Published in 1999, An Unexpected Light is a remarkable piece of travel writing – it won the 2000 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award – and a very interesting memoir of two journeys through Afghanistan at different times in the country’s history. But more than anything it is a love story: a tribute to Jason Elliot’s desperate love for a place he will never truly belong to.
As with my posts about the previous two books in this trilogy, there are going to be spoilers below. Go and read London Match, it’s excellent, if you want to read any further.
Really. I’ll just spoil it, and that would be a shame. Don’t click through unless you’ve already read it.
The first thing to note here is the sheer intellectual achievement of these poems. I’ve dragged myself through many dry, boring academic texts that deal with the same themes but Eliot managed to approach metaphysics in text and make it beautiful.
There are four longish poems here. They were published separately but hang together perfectly, and the central characters are time and reality. The first, Burnt Norton, is the most abstract. God is that which can exist outside time, we’re bound together by time and experience everything in terms of it. The present is of paramount importance and is all we know.
The others bring in wordly metaphors: the sea, the weather, fire, London, wildlife, singing and dancing move in and out, employed to describe a set of Christian philosophical beliefs, more than ethics and into the nature of reality.
There’s a lot of Christianity here but no preaching. It’s laid out for the reader to interact with but at no point is it necessary to believe it. This is what it is, what you do with it is your affair.
Go and read this book. It’s very short, so you can read it again, and then again after that. This is what the twentieth century was like.
Back into chronological order for Bond books, I came to Live and Let Die. I vaguely remembered the Roger Moore film as a bit poor, but that was the eighties and I didn’t expect the book to be all that similar. It’s not.
After a few pages though, I wanted to put this book down and go and do something, anything, else. It’s awful. A writer of the fifties and sixties such as Fleming might be expected to have held some outdated views, but Live and Let Die is so unspeakably racist that if I hadn’t been writing this blog I would have thrown it in the bin after no more than twenty pages.
The plot, the pursuit of a black crime boss whose power comes from his impersonation of a revered voodoo spirit and the supposed inherent superstition of black people wherever they might be, is bad enough, but if anything the conversations had by Bond and his colleagues are the worst bits.
They characterise, they generalise, they belittle, they patronise. They might profess to respect some black people (never anyone of their acquaintance, just Black People, that homogeneous mass) but they do so in the way they might praise a particular breed of dog. There is no humanity expressed at all.
No black character is anything but a poorly-assembled collection of irrational beliefs and plot devices. The black community is portrayed as a sinister sub-culture of savagery, loitering around the edges of civilisation, feeding off its scraps and plotting invasion.
America itself, where most of the action takes place, is a source of surprising pleasure for the travelogue writer in Fleming. Here you can find good simple food when they don’t try anything too fancy, here is good honest liquor.
There are some passages of description where the action takes over and you can forget what a loathsome bit of writing this is. There’s a sequence in warehouse full of fish tanks, for example, that’s packed with suspense and intelligence, but then before long we’re back to people’s personalities being put down to having ’some Chinese blood in them’, and you lose the will to carry on again.
James convinced me that the other books in the series aren’t like this so I’ll persevere with Moonraker later, but this was some hours of my reading life I’d rather not think about again.
Mrs. Chppy’s Last Expedition: the Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-bound Cat is just a cracking good read! Alexander is an accomplished writer and researcher on English naval history, including an account of the crew’s survival on the ill-fated Endurance expedition to the Antarctic.
In this book, rather than give us Sir Ernest Shackleton’s or another sailor’s perspective, Alexander imagines the entries of the journal kept by the ship’s tomcat, called Mrs. Chippy (by some anatomically ill-informed shipmates). So convincing does Alexander strive to make the journal, that her name isn’t prominent anywhere on the cover or title page. I even debated whether or not to include the author’s name in the blog post heading, so as not to ruin the effect.
