Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 6

Review of The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn, pub. Penguin 2022

“Édouard asks if she knows the French phrase les enfants perdus – the lost children. She shakes her head. ‘I think of it often,’ he says. ‘It has a military meaning. It describes a small troop who volunteer to make a dangerous attack. To go first. In Dutch, it is verloren hoop. In English, forlorn hope.”

Quite apart from the military meaning of “les enfants perdus”, it would make a good epigraph for a novel much concerned with inadequate parenting and the way it repeats itself down generations. At its centre are three half-siblings, Cristabel, Flossie and Digby Seagrave, growing up between the wars in an old country house in Dorset. Cristabel is the daughter of Jasper and his first wife, who died at the child’s birth. Flossie is the daughter of Jasper and his second wife Rosalind. Jasper himself dies when the girls are young, not that they notice much difference as he paid them no attention. Rosalind then marries Jasper’s brother Willoughby so Digby, their son, is Flossie’s half-brother and Cristabel’s cousin.

All three of the adult Seagraves, in different ways, are bad parents, and much of their inadequacy in this line stems from the poor parenting they themselves experienced. Samuel Butler’s solution to this, in The Way of All Flesh, was to have his hero break the chain by opting out of parenthood altogether. One of the siblings does this, and another looks like doing so by the end of the novel. Yet people also are their parents, even as they conflict with them, as Cristabel at one point keenly realises:

“As his voice echoes about the theatre, Cristabel hears his father in him – Willoughby’s warm story-telling baritone – as if Digby briefly embodied an older version of himself. Having not seen him for so long, she now seems to be seeing different versions of him, some familiar, some strange. Past and present and future Digby.”

This theatre, a space made from the bones of a dead whale in which they stage amateur productions, mostly of Shakespeare, for and involving family and friends, becomes emblematic for the act people put on for others, and the desire for applause which echoes the longing for parental approbation. It’s significant that Cristabel, the orphan who has no parents to impress, also has no ambitions in front of the footlights. Her forte is direction and the most significant acting she will do is in real life, as a spy. She is one of that generation of women for whom World War Two was genuinely liberating, in that it enabled them to do things formerly out of their reach:

“How can it be that she loves this murky, blighted and pockmarked England more than she loved its peaceful green predecessor? Because she can drive a car through it, in a uniform; because she can be with a man in it, without marriage.”

Particularly in its second half, the narrative is a page-turner, whose plot I am naturally not about to give away. But all through, much of the reading pleasure comes from the style. There is a dry, sardonic tone, a little reminiscent of Rose Macaulay, which often surfaces either as humour (“had a brief but SOUL-SHATTERING affair with a Norwegian submariner and couldn’t look at a pickled herring without weeping”) or simply keen observation, as in Rosalind’s reaction to the loss of so many of her beaux in the Great War: “One by one, all the charming boys she had danced with and strolled with and dined with had disappeared. At first, it was awful, and then it was usual, which was worse than awful, but less tiring.”

But the virtues of the writing go deeper than this. Rosalind’s reaction to the Dorset countryside, after living in London, is:

“In London, the outdoors had been tidied up into parks. At dusk, the lamplighters with their long poles would light the gas lamps lining the pathways, golden circles flickering into life across the city. But in Dorset, the darkness descends so completely it is like falling into a coal cellar.”

In itself, this is a subtle piece of observation and place-description, but it also foreshadows a crucial scene later in Rosalind’s life, when London, in the blitz, will look and feel very different: “Every route through the lightless city is now an unpredictable one. It is a shadowy moonscape and the bombs change its shape every night. Landmarks evaporate, streets are roped off, and dust falls over everything.” We haven’t heard the last of that cellar, either…

The period, basically the 1920s. 30s and 40s, is very convincingly evoked, in both the language and the manner of its characters, so much so that the only place where I momentarily blinked was when the author, in the phrase “an elegant young Black man”, uses the modern convention of spelling “black” with a capital B.  That did jar, because at the time when this is set, such a usage would have seemed downright odd. But most of the time, one is thinking how apposite is the phrasing, how perfectly suited to what it is doing – Digby, on the way back to Dunkirk: “Yesterday morning, a German plane came screaming over and the man in front of me shot himself in the head, to save them the bother.” Flossie, gradually getting over a bereavement: “As she works, she considers what she might do with her crops. Betty has a recipe for raspberry shortbread she could try, if she saves up her margarine rations. This imaginative pondering feels as if she is, if not exactly returning to herself, then arranging to meet herself, a little further on.”

Review of Shifts by Christopher Meredith, this edition pub. Parthian 2023

It was impossible to go back to what they had been, the river only running one way.

This is a new edition of Christopher Meredith’s debut novel, first published in 1988 but set a decade earlier at the end of the steel industry in Wales. It centres on a group of men employed at a steelworks faced with imminent shutdown, their work not only arduous and dangerous but, now, intrinsically useless:

“The drums had been shoved one after the other under the leaking grease pipes until the maintainers eventually came round to repair them. Lew Hamer had shown Jack and Kelv the job, telling them to manhandle the drums out and chuck them on a spoilheap. They had sat and looked at the drums for a while. Jack dimly recalled myths about Greeks being set pointless and impossible tasks.”

