humour – Kate Macdonald

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.

E F Benson and Dodo’s Daughter

This time in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m reading a novel of utter frivolity. It’s called Dodo’s Daughter, and is a sequel to the earlier and unforgettably frivolous novel of Edwardian society life, Dodo. Dodo is a ditzy lady, invented by that great chronicler of society silliness, E F Benson. Nowadays he is much better known for his creation of the immortal Lucia and Miss Mapp, and their battles to social death in Tilling and Riseholme in the early 1920s. But Benson had been frivolling for twenty years before Miss Mapp and Lucia were born, and the stories about Dodo are a pretty good introduction to what the Edwardians thought was witty about his writing. In this novel, Dodo, who is about to embark on her third marriage to the man she jilted for his brother as her first, has a problem daughter, from her second marriage. Yes, it’s complicated. She knows when to take herself off to bed, and has a greater awareness of her need for sleep and a happy home life than she did as the epitome of heartless frivolity at age 18.

Dodo’s Daughter is really two books in one. It’s a conventional romantic melodrama, written with a hint of camp tongue in cheek. It’s also a modern story of heartless girls and boys living a meaningless life in which being amused is their only goal. They have a great many things to say about the modern Edwardian girl – her choices in life, why she gets married, and what marriage was really for. Naturally, these are rich girls and boys: all through the novel no-one does a stroke of work because Benson writes about them as an isolated bubble of upper-class society.

Nadine is Dodo’s daughter, a chain-smoker (which was very daring), and the leader of the pack. She is an appalling flirt and an empty conversationalist: her attitudes are really so much like those of a caricature of the 1920s flapper that I had to check the date of this novel twice. But it really is 1913, and prewar. Nadine and Dodo are both totally egotistical, but they both cheerfully admit this, and expect the world to accept them as they are. They aren’t malevolent at all, they are very concerned that everyone has a nice time and gets what they want. But their efforts to get what they want take priority over the desires of anyone else.

The third most important character is Seymour, an early tryout for Georgie Pillson of the Lucia books – with his jade dusting, his embroidery (interestingly contemporary with Peter’s embroidery in Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore), his devoted female servant, his effeminate airs – but this (in the gender politics of the day) is all a pose. Seymour is quite aware of how he appears, and seems to rather enjoy allowing the worm to turn. He breaks away from his languid poses to come over all masculine and domineering when he becomes engaged to Nadine. He rages at his tedious mother and sister for assuming that his effeminate pose gives them the right to order him around, and he becomes the most formidable character in the book, because he is simply the most intelligent man on the stage.

Benson does a very well-executed job of mixing styles of writing. He combines the epigrammatic late Victorian style of Oscar Wilde with an unexpected and unstudied close analysis of emotion and social realities. He juxtaposes melodramatic plot details- of attempted murder and an older woman braving childbirth – with intense self-analysis and an almost stream of consciousness dialogue (very ahead of its time). This combination feels abrupt because it’s disconcerting, but it is also completely under control. Benson knows what he’s doing.

The last third of the novel is all about Hugh, who is in love with Nadine but has been jilted by her for Seymour, and won’t stop hanging around suffering. Will Hugh die, or recover, or recover without the use of his legs, after a dramatic sea rescue of a shipwrecked boy? (Whom we never see again, incidentally.) This drama brings out the more interesting aspects of their characters. Hugh develops the stiffest upper lip I’ve ever encountered in prewar popular fiction. Nadine actually stops thinking about herself for minutes at a time. But Seymour becomes terrifically complicated, and takes refuge in bitter campness to avoid being devastated by Nadine’s weather-cock behaviour. He also comes off better than Dodo, by demonstrating the emotional maturity and self-awareness that none of the others possess.

The effect of all these agonies under a light dusting of frivolity is to produce a really modern novel that examines the emotions swirling around inside an eternal triangle. There are clear signs that Benson is struggling to free his writing from the grip of the Victorian romantic novelette, and from the Wildean drawing-room comedy of epigrams. But the novel is clearly Edwardian: the incessant chain-smoking of Nadine and her mother should tell us that at least.

Dodo’s Daughter is also rather interesting if you’re looking for early feminist fiction. Dodo herself is a financially independent woman (thanks to both her former marriage settlements), but she is also an independent woman in terms of making her own decisions, deciding whom she will marry, where she will live, and so on. She keeps having to throw her drunk ex-husband out of the house (that’s the second one, who was a German prince of very Prussian characteristics), and she won’t ask her third husband to do this. She goes downstairs herself and gets rid of the awful tyrant Prussian, time and again.

