Martin Fone's Blog, page 223
July 5, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (238)?…
A Richard Snary
Humour, I find, is a very personal thing. What appeals to one person often leaves another unamused. Humour down the ages doesn’t seem to travel well, either. You just need to think of the cartoons in Victorian editions of Punch magazine. At best, the jokes are convoluted and elaborately contrived. At worst, they just don’t seem funny at all, certainly not worth cracking the whalebone of a corset over.
I was musing about humour after I came across a reference to a phrase which left me momentarily baffled. What was a Richard Snary? After a bit of thought, I don’t do crosswords for nothing, I had cracked it. Of course, it was a dictionary. More importantly, it was a play on words which owes its origins to as far back as the seventeenth century, at least.
The first recorded reference, albeit a variant, appeared in John Taylor’s Motto or et habeo, et careo, et curo, which was published in 1621. He wrote of the word primogenitor, “in my English Latine Richard Swary, I finde or coynd this worthy word”. The meaning in the context is crystal clear. Taylor, the self-styled water poet, was an interesting character, apprenticed to a London waterman. He was then press-ganged into the navy, seeing service at the siege of Cadiz in 1596, and on his discharge “with a lame leg” plied his trade on the Thames, collecting the wine demanded of ships by the Lieutenant of the Tower of London. After about fourteen years in around 1622, he was fired because, according to his account, he refused to buy the wine.
William Hawkins wrote what was termed a lyric play in five acts, entitled rather inelegantly Apollo shrouing composed for the schollars of the free-schoole of Hadleigh in Suffolke. The scholars performed it on February 6, 1626, Shrove Tuesday. I hope they were rewarded with pancakes afterwards. Anyway, the play contains the following piece of repartee: “I had rather…hang our great dicsnary at they heele, for a clogge to keep thee from gadding to play/ Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor Richard-snary; I care not how little I come neare them”.
Again, the sense is unequivocal. What it also suggests is that the prevailing pronunciation at the time made dictionary a trisyllabic word rather than the four syllables it is now. It is left to the inestimable Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published initially in 1785 and then revised in 1788, to give an apocryphal story as to the derivation of the joke. “A country lad”, he wrote, “having been reproved for calling persons by their Christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to shew his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary”. Collapse of stout parties.
Well it was not that funny but Dick is an abbreviation of the name Richard and once we realise that, the meaning is obvious. The trisyllabic pronunciation of dictionary hung around for a couple of centuries, at keast in the more rural parts of the country. The Shrewsbury Chronicle, in an article in its edition of November 28, 1845, entitled Dialect of the Bilston Folk. There it reports, with the same hint of disdain Shrewsbury folk still display to their eastern neighbours to this day, that “some of the better apparelled, who affect a superior style, use words which they please to term dicksnary words.” And even as late as May 5, 1905 the Devon and Exeter Gazette prints a letter from a correspondent who tells of “an ole dicksnary”.
Regrettably, I rarely use a dictionary these days but when I do, I shall delight in calling it a Richard Snary.
July 4, 2019
Motivated By Curiosity And A Desire For The Truth – Part Thirty Eight
Which city has the most bridges?
Look at a map of central Amsterdam and you cannot fail to notice a concentric ring of canals, fanning out southwards from roughly where the Centraal Station now stands. As the city grew in size and wealth in the seventeenth century, the surrounding swampland was drained, creating islets surrounded by water. The water was transformed into navigable waterways. Rather like the rings of a tree, the canal system is testament to the rate of growth of the city during its Golden Age and the zeal with which the Amsterdammers reclaimed land.
Fresh water is flushed through the canal system three times a week when a series of locks are opened. The old joke is that the average depth of a canal is made up of a metre of mud, a metre of water, and a metre of bicycles, some fifteen thousand of which are fished out each year. Although the canals are much cleaner than in yesteryear, no longer being used as a convenient repository for the city’s waste and sewerage, it is not advisable to take a dip in them. This advice, however, is not enough to deter the hardy souls who take part in the annual Amsterdam City Swim, this year scheduled to take place over a 2,000-metre course through the waterways on September 9th.
