"Ulysses Found" by Ernle Bradford

Based on a lifetime of sailing the Mediterranean in a small boat, this book locates the places in Homer's Odyssey. Homer often gives precise sailing instructions and detailed descriptions of harbours (the exception is the clearly mythical voyage to the land of the dead) and Bradford uses these to trace the voyage. Sometimes Bradford agrees with classical sources (almost everyone locates Scylla and Charybdis in the Messina strait between Sicily and Italy) and sometimes he disagrees but in every case he has excellent reasons for his identification. Of course, this all assumes that Homer was working with a sailor or sailors or at least with their log books, even when, as Bradford admits, citing the lack of any encounters with other voyagers in the Odyssey, the Greeks of Homer's time never adventured into the Western Mediterranean.

This is a brilliant, fascinating, well argued and convincing book and the meat of the argument is perfectly spiced with anecdotes about the author's own adventures.

The route that Bradford suggests makes sense both in terms of directions, times and likely speeds, and the descriptions of land. In short, Bradford suggests Ulysses travelled north from Troy to raid the Thracian coast near Mount Ismaro. He was then driven by a storm to the Island of Djerba off the Libyan coast, the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He then travelled north to the land of the Cyclopes in SE Sicily, north to Ustica (the Island of Aeoleus) and again north to Bonifacio on southern Corsica, the Land of the Laestrygonians. He then travelled east to Circe's island (actually a headland) on the Italian coast north of Naples. After Circe he travelled west through the r (to the Land of the Dead) and then back to Circe. Leaving her again he went via the Isles of the Sirens (just south of the Sorrento peninsula) through the Messian straits (Scylla and Charybdis) to Taormina in Sicily where grazed the Cattle of the Sun. He spent years on Calypsos island (Malta) before finally travelling home via Corfu (the Land of the Phaeacians).

I've created a series of maps for this which can be found here


Fascinating bits:

• Odysseus means ‘son of wrath’. But Ulysses derives from Olysseus which comes from O Lukos, ‘the wolf’
• When young U is wounded in the thigh by a boar in a hunting accident. “This wounding in the thigh seems to equate him with a number of eastern gods, Tammuz, Adonis, and Cretan Zeus, all of whom were wounded and killed by a boar. These stories all stem from a Phoenician source.” 
• “The rudder, as we know it today, was a north European invention, and probably originated in the Baltic. This axled, hinged rudder was still considered something of a modern invention when used in the caravels of Henry the Navigator in the early 15th century. It was unknown in the classical world.”
• Odyssey ca C12 BC: “ the Cretan, or Minoan, seapower had collapsed before invaders from the north ... the Phoenicians had not yet founded their colonies on the North African coast.”
• Polyphemus has ‘eyebrows’ in the Odyssey: “It is not till later times that he becomes monophthalmic.”
• “Garlic itself has long been associated with magical properties ... s late as the 14th century ... we find that garlic was reputed to neutralize the lodestone, thus putting the magnetic compass out of action.”
• “Comparatively few rivers of any size flow into the Mediterranean, and it loses by evaporation two-thirds more than it receives from its rivers. This steady loss is made good by an inflow of water from the Atlantic.” This will allow U to drift back to the Med after visiting the ‘land of the dead’.
• “The two mountains which face each other across the Strait were called ‘The Pillars of Melkarth’ by the Phoenicians. They took their name from the twin pillars of the great temple of Melkarth in the city of Tyre. ... Melkarth was not only a sea god in Phoenician mythology, he was also Lord of the Underworld, and it was between the pillars of the Strait of Gibraltar that he was believed to dwell.” which is why C sent U to Gibraltar to go into the Underworld.
• “Baltic Amber was being imported overland into prehistoric Greece centuries before the Homeric period.”
• “It was the Phoenicians who first gave the island its name, Maleth or Malet - the Shelter, Haven, or Hiding Place ... the word ‘Calypso’ in Greek means ‘hidden’ or ‘hider’, and the Homeric words for Calypso’s isle, Neesos Kalupsous, can best be translated in English as ‘The Island of the Hiding Place’.”
• “The Maltese archipelago was inhabited many centuries before the basin of the Mediterranean was flooded.”

Great quotes

• “I do not think that anything is lost by attempting to find a skeleton - however magnificent the cupboard that hides it.”
• “Ulysses was the shopkeeper with his thumb on the scales, and an eye for the girls, handy with a knife in a dark alley, and at the same time in some strange fashion or other, capable of honesty - or was it of great consistency? - over most of the major issues.” 
• “When men return from war it is their record as fighting men which usually determines their immediate position in society. Inevitably within a short time the standards of judgement change, so that often the war hero turns out to be a peace-time failure.”
• “In Trapani I have felt history as heavy as a plush curtain. ... One's own life is seen as no more than a minute drop of resin oozing from the trunk of some giant tree.”
• “Places are little in themselves, you must earn them by your voyage.”

A wonderful voyage.

