Nicholas Graham's Blog

Lastnight I dreamt I went to East Berlin again.

One of the oddestmemories of the Cold War was my reading, at some point in the mid-80s duringits Reagan/Gorbachev-instigated catharsis, a remark to the effect that Westerncapitalism was bound to triumph over Soviet collectivism because of the moralascendancy of our cold war culture, and that decisive evidence for this perception was to be found in the literary excellence of the Cold War espionage thrillersof John le Carre.  I’m not sure now whoseproposition this was – possibly the late Roger Scruton, the idea certainlybeing batty enough – but it put me off the idea of reading le Carre at alluntil well after the War itself was lost and won. Then, of course, I began to understandwhat I’d been missing. And it certainly wasn’t validation of the moralascendancy of capitalism’s values under American hegemony. 

If we thinkof le Carre as the magus of the cold war in fiction, it comes as a shock torealise that those decades of low dishonesty only map onto and concern thefirst half of his career.  When the wallscame tumbling down in 1989/90, he’d just published his 13th novel TheSecret Pilgrim. But what to do when you find, at age 58, that the old worldhas vanished, transformed into a new set of moral depravities?  He could have chosen to keep his place in theold world as a kind of curator of newly historicalised fiction of the Cold War,preserved in looking-glass amber. 

Instead hechose to shed those ambiguities for the multi-polar complexities  of the new world – peace dividend,end-of-history and all.  So there is asense in which The Night Manager published in 1993, as the dust of thefallen walls was settling, is really his second first novel, his Numero Deux. 

Given itscurrent (very enjoyable) re-invention as a glossy babes, bombs & Balenciagathriller, it's well worth re-examining the novel itself. For a ‘secondfirst novel’ there are two remarkable things about it. 

One is the wayle Carre develops to an end-state his long-standing preferential option for the agent in thefield over the delinquent agent-runners safe at their desks. 

The otheris an act of grand larceny from the work of another writer so spectacular thatit can only be an hommage, so well-hidden in plain sight that it has, sofar as I’m aware, gone completely unremarked.   It’s this aspect that I want to examine brieflyhere - and I should state at this point that what follows will puzzle anyonefamiliar only with the 2016 TV adaptation, where the updating of the action tothe new millennium means that the unravelling of the plot follows quitedifferent physical & geographical arrangements from those of the book(& non-coincidentally delivers a much less morally ambiguous resolutionthan le Carre’s original). 

In summary,Pine/Quince/Birch’s penetration of Roper’s household and organization encompassesa set of motifs each member of which has some sort of origin, back through thelooking glass, in a quite different novel by another writer.  I need to stress here that I’m not suggestingplagiarism of any sort.  Something quitedifferent seems to be going on, and it is a rather wonderful puzzle, a sort ofletter-home to the lost world. 

Let’sconsider –

·       Pine/Quince/Birch’s house on the Cornishcoast is an emblematic place of refuge, self-discovery, memory and re-invention. 

·       A young naif finds herself installedas chatelaine to an older, violent man. Jed is a trophy, powerless to controlthe members of his staff & is effectively a prisoner of that man and hishousehold.

·       The household is dominated by a chiefservant, Corcoran, whose loyalty makes him suspicious and contemptuous of the intruderPine.

·       The revelation of the truth &the resolution of the plot revolve around events that occur on a small boat. 

These shardsof broken plot, re-arranged in the looking-glass imagination are authenticmotifs of the narrative of The Night Manager every bit as much as theyare of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  And the identification of the gay, alcoholicinside-outsider Major ‘Corky’ Corcoran, Richard Roper’s deeply disturbed consigliere,as a Mrs Danvers in drag is an exquisite piece of transformation.  But what exactly was le Carre playing at withthis bit of literary exhumation & relic-adoration?

I have noidea if he admired du Maurier’s work or knew her in life. Both of them, it isworth recording, lived in coastal Cornwall and both seem to have had deeplyproblematical relationships with their fathers. Du Maurier died in 1989, a few months before the events that destroyed theold world that was  le Carre’simaginative kingdom.

