Blog, books, stories.
I can’t resist posting a link to this song which has recently been posted on Spotify, written and performed a few years ago by my son-in-law Dupé (the singer), and my son Dom (who played most of the instruments). I’m very proud of them both!
I gather the title literally translates from Yoruba as ‘I have said my own’ – as in, ‘I’ve said my piece [so now it’s up to you.]’
This word, used in a political sense, grates on my nerves in the same kind of way as the word ‘problematic.’ They are both smug words. If someone calls themself a progressive, they are implying that they’re on the ‘right side of history,’ that they can see how things not only ought to be, but how they ultimately will be. And they are implying that people who see things differently, if not actually in bad faith, must be ignorant, or deceived – and certainly can’t possibly be seeing something real that that the ‘progressive’ has failed to take into account.
This seems to me not only rather arrogant but extremely unlikely to be true. The 19th century term ‘Manifest Destiny,’ used by those who argued for white settlement of the whole of America, is another example of a claim being made that a certain set of values is the most advanced, is worthy to supercede all others, and is bound to defeat all others sooner or later. Calling yourself a progressive is, to my mind, a bit like that.
It’s true that it’s often reasonable to assume, in the absence of other information, that things tomorrow will be similar to how they are today. And, in the same way, it often makes sense to think that, in the short-run, history will carry on in the direction it has been following in the recent past. In the 20th century in Western countries, the franchise was extended, material prosperity increased for most of the population, the state took on a wider role in looking after citizens who couldn’t look after themselves, and rights for many minorities were enshrined in law. It wasn’t unreasonable to believe that, in the short run, that sort of thing would continue to expand.
But to assume things will carry on forever in that direction, and do so everywhere, would be to over-centre both our own particular patch of time and our own particular patch of space. It’s analogous to thinking, on the basis of the weather in Britain one autumn, that the weather in general is going to continue to get cooler and cooler indefinitely, all over the world.
If you lived in Britain in the heyday of the British Empire, you might quite plausibly have thought that British civilisation was the most successful civilisation in history and that there was no reason why it shouldn’t grow greater and greater over time (‘God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’), and in the short run you’d have been right – but only in the short run.
I often hear people these days saying how awful the news is just now, and I do wonder about that, because, though terrible and scary things are certainly happening, terrible and scary things have happened throughout history. (In my childhood, nuclear war seemed imminent, there were many, bloody post-imperial wars, there was even -and this now seems very strange and shocking- a brutal civil war going on in part of the UK.) And this makes me wonder if what distresses people so much about the ways things are right now is, not simply that things aren’t going in the direction they wanted them to, which is how I feel too, but that they’re not going in the direction they believed they were destined to go.
I haven’t believed that part for some time. I’m more inclined to the idea that history is a natural process, a biological process even, which we’re part of but can never fully understand or master – not least because the values we use to guide us are not absolute things, but are themselves a product of that same process. And this is why, though I consider myself on the left side of politics (insofar as it is even meaningful to arrange political views on a single line), and though, in many respects, I have socially liberal views, I don’t consider myself to be a ‘progressive.’ A number of my books are set in the future, but I don’t think anyone can really say for sure which way history will go, or even which way it should go. I can see many possible futures, but none of them is just more of the same.
I was playing some music while I ate my breakfast. It was a playlist of the songs I’d listened to most often this year and it happened that ‘Wild is the Wind’ by David Bowie came up (here it is on Youtube, here on Spotify). It’s a lush, extravagant, love song, originally recorded by Johnny Mathis in the fifties:
…Give me more than one caress
Satisfy this hungriness
Let the wind blow through your heart
For wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins… etc etc
(I think the mandolins line is terrible by the way! It really jars. But I like the rest of it.)
Many people have covered this song, including, memorably, Nina Simone, but it’s well suited to Bowie, whose powerful voice and sense of theatre seemed to enable him (often, if not always) to get away with melodrama without seeming tongue-in-cheek. I know the song well and was only half-listening. I left the room to do something, closing the door behind me, and forgot about the music.
