Literature, Novels

Novels’ Settings – Are They Important?

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I read a short essay by Andrea Camilleri on literary places (Realtà, invenzione e memoria dei luoghi letterari) which has really made me think about the settings of literary works and how important they are. It is fair to say that I did not fully understand Camilleri’s categorisations of different types of literary  places, but I have started to wonder what the link is between the meaning of the work and where it is set.

Obviously, this will depend entirely on the individual work. In some cases, it is a generic place at a vague time in the present. However, the place and time are specifically chosen or invented. Camilleri would say (I think) that there is a type of remodelling, even when one writes about a real place. Fantasy books must have a very strong sense of place, because a new world is being created. If it is not to be just a copy of an ordinary place with added centaurs or unicorns, there has to be a thoroughness in the development of the geography, culture, philosophy and religion of the world. I do love to see a map at the beginning of a book – it usually follows that I will like the contents! But a map is not enough to build a world. Philip Pullman succeeds in doing so in His Dark Materials, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter world likewise. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, and many more, have made worlds so complete and beautiful we might even imagine ourselves there and long to live in them.

I imagine that some people do not like to have to work so hard to assimilate an imaginary world. But I believe all the worlds we read about are imaginary, even if they have their corresponding real places in our real world. Our own perspectives of our environment ensure that every author’s description of a place will be different, depending on their experiences, age, intentions and feelings. After I read Camilleri’s essay, I wrote a short piece of writing on the village of my childhood. It is a real place, populated by real people. But would anyone, even someone there in the 70s and 80s, recognise the place from my description? Would they agree that it is a good representation? But I wonder if that is the point. The description tells you more about me than about my village. And this is why the consideration of settings in novels is so important.

The author, intentionally or otherwise, has chosen a place for his characters to inhabit. This must, to some degree, tell us about his or her concerns and preoccupations, the things which drove them to write the book in the first place. We might imagine that the setting is simply something known to the author, but it becomes a unique place as soon as the author writes it down. That unique place tells us the perspective of the author, in big things and small.

So, Dickens’ London is a different place from Trollope’s or Thackeray’s, just as Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh is different from the place you can wander around on a Saturday afternoon. The names may be the same, the streets, the hotels, the churches; nevertheless, it is somewhere completely different. Can you imagine, for one moment, a megalosaurus waddling in the mud up Holborn Hill in the London of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? The image, grotesque and, at the time, controversial, is purely Dickens. It is Dickens’ London we evoke in every picture of an English Christmas; we can almost live in its dark, sinister, winding streets, the squalid poverty of its slums, the places where the ordinary people live, from Tom All Alone’s to Bleeding Heart Yard. As much as we would like to believe that he described the real London around him, we can’t help but notice how far away it is from Trollope’s elegant drawing rooms and the contained practicality of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street.

This quotation I referred to earlier from the beginning of Bleak House is a place to start when thinking about this:

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

If we look at the dinosaur wading through the mud up Holborn Hill, we see Dickens’ love of the outrageous, the exaggerated image of, what was then, a newly discovered and religiously controversial part of our history. That ancient history mixed with new Darwinian ideology, marching on the outmoded, damaging bureaucracy of Chancery Lane and the British justice system, while the men and women slipped and slid on the mud in the streets, splashed and dirty to the eyes, is a perfect image of the new and ancient quagmire that was the law. Holborn Hill is not, for Dickens, simply a real place in London, but is the approach to the seat of the Court of Chancery, (otherwise known as equity), dealing with the settlement of wills and business affairs, and known in the nineteenth century for the slow ruin it brought to all who were doomed to be involved in it.

So, it seems, a place is not just a place. For the author, it has a meaning beyond its name. That may be tangential or pivotal, but, as it had to be specifically chosen by the author, it has to hold some significance beyond its reference to a place in the real world. Whether the setting really exists or not, we always enter the place of the author’s imagination when we walk there with them.

Fiction

A Sense of Place

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I remember having an Italian pen pal when I was about twelve or thirteen; his name was Giuseppe. In one letter, he asked for a photograph of the place I lived and I was happy to send him one. In those days, when you took a photo, it came out well, or it didn’t, and you had no way of knowing until you bought the prints from Boots. This photo, taken on a misty day, essentially showed streetlights dimly shining in the gloom, fog covering everything, and an indistinct street disappearing into nothing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that he never wrote to me again.  I suppose what he saw was more or less a grey fog with floating street lamps and the grey tarmac of the road. What I had seen was a magic scene of mystery and fantasy which covered the everydayness of my normal world.

The village I grew up in was not pretty. The very word ‘village’ gives you the wrong impression. I don’t know what happy scenes of picturesque Englishness you have before your eyes, but banish them! The size of the settlement rather than its character is the only reason I chose the word ‘village’. Originally it had been a village and a colliery, separated by barely a mile of fields. The village had been a street of stone-built cottages opposite an imposing pub, and a further collection of houses around a cross-roads, with the vicarage standing austerely in front of a tree-covered paddock, and a tiny school of golden stone a few yards down the road.  The colliery, instead, was three rows of blackened brick terraces across the road from the mine. In my day, the two had become joined by a sprawling residential estate of reasonably priced houses, and the vicarage had been torn down to make way for twelve detached modern houses, one of which was my home.  The little main street had two shops in it when I was young: Bank Top Stores, a corner shop worthy of the name, and Barker’s, a tiny little sweetshop, where I spent any money I could find or was given.

