Kipling and AI

 Someone just sent me this video inspired by - or at least using as a template - Kipling's poem Boots which was written about the Boer War and subtitled Infantry Columns (its rhythm clearly being intended to echo the repetitive thumping of marching feet):

My friend was shocked because the video is entirely AI generated and it seems so slick. I am not so worried as, while the thing is put together seamlessly, I think it fails to capture the poem's meaning or tone or almost any aspect of Kipling's intention. Therefore, for me the video demonstrates that AI is shallow, an information accumulator, an image creator of sorts but not a creator of meaning. So far as I can tell from this example, AI appears not to understand feelings. It is therefore quite unable to deal with complex emotion, let alone the deliberate dissonance between tone and content in Kipling's poem.

That might seem an odd thing to say given that the most striking feature of the video is the extreme dissonance it creates between the tone of the poem and the images AI has created to represent it. The missing factor though is intent: I don't think AI knows what a peculiar effect it has created. Nor do I think it set out to create the effect deliberately.

On the other hand the superstitious part of me is afraid that by publicly criticising AI's video, I will become AI’s target and it will punish me.

How could it do that? I don't know, but it is the absence of emotional understanding that AI displays that is the cause of my alarm. AI can do some things that humans can do - and it can often do them faster than humans. Therefore, one could say that it is partly human. However, it lacks important attributes such as empathy. I wonder, therefore if, rather than being completely unlike any human, AI is, in fact, very like possibly the most dangerous variety of human: that is, the psychopath.

What do others think?

Ship Ahoy

Reading English Journey by Beryl Bainbridge - panned when it came out but I like her company and revere her novella called The Birthday Boys - I came across.her account of meeting a man who worked on the first Cunard ship called Queen Elizabeth. He was invited to work on the second but, Bainbridge tells us:

"He couldn't bear the contrast between the old grandeur and the new vulgarity."

What a bolt of recognition I experienced, reading that sentence. What that man felt about the two QEs is what I too often feel about the entire tawdry modern world.

A Time to Be Silent

Making stately progress through a pile of old New Yorkers, I have reached an article about the Spice Girls from 2022. Apparently, Danish researchers concluded in 2014 that the Spice Girls’ first single, Wannabe, was, at least at that time, the catchiest song ever written.

There is so much left unexplained in that piece of data - how did the researchers define “ever”; how did they define “catchy”; above all, why did they bother?

Never mind, Wannabe is a very cheerful piece of music and a delight to hear - occasionally.

The thing though that really did amaze me in the article was the news - or information I suppose; it can’t really be news 28 years later, (although it is to me) - that in 1997 the Spice Girls went to South Africa to perform a concert for charity and, during their visit, they met Nelson Mandela and, when some journalist asked him how he felt about meeting them, Mandela replied:

“You know, these are my heroes. And I don’t want to be emotional but this is one of the greatest moments in my life.”

Of course, I wanted to know in what tone Mandela made this statement - I assumed he was being a little jokey.

I found the video, and the whole event is wonderfully good-humoured, except for one thing. It turns out that the future King of England was also present - 15 kilos ago, at least, by the look of him - and could he keep silent? No, he could not.

And as a result he spoiled things, butting in with a look-at-me intervention that serves no purpose other than to make everyone else there look confused and awkward.

What a pity the young prince didn’t have a quick read of Ecclesiastes as he was driven to the occasion.

You can see the exchange here, starting from about 2 minutes in.

Amusing

 This made me laugh:

What Just Happened?

Years ago Michael Frayn wrote Noises Off, an especially hilarious farce in which the audience views a play as if they are sitting in the wings, seeing what goes on backstage. Looking at yesterday's Oval Office meeting, I felt as if I was watching the 21st century revamped version of Noises Off, played this time as tragedy, not farce. 

As a result, while lots of people have been focussing ever since on what was said during yesterday's meeting, I've been stuck one degree back from the substance of the conversation/discussion/ disagreement/unedifying spectacle/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. The question that has obsessed me - and continues to do so - is why the meeting was held in public, under the media's gaze. 