If there’sanything beyond that, I’d be guessing that in some respect we all carry around withus  memories of our own Manderley, thelost Purgatory to which, once we have ascended from its summit, we can neverreturn. And that by vicariously invoking this land of lost discontent le Carremay have been telling himself, probably subconsciously, that for him one lifeas the chronicler of the moral choices of the Cold War was ended and couldnot be returned to.  Another, as thechronicler of the moral choices of the multi-polar world had arrived. And thismeant an unencumbered critique of the newly-imposed ascendancy of the people justthen congratulating themselves upon having won the Cold War.  The arms dealers of The Night Manager,the drug-toting globalists of The Constant Gardener, and le Carre’s owndisavowal of Britain towards the end of his life by becoming a citizen of its originalcolony, all suggest that he had nothing for the comfort of any of them. Scruton,if it was indeed him, must have been profoundly disappointed.  The rest of us can only rejoice.

 

The lasttime that I blogged about AI and fiction, I finished by suggesting that themost likely manifestation of AI in the future novel meant a return to some ofthe characteristics of literary modernism – polyphonic voice, pastiche, fragmentedexperience, irony, deep interiority. 

That I’venot yet further explored that idea’s largely down to the fear that the pace ofAI development being such, anything I say will be written with one foot in the cloudsof speculation the other in the dustbin of history and consigned to itheadfirst before I’ve pressed ‘publish’. 

This fear hasnot restrained AI-oriented futurists, mostly fixated on the idea of AI as amimic of capitalist production, defense posture & global hegemony – all thewet dreams of the oligarch class, embodied in an affectless piece of softwaretrained to be as rapaciously moronic as its masters.  So let’s deal with capitalism first – atleast as far as it orchestrates the means of production in the publishing sideshowof the global entertainment spectacle. I’ll come to the fate of the primary producer of fiction – e.g. me – later.

It’s nowperfectly possible to AI-source the copy-editing, book design, cover art and –for all I know the marketing campaigns too – of any given piece of fiction.  No doubt the high-recognition-factor celebswho appear as purely nominal authors on the covers of their works are in theprocess of themselves being replaced by AI-sourced celebs, designed and generatedto target just the right sub-demographics (assuming there’s anyone left inthose groupuscules with the attention span to actually read anything atall).  But what about, you know, plotand, like, character? And the actual hard graft of writing all those words –and then getting them in the right order? Publishers the infosphere over must want to AI-source all that too,freeing themselves forever from dependence upon those pesky deadline-missing,importunate, messy, bibulous, publicity-averse wasters-of-midnight-oil actualwriters.  You know, the people that we’reall supposed to be here for in the first place. 

A  modestly controversial proposal: I don’tbelieve that you can AI-source fiction – at least not worthwhile fiction, asopposed to derivative, performative-spectacular mimesis of genre (which maywell be what a lot of readers are going to be content with).  And its not because AI is not yet powerfulenough or well-trained enough to do so convincingly or because it hasn’tingested enough source material or because its human implementors have simplynot given the AI a sufficiently detailed prompt from which to work.

No. Itcan’t be done because it is an error of categorization, rooted in our failureto understand what is really meant by the ‘artificial’ bit of AI, and tounderstand what it is that writers actually do to with by and from words. 

Let meexplain.

Top bardTom Eliot gave us a clue about this over a century ago in his now suddenlyprophetic essay Tradition& The Individual Talent. 

AI – whattradition? AI – what talent?  Eliotproposes that each new exponent of a form is influenced by and in turn developsand extends the body of work, or tradition, in which they create.

Let’s takethe tradition element first:

AIs can betaught, by ingesting texts (usually stolen goods) of a literary form, and canwhen prompted produce a more-or-less competent – depending upon the care andprecision with which the prompt is devised – pastiche of that form.  We’ve all played this parlour game.  Some while ago I prompted an AI to write apoem on the doctrine of atonement in the style of the metaphysical poets. Theresult was a technically competent, perfectly dull pastiche that wouldn’t havedisgraced a bright A-Level student. By which I mean someone who understood alittle about Christian theology, the rules of rhyme and scansion, but had neverexperienced the reality and experience of suffering. (I’ll come back to theimplications of this below). What it didn’t do was look sound or delivermeaning anything like a genuine piece of 17th century religiouspoetry really looks sounds and delivers. The AI may have consumed the tradition but it had not in any sense occupiedits boundaries, let alone extended or transformed them.  As a play in the imitation game it wasredundant. 

So what canAI actually do within a given tradition? It can consume existing products and mimic them – more or lesspoorly.  It’s ability to improve itsmimicry is, I suppose, limited by two factors –

(i)                 theingenuity of the AI’s implementors, and

(ii)                theavailability of original material for theft/ingestion. (i.e. the corpus of thetradition to be mimicked).

