Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Josienne Clarke

My wife and I went to see Josienne Clarke in the Junction in Cambridge a couple of months ago, when she and her band were doing a performance of the songs of Sandy Denny. I’m no folk buff and knew very little about Sandy Denny and her songs (I’ve learned a bit more since), but I first encountered Josienne Clarke some years ago, I often listen to her music – she normally sings mainly her own stuff – and always go to see her if she’s performing in this area.

I get easily bored, but I was spellbound throughout the concert, as I always am when I see her. She has a wonderful singing voice. It’s not especially powerful – she’s not a belter-out of songs – but is very precise and expressive. She seems to me someone who takes very seriously the craft of singing. When performing she has a lovely way of describing the music as she makes it with graceful twirling spirals of her hands – something I find myself doing myself when I listen to her music at home. (I think the photo above captures her right hand in mid-twirl). Hers is definitely a folk singing voice, though she is not a folk purist, and her band plays electric instruments, keyboards, drums.

After the concert I went up to the merchandise table and bought her latest album Parenthesis, I on CD. This was, strictly speaking, pointless, as I never play CDs these days, and listen to her music on Spotify. So, as I admitted to my wife I basically spent £15 just so as to be able speak to her, but when I got to the front of the queue, all I could think of to say was ‘You’re a wonderful singer, Josie.’ As my wife teasingly pointed out, I really was quite star-struck. Anyway, she needed the money so as to be able to record a Sandy Denny album.

When I first came across her she was performing as a duo with her then partner Ben Walker, who played guitar (she played guitar also, but he was the one that did most of the fancy stuff) and did the arrangements on their recordings, though she was the singer and the songwriter. It was apparently a very painful break-up and she’s since written a number of very raw break-up songs. My favourite of these is ‘Dark Cloud’, which you can hear on Spotify here – a beautiful song about living with someone who refuses to let you make them happy, and makes you feel guilty if you ever dare to be happy yourself.

She did some beautiful songs in the duo, but she really didn’t need the help. On Parenthesis, I, she did all the production and arrangements, including adding saxophone and recorder parts that she played herself. My favourite song is probably ‘Dead Woman’s Bones‘ – a song about a man appropriating the brilliance of a dead woman songwriter. I wonder if this is about Sandy Denny, who I am pretty certain is the subject of another song on the album called ‘Magic Somehow’- Denny died at 31, after deliberately throwing herself down some stairs – but I don’t know enough about her to know if there is anyone who can be accused of appropriating her work in that way. Or perhaps the song is about how Clarke’s former partner made her feel – or simply about women artists throughout history whose work has been claimed by men. Anyway, the song works on every level, including a very beautiful and complex arrangement. God knows how many times I’ve played it.

Josienne Clarke isn’t exactly a household name – household names don’t tend to sell their own merchandise – but she has loyal followers. She deserves to be better known, but then she wouldn’t play the small venues which she does so well. Not being famous but having people who really appreciate you isn’t such a bad place to be in some ways.

One thing I thought was a pity was that the average age of the audience was, like me, more than twenty years older than her. (She’s in her early forties). I hope this reflects the fact that Sandy Denny died nearly half a century ago and her fans are getting old, and isn’t a sign that this kind of music only appeals nowadays to people my age.

Josienne Clarke’s website

Palestine Action

Rather incredibly, it is now a criminal offence to express support for this organisation. It’s been proscribed, and is therefore legally on a par with groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. So, although prison would certainly be an interesting experience, I won’t express support for it here.

And actually I’m not sure I would support all their actions, even if it was legal to do so. I think direct action sometimes serves the purpose of making its practitioners feel heroic, while not really advancing their cause, and perhaps even sets the cause back at times by alienating people who might otherwise be sympathetic – but I have to admit that these reservations may often be a rationalisation of my own timidity and my ridiculous terror of being told off.

