Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

The Neapolitan Quartet

A tough neighbourhood inhabited by tough people quick to anger, to violence, to threats to kill. Local businesspeople who move back and forth across the grey area between legitimate business and crime. Adultery. Revenge. A lot of shouting. A story that goes on and on… It sounds a bit like East Enders, but is actually the celebrated four-novel sequence by Elena Ferrante, set largely in post-war Naples, and which, unlike East Enders, includes characters, including the main protagonist Elena Greco, who leave the community in which they grew up. I listened to the novels back to back as audiobooks, which is something like 60 hours of listening, so they certainly engaged me, and yet I didn’t love them.

I’m wondering why I didn’t love them? Maybe part of it was seeing relationships between men and women depicted, from a woman’s perspective, as so disappointing, so ultimately unrewarding. Hard for a man to hear, I guess. And yet all the relationships in these books, including the friendship between two woman which form the spine of the whole quartet (Elena, who leaves the neighbourhood to become a celebrated writer, and Lila, who remains), feel cold. Ferrante is admirably honest in depicting the negative feelings that always exist to some degree in any long-term friendship, but not so good on the positive ones that make us persist with friendships anyway. And it’s hard to see what really drives Elena Greco. She certainly does a lot of stuff, she leaves her working class neighbourhood to go to university, she marries the son of a prominent and wealthy left-wing intellectual, she writes a best selling book, she leaves her husband to have a relationship with another married man etc, but I was left with an odd feeling that she was sleepwalking through all this. Even the books she describes writing seem like they emerge from her almost by accident.

Elena Greco is someone who moves from a poor working class neighbourhood to become part of the middle-class left-wing intelligentsia. I know from friends who have made this same transition that this is a bewildering experience, you never quite feel part of the new milieu which you have joined, and you look back on where you came from with a confused mixture of loyalty, affection and contempt. And maybe the impression I got of sleepwalking is partly the author’s way of depicting this kind of bewilderment, this double estrangement.

Towards the end, Lila experiences a terrible calamity, one of the very worst things that can happen to anyone. Since Elena Greco has already written books based on real people in the old neighbourhood, Lila makes her promise not to write a book based on this calamity. But then Elena does so anyway, winning herself acclaim at a time when her literary reputation has been fading, and ending her friendship with Lila. Of course, it’s a problem for any writer that the things that are most vivid and meaningful to us are often things we can’t write about without hurting people we care about. Some might argue that a true artist must be willing to sacrifice everything and anyone for her art. I’m not so sure. I think having to find ways of recasting raw experience in a completely new form is one of many disciplines which seem restricting but are actually liberating.

One thing about audio-books, incidentally, is that one’s sense of the book itself is mediated by a third person (or actually by a fourth person in a case such as this, since the quartet also been translated from another language). Hillary Huber, who recorded these books, did an admirable job of developing a different voice for each character, but I imagine the book might have had a different feel if I had read it myself in my own internal voice.

Happy Ēostre

I looked up the etymology of ‘Easter’. According to Bede it was named for a pagan Germanic goddess, Ēostre. So as with Christmas, a Christian festival may be piggybacking a previous pagan celebration, and so cashing in on the extra depth, the layers of associations, that this would have provided for recent converts from paganism.

Ēostre is thought by historical linguists to be traceable to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *H₂éwsōs, and to be cognate with ‘East’, that being where the sun rises. Apparently, in Indo-European myths, the *H₂éwsōs figure is often a daughter of the sky-god, who brings light to the world only reluctantly and is punished for doing so. In which case a daughter of the supreme god who is punished for bringing light has been supplanted by a son of the supreme god who is also punished for bringing a kind of light.

There’s lot of guesswork in all this whose plausibility I am certainly not qualified to evaluate on the basis of reading a couple of Wikipedia articles, but I love the depth of words, the endless chains of associations from which they derive their meaning, stretching back until they disappear into the mists of the past. There’s more more richness in this, I feel, than in rigid theological systems which, like language pedants, seek to set in stone something which is by nature always in a state of flux.

