Author: Antenna

The Shepherd’s Tale by James Rebanks: hefted to the land

This is titled both to link it to and distinguish it from W.H. Hudson’s 1910 classic “A Shepherd’s Life”, relating the tales of Caleb Bawcombe in C19 Wiltshire. Obliged to read this modern take as a book group choice, I was expecting a bland memoir, overhyped by a publisher as a sentimental portrayal of an arduous, largely vanished occupation.

In fact, it provides a fascinating explanation of why successful modern sheepfarming iin upland areas involves a mixture of hard labour and decisions which are in their way at least as complex as aspects of the history degree at Oxford which the author eventually obtained as a mature student.

A Herdwick ram

For instance, to breed sheep best-suited to the harsh Lake District environment requires ongoing study of the features of the rams or “tups” best suited to mate with specific ewes. The value of one’s stock is raised by winning prizes at local shows in a tightknit community where there is a high demand for tups which will increase the quality of one’s lambs.

The degree of cooperation and equality which has existed in the rural community for centuries is impressive. The common land on the upland fell is shared by a system of grazing rights based on “stints”, pieces of land which can be bought or rented between “commoners”. The sheep are herded up there in the summer, to enable the grass on the lower land to grow sufficiently to produce the hay needed for the winter feed. When it’s necessary to drive them back down to be dipped, all the commoners involved are expected to lend a hand, with the vital assistance of their generally very skilful sheep dogs.

James Rebanks has also altered my perception of the Lake District as simply a unique area of great beauty to be protected but also enjoyed as much as possible by visitors from other regions. Poets like Wordsworth and writers of acclaimed travel guides like Wainwright discovered the Lake District for themselves, as an idyll in which to escape, and promoted this limited view. Rebanks has made me aware how this disregards the existence and therefore the needs of the local rural population, and their contribution to preserving the landscape.

This matters, if teenagers, particularly boys already involved in working the land with their families, are obliged to pass exams which they regard as irrelevant to their expected future, by teachers who through their own form of ignorance seem to disparage their way of life.

So bright boys like Rebanks wasted their time at school – he only gained GCSEs in woodwork and RE, leading to the family joke that he could become a coffinmaker! None of his teachers respected the role of being a farmworker enough to convince him of the need for a certain level of education just to have more choice to do what one wants in later life. In Rebanks’ case, this was to earn money from professional employment, ultimately perhaps unexpectedly, success as a bestselling author, in order to earn the money to establish himself more firmly as a farmer..

Having found this much more gripping and thought-provoking than expected (if a bit repetitive in places), I recommend this as a read that is both informative and by turns humorous and moving in portraying a generally unfamiliar way of life. This also provides the evidence to question modern values and too ready acceptance of the way we live now. I shall definitely read the sequel to this, “An English Pastoral”.

“Les Innocents” by Georges Simenon: “to undestand, but not judge”

Numbers differ according to which source one reads, but “Les Innocents” was the last of the 117 “romans durs” which Georges Simenon wrote in addition to the 75 books and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Maigret. In these “hard novels”, Simenon wished to create stand-alone stories with psychological depth, entering the minds of his main characters, exploring what factors had shaped them, how they behaved in extreme situations, how they reflected on their lives in terms of success, failure, and the point of it all. Although his “romans durs” were admired by writers like Gide or Mauriac, other critics questioned the quality of novels produced at such speed and frequency.

In “Les Innocents”, based in Paris, Georges Célerin is a successful jeweller, a skilled goldsmith with a flair for design, who at times can hardly believe the intense happiness of twenty years of marriage to Annette. Dedicated to his work, he accepts her insistence on continuing her social work, caring for the aged poor, because she wishes to maintain her independence. Their two teenage children give no cause for concern, and the burden of domestic tasks is shouldered by their former live-in nanny, now housekeeper, Nathalie. This idyllic life is shattered when a policeman appears in his workshop, with news that Annette has been killed – running across the road, she slipped and was crushed by a lorry.

