Human stories told for nothing: The utter waste of war. (Books - A Long Long Way - Barry)

I had only ever heard of Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, which I assumed (wrongly) to be some sort of commercialized quasi religious tripe, given the American cover which had a picture of an angel, and the fact that everyone was reading it. It put me right off. So last week, when my research advisor (an Irishman) put of copy of Barry's A Long Long Way into my hands, calling it one of his favorite books, I was forced to acquire an informed opinion of Sebastian Barry. That, and I was able to find out what my advisor liked in a book. That long preamble out of the way, I have to say that A Long Long Way was passionately written and devastating in its depiction of the human waste of war, in this case World War I.

It concerns Willie Dunne, a 5' 6" volunteer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Irish participation in World War I aggravated an already fractious climate in the fight for home rule in Ireland, which came to a head in the Easter Rebellion in 1916. The rebellion led to a growth in popularity of the Irish republican movement. When the German front began to collapse, the British seriously needed soldiers and were forced to enact home rule. Willie Dunne was among the many Irish soldiers fighting a war on two fronts, one against the Germans, the other an internal battle among allegiances toward family and country. A Long Long Way is Willie's story.

He was a little baby and would be always a little boy. He was like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare.

Barry has a poet's gift for grouping everyday words into elegiac sequences. He makes no bones about the fact that this is going to be a story of heartbreak.

And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish - and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Burkha, Cossack, and all the rest - their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers' milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death's amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.

Human stories told for nothing. Words to choke a reader with sadness, and bitter words coming from a writer.

I found this cataclysmic story utterly enveloping. I could read it and be involved anywhere, on a crowded bus or in the quiet of my home. Barry has a sure hand in painting landscapes:

The field flowers were just appearing; light rains washed and washed again the pleasing fields. In those parts the farmers seemed to have decided that they might prepare to sow a harvest. The little villages seemed queerly optimistic; perhaps the human hearts were infected with whatever infects the very birds of Belgium. The sun lay along objects with indifferent and democratic grace, gun-barrel or ploughshare. The war was like a huge dream at the edge of this waking landscape, something far off and near that might ruin the lives of children and old alike, catastrophe to turn a soul to dry dust.

...and he people's them with incisive sentences:

He was mopping at his eyes with his sleeve like a bad actor. His big, doughy face was melting and as red as a red arse.

Usually I can't stand battle scenes. Whether in history or fiction, I find them impossible to envision, possibly because I can't see any people in them and find it impossible to see in my mind's eye the abstraction of a battalion. Not so with Barry's. His battle scenes, though virile and violent, are also populated. He is observant of the people in them:

The guns went on wailing and caterwauling. There were ferocious blows and bangs and thumps. The sergeant-major, for reasons of his own, was whistling 'The Minstrel Boy' now low under his breath, which was a curious fact, since he never whistled. Willie could see in his mind's eye the gunners work their guns, the way they were so used to it, and knew all the movements, like in a Saturday dance. Like they were waltzing or something with those metal guns.

And he writes damn good dialogue too. You can tell that Barry wrote for the theatre. It would be so easy to speak this lines:

'All the fucking lads up there. You should see the place. It's just a flat fucking few acres with little spots of white dust on it where the fucking houses were. And those devious Ulster lads from the 36th milling about and calling us wonderful fucking Paddies, that's what they said, and shaking our hands, And Australians and all kinds of mad bastards. And hundreds and hundreds of fucking Boche surrendering and shouting out that fucking Kamerad thing they do, and you couldn't blame them. What a fucking to-do. You wouldn't see it in Dublin on a Saturday night in the fucking summer, Willie. We're after winning this one. Isn't that a fucking how-are-you for the books?'

What Barry makes most plain in this beautiful book is the confusion and the utter waste of war, even in the case of a noble cause. It ruins the men (and now women) who fight it, the earth under them, the families they left behind. It ruins lives not even totally formed yet. One of its great tragedies, this book tells us, is that it ruins boys before they ever grow up enough to know their own minds.

Now the battalion in reserve was supposed to appear behind them in a bit and surge on wonderfully to Langemarck. Not a soul living seemed to be near them, nor a soul behind. All was a blank, black sheet of murderous nothing. It was daylight and the war had fogged the world.

The pain of not-knowing and of knowing (Books - Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane)

Friend Sheila enthusiastically recommended Seamus Deane's 1996 novel of growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, Reading in the Dark, and I echo her enthusiasm. Deane renders the indignation of a child who knows he is excluded from the mysteries of adulthood with great conviction. In the case of this novel, these are not just the work-a-day mysteries of sexual relations or violence considered too great for a child's understanding. Our first-person narrator is aware of deep secrets that rule the internecine feuds within his family, secrets of informing and murder that haunt his parents' every waking action. They flavor his life like a strong spice one can taste in every bit of a stew and yet not know what it is. He learns the full story in dribs and drabs, sometimes from unknowing truth-tellers. Deane's talent, is withholding it from his reader as well in such a fashion that the not unfamiliar story of an Irish childhood becomes riddled with suspense, and his coming of age filled with the regret that accompanies the realization that being excluded from this knowledge is no less tormenting than possessing it.

The great pleasures of Deane's many short chapters are his sense of humor, the wisdom his narrator grows into about people and their burdens, and absolutely crack writing.

