"But let a woman in your life..." The Blind Assasin

A little while ago, there was a Facebook thing (I don’t know what else you call them) asking people to name their fifteen favourite/most influential writers. I posted mine and a female friend (I use friend here in the sense of someone I actually talk to, visit etc rather than a Facebook Friend) observed of mine, “You need to read more female authors.”

All fifteen of mine were male. True, Lee Harper was a writer who popped to mind moments after I posted the list and in the days following I remembered some female writers I had read (e.g. Jane Austen, E. Annie Proulx, Enid Blyton, Ayn Rand (urgh!)) but in all honesty, there are not that many female writers whose work I follow. My friend sent me a list of writers to check out. The name that struck me strongest was Margaret Atwood, an author who is on my list of ‘I really must read … one day’. So the day had arrived and I dutifully (if eventually) took to the library to borrow a Margaret Atwood novel.

The one I chose was The Blind Assassin. I loved the title and the cover, a 1930s advertising portrait of a woman. The book starts with the death of Laura Chase, the author of ‘The Blind Assassin”. Laura’s book is the story of a man and a woman, secret lovers, always on the move. Why they are on the move is a mystery and he tells her science fiction stories that he later writes up for pulp fiction magazines. ‘The Blind Assassin’ has stories within the story that is within The Blind Assassin. Along with excerpts from Laura’s book, we get newspaper accounts of tragedies befalling a family, and the memoirs of Laura’s older sister Iris, writing in modern times. As Atwood’s book continues, all these strands come together in a satisfying and moving way.

I really enjoyed this book. I followed my pattern of reading books I love by devouring early chapters, and lingering over the last few, avoiding reading the book so I would not finish it so quickly. As the book draws to a close, you may find yourself flipping back to the beginning, as I did, looking for what you missed the first time. My description of the book may make is sound difficult, but it is immensely simple and pleasurable to read.

I don’t know why I haven’t read more female authors.  There was a time when there were fewer around but that was sometime ago, and today they are legion. I've never avoided a book because it was written by a woman, and I'm sure there are books I've read of which I cannot recall the sex of the author. I did read a few books by women that re-imagined classic female characters e.g. Rebecca, Morgana le Fay and Medea. All these books turned these diverse characters into the one: a sexually- confident, liberated, very modern woman. It was as if we re-imagined Hamlet, Beowulf or David Copperfield as a sexually confident, liberated and very modern man: unlikely and dull.

Still, the failings of a few authors working in one genre should not have put me off the entire gender. I do have a hard time picking up modern novels by anyone, worried that they will be all technique and no story. And many books do appeal to one sex over another. I discussed my failure to get through Madame Bovary with this same female friend and she said, “I think that’s more of a woman’s book.”

So why I have this curious failing is open to discussion, if you are so inclined. In the meantime, Sophie, I am hooked on Margaret Atwood; The Handmaid’s Tale will be my next one, I think.

"The long and winding road." Sesame Street

I’ve just finished reading Sesame Street: A Celebration, 40 Years on the Street, and what a flood of memories it released. Muppets, characters, sketches, jokes and animations I had forgotten but which delighted me in childhood, and thanks to YouTube, do so now.

But this is not just a book for reminiscing people of a certain age. This gives us the story of Sesame Street from one remarkable woman’s idea of how to turn the wasteland of 1960s television into a tool that could teach children, to the multi-national, multi-generational, still delightful, imaginative and fun institution that it is today.

From the beginning, the show was backed with research and time spent with children, and this process still goes on today. If today, we of a certain age lament the changes on Sesame Street, these changes are geared to make the show as fun and useful to today’s child as it was to us. Mr Hooper’s store looks more like part of a chain because that’s what kids see on their streets. The episodes are now shorter, with a stronger through-line because it keeps the kids’ attention better. They don’t necessarily want forty-something year olds watching, unless they are watching it with their children. Mind you, that doesn't mean you shouldn't: it's still fun and the jokes aimed at the Mums and Dads are still there too.