Grief-striken, Célerin is forced to reflect on his marriage. Gradually, he comes to realise that he did not know his wife, but it is clear that he loved her far more than vice versa, while in his obsessive focus on his wife, he did not pay his children sufficient attention. In short, this is an example of the lack of communication between a man and a woman, which was so often a theme of Simenon’s work. How will Célerin react when by chance he is driven to find out for himself what on earth she was doing in the locality where she met her death, and so confront the truth?

Simenon was a gifted storyteller, weaving insights and a strong sense of place into the often banal events of ordinary lives. He is good at building up tension, and if he sometimes disappoints one by diffusing it, this may prove plausible, as in real life. Perhaps assisted by his early employment as a journalist, including as a crime reporter, he made a conscious effort to write in a clear, concise style to engage the reader. This is most evident if read in French, by comparison with the flowery phrases often found in this language. My only criticism is that in dialogues it can be hard to be sure who is talking.

The most fascinating aspect in all this is Simenon’s own personal life, so much more complex and intriguing than, for instance, this plot. In reality, he had not only affairs, but a chain of much younger mistresses, living with him and his wife for long periods (not to mention bearing his children), or holidaying with him and each other at the same time. In his novels, he clearly took particular situations from his own life and developed them. His stated aim was to understand without judging, but it is hard either to understand or fail to judge the convoluted transgressions of his life.

Gainsborough – A Portrait by James Hamilton

“I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the very End of Life in quietness and ease.”

Thomas Gainsborough claimed to prefer painting landscapes, but is best known as a leading and very prolific C18 portrait painter. After moving to London in later life, and famous enough to be invited to paint George III and Queen Charlotte, he became quite well off.

Hamilton’s opening chapter portrays Gainsborough as sociable, charming and generous, but also subject to mood swings, and bursts of rage, as when he slashed a canvas which a client had rejected. His friend the actor Garrick’s description of his mind as like a “steam engine overcharged” with genius implies a manic quality. As a young man, he was more harshly criticised as “very dissolute…inordinately fond of women”, which eventually seems to have led to an attack of venereal disease which nearly killed him. He was also often in debt, despite his high work rate, painting “upon his feet….during five or six hours every day”, and a wife who came with a useful annual annuity, the result of being the illegitimate daughter of a prince. Hamilton suggests that the cost of keeping his wife and daughters as well-dressed “advertisements” for his work was initially more than he could afford!

In later life, Gainsborough could chat informally to the king with ease, but was too unorthodox to “play the game” as a member of The Royal Academy, to the extent that when he complained about the way his pictures were being hung at the 1784 Academy Exhibition, he was simply ordered to take them down!

Although at pains to write a biography, Hamilton’s expertise as an art historian has led him to analyse in some detail the painter’s work, with coloured plates usefully provided for many of the examples, but often too small in the paperback edition to appreciate sufficiently. So it is worth looking up images of them online. Gainsborough’s portraits of the gentry and aristocrats are often rather stiff, and the backgrounds may be of greater interest, as in the famous painting of Mr. and Mrs Andrews crammed one side of arable fields clearly depicted the husband’s new farming methods. Beautiful, elaborate dresses, displaying skill in painting silks and velvets, were often added afterwards, neither belonging to or ever worn by the sitters. Some of the most striking portraits, with a photographic quality of realism, focus on the faces of friends, who often had to wait months to receive them as gifts, since they were painted in between more lucrative commissions.

One of the most fascinating aspects, although we have to wait to Chapter 25 to discover it, is Gainsborough’s unusual approach to painting. He liked to work in darkened rooms, lit only by flickering candlelight, with a large canvas tied loosely to a frame so that it billowed slightly like a sail, while the sitter’s head was positioned only inches away from the painting of it. Gainsborough worked with great physical energy, continually stepping backwards and forwards. Most extraordinary of all, he is reputed to have painted at times with long-handled, six foot brushes, which must have been larger, ordinary brushes tied to flexible handles of say, willow or hazel.

Another intriguing fact is that, whereas from boyhood, growing up in Suffolk he painted landscapes from observation of nature, later on he would construct landscapes to copy, using heads of brocolli for trees. Endlessly experimental, he would use his fingers, bits of sponge, even on an impulse sugar-tongs to apply paint.

