Theatre note: Blind Summit's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Last night a friend's spare ticket took me to an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was sold to me as a puppet version, which sounded irresistibly unwise. In fact, although there are a couple of puppets, what you mainly see are people, in overalls, performing the story as Brechtian didactic theatre - as if Brecht were a member of the Ingsoc Inner Party. Chunks of the original narration are delivered with a sort of ironic sarcasm, which I suppose cancels out to sincerity. The framing device works brilliantly in the first half, sinister and funny; it helps that you're not wholly certain at first it isn't real bad Brechtian theatre. In the second half, when the company are required to evoke soul-annihilating terror, the frame starts to get in the way. But if soul annihilation isn't your idea of a fun night out, that might be just as well.

Weather note: when I came out of the BAC, the saddle of my bicycle had a thick coating of frost. Not lock-freezing cold yet, though, thank God.

End-of-season's greetings

They will keep the feast in Stepney. The angel's wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, 'How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?'

He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. 'Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an instrument of torture.'

From Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which having just finished it really does appear to be that good. Time is required, though, to certify the level of praise it has received, and time can be particularly hard on historical novels. As the main points of your new year emerge from under canvas, may they turn out to be decorations, rather than instruments of torture.

007, meet FAT32

"Give me a hostname and target directory, I'm in but I'm lost."

"One sec... try 'auto slash share slash fs slash scooby slash netapp slash user slash home slash malcolm slash uppercase-R slash catbert slash world-underscore-domination slash manifesto.'"

-- a spy seeks help in cracking a computer, in Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives

.

[The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross, 2003. Confident, stylish and accomplished mix of Cold War thriller, IT-desk humour and multidiminsional SF/horror. But it comes with a laudatory third-party preface, acknowledgements ahead of the text and a somewhat self-congratulatory author's afterword, a combination that in most genres - maybe this one, I don't have a strong sense of the local norms - would be counted on the smug side. Good job he's good, eh?]

Clever Perec sell

This "staff pick" card, found in an Islington bookshop, pimps A Void, Adair's virtuoso translation of La Disparition, in words that honour its famous lipogrammatical constraint. OK, so that's not a wholly original trick - a critic or two had a go at it on first publication - but it's still not a thing that many of us would think to try in such tight conditions. Bravo Adam, I say.

Why show-offs prefer hardbacks

Allow me to introduce Doomed Second-Hand Bookshop Purchase No 371, a complete paperback set of the old and now very unfashionable translation of In Search of Lost Time (£10):

What's heartening for me is that its previous owner ("Sarah Thesiger, 1970", according to the inside cover of Swann's Way I) was a spine-breaker, so that to glance along the set is to follow an enthusiasm through its gradual decline, with surrender coming somewhere towards the end of Vol II of The Captive. The careful paperback-owning pseud is advised either never to break the spine of a book, or to buy second-hand examples more thoroughly broken than this.

Another ruddy booklist

Obviously the problem with that list of books designed to entice reluctant boys into reading is that it doesn't contain enough things that Daily Mail readers were forced to work through when they were little. That is the problem with all lists of books for children. Lists of books for adults are prone to more or less the opposite problem; they are snobbish, hidebound, difficult, highbrow - though to say "elitist" might not, in this context, be politically correct.

Mask off, I think giving school libraries the money and the permission to buy boy-enticing pulp is rather a fine move, although making it a high-profile initiative may serve to reinforce the idea that boys don't read. On the contents of the list I'm not much qualified to comment. I'm happy to see the inclusion of adventuresome books with female lead characters (Northern Lights, A Hat Full of Sky), but then I was a boy who read all my sister's Mallory Towers books, my pre-pubescent misogyny temporarily crushed by Enid Blyton's narrative drive.

Chemistry

A nicely pitched moment of joy among the horrors of Nicola Monaghan's tale of drugs and suffocated lives on a Nottingham estate, The Killing Jar, made better by a bathetic conclusion:

The sun rose, casting more blood and pus into the mucky air up around the clouds. I grinned my head off. It were beautiful, I knew that. I was at least using the word proper then. Jon was gorgeous, lit by the yellows and reds and what was left of the moon. We laid there, and birds started to sing, and we could see the grass was green again, and that our jeans were blue, not black. I hadn't noticed before that instant that everything was black and grey and mud brown at night, even once your eyes got used to the dark and you could see.

