It’s a curious thing how writers come in and out of fashion. A writer can be a great success in their lifetime, critically acclaimed, popular perhaps too, yet after a few years be largely forgotten. Others languish in obscurity, are even ridiculed, but years later come to be seen as masters in their field. There’s little pattern to it that I see, literary immortality is a crapshoot.

Ross Macdonald hasn’t fared so well at the tables the last few decades. In his day, Macdonald was a major writer of hardboiled fiction, he was referred to as belonging to the holy trinity of crime, along with Chandler and Hammett. Now, he’s little known, undeservedly so because while I don’t (so far anyway) put him next to Chandler and Hammett in terms of ability he’s an enjoyable read with a fine line in snappy dialogue and sense of place.

I heard about Ross Macdonald through a Tobias Jones article in the Guardian, which can be read here. Jones argues that Macdonald surpasses the other hardboiled greats, but that this took time with the early novels consciously imitating his predecessors. That’s interesting, and in a way reassuring, because I started with Macdonald’s first and while I enjoyed it I couldn’t help but notice quite how derivative of Chandler in particular it is.

Macdonald’s protagonist is private detective Lew Archer, the name a reference to Miles Archer – Sam Spade’s partner in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Archer operates out of LA, mostly doing divorce work, but in this first of fourteen novels he is hired by a Mrs. Sampson to find her husband who has failed to return from a trip. The Sampsons, naturally, are rich, and Mrs. Sampson is determined to outlive her husband and inherit his wealth. She’s concerned that he might be with another woman, which could mean she could get squeezed out of the inheritance, it soon becomes apparent though that the truth is more likely to involve kidnap.

As you’d expect, matters soon complicate. Sampson’s daughter, Miranda, is young and beautiful and in love with Sampson’s private pilot, handsome young Alan Taggert, but Taggert doesn’t love her back. Who is in love with her is Albert Graves, a lawyer and old friend of Archer’s, but to Miranda an old man of 40. Mixed in too are a has-been film star, a California guru operating a mountaintop temple, a piano bar singer with a background in jazz and drug-induced psychiatric problems, a smooth and silver haired hood and many more. It’s not original, these are all pretty much stock characters for the genre, but it’s well written and moves along speedily.

Normally, I like to quote passages from works, so as to give a feel for the writing. Here though, the one-liner tends to be king. Hardboiled fiction loves snappy dialogue, Chandler can maintain it for whole passages of glittering beauty, Macdonald isn’t that good (yet anyway), but he still has his moments. I thought this line, from the first page, quite marvellous:

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money.

I also liked “unripe oranges like dark-green golf balls”, and generally was impressed by how vividly California was itself brought to life, a character in the drama. Archer goes from rich and secluded estates, to downtown dives, to grimy shacks, and throughout it all Macdonald has a nice eye for the California landscape.

From the summit of the pass we could see the valley filled with sunlight like a bowl brimming with yellow butter, and the mountains clear and sharp on the other side.

There’s a lot of nice little character descriptions too, a telephone operator who “was a frozen virgin who dreamed about men at night and hated them in the daytime.” “Her tone clicked like pennies; her eyes were small and hard and shiny like dimes.” A thug is described as follows “I didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute rounds.” That’s very easy to picture, and tells you all you need to know of the thug in two sentences.

The Moving Target is an easily read book, which of course it should be. It was hampered for me by my reading it during a week when I’ve had a cold nasty enough to kill my concentration (though not so bad as to keep me from work), which meant it took days to read what should have taken an evening, even with that though I found my interest sustained and the pacing held up well. As it goes on, it gets nastier, as Archer gets further into the twisted lives of Sampson and his associates, a world of jaded sex, drugs, new age beliefs (not that they called it that then, but it’s what they are) and of course money.

The most unusual element is a focus on psychology, something I understand gets much more pronounced later in the series. The piano bar singer sings a song about her psychiatric issues with “decadent intelligence”, Archer early on asks if there’s “a psychological explanation for my being here”, Archer’s a form of secular priest, a therapist even, bringing the truth to light and encouraging confession (which may be good for the soul, but it’s lousy for your chances of avoiding the needle). Of course, hardboiled detectives always have that element of clergy to them, that feeling of being agents of a higher justice in a world that feels no need for it, what’s unusual here is the way the references tend to the psychological, the psychiatric even. So far it’s an interesting twist, I’ll see in due course if it gets too much in later volumes.

As I noted above, this is Macdonald’s first, and though at times there are some lovely bits of dialogue (“I wouldn’t trust him with a burnt-out match.” is another), at others he slightly overdoes it. The line between inspiration and pastiche can be a thin one, and once or twice Macdonald crosses it. Here, I thought the tires element just a metaphor too far:

“You want to go there?”
“Why not?” I said. “The night is young.” I was lying. The night was old and chilly, with a slow heartbeat. The tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top. The neon along the strip glared with insomnia.

That’s just too hardboiled. I couldn’t take it entirely seriously, it was too studiedly Chandler-esque, too plainly an imitation. Macdonald also has a habit of describing all the female characters’ breasts, which have nipples that look at Archer like eyes or point out at him (going on the films I suspect 1940 bras were a bit pointy actually) or generally tend to be a bit noticeable – giving me at least the slightly unfortunate impression that Archer was one of those men who speak to women’s chests rather than their faces.

Plotwise, this goes as you’d expect, Archer gets beaten up and sapped a few times (“His fist struck the nape of my neck. Pain whistled through my body like splintered glass, and the night fell on me solidly again.”), has guns held on him more than once, people get killed and the whole thing turns out more complex than it looks. This isn’t a novel that pushes the boundaries of its genre, it’s rather a novel by an author drawing heavily on what went before and writing firmly within the genre his predecessors created. It’s enjoyable, but it’s a novel for genre fans, not so much for those looking to take a dip outside their usual literary waters, for whom I’d recommend going back to Chandler or Hammett just like Macdonald himself did.

Still, for all that I am a genre fan, so I’ve ordered the next. For me, the jury’s out whether the psychological elements coming more to the fore will make it better or worse, it’s good Macdonald later finds his own voice but I may not of course like that voice. Still, there’s only one way to find out and this was good enough to make it worth sticking with Macdonald a bit longer while he finds his feet.

The Moving Target. I read this in the Black Lizard edition, a range published by Vintage. Black Lizard tend unfortunately only to be available in the US, I like them as they’re physically light with good paper and printing making them an easy and pleasurable read. Hopefully we’ll see more of them in the UK going forward, as there’s a bit of a paucity of good imprints for works of this kind right now in the UK (which is, in part, why I’m so fond of Serpent’ Tail).

Guy Delisle is a Québécois animator, comic writer and artist. He is most famous for his graphic novels Shenzhen and Pyongyang, which illustrate his experiences managing animation teams in China and North Korea.

Guy Delisle came to my attention through the Just William blog, with this post here, I made a mistake about the order of Shenzhen and Pyongyang (2000 and 2003 respectively), and so started with Pyongyang thinking it was the first. It wasn’t, but it was excellent, and given it’s taken from real life getting them out of order doesn’t much matter (there’s no plot in real life, after all).

Pyongyang was originally written in French, and is translated by Helge Dascher. It’s a very natural translation, enough so that I didn’t actually realise for quite some time that this was a translated work.

Anyway, what’s it like and what’s it about? Very simply, it’s about Delisle’s experiences living and working for a period of a few months in Pyongyang, capital city of North Korea. As such, it’s a very rare insight into what life is like in that astonishingly isolated country. As you might expect, it’s not really a cheery read. North Korea comes across as being as terrible as you might imagine, a bizarre mix of poverty, empty spectacle and official deception.

Delisle has a very simple art style, uncluttered. He uses a range of grey shadings, but with a lot of variation in panel sizes – creating an effect where there are close-ups and long-shots and so a sense of movement in what might otherwise be a fairly static text. There’s a sly humour running through it, Delisle clearly at times became deeply frustrated with the constraints and absurdities of North Korean life, though he’s aware too of quite how much trouble a joke on his part might cause to the locals (perhaps not always aware enough though, I’m still not wholly sure it was wise or safe to lend one of his translators a copy of George Orwell’s 1984). I’ve attached three images below, the second is where Delisle slips out for a walk without his then translator to do some shopping one day.

