BEST POSTS | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Nature

I watched the BBC series Wild Isles, presented by David Attenborough. It was beautiful to look at, but it left me wondering about ‘nature’, as presented by these programmes.

In the first episode we were shown a pod of Orcas off the coast of Shetland (or was it Orkney?). I’ve watched enough of these shows to know the kind of spectacle we can expect from Orcas – they typically harry their prey to a slow and terrifying death and I still vividly remember, from Attenborough’s Arctic show, the closeup shot of an exhausted seal looking straight at the camera, as orcas dragged it off an iceberg to be torn to pieces. It felt wrong to be staring into its eyes.

This time round a baby seal, which had swum out some way off the shore, was caught by a member of the pod. The orca then took it, still alive, to a group of its companions, where, after a certain amount of playing with its victim, the successful hunter demonstrated to younger orcas -Sir David sounded quite aroused at this point- how to hold it under water and drown it.

Later on, though, we were shown an orca that had itself drowned in a fishing net. Sombre music played. This drowned cetacean was apparently a tragedy, while the slow torment of the baby seal had been presented as something rather thrilling. Why, I wondered? Why should I care about one and not the other?

The same pattern persisted throughout the series. Predators hunting and killing -and quite often targeting the young of their prey- dominated most episodes, and were presented as an exciting spectacle, accompanied by rousing, if sinister, music,as you might hear in an action scene in a movie. We were being offered animal-killing as a voyeuristic entertainment, not unlike the animal slaughters that the Romans put on in their arenas, except that this was ‘nature’ so we could savour it guilt-free. But then there would be a sudden switch of tone and talk about the fragility of ‘nature’ and the need to protect it from the depredations of humanity. I found this no longer worked for me. I grew bored of the slaughter, and even sickened by it, and it certainly didn’t put me the mood for ‘only man is vile’ pieties. My thoughts were more on the lines of Kurtz in the Congo jungle: ‘The horror, the horror.’

After hunting scenes, the next most frequent dramas depicted in these shows are the endless combats between male animals fighting to obtain, or defend, access to females. In one episode a huge, repulsive male seal spotted an equally huge and repulsive rival that had emerged from the sea, and flopped and wriggled his blubbery bulk across the sand to do battle. They ripped each others flesh, they roared, they reared up to look as big as possible. The much less repulsive female seals meanwhile hurried to get their babies out of the way, because the males in such battles are apparently so indifferent to anything except their need for dominance, that they will crush their own children to death without a thought if these are foolish enough to get in their way.

It all felt rather familiar actually, like the story-line for much of human history. Not so much a case of ‘only man is vile’, as ‘nature is vile, and we’re a part of it.’

Kite Strings

I’m not a fan of big C Conservatism, but I have a definite streak of small c, in that that I am suspicious of the impulse to trash traditions, rules and taboos, just because they are traditions, rules and taboos. To re-use a metaphor from one of my stories, a kite string may seem to be holding back the kite that strains against it, but in fact provides the rigidity that enables the kite to fly. Cut the string and the kite comes flopping down.

It’s not a universally applicable metaphor, obviously, but it’s worth thinking about before cutting a string (the monarchy, for instance?). I think I see society as a huge kite with multiple strings: you can cut them, but don’t cut too many at once, and don’t cut them without putting new ones in their place.

One of the objections I have to big C Conservatism as it exists now is that, at bottom, it is not actually conservative in the small c sense. It postures as small c conservative by ritually defending certain old fashioned symbols, but this is largely cosmetic. Modern political Conservatism, in fact, is a reckless cutter of kite strings. Greens and socialists are, in many respects, more conservative than Conservatives.

Father of the Man

I proposed the song ‘5.15’ as theme music for my previous post. The Who, from my perspective now, seem to me to have represented better than anyone else what it was like being an alienated adolescent in the 1970s. And, of their many takes on this subject, ‘5.15’ (about a stoned teenager riding a commuter train out of London) is, I think, the best. So many things are captured in this song – the free-floating sexual frustration, the sense of detachment from the adult world (‘Why should I care? Why should I care?’) – but my favourite verse is:

Magically bored
On a quiet street corner
Free frustration
In our minds and our toes
Quiet storm water
M-m-my generation
Uppers and downers
Either way blood flows

‘Magically bored’ is perfect!

See also, obviously, ‘My Generation’, its stammering refrain referenced in the above verse, and in particular ‘See me feel me’. This last (from Tommy) is more of a fragment than a song, but its eight, several times repeated, opening words can still bring tears to my eyes, so powerfully do they represent to me now the longing and fear of a 16-year-old from a somewhat dysfunctional family who has never been kissed, never even met a girl of his own age in a social situation, who has only just begun to make real, if rudimentary, friendships, but knows that in another year, he will have to go out into the world.

