Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 3

Blog reviews for 2024

Here's a list of this year's blog reviews, with links to each. For me, this year's standout was Ferdia Lennon's novel, Glorious Exploits.
Poetry
The Electron-Ghost Casino  by Randolph Healy, pub. Miami University Press 2024
Velvel’s Violin by Jacqueline Saphra, pub. Nine Arches Press 2023
My Body Can House Two Hearts, by Hanan Issa, pub. Burning Eye, 2024
Iktsuarpok, by Nora Nadjarian, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2023
A Darker Way by Grahame Davies, pub. Seren 2024
Belief Systems by Tamar Yoseloff, pub. Nine Arches 2024

Fiction
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, by Paterson Joseph, pub. Dialogue Books 2022
The Yellow Nineties, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Three Impostors Press 2024
Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, pub. Fig Tree 2024
Cole the Magnificent, by Tony Williams, pub. Salt Publishing 2023
Nocturne with Gaslamps, by Matthew Francis, pub. Neem Tree Press 2024

Children’s/YA
Culhwch and Olwen, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Graffeg Ltd 2024
Starspill, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Firefly Press 2024

Non-fiction
Scotland's Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced and Misunderstood, Alistair Moffat, pub.Thames & Hudson 2023
The End of Enlightenment, by Richard Whatmore, pub. Penguin 2023
Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark, pub. Penguin 2023
The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary, by Andrew Drummond, pub. Verso 2024
A Grand Tour of the Roman Empire by Marcus Sidonius Falx, by Jerry Toner, pub. Profile Books 2022
The Blazing World, by Jonathan Healey, pub. Bloomsbury 2023
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789, by Robert Darnton, pub. Penguin 2023
Femina by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2022
Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond, by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster 2024
My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024
Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout, pub Polygon 2024

Review of Night Train To Odesa by Jen Stout, pub. Polygon 2024

When Nikolai told them how the family had had to hide in the cellar for a month, the man in command replied “Why were you hiding? We came to liberate you!”
 And at that, Nikolai had snapped a little.
 “I said, Did I invite you here?”

Jen Stout, born on Fair Isle, had fallen in love with the Russian language in high school, and a school trip to St Petersburg convinced her that she wanted to return. Various things then got in the way – family commitments, lack of finance, Covid – as they do, with the result that, apart from a stay in Ukraine in 2018, it was 2021 before she managed to get to Moscow on a nine-month fellowship. And three months into that, war broke out…

You or I might have gone home at this point, but Stout is a freelance journalist by trade; she went as far as Vienna, to collect some flak jackets a friend wanted taken to Ukraine, then headed for the crossing point of Isaccea in Romania to report on the refugee exodus. Then, after a short conflict-zone training course, it was back to Ukraine, spending time in Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donbas among other places.

This is a journalistic account but also a personal one; she had friends in Ukraine already and made others while there. It is very much a story of individuals and the war’s effect on them. The laconic response of the man in Kostiantynivka to the shelling of his apartment block: “The place was full of broken glass, broken furniture. His enormous grey cat had been hiding in the cupboard when it happened, so there was no harm done really, he said.”  The children at Chuhuiv: “some kids had chosen a hairpin corner for their playtime checkpoint. They brandished plastic guns and scowls […] eerily perfecting the contemptuous glare of bored soldiers.”  Some named individuals, like Victoria Amelina of PEN Ukraine and Vlada Chernykh, medic and drone pilot, have been killed since she met them.

She is a sharp observer and alert to reactions that do not necessarily fit the clichés editors expect and want; “One thing stands out in almost every interview I did with the new refugees coming across at Isaccea: their fury. While the paper wanted heart-rending stories of escape and despair, my interviewees wanted to tell me what a bastard Putin was, what a piece of shit.”

Her observation of the way people at war quickly become inured to danger will strike a chord with anyone who has read accounts of the Second World War air raids and how soon the warnings began to be ignored: “a loudspeaker voice boomed out over the intersection, ordering citizens to turn off the lights and mains gas and take shelter. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention.”

Other aspects of the war that come over very strongly: the way a conflict between neighbours inevitably divides families and friends, with some no longer speaking to relatives on the other side of the border; the way it polarises opinion, so that people refuse to speak each other’s closely related language and begin to refer to each other as “nazis” and “Rashysts” – a compound of “russkiy” and “fascist”. The mayor of Kharkiv, once suspected of Putinist leanings, takes to speaking only Ukrainian. When Stout suggests this is political trimming on his part, her Kharkiv friend disagrees; yes, expediency is part of it but there is more: “There was, she went on, this strong sense of personal outrage: how dare these Russians try to destroy Kharkiv’s flower gardens, its beautiful avenues? The mayor, she added, was no exception.” As Hitler found, bombing and invading people is apt to concentrate their minds against you and everything you stand for. One of the most thought-provoking stories in the book is how the Kharkiv LGBT activist Ivanna makes common cause with Tarasenko, commander of the “Freikorps” militia, which had no time for LGBT and had specialised in disrupting their marches. She does so because she feels their common enemy (and the Russian government is of course no more tolerant of LGBT than Tarasenko) is more important. When he dies in battle, she mourns him and writes a valedictory, much to the annoyance of his comrades, who find it insulting for her to speak of him.

