Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 8

Review of Coldharbour by Kathryn Daszkiewicz, pub. Shoestring Press 2022

Names are fluid.

Several of these poems pick up on the names we give things and follow them down unexpected paths. There are places called Coldharbour (or Kaltenherberg) all over England and Germany; they are generally in forests or on hills and derive from a Saxon phrase meaning shelter without hospitality – they tended to be semi-ruined Roman buildings where the benighted traveller could find a roof, but no fire or food. In the title poem, it’s possibly their forest location that further suggests the fanciful derivation “col d-arbre”. The people of the poem are walking in woods, uphill, towards a place that may or may not be there, and which may refer to the fortification of which the Coldharbour gate in the Tower of London is the only remnant:

 You think you know the way –
 that there’s a tower somewhere at the top.

The poem in fact is haunted by loss and ruin, its journey hampered by terrain, darkness and unfamiliarity:

 we are walking
 toward woods I do not know
 uphill into a gloaming
 the day before the year turns

This journey through dark forests and towards a tower has a clear folk-tale aspect, and is not the only time folk-tale and myth underpin these poems. To those who object to the presence of myth in modern poems, I would say only that a “myth” is a story that has been around for a very long time, and the reason for its survival is that it generally says something of universal and lasting resonance. It is, as the late Mr Carson used to say, the way you tell them that matters; whether you can give them a turn that speaks to modern readers. In “Tam Lin”, the partner of a man having a nightmare finds herself holding on to him “like the Scots maid” who, in the ballad, holds on to her bewitched lover as he

 translates
 to beast
 to newt
 to snake
 to bear
 to hot iron bar
 breaking the spell
 to ferry you across

that liminal space
the bridge between your demons
and a dawn.

One of the myth-based poems here is called “The Myths We Make Our Own”, which seems as good a definition as any of how poets use mythology. This poem uses the myth of Demophoon and his deserted lover Phyllis, and intimations of betrayal and abandonment haunt the whole collection. Sometimes the betrayer is human; “Meres Knoll” reads like a dark meditation on a relationship that loses its attraction:

 What’s joined together second time around
 is always loose. There is no
 going back.

The creation of a mood via the build-up of small details in this poem – the cemetery, the stream “dammed with thrown stones and sticks” is impressive, not a word wasted.

But just as often, the betrayer is something more elemental: illness, dementia, the false traytour Deeth. It can even be nature, of which there is a lot in Daszkiewicz’s work. She is very aware of the natural world, but not in any idyllic way; the teeming plantlife in her poems can be as menacing as any other element. In “Cuckoo Pint” “branches of torn oak/grope at the thatch”. In “The Lovers”

 Cypress and holly arch in green union
 of leaf and branch and twig above their heads

but at the same time

 opportunists - bindweed, snaking ivy
 creep through the failing fence; last autumn’s
 leaves lie brown along the sides although it’s nearly Beltane;
 nearby, the broken eggshell of a dove.

The awareness, indeed constant presence, of the natural world in this collection manifests as a palette of bright colours, but the dark ground on which they are enamelled is what gives it depth and heft.

Review of The Thirteenth Angel by Philip Gross, pub Bloodaxe 2022

                                                      curlew
      cut from the sky, its long cry
      flying on without it
(“Smatter”)

As we see from the above, Mr Gross is still heavily into mortality, as he was in Love Songs of Carbon. But he has also been getting more and more interested in the metaphysical, the things-behind-things, as we saw in Between the Islands. And whatever his other prevailing interests, his fascination with word-patterning remains constant, witness in the above lines the alliteration of “curlew” and “cut” and the internal rhymes of “sky”-“cry”-“fly” and the half-rhyme of “long” and “flying”, all in the space of twelve words.

There are several sequences here, and the sequence form is used not narratively but rather in the way of someone circling an object to see it from all possible angles. Particularly in “Smatter”, this produces a series of cinematic moments, brief but sharp and sometimes throwing up unexpected connections with each other (it seems possible, for instance, that the protagonists of the “Alexandru” and “Alice” sections collide literally and fatally), but often random. At the start of this sequence, I thought it might be a journey-of-life poem, with a man’s life being seen through the metaphor of a road journey. By the end I was sure that either my first thought was quite wrong, or the metaphor had wholly taken over from its subject and become the subject: poem as road movie. The flitting from moment to moment, from human to animal, death to service station to mist to road-noise, is hypnotic; the movement is automatic, almost somnambulistic (except for being so sharply observed and formulated in language) and one feels like the driver who may soon be asleep at the wheel. It becomes, in the end, a meditation on transient existence. In this section we are still recognisably in a car:

      A meditation on the moment: visualise
      this space in the air, a moment after
      your own passing through it, the moment before
      the car behind you fills that space precisely,
      somebody else’s eyes blink, thinking
      this same thought, that moment: here
      I am am I am here.

