Friday Five: Autumn Arts Part Two

Following on from last week's Friday Five, here are the rest of the questions from the Autumn Arts section of the quiz, with answers at the end.

5 more Autumn Arts questions:

1. Description of a painting from Wikipedia: “This painting captures the moody atmosphere of an autumn day on the Seine River, also known as La Seine. The sky is dark and cloudy, but there are spots where light shines through to illuminate the water and buildings that line its banks. There are a few trees on either side of the river that have not yet lost their leaves, while others have already turned brown and orange. It is a beautiful painting that captures the mood of a late September day in the region, with its changing light and gentle breezes. The river, which is usually so busy, becomes calm and reflective. The reflection of the trees and buildings on the water’s surface can be seen in full detail as well as their reflections in the windows of houses near by.” What is the name of the painting and the artist?
2. Dictionary definition of a word beginning with 's': “A rustle or soft, whispery sound, particularly of leaves in the wind” What is the word?
3. The publisher's blurb from the fourth book in a series: "What if you knew someone you loved was going to die? What if you thought you could save them? How much would you risk to try? How far will a woman travel to find a father, a lover a destiny? Across seas, across time – across the grave itself?” What is the name of the book, the series and the author?

4. Description of an English post-punk group formed in 1976 band by music critic, Simon Reynolds in the NME: "A kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny, voiced through a unique, one-note delivery somewhere between amphetamine-spiked rant and alcohol-addled yarn." What is the name of the band and the lead singer?
5. Description of a film from Wikipedia:  “A 1994 American epic Western film directed by Edward Zwick and starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Julia Ormond and Henry Thomas. Based on the 1979 novella of the same title by Jim Harrison, the film is about three brothers and their father living in the wilderness and plains of Montana in the early 20th century and how their lives are affected by nature, history, war, and love.” What is the name of the film and what Oscar did it win that year?



Answers: 1. Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil by Claude Monet 2. Sussuration 3. Drums of Autumn from the series Outlander by Diana Gabaldon 4. Legends of the Fall; Best Cinematography (John Toll); 5. The Fall; Mark E. Smith

Friday Five: Autumn Arts Part One

We had a party to celebrate the autumn equinox, for which I wrote a quiz. One round was called 'Autumn Arts' in which I described a thing and the guests had to guess what it was. Here are five of them (with the answers at the end):

5 Autumn Arts questions:

1. Description of a painting on Wikipedia: "Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, it was described by the critic John Ruskin as 'the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight'. The painter's wife Effie wrote that he had intended to create a picture that was 'full of beauty and without a subject'. The picture depicts four girls in the twilight collecting and raking together fallen leaves in a garden. They are making a bonfire, but the fire itself is invisible, only smoke emerging from the between the leaves. The painting has been seen as one of the earliest influences on the development of the aesthetic movement." What is the name of the painting and the artist? 
2. Description of a TV series on IMDb: "The psychological thriller examines the lives of two hunters - one is a serial killer who prays on victims in and around Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the other is a female detective drafted from the London Metropolitan Police to catch him." What is the name of the TV series and the actors who play those characters?
3. The first lines from the translation of a novel: "May I monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy ape who resides over the fate of this establishment. In fact, he speaks nothing but Dutch." What is the name of the novel and the author?

4. Description of some music on Classic FM: "Like the other concertos [this] has three movements; the first is energetic and rhythmic, and depicts a harvest festival dance. The second is a slow movement that seems to usher the cool air and reflective crisp mornings well and truly in. And the third movement is a lively and jaunty affair, setting to music an autumn hunt taking place atop a layer of crispy settled leaves." What is the name of the concerto, the suite from which it is taken and the composer?
5. Description of a film by Variety film critic Emanuel Levy in 2000: "Utterly banal, Joan Chen's tediously sappy romance is a kind of modern-day Love Story (a better film!) with a 'twist': Richard Gere's suave lover is old enough to be Winona Ryder's father." What is the name of the film?

Answers: 1. Autumn Leaves by John Everett Millais 2. The Fall, Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson 3. The Fall (La Chute) by Albert Camus 4. Autumn from Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi 5. Autumn in New York

Get Orf My Land: The Shepherd's Life

The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks

Penguin

Pp. 287

Sheep are big business. Last month (August 2020) in Lanark, Scotland, a sheep called Double Diamond sold for a world-record sum of £367,500. James Rebanks knows that sheep are important. As a shepherd, he understands that farming and shepherding are crucial to the economy and the livelihood of many. He explains that this is hard work but that he loves it and enjoys the connection that he gets from the land. What he doesn’t seem to understand is how privileged he is and how many of the people he scorns would love to have been given his opportunities.

