Recent Reading - Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

I was attracted to Station Eleven because it is a story about what happens when a new and extremely lethal virus arrives in the world; I hoped it might give me a better understanding of what happened to us all over the last two years. 

The novel was published in 2014 and the virus it imagines kills 99 per cent of those it comes in contact with. The action switches back and forth from not long before the pandemic hits to the aftermath, describing what existence is like for those who still remain. 

Given that St John Mandel's fictional virus is so extremely deadly, I ended up feeling that the contemporary parallel the book reflects most clearly is not actually the events following the appearance of COVID19 but the situation now, as we move mostly blithely through what may be the last days before an outbreak, large or small, of nuclear warfare.

Station Eleven is one of the most entertaining contemporary works of fiction that I have read in ages. It is very intricately constructed, (possibly a little too much so, slightly straining the reader's credulity occasionally). Even though until the very end there isn't a really urgent plot line, it kept me glued. I don't think it is the kind of novel that leaves you wiser at the end, or provides an insight into humanity or existence, but it is exceptionally imaginative, clever and compulsive. I enjoyed every page and, unlike so many novels, it didn't peter out towards the end.

They Don't Make Them Like That Any More

Being at heart a trivial person, I read with great interest an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a book on the Royal Family that has just been published. 

Although trivial, I am not persistent. If gossip is put in front of me, I lap it up, but I don't go out of my way to find it (well, I did once - when living in Vienna, learning German, I bought a very downmarket magazine that published a transcript of a conversation Prince Charles had on the telephone with Camilla Parker-Bowles; I told myself I did this purely in order to practise my German; I certainly ended up happy that I had read the ghastly exchange through the filter of a foreign language; even with the slight muffling of meaning that comes from having to look up lots of words while reading, it was a pretty sordid exchange that still makes me wince when I think of it).

Anyway, I haven't followed Windsor family business assiduously enough to have been aware that a person called "Porchie" (Lord Porchester to those who did not know him) had at one stage been a very close friend of the Queen.

As soon as I learned of his existence, however, I wanted to get a look at him, and so I began combing the internet for his image. In about 25 seconds I came upon this picture, taken by Robert Jackson. The man on the left, walking beside the Queen is "Porchie". He looks adorable.

But whether or not he looked adorable no longer interested me because I had become riveted by the picture itself. Looking at it, I saw the world I was born into and I realised that every vestige of it has been swept away.

The things that make me nostalgic about the scene are myriad but probably right at the very top of the list is the utter lack of commercialisation visible anywhere and the complete nonchalance of the other racegoers about the fact that the Queen is only feet away.

What happened to women like the one in the hat seen here striding forward? She has either just seen her horse win and is off to collect her winnings, or she is going to find her husband to command him to hand over another 10 bob. For what it's worth, I think he is called Reggie, and I imagine he may be hiding, downing a stiff gin and enjoying a break from that masterful personality with whom he has signed up to a lifetime of marriage.

And what became of all the women like the one glimpsed side-on behind the determined strider? She has a strong resemblance to Edna Everage in her original Moonee Ponds iteration

And there is another of her ilk in the left-hand corner of this part of the picture.

No one is fat, everyone is dressed well. They all have proper shoes on - that alone is extremely rare now. I know this for a fact, because I have lately developed the habit of counting the number of people I see when I go out who are not wearing factory-made sports shoes - and the numbers are invariably close to zero.

Are things better in our new era? Or simply different? Is my sadness at losing the circumstances of life one can see a bit of in this picture simply due to the fact that what I see here is the world of my childhood and I liked that world simply because being a child is a time that, at least in retrospect, seems rather less exhausting than being an adult?

I do have a distrust of change and what is claimed to be progress, but I think that distrust is not unreasonable. I believe that a time when people made shoes with craftsmanship rather than industrial machinery and plastic extrusions was not only more stylish but more pleasant for those engaged in the shoemaking - and this applied more generally.  Whatever the economics of smallscale manufacturing, I am convinced the social good of working in a skilled job, making or mending things, was considerable. Being apprenticed to learn a trade meant becoming a person who had mastered something. Leaving school now, the closest most young people will come to a job where they feel they are slowly learning a trade is getting a barista certificate. 

Of course back then it was virtually impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in Britain. Eating out was also not much done. By today's standards, things were frightfully dull and boring. All the same, I sometimes I wonder if things haven't now become a bit too exciting. I feel that I am bombarded with distracting novelty to the extent that novelty has become faintly addictive. Slow and steady activities like reading, thinking, maybe even making something seem, by contrast, to take too long.

By the way, can you guess when the picture was taken? I couldn't. I assumed it must have been about 1960 or '61, but a picture from the same day is labelled as being taken on 30th September 1969. Astonishing to realise that even then the old ways hadn't been entirely swept away.

Recent Reading

In the beautiful old police station in Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia, there is a secondhand bookshop that takes up five or six rooms and is a bit of a treasure trove. 

On a rainy day recently, I dropped in and bought the three books in this picture:

The first I read was the Graham Greene. Greene described the book as a "frivolity". In the first half of the story you are on tenterhooks that poverty will result in disaster and in the second half you are led to almost believe that wealth, at least for some people, can have its own devastating consequences. I enjoyed the book. If you are fond of Graham Greene, you probably will as well.

After Loser Takes All I read the Penelope Lively. It is set in London, partly in a 'now' that is a three or four decades ago and partly in the Blitz. The parallel storylines didn't quite work for me - tricky fictional structures like this often distract me when reading, which is probably a symptom of my lack of sophistication. 

In the more modern part of the story, (such as it is), the main character is an architect called Mark who spent his childhood looking at buildings and trying to make out how they were put together. He drives about London seeing it as a jigsaw of time. His musings are quite beguiling and full of ideas but I didn't really feel any great interest in this character or any of the others, (and I point blank did not accept that the really ruthless villain portrayed in its pages bore any resemblance to anyone real - not that I didn't believe in his wickedness but that I didn't believe in his stupid behaviour towards the main character). 

In the book, Lively chooses to shift from present tense to past tense and then back to present tense, with no real reason, which I found annoying. It also seemed to me that she had tried, unsuccessfully, to shove an essay into a fictional framework. One striking thing about the novel though is the pre 9/11 innocence of the contents, particularly noticeable in the descriptions of tower blocks being constructed - there is absolutely no hint in the text that they might be turned into targets. 

Overall, I found City of the Mind entertaining to begin with, but rather tedious after a while - not incompetent but too carefully wrought and confected. The essence of the problem for me was that I didn't care at all about the main character. It is hard to know in such circumstances whether that is the writer or the reader's fault.

Finally, I read the Michael Innes. Published in 1941, it tells the story of Inspector Appleby being shipwrecked and having to solve a murder on an island. By contemporary standards the book's language is very racist, in the sense that the white characters and the black characters are intensely aware of the other's colour. Being black isn't considered a bad thing by most of the characters, but it is considered a notable thing - those who are black are seen as 'other' in a way that is no longer encouraged. If the reader can leave that aside, the book is fun, as Innes's Appleby fables usually (although not always) are. 

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