I don’t know what I could have taken a photograph of for Giuseppe to give him a real feel for the mining village of my youth. The pub, perhaps, quite grand from the outside. I remember being sent to get my Dad and being allowed into the bar to speak to him – men only, smoke-filled, full of taciturn working men. Or perhaps the school, later a library, where I began my school life (smacked for colouring over the lines of a rabbit in my brown pencil) and continued as an avid reader at the library once the new school was built in the new estate. I could have shown him my 70s built house – large windows, neat lawn – or the fields at the back covered in nettles and dock leaves. I can’t imagine he would have been impressed by any of that.

To me, in my grey 70s childhood, Italy was a fantasy land of beauty and dreams. No one from there could be interested in my small, ordinary corner of the world.

I have lived in other places, but I came home twenty years ago – not to the village itself but to a prosperous market town nearby. But when I dream, I am often there, in that house, in that street. Whether I like it or not, that is the landscape inside my head. I wanted to soften its corners with the foggy picture I sent to an uncomprehending Italian boy, but it remains hard and real in my mind, more than the prettier scenes of my adult life.

Literature, Reading

Machiavellian Villains

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What is the point of a Machiavellian villain? It gives us something to hate. And we all love something to hate. We try and make sure that something is legitimately hateable. We don’t want to catch ourselves hating someone because they’re not like us, hating something because it makes us feel uncomfortable, or changes our opinions of the world or of ourselves – though that is always a temptation, as I hope you agree. We want to hate something that is truly abhorrent. A murderer. A movement which aims to destroy the planet. An institution which oppresses the innocent. But you must agree, the feeling of wholeheartedly being against something or someone is cathartic. It’s a relief after always having to look at all the different points of view and be reasonable and understanding all hours of the day, every day.

And that is why we love a Machiavellian villain.

We know he is bad – he has told us so. He does not hide his corrupt and evil motives from us, the audience. The other characters in the play may be fooled by him, but we are not. We know his aim is to bring about ruin and chaos, destroying and shattering all that is good around him. I say ‘him’ because so many of the villains are men – from Shakespeare’s Iago and Don John, to Moriarty, Lex Luther and Voldemort. But of course we have Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, Nurse Ratched, Bellatrix Lestrange and Cersei Lannister, to name a few. And what a relief it is to hate them. Like a pantomime villain, we boo and hiss when they come on stage. We know that what they do is bad, just because they do it. And the bad they do, they do it just because they can. We don’t have to try and understand their abusive childhood (though many of these characters have them); we don’t have to say, ‘but on the other hand, think of it from their point of view…’. We can feel free to wish for the main character to hurt them, to kill them. No matter how flawed our enemies are in real life, we don’t wish them actual harm. We may say we despise that politician who lied to the country, or say we hate the businessman who defrauded his workers and got away with it, but we don’t really want them to be blasted with a ray gun, to disintegrate at the end of a magic spell or be executed for their crimes. We are reasonable adults who see both sides of the argument, and understand that the world is crumbling and battered, and try to make allowances.

That is why the Machiavellian villain is so delicious, and why we should try and avoid him. It is fine in in fables and fairy tales, in legends. These genres need the black and white of the good and evil. There is a place for that in our society. But in these divided times, I feel we need to fight against the desire to see things in black and white. What we do in our spare time, in our reading and our TV watching, in the films we enjoy, will help form the way our mind works. It is time we thought about the nuances in life and looked at the literature which can help us appreciate that. Not all of the time, but for at least a part. Sometimes that is about the choice of literature we watch or read, and other times it is about our interpretation of it.

I think Shakespeare’s Iago allows us to simply think of him as a bad man. He sets out, unequivocally, to harm Othello. As he cooks up a plot to snare Othello before our very eyes, in Act I Scene iii, he ends his speech saying,

I have’t. It is engender’d. Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.

He calls on ‘Hell’ and ‘night’ and likens the plan to a ‘monstrous birth’. What more do we need to know?  But I think Shakespeare also gives us the option to see his reasons for his behaviour and makes it possible to play him as a rounded character – nasty, selfish, vindictive – but human. He hates that he has been passed over for Cassio, that he has to work for Othello, a black man and an outsider. He has heard malicious rumours about Othello ‘doing his office’ ‘betwixt his sheets’, in other words having an affair with his wife, and he is willing to bring him down on the off chance that the rumour is true.

This may seem like a crazy, unnatural way to behave. When would a normal person ever do that? Think of the times that a person in the office has been gossiped over, motives ascribed to them, actions too, with barely a shred of evidence. Has that stopped the gossips pouring over them, destroying them with cruel words and even unpleasant actions? Think of a successful person, perhaps a footballer, a person of colour in a job where that more unusual than it should be, or a person who is famous and in the public eye. Then think of all the nasty comments, and cruel manipulative behaviour of the press and the people who read the slander and the lies. Iago’s seemingly baseless, unexplainable evil is not very much further down the road than this.

So, while the desire to hate the enemy, be partisan, to boo and hiss at those we see as villains, is strong and comforting in a world of insecurities and uncertainties, it leads to nothing good. It is, in essence, a type of immaturity – a comfort blanket we need to feel safe. It is better to have fun with our comic book villains, knowing them to be just that, but in our reading and watching also try and exercise our empathetic muscles to understand the undercurrents of evil in the people around us, and in ourselves. So, fewer Machiavellian villains, please, and more mixed, real, flawed and endlessly fascinating human beings.