But when, near the end, this thought recurs, it has become dehumanised, abstracted; it is more recognisably Lucretius and the Greek atomists theorising existence:

      The road is a verb, as electricity

      is all verb, not the individual
      atoms, nouns, you/me, our
      indecisions, alternating currents
      switching to and fro.

Gross’s observation, and his ability to encapsulate it in often unexpected language and imagery, are as sharp as ever. The penthouse that might be

       a reach for the sky
      or a flight from the ground
        (“Nocturne: The Information”).

 If I have one quibble about the language use, it is that he could trust his readers a bit more. In “Porcelain”, the idea of the one-time super-continent Pangaea as a piece of broken crockery and the seas between its fragments as kintsugi is a beautiful fancy; I just wish he didn’t feel a need to explain the word kintsugi:

      or what decadent
      aesthetic shivered it, setting the sea
      in the rifts as kintsugi,
      as glittering gold.

And in the line from “Smatter”, “as if this was a bardo, a between-life”, I think again he could leave out the explanatory phrase and trust the reader to either know the word or be willing to look it up.

I haven’t yet said much about the angels who haunt this collection. They too seem to be essentially moments, transitory but pointing beyond themselves:

       Like a lens. What you see
      is not it but through it, world refracted, clarified.
       (“A Glassy Thing”)

This makes it all the more interesting that the “thirteenth angel” of the title poem turns out to be “the world itself”. They also seem to be intimations of mortality, of the “nothing” toward which everything mortal is headed.

      To know that one is late
      in the day, to feel it slipping away

      with the sun, after its brilliant inquisitions
      into the matter of things
       (“A Latter-Day Angel”)


This is a very cerebral, thoughtful collection, though not without moments of humour.

Review of The Marchioness of Peru vol 1 by Creina Francis, pub. 2022

“In London, Bennie enjoyed dining with Peru’s Consul to the Court of St James, Oscar Victor Salamon. He was a small, swarthy man with a cynical charm, permanently scarred in his inner being by a short sojourn at an English public school. He lived in a service apartment whose food he despised, but he had a solution for his guests, “First I give them an absinthe, and then they do not know what they are eating.”

This quotation encapsulates several features of The Marchioness of Peru: family memories, a certain exotic flavour and an eye and ear for humour and eccentricity. We have here the first volume of a family memoir, centring on the author’s grandmother but radiating out from her to both her ancestors and descendants – she is used quite satisfyingly as the fulcrum of the narrative. She was a widely travelled person, as were other members of her family (one of her sisters was christened Korea because that was the coast her parents happened to be sailing by when she was born), and this volume mostly concerns her time in England, New York and Peru. The next promises her later adventures in Africa.

Bennie (Ethel Burford, née Harnden, but she did not feel “Ethel” suited her) was an interesting woman who lived in interesting times. This memoir has been constructed partly from surviving letters and diaries and the memories of other relatives, but mostly from conversations with Bennie herself near the end of her life. She was clearly a great reminiscer, but not an organised one; she would talk for hours but “could not be brought to sit down and coherently write the story of her life from beginning to end”. This may actually be just as well: most people’s lives are more rambling than coherent, and the method of composition has given this memoir a conversational tone that sets it off well.

Her grandfather was a ship-owner; her father a ship’s captain whose wife often sailed with him, so it was unsurprising their children also had the travel bug and now have descendants all over the world. “For the first eighty years of Bennie’s life”, the author remarks matter-of-factly, “she was always going somewhere by ship.” After a childhood in the north of England, she spent some of her young womanhood in New York, but the real focus of this volume is her time in Mexico and Peru, as the wife of Bill Burford, an electrical engineer who worked in the oil industry. They had married in 1910 and spent most of the next quarter-century in South America, mainly Peru.

