Reading J G Farrell
I’m halfway through The Siege of Krishnapur and loving J G Farrell’s wry humour as he traces the decline of British colonial power in a fictional Indian outpost. Farrell’s novel – the second in the Empire trilogy – won him the Man Booker prize for fiction in 1973.
The story is based on the real experiences of British subjects during the Indian rebellion of 1857 so it has a serious intention yet at times it is hilarious. Hardly any of the garrison members have escaped ridicule so far; from the Collector who daydreams about the Great Exhibition as a manifestation of the superiority of European culture while musket balls land all around him; to the doctors who feud about the best way to treat cholera and the British women who despair at having to wash their own clothes. Under attack on all sides by mutineering native sepoys, the Padre gives a running commentary on the multiple manifestations in nature of his God’s creativity as those around him desperately try to keep the cannon loaded and firing. Somewhat predictably we also have the naive new arrival in the form of Fleury, a young man of poetical inclination whose notions of a new society are either ignored or ridiculed by the other men.
One of the funniest scenes occurs as Fleury’s new friend Harry races against time to get defences in place against the enemy he can see advancing through the melon fields….
Fleury had not been paying attention when the cannon was loaded; the beginnings of an epic poem had been simmering in his brain.
“Fleury, for God’s sake!” shouted Harry, who knew how desperate the situation was. Fleury did not know; he was in a daze from the noise and smoke which had tears streaming down his face, and the haze of dust which hung everywhere, very fine, lending the scene a “historical” quality because everything appeared faintly blurred, as in a Crimean daguerrotype. Fleury found himself appending captions to himself for the Illustrated London News. “This was the Banqueting Hall Redoubt in the Battle of Krishnapur. On the left, Mr. Fleury, the poet, who conducted himself so gallantly throughout; on the right, Lieutenant Dunstaple, who commanded the Battery, and a faithful native, Ram.”
Farrell seems to take great delight in showing how the beliefs and values held by each of his characters gradually crumble under the pressure of the siege. It’s evident that he was a man unafraid to challenge the status quo – at his acceptance speech for the 1973 Booker prize, he criticised the sponsors for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. It’s a testament to Farrell’s skill however, that the judges went onto award him a further accolade in 1980 when they named Troubles as the winner of The Lost Man Booker Prize (a one-off prize to honour the books which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize in 1970.). Farrell however had died the year previously in an accident off the Irish coast so lost the opportunity to take a further pop at the Establishment.
Want to know more?
There is an excellent commentary on The Siege on the Guardian book blog
Getting to know V S Naipaul
Asked by a friend recently to explain who V S Naipaul is, I found myself struggling to think of much beyond the basic facts – of Indian descent but actually born in Trinidad, knighted for his services to literature and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Beyond that, my knowledge comes solely from the viewpoint of another Booker prize winning author, Paul Theroux.
The two were once close friends but – as Theroux relates in Sir Vidia’s Shadow - their relationship came to a somewhat strange end on a London street in 1997. The two didn’t speak again until they both happened to be guest speakers at the Hay Festival in 2011 where they were seemingly re-united via a handshake.
Theroux had been very shaken by the rift. It was Naipaul who had encouraged him when his writing career was in its early stages afar their first meeting in Uganda in 1966. It was Naipaul who acted as his mentor over the next thirty years. Theroux delivered a flattering portrait of his friend in V.S. Naipaul, an Introduction to His Work (1972).
Their split supposedly happened after Theroux discovered that one of his books – which he had inscribed and given to Naipaul as a present – had been put on sale for $1,500. But there had already been a thawing of the relationship on Naipaul’s side after Naipaul’s wife wrote a letter to Theroux in which she accused him of trying to make her husband seem fanatical when he interviewed him during a recent Hay on Wye literature festival. Then came the silence – Theroux’s letters and faxes went unanswered; phone calls were not returned. The actual break came one Spring morning as Theroux and his son Marcel walked towards Chelsea and encountered a scowling strutting figure walking quickly towards them.
