This year (2022)
Previous years: 2021; 2020; 2019;
2018; 2017;
2016; 2015;
2014; 2013;
2012; 2011;
2010; 2009;
2008; 2007;
2006; 2005
Philippa Gregory:
Tidelands
& Dark Tides
Stacey
Halls:
The
Familiars
Mrs England
The Foundling
Jack London:
The
Sea-Wolf
Martin
Eden
Hayley Mills:
Forever
Young
John Banville:
April
in Spain & Mefisto
Snow
The
Newton Letter
Even
the Dead
The
Book of Evidence
Benjamin
Black:
Christine
Falls
The Silver Swan
Elegy for April
A Death in Summer
Vengeance
Holy Orders
Lisa
See:
Snow
Flower and the Secret Fan
Douglas
Hurd:
Robert
Peel, a Biography
Claire
Tomalin:
Samuel
Pepys, The Unequaled Self
Kathy
Glass:
Hidden:
Betrayed exploited and forgotten
Rudolf
Steiner:
Christianity
as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity
These are two books, the second of which is a
continuation of the first, thus making two parts of a single story. In
Tidelands the time is 1648. Oliver Cromwell is in charge of his New Model
Army, forging a New Normal for England. The King, Charles, has been arrested
and is being confined - more or less - to a house on the Isle of Wight. From
there he appeals to the Scots, the Welsh, perhaps even the Irish, to take up
arms against the New Model Army to defend his God-given position as divine
leader of England. On the "Continent" the Peace of Westphalia has just been
agreed, ending the Thirty Years War. All of this is usually represented as
being a matter of religious fanatics killing one another; an example of
"mass formation psychosis". But was this true? Was it really a psychosis
similar to the madness we are living in today which is driven by the
irrational idea that Death can be conquered by injecting magic scientific
potions into the body every few months? And did all those people around the
time of 1648 kill each other merely because they had different ideas about
what is the true doctrine to tell us what we should expect to find after
Death? The story in this book gives us a different perspective. Accordingly
it was a matter of the masses of normal people revolting against the
injustice of those days. The fact that everything was owned by a few
oligarchs - the aristocracy. The normal people "owned nothing and were not
happy". Such is the background to the story of these books.
We are concerned with simple folk living in a fictional
place called Sealsea Island which we are told is such that Chichester is
about 8 or 10 miles to the north. Looking at the map I see that there is a
real-life town named Selsey on the south coast of England about 10 miles
south of Chichester. However Selsey is not an island, nor is it a tideland,
being situated behind a well-defined beach and consisting of summer
cottages. Perhaps we should think slightly to the west, for example Thorney
Island, near the Chichester harbor and yacht club.
The heroine is Alinor, a woman in her mid 20s with two
children in their early teens. (Things progressed rapidly in those days!)
Her husband, a fisherman, disappeared a year ago, leaving her practically
destitute, dressed in rags, living on meager portions of thin gruel. She
also serves as a midwife to the peasants of the island. Suddenly, in the
middle of the night, James, a finely dressed gentleman in his early 20s
appears, asking for help. She leads him to the house of the local squire,
Sir William Peachey. We discover that James has been transported over from
France where he has become a Catholic priest and a member of a monastery.
His mission is to conduct secret and private masses in the castles of those
aristocrats who have not rejected popery. Also he is to organize an escape
for King Charles, finding a ship to carry him from the Isle of Wight to his
remaining admirers in France. All of this falls through. But at least James
falls madly in love with Alinor, and she with him.
During a few days of torrid sex a baby is conceived. Also
in another thread of the story, Alinor's precocious daughter Alys has become
pregnant to the local farmyard hero. James travels away on his important
mission, promising to return to carry Alinor away. He is in London,
observing the legal process against King Charles and the subsequent
beheading. Upon his return, Alinor, who has suddenly discovered her own
pregnancy, tells James. He is dumbfounded. - Perhaps in those days Catholic
priests were not informed about the Birds and the Bees. - He insists that
Alinor do something to get rid of it. She doesn't. And in the other thread
of the story, Alys steals the money for the dowry her lover's parents are
insisting upon. All of this leads to violent scenes and the accusation that
Alinor is a witch. James wants nothing to do with the whole business; Alinor
is subjected to a trial by dunking which she barely survives; Sir William
Peachey declares that she is thus not a witch; and finally Alys forces James
to give up a few coins, sufficient to enable both her and Alinor to escape
to London.
So ends the first book.
Therefore I thought it would be interesting to see how
things go on with the second book.
It is now 21 years later. Alinor and Alys have a small
warehouse on the south bank of the Thames. Suddenly James appears. He is Sir
James Avery, the owner of a huge mansion on The Strand as well as huge
properties and castles on his lands somewhere in the north of England. He
assumes that Alinor has borne a son which is his heir who has now come of
age. An interesting idea with the potential for producing further drama...
Unfortunately though, the author found it necessary to
tell three or four other, completely different stories in an endless series
of short chapters jumping back and forth between one and the next. We have
the brother of Alinor somewhere in the backwoods of New England, siding with
the Indians rather than with his fellow puritan settlers. This story had
absolutely nothing to do with the main story. Then there is a story of
intrigue and seduction in Venice and London. A hopeless mishmash. What a
disappointment.
It is 1612. Queen Elizabeth has been succeeded by
King James who, famously, wrote the book, Daemonologie, which is concerned with the
problem of witches. Indeed, the Witchcraft Act of 1542 deals with people
who:
... use devise practise or exercise, or
cause to be devysed practised or exercised, any Invovacons or cojuracons
of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries to thentent to
fynde money or treasure or to waste consume or destroy any persone in
his bodie membres...
Accordingly, in the modern world William Henry ("Bill") Gates III is a
witch. In Scotland witches were burned at the stake. In England they were
hanged; perhaps a more humane method of getting rid of them.
The book is concerned with the Lancaster witches. Twelve people were accused of
witchcraft. Of those, 10 were hanged, one died in prison, and one, Alice
Grey, was acquitted. All of these historical figures with their stories, as
related by Thomas Potts in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in
the Countie of Lancaster are characters in this novel, as is Thomas
Potts himself as well as the horrible magistrate Roger Nowell. The story is
built around a fictional character with a beautiful name: Fleetwood
Shuttleworth. She has not yet reached the age of twenty, but she has already
had three painful stillbirths. She is much in love with her husband,
Richard, as is he with her. They are the wealthy owners of extensive lands
and manor houses. Alice Grey is a poor, almost destitute woman who is a
midwife, gathering herbs and other plants to help women through the travails
of pregnancy. And thus a dramatic story develops with Fleetwood saving Alice
who helps her with her pregnancy.
I enjoyed the last one so much that I thought I'd
try another of the stories of Stacey Halls. As with the first, this is
inspired by an actual historical event. On the night of the 18th of
September 1896, Charles Albert Browne threw two of his daughters 75 meters
down into the waters below the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Both survived. The elder
daughter, Ruby, suffered no lasting physical injuries (but see the previous
book: The Body Keeps the Score for an account of the
mental injuries, particularly given that it was her father), while the
younger daughter, Elsie, was partially paralyzed. The father was put into
the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, but then we are told that he was
discharged into the care of his wife in 1899. Imagine the horror this would
have been for the poor girls, always knowing that their father could strike
again at any time in the middle of the night. Thankfully in the story of the
book, the author has the father dying in the lunatic asylum. But
nevertheless, Ruby, whose last name has become May, continues to suffer the
consequences.
We only learn about all of this towards the end of the
book. Ruby has graduated from a posh college for nurses. So she is Nurse
May. However she does not work in a hospital handing the surgeons their
gleaming instruments, or caring for the patients lying in their beds.
Instead she has been trained to look after the children of wealthy families,
wearing the stylish uniform associated with the college. We are told that
she is not a "nursemaid". Looking it up in the Wikipedia I see that a nursemaid is considered to be inferior, or assistant
to, a more senior "nurse". This more senior grade of childminder is also
known as a "nanny". And then we have the idea of a governess, someone who is expected to not only look
after the children of the rich, but to teach them as well. Judging from the
writings of the Brontë sisters, such a role, teaching rich little brats,
must have been horrible. But in this book everything is sweetness and loving
care, with the four children of the England family loving and worshiping
Nurse May above everything else.
Getting started in the book we wonder about the strange
behavior of Mrs. England and the almost overly friendly reception by Mr.