This is a powerful book, moving but always striving for some journalistic objectivity. She recounts some instances of journalists behaving badly: harassing refugees for copy, filming without permission, getting in the way of medics. But her own contribution to observing and recording events shows clearly how necessary a job a good journalist does.

Review of My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024

We will never stop being a nuisance.

This is the story of how a young Afghan woman, in the time between when the Taliban were first driven out of government and when the West, unforgivably, allowed them back, managed to create an Afghan women’s football team, and then had to get them out of the country before the returning bigots could wreak revenge on them. Along the way she has to combat conservative (one might rather say mediaeval) attitudes that are much the same whoever is in power, a warlord who encourages the team but only for his own murky ends, and men who resort to violence with little or no provocation. “To be a young woman in Afghanistan is to grow up with violence. To learn not to fight back. To fight back is to risk being killed. If you are beaten it’s because you were at fault, you must have done something wrong.”

Popal, however, does fight back because, and she makes no bones about this, she is a difficult, ruthless, uncompromising person who must sometimes be hard to live with. No other sort of person could possibly achieve what she did.  As she says, “I wanted to kick open as many doors as possible before I was kicked out of one.”  Unlike many, she was blessed with an understanding, non-religious family who supported her, but this made life very hard for them with their more conventional neighbours. Her father and brothers do sometimes beg her to row back a bit, which she will not do; only her mother is unfailingly supportive.

Under the first Taliban regime, her family, like many, escapes to Peshawar, where she and girls like her enjoy far more freedom than they had at home. “In our new neighbourhood, I was able to join in street football games, huge games with uneven teams. I loved it. We ran after the ball in packs, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.” When the Taliban fall, there is a noticeable generation gap between parents who can’t wait to return and youngsters, of both genders, who do not want to give up their new freedom. “I felt hugely conflicted, caught between my own raging emotions and the new light I could see gleaming from my parents and grandparents My brothers and I raged at the unfairness of it. We recognised their delight, but we could not share it.”

The pessimism of the young proves well founded as schools for women are shut down, (during the interim they had been so popular with girls trying to catch up on their lost education that the school day had to run in shifts). Music, TV, dancing and most of what makes life fun are banned, “Taliban” and “fun” being more or less antonyms. People anxious not to be persecuted themselves boost their credentials by informing on their neighbours. In the midst of all this, and in the teeth of men who physically attack her and shout “whore” after her in the street, Popal creates a team that ends up playing international matches with some success.

Unsurprisingly, she and her mother eventually become refugees in Denmark. From here, she becomes central to the frantic efforts to evacuate women football players before the returning Taliban can get hold of them. FIFA has no interest in helping them but some individuals, like Leeds United chairman Andrea Radrizzani, do miracles of PR, and Kim Kardashian sponsors a charter plane from Pakistan when it looks as if the government there will hand the women back to Afghanistan. There will be some surprises here, eg for those who were told that the Afghan army effectively gave in to the returning Taliban, when the truth is that they were desperate to fight but were prevented by the government.

This is a tense narrative, with many dispiriting aspects, but what prevails is a sense of exhilaration in the defiance of these oppressed young women:

“One day, a girl named Damsa, a powerful and talented left back, turned up to one of the training sessions visibly upset. When pressed she told us that she had been beaten by her brother because she had wanted to rush off to football before she’d finished washing the dishes. She had twisted free of him and got to training, but she didn’t know what she would return to. The other girls nodded along, tutting in sympathy. ‘Fucker,’ said Samira sharply, and the girls looked at her. ‘Fucker’, said Damsa, and the women laughed.

We all took off our headscarves and felt the air moving through our hair.”

It is incidents like this that make one realise how necessary it is to be stroppy, to make a pest of oneself, in order to change anything. “We will never stop being a nuisance. We will never stop poking and prodding. We will never stop asking for the rights that should be ours.” At intervals, Popal articulates what football means and has meant in her situation: “To be part of a team is to be reminded that you matter. To be relied upon and to rely on others. To feel that you exist. When your team scores and you run to greet each other, shouting in joy, you are calling out to each other, ‘I am here! I am here!’”

Review of Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages: Alice Roberts, Simon & Schuster 2024

This is the third in a trilogy of books on osteoarchaeology and related disciplines and how they are changing our view of history. This time the focus is very much on disease; what the bones of the dead can tell us about the pathogens that killed them and, through that, about the conditions they lived in. These studies can also have a surprising contemporary relevance.