Jack is a returner, come back to the place of his childhood having failed to make a go of things elsewhere; he is about to learn the truth of Cavafy’s remark that messing your life up in one place generally means you will do the same anywhere. His friend Keith, more rooted, is trying to make sense of his life and work in the valley by studying the local history that led to the steelworks in the first place, though hampered by the fact that he has no Welsh and cannot read the gravestones and documents that hold the information he needs: “The notes Keith held were in a language that was his own, but that he could not understand.” Robert, an obsessive, asocial bachelor, is “Robert” at home but “O”, a nothing, at the steelworks.

In many ways this is true of all the men who work there, whose individuality is not needed when on shift. But though they may not enjoy the job, it defines them, and its loss threatens to leave them not only insolvent but no longer knowing who they are and what their place in the world is. The women of the valley have more chance of work, but are no better off for job satisfaction:

“She was a widow, and worked in a factory from eight to half past four. The factory made electrical components, she told him, but she didn’t know what they were for.

She explained to him once that if she fitted together twice as many of the little pieces as she was meant to fit together for her basic rate she got a bonus of thirteen pence per hour. It only made you tired, she said, if you thought about it.”

Three things come through the writing very clearly. The first is the contrast between the natural and built environment these characters live in, a contrast that tends to surprise those seeing the valleys for the first time. The house where Keith and his wife Judith live has a “cracking view” across the valley, but like Gus Elen, you are better off ignoring the characterless ‘ouses in between, not to mention the factories and spoil heaps. The second is the sense of imminent danger just below the surface in the steel mill, where there seem to be umpteen ways to do oneself a mortal injury:

“Without looking down, Willy sidestepped a pool of slime in which a mangled steel cranesling lay contorted like a writhing snake. Suddenly he stopped, turned, and raised a warning finger. ‘Mind’ he said inexplicably. ‘Look here.’ He pointed into the gloom. ‘Know what these are?’ Jack strained his eyes and saw a bank of filthmantled metal boxes fixed along the wall. ‘Fuseboxes’ he said wondering if it was a trick question. ‘Thassright’ Willy said. His face relaxed for a moment but then the earnestness returned. ‘So be careful where you do piss. It ’ouldn’ be a nice way to go.’”

The novel is set at a the time of a seismic “shift” in the South Wales economy, and the third thing that comes across is how ill prepared people are for it and how little they can do about it. Some, on the mill’s closure, opt for similar jobs elsewhere in the country, which, given that the whole industry is doomed, merely postpones their problem. Some move on with no very clear idea of where and to what they are going. Some stay where they are and try for other jobs in the area, though it is women who have the best chance of factory assembly-line work. Meanwhile Keith’s observation about history – “it’s not something you can escape from” is borne out when a film crew arrives at the moribund factory and the men find they have themselves become historical exhibits:

“All the men were issued with hard hats, and some ingots were filmed as they were rolled into slabs. Jack laughed at the nervousness of the crew and the way they jumped when an ingot boomed and cracked out sparks as it hit the rolls. Wayne asked one of them what it was for. He was vague about the answer he got, but it was something about archives. Jack stood next to an old rigger wearing huge leather gloves and a metal helmet and they both tried to edge into the shot. But the rigger was watching the mill. He told Jack they were watching history and Jack, trying to look solemn, said nothing.”

The energy in the novel comes from its unusual setting, and the author’s assured familiarity with it – he had himself worked there. But the assurance of the prose, in a first novel that never sounded like one, was down to pure talent. Jack’s sudden sense of transience at one point is a typically sharply-conveyed moment:

“It struck him that everything sat lightly on the hillside. The cars, the pine trees on their shallow plates of roots. Looking at the stepped roofs of the houses, he could imagine them slipping and fanning down the hill like a tipped shelf of books.”

As Diana Wallace reminds us in the foreword, Shifts, from when it first came out, has been “the classic novel of de-industrialisation in Wales” and it is good to see this new edition from Parthian.

Review of Eftwyrd by Bob Beagrie, pub. Smokestack Books 2023

J K Jerome remarks somewhere that he understands Scots fairly well, because “to keep abreast of modern English literature this is necessary”. Were he with us today, he might be brushing up his Anglo-Saxon, or at least the dog-Latin-like version of Old English that a surprising number of recent poems and novels have employed to evoke their world.

This is the sequel to Beagrie’s Leasungspell, in which a monk called Oswin was travelling from his monastery at Herutea (Hartlepool) to Streonshalh (Whitby) with letters from Abbess Hild in 657 AD, the year of the Synod of Whitby. His journey was interrupted, to put it mildly, by a river-witch called Peg who captured him as he tried to cross the Tees and held him underwater. Eftwyrd begins with his escape from her and his resumption of his journey.

