Martin Jones's Blog, page 34
February 13, 2017
Animal Stories – Bringing the Gods to Earth
Animal stories; I was suspicious. Then, after inconveniently having an idea for a story about dogs, I decided to have a look at them. Animal stories have a very long history. Aesop’s Fables, a collection of sixth century BC short stories, one-liners and aphorisms, is full of animal characters – hens laying golden eggs, hares racing tortoises and so on. The animals lend an elemental quality to the stories – the sense that earthy, fundamental truths are under discussion.
Fittingly for stories about fundamental truths, it seems that during the evolution of the Fables, the original characters switched from gods to animals. Some Aesop scholars think this may have happened to make the spiritual world of gods more accessible to an earth bound readership. Some of the Fables actually involve mythic animals, which exist halfway between the world of gods and man – the halcyon bird for example.
This sense of the elemental and the spiritual continues in animal stories today. There are of course children’s stories, in which authors such as Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne explain down to earth truths through rabbits, bears, kangaroos and pigs. At the literary end of the scale, you have a story like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, about a pet dog who regresses to its original wolf nature. Jack London sets out to explore basic themes of life, death and survival. There is also that characteristic spiritual quality, where animals are close to gods. Buck the dog actually becomes a god to the indigenous Indians of the valley where he takes up residence with his wolf companions.
Thinking of a modern take on animals inhabiting the realm of the gods, there is the interesting case of the dragon. The dragon is similar to a halcyon bird in that both are mythical creatures, sitting halfway between the earthbound world and the fantastical godly realm. Dragons play an important role in the hugely successful books of Tolkien. They also reappear in more recent fantasy fiction by, for example, George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb or Patrick Rothfuss. Patrick Rothfuss is especially interesting in this regard, since his dragons move closer to the status of earthbound animals, with a Latin name and reasonable explanations for their fire breathing abilities.
Animal stories today continue to fulfill the role they played thousands of years ago, revealing basic truths, and bringing the world of spirit and fantasy down to earth.
February 8, 2017
Alice Munro – The Short Story Comes Of Age
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The modern age is supposed to be about limited attention spans, but books seem to be getting longer and longer. A trilogy these days is just a teaser for the next five volumes. Perhaps long fiction is a sign of an age where people are relatively isolated. You picture a short tale as something that people share beside a campfire, passed around like biscuits. These are insular affairs, bounded by the edge of the light, reaffirming the identity of a small group. Perhaps we don’t have so many campfires anymore. Instead, people read quietly on their own, lost in enormous books describing fictional lands, where more often than not, people wearing leather and wielding swords gather around campfires and tell tales.
There are, however, new ways for people to come together. The internet is now a place where people socialise and find like-minded people. It is here that short fiction seems to be making something of a comeback. Many websites offer short and ultra-short fiction – flash fiction – taking place around the scattered campfires of the internet.
Alice Munro is one of the best modern short story writers. She works in the long tradition of tales expressing the identity of the storyteller’s locality, Canada in her case. On the other hand, Alice Munro has devoted readers in all parts of the world. The world is more connected now than it has ever been. Stories have to reach out beyond the fire. In terms of the history of the short story, this expansive trend emerged in the sixteenth century when the “sketch” developed. This was a short piece of writing almost journalistic in its intent. The sketch writer’s aim was less to define the fireside group as introduce readers to places or facts with which they were unfamiliar. Alice Munro has the spirit of the sketch in her work, a sense of bigger things beyond the bounds of her stories. There is the characteristic quirk, for example, that Munro’s characters exaggerate drama in small things, and underplay drama in big things. Canada is a place of everyday lives and trifling events: Canada is also an ancient landform called “the Precambrian Shield,” which sits in vast time and space outside the windows of a train carrying a young woman to college or a new job. This limitless and ancient landscape bleeds into apparently small lives, revealing great space and universality in them. Ordinary people have psychic powers, mundane events have mystical overtones, and minor accidents have wide, almost predestined consequences.
The serious reputation of short stories has always suffered in comparison with the novel; but short fiction could actually be the tip of a modern iceberg, suggesting much that lies beneath the surface. Short stories could actually lay a claim to represent a definitive modern form.
January 28, 2017
Points of View
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In fiction, the rules of point of view are strict. You either write in the first person – “I did this, I looked at that,” and keep to it throughout; or you write in the third person, through a particular he or she, with only sparing excursions to the viewpoints of other characters. Certainly, changing point of view in the middle of a scene is a no no.
