The Great Leap Forward (well, mostly upward actiually)

Thank you to the New York Times for informing me that The Jump Book exists. A book of photographs of the most unlikely people jumping. Rather great. Take a look. The Duke of Windsor or Richard Nixon - which is the most surprising?

Recent Reading - March of the Long Shadows by Norman Lewis

Moderately entertaining, well-written, faintly surreal novel set in post-war Sicily. Certain characters seemed to have appeared direct from a Wes Anderson movie, but since the book predates Wes Anderson, perhaps he has read it and drawn inspiration from it - or possibly he could make a movie based on it. 

Lewis has a strong sense of the absurd and there are a lot of laughs in this novel, if you like fairly dark humour. Examples chosen at random:

a) one character announcing "To really enjoy a war...you have to be as far from the action as possible and of course on the winning side. Given those two essentials the experience is incomparable"

b) this description: "Marinella, a small manic seaside town of a kind only to be found in Sicily, with a wild mixture of crenellations, Moorish arches, stained glass, crazy pavement and broken statuary. People went there to fornicate surreptitiously in the vicinity of a ruined temple of Venus, to gape at an angel's footprint in the rock, to cuddle the polished shaft of a prehistoric phallus and sometimes to commit suicide by sliding down an increasingly steep grassy slope which finally precipitated them into a deep sea saturated with the benign magic of coral."

c) a character described thus: "He was a tactless man who had ruined his career by criticising people it would have been safer to leave alone, including Mussolini for seducing every woman who ever came to see him, Marshall Badoglio for losing battles and the Pope for his alleged possession of a gold telephone. As a result, having once been a consultant in urinology [stet], he now presided over a unique collection of fossilized toads and several cases of pickled exhibits demonstrating the growth of the foetus in the horse."

The book, via this passage, also led me to finally understand why I could never live among high mountains:

"I had been offered a remarkable house on a cliff's edge near Ragusa. 'Buy it', the locals said, 'It's going for nothing.' I took a friend along to ask his advice. The view everyone raved about was of a rock pinnacle known as U Vicchione (the Old Man) rising a thousand feet sheer from the sea. I handed my friend a pair of 12-power binoculars at the precise moment when one of Europe's last sea eagles perched on its summit drew the wedge of its tail-feathers tight and unfolded its enormous wings, about to take off. He passed the glasses back and shook his head. 'Overpowering', he said, 'it is far too beautiful.' 'Is that possible?' 'You want to settle permanently in a place like this?' 'That was my intention.' 'After three months this view would overpower you. You'd sit with your back to it, and then you'd move into a room facing the other direction. To live in a house you don't need eagles. You need swallows under the eaves. Forget about it. This isn't for you. What's wrong with a moment of calm in one's life?'

I also liked this description of the sensation of knowing you are soon to leave a place in which you have been living - and to which you will probably never return:

"I was attacked by a feeling of impending loss. It was describable as a kind of anxiety to fill in every minute of what was left of time in Palma [the town where the novel is set], to imprint its scenes on the mind, to gather up as a matter of urgency the last of the Sicilian experiences and sensations that would soon be beyond reach. 'When the tree is gone', says their proverb, with its memory of Arabian sands, 'we appreciate its shade.' This was a preposterous island, but enslaving as well, and I had developed an addiction to its hard flavours, its theatricalities and its restlessness. Everything had to be salvaged, nothing squandered of these last hours. Running a bath I listened to the throaty outpourings of water brought from some ancient conduit, feeling its coolness flood into every corner of the room, and sniffing its odours of ferns and earth. I pushed open the window and a blade of sunlight sliced through into the room's twilight. The pigeons were clapping their wings in the courtyard, and a girl on a rooftop sang an African song ..."

What Do We Think of This? (a New Series)

To my astonishment, this orange contraption appeared in a quiet street in Bristol the other day.

What I think about it:

Not very long ago (possibly during COVID lockdowns?) I wasn’t overjoyed when masses of under-paid men* began hurtling about the streets and pavements of European cities on bikes and scooters, carrying soft cube-shaped* boxes on their backs - but this new wheeled object is not an improvement. At least there was human interchange with the cube-people - and you could give the poor fellows a decent tip when they turned up at your door.

