All posts | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Old

I will turn 70 in less than 2 months time, which feels to me like quite a big milestone.

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 (achey limbs, illnesses etc), since 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 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. Retirement, a pension, social 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 all of that exhausting stuff, but I can happily spend whole mornings just thinking and dreaming. Thus, for instance, I travel on trains a lot but where once I might have used the time to read books or write, what I do these days very often is listen to music and think or, if the opportunity presents itself, get into a conversation with other travellers. I do love talking to people.

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.

Decadence

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.

Britian, 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.

Writing Worlds Podcast

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.

Jodrell Bank

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.

Me inside the bowl of the Lovell Telescope.

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.

Ida Janiak, my collaborator, is on the right.

The Tooth Fairy

My very dear oldest granddaughter – she is six and a half- was staying in my house when one of her milk teeth came out. It’s the third one she has lost, and she knows the routine: she leaves the tooth under her pillow, and in the morning the tooth has gone and the tooth fairy has left a pound coin in its place.

‘Is it really a fairy that comes,’ she asked me before she went to bed, ‘or is it grownups?’

I said, ‘Do you really want to know that, or would it spoil the fun if I told you?’

She said, ‘No, it wouldn’t. It’s fun if it’s the tooth fairy, and it’s fun if it’s grownups. I don’t mind.’

Incredible to think that this small person, who, less than seven years ago, wasn’t even born, can already think in such a nuanced way. But human beings are like that!

I said, ‘Okay, so you want me to be honest with you?’

She said yes, so I told her the truth. She nodded. She’s a clever kid who thinks deeply about things. She must have already known that this isn’t the kind of the world in which things like tooth fairies naturally fit.

Next day, she found the coin and told us excitedly that the tooth fairy had come in the night.

What an intricate thing belief is. A friend of mine asked the vicar in his local church if he really believed in the things that religion says are real. The vicar answered him with surprising honesty, ‘Well, I try to live my life as if they were real.’

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 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 a lot of 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, a little less raw than some of the others, 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’s done 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 is a good place to be in some ways. (Speaking as a writer in that position.)

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.