England. They own a cotton mill somewhere in the north of England. I forget
exactly the time of the story, but it must be sufficient for Ruby to have
grown up after the trauma of 1896 and gotten through college, so perhaps it
would be around 1905. Mrs. England's parents and grand parents have much
more extensive textile factories than that of the England family, and they
live in huge mansions. But they seem strangely cold and reserved. What are
the hidden secrets? How will it all end?
The time of the story is 1747, and then a couple of
years afterwards in 1752, so it is placed half way between the two previous
novels. This time there seems to be no particular historical event forming
the basis of the story, and perhaps for this reason it feels contrived and
unlikely.
We learn about the Foundling Hospital; there is a map of London at the
beginning of the book, showing us where it was located. My Kindle does not
make a good job of displaying such illustrations so I found a better map of London online, showing the whole situation.
This is John Rocque's Map of 24 sheets, and we find the Foundling Hospital,
seeming to be smaller than the description given to us by Stacey Halls, when
double-clicking for magnification on sheet C1. It was out in the fields to
the north of town. Of course in modern London, sheet C1 is the middle of the
city, in Bloomsbury, and the Foundling Hospital has been replaced by the
Foundling Museum.
The idea was that babies of destitute mothers might,
depending on a lottery system, be admitted to the Hospital where they would
be looked after and then educated to the extent of becoming useful laborers
in the case of boys, or servants in the case of girls.
In the story of the book, a poor woman admires a handsome
young man from afar. She sees him entering a pub and lingers outside,
waiting for him. He takes her into a dark alley, lifts her skirts, inserts
himself and thus fathers a baby. She sees no more of the man but, being
secretly in love with him, learns that he has died. Nine months later she
gives the baby up into the Foundling Hospital. Five years after that she
wants to retrieve her daughter. It turns out that the baby had been
retrieved by the wife of the father of the baby the day after it was given
up. This wife, or widow, lives as a recluse, suffering from post traumatic
stress disorder induced by having seen both her parents shot dead by
highwaymen when she was a small child. And so she confined the child to a
close isolation. But then our heroine, the actual mother, managed to become
the nursemaid to the child. Immediately, without knowing the truth of her
parentage, the young girl falls totally under the influence, the love, of
the nursemaid - her biological mother - and she hates her false, apparent
mother. And we are continually confronted with the discrepancy between the
inherited wealth of the false mother and the grinding poverty of the true
mother. What is to be the fate of the child? Such is the story. There are
further contrived twists to the plot. The young doctor who is the director
of the Foundling Hospital is in love with the false mother (or is it only
her wealth?) despite the fact that she is depicted as being an unpleasant
monster. All of this was rather a let-down, particularly since I had enjoyed
the story of Fleetwood Shuttleworth and the Lancaster Witches.
I've been reading lots of books written by women,
probably for women, and so I was in the mood to read something more
masculine. Something by Jack London. I must have read The Call of the Wild
many years ago, but if so I have completely forgotten about it. I do
remember having read John Barleycorn. There the author tells us about his
alcoholism, describing in great detail the depravity of it all. A disturbing
and unsettling book. Looking at the pictures of Jack London in his Wikipedia article and reading about
his life we do not see an aggressive, brutal, masculine figure in the style
of an Ernest Hemingway. He had sensitive features. The Klondike Gold Rush
was a catastrophe for him. His California ranch was a failure. But he seemed
to be always in search of adventure and this led to him becoming an
extremely successful author.
The story of the book starts off with Humphrey Van
Weyden, a literary critic, on a ferry in San Francisco Bay, traveling from
Sausalito across the Golden Gate back to the city. Of course the bridge had
not yet been built when the book was published in 1904. There is a thick
fog, and he speaks with his neighbor who tells him how dangerous this is.
Suddenly the ferry is struck by another ship and sinks. Humphrey is in the
freezing water, lost in the fog, drifting out to sea. A schooner passes by
and picks him up. They are going across the Pacific to Japan and the seal
hunting grounds. The captain is Wolf Larson. Humphrey expects to be put
ashore, or at least transferred to a passing ship returning to San
Francisco. He is prepared to pay a great amount of money for the service.
But Larson refuses. He laughs at Humphrey, calling him "Hump", telling him
that he should learn to earn his own living rather than just living off
society using the money that his father has left him.
Larson turns out to be a brutal character, murdering
sailors on a whim. But he is self-educated and widely read. Humphrey and
Larson have long conversations, disputes on philosophy. Is the human
condition characterized by finer, moral values, or is the only purpose of
life the satisfaction of ones own desires, regardless of what brutalities
those desires might involve? Various philosophers are bandied about. In
particular Nietzsche plays a role.
Somewhere about the house we have a dusty old volume of
the works of Nietzsche, printed in a fraktur typeface. But I decided to
download Also Sprach Zarathustra from Project Gutenberg. For the
last few years, gutenberg.org has been blocked in Germany owing to the fact
that some German publisher claimed the rights to some sort of ancient book,
and started litigation. But thankfully that must have been resolved since
the blockage has now been lifted.
I have now made it through the first part of Zarathustra.
Rather heavy going. For lighter relief I have started on another of Jack
London's books. Zarathustra
(or Zoroaster) was thought to have lived over 3000 years ago and is
considered by some to be the first philosopher in history. In Nietzsche's
version he begins by emerging from his cave and standing in the light of the
sun. He descends from the mountains to teach humanity. His first lecture is
to the inhabitants of a mountain village. He speaks about the will to live,
the striving for success, but this did not go down well and he was kicked
out of town. Then there follows a long sequence of short chapters on various
aspects of life and of people. Lots of disjointed ideas, saying one thing
and another, often seemingly unrelated to one another. I see that there have
been various translations into English, but I can hardly imagine how that
would be possible. For example think of translating Finnegan's Wake into
some other language. You would end up inventing a jumble of language which
has a more or less tenuous relation to the original. And with Also
Sprach Zarathustra we have a language and a world which has changed
beyond all recognition in the time since it was published in the 1880s.
For example the word "Übermensch" is usually translated
into English as the word "Superman". We think of Clark Kent, donning his
costume and jumping over skyscrapers. Or we think of Nazis and concentration
camps. In the present book Wolf Larson is taken as an example of such an
Übermensch. In contrast Humphrey Van Weyden is a civilized "Normal-mensch".
But all of this is not really what Nietzsche is saying. Übermensch is not
particularly a word in the German language. But Untermensch is. That is
someone who is down-trodden, hopeless, poor. And yes, also someone who is
subhuman. A Nazi would apply the term to Jewish people, Africans, even
Asians. But that was not the case with Nietzsche. For him, becoming an
Übermensch was an uplifting idea, raising oneself to a higher level of
existence. Of course I really have no time or inclination for vague
philosophical thoughts. But I do plan on gradually making my way to the end
of Also Sprach Zarathustra. It is true that there is a kind of
rhythm to the language. Nietzsche was a friend of Wagner, and he imagined
that some of his text could be set to music. And of course we have the
wonderfully inspiring settings of Mahler and Strauss.
Finally the schooner reaches the hunting grounds off
Japan. They encounter a small boat filled with people who have been
shipwrecked. Most are sailors, but there is also a lady, Maud Brewster. And
they are also kidnapped by Wolf Larson. She is a poet and it turns out that
she knows of Humphrey and he of her. There are literary conversations, with
Larson an amused listener. After various dramatic moments, Humphrey and Maud
escape in one of the ship's boats. They fight storms, nearly drowning, but
eventually, after what seems like weeks, being driven by the wind and the
seas, they happily drift into a protected cove within a larger cove on a
deserted island, perhaps somewhere along the Aleutian chain. They begin to
survive and to fall in love with one another. But then one day, the derelict
schooner happens to drift into exactly the same cove within a cove on this
same remote island. This is as ridiculous a twist of the plot as is that in
Jane Eyre.
(Jack London - and also Charlotte Brontë - should have
thought through what they were going to write before getting lost in such
nonsense!)
Anyway, the ship is deserted except for Larson, who seems
sick. He tries to kill them, without success. He dies himself, and Humphrey
and Maud, having repaired the ship, disappear into the sunset, living
happily ever after.
It is said that the character of Wolf Larson was based on
the real life character of someone named Captain Alexander McLean. But surely if a captain of such a
wild hunting ship, filled with brutal hunters and tough sailors, terrorized
and murdered one after the other of the crew, then he would himself have
been quickly murdered. After all, even an Übermensch like Larson would have
to sleep and be vulnerable to a knife in the back or some other method of
dispatching him, thus proving the falsity of this interpretation of
Nietzsche's philosophy.