North Korea itself is utterly surreal, on arrival Delisle is given a bunch of flowers, and is expected to leave them at the base of a huge statue of Kim Il-Sung (the statue visited under a pretext, as Delisle’s must appear a natural gesture). He stays in a vast and empty hotel, 50 storeys high, with all foreigners on the 15th floor – the only one that’s lit. There are two restaurants in the hotel, Restaurant Number 1 and Restaurant Number 2 (number 3 being under renovation), every morning at 7am his maid wakes him to replenish the water in his mini-fridge regardless of any do not disturb sign he may hang on his door. There are ideas of how things are done, but distorted, lacking any sense of why they are done, reduced to empty form.

Pyongyang itself is curiously, disturbingly, sterile. No one loiters, no one chats, people go about their business and do not linger. At Delisle’s own work, a Korean technician sits alongside him pointing at the screen whenever he pauses a moment so as to let him know what to do next. She sings along to the radio in Korean, naturally she speaks no English, so she is not able to provide any actual help to him. Everything is controlled, all the radio stations are tuned to the same station and when he tampers with his to tune in to other frequencies he finds there are broadcasts he was unable to listen to but they all play exactly the same thing. At night the streets are unlit, his animation team practice every morning with wooden rifles, it is a phenomenally joyless country.

Delisle does try to get to know the local culture, he hears about the philosophy of the country’s two leaders, he visits national museums, at times he even manages to go out for walks on his own into the streets, but in a very real sense there is no living local culture. There is mass culture, state approved, state disseminated, with any sign of individuality or independent thought clearly very dangerous indeed – the re-education camps are always waiting. As Delisle says “at a certain level of oppression, truth hardly matters, because the greater the lie, the greater the show of power.”

The indifference to humanity portrayed in this comic is extraordinary, the “volunteer” workers, the desperate poverty, the openly stated calculations of what percentage of the population need survive to allow society to continue (30%). For centuries people have dreamed of utopias, we must be thankful that most of us never have to experience them.

There is a question as to how appropriate this material is for a comic. Like many things, I think the answer to that lies in the execution. Here, Delisle shows us a city most of us will never visit, I learnt more from this comic than I have from anything else I’ve read or watched on the place, there’s an immediacy to this form that can make it a powerful tool for reportage of a sort that more conventional accounts can struggle with. It’s easily read, it’s often very funny, and it’s absolutely horrible because what it portrays is horrible. Delisle is not a journalist (unlike, say, Joe Sacco is in his comics about Gorazde and Palestine), but for all that he makes serious points and it doesn’t diminish their impact that he makes them in a comic.

Overall, I think this is a skilful portrait of a place that most of us know very little about, it’s well drawn and written and expertly translated. Having read it, I know more than I did, and I enjoyed learning it. That’s no small achievement, and I’m looking forward to reading his Shenzhen next.

As a final note, of all the things in this comic which I found ugly or depressing, perhaps the worst – among all the monumentalist architecture, cowed population, poverty and fear – comes when Delisle asks his translator why he has seen no handicapped people. He is told that there are none. The perfect society has no place for the infirm.

Pyongyang

Thomas Pynchon has a reputation as a challenging author. I’ve just finished The Crying of Lot 49, he lives up to that reputation. This is an extraordinary work, not one that apparently Pynchon himself rates but one that I definifely do. All that said, it’s complex stuff.

Pynchon is most famous for his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, a book with such impact that Pynchon’s career is now divided into pre- and post-Gravity’s Rainbow phases. By all accounts, Gravity’s Rainbow is a masterpiece, a triumph of 20th Century literature, it’s also though famously dense and rather long and so perhaps a slightly amibitious entry point to Pynchon’s work. The Crying of Lot 49, by contrast, is around 110 pages or so and is thought to be one of his most straightforward and linear novels. Straightforward is relative, it is superb, but having finished it I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the plot was, or even whether there was a plot.

On the surface, it’s the tale of how Oedipa Maas is appointed executor to the estate of a rich ex-boyfriend, and as a result comes to uncover an ancient conspiracy dedicated to creating a rival postal service to the US Government one. It’s not that simple though, there may not be a conspiracy, if there is it may not be that one, there may be several conspiracies, there may just be random noise, throughout this novel meaning is always just out of grasp, never quite realisable, perhaps not there at all.

Here’s the first sentence of the novel:

One Summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsh in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or the supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous enough and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

That’s a very characteristic sentence, dense yet clearly written and already not wholly serious. It also contains what is usually a pet hate of mine, blatantly incredible character names. Obviously in real life few people have names like Pierce Inverarity or Oedipa Maas. Generally, when novelists seek to give characters cutesy names I find it alienating, it reminds me I’m reading a book. Waugh’s Scoop was in large part ruined for me by the obviousness of the silly names given to the newspapers in it.

Here, that didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t is that the names have a purpose. Before I get to that though, here’s a few more, a sample of some of the characters encountered in this short work:

Wendell ‘Mucho’ Maas, Dr Hilarius, Metzger who used to be a child actor named Baby Igor and who is now a lawyer (and whose life story is being made by a former lawyer who is now an actor named Manny Di Presso), Mike Fallopian, Randolph Driblette, Genghis Cohen. There’s also the wonderfully named law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles.

A lot of these names are allusions, though not necessarily ones with any actual significance to the text. Some, Genghis Cohen, are outright jokes, but most of them almost mean something. Oedipa Maas, Manny Di Presso, the references are obvious, but meaningless. Like so much of this novel, they tremble on the brink of significance, they appear important, but it’s really not clear that they mean anything at all.

As Oedipa starts to investigate Pierce’s affairs, she becomes involved with co-executor Metzger, and becomes aware of what may be a conspiracy running right through Southern California involving a centuries-old organisation dedicated to alternate means of mail delivery. She goes to see a newly staged Jacobean revenge play, which contains within it curious references to the contemporary conspiracy, she visits an inventor of a perpetual motion machine that doesn’t appear to work, and becomes alert to the symbols of the conspiracy – a line drawing of a muted trumpet, forged stamps each containing intentional and often disturbing minor errors.

Her psychiatrist, Dr Hilarius, presses her to take part in a new study using LSD for therapeutic purposes, her husband is still scarred by the psychological trauma of having worked on a used car lot and now works as a DJ but is having a crisis of faith in that calling, Manny Di Presso is being hunted by one of his clients, the hotel Oedipa books into is used for practice sessions by a mock-English band called The Paranoids who try to spy on her in the mistaken belief she is having bizarrely kinky sex. Paranoia then is everywhere, paranoia is at the heart of the novel.

Pynchon creates here a powerful sense of place, even though the place much of the story occurs in is made up, San Narcisco:

San Narcisco lay farther south, near LA. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a group of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access routes to its own freeway.

Throughout the novel there is a sense of 1960s Southern California, a mix of drugs, capitalism, creativity and urban sprawl. The weird is everywhere, there is a bar that only play electronic music (which to me is a form of music that originates in Germany and Britain in the late 1970s, I don’t really know what it meant back then), with live nights on Saturdays. The defence contractor Yoyodyne has its offices here, where the staff sing company songs but use their own private mail network (separate to the conspiracy) to pass contentless messages, sent to each other only to ensure the private mail network has something to deliver. There is a company that makes bone-dust cigarette filters from the bones of dead GIs. It is an an insane melting-pot of innovation and horror.

Among the chaos of Southern California, Oedipa begins to find meaning in her investigation of the conspiracy, assuming it exists that is. Is she herself descending into paranoia? Is it all some post-mortem joke of Pierce Inverarity’s? Is it in fact an ancient conspiracy, albeit a singularly pointless one? The search for meaning creates meaning, we find patterns in the noise, but whether any of it exists outside our own heads is unclear, perhaps unknowable.

And that is a large part of what this is about, for me anyway. It is a vision of paranoia, of the terror of a world in which everything makes sense, we create conspiracies though because even that is preferable to a world where things make no sense at all. They are out to get you, but at least they care enough to try. As reader, we are like Oedipa, looking for meaning in a mass of references, allusions, apparent themes, we draw conclusions on what it’s all about but who knows if we’re right? Perhaps we just want it to be about something, so we find things within it that support our expectations.

Along the way, there is some genuinely very funny comedy here, it contains for example one of the funniest, and stupidest, sex scenes I’ve ever read and there are some marvellous throwaway lines:

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

There is also a certain beauty to the whole thing, wonderful and disturbing imagery, an exuberance bursting through the pages which seems uncontrolled but which is in fact expertly crafted. At one point Oedipa finds herself staying in a hotel which is also hosting a conference for deaf-mutes:

Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crêpe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible.They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mute’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner.

