Jul 18, 2021 | Books
I reached the end of A Dance To The Music Of Time. It was a long canter round the Palais and I’m inclined now to go to the bar and give my legs a rest for a while. I have to say, though, that the final book, for which this post is named, is strange and not, for me, a wholly satisfying conclusion. That annoys me more than I expected.
Nick Jenkins is conscious of his own ageing as he recounts the deaths of contemporaries, the weddings of his contemporaries’ grandchildren (as always, we learn nothing of his own children, and only a little about his wife, Isobel), and a meeting with the object of what was once young love. He is, in the words of Thomas Vaughan,
Looking at the sunset towards the west wind
Hearing Secret Harmonies.
He is less inclined to leave home to go to London because:
In a writer’s life, as time shortens, work tends to predominate, among other things resulting in a reduction of attendance at large conjunctions of people.
That doesn’t, of course, preclude telling of some of those conjunctions of people that he does attend, and, in doing so, he brings the Dance sequence to an end which, rather like a progressive barn dance, is to bring it back to the beginning.
I’m pleased with myself for making my way through the Dance, although I suspect it was only because I got all the books together, used, cheap, that I felt inclined to persevere. And it was rewarding. It takes effort to adapt to Jenkins’s voice and style, but there is a fine return in terms of style, humour, and reflection. I’m not sure that I’ll ever take another turn through the sequence, although I might remind myself of the first three books – I read them so long ago that the memory fades.
One of the striking things about these books, despite the male narrator and the male-dominated world(s) through which the story progresses, is the agency of the women, especially sexual agency. Although the story is told largely through the voices of men, what Powell shows is often quite different from what the men tell, and I think that is deliberate. He is also, given that it was illegal at the time, clear that some of the characters are actively homosexual or bisexual or otherwise enjoying non-vanilla sex, and is non-judgmental about it. Rather like the norse sagas, the issue isn’t so much behaviour as character and context.
Having said that, the most sexually aggressive of all the characters, Pamela Flitton/Templer/Widmerpool is a blank space. It is clear that she has been ‘damaged’ in some way in childhood, but it is never made explicit what happened (though hints are dropped). Rather like Canon Fenneau (below), I should have liked to know more about her interior life.
Hearing Secret Harmonies, and the series, ends with an invocation of the cycle of endless return and repetition of life, but if the previous books in the series are tinged with tragedy, Hearing Secret Harmonies veers too much towards farce, and that’s a shame. I also have a problem with the through-narrative of the final story, which doesn’t ring true. The book is a somewhat slight satire on the late 1960s/early 1970s, that, for me, misses the mark, undercutting the fate of Widmerpool. Widmerpool may well have been, in the words of Bob Duport, 100% bastard and a château-bottled shit, but he deserved a better ending.
Throughout the series, the occult is a bit player, or at least occultists are: Dr. Trelawney, loosely modelled on Aleister Crowley, Mrs. Erdleigh, spiritualist and fortune teller, the somewhat sinister Canon Paul Fenneau, Russell Grynnett (by implication) and Scorpio Murtlock. Sometimes these are presented as figures of fun, sometimes not, and Jenkins maintains a distant, rationalist perspective on them all. Unfortunately, Murtlock is to the fore in the final volume, and it just doesn’t work for me, despite the usual display of Powell’s sly witticisms and ironies.
I might add that, of all the occultists in the books, Canon Paul Fenneau, strikes me as simultaneously the most interesting and the most under-developed. He’s the one who would be played by Peter Cushing.
The end of the final novel is, I think, pleasingly ambiguous. I am not sure if Powell is simply drawing a veil over proceedings, or if we are meant to infer that Jenkins has literally, as well as fictionally, breathed his last:
The thudding sound from the quarry had declined now to no more than a gentle reverberation, infinitely remote. It ceased altogether at the long drawn wail of a hooter—the distant pounding of centaurs’ hoofs dying away, as the last note of their conch trumpeted out over hyperborean seas. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.
I am sufficiently engaged to hope that Nick and Isobel spent their last years in long and contented companionship.
***
On the subject of tragedy and farce, our ludicrous government continue to be an international embarrassment. I’m indifferent in some respects to the farcical shenanigans; I absolutely am not indifferent to the tragic outcomes that will follow – which will not be incurred by those politicians, of course. Many of the core characters of Powell’s Dance are products of a lightly fictionalised Eton, and it is notable that most of them are confident, articulate and content to trade on privilege, while also never quite being up to the mark.
The dance continues.
Jul 15, 2021 | Dead Water
It’s early afternoon as I write this. I came up to the desk to make progress with a story, but woke up 45 minutes later, drowsy in the day’s warmth. In front of me I have a large glass containing ice, lime juice, ginger ale and crushed mint leaves. I’ve already had to rescue one wasp from it. Outside my window, a pair of juvenile goldfinches are at the birdfeeder.
Edinburgh often has days and weeks like this: warm under blue skies. For the past week or more I’ve been sleeping on top of the bed under – or not – a single blanket by an open window. My phone says it’s currently 24° outside, while, according to the thermometer behind my desk, it peaked at just short of 28° (81°F) here in the shed, with windows and doors open.
I can’t extrapolate from this, of course – it’s summer, after all, and my diary tells me that I can expect warmer later this month or in August. It hit 24° here a month ago as well. But neither can I ignore what is happening elsewhere in the world, all these ‘100 year’ events that seem to be happening every year, from excessive heat and fires on the west coast of North America, to the torrential downpours and floods in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to this year’s fires in Siberia and the melting Arctic. The most visible effect in Edinburgh has been milder, damper winters (see this post – second para. – from last October.)