A rough young man, Martin Eden, on the ferry from
San Francisco to Oakland, sees someone being attacked by ruffians. He steps
in with his fists, coming to the aid of the stranger. And so he is invited
to the house of the Morse family for dinner. They are of a finer class. The
father is a rich lawyer, the brother whom Martin has saved is a student at
the University of California at Berkeley, as is the daughter, Ruth. Martin
sways in with his seaman's gait, feeling awkward in his muscular, working
mans body and clothes, embarrassed by his halting, grammatically challenged
speech full of slang and double-negatives, and he is bowled over by the
beauty and refinement of Ruth. Yet all are thankful that he has saved the
brother, and they listen eagerly to his seaman's yarns of his travels about
the Pacific and his visits to foreign lands. Ruth is both repelled and
fascinated by his muscular strength. She says in parting that he should call
again. And so a deep relationship develops between Martin and Ruth. She
teaching him to speak English properly, he burying himself in books, seeking
self-improvement, reading, writing, studying all day, allowing himself only
5 hours sleep each night and even resenting this time away from his studies.
Within a short time he speaks correctly, at least
according to the standards of Ruth and the Morse family, and he has mastered
literature and philosophy to the extent of being able to talk down to a
professor of something or other from Berkley who is visiting the Morse
household. Martin's ambition is to become a famous best-selling writer,
dashing off novels, poems, critical essays, and gathering in huge royalties.
He produces reams of manuscripts, sending them off to one magazine after the
other. And he is astonished to find that they are rejected. Everything is
rejected. Yet he knows that what he has produced is better than the stuff
which fills those magazines.
He has no income, despite working 19 hours each day. This
is all for Ruth; he imagines that when he becomes rich and famous they will
marry. Ruth is also in love and would like to marry him, but she sees that
his writing is leading nowhere. Martin pawns his bicycle, his good suit; he
often goes hungry; Ruth's father offers him a position as clerk in his
office. He should get a real job. But Martin knows that he is superior to
all that. He insults the father and a visiting judge with arrogant
philosophical posturings. He is rejected by the family, and Ruth tells
Martin that it is all over between them.
Unexpectedly, a manuscript is accepted and he receives 5
dollars. It was a long manuscript. He had read somewhere that magazines pay
2 cents per word, but counting the number of words in his manuscript he
realizes that he is only getting a tenth of a cent. Or something. Then
another manuscript is accepted and he is promised 40 dollars, but the money
never comes. An empty promise. He is disillusioned. He gives up writing.
Wandering back to the slums of Oakland he meets his old crowd and a true
woman, Lizzy, who loves him beyond anything. But he is no longer part of
them. Gradually more and more of his old manuscripts are accepted. Money
starts to roll in. He is rich and famous. Ruth now wants to marry him; the
mother is suddenly friendly. But Martin asks why? He is the same person as
before. These are the same manuscripts which everybody rejected when he was
poor and half starving. The world is false and meaningless. (But why didn't
he go back to poor Lizzy?) He takes a cruise into the Pacific on a luxury
steamer and in the middle of the night drops silently into the ocean,
drowning himself.
The moral of the story? Riches and Fame don't make you
happy?
I wondered how much of this was autobiographical. Jack
London didn't drown himself, but he did die at the age of 40, overdosing on
morphine, perhaps a suicide. Particularly at the end of the book, Nietzsche
is referred to, and during Martin's arrogant rants, Nietzsche's philosophy
is propounded. I am still slowly reading through Also Sprach Zarathustra.
My mistake at first was to think of reading it smoothly, from page to page.
The chapters are short and the sentences are clear and concise. But often,
at least at first, they seem to give little sense. It is perhaps a kind of
poetry in prose. There is an iconic picture of Nietzsche, a drawing of the
ill philosopher taken from a photograph after he had become insane, just
before his death. His insanely huge mustache and sunken eyes. But as a
younger man he was quite handsome. He became a professor of classics at the
University of Basel when he was 24 years old. And he did not look like a
muscular superman.
Along with thousands, if not millions of other
teenagers back in the early 1960s, I was in love with the actress Hayley
Mills. I must have watched the movies she made with Walt Disney. Later,
perhaps much later when it was shown on TV, I saw Tiger Bay, her
first movie. Then when visiting Plymouth for various weeks ten years ago, I
remembered that first film and so got the DVD. What a delight it was to
again see the 12 year old Hayley Mills playing opposite Horst Buchholz. In fact Hayley Mills tells us in this
book that she was secretly, totally in love with Horst, and she dreamed that
perhaps in 10 years when she had grown up they might make a sequel to Tiger
Bay with the character of Horst Buchholz, now 35 years old, being released
from prison to fall in love with the mature 22 year old Gillie, and then in
real life Hayley and Horst would marry and live happily ever after. Tiger Bay has been made available in its full length
on YouTube. A wonderful film, not to be compared with the childish kitsch of
Disney.
We are told of her feelings for Walt Disney. He was
almost a second father for her. Whatever else one might say about him, he
certainly was a man of high moral standards, far different from the sleazy
Hollywood figures we read about who are only too eager to exploit those
under them. For Hayley Mills the Disney studios were a second family. At the
end of her exclusive contract with them she was offered a further contract.
She was now about 18 and thinking of other roles.
Earlier, when she was 14 she had been offered the role of
Lolita in Stanley Kubrik's film, but Disney refused to let her have it. She
very much regretted this. She herself was feeling the emotions, the
awkwardness of entering puberty, and she could imagine a Humbert Humbert.
(But really, Sue Lyon, the actress who played the role was much more in
character, despite what Hayley Mills might have felt.) Instead she was
allowed to star in an independent, black and white British film, Whistle
Down the Wind, based on a story written by her mother. The story takes
place in the rural north of England. A girl, played by Hayley, discovers an
injured man hiding in the family barn. He is a murderer. She asks him who he
is. He exclaims, "Jesus Christ" to express the hopelessness of his
situation. So she believes he is the biblical Christ, tells lots of other
children, they flock to see him, but in the end he is taken away by the
police. We are told that the film was a great success in England and also in
America. As with Tiger Bay, it can be freely seen in YouTube. I find it difficult to
understand the critical praise it received back then. The Lolita-like Hayley
Mills, at 14, is much taller than all the other little children in the film
who are perhaps between 7 and 10 years old. It is simply unbelievable that a
14 year old girl could be so silly. At least the children playing her
brother and sister fitted into their roles.
Then when she was 18 or 19 and free of Disney contracts
she was in The Family Way. Again an independent British film, in
color this time, the north of England, but in a dreadfully small, almost
claustrophobic, working class house in a dreary, dirty city. The story is
that she marries the son of the family; the money for the honeymoon has been
stolen, and so they exist in small rooms with paper-thin walls, surrounded
by the rude conversations of everybody. In this situation the newly married
husband is unable to consummate the marriage. Eventually the brother, or
somebody else, does. There is even a fleeting nude scene. I remember going
to the movies and seeing the film as a student back then and feeling that
she had somehow violated whatever it was that we had felt for her. And in
the book she tells us about all of her feelings when making the film. She
even thought of suicide, closing her eyes, putting her foot down on the
accelerator and driving her car off the road. But she did not manage to kill
herself. Instead the car ran softly into a bush, and so she reversed out and
drove back to the studio. Back in those student days I read that she had
married someone who was more than 30 years older than she was. She was no
longer a lovable little girl.
In fact by the time she tells us about her marriage to
Roy Boulting, the book is almost at an end. She mentions the forgettable
films and not so forgettable stage performances which came later, but that
is no longer part of being "Forever Young". The marriage to Boulting did not
last long. She had a son with him (it was his 5th or 6th son, and his fourth
marriage). She never married again, having another son with somebody else,
and for the last 20 years her partner has been a very pleasant looking man
who is 20 years younger than she is. She tells us that she was very close to
Andrew Birkin, someone her age, the brother of Jane, even in love with him, but she was afraid of
losing him if they were to marry.
She tells us about all the famous actors and actresses
she worked with: "Larry" Olivier, "Dicky" Attenborough, and so on. They are
all sweet, wonderful. Filming a big movie, the cast and the production team
are all intimately together for months at a time, becoming great friends,
telling stories, jokes. Or being part of a traveling stage production for
weeks and months is an even more totally fulfilling emotional experience.
Yet when the film is finished or the play has come to an end, everybody has
a farewell party, they go their own ways, and there comes an emptiness.
Thankfully Hayley Mills, at now 75, has retained her youthful, even
childlike optimism and her love for her children and grandchildren.