The show was never short of role models. From the start it had a mixed cast, which quickly became even more diverse, and was set in a New York street in a poor neighborhood, because that was their main demographic, poor American urban kids who never saw their world on TV. While the Muppets were originally going to be a stand-alone element, testing proved the kids switched off when only humans were onscreen, so the Muppets took to the street. Big Bird showed them even big people could make mistakes, Oscar that it was OK to be grouchy sometimes. The humans grew older, got married, had children, changed jobs, or moved away.

The show has taken on some big themes. There are two pages dedicated to the episode when Mr Hooper, who had died in real life, died on the show, and Big Bird trying to comprehend what death means. They’ve made shows about 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, made specials for children whose parents are in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even, until funding ran out, had an outreach program for children whose parents were in jail. The scope of what the Sesame Workshop, formerly the Children’s Television Workshop, does is quite staggering. It also goes to show you can help children comprehend the real world without mindlessly exposing them to the harshness and the ugliness of the world, as some want to do. Life can be tough, but it can be wonderful – all at the same time.

The book is big, colourful and generously illustrated, and invites browsing as well as a detailed read. The Muppet characters are so alive, it seems to make no difference that you can see the people operating them. Half an Ernie is still the fellow you love. You get a big insight into Muppet world from this book. I was encouraged to know they have younger replacements for the Muppeteers. While the death of Jim Henson (Sweet Jim Henson, as Custard once called him) took everyone by surprise, they now have trained operators for all the favourite Muppets, while still developing new characters as needed.  Some of the sketches that made me laugh while I watched it with my nephews and nieces I now realise were with these new Muppeteers. I didn’t notice, and I’m a bit of a Muppet tragic.

Children are still their main target and drive the changes to the show, as it should be. But their reactions can still surprise. Animation by Maurice Sendak, of ‘Where the wild things are’ fame, was taken off when it frightened children. Children at home imitated Don Music, a Muppet pianist who used to head butt the keyboard in frustration, so he disappeared. Apparently many kids were confused when the actor playing Gordon was replaced. I just remember wondering why Gordon had suddenly gone bald. But children are always ready to suspend disbelief. One child on the set seeing Caroll Spinney undressing as Big Bird said to his mother ‘Does Big Bird know he’s got a man inside him?’ Sometimes, when we become adults, we should keep childish things with us.

"Where's the ka-boom?" The history of Plutonium

In Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, the Danish physicist Neils Bohr  and his German colleague Werner Heisenberg discuss, among many other topics, the critical mass of uranium, that is the amount needed to produce a chain reaction for an atomic bomb. Heisenberg shows Bohr his figures proving an impossible amount of uranium was needed, making an atomic bomb unfeasible. Bohr points out a misplaced decimal point in his work, which distorted the answer by at least a factor of ten. Heisenberg is shocked and so are we: if Heisenberg had got his sums right, he might have persisted in the work and Hitler got an atomic bomb before the Americans.

In Jeremy Bernstein’s book Plutonium: A history of the world’s most dangerous element, there is an even more interesting possibility. The great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi actually achieved nuclear fission in 1934 but either did not see it or did not realize what he was looking at. The official discovery of nuclear fission did not happen until 1938. By 1945, the US had working atomic bombs. Consider those dates. If Fermi had recognized fission in 1934, the arms race may have started then, and World War Two been an atomic war from day one.

Such is the role of chance in world history. And in science.  It is worth remembering that scientists are like the rest of us. Despite best practice and best intentions, they can still make mistakes, see only what they want to see, or not see what they are not looking for. Uncertainly is an integral part of science and should not be used as an excuse to dismiss it.

This book is a history of the discovery and development of plutonium, which is a great element for making bombs, but not much else.  I enjoy the occasional book about science though I don’t always, if ever, entirely understand them. Accepting this means I can enjoy these books for what I can understand rather than worry about what I do not.