The Shepherd’s Life is not particularly well-written but Rebanks received an advance from an agent before he had written it. Although he appears to despise people who don’t do his work, they seem to be interested in him. He writes a sort of auto-biography, which also contains a lot of information about farming and a lot of assumptions about what non-farmers think of him and his industry. Many of his blunt and antiquated attitudes are irritating and arrogant, such as his inherent sexism and antipathy towards intellectuals, but the sections on sheep-farming itself are interesting and the most engaging.

As a child he followed his grandfather around the place knowing that he would inherit the farm because he is male. He has sisters, but it was “different for girls…their role is to leave and do something else to earn respect.” This knowledge of his purpose in life means that he feels ownership of the land. “We owned the earth. We’d been here forever. And we always would be. We would get battered from time to time, but we would endure and win.”

For him and his family, “our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place.” And what if we can’t inherit a farm? Will we never ‘belong’? He dislikes Alfred Wainwright, Chris Bonnington and William Wordsworth because they’re ‘not from round here’ and so have no right to talk about ‘his’ land; he thinks climbers, poets, walkers and daydreamers are pointless, and that tourists are “minor irritants, like ants – they got in the way and they had strange ideas, but a little bit of bad weather and they’d be gone again to get on with stuff that mattered.”

The book itself is poorly written, grammatically clunky and very repetitive; a lot of sections start out telling us what someone is doing in the present tense, as he tries to set a basic scene: “My father is wielding a white-handled meat saw…” “My mother is sitting on a wooden chair in our barn…” “We are working in the sheep pens.” The use of generic pronouns is also problematic, for example, he writes of his grandfather, “He had a rough whiskery face when you kissed him goodnight.” This begs the questions, when did I kiss him, and what was his face like when I didn’t? He acknowledges, “We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories” and yet, he doesn’t narrate his own very well.

He became inspired by books when he picked up a copy of A Shepherd’s Life by W.H. Hudson (the story of a shepherd called Caleb Bawcombe) and says he admires “the brilliant plain storytelling, no messing about”. It is predictable when he talks of reading; it is of male authors – Camus, Salinger, A.J.P. Taylor, Orwell – and that his biggest inspiration is the hyper-masculine Hemingway. After criticising the poets, he tries to write his own, and I certainly hope he’s a better sheep farmer.

He is at his best when writing about the sheep, the dogs, and the cyclical nature of farming. When told without prejudice, these snippets are interesting and engaging, including the shepherding chores of lambing, making hay, shearing (“It is a carefully choreographed thing in which the sheep is turned, shuffled and rolled in clever purposeful ways”), dipping, and training sheepdogs.

He divides the book into four seasons, as everything they do is connected to the weather and the natural cycle. In many respects, shepherding and farming have not changed in centuries. “You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, not by our will.”

If you remove the tractors and the machinery, the farming practices are ancient, and it upsets him that these traditions, skills and knowledge are being lost or dismissed. He commends the ‘old ways’ and wants future generations to see the reality of farming and agriculture. His book is almost a call to arms to protect the natural mechanics and importance of farming.

James Rebanks is a tough person to like – he has some interesting things to say about sheep and the farming of them in the Lakeland fells, but he tells them in a didactic and hectoring tone. If he could climb down from his privileged perch, his message about sustainable farming might be easier to hear.

Walking in Circles: London Overground

London Overground by Iain Sinclair

Hamish Hamilton

Pp. 258

In 2012 Iain Sinclair and his walking companion, Andre Kötting (British artist, writer and film-maker b.1959) spent a day tramping around the London Overground circuit, and Sinclair recounts the journey by weaving in references to others who have come before. Processions and pilgrimages are evoked from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, as the duo walk just for the sake of walking. He is at his best when describing the physical mechanics of motion. “Refuelling was a requirement, but sitting down would carry the risk of our not being able to rise again. Pints were delivered, swilled back, replenished, before a bowl of steaming fish pie made it from microwave to table.”

He likes to walk. He has walked around Hackney, the M25, and areas that have been cleared for the Olympics before, and written books about all of them.  Understanding the needs for a hook with which to draw in the reader, he chooses routes that are frequently travelled, but by different forms of transportation. Above all, he fears bland homogenisation and he despises shopping centres, such as Clapham Junction, in a sentiment familiar from Ghost Milk.

Sinclair writes with a sense of nostalgia, and is proud of his grumpy old man status: “This old-man sourness is addictive. Period pains from the inability to accommodate change. When nature pricks and the heart engages, people go on long pilgrimages”. Resistance to progress tends towards snobbish bigotry. He dislikes popular culture; he dislikes cyclists, mothers with pushchairs, and people on mobile phones; anyone, in fact, who enters ‘his’ space.

