From Tintern Abbey to Hobbiton - Celebrating Literary Britain

Retrospective on Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

British Library, May - September 2012

Reading The Casual Vacancy got me thinking about British types and stereotypes, and about visiting Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library last month. The very experience of wandering through the exhibition made me feel inescapably British... Averting my eyes when the mobile ringtone splintered the almost unnatural hush of the sacred exhibition space. Stoically shivering against the cold of the air temperature control systems, set low enough to preserve both the precious manuscripts and the icicled visitors. But most of all, I felt British because the displays brought alive something essential in our nation: its idealised celebration of the countryside, its quiet outrage at and adaptive acceptance of industrial revolution, its unexpected subversion in the secretive vitality of the suburbs.

The themes of Writing Britain (Rural Dreams, Cityscapes, Wild Places, London, Edges and Waterlands) led you on a purposeful meander through the contours of Britain’s literary identity, and showed how that identity has been sculpted and eroded by the spaces and places in which our poets and writers have moulded their words.

The most appealing elements of the exhibition for me were the manuscripts and artworks on display, and the often symbiotic relationship between the two. Visitors do not suffer from the blindness Wordsworth fears in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as the curators have provided two evocative paintings to enhance our appreciation of his pantheistic masterpiece. Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is wonderfully illuminated by his illustration of a grotesque, full-lipped, squat-limbed Queen of Hearts.

It was a shame that these sometimes weren’t exploited to their full potential. JRR Tolkein’s picturesque watercolour evocation of Hobbiton (see image at top of page) would have benefitted hugely from the presence of the text next to it, even in published form in the absence of a manuscript from the library’s archives. The modern take on Heart of Darkness as a graphic novel would have been enriched had Conrad’s text been laid next to it for direct comparison.

The absence of transcriptions next to some manuscripts also detracted slightly from the exhibition, often from a purely semantic point of view. Possibly the rationale was to present the historical artefact as it existed at the time of creation, but the effect of this was to frustrate when you couldn’t actually read the beauty of Keats’s words in ‘To Ailsa Rock’ as clearly as you could perceive it in the accompanying artist’s rendering.

But what struck me most potently was the surprisingly ephemeral quality of the contents of the exhibition, a sense of their fragility and their existence very much as entities of the past. And perhaps this is indeed because of the absence of those anchoring transcriptions, providing liberation from our constant need for modernisation, clarification and easy-to-digest information.

Because I visited the exhibition with the expectation of being faced with resoundingly physical objects which would impress upon me the fundamental endurance of literature, embodying its original inscription on the page. And of course the endurance of literature was palpable, but I emerged with an irresistible sense of wonder at the relative insubstantiality of these works of art; it is the simple jotting of a few lines on a piece of paper that have transmuted into the monumental printed texts we read today. It overwhelmed me to see Blake’s ‘London’ and ‘Tyger Tyger’ crammed into opposite corners of one battered notebook leaf, poems that were to become some of the most famous of the Romantic age.

So, to come back to the stereotypes of the British: comical, bathetic and, in the case of the social condemnation embodied in Rowling’s new novel, sometimes unpleasant. This exhibition reminded me that there is counterbalance to the stereotype, a multi-faceted culture of literary celebration and experimentation that the British Library honoured in this, quintessentially nostalgic, understated and considered exhibition. 

For what was included in the exhibition, see here.

Casual cruelty in The Casual Vacancy

On JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

Launched at Southbank Centre, September 2012

A disclaimer: I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I have read the books more times than I care to admit, and may or may not have dressed up as a snitch: golden sandwich-board-ball, wings and all.

That said, I went to see JK Rowling launch her new novel The Casual Vacancy with slight scepticism, partly because I had seen past interviews in which she appeared somewhat lacking in charisma, or at least forced to forgo charisma for the sake of discretion. But for the launch of her novel at Southbank Centre last month she came across as extremely genuine, engaging and honest. Her desire for the book to be well-received was palpable, as was her acceptance that there could be no discussion of it without reference to the behemoth that is her fantasy series.

Rowling opened up about her preoccupation with death, which presented itself with increasing ruthlessness throughout Harry Potter. She admitted to a crippling sense that, as she says inThe Casual Vacancy, ‘tiny ghosts of your living children haunt your heart’; that life is a constant process of mourning the past. This is something Rowling acknowledged no child would want to know of their parent, and which she followed with an immediate apology to her daughter in the audience. Such frankness is indicative of just how personal she is being in this book – The Casual Vacancy is not simply a ‘500 page socialist manifesto’ as Jan Moir has unforgivingly labelled it, but is a novel that addresses Rowling’s own emotional as well as political concerns. She affirmed that she had been experimenting with adult novels before Harry Potter materialised, fully formed and bespectacled, on that famous napkin, and that this is not a cynical, provocative career move to wrong-foot the critics but is something she ‘couldn’t help but write’.

I was pleasantly surprised, after mediocre reviews, to find that the novel feels on the whole well-written; her slight clunkiness-of-phrase (to employ a somewhat clunky phrase) is offset by the engaging structure and plot. But I have to say that I am now 200 pages in and struggling, not because I don’t think the novel is of a high enough quality but because it is relentlessly depressing.