The account is a fun mix of rigorous research and anthropomorphic fantasy. The many footnotes gleaned from Royal Geographical society and Scottish Geographical Society archives are complemented by playful references from the likes of Lord Mouser-Hunt. Feline arrogance is brilliantly articulated and the photographic captions – many with Mrs. Chippy *just* out of frame, are a great addition. By Mrs. Chippy’s own account, he was central to every aspect of the functioning of the ship. Without going that far, I can easily imagine that a cat onboard would be a good morale booster given the harsh and bleak day-to-day existence as the crew struggled unsuccessfully to wrest the Endurance from the pincer-like encroachment of the surrounding ice. A humorous take on a naval expedition and an excellent lure for readers like me who wouldn’t otherwise venture to the Maritime History section of the bookshop.
I’m not terribly highbrow (anyone reading this blog will have guessed that three books ago) so I approached this book with trepidation (translated Nobel prize winner, classic literature …) But it was great: a wonderfully absorbing read, just like the Victorian storytellers I thought I wouldn’t enjoy and then couldn’t put down, at school and since.
Essentially its a tale of a family in Cairo in the early twentieth century, set against the political turmoil in Egypt in this period. The stern patriarch, oppressing his family into adhere strictly to religious principles whilst allowing himself the luxury of debauchery, the good-for-nothing eldest son, the smart but not-so-pretty sister and the very pretty but lazy one, the gentle-hearted mother are all there. They enjoy and suffer the same experiences – sibling rivalry and support, failures of character and unintended heroism, passionate love and marital boredom, meals and school and work and weddings - found in any family saga, albeit within a setting very different from the European stories familiar to me.
The differences are few but fascinating: plumpness being a key to beauty, the absolute cloistering of the women (in this family only – other respectable women in Cairo are allowed to go out, but one of the key events is the near-divorce that proceeeds from the mother, Amina, leaving the house for the first time in decades to pay a brief but reverential visit to a nearby mosque), the deeply felt and unquestioning belief that women are simply not as “human” as men.
These last two are particularly emphasised by Naguib Mahfouz as a parallel between the family and the country struggling with changes to a way of life that has existed for centuries.
The writing is prosaic and just a little stiff, sometimes a characteristic of translations, but here, I think, that is the original tone, since the family are so very formal and traditional. Where he excels is in expressing characterisation through thoughts – potential “types” become real people as the reader follows the scattered, random words and phrases filling their heads in reaction to the events going on around them.
As in all good Victorian novels, this is the first part of a trilogy and I am looking forward to reading the next two.
I love Alan Bennett. That could be my whole blog post right there [click 'save' and 'publish'].
I read Untold Stories (2005) a few years ago, and found myself constantly stopping to admire Bennett’s talent as a writer. Funny thing, too, because for me, his talent lies in the absolute subtlety, effortlessness and self-effacement of his prose. Yet so few people have that kind of facility with words that I find it remarkable how he imbues the potentially unremarkable with such life.
The Uncommon Reader is a sweet and funny little book imagining what might happen were Her Majesty the Queen to stumble upon a mobile book library and awaken a voracious passion for reading. I’d recommend everyone read this (and I’m happy to circulate it to all of us in 26 books, somewhat uncommon readers we happen to be). Of course, there’s the ‘common’ play on words, where the Queen is the paragon of all that is literally un-common. What is brilliant about this book is that it manages to simultaneously capture, describe and analyse many reasons for reading – entertainment, education, distraction, fulfilment – as well as others’ (potentially negative or uneasy) perception of readers. But what could so easily be dry, dull and self-indulgent is told with Bennett’s characteristic lightness, freshness and insight.
That’s how many books (at least) should be appearing on this site over the next twelve months. I started the 26 books project last year on my personal site. This year I’ve invited five other people to join me. I’ll introduce them in due course on the About page.
In the meantime, the site is slowly coming together. The design needs to be finished and I need to add a few links but posting will begin shortly.
