p 11)
• "That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies." (p 19)
• "certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure." (p 20)
• "That has ever been the fate of energy in security: it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come langour and decay." (p 20)
• "We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity" (p 21)
• "the devil begotten of fear and blind anger was ill curbed." (p 24)
• "The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility." (p 36)
• "intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. ... There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change." (p 49)
• "The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everyone knows now, he has never returned." (p 58; final sentences apart from the Epilogue).

A very short classic. Easy to read. October 2017; 58 pages

Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess

A masterpiece (rated 82nd in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time, 68th by a BBC poll, and selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began, 1923) by the man who wrote so many other masterpieces including:

• "Earthly Powers": fabulous
• The Enderby novels
• The Malay trilogy
• One hand clapping
• Dead Man in Deptford about Christopher Marlowe

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry." (p 3) 

Alex and his three droogs are thugs and robbers in a dystopian world. Although some aspects of society are rigidly controlled in a mirror to soviet society in which everyone lives in tower blocks and everyone has to either go to school or work, the police have lost control of the night and youth gangs roam the streets. 

And Alex inhabits an alternate reality. He and his droogs have their own argot, nadsat: it is the language that first excites when you read the book. At the start it is overwhelming: “Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchok some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four.” (p 3) is one of the easier sentences. But it is surprising how swiftly one learns the lingo. Then, having entered the mind of Alex through being able to understand his inner voice, we enter also his world of violence. In the first few pages Alex and his droogs beat up an old man and vandalise his library books, rob a “sweets and cancers shop” (p 9), and steal a car and drive out to the countryside to break and enter and beat up an author and gang rape his wife. The film was condemned at the time for its violence but it is all there in the book. And the book ensures that you, sharing the language of Alex, are aware of his joy in violence. He loves it. It turns him on. It excites him. It fulfils him. He is overwhelmed by it.

He also loves and is overwhelmed by classical music. “Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.” (p 26) is a reaction to just a few notes he hears sung. He comes home from the gang rape and lies in bed listening to a violin concerto. The next day, truanting from school, he meets two young girls at the record shop and takes them home, gets them drunk and brutally rapes them to the last movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony, the Song of Joy: "then these two young ptitsas were not acting the big lady sophisto no more. They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home  and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. ... They were creeching and going ow ow ow as they put heir platties on, and they were like punchipunching me with their teeny fists as I lay there dirty and nagoy and fair shagged and fagged on the bed ... Then they were going down the stairs and I dropped off to sleep, still with the old Joy Joy Joy crashing and howling away." (p 36) Thus with this distinctive narratorial voice sex and violence and classical music are combined.

Alex is captured and jailed and given experimental aversion therapy to brainwash him into being good. But when he is released he discovers that not only can he not stand the thought of violence but also he can't stand his music. Rejected by his parents and his droogs, subjected to violence from his victims, he is used by political subversives in a battle against the government and it is only through a suicide attempt that his brainwashing is undone.

There are some nice parallels between the start of part one and the start of part two: The first line, “What's it going to be then, eh?” (p 3) is repeated four times over the first few pages. It is then repeated four times at the start of part two and four times in part three although one of those is left until the last few pages. “In out in out” is how Alex refers to sex. But when he is in prison at the start of part two the chaplain asks “is it going to be in and out and in and out of institutions?” The three parts are carefully structured: Alex as vicious teenage tearaway; Alex in prison and undergoing experimental treatment to make him good; Alex trying to survive in a post prison world. It is a morality play in three acts. The message? Young people go through a naughty phase? There is only morality if there is a choice? A totalitarian society is bad because it takes that choice away?

Selected quotes:

• “Then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.” (p 7)
• “He said nothing for fear of being called gloopy and a domeless wonderboy.” (p 9)
• “We went back to town, running over odd squealing things on the way.” (p 20) 
• “I felt all the little malenky hairs on my plott standing endwise and the shivers crawling up like slow malenky lizards and then down again.” (p 22)
• “I got more razdraz inside, calmer out.” (p 24) 
• “This biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into the cause of goodness, so why the other shop?” (p 31)
• “Civilized my syphilised yarbles.” (p 32)
• “And so I lead my three droogs out to my doom.” (p 43)
• “That was everything. I’d done the lot, now. And me still only fifteen.” (p 56)

A stunningly brilliant book pushed into stratospheric orbit by the language. Overwhelming. A masterpiece.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Legends of Alexander the Great " translated and edited by Richard Stoneman

This compilation of legends about Alexander the Great is set in India. He and his army encounter terrible monsters including hippopotami, gold-digging ants, scorpions, dragons, and the terrible Odontotyrannus; they hear of dog-headed men and men whose head is beneath their shoulders. Alexander meets the Brahmans, naked philosophers who have no possessions and who lecture him on his greed and his ambition. There are extracts from better known works which refer to Alexander, such as the Confessio Amantis by John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer who plays a bit part in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play co-written by Shakespeare based on a work by Gower, and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Good fun. It was particularly interesting to note how these different works quoted (with citation) one another.

Some great lines:

• “A chapati is best eaten from the edges inwards rather than from the centre outwards.” (p xvii)
• “Once you have started inventing strange hybrids it is not hard to go on.” (p xix)
• from Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle
• “A soldier named Zefirus discovered some water in a hollow rock; he filled his own helmet with it and brought it to me [Alexander], being more zealous for my life than for his own. Then I called together the whole army and in the sight of them all I poured away the water. I thought that if the army saw me drinking it would only make them feel even more thirsty.” (p 6)
• from On the Wonders of the East [Pharasmanes to Hadrian]
• “There are found ants the size of dogs, with feet like locusts. They are red and black and they dig for gold.” (p 21)
• from Palladius On the Life of the Brahmans
• “How many kings of foolishness do you think rule over fools? Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, tongue, stomach, genitals, the entire flesh of your body. There are many of them within, like implacable mistresses and insatiable tyrants, making endless demands; desires, avarice, love of pleasure, murder, assassination, meanness, dispute: to all of these and more men or enslaved, for these they kill and are killed.” (p 40)
• “Your mind is your tongue and your brains are in your lips.” (p 40)
• “You surround yourselves with many possessions and take pride in them, blind to the fact that none of them can help you to the truth: gold does not sustain the soul, nor fatten the body; quite the contrary, it darkens the soul and emaciates the body.” (p 41) 
• “Every human desire ceases when it is satisfied, because this is inherent in nature. But the desire for wealth knows no satiety, because it is against nature. That is why you adorn yourselves with it and glory in it, regarding yourselves as superior to other men. And that is why you take as your own what belongs to everyone” (p 41) 
• “The groans of the wronged will be the punishment of the wrongdoers.” (p 43)
• “Desire is the mother of penury ... It is miserable because it never finds what it seeks, is never content with what it has, but is tortured with lust for what it does not have.” (p 45) 
• “I do not eat fish like a lion, the flesh of other animals does not rot within me, I do not become a grave of dead animals.” (pp 45 - 46)
• “He who wishes to please everybody must be the slave of everybody.” (p 51)
• from The Correspondence of Alexander and Dindimus
• “If one man would carrying a lit torch and other men were to come and light other torches from the first: it would not lose its own light.” (p 57)
• “We are not dwellers in this world here as if we expected to be here forever; rather we are sojourners, here for a temporary visit.” (p 64)
• “The only glory to be found in blindness and poverty is that blindness does not see what it lacks and poverty has no way of getting it.” (p 66)

October 2017; 104 pages