We imagine those famous Hollywood actors living in their
mansions in Beverly Hills, or out in Malibu, throwing extravagant parties,
driving exclusive, expensive cars, enjoying all their riches. But
unfortunately this is not the case with child actors. Their parents have
control of the money. For example we are told that Shirley Temple, the
darling of the 1930s, upon reaching 21 and being allowed to take control of
her finances, discovered that only $10,000 remained. Her parents had spent
all the rest. The situation with Hayley Mills was different. Her father was
himself a famous actor with no time for all that paperwork, and so he simply
left everything to the family lawyer. Often a dangerous policy!
The family lawyer was a comfortable, established man with
pleasant offices in London. He was welcomed into the family home. A father
figure and an intimate friend of the family. He took his 2 or 3% or more,
year for year, all very proper. Hayley Mills received £10,000 for each of
her 6 films with Disney. In today's devalued money that would be about
$200,000 per film. Invested sensibly between 1960 and 1967 it should have
given say two million of today's dollars. On her 21st birthday she went
happily into the offices of the family lawyer, having given little thought
to all of her earnings until then. They gave her a thick manila envelope
from the British tax authorities, informing her that everything was to be
taxed at the rate of 95%!! Adding to that the fees taken out by the lawyer,
she was in fact deeply in debt as a reward for all her work as a child. Such
was the rapacious Labour Government of Harold Wilson's Britain. For some
obscure reason which she doesn't explain in the book, if the lawyer had
taken some action before her 21st birthday then this tax would not have
applied. Roy Boulting advised her to sue the lawyer, but how could she do
that? Instead she followed the advice of the lawyer, contesting the tax in
the courts, one appeal after the other up to the High Court, and even in the
end to the House of Lords which was the ultimate authority. At each stage of
the litigation the lawyer's fees increased, as did Hayley Mills' debts
proportionately. The end result was that she lost. But she put this behind
her and went on with life.
We start off with a man and a woman on holiday in
the town of San Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. Gradually we learn
that he is Irish, a drinker, and a pathologist in Dublin. His wife is a
psychiatrist, Jewish, having fled from the Nazis. It is some time in the
late 1950s or early 1960s. While drinking in one of the local bars he spots
what he believes to be a familiar face, someone from the past, but he can't
quite place her, and so an elaborate story develops. The mysterious woman
was supposed to have been killed years ago by her brother who himself
committed suicide. She belongs to a powerful political dynasty in Ireland
with family secrets. The fact that the woman is living secretly in Spain, if
known, would lead to the downfall of the family. And so a killer is
organized to get rid of her.
How does a prominent family go about eliminating an
unwanted member? Obviously I have no idea at all. But if for example we were
to take at face value some of the various lines of speculation concerning
the death of Princess Diana, then it would seem that there exist agencies
within the tentacles of government to deal with such a situation on a
professional level. Did there exist such things in Ireland in the 1950s and
60s? Who knows? In any case the killer in the story is just an isolated
little man with a troubled childhood who happens to have randomly come to
the attention of the civil servant who has been assigned the task of dealing
with the situation. We follow the killer about, getting to know his feelings
for things, his lack of plans, the spontaneity of his actions. And we follow
all the other characters as well.
Wonderfully elegant writing, often amusing. A great book.
After finishing April in Spain, I looked for
something else by John Banville. It seems that he has written a whole series
of these detective stories. But then I saw that he had also written a book
which was said to be based on mathematical ideas, Mefisto, and so I downloaded that. What a
disappointment! It was a long-winded narrative of a character doing one
thing and another, each of these things being irrelevant to the further
development of whatever plot there was, and all being described in tedious
detail. The character was supposed to be interested in mathematics. A few
unrelated and often falsely used mathematical words are thrown in. I plodded
through to the end of Part 1, hoping it might improve. And I even got
halfway through Part 2 before giving up. The character is interacting with
some sort of strange computer, reflecting the fantasies of science fiction
authors of the 1930s. Yet the book was first published in 1986, a time when
the author would have been aware of the reality of personal computers. The
title of the book reminds us of the Faust Legend. Whether or not the book had anything to do
with that was not apparent.
I wonder if the author, having arrived with all the rest
of us in the year 2022, has grasped the truly diabolical nature of
computers. We are now expected to carry around with us these horrible little
objects which are filled with various features, doing who knows what,
capable of spying on our every activity, and which are necessary for proving
that certain aspects of our bodily activities satisfy the given norm. A new
kind of pact with the Devil.
Snow, by John Banville
Undeterred by the previous book, I read another
detective story by John Banville. This time we have a Catholic priest being
murdered in a run-down stately home of the earlier Protestant aristocracy in
rural Ireland in 1957. I wonder if Banville himself is a Protestant. The
story develops in the style of Agatha Christie. But before the halfway point
it diverges from that style since by then it becomes clear to the reader
"who done it". It was again a beautifully written story, but the theme is
unpleasant.
The aristocracy of the Catholic Church, all those
bishops, cardinals, popes, continue today to reside in the their palaces,
surrounded by riches. Yet unlike 1957, they are now openly confronted with
the corruption and sins which were committed in those days. Undoubtedly in
another 50 years - around 2075 - the bishops, cardinals, popes of the
future, residing in their palaces, enjoying their riches, will apologize for
the corruption and sins which are being committed today. This is not to say
that I would favor one particular religion over another. But it was a very
overdue reform which was enacted by Martin Luther back in 1517 when he
declared that priests should be allowed to marry.
Modern popular culture is obsessed with sexuality. And so
the question naturally arises as to why a young man would voluntarily enter
into a closed male society in which the rule of celibacy is enforced. I am
sure that it is not the case that all Catholic priests are homosexual. And I
know that not all homosexuals are pedophiles, just as I know that not all
heterosexuals are pedophiles. Nevertheless the victim of the murder in this
story was a Catholic priest who 10 years before this time, in 1947, was one
of the Catholic brothers responsible for an institution for delinquent boys.
And in a disgusting chapter he describes his feelings of euphoric religious
exultation while thrusting himself into the anus of "his" defenseless,
trapped, 9 year old boy, watching him tremble, crying with pain, clutching
the alter. This troubled boy has grown up, turning into an awkward, bumbling
fool. He is the groom of the estate, and the priest, Father Tom, enjoys
hobnobbing with the upper classes, hunting, keeping his horse in the
stables.
The story is told through the experiences of Detective
Inspector Strafford. He is Protestant. But still he is summoned to an
audience with the high priest of Ireland. The Bishop or Archbishop or
whatever of Dublin or something. A very dangerous man who makes it crystal
clear to Strafford that he will be destroyed if the affair were to become
public.
But beside all this religious darkness we learn much of
the other characters, making for an enjoyable read.
Mefisto, Banville's earlier book, had
little to do with Faust or mathematics despite the fact that such things
were advertised in the blurb. Thus I didn't expect this book to have much to
do with Newton. But he wasn't wholly absent. As is the case with many
people, a phase of intense creativity in young years is followed by a period
of stagnation later on. A mid-life crisis. Newton turned to the Bible,
imagining it to be a scientific treatise, written by God, which when
examined carefully would yield the secrets of the Universe. He also delved
into alchemy, mixing chemicals, poisoning himself, perhaps leading to
madness in later life, with the dream of amassing never ending golden
riches.
The hero of the present book is writing a biography of
Newton, concentrating on this interesting phase of his life. He has been
working on the book for seven years, but now he has realized that this
project is nothing more than useless nonsense, and so he has given up and
rented a place - what used to be the gatekeepers cottage - on a rundown
estate somewhere in the back woods of Ireland for the summer. And thus ends
all reference to Newton.
The remnants of the ancient aristocratic family consist
of two sisters, a child, and a man who may or may not be the husband of one
of the sisters. The less attractive one, the sister without the man, throws
herself at the hero, and they subsequently spend most of the summer together
in bed. The book is then concerned with philosophical observations on the
role of intimacy when dealing with persons one finds to be slightly
repellent.
To be honest, I would have preferred to read about the
details of Newton's excursions into the realms of speculative religion and
the esoteric rather than this somewhat banal story.
Even the Dead, by Benjamin Black (John Banville)
Banville has written seven books under the
pseudonym Benjamin Black. These are crime stories involving Quirke, a
pathologist with a difficult background in the Dublin of the 1950s. The
first book of Banville which I read, April in Spain, was also a
Quirke book, but published under his real name. And then Snow is
also a crime novel, continuing the series, but the character of Quirke no
longer takes an active part. These books are completely different in style
from the two "serious" Banville books which I have read up to now. They are
fluent, direct, full of atmosphere. A style which would disgust the academic
judges of all those literary prizes. The rambling, train-of-thought writing
of the more serious Banville was indeed such that he received the Booker
Prize in 2005 for The Sea. But reading the reviews of that book
suggest that it would not appeal to me.
