The Turn Of The Screw and The Aspern Papers by Henry James

Henry James, great though his name remains, can be something of an acquired taste for some readers. Lest it be said, in terms a lay person unacquainted with this writer’s indeed impressive array of both products and talents, that this particular artist of the written word might, on occasions perhaps far too frequent to count, might occasionally employ one or two -  let us fall short of the word ‘many’ - employ just a few too many of the aforementioned raw materials of his craft - words - for good measure. And sometimes this opacity of prose does obscure rather than enhance meaning, of that there is no doubt. Equally obvious, however, is the writer’s complete mastery of elegance and pace. So what better place for the still wary to start than a pair of short works, The Turn Of The Screw and The Aspern Papers?

The Turn Of The Screw is a classic ghost story. It’s told as the first person account of a governess appointed to a well-to-do family that has no mother. A distant father and a housekeeper live alongside a young girl and an older boy, who has just returned from school with a letter that suggest he does not return.

There is something strange about the children. They seem worldly wise beyond their years, almost political in the way they seem to require adults always to comply with their wishes. And then there are the sightings, apparitions of previous employees, perhaps, people who might have looked after these same children. What is the history? What are the circumstances that led to these poor souls being apparently trapped in this place in the psyche of two small children?

Turn Of The Screw is a ghost story, but it certainly avoids the clichés and falsely hyped drama that so often affect the genre. It thus, in the hands of Henry James, achieves a status that is merely fiction. No genre need claim to intervene, since its development and indeed denouement is always more about the characters rather than the events.

The Aspern Papers is another first person account, but here the storyteller is engaged in a search, a pursuit, in fact, and not a self-analysis. The Aspern of the title was himself a writer, but one active in the early part of the nineteenth century. By the time our narrator goes in search of the writer’s papers, we are decades into the future, well past the writer’s death.

Aspern’s former lover, now known as Miss Bordereau, who, it is believed, still holds the archive of this revered but little-documented genius, lives in Venice with the young and attractive niece, Miss Tina, who is likely to inherit. The narrator travels to Italy, makes contact with the household by renting rooms in their dilapidated canal-side home.

Miss Bordereau proves to be something of a recluse, so even arranging an audience where the narrator might discuss the Aspern Papers proves difficult. But the old lady knows how to do business and exacts a high rent from her tenant, meaning that the mission must be completed as quickly as possible, before funds run out. The eventual financial beneficiary of the arrangement will be the young Miss Tina, who soon becomes an object of interest for our storyteller.

The Aspern Papers is a thoroughly successful short novel that works by layering various plots and motives so they can all progress together via luscious, if rather dense prose. For a reader unused to James’s style, these two often coupled classics perhaps form a perfect introduction.

Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey

Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is very much the follow-up after the success of Tristram Shandy. The author does not try to re-create the near anarchy of the earlier work. Indeed, especially when compared with Shandy, Sentimental Journey at times even approaches coherence. But it remains a variety of coherence that might confuse a modern reader, since the book is neither a novel nor a travel book, though at times it aspires to be both. What it is not can be listed, but what exactly it is remains hard to describe.

The Reverend Yorick, apparently, is on a European tour, specifically to France and Italy. Along the way he relates his experiences, but he is less inclined to take in the scenery than chase the local talent, an activity that appears to demand much attention and time wherever it might be pursued.

If any theme does run through Sentimental Journey, then it is this, the Reverend Yorick’s pursuit of skirt. Be they chamber maids or merely ladies of leisure (day or night), the good Reverend is clearly interested. But his exploits are couched in an absurd eighteenth century politeness, an unwillingness to speak directly of the matter in hand, gloved or not. The style, perhaps, was as absurd in its own time as it appears to be today. As a consequence, there are significant passages where the narrator seems to spend much time not discussing the thing he is actually talking about.

Lawrence Sterne is determined that his sentimental traveller should explore the experience of travel. This is a journey to experience as well as within it, but experience here is a process, not a destination. In modern terms, he is the kind of person who wanders past Notre Dame in search of an ice-cream, and would see neither irony nor contradiction in the act. He is perhaps the quintessential British tourist who looks at the stained glass from the outside, proclaims it to be less than it’s cracked up to be and then complains that the ice cream was the wrong flavour.

Yorick does meet several interesting characters, but he rarely lets their diversion come between himself and his pursuits. And some of these prove very humorous indeed, possibly even funny.