...But our celebrations were not official, like the Protestant ones. The police would sometimes make us put out the fires or try to stop us collecting old car tyres or chopping down trees in preparation. Fire was what I loved to hear of and to see. It transformed the grey air and streets, excited and exciting. When, in mid-August, to commemorate the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven, the bonfires were lit at the foot of the sloping, parallel streets, against the stone wall above the Park, the night sky reddened around the rising furls of black tyre-smoke that exploded every so often in high soprano bursts of paraffined flame. Their acrid odour would gradually give way to the more fragrant aroma of soft-burning trees that drifted across the little houses in their serried slopes, gravelled streets falling down from the asphalted Lone Moor Road that for us marked the limit between the city proper and the beginning of the countryside that spread out into Donegal four miles away. In the small hours of the morning, people sitting on benches and kitchen chairs around the fire were still singing; sometimes a window in one of the nearby houses cracked in a spasm of heat; the police car, that had been sitting in the outer darkness of two hundred yards away, switched on its lights and glided away; the shadows on the gable wall shrivelled as the fires burnt down to their red intestines. The Feast of the Assumption dwindled into the sixteenth of August, and solo singers began to dominate the sing-along chorusing. It marked the end of summer. The faint bronze tints of the dawn implied autumn, and the stars fainted into the increasing light as people trailed their chairs reluctantly home.

Some of his paragraphs could be sung, so beautiful are the processions of simple words that accomplish his rich and deeply-felt descriptions. This memoir-like novel is tinged with deep sadness, but the way Deane renders his story is shear pleasure.

Irish despair casts a spell (Books - The Long Falling by Keith Ridgway)

I am grateful to John Self for having introduced me to another Irish wordsmith who can wring from the despair of his fellow souls graceful prose and a meaty, tension-filled read. I actually finished Keith Ridgway's 1998 novel The Long Falling about a week ago, but due to final exams, now over, I couldn't get to it here until now.

It rains on Cavan, Monaghan; rains on the hills and the lakes, and the roads; rains on the houses and the farms and the fences between them; on the ditches and the fields, on the breathing land; rains on the whole strange shape of it. Puts down a pattern.

And then it stops.

And the places of the country look different in the sun. They look new...

One knows from the stark opening that this is going to be a dark ride, but not without its riches. Ridgway writes of a long-abused wife and her gay son who, for a time, are united in the violent loss of their husband and father. Yet they are finally isolated in their unique pain even as they are transformed by it. I won't say more than that about the action, because somehow this book about estrangement from self is plotted with the suspense of a mystery. Ridgway also writes crack dialogue:

'I'm sorry about that,' she said. 'I just... I just got to the point where I wasn't...'

He nodded. Looked at the window. Saw them in another room.

'Wasn't able...'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Wasn't able to be calm.'

Her eyes caught his and he was suddenly aware of her, definitely, without question, as the same woman he had walked with as a boy.

You couldn't pay a screenwriter to do better dialogue. It snaps off the page with bulls-eye accuracy. Ridgway conveys the content of his story with way more than words - the rhythm of the interrupted thought builds, conveying a fraught state of mind without ever describing it - and this is accomplished while simultaneously shifting time frame for the second character.

Ridgway is equally capable of fashioning a resonant turn of phrase.

For the rest of the day he stayed away from the kitchen. Until later, when they sat down for their tea, and he cut the bread and talked so that she would not talk. He spoke as if silence cost him money...

or

Panic rang through her like a storm of bells...

This is a mesmerizing novel. Ridgway's writing is often arresting. The reader looks up from the page seeing with fresh eyes. What more could one ask from a book?

Lost chances (Books - Love and Summer by William Trevor)

William Trevor's new book Love and Summer is a wistful tale, redolent of lost chances. Its first third, as its characters are introduced, feels more like a set of short stories than a novel. The narrative ambles from neatly sketched character to neatly sketched character in desultory prose that eventually settles down to tell a predictable yet still involving story.

Love and Summer opens with a funeral, of which the embittered Miss Connulty is the benefactress:

Miss Connulty didn't care any more. They could do what they liked: delicious death had been a richer compensation than she had ever dreamed of. She was in charge, and today she wore the pearls.

Ellie Dillahan, an orphan in the care of the nuns, receives her good fortune in becoming the the servant of Mr. Dillahan, a farmer, who eventually marries her. Both women's routines are disturbed by the appearance of Florian Kilderry, a young dreamer on a bicycle.

She wondered if she would be the same herself; if she was no longer - and would not be again - the person she was when she had gone to Mrs. Connulty's funeral and for all the time before that. When he had asked whose funeral it was it had been the beginning but she hadn't known. When Miss Connulty had drawn her attention to him in the Square she had realized. When he'd smiled in the Cash and Carry she'd known it too. She had been different already when she stood with him in the sunshine, when he offered her the cigarette and she shook her head. Anyone could have seen them and she hadn't cared.

Each woman has been rescued from misfortune, Ellie from loneliness and poverty and Miss Connulty from an early pregnancy out-of-wedlock. Each accepts her salvation into a passionless world of routine without question, realizing only later what they have given up, and in the heat of a summer, Florian Kilderry, almost a ghost haunting the ruins of his family's estate, ignites their fantasy.

