drinking – Kate Macdonald

A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson

I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family rather forces this aspect on the reader.) It uses the Nicolson surname to suggest that the author is a literary personality (this memoir is her fourth publication) who wants her life to be interesting to the public, like that of her father Nigel Nicolson, the former Member of Parliament and co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and possibly also of her brother Adam Nicolson the historian, about whose books I have written here, and here. A House Full of Daughters is also a personal memoir, of the callousness of the English upper-classes when they are really selfish. Thus if you are looking for Bloomsbury spin-off material you’ll be disappointed, though it is rich in Sissinghurstiana, and unhappy rich people’s lives.

The three intertwined stories are: (1) yet more details from the Sackville-West / Nicolson history, (2) the chilly upbringing and tragic life of the author’s mother, Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, and (3) Nicolson’s own story of how she and her mother both battled loneliness and alcoholism in their otherwise comfortable lives. The subtitle tells us that the memoir is about seven generations: Catalina, Pepita, Victoria, Vita, then Vita’s daughter-in-law Philippa, and her daughter Juliet, and Juliet’s two daughters. As an act of recovery of women’s lives in the twentieth century this book is undeniably interesting, but the lives of Catalina Duran and Pepita de Oliva in nineteenth-century Spain have been covered already, as Vita Sackville-West’s forebears, and Victoria and Vita Sackville-West are well-studied figures. The views and experiences of the seventh generation, Juliet’s two daughters, are barely mentioned, and they do not fit into the rather artificial framework that Nicolson creates around what she calls the ‘bargains’ that the six earlier women made with their husbands or fathers to gain the lives they wanted.

These ‘bargains’ are hardly a new phenomenon: women living in a patriarchy have always had to bargain with their bodies and domestic service to make their lives work out as best they can. For this memoir, access to surviving documentation is the real value (though I’d like to know where Nicolson found the intimate thoughts and feelings of her otherwise totally obscure Spanish great-great-great grandmother). The very private family documents that Nicolson quotes from, for example, that reveal the details of her great-grandparents’ exuberant sex life, are indeed a privilege to read, because Nicolson (with her brother) is the administrator of the estate. By using her access to reveal more of the Sackville-West / Nicolson story, Juliet Nicolson does an excellent job of conveying the human predicament of an Edwardian first-time mother determined never to be pregnant again, and of the ‘sexual desertion’ of the young husband suddenly denied access to his wife in every way.

Two generations later, Nicolson deals with her appalling grandparents, Sir Gervaise and Lady Tennyson-D’Eyncourt, most impressively. They were rich, with several homes, but wealth and comfort do not improve a naturally cold temperament. Nicolson describes her grandmother judiciously as unloving: ‘disapproval and contempt were Pamela’s default settings … She was wholly unhuggable and in her own way just as unmaternal as Vita’. I don’t agree that Nicolson’s mother Philippa was born ‘at a bad time to be a daughter’, since millions of other girls her age had wonderful lives. It’s obvious that Philippa was born into a family that didn’t want a daughter, and she suffered accordingly, expected to exist until marriage like every other girl of her class. It was Love in a Cold Climate in real life, but without the loving support of friends and a large family: after she finished school, the poor girl was completely isolated, and seems to have had no inner resources of her own. Philippa then had the additional bad luck of marrying the charmingly selfish Nigel Nicolson MP who wanted a wife to keep his parliamentary constituents happy, and didn’t have any other use for her. When a daughter writes so critically of her parents, and of her grandparents (Harold Nicolson seems to have been the only grandparent of the four who knew how to be nice to people), the effect is startling. The accounts of Philippa’s miseries, and of the scourge of tuberculosis in her life and in her mother’s life also, reflect horrible English class cruelties deriving completely from their privileged setting.

The last story is the very personal one of Juliet Nicolson’s life to date, and dwells on her loving relationship with her father (who seems to have manipulated her just as he did her mother) and her rejection of her mother in favour of the Sissinghurst connection. It is heartfelt, and not comfortable reading. I am also uncomfortable with the way Nicolson joins her own life’s details to the historically documented and well-published accounts of her forebears’ lives, since one will automatically expect comparable accomplishments and achievements, not just a connection by birth. But Nicolson does not inform us about any of her own writing, we hear almost nothing about her professional life, and far too much about her emotional travails, which have meaning only for her personal circle.

