Characters mutually fragmented - Trespasses by Paul Bailey

Trespasses by Paul Bailey presents the reader with an early challenge. The principal character, Ralph Hicks, or Ralphie to his mother, has suffered a breakdown and, during the book’s first fragmented section, we see the world from his disjointed, guilt-ridden, apparently random perspective.

Perhaps a sense of confusion was intended by the author, who might have assumed as much skill in the average reader as he possesses as a writer. As an introduction, the opening seems to work less than well. When the form is revisited later on, it works poignantly and wholly effectively.

Eventually, Trespasses is a beautiful, engaging, but deeply sad tale. Ralph, an academically gifted working class lad, meets Ellie, a quintessential lower middle class lass, and they marry with apparent happiness. But Ralph, perhaps because of a childhood experience of his parents’ not unhappy but woefully incomplete relationship, simply cannot love.

He always seems to need a motive, a clear reason for doing something that is not immediately physical. Ellie, not herself a victim, suffers the indignity of what she sees as a one-way trade in emotions. She takes her own way out. But perhaps Ralph did love. Perhaps that’s why he reacted as he did. Trespasses is a short novel that must be read slowly. Many of the apparently mundane passages seem to contain clues about the characters, none of whom exhibit any of the expected clichés.

There are neither heroes nor villains here, only people. But they are people portrayed almost in shorthand, in a way that any of us might meet them, incompletely, in real-life encounters. Thus some simple passages benefit from being read like poetry. There are multiple references to events that are described from different perspectives – a visit to the zoo, a sexual experience, a walk with a father and his lady-freind, a meal remembered.

Trespasses is in part an experimental novel, an attempt to blend innovative style and form with content to form a whole. It does not succeed completely, but it comes very close. Many readers will not cope with its initial demands first time of asking. But it is also a thought-provoking and deeply moving human story. The characters become thoroughly three dimensional but, like most people, they are likeable only in part. It takes real writing skill to bring such people to life, even via their deaths.

Another Side of the Slave Trade - Rough Crossings by Simon Schama

No short review of Rough Crossings by Simon Schama could begin to do it justice. It is far too big a project, far too significant an achievement for any simple summary. It presents a momentous story, highly relevant to our own times, of partial emancipation for the enslaved.

The book is not for the faint hearted. For a start there’s almost five hundred pages of detailed historical narrative, several distinctly prickly characters to meet and many direct quotes from contemporary documents, complete with the writers’ inconsistencies of spelling and grammar. And then there is the raw suffering that it describes. There is real human suffering here, real people who were wronged by others who perpetrated a crime for which they will remain forever unpunished.

Balancing this, however, is optimism engendered by the idealism of those who campaigned and worked for freedom and justice, against the convenient populist bigotry of their time. But rising above all others are those whose personal histories are described. These are people who devoted their lives to the undoing of the wrongs that were done to them, who never lost faith in life’s eventual ability to deliver justice, despite the repeated contradiction of experience. In the end, it’s the enduring human spirit that seems to triumph, despite the lack of any obvious lasting victories.

For all concerned, it’s a struggle, has always been so and will probably remain so in the future. Rough Crossings chronicles the politics, warfare, commerce and human experience surrounding the practical application of the campaign to abolish the slave trade. It was Gore Vidal who described several of the founding fathers of the United States as dedicated slave owners, eager to protect their investments. He thus questions their commitment to their own declarations on freedom and equality.

Simon Schama provides much detail to support this theme. He describes black soldiers fighting for the British, ex-slaves, escapees, collaborators and supporters who sided with the colonial forces. We follow some of these people to the not very hospitable but at least relatively vacant lands of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. And then, via the campaigns and vision of Granville Sharp and the active management of John Clarkson, we follow the development and enactment of a truly magnificent project.

The abolitionists, not for any convenience associated with the idea of merely “shipping them back home”, but born of a sincere pursuit of freedom and autonomy for human kind, suggest that freed slaves might settle in Sierra Leone and there establish an autonomous, modern and self-supporting state. Not all goes to plan, of course, but then whatever does when idealism is realised? But the plan comes to fruition and communities sail the ocean to establish themselves in warmer climes on West Africa’s shore.

