a gallimaufry

on AI and sensibility

I teach English as a second language to adults in an adult education centre in Belgium. All the courses are ‘evaluated’; that is to say, the students have to do tests in order to obtain a certificate at the end. Inevitably, some students have used AI to help with their homework when it’s a writing task. In fact, we’ve had an interesting discussion over whether it’s acceptable to use AI or not. Some students argue that AI is a tool just as a dictionary is a tool, so why shouldn’t they use it?

Anyway, it’s pretty easy for me to spot who has used AI and who hasn’t. The obvious point is that if you’ve only been learning English for three years, you are not going to be able to write flawless screeds using complex structures you’ve never been taught. But also, I know my students. I know how they talk and what their interests are. They all have idiosyncratic ways of expressing themselves. When they use AI, the writing is impersonal. There’s no flavour of the student as an individual.

So I was thinking about that a little bit. My students will be using some basic free form of generative AI. I imagine – although I don’t know, because actually I am pretty ignorant about AI – there are more sophisticated versions which can be taught more nuanced, more personalised language. But whose?

(Elin Danielson Gambogi, After Breakfast (1890); oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

If I think about the art created by my favourite artists, it’s not really the basic elements of craft that appeal to me about their work. (I’m going to focus on creative writing, but I think you could apply this to visual arts and music too.) So if I think of a novel, there may be plot, there may be characters, there may be themes, absolutely. But what makes that novel appeal to me or not depends on something less tangible, and that’s the sensibility of the writer. There is something about the combination of all those elements of a novel that is special to that writer and it arises from everything about them as a person – their character, their life experiences, what they’ve read or seen, what happened to them that morning, their childhood pets, how they get on with their brothers, their particular neuroses, their loves and hates. Consciously and unconsciously that shapes their work.

This means I will read and enjoy even those novels by my favourite writers that I can objectively see are less good, or even flawed.

Can AI ever have its heart broken at the age of fifteen and find solace in obsessively listening to The Smiths for six months? Can AI ever trudge for three days through the mountains only to look down in wonder at Macchu Picchu in a bowl of sunlight? Can AI ever feel the shame that comes from going along with something at work which it doesn’t like but doesn’t feel strong enough to oppose? Don’t all of those things form the work as much as the creator?

In one of his wonderful Substack pieces James Marriott posted a genuine poem by Seamus Heaney and one his friend had asked chatGPT to write in the manner of Heaney. (Content warning: there is dissing of Heaney.) This is what he concluded:

There’s also the fact the AI poem doesn’t really go anywhere or express an idea or allude to a specific bit of history. It just circles vaguely round its themes. AI still struggles a bit with story or argument — a lot of what it produces can feel somewhat inert. […]

Interestingly, AI is much worse at Philip Larkin. It seems to struggle slightly with variations of tone that are more complex than simply “poetic” (the register a lot of Heaney is written in). Its attempts to be wry or angry can fall flat. And Larkin often uses his poems to tell a story.

I think this is really interesting. AI can create a pastiche of a style but not of a tone. I suspect it will learn to write better stories and arguments in time, but I don’t think it can ever evolve a sensibility. Part of creativity is learning and imitating, following what exists. But every creative work is infused with something of the creator that is unique and cannot be replicated by anyone or anything else.

You can read James Marriott’s full piece, and test yourself on the two poems, here. And if you haven’t signed up to his Substack, you really should.

 

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, by Han Smith

What an amazing title, don’t you think? I actually finished reading this novel a while ago, but didn’t have time to write about it. Since then it’s haunted me, which I suppose is its way of saying I should write about it.

The almost daughter is a teenager in an unnamed country with a terrible past which no one speaks of. She shares an apartment with her parents and brother in a decaying provincial town. Her mother is learning English over the internet with a woman in Bristol, and regularly visits an old woman, a friend of her grandmother, who lives alone in another apartment and struggles to care for herself. The stories of this old woman ‘with a cave inside her’ and the almost daughter develop alongside each other in 77 portraits, which overlap each other to create a layered whole, richly ambiguous.

As part of a prank, someone sticks a portrait of the country’s president in the lift in the almost daughter’s apartment block, provoking a range of reactions from the inhabitants which unsettle the almost daughter. At the same time, a purple-haired girl called Oksana starts at her school.

The girls of this country are famous for their beauty and the almost daughter and her friends Valya and Elda are training themselves to go for a casting for a model agency. But the almost daughter is also drawn to Oksana, and to a controversial project to create a museum and a monument to those who died in the work camps on the town’s outskirts. The almost daughter increasingly struggles to balance the different parts of her life, to know and not know, until she has to make choices about who she wants to be and how much courage she has.

