All posts tagged Romance

The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.’

Originally published as a magazine article in 1889, Wilde substantially rewrote this essay for inclusion in his volume of four long critical essays, Intentions (1891). In De Profundis Wilde refers to it as ‘the first and best of all my dialogues’ (Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, page 157).

The dialogue form

It is in dialogue form, harking back to the Platonic dialogues Wilde would have studied for his Classics degree, and signalling Wilde’s embryonic interest in drama – and his realisation that his ‘ideas’ were maybe less amusing than his taste for paradox, for surprising reversals of expectations, for sudden bon mots and witty phrases – all of which are easier to engineer in dialogue form. Dialogue allows:

quick fire interchange
one person to develop an idea at length until it is in danger of becoming boring, at which point – the other person interrupts with a deflating remark or a witty summary of the argument so far; this means that:
treatment of individual notions can be pages long or made in a throwaway one-liner; and
the case of the proponent can itself subjected to irony and satire by the interlocutor – Wilde can parody or ironise his own argument

His earlier essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, is a straightforward essay, no dialogue, so Wilde has to go a long distance in his own voice and strains a bit to make a consistent ‘argument’. The digressions and cul-de-sacs are there for all to see. In Lying, as soon as the dramatic lead (Vivian) tires of one line of witty sophistry, his foil (Cyril) can interrupt – not understanding, or pooh-poohing the idea, or asking for clarification, thus neatly ending one line of thought and setting up the next one.

The Argument

All Art is lying, wonderful imaginative lying.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

However, in Wilde’s time more and more artists were determined to drag the ‘real world’ into their art, making it ‘relevant’, addressing ‘issues’ and thus showing a tragic misunderstanding of what Art is and is for, and – the great crime in Wilde’s eyes – destroying their individuality – so that all the writers end up sounding like Parliamentary reports and all the artists end up creating works which are grim and depressing.

Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.

Art is a form of lying, of rejecting the banality of ‘reality’ and creating something marvellous from our imaginations. Wilde must have had notebooks packed with sentences starting ‘Art is…’:

The object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.

Taking this as his point of departure, the entire essay enjoys contradicting the popular view of the day (Wordsworth, Ruskin, Morris), that we must somehow get ‘back to Nature’, that Nature is a cure for modern industrial society. Quite the opposite:

What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition… Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity’ is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Provocation 1. The incongruous

Wilde enjoys provoking his reader, which takes at least two forms: one is the witty application of homely phraseology in an unexpected way, to create a humorously incongruous effect.

Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out…Art is…our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Thus, as he endeavours to show his friend Cyril how far lying has decayed, the protagonist Vivian makes a humorous survey of the professions, all on the witty assumption that they are and have been professed liars, so that he is in the witty position of lamenting the decay of lying in professions which most Victorians would assume to have been the bedrock of British honesty and probity:

CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue [!]…Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful…They…have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent [!]. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon [!]. One feels it as one wades through their columns…

Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy…or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination! and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.

Later, he manages to include journalists in his list of the lying professions. The same journalists who would hound him into prison and cackle around his fallen corpse.

Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader writer is not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.

Provocation 2. Anti-England

Like any man of feeling or imagination, Wilde is depressed by the small-minded, xenophobic, philistine culture of England (something which has always driven our best writers abroad, to escape our stifling conformity and seek out a wider world). An attitude given bite by the fact that he was, of course, Irish and saw himself, as so many literary men of the Modern period (1890s onwards), as an outsider.(1)

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Nonetheless, one trembles when one reads his casual insults of England and the English. For, as we know, the English were going to have their total and humiliating revenge on Wilde and to drag all his witty paradoxes down into the lowest mud.

A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious non-comformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.

The contemporary scene

Wilde gives a fascinating summary of the contemporary literary scene, of which he laments: ‘the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’

He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything’ and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself. The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.

In his way Wilde is echoing Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Romance, a conscious revolt against the Gradgrindish obsession with facts, a wish to escape, to soar on the wings of free imagination. Although Stevenson is first in line to be criticised:

Mr Robert Louis Stevenson… is tainted with this modern vice [of realism]… There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.
Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible ‘points of view’ his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
Mr George Meredith! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says.
Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective.
The horses of Mr. William Black‘s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.
Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things.
Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about ‘le beau ciel d’Italie.’ Besides, he has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying.
‘Robert Elsmere’ is of course a masterpiece – a masterpiece of the ‘genre ennuyeux,’ the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. It is only in England that such a book could be produced.
As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

Wilde prided himself of his knowledge of French culture – their poetry and painting vastly more advanced than their English counterparts. But he is equally as damning of the new French realist school:

M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!.. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. M. Zola’s characters have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.
M. Daudet is better. He has wit, a light touch, and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide… The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.
What is interesting about people in good society – and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London – is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality!

But he likes Balzac:

Balzac was a most wonderful combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples: the former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality… A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism… But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.

Art does not express the world, Good Lord no! It expresses the individuality, the genius, of the artist.

Art should be quite detached, quite useless

Where Morris the Marxist argued that Art in an ideal world would be the results of happy men expressing their creativity, especially in decorating the everyday objects of our lives, so that everything a happy fulfilled worker makes is Art – Wilde the hyper aesthete argues that all Art should be quite useless, quite irrelevant to our everyday lives and concerns: that is its point.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind…

I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over.

Life imitates Art

So far, so plausible. Wilde has moved beyond outraging the bourgeoisie to establish his main point: Art is a wonderful kind of lying which, in his age, was everywhere in danger of being hobbled by the mania for Realism. But the essay goes to another level when Wilde pushes the conceit further to say that, not only is dull and vulgar Life bad for Art, but that Life itself actually copies Art.

Paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters [the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Burne-Jones], has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of The Golden Stair, the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin’s Dream.

And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative faculty, set herself to supply the master with models.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into sweet shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers… The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is with trying to reproduce Fiction.

And, he goes on:

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.
Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

Wilde doesn’t say there is a tendency to copy art: he thinks it is an absolute rule:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life – the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it – is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

This anticipates Raymond Chandler’s 1930s comments about his hoodlums and gangsters modeling themselves on the movies, a sentiment echoed by Alistair MacLean in his thrillers of the 1960s, and of what I know of Auden and his circle modelling their posing, the way they lit and held cigarettes, on the movie stars of the 1930s. It seems to me a very persuasive argument indeed that Art gives us the models and then people enthusiastically set about copying them – except that Wilde probably wouldn’t call movies, TV and pop videos Art: but they are what provide contemporary humanity with our models for behaving and talking.

Nature imitates Art

And Wilde’s comic style, his essential humour, combines wonderfully when Vivian is goaded by Cyril to go one step further and suggest that Nature imitates Art – the precise opposite of what most of the nineteenth century has been telling itself:

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon.

The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.

But I don’t want to be too hard on Nature… That she imitates Art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man.

Art doesn’t reflect its society and times – it creates them

In the same spirit, Wilde rejects another cliché, that Art reflects the society and times it was created in. Wrong, says Wilde; the precise opposite: Art doesn’t reflect: Art creates the style and look of its times.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

The Japanese people are, in fact, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

A new world

The essay ends, with a witty call for a revival of lying at all levels of society, beginning in the nursery and extending through school and into the higher professions. In a kind of satire on the millennial, revolutionary rhetoric of this decade of revolutionaries and nihilists and anarchists, Wilde looks forward to the overthrow of the present dull world of facts and the rebirth of a wonderful world of lying and imagination:

The solid stolid British intellect may not hear the voice of fantasy now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings. And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.

The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.

Three principles

And the essay winds up with some more generalisations from Wilde’s books of sentences about Art.

1. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.

2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything… It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

3. The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.

It is a revealing moment when Wilde jokingly says that society must return to its ‘lost leader’, the skilled liar. Mostly this is paradoxical wit – but the phrase ‘lost leader’, by 1891, already referred to Charles Stewart Parnell, whose affair with a married woman split the Irish Parliamentary Party of which he was leader, and, arguably, set back the cause of Irish independence by a generation. Wilde’s oblique reference to a man hounded to his death by the British establishment because of his private life has a terrible reverberation for us who know what Wilde’s fate was to be.

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by Simon on July 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Books

Tagged 1891, Aestheticism, Anti-England, Aristotle, art, Balzac, Burne-Jones, Caesar, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Charles Stewart Parnell, Christ, Comedie Humaine, Corot, critical essay, Cyril, Daudet, Decay of Lying, dialogue, Dick Turpin, Dostoieffski, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, essay, Flaubert, George Meredith, Guy de Maupassant, Hall Caine, Hamlet, Henry James, Hokkei, Hokusai, Holbein, humour, Illusions Perdues, Intentions, Irish Parliamentary Party, Jack Sheppard, James Payn, Japanese art, L'Assommoir, Life imitates Art, Literature, Lucien de Rubempre, lying, lying professions, Marion Crawford, Monet, Mrs Oliphant, Nature, Oscar Wilde, philistine culture of England, Piccadilly, Pissaro, Pre-Raphaelites, Rastignac, Rider Haggard, Robert Elsmere, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robespierre, Romance, Rossetti, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Second Empire, the Black Arrow, The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man under Socialism, Tourgenieff, Vivian, Werther, Wilde, William Black, Zola

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2024

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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)

This is, to begin with, a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and then, as it develops, a thoroughly harrowing and upsetting, and then, at the end, some kind of redemptive and redeeming, novel. But whatever the changing subject matter and mood it overflows with old-fashioned pleasures of narrative, character and plot. It fully deserved the prizes it won and its widespread popularity. To cite the facts of its success: it was on the Times bestseller list for four years, has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than 17 languages. It also won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and I’m surprised it didn’t win more.

Overview

It’s set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War and its aftermath. The narrative follows a core handful of characters through:

the golden days of peace (1939 and 1940)
the advent of war i.e. having promised they wouldn’t Italy declares war on Greece (October 1941)
the Greco-Italian war (28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941)
the island’s lazy, peaceful, comic opera occupation by the Italian army from May 1941 to September 1943, with a token presence of the German army which mostly kept itself to itself
the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943 which placed all Italian forces in an ambiguous and confusing position, and triggered the awful massacre by the Germans of every Italian soldier on the island – a total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the resultant, 5,155 were executed, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were accidentally bombed by the Allies: the mass murder is considered a war crime second only to the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn
the period when the island was occupied solely by the German army, hugely more brutal and rapacious than the Italians (September 1943 to October 1944)
the troubled period after ‘liberation’ of the Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949) when, in de Bernières’ view, the Communist forces of ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós – the Greek People’s Liberation Army) behaved with even greater brutality to anyone they considered traitors, bourgeois or just wanted to loot and rape, than the Nazis

Having got to about page 370 and supped deep of horrors, massacres and mutilations, you’d have thought de Bernières would draw this sorry sage to a conclusion but there’s more.

Central characters

For the first hundred pages or so we are introduced to the central characters of a small village not far from the town of Argostóli, on Cephallonia, being:

Dr Iannis, a widower, small, alert, curious wise old bird, who has a gift for healing despite not actually having a medical degree
Iannis’s wife died some time ago (of tuberculosis) so he lives alone with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Pelagia, who has picked up much of her father’s medical knowledge and secretly wishes to become a doctor herself
dodging around is the 6-year-old girl Lemoni who’s always getting into pickles ‘in her capricious and erratic manner’ (p.175) from which Pelagia rescues her

The first hundred or more pages consists of a slow, relaxed and deeply pleasurable introduction to the peacetime life of a Greek town, with its annual festivals described in great detail along with its charmingly picturesque characters, including:

huge local strongman, Velisarios, whose party trick is to pick up mules
Father Arsenios, a fat, roly-poly drunken priest, always sweating like a pig and dogged by his failure to live up to his calling
Kokolios the cartoon communist
Stamatis the cartoon monarchist

This is all hugely enjoyable because it is how we Brits imagine Greek rural life to be. the narrative is peppered with the many sweet and eccentric little incidents in the village and the characters’ reactions to them. Every morning Dr Iannis goes off to the kapheneion to meet up with Kokolios and Stamatis where – being a republican, a monarchist and a communist – they have the same grumpy old arguments, very much like a Greek version of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

And behind the individual characters and chapters what comes over is the wonderfully urbane, amused, wise and droll attitude of the ‘implied author’ i.e. the authorial voice created by the text. To put it more simply, de Bernières’ voice. His treatment of his characters, his focus on the eccentric and charming, his immense good humour, radiate through every sentence and make it an immensely warming, lovely read.

A narrative of sorts gets going when, during the feast of the island’s saint, Saint Gerasimos, Velisarios does his party trick of holding an enormous heavy Venetian gun while the local kids stuff it with all the junk and rubbish they can find, then he gets someone to light the fuse and holds it while it goes off, a deed which requires staggering strength.

Anyway, on this particular occasion he fires it at the empty end of the street just as the handsome young fisherman Mandras comes round the corner. He isn’t badly injured but is taken to the house of Dr Iannis where he comes round to find the beautiful face of Pelagia looking down on him and promptly falls in love.

This Mandras proceeds to hang around the doctor’s house, continually bringing them offerings of fish for Pelagia to cook, until one day he’s fooling around in a tree and falls out, landing on an urn below and getting loads of shards of terracotta stuck in his bum, an absurdity which endears him even more to Pelagia.

On one occasion Pelagia goes down to the sea and not only sees Mandras setting out his nets to catch whitebait naked – i.e. sees what a dazzlingly lithe, fit young body he has – but is then astonished to see him whistle to three tame dolphins and allow himself to be pulled out to sea holding their fins.

Mandras’s mother is Drosoula, a strikingly ugly woman whose bad looks everyone forgets after a few moments in her company because of her warm nature. (On one occasion Drosoula tells Pelagia she only secured a husband because he had ‘unusual desires’ which she was prepared to satisfy – sodomy?).

Anyway that gives you a flavour of the charming and gently amusing first 100 pages or so.

A chapter per character

I haven’t yet mentioned the key ‘formal’ aspect of the novel, which is that each chapter represents the point of view and voice of a different character. The chapters are relatively short (5 or 6 pages) and each time you start a new one, you know it will be a new character and a new point of view.

In fact the chapters come in (at least) two flavours. First of all, there are chapters where the narrative is told by a third-person narrator but with a strong leaning towards a specific character’s point of view. The character in question is usually indicated in the first sentence if not in the very first words, making it pretty easy to understand and orient yourself:

Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse… (first words of the novel)
Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis… (p.36)
Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder… (p.127)

The second kind of chapters are those told from a first person point of view, which I’ll elaborate below.

Politicians

What this technique allows de Bernières to do with tremendous effectiveness is cut between scenes and settings: it allows him to move the story along without having to set scenes each time; he can just cut away to a new character in a new setting in a very effective, filmic kind of way. Thus although the book is quite long, and very packed with text, it feels relatively light because you can just take it one bite-sized scene at a time.

In the early parts, the most striking use of this technique is when he cuts away from the idyllic island altogether to give us entire chapters devoted to the international statesmen responsible for running affairs in the early 1940s.

Thus we get chapters taking us into the mind of the Greek leader, Ioannis Metaxas, a Greek attempt at the kind of strongman leader typified by Hitler and Mussolini. The chapter devoted to him reveals a man who is browbeaten by international events and defeated by his disreputable daughter, Lulu.

