Andy Sharp's THE ENGLISH HERETIC COLLECTION: RITUAL HISTORIES, MAGICKAL GEOGRAPHY

Can we use film geographies to create cultural maps across a slice of time?

A long, long time ago when I first became concerned that all I ever seemed to read or watch was fiction, I made a particular effort to start adding more non-fiction to my cultural diet, went to the University of Wyoming's Coe Library (from which you could check out any number of books for a whole semester), and grabbed a big stack of stuff. One of which was Simon Schama's then-brand-new Landscape and Memory, a book that in many ways changed my life. Among other things, it led me to concoct, sometime later, one of my odder blog posts about how I personally had imagined the landmarks and locations of The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid.

Landscape and Memory is just that kind of read. But it's one that is almost sui generis; it wasn't until I discovered* W.G.Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn that I found anything to compare. 

Now I've found a third such project, a book that sums up a unique artist's strange and fascinating and definitely Ballardian (he even references Simon Sellars!**) oeuvre, English Heretic. A project that seems to have been aimed specifically at my little head but about which I'd been totally unaware until somehow I learned about Andy Sharp and The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.***

Imagined in direct opposition to English Heritage and all it stands for, Andy Sharp describes his English Heretic project as a way to "use place as a means of fecundating the imagination." The resulting book is a survey of decades' worth of incredible creativity and energy, rendered in very serviceable prose, with lots of astonishing little insights popping up like graveyard ghouls from a cemetery that's older than my entire country.

As the quote I used to start this post indicates, a lot of Sharp's work begins and ends with film locations and sets, especially those appearing in the low-budget esoterica of the 1970s folk horror masterpieces he loves (many of which can be enjoyed via YouTube or Tubi as of this writing), like Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan's Claw or The Shout or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. I have seen precisely none of these films, but I'm looking forward to doing something about that soon. Judging from the trailers, I'm in for a pretty good time!

Anyway, a discussion of the latter film yields exceptional fun: The filming of Living Dead took place partly at a somewhat famous church, Hathersage in Derbyshire, and was interrupted by a coach load of tourists who "on witnessing the zombie orgies informed the authorities." The film crew had been working and camping it there for three days without official permission, of course. By the way:

The tourist party had come to Hathersage to view Little John's grave which takes up seven feet of the burial ground. Little John is the church's most famous inhabitant. I'd like to imagine Little John's reanimated corpse joining forces with Guthrie**** and his undead merry men to reap anthropophagic revenge on the do-gooding snitchers of Hathersage.

Sharp goes on to connect elements of the film's plot with actual local folklore, but leaves us to speculate whether the filmmakers were consciously aware of that folklore when making the movie. I mean, it's way more fun that way, right?

One location I can't believe Sharp didn't write about in any of these projects of his, is Winspit Quarry, though. You may think you don't know this place, but, friends, if you've ever watched much of the original Doctor Who series, you've likely spent rather a lot of time looking at it: it's that quarry Privately owned but publicly accessible at your own risk, this has to be one of the most haunted locations on the Sceptered Isle. It's stood in for so many alien planets, you guys. The psychic ghosts of so many rubber-bodied aliens are stalking it. And it's not like Andy Sharp doesn't know his Doctor Who or his Blake's Seven or anything. But maybe this is simply too famous a location for him.

Sharp isn't only concerned with films, though; another major cultural touchstone for this work is most of my very favorite psychologist, James Hillman's, later works after he developed his "acorn" theory of personality development, which I first encountered in a book he collaborated on with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotheraphy and the World is Getting Worse.***** The personality at its youngest and least developed is Hillman's acorn, which is tiny and nut-shaped but contains within it the potential to grow into a vast and branching oak tree; as it becomes a sapling it develops "nubs" which Hillman views as behavioral and obsessional interests that hint at the personality's mature form, destiny and role in the world. Sometimes, as with, say, Winston Churchill, Hillman sees these nubs in a kind of negative, as when he considers Churchill's childhood stammer as a kind of fear or intimidation of the promptings his soul was giving him that prefigured that one day he would have to save the world by his speech. I believe Hillman went further with this notion in a book of his that I still haven't read but which turned out to be his most popular, The Soul's Code.

Anyway, Sharp calls on Hillman and his acorn theory as he contemplates personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, J.G. Ballard and Max Ernst, all viewed through the lens of place. He particularly goes to town on Ballard, whose fractally fascinating life as a child in a Japanese prison camp, an avant-garde writer of incredible science fiction short stories and a single father who only really got weird with it after his wife's untimely death left him raising four children a stone's throw away from a major film studio.

Of course Sharp is most interested in Crash, though The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition get plenty of attention, too. But it's Crash and its unforgettable character of Vaughan who really haunts English Heretic, as a fictional subject of Sharp's "Black Plaque" project, again, in direct mockery of English Heretic's plaques concerning the doings of various celebrated English people in various English places.

Sharp likes the nastier sort of person, of course. Don't we all?

At the rate I'm going, all but homebound on the high plains of the western U.S., I'm never going to get to visit the U.K., will never see any of these places with my own failing eyes. Thank Yog that people like Andy Sharp and Simon Schama are writing the next best thing to being there, books like English Heretic.

*Thanks to my late, lamented friend Lethe Bashar, aka Chris al-Aswad.

**IYKYK

***And no, I don't remember how I found out about this book, and it's driving me crazy. I've interrogated my usual suspects and nobody's owning up. So maybe Andy Sharp has just been beaming this book at my bean since 2020 and my skull is just too thick -- I do famously have incredibly dense bones, like freaking Wolverine -- to have admitted the signal right away. Or something.