His references are deliberately esoteric but they are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and decidedly male. The number of name drops becomes exhausting – there are 387 in 258 pages (I counted and catalogued them all, with their Wikipedia entries as interpretation). Of these 387 authors, artists, poets, politicians, film-makers, architects, actors, explorers, scientists and activists who people this particular landscape, only 43 are female: that’s fewer than 12%. Women may be mentioned as eye witnesses to events, nameless passers-by to whom he talks, or memories of previous lovers (again nameless), but they make no significant impression on this history of London.

Sinclair writes in truncated sentences, which can be punchy but soon grow tiresome: “He put his money where his mouth was. And his tongue was blistered with diamonds.” It can be difficult to tell whether the prose is clever or just obtuse: are these profound analogies or empty aphorisms?

One of Sinclair’s bugbears is the commercialisation of the environment. He notes the areas of desirable real estate: “Even a minor physical elevation comes with entitlement to upward social mobility.” He admits, “We would all live on the river if we could, waiting for the rains of Schadenfreude to wash us away. Climate is another word for conscience.” He shuns the wealthy and the nouveau riche. “Fundamentalism of every stamp, including the fundamental decencies of the old Surrey stockbroker belt (now given over to Russian oligarchs and Premier League footballers), is suspect. Bourgeois marriage is a lie. Property is debt.”

While mourning the past, he invokes the present in poetic language, “The Thames riverbank would, in a few years, become a circus with a Ferris wheel, chair-lift rides, millennial (discon)tent on the East Greenwich swamps, and a shockheaded mayor as a public clown, swinging from wires or falling off a trick bicycle.” His associations with the city are intense, and he refutes any that don’t align with his emotions. “Maybe that’s it: the memory-place should remain fixed. The attitude to the great sprawl of the metropolis is verging on Oedipal.” London changes constantly, and while everyone is defensive of their own version, they should probably be more tolerant of the fact that there is room for many more.

Second Person Singular: You

You by Caroline Kepnes

Simon & Schuster

Pp. 422

Joe Goldberg narrates this erotic thriller in a way which is intended to be claustrophobic and creepy, but just results in being tired and formulaic. Maybe it is because Gone Girl ruined everything and there have been so many imitations of the toxic controlling relationship and the unreliable narrator that we are no longer shocked by the horrible things people do to each other in the name of their warped ‘love’. Perhaps the advent of the Fifty Shades phenomenon leads us to an expectation of more dominant sexual content in contemporary novels. Whatever the reason, this novel does not surprise, titivate, nor really even register interest.

The USP of the novel is that it is narrated not only in the first person, but that it is addressed to the second, so the ‘you’ of the title is both a character in the novel, and also potentially the reader. Joe Goldberg is the owner of a bookshop, into which walks his obvious love interest, Guinevere Beck (who prefers to be called Beck, as you would). The interaction between them is what is known in the movies as the ‘meet-cute’, and it is meant to recall scenes from rom-coms such as You’ve Got Mail.

Because it is a first-person narration, the reader is drawn into his world and perspective, but alarm bells ring straightaway. Stalkers are not sexy. Joe likes to observe people without them being aware they are being watched, which is uncomfortable when he preys on Beck, stealing her phone, hacking her emails and stalking her on Twitter, analysing every message and tweet that she sends, trying to fathom hidden meanings and monitor her behaviour under the guise of being her protector. He also stalks her physically, following her home and watching her through the windows – she doesn’t close her curtains – perhaps she does know and her behaviour is intentionally that of an exhibitionist.

Joe likes to play games, but it seems that Beck does too. She leads him on and then turns away, which infuriates him, but is she really teasing him or is that just his interpretation? Beck is not an attractive character either; she seems narcissistic and self-obsessed, but is that his portrayal of her? Beck is studying for an MFA in creative writing, and thinks of herself as a writer inventing scenarios, although feedback from her fellow students suggests her short stories are thinly-disguised diary entries. Joe’s record of the relationship makes his reasoning sound acceptable, until his violence and depraved actions surface. Is it interesting or depressing to be inside the mind of a privileged, entitled predator?

Joe uses many popular culture references of disturbed minds to drop clues that all is not rosy in his world. The allusions begin innocuously enough although they rapidly get darker as elements of fantasy, delusion and mental illness creep in to the descriptions. People with mental conditions are often aware of them in others but blind to them in themselves. In mentioning American Psycho he deliberately draws attention to the artifice and the twisted imagination of certain people. We are cautioned that this may not be real (there is a cage in the basement of the bookshop; few other characters with whom he interacts etc.), but the characters are so dislikeable, and the novel appears to be derivative and playing on all the popular tropes of the recent erotic thriller glut, making it impossible to care.

