25/4/13 “LEAVING ALEXANDRIA” by RICHARD HOLLOWAY

“Leaving Alexandria: a Memoir of Faith and Doubt” by Richard Holloway, was published in 2012 by Canongate. Richard Holloway was the Bishop of Edinburgh from 1986 to 2000, and therefore this book was of special interest to our Edinburgh-based book group. Indeed, several of our members had encountered him either socially or professionally, and one had been a member of his congregation.

For any Sassenach reading this, I should explain that Richard Holloway was a Bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church. This is a completely different church from the Church of Scotland, which is protestant (Presbyterian) and does not have any Bishops at all. Neither of these churches is the same as the Church of England. And although the Episcopal Church has some of the ‘bells and smells’ associated with Catholicism, it is not the same as the Roman Catholic Church, which by the way is also alive and well in Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church believes, however, as the Roman Catholic Church also believes, in the doctrine of apostolic succession, whereby the Bishops are in a direct line of succession from the apostles.

It is useful to know the religious background of Scotland before tackling the book, as much of Holloway’s memoir is about the author’s struggle to reconcile religious doctrine with his own observations of people and society. As somebody said, religion in Scotland can get you into trouble from childhood onwards. One member recalled his own childhood.  If you are an Episcopalian, Protestants think you are a Catholic and beat you up, and Catholics think you are a Protestant and beat you up. You can’t win.

Yes, religion is complicated in Scotland, and the Scots take it seriously; they attend church more than the English and they have more denominations of Christianity. Visitors to this part of Edinburgh are surprised to see that in one location, a crossroads known as ‘Holy Corner’, four denominations of Christianity are represented by a church on each corner.

The member introducing the book said it was about ‘Richard Holloway and his soul’, and the work of a great spiritual intellect, yet written in a gentle and engaging style. We nodded in agreement. He pointed out that the author had insisted the book is not an autobiography, but a ‘memoir’.  He went on to say that the book was controversial, but one of our group took issue with that. Well, Holloway himself had obviously been a controversial character, as his frequently-expressed views were not always orthodox, but the book did not seek to be controversial. It merely wrote down the author’s thoughts and experiences on religion, God and people.

This man had, after all, been thinking and writing about Christian doctrine for nearly 50 years. He held strong positions on such matters as the ordination of women and marriage of homosexuals, in fact all the issues which have been tearing churches apart for the last few decades.  For much of his life Holloway had championed these ‘progressive’ causes, and had thus run up against hostility from his parishioners and some of his fellow clerics.

But to begin at the beginning. Holloway was a working class boy, brought up in the small Scottish town of Alexandria, near to Loch Lomond. It is an unremarkable town, with only one notable building - a magnificent Victorian edifice that was once Scotland’s first motor car factory. The building was later converted into a torpedo factory, and is now rather ignominiously converted into a series of cut-price shops. His childhood was unremarkable, going to the cinema, trips to Glasgow, learning about sexual matters the hard way, walking in the hills.

Although his parents were not religious, he sang in the local church choir. He says it was not the ‘wee church’ that he fell in love with, but what it pointed towards (the idea of an ‘elsewhere’). He became an altar boy, and from there at the tender age of 14 he left Alexandria (hence the book’s title) and went to Kelham Theological College to train for the priesthood. He describes the regime of cold showers, with the frequent taking of mass and the long periods of quiet contemplation and prayer.

During the holidays he goes home and helps with the harvest, encountering Brenda the Land Girl from Glasgow, and has a sexual awakening. He writes touchingly about such things, and is often extremely funny when speaking of intimate human encounters. Later, back at Kelham he talks to the beloved Father Peter about the biology of sex; Peter gives him the impression that God himself regarded the whole business of sex as regrettable and wished that he’d invented a less troublesome way of guaranteeing the continuance of the species. Holloway becomes rather interested in sexual matters, as any enquiring lad does at that age (but most of us don’t write it down in a book, and we especially might not write it down if we were connected with the church in some way).

One way to read this book was to take its main theme to be ‘does God exist?’. But this was too simplistic; the real theme was ‘how does a man of God (or any man) deal with his doubts about the existence of God?’. Or, more broadly, he was trying to find out who he was.  Many of us know that struggle. The author points out that theists and atheists have more in common with each other than they do with agnostics; the analogy is with the chess board being black and white, never grey. We were reminded of previous book we had read: Chris Mullin’s A View From the Foothills (2009). Mullin was an extremely able Member of Parliament who did not quite fit the role he had been given. We also recalled Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God (1963), and the preaching of David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham.

Someone once told him, ‘Richard, the trouble with you is that you publish every thought you have’. Why did people write such books (he’s written 28)? Was it narcissism? Not in this case. Was it a way to apologize to those people he offended? No, at least not entirely. It was mostly to help him set his thoughts in order, a well-known path to self-knowledge. One conclusion was ‘being who we were, we were bound to act the way we did.’

Perhaps writing a book like this is cathartic, like a Confessional. He stands naked before his readership, just as Alan Ginsberg the American poet of the 1950s is said to have stood naked before his audience. But does he reveal everything? There were large areas where he did not go: his family, his experiences in Africa for example.

We found it hard to understand why he accepted the post of Bishop when he was so unsure of his beliefs. He should have stepped back from the opportunity. Parishioners entrusted their spiritual welfare to him, and he may have let them down. Was he too self-indulgent? He was certainly politically naive. But wasn’t Jesus like that? Both Holloway and Jesus felt their place was with the poor, the sick, the outcasts who could not help themselves.

What does it mean to be a Christian and did Holloway even qualify? Simply to behave like Jesus and to follow Jesus’s teaching is only a part of being a Christian. You can follow Jesus’s teaching as summarized in the beatitudes by becoming a socialist or a social worker, yet not be a Christian.

It seems to me that to qualify, under the doctrines of all Christian denominations, you have to believe that Christ was the son of God, and that he was crucified to save mankind, and that he resurrected and ascended into heaven. But isn’t it too much to ask modern people to believe? Isn’t that like believing in fairies and Santa Claus, and do Christians today really believe in all that?  On page 156-158 he explains how he struggled with one of the centrepieces of Christian doctrine, the Resurrection, and how he felt on the first occasion he had to present an Easter sermon.  For him, Jesus did not physically rise from the dead and ascend into heaven. It was impossible. Rather, the Resurrection was a metaphor for the possibility of change and renewal.

Then he moves on (page 159) to ask what happened before the Big Bang. Of course, science cannot tell us. Some Christians say it proves that science has somehow failed in this crucial area where Christianity provides an explanation, i.e. God. Holloway does not say that, simply that we have to learn to live with uncertainty, it is a part of the state of being. I love this stuff.

At this stage in the evening my thoughts were disturbed by a dreadful rasping noise, which I first took to be the heating system about to explode.   But no-one else seemed concerned. Then I realized the dog was in the room, and considered that the sound must be the beast’s snoring. But no; our host stood up, and walked across to that dark part of the room. ‘Anyone for coffee?’. The rasping had only been the coffee machine.

Yes, the book has humour, lots of it. For me, the funniest part was his experimental talking in tongues to a complete stranger, a young woman of Chinese appearance, at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. She fled.

The writing was sometimes poetic and profound:

‘Religion’s insecurity makes it shout not whisper, strike with the fist in the face not tug gently with the fingers on the sleeve. Yet, beneath the shouting and the striking, the whisper can sometimes be heard. And from a great way off the tiny figure of Jesus can be seen on the seashore, kindling the fire’.