The present book is the seventh in the Quirke series. I
thought maybe I could read backwards through the series, ending up at the
first volume, Christine Falls. But then I suspect that the later
books reveal details which in the earlier books remained mysterious, thus
reading of consequences before knowing what the actions were which preceded
them. In this seventh volume, Quirke appears worn out, he suffers from a
knock on the skull which he received in a previous episode and he has been
convalescing for weeks at the home of his brother. The story involves a
closed Catholic institution, a kind of religious prison for unmarried
pregnant women whose babies are then sold off for adoption to Catholic
families in the United States. It starts off with a car crash, a murder, and
it ends with the killing of the evil figure behind all of this.
John Banville - in contrast to Tony Blair and other such
figures - is obviously no friend of the Roman Catholic Church.
The story follows, more or less closely, the
real-life murder of a young nurse in Dublin by Malcolm Edward MacArthur. The corresponding character
in the book is Freddie Montgomery. Unlike MacArthur, Freddie has actually
done some work in his life, having a position as a statistician in
California for a year or two. But essentially he is like MacArthur. The son
of an ancient Irish family, living off the remains of the estate until it is
bankrupted, leaving him with no means of support. In desperation he tries
stealing a painting from the mansion of a family who had bought his family's
paintings. It is a messy, sloppy business. A maid jumps into the backseat of
his getaway car, careening down the road. She hits him and he takes a hammer
and slams it into her skull two or three times, killing her. Then the book
is written as if it were a description of his life, written in prison,
explaining all the circumstances, imagining that he is writing this as
truth, a confession to be submitted to the court in order that an honest
judgement of his case and his life can be made. Many of the details parallel
that in the MacArthur case. All very sordid.
The fact that justice is not equal between the common
people and the members of the aristocracy is shown by the real-life
treatment given to MacArthur, who was "confined" in the luxurious Shelton Abbey prison where the inhabitants wile away
their time pursuing pleasant pastimes, for example golf, woodworking, arts
and crafts or pottery. MacArthur was released in 2012 after 30 years of this
comfortable life. It must have been a shock for him to reenter a world in
which he no longer had a comfortable hereditary income. Similarly, John
Banville has written two further books as a sequel to this one, describing
the descent of the hero, Freddie Montgomery into a life of degeneration and
crime after his release from prison. But reading the reviews of those books
makes me think that I've read enough of this story already.
It was nicely written, in the rambling, "serious" style
which caused it to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But somehow,
finishing a book like this with all the characters and events being
unpleasant, void of all redemption, is a depressing thing.
As mentioned before, Benjamin Black is the
pseudonym of John Banville when he is writing crime stories featuring the
character Quirke, a pathologist in a Dublin hospital. At the time I am
writing this, having read through three of the Quirke books, I have still
not discovered what Mr. Quirke's given name is. On the other hand, before
starting at the beginning of this series I had read the last episode, Even
the Dead, and there it is revealed who his true father is. Therefore
I know that his quirky last name is itself false, or a pseudonym. He was
deposited as an orphan in a cruel Catholic institution for destitute boys
before being "rescued" by the wealthy and powerful Dublin judge who poses
as his adoptive father.
Quirke is a heavy whisky drinker. He's always thinking
about it, feeling guilty and hungover after his prolonged drunken
episodes. He tells us he is not addicted to alcohol; it is a substitute
for his loneliness and regrets. But then after a period of drying out in a
Catholic institution for the correction of moral weaknesses, he recognizes
his alcoholism and resolves to become completely abstinent... A difficult
resolution in the alcoholic culture of Ireland. And then he smokes
continuously, even more so after giving up the drink. Everybody is
smoking. We are told of silver cigarette cases being stylishly flourished
about the place, and the ceremony of lighting up, flicking open a Zippo,
or even a silver or gold lighter. And then we have the different brands of
cigarettes. I've forgotten which brand Quirke favors. But the characters
are often described by the brands of cigarettes they smoke. Simple country
folk - including Inspector Hackett - smoke the rough cigarettes associated
with them, while the more refined classes of society have their own
brands. I wonder if these really were the brands of cigarettes which were
sold in Ireland in those days. I had never heard of them. They were not
the brands which dominated the world of advertising back in those days:
Marlborough, Camels, Benson & Hedges, and all that. And so the
dialogue in these stories is continuously punctuated with hacking coughs.
I'm enjoying reading these books describing the simple
depravities of Ireland in the 1950s. It is a pleasant way to divert the
mind from the much deeper depravities which are being imposed on us in the
2020s. I see that John Banville was born in 1945, just a year or two
before me. Surely this was the most optimal time here in Europe, and in
most of the world, to have been born and to have spent a lifetime. A time
of peace and freedom. Maybe it is true that every generation, upon
reaching old age, says that the world is falling apart. I hope this will
not be the case for the world our children and grandchildren will be
inhabiting, but things do not look good at the moment. And so it is
pleasant to go back to the world of the 1950s in these books, knowing that
it was the beginning of a wonderful time.
Christine Falls:
This is the first book of the series. An unmarried woman
dies after a difficult childbirth. An unpleasant business in the brutally
Catholic Ireland of the 1950s. And the woman who had attended her is
subsequently beaten to death. We learn that all of this is connected with an
association of horrible old men, the Knights of Saint Patrick. They accept
"fallen" women into their prison-like laundry where the women are forced to
work under the supervision of cruel nuns. The babies are then taken away and
transported to the United States where they are given to Irish Catholic
families, not to be adopted, but rather to be temporarily brought up before
being forced to become priests or nuns.
We learn much about the background of Quirke. He and his
brother Malachy - or Mal - as medical students had spent some time in Boston
(Massachusetts), 20 years before our time. They became acquainted with the
two daughters of a rich Irish immigrant. That must have been in the 1930s.
The good daughter, Sarah, refused to indulge in sex before marriage. Delia,
the other, became pregnant, so that Quirke had to marry her, but she died in
childbirth and Mal married the lovely Sarah, much to Quirke's regret.
Quirke's daughter Phoebe is then brought up by Mal and Sarah as their own,
not telling her who her parents really were.
It is now the present, that is to say some time in the
1950s. Quirke suspects that Mal, who is a member of these Knights of Saint
Patrick, had gotten Christine Falls pregnant. Was he then responsible for
the murder of the other woman in order to cover it up? And had he even had
Quirke himself beaten to within an inch of his life in order to stop him
from investigating further? The old Judge Griffin - the father - disliked
his son Mal and always favored Quirke. But the judge, despite his age and
standing in Irish society, is himself no angel. And Phoebe is told that
Quirke, who she now hates, is her real father.
The last book of the series, Even the Dead, which
I read a week or two ago, also deals with the same basic story: the illegal
shipping of illegitimate babies from Dublin to Boston. I wondered if all of
these Quirke books would continue with just this single theme. That would be
boring. But I have gotten started on the second book in the series and it is
concerned with a different form of depravity, so I suspect there will be an
interesting variety of crimes to read about in the next couple of weeks.
The Silver Swan:
"Doctor" Kreutz, despite his name, is a mysterious Indian
person, expounding Eastern religions and practices while performing erotic
massages on middle-aged women, snapping pornographic pictures of them with
his camera. A younger woman gets mixed up in this business, keeping things
secret from her middle-aged husband. She goes into partnership with Doctor
Kreutz's sidekick, Leslie White, a sleazy but elegant man, seemingly
irresistible to all women. Their business is "The Silver Swan" beauty
parlor. Even Quirke's daughter Phoebe, in all her innocence, is attracted to
White.
The whole thing ends in a series of murders. Was the
first death, that of the young woman, a suicide?
Elegy
for April:
This is the beginning of the story that was resolved in April
in Spain, thus answering the question posed at the end of the book. We
are introduced to the Latimer family. April Latimer is perhaps 25 and she is
a junior doctor in the hospital where Quirke is the pathologist. As we saw
in that later book, the uncle is a powerful and corrupt politician in 1950s
Ireland. The father was a famous fighter in the struggle for Irish
independence, but his private life was filled with degrading, horrible
excesses. April's brother is a brittle but successful Dublin lawyer.
Unfortunately poor old Phoebe, Quirke's daughter, is
again brought into the whole mess. She has a circle of friends including
April. There is also a small, pushy young man who works as a reporter for a
Dublin newspaper.