In fact, there are two ruined estates in this story, and their presence creates a landscape of desolate romance that seems doomed from the start. I found this an imperfect novel. It was easy to see what was going to happen. Although I cared what would happen to Ellie and Florian, I found them rendered with a lack of specificity. They remained stand-ins for romantic characters who I could never really see as people. Ultimately I found Miss Connulty drawn with greater detail and her secrets and paradoxes far more intriguing. Her subplot lies abandoned for a chunk of the novel, only to be picked up again at its end. I am left having enjoyed the beauty and assurance of Trevor's prose and the atmosphere he created in Love and Summer without ever completely falling in love with the story.

To reveal or not to reveal (Books - Authenticity by Deirdre Madden)

Upon finishing Authenticity, Deirdre Madden's novel built around two visual artists and their encounter with an attorney in the midst of a mid-life panic who turns to painting, I stand with my mid-point analysis - it is a book about the consequences of imagining. As I have mentioned in other posts about Madden's work, her characters frequently cast their minds out upon the currents and try to place themselves inside the experience of others. This is certainly many artists' stock-in-trade, but people of all kinds imagine the lives of others. Those who do not have much knowledge of or use for the arts consider such activity the stuff of children or mere frivolity but it can have many uses. This imagining can be a pleasurable escape, an exercise in empathy, or it can be a provocation of the most unsettling sort. As the painter, Roderick, observes of the attorney, William:

"If painting had been only a pipe dream, then there'd be no problem. It would be enough for him to have it as a hobby. Unfortunately William really has made a huge mistake. He's done the wrong thing. It isn't just that he thinks he's wasted his life, he knows he's wasted his life. But what can he do? His situation is all but set in stone. He needs to keep his family - and himself, mark, and himself - in the style to which they're accustomed. Nor am I saying for a moment," he added quickly," that I think he ought to walk out on his family. I don't consider that kind of behaviour a prerequisite for being an artist."

Funny this coming from Roderick, who did walk out on his family while in an alcohol sodden crisis of his own several years prior, and exacted many emotional costs of his wife and daughters as well as paying all sorts of costs himself. Imagining alternatives can be an expensive activity, and one whose price not every person can afford. One point Authenticity seems to make is that, artistry may extend to many an allure of either heady nobility or fame and grandeur, but the actuality of the artistic life is not for sissies. It is not an easy way to live despite the fact that many people outside the artistic professions associate the daily activities of the artist with play.

Another exploration in Authenticity is the nature of that art. Madden makes that conversation tangible through the contrasting work of Roderick, a middle-aged, "mid-career" painter whose process emphasizes how he sees objects and rendering what he sees with both freeness and precision resulting finally in what most art critics would call abstract painting. A certain kind of painting has become an end in itself for Roderick. His encounter is with paint and canvas, with painting itself, and though he may be expressed through the work because it is his vision that is rendered on the canvas and because his technique and his freedom allow something unique to himself to be deposited there, his painting is not intentionally autobiographic or self-revelatory. Whereas Julia is younger and at the start of her work's trajectory. Her art is not only more wide-ranging in media - using three-dimensional objects, collecting stories and impressions from people, building fabric constructions people slide through - it is also explicit in its mission to reveal the what is most private and personal. To some degree, these different philosophies of art are expressive of the different people who make them and the process of art making really contains all those ingredients to a greater or lesser degree. This dichotomy is set-off by the work of William who, if not painting for his livelyhood is painting for his very life.

As Madden observes the interaction betwenn art and artist, she also explores the experiences of their loved ones - the pleasures for some of sharing the passion for art and ideas, the incomprehension of others about why they work so hard if the costs are so high and the apparent rewards so small, and the costs exacted of still others who suffer along with their husband, parent, lover, or as is the case in Authenticity, brother. Madden writes a most sympathetic character in Roderick's older brother Dennis, although I find her usually fine eye for believable character clouded here by sentimentality. There is a certain generality to lone and long-suffering Dennis that smells of Hollywood neatness, particularly in his early childhood promise to "look after him always." I also found a self-helpy quality to some of the writing around Roderick's divorce and alcoholism that may be hard to avoid these days but was surprisingly cliched coming from Madden's relentlessly original pen. Ultimately I found the five shorter novels I read of Madden's more clear-eyed, more idiosyncratic, finer works of art than Authenticity. I feel Madden got a little literal here, explaining the ideas she wanted this novel to express rather than writing from them and letting them be expressed. Oddly, in a book about the very idea of the struggle to live unconventionally, Madden has written her most conventional novel. Still, this is a compelling story about making art, highly recognizable to me from a life lived among artists. Madden has rendered this world with complexity, verisimilitude, and great intelligence and while I admire her other books more, I am happy to have spent time in the company of more of her characters.

My earlier thoughts about this book can be found here.

Reaching out from ourselves towards others (Books - The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden)

The waning days of my winter break have unfortunately been occupied with taking care of The Ragazzo, who has had been impressively sick. Great fun has been had by all and plans for seeing friends, household projects, and museum visits were abandoned. At least I got to continue my exploration of Irish novelist Deirdre Madden's body of work with her The Birds of the Innocent Wood.