The final chapter ‘Epilogue’ includes his thoughts during a walk in the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh.  He raises massive issues for all religious people:

‘Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake. Lies are just lies, but mistakes can be corrected and lessons can be learned from them. The mistake was to think religion was more than human. I was less sure whether God was also just a human invention, a work of art – an opera – and could be appreciated as such. The real issue was whether it should be given more authority over us than any other work of art, especially if it is the kind of authority that overrides our own better judgements’. 

The book was certainly thought-provoking. We admired the fluency with which the author expressed his deepest feelings. You do not have to be a Christian to be moved by this book; it is surely one of the most engaging books to have been written in 2012.

28/3/13 “THE CITADEL” by A. J. CRONIN

The host for the evening and the proposer of A. J. Cronin's “The Citadel” (1937) was a retired General Practitioner. He opened proceedings by explaining the reasons for his choice of book and detailing the author’s background.

He explained that he first became aware of A. J. Cronin  (“AJ”) when his family watched Dr Finlay’s Casebook. BBC TV broadcast the series between 1962 and 1971 and, while he did not admit to watching all 191 episodes, the programme had undoubtedly influenced his subsequent career choice. He was smitten by the writings of “A.J” after reading “Hatters Castle”, and subsequently sought out most of Cronin’s other books. He first read "The Citadel" in the 1970’s.

“The Citadel” was published in 1937 and was a global best seller. It sold 100,000 copies in the first three months of becoming available and was reprinted at a rate of 10,000 per week. It established Cronin as one of the most popular novelists of the 1930’s. By today’s standards the novel elevated Cronin to multi-millionaire status. In common with a number of his books it was turned into a successful film in 1938, winning four Oscar nominations and grossing $2.5 million.

Cronin was born in Cardross in Dumbartonshire in 1896. His father was an Irish Catholic and his mother was from a staunchly Protestant family.  They lived in Cardross for six years, but his father’s deteriorating health forced them to move to Helensburgh. There he died suddenly from pulmonary T.B. when Cronin was only seven years old. His mother then took “AJ” to stay with her parents in Dumbarton. She later moved to Glasgow where she obtained employment as a sanitary inspector.

“AJ” was an all rounder. He was gifted academically, and also excelled in athletics and football. He moved from St Aloysius College to Glasgow University having won a Carnegie Scholarship to study medicine. After a short spell in the Royal Navy, he returned to Medical School, graduating in 1919 with honours. He met his future wife, May, also a medical student about this time. He went on to obtain the additional higher medical degrees of MRCP and MD, as well as the Diploma in Public Health.

After graduating he worked in various hospitals in Glasgow and Dublin. Whilst employed as medical superintendant in Lightburn Hospital near Glasgow, a post for an unmarried doctor, he was pressured into marrying May as she had announced that she was pregnant. Following a quiet wedding in Glasgow, they moved to the Welsh mining town of Treherbert where he was briefly employed as a GP assistant. He moved again to a GP post in the larger nearby mining town of Tredegar where in 1924 May gave birth to their first son Vincent. 

In the same year they moved to London, where “AJ” took up an appointment as the Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain.

While in this post he published reports linking coal dust exposure to pulmonary disease. In 1926 he bought a medical practice in the City. His second son, Patrick was born in the same year. He successfully built up his practice, but he suffered from a chronic gastric ulcer.  This, together with significant profits from investments made by an Investment Group to which “AJ” had been introduced to by a grateful patient, influenced his decision to leave medicine.  In 1930 he put down the stethoscope and picked up the pen, thereby fulfilling a longstanding ambition.

AJ’s third son, Andrew was born in 1937 by which time he had become a successful author. In 1939 he moved to the USA where his reputation was already established. “The Citadel” won the National Book Award in the USA in 1937 and in a Gallup poll in 1939 it was voted the most interesting book that readers had read.

He was in great demand and moved around the country promoting his work. The family never stayed more than a year in any one house until he eventually purchased a house in Connecticut in1947. He remained there until moving to Switzerland in 1955. By this time he was a very wealthy man, and his move was probably motivated by his tax situation.  He died in 1981.

Some members of our group had experienced difficulty in acquiring a copy of the book and there was a concern that there would be differences between the various editions read. This concern proved unfounded. More amusingly, kindle editions of Cronin’s novels, including “The Citadel”, had newly become available on the day of our meeting. Some thought that the demand created by our members and followers had forced Amazon’s hand. Others suggested that this simply confirmed a growing interest in Cronin’s writings as a result of the publication of the second biography of his life (“The man who created Dr Finlay” by Alan Davies, 2011). This publication, and a discussion paper published in the journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on the possible influence that “The Citadel had on the formation of the NHS, seem to have stimulated renewed interest in Cronin’s work.  Whatever the truth, the coincidence, if that is what it was, proved a source of great frustration to all of those who had had difficulty obtaining a copy.

There was a unanimous view that the book was an “easy” read. It was a “good yarn” written in what one of our group described as “stage direction “ style. It was agreed that the strength of the book came partly from AJ being able to draw on his own experiences, both personal and professional. While the autobiographical basis of the novel successfully captured the nature of the challenges encountered by Dr Andrew Manson, it was also extremely controversial, as a number of people threatened to sue Cronin over his depiction of them in his characters.

The group spent some time trying to understand the reasons for their generally positive view of the book. It was described as a polemic, challenging the social conventions of the time and dealing with the exploitative nature of parts of the medical profession in the 1930’s. The crusading theme of the novel was a major factor in its popularity. The book was dedicated to uncovering systematically the unsatisfactory practices of significant sections of the medical profession, and to confirming the view that money was indeed the root of all evil. The book was shocking, and it generated controversy and moral outrage. It uncovered the practices of a profession which hid behind the mysteries of medical science. This sensational content was an important factor in the group’s enjoyment of the novel.

We discussed the wider impact of the book. Its popularity both here in the UK and in the USA focussed attention on medical services and the way they were organised. The criticisms of the medical profession delivered through the eyes of those working within the service, and from the perspective of those on the receiving end, had undoubtedly had an influence on the debate that eventually led to the creation of the NHS in 1948. Indeed some suggested that the book had a profound affect on these deliberations. Nye Bevan, one of the architects of the NHS, probably knew Cronin when Bevan served on the Tredegar Hospital Committee, and may well have been influenced by the book.

Many of our Group considered that at least part of their enjoyment of the book could be attributed to their familiarity with the social conventions of the time. All were anxious to point out that they were too young to be directly involved but they were all able to relate to the experiences of their parents!

Other factors contributing to our enjoyment were AJ’s persuasive narrative skills, his acute observations, graphic descriptions and his impressive characterisations. Other compelling features were the idealistic nature of the plot, combined with the “feel good” factor, and the triumph of right over wrong.

On the negative side some thought that the novel was “wordy” and that the writing was “pedestrian” particularly when compared with other notable authors. One member questioned the pace of the novel. He pointed out that the first part of the book, describing Manson’s life in Wales, occupied some 56% of the book, his period in London 36% and the passages dealing with his wife’s death, his selling up and the “trial”only 8%. He suggested that one explanation was that the earlier passages were autobiographical while the rest was not. This raised a question about the writing process adopted by “AJ” and speculation over whether or not he planned the structure of the novel or simply allowed it to emerge as he wrote.