Apart from the beauty and strangeness of the imagery in that passage, I can’t help but see it as an image of America itself. Everyone dancing to their own dream, somehow not colliding and the whole thing unexpectedly working. There is something both frightening and magnificent in it, it’s not the only vision of America out there (I don’t myself buy into American exceptionalism), but it’s a vision and in some ways an optimistic one. And if America is anything, it’s optimistic.

So, there are my thoughts, for now anyway. Whole books have been written on The Crying of Lot 49, books longer than the novel itself. There are essay collections about it, teacher study guides, any blog post is but a thin scraping at the surface. This book is packed with references, to Nabokov, to the Beatles, to all sorts of things, most of which I probably didn’t get. Most of which I doubt anyone gets, though we’d each likely get different ones.

I’ve not even touched here on many possible core issues of the book, communications theory and failures of communication, consumed experience, the blurring of the self, entropy, I could write 10,000 words and still not manage all of it. For me though, it connected most as a story of the search for meaning and the (perhaps?) creation of it where we don’t find it – the imposition of patterns on random data. Other readers could, many have, drawn quite different conclusions.

It’s an extraordinary achievement.

The Crying of Lot 49

Louise de Vilmorin’s 1951 novella Madame de ___ is a beautifully crafted gem of a work. Deliberately written to evoke the style of French 18th Century literature, it is a small tale of the fate of a woman who loves unwisely (in a society where to love at all is quite unwise) and of how her most treasured possessions prove her undoing.

Madame de ___ (no character in the book is named, of which more shortly) is the wife of M. de ___, a rich and highly rational man with a position in society and with unimpeachable name and credit (and those two things cannot of course be separated). Madame de ___ owns “a pair of earrings made of two superb diamonds, cut in the shape of hearts”, a gift from M. de ___, given the day after their wedding.

Years later, as the book begins, Madame de ___ finds that her lifestyle and habit of misleading her husband through vanity as to how well she handles her accounts has left her in debt. She sells the earrings to the family jeweller, who informs the husband who promptly buys them again and gives them to his former mistress who is leaving the country. Coincidence leads the earrings back to Paris, and back into Madame de ___’s life, and from there they pass from hand to hand accompanied each time by lies so that what starts as a token of love becomes a symbol of its absence.

The novella provides no clues as to when it is set, my mental image was of 19th Century Paris, but the 18th would work just as well. There is a reference at one point to the possibility of a duel, that and the behaviour of the characters place us within those two centuries, but nothing is made explicit. Equally, descriptions are slight to the point sometimes of non-existence, no character has a name – each is identified merely by family or occupation (the jeweller, the nephew, the ambassador). We know the characters through their words and their feelings, not through their world.

And yet, for all that they have a surprising solidity. This is partly, of course, because we can mentally furnish their world ourselves. I’ve read 18th and 19th Century French literature and have a pretty good idea how those worlds functioned, my mental image may not be yours, but then is it for any book? Part of that solidity too though is the skill of the writing, the descriptions may be slender, but they are sufficient and de Vilmorin shows her skill in the way such sparse elements unpack in the mind to become much richer.

Here, on the first page, we first meet Madame de ___:

Elegance rather than beauty was accounted the mark of merit in the circle of society to which Madame de ___ belonged and in that circle Madame de ___ herself was acknowledged to be of all women the most elegant. She set the fashion among those who knew her and, as the men said she was inimitable, sensible women sought to imitate her. They hoped that some glint of her lustre might shine on them, and that their ears might catch some echo of the adulation she received. Wherever her approval fell, distinction was conferred; she was original in all her ways; she made the commonplace seem rare, and she always did what nobody expected.

The de ___’ s marriage is childless, and though once passionate is now loveless and a matter of form. Madame de ___ and her husband do not dislike each other, the book is not that kind, rather they have the feelings it is appropriate to have for one’s spouse, and in this time and place (whatever time this may be) such feelings do not of course include love. Their dealings with each other are proper and polite, as much so in private as in public.

Madame de ___’s small sin has been one of excessive consumption, of spending too much. But she is no Madame Bovary, her sale of the earrings controls her debts and she is already living the life Bovary dreamed of. Madame de ___ ’s difficulty is that she loves, but her life has not equipped her for the honesty that love requires.

Like the earrings themselves, Madame de ___ has no real function beyond decoration. She is in a sense herself an object, an adornment to her husband’s life with her attainments reflecting upon his. She has no desires of her own, at least none that trouble the status quo. When she falls in love, however, this changes. She comes to question who and why she is, she comes to have wants of her own, ones at odds with her position.

Suddenly she felt that she no longer had any importance; she asked herself what she was doing in the world, and why she was living; she felt that she was lost in infinite space; she sought for the meaning of life and could find no answer in her mind, only the face of one person. Her heart grew heavy with the double weight of that presence and that absence. She felt a violent desire to be given confidence in her own existence and she felt that nobody could give it to her but the man without whom she now knew life would be unendurable.

I won’t speak to how the novella unfolds, Madame de ___ lives in a society where deceit is normal, accepted, where husbands have mistresses and wives’ lovers and none of this matters unless it is admitted or made public. Her ease of deceit is her undoing, even now she has love, her instinct is to lie, and lies and love sit poorly together. As with much of the fiction it is based on, Madame de portrays a world in which women have no meaningful choices and sharply constrained circumstances.

There is a single large coincidence at the heart of the novella, the earrings do after all have to reenter Madame de ___’s life after she sells them. Indeed, M. de ___ notes the issue at one point:

“Coincidence is very extraordinary,” he thought, “but perfectly natural. One can only wonder at it.”

The irony, however, is that what he thinks coincidence generally isn’t, it’s combination of people’s deceits that create the illusion of coincidence. Although the jeweller comes to sell the same earrings to M. de ___ no less than four times, chance plays very little part in any of it.

The earrings are at the centre of this novel, hearts carved from diamond, untouched and unchanging. The symbolism is obvious, but no less effective for that. De Vilmorin’s prose is cool and elegant, effortlessly readable. I read this in one morning, leaving home late because I’d taken a look at the first page and been captured, unfortunately arriving at work a little too early and so having to go out for a coffee so I could finish it.

Madame de ___ is a scant 58 pages long, and that in a Pushkin edition. In a more traditionally sized imprint it would of course be even shorter, making it arguably more of a short story than a novella. Still, however you characterise it, it is beautifully written and cleverly crafted and another example of how good Pushkin Press are at finding these underappreciated works and bringing them back to our attention. It is translated by former British ambassador to France, Duff Cooper (de Vilmorin’s lover), and comes with an interesting endnote by his son, historian John Julius Norwich. Louise de Vilmorin appears now to be more famous, in fact, for her lovers than her own work (Antoine de Saint-Exupery was among their number), which on the strength of this novella is a considerable shame.

On a final note, I found out about Madame de ___ through Guy Savage’s blog, his own writeup is here. Interestingly, he and I chose the same passages to quote, although I didn’t refer back to his review until after I’d already decided which bits I wanted to excerpt. Guy has a tremendous knowledge of Nineteenth Century French literature, much in excess of my own, and his analysis of this work is excellent. He has of course my thanks for bringing this to my attention, I doubt otherwise I’d even have heard of it.

Madame de

The Prone Gunman is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s most famous novel translated into English, though since only two of his novels have been translated that’s not perhaps saying too much. Both The Prone Gunman and earlier novel Three to Kill have been published in the UK by the always excellent Serpent’s Tail, but with different translators, The Prone Gunman being translated by James Brook.

Three to Kill took a normal man and explored how he changed when his situation changed, becoming a casual killer when removed from his normally bourgeois existence. It was Marxist noir, fiction where the psychology of its protagonist was merely a function of his socio-economic position, and so a dark commentary on the hypocrisy of society.

The Prone Gunman is in some ways a more ambiguous novel. Like its predecessor it is, in places, very violent. Like it’s predecessor, it makes no distinction between descriptions of people and of things, humans are given no more weight than rooms or vehicles. There’s an inescapable implicit judgement in that. Also like it’s predecessor it is at times quite simply a very effective thriller.

Where The Prone Gunman differs though is in its plot, which is bordering on stereotypical and in its slow subversion of that plot. The protagonist here is one Martin Terrier, a professional hit man working for a shadowy organisation known as the company. He wants out, but the company wants him to do one last job, and is prepared to go to terrible lengths to persuade him to come back.