Walking through the city can be a little disconcerting. For the unwary pedestrian, navigating their way around the significant and sometimes painful obstacles posed by the host of bollards and bikes to be encountered, bridges are a positive godsend. As Amsterdam has around 100 kilometres of canals, the only easy way to get from A to B is by crossing bridges. And what a wonderful array of bridges the city boasts, coming in all shapes and sizes, some beautiful, some distinctly utilitarian. After a while you become so blasé that you barely notice that you are on a bridge. They just seem to blend into the cityscape.
The oldest bridge is the Torensluisbrug, spanning the Singel and once forming an entrance to the mediaeval city. The tower, after which it is named but long since gone, was manned by guards on the look-out for hostile invaders. The bridge’s cellars served as dungeons and were flooded at high tide, adding to the unfortunate prisoners’ misery.
For me, the most elegant of Amsterdam’s bridges is the Blauwbrug which stands on the site where a wooden, blue bridge spanned the river Amstel in the 17th century. The current bridge, built in 1883, is modelled on the Parisian bridges which were à la mode at the time. And the most iconic has to be the so-called Skinny Bridge, the Magere Brug, a typical Dutch double draw bridge which opens several times a day to allow boats pass through. These days all the bridges which open are controlled automatically. Rather enterprisingly, the now redundant bridge houses are being converted into hotel suites.
Whilst Amsterdam’s canals are well served by bridges, the river IJ, which divides the northern part of the city from the rest, is another story. There is only one single bridge spanning it, the Schellingwouderbrug, some five kilometres away from the city centre, and a tunnel, closed to cyclists and pedestrians. That it is a major shipping route explains this oddity, but it is somewhat incongruous, nonetheless.
So, is the city with the most bridges in the world Amsterdam? When I first considered this question, I thought it would have been easy to resolve. A quick internet trawl revealed that I had overlooked the claims of the German city of Hamburg. Standing on the River Elbe at its confluence with the Alster and Bille and with a profusion of streams, rivers and canals, it boasts some 2,500 bridges within its city limits, more than Amsterdam, London and Venice combined. To put it into perspective, New York and Pittsburgh, North America’s leading contenders, have just 778 and 446 respectively. That seemed to settle question quite conclusively.
I soon began to realise, however, that the question might not be quite as simple as it seems. I came across another site which confidently asserted that there were 1,753 bridges in Amsterdam. More research unearthed a Dutch website (http://www.bruggenvanamsterdam.nl/), which proved to be a veritable pontist’s paradise, a treasure trove of bridge trivia. It also caused me to consider a question I had cheerfully ignored at the outset; what is a bridge? Does it have to cross something like a road, a railway track or a piece of water? The conclusion the website came to was that it just has to bridge, doubtless the result of several hours of earnest contemplation in one of the city’s infamous coffee houses.
Be that as it may, the website confidently states that as of this year Amsterdam has some 5,172 bridges, consisting of 1,891 to which the authorities have allocated numbers, 95 in private ownership, 42 locks, 1,471 bridges or overpasses which are unnumbered and 1,673 duikers which, loosely translated, are akin to a culvert. This may well knock the German claim into a cocked hat, although I can’t help thinking we are not comparing like with like.
But the Dutch are not finished yet. They point out that the land area within Amsterdam’s city limits is less a third of that of Hamburg and so on a density basis, their city comes out on top.