Alien Life

Astronomers believe they may have discovered signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. The planet itself is only known to them because of the slight flicker that occurs each time it passes between its sun (K2-18) and us, and the indicators of life are the tiny changes in the colour composition of that light that occur at the same time, assumed to be the result of light passing through the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopy suggests that these changes indicate the presence of dimethyl sulphide and/or dimethyl disulphide, both of them gases which on Earth are produced by marine algae and bacteria. The planet is so far away that the light being analysed has been travelling towards us for 124 years.

There have been claims like this before which haven’t stood up to further examination -claims, for instance, that the imprints of bacteria had been found found in meteorites of Martian origin – so too much excitement is premature. Also, even supposing that the biological origin of these chemicals is somehow confirmed, this doesn’t mean that K2-18b is populated by organisms like our animals and plants. On Earth, as I understand it, these chemicals are produced by simple prokaryote organisms, and there is a really huge evolutionary leap involved in getting from prokaryotes to the much more complex eukaryotes that are the basis for all large multicellular organisms on Earth.

Nevertheless, even the discovery of something resembling bacteria or algae on another planet would represent an enormous change in our knowledge of the universe. As far as we’ve known up to now, life could be unique to our own planet -the result perhaps of a set of coincidences so unlikely as to literally never have occurred anywhere else. But if we know that life also exists on another planet only 124 lightyears away (‘only’ is an odd word to use for such an immense distance, but bear in mind that our galaxy, itself one of billions, is some 90,000 lightyears wide, and 1,000 lightyears deep), it becomes clear that life must be present all over the place. Like the Copernican revolution, proof that this was the case would represent a futher radical decentring of our place in the universe. Or at least it would do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that it doesn’t feel all that surprising. We have been familiar for a long time, after all, with the idea of life on other planets, which has been a staple of science fiction for a century and more.

This, for me, is a reminder that science fiction, dismissed by many as a rather lowly form of writing -escapist entertainment and no more- is a modern form of fantastical literature that burgeoned in the wake of the incredibly rapid scientific and technological changes of the past two centuries, and perhaps serves a rather important cultural function for such a constantly changing world. Interplanetary travel, robots, artificial intelligence… all were explored in fiction long before they actually existed. (Social media, admittedly, not so much!) And, just as children’s play helps prepare them for adulthood, science fiction helps us deal with the fact that, unlike people in earlier ages, we live in a time where, within a single lifespan, things will be discovered that will turn upside-down the way we see and interact with the world.

And science fiction also provides a way of visiting, if only in our imaginations, the places in the universe which we know might well exist, but which we know we will never actually see. I mean, how could we bear knowing that there is, or may be, other life out there, without at least speculating about the forms that life might take? And isn’t it the function of all fiction, in fact, to take us to places where we couldn’t otherwise go?

Might is Right

‘The Americans want our resources, our water, our land and our country,’ says the new prime minister of Canada in his acceptance speech. Canada! Even a couple of months ago, a Canadian prime minister talking about the threat of annexation by its neighbour and long-term ally really would have seemed the stuff of speculative fiction, not something that could happen now.

Whether or not Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’ depends on how broad or narrow a definition of the word ‘fascist’ you use -Is Putin a fascist? Kim Jong Un? Narendra Modi? Erdogan? – but he represents an extraordinarily sudden reversion to a style of leadership that prevailed for much of history: the naked and unapologetic wielding of power, not to make the world better in some way, but simply in order to dominate and prevail.

The use of force by powerful countries has of course never gone away and America, Britain and other nations have been actively involved in very recent times in overthrowing governments they didn’t like, but America’s new posture of openly flaunting its power to dominate and spread fear, even among its supposed friends and allies, really is reminiscent of a medieval king, like King Scyld in Beowulf (that ‘wrecker of mead-benches’ who forced neighbouring clans to pay him tribute, and of whom the poet says ‘That was a good king’), or of the Roman generals who won adulation by conquering new territories, and bringing their defeated leaders back to Rome to be paraded through the streets in chains.