It’s an odd thing. To my 16-old-self, anyone over 40 was in some way emotionally already dead (‘…The things they do look awful cold/ I hope I die before I get old…’), so, if he could see me as I am now, that adolescent me would probably not recognise me as being in any way like him, but I feel an affinity with him all the same, a greater affinity, in a way, than I feel with all the other iterations of me that have existed in the years between. Why is that, I wonder?

I think partly it may be because, now, past the age of retirement, with my bus pass and my pension (yes, baby boomer, alright for some… etc etc), I have reached a kind of second adolescence, when I am no longer required to go to work every day or to have long-term plans, and when I can, if I wish, spend a Tuesday morning sitting around for several hours, listening to songs, and asking myself what they mean to me. (The magical difference is that I no longer have to cry into the void ‘see me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, because I have the things I feared I would never have.)

But it’s also partly because I have always tried in some way to be true to that 16-year-old, and not to embrace the kind of adulthood he despised. It seems odd in a way for a fully grown man, with a lifetime of experience to draw upon, to want to stay true to a clueless 16-year-old. But there it is. Foolish as he was, he saw something that I don’t want to forget. Like Wordsworth said (I’ve just looked it up! I had no idea it was him), ‘The child is father of the man.’

Cue for another song fragment from a man who burst up from a miserable childhood to explode like a firework into brilliant colours, and then crashed to the ground before he could finish writing the album this song was supposed to be part of.

Cancer? Who cares?

[Soundtrack for this post: 5.15 by The Who.]

A short while ago, in a more than usually neurotic moment, I briefly persuaded myself that I might have lung cancer. (As far as I know I don’t.) This made me think of a time, over half a century ago, when I was 16. Our school had organised a lecture about the harm caused by smoking. The doctor who gave the talk had some bucket-like boxes on stage with him and at a certain point, he opened these up and, to our slight incredulity, took out a number of cancered lungs, flattened and encased in clear plastic, which he passed round for us to feel. The healthy parts of the lung felt soft and spongy, he pointed out, but the cancered parts were hard unyielding lumps.

We felt the lumps, and they were nasty, but we were unmoved. After the lecture was over, my friends and I headed off to one of our usual smoking spots to roll up moist, aromatic Old Holborn tobacco into unfiltered cigarettes, and draw in the rich, tarry smoke. I smoked so greedily back then that I often finished when my friends still had half a cigarette left, and tried to scrounge drags from theirs. If I smoked a manufactured cigarette, I would draw on it so hard (my poor lungs!) that the filter sometimes fell apart in my mouth.

Remembering this from the perspective of someone who thought he might have lung cancer, I felt briefly angry with my past self for his utter indifference to my well-being, but the feeling didn’t last. The thing is that, while I can remember being that 16-year-old, and still have that 16-year-old inside me – for better or worse, it was the most intense and vivid time of my life – the reverse is not the case. I was not inside him. He had no sense at all of his future self in fifty years time. Me, as I am now, was a complete stranger to him, far more so than, say, my grandfather, then just 7 years older than I am now.

In fact, never mind fifty years time, I had no sense of myself in five years time, no idea where I was going, let alone how I was going to get there, other than a vague sense of wanting to be a writer, or a rock star, or something of that kind, which I suppose represented the possibility of being able to continue to play, to hold onto some aspect of being a child.

All I really understood was the tiny universe of my school where I lived as a boarder, cut off from the rest of the world. The one imperative I felt was a need to draw a line between myself and the adult world, and the values and forms of authority that the adult world accepted. Even to think about my future in a constructive way would have been to do what the adult world wanted me to do, so that to attend to what the doctor said, and do something about my smoking, would have been a kind of surrender. To free myself from the past, I had also to deny my future.

That’s how it felt at the time, and even now I can enjoy in retrospect the feeling of defiance involved in rejecting prudence, forethought and common sense as so much boring, grey, bourgeois claptrap. Of course, I now also see the fear and desperation that lay behind this -and the timidity that actually controlled me – but it wasn’t just fear, it was a need to break free from a stale mold that others wanted me to fill, even if this meant casting myself naked into the world, and even if it meant doing myself harm.

A very early work

I have a story which I wrote when I was four or five.

The full text is as follows:

Once upon a time there was an old man he lived in a church but he didnt like it

The man cried very loud so he said I want a house to live in

He heard the door bell He peeped out of the window and saw somebody he would like

Now it was evening and the person said can I live with [you]

Yes please said the man

I will said the person.