In the weeks that have passed since I read this, some of the details have slipped my mind. But what has not is the beautiful and precise language, the way that the fragmented structure of the novel reflects both the characters’ uncertainty and ambivalence, and the foggy atmosphere of disinformation and repressed speech. It really is not like anything else I have read and it’s one of those books that changes you.

 

The Dark Labyrinth, by Lawrence Durrell

During the early part of June, 1947, a small party of sightseers found itself trapped in what was then the newly discovered labyrinth of Cefalû, in the island of Crete. They had penetrated the network of caves and corridors with a guide from a tourist agency, their intention being to examine the so-called ‘City in the Rock’ – whose discovery early in the preceding year had set a seal upon the long archaeological career of Sir Juan Axelos. By a sudden and unforeseen accident, the guide in charge of the party was killed. Falls of rock separated several members of the party from the main body, and it was only the sheerest chance that led one of them, Lord Graecen, to find his own way out.

So begins this strange novel. Lord Graecen recovers at the nearby house of Axelos, which is also called Cefalû. A desultory search party is sent out; it transpires that this is not the first party to have been lost in the labyrinth and never seen again. There is a rumour that a violent creature – a minotaur, even – lives in the labyrinth and has been killing villagers. The passenger ship on which they were travelling is called the Europa, to continue the bull analogy and highlight the journey from one realm into another.

But no, this is not that sort of novel at all. I suppose it is a philosophical exploration, but with powerfully realised characters and settings. Straight away it skips back in time, to explore why some of the members of that party had a compelling reason to visit Crete. Lord Graecen, a moderately successful poet with only a few months to live, is to inspect the City in the Rock which Axelos discovered. John Baird is haunted by the ghost of a German soldier he killed in one of the caves at the entrance to the labyrinth and believes that if he re-inters the remains on sanctified ground he will be freed. Campion, brilliant painter of ‘innocent, powerful paintings’ and deeply objectionable human being, is sent to Crete by the War Office to paint some war graves. He and Baird are acquaintances. Olaf Fearmax, a spiritualist who has been abandoned by his spirit guide, has no special reason to visit Crete: he is en route to Egypt. However, he is linked to Graecen and Baird through the figure of Hogarth, a psycho-analyst who has been treating him and Baird, and who is friends with Graecen. Because of this connection, they all decide to travel on the Europa.

The other passengers we meet on the ship (at which point for me at least the novel picks up; the back stories of Graecen et al. are necessary and interesting and yet also a bit dull). Awaiting the Second Coming, Miss Dombey is known to Baird from his youth; she is a peppery, rigidly religious woman with a little dog, planning to convert the heathen and horrified by the presence of a bidet in the bathroom of her cabin. Mr and Mrs Truman won their tickets in a competition; although they are slightly lower class than the other characters, their charm and good spirits win them over. Virginia Dale, on the other hand, young, beautiful and convalescent, turns out to be – horrors! – Cockney! And poorly educated! Poor Virginia is the only character whose thoughts we never share, although Durrell is too clever a writer not to make her intriguing. And despite their snobbery, both Graecen and Campion are drawn to her.

All the names are deliberately suggestive.

I am afraid I will include spoilers so be warned if you haven’t read the novel... And this is a pity, because I think it is important to read it at least once not knowing what lies ahead, not least because small crumbs of information are dropped on the way which entirely change your perception of a person, an event. This is most marked as regards Axelos and the minotaur.

(Pablo Picasso, ‘Blind Minotaur guided by Girl in the Night’, from La Suite Vollard (1934); found here)

On the voyage out, the odious Campion confesses to Fearmax that he has been profoundly affected by the medium’s writings:

[...] when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it – watching it happen as an extraneous thing – one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon [...]
When one begins, as you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm – it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his [...] immortal self is enshrined. [...] What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role [...]

Later on, Fearmax explains that he has spent his life creating a ‘system’, a philosophy, of how the world works. He knows that it may be incorrect; he accepts that when he reaches Egypt, if he learns anything, he will forget the elements that don’t align with his system and integrate the ones that do. For him, the value is the process, the working-out of the system for himself. He is horrified by the idea of disciples, who latch on to the system he has developed without doing the necessary work of thinking for themselves.

What both men seem to agree upon is that our reality and sense of self are created by us in reaction to death. They are an act of will. Later, Ruth Adams says of her brother, ‘He [...] used to say that the whole of the Western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and destruction.’ In the direct aftermath of the Second World War, this must have felt very sharp to Durrell’s readers. Within the novel itself, the traumatic shadow of the conflict lies on all the characters, not just Baird.

The dark labyrinth, therefore, is in one sense the human brain (which even looks labyrinthine, doesn’t it?), creating our cocoons and shaping our reality. For this reason, Hogarth, the man who seeks to understand the human mind, is prominent in the first half of the book. In the second, he is replaced perhaps by Axelos, a man whose relation to objective truth is complex and bewildering. In this way the actual labyrinth which the tourists enter becomes an embodiment of their own minds. What happens to each of them after the rockfall is not a coincidence, it is predicated on their psyches, it is the changed face of their realities in the face of death. That is reductive; the novel is not. It remains mysterious and beautiful and surprising.