Setimental Journey is unfinished. It is probably autobiographical. Much of the material feels like it may have been expanded from a journal kept on the road, kept by Sterne himself, while he made his own travels on the Continent. But there remains the ultimate problem for the modern reader, who will always want to ask, “Where is all this going to lead?” And the answer is, experientially, precisely nowhere. And that’s the point.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

If Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell had been a piece of music, rather than a novel, it would probably have taken the form of a gigantic Bartok arch. Its apparently simple, but rather disconcertingly foreign-sounding start would develop into something that sounded quite new, but also strangely familiar. It would reach a central climax at its keystone, but a climax that would not satisfy in the conventional way that music often does, by achieving a stable tonic tutti in a home key, expressed via harmonies that reassure, confirm and reinforce. No, this climax would be violent, but also strange and disconcerting, offering as much question as confirmation. And then it would retrace its steps, but revealing them transformed by the very process of revisiting them. It would progress through its stages of development until it returned to its opening theme, mildly but intellectually transformed.

And it would be here that we would realise that all the material the piece had presented was in fact derived from the same basic idea, transformed via style, tempo and time to appear different, despite its progress through different episodes, which only now appear to be linked. At the end of the process, we are sure where we have been taken, but not at all sure where we have arrived. It might look and sound like the beginning, but we now see it anew, transformed, perhaps even distorted, even a little devalued, a reality newly interpreted.

But Cloud Atlas is a book, a literary, not a musical journey. The territory visited in the atlas, however, is like any inhabited by any artist, that of the human intellect and psyche. Like Julian Barnes’s A History Of The World in 10½ Chapters, it appears to meander from story to story, from setting to setting, with only barely random links. We begin on a nineteenth century Pacific voyage of assumed cultural superiority, graduate to a nineteen-thirties cooperation between a famous, syphilis-ridden composer and a young, naïve and bisexual amanuensis and then suffer a brush with corporate vengeance as a journalist seeks to expose safety risks with an atomic energy installation. A British vanity publisher, vainer than most of his clients, suffers success with a gangster memoir and walks straight into demands for a greater slice of what he assumes is his own action. Many decades later we encounter a dystopia, where a humanoid bred purely for service graduates threateningly to a more enlightened state. Into a further indeterminate future, we find a complete disjunction between rich and educated versus peasant and poor, groups who do not even share the same environment. And thus we reach the keystone in the arch, when the characters of a dystopic future cooperate to complete a mission that appears to be in both their interests. They share a design, a motivation, perhaps even values.

Then in turn we revisit each scenario we encountered on our way up. Each still occupies its own place in space, time and perception, a state in which they know their past but must speculate on their future. Even if we go backwards, time still progresses. By the time we have descended the other half of the arch, we are back where we began in the nineteenth century Pacific. But strangely, it seems that this earliest of the characters in time knows everything about all the others and can describe their lives.

But as we work through these apparently different stories, we begin to perceive a thread. There are obvious links. In some shape or form, each new scenario demonstrates an awareness of what preceded it. But these obvious links are not the real thematic threads. We are interested in each story because we meet characters pursuing both cooperation and competition. We find people driven by belief, internally driven by motives they themselves cannot control. But it is this drive that forces them to act, and it is their actions that provoke responses, cooperative or competitive, in others, differences usually driven by perceived interest.  And perhaps inevitably they all judge. They all seek personal advantage, but sometimes this is pursued via shared or group identity, alliances that both define and protect. We compete as individuals, but we also live by cooperation, applying judgment via assumption, presumption and prejudice, alongside what we excuse as intellect.

Thus Cloud Atlas examines the human condition. As an atlas it fixes certain aspects of humanity as constants, the ever-present belief, motivation and the need to act, to cooperate and compete. But the cloud is the nebulous form these constants may take in different time and place. We are driven by common traits towards unpredictable outcomes, the consequences of which our own future must accommodate and share. In Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell perhaps there is permanence along the way, but each scenario finds characters apparently forced by mere circumstance to act, to respond, to initiate, but only ever with partial sight of possible outcome. As the arch reveals its completion, we are back where we began, but we are richer for the experience, transformed by the journey. We might know where we are, but how do we respond? There, perhaps, is the permanent question.

The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Reading takes you there, sometimes even to places where you, the reader, may not want to go. Someone else, someone we have never met, did this, thought that, recorded it and related it. The reader, never unsuspecting, willingly takes the author’s hand to be led partially blind along others’ pathways, into foreign lands, or distant times in unfamiliar landscapes. If the experience proves rich, a reader has seen life, culture and time through another’s eyes and is richer for it.