A minute later, I noticed a strange muffled sound from behind the door, a kind of agonised cry or moan, which for a moment I couldn’t place. But it was the song still playing. Stripped of its words, its melody, its elegant theatricality, it sounded like an animal, far off in the distance, howling with longing into the darkness.
I started reading this book -and I can no longer remember why I did – with some quite strong prejudices about Sally Rooney’s work, which, I fear, may have largely been based on the envy of an only very modestly successful writer for a very successful writer indeed. I would sum up my prejudices by saying that my impression, from reading reviews etc, was that she wrote about very attractive, very intelligent people having very exciting, if complicated, sex lives – and that her books were a kind of posh, elegant fantasy world for folk who’d love to imagine themselves as part of a sophisticated elite.
Well this is a book about very attractive, very intelligent people having very exciting, if complicated, sex lives, but, as it turned out, I came to like it a lot. I thought it a bit sugary (that was the word that came to mind), but I ended up forgiving it even that.
To deal with the ‘sugariness’ first. What I meant by that is that the book presented what seemed to me a very idealised view of romantic and sexual love. The characters are not only good looking and intelligent, but also exceptionally emotionally intelligent: extremely honest with one another about their own feelings, extremely willing to accomodate the feelings of others. Things happen which seemed unlikely, and sometimes the book read to me like a sexual fantasy (and a male sexual fantasty at that) rather than a depiction of the real complications and ambivalences of sexual/romantic relationships between men and woman.
For instance, Peter, the older of the two brothers round whom the story is built, has a girlfriend, Naomi, nine years younger than himself, who says things to him like ‘do whatever you like to me.’ (I’m not aware of the reception this book has received but I’m willing to bet that people have found this ‘problematic’). Also, Peter agonises throughout the book about being torn between the very beautiful, intelligent and extremely sexually available Naomi and his very beautiful and intelligent ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who he still loves deeply, and is still loved by, but who ended the relationship with him after a mysterious accident which prevents her from having penetrative sex (though she does still give him a blow job) – but in the end (spoiler alert), he ends up being able to maintain his relationship with them both, the two of them having become friends. This seemed quite generous on their part, though certainly nice for him.
Meanwhile Ivan, the younger brother, who is a 22-year old semi-professional chess player, very handsome, very smart, but shy, naive, gentle, and sexually very inexperienced, manages to seduce Margaret, the very nice and extremely beautiful 36-year-old director of an arts centre where he’s been booked to play ten simultaneous exhibition games. And he does so a matter of hours after meeting her – which, speaking as a recovering shy, naive, sexually inexperienced young man, feels rather unlikely, though it is, to my inner naive young man, without doubt a very alluring fantasy.
So by sugary I mean, I suppose, idealised, simpler than reality, a fantasy… But I forgave the book this because I decided that in one way or another, a novel has to be simpler than reality. However long and complex, a novel is a truly tiny thing compared to the real world, and it is, in a way, like a scientific experiment which holds some factors constant, in order to isolate and explore others. Movies have to simplify life in the same sort of way, and the protagonists of any cinematic love story are invariably much better looking than the average human being, and usually much more graceful and charming in their manners also (if only we all had scriptwriters to prepare our romantic encounters for us!). But this may actually be necessary (or so I thought) because a film, which is much shorter than a novel, has only a brief time in which to tell the story. We need to understand the attraction pretty much from the off, and a good way of achieving this is to cast very beautiful and charming men and women actors, since we can all immediately see the attraction of good-looking and charming people. (I’m almost 70, and I’m still instantly moved -disturbed even, sometimes- by female beauty.)
Also ‘sugary’ is a synonym of ‘sweet’ – and sexual love between men and women is sweet. It just is (for biological reasons, of course, as Rooney herself notes, but then all love has a biological basis), as is the trace of it that exists, I think, at least to some small degree, in most warm relationships between heterosexual men and women, even when these relationships aren’t, and will never be, sexual. It can go badly wrong, it can lead to all kinds of misunderstandings and even to horrible abuses, but it is, in itself, sweet -and even the horrible things that happen are often due to people craving that sweetness and not knowing how to get it, or not knowing how to hold onto it.