The value of this strand of the narrative is in how Nicolson’s life’s trajectory was similar to and yet differed from that of her mother, and how they both dealt with feelings of inadequacy and rejection through alcohol. This story doesn’t depend on who the protagonists are: it would be equally compelling as the story of total unknowns. Their story is about strength of character, the efforts of friends and family that did and did not help them, and why one woman died by her wilful destruction of her liver, and the other decided to survive after a final intervention that made a difference. We don’t need names, or family privilege, or the earlier, celebrated generations, to value this part of the memoir as it deserves. The effect is a patchwork of biography, that reduces its impact of its most meaningful aspects.

Juliet Nicolson, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family (Vintage 2015), ISBN 978-0-099-59803-9, £9.99

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies

I posted a double review of Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies over on Vulpes Libris: An Only Child, and My Father’s Son. I learned a lot about Irish history, Irish literature, Irish convents and army pensions.

Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

Hem 1 This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. He is a giant of American literature, and of masculine writing. He wrote men’s books about manly subjects: war, bullfighting, deep sea fishing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Islands in the Stream was published after his death, in 1970. It was put together from three fragments of novels found in his bank vault in Havana after his death. They were intended by Hemingway to form a larger work, but his widow and literary executor put the pieces together. You’d never think it was cobbled together at all. It’s a stupendous novel, and I loved it.

Hem 2 It’s also chillingly tense. Hemingway’s narrative style is famous: he called it the iceberg technique, or something like that, because all the work was done below the surface of the words. So we have plain, pared-down prose, no words wasted, nothing exuberant or decorative, which gives the rare instances of enthusiasm, passion, pleasure, etc, real power, because they stand alone without fuss. The effect is similar to encountering a large rock in the middle of a desert plain. It gives the impression of being bigger than anything else around, because it’s the only one of its kind, but if it were surrounded by equally large-sized rocks, we wouldn’t pay it any particular attention. The effect of such restraint in the writing is that we really feel the undercurrents of emotion. More importantly, we can feel the stuff that’s not being said, and the approach of terrible things a long way off. The tension mounts, and it just keeps on mounting. But because Hemingway’s writing is so controlled, you can feel sure that the catastrophe won’t be sprung on you out of the blue. There will be warnings, and you will have to wait for the warning to happen for the awful, or dangerous, or risky thing to happen. When it does happen, it’s a relief, because now we can get on with it, and not sit there imagining ‘he’s going to kill them’, or ‘they’re going to be washed overboard’, and so on.

Hem 3 Tension is a peculiar thing in a novel. If you think about it rationally, the reader can put a book down at any time during a tense-making episode, and it will wait for you. Nothing will change the outcome on the page. You can change how you respond to the outcome by being in a different frame of mind, or wait to have the right kind of time to devote to reading it. You can go to sleep and read the resolution of the tension with a clear mind and full attention on a different day. So what is it that makes us succumb to the tyranny of the plot and keep reading past midnight, or miss a bus stop, in thrall to the story? In Hemingway, I think it’s the hypnosis of the small plain words and the steady encroachment of story and character in tiny, incremental steps. He likes the character, and we like the character, so we don’t want anything bad to happen to that person. Emotional investment in a character binds us to their fate. The more an author encourages us to feel good about a person, the less we are likely to not be too bothered if that person does something horrible, or has something horrible happen to them. So it’s in an author’s interests to make the readers feel invested in some way – good or bad – in the characters so the book will be read. This will work for the situation too, if the situation is bigger or more interesting that the people.