One member pointed to apparent contradictions in the book, such as investigations into lung disease but the acceptance of heavy smoking, and the toleration of the unhygienic practices of his dentist friend, Boland, while being very critical of poor hygienic standards elsewhere.

The discussion moved on to consider whether or not the characteristics associated with the provision of medical practice, as described by “AJ”, still exist today. The increasing importance of private practice and the presence of more and more competition were cited as examples of factors that have remained features common to medical service delivery, both pre and post NHS. It was, however, accepted that such a comparison had little meaning. The NHS, having brought structure to the previously unstructured organisation of medical services, had had to meet the challenges of rapid medical advances and growing individual expectations, and these factors ruled out any serious attempt at comparison.

Our host encouraged us to read more of “AJ’s” work and some of the group seemed motivated to do so. However, no one anticipated a profound career changing impact as a consequence.

28/2/13 “ROB ROY” by SIR WALTER SCOTT

The proposer said he had been hugely influenced by Scott in stimulating his interest in history when he had read “Tales of a Grandfather” (written for Scott’s 6 year old grandson) at the age of 7 or 8. This was history as gripping and entertaining story superbly well told but also critically. For example Scott tells the Macbeth story as in Shakespeare but then explains in his notes where it is historically wrong.  As part of his history degree, he had written a dissertation on Scott as a historian through both his novels and histories.  Only recently he had discovered he was Scott’s 2^nd cousin, nine times removed.  

Scott was both a historian and novelist. He needed to be seen in the context of the historiographical background of the C18th Scottish Enlightenment. He was greatly influenced by the “conjectural” history propounded by Adam Smith and, most notably, Adam Ferguson, author of the “Essay on Civil Society” and the father of Scott’s best friend and now seen as one of the founders of sociology.

The conjectural historians saw history as the progress of society from hunter/gatherers, to shepherds/herdsmen, to farmers and finally to the latest age of commerce. Ferguson as a Highlander was acutely aware of these stages; he had experienced them all. There were other C18th historical schools. Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire were writing traditional political narrative history. In his novels Scott was writing in the new philosophical, sociological analytical tradition.

Scott’s own views on the writing of history were interesting. He was very critical of inaccurate history; praised the use of original source material though he was less of a researcher than a reader and listener; and had a prodigious memory for what he had read or heard. He regarded history as a reservoir of material for his novels and consciously took liberties with facts and chronologies in his novels. When criticised  he responded:

“ My violation of the truth of history gave offence to Mr Mills, the author of the History of the Crusades who was not, it may be presumed, aware that romantic fiction includes the power of invention, which is indeed one of the requisites of the art” (introduction to The Talisman, 1832).

Scott was often seen as an ultra- romantic novelist but this was a misreading. David Daiches had said “Scott’s best and characteristic novels might with justice be called anti-romantic. They attempt to show that heroic action is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful”. Daiches argued that Scott’s real interest as a novelist was “in the ways in which the past impinged on the present and in the effects of that impact on human character, in the relations between tradition and progress”. These themes were best realised in the novels dealing with the Scotland of the not too distant past of the C17th and C18th, ie Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Redgauntlet and Chronicles of the Canongate.

Many people had criticised Scott for carelessness in composition, weak plots, and wooden lifeless heroes. Indeed Scott himself made these criticisms in an anonymous review in the Quarterly Review in 1817. But Scott also said “ My aim was to throw the force of my narrative upon the character and passions of the actors; those passions common to men in all stages of society”. They were character and manners novels in the Fielding and Smollet tradition but also within the framework of history.

Scott was a “passionate Scot but a prudent Briton” and this tension was worked out in the Scottish novels. Underlying them was a sense of the inevitability of progress, in accordance with conjectural history principles, and a sense of the impotence of traditional heroism. Scott himself in his 1829 Introduction put forward this idea of historical conflict at the heart of the Waverley novels, in particular in the Scottish novels Cavalier v Roundhead, Episcopalian v Covenanter, Jacobite v Hanoverian,  and Highlander v Lowlander.

Looking at the novels in this way, a discernible conjectural model of a pilgrim’s progress could be described. An Englishman or Lowland Scot wandered into the Highlands, or an equivalent, from civilised to barbarian society and became involved with passionate partisans, often Jacobites for example in Waverley, Rob Roy and Redguantlet. The “heroes” ( Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy) were essentially dull, insipid, amiable  young men who were disinterested, passive observers of the historical forces in conflict. Activity therefore depended upon other sources of energy - “dark heroes” (Rob Roy in Rob Roy) - whose intentions were good but mistaken. These contrasting pairs represented passion against reason, romantic emotion against sober judgement, the “passionate Scot versus prudent Briton”. Often the passive heroes became involved with the forces of barbaric society but they retained personal links with both sides and eventually put heroic ideas behind them and returned to civil society.

Scott was also the first great writer to be interested in the common people as well as the great. His “low life” characters were often the most real and best drawn, not least because he was able to use Scots idiom and dialogue in a dramatic way. This interest had been appreciated by many commentators, eg the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs in “ The Historical Novel”.

Scott’s personal attitude to what he was writing was important. He was wary of taking sides too obviously but his passive heroes committed to the superiority of civil society win in the end. Scott saw the inevitability of this in accordance with conjectural history principles. For example. Scott recognised the great changes brought about in the Highlands by economic development. He saw the breakdown of the clan system, of the master servant relationship on feudal lines, as brought about by the increase in division of labour and private property rights. He saw the chiefs using their increased monetary wealth on their own wants and luxuries. He saw Jacobitism as artificially preserving a system which was already decaying. But while he might accept this conjectural and modern historical analysis his feelings were more complex and ambivalent. He saw the victory of “progress” as both inevitable and desirable but he also saw that something of value was lost by the passing of the old feudal world. He did not sigh for the past but he gloried in it. It is interesting that the most sympathetically treated characters were those who manage to make themselves at home in the new world without altogether repudiating the old, eg Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy.

The intentions and achievements of Scott have been misunderstood because of the effects of his work. The image that Scotland presented and still presents to the world, the emphasis on the Highlands and “tartanry” owes much to Scott (cf George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822).  However, it was not Scott’s fault if readers were enchanted by the picturesque and romantic rather than the anti- romantic and realism, the rejection of the past and acceptance of the economically inevitable present (cf Mark Twain on Scott causing the American Civil War).

Turning now briefly and specifically to Rob Roy, it was the most clear articulation in any of his novels of the economic basis of conjectural history. Economic theory was central to the novel.  The influence of Adam Smith’s ideas are obvious. Baillie Nicol Jarvie was a brilliant illustration of Smith’s idea that the selfishness of the individual pursuit of wealth can be reconciled with social obligations to one’s fellow men and country. Scott showed considerable awareness of the technical aspects of the regulation of trade and of banking and credit.  The plot barely touched on the armed struggle of the ‘15 but centred on whether the Jacobites can use financial means to destabilise the British Government. Frank told us on his return to London that:

 “ We immediately associated with those bankers and eminent merchants who agreed to support the credit of the government, and to meet that run on the Funds, on which the conspirators had greatly founded their hope of furthering their undertaking, by rendering the government bankrupt”.

The ability of the British Government to fight wars was based on its ability to finance them. The development of an efficient national finance system and London as a financial centre allowed the government to borrow what it needed. This was a major advantage not just in 1715 and 1745 but also in the series of wars against the French in the C18th.