Hamilton creates a strong sense of place as regards where Gainsborough spent most of his life. As a boy, it was Sudbury in Suffolk, where the once prosperous wool and cloth weaving trade had declined, leaving a politically corrupt sytem and discontented population. It was only the small inheritance from an uncle who had made money from property ownership in the depressed town which enabled Gainsborough, aged only 13, to escape to London as an apprenticed engraver – “some light, handy craft trade”.

The descriptions of Bath are fascinating, particularly if one happens to live there. There is the irony of the unhealthy nature of a spa town with the smoke from coal fires trapped in the valley, “set so deep …air was apt to stagnate”. In summer, “the air was thick with the chalk and dust thrown up by traffic….which in the wet and cold of winter became a deep mire”. Those who came to take the waters would have been better off staying at home in view of the sedan chairs used to transport the gouty and rheumatic, which were reduced to boxes of sodden leather in the frequent rainy days.

Apart from the sensitive, appealing portraits of his two daughters when little girls, and one of his wife as an older woman, with a direct, quizzical gaze, Gainsborough’s immediate family members remain two-dimensional. He is described as hen-pecked, but perhaps his wife had good reason to control his income from portraits. It is unclear why Hamilton calls the daughters “troublesome”. The elder daughter may have inherited a more extreme form of the painter’s possibly somewhat manic personality. For her to be considered “mad” may have led to her short-lived marriage being a failure, with her younger sister being forced into the role of a spinster carer. Probably, there is simply a lack of information to explore these family dynamics further. Yet there is a vivid image of Thomas wondering how best to dispose of his deceased brother Humphey’s invention of a by then rotting steam engine. Clearly, they were talented members of an “ordinary” family.

Similarly, I would have liked Gainsborugh’s uneasy relationship with Joshua Reynolds to have been presented more fully and clearly. Was it more than the case of an orthodox President of the Royal Academy criticising Gainsborough, even after his death, for “a want of precision and finishing” which Hamilton sees as “brave, flamboyant exuberance”?

Overall, the biography is meticulously researched and a mine of information. Yet reading it proves a laborious task at times, largely through a lack of rigorous editing to remove the frequent repetition, tedious lists of, say, lients or paintings, and long-winded digressions. I found Gainsborough’s chequered relationship with The Royal Academy too fragmented and hard to follow. The tendency to speculate in the absence of evidence or impossibilty of knowing how Gainsborough could have reacted to the present could also be quite irritating.

Despite these reservations, I recommend this biography, having gleaned a great deal from it.

Germinal by Zola: a marathon read worth running

When Zola died in 1902, crowds of workers hailed his funeral cortège with cries of « Germinal », the best-selling novel which is probably his most famous work. This was based on the meticulous research conducted in 1884 when, formally dressed in frock coat, high collar and top hat, pen and notebook in hand, he descended into a coalmine belonging to the Anzin company in the Pas-de-Calais region of France, in order to assess the working conditions which led to a prolonged and unsuccessful strike.

A journalist before achieving sufficient success to support himself as an author, Zola had known great poverty as a child, after his father’s premature death, and as an unemployed young man who had twice failed his baccalauréat. Perhaps the experience of inequality triggered his strong social conscience. This was combined with a firm conviction that people’s lives are determined by a mixture of heredity and their environment. We see this in the principal character in Germinal, Étienne, the idealistic but naive newcomer who is carried away by his inherited impulsive, addictive personality to become the leader of a doomed strike. While conveying vividly the hardship and injustice suffered by the mining families, Zola continually shows how they have been brutalised by this: casually promiscuous, quick to take advantage of each other and capable of cruel acts of vengeance.