And sometimes the experience is utterly surprising, especially when the landscape and culture in question is one whose recent press, and therefore the reader’s assumptions, are not wholly positive.  It is then that the readers own assumptions may be questioned, even by apparently uncontroversial subjects. And it in this respect that the reading of The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is thoroughly recommended.

It’s a novel published in 1883, focusing on the rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, from naïve encounter with nature to married expectancy of two orphaned girls, Em and Lyndall, growing up in a mixed, though predominantly Boer, determinedly white household. Now white South African culture of the nineteenth century has rarely commanded a sympathetic English language press. The twentieth century’s policy of separate development, Apartheid, they called it, can be traced to the assumptions and notions of separateness that we learn to take for granted in the pages of Olive Schreiner’s novel.

There is no attempt to explain or justify such ideas in the book. It is no bigot’s apology for failing. What it does do, however, is portray life for this family, and especially the two young girls within it. We grow with them through childhood to the goal of becoming women in a small farm in the dry karoo scrublands of South Africa.  Daily life, with its wholly obligatory chores, is almost dispassionately described. These people were farmers, but in fact peasants in modern parlance, since they approached the activity not as a business, but as a means of achieving sustenance.  They observed that cattle did not breed with ostriches and that different species inhabited their own cycles and niches of life. It’s what God decreed and, though there was always space for doubt and question, these were activities that could not publicly be expressed or acknowledged, since the bedrock of community might be undermined.

There was a perceived and assumed order to things, an order that had to be obeyed, the price for non-observance being non-survival. Outsiders, like guests at any formalised gathering where regular participants implicitly know the rules, were always seen as potential threats. And, when your nearest neighbour might be many miles away, separateness was part of the assumed and inhabited landscape.  And so we see the concept applied even to the different people with whom these white farmers had to cultivate daily contact, contact without which none of them would have survived.

What happens to the two girls, Em and Lyndall, in their African farm is the very substance of the book, content that only should be revealed via the reading of the tale. Suffice it to say that this novel about lives lived within a system of apparently rigid rules eventually relates events that have all the characters questioning the very basis of the assumptions they live by. Life was hard, and often cruel. But that was the life they lived and, given their location in place and time, it was perhaps the only life that was possible. The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is a book that certainly takes the reader into its own world. It presents a life and landscape that is both unfamiliar and little understood. By the end, we may be no more in sympathy with its reality, but we certainly do know more about it.

Joseph Hanlon, Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire.

Why might anyone want to read a book describing contemporary politics and international relations some thirty years after its publication? Surely a more recent history or overview would be preferable. Memoirs can always evoke recollections of the writer or the context in which the memorabilia were created. Overviews and analyses do retain their relevance, if sometimes not their accuracy when revisited some decades on from the events they describe. But a work of on-going contemporary commentary of a specific political issue, whose particularities perhaps no longer even apply to our times - why should anyone now read such a book?

It’s a question that was worth asking at the start of Joseph Hanlon’s 1984 work, Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. Written less than a decade after Frelimo had assumed power as the colonial Portuguese fled the country, this book is very much a snapshot of where Mozambique found itself in the early 1980s. At the time, most issues still remained unresolved. Most challenges facing the Frelimo government had still not been addressed, let alone overcome. As a consequence, events were moving fast and the regional situation remained fluid, to say the least. Thus it might be argued that such a work as Joseph Hanlon’s book barely retained its relevance on the day of its original publication, let alone some thirty years hence. But now it is the contemporary snapshots the book presents that make it all the more worthwhile a read.

Joseph Hanlon’s text summarises the history of Frelimo’s rise to power. He considers progress made or, indeed, not made in the nation’s healthcare, agriculture, education and general political restructuring. He considers Mozambique’s relations with its neighbours and its position in international politics and trade.

And it is here that we find real interest in Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. First, the book is couched firmly within the Cold War paradigm that was simply inescapable at the time. In the twenty-first century it is easy to forget that in the second half of the twentieth century it was impossible to write anything about international relations without framing it in the East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism struggle. Mozambique, of course, because of its professedly left-wing government was perceived to be in the Communist camp, but Joseph Hanlon regularly reminds us that, though this was inevitable, given the ideological leanings of Frelimo, in practice this did not necessarily mean that socialist policies were followed, or that assistance from the Soviet Union was received. It did mean that the country’s economy and its society was destabilised by external forces, ultimately backed by the United States. At the time, it was not the only nation in poverty whose internal privation was exacerbated by external aggression.