In Rob Roy Scott was comparing an advanced commercial society alongside a traditional patriarchy. Readers were invited to conclude that the Hanoverian state offered new opportunities and that life in Northumberland and the Trossachs was nasty brutish and short. This was a Scott Hanoverian not Jacobite novel.

DISCUSSION

There was a smaller attendance than usual but the group benefited from comments from some of those not able to attend.

In general there was a warm and positive response to Rob Roy. The majority described the novel as an enjoyable yarn, gripping, exciting and humorous. It was a coming of age novel. There was a mystery, an engaging love interest, great characters and much stravaigin about in the Borders, Glasgow and the Highlands.      

Others were less enthusiastic, seeing the novel as slow to start, though picking up as the action progressed. Some saw the characters as mere caricatures. The language caused problems for some, not just the prolix nature of novels of the early C19th but the fairly extensive use of broad C18th Scots. This was a particular problem for the English members of the group. It was acknowledged though that the use of the Scots language gave a rich historical context to the novel. In using dialect for the low life characters Scott was following in Shakespeare’s footsteps. There was an interesting discussion as to whether the use of dialect had been a problem for the original readers of Scott’s novels, an issue none of those present could elucidate.

One very late-comer had now read Rob Roy for the third time. He had first read it on the recommendation of the proposer following a discussion in the school library at the age of 15 or 16. At that time he had much enjoyed it as an adventure story. The second time he had read it was ten years ago, when he was intrigued by the tension Scott explored between Unionist logic and Scottish romanticism. On that occasion he had been irked by the extended use of dialect and by the character of Andrew Fairweather, and taken aback by the callous execution of Morris. However, he had thoroughly enjoyed his third reading. What particularly struck him this time was the way in which Scott had not just invented the historical novel, but had set a template for the great nineteenth century novels that were to follow.

There was no direct example amongst the English novels to date that he could model himself on – the epistolary novels such as Richardson; the comic picaresque novels of Fielding and Smollett; the gothic novels such as those of Mrs Radcliffe; and the novel of manners emerging with Jane Austen. Scott produced a new synthesis that took some elements from other novelists but drew most heavily on Shakespearean drama. He offered a serious exploration of social, economic and historic themes. He combined this with an exploration of character, with adventure, with humour, and with an early example of evocative writing about the natural world. And he had little truck with sentimentality in this novel – no sooner is the happy ending offered in one half of the sentence than the heroine is killed off in the second half.

There was some discussion as to why Scott’s reputation had declined in the C20th. One squarely laid the blame on F. R. Leavis, aided and abetted by E.M. Forster. Leavis had excluded Scott from his “Great Tradition” of English novelists, dismissing him in a footnote, and argued that the great tradition ran through Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence. Leavis’s influence had been considerable and malign in respect of Scott’s reputation. The whole idea of a “great tradition” to which one had to belong was flawed, but Scott had been hugely influential on the great C19th English writers, with a clear line flowing through the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy to Lawrence. Half of all novels bought in the C19th were by Scott.

The general conclusion was that it had been well worth reading Rob Roy, particularly for an Edinburgh Book Group.  

     

31/1/13 “ENGLISH JOURNEY” by J. B. PRIESTLEY

 

The group convened in January 2013 to discuss J.B. Priestley’s record of an "English Journey" undertaken in the autumn of 1933, almost eighty years ago. That journey was suggested by the publisher, Gollancz, and their left wing views could be said to have coloured the excellent prose contained within the book. Not only could it be said, but it was said by more than one group member. Alas, not everything of note said by members of the group is recorded on this occasion because your humble scribe was unaware of his necessary recording role until an hour of discussion had ensued and someone noticed the lack of scribbling. What perceptive observations have been lost? (Perceptive? you must be joking, Ed.) Hence, this month’s episode is compiled from ill-remembered and prejudiced views, and the later contributed notes of other attendees.

In his summary, ‘To the End’, Priestley speaks of three Englands. Old England is defined by the cathedrals and minsters, the manor houses and inns, and quaint highways and byways. Nineteenth Century England is formed from coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool and railways. He suggests that ‘Merrie England” cannot be improved upon, at least with rose tinted spectacles. However, he does point out that there was a substantial exodus to the industrial, revolutionary cities in the nineteenth century. Vote with your feet, as they say. His third England was more universal, possibly born in America, of cinemas and Woolworth’s, of the city bypass and semi-detached bungalow, and so on. As he points out perceptively elsewhere in the book, the coming of improved transport and communications may signal the death of individual and regional character. When talking of East Durham, he talks of its strange isolation. ‘Nobody goes to East Durham’, and by implication, no-one who lives there can afford to leave. As elsewhere in the book he talks of the harsh northern environment either bringing its inhabitants to despair, or blunting their senses and clouding the mind. This is certainly harsh, and perhaps over-stated. As he observes, regional theatres flourish in the most unlikely settings, and there are merits in the enterprise and ingenuity of the sons of the industrial revolution that is not always echoed in the gentrified classes to the south of Sheffield.

Speaking of East Durham, rarely can a book have been so well illustrated by its accompanying photographs; the Bill Brandt picture of the brick house sheltering under the coal slag heap with the heavy machinery of the pulley system perched on its top is magnificent and such photographs can be as influential as the text. Although written eighty years ago, this at least was familiar from my own childhood, when part of Lanarkshire was dominated by these spoils from deep mining. However, not everyone had the same edition, and some were poorly illustrated by modern equivalents. If you buy this book, go for the Folio Society edition of 1997, and check the photographs before you buy! Of course, the power of the image is so dominant now. Think for example of the citizen in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square.

However, our discussion became less centred on the observation, and more on the causes of what was observed, in a historical and industrial or business context. Of course, English Journey is in itself an influential work and a precursor of the Mass Observation Project that followed, which we read about earlier in “Nella Last’s War”. Although titled an English Journey, many pointed out that it was incomplete. Priestley himself acknowledged that he had not completed the task, and had failed to meet his original intentions to be more comprehensive. Rather, than three Englands, a majority though that this was really about two Englands, and that Priestley betrayed his left wing sympathies in suggesting that the industrial north had been betrayed by the allegedly (by some, not all) unproductive, parasitic south of bankers and other financial contributors to the British economy. To what extent was the plight of the North the fault of poor management by its own community, to what extent due to southern exploitation? Was it due primarily to the location of the great natural resource of coal, which spawned the associated industries? Was it due to the inventiveness of the northern mind, which we considered earlier in “The Lunar Men”, unallied to business control? These are difficult questions to answer only in the context of this possibly biased book.

In defence of the South, one pointed out that the GDP was greater than the North in 1933, and that this was not dominated by the financial sector and other service industries, citing large aircraft manufacturers west of London as an example. While he appreciated Priestley’s descriptions of England in 1933, it was a partial account in that it neglected to cover London and the south east which were doing relatively well economically. By 1933 the recession was over and GDP growth for the UK as a whole between 1934 and 1939 was 4%, a much better recovery than we have managed this recession. Would social conditions not follow economic improvement? If WWII hadn’t come, would this recovery have continued? Has anything changed? Mind you, there are lies, damned lies and ....

Alas, no-one can be sure, so we await the thesis on contributions to the GDP then and now to ascertain the truth. Certainly, what the book does do is contrast the plight of the working class “up North”, where it is indisputably “grim”, with the rather diverse activities in the South and South West, for example in the description of his acquaintance on the coach to Southampton, who had in his varied CV experience of hairdressing, raincoats, wireless sets, and tea rooms. As Priestley observed, new businesses were springing up all around London, and so contributing to the aforementioned GDP in the more pleasant surroundings of the M4 (later) corridor. The industrial heartland was shifting from North to South, to be founded not on coal, but on semiconductors and plastics.