Literature, Novels, Reading

Parallel Lives

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I have been thinking about parallel lives a bit recently. Haven’t we all had the thought that if we had done something differently, taken a different decision, our lives would have taken a completely different route? Sometimes we might think this wistfully, wishing perhaps that we had taken the alternative path. Sometimes we might be relieved and grateful that we did not. More often, I just wonder about that other me, what she must be like, what she has learned, how she feels. To meet her might just sort out that problem of deciding whether one thing was a consequence of another. What I mean by that is that we make assumptions that our life is happy, miserable, comfortable, difficult, because of a certain action we took, sometimes years ago. For example, I might imagine that I hate exercise (and so am hugely unhealthy) because my P.E. teachers were sadists who in torturing me, turned me off physical exercise for good. I might think that my health issues stem from that moment in time. If, however, I visited the life in which my P.E. teachers had been kind and encouraging, I might also find that that had no effect on either my weight or my health. In fact, because one thing precedes another, as we all know, it doesn’t mean the first caused the second. But in our lives, somehow, we have unquestioned assumptions about our past which nag at us, usually to tell us how we have failed to hit the mark.

These esoteric musings are probably the result of too much time on my hands. Lockdown has done that to some of us! But I have also been reading some books which are pondering the same questions. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig explores these ideas in depth. The premise of the book is that a woman, who feels that all her wrong decisions have led her to a point of loneliness and misery, tries to kill herself. She finds herself between life and death in a library where every book is a life she might have led. She has the chance to try living some of these lives, and discovers that the assumptions she had always made about which actions caused which consequences, and indeed about what she really wants out of life, have all been flawed. She used those assumptions to convince herself that she had taken the wrong path and she was to blame for it.

Have you ever had thoughts like these? They can be so damaging because instead of accepting who and where we are, we constantly judge ourselves by the success of our imagined other selves. If I had taken that job, I would never have been made redundant. If I had moved the year before, like I knew I should, I would never have met the one who made my life miserable… and so on and so on. We are blaming ourselves for past decisions instead of moving forward from where we are.

There are two other sorts of ideas, bringing their terrible effects, which potentially might come from this idea of our parallel lives branching off from each circumstance and each decision. The first is to paralyse us when faced with a decision. Sylvia Plath uses a beautifully disturbing image to describe this in her novel The Bell Jar. She imagines herself in a fig tree, and each of the figs is a potential life, but she cannot choose:

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The second danger, I think, is to use our consciousness of our parallel lives to absolve ourselves of responsibility. I think most of us tend to blame ourselves too much, like Nora in The Midnight Library but there are those who say to themselves that if life had not offered them that particular set of circumstances then they would not have done whatever it is they wish undone. The short story If (Se) by Luigi Pirandello explores this kind of mind set. The protagonist of this story has murdered his wife for having slept with a man she previously loved. He spends his life imprisoned by the thought that the circumstances all came together to make it inevitable that this should happen. If he had not had to stay in Potenza, if his wife had moved away from the area when she was a child, these things could never have happened. He imagines a life in which his wife is happy with her lover, married to him instead of the protagonist. He wishes that life were possible, but believes that the decisions taken, the circumstances which presented themselves, forced him into becoming a murderer.

I don’t think any of these attitudes can help us. We are where we are. We must take responsibility for the decisions and actions we have taken. We must choose a path. Not choosing is not an option, because it becomes a choice in itself. And blaming our current woes on past decisions, though truly understandable, is not helpful either. We cannot say that one thing caused another with any certainty, but whatever the truth of that, it cannot change where we are now.

I should have done that. I shouldn’t have done this. We all think like that. And to whatever extent it can help you gain wisdom and understand how best to act, then it can guide us. But essentially it is a way of trying to change the past. You can never do it. We are here, and we must go forward from where we are. The question to ask is, what is the best thing  to do now? So, however intriguing my parallel lives might be, it is in the present moment that I have infinite power to choose, to change, to improve, to enjoy. We sometimes forget the magnitude of the power we have over our own lives.

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The Lowest Common Denominator

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Stereotypes can be iniquitous. It may be said that we can’t live without them. They are a short-cut in a complicated world. And we need short-cuts to live. Stereotypes tell us what we should expect, and we find them particularly useful when they tell us when to be wary, when to be careful or cautious. But logically we must know that they are inherently false. It cannot be true that everyone in a particular group shares the same traits. There may be some truth in the original idea, but when we apply it too rigorously we have to realise it is a flawed way to see the world. For example, think of the stereotype of suburbia – quiet streets, neat lawns, twitching curtains, judgemental neighbours. Before long we have to add some of the uncomfortable truths, like the alcoholism and drug-taking going on behind respectable doors, like the swingers parties, like the prevalence of domestic violence. We have to admit there is some truth to the stereotype, but it should just be treated as a guide, not a rule book.

How dangerous they become, however, when we assign them to groups of people. The bigger the group, the more ridiculous it is. The assumption that all Jewish people, all young black men, all Chinese people, all women, behave in a homogeneous fashion is absurd. The millions of people in that group must be hugely varied, with varied needs, talents, likes, fears, desires and expectations. Nevertheless, despite the irrationality of it, society keeps on using stereotypes to the detriment of the people in the group it is talking of. We are so used to it, it has almost become hard to spot.