Leasungspell was conceived primarily as a spoken performance, in which format its blend of Old English, modern English and Northumbrian dialect would be easier to follow, as you can see and hear from various clips on YouTube (eg  here ). The poem also had a website, still called leasungspell.com but now occupied by something in Japanese about motorbikes. I assume this sequel will be similarly performed, but this is a review of what’s on the printed page. The casual browser, seeing lines like these

        þa hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide þruh eorþan sceatas,
        grandleás ġerārum begeondan æl eorþan cynedómas,
        an’ te gǣlde oferlang wiðin hits níedgráp nēþaþ
        overprice mi, tóslítness, multen me int’ sealt sprutan

might lose heart on the spot. But some of the words, especially when sounded, will reveal their meaning – “sealt sprutan” is not a million miles from salt spray, and remembering that the ð of Old English was our “th” gives you “within”. Many of the poems are in fact followed directly by translations into modern English. Some, particularly later on, have partial translations, prose summaries or even just a vocabulary. In effect, then, there are two versions of most of the poems. Will readers tackle both, and will they benefit from so doing? Let’s come back to that later.

Leasungspell opened with the words “Huisht, lads, haad ya gobs”, quoted from the folk song The Lambton Worm, and Eftwyrde too is a gallimaufry of quotes and influences. Many are from folk tales and myths; some from more surprising sources:

        Then I eat the plum fruits, so sweet, so cool, wondering if some
        one was saving them for breakfast before they were given to me.

Beagrie’s description of Oswin’s quest as a “fool’s journey” would seem borne out by the fact that Oswin’s letters not only get lost en route, they hardly matter, since when he gets to Whitby he finds Hild already there. But in folk-tale tradition he finds other things along the way, and possibly also loses some, notably his faith. He starts out from Hartlepool a Christian, but by the end he is questioning the effect of organised religion on human behaviour and realising how it can be used as a means of control and self-enrichment.

The narrative has a lot of tension, which is my excuse for skipping some of the OE versions to get on with the story. But that is what one does on a first reading; it doesn’t mean I would necessarily do it again.

Back, then, to the dual versions. Do they add anything to the concept? Something, certainly. A layer of distance, also some fruitful ambiguities. “Eftwyrd”, for instance, immediately suggests “afterwards”, and it is indeed a sequel to the former story. But given that an eft is the terrestrial phase of a newt and “wyrd” in OE means fate or destiny, it could also suggest the strange physical state Oswin is in after his sojourn underwater; he has become a sort of human/water creature hybrid whose appearance frightens others and leads to his being taken for some sort of demon. “Fish-on-land-fate” (or “fish-out-of-water-fate”) is not a bad summing up of what happens to him, both physically and metaphorically, during a journey that sees him become detached and alienated from the world he lived in when he set out.

Next time I read, I probably will try to get by without the translations. For now, though, they were for me where the development in Oswin’s thought-process became clearest, signalled by the change in his lexis and imagery between this:

        smoke coiling up from the harbour homes beneath
        like steam from a bowl of warm hearty broth;
        they cling like limpets to the strip of earth,

to this:

        yet without recognising the materials of the craft
        or where we set off from in the beginning,
        the freedom to transform across endless newness

        to the joy of the gods of betweenness
        with our overpassing bodies, where these gods
        almost believe in us and would trust

        us to stay with them without transfiguring
        into the next thing the way clouds pretend
        to be ten thousand things we hold by name

Review of Poèmes Écossais by Paul Malgrati, pub. Blue Diode Press 2022

 

a newfound lingua franca —the common tongue of our possible land.

So Paul Malgrati, in a foreword, describes the exhilarating mash-up of Scots and French (with a few other languages periodically surfacing) in which he has written this dynamic first collection. He feels obliged to add, possibly in anticipation of criticism, “The following poems were written in Scots by a native French speaker. They are not an attempt at Scottish mimicry. Nor do they belong to any recognisable kind of Scottish patois.” Any such criticism would be both mean-minded and misdirected, for what we have here is an idiolect, the voice found by a man who was born into one culture and has adopted another. It never sounds forced or affected; what it does sound is massively energetic, a language continually straining at the leash and urging both writer and reader on. In “Tae ma Dundonian jo” he articulates the personal circumstance that helped to bring about this happy fusion:

        je t’adore mair nor the drums o Montmartre
       wi upbeats o brangles an beaten barricades;
       je t’adore mair nor a dram o sunkiss,
       when the Law Hill skyres, uprisen at tea time;

         je t’adore mair nor the Covenant within,
        that uplifts oor mystère an maks siccar the lift;
        je t’adore mair nor la mia patria,
        fir a countra was born in the tryst o oor hames

It isn’t just two languages that come together but two histories and sets of cultural references, as when “Rousseau bumped intae Hume” (“Forêt de Montmorency”), or when in “Champs-Elysées”, a failed revolt bumps into a sell-out Union:

      Ah!  ça ira!’—t’was whit they said
      the last risin o Misérables
     agin the rotten rottans’ rale,
     —yon scunn’rin crew—
      that’d sell awa Marianne
      fir Darien shares.