Hem 4 So, back to the novel. Only one of the characters in Islands in the Stream populates all three of its parts: Thomas Hudson, a famous artist, a former habitué of 1920s Paris, where he lived with his first wife and son Tom. Now he lives on Bimini, an island of the Bahamas, 50 miles off Florida. He paints, and he drinks. This is apparently not too much, but the amount he and some of the other men sink daily, often starting at breakfast, made me blench. I’m not a spirits drinker, but they certainly were. Hemingway wrote this novel in 1950-51, and it certainly has a feel of Ian Fleming about it, with the details of men’s lives, and how they saw women. Hemingway and Fleming wrote with detailed precision about what their characters ate and wore, and the drinks descriptions are basically recipes without quantities. Thomas Hudson – and here’s an interesting thing, which I’m sure Hemingway critics have explained to their own satisfaction, but it was new to me – Thomas Hudson, when referred to by the narrative voice, is always called ‘Thomas Hudson’. Not Thomas, not Hudson, always the two names together. When he’s referred to by characters, its Hudson or Tom or Tommy, but the narrative voice sets itself apart with the formality of the full name. There is another Tom, his son, called Young Tom or Tommy at different times, but often just Tom. But the painter is given his full name, as if he were a brand of rum.

Hem 5 Thomas Hudson lives on Bimini in his house. He has a cook / major-domo / housekeeper and trusted friend and native Biminian called Eddy, and a houseboy called Joseph. The novel opens when Thomas Hudson has finished work for the day, and spends the evening drinking with friends on the quay, where things get a little out of hand, and there’s a fight. His friend Roger Davis, a novelist and screenwriter, comes back to Hudson’s house to gets his wounds doctored and to sleep, and to stay, since he needs to find quiet to start writing again. And, of course, the boys are coming: Hudson’s three sons, Tom, and David and Andrew, by his second wife. The five of them have a wonderful summer on the beach and in and out of the water. This novel is apparently praised for its nature descriptions: it certainly has tremendous descriptions of fishing, sharks, and eating. Some visitors to the island arrive, one of them being a girl who’s come to find Roger, which he is very glad about. That’s the last we see of him, because he takes her off to Hudson’s ranch in Idaho, to start writing again.

Hem 6 This is set a few years later in wartime, in Cuba, which isn’t very far south of the Bahamas, in Hudson’s house in the countryside outside Havana. There he has a vast number of cats and dogs, and three or four staff to keep the place running in his absence. He is absent a fair bit, because he’s converted his boat into a survey vessel for the US Navy, and he’s scouring the Caribbean coastline looking for U-boats. When this episode opens he’s just come back from an exhausting trip, and his favourite cat, Boise, is ecstatic at Hudson being home again. Hudson spends most of this section of the novel drinking, or fretting about whether the cats are eating enough. Boise eats fried eggs, and accepts a little champagne. Hudson tells stories in a bar to Honest Lil, an old prostitute friend, and allows himself to recall some very exciting episodes from his past with a princess on a boat going through the Corinth Canal. This is Lil’s ploy to make him forget a recent sadness, and to get him warmed up by recalling the princess’s sexual appetites. But out of the blue, a woman no-one expected to see walks into the bar, and Hudson and she have an ecstatic reunion, which fills Hudson’s slightly fuzzy mind with unfettered joy. It probably isn’t joyful for Honest Lil, because we don’t see her again. The drinking in Havana is prodigious, I lost count of the frozen double daiquiris that Hudson consumed. But just as we’re thinking, at last, he can be happy again, just for a bit, Hudson gets an emergency summons from the Navy and he has to go back to sea.

Hem 7 The third part of the novel is spent largely at sea, hunting for some German seamen who escaped their wrecked U-boat, and made the mistake of massacring some islanders when they stole their turtle boat. Hudson’s ship has a crew of irregular sailors, mainly smugglers and fishermen and a discharged Marine, as well as a Navy man who has been given to Hudson to make sure his ship stays in radio contact with naval authorities on Havana. This is one of the thin threads attaching the third part of the novel to the war: another thread concerns Tommy the younger, and other people in Hudson’s life who are also serving in the war. I did wonder when reading this section, why did Thomas Hudson not go straight into the army or navy? Why did he become an irregular pirate for hire? Could any of this stuff have really happened? It’s plausible enough as a novel for me to not want to bother checking out the history: the romance of the plot is quite satisfying enough.