Then along comes Katherine Mansfield. Sent by her prosperous New Zealand family to a finishing school in London, she was meant to imbue a smattering of literature suitable for a polite young lady. Unfortunately she developed a genuine passion for books and art. Returning to New Zealand in the early 1900s she became unmanageable, had a few lesbian affairs, and ended up living a Bohemian life back in London.
This is by way of introduction to a striking use of point of view I have just come across in a Katherine Mansfield short story called At The Bay. Early in the story we join Stanley Burrell who has got up early, and is off for a swim in the sea before work. We quickly see that Mr Burrell is a stuffy character who likes everything just so. He doesn’t want to be disturbed in his swim by the easy-going Jonathon Trout. Point of view flits around between the two men, until Stanley goes grumpily back to his house and moans about not finding his bowler hat and walking stick in their rightful place. We see him from Aunt Beryl’s point of view, only to be dragged back into Stanley’s panicky mind as he searches for hat and stick.
Then he finally leaves for work.
“The relief, the difference it made to have the man out of the house.”
I felt the relief in switching to the perspective of Beryl and then to that of the serving girl Alice.
For most writers switching point of view creates confusion, and interferes with the process of getting involved with a character. Remarkably, Katherine Mansfield actually breaks this rule to increase involvement, to experience the relief of a sudden liberation from a certain way of looking at the world. She makes you realise that sometimes people see the world not through their own eyes, but through those of someone more dominant. When that person leaves, the world looks different.
It does make you wonder whether our intolerance of alternative view points in fiction reflects a certain Stanley quality in us all.
January 20, 2017
Loss of Innocence
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As America inaugurates its new president I’ve been reading Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence.
The Age of Innocence portrays New York society in the 1870s, just before the advent of the modern age. Life is hemmed in by social niceties. By the end of the book, however, there is proof of the old truth that restrictions we struggle against when young, leave a hole when they are gone. 1870s New York for all its hypocritical tendency to gloss over truth, understands human nature. Citizens in the environs of Washington Square work as a team to corral humanity’s wilder impulses and unpredictability. And of course, within a few decades those wilder impulses were to destroy the Europe where New Yorkers purchased their dresses and took their cultural holidays.
The Age of Innocence is beautifully written, portraying a lost world with a wonderful eye for detail. Like 1870s New York itself, the story plays out elegantly, with huge emotion struggling beneath the surface. That’s what I liked most about the book. I’d just come from a modern story where the emotion was in your face, and the violence graphic. The contrast with The Age of Innocence was striking, and I have to say, welcome. There is violence, but it sits tightly controlled in a social pressure cooker. There is emotion, but it is subdued like a wild horse broken by a trainer. There are victories without cheering, and shattering defeats that pass without tears.
The Age of Innocence New York becomes more relevant to the modern age the further it disappears into the past. It sits there as it did in Newland Archer’s memory, deeply imperfect while he lived it, but providing a counterbalance to the modernity that replaced it.
January 9, 2017
The Month of Janus
The month of January takes its name from the Roman god Janus. If you’re feeling confused at the beginning of the new year, then Janus is the god for you. In Roman mythology he was the ruler of both endings and beginnings. Just for good measure Janus was also in charge of transitions, of the middle ground, between such opposites as barbarism and civilisation, city and countryside, or youth and adulthood. So you could say he was in charge of everything.
Out with the old, in with the new, business as usual – it was all the same to Janus.
Janus was not the senior god of the Roman world, but he was perhaps the most powerful. He had to be called upon at the beginning of every religious service involving any other god. After all he ruled gateways, including the door through to the godly realm. So in 2017, whether you are dealing with endings or beginnings or anything in between, January is named after a god who kept an eye on all those things, and treated them just the same.
Happy new year
January 1, 2017
The Tolling of the Bell at New Year
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As 2016 ended, I decided to read Ernest Hemingway’s famous book about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom The Bell Tolls. On the first page, he quotes those famous lines from John Donne:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
In 2016, as part of a worldwide trend towards division, the UK was a clod washed away by the sea. Teresa May has since told us to be unified, but at what stage does a group of people become unified? At what point do borders truly reflect the oneness of the people within them, so that they can say, “this is who we are”?
Reading Hemingway I would say, never.
The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, who in an earlier life taught Spanish at an American university. Now like many other idealistic young men in the 1930s, he has joined the International Brigade of volunteers fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He has gone behind enemy lines to help a partisan band of republican Spanish. Finding a situation that is not exactly black and white, he reflects on how hard it is to find unity amongst people:
“Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often, but they always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves. If you had three together two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other.”
That is the reality of people living together. There is no final cohesive unit of humanity. People chase after a secure sense of identity when such a thing does not exist.