Her closest friend is Edith, an eccentric composer, who reminded me so much of the suffragette composer Ethel Smyth that I had to read up on her on Wikipedia, and yes! She was! Apparently Benson put Smyth into all his Dodo books, and she loved her portrait. Edith is a monomaniacal composer, and when the muse strikes, she just keeps on composing on the dining room table while her meals are brought to her and placed around the sheets of music paper.

Nadine is a mouthpiece for arguments about the role of women, what girls are to do with their lives, whether there is an alternative to marriage, and whether it’s possible to do without men. It’s a fairly safe guarantee that any time she is in a scene, feminist discussion will begin. Through her, Benson makes some fascinating remarks about the current generation of girls managing without men in the future. Because this novel immediately precedes the First World War and the 1920s, the ‘decade of single women’, this seems like seeing into a very grim future indeed. But it may be that Dodo’s Daughter is anecdotal evidence that even before the war and the slaughter of a generation of young men, women were thinking that life without an obligatory husband or other male authority might soon be a social possibility. Or not. Since Benson was a satirist, who can really tell what he was laughing at, and what he was wistfully hoping might come true?

Arnold Bennett builds a theatre: The Regent

A highly satisfying novel of wish fulfillment bounds onto your screen in this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up. In Arnold Bennett’s The Regent (1913), a wealthy provincial magnate builds a London theatre by whose success he confounds the city folk who know better than he does. There are no agonies and no tense little scenes of social drama in this novel. It is pure uncomplicated pleasure.

The hero, Edward Henry Machin, is a man too big for his house, and for his town, so when he is let loose on London it’s a big relief for us all. He is a Bursley businessman who hasn’t enough to do. He’s made all the money he wants, he is driving his wife and mother to distraction forcing new domestic inventions into the house that they don’t want and don’t see the need for. His mother in particular is grimly resistant, and his exasperated wife just wants him out of the house so that she can get on with housekeeping the way she wants.

Arnold Bennett was a stiff-necked and highly capable Staffordshire writer, author of over thirty novels and short story collections, and plenty of non-fiction as well. He was proudly provincial, but also European, having lived for many years in France where he cohabited with a French actress. He wrote many novels about The Potteries, the crockery-making district of the Midlands of England, and most of his characters have Midlands roots and values, representing the heartland of England as an industrial nation. Bennett has been labelled the epitome of middlebrow writing because he wrote novels to entertain and to sell, not to experiment or to create innovation.

The Regent absolutely entertains but it also holds a mirror up to a rapidly changing and modernising society. The story is packed with admiration for modern inventions that make life easier and business more efficient. Edward Henry uses the telephone all the time, and pulls off a remarkable little deception using the phone which I would never have expected in a novel of 1913: it’s exactly what I would have expected from a ruthless business deal of the 1980s.

Edward Henry goes out in a huff one evening, hurt that his domestic helpfulness is rejected in his own house. He finds himself at the theatre. To his surprise some business cronies invite him to join them in their box, and he finds himself being lobbied to buy 50% of an option to develop a plot of land off Piccadilly into a theatre. That’s Piccadilly, London, not Piccadilly, Manchester, and Edward Henry has hardly ever been to London. But he does know business and he is no fool. Somehow, as part of the discussion, he rises to an additional challenge, which is to stay at London’s most exclusive hotel, the Grand Babylon, while he’s down there looking at this plot of land. (The Grand Babylon Hotel is an invention, of course, by Bennett, whose rather good novel of the same title was published in 1902.)

He at last has a project that takes all his time and attention, and is suitably audacious for his formidable energies. He learns about London ways, but he also deals with London people by applying simple business techniques to the management of money. Nobody quivers with tension for chapters on end, and nobody is slighted or crushed for ever by the cold lift of an aristocratic eyebrow. Maybe I’ve been reading too many 1913 novels about sensitive souls who take themselves too seriously, but The Regent was so refreshing for its complete lack of pretension. It is also pleasant to read an English novel in which London is not the centre of the universe, just for a change.