I can’t see this free-living and hard-drinking artist and big-game fisherman submitting to uniform and military rules, and possibly he was too old as well. Instead, we get a truly exotic idea of Cuba and the Floridian islands, the Bahamas, all of the Caribbean, as a modern refuge for terrible pirates who prey on the locals and kill ruthlessly. Islands in the Stream is very Dr No, very sun-kissed and hard-drinking, and very, very hard-man American hero. It reminded me strongly of the Commando comic books I read as a child, where the war was simply a setting for personal heroics and dramatic tension involving guns and the occasional guttural swear word. As a story of eight men cooped up in a boat together in the heat, getting frustrated by not being able to catch their prey, and feeling just a little bit edgy about one or two of the others, this last part of the novel should glue you to the very last page, no matter what else you should be attending to.

Dornford Yates’s Gothic melodramas, in Anthony Lyveden & Valerie French

Prepare for high-stakes romantic melodrama, early 1920s style. This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Dornford Yates’ first two novels. Anthony Lyveden was published in 1921 and its sequel, Valerie French, appeared in 1923: they were written after he had made his name with several collections of brilliant and witty short stories about London life among the aspirational gentry. Both novels are passionately intent on making the reader feel dreadful about the plight of the unemployed ex-officer. They are romantic love stories, with ghosts, and a possessed Gothic forest. Their plots depend on misunderstandings and how the workings of Fate might ruin the hero’s life.

They are also novels about a kind of metaphorical shell-shock, a form of amnesia brought on by supernatural influences, that represents the horrors endured on the Western Front, and how these experiences prevented soldiers from having a normal life, post-war. They’re intense novels, and very, very opinionated: you won’t miss the author’s own views about how class and social rules matter in society. They will exasperate you as the hero and heroine continually have near misses, fail to tell each other crucial pieces of information, fail to ask the right question, and don’t realise that a vital letter has got burned in a railway accident. They give the workings of Fate good value for money.

The eponymous hero of Anthony Lyveden is an former British Army officer who suffered no particular wounds or damage, but, one or two years after the First World War had ended, is desperately looking for work. How can this be possible? He’s a gentleman. Gentlemen don’t need to look for work. They have lands, and estates, and invisible income sources. Not this one: he was orphaned early in life, brought up by an uncle, and then his uncle’s will gave him all the uncle’s large fortune, with the prior condition that to receive the estate he had to have achieved a knighthood. Anthony has not been offered a knighthood, of course. Yates expects his readers to learn from this that if you are a gentleman you don’t angle for such an honour (are you listening, Nigel Farage?), and to wangle a knighthood to acquire a fortune is to demonstrate your own unworthiness. If Anthony wants a fortune, he will have to make it himself, just like the rest of us. Thus the novel instructs early 1920s society on how to behave in the matter of knighthoods and fortunes, with, Yates hoped, a trickledown effect on other matters of social usage.

The novel opens when Anthony is on his way to be interviewed for a post as a footman. He succeeds, and enters domestic service for the first time as footman to a couple of the grossly exaggerated lower-class war-rich. Mr Slumper is a financier and his wife is a really horrible woman with no education, looks, manners or saving graces whatsoever. The rest of the servants in the house are greedy and grasping, so Anthony is the only one to give the couple any kind of honest service at all. When Mr Slumper comes home in a state knowing that his business is about to fail spectacularly, Anthony does not abandon his employers, but gets them to the train station, and his reward for faithful service is some of his due wages. Lesson no. 2: always give good service, no matter who it’s for, and your example will rub off onto even the vilest of people.

Anthony’s next job is with a titled family, which means less agony for him in serving the unworthy, but more agony because these are people he would have avoided socially because they are cold, ungenerous and unpleasant. Yates is really keen for us to realise the horror of such things now being possible. The vile son of the family bullies Anthony in a shockingly lower-class, caddish way, until Anthony knocks him out after one insult too many. The father applauds this event, but has to let Anthony go. Some things just can’t be forgiven.

So you see, this novel is beginning to look like the Pilgrim’s Progress, with the perfect hero undergoing trials of temper, pride, and self-control, and coming out in the right every time. Anthony’s third post is a put-up job, since Anthony has met The Girl. He owns a dog (most Yates heroes own and worship their dogs), which he boards in kennels in the countryside while he’s in service, and goes to visit at weekends for long walks in decent gentlemanly solitude. His dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Anthony breaks up very efficiently (moral: a man who can separate two fighting dogs is admirable), but he accidentally offends the other dog’s owner, while falling head over heels in love with her at first sight. She secretly returns his feelings, but when they accidentally meet again, he is handing the visibly appalling Mrs Slumper into her carriage, while The Girl is awaiting her own servants and carriage.

