Interview with Hilary Mantel

A surprisingly good, detailed and in depth interview with Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.  Though it is A Place of Greater Safety which I remember most fondly - it is one of my all time favourite novels, though I did not know was her first effort (though not first published) until reading this interview.

Originally published in The New Statesman.

“Also, it taught me what I’ve long suspected: that public opinion is not something that features very highly in my life. Nobody should go into a trade like writing expecting applause, or universal approval, or even popularity. What appals me is that people mistake this constant storm of trivial abuse for some kind of freedom. ‘Me, speaking my mind!’ ” Her tone is boldly dismissive. “It’s not. It’s actually a huge distraction of the bread and circuses variety. To a large extent proper civic engagement, community engagement, proper political debate and activism, has been replaced by this. By illogic. By platitudes. And actually a lot of it is just abuse and bullying. There’s a nasty, narrow little conformism. And people are afraid, quite understandably, to differ from the norm. I think it’s a very sad state of affairs.”

The Sea by John Banville

The Sea is a curious little book.

This might seem a peculiar statement to anyone who has read it, for on the surface, it is very simple. An elderly man, one Max Morden (morbid, moribund - geddit?), revisits the dingy little town where he grew up, recalling his relationship with an odd family that holidayed there, and the recent death of his wife.

On my first reading, I found the novel disappointing. I am a Banville fan. I've read several of his books, and this has given me a sense for what he is about. Compared to his past work The Sea seemed weak at first encounter. I imagine that readers drawn to him for the first time, perhaps seduced by the MAN Booker prize award, will be deeply perplexed as to what is going on.

Banville's books seem to be connected in a loose sequence, and this is the latest installment. Though the main characters all have different names, they are all very similar, progressively aging males. They share an interest in art criticism, though not as creators themselves. This is significant, I feel. These people are all fascinated by the creation of artifice. They are not to be taken at face value. Also, there is always something dark and terrible lurking int he past, usually not identified or explained. In Banville's novels, the gaps and silences are often more important than the words.

And while we're talking about the words, all these protagonists speak with very similar voices. Some people find Banville's dense language off-putting. I've read enough of his work to say - I THINK - that this stuffy, affected tone is a deliberate ploy on his part, not merely him being monotonous. His characters use language as a shield or a disguise - often shielding themselves as much from themselves as from the outside. But when Max faces up to his grief in The Sea, he expresses it in short and brutally obscene spurts of grief. It is shocking and effective, and a few short sentences leave the preceeding pages of finally wrought words hollow and artifical, just as - again, I THINK - banville intended.

So, what of the book itself? On my first reading, I fell for Max's - or Banville's - trick. The whole novel is an exercise in misdirection, as Max tries to focus our attention, and his, on the long dead past. Don't be fooled by him. His grief is raw and deeply felt, but hidden under a miasma of postures and fine words.

Overall, a very effective, subtle novel. It may not be rewarding on a first reading, or to those unfamiliar with Banville's work, but it is worth getting to know.

**

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maughan

I enjoyed the film of The Painted Veil, though mostly for the amusment of watching Edward Norton and Naomi Watts pretend to be terribly proper English people. The plot clunked along from one fairly predictable point to another. It was pretty to look at (Particularly Ms Watts), unchallenging but at the same time just slightly better than the usual period costuumer-in-an-exotic-location fluff. Perhaps the book would have felt been less by-the-numbers, and as they say, never judge a book by its film adaptation. Look what the bastards did with Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster. And that was only a short story.

So, in the spirit of Finding Out More, I read Of Human Bondage. As the luckless curate said, part sof it were excellent.

The first two chapters are perhaps the most pathetic (in the true meaning of the word) I've ever read. Perhaps they are a touch sentimental by modern standards, but the writing is controlled but at the same time empathetic.

Alas, the rest of the book slides quickly down into a morass of awfulness and never manages to drag itself out.

Those first two chapters deal with the orphaning of the main character, Philip. After the death of his mother, he is sent to live with his deeply priggish uncle, a minister, then attends boarding school where he is bullied and mocked because of his club foot. He tries various professions and decides to become an artist in Paris for a while. After he fails tin that endeavour, he returns to England, completes his medical training, but falling in love with a trollopy tease of a waitress and is drawn into an arid, loveless, potracted relatinoship with her.

