Nobelling

So, the world has a new Nobel Prize for Literature laureate: Doris Lessing, the octogenarian sometime science-fiction writer, Sufist, feminist and ex-Marxist. I'm glad about that - I like Doris Lessing very much, ever since forced to read some of her short fiction by the lecturer in my Reading Science Fiction module I took in my first year of university. Oh, Doris Lessing, how I do love thee, let me count the ways:

1. Unlike other writers who I won't stoop to naming (well, okay, Margeret Atwood), she was never ashamed to admit that she wrote science fiction, and her novels were often explicitly part of that genre. She once remarked that some of the finest writing of all time was science fiction - and the literary world needs people like that to stand up and say such things, given that the elites still regard the genre as pulpy tripe.
2. She was a tough, strong and independent woman, but refused to let herself be caught up in the "ideology" of feminism. (She was very even-handed in regard to both sexes, saying in 2001 that modern women are 'smug and self-righteous' and 'too quick to denigrate men' - which was seen as a 'controversial' view at the time, but nobody noticed that she was indirectly pointing the finger at men too, for allowing themselves to be 'rubbished and cowed' by women.)
3. She took her award with typical British self-deprecation, saying that "they can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off."

Anyway, I noticed something interesting about the way the modern media works in the coverage of the story. Compare this report, from the morning, with this later one from the same news source. In the first, more truthful version, Doris comes across as a pugnacious old battle axe, saying "Oh Christ...I couldn't care less!" when first told about the award, before remarking, "I've won the all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, okay?" and "I'm already thinking about all the people who are going to send me begging letters..."

But the later report abandoned the realism and altered her quote (the only one reproduced) to "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's the royal flush," which I'm sure you agree sounds much nicer but also much less sarcastic and much less interesting than the original.

The Committee really shot themselves in the foot with the Al Gore award, though. Say what you like about climate change and An Inconvenient Truth, what exactly does trying to save the environment have to do with World Peace?

I have a strong suspicion about Al Gore, you know. And it's this: the only reason why he has become something of a champion of the liberal centre-left is that he isn't George Bush. Such people like to watch him on TV or at the cinema and listen to him speak, gaze at him admiringly, and say "If only, if only he could have been President. The world would be such a better place." It's almost better for him and them that he lost, because it will forever be one of those "if onlies". And, as we all know, there is nothing more bitter-sweet than the noble hero who tragically fails at the last gasp.

But that's a pretty poor reason to award someone a Nobel Prize for Peace.

Death of the Author?

So, the end of the literary novel is at hand. Can't say I'm greatly upset. "Literary" fiction has always been, for me, a by-word for boring, pretentious flab, and I can honestly say that the only "literary" writers still active today who I genuinely admire are Milan Kundera and Donna Tartt. Non-genre fiction has not been interesting or attractive since the 1950's, when it lost its ambition to speak about the human condition and started instead to contrive ways to offend, shock and intrigue in order to sell.

The Daily Telegraph's discovery that Jordan, the topless model, has sold more copies of her 'novel' Crystal than the entire Man Booker Prize shortlist then, should not come as a surprise - because nobody wants to read boring, pretentious flab. In fact, without the help of old "literary" fiction stalwart Ian McEwan, whose On Chesil Beach sold 110,000 copies, the entire shortlist of five books would have managed just 10,000 sales between them - only 6% of the total achieved by Crystal (300,000):


That Ian McEwan sells well should, in my view, signify the death-knell for the genre anyway, because: a) McEwan is an awful, awful writer - a turgid stylist with idiotic plots - and is bound to turn more and more readers off "literary" fiction for good, and b) because his success is symbolic of the tendency amongst book reviewers to believe a book is good just because it's written by a well known writer who tells them that it's good - and that tendency can only result in ruin.