Published in 1934, there seemed little sense of awareness of events elsewhere in Europe, but then this is an English Journey and perhaps this reflects the times. There are references to the previous war. His time in the trenches obviously had a major effect on him. This was seen in the moving description of the battalion reunion, one of the strongest sections, and in the imagery he uses throughout the book. Yet even at the reunion it moves on to social comment. “We could drink to the tragedy of the dead ....this tragicomedy of the living, who had fought for a world that did not want them ..... to exchange their uniforms for rags.” Again, there is ambiguity in whether the commercial and social observations are a fault of economics, of history, or of individual lassitude.  “It is hard to look at small shops with anything but disgust. They are slovenly, dirty and inefficient. They only spoil the goods they offer for sale especially if these goods, as they usually are, happen to be foodstuffs. One large clean shed, a decent warehouse, would be better than these pitiful establishments.”

Time for a digression and a sideways swipe at Edinburgh’s current Tram Saga. Priestley states that “the people show a sound instinct when they desert the tramway for any other and newer kind of conveyance. There is something depressing about the way in which a tram lumbers and groans and grinds along like a sick elephant.”   Whoa, cowboy! Maybe Priestley was over-impressed by the wonderful motor coach, maybe he hadn’t tried to crawl past the illegally parked residents of Edinburgh tethering their own elephants (sorry, 4x4s) outside the local private school. Let’s get back to the point!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Some of us were un-attracted by his judgemental style, common these days amongst newspaper columnists, certainly. The default mode is belligerence and knocking down straw men, and is sometimes downright rude. Consider for example his comments on the whist drive: he was rude if honest(?) about participants (all ugly); patronising (but all such decent working class people); and sneering (unlike bridge players in the south).  He made many sweeping generalisations, e.g. on the Irish, “ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease”. Not just the Irish. “In those days you did not sing the woes of distant Negroes, probably reduced to such misery by too much gin or cocaine. I am not sure of the new Blackpool of the weary negroid ditties.” He was similarly dismissive of the working classes and their football, but then perhaps even Priestley was too young in 1934 to have seen a Hibernian cup win. One of us opined that Orwell’s tone was equally passionate, but less judgemental, and so preferable. Some of this may be a deliberate persona Priestley is cultivating - the cantankerous, plain-dealing West Yorkshire man. This was unattractive, in one view.

Turning again to the book’s origins, more than one thought the book biased by the political agenda of both author and publisher.  It was said that Priestley’s “English Journey” and Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” hugely influenced the Labour Party and popular perception of the 1930’s as a decade of depression. A historian liked and applauded the book, particularly the aforementioned regimental reunion, but had serious reservation about its influence (innocently or politically motivated?) on perceptions of the 1930s. To draw an analogy, he suggested that Neville Chamberlain’s failures in dealing with foreign affairs have also affected his reputation as an effective Chancellor.

And so we, too, moved “to the end”. I think there was universal agreement about the excellence of the writing and the evocation of time and place. He used language very effectively – a writer at the height of his powers.  Sometimes, the text was genuinely moving. Normally an outsider, it was felt that he wrote quite differently when an insider as in Bradford. However, there was much disagreement about the independence of the view and the accuracy of rendition. One quoted a comment that this was “a succession of moods rather than a succession of places.” Again, we could all agree that this was not an unbiased coverage of all Britain (omitting London and its environs); his insight into industrial development is uneven. Not everyone felt that this was necessarily a fault. Perhaps the North, in particular, was a far country of which the more affluent South, where policy was made, was not wholly aware. He was at his best when he was being descriptive, analytical, or anecdotal, at his worst when he was being judgemental, patronising or pushing a pre-devised agenda. The book is a good, if biased, historic record, and important in developing social concern for problems of unemployment and industrial squalor. There are some real flashes of insight, both into people and into the way some places have developed. Overall it was a fascinating book of abiding interest.

Yours in social justice,

TINA.

29/11/12 "BESIDE THE OCEAN OF TIME" by GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

This book wins my award for the most alluring title of all our books so far. Yes, time is a kind of ocean in which we all drown, metaphorically speaking. Of course, George Mackay Brown is an author who uses metaphors and symbols beautifully, as befits a poet. To quote from one of his poems:

In the fire of images

Gladly I put my hand.

The proposer of this book was very familiar with the author’s work through the poems, short stories and novels.  Only one other member of our group had read the book before. George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) spent most of his years on Orkney, in Stromness, suffering poverty in his early life and then illness (tuberculosis, bronchial problems, depression and finally bowel cancer). His poor health barred him from the army at the start of World War II. He worked as a journalist on the Orkney Herald.  He was a student in Edinburgh, frequenting the bars of Rose Street and meeting other writers. There he formed a relationship with a woman, Stella Cartwright, described as "The Muse in Rose Street".  However, he never married.

He was a troubled soul, as judged from his work, his life and the available photographs. He turned to alcohol but he was never an alcoholic. His fondness of beer is nicely expressed: drink, he said ‘flushed my veins with happiness...washed away all cares and shyness and worries’. Most of us can relate to that. His work was widely recognised in Scotland, and he was awarded the OBE in 1976. Beside the Ocean of Time was the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Booker Prize.

The writing, in one sense (the best sense) is naïve: he seldom uses big words or elaborate sentences, and the plots are never complex. In this book the chapters are for the most part short stories relating the dreams of a child. However, the child becomes a man and a poet; the chapters finally connect to make a coherent tale of a man’s life. Many elements are clearly autobiographical.

The child is Thorfinn Ragnarson. He lives on an imagined island in Orkney called Norbay. The first sentence is ‘Of all the lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarson’. He’s a sleepy fellow, and a dreamer.  Most chapters begin with a mundane scene of island life; pretty soon the boy falls asleep and dreams of a historical event in which he is a character. In the first story we are sailing down the Volga to confront the Cossack army, in the second we are at Bannockburn. The boy always wakes and the chapter ends as the real world is brought back. The stories are strung together to make an Orcadian chronology. It’s a simple and effective format, and the book is in a style like no other we could think of although we made comparisons with Under Milk Wood, Silver Darlings, Sunset Song.

Parts of the book have a magical quality, like the scene of the seal-people dancing, and the beautiful seal-girl crouching at the shore; she has lost her seal skin, having left it on the rock with seven limpets. What can this be all about? He takes her home, he marries her, she’s strangely addicted to sea food; they have children with scaly hands, then she leaves. Then he wakes up. It was another one of those dreams. She was a selkie, the mythical creature in Faroese, Icelandic, Irish and Scottish folklore.

The wheel of time moves slowly in Norbay, not much happens. Mostly we read of island folk living close to nature and going about their daily lives. But there are intrusions, some in dreams like the Viking Invaders and the Press-Gang; and some real, relating to social change in the years leading to the Second World War.  There is the intrusion of alcohol (the social cleavage between the ‘inn-folk’ and the ‘kirk-folk’); various outsiders come, most notably the lovely young woman who arrives unannounced and stays with the new Minister in the manse, causing the islanders to gossip: should they report the matter as misconduct to the General Assembly? She rides a horse along the tops of the cliffs, wildly. Then, one day the mysterious girl departs, saying to the young Thorfinn ‘You, poet, wait for me. I’ll come back some day. Never forget’. Three strange men, also unannounced, arrive in 1937 and proceed to set up their tripod and instruments in the wheat fields to survey the land. They are attacked by a local woman and their equipment is kicked over. Intrusions are to be resisted.