What I ended up liking about this book is this. Books about sexual love are of course two a penny -it is probably the single most common driver of human stories – but usually they take sexual attraction and sexual love as a given, a thing that everyone understands and recognises. In this book, it seems to me, Sally Rooney doesn’t do that. She attempts to unpack sexual love, and look at it in an almost naive way, as if encountering it for the first time, even though her prose is itself polished and sophisticated. I think that’s what writers should do with human experience: make us see things we think we already know as if they were new and fresh. What’s more- and this is something that I think is relatively unusual for a woman writer- she does this as much from a male point of view as a female one, both with equal sympathy.
Continue reading “A Certain Captivated Feeling”I mentioned in my last post that I like talking to fellow passengers on trains. There’s a particular kind of intimacy in conversations with people you’ll never meet again. (I do always make sure I give them a get out if they don’t feel like talking!) In recent weeks, it so happens, I have had two long conversations with young Chinese people, one a young woman graduate with a background in mainland China (this was an extra-long chat because we were in a train that stood in the station for a whole hour waiting for a driver who never showed up, and eventually moved together to another train), the other a young male first-year student with a Hong Kong background. They were both very intelligent, thoughtful people and I liked them very much. Neither of them was a fan of the totalitarian government of the PRC, but both had the same criticism of Western society, as compared to Chinese society. It is too individualistic. Too soft.
The young woman spoke about the rights of individuals being elevated above duties and responsibilities to the family, the community and society. The young man raised the issue in the following interesting way:
‘There is something that troubles me about Western society, but I don’t like to criticise it because it’s basically a nice thing.’
He really was reluctant to even name the thing that bothered him, but, after he’d circled around it a bit, I put it to him that what he meant was that we were too preoccupied in our contemporary culture by people’s feelings and vulnerabilities. Yes, he said, that was roughly what he meant – and then he repeated that he wasn’t saying that being sensitive to people’s vulnerabilities was a bad thing —it obviously wasn’t— but that… he hesitated again and I suggested that, nice thing though it was, an overemphasis on vulnerabilities might place a society at a disadvantage when it came to competing in a tough world. What’s good for individuals in the short run, may not in the long run be best for their society’s long term survival – a certain toughness is necessary for that. He agreed that this was broadly his point.
I’ve heard, or sensed, a similar critique before from other people from developing countries and it connects with the point I made in a recent post about ours being an old society. And I guess I’ve heard it too from people politically on the right when they talk about ‘snowflakes’ and oversensitivity.
A further question is whether actually it is even in the interests of individuals themselves to make too much allowance for their sensitivities. For instance, a teacher wishing to avoid hurting the feelings of students might be overgenerous in praise and sparing in criticism, and award high marks for work that really wasn’t all that good, but would this actually be fair or helpful in the long run for the students themselves? Wouldn’t it actually help them more to give them an honest appraisal, or even a harsh one if their work is poor, even if it does upset them? At least that way they are given the opportunity to learn and grow on the basis of genuine feedback, and can prepare for a world which will want to know their real abilities and won’t, just to be nice, give them jobs they aren’t equipped for.
A long time ago, I wrote a short story called ‘Valour’ (not one of my best to be honest) which described an alien race that saw the world in threes rather than, as we tend to do, in binary opposites (good/bad, right/wrong, left/right etc). These beings had three sexes, their bodies were based on a three-way symmetry, and they had a three-way morality which did not simply involve good versus evil, but had two rival, but equally valid, alternatives to evil – gentleness and valour – meaning that valour, gentleness and evil were three separate poles. To defeat evil, valour and gentleness would need to form some kind of alliance in spite of their incompatibilities, but often valour allied with evil against gentleness, which created heartless, hyper-‘masculine’ militaristic societies, or gentleness allied with evil against valour, which created flabby, overindulgent societies that would ultimately decay and fall apart. The idea wasn’t fully developed, I must admit, but you get the idea.