However, one thing I certainly do not support is the proscription of organisations that engage in non-violent direct action. Ordinary criminal law exists to prosecute people who trespass and damage property. There is absolutely no justification for placing people who do these things for what they believe are principled reasons, on a par with people who murder indiscriminately to get what they want.

Nearly 60,000 people, including many thousands of children, have been killed by the bombs, shells and bullets of the Israeli armed forces in the Gaza strip. Schools, hospitals and homes have been reduced to rubble, not only by bombs and shells, but also quite deliberately, by demolition machinery. Families have been forced to move back and forth through a landscape of destruction where they may be killed at any moment. A million children have had no school for two years, and all of them have been subjected to trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. The Israeli authorities are now talking of herding much or all of the population of Gaza into a small enclosed area – that is to say, a concentration camp – which they will be prohibited to leave unless it is to go and live abroad. What’s going on completely dwarfs any attrocity that’s ever been committed by any terrorist group*.

And in this context our cloth-eared government decides to proscribe a group which uses illegal but non-lethal means to try to disrupt, and draw attention to, the ongoing supply of arms to those perpetrating the slaughter! I voted for this government. I don’t think I can vote for them again.

Dark Ecology 2

Following on from the interview with me by Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson in which we talked (among other things) about the sunless ecology of Eden, their ‘Science in the Fiction’ podcast has done two additional episodes about the real science of sunless ecosystems (which of course do exist on Earth – notably around thermal vents in the depths of oceans):

Ep 57: Julius Csotonyi on Dark Ecology in ‘Dark Eden’ – Part 1

Ep 58: Julius Csotonyi on Dark Ecology in ‘Dark Eden’ – Part 2

One thing I learned from these is that there are organisms that photosynthesise using infrared light alone (ie the form of light that is radiated by hot objects even when they produce no visible light, often slightly misleadingly called ‘radiant heat’). I would have used this if I’d known about it.

Risking Sentimentality

I said in my previous post that you have to risk sentimentality to be real. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of looking after children.

We have lived for so many millenia in cultures dominated by the idea of ‘masculinity’ as the supreme virtue that we have come to value ‘masculine’ qualities much more highly than ‘feminine’ ones: gentle Mother Mary is subordinate to stern God the Father, weak and emotional women who look after children are subordinate to strong and rational men who run things and make war, etc etc etc. (Even women fall into the trap of thinking this way, if they equate liberation with being more like men.) And in such a culture, it’s easy to confuse soft and gentle feelings with weakness and sentimentality for, after all, such feelings are associated with low status work.

Looking after children is for me one of life’s sweetest and most profound pleasures. (Easy to say that as a grandparent, I know, when childcare is not a constant daily task, but I would have said it as a parent too, even though it did often exhaust me). It’s also very hard and difficult work, and one of the most important things that anyone can do. But the pleasures of being with children are hard to write about because you worry about sounding sugary and sentimental.

So when I say that we need to risk sentimentality, what I mean is that we should reclaim the tender feelings we have for children (and for people generally, and for other living things), and be willing to express them even if some people do find it sentimental. Sentimentality is a real thing of course, a form of false feeling, but the fear of seeming ‘sentimental’ often has the effect of shutting down the expression of gentle feelings, so as to bring the subject back to proper important grownup things like war and money and power.

There was a time when gentlemen used to discuss these grownup matters over cigars and port, after the ladies, bless their soft little hearts, had left the room to chatter (at least in the minds of the gentlemen) about children and love and puppies. Obviously women should stay in that room and talk about money and power too (boring topics though they ultimately are, they do need to be talked about), but it would be good if the overall conversation became one in which children, love and tenderness were given the weight they merit. Money and power are, at best, necessary evils, means to an end. Love, like beauty, is an end in itself.

One person who writes very well about his feelings for his children, without a trace of sentimentality, is my own dear son Dom, who is a songwriter. Here is a lovely song of his about watching his children play – specially poignant for me of course because I know and love those children too.

Love and Mercy

Why did God make the radio? The answer, obviously, is so that we could cruise along a coastal road with the windows down and the blue sea in the distance, listening to the sweet harmonies of The Beach Boys singing the music of Brian Wilson.