But it’s OK: Yates does not intend Valerie French (for it is she) to knowingly fall in love with a footman. (He has already written a really vicious short story about the hell that awaits a girl of good family who marries beneath her, which is truly fiendish in its revenge on the erring victim. He did not approve of mésalliances.) Valerie can tell instinctively that Anthony is a man of her own class. Luckily she has friends who are also working in service, in a very cushy job indeed, so she arranges for Anthony to get a job there too, and he is at last in a safe haven. He has friends of his own class, the work is light, decent and honourable, and the employers are delightful, grateful lower-class darlings. They know their place, and the other servants are paid to make sure that these upper-class footmen and housemaids can eat separately, on a table they don’t need to lay or clear themselves. Some things really matter.

The inability of the ordinary demobbed soldier to get work after the end of the war is pretty much ignored in this novel, because Yates is very keen to draw out the agony of how awful it is for a gentleman to suffer this fate. He artificially twists the plot to increase the humiliation, suspense, tension and reversals of fortune that the perfect ex-officer without a job must undergo. But why? In both Anthony Lyveden and Valerie French Anthony undergoes starvation, is enslaved by an enchanted forest while working as a kind of deranged Forestry Commission worker, loses his sanity, loses a girl, is nearly seduced by another girl, has to perform increasingly demanding tests of noblesse oblige, and constantly displays extraordinary exhibitions of loyalty to his dog. These ordeals of chivalry increase our sympathy for the ex-officer hero, and present these injustices as evidence of the national disloyalty to those who fought in the War and are yet unrewarded. At the very least, we are expected to feel indignation at the state of the post-war nation which can’t look after its gentlemen.

Is Anthony worth it? His heroism and natural leadership is typical for 1920s popular fiction, as the British ex-officer working with demobbed Other Ranks. At the beginning of Valerie French, the reactions of the demobbed Other Ranks to Anthony the starving and desperate ex-officer in need are extraordinary: not only do they feed him, they take him in their lorry to a pub, where the landlord, on hearing Anthony’s accent, immediately offers him unlimited credit, and then the lorry drivers slip Anthony twenty shillings, pretending the notes had fallen out of his coat. Shortly after this, Anthony inadvertently helps a thief steal a spare wheel off a car, meets a stupendously shouty barrister called Sir Andrew Plague, is instantly trusted despite the evidence, and is rescued from court simply because he looks and sounds like a gentleman. All this demonstrates the importance of class loyalty.

With Sir Andrew, Yates really lets rip with his trademark lexical exuberance and repetitive allegorical word games. For some readers these can be wearing. But the constant cranking up of the tension through both novels (often over very trivial things) is more stressful. It has the effect of cliff-hangers wandering around the plot looking for the cliff: are we really expected to get worked up about Valerie’s hysterics about her rigid codes of honour in every chapter? Is it such a drama to choose between telling or not telling Anthony his past when he recovers from ‘brain fever’ without his memory? This illness is a metaphor for shell-shock. After Anthony has been rescued from the utterly bizarre psychotic wood called Gramarye, a malign enchanted ecosystem that can twist time and space, his mental condition is precarious, and he needs to be nursed, unable to be a whole man again without long and careful recovery. In contrast, Valerie’s histrionics of honour because Anthony cannot remember who she is are tedious.

But overall, both these novels are very satisfying. There are spectacular plot twists, there are large helpings of useful instruction on how to perform noblesse oblige, there are some excellent dramatic characters, who are practically eating the carpets while screaming at each other. Anthony himself is a curiously inactive and passive character, perpetually tossed by fortune. He is given things by everyone who meets him, and he has a ridiculous chivalric habit of sacrificing himself to extraordinary lengths so as to not to embarrass a lady or allow her name to be maligned.