An observation offered late in the book will be permanently etched in this reader’s memory. The first women ever to participate in electing the government of a modern state were black women in Sierra Leone in the 1790s. Rough Crossings is worth reading for that revelation alone, for it is not the fact itself but the assumptions of the protagonists that led to it that is truly fascinating. How things came about, the motives of those involved and the energy with which they pursued their ideals is the real story, the enduring fascination.

There is far too much in Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings to review. There are finely drawn biographies, moving stories of human interest, political posturing and analysis, and a complete history of a commercial enterprise based on idealism. The only advice is to read the book, but also to take time along the way to reflect on what is described, to imagine what issue of our own time would be as politically risky as the applied idealism of these eighteenth century anti-slavery campaigners. And then follow that with any attempt to empathise with the experience of the cargo, whatever the direction of or motive for its transport.

A Sri Lanka Pursuit - The Far Spent day by Nihal de Silva

The Far Spent Day by Nihal de Silva promises much. The fact that it does not deliver all it attempts should not deter anyone from exploring its world. Those interested in reading about the society and politics of contemporary Sri Lanka will find too little to justify careful scrutiny of the 100,000 word text. But they will enjoy the unexpectedly complex thriller that unfolds. People seeking a rip-roaring story will enjoy the process, but the only real suspense is that of the chase, since the identity and deeds of the protagonists, and indeed their principal roles is never in doubt.

The Far Spent Day is constructed as a film. The characters live very much in the present of the events that confront them and rarely reflect. Nihal de Silva also inserts gaps in the text whenever there’s a new scene or a change of camera angle. There is also copious dialogue, enhancing the film-like effect. The style is racy but restrained. There is much promise of sex, but Sri Lankan youth seem to be more restrained than their Western counterparts, certainly their fictional counterparts.

The novel’s Sri Lankan experience is valuable, if under-played. Ravi, a Sinhalese, and Tilak, his Tamil friend, have returned from overseas with their university degrees. They go out to celebrate and have a couple of drinks. There is a brawl and punches are thrown. Ravi and Tilak’s problem is that they have picked a fight with a political bigwig and such people don’t fight clean, or give up until they have ground all opposition into the dust, usually dead. Anyone who has driven in Sri Lanka knows about a minister’s cavalcade. It approaches from behind, comprises a number of large four-wheel-drives, and travels at speed with horns blaring and headlamps on full beam. Men in the passenger seats wave giant red and white gloved hands out of their windows to demand that all other traffic should get out of the way, immediately and without argument. They demand control, and get it, because if you don’t give way, they will run you off the road. If there were an accident, it would not be their fault.

Ravi and Tilak find themselves involved with such a character, and the minister decides to get even. How even that means only becomes clear at the end of the novel’s first section. Ravi’s life, and that of his whole family, has been utterly destroyed, ruthlessly destroyed. Every attempt he makes at securing justice results in more suffering for himself and others. Tanya, a young attracting Burgher journalist, takes up Ravi’s cause. She is in search of a scoop, but her own security is soon at risk. Ravi and Tanya are soon involved in a chase across the country in pursuit of their minister quarry, whose allies pursue the two companions. They evade capture, but not consequences.

They seek evidence, find it and a relationship develops between the Sinhalese Ravi and the Burgher Tanya to add further complication and twist. Later a young girl called Janaki becomes part of the plot. She assists Ravi in matters that only a professional woman could conduct. But it does her no good as newspaper stories backfire and scandals fail to materialise. The minister’s influence seems to stretch everywhere in Sri Lankan life. But Ravi has one final push to secure justice, to allow him to live his own life again without constantly fearing for his own safety. Eventually, when the book’s plot has worked through, the characters and the reader are all exhausted, but we got there.

The Far Spent Day would be a better novel at two thirds of its current length. It will not completely satisfy and reader, but its blend of fast-moving story with glimpses of Sri Lankan life is a rare mix, one that many readers will find compelling.