****Guthrie played a drowning victim who spends the film as a soaking wet "submarine zombie."

***** A book which I cannot recommend highly enough, old as it is. Hillman and Ventura bounce off each other beautifully, and pushed each other into a lot of wild ideas that the rest of our culture is still catching up with.

Dubravka Ugresic's FOX (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams)

Is Fox a novel? Is The Rings of Saturn? What kind of a book is Landscape and Memory?

Does it matter for anyone who isn't a marketing executive or bookstore clerk? 

Dubravka Ugresic is one of those writers whom I always think was a Nobel laureate but isn't (I even had, always second guessing myself, to double check before posting this). A child of the former Yugoslavia now categorized as Croatian (but who ended her days in the Netherlands because politics), she had the kind of international reputation that leads to enthusiastic promotion by the likes of Open Letter Books (one of my favorite indie publishers and not just because Chad has had me on their podcast, honest!) and to my grabbing all of her works available when they have a sale. But then I get decision paralysis gloating over my hoard and then a library book I'd requested yoinks ago would suddenly come available (but as an interlibrary loan) and then one of my friends would publish something new and then...

So I slept on Ugresic despite my enthusiasm. To my shame! Because Fox is the kind of all-but-uncategorizable opus that is one of my favorite kinds of things to read: a guide through the vast and diverse catalog of the art that has fed the writer's imagination and scholarship through a rich and fascinating career. 

All brought under an inventive rubric to bind it all together: the role of the image of the fox in various cultures of the world. And it's not merely as a generic trickster figure. 

I mean, do you see why I mentioned The Rings of Saturn?

So, just for fun, I tried to keep track of writers and works Ugresic brought under the Fox's sway. And yes, lots of these are new to me and yes, my TBR groans anew under their figurative weight and halfhazard stacking.

§ Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita I have adored for decades and which Ugresic is reminded of upon her arrival in Moscow for graduate studies in the 1970s.

§ Russian/Early Soviet (as in murdered by Stalin's NKVD early) writer Boris Pilnyak and his great novel, The Naked Year, as well as a piece around which Ugresic based her first chapter, "A Story About How Stories Come to be Written."

§ Japanese author Jun'ichiro Takizaki, a contemporary of Pilnyak, whose novel Naomi Pilnyak likely encountered during a sojourn in Japan and, Ugresic posits borrowed from for a somewhat fictionalized biography of one Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki -- who may or may not have existed! The biography might not either. Ugresic is a bit of a trickster herself, maybe?

§ Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and critic I've always meant to explore but had never determined where to start. I now think I'm going to look for The Arcades Project, which Ugresic discusses in the context of having met a cosmopolitan figure she only designates as "K," whom she met in Japan while touring scenes from Tanizaki's life.

§ Japanese feminist and communist Yuriko Miyamoto, once a friend of Soviet film deity Sergei Eisenstein, whose works like Mileposts/Landmarks/Signposts (Dohyo in Japanese) look like they're going to be hard for me to find. She's sure sounds fascinating, though! And yes, she met Boris Pilnyak and fictionalized their unpleasant encounter.

§ Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British scholar and professor whom Ugresic imagines having imagined Miyamoto's and Pilnyak's encounter while writing his essay contrasting writerly types, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which was largely about Leo Tolstoy.

§ Peter Bruegel the Elder, whose painting "The Beggars" features peasants whose ragged clothing is festooned with fox tails; Ugresic thinks of this while contemplating the sight of modern Japanese tweens donning cute fox ears and tails over their clothes in tribute to the good old kitsune of Japanese folk tradition.

And all of this is just from the first chapter. At this point while I was poking around trying to decide what to pursue, I found that somebody has already written a pretty detailed annotation of Fox so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, here. But there's so very much more; it would take a lifetime (as indeed it did, for Dubravka Ugresic) to properly explore it all and I'm already middle aged. And still haven't tracked down and read everything that W.G. Sebald set me haring after years ago!

I mean, she also describes a visit to the Tokyo train station that the hero of Marshland is accused of bombing, but it looks like that weighty tome was not part of Ugresic's literary universe - or at least she didn't mention it here. A pity if she never got to read it; she'd really have liked it, I think.

Fox is also a travelogue, in which international literary star Dubravka Ugresic explores places like the tourist trap Pompeii has become, her accounts of same frequently reminding me of those of fellow globetrotting scribe Umberto Eco, who left this ancient city out of his Travels in Hyperreality probably out of the same thinking that allowed me to live nearly a decade in Boston without ever once visiting the Bull & Finch.*

As I watched the human circus, the frenzied waiters reeling from the tempo, the countless plates sailing above our heads, the voluntary humiliation to which we acquiesced as if we had paid for the right to be humiliated; as I watched our stampede emptying the lunchroom so the next group could stand paid in, I suddenly longed for great Vesuvius to do it's damndest, spew its lava all over us, carbonize us, and blanket us with 20 tons of volcanic ash...

But what is most on Ugresic's mind as she visits various places, contemplates the real or imagined biographies of real or imagined artists, has a romantic encounter with a noble squatter in a house she inherited from a fan of her work back in her new-old homeland, is the plight of refugees of all sorts. Whether they're arriving, desperate and near-drowning in leaky boats on the shores of Lampedusa while she lunches with a possibly-fictional widow of a possibly-fictional writer of international renown, flees from Stalin's NKVD or later authoritarians to more permissive regimes in the east or west, or are simply a nice little old last ekeing out an existence in South London, all but forgotten but for a handful of people like Ugresic who have read her one book, migrants and refugees, who have to partake of all of the qualities of the fox, peek through at us from every page with gently reproachful eyes. At us and at Ugresic, who does not exempt herself from responsibility from their plights. She may have done things here or there to help, donated to causes, looked the other way on property violations, but she could always have done more, just like all of us. Even though she is, herself, a victim, too, of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, which she describes in unforgettable terms: 

From outside, it all looked as if this were happening inside a glass snow globe with the snow swirling. But, inside, instead of snow they're swirled blood. When somebody picked up the globe and shook it, miniature people inside the globe conducted a miniature war, burned books as big as poppy seeds, erected miniature borders, opened their miniature camps for the ethnically unsuitable, raised fences and barbed wire, revise the school books, erased everything old and established everything new, they died in miniature, we're expelled in miniature, blew up miniature homes, everything went on in miniature - and over it all flurried that soothing artificial snow.