Bernstein makes this story intelligible for the non-scientist, even allowing them to skip most of the most technical chapter. He does his best to explain some complex ideas in chemistry and physics and does pretty well. He is not helped however by a serious misprint. After he explains the traditional notation as “the atomic number at the lower right and the atomic mass at the upper left”, the equation for the first observed and noted example of nuclear fission is printed thus: ₉₂U^238  -> ₅₆BA¹³⁷ + X. I have trouble telling my left from my right. I have even more trouble remembering the difference between atomic mass and atomic number and how they affect the behaviour of elements in reactions. Imagine the time I spent trying to understand that passage. I hope this is rectified in any future editions.

One reason I find these books difficult is that I have trouble understanding how scientists work at the levels at which they do. Physicists and chemists worked on plutonium for some years, finding important properties and behaviour, before they managed to create enough to see it – and then only through a microscope. The scale of the work bamboozles.

But this is not just a book about chemistry and physics. The human factor, as I alluded to above, plays an enormous part. The scientist who first identified nuclear fission, Otto Hahn, noted what he saw but could not work out what had happened. His former colleague, Lise Meitner, now in another country due to Austria’s Nazi race laws, was the one who identified the process and the results correctly. But the Nobel Prize was awarded to Hahn on his own, ignoring the work of his female colleague both before and after his discovery. For his part, Hahn couldn’t see the problem with that.

Hahn meanwhile discovered he had won the prize while in a British prison after the war, where he was held with other scientists who had been working for the Nazis. It’s good to see that the Prize Committee, however imperfectly it works, could recognize achievement free of political considerations. If only they could always do that. Ah well, they are humans as well.

Bernstein ends the book with a consideration of the amount of plutonium in the world now, most if not all contained in warheads on the end of missiles. What are we to do with it? How do we live with this dangerous leftover from the Cold War? Which I suppose raises in however tangentially a manner the question of nuclear power, and should we look to nuclear power as a stepping stone on the way to a world less dependent on fossil fuels. To me, this is a no-brainer: of course we should. If people look beyond scare-mongering and sloganeering to science and technology, they would discover a safe, reliable, green form of electrical power, which we can use while we develop renewable energy sources to the point where they are both practical and affordable. Forget Chernobyl or the Simpson's Monty Burns; focus, for example, on the the 80% of power France gets from nuclear stations, and has done for decades. Phew, didn't meant to get all political, but there it is.

And here is a shameless plug: I won this book in a Facebook competition run by Australian popular science magazine Cosmos. If you like science, do check them out. I’ve also won a Nicolas Cage DVD called ‘Knowing’. I’ve yet to watch it but I’ll let you know how it goes.

"What is a man but his old stories?" Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart trilogy

The other day, I read in The Age one commentator describe the current Irish financial crisis as a betrayal of the men who fought for the Republic. There is very little in Irish history that isn’t.  The cool winds of Ireland are not produced by differences in air pressure over different parts of the earth’s surface but by the untold millions of betrayed men spinning in their graves.

I don’t mean to sound cynical; Ireland’s history to me has always seemed astonishingly sad. The sadness derives from the cyclical nature of the violence and tragedy; men risking their lives left waiting on beaches for promised support that never comes, again and again; children being indoctrinated to share their parents’ hatred; the country finally winning some independence in the Anglo-Irish War then turning on itself in civil war; people imagining that this time, this violence, this shooting, this bomb will change things, that this promise, this assurance, this treaty will bring peace.

Nor do I want to romanticise it. The bombings, the shootings were all too often pointless, petty, motivated not by high ideals but by a lust for money, power or violence for its own sake. At long last, peace may well be coming to Ireland. Bombings still happen, but not nearly with the frequency they once did. (The Irish always maintained a sense of humour: a shop in Belfast that lost its front kept in business and put up a sign ‘More open than usual’.) In the long contest between the bullet and the ballot box, the ballot box has won, as it usually does – but the bullets keep coming.