They lived in a lovely cottage and they loved it and they wouldnt move house again

A smart car came to fetch the person but the person said I dont want to go

and the man in the smart car said you must go

and the old man shot the man in the smart car

Funny thing is, the story works pretty much like the stories I still write. It takes things from my own life and and mixes them up with imaginary things. There are recognisable autobiographical elements: I had not long moved from a terraced house to a large hollow house which might well have seemed like a gloomy church.

Sometime before that, when I was less than 2, so it may well already have been outside of my conscious memory, an au pair girl who had looked after me – and (or so I now hypothesise) was warm and fun compared to my depressed and unpredictable mother – had returned to Germany, presumably collected in a car (by a boyfriend, perhaps, or maybe just a taxi driver?)

I’ve been told I was very distressed by this, so it seems to me that this story might have been a rewrite of that painful scene but with the difference that its protagonist had some power – murderous power, no less! I like the old man’s smile as the smoke and flame comes out of his gun.

There’s a primitive magic in stories and pictures. It’s as if at some level we think by naming or depicting things, we can control them.

It’s interesting to me how the old man is allowed an age and a gender, but ‘the person’ is given neither, even though in the pictures she is clearly a woman or girl, as if this someone I wasn’t supposed to name. (Or maybe I was just coy about admitting I liked girls.) I like how the old man reaches out towards her from his window with both arms when she’s still outside his front door.

I’m still dislike the idea of moving house – and have lived in my present home for forty years.

Idea for an Alternate History

The so-called culture wars have a tendency to map all debates into two pre-existing camps: us and them, and this can result in certain positions becoming associated with one side or the other in a way that seems almost arbitrary. (Why, for instance, would we associate concern about the environment more with social liberalism than with social conservatism?)

This polarising tendency appears to be particularly pronounced in America but my sense is that it is more pronounced in Britain than in other European countries. If this is true, I wonder whether it is a product in part of ‘first past the post’ electoral systems which tend to result in a competition for power between two dominant parties, and make it hard for third parties to make headway? (For isn’t that what we mean by ‘culture wars’: the intellectual equivalent of an adversarial two-party system?)

Anyway, I think it may be partly as a result of this kind of binary thinking, that Liberalish, Remainish people often lump the Brexit vote together with the election of Trump, as if they were exactly the same phenomenon. This is understandable but lazy. Of course there are large overlaps, but there were people who voted for Brexit who wouldn’t have dreamed of voting for Trump, and there were reasons for voting Brexit that had nothing to do with Trump-style nationalism.

So much of politics is about projection. ‘We’ project things we don’t like onto ‘them’ and mock the things they value, while projecting everything that is good and virtuous onto the things we do value. Indeed the very fact that ‘they’ despise something, makes us value it even more, to the point of uncritical idealisation.

A narrative emerged among some Remainers, for instance, in which they mocked or condemned patriotism but declared themselves proud Europeans. But is there any moral difference between identifying with a country and identifying with a continent? (If there is, I’d be interested to know what exactly is the the land area required for identification with a piece of territory to become virtuous?)

Breaking away from larger entities, defending the integrity of large entities, and joining together to form larger entities are, it seems to me, all quite common political processes. They can all be presented as progress, and can all in different circumstances be associated with political positions that may be described as left-wing, right-wing or neither.

I find myself imagining a parallel timeline where it’s the right-wingers who are the biggest fans of the European project, because they want to enhance and perpetuate the global power of the wealthy, developed, culturally Christian countries that once divided the world between them. and it’s the fascists in particular who want to unite the ancestral homeland of the white race into a single giant state. (The lefties in this universe would be advocates for organisations such as the Commonwealth or the Francophonie that build links between countries across the global North-South divide.)

If you imagine something that seems plausible, it sometimes turns out to already exist. (I didn’t know that ‘rogue planets‘ were really a thing, for instance, until after I’d invented one for a story.) After writing the above, I learned that the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, did indeed advocate uniting Europe into a single state.

Worldbuilding

Someone quoted the following quite widely-cited passage from M John Harrison in something I read recently:

‘Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

‘Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, and makes us very afraid.’ [More context here]

Do I agree? Well, it depends what kind of worldbuilding he means. Some worldbuilding is necessary to any sort of story-telling – all stories need a context of some kind, and sometimes the context is at least as important as any of the characters – but some worldbuilding isn’t necessary in that way, and too much of it can be counterproductive, even if it doesn’t make us ‘very afraid’.

Of course Harrison is right that for a writer to construct a whole world is in any case impossible. Even to precisely describe a wooden chair would take more words than the word count of an entire library of novels. The reader must be allowed to do much of the work (work to which we are well accustomed, since in life also, we must assemble a sense of a complete world from a collection of fragments and guesses.)