Thankfully there are characters with good comic value, since Yates understood the purpose of sparring and invective, to relieve this stiff-upper-lip tension. There are constant misunderstandings of motives and reasons through upper-class inarticulacy. There’s a girl called André, who I think must be modelled on Theda Bara, who slinks and smoulders, but has to shout to get the attention of the astonished gentlemen about to murder each other for her honour (Yates concerns himself a lot with a lady’s honour). There is a spectacular three-way fist fight between Sir Andrew, Colonel Winchester and Anthony, resulting in a broken leg and a broken door. What with the whips, it’s like a medieval cat fight, with honour sticking it to everyone in sight. Thankfully, the story ends with a return to classic British values of the period: Anthony finally recovers his memory when Valerie is attacked by a less than human foreigner whom he has to strangle. These are epic novels of drama and nightmares, but they are also delightful, if you leave your sense of proportion at the door.

I write a great deal more about these novels and Yates’ other works in Novelists Against Social Change (2015).

Pratchett on bigotry

From time to time I binge on Discworld. This week, on holiday, I’ve been rereading some of the Terry Pratchett novels that tackle bigotry and racism. They are deeply satisfying combings from the beard of his invention. They don’t offer a unified theory of how people could be nice to each other, but they are superb as reflections of the human condition.

Feet of Clay (1996)

This one has a very high joke count, including the immortal ‘We can rebuild him, we have the pottery’, which only readers of 50ish will ever appreciate fully. * Feet of Clay is The One About The Golems, in which Lord Vetinari is incapacitated by a mysterious poison, Nobby Nobbs is raised to the peerage, Cheery Littlebottom is encouraged to express her feminine nature with illicit lipstick, jewellery and high heels, though she refuses to shave her beard off, and dwarf bread makes its terrifying entrance as a fighting weapon.

Cheery transitions from a standard if slightly nervous male dwarf demeanour to a more feminine self-presentation with the help of a well-established non-human, Delphine Angua von Uberwald, the only werewolf on the Watch. It’s not just because they’re both minority females in a professional milieu full of males, but they are both struggling with how to reconcile their natural feelings. Cheery wants to be able to wear a skirt and not be shouted at by male dwarfs who think openly-displayed femininity is disgusting (we’ll find a much more precise sandblasting of this mindset in The Fifth Elephant). Angua would like to not have to hear (muttered) jokes about what and who she eats. Pratchett’s deft slicing apart of the layers of social prejudice is done with the sharpest of filleting blades. Class, sex, lineage, race, species, deadness, aliveness: all participate in a complex plot jostling with remarks about how it’s normal to hate different people because They and Everybody says so.

The golems show this most concisely, since a golem is a not a person, and is not legally alive. Yet how can a machine be accused of murder? Once the religious confraternity have begun fighting among themselves on this question, one golem learns to speak, develops self-awareness, and develops the financial acumen to work out how to free the other golems by earning enough to buy them. This is a rather nice result from a pyramid chain, since Carrot started it by buying Dorfl for one dollar: one good turn produces an autonomous new species. We are only left with the problem of who organised the poisoning.

* The Six Billion Dollar Man? Steve Rogers? Blonde man with permanent sun-squint runs very very fast in slo-mo? YOU remember ….

The Fifth Elephant (2000)

The One In Which Vimes Goes to Uberwald. I love this novel because it has the Igors, the traditional servants of the vampires who are accomplished surgeons and recyclers of body parts. Vimes goes to Uberwald to represent the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, and to solve the crime of the stolen Scone of Stone, without which the Low King of the dwarfs cannot be crowned.

The Lady Margoletta (is that an echo from Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club …. surely not) is a vampire on the wagon, a modern vampire lifestyle about which we will read a great deal more in The Truth. She goes to mutual support groups and drinks a nasty red drink that probably tastes like cough mixture, but otherwise has a keen interest in sporting events involving werewolves chasing Vimes through the snow. Angua’s father, the Baron, is clearly almost completely wolf, while her mad brother Wolfgang is a Nazi with fangs. Pratchett puts black and silver fascist insignia on Wolfgang’s racial purity nonsense to ram that point home: fascism is beastly and savage, and does not belong in civilised society. Wolves, and other dogs, are completely civilised and natural within their own ecological niche. Werewolves are simply terrorists of nature.