‘It was Vidia, looking crazy……What disconcerted me was that I stopped and he kept walking…….He was striding, thrashing the pavement with a walking stick; he wore a funny little hat, floppy brim and all, a tweed jacket, a turtleneck.
‘It was he. In a city of seven and half million, our paths had miraculously crossed.’
A brief exchange of banal comments followed and then as Theroux remembers the encounter…..
‘I was nerved and trembly, I could hardly breathe. I stammered saying, “Vidia did you get a fax from me?
‘Yes, Now I must -’
‘Do we have something to discuss?’
‘No. He had almost broken away, He was moving crabwise, crouching a bit, cramming his hat down.
‘What do we do then?’
‘He drew his mouth back. His face went darker. His mouth twisted down. …His grip on his cane was sudden and prehensile.
‘Take it on the chin and move on”
‘The word scuttled came to mind as he moved. He was fearful and in a hurry.
‘He knew. It was over. It never occurred to me to chase him. there would be no more.
‘I was dazed because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes…..’
Extract taken from Sir Vidia’s Shadow, published by Penguin Books 1998
Booker Prize Long List Draws Closer
The judges are getting close to the time when their long list selection for the 2012 Man Booker prize will be announced.
The judges have more than 100 titles to read from which they’ll select 12 or 13 titles (names will be announced in July) and then the six shortlisted titles in September. The big fanfare comes in October when the Man Booker prize winner will be announced.
Now I think of myself as an avid reader and a fairly quick one at that. But the thought of having to read more than 100 novels in less than seven months, would terrify me. I could possibly manage it if a) I gave up work and b) stopped doing domestic stuff like gardening, ironing, cleaning etc etc. But these judges are still active in their own professions whether acting or academia. So it begs the question for me – how much do they actually read as opposed to skimming? And if they do actually read them, how much can they retain in order to be able to debate the merits of each with their fellow judges?
Would love to be a fly on the wall of some of their discussions. “Was that the one where …….”
Is there a secret to writing prize-winning novels?
There’s an infographic currently circulating in the Blogosphere in which the themes that were prevalent in the 2011 Man Booker long list are analysed.
Someone at Delayed Gratification – a ‘slow journalism magazine’ (whatever that is) felt compelled to graphically chart the themes in order to show ‘what makes a prize winning novel.’ The result is attractive, even if the swirling coloured connecting lines do bear more than a passing resemblance to the London Underground map.
But what exactly is the point of this endeavour? Ok, so now we know that death was the predominant theme and far exceeded narratives featuring love or betrayal. That’s hardly an earth-shattering insight. Death has always featured significantly in literature. Just think about the body count at the end of many of Shakespeare’s plays where even the romances like Romeo and Juliet end with a few corpses strewn around the stage. Death is also at the heart of many of our classics (Germinal, Tess of the D’urbervilles; Anna Karenina being just a few examples).
What irritates me is the premise that it’s ok to analyse literature in this way. It reminded me of a scene in the film The Dead Poets’ Society in which Robin Williams plays the new English teacher at a prestigious American boarding school. He mocks the way the boys have been taught to evaluate literature – almost to the point of plotting the score for each poem or piece of prose on a graph. Score 12 for language but only 4 for characterisation and you’ll never be considered a ‘great author’.
That was fiction but I discovered today that at Stanford University some its English literature graduate students are engaged in something called ‘literature mining’. They are currently “mining 19th Century British and American novels” to track how literary styles in novels changed through the course of the 19th Century. Instead of just relying on their knowledge of literature gained from just reading the texts, to understand how the styles changed, they are counting the frequency of words that share a particular theme and mapping how the frequency changes over time. And after all that one of their conclusions was that there was:
“a more fundamental shift in the style of narration from abstraction to concreteness, from telling to showing. No longer talking about abstract values but embodying them in actions.”
So, three or four years studying literature at one of the leading academic institutions in the world’s most powerful nation couldn’t have told them that without the need for software analysis tools and statistical approaches??
Bring up the Bodies
I’ve dropped enough hints I hope to make sure that in a few days time, I will be opening a birthday present to find myself the owner of the new Hilary Mantel novel Bring up the Bodies. After reading the review in the New York Times I know I have a nail-biting few weeks ahead of me.