The novel opens with a dramatic description of the mine at night as first seen by Étienne. Zola portrays it as a kind of monster, literally swallowing up the miners as they descend for their shift. The descriptions of the working conditions are truly appalling : long, dangerous trudges and climbs deep underground to the coal seams, drenched with water as they hew the coal, risk of fire damp explosions, unfair pay cuts when they fail to meet impossible targets to both install the pit props to protect themselves and bring enough truckloads of coal to the pithead. The food is so scanty and poor, the exhaustion so intense, the patronising support available so inadequate and unreliable, hardships and misfortunes for some pile up to such a weight that one wonders how the mining community can survive at all. The comparisons with the pampered lives of the families of the mines shareholders and senior staff are shocking.

There is a powerful metaphor in the huge percheron, the draught horse brought down as a foal to drag containers filled with coal along tunnels to the pithead, which becomes blind through lack of light, can only dream of the sunlight, and eventually dies underground, to be buried there.

Events often seem exaggerated or far-fetched, and many characters, particularly the wealthy, highly stereotyped. The frequent detailed descriptions filled with technical terms for the mining operations are hard to follow, especially in the original French if not one’s first language. So reading all five hundred and forty odd pages of it (or even more in some editions) requires a marathon effort. One can grow inured to so much intense suffering, and the touches of ironic humour cannot compensate for this.

Produced originally in instalments for a magazine over a period of about four months, now the novel seems too long, at times repetitive, and in need of a firm edit, reflecting the lack of alternative media at the time to distract people from reading it. Yet, it is the kind of classic novel which lingers in the mind, provoking thought. If possible, it is best to read the novel in its original langage to experience the full impact.

The novel ends on the optimistic note, that the miners, forced back to work but their spirits unbroken, will, like seeds, produce future generations who are able to rise up and claim their rights – a belief , yet to be realised, which has inspired the causes of socialism and reform. Hence the title, for Germinal was the seventh month of the French Revolution’s revised calendar, intended to evoke the idea of seeds of equality growing in fertile ground.

“The Glass-Blowers” by Daphne du Maurier: blown away

It is many years since I devoured the swashbuckling yarn, “Jamaica Inn”, and the slow-burning psychological dramas, “Rebecca” and “My Cousin Rachel”, but Daphne du Maurier’s “The Glass-Blowers” is in a different vein. Thoroughly researched, this is a fictionalised account of the lives of her French ancestors, the Bussons, skilled craftsmen who prospered in the late C18 producing finely engraved glassware for the aristocracy – on one occasion even the King paid a visit – in the forested land of what became Sarthe, in the Pays de la Loire.

Judging by reviews, I was not alone in finding the opening chapters quite tedious, overburdened with description, while it was hard to engage with the two-dimensional characters or keep track of the locations of the various glassworks. Admittedly, this served to “set the scene” for a stable, contented, self-contained community, run in an orderly, caring fashion by Sophie’s parents, with no awareness this was about to be disrupted by the French Revolution.

The narrative becomes more absorbing as the personalities of Sophie’s three brothers become more distinct. Robert, the eldest is talented, charismatic but at times shockingly self-centred, utterly seduced by the world of the aristocrats which he is determined to enter. François, who has no interest in glass-blowing, falls under the influence of Rousseau’s writing, and dedicates himself to creating a more free and equal world by helping the poor, leaving the youngest Michel, hampered by an acute stammer and underestimated by his father, to be the one most likely to keep the family business going.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the portrayal of the French Revolution, through its stages of initial optimism, descent into a reign of terror, and ultimate restoration of the monarchy, as viewed from the different perspective of the countryside some hundred miles from the action in Paris. There is the initial fear of marauding bands, since communication is so unreliable. Being in a social limbo partway between the workers and the aristocracy mainly in flight, Michel and Sophie’s husband gain in status from marshalling their workers to join the National Guard, but the author pulls no punches in showing how the pair rapidly become domineering, abusing their new-found power in the process, at the price of losing the goodwill of their employees.

Although I thought I knew a good deal about the French Revolution, du Maurier prompted me to reflect for the first time what it must have been like to be living some way from the capital with patchy and inaccurate information, the threats from the various factions which formed, and the ultimate realisation that successive groups had replaced each other at the top, leaving the workers at the bottom of the system feeling no better off. Once the old way of life had broken down, there were some powerful descriptions of how people think and behave in violent situations, and the portrayal of how attitudes and behaviour change over time in the light of experience was also convincing.