As plots go, that’s pretty trite stuff. And for the early part of the novel we’re in very comfortable territory. Terrier carries out a hit, hands in his notice, casually breaks up with his then girlfriend as he is moving on and not planning to take her with him. He is a sociopath, utterly without affect, when it becomes apparent to him that the company is pursuing him and that those close to him may be tortured, even killed, it is a practical problem and nothing more.

That makes for a good thriller, but then The Prone Gunman goes further. Before too long (and I’m going to avoid any major spoilers here) it turns out that Terrier is a killer for a reason, he has a plan. He left a small town, a girl he loved, swearing one day to come back and have revenge on those who once mocked him and to take the girl finally for his own. Now, a career of murder behind him, he has enough money to make those dreams come true.

Unfortunately for Terrier, while he is a superbly effective assassin, he’s also just not that bright. In fact, one starts to suspect that he’s an emotional as well as a moral imbecile, stuck in adolescence and with a romantic dream fuelling him that bears little resemblance to reality. For ten years he’s lived with a goal in mind, the tragedy of The Prone Gunman is what happens when he turns back up expecting that goal now to be fulfilled.

I have to be careful here, there’s a lot of plot in this book’s 150 odd pages, and it would be very easy to spoil it. I’ll return to the issue of what makes Terrier interesting in a moment, but first I want to talk a bit more about Manchette’s style, the peculiarly passionless way in which he details a scene. The following three quotes are respectively a person, a room and a murder. Here’s a person:

Alex was a twenty-seven year old brunette with short hair, striking blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a beautifully formed neck and jaw line. She was tall with long legs and breasts almost as firm as her thighs. She was dressed now in a three-piece light-gray pantsuit and a white shirt. She had a white leather handbag on her shoulder and in her hand a rectangular wicker basket with a top.

What’s noticeable there is we know a great deal about what Alex looks like, nothing at all about what kind of person she is. It’s not just the female characters that are treated this way, it’s not a question of simply treating women as objects, Manchette treats everyone as objects. The men’s descriptions are equally dispassionate.

Here we have a room:

Terrier took his hands out of his pockets, turned his back to Félix, and went into the house, going directly into the main room, where there was a dining nook, a living area, and a convertible sofa where visiting friends could sleep. The walls were made of rough boards coated with a clear varnish, most of the furniture was rustic and old, and here and there old copper utensils decorated the place. In the hearth burned a wood fire that Félix had lighted a little while before and stoked with a copper toasting fork some sixty centimeters long that he had purchased the year before at an antiques shop in Ireland.

There’s not much difference in tone between the passage describing a beautiful woman, and that describing a fairly expensive but otherwise ordinary living room. And here we have a murder:

Their eyes met. Dubofsky opened his mouth to shout. Terrier quickly shot him once in his open mouth and again at the base of his nose.
At the discreet sound of these shots, the redhead turned. Terrier also turned, and they found themselves face to face just as Dubofsky’s head, which was split open, full of holes, and shattered like the shell of a hard-boiled egg, hit the sidewalk with a squishy sound. Terrier took two steps forward, extended his arm, put the silencer against the girl’s heart, and pressed the trigger once. The girl flew back, her intestines emptying noisily, and fell dead on her back. Terrier got back in the Bedford and left.

That’s actually a very chilling sequence, but the point is it’s delivered in much the same calm voice as everything else. Part of what makes Manchette effective as a writer is his flatness of style, none of it really matters. It’s all just objects and forces in motion, recorded equally and without distinction.

The other interesting thing with Manchette is how deeply cinematic he is, not in the sense of high octane action (though this book does contain some fairly over the top sequences), but rather in that his gaze is an external one. We don’t know what Terrier or anyone else thinks, we don’t know what the author thinks, we merely know what is observed and plainly recounted to us. The author’s eye is a camera, recording without judgement or interpretation, as a reader we must work out for ourselves what is signified by the things we see. This makes Manchette a disquieting writer, his scenes are often ambiguous, doubtful, his refusal to attach significance to people or events leaves the reader devoid of clues normally present.

Manchette uses this most effectively in this book in his descriptions of Terrier himself. At times the writing goes into close up, we see Terrier’s expressions and reactions, but without explanation. Here’s some brief examples. In this first, he’s had a setback:

He seemed to reflect for a moment. He did not seem shocked. Perhaps he experienced a little sadness. Certainly he must have been thinking, for his face was screwed up in concentration.

In this second, he’s suffered a major blow, a disaster for his plans:

Terrier tossed what he was holding onto the pillow and abruptly sat down on the edge of the bed, crossing his gloved hands over his stomach. He leaned forward and gave a long sigh. His mouth was open and he blinked repeatedly. He seemed to calm down after a moment. He got back up.

And here, after extraordinary danger and hair’s-breadth escape (possibly only temporary), he learns that he may have been set up (I assure you, in a novel like this that’s really not a spoiler):

His haggard face at first registered great perplexity; then it registered worry, thoughtfulness or whatever other movements of consciousness that might cause his face to look as it did.

There’s two things going on here, firstly that cinematic eye I spoke of above, and secondly a refusal to give the reader access to the omniscience of the author. Manchette must have an idea what Terrier is thinking, but he doesn’t share it with us, we can only make guesses.

As the novel continues, Terrier’s character becomes more absurd, in a way pitiful, though never less competent an assassin. I can’t detail too much how Terrier’s plans unravel, but it’s fair to say his old love isn’t as he remembered her those many years ago, their relationship is not what he might wish, by the end his whole situation is descending into tragic farce. He starts as a stereotypical cold-blooded killer, he ends with us understanding that he was a highly efficient murderer but a deeply deficient adult human being, and those around him are not really much better. He wants to leave his life, to recapture a dream from adolescence, but as one character angrily says to him, “There’s nowhere to go.”

Manchette’s book is in part I suspect a satire on the very type of novel it starts out being. The cliché intentional as he goes on to tear down that which he has set up.

For all that, I didn’t like this as much as Three to Kill. My impression is that this is generally the more highly regarded novel, and as a pure thriller it probably is the better work, but Three to Kill raised questions about what makes us who we are that I thought challenging and disturbing. The Prone Gunman subverts its own genre, but while it does still cause the reader to doubt their own certainties for me at least it doesn’t do so quite as effectively as that earlier work.

The Prone Gunman

A Visit to the Barbary Regencies in 1830 is an unusual book, unusual for me anyway. It is an excerpt from the diaries of Lord Grosvenor, originally published by him in this form, in which he details his visit to the Barbary regencies of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers in the year 1830 (as the title rather suggests). It is 100 pages long, but has generous spacing and margins, making it a very quick read.

The difficulty with writing about diaries, is that by their nature they are a bit bitty. That’s the case here too, Grosvenor writes about what happens to him, there isn’t an overall narrative or theme to draw out. Accordingly, my main goal here is simply to illustrate the nature of the diaries and what makes them interesting. As a result, I’ve tried to bring out the feel of the diaries below, but haven’t attempted too much by way of analysis.

Anyway, I said above that this is a quick read, it’s also rather a fun read. Lord Grosvenor is an entertaining diarist, his experiences are interesting, and it’s a window to a world that is much more alien than we often give it credit. Grosvenor travels the region on board the Isis, a 50 gun frigate commanded by Captain T. Staines (no sniggering!). To anyone with the remotest fondness for Patrick O’Brian (which really should be everyone), it’s a reminder too of quite how good O’Brian is and quite how much he gets right.

Grosvenor’s trip takes place at a time of some tension, each of the regencies is technically independent but none try that indepence too strongly with the Sublime Porte. France is blockading Algiers, and military action once started might spill over to Algiers’ neighbours so making them understandably nervous.

It’s in the above context then that Lord Grosvenor writes his impressions of the landscapes passed, of the rulers and other figures he encounters, and of the various European dignitaries and travellers also at large in the region. Here, he describes the ruler of Tripoli:

The Pacha’s appearance, if not prepossessing, had at least the merit of novelty; the quantity of kohol with which he had stained his eyelids, making it scarcely possible to distinguish his features and the large silk tassel of his Bournouse, which fell over a small white turban upon his forehead, gave him a singular, but not very pleasing expression of countenance. His age may be from sixty to seventy; his figure is of a proper Tripolitan corpulency, and of this advantage he is so sensible, that he sat upon the very edge of the throne to ensure it’s not being lost upon us. But, however vain his Highness may be of his figure, he is still prouder of his pink silk stockings – mais hélas! il faut souffrir pour être beau. The European stocking-weavers (for Tripoli has none to boast of) not being yet sufficiently accustomed to the Barbary market, it became a matter of no small difficulty to procure a pair sufficiently elastic for the royal dimensions; and those his Highness now wore must have painfully impeded a free circulation.