This machine, which presumably seeks to replace them, must have used up masses of energy in its construction (in China, I’m guessing, therefore possibly its construction was carried out by Uighur slaves). It probably also caused masses of soil and water pollution while being made - and almost certainly continues to burn up fuel of some kind in its operation as well (a lot of energy is needed for a machine to be able to think well enough to go where it’s sent, without a human to drive it). And I bet it is not free of rare earths, with all that they entail (child labour springs to mind, plus the scarcity their name implies).

The suggestion painted along the box’s metal side is that we should “just eat” and the plan is to remove obstacles to doing that. In an age of over-eating, is this not unwise? Even if it isn’t, is the pleasure of eating food delivered in plastic boxes really greater than the pleasure of food made at home, having exercised the uniquely human ability to plan and prepare a meal, (not to mention the business of shopping for the ingredients, with all the small experiences you have along the way - think Vonnegut’s post office outing).

This glorified wheelie-bin cuts out one more person-to-person interaction in daily life. Its introduction is fuelled by greed - not just the greed for food, but the greed for profit that is also behind the drive to get rid of people on tills in supermarkets, enlisting customers to do that work themselves, and the removal of staff to take your money at boomgates on European motorways, which relies on the computerised system working smoothly (you should see the chaos when it doesn’t) and the disappearance of bank branches where you can talk to a human being - and so on and so on.

People somewhere far away, whose names we may never know and whose faces will almost certainly never be revealed to us, are dedicating their energies to devising ways to make more and more money by depriving others of work and the chance to feel worthwhile and part of a community. I hate it.

What do you think?

*interestingly, there does seem to be a females-need-not-apply element to this new, (potentially fleeting) field of employment

*if we can say ‘tubular’, why can we not say ‘cubular’?

Literary Meals: Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

 

Admittedly this 25p bargain might at first glance be taken for a Mills & Boon offering. However, when I saw it I remembered that my mother and her friends used to love Mary Stewart and, whatever their other faults, they weren't happy to read trash. So I bought the book, despite its lurid cover, curious to find out what it was that they had enjoyed about the author. I am so glad I did.

Madam Will You Talk? is set in an English person's dream of France, where it is extremely easy to find inexpensive, quiet and comfortable hotels, where Provencal towns are not choked with coaches full of tourists and where the kinds of restaurants Elizabeth David seemed to find waiting round every bend are indeed waiting round every bend. I had begun to think lately that David had been romanticising France in much of her writing, but Stewart describes the same world as David vividly and convincingly. By the end of the novel, my faith was restored and I believed once again that for a decade or two after the war that lovely French world did indeed exist. 

The book is a thriller but a highly literate one. In one conversation, characters casually swap lines from Macbeth; in their milieu, it seems, such things are part of the average person's normal store of knowledge. Additionally, at the start of each chapter the reader finds a quotation:  Stewart chooses to recruit for this purpose Chaucer, Spenser, Browning, Coleridge, Marvell, Blake, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare, among others. I suspect that fragments from such authors rarely grace the pages of contemporary "chick lit". 

When I finished the book, I looked up Mary Stewart, to find out more about her. She was a vicar's daughter who seems to have been a brilliant English literature student, which explains the quotations. The poor woman had an ectopic pregnancy, which led to infertility. Whether that alone led to the writing of many novels, I don't know.

Anyway, Madam, Will You Talk?, despite a slightly unconvincing plot twist you can sense coming almost from the first page, is charming and enjoyable. It also has a scene with an hors d'oeuvre trolley in it. I have never forgotten the hors d'oeuvre trolley in a station hotel in Scotland my father took us to one evening while we waited for a train to travel further north. It was as delightful as Stewart's and, like the setting of her book, it belonged to what was very shortly to become a lost world:

"Presently at my elbow I heard the chink of silver, and opened my eyes to see the big glittering trolley of hors d'oeuvre, with its hovering attendant...The man served me from the tray. I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours...there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury butter in curled strips of fresh lettuce, there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate and filed another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassful without a word, and began to eat...The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetising, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee...and...liqueur brandy...swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses. For a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam."

Madam, Will You Talk?, which was Mary Stewart's first novel was published just after the end of rationing in Britain, which, given the long time between manuscript completion and publication, makes me wonder whether Stewart wrote it hungrily, in the midst of Britain's austere rules. 

