Literature, Iris Murdoch said, as opposed to philosophy, her other concern, is ‘very natural to us, close to ordinary life and to the way we live as reflective beings’. Why then, you might ask, are her stories so rich in extraordinary and eccentric characters, why do they culminate in some explosive event or catastrophe and why do her people behave in extreme ways, incest, attempted murder, suicide? She was writing in rebellion against the reduced scale, as she saw it, of other twentieth century fiction which seemed to assume that every individual was free to make his or her own way in the world with other people as objects of choice or mere background to their lives. She wrote instead about disturbing figures of power, both what it was like to exercise such influence and about those subject to its authority and in doubt or open reaction or delighted acquiescence. She saw very clearly all the non-rational obsessive and desiring elements of a self which was often far from free. ‘Reality is not a given whole,’ she wrote. ‘An understanding of this, a respect for the contingent is essential to imagination as opposed to fantasy.’ Her characters are always articulate middle-class not out of snobbery but because they constantly try to understand their competing and conflicting inner pressures. There’s always an intense excitement in her books as they move, especially in the earlier works, between something close to myth or fairy tale, say The Bell or The Italian Girl and a more recognisable sense of the everyday, say The Sandcastle or, my own favourite, An Unofficial Rose. But the greatest achievement is really the long later novels where the power of the almost magically endowed prophetic figures casts a spell over an immensely varied cast of characters, as in The Message to the Planet or The Book and the Brotherhood. Each novel is a world in itself, compulsively readable, constantly surprising, stimulating of thought but above all, to use her own word, ‘fun’ to be with. If you haven’t read any before, what pleasure is in store for you, and if you have they will seem even more rewarding when you return.

Brian Nellist

Vintage Classics have recently republished most of Iris Murdoch’s novels together with her essays on Sartre and the challenging and brilliant Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

Beautiful, aren’t they?
 
Remember: you can purchase the above books through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.

Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty
A Memoir by Robin Daniels
(Palatine Books)

We have been sent a review copy of an absolutely beautifully produced new book. Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty by Robin Daniels is a book of charm and insight, combining personal memories, biography, a fine selection of Cardus maxims and extracts, and an appraisal of Cardus the man, the friend and the writer.

Nevil Cardus was born in Manchester in 1888. He was the first music critic to be knighted, the most evocative and most often quoted writer on cricket of all time, (Wisden dubbed him ‘the patron saint of the craft of cricket writing’) and one of the great English essayists of the 20th century.

For more than half a century he wrote about music and cricket for The Manchester Guardian, changing the course of writing on cricket. He developed a style of writing that was intuitive, richly felt, evocative of colour and atmosphere and insightful about player or musician.

In a long and remarkable life, Cardus was a friend of famous writers such as JM Barrie and JB Priestley, cricketers CB Fry, Don Bradman; singers Kathleen Ferrier and Lotte Lehmann; conductors Beecham and Barbirolli and musicians Menuhin and Barenboim. The book is filled with a sense of Cardus’s large and warm personality.

Robin Daniels’ loving reflection on the life and work of his friend is testament to his own lifetime’s love of reading:

Unlike the internet, books offer a place to feel, respond and ponder – safely, slowly and inwardly. Reading is not meant to be an end in itself: it need not be just for escape and entertainment, or the passive gathering of information. Reading invites interpretation and close dialogue (with the text and with oneself); it offers a site for thinking about self and others and the world around us. Reading gives us space to alter rigid pathways of habitual thought. It can touch our own emotions, yielding new links or associations and insights.

In his introduction to the book Andrew Flintoff writes: ‘I am glad to recommend this book, especially because Robin Daniels is honouring the memory of his friend by donating some of the royalties to the Lancashire Academy, for the finding and coaching of Lancashire stars of the future … For specialist and non specialist alike, this is a first-class book about a first class writer. Neville Cardus has many imitators but no equal.’

(You can buy Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty A Memoir by Robin Daniels here at our online bookshop.)

by Angela Macmillan

Perhaps it is Davis’s role as editor of the non-academic literary magazine The Reader that gives him licence to argue vehemently for the role of the reader in Victorian novels and poems… It is readers, he contends, who ‘go to the book to internalize it, personally, emotionally, as if they might just find revealed there a version of the secrets of their lives’… Essentially, Davis’s book is about a philosophy of literature; in it he expands the possibilities of what studying literature can mean, how we can expand our minds in order to reach new and exciting conclusions about things we often take for granted, about ourselves, about the past, about life… Readers – all readers – cannot ignore that they are emotionally moved by literature, and why should they?