Edward Henry brazens it out, with extreme attention to detail, and the ensuing sub-plot of how he will impress the Grand Babylon staff is an excellent undercurrent of humour for the remainder of the novel. He secures a valet, orders new clothes, takes a suite, and starts to look the part that he is now playing in earnest: a wealthy entrepreneur about to move into the London property market, and the theatre. He’s still quaking inside, but he know that he’s tough, and that he can do this, and he carries the reader’s confidence with him.

When Edward Henry meets the other shareholders he finally feels in control. They’re all theatrical types; more concerned with naming the as yet unbuilt and undesigned theatre than with discussing its business plan or its capacity. Edward Henry can run these amateurs singlehanded, and in fact he runs them off the project entirely, getting rid of this useless baggage by buying their shares. They’re all so impoverished they will happily take his ready cash and abandon the idea of their own theatre in return of the assurance of some rent paid and expensive meals. And now that they’re off his hands, so he thinks, Edward Henry can get down to making his own plans for the theatre.

This is the clever thing about the story: Edward Henry had no interest at all in taking on a theatre project at the beginning, but when he found an opportunity asking to be taken up, suddenly building a theatre was exactly the thing he wanted to do. It solved his domestic problems too, because he could rampage about London instead of about his beleaguered house and a town he already controlled and was bored of.

Bennett 3 — See, THIS is what happens when cheapskate print-on-demand firms slap together a cover design for a book they’re selling that they’ve never bothered reading

How he manages his campaign, how he navigates past London’s aristocratic lawyers, how he wriggles out of the manipulations of actresses and the cunning of journalists, all these make up the joy of this novel. We’ve already had the highly satisfying encounters with pretentious actor types, and now we meet the completely unpretentious Lady Waldo, the owner of the freehold and a former actress who would just love to go back to the stage. This gives Edward Henry just the lever he needs to get her lawyers off his back and release the land for a theatre instead of a church for their preferred religious sect. I particularly enjoyed Edward Henry’s avoidance tactic for Miss Elsie April, the leading femme fatale of the stage, who plans to conquer him in her usual manner. She is discomfited by Edward Henry bringing his wife and children down to London especially to meet her. He also manipulates Isabel Joy, the roaming suffragette, who is on a round the world tour of no more than 100 days in which she has undertaken to be arrested a certain number of times. Because the papers are more interested in her, than in Edward Henry’s new Regent Theatre, he has to find a way of getting her off the front page, or getting onto the front page with her.

A different author might have had Edward Henry run off with Elsie April, or have his venture fail, but Bennett was not writing melodrama, but domestic sensibility. It’s a good thing to keep your feet on the ground, to know where you come from and what your worth is, and it will not stop you having adventures. Edward Henry is also nicely uninterested in being a star himself. He appears on stage to congratulate the audience on liking his first production, but that’s because he can’t think of anything else to say, and by that point he is in the thick of his planning for his next endeavour. He’s a producer, not a director, and operates steps ahead of everyone else in the business. He is a gust of refreshing no nonsense, as is this excellent novel.

Ayisha Malik, The Other Half of Happiness

The continuing adventures of Sofia Khan have been much anticipated. I adored Malik’s first novel, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, and its sequel begins very satisfyingly with the immortal words of ‘Reader, I married him’. This is of course the burning question at the end of Sofia Khan when she’s flying off to Karachi with Conall, whom she has only just realised has become a Muslim (the beard, the not drinking, the Muslim friends: none of that clicked before). Would they actually get married, or just save the world chastely together? Conall – her inscrutable, kind Irish neighbour – is all Sofia has ever truly desired, and one month into their new married life in Karachi she realises that she hardly knows him.

Malik clears that point out of the way briskly so we can carry on with their story, which is not so much the story of a marriage as learning what you’ve got once you are married. It is very pleasing to read a novel that tackles marriage as something that needs work, and that needs total honesty. Unfortunately one of this happy couple has not been wholly honest, and has to rethink some priorities in life, dragging the other partner in the marriage along to a bravely bleak ending.

Pause for a realism break. The conventions of fiction mean that a page and a half of dialogue has to stand in for the days of necessary intermittent, accumulating communication that make a marriage work. Sofia certainly talks to Conall, and he does listen. Occasionally he talks to her. But in this novel, almost every plot point and character arc depends on non-communication, the failing to divulge, and characters’ reluctance to pass on crucial information. The Other Side of Happiness depends on these non-communications for the story, and Sofia, to wind their way into your affections.