Despite my reservations, this is probably more worth reading than, say, the escapism into “Jamaica Inn”.

“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard

I was curious to discover why “The Transit of Venus” has been regarded by some critics as a modern classic, one of the most outstanding novels of the C20.

Growing up in Australia in the years leading up to World War II, Caro and Grace are orphaned when a ferry, the Benbow, capsizes in Sydney harbour, leaving them to be raised by their difficult, manipulative cousin Dora, apparently based on the author’s own mother: “a destroyer who sees herself as a perpetual victim”.

The Transit of Venus across the Sun in 2012

An Australian herself, born in 1931, Shirley Hazzard was well-placed to describe life in a distant Dominion where children are taught British history and culture as being somehow more important and interesting than their own. For the sisters, “going to Europe” is “about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage”.

Once in England, pretty, passive Grace is quickly married off to the stuffy, pompous bureaucrat Christian. Less conventional and more of a risk-taker, Caro is caught in a triangle of “doomed love” between on one hand, the charismatic, egotistical playwright Paul Ivory, to whom she is physically attracted, and on the other, scientist Ted Tice with whom she has a strong rapport, in a meeting of minds. The narrative takes us through several decades into their late middle age, focusing on certain key events. So in its disjointed, wide-ranging scenes, it is a kind of literary soap opera.

I was initially puzzled by the style of a book which, first published in 1995, seemed to date from an earlier age, until I read that Hazzard had greatly admired Henry James. By coincidence, I read it immediately after Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, a ground-breaking “stream of consciousness” novel. There are parallels with this style in “The Transit of Venus”, which although generally written in carefully crafted sentences, often breaks off to leave them hanging, unfinished. They drift in and out of direct speech, and wander as thoughts do. The reader has to concentrate continuously to pick up allusions to past events, not to mention the clues required to understand the novel’s ending. Although I have only read it once, this is one of those novels which needs to be reread slowly, to grasp its meaning and appreciate it more fully.

Hazzard was clearly a talented writer, but perhaps because every chapter went through many (it has been suggested twenty-seven) drafts, the result often seems contrived. Although some of the dialogue is very realistic, at other times it appears artificial and pretentious, like the opening comment in a hotel bedroom scene: “I like this eclecticness. Most eclecticness is too dark”. I did not find the characters particularly convincing or engaging. Yet perhaps they were inspired by people met in Shirley Hazzard’s unusual life: she travelled a good deal as the daughter of a diplomat, through her employment in offices of the United Nations, and her marriage to a respected “Flaubert scholar”. In other words, how many “ordinary” people did she meet?

At times the novel is a page-turner, with interesting anecdotes, thought-provoking observations, striking and original descriptions, and beautiful prose. At others, sentences become incomprehensible, passages seem overwrought, and attempts to introduce a sense of the societal changes or politics of the time appear clunky. Chapter 31, located in a New York television studio where Caro overhears a conversation which has something to do with the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs, is probably based on an incident which the author experienced, but makes little sense and jars in being so misplaced and overlong.

What will Gen Z and those who come afterwards make of all this?

“Persuasion” by Jane Austen: standing the test of time

Jane Austen’s heroines tend to be very young and destined for love and marriage, Anne differs in being twenty-seven, so considered “on the shelf”, her youthful beauty faded by regrets and resignation, and only the prospect of a dull life, undervalued by her vain, snobbish father and elder sister, and exploited as a convenient companion and childminder by her self-centred younger sibling. Aged nineteen, Anne allowed herself to be persuaded by an older friend to reject the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer whom she truly loved, because he was penniless and socially inferior to her, a baronet’s daughter. His subsequent success in the navy, returning to England with wealth gained from capturing vessels from the French during the Napoleonic wars, causes her to regret this decision.