Which is exactly what I did the day after he died (though it wasn’t strictly a radio). I even shed tears – and I’m the man who didn’t weep for his own mother! Insofar as you can love someone you only know through his work, I loved that guy.

So he wasn’t always very nice in his personal life? I don’t care. So his politics were conservative? I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a shit. This was a very wounded man who had a rotten, abusive childhood and who, instead of making the bitter, angry, miserable music one might expect from someone with that history, chose instead to express the love and mercy that every child from a rotten family longs for.

You might say that I’m being sentimental but I would strongly dispute that. We are so frightened of being sentimental these days that we overemphasize the hard emotions – lust, anger, the will to power – just to show how sophisticated and liberated we are. But that’s all nonsense. Being hard-boiled and cynical is just being sentimental in reverse. Sometimes you have to be prepared to risk sentimentality if you are to be to be real.

In one or other of the tributes to Wilson, someone referred to ‘Good Vibrations’ as a song about lust. But listen to it! It’s a man thinking about a woman who seems to him utterly lovely in every way. And yes, okay, it would be naive to pretend this feeling has nothing to do to do with sex, but to my mind it’s not so very different to other non-sexual kinds of tenderness, such as the way my heart melts when my 6 year old granddaughter comes running cheerfully out of school. To just call it ‘lust’ is ludicrously reductive. Gentle and tender feelings are also real, and they’re what comes pouring out in Brian Wilson’s lovely music.

Here is one more beautiful little fragment.

Dark Ecology

It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson, who are based in Canada, for their ‘Science in the Fiction’ podcast. You can find the result at all three of these locations:

Buzzsprout Apple Podcasts Spotify

Palestine

A friend made herself watch footage taken by the Palestinian perpetrators of the massacre that took place on October 17th 2023. I don’t fully understand why she put herself through this, but the scenes she witnessed were absolutely hideous in their savagery.

But if the Israeli government had ever been serious about coming to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, it would not have deliberately neutered, humiliated and discredited the Palestinian partner that was available to it to deal with – the Palestinian Authority, a partner which accepts Israel’s existence as a fact – by, among other things, allowing settlements to continue to mushroom all over the West Bank, and by protecting the settlers with soldiers, even when they roam about with guns and terrorise their Palestinian neighbours.

Indeed, as Israeli politicians openly admit (see this article in the Times of Israel), Israel quite deliberately built up Hamas in order to further weaken the Palestinian Authority (thus also helpfully building up a Palestinian enemy too fanatical for people in the West to feel much sympathy for). So Israel’s official justification for destroying Gaza is to eliminate an organisation which Israel itself helped to bring to power.

When Israel became independent, Palestinian Arabs were the majority in the area that is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians still constitute about half the population of the area. If any of them claim that the whole area belongs to them ‘from the river to the sea’, there are howls of outrage – and yes, whatever the history, it’s not reasonable now to claim more than half of it. Yet many Israelis, including members of the current government, also claim everything from the river to the sea.

What’s worse is that, even when Israeli politicians did pay lip service to a two-state solution, they were in fact making that impossible by colonising the land all the way to the river. They must have known this. It’s been obvious for half a century.

And we’re all complicit because, though we could see perfectly well what was going on- it’s not difficult: you do not colonise territory you intend to give back – we allowed our leaders to pretend not to see it. We are like the man who makes friends with an affable neighbour and pretends, when he calls round to take him to the pub, that he doesn’t notice the bruises on the face of his affable new friend’s wife.

(To continue the analogy, the neighbour has now taken a hammer, smashed all his wife’s things, and is chasing her screaming round the house – and we’re just beginning to mutter embarrassedly, ‘Oh mate! We know she’s a nightmare, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit far?’)