November 2018; 221 pages

"The Wench is Dead" by Colin Dexter

Morse is in hospital with a stomach ulcer. For over a week! I suspect that he would have been seen in A & E and sent home with some tablets nowadays. Whilst there, putty in the hands of alternately  strict and beautiful nurses, he reads about a murder case of the 1800s and begins to suspect that the original verdict is incorrect. Aided by the indefatigable Sergeant Lewis and a visiting librarian he begins to put together the evidence that will unravel the mystery.

Fascinating from its account of how much leisure illness afforded us in the 1980s, Dexter successfully pads out a slimline murder mystery.

"There is a sadness which invariably and mysteriously accompanies the conclusion of any journey ... a presage of the last journey we all must take." (C 29)

A Morse book. The series started with Last Bus to Woodstock.

This book won the Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association in 1989. Other winners include:

• The Dry in 2017
• Dodgers in 2016
• The Spy who came in from the Cold in 1963

November 2018; 134 pages

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

"Last Bus to Woodstock" by Colin Dexter

The very first Inspector Morse mystery, written in 1975.  It also introduces his sidekick, Sergeant Lewis. Set in the days when men, particularly Oxford dons, thought nothing of driving to a country pub for a few drinks, a spot of misogynist conversation, some casual sex with compliant barmaids or secretaries (who are apparently always up for it), and then driving back home and when you had to go to a cinema or back street newsagent to access pornography, this concerns a girl who, having hitch-hiked to Woodstock, is found with the skull smashed in in a pub car park. Although it depends too much on coincidence piled on coincidence for my taste, it is full of misdirection and there are some nice moments in which the author delays the reveal just a little bit longer.

Some great lines:

• "Her pride and poverty semi-detached was still her real home." (Prelude)
• "As I get older I must confess to the greater appreciation of two things in life - natural beauty and the delights of the belly." (C 11)
• "There was something, too, about the hands of people who worked with metal: a sort of ingrained griminess, however patiently they were scrubbed." (C 22)

November 2018; 182 pages

"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare

The classic love story about "star-cross'd lovers".

It is interesting that there is a prologue in the form of a sonnet which gives the plot away and that the Chorus delivers another sonnet prologue to Act Two but then the prologue's cease. This is a bit like the 'play within a play' idea in The Taming of the Shrew which Shakespeare also seems to have forgotten half way through. 

There is also a lot of word play and other stuff going on. The Nurse is a very garrulous figure of fun. Romeo's mates, Mercutio and Benvolio, do a lot of stag-talk (eg “Draw thy tool ... My naked weapon is out”). And the servants regularly come in with some comedy. Either Shakespeare needed fillers to pad out his rather simple story or he realised that the audience would want some gagging going on before the denouement.

Romeo Montague, pining with unrequited love for Rosalind, intercepts an invitation to a feast she will be present at ... but it is hosted by his family's sworn enemies, the Capulets. Going hidden to the feast he sees and falls in love with thirteen year old Juliet Capulet and she with him. Later that night, in the famous balcony scene, they pledge their love to one another and arrange a meeting at the holy cell of Friar Lawrence to get married.

But after they are married Romeo gets involved in a street brawl and kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt. This gets him banished from the city. Meanwhile, Juliet;s parents have made plans for her to marry Paris.

Romeo steals into Juliet's bedroom to consummate his marriage before fleeing to Mantua.

Friar Lawrence now gives Juliet a potion so she can feign death rather than marry Paris. The Friar's plan is for Romeo to come to the vault, disinter Juliet, and take her to Mantua. But the Friar's letter is dismayed and Romeo only hears that Juliet has died.

Romeo returns to Verona. Entering the vault he drinks poison to be with his wife. She then awakens, sees him dead, and stabs herself with his dagger.

November 2018

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

"Deja Dead" by Kathy Reichs

A serial killer is loose in Montreal. Pathologist Temperance Brennan decides the cops aren't working hard enough so conducts a few investigations on her own.

The strength of this otherwise predictable yarn lies in the detailed descriptions of, for example, the saw marks on the bones of a dissected corpse. For me, however, there was simply too much detail. Two pages on the different sorts of saws and their teeth? I skipped a lot of that. I guess I wasn't the target audience. We're all different.

In chapter 38 there seems to be a confusion between impotence (the inability to get an erection) with infertility (“goodbye spermatogenesis” as the detective says. This wouldn't matter ... except in a book which sells itself on medical detail.

There were some nice descriptions:

• “We sure aren't sitting any speed records clipping this worm.” (C 8)
• “Probably makes him harder than a math final.” (C 12)
• “His fingers felt cold and limp, like carrots kept too long in a cooler bin.” (C 16)
• “The little bastard’s about to blow a vocal chord. You don't get over there pretty quick he's going to circle right up his own asshole.” (C 17)
• “Two black kids ... wore ... pants big enough to have a nuclear family.” (C 35)

But I felt that “His eyes looked cold and hard, like some Mesozoic mammal.” (C 41) was meaningless. Does anyone know what the eyes of Mesozoic mammals (the very first mammals in the fossil record) looked like? And even if scientists do, I don't. 