Recent Reading - The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial

The Mushroom Tapes is a book made up of transcripts of conversations between three writers about the trial of Erin Patterson in the Australian state of Victoria for the murder by poisoning of several of her husband’s relatives - on 29 July, 2023, she had them round for lunch and gave them a dish called beef Wellington, having, almost certainly intentionally, used death-cap mushrooms in the dish’s preparation.

The transcripts are linked by interconnecting segments written by an unidentified narrator who describes things like the courtroom and its protagonists, the view through the car window en route to the small town where the trial takes place and other extraneous details. Perhaps all of the three collaborators wrote these bits, perhaps just one of them, perhaps someone in the publishing house - either way, I felt that this element of the book’s structure did not quite work.

The three writers involved in the project are Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. The last on that list I had not heard of before. I have read a couple of books by Chloe Hooper, but largely forgotten them, and I have read many of Helen Garner’s books, including Joe Cinque’s Consolation, her account of the trial of Anu Singh for the killing in Canberra of her boyfriend Joe Cinque, and This House of Grief, her account of another Victorian murder trial, this time of a man called Robert Farquharson, who, after being discarded by his upwardly mobile wife, seems to have deliberately driven his car into deep water with his children inside it, making an escape, but leaving them to drown.

Those books by Helen Garner are very disturbing, but each achieves something that takes it out of the realm of voyeurism: Joe Cinque’s Consolation delivers a kind of justice for Anu Singh’s victim, Joe Cinque, and his family, particularly his mother, providing them with the dignity of being seen and recognised as victims and portraying Singh, who was convicted only of manslaughter, (mental health, innit), with a clarity that exposes the strong possibility that Joe Cinque did not get true justice from the legal system; in the case of Farquharson, Garner’s account goes a long way toward unlocking the mystery of how a man would reach a point where he thought drowning his children was a solution to anything - it provides understanding for the reader, transforming the alleged perpetrator from a demon into the lost, confused human that he almost certainly is.

This collaborative effort, by contrast, provides very little insight into anything except the curiosity of the three writers, and it therefore struck me as less successful, and possibly not really defensible. The book is dealing with reality, but it is unmethodical, impressionistic and for the most part little better than gossip. I felt grubby by the time I finished reading it.

Perhaps it was the book’s collaborative nature that was the problem - reading transcripts of the obsessive chats of three people about a senseless murder, I kept thinking of Gogglebox, with Sarah and Chloe and Helen as a posse of Goggleboxers on a sofa, lapping up the latest show, while readers look on. At one point Chloe Hooper herself says, “This trial is being used for public entertainment. I feel squeamish about joining the pile-on”, but of course in the end she overcomes her scruples. And, to be fair, I suspect that, if you were in Australia during the trial, unless you made a very deliberate decision to turn away and not be drawn into seeing the trial as a spectacle, it would have been all but impossible not to be swept along on a wave of ghoulish voyeurism.

Not that the authors set out deliberately to be ghoulish: indeed, they claim, in the curious third person plural narratorial voice that comes and goes during the book, that they only half want to write about the subject at all: “None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants not to write about it.” Whatever the truth of that, in the end they cannot resist. And, having given in to the urge to write about the murder, they then publish what they have written - which means they finish up cashing in.

Of course, what I imagine they hoped to do - what anyone who looks at the case for half a moment would like to do - was to understand Erin Patterson and what might have motivated her to kill several members of her husband’s family. In this pursuit, each of the three writers is from time to time perceptive, particularly in highlighting the very contemporary way in which Patterson led her life: she had few in-person interactions, her real-life community appears to have been replaced by online ‘friendships’ with people most of whom she had never met face-to-face. As Krasnostein observes: “Her life was online. It was a fantasy life”.

One aspect of the case that the trio do not examine closely, (possibly they are not equipped to), is the role Christianity plays within it. The victims of Patterson’s murder were all devout Christians - unusually devout within the context of Australia, which is increasingly un-Christian. Patterson toyed with her victims’ religion, at one point she even claimed to have had some kind of epiphany, but in the end she drifted away from the church. Those she killed were kind to her. They prayed for her and urged her to pray when she was in difficulty. This is all mentioned in The Mushroom Tapes, but barely discussed.