That's certainly how it looked to me as a barely 20-something watching it all on the evening news from halfway around the world. And I still only know it via literature, but, let's be honest: the only way I know anything is either through literature or through a few years working (very badly) as a field entomologist.

Ugresic's books, by the way, were among those deemed unsuitable and removed from school and library shelves, presumably to be burnt, as she learned some 25 years later when she returned to Croatia on a visit. So she was, in a sense, doubly exiled, for all that she was welcomed and, in a small degree, feted in the West as a writer of international reputation. She just wasn't nationalist enough to please her new/old nation. A lot of us may come to know how that feels.

Her accounts are not totally mournful, though, witness a late chapter devoted to famous literary emigré Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, son Dmitri, and the small band of women whom they met in New York City when the women took on Nabokov as a language tutor, in exchange for which they, especially the "human footnote" Dorothy Leuthold, guided the Nabokovs through their early explorations of the United States. As she relates charming anecdotes from this period in the Nabokovs lives, she muses also on how people mentally colonize environments that are new to them, appropriating things and people with whom they are not yet familiar by, for instance, bestowing them with diminutive nicknames such as "Dasha" for Dorothy. After whom, famously, Nabokov dared to name a species of butterfly he discovered in the Grand Canyon with her. He was famously very knowledgeable about butterflies and moths so perhaps he could indeed be sure that he was indeed the discoverer of this variety, but it's still kind of adorably presumptive to not only name it but to bestow it with his chauffeur's name. Though I'm sure she considered it a nice tribute -- what if she didn't want to be so remembered? The right to be forgotten is a right that not a lot of us think enough about, I suspect. Especially since the internet is going to make that close to impossible for a while yet.

Dubravka Ugresic left us mere months after I first discovered her and scooped up all of her then-available English translations at Open Letter. I've still got several more to read, and I'll no doubt tell you all about them right here. I, uh, hope she wasn't one of those who'd rather be forgotten.

But if that was the case, she shouldn't have written such fascinating books.

* Aka the "Cheers" bar.

Toby Ferris' SHORT LIFE IN A STRANGE WORLD: BIRTH TO DEATH IN 42 PANELS (narr by Jot Davies)

Jot Davies is one of those audio book narrators whose name on a project automatically makes that project a likely listen for me, but put him on something like Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels, which turns out to be the answer to "what if John Berger and W.G. Sebald were merged into a literary/art historical Brundlefly (and also freakishly made the same allusions to the same cultural touchstones I'm thinking of right as I think of them!) and wrote a book about Breugel the Elder" and that becomes a dead certainty. 

Author Toby Ferris set about the project that gave rise to Short Life in a Strange World after being seized by a "mania for [Pieter] Breugel" as he mourned his recently dead father. Short narratives from that father's life are intertwined with biographical sketches of the author's trip to all of the museums and private collections that possess  definitively proven works of Breugel, and accounts of what is known of Breugel's own life as Ferris minutely observes Breugel's works and the settings in which they exist circa the early 21st century.

Along the way, Ferris winds up writing both lyrically and informatively (the lyricism greatly enhanced by Jot Davies' precise diction and rich and sonorous intonation) about diverse subjects such as the process by which paintings are restored nowadays versus in the 19th and 20th centuries, the aims and ambitions of medieval alchemists, the economic and cultural realities of life in what was, in Bruegel's time, the Spanish Netherlands, the arrangements of modern museums, the English phonetics pose to native speakers of Asian languages (that must have been particularly fun for Davies to narrate), and the occasional wilderness adventure undertaken in the company of Ferris' brother on the author's extended visit to the United States.*

Entertainingly, each chapter begins with a note about how much of the total "Bruegel Object", as calculated by a spreadsheet the author created as he first began contemplating this odd and lovely project, is discussed in that chapter.** From that starting point, Ferris can go in any direction as the imagery in each painting or group of paintings inspires speculation about the change of the seasons, the medieval understanding of death and new life, the difference between painting on wood versus canvas... anything goes, which is where the book most evokes W.G. "Rings of Saturn" Sebald for me and makes me wish Jot Davies could narrate that book someday.

What really stands out for me, though, is an odd little interval late in the book, the short but arresting 11th chapter, "Singularity." Here Ferris pauses to consider a sliver of the "Breugel Object" that has disappeared from public knowledge after being sold at Christie's early this century. This little roundel was a rather recent attribution after careful study with 21st century technology, this as much for its material faithfulness to Breugel's era as for its image, and so Ferris wrestles a bit with how much it should actually bother him that he has no way of seeing the original (the John Berger bit of the Bergbald Brundlefly). It's not part of the canon of classically-understood-to-be-Breugel, after all, and copies, made by one of Breugel's sons and by an engraver that somewhat altered the depicted image to make it more suitable as an engraving, are publicly held where he can see them. Ultimately, concluding that completism is an unrealistic and undue standard for him and his decidedly not academic approach to Breugel, Ferris decides to just let it be, man. After all, he's not trying to hunt down Breugel's drawings or misattributed works, etc, either. Framing matters. 