Towards the end of the book we are transported to more modern times and the pace quickens: now, Thorfinn is a young man and we are on the brink of World War II. The mood is dark. The island is being requisitioned as a military base, in fact an aerodrome to provide protection for the naval base (a naval base really existed on Hoy from 1945 to 1957 and there were indeed aerodromes). Well, that explains the three men who were conducting the survey. The island has never known such a thing, as people, supplies and materials are brought in. It’s the climax, the final intrusion; we witness the destruction of a primitive island society by massive modern technology.  He cannot stand this cataclysm and he leaves as bulldozers and machinery concrete over the fields to make a mile-long airstrip.  In the final chapter, years later, we return to the island and everything is different; there are unexpected twists and turns that bring closure to the plot. I won’t tell you what happens.

 It was an easy read, light relief after Salman Rushdie! We all enjoyed this book. There is a strong sense of place. We see the shaping of the man by the place and people, and the historical dream-stories remind us that it has always been that way. The final destruction of the land, as the hand of man replaces productive fields with impervious concrete is the ecological metaphor for our time. Amen.

Having no serious disagreement on the quality and meaning of the book, we finished our discussion rather early. Our host tempted us with oat cakes and there was talk of Orkney Whiskey. The conversation turned to ‘what’s wrong with Scottish rugby’ to which the reply was ‘the same as what’s wrong with Scottish football’. We stepped out into the cold night of Morningside, under a full moon and a sharp frost, and made our way home.

25/10/12 "THE MOORS LAST SIGH" by SALMAN RUSHDIE

The proposer indicated that Salman Rushdie was no stranger. He was born in 1947 and this prompted him to write Midnight's Children. The proposer had  a copy of this book autographed and  dedicated to him as a member of the 1947 club .The proposer had told Rushdie he had been  conceived in Calcutta during the Raj even though  born late and in Edinburgh .

Rushdie’s father was a rich lawyer /business man who changed his name to Rushdie after the great Muslim philosopher of medieval Spain. He was a Bombay wallah and after early education he sent Salman to Rugby School and thence to Kings Cambridge  to read History .Then Rushdie joined an advertising agency dreaming up “That will do nicely”   for American Express , “Naughty but nice”    for cream cakes and “Irresistible” for Aero chocolate .In the evenings he wrote a first book [a failure ] and then in 1981 Midnight's Children which won the Booker Prize and the later Best of Bookers. This won lots of Awards and opened the way for many other talented Indian Authors, eg Vikran Seths A Suitable Boy .

After Shame a book set in Pakistan he went on to Satanic Verses .At some time it was always going to provoke Muslim ire but he doubtless did not expect the Fatwah.

Then in hiding he wrote The Moor's Last Sigh. This was an important matter for us to recognise in our discussion. The proposer  met him when he appeared in 1995 in London and Edinburgh to launch the book. Security is a familiar fact now but 17 years ago it was interesting to give one’s details in advance, be searched on arrival and then see that 10% of the audience was looking at the rest of the audience not at Rushdie. He looked in the flesh less ugly than  expected. The goggle eyes are probably made more obvious by TV studios. Also he was charming.

The proposer had not read Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s recently published book about his life in hiding after the Fatwah .There was no index so he could not see in the book shop what Rushdie  had to say about The Moor. Finally in 1995 the proposer went with his wife to India for the first time and later in the year to Granada. The Red Forts in Delhi and Agra are not too different from the Alhambra .Also they saw the spice markets and warehouses in Cochin and the Synagogue with its blue tiles .It follows that this is more than just a literary  choice for the proposer.

 The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel about modern India. Its hero is Moraes Zogoiby of Bombay, nicknamed by his mother “the Moor.” But the famous sigh to which the title refers was breathed five centuries ago, in 1492, when Muhammad XI, last sultan of Andalusia, bade farewell to his kingdom, bringing to an end Arab-Islamic dominance in Iberia. From Sultan Muhammad a line of descent, partly historical, partly fabulous, leads to Moraes, the narrator, who in 1992 will return from the East to “discover” Andalusia. In a dynastic prelude occupying the first third of the novel, Moraes’s genealogy is traced back as far as his great-grandparents, the da Gamas. Francisco da Gama is a wealthy spice exporter based in Cochin in what is now Kerala State. A progressive and a nationalist, he soon disappears from the action (Rushdie gives short shrift to characters whose usefulness has ended), but his wife Epifania, faithful to “England, God, philistinism, the old ways,” survives to trouble succeeding generations and to utter the curse that will blight the life of the unborn Moraes.

Their son Camoens, after flirting with Communism, becomes a Nehru man, dreaming of an independent, unitary India which will be “above religion because secular, above class

because socialist, above caste because enlightened.” He dies in 1939, though not before he has had a premonition of the violent, conflict-riven India that will in fact emerge.

Camoens’s daughter Aurora falls in love with a humble Jewish clerk, Abraham Zogoiby. Neither Jewish nor Christian authorities will solemnize their marriage, so their son Moraes is raised “neither as Catholic nor as Jew,…a jewholic-anonymous.” Abandoning the declining Jewish community of Cochin, Abraham transfers the family business to Bombay and settles in a fashionable suburb, where he branches out into more lucrative activities: supplying girls to the city’s brothels, smuggling heroin, speculating in property, trafficking in arms and eventually in nuclear weapons.

 Aurora is a  complex character and , in many ways the emotional centre of the book. A painter of genius but a distracted mother, she suffers intermittent remorse for not loving her children enough, but prefers finally to see them through the lens of her art. Thus Moraes is worked into a series of her paintings of “Mooristan,” a place where (in Aurora’s free and easy Indian English) “worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away…. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine.” In these paintings, with increasing desperation, she tries to paint old, tolerant Moorish Spain over India, overlaying, or palimpsesting, the ugly reality of the present with “a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation.”

Aurora’s paintings give a clear hint of what Rushdie is up to in this, his own “Palimpstine” project: not overpainting India in the sense of blotting it out with a fantasy alternative, but laying an alternative, promised-land text over it.

But The Moor’s Last Sigh is not an optimistic book, and the paintings of Aurora’s high period become darker and darker. Into them she pours not only her unexpressed maternal love but also “her larger, prophetic, even Cassandran fears for the nation.” Her last painting, which gives the book its title, shows her son “lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell.”

Moraes is born under the curse of two witch-grandmothers, so it is no surprise that he has a clublike right hand and a metabolism that dooms him to live “double-quick,” growing—and aging—twice as fast as ordinary mortals.  The comparison was made with Oscar in The Tin Drum, previously discussed by the Group.

Venturing into the world, he is caught in the toils of the beautiful but evil rival artist Uma Sarasvati. A pawn in the war between this demon mistress and his mother, Moraes first finds himself expelled from his parental home and then in jail, accused of Uma’s murder. Released, he joins the Bombay underworld as a strikebreaker and enforcer in the pay of one Raman Fielding, boss of a Hindu paramilitary group.

Moraes’s grandfather Camoens had faith in Nehru but not in Gandhi. In the village India to which Gandhi appealed, he saw forces brewing that spelled trouble for India’s minorities: “In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram… In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.” His prophecy begins to fulfil itself in Moraes’s lifetime when the doors of the Babri mosque at Ayodhy are battered down by crowds of fanatical Hindus.