Perhaps more able to empathise with Anne than with her younger heroines, Austen provides a subtle psychological study of Anne’s various emotional stages as she realises that her path is like to cross with Wentworth’s, since he is related to the naval couple who rent the hall which her father is forced to let, as the least embarrassing or inconvenient way of paying the debts he has accrued through extravagance. We see her apprehension that others will know of her past relationship with Wentworth, her feelings when she hears what Wentworth thinks of her – that she has changed beyond recognition, which is hardly a compliment – and how the two manage to maintain a cool politeness in the company of others – and so on. Austen is probably expressing her own views, when she has Anne argue that women are more constant than men in being true to another’s memory.

“We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined and our feelings play upon us. You are forced on exertion. You always have a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back in the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”

In this example of quite a deep conversation with a man, showing mutual respect, when he observes,
“Songs and proverbs all talk of women’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men,”

she replies, “….Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything!”

This sounds remarkably modern.

It is a world of stifling social conventions, underlain by prurient gossip, and frequent scheming for personal gain. There are fascinating insights into Regency life. On the whim of a headstrong daughter, moderately wealthy characters who do not need to work for a living can drop everything for a trip to Lyme (Regis). The journey of 17 miles takes so long that it is worth staying there overnight. The ridiculously vain Sir Walter Elliott looks down on Admiral Croft, his tenant, for his ruddy seafaring complexion, while the latter cannot abide the large mirrors which dominate Sir Walter’s former bedchamber. Two of Jane Austen’s brothers were Admirals, so she had a good understanding of life at sea, if only hearsay, and of the position of naval wives – both in being left alone for months, unsure their husbands would return in times of war, and in making the choice to join a voyage as the only woman on board, in order to spend more time with their husbands.

Despite its rather contrived plot, this novel has more depth than I had remembered, and deserves to be more widely read.

Howards End by EM Forster: accepting our differences

In what was to prove the end of an idyllic period for the leisured English middle classes just before the outbreak of World War One, E. M. Forster captures the tensions and lack of “meeting of minds” between two middle class families with very different roots and attitudes: the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The intellectual Schlegels get away with appearing a bit unorthodox since they are half-German, that is “foreigners”. They are idealistic within their cocoon of privilege, living comfortably on inherited money. The much wealthier, pragmatic, materialistic Wilcoxes have built a fortune “in trade” and have no compunction about “keeping the workers in their place”. As Henry Wilcox observes,
“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years…the hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom”.

Through a fateful meeting of the Schlegel siblings with the bookish, music-loving clerk Leonard Bast, Forster portrays the rigid class divide of the early 1900s. Too poor even to afford a decent umbrella, too decent to abandon the ageing, former prostitute lover who has latched on to him, unable to regain a foothold on the ladder of respectability when he loses his job through no fault of his own, it proves too hard for him to win acceptance and pursue his interests.

Howards End seems an unlikely place for the Wilcoxes to live, being a somewhat unfashionable place in the depths of the countryside, based on Forster’s own childhood home, “Rooks Nest House”. It turns out that this belongs to Mrs Wilcox, a rather unsatisfactorily vague, two-dimensional character, dismissed as “uninteresting” by Margaret Schlegel’s chatterati friends. She exerts a calming influence on her family, but is not the woman one would expect Mr. Wilcox to have chosen for a wife. It seems that she is the “guardian” of a house which is the almost mystical symbol of an idealised way of English life that is fast disappearing at the turn of the C19 century. Knowing that she is terminally ill, she appears to hold, but never clearly expresses, the belief that Margaret Schlegel is more suited to own the house than the soulless, capitalist family into which Mrs Wilcox has married. The implications of her decision form an important part of the plot.

It may be surprising that, when widowed, the patriarch Mr. Wilcox falls for Margaret, the plain, serious-minded elder sister who has devoted herself to her orphaned siblings to the point of risking becoming an old maid. It is understandable that she seeks “a real man” in the form of Mr Wilcox, even though the two are clearly fundamentally different in their attitude to life.

The main characters, at least on the “middle class” side, are well developed. Margaret’s younger sister Helen, impetuous with a hint of instability, plays the role of the character prepared to challenge the system, but ill-equipped to cope unaided when “it comes to the crunch”. Brother Tibby provides a further contrast as the hypochondriac, wimpish bookworm cosseted by his sisters, who do not seem to resent the fact that, being the male child, he is the one to go Oxford.