I don’t want to give away too much about the actual events of her life; suffice it to say that three things emerge very clearly: the characters of the protagonists, the manners and values of the time, and the author’s writing style. Both Bennie and Bill, Bennie especially, had been somewhat emancipated by their travels from the insularity of early 20th-century England, and this openness of outlook served them well in a strange country, particularly when Bennie developed worrying symptoms and decided to consult a local doctor rather than the procession of drink-and-drug-addicted incompetents who comprised the British medical establishment in the oilfields. The couple did not share the prejudice that made it “unthinkable for a Mexican doctor to examine a white woman”. In other ways, though, Bennie was ill-suited to life as a company wife, since she got on better with men than women and had no desire to join in the culture of tennis-playing and tea parties that constituted social life.

What one might call the period flavour comes over very strongly. Time and again the reader is brought up short by the difference between those days and our own, for instance when Bill’s sister marries and her period unexpectedly starts on the wedding night; “The virgin groom […] was incensed. He actually believed that women came on heat as predictably as dogs, and swore that his new wife’s family had played a deliberate trick on him.”

But perhaps what makes the greatest impression is the author’s sharply observational, laconic style. Describing an incidental character: “He was a short bow-legged man, with a fine handsome face and a hard business brain that caused him, for professional reasons, to worship in several churches.” Or when Bill, taking advantage of the manager’s absence, “built on a large extension which was a most modern, efficient kitchen, and an eyesore for miles around”. It sounds rather like the way Bennie herself might have spoken or written, which in the circumstances would not be surprising. This memoir was written mainly for the members of a widely distributed family and was privately printed. But because it deals with unusual individuals in eventful times, it would interest most readers, so we may be glad that it’s also available on Kindle here.

The impetus to write this book came from a family conversation about the fact that Bennie had destroyed much of her correspondence with Bill. Frank, her son, argues that this was her right, but his daughter disagrees:

“Look how interesting the letters are between Josephine and Napoleon! If anybody had worried about their privacy then, we wouldn’t have them now.”

Other family members object that “Bill and Bennie were not Napoleon and Josephine!” whereupon the author has a sudden realisation; “But they were. To us they were our own personal family equivalents of Napoleon and Josephine.” There is a lot of truth in this, and though it does help that they led unusual lives, it is a reminder that all personal memoir is part of the story of its time, and to be treasured accordingly. I shall certainly look forward to the second volume.

The "needing to be liked" trap

(and, perhaps, a way to avoid it)

I was chuckling over the Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (first published 1899) of Capt. Harry Graham the other day. You'll recall that this is the chap who writes polished little epigrams in which the speaker or protagonist reacts to some awful tragedy with inappropriate levity, self-interest or indifference. Like this:

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell, --
We must buy a filter.

Or this:

O'er the rugged mountain's brow
Clara threw the twins she nursed,
And remarked, "I wonder now
Which will reach the bottom first?"

There are many,  many more; see here.  Thinking about them, two things came to mind. There have been many imitators, and nearly all fall well short. This is partly because they often don't match his metrical polish, but there is something else too — they hardly ever go far enough. When I read the Rhymes to my students and got them to write their own, I noticed that although they loved the transgressive frisson the poems gave them, they were hesitant to reproduce it themselves by imitating Graham's pose of brutal indifference. And nothing less will do; you can't just be vaguely catty or ever so slightly daring. You have to go far enough to create that momentary shock.

And that made me think of something else: the trap I think so many poets fall into of Needing To Be Liked. Poets have much in common with comedians, who also fall into this trap. In their case it blunts their edge and makes them sentimental (Robin Williams being a good example). With poets, it tends to manifest in an anxiety to come across as worthy and right-thinking, especially if they use the first person a lot, and a fear of uttering any sentiment that might shock or annoy a similarly right-thinking, liberal audience.

It's easy to see why they feel this way.  In the first place, readers and even many reviewers have an awful habit of supposing the word "I" in a poem means the poet,  and is uttering his or her own thoughts. Secondly, there do seem to be quite a lot of finger-wagging thought police about: I recall a review of a collection which included a poem in which a child was playing with a toy gun. The reviewer was indignant that the poet had neglected to include an explicit condemnation of "war toys", apparently oblivious to the fact that this had nothing to do with what the poem was actually about. Another poet caused a kerfuffle on social media, a few years back, by imagining Hitler as a young boy. Myself I would have thought it interesting to speculate on how a virtual tabula rasa turns into a monster, but no: seemingly some thought the mere choice of such subject matter automatically made one a fascist.