The Trumans find themselves in an enforced paradise, along with an old lady who has been trapped there for over twenty years, but who experiences a sort of radical freedom. She tells Elsie Truman:

I remembered how life was before [...] I was outside everything in a certain way. Now I participate with everything. I feel joined to everything in a new kind of way. [...] In my own mind, inside (not as something I think or feel, but as something I am) inside there I no longer prohibit and select. I include. It’s the purely scientific meaning of the word ‘love’.

Have they found the ideal existence? Nothing is so simple, perhaps. Elsie Truman realises, contentedly, one evening, that this place doesn’t ‘really exist, except in their imaginations’. And the final chapter is unexpected too.

A Share of the World, by Hugo Charteris

Moonlight made a world of the near and the far. The near was vast and black, split up by spaces of nothing, and the far was pale and precise. A bush beside him was a gigantic black, but a star, a remoter sun, was a pin-hole in a bling between shoals of cloud in the low tide of weather. Light was pale smoke which showed things best when it got behind them rather than on them. [...]
Voices clamoured in his head, I can’t go on, I must go on. They’re there, just in front, they’ll wait till you’re on top of them and the shots will go through and through you like the needle of a sewing-machine through linen.

Described in the blurb (accurately, I think) as ‘a lost classic’, this is a reissue by Michael Walmer of Charteris’s first novel. It was originally published in 1953 to instant critical acclaim – there is praise from Rosamund Lehmann and Francis Wyndham on the cover, and Evelyn Waugh selected it as Sunday Times best first novel for that year. I read it as part of the Read Indies month hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

John Grant is a very young officer who has just been dispatched to the front in Italy, during the Second World War. He has been ordered to lead a recce to a farmhouse to see if German troops are still there, or if they’ve withdrawn. The first part of this novel tracks him moving through the moonlit countryside on this mission, his fear, his doubt. It will come as no surprise that things end badly. The second part of the novel is concerned with John’s life after the war has ended, and his decision to court and marry Jane. Linking these two parts is the sinister figure of Bright, embodiment of John’s shame and self-loathing; the dynamic of hunting; a sense of mysticism:

John found himself on his knees holding the wounded man’s hand. [...] All the tension and ache of his own impotence was now flooded away in a purge of pity. This he understood. This freed him, expanded him with a general affinity which went beyond the lines.
Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody’s face all the time.

With incredible skill, Charteris evokes the weirdness of life on the front lines and the almost unbearable tension of Grant’s nocturnal foray into the unknown. His vivid similes are unexpected, his immersing of us in John’s thoughts and feelings so complete that everything is strange, and everything is psychological. He filters everything so completely his own preoccupations, nobody else has an existence beyond their relation to himself. The white Italian farmhouse becomes emblematic of his struggle to overcome the parts of his character he despises; the Matlock family home where he tries to seduce Jane is a sort of trap. In both situations, John is tested by John and found wanting, by John.

(British infantry moving cautiously through the ruined streets of Impruneta, Italy, 3 August 1944. By Johnson (Sgt), No 2 Army Film & Photographic Unit, photograph NA 17570. Imperial War Museum, found here)

Woven into the wartime scenes are flashbacks to John’s (even) younger days, in which he became inculcated with the standards of masculinity he fails to live up to. Most of them are concerned with his experiences at Eton and his officer training, but the earliest is a disturbing childhood memory. John has crept out of bed to sit on the stairs, listening to the grown-ups at dinner. And then:

John heard a creak above him. […] He looked round and up. A man stood at the top of the stairs. The sudden sight of him was the cold end and blank of thought. The sick wait for this to be different – the sick reluctance to have anything to do with his eyes.
The man had blue sandshoes on, a black overcoat with a collar up and a torch, and the bristles on his peel-coloured face looked like some sort of patchy disease. No sound came from him. He seemed to be looking straight at John; then at his hand and sucked a finger. […]
The man came down ten steps as though he had slid down a wire on a velvet loop […]

Everything is there: the very slightly discombobulating prose, John alone and shut out, the feeling of horror and powerlessness, the malignant figure who I think later becomes elided with Bright in John’s mind.

The destructiveness of John’s self-disgust and solipsism is reflected in love as well as war. John has two romances, if they can be called that. The first is with Susan, who is fourteen and comes to his bed one night. It’s not clear how old exactly John is, charitably let us say he is eighteen, but he feels guilty about this and carries on a secret correspondence with her, deceiving himself that they should marry when in fact it is clear that they have nothing in common. Fortunately, Susan turns out to have more sense than him. His love for Jane is built on an even weaker foundation: he sees her dancing at a party, having never met her, and decides to marry her. Marriage will prove that he is a man and save him from ‘the web of himself’. Jane is preoccupied with her dying father and uncertain in her response to John. His anguish confuses her. Never have I hoped so ardently that a character would refuse another – for both their sakes.