I'm not greatly worried. In fact, fiction sales in the UK increase year after year (from 51 million in 2001 to 70 million in 2006), because the genres are in rude health - and, as should be evident to just about anybody who reads widely across different genres, the best writers around nowadays write genre fiction: Ian Rankin, Henning Mankell and Barbara Vine in crime; M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe and George R. R. Martin in fantasy; William Gibson and Dan Simmons in science fiction; John le Carre in thrillers. Real writers, in other words - the ones who write good, stylish prose about interesting stories involving interesting characters, which also somehow manage to tell us something about ourselves. What "literary" fiction used to do in the days of Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

So hooray for Jordan, and hooray for one day not having to listen to people raving about Ian McEwan. And maybe next year's Man Booker shortlist will include books that people actually want to read.

LOTR

The second Lord of the Rings film was on TV last night; I enjoyed watching it, but was surprised at how poorly it's stood the test of time. I loved the films when I saw them in the cinema - really came out of them raving - but now I understand that it's mainly because they are such great cinematic experiences rather than great movies.

That's not to say there aren't wonderful moments. But the flaws stand out to me as sore thumbs now: the hyping up of Legolas (really a rather minor character in the books) into some sort of superhero (Elf Man, he could be called) and his sometimes embarassingly silly stunts; the plot inconsistencies (Treebeard gives a shout and literally ten seconds later all the Ents in Fangorn are by his side, a la Liono from Thundercats); the odd lack of tension in the battles despite all the digital brilliance.

Worst of all are the continuous comic nods to the audience, like Gimli's running joke about dwarf-tossing; the books had some humour of a kind, but it was never a knowing humour, and as the chief virtue of the books is the fact that they present a consistent world without any reference to our own, those jokes really detract from the authenticity.

Maybe it's because I'm a bit of a LOTR boffin. I feel very uncomfortable with this new-found acceptance of 'geek culture' - fans of Buffy and Star Trek and whatnot are really just modern-day trainspotters, it seems to me - and I've never been able to understand why people manage to get so excited about films, books and TV series that those things become a way for them to define themselves. But what can I say? I read The Fellowship of the Ring at the age of 11 and was smitten with the thing, and have remained so ever since. I'm one of the few people in the world to have read The Silmarilion several times over. I know all the competing theories as to who Tom Bombadil really is (but not why he's so annoying). I've even physically forced myself to try to read some of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth books.

To a person like me, the films are full of great moments, but characterised by real own-goals, like how the elves suddenly turn up at Helm's Deep to help the Rohirrim, when the entire point of the books is that the elves don't give a crap anymore and it's for humans to do everything for themselves. I suppose it's symptomatic of the fact that it's a film made for a mass audience, whereas Tolkien was just writing the things as a hobby to keep himself occupied between fighting wars. And if Peter Jackson had been too true to the books, we might very well have ended up with Brian Blessed popping up as Tom Bombadil half way through the first film, with the consequence that nobody would turn up to watch the others.

The moral of the story being, I suppose, that I wish people wouldn't make films of my favourite books. But I know that's never going to change.

I'm faintly embarrassed by this entry, but there you are: I like fantasy literature and that's that.

Stravinsky and Barthes

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Igor Stravinsky is one of my favourite composers. The Firebird and The Rite of Spring are, I think, two of the weirdest and most wonderful pieces of music ever written; by turns beautiful, wild, cold and unearthly. They're brilliant examples of the last flourish of Modernism; Stravinsky was to classical music what Wallace Stevens was to poetry - the zenith, the apex, before traditional Western art collapsed into naval-gazing, alienating postmodernism.

So I was interested to read the other day a quote by Stravinsky, who once remarked that "music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc...If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality."

Which is odd, because it is reminiscent of the Arch Pontiff of postmodernism, Roland Barthes, and his famous assertion that the publishing of a work of literature constitutes the "Death of the Author". It was Barthes' belief that, when setting a novel loose upon the world, the author loses all control of it and it becomes a text wholly in the power of the reader to interpret and analyse. Stravinsky's comment seems to me to be hinting at the same thing (postmodern ideas being confirmed by one of the great figures of Modernism); once a work of music has been created, the composer's ideas and designs for it become meaningless because it now belongs to the listeners.

