Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Review of Culhwch and Olwen, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Graffeg Ltd, 2024

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 05:49:08 GMT

“Every tale has another chapter”

In her blog at https://www.catherine-fisher.com/culhwch-and-olwen/, Catherine Fisher explains what drew her to this particular Welsh legend and made her want to write a version of it for today’s children: “Culhwch and Olwen is not one story, but many different tales, held inside a framework. It’s a heap, a tapestry, a tangle, a hedgerow of stories”.

It begins, in fact, with a noblewoman giving birth in a pigsty because she has fled her home for reasons not plain even to her, never mind anyone else, and which would clearly make a story of their own; it ends with a young man and his wife returning to a court where it is hard to imagine him being safe, let alone happy. Along the way, there are all manner of other stories peering round corners and asking to be investigated, and some are, taking the reader down various byways, but others are tantalisingly unexplored: what became of the kind swineherd; who was Tywyllych’s dead husband; where did the great boar end up?
Being a writer very much disinclined to talk down to children, Fisher does not minimise the harsh elements of the tale: the pain of childbirth, the grief of an early death, the animosity bred in individuals by war and conquest, the clash of generations. But she does show how love, friendship, generosity and gratitude can mitigate these. Her favourite character in this huge galaxy is the Arthurian knight Cai – prickly, arrogant, dangerous – for whom she has shown a partiality in other books, but my favourite was a lame though determined ant. It will be no surprise to those who know her as a poet that she is adept at conveying the lyrical side of the story, but for any adults not acquainted with the hard edge of her YA novels, here are Cai and Bedwyr fulfilling one of Culhwch’s tasks by making a leash for the hound Drudwyn. It must be made from the beard-hairs of the fearsome Dillus, and these must be plucked while he is still alive. Fortunately, he happens to be asleep and drunk when they find him:

“Cai took a spade from his horse and began to dig. He dug a deep narrow pit and rolled Dillus into it, upright, and filled in the earth and trampled it down so that only the man’s sleeping head remained above ground.
“Tweezers”, he said. Bedwyr handed them over.
Cai crouched and plucked out a hair from the bristly black beard. Dillus gave a yell of pain and his eyes snapped open. He wriggled and struggled.
But he was buried deep.
Swiftly Cai plucked strand after strand of the beard and gave them to Bedwyr, who was already weaving and plaiting them into a leash.
But the huge man’s struggles were causing earthquakes and tremors. The whole mountaintop was shaking. “When I get out of here,” he roared, “you are DEAD!” Cai kept plucking. Suddenly Dillus roared out and one arm came free. Then the other.
“Look out!” Bedwyr leaped back.
“Do we have enough?” Cai snapped.
“Yes! Yes! Plenty.”
“Good. Then he doesn’t have to stay alive any more.” Cai stood up. With one slice of his sword he took off the man’s head,
Then he turned and walked away.

In the blog, she regrets having to play down the “list” feature so typical of these legends, though she does manage to echo it in one of the poems scattered through the narrative. But given the intended audience, I don’t think she could have done otherwise; most young readers would be unwilling to accept such long pauses in a story full of incident and narrative drive. She uses the poems to echo points where the original narrative is “written in a heightened prose” and to change the pace. They can also serve to see the story from a different angle, rather as Kipling uses poems to comment on short stories, and the first poem, “The Priest Tends the Grave” is a fine example of this. Prince Cilydd has assured his wife Goleuddydd, dying in childbirth, that he will never remarry. She, rating this promise at its true value and not wanting her son to have a stepmother, makes Cilydd vow to remarry only when he sees a bramble growing on her grave; then, unbeknown to him, she lays a duty on the priest attending her to weed the grave. Only after the old man’s death does the bramble grow:

He's busy. Gets there late on an autumn evening.
There are shoots. On his neck her angry breathing.

A decade of dandelion, nettle-sting,
He has grey hair now. His hands, uprooting.

Who can stop this green life? It just comes.
A dead queen torments his dreams
.
Boys play on the graveyard wall. His knees hurt.
Thorns tangle around his heart
.
He’ll be as cold as her next winter.
Every tale has another chapter.

