Other people's books | Chris Beckett's Fiction

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 the idea that it’s okay to have sex with women you capture in a war – which to say, rape them, as we’d understand it now – 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.

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

In his excellent book, The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor of political philosophy, refers to another book, now out of print, published in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and took the form of a dystopia.

Writing as if he were a historian looking back from the year 2033, he [Young] described with uncanny clarity the moral logic of the meritocratic society that was beginning to unfold in the postwar Britain of his day. Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.

As Young’s imaginary historian writes:

Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are… no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too that not only are they of higher calibre to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.

‘Not only did Young anticipate the meritocratic hubris of elites;’ writes Sandel, ‘he glimpsed their affinity for technocratic expertise, their tendency to look down on those who lack their lustrous credentials.’ He quotes Young again (still writing as if a historian in 2033) who suggests that ‘some members of the meritocracy… have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern’. Some of them, indeed, are ‘so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended’. Here Sandel references Hillary Clinton’s famous —and extraordinarily politically inept— remark about half of Trump supporters being ‘a basket of deplorables’. I saw the same kind of contempt over and over again coming from remain voters in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Indeed I felt so disgusted by it, as a remain voter myself, that I wished I’d voted leave.

As Sandel notes, in Young’s dystopia, ‘resentment against elites was compounded by the self-doubt that a meritocracy inflicts on those who fail to rise’, for, as Young’s historian wrote, ‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance.’ Sandel goes on:

Young predicted that this toxic brew of hubris and resentment would fuel a political backlash. He concluded his dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
Continue reading “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”

Alice Bradley Sheldon

Alice Sheldon, 1983, aged 58, four years before her suicide: Photo by Patti Perret

Alice Sheldon (‘Alli’) wrote science fiction mainly under the name of James Tiptree, Jr. Some while back, I wrote an appreciation of her stories here. Of all science fiction writers, she and Philip Dick are the two I feel the closest affinity with.

Alli liked to correspond on a friendly basis with editors and with other writers whose work she enjoyed. Her penfriends included Joanna Russ, Frederick Pohl, Ursula le Guin, Robert Silverberg, Gardner Dozois and Harlan Ellison. I’d like to think that, if I’d been older and my writing career had started ten or twenty years earlier, I might have been one of her penpals too. I think she might have liked my stories -some of my stuff, including the novel I’m struggling with right now, is thematically quite close to hers- and she made a point of contacting writers whose stuff she liked. But in fact she died – she shot herself, to be precise, after first shooting her blind husband in his sleep – three years before my first story appeared in print. (My first ever published story, A Matter of Survival, was about a nation of men at war with a nation of women, a very Alice Sheldon subject.)

The odd thing is, though, that if there had been an overlap between our careers and I had been her penpal, I, like all the people I’ve just listed, would have believed I was writing to a man. Because James Tiptree wasn’t just a pen-name for her stories, but the persona under which, over some years, she engaged in all this correspondence. It wasn’t just superficial stuff, it was often quite deep and intimate, yet it was all signed off by James Tiptree.

I’ve been reading her biography by Julie Phillips. Alli (I’m calling her that because Julie Phillips does, and because Sheldon was her married name and not a name she had from birth) was the only child of a wealthy Chicago family. Her parents were adventurous people with the resources to have big adventures. As a child Alli was taken on trips to Africa – living in the bush, hunting, visiting remote communities… – and her mother was a successful writer who also did lecture tours in which she regaled audiences with tales of these adventures. Alli herself grew up as a vigorous, outdoorsy sort of person who liked riding and fishing and shooting.

She was a painter for a while. In the war she was a photo analyst for the army, and went on to do this work for the CIA, which is where she met her second husband, Ting, who was 12 years older than her and came from a similarly elite background. Ting was who she lived with for the rest of her life and eventually killed, believing this to be an act of kindness.

She wanted a child but wasn’t able to have one. She studied psychology and engaged in psychological research. She enjoyed ‘masculine’ pursuits and the company of men, though she was sexually drawn to women. She suffered from depression. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, loving in a way, but intense and stifling. And when I say stifling, I mean stifling. Alli told Joanna Russ that, when she was fourteen, in a stateroom on a ship, her mother had ‘more or less openly invited me to bed with her’.

