(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.
This month I stuck with easy reads but ventured away from rereads to new books.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang
After finishing The Secret History I wanted to carry on reading more of it but of course, that isn’t possible. Reading Babel was my attempt to stay in that mood. I admit, I started it anxiously, the subtitle and Kuang’s reputation suggested that my squeamishness would take a battering. Fellow wimps: it is not too graphic. The story is set in an alternative nineteenth century and it has a brilliant concept, which Kuang uses to explore both the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism. The concept is this: if you inscribe in silver two words from different languages with approximately the same meaning, the gap in meaning becomes charged, magical. So you can use these silver bars to power everything. Had Kuang left it at that, it would have been terrific, but she couldn’t resist elaborating on the idea at length, which (a) became a clog on the story and (b) resulted in some contradictions. I am not usually that bothered about show vs tell but there was an awful lot of telling in this book and this held it back from greatness, though it was good.
Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo
Like Babel, this is a novel which I think needed a few more edits to refine. This is the sequel to Bardugo’s first novel for adults, Ninth House, and again it’s set in a version of Yale where there are secret societies practising magic. The whole Yale university scene is so weird I was astonished to find elements I assumed Bardugo had invented are in fact true. There are indeed secret societies and they are called things like Skull and Bones and they do have special houses they call tombs… Anyway, Ninth House was clever and fun but Hell Bent, while very readable, is messy. The central problem is too much plot, with insufficient foreshadowing so it feels as if things are being made up on the hoof just to enable another plot twist, and characters reduced to mere puppets of the narrative. Plenty to enjoy but it did feel like a missed opportunity.
Five Bad Deeds, by Caz Frear
Married with three children, up for a good teaching job and planning the extensive renovation of her dream house, Ellen has an enviable life with solid friendships. Unfortunately, someone sets out to destroy it. Also unfortunately, pretty much everyone in this novel – which is told from the viewpoints of several different characters – loathes Ellen, and she’s pretty unkind about them too. Although the constant sniping did get me down a bit, this well-plotted thriller bowls along at a neat pace and gave a few deft swipes at middle-England’s values.
The Harp of the Grey Rose, by Charles de Lint
Loved this. Very much in the mood of The Hobbit or the Prydain Chronicles, it’s a gentle fantasy about a harpist who falls in love with a young lady who is not all she seems to be and embarks on a quest to save her and overcome an evil that will destroy the world. The music, the delicately melancholic feeling, the talking bear and magical creatures – this is a fantasy world you would like to live in.
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green
Although I’ve read Arthurian romances, lais and poems, I’ve never made it through a whole cycle and when I saw this in an Oxfam bookshop it just fell into my hand. A quick and easy read, as you’d expect. Surprises: Arthur doesn’t seem to be that great a king and just sends out his knights to sort out problems. It’s a relief when Nimue carts Merlin off, since as soon as anyone does anything, he bobs up and says, ‘Oh no you’re doomed now and Logres shall founder and the darkness will return,’ which has a damping effect one would imagine. Gearing up for Malory now.
Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston
Amari joins the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs when her brother disappears, determined to find him. As a trainee, she’ll have to pass a series of competitive assessments. Since she is smart and possesses extraordinarily strong powers, this should be straightforward: unfortunately the sort of powers she has are reviled and make her an object of suspicion. Very Men in Black meets magical school story, this is funny and endearing.
High Rise Mystery, by Sharna Jackson
Meticulous Nik and her dramatic sister Norva are horrified to discover the body of their art teacher, Hugo Knightley-Webb, at the bottom of the rubbish chute in their block of flats. Knowing everyone in the Tri, they are ideally placed to solve the murder and make a perfect team. The story crackles along, and you will hear Nik and Norva in your head long after you’ve closed the book.
The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett
Not sure why I felt like reading about Christmas in July, but I did. How did a skeleton end up inside the Fairway Players’ panto prop beanstalk? This short novel follows a similar structure to The Appeal, with our two plucky young lawyers Charlotte and Femi once again sifting through emails, text messages and other documents to ascertain the truth. The solution is pretty obvious but this isn’t important as the pleasure lies in the Players’ constant backstabbing and sniping, culminating in an unforgettable performance of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Only proviso: read The Appeal first.
A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)
I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)
The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.
Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...
(Image used on the current Penguin Classics edition of The Romance of Tristan; found here)
In the introduction to his translation of Béroul’s Romance of Tristan, Alan S. Fedrick warns us:
[…]Beroul’s poem contains much that will startle and baffle a present-day reader who judges it by the modern aesthetic criteria of fictional narratives. There is no doubt that Beroul’s poem is sadly defective by modern standards; for it is far from easy to imagine that a piece of narrative fiction can exist as a serious work of art while dispensing with elements as fundamental as a coherent plot, an ordered flow of events with a clearly discernible causal nexus, and convincing characterisation.