So, the answer to our question is like the claim of that famous international lager, probably.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone
July 3, 2019
Book Corner – July 2019 (1)
Man and Wife – Wilkie Collins
This was Collins’ ninth published novel, published in 1870 after being serialised that year both in London in Cassell’s Magazine and in New York in Harper’s Weekly. Following on immediately after his meisterwerk, The Moonstone, did it no favours and its ability to stand the test of time has not been helped by the fact that the plot turns on a piece of legal obscurantism and that Collins was on a mission to expose what was a scandal. Too many critics have been influenced by Algernon Swinburne’s damning couplet – “What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?/ Some demon whispered – Wilkie, have a mission!” – to give the book a fair crack of the whip but I found it entertaining enough and the author’s moralising not too tendentious to be annoying.
In Scotland at the time the irregular marriage laws deemed that a couple who were of an age to be married and who had passed themselves off as married either before witnesses or in writing were indeed legally married. Anne Silvester fell victim to this legal oddity when, to save her honour as he thought, Arnold Brinkworth passed himself off as his wife in a remote tavern, thus giving the villain of the piece, Geoffery Delamayn, the opportunity to resile on his promise of marriage to Anne. That Geoffrey gets hung by this particular petard, albeit at the expense of the unfortunate Anne, is a form of rough poetic justice.
Collins, who had an unusual domestic arrangement himself with two families, writes with acerbic wit about the institution of marriage in general and the absurdities, in particular, of the situation in Scotland. Anne’s mother had also been a victim of a piece of obscure marriage legislation, the law in Ireland that allowed a husband to annul his marriage if he had converted to Catholicism within a certain period before his wedding. Inevitably, her mother’s desire that Anne doesn’t suffer her fate means that she will. We know what is coming but Collins holds the reader’s attention.
Stranger to modern eyes are Collins’ diatribes on the perils of athleticism and the mania for getting and keeping fit. As someone who will run a mile from exercise I am with him here but Geoffery Delamayn is the epitome of a muscly, sporty, fit young chap. He undertakes to represent the South, and is heavily backed in the process, in a four-mile race and undergoes a fierce training regimen, despite medical advice that he is damaging his health. Inevitably, Geoffery’s perceived mania for sporting prowess proves his undoing. It is an odd sub plot to what is a strange subject for a novel but then we are so removed from the social mores of the time that we have to run with it.
The pace of the book picks up as it reaches its conclusion and becomes almost a thriller. The odious Delamayn has found an ingenious way to kill Anne without detection, courtesy of the cook, Hester Detheridge, a truly Gothic character complete with slate upon which she writes with amazing speed, who did away with her old man in similar circumstances. Will he succeed or will Anne be rescued in time? The finale to this episode is a tad melodramatic for my taste but all ends well and Anne is able to find happiness (or so we hope) after all her travails.
One of the noticeable traits of this novel, and indeed in Collins’ other works, is the high proportion of characters with some form of disability. Sir Patrick Lundie, the Scottish lawyer, a wonderful character, has a club foot, this perhaps explains his aversion to physical sports, Hester is dumb (or at least pretends to be), the roguish Scottish waiter has but one eye and Anne carries a social stigma.
The scene in London when the protagonists meet to thrash out Anne’s future is a magnificent set piece full of tension. But Anne herself is a perplexing character. She is clearly meant to be more sinned against than sinner but during the course of the book she conducts an improper relationship, blackmails emotionally her lover into marriage, lies, and traipse around Scotland and England seeking revenge. She is a complex character and I didn’t feel that Collins had succeeded in making her wholly believable.
This is a minor quibble. For the most part it is a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining read, not quite in the class of The Moonstone, but one which cements Collins as one of my favourite Victorian novelists.
July 2, 2019
Vending Machines Of The Week
It is always gratifying to find a nation confirming the stereotypical image of themselves.
Take the Germans, for example. They seem to like nothing better than a wurst and have a whole range of sausage delicacies to nosh on. But if you have a craving for a Bratwurst, Knockwurst or a Bockwurst in the middle of the night, where do you turn to?
With typical efficiency, the Germans have come up with the answer and it is simplicity itself. A vending machine. According to reports, these sausage vending machines are springing up all over the country, particularly in areas which are not well served with out of hours shops.