Can eitherbe significantly extended? Attentive readers may remember that a couple ofyears ago there was a brief panic when it was realized that AIs-in-trainingwere running out of human-authored content to steal, erm, sorry – ingest.  The obvious solution – get the AIs to producetheir own bloody training content – ran into a very serious problem: AIstrained on AI-generated content themselves produced outputs of ever-diminishingquality (however you define ‘quality’ – accuracy, coherence, utility, interest).

How to movebeyond this boundary?  Let us supposethat a hegemony of publishers implements a population of AIs that are trainedon the existing content of a tradition e.g. the literary novel. The firstgeneration of AIs are then prompted to produce their own extensions of thistradition. A second generation is then implemented and trained upon the contentof the first – they then produce their own generation’s content. A thirdgeneration can then be trained with the content of the second. And so on. Willinnovations of form, voice or content arise? Will schools or movementsdetectably develop and differentiate themselves?  At what point will the horizon of commercialviability, or even reader readability, be encountered?  Will some kind of identifiable AI aestheticarise?

My guess isthat sooner rather than later for some genres, but that it will be infinitelypostponed if the content / quality squeeze alluded to above holds good for mostforms of production.  And the clue forthe reason is in the name – we’re dealing here not just with artificialintelligence but with artificial creativity (and yes, in the real world thesetwo things don’t have a quantifiable relationship either).

Now let’sdeal with the other variable in Eliot’s calculus – individual talent. 

An AI canproduce fiction that conforms to a given specification in mimicry of a givenpre-existing tradition. But it cannot undergo the individual experience that ahuman being mines and transforms when they extend that tradition. Whether itsfamily romance, exile, heartbreak, war, poverty, illness or thwarted love,whatever it is that feeds the writer besides the awareness of what has gonebefore – and I’m not going to be so jejune as to suggest that this must besolely a history of trauma or suffering – none of this can (currently) beexperienced by an AI. Eliot gives us a clue about this problem of individualsensibility in his other great piece of criticism TheMetaphysical Poets with his remark about the lost unity of intellectand sensibility, exemplified by how we experience the scent of a rose.  No doubt some of the tech broligarchy – ifthey can justify taking time off from the design of engines mimicking the moreruthlessly inhuman forms of capitalism - are today hooking up a spectrograph toa neural network, putting it in a garden of Hybrid Teas, and teaching it tosmell the roses.  Will this mean that –as per Eliot’s dictum – it experiences the scent of a rose or simply understandsit? I’d hazard that even with its integration into advanced robotics AI isstill necessarily and unavoidably artificial intelligence, not artificialsensibility (still less the real versions of either) and that AI-generated poetryor fiction in fact represents a cultural end-state for the dissociation ofintellect from sensibility that Eliot detected as beginning in the 17thCentury and which still characterises our experience today. 

So whatdoes this technological and cultural squeeze mean for future fiction, assumingthat any of us are still around to write or read it?  And how can fiction represent individualconsciousness and social experience in a world of AI?

The tropesof modernism are a good starting point for this - interiority, multiplicity ofvoice and consciousness, innovation of language and form, fragmented experienceand memory, representation of the sub-conscious. (I’d conjecture that it willprove impossible for an AI to have one).  

To take theexample of two (comparatively recent) masters of late modernist fiction –Lawrence  Durrell and Alasdair Gray.  Both write complex, many-layered andpolyphonic novels that are ‘about’ AI – though neither of them uses the term –in the sense that they feature intelligent, learning creatures who raisequestions about consciousness, language, memory, the social self, etc. 

InDurrell’s 2-decker novel TheRevolt Of Aphrodite a world-dominating plutocrat (who does that remindus of?) uses robotics & a form of AI to create a simulacrum of a deadscreen-goddess with whom he had been obsessed before she was famous.

AlasdairGray’s PoorThings uses a Chinese box of encapsulated narratives to tell the storyof the implantation of a baby’s brain into the body of an adult woman revivedfrom death. This triggers a chaotic and frantic learning process of what it isto be human (& particularly, this being Gray, sexual).

(Culturewar alert: In both cases, male writers have imagined male creators (one adoctor, the others the plutocrat & his tech-bro narrator) creating femaleintelligences for whom experience is primarily imagined to be sexual.  In both cases the creations move rapidlybeyond their control, wreaking havoc in the world.  Where have we encountered this before?) 