But my most serious objection to this all-too-putdownable doorstopper was the stupidity of the main character. Even after discovering that she is personally being stalked by the serial killer, even after her best friend has been murdered, even after the killer has left a human head on her lawn, she still evades her police protection detail to go swanning about in Montreal's red light district. Even after finding that said killer has taken an interest in her daughter she fails to alert the police when she discovers her daughter's backpack outside her front door but can't find or in any way contact her daughter. Instead she goes into her house and waits for the serial killer to come and murder her. There comes a point when I refuse to suspend by disbelief any further.

November 2018; 509 pages

"The Peterloo Massacre" by Joyce Marlow

On 16th August 1819 there was a mass meeting held at St Peter's Fields in Manchester protesting against the starvation wages being paid to cotton spinners and particularly weavers, and against the old system of Parliamentary representation which meant that Manchester, then the second largest city in England, had no MP. The meeting was addressed by Henry Hunt, a famous Radical. The Mancunian authorities were nervous that the crowd were going to attempt a revolution so they read the Riot Act and decided to arrest Hunt. The size of the crowd, tens of thousands, meant that they felt the police, mostly consisting of volunteer Special Constables recruited for the occasion, would be unable to accomplish the arrest and the dispersal of the crowd so the magistrates requested military back up. The Manchester  and Salford Yeoman Cavalry, a company of part-time amateur soldiers, were in readiness, having sharpened their sabres when recruited to attend the meeting. They had also been fortifying their nerves with spirits and were drunk. They charged the crowd resulting in at least a dozen deaths from trampling and sabre wounds and several hundred injuries. Since this happened four years after the Battle of Waterloo it became known as the Peter Loo, or Peter-Loo, or Peterloo Massacre. The right-wing reactionary Tory government of Prime Minister Lord Liverpool proceeded to refuse demands for an inquiry, to exonerate the panicking magistrates (promoting one of them) and to praise the over-reacting and murderous Yeomanry. They even prosecuted the Radicals who had been there and jailed a number of them. The Radical movement collapsed afterwards. However, it may be that the memory of Peterloo helped bring about the parliamentary reforms starting with the Reform Bill of 1832.

This is a well-written book. The first half is concerned with the situation before the Massacre: the economic condition of the weavers and spinners during the early Industrial Revolution, and the development of radical and Radical thought. The archaic methods of governing Manchester, a market borough owned by the Lord of the Manor who appointed the BoroughReeve, the Court of Leet, and the two Constables (while attempting to sell his manorial rights for £90,000), contributed to a magistracy that was out of touch with the people and prone to panic. The actual Massacre takes only a couple of chapters; after all, it happened quickly. The truly shocking aftermath of government reaction takes the rest of the book. Despite the fact that the gory bits are dealt with swiftly, this is a fascinating read.

A slice of working class history that deserves to be better known. November 2018; 208 pages

"The Loney" by Andrew Michael Hurley

Winner of the Costa debut novel award in 2015.

The Loney is a bleak place on the Cumbrian coast where the tides can roar in and drown the unsuspecting. And in an isolated farmhouse three couples, two children and their parish priest arrive for a Catholic retreat with the ambition of effecting a miraculous cure for one of the boys who is mute. But their belief in God is challenged by mysterious things that begin to happen and by sinister men who seem to want to chase them away. And what is happening in the old house on the island that the tides cut off.

The Sunday Times called it an "excursion into terror". I wasn't in the least terrified. The most interesting part of the book is the character of the narrator's mother who is an obssessive compulsive religious; for whom religion is ritual and every ritual has to be performed correctly in every detail if there is to be any chance that God will perform a miracle and cure her mute, retarded son. In this she battles everyone including the gentle forgiving parish priest who is, in her eyes, no adequate replacement for the cruel disciplinarian he replaced. This is a novel in which religion is dissected: the narrow cruelties of small-minded ritualists versus forgiving generosity; the derelict customs of the sterile good versus the evil fecundity of magic.

The book is beautifully written. The descriptions are lovely and the evocation of the landscape masterful. The characters are depicted perfectly. But the plot is a textbook in hinting. Who are the sinister local men and what do they want? Why has a room in the house been sealed off and what is in it? Who is the very pregnant schoolgirl in the Daimler? Why is there a gun under the floorboards? And how did Father Wilfred die?

Some wonderful moments:

• "The emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all ... more the soggy afterbirth of winter." (C 2)
• "I'd never seen a man be so unkind to his own body." (C 2)
• "Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance." (C 2)
• "The specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither."(C 3)
• "All along the beach ... the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner."(C 8)
• "It was an albino with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood." (C 10)
• "Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children." (C 12)
• "He was the type that, given a different time and place, would have joined the Hitler Youth like a shot or been on the front row at a public hanging." (C 14)
• "Death was a poor draughtsman and had rendered his likeness just a little off-centre, giving him the look of someone who was almost familiar but lacking the something that made him so." (C 23)
• "Praying's like tuning a radio ... You have to be on the right frequency, otherwise all God hears is static." (C 23)

A perfectly structured book with great characterisation and an evocative setting. A page-turner. November 2018; 360 pages

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

"The Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe

This is a Kafkaesque novel. In prose suited to an impartial report this book tells of a teacher whose hobby is entomology. Seeking beetles he comes to a weird sand-bound village near the sea. He spends the night in a house at the bottom of the sand-pit ... and awakes to find he is trapped, condemned to labour digging sand out of the hole he is in. Of course he tries to escape ...

