Advent 7 Non-Fiction

I'll let you in on a very badly kept secret. The bibliography in my doctoral thesis runs to thirty pages. I haven't read every page of everything cited. I know, shocking isn't it. I don't speak for all academics when I say this but my guess would be that I speak for a majority. The way things work is that your first port of call when faced with a learned text is the index to check for direct references to the item you are researching. This is only the same as the way one uses legal texts when advising on a topic. It's not cheating.

Anyway, I mention all of this because as part of my reading this year I pulled a critical text off the dusty shelf and read it from start to finish. The lucky text was Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: an Introduction. This one doesn't get a mention in the aforementioned thesis, rather it was acquired for a module on the degree course. It's surprisingly readable if a little on the dry side. I was going to quote a pseudish passage about homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, but that sort of thing is too easy a target for the cynical. Oh and we should say that Armitt has a point about Tolkien. No, here is a nice take on how fantasy fiction justifies its place in Genre Studies and the wider world of literary criticism:

There is no more pertinent or influential question in the current field of fantasy than the question of the role genre plays in it. We have established fantasy, here, as the type of writing that questions what happens beyond the horizon, but in doing so we remain defined by that boundary, even in the act of crossing it. In effect, the boundary marks the point at which the worlds begin and end - the Primary World versus the Secondary World, the point at which sleep becomes dream. In realism we never reach those boundaries, and so are less conscious of their presence. As a result the realist world gives the illusion of being boundless, but only because we never get the chance to test its limits.       

 

Advent 6 Canon

It says something of both our education system and my own laziness that a man can flaunt a doctorate in English Literature without ever having had the stamina to finish reading a Jane Austen novel. This has been rectified and I will confess that it was at times a chore - Austen is just not my cup of tea. I spent a good part of Sense and Sensibility merely wishing that the worthy Elinor would give her sister Marianne a good slap. 

However it is the way of these things that you get to the very end of a book (Chapter Fifty in this case) and a paragraph leaps off the page and assaults you with its concise beauty. This is writing of luminescence and the journey is worth the toil:

Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again.

Advent 5 Fiction

I would like to have met Kurt Vonnegut. I have raved previously about his masterwork Slaughterhouse 5, and also about the Sky Arts documentary on him - use the search engine at the top of the blog and you'll trace my ravings. Aren't computers clever? And just a tad frightening.

Today we consider Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Definitely one of the best books I have read this year. It is coruscatingly funny yet laden with deadpan tragedy. Its point-of-view is artfully all over the shop. Mesmerising. I will set out a sample below. Those of you paying close attention may trace an echo of another (and on balance slightly lesser) novel mentioned later in this Advent strand.

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.  

  

  

Advent 4 Non-Fiction

Maurice Garin

The First Tour by Isabel Best is a short and rather shoddy account of the first ever Tour de France, staged over six gargantuan stages in 1903. The competitors covered an unimaginable 3000 kilometres in those six instalments on fixed gear bikes and were responsible for their own repairs - no support cars or domestiques. The winner (by what remains a record margin of two hours and fifty minutes) was Maurice Garin. Notwithstanding the infelicities of the text, this booklet does just about manage to do justice to the super-human efforts of Garin and his competitors.

Henri Desgrange called him The Bulldog, but Garin, a chain smoker, was also known as 'Le Petit Ramoneur' - the little chimney sweep - owing to his job prior to turning pro. He was one of nine children born in a French-speaking village on the Italian side of the Alps. Legend has it that his parents swapped him for a large round of cheese when he was 14, possibly in order to smuggle him into France. Ten years later he set up a bike shop in Roubaix with two brothers, one of whom supported him at the 1904 Tour. Garin was tough enough to survive the harsh realities of early cycle sport. As an amateur in 1893, he grabbed another rider's spare bike when he punctured in Namur-Dinant-Givet, riding on to win.   

Advent 3 Canon

I am more than occasionally of a mind to reach into my ancestral Welshness. One of these moods overtook me when at Caernarfon Castle last year and I duly purchased a copy of The Mabinogion from the gift shop. An English translation you understand - I'm not even remotely equipped to read it in Welsh. The translation is by Sioned Davies. I will quote from the translator's own Introduction and you will get a flavour of what this collection of twelve tales is about:

Brothers transformed into animals of both sexes who bring forth children: dead men thrown into a cauldron who rise the next day; a woman created out of flowers, transformed into an owl for infidelity; a king turned into a wild boar for his sins - these are just some of the magical stories that together make up the Mabinogion.

These stories hark back to an ancient oral tradition. The constant couplings and killings can be a tad wearying when read - I suspect the whole thing would be a load more fun if delivered in the voice of, say, Richard Burton or, here's an idea, Tom Jones. If you liked the film Excalibur with its atmosphere of dark magic, then you will get something out of The Mabinogion.  

 

 

  

Advent 2 Fiction

If you have endured my pergrinations through the blogosphere for any time, you would not expect this year to pass without a reference to the man who, in my scabrous moments, is my favourite author, that old rascal Simon Raven. I am not a great one for re-reading any more than I re-watch many films. These are rules to which there are lots of exceptions. Most particularly I am probably in my fourth joyous saunter through Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence. In mid-ramble I happily let Places Where They Sing entrance me. It is the sixth volume in the sequence.

Raven puts these words in the mouth of Robert Reculver Constable, a priggish don of whom he does not, I judge, wholly approve. Typical of Raven however the sentiments that Constable spouts would find favour with Raven. Nuance is all my dear.

So much for Tom and Daniel. There remains the question of the left-wing joker ... The Rev. Oliver Clewes, the College Chaplain. He is one of those new progressive clerics who hardly seem to believe in God at all and apparently picture Christ as some kind of revolutionary guerilla from South America. As a nominal Christian, Clewes is mistrusted by most of the left, while as a declared socialist he is mistrusted by all of the right. The few people remaining merely despise him as an equivocating opportunist. The one important thing to be said of him, therefore, is that he will discredit whatever cause he may adopt in the eyes of everybody, so that one can only hope he will not support a good one.         

Advent 1 Non-Fiction

Now don't go saying that I never treat you. Today we open with a volume of non-fiction (well, two volumes to be precise, but they come as companion pieces) and you are offered the chance to read it free and gratis, courtesy of the open access section of the library of Birmingham City University. I make no recommendation of it but I confirm that I have this very year re-read it for the umpteenth time and, at the last count, I found six typographical and/or grammatical errors. I apologise for this for I am the author. This is the thesis that earned me my doctorate - Shakespeare and Bagehot  

I will save you the effort of reading my leaden prose and just give you the concluding paragraph which I hope conveys some idea of what the whole academic shenanigans is getting at: 

The future (as Harootunian reminds us) is part of history. Possibly we may discover, with Shakespeare's unparalleled insight, that there is a form of sovereignty beyond Bagehot's contemplation and yet still within an Age of Discussion. For now and for my own deliberately limited purpose, Bagehot's writing is an analytical tool we can profitably use. Within the confines of his own tragedy, Coriolanus is wrong when he asserts that for him, 'There is a world elsewhere' (3.3.159). We are more fortunate. Bagehot gives us the skills to understand where we have got to. Shakespeare may help unlock the future.