If you want to read about the Irish experience of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, you could do a lot worse than starting with Roddy Doyle’s wonderful The Last Roundup trilogy: A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing (2004) and The Dead Republic (2010). The three novels tell the story of Henry Smart from his birth in Dublin in 1901 through to his old age in 2010. Born into a world of poverty and violence, he never entirely escapes it. Even as a child, his eyes have a force than intimidates men and attracts women. In the first book, he survives a miserable Irish childhood to fight the Easter Rebellion, the Anglo-Irish War, the Civil War, and marries before he has to flee the country, just ahead of his former allies.  In the second, he finds England isn’t far enough and runs again to America where he falls foul of a whole new type of gunman. There he also has jazz, bootlegging, American-style evangelism, and the Depression to occupy him before middle-age takes him in the third book back to Ireland where his past and Ireland’s are still waiting for him.

He brushes against some big names - that’s his elbow in the photo of de Valera under arrest.  He works with people such as Michael Collins, John Wayne and in Oh, Play That Thing, he works for a very young Louis Armstrong, before the jazzman even has the nickname Satchmo. James Connolly teaches him to read. Gerry Adams wants to be seen shaking his hand. John Ford wants to make his story and makes The Quiet Man instead. This is not Forrest Gump reassuring us everything is fine. We keep being reminded of what’s going on behind, or underneath, the stories we know, the violence, the money, the ideals, the deals, the sweat, the blood, the dreams, the sex, the whim of chance and the drive of fear. 

These are rich, entertaining, novels, full of humour, great characters, incident, and dialogue. Henry’s wife, Miss O’Shea, could carry a novel herself.  I actually gasped out loud during moments (I’m not much of a one for gasping.) Some characters are created in a dash of words, and can disappear in fewer, yet stay with you, like they stay with Henry. Doyle’s language is a pleasure to read and he is a wonderful storyteller. I found myself reaching for this novel even if I only had five minutes to spare. Then as they drew to a close, I would try to make the remaining pages last as long as I could. This is a subversive look at Irish history, driven by a great love story.

It is also a story about stories. Henry is made and trapped by his own story, even the bits that aren’t true, even the parts he made up.  The stories he knows about other people make him a hero and a target. He and his missing wife (or is he the one missing?) track each other by the stories they tell and hear. He and John Ford fight over how to tell his story to an American audience, through a Hollywood film. The fight for Ireland may well simply be a fight for the story of Ireland, how it is told, and who gets to tell it. And stories are nothing without an audience. This is where you and I come in.

All the strands of Henry Smart’s long life tie together beautifully by the end of the third novel. I could not say if each book stands alone as I read them in order within a few months of each other.  I would urge you to read them in order too, although there's no need to rush – they were published over eleven years. The humour, vitality and sadness of Irish history are here and Henry Smart is a memorable entertaining narrator. His brother Victor will haunt me for a long time.

"(and he meant it.)" Lewis Carroll's other book

is unusual but by no means unique. James Joyce started ‘Finnegans Wake’ midsentence, and ended in the same way. (The two fragments make sense as one complete sentence, making Finnegans Wake a book you can read over and over for the rest of your life.) But he was not the first writer to start a book this way. He may have got the idea from his favourite work of Lewis Carroll’s, Sylvie and Bruno.

Never heard of Sylvie and Bruno? Or its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno concluded? Not many people have. Despite Carroll considering them his best and most important works, they were a failure when published and have languished in obscurity every since. It’s not surprising. They alternate between the tedious and the twee. Each book is longer than both Alice books combined. They have three stories which are difficult to follow despite none of them having a particularly strong plot. The lead characters are a brother and sister team of cavity-causing sweetness, and Carroll has Bruno talk throughout in baby talk e.g. ‘oo’ for ‘you’ and ‘welly’ for ‘really.’ The books meander, bog down in philosophical discussion, and often bewilder. To get through them requires more perseverance than enjoyment.