If that is a little offputting, postmodernism has interposed itself between the contemporary reader and Fedrick, whose words were published in 1970. I don’t think that we now apply those aesthetic criteria to all fiction, and in fact this passage seems more dated than Béroul’s poem, written down in c. 1170–90. It is true that the poem is studded with contradictions – for instance, several enemies are killed off more than once, gleefully – so that it can occasionally feel as if you’re reading several palimpsests laid one over the other rather than a single poem. These may be accounted for by the oral origins of the poem, the inattention of the scribe who copied it down into the only surviving manuscript of it or its author being not one but at least two poets; they may also be deliberate aesthetic choices. In any case, the poem is held together by its central concern, the love affair of Tristan and Yseut.
‘Sir, I love Yseut so much. Because of her I cannot sleep nor even doze. My decision is soon taken: I would rather be a beggar with her and live on herbs and acorns than possess the kingdom of the rich King Otran. I beg you not to ask me to leave her, for I cannot do so.’
Still, while this version of Tristan and Yseut may be the earliest written one still in existence, any reader expecting a wonderful romance of noble, star-crossed lovers will be surprised. The narrator of the poem is cheerily partisan, vituperating the lovers’ enemies (‘Whoever would think of such a low trick?’; ‘May God curse them!’) and exclaiming excitedly at moments of high tension (‘God, what folly! He was too rash’). What is odd is that Tristan and Yseut do not seem to justify such support. They suffer no qualms of conscience over their illicit relationship and deceive with both outright lies and, more usually, with ambiguous oaths. Tristan, who even before meeting Yseut has amassed a lot of experience in disguise and deception, repeatedly avows that he will prove his innocence in trial by combat, well aware that he is such a great warrior that nobody will dare challenge him. This is not the spirit of trial by combat, during which God is supposed to support the virtuous, not the strong. Tristan’s reasoning seems to be he is strong so therefore must be virtuous and supported by God, and he’s certainly right that nobody will risk fighting him. He is really little more than a bully, and not averse to murdering unarmed opponents either. And Yseut? Having persuaded her maid, Brangain, to take her place on her wedding night, Yseut tries to have Brangain murdered to safeguard her secret. She also swears on the holiest relics in Cornwall that ‘no man ever came between my thighs except the leper who carried me on his back across the ford and my husband, King Mark’. The leper is Tristan in disguise, so while Yseut’s vow has one meaning for us, the readers, it intentionally deceives the other characters. In fact, there is no moral heart to the story: the only religious character, Friar Ogrin, advises the lovers to lie to the king in order to be pardoned. King Mark himself is not at all sympathetic, quick to violence and easily persuaded by whichever of his barons has his ear at any one moment. We may not be able to approve of Tristan and Yseut’s behaviour, but we can’t feel in the least sorry for the cuckolded husband. Powerful as Mark is, especially compared to a foreign knight and a woman, he is easily outwitted by their resourcefulness and courage.
(Illustration used for the cover of Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, translated by Hilaire Belloc and completed by Paul Rosenfeld, New York: Random House; found here)
So what is going on here? Well, it seems to me that Béroul has chosen this legend, which would already have been in circulation orally for many years, to undermine mediaeval ideas about courtly love. Although their love for each other is strong and they willingly suffer for one another, and although their ingenuity is admirable, Tristan and Yseut are portrayed by Béroul as selfish and deceitful adulterers. They play with words and distort the truth (even in the quote above, in which Tristan claims he cannot sleep for love of Yseut, he is fibbing for effect). Courtly love is, like the lovers’ language, just a disguise for a rather less glamorous truth, a pretty dress to cover selfishness. Is Béroul also criticising an equivocal Church and a violent feudal society? That I don’t feel qualified to answer. However, I do urge you to settle down with this ambiguous, lively and often funny little book one evening and draw your own conclusions.
(Cat’s paw prints on fifteenth-century
manuscript in the State Archives of Dubrovnik, photographed by Emir O. Filipović; found here)
(Worse than paw prints! In about 1420 a
scribe in Deventer, the Netherlands, returned one morning to continue work on
his manuscript to discover a cat had weed on it! In a rage, the scribe drew a
picture of the cat and wrote ‘Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper
nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum ostum in
nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne
permittantur libri aperti per noctem uni cattie venire possunt’ – Here nothing is missing, but a cat urinated
on this during the night. Cursed be the pesky cat that urinated over this book
during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too.
And take very good care not to leave books open at night where cats can come.