Several of the story’s themes are miraculously condensed here, notably the attempts of the old and dead to control the young and alive, and the resurgence of life against all odds. Like all Catherine Fisher’s books for children and young adults, this has plenty to interest older readers as well.

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Review of The Bones of Barry Knight, by Emma Musty, pub. Legend Press 2022

Wed, 04 May 2022 13:16:14 GMT

This is a multi-narrator novel in which the various speakers are all converging on one point, a refugee camp. Seven-year-old Saleema lives there; Amanda works for a charity partly responsible for its running; ageing rock star Barry is hoping to resurrect his career via a well-publicised visit there; journalist Ana is pursuing an investigation into both him and the charity, while Sol and Omar have connections with people already there and are going for their own personal reasons.

All the narrators are believable; some, inevitably, are more engaging than others – Saleema, the lively, curious child, especially so. She and her friend Noor have aged prematurely and known too much tragedy, but they are still children:

“even though it is too hot to do this and we are nearly too old for such childish things, suddenly the very feeling of running is everything. My body wakes up as we take a corner too tight and have to jump a tent peg, leaving adults shouting in our wake. ‘Where are we going?’ I scream after her and she briefly turns to me and then starts laughing as she runs, like it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said, or she’s ever heard. ‘Are you crazy? We’re not going anywhere! We’re just running because we can!’ And then I start laughing too, because of course we’re not going anywhere and because the running feels good and then we collapse in the shade of the big tent for the kids with no parents, but round the side, where no one else can see us. I can hear my mother’s voice; she’s telling one of them off for making a mess, and I can tell from the tone of her voice that she doesn’t love them more [than me]. For a moment, everything feels lighter.”

Amanda, troubled by the impossibility of keeping clean hands in a situation where helping people also involves turning a blind eye to bribery and corruption, has developed a cynical edge that individualises her voice:

“the governments think that the camps should be worse, potentially with no toilets at all, so they don’t create a pull factor, as if having an adequate number of toilets will bring thousands running – ‘Have you heard, in the camp a little further north they have loads of toilets!’ ‘Praise be to God, we must leave everything and go there now!’”

And Barry, who for most of the book has little enough to recommend him as a human being, nevertheless has a degree of self-awareness and sense of humour that render him rather more likeable than one might expect, particularly when he gets to the camp and shows more sense of fitness than the staff:

“She says we’ll start with a little tour, like we’re in some sort of bloody theme park or on safari. I almost make a joke about looking forward to seeing the hippos, but I stop myself, and congratulate myself a little for doing so.”

Sol and Omar I found slightly less engaging than the others; Amanda’s acid description of Omar as “righteous” is on the money, and though phrases like “How can any of us move forward without first examining our past, understanding our present and looking towards making our future a better place?” are believable from him, they do not endear him to a reader. By and large, the multi-narrator strategy does not create undue problems in keeping up with the story; we always know more or less where we are. Now and then, one comes on a name or detail mentioned earlier and thinks “who or what was that?” – but that is what second readings are for.

Tension builds up gradually through the novel, until everyone arrives at the camp, when both the speed and tension of the narrative really take off. The ending, even though it is foreshadowed in the prologue, and hinted at in later chapters, is still capable of surprising a reader; I think because these characters have all become quite well known to us, and unlike Saleema we have not needed to absorb the fundamental truth she voices when remembering her father:

“I remember how it felt when he smiled at me with his hope all over his face and I knew I didn’t have to worry about anything and that he would keep me safe. And then they took him away and put him in prison, and then they killed him, and then he was dead, and that is how sudden life is, and how sudden death is.”

This is very much a novel about contemporary political issues, specifically what sometimes gets called the “refugee crisis”, which appears in novels less often than one might expect. But fortunately, it revolves around believable people, without whom no issues can long engage a reader. The writing is assured and has that credibility which convinces one that the writer knows her subject matter well.

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Review of Notes On Water by Amanda Dalton, pub. Smith/Doorstop Books 2022

Wed, 04 May 2022 13:15:11 GMT

Everything is river and the river is more than itself

This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first.

I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building.

The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient:

I think I am in the river Cocytus,
or maybe this is just black water
running underneath an urban street.

In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death:

In just seven weeks he goes
from coffee and wine
to peppermint tea
to tiny fruits
to water
on a spoon

and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him:

Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
and broken. Everything is wet.