I, who have several uncompleted "survey all the things" type projects all over this here blog, respect this decision a whole lot, and take a kind of comfort in it, too. I may not get around to reading all of the Doctor Who novels or ever finish my cheeky and irreverent close study of Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, but that doesn't mean that what I've competed of these are worthless for not being 100% COMPLETE COMPLETE COMPLETE. I mean, people wouldn't bug me to resume them if they didn't like what I've done of them so far, right?

And so with this book. While Ferris may have drawn the target around where his arrow hit rather than hitting an objectively established mark, what came of his effort is a lovely meditation on life and death and art, on landscape and memory (hey, Simon Schama!), how material objects such as paintings get scattered around the world,  and on how it feels to be in the same room with a famous masterpiece in our age of image reproduction and reduction. 

What a delightful listen! I think, though, that if I were to read it again, I'd want to sit down with a hardcover edition. The audiobook had an accompanying PDF to allow the listener to examine images of the paintings under discussion, and of course there are any number of ways to look at art on the internet,  but looking at them on the tiny screen of my phone was not very satisfying. As with most art books, of which this is certainly one, the luxury of glossy full color reproductions of the art is highly to be preferred.

But hardcovers don't sound like Jot Davies. Decisions, decisions...

*This is how I wound up having an amusing Twitter conversation about bear spray and, er, used bear chow, with narrator Davies (quite forgetting that the author was still included in the reply chain after Davies had clued him in to my early praise of this book as I was getting started with enjoying it). Sometimes the internet is still a boon to mankind, even in this dumb decade.

**The insights he derives from this supremely nerdy creation of his are weird and amusing. For instance, by Ferris' calculations, 74% of the "Breugel Object" contains a depiction of people in crowds. As someone who spent four years taking all my meals with the famous "Timer" of Phish fame, Zyzzyx, keeper of the Phishstatistics page, I can't help loving attempts like this to quantify art's impact on us. 

Rebecca Solnit's ORWELL'S ROSES

Thinking about Orwell's roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions. The word was adopted by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a decentralized or nonhierarchical model of knowledge. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be," they declared. "This is very different from the tree or root which plots a point, fixes an order."

The above passage from Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses could serve as a thesis statement for the book as a whole, for while I've seen this book described as a sort of biography of George Orwell, it's really only a tiny bit that, as I'll discuss below. 

Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, is a foundational writer for me, for all that the only fiction of his that I had ever read until unusually late in life for a lit major was Animal Farm*. For me, what I've always loved him for the most has been his essays, many of which I can quote almost word for word. I've enjoyed pseudo-biographies of him before, especially Emma Larkin's hyper-focused and fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, which does just what it says on the tin: locates important experiences and settings from Orwell's well-known years as a member of the British government's Indian Imperial Force as inspirations for a lot more of his work than just his first novel. Among its more interesting insights came from Larkin's conversation with a local on a visit to what is now Myanmar in which at first her conversation partner didn't know who she was talking about when she mentioned Orwell by either his pen or actual names, but then realized she was talking about "the prophet."

Orwell's name is on every tongue in this dumb century of ours, usually as a shorthand way of demonizing one's political opponents. Wearing masks to contain the spread of a killer virus is somehow Orwellian (though I really doubt he'd agree). Insisting that counterfactual insanity is still somehow true despite mountains of actual evidence that the crowd wasn't that big, and that your guy is in photographs with Jeff and Ghislaine, too, is Orwellian. Vaccine requirements are Orwellian? People wishing it was maybe a little harder for unhinged teenagers or mentally ill spouse-abusers to get access to automatic weapons is Orwellian? Insisting that you can't trust anything you hear in the press is pretty Orwellian. Orwellian, Orwellian, Orwellian.**

So while I still think everybody who uses his pen name in vain should have to read Larkin's book if not re-read Orwell directly***, it's a pretty interesting time for something like Orwell's Roses to make an appearance.

Right as I started reading it, I was brought back to one of my favorite reads from last year (you know, 2020 And Some Months), Dean King's Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, a biography of another of my favorite writers of all time that focused quite a lot on O'Brian's cozy-sounding yet strenuously laborious domestic arrangements over the years. Here, too, quite a lot of attention is paid to its subject writer's housing, focusing on his house in Wallington, Hertfordshire, England, where he lived from 1936 to 1940 when he wasn't off at the Spanish Civil War, and where he planted the roses that first captured Solni'ts imagination.

Even more attention, though, is paid to what it means to plant roses in the first place, and Orwell's Roses turns into something much more interesting than another Orwell biography could be; Solnit has let her curiosity, her knowledge and her understanding of the writer's life, the life of the politically aware, and of what industrialization has done to all life on earth, lead her to all sorts of interesting ideas and connections between the man and his roses -- and each of us. The result is a book that makes me think of W.G. Sebald more than of anyone else, except Solnit isn't content to just show us fragments; she wants to pull them together into something, if not whole, at least whole enough for us to see how the fragments might fit together, and how there might be more than one way to fit them. This is pure black magic to me, making Orwell's Roses the best example of "the kind of book I wish I could write" that I've yet found.

Orwell's Roses take Solnit to some unexpected places, such as Bogota, Columbia, a city that is now surrounded by vast greenhouses and the infrastructure to process, package and ship their sole product: scentless, immature roses on an industrial scale, destined for supermarkets, airport booths and florist's shops in the United States. The roses we give one another for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to celebrate love and beauty are grown by overworked, underpaid, exploited workers in their thousands, who are, Solnit discovers, made into walking billboards for Orwellian slogans by the text printed on their coveralls: "Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work", "The attitude depends on you. The rest we want you to learn here" are some choice examples, printed in Spanish on the actual garments, of course.