I will turn 70 in less than 2 months time, which feels to me like quite a big milestone. I’m old enough that people sometimes give up their seat to me. The other day a woman in her thirties or forties even offered to help me carry my case, which was kindly meant no doubt, but not at all pleasing to me. I can still carry a fucking suitcase thank you very much!
Old people often say that they don’t feel old, by which, I take it, we don’t mean that we are unaware of the physical changes taking place inside us – people my age talk about their health a lot – but that the spirit that looks out of our eyes feels like the same spirit it always has been.
I don’t see how we can know this is true, actually, since our memories of being young are filtered through our consciousness as it now exists -maybe it’s only in retrospect that being young isn’t so different from being old? – but anyway, that’s how it feels. Perhaps what we really mean is that, when we were young, old people seemed to us to be a very different kind of being, driven by entirely different needs, but now we are old we see that our needs are essentially the same: love, sex, comfort, stimulation, the esteem of others, a sense of purpose… etc etc
I’m less driven though in many respects. Retirement, a pension, society’s expectations of older people – all of these things make it much easier for me to do nothing in particular without feeling bad about it. I hope I have some more books in me, but it doesn’t matter to me so much as it once did. I had an ambition to be a writer when I was young and I am very proud of having achieved it – proud and relieved, because writing, more than almost anything else, has given me a sense of being someone, which I completely lacked as a young man – but I feel I have achieved it and writing now is simply something I like doing.
And I am more interested just in the experience of being alive. I can’t be bothered with bucket lists and cycling up Mount Kilimanjaro and so on – to be frank that all seems a bit desperate to me – but I can happily spend whole mornings just thinking and dreaming. Thus, for instance, I travel on trains frequently but where once I might have used the time to read books or write, what I mostly do these days is listen to music and think or, if the opportunity presents itself, get into a conversation with other travellers. I do love talking with people I meet by chance.
I had the protagonist of my novel Tomorrow say that, if you had the choice between telling a story and being a character in a story, then being a character was the way to go, and I feel that more and more. I guess this is partly because society doesn’t expect me to be productive any more (how great is that!) and partly because I’m conscious that the story of me is now in its third and final act.
I listen to music a lot. As I’ve observed before, I actually think that’s part of the ‘being a character in the story’ thing. A few generations ago, no one would think that listening to music was a thing you did while travelling from A to B, but films and TV have trained us to think of characters in stories having music in the background and, beginning with radios in cars, technology has made this a possibility for all of us, and not just a privilege reserved for fictional beings. I like intense, emotional music, but I’m particularly fond these days of Cuban jazz – sharp, cool, instrumental music with a salsa-esque rhythm – because it makes me want to dance. (If you have Spotify, try keeping still while listening to this.)
I do dance when I get the opportunity – it’s another way of being a character in a story, I suppose – and will even do a few discreet steps as I wait on station platforms for the trains that take me to my beautiful grandchildren.
At some point, most likely in well under twenty years, I’ll be dead. I’m fine with that, but I’m not looking forward to the decrepit bit that usually comes first.
In an Apple store, while waiting for my phone to load up, I got talking with the young Indian man who was looking after me. He was a business studies student at a new university (i.e. former polytechnic). His parents had paid £20,000 to an agent in India to secure his place on the course, but they’d been told a lot of things that turned out not to be true, for example that graduates of the course had a 99% chance of securing a job – the real figure was very much lower. He felt he’d been lied to by the agent and by the university itself, but he dreaded telling his parents this because they’d invested so much to get him there, and were so excited on his behalf about what it would do for him.
I said to him that I had heard similar stories elsewhere about very low quality business studies courses geared to the international students who keep universities afloat by paying much higher fees than UK students. For instance, courses that accept students with only a very poor grasp of English. I said that it seemed to me that Western countries are still trading on the cachet that comes from empire, the idea that we, who are still so wealthy and who so recently ruled the world, have something special to sell, a sort of magic cloak of prosperity. I said I thought the time would come when countries like India and China would see through that magic cloak just as the small boy in the story saw through the Emperor’s clothes, and realise that their own colleges could do courses as good or better than the ones they pay so much for in countries like Britain.