The dwarfs have an internal problem, traditionalists versus reformers, and their hardcore deepdowners refuse to look at sunlight or even go above ground. These traditionalists call Cheery Littlebottom some very foul names because she wears a skirt, but under pressure even they are forced to use the feminine pronoun. This is a dark novel, due to the fundamentally uncompromising nature of fanaticism, but accommodations can be made as you step around the bodies.

The deep vein of sardony (from which Pratchett mines his sardonic) can be seen in the plot twists around the stolen, faked and mysterious Scone of Stone. It is a fundamentally silly thing, a super-toughened lump of dwarf dough, carrying the echo of our own dear Stone of Scone, upon which the monarchs of Britain are crowned. Tradition bestows truth and meaning on the most ridiculous and ordinary objects, like a stone and like bread, and people die if these are disrupted or changed. Pratchett’s genius lies in moving his narrative from comedy to tragedy in the flip of an adjective.

Thud (2005)

The One With ‘Where’s My Cow?’ When you need dramatic tension, you add a baby, psychotic fundo dwarves with flamethrowers, race riots and the steadiest werewolf on the Watch attacked by class consciousness and sexual jealousy. This one has everything. The anniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley is approaching, a historic conflict between dwarves and trolls, but no-one knows who won. Dwarves are being murdered underground, and there’s finally – finally! – a vampire on the Watch, and she can hear heartbeats in the next room. The phenomenally attractive but very innocent pole-dancer Tawnee is taught the facts of life, and her choices, by three friendly non-human female Watch officers in a night of dubiously named cocktails. Trolls do drugs, dwarves do religion, and everybody has to show a little bit of adaptation and compromise if we’re going to make progress. Vetinari even uses italics for emphasis, something I don’t think we’ve seen before.

The central idea of the plot – that the historic antipathy between trolls and dwarves is being exploited by somebody or something – is beautifully expressed in the central metaphor of the game of Thud, a board game with two halves. You play your opponent either as a dwarf or a troll, and then you play it again from the other side’s perspective. This seriously brilliant concept leads to young dwarves and trolls playing peace games in a cellar, learning about each other’s culture and mindset. The older generation haven’t done this, and they’re the ones who cause trouble, and keep Vimes from getting any sleep for what seems like a week.

As Pratchett matured his art, his themes became more universal and more perfectly expressed to model human behaviour. I really do think Thud is one of his finest novels, up there with I Shall Wear Midnight (community responsibility and male aggression), and possibly also Lords and Ladies (power and violence do not a ruler make). The debate is open.

I’ve posted reviews of other Pratchett novels here and elsewhere, which you can get at through this link to The Shepherd’s Crown.

Three disappointments for the dud pile

I’ve had a bad run of books I didn’t like and books read for work rather than pleasure recently, so all I can offer this week are these three pallid specimens. I’ll try to crank up my enthusiasm next week. It’s the end of term, holiday reading is beckoning, I have hopes of something marvellous waiting for me when I pick up the very next book from the pile.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

I love Karen Russell’s short stories, in St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, which I reviewed here, so I bought Swamplandia!, her novel, and have been putting off reading it for over a year. I took it all the way to Hawaii and brought it back unread. Not a good sign. So I went and put myself on a train with nothing but this to read and made myself get through it. It’s not great. Her imagination is stupendous, and her eye for compelling detail creates marvels, but this novel is a short story that has grown beyond its natural capacity for wonder. And I was not entranced: I was bored by halfway through. The central premise of an alligator park in a Florida swamp is solid; Ossie’s romance with a ghost is extremely odd; the story of Louis’ swamp-sailing life in the 1920s is a beautiful short short that might have been published somewhere else first, it is so polished and self-contained. I was completely unconvinced by the Chief’s obsession with keeping the park on, and by Kiwi’s passive endurance. Ava the narrator is of course a star, but the red Seth is unused and wasted, like a glowing ember snuffed out by Gothic monstrosity. Too many details, not enough story.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Another novel I put off reading until I absolutely had no choice. I inherited a Modern Scottish Fiction course from a departing colleague, and so I inherited all the novels he had carefully chosen and a course outline he had refined over the years. Miss Jean Brodie, A Disaffection, Morvern Callar, Lanark, Keep Breathing, they’re all there. And lurking like a malignant toad at the back, was Trainspotting. I read the first half in a gobble of desperation, like a really bad medicine, and felt ill. It vastly enlarged my vocabulary for drug addiction and a truly astonishing collection of words pertaining to the body and its functions, humours, liquids and solids, but did I enjoy it? No. I hated it. I admire its technique and innovation, but I was counting the hours until I could put it back on the high shelf. I wrote my class notes. Reread bits. Cautiously took a peek here and there through the remainder of the novel and read some of the shorter chapters. Revised my class notes. Took the class through the first seminar of the week, and felt some hope. They liked the novel, some of them really liked it, so they did more of the talking than usual. Emboldened, I finished the chapters I’d not read, and we tore through the second session. I had had the brainwave of getting the class to put the book on trial, and my obliging lawyer sister found me Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. That went down well, with some strong defences of its scatology, misogyny and the glamorisation of violence. Now I never need read the bloody thing again.