Just right: A Universe of Sufficient Size

A Universe of Sufficient Size by Miriam Sved

Picador

Pp. 311

Spanning continents and three generations, this rich novel of mathematics, politics, friendship, family, sexuality and love, features numerous time and narrative shifts. Illy discovers a diary written by her mother, who has left it deliberately where she can find it, and reading it changes Illy’s perception of history and her self. It takes her back to 1930s Hungary, when Jews are barred from attending university, so a group of five friends and mathematicians (two couples – Ildiko and Levi; Eszter and Tibor; and Pail) meet beneath the statue of Anonymous in Budapest to expound upon their theories.

This desire for anonymity is unusual as nationalities fight to be the one to make mathematical breakthroughs that can be given military applications. Ildiko considers how one can know what future use will be made of the science, maths and physics they think they are discovering in isolation.

The friends cannot know that the Holocaust is coming, but they are aware that the future will be dangerous and that their group will dissolve. They can’t imagine marriage or children, because they live in such uncertain times. They all, particularly Eszter, want to protect Pail from the real world and shield his genius, worrying that he is not equipped to deal with the coming war and its consequences. While Pali remains entrenched in his theoretical problems, not all of the friends agree he needs extra attention. Ildiko tells Eszter, “Someone will always look after Pali, because he is brilliant and hopeless at the same time. I have noticed that people can’t resist the combination of brilliance and hopelessness in men.”

This world is echoed in the present when Josh, Illy’s son, attempts to find applications for his version of theoretical mathematics. He is aware of the work of Pali Kamar, but thinks the internet provides practical applications, which he explains to his grandmother, Nagymama, not knowing she was a friend of Kali’s. Josh is excited by finding order in chaos; to understand the universe; to feel less insignificant, which he (and Pali before him) demonstrates through Euclidean planes. Josh searches for order and predictability, trying to shape the situation to fit.

Everyone in the novel tries to find their own pattern and shape their own narrative, while accepting difference and factoring it into individual and societal equations. When Nagymama moves to America, “It still surprises her how everything in this ridiculous country seems brighter, bursting with its own youth; even the vegetables have a juvenile optimism.” Infinite possibilities provide exciting concepts, but is it necessary to try and define them when there are constant breakthroughs and alternate opinions which subvert preconceived notions about everything from sexuality and religion to mathematics and astrophysics?

It's Not About the Girl: The Girl Before

The Girl Before by JP Delaney

Quercus

Pp. 406

Edward has designed a house that is minimalist in appearance, with all the modern technology to make it seem almost sentient. To rent One Folgate Street, with its open-plan features, floating staircase and clean spaces, potential tenants must answer a series of questions before gaining admittance. Once they have been accepted, they understand that he has a sense of authority over them. Everything in the house is computerised and Edward controls the computer; if the tenants don’t answer the questions to his satisfaction, he will turn off the lights or the hot water for the shower. The questions get increasingly pertinent and personal, as the house computer search engine will only respond with certain information, and it collates all the findings to provide ‘helpful hints’. The novel questions when being cared for becomes being spied on; when does being protected become being stifled?

It is clear that Edward is a control-freak. He needs to control all aspects of his – and others’ – lives; not just their living arrangements. He cooks in a very methodical manner with precisely the right hard-to-find ingredients; he admires foreign things so that he can appear knowledgeable and correct people’s pronunciation to constantly assert authority. He also likes the Japanese custom of hitobashira, which he tells a tenant is about burying dead people under buildings, but she later finds out it refers to burying the living. So far; so creepy.

But wait; there’s more. He has very similar relationships with very similar women, two of whom live in his house and narrate alternate chapters. Jane is ‘now’. She has had a stillbirth which makes her vulnerable; she has memories which Edward triggers, she thinks accidentally. Emma was ‘then’. She had been attacked and raped by burglars – her partner, Simon, adores her, but can’t live by her stringent rules or those of the house. Jane’s friend, Mia, points out how much Jane looks like Emma, the previous tenant, who died in the house, and Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, before that. Emma defends him, “Men often go for the same type. Women do too, of course. It’s just that in our case, it isn’t usually physical resemblance so much as personality.” But when does it stop being a ‘type’ and become a fetish?

Past experiences are repeated in the present; the lines Edward uses echo over each other as he says them to both women and they find themselves starting to question his past. When Jane questions Edward about his former relationship (his wife and previous tenant both died in suspicious circumstances), he tells her not to look into it. “The past is over; that’s why it’s the past. Let it go, will you?” There are heavy-handed metaphors about clean slates with faintly discernible chalk marks from previous writings, and if we hadn’t already got the point, Jane spells it out for the hard of understanding with a high-school art essay about palimpsests and pentimenti.

As with any novel including the word ‘girl’ in the title, it seems we must have sex, violence, and an unreliable narrator. It is also worth bearing in mind that it is written by a man. A policeman advises Emma, “We take cases of rape very seriously. That means assuming every woman who says she’s been raped is telling the truth. The flipside of that is that we take false rape allegations equally seriously.” This suggests they are equally common. Fact check: over the past 20 years, only 2% of rape accusations proved to be false. It’s not that men can’t write realistic female characters, but a reliance on pop psychology and simplified gender stereotypes doesn’t help.