- Thankfully the "legacy media" is now gradually
dying out. We have finally cancelled our subscription to the local
newspaper which we have been receiving for the last 40 years or more.
-
Also an actress in the Irish theater; and finally an
African medical student from Nigeria. All of the women are fascinated by
this exotic member of the circle. We are told of Phoebe's fascination with
his dark skin: its texture, its smell. And in an erotic passage we are told
of her beautiful union with the student on his narrow bed. The old woman
living in the top floor of the derelict house where the actress lives tells
us that the student has been a frequent visitor there. And what about April,
who, according to the moral values of the Dublin of that time, lives a wild,
unconventional life?
The story starts off with Phoebe wondering where April
is. She has not heard from her for the past two weeks. And she gets Quirke
into the quest to find April. As a pleasant distraction, Quirke is welcomed
into the bed of the actress. I find this difficult to understand. In fact,
women seem to throw themselves at Quirke. We can understand this in the case
of the healthy young African, but Quirke? He spends half his time staggering
about in a drunken stupor. And not only for that half, but for all the time,
he is filling the air with his foul cigarette smoke. Do women really find
that to be attractive? Does this reflect the desires of most women, or is it
only an aberration in the mind of John Banville? Who knows?
Perhaps his attraction as far as the actress was
concerned was at least partially based on the fact that he purchased a very
exclusive car in the middle of the story. An Alvis TC 108 Super Graber Coupé. Apparently only
three of these hand made cars were ever produced. Am I giving too much
away to say that at the end of the story, Quirke's car is totally
demolished. Driven off a cliff into the sea, thus leaving the world
with only two of these cars. Or is this just a fiction so that, in
fact, all three still remain in existence?
In any case it is clear that the Latimer family has
gotten rid of April in one way or another.
A Death in Summer:
A man is found with his head blasted off, attached to the
body with just a few strands of corpuscle. He has a shotgun in his hands.
Obviously the killer placed the gun in the hands of the corpse. I can't
imagine that a shotgun would be capable of blasting off a person's head.
Could it be possible if the gun was filled with heavy, explosive slugs? His
name is/was Richard Jewell, or Diamond Dick. Inspector Hackett and Quirke
are at the scene of the crime. The wife and sister of the deceased are
strangely distanced. We are told that Richard Jewell was a Jew. But he had a
Catholic upbringing and considered himself to be a Christian. Nevertheless
the other characters think of him as being Jewish. They are not prepared to
separate him from his original tribe, or caste. We are told that other
characters are also Jewish. Except for Quirke's assistant, David Sinclair,
who also belongs to the tribe, they all seem to be evil. Is John Banville an
anti-Semite? He is certainly anti-Roman Catholic.
What is the nature of this evil? They, along with various
Christian men, are members of a society called the Friends of Saint
Christopher's Orphanage. Poor little boys, 7 or 8 years old, are held
prisoner in this institution. It is run by a person named Father Ambrose. An
elegant old man. He is essentially a pimp, selecting boys to be abused by
these Friends of the Orphanage. Jewell is continuously seeking "fresh meat"
to satisfy his tastes. He has even abused his own daughter and his
step-sister, who is much younger than him.
The French wife, whose maiden name was Françoise
d'Aubigny, is a manipulative person. She sleeps with Quirke. And also Phoebe
is again dragged into things as well. Towards the end when Françoise has
escaped to her property on the Côte d'Azure, she tells us that her father
was fascinated with German culture. (This is just after World War II.) She
angrily spits out the German equivalent of Françoise, namely Franziska.
Well, that war is long in the past, and I prefer the name Franziska rather
than the manipulative Françoise.
Vengeance:
This one was a pleasant break from all those Roman
Catholic religious orders with their members abusing children in horrible
ways. Given
all the bitterness of the writing, I wondered if the author had
himself suffered such abuse. According to his Wikipedia page, he did
go to Catholic schools, but he was living at home. The entry includes
the absurd statement: " A reformed criminal,
Banville stole a book from Wexford County Library while in his teens." Can
we speculate that perhaps that statement might have been put into the
Wikipedia by a Catholic priest? As revenge? Vengeance?
The book begins with an interesting and bizarre scene. A
young man who knows nothing about sailing is invited out for a day on the
water by an older man. They sail off for hours until they are out of sight
of land. Suddenly the older man draws a pistol and tells a story, seemingly
threatening the younger man. Then, rather than murdering the other, he
points the pistol at his own chest and fires, collapsing on the deck in an
expanding puddle of blood. The young man is horrified and instinctively
throws the gun away into the ocean. After many hours he is rescued.
How can he prove that he didn't murder the older man? But
it's worse than that. The whole story involves a major family business which
is jointly run by two families. A generation or two before, the families
were equal partners. But then one of the families began to dominate the
business. This was the family of English-Protestant heritage of the older
man in the boat. The family of the younger man was of Irish-Catholic
heritage. And secretly this younger man had been manipulating the finances,
squeezing out the other family. Thus one way or another, it would seem that
the younger man would be ruined.
But it is a complicated story with many more twists and
turns. And we are told of the ambivalent feeling of the Irish for their
Irish-Anglo-Protestant neighbors. They are despised for their role in past
history, and yet they are respected as being better businessmen, more
honest, more successful than the Catholics.
Holy Orders:
In the middle of the night a body is found floating in
the canal. It turns out to be Jimmy Minor, the reporter, the sometime friend
of Phoebe. Again a long story where, this time, we encounter the "Tinkers".
I think they are now called the "Travelers". An Irish phenomenon, similar but distinct
from the Gypsies, or Romani. (The champion heavyweight boxer, Tyson Fury
tells us that he is a Traveler.) But in the end everything again comes down
to the abuse of small children by Roman Catholic priests.
Well, this is the end of the Benjamin Black, Quirke
books. He has gradually gotten onto my nerves with his constant need for
whisky and cigarettes. During the story Quirke begins to experience
hallucinations. He seems to be losing his mind. The final scene has him in
the office of a specialist, presumably a neurologist, X-raying his brain to
see what's wrong with it. While alcohol addles the brain it must also
preserve whatever there is which remains. We are not told what the result of
the examination has been.
After having immersed myself in all those John
Banville books I was at a loss as to what to read next. I tried The Wanderer by Knut Hamsun. That is actually a
trilogy of short books. I read through the first story; a man, apparently
well-off, rejects the comforts of the city and occupies himself with casual
laboring jobs on the farms of southern Norway. He falls in love with
middle-aged farmers wives who reject him. Meaninglessness, hopelessness.
Starting on the second book of the trilogy before quickly giving up, it was
just more of the same. Then I tried A Room with a View, by E.M.
Forester. Perhaps it was meant to be amusing. But again, it seemed
meaningless. The news, Ukraine, Covid, was just too depressing.
This book by Lisa See was similarly depressing to match
the general mood. As always, she writes about China. I was unclear about the
time of the book until near the end where it is said that much of the
suffering was due to the Taiping Rebellion, which was in the 1850s. But the
story could have equally well been placed hundreds of years before that
time. If everything she writes about these things is true then China must
have been one of the most distorted and warped societies that has ever
existed.
First of all we have the horrible business of deforming
the feet of young girls. As it is described, when the child is about 6 years
old, having been allowed to run about and play in the healthy air before
that time, the little girl is then confined to the "women's room" in the
upstairs part of the house. There the feet are bound tightly, and ever more
tightly. The girl cries out in pain, but is forced to walk back and forth in
the room, with the binding ever tighter. Soon the bones break, the girl
weeps in pain but is forced to walk back and forth again and again. The
broken bones are then bound ever more tightly, and the result after a couple
of years is either gangrene setting in and the girl dies, or the bones set
in a bizarre deformity, rendering the growing girl and the grown woman a
virtual cripple. It is then said that men found such deformed, crippled feet
to be sexually attractive! How can we understand such sexual depravity which
apparently pervaded the whole culture of China? And then the main character
continuously tells us how ugly normal, healthy feet are. These are the feet
of the women servants. I read quickly through the disgusting chapters where
the narrator, Lily, and her contracted friend, Snow Flower, have their feet
bound.
From then on life for the women was confined almost
exclusively to the "women's room". Soon they are married off to other
families and other women's rooms. Their only value there is measured
according to their ability to produce male babies. Female babies are
rubbish; a drain on the household; a useless mouth to feed and then a drain
on the family finances since a marriage involves large sums of money being
transferred from the family of the bride to that of the groom. Then if the
husband of the woman dies she is considered to be disposable and is sold off
as a servant, or perhaps as a sex-slave to the highest bidder.