It is true that on one occasion Garner does raise the question of evil - “I don’t really believe in the devil, but I do believe that people become possessed by evil”, she says, wondering whether this is what happened to Patterson: “There’s this great wretched darkness that she seems to reveal”, she muses, adding, “I have a horrible sense of her as a kind of black hole, a vortex” - but the book, being a twenty-first century book, published in Australia, does not pursue the question of evil much further than that. Indeed, Hooper at one point swaps out the word “evil” in Hannah Arendt’s banality observation and replaces it with “sociopathy”.

This is frustrating as I suspect that Erin Patterson’s crimes did arise from evil. Consequently, the nature of evil is the thing that needs looking at in the aftermath of her crimes. But instead the writers deflect, musing about whether fungi are the secret rulers of the world, talking about their dreams, wondering about the advantages and disadvantages of reporting the case as women, complaining about being old and feeling invisible, asking each other questions about the experience of reporting itself - what it was like to be in the media scrum after the verdict, for example - and ending up with a muddled sense of sympathy for the murderer, because the courtroom has, they feel, at times had the aspect of a “witch-trial”. Garner finishes by objecting to some of the photographs released of Patterson, because they are unflattering, while Chloe Hooper describes the decision by members of the families of the victims not to turn up for the verdict as “a power move”, which I think suggests a deep misunderstanding of their actions - and emotions.

The book is very readable, but it does not provide the reader with any greater understanding of why on earth this horrible event took place. Therefore it ends up being an entertainment and nothing more. Creating from an infinitely sad event something that is simply an entertainment does seem to me to be morally questionable. I realise what I am saying is that if this book were morally instructive I would find it less disturbing - and that may be for many a preposterous, old-fashioned proposition. But as the book, in the final analysis, is trivial and lacks any moral purpose, I do question its existence, and feel the time I spent reading it may have been wasted.

———

On a lighter note, (if dark humour can be light), reading an article about a young chef this morning, I came across this advice about beef Wellington, and thought, “If only Erin Patterson’s guests had read this before they sat down at her table”:

Not My King

There is an alternate world where we would have King Edward on the throne of England: it is the world where any divorced member of the British royal family would be barred from taking the throne. It was the world that existed at the time of the Abdication.

Why is divorce now okay for Britain's monarchs? Is it because the Church of England decided to allow divorced people to remarry in church, even if their first husband or wife was still alive? No one mentioned at the time that this meant the monarchy was suddenly free of ancient obligations.

It seems so odd that Edward VIII had to abdicate to marry a divorced woman and yet now we have a monarch who has himself chosen to divorce and who has gone on to marry someone else who has also ended her marriage through divorce.

Who among the monarch's subjects was consulted about what is a very radical change in the way that things are done? 

At its best, a constitutional monarchy can create a rather lovely illusion, provided all those within the gilded cage stick to majestic rules, behaving well (including not divorcing) and never sharing their views (about anything). The goal is to set an example of serene dignity and relatively selfless fortitude, to create a dream of an ideal family. The current Danish Queen Mary is marvellous at sustaining the illusion - and Catherine Middleton, although sometimes a bit sugary, understands the basic principles.

The British monarchy is perpetuated only with the consent of the monarch’s subjects - and the change with regard to divorce was never requested nor consented to, merely imposed. Now we are saddled with a right Charlie, who will be followed by a tiresome climate zealot.

The only undivorced child of Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, seems ideally suited to be King - Edward appears to be very dutiful, entirely without opinions and unracy in the extreme. His older brothers probably think they are cleverer than he is - and his nephew William may think he is too. Perhaps it is Edward's apparent lack of arrogance that makes him the least likely to try the public's patience. His sister also seems to have learnt how a royal figure needs to behave in recent years, but she is divorced, and tends to seem impatient - and anyway, under the old rules of succession, Edward is ahead of her

POSTSCRIPT

Well - as if on cue, an article emerges revealing that Prince Edward was once mildly racy - but only in a rather sweet way, apparently.

What a world we live in, where people happily profit from publishing private letters entrusted to them long ago by those still living. Is the word ignoble right in this context? I must look it up. Adopting Humpty Dumpty's approach - he used words to mean whatever he chose - I think it is an ignoble (meaning contemptible, low, graceless, tasteless, treacherous) thing to do.