 

Full House, by M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane)

Full House was Molly Keane’s seventh novel, first published in 1935, and what a splendid one it is. For it as for all her early novels she used the pseudonym ‘M.J. Farrell’, a name she had seen over a pub, because had she been identified she would have been socially ostracised by Anglo-Irish society for, essentially, selling their secrets. As a class they do not emerge from her fiction terribly well.

The house of the title is Silverue, an exquisite eighteenth-century mansion:

Between the hills and the sea this house called Silverue had been built. Groves of birches came chasing down the feet of the hills nearest the sea. Chasing because birches are forever in flight, maidenly and unsteady as maidens are. Springs burst up among them, wetting the rocks and soaking the dark mosses. These groves were quiet and drenching and full of the sea mists. A perfect buttress of a fuchsia hedge, almost, in parts quite, a tunnel, divided them from the climbing path. Polite and formal distances of lawn held them further apart from the house.

Silverue is a proper, Anglo-Irish Big House, which has survived the house-burnings of the early twentieth century. No politics, however, are acknowledged by its inhabitants, who do not acknowledge anything at all unpleasant or difficult if they can help it. The house belongs to Sir Julian Bird, but is ostensibly ruled by his wife, the beautiful and self-absorbed Olivia. Olivia irritates her three children, tyrannises over the governess and bickers with the servants. Julian, busy with his heraldry, cattle-breeding and gentlemanly sports, loves his wife too much ever to gainsay her even though, in the eyes of her visiting friend Eliza, Olivia is selfish and stupid. Sheena, the nineteen-year-old daughter ‘who wore quite literally ragged clothes, but took great trouble over her hair’, is in love with Rupert, scion of the neighbouring Big House, Owenstown.

Eliza’s visit to Silverue coincides with the return of John, the eldest child, after having recovered from a mental breakdown. His arrival will prove a catalyst for the rest of the family, exposing its fault lines, and also for Eliza. But it will be Eliza who makes the greatest sacrifice, in this social comedy with a dark streak to it.

The darkest element of the streak is the unhappy life of Miss Parker, the bearded little governess. Neither a servant nor a member of the family, not especially beloved by her pupil, Markie and expected to devote her free time to various little tasks for Olivia – planting a thousand crocus bulbs, traipsing over to Kiljennet post office or to Woodenstown to deliver a note, endlessly worming and purging the unfortunate dogs (‘I do think all the dogs should have a good Pulvexing and a sharp walk’). Silverue is ‘a cold house that did not live for her’. Even Eliza, sympathetic to most, doesn’t really see her as a person. In vain I hoped that Miss Parker’s depilatory cream would remove her facial hair, that she would find love – or at least, a kinder employer. Or burn the house down.

The story is told through shifting viewpoints, the dominant one that of the outsider, Eliza. While the other characters are essentially self-absorbed, Eliza observes the family with acute sympathy and in fact colours our perception of them. She is most critical of her friend, Olivia, while allowing that she has a genius for gardening and home decorating. But Eliza is in love with Olivia’s husband, and so is perhaps less generous to Olivia than she might be – and perhaps more forgiving of Julian than she might be. Aloof, Julian glides past unpleasantness; he loves his wife but expects her to maintain her beauty and, ultimately, he prefers to sacrifice Sheena’s happiness rather than expose a secret which reflects poorly on him. Even Eliza notes ‘with the same old surprise [...] his obstinate mouth and cruel secret eyes’.

(George Barret, Powerscourt House, County Wicklow with the Sugarloaf mountain (1760); Yale Center for British Art; found here)

Molly Keane writes lush and lyrical descriptions which nevertheless are judiciously controlled, each word precisely chosen. She keeps them to short, effective dabs to conjure the Arcadian qualities of Silverue and its environs. Indeed, the house reflects the family: although good to look at, it is ‘dark and flat and just too high in the middle’; its wings are graceful but the house’s ‘face’ is obscured by ivy and another plant called ‘Good Neighbour’. It is lovely, imperfect and partially hidden from view. Meanwhile, the garden delicately reflects Olivia (lush, gorgeous, high maintenance, occasionally vulgar) but also the shifting emotions of the people there:

Eliza was wearing a long silver evening gown and a green tweed coat. She went toiling up the path through the woods as though she were a tree herself walking. Now the evening was more silver than it was grey, and when the birches thinned and scattered there were rocks among the scabious and the bell heather where you could sit and see an angle of the house which was like a dream of a place that you will see and have known before you see it. Not a very pleasant or comfortable dream. This was where Eliza was going.