Could it really be that this brutal and disgusting story
represents a true description of traditional Chinese society? Lisa See has
told us of her qualifications for writing about such subjects. She has
visited her distant relatives in China, heard their stories. How depressing.
Perhaps we can understand Mao's cultural revolution as a very sensible way
to change things for the better.
Having finished the book and looking for something else I
saw that Lisa See had written Flower Net, a kind of detective story which she
published in 1997. A story of a network of organized Chinese crime,
smuggling things into California. We have the Chinese investigators using
their methods and then the American FBI with its methods. The Americans are
described as civilized, reasonable, helpful, while the Chinese are also nice
people, but they are prepared to exercise brutality. In particular we read
about the fact that each neighborhood in China has an overseer who records
all the details of the lives of everybody in the neighborhood, down to the
last details. On the basis of these records it is then determined what they
are allowed to do, where they are allowed to live, whether or not they are
to be punished.
Some time ago I watched the Black Mirror series, showing
more or less fanciful possible futures, dystopias. One episode was a
humorous story of a young woman in a society dominated by a mobile telephone
software similar to "Facebook". People continuously clicking "like" or
"dislike" buttons. Having lots of "likes" allowed people to have better
places to live, higher income, education, travel, and all that. The woman of
the story tried everything to get as many "likes" as possible, yet she
dropped further and further down in her "Facebook" score, becoming an
outcast, homeless, rejected. And then I saw a report saying that exactly
this system is being implemented in modern China! How horrible. A
realization of this fictitious dystopia. Could it be that we will face a
similar fate? After all, the traditional forms of government are gradually
being replaced by the companies which control the virtual world that people
live in today. When I walk about the place, most people I see are not
looking at the world around them. Instead they are holding their mobile
telephones up to their faces while walking. But on the other hand, although
it appears to be part of traditional Chinese culture to be continuously
evaluated by a neighborhood overseer, that is not the case here. The Stasi
of East Germany is a recent memory which is thought of with revulsion. So I
hope that we will not soon be living in a world governed by "Facebook" likes
and dislikes.
I've been finding it difficult to get started
reading things, soon giving up, dissatisfied with what was started. The book
Entangled
Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, seemed interesting. All about fungi,
mushrooms, yeast and all that. They are everywhere. In the soil where they
are essential for plant growth. Indeed, they create the soil in the first
place. And our bodies are full of all sorts of fungi. We would not be able
to live without them. It really is a fascinating subject. But the often
flippant style of writing put me off. Merlin Sheldrake (a wonderful name)
tells us of his experiences with LSD, administered to him in the
experimental environment of a hospital. He describes the fungi which infect
certain kinds of ants. It changes the behavior of the ants, making them
climb up to the top of a plant and then bite into the stem of the plant with
a death grip. The fungi then consumes the body of the ant, growing a stalk,
or mushroom, which projects from the ant's head. He then speculates for page
upon page about the relationship of ergot to humanity. This is a fungi that grows on
grains and led to much sickness in medieval Europe. It also causes
hallucinations and is the basis of LSD. And then there is mescalin and the
"magic mushrooms". Are these fungi taking over the human race in a similar
manner to the ant fungi? Such speculation became boring and I turned to
something else before getting very far into the book.
I tried Why We Love Pirates, by Rebecca Simon PhD. She
explains in an interesting way who Captain Kidd was and how he was unfairly
used to set an example. She tells us how much she enjoyed the movies of the
Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp. And so the book goes on and on
about what happened in the Bahamas at the beginning of the 17th century. But
surely there is much more to piracy than just that. We have the modern day
pirates capturing gigantic ships off East Africa. Perhaps they are not
lovable, but their prizes are impressive. Then the pirates in Indonesia,
around the Maluku Islands, or those in the Strait of Malacca. And of course
there have been pirates throughout history. Think of the "Shores of Tripoli"
of the 19th century which the Marines sing about, or even the pirates of
Ancient Rome. It is a huge subject, yet the book was nothing more than a
romantic celebration in the style of Johnny Depp. I quickly gave up.
And so I thought I would try a few biographies. Real
stories about real people. I started with this one about Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister of the
1840s. The author, who writes elegantly and with deep knowledge of his
subject, was the Home Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. Occasionally in the
text he compares one situation or another which confronted Peel with
something or other to do with Thatcher, always in her favor, which was an
irritation. But apart from that it was a very enjoyable read. It was
pleasant to fill the mind with the world of the early 19th century. Of
course there was much wrong with the England of those days, and Peel was not
always prepared to do the right thing. But at least he did not require the
whole population to lock themselves in their houses for weeks on end, wear
masks and be injected with genetically engineered substances. And so it was
very pleasant to live for a few days in a different time of long ago while
reading this book.
In the 1830s and 40s people remembered the horrors of the
French Revolution. Thus there was very much of a conservative feeling.
Society should only be changed slowly, gradually. The interests of rich
landowners and the wealthy industrialists were respected.
What was the normal state of affairs in those days? For
example, Catholics were not allowed to sit in parliament. Thus whereas the
vast majority of Irish were Catholic, they were denied representation. In
fact at the beginning of his career, Peel was the commissioner for Ireland,
representing the conservative interests of the Protestant - English -
minority. Much of the book is concerned with Ireland. And then there was the
corrupt electoral system. Voting was open, in front of everyone. Obviously a
tenant farmer did not cast a vote opposing that of his local squire. And of
course only men who owned a certain amount of property and income could
vote. Some rural constituencies only had a few small villages while major
cities of the industrial revolution such as Manchester were hardly
represented at all. And then there were the Corn Laws, first brought in to
finance the war against the French. The import of grains was taxed on a
variable basis, thus ensuring that the local squires and farmers had a
guaranteed high price for their crops. The Corn Law was brought in again
after Napoleon was defeated to satisfy the farmer's lobby. Peel was at first
a staunch supporter of all of these things, but later, as Prime Minister, he
had them all changed.
We read much of the complicated politics of those times.
One advantage of the chaotic and unfair electoral system was that each
member of parliament was an individual, only loosely tied to a party. There
was nothing of the rigid party discipline of these days. If Boris Johnson
were to be substituted for Robert Peel in the 1840s, his lockdowns, mask,
and genetic injection proposals would have been greeted with derision and
rebellion. Parliamentarians were free to think for themselves and to vote as
they pleased.
Robert Peel was the son of a wealthy textile
manufacturer. We read about his childhood, schooling, university. He went to
Harrow where, we are told, education consisted almost exclusively of the
learning of Latin. The goal was to be able to speak and to read and write
Latin as fluently as his native English. The pupils, even in private, were
to speak Latin. Advanced pupils learned Ancient Greek and Hebrew. Science
and mathematics was unheard of. He was a contemporary of Lord Byron at
Harrow who recalled that "while I (Byron) was always in scrapes, he (Peel)
never". Studying at Oxford he discovered that there was more to the world
than just Latin. Oxford actually had science. And so Peel decided to study
both the Classics and Mathematics. He became the first person ever to have
obtained a double first in these two disciplines.
Without being an aristocrat he had inherited great
wealth. When reading in the book of the sums of money involved in one thing
and another, these sums are sometimes compared with the modern-day
equivalents which have been diminished by inflation. There is an official inflation calculator of the Bank of England. Clicking
in there, we see that one English pound of 1840 is calculated to have the
same value as £108.40 today. That is, English money is less than one
hundredth the value it used to have. But then, when describing the huge
palace-like houses Peel lived in in London, with his collection of paintings
and everything else, we are confronted with a few seeming contradictions.
For example we are told that he built himself a huge mansion, or palace, on
a beautiful site with extensive gardens overlooking the river, and it cost
him £14,000. Multiplying that by the Bank of England's supposed rate of
inflation, we obtain something like one and a half million pounds. Yet that
would be barely sufficient to buy a modestly sized apartment with two or
three bedrooms in some high-rise building in today's London!
Despite his wealth, as Prime Minister Peel was concerned
about the plight of the poor. During the Irish potato famine he tried to
import as much corn (maize) from the United States into Ireland as possible.
By reducing import duties on food and most other things, life became more
affordable and the English economy became more competitive. In a time of
loose morals he was devoted to his wife and his family. At the age of 62, on
a ride in London, he was thrown from his horse. His injuries were such that
he died a few days later. Crowds of people gathered before his house to morn
the passing of a politician loved by the people.