Families in Conflict - Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne

Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne presents a vast project. Its story crosses the globe, beginning in Sri Lanka and ending in Britain. Great events befall its characters, but throughout their lives seem to be writ small against a backdrop of history. The novel opens with an apt quote from Jack Kerouac – All life is a foreign country. This idea forms substantially more than a theme, in the no matter how secure the book’s characters might appear – and equally however insecure – they never really seem to be at home with themselves.

We meet the Fonsekas in Colombo. They live near the beach in this frenetic city. Alice is a nine-year-old. Her parents, Stanley and Sita are a mixed marriage, Tamil and Sinhalese. Alice’s grandparents, Bee and Kamala, are happily married in their own way. Bee is something of an artist. The grandparent show significant wisdom. But things are stirring in Sri Lanka. There is a smell of conflict, a hint or war.

A mixed marriage is hard to sustain, and its offspring don’t fit into anyone’s interests or desires. Alice grows into a rather isolated child. She has friends, but then she doesn’t. She does well at school, and then she doesn’t. She makes things, shares her grandfather’s artistic bent. Lives in paradise grow steadily more complicated, apparently less sustainable. Stanley, Alice’s father, decides that his future, and eventually his family’s, lies in Britain. He books a sea passage and an unscheduled stop-over in Greece opens his eyes to ancient cincture and provides other activities that always threatened, but until then never materialised.

In Britain he ekes out an immigrant’s lot, doing whatever he can. When Sita and Alice eventually join him, he has changed and they don’t fit in. They can’t. Perhaps no-one ever does, anywhere. Sita mourns the child she lost to her own destruction as she works from home on her sewing machine. Alice doesn’t get on at school, except with a chain-smoking art teacher. And so life progresses, from one mistake to the next, with an idealised past becoming a new paradise, a place that it perhaps never was. But there is no going back. Conflict has intervened. Lives have been lost and there will be more to follow. Marriages fail. There are short passionate affairs.

There is much imagined longing. Roma Tearne’s story thus meanders through its themes, but without ever concentrating on any particular one to create a lasting impression. The characters seem more confused than reflecting, more victims of events than their instigators. Wherever they are, they remain foreign.

Maudiegirl and the Von Bloss Kitchen - a cookbook fiction

Maudiegirl Esther Kimball’s first husband, Campbell, died on the voyage to Ceylon. Her second, Kimball, succumbed to malaria. She then married Cecilprins and became his tower of strength. This is how Carl Muller describes - for want of a better word – the heroine of Maudiegirl And The Von Bloss Kitchen. The book continues the story the author began in the award-winning The Jam Fruit Tree, a tale of Burgher life in Sri Lanka.

If “heroine” was a slightly inappropriate description of Maudiegirl, then “story” is certainly not a description of this book’s plot. Simply put, the book presents a picture of life within the Burgher community, an island within an island. It illustrates, but does not lead. Read it for an experience, not a journey. 

Nominally Dutch, but Sinhalese-speaking, Asian born but with European aspirations, the Burghers are a wholly integrated race apart. The names survive – Van Der Poorten, Caspars etc – but the identity is merely confused. Whose isn’t? 

Most of this Burgher family’s life revolves around food and sex, not always in that order. Sustenance and procreation occupy most of the time, with recreation – usually in the form of sex – taking up the rest. Maudiegirl is the pillar of the household, probably of the community. She brings people together, solves problems, disposes wisdom and occasional rebuke via her cooking. She has a recipe for every occasion. Her meals can cure ills, solve problems, offer advice, and her cooking skills are recognised throughout the Von Bloss family, even the community.

The cooking’s unfamiliar and complex mix of influences, European, Asian, Dutch, English, Sri Lankan, Indian and American, reflect the community in which they live and its place in the world. A woman who can’t conceive eat too much fish. Need something stronger. Stewed eel works wonders. Only wonder what. Dunnyboy expose himself in public. Big thing. Worries sisters. Eat pork pie. Daughter need baby. Need hammering. Make plum pudding (dried fruit only, butter a pan, boil or steam for four hours). Problem solved. 