That said, they are not without their charm and magical Carrollian moments. One character invents a map scale of 1:1, but he can’t use it due to complaints from farmers – it covers the entire country. So they use the country as its own map, and it does nearly as well. The Mad Gardener’s song, which is often anthologized, appears at fits and starts throughout both books. (“What Tottles meant” is rather good as well.) Bruno observes that evil is live backwards. It’s like watching one of Shakespeare’s lesser-performed plays; it becomes apparent why they are lesser-performed but they still have moments of which lesser writers can only dream.

The structure of the novels is complex. The narrator, known only as Sir, passes through three levels of existence. There is the real England, a fantasyland Outland, and the Fairy Kingdom. Sir, an elderly bachelor who may suffer from narcolepsy, passes from one world to the next without a word of warning to the reader, sometimes surprising himself. Sometimes the other characters in the other worlds are aware of him, at other times they are not.

In Outland, the Warden leaves his children, Sylvie and Bruno, to be cared for by his brother the Vice-Warden and wife, Tabikat, while he travels to Fairy Land. In his absence, the brother declares himself Emperor; In England, Sir follows the progress of a romance between his friends Arthur and Lady Muriel. The romance is interrupted by the attentions of another man, and an outbreak of disease in a nearby village. This is the most conventional part of the book, but also provides Carroll with opportunities to discuss his opinions on God, religion, sin, government, atheism, self-sacrifice and many other topics not usually found in a book aimed at children; In Fairy Land, the Warden becomes the Fairy King and Sylvie and Bruno have adventures. 

As far as plot goes, that’s about it.  As Carroll stated in his introduction, these books were an attempt to link together different materials, poems, stories, lines of dialogue and thoughts collected over many years into a single book. He calls the result ‘litterature’.  As a result the book is much more self-conscious but perhaps also more revealing.

Sir is not the only character who moves between worlds. Sylvie and Bruno appear in all three.  The Professor in Outland is Mein Herr in England and an eccentric in both. Lady Muriel is almost too good to be true. She is beautiful, intelligent, patient, loving, curious, and generous; maybe Carroll’s ideal woman. To make things more confusing, there is a strong implication that she and Sylvie are one and the same character, despite encountering each other in the real world. But Tabikat, Muriel’s shadow counterpart in Outland, is a fat, vain and foolish woman. One some level, Muriel, Sylvie and Tabikat are one and the same person – an idealised child, an idealised woman and a nightmare woman.

What this says about Carroll’s attitude towards women is anyone’s guess. Although long accepted as a repressed paedophile, more recent research suggests that this is a distortion, if not an outright slander, on Carroll’s character. Carroll enjoyed the company of many women of mature age, some of his relationships bordering on the scandalous. One theatre director (Carroll loved theatre, also scandalous for a Victorian clergyman) described Carroll as ‘a greying satyr in sheep’s clothing’. Sylvie and Lady Muriel are equally idealised in the novel, but I get the clear impression that Sir would much prefer to stay with the woman and not the child.

Carroll was aware of his fame as a writer for children and his role as a clergyman. As he got older, if he didn’t actually become more conservative, he certainly played the part. The ‘Alice’ books are famous in part because they have no moral. Sylvie and Bruno is dripping with them. Carroll used these books in part to preach to his audience – and they are the worse for that.

These are difficult books to read. It is no wonder that those who turn to these books looking for more Alice are disappointed. But this is not what Carroll set out to do. Carroll was an inventor in many areas, none more so than in his writing. With ‘Alice’ he thought he was ‘striking a new path in fairy-lore’ as indeed he was.  Having been down that path once, (well, twice) he had no intention of going there again. His experiment, though failed, was bold. He may have even been ahead of his time. The Sylvie and Bruno books with their multiple plots in diverse worlds, surrealism, ad-hoc structure, and self-referential nature are, it’s been suggested, the first post-modern novel. They are certainly like no books of their time and structurally sit more comfortably in the Twentieth Century. Which brings me back to James Joyce. Ending an essay like this