Many relatively new research techniques have revolutionised our ideas about the past – palaeopathology, the study of diseases and injuries of the past, archaeogenomics, the extraction and analysis of entire ancient genomes, not only human genomes but those of diseases themselves. And things are moving quickly; not long ago it was almost impossible to sex the bones of juveniles, because sexual differences like pelvis size were not yet evident. Now we know that the amelogenin gene appears on both the X and Y chromosomes, in slightly different forms on each, which means this gene can be extracted from teeth to help sex juvenile bodies. The term “osteobiology” has been coined for what we can learn about people’s lives and deaths from their bones, and while there will always be frustrating lacunae, there is more information to be found there than one might think.  Isotope analysis can show diet (and by extension social status), and where the person lived in childhood. The localised wear and tear on the bones of the sailors who sank with the Mary Rose has much to say about the work they did while alive. In a mass grave in Oxford, where at least 35 people had plainly died by violence, the absence of “the type of wounds you might expect when someone is defending themselves – often on forearms” suggests this was not a battle but a massacre, possibly of people who were running away at the time. And though all the bodies where sex could be determined were male, there was also an absence of old, healed wounds on the bones, meaning they were unlikely to have been professional fighters.

The chapter on the Oxford mass grave postulates a connexion with Ethelred’s infamous decree of 1002, more or less inciting mob violence (the St Brice’s Day massacre) against those of his subjects who happened to be Danish, or descended from Danes, or who looked as if they might be. Like most suggested answers to archaeological puzzles, this one is not certain, though it does sound plausible, but it is the techniques used, rather than any positive solution, that provide the interest, particularly when they turn out to have a personal, human application. One of the Oxford bodies, that of a young man with ten horrific skull injuries, turned out to be “closely related to another man, buried in the cemetery of Galgedil on the Danish island of Funen. That man – who was probably around the age of fifty when he died – also seems to have suffered a violent death, with a stab wound to his pelvis”. They were second-degree relatives; the older man would have been the grandfather, uncle or half-brother of the younger.

The chapters on researching the genomes of disease were the most fascinating. The plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, turns out to have been with us at least since the Late Neolithic. The leprosy pathogen, Mycobacterium leprae, would seem at first sight to be intent on putting itself out of a job; it is a parasite which can only live in a host (it cannot be cultured in a lab), but which all species quickly reject except two: the nine-banded armadillo and homo sapiens. And even most of the latter are resistant to it; only one in twenty is susceptible. Its saving grace, however, is the remarkably long time it takes to incubate, show symptoms and kill its host, giving it plenty of time to pass on to a new one.

In the chapters on Paget’s disease and syphilis, we meet both a pathogen and an individual person – in the latter case, even possibly a named one – which naturally increases the interest. The Paget’s chapter is also interesting for what it shows about the relevance of palaeopathology to modern medicine; research has shown that the disease was far more severe in mediaeval times than it is today and has isolated a particular protein that might give clues as to why.

There’s much to like about this book, also a few downsides. One is her determined quirkiness. Her humour does sometimes work, as in the description of modern pilgrims to the tomb of Becket, who sound every bit as gullible as their mediaeval forebears: “a man who wanted to re-frame negative experiences he had at sites that would be visited, a woman who was there as part of her shamanic training, a raver who had been up clubbing the previous night and had stumbled upon the group, a banker who wanted to reconnect with nature, and an American cyclist and university administrator with a penchant for history”. But she can sound irritatingly arch, and though it is less of a problem than in the first of the trilogy, there are still instances: “Eighteen of the relatively complete skeletons showed evidence of ossification of the ligamentum flavum (OLF). I know – sounds painful, doesn’t it?”. That makes this reader wince rather than laugh. There is also the occasional carelessness; she mentions “a minstrel at the court of King Henry” without specifying which of the eight she has in mind, and it isn’t evident from the context. And she is sometimes inclined to overdo the background information, never more so than in the chapter on Becket, which has very little to do with the book’s theme and certainly didn’t need his well-known life story rehearsing. Most of that chapter strikes me as padding.

However she does make a good case for the role of non-verbal history in conjunction with (and sometimes as opposed to) the written variety. “The testimonies etched, cut and burned into bone have one important advantage in that they are not skewed by politics, not managed as propaganda, not favouring one version of events over another. They are simply oxygen and strontium, carbon and nitrogen, the shape of a male pelvis, the mark of a blade cutting into bone. They do not obfuscate, deceive or embellish. They are just there.” They are of course still subject to human interpretation, but to be fair, she is scrupulous about mentioning alternative versions.

One interesting thing: she several times points up contemporary parallels, as in “We learn of an episode of terrible brutality, when hate speech unleashed a tide of violence against an ethnic minority in multicultural England; of life-changing disease as incurable epidemics swept through medieval Europe”. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it has been a feature of nearly every history book I have read in the past few months, by widely differing authors, and I wonder if publishers in this genre are demanding an awareness of “contemporary relevance” from their authors. (The exception among said authors was Jonathan Sumption, who in his final volume on the Hundred Years War seldom acknowledged the existence of any century after the fifteenth.)