The whole thing is very banally pretentious. Various theories or philosophies for life are put forward, giving the affair a rather studied (and shallow) European air. But Sentimental Education this is not - though I suspect Flaubert's novel was very much on Maughan's mind when he wrote Of Human Bondage. There's nothing here that is interesting or remarkable. The philosophy is bland and superficial. The psychology of the characters dull and the action sluggish.

What dirt and nastiness Maughan permits is decorous and prim - ironically, this studied unpleasantness precisely the sort of thing Philip rails agains. Maughan is obviously trying to show his readers something of the grisly little world they try to ignore, but chickens out - surcumbs to his own conventional respectability - rather than present them with the real, unalloyed unpleasantness of life. Obviously, one can rebel against bourgeois conventions and morality, but only so far. I can't recall anything very interesting about how it was written - after a hundred pages or so I switched off, though I kept turning them in the hope of finding something to reward my perseverance. It is fustrating, though, to think that while Maughan was moving his stuffy litle marionettes in their quiant little comedy, Joyce had already written Potrait of the Artist and was at work on Ulyssess.

Now, it is not fair to compare a book to Ulyssess and say, "It isn't Ulyssess, so it is no good." If all books were as experimental, dense and byzantine as Ulyssess, book sales would be even lower than they are and illiteracy would be a necessity for keeping a blanced mind. But one can, fairly, compare a book to its contemporaries. When we do that, it's pretty obvious that Of Human Bondage was written twenty years too late - it is too old fashioned, uninteresting and blandly written compared to other books published in 1915 which are nowhere near as radical or unreadable as Ulyssess (1). I would take The Valley of Fear - or even Tarzan - over Of Human Bondage. And that's just the popular fiction. Never mind that D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Ford Maddox Ford all had considerable books published that year.

NO STAR

1 - '1915 in Literature,' wikipedia article, viewed 10th of December, 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_in_literature)

James Kelman

Since Alastair Gray has put himself out of the running (1), James Kelman can now lay claim to the crown of 'Most Important Living Scottish Writer' - should he care for such a title, which I rather doubt.

I have read three of his novels, plus short stories (2). Since that trio includes THE WHOLE of the near unreadable Translated Accounts, it surely qualifies me as Kelman's most devoted reader, and world authority on his works. Come on! Who else has actually read the whole damn thing?

Other that Translated Accounts, I've read How Late It Was, How Late and A Dissaffection. Both are good, though it was a long time ago and I'm struggling to recall enough to make a spirited defence of them.

How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize a few years ago, back when I was naive to imagine that this particular trophy actually meant something.

At the time, it was TERRIBLY controversial, because Kelman's fondness of the word 'fuck' and all variations thereof proved too strong for some folk. One newspaper calculated that the word occurred more than four times a page. How did they work that out? What poor bugger had to sit there and count how frequently James Kelman swears? It has been a long time since I read it, but I remember it being being very intense and bleak. The other two are clearer in my mind, so I'll focus on them.

I recall A Disaffection as reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, only coarser, longer and set in Glasgow.

The main character, Patrick Doyle, is a pissed off 29 year old teacher and he is fustrated sexually and careerwise. Sometimes you want to scream at Patrickbut this is a testament to Kelman's ability to make his character seem real, because real people are like that. The final scenes of the book - basically an all day piss up with his brother and his brother's mates, when he should be teaching, interrupted by the arrival of his brother's wife, culminating in a long walk home in the rain - are brilliantly poignant. Kelman must be the only writer who could imagine a trudge home in the Glasgow rain, with a strong liklihood of a kicking from a couple of belligerent cops, seems at all redemptive.

Translated Accounts is a very strange book, composed of fragments of first person narratives, translated by a person or persons who have only a limited familiarity with English. Here are the final lines, which I think are stunningly good:

I cannot say about a beginning, or beginnings, if there is to be the cause of all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak it is these, if I may speak. (1)

And now, a digression ... I remember reading some spurious comparison between Alastair Gray and Kelman, to the detriment of the latter on the grounds that Kelman is limited by his decision to write in dialect (ducks Kelman's haymaker - he dislikes the word intensely) and his concentration on dull realism. This is bullshit. Kelman's concern is for with the unrepresented, and those who are made to be silent.