The Girl Before is not about a girl, before, after or present. It is about a house and a man’s viewpoint of manipulation and control. It is an entertaining read, but it is not earth-shattering. Shock value isn’t everything, and its veneer wears off very quickly.

Cosy Cat Crime: The Cat Who Sniffed Glue

The Cat Who Sniffed Glue by Lilian Jackson Braun

Jove Books

Pp. 200

The eighth book in The Cat Who… mystery series is a light-hearted mystery featuring an eligible bachelor, Jim Qwilleran, and two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum. Qwilleran is biggish, 50-ish, and with a moustache that bristles when he is ‘on to something’. He is a bachelor so he eats out at restaurants every night and has a succession of lady-friends, whom he calls for dinner dates. They are always keen to accept (perhaps because of his inherited fortune) and he has a succession of romantic entanglements with housekeepers, librarians and interior designers.

The cats play a major role in his life, and they are incredibly spoiled, with their own apartment and chef. With feline intuition, they help Qwilleran solve crimes as he explains the details of cases to them, and they respond with clues such as banging into things, sitting on vital evidence, or tripping up villains.

The novel is set in Pickax City, Moose County, “400 miles north of everywhere”, with nearby towns called Chipmunk and Brrr (it’s the coldest place in the county) bursting with folksy characters. Written in 1988, it is a novel of its time, before the digital age. Newspapers are still read in physical form; the town does not have one but Qwilleran, himself a ‘newspaper man’ helps to establish The Moose County Something. It is going to “hit the streets” in a week, and there is no name for it – maybe things were run differently thirty years ago, but this still seems very slack in a corporate world, and is yet another aspect of the novel that is exceptionally homey.

Braun also incorporates theatrical tropes into her mystery, as each chapter is introduced with Place, Time, and Cast – this is both an original device and means to introduce characters, but also an example of lazy description and stereotypical characters. Interior designers and architects see buildings as a set designer would, and places are described like stage directions.

The crime begins with vandalism and drink driving, but all are shocked when it progresses to murder. It is what is described as a ‘cosy mystery’, the increasingly-popular genre of crime that is the literary equivalent to a hot cup of tea; the perfect antidote to the daily onslaught of violence and outrage. The characters are broadly drawn, there will be more description of meals eaten than of wounds inflicted, there is very little violence or pain, but copious cold leads to follow in the quaint little community, and the murders don’t really matter all that much. In these olden times there are no forensics, and red herrings include plenty of opportunities for the cat to sniff glue: snowshoes; bookbinding; taxidermy; model-ship making; theatrical make-up.

Amazon has three sub-categories of ‘cosy mystery’: animals; crafts and hobbies; and culinary. This places itself firmly in the former category, and if you know what to expect, you will not be disappointed.

God Help Us: Winter

Winter by Ali Smith

Penguin

Pp. 322

Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet began with Autumn, published last year, and continues here with Winter. The subject is quite different but many of the themes are familiar. It is written in a continuous fluid style, but with short sentences and without irksome stream-of-consciousness. The novel embroiders snatches of literature and legend into a rich tapestry: a retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for our times. Dickens opened his festive novel with the words, “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Smith riffs on this idea. “God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead.”

So, what’s left? An ageing woman called Sophia imagines a child’s floating head to keep her company. She is visited by her son, Arthur (Art for short), who writes a blog called Art in Nature, which his ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, hates because it isn’t political. He explains, “What I do is, by its nature, not political. Politics is transitory. I watch the progress of the year in the fields, I look closely at the structures of hedgerows. Hedgerows are, well, they’re hedgerows. They just aren’t political.” Not wanting to admit he is alone, Art pays Lux, a girl he spotted in a bus-stop, to accompany him and pretend to be his girlfriend. When Sophia appears to be very ill, Lux contacts her estranged sister, Iris, to whom she no longer speaks. Iris turns up on the doorstep and recriminations and family resentments rise to the surface. The names with their connotations of sleeping heroes, guiding light and Greek gods are all pertinent.

The treatment of nature is centre stage – if Autumn was about Brexit; then Winter is about the environment, and the disasters destroying the planet and humanity. Iris is politically motivated, and the sisters dredge up memories of the Greenham Common protests, about which Smith seems almost nostalgic. She suggests that individuals can still make a different if they work together, as topics range from the Grenfell Tower to the insistence on stopping migrants; the political becomes personal and vice versa. The novel contains CND songs, and 1960-style rhymes about poisonous gasses and noxious chemicals. Horrifyingly, people are crowdfunding to raise money to stop rescue boats from helping refugees.

