Nicholas Graham's Blog

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.

 As acurrency of cultural and political exchange, ‘antisemitism’ is now probably completelyworthless – coined, clipped, counterfeited, devalued and Greshamed to buggery& back – able to mean absolutely anything and nothing, a function of the cynicismof its users.  Which is not to say thatthe history of 1900 years of hatred and violence to which it was the mealy-mouthed pseudo-scientific climax, isn’t coming back to bite our enshittified society soonerand nastier than we think. So, in a modest spirit of cultural enquiry, Irecently went back to one of the great unacknowledged disgraces of our nationalliterature and found myself wondering, once again, why on earth I continue togive shelf-space to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Because,gentle reader, it absolutely reeks of it.

Those onlyfamiliar with the Bart stage musical (shortly to be revived in the West End, which may make for some interesting reviews) andHarry Secombe’s comic turn as Bumble The Beedle, may find this assertionsurprising.  Is Ron Moody’s Fagin reallyJewish at all?  What about my old mucker RowanAtkinson’s portrayal – all skin-crawling villainy and comic grotesque?  Read the book, and you’re in for a nastysurprise.

In essence,Oliver’s universe starts out conventionally improving – a young boy’s moral characteris a clean slate, contested by the blandly good-humoured beneficence of Mr Brownlowand the repellently fascinating but minutely dissected evil of Bill Sikes’ criminalpsychopath, Nancy’s abusive victimhood and Jack Dawkins’ cheerfully amoralgangsterism that’s the great-grandfather of Bugsy Malone via Marcel Carne’sLacenaire   Then things turn nasty.  The monster in the fictional spaceis Dickens’ portrayal of the various Jewish characters, and specifically Fagin.  Because Dickens extends that conventionalmoral universe with all the tropes of racism at his disposal. And no, it justwon’t wash that Dickens self-edited by removing numerous instances of the word ‘Jew’.  What he left in is a catalogue of every antisemitictrope you’d rather not be thinking about. Dickens’ Jews all talk in comically adenoidal accents, look out for eachother to the cost of their English host-culture, and are perpetually engaged inopaquely nefarious enterprise. 

Allthis is prologue to Fagin, whose portrayal occupies the depths of the antisemiticimagination.  Dickens descends into thismidden in three distinct steps.

Firstly, hedescribes Fagin as a reptilian life-form inhabiting sub-human depths far beneaththe moral landscape occupied by the Anglo characters – good, corruptible orevil as they may be.  So far, so antisemitic.

Secondly, Dickensshows Fagin deliberately encompassing the corruption of the (eminently corruptible) English. When Noah Claypole comes to London, Fagin invites him to pick one of hiscatalogue of criminal rackets – robbing small children of their pennies.  It’s easy money and if persisted in can makeyou a good living.  It’s also worth abrief excursus to understand the position that mugging defenceless infantsoccupies in the moral universe of 19th century fiction. 

Readersonly familiar with the stage-musical reinvention of Les Miserables – a 2-hourgallop through selected narrative highlights of a 1500-page novel – may imaginethat Jean Valjean’s redemption begins directly after his theft of Bishop Myriel’ssilver candlesticks.  Victor Hugo hadother ideas – in the novel, after receiving the bishop’s forgiveness, Valjeanpromptly goes out and mugs a waif for the child’s last sou.  It is the nadir of his depravity and thecrime for which Javert pursues him across decades, aflame with therighteousness of his cause – defender of the defenceless.  Valjean’s crime is something akin to the sinagainst the Holy Ghost, redolent of Matthew 18:6, an act that prevents the possibilityof Christian redemption.  And this is also the crime by which Dickens has Fagin corrupt his new apprentice. 

And finally:  Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin’s last hours ondeath row is a bravura piece of writing. It teases out the creeping minute-by-minute horror of the approach ofpersonal extinction in the mind of the condemned man  And it does so with a care and precision of tonethat permits the reader to experience absolutely no fellow-feeling or sympathy forFagin at the imminence of his death.  Dickenspulls off a sort of novelistic totalitarianism, forbidding the reader to pityFagin because in Dickens’ view he’s simply not human like you or me.  

You cannotclose Oliver Twist without feeling defiled by having touched pitch andlicked it off your fingers every time you turn a page - which is an odd sort ofacknowledgement of Dickens’ implacable brilliance as a writer. Read it by all means,and then ask yourself not should we cancel our national treasure, jolly musicaladaptation and all, rather would you really give this shelf-space if it appearedin any other work by any other writer?

It’s a truismamong biographers that they all start by falling in love with their subjects –and end up hating them with a vengeance. Quite how this works out for the objective historian self-tasked withthe production of a biography of Adolph Hitler is a rather worryingquestion.  Only a propagandist would beginat the position above. Or do you reverse the process, start by hating and findthat lurid attention to mind-defying evil has begun to fray your edges? 

In thelatest edition of our bookchat readers’ podcast For Whom The Book Tolls,fellow-writer DK Powell and I discuss Professor Ian Kershaw’s numbinglycomprehensive and enlightening biography ‘Hitler’.  We also consider how historical fiction hasapproached the problem of depicting monstrosity.  In ‘Young Adolf’ the great Beryl Bainbridge fictionaliseda just-possibly-historical visit by Hitler to his half-brother in Liverpool in1912, and we look at  Timur Vermes’merciless satire of sweet-talking  fascismin the age of infotainment ‘Look Who’s Back’. 

You canfind the podcast here –

https://youtu.be/Si3wR8n0sEo

and afurther summary of our discussion on Ken’s excellent blog here –

https://writeoutloudblog.com/2024/11/03/for-whom-the-book-tolls-episode-2-hitler-by-ian-kershaw/

I shouldadd that I’m more than a little sceptical of the tendency to pathologise Hitleras a form of reassurance – a canter through the bibliography suggests that atone time or another a diagnosis of practically every disease in the medicaldictionary has been proposed as a means of explaining him.  (Housemaid’s Knee an honourable but unsurprisingomission given the preternatural levels of feckless, narcissistic inactivitythat according to Kershaw characterised much of his private life).  Bainbridge seems to me to get closest to aplausible psychological necromancy while avoiding the trap – just - of archlyanachronistic anticipation.  Vermes’satire plays very clever games with first-person voice, asking the readerwhether they think they’re clever enough to see through the comically re-animatedmonster and therefore ‘in’ on the joke, or actually complicit.  Even before the events of 5thNovember 2024, it’s a deeply uncomfortable read for all its comic frisson.

If you wantto follow this up by reading any of the books we discuss or refer to, you canfind them here:

Hitler,by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2013);

YoungAdolf, by Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, 2010);

LookWho’s Back, by Tibur Vermes, trans by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press, 2014);

The Danzig Trilogy, by GunterGrass, trans by Breon Mitchell (Vintage Digital, 2017).