BothDurrell & Gray excel at the long slow burn of sliding-doors revelatoryirony.  And its notable that jokes areone thing AI doesn’t seem to do well.  Itcould be that irony – the deepest joke of all - requires both writer and readerto be able to acknowledge and evaluate the authenticity of the experience ofanother voice, and the reality of the consciousness which produces that voice. Theword is, I suppose, imagination. And it cannot be generated solely by consumingand mimicking the imaginative productions of others. 

Anotherconjecture:  as the transmitter ofinauthentic experience and unearned emotion, the characteristic voice of AI-authoredfiction will be essentially sentimental. This will allow it to fit into a capacious niche within the prevailingtastes of American culture. 

Someend-thoughts:  to suggest that fiction shouldoccupy only the republics of experience in which AI falls short would be tosell short fiction itself.   Theassertion probably depends upon whether you see the novel as a distinctcultural form developing out of early modern and Enlightenment culture andsociety; or if you see the production of fiction – tale-telling, fabrication,deception, entertainment, the representation of social reality and theindividual consciousness’ engagement with it, as a manifestation of 3 millionyears of hominid evolution in ever more complex social groups.   In such a tradition, each novel is anend-point of creation, a boundary of the universe – or at least the linguisticallyand socially perceptible boundary of that universe. But I would say that,wouldn’t I?  I’m a novelist. Reject allimitations.

Cumbria’s suicide rate is 50% higher than the national average.  Among the county’s farming community, it’s higher still.  Hang on to these facts, because they’re important later in this piece.

All celebrities are psychologically damaged; celebrity politicians dangerously so.  Rory Stewart’s memoir PoliticsOn The Edge is subtitled Notes From Inside, possibly a nod to Dostoyevsky but both labels are ambiguous. His account of his time as MP for Penrith & the Borders and as a minister under Cameron and May is not just about the challenges of representing a constituency at the overlooked edge of England. It’s also about operating within a system of governance so dysfunctional that, if Stewart’s experience is an accurate indicator, it’s very possibly now beyond any kind of reform (& most definitely beyond the moronic opportunism of the capitalised variety).

The subtitle is a more interesting double, or just possibly quadruple, entendre.  It’s not only that Stewart very obviously has a miserably frustrating time of things as successively a backbencher, committee chair, junior minister and cabinet minister. His plans for change are frustrated at every turn (as I write this, news stories about wrongly released prisoners make it clear that all of the problems he identified as prisons minister 10 years ago persist today, and none of the solutions he championed have delivered change).  He makes no secret of his belief that change can only be successfully implemented from the very top –ideally by Prime Minister Rory Stewart who, it is implied, would have been a sort of benevolent governor of HMP Whitehall, bringing education and reformation to the chronic re-offending of the long-term inmates of an institution that’s clearly part open prison, part secure unit hospital. 

The subtitle also promises or at least implies some degree of interiority from the author and that is where the memoir becomes genuinely intriguing. One expects all politicians’ propensity for lies, evasion and half-truth to originate in deception of the self: they and not their electorate are the real first victims of dysfunctional ambition and self-promotion.  What we get is the visible agony of a serious commitment to public service attempting to find its way through a world focused on the celebrity narcissism of showbiz for ugly people.  Perhaps we should not be surprised by how little he achieved, rather that he got so far and lasted so long.  Stewart has a notably low opinion of almost everyone he encounters at Westminster (full disclosure – one of the very few people he has a good word for is a long-standing friend of mine; I have never discussed Stewart with him).  Conversely, and oddly, it soon becomes obvious that almost everyone Rory encounters in turn takes a decided dislike to him.  It’s striking that he offers no insight into why this should be the case. When asked rhetorically by a friend and ally that he must surely know why, he repeatedly disclaims all understanding.  Perhaps its no more than the fact that he’s committed two long-term cardinal sins for a Tory and a toff – those of being  egregious, and of being unapologetically clever.  If so, neither of these trouble him as possible explanations. 