And, while she doesn't travel there, her musings also lead her to Russia and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and especially to the stories of Nikolai Vavilov and Trofim Lysenko, respectively the pioneering geneticist who strove to save the world from hunger through slow and careful plant breeding and seed saving, and the Lamarckian pseudoscientist who convinced Stalin that all that plodding around with the scientific method was a waste of time and they could fake it until they made it when it came to improving crops and crop yields, which lead to years of famine and death while Stalin bragged about how well his plans were working and even famously exported grain while the people growing it starved.

But it's not just to the grim in Orwell's world or ours that Solnit points us; the man, Eric Blair, had a great love for the simple beauty of the mundane, the close at hand, the homely, and especially the English -- the countryside, the junk shops, the soil in which so much could be grown that he and his first wife, Eileen, could often feed themselves from their garden, and Solnit celebrates this side of Orwell and of life right alongside his and her accounts of his experiences in miserable coal mines, on the battle fronts in the Spanish Civil War, and suffering in tuberculosis wards as his hard, active, risk-taking way of life caught up with him and took him young. 

The result is a book that I didn't expect but also didn't know I needed: a good beginning for what's sure to be another Orwellian year. 

*A first American edition of which is still one of my most cherished possessions, one of those things they'll have to pry from my cold dead fingers.

**Late in the book one of Solnit's companions in travel and exploration for the book wonderis "whether the word Orwellian should perhaps mean something other than ominous, corrupt, sinister, deceitful, a hypocrisy or dishonesty so destructive that it is an assault on truth and thought and rights" because Orwell, the actual man, was as concerned with beauty and pleasure (Solnit embarked on a re-reading of 1984 for this project and found, to her surprise that even in his totalitarian horror story there is beauty and pleasure throughout, for Winston's entire rebellion is an effort to hold on to these, and one can't depict something being clutched at without describing what is being clutched) as with brutality and deceit, but they ultimately conclude that Orwellian has become too useful a word, and too embedded in our culture, to try to change now.

***Except even back when Animal Farm first appeared, to say nothing of 1984, right-wingers were already misunderstanding the point so hard that Orwell felt he had to issue a declaration more or less from his deathbed that no, dummies, "My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is notintended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism."

John le Carré's SILVERVIEW

Even Proctor was impressed by the homespun nature of these exchanges, given the scale of things to be ironed out, but he had been long enough in the job to know that momentous happenings had a way of acting themselves out on small stages.

Is there anything more wistful, more beautifully sad than sitting down to read a writer's last published novel? Yes, yes there is, and it's reading that writer's posthumously published novel, which I finally had to do even though I'm cheating a bit because I still haven't read all of the rest of John le Carré, but I decided for once to at least try and be in sync with the man's true fans.

And this is the right year for me to read Silverview, because this is also the year that I discovered the pleasures of literature from the Balkans, especially the work of Selvedin Avdic, whose work is intimately concerned with the aftermath of the brutal and horrifying conflicts that took place there mostly in the 1990s but are still being felt to this day, as his horror novel Seven Terrors vividly showed me.

Silverview isn't set there or then, but its central concern is very much concerned with that place and time, specifically a multi-ethnic village a British intelligence agent came to cherish for its peacefulness amidst the horrors, what happened to it and to the family he all but adopted, and how that affected him, his own family in Great Britain (especially his marriage, the small stage upon which these big events first take place), and his Service afterwards. Our man this time is one Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a devout Polish Catholic who was an eager collaborator with the Nazis; in Avon's adulthood he attached himself as passionately to socialism/communism as his father had (at least claimed to be) to the Church until he became disillusioned with that cause and adopted another: the would be do-gooding of the western world, eventually in the form of British Intelligence.

Not that we know this for a while, because this is a John le Carré novel and we're going to get to know the other people in his life first, chiefly a youngish man who made a lot of money as a trader in London, became disillusioned by it, and decided to move to an East Anglian village and open a bookshop even though he turns out not to know very much about books. Julian is the kind of guy a lot of us enjoy disliking, in other words; born to the right-ish parents, raised to be a certain kind of successful, successful at what he was supposed to succeed at, and now just blithely assuming he'll succeed at something new with all the confidence that only having enough money to be able to afford to lose a lot of it without pain can give a guy. But of course, if it weren't for guys like him, a lot of little villages out there would never have book stores, or record stores, or groovy little coffee shops that aren't owned by behemoth corporations that over-roast their product and force everybody to adopt faux-Italian vocabularies for just so we can order a damned cup o'joe.

We still don't really have to like these guys, though.

But Edward Avon does, right away, for reasons that aren't clear until much later in the book. Avon is now living in that same East Anglian village and wins our hearts immediately for insisting that if Julian is going to run a bookshop in East Anglia, he had better already know W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn by heart. Which was just what I was thinking as I sank into Julian's story!

Then enter one Stewart Proctor, holder of one of those ambiguous positions within the secret service in which he commands a lot of resources and personal loyalty but seems still to have to answer to a lot of shadowy figures behind the scenes. We don't know why he's in this story for a good long time (relative, of course, to the fact that this is not a big, hefty doorstop of a novel) except that it has something to do with Edward, or with his wife, Deborah (a spy's spy in her own right) or maybe just their daughter, Lily? He circles around this story like a rather kind-looking shark until suddenly he strikes and fills the waters with, not blood but maybe adrenaline? For all that everybody in this story except for Julian and Lily are on the far side of age 60 if not 70, as if this is le Carré's version of All Passion Spent. But with, you know, spies.

And the odd terrifying lawyer, which I was already picturing being played someday by Janet McTeer, who once played Vita Sackville-West (author of All Passion Spent) in a TV movie. Rawr.