But the fact that we may be misunderstood by careless readers (some critics among them) does not mean poets should imitate spaniels, tongues hanging out for audience approval.  Even kind, liberal-minded people have dark thoughts sometimes, and poets should be ready both to acknowledge this in themselves and to make their readers think about it (as, for instance, Frederick Seidel does, not without getting into some trouble for it).

And in a small way, I think the sardonic captain can help us here. If you teach creative writing, introduce the Ruthless Rhymes to your students and get them to try writing their own. When they hold back, as they will at first, encourage them to be more transgressive, to see how far they can raise the shock quotient before their audience says "oh no, that's too much".

At least it might get them out of the habit of needing to be liked.

Review of My Pen is The Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, pub. MacLehose Press 2022

Now they say the Taliban has changed. But how could they change without reading a book? If a person never reads a book, how can he change?
 (“Blossom”, by Zainab Akhlaqi)

Shaherbano, the girl who utters this magnificent contempt for ignorance, will die in an attack on a girls’ school, which the Taliban have targeted because they, like her, know the power of education, though unlike her they also fear it. I don’t think I have ever read a book that breathes such a passion for learning as this collection of stories. They come from both urban and rural women all over Afghanistan, written in Dari and Pashto, collated by the organisation Untold, translated into English by Afghan women and men, at a time when the Taliban were busy repossessing Kabul. One story was hand-written, photographed and sent via a chain of WhatsApp messages.

Unsurprisingly, there is a considerable undercurrent of bitterness and irony in many of them, as when the protagonist of Marie Bamyani’s “The Black Crow of Winter” reflects: “If only I had a relative who worked as a government official, he would have helped us. I couldn’t think of anyone. Poor people have poor friends.” The narrator of Sharifa Pasun’s “What Are Friends For?” is similarly acerbic: “Thank god, I said to myself, that the sun is not someone’s property, otherwise I’d have to pay rent for that as well.”

Yet these authors are also keenly aware of the small sensual pleasures of the world around them, its sights, sounds, smells, tastes: “The sound of the azan broke through the dark blue and orange atmosphere of the evening. The smell of onion and tomatoes filled the alley, where you could guess what each neighbour was having for dinner” (“The Worms”; Fatima Saadat). There is a strong feeling that escaping to another country, though it might solve many problems, would leave them with a terrible sense of loss. They also value individual acts of kindness, female solidarity, the fellow-feeling that keeps people going. It can’t be denied that a great many of Afghan women’s problems stem from Afghan men.  Yet there are allies too, as we see from the male students refusing to take their university exams in solidarity with their sisters, and there is a remarkable sense of balance in these stories. For every cruel husband in these stories, there is a loving one, for every father who does not value daughters, another who does. Indeed, these authors are forgiving enough sometimes to take a male protagonist and think their way into his head, notably in “D for Daud”, where Anahita Gharib Nawaz uses the voice of a teacher who falsely confesses to a crime to protect his student, and “I Don’t Have The Flying Wings”, where Batool Haidari movingly inhabits the consciousness of a young man who longs to be a woman.

War and violence naturally figure, in an often chillingly matter-of-fact way: “Oh God’s mercy! Who have they shot this time?” (“Haska’s Decision”, by Rana Zurmaty). So do suicide bombers, and it is notable that these are portrayed less as fighters or martyrs than as mentally disturbed people, so damaged by an unloved or low-achieving past that they have lost all normal feelings of humanity. They are to be abhorred and pitied, never admired.

The actual quality of the writing is very high. These are subtle, accomplished writers who deserve a wide readership. I think there was just one story where I thought an object was being used symbolically in too obvious a way. One testimony to their quality is that although they are deeply rooted in their own time and place and bring it vividly alive, the stories go beyond it: their concerns are universally relevant. Reading Fatema Khavari’s “Ajah”, in which the achievement of a group of women astounds their menfolk, I found myself humming the union anthem “solidarity for ever”, while in “Bad Luck”, by Atifa Mozaffari, in which a woman makes a marriage of necessity, believing her real love to be dead or exiled, I recognised an old Scottish folk motif whereby a girl marries an old man, for her family’s sake, after her sweetheart is apparently lost at the fishing. The similarity shows not that “Auld Robin Gray” is well known in Afghanistan, which would much surprise me, but that love, loss and compromise are the same the world over.