Or when, in “Drount Cathedral”, inspired by a Debussy prelude, he exports “La Cathédrale Engloutie” to Scotland…

   in the cranreuch o yer bairnheid,
   when yer maw grinned at ye thro the haar,
   ayont the firth an the tangible moor,
   there, yonder, in the parlour,
   where elders shivered o ayebidin wae,

Times collide and mash too, in the long poem “Siege o Dundee, c, 1651”, where a brutal Cromwellian sack somehow synchronises with modern times so that a contemporary street busker with mental health issues morphs into a timeless chorus to the action, and the rebuilding afterwards ends up as the kind of reconstruction that followed quite another war:

   “Wheesht!” they say —“Hearken tae the Provost’s plan:
  a Brutalist, Le Corbusist, béton-
  holic, Kumaian, criss-crossit, bald
  33 square-gane, car-pairked, bingo-
  perkit conurbation!” —“Hear! Hear! A toast,
  braw gentleloons! Gie’s a tart o concrete!”

And I suspect the same conflating of times in “Leith Harbour”, where the ostensible speaker is Mary Stuart returning to her birthplace from the France where she had grown up, but in which one can surely also hear the voice of the emigrant poet:

     Let me luve ye like hame, will ye? new land that’s grown wild
    intae me wi sharp, ill-manly bliss an staunch, hard,
    yet delichtfu howps that godly virr rove here.

   Are ye mine, unco patrie?

It should by now be clear that this is a poet completely unafraid to do what he pleases with language, and I wish it were possible to quote online from “Mapamound”, which is basically a land/word/scape that periodically breaks up into different contours or streams. Unfortunately I can’t reproduce the formatting. When he wants to, however, he can also execute conventional formal poems perfectly, as in the sonnet “Wallace o Arc”. Although he doesn’t say so, I am sure he is here writing about the Kelpies of Falkirk, that statue of the fey horses which tempt people to ride on them, but you mustn’t, for they will head unstoppably for water and drown you (We have them in Shetland too, but since our mythology is more Nordic, we call them njuggles).

    At stake, in war-cried noons o quarters past,
   they lure ma watch wi watergaw-bewasht
   ambuish. Their huifs, aloof, entice the route
   tae auld Orleans — yon drawbrig their moustached
   satyr o maidenheid cuid force — an Ah
   wad fain find them an ride alang, were Ah
   nae feart tae hug their schiltron o horns.
   Ah’ll bide here, syne, an let their beauty gang.

   See —they rise up yet, wi eldritch panache.
   Fantoush pastiche, their sonsie miracle
   relichtens faith in ma patrol. Ah’ll bide
   alert, ma watch awauken, nae fir faes
   but ferlies queer; the likes Ah’d kill
   tae keep in sicht, fir they’re the kythe o grace.

Reading a poet who uses language so freely and inventively is a bit like riding a kelpie: exhilarating in the extreme, though hopefully not ending in a loch. I have not found a new collection, or a new poet, so exciting in a while.  The collection can be found here in print, here in an epub version .

Review of Buried, by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster UK 2022

“There’s a lot you can tell from a skeleton.” Since I have an unhealthy interest in osteoarchaeology, this is my ideal opening sentence; in fact it convinced me to buy the book. Actually it is as much about what one can’t tell, or thinks one can tell, from burials as what one can. Burial customs, how a body lies in a grave and what is put in with it, can indeed tell us a lot, but there is a tendency to interpret what one sees in the light of what one expected to find. A good example is the one in chapter 5; at one time, finding a female Anglo-Saxon burial with half a dozen brooches, archaeologists tended immediately to think “high-status woman”. But brooches were not just decorative; they had the function, before buttons were invented, of fastening both dresses and cloaks. As archaeologist Hugh Willmott points out: “There’s a tendency to think: she must have been special, she’s wearing all these brooches. But perhaps she just died in winter, buried in her winter cloak. Maybe even two cloaks, if it was very cold.”

Until quite lately, what archaeologists could learn from a skeleton was often limited to sex, age, cause of death, perhaps an idea of what they looked like in life and what state of health they enjoyed. New techniques like genome and isotope analysis in this field have enabled archaeologists to find out a great deal more about bodies, and sometimes surprised them in the process. In particular, they can indicate family connections and where someone was brought up, which can often be a very long way indeed from where they were buried. The subtitle of this book is “An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain”, and it is “alternative” not just in the sense of viewing the time through the dead rather than the living but in trying not to visualise it as a succession of waves of invading hordes – Romans, Saxons, Vikings, one after another. There were invasions, and raids, but also a great deal of perfectly peaceful migration, and the different populations overlap both in time and in place more than one might think.