This is the most unusual in form of her Madden's books which I have read so far. It alternates chapters about the lives of Jane and Jane's twin daughters, Sarah and Catherine, criss-crossing back and forth through time as it reveals its small surprises. I read it as a story of the price of isolation, either by having love witheld from you or witholding love from others. Not to say that that witholding is performed out of malice, most of the self-imposed isolation in Madden's characters is out of fear of loss or fear of being touched. The alternating chapters are almost stand-alone pieces, yet the information they yield as regards the story is incomplete. The reader knows they are incomplete because the daughters' stories occur almost 20 years after the story of Jane's years as a young woman and through their details imply the missing information. With this structural device, Madden succeedes in creating a good deal of suspense, even though the events of this novel are largely interior and the settings entirely domestic.

Madden's narratives most conspicuously occupy the inner lives of their subjects. Her evocation of this flow of thought naturally (in my observation) intertwines imagination of worlds outside the present time, space, or life of her character with the present moment to achieve a verrisimilitude of inner experience. As I have described in my post about her novel One by One in the Darkness, her characters often imagine themselves inside the lives of other characters (or at least struggle to do so) - an act that is de rigeur for writers, actors, and other artists:

Sarah has only ever loved her family, and her family has made her suffer. Looking through the open door to where her father is sitting is like looking into a seashell which is coiled and chambered. Each chamber is a memory, its size and brightness in accordance with its position on the coil of time which stops with the shell's sharp apex: the moment of her birth. But beyond that there is a wide yellow shore scattered with shells, and she can see but she cannot touch the huge shells which contain her father's secret memories. She cannot imagine what it would be like to move through those vast coiled systems of chambers, seeing with her father's eyes the eighteen years which make the sum totaly of her own brief life, and then before that those early, mysterious years which lie beyong the scope of Sarah's memories: the years of her parents' marriage prior to the birth of their children; the years of his life before his marriage, spent on the farm alone with his father; the years of his boyhood and youth spent with both his parents, prior to his mother's death, and then these shells also come to the still point of his birth and are ended. But before this were the lives and memories of his parents, and their parents before that, and their parents before that: the shells of these memories have been sucked back into the sea by the tide, and some have been dashed by waves against the rocks and have been broken, some have fallen to the sandy bed of the sea, and some will drift forever and forever. And Mama: she wonders what has happened to the poor misshapen shell of her mother's life, and she wishes that she could have saved it above all from the cold blue infinite sea.

This paragraph summarizes the action of the entire novel, whose narrative voice as I copy it out reminds me intensely of Virginia Woolf's, particularly in my favorite novel of hers - The Waves - to get inside another's life, making it as palpable and important to oneself as is one's own life. Certainly that struggle can be the act that allows one to break free of self-imposed isolation (when another's needs become more important than one's own fears). This novel embodies that struggle on multiple levels - the isolation of an orphan (Jane) who struggles in a life without parental love, later the mutual isolation of Jane and her husband as they try to break through themselves to become vulnerable with each other, the lives of their daughters who as twins have their own unique version of sameness and separateness not experienced by most siblings, and the closely detailed diaries kept by Catherine to know herself.

One of my favorite moments in the book is a visit that Jane makes to her neighbor Ellen's house. Ellen has known Jane's husband all of her life and Jane is jealous and insecure of her. Ellen probes Jane for the story of her life, which Jane shares in all its horrid detail of the deprivation of life in a convent orphanage but is sure that Ellen did not believe her and did not like her.

Jane's antipathy towards Ellen was mixed with a considerable degree of curiosity, and she wanted to know all about her background. James would tell her nothing, but his father was happy to oblige. One winter's night as they sat by the stove, he told her the story of Ellen's past. Jane listened attentively and later she would run over it again and again in her mind, embellishing the tale with little added details of her own, imagining certain scenes with particular intensity. Every time she saw Ellen thereafter, she would think of what she know, conscious always that it was partly truth and party her own invention...

When Ellen was twelve, her father, overwhelmed by debts, took an ornamental revolver out to a ruined gazebo in the grounds of the house. His wife heard the report, and it was she who found her husband with half his head blown away. (The deed was, of course, in reality performed with a shotgun in the back yard: the revolver and gazebo were gothic fancies which Jane could not resist adding.)

I love this scene particularly because we all must knows others somewhat through the veil of our own narratives, and this is not confined only to people we love but also to those we dislike. I think that people who live largely interior lives and get used to living in their own minds, and Jane exemplifies this, in their isolation can interact not so much with others as with the characters they have made of them.

I found the many ways in which Madden writes about people reaching out from themselves towards others in The Birds of the Innocent Wood, and how this informs their experience of the own lives, particularly insightful. The beauty of the writing and the asymmetry of the structure, given the incompleteness of the lives we become acquainted with, are brilliantly suited to the content. The narrative acquires an intensity through the suspense evoked by the alternating time frames and the secrets the characters, in their isolation, withold from one another. The Birds of the Innocent Wood is a stunning and unusual piece of writing from a writer who, in the past year, has quickly become one of my favorites - Deirdre Madden.