'Happiness is cheap in the East Midlands, Kez, me duck,' said Jon. I looked up and saw the sun, a broken yolk in the egg-white sky. He was right. Two quid wholesale, them pills'd cost us, and here we were laying on the grass and in love with the light.

I was eighteen years old and I was invincible. That morning everything was amazing. The light, my brother, everything. Ecstasy does exactly what it says on the packet.

[The Killing Jar, by Nicola Monaghan, 2006. The education of a heroin addict's daughter, with enough shocks to fill two misery memoirs and make a talkshow from the leftovers; drug-dealing in the playground aged ten is towards the nicer end of the spectrum. It is lifted from mundane sensationalism by the precision with which it recreates its setting (Broxtowe estate, 1980s and early 90s, with outings to Skegness and the clubs of Hockley) and the voice of its narrator. Kerrie-Ann Hill speaks in a Nottingham dialect that has the music right as well as the words, presents her experiences coolly, as nothing that out of the ordinary, and goes nowhere near self-pity; characters who look on her as a victim, manipulated or available for manipulation, have a low survival rate. Clever observational writing shores up the impression of her as someone sharp enough to survive in dangerous circumstances, and buys credibility for more flowery passages like the one quoted.]

Comedy of despair

You drag yourself out of the desert desperate for water, and the barman is busy. But this is not a romantic world. There's not enough Santa Claus to go round. Everyone treats each other with disdain. No one is indispensable. There are mothers of twins who have trouble getting the buggy in and out of shops. Who cares for these? There are people, our contemporaries, lost in libraries through the malice of evil librarians. Who loves these? We are all labouring under a lack of love, a bad situation for human beings. This situation is even bad for CATS.

The biggest threats to life now are leaky radiators, superglue and pre-cooked chicken. When people were dying all over the place (Schubert died just three months after declaring himself healthy), they lived with gusto. They did not waste a brushstroke because they feared death. But now people only die from their own or their doctor's negligence. Convinced of immortality, we're troubled by boredom, an inordinate sense of history and our own fecundity.

Animals have a much harder time of it. The world doesn't owe them a living. But at least they haven't forgotten what it's all about: you, the earth, the sky. Even trees know this.

- Lucy Ellmann, Varying Degrees of Hopelessness

[Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, by Lucy Ellmann, 1991. Love (and the lack of) and sex (and the lack of) at a funhouse-mirror version of the Courtauld Institute in the late 1980s. Talked of as a precursor to the chick-lit boom. Which, in the comic examination of single twenty-and-thirtysomething female lives, it probably is. But it's a hell of a lot odder than that: the anti-naturalism and the brevity, the madly individualistic style, the intensity that is sometimes a deadpan joke and sometimes not, the worrying at the facts of sickness and death - these could be descended from early Beckett. Which is not to accuse Lucy Ellmann of ever writing like anyone else.]

Rules? What rules?

If you have a goodish memory and you are planning to read China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, you may wish to skip this post. The bit I want to quote is from near the end and the book is extremely plotty. I have redacted some especially spoilerish sentences in the middle of the quote, even at the cost of rather spoiling its effect, but you should consider yourself warned.

The reason I so want to quote it is that it takes aim at a piety of children's fantasy that used to annoy the hell out of me back when I was in the target age-group: the touching final scene where the hero or heroine is informed that, because they have successfully completed their heavily symbolic rite of passage, they must leave the world of the imagination behind, with the compensatory promise of returning to it after death (if this is a Christian-apologetic fantasy) or having lots of sex (if it's a hippy-liberal one).

Mieville's heroine, perhaps because she is small and dark and round-faced and would have been a comic sidekick if destiny had had its way, has an answer:

'The stuff that happened here,' Deeba said, 'I'll never forget. What we did. I'll never forget you. Any of you.' She paused, looked at each of them in turn.