The book pulls apart all the usual ways people consider themselves to be together. National identity means nothing; comrades in a life or death struggle seem just as likely to shoot each other, as they are to shoot at the enemy. Even an individual seems divided. Robert Jordan has many arguments with himself. But set against all this are moments which can only be described as transcendent in the unity they describe. These blissful interludes involve a love affair between Robert Jordan and Marie, a young woman the partisan band have rescued from fascist captors during a raid on a train. The pressure of the situation drives these two together, so that in them we see the other side of the coin. Unity can exist in division.
In a world that wants to divide itself in pursuit of identity, For Whom The Bell Tolls should be required reading.
December 18, 2016
The Handmaid’s Tale and Fundamentalism
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I’ve just finished the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s famous dystopian novel published in 1985. Once I recovered sufficiently to think straight, I decided that, for me, the Handmaid’s Tale is about fundamentalism. It describes a society which thinks that certain truths do not change, as though you can brush your teeth and drink orange juice just afterwards, and the orange juice will always taste like orange juice.
Religious zealots have taken over the government of America. They respond to the ills of modern western life, both moral and physical, by creating a society of merciless rigidity. A falling birth rate has resulted in the creation of a caste of women called Handmaids, used by powerful men to bear children for them. The narrator is one of these unfortunate women. From her perspective, little things we take for granted look very different. For example, she plays a secret game of Scrabble. While for us Scrabble is harmless fun, in the dark Handmaid future, such apparently spurious ways to pass the time are outlawed. Scrabble is a forbidden pleasure, akin to drug taking.
For the Handmaid, telling a story becomes, like Scrabble, something dangerous. Telling a story is about communication, something that can only happen when there are different points of view to share. In the Handmaid’s world there is only one point of view, that of the government. For them orange juice always has to taste the same, whether you’ve brushed your teeth or not. So there are no books and no writing. Books suggest that there are other equally valuable truths out there.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascinating, scary and all-encompassing meditation on social ills, with the book itself becoming part of the struggle it describes. It deserves its status as a modern classic of speculative fiction.
November 29, 2016
The Timelessness of Neuromancer
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Neuromancer is a genre defining book, written at a time when computer technology was about to change the way people lived. 1982 saw the standardisation of the Internet Protocols, which gave the potential for world wide proliferation of computer networks. 1983 saw the introduction of Apple’s Lisa, the first commercial personal computer to use a “graphical user interface”, the now familiar visual way of interacting with a computer using icons, menus and windows. Then in 1984, Ace Books published William Gibson’s Neuromancer, imagining a future where computer users can enter a shared “matrix” of linked data, which opens up in a visual way.
This is a historic book capturing an important moment in the development of world changing technology. It is written in a visual style, like a comic in words. However, this comic is a tough read, densely written with sudden jumps between scenes, often over the course of a short sentence. These scenes can be in the real world, in the matrix world, or in a combination of both. It is impossible to skim read. By the same token you also have to just let the writing open out in front of you. If you want to know exactly what is going on at all times, this will be a frustrating book.
So is it a good book? While Neuromancer may have captured a moment in history, when people began to interact widely and visually with computers, it is inevitably less successful in viewing the future. There are so many anachronisms – pay phones, floppy discs, space stations with magazine stands and libraries of books. Imagine a space ship full of glossy magazines and books straining into orbit when you can just send up weightless data to a screen. The story involves data thefts – an idea which has a modern feel – but this involves hackers shutting down security systems in a physical building, so that people can get in there and steal a CD.
Sill, in making a judgement we should bear in mind that science fiction does not so much reveal the future as use a futuristic scenario to tell us about ourselves in the here and now. That is where the real quality of Neuromancer lies. The story portrays people with vast ambitions to develop human potential in partnership with computer technology. But there is some wonderful, subtle imagery suggesting a kind of Buddhist stillness in this bewildering, violent, flashy, fast moving future. For example, the magazine stocked space station, the setting for the story’s second half, contains a city built on the vast, curving inner surface of a hollow sphere. There are two main roads in this city, a ring road called Rue de Jules Verne, and a road running across the length, called Desiderata. If you go far enough around the Rue de Jules Verne, you will only ever come to Desiderata from one side or the other.
Desiderata is of course a prose poem written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. The tone of the poem is revealed by its opening sentence:
“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.”
Go far enough around the science fiction circle of Jules Verne and you will only ever come back to the peace and acceptance of Desiderata. This is the vision I found interesting, the stillness combined with all the disorienting action. For me this nuanced view of human development constitutes the lasting quality of Neuromancer, allowing us to overlook details about pay phones and magazine stands in space.
