Ross Lawhead's Blog, page 6

PAW 19 – Pygmalion (300) by Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw; Penguin Paperback 300; 1946 edition

I knew that Pygmalion was adapted into the movie/musical My Fair Lady, but I was unaware that the characters and dialogue were all from Bernard Shaw, it was only the music and dance numbers that were added. And that was a thrill and a disappointment because although apart from the catchy (infective, really) tunes and general jolliness, it is a fundamentally misogynistic story.

First, a word needs to be said about the actual Penguin Paperback edition of the play, which, however you feel about the story itself, is certainly a joy to experience. It is a slim volume, but it has a preface and a lengthy epilogue by the author, as well as over 100 illustrations of the story, peppered on just about every page. It also contains the scenes that Bernard Shaw himself wrote for the original movie that was first adapted from his play. It was intended as a very special edition in celebration of Penguin’s Tri-Centenery of publications.

The title references the Ancient Greek story of Pygmalion, a sculptor whose skill is so great that he falls in love with a sculpture that he creates. Apart from the Bernard Shaw play, which not only spawned My Fair Lady, but also Educating Rita, She’s All That, and others, the Pygmalion story itself has inspired movies like Mannequin and Lars And The Real Woman. It is a fundamentally perverse story — a cautionary tale, more than anything. However, translated by Bernard Shaw we have a story in which a man moulds a woman into a particular shape, that is where it becomes misogyny. Where once she is coarse and ignorant, she is now elegant and graceful, and that is all thanks to him (or the other male lead, Colonel Pickering). The play ends by dwelling on the question of who she can marry, not on what she is able now to do.

Illustrations by Feliks Topolski

All this said, the story itself displays ambiguity in these developments. For instance, Higgins is shown to be comically rude and awkward in society. Higgins’ mother is a strong female character, and the young Freddy can be adequately described as a bimbo.

Which would all be fine except for Shaw’s preface and epilogue in this edition. In the former he describes his admiration for (the amittedly very impressive) Professor Henry Sweet (who I am also a big fan of, for different reasons), and by describes Higgins as being a character with no flaws. And by revealing Higgins’ his social awkwardness, Shaw does not intend to display feet of clay, but rather Higgins’ personal freedom. This revelation carries over into the epilogue as well where Shaw twice, favourably, cites Nietzche and dwells for a bizarrely long amount of time on H. G. Wells (the novels and the man) for a very trivial plot point. Shaw calls this epilogue a ‘sequel’, to the story, and it is. It tells us the story of Liza Doolittle, her marriage to Freddy, her difficulty in starting a flowershop business — which, uncharacteristically, she is not able to learn the business side of in the same fairly easy way that she learnt a different way of speaking. Shaw’s expressed reason for writing this ‘sequel’ is because he was incensed at the stage productions of his work which hinted at Higgins and Doolittle falling in love and marrying each other. He wrote this to set the record straight because, in his words

Galatea [Doolittle] never does quite like Pygmalion [Higgins]: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.

So, in conclusion, man is the shaper, the creator; woman is the raw material to be changed and imposed on. That hardly makes me want to break into song.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 18 – Grand Babylon Hotel (176) By Arnold Bennett

Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett; Penguin Paperback 176; 1938 edition

Grand Babylon Hotel gave me a a couple surprises. Maybe it was off of reading Crome Yellow last week that I was expecting something a little more detached and erudite — I wasn’t expecting an adventure mystery thriller with the main protagonists being an American millionaire and his very capable daughter.

I got another surprise when I checked on when the book was published: 1902, which make it contemporary with Sherlock Holmes. However, the prose is as loose and accessible as something written much later. I think it could very rightly be seen not just as a precursor of the pulp fiction genre — especially reminiscent of Raymond Chandler in which nearly every chapter contains some sort of plot reversal — but also the type of book that Agatha Christie inspired.

The millionaire-as-detective angle was very effective. After all, where can’t a man with unlimited money go, and who can’t he speak to and get information from? Throw in an American penchant for revolvers and he makes a formidable adversary for any criminal crossing his path. And taking into consideration the fact that it was written over 100 years ago, it is very prescient. At one point one of the characters, a prince of the fictional Germanic country of Posen, remarks:

‘…These rich men have no secrets from each other. They form a coterie, closer than any coterie of ours. Eugen, and far more powerful. They talk, and in talking they rule the world, these millionaires. They are the real monarchs.’