It seems to be a metaphor for life, in which we try to deny the necessities but time sweeps our dreams away and buries them.

This is not a page-turner although, like Kafka, it is very easy to read. It is wonderful because of its profound, though troubling, insight into the human condition, such as:

• “Punishment inflicted ... would mean that a crime had been paid for.” (C 7)
• "Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost." (C 18)
• "Time cannot be spurred on like a horse. But it is not quite so slow as a pushcart." (C 19)
• “Obligation is a man's passport among his fellow men” (C 19)
• “Life is a bound diary, and one first page is plenty for one book.” (C 19)
• “More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.” (C 21)
• “One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.” (C 24)
• “Even flies won't come if you don't advertise.” (C 24)
• “It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.” (C 25)
• “What was the use of individuality when one was on the point of death?” (C 26)
• “Three days a beggar, always a beggar they say.” (C 28)
• “The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.” (C 28)
• “Patience itself was not necessarily defeat. Rather, defeat really began when patience was thought to be defeat.” (C 28)

As well insight he has some grotesquely original descriptions. I don't think I'll ever forget the boiled gristle or the taste of ear wax:

• “The man answered her with eyes in which time had ceased to run.” (C 20)
• “A strong smell like boiled gristle surrounded her.” (C 20)
• “He had dozed off for a moment, rolling over in the sweat and secretions which smelled like rancid fish oil.” (C 21)
• “His vocal cords were shredded like strands of dried squid” (C 21)
• “Maybe even a human being could sing such a song ... If tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears ... if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra ... if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids.” (C 22)
• “There was nothing that tasted so good as one's own ear wax ... it was better than real cheese.” (C 24)
• “Suddenly a sorrow the colour of dawn welled up in him.” (C 27) 

And there are other great quotes:

• “The village, resembling a cross-section of a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes lay sprawled over the village. Either way, it was a disturbing and unsettling landscape.” (C2)
• “Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.” (C 6)
• “It was like to trying to float a house in the sea by brushing the water aside. You floated a ship on water in accordance with the properties of water.” (C 6) 
• “Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself.” (C 11)
• “It only happened in novels or movies that summer was filled with dazzling sun. What existed in reality were humble, small town Sundays ... ... little scenes everyone has seen in the corner of some trolley ... people's pathetic jealousy and impatience with others’ happiness.” (C 14)
• “Why did places where animals live have such an unpleasant smell? Wouldn't it be fine if there were animals that smelled like flowers!” (C 24)

In the end, there is a sense of defeat: “They might as well lick each other's wounds. but they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.” (C 27)

Very thought-provoking. November 2018; 240 pages

"H. G. Wells" by Lovat Dickson

This is a biography of the writer of science fiction novels such as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man, of 'serious' novels such as Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, and Love and Mr Lewisham, of a History of the world and many, many more books. Starting life as the son of ex-servants (told of in Tono-Bungay), failing to impress as a draper's apprentice, a chemist's apprentice, and a draper's apprentice (again), then failing as a teacher because his cousin the headmaster had "forged the necessary references and documents to obtain the position", enduring grinding poverty as a student, he became a lifelong socialist. Wells sparred with George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs before leaving the Fabians; later he interviewed both Lenin and Stalin. The private life of Dickson's "lusty, whoring, meat-eating, tubby hero" was scandalous, leaving his first wife to run away with the woman who became his second, then engineering a marriage that left him free to have affairs (he wasn't the only one: children's novelist Edith Nesbit lived among many children fathered by her husband - and their mothers), including fathering novelist and historian Anthony West on his long-standing lover, author Rebecca West (who wrote The Return of the Solider). Novels reflecting his advocacy of free love proved rather difficult even for a world famous author to publish in the years before the First World War. This book makes the point that we sometimes see the First World War as the watershed, after which the old order could no longer stand, but change was occurring before then. "Antagonisms between classes, between generations, even between the sexes, were expressing themselves in strikes and lockouts, in lack of sympathy between social classes, in women's struggle for emancipation, in political uncertainties. A new order was evolving, making the young impatient to inherit their destiny, and the old grimly reluctant to yield up authority." (C 12)

He was incredibly influential. "Test him for prophetic accuracy at any point, and he is nearly always right." (C 19). One book, The World Set Free, with its prediction of atomic warfare written in 1913, so horrified Leo Szilard that when he sought to patent his idea of a nuclear chain reaction he assigned the patent to the British Admiralty in order that it might be kept secret.