Covid continues, and builds momentum, while politicians flounder in their own ineptitude, but it is the change in climate that’s the big picture, a process of change that I think is now irreversible. I keep up to date with news and views on climate change in the popular science press, and I know the view continues to be expressed that there’s still time to change course. But all the things that are said to be essential to do rely for their implementation on co-ordinated, decisive action by politicians and on the majority of humans ‘doing the right thing’.
The thing is, I have no faith that politicians in particular or humans in general will do anything at all of significance. Short of some volcanic cataclysm, the future is here and it’s already too late. The Moon is getting in on the act, too, sleekit wee bastard that it is.
What else is there to do but to sit here writing dystopian fiction?
Jul 11, 2021 | Uncategorized
Shield-shattered fighters slew and were slain
Not one of them came home again
In between Anthony Powell novels, I read Gillian Clarke’s The Gododdin, Lament for the Fallen.
The Gododdin, about which disputation swirls, is a collection of elegies to the dead of the Gododdin, likely dating to late C6, though not written down until much later. It survives in Old Welsh, but dates to a Brythonic past. The Gododdin, known to the Romans as the Votadini, had a major seat of power at what is now called Edinburgh. Their lands spread between the Forth and the Tyne. The elegised warriors appear to have died in at least three conflicts, though the major one is the battle of Catraeth that may (or may not) have been modern-day Catterick. Their opponents were Saxons.
I simplify.
Clarke set out to produce a poetic interpretation of the ancient verse rather than a word-for-word accurate translation, varying her metre and style to devastating cumulative effect. Most of the dead are named, preserved to history by the manner of their death, remembered 1500 years later in a world they could not possibly have imagined.
ERF
Grey horses whinnied in his care
He gave not an inch to the land of Pobdelw,
lost not an acre, battle-bull,
his way quick, his death cruel
In sensibility, it reminded me of Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), her elegy for the named dead of the Iliad. Oswald, too, departed from strict translation of the Greek to capture the ‘atmosphere’ of the memorials, stripping out 90% of the original text.
Lycaon naked in a river pleading for his life
Being answered by Achilles No.
As I drafted this, ‘Three lions on their shirt…’ came drifting through the backgardens from further up the street. The media, social and otherwise, has been full of references to warriors and battles at Wembley tonight. Metaphor, I know, but even Chiellini isn’t going to be slaughtering naked men in the river in a revenge-rage for the death of Patroclus. Not in normal time, anyway.
Jul 10, 2021 | Goggle-eyes, Writing
Both daughters have said they miss checking in here nightly. I’ve quite enjoyed the freedom from the daily blog, but am happy to record some doings.
***
I first started on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of TIme in 2016. It is a difficult read at times because of the voice of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. Jenkins is a decent enough man, though not especially distinguished. The books are his observations on his life and the characters that come and go in it. For the most part, though not entirely, these are the middle and upper-middle classes who are largely in a state of decline and fall through the twentieth century. Jenkins’s voice is somewhat dull, and his recollections heavy with subclauses and sub-subclauses and digressions, all of which make him something of a prolix narrator, and that, I suspect, is why many make a start and give up on the series (and why I put it aside for a while).
I’ve taken it in fits and starts, but I’m now on book ten of the sequence–Books Do Furnish A Room and enjoying it. I thought the three books dealing with WW2 particularly good, Jenkins’s voice changing to a slightly more clipped and direct manner as befits his rise from subaltern in a Welsh Regiment to major in an obscure backroom post in London.
Jenkins himself is endlessly problematic: his function is to be the observer and, though the books are written first person, we don’t ever really get close to him. It’s something of a writing cliché, but, through the eyes and voice of Jenkins, Powell shows rather than tells and in doing so allows us only occasional glimpses of Jenkins’s true feelings. However, beneath the prolix syntax and the curiously unengaging narrator, lies a series of character portraits that can be very funny (Wodehouse was a fan) and unexpectedly moving.
The novels set post WW2 have a different voice again, rather as if Jenkins is reverting to a pre-war persona that no longer quite fits, while the appalling Kenneth Widmerpool, who made his way to full Colonel through his mastery of bureaucratic manoeuvres and connivances in Whitehall, has become a Labour MP without ever running his colours up an ideological staff. I’ve met his type.
***
I’ve been watching Loki, which I’ve found entertaining and fun. It’s about the only TV I have watched though, except football.
In similar Marvel vein, I watched Black Widow, which is a decent film within the Marvel bubble, though not quite the triumph I’ve seen people proclaiming it to be. Back in 2017 (Conservative but not Entirely Unfun) I wrote here
My touchstone for superhero movies remains The Incredibles, which was pitch-perfect, although it benefits from being animated. The best of the live-action crop, for me, is Logan, which succeeds as a fine super-hero movie by dint of being a fine movie by any standard, rather in the way Jessica Jones was streets ahead of the TV equivalents. Logan also, and notably, largely avoids big set up CGI fests and concentrates on character and personal tragedy.
You might think it unfair of me to contrast Wonder Woman with Logan, as they are very different movies. But that is also my point. Wonder Woman is a good superhero movie; Logan dared to be something else.
Since then we’ve had the excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as well.
Black Widow explicitly invokes the ghost of Roger Moore-era James Bond and is entertaining in that respect. However Black Widow is at its best when focusing on character and at it’s weakest when Ray Winstone’s General Dreykov monologues in best Bond-villain style about his dastardly plan and our heroines set about arranging his demise. As with many Marvel productions, it is a good film, but there’s an even better one struggling to get out.
***
I’ve been working away behind the scenes on a couple of projects and can now say that I plan to have a collection of linked short stories, Coyote In The Corner, published later this year in time for Christmas, in ebook and print on demand paperback. The linking elements in the stories grew from wondering how vampires would react to climate change and subsequent loss of habitat (badly, as it turns out). More on this nearer the time.
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