Recent Reading - Crime and the Academie Francaise by Patrick Marnham (Dispatches from Paris)

Why would anyone buy a 1993 collection of columns about France? Surely it would be completely outdated? Who cares. It's by Patrick Marnham, whose writing is worth reading at all times.

This volume contains pieces by Marnham from the 1980s on criminal proceedings in France; the French Communist Party; French politics more generally, (then, as now, prominently featuring a Le Pen); French attitudes to Britain; and much else besides, including a chapter on the fascinating "Black Museum", and accounts of various peculiar French criminals (notable among them, for someone like me who finds themselves suddenly in the category of "the elderly", one Simone Weber who, on discovering an elderly and wealthy man, marries him without his consent or knowledge, substituting him at the ceremony with "another old man who was on day release from a nearby asylum", forging his will and then, it appears, poisoning him and grabbing his wealth). Above all, the section devoted to the celebrations to mark the anniversary of the French Revolution is worth the price of the book on its own.

I cannot list every single one of the many amusing and interesting things the book includes, but here is what might be called a limited taster menu:

1. Jean Paul Sartre's mother kept his hair in ringlets, dressed him in frocks and called him Poulou. This explains a lot I think, although Marnham doesn't reveal exactly how old Sartre was when he took to trousers and a more severe approach to hairstyling.

2. Between March 1980 and November 1987 an anarchist group called Action Directe terrorised France. Its bomb-maker was a man called Maxime Frérot. Action Directe was a murderous organisation but it was also at times comically incompetent. Marnham describes one of its less successful operations, a bank robbery that took place in Lyon on 12 July, 1985:

"One member of the 'commando' came down on the TGV fast train from Paris already wearing the wig he was supposed to put on for the raid. Later he produced a notice reading 'Closed for Holdup', but hung it on the back door upside down. When he got to the safe it was empty, and his false nose fell off. Outside a passing fire-engine blocked the passage of the getaway car."

Marnham also tells of another Action Directe bank break, in which "Frérot misjudged the strength of the explosives at a savings bank and blew down so much rubble that the money was buried beneath it."

3. During the 1992 campaign on the Maastricht Treaty, Mitterand announced that he must have an urgent operation. When Jean-Marie Le Pen suggested in a debate on television that the operation was not urgent but a campaigning ploy, (an accusation that Mitterand's doctors much later revealed was accurate), "it provoked a walk-out by several leading partisans of the 'Yes' vote. Led by the Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, they formed a dignified procession and moved towards a side door. Unfortunately this proved to be a false door which did not open. As they searched around in some confusion for a door which would let them out of the studio the raucous voice of M. Le Pen continued to bellow his bar room insults through the microphone. It was a farcical climax to the national debate, the great and the good of France, attempting a principled gesture, in fact groping around for an exit while being showered with verbal abuse by the leader of the extreme-right." And there was me believing the accepted line that French television is boring.

4. In 1987, when Jean Marie Le Pen went to Lourdes while campaigning, he was abused by a priest for profaning the Grotto. "Typically", Marnham tells us, "Le Pen enjoyed the last word. 'I am here to talk to God, not to his intermediaries', he said." (The book has a great deal on Le Pen, all of it interesting and perceptive, including the assertion that Mitterrand 'invented' Le Pen in 1983 by introducing proportional representation - read the book to get the full argumentation.)

5. "One of those who escaped the guillotine [during the Terror] was an aristocrat called M.de St-Cyr, and it would be nice to think that the story of how he did so was true. Dragged before a Revolutionary tribunal he was asked his name. 'De Saint-Cyr,' he replied. 'Nobility has been abolished', said the president. 'Well then, Saint-Cyr', he said. 'The time of the saints is passed', said the president. 'All right then, Cyr', said the aristocrat. 'We no longer use the word "sire" since the execution of the king', said his tormentor. At this point, the aristocrat lost his temper. 'Since I have no name I must be an abstraction and since there is no law allowing you to try an abstraction I must be acquitted', he shouted. The judge then said, 'Citizen Abstraction, you are acquitted but you had better choose a good Republican name in the future if you wish to escape suspicion.'"

If these examples appeal, I recommend getting hold of the book. It is packed with so many more interesting passages and hilarious anecdotes. I loved it.