Review of “Femina” by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2022

The full title, which wouldn’t fit my blog’s template, is “Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through The Women Written Out Of It”. But long as this is, there are still two words missing: unsurprisingly it should really read “A New History of the Middle Ages In Europe” etc, for the other continents known to Europeans at the time, Asia and Africa, get only passing mention. It begins with a worthwhile point, namely the fact that our interest in history, and our way of interpreting it, stems from the concerns of our own time – quoting V A Kolve, “we have little choice but to acknowledge our modernity, admit that our interest in the past is always (and by no means illegitimately) born of present concerns”. This was certainly true of the twentieth-century scholar of mediaeval literature Emily Wilding Davison, she whose protest at the 1913 Derby ended in her death under the hooves of the King’s horse. Davison researched and published widely on mediaeval history and had achieved the equivalent of first-class honours at Oxford, but could not graduate, as Oxford degrees would not admit women. Understandably, and not entirely wrongly, she saw the Middle Ages as a period in which women had in some ways had more agency and possibilities than they did in the 19th century and took inspiration from it.

While it is true that until fairly recently, mediaeval women like Aethelflaed of Mercia and Jadwiga of Poland were not given the importance they deserved by (mainly male) historians, it is far less true now and I’m not sure it was ever true of Hild of Whitby, whose importance could scarcely be denied by any ecclesiastical historian. And if the Oseberg ship burial were uncovered today, nobody would claim, as they did in 1904, that such an elaborate burial could not possibly be in honour of the two women whose bodies were found in it, and that there must have been a third, male, body who was its real focus. Archaeology, like other disciplines, has moved on since then. So I wouldn’t call this book’s approach groundbreaking. But it has some fascinating sketches of mediaeval women and the places where they lived and exercised influence and power.  Cathar women like Arnaude de Lamothe, noblewomen like Cynethryth and Eadburh of Mercia, and the nameless plague victim in the East Smithfield burial pit who died in London around 1340 but whose bones and teeth show she was born in Africa. They also show that she had a healthier childhood diet than those who had grown up in Britain, but her rotator cuff disease and spinal degeneration speak of hard and repetitive work – it really is remarkable what an informative picture techniques like isotope analysis can provide these days. And the two twentieth-century women, Margarete Kuhn and Caroline Walsh, who smuggled the Riesenkodex of Hildegard of Bingen out of occupied east Germany, are as fascinating in their motives and character as any of the mediaeval subjects.

The style is generally pleasing, though sometimes I think she gets a bit carried away, for instance when describing Hild’s childhood in King Edwin’s court at Yeavering (then pagan): “she would have been brought up listening to the boasts of warriors, the tales of heroes and the myths of Woden, Freyja and Thor. She was a warrior princess.”  Well, no; she was a girl who (possibly) heard a lot of stories about warriors.  And I had a dreadful sense of déjà vu on reading, in an account of the Battle of Hastings, “Harold met a grizzly death”. This is the second time in as many months I’ve seen this howler in a history book by an author who lectures at Oxford University; it leaves one wondering for how long the OED will preserve the difference between “grisly” and “grizzly”. There were no bears roaming that battlefield.

This chapter, which mainly concerns the craftswomen who made the great embroidery, has some interesting and, I would think, little-known details, like the tiny needle-holes and anachronistic wool that betray nineteenth-century tampering with the original. And it would be easy to assume that when, at the end of the nineteenth century, some women in Leeds produced a copy, they added tiny underpants to naked figures and reduced the size of horses’ penises out of Victorian prudery. This did indeed play a part, but it was not the women who were censoring. It was the staff at the V & A who produced, and altered, photographic images for the embroiderers to use as templates, and who clearly couldn’t take the explicitly bawdy humour of the nuns who stitched the original.  This harks back to the point made in the Introduction, namely how in some ways the position of women had gone backwards since the Middle Ages.

The other immense help in having agency, apart from being the right gender, was of course wealth, and the education to which this gave access, and this could sometimes be more important. An educated noblewoman like Hildegard of Bingen might sometimes encounter misogyny (though one pities whoever tried it on), but she certainly had more power and influence in the world than an unlettered ploughman. Maybe this is partly why Margery Kempe stands out. Not a noblewoman, solid tradesman class and proud of it; reasonably well off rather than rich, no formal education that we know of (and we would have, for she made sure we knew everything there was to know of her), but determined to leave her testimony, and preserving her own individual voice even when dictating her memoirs. She would have been a truly infuriating person to know, and one can sympathise with the fellow-travellers who so often lost their temper with her, especially the priest who, when Margery made a scene in church, sobbing loudly at an account of the crucifixion, remarked calmly, “Damsel, Jesus is long dead”.  But one still cannot help being grateful for a record of how many women of the time must have lived, which must have taken both considerable determination and considerable ego to produce.