'And part of the reason I won't forget you,' she said, 'is cos I'll be back all the time.'

***

Mortar and the Propheseers - the Suggesters - looked up, startled.

'Come on,' she said, smiling. 'What are you even talking about, Mortar? It's easy to get from London to here [...] People are always going between, and you don't see either universe collapsing, do you?

'You just think it's hard to go between the two cos you've always thought it must be. You're just saying that cos you sort of think you should.'

Deeba's friends stared at her and at each other. 'She has a point,' Mortar said eventually.

[Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville, 2007. Systematic dismantling of the cliches of the children's quest novel, funny but with serious intent, characterisation and narrative drive, set in an alternate London that entails particular thanks to Neil Gaiman in the acknowledgments. It compelled me to read it in a sitting, which is not considerate behaviour in a 500-page book, even one with relatively large print, but is impressive. Author's own illustrations.]

Presbyterian bean salad

"Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life's problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You'd have thought I'd died. We saved it for lunch." - the Rev John Ames, 76, recovers from a health wobble in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

[Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2005. Astonishingly graceful novel in the form of an old pastor's letter to his young son, with a plot that develops so gently that I was a third of the way through before I realised there was going to be one. It ends up gripping. Its pulpit topics - death, love, redemption, forgiveness - are the obvious basis for praise, and you could extract 80 pages of good epigrams from its 280 pages. But it's the convincingness of John Ames's voice, and the solidity of his 1950s Iowa setting, which make the goodness palatable.]

Ask a fictional journalist

Minor characters from old novels guide you along the bleeding edge of blue-sky thinking. Episode two in what, at this rate, might actually be a series. Episode one and rules of the game here.

This week: Press baron George Roads on the role of editorial judgment in decision-making. No questions needed; he speaks far too well for himself:

You mark up the daily net sales of your paper -- on a curve -- a diagram thing. And then, some time when sales seem pretty average, you try a new feature -- 'Turf notes and notions,' or 'Books that have Pep,' or that thing we're trying out now in The Day -- 'The Bread of Life: the Christian's Daily Crumb.' You keep it up every day for a fortnight and watch the curve on the chart. Then you drop that feature for a fortnight; then you put it on again; and all the time you keep on watching your sales on the chart. The chart may show nothing at all -- the feature hasn't mattered a damn, either way. But now and then the curve goes up a little bit during the second week of the fortnight the feature is in, and down again during the second week of the fortnight it's out. Then you may -- though it isn't sure yet -- have yourself a winner; so you feel round a bit more, just to eliminate possible causes of error. And then, when at last you've got a dead cert, you back it, all in, like a man. Science and guts -- that's all there is to it. Simply keep your hand on the pulse of the nation.

Taken from chapter five of Rough Justice, by C.E. Montague (1926). Compare Yahoo's homepage redesign process. For an earlier appearance of Roads, and notes on where he came from, go here.

Ask a fictional journalist

Let minor characters from Victorian and Edwardian novels guide you through the bleeding-edge world of new media. A new series! One that may have more than one part! Interviews are conducted on a Wired speak to Rockefeller basis, not a Zembla speak to Henry James one: that is, I am decontextualising quotes, not attempting to use my imagination. Opinions may be selected for resemblence either to conventional wisdom or actual wisdom, cuts may be concealed without remorse and quality of transcription may, as ever, be crap.

This week's interviewee is Mr. John Rorrison, the sole Fleet Street contact of the hero of J.M. Barrie's When a Man's Single. Rorrison is certainly probably possibly "practically editing a great London newspaper". He explains How to succeed in blogging.

Rorrison, I've got this great new political blog. Will you link to it?

You beginners seem to be able to write nothing but your views on politics, and your reflections on art, and your theories of life, which you sometimes think original. Readers don't want it.

I know what this is about. You only link to your powerful mates, right?

Don't believe what one reads. Men fail to get a footing on the press because -- well, as a rule, because they are stupid.

All right, all right. So there are too many of us trying politics.