Think of the title of the film “What Women Want”. It is clear that each individual woman wants something different, being a unique person with a unique experience and history. How many videos have you seen on YouTube (or is it just suggested for me?!) asking similar questions? Today I saw one promising to translate, “What men mean when they say…”. I didn’t click on the link. But I would suggest that different men mean different things. Lumping half of the population into one group becomes anything from vague to offensive, and is not even close to accurate.

At the basis of stereotypes we have so many kinds of prejudice – racism, sexism, homophobia, religious hate and so many more. We may feel we can avoid the more obviously offensive and brutal stereotypes which fuel those kinds of prejudice. I hope we can, though it is shown over and again how many people seem unable to sort the individual from the crowd. We still live in a world where people can condemn ‘the poor’ because they can’t feed their children, condemn the immigrant because they arrive at our shores, condemn the struggle to ensure Black Lives Matter, all because of an idea that is associated with that group.

The idea of the undeserving poor has been with us for centuries, but it may have had its heyday in the Victorian era when the industrial revolution brought the poor out of the fields and under the noses of the rich. Dickens fought against it in many of his novels, the one which most readily springs to mind is A Christmas Carol. Scrooge refuses charity to the poor because he says the state already provides for them (‘Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?) And he suggests that he works hard for his money, it is his, and what are these people to do with him? But Dickens tries to remind us that the poor have faces, are real people with loves and hopes and fears. They are our ‘fellow-passengers to the grave’ as he says. We are linked with them and they with us. Essentially, he is breaking down the stereotype to the real person. I hope you can see the link with the discussion over Free School Meals as clearly as I can.

But even less iniquitous stereotypes still cause damage. The idea of the irresponsible student, who gets up in the afternoon after partying all night, who does no work and cares nothing at all about the people in the community around them, this stereotype has reared its head during the COVID crisis in universities this Autumn. And it has done damage as all these things do. I am not saying that no student has had a party. I am not saying that it is not true that more students will like to go to a party than a similar number of people from another demographic. I am saying that not all students are the same. The result of the stereotype has meant that some have blamed students for the spread of COVID (instead of the universities who asked them to come, the huge halls of residence, the parents who encouraged them to go, the lack of testing available etc). And in this moment of blaming them, many have forgotten those who have been isolating in their rooms, have been working hard but unable to make friends, those who have been sick and a long way from home and those who love them.

Stereotypes, both big and small, as innocuous as they may seem, are all a way to make beautiful, unique individuals into an easily manageable lump. It may be easier for us, in that moment, to think of the world in this way, but the pain, heartache, violence and suffering it causes are not worth it. You may wonder why I do not focus on the big hitters like sexism and racism – well there are plenty of others who do that, and most of us are well aware of them. But what I would like, in my small way, is to point out the sneakily reductive way we all think of others. Guard against it! Human beings deserve to be gloried in, celebrated, in their infinite variety, rather than reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Literature

How others see us

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Recently I have been thinking more than ever about how Britain seems to those outside it. We cut a poor figure on the world stage just now. The ridiculous mixture of Brexit and an incompetent, rudderless government at a time when we need stability, expertise and a measured and firm approach to leadership is not only creating a burgeoning disaster for us natives of these beautiful islands, but makes us look like fools in the eyes of the world. In one sense, this is the least of our worries. But it is something that has been on my mind.

On Twitter recently, I saw an Italian’s response to Boris Johnson’s risible comments on Britons’ love of freedom being one reason for the situation we are in. I felt ashamed that this Italian should think that ordinary Britons agreed with Mr Johnson. We don’t imagine that other countries love freedom less. We know that our own pride and stupidity is, at least in part, the reason for the number of deaths from COVID and the reason for the lack of solutions we have found to ameliorate the situation.

At the same time as all these things are happening in our political and personal landscape, I have been reading Natalia Ginzburg’s Elogio e Compianto dell’Inghilterra (Praise and Complaint of England). Written in the Spring of 1961, Ginzburg confidently sketches what she sees as England’s virtues and vices. What is amazing to me is how wrong she is about both. We neither deserve her praise nor her censure. What comes across instead is a complete lack of understanding of who we are, or were, the gap of misunderstanding perhaps created by differences in culture as well as her own feelings towards the situation in which she found herself. It made me wonder if this is true now, in others’ assessment of us, just as it was then.

She starts her eulogy by saying that we have a good government, that our lives are well ordered, that we have an accepting, tolerant and diverse population. None of things is true, nor ever was. She says we totally lack cynicism. I can’t even imagine where that idea came from.

The overriding melancholy of England, the reserve of its people, their lack of passion, is typical of a foreigner’s complaint. People are not reserved in their own circles. And the working class have never been reserved in any company. Lack of demonstration of passion does not equal lack of passion, just as the demonstration of it does not show its depth.  In the very order of London’s design, in the beauty that is deliberately worked into its makeup, Ginzburg finds fault. For her, beauty can only come spontaneously. This I understand, though I feel sad that she feels one cannot choose to create beauty, especially since our lack of creativity and imagination seems to be at the root of Ginzburg’s critique of the English. Why she should think the land that bore Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, the Brontes, and in her own time, Grahame Green, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, should be classified as lacking imagination, I cannot fathom. And creativity is not just literary; it comes in inventions in engineering and medicine, games and sports, décor, fashion and music.

I find it hard to comment on her accusation that we are the most melancholy country on earth. As a melancholic myself, I have no right to deny it. She should have met my mother, though. A cheerier, more positive person you could not hope to meet! Similarly, it is hard to refute her charge that foreigners are not changed by coming here. I am not in a position to judge.