At the end of “Bad Luck”, the protagonist wastes no time in useless regrets; things are as they are, and one must make the best of them. “She no longer wondered if Ali had been thinking about her all these years. She had to worry about what to cook for dinner and how to convince her husband to remove his artificial leg at night.” The women in these stories are not passive victims of fate; they are determined to have some agency in their own lives, however circumscribed this may be by men and authority. They are brimful of small schemes to improve things; a mother scrimps enough cash to buy her son a lollipop, a widow avoids remarriage by starting a biscuit-making enterprise. Not all their schemes work; cruelty and bigotry are powerful enemies. But the determination that shines through the protagonists is the determination which caused these authors to write down and publish their thoughts, sometimes even under their own names, a piece of courage that frankly astounds me. We must hope, not only that they will not suffer for it, but that one day they will be able to be published in their own land and language.  But in the meantime, enjoy this vivid, powerful, entertaining collection. The Taliban, poor ignoramuses, don’t know what they are missing.

Blog reviews 2022

Here's my annual list of the reviews I've done this year, with links.

Poetry

Where the Birds Sing Our Names (anthology), ed Tony Curtis pub. Seren 2021
Veeve by Christine de Luca, pub. Mariscat Press 2021
Notes on Water by Amanda Dalton, pub. Smith Doorstop Books 2022
We’re All In It Together (anthology), eds Stewart, Ely, Campbell, pub. Grist 2022
As If To Sing by Paul Henry, pub. Seren 2022
Feeling Unusual by Ann Drysdale, pub. Shoestring Press 2022
Rock, Bird Butterfly and Old Friends by Hannah Lowe, pub. Hercules Editions 2022
A Pair of Three by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman Books 2022

Novels

Darkness in the City of Light by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2021
The Artist’s Daughter by Caz Eddy, independently published 2022
The Crescent Moon Fox by Metin Murat, pub. Armida Publications 2022
The Bones of Barry Knight by Emma Musty, pub. Legend Press 2022
The Last House by R G Adams, pub. Quercus 2022
Rock-Bound by Jessie M E Saxby, pub. Northus Shetland Classics 2022

Non-fiction

Letters on Shetland by Peter Jamieson, pub. Northus Shetland Classics 2022
Ravenna by Judith Herrin, [pub. Penguin 2021
Georgian Harlots and Whores by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword Books 2022
The Decline of Magic by Michael Hunter, pub. Yale University Press 2020
Dutch Light by Hugh Aldersey Williams, pub. Picador 2020
Venice: Discarded Daughter by Marsha Fabio, pub. Newman Springs Publishing 2021
Waves Across the South by Sujit Sivasundaram, pub. William Collins 2020
A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum by Emma Southon, pub. Oneworld 2020
The Story of China by Michael Wood, pub. Simon & Schuster UK 2020
In Bed With The Georgians by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword 2016

Review of In Bed With The Georgians, by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword 2016

I’ve already reviewed Mike Rendell’s more recent Georgian Harlots and Whores here, and you will not be surprised to learn that this covers some of the same ground, but it is far more wide-ranging. Georgian Harlots concentrated, as its title implies, on the ladies at the top of the Georgian sex trade and how they exploited their celebrity. The subtitle of this volume is “Sex, Scandal and Satire in the 18th Century” and it focuses not only on the racy ladies but on various more or less immoral Georgian gentlemen – a word fairly inappropriate to some of them, like Lord Baltimore, rapist and kidnapper, Field-Marshal Earl Ligonier, notorious paedophile, and Colonel Charteris, fraud and serial rapist with, as Rendell tartly remarks, no redeeming features that anyone could see. These appalling excuses for men relied on their birth and money to save them from the law, which it did, but they were ruined in society and often had to seek refuge abroad, which was largely due to the fearlessness of the Georgian press.