Camoens is prescient but ineffectual. Aurora, an activist as well as an artist, is the only da Gama with the strength to confront the dark forces at work in India. When the annual festival procession of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, a show of “Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism,” passes by their house, she dances in view of the celebrants, dancing against the god, though, alas, her dance is read by them as part of the spectacle (Hinduism notoriously absorbs its rivals). Every year she dances on the hillside; dancing at the age of sixty-three, she slips and falls to her death.

Raman Fielding, rising star of the Hindu movement, is a thinly disguised caricature of Bal Thackeray, the Bombay leader of the Shiv Shena Party, which Rushdie elsewhere calls “the most overtly Hindu-fundamentalist grouping ever to achieve office anywhere in India.” Closely linked with Bombay’s criminal underworld, Fielding is “against unions,…against working women, in favour of sati, against poverty and in favour of wealth,…against ‘immigrants’ to the city,…against the corruption of the Congress [Party] and for ‘direct action,’ by which he meant paramilitary activity in support of his political aims.” He looks forward to a theocracy in which “one particular variant of Hinduism would rule.”

The underworld struggle between Fielding and Moraes’s father culminates in the murder of Fielding and the destruction of half of Bombay. Sick of this new “barbarism,” Moraes retires to Andalusia, there to confront another monster or evil, Vasco Miranda. Miranda is a Goan painter who has made a fortune selling kitsch to Westerners. Obsessively jealous of Aurora, he has stolen her Moor paintings; to reclaim them, Moraes finds his way into Miranda’s Daliesque fortress. Here Miranda imprisons him and lets him live only as long as (shades of Scheherazade) he writes the story of his life. Rushdie of course at the time of writing the book was in hiding, a form of captivity, to avoid the same fate as Scheherazade.

Locked up with Moraes is a beautiful Japanese picture restorer named Aoi who perishes; Moraes, with Miranda’s blood on his hands, escapes. It is 1993, he is thirty-six years old, but his inner clock says he is seventy-two and ready to die.

The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to which they loop back, are packed (or palimpsested) with historical allusions. Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish corruption of his name): he sees himself as Dante in “an infernal maze” of tourists, drifting yuppie zombies, and also as Martin Luther, looking for doors on which to nail the pages of his life story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is hard to avoid the impression that all the left-over analogues of the Moor fable from Rushdie’s notebooks have been poured into these chapters, which are as a result frantic and overwritten  while elementary rules of fiction, like not introducing new characters in the last pages, are ignored: Aoi is the case in point.

 As if unsure that the import of the Boabdil/Moraes parallel has come across, Rushdie glosses it as follows: Granada, in particular the Alhambra, is a “monument to a lost possibility,” a “testament…to that most profound of our needs,…for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of boundaries of the self.”  The palimpsesting of Moraes over Boabdil supports a less trite, more provocative thesis: that the Arab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in Spain.

Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigour in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, “inexhaustible Bombay of excess,” the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over whose person he is written. Both are cities from which a regenerative cross-fertilization of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic and religious intolerance.

Like Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale. In its architecture, however, the Group found it disappointing. Aside from the dynastic prelude set in Cochin, and the last fifty pages set in Spain, the body of the book belongs to Moraes’s life in Bombay. But instead of the interwoven development of character, theme, and action characteristic of the middle section of what might be called the classic novel, the middle section of Rushdie’s novel makes only fitful and episodic progress. New actors are introduced with enough inventiveness and wealth of detail to justify major roles; yet all too often their contribution to the action turns out to be slight, and they slipped (or were slipped) out of the picture almost whimsically. It was also argued by some in the Group that those without a good knowledge of the history of the period both in Bombay and wider India would struggle with the narrative.

To complaints of this kind—which have been voiced with regard to the earlier books as well—defenders of Rushdie have responded by arguing that he works, and should therefore be read, within two narrative traditions: of the Western novel (with its subgenre, the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained, shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a multicultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than one culture but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew another.

It is not easy to counter this defence in its general form, particularly from the position of an outsider to India. But to take a single instance from The Moor’s Last Sigh: the episode in which Moraes’s father, Abraham Zogoiby, in a fit of enthusiasm for the modern, impersonal, “management” style in business, adopts a young go-getter named Adam over Moraes as his son and heir. For some fifteen pages Adam occupies centre stage. Then he is dropped from the book. The Group found the episode unsatisfying; further, we would hazard a guess that the reason why Adam disappears is not that Rushdie is following traditional Indian models but that he is only half-heartedly committed to satirizing the business-school ethos; he abandons this particular narrative strand because it is leading nowhere.

Others disagreed, enjoying the stories of Adam and other personages who blazed briefly across the pages of The Moor’s Last Sigh and then expired.

Such characters as Vasco Miranda or Uma Sarasvati or even Abraham Zogoiby himself provide a comparable problem. In their extravagant villainy they seem to come straight out of Hollywood or Bollywood.

In fact Rushdie is far from being a programmatic postmodernist. For instance, he is disinclined to treat the historical record as just one story among many. We see this in his treatment of the two histories out of which Moraes’s story grows: of the Moors in Spain, and of the Jews in India. In the case of the Moors, and of Muhammad/Boabdil in particular, Rushdie does not deviate from the historical record, which is probably most familiar to Westerners from Washington Irving’s nostalgic sketches in The Alhambra. As for the Jewish communities in India, their origins are ancient and will probably never be known with certainty. However, they preserved certain legends of origin, and to these legends Rushdie adheres without embroidering, save for one superadded fiction: that the Zogoibys descend from Sultan Muhammad (called by his subjects El-zogoybi, the Unfortunate) via a Jewish mistress who sailed for India pregnant with his child. This story is specifically (through not unequivocally) singled out as an invention by Moraes in his function as narrator.

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The overall reaction to the book was positive. It brought out the complexity and diversity of Indian society and history. It was a rich, extensive, humorous and complex story that was very enjoyable to read. There were reservations  ( see above) expressed by some of our number. The virtuosity and exuberance were entertaining and admirable but sometimes descended into showing off, stylistic confusion and incoherence.  Against this it was also pointed out that those writing in English but brought up outside England were able to call upon a wider range and background in their works, eg Kipling and Paul Scott in earlier times and Rushdie, Seth, Zadie Smith and others .

    

Fielding is Bal Thakeray the founder of Shiv Sena see ayodhia  riots  and theBombay riots

QUOTES

“give up such delusive  Esperance you rotter “

Sarah “ a large full bodied  girl waiting like an undiscovered  continent, for Abrahams vessel to sail into her harbour”

Laurel and Hardon

27/9/12 "THE BAD GIRL" by MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

The proposer first came across Llosa’s writing when visiting Miraflores, an upmarket neighbourhood of Lima, the capital of Llosa’s native country, Peru, and the setting for the opening section of ‘The Bad Girl’.  The assistant in a bookshop recommended Llosa as an introduction to Peruvian literature.  The proposer had subsequently read a number of his books, but found this to be ‘by far’ the most accessible.  It was also more overtly international in its content and sphere of action than some of the others, which contained, for his tastes, rather more than he wanted about Peruvian history and politics.