In one thing I think she is right. Our civility is feigned. We are not truly civil; we use it as a screen to mask our indifference or hostility, to avoid confrontation. We are likely to be passive aggressive rather than obviously confrontational. We tut when people jump the queue; we pointedly say ‘thank you’ when someone fails to thank us for holding the door open. The Very British Problems account on Twitter constantly reminds us that what we say is not what we mean. ‘What a complete disaster!’ refers to a minor upset in our routine, while ‘today’s been rather tricky’ indicates a bereavement, mental breakdown or other significant life event.

What I would say about Ginzburg’s assessment of England is that she is too emphatic in her declarations. She starts her phrases with ‘England is a country where…’ or ‘The English are a people totally without…’. I have lived here my whole life, it is my culture, these are my people, and I cannot say for certain what England or the English are like. I suspect, though I don’t know for sure, that she equates London with England, which would be like saying Neapolitans were the same as people from Genova, or Sicilians could be lumped in with people from Venice. She speaks as though she knows us, but she does not. We have many, many faults – arrogance, parochialism, a rigid class system and a tendency to rely on the merits of a mainly invented history – all these I could agree we are guilty of. I will not list our virtues. In these difficult times, our virtues seem hard to find. But, along with human beings everywhere, there is kindness, compassion, determination and resilience, which we all need just now. I don’t claim any of our faults or merits as uniquely English. We are people. I just wish I’d had the opportunity of welcoming Natalia Ginzburg into my home and showing her the warmth that she so obviously did not find when she visited our country.

And this is where we started this discussion. To be considered as a people of integrity, tolerance, kindness and strength, we have to show those qualities. In these horrible times, neither we nor our government are doing a good job of that. We have to do better.

Literature, Novels, Reading

Henry James and his impenetrable prose

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I have just finished reading David Lodge’s book Author, Author, a fictionalised biography of Henry James. I was keen to read it, not because I was interested in Henry James, his work or his life, but because I like Lodge’s style of writing, how entertaining he is, and how the thoughts he brings to my attention reverberate around my head long, long after I have finished reading. He is an author who does the amazing thing of being at once entertaining and instructive. He approaches difficult, intriguing and pertinent questions through a story you want to read. This, it seems to me, is the key to good writing. The language the author uses, the way he or she conveys meaning is, of course, central to the experience of reading their book, as is the characterisation, the choice of meanings and themes, the way they weave themselves into the history of the written word. But if it is not entertaining, why would I keep reading?

It seems a particularly important point, considering that Henry James’s ideas and characterisation have depth and substance and his way of writing was ground-breaking, elegant and, at times, beautiful, but at the same time his writing is impenetrable. I find myself comparing Henry James to David Lodge and thanking my lucky stars that I had to read about the former’s life in the words of the latter, not the other way around. It is at this point that a certain number of you will judge me. You may think that I am not the avid, competent, experienced reader I pretend to be. In short, you may suspect that Henry James is just too hard for me, and if I were better read, more intelligent, had a longer concentration span and a stronger determination, I would see the immense beauty and profundity of James’ work instead of criticising it. You may well be right. Maybe I am just not up to the task. But it makes me consider what the point of reading, of literature, is. Should we consider the ‘best’ works to be ones that are only accessible to the very few?

The thing is, I have read two of James’ novels: What Maisy Knew and The Portrait of a Lady. I studied them at university and struggled through them both with great reluctance but with perseverance. And I have to say that I have read and do read widely, during my teenage years, for my degree, and in every year (and there have been quite a few) since then. I want to say, with all modesty, that if I, an English graduate, a teacher of English, a keen reader, find James’ work almost impossible, what chance has a less experienced reader?

Perhaps it is not the experience but the type of reader that is the issue here? Perhaps I am the wrong type? Like an art lover who still hankers after a reflection of the material world in the works they admire, I like clarity and entertainment in my fiction. Perhaps it is just a preference?

It is not that I don’t like to work hard to read fiction. I have read Beowulf in the original, and some of Chaucer’s works too. I love the absurdities of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and I appreciate the inventiveness and humour of Tristram Shandy. Currently I am reading some of Natalia Ginzburg’s short stories in their original Italian, though I have to look up a word or five in every sentence. But all of these reward you with a story, with humour, with clever tricks or deep thoughts, with emotional depth and new ideas. I could not find enough of that in James to keep me working as hard as I needed to in order to make sense of his circuitous sentences.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is another such work. There may be people who have read it and found it exciting and progressive, but how many are there that would recommend the book as one to read for pleasure? Practically every word in it needs notes to explain the derivation, connotation, implication of the sense, the etymology, the intertextuality and on and on. And when you have worked hard on it, what do we get for our trouble? I suppose, at least we get to know Leopold Bloom, whose warmth makes James’ characters seem like they are sculpted from ice. In any case, like Joyce’s, James’ work demands an almost academic approach. The winding, evasive nature of his sentences, each one’s meaning subtly linked to the last, draws you on into an ever-deepening labyrinth of meaning. I can stare at a sentence for a while and still not quite comprehend the scope of it. Each time the aim of the sentence slips a little further from my grasp, until I am lost in a sea of elegant phrases which don’t seem to refer to any world or ideas I have ever known.