So why does Victorian literature still matter? If we are to take part in attempting to respond to the title of Davis’s stimulating study, perhaps it is that Victorian literature is fundamental to understanding ourselves and our past. Like the Victorians, with their fascination with origins (culminating in Darwin’s Origin of Species), perhaps we too feel the need to trace who we are and where we come from. The Victorians left their legacy in our architecture and designs, music and art, politics and science, and even (or especially) our theories of life and death. Yet, most of all, perhaps we find ourselves in their literature.

You can read the review in full here. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters by Phil Davis is available to buy (along with all the Victorian literature you could ever want) from our online bookshop.

CHAPTER 5 Getting Into Reading, Jane Davis.

“Davis writes a stand-out piece on her creation of a project called ‘Get Into Reading’. Get into Reading (GIR) started on a £500 grant, targeted people from the deprived areas of the Wirral and it gave them a venue in which to read for pleasure. It is Davis’ frank retelling of her mother’s fascination with books and her own chaotic young life that suggests the only route for her was to create such a project. Groups have different target members-one group called ‘Feel Better with a Book’ is for mental health service users, another called ‘Book Break’ is for carers. The chapter concludes with several interviews with GIR participants and staff. I would imagine that the resultant glowing evaluation is priceless when it comes to the continuation of funding. In her closing remarks, Davis emphasizes the need for a social space to talk and share enjoyment in books:

Few people are conscious of a need to share conversations about the stuff contained in great books…As one of our first beneficiaries said to me, ‘You need it, but you don’t know you need it.’ We are more aware of our need as a series of negatives: people feel depressed, feel disconnected, see ‘nothing out there’ and feel a library is ‘not for me’…” (p. 93)

I hope those in public libraries will take up Davis’ challenge and start a weekly book group.

Development is well worth reading. However, Francis Bacon’s advice applies here. Many chapters are only to be “tasted”, while a few should be “chewed and digested” (quoted from his essay Of Studies) – my selections are Davis’s chapter and another by Sambell, a fascinating look at futuristic fiction for youth and its increasing complexity since the 1980s.

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From Worster Danielle , Information Officer, British Heart Foundation. Book review. P.16. Health Libraries’ Group Newsletter, Vol 26, Number 1, March 2009, ISSN 02666-853X

A sobering if not worrying read. Gripping in the usual le Carré manner with believable ‘nasties’ doing their establishment jobs, in-fighting for personal prestige, group prestige and with nowhere an ethic to be seen. Ethics are for outsiders and underdogs of course. Set this time in Hamburg, port of illegal immigration, it focuses on intrigue involving manipulation of the Islamic ‘terror’ scene to cover up the entirely up-to-date huge business of carpet-bagging, East-West (Europe of course), and contents laundering; never mind ‘class’ upper or lower, money glue sticks anywhere, nor the suffering of the little people. Without the little people there would no scabrous political causes and no-one to get in the way. Le Carré is cross and doesn’t mind showing it. Bravo to an octogenarian writer with his finger truly on the pulse, racing with a fast-moving passionate script curbed only by the background beat of bitter realism. After watching Channel 4’s “Oligarts” nothing surprises.

Posted by Maggie Goren

Wizard’s First Rule (1995)

by Terry Goodkind

The book opens with a young man called Richard Cypher, a woods guide living in the forests of Westland. One day he is walking by a ravine when he encounters a young woman under attack by four large armed men. He does the chivalrous thing and helps her fend off three of the men; the fourth is mysteriously despatched by the young woman. She reveals that her name is Kahlan Ahmnell; she crossed the boundary to find the great wizard who created the magical boundary to stop the evil Darken Rahl.

From the outset, this book looks like one of those ‘nice’ books that occasionally comes along where nobody swears and people faint rather than get killed, but you could not be more wrong. There is blood and guts aplenty and torture scenes that made even me wince in sympathy.