Here Eliza is identified – identifies herself – with the maidenly birches, the part of Silverue that is not quite part of the garden, the romance of the place. And indeed, romance is to follow her. But it is typical of Keane that she complicates the idyll, disconcerts us with the house that is unreal, lost, a dream, a place ‘that you will see and have known before you see it’.

The beauty and order Olivia creates in Silverue seems protective. It’s cultivated loveliness is contrasted with the hills, where fires burn on the moors, and the wild sea. These are the backdrops for hunting and fishing expeditions, places from which entertainment and possibly food may be extracted before the Birds withdraw back into Silverue.

(George Barret, Powerscourt waterfall (1760); Walker Art Gallery; found here)

Halfway through the novel, they attend a tennis party at Owenstown along with various ghastly people and Rupert’s two discontented, scheming sisters. While Silverue is romantic and decorative, Owenstown is principally sporting: ‘a charming old house’ in ‘fox-hunting country’, looking down the valley through ‘belts of woodland [...] strong and well-preserved covert for foxes’. Aunt Louisa’s water-garden there is most certainly not up to Silverue standards:

There was something almost invigorating in its awful failure to please. [...] Even Aunt Louisa would wonder about it a little at times, but she would still any query in her mind by buying another pot of bronze or stone or alabaster and disposing it in some fresh nook. [...] And there was always room for a new nymph, cherub or bird-bath [...] In these days when so many people have such successions of good ideas about gardens and put them into execution with such practical efficiency, it comes as a kind of inverted pleasure to see a really good gross unbelievable muddle like this.

The third house which features in this novel is ‘a queer empty house with high rooms and lovely ceilings [...] an abandoned house, and yet for one night here was music and dancing and wine and rare food again.’ It’s the venue for the nightmarish ‘fowl-and-damage’ dance (which I think is to raise money for reparations the hunt must pay for what it carelessly destroys in its pursuit of foxes), forsaken and filled with trees and where lovers will quarrel. Perhaps this house hints at the future for Silverue and Owenstown, at present ‘full’ but perhaps one day to fall empty, their families gone.

 

Shiny New Books: Otherworld: Nine Tales of Wonder and Romance from Medieval Ireland, by Lisa M. Bitel

(Illustration by Saba Joshaghani from Otherworld: The woman in the green cloak came to him smiling, but she raised a horsewhip and struck him)

My review of Otherworld is now up at Shiny. A lovely little book, funny, strange, sad. I enjoyed it so much.

 

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker

She knew that she was behaving horribly, she knew she was indeed horrible, a despicable compound of arrogance, covetousness and self-centred rage. She was like one of those seething, stinking mud spouts which boil up in Iceland and lob burning rocks at passers-by. She felt guilt for blighting Vera’s pleasure and excitement; she felt shame. Her shame and guilt only made her angrier.

I’ve long wanted to read this portrayal of a gothic Scottish childhood, and the dark days before Christmas was as good a moment as any to settle down with it. Elspeth Barker published it, her only novel, in 1991. In it, she reworks elements of her own life (she was born during the Second World War, hand-reared a jackdaw, and grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a boys’ boarding school) for her story of Janet; indeed, Janet may not be too different to her (unorthodox, a devout animal-lover and an enthusiast for poetry and the Classics). While occasionally this gives a flavour of the writer’s own resentments being channelled unmediated through Janet, this novel’s magic lies in the beauty of its prose, its effortless conjuration of atmosphere and its depiction of someone who cannot and will not fit in.

The first thing we learn about Janet is that she is already dead, aged only sixteen; pushed down the staircase in her family’s castle home ‘oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress’, her body dappled by the colours of the stained-glass window above her. Her family is ambivalent about her death; Janet was too different to them, she ‘had blighted their lives’. ‘[T]he speywives, the fishwives, the midwives, the ill-wishers’ blame Janet for her own murder, and her jackdaw is her only mourner. This beginning flavours everything that follows with poignancy.

After establishing Janet’s unhappy demise, the narrative skips back to her birth and her early life in her grandparents’ Glaswegian manse; her father’s return at the end of World War II and the family’s removal to the castle of Auchnasaugh, where Janet’s parents set up their school. Janet, now the eldest of five siblings, at first doesn’t understand and later refuses to understand conventional behaviour. She withdraws into literature and the ‘stern and wild’ landscape around her which strikes a chord with her nature, in contrast to the narrow-minded stupidity she sees in people.

But then it was summer and a rare, exquisite summer. [...] Janet forgot her earthly doom and rose before daylight to ride bareback up the grassy tracks through the woods to the moors. She watched the sun rise over the far hills, the mist float in steamy filaments off the glen and the silent golden day bring glory to the sombre pines. She was the first person in the world; only she disturbed the dew.