Inner struggles of mind and soul & this year's book stats (Books - Hidden Symptoms by Deirdre Madden)

I finished Deirdre Madden's first novel, Hidden Symptoms, early this morning. Written in 1986, it displays many of the hallmarks of her more mature work like Molly Fox's Birthday, Remembering Light and Stone and One by One in the Darkness - complexity in her characters, their interior struggles with art, faith, politics, and family - but with an extra dose of passion. It has less reserve than her more recent books. This novel concerns Theresa, a university literature student, whose twin brother is murdered in the violent struggle in Northern Ireland, and does interior battle in maintaining her faith in light of her suffering. The narrative has a drive more forceful than her more recent books, but no less humane. Madden's work has a seriousness about people who think deeply about their inner lives, who don't spout platitudes and formulas around finding love and meaning in them, and who appreciate that this struggle is an ongoing feature of a thoughtful existence. This is the kind of fiction I really value, which makes me glad that I still have The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Authenticity on the pile and that leaves Nothing Is Black, Snake's Elbows, and Thanks for Telling Me, Emily yet to find and to read.

And that brings me to my 52nd book for 2009. I'm likely to start another book this year but I probably won't finish one, so let's review the stats:

8 non-fiction
44 fiction

included in the fiction are:
4 written for young readers
10 mystery/thrillers
3 fantasy/science fiction
No poetry collections this year
1 short story or novella volume
1 play
the rest fall into the "general" fiction category

25 were written by women
27 were written by men

This year, all but 5 were originally written in English and those authors were Irish, English, South African, and American.

I'll post my best general fiction read or reads of 2009 some time in the next day. For the other categories, scroll down.

The reach of the British Empire, local & global (Books - The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt & Film - The Wind That Shakes the Barley)

I am half way through A. S. Byatt's latest novel The Children's Book. This is a vast narrative spanning art and politics over Queen Victoria's later decades and King Edward's first. It's central story is that of a wealthy family discovering a poor young man from the North English coal fields sketching in the Victoria and Albert Museum (its director is among the book's cast of characters). They see great talent in the young boy and give him first clothing, a place to live, and instruction in reading and later find him employment with a master artist. There are multiple interactions in this story between members of the wealthy upper class, middle class working people - that is, writers or school teachers - and the poor like Philip the young potter and his sister Elsie. Between ideas of the British Empire's role as steward of the world - civilizing vast swathes of the uneducated and unwashed as they try to preserve the old ways - versus rising notions of anarchism in Russia and socialism in Germany and England, spreading notions of free love, higher education and suffrage for women, birth control. And between art and, 'life,' I guess you could say, or 'fact.' Byatt plays out this last interaction in multiple ways. For instance, there is Philip, the budding artist - a meeting is being held at his mentor's home of a way to use his pottery designs to make money for the family - into this meeting arrives Elsie Warren, Philip's sister. Olive Wellwood, a writer of childrens' stories, is present.

That left Olive, who was a grown woman, and Frank Mallett, who was a clergyman. He consulted Olive, and it was agreed that Miss Warren should be found a place to rest, and perhaps some temporary fresh clothing. Oliver bent over Elsi and said it was very odd to be present at the discovery of two runaways in one family. She was thinking what a good story it would make, the girl who walked across half England to find her brother. She smiled at Elsie, absently, studying her intently...

Firstly, the very fact of Philip and Elsie's class means that 'life' is infringing on 'art' all the time. Poverty, the way the issues of mere existence force themselves again and again upon someone with no money, does not allow for a life steeped in the pleasures of creation - no matter how talented the artist. Seconds, Olive is sewing seeds of a narrative she will create based upon the facts of the life of Elsie Warren. Thirdly, this interaction between the classes - those with means figuring out how they will provide for Elsie ( she will become a servant, of course) just as they have for her brother Philip, plays out in miniature the role of Empire and colony.

Another example of this interplay:

Prosper Cain came when he could, when the business of the Museum allowed it. He gave a talk on the craft of art, and the art of craft, and of how - even in painting and sculpture - the two were inseparable. You needed design, and you needed basic physics and chemistry, or your pain would not dry under its varnish and your clay would not hold its glaze. And you needed also something - a sharpness of vision - which couldn't be taught, but could not be acquired, in his view, without incessant practice.

Here is the interaction of art and craft, art and commerce, art and science. Byatt returns to this refrain again and again as a way to characterize the complexity of this burgeoning modern world and how it is different from the stiff though also more simplistic fiction that came before it.

The Prince of Wales carried out his own family rebellion, and let it be known that he proposed to reign as King Edward. Victoria and Albert had named him Albert Edward, but he chose to follow the six earlier English Edwards...He was not, in Albert's way, a good man. He was immediately named 'Edward the Caresser'. He like women, sport, good food and wine...There was a sense that fun was now permitted, was indeed obligatory. The stiff black flounces, the jet necklaces, the pristine caps, the euphemisms and deference, the high seriousness also, the sense of duty and the questioning of the deep meanings of things were there to be mocked, to be turned inot scarecrows and Hallowe'en masks. People talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously about sex. At the same time they showed a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.

At the book's center (literally) comes a story penned by Olive. In it a little girl discovers a race of tiny people living beneath a tree. She enjoys them and so takes a few for her very own to live in her doll's house. She tries to feed them and provide for them and expects them to play with her but they are unhappy with their imprisonment and will not. The little girl cannot understand this, until a great hand reaches down through her window and does the same to her. This rather bald metaphor is played out again and again through The Children's Book, whether through the literal events of history played out in the changing British Empire, through the wealthy banker finding employment for the poor potter and his sister, whether it is the protection of the child by the parent which usually originates in loving intentions but which can also produce unintended damaging results, or whether it is the artist who manipulates her characters in an Empire of her own. I haven't decided yet whether I am finding this interplay of ideas - on the macro scale and the micro, in the fictional world and the real, in the political world and the artistic - overly simplistic or whether their interplay will make for satisfying complexity that is greater than the sum of its parts. Right now, the many strands of this narrative feel unintegrated but there are another 300 pages to go.