The Book that Launched a Thousand Fantasy Clichés

I enjoyed the Odyssey – there was a sort of rough naivety about it that was lively, and gave me a sense of human minds looking out at the world at a time when the the Bronze Age was simply the thing you woke up to every morning – but I’m getting bored of the Iliad. I started losing interest during a seemingly endless account of a battle between ‘mighty’ ‘brave’ ‘handsome’ ‘god-like’ kings and princes: Thisos, Son of Thatos, ‘Lord of Horses’, ‘ruler of the fair city of…’ etc etc etc

The aim of it all is to raze to the ground a city, and kill or enslave all its inhabitants, because a prince from that city had the gall to kidnap the pretty wife of Menelaus and won’t give her back. (The besiegers also kidnap princesses and use them for sex, but that’s different, right, because this is war and that was just stealing?) I haven’t reached the end, and I don’t think I will, but I seem to remember from versions I read as a kid that, when Menelaus finally does recover Helen, he is briefly tempted to kill her because of all the trouble she’s ’caused’. But then he sees how pretty she is and changes his mind. Awww!

What tosh it all is, what utter tosh, this stuff we’ve been fed for centuries as something big and uplifting and heroic and important.

Spoils of War

I’ve been listening to the Odyssey and the Iliad, as translated by Emily Wilson and read respectively by Claire Danes and Audra McDonald – they were written to be performed out loud, after all. Wilson has done a great job of stripping away all the pompousness and phoney archaism which (for me at least) is associated with the classics. As she points out in her introduction, it’s nonsense to think that archaic English from two centuries ago is somehow a more authentic representation of Homeric Greek than modern English is: these poems are getting on for three thousand years old!

Having them read by two American women works well for the same reason. When not portentously declaimed by middle-aged men with public school accents (i.e. people who sound a bit like me), these ancient texts no longer smell mustily of Oxbridge lecture theatres, and I felt like I could catch a glimpse, though very dimly and filtered in all kinds of ways, of living human beings going about their lives, all the way back in the Bronze Age. Danes’ youthful, slightly husky, passionate voice worked particularly well, making the rough but vivid storytelling feel alive.

These are evocations of a very strange world. I loved one moment in the Odyssey where a princess sets off to do her washing in a nearby river. The dirty clothes are loaded into a cart on which the princess herself rides while a dozen of her slave girls walk beside her. While the clothes are drying, the princess and her slaves play games together on the bank. How alien this all is to us! She’s a wealthy princess, she owns many slaves, but she still washes her clothes in a river, still goes along herself to do it, and her slave girls are – sort of – also her playmates!

There seems to be a widespread assumption around at the moment that the arts are there to subvert and challenge the established order, but actually, as I’ve observed before, they most often serve the opposite purpose, of bolstering and legitimising privilege. And while these days they often do the latter while pretending to do the former, until recently they made no bones about it. In Celtic Britain, a prince would employ praise poets whose job was to celebrate his achievements. Go back another millenium and Homer is raising to mythical status a class of warlords, who own slaves, go on raiding parties, hobnob with gods, and themselves employ poets to entertain them at their sumptuous dinner parties. We are constantly being told about their wealth and their many beautiful possessions. A sewing basket made of silver stuck in my mind, because the poet made a point of mentioning that it even had wheels.

But what was particularly striking for me is that these poems were written not only for the ruling class, but for the ruling gender. There are many women characters, some of them powerful (notably the goddess Athena), but this is a world in which you raid a city, kill the men and carry off the women as part of the loot – and that apparently is fine. The Iliad famously begins with a quarrel between two men, Achilles and Agamemnon, over a beautiful princess, Briseis, who Achilles has captured and made his sex slave, but who Agamemnon demands for himself, having had to give up his own sex slave for diplomatic reasons. When he loses Briseis, Achilles sulks like a spoiled child and has to be comforted by his goddess mother – but no one considers what Briseis thinks.