I'm not quite sure that I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Postmodern theories and tropes always seem to me to be either completely banal (racism and sexism are bad, truth is contextual), or completely absurd (everything, including the holocaust and your breakfast, is a text), and this is really a little bit of both. But it certainly made me think, and the more I think about it, the more I start to see Stravinsky's point. Music, much more than literature, is for the listener to interpret, and while it is overstating the case that "music is...powerless to express anything at all", it is certainly true that once the listener hears a piece of music, the composer is powerless to influence their reaction, however much they might wish it were otherwise.

Everyone knows the story of how Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, for example, somehow morphed from a song about bitter veterans of the Vietnam War into a jingoistic anthem in the mind of Ronald Reagan during the 1980's. Every Breath You Take was originally intended to be a study in voyeurism and stalking by Sting, but it is now a common feature on "Great Romantic Love Songs" compilation albums in HMV. Somewhere Over the Rainbow's lyrics are deeply melancholic, penned by a deeply melancholy man, but it now seems the very embodiment of hope - thanks to Judy Garland. You Were Always on My Mind is a very different beast when sung by Willie Nelson when compared to Elvis.

By a neat little twist, it was Stravinksy himself who was one of the most unfortunate victims of this, which is perhaps why he made the statement in question: when Walt Disney decided to use The Rite of Spring for his film Fantasia, he not only completely altered Stravinsky's original vision (changing the piece from an elegaic celebration of pagan Russia to an account of how dinosaurs lived), he also cut out whole segments, changed the order of huge swathes, and even fiddled with the rhythms. The "Death of the Composer", indeed.

I intend to follow this blog entry up with an essay for Harpers on the deconstruction of the song, I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts.

Huck, Jim and The River

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"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Hemingway apparently said this. As mentioned previously, I've decided to read some older books that perhaps I have missed out on in the past due to not studying Literature at school. I've heard a few suggestions from people, and shortly after I posted about it noisms loaned me a couple of books.

I still have Moby Dick to read, but I thought that I would start by reading The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, as I remember when I was eight or nine I read some of either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. I don't remember what I thought about it at the time, and if I'm honest I don't know what I make of it now.

Whenever you read a book that was written some time ago it can be difficult at first to appreciate what people might be talking about, or to relate to their situation. At the end of the day, we are all human though (and I guess not many people pre-20th century wrote about being other than human) so we have that to grab hold of, so it is merely the difference in circumstances that can confuse. For me, in reading Huckleberry Finn, the big thing that astonished me was the attitude to slavery.

OK, I understand that it was written at a different time, but to see Huck thinking and accepting that he will go to hell for helping Jim escape is quite a hard thing to relate to. Did people really think so little of other people? I suppose that despite tabloid headlines and celebrity slip-ups we do like to think that we are living in better times, when racism and prejudice are merely things that happen when we're not careful. It's a lie, you only have to look harder and see the prejudice that is still a very great reality in some parts of the world and in our own societies.

Still, that, for me, was the most shocking attitude in the book, that people could think that way about other people, and that the slaves would seem to just accept it.

It's not that I dislike Huckleberry Finn, actually there is a lot to like about it, although I think some of the episodes in it do go on for longer than is neccessary (the king and the duke long outstayed their welcome in my opinion); the incidents that Twain puts Huck and Jim through are genuinely interesting - and I suppose what surprises me is that after everything they go through on the river and all their trials and tribulations Huck really does think that he is damned for deciding to help Jim, even though Jim has time and again shown him exceptional kindness and true friendship.