And if stories of the mis-expressed benevolence of the British Empire is your cup of tea, you might appreciate Ken Loach's extraordinarily passionate film The Wind That Shakes the Barley - a naturalistic account of the British occupation of Ireland in 1920 and how the treaty between Britain and Ireland ended up pitting brother against brother. It is a wrenching story and the acting is first rate. Loach is a distinctive and underappreciated director whose films really bear viewing.

Asking the reader to imagine the lives of others (Books - One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden)

Having been wowed by Deirdre Madden's latest book, Molly Fox's Birthday, which I read on my recent vacation in England, I immediately went in search of her earlier books, finding One by One in the Darkness in an independent bookshop in Chipping Norton. Written in 1996, this is a broader work than Molly Fox's Birthday. It encompasses a familial drama of three sisters, their parents and grandparents in both the present and the past, in parallel we read an account of how the armed struggle in Northern Ireland in the same time periods affected individual lives. The sisters have chosen very different paths, or perhaps the paths have chosen them but, at any rate, Cate finds herself in a glamorous editing job in London, while Helen works as a lawyer in Belfast dealing often with work related to the political struggle. Sally lives in the country with their widowed mother, teaching primary school.

She woke early in the morning. Not surprisingly, she'd been sleeping badly in recent weeks, and she lay now for more than an hour thinking about her family. She like to imagine them still asleep, each of the three women lying in the warm darkness of her own room: Helen in her house in Belfast, Sally and her mother at home in the country. Late when Cate rose and moved about her flat making coffee and preparing her luggage for the journey, she thought of her family waking. Helen would stretch out her hand and switch on the radio, would like there drowsing and listening to classical music. Sally would go downstairs, and, still in her dressing gown and lseepy-eyed, would stare blankly at the cloudy sky while she waited for the kettle to boil. She would make tea, and bring it upstairs to her mother's room...

A common theme between the two Madden books I just read is this practice of characters imagining others' lives, not a surprising activity for a writer, and one that seems to form the backbone of her narrative. Madden's writing is straightforward but it does not spoon-feed the reader. She asks that you pay attention. Character is developed through uncliched and idiosyncratic details, such as Kate changing her name to Cate when she moves to London to either escape her past or seize her present (take your pick). The first shift from the present day narrative to the past is accomplished without fanfare, the only differences being the details of the action and a slight shift in tone. The beautifully subtle give-away was the spelling of Kate's name, suddenly beginning with a 'K.' The novel is full of delicate touches like that one that demand attention of the reader.

But imagining other's lives is not merely stock-in-trade for the writer, it is the necessary ingredient for empathy, moreover it is Madden's charge to her reader. As such Madden's novels, and indeed all art that makes this endeavor, serve a vital purpose in a world in which so many relationships are selfishly motivated and violently expressed. This book's events are the stuff of lives everywhere - the current generation disturbing the traditions of the past, sibling rivalry, school, work, illness, death and birth - but that doesn't make this book ordinary. The writing is observant, touching and would be eligiac if it didn't include the present-day narrative off-setting the one in the past. This interplay asks the reader to ponder influences and consequences rather than let sentimentality color the past either with too rosy a complexion or one that is too maudlin. One by One in the Darkness is a deeply felt but contained narrative, sophisticated in its brevity but simple in its diction, sending me in search of yet another novel by a writer I am coming to love for her clarity, passion, and humanity.

An undisturbable sense of wholeness (Books - Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden)

Funny thing, birthdays - the anniversary of the day we met the world for the first time. Most of us celebrate this day - a little narcissistic pleasure our culture seems to indulge - however, Molly Fox, the celebrated actress does not. Here is a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' Whose profession it is to create selves from that knowledge through the medium of her own self and yet, when it comes to letting others know her, even those who are close, she does not. And the day on which most of make an acknowledged public celebration of self is not a celebration for Molly Fox. That is the subject on which our narrator, playwright and friend of of Molly Fox, ruminates as she lives in Molly Fox's house in Dublin.

Molly has escaped to New York prior to beginning her next project in London. The friends swap homes so that Molly has a place to stay in London and so that our narrator may begin to write a new play in fresh surroundings, as the writing is giving her some trouble. Realizing it is Molly's birthday leads her to remember Molly, their mutual friend Andrew who becomes an art historian, and other key people who make up their emotional and practical lives. The playwright also creates selves in her work, and in the absence of her friend and of any good ideas for a play she ponders who we are. Who we are to ourselves? Who we are to others? How do past events form us? How do our families? How does our nationality? Can we transform ourselves or is our identity inherently unchangeable? How, indeed, do our house and possessions inform us?

What kind of woman has a saffron quilt on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books? Stores all her clothes in a shabby antique wardrobe, with a mirror built into its door? Who is she when she is in this room, alone and unobserved, and in what way does that differ from the person she is when she is in a restaurant with friends or in rehearsal or engaging with members of the public? Who, in short, is Molly Fox?