Although apparently a fairly merciful fellow by local standards, it should be noted that one of his wives is fond of revenging herself on any disrespect by having the culprits strangled with a bowstring.

Still, such are the hazards of courtly life in what Lord Grosvenor refers to as the Orient. It is fair to say that this is not the happiest period in the history of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world, there is a palpable sense of decline, these cities are rich outposts now divorced from what was once one of the most powerful empires on Earth and their relationship with the European powers is now far from an equal one.

Just as life on shore has its diversions, so too does life on ship. The following passage could, once again, have come straight from the pages of an O’Brian novel:

Sir T. Staines had orders to take on board any extraordinary animals that Col. Warrington might wish to send to England, and was much dismayed upon finding no less than four ostriches, two antelopes, three Fezzan sheep, three blue cranes, besides several stuffed birds, waiting to be embarked. He was constrained to make immediate preparations for their accommodation; and they were all brought safely on board, except one ostrich, which, in its struggles up the ship’s side, injured itself so much, that it was thought better to leave it behind.

Later a possibly imaginary lioness must also be contended with. This is of course the great age of natural history. Amateur scientists and collectors travel the world to find rare creatures unknown to European experience, and then kill, stuff and mount them.

Generally, Lord Grosvenor is simply a passenger. On occasion, however, he himself is of some assistance in the voyage:

Upon the aide-de-camp’s return I was called in to act as interpreter, his knowledge of English and Sir T.’s of French, being just sufficient to create a serious misunderstanding.

The issue there at hand being that Captain Staines has orders to check in at Algiers, and the French have orders that nobody shall be allowed to make port there. A misunderstanding, in these circumstances, could have very serious repercussions indeed.

Later there are more reminders of the belligerence of the time, France is not the only nation to be engaged in these waters:

We passed the Austrian squadron, consisting of one double bank frigate, two corvettes and two brigs, lying off Algesiras. They are by way of blockading the port of Tangeir, and bombarding the Emperor of Morocco, with whom Austria is at issue; but their navy is of the most contemptible description, and the campaign will therefore end as is has begun, at Algesiras.

Although dismissive of the Austrians, the attitude to the French is very different and far more respectful. An Algerian plan to destroy a French force using 150,000 local tribesmen is expected to meet with little success, however legion the tribesmen may be it is expected they will be no match for French discipline and artillery.

Grosvenor speaks too of the difficulties of pre-steam travel (obviously not in those terms though). The Isis is at times carried perilously close to shore, or near to shallow waters. There are storms and seasickness, quarantine and as ever in the golden age of sail the wind is of utmost importance:

Had we remained but twelve more hours at Gibraltar, we should have missed the wind which only just carried us through, and perhaps have been prisoners for a month.

Prisoners there merely meaning delayed, not literal imprisonment.

The book comes with prints of the original engravings that accompanied it, not in the highest quality here of reproduction but interesting for all that, and with two appendices which formed part of the original work and which add some supplemental detail about Captain Staines and about some subsequent military events, respectively. Here Lord Grosvenor explains how Captain Staines lost his arm back in 1807:

Poor Sir T. Staines was dreadfully wounded in this engagement; and, his surgeon being killed, he was forced to apply the assistant to amputate his arm at the socket. Perceiving that the young man was very nervous at being called upon to perform so perilous an operation, Sir T., with the utmost presence of mind, raised himself from his bed, and told him in a confidential manner, that although he much lamented the surgeon’s death, he yet, upon this critical occasion, felt greatly relieved at not being necessarily under his care, having much greater reliance on the skill of his assistant. Thus encouraged, the young man proceeded and performed the operation with great success.

Later, Sir T. loses much of the use of his other arm in a duel, yet remains in good spirits. Extraordinary. No wonder they won an empire.

A visit to the Barbary Regencies in 1830

Wait until Spring, Bandini is the 1938 novel of now relatively little known author John Fante. It is the story of Svevo and Maria Bandini, dirt-poor Italian immigrants living in small town Colorado, and of their three American-born children, Arturo, August and Federico. It is a novel about the impact of poverty and the American immigrant experience. It is a coming-of-age novel, and a novel of the Great Depression.

Hardly unfamiliar territory then. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid comparisons with authors such as Erskine Caldwell or John Steinbeck. But, and here’s the thing, from what I’ve read of each (and that’s admittedly only one Caldwell and one Fante, though several Steinbeck) he’s better than either of them.

Caldwell makes monsters of the poor, the characters of Tobacco Road (which I discuss here) are reduced to living as less than beasts, portrayed as lacking even the empathy of a lizard. Steinbeck goes the other way, his poor are virtuous, saintly even, good people caught in terrible times. His desire to preach, to effect social change, gets in the way of the credibility of his characters. Fante is the Goldilocks of this trio, the Bandinis are neither monsters nor saints, rather they are absolutely and convincingly human and Wait until Spring, Bandini is in part a triumph precisely because its subject matter is so well known and yet the novel itself is so fresh.

Wait until Spring, Baldini is essentially a plotless novel. It opens with Svevo Bandini coming home having lost what little money he has gambling, his wife is a virtuous and devout woman, patiently waiting for him even knowing what he has done and (and this is the first unusual note) still desiring him – her faith and her physical passion for her husband are cornerstones of her life.

The Baldini’s are poor, deep in debts they sometimes pay but never quite clear. Svevo is a bricklayer, but the book opens in winter and in winter there is no work to be had. The Bandini’s raise a handful of chickens, and so eat eggs for dinner every night, Svevo goes to the pool hall, Maria counts her rosary beads, the boys fight and argue and live in fear and awe of their father. They are a family. Loud, argumentative, passionate, Italian-Americans in the classic American sense (if you don’t know what I mean, go buy a Scorsese movie).

What makes the novel then, in the absence of a plot and in the face of such ordinary characters, is the prose. Fante writes with an immediacy and clarity of style that I found both refreshing and at times just plain fun. He’s a great stylist, easy to read and actually highly accessible, particularly so given quite how good he is. The novel takes a few pages to get going, early on it reminded me (and this is not here a compliment) of James Ellroy of all people. Having a tendency to say things. Abruptly. And in threes. But that, thankfully soon passes and from there there’s a feel for dialogue and character which just shines through the page.

Here, Arturo knows a secret and his younger brother wishes to learn it:

August was ten; he didn’t know much. Of course, he knew more than his punk brother Federico, but not half so much as the brother beside him, Arturo, who knew plenty about women and stuff.
‘What’ll ya give me if I tell ya?’ Arturo said.
‘Give you a milk nickel.’
‘Milk nickel! What the heck! Who wants a milk nickel in winter?’
‘Give it to you next Summer.’
‘Nuts to you. What’ll ya give me now?’
‘Give you anything I got.’
‘It’s a bet. Whatcha got?’
‘Ain’t got nothing.’
‘Okay. I ain’t telling nothing, then.’
‘You ain’t got anything to tell.’
‘Like hell I haven’t!’
‘Tell me for nothing.’
‘Nothing doing.’
‘You’re lying, that’s why. You’re a liar.’
‘Don’t call me a liar!’
‘You’re a liar if you don’t tell. Liar!’
He was Arturo, and he was fourteen. He was a miniature of his father, without the mustache. His upper lip curled with such gentle cruelty. Freckles swarmed over his face like ants over a piece of cake. He was the oldest, and thought he was pretty tough, and no sap kid brother could call him a liar and get away with it.

Although there is no plot as such, there are incidents, strands to follow. One of these is the visit of Maria’s mother, Donna Toscana, an obese and sour woman who loathes Svevo and uses her visits as an opportunity to berate her daughter for ever having married such a man. Each time she comes, she writes first and on arrival of the letter Svevo goes out on a drunk so as to avoid her, returning sometimes days later and so giving yet more fuel to Donna Toscana’s vitriol. This time, his drunk takes him to what may be the arms of another woman, plunging the whole family into crisis.