Any possible human allies she has are ineffective and easily disposed of, by fate or her parents – her grandparents are elderly, her beloved grandmother Ningning dies, alcoholic Cousin Lila is too self-absorbed and frail to offer much in the way of companionship. So Janet finds some comfort with birds and animals, ‘whom she loved without qualification’ and of whom there are many: a parrot, the jackdaw, ponies, the dogs and cats who roam the castle and ‘lick the butter’ to the disgust of a hearty visiting family.

The novel’s title comes from its epigraph, by Sir Walter Scott:

O Caledonia, stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Friends and family reveal to Janet her shortcomings as a social being. She acts according to what her own common sense or desires dictate: these are not society’s codes. It becomes hard to know what to do in any given situation. Once, when they’re driving to the dentist’s, Janet’s little sister Lulu opens the car door and falls out, and Janet says nothing. Instead, she waits, knowing that she will somehow be blamed as soon as the adults notice.

What Caledonia, the ‘meet nurse’, reveals to Janet is the beauty and the brutality of existence, the ever-presence of death. The universal truths that lie beneath the thin film of modern society. Janet’s rural castle life is far from glamorous (although it is Romantic). Weasels kill rabbits; lobsters are boiled alive; a headless deer hangs by the sawmill. In Arcadia ego, as Janet would appreciate.

And as we already know, the ‘poetic child’ will never have to test the nurse’s lessons against an independent existence in the world. She will never grow up.

The child’s-eye view is faultlessly depicted: elaborate ways to dispose of nasty lunches, the wince of tight pigtails, the problem of siblings (‘A nasty rat has buried your baby. She’s gone now,’ the infant Janet announces to her mother, after she’s filled her baby sister’s pram with dead leaves), the bizarre terrors (such as Janet’s conviction that a witch lives in a ruin near her school). In her instinct for the grotesque and the absurd, and her sympathy for children, Barker has a spiritual sister in Barbara Comyns.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker by Jane Bown, 1991; found here)

Barker offsets her novel’s rich gothic tones with a dark humour; there is ridiculousness even in horrible moments. When Rab the dog slaughters the escaped hens, he has to wear a dead chicken around his neck (a blackly comic ‘primitive aversion therapy’). Everything is vividly, even unnervingly evoked: each word perfectly chosen, the prose full of wonderful rhythms. Barker weaves a dark, glittering spell that draws you into Janet’s world, her restless imagination and her savage refusal to compromise herself. I kept hoping that magically she would not die after all...

What fun she would have as a ghost. She could hardly wait.

To Catch a Moon, by Rym Kechacha

(Remedios Varo, Embroidering the Mantle, centre panel of a triptych, 1961; found here)

Normally, when I buy a book I read about it – the back-cover copy, reviews, the first few pages, that sort of thing. But sometimes I choose a book because I imagine I would like the person who wrote it. I think perhaps that is where the difference lies between books you admire and books you genuinely love: the author has a sensibility or a way of looking at the world that speaks to you and they become a favourite author. That favourite author may write books that are more or less good, but you enjoy them anyway because that sensibility is still there.

So it was with this novel. (Which is, for the avoidance of doubt, very good indeed.)

By chance I read an interview with Rym Kechacha at the British Fantasy Society (did I see a link to it in Bluesky?). She loves Diana Wynne Jones, and she also likes Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kelly Link and gardening. Definitely my kind of person. She has written a novel inspired by the paintings of Remedios Varo. A painter whose work I love, though I don’t know much about her. All these ingredients impelled me to buy a copy of To Catch a Moon as soon as I could find one (sadly, it is out of print at present but there are plenty of copies floating around on the internet and perhaps soon it will be snapped up by another publisher).

And I loved it! One of its pleasures is working out what sort of novel it is, and where it’s going, and how the pieces fit together – so I’ll try not to give too much away.

(Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956. MoMA; found here.

It is in a way a portal story, with you, the reader, being the character that travels through the portal – Varo’s kitchen in Mexico City in the middle of the last century – into a world that has been inspired by Varo’s paintings and may or may not be inside her imagination. It’s a world that is governed by different laws to ours, stitched into existence by yellow-haired girls in a tower in the woods, and finely balanced in a contract between the powers of the Moon, the Sun and the Earth. There is a group of travelling performers – a woman, a talking goat, a trickster juggler, an enchanted lion made of leaves. There is a wandering star child. There is an owl woman, who paints baby birds by moonlight and then they come alive. There are witches with flaming thumbs. All of these people will be drawn together, but you’ll have to read the novel to find out why this is.