Britain, I thought, along with Europe in general, has become old like me, relying on our past. He agreed, and continued the analogy by saying that countries like India were young like him, energetic and with nothing to lose.
It so happened that I went to get a coffee afterwards and ran into a friend who has a Sri Lankan background. He said he had a cousin from Sri Lanka who’d come over to Britain to study 15 years ago, had had the same experience as the guy in the Apple store, and drawn the same conclusions.
Britain became rich because wealth from empire allowed it to industrialise – and then to sell its products to its own vast captive markets. But nowadays we import most of our manufactured goods from Asia, and rely on the export of services (including education) to generate the income to pay for them. We are going to be in trouble, surely, when those same Asian countries realise that, just as they have overtaken us in manufacturing, they could overtake us in services too. My friend agreed. Leaving the EU, he thought, had accelerated our decline but even if we’d stayed in, we’d only have delayed it, not stopped it from happening.
At the end of their careers, older people can rise to senior positions and command high salaries on the basis of their accumulated experience and the prestige that comes with it. But eventually it becomes apparent that young people know as much or more, are better attuned to the world as it is, and will get a whole lot more done for a whole lot less – and that’s when the old people get pensioned off. The trouble is that when the ‘old person’ in question is not really a person but a country, there’s no pension pot to provide for our old age.
This podcast is a conversation between myself, Chris Gregory and the extremely funny Emily Inkpen. You can also listen to it on Spotify and lots of other places.
My dear son, Dom, has written a theme for Dark Eden, such as might be used at the beginning of each episode if the book was a series. I really love it. It truly captures for me the combination of beauty, melancholy, alienness and darkness I envisaged for Eden, with that steady deep pulse running through it to evoke the most constant and characteristic sound of the luminous forests of Eden: the hmmph – hmmmph – hmmmph of geothermal ‘trees’ pumping their sap down to the hot rocks below, and pumping it back up again. To get the full effect you need to listen to it loud, with plenty of bass. I absolutely love it.
Dark Eden theme, by Dominic Beckett
See also:
The Holy Machine, by Edinburgh-based band, The Southern Tenant Folk Union
This vast structure is the main radiotelescrope at Jodrell Bank, near Macclesfield, where I and a bunch of other writers spent the day last week. This was as part of an ongoing project of Comma Books in which they pair up a set of writers with a set of scientists to create a series of original short story anthologies inspired by real science. In this case, the scientists were astronomers at Jodrell Bank. The main Lovell Telescope was the largest steerable radiotelescope in the world when it was built in 1957, and is still one of the largest. It’s apparently so powerful that it could detect a mobile phone on Mars, in the unlikely event that someone lost one there – and it needs to be that powerful, because one of its purposes is to detect radio waves originating so far away that they have been spreading out through space, like ripples on a pond, for billions of years.
We got to climb up the telescope and walk around in its enormous white bowl. (I was surprised we could do this, given that this is a precision instrument whose surface is supposed to be smooth to an accuracy of 1mm, but it is very solid and robust.) Here I am, looking rather pleased with myself.
During the day, the writers would ask each other, ‘So who is “your” astronomer?’ ‘My’ astronomer is Ida Janiak, who, apart from being extremely nice, is interested in exoplanets and alien life, and has a particular expertise in optical telescopes. She is going to help me write a story about a ‘free-floating planet’ (or ‘rogue planet’), a planet without a star. I have already written a whole trilogy set on one of these called Eden, but when I originally came up with the idea (for a short story called ‘The Circle of Stones’ back in 1992), I honestly didn’t know that such things really existed. It just seemed to me a plausible possibility that planets could form from dust and gas in space like stars do, or could spin out from a solar system, and I went with my own ideas of what it might be like.
With Ida’s help I am now going to write a story about a FFP that, this time, is more or less scientifically accurate, and so isn’t very much like Eden. There is, however, a scientific consensus, as I understand it, that an FFP with a hot core could sustain life without the help of a star. And that does concur with my own original intuition.