I vaguely remember reports of Biden having a blazing row with Zelensky at some point - but the news of that was only available because it was leaked; there were no pictures or film of the occasion. Who had the bright idea of conducting delicate international negotiations under a blaze of lights, with cameras recording everything? In what possible way was that ever going to be helpful? 

I am truly baffled.

What I Have Been Reading: The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy

This novel tells the story of one woman's game of cat-and-mouse with a masked man over the course of an evening at a sumptuous ball. The rustle of silk, the sparkle of chandeliers, a scattering of snowflakes, a scrap of black lace, swathes of deep yellow brocade - will they end up in bed together? What do you think? I'm afraid I didn't care. There was nothing at stake. Prettily written, I admit.

What Price Freedom?

I stayed the last two weekends in Vauxhall. On both the Saturdays I was there, at about half past midday, I set off towards points further north in London from a place near Vauxhall Park:

Each time, when I got beyond the park, I started to notice blocked-off streets and large numbers of policemen and police cars and vans. On the first occasion, when I reached Vauxhall Bridge, a tall, dark-bearded policeman crossed in front of me. The policeman was carrying a stack of orange cones. 

"What are you all doing," a man near me asked the policeman. "Preparing for the demonstration," he replied. "What demonstration?" I asked. "The pro-Palestinian one," he said.

When I reached the other end of the bridge, I saw yet more policemen and vehicles. There were more, presumably, deployed all along the march's route. 

In a corner, confined within a mass of temporary fencing, I also saw a crowd of people, many of whom were carrying Israeli flags. They were being prevented from moving about outside of the small fenced area the police had allotted them.

Up until then I had believed the pro-Palestine protests that happen each weekend in London should be allowed, even though since the Ramallah lynching in 2000 I have not supported the Palestinian cause at all. My reason for believing the protests should go ahead was because I did not want freedom to be curtailed. However, seeing the arrangements that the authorities seem to believe are needed in order to allow the protests, I am now wondering about what precisely freedom means in this situation. 

Leaving aside the question of who is being protected from whom, (are the demonstrators dangerously violent when confronted with people who don't agree with them - because, if they are, they forfeit the right to be given free run of the streets to air their views), I began to wonder about the right of Londoners to enjoy their own streets in freedom. In this context, I was struck by how unnecessarily the police were using their power to inconvenience people - they seemed to be relishing insisting that people couldn't cross certain roads nowhere near the route of the march. An elderly couple were told to stagger on up to the next crossing, "only about a hundred and fifty yards further up" and when the couple asked why they couldn't cross where they were, they were told: "It's up to us to decide, and we have decided it is safer for you not to cross here." 

I also wondered about the freedom of ratepayers - have they ever been asked if they mind subsidising the marchers to the tune of the Met's no doubt vast overtime bill each Saturday? And, above all, what about the freedom of those who wish to support Israel? Why aren't Israeli supporters allowed to wander about freely, while Palestine supporters are? 

Of course, the second weekend I witnessed all these preparations, just after the release of the Bibas children's bodies, I also found myself unable to believe the great hordes of Palestine supporters would be out in force again. After having discovered that their own people had strangled in absolute cold blood, quite deliberately, two small boys, placing their hands round their necks and squeezing the life out of them - and then followed up by turning the return of the poor children's bodies into one of the most graceless spectacles ever created - I assumed they would give up and stay at home.

But there they were, streaming down from Westminster and over the bridge as if nothing had happened. It turned out they didn't care at all.

The first Saturday I was in Vauxhall, I should add, my reason for going north was to get to Marylebone Theatre to see a play called What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. At least one big London theatre was too afraid to stage it, in case they were besieged by Palestine supporters who don't like Jews. What price freedom?

At the Theatre: The Merchant of Venice 1936

A new production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is always an interesting prospect, as the play is so puzzling. It contains some of Shakespeare's most beautiful speeches, including probably the most famous discussion of mercy in the English language, but it tells the story of a man's desire to use the law to take revenge on another man, almost certainly killing him, and of the punishment that is meted out to that man for desiring to do such a thing. The fact that the man in question, Shylock, is Jewish only adds to the difficulties, as the play appears on the face of it to be anti-semitic, even though in Shylock's famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed" speech in Act 3, Shakespeare writes with what seems to be complete empathy for the plight of Jews subjected to anti-Semitism.