Having been impressed by Cymbeline, Lux originally came to England because it is the land of Shakespeare. In an obvious political metaphor, she says, “If this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is at the end, where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated… then that’s the place I’m going. I’ll go there, I’ll live there.”

Language and communication are themselves under threat in this modern world. To glean information, people no longer talk to each other; they google things and the results are listed. Just as there is a disembodied floating head in Sophia’s imagination, words are split in half to create new meanings: get ahead; get a head; “I’m nobody’s child. I’m no body’s child.” Art examines the concept of snow and the connotations of the word ‘snowflake’. In one section, Art asks Lux a series of questions, and then we see her side of the dialogue separately as she answers them. Further indications that cohesive dialogue is breaking down is seen in parliament when a man barks like a dog at a woman who is trying to make a speech.

This is a novel of stories and interpretations. We are given tales of fertility; the Green Man, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and defenders of past rituals and natural bounty. Smith combines the richness of the past with the frustrations of the present and a glimmer of hope for the future, believing that communities and compassion can overcome division and isolation. Winter is an incredible achievement – it was written to reflect the immediacy of the time (even the text is not justified, implying a sense of urgency), yet it feels fresh rather than hurried. It ends with another echo from A Christmas Carol: “In the middle of summer it’s winter. White Christmas. God help us, every one. Art in nature.” It’s enough to make the reader want to take to the streets.

History Never Repeats: The Testaments

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus

Pp. 415

In her acknowledgements, at the end of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood thanks “the readers of The Handmaid’s Tale; their interest and curiosity has been inspiring.” If my desire to know what happened after The Handmaid’s Tale is in any part responsible for the writing of this book, 35 years after its predecessor, you’re welcome. It’s been a long time coming, but it is certainly worth it, and after all this time, it still has a clear directive: “We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.”

Much of the novel is a thinly-veiled polemic against totalitarianism. One of the narrators is Aunt Lydia, who warns against assuming all that is new is good, and ignoring past wisdom, especially that derived from women. “The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.” She keeps a secret diary, which is part confession, within the hollowed-out pages of a book, incorporating sarcasm about women’s perceived roles with asides about the veracity of history and the stories we are conditioned to believe.

Her wit and humour are displayed throughout her manuscript, and she rambles with her folksy sayings and pragmatic methods. There is a dark side to the humour, however. Some of the young girls threaten to will kill themselves if they are forced into marriage, afraid of male sexuality. “No one wants to die. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.” It is horrifically symptomatic of totalitarian regimes: women and children suffer as men rape and take what they want.

Before Gilead, Lydia was a judge, and the new (male) rulers did not want her around. “Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.” Persecution was fairly indiscriminate: “All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.” Now she is a cornerstone of the Gilead government, but she knows power can be overthrown and statues easily toppled.

Whereas The Handmaid’s Tale was focused primarily on June and the other handmaids and was claustrophobic in tone; this novel is narrated through three different voices: Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy. As the title suggests, they are putting their name to a document they have sworn to be true, and the novel opens up into a wider world. Where there are women; there is communication. “The Aunts, the Marthas, the Wives: despite the fact that they were frequently envious and resentful, and might even hate one another, news flowed among them as if along invisible spiderweb threads.”

Treatment of women by men, who seek to dominate and oppress them, is an over-arching motif. Women must be pure: those who enjoy sex and physical relationships are sluts. Women should be nurturers and carers. Women are blamed for their indiscretions; men are not held accountable for their deeds: men must act on their urges; women must not encourage them. Women exist to reproduce; their bodies are baby-making factories and do not belong to them individually. “Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estée. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha. Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?” It’s all depressingly familiar.

Aunt Lydia keeps secrets so she can blackmail people later when it is useful to do so. “All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognised this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.” Fake news and students on strike are recognisable tropes. The combination of adulterated Shakespeare and pertinence to contemporary affairs is deliberately unsettling. Atwood uses the language of fairy tales, but the chilling ones like Sleeping Beauty and later comparisons with Bluebeard.

Atwood notches up the tension as a couple of young protagonists escape Gilead by boat in a thrilling adventure, as the reader experiences the fear of young women who have never left their established order. Just as in The Handmaid’s Tale, there were cassette tapes that carried the messages of those trapped within a system; here there is another way of disseminating information and spreading the truth. Aunt Lydia thinks, “Fly well, my messengers, my silver doves, my destroying angels. Land safely.” Further parallels between the books exist in the closing of them both with a Symposium. Here the thirteenth Symposium cleverly ties it together and prevents alternative endings, while still leaving sufficient scope to flesh out. “As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Making it Up: Today I Am A Book

Today I Am A Book by xTx

CCM Design

Pp. 117

All of the short, poetic segments (it feels wrong to call them stories, and, besides, they have the tart juiciness of an orange) in this collection are introduced with the words ‘Today I am a…’ It is a great creative writing exercise, and a way to express thoughts and feelings, but a lot of them are complicated and negative.