Cologne, Historisches Archiv, G.B. quarto, 249, fol. 68r, found here)
What were cats doing in mediaeval libraries anyway? Read this post to find out... It contains a link to this charming ninth-century Irish poem, translated by Robin Flowers:
The Scholar and his Cat, Pangur Bán
I and Pangur Bán my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.Better far than praise of men
’Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.’Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.’Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
(Picture of cats and rats from unidentified mediaeval manuscript)
(Pisanello, Madonna della quaglia [Madonna of the quails], tempera on wood, c. 1420; Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona)
Hello again! I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long, both here and on your blogs, I’ve fallen completely out of the loop and it feels strange now I have a moment to reflect upon it. I have missed you! The last weeks – maybe months? – have been a frenzy of teacher-training tasks, lengthy viruses and spurts of preparation for Christmas. Finally, all of that is finished and tomorrow we are setting off to stay with my parents in England for a week. From the news I understand that only the highest peaks of Britain are still above water and of course now rather crowded with the entire population clinging to them, so we are packing a boat, candles, tinned food.
In book news I am now deep in an Iris Murdoch binge, I had forgotten how good she is and how much I like her. This follows the Holly Roth detective novel I bought earlier this year, which I am afraid was pretty awful in terms of characterization, plot and style and yet whiled away a couple of plague-ridden hours most pleasantly, and some Ann Bridge, whose novels I enjoy but I have to take in small doses as she is so fearfully bossy.
Anyway, after the holidays I promise I shall write here much more frequently; I’ll reply to Florence’s questions and crack on with the Grimms’ tales. In the mean time, here is one of my favourite Christmas poems: the anonymous fifteenth-century ‘I syng of a mayden’, which survives in one copy, in the British Library (Sloane 2593). You can hear Benjamin Britten’s enchanting setting of it here.
I syng of a mayden
þat is makeles,
kyng of alle kynges
to here sone che ches.He came also stylle
þer his moder was
as dew in aprylle,
þat fallyt on þe gras.He cam also stylle
to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille,
þat fallyt on þe flour.He cam also stylle
þer his moder lay
as dew in Aprille,
þat fallyt on þe spray.Moder & mayden
was neuer non but che –
wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.
(þ is pronounced ‘th’; ‘che ches’ means ‘she chose’)
Merry Christmas, dear readers and fellow bloggers! Thank you for all your comments and all the pleasure your own web-logs have given me this year. May you all enjoy the holidays and let us all look forward to a splendid 2013!
It’s a dank dark morning here in Belgium and I am huddled cosily under a blanket in my dank dark study and this poem seeped into my head.
O westron wynde when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne –
Cryst, yf my love wer in my armys
And I in my bed agayne!
(Anon., 1520; from Paul Keegan, ed., The New Penguin Book of English Verse (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000), p. 74)
There’s a lot of smalle rayne falling here, but it’s nice to be inside and warm. Have a lovely weekend, dear friends!
(Jean Mansel, illuminated page in Vie de Nostre Seigneur Jésus Christ (11.1 x 15.8 cm, fol. 174), fifteenth century;
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; found here with the following explanation of conception and ensoulment:
This illumination from a fifteenth-century French manuscript shows a couple in bed. The Holy Trinity—father, son and Holy Ghost—watch from the upper left corner and send them a childlike form. This recalls the iconography of the Annunciation. The scroll quotes Genesis from the Latin Bible: ‘Let us create man in our image and likeness’ (Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudem nostram). The slippers by the bed refer to God’s commandment to Moses to remove his sandals before the holy ground of the burning bush, and so point to the holiness of the sacrament of marriage. The woman’s extended right arm probably signifies Eve’s offering the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, reminding us that we all inherit Original Sin at conception. The burning candle on the mantelpiece indicates the beginning of a new life. Ensoulment and conception are tightly linked here, and so probably took place in the same moment, contrary to Aristotelian and vernacular ideas.)
(King David in the Psalms, The Westminster Psalter, London, c. 1200 , British Library, Royal 2 A. xxii, f. 14v © British Library Board)
An exhibition of the British Library’s collection of manuscripts owned by medieval kings and queens of England is opening on 11 November; I am desperate to go and see it but probably won’t be able to do so. It looks wonderful. The collection is of luxury books which belonged to monarchs from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, truly works of art. Because they are books, and thus usually closed, the paint colours often remain almost as vivid as the day they were painted. The press release promises that the books give insight into royal identity, prescribed regal behaviour and moral codes, and politics.