As well as a variety of bangers, the machines dispense that indispensable accompaniment to a wurst, the potato salad, in a punnet of course. Other out of town machines provide a range of other essentials such as milk and eggs. It makes the staple fare of our vending machines, the healthy products that are fizzy drinks and chocolate, look rather tame.
I wonder, though, if they have solved the problem of the coin sticking in the works, always a source of frustration to me if I am ever tempted to use one.
July 1, 2019
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Six
Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)
From the age of around ten, until I went to university, I lived in the beautiful rural county of Shropshire. One of its principal claims to fame is that it is home to the world’s first major bridge to be constructed entirely of cast iron, spanning the Severn Gorge at Coalbrookdale.
Abraham Darby’s iconic design was a testament to the burgeoning age of industrialisation and word of the bridge, opened in 1779, spread around the world. Its fame gave its rather prosaic name to the small town that grew up around it, Ironbridge.
Revolutionary as the material used to build the bridge was, Darby’s iron construction was traditional in design, consisting of five ribs, forming a semicircle, a technique dating back to at least the Roman times. The drawback with a semicircle was that the width dictated the height of the bridge, fine for a steep gorge like the one at Coalbrookdale but creating an irritating hump on wider spans.
The Romans, ingenious to the last, solved this problem by using a sequence of small arches. But this approach caused other problems, not least that there was more work required to secure the footings which, in turn, could alter the flow of the river, as the nineteen arches on London Bridge had done to the Thames.
Now that there was a revolutionary new material with which to construct a bridge, wouldn’t it be great if the design was freed from the restrictions imposed by the traditional semicircle methodology?
This is where Thomas Paine sought to make his mark.
One of America’s founding fathers, Thomas is best known these days as the author of The Rights of Man, published in 1791 and a forthright defence of the French Revolution against the attacks of British politicians such as Edward Burke. But he had other strings to his bow, not least being an ardent pontist, fascinated by the mix of architectural splendour and sheer practicality that makes up a bridge.
Aren’t we all?
Intrigued by iron bridges, Paine sought to raise enough money to build a bridge that would span the river Harlem in New York in 1785 and another to cross the Seine in Paris in 1786. His lack of experience in bridge building counted against him, as did his revolutionary design for the span.
Thwarted by practicalities, he turned his attention to perfecting his design.
Claiming to draw his inspiration from a spider’s web, Paine sought to liberate bridge design from the restrictions imposed by a semicircle. He concentrated his attention on what geometricians call the “chord of a circle”, which, simply put, is a straight line between two points on a circle. Using a chord meant that the height of the arch could be adjusted to the demands of the topology of the area to be spanned.
Goodbye, hump-backed bridges.
Convinced that he had cracked the problem, Paine applied for a patent on his idea, the application being granted on August 26, 1788 (patent No. 1667), specifically for a bridge, using his design, to span the river Don in Sheffield.
Despite having the patent to hand, the project was still born.
Desperate to raise some public interest in his design, Paine turned his attention to creating a 110 foot-long iron bridge, effectively a bridge to nowhere, on the bowling green of a public house, the London Stingo, in Lisson Green, on the edge of London’s Paddington.
Quite what the bowling fraternity thought of his erection is unrecorded.
Paine had interested Thomas Jefferson in the project. The Sage of Monticello was enthusiastic, convinced that Paine would build an arch of up to five hundred feet and that any bridge so constructed would soon cover its building costs in toll fees generated.
Work was started in May 1790 and completed in the September, eliciting a congratulatory note from Jefferson, “I congratulate you sincerely on the success of your bridge. I was sure of it before from theory: yet one likes to be assured from practice also.”
But fine words butter no parsnips.
No money was forthcoming to enable Paine to build a bridge to his new design across a river and, by October 1791, the structure was rusting. Disheartened, Paine suffered the ignominy of seeing his bridge dismantled and packed off to Yorkshire, some of the iron then being used to build a bridge spanning the River Wear in Sunderland in 1796, at 240 feet then the longest iron bridge in the world.