Here are the labra trees, stitched in a thread that sparkles green and gold when they raise their needles. Here are the flecks of grey foam, frothing on the waves as the wind drags them into a curl. Here are the sloping slate roofs, perfect cones and pyramids balanced atop the boxes of houses. Keep the hand steady, don’t let the fingers slip. Not a stitch too many, nor a snip too few. Mandoré calls out the patterns from his book and stirs the urn with his great silvery staff and they’d better keep up; let their fingers fly across the silken folds of the world they’re making. If they let it slip by unmade they’ll feel the sting of that staff across their backs.

Kechacha’s prose is careful and beautiful; at times it becomes an incantation, summoning the world into existence as the girls sew. The magic that she conjures up in her precise descriptions of flowers and foxes, wheeled spirits and joyful witches is the mysterious force that flows through everything in the world and creates a harmony in everything. But, while this world seems a lovely place to be and the story is told at a leisurely place that allows you to enjoy it fully, it is constructed upon a foundation of suffering. It requires a small number of people to eke out wretched and enslaved existences to create and sustain it. The novel delicately asks: in an ecosystem where everything is co-dependent and finely balanced, what does it mean to have free will?

Any piece of fiction which centres creativity also explores at some level the act of writing and of making art itself. Here, the world is created by girls, albeit imprisoned and compelled by male spirits; girls who embroider, doing traditional and culturally undervalued women’s work. The thread with which they stitch is magically possessed and it is the thread that creates, guiding the girls’ needles. Some of their stitched creations are also creative: the owl woman, but also the witches and the wandering players. All of this has been woven into words by Kechacha, who herself draws on the art painted by Varo; layers upon layers.

Thinking about this in the terms of free will that the novel has set up, it’s clear that there are layers of exploitation and constraint involved in the acts of creation depicted in the book and in the book’s own creation. Within the book, the sewing girls and the Moon’s daughter both create under duress, imprisoned. The creativity of other characters - Leira, the owl woman - is also exploited, more subtly, by Luna. Meanwhile, in the writing of the novel itself, Kechacha has chosen some formal constraints: the world depicted in her writing is a world conjured up by selecting from and linking Varo’s paintings and must retain a fidelity to them. And she has framed the fantastical part of her book with an apparently realist piece of fiction constructed around real people: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Walter Gruen, containing what might seem like unreality with something that purports to be reality.

The girls and the owl woman within the novel are able to create in the most literal way: their art brings things to life. Yet they are also shown most literally as channels for a force that originates outside them and is directed by the Moon, an artistic compulsion if you like that flows through the thread and the prism. (Look at the painting below, Creation of Birds, to see what I mean.) In this way they are analagous with witches, traditionally seen as instruments of darkness. The significant difference is that the owl woman directs that compulsion herself and the girls are forced by Mandoré and his fellows. In the frame story, Remedios struggles to reconnect somehow with this vital source of creativity, something both necessary and dominating, external and internal, that guides and possesses.

At the end of the novel, Remedios is working again. At some level, the story has refreshed her: she has caught the moon.

(Remedios Varo, Creation of Birds, 1957; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; found here)

The Last Murder at the End of the World, by Stuart Turton

Having – is ‘enjoyed’ really the right word? ‘admired and been so wound up by I could not put it down’ is a better description – Stuart Turton’s first novel, The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, there was absolutely no way I could walk past The Last Murder at the End of the World when I spotted it in our library.

Both books are detective novels, very much in the Golden Age tradition – but with added existentialism, which piles on the sense of urgency. The Last Murder is set in a post-apocalyptic future – no! Wait! Don’t let that put you off! It’s set in a village on an island. Much of the village is in a former military barracks, but the villagers have painted bright flowers and animals over the crumbling concrete, planted old jeeps with flowers and converted an old radar dish into a bird bath. In the mornings, they work in the service of the village – farming, fishing, teaching. In the afternoons and evenings they rest, eat communally, perform entertainments for each other. It all seems a pretty idyllic existence, if simple and with limited medical resources. (Worryingly, books are in short supply and seem to be mainly Sherlock Holmes stories.)

(And there is a map! Always a bonus. From here)

However, this is the last outpost of humanity. On the horizon hums a fog of insects which kills everything it touches and which has destroyed the rest of the earth. Only the island’s emitters keep them at bay. Other not so fun facts: the climate is hot, there’s a nightly curfew and everybody dies in their sleep the night they turn sixty. Despite this, the villages seem content – except perhaps Emory, who doesn’t seem to be good at anything except asking annoying questions.

Then someone is murdered, triggering the switching off of the emitters and the gradual encroachment of the fog. Emory has 107 hours to solve the murder before the insects cover the island and kill everything on it. That’s a bit more pressure than Poirot generally faces.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the most curious thing about this novel, and that’s the narrating voice. Abi is an entity who can see into everyone’s minds. She is described at one point as a sort of communal conscience, but she’s also a security system. When a villager is upset or angry, she can reason with them, talk them out of destructive or hurtful behaviour. She too works in service to the common good. But she wipes everyone’s memories of the night of the murder, so that even the killer doesn’t know they’re guilty. Why has she done this?