This is an explosive series and the first book sets the pace for the entire series. The level of detail is awesome and the locations are inspired. The author jampacks detail into just shy of eight hundred pages, not too much but enough to keep you wanting more. The crowning feature is the characters, from the stout-hearted Richard to the fierce and passionate Kahlan; from the wonderfully eccentric Zedd to the devilishly handsome and utterly despicable Darken Rahl, who is possibly the most evil character I have ever read. I wonder what is lurking in the author’s mind when he creates such characters.

Wizard’s First Rule is a benchmark in the Fantasy genre. It had me hooked from beginning to end. If there is one book you should read if you are a Fantasy fan, it should be this – Tolkien be damned, long live Goodkind!

Posted by Martin

Major Benjy, by Guy Fraser-Sampson

Troubador Publishing Limited, 2008

Review by Siobhan Chapman

E. F. Benson (1867-1940) published scores of novels and biographies but is now remembered chiefly for the six books that make up the entwined ‘Lucia’ and ‘Miss Mapp’ series, comedies of social manners set in thinly disguised versions of Broadway (Lucia’s ‘Riseholme’) and Rye (Miss Mapp’s ‘Tilling’) in the 1920s and 1930s. Such is the popularity of these novels that the E. F. Benson society offers a guided walk of Rye twice weekly during the summer months so that visitors can be sure that they see the houses ‘where Mr & Mrs Wyse lived’ and where ‘Lucia and Georgie stayed on their first visit’.

It is therefore audacious of Guy Fraser-Sampson to offer a new Tilling novel. Neither a sequel nor a prequel, it is specifically intended to fill what Fraser-Sampson describes as a ‘narrative gap’ between Miss Mapp and Mapp and Lucia. It was audacious also to declare a few days ago on the blog of Picnic Books that he will present two further novels in the series – provided that this first one sells in sufficient quantities.

Major Benjy generally succeeds in Fraser-Sampson’s self-appointed task of providing a new Mapp and Lucia book simply because six is not enough. There are flaws, or at least differences from Benson’s originals that may be judged as flaws by his fans. Fraser-Sampson is, perhaps inevitably, not quite such a master of the mot juste as his predecessor. He has a tendency to overuse certain phrases and expressions; ’she finished lamely’, for instance, occurs with unwelcome frequency.

Perhaps most strikingly, he is much more explicit in his account of the sexual undertones of Tilling society. This is hardly surprising, and perhaps not inappropriate, given the changes during the past seventy years in what can be said in print. But Benson was a master of innuendo and understatement, and his fans will find here rather more than they have been told before, and perhaps more than they will feel they need to be told, on topics such as Major Benjy’s expectations of his interactions with women of a lower social class, and the precise nature of the relationship between Irene and Lucy. Fraser-Sampson’s undoubted strengths, as they were strengths of the original series, are in mastery of character, in skill at describing a comically embarrassing social situation, and in the control of timing. A number of the plot lines in Major Benjy could have come straight out of the original Mapp and Lucia series. A prolonged contretemps involving Miss Mapp, her chief rival Diva Plaistow and the Tilling cake-making competition is a particularly fine example.

This novel will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for fans of E. F. Benson and for anyone likely to be entertained by what feels very much like an extended and elegantly written episode of The Archers set in the inter-war period, this offers a quick, light and diverting read.

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Siobhan Chapman’s most recent book is Language and Empiricism, After the Vienna Circle. Her other books include Philosophy for Linguists, Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist and Thinking about Language.

A full symphony orchestra, a chamber orchestra, organ, two conductors, three vocal soloists, a boys choir and four other major choirs came together in the massive and awesome cathedral space.  Blending the liturgy with secular texts, the work uses the Latin Mass for the dead, interwoven with nine songs for tenor and baritone, based on the war poems of Wilfred Owen.

The combination of all these factors made for an evening of unparalleled experience that no one who was there will ever forget.

In the Dies irae, the soprano’s singing of the Lacrimosa is interrupted by the tenor (on this occasion the sublime voice of Ian Bostridge) singing the words of Owen’s great poem ‘Futility’.

Futility

Move him into the sun-

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds-

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?

The traditional Mass offers ultimate hope of salvation.  Britten’s angry, tender, moving War Requiem ends quietly and inconclusively with no such complete promise but only a resolution of sorts.