At least, the bowlers of the London Stingo got their green back.
By then, Paine had weightier matters on his mind. The Pitt administration, fearing a revolution at home, started to crackdown on agitators and dangerous sorts. With a warrant out for his arrest, Paine skipped across the Channel to France in September 1792.
It is a pity that there was no bridge to facilitate his escape.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
June 30, 2019
Earwax Of The Week (2)
As a species, it seems, we are obsessed with records and here’s one that I never thought I would be troubling you with – the world’s longest chunk of earwax.
A patient went to see Neel Raithatha at the Hear Clinic in Oadby near Leicester, presumably complaining about some discomfort in his ear. After some investigation, Neel realised that this was a cut above the usual job he does and deploying endoscopic cup suction, he was able to get hold of the wax and pull and pull and pull.
Remarkably, the chunk of earwax, measuring 2.5 centimetres, came out intact and, more importantly, the eardrum wasn’t damaged by the process. As the average ear canal measures around 3 centimetres, the brown clump of wax was a whopper but, clearly, there is some opportunity for the record to be broken.
Whether Neel charged his standard fee of £50 per ear (£80 for two) for wax removal has not been reported.
June 29, 2019
Mollusc Of The Week (2)
As a long-standing, and rarely sitting, commuter for many years I have heard many an excuse for the delay or cancellation of train services but this is a new one on me.
On May 30th the normally efficient railway in southern Japan operated by J R Kyushu came to a halt, with 26 trains cancelled and many more delayed because of a power outage.
The reason for the failure was quickly tracked down to a device which had short-circuited. The problem was soon rectified and services resumed. But it is only now that the full details of the chapter of events that led to the outage have been revealed.
On opening the box housing the device, engineers found the charred remains of a slug, about 2 to 3 centimetres long. The kamikaze mollusc must have got through the casing somehow and touched an electrical cable inside, frying itself in the process as well as triggering a massive power failure.
J R Kyushu describe the set of circumstances that led to the disruption as “rare” but I am sure that it will find its way into Network Rail’s book of ludicrous excuses.
June 28, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (237)?…
Pom
The one sporting occasion I always look forward to is the Ashes series, a contest fought out by the cricketing heroes of England and Australia. The rivalry on the field is intense and the spectators, their larynxes suitably lubricated by amber nectar, are quick to join in. To the Australians we English are poms, a description usually bracketed at both ends by epithets, juicy, racy and pejorative. But why do the Australians call us poms?
Once Captain Cook had discovered the Australian continent for the white man and the British started to colonise it, to the dismay and inconvenience of the existing aboriginal population, it was used as a dumping ground for what then were considered to be the detritus of British society. In truth, they were little more than petty criminals who were sentenced to transportation to the other side of the world for seven years or more for what to modern eyes seem trifling misdemeanours. The legacy of Australia’s convict past has been one that has been difficult to eradicate and it is tempting to look to that iniquitous system for the origin of the term.
Perhaps it is an acronym for Prisoner of Millbank, where many convicts were held before deportation, or Prisoner of His Majesty, or Prisoner of Mother England? The latter two are particularly unconvincing as an additional letter has to be swallowed up in the process. Portsmouth, the port from which the convict ships set out, was known as Pompey. Perhaps the first syllable of the nickname gave rise to the term for Brits? Alternatively, it could be a reference to their port of arrival, Port of Melbourne? I am troubled by these explanations. Why would the early settlers, the majority of whom were British, use a term which is intended to differentiate incomers from native, white stock? It smacks of convenient retro-fitting to me.
Moving away from the world of convicts, another theory is that it is an abbreviation of pommes de terre, the spud being a staple and favourite part of the diet of the British troops during the First World War. Granted it was the first occasion that men from the two nations spent much time in close proximity but it requires a stretch of the imagination to think that the Aussies, inventive in their use of language as they are, made this linguistic jump. And, anyway, the term Pom was used before the Great War, the earliest instances cited in the Oxford English Dictionary dating to 1912.