Many are tales of abuse, violence, sexuality and shame, with cripplingly low expectations; a woman goes to bed early because she wants to masturbate without her husband disturbing her; a woman seeks out compliments from a man she knows “isn’t good at saying nice things”; a woman desperately wants to hear the words ‘You are wanted’. In Today I am a Slave, the author writes, “Except for trying to kill me every day, Pepito is pretty nice. He’s definitely getting better at it though. Surprising me now, but I am vigilant. I don’t want to die and I don’t think he wants to kill me. Yet.”

Let’s get the question of authorship out of the way. Who is xTx, and does it matter? I assume the author is female, although some segments are written from a male point of view. The first page announces, “Today I am a dedication. Today, and everyday you are my driving force. Thank you, Roxane Gay, for making me believe. Still.” Many of the themes are similar to those found in Roxane Gay’s book Bad Feminist. For example, one harrowing piece reveals, “Today I am a bulimic. I take in the world. I throw it up. Do you want to see pain? Hold on for a minute. Just one minute. That’s all it takes for me to work it back up. Do you have patience? Are you a patient person? The one who waits the longest gets the best payoff. Please trust me.”

The narrator goes on to list the things she has swallowed; “An ongoing gorging since I was a girl: Frosted Flakes, a handful of bow shaped barrettes, twelve ice creams, seven fingers of my brothers’ friends inside me”. She explains, “The time it takes doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel afterwards.” Her specific instructions of what to do are heartbreaking and visceral (don’t read them while you’re eating) from “1. Eat enough to make you feel sick and/ or hate yourself” through “4. Approach the toilet. Make sure it hasn’t been cleaned in a while. The filth will help you” and “7. Stare at the toilet water. Feel how gross you are, how utterly disgusting and worthless you are” until “11. After each hurl reach again. Keep fucking puking. Empty your fucking guts. Remember to breathe. Remember you are a big piece of shit.” That is absolutely raw and confronting; it is shocking and emotional; it is exceptional.

She is often the gateway for someone else’s needs or frustrations. In Today I Am A Time Machine she writes, “He has made me his time machine so he can stay there. He tells me this. He wants me to open myself wide enough that he can crawl through. Go back to the boy he once was… Back to when his life wasn’t as tarnished as it is now.” She is not often considered as a person in her own right but in how she relates to others and what they can take from her. In Today I Am A Lion she confirms “It’s hard being everything for everyone when you just want to be someone else’s everything.”

But women are expected to be all things to all people, and that is exhausting, even though we should be prepared for it. “It’s easy to be a make-up artist when you’re a female. So much of what we’re meant to be is pretend anyway.” As she continues in Today I Am A Make Up Artist, she can no longer tell tall tales and make up big stuff as an adult, so she has to “resort to little things like giving the guy at Starbucks a fake name just so I can see it black Sharpied on the cup… convincing my boss I am completely on top of things, assuring my two kids that everything will be okay, telling my husband I love him.” This story switches from comic to bleak in the twist of a sentence.

Her prose is sparse but full of imagery. The analogy in Today I Am An Outlier is breathtaking when considered more deeply: “My period blood is made for bigger things. It’s an important liquid made waste when not called upon. It’s like the genie from the lamp giving up and leaving, bags slung over shoulder, after eons of nobody rubbing.” And, like all good story-tellers, she returns to the beginning with Today I Am A Writer: “Today I am a writer. I say this thirty-three times while forcefully bashing my head into the metal keys of a typewriter. I want the answers to imprint my face. I want its ribbon to birth answers. Tell me what I need to say… All the blood mars any facial embossing and I am still sitting where I began – blank.”

There is a lot of style in these segments, but there is also deep substance. The stories that seem short and even superficial are full of meaning. Much of that meaning is grim and dark; this is an uncomfortable glimpse into a tormented mind that is trying very hard to make up.

Blurred Lines: How to Talk to Girls at Parties

How to Talk to Girls at Parties by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Dark Horse Books

Pp.62

This is the first graphic novel I have read since I sat with a box of comic books at school on those rainy days when we couldn’t access the playground – unless you count Viz, of course, which kept me amused through my late teens. It was published June 2016, although the original short story by Neil Gaiman was written in 2006. The artistic content is clearly as important as the narrative or the words themselves, and here the images are supplied by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá: a Brazilian duo (twin brothers), who have won awards and international acclaim for telling stories in comic book form. The pictures feature bright colours with strong outlines and bold details against watercolour-like backgrounds to the panels. It is impressive and efficient to be able to draw pictures in place of descriptions, but it can occasionally lead to confusion as details, humorous asides, and motivations are omitted.