What makes this novel so clever therefore is that, on one level, we’re with Emory, racing against time to save her island. On another, we’re trying to work out what Abi is and why she is, because this explains the what and the why of this society’s existence. And the further we go, the more moral questions are thrown up for us to consider.

I can’t really write any more than this because working things out is one of the joys of the book, of course, and I don’t want to spoil that for you if you haven’t read it yet. Can I use the word ‘metafictional’ without being pretentious? Because yes, this is. Other joys: the richly imagined island world, the characters who are genuinely trying to do their best for each other, the sense of a quasi-communist society which seems rather pleasant, questions about memory and history, about power and benevolence. The big surprise? Finding halfway of so through the novel that you would prefer humans to become extinct…

 

Salem Chapel, by Margaret Oliphant

Well, my cunning plan for monthly reading round-ups has obviously failed, so it’s back to traditional reviews for me for now. The main problem is that at the end of each month I’d forgotten what I’d read and anything interesting I might have thought about it. Make notes, Helen? Perhaps I will. Perhaps that can be my new year’s resolution.

I only finished Salem Chapel a few days ago so I can at least vaguely remember it... It’s a slightly odd novel, imagine if Barchester Towers was walking down the street and was suddenly assailed by East Lynne and you might have an idea. Peopled with the kind of full-blooded characters, from Mr Tozer, the dependable butterman and deacon, to Adelaide Tufton, the acerbic and relentlessly curious invalid, that I delight in a Victorian novel, it does become a page-turner when the melodramatic subplot gets going and I stayed up late anxious to find out what happened...

Fresh from theological college, John Vincent arrives in Carlingford as the new Dissenting minister for Salem Chapel. Brimful of idealism, he sees himself tending to the destitute and delivering sermons so inspiring he will soon be mixing with the town’s highest echelons of society. Alas! The poor, though poor, are not quite as needy as he had anticipated and his congregation is drawn not from the upper classes but from trade. Not only are they smug about their wretchedly middle-class ways, but they expect him to participate in their endless tea meetings and pay them social calls as well. Vincent pleases them by preaching so vigorously that pew subscriptions soar, but then promptly falls in love with the young dowager Lady Western, who is of the Anglican persuasion. Mrs Tozer, Mrs Pigeon and Mrs Brown all heartily disapprove of young men chasing ladies above their station (especially when there are unmarried Tozer and Pigeon daughters around) and so Vincent quickly loses his bloom and finds himself struggling to retain the confidence of his congregation – who pay his wages and therefore call the shots. Respectability and value for money are both highly prized in Salem Chapel, and mooning after Lady Western casts doubt on whether the new minister represents either of those ideals. Vincent, certain of his superiority to the cheesemongers and greengrocers of his flock, is blind to his danger.

An anomaly among the Salem Chapel worshippers is Mrs Hilyard, a thin, sardonic woman with a secret past and an endless pile of sewing. And far away in Lonsdale, a mysterious gentleman begins to court Susan, Vincent’s beautiful sister. Could there be a connection here? Reader, there most assuredly is – and thus the sensation part of the novel bursts in.

According to Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote the excellent introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition, Margaret Oliphant (a widow with three children to feed) seems to have introduced the sensation plot in order to increase sales, but was herself unsure of it. Beside the acute observations of Carlingford life, and the wonderfully drawn characters – the Tozers, Mrs Vincent, Lady Western – the sensation plot does come over as histrionic peopled with cardboard figures. Nevertheless, its unnaturalness does reflect the feeling, when something so terrible happens, that it is all a nightmare, unreal, discombobulating. And although it might be artistically weaker than the realist novel into which it irrupts, it does raise the stakes and make for compulsive reading, while testing Vincent and the chapel-goers and finding them, in their different ways, wanting.

The very extremity of the crisis somehow points up the ridiculous binaries that govern everyday life. It excites the prurience of Carlingford but, conveyed to them principally through the newspapers, does not belong to everyday life and fails to awaken their empathy. Far from rallying to their embattled minister, they chafe at his absences and failure to place them above his own family.

Oliphant uses the drama to point up the hypocrisies of Victorian society in general and the cruel double standards that existed against women. And yet,while the men have power and freedom and so delightfully prefer death to dishonour for their womenfolk, the female characters are not without resource. They wield the soft power within their community and, when the chips are down, avenge and escape without male assistance. Even the self-deprecating Phoebe has her eye on the main chance. As Tozer, endlessly politicking but outmanoeuvred by Mrs Pigeon, says, ‘it’s all along of the women, sir – it’s them as is at the bottom of all the mischief in a flock.’

(Portrait of Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881, thus almost twenty years after she wrote Salem Chapel; National Portrait Gallery; found here)