Yet somehow this biography failed to enthrall me. It virtually ignored some of his most famous works, such as The Invisible Man, concentrating instead on charting the development of his ideas in some of his later works. I was sometimes confused by the chronology. There were moments when episodes in the books were linked with real life experiences, and it is clear that Wells frequently turned friends and acquaintances (and enemies) into characters, but I still wanted more about the writing and less about the life. Perhaps I am being unrealistic. Perhaps I should read a literary evaluation rather than a biography.

Some more great lines:

• "if an angel were to appear on earth, somebody would be sure to shoot it." (C 5)
• "Jealousy and possessiveness are the natural accompaniment of any love affair" (C 6)
• "the heaven Wells dreamed of in 1900 bears a distinct resemblance to the 1984 hell imagined half a century later by George Orwell." (C 7)
• "The Christian Christ is too fine for him; he had no petty weaknesses." (C 9)
• "He saw all the scandal as emanating from the Old Gang in the Fabian Society - not surprisingly, since he had succeeded in seducing the daughters of two of its most eminent members" (C 11)
• "part of the price for such a misdemeanour has to be paid by those who have not drunk the wine and eaten the cake." (C 11)
• "Self-sacrifice is a dream and self-restraint a delusion." (C 11)
• "He was not powerless against the surge of sex so much as seeking it ... as a sensual release to a mind overburdened by thought." (C 12)
• "Popular newspapers inclined the popular mind to the persuasion that just outside their humdrum lives drama impended." (C13) Panem et circenses I suppose.
• "Sex had got out of the pages of daring novels and into the bed of the common man" (C 16)
• "It was a poor time for prophets, since all of them must be Cassandras." (C 18)

October 2018; 317 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

"Acts of Undressing" by Barbara Brownie

This is a fascinating book about something we do every day which can be regarded as extreme: taking our clothes off. The author covers (or should that be uncovers) public changing places; striptease and burlesque; clothes designed to reveal such as slashed jeans, skirts with slits and fishnet stockings; the sounds of zippers, poppers and Velcro; streaking, mooning and flashing; St Francis of Assissi (!); undressing as protest; denuding for dominance; sociofugal places; abandoned clothes as territorial markers; shoefiti and pseudocide.

Absolutely fascinating and easy to read.

Great quotes:

• “The human body is born naked, but moments after birth the body is clothed and begins a lifelong cycle of dressing and undressing.”
• “The institutionalization and ubiquity of the nude body have prompted striptease performers to seek new means of delaying gratification, and so in contemporary burlesque the focus of performance is the undressing, not the nudity that results.”
• “The burlesque striptease is ... intermittent: punctuated by the removal of each part of the costume. There is typically a pause for celebration between each removal, as the audience is given time to appreciate the sight of the freshly unveiled area of skin or costume.”
• “Fasteners cry out to be unfastened. They provide visual cues to how a garment may be removed from the body”
• “As had been so well illustrated in Brave New World, the zipper’s sexual connotations arose largely because of the speed and ease at which it permits disrobing.”
• "Zips, poppers and Velcro all have distinctive sounds ... Some kinds of fastenings make sounds only during unfastening: poppers can be significantly louder when unpopped than when popped, and Velcro is virtually silent when stuck together but generates clearly audible sound when pulled apart. Consequently, the sound of fastenings is more readily associated with undressing than with dressing.”
• “Flashing, mooning and streaking straddle the fluid line that separates erotic and hostile gestures.”
• “In Dunedin’s annual nude rugby game ... ‘reverse streaking’ occurs in which clothed spectators run onto the pitch.”
• “The sporting arena is, and always has been, a venue for thinly veiled eroticism ... the sports spectator’s gaze is both respectful and erotic. Spectators’ viewing habits are based partly on the perceived sexual attractiveness of particular athletes, even when an athlete is not explicitly a subject of his or her erotic fantasies.”
• “Sports practices have always straddled the boundary between athleticism and eroticism, and ancient civilizations ‘acknowledged and celebrated the erotic element in sports’.”
• “In a sports setting, clothing has special value as an indicator of team brand loyalty. Sports fans are visibly marked tribes, and clothing is an essential part of the expression of one’s fandom ...The removal of clothes in this context therefore acts in part to neutralize the streaker.”
• "Nakedness has been imposed (through persuasion and force) to reinforce the perception of natives as primitives. Among European and American slave traders, nakedness was imposed to keep perceived savages in their place, as a sign of their status as chattel.”
• “For those at the very top of human hierarchy, denuding is a means of stripping signs of power and status, as when regalia are torn from those condemned to execution”
• “Class differentiation [is] ... one of the driving forces of fashion”.
• “‘sociofugal’ spaces, such as libraries, in which ‘people typically try to avoid one another’. ... users accept and reinforce their isolation by marking a large territory around their immediate location. This may involve placing coats and scarfs on neighboring chairs”
• “One anonymous caller ... describes tossed shoes that once belonged to gang members who have been shot dead. He describes a local ritual of removing the shoes from a fellow gang member’s feet before the police arrive to claim the body.”
• “Graffiti frequently appears in apparently inaccessible spaces is evidence of ‘spatial conquest’.”
• “‘Place hackers’—urban daredevils whose aim is to reach the most inaccessible locations they can find ... There is an element of skill in accessing an apparently inaccessible site, which attracts admiration (or envy) from fellow artists and audiences.”
• “‘The conquest of territory ... is always an act performed for an audience.’ There is a primary audience who directly view the act of territorial marking, and secondary audience who learn of an individual’s presence by observing the marker afterward.”