 Indeed many bodies, and pictorial representations, seem to show people (women especially) with a “hybrid identity”, wearing aspects of both Roman and North European dress and jewellery, presumably depending on what was in fashion at the time. Funeral customs too are often mixed. Sometimes folk who, judging by their dress, embraced Christian culture while alive are nevertheless buried in an older, non-Christian way, either because while dress is a matter of fashion, funeral rites are a matter of family tradition, or perhaps because their relatives felt this was no time for the deceased to make an enemy of any potential god and were hedging their bets. But sometimes too, there are elements of different cultures, perhaps those the people concerned originally came from, but modified, as if they are both keeping some of their ancestral rites and absorbing some from their current surroundings, making something new in the process. A custom from Frisia, whereby the dead ere often buried in log coffins, is mirrored in an 8th-century Norfolk cemetery.

This book is full of fascinating phenomena (I especially enjoyed the chapter on decapitated burials), but the archaeological detective work usually leads to theories rather than definite answers, which is as it should be. I’m glad to see that Simon & Schuster, this time, have sprung for some decent colour illustrations – they rather unforgivably didn’t in her last. Roberts’ writing style is sometimes a bit chatty and personal, but not so much as to become irritating. This book should interest anyone with a yen for ancient history, but especially those of us who’d rather dig up a skeleton than a pot of gold any day.

Review of “Infamy: The Crimes of Ancient Rome” by Jerry Toner, pub. Profile Books 2020

book cover

Fierce punishments were a way of compensating for the low chance of detection, rather in the way that a huge jackpot compensates for the low chance of winning the lottery. There simply were not enough resources to do anything more than make a terrifying example of those few criminals who were apprehended.

This quote illustrates what Toner is best at: making telling comparisons with our own time but without judging a very different society by our own. He also knows when to be sceptical of written sources, especially famous ones, who in an age of low literacy were invariably educated and upper-class and whose viewpoint is necessarily skewed by their own experience. The likes of Tacitus and Suetonius were most interested in high-profile treason and murder cases, but ordinary folk were far more concerned about thieves, street muggers and con artists, just as they are now. By “Rome” in the title, Toner means the whole empire, not just the city, and he uses many examples of petitions and cases from the wider empire, notably Egypt, to illustrate the kind of crimes that bothered people and how they might use the law to redress them.

The problem with doing so was, firstly, that the chance of catching criminals was small (the vigiles, or Watchmen, were mainly concerned with looking out for fires) and secondly, that if a criminal was caught, it was not usually up to the state to do anything about it, unless his crime was a political one. There were certainly laws against civil crimes like theft and violence, but it was for the victim to press charges, collect evidence and go to court with it, all of which might cost more money than the loss warranted, particularly if one factored in bribery and corruption in the legal profession. In one of the Egyptian petitions, the complainant, who seems to have been a fair amateur detective, explains that the thieves “broke through a window which overlooks a public street and which had been blocked up with bricks, probably using a log as a battering ram”. They had then, he deduced, removed his barley by means of a rope, whose traces he found on the windowsill. Nobody was going to deduce this and present it to a court unless he did.

There was therefore a disconnect between the ideals Roman law set out (many of which still underlie modern European law) and what it could actually do. This disconnect also applied to the large body of law concerning private morals. Ever since Augustus, emperors had been using the law to try to eliminate excessive consumption, luxury among the common people, adultery and whatever the emperor of the day regarded as sexual depravity. Most folk, predictably, regarded their tastes in food, dress and sex as none of the law’s business and ignored it.

Inevitably, the law’s practical shortcomings led to discontent among crime victims who saw no chance of redress, but Toner suggests that such discontent may have been mitigated by the fact that they had low expectations of the justice system in the first place. The number of curses against thieves, written on lead sheets and found all over the empire, notably at Bath, suggests that many had little hope of recovering their property except by divine intervention - and if even that failed, they could console themselves with the thought that at least the offender might be visited with the unpleasant symptoms specified in the curse. These are always way out of proportion to the crime, which may indicate not so much the victims’ intrinsic cruelty as their frustration at not being able to right their wrongs.

What was causing crime was, as might be expected, poverty and inequality, the latter particularly in cities like Rome, where poor and rich lived close enough to compare each other’s lifestyles. As much as anything, the law was there to uphold this status quo, which contained elements of built-in inequality that feel alien to us, notably slavery. Slaves had very few legal rights, though some emperors would intervene on their behalf against excessively cruel owners (Augustus prevented one such from feeding a slave to his moray eels for breaking a vase). Since they counted as property rather than people, it was, for instance, impossible in law for an owner to rape a slave; he was simply making use of his possessions. This strikes us as shocking, but as Toner points out, things have not changed as much as we like to think and there is still a disconnect between what the law asserts and what it can do, not to mention who is in a position to make use of it:

“We might like to think that the modern world has improved because slavery is now illegal in every country, but according to one estimate, there are almost thirty million slaves in the world today, a far higher figure than Rome ever possessed. […] A Roman would probably argue that the modern Western lifestyle requires similarly drastic inequalities in order to be maintained. Over 70% of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day and half of global wealth is held in the hands of the top 1%. The eight richest men own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion. It is a level of inequality that is, if anything, far worse than existed in the Roman world. We in the West simply keep our low-cost producers out of sight, housed in factories in faraway countries. At least the Romans faced up to the social hierarchy that helped generate the wealth and leisure that allowed them to enjoy themselves at the baths and games. I suspect the Romans would feel that their values and ours were in many ways the same; a belief in the pursuit of personal fulfilment and wealth, regardless of the cost to others.”