Another strand though, and perhaps the central one, is the adolescence of Arturo Bandini. Recently, Kevin of Kevinfromcanada and Trevor of themookseandthegripes both reviewed a novel (Fall) which focuses among other things on what it is like to be an adolescent boy. I wasn’t persuaded by what I read of Fall, it sounded to me to have got its subject matter badly wrong. Fante here covers that ground, and does so with an accuracy that makes it almost uncomfortable to read:

His name was Arturo, but he hated it and wanted to be called John. His last name was Bandini, and he wanted it to be Jones. His mother and father were Italians, but he wanted to be an American. His father was a bricklayer, but he wanted to be a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. They lived in Rocklin, Colorado, population ten thousand, but he wanted to live in Denver, thirty miles away. His face was freckled, but he wanted it to be clear. He went to a Catholic school, but he wanted to go to a public school. He had a girl named Rosa, but she hated him. He was an altar boy, but he was a devil and hated altar boys. He wanted to be a good boy, but he was afraid to be a good boy because he was afraid his friends would call him a good boy. He was Arturo and he loved his father, but he lived in dread of the day when he would grow up and be able to lick his father. He worshipped his father, but he thought that his mother was a sissy and a fool.

That for me is true, the emotion of it, the sheer intensity of feeling. There are similar passages detailing his feelings when he sees his friends’ mothers or girls at school, he is at an age where he can barely glance at a woman without being overwhelmed. He sees one friend’s mother sweeping the floor, “his hot eyes gulping the movement of her hips.” For me, this utterly persuaded, this is how those years were for me too and it’s rare I’ve seen it captured so well, so clearly.

Fante is marvellous too on the sentimentality of the young, on how they live in a world more romantic than real. Arturo is in love with a classmate, Rosa Pinelli, a girl who pays him no attention at all and yet who he thinks of as his girl. He loves her, but is troubled by the thoughts he sometimes has of her, he is caught between the affection of childhood and the desire of adulthood. Even in church, he can barely concentrate, the mere thought of her leading his mind to ideas that will need to be unburdened in the confessional later. Arturo fantasises of becoming a big shot, of playing for the Cubs and making her really his girl, of impressing her with newly discovered links to Italian nobility, or giving her gifts that will show her the kind of guy he really is. He doesn’t talk to her though, he doesn’t know how.

It was a block out of his way, but he wanted to pass Rosa house. The Pinelli bungalow nestled beneath cottonwoods, thirty yards from the sidewalk. The blinds over the two front windows were down. Standing in the front path with his arms crossed and his hands squeezed under his armpits to keep them warm, he watched for a sign of Rosa, her silhouette as she crossed the line of vision through the window. He stamped his feet, his breath spouting white clouds, no Rosa. Then in the deep snow off the path his cold face bent to study the footprint of a young girl. Rosa’s – who’s else but Rosa, in this yard. His cold fingers grubbed the snow from around the print, and with both hands he scooped it up and carried it away with him down the street …

In places, this is a very funny novel. Arturo’s forced service as an altarboy, his superstition, the clash of his religion with his fundamentally rebellious nature. At other times, it is full of quotidian tragedy. Petty thefts of spending money from your mother’s purse, arguments that wound more because they are born of knowledge and love, the sheer misery of eating the same thing day after day and of wearing clothes that don’t fit and that shout your poverty to the world. Having grown up myself in a council flat with unemployed parents, there’s a lot here I recognise, the sheer anger of being poor, though transplanted through time and across continents. I’ve no idea of Fante’s own circumstances, nor do I care, but I’m quite confident that whatever they were he knew or imagined the truth of poverty with remarkable accuracy. It’s not noble, as Steinbeck paints it, but nor is it so terrible as Caldwell has it. Being poor can be brutalising, but it doesn’t stop you being human. Fante remembers that, and writes a better book because of it.

I’ve quoted a fair bit from the novel here, partly as I wanted to show the dialogue and the gift for description, I’m going to allow myself one last quote. This last one just to show how, among the poverty, infidelity, adolescent angst and family strife, Fante still manages to avoid making this novel in any way heavy going. Also, I just loved this passage, and why have a blog if you can’t indulge yourself on occasion?

Arturo Bandini was pretty sure that he wouldn’t go to hell when he died. The way to hell was the committing of mortal sin. He had committed many, he believed, but the confessional had saved him. He always got to confession on time – that is, before he died. And he knocked on wood whenever he thought of it – he always would get there on time – before he died. So Arturo was pretty sure he wouldn’t go to hell when he died. For two reasons. The confessional, and the fact that he was a fast runner.

Although Fante is now fairly obscure, it’s the nature of the blogosphere that deserving titles spread from blog to blog. John Self of Asylum reviewed this novel here, and Kevin of kevinfromcanada reviews the whole Bandini quartet here. I’ve sought here not to duplicate their thoughts, and they both quote different passages than those I chose, I of course recommend both writeups unreservedly. John’s also contains some interesting links for further reading.

Kevin though convinced me to read Fante, and so has my distinct thanks. Without his advocacy, I likely wouldn’t have known Fante’s name let alone have read him. That said, there is one small point that at the moment I disagree with Kevin on. Kevin ends his piece commenting that Fante doesn’t rank with Steinbeck. I grant I’ve only read one Fante so far, and I admit I don’t know if I’d call him one of the great writers (actually, I’d hate to only read the greats, whoever they may be), but for me right now it’s more that Steinbeck doesn’t rank with Fante. Either way, I’m glad that he’s getting some belated recognition, and I fully intend to read the rest of the quartet.

Wait until Spring, Bandini

The Military Philosophers is the ninth volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Dance is broken into four seasons with three books in each, this then is the last book of Autumn.

In the first six volumes, Spring and Summer, Powell introduced a huge and complex cast, each skilfully brought to life. Part of Powell’s mastery is his ability to introduce and reintroduce characters, reminding the reader who they are without tedious exposition or the need for caricature. By the mid-point of the twelve volume whole he has populated a living London, a world filled with friends, family, lovers, rivals, acquaintances.

The Autumn novels cover the war years, and now that I’ve finished The Military Philosophers I can say that nothing else I have read has brought home for me the cost of those years. War novels typically show the horrors of the front, the casual death and sudden brutalities. Powell is not so obvious. He takes time to let us get to know people, as in real life we may not like all of them but we become accustomed to them. Then, as the war continues, many of them leave the dance never to return. As a rule they do not leave in dramatic fashion, Nick Jenkins (the narrator) is an intelligence officer in London and so when he hears of deaths he hears of them second hand, news of another exit. The effect for the reader is that as time goes on people simply stop being part of Nick’s (and our) world. They become an absence, an emptiness where once there was a person.

There is a huge power to this, some deaths may be dramatic in their own terms, but the effect in the novel is as in life – as one gets older from time to time one hears that a friend, family member, distant acquaintance even has died and one never sees them again. One hears that a great-uncle was hit by a car, a friend’s sister fell ill and didn’t recover, a multitude of fates all with the same end. In the war, that experience we all have (if we live long enough) is magnified many times over, and by the end of The Military Philosophers many of Dance’s characters, major and minor both, are simply gone.

The Military Philosophers opens in Spring 1942, and closes in 1945 with Nick Jenkins picking out his demob suit. As ever, the novel focuses on a handful of incidents over its period, a cabinet office meeting, time spent on liaison duties with allies, a night sheltering from an air raid, a tour with various military attachés of liberated France, the thanksgiving service for the end of the European war.

By this point, the possibility of severely damaging the work for others by discussing plot details is very high, part of the pleasure of Dance is how the courses of people’s lives turn, how some succeed with seeming inevitability while others fade from view. Early promise is fulfilled or frustrated, people marry or remarry, those we think we know are seen in new lights. Powell uses the space he has given himself to show how people change, or don’t, as the years pass and part of the increasing triumph for me of this series is how despite the fact my own life and background bears no resemblance to anyone in Dance, the pattern of their lives rings true for me all the same.

All of which makes this sound terribly serious, and though it is it’s also very funny. There’s a continued use of (often wonderfully inappropriate) classical references, and though I’m reasonably good on my classics I’m not a patch on Powell and it’s obvious if I were better there are extra levels here I would pick up. Even with my understanding though, it’s hard not to be amused at the excess of some of the comparisons, such as here where Nick heads to his boss’s office after a meeting in a basement office:

Like Orpheus or Herakles returning from the silent shades of Tartarus, I set off upstairs again, the objective now Finn’s room on the second floor.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had too in Powell’s prose, his excellent descriptions such as here where he details a rather desolate scene in liberated France:

In one of these secluded pastoral tracks, a Corot landscape of tall poplars and water meadows executed in light greys, greens and blues, an overturned staff-car, wheels in the air, lay sunk in long grass. The camouflaged bodywork was already eaten away by rust, giving an impression of abandonment by that brook decades before. High up in the branches of one of the poplars, positioned like a cunningly contrived scarecrow, the tatters of a field-grey tunic, black-and-white collar patches jut discernible, fluttered in the faint breeze and hard cold sunlight. The isolation of the two entities, car and uniform, was complete. There seemed no explanation of why either had come to rest where it was.