I was reluctant to pursue this line of thought because I suddenly realised that, lying in my bed in London next week, she might do exactly the same thing to me. Given her particular gift she would be able to reconstruct me, to know me much better than I might wish myself to be known, especially by such a close friend.

'Can we ever know another?', this novel seems to ask. Is it as they know themselves? Is that pursuit worthwhile? The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book of these potentially abstract musings that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. One could examine the details of lives and their motivations so deeply that what one accomplishes amounts to dissection, leaving us with knowledge of these people in bits torn from each other. Somehow Madden tears apart muscle from bone and yet leaves us with insight into lives that is richer and more whole than when we began. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor, writer, and arts scholar to reflect on the ways we can inhabit this inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative (if one can call them events) that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your own reading of this book which is as slight in pages as it is long in humanity.

The greatest pleasure of reading this book is this sense of integrity, the life of the narrator and the work of Deirdre Madden seem inextricably fused. This may be an illusion or it may be fact but the important thing is that it feels true.

'Thanks awfully. It's a hot day.' I agreed and for a few moments we made small talk about the weather, about the solstice, about heat and light. He looked very like Molly, but Molly at her most nondescript, Molly as she was when she didn't want to be recognised and refused to project her personality. Fergus was incapable of that transformation that could make his sister such an electrifying presence on stage, and indeed in her private life, when she so desired. He was a small man, lightly built with brown hair and the same olive complexion as Molly. He reminded me of thing so much as a little wild bird, a sparrow or a dunnock, and in dealing with him I always felt I had to behave as if he were indeed such a creature. Anything sudden or abrupt would startle him; he needed stillness and calm, He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit a new one off the stub of the one he had just finished. 'Isn't the cow dreadful?' he remarked unexpectedly, indicating it with a toss of his head. 'I said to Molly, "What possessed you? It ruins the whole garden." But she just laughed.'

I forgot to mention the voice. Like his sister, Fergus is blessed with a magically beautiful voice....

In this passage, the description of Fergus is accomplished by Deirdre Madden the writer but seems like our narrator's private musing. The sentence 'I forgot to mention the voice,' could seem unnecessary, Madden could have edited it out and just described the voice, but the writer/narrator follows the flow as one thought breaks into the stream of another. Calling attention to this process doesn't remove me from the reading experience but, rather, pulls me deeper in as the thoughts are not cleaned up for me. I get the whole flow seemingly the way it came. This could be the way the narrative unfolded for the writer or it could be a deliberate creation, but once used in this published narrative it necessarily assumes an identity as artifice, and it is artifice of the best kind in that it helps me believe in the identity of someone who does not exist, the playwright - a character created by the writer Deirdre Madden.

The subject of this narrative could, I suppose, be seen as indulgent. 'Oh, yawn, a writer writing about writing.' But its transparency is rendered gold by this seeming fusion of narrator and writer I have been going on about. I don't know if Madden herself was writing her way out of a dry period or if this is artifice too, but the narrator-character's creative process around beginning the creation of a new play is pitch-perfect. This is a period which, for many creators of art, is frought with tangential thought and a period of collection during which one must be patient and not fritter away the good stuff by talking about nascent ideas and then, when one notion alights on the brain with the delicacy of a grasshopper landing on a leaf, one must follow that notion with greedy energy to make sure that it doesn't escape and then, often, we hit a point where the effort seems to produce an inevitable path and the words, dance, music, painting flows. But prior to that conception, a new beginning can often seem unobtainable. We are sure it will never happen again.

I had a dual awareness of writer-character and writer-creator converging and diverging as I read. They converge perfectly for the experiential reader while they diverged for the part of me that analyzes artistic structure and process. This plays with the separateness and fusion between selves that is the subject matter of this novel and simultaneously with the integration of artifice and narrative that are the engine of this novel. The result is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. I finished Molly Fox's Birthday only last week (thank you dovegreyreader for leading me to this book) and already I want to read it again. While in England I bought two more copies to give to friends and picked up Deirdre Madden's earlier novel One by One in the Darkness and read that too (my thoughts on that one are here). It is rare that I add books to my favorites list, this one is going right up there.

In honor of November

Ciaran O'Driscoll, a contemporary Irish poet whose work I have posted in An Inflorescence has kindly sent us a new and Novemberish poem. It was published in Southword but otherwise, we're the first to see it, I think. Thanks Ciaran! Now if we're lucky, I won't mistype it. Actually, my poor typing is the reason Ciaran O'Driscoll contacted me to begin with and we ended up with this poem, so maybe it was serendipitous. It is accompanied by a painting by Sean McSweeney a great contemporary painter from Sligo. So, in honor of November...


SENTENCE

I'm waiting for a sentence
here in this winter light,
a set of words to put things right
and break the silence of November.
I'm frozen waiting says
the woman in the bus-stop shelter.

By this weird luminosity
you can easily read the plight
in trees, the inroads of emptiness,
how the leaves that cling
no longer really belong.
And there's a November light

makes people paper cut-outs,
while a second coming shines
among the ragged gaps
in dispersing coalescing clouds.
Is it only when empires fall
that the sentence forms, mind to mouth?

Ceramic armies of verbs and nouns
interred inside my head
and in the autistic child's
for whom some soldiers sprang to line
when cows broke through his garden fence
breaking the grip of silence.

Not much to hang on to, this -
only a few leaves left,
winter in root and crown.
When the sentence comes at last,
it comes as a surprise,
bringing empires down.