‘Curse them!’ said Eugen.

This proves to be true since it is the monarchs themselves that find themselves needing the help of the American oligarch, and at the end it is shown that money answers all things, breaches of the law and suicide attempts alike. For all of that, however, it is an easy, quick, and enjoyable read and the multi-stranded plot is juggled with an easy deftness. This is a book that should definitely be more well known.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 17 – Crome Yellow (41) by Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley; Penguin Paperback 41; 1936 edition

Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley’s first novel, written when he was about 28. I didn’t have very high expectations for it — I’m not exactly sure why — but I was pleasantly surprised.

The story is of a house party and a group of free-thinkers who have congregated there. Ostensibly, Crome Yellow is based on Huxley’s own experiences with the Bloomsbury Set, and it’s easy to see the young writer himself in Denis Stone, for the most part the aspect character. The story is very wise with mature and knowing touches in the fact that these visionary artists’ work is not so masterful, and the modern, amoral lifestyle is actually far from decadent. To the characters in the book, words are cheap, actions are emotionally costly (perhaps the only running theme of the book, culminating in the termination of Stone’s participation in the group). Mary, for instance, never gets to have a casual affair with any of the young men in the house, a running joke in which a good deal of humour is drawn.

The chapters are short and give the feeling of a sort of portmanteau of stories, a collection of vignettes along with a couple gothic tales about the previous tenants of Crome House.

There are also three moments that are striking for anyone that is a fan of Brave New World, which Huxley was to write eleven years later. In one chapter a character talks about children being born in bottles and raised by society, in another there is a prophecy about American Indians revolting on their reservations, and later on a character talks about how society could be arranged into tiered castes.

There is also unintentional humour to be found in Huxley’s odd narrative fixations, first with the word ‘supererogatory’, and the description of girls in swimsuits being ‘sleek and seal-like’.

All in all, Crome Yellow is a surprising and rewarding read.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 16 – Night Flight (182) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; Penguin Paperback 182; 1940 edition

Night Flight was a smash hit when it was released, but it has since been almost forgotten (at least in English literature), and rightly so. The story is of a group of men, some aviators, engineers, and a controller, whose job it is to deliver the mail along way-stations in South America. Simple enough, but the task is complicated by the fact that this is being done in the days before radar, before very precise instrumentation, and also, in this case, at night.

It needs to be remembered that Night Flight was written in 1931, a good twenty or thirty years before commercial flights became feasible to the general public. That explains most of the book’s early appeal — it was a way to experience something second-hand that would be completely impossible first-hand. For modern readers, we are able to gain an insight into what it was like for the first pioneers of the early aviation industry…

Kind of. Because this is where Night Flight really falls down. It is far too brief a book, and far too self-consciously written to give a real sense of what it’s like to fly. Descriptions are terse and abstract, so you never really get a full sense of what is being described. Characters are thinly developed and the thoughts that they have that the readers are made privy to are not really thoughts that people have. The writing tries to be philosophical, but fails; to wit:

“I tell you, Robineau, in life there are no solutions. There are only motive forces , and our task is to set them acting — and then the solutions follow.”

Well, are there solutions or aren’t there? It’s possible that a bad translator may be obfuscating the pure expression of the original, which would be a shame, but none of the elements really seem to connect emotionally. Everything seems to be being held at an arm’s distance. You feel that what the writer is trying to convey is that this heroism is an everyday heroism, one that isn’t trumpeted. But we want it to be trumpeted, and are disappointed when the author won’t. There is fear, love, hate, wonder, and joy to be found in the events of this story, but we aren’t allowed every to really feel them with the author who must have either been cynical about these qualities or, as I feel he was, too touched by all of them to feel safe in expressing them fully. Ultimately, even the fact that this is a fiction serves to distance the author even further from the subject. Since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pilot exactly of the type described in the book, Night Flight should have been a memoir or article; not a brief, impersonal story.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 15 – The Penguin Charles Addams (1845) by Charles Addams

The Penguin Charles Addams; Penguin Paperback 1845; 1962 edition. Cover illustration by Charles Addams

The Penguin Charles Addams is one of a fun series of books that Penguin tried in the early Sixties, and that was cartoon collections. I may feature more of them in further reviews; not all of them are great. Most of them were British, at least one of them was French, and a couple were American — which Charles Addams was.