He has also been accused of misogyny, a charge often levied at male who write about males subjects, though curiously often aimed at females who write about females. It is a libel that can easily be put to rest. Though most of his narrators are male, he is concious of an excluded 'female voice' (ducks anouther swing from Kelman) and highlights this in the closing pages of A Disaffection. The first speaker is Patrick, well pissed. The second is his sister-in-law, Nicola. Kelman doesn't like quotation marks and the paraphenalia of bourgeois grammar. Live with it:

Pat waited a few seconds before speaking. What I mean there about Elizabeth is she's got a sense of peace. John has it as well right enough but I think she has it more. It's a real sense of peace.

Pat. Women have to listen more than men, that's why they've got a sense of peace as you call it; they're used to listening - that's what they have to do all the time, listen to men talking. Yet to hear them you'd think it was us did it. And not only listen to them, women have to watch them all the time as well, they've got to study their moods, they've got to see its alright to speak if this is the bloody time you can ask the question or no, is it the wrong time and you'll have to wait because half the time men just areni willing to listen to something if they don't want to hear it, it gets you down. (2)

Back to Translated Accounts. It is, I think, the ultimate realsiation of what Kelman has been trying to do with his linguistic guerilla warfare. Reading it a few years ago, I tried to work out what his goal was. I came up with three options:

First of all, by writing a novel that tetters on the verge of incomprehensibility, he is trying to make the reader actively create the narrative from the fragments he has provided. The reader has to create the characters and action in his head. If so, he has failed dramatically, because the novel is too resistant to this sort of exercise. The reader will simply give up in fustration. That said, there was one sequence which I read as describing a building crowded with refugees, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. But, with reflection, I don't think that was what he was trying to do.

Second, he might be attempting - by making the setting, characters and conflict anonymous - to describe some universal experience of displaced or opressed persons. The anonymous characters who flit through the ... (words fail. Novel? Story? Collection?) ... the accounts might be Palestinians and Israelis, or Sandinistas and Contras, Jews and Nazis, blacks slaves and their owners, or Glaswegians fighting against English tyranny. If this was his purpose, however, he failed again as the book is so incoherent that it is impossible to draw any sort of narrative or structure out of it. It isn't anyone's experience.

Which brings us to option number three, which is, I think the correct one. I think Kelman has been trying to respond to the critics who bemoan his obscenity and his refusal to write in anything approaching Standard English (pah!). Translated Accounts a story taken out of its natural reister and translated into a hideous non-language by computer mediation - a bit like running Zola through Babelfish. It is, to all intents, unreadable and incomprehensible - which is the point. I think Kelman is trying to show us that a story or a character must be described in its natural voice. To do otherwise is to bastardize it and to make it - from an intellectually and artistically honest point of view - as deadly and meaningless as the mangled accounts that he has produced. So the Accounts themselves are almost a shaggy dog story - it isn't the accounts that are important, but the fact that they have been translated. They've been taken out of their natural register, an immediately cease to be relevant, interesting or important.

If that was what he intended to do, he's suceeded magnificently. But it is a Phyrric vistory, because the book isn't any more readable just because it is meant to be unreadable.Though I would be interested in reading an alternate version, Untranslated Accounts, to see what was actually going on.

1 - This review was written a couple of years ago. Gray has produced another book since, so perhaps he is not as out of the race as he appeared to be a few years ago.
2 - And since writing this, I have read Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, which was a major disappointment.

Baudolino by Umberto Eco

It should be a law that bad books should be small, so that those who insist, foolishly, on finishing every book they start, are not subjected to the trauma of spending weeks or months in the company of bad books. Alas, it is not so. Credo, by Melvyn Bragg, is a very poor book. It is about nine hundred pages long, and I don't think I enjoyed a single one of them. Baudolino, by Umberto Eco, is a slender five hundred pages long, but by the time I reached the end I was fuming, and wondering if I could scrape together the monies to go to Italy and throw all five hunmdred pages in Eco's face.

One reason I am so annoyed is that I had really high hopes for this novel. I thought the Name of the Rose was very good. I'm disposed to like Umberto Eco, because he's fantastically clever and not ashamed of it, and also because, as he is a semiotician, it would be easier - and hence less interesting - to dislike him.

Baudolino promised to be good. It is set int he Dark Ages, culminating with the sacking of Byzantium by the rabble of the Fourth Crusade. I like the (so-called) Dark ages. I like tales of adventure and warfare, and this book promised this. I also like clever writers, and Eco is certainly clever.