The role of the press, in fact, produces some of this book’s most fascinating moments. On the one hand, the laws against libel, particularly seditious libel, were more stringent than now – it was not, as it now is, a defence to prove that what you had written was true, hence you could be imprisoned for calling the Prince Regent a fat debauched spendthrift, which he undeniably was. Yet these vicious laws in no way appear to have dampened either the propensity for muck-raking or the sheer courage of Georgian journalists and cartoonists. The elegant savagery of Gillray’s cartoons (there are several here, for the volume is lavishly illustrated in colour), and the obituaries of royal personages printed in respectable papers, eg the Spectator on William IV: “His late Majesty, though at times a jovial and, for a king, an honest, man, was a weak, ignorant, commonplace sort of person” or the Times on George IV; “there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king”, would lead one to wonder why our own press is usually so much more mealy-mouthed when it comes to the great and supposedly good, reserving most of their savagery for those less able to hit back.

This book deals with the whole of the sex trade, from high-end courtesans like the ladies of Georgian Harlots to the virtual prisoners in brothels, hapless, exploited and often alarmingly young, for even though the age of consent was then only 12, many Georgian men still seem to have preferred their partners younger. It’s a moot point whether these women, who at least had some assurance of food and a bed, were worse off than the freelance street-walkers known as “threepenny stand-ups”. Except at the top, there was little romantic about the trade, and it is unsurprising that the women involved in it so often took to drink or drugs to palliate their existence. Talking of which, I might take issue with Rendell’s evident dislike of the “moralising” in Hogarth’s prints. Yes, maybe they are preachy, and sometimes too obviously so. But Hogarth may have been hoping to reach not just an educated audience but one that needed “messages” spelled out, and anyway he was a good egg, pouring money into Captain Coram’s Foundling Hospital to rescue the sort of infants the kindly captain had been appalled to see discarded on London’s rubbish heaps.

The illustrations in this book, and the background to them given in the text, are one of its best features. Another is Rendell’s ability to unearth the sort of odd fascinating facts that enliven any narrative and stick in the memory. I knew about molly houses, but jelly houses? These were not in themselves houses of assignation, but cafes where one might assess possible partners for later (pick-up joints, as it were) and yes, one did also eat jelly there. I may never connect that comestible with children’s parties again…

Review of The Story of China by Michael Wood, pub. Simon & Schuster UK 2020

I saw this book last year in the local bookshop and reflected that I knew next to nothing about the history of China. I’d read Confucius’s Analects, some Tang poets and had vague memories of the unspeakable Mao; in between (and before, but in my ignorance I had no idea how much “before” there would be) was a blank. This seemed unconscionable, given that we were looking at one of the world's great civilizations, so I bought the book and have never regretted it.

The title, “story” rather than “history”, is very deliberate. Though it is a serious scholarly history with all the necessary critical apparatus like notes and index, it is one of those history books you can read many times over, and in huge enjoyable chunks, both because of his writing style and because of his way of coming at the subject. Whenever possible, he gives us accounts of, and by, named individuals, and nothing else can so bring history alive. “Police Procedures in the Qin Dynasty” just isn’t in it with Wood’s account of how Magistrate Chu of Liyang, in the year 242 BC, goes about solving a murder case.

The reason Wood can do this, of course, is the amount of written material from truly ancient times; it sometimes seems as if while Europe was inventing the cart, China was inventing the civil service. Literacy appeared very early, certainly from about 1200 BC and probably earlier, in the Shang dynasty, and both they and the dynasties that succeeded them demonstrated a positive mania for keeping written records of who was doing what and where. Historians of course will bless them for it, but at the time, though it must in many ways have facilitated good government, the main purpose of all this documentation was probably to facilitate control. Over and over, it becomes apparent that these are a people who have often been far more willing than Europeans to cede individual freedom in exchange for order.

One of many Western misconceptions about China which Wood demolishes is that of insularity and resistance to change and outside influence. Possibly this notion grew up in the nineteenth century, when outside influences from the West mostly took the form of bullying, but Wood’s accounts of intrepid Chinese travellers in the Han and Tang eras, and of cosmopolitan cities like the Tang capital Chang’an, clearly show a society anything but insular or hostile to outsiders, though as in any society there were periods of introspection and reaction, notably in the fourteenth century after the Mongol occupation. But in 635 AD, a Syrian Christian monk arrived in Chang’an for audience with Emperor Taizong, who ordered the scriptures to be translated for the imperial library, authorised the building of a church and issued a proclamation beginning “Right principles have no invariable name, holy men have no invariable station; teachings are established in accordance with the values of their own regions and with the object of benefitting the people at large”. As Wood drily remarks, “it is hard to imagine a Daoist or Buddhist embassy arriving in Constantinople in 635 being allowed to build a temple in such an open-handed spirit”.