But if it is not the potato, it may well be another species of the plant world, Punica granatum, or the pomegranate, to you and I. The fruit is between the size of a lemon and a grapefruit and when they ripen in the sun, they go red. Rather like the newly arrived immigrants after they arrived, pasty-faced and somewhat green about the gills, off the ships to be assaulted by the full force of the sun and Australia’s strong ultra-violet rays. They had a tendency to go red as lobsters and were easily distinguishable from the more sun-hardened, bronzed Aussies who had been there for a while and were acclimatised to the rigours of the climate.
The citations in the OED from 1912 show how pomegranate became used to describe a newly arrived immigrant. First, we need to understand a bit of the argot of the docks in Melbourne. Those with a penchant for rhyming slang called immigrants Jimmy Grants. Given their propensity to go red in the sun, perhaps some wag thought that a reference to the fruit would result in a more barbed insult. He may not have been wrong; “Now they call ‘em Pomegranates and the Jimmygrants don’t like it”. A variation on the term is also recorded; “The other day a Pummy Grant was handed a bridle and told to catch a horse”. As a nation the Australians rarely use polysyllables when one will do and so pom became the pejorative name for a newly-arrived British immigrant.
The Anzac Book of 1916 supported this theory, attributing Pom as an abbreviation of pomegranate and the author, Herbert J Rumsey, gave the theory some intellectual rigour in his book about the stream of immigrants seeking to make a new life in Australia, entitled The pommies, or, New chums in Australia, published in 1920. And it was good enough for D H Lawrence who repeated the theory in his Australian-based novel of 1923, The Kangaroo. “Pommy”, he wrote, “is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months before their blood “thins down”, by their round and ruddy cheeks”.
Perhaps it is right and at least it takes us away from the more dubious convict-era derivations. It was almost certainly a post-convict term but was also likely to have formed part of the everyday speech of Australians well before the first examples appeared in print, perhaps dating to the nineteenth century. These days, of course, Pom is used generally to describe a Brit, not just one who has newly arrived in Australia.
I just hope that come the middle of September the Poms have their hands on the little urn once more.
June 27, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Sixty Eight
It has been a while since I talked about tonic. But as one advertising strap line says, “if ¾ of your drink is the mixer, mix with the best”, it is a subject that gin lovers ignore at their peril. In those far-off days before the ginaissance, a gin and tonic, at least in a pub, was a tot of Gordon’s drowned with a bottle of Schweppes’ Tonic. I always found it a bit of an overpwering mix of sweetness and bitterness.
The explosion of gins with their many and varied tastes in recent years has prompted gin aficionados to experiment with tonics which are more sympathetic to and compliment the spirit rather than overpower a rather bland offering. Schweppes has rather become a tonic of last resort rather than the go-to mixer and has seen its market place dominance, at least here in Blighty and in the gin arena, by new kids on the block like Fever-Tree.
But Schweppes have not been in business for over two centuries without knowing how to reassert their dominance. They have recently launched their 1783 range, a tip of their metaphorical hat to the year in which Johann Jacob Schweppe, on developing a process to produce carbonated mineral water, opened his first factory in Geneva. He moved operations to London in 1792. Tonic water was not produced until 1871.
Seeing their Crisp Tonic Water at an introductory price on our local supermarket’s shelves, I bought a few pallets. I was not disappointed. Whilst the citrus and quinine elements are still in evidence, the volume dial has been turned way down. The result is that it is a much more subtle mixer, still a bit bubbly, but one which better compliments and enhances the flavours of the better-balanced gins that have been spawned by the ginaissance. They also have a number of other flavours, their Salty Lemon being particularly moreish.