Review of Nocturne with Gaslamps, by Matthew Francis, pub. Neem Tree Press 2024

The city has not known real darkness since the beginning of the century; the gaslamps in every street give a purplish glow to the night sky that seems part of the texture of the air. Now this purple has turned to black and it is as if the man has been plunged into the depths of space.

Hastings Wimbury, would-be actor, is working as a “gas-boy” responsible for the lighting effects in a London theatre – which are more elaborate, and a lot more dangerous, than one might have thought.  In fact, in 1883, we are just on the cusp of when gas began to give place to electricity, as Hastings notices on a nocturnal stroll:

“It was as if London itself had been turned into a theatre, with the Embankment its auditorium and the Thames the stage, with its scenery of moored boats and barges, and the steps arranged along it as entrances to that impossible space. He sat on a bench and looked at the reflected lights, a show like those he had helped to put on at the Villiers. These were not gaslamps but electric lights, Yablochkov candles as they were called, that used the same mysterious power as Mr D’Oyly Carte’s electric fairies at the Savoy. He looked at the nearest of them; above the base with its coiled black dolphins rose a tall iron post with a globe on top giving off an intense white light. The whole structure crackled and hissed and seemed to shake slightly; he was sure that if he were to go up and touch it, he would feel those vibrations flowing through his own body. One night soon, Hastings thought, there will be enough of these celestial candles to eliminate the shadows altogether. Then there will be only day, the yellow day of the sun alternating with the pure white day of electricity.”

Light and dark, both literally and in the mind, are at the heart of this novel; Hastings has, in the best tradition of Victorian Gothic mysteries, fallen in with a well-spoken titled foreigner who, as any alert reader can guess, is Not What He Seems. Who and what he actually is, however, is less easy to guess. There are many conscious literary echoes, from Sherlock Holmes’s emphasis on observation: “Dr Farthing always warned her never to judge a man by his appearance (which struck her as odd since he was always lecturing her on how much could be deduced from it)” to the Reverend Pilkins with his fleeting resemblances to certain Austen clergymen in embarrassing situations. Arthur Machen, too, feels as if he might at any moment turn up in the dark London streets that he liked to depict. But it is RLS and his fascination with “doubleness” who is the most persistent ghost.

Appropriately for this theme of doubleness, the novel has two heroines, Flora, the country lady to whom Hastings is unofficially engaged and Cassie, the town girl in the new profession of stenographer, who falls for him. Though rivals from different backgrounds, they form common cause to solve the mystery when he disappears, and since each in her own way is enterprising, sharp-witted and with a keen sense of humour, their quest is an entertaining one for the reader. Indeed there is a deal of humour in the novel, evidence of how much the author himself is enjoying the genre (“’Unhand me,’ Flora said, finding an opportunity to use the expression at last”). Mr Gilbert at the Savoy would probably call it rollicking. It is pacy, and switches expertly between its various point-of-view characters. It also gives us the joy of being ahead of our protagonist: we know, long before he does, that he is being fooled; what we don’t know is by whom, and when we find out, there is one of those “how didn’t I see that sooner?” moments. I read it in one afternoon, slowing down only when I needed a magnifying glass to read the letters between Hastings and Flora which have been printed in a cursive font. I can see why the author did this; it does add to the period feel, but I could have done with a font that was easier to read.  I doubt, though, that this would bother younger eyes.

The characters – Hastings, doggedly continuing to convince himself of the increasingly impossible, Flora dealing with her intoxicated suitor, Cassie making her way in a man’s world – are not just convincing but engaging, and the atmosphere of nocturnal Victorian London really comes alive. It shouldn’t be regarded as a parody of Victorian Gothic, for that implies a slightly superior, even mocking, attitude to the genre, and this shows nothing but delight in it.  I found it a hugely enjoyable read.

Review of Starspill by Catherine Fisher, pub. Firefly Press 2024

“Zac buried his head under the pillow. ‘Go away. I’m asleep.’
“It’s freezing out here. Hurry up!’
He knew it was the kitten. The cats of Starspill were cool and haughty and rarely spoke to humans if they could help it…”

At this point a lesser writer would waste time inventing an explanation for how it comes about that the cats of Starspill can speak to humans at all. Fisher simply gives it for a fact: this is how things are in the world I have made, where fog permanently smothers the town so that artificial light is always needed; where a wolf has swallowed the sun and where stars, or pieces of stars, hot enough to burn the hand but small enough to fit in a pocket, periodically fall and are made into lamps.  Says the Storyteller; ‘And thus is my tale told. Yet there is no end, for the tale goes on and we are inside it.’