The story is set in East Croydon, told by Enn, and framed as a narrative from 30 years ago. He is a fifteen-year-old boy with all the normal concerns of a heterosexual teenager: namely how to make girls notice him when everyone seems to be attracted to his best mate, Vic. The language is either deliberately teenaged and ignorant or woefully blokey and sexist as he talks of girls as objects. Vic tells Enn, “You just have to talk to them. They’re just girls. They don’t come from another planet”, which is not bad advice, although it may also turn out not to be true.

At a party, Vic abandons him to go upstairs with the best-looking girl present (presumably for intimate encounters). Enn is despondent but forces himself to talk to three girls: Wain’s Wain, who explains that she is a second – she has six fingers on one hand – and thus not allowed to breed; a second nameless girl who claims, “I love being a tourist” and regales him with stories of “swimming in sunfire pools with whales” and learning to breathe; and Triolet, who claims to be a poem.

The story plays upon the need to belong and the fear of being an outsider, with strong implications of other-worldliness. Women are clearly from another planet – Mars and Venus anyone? When Triolet kisses him, it blows his mind. He sees “towers of glass and diamond and people with eyes of the palest green and unstoppable beneath every syllable I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.” The drawing is of a fantasy land with bridges and turrets; minarets and spires in green and gold – a bit like The Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Vic interrupts his reverie as he runs terrified from the house and Stella stands looking down at him in fury. There are suggestions that he tried to sexually assault her, although it is all rather ambiguous (The short story includes the line, “Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes”, which makes it less so). When Enn looks back he finds he remembers impressions of the evening rather than facts, and perhaps it is all a metaphor for the mind-altering universe of teenage hormones.

Neil Gaiman is hailed as a hero by many of my fantasy-loving friends, but I can’t help but feel there is something distasteful about this story. The pictures are beautiful but the sentiments are not. In trying to blur the lines of sexual experimentation and assault, I think this is unhelpful – especially when considering the teenage market at which it is aimed.

Picking up the Pieces: The Mao Case

The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong

Sceptre

Pp. 289

With this novel set in Shanghai and Beijing, Qui Xiaolong introduces us to cities of growth and contrasts where modern mores sit alongside past rituals. This is a world of art and culture; teahouses and calligraphy; corrupt officials and Triad gangs; opera and poetry; ‘Big Bucks’ and ‘little concubines’; street food and emperor’s places; ballroom dancing and Buddhist scripture. And above or below everything, there is the shadow of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

There are five previous outings for Chief Inspector Chen, but this reads perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. Chen is relieved of his regular duties to focus on a special case which may or may not involve Chairman Mao. “A case concerning Mao could have unpredictable consequences, possibly serious ones for the cops involved.” Shang Yunguan was a 1950's movie queen who became one of Mao’s many dancing partners before falling from grace and, with her daughter Qian, being denounced in the Cultural Revolution. Now her daughter, Jiao, is causing suspicion through her affluent lifestyle of parties and painting and it is feared she may be in possession of material that could harm the Party. If Chen doesn’t solve the case soon, Internal Security will become involved, and then it really will be game over.

Jiao spends a lot of time in the company of older men, which is not in itself exceptional. The practice of ‘Big Bucks’ keeping young women as concubines is commonplace. They party at an old mansion frequented by ‘Old Dicks’ obsessed with the 1930's and English manners. The treatment of women is problematic – a plot point hinges on a young women being used as bait; she will be harmed but the police will gain information so this is acceptable.

Chen, as a “capable and honest cop” was “a rarity in an age of wide-spread corruption”. He also writes poetry and so is the right person to decipher whether there is anything in the verse Mao wrote which could be personally or politically compromising. The attitude to Mao is an interesting one. The book’s dedication is, ‘For the people that suffered under Mao’. These were indisputably horrific times, and China’s attempt to come to term with this period of its history is one of progress rather than reflection. Chen understands that for the younger generation, who are not personally affected by the horrors and the massacres, Mao is becoming a mythical figure. “The past is now seen as a sort of golden Mao period where there was no gap between the rich and poor, no rampant Party corruption, no organised crime and prostitution, but instead there were free medical insurance, stable pensions, and state-controlled housing.”

Many things are altering in this new world, from attitudes to buildings. There is apparent affluence, but as in the past, it is not equally distributed. “In the fast-changing city, the gap between the rich and the poor was once again expanding. The newspapers and magazines had started talking about a harmonious society, all of a sudden and all at once, like never-tiring cicadas in the trees.” Chen is disconcerted by the modifications to a city he once knew and doubts they are entirely for the better.

The novel picks up pace in the final quarter – there are murders to be solved after all – but for most of its length it meanders through poetry and the past, as Chen reflects on his ex-girlfriend and previous experiences. Although the plot feels a little perfunctory, the setting of the novel is clear and precise, and everything is overshadowed by the spectre of Mao and his legacy.