But it’s also in these chapters that we get the first use of the other type of narrative, first-person narratives. The most recurring of these first person narratives is, unexpectedly, by a hulking Italian soldier who is in fact a repressed homosexual, and who, indeed, appears in chapters titled (all the chapters have titles) ‘L’Omosessuale’. Like the third-person chapters and to make it pretty simple and clear, the protagonist of these first-person chapters tends to be introduced in the first sentence:

I, Carlo Piero Guercio, write these words with the intention that they should be found after my death… (p.22)

This touchingly sweet, gentle giant and his inexpressible homosexual yearnings turn out to be a major thread running through the whole narrative.

At the furthest extreme of this spectrum is the sole chapter in which we hear the non-stop speech of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, chapter 2 given as a Joycean monologue. It’s only seven and a half pages long but it is priceless, wonderfully conveying Il Duce’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, his vanity, his posing, combined with his madcap military schemes and would-be clever-clever ruses. He comes over as a dangerous idiot but is brilliantly conveyed and satirised. Just this one chapter could be presented as a hilarious short story or short prose text standing by itself.

Captain Antonio Corelli

So that’s a summary of all the elements of the text, namely ten or so characters on the island of Cephallonia, the Greek Prime Minister, the Italian dictator, an Italian soldier, plus a few other characters, so what happens?

What happens is the novel covers the true historical events leading up to and then during the Greco–Italian War of 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941; which was followed by the German invasion and conquest of Greece in the summer of 1941, and the occupation of Greek territories by German and Italian forces. We follow our cadre of characters through several years of occupation up till armistice made between the Italian government and the Allies in September 1943, at which point the German army was ordered to regard their erstwhile allies, the Italians, as enemies, with the result that they rounded them up and massacred them.

These are the high-level historical events which provide the backdrop to developments among the characters we’ve slowly got to know on the island of Cephallonia. So who is Captain Corelli?

Well, from a technical point of view it’s interesting that Corelli only turns up on page 157 i.e. a little over a third of the way through the text. Corelli is a handsome, charming, charismatic Italian officer who inspires love and affection in his men and finds himself billeted on Dr Iannis and Pelagia with, as they say, comic and romantic consequences. Oh and he plays the mandolin which he takes everywhere with him (and which he calls ‘Antonia’) because he is a music lover and also to charm the ladies.

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

Introduces us to humane and humorous Dr Iannis as he removes the dry pea lodged in the ear of his friend Stamatis then returns home to carry on composing his ‘New History of Cephallonia’, an ongoing project which allows de Bernières to fill in the backstory of Greek and Cephallonian history. And introduces his humorous, chiding daughter, Pelagia, 17 years old (p.19).

2. The Duce

Rome. The hilarious chapter given as the free-associating, idiotic ranting of Mussolini to secretaries and underlings and introduces his illogical reasons for declaring war on Greece – i.e. it will make Italy look strong, put him up in the same league as Hitler, the war will only last a few weeks etc.

3. The Strongman

Introduces us, first, to Alekos, a goatherd who lives high up on Mount Aenos and who will, from time to time, cast a cold, detached, uninvolved eye on events down n the plains. But the chapter is titled after Megalo Velisarios, the famous strongman. We also meet the cheeky little girl, Lemoni, who’s constantly getting into mischief. And fat waddling Father Arsenios who waddles into the square as Velisarios is entertaining the crowds and who Velisarios picks up and places on a wall to great cheers and Arsenios’s mortification. Velisarios fires the ancient (1739) Turkish culverin and accidentally hits Mandras the fisherman coming round the corner (the wound is caused by an old donkey nail). So Velisarios carries the wounded boy to Dr Iannis’s house where he first meets Pelagia.

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

First person account by the Italian Carlo Piero Guercio, a sensitive man tortured by his homosexuality:

I am exploding with the fire of love and there is no one to accept it or nourish it. (p.23)

He joins the Italian Army to be among men and escape conventional expectations. In a novel full of good things this sensitive portrayal of a vexed homosexual is one of the best.

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

Third person account of authoritarian Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas (1871 to 1941) in which he surveys the course of political events which brought him to power, his motivation for enforcing an authoritarian form of rule, to befriend Hitler and Mussolini and his dawning realisation that they are about to betray him and invade his country (‘Why had his international brothers betrayed him?’ p.29). Interspersed with rueful regrets about his wayward daughter, Lulu. All building up to his decision to say NO to Mussolini’s bullying ultimatum.

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

Guercio describes being a member of the Italian Julia Division sent to fight in Albania.

No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. (p.31)

The joy of being among young, beautiful, virile comrades. Unfortunately, he learns from bitter experience that the Italian chain of command is an inept joke, led by the idiot Mussolini, with the result that there isn’t enough support, organisation, arms, equipment or winter uniforms. He falls in love with a young married corporal from Genoa named Francesco (p.34) but becomes disgusted by the squalid lies and deceptions imposed on the Army and the public to justify Italy’s invasion of Albania.

The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom April 7 to 12, 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighbouring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown. (Wikipedia)

7. Extreme Remedies

Father Arsenios is at the back of the church and feeling sorry for himself for being a fat, useless, vice-ridden priests when he realises villagers are coming to leave gifts in the main body of the church, to apologise for the indignity he suffered when the strongman, Velarios, picked him up and place him atop a wall to general laughter. There follows a comic scene where Arsenios, dying for a pee, can’t bring himself to exit through the church and be seen by everybody (there is no toilet in the church) so he employs the desperate remedy of drinking one of the bottles of wine brought for him so as to have a receptacle to pee in. He does this several times with the result that he is completely plasters and lying in a pool of his own piss by the time that Velisarios comes to apologise in person.

Velisarios carries the unconscious priest to the house of Dr Iannis who forces him to drink vast amounts of water. Then Iannis is visited by Stamatis, whose ear he unblocked and now comes comically complaining that for the first time in decades he can hear his wife’s endless nagging and asks if the doctor can put the pea back in his ear.

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

Dr Iannis departs for the kapheneion to meet his friends Stamatis and Kokolios the communist for their daily argument. But the little girl Lemoni begs him to come and see the funny kind of cat she’s found deep in a labyrinth of brambles. Undignifiedly crawling on his hands and knees the doctor discovers it is a pine marten caught on wire and carefully detaches it.

Dr Iannis takes it back to his house to treat where, incidentally, Mandras is still laid up with his ‘wound’ and still flirting like mad with Pelagia, who he has just kissed. Iannis contemplates simply snapping the marten’s neck but then is overcome by humane sympathy and instructs his daughter to being straw and dead mice. He’s going to nurse it back to health.

9. August 15, 1940

Dr Iannis returns to the kapheneion encountering Lemoni on the way who is taunting a dog with a stick. She tells him she has decided to call ‘the strange kind of cat’ Psipsina (apparently this is a common Greek word meaning something like ‘puss’, p.374). Back drinking coffee with his mates a good hearty political argument swiftly ensures, with the communist Kokolios telling everyone they’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes etc. In casual conversation Iannis delivers what might be the central message of the entire novel:

‘We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.’ (p.52)

As usual, the menfolk gather round an old radio set to listen to the BBC news and learn the latest (Churchill has allied with the free French, there’s been another Albanian revolt against Italian occupation).

Pelagia runs in to inform him that Mandras was fooling about in the olive tree in their yard and fell out of it and landed on his bottom on a terracotta pot. His buttocks are packed with shards and bleeding. Iannis has to rush home and spend hours with Mandras lying with his pants down on the kitchen table, while he carefully extracts every fragment (later commenting that Mandras has: ‘the arse of a classical statue, a very fine arse,’ p.69).

When Iannis returns to the kapheneion for the third time it is to find an extraordinary change in atmosphere. Martial music is playing on the radio, both his friends are weeping and the priest is striding up and down declaiming from the Old Testament. They’ve just heard that the Italians have sunk a Greek battleship, the Elli while it was anchored in the harbour at Tinos, participating in the celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (sinking of the cruiser Elli). Everyone in the café knows this has brought the possibility of war closer.

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

Guercio and Francesco are chosen for a mission by their officer Colonel Rivolta (p.58). They are to dress in Greek uniform and make an attack on an outpost of what they are told are Greeks masquerading as Italians. When they dress up and sneak up to this border post they realise a) the guns they’ve been given don’t work and b) the Italians really are Italians and c) there are many more of them than they were told and they are expecting them. In other words they’ve been conned into doing one of those ‘border incidents’ which cynical leaders throughout the twentieth century used to justify wars.

In the event they arrive early (at midnight not 2am) discover a big drum of kerosene under the tower and set it alight, causing panic in the tower at which point they open fire with a machine gun massacring the men in the tower. It’s only when one of them falls out of the tower and they recognise him as a fellow Italian that the full depth of the deception dawns on them.

11. Pelagia and Mandras

These two beautiful young people fall in love. The chapter contains a slight formal innovation which is that it contains alternating sections describing first Pelagia and then Mandras’s points of view as they: have a poo in the outhouse and worry about menstruating (Pelagia); load nets onto a boat (Mandras); draw water from a well (Pelagia); sings to his tame dolphins (Mandras). Mandras is given a little speech typifying the motivation of so many men to go to war, to prove themselves a man etc.

I know I will never be a man until I’ve done something important, something great, something I can live with, something to be esteemed. That’s why I hope there’s going to be a war. I don’t want bloodshed and glory, I want something to get to grips with. No man is a man until he’s been a soldier. (p.68)

It’s also tied up with marriage. He envisions going down on one knee and proposing to Pelagia. Pelagia thinks adoringly of the way Mandras now arrives every late afternoon with a gift of fish which she cooks and he sits at the table being polite to her father and rubbing her shin with his foot.

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

An extended and wonderful description of the feast of the local saint, St Gerasimos, with stories of his wonderful miracles. the chapter focuses in on inmates from the local lunatic asylum who have been brought to join the crowds watching the procession of the saint’s mummified body, notably Socrates and Mina. Mandras gets drunk and proposes to Pelagia (p.80) before drinking more and passing out. The day continues on into the evening which is a time of wild partying, music and celebration.

13. Delirium

Mandras doesn’t come for two days and Pelagia is reduced to agonies of worry. Lots of stuff about what traditional marriage meant for a Greek woman back then i.e. consigned to a life of endless labour and childbearing but arguably better than the fates of spinsters and widows.

This is why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. (p.86)

As in the description of the delusions of the madwoman Mina, so throughout his characterisation of Pelagia, de Bernières displays a supernatural level of insight and understanding. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not only deeply pleasurable to read but deeply instructive, too.

On a typically warm and beautiful evening the doctor and his daughter sit outside looking at the stars, thinking about the future. She is fantasising about married life with Mandras until her father gives her a small pistol, warning that war is coming and in war bad things happen to women i.e. rape. She will use this gun only once, and with deep irony, in chapter 63.

The next day is the day when Pelagia goes down to the seashore and stumbles across Mandras, naked, setting his nets then going frolicking with his tame dolphins and is dazzled by the perfection of his young body (p.89).

14. Grazzi

Despite the picture postcard charm of all these village scenes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a historical novel and contains descriptions of, and even soliloquies by, real historical figures. After the chapters devoted to Mussolini and Metaxas we have this one, told in the first-person by Emanuele Grazzi, Italian ambassador to Greece during World War II, who was given the shameful job of delivering Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas on 28 October 1940. Grazzi’s account gives a vivid sense of the incompetence, bad faith and lies of the Italian government which told neither its Army Chief of Staff nor ambassador that they were about to go to war with Greece, operating on Mussolini’s idea of taking everyone by surprise – which just ended up covering everyone in shameful dishonour.

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

Guercio and Francesco keep quiet about the farce they were involved in and are sent to train Albanian guerrillas who they discover to be unreliable lying thieving murderers (p.98). Guercio then goes on to give a vivid description of the chaos and mismanagement of the Italian invasion from Albania into northern Greece, the lack of ammunition, transport, air cover, the right equipment or uniforms for the freezing mountain tops, pages 99 to 104.

Incidentally, in among the memoirs he describes himself as he currently is i.e. sunning himself on the peaceful island of Caphallonia and, on page 100, makes the first reference n the novel to Captain Corelli:

a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

Italy and Greece are now at war. These are detailed, worried missives from Pelagia, increasingly begging for some kind of response. What she doesn’t know is that Mandras can’t write (p.130). She describes the inhabitants of their village rallying round to support the war effort and how everyone thinks Metaxas is a hero for standing up to the bully Duce. She describes an outbreak of fortune telling because Mandra isn’t the only son who’s been conscripted and sent to the front – hundreds of families have sent their main earners and supports to the war. She describes the beating up of some unfortunate Italians who live among them:

Why are people such animals? (p.107)

Because dear 17-year-old Pelagia, people are in fact animals, just another species of animals among the 1.2 million species so far identified by scientists. Everything your teachers and priests and leaders told you about humans not being part of the natural world, about our special soul given us by a loving God, was lies which left you completely unprepared for the world as it is and human beings as they are, and so asking such soppy, pointless questions.

Food is becoming short so Christmas Day 1940 wasn’t its usual festive celebration. On Christmas Day the Italians bombed Corfu, the bastards. de Bernières only gives us a selection three (fairly long) letters but the last one states that she has written one hundred letters to Mandras and is becoming frustrated and disillusioned at his lack of reply.

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

Continuation of Guercio’s account of the Greco-Italian War, piling detail on detail of Italy’s mind-boggling incompetence and the bravery, ferocity and effectiveness of the Greek counter-attack which drives the Italians right back to their starting points and then further back.

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

Pelagia sinks into a deep depression from which the doctor seeks to rescue her by various ruses like rearranging utensils or stealing stuff from the kitchen, anything to provoke anger and get her out of her mood. War is producing a shortage of medical supplies. He soldiers on with his history of Cephallonia, describing the brutality of the Balkans, crossroads between East and West, and the indolent pederasty of Turkish rulers.

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

Another little formal experiment or piece of playfulness. De Bernières gives a description of Francesco’s miserable death (half his face blown off by a mortar) in the form of an interview Guercio has with his beloved’s mother whereby Guercio tells her heroic patriotic lies, and each of his lies is offset by a long passage in parentheses describing what really happened, in those freezing, lice-infected trenches.

It ends by explaining how the Italians had, to all intents and purposes, lost to the Greeks when the Germans intervened, invading from Bulgaria in the East and opening up a second front which the Greeks couldn’t defend, especially since the Germans sent in 1,100 Panzer tanks against the Greeks 200 light tanks (many taken from the useless Italians).

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

One day Pelagia returns from the well to discover a wreck of man, covered in hair and beard, dressed in animal skins with red eyes and sunburned skin, infested with lice, sitting at her table. She is terrified and it takes several pages of scared enquiry before she eventually realises it’s Mandras back from the front in terrible state, having dodged the Germans and walked hundreds of miles.

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

Shrewdly, Pelagia co-opts Mandras’s mother, Drosoula, herself one of the million Greeks who were ethnically cleansed i.e. deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey after the First Word War. Together they strip and set about healing this broken skinny wreck of a man. Long gone is his god-like arse. De Bernières gives a vivid and extensive catalogue of Mandras’s appalling symptoms (worms, parasites, ticks, fleas, ezcema, gangrene) and shows Pelagia treating them all efficiently. Drosoula is impressed.

‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ (p.138)

Dr Iannis had been up in the mountains checking Alekos and his herd of goats (who are always in perfect health). Now, upon his return, he is astonished to discover a huge ugly woman sleeping with Pelagia in his bed, and an emaciated malnourished man sleeping in Pelagia’s. When he listens to the detail of her treatment he is extravagantly proud of his daughter.

22. Mandras behind the Veil

A monologue from Mandras who resents how he is ignored in the Iannis house and realises Pelagia is horrified by him. This is a bitter pill since it was only a hallucinatory determination to get back to Cephallonia and see her again which kept him going after his entire unit was wiped out and he set off on the huge treks through ice and snow and mountains and forests and seas to reach her.

His account includes the magnificently mad episode of him coming across a stone hovel and lying down to sleep, only to be woken by an incredibly ugly old crone with only one eye. She feeds him and he starts to recover a bit but on the third night has a sex dream in which he imagines he’s sleeping with Pelagia but wakes up to discover it is the withered old hag writhing under him.

‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. (p.144)

I thought this was inspired in its mocking lunacy, and captured the insanity of the war, and of human existence, in one magnificently grotesque image.

I laid back down next to her and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

Exactly. If there is a God and he claims to love the human race, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Mandras tells us that the disillusionment of his reception by Pelagia has been absolute. Now he just wants to return to the front to fight.

23. April 30, 1941

On 6 April 1941, the German Army, supported by Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler launched the assault in order to overthrow the recently established pro-Allied government in Yugoslavia and to support the stalling Italian invasion of Greece. By 30 April the Germans had taken Athens and the Greek king and government had fled to Crete.

There is a hiatus on the island as people wait to see what will happen. They prepare for death or rape. The priest curses God for letting this happen. The doctor starts reading up in his ancient medical textbook, ‘The Complete and Concise Home Doctor’, about wounds.

Mandras is mentally disturbed. Back staying with his mother, he withdraws into himself, except for sudden moments of lucid normality, such as when he joins the celebrations on National Day, 31 March, and Easter on 19 April. Other times he rants and raves. he tells the priest his legs are made of glass. He tries to amputate on with a spoon. He shouts at Pelagia. In one scene he makes her read every one of the 100 plus letters she sent him, humiliating her by pointing out how they got slowly shorter and shorter until in the final ones she asked him to call off the betrothal. Pelagia realises with anguish that she now hates Mandras.

At that moment the Italian invasion starts. Planes fly overhead and landing craft beach and disembark thousands of Italian troops. The islanders are surprised at how diffident and polite they are. At the head of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery of the Acqui Division marches Captain Antonio Corelli, the first time we’ve seen him, so to speak, page 157. He confirms everyone’s stereotypes of Italian men by spotting Pelagia and instructing his men to turn eyes right in order to appreciate the ‘bella bambina’. One soldier does a goose-stepping impersonation of Hitler. Another walks like Charlie Chaplin. Dr Iannis tells Pelagia not to laugh, they are the enemy.

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

Back to the first person narrative of Carlo Piero Guercio who, for some reason, has stopped being referred to as l’omosesualle. He explains how he was posted to the 33rd regiment in May and how Corelli became a kind of saint to him (p.159). Origin of La Scala club, a group of Italian soldiers who all went to the latrine together and covered up their lavatorial sounds by singing opera (p.160). He receives typically whimsical instructions from the head of La Scala, Corelli, for example rule 4 is that all aficionados of Wagner to be shot out of hand.

He tells the story of the ungracious surrender, namely that the Italian CO and officers marched to the Cephallonia town hall and sent in messages demanding a surrender to which the reply was ‘fuck off’. The Greek authorities said they had defeated the Italian army and refused to surrender except to a German officer so one had to be flown in specially from Corfu.

25. Resistance

The islanders’ response to occupation e.g. graffiti, insubordination and jokes (‘Why do Italians wear moustaches? To be reminded of their mothers.’) A quartermaster arrives to tell Iannis and Pelagia an officer is going to be billeted on them. Iannis gruffly agrees so long as the quartermaster can get him medical supplies. The officer turns out to be Corelli who is driven up by Bombardier Guercio. He is charming and humorous from the start but it is a joy to watch him being steadily put in his place by the doctor and Pelagia who confuse and embarrass him, humiliation doubled when the doctor diagnoses him as having hemorrhoids and then assigns him Pelagia’s bedroom (Pelagia will sleep on the kitchen floor) which destroys Corelli’s sense of himself as a gallant gentleman.

Corelli shyly reveals to them that he plays the mandolin. He joined the army when there was no war and it was a way to get paid for lazing around. That night there’s a scream and he comes running from the bedroom because the pine marten routinely sleeps on Pelagia’s bed and bit him.

26. Sharp Edges

The truck Guercio’s driving to collect Corelli breaks down. Walking, Guercio encounters Velisario, two hulking giants of men who cannot communicate but offer each other cigarettes, nod before going their ways. Velisario comes across the broken down truck, gets a friend, steals the wheels and pours petrol in the radiator.

Corelli is his usual charming self and chats merrily with the little girl Lemoni. When Pelagia breaks them up he asks why and it’s Pelagia’s turn to feel unworthy. These little domestic events and their psychological consequences are so wonderfully done, so real and vivid.

Mandras surprises her by appearing silently. Their every meeting is awkward now. He makes a joke which offends her. She gives him the waistcoat she sewed for him but his first comment is that the pattern is asymmetrical (p.177).

Mandras announces he is leaving now to return to the fight. The army is over but there are partisans in the mountains. Pelagia tells him that every time he is about to do something bad, he is to stop, think of her, and not do it. They hug like brother and sister. Their love is over. Then he walks away.

That evening Corelli finds the hand-made waistcoat on the back of a chair, marvels at its craftsmanship and says he will pay Pelagia anything for it but she insists it’s not for sale.

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

Next morning Corelli wakens Pelagia by practicing his mandolin in his/her bedroom. She had been dreaming about the afternoon before when Corelli had arrived on a horse and managed to make it caracole. Corelli explains the structure of a mandolin, how to play it and why he switched to it from the violin which he was useless at. His playing enchants her (p.186). That evening Corelli agrees to perform for the doctor but irritates him by merely tapping the instrument till Iannis loses his temper and makes an outburst. Offended, Corelli explains that he’s playing Hummel’s concerto for mandolin and was tapping out the first 45 bars before the mandolin enters. And now he’s made him lose his place!

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

Describes Mandras’s career as an andarte i.e. partisan. By chance he falls in with the ELAS, the communist group. The resistance is being led by British officers parachuted in to organise and direct assaults, in this case a Brigadier Myers (p.190) who warns his superiors that a lot of their arms are going to communists and storing up trouble for the future (i.e. the post-war civil war).

Anyway, by chance Mandras falls in with a troop of ELAS led by pitiless martinet Hector, wearing his trademark red fez. He is broken in by being led to a village where they drag out a harmless old man, make him kneel then brutally beat his back with a knout before shooting him in the head. His crime? Not reporting a British parachute drop of supplies to ELAS, pilfering a bottle of scotch from it and being found unconscious under the parachute.

Hector makes it quite clear they are going to liberate the people by killing a lot of traitors, royalists, bourgeoisie, lackeys, saboteurs and so on. He is fluent in the death speak of Stalinism. It becomes just as clear that de Bernières loathes and despises the communists.

29. Etiquette

Joke chapter in which Corelli, embarrassed by his inability to communicate with the locals asks for basic phrases from the doctor who waggishly tells him phrases to formally greet all the Greeks he meets which, in reality, mean ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’ (p.196).

30. The Good Nazi (1)

Historical background to the two towns of Argostoli and Lixouri, with explanation that the Italians garrisoned the former and the Germans the latter. Hitler didn’t trust the Italians an inch and sent to Cephallonia 3,000 Germans of the 996th Regiment under Colonel Barge, who were to carry out one of the war’s worst crimes.

One of these is young Leutnant Günter Weber, humourless, obedient, only free when he takes his uniform off at the beach. He is there when the Italians roll up in lorries along with a load of whores shipped there from Libya and much preferring relaxed Greece. They merrily strip off and splash about in the sea to the horror of conservative peasants. Weber is 22, a virgin and has never seen a naked woman before.

Correli introduces himself and when he asks whether Weber is any relation to the German Romantic composer Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the son of a pastor in the Tyrol and knows nothing about culture. In the event, they get him drunk, the whores flirt with him, they throw him in the sea, and manage to break down his prim reserves. He becomes an honorary member of the La Scala club.

31. A Problem with Eyes

Two months go by and Pelagia does everything she can to discomfit the captain, almost always spilling food on his uniform when she serves it. She prepares a great speech of outrage at being occupied but somehow never finds the moment to deliver it. He leaves his pistol lying around and then catches her red-handed dunking it in a bowl of water to as to render it inoperative.

Infuriated by his unflappable good humour and manners Pelagia slaps him then throws unripe olives from the tree at him. More months go by and he becomes a fixture. She finds herself looking forward to his morning greeting and then becoming a little concerned if he’s later than usual coming back from the barracks.

He spends his time doing vast amounts of paperwork, or writing music and plucking the mandolin and sometimes watching her crochet. They begin to realise they’re looking at each other and eventually having a childish staring competition which Corelli wins with much laughter. Dr Iannis realises his daughter is falling in love with the enemy occupier.

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

These chapters are about the cruel and heartless communist Hector and his indoctrination of the uneducated lost soul, Mandras. Mandras learns to intimidate the peasants to steal from them, which is fine because Hector dismisses them all as Royalists, petit-bourgeois sympathisers, republicans etc.

33. A Problem with Hands

One dark night the doctor, Pelagia and Corelli are all in the living room, the latter composing music on sheet music paper. Pelagia walks over to look and places her hand on his shoulder as if it’s the most natural thing in the world until she realises what she’s doing and is then crippled by self consciousness. Luckily at that moment Psipsina scratches at the door and Pelagia lets her in from the storm outside and the marten promptly sits on Corelli’s lap make it water-soaked. Pelagia laughs and scoops the marten off his lap then starts to wipe it down, but when Corelli looks into her face she realises the sexual overtones of what she’s doing and straightens up with scorn.

This sets him fantasising, for some reason remembering that Vivaldi taught at a convent full of young women and suddenly Corelli is imagining loads of nubile girls pressing up against him and kissing and caressing him. He now has a prominent erection sticking up through his trousers and when Pelagia calls him to help her with her wind her wool he can’t stand up without revealing it so he makes a big performance of pretending to be a dog and going across to her on all fours which, of course, makes her smile, and they flirt and banter some more. The doctor sighs.

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

Hector is summoned to the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers to be given a bollocking. Nobody had warned Myers that he would be spending 90% of his time trying to stop the Greeks being at one another’s throats (p.217). He finds Hector double dealing, dishonest and barbarous, meaning given to torturing and killing any peasants who don’t give him what he wants. Myers gives details of how Hector and his group torture peasants, gouge out their eyes and slit their throats. He knows Hector and his like don’t pay the peasants with the money the British give them a) because they’re greedy b) because they’re storing it up to fund the coming revolution.

Mind you, de Bernières is happy to take the mickey out of the Brits, who are routinely portrayed as upper class twits: ‘Top hole explosion, Absolutely ripping!’ Bertie Wooster meets the Greek communist partisans.

35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’

A satirical pamphlet which takes eight pages to rip the piss out of the intellectual pygmy, liar, coward and rapist, Mussolini. At the very end of the book we learn that it was written by Carlo and Dr Iannis (p.424).

36. Education

Back with Hector and the partisans, showing that most of his group are thoroughly disillusioned: all they do is loot peasants and avoid any attacks on Germans, leaving everyone else to fight the war. This chapter is another exercise in style because it consists of a brilliant pastiche of a speech by a communist saturated with the self-serving rhetoric and justification for every kind of iniquity characteristic of communist ideology. Compare and contrast the revolting cowardly criminal communists described in Evelyn Waugh’s war novel Unconditional Surrender.

37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

Carlo and the doctor come across Corelli reading the pamphlet quoted in chapter 35, leaping up and hurriedly tearing it in two. But this leads into debate about who wrote it, whether it was an Italian or a Greek and Pelagia, clever woman that she is, begins to speculate out loud that it might have been written by a Greek who was fluent in Italian, had access to BBC broadcasts, and someone who cold distribute it around the island when…she notices her father and Carlo both shuffling in embarrassment and concern. My God – it’s them! And her burbling nearly gave it away to Corelli. She goes inside to prepare dinner.

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

It’s the morning after Corelli returned to the house disgustingly drunk, declared his love for her, fell over and was sick. Now he has a crushing hangover and is crushed with embarrassment at his behaviour while Pelagia pours him cold water and berates him. His excuse is his battery’s football team won last night, but she says Weber has been by to explain that the Italians cheated.

While she stands there berating him, into Corelli’s head comes the theme and rhythm for a march which he will compose on the mandolin and write down, hence ‘Pelagia’s March’.

39. Arsenios

The war is the making of Father Arsenios. He quits his parish and takes to walking the length and breadth of the island preaching against the invader and iniquity and the fast-coming arrival of God’s wrath. He is cared for by nuns and monks at monasteries where he stops and by the peasants who feed the itinerant monk and the Italian soldiers enjoy his regular visits and obvious sincerity even though none of them can understand a word. For two years he tramps the length and breadth of the island, burning off his obese bulk, becoming thin and wiry and brown as teak.

40. A Problem with Lips

Short chapter in which Pelagia is passing out of the house as Corelli comes in and she finds herself absent-mindedly kissing him on the cheek. it’s only a few paces later that she realises what she’s done and then tries to furiously back peddle, claiming she though Corelli was her father, a mistake Corelli mocks by saying yes, they are both old and small. Then he throws himself on his knees and makes a comic opera declaration of love, before kissing her on the forehead and running off before she can slap him.

41. Snails

The three adults, Iannis, Pelagia and Corelli, go snail hunting led to a particularly rich briar patch by the ever-inquisitive girl Lemoni. Here Pelagia manages to scratch herself on a bramble then get her hair caught and Corelli can only unravel it by leaning in very close. He takes advantage to kiss her cheek. Suddenly Pelagia bursts into tears. When he asks why she says she can’t take it any more, any of it. He agrees and suddenly they are locked in their first embrace of long passionate kisses.

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

For the first time we go inside the mind of Corelli in a first-person chapter devoted to his thoughts which are, predictably enough, all fantasies about Pelagia, some sexual about her breasts and so on, but mostly lovely scenarios or fantasy scenes or thinking of her actions in terms of musical chords, different moods reflected by different chords, which build together to make Pelagia’s March which he is writing.

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

The adults are in the fiddly process of preparing the snails for cooking when the never-mischievous Lemoni comes to the house to announce that she has discovered a big rusty ball on the beach. Carlo and Corelli both realise from her description that it’s a mine, the floating kind used for attacking ships, which has washed ashore.

This longish chapter describes their attempts to clear the villagers out of the way and blow it up safely. In this Corelli is hampered by an officious engineer who tells him all his preparations are inadequate. Corelli gets Stamatis and Kokolios to dig a trench in the sand just 50 metres away and the engineer mocks this. In the event the entire town turns out to watch, shooed away to the safety of the clifftops, while Corelli’s bombardiers have rigged up a small explosive charge underneath the mine and wires leading to a detonator in his little trench.