CIARAN O'DRISCOLL
(First published in Southword, Issue 12)

An Inflorescence - A flowering of poetry every Friday (Contemporary Irish Poets - Ciaran O'Driscoll)

and now.....drum roll please....the official start of a regular Friday series of poetry (or perhaps it will be an irregular series, who knows?). The vote was unanimous (all two of us). It will be called An Inflorescence which is the title of a poem by Timothy Donnelly, whose Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit I included as one of my four choices in the Summer Poetry Challenge. Feel free to send requests in the comments for favorite poets if you are so inclined.

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.



Today, an Irish poet. I was going to present several, but I might as well spread out the riches over the weeks (and have more time to read). What is it about that small green island that produces so many men and women obsessed with the crafting of words? Here's the Irish Literary Revival site, devoted to works by living Irish writers. It has access to all sorts of good stuff by contemporary writers (hat tip: From Boston to Berlin). Through it I discovered Ciaran O'Driscoll from Limerick, and his collection Gog and Magog from which I bring you the following two. I love the way the first poem has me enter the park as the protagonist did, climbing over the wall ungracefully, and how we don't see the poplar until after the fact, when he looks it up in a book. The second is at once a still life, a poem and a tryst. I love the unexpected combinations like lemon ghost and tightening rain.

The Uncompleted Park

Someone who dumped a mattress over the wall
provided me with a soft landing
in what a gate crested with flourishes
of iron penmanship, its middle dangling
a heavy chain and lock
like well-hung genitals, defined as park
and my eye defined as uncompleted.

Saplings were trained to posts
by wire in shoes of a rubber hose,
but paving stones were told apart by moss.
There was no seat, sculpture or fountain yet,
only a wild grass tame enough to let
the wild carrot's occasional crown and stalk
stand out and indicate the depth of space.

Between the entrance and the bank
of the old railway, I collected leaves
to take home and identify in a book,
and now I know it was the wind
switching a popular from green to silver
brought to my notice the uncompleted park
on the city's penny-pinched long finger.



West

There's a lemon ghost
of sunlight in my trails
of cloud, today I am
the suave eye-cheater
with yellows greens and browns

so finely modulated
you came for pleasure. I
am pliable, collapsing
neatly on to your bookish
frame of reference,

the eye nevertheless
is drawn into my depths
from small cromwellian fields
and scattered ice-age boulders.
Even as rain tightens

Over my curved rim
I am beckoning you
to endless bog. My charm
is at odds with all known
technologies of survival,

your feet on the tarred lane
talking you back from the edge
of fabled treachery.
Listen to the wind now,
my howling inwardness.

Medicine Chest - in case you develop the vapours

In one of the B&Bs where we stayed in Ireland, this medicine chest sat on the dressing table, yes we had a dressing table in the room. We also had a chaise lounge on which we could collapse with the vapours before taking one of these powders.

Is this Joseph Cornell, or what? Here's his:




And now that I've started with Cornell, I just can't resist one more. Couldn't this be the castle where you would find this chest?




One day I'll do a post on the magician Joseph Cornell but I'll be here all day so right now, I'll refer you to Sheila's excellent post at The Sheila Variations instead. Somehow, she's referencing Cornell today too. Great minds...

The Erin Isle

An essay in photos:



That's not us, but other ale drinkers in the supposed oldest pub in Ireland.

The Erin Isle - James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Stoneage burial mounds, and Guiness

Nothing like a little vacation. The Ragazzo and I spent the last 10 days in Ireland. Neither of us had ever been there before. We spent a few days in Dublin and the rest in the countryside and smaller towns (Kilkenny, Athlone, Sligo and The Burren). Despite incessant rain, we hiked, visited ruins and burial sites like Carrowkeel (above) 6,700 years old - can you imagine - something built by people that long ago. We even stayed on an 18th century estate with 1,600 sheep, housed in a palatial country mansion that has been in the Percival family for 100s of years. That's Percival as in the fellow who sat at the Round Table!




Oh! And, of course, The Writer's Museum in Dublin. Which has lovely little cases full of notebooks, letters and typewriters and provides a primer and all writers Irish.



Also looked at the work of some contemporary visual artists like Sean McSweeny who had a show at the Niland Gallery in Sligo. His works are abstracted landscapes, mostly smaller in scale; they capture the darkness and wildness of the shorelines, pools, bogs and pastures of Ireland (particularly the western coast) with bold, thick applications of paint, the colors roughly mixed, the brush marks evoking the roughness of the landscape. Pale blue paint presents the light as it glints against dark grey-green waters. Swathes of spring green and splashes of bright yellow play against deep browny-greys capturing the contrasts of flowers and meadows to the bogs.

Unfortunately I got a sinus infection on the trip and spent a couple of miserable days shivering and hacking. The bright side of that was that we both got a little more reading done than we might have. Me on the summer reading list and The Ragazzo on Iris Murdoch.

I somehow restrained myself from returning with more than 1 new book. But this one looked so cool I just couldn't resist. Reading it will have to wait at least until August when I'm done w/the SRC, but Sam over at Book Chase wrote an interesting post on it just a few days ago.



Perhaps more details or even a couple of more pictures on the trip will follow. But for now, on to the books I've finished for the Summer Reading Challenge