And here, in a much earlier scene, where Nick is required to visit the office of one of the more obfuscatory elements of the British civil service:

The stairs above the second floor led up into a rookery of lesser activities, some fairly obscure of definition. On these higher storeys dwelt the Civil branches and their subsidiares, Finance, Internal Administration, Passive Air Defence, all diminishing in official prestige as the altitude steepened. Finally the explorer converged on attics under the eaves, where crusty hermits lunched frugally from paper bags, amongst crumb-powdered files and documents ineradicably tattooed with the circular brand of the teacup. At these heights, vestiges of hastily snatched meals endured throughout all seasons, eternal as the unmelted upland snows. Here, under the leads, like some unjustly confined prisoner of the Council of Ten, lived Blackhead.

Blackhead is a minor character, a type almost, the Platonic form of the civil servant made flesh, “the mystic holy essence incarnate of arguing, encumbering, delaying, hair-splitting, all for the best of reasons.”

Other characters are developed in this volume, most notably Pamela Flitton – a strikingly attractive girl whose “rankling animosity against the world in general was discharged with adamantine force…” Flitton moves from man to man, provoking minor scandals and using her near-irresistible magnetic force to lure men to her often to their vast disadvantage. Like so many, she is a person who lives by the will, her sheer force of personality bending the world around her. Existing characters recur, Peter Templer, Odo Stephens, Mrs. Erdleigh and others.

And, of course, Widmerpool returns. Widmerpool by this point is the nearest thing Dance has to a protagonist, his will carrying him ever upwards to new heights of power and prestige. He is a monster, a man who shows no loyalty or compassion at all to those he leaves behind in his wake, yet remains a brilliantly drawn character. I particularly liked this line, where Widmerpool runs into Nick and his wife at the theatre: “Widmerpool, who had met Isobel in the past, peered closely to make sure I was out with my wife, and said good evening.”

As the story moves into France, references to Proust become more explicit, with Nick encountering some of the locations that are used in his In Search of Lost Time. I haven’t read Proust yet, it’s my project for 2010, and I rather regret that because in part Dance seems inspired by Proust’s work and as with the classics there are references I suspect I’m missing that I would pick up if I’d read In Search already.

At the end though, a work as layered and complex as Dance will always be at least partly inaccessible, there will always be more in there, nuances that another reader would see that I do not. That’s inevitable, and in a way is a testament to the work. I’m already excited at the prospect of finishing the series, now too I find myself looking forward to one day rereading it, so that I can see it all unfold again with knowledge of what is to come.

Still, for now it is the mix of comedy and tragedy (an appropriately Grecian contrast which Powell would appreciate) that sticks with me. Death, fear, disappointment, ruined hopes, but also friendship, warmth, the foibles of humanity. The follies of the powerful come up often, there is a wonderful section involving a race between a party of foreign generals for who gets the only bath in a guest house. There’s also a marvellous section consisting largely of Nick’s thoughts wandering as he sits in the victory thanksgiving service, musing on the meanings of the hymns and observing the people around him:

General Asbjørnsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.

There’s a humanity in all of this which runs right through this work, this series indeed. Not perhaps a love for us all, but at least an understanding.

As I move towards the last three volumes of Dance, I am increasingly of the view that this is one of the great works of literature, a masterpiece. The statistics, 3,000 pages, twelve volumes, are deeply offputting I admit. But the reward is worth it, each novel is itself only around 250 pages and each is enjoyable and challenging in its own right. This is deep stuff, lightly written, an example of what at its best literature is capable of.

The Military Philosophers

I’ve decided that going forward, on occasion, I’m going to post about comics/graphic novels that I think are particularly good and might appeal to people not normally interested in the form. I don’t remotely propose to turn this into a comics blog, nor do I intend to cover everything I read in that vein, but after reading about Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles on Just William’s Luck here, I think there can be value in discussing some of these works.

That doesn’t incidentally (in case any comics fans read this) suggest any negative view of those titles I read but don’t cover. This is a literary blog – I don’t cover films or tv series and with only a few exceptions I won’t be covering comics either, however excellent (and there’s some truly excellent stuff out there that I won’t be discussing). My interest here is only to shed light on some titles that might otherwise go unnoticed and that people with an interest in literary fiction might also find rewarding. At the moment, I’m expecting to write up over the next few months:

Berlin, by Jason Lutes;
Bluesman, by Rob Vollmar and Pablo Callejo;
Incognegro, by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece;
Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser, by Mike Mignola; and
Pyongyang, by Guy Delisle.

There’ll probably be a few others too, as the interest takes me, but only a few as this is still very much a books blog.

Balthasar’s Odyssey, published fittingly enough in the year 2000, is a novel by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. Maalouf, a former Prix Goncourt winner, writes in French rather than Arabic and in the 2003 Vintage translation I read is excellently translated by Barbara Bray.

This is the first Maalouf novel I’ve read, though I also have some of his non-fiction work on my shelf. I’ll be buying more. Balthasar’s Odyssey was warm, funny, intelligent, charming and at times extremely thought provoking. It’s also a tremendous blend of historical and literary fiction, enjoyable simply as a tale of a Levantine book merchant’s quest for a rare text across Seventeenth-century Europe or as a meditation on mortality, faith, tolerance, the importance of doubt and indeed on what it is to be a writer.

The novel opens in the year 1665. Balthasar Embriaco is a bookseller of Genoese family, but born and bred in Gibelet (also known as Byblos). He 40 years old, a plump widower kept company by his two nephews and his servant. A mild mannered and scholarly man, he is browbeaten by the more religiously observant of his nephews (Boumeh) into entering into a quest for a book titled The Hundredth Name. Boumeh believes (as do many others) that 1666 is the final year of the world, the apocalypse foretold in the bible and other holy texts, but the missing book is said to contain the famous hundredth name of god and knowledge of that name brings with it power that may help one survive the days to come.

Or may not, for Balthasar is something of a mild sceptic, worried that the apocalypse may be coming and that Boumeh may be correct, but suspicious too that Boumeh’s prophecies are too neat, his signs too convenient, that the world will continue as it always has:

I always think that if you look for signs you find them, and I write this down lest, in the maelstrom of madness that is seizing the world, I should one day forget it. Manifest signs, speaking signs, troubling signs – people always manage to “prove” what they want to believe; they’d be just as well off if they tried to prove the opposite.

Balthasar is a somewhat vain man, proud of his family’s long and once distinguished name, of his own business and reputation, of his intellect. To show belief in what he suspects to be mere superstition would be an embarrassment, a humiliation even, but what if he is wrong, what if the world really is about to end? Balthasar’s is is an equivocal soul, he is kind and generous but he is not the strongest willed of men.

Balthasar is also, critically, a writer – he keeps a journal of his travels and that journal forms the novel itself. The text is Balthasar’s journal, his thoughts, his observations, his private hopes, fears and shames. The consequence of that is that Balthasar’s Odyssey as a work is only enjoyable as long as Balthasar himself is enjoyable to spend time with, as long as he is interesting. It is fortunate then that he is one of the most likeable and most human characters I have encountered in fiction for quite some time.

As mentioned above, it’s quite possible to simply read Balthasar’s Odyssey as an often extremely funny account of a middle-aged and rather portly merchant’s misadventures across the Seventeenth-century world. He travels through Constantinople, where he encounters spectacular levels of corruption, to Chios where he encounters smugglers and yet more corruption, to Genoa, Amsterdam and to London itself. Along the way, he makes various friends, many of them themselves at least a touch eccentric, falls in love and engages in a touchingly written romance all the better for its at time faint absurdity (and which of us hasn’t been absurd when in love?). He runs into strange religious orders and dangerous criminals alike, all on a mission to obtain a book he isn’t persuaded actually has any real power at all.