This is a provocative and challenging statement, but hard to dispute. And though readable and accessible, this is a properly scholarly study with all the necessary apparatus behind it — Toner is after all a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Churchill College, Cambridge.

Review of The Dogs, by Michael Stewart, pub. Smokestack 2023

book cover

This is one of those themed collections where it is important to distinguish between theme and subject matter. Superficially, it concerns the dog, past, present and future: the first part is an imagining of prehistoric doggery- their creation myths (“In the Beginning”), their intrinsic nature (“Digging”), their relationship with early man, fateful for the integrity and independence of their species. The second part examines the present state of this one-sided relationship in more depth, while the third is set in a future where dogs transcend this relationship and become more like people. (Though it isn’t quite so straightforward, for there are three poems titled “In This Boke That Cald Genesis” scattered throughout the collection which continue the mythmaking.)

In all three parts though, humans are as much the subject as dogs. What they do to dogs by way of exploitation, alteration and appropriation is emblematic of what they do to the world in general. At the end of “The Man”, we see the dog’s dilemma, but we also see how easily, in these lines, “dog” could be replaced by “man” and “man” by “god”:

     Dog looked around at his lot,
     were he to leave the man
     he had nowhere to go, no source of food
     and no shelter.
     There was no way back
     to the place
     he’d come from.
     He had no choice:
     now he loved
     T H E   M A N

And in “The War Dog School”, even without the echo of Emma Lazarus the parallels would be clear:

      Shoeburyness, Essex, 1917:
      Airedale, Lurcher, Mastiff.
     We take your strays.
     We will clear out Battersea.
     Give us your terriers,
      collies and Great Danes.
     We will turn your poodles into pinschers,
     your retrievers into sentries,
     your pugs into pugilists,
     your Shih Tzu into soldiers.
     We want sagacity, fidelity
     and a strong sense of duty.
     We will place you on
     the Western Front,
     take our messages through
     clouds of mustard gas
     while men in trenches
     peer through masks.

     Missing from the cenotaph:
     the dog who ran across
     No-Man’s Land
     and collaborated with the Boche.

The man/dog parallels are well handled, as are those poems dealing with the dog’s essential nature – “Digging” is particularly convincing:

     Past amber and pewter, Thor’s hammer,
     through new red sandstone, coal,
     silurian slates and millstone grit,
     until the rock beneath claw
     turned hot and molten.
     As the earth he dug got hotter,
     he smelled the brimstone
     and felt the fires.

This is also one of the mythologising poems that worked for me. I’m not so sure about some others, partly because I doubt any species except ours is self-obsessed enough to make myths about itself, partly also because the “Genesis” poems are in a sort of cod Anglo-Saxon, a device I’ve seen in other poems and novels in recent years. I understand why: to convey antiquity, but there’s antiquity and antiquity, and Stone Age man (or dog) talking Old English doesn’t quite feel right to me, though I don’t profess to know how he could have done it instead – unless indeed he used the phonetic spelling technique he later employs in “Dog’s Final Testament”.

Some of the poems in the second part about how humans have altered dogs for their own purposes are excellent, particularly “Corinthians 13:12”, with an ending it would be wrong of me to spoil by quoting. And the fantasy of “The Rapture” uses humour to good effect:

     The land is shining
     now that it has gone to the dogs.

“The Dogs are Laughing” does a similar thing with its line My dog, why hast thou forsaken me?, playing on the famous dog/god coinage and turning its meaning, because here it is the worshipper, not the god, who has absconded.

I don’t think it always avoids the trap of anthropomorphism, eg the note of indignation in “Chihuahua”:

     You will not listen to baby talk.
     You have been called ‘teacup’ for too long,
     do not answer them, when they shout:
     Fifi, Foo-Foo, Pookie, Pumpkin or Tinkerbell.

This is surely a human point of view; the dog couldn’t care less what you call it. However, as the quotations above should make clear, this is an unusual, original and challenging collection.

Review of The Dawn of Language by Sverker Johansson, trs. Frank Perry, pub. Maclehose Press 2022

book cover

“Soon after I finished my doctorate in 1990 on the production of lepton pairs in proton collisions in a particle accelerator in Switzerland, I discovered something that was more exciting than physics: language.”

Well, heaven knows I would never argue about that conclusion…. Having recovered from this false start as a particle physicist, Johansson became an MPhil in linguistics and began researching the origins of language, in particular why such a complex spoken language evolved among humans (and indeed changed their own physiology in the process) when it did not in other species. This is a contentious subject which many in the field will not go near, because it necessarily involves much speculation. Those who do indulge in it have argued hugely and sometimes acrimoniously with each other’s theories.