Since the Italian Fascists and German Nazis admired this kind of might, and claimed to be emulating this kind of leadership, it really isn’t an exaggeration to say that Trumpism is a cousin of Fascism and Nazism, an ideology, like them, based on the glorification of might. But Fascism and Nazism were very specific ideologies that emerged in Europe in the second quarter of the twentieth century, alongside Stalinism (which, barring the genuflection to socialism, was something rather similar) and to call Trump a capital-letters Fascist is perhaps to ignore how commonplace the rule of more-or-less naked might has been throughout history, and how commonplace it is around the world.

England

My sister told me the following. Her sons play online games in which players identify themselves with a name and a flag to indicate their their country of origin. Scottish players use the saltire, Welsh players the dragon, but my nephews don’t use the St George’s flag because it has become associated with far-right politics, and they avoid players who do use it. Instead they choose the union jack.

I can’t criticise my dear nephews’ pragmatic choice – they are there to play a game, not to get involved in unpleasant conversations, and of course they don’t want to be ostracised by other players – and yet a part of me wants to yell, It’s our fucking flag! Are we really just going to lie down and let those people steal it? England is already the only part of Britain that doesn’t have its own parliament, meaning that its government is also the government of the UK (one consequence of which is that England can have a government that wasn’t elected by a majority of English MPs – something that never seemed to be mentioned when English remainers were wailing that Brexit wasn’t democratic because Scotland didn’t vote for it!) Are we also to be confined to using the UK flag?

If English people say ‘England’ when we mean Britain, or ‘Britain’ when we mean England, we get ticked off. But you can see why we get confused!

I’m not trying to suggest that England is hard done by. It’s the richest, and by far the largest, part of the UK – several times more populous than the other three countries combined – but I do think we should be allowed our own identity.

Perhaps more importantly, I think that this kind of move – eschewing our own national flag, expressing distaste for our own country – is exactly the kind of thing that alienates the general population from left-leaning middle class folk like myself, thus contributing to the disastrous rift that’s opened up in the century-long class alliance that used to sustain progressive politics. We liberal types are very hot on respecting other people’s cultures. We should apply the same principle to the culture of our own compatriots. Not least because, if we don’t, they’ll turn to people who do. But also because disparaging your own just isn’t a very appealing habit.

And anyway, look at it, what a beautiful flag it is! The flag of England!

The wrong side of history

I don’t always like Marina Hynde’s column in the Guardian – her heavy sarcasm can get a bit relentless – and, for that matter, I don’t always like the Guardian, but I thought this piece of hers, about the reaction to the movie Emilia Pérez and what it tells us, was right on the nose, so much so that I’m going to quote about half of it right here:

… A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.

Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too… It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.

… I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.

In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right…

I agree. I think that particular kind of judgy, conformist, witch-hunting ‘leftism’ must take some share of the blame for the rise of the authoritarian right. In other words, in its own terms, it’s ‘on the wrong side of history’, though, like Marina Hynde, I’ve always hated that phrase, with its smug implication that the speaker’s world view is the one that will ultimately prevail.

Value added (2)

So, just as branding can add value to a manufactured product, so can the ‘brand’ resulting from fame and adulation add value to a cultural artifact: a book, a film, a painting, a piece of music… (I’m avoiding the term ‘work of art’ because that tends to imply something highbrow, and this is equally true for works at every level of ‘brow’)

But it’s possible to flip the comparison right over and argue that these cultural products themselves function as a kind of branding that adds value to everyday life.

For instance, I sometimes like to listen to music when I’m driving. Get the music right and it works with the passing scene like the soundtrack of a movie. Life feels that little bit more interesting and intense, and I feel a bit like I’m a character in a story and not just – you know- little inconsequent me.