This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.

The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.

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Review of The Crescent Moon Fox, by Metin Murat, pub. Armida Publications 2022

Wed, 04 May 2022 13:14:06 GMT

“It was the first time that Zeki was seeing Cypriots as Cypriots – for once they were neither Greek nor Turkish. Here they were one people. Here on the ship he saw people sharing food – even if it was just a hard-boiled egg or a tomato – talking, playing cards and backgammon. Why do we have to be away from our island to be one people he asked himself?”

What constitutes identity? This is a question that concerns this novel throughout. Set mostly in Cyprus, over a period from 1933 to 2007, it tells the story of the British withdrawal from the island and the subsequent strife between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Zeki Aziz, from a Turkish village, is a promising student who wins sponsorship to study at the LSE. At first he sees England very much from an outsider perspective (and quite amusingly, for though this is a novel about deadly serious matters it is leavened with humour):

“The couches and oversized armchairs were upholstered in a deep burgundy-coloured leather that was stitched into patterns that seemed to resemble a series of fat bellies and dimples. The tables in the room were made of wood but not of a type he had ever seen. The wood was highly polished and looked as if it might be very old – which he thought was a shame for a house which otherwise gave signs of belonging to someone so rich.”

But by the time he returns, not altogether willingly, to Cyprus, he is very much betwixt and between two cultures and seeing both as a partial outsider. Ironically the same is happening in reverse to Major Gamble, a British diplomat in Cyprus who had helped to finance Zeki’s studies and who now finds himself faced, post-independence, with going “home” to a country with which he no longer identifies:

“But where and what was home now? The truth was that he no longer recognised the place that Britain was becoming. Everyone around him seemed to be getting younger. And on every street corner you could hear that awful noise that they referred to as ‘pop’ music. As he made his way along the coastal road, past Boğaz, he thought to himself that he had spent so much time away from England, perhaps he should stay on in Cyprus after all.”

Meanwhile Zeki’s childhood friend Aydin is finding that some aspects of identity can trump the geographical and political. There are in fact several individual instances in this novel of Greek and Turk forming relationships. But over and over, when it really matters, people revert to tribal groupings, as Zeki notices when he becomes a representative in the new parliament:

“His fellow representatives were waiting in the courtyard taking refuge from the heat by standing in the shade of the orange trees. He looked at these groups of men clustered together by the trees and realised that not a single group was mixed. Greek stayed with Greek. Turk stayed with Turk.”

I found this novel quite a page-turner; it never loses itself in “issues” so as to forget that novels are essentially about people, and the lure of “what happens next” to the various characters in whom the reader has become interested is strong. So I don’t want to go too much into plot details. But one thing I really like is the novel’s refusal to provide glib solutions to the problems it raises. People become personally close to individuals of the other community, yet this does not change their attitude to “the other” in general, nor prevent them from participating in atrocities against them.

The writing is subtle and delicate. When Zeki, during his time in London, visits Paris, he is excited at “visiting, for the first time, a properly foreign country”. This points up very economically what has become apparent: that of the various solutions for Cyprus, the only one neither side really wanted was the one they got, namely independence. The Greeks wanted enosis, ie union with Greece, the Turks, being heavily outnumbered, wanted the British to stay and protect them, and to Zeki, Britain has never been a “properly foreign country”. When, back home, he meets Aydin again after several years, he is taken aback when Aydin, who in the meantime has come under some Greek influence, looks forward to the British departure; “Can you believe it? No more British büyük efendis to lord it over us.” Later in Zeki’s village, when he is greeted with “Zeki, lad, hoşgeldiniz, my you look like a real büyük efendi.!” we do not really need the glossary at the end to know what is going on.

I suppose we must come to the fox of the title. It is real, but also a sort of symbolic protector of the village, in which role it didn’t really do a lot for me, other than give the book a quirky title. I would rather end by quoting another instance of writerly subtlety. Here, Zeki is on the point of leaving Cyprus for the LSE. The sense of belonging that comes over him in this passage is powerful, but the reader should not overlook the first sentence of the paragraph.