When he detonates it, sure enough, it goes off with a much vaster explosion than anyone had expected, sending a vast amount of sand mixed with shards of red hot metal flying high into the sky and then raining down on the locals lying flat along the clifftop. This is actually really dangerous and the busy little engineer is decapitated by a red hot piece of shrapnel while other locals are more or less badly burned by the rain of hot metal stinging like hornets (p.260).

Concerned for Corelli, Pelagia leads the charge down to the beach but it’s Carlo who finds Corelli’s trench obliterated and takes a moment before he sees the captain, who was seized in the blast, thrown into the air, dumped back down and covered with sand. He’s mostly alright but is deaf for two days afterwards and suffers periodic tinnitus for the rest of his life. The doctor is infuriated when a small army of people covered in sand with black eyes and cuts all over, presents itself at his house.

Corelli is nearly put on a charge by the Italian Commanding Officer, General Gandin, of whom more below. But he is bedbound at Iannis’s for days and revels in the attention he gets from Pelagia, Carlo and even Lemoni. Even friend Weber brings his wind-up gramophone round and tries to teach him German popular songs.

But he’s even more infuriated to discover that his house is completely infested with snails, these being the hundreds of snails Corelli and Pelagia and Lemoni brought back from their snail hunt which have escaped from their buckets and had all day to ooze themselves into every nook of the house. Charming comedy.

44. Theft

Kokolios discovers two Italian soldiers trying to steal his chickens. This bear of a man grabs them, beats and kicks them and drags them along to Dr Iannis’s house where he wakes up the household and presents them to Captain Corelli for discipline. Corelli goes inside and returns with his pistol and for a horrible moment Pelagia thinks he is going to shoot Kokolios. Instead he points it at the soldiers and, to their amazement, tells them to get down on their hands and knees and lick Kokolios’s boots. Which they do, after he’s threatened and kicked and pistol-whipped them.

At which point Kokolios realises he is stark naked (apart from his boots), suddenly covers his privates, and goes running off. Comedy. Two days later Pelagia’s beloved goat, who she has been feeding and grooming, her consolation in many an emotional drama, has gone missing. She is furious with Corelli, blaming his soldiers and he can only hang his head.

45. A Time of Innocence

Corelli and Pelagia become lovers in the old-fashioned sense, they ‘walk out’ together, kiss and cuddle but have nothing like sex. There is no contraception and Pelagia has seen too many girls her age either shamed by single motherhood or dying after botched abortions.

Weber gifts the captain an old Wehrmacht motorcycle which had broken down, in exchange for Italian rations. Corelli turns up on it and amazes Pelagia. They proceed to have mad adventures biking all round the island, specially when he takes corners too fast and ends up wildly going down side tracks, or when she leans the wrong way on corners.

This allows them to motor to places where Pelagia won’t be seen or recognised (death in such a conservative culture) and then they find a disused shepherd’s hit which becomes a safe place for them to lie and canoodle for hours (p.269).

All their talk is fantasies about what wonderful lives they’ll lead ‘after the war’.

46. Bunnios

Up on Mount Aenos the isolated goatherd Alekos hears a plane booming overhead and then watches a white circle fall from the sky. In his simplicity he thinks it is an angel but it is, of course, a British officer being parachuted in. This officer whacks his head on a rock and required a) untangling from his parachute and then b) days of careful feeding and care.

This is one of the comedy posh Brits who crop up throughout the story. ‘What ho’ is his only remark before passing out. When, after a few days, he tries to talk to Alekos the latter doesn’t understand a word and we are only later told that this is because this typical product of a British public school is speaking ancient Greek (p.275). De Bernières very amusingly conveys the impression this has on his Greek listeners by translating it into Chaucerian English:

‘Sire, of your gentilesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certayn thyng.’ (p.2174)

The angel has a mechanical box which he turns on and emits squeaks and squawls though he hears words like ‘Roger’ and ‘Wilco’ and so on. It is a radio.

After some thought, Aleko decides to take the angel to see Dr Iannis. This takes four days of travelling down the mountain by night and hiding from patrols during the day. At Iannis’s the angel reveals his identity as Lieutenant Bunny Warren, seconded to the Special Operations Executive from the Kings Dragoon Guards (p.276).

After discussion, they get him a native outfit and he makes his way off into town where he ends up by sheer chutzpah staying in a local house which already has four Italian officers billeted on it. He confounds them by trying to communicate in Eton Latin. Bunny takes to trekking all over the island, regularly going to the isolated shack where he’s hidden his radio and reporting back to Cairo details of all enemy troop movements.

In his journeys he comes across Father Arsenios and takes to walking with him, passing as another religious lunatic. One more oddity in a book full of eccentrics.

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

We find the doctor once again writing a section of his history. He’s gone back to the ancient Romans’ occupation of Cephallonia. More importantly he can’t get his pipe to draw any more because of the vile apology for tobacco which is all you can get in wartime. He reflects that his history is more or a personal lament than an objective factual account. I’m sympathetic to the notion that History writing is actually impossible. We can never fully know the past for the blindingly obvious reason that none of us even understands the present. Like newspaper columnists all we can do is play with stereotypes and clichés, slightly more advanced stereotypes and clichés it’s true, but simplifications nonetheless. Because the true history of any event is beyond our abilities to fully understand. We always shape and interpret everything to suit our own purposes. History is no exception, the reverse: it’s distortion and simplification writ large.

Anyway, next time Pelagia comes in he asks her to sit down and have a heart to heart. He says he realises she and Corelli are in love. She blushes scarlet. He proceeds to calmly make the case against their love: 1) The captain is a foreigner and an enemy. If people discover she’s having an affair with the handsome enemy she will be universally decried as a traitor, spat at, stoned in the street. Her social life will end. 2) If she thinks of leaving for Italy she will leave behind forever everything which matters to her. 3) Infatuated love is transient, 6 months a year. After that it settles down to be hard work and you either discover you are two trees whose roots have entwined (like Dr Iannis and his wife did) or discover that you are separate beings. He is worried this is what Pelagia will discover when the dust settles. 4) She is still officially affianced to Mandras and nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. 5) Sex deferred becomes more and more obsessed over, but lust can only really function within marriage, otherwise the risks are enormous of pregnancy, complete social death, the man abandoning her, or dying from an abortion. 6) If she did have a child and become a single mum no man would marry her and she would end up like most in that situation, becoming a prostitute. 7) Sexually transmitted infections for which there were, in 1943, no cures.

48. La Scala

Weber brings evidence of crooked Italian scams to Corelli. Carlo is there and the doctor. It turns into a debate about morality and ‘science’, giving Weber the opportunity to expound at length the Nazi idea of the New Morality, Strength Through Joy, the fascist perversion of Darwinian evolution.

Although this then morphs into Weber bringing in his wind-up gramophone and playing Lili Marlene on it, which Corelli plays along to, the sound wafting out into the warm Greek night and enchanting listeners. (Compare with the descriptions of hearing Lili Marlene over the radio in Fitzroy Maclean’s war memoir Eastern Approaches.)

Pelagia expresses such joy at the machine that Weber promises he’ll leave it with her when he finally leaves and she calls him a sweet boy and kisses him on the cheek which makes him blush. She must be 19 or so by now and he, maybe 24. They’re all kids.

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

Dr Iannis and Corelli are sitting quietly chatting while Corelli restrings his mandolin. Iannis gives Corelli the male equivalent of the talking to he gave to Pelagia a few days earlier. He is nettled when Corelli gives a blithe picture of their future together and says he loves Pelagia, as if that will solve all problems. Iannis tries to explain why he thinks Italians and Greeks are profoundly different, with a view to explaining why Pelagia can never leave the island and go with Corelli back to Italy. She would die of homesickness (p.291).

50. A Time of Hiatus

The Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. According to the very opinionated narrator this amounted to a betrayal of the Greeks, their most loyal allies and, fatefully, allowed the Greek communists a year to arm and prepare for their takeover i.e. the civil war, although in some places the people rebelled against the 25% tax they imposed everywhere.

The Italians on Cephallonia follow the progress of the Allies up Italy and talk aloud about armistice or surrender. The Germans in their small garrison fume at their perceived betrayal. Father Arsenios passes by with tattered dirty Bunny. Corelli tells Pelagia his boys think they should disarm the German garrison while it’s still small.

51. Paralysis

This chapter opens with another experiment in form for de Bernières has developments in Italy narrated as if in the style of Homer. De Bernières gives a day by day timeline of the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943 and the secret negotiations of his replacement, Marshal Badoglio, with the Allies. The La Scala choir doesn’t meet any more. Corelli doesn’t come to the house any more, too busy training with his unit. On 8 September comes the announcement over the radio that all aggressive actions by Italian forces against the Allies will cease at once. Church bells are rung all over the island and neighbouring islands.

The Italian officers are confused: should they surrender to the Germans? sign an armistice with them? attack them? Corelli is crystal clear that they must disarm the Germans or they’re ‘fucked’. Italian warships in the harbour slip anchor and head back to Brindisi thus preventing the evacuation of the 5,000 or so troops on the island. Hard to credit such cowardly betrayal.

Corelli asks the doctor how he can contact the resistance or andartes but the doctor doesn’t know and all Corelli’s efforts fail.

52. Developments

Consisting of 10 short sections giving the points of view of people caught up in the general confusion.

First person Carlo can’t believe their orders to surrender to the Germans.
Conversation between Italian CO General Gandin who tells his German counterpart, Barge, that the Italians are voluntarily giving up positions to show their good faith.
First person Corelli gives his mandolin to Pelagia for safekeeping, She reveals they’ve also taken Carlo’s manuscript and Corelli is surprised to learn the big man is a writer.
Leutnant Weber cleans his gun.
General Gandin uselessly confers with his chaplains and shows an irrational fear of attack by Stukas, unaware of the fact that’ from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised’ (p.304)
Someone comes to Corelli’s barracks to tell them Italian officers in another place have been shot by the Germans, prompting Corelli to demand a vote.
General Gandin wastes the next day in indecision.
Quote of the short order sent directly from Hitler ordering the complete liquidation of all Italian forces on Cephallonia. Since Italy hasn’t declared war on Germany, the Italians are to be treated as franc-tireurs rather than as prisoners of war.
General Gandin’s conference with senior officers, at which he highlights contradictory orders from Rome. Indecision.
The British decoded the German order to liquidate the Italians but did nothing because it would reveal the fact that they’d cracked their codes. De Bernières has quite a lot satirical disgust at the British attitude and abandonment of their allies.

53. First Blood

The fighting breaks out piecemeal as Italian officers, abandoned by their commanders and their allies, take courage. Planes fly overhead dropping bombs. Italians take on the Panzer tanks parked at strategic points in the towns. Instead of demanding a surrender, Gandin calls only for a truce, effectively handing the initiative to the Germans.

54. Carlo’s Farewell

Carlo writes a love letter to Corelli saying he has loved him as much as Corelli loves Pelagia.

55. Victory

How the Germans promised the Italians safe passage from Corfu them machine gunned them in the water i.e. German mass murder. Stukas dive bomb the Italian barracks. Gandin makes the mistake of calling all Italians from outposts into the town where they are easier targets. Whatever it was this is now a war novel. From his mountaintop Aleko sees the flashes and hears the bangs and knows the war has come to his island. Bunny Warren tries to get Cairo to send reinforcements for the Italians but de Bernières gives a characteristically scathing characterisation of top hole British perfidy:

‘Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can’t be done. Chin-chin.’ (p.316)

In their house Iannis consoles Pelagia who is terrified Corelli is dead. Stamatis and Kolokios come to ask the doctor’s absolution for they are taking their rifles and going off to kill Germans. Meanwhile, Corelli wanders through the rubble of Argostoli which has been seriously bombed. He comes across a little girl, dead, buried in the rubble of a house. Refugees are streaming in from villages razed by the Germans, clogging the streets and making it difficult to move artillery. Meanwhile two more battalions of Germans land. The Germans flatten villages all over the island in fierce fights with the Italians who run out of ammunition and blame the British for abandoning them.

After days of fighting an exhausted Corelli motorbikes to the Iannis house, kisses Pelagia, tells this is the last time she’ll see him alive. She begs him to stay and hide in the house but he explains he has to be with his boys and motors off.

56. The Good Nazi (2)

Cut to Weber arguing with his superior officer that he doesn’t want to carry out the direct order to murder the Italian prisoners. He and his CO argue about the legality of it, which all depends on the prisoners’ status as either POWs (with rights) or franc-tireurs, who it is legal to shoot.

In the lorry taking them to their deaths Corelli and his pals sing the humming chorus from Madam Butterfly. Weber is appalled that these men arrive singing and jump down from the trucks instead of being forced at bayonet point. Corelli recognises Weber and waves to him. Weber goes up to him, they share a cigarette, Weber hesitates and apologises, Corelli is gracious and shakes his hand but Carlo is rude and unforgiving, Weber walks away.

The order to fire is given but the Italians aren’t lined up against a wall but standing or sitting or lying around crying so the Germans have to shoot them where they are. De Bernières singles out for his loathing a sadistic Croatian sergeant who takes thuggish pleasure in emptying his machine gun into the Italians bodies.

And now occurs the most famous incident in the novel. For as the firing starts, huge strong gay giant Carlo Piero Guercio steps smartly in front of Corelli, seizing his wrists in his hands, and stands in front of him like a human shield, receiving bullet after bullet in his body, seeing if he can count to 30 and nearly getting there before a bullet smashes his jawbone and he falls backwards onto Corelli crushing him. Then Weber walks dazed through the abattoir of bodies delivering the coup de grace with his pistol, bends down and looks directly into Corelli’s face, their eyes meet as Weber’s pistol hesitates, then he pulls it back, stands up and walks away.

57. Fire

And now there is an almighty coincidence when Velisarios – remember him? the village strongman? – comes across the killing field and recognises the corpse of Carlo and lifts him up, with difficulty propping him against a wall, and recognised the bloodied body underneath him as the captain who’s been billeted with the doctor. He has multiple bullet wounds and is covered in blood, so much so that Velisarios wonders if it would be kinder to finish him off there, but Corelli whispers ‘Iatro, Pelagia’ so Velisarios picks him up and carries him to Dr Iannis’s.

Meanwhile up on Mount Aenos the goatherd Aleko who, as I said at the start watches all these vents from an Olympian height and with Olympian detachment, sees fires spring up all over the island. With their usual thoroughness the Germans are now burning the bodies, thousands and thousands of Italian men who they’ve murdered in cold blood.

Father Arsenios comes across then largest fire, it is now dark and the German soldiers are exhausting themselves bringing in truckload after load of corpses and throwing them into the flames, some not yet dead. It is a scene from hell and Arsenios shouts his Biblical anathema on all concerned, then starts beating the Germans with his walking staff until eventually a German officer draws a pistol and shoots him through the nape of his neck and they chuck his body onto the enormous pyre.

Eventually the Germans leave and the Greeks come to rescue the bodies they can, in order to give them a decent Orthodox burial. General Gandin is executed along with all his staff officers. It was a massacre of up to 8,000 Italians and a massive war crime.