October 2018;

"Macbeth" by William Shakespeare

The Scottish play. One of the very best. Witches tell Macbeth he will be king. His wife encourages him to assassinate King Duncan and assume the throne. One murder engenders more until the forces of retribution assemble outside the castle.

I saw this play on Saturday 12th January at the Barbican in an RSC production. I have previously seen a youth production which was marred by the fact that nearly every line was shouted. There is a lot of dark in Macbeth and a lot of drama; it is perhaps the most unremitting of Shakespeare's plays with only a single comic pause; even Hamlet lets up more than this intense play. But for that very reason the actors have to vary to tone. Evil can be shouty but perhaps a whispered evil is more scary, especially when it acts as contrast.

Macbeth is a play with many themes. It was first performed in 1606 at Hampton Court in front of King James who was descended from Banquo. It was a few months after the Gunpowder Plot so the idea of treason was very topical. There are a couple of references to 'equivocation' in Macbeth, most notably in Act 2 Scene 3. Equivocation was practised by some Roman Catholic priests (who were banned persons in Shakespeare's time) because their vows would not permit them to tell a lie to the authorities but they could say things that were true if you interpreted them correctly. Thus, for example, the prophecies made by the witches in Act Four Scene One are equivocal; they are taken by Macbeth to mean that he cannot be killed but in fact outline the circumstances of his downfall. Since the trial of Father Garnet which brought equivocation to the attention of the Jacobean public was in the Spring of 1606 it would seem that Macbeth was almost certainly written after this time. These poses problems for those who believe that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's plays since he died in 1604.

Macbeth is full of motifs which play to the idea of equivocation, or saying one thing when the other is true. For example, in the very first scene, the dramatic opening of three witches on a blasted heath, they talk about losing and winning (they will meet again "when the battle's lost and won"), a theme continued in the last line of scene 2 when King Duncan says “What he [Cawdor] hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.”; and they say that "fair is foul and foul is fair" which is repeated in Macbeth's first line (A1S3): “So foul and fair a day I have not seen”. Shakespeare repeatedly uses irony to underscore this point about equivocation: Macbeth is called 'noble', his wife is called 'gentle'; we will see these are very far from the truth.

The story is that Macbeth meets three witches who prophesy that he will become King. When the King comes to stay in Macbeth's castle, M, urged on by his wife, Lady M, assassinates the King. The King's sons flee and Macbeth becomes King. But “To be thus is nothing; /But to be safely thus.” To secure his crown Macbeth must murder his friend Banquo and those who are suspicious of how he attained the throne, killing Macduff's wife and children when he is unable to capture Macduff. Eventually, the forces of opposition lead an army against him and he goes down fighting.

This play has some wonderful dramatic moments, such as the witches, and in the very centre of the play the ghost of Banquo, seen only by Macbeth. It has Lady Macbeth sleep-walking, maddened by her conscience. It only has one comic moment which occurs immediately after the assassination of Duncan. It also has some profound and some heart-rending meditations on betrayal, murder, and death.

• Prophecy:
• “If you can look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow and which will not, /Speak then to me” 
• Fate:
• “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me/ Without my stir.”
• Ambition:
• "I fear thy nature, /It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness /To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, /Art not without ambition, but without /The illness should attend it."
• Wicked womanhood:
• "Come, you spirits /That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, /And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full /Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; /Stop up the access and passage to remorse, /That no compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between /The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, /And take my milk for gall"
• "I have given suck, and know /How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: /I would, while it was smiling in my face, /Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, /And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you /Have done to this."
• Uncertainty:
• "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well /It were done quickly: if the assassination /Could trammel up the consequence, and catch /With his surcease success; that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all here, /But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, /We'd jump the life to come."
• Insomnia (as a result of a guilty conscience):
• "Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! /Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep, /Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, / The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, /Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, /Chief nourisher in life's feast .../Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor /Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more."
• Life and death:
• “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, /Creeps in this petty pace from day to day /To the last syllable of recorded time, /And all our yesterdays have lighted fools /The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! /Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more: it is a tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”

Professor Sir Jonathan Bate in a Gresham College Lecture originally delivered 27th March 2019 at the Museum of London points out that “in classical literature, ghosts have three main functions: to call for vengeance if they have been murdered, to warn society of bad times to come, and to demand proper burial, without which they cannot proceed into the underworld. ... Shakespeare’s development of the figure of the ghost is to combine what could be described as the classical nemesis and augury functions – the ghost as sign that the downfall of the murderer is nigh or that something is rotten in the state – with a modern conscience function, the idea that the apparition is a figment of the guilty imagination of the person who thinks they see it.” He then suggests that in Macbeth the nemesis function is provided by the witches while the auguries come from the strange things happening in the natural world.