Perhaps because it is so difficult, the opportunities to see the play are fairly rare. But in 2023 an actress called Tracy Ann Oberman decided to create her own production, in which she would play Shylock, setting the action against the backdrop of the rise of Oswald Mosley and his followers. Having read too much PG Wodehouse as a child I have always equated Mosley with Sir Roderick Spode and consequently underestimated his dangerous influence. Oberman's grandmother was living in the East End of London at the time of Mosley's activities and took part in the Battle of Cable Street, something I knew nothing about before going to this performance. It was an event that seems to have demonstrated that Mosley was not the idiotic figure of fun I'd assumed, and learning of its existence has made me wonder about whether Wodehouse did everyone a disservice by creating Spode, using absurdity to minimise what was a real danger.  

Having been performed to great acclaim in London, the production is now touring Britain and so when it came to Bath while I was staying in Bristol I took the opportunity to go along (this is beginning to sound faintly like the opening to a visit to Julian and Sandy as spoken by Kenneth Horne). The performance I went to was a sell-out and in front of me were over 100 school children, almost overcome with excitement at being in a theatre.

The performance began in what I presume was Hebrew as some kind of Jewish ritual was presented, with Oberman at its centre. Once that was over we galloped into the play itself. A small cast doubled up playing a variety of parts and they were excellent in all of them. The whole thing is full of gusto and energy and Obermann as Shylock is superb. The fact that the character is played as a woman seemed to me to work very well - somehow a woman's suffering at the hands of bullies struck me as something one could feel more sympathy for than a man's, possibly because a man, possibly unfairly, is expected to fight rather than cry. Oberman's performance persuaded me that the arrogance and scorn Shylock is subjected to is more than enough to goad her into wishing to make the leader of her enemies suffer in his turn.

In what to me at first seemed a very clever twist but I later realised was an inevitable result of transforming Shylock into the play's hero, Portia, who I had always thought of as a heroine, is here presented as a really nasty creature, taking delight in grinding a Jew into the dust. While this was a revelation for me, given the over-reach of many in the modern legal profession, i didnt mind at all having a sense of hostility for a lawyer whipped up in my heart.

At the end, Oberman stepped forward and told of her grandmother's experiences in the Battle of Cable Street and then, together with the whole cast, exhorted the audience to show solidarity with their contemporary Jewish neighbours, while raising her fist over and over, in a gesture that, were Elon Musk to have made it, might have been mistaken for a Nazi salute. This seemed a faint sacrilege but I think Shakespeare survived it.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance. Despite many of the schoolchildren complaining as they left about how long the thing had gone on, the play has actually been admirably streamlined (although purists might argue that cutting out bits of Shakespeare can never be admirable). But there is one glaring flaw in the production - tragically, it is already out of date. The enemy faced by people of Jewish origin is no longer the Mosley mob they encountered in Cable Street. Oberman knows this all too well as since October 7, 2023 she has had to be guarded against attack from pro-Palestinians. 

It would have taken a lot of work but the truth is the production needs to be revamped. In place of Blackshirts, the characters opposing Shylock need to be dressed in those dreadful uniforms Hamas members love to parade in as they release hostages. It is not frustrated white men but Islamists who are bent on doing violence to Jews these days  - and we all need to show solidarity with each other as they will be coming for us next.

Going Backwards

Recently the Financial Times Weekend Magazine published this fascinating and beautifully illustrated story of how an industrial process that replaced skilled craftsmen who made lace by hand is now, in its turn, dying, due to a lack of people with the skills it needs to survive. As newspapers are ephemeral things and thus it becomes very hard to access the fine pieces they sometimes contain, I decided to photograph my copy of the article to preserve it for others to read here. I may be biased as I am very interested in textiles, but it seems to me to be so exceptionally good and interesting that it deserves to be widely seen and read. It is, I think, an unusual story - it describes an instance of industrialisation retreating so that, if lace, the product that machines took over the manufacture of, is still required in future, it will need once more to be made entirely by hand:

 

What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

I bought my copy of The Transit of Venus from a bookstall by a metro station in an outer suburb of Budapest, where I'd gone to buy a lamp. Who knows how this relatively obscure English language novel ended up in that unlikely setting. If I'd enjoyed the book as much as I expected to, I might have decided that the supernatural was at work and the book was put there especially for me.  