Johansson outlines and discusses all these theories, from those supposing grammar to be an innate brain function that evolved all on its own in one go, to those who see it as a social and communicative function that developed in tandem with the co-operative instinct of humans and over a considerable time. He discusses them with suitable academic detachment (though I have to say, after reading this, or indeed many books on linguistics, you’d be hard put to it not to conclude that Chomsky’s views on the innate grammar module are round the bend). I don’t actually want to go into his arguments and conclusions in detail, which would be a bit like giving away the plot of a detective story. Suffice it to say that I found his method of summarising the conclusions of each chapter in italics at the end very helpful; also his knack of finding illuminating analogies when talking about such things as brain function, which don’t form any part of most readers’ knowledge. One great example of this is when he describes a major difference between the brains of other primates, as compared with humans and birds:

“Primates are completely incapable of imitating sounds. This is largely because they have only indirect control of their vocal tract. In mammals these organs are normally controlled by a particular little brain module deep down in the older parts of the brain. That module is pre-programmed with the normal sounds of the animal and affords no scope for making new sounds. […] In people – and in songbirds and other animals that need to use sounds creatively as well – new ways of making sounds have developed […] there are a number of nerve cables that circumvent the sound module and link the conscious brain and the vocal organs directly. You could liken this to an old computer equipped with a very basic sound card that can only produce a number of standard sounds. It might seem as if the obvious thing to do would be to upgrade to a better sound card with greater range. What evolution has managed instead, in both humans and songbirds, is to let the old sound card remain in place while running cables past it directly from the CPU to the speaker outlet.”

He also, necessarily, uses many examples and analogies from other species, and from human children. This is unavoidable, because the way children learn anything has implications for how humans originally learned it, and I can see why he uses his own children as research material; they are after all his closest source. But I’d rather he anonymised it a bit; “my daughter” somehow sounds more professional and less anecdotal than using her name, and I certainly didn’t need to know that he had named his unfortunate son Faramir.

I think he also, in his preoccupation with why our language abilities are so far developed beyond those of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, rather skates around the problem of marine mammals, who are also clearly a long way in advance of chimps. And while I am sure he is right about the basic unsociability of chimps, they do sometimes hunt in packs, which surely requires both forethought and communication to some degree.

But this is a very readable foray into a subject that could have been made far less so. I like the way it raises questions we seldom ask about things we thought we knew – eg, if the purpose of language is to communicate information, then the listener, who learns something new, benefits more than the speaker, so why do we all prefer talking to listening? It was also fascinating to see how human physiology has altered to accommodate speech, sometimes with attendant drawbacks in other areas. I can’t imagine a more absorbing field of research than how we became the kind of animal we are, and speech was absolutely central to that evolution.

Review of “Woman, Captain, Rebel” by Margaret Willson, pub. Sourcebooks 2023

Asleep but weather-awake
virile goddess and crew
 - from an anonymous contemporary verse about Thuridur

This is a biography of Thuridur Einarsdottir (1777-1863), an Icelandic fishing-boat captain who also farmed, traded and acted as a guide to travellers and tourists during her long life. In her time she was renowned, especially for her seamanship (in 27 years as captain she never lost a boat or a crew member) and not long after her death, Brynjulfur Jonsson, who had known her, wrote an account of her life. But later (male) historians, while not denying her seamanship and entrepreneurial intelligence, cast her dismissively as a troublemaking, slightly comical virago – indeed while seagoing fisherwomen had been fairly common in 18th and 19th-century Iceland, in the 20th century they were pushed out and the trade became wholly male. Thuridur fell out of common knowledge, a neglect this book aims to redress.

The ”troublemaker” epithet got attached to her because of her propensity for going to law to secure not only her rights but those of others she felt had been mistreated; she would not put up with injustice or bullying, of which there was a lot about in the dark days when Iceland was ruled fairly contemptuously by Denmark and seen as a sort of primitive colony. During Thuridur’s stint as a guide, Ida Pfeiffer, the famous 19th-century Austrian tourist, is one of her clients, and displays a typical middle-class West European superiority complex by marching straight into poor folk’s houses, without an invitation or a by-your-leave, to interrogate them on their way of life – one fairly itches to slap the woman and she is probably lucky Thuridur refrained from doing so. The reason Thuridur’s parish death record describes her, accurately, as “pauper and captain” is that she spent all her savings on a final court case to ensure that her disabled niece would receive the financial assistance she needed; she won the case, but in preventing someone else from dying a pauper she became one herself.

As for “virago”, that probably alluded to her style of dress. Most Icelandic seagoing women wore trousers at sea, for the good reason that they were a lot less cumbersome than long wool skirts, but Thuridur seems to have discarded skirts altogether except for church and grand occasions, for which she also wore a tail-coat and short top hat. There is no suggestion that she was gay; there were several men in her life and she had a child, who sadly died young. She simply seems to have preferred male attire, which considering how inconvenient female clothing was at the time is hardly surprising. Possibly many women would have, but few would have had the confidence and disregard of public opinion to go with their wishes.