58. Surgery and Obsequy

Velisario brings Corelli to Dr Iannis’s. Neither Pelagia nor the doctor recognise him but they set to work to treat him. The procedures are described in great detail. After cleaning the blood off they see six bullet wounds but when Iannis starts operating he discovers that they are shallow wounds i.e. haven’t gone clean through the body. Velisario explains how he found the captain, hidden under Carlo, and they are awed at Carlo’s self sacrifice. They ask Velisario to go and fetch Carlo’s body which he does, at some effort, and Iannis digs a grave in the back garden where they sew up his shattered jaw then give him a decent burial. Iannis reads an eloquent eulogy as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.

59. The Historical Cachette

The cachette is the hole under the floorboards which has been used to hide rebels and recusants for centuries. This is where they hide Corelli if the Germans are active locally. When he wakes he is in terrible pain. Iannis had to break some of his ribs in order to extract the bullets and wired them together with mandolin wire. This will have to be extracted in further operations. Iannis gives an unflinching prognosis of what Corelli can expect and when the latter jokingly asks him to lie to him, the doctor replies:

‘The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’ (p.341)

Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?

Corelli develops a fever, requires careful bathing, the fever breaks after four days and then he begins to eat. The doctor makes him stand up and walk on the spot. The pain is very bad but it looks like he’ll live.

60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows

Pelagia is now in very poor shape. Her skin is stretched tight and translucent. She is stick thin. She has grey hairs. Her gums bleed and she’s is worried teeth will start to fall out. She’s lost 50% of her body fat and her breasts have shrivelled. Now they start to starve and are reduced to hunting for lizards and snakes. She and her knackered lover, Corelli, lie on the bed together for hours and fantasise about the future. He hopes there’s a God because he wants to believe all his boys are in heaven. She says she hates all Germans but he makes the point that a lot of the German army isn’t German: they recruited from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, wherever there are thugs and sadists.

(p.345)

They realise that the longer he stays the more likely he’ll be discovered. So with reluctance they ask Stamatis or Kolokios to contact Bunny Warren who, a few days later, comes knocking at the window in the early hours. Provided with gold sovereigns by London, Bunny has for some time been paying local fisherman to smuggle allies out of Cephallonia. Now he arranges for Corelli to be taken by caique to Sicily the next evening.

61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

Corelli and Pelagia’s last day together, full of soppy sentimental fantasies about the future, squabbles about whether Corelli should rejoin the army to carry on fighting Germans, what they will name their children. Almost casually, Dr Iannis tells them he has given Corelli permission to marry his daughter.

That night Bunny comes scratching at the window, gives detailed instructions for how to sneak past the German coast guards, the walk in silence down to the beach, lights flash, a rowing boat comes inshore, Corelli and Pelagia hug, hold and kiss for the last time, then he clambers into the boat and is rowed off into the darkness.

62. Of the German Occupation

After the light-hearted romantic Italians have all gone, shot down in cold blood and incinerated, the Germans prove to be brutal heartless machines, with only one ideology, naked power, and the conviction of their own ineffable superiority. They go into anyone’s house at any hour, beat the inhabitants and steal all their belongings. Both the doctor and Pelagia are beaten and lovely Psipsina is casually beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. Drousoula has cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts for scowling at a German. Four Germans systematically destroy all the medical equipment Dr Iannis has accumulated over four decades. When the Master Race are ordered to withdraw in November 1944, the destroy as many of the houses of Cephallonia as they can.

63. Liberation (the communists)

The Liberation is no liberation because the Nazis are replaced by the brutes of ELAS, the communists, who elect themselves to all positions of power, impose a tax of 25% on everything and start rounding up Fascists and counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois and everyone who poses any kind of threat and sending them to concentration camps. De Bernières really hates them and enumerates their crimes, including stealing food sent to Athens by the Allies for famine relief, destroyed factories, docks and railways the Germans had left intact, created 100,000 refugees, and mutilated anyone who crossed them, castrating and gouging out the eyes of the recalcitrant.

The doctor is dragged away in the middle of the night and sent to a labour camp for the crime of being bourgeois. They beat Pelagia unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios and Stamatis try to protect the doctor all three are arrested and sent to the docks to travel to a camp on the mainland. The communists invite Bunny Warren to a party and shoot him. Chin-chin.

After she’s beaten up Pelagia goes running to Mandras’s mother, Drousoula who takes her to her (shrivelled) bosom and cares for her like a mother. Within a few days she moves into the doctor’s house which becomes a matriarchy.

Return of Mandras

But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Mandras arrives at the doctor’s house and he is now a bloated monster, degraded after years of murdering and raping at will with the communist partisans, gross and disfigured, looking like a toad.

He has come back to claim her as his bride (although he is as disconcerted by the change in his appearance as she is by him). Conversation turns to abuse and he angrily gets out the bundle of letters she wrote him all those years ago and repeats the scene of insisting she read them out loud. This escalates into shouting then he’s accusing her of sleeping with an Italian Fascist, everyone’s told him about it, he starts calling her a whore and when she makes a move to leave, smacks her round the face and when she falls to the floor kicks her in the back, lifts her by the wrists onto the bed and starts to rip off her clothes, as he’s done to so many women over the past three years. (De Bernières gives a horribly convincing psychological insight into the raging joy of rape and then the bitter aftermath, p.366).

Mandras beats her again and again and again till her face is a bloody swollen pulp then hoiks up her skirts but this causes the little derringer pistol her father gave her all those years ago to fall out of the pocket and beside her head. She grabs it and fires, shattering Mandras’s collarbone. He staggers back and at just that moment Drosoula returns, entering the bedroom to encounter this scene.

She rushes over to Pelagia who manages to say through her bloody mouth that Mandras tried to rape her. Outraged, Drosoula produces her own pistol and points it at her son. She formally disowns him, calls him Fascist, Fascist rapist, curses him with traditional curses: may his heart burst in his chest, may he die alone, he is no longer her son, she has no son.

Stumbling outside, Mandras sees the old olive tree, the one he used to fool around in, the one he fell out of onto the pot, the focus of so much love and laughter. Now the whole scene is ashes and emptiness. It’s all been for nothing, all his fighting and suffering and mastering the discourse of revolution, all for nothing. He stumbles along tracks down to the seashore where once he frolicked like a young god, strips off and wades into the sea.

Some time later his body is washed ashore, being nudged and nuzzled by his three tame dolphins. This, the immeasurable degradation of Mandras, more than the killing of Carlo and maiming of Corelli, made me feel really sick and distraught. The charming youth with the arse of a god and a permanent smile had been reduced to a fat, exploiting, bully rapist, symbol of a world degraded to bestial levels.

64. Antonia (the baby)

Someone leaves a newborn baby in a bundle on the step of the house. Drosoula and Pelagia take it in and discover it is a baby girl, to join the matriarchy. Pelagia names it Antonia after Corelli’s name for his mandolin. After so much loss it becomes the focus of their hopes and efforts.

Iannis returns

One of de Bernières’ aims is to flay the communists in the fiercest way possible for their barbaric behaviour. He makes Iannis the vehicle for this, for he has Dr Iannis return, after three long years in communist camps on the mainland, a complete wreck, a broken man. He can’t speak, can barely shuffle, his hands shake, broken by the forced marches without food or water, watching villagers along the way who are slow to feed the people’s army having their eyes gouged out, being castrated or raped, the mouths slit wide. He is haunted by the memory of seeing his two oldest friends, Stamatis and Kolokios, incapable of staggering further, sitting by the road as the column staggered onwards, waiting to be shot as ‘stragglers’. In many ways de Bernières paints the communists as worse than the Nazis.

All the more impressive, then, that he moves back in with the matriarchal household and helps Pelagia who is now the main doctor, healing the sick of the village, despite the deep sense of futility burned into his core (p.371).

She tries to get him interested in his old project, the history of Cephallonia, but the gently whimsical approach to history has been burned out of him. I was recently thinking about Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ towards the end of which Marlowe discovers that the deranged envoy of ‘civilisation’, Mr Kurtz, has scrawled words of nihilistic despair across the bottom of a missionary pamphlet, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. In much the same spirit, Pelagia discovers that her father has scrawled across the bottom of the last page of his manuscript:

‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’ (p.372)

L’omosessuale

Pelagia finally reads the stash of writings by l’omosessuale, Carlo Piero Guercio, and marvels at the secret sensitivity behind the man’s giant strength, marvels at the depths of his love, for Francesco and Corelli. Thus the strength and virtue and endurance of gay love is one of the book’s central themes.

The house becomes a matriarchy, run by Pelagia and Drosoula, who raise little Antonia as a free spirit. The conservative neighbours call them witches, exacerbated by the obvious emasculation of the once-proud doctor, throw stones or hiss at them in the street, tell their children to avoid them. (This reminds me very much of the way the villagers treat the Englishwoman at the centre of John Buchan’s 1926 melodrama, The Dancing Floor.)

In 1950 they can’t scrape together enough to bribe an official who has discovered that neither Iannis nor Pelagia has a medical degree and so bans them from working. It looks as if they’re going to starve until Fate steps in in the shape of a Canadian poet, one of the millions of bourgeois intellectuals who, in the postwar boom, were seeking out the ‘authenticity’ of ‘primitive’ life among workers and sailors. To their astonishment he is prepared to pay an outrageous rent for the old house by the quay which Drosoula had abandoned to move in with Pelagia, and their finances bounce back to health.

In this figure de Bernières gently satirises the existentialist chic of the post-war years, humorously saying that the poet found himself living a happy and contented life and unable to write the angst-ridden and depressing verse which had made him famous and so he eventually packed up and went back to Montreal, via Paris:

where freedom was in the process of being recognised as a major source of Angst. (p.374)

I think he underestimates the extent to which existentialist thought, although well-established before the war, was a) coloured by the wartime years and b) was a kind of traumatic response to the war, and especially to the occupation. But it was also a fashionable fad, as well.

Almost inevitably the household acquires a cat. Women and cats. We learn for the first time that psipsina is, apparently, Greek for ‘puss’. They had started calling Antonia psipsina as a nickname and there is some of the old light-hearted whimsy in the comic confusion created by calling out psipsina and both the cat and the child misinterpreting it.

The revenant

In 1946 occurs the first of strange phenomena. One day, outside, nursing the baby, she looks up and sees a man dressed in black standing hesitating at exactly the spot where Velisarios hit Mandras with the canon. She is convinced it is her beloved Corelli, puts down the baby and runs down the street but when she turns the corner the figure has vanished, despite her anguished calls. Later a single red rose appears on Carlo’s grave. Is it Corelli’s ghost? Next year, at about the same time, she sees the figure again and another red rose appears. As the years of her spinsterhood progress, Pelagia is comforted by the love from beyond the grave.

65. 1953 (earthquake)

Pelagia stops thinking of herself as Greek. The barbarity of the civil war destroyed any belief that Greek culture was special or superior. Increasingly she thinks of herself as Italian and buys a radio cheap because its tuner is broken and it can only reach Italian radio stations. She sings Italian songs and raises Antonia to speak Italian.

Wars

Despite the tourist whimsy of many passages, this is fundamentally a book about war and wars. In one sentence de Bernières positions the events of this chapter after the Greek Civil War (March 1946 to August 1949), after the end of the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953) and just as the French were drawing near the disastrous climax of the First Indochina War (December 1946 to July 1954). The Second World War may have ended but it was still a world in flames.

Earthquake

This chapter is a fantastically vivid and almost magical realist depiction of the 1953 Ionian earthquake as experienced by our main characters i.e. weird electrical phenomena, followed by a series of shocks, then the Big One, as they desperately try to escape from the collapsing house.

The most destructive [of the shocks] was the August 12 earthquake. The event measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale, raised the whole island of Kefalonia by 60 cm (24 in), and caused widespread damage throughout the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos … Between 445 and 800 people were killed. (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot is 1) the doctor’s old house is reduced to ruins 2) the doctor is crushed to death, the peg for another of the book’s countless ironies:

[The ruined house] also contained the disillusioned soul and tired body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid. (p.383)

66. Rescue

De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. (p.383)

but remember this was published in 1994 and so written during the chaos at the end of the Thatcher regime, marked by the poll tax riots, and then the Conservative Party’s typically squalid and shambolic sacking of the greatest leader it’s ever had, in November 1990 and hurried replacement by the sad and ludicrous figure of John Major, who depressed all progressive-thinking people by winning the 1992 general election by a landslide. So, yes, from the perspective of 1994, Britain was indeed an unhappy, disgruntled, rather ludicrous country.

But there’s more, de Bernière expresses the standard liberal lament over Britain being America’s poodle:

[Britain] had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. (p.384)

You could argue that the crudeness of this is unworthy of the writer who’s delivered so many luminously subtle moments throughout this wonderful book. Then again, satire is, in general, crude. It prompts a second thought: that de Bernières and the world at large had seen nothing yet, and would be amazed ten years later at the behaviour of Tony Blair who rightly earned the nickname ‘Bush’s poodle’ and sent British forces into Afghanistan and Iraq…

Back to the text: it’s the British who send the most aid and stay the longest to help the inhabitants of the Ionian islands to recover but the chapter then goes onto become an overview of all the rescue attempts and aid sent by various countries, as well as the impacts on the locals, some of whom fell into despair, some intractable guilt at having survived, some set up businesses, unlikely leaders emerged such as Velisarios, the strong man, who took charge in Pelagia’s village. The narrative details his heroic acts (single-handedly cleaning out the village well so that nobody went thirsty) deeds which were remembered and venerated for decades afterwards.

In among the general confusion, an Italian fireman borrows an American jeep and drives out to Pelagia’s village, making his way to the ruins of the old house and identifying the ancient olive tree, split in two by the quake, and then sees the grave of the gentle giant Carlo, which has been opened up. He gets a spade from the jeep to recover the big man but as he does so the earth shakes again and the grave closes of its own volition.

Surely this is Corelli, but the text doesn’t say so.

67. Pelagia’s Lament

First-person lament by Pelagia for everything she’s lost, specifically her upbringing by her wonderful father, fount of fantastical stories, which leads up to her memory of Velisarios digging through the rubble to find her father, so small and limp and empty without his soul, and she realised how beaten and broken he had been but how he was the only man who loved her to the end. This lament made me cry.

68. The Resurrection of History

Pelagia sinks into profound guilt that she panicked and ran out of the house and left her father to die. Drosoula and Antonia sympathise to start with, but become more irritated as Pelagia becomes more morbidly obsessed. Eventually they make up the story that her father has appeared to them in dreams and told them to tell her to complete her father’s history of Cephallonia. After initial scepticism, Pelagi discovers that she can do it, enjoys doing it, starts flexing her intellectual muscles, expresses opinions she never knew she had, writes off to experts in Europe and America for more information and is amazed at the enthusiastic replies she receives. Several publishing houses turn it down but it doesn’t matter. Her father’s project has saved her.

It is 1961. Part of her intellectual exercise is enjoying teasing and contradicting the now teenage Antonia. But the girl dismays her and Drosoula by announcing that 1) she is a communist and 2) she is getting married, at the age of 17 (p.397).