Everyone is distracted, or unnaturally reticent, or withholding information, although they know they ought to hand it over but haven’t the nerve, or don’t think it’s important, or think that it’s so flaming obvious that anyone who needs to know, will. I have rarely read a novel during which I wanted to scream TALK TO HER! so often, to so many characters, Sofia included. Again and again a massive load-bearing plot twist depends on X not having told Y the facts about Z. It gets to you after a bit. All the female characters spend their lives on social media, texting, talking in bedrooms or living-rooms, yet Things Don’t Get Told. The men are the really taciturn ones, except Conall’s brother Sean (I absolutely relate to Sean), who spends the novel asking helplessly why X hasn’t told Y the truth about Z, thus revealing Z to the grateful reader.

Meanwhile, in Sofia’s personal trajectory, she has a book launch and a wedding, and an unexpected trip to Ireland where she sings the hymns during Mass and does not comprehend Irish dialect. She becomes a publisher’s reader. She tries to work out how to write her next book, on Muslim marriage, when everything she thought she knew about it is getting tragically complicated and too bloody real. She rises, though. Our Sofe rises up, she keeps afloat, her beloved friends bob along with her, and even her mother does extraordinary things. Conall is Sofia’s problem: a more annoying, aggravating, monosyllabic, lovable lunk I have yet to read.

The Other Half of Happiness is not the fascinating, delirious page-turner that Sofia Khan was, keeping me trapped reading it on a sofa for hours. It’s deeper, it’s more serious and a lot braver, in terms of writing about marriage. It is a tear-jerker, though I also laughed out loud. The one-liners may be fewer, but they still devastate.

Ayisha Malik, The Other Half of Happiness (Bonnier Zaffre, 6 April 2017), ISBN 978 17857 607 30, £7.99

Saki’s When William Came

When William Came by Saki (H H Munro) is a complicated novel. On the face of it, it’s a straight propagandist story at the peak of the anti-German pre-First World War war fever craze, to warn the British to start preparing for war and get the young men into the army as soon as possible. Underneath that, it’s a classic Saki story. It’s witty and sly about glossy boys who prey on middle-aged Edwardian matrons, who know perfectly well what they’re doing, and understand the duplicity of their upper-class society. At an unexpected third level, it’s a rather strongly-felt hymn to the English countryside, English values and the tragedy of not being able to live in England. And I say ‘England’ deliberately: this novel is about England, not Britain. And, finally, it’s a strangely subtle fantasy about the grafting of European values and culture onto London society, which has the surprising effect of letting us see what Saki thinks about the rest of Europe, about Germans, Italians, Jews and all. I’m going to try to avoid the word ‘offensive’ because one person’s outrage can be another person’s delighted amusement, especially in fiction from a historical period that we don’t live in.

When William Came isn’t at all a black and white, easily polarised narrative. This is what makes it probably the best of the war fever novels, because it is not simplistic, not single-level, and so it has survived as a novel, rather than as a novelty, beyond the fad of fear of Germany. No-one now would read The Battle of Dorking unless they were literary historians: there is no other excuse. No-one now would read The Swoop, or, How Clarence Saved England, unless they were completist P G Wodehouse fans. They certainly wouldn’t read it for the enjoyment of war fever fiction. I have a fat volume of these tales, lovingly and painstakingly collected by the late I F Clarke, the great pioneer in the recording of really obscure, very generic fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was interested in science fiction and feminist fiction too, any kind of genre fiction as long as it was from around this period, and war fever fiction was one of his specialities. His bibliographic achievements are invaluable to literary historians, but this particular fictional cul-de-sac has not been much visited by the average reader.

One hundred years later: is When William Came still worth reading? If you like Saki, absolutely. There’s a lot here for those who appreciate Saki’s particular style to enjoy. If you’re a war-fever collector: yes, certainly. This novel is a sophisticated addition to the canon, it’s by a most accomplished stylist and it’s actually a really fascinating read. There is no conventional plot: the novel is a series of scenes with political speeches laid on, but they are very cleverly arranged, have real characters, vintage Saki creations, who continue to live on after you’ve finished the book. The propaganda value is potentially immense, but I doubt whether anyone took the novel seriously because of who Saki was.