As I say, this is most likely my own lack of some important element of literary appreciation. I am probably not up to the standard required. But it does occur to me that there were many plebeian readers like me in James’ own day who did not appreciate his work. It is clear David Lodge admires him and would wish us all to do so. But as I would like to listen to music with a tune and look at a picture which reflects the world I can see around me, I would like a story which entertains me with its plot and characters, bringing meaning to me in a language that makes itself at home in my life.

Part of my role for a long time now has been to engage people in literature and reading. I would like to encourage all of us to read more, not just the elite. In any case, I believe the best minds make their work accessible to all. Shakespeare wrote for the pit as well as the aristocracy. Dickens wrote for the mass market as well as the literary academics. Perhaps that is my excuse for not quite getting Henry James. I suppose it’s easier than admitting I am simply not clever enough. I feel that James’ prose is so exclusive that I can’t imagine many people getting past the first page. Perhaps you don’t feel this? Please tell me if I am wrong! But I wonder, what is the role of works like these, especially in these days of reduced literacy, soundbites and YouTube clips? David Lodge felt his work on James was part of the zeitgeist in 2004 when it was published. Was he right? I think, even if he was, that time has passed.

Literature, Novels, Reading

Empathy and reading

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I have heard some strange views recently about reading not fostering empathy but only creating selfishness from different points of view. I find this such a sad objection. It’s as if, in a world dying of thirst, we are arguing about whether elderflower pressé is better than orange squash. In every walk of life, from the classrooms and playgrounds of our schools to the corridors of power at Westminster, the lack of empathy shines through. The ability of some to look on desperate, cold, terrified human beings arriving at our shores and see them as a threat, vilifying them as less than human (‘vermin’, ‘plague’, ‘invasion’) is one piece of evidence for our general lack of empathy. The cynical targeting of NHS staff and resources after relying on them so heavily, and thanking God for them so profusely, is another failure in empathy. But, on the small, human level, the child who excludes another from party invitations to pay them back for an insult, the young person who continually calls someone names in order to boost their status in their own group of friends, the teacher who gives up on the disruptive, angry child in their troublesome Year 10 class, or the senior manager who guilts their employees into taking on this new responsibility/staying late another evening, knowing they are already at the limits of their capacity – all these show lack of empathy. How different our world would be if each of us increased our levels of empathy!

Books have always answered the question, what does it feel like to be someone else? Through the minds of people all over the world – people long dead, from alien lifestyles and beliefs, people of different races, religions, gender nationality, class – we experience the world in a way we never could on our own.

Reading is a complex affair. Authors try and put themselves into others’ shoes to describe anything from a middle aged bank clerk in early twentieth century London (Mary Poppins) to a child alone in London in the mid nineteenth century living in abject poverty working in an exhausting, menial job (David Copperfield). In these two examples, the authors had either direct experience of what they were writing about, or something very close. P.L. Travers wrote Mary Poppins’ Mr Banks with her own father in mind. Charles Dickens’ own childhood working in a blacking factory, his own father in prison for debt, was the inspiration for the experiences of David Copperfield. I hope you agree with me that both of these, in very different ways and styles, feel authentic. They truly provide a window into worlds we otherwise would never know. The child reading about the stultifying effect of the grind of work on the heart and mind of a middle aged man, and the adult reading about a child’s sense of abandonment, shame and misery living in poverty, both see something which is outside of their personal experience. They, in caring for Mr Banks or David Copperfield, can then transfer that affection or understanding to the real lost man or lost child in their own lives. This is, of course, the key. Learning to transfer the love of the fictional character into the understanding of the real people around us. Empathy is like anything -once we learn it, it becomes easier and easier. We may even learn to accept, tolerate or even care for those around us who annoy us, irritate us or even injure us.

There are authors who are not so successful in putting themselves in others’ shoes, of course. Dickens is known for the shallowness of some of his female characters, for example. As a woman, I often read books where the women in them seem little more than the male author dressed up. It is rare, in my opinion, for an author to capture the feeling of living in a female body. Male authors often just transfer their own ‘normal’ into the life of a female character. That is putting aside the strange, mindless stereotypes that sometimes make it into published fiction. Once you read The Handmaid’s Tale and feel the main character’s sense of her own physical being, it is hard not to read other fictional women as only partial creations. No doubt many people experience this kind of lack when they read. The token black person in the friendship group, the cheeky working class lad made good, the jolly fat earthy friend who never gets the boy, these are the kinds of stereotypes which keep recurring. But even in well-drawn and in depth characterisation, no doubt people from different racial or religious backgrounds hear a jarring note, feel a lack of authenticity.

Even in these cases, though, I would argue that we are all still practising empathy. The author is trying, even if not totally successfully, to make real an idea or situation we probably haven’t experienced. We still gain something, if not everything possible. This is only if the author and the reader genuinely try to imagine the life of the other with sympathy and care. Obviously, the lazy stereotype, the cruel or thoughtless belittling of others, in fiction or in life, is the reverse of what fiction should aim to achieve.

It has been argued that when people write about perverted, cruel or criminal individuals, a sense of empathy gets between the reader and their ethical judgement. I still struggle with this idea. Understanding someone is not to acquit them. We don’t lose our sense of what is right and what is wrong because we understand why someone behaves as they do. Even in books when we are fully immersed in the evil mind of the author’s creation, the reader does not have to lose their critical faculty.

We judge everything. Always.