Secondly, reading Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire, we are reminded of just how much change has been effected in the last thirty years. At time of writing, Zimbabwe was newly independent, while South Africa remained a determinedly apartheid state. The South African Development Coordination Conference was in only fledgling state, and still driven by the optimism that greeted its brief to promote economic integration amongst those nations primarily dependent on South Africa.

Thirdly, and perhaps paradoxically, the book reminds us of how little even revolutionary governments often manage to change via their own policies and actions. Nowhere is ever inherited as a blank slate, and existing practices, interests and structures inevitably have to be considered and accommodated. They can also be challenged, but again Joseph Hanlon’s book illustrates how difficult a task this always proves to be.

Fourthly, the book’s quite stunning appendix serves to illustrate just how complicated apparently simple problems can be. At a time when crops had failed as a result of drought and other had withered as a consequence of the disruption caused by war, Mozambique could not feed itself. Joseph Hanlon offers the intriguing analysis that under the conditions that pertained at the time, promoting agricultural development might have been both more costly and less effective that merely buying food in the open market.

So, rather than being a text which is relevant only to its own time, Joseph Hanlon’s Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire now presents ideas and descriptions which challenge us to reinterpret the region as we now see it. The book reminds us that what we today assume to be the dominant paradigm through which we must interpret current events may be utterly inappropriate in a decade or two. Joseph Hanlon’s book was written to describe a quickly changing scenario in the 1980s, but it now reminds us that no matter how permanent some ideas may appear, they in fact represent no more than merely transient assumptions.

Stoner by John Williams

To reveal that “he dies in the end” gives no more away about the plot of Stoner by John Williams than the revelation that “he’s born in the beginning”. Both phrases refer to Stoner, William Stoner, principal character of the book that’s named after him. Perhaps it might be more accurate to refer to Stoner as just the principal, because it could also be argued that Stoner himself really did not have much of a character.

Born in 1981, John Williams, the author, tells us, William Stoner was brought up on a Missouri farm and then went to college to study agriculture at the age of nineteen. A Damascus moment in a literature class soon provoked a change of course and thus Stoner left agriculture behind to plough a literary furrow. A true mid-West lad, Stoner stayed local for his studies. He completed his degree and then a doctorate before academe beckoned, and he began a career in the same University of Missouri where he had himself studied.

Thus Stoner became a teacher. He also became a husband, a husband of sorts to Edith, who tried to persuade herself from the start that she knew what she wanted from life. He also became a father, despite the ever present difficulties in the marriage. Problems mounted elsewhere as well, and relations with students were sometimes tense, while colleagues also often became sites of conflict. Grace, his daughter, grew up whatever way she could, given her father’s apparently limitless devotion to his work and her mother’s undeniable dedication to herself. Stoner’s interactions with fellow teachers, departmental chairs and deans went this way and that, and varied relations with students happened both inside and outside the classroom.

Great events of twentieth century history passed by William Stoner. A First World War was fought. Friends went and did not return. One loss in particular remained at the forefront of Stoner’s thoughts. Denied his own life, the memory of this lost friend regularly returns to Stoner’s thoughts whenever he needs a reminder that life could have dealt him a worse hand. And then the great crash came along to ruin lives and opportunity, especially for the family of Edith, Stoner’s wife. And then, just when you might least expect it, another war comes along. Conveniently for Stoner, this new conflict begins when he is already too old to participate. But rest assured, he knew some of the casualties.

The core of Stoner the novel is the portrayal of a life, the professional and the less so, in a university department. This is mister ordinary writ small. There are feuds, friendships, words of advice whispered towards ears, and simple, blazing rows that bow people apart. No-one, we must hasten to add, is ever killed in these battles, no guns are drawn, let alone fired, and there is no blood letting, except figuratively. But it can be seen that the injured are legion.

If all this sounds rather glib, then it might just be possible that this highly credible scenario does not quite live up to its celebrity backdrop. Yes, Stoner is born at the start and dies at the end. The life in between ought to be the meat, the real guts of this story. But strangely, it isn’t. For all Stoner’s obvious commitment, patience and integrity, he rarely seems to be a participant even in his own life. Things happen to him, and around him, but yet he seems strangely passive, unwilling to express opinion, commit himself or take sides. By the tale’s end, history has come and gone, characters have impinged upon this life, left their mark and gone their own way, and students have grown up to live lives of their own. And throughout William Stoner seems curiously inert, lacking in opinion, unable to influence the impressions that others make on his life. As a character, he seems to be little more than a vehicle through which others’ foibles can be experienced. In the same way that Forrest Gump in film enacts history apparently without reflection, William Stoner sees his friends and colleagues take what the twentieth century can throw at them, but without really participating himself.