There is then a great deal of gentle comedy in this work, but plenty of reminders too of quite how perilous the world back then was and quite how major an undertaking significant travel was too. Balthasar on his journeys has to contend with inclement weather, illness and plague, grasping and tricksy caravan masters, madmen and war. Death, on several occasions, is a real prospect. There are times he must hide from angry mobs, from possible execution, his journey is a terrifying one in many respects and he is not a courageous man by nature.

As a simple piece of historical fiction, Balthasar’s Odyssey is extremely successful. The characters are concerned with issues of their day, they persuade as men and women of their time and the places and incidents along the way are credible and well realised. If there were nothing else, I would have thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

Balthasar’s Odyssey though is not just a work of historical fiction. It is also a discussion of faith, doubt, fear and of what it is to be human. The concerns of the characters are concerns of their time, but concerns of ours too – intolerance, extremism, the dangers of people too convinced of their own rightness. Balthasar’s Odyssey is about the Seventeenth-century, yes, but humanity’s flaws then were the same as humanity’s flaws today.

Balthasar spends part of his journey with a Jewish friend he meets along the way, Maīmoun. Here Balthasar and Maīmoun are discussing the most beautiful sentence in any religion, Balthasar has proposed “Love they neighbour as thyself”, Maīmoun has reservations:

‘Wait. There’s something else, something more worrying, in my view. Some people are always sure to interpret this precept with more arrogance than magnanimity. They’ll read it as saying: What’s good for you is good for everyone else. If you know the truth, you ought to use every possible means to rescue lost sheep and set them on the right path again. Hence the forced baptisms imposed on my ancestors in Toledo in the past. And I myself have heard the injunction quoted more often by wolves than by lambs. So I’m sorry – I have doubts about it.”

…

“If you’re looking for the most beautiful saying to be found in any religion, the most beautiful that ever issued from the lips of man, that’s not it. The one I mean was spoken by Jesus too. He didn’t take it from Scripture though, he just listened to his own heart.”
What could it be? I waited. Maīmoun stopped his mount for a moment to underline the solemnity of his quotation.
“Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

Maīmoun too is a sceptic of the coming apocalypse, a more robust one than Balthasar who secretly doubts his own doubt. Maīmoun’s father, however, has no such doubts and fervently believes that the end days have come, indeed once equally fervently believed that they were due in 1648 and when the day of resurrection then failed to arrive on schedule merely adjusted his expected dates. Maīmoun lost his faith when his father’s apocalypse failed to arrive, his father merely assumed it had started but somewhere far away and so the evidence had yet to arrive. Maīmoun’s father, in other words, has faith. Maīmoun has none, all he has is tolerance, a belief in the importance of not judging others, and a hope that one day the whole world may be like Amsterdam where it is said Jew and Gentile are able to live in peace.

The issue of faith is one of many (too many for one blog entry) strands in this novel. Balthasar’s nephew, Boumeh, believes in numerology and that the secrets of the future are laid out in ways that can be divined through the manipulation of words and numbers. In one marvellous sequence, Boumeh rather patronisingly explains to Balthasar and Maīmoun how numerology proves that 1666 is the last year of the world:

“But why was an event announced in 1648 that’s supposed to take place in 1666? That’s a mystery I can’t understand!” I said.
“Nor can I,” agreed Maīmoun.
“I don’t see any mystery,” said Boumeh, with irritating calm.
Everyone waited with baited breath for him to go on. He took his time, then went on loftily:
“There are eighteen years between 1648 and 1666.”
He stopped.
“So?” asked Habib, through a mouthful of crystallised apricots.
“Don’t you see? Eighteen – six plus six plus six. The last three steps to the Apocalypse.”
There followed a most ominous silence. I suddenly felt that the pestilential vapour was approaching and closing in on us. Maīmoun was the most pensive of those present: it was as if Boumeh had just solved an old enigma for him. Hatem bustled around us, wondering what was the matter: he’d caught only scraps of our conversation.
It was I who broke the silence.
“Wait a moment, Boumeh!” I said. “That’s nonsense. I don’t have to tell you that in the days of Christ and the Evangelists people didn’t write six six six as you would today in Arabic: they wrote it in Roman figures. And your three sixes don’t make sense.”
“So can you tell me how they wrote 666 in the days of the Romans?”
“You know very well. Like this.”
I picked up a stick and wrote “DCLXVI” on the ground.
Maīmoun and Habib bent over and looked at what I’d written. Boumeh just stood where he was, not even glancing our way. He just asked me if I’d never noticed anything particular about the numbers I’d just traced. No, I hadn’t.
“Haven’t you noticed that all the Roman figures are there, in descending order of magnitude, and each occurs only once?”
“Not all of them,” I said quickly. “One’s missing…”
“Go on, go on – you’re getting there. There’s one missing at the beginning. The M – write it! Then we’ll have ‘MDCLXVI’. One thousand six hundred and sixty-six. Now the numbers are complete. And the years are complete. Nothing more will be added.”
Then he reached out and erased the figure completely, muttering some magic formula he’d learned.

A curse on numbers and on those who make use of them!

Balthasar is an intelligent man, but not a worldly one. He is often outwitted, and there are several occasions where he may have been outwitted, but cannot be sure and because he cannot we cannot. He is as reliable a narrator as he can be, but he is human and the limits of his perception become the limits of ours. As a reader, we too have to doubt, to operate in the absence of perfect knowledge, we have to accept that much as we may wish otherwise not all the answers may be forthcoming. There may be things we never know, however much we might wish to.

And that takes me onto another of the novel’s themes, what it means to be mortal, to know that everything we do may be lost on our death. Balthasar is a writer, he records all that he encounters and more importantly his secret thoughts and fears in his journals, but why? What’s the point of doing so? Indeed, what’s the point of doing anything?

Balthasar, and Balthasar’s Odyssey, has no answer to that. Balthasar after all is one of those in his world who do not have faith, and having no faith he has no solutions. Nonetheless, the nature of his quest – the possibility of apocalypse and of perhaps a magic name that will allow fate to be escaped – naturally turn his mind to these issues.

In the following passage, Balthasar is facing the loss of his journals, and asking himself why, if he cannot be sure his words will survive, he writes at all:

I know my words are bound to end up in oblivion. Our whole existence borders on oblivion. But we need at least a semblance, an illusion of permanence if we are to do anything at all. How can I fill these pages, how can I go on searching for the right words to describe events and emotions, if I can’t come back in ten or twenty years to revisit my past? And yet I still am writing, and shall go on doing so. Perhaps the honour of mortals resides in their inconsistencies.

Later, sitting in his room in a wooden building with the Great Fire of London approaching, Balthasar’s thoughts again turn to mortality:

The all-devouring fire draws closer and closer, and I sit here at this wooden table, in this wooden room, committing my last thoughts to a sheaf of pages that will ignite at the smallest spark! It’s madness, madness! But isn’t that just an image of my mortal condition? I dream of eternity when my grave is already dug, piously commending my soul to the One who’s about to snatch it away from me. When I was born I was a few years away from death. Now it may be no more than a few hours. But what’s a year anyway in comparison with eternity? What’s a day? An hour? A second? Such measures only have meaning for a heart that’s still beating.

Writing here becomes a metaphor for mortality, the act of writing, of recording something in the face of nothing, becomes both pointless and yet marvellous. An expression of hope in the absence of anything obvious to hope for. Balthasar is a frightened man, he does not want to die, he does not want his words to be lost, but he cannot help the risk of these things and so continues as if those risks did not exist. What else is there to do?

He writes for another reason too, one that perhaps holds true for any writer, he writes because it is his nature to do so. Because he cannot do otherwise.

What else can I do? My pen wields me as much as I wield it. I have to follow its path just as it follows mine.

All of that makes this sound a despairing novel, it really isn’t though. Balthasar is afraid of dying, but mostly his fears are more quotidian. There is a powerful sequence where the woman he has fallen in love with must go back for a while to her former lover, and his fears then at what may occur and whether she will return to him are in their way much worse than his fear of death or the end of the world (which really, as he reflects in the quote I used for my title, are the same thing). There is something profoundly human in this, he has his dark nights of the soul but he has too his mornings making love in a sunlit room, his meals with friends and late evening conversations, his anguish at the prospect of separation from friends and lovers, his guilt when he lets people down. The triumph of this novel is in the humanity of its protagonist, in his continuing to be human even though he suspects there is no purpose to it or to anything else. At the end, Balthasar’s Odyssey is a curiously hopeful novel – even though it holds out nothing particularly to hope for. We just hope anyway, we may as well.

Balthasar’s Odyssey