Thuridur was famously “lucky” at the fishing, but less so on land.  Even though she was intelligent and enterprising, making a success of whatever she turned her hand to, something or someone always seemed to get in the way. In this she is rather like Grettir Asmundsson of the sagas, and indeed her story, with its close calls at sea, reverses of fortune and a vengeful family ghost called Mori, does read like a saga. And like them it is a page-turner; I defy anyone not to want to know what this resourceful, indomitable woman will be up to next. There is of course a long “my journey” preface, plus, at the end, “reading group notes” and an author interview, but they can all be ignored as usual, and on the plus side there are also thorough notes, a bibliography and an index. Not to mention a cracking story.

Review of The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell, by Gail Aldwin, pub. Bloodhound Books 2023

In 2014, Stephanie Brett, reporter on a local West Country newspaper, is unexpectedly made redundant, which leads her to do two things: take in a friend as lodger to make ends meet and revisit an old story, a young girl’s disappearance in 1979 which was never solved. Stephanie, then a trainee, had made mistakes in her reporting of the case; also the missing girl and her older sister had been acquaintances of hers at school, so the case still nags at her mind. She decides to take it up again and her old boss suggests she make a podcast for local radio. Initially she jibs at the thought of yet more change in her life – “stuck in the rhythms and routines of the newspaper, she didn’t want a change” but decides to go along with it for want of anything better.

From here on, the story develops along two lines and in two separate times, Stephanie’s enquiries and interviews for the podcast, narrated in close-third person, and the thoughts of Carolyn Russell, the disappeared girl, in the months before she went missing. This strand is told in first person by Carolyn herself, an interesting narrative choice given that the reason her disappearance was never solved was that nobody knew what was really going on in her head, or indeed her life, at the time. The reader, therefore, for most of the time knows more than Stephanie does. At one point, in fact, one of Stephanie’s interviewees tells what we already know must be a lie, but Stephanie has no means of knowing it.

We also sometimes know more than Carolyn does, for her narrative is that of a sixteen-year-old girl who is apt to interpret things amiss, particularly when she deludes herself that her maths teacher is in love with her. The way a teenage girl thinks and talks is very convincingly mirrored in the writing – “A group of girls had gone nearer to the fence but we didn’t want to get close. They were the sort who knotted their shirt ends into a bra top and showed off their flat stomachs while they sunbathed.” Nowhere is this thought process better handled than in Carolyn’s fantasy about the unfortunate Mr Simmons:

“I stood there watching him miraculously correct the blinds and they slung into place. As he adjusted the strips to shade the room, I knew I had to act quickly or miss my chance.

‘I’ll get my things.’ Dropping down to pick up my bag, I rose again and bumped his arm. He acted startled and pulled away. I knew it was a little joke between us.”

If much of Carolyn’s life is a secret from others (including the reader, for we shall find by the end that we knew less about her than we thought, or rather, we dismissed some clues that did not seem to fit the image we were forming of her), Stephanie’s is the reverse. I did occasionally wonder if we were being told more of the minutiae of her life than we needed to know – “Stephanie allowed plenty of time to arrive at the meeting with Janine. Trains ran twice an hour and she knew Warren town centre was a fair walk from the station. With twenty minutes to spare, Stephanie took a detour around the streets. When she reached the church, she sat on a bench and appraised the squat grey building. The origins were Norman, but the addition of a porch and a tower made it appear quirky.” None of this actually turns out to be relevant, and so much scene-setting can slow the pace down. There is, however, admittedly a case to be made for stressing the contrast between Stephanie and Carolyn; Stephanie herself sometimes sees parallels between them but in most ways they couldn’t be less alike, and Carolyn would not notice the church or recall the first thing about it.

The other minor quibble I have is with a stylistic tic whereby sentences often start with a participial phrase – in this paragraph four out of eight sentences do so:

“Sitting at my desk, I fanned the index cards from Sim and admired the lovely pastel colours. I tossed the yellow ones aside, needing no reminder of Mr Canary. Closing my eyelids, I blocked out the image of him leering towards me. Not for a moment had I imagined he’d try something on. Thank God I’d escaped in time. Squeezing my eyes tighter, I extinguished the memory and my heart settled to a regular beat. It was a relief he hadn’t returned to the shop since. He was an utter waste of space compared to my one true love. Choosing a red biro from the pot, I gripped the end and prepared to write.”

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this device, it becomes predictable and occasionally the opening phrase, separated from its governing noun, dangles comically: “Formerly a tobacconist shop, Beth was the talented baker who put the café at the top of TripAdvisor reviews.”

Since the plot hangs on a mystery, it would be wrong to reveal too many details. Enough to say that it’s definitely a page-turner, not just because we want to know what happened to Carolyn but because we are also invested in Stephanie and whether she will succeed in turning her life around via the podcast. Interestingly enough, this turns out to depend less on whether she can solve the mystery than on whether she can put it, and other aspects of her life, behind her. The characters are well drawn, particularly Beth, the lodger, Doug, Stephanie’s ex-boss and Mrs Russell, Carolyn’s mother. The central investigation is always gripping and its final result a refreshing variant on the usual “missing girl” plot.