Saki was a satirist, a writer of light squibs, frothy cynical superficial fiction for amusement, and the after-dinner quotation. He made his name by sending up turn of the century Westminster political pretensions in The Westminster Alice, in which he rewrote topical political events in the style of Alice in Wonderland. These were published in weekly instalments, and as a book in 1902: he was really a newspaper columnist. He then became celebrated for his short stories. If you read these en masse in one of his collected fiction editions, they give you a total immersion into callous candour and heartless selfishness. They are brilliant: he had a gift for seeing straight through the pretension and pompousness of Edwardian upper-class society, and for being bitingly straightforward about the hypocrisies of daily life. When William Came was his last novel, because shortly after it was published, the First World War broke out, he joined up (over-age) and died in November 1916, killed by a sniper’s shot. His last words, to a fellow soldier, were ‘put that bloody cigarette out’.

When William Came is speculative fiction, a what-if story, so when it begins we are immediately intrigued by the something that has occurred. It is referred to, politely and discreetly, by the characters as the ‘catastrophe’, or is simply not mentioned at all, as if it were rather too unpleasant to discuss. ‘It’, of course, is the German invasion of Britain, which was accomplished very easily in only a few days because the British were too lazy to train their young men to be an active defence force. The mighty power of the massed German armed forces overwhelmed the puny and pathetic British attempts at self-defence, and in a remarkably bloodless takeover, Germanised the entire country. Actually, we only see London, and a bit of the countryside, but we are to take it that whatever happens in London, must have happened to the rest of the island. Streets have been renamed in German. Road signs and place-names now have signs in both languages. The British way of socialising has been transformed to German habits. There are no pubs any longer, only continental-style cafés where you argue, play chess and read the paper at set times in the morning (when Saki was writing, this was very un-British). A German monarch sits on the British throne, and many, many Britons have left the country to settle in other parts of the Empire. The British king now has his court at Delhi. There is a richly sentimental episode where a traveller in Mandalay, or somewhere similar, visits an English family who have settled there, where they can still raise the Union Jack on a flagpole. Charming German aristocrats are infiltrating the British social scene. The British middle and upper classes, already supine, are being slowly squashed, and British men have been emasculated. The only successful British men are the charming glossy boys whom Saki specialised in writing, who exist by flattering and serving their own interests. It is now illegal for British men to join the army, they have no masculine role any longer. But hope still exists: even if British men have been beaten and are unable to fight back, with fox-hunting their only active, physical pursuit, British youth will not lie down under the German yoke. At a grand review in Hyde Park, at which the Boy Scouts of the nation are to parade and salute the German emperor and his son, the gathered crowds are first embarrassed, then gleeful to see that British youth has decided to ignore the summons by the German Emperor, and simply do not turn up. It’s a sad sight to see an Emperor kept waiting by his subject race, and so the novel ends on this uplifting but flatly ridiculous sight. There is hope for the nation, even an unprepared nation, if its youth keep a proper attitude towards the enemy. At least, that’s what I think Saki is saying.

The scorn in this novel is very, very evident. It is a Tory rant. Decadent social customs are held up for ridicule: modern dance, couples who do not live together in harmony, the adoption of pretty boys by older women as agreeable social accessories. The most wonderful character in the novel is Joan Mardle, an irritating woman related to practically everyone in Society, who invites herself to events and then comments on them loudly at moments when the din of conversation has dropped. She is the spirit of inconvenient candour, a kind of anti-flatterer, whose ringing voice and piercing tones say aloud what everybody else has been thinking, or trying not to say, or would have preferred not to be noticed. She alone is worth reading this book for, but when she is part of a glorious satirical shower of scorn, she makes When William Came simply magnificent.

How does this novel fit into the literary scene of 1913? It’s obviously part of the anti-German war fever fad, and it’s also a nice example of early twentieth-century speculative fiction. It’s a strong example of Edwardian satire and dilettantism, the kind of literary alley down which you would also find E F Benson and Anthony Hope. These are minor sub-genres: Saki was not a major writer, but he was absolutely brilliant at what he did.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

In a review posted this week on Bustle, E Ce Miller gave us a list of the 50 great / important works by women we should all read. Imagine my feelings of smug self-validation when I found that I’d already read about a third of them, and that I was in the middle of reading (actually, galloping through) another: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

I knew about Alison Bechdel from her culture-changing idea of the Bechdel Test, that thing you ask of films, books and other cultural productions. If two or more women are having a conversation, if it about something / someone other than men? If the film or book can answer ‘yes!’, then it has something to say to more than one segment of the population and has a fair chance of not being gender biased. She was also awarded one of the 2014 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Awards, to allow her to keep writing and creating. Fun Home is far more than a graphic novel, because it’s a memoir, not fiction at all. (It was also made into a smash hit musical.) It’s painful, beautiful, poetic and symmetrically chilling. It’s about Alison Bechdel’s childhood in Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 1970s, during which time she grows to realise that her father is more than an obsessive house renovator and the grim community mortician (Fun as in Funeral). He oppresses his family, but he also loves them, and he loves boys too, though is too closeted to come out. Thus the circle of escape, obsession, dictatorialness and unexpected admissions of pleasure continues. The story moves back and forth in time like a weaving shuttle, so the reader experiences layer after layer of story, with each new layer gaining texture and resonance from its foundation.