(what was also quite amusing is that I was reading noisms annotated copy from whenever he studied the book; running across "V IMPORTANT" and "funniest line ever" in several places was a different way of reading a book)

Part of me thinks that the final few chapters are a little too convenient, too many things suddenly turn out right - Jim's freedom, the fate of Huck's father (one wonders if Miyazaki has ever read Huckleberry Finn) - but in some respects life is just like that, things can seem to be going all wrong and then everything surprises you and comes together.

Part of me yearns for their raft, for just floating down the river. In the same way, I first really longed to travel when I read On The Road - but both Huck and Jim's journey and Kerouac's travelling are closed off to me, they're just not realities any more (unless I'm wrong and someone knows that these sorts of "trips" are still made in America). Still, they make me want to get out there and see more of the world.

I don't know if Hemingway is right or not, and I'm still uncertain about how much I really enjoyed Huck Finn. Saying that, the way that the themes - especially the idea of drifting along the river - have stayed in my mind since I've finished it, I can't help but recommend it if you have never read it. And if you have read it, maybe you should find time to re-read it.

I've just started Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and after that I'll go on to Moby Dick.

One day, however, I am certain that I will join Huck and Jim on the raft again, and see where the river takes us...

Hurting People's Feelings

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Salman Rushdie, the famous British-Indian novelist, was appointed to be a Knight Bachelor last week - as you're perhaps aware. You're also probably aware that there is an ongoing fatwa against Rushdie, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, because he wrote a naughty book called The Satanic Verses which satirised Islam; the decision to bestow a knighthood on him has therefore caused quite a fuss in certain circles.

The reaction is absurd, of course, and only serves to demonstrate that there is a small section of the Muslim world that has clearly lost the plot - the Pakistan Ulema council, for example, has decided that in retaliation it is bestowing the title of Saifullah, or Sword of Islam on Osama bin Laden, because "if a blashphemer can be given the title 'Sir'...despite the fact that he's hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam must be given the lofty title of...Saifullah". That's right: Britain has hurt their feelings (the poor little lambs), perhaps as badly as if we'd stolen their lunch money, or spilt their milk, and so the only sensible reaction is for them to honour a murderous, psychopathic thug who relishes the deaths of Westerners in general and British/Americans in particular. It seems a tad disproportionate, but who are we to question the Ulema council? After all, cultural relativism, who are we to judge, etc, blah de blah.

Now it seems that Pakistan's National Assembly has unanimously condemned the awarding of the honour, with Religious Affairs Minisiter Ejaz-ul-Haq arguing that suicide bombings in Britain are now justified, and that "if Britain does not withdraw [the knighthood], all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations". Fair enough, but one has to wonder whether Mr. ul-Haq is also advocating breaking off relations to the extent that Pakistan, for example, might turn down all the aid money that Britain supplies it with. One suspects not; funny how you can usually tell with these things.

You would expect that sort reaction from hardliners like the Ulema council and Ejaz-ul-Haq, and I'm not particularly worried about it. Worse is that of people like Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer (who has said that the knighthood should be put "on hold"), seem all too willing to pander to them. Encouraging hissy fits - and, worse, backing down to people who are willing to countenance suicide bombings and the indiscriminate murder of civilians - is obviously, palpably wrong, and it worries me that peers (who by their nature are supposed to be sensible, educated people) should be so simultaneously stupid and spineless.

Personally, I've never liked Salman Rushdie, and I think he's a bad writer who courts controversy to sell books. I also dislike the current tendency among the British literary elites to honour authors just because they're from a developing country and write novels with themes that happen to tie into the particular angst of the moment. For that reason, I'm not particularly happy that the man is now a Knight of the Realm. But it's our decision who we award knighthoods to, not Pakistan's, and no amount of browbeating and hysterical overreaction should dissuade us from that. And if Pakistan really wants to cut off diplomatic relations with Britain, it should have the guts to carry that threat through to its sensible conclusion and hand back our aid money. We're happy to give it, and in some sense obligated, but nobody's got a gun to your head.