Posted by Angela Macmillan

Chris Pak was born and grew up in Hong Kong and is currently completing an MA in Science Fiction Studies at the University of Liverpool. Apart from sf and music his interests include postcolonialism and environmentalism which he plans to study at PhD level later this year under an Allott Graduate Teaching Assistantship.

Solaris was written by Polish author Stanislaw Lem in 1961 and has since been regarded as a science fiction classic. It has been adapted for film twice: in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky and in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. While the Fabe & Faber edition I read for this review takes its cover art from the 2002 film it is perhaps no surprise that a reading of the book provides quite a different experience from the film; Lem himself has said that he never liked the first and was unenthusiastic about the second. Coming to the book after having watched the 2002 adaptation I was unprepared for the magnificent focus on the planet Solaris and the way in which the psychological examination the narrator, Dr. Kris Kelvin, and the motives behind the ideal of the scientific quest for knowledge are built around this foundation.

Solaris is a planet orbiting two suns, a red and a blue, whose surface is covered by a single “ocean” that has been the subject of debate in “Solarist studies” for a century. The problem is no less than the question of life and consciousness: if the sea is organic is it conscious and, if so, can it be communicated with and understood? The confrontation with Solaris forces scientists to continually re-evaluate the assumptions that inform their understanding of the universe: first that of the possibility of life on a planet orbiting two suns, for they discover the sea is indeed organic, then the conditions necessary for the development of consciousness and finally the possibility of making contact with and understanding something so utterly different.

Solaris continually defies not only understanding, but analysis. The monsters of this science fiction text are spectacular phenomenon such as the eruption of formations from the sea that, when examined, are revealed to represent in spatial terms complex mathematical equations through the flowering of their architectural structure that illustrates or directly contravenes the laws of physics. Is the ocean aware that it does this? Their efforts to explain these phenomena are continually subject to anthropomorphism, the scientific project imagined not as a march towards understanding but a slower ‘stumbling, one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us’ (178). The planet remains incomprehensible. We learn of Solaris and some of the previous expeditions through several sequences of Kelvin reading and thinking about the scientific works about it. Through this device the sheer bulk of the knowledge of Solaris is ironised by contrast with the little actual knowledge they have of it. Yet despite learning very little about Solaris itself this extended confrontation with the alien reveals to us something about our own humanity. Solaris does what the best of science fiction does well. Through encounters with the undeniably Other we get a glimpse of those characteristics that we hide from ourselves.

The book opens with Kelvin describing his departure from the ship Prometheus in a shuttle to Station Solaris. Isolated from Earth, then from the Prometheus on a journey alone in space, then in a station on an alien planet with only three other researchers the foundations for a psychological examination of our narrator and the two other scientists, Snow and Sartorius, is set. When he arrives all is not well. His mentor Gibarian is dead and he is faced with inexplicable behaviour from supposedly rational scientists. Tapping into the brooding apprehension that is the Gothic hallmark the breakdown of order and the mystery that permeates the opening of the book reads as if it were a horror story. Snow refuses to explain what has happened and Kelvin begins to question their sanity as he tries to establish the facts behind their situation at the station. The appearance of an apparition forces him to question his own sanity and what follows is an initial triumph whereby Kelvin uses scientific means in order to establish, ironically against hope, that he is indeed sane.

Station Solaris is being visited. These manifestations, dubbed ‘Phi-creatures’ by Snow, manifest as people from the unconscious memories of the scientists’ pasts. Kelvin is visited by a manifestation of Rheya, his young wife who, ten years ago, he drove to commit a desperate suicide. He cannot escape her; she is compelled to follow him and is able to return when sent off the station. Snow and Sartorius are visited by their own ghosts that cause them to isolate themselves from each other in order to deal in their own way with these reminders of what is hinted at as even more tragic pasts. Rationally Kelvin must admit that the Rheya he sees is not the Rheya he knew–is not even human–but this knowledge is under siege by the emotional force attached to his memory of her.