There is however a moment where the ignored and unmanageable suddenly come up close and personal, when Stewart baldly admits there was a time that he considered suicide.  We should, I think, take this claim profoundly seriously rather than dismiss it as the performative self-dramatisation of  a public schoolboy caught out in the manner of Richard Branson at Stowe.  (There is not so much as a distant echo of “And then you’ll all be sorry”, the usual end-point of such cases).  The occasion was a maliciously selective quotation in the press that gave the impression, falsely, of a snob’s disdain for the poorer sort of farmers who were the backbone of traditional Tory support in his constituency, and he was clearly utterly mortified by what it might be thought to reveal about him.  This moment is made all the darker by the complete absence, anywhere in the book, of any mention or awareness of the epidemic of suicide (see above) in that community and in his wider constituency. 

What we do get is the gradual revelation of an elusive pathological hinterland in which political struggles are made unbearable by crippling attacks of migraine.  He is an avid exponent of the Walking Cure - long tramps through constituency and borderland that are probably not so much fact-finding missions as self-medicating ministrations of his own interior. One is tempted to shake him by the shoulders and demand “But Rory, what exactly is it that you are walking away from in such a brisk and purposeful manner?”  I suspect that this would elicit the same null return as the ‘Surely you know why?’ question above. 

Does any of this, in the context of a bestselling political memoir, really matter?  Well, up to a point or two, yes it does.

First point: Stewart is still a shaper of political attitudes amongst the bien-pensant podcast-consuming classes via his lucrative sideline The Rest Is Politics.(Shorter version of his take on being a neo-colonial administrator in an unstable satrapy – “You have to ask yourself – who do I shoot first?”). Second point: in Cumbria rumours abound that Stewart intends to run as an independent candidate in the 2027 election for Cumberland and Westmorland’s strategic mayor.  I have little in common politically with either Tories or toffs, but it could well be that if he runs he could win and be a decently good holder of the office. Stewart is clearly one of nature’s District Commissioners – and the job of strategic mayor of a remote, impoverished region with complex problems that have chronically escaped the solutions of conventional Westminster would probably quite suit his blend of individuality, intellect and bloody-minded persistence. He would, I guess, get a decently strong personal vote, plus those of the excluded middle who with the collapse of both Conservatives and Labour locally want to ensure that Reform UK Ltd’s coalition of the whining are not allowed anywhere near the levers of power, as well as the 2nd preferences of those prepared to tolerate a winner so long as he’s not ‘one of that other lot’, whoever that lot may be. And that may just constitute a coalition of the winning. 

If he runs and if he succeeds then I very much hope that he will treat as his first priority the mayor’s strategic responsibility for health and wellbeing and bring his considerable talents and energy to bear upon the problem of Cumbria’s bloody epidemic of suicide and self-harm.  Our people have suffered more than enough.

Years ago my centaur’s random course through lifecrossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days– the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and wentalong, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead afigure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with amodest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of theLyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyageof discovery, understanding, memory and passion.  Later on, in the bar, he was great company -& when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlinglystimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit,she said that I’d got him about right.  Learningthat in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits ofpoets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken yearsearlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and withthe shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’msatisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death withlidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmittingto us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and outof hell.  At our next meeting the poet waskind enough to thank me for the gift.  Thiswas at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, averse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixedclassical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of highand low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truthand power.  (My abiding memory of thatmeal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had giveneach of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creatingwildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises theysported). 

And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return– a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf Warof 1991.  The cover photograph was animage straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killedby American fire during his retreat from Kuwait.  (The picture is well-known in the UK, but neverseen in the USA according to American friends). In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, beingupbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, andthen going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers whokilled him.  It’s a chilling, terrifyingtale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond itscontrol.  And it takes as its departurenot just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at thetime – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and thenreaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where youencounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know theright words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.  

And this poem was published on the newspages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note  – of a national newspaper.  It’s difficult now to imagine, in our worldof enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readershipand speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible andin language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition andcompassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But TonyHarrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face ofevil.   

But we live in diminished times, and a time diminishedstill further by his passing.  Where nowthe scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, thebursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin andmore Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about ourcondition?

I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shineback to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate everyone of our tomorrows.

 

The estimable Jen Bowden produces an outstanding regular podcast 'Northern Voices', in which she interviews writers from the north of England about their work, their craft and the challenges and beauties of being a 'northern writer' (however you may frame that particular label). I'm delighted to report that in Episode 87 Jen & I talk about my historical novel 'The Judas Case', the odd biases against partnership publishing and other challenges facing writers in the north.
You can find it here: https://soundcloud.com/northern_voices/episode-87-nicholas-graham

Youprobably have to go as far back as the Brontes to find three women having asdysfunctionally miserable a time of it in the uplands of the north as Margot,Mama and Eden, the bizarre love triangle at the heart of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb.