Taizong was an interesting character in his own right, but it is one of the many virtues of this book that it does not focus on emperors, aristocrats and warlords to the exclusion of the ordinary folk who actually make up a nation and a history. He is particularly careful not to emulate the many male historians who have managed to airbrush women out of the picture. His evocation of a culture includes the animal-loving ninth-century civil servant Wang Renyu ruminating on the social and familial instincts of his pet monkey, Magistrate Chu combing the market for stolen property, the fourteenth-century poet Zheng Yunduan, imagining herself inside painted landscapes she can never visit in reality, crippled by her bound feet and the conventions that keep her indoors, the otherwise unknown diarist Zhang Daye, describing the horrors of his flight as a child from the Taiping rebels in the 1860s, and many more. The book is copiously and beautifully illustrated, but in some ways the most telling illustrations are these pen-portraits of individuals he uses to zoom in, as it were, on moments in a long and fascinating story. At one point, Wood describes (and also includes in the illustrations) the twelfth-century scroll Festival on the River, a 20-foot hand-painted panorama of everyday life in Kaifeng around 1120:

“Around us is bustling city life […] before us is a world of teashops and wine bars, barbers and boatmen, physicians and fortune-tellers. […] We pass Wang’s Funeral Store, hung with paper horses, flower arrangements and other funeral offerings. Further along the street are tea houses and bakeries and a huge restaurant decked out with flags and banners. There’s a sesame pancake stand under a big umbrella with hot pancakes waiting on the tray, just as any traveller in China would see today. Soon our stroll brings us to the banks of the Bian River, which carries cargo and passenger boats right into the middle of the city […] At the wharves there are boats unloading stone, timber and building materials, a camel caravan enters the gates; in the travellers’ inns and teahouses, diners crowd around the tables.”

In essence, this book is a verbal equivalent of the scroll, extended to cover a far greater land area and several millennia.

Review of A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum by Emma Southon, pub. Oneworld

It isn’t often I fail to finish a book, especially on a topic that interests me. But the style of this one was such an irritating mixture of childish, chatty, patronising and potty-mouthed that I just couldn’t live with it.

It’s about violent crime in ancient Rome and I had bought it as a present for a fan of Roman history (and foolishly didn’t read it myself beforehand). And yes, the title clearly indicated that it was “popular” history, but its cover also called it, on the authority of people like Sarah Perry, BBC History magazine and the Wall Street Journal, “scholarly” and “erudite”. I assumed, therefore, that it would be written in normal literate English, albeit with more contractions than your average scholarly history. I didn’t expect to find phrases like the following (my italics):

“we can yada yada yada the lead-up to Tiberius Gracchus”
“He went Full Centrist Dad to be honest”
“but it was still a bit like the Archbishop of Canterbury going full dark no stars”

What does that last one even mean? Or indeed Full Centrist Dad? I have no idea. It was also soon apparent that the author had a very low opinion of her readers’ intelligence and attention span. Sentences like the following are everywhere: “I’m sorry but it involves a lot of politics and chat about land reform policies and it’s awful. We can get through this together; I believe in us”. Only she clearly doesn’t, or she wouldn’t be so damn insulting.

What is worse, and what the back-cover blurb really should have made clear, there’s quite a lot of vulgar and offensive language, which actually rather upset the person I bought it for. Nobody is annoyed if they can be “p-d off”; nobody makes a mess of something if they can “f-ck  up”. It all reminded me of those children’s books written by (or ghosted for) celebs, which talk down to their young readers by larding the story with the kind of words five-year-olds snigger at.

Why someone with a PhD in ancient history should want to write in this look-at-me-being-trendy style is the question. I can only assume the idea is to “popularise” the subject and bring it to a wider audience. But while trying to do this, one may chance to alienate the audience one already has, and for this dedicated history fan, who speaks standard English and can take an interest in politics, it quickly became incredibly tiresome. It also strikes me that, given the way popular argot dates, parts of it may well soon be as unintelligible to the target audience as they now are to me. I have heard it argued that one should not review a book without having read the whole of it. Say, then, that I am reviewing the reason I couldn’t get more than a few chapters into it.