These manifestations are products of the ocean, for what motive no one can say. It becomes clear to the scientists that it can read their minds and create perfect human bodies and, ironically, they begin to suspect that the ocean is using these figures as tools to study them. These phi-creatures are not aware of their creation and believe themselves to be the people they look like, albeit with the memories of the mind that they were created from. It does not take long for Rheya to discover that she is not human and can have no existence independent of the planet Solaris. What follows is a heartrending sequence of denial and the struggle against her very nature. Kelvin, tormented by the memory of his dead wife, his ejection of the first manifestation of Rheya into orbit in a shuttle around Solaris and the emotional pressure of this manifestation, is plunged into an irrational apathy and becomes detached from reality.

Solaris is a book that examines the fundamentals of our existence and place in the universe. It questions the divergence between the arts and sciences by illustrating the propensity for scientific explanation to rely on an ‘anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us’ (178) while accepting that, despite the way that objective reality is filtered through the human senses and understanding, it must still bear some relation to that reality. It questions the project of the colonisation of the universe through an overarching scientific knowledge, ‘The Myth of the Mission of Mankind’, when the darkness of the individual mind has not yet been adequately examined and faced (181). Finally, it asks us to consider how far the scientific urge for contact with an alien Other is the displaced yearning, in religious or poetic terms, for a redemptive meeting with something that transcends the limits of man and could flood human understanding with a knowledge that is properly incommunicable. Ultimately, the great achievement of Solaris is the way in which, upon finishing the book, all these questions remain juxtaposed and oscillate unanswered while this state of unknowing is held open in a shift from hope, implying a looking backwards to a negation or lack, to expectation, leaving the future somewhat ironically open and expansive to the ambivalent possibilities of a universe of ‘cruel miracles’ (214).

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Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, is published by Faber and Faber.

Posted by Chris Pak

Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet is a collection of poems about the war in Iraq. It draws on his experiences there serving with the US Army in 2003 and 2004. Twenty-first century soldier-poets have a tough job. Not only do they have to contend with the legacy of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and the rest, but modern warfare is conducted on television. While the images seen by civilians may be controlled and mediated, the way war looks and sounds is familiar, at least in a general way, to most adults. In World War I poets provided a human narrative to go with the lists of dead. What can a poet add when war itself is right there in your living room?

The answer is, quite a lot. In ‘Night in Blue’, a poem about flying home, Turner says ‘I have no words to speak of war’, but if that is true then the words he finds to speak of other things say a great deal about war and about this war in particular. What strikes me reading these poems is the clarity of the description and the sense of bright, sharp light. This is a war of waiting and long-distance, of sudden violence and shattered calm. In ‘Hwy 1′ a crane is shot by one of the soldiers as it roosted on powerlines: ‘it pauses, as if amazed that death has found it / here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning’. Elsewhere, in ‘16 Iraqi Policemen’ Turner describes the aftermath of a car bomb in which ‘the dead policemen cannot be found, / here a moment before, then vanished.’

Beyond the coolness of these descriptions Turner’s sensibility is one of solidarity and shared experience. Several of the poems are from the point of view of Iraqis; several others have a semi-mystical feel to them, as in ‘Kirkuk Oilfield, 1927′:

… the dead are buried deep in the mind
of God, manifest in man and woman,
given to earth in dark blood,
given to earth in fire.

For the most part the soldiers do their jobs as sensitively and simply as they can, muddling along with the Iraqi population and living alongside them. But war is never far away. Its brutalizing effect erupts in the poem ‘Body Bags’, in which soldiers kick the feet of dead Iraqis and mock them. What is best about the collection though is its understanding of how war ties us together, how it changes forever the way we think and feel and remember:

Rockets often fall
in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues
of the brain’s myelin sheathing, over synapses
and the rough structures of thought, they fall
into the hippocampus, into the seat of memory –
where lovers and strangers and old friends
entertain themselves, unaware of the dangers
headed their way …

You can hear an interview with Turner in which he reads from Here, Bullet at the Guardian Books podcast. Here he is reading on YouTube. Another interview is here at Alice James Books. His page at Bloodaxe Books is here.

Brian Turner studied poetics at the University of Oregon before signing up to the US Army at the age of 30. He served for seven years, including tours in Bosnia-Herzegovina and finally in Iraq, where he was an Infantry Team Leader for a year from November 2003. Here, Bullet is Turner’s first collection of poetry and the first published collection to emerge from the Iraq war.

Here, Bullet was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005 and in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. Extracts are printed here by permission.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana