Martin Jones's Blog, page 32

Puzzlewood – Walking Through a Story

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It’s the summer and people are taking their holidays.  A few days ago, my brother set out on his bike ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, while my wife found us a hotel in the Forest of Dean, convenient for meeting up with the intrepid adventurer.  It seems natural to take trips like this.  It’s hard to remember that until the sixteenth century, most people had only two options for getting away.  You could become a soldier, or a pilgrim.  If you didn’t fancy the prospect of getting hacked to death, or facing a dangerous journey in pursuit of dubious spiritual gain, the only other option was to read, or more likely listen, to a story.   Not surprisingly, authors aiming to transport their readers often based their work on activities that offered escape in real life. English literature’s oldest work, Beowulf, written some time between the eighth and eleventh centuries, tells of a warrior journeying in pursuit of a monster. Then in the fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote his famous Canterbury Tales about a pilgrimage between London and Canterbury. Going back to the military travel option, the fourteenth century also offered readers Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by an unknown author, following the wanderings of a soldier trying and failing to live up to the virtues of knighthood.

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At about the same time, William Langland was attempting something a little different. His traveller was a ploughman, who rather than leaving his monotonous rut in a physical sense, went journeying in dreams.  Piers Ploughman is like someone sitting in their bedroom, reading.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of travelling to a new world while not straying too far from home was catching on. Places in the UK that happened to have an otherworldly feel became popular tourist destinations. Mother Shipton’s Cave, Britain’s oldest paying visitor attraction, opened in 1630. The Mother Shipton experience involves a gentle walk beside the River Nidd, to an unusual cave formation produced by the passage of mineral-rich water.  Here, conveniently close to the Yorkshire town of Knaresborough, visitors find themselves in a place that seems a world away. Other easily accessible escapes also became popular.  The Silent Pool and Box Hill in Surrey, Chedder Gorge in Somerset, Lydford Gorge in Devon, Dovedale in Derbyshire, the whole of the Lake District, and Puzzlewood in the Forest of Dean, all provided a way out into the unknown.

Once again the physical places where people went to escape, influenced the writing that served a similar purpose.  Mother Shipton’s Book of Prophecies was a best seller in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Lake District influenced a lot of famous poetry. Martin Tupper wrote stories about the Silent Pool. Keats wrote about Box Hill. Tolkien visited Cheddar Gorge, which influenced his imaginary Helms Deep.

Tolkien also visited the Forest of Dean – as I did this weekend – and probably made his way to the well-known curiosity that is Puzzlewood.  This is an amazing few acres of woodland, growing around a collapsed cave system and Iron Age mine workings. I paid my £6.50, walked down a path beside an enclosure for hens and passed through an opening between thickly foliaged boughs.  Then, against all odds, the forests of Middle Earth reared up around me.  I saw a child in a Star Wars T-shirt, busy exploring the forest planet of Takodama, a part played by Puzzlewood in Star Wars The Force Awakens.

Walking through Puzzlewood I was walking in a story, a place that takes you somewhere else, while staying in the world you know. 

 

 

Blondie – One Word With a Lot to Say

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Last week I wrote about two carefully chosen words – Weather Report.  This time I want to write about a single, carefully chosen word.

Blondie is the name of an American rock band fronted by Deborah Harry.  According to Rolling Stone magazine, Blondie has sold in excess of forty million records over the course of a career starting in 1974.

For a single word, Blondie has a lot to say.  First, there is the biographical background it reveals.  After graduating with an arts degree in 1965, Deborah Ann Harry worked at BBC offices in New York, then as a waitress, a go-go dancer and as a Playboy Bunny.  I don’t know if young Deborah found herself called Blondie at the BBC, but in her waitressing and dancing jobs, this was how men often refered to her.

The first thing to note about the name Blondie is the “ie” ending.  This sound often denotes something small, insignificant, playful, charming, as in cutie or sweetie.  The linguist Otto Jespersen has suggested that the effect of ie is to convey a childlike quality. Children tend to add an ie sound – one of the easiest to produce – at the end of words as they begin to learn language.  As a child struggles to master the tricky business of talking, there seems to be a natural tendency to return to the security of something easily managed.  In this way, the ie sound is associated with children.

So Blondie has this suggestion of something cute and childlike.  Those characteristics then collide with the reality of Blondie as a hard-hitting rock band. Blondie now takes on a different nature.  There is something tough in the name, a denial of intimacy and individuality. It’s a generic nickname for fair-haired young women, which while starting all cutesy in the nursery, has now taken us into seedy bars and clubs where superficial adult relationships are playing out. Someone called Blondie is not receiving respect for herself as a person.  At the same time, this demeaning term suggests a character without individual vulnerabilities.

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The music Blondie made is like a novel based on the short story of their name. Listening to my favourite Blondie album Parallel Lines, we meet Sunday Girl,  “as cold as ice cream but still as sweet.”   Heart of Glass, portrays a similar character. A glass heart suggests someone tough and unemotional, but also fragile and vulnerable .  In One Way or Another, a cold hearted girl is both a stalker making dark threats, and a playful little thing, giving you the slip in a game of hide and seek. There’s Pretty Baby – that ie sound again – about a young girl trying to separate the fantasies of romance from reality.  Picture This, apparently a love song, is actually a celebration of the vision of a loved one rather than an acceptance of their reality. Fade Away and Radiate , similarly, paints a picture of someone watching a film, who feels a deeper connection with a silvery screen goddess than with real people who mock her in daily life.  Finally, there’s a line in I Know But I Don’t Know, about how “I’m your dog but not your pet.” Blondie is a pet, a bunny, a cutie, the vision of a perfect, undemanding companion; but you’d be wrong to think that this pet isn’t an animal with teeth.

So there you are – Blondie, an album of songs in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

I Get The News I Need On The Weather Report

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Weather Report were a jazz fusion band of the 1970s and 1980s.  They recorded wonderful music and came up with one of the best band names in history. Weather Report illustrates the effort that has to go into finding just the right words.

In 1970, pianist Joe Zawunil, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and bassist Miroslav Vitous, all luminaries of the jazz scene, decided to form a new band. However, they did not have a name to describe the unclassifiable music they were making. The three founding members met in Zawunil’s New York apartment to put that right. Zawunil, in an interview with Jazz Forum magazine in 1976, described how they went through thousands of names. They kept coming back to the name Daily News, but felt it wasn’t quite right. Then, thinking about the news, Wayne Shorter pondered on the fact that the news always contained a bulletin about the weather. When he suggested Weather Report, they all knew they had found what they were looking for.

So why is Weather Report a better band name than Daily News? Well, let’s think about it. It is difficult to see a jazz band as a group of journalists. It’s hard to get a clear story from free flowing music without any lyrics. If a piece of jazz music were a news story, you wouldn’t be able to work out what was going on in the world that day. Daily News is too literal.

The Weather Report is a different story. The facts of weather are not like the facts of news. We all accept that reports on the weather have an informal relationship with what actually happens. The weather is vast and ever changing, benign, glorious, dull, violent; and our ability to understand and predict the weather is partial. It’s like listening to music and feeling there is a pattern and meaning there, but not having the ability to understand it.

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If music is commenting on the world then it does so in the form of a weather report. Talking about the weather is a shorthand for talking about nothing important. At other times a weather report can tell you that your house is about to blow away. The weather is such a vast, mysterious constantly changing story, spinning out endless variations on the same themes, like a piece of jazz. Music is harmless entertainment, and a force that can move millions. It’s a breeze on a sunny day and a storm changing the landscape.

None of this is in the Daily News; it’s all in the Weather Report.

 

 

A Distant View of the Perfect Book

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This book is about a Paris bookseller, who styles himself a literary pharmacist dispensing books for emotional ailments. I work in an actual pharmacy, so I was interested in this idea. Real pharmacy, of course, is precise, with cures measured in milligrams. Literary cures are not going to be like that, and the sceptical part of me wondered at the wisdom of comparing the vague benefit of books with pharmacy. Yet as a reader, I had the sense that books are good for you. So, what benefit might I gain from The Little Paris Bookshop?

Initially I didn’t seem to be gaining very much. The story started well, only for the plot to become decidedly shaky – based on a misunderstanding that was difficult to accept in people who were supposed to be sun-moon-and-stars in love. There were coincidental meetings that strained credulity. The sentimental view of books themselves became wearing, almost as if this was a novel about the idea of a good book rather than the thing itself. After all, Southern Lights, the book that literary pharmacist Jean Perdu most admires, is itself fictional. Only a pretend book can be perfect. We do have to accept that about books. This is where we come on to something more positive. Real books are not perfect, but they are the only kind of books that are going to offer us something we can use.

Back in the real world, The Little Paris Bookshop made some reasonable claims for the value of books. Books typically take you into the experience of someone who might be very different to yourself. In this way, they can help enhance a sense of empathy. That’s what I think Nina George is getting at when she says reading can make people more temperate, loving and kind. In this respect, the call for the world’s rulers to take a reader’s licence is a good one. However, Nina George is also right when she says that reading cannot give the power of empathy to a person who lacks it. “The truly evil… did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends.” Sadly there is no cure for sociopathy.

So beyond the fact that books can make nice people nicer, what is there? The Little Paris Bookshop has no easy answers on that score. Books do not seem to be the solution to Jean Purdu’s problems. In fact, you could say he turns his back on books and goes off and gets a life. But what kind of life is that? Well, it’s a kind of glorified boating and beach holiday. He goes on a trip he doesn’t really need to take, but goes anyway. He is not looking for anything in particular, which provides the kind of open-ended journey where he does actually find something. Maybe that’s what a book is, a holiday, special in not being strictly needed.

I have to admit this wasn’t the best holiday I’ve ever taken. There were some interesting views, a few worthwhile excursions, but some fellow tourists did get drunk and over excited. This might not be a holiday I’ll repeat, but I’m glad I took it.

Life Is A Jar Of Pickle

 

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On 14th August 1947, the British colonial authorities, bowing to the will of religious pressure groups, partitioned British India to create the state of Pakistan.  Then at midnight the same day, India gained independence from Britain. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born on the stroke of that midnight. The stories of India and Saleem then continue in parallel up until the 1970s.

It’s tricky to sum up such a massive multi-layered story, but I think the Beatles might help:

“It’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder.”

Salman Rushdie’s advice in Midnight’s Children would be:

“It’s a fool who thinks that the world can be brought together by dividing it up.”

The novel opens with an account of the meeting of Saleem’s grandparents.  His grandfather is a doctor, who attends a young woman called Naseem, whose protective father only reveals portions of his daughter for examination through a hole in a sheet.  The doctor falls in love with each piece of his partitioned patient and ends up marrying what seems to be a complete woman.  Certainly, Nazeem seems to be complete in the sense that she knows everything.  Her rigid, intolerant outlook accepts nothing beyond the borders of her own point of view.  And so, in appearing to know everything, she allows in only a small part of the world.  People partition the world because they think within the borders of their outlook everything will be harmonious and consistent.  Each example of doubt results in a hardening and shrinking of the borders. Pakistan faces internal dispute by dividing and becoming two countries.  Similarly, Nassem’s borders shrink in upon her until she really only has her kitchen and pantry left.

In contrast, Midnight’s Children is not a narrow morality tale.  Along with illustrating the destructiveness of partition, the book also accepts that the hole in the sheet has value.  There’s the example of a painter who in a futile attempt to include the whole of life in his art made his pictures ever bigger.  This is never going to work.  An artist has to find the whole in a small part.  He has to take a vast sheet and cut a tiny hole in it.  So no simple moral there then. You have to allow in things that confuse the picture.

Midnight’s Children is profound and complex, but also light and humorous.  This contrariness is what you’d expect from a book that doesn’t believe in bringing people together by driving some of them out.  The book invites you in, welcoming human foibles and variety in all its forms.  Food recurs often in the book, particularly pickle, which of course is a blend of ingredients left to marinade together.  Midnight’s Children is a massive jar of pickle.  Tasting it, the diner might well decide that people should live together in the same way.

We live in a time of renewed nationalism, when Midnight’s Children serves as a cautionary tale.

Carrots, Rumour and Fake News

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Memorial to RAF West Malling at King’s Hill in Kent 

Last weekend I took a ride to what was once West Malling Airfield.  This former Battle of Britain air station is now a smart housing development, at the centre of which, next to a Waitrose shopping centre, stands the old control tower, used as a coffee shop.  After a cup of tea and slice of granola, I went to have a look at a memorial behind the control tower, a segmented circle arranged around an RAF roundel. Each segment either defined a wartime slang word, or carried a brief story from the airfield’s history.  There was one story in particular that caught my eye.  85 Squadron based at West Malling became expert in night fighting, so much so that the government spread a rumour that this success was due to a diet of carrots boosting the pilots’ night vision. This fabrication served to disguise the existence of airbourne radar used by the squadron, while also encouraging people to grow vegetables.

I wondered if this carrot story had anything to teach us about why some falsehoods become accepted as fact. So, I consulted Psychology Today, found a list of reasons why powerful rumours occur and applied them to carrots.

Rumour feeds on anxiety, tending to flare up around particularly stressful events, like 9/11.  Shakespeare has a character called Rumour who weaves his tales during a time of crisis, namely the rebellion which brought Henry IV to the throne of England. Rumour and crisis go together because in times of stress, evolution has designed us to seek out and share information to help deal with the emergency. Unfortunately when information is lacking we tend to make things up, since exchanging information, even if it is false, tends to alleviate our anxieties.

No matter how ludicrous it might be, a rumour tends to start off in something that could actually be true.  George W. Bush did not say “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”.  But with a history of linguistic faux pas, it’s the sort of thing he might have said.  Thinking of carrots, they are a source of vitamin A which is involved in eye health, even though eating carrots is never going to turn your eyes into night vision scopes.

Easily swayed nonexperts are more important than influential people in giving power to rumour.  Psychology Today uses the example of Bubble Yum, a chewing gum product from the 1970s which aimed for immediate bubble blowing squishiness without the bother of preparatory chewing.  Some imaginative child in a New York school wondered if Bubble Yum’s squishiness was due to the fact that it was made from spider eggs.  Research commissioned by Life Savers, the company manufacturing Bubble Yum, estimated that within ten days of the company learning about the rumour, well over half of New York’s children had heard the story.  This powerful rumour did not spread because of celebrity endorsement, or through major media channels, but by passing between children in playgrounds.  Going back to the carrot story we see that the people who propagated it were housewives who prepared food and their children who ate it.  John Stolarczyk of the World Carrot Museum – who knew there was such a thing? – suggests that the carrot rumour probably started among people like this. The Ministry  of Information then reinforced the message for its own ends.

The more you hear a rumour the more you will believe it.  This is true of President Obama apparently having a secret life as a radical muslim, and of carrots conferring night vision powers.   Carrot vision could be reinforced at most meal times, and on most dark nights.

 

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A wartime poster celebrating the power of carrot night vision – courtesy of the World Carrot Museum

Rumours reflect the zeitgeist,  that is, a potent rumour will concern itself with what people are thinking about anyway.  They might be thinking about a political candidate in an election, which provides fertile soil for rumours about them.  In the case of carrots, people were thinking about fighting a war,  finding enough food to keep them healthy, and finding their way safely around towns and cities blacked out at night. The carrot rumour naturally combines all these things.

Rumours are simple and concrete.  Rumours have a single, uncomplicated, vivid message.  We only use ten percent of our brains.  People swallow eight spiders a year in their sleep.  Carrots let you see in the dark.  We remember concrete, sensory things better than abstract things.  We remember “carrot” better than “truth”.

Rumours are generally connected to people we dislike or envy. Rumours often attach themselves to celebrities, people who are admired and envied in bewilderingly equal proportions.  Cher and Janet Jackson have both been the victims of stories about ribs removed in pursuit of a better figure.  The most powerful rumours go even further and imagine the death of a celebrity. Catherine the Great died trying to make love to a horse.  Paul McCartney is dead.  Avril Lavigne is dead.   In the case of carrots, any sense of dislike is transferred to a German pilot over Kent getting shot down by John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham based at West Malling Airfield.

So the carrot story, by any measure, makes for a powerful rumour and has a lesson for us about today’s “fake news”.  We live in uncertain times, with worrying problems in major governments, creating the basic state of anxiety in which rumour proliferates.  We have massively enhanced powers of communication passing information quickly to millions of people who are not expert in what they are reading or watching. The internet tends to reproduce an idea in endless loops, typically packaged in short, uncomplicated, often visual presentations, which we now describe as a meme.

This all goes to show that no matter what American presidents may say, the mainstream media is not the creator of fake news, just as New York’s newspapers did not create the story about spider eggs conferring squishiness to Bubble Yum.   Powerful organisations like the British Ministry of Information can support rumour, but the fuel which fans the flames comes from fear, envy and lack of specialised knowledge amongst the population itself. Indeed the current role of reputable news organisations these days is not creating stories.  Instead they are often trying to debunk them, their efforts ironically denounced as fake news by people who are trying to avoid truths they do not like.

 

 

 

 

Zoella, Emily Dickinson, and the Swiss Government

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Perhaps it’s a way of simplifying things.  Whether it’s historical periods,  ideas or inventions, we like to link them all with one person.  Monarchs are a shorthand for their time. Famous scientists are picked out of a tangle of piecemeal progress to stand for that progress. Isaac Newton for example, is famous for his scientific work, and also for his ruthless efforts to deny the efforts of others.

Then there’s the writer, the name that appears on a novel,  or a collection of poems.   Surely a book is not like seventeenth century science hi-jacked by Newton, or sixteenth century England, personified by Queen Elizabeth I. Surely a book is about individual creativity?

Well, no not really.  A book has an author, which simplifies a complicated reality which involves a lot of people. To start with there’s the long suffering wife, husband or partner who might have lent financial support, manuscript reading time and ideas.  Then if you’re lucky there might be editors, agents and beta readers, all feeding into this project which carries the author’s name like a kind of branding.   Of course there are gradations, with someone like Emily Dickinson at one end of the scale – famously working in reclusive isolation – and Zoella at the other, who apparently chatted to an editorial team at Penguin, who then wrote her novel about a young girl who makes it big in the video blogging world.

However, even with contrast as stark as this, we have to be careful about making assumptions. The mythology of Emily Dickinson plays up her isolation, when in fact, for a recluse, she was extremely sociable – it’s just that she tended to carry out her relationships with people via letter.  About a thousand of her letters survive, although this is probably only one tenth of the total.  One of her favourite correspondents was sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, who according to biographer Wendy Martin offered friendship, advice, and editorial suggestions.  Emily Dickinson did not work in isolation.  Writing is communication and you simply cannot do it alone.

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And that brings me sadly, to politics.  Writers do not work alone, and neither do politicians.  While a writer bigging themselves up might be annoying,  the idea of the great individual can be positively damaging when someone in politics starts seeing themselves as some kind of superhero.  Governments are huge organisations involving thousands of people.  It is damaging when one person begins to think they are more important than the institutions that provide the stability of government.  In the UK, Theresa May wants people to elect her because she will give strong leadership, as though that is the key to success.  This is simply not true. In fact, you could say the opposite is true. A truly successful country has strong institutions that protect against the vagaries of individuals.

Switzerland, for example, is one of the world’s most successful countries. It also has a government designed to make sure that strong leadership concentrated on one person does not arise. The President of the Swiss Confederation is the presiding member of the seven member Swiss Federal Council. The person filling this role is elected for a one year term by the members of the Federal Assembly. The President chairs meetings of the Federal Council and undertakes representational duties, but does not have any powers beyond that of other members of the Federal Council. It is very unlikely that you know the identity of the current person holding the role of president – who happens to be Doris Leutard – because the Swiss system does not seek to concentrate power in one person.

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Doris Leutard – This photo is from the website of the Swiss Federal Chancellery

The Swiss government is the equivalent of  an editorial team with Doris Leutard as the writer.   Doris might write an article after reading and thinking about pieces written by other people.  A partner will read early drafts over, make a few comments.  Doris may then change some things.   The fact that it’s got her name on the finished product should not deceive you.

If you are one of those unsung heroes who have helped a writer, leant an ear, read their stuff, made suggestions, given time and patience and received no recognition, this piece is dedicated to you.

A Game of Thrones – Fantasy in Exile

 

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First a little history for you.  While fantastical tales are as old as storytelling, modern fantasy fiction and fairy tales are different.  Folk tales took place in our world, even if their location was far away or long ago.  In contrast, fantasy authors since the nineteenth century have shunted their stories off into separate worlds, often helpfully mapped in the first few introductory pages.  This shutting away is a major characteristic of modern fantasy writing, illustrated by the fact that Wikipedia lists 202 fictional worlds (I counted them) created by well-known authors. It’s as though real life doesn’t have room for fantasy anymore.  Fantasy has been banished, like an eighteenth century convict sent to Australia.

A Game of Thrones appears to follow this familiar pattern.  The story is set in its own fictional realm, with maps provided of three fanciful continents, Westeros, Essos and Sothoryos. There are also recognisable medieval elements of fantasy – castles, knights, swords, fair maidens.  However, the story opens with a more historical than fantastical feel. There are no wizards with pointy hats.  The powerful families of the book take advice from “maesters”, people who are like early scientists, studying the technical aspects of medicine, architecture, history, navigation and so on.  Old wives’ tales concerning lost magical forest dwellers do not impress them.  They have shut the old tales out of their minds.  In fact this shutting away of folklore is made literal, by a vast ice barrier, a kind of Hadrian’s Wall, blocking all access to the northern part of Westeros, manned by a group of soldiers known as the Night’s Watch.  It is not entirely clear what lies behind this fortification, beyond a sense of slowly developing threat. We hear stories of magical goings on, which the maesters airily dismiss.  An ocassional zombie-like creature emerges to do battle with the Night’s Watch.  It’s as though all the folklore of Westeros has been exiled behind that wall, just as fairy tales in the real world have been exiled to their own separate places. You get the feeling they are not happy to stay there.

Meanwhile in the medieval setting south of the wall, George R.R. Martin tells a well-handled tale of brutal, self-involved, incestuous politics.  There are complex meditations on the nature of power and virtue.  However, for me the real quality of the book is that underlying sense of old world legends and tall tales shut away, waiting to come back. If you were to write a book that was both modern fantasy and a thoughtful reflection on modern fantasy, then  A Game of Thrones would be it.

In some ways I endured this book rather than enjoying it, particularly towards the end where the brutality cranks up, and magic finally makes its fiery return.  There were stomach-churning sections that I had to skip by.  Nevertheless I see why this is a milestone in fantasy fiction.

 

Agatha Christie, Hiding in Entertainment

 

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The Boathouse at Agatha Christie’s Greenway estate near Dartmouth

Agatha Christie was a hugely popular crime and thriller writer who sold millions of books during a working life extending from the 1920s to the 1970s. In 1962 a UNESCO report quoted by her biographer Charles Osborne said that Agatha Christie was the most widely read British author in the world, with Shakespeare second, a long way behind. The Guinness Book Of Records – according to Wikipedia – claims around four billion copies of Agatha Christie’s books have sold worldwide, with only The Bible selling in greater quantities.  By any measure Agatha Christie was seriously successful.

Widely read though they are, detective stories have long been dismissed as mere entertainment.  WH Auden viewed them as tobacco, an addiction which wasn’t quite proper. Now, it is not for me to spoil things by claiming detective fiction for the earnest English Literature crowd, but it is interesting how closely detective stories are related to the earliest days of novel writing. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Puritan self confession narratives began to evolve into fictional moral tracts, which became what we now know as the novel. In the popularity of detective stories, it is easy to hear echoes from the novel’s earliest days. Detective stories involve a crime, usually a murder, and the successful uncovering of a culprit. On the way the best crime writers are able to explore our conceptions of morality.