69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

Life continues. Pelagia starts to receive postcards from cities round the world with short cryptic messages in Greek. They can’t be from Corelli, he couldn’t speak Greek and what was he doing gallivanting round the world. She decides they’re from the ghost of her father continuing the peregrinations of his youth.

Antonia gets a job serving in a café in Argostoli and is chatted up by short, plump, 32-year-old radical lawyer Alexi (p.399). Despite all her mother’s opposition, Antonia gets married at a happy traditional ceremony.

Time passes. Drosoula sets up a ramshackle taverna in the space down by the quay where her house used to be and becomes a tourist attraction, famed for her slow service but eccentric company. Lemona, now the plump mother of three children, helps out as does Pelagia.

Antonia cries when King Paul dies, comes for comfort when Alexi is locked up by the colonels in 1967 and again in 1973, goes to the mainland to take part in feminist demonstrations. She tells her mother it’s all the fault of the older generation and it’s up to the young people to fix the world. As all young people do. But, as a feminist and a radical, she refuses to have a grandchild for Pelagia to the latter’s sorrow.

Drosoula dies quietly in her chair and is buried next to Dr Iannis and Pelagia suddenly realises she is alone. But in the event Antonia does get pregnant and have a little baby boy. Pelagia dandles it and calls it Iannis so often that that becomes its name. Alexi is a rich bourgeois now, builds an apartment block on the hillside where the old village used to be, rebuilds Drosoula’s taverna, hires a competent chef, takes 50% of the profit.

70. Excavation

Iannis grows to be a beautiful 6-year-old who helps out at the taverna and is cooed over by foreign matrons. Alexi becomes a property tycoon, building evermore apartment blocks with swimming pools and tennis courts. Antonia opens a tourist emporium full of tat in Argostali and then in half a dozen other towns. They become rich.

The boy Iannis engages in competitions to pee as high as possible against the wall at the back of the taverna and his dreams are full of plump tourist matrons pressing him their squishy bosoms.

When he’s ten, Pelagia hires Spiridon, a talented bouzouki player from Corfu, whose dexterity reminds her of the one true love of her life. iannis dreams of becoming a kamakia or ‘harpoon’, slang for the handsome young men who hang about the airport on mopeds and make a living having passionate week-long affairs with single women who’ve flown to Greece looking for ‘romance’ (p.407).

Anyway, Iannis conceives the ambition of playing the bouzouki not least because, by the end of every evening, Spiridon has his arms round the prettiest girls in the restaurant and is being showered with roses. Spiridon says his arms are too short to play it, he should start with a mandolin, so he begs his mum and dad for a mandolin but they keep forgetting to get one on their umpteen trips abroad, so instead he pesters granny Pelagia, who says there’s one buried in the ruins of her old house.

Which is why Iannis is dispatched with Spiridon to dig it up and hence the title of this chapter. In digging through the rubble they discover all kinds of relics which mean something to the reader – a wartime photo of Corelli and Weber, a family photo album starting with Dr Iannis’s wedding, a jar with a shrivelled pea in it (the pea which kick starts the whole narrative).

In the middle of this digging a huge old man appears in the ruined doorway. It is old Velisarios, come to see if they are looters. In his hand he holds a red rose and it’s only now that we learn that it is he who has left a rose on Carlo’s grave every year in October and, it is strongly implied, that he too was gay and recognised and respected a kindred spirit.

Anyway, it’s this huge strong Velisarios who opens up the trapdoor to the historic cachette under the old house where, of course, they find all its treasures perfectly preserved – the manuscripts of Carlo’s letters, Iannis’s history, Weber’s wind-up gramophone with records, the clasp knife she gave her father, the blanket she crocheted throughout Corelli’s stay, and, in side a box inside cloth covers, the most beautiful mandolin Spiridon has ever seen.

71. Antonia Sings Again

Reunited with all these evocative objects, Pelagia cries for weeks, and then shows the photo album in particular to Iannis, boring him with stories of all the old people in them.

And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.

72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)

Cut to 1993. Iannis is 15. He likes to go up to the old ruined house to practice the mandolin. One day an old grey-haired man approaches him. It is, of course, Antonio Corelli. He politely points out that the boy is fingering the mandolin in slightly the wrong way which is hampering his technique. When he takes the mandolin to show him how, he suddenly realises it is his old one. Everything comes flooding out and he tells the enthralled teenager how he is the man his mother was going to marry, how he was saved by the giant buried in the back garden and how the four strings missing from the mandolin when they first found it… are in his chest, holding his ribs together, he never had them removed.

73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)

This final chapter opens comically, with Pelagia, confronted by Corelli in the middle of her taverna, going mad with rage, overturning tables, throwing plates and pans at him, then prodding him with the broom handle as she furiously accuses him. All these years she thought he was dead and yet he was alive and living the life of Reilly.

So now we have the Big Reveal, the explanation of the last 50 years of their lives (1943 to 1993). It was Corelli who Pelagia saw at the end of the road in chapter 64, in 1946. He had come back to see her. But what he saw was her nursing a baby and put 2 and 2 together and made 53, wildly assuming that she was married with a child. In his confusion he ran and jumped over a wall so that when she ran after him she saw an empty street.

He came back every year around the same time but always saw her with the baby and made the same mistake. Pelagia asks the obvious question, why did he never meet her and ask her? Because he didn’t want to ruin what he thought was her new, happily married life by stirring up old ghosts. So like a gentleman he did the restrained thing and backed off. Although he did return every year, so her impression of seeing the mysterious dark man was real.

In the meantime he took her parting advice, left the army and became a fireman. Plenty of time to practice and compose and eventually he wrote classical pieces which became a success, three concertos, one of them with Pelagia’s March as its central theme.

He became a successful concert performer and was in demand around the world. Hence the postcards. They were from him. Why in Greek? Because when the full truth of the Fascist regime’s evils came out he was ashamed to be an Italian and emigrated to Greece. He’s been a Greek citizen for 25 years.

Much more chat and memories then he shyly gives her a Walkman and a tape of his 1954 concerto and leaves, to meet up later. She fumbles with the Walkman but once she works out how to work it, is amazed at how immediate and total the musical experience is, right in the centre of her head. And then she hears Pelagia’s March which he used to hum, subject to all kinds of developments, played by different instruments and then makes out the rat-a-tat-tat of machineguns, and the rumbling of drums which embodies the earthquake, my God, the whole narrative is captured in musical form.

That evening he brings her a goat. He went to the trouble of taking a taxi to the top of Mount Aenos where he was swindled by Alekos, and had to pay the taxi driver a double fare to bring it all the way down the mountain. It’s restitution for the one she loved which was stolen in chapter 44. She says she’ll name it Apodosis which is Greek for ‘restitution’. She amusingly humiliates Corelli when he tells her she should get good milk out of it, maybe sell yoghurt in the restaurant and she points between its back legs at the big pink scrotum!

That evening he returns with a modern motorbike and suggests they roar off up into the hills to see if they can find the old shed where they used to hide away and kiss and cuddle, which they called their Casa Nostra. Pelagia says it’s a preposterous idea and agrees. As they roar up into the hills Pelagia is pleased and terrified and holds on tight.

And in the final image of the novel, they are overtaken by a scooter carrying not one but three young woman, wearing skimpy dresses showing their shapely breasts, long hair flowing in the wind, one driving, one doing her eye make-up, one nonchalantly reading a paper. An image of carefree youth and optimism. Corelli thinks that when he comes to map out his next concerto all he will have to do is remember this moment to conjure up the spirit of Greece.

THE END.

The unsaid as a central theme

Writing out the sentence describing Dr Iannis’s death in the Ionian earthquake, and how he had for years prepared some noble and profound last words which, in the event, he had no chance to utter before being crushed to death, made me realise that this is a minor but significant thread in the book – the frustration of the unsaid.

On several occasions Corelli has big speeches ready to deliver to Pelagia, only for her temper or mood to sweep the conversation away.

Similarly, Dr Iannis likes to prepare grand speeches with which he will demolish the communist beliefs of Kokolios or the monarchism of Stamatis, and yet life (and Lemoni) keep interrupting him so that they are never delivered.

Mandras has so much to say to Pelagia on his two returns, from the Albanian front and then from life with the communist partisans, and yet both times his hopes of expressing what he feels are dashed and he ends up attacking her in a raging fury.

But the theme has its best embodiment in the entire life of Carlo Guercio, who overflows with love for Francesco and then for Corelli, which he can never ever, in real life, express.

Related, is the scene of Pelagia and Corelli’s last day together before he takes the illicit boat back to Italy, in which they have plenty of time and yet, somehow, mysteriously, don’t get to express a fraction of their feelings.

And maybe also related is Dr Iannis’s eternal frustration with his History of Cephallonia – no matter how much he writes he somehow never gets to express what he wants to say.

It’s as if it’s a buried moral of the story, that no matter how eloquent the writing and the words, the most important part, somehow, still, is left unexpressed. Something which is expressed nearly at the end of the text when Pelagia shows young Iannis all the photos from her life and he is suddenly struck by how little survives of our lives and loves, thinking:

How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on it? (p.416)

Hummel’s concerto for mandolin

Greek words

agapeton – sweetheart
iatre – ‘Doctor’
koritsimou – my girl
kyria – respectful title for a female, ‘kyria Pelagia’
mangas – men, chaps
papakis – diminutive form of address to a father
patir – form of address to a priest, same as ‘Father’

Credit

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières was published by Secker and Warburg in 1994. References are to the 1995 Minerva paperback edition.

Modern Greek reviews

The Dancing Floor by John Buchan (1926) [set on a fictional Greek island]
Ill Met by Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (1950) [kidnapping a German general on Crete]
Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955) [the German invasion of Crete]
Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor @ the British Museum (March 2018)

Second World War reviews

Second World War reviews

4 Comments

by Simon on April 26, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Second World War, War

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Posted by Simon on April 26, 2024

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Huntingtower by John Buchan (1922)

‘I learned in the war that civilisation anywhere is a very thin crust.’
(Buchan’s central message, delivered in this book by John Heritage, poet and soldier, page 116)

I’ve been reading old John Buchan novels I’ve picked up in second-hand shops as a break from the Africa project which overflowed with famine, civil wars, military coups, massacre, torture and child soldiers.

However, reading the series of five novels about Sir Edward Leithen has not turned out to be as easy and relaxing as I imagined. They all show the same weaknesses, which include the off-puttingly upper-class milieu, his terrible way with names but, above all, the weirdly contorted and contrived storylines.

Having finished the five Leithen books, as an experiment I tried one other novel (he wrote 30), this one the first of the series of three novels featuring on the face of it a very different protagonist, the retired Glasgow greengrocer and businessman, Dickson McCunn, ‘late of Mearns Street, Glasgow, wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and fifty-five years of age’ (p.55).

He makes an effort to show McCunn as coming from a different class than the hunting, shooting and fishing, Oxford and the bar Leithen, moving in his high society circles – instead McCunn is obviously intended to be a broadly comical figure and the story does, here and there, raise a wan smile, although ‘comic’ is not the term. It’s quite funny that Heritage mishears Dickson’s name and insists on referring to him throughout as ‘Dogson’.

Instead the plot is standard Buchan thriller i.e. a number of thriller tropes strung together on a wildly improbable and frequently incomprehensible plot.

The plot

So this Dickson McCunn is not just any old greengrocer, that would be a bit too déclassé – instead he has, until the novel opens, been the owner of the largest food and greengrocery supply business in all Glasgow

The big provision shop in Mearns Street—now the United Supply Stores, Limited
‘you’re a household name in these parts. I get all my supplies from you,’, says Lord

‘Comic’ touches are that he is a member of a literary society and likes to quote Tennyson and Browning i.e. is amusingly behind the times, and is inordinately proud of the safety razor he has just treated himself to. He has just the day before sold the grocery store he has built into the city’s premier emporium. Now, aged 55, he wants to have adventures. The broad comic joke of the entire novel is that he stumbles into an adventure and discovers that real-life adventures are not at all the entertaining romances he imagined.

What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. (p.53)

So McCunn packs his bags and heads off for a walking tour of the Carrick district of Galloway (p.25). Before he goes:

That morning he had received an epistle from a benevolent acquaintance, one Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who called themselves the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’. Behind the premises in Mearns Street lay a tract of slums, full of mischievous boys with whom his staff waged truceless war. But lately there had started among them a kind of unauthorised and unofficial Boy Scouts, who, without uniform or badge or any kind of paraphernalia, followed the banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and subjected themselves to a rude discipline. They were far too poor to join an orthodox troop, but they faithfully copied what they believed to be the practices of more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their pathetic parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader, a red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send them to camp in the country. Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not deny to others what he proposed for himself. His last act before leaving was to send Mackintosh ten pounds.

Tramping the roads turns out to be not quite as glamorous as the poets make it sound. On the first day he meets beggars and tramps who are not as picturesque as he hoped. The second day he is tired and the weather takes a turn for the worse.

At the Bull Inn at Kirkmichael McCunn meets John Heritage, a posh Englishman and would-be poet. They have an argument of sorts because Buchan makes Heritage the kind of superficial posing socialist that he despised. He makes Heritage a) sympathise with the Bolsheviks in Russia the novel was serialised in 1921 i.e. while the Russian civil war was still in full swing) and b) take a ludicrously dewy-eyed view of the working class. To which an irritated McCunn delivers an eloquent rebuke:

‘You ideelise the working-man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday…. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!’ (p.28)

McCunn then reads the slim volume of verse Heritage has published (titled Whorls), which is an opportunity for Buchan to ridicule modern poetry, thus showing what a philistine he was. NB Also at the inn is a stranger he chats to for a while, a handsome young man with an Australian accent. Anyway, after his argument with Heritage he goes back to Mrs Morran’s place and so to bed.

Next morning McCunn has breakfast early and sets off. He comes across a detour from the main road which apparently leads to a peninsula of land which leads from Kirkmichael down to the sea, with a sign reading ‘Dalquharter and Huntingtower. (The peninsula is known as the Cruives, an old name which is ‘something to do with fishing.’ Hence the name of the village pub, The Cruives Inn.)

McCunn tosses a coin to decide whether to walk on or take make a detour to see this Huntingtower place and it comes down tail, for the detour.

He is irritated, after walking a way, to see the poet’s figure approaching up a tributary road. They fall in together and walk onto a pretty village. The innkeeper here is surprisingly rude and says there’s no room, so they poke around and come across a private house which does rooms in the care of sweet little old lady Mrs (Phemie) Morran.

She makes them a fine tea and when McCunn asks about this Huntingtower delivers a handy history. It’s always belonged to the Kennedy family, until the most recent heir to the family, name, Quentin Kennedy, went off to the war and died of the influenza. Now the place is up for sale.

After lunch our boys set off to see the house but when they come to the lodge are met by a rude and officious gatekeeper who tells them no. This, of course, is a red rag to a bull, and Heritage and McCunn follow the wall round till it turns to hedge, slip through it and go to explore the house. En route they flop down in pretty fields with a view and talk about poetry and Heritage whistles an aria from a Russian opera then goes on to tell the story of how he was posted to Italy at the end of the war and from his rooms by the Spanish Steps heard a guest in the same hotel, a pretty Russian girl, sing this air.

Finally they arrive in sight of the house but are disappointed to see that instead of a weathered rocky old pile it is a newly built house but a pastiche of a Tudor mansion, completely inappropriate for this harsh northern clime.