There is no lovable character to root for. The reader is subject to a constant barrage of insidious suggestions that no one in our country, across the spectrum of the class system and for myriad miserable reasons, is happy. There are some characters with subtle redeeming qualities: the well-meaning but ineffectual school councillor, the ‘f***ed up’ but sympathetically-drawn daughter of a heroin addict. But most are almost entirely, fundamentally unpleasant; from the sinisterly abusive middle-class father to the subtly psychotic teenage boy, all the characters lead you lose faith in humanity.

So, as much as I admire the book, enjoy the writing and respect the writer, I hereby think I will have to abandon it. Perhaps I'll turn to Cider with Rosie instead, another West Country story of a different time and of a very different kind.

Engaging new writing from unseasoned playwrights

Unseasoned, Back Here! Theatre Company

Shooting Star at Liverpool Street, Monday 15th October

Monday's trip to see Back Here! Theatre Company’s collection of new work Unseasoned was an unexpected delight. This was a showcase from actors at the beginning of their careers, performing new writing that consisted of four short plays and four monologues plus a sizzling UK premiere of Tennessee Williams’s short play In Our Profession. Slightly unseasoned though they sometimes seemed, it was in general high quality, thought-provoking (especially to the mid-twenties crowd who made up most of the audience) and hugely entertaining.

My general sense was that because the actors and playwrights were young, they were addressing all the concerns that I feel most vividly at the age of 25. From the slow decay of relationships to the terror of parental death, our generation's fundamental fears were examined in ways that were, if a little rough around the edges, simultaneously poignant, genuine and laugh-out-loud funny. 

Choosing art with a boyfriend devolves into a histrionic analysis of the relationship’s flaws. What at first seems to be the 'awkward turtle' of two people's first encounter through a sex dating website is actually a desperate attempt to revive a couple’s failing sex life. A tramp provides the cathartic ear a young man needs for his woes, accompanied by a repulsive, but enlightening, swig from a cigarette-saliva-rimmed can of White Lightening.

Although some of the acting wasn't perfect, and some of the scenes not entirely coherent, overall I found the evening absorbing and very enjoyable. The fusion of comedy and pathos, of light-hearted banter and grave admissions of mortality and heartache, worked well to bring alive a host of characters and situations that were at once unique and universal. Which is ultimately what all good theatre should do.

And they're doing it all again next Tuesday 23rd October - for details see their facebook page here.

Will Self's self-indulgent modernism

On Will Self at Southbank Centre, September 2012.

Will Self’s concept of 'modernism' in the novel (can we even call it modernism anymore? Should that term not have been confined to the early 20^th century along with the modernists who first expounded it?) is flawed.

Perhaps within the parameters Self sets out, it is legitimate. But those parameters are far too rigidly delineated. When I went to see him talk about his new novel Umbrella, his propounding of, let’s call it experimentalism, in the novel was erudite and well-informed, and is well-executed in the novel. But I can’t help feeling he is a little too blinkered in the unforgiving nature of his philosophy. Yes, it is essential that creative writing in both form and content continues to push the boundaries of what has yet to be attempted in literature. And it is important that the multifarious nature of our world and of humanity can be linguistically encapsulated in the multifarious nature of the novelistic internal voice. But does that mean that the ‘realist’ tradition, honed by George Eliot and Jane Austen and now typified by the likes of Amis, McEwan et al, should be eschewed in favour of an attempt to conduct the darting meanderings of consciousness into language? And isn’t this language by its very nature carefully structured by the novelist and thus, ironically, ‘unreal’?

For what is language but a constrictive conduit through which we must necessarily articulate our abstract thoughts and emotions, and by which we are thus restricted within the very boundaries of that language and the limited manipulations upon it that we attempt to enact? Self’s argument that the novel should aspire to communicate the ‘reality’ of our thoughts and their infinite tributaries and deviations is valid, and has to an extent been executed by the 20^th century greats: Joyce, Woolf and so on. Self experiments in Umbrella with shifting time-periods mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and with the expression of what he calls ‘condensed thought’ via italics. And I do believe that such experimentation should be valued and acknowledged as a progression of the artform. But I cannot help but feel that his dogmatic insistence that this is the only way, or at least the closest way, of authentically conveying our inner thoughts is flawed.

Because for me novels express the most fundamental truths, emotions and expressions of being. And they can do this despite, or even due to, being composed of chapters, cohesive sentences and linear narratives. Not all novels achieve this veracity of course, but some do it to at least an equally potent effect as the stream of consciousness and some, I would argue, more so. Marshall Brown is speaking of poetry when he invokes ‘the vital round dance that lets form give life and meaning to content and lets content give substance and expression to form’ but I think this can apply equally to the novel and its form, be it experimental or traditional.

Think of Dickens in Great Expectations when he entreats the reader to ‘Think of the long chain of iron or gold, thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day’. Dickens is a proven master of the chapter, of the slow materialisation of the links that join together and form unbreakable nexuses around which an entire world can be created. Or think of Will Self’s contemporary David Mitchell, a fine example of experimentalism through the very distinct chapter partitions of his masterpiece Cloud Atlas, whose first character says: ‘Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent’.

These truer truths may be latent within the simulacrum of the realist novel just as much as within the simulacrum of the continuous stream of thought; they can be found not just in the attempted realism of the mind’s nebulous internal iterations but in the marshalling of these thoughts into something less ‘real’, perhaps, but equally true.