First adisclaimer: I’m prejudiced against serial killers.  Time was, the better class of murder involvedthe violation of complex knots of financial, familial or sexual obligations;betrayal, intrigue, the deep roots of personal and social dysfunction,long-hidden animosities and ancient or tribal hatreds.  Then along came the serial killer, blown infrom the anonymous, asocial wildernesses of the Empty Quarter of America, atjust the moment that Margaret Thatcher announced there was no such thing as‘society’ and the value of a life was reduced to its position – or lack of one- in the marketplace.  The age of consumerentitlement made the psychopathology of the compulsive killer the focus, andmurder fiction became a sort of action-painting.  At its worst, plot became a crossword puzzleto be cracked by ticking boxes and recognizing patterns not meanings.  At its best, a tool for the dissection of theenflamed horrors of the human soul.  Theinteriority of the killer, not the social relations of the victim, became thefocus of narrative discovery.   (I exclude from this opinion the work of theexcellent Patricia Cornwell, whose Scarpetta is, throughout, a deeply politicalfigure).*

What Rosedoes in The Lamb is take that interiority to a new level, if onlybecause she brings the intense social relations of the killers’ family romanceinto play, and watches unspeakable horror play out through the eyes of a not-that-innocentchild. 

The Lamb is, at its most basic – and it isabout basic urges, no doubt – a sort of post-feminist eating-disorder retellingof Sawney Bean, the Galloway cannibal who lurked in the darkness at the edge ofRenaissance Scotland.  Here the familyoccupy a cottage somewhere anonymously remote in the Cumbrian fells (it’sprobably no coincidence that Cumbria is currently a serious foodie destination,with 13 Michelin-starred restaurants and many more adorning the Good FoodGuide), though a convenient bus-ride away from Margot’s school, which shecontinues to attend without care-workers batting an eyelash while the culinaryhorrors play out at the other end of the line in broken Britain.  The route between these two worlds, from theoppression of the mundane to the horror of the underworld, is important: its overseen  by the driver of the school bus, and it saysa lot for Rose’s adeptness with ambiguity that we can never be quite surewhether he is genuinely concerned for Margot’s wellbeing – or subtly groomingher. 

Alljourneys into the world of childhood enchantment begin with the absence of thefather, and the identity & whereabouts of Margot’s are subjects ofpersistent mystery and reticence. (There’s an early clue to Margot’s ownwithholding of information from us in a family of rampant appetites when theyhave the local gamekeeper – father of one of Margot’s schoolfriends – fordinner and the identity of exactly which body-part Margot consumes is coylyelided in a way reminiscent of how we’re never quite told exactly whatHeathcliff actually does with the exhumed body of Catherine Earnshaw). 

Releasefrom this double hell comes when Margot reaches puberty.  I’ll maintain my own reticence on the detailsof the denouement, but will say that while there is a pitiless logic to the plotline– the astute may have seen it coming for some time – the voice and viewpoint bywhich it is  transmitted raises some deepquestions for the reader.  Have we, afterall, been participating in a fictional abuse memoire (well, yeah,unavoidably)?  And the continuation ofMargot’s voice by other means implies the omniscience of eternity, quite theshift after the relentlessly visceral, corporeally messy details of the narrative.    

*Fun fact: I had the good fortune, many years ago, to study creative writing under Anthony Abbott at Davidson College, a year or two after Cornwell had graced his seminars.  Tony's influence and encouragement had a profound effect upon my own work.

Just howlong does it take for gangsters to be mistaken for aristocrats?*

In the latestedition of For Whom The Book Tolls, DK Powell & I discuss two seminal booksfor our age – End Times by Peter Turchin and The Leopard byGiuseppe di Lampedusa.

Watch the podcast here:  https://youtu.be/948ZNduVtCc

In EndTimes Turchin claims to have invented a new science – ‘cliodynamics’,effectively the crunching of large sets of historical data that suggestshistory is predictably cyclical after all. So far, so psychohistory & Hari Seldon / Isaac Asimov.  ‘Real’ historians of my acquaintance whentold about him tend to sigh and say ‘Oh no, not another one . . .’

But Turchinis originally a studier of animal population behaviours, andhe’s brought scientific rigour to his thesis.