Dickson had never before been affected by an inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted to get far away from it as fast as possible.

Buchan uses the same tactic in The Dancing Floor where he just asserts that the Greek village his heroes arrive at is eerie and spooky, without very much evidence, and then repeats the assertion in various ways until the reader is compelled to buy into it if you’re going to accept the story at all. He often does this. Asserts a factitious mood of foreboding with absolutely no justification, just because he needs to concoct an atmosphere of menace which then underpins the flaky plot.

Dickson’s mind was a chaos of feelings, all of them unpleasant. He had run up against something which he violently, blindly detested, and the trouble was that he could not tell why. It was all perfectly absurd, for why on earth should an ugly house, some overgrown trees and a couple of ill-favoured servants so malignly affect him? Yet this was the fact; he had strayed out of Arcady into a sphere that filled him with revolt and a nameless fear. Never in his experience had he felt like this, this foolish childish panic which took all the colour and zest out of life.

And:

‘I called this place Paradise four hours ago,’ Heritage said. ‘So it is, but I fancy it is next door to Hell. There is something devilish going on inside that park wall and I mean to get to the bottom of it.’

Forced. Contrived.

Then several things happen which justify the accusation of outrageous coincidences. They hear footsteps as another officious porter or lodgemaster arrives and so begin to head away, but Heritage suddenly falls to his knees. He’s heard singing coming from the open window of the house and it is the voice of the beautiful Russian girl he met at the Spanish Steps!!!!! Of all the people in all the world, they just happen to bump into the very one Heritage was telling a story about 5 minutes earlier…

They hasten back to the nice cottage of Mrs Morran for tea where they spread out a map, with Heritage determined to go back, defy the gatekeepers and get into the house, when there’s a commotion as a dirty ragamuffin boy forces his way through to the parlour where he identifies himself to McCunn as…the very leader of the Gorbals wanna-be Boy Scouts who McCunn gave some money to as his last gesture before leaving the city. Quite a coincidence!

The Die-Hards are on some kind of outward bound, Boy Scout trip to the region, when they, also, had stumbled across the mysterious house and then been rebuffed by the rude gatekeepers, since when they’ve taken to staking out. So not only a coincidence that the boys McCunn gives charitable donations too just happen to have come to the exact same corner of Scotland as he has, but are staking out exactly the same house which he and Heritage have developed an interest in!

Apparently Buchan sub-titled the novel ‘A Glasgow fairy tale’ and he tells us straight out from the first that McCunn was looking for romance and adventure. The Russian princess is referred to three times as ‘a fairy tale princess’. And the characters themselves archly refer to being in an old fashioned romance:

‘You should be happy, Dogson,’ said the Poet. ‘Here we have all the materials for your blessed romance – old mansion, extinct family, village deserted of men and an innkeeper whom I suspect of being a villain.’

Long story short, these lads, known as the Gorbals Die-Hards and led by one Dougal Crombie, join forces with McCunn and Heritage. Through a series of convoluted complexities and a great deal of sneaking down the valley of the adjacent river, and crossing fords, and sneaking behind bushes and across lawns etc etc they eventually gain admittance to the house and discover it contains two Russian women, Saskia and her elderly cousin, Eugènie (first named on page 67). Saskia is, of course:

tall – that he could tell, tall and slim and very young. (p.63)
Dickson insisted on stripping off his trusty waterproof and forcing it on the Princess, on whose slim body it hung very loose and very short.
the slim girl, into whose face the weather had whipped a glow like blossom

And:

Dickson’s first impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. (p.65)

And:

Again Dickson was reminded of a child, for her arms hung limp by her side; and her slim figure in its odd clothes was curiously like that of a boy in a school blazer. (p.70)

Right at the end of the story:

She is no more the tragic muse of the past week, but a laughing child again, full of snatches of song, her eyes bright with expectation. (p.206)

Later:

He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy’s. (p.137)

All the classiest women are slim. The best kind of women have the quality of children. But the absolute bestest women are actually boys.

The younger prettier one, Saskia, explains. They once belonged to one of the grandest families in Russia. When the revolution struck they formed part of the general resistance of their class. As the tide turned against them they were tasked with saving jewels belonging to the Russian royal family. These they smuggled out as far as France.

But here some thriller voodoo intervenes because Saskia emphasises that the criminal Bolsheviks have agents everywhere on the lookout for them and the jewels. When these agents closed in on them in France they fled to Scotland. Saskia had met a noble Scot named Quentin Kennedy who told her he owned a fined house where she would be welcome to stay, and gave her a letter of introduction to his ‘factor’, Loudon (p.69). But when she arrived in Scotland and came to the house she found herself imprisoned and guarded by the three men who Heritage, McCunn and the Die-Hards have seen patrolling the grounds.

Illogically, although her coming was anticipated, none of these bad guys intercepted her before she actually got to Huntingtower nor, since she arrived, have they searched or interrogated her to find the whereabouts of the jewels. Well, they asked her where the jewels were and she refused to tell them and these international terrorists left it at that! This simply doesn’t make sense and is typical of the yawning plot holes or lack of logic which lace Buchan’s ‘shockers’.

Saskia says her gaolers are awaiting the arrival of another man, their master, the leader of the conspiracy, who McCunn and Heritage nickname The Unknown.

Chapter 6

Well, they decide McCunn should take the jewels to his bank in Glasgow. This he does, although the episode is milked of as much paranoid thriller voodoo as possible, with a messenger from the besieged house racing after the horse and cart McCunn goes to the railway station in, the creepy inn-keeper Dobson who is clearly in on the conspiracy leaping onto the train and keeping tabs on him, and then the package which McCunn accidentally on purpose leaves exposed in a cab he’s hired, sure enough being stolen. As in The Power-House, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan is at pains to convey the sense of a vast invisible conspiracy with its tentacles in every city.

Anyway, the box the baddie steals from the cab was a decoy and McCunn gaily walks into the biggest bank in Glasgow to reveal that he has the princess’s precious jewels sown into his shirt and waistcoat, he cuts them free and puts them in a safety deposit box.

So, on the face of it, grocer supremo Dickson McCunn has done more than his fair share of helping a damsel in distress and ensuring that her treasure is safe. However, this is a thriller and we all want to know what happens back at Huntingtower and how the siege will play out, right?

And so Buchan gives his middle-aged grocer a crisis of conscience, making him pause as he catches a tram back to his town house and ask himself whether he isn’t running away precisely when his friends need him most etc (p.85). Maybe this is a plausible piece of plotting but it feels a lot like Buchan bending his character in order to reinvolve him with the entire convoluted plot to the end.

By the time he’s gotten off the tram he has come to the decision to go back into the valley of doom and help Heritage and the beautiful princess. However, being a practical businessman he takes practical steps. First of all he orders a huge hamper of luxury provisions which he will take with him to feed the allies (Heritage, the ladies, the Die-Hards).

Then he goes to see his Glasgow lawyer (Mr Caw of Paton and Linklater) to ask him to contact the firm in Edinburgh responsible for renting out Huntingtower. He makes as if he, the wealthy Glasgow businessman, wants to buy it and to warn the factor, Loudon, that he is on his way, today or tomorrow.

Then he goes to see Mr McNair a gunsmith who is a fellow elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk. Unfortunately, the careful Scot says he can’t sell him a gun – but he can lend him a service pistol and 50 cartridges (p.88). Thus armed, McCunn hastens to catch the 7.33 from Glasgow to Kirkmichael.

Chapter 7

McCunn checks into the Salutation Hotel at Auchenlochan and sets off to visit the lawyer Loudon. Loudon gives him a thorough, intelligent summary of the state of Huntingtower and is readily willing that McCunn see it and buy it; he just reasonably insists that he needs to inform the owners, who live abroad, how about visiting sometime next week? He insists that nobody is allowed inside the building so is fazed when McCunn insists he saw some women in it. He then changes his story to tell some cock-and-bull yarn about a mad old relative of the family that’s being kept there – it’s she who will take a week or so to get out of the way before McCunn can visit. At this point McCunn realises Loudon is lying and is in on the conspiracy.

He doesn’t let on and instead says he’ll be returning to Glasgow by the late train, shakes hands and leaves. His suspicions are confirmed when he hangs around in the shadow on the other side of the street and see Dobson, the dodgy inn-keeper, slouch up and go round the side of Loudon’s house. They’re in on it together.

McCunn walks along the main road to Dalquharter and is accosted by one of the Die-Hards who takes him to their camp in the woods, very neatly done with a fire burning. Dougal tells him they’ve smuggled Heritage into the house again. McCunn tells Dougal to send some of the boys to the station to fetch the big hamper of food which has been delivered to the station. Dougal then introduces him to the rest of the ‘men’, being:

Thomas Yownie, the chief of staff
Peer Pairson
Napoleon
Wee Jaikie
Auld Bull

Chapter 8

After this sojourn with the Die-Hards McCunn goes straight to Mrs Morran’s, checks in and falls fast asleep. At 1o the next morning Dobson pays a visit and is rudely officious, warning McCunn that he is not allowed to go near the house nor to walk along the coast. it degenerates into a shouting match with McCunn saying Dobson is obviously hiding something he doesn’t want other people to see and Dobson losing his temper, shouting abuse, banging his head on the lintel and falling down the stairs on his way out (p.107).

To be one the safe side, to forestall attack, McCunn persuades little Mrs Morran to accompany him along the main road to the bridge across the river where she turns to go home while he cuts down a track beside the river running to the sea. Maybe this is intended to be spooky, maybe it’s intended to be comic, but it comes over as bizarre.

After a great deal of unnecessary fuss and complication, McCunn crosses the river where it hits the beach under the guidance of Auld Bill and arrives at cliff tops beneath the house and has to be helped up them etc etc. All instead of just walking up to the house and pulling out the gun if any of the three guards try to stop him. There’s always a huge amount of sneaking over heather, and fording rivers, and clambering up cliffs in Buchan stories, rather than just knocking on the front door.

Chapter 9

Incomprehensibly, rather than just take the princess far far away, for example to Glasgow, the allies have decided to spirit her out of the main house and down to the old ruined watch tower in the grounds (!?). Having dumped equipment here, they all then sneak up to the house, across the verandah (pretty easily avoiding the supposed guards) and into the garden room.

Here he meets Heritage who tells him the latest news. Saskia has given more details about Mr Unknown, about the Mastermind behind her (not very effective) kidnap. He comes from a rich family but when the revolution broke out, threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He is a kind of evil genius, ‘none of your callow revolutionaries’.

A digression on antisemitism

Buchan, or his character, betrays the typical bourgeois or aristocratic belief that mere working class people couldn’t have overthrown an entire social order, couldn’t possibly win a war against armies led by aristocrats and bolstered by British and allied forces. Ghastly oiks couldn’t possibly do all that by themselves. This is one source of the popular stereotype that there must be mysterious powers behind the revolution, either renegade aristocrats (as here) or, much more perniciously, the Jews. According to the notes to this book there was an academic spat about whether Buchan was antisemitic or not, a long time ago, in the 1970s. Buchan may or may not have been but some of his characters certainly are. Here’s the view of the ‘fairy tale princess’ Saskia:

‘Our enemies were very clever, and soon the hunt was cried against me. They tried to rob me of [the jewels], but they failed, for I too had become clever. Then they asked the help of the law – first in Italy and then in France. Oh, it was subtly done. Respectable bourgeois, who hated the Bolsheviki but had bought long ago the bonds of my country, desired to be repaid their debts out of the property of the Russian Crown which might be found in the West. But behind them were the Jews, and behind the Jews our unsleeping enemies.’ (p.68)

And here’s Heritage, supposedly one of the good guys:

‘The place for you,’ said Dickson dryly, ‘is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.’
Mr. Heritage approved. ‘They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods – they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them – but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.’

Mind you, Heritage’s antisemitism lies alongside his ignorant support of the Bolsheviks, of which he is later completely cured. So possibly antisemitism is expressed by characters who are intended to be callow, naive and ignorant, and who eventually learn better. Maybe.

Anyway, the allies all conclude that the Big Bad Man is coming that very night. They continue into the house and deliver McCunn’s magnificent hamper of luxuries to the Russian ladies. Saskia is overwhelmed and gives McCunn a kiss. This transports him to seventh heaven, a moment familiar from a million movies where the glamorous young heroine gives the middle-aged old hero’s assistant a kiss and transports him back to his youth!

Heritage has a plan. They’re inside the house now. Rather than go outside to engage in battle he plans to lure the three guards inside and lock them up. And using the Die-Hards, this is exactly what they do, wait for the guards to enter, then turn the lights off and lure them via noises or mutterings or distant lamps into three separate cellars or rooms where they can be locked tight. But not before one of them, the one called Léon, bumps into McCunn and, mistaking him for Dobson, shares the news that the Unknown is arriving at dawn aboard a Danish brig. When the bad guy realises it’s not Dobson he’s talking to there’s a mad scuffle in which Heritage gets knocked to the stone floor and knocked unconscious. At which point half a dozen Die-Hards jump on him, disarm him and bundle him into a cupboard which they lock.

All the good guys emerge onto the verandah, along with provisions, waterproofs and whatnot. There’s a banging of pots at the other end and McCunn sees a figure against a glass door. In that moment McCunnis convinced that this must be the Fourth Man they are all waiting for and pulls out the loaded pistol he was lent by Mr McNair and fires. He wings the figure who spins and disappears into the house. but something about the way he moved makes McCunn realise it is Loudon the factor (p.125).

Now, I was genuinely shocked by this. McCunn, up until now a figure of fun, is ready to shoot dead someone whose identity he can’t even make out in the dark. He’s as bad as the Bolsheviks.

Chapter 10

Inexplicably, rather than heading inland and getting as far away from the coast where the boat full of baddies is about to arrive, heading, for example, to the bloody train station, catching a train to Glasgow, reporting everything to the police and putting Saskia under diplomatic protection, the Allies decide instead to hole up in the ruined tower stop the cliffs. Here they Heritage comes round from his concussion, and they have another long debate about their plight.

Here something emerges into the full light which I hadn’t noticed previously which is somewhere along the line, Saskia had told them that she had been told to wait at Huntingtower for ‘her friend’. McCunn makes the super-sensible point that they should get to safety then send this ‘friend’ a message. Saskia obstinately refuses to leave (p.130). This is just stupid and feels like a contrivance to drag out the already thin and creaking plot.

Now McCunn comes up with a hare-brained scheme. Coming into the village several times he’s noticed a big white house (i.e. country house) on a hill. Why doesn’t he go there and try to recruit the laird and his people? He’ll need some evidence or they’ll think him mad, so he says he’ll take Saskia and, improbably, she agrees to go. Meanwhile, they’ll take Eugenie to Mrs Morran’s where she can be put to bed in a nice warm bed. (Good grief, do they think a gang of international terrorists aren’t capable of storming a little old lady’s b&b?)