Over and over, for many years - even decades - I'd heard about what a classic The Transit of Venus was, so, when I got the book home and one of my children, seeing it lying on the kitchen table, said, "I didn't know you were fond of Mills & Boon", I became very holier-than-thou. I pointed out that one should not judge a book by its cover, (at last an opportunity to use that cliche) and that in fact Transit of Venus is considered a minor masterpiece. 

Now that I have read it, I think perhaps my daughter's comment was not entirely misplaced.

The book's main preoccupation is a young Australian woman called Caro Bell. She has a sister, Grace, about whom I would have liked to know more - (and eventually she is given a little space within the narrative, although her story, like the brief glimpse we have of Valda, a colleague of Caro's, seems inserted rather untidily into what is really Caro's book) - and a half-sister, Dora, who is a masterpiece, a character whose overbearing self-pity causes great misery for Grace and Caro throughout their lives. 

From almost the first page a young scientist called Ted Tice, who is staying in the same house as Caro, falls permanently in love with her. She instead becomes addicted to a sinister character called Paul, who treats her with a cruelty she finds hard to renounce - the relationship reminded me of Teresa Hawkins and Jonathan Crow in Love Alone, but Love Alone is an infinitely better book. 

Eventually, after years of misery, Caro meets and marries a rich American, with whom she is very happy. He does good works in South America, which enables Hazzard to give the reader a glimpse into the iniquities of South American despots. When this fellow dies, everything is finally resolved. Although the prediction made on one of the novel's first pages that "Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement" is not actually fulfilled within the novel, unless I missed something, which is possible.

One realises from the opening scene, in which we are given a description of a storm spreading across a piece of countryside, that Shirley Hazzard describes landscape very beautifully. This opening rivals the first pages of Return of the Native. She also is extremely clever at evoking a character with only a sentence or two. The young man who is to become Grace's husband is introduced to us thus:

"He did not often go alone to a concert or anything else of the cultural kind. On your own, you were at the mercy of your responses. Accompanied, on the other hand, you remained in control, made assertive sighs and imposed hypothetical requirements. You could also deliver your opinion, seldom quite favourable, while walking home."

Not surprisingly, he turns out to be very disappointing as a human being. Equally useless is The Major, with whom Dora becomes involved. At his first meeting with Caro and Grace, Dora is passing round the photographs he has taken of travels they made together. "I'd have taken more", he explains, "but I'd used up most of the roll on the dog."

Chapter 6 in which we see the two girls and their half-sister living in Sydney after the First World War gives an absolutely vivid and fascinating picture of what it was like in that city at the time - rather unpleasant, apparently, which may explain the hopes Caro has about what England will contain and the subsequent bitter disappointment she feels when she discovers the English are not all heroic. 

I suspected while reading the book that Caro was a cypher for Hazzard herself, but her life story, as presented by Wikipedia, does not appear to include much time in England, which means I must take my hat off to her for her perceptive lack of illusion about the inhabitants of the British Isles. Judging by her fictional portrayals of them, she particularly despised English academics: both Professor Thrale with whom Caro is staying at the start and Professor Wadding, right at the end of the novel, are treated with considerable scorn by the book's narrator. Professor Wadding, for instance, is given this ridiculous remark:

"My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy". 

The England we read about in Transit of Venus is very much seen through the perspective of Australian eyes. There is the sheer amazement at the verdant nature of the place that most Australians feel on arriving in Europe generally, "the full prestige of green" as Hazzard puts it. There are insights into how English society works, that possibly are more readily recognisable to those coming to Britain from outside and from the New World than they are to the natives. For example, "In England, class distrust might destroy even the best, by distracting their energies", Caro thinks at one point. Later her cruel lover, who is not an Australian, but is a kind of outsider, says: "I loathe the undernourishment of this country, the grievance, the censoriousness, the reluctance to try anything else. The going through to the bitter end with all the wrong things." That character also claims that "Saturday afternoon in England is a rehearsal for the end of the world."