Carl Muller’s style is pithy, occasionally playful, often funny, always earthy, sometimes vaguely embarrassing. He sails metaphorically close to winds and occasionally obfuscates via the inclusion of unexplained, un-translated Sinhalese words and phrases. He makes no excuse for this, and invites the interested reader to find a Sinhalese speaker to help translate this world language and explain, and thereby intensify the experience and promote communication between races and cultures. So there! Maudiegirl And The Von Bloss Kitchen, this part novel, part cookbook, thus records the day-to-day, reflects life and opens a window onto a perhaps unique culture that is in no way special.

There is no plot, no obvious sequence of events, only everyday life as it predictably and unpredictably unfolds. It is also a superb cookbook, recording the recipes of an expert cook. And refreshingly, whatever she cooks and in whatever style, no-one ever seems to dislike anything, pick at their food, question its authenticity, count its calories or even mention omega-3. It’s the food of a living culture.

Figurative Expression - The Art of Antoni Miro

It is certainly a considerable privilege to have the opportunity to visit the house and studio of an accomplished artist with an international reputation. When the visit is to Antoni Miró’s finca, in Ibi, near Alicante, Spain, then the experience is substantially more than mere privilege: it is nothing less than enlightening delight. Antoni Miró’s work is extensive and challenging, but it is also direct and immediately communicative. It has a fundamental humanity, its subject matter largely drawn from impressions experienced by the artist and not, primarily and crucially, within him. He may have internalised responses to his subjects, but via his art he wants to share those raw responses with his viewers, not to impose his views on them.

A phrase that he has used in relation to his work is “a chronicle of reality,” and it is the reality of our modern world, with all its complicated social, economic, political and personal relationships that inhabits his art. Antoni Miró was born in Alcoi in 1944. He confesses to an inner drive that demanded he became an artist, a compulsion that saw him reject a role in the family business in favour of a pursuit of his personal goal. His first solo exhibition came as early as 1965, the year when he founded the group Alcoiart, which functioned until 1972.

Throughout his career he has explored what he calls figurative expression as a tool to create visual communication. His art is thus immediate, never quite photo-realistic, since it liberally employs artistic licence of light, shade, focus and colour to highlight the core of a work. But the images are direct, often drawn from everyday experience and they are presented to evoke and provoke reaction in the viewer. Beggars in the street figure regularly, often alongside the portrayed reactions offered by those they confront.

Everyday objects abound – taxis, excavators, ships, bicycles, buildings and industrial scenes. Beside a multitude of passers-by, anonymous people encountered for just seconds in a day’s encounters, there are also portraits of well-known characters, historical figures, politicians, scientists, philosophers and many fellow artists. And there is also the figurative reworking of familiar themes, such as reinterpretations of Velasquez, which appear frequently in his work. A particular theme which recurs many times in Antoni Miró’s work, however, is the process of looking at images. It’s almost a process of self-analysis.

There are many gallery scenes, where onlookers, some interested, some less so, scrutinise, discuss, ignore, glance at or walk by well-known artworks. The Famous Giaconda looks out at us while the assembled unknown onlookers are potentially all identifiable, with names, families and lives of their own. The lady in the picture is immortalised by time, but is anonymous, despite being instantly recognisable. She can’t tell us about herself, whereas all the anonymous onlookers are real individuals destined to remain unknown. There are also responses to issues in Antoni Miró’s work. His burka polyptich is reminiscent of Andy Warhol. But whereas the subjects of Warhol’s coloured variants were iconic and instantly recognisable, the women in the burkas remain hidden from view, eternally unknown by choice.

There is New York City portrayed as a graveyard, the obelisks presenting a necropolis of a culture, perhaps. A trip through the grounds of Antoni’s Ibi finca – perhaps by Land Rover, on a wet afternoon! – reveals an extensive sculpture garden. There are many works in a multiplicity of media. Again much is drawn from everyday life, using everyday materials, objects and images. There is a striking series exploring the erotic. It is, after all, part of life and experience, so it forms an essential part of Antoni Miró’s art. Antoni Miró explains how dictatorship in Spain stifled freedom. It was an era when he fought for the voice of the individual.