Yes, and each thinks himself as original as he is profound, though they only have to meet to discover that they repeat each other. The pity of it is that all of them could get on to some extent if they would send in what is wanted.

And what's wanted?

They should write of the things they have seen... readers have an insatiable appetite for knowing how that part of the world lives with which they are not familiar. They want to know how the Norwegians cook their dinners and build their houses and ask each other in marriage.

But I'm in Aberdeen. I'm hardly ever anywhere exotic.

Neither was Shakespeare. There are thousands of articles in Scotland yet. You must know a good deal about the Scottish weavers -- well, there are articles in them. Describe the daily life of a gillie: 'The Gillie at Home' is a promising title.

But TotallyGillie.com must have done all the big topics by now.

Of course they have, but do them in your own way... new publics are always springing up.

So I'm not to write about politics at all?

Write about politics if you will, but don't merely say what you yourself think; rather tell, for instance, what is the political situation in the country parts known to you. That should be more interesting and valuable than your political views.

And what if I don't want to write all this personal bollocks?

If you have the journalistic faculty, you will always be on the look-out for possible articles. The man on this stair would have had an article out of you before he had talked with you as long as I have done. Once I challenged him to write an article on a straw that was sticking out of a sill of my window, and it was one of the most interesting things he ever did. Then there was the box of odds and ends that he promised to store for me when I changed my rooms. He sold the lot to a hawker for a pair of flower-pots, and wrote an article on the transaction. Subsequently he had another article on the flower-pots; and when I appeared to claim my belongings he had a third out of that.

The man they couldn't bar

This morning, someone asked me what I was laughing at. It was The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson's novel-in-27-unbound-sections on grief and the vagaries of memory. Specifically, the bit that follows. 'Tony' is Tony Tillinghast, the friend whose death from cancer a chance visit to Nottingham has prompted B.S. Johnson to remember. The pub is one near B.S.'s flat in Angel, from which he and his friend Jack had been banned after scribbling obscenities in the 'virginal urinal', smashing the odd pint glass, and so on. A pause of three em spaces in the original is represented here by a paragraph break, because my HTML isn't all that. Anyway:

...Tony suggested going into the pub, on this occasion, it must have been the second time he came to the Angel, not the first, now I think of it, because I had worked at another pub, and I was barred from that one, too, or did not go in there, anyway, or something, but he said Let me go in first and order one for you to come in and drink, after a few minutes. And it worked perfectly, I stood outside and counted a hundred, then went in to him and took up my drink, and they were astounded, confounded, the woman and the barmaid, who were both there, it worked well, they muttered amongst themselves, or together, but there was nothing they could do about it, it was so well timed. But they would no serve us with another drink, I remember asking Why not? very aggressively, and them staring back, angrily, and saying You know why! And I think threatening to call a copper. But we left victorious despite, Tony and I, with some dignity, too, as I remember. The beauty of it was that Tony was so polite, gentlemanly and friendly in buying the drinks, had formed a relationship with them, they being very pleased at new custom in an area where it was not common, I think, and they therefore had this friendliness thrown in their faces, so to speak, but could do nothing about it. Ah, the beauty of that!

And then Tony suggested doing the same thing the next evening, only sending two friends in to set up drinks for four, and then both he and I would walk in, and after that they would surely never serve any drinks to anyone unless they saw who it was first, they would be that unsure that they were not going to see the two fat guys walk in again.

[The Unfortunates, by B.S. Johnson, London, 1969, reprint 1999. More readable and less affecting than I expected, although that may be my shallowness. It is an excellent portrait of what the mind does in a stretch of waste time -- kinships with Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, which again I wasn't expecting. The precise observation of Nottingham detail was a pleasure for me, although knowing the geography of his wanderings tugs against the randomness of the form.]