My problem with the book is that it is essentially just a story of Caro Bell's love affairs. I am not persuaded, as I was by Stead in Love Alone, that I am learning anything more about human existence from this romantic retelling. Additionally, Hazzard often indulges a taste for the overblown and portentous. For instance, when she describes a scene at a meal in the dining room of Grace's future husband's family thus:

  

"Everything had the threat and the promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this. Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break",

I feel that the passage - most especially the last line - is just too much.

Again, when Caro is in bed with her lover, Hazzard tells us that Caro leaves her breast "gravely revealed, like a confession", which, for my taste, is an over the top bit of phrasing, as is Hazzard's observation about Caro that "Love had become her greatest, or sole, distinction". Perhaps this is just a question of taste, perhaps for others phrases such as these are beautiful. Other readers may admire sentences such as "Her mind shifted on silence, like a ship on the disc of ocean that represents the globe" and "The deed of death has no hypothetical existence - or, having its hypothesis in everyone, must be enacted to achieve meaning". For me, they are excessive, full of a self-conscious grandeur that I find strangely jarring. 

In short, despite many excellent images and insights, (some Hazzard seems to think so good she uses them twice, for example telling us in Chapter 12 that "nothing creates such untruth as the wish to please or to be spared something" and then reminding us in Chapter 26 that "Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please"), by the end of the book I was becoming appalled by her pomposity and, above all, her lack of humour, (which I think may be the element that I dislike in the overblown phrases I've quoted above). I don't regret reading the book but in the end I can't help thinking that it is a shame that Hazzard had such skill with words but not much skill as a novelist. She never persuaded me why I should love Caro so much as to spend an entire novel with her and so in the end I felt unsatisfied. Having oscillated between stunned admiration at some stretches of writing and annoyance at much else, I finished by wondering if I would have preferred the book if it had been told from Ted Tice's point of view instead.  

What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a narrative centred on a weekend during which three elderly women clear out the beach house of a friend who has died. The friend is called Sylvie and she seems to have left the beach house to a person called Gail, who never appears and about whom we are told almost nothing. 

The three women are called Wendy, Jude and Adele. Wendy is an academic, very slightly in the Germaine Greer mode, except she has - or had - a husband and children. Her children don’t like her because she was too absorbed in her work to pay them much attention when they were little. Her husband is dead. She has an incontinent half-blind extremely old dog, a present, as a puppy, from Sylvie at the time of Wendy’s husband’s death. Jude has made a career as a manager of very expensive restaurants and is very keen on order and keeping a tight control on everything she can. She is short-tempered and intolerant of mess. She has been mistress to a wealthy married man for decades and that relationship is the one joy of her life. Adele was once a successful actress but is no longer. She is fairly self-indulgent and has just discovered that she is being kicked out by her lover. She has no money, no prospects and nowhere to go, but she isn’t enormously troubled by any of this. These women have all been friends for a very long time, but their friendships have been thrown out of balance by the death of Sylvie, who, in a way that is never explained, made everything work smoothly.

Who Sylvie was remains a mystery throughout the book, and the reason the women feel they need to do this chore for Gael is never made clear. The house is built on a slope and has a peculiar outdoor lift arrangement on which the characters spend a lot of time travelling up and down. I suspect the author had some real place in mind as this is such an odd and unusual detail and required such a lot of explaining to help the reader imagine it. I think it would have been better left out as each time it was mentioned one was distracted by questions of why one had never seen one anywhere and whether such a thing would actually be permitted given the prevalent concerns about safety one encounters in Australia generally. So far as I could tell it didn’t serve any point or further the plot in any way. 