The Trojan war itself is fought over another woman, Helen, who a Trojan prince, Paris, has kidnapped from her Greek husband, Menelaus, taking her away also from her daughter and friends. There is an attempt -it doesn’t work out- to avert war by having a duel between these two men, with the agreement that whoever kills the other gets Helen as his wife, plus all the dead man’s wealth, and then the two sides will make peace. Weirdly, Helen is presented in the text as an intelligent human being with feelings of her own, and yet her own preferences regarding these two men are apparently still as irrelevant as the preferences of a herd of does watching two stags fighting for control of them.

Women belong to the men who capture them. Men do as they please, but the slave women in Odysseus’ household who had sex with the suitors who pestered his wife Penelope in his absence, are hanged by our hero on his return. (Neither Odysseus’s son nor Penelope were strong enough to stop these men coming round and eating their food, but apparently their slave women should have stood up to them.)

By the way, I’ve looked into this recently and having sex with women you capture in a war – which to say, in modern parlance, raping them – is permitted both in the Koran and the Bible. Here’s the Koran telling Mohammed it’s okay to have sex with woman prisoners:

Oh prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee… (Surah 33: 50)*

The Bible, meanwhile, is all heart and allows a captive woman a month to grieve her families before her new owner is permitted to ‘go in unto her’. It even – awww, God, you’re so nice! – forbids him from selling her for money if he decides he doesn’t like her:

10. When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands , and thou has taken them captive, 11. And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to be thy wife; 12. Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13. And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14. And it shall be, if thou hast no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou has humbled her. (KJV: Deuteronomy, 21: 10-14)

Jeez! What a legacy women are up against!

*My copy of the Koran is published by Amana publications with a commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and was given to me free at a street stall by the Albirr Foundation UK.

Upon Blackfriars Station, Platform 1

I frequently travel back and forth these days between my home in Cambridge and London, in order to spend time with grandchildren. I rather enjoy being part of that enormous tide of people that flows into London every day, and across it, and then flows back out again every night, train after train from all those mainline stations, each train filling up with people and rushing out into the home counties, only for another another train to arrive and fill up in turn. What a strange thing: all those thousands of human souls on the move, each one an entire universe!

My favourite station is Blackfriars, which (uniquely as far as I know) straddles the Thames on its own bridge. As you emerge from the train on Platform 1, you are faced with a single enormous window, the length and height of the station itself, which takes in, to your left, St Pauls and the prestige office blocks of the City, and to the right, the Tate Modern building in the foreground and the Shard behind it, while between them the wide river, sparkling in the sun, is spanned by a series of bridges, each slightly more hazy than the last, stretching back to Tower Bridge in grey silhouette in the distance. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, and it puts me in mind of a poem by Wordsworth that my father liked to recite, about the morning view from another London bridge:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…

* * *

I was talking to a writer friend, Colette, about the Neapolitan Quartet and I said one of the things I felt the lack of when I was reading it was sensory information of any kind. The narrator just talks about relationships and interactions and, if she mentions the material setting at all, does so only minimally, in the way that a dramatist does in stage directions. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a personal choice. What you exclude is as important as what you include in any sort of work of art. Colette likes pared-down writing and, as she says, descriptive passages in books are often boring and can feel quite self-indulgent on the author’s part. But my own personal feeling is that I want a novel to evoke, as far as possible, the full breadth of the feeling of being alive, and experiences such as standing in front of that window, or being part of the flow of people in and out of London, are as much a part of that, as are personal interactions.

It seems to me (and this probably isn’t an original thought) that of all art forms, novels are uniquely well placed to encompass the whole picture: interior and exterior worlds, human relationships and material reality… Other art forms can arguably portray any one of these things better than novels can, but novels (and even short stories for that matter) have a sort of ‘jack of all trades’ quality that means they can bring everything together in a way that no other form quite can.

* * *

The other day on Platform 1 of Blackfriars station, with a few minutes to wait for the train to Peckham, I was standing by the glass taking in the view next to a smartly-dressed woman who was doing the same thing. I made some comment about how beautiful it was and she said ‘You know what? I pass through this station every single day, and I never grow tired of it.’

See also (while on London bridges): Waterloo Sunset