There was a time once, I remember, when certain young men would put speakers on the outside of their cars with the idea, or so I imagine, that the rest of us, too, would see them as being like characters in movies, and that this in turn would enhance their own sense of being so – their sense of being someone, in other words, and not just anyone, which is an important thing to have, even if putting speakers outside your car is rather narcissistic.

So a cultural artifact, music, is adding richness to a car journey, and therefore adding value to life itself, in the same way that music, words and images can be used to add value to a product advertised on TV.

It may do this just by being pleasurable to listen to, and evoking various moods and feelings which we find engaging, but it may also function by making us feel like we are inside another cultural artifact, a movie, a story-world, a place where life is more vivid and intense. Advertising does this too. Look at car ads on TV, or perfume ads, and, in pretty much every case, you are being invited to think of the product as something that will admit you to a story world. And this is not even a con, exactly.

We’ve got sales targets

While on the subject of ads, let me admit that there is a copywriter inside me, crying to be let out. I once whiled away an hour on a train by devising in my mind an entire advertising campaign for McCoy’s crisps, including TV ads, posters and merchandise.

I did actually think about being a copywriter when I was a kid, inspired, as I said before, by The Space Merchants – in spite of (or, to be honest, probably because of) that book being about the dangerous power of advertising. Unfortunately for my advertising career, I did also internalise the book’s political message, and by the time I was old enough to need a job, I didn’t feel able to give over my life to helping giant corporations sell harmful things.

But I think I would have been good at copywriting. It certainly would have been a better fit with my skills than being a social worker, and an excellent training for being a writer, at least in the narrow sense of honing my skill with words, because the best advertising copy has something in common with poetry – it has to be as succinct as possible and make every word count – but with the added twist that, unlike poetry, it has to work even when its readers have barely noticed that it’s there.

This ad from a while back seems very simple, but is a small masterpiece of compression.

Oasis soft drink ad: ‘It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets.’

The final sentence – ‘We’ve got sales targets’ – is disarming and funny because it frankly admits the real purpose of the ad, and yet it doesn’t in any way reduce the impact of the sequence set up by the previous sentences and the picture of the drink: summer (hot), thirsty (unpleasant), and Oasis (a cool and refreshing release from heat and thirst – and, speaking of release, isn’t that image quite blatantly orgasmic?)

In fact, far from reducing its overall impact – the ‘sales target’ sentence allows the rest of the ad to slide gently into your consciousness (and, more importantly, into your unconscious), like the smooth coating on a pill, without seeming too bald and shouty.

And notice how ‘You’re thirsty’ is in a larger font. So often when we’re busy, we don’t notice our bodily sensations until something draws them to our attention. (When I was a social worker, I would often notice right at the end of the afternoon that I felt quite light-headed, and realise that I’d forgotten to eat my lunch.) Also, though I don’t really know why this should be, ‘thirsty’ is a particularly powerful word with lots of bite. Much more so than, say, ‘hungry’ or ‘tired’.

Brilliantly effective writing. And all done in eight words – or nine including the bottle. I can’t stand those kinds of drinks as it happens, but it would have worked on me otherwise, no question about it. And, if only it wasn’t for my political scruples, I would have loved to have worked on ads like that.

Value added

I once heard an advertising professional making the case that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it adds value to them – we enjoy products more because of the associations that advertising has added to them. I’m quite certain this is true (and not just because, ever since I read The Space Merchants as a kid, I have had a fascination with advertising’s dark arts).

For instance, my youngest daughter and I used to love Hobgoblin Ale’s ‘What’s the matter lager boy?’ ads, and bought the beer accordingly. I have no doubt the ads made the drink seem more fun than it would have been if we had drunk it from an unmarked glass without knowing what it was. We would still have liked it it, no doubt, but it would just have been a beer.