SILLY IDEA BONUS: Thanks to Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson, we now have a pretty good idea of when The Unfortunates took place: Boxing Day, 1964, when The Observer assigned the author to watch Forest play Spurs. A city that took its literary heritage seriously, rather than just arranging random volumes in the shape of an N, would declare Boxing Day to be B.S. Johnson Day, on the model of Bloomsday, and have hordes of tourists buying quarters of ham from a deli near Old Market Square, drinking two marsalas in Yates's Wine Lodge, and then watching a disappointing Forest match. Of course, in the spirit of the book, you would have to let your visitors do these things in an order of their choosing, or maybe gather at the railway station and then draw lots to decide the schedule. I may write a letter to our tourist authorities, and see how politely they give me the brush-off. And I may then try and do it myself anyway.

Hospital canteens and the "duty to protect"

Agnes was gentle and indecisive generally, a dove if ever there was, but had flown out hawkishly over the war. Her brother-in-law had been in his prisons, and, though she would not say what had happened to him there, Agnes thought even war was better than letting such things exist.

But if we remove one tyrant, then why not another, she'd said to Agnes; most of the staff at this hospital could give ample reason for us to go to war with their country of origin - every single one of them, if you asked the cleaners.

True, said Agnes; and maybe that's the way ahead.

-- from "The Phlebotomist's Love Life", in Helen Simpson's collection Constitutional. The driver of the story, and the emotion we're probably meant to identify with, is anti-war rage; but I like the opening up of another option.

Commercial note: On the evidence of Amazon, Constitutional's out in paperback on October 5. I hereby claim to be a month ahead of the curve, rather than eight months behind it.

[Constitutional, by Helen Simpson, London, 2005. Seriously accomplished comic stories. The plots flick round like second-hands, but each has the rest of a clock behind it. Adulterous, au-pair-employing suburban London appears to have literary life in it yet.]

Origin myth

Two short scenes from David Peace's Clough-at-Leeds novel The Damned Utd. There are three more scenes between them, all in the space of two pages.

First this:

The cleaning lady is cleaning my office, under the desk and behind the door, whistling and humming along to the tunes inside her head --

'You know, I once sacked all the cleaning ladies at Derby.'

'What did you do that for then, Brian?' she asks me.

'For laughing after we lost.'

'Least you had a good reason then,' she says. 'Not like Mr Revie.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well,' she says, 'Mr Revie once sacked a lass here for wearing green.'

'Wearing green?'

'Oh yes,' she says. 'He thought green brought bad luck to club.'

'And so he sacked her?'

'Oh yes,' she says again. 'After we lost FA Cup final to Sunderland.'

'Just like that?'

'Yes,' she says. 'Just like that.'

The telephone starts to ring. I pick it up. I tell them, 'Not now.'

Then this:

I have been in the kit room. I have been among the socks and the straps, the shirts and the shorts, but I have found what I was looking for. I have changed out of my good suit and nice tie into my tracksuit bottoms and this old Leeds United goalkeeping jersey.

Down the corridors. Round the corners. Through the doors and into the car park. The team and their trainers are already sat on the bus waiting for me. I climb aboard and plonk myself down next to Syd Owen at the front of the coach --

'What do you think of this then, Sydney?' I ask him.

'Of what?'

'Of this?' I ask him again, pointing at this old Leeds United goalkeeping jersey.

'I think if the team have to wear suits when they travel, so should their manager.'

'But what do you think of the colour, Sydney?'

'Green?' he asks. 'I think it suits you, Mr Clough.'

You'd call that cinematic, except the final reveal would be extremely difficult to do on screen. The writing has other hidden sophistications, too: I hadn't noticed the cleaning lady's dropped 'the's ("bad luck to club", "After we lost FA Cup" -- the tic of Yorkshire dialect cliche represents with a "t'") until I had to type her out.

For the significance of that green jersey, if you don't already know, try the picture at the head of this BBC obituary or the logo of the Brian Clough Statue Fund.

[The Damned Utd, by David Peace, Faber, London, 2006. A first-person account of the manager's nightmarish 44 days in charge of Leeds United, the most powerful and hated club in Britain, intercut with a second-person account of the rapid rise that took him there. The structure could be hubris and nemesis, or a reflection of the curse -- "first with gift and then with loss" -- that an unknown Yorkshireman is casting on our anti-hero. Builds an impressive sense of grim inevitability, although that could be something to do with me already knowing what's going to happen. No idea how far from documentary it is, but it feels original and fully imagined.]