Arthur Quiller-Couch in Shakespeare's Workmanship suggests that the biggest problem facing Macbeth's author was that “Tragedy demands some sympathy with the fortunes of its hero.”. That this is achieved in Macbeth is shown by the fact that the ghost of Banquo appears to Macbeth alone (and the audience). Furthermore, as Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics, the proper subject for tragedy has to be a good man who goes wrong through weakness. But Macbeth goes spectacularly wrong along every dimension. He is a soldier who betrays his general, a subject who betrays his king, a host who murders his guest, a gift-receiver who betrays the trusting giver, a strong man who murders the defenceless. Q-C compares him to Milton's Satan who says “Evil, be thou my good”, which is a version of “Fair is foul, and foul is fair. The only way in which the audience can understand the multiply evil Macbeth is if they feel that he is somehow not in his right mind. For Elizabethan audiences madness was unlovely (they punished lunatics) but they believed that witches could enchant. This is the reason for the witches.

Q-C also suggests that Shakespeare “has deliberately flattened down every other character to throw up Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into high relief.” The only other character of interest is that of Banquo who acts as "a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate; a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference.” Shakespeare often used such a character: Horatio in Hamlet and Kent in King Lear are other examples. This is why Shakespeare changes history to ensure the Banquo does not take part in Duncan's assassination and this is why Macbeth has Banquo killed: not because B is a danger to him but because B acts as a reproach.

Finally, Q-C suggests that Macbeth is like a Greek tragedy: “Though it is full of blood and images of blood, the important blood-shedding is hidden, removed from the spectator’s sight ... Duncan is murdered off the stage; Lady Macbeth dies off the stage; Macbeth makes his final exit fighting, to be killed off the stage.”

October 2018

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"Dark Water" by Elizabeth Lowry

Set in the middle of the 1800s, a young doctor is working as assistant surgeon, Hiram Carver, the narrator, on a US naval ship and becomes fascinated by one of the officers, William Borden, who, on a previous voyage, survived months adrift in the Pacific in a small boat following a mutiny. The doctor subsequently takes a job in a Lunatic Asylum where he developing understanding of the relationship between lunacy and sanity is challenged by his growing knowledge of what happened on that small boat.

This is modern Gothic. Jerrold Hogle, in Gothic Fiction, states that “A Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space" in this case the Asylum, in which "are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters". Dark Water contains supernatural events: the Hero of the mutiny is presented in some ways as a god or a priest demanding sacrifices, for example when a sailor is flogged on a becalmed ship at which point the wind begins to blow. The finale takes place on a cliff edge, the liminal space between land and sea, and the doctor has a vision of a mysterious bird. The subject of madness is, of course, archetypal Gothic. And there are times when the writing becomes as purple as traditional Gothic:

• "It was the sparrow that fell, dead, to the ground. It was the caterpillar sleeping in its chrysalis and the fish hatching in the cusp of the wave. It was the worm curled around the rose ... It was the rock and the wave that smashed the rock." (p 444)
• "I plummeted into the sea's dark embrace, and sank. It was cold, and it was not. It was hot, and it was not. It was precisely as hot and cold as my own blood." (p 446)

I detected notes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

The structure of the book is interesting. My edition was 464 pages long. The first part (64 pages, about 14%) is set on board the ship. The next 44 pages (9%) deals with the new job at the Asylum. So we are nearly one quarter of the way through when ship and Asylum intersect. During the next 194 (40%) pages there is a 40 page (9%) interlude during which we learn what happened on the small boat in the Pacific. The next section (another 10%) deals with Carver unscrupulously making progress in his career before we reach the denouement, again nearly a quarter of the book, which contains Borden's 35 page story of his life.  I found this pattern slightly arrhythmic. My reading surged forward at some points and dawdled at others. Some of the sub-plots concerning patients seemed to distract rather than to contribute to the plot.

There were moments of great writing though. There were some wonderful descriptions:

• "An orange moon lolled on the mizzenmast" (p 6)
• "The horizon was swagged with clouds that piled up overhead in a rolling mass, its black bole split by a purple artery trailing ghoulish light like blood from a wound." (p 32)
• "My eyeballs stung from the wine I'd drunk the night before." (p 81)
• "She was dressed for worship in a skirt like the puddle on a butcher's block" (p 155)As well as being a great way of saying 'red' this is a lovely bit of pathetic fallacy, linking church to butchery and so continuing the theme of sacrifice.