Years ago the Folio Society put out a three volume
set of the Diary of Samuel Pepys which I have here on my shelves. It is not
the complete diary. According to the Introduction, about 2/3 had been left
out, which means that the whole thing must take up about 9 volumes and over
10,000 closely written pages. Nevertheless this edition has at least part of
what Pepys wrote for each of the days in the 10 years he kept the diary. It
is a beautifully produced set with many fine illustrations. But of course I
did not read every page. I suppose I soon gave up, browsing here and there,
admiring the pictures. Then a few years later I got another book from the
Folio Society called "The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary". Very
interesting and enjoyable, and something I could read all the way through.
Over the years different publishers have extracted just a sufficient number
of passages to make a normal-sized book. The 19th century extracts avoided
everything scandalous whereas more recent editions include all the juicy
bits in addition to the set pieces: the Fire of London and the Great Plague.
It is interesting to read what Pepys writes on all sorts
of themes. His state of health, music, his personal friendship with many of
the leading figures of the London of the 1660s, including the King, Charles
II. He was also a member of the Royal Society in those days when it was a
club for pleasant discussions of all the phenomena which interested the
members. So now I have read another book about Pepys. This one is more
concerned with the juicy bits, following the fashion of today.
We have Pepys mixture of Latin and French words for
obscuring his erotic fumblings. Claire Tomalin suspects that he used these
as a way of increasing the pleasure of his memories while writing the diary.
But she tells us that his encounters were mainly confined to erotic
fondling; perhaps only the poor Mrs. Bagwell was subjected to a long-term
and full sexual exploitation. Her husband, Mr. Bagwell, a carpenter at the
naval yards, was offering his wife as a kind of prostitute in exchange for
favors. And then we are told that at one point in the diary Pepys has
intercourse with his wife and finds that she is enjoying it. He thinks that
this is strange, unnatural, and he meditates on it. Women are only there for
the pleasure of men.
The author, who certainly does not condemn her subject,
tells us that the diary is perhaps the best description in literature of the
married state. Really? Am I just being boring, old-fashioned, conservative?
I find the way Pepys was continually cheating other people, always lying
through his teeth, to be very distasteful. For example he obtained one of
his positions by making a deal with somebody else: Thomas Povey. It was
agreed that the usual bribery payments which came with the office would be
split equally between them. But although Pepys received bribes of many
thousands of pounds, he gave Povey nothing at all and replied to all
inquiries with letters of high indignation. Well, Pepys became a wealthy and
famous man. In contrast we mathematicians spend our time on obscure puzzles
which interest almost nobody. Cheating, lying in the style of Pepys leads
nowhere, and thus our lives remain ordinary and boring.
The diary ends with his pursuit of Deborah "Deb" Willet. Earlier editors and biographers assumed
that Deb had disappeared into the mists of history, free of Peyps's further
gropings. But in an Afterword we learn that in 2006 a historian discovered
documents related to Deb's further life. She married Jeremiah Wells, a
theologian, and we learn that Pepys obtained a position for Wells as a
ship's chaplain. Deb had two daughters, but then she died only a few years
later. Jeremiah Wells died a year and a half after that. All of this is in
the time after the diary so that we have no definite details, mere
speculation. Was Deb treated similarly to Mrs. Bagwell, with Wells playing
the role of a pimp? Were perhaps one or another of the daughters Pepys's
children? Did Pepys, with all his money, see that the two daughters were
supported after both Deb and Jeremiah died?
At the beginning of the book we are told what it was like
to enter a house in London in the 17th century. The smells, the dirt, the
fact that people are unwashed. And then they are continually getting sick
and dying. We learn the details of the operation to remove the stone in
Pepys's bladder when he was a young man. And then after his painful death at
70 he was dissected by his associates of the Royal Society and it was found
that there were stones in his right kidney, even adhering it to the back
wall of the abdominal cavity. His stomach and intestines were totally
inflamed. But his heart and right kidney were still sound. And then much
earlier, after a holiday trip to France, his wife Elizabeth became ill and
died within three weeks. She was only about 40 years old. Pepys's siblings,
his relatives, all seemed to die quickly. At least his father enjoyed a
longer life.
What were they all dying of? Was it just the dirt, the
unsanitary water, unclean food, the immoral way of life? These days most
people live well beyond 70. I am approaching 75, running a few miles a
couple of days each week, taking no medicines, avoiding doctors,
particularly since they started injecting people with these gene therapy
shots. What advantages do we really have over those people of 350 years ago?
For example the kings and queens of that time rarely made it much past 50,
assuming that they were not assassinated before then. But the present Queen
Elizabeth, her husband and her mother all live up to and beyond 100.
When starting to write my thoughts here,
discovering the homepage of the author, I was astonished to find that she
has already published something like 36 books. Kathy Glass is a foster
mother. A foster family takes children who the social services deem to be in
troubling circumstances and gives them a temporary home until either things
clear up, or real adoptive parents are found. She must have had at least 36
foster children. It seems that each of her books describes one of them. This
one is a 10 year old boy named Tayo. He is clearly an African, but upon
arrival he tells the author that he is white. The story is that his mother
came from Southeast Asia; was it Thailand? She was working as a lap-dancer
in Nigeria where she slept with the father of Tayo. He was a highly educated
and successful businessman, and without marrying her he agreed to support
her while having his son Tayo living in his large house in Lagos where he
attended the finest schools in the country. But when Tayo was only 5 or 6
the mother kidnapped him and took him on an odyssey, finally ending in
London where she worked as an occasional prostitute. She was a drug addict.
She hated Africa - and almost everything else - and told Tayo that he was
white, not black. Tayo had to organize her life for her, dodging the fists
of drunken, drugged men, occasionally staying with other people, attending
various schools temporarily, even being forced to work in a sweatshop in
London on a sewing machine for 12 or more hours a day.
When Tayo was brought to stay with Kathy Glass she was
astonished to find that he spoke politely with a very refined British
accent. He gradually grew used to life with Kathy, doing well at school. The
mother could only be contacted through a mobile phone number which was
almost always turned off. She gave no address. Contacts were violent
displays of shouting and bad language. While the mother needed Tayo to help
her, it was clear that he needed a stable family, away from the mother.
He had vague memories of an ideal former life in Nigeria.
He wanted to return to Nigeria to his dad. This became an obsession. He
expected people to find his dad and bring him home. But the mother refused
to give any information, and Tayo couldn't remember. What was the real name
of his father? Where had he lived in Nigeria? Tayo became sullen, withdrawn.
All he could think about was returning to his father in Nigeria.
Then suddenly he was found. The father had employed
private detectives, searching everywhere: Thailand, Europe, looking for
Tayo, year after year for five years. He came to England, an elegantly
dressed gentleman, meeting Kathy and learning about the situation of his
son. There was a legal process for Tayo's custody, opposed at first by the
mother who appeared in court in a drunken state, shouting and swearing. And
so custody was granted and Tayo returned to Nigeria, the land of his dreams.
A beautifully written, moving book.
Listening to a recent podcast, the speaker
described how after living for years in the Far East he had come back to
Christianity. He described the thoughts of the ancient Greek philosophers,
their assertion that the true Revelation was in everybody, only needing to
be awakened, and it was of a nature beyond words, incapable of being
described. This mystical fact is the basis of Christianity. He was asked
where one might read further into such things and he recommended the
writings of Rudolf Steiner.
The word Mystery fills this book, and we wonder what it
is. What is a Mystical Fact? How is it possible to write a book describing
something which is beyond description? A few chapter headings: The Mysteries
and their Wisdom; The Greek Sages Before Plato in the Light of the Wisdom of
the Mysteries; Plato as Mystic; The Mystery Wisdom of Egypt; The Lazarus
Miracle; Christianity and Heathen Wisdom. Passages in the Bible, in Plato's
Symposium, and in other ancient writings are examined and interpreted
in terms of secret meanings. All of this was too mysterious for me.
Perhaps much of this speculation is motivated by the
seemingly brutal fact that each of us will, individually, in reality, in
some very specific way, time and place, die. There is no vaccination against
this. Covering your face with a mask and hiding at home will not make it go
away. Is this something to become nervous about, frightened? To have
"butterflies in the stomach" as if some difficult public performance must be
prepared for and for which we are ill prepared. By its very nature Death is
a mystery. People who have had near-death experiences and people who have
accompanied many deaths in hospices tell us that death can be a wonderful
experience if we do not fight it. Otherwise it can be dreadful.
Surely the best thing is to live in the world of our
experience as it is. It is often thought that modern physics is a mystery,
only to be understood in terms of esoteric thought. I prefer to let the mind
and the spirit seek a more rational revelation.