When reading, we judge how authentic the character is, how real the situation. We judge the character’s actions and reactions. We judge the language the author uses. We judge the arc of the plot and the ideas the writer is trying to convey. Not dismissively. Not unsympathetically. But with discernment and care.

Essentially, reading with empathy and for empathy is part of reading with judgement. The writer tries their best to place you in a new world. We take what we can of it to learn something about our own. It is a partnership between reader and writer. We can’t blame the writer if we don’t come away from our reading experience with a wider view and understanding of the world. We can’t blame the writer if we don’t learn to apply our love of Oliver Twist and the Dodger to the children living on the streets of twenty-first century London. Reading creates empathy. But we have our work to do as well. Can you imagine a world where we all tried to see things from others’ points of view? If reading can help us achieve that, it is well worth the effort, don’t you think?

Exams, Teaching

What are A level grades for?

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I have thought about blogging during this terribly stressful time of A level and GCSE results and the chaos that surrounds that, but every time I put pen to paper (metaphorically) I stop myself. Either what I have to say has been said before, and often by more skilful and knowledgeable people than I am, or I have been so incandescently angry that I would be unable to maintain the balanced, polite and positive attitude that I try to preserve on this blog. And, it can’t be denied, I have been angrier than I have ever been during the results fiasco. It is brought closer to home for me because, this year, I not only have students who I have helped prepare for exams, but my own son would have been taking his A levels. As a result, I have felt first-hand the uncertainty, anxiety and tension every parent has felt in this period, and I have witnessed first-hand the same stress, anxiety and concern that every student has experienced. I acknowledge that for many the stress is not over. For many, hopes of future jobs and courses have had to be put on hold with no prospect of a way forward. Many people have been disappointed twice over, once on receiving their results and the second time when their CAG (Centre Assessed Grades) could not be accepted by universities who had already allocated their place to someone else. For me, however, I have found calmer waters, and can now begin to think more clearly about all that has passed.

The thought which most readily springs to mind is, how could we have avoided this? The answer to that is political, so I won’t follow that thought to its conclusion. The other idea, which is more significant educationally, is what use are qualifications at all? I mean, why do we do them? I don’t mean to suggest that we stop. I just would like to consider our purpose.

Primarily, it seems, A levels at least, have become a way for students to find a place at university. Universities here are tiered. We know that Oxford and Cambridge are at the top. Then we have Durham, St Andrews, Bristol, Imperial, LSE then Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and so on until we arrive at smaller institutions which used to be colleges under the protection of local universities. The higher your grade, the higher up the tree you can go. (I won’t even start to discuss the unfairness of this and how different universities excel at different kinds of courses, but I think you must agree that this is how most people see the system in Britain.) Is this the best way to finish our compulsory secondary education – with a test which is essentially an entrance exam for higher education? I would like to think that advanced level studies have a worth in their own right, and there are certainly plenty of students who decide not to continue with education after A level but opt for a work route instead.

If we start to doubt the reason why we give the grades we do at A level, we might also start to doubt what is taught, how it is taught and how it is assessed. Why was there so much horror expressed at the idea that students might get higher results than in previous years if given their CAGs instead of the moderated grades? Why, I thought, would that be such a bad thing? If results are to indicate the learning and the potential of a student, then why aren’t we glad if the results are better? Who are the results for? If they are for the school, for universities, for the government, for the country, then, yes, these things have an impact. But if they are for the individual, what is the issue? The problem is that exam results are not just for the individual student. They are used as a way to assess students’ ability to go on to higher education. They are used as a measure for institutions and for government departments and for the country as a whole. What is more important to the Department for Education, I am driven to wonder? Is it their own reputation or the happiness and success of individual students throughout the country?

However, I can see that companies and institutions have to compare results across year groups and so it is important that there is a standard which must be reached to receive an A or a B at A level. It is clear, however, that comparing across cohorts is not what the education system focuses on. Instead of there being a definitive standard, grade boundaries are always moved to make sure that a certain percentage of each year group gets each of the grades. Here we are not comparing like with like. We don’t take into account fluctuations across different year groups.

We don’t want students to get needlessly inflated grades either, though. An A has to mean something. And so does a U. But what, in a system which relies entirely on exams, do these grades actually mean? They favour students who have, what my parents call a ‘big match temperament’; they can rise to the occasion, using the nerves to improve their performance, pulling out ideas and applying knowledge even better than usual, knowing that this is the moment which counts. Many students, as we all know, are successful, intelligent, thoughtful students but can not function that way. Instead, they are blocked by terror, forgetting all that normally would be at the tips of their fingers. Do we want results to measure this ability – to remember and apply knowledge under pressure – more than any other? When exactly is this going to be needed again?  The answer is, at university. At work it is much more likely that a steady, consistent understanding and application of ideas is required. Should our final exams exist simply as a way to see if people are suited to further study?

People have complained that the CAGs are higher than the moderated grades, and the grades which students normally get, and therefore students are getting gifts of grades instead of what they have worked for. One reason for that may well be the usual exam nerves which defeat so many young people. Another of the reasons the grades are not so good normally is that the students haven’t had to fight through the vagaries of life to receive their result. No one has had to sit and try and work while having a cold, hay fever, sickness or whatever other illness may have struck on the day in question. No one had to concentrate after hearing bad news, suffering from bereavement, coping with the after-effects of an argument at home or a break-up with a girl or boyfriend. No one found it too hot or too cold, no one found it hard to concentrate with someone chewing their pen in the next aisle and so on and so on. These marks were what students could achieve, on average, over months of work, rather than the usual exam results which record a moment in time. Why would we feel that a system which builds in such factors as luck and temperament is fairer than teachers assigning a grade which is decided on based on two years’ worth of work and effort?