He is most famous for what spun off from his comics, the popular 1964-1966 TV show The Addams Family, and the two 1990s movies of the same name. And this collection contains many of the ‘Family’ cartoons, originally printed in the New Yorker magazine. Most of the cartoons hinge on a quirkiness bordering on the surreal — often with some sort of deformity as the pivot point — but not all of them are macabre. An artist sculpting an angel out of stone calls out the window “Same time next Monday, then, Mrs Grant?” Some are subtle, such as a row of sheets hanging outside a house with eye-holes cut out of them, and some are plain racist (less said about those, the better). Some are of, shall we say, limited humour, such as a nurse poking her head out of a delivery room door to announce “It’s a baby!”

The strength is definitely the Addams Family cartoons — a whole cinema full of people crying and Uncle Fester laughing, Pugsley and Wednesday returning from summer camp in pet travellers, and Morticia Addams’ parting advice to the babysitter “…keep your back to the walls at all times.”

The downside of this collection is that it’s rather short — you can go all the way through it in less than fifteen minutes. Its 120 pages hold about that many cartoons, but Addams’ style is so perfectly polished, and his humour so unlike anyone else, that it is a pleasure to have it on the shelf in order to pick it up and dip into it every so often.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 14 – Franny and Zooey (2120) by J. D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger; Penguin Paperback 2120; 1968 edition.

Franny and Zooey is a very odd sort of a book. It’s a work of very uneven and unmixed parts — some of which are very good, a couple of which are very bad, but all of which have to be taken together. Definitely overshadowed by the masterwork The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey lacks thrust and is constantly self-conscious, almost self-destructive. The most bizarre and noticeable flaw of the book is Salinger’s complete and mystifying lack of ability to write prose. It’s completely unaccountable that an author who writes slick and brilliant dialogue is positively ham-fisted when it comes to describing something. Here are two of the worst offenders in the book, the first describes a restaurant, Sickler’s:

Sickler’s was a restaurant where a student and his date either both ordered salad or, usually, neither of them did, because of the garlic seasoning.

This sentence is a mess of contradictions that leaves you with absolutely no sense of the restaurant, it’s atmosphere, or even how, logically, two people can not usually order a salad — or even why any of this needs explaining. Try this next one on for size:

This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had, in the ready made dramatic idiom ‘set foot’ in Seymour’s and Buddy’s old room. Discounting a totally negligible incident a couple of years earlier, when he had methodically dragged the apartment for a mislaid or ‘stolen’ tennis-racket press.

For a start, I’m not convinced that ‘set foot’ actually is an idiom, and second, why would you draw attention to it? And what business does that second sentence have being in any book anywhere? If it was so negligible, why bring it up? And isn’t that descriptor at odds with the adjective ‘methodically’? What is needed here is a confident editor to take a red pencil and strike out every word in that paragraph except ‘This was the first time in almost seven years that Zooey had set foot in Seymour’s and Buddy’s room.’

Perhaps one of the reasons that the prose is so clumsy is because very little happens in the stories. What they are both about are conversations — scintillating, fascinating, vastly intelligent conversations, relayed in a Socratic fashion, first between Franny and Lane, the Zooey and Bessie, and then Franny and Zooey. It involves the Glass family, who are clearly an inspiration for Wes Anderson’s ‘Royal Tannenbaums’, a family of famous academic overachiever ingenues whose heyday has passed and are now trying to find meaning for their lives. The dialogue is incredible in what it enables to communicate without saying, revealing far more than the characters are aware that they are telling to each other. It’s rich and colourful, and also brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for pure luxuriousness of readability and invention. And this betrays the fact of why Catcher in the Rye is so enduring while the descriptive passages in the rest of Salinger are so clunky — Catcher is written in first person.