Perhaps this is John Williams’s point. In film, Forrest Gump is the embodiment of Middle America, the faithful, uncritical, trusting majority that suffers the consequences, picks up the pieces, makes the best of things, and always puts the wheel back on the wagon. Perhaps William Stoner is similarly an allegory to depict the respectability and value of the suffering Job. There are surely many others who have lived out such plots, such as anyone invented by Anne Tyler, or Saul Bellow’s Herzog. But William Stoner’s determination to remain the third person recipient of his author’s God-like view on his life is truly worthy since, if William Stoner really did have control over his own voice, he would surely have demanded just a little more of the action.

A Search For Donald Cottee is a Quixote parody

The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O’Doherty

In The Deposition of Father McGreevy Brian O’Doherty transports us into a world and culture that will be quite alien to most readers. By the book’s end, we may even be convinced that this might be a different universe.

But Brian O’Doherty’s book is set in Ireland, not some distant, fanciful galaxy. It’s the west of Ireland, County Kerry to be precise, where there is a remote community on a mountain side. A harsh winter has brought sickness and, in this small place, all the women have died. It’s a momentous calamity, rendered all the more devastating by the community’s inability to bury the corpses, because the earth is too frozen to break. The local priest, Father McGreevy, takes up his pen to describe the plight of his parishioners, as they struggle to come to terms with the fate that has befallen them.

Father McGreevy’s view of the world, of course, comes from a particular standpoint. He deals with sin, guilt and all the other trappings of Roman Catholicism. But he is also a man of the world, and understands much, though not all, of what makes men tick, even though women do seem to remain a tad beyond the pale. He is also aware of how the demon drink can enter a man’s soul and transform him into something he might never have wanted to be.

None of this would have come to light, however, if William McGinn, a journalist in the 1950s, had not come into the possession of Father McGreevy’s jottings. The old fellow was gone to earth himself by the time an envelope with his testimony passed into the hands of McGinn who, out of curiosity and a need to unearth a good story, tells us the priest’s tale. Footnoted to explain the more obscure allusions and references to Irish history, literature and folklore, Father McGreevy’s notes begin with the winter tragedy. What begins to unfold, however, is a decline to death of an entire community, itself a metaphor for a whole way of life.

Pestered by progress, battered by the elements and deserted by its masters, the peasant existence, that for so long had been life’s only option, was now being squeezed into the shape of an in-bred deformity. This village on a mountainside is frozen as much by time as by its winter frost. Perhaps McGreevy’s reliance on religion to seek an explanation for illness and misfortune, an approach that in the past might have united a community struck by adversity, was already itself part of the problem, part of the frostiness that hardened everything into an unyielding, unforgiving, inflexible and hostile environment.

But what we are not prepared for in this tale of degeneration and decline is how McGreevy’s tale develops. The priest bears witness to some deep sins, acts that he previously had never even imagined possible. The lad might have been a half-wit, but he had a complete body, that’s for sure. And, again for sure, the acts in question are not what you think they are. The Father’s deposition has it all, and it’s there for you and William McGinn to read. Let it be said that the local doctor, himself a metaphor for a more pragmatic and modern way of life, takes a remarkably casual, even ungodly line, when McGreevy bares his soul to describe these shocking practices.

But, as ever, as sin leads to more sin, grievous acts lead to more eve grievous consequences. And it’s only via locating some of the participants, still alive but incarcerated in mental hospitals in their decrepit old age, that McGinn forms his own version of what happened up there in the frost on that Kerry mountainside.

The Deposition of Father McGreevy is an extended poem. But it is also a deeply surprising, ever shocking tale of the desperation that almost inevitably rules a way of life. Strangely, we never really did establish what happened to all those women, the ones who died that winter. And we never really established why the ailment was so gender-specific. We do know, however, why the men might just have been the cause of the plague. Because, when left to their own devices, it may be sin and depravity that beckons, and this just might be their true nature. The Deposition of Father McGreevy is often funny, is always graphic and is continually evocative of a potentially endearing culture. But it’s not a reassuring vision of humanity.

 

My own latest novel is One On One