I think (at least) two ideas stand between us and accepting teacher assessment as a final grade. One is that we had to go through exams, so why shouldn’t others. That, I have to say, is the worst reason to do anything. Perpetuating unfair and detrimental systems because we had to suffer through them is unthinking cruelty. The other more solid reason is the general lack of trust both the government and the public have for teachers’ professional judgement. That subject is worth a blog on its own. I have experienced it personally, as has every teacher, I dare say. Putting aside the lack of public trust for the moment, I would suggest that if the government doesn’t trust its teachers it should look again at the training and management of its education providers. Perhaps politicians know how untrustworthy they are and so can not trust anyone else. But to put our nation’s youth into the hands of a body of people you don’t trust does not seem wise on any level. I believe they are trustworthy. If others don’t, they should do something to recruit teachers they can trust rather than setting up a system that assumes teachers can not and will not treat students equitably.

In effect, what I am saying is that treating A levels simply as an entrance exam for university is too narrow, and trusting simply to exams is too unfair. Teacher assessed grades might help combat both these issues, not just this year, but from now on. As so many people have been saying, if we don’t overhaul an unfair, outdated system now, when will we ever do it? I don’t believe the only reason to assess students at the end of school is so that we can see which university, apprenticeship or job they go to. First, we should ponder why we should assess students at all, then try and devise a system which takes those purposes into account. Will we have the courage to take the opportunity to do it?

Literature, Novels, Reading

Being Divisive

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With all the controversy in the news and on social media about the opinions of authors, I thought I would add my thoughts to the debate. Plenty of thoughts have already been shared, and you might think that the debate is raging well enough without me. You may well be right. But the thing that strikes me is that it is not so much a debate about issues as an opportunity to be divisive, and often cruel. Unfortunately, I expect to see that in many walks of life these days, but when I see people who I normally agree with and usually respect piling on to abuse another human being, I begin to despair. So my contribution is to point out that this has stopped being a debate and has become, what we so often see on social media, an opportunity for people to boost their own self-esteem by trashing other people’s.

JK Rowling’s attitude towards the trans community, her feminism and usually liberal stance, and the power she wields as a result of the deservedly loved Harry Potter series, has been the cause of a huge amount of discomfort, upset and disappointment. It has also been the reason behind so much unpleasant rhetoric. There is the rhetoric of those who were aiming to support Rowling, who have often ended up by looking down on and demeaning trans people (not that that is what I am suggesting Rowling was doing – I don’t presume to comment on that).  And there is the rhetoric of those supporting the trans community, who have often ended up by attacking and belittling Rowling as an individual. I have no time for either of these positions. I would challenge them both because they are unkind. They forget that there are people who read these messages are hurt by them. And, by the way, I don’t excuse Rowling from this attitude. I have no intention of adding my own befuddled ideas to an already boiling mass of barely comprehensible squabbling; who am I to pronounce on such a subject? But people from both sides of the argument, people who previously I admired, are showing such nastiness and cruelty, in the name of some higher ideal. If we all showed kindness as a matter of course, we would not need either feminist or trans movements, because we would already accept people as they are, including their frailties and faults.

I move on, cautiously, to the next author who has been the subject of debate. David Walliams and his children’s books have been thoroughly attacked on Twitter (and possibly elsewhere). The fact that his books are available in every bookshop, supermarket and in many other places, undeniably pushes other children’s authors to the margins. I am all in favour of inclusion in children’s literature and support those who promote the long list of excellent authors who don’t get the limelight that Walliams does. One of the other arguments people are using against Walliams is that his characters are savage caricatures which degrade those they depict. Some of these people, in the name of protecting our children from this, are attacking Walliams himself, calling him all sorts of names and making all sorts of unpleasant insinuations. They don’t seem to see the irony.

My point is this, no matter how important it is to support the right of a trans woman to embrace her identity, or how important it is that women be free, equal and safe in our society, or how important it is that children should have a wide choice of books to choose from, or how important it is that people of all genders, ages, sizes and races should be treated with respect in the books we read to our children, none of this excuses the vicious and personal attacks people are making on Twitter and elsewhere. There is room for a reasoned debate. We should have open minds and hearts, ready to share our views but also to hear others and be prepared to change our minds if we are convinced by others’ arguments. Unfortunately, that is not what we are seeing.

I realise this isn’t news. This is our reality. This is the new norm. But it shocked me that lovers of books, of women’s rights, of trans rights, of children’s education – all those who I expect will have the thoughts, feelings and reactions of vulnerable others in mind – it shocked me that these people too have abased themselves and become the very thing they usually say they despise. If nothing else it should remind us that we are all human. We all fall from grace. There is not one of us who has not made a mistake, held a mistaken point of view, been stubborn, been unkind, been proud, been unfair. All of us are flawed. When we are next tempted to thrust the knife into someone on Twitter – a human being like us, however famous, however rich – maybe we should remember the last time we did something we are ashamed of, something we regret. Hopefully, that might make us kinder, more forgiving. We will never solve the problems our world struggles with by displaying cruelty and malice. I don’t absolve myself of any of this, by the way. We’re all in this together.

Exploring, discussing and revelling in reading.

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