If this was a longer book I wouldn’t recommend it, but at a scant 157 pages, it’s a worthwhile weekend diversion.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 13 – The Ministry of Fear (1897) by Graham Greene

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene; Penguin Paperback (1897); 1974 edition; cover by Paul Hogarth

The Ministry of Fear is one of Graham Greene’s ‘entertainment’ novels, but that’s certainly no reason to pass it up, it is just as insightful and complex as his other, more theological works. The story centres around Arthur Rowe who carries a dark secret — he help his wife commit euthanasia when she was extremely ill. This weighs on his conscience, making him him feel less heroic than broken, but seeming to us the other way around. But as he stumbles onto a villainous espionage tale that lacks a James Bond, he’s the hero that Greene must make do with.

The setup itself is quite fun. You know those weird question/response passcodes that spies purportedly relay to each other in movies — “It is unseasonably warm this month”, “But the ice in Krakow is still thick” — this book starts with the main character unwittingly answering the correct responses to a fortune teller at a town fete, resulting in him winning a prize cake. On the way home, someone tries to steal the cake from him, apparently there is something in it that he wants, but our hero hasn’t figured this out yet. Then, just as he is about to investigate it, his house is bombed. This is wartime Britain, so the event is less of a plot than a stroke of fortune (or misfortune). That’s chapter one…

The Ministry of Fear satisfies in so many respects. It is extremely intelligent, witty, insightful, emotional, and moving; a wonderful antidote to the reflexive two-dimensional Hollywood spy stories. This story attempts to mix as much real-life complexity into that genre as possible, and that gives what might be the story’s one criticism — that it isn’t really satisfying as a spy thriller. It’s too evolved and complex. But it absolutely does satisfy as a wonderful Graham Greene classic.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 12 – The Comforters (1911) by Muriel Spark

The Comforters by Muriel Spark; Penguin Paperback 1911; 1963 edition, illustration by Terrence Greer

The Comforters was Muriel Spark’s first book and it is instantly impressive, if meandering, inscrutable, and autobiographical in a delusional, surreal sort of way– like much of Spark’s best work.

The central plot is a sort of Ealing Comedy jewel heist, involving some unlikely characters just like an Ealing Comedy, and a young author, Caroline, who becomes entangled in their affairs. However, the interior character of the author is where most of the drama happens, since she is fairly delusional (or is she?) in a harmless way that people in one of the comfortable British classes were thought of. Caroline’s boyfriend Laurence would probably be the lead character in any other book written by a male author, and here he serves as a catalyst to many of the interactions in the book. There is also the literally larger-than-life Mrs Hogg, who is reminiscent of G K Chesterton’s Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday. In the same way as that character she embodies a kind of cosmic inscrutability, yet she certainly has her flaws and bears feet of clay.

Spark, like Chesterton and Greene, was a Catholic writer who manages to combine the playful imagination and experimentalism of the former with the sharp insight into human nature of the latter. And of course all three, being Catholics, were well at home with mystery and philosophical tension.

Spark apparently had experience with hallucinogens in the form of dexedrine which was used as a dieting aid in the Fifties. She wrote the book and lent it to friend and author Alan Barnsley who passed it on to Evelyn Waugh (another fine Catholic novelist) and he sent it to Macmillan who published it that same year.

It’s not the first book of Spark’s that I would recommend someone to read (that would be Loitering With Intent), but if you are a fan of Muriel Spark, it would be a mistake to give this hard-to-find volume a pass.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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PAW 11 – The Incredulity of Father Brown (1069) by G K Chesterton

The Incredulity of Father Brown
by G. K. Chesterton; Penguin Paperback 1069; 1963 edition; Cover by Romek Marber

The Incredulity of Father Brown is the third collection of short mysteries by G K Chesterton about that character. It is also, perhaps interestingly, the first collection of stories about the Catholic priest written when Chesterton was, himself, a Catholic.

Not that this would seem to have any bearing on the stories themselves — they are still delightfully and masterfully written. Just about all of them hinge on a sudden revelation of plain-thinking, or common sense. No matter how grand or twisted the obfuscation of the mystery is, Brown is able to deftly wave it away and let everyone see the actual situation for what it is.

To say more would  give away the individual stories themselves. Personal favourites in this volume were “The Arrow of Heaven”, “The Oracle of the Dog”, and “The Doom of the Darnaways”, this last of which is a very moody and gothic mystery with shades of Poe in the atmosphere. Chesterton heaps layer upon layer of superstition, spiritualism, and science. At its philosophical climax, there is as serious discussion about suicide. And Brown is in the middle of it, the pure rationalist. This is my favourite passage from that story, and one of my all times from Chesterton:

‘I’m uncommonly keen on daylight,’ answered Father Brown, ‘especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.’