The birth of modern political journalism (with a note on how it might die)

The text of today's sermon, like so many of the others recently, is from C.E. Montague. In this case, A Hind Let Loose (1910), his first novel, a farce about crappy provincial journalism. George Roads, a rising press baron, is talking to an unimportant interlocutor about the town's two newspapers, the Tory Warder and the Liberal Stalwart. I have made a snip in the middle, indicated by three dots.

"Still at it, ain't they?"

"At what?"

"Readying folk to read anything else they can get, to be rid of 'em. Bless you, these old party papers! Party! Good Lord!"

"'Party!' says Burke, 'is-'"

"Burke! I dare say. Some Fenian. Tell you, the thing's played out. Why, look about you; take a business man, average business man. He's got no party; not such a fool. He's fluid, not frozen all up. First this way a bit, then that way a bit - that's him. And d'you tell me he doesn't get up, every morning, fair itching to be rubbed a way no paper in this place has ever rubbed him yet? Kept in touch with - that's what he wants to be."

"What's 'kept in touch with'?"

"Told he's right." Roads' audience grew; his audiences had a way of growing...

"What would you pay," Roads pursued, with a corresponding rise of voice, "to be told, first thing when you got down to breakfast you were drunk last night, or you revoked, or ate with a knife, or something? That's what they call the game, I s'pose, these party papers. Why, look at the last war. Do you folks really want to be told a war's wrong when their blood's up? Or right, a year after, when they're sick of it? That's what they do, between 'em, these papers - blackguard their own customer, turn about; soon as one shift knocks off work at saying the country's a fool, t'other'll come on."

If you detect a pre-echo of the Daily Mail's Iraq policy, you should be warned that "Roads" is not a synonym for Harmsworth; the early career Montague gives him is much closer to the Hulton clan, which would make the half-penny morning paper he's planning the Daily Dispatch. And no one needs to make satirical points against the Daily Dispatch any more.

On the other hand, Roads' reader-frottage approach to editing is the foundation of much modern journalism; papers and writers vary according to who they try to rub. This may be an underestimated driver of newspaper resentment of blogs; it is galling to hear populist rhetoric from writers who can get away with rubbing far smaller groups of people than you. Anyone can be a blogger, true; but good blogs, good political blogs particularly, tend to assume a level of knowledge and a precision of partisanship that no one who needs to appeal to a newspaper-sized audience will dare. Homework assignment: rework the Long Tail thesis to fit what's happening to political writing, bearing in mind that the money's more in the patronage and commissions attracted by blog reputation than it is in AdSense, assuming there's any money at all.

Death, sex, sandwiches

John Harvey's Resnick novels had proper characters, convincing and involving police-procedure plots, and an acute sense of place. They had, in general, good clean prose. (True, the first page of Rough Treatment has a fat man move with surprising lightness, but what else is a plus-sized burglar to do?) For Nottingham readers, however, they had one other decisive virtue: cafe recommendations. In almost every novel our finicky Polish detective would disappear into some little place in the inner city or the Victoria Centre market. Many of them proved to exist and to be as good as billed.

I've just had my first encounter with the new Harvey series character, Frank Elder -- his second appearance, Ash and Bone. And I must say I was worried. He conducts many of his meetings in Starbucks. But we are saved. There is a cameo appearance for Resnick, with this outcome:

The cafe was French, a small patesserie set back from the main road that ran immediately south from the station. There were a few tables on the pavement, maybe a half-dozen more inside. Bread, criossants, baguettes and a gleaming espresso machine. Two women of a certain age, smartly dressed, sat near the rear window drinking coffee; a silver-haired man, camel coat folded over the back of his chair, was reading Le Monde and eating a croque-monsieur. Elder, who had used St Pancras enough over the years, had no idea it was there...

'How did you know about this?' Elder said, looking round.

'Charlie told me about it.'

I think I know where he's thinking of, and I haven't gone in, and I will.