November 13, 2016
Science Fiction – Back to the Future
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Some of the most successful science fiction has gone back to the past in imagining the future. 2001 a Space Odyssey starts in the earliest days of human history before catapulting out to a space station in Earth orbit. Jurassic Park brings back dinosaurs. Then of course, there’s Back to the Future.
J.G Ballad’s story The Drowned World is an archetypal story of the future that includes a vision of the past. The sun has become hotter, creating a flooded, tropical Earth. The climate has returned to a state that prevailed during the Triassic period. Human survivors of this watery apocalypse find themselves drifting back in dreams to an earlier incarnation of life on Earth. Life has a buried memory of all that has gone before, and those buried memories begin to emerge during sleep.
This is a great premise for a story that can range from past to future. I would also say that the idea has biological accuracy. I once read a book by the evolutionary theorist and writer Lynn Margullis tracing the echoes of ancient life in our own cells. She points out, for example, that the salt balance of human tissue fluids mimics the salt balance of the ancient ocean from which life first emerged onto the land. (See Microcosmos by Lynn Margullis for more.)
So this is a fascinating scenario for a book, which in many ways is poetically explored. There are a few downsides, however. The dialogue between the characters can be that of “British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s”, as Martin Amis puts it in an introduction. The middle part of the story, centred on an evil looter, also becomes very conventional – the rescue of a damsel in distress trapped in the bad guy’s lair. The damsel herself is vapid and lifeless, trying to hang on to the superficial cosmetics of her former self, even as she sinks into her Triassic dreams. All of the characters, for that matter, are somewhat two-dimensional.
Then again, Ballard is a clever writer who uses conventional structure while giving it a twist. The conventional part of the story coincides with people trying to hang onto a world that has gone – during a section when the evil looter drains part of flooded London. In this way it’s as if the creaky old world emerges from the flood in hackneyed old plot devices. As for the characters, Will Self makes an interesting suggestion in an essay written for the reissue of The Drowned World in 2013. Self writes that Ballard is not creating characters in the normal sense, with backstories designed to make us identify with them and read on. Instead, these are archetypes of people responding to change. Some are vigorous in their resistance, wanting to hang onto what they know. Others are accepting, waiting to see what the new situation will bring. The damsel in distress is a combination of these reactions. In that sense The Drowned World is more of a myth or a fairy story than a novel, despite aspects of the novel that are straight out of the Ian Fleming style of writing.
I don’t know if I buy this idea entirely, but I buy it enough to see that this is a fascinating book, interesting more for what lies beneath the water than for what floats on the top.
November 11, 2016
Voting for Boaty
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Recently I read a book called The Populist Explosion which tried to explain to me why Europe and the United States have decided to vote in highly unusual ways. Getting to the end, I wasn’t much the wiser. Initially I thought it was all about the economically marginalised and the left-behind. But then I learned that one of the most extreme populist movements in Europe can be found in Denmark, which has the world’s second most successful economy. Similarly, the UK decided to leave the EU even though it had one of the strongest economies in Europe.
Then I read a BBC article called The Trump-Brexit Voter Revolt which told me that Trump was not particularly successful with voters on a low income.
So I have another theory. This all started with TV shows where wannabe celebrities try to be pop stars, or where people who are already celebrities do horrible trials in the jungle, or learn to dance, ice skate or ski jump. In all these shows, viewers vote to save the contestants they want to remain in the programme. And in virtually all of these shows the audience has at one time or another decided it would be fun to vote for the most unlikely candidate, whether they are scared of spiders, have two left feet and no sense of rhythm, or can’t sing very well. Two Scottish lads lasted long enough on the X Factor one year to get under the skin of the establishment, personified by Simon Cowell. In 2008, John Sargent had to leave Strictly Come Dancing because he thought he might win. John’s run of success dismayed the government of Strictly, led by PM Len Goodman. This year the populist candidate on Strictly is none other than that former member of the establishment, Ed Balls.
The same populist pattern then crossed to the United States. In the final of American Idol 2009, underdog Kris Allen beat the heavily favoured front runner Adam Lambert. The writer Michael Prell tells me that over 50 million Americans voted for Kris. Not many of them, however, went out and bought his record – only 0.16% of those 50 million decided they wanted his debut album. It was the story of the underdog coming through that mattered, not how good that underdog was at singing.
This is where people realised how much fun it is to use votes to dismay the establishment. It started with Pop Idol, veered off through votes to give crazy names to Antarctic research vessels, and ended up giving us Brexit, Corbyn and Trump.
It might not be so much fun now.