The sad and ordinary fact of Bruce Bechdel’s death, hit by a truck as he crossed the road, is examined again and again for clues and for answers. He took the children camping, he took them to stay with friends in New York (where he could go cruising at night on Christopher St), he had them cleaning and doing chores every day, he taught them to swim. Helen Bechdel, a former actress who gave up her dreams to be the mother of a family, endures her husband’s erratic ways and endless, casual affairs with angry endurance. She retreats into acting and a thesis, while he is in a world of his own, sourcing chandeliers and Victorian glassware, and foolishly buying beers for underage boys. The children separate as well (the renovated house certainly has enough space), so isolation and private experiences become normal.

When Alison goes to college she works out the name and the meaning of her own sexuality, which adds another layer to her relations with her father. She had loved men’s shirtings and suits as much as he did, and she fetishised the lines of a man’s body, wanting that shape for herself, as much as he wanted their bodies. The artwork tells more than half of this complex, shifting story, with frames repeated to silently show that yes, there was more going in here, in this particular exchange or event, than the younger Alison had noticed. Although the seven episodes of the book move back and forth in time in a patchwork of recollections and linked stories, the language of the narration begins simply, increasing in complexity as more understanding emerges. When moments of comprehension surface in the small or adult Alison’s mind, the effect is stunning: word and image working together simply and beautifully to hit the reader for six.

You can read this as a memoir of family life with an unusual proximity to death and its processes (I’ve barely mentioned the family funeral home business: that’s an entirely separate story). You can read it as a sad story of closeted homosexuality (Bruce), or as a satisfying and wryly self-deprecating memoir of an out lesbian at ease with herself and her life. You can read this as a book about the importance of reading the right book at the right time to realise the truth about sexuality, in all its manifestations. You can certainly read this book as a pointed rebuke at the pretentiousness of college English literature tutorials, and the dangers of obsessing over one particular text (Bruce was also a high school English teacher). We don’t read a lot about Alison’s brothers as adults, and perhaps that was by their wish. At the end of the book, her first acknowledgement is to her mother and brothers for ‘not trying to stop me writing this book’. Her portrait of her mother is understanding but also unsparing: Helen was an expert mother and an understanding woman but not warm or friendly. Those children lacked hugs. That family lacked warmth. It was not a fun home, by any means.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), ISBN 978-0-224-08051-4, £12.99

Bertie Wodehouse’s socks and spats

Some years ago I wrote a scholarly chapter on how clothes were used as social indicators in the fiction of P G Wodehouse and Dornford Yates. This was for Middlebrow Wodehouse (ed. Ann Rea), and was a thoroughly enjoyable chapter to research. Costume history is one of my favourite branches of history, and I’ve been studying it since I was a little girl, when I copied the illustrations in books of ‘costume through the ages’, and then coloured in these tracing-paper facsimiles with wildly inappropriate patterns and colours. You learn a lot about dress construction when you’re deciding which parts of a hooped skirt were made of the same fabric. Other important sources of historical sartorial information were Louise M Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, and a book I never found again outside Aberdeen City Library, called something like Calico Captive, all about dress-making on the eighteenth-century Canadian frontier.

But all of this was about women’s dress: there was very little to say, it seemed, about how men dressed, other than the political importance of sumptuary laws and the cod-piece, and how Beau Brummell made restraint elegant. I had long wanted to work out the thing with Bertie’s spats, so was very pleased to have an opportunity with this chapter. Recently I was alerted to some online discussion of the book, and whether Wodehouse ought to be studied at all. To partially answer that question, download my chapter here, with my compliments. km-chapter-on-yates-and-wodehouse-2015-site-version

* The title is, of course, a daft mistake: But no-one has mentioned it, so I’m going to pretend it’s a deep metaphorical conflation of character and author.

Category: humour

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