[Ash and Bone, John Harvey, London, 2005. More thrillerish than the Resnicks -- that's the way the market's going, apparently -- with what seems like a greater number of splashy plots, and more sex. But that could be my faulty memory. The structure resists tidiness nicely, and the social set-up feels more solid and plausible than any policeman-out-of-retirement novel has a right to. I'll be reading the others.]

War correspondents vs tipsters

Some newspaper-bashing for balance. This is a soldier's cogent explanation of why horse racing ceased during the First World War. Unfortunately, because of C.E. Montague's way with non-RP dialogue, it appears to be spoken by Dick Van Dyke:

The pipers done it. Want to get aht o' pyin' a fair wige to a taht for 'angin' abaht Noomawket 'Eath. It tikes a man o' skill to watch a maw'nin gallop. Not like war correspondin'. Naow use feedin' backers a bag of emowshnal bilge abaht 'eroes an' cheery wounded an' any old muck. A taht must know 'is job. An' wiges accordin'...

-- from "The First Blood Sweep", in Montague's short story collection Fiery Particles.

[Fiery Particles, by C.E. Montague, London, 1923. Scarcely better than the Montague Cockney is the Montague Irishman, distinguished by his fondness for apostrophes and anti-semitism. This collection gives you him at war and at peace. It still manages some penetrating writing, though. The best story is probably "Honours Easy", in which two privileged officers far from the front compete to collect medals. One hunts blue ribbons, the other red. Montague despises them both, but he would never go so far as to transcribe their accents phonetically.]

You're a guest at the Somme

It is about 1917. Your tour guide is C.E. Montague, who was the chief leader-writer of the Manchester Guardian back when it was the only paper of weight in England consistently to oppose the Boer war. When the first world war broke out he dyed his grey hair black and volunteered for the trenches. After a few years they imposed an age limit on that; he has ended up as a censor and press officer. This account is from H.M. Tomlinson's introduction to Montague's posthumous A Writer's Notes on his Trade:

One night H.W. Massingham arrived at our chateau, on a brief visit. He was the editor of the Radical Nation, a weekly political and literary review which fought nonsense with such knowledge and persistence that for a time the Authorities declined to allow the soldiers to read it. Montague was a Radical. Probably the opinions of both of them about war approximated; they approached each other, at that time, even over that particular war. I am sure Massingham was not able to guess that. Montague made no sign. The next morning, early, the three of us set forth for Courcelette, on the Somme. It was bitterly cold, and Massingham, frail, and not then in the best of health, had had enough of it long before we reached the ruined town of Albert. This is not the place to do more than mention the fact that the battleground of the Somme was unattractive. I saw Massingham's eyes full of horror as he glanced over the landscape, at the point where Montague judged we had better leave our car. A leg bone with the boot still on it was sticking out of some rubbish beside us. Montague was beginning to look cheerful. The day was grey and the wind was north-east. Shells were falling into Devil's Wood, shells were falling on La Boisselle. Montague turned to our driver with instructions for him.

"We shall be back in about two hours. If they are shelling this road, don't come to us. We will come to you."

"Yessir."

Massingham overheard this item of local interest with deep curiosity. Had Montague but known it, he would have taken the driver aside and whispered it; but he really appeared to suppose that any man would value an opportunity such as now offered. On we went.

We came to what used to be the windmill, on the Pozières ridge. Nothing showed there but tumbled rubbish in the universal mud; but as we drew level with it four nine-inch howitzers and two six-inch naval guns went off together, and slightly lifted me from my feet. All in the work of such a day! But Massingham was not used to it, and he was visibly shaken. One would be, even without neuralgia, and he had some. Montague, however, was getting brighter and brighter. He had no eye for Massingham. His gaze ranged the horrid landscape for inspiriting signs that it might oblige us with a display of its common routine of eruption and disaster, for he desired to satisfy the interest of a brother Radical; therefore he never noticed that Massingham already was more than confirmed in all he had ever thought of battle.