This perfectly states not only Brown’s, but Chaterton’s level-headedness when it comes to religion and philosophy. True philosophy and religion are a help to mankind, not a hindrance, at that is where the joy of worship resides — a worship which Chesterton has applied to the mystery genre.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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Virgin Media Calling (1)

I haven’t heard from EE & T-Mobile since that last conversation I had, but luckily Virgin Media has stepped into the gap. Today I spoke to Anthony:

Anthony: Hello, sir, I’m calling for Ross Law…? Low…? Lowhead?

Me: Yes?

Anthony: Hello, this is Anthony from Virgin Media, how are we today?

Me: Hi, Anthony. Where’s Napoleon? He spoke to me yesterday.

Anthony: You talked to someone yesterday? And what was the result of that call?

Me: He offered me a £5 SIM card.

Anthony: That’s right, and I can see here that you didn’t complete the process yet. Sir, in order to access your account, I need you to answer a few security questions, for data protection purposes. First, can you tell me the first and third characters from your password, please?

Me: First and third…? No. I can tell you the second and fourth, but not the first and third.

Anthony: Ha ha. You can tell me the whole password if you like. Or just the first and third characters.

Me: No. Who can remember all that stuff?

Anthony: That’s fine, sir. In that case I will ask you a few more transactions, for data protection purposes. What is your date of birth?

Me: My full date of birth?

Anthony: Yes.

Me: Aren’t you only supposed to ask me my partial date of birth? For data protection purposes?

Anthony: Yes, the day and the month of your date of birth, please.

Me: Uh…. December 19th.

Anthony: That’s…. not what we have recorded here.

Me: It’s December 19th.

Anthony: That’s okay, we can change that later. Now, can you tell me how you pay your Virgin Media bill, please?

Me: How I pay it? I pay it with money.

Anthony: Very good. And how do you pay that money?

Me: Ummm. It’s money from the bank. I give the bank my money and then I tell them to pay the bills with the money that I give them. And they do. Apparently.

Anthony: That’s absolutely correct. And now, what is the size of your broadband?

Me: Size? Size? What size is it? It’s like, the size of a hardback book but, it’s, you know, it’s light. It’s not as heavy as a book. Do you mean in inches?

Anthony: I mean what speed is it? How fast is it?

Me: Fast? It doesn’t move, Anthony. It’s behind the sofa. I mean, I think…

Anthony: Do you know what size TV package you have?

Me: What size TV? I think it’s forty inches.

Anthony: No, the package. The size of TV package.

Me: Like… the box it came in? That package? It was definitely more than forty. I mean, it had to have been.

Anthony: No, I mean, the full TV package. What is your total TV package?

Me: It… It came with a remote control, and a few cables, like a power lead…

Anthony: Do you have your most recent bill with you?

Me: Yep. I’ve got that.

Anthony: Fantastic. Could you tell me how much your last payment was?

Me: But it’s in my box file. Anyway, don’t you know that? If you’re really from Virgin — as you claim to be — aren’t you supposed to know all of this stuff? I mean, why ask me?

Anthony: I have to ask these questions for data protection. That’s why I asked you for your date of birth and all the other information.

Me: Oh, I see. And I got that wrong, is what you’re saying.

Anthony: We had something different recorded.

Me: Ah. Just out of interest, Anthony. How many questions do I have to get wrong before you fail me?

Anthony: I’m sorry?

Me: How many questions do I have to get wrong before you fail me? Three? Five?

Anthony: I… I don’t understand.

Me: I mean, you called me up… you told me who I was, and you started asking questions. What happened if I you failed to ID me?

Anthony: I…

Me: How many people have you failed to put through ID?

Anthony: No one. I have never failed anyone.

Me: Every time you’ve called someone, you’ve always managed to talk to who you want. Always?

Anthony: Yes.

Me: Wow. Oh, wait. That’s my wife coming home. I’ll tell you what, can you call me twice a day, every day, until I answer again?

Anthony: Certainly! I will make a note on your file–

Me: You haven’t ID’d me, Anthony! You can’t make a note on my file!

Anthony: If you could just answer some–

Me: I gotta go.

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