The first chapter of Baudolino is fantastic. It is supposed to be the narrative of Baudolino, scrawled on parchemnt filched from his mentor. He has scrapped it clea of what was written on it, but imperfectly. Also, Baudolino, at this stage, is only semi-literate. So the opening chapter is confused and exhilarating, as we pick our way through the jumble of Latin fragments from the text that preceded Baudolino's, straining to catch the meaning of his erratic syntax and spelling. It is a treat. This, surely, is what clever professors turned writers should be doing - showing us, in a playful way, what a delight the simple act of reading can be.

Unfortunately, after that fabulous opening gambit, Eco decides not to bother with the shambling prose of his peasant boy hero, and fast forwards to his dotage, where he recounts his life to Niketa, a Byzantium official recently rescued from maurading Crusaders. So out goes the teasing muddle of the opening chapter, and it is replaced by a very long, eventful tale, which is rendered lifeless by the bland and spiritless style in which it is told.

It shouldn't be like this. There are endless sieges, battles, a murder mystery, a quest, sex with fantastical creatures and parisian whores, debates about the nature of the world, faith, and enough major characters to populate a small Balkan country. But the flaw is the way in which the tale is told. It is like Eco used up all his energy in that first chapter, and after that can't be bothered trying to make the subsequent tale challenging, or even interesting. One is tempted to speculate that he dreamed up the idea for the opening chapter, then had to come up with a story to append to it.

It might seem odd to accuse the author of a five hundred page book of 'Can't be arsed-ness' but it feels like Eco can not be bothered with his story. Scenes and events seem to bore him, so he trundles on another dramatic happening to see if that one will be more amusing. it isn't, so along comes another, and another. Soon, one realises, a lot of stuff is happening, but nothing important is occurring. Things that might be interesting are dispatched with rude haste as Eco moves on to something else.

The treatment of Baudolino's wife is an example. She is introduced on page 228. By page 231 she is dead. We've barely had time to learn her name, and she is out of the book. In between, she hasn't had time to develop as a character, so we don't feel much sorrow at her passing, so the sunsequent references Baudolino makes to her lack emotional power.

A lot of the problems of the book lie in the style of writing. This is a serious charge to level at a semiotician. But the writing is bland and uninteresting. Some of it is told in the first person past tense, some in the third person, but neither perspective has impact, interest or tension. Sometimes, it gets plain careless. On an epic quest, the companions confront many dangers. Here is how one of them is described:

At midnight, as the men were thinking they might get some sleep, crested serpents arrived, each with two or three heads. With their tails they swept the ground and they kept their jaws wide open, with in which three tongues darted. Their stink was perceptible at a mile's distance, and all had the impression that their eyes, which sparkled in the lunar light, spread poison, as for that matter, the basilisk does ...

There are several problems here. First of all, the passage is boring. An encounter with giant serpents at night should be terrifying to read, not bland. People should be yelling, all our senses should be used to convey the intensity of combat. Apparently, however, no-one even bothered to utter a word during the skirmish. Second, there is little description. What do the serpents smell like? Burning tyres? Sewers? Boiled cabbage? Third, Eco forgets one of the first rules of creative writing - show, don't tell. How do the companions discover the serpents are mutli-headed, multi-tongued, and possessed of a lethal gaze? The description above reads more like a cargo dispatch. DELIVERY: One dozen triple headed serpents, stinking. Finally, Eco even presents the information in the wrong order. The first thing that the companions would have become aware of was the smell. Then perhaps the sound of things moving in the darkness. The they might see something moving in the shadows, then the realisation that they were confronting something unnatural and terrifying.

Now, imagine this encounter is one of several, each recounted in the same bland style, each offerring no hope that this one will be the last. At one point, Eco indicates he has tried to use different voices in the writing:

As he [Baudolino] had been tender and pastoral in telling of Abdul's death, so now he was epic and majestic in reporting the fording of that river.

Only, there is no noticable difference in tone between different sections. The whole book, apart from the excellent first chapter, is told in the same monotonous voice, as far as this reader can judge.

The book is very long, and through out it is written in a boring style devoid of drama and interest. the characters are unappealing and the polt, though straining for epic qualities, is boring. Read (or as I intend to, re-read) The Name of the Rose, which is a much better book than this.

*