Harrison’s own novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is actually, I’d say, a rather good piece of worldbuilding. The story ostensibly takes place in contemporary England, partly in London and partly in the Midlands, but the setting is an imaginary place nevertheless, and one of the main pleasures of reading the book, and the thing that most lingered in my mind afterwards, is this place’s peculiar, queasy, dreamlike flavour. (The one moment that jarred for me was when the narrator mentioned ‘the debacle of Brexit’, thus ceasing to be the unfolder of a fictional world and becoming just M. John Harrison talking about this one.)

The Sunken Land is saturated with watery imagery: flooded fields, flooded houses, flooded gardens, dampness, houseboats, phials of muddy water, things that live in water, the River Thames, the River Severn, taps, kettles, toilets, a map of the oceans, the pools that form in sodden fields where you can still see grass and flowers beneath the glassy surface… This squelchy stuff, which all of us can easily assemble in some form or other from our own watery memories, comes together in the book to form an extended metaphor for the main protagonist’s depressed, sunken state (and, in a less clearly defined way, a metaphor also for the country we live in), so it’s absolutely essential to the whole enterprise that we enter into it. But he coaxes us to do this, not by precisely describing and explaining everything, which would be impossible (as he says), but by convincing us that he has immersed himself in it.

Lots of novels fail to do this. I have given up reading many books because I can’t experience their settings as anything more than clumsy cardboard cutouts, which no one has ever really inhabited. And if even the author hasn’t been there, why should I as a reader even try? But my point here is that this is worldbuilding, and there wouldn’t be much left of The Sunken Land without it.

What Harrison dislikes, then, is not worldbuilding per se, but a particular kind of worldbuilding in which the author gets over involved in making stuff up for the sake of it, fussily providing piles of detail which have no thematic purpose and get in the way of our own imaginations. The classic case of this is Tolkein’s imagined languages, alphabets and the whole vast historical/mythological backstory he created for the Lord of the Rings (though, to be fair, he summarised much of this material in appendices to avoid overloading the books themselves). Tolkein clearly had fun coming up with all this detail and, since I used to make up languages, alphabets and mythologies myself as a kid, I understand the pleasure of it. It’s the sort of activity that feels comfortable and safe because it’s intellectually engaging but also emotionally neutral, a bit like doing crosswords, or sorting out a stamp collection, or playing solitaire on your phone. (These days I look things up on Wikipedia that have no bearing on anything important to me at all. I find it restful.)

I don’t myself see anything sinister in this sort of activity, but it certainly doesn’t have much to do with story-telling, or the literary arts, and most of us probably wouldn’t want to feel that we’d spent too much time on it at the cost of other more lively and more outward-looking pursuits. It can be an escape from stress, though, and readers as well as writers find it so, which is where the ‘nerdism’ comes in. Some people enjoy absorbing themselves in the minutiae of imaginary worlds such as Tolkein’s, or J K Rowling’s. Some people learn to speak Klingon, or enact scenes from their favourite fictional universes, taking a holiday from the real world in those non-existent places. The kind of worldbuilding that Harrison disapproves of is (I think) the construction of these sorts of intricate non-places to hide in, something that is often referred to as escapism by those who dislike science fiction and fantasy.

I’m sort of with him. Yet at the same time I think it can be a hard line to draw, this line between necessary worldbuilding, which Harrison’s novel is a good example of, and the escapist kind which he despises and which, as he puts it, is not ‘technically necessary‘. After all, any novel or story, however literary, however serious, however engaged with painful and important topics, is necessarily in part an escape from the quotidian world, for writer and reader alike. Even a discussion such as this is in part a nerdy escape of that kind. Even the learned arguments that take place amongst eminent critics and distinguished scholars.

Utopia can wait

Two kinds of statement seem to come from the more radical wing of climate change activists:

(1) Unless we end greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years it will be too late and we will see a catastrophic collapse of civilisation and of the biosphere,

(2) We will only end greenhouse gas emissions if we completely get rid of the present capitalist political/economic system.

While I accept the possibility that both these statements may be true, I really hope they’re not, because there is absolutely no way that a completely new and fully functional political and economic system is going to be constructed in the next few years.

I mean, it’s not even as if we have blueprint of how such a system might work. You can’t just say you want ‘a society that values people more than profits’, or ‘a society that lives in harmony with nature’, and call that a plan! How are resources going to be distributed? Who is going to be in charge? (Oh, the people are going to be in charge are they? Is that the same ‘people’ who voted for the governments you say aren’t doing enough?) What is going to prevent the pursuit of short term gains that lead to long term harm? What incentives for work are there going to be? What is going to prevent the system being hijacked by its own elites, like Communism was? etc etc.