‘The Bad Girl’ has been compared with last month’s book ‘Madame Bovary’, by Llosa himself as well as others.  However, the group felt that the comparison was rather stretched.  Like Madame Bovary, the bad girl is seeking escape from her circumstances in pursuit of a flawed ideal.  But Madame Bovary’s ideal is romantic, whereas the bad girl’s is financial: the ‘high life’ at any emotional cost.  A similarity does exist however in that each of them pays a heavy price for their ‘escape’.  We felt that Llosa was less judgemental about his characters however, and both the narrator Ricardo and the subject of his obsession, the bad girl, are treated sympathetically.  The even-handedness of Llosa’s account of the bad girl was evidenced by the range of opinions about her in our group.  Some saw her primarily as a victim, others as a selfish predator.  She had elements of the classic ‘femme fatale’ of noir fiction and film, using her looks and charm ruthlessly to get what she wanted, and not hesitating to break up families and embark on bigamy.  As for Ricardo, we noted that he too had a fascination with the exotic – represented in his case both by the bad girl herself and by the attraction of life in Paris.  Like her, he is following his dream, although he is considerably more timid, and only at the very end of the story is it implied that he will produce the work of literature (the book itself) which will transcend his role as a humble translator of the words of others.

We agreed that the book was a superbly ‘easy read’, being very linear in structure and engaging in its content. Because of the range of characters and locations, each chapter felt like a new short story, although continuing the main thread of the narrative.  There was one reader who felt that sometimes we got too much circumstantial detail about Ricardo’s daily life, and another who thought background research had been a little too overtly displayed.  However, these were minor objections. We discussed whether it would make a good film, which raised the question of how the highly explicit sex scenes would be handled.  It was agreed that these were not pornographic, since the writing did not seem calculated to titillate.  It was pointed out that in today’s cinema, explicit sex scenes had become widely accepted.  There was also some discussion of the portrayal of the bad girl as a woman with a deep need to be dominated, as demonstrated by her acquiescence in the degrading treatment meted out by Fukuda.  Equally disturbing was her comment when Ricardo, for the only time in his life, hits her: “You’re learning how to treat women, Ricardito.”  A comparison was drawn (not in terms of literary merit!) with the current best-seller of the moment, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, which takes as its premise a female’s need for submission and rough treatment.  As mere men, we felt disqualified from drawing any conclusions from this, and moved on.

Returning to the qualities of the book in general, discussion ranged over characterisation and structure.  One reader thought that it was a very engaging love story, which was two-way and not a one-sided obsession.  Someone else pointed out that the bad girl was frequently trying to escape Ricardo, and that he was, until the end, the one who sought her out and ‘gatecrashed her party’.

The explication of the initial mystery of the bad girl’s origins was felt to be very satisfyingly delivered in the later part of the book.  Her father was in fact only one of a number of vivid minor characters who came on stage for sections of the book before disappearing forever.  One of the most enigmatic of these was Yilal, the boy who wouldn’t speak.  There was a feeling that his role in the story was rather tangential, but he at least demonstrated that the bad girl was capable of one altruistic relationship.  In some measure it was felt that the coming and going of minor characters left readers with quite a few loose ends, although this could well have been intentional.

Although the book seemed squarely aimed at an international readership, one of us pointed out that there was a continuous strain of political reference in the story, most notably with the account of what happened to Ricardo’s friend Paúl, and with the observations of Ricardo’s uncle on the decline of Peruvian idealism and democracy.  It was noted that Llosa himself was very active in politics, and in fact ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990.

Finally, in the light of Llosa’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, there was some discussion of the qualities necessary to attain this distinction.  Among the requirements were universality, prolific output, longevity, and, no doubt, consistency with various political considerations at the time of the committee’s deliberations.

From the Nobel Prize we meandered to J.K. Rowling’s forthcoming first adult novel, Scottish independence, Catalan independence, whether ‘the further south you go in Europe the worse it gets’ (economically!) and, finally, whether Richard the Second had been unfairly treated by historians.  By now we had really lost our thread, the bottles of wine and beer were depleted, and so we slunk away into the night.

30/8/12 "MADAME BOVARY" by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The proposer began our discussion with an account of Flaubert’s background, with particular regard to matters bearing on the novel, which was first published in serial form in 1856.  The book had taken him five years to write, and was set in a part of Normandy that was familiar to him.  The action occurs in the period 1827-46.  It is one of the best-known nineteenth century French novels and counts many eminent writers among its admirers, including Henry James (who wrote “Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment”) and, more recently, Mario Vargas Llosa.  The eminent critic James Wood  remarked that “novelists should thank Flaubert as poets should thank Spring” because “he established for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible”.

The group acknowledged that Flaubert seemed to be revolutionary in his attention to detail and his deployment of a style of narration that anticipated the Joycean “stream of consciousness”.  But in spite of this capacity for getting inside his characters’ heads, the group felt that he was contemptuous of their bourgeois attitudes and essentially pessimistic and misanthropic.  We had all struggled to find sympathy with either Charles or Emma Bovary, and wondered if Flaubert himself had any sympathy for them, despite his famous remark “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”.  We wondered if this lack of sympathy resulted from him being a self-confessed reformed romantic, whereas she never fully understands the falseness of such a world view.

One reader remarked that he had missed any humour in the novel, although the proposer commented that in his case he had found humour that he had missed when he first read the book at the age of sixteen.  He cited the satire on the slow speech mannerisms of rural folk, and Madame Bovary’s visit to the curate.  The figure of the apothecary Homais had comic elements, but it was remarked by the proposer that he felt the focus on Madame Bovary herself tended to squeeze the life out of the other characters.

We turned to discussion of the book’s themes.  We couldn’t come up with any novels of an earlier date that portrayed an adulterous marriage in such detail. Was the novel ground-breaking in this respect as well as in its realist style of writing?  We couldn’t be sure, but we thought so.  There was some discussion of its contemporary reception as immoral, and comparison with later frank treatments of sexuality that got into trouble with self-appointed moral authorities, such as Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.  However, ‘Madame Bovary’ was in fact anything but an apology for adultery.  It contains the observation that adultery ends up in the same banality as an unsuccessful marriage, and punishes the adulterous protagonist with a slow and painful death.

We discussed the quality of the various translations we had read.  One reader had been put off while reading one otherwise good translation by a number of modern Americanisms which he felt disrupted the nineteenth century European ambience of the story.  The proposer pointed out the similarities in the life of one of the book’s best-known translators – Eleanor Marx-Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx – with the life of Emma Bovary herself, notably her suicide by swallowing poison.  The usefulness or otherwise of notes and indexing was considered, and it was felt that they drew attention to many contemporary allusions that we would otherwise miss.  For one member of our group, the detailed picture of mid-nineteenth century rural life that the book portrayed was its chief pleasure.

A few structural oddities in the book were brought up.  For example an unidentified “we” begins the narration but subsequently disappears in favour of a generalised omniscient narrative voice, albeit one close to the inner thoughts and feelings of Emma Bovary in particular.  Another oddity identified by one reader was the failure of Madame Bovary’s affectionate father to show any further interest in his daughter once she had married.  For him, this was not credible, but another member of the group pointed out the insularity of life at the time, and the difficulty of making journeys in rural France in those days.

Finally, in spite of its undeniable historical importance and influence on other writers, did ‘Madame Bovary’ stand up as worth reading for a contemporary readership?  The response was a rather muted ‘yes’ from the group.  Certainly for this reader, the experience of a first reading of a classic text that had long been on his “must read one day” list was one of indifference to the fate of the characters, and a sense of having somehow missed the point.  Although others in the group had enjoyed the book more, even the proposer declined to champion the work as a masterpiece.