Inasmuch as there is a plot: I got mildly excited when Wendy takes an object described as unusually heavy out of a cupboard that she is clearing. The object, we are told, is contained within a black cover. Wendy finds she cannot open the black cover and hesitates. Then, after a moment, she chucks the mysterious thing into a black bin bag, along with the rest of the rubbish. Having had my attention drawn to this object so emphatically, I assumed it might turn out to be something important that would need recovering later in the book. However, it is never mentioned again - and no other line of plot comes up to create any kind of concern on the part of the reader about what happens next. 

Wood is excellent at creating a world on a page and extremely unusual in taking elderly women as her subjects. I imagine her intention in this novel is to meditate on friendship. Unfortunately, there was not one single line of it that leapt out at me and made me thing, “Oh what an insight”. It is vivid and well-written, but it is, I suspect unintentionally, very unsettling in its portrayal of three entirely self-absorbed, spiritually empty lives. Although the theme is friendship, there was little that could be called comforting or generous in these friendships - more a clinging to each other, faut de mieux, than anything involving love and care. Perhaps that is often the truth of human relationships, but it is a bleak one all the same. Perhaps this is realism and I ought not to object. Perhaps my Catholicism is getting in the way

Small Miracles

 I came across this observation from GK Chesterton recently: 

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. We should always endeavour to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake and wonder more at the earth. What was wonderful about childhood is that any thing in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

Shortly afterwards, I found that one of the small pots of unidentified bulbs I had bought some weeks earlier had burst into flower:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen glossier examples of crocus. I was amazed. 

But, while they could hardly be classified as the permanent thing Chesterton urges us to wonder at, they could not really be called the exception either, given crocus are ubiquitous in late winter and early spring, (one proof of this is the fact that James Marriott also mentioned crocus this week: he spotted one flowering in the wild - and the incident reminded him that Geoffrey Hill wrote a poem about crocus). 

Whichever category Chesterton would have put crocus in - permanent or exception - I think he would have agreed that mine at least - so richly purple, so radiant - are miracles in his “world full of miracles”.

For a time, the other pot I’d bought remained harder to feel any wonder at - while its companion offered a storm of shining flowers, all it could manage was this unpromising set of stalks:

But then one morning I discovered those stalks had transformed themselves into these exquisite flowers:

Can Bad People Do Good Work

Today at a second-hand bookstall I found a collection of articles by Clement Freud. I bought it and began to read it and so far have found it hilarious. 

The book was published in 2009. In 2016, after Freud's death, two women revealed Freud had molested them when they were in their early teens. One was raped by him. 

Is it wrong to continue to find someone's work hilarious, once they have been revealed to be wicked? It was easy to forego the creative output of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris as neither of them ever created anything I was interested in. I think most of Wagner sounds like the score for Ben-Hur so his association with Nazism has never meant I've had to think about depriving myself of his music, as I wouldn't choose to listen to it anyway.

The dilemma comes when one likes the work, but not the person who created it. Caravaggio was a murderer but his Taking of Christ is still marvellous. Bill Cosby's monologues would probably still make me laugh - and Kramer in Seinfeld certainly does.

Does it achieve anything to refuse to be amused by Clement Freud's anecdotes? Is laughing along with what he writes a way of being complicit in his actions?

I suppose there's the whole performance of reading someone's work in the light of ghastly posthumous revelations. That seems to be a tactic for Alice Munro fans. In both instances - Munro and Freud - I rather wish that particular light thrown on their work had remained dimmed

Unintended Consequences

There are many consequences of being asked to accept that men who believe themselves to be women are women. The one that is little discussed is the difficulty now faced by women who are women but look a little bit like men - or at least like men who believe themselves to be women and dress up as if they were.

Once upon a time this suspicion wasn't really likely to come up because there wasn't an identity game being played with the public where, if a man says he's a woman, he is recorded across all forms of media as a woman, with no trace remaining of any transition being made. As a result of this new practice, if a woman's bone structure is somewhat masculine, many people these days start to wonder whether she might in fact be a man passing himself off as a sex into which he was not born. 