So was Agatha Christie a writer who could explore morality?  If you were to read some of her autobiographical writings, you would not think it likely.   In fact, she talks of right and wrong in terms stark enough to sit easily amidst the adherents of fringe right-wing politics. The innocent and guilty are portrayed as fundamentally different, virtually as separate beings:

“Why should we not execute him? We have taken the lives of wolves in this country; we didn’t try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamb – I doubt really if we could. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. These were our enemies and we destroyed them.” (Quoted in The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne).

Statements like this do not offer much hope for a nuance and ambiguity. Nevertheless, through the 1930s and 1940s, the Agatha Christie publishing phenomenon exploded around two detectives, a former Belgian policeman named Hercule Poirot, who first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920; and Miss Marple, who usually solved crimes in the village of St Mary Mead, making her debut in Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. None of the many novels featuring these two characters was to sell millions by presenting dull and obvious homilies.   Murderers are frequently portrayed sympathetically, while victims are often flawed in some way.  An Appointment With Death, a Poirot novel published in 1938, is typical.  An evil old woman called Mrs Boynton takes a holiday in the Middle East with her unfortunate family, which she has terrorised for decades. The family finally snaps, murdering the old woman with an overdose of her heart medicine, hoping that the murder will be overlooked as death by natural causes. The various suspects are considered by Poirot who just happens to also be holidaying in the area. As part of his investigation, Poirot interviews a doctor, who does not want the death investigated.  He argues that the world is better off without Mrs Boynton, and that one damaged member of the family, Ginerva Boynton, might have committed murder in self-defence:

“I should say mentally she is in an extremely dangerous condition. She has already begun to display symptoms of schizophrenia. Unable to bear the suppression of her life, she is escaping into the realm of fantasy… The sufferer kills – not for the lust of killing – but in self-defence.”

Meanwhile, crusty Colonel Carbury dismisses such liberal meanderings and pushes for a proper inquiry.  He does not want this because of any moral qualms, but because as he puts it: “I’m a tidy man.” You get the feeling that Colonel Carbury is a fool, whose neat conception of the world has no room for its true complexity.  Poirot himself is similar in outlook, admitting to no gray areas:

“The victim may be one of the good God’s saints – or, on the contrary – a monster of infamy. It moves me not. The fact is the same… I don’t approve of murder.”

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A letter, received by Agatha Christie, on display at Greenway House

So how to do you reconcile the novels with the autobiographical views?  Perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that Agatha Christie herself was always adamant that her stories were merely unimportant entertainment.  Perhaps by viewing her writing in this way, she was free to explore ambiguities that she was reluctant to accept in her daily life as a wealthy English woman who wanted the criminal classes shot like wolves and wild hogs.  If she came to different conclusions in her books, that didn’t matter, because her books didn’t matter, even if they did sell in their billions.

The word entertainment comes from a Latin word “tenere,” meaning “to hold”. We are held by the things that entertain us, given succor by them.  Christie novels offer a clear and comforting picture of morality where a supreme, seemingly all-seeing detective will always solve a crime. And yet alongside this reassurance there is an accurate reflection of the true complexity of human behaviour where innocent and guilty are almost interchangeable. In a Christie story, the wolf and the lamb not only lie down together, they are often the same animal. And as for Poirot, a character who Christie said she ended up hating, he sees everything, and yet seems blind to life’s gray areas.

In this respect it is not so fanciful to ultimately see a link between the world’s two top best selling collection of stories.  Perhaps they both hold people in a similar way.  In Exodus, for example, God has to ask Abraham for his help in deciding what to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. God sees everything, but in doing so, like Poirot, he is not involved. Abraham is involved, does not have a universal breadth of vision, but “understands” things in a way that an all-seeing power cannot. God has to ask Abraham for advice.  This section of Exodus is just like a Christie story. Perhaps it is a bit intimidating to feel that you might be writing a modern Exodus – so we might understand why Agatha Christie was so keen to dismiss the significance of her stories.  Nevertheless, significant is what they are.