We passed an aeroplane which had crashed, and beyond that the track rose again to a ridge; and over the ridge was the enemy. Montague stopped, and inspected Massingham, who was in a blue-serge suit and dark overcoat. Montague spoke. "On the top there," he said, "the enemy will be able to see us. He mightn't waste shells on three soldiers, but if he saw a civilian he would guess an important visit was being made, and he might hand us a bouquet. We'd better go back to the battery and borrow a khaki overcoat for you, before we go on."

"But," expostulated Massingham, "I don't want to go on. I've seen all I want to see."

Montague's disappointment was manifest. He was just beginning to enjoy himself. Could Massingham ever again have such a chance as this to see how very bad the worst could be? Why waste such a day?

It may add something to know these men were old colleagues, as well as fellow radicals. Massingham was editor of the liberal Daily Chronicle when the Boer war broke out. He opposed it. His proprietors told him to change his mind or resign. And when he resigned, he found refuge as a London and parliamentary correspondent for the Guardian.

[A Writer's Notes on his Trade, by C.E. Montague, London, 1930. Highly crafted craft essays, still full of valuable perception, but also illustrative of how different posh journalism was in his day. A capacity for instantly producing apposite quotes from Walter Scott will no longer help you get a job; he writes as if it does, both in style and content. Past notes on Montague here and here. ]

Heart of Darkness, as told by Wilkins Micawber

Just read David Copperfield for the first time and was left with an interesting question. Why on earth had I never read this before?

I decided to blame E.M. Forster.

You see, I loved Aspects of the Novel long before I read almost anything that it discussed. Most critics went in for fake precision. Forster had a calculated vagueness that seemed truer to real reading. And he was at ease in registers those other critics barely dared try: parody, fantasy, satirical attack. If they ever build a Tomb of the Unknown Humanities Undergraduate, his riff on pseudo-scholarship will serve excellently as an epitaph.

I remembered Aspects being somewhat sniffy about Dickens. Here, I thought, is where I bought my views, which Hard Times and Oliver Twist and Great Expectations up until the point when I realised my copy had 32 pages missing failed to shake. Then I looked Dickens up in the index, turned to page 78, and found an admittedly sniffy passage that anticipated much of what I wanted to say here:

Dickens's people are nearly all flat (Pip and David Copperfield attempt roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than solids). Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own. It is a conjuring trick; at any moment we may look at Mr Pickwick edgeways and find him no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view. Mr Pickwick is far too adroit and well trained. He always has the air of weighing something, and when he is put into the cupboard of the young ladies' school he seems as heavy as Falstaff in the buck-basket at Windsor. Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they 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. He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.

Dickens's caricatures, or at least the David Copperfield ones, live in ways that a caricature of a caricature would not. They change, for a start. Sometimes it's a flip of the cardboard, like the self-pitying "lone, lorn" Mrs Gummidge when she discovers someone else merits the adjectives and becomes instantly unselfish. Sometimes it's a slow mounting up of the initial characteristics, like Uriah Heep. And the man trusts them. Is it not an extraordinary act of courage to speak one of the climaxes of your novel through someone who seems to be a joke, as Dickens does with Mr Micawber?

"Then it was that--HEEP--began to favour me with just so much of his confidence, as was necessary to the discharge of his infernal business. Then it was that I began, if I may so Shakespearianly express myself, to dwindle, peak, and pine..."

and so on, through half a dozen pages it would be even more of a spoiler to quote. "Adroit and well trained" and "conjuring trick" seem hardly to do justice to that kind of bravura, but they indicate an appreciation of it within the fashions of Forster's time. (C.E. Montague, who I expect to be going on about here again soon, also fights to reconcile loving Dickens and feeling he shouldn't like him. Heaven knows what bits of conventional wisdom I'm bending to, even when I think I'm thinking straight.)

[Aspects of the Novel, by E.M. Forster, 1927. Seductive account of how fiction works -- absolutely seductive when you're too ignorant, impressionable and thick to notice any blind spots he doesn't tell you about. Have resisted rereading it whole in case there are some. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, 1849-50. Worth several weeks of anyone's life, for reasons I haven't begun to describe.]