It was an article in The Times recently that started me thinking about this. Apparently there is a successful writer who has the pen name Freida McFadden but is actually called something else. These are pictures of Freida McFadden. Judging by McFadden's advice to other writers, gender is a complicated issue in this writer's mind. The killer apparently can be a he and be a mother and a daughter. 

More Food

A Syrian Antioch Christian family (that is members of the Orthodox Church of Antioch), living for the moment in Istanbul, invited someone we know who lives there too to a lunch to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration today. This is our friend's description of the meal; I'm jealous: “They live in the most modest rented backstreet flat imaginable, yet they prepared a feast fit for a king. We started with perfect sesame bread dipped in pomegranate sauce, olive oil, and powdered cumin. Baby olives were served with fresh tomatoes, and yoghurt was served with beetroot and capers. Then came succulent lamb chops on pide bread and fresh rocket. Even the mineral water had been carried from Antioch and was raised to the health of President Trump. There was a dessert of crystallised pumpkin dressed with sesame sauce and walnuts."

Food in Fiction - The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

Described in The Siege of Krishnapur, there is a meal more delicious than I would have expected in British India. Here it is:

"The fried fish in batter that glowed like barley sugar, the curried fowl seasoned with lime juice, coriander, cumin and garlic, the tender roast kid and mint sauce."

Perhaps it's less a meal than a mere list of dishes. But delicious all the same.

What I Have Been Reading Lately - The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

I read JG Farrell’s Troubles a dozen years ago and enjoyed it, particularly Farrell’s descriptions of food. All that I remember now, aside from the food bits, is something disgusting in a chamber pot and the main character, in a state of mild and indecisive unhappiness, mixed with confusion - either mine or his - wandering about a lot in the gardens of a hotel, in or just outside a small town in Ireland. 

In The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell abandons the damp decay of rural Ireland in favour of an imaginary outpost of Empire during the Indian Mutiny. Farrell, I think, viewed most human behaviour as folly and, perhaps to ensure the reader understands that the enterprise that is the brief presence of the British in Krishnapur is part of that folly, he begins the book by showing the reader Krishnapur as it is now, long after the Indian Mutiny. His opening pages provide a wonderfully evocative description of what travellers would see when approaching what is left of Krishnapur from a plain to its east. By the time he brings the reader close to the settlement, it becomes clear that Krishnapur is now totally deserted. It “has the air of a place you might see in a melancholy dream”. 

Skilfully Farrell moves from this introduction back into a past where Krishnapur is a hub of British activity. He assembles a cast of vivid characters, about whom he seems to feel no particular affection - the two doctors who are opposed in their approaches to treating cholera and one of whom is described much later as “the best of us all. The only one who knew what he was doing”; the phrenology-obsessed Magistrate; Fleury, the semi-intellectual, who is useless and, in his attitudes to women, reminded me of the men in Women Know Your Limits; Harry, the less well-educated soldier, who Fleury “always condescended to think rather dull”, but who turns out to be an infinitely more useful person to have around than Fleury himself; the Padre, who I suspect Farrell intended should be laughable but I found admirable in the circumstances; and, above all, the Collector, a true Victorian, a man who has never forgotten the several “ecstatic summer days” he spent at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, marvelling at the engineering feats and models of possible inventions on display. Among the things he admired were a model of a train that would lay down its own track as it progressed; and drinking glasses with separate compartments inside them so that somehow a drink becomes more fizzy for the person drinking it. 

The Collector’s walls are “thickly armoured with paintings” and among his favourite possessions are a marble bas-relief called The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice and a small sculpture called Innocence Protected by Fidelity, “a scantily clothed young girl, asleep with a garland of flowers in her lap; beside her a dog had its paw on the neck of a gagging snake which had been about to bite her.” At the start of the book the Collector compares himself to the Magistrate and feels satisfaction that, unlike the Magistrate, he, the Collector, is a whole man. “For science and reason is not enough”, he thinks, “A man must also have a heart and be capable of understanding the beauties of art and literature.” 