 

The Lord Of The Rings – A Safe Place for Dangerous Things

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Merton College Oxford, where Tolkien was Professor of Anglo Saxon Studies

It is often the case that practitioners of humble art forms have more freedom of expression than those working at the smarter end of the market.  Until the fifteenth and sixteenth century,  pictorial art was confined to religious themes, and physically restricted to church buildings. The widening of art’s scope took place not in the painting of timeless masterpieces, but in the decoration of tapestries, storage boxes, furniture, crockery and cutlery.  At the National Gallery, fifteenth century storage boxes decorated by Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo are just as important as famous paintings.  It was the lack of expectation surrounding a storage box that allowed Botticelli to try different things in safety.

A similar thing often happens with writing.  Take the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example.  A devout Roman Catholic after converting at a young age, Tolkien’s religion did not naturally admit to change, questioning and ambiguity, but in the safe place of seemingly unimportant children’s stories, Tolkien found a new freedom to explore.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings opens in The Shire, an imagined rural community of hobbits, small, furry-footed folk who like eating, drinking, smoking pipe weed, and pursuing an unvarying farming existence. The Shire, however, is not simply an idealisation of an older and better world. There is much small mindedness in hobbit society. Maps of the Shire show mostly white space beyond its borders. And even within the Shire, hobbits from one area will judge hobbits a few miles down the road as strange folk. It is not surprising that some hobbits feel restless in this stultifying little community. There’s old Bilbo Baggins for example, the hero of Tolkien’s first book The Hobbit, who went on a long journey and never really settled down afterwards.

By the time The Lord of the Rings begins, Bilbo is an old hobbit of one hundred and eleven.  While always considered an eccentric in Shire society, the complicated nature of change is reflected in the way Bilbo has become stuck into his own eccentric rut. Bilbo owns a mysterious magic ring which he picked up on his travels. This ring, as it turns out, has various dark powers, one of which is to keep its owner from ageing. Bilbo is one hundred and eleven but looks much younger. While this might seem like a good thing, the endless youth provided by the ring actually presents itself as a failure to move on. Bilbo makes an important personal step when he manages to heed the advice of his wizard friend Gandalf, and hand the ring to his adopted heir, Frodo Baggins.

Ironically, the ring that kept Bilbo’s life in limbo immediatly creates a revolution in Frodo’s life. Gandalf explains to him that the ring is sought by evil forces, hoping to use its powers to enslave Middle Earth. Frodo and a few friends set off on a journey designed to keep the ring out of enemy hands. On this journey, change remains an overriding theme.  One of the most telling moments comes in an argument between the good wizard Gandalf, and Saruman the White. Saruman, the wisest of wizards, has turned to the dark side. The furious row between the wizards is virtually the conflict between the outlooks of religion and science. Gandalf objects to the fact that Saruman’s once pure white cloak is now multi-coloured. With scientific sophistication, Saruman replies that white can be many things:

“White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be over written, and the white light can be broken.”

The image of breaking white light is clearly inspired by science. Isaac Newton had shown in the eighteenth century that white light is actually made up of coloured light. Passing white light through a prism has the effect of breaking white light into its constituent colours.  Gandalf objects that “he that breaks a thing to find out what it is leaves the path of wisdom.” This is the philosophy of a man who instinctively shies away from the modern scientific world.

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Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, where Issac Newton studied light, confirming that white light consists of a spectrum of colour.

We should remember as the wizards argue that Gandalf is called the Grey, with connotations of boredom, colourlessness, and the difficulty of defining clear categories.  Steady old Gandalf does not simply represent good any more than treacherous Saruman simply represents evil. The idea of change in The Lord of the Rings is complex, there are many grey areas, which were lacking in Tolkien’s everyday life bound by rigid belief.  Tolkien claimed that his stories had nothing to do with commenting on real issues.  He tried to keep them a safe place.  The reality is, Tolkien shone the white light of his life through the prism of his books, and it emerged as many colours. Maybe that’s what always happens in great writing.