When one has created a story-world, the next necessary thing is to imagine convincingly how things work inside it. The lack of natural light, and the inadequacy and price of the substitutes (candles and the star-lamps, which mostly don’t function much better than oil-lamps, or are beyond people’s means), have had a predictable effect; “hardly anyone read much now, as light was so expensive”. In consequence school ends at an early age for most, and though his friend Alys is still there, our protagonist Zac, who must be somewhere in his early teens, has left to work for his brother Gryff, star-collector and lamp-maker.

It is a novel of several linked quests, and in that way reminiscent of the old Welsh legend of Culhwch and Olwen, of which Fisher published a retelling for children earlier this year. The plot concerns how Zac and Alys (the A-Z as one might say), helped by a mysterious bookseller and under orders from the town’s imperious cats, try to find and win three embers of the lost sun, which if combined will defeat the fog – an end unpopular with some, who have come to worship darkness and a wolf-cult, while others have ceased to believe that things were, or ever could be different:

“’Would you like it if the Sun came back?’ Zac said suddenly.
She stared at him. ‘Not much chance of that.’
‘But if?
‘Blue sky, heat, green things growing, birds singing? It’s a myth, Zac, just a story. It could never happen. Things were never that good.’”

If you wanted, you could easily enough see allegory in this novel. The map which illuminates the labyrinth through which the questers must travel is in a bookshop. Aurelian the bookseller explains:

“It was a secret way of travelling, a system of hidden ways through the world. […] They say there is no time there, that you can enter and be a hundred miles away in a moment. There are certain secret entrances – they are called Thresholds and the Map shows where they are”.

But it isn’t as simple as “books = doors into new worlds” or “fog = ignorance” (or perhaps, given Zac’s divided feelings about it, “familiarity”). It makes more sense to see fog, wolf etc as folk-tale archetypes that can have many different incarnations in the real world. In this particular real world, there is a basic conflict between those who fear the light because it “will show you all the foolish and dangerous things that should not be seen” and those who believe that “we need to see and understand our world”. This conflict has been going on throughout history and it is not hard to think of other examples of it. I should imagine the Taliban dislike most books, but if they were capable of understanding this one, they would be especially averse to it.

Zac is a likeable protagonist, but for most readers the star will be the self-possessed kitten who shares his adventures. It is also oddly pleasing that while the humans in the story have various more or less complex motives for wanting or not wanting the sun back, the motivation of the town’s cats is simple: they just want to be able to bask in sunlight. Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the author’s own two cats.

Review of The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789, by Robert Darnton, pub. Penguin 2023

The sources about the flow of information in eighteenth-century Paris are extraordinarily rich. We can reconstruct conversations in cafés, pick up news in underground gazettes, listen to the running commentary of street songs, and visualize power as it was displayed in processions and festivals. We often say that we live in an age of information, as if this were something new. Yet every period of history is an age of information.

This is an attempt to figure out, not so much the causes of the French Revolution as the mood that gave birth to it. After all, hunger, unemployment, disaffection with the government, were nothing new; they had existed for a long time without actually erupting in violence and the overthrow of a regime. This time they did, and Darnton persuasively argues that various factors had combined to build up a “revolutionary temper” in the people. Beside street songs, he uses diaries, pamphlets, gazettes, fashions in hairstyles, demonstrations, court records, even café conversations, which were reported, often in dialogue form, by police spies who had no idea what a help they were being to later historians. Without these obliging fellows, we should not know what café wits were saying after the battle of Lawfield: “Police spies noted that the foreign gazettes were widely read in Paris and that some Parisians—those with enough money and leisure to frequent cafés—had doubts about the government’s claim of victory. “That is to say that according to them [café commentators], we won the battlefield and they won the battle.”

Darnton takes various incidents and cases in the lead-up to the revolution and shows how they were reported, how they appeared to Parisians, and how each contributed to, and sometimes changed, the prevailing mood on the street. (The book does not totally ignore the rest of France, but Paris is its main focus, reasonably enough, since it was there that things really kicked off.)  Satirical songs set to well-known tunes, for instance, were widely thought to have brought about the downfall of the Maurepas ministry, while Voltaire’s passionate pamphlet campaign undoubtedly brought about the posthumous rehabilitation of poor Jean Calas. Such events demonstrated to ordinary people that even under an autocratic regime they had more potential power than they might have supposed. Meanwhile unprecedented advances in science – like the craze for ballooning – seemed to show that they were living in an age where there were possibilities for change and progress.  After one incident where Parisians had for a short time taken over the streets, the Marquis d’Argenson wrote: “The common people now are under no constraint and can dare to do anything with impunity …. When the common people fear nothing, they are everything.”