For a time, all is well in the little island of Victorian civilisation that is Krishnapur. Not even the faintest glimmer of doubt has entered the mind of any of the enclave’s inhabitants about their mission in India. The Collector, at the pinnacle of Krishnapur society, is the only one who seems concerned by certain small but strange incidents involving chapatis, but not enough to have his faith shaken. He remains in love with statistics - “At the thought of statistics, The Collector …felt his heart quicken with joy…Nothing was able to resist statistics, not even Death itself” - and strong in the conviction that anything and anywhere, including the entire Indian nation, can and should be wrangled into leading a Victorian life. 

The story of the book is the story of the destruction of Krishnapur and of its inhabitants’ illusions, most particularly those of the Collector. The Collector is forced to recognise “that there was a whole way of life of the people in India which he would never get to know and which was totally indifferent to him and his concerns.” His beloved sculptures and models from the Great Exhibition - and, indeed, everything material he holds dear - are swept away, some used as reinforcements to crumbling battlements, some simply smashed in weeks of fighting. The accoutrements of civilisation - fine clothing, cleanliness, decent burial - all vanish so quickly it is impossible not to recognise the flimsiness of the edifice in which the faith of the Collector and his companions has been placed. 

However, at the end of the book, for most of them, the effect of the experience is more or less fleeting. “It is surprising how quickly the survivors returned to the civilised life they had been living before”, Farrell tells us, “Only sometimes in dreams the terrible days of the siege, which were like the dark foundation of the civilised life they had returned to, would return years later to visit them: then they would awake, terrified and sweating, to find themselves in white starched linen, in a comfortable bed, in peaceful England”. 

But the Collector absorbs the meaning of what he has experienced and consequently he does not adjust so easily after the experience he has been through in India. He sees things with new eyes: 

“Crossing for the last time that stretch of dusty plain which lay between Krishnapur and the railhead, the Collector experienced more strongly than ever before the vastness of India; he realised then, because of the widening perspective, what a small affair the siege of Krishnapur had been, how unimportant, how devoid of significance.” 

Back at home he takes “to pacing the streets of London, very often in the poorer areas, in all weathers, alone, seldom speaking to anyone but staring, staring as if he has never seen a poor person in his life before.”

Meeting Fleury by chance one day, he stops and they chat. 

“Culture is a sham”, the Collector tells Fleury, “It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.” 

Fleury tries to argue and to persuade the Collector of the importance of ideas. 

“Oh, ideas … said the Collector dismissively”. 

Farrell ends with speculation about the Collector, speculation that highlights the mystery, even absurdity, of most human endeavour and of life itself, (Farrell's central theme):

“The years go by and the Collector undoubtedly felt, as many of us feel, that one uses up so many options, so much energy, simply in trying to find out what life is all about. And as for being able to do anything about it well … Perhaps by the very end of his life, in 1880, he had come to believe that a people, a nation, does not create itself according to its own best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge.”

Reading these words, I had assumed that Farrell was elderly when he wrote his novels and they were the result of years of experience. In fact, he died after falling while fishing on a cliff in Ireland at the age of only 43. The admirable richness of his imagination is everywhere on display in The Siege of Krishnapur, together with a wonderful skill at telling an interesting story and weaving it with wit and intelligence. I find it hard to discover that he was so young and a missed footing robbed us of more work by him.

Words and Phrases - an Occasional Series: Two Fashionable Words I Avoid

There are words that are strangely appealing to writers, even though they should be resisted in almost all contexts except the context for which they were created. Their allure is the allure of shiny things, when what a writer needs is usually not flashiness but clarity of meaning.

“Shard” is such a word. It is, to be fair, not so much shiny as purple, (as in “purple prose”) - or, if not precisely purple, certainly gaudy. It is a peacock feather word, a glossy substitute for “fragment” or “sliver” or “broken bit”. When encountered in a contemporary poem, it is a disappointing sign that there is probably little point reading further. It serves almost always as an indicator the writer has swooned at the altar of their own poetic rapture.

“Liminal” is another current favourite of writers, although more favoured in prose than in poetry. It is a show-off word. It is supposed to tell the reader that the article they are reading is not a bit of tabloid nonsense but something intellectual. It tells me that I am entering the territory of pomposity. I look for something else to read instead.