Passing through the duty-free shop in Alicante airport, my attention was caught by a rather dumpy bottle, black in colour with white and magenta lettering. On closer inspection I found it was called MOM with the strap line of “God save the Gin”, a sentiment we might all drink to. To add to the faux-royal feel of the bottle, there is a magenta crown above the word MOM. The label promises “royal smoothness. A premium gin made with exotic botanicals and berries to give a touch of smoothness. Infused after four distillations to achieve an amazing purity and class.” The only other relevant information on the bottle is that it is distributed by Gonzalez Byass of Cadiz.
It is a striking bottle which, at least the marketeers claim, is designed to show a mix of tradition and modernity. It is also supposed to appeal to the fairer sex. What that says about me, I know not. The cap is a screwcap and the nose is very sweet and fruity with hints of juniper and citrus, probably orange.
To the taste I found it amazingly sweet at first, it must be all those red berries and other exotic botanicals we were promised but the identities of which are not revealed, but then the juniper and spices fought their way through. The aftertaste was warm and long-lasting with a mix of pepper and citrus.
At an ABV of 39.5% it is at the lighter end of the strength spectrum and, on balance, was a little too sweet and syrupy for my taste. It was by no means unpleasant but, I fear, it will be a gin which will linger on my shelf.
June 26, 2019
Book Corner – June 2019 (4)
Small World – David Lodge
Throughout my working life, I have attended many a conference and even spoken at a few. The upside of these events was that they were held in swanky hotels in, generally, attractive places. The downside often was that you met the same old people and talked about the same old stuff. They don’t seem to have been half as exciting as the academic conference circle described by David Lodge in his 1984 novel, a sequel of sorts to Changing Places and the second of his Campus Trilogy.
The book is subtitled an Academic Romance and the key to understanding the more general theme behind what is an entertaining romp is contained in an unlikely piece of literary criticism provided by Cherry Summerbee, a BA check-in assistant; “Real romance is a pre-novelistic kind of narrative. It’s full of adventure and coincidences and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that.” Another clue is provided by the first object of Persse McGarrigle’s desire, the beautiful Angelica Pabst; “[romance]has not one climax but many, the pleasure of this text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contraction of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless. The greatest and most characteristic romances are often unfinished … Romance is multiple orgasm.”
The book is full of incidents and adventures, which take place around the world at academic conference venues. There is an awful lot of sex and lust, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes thwarted. As per Summerbee’s analysis, most of the characters are in search of something. Some are familiar from Changing Places reappear, principally Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow and their respective wives, Zapp is divorced but the Swallows are back together in a rather humdrum marriage, but there are many more who flit in and out of the story, their role only becoming clearer as the book progresses.
The protagonist, a new character, the naïve Irish academic and poet, Persse McGarrigle, can be seen as the knight figure in search of his beloved, or two by the end of the book. He is continually frustrated as when he arrives anywhere the object of his pursuit has just left. The leading academics are in search of a sinecure professorship, sponsored by UNESCO.
Mediaeval romances are stock full of allegorical characters and Lodge follows suit. Angelica is the Dark Lady to Persse’s Knight Errant, Miss Maiden is the prophetess and Fulvia Morgana is the morally and sexually corrupt woman. The plot involves confused or mistaken identities. Persse thinks he is making love to Angelica but in fact it is her twin sister, Lily, and the wise old owl that is Miss Maiden turns out to be the mother of the twins, having been seduced by an academic and forced to abandon the pair on an aeroplane.
The book is very funny and after reading it, you will cross swords with an airport representative allocating seats at your peril. And Lodge takes particular delight in puncturing the pomposity and self-regard of academics. One of the papers presented is entitled The Problem with a Colon and Persse floors a distinguished panel with a simple but very pertinent question. The joys and perils of air travel is another theme that pervades the book and Zapp’s eulogy on the transformational power of the speaker phone and fax machine is both prophetic and anachronistic to the modern reader.
A great book which unlike many of its type does not run out of steam.