The novel is accompanied by a fond note from le Carré's son, who writes under the name of  Nick Harkaway, who describes the not-as-difficult-as-he'd-feared task of getting Silverview ready for publication in terms of wondering whether he dared "put eyebrows on this Mona Lisa" and for those who might raise their own eyebrows at the implied comparison, yes, this is a Mona Lisa. It is a masterful work from an artist very much in command of his powers and a lucky last gift to his fans. I wanted the experience of reading it to last a while but of course I read it in a day and a half, and now must return it to the library because lots of other people are waiting.

Ah, me.

100 Books #65 - J.G. Ballard's THE BURNING WORLD

Sometimes I read to escape my situation; sometimes I read to wallow in it. I suspect that my taking up The Burning World during this hot, dry, searing, scorching summer of wildfire and little rain is due to the latter tendency, but I'm not entirely sure. I never am, with J.G. Ballard.

This is my third foray into the gently trippy, weirdly abstracted imagination of this mid-century master (last year saw me sinking under the surface of The Drowned World; I spent part of February freezing over in The Crystal World. I guess I'll have to track down The Wind from Nowhere next, to get all of Ballard's "Elemental Apocalypse" quartet under my belt), and I'll definitely be returning for more. Nothing compares to a Ballard novel: short, vivid, melancholy, yet curiously detatched, just like his characters, who are never fighting the drowning/crystallizing/burning of their worlds, but rather just observing and saying something along the lines of "Well. How about that?"

As the novel opens, Charles Ransom, -- our, well, I hesitate to call him either hero or protagonist, so let's just call him our viewpoint character -- lives and waits in the lakeside community of Larchmont, where his marriage to Judith has dried up along with most of the continent. At first, it is she, but not he, who is preparing to follow most of the rest of the area's residents in abandoning the town forever in an exodus to the coast, where desalinization plants offer humanity's last hope. Soon Ransom is left only with the remnants of a somewhat bullying Presbyterian minister's shotgun-toting congregation, Mr. Lomax, a possibly deranged architect expending every last bit of his resources in pursuit of what he imagines is going to be a promising future, Lomax's even more bizarre sister Miranda*, a weirdo named Quilter who runs around with a dead peacock hanging off his belt, and Ransom's friend, Philip Jordan, a strange, silent young man of about 20 whose whole life was spent mucking about in the water until the water started to go.

And then there's the fishermen, whether bent over a beached boat "like widows over a coffiin", standing mutely, hats in hands, at the back of Reverend Johnstone's church, or rampaging through the streets with nets like toreadors, become fishers of men for their own quixotic crusade, because Larchmont isn't nearly sad or Lovecraftian enough yet. Really. I'm talking burning churches wearing sturgeon's heads as hats Lovecraftian.

The cause of all this desolation both is and isn't plausible (not that causes or plausibility seem ever to be the point, in Ballard): decades of pollution and discharge into the oceans has left a soup of petrochemicals and polymers that have formed a thin but impenetrable skin on their surfaces that has halted, probably forever, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation that makes life on land possible. This is my first Ballard, in other words, in which the end of the world is humanity's fault.

Not that any hand-wringing over this happens, as would be true with pretty much any other author. The closest we come is the sermons of Reverend Johnstone, who regards the drought not so much as punishment as just another manifestation of the opus contra naturam by which man earns his right to exist in creation. All those migrators away from the dwindling lake and the withering vegetation are sinners for their lack of faith and sissies who are unworthy of the grace of God.

But not Charlie. Charlie thinks he is staying put, though not, of course, for any reasons the Reverend would understand, nor, I suspect, any that Charlie would, either. His inaction, even when impulsively accompanying a water truck driver to deliver the last of the water from Lomax's swimming pool to a local zoo to keep the animals there alive for a few more days, draws always the same reaction from others: they want to know what he is going to do, why he hasn't left, as though somehow knowing that will make their own paths clearer. But Ransom can't help them. He's about to have problems of his own.

Like holding onto his humanity once circumstances finally compel him to leave Larchmont with just three other people, on his own lemming-like journey to the sea:

During their journey to the south he had felt an increasing sense of vacuum, as if he was pointlessly following a vestigial instinct that no longer had any real meaning for him. The four people with him were becoming more and more shadowy, residues of themselves as notional as the empty river.

Another common theme in Ballard, that, it seems**; the guy did imagine everybody dreaming of slipping back, evolutionarily, to their lizard brains or beyond in The Drowned World.

I must digress here for a moment, for I find I have a similar experience when I read Ballard. The characters and their immediate situations are always sort of drifting in and out of my consciousness. I've pondered this for a while and decided that this is because Ballard manages to summon so many cultural ghosts to haunt his stories. Phrases or passages suggest Shakespeare, Saramago, Sebald, Homer, Tolkien, tarot decks, Greenaway and Herzog films, but do so with such subtlety that one doesn't consciously notice it as she reads along. Ballard is a hypnotist, and he's inducing daydreams. Hence the bewildering effect of seemingly ordinary passages like this, when our hero spots a man in a dusty cotton suit, sort of shambling ahead in the distance: "Without thinking, Ransom walked forward a few paces, as if following the man. He waited, almost expecting to see a dog appear and run around the man's heels." The Fool card. And now I'm tripping on T.S. Eliot and Tim Powers... meanwhile the mystery man keeps shambling along in the "absolute isolation of the chalkwhite promenade, with its empty perspectives..."

Imagine experiencing something like that every few paragraphs, and then you'll see that Ballard is expanding way beyond the notional 160 pages of this novel, or page count of any novel. I could share examples of this until this post was longer even than my Lord of the Rings rambles.