The current era, where the market and capital are the new dictators, presents its own issues. In some ways, it was easier to cope with the more obvious contradictions of the past. Today’s oppression is more nebulous, but real all the same. He has thus used his art to campaign on behalf of social justice. He advocates a socialist, anti-capitalist stance where environmental, social and political themes dominate, alongside the essential ingredient for him, which is Catalan identity. His art involves the viewer as it searches for a more fully human world.

Its neo-figurative technique is direct, making its subjects both instantly recognisable and communicable. Its inspiration is the stuff of life, itself, in whatever manifestation that might appear. But in order to recognise, in order to understand, in order to react, any of us has first to be able to see, to observe and to notice. Antoni Miró’s art is primarily about learning to see, to look and then to realise our relation with life, our own lives, and those of others with whom we interact, with whom we share experience, but rarely know.

Marriage under scrutiny - A review of Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy

In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel. Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was described there as “the first delineation in fiction of the woman … of the feminist movement – the slight pale ‘bachelor’ girl – the intellectualised, emancipated bundle of nerves” that modern conditions were producing. The book’s reception ‘cured’ Hardy of the desire to write another novel, and all of the above happened before the dawn of the twentieth century.

Jude The Obscure is a novel about relationships within marriage. Hardy’s opinion was that legal ties between men and women ought to be breakable once the union had achieved dysfunction. It was an opinion that differed from that expected by the age. It prompted a bishop to burn the book, rather than the writer, who was unavailable at the time. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley was adopted into a baker’s family, and harboured an ambition to self-teach himself into a classical education in Christminster’s learned colleges.

His schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson helped a little. Jude’s ambition was always somewhat far fetched, though he applied himself diligently to his studies and achieved a great deal. In his formative years, he also learned the stonemason’s trade to allow the earning of a living. On a country walk he then took up with Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer. Having found himself stuck, he tried to learn how to stick real pigs but somehow the penetration never came easy. The couple parted, apparently childless. Sue, Jude’s cousin and thus a co-member of a family reputed for its marital failures, was always a soul mate for the young man. But she never quite seemed up to the task of giving herself, giving of her self. Thus, when she married Phillotson, the much older, staid and perhaps already failed schoolmaster, his lack of demands on her fit exactly with her assumptions about how married life would progress. Sue certainly knew what she wanted from life and did everything in her power to secure it. Safety, security, respectability, perhaps property were top of her list.

Arabella, the pig farming barmaid who lured the naïve Jude, was similarly single-minded in pursuing her own, rather different interests. After leaving Jude, she takes up with a new man and hops it to Australia, apparently for good. Sue and Phillotson finally dissolve their marriage by mutual consent to allow Sue to pursue her desires. She and Jude, who love one another dearly, then make their lives together. They do not marry. They live as brother and sister, with lust on one side of the bed and revulsion on the other. A child arrives by train. The wizened-looking boy is Jude’s, Arabella claiming she was pregnant before the couple separated. Sue and Jude offer a home for the waif, and then two more whose family fortunes have fallen on bad times.

And then tragedy appears. Their world falls apart. Sue craves the responsibility of marriage, perhaps merely for the respectability she has lost, so she returns to a new marriage with Phillotson. As before, it’s just for the show of it. Jude develops consumption. What happens in Jude The Obscure is the meat of the book. How it happens is less important than how the characters justify their actions, effectively their reactions to what life offers in response to their imagined aspirations. How these people seek to justify themselves tells much of what they think is expected of them by others, by the society at large. Thus the novel appears to be a study – even a treatise - in selfishness melded with self-obsession, but this is always shrouded in a coded justification that cites the need for social, societal, even sanctified heavenly approval.

In many ways, Jude The Obscure’s men are its victims, its women coldly triumphant, its tone vaguely misogynist. It has little time for the establishment, which is often portrayed as a conspiracy to promote misery. Christminster, Oxford in other words, is thought of as a great centre of high and fearless thought. But in reality it is “a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.” The alternative, self-congratulatory selfishness did not appear to be much better. Thus Jude The Obscure has much to say about our own time, about public virtue and the need to live according to the socially expected.