Larry Niven, Ringworld

I’ve been meaning to read Larry Niven for years, so I scooped up a copy of Ringworld, hoping for technological wonders. Foolish me. I’d forgotten that the only Niven story I’ve read was ‘Cloak of Anarchy’, which had the futuristic technology I craved, and the slightly dystopic enclosed society, and also the naked girl walking through a park with her cloak hovering behind her, unafraid of sexual assault because of the police surveillance. And then the surveillance stopped, and oh look, assault begins. Ringworld (as far as I read) doesn’t have the assault, but it does seem to revolve around an old man’s seedy, leering gaze on a very young woman’s body in and out of various anonymous and uninteresting parties, and frankly I could not be bothered. Several alien characters, who seemed like tedious blokes in alien suits for all the difference they exhibited in their behaviour or perceptions, exasperated my tolerance for tired 1970s fantasies until I just had to fling Ringworld on the floor. It went to Age Concern last week, and they’re welcome to it.

I Am Legend

So, when I read this title, I Am Legend, I automatically think of Tim Curry in magnificent raunchy curled horns and stomping devil hooves, terrifyingly, hugely red, from Ridley Scott’s 1985 film Legend. Or John Legend. Or perhaps the film with Will Smith in it. In descending order of recognition, that title barely scrapes a thought for Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel. Pity. Matheson certainly didn’t invent the vampire, but he put it into 1950s pulp fiction, and imagined vampires in American high streets and grocery stores.

Matheson’s I Am Legend is the basis for the 2007 Will Smith film, which (from looking at the online descriptions) moved the action from an anonymous, Everyman small town to (yawn) New York, and upped the leading character Robert Neville to a ‘brilliant scientist’. Matheson’s Neville is a regular American guy who has to repair his house every morning after the nightly attacks from his vampire neighbours, and also force himself through a basic biochemistry course from library books. You get desperate when you’re working out how your immunity to vampire attack can help you kill them before they kill you.

matheson-3 — a six-exclamation point read

Matheson’s novel is a pulp classic. It’s a straightforward survival story, generously laced with gore and relentless sexual suggestion. The female vampires flaunt themselves at Neville, trying to lure him outside (of course they do; female vampires only exist to supplement male sex fantasies). The female survivor who Neville rescues is unaccountably unable to keep her bathrobe tied properly. There’s even a scene where something secret is brought out from its hiding-place inside a brassiere. Whatever happened to pockets?

I Am Legend has been repackaged as a science fiction classic, despite its horror lineage, because it uses a serious scientific approach to the problem of the biochemistry of vampirism. Is it in the blood, or in a bacillus? How does the bacillus allow vampires to survive gunshot wounds? Why does wood work when lead won’t, and exactly which part of the garlic bulb is the repellent? I definitely enjoyed the science more than the tedious pulpy parts, because as Neville thrashes through his flashbacks of what happened to work out why the vampire plague happened, we see glimpses of a far more interesting story. I was bored quite quickly by Neville refusing to escape from being trapped in his house by night and scavenging by day. I wanted to read the whole thing, not his deranged memories and circular ramblings. The oblique storytelling becomes really murky towards the end, so much so that I am still none the wiser about why Neville has become a legend to the new society that is taking over the earth. They don’t sound like nice people. I was happy to close the book.

Category: drinking

Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

Three disappointments for the dud pile

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