This effect should be a flaw by most gauges of literary worth or entertainment value that I know of, but it's not. Novels are supposed to suck you into another world when you read them. Ballard just sucks the rest of the world in with you.

That's not to say Ballard is just borrowing other art. There is original imagery that is going to stay with me for the rest of my life in this novel:

They reached the margins of the river estuary. the funnel-shaped area had once been bordered by marshes and sandfalts, and the low-lying ground still seemed damp and gloomy, despite the hot sunlight breaking across the dry grass. The hundreds of vehicles parked among the dunes and hillocks had sunk up to their axles in the soft sand, their roofs tilting in all directions.

And so begins our fossil record, no?

Ballard writes a lot about isolation and solipsism, directly or indirectly, always in a perfectly neutral tone, no judgement or consequence. His characters just end up islands or, in this case, dunes, just as we who read him do, for surely no two of us are ever lured into the same space. And once lured or driven apart, these characters seldom reunite as they adapt in their idiosyncratic ways to their utterly transformed world. And when they do come back together, it's not always in merry meetings. Adaptation and isolation do lead, after all, to speciation, don't they.

And so it is on the seacoast to which Ransom brings his three companions, Philip Jordan, Jordan's blind and elderly foster father, the Calibanesque Quilter's witchy mother (yeah, shades of Sycorax!), and a red-haired former zookeeper, Catherine. A ten-year lacuna sunders them utterly (not that that's very hard), and when next we see them, they are unrecognizable. And as to what they get up to, reverting as they have to a primitive life of sealskin capes and repurposed fragments of the old world, is as bizarre, yet well-imagined, as anything I have ever seen. Capturing water that the tide washes up and then steals away is difficult enough; moving it around enough to leach out the salt is monumental; stealing it is almost ridiculously complicated!

But even that mighty effort is just a stop-gap, if a long one. It's no way to live, and echoes of Lomax's last words to Ransom, telling him that he'll be back someday, have already dragged the reader's thoughts back to Larchmont even before the excuse is found to try going there. That suggestion, planted so long ago, is the deepest and most compelling of all, and so it doesn't matter a bit that the excuse found doesn't make a lot of sense. Why, of course.

I'm perhaps no longer making sense, but Ballard does that to me, just like W.G. Sebald did. I'm in awe and maybe still a little entranced. And watching everything burn. Well. How about that?

*There is totally a sort of reverse-Tempest thing going on; Quilter gets compared to Caliban at least as often as Philip Jordan to Ariel; Lomax might make an Antonio to Ransom's Prospero, but as Miranda belongs to/with Lomax (sister rather than daughter, but still) perhaps it is he who is Prospero? But Ransom does not seem like a usurper type, or any other of the types from the Shakespeare play. And maybe he's not supposed to. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies. I do that, sometimes. But really: there's even rather a lot of repetition of the world "bosun."

**I keep saying "it seems" about Ballard because I'm being cautious. I've only read three of his books to date, and so am not entirely comfortable making sweeping pronouncements about what is or is not common to Ballard's work, thematically or otherwise. BUT, I do feel somewhat backed up in my sense of Ballard by this great little piece by Martin Amis that appeared recently in the Guardian. And I plan to become a real Ballardian. That's right, dear readers, there are going to be many more musings on Ballard's books in this here blog.

100 Books #25 - Adolfo Bioy Casares' THE INVENTION OF MOREL

I first became interested in Argentine fantasist Adolfo Bioy Casares last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, when I had the unique opportunity to see on the big screen a film, Invasión, which he and my all-time hero, Jorge Luis Borges, helped write. It's a dreamy, trippy police procedural fantasy that is also often described as an updating of The Iliad. And it was almost lost; it was only by a supreme international effort in 1999 that it was reassembled and restored, and it was worth every bit of effort those dedicated cinephiles made. You can see it broken up into twelve pieces on YouTube right now (with English subtitles only; when Laroquod and I saw it in Toronto, the subtitles were in French and a volunteer read hasty a English translation into a microphone, which as you might imagine just added to the surreality of the experience) and I strongly suggest that you do!

Casares' experience with and love of film deeply informs this short work, which Borges praised as one with a "perfect plot" and which I found reproduced for me the deep and enjoyable weirdness of watching Invasión or reading W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, one of my favorite books from last year's 100 Books Challenge attempt. Indeed, I think the phrase "Rings of Saturn with a perfect plot" describes this novella, well, perfectly, for in fewer than 100 pages, Casares managed to hit it all -- romance, obsession, the paranoia of a fugitive, the fear of contamination and invasion, isolation, ghosts, jealousy...

I wouldn't dream of spoiling the plot for you, or the language, beautifully rendered by translator Ruth L.C. Simms. But I will say that anyone who loves a good Borgesian fantasy/thought experiment really, really owes it to him or herself to explore Casares' work as well, and make sure that The Invention of Morel makes the "to read" pile soon.

Now, I think I'm going to indulge myself in a re-watch of Invasión over at YouTube.

*Blogger's note: despite its brevity, I am counting this as one of my 100 books, not only because New York Review Classics chose to publish it in its own volume (with a lovely prologue by Borges), but also because I just read at least two full novels that I counted as one in The Wool Omnibus. Golly, have I had some enjoyable reading lately!

100 Books 50 - Haruki Murakami's KAFKA ON THE SHORE

When I was in school, magic realism seemed to be the special property of the South Americans -- Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, Gabriel Garcia Marquez above all. And, Borges aside, I found it none too enchanting as an idea or a genre; it stayed on my radar but the pings were few and far between.