“Zeki did not go home. He turned instead and took the path that led up to the hill behind the village. When he reached its brow he breathed more easily and stopped to look around him. This was his land, he said, as if to reassure himself. In front of him he had the sea, perfectly blue, and the rocky shoreline that disappeared into the distance, virgin land as far as the eye could see. He turned and took the track that led towards Avrigadou. He walked slowly, taking his time to follow with his eye the flight of different birds; looking to see which of the shepherds were out in the hills with their flock. He saw goats standing up against a carob tree chewing at the pods that were blackening in the sun.
Across the sea he could make out the coast of Turkey, and he stared at the pale outline of its mountains. Then he heard some stones falling down the hill from the ridge above him, almost as if someone or something had lost their footing. He called out. No one answered. For a moment, for an eternity, the landscape seemed quite silent as if some higher force had called for quiet. He had the distinct impression that someone or something was observing him. He called out again. Nothing. He could no longer hear the cicadas which a few moments before had been deafening the hills. He was all alone, but not alone, for an overwhelming sense of peace took hold of him. He knew that he was from and of this piece of earth.”

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Review of Ravenna, by Judith Herrin, pub. Penguin 2021

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 08:03:33 GMT

This is a history of Ravenna between the fifth and eighth centuries, focusing on its troubled relationship with both Rome and Constantinople and its consequent role as a sort of fulcrum of early Christianity. It is well illustrated, with maps, a comparative chronology, notes and index – in fact a proper, scholarly history.

The book does face one major difficulty, which the author admits in the introduction: historical records from the time have mostly not survived well, and those that do were invariably written by clerics who naturally prioritised their own concerns. The result is that while sources like Agnellus obligingly provide us with endless lists of bishops and their works, plus the kings and emperors they quarrelled with, it is, in Herrin’s words, “extraordinarily hard to work out how people lived then”. This book will tell you all about the various churches of Ravenna; it won’t tell you how they related geographically to each other, how people got from A to B and what they would have seen on the way. I assume Ravenna was built around two main streets, one running north-south and the other east-west, because that’s how most Roman towns worked, but even that is not certain because Ravenna, rather like Cork, was built for defensive reasons in a marsh, and in such terrain, the location of streets is often determined by where the watercourses happen to be. There is no map of how Ravenna itself was laid out at the time, and I assume this is because it would be guesswork, though even that might have helped.

Herrin does her best with this problem; there are sections on “living in Ravenna” at various time points, but they mostly consist of records of people’s donations of land and property to the church (it sometimes seems as if the only purpose of lay people in Ravenna was to furnish income for the clergy). The few times we do hear about the life of lay people are fascinating – there is an absorbing chapter about a sixth-century doctor and another about eighth-century gang warfare between different districts; “these local residents went out of the city on Sundays to fight each other […] using slingshots, throwing stones and beating each other with sticks”. By then, it was actually rather a relief to know that at least some inhabitants did not spend the entire day in church.

Essentially then, this is a political and religious, rather than social, history, and very interesting it can sometimes be, particularly when the participants come alive as individuals (Galla Placidia, Attila, Theoderic). It throws light on a society whose priorities were often hugely different from our own; most readers will feel baffled that, with Arab troops practically at the gates, Rome and Constantinople were still arguing and issuing edicts on whether Christ should be portrayed in painting and mosaic as a young man, or an older one with a beard. Seemingly it mattered at the time.

So in order to get the best out of this, you need to have a real interest in the political and religious development of Constantinople in the east and Rome and Ravenna in the west, and the complex relationships between the three. For those who can enter into this, it is a most thorough and well written study. And if at some points it does read rather like a list of bishops, there are still the sort of glimpses that bring history alive. The most telling for me, as a writer, was Archbishop Felix, decreeing in his will that all his works should be burned, because, being now blind, he could not edit them and preferred them to be destroyed altogether rather than risk them surviving with copyist’s errors. I mean, we all hate typos, but really…

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You know things on LJ are bad when

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:03:54 GMT

... even I come over here to find out what's going on. I might even have to try to get this journal looking half-decent.

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Just so you know....

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:08:17 GMT

... anyone reading this, you're unlikely to see much. I set this up in case for any reason it became impossible to stay with LJ, also because some of my friends post on DW and it was convenient to have a DW ID. But I don't take to DW much so far and fully intend to go on posting at LJ.

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