Below is an extraordinary picture from Henry VIII’s psalter (c. 1540) with Henry posing as (a very middle-aged) David. The colours almost hurt your eyes! Henry chose to identify himself with the supposed writer of the Psalms, a great warrior, musician and poet and also the direct ancestor of Jesus; nothing if not modest. David had an adulterous affair with Bathsheba, and perhaps Henry allows an allusion to his affair and marriage with Anne Boleyn. Bathsheba’s first son by David was struck down with a mortal illness by the Lord; Anne’s son also died (stillborn). Anne had been executed in 1536 and Henry may be affirming that his relationship with her was sinful, the result of (her) witchcraft.
I wish I could decipher the note in the margin...
(Henry VIII as David, Henry VIII’s Psalter, London c. 1540, Royal 2 A xvi © British Library Board)
And here is Henry V, as a yong man and Prince of Wales, from a copy of the Regement of Princes which was made for him. This was an English book in verse which gave exemplars (or ‘mirrors’) of good and bad regal behaviour for a prince to reflect upon. The image shows Henry receiving a copy of that very book from the kneeling author. Incorporating his portrait in the Regement makes him an exemplar as well as a reader, and binds him personally more closely to the lessons of the text.
(Henry V as a young prince, Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, England, c. 1430–38, British Library, Royal 17 D. vi, ff. 39v–40 © British Library Board)
And this is fabulous in both senses of the word! It’s a map of the pilgrimage route to Jerusalem, drawn by Matthew Paris in around 1250 and forming the preface to a copy of his Historia Anglorum. The itinerary begins in London and then travels by way of France and Apulia, with major stops and landmarks drawn on it. The camel is enchanting.
(Itinerary to Jerusalem, Matthew Paris, Map to Jerusalem, St Albans, c. 1250, Royal 14 C vii, ff. 2–5 © British Library Board)
Even if I cannot actually get to the exhibition, I will be selling my first-born and only child in order to purchase a copy of the catalogue.
(All captions are those written by the British Library; see here for further information.)
Tutivillus or Titivillus is a demon associated with writing and literacy. In the Middle Ages he was painted on church walls and carved on misericords, bench ends and corbels; he trod the boards as a character in the Towneley Judicium and Mankind; he introduced errors into scribes’ work copying texts and his exploits were described in sermons, conduct books and poems. You can see him lurking beside a monk’s desk in the picture I used for my profile photograph, an expression of concentration on his face, a stealthy claw laid by the ink well (it’s a fourteenth-century image I took from here; the original source is unfortunately not given). Later he haunted printing presses, causing typesetters to make mistakes.
I am very fond of Tutivillus and wrote my MA dissertation about his representations in mediaeval English church art and sermon exempla. Exempla were illustrative stories drawn from folklore, the Bible, everyday life, the writer’s own imagination; they can be found in sermon collections referred to by priests, conduct books and didactic treatises. There are two about Tutivillus. The most common relates how a priest, deacon or saint sees Tutivillus perched high up in a church noting down the idle gossip of parishioners who are chattering rather than paying attention to the Mass; the people talk so much that he must stretch out his parchment with his teeth in order to fit all the words on it; in many versions the parchment breaks, Tutivillus bangs his head on the wall or pillar of the church and the priest laughs and warns the congregation, who usually repent and oblige the demon to erase what he has written. In the other exemplum Tutivillus is again seen in a church by a man of God, but this time the devil is creeping through the choir with a bulging sack over his shoulder. He explains that he is gathering up all the ‘syalablys & woordys, ouerskipped and synkopyed, & verse & psalymys þe whiche þese clerkys han stolyn in þe qweere, & haue fayled in here seruyse’ (from the Alphabetum Narrationum: An Alphabet of Tales) and stuffing them into this sack. In some versions, after they die the offending monks are sent to Hell where they must carry sacks full of the words they mispronounced in saying Mass and thus stole from God.
I burbled on at length on various aspects of all this in my dissertation, but what I found most fascinating was that both these stories dramatise a spoken sound becoming a visible written mark on a page, a process which must have seemed astonishing to people encountering it for the first time in a culture moving from the oral to the literate. I particularly liked the idea of mumbled words attaining a three-dimensional form and weight and lying on the church floor like lumps of half-chewed bread for Tutivillus to slip into his bag. To me it is all of a piece with the mediaeval love of allegory, of taking abstract qualities and clothing them, with transubstantiation, with approved and transgressive language, with St Augustine’s theory that a person’s mind creates an image of the word when he or she hears it. But this post is already far too long and tortuous, a bit like Tutivillus's parchment, ha ha.
You can see a carving of Tutivillus on a bench end in Charlton Mackrell here and craning in solicitously to hear the tittle-tattle of two ladies of the mid-fourteenth century here, his parchment in his right hoof. Anne Marshall has posted surviving wall paintings here; I have posted her picture of the one in Little Melton, Norfolk, above (a faint Tutivillus can just be perceived standing on the bench to the right).