Lots of different kinds of people have their place of course, and this may in part be a matter of temperament, but speaking for myself, I am much less impressed, when it comes to combating climate change, by radical heroics than I am by meticulous practical work. XR cofounder, Roger Hallam, apparently thinks that nothing will change without a major insurrection that leads to large number of activists going to prison. I can’t see myself that large numbers of people being sent to prison will necessarily have the desired effect. I can imagine all sorts of possible consequences of insurrections of that kind, including the rise of authoritarian governments with no interest in climate change at all.

Remember that Lenin believed he was leading the Russian working class on the fastest route to socialism – and that Russia ended up with petro-capitalism and Putin.

Personally I’d rather see large numbers of people working on problems such as mass energy storage, affordable green fuels, and carbon neutral cement. It’s solving problems like these -and the political and business headaches that come with them – that’s going to stop climate catastrophe. Utopia can wait.

Vermin

I haven’t read this book yet – it’s on its way to me- but I’m keen to do so because it connects with something that I’ve been thinking for a while, which is that, even in their concern to protect ‘nature’ against the depredations of humans, human beings are anthropocentric. The ‘nature’ people seek to protect is a kind of much loved park or garden that they don’t want to change in any way.

For instance, people who worry about species becoming extinct are often in favour of measures that would involve killing large numbers of animals that are thriving and prospering. Red squirrels (‘indigenous’) must be protected. Grey squirrels (originating from North America) are ‘vermin’ to be controlled.

‘Vermin’, like ‘weed’, is an entirely human category which means ‘successful species we don’t like’. Some flightless bird that stumbles about on a small island off New Zealand, and survives only because there are no ground-living animals to prey on it, must be protected by killing any new arrival that threatens it. But possums, introduced to New Zealand by humans, and now thriving there, are vermin to be wiped out.

I don’t say that people aren’t entitled to make these choices -I’d be sad myself if red squirrels died out, and sad if New Zealand’s flora and fauna became simply a compendium of European and Australian species. I’m just pointing out that they are essentially aesthetic choices, based on human preferences, and have nothing to do either with animal welfare (I’m sure British grey squirrels and New Zealand possums enjoy being alive every bit as much as the animals they are supplanting) or with protecting nature. Species evolving in isolation, and species competing with one another when circumstances bring them together are equally natural processes (see for instance The Great American Interchange) and are both important drivers for evolution.

So, if you deliberately protect species against their competitors, you are actually stopping one of the ways in which new species come into being. British grey squirrels and New Zealand possums may threaten indigenous animals, but, given time, they themselves will evolve and diversify into new indigenous forms. (Llamas, for instance, those most iconic of South American animals, are actually descended from the North American mammals that came south when the two Americas collided, and drove many of South America’s indigenous mammals to extinction.) Admittedly this takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and often much, much longer than that*, but the fact that this is longer than the lifespan of human beings or human cultures is our problem, not nature’s.

*PS Having since read the book, which gives many examples, I have now learned that new varieties, and even new species, can sometimes emerge far more quickly than this. Nevertheless evolution is a slow process, and presumably even slower if things are done to stop it happening.

Lorry Drivers

I heard a news item on the radio last week about the department store chain, John Lewis, getting ready for Christmas. It concluded with a reassurance from John Lewis that there would be no shortage of lorry drivers because they had put up lorry drivers’ pay and were busy recruiting. In fact, they have put up pay by £5,000. Many other chain stores have done the same.

The current shortage of lorry drivers in the UK is due in part to Covid, but there seems to be general agreement that Brexit is also a factor, because companies can no longer recruit drivers from other parts of Europe.

I’ve seen this presented in Remainer contexts as another example of how bad Brexit is, but if I was a lorry driver who’d voted for Brexit, I wouldn’t take that view. I’d see it an example of Brexit helping me, just as I’d hoped, and I’d be pleased. Driving lorries isn’t an easy job, and up to now it hasn’t been particularly well paid. £5,000 a year is a big raise.

And, if I was lorry driver who’d argued in the past that companies were holding wages down by bringing in workers from poorer parts of Europe, I’d be angry. I’d be angry that up to now I’d been told that this was a myth put about by racists and xenophobes.

A very Remainer friend of mine once said that Brexit would be bad because we’d no longer have access to all these excellent plumbers and cleaners from Eastern Europe. Bad for the cleaner- and plumber-using classes perhaps, was my thought at the time, but not necessarily bad for the cleaning and plumbing classes.