My main criticism of Phillips’ excellent book would be that she doesn’t dig deeper into this episode. I can appreciate the difficulty of doing so in the absence of any other material, but to be sexually propositioned by a loved parent -and in fact even just to have the sort of enmeshed, boundaryless relationship with a parent in which that is even thinkable – is liable to turn the rest of your life into a knot that can never completely be undone. Nothing quite makes sense any more. The things you most long for are also the things you dread. You’re like a circuit board with the components linked up wrong so that the switches don’t do what they’re supposed to do: lights that are supposed to come on at the same time don’t do so and others that aren’t supposed to come on at the same time, nevertheless always do. The fact that 14-year-old Alli was tempted to say yes to her mother’s proposition, and never blamed her for it, doesn’t alter that fact – it just shows how tangled things already were. I wonder what else happened that Alli never chose to share?

Anyway, when you know about that, you can certainly understand better why she wrote stories like ‘Love is the Plan the Plan is Death’ in which the spider-like narrator is slowly being eaten alive by his mate.

Tiptree was unmasked as Alice Sheldon in 1976. (He had told his correspondents about his mother’s death, and people looked up the obituary notices in the Chicago papers and worked it out.) Alli was frightened that all her pen friends would be upset by the deception and desert her, but it seems that everyone, men and women, reassured her of their continued friendship. Ursula le Guin wrote her a particularly lovely letter, welcoming her as a ‘sister soul’.

I found the chapter in which Tiptree unravelled particularly powerful. It reduced me to tears in fact. It was touching to see le Guin and others welcoming Alli as a woman friend but it was also obvious that something important to her had begun to fall apart, something that had made it possible for her to share her inner self, and yet feel safely hidden. I think of a spider creature again, one that longs to join with others, but fears being devoured.

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 feel rather cold, including parent-child relationships, and the friendship between two women which forms the spine of the whole quartet (Elena, who leaves the neighbourhood to become a celebrated writer, and Lila, who remains). Elena as narrator 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 (I mean Elena Greco: it’s a little confusing that she shares a first name with the author’s pseudonym but when I say ‘Elena’ I’m referring to the character). 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. She even seems oddly detached from the books she writes. Elena 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 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 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 directly without hurting people, and there are those who argue that a true artist must be willing to sacrifice everything and anyone for her art. (I don’t go along with that myself. I think having to find ways of recasting raw experience in a completely new form is one of those many creative disciplines which seem restricting but are actually liberating.) But we don’t see much of Elena’s thinking on these questions.

In fact, though its narrator and main character is a writer, the quartet didn’t leave me feeling I’d learned much about why or how she writes at all. When still at school, Elena was proud of being one of the best pupils in her year. She talked about her own diligence. She recorded the high marks she received for the assignments she was set, and the praise she got from her teachers. And the way she speaks of her books is rather like that: assignments she has set herself and diligently completed, like a gifted and responsible student.

This approach is in contrast to Lila, the inspired businesswoman, who is even more gifted but refused at school to play the conscientious student, and refuses as an adult to play the meritocratic game and join the decorous ranks of the educated classes. Elena sees Lila as braver than she is, and maybe that sense of her as a diligent student, bright and yet plodding, and always hoping for high marks and praise, is just the way she sees herself.

One thing about audio-books 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 has also been translated from its original 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. (Another issue, incidentally, is that, unlike with a printed text, I can’t easily go back and check things when writing a commentary such as this, which I’d normally do, and have had to rely on my memory.)

A Family Story

A family man is having a mid-life crisis, his own personal crisis of masculinity. His life is one of comfort, safety and regularity and it feels too easy. He wants to grapple with nature, he wants to feel that he’s protecting and providing for his family. So he persuades his wife that they should leave their comfortable home and move to a remote island to live in a lighthouse: the man, his wife, his son -a gentle, sensitive boy, on the cusp of adolescence- and his physically very small but extremely tough foster-daughter.