Review of Waves Across the South, by Sujit Sivasundaram, pub. William Collins 2020

This is a history of the “age of revolutions”, ie from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, but centred on events around the Indian and Pacific oceans. “By looking to the forgotten quarter of the Indian and Pacific oceans, the intent is to turn the story of the dawn of our times inside out. It is to insist on the critical significance of the peoples and places in this oceanic tract in shaping the age of revolutions and so our present”.

It follows that the book deals with many events and places which get at best cursory treatment in Western-centric studies of the time, and this in itself cannot fail to be absorbing. His account of the enthusiasm with which most of the population of Mauritius embraced the news of the French Revolution is most enlightening. The colonists were all for the abolition of the monarchy: Henri de Macnémara, the Irish commander of the French fleet in the Indian Ocean (!), made the mistake of sticking to his royalist beliefs and was beheaded. But local enthusiasm waned considerably when they heard the new French government had abolished slavery, which they decided wouldn’t do at all.

He is also good on the way different cultures fail to understand each other. There is somehow a grim inevitability about how, wishing to teach convicts on Norfolk Island how to process flax, the British authorities imported two Māori men to teach them the art, unaware that it was Māori women who worked flax. In Tonga, Europeans were puzzled by a difference in value systems; “objects were not sold and did not retain a value on the basis of the work that had been put into making them. Rather, value was determined primarily by the rank and status of the creator of the object.”

Perhaps most informative of all are the late chapters on how mapping, surveying and other forms of measurement relate to empire-building, and how looking at things from the perspective of the sea rather than the land changes one’s view of what is going on. There is in fact much to be learned from this book, both in the way of new facts and new perspectives on facts we thought we knew.

Now and again, I feel his interpretation of the tone of some of his sources is awry. He accuses the explorer D’Entrecasteaux of describing the women of Tonga in “heavily patronising terms” on the basis of this passage:

 “Most of the women of the class in which the chiefs belong have very good looks; their aspect is interesting, they are expressive without being flirtatious. They usually have beautiful hands, and their fingers could easily be used as models.”

 For the life of me, I see nothing patronising in these words: the language is restrained and respectful. I also think he sometimes misses tones of humour, especially in his grumpy account of how the statue of Matthew Flinders in Sydney comes to be accompanied by a model of his cat Trim: “It is partly as a result of a tribute penned by Flinders […] that his cat has been raised to this pedestal. Flinders’ tribute bears the marks of someone with too much time on his hands and is ironic and overly affected in turn. Trim appears as an astronomer and practical seaman and is said to be a cat of Indian origin. Flinders proposes that Trim is related to a cat who entered Noah’s Ark”. Yes, well, Flinders is having a laugh, isn’t he? Like many a happy ailurophile – the owners of Pangur Ban and Jeoffrey come to mind – he extols his companion in affectionate hyperbole. Quite apart from the irony of a writer who uses the overly affected word “penned” accusing another of affectation, this seems an awfully stuffy reaction. It also seems slightly unfair to accuse the municipality of Port Louis (Mauritius) of concerning itself with “mere trifles, like the case of a Mr Rendle, whose carts knocked against a suspension bridge due to bad driving”. If the safety of the bridge was being compromised, it was anything but a trifle.

As an artefact, this book shows some signs of cheeseparing (I am reading the paperback; I don’t know if there was a hardback or if it was any different). The illustrations are black and white, small and blurry; I can’t get much out of them, especially those which are poor reproductions of colour paintings. Even more seriously, the book is hard to hold or read with any comfort. Like so many modern paperbacks, it refuses to open enough to make the text on the inside of the pages easy to read, and if one tried to yank it further open, I don’t doubt, from the alarming creaking of the pages, that the binding would crack. It needs to be held open (or as open as it gets) with both hands all the time and is quite heavy, which discourages long spells of reading.

This necessarily stop-start method of reading may be why, by the end, I was not sure I had altogether followed his central argument.  He demonstrates, certainly, how the ripples of revolution, particularly that in France, spread outwards to places like Mauritius and the Cape, how authority, particularly in the person of the British, took anti-revolutionary counter-measures, and shows events and persons from an unaccustomed angle, all of which is welcome and of interest. But I’m not sure any of this amounts to “turning the story of the dawn of our times inside out”.