a gallimaufry

round-up: July 2024

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.

 

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

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...

 

on Beatrix Potter and Brer Rabbit

Perhaps you missed the slight kerfuffle about Beatrix Potter recently? I certainly did; it wasn’t until I was chatting on the phone on Sunday with M that it came to my attention. M had read about it in The Times; Beatrix Potter was being accused of cultural appropriation by some crazed academic because Peter Rabbit was a talking rabbit like Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit stories were originally told by enslaved Africans. We both thought this seemed a bit silly.

Curious, I found the article in The Conversation by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall. It is a really interesting article! I am so glad to have read it. If you are a Potter fan, I urge you to do the same. And if you are a fan of Enid Blyton, for once she comes out of it well!

(Beatrix Potter, illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne, London, 1902; found here)

Zobel Marshall makes a compelling case that Potter knew and loved the Brer Rabbit stories of ‘Uncle Remus’ and drew on them for the plots of some of her stories as well as some of the language. Fearful of plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism, Potter herself never publicly acknowledged the link; since then very few academics have acknowledged the link either.

Finally, Zobel Marshall sites this refusal to discuss Potter’s use of Brer Rabbit as part of a wider appropriation of Black culture, in which Black culture is used by predominantly white culture and not acknowledged.

I mean, can any of this actually be disputed? The article is measured and well argued. I do disagree with her claim that the plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, of the trickster stealing food, being the ‘plot [that] is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales’. The plots of most of her books are quite different. Still, I was curious about M’s interpretation of the article, based as it must have been on what they read in The Times. And a cursory Google brought up a list of furious headlines in the right-wing press.

I couldn’t read The Times article because it is behind a paywall. I think it must be this one. I note the use of the word ‘stole’; not a word that Zobel Marshall used once in her article, as far as I could see. However, inflammatory headlines in the Daily Express (‘Beatrix Potter Accused of ‘Copying’ African Slaves’ Stories for Peter Rabbit) and the so-called news site GB News (‘Now Peter Rabbit is Under Threat by Woke Mob as Beatrix Potter Attacked’) were followed by reasonable summaries of Zobel Marshall’s article so perhaps the Times article is also better balanced.

Not so Libby Purves’s reaction in the Daily Mail: ‘Academic Accusing Beatrix Potter of Stealing Peter Rabbit Needs a Lie Down.’ To be honest, I never have high hopes of the Mail and this is an opinion piece, but I do respect Purves and was therefore very disappointed by what I read. Purves admits that what Zobel Marshall writes is ‘fairly convincing’ but the problem is her tone: ‘her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, I suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt’. Purves then goes on to explain that cultures have always borrowed from and influenced each other, which is not Zobel Marshall’s point, and to complain about the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

(A.B. Frost, illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris, published by D. Appleton and Co., 1911; found here)

Purves uses Zobel Marshall’s article to make a wider point, and I intend to do the same with hers. I find her reaction absolutely typical of those people who lose their wigs when the National Trust dares to include information in their properties that a family enriched itself through slavery or who immediately tell you, when the topic of slavery comes up, that Black Africans profited from slave trading too. Why are they so frightened about accepting historical fact? Why can’t we say that some British families profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade? Why are we only supposed to feel pride in our past and not shame as well? Why can’t we acknowledge it if we draw on another cultural tradition for our own creative work?

Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated wonderful books that we still enjoy today, and she drew on the stories of Brer Rabbit to do so. See – it’s not difficult to make a start, is it?

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.

Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.

The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.

(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)

I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:

It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.

People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.

White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.

(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)

Norse Mythology, retold by Neil Gaiman

There’s an English-language section of my local library; much of its contents don’t appeal but quite a bit does. I probably would not have gone out and bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology but there was absolutely no reason not to borrow it, so I did.

I think that this is an important and sometimes overlooked function of libraries. Not many of us have unlimited funds for book purchasing. If we’re going to be parting with money for something, we’re more likely to do so on something from which we’re fairly sure we will get what we want – enjoyment, enlightenment, or whatever. In a library, with nothing to lose, we can take risks with our reading, we can try out that author or dabble in a new genre.

Despite having a copy of Barbara Leonie Picard’s Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes unread at home, I brought the Gaiman book back with me. What a pleasure it was! The tone was perfect – elegant, clear, funny and lively. (Alas, I had to return the book yesterday so I cannot quote anything here.) Sometimes writers retelling myths get a little bogged down in an archaic style, but Gaiman never does. I’d say, as someone who is profoundly ignorant about these myths, that it is intended as an introduction to them, as it is quite short. But it is such a good introduction I’ll definitely buy a copy for my daughter when she’s older.

I was surprised at how little Odin featured; Loki and Thor are the principal characters in these stories. Blunt force and skill in battle are highly valued (unsurprisingly, given their reputation) by the Vikings, no matter that the slaughter is often completely unnecessary. Thor is really nothing more than a big bully. I was intrigued that trickery also clearly met with the Vikings’ approval. Striking a deal and then reneging on it was praiseworthy; the only possible improvement would be then killing the person you’d just tricked. The gods decide that they need a defensive wall around Asgard to protect them from unfriendly giants. Along comes a mysterious man who says he can do this in three years. His price: the sun, the moon and the goddess Freya. The gods agree (apart from Freya) but only if he can complete the wall over the winter. When it becomes clear that he will succeed, they cunningly prevent him from placing the last stone and completing the wall. And then they kill him. So they have their wall, and they keep the sun, the moon and Freya. Hurrah!

I really enjoyed reading these, I am dusting down the Picard which contains plenty of stories Gaiman didn’t include, but I am very glad that I wasn’t a Viking.

(Johan Egerkrans, Idun, found here)