His point:the accumulation of wealth upwards leads to 3 things fatal for any society –gross inequality, the immiseration of the majority of the population, theover-production of new elites who compete for power. Result: political disintegration followed by the persistence of the underlying conditions.

Now, dothose three things remind you of any societies either on this side of theAtlantic or the other? 

And on the subject of new elites replacing old, it’s time for you to read– or re-read - one of the great historical novels, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s TheLeopard.  Set in Sicily during the 1860srevolution that led to the unification of Italy, it charts the managed decline –and persistence by other means – of Fabrizio, Prince of Salinas, whose nephewTancredi recognises reality early on – “If we want things to stay as they are –things will have to change.” 

The novelhas been filmed twice – once in 1963 by Italian aristocrat and Marxist LucinoVisconti, starring Burt Lancaster as the prince, Alain Delon as Tancredi andClaudia Cardinale as Angelica.  Thisversion is hypnotically ravishing & I warmly recommend it.

Available viaAmazon Prime: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B00FYGUMKS

There’salso a new adaptation available on Netflix that really opens out the book’s oblique,interior narratives – we get a lot of wartime action scenes - and re-castsTancredi’s romantic relationships in a way that’s not encumbered by the socialcodes of 19th century Sicily  (if you so much as glance at a girl withliving male relatives, be prepared either to marry her or to fight for your life). 

Available via Netflix:  https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81392676

You can find End Times here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Times-Counter-Elites-Political-Disintegration-ebook/dp/B0BFB71KPC

And The Leopard here:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leopard-Revised-material-Vintage-Classics-ebook/dp/B0041RRH6S

 *Twogenerations at most, in either direction, judging by the above. 

In the latestedition of For Whom The Book Tolls, Ken Ford Powell and I pitch a couple ofrecent must-read books to each other. Ken talks about The Spittle Of Zimolax, a between-the-wars mystery featuringan intrepid female sleuth working for MI5 in pursuit of a tantalisngly well-imaginedMcGuffin.

And I pitch toKen the great Polish sci-fi novel ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaus Lem (1921 – 2006).  Much-filmed, Solaris is that rare thing – abook that contains multitudes of other books, a sort of Borgesian multibrary.  It’s not ‘just’ science fiction, it’s a ghoststory, a heartbreaking love story, a political satire, an enquiry intoknowledge and how we think about the world, an exploration of consciousness, awarning on the dangers of AI – virtually everything that disturbs us about ourcontemporary world is contained within it, and it was first published in 1961.

It alsoprovides the cultural missing link between George Clooney, a visionary Russianfilm director, and the Sex Pistols . . .

How,exactly?  You’ll have to listen to thepodcast . . .

https://youtu.be/YrmbVZXwag4

 

 

 If you’regoing anywhere for a day over Christmas and the New Year, head to Carlisle andTullie House, where you’ll find an absolutely enthralling retrospective of thework of Cumbrian landscape artist Sheila Fell. And if you’re going to Carlisle,make sure you take the high road through the hills of the Lake District, whereyou’ll be able to experience the original landscapes – if you’re lucky,there’ll be snow – that she transmuted into some of the most powerfully movingvisions of Britain in the 20th century. Tullie House has over 70 ofthem on display, and they are unmissable.

Sheila Fell(1931 – 1979) was a West Cumbrian coal-miner’s daughter who studied painting atSt Martin’s School Of Art, exhibited in London in the ’50s and ’60s, waselected to the Royal Academy in 1969, a time when the membership wasoverwhelmingly male, and died far too young, when she still very clearly had decadesof visionary productivity ahead of her. The retrospective at Tullie House is the first such of any size in over 20years and really should be grasped, gazed upon and cherished.

Fell’slandscapes are demonic in their intensity and depth – farm-houses cower beneathlowering mountains, accumulations of mass and gravity that seem to bend out ofshape the constrained, crushed figures of labourers, horse-and-cart or theempty space of a lane between bulbous haystacks where the figures seem to bestruggling to escape.  And above all thisthe huge immensity of the mountains and the wild uncontrollable energy of cloudand sky convolves in fury.  The Lake Districtis, of course, a post-industrial landscape, strewn with the spoil heaps of abandonedmine-workings; Fell’s vision is chthonic, about as far from the chocolate-boxscenery of the day-tripper as you can get, and utterly authentic.  And all this fashioned out of precise,weighty strokes of paint that seem to have been applied with the implacable slowviolence of the geology that gave them their subject. 