Then I stumbled across Haruki Murakami's After Dark while perusing the new books at my local public library a couple of years ago, and got hooked on Murukami's dreamy style, the clear concision of his prose, Murakami's erudition and his strange imagination. I rushed to read the rest of the library's collection of his offerings -- Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- and pegged him as someone to watch for, forevermore.

Reading Kafka on the Shore felt a lot like reading W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn (quite possibly my favorite read of this waning year) except with narrative. The same seductive dreaminess is there, the same plunges into what just cannot be but is so convincingly presented it feels true anyway, the same reluctance to finish and put the book aside. Unlike Rings of Saturn, though, which I ultimately did put aside to save it for a rainy day, Kafka on the Shore wouldn't let me go until its stories were told -- or mostly told*.

Murakami's characters inhabit strange inner and outer worlds that really don't often make sense, but are rendered in such lovely language (and Murakami does his own translating, I believe!) that the near-incoherence still just works. I can't imagine real people ever having the weirdly opaque conversations these characters do, or making the decisions they do, but I guess that's what makes this realism magic, no?

To talk about the details of the story -- a teenaged runaway, a murder, an Oedipal drama, a quest -- is not so much to commit the hideous modern sin of spoilers as to completely miss the point. This book is a lovely, gentle drug in prose form, mildly intoxicating and more than a little addictive. And yes, I want more.

*Frustratingly, there are narrative questions left unanswered, including one really big one that I'm still a little miffed about. The whole of the two interwoven accounts starts with a strange event of which there is no account; we see its effects but nothing of the cause. This absence still gnaws at me and spoils my enjoyment of the book just a bit.

100 Books 33 - W.G. Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN

This book is categorized and shelved as fiction, but I cannot help wondering how different my experience of reading it might have been were it not. This is a weird thing to say, I know, but The Rings of Saturn is a weird book.

Ostensibly, The Rings of Saturn -- so named, supposedly, to denote its fragmentary nature, as the planet Saturn's rings are composed of innumberable fragments -- concerns German author W.G. Sebald's walking tour of the southeastern coast of England. We do get the odd description of his physical travels here and there, with some lovely scenery porn and enough detail to convince the reader that he did indeed make the journey, visit those places, even without the odd, strangely melancholy accompanying photographs strewn throughout.

But the physical journey isn't really the thing, here. What is the thing is a somewhat inner, somewhat imaginary, dreamlike wandering through the past lives of the places the narrator encounters, the buildings, the landscapes and the stories of the people who lived there or in other ways made them somewhat famous. It's all very convincing and the line between fact and fiction is -- is there a word out there that goes beyond what we mean when we say "blurred"? Because it's way more than blurred. Like an international border in the middle of a lonely, unpeopled landscape, the line, if there even is one, is imaginary and only an extreme and well-enforced collective belief that is there gives it any reality at all.

But there are no authorities here insisting on a division. Once the reader has let herself be immersed in the strangeness (and its so seductive, who can resist the urge to wade in up to the chin, if not all the way in?), though, the question fades away. There are reminders here and there that this is supposed to be fiction -- Sebald is a great admirer of Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, and evokes especially the weird wonders of the master's "Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" a story written in the form of an encyclopedia entry, purporting to tell the reader all she needs to know about a completely made-up country that the entry itself acknowledges was made up -- but these are rare and so subtle that they pass almost unnoticed, the reader just nodding and smiling and tripping gently along.

When the narrator comes to the English village of Lowestoft, where Joseph Conrad lived for many years at the beginning of his new life as an Englishman, this has the potential to become problematic. Conrad fans (and I am one) know a lot of factual material about how he spent his time there, who he met, what he knew... and suddenly our dream has brought us quite convincingly right into what feels very much like a good representation of Conrad's own experience, what he saw, what it looked and felt like, what it made him remember from his own past... On later reflection it becomes obvious that no one could ever know that but Conrad himself, who is of course no longer around to affirm or contradict this account, but at the time, while reading, one is hypnotized into believing and enjoying it all. Is that factual, the last freed part of her mind might ask, feebly trying to send an impulse to go check Joseph Conrad: A Biography shelved in the third bedroom she has converted into a dedicated library and reading room, but the rest of her mind says no, no need, this is fine, just go with it and enjoy...

The only thing that breaks the trance is Sebald's occasional maddening habit of being just a bit too opaque, too coy, as when the narrator riffs for pages and pages on the life and miraculous works of his namesake saint, without ever once actually naming the saint. Here I did break free, my curiosity piqued to the brink of madness, sure I could follow the clues to find the saint, even though I wasn't sure of the narrator's first name, whether or not it was meant to be understood as the same as the author's, and weirdly unable to discover, for certain, what the author's first name was. I gave up after a while, because I wanted to explore more fragments.

Perhaps, I think as I finish, all of this is true. Perhaps what is fictional about The Rings of Saturn is its perfection, its graceful ordering, its masterfully executed subtlety, its seamless transitions from idea to idea, locale to locale, memory to memory. It has the feel, this book, of a sublime stream of consciousness, but the consciousness is suspiciously artful and not like an ordinary human stream of consciousness at all (for we know that is messy and tenuously associative, idiosyncratic and impenetrable, cf James Joyce and Henry Miller especially, and, of course, the wanderings of your own imagination through an ordinary day).

I haven't finished The Rings of Saturn yet, and I don't want to. Although I have made it last for as long as I possibly could, having rationed myself to just four or five pages a day, I approach the end with profound sadness, even as I glory in the experience. I cling to it as one clings to the last tatters of the first, giddy rush of being in love, when the beloved's flaws and essential humanness are coming more clearly into view but one struggles to ignore them. Oh yes, there is life beyond this haze, and it's usually good to break the spell, but it's so very nice to be under it.