Ever since Mantel announced she was
writing a sequel to her Man Booker prize-winning novel Wolf Hall, expectations have been running high. I’m a history fan and used to devour every Jean Plaidy I could get my hands on when I was in my teens but every historical fiction book I’ve read since then has disappointed. The narratives were clunky; the characters stereotypes and the whole thing just felt predicable. All that changed with Wolf Hall. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could read it in one sitting as the blurb on the back of my copy claimed one critic did, but it was certainly not a book that I could put down easily. From the immediacy of the opening scene where the young Cromwell gets his head kicked
Follow up novels are a difficult act to pull off but it seems that Mantel has done it. “Equally sublime”, “beautifully constructed” comments Janet Maslin. Roll on the 19th!
Booker Prize 2012 – controversy free??
According to Sir Peter Stothard, the chairman of this year’s panel, the 2012 Man Booker Prize will be “controversy free.” By that he means free from the accusations of ‘dumbing down’ that surrounded last year’s awards when the judges announced they wanted books that had a high ‘readability’ factor.
So how are we meant to interpret the way this year’s prize will be determined?
Some academic heavyweights have been brought into the judging panel to lend gravitas but the figures from the entertainment world are still in evidence – presumably to ensure that the reading tastes of the ordinary man/woman in the street can still be reflected. Does that mean we will end up with a list of books that people actually want to read – or feel they should read so they can keep up with conversation around the supper party table in some leafy London suburb?
The judges undoubtedly have a difficult balancing act ahead of them – if they choose books the academy world loves but are deemed ‘difficult’ to read, the sales boost much desired by publishers, will not materialise. Sales of the 2011 shortlisted titles – a list considered to have a higher ‘readability’ factor than previous years – were more than double the level of the 2010 short listed books.
Stothard’s comments may have been designed to placate the literary cognoscenti and in doing so, fend off the threat that a rival prize will be established. Until we see the shortlisted titles, we won’t know whether he has succeeded. One thing is sure however, the idea of a controversy free year will not be all that welcomed by the publishing companies representing the authors of shortlisted titles. For them, all controversy (which translates into column inches in print or electronic ink) represents free exposure for their product. The greater the level of controversy, the more the reading public could feel compelled to go out and actually buy the book even if it’s merely to find out what all the fuss is about.
So a year in which the shortlist doesn’t attract comment, will not please the commercial interests that encircle award schemes like the Booker; the Orange Prize and the Costa Book Awards to the increasingly close tie up between entertainment world and books (think Oprah Book Club; Richard and Judy etc). Maybe Stothard is simply tilting at windmills?
Mistakes – they’ve made a few…..
They’ve done the research; spent hours in libraries or on line checking their facts (or maybe their paid researcher actually did the grunt work); the book is now out – and guess what? Some tweed jacket wearer sporting a handlebar moustache spots an anachronism and can’t wait to point out said defect to the author.
Do we set too great an expectation on our leading authors? Undoubtedly there are some books where the writer has made a fatal flaw that anyone with just a modicum of common sense would recognise (I hate it when authors use twentieth century expressions – usually of American origin – in narratives set in an earlier period). Then there are other novels that contain errors which make no material difference to the narrative. You note them but push them to one side because you’re enjoying the story so much?
Booker Prize Winner Ian McEwan apparently spent two years observing a neurosurgeon for his novel Saturday.The surgeon was less than pleased to find McEwan had his protagonist use a paintbrush to apply antiseptic prior to an operation (not a tool that is common in an operating theatre it seems). I can recall the gruesome details of the surgical procedure in that novel but can’t honestly say that knowing whether the surgeon used a paintbrush or an artist’s brush matters much.
Even his winning novel Amsterdam came in for close scrutiny. After it was published McEwan received a letter from a World War 2 veteran that he’s used the Americansm “on the double” instead of the ’at the double” term used by British soldiers of his day.
McEwan reflected on such trips and hazards that confront the novelist at a recent lecture – summarised in this news article,http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/04/mcewan-recounts-his-missteps/
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