Written at the end of a prolonged period of social stability and convention, but foreshadowing some dramatic changes, this stands out as one of the first “modern” novels, quite radical and original in certain respects. The story proceeds with some unexpectedly humorous moments and a sense of real connection between the characters in the form of conversations to which one can relate. Forster focuses on the relevant scenes, confidently omitting any superfluous “linking” chapters. Perhaps he can be forgiven for drifting occasionally into overblown Victorian-style philosophising.

This is an engaging family drama, with some profound insights which repay rereading. It can be read at two levels: either an Edwardian soap opera, or a quite complex amalgam of Forster’s deep reflections on the nature and future of English society, the differences between people and the ultimate need for tolerance. Although the characters may be a little wiser at the end, the wry truth remains that in any crisis the poor and the underdogs will tend to be the ones who lose out, but hints of the approaching war suggest that the escapist paradise of Howard’s End may not last.

“The Sea” by John Banville

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” W.H.Auden

By coincidence, I read this novel immediately after Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking stream of consciousness, “Mrs. Dalloway”. Despite many differences, and being written close to a century apart, there are striking similarities: both consist largely of flashbacks and reminiscences, with nostalgia for something lost. Although both lead up to a sudden tragedy, it is described more briefly, even casually than many minor incidents and this is because the act of writing about how one observes and experiences the world, and captures thought processes in words, is more important to both authors than plot.

John Banville can “do” plot, since he also writes crime fiction under the name of Benjamin Black, regarding it as a “craft”, “cheap fiction”, but uses his own name to create, as an “artist” works like “The Sea” for which he won the 2005 Booker Prize. His prose is more conventionally structured than Woolf’s but very lyrical, even poetic, original, sharply observed with touches of black humour, and peppered with unfamiliar words like leporine, losel and mephitic as in “blue shale giving off its mephitic whiff of ash and gas”. Some I had to underline to look up later rather than disrupt the flow. Now “mephitic” means foul-smelling or noxious, so why not use a term everyone will understand? I concluded charitably that this was not a sign of pretentiousness, but a genuine fascination with rarely used words.

The novel is narrated by Max Morden, the pseudonym of a man probably in late middle age who has somehow escaped his working class roots, married a woman who inherits the fortune her father made in perhaps questionable business, and become an art historian. None of this rings quite true but what is important is Max’s grief over his wife’s recent death from cancer. Unable to find much solace in his prickly relationship with his daughter, who is also grieving, he seeks relief by taking refuge in “Ballyless”, a small Irish coastal resort. This is where his parents took him to stay every summer (until his father left the family home), and Max made the acquaintance of a more affluent family, the Graces, who rented a house called The Cedars, where rooms are now let out by the landlady, Miss Vavasour.

Aware of the difference between his parent’s cheap wooden chalet and The Cedars, Max is soon infatuated with Mrs. Grace who “walked at a languorous slouch”…and “smelled of sweat, and cold cream, and faintly of cooking fat. Just another woman, in fact, and a mother at that. Yet (to him) in all her ordinariness as remote and remotely desirable as any painted lady with unicorn and book”. He is wary of Mr. Grace who is portrayed as a kind of middle-aged Pan, and “fascinated and at the same time slightly repelled” by the children, because of their relationship as twins, intimate, “like magnets” even when at loggerheads – Myles, who is mute and irritating in his attention-seeking, and Chloe, assertive and unpredictable. Then there is the young woman Rose, employed to keep an eye on the pair.

Apart from Rose, none of these characters is very appealing but Max analyses them and himself, very expressively. You could say that this is like the earlier part of a “coming of age” novel, which carries the reader along, free of any division into chapters. It is not until less than twenty pages from the end that we reach the event, reminiscent of L.P Hartley’s “The Go-Between”, which we realise has haunted Max, all his life, perhaps even more than the death of a wife he did not feel he really ever knew.