This podcast discusses the possibility that Stradivarius instruments might be a spectacular example of this effect. Many people are convinced that these centuries-old violins and violas, which can sell for tens of millions, make a uniquely beautiful sound. And yet, as the podcast shows, musicians involved in blind tests did not favour the Strads over modern violins, or even correctly identify them more often than you’d expect them to do by chance. In the podcast, a professional musician who actually owns a Strad refuses to accept the validity of this finding, but it is very difficult to separate a product from its branding unless you do a blind test (especially if you’ve spent a fortune on it). And, as that advertising man might ask, why would you even want to separate a product from its branding, when the branding really does make you enjoy the product more?

How much does this branding effect apply in the cultural sphere generally? There can’t be much doubt, for instance, that a simple sketch attributed to Picasso will be worth far more, and receive far more attention and praise, than would be the case if that exact same sketch had been made by an artist no one has heard of. (Duchamp famously showed that, just by signing it, he could turn a urinal into a work of art.) I’m pretty sure that I have often given films, books, paintings etc a much more sympathetic hearing when I’ve known in advance that they are considered to be masterpieces, than I might otherwise have done. In fact, it’s hard to see how our appreciation of books and films could not be affected by their reputations, given that books and films only work at all by triggering associations in our mind, and their reputation will inevitably play a part in those associations. (Being perverse and prone to jealousy, I sometimes dislike books and films more than I otherwise would have done, precisely because of the kind of praise they’ve been given – but that’s still a branding effect. It’s still me being influenced by the book or film’s reputation.)

Nevertheless it is still meaningful to ask if it’s the reputation of a work of art, or the associations that would be set up anyway by the work itself, that is the main contributor to the value that’s attributed to it. Watching a particularly good episode of Succession, my wife asked ‘Is Shakespeare really so much better than this?’ I think it’s a good question. If you make up your mind that something’s wonderful, whether it’s Shakespeare or the Beatles, Ulysses or the Bible, then you will find wonderful things in it, and you are much more likely to make up your mind that something’s wonderful if everyone keeps telling you so. In the case of those four examples, there are whole industries devoted to celebrating their wonderfulness.

Life isn’t like a novel

I turn 70 at the end of this year. It’s an interesting time of life. In some ways I feel more myself than I ever did. This is perhaps in part because of not having a day job of any kind – I haven’t had one for 9 years- so I don’t have to play a role, or fit into a system in the way I once did, and I have a lot of time when I can think, or write, or see people, or do whatever I want.

(I’ve sometimes noticed in the past when I’ve met up with people who still work in a place I used to work, how intensely involved they are in the politics of that world, the machinery of it. It seems to be so BIG for them, just as it once did to me, yet now, from outside, it seems so small, like an ants nest on the floor of a forest, and it seems almost comical that they should take it so very seriously.)

Another thing is that a lot of options are closed to me. For instance, I’m not going to begin a whole new career at this point, or start a whole new family. I have had most of my life (I’d have to live to 140 for that not to be true!), and I have to recognise that in many ways, this is it – I’ve got as far with this thing or that thing as I’m ever going to get, whether or not I’d hoped to get further. So I’m sort of stuck with being me.

One thing I do a lot of, though it can be painful, is review my life so far, almost as I might look back at a novel when I’ve reached the end: So those were the main characters! So this was the story arc!

But when I do this, I realise that life doesn’t really work like a novel. For example, if, in a novel, there was a character who met with the protagonist regularly for a chat, but didn’t advance the plot in any way – didn’t have an affair with the protagonist, or set up a business with him, or say some wise or devastating thing that changed the course of his life…- you’d either cut that character out, or give them something to do. I think this is true even in a literary novel which likes to think it’s above the vulgarity of plot, but still has to show the protagonist progressing.

This is why characters in novels often seem to have a rather limited number of friends, and we seldom hear much about the conversations they have with their children or grandchildren, even though friends, family, children are probably for most people the main thing that give their life meaning.