The wife is a gentle, calm, nurturing woman, who, without complaint, sets aside her own preferences in order to help her husband get through whatever he feels he has to get through. But she pays a price for her selfnessless. Life is tough on the island, she gets lonely, she misses the things she loves back home, and, for all her overwhelming need to care for others, she can’t completely bury her resentment at being taken for granted, as if her own wishes were of no account. (To add to her sense of being confined, her husband is so determined to be a provider and protector, that he’s constantly telling her to take it easy and leave everything to him.) She occupies herself by making a garden that the sea promptly sweeps away, and then by painting from memory, on the inner walls of the lighthouse, a picture of her beloved garden at home.

Unknown to any of the family, they’re followed to the island by someone who has become obsessed with them. She is a desperately isolated figure, so appallingly alone that it’s frightening just to be in her presence, so lonely that her loneliness freezes everything around her. (Such people do exist – I’ve met them myself).

There is another extremely isolated figure, the island’s single existing inhabitant, who they just call the Fisherman, because he won’t tell them his name. He lives in a tiny hut and refuses to talk to anyone.

It doesn’t sound like a children’s story, but the title of this book is Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson. The father, his wife and his son are not human, but Moomins, which (as you probably know) are cute, hippo-like, cartoony creatures. The tough girl is a tiny fierce-faced creature called Little My, and the lonely being that follows them is a creature known as the Groke, who freezes the world around her not just in a metaphorical way, but quite literally. If she sits somewhere for too long the ground turns to ice, and everything that grows there dies.

I Hope I shall Arrive Soon

Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas.

I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it.

I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving.

One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.

A Hair Divides

Another mid-century British writer recommended to me by my late friend Eric Brown (see earlier post on Patrick Hamilton) is Claude Houghton. He’s not well-known these days. Most of his large output is no longer in print, and the few books that are still available are only so because they’ve been reprinted by Valancourt Books, a company which specialises in bringing forgotten books back from obscurity. I’ve read three of these books now: I am Jonathan Scrivener, This was Ivor Trent, and A Hair Divides.

Ivor Trent and Jonathan Scrivener are in many ways very similar. Both are set between the two world wars. Both have an eponymous character who is not present at all for most of the novel. Both have a main viewpoint character who is seeking to learn more about this absent charismatic figure, and does so through a series of interactions with the friends, lovers and acquaintances of the missing character. Both too deal with the idea of a superior human being, who perhaps offers some hope in a world that seems to have lost any sense of direction. Shades of the Nietzchean superman? They are both engaging reads, and Ivor Trent in particular left a particular dream-like flavour in my mind that stayed with me, though (as with all dream-like flavours), I would be hard pressed to say what it was. None of the characters was very likeable, though, and they and their stories did not stay with me.

A Hair Divides I think is a fine book.

Patrick Hamilton

“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? Having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may age rather better than Lessing’s own.

I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though before that I was a fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I read, in quick succession, Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and loved them: the writing, the humanity, the originality. And, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be fans, or, if they read the books for the first time, were as enthusiastic as I was. (Except my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a close second. I also particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

What comes first?

Recently I came across this conversation that took place sixty years ago between C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. In particular I was struck by what Lewis had to say about his novel Perelandra (aka Voyage to Venus), which is set on a Venus almost entirely covered with ocean:

‘The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labors in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then, of course, the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.’

Amis observes ‘that [having to make something happen] frequently taxes writers very much’. Readers want a plot – I do myself as a reader – but it isn’t necessarily what most interests the writer about their book. (The narrator of my novel Tomorrow, who wants to write a book that works without a plot, is a case in point.)

Aldiss, on the other hand, is surprised to learn that Perelandra‘s treatment of the Christian idea of the ‘fall’ was not the starting point, and was only developed in order to make the imagined world come alive.

I was surprised too. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy, like his more famous children’s books about Narnia, is so very much infused with Christian themes, that one assumes that they were his original purpose in writing them. But Lewis wanted to write about a world with floating islands. The reason he came up with a story that included those themes, is that he understood the world in those terms.