There was also a wave of idealistic sentimentality, for which one may blame La Nouvelle Héloïse, which generated a demand booksellers could not satisfy, they had to fall back on renting out copies by the hour. The fan letters Rousseau received show readers wallowing in “tears,” “sweet tears,” “tears that are sweet,” “delicious tears,” “tears of tenderness.” Not only that; many had persuaded themselves that the characters and events depicted were real, because they wanted them to be (“I sense that I am better ever since I read your novel, which, I hope, is not a novel”), much as fans of TV series sometimes do now. This confusion of fact and fiction fed into the permanent rumour mill that could do such damage. Calas was killed on the basis of completely false rumours, and though her extravagance is a matter of record, the evidence for Marie-Antoinette’s alleged debaucheries is equally flimsy. And the sentimental belief in the perfectability of man showed up even in politics; “On July 7, 1792, Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, a deputy from Rhône-et-Loire, told the Assembly’s members that their troubles all arose from a single source: factionalism. They needed to respond to the principle of fraternity. Whereupon the deputies, who had been at each other’s throats a moment earlier, rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing one another as if their political divisions could be swept away in a wave of brotherly love”. They couldn’t, of course, as would soon become clear. Lamourette was guillotined in 1794.

As the proliferation of pamphlets, songs, posters and other forms of information shows, the public were desperate for news, and government attempts to censor it were not only ineffective but generally counter-productive. Means of evading censorship were incredibly inventive – Darnton remarks of wall posters that “if attached to walls with enough pressure and powerful glue, they could leave a readable impression after being removed by the police”. Even more brilliant was the method used by the Abbé de Prades to get the defence of his controversial thesis past the Sorbonne; “The examiners did not read it carefully or perhaps not at all, because it was printed in the standard format of one page, but […] it went on for 8,000 words and therefore had to be printed in very small type. They passed it without hesitation, but then word spread that it contained heretical propositions”.  When the establishment tried to use similar methods, it tended to shoot itself in the foot: “The scandal might have dissipated if Archbishop Beaumont had not thrown oil on the flames by issuing an episcopal decree (mandement) on January 31, which was distributed in all parishes and hawked through the streets. In it, he fulminated against de Prades’s arguments in so much detail as to make them known and comprehensible to Parisians who had no familiarity with such abstract propositions”.

Meanwhile the unsavoury private life of Louis XV, commemorated in verses like “Quitte ta putain/Et donne-nous du pain”, and the chilly hauteur of his successor Louis XVI, plus the financial extravagance of the latter’s Austrian wife, were diminishing any respect for the monarchy, while a succession of ministers tried by various methods, all unsuccessful, to stabilise the price of bread. The usual reaction in the Paris streets was to hang the offending minister of the day in effigy, and while the authorities did not positively condone this, they do seem to have seen it as a relatively harmless, carnivalesque means of letting off steam. In fairness, few would have prophesied that in a few years the victims would not be effigies.

Though perhaps they should, for the volatility of the crowd – Chaucer’s “stormy people” – does come across very strongly, as does the change in the public mood between 1773, when Beaumarchais got the better of his enemy Goezman by, in Voltaire’s phrase, getting the laughter on his side, and 1787, when he came off worst against Kornmann because the public was no longer in a mood for wit.

There are many entertaining observations – during a period when Jesuits were unpopular, “shopkeepers sold toy Jesuits made out of wax, which could be made to retreat into a shell like a snail by pulling on a string” – and Diderot’s suspiciously anti-religious Tree of Knowledge in his Encyclopaedia – “he gave “Revealed Theology” a place on his tree, but he consigned it to a small branch close to ‘Black Magic’.” But the one that stays in the mind, because after reading this, one can see how events confirm it, is the verdict of one of the foreign newspapers Parisians favoured, in the absence of an uncensored press of their own: “’It was an insurrection,’ remarked the Gazette de Leyde, ‘because one had become necessary.’”

Review of The Blazing World, by Jonathan Healey, pub. Bloomsbury 2023

‘We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going to do it we have dissatisfied all men.’ Edward Sexby

The subtitle of this is “A New History of Revolutionary England”; in effect it’s an account of the 17th century and a few years beyond. It runs chronologically through the reigns of James I, Charles I and the Republic; then with the opening of the Charles II section, there’s what feels like an odd hiatus, digressing on chatty sketches of individuals like Margaret Cavendish and John Aubrey, after which we plunge back into the rest of Charles II, James II and the Glorious Revolution.

It so happens I’ve lately been reading a lot of histories covering revolutionary periods – 1525, I789, 1830, 1848 – and certain motifs seem to be common to all of them. The way in which, to quote the present volume, “harsh economic conditions over the winter, stemming ultimately from a poor harvest, were blamed on the government”; the tendency of the populace to expect any change of government to bring about paradise on earth by next week at the latest – as Edward Nedham remarked, the return of Charles II was widely expected to result in “peace and no taxes”. Above all, the central paradox of most revolutions: that they are driven by the “middling sort”, in the phrase of the time, the educated middle classes who want more say in affairs for themselves but who need the working classes to do most of the actual fighting for it. If the revolution succeeds, this inevitably leads to trouble, because the property-owning middle class is generally every bit as averse to government by “the mob” as to autocracy, and while those who did the fighting naturally expect some reward, the instigators of the revolt may prove unwilling to grant anything like a universal franchise.