There were some profound insights:

• "That's what wanting is. The looking for what you cannot have." (p 27)
• "You can't command before you have learned obedience." (p 27)
• "Here we are, piloting a wood-shaving over an abyss. Is there a better definition of madness?" (p 60)
• "These laws have been passed by our legislators. Are we wiser or better than they are? .... Shouldn't we be? Our legislators have been elected by us." (p 79)
• "I have sometimes wondered if wealth itself - and its first cousin, social importance - shouldn't be recognized as infectious agents, so productive are they of distorted cognition, particularly of delusional feelings of merit." (p 103)

An interesting reinterpretation of the Gothic genre with themes of madness and sacrifice.

October 2018; 464 pages

“Aspects of the Novel” by E M Forster

The writer of classic novels including A Passage to India, Howard's End, Room With a View, Maurice, and Where Angels Fear to Tread, eloquently explains his understanding of this art-form.

He professes difficulty in defining the novel, citing works as diverse as Tristram Shandy, Emma, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The White Peacock. This is a man who has read widely! He settles for the novel being “a fiction in prose” of at least 50,000 words. (p 25)

“The novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.” (p 40) “A story is a narrative of events arranged in time-sequence.” (p 44) The secret is to keep the reader turning the pages. “Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense - the only literate tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.” (p 41) Therefore a story “can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” (p 42) “Telling a story ... shock-headed public gaping around the camp-fire and only kept awake by suspense ... storyteller needn't pick up loose threads. As long as he keeps his shock-heads excited he needs no plot.” (p 160) However, a novelist aspiring to be an artist should “Interest the reader in people - not in what happens next.” (p 174)

Novels are about characters. But here he distinguishes fiction from memoir or biography or history because “A historian ... is quite as much concerned with character as a novelist, but he can only know of its existence when it shows on the surface.” (p 55)

He points out that novelists tend to ignore many of the facts of life such as " birth, food, sleep, love and death.” (p 57) In novels most babies “come into the world more like parcels than human beings. When a baby arrives a novel it usually has the air of having been posted ... one of the elder characters goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in the action.” (p 60) “The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a book neatly.” (p 61) Furthermore “Food in fiction is mainly social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially asked to do so.” (p 61) Sleep is useful when dreams can be recounted but a character “is never conceived as a creature, a third of whose time is spent in the darkness.” (p 62) And novels are obsessed with relationships. “The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other ... is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.” (p 62) Thus “Homo Fictus ... is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And - most importantly - we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.” (p 63)

He distinguishes between flat and round characters. “Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures ... They are constructed around a single idea or quality ... Really flat characters can be expressed in one sentence.” (p 73) “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized ... they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere.” (p 74) “A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards.” “Dickens’s people are nearly all flat ... Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence ... Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. ... His immense success with types suggests that there may be more to flatness than the severer critics admit.” (p 76)

He is sceptical about the idea of point of view pointing out that both Dickens in Bleak House and Tolstoy in War and Peace shift viewpoints “A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off ... Indeed this power to expand and contract perception ... this right to intermittent knowledge - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life.” (p 83)

He explains how plot can be distinguished from story: “A plot is ... a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (p 87) And what is essential about a plot? “This element of surprise or mystery - the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called - is of great importance in a plot ... Mystery is essential to a plot ... To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.” (p 88) However, “Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up.” (p 93 - 94) “Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the denouement.” (p 94)

Some plots have patterns eg: the shape of an hour-glass in a cross-over plot or the shape of a circle or a chain which binds “the scattered incidents together with a thread woven out of their own substance.” (p 136) However, he warns that "A rigid pattern ... may externalise the atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on life, and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. ... tyranny as it grows powerful grows petty.” (p 145) He cites Henry James.

He has many more insights, beautifully (and sometimes confrontationally) expressed:

• “Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.” (p 30 - 31)
• “The world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.” (p 34)
• “We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like ... but it is all from the outside.” (p 57) 
• “Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.” (p 58)
• “Food the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, ... taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.” (p 58) 
• “When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep.” (p 59)
• “One of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been - will be.” (p 63) 
• “All our experience teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance it like jugglers if it is to remain.” (p 63) 
• “All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and ever.” (p 63)
• “If God could tell the story of the universe, the universe would become fictitious.” (p 64)
• “You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.” (p 87)
• “For two inquisitive people to be friends must be impossible.” (p 88)
• “Perhaps our subject ... has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right - it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right - it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground.” (p 101)
• “The saying of St Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.” (p 122)
• “The fantasist ... manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. ... It characterizes these novels and gives them ... roughness of surface.” (p 124)
• “As a rule, evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which seldom soars about misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness. Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social, or something very vague ... they want it to exist, in order that it may help them on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with a villain.” (p 128)
• “Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time in trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out leaving the door open behind them. The door may be spacious, witty, harmonious, friendly, but it smells, and there is no getting around this.” (p 161)
• “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” (p 165)
• “H.J. in The Turn Of The Screw is merely declining to think about homosex, and the knowledge that he is declining throws him into the necessary fluster.” (p 171)
• “Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.” (p 171)
• “Time bears all its son's away unless they look sharp.” (p 173)

Stupendous and eye-opening. October 2018; 187 pages

Another similar book of literary criticism is The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock

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