And shebrings the same precise intensity to her visions of the Solway and the industrialtowns of the coast.  Seascapes of Allonbydepict low houses battered by waves and light. The show includes two of her paintings of Maryport harbour, where a seaof battered pewter hangs ominously above the town.  These, and the brooding townscapes of her home,suggest that an entire vision of nature and society can be conjured out of lightwithin a bicycle-ride of  Aspatria.  Fell sketched rapidly, in Cumbrian nature,and then worked with paint and canvas back in her London studio – what you seeis the turmoil of emotion experienced with rural intensity and then recollectedamongst the tranquility of a great city. 

The showmakes much of her friendship and sketching trips with LS Lowry, and while they’rearguably both visual poets of the industrial North, it strikes me that Fell hasa power that far outdoes Lowry’s cold urban vistas and naïve automata.  If Fell’s images and colour have referencepoints then they’re the farm-labourers of Van Gogh, JMW Turner’s overwhelmingskies and seascapes, the smooth light curves and contours of Edward Munch’slate-career agricultural paintings – brooding cabbage-harvesters under lowskies. 

Don’t befooled into thinking that this makes her merely an inheritor of titanicinfluences.  Fell is utterly anduncompromisingly personal and her work embodies the authenticity of Cumbria – alandscape that shaped and is shaped by its people. I left the exhibitionintoxicated by the power of Fell’s vision, grieving that it was cut so abruptlyshort.  The show is, simply, unmissable.

Sheila Fell:Cumberland On Canvas – Tullie House, Carlisle, to 16 March 2025.

https://tullie.org.uk/events/sheila-fell-cumberland-on-canvas/

Those insearch of more may also wish to track down the late Cate Haste’s sadlyout-of-print Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Lund Humphries, 2010 –ISBN: 9780853319795). 

In the 3rd episode of our bookchat podcast ForWhom The Book Tolls, I discuss ghost and mystery stories ideal for Christmasreading with fellow Cumbrian writer Ken Ford-Powell. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kj1iZYCP4    

We both absolutely loved Nicholas Foster’s The ConsulFrom Tunis, an impressive debut collection of subtly disturbing tales that willappeal to those who prefer their supernatural to be gore-free but soaked indiscomfit and anxiety of the most sophisticated sort.  Foster pays hommage to MR James early on inhis collection, and his work is every bit as good as the master’s own.

In Foster’s collection a group of old university friendshold an annual reunion at a swish restaurant and, over the port, swap storiesof the uncanny. Suddenly, we’re not in Covent Garden anymore: war-time Greece,medieval Cyprus, the English Revolution and Byzantine slave-masters releasetheir unquiet revenants into post-prandial post-Brexit Britain. Difficult topick out brilliants from such a rich casket, but these moved and enthralled me.In ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ martyred sectarians of the English Civil War escapefrom hell to hack a City firm’s IT systems. The heroine of ‘Joining The Dance’,an art restorer in a post-Soviet Baltic state, is subtly ensorcelled by thehidden images of damnation in the fresco she’s restoring. And a high courtjudge’s career is derailed by the intervention of a witness summoned by forcesmore potent than the law that he serves in ‘The Hand of Justice’.

There are two things about Foster’s craftsmanship that liftthese stories above simply being highly accomplished. First, their widehistorical and cultural frame of reference always feels authenticallyexperienced rather than merely ‘well-researched’. Secondly, the tales arestructured as Chinese box narratives that disorient the reader just enough toleave you unprepared for the jolting manifestation of the uncanny: this isstory-telling as conjuring, in both the obvious senses of the word. I loved thiscollection. And I can’t wait for his next. 

The Consul From Tunis is strongly recommended as theperfect Christmas present for any friend who loves high class supernaturalchills.

We also discussed Isaac Asimov’s Tales of The BlackWidowers, and Roald Dahl’s Collected Short Stories – both classicsof their genre that are perfect reading on a winter evening with a glass ofmalt and a roaring fire. 

The podcast is also available on Ken’s blog Write Out Loud, which I recommend youfollow.

And here are links to the books we discuss –

TheConsul From Tunis by Nicholas Foster;

Talesof The Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov;

TheGhost Stories of MR James;

The Collected Short Stories by Roald Dahl.