Sure enough, here we find Rainborough advocating universal male suffrage, while Ireton, on the other hand, believed voting rights should be vested in those who owned property: those with what he termed ‘a permanent fixed interest’ in the nation (though not property-owning females, obviously…). The parliamentary commander Essex, meanwhile, worried “that they were replacing ‘the yoke of the king’ with that of ‘the common people’. ‘I am determined,’ he announced, ‘to devote my life to repressing the audacity of the people.’” Charles I, on trial, was no better: “When Charles himself listened to his people testify against him, he was sarcastic and scornful, pulling faces and scoffing”. By the end of the century, perhaps unsurprisingly, what had been achieved was “a democracy of property owners” with, still, a very limited franchise – which was admittedly an improvement on the situation a hundred years before. Nor could Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, arguing that the people were born free, had the right to choose their own governors and therefore also the liberty to depose those rulers if they transgressed the laws, be imagined in print at the start of this period.

If you want a history of events in the entire 17th century, this is probably as good as any. It does a good job of bringing out the counter-productive strife among the Parliamentarians and the remarkable degree of petty spite and vindictiveness of which both Charles I and II were capable; also the limitless deviousness and deceit of Charles I, forever assuring people of one thing while doing or plotting another. It is also good at highlighting the sort of minor incident that sticks in the mind, often because it illustrates something beyond itself – like, for instance, the Marquess of Hamilton’s attempt to land at the Firth of Forth, frustrated by his own mother, who brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot him, illustrating how polarized society had become. And the picture of Charles I at the Revocation, “intervening with a ‘great deal of spleen’ and threatening to write the names of his opponents down on a list” is irresistibly reminiscent of Philip Madoc’s Nazi U-boat captain from Dad’s Army.

However, for the period up to the Restoration, I would still prefer Stevie Davies’s Unbridled Spirits.  Though it especially foregrounds the women of the time, for my money it still gives a more vivid picture of the whole. There is also the matter of prose style; Davies’s English is impeccable, which cannot be said of Healey’s, even if he does teach at Oxford. For one thing, he can’t seem to conjugate, or indeed differentiate, the verbs “to lie” and “to lay”. He has “the bloodshed of the Second Civil War laying heavy on their minds” when it should be “lying”, and we are told that Charles “lay his head down” on the block, rather than “laid”. He also has the annoying modern habit of writing “quite the” when he means “quite a” (“It was quite the statement”). I will, however, charitably assume that an editor, perhaps relying on a spellcheck and forgetting that it can’t recognise homonyms, was responsible for the awful typo, “While the Gunpowder Plotters were meeting their grizzly fate” – I mean, granted their end was not pleasant, but I never knew they’d been eaten by bears…

ANN DRYSDALE

"They were the doors out of the ordinary"
(“Mari Lwyd Finds the Forgotten Horses”, from Ann Drysdale's collection Feeling Unusual)

I knew Ann, who has recently died, when I lived in South Wales; I'd heard her read several times and she came to read and talk to our Masters students. In a way this was ironic, as an academic of my acquaintance once said of her, not meaning it as a compliment, "She isn't really a seminar poet". He meant, I think, that you couldn't spend ages discussing what she was getting at in this or that poem, because, inconveniently for his purposes, she had made her intent clear to anyone of average intellect. Though by no means superficial or obvious, she saw no merit in the fashion for deliberate obscurity; she wrote poems, not crossword puzzles.

Yet there would in fact have been plenty to discuss at a seminar; not so much what she was doing as how she did it. The way she used humour to deflect sentimentality.  Her astonishing range, lightly worn, of cultural references, and how subtly she could slip them into a poem to direct the reader's reaction. The eternal curiosity that led her to seek out more information about her many enthusiasms, from sheep to tall ships, so that they were not just enthusiasms but knowledgeable enthusiasms.  Her gift for finding images that at first glance looked incongruous; at second glance memorably apt:

    The white bird tumbles clumsily out of the sun
     carrying a small crab like a novelty reticule
     held ostentatiously in its tight tweezer-beak,
     every leg pedalling, each one on its unicycle ("A Sea View", from Vanitas)

The last interaction I had with her on Facebook was a comment she left on a post I'd made about the replica East Indiaman Amsterdam at the Dutch maritime museum. I'd mentioned that the remains of the original ship, sunk off Hastings, could apparently still be seen at low tide. Being Ann, she had seen it, and attached a photograph in which, little though there was to see above the mud, one could still make out the vessel's graceful shape.  This now seems eerily apt, for Ann was very much a poet, and indeed a person, who could look at a skeleton of spars and see a full-rigged ship.