As is often the case, the most significant event has an unreal quality,
“All that followed I see in miniature, in a sort of cameo, or one of those rounded views, looked on from above, at the off-centre of which the old painters would depict the moment of a drama in such tiny detail as hardly to be noticed between the blue and gold expanses of sea and sky. I lingered a moment on the bench, breathing.”

So, a novel to be admired for its style, the quality of the writing, the insights which express thoughts one has been unable to articulate so well oneself and the evocative power of past memories. Yet somehow, it may leave one unmoved, I think because one does not relate to the characters sufficiently, and some of the situations seem too contrived.

“Kaput” by Wolfgang Münchau: Looking under the bonnet

Half a century later, matters look a little different, with such warning signals as the rapid rise of the right-wing AfD, and the over-reliance on gas produced, piped into Germany and stored under the control of the state-owned Russian Gazprom. For German journalist Wolfgang Münchau, the root of the problem is Germany’s fixation with the out-dated export-driven business model of “neo-mercantilism”. In essence, Germany’s “super-cycle” has come to an end, but that, unlike for instance the Nordic countries, it is has chosen to invest its surpluses in “the same old technologies and underinvested in digitalisation”. Meanwhile, the growth of “green energy” has been hampered by excessive bureaucracy.

Münchau cites many examples of the self-serving complacency and lack of vision with which influential politicians have colluded with state banks to invest in long-established engineering rather than the riskier small innovators and in particular digital technology which would provide so much future wealth. The failure to install sufficient fibre-optic cables has resulted in very poor mobile phone reception and slow internet (as recently as 2024) – leading to the anecdote of the horse which delivered some photos over a distance of 10km faster than a computer could upload them!

At least initially, the German teachers’ association supported an academic’s view, expressed in books like “Digital Dementia”, that schools should not use computers, to avoid damaging their pupils’ concentration.

Münchau claims that, from the late 1990s, the German government was “in the pocket” of major car firms like VW and Porsche, which clung to the production of fuel-driven cars. At VW, the CEO who wished to focus on electric cars was fired, and there was the scandal of VW ironically installing software to reduce automatically emissions when being tested in a fuel-driven car.

The “modernisation partnership” with Russia which involved importing cheap gas from the latter in order to export machinery in the opposite direction has proved a miscalculation. The decision to phase out nuclear power, and limited capacity to produce green energy increased the dependence on gas. The partnership was, as it turned out naively, promoted as helping to “democratise Russia”. In fact, the sanctions imposed when Putin invaded the Crimea in 2014, meant a sharp fall in exports of machinery from Germany and increased unemployment which in turn increased support for the AfD.

Germany profited from exporting the equipment needed for the Chinese to industrialise, not foreseeing how quickly they would turn the tables and undermine the economy with cheaper manufactured imports, using “smart technology”, internet-connected machines to increase productivity. The Chinese are rapidly gaining an increasing share of the growing e-car market, developing a very efficient supply chain, copying what the Germans did for the fuel-driven car. China has taken over the German solar panel market and robotics, while Germany is dependent on China for the import of laptops, mobile phones and rare earths.

So Germany has met its match in a superpower which is also focused on export surpluses. Economic relations with China are complicated by, for instance, the need to comply with EU sanctions in response to Chinese breaches of human rights.

Although very informative and thought-provoking, at times “Kaput” seems repetitious, and peppered with the names of too many transitory politicians, business leaders and companies for a non-German reader to keep track. Barely a year after publication, some facts have been superseded and in the final two chapters Münchau seems anxious to finish, and slips into over-condensed economic theory e.g. regarding the operation of “the debt brake”.

The gist is that necessary government investment is the first casualty when spending has to be cut to comply with keeping debt relative to GDP within a certain tight limit e.g. 0.35% of GDP. Although this rule could be relaxed in the case of a national emergency, the government was found to have misspent funds meant for COVID “by funnelling them into the climate budget”.

Then there is the shortage of skilled workers, with vocational training struggling to keep up with the creation of jobs in “new” industries, and the declining number of young Germans entering the labour market. The controversial and not entirely altruistic welcoming of a million Syrian refugees may have boosted the supply of workers, but also fed the rise of the AfD.