So first McCunn accompanies both women through gathering rain and wet grass and grounds and along the empty road to Mrs Morran’s cottage. Here the old lady, with the instinctive reverence for aristocracy which conservatives like Buchan like to believe hide in the hearts of every peasant, curtseys to the princess. Then she tells McCunn to go stay in the attic room while the strips, dries and dresses both ladies in good solid highland clothes. McCunn is astonished in the change in Saskia’s appearance once she is wearing:

a heavy tweed skirt cut very short, and thick homespun stockings, which had been made for someone with larger feet than hers. A pair of the coarse low-heeled shoes, which country folk wear in the farmyard, stood warming by the hearth. She still had her russet jumper, but round her neck hung a grey wool scarf, of the kind known as a ‘comforter’. (p.135)

Mrs Morran then makes them a fine breakfast with hot tea as if they had all the time in the world. Eugènie is put to bed and McCunn and Saskia, covered in waterproofs, set off into the rain again, and there is a typically tortuous description of the elaborate route via roads, tracks, heather, moorland and whatnot till they get to the front door of the big house on the hill overlooking the railway station. (Get on a train at the railway station and hie to Glasgow, maybe then to London and complete safety? No.)

Mrs Morran had told McCunn over breakfast that this house belonged to the dashing hero Sir Archibald Roylance, one of Buchan’s recurring characters. The one-armed butler shows them into Roylance who is lounging in a chair bored, reading a book. As McCunn tells him the story, he leaps out of the chair exclaiming, in an impeccably posh dropped h, that ‘It’s more absurd than this shocker I’ve been readin’.’

Chapter 11

Astonished at the turn of events, Roylance bows to the princess and then they converse. He confirms that he was one of Quentin Kennedy’s best friends, they went to the same school together etc. Saskia tells him her story but Buchan says explicitly that she gives more detail now that she is talking to someone of her own class. In particular, she identifies the Great Unknown as a Russian man named Paul Abreskov.

Once he’s heard the full story, Roylance declares he’ll take Saskia to the local head of police and then bring her back here where he can defend her. But Saskia obstinately insists that she return to the hunting tower, to meet with her friend and to support Heritage and the Die-Hards who are fighting on her behalf.

When McCunn expresses his wish to get back in the fight, too, Roylance is inspired to join them. Unfortunately every single member of his staff, including himself, was wounded or crippled in the war. So McCunn tells Roylance to take Saskia to see the cops while he borrows his bicycle to get back to the house. But on the way his bike has a stick through the spokes which sends him flying and knocked unconscious, by two mercenaries paid by Dobson to get him.

Out for a walk, Mrs Morran comes across McMunn’s hat, sees a scuffle took place in the roadside mud, finds the bicycle hidden in bushes and concludes that McMunn has been captured. On the road back she comes across Wee Jaikie and tells him to sound the alarm (p.149).

Chapter 12

When McCunn comes round he’s tied to a tree. He has a couple of pages of regretting ever getting caught up in ‘romance’ and adventures (‘He did not want to die’ etc) before Wee Jaikie appears and cuts most of his bonds but is interrupted by the return of his capturers. These loiter just long enough to taunt him for being captured and sharing with the reader the vital information that the Danish brig has arrived and anchored and the baddies will be landing in half an hour. Then they move off, allowing Wee Jaikie to return and finish cutting McCunn free.

McCunn staggers back up to the public highway and encounters a man squatting down and repairing his motorcycle. He is a handsome young man who McCunn recognises as the man with the Australian accent he met at the Black Bull inn way back at the start of the story. Now the thing is that, during one of the many conversations between McCunn and Heritage about the mysterious Unknown Man who Saskia has told them she’s terribly afraid of, the mastermind of the kidnappers etc, our guys had decided it must be this Australian fellow. So the chap has barely looked up from his tinkering with his bike before McCunn grabs a spanner and takes a wild swing at him. Luckily the man ducks and then stands and punches McCunn, knocking the older man flat.

After some moments of understandable confusion, the man reveals that, far from being the Enemy, he is in fact The Friend who Saskia keeps going on about, the one she promised she’d meet here, the meeting which is her excuse for not doing the sensible thing and catching a train to Glasgow.

He introduces himself as going by the name of Alexander Nicholson but his real name is, of course, Russian, being Alexis Nicolaevitch. He quickly gives his backstory i.e. he left Russia before the war and emigrated to Australia, went back when war broke out, and when Russia signed its ceasefire made his way to join Australians fighting on the western front, and so found himself in Paris after the war.

And, of course, he is not just a ‘friend’ but the fiancé of the beautiful princess (‘She is my kinswoman. She is also my affianced wife’ p.159). He is, in fact, the fairy prince. And of course, desperately interested when McCunn reveals that he, McCunn, knows where the princess is and has been helping her.

So he helps McCunn onto the back of the bike and they set off towards the village but are almost immediately intercepted by Dougal, head of the Die-Hards. He tells the two men that the enemy ships have arrived, three boatloads of 23 or 24 men.

As usual with Buchan the situation feels needlessly complicated. Dougal tells them the enemy are on their way to besiege the tower. Heritage and some of the boys are inside and will put up a stiff fight. But when Lord Roylance returned with Saskia, Dougal insisted on putting them up in the house, allowing the enemy to think they’re in the tower, while they remain safe and at large (why oh why don’t they head away from the blasted enemy?).

Apparently, Roylance and Saskia got to meet the chief constable who believed their story but said it would take a while to rouse his men (really?) so there’ll be no help from that quarter for a while (really? when the country is being invaded by foreign nationals?)

Chapter 13

Cut to John Heritage holed up in the old tower and barely believing that an enlightened modern man could be caught up in an adventure out of romance. He’s alone in the tower but a) notifies the guards (who have managed to get out of their locked rooms in the main house) by shouting at them from the windows, b) and convinces them the princess is with them by waving skirts around and mimicking conversations in French for the guards’ benefit.

Dawn comes up and the morning passes and then the afternoon with nothing much happening except Heritage becoming more and more anxious. He fondly imagines the police, tipped off by Roylance, will arrive any moment and capture the whole pack of enemies. It gets chilly and in a typically waspish incident, Buchan has the one-time poet tear up his own slim volume of verse in order to feed the fire in the tower. You see, once a young man has tasted ‘action’ all his poetic vapourings, as well as his foolish left-wing tendencies, will evaporate.

Finally something happens which is a whole crowd of wet-looking rough sailors arrive and form a siege party. A posh man yells up at him to let them in, but Heritage stoutly refuses. He has been charged with defending the tower and he will stay to the end. When several try the door he shoots. Then they get a battering ram and pound the door again, and he shoots through a crack in the masonry and hits someone. Finally he sees something lob a bomb at the door which explodes in a great crash of timber and he hears the mob pouring into the ground floor of the tower. So Heritage retreats up the stairs to the topmost parapet and prepares to sell his life dear.

But at that moment he sees a white figure come running from the house and with horror realises it is the princess who he thought was miles away. She’s obviously seen the mob besiege and then storm the tower where a brave man is prepared to give his life for her. And so she runs down to within earshot of the mob and harangues them in Russian, then turns and runs off. The enemy forget all about Heritage, pour back out of the tower and set off in pursuit of the girl.

So really, Heritage’s occupation of the tower for most of the day had absolutely no practical value because it didn’t allow the princess to go anywhere, in fact the opposite, as soon as it began to fall she rushed within sight of her enemies. Like so much in Buchan it’s quite exciting and action-packed so long as you don’t actually think about its plausibility.

Chapter 14

Back to Dougal when Sir Archie arrives along with Sime the butler, Carfrae the chauffeur, and McGuffog the gamekeeper, and an armful of guns and two big cartridge-magazines. There is a typically long-winded debate about what to do: Roylance is for going to join Heritage in the tower, but Dougal objects that they would then be presenting themselves as sitting ducks. Dougal; counter-suggests that the ten or so of them go down to the beach heavily armed and fire on the sailors when they try to land, killing many of them. Roylance says that is illegal in a law-abiding country, and so they find themselves pushed back into the strategy of reoccupying the house and withstanding a siege. Innumerable details of how they barricade every door and window, Roylance all the time worried in case the whole thing is a mistake and they get in bad trouble with the law.

Eventually they see the figures coming from the seaward end of the house’s lawns and making for the tower. Panic stations. They hear the shots Heritage fired and then the explosion of the bomb. Saskia is wound up into a fever of concern and suddenly tells Roylance she’s going to save Heritage, wriggles through one of the blocked doors and is gone.

As we saw through Heritage’s eyes, she breasts a ridge and shouts at the attackers who promptly leave the tower to chase her. We see the breathless pursuit through Roylance’s eyes, who shoots the lead enemy who is getting within yards of the tiring girl in the leg. She reaches the ladder up the steep wall to the veranda as the leaders of mob close in but then suddenly a tall man emerges from nowhere, picks her up and forces her up the ladder our boys had leaned against the wall and turns to face the mob, addressing them in Russian. It is, of course, Alexis the fairy prince.

He harangues the mob then turns, races up the ladder, drawing it up after him, and through a part-open door into the house which is quickly barricaded. Saskia recognises her Alesha and runs into his arms. Our chaps hurriedly deploy their forces and then the whole thing turns into the defence of the Alamo or Rorke’s Drift, as the enemy try to break through various doors or windows only to meet fierce resistance.

Despite valiant fighting our team are forced to make an orderly retreat to the first floor landing. Suddenly out of the mob of sailors steps the elegant figure of Paul Abreskov, former lover of Saskia and now Bolshevik leader. In impeccable English he politely says the fight is now over and asks Saskia to come with him.

Obviously Saskia defies him, backed up by Roylance. Suddenly the mood in the mob at the bottom of the stairs changes. Messengers come from outside and they start to waver. Paul makes another plea as Dobson re-enters and tells him they must go now, the police have arrived, they’ll all be arrested. Then an evil look comes into Paul’s eye and he says if he can’t have Saskia, no-one can have her, and he reaches into his pocket, they hear a click and his hand comes out ready to throw.

At that second a figure comes out of nowhere, grabs Paul’s hand and makes a throw into the corner. The bomb Paul meant to throw at our team goes off with a terrific bang, blowing a hole through the fireplace into the next room. When the smoke clears their saviour is revealed to be Heritage, come from the tower, and Paul, like all the attackers, has gone.

Heritage announces that the police have just this moment arrived. Then who the devil was worrying the mob so for the previous ten minutes? At which one of the Die-Hards enters the room, wet and torn and scratched and bleeding, to be greeted by his chief, Dougal. Yes it was the Gorbals Die-Hards who saved the day!

Chapter 15

Goes back in time a few hours to tell things from McCunn’s point of view. Having escaped from being tied up, and mistakenly hitting out at Alexis, he had let the fairy prince and the Die-Hard zoom off on their motorbike and walked to Mrs Morran’s. Here he discovered was the command post of Thomas Yownie. He, the other Die-Hards and especially Mrs Morran are very concerned for nice Mr Heritage. First they hear the bomb go off which blows in the tower door, then Napoleon bursts in to report that he’s seen at least 27 baddies swarming up from the beach. At which point Yownie has a brainwave. Dobson is a lead figure in the opposition and he has a mortal fear of the police. Now night has fallen it is very dark so…why don’t the Die-Hards pretend to be the police?

And that’s what they do in a great comic set-piece which Buchan emphasises by adopting the tones of a military historian or, even better, a bard singing of the deeds of heroes. So he describes how the five or so boys dispose themselves around the building, blowing their police whistles from near and far, engaging in threatening conversations about how many of the mob had been captured, a constable informing his superior that the boats have been seized, Loudon is taken and so on, sowing doubt and fear into their listeners, especially Dobson who keeps rushing into the house to tell the irritated Paul that their cause is lost and they must flee.

There’s then a tense description of how Heritage escaped from the burning tower which was more fraught and dangerous than you’d think since he tried climbing down the outside only to find a great hole blocked his way and had to climb back up to the attic room and fight his way down the red hot stairs where he picked up burns and set his clothes alight before finally making it out into the cool wet heather.

Meanwhile McCunn and Mrs Morran listened to the effective cries of the Die-Hards and then witnessed the arrival of the actual police, some mounted on horses, who gave chase to the fleeing baddies. In the bay two boats are riding and pitching in heavy seas but the third is still ashore waiting for someone. McCunn and Napoleon realise it must be the enemy mastermind and then he’s upon them, rushing through the dark across the grass. Both McCunn and Napoleon try to tackle him, the boy being thrown off and McCunn being shot at at close range, but both fail to stop him and the agile young Russian leaps into the third boat, which quickly casts off.

But the storm is blowing up and the Atlantic breakers growing with each passing minute. From his vantage point ashore McCunn watches the three ships, one by one, founder and sink. Next day the dead bodies are washed ashore.

Chapter 16

Which ties up the loose ends. It’s only a week since McCunn set off on his merry ramble through the countryside but what a week! Now the storm has blown itself out and spring has arrived and the house, which seemed so threatening under lowering skies, now seems handsome set amid beautiful gardens.

1. The affair is hushed up. The police are leaned on by a superior not to make a report. The coroner gives death by drowning of unknown sailors to the baddies. Loudon is found dead at the foot of the cliff and the papers give him a glowing obituary as a sound member of the community (cf the glowing obituary given to Andrew Lumley who everyone thinks is a leading light of the community and only a handful know is the leader of a wicked international conspiracy in The Power-House).

Anyway, this is a fairy tale so all the goodies live happily ever after. 2. Some of the Russkies survive the storm and Alexis, in fine aristocratic style, forgives them and pays their passages to British Dominions where they can start new lives.

3. Saskia and Alexis walk hand and hand on the sunny greensward with their lives ahead of them.

4. Dickson and Heritage can see the lovers from where they’re sitting. Dickson is worried that Heritage will be devastated that Saskia, who he was in love with, is affianced to another man. But on the contrary, Heritage has the true gallant knight’s happiness that he served a beautiful princess. And he goes on to deliver an Author’s Message:

‘The trouble about you, Dogson,’ says Heritage, ‘is that you’re a bit of an anarchist. All you false romantics are. You don’t see the extraordinary beauty of the conventions which time has consecrated. You always want novelty, you know, and the novel is usually the ugly and rarely the true. I am for romance, but upon the old, noble classic lines.’ (p.207)

Which reminds me of the huge biography of Lord Salisbury I read a year ago, a lifelong arch-conservative whose philosophy was summed up in a pithy quote:

Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

If you are convinced that change, any change, is for the worst, then of course you will try your damnedest to prevent any change and conserve things just the way they are. And that is the conservative mindset.

5. Dickson wanders on and looks down on the camp of the Die-Hards who are camping in the house’s empty grounds. He reflects on how few chances they’ve had in life and decides he will adopt them as his wards, house and clothe and feed them and pay for their educations.

6. Throughout the tumultuous week McCunn’s wife, referred to only as ‘Mamma’, has been away at a spa. Now she returns home to find her husband looking tanned and with a few cuts and bruises. He seats her by the fire and treats her to some of their maid’s scones. Then McCunn ends the novel by taking out and giving to her a beautiful necklet of emeralds. It is, of course, a gift from the grateful Saskia and Mamma is delighted.

Thoughts

I watch too many movies for my own good. The thing about American films is how smoothly (by and large) they are plotted and how swift the action is. By complete contrast, Buchan’s shockers come from another era, when readers (apparently) enjoyed rickety plots and an extreme amount of circumstantial detail.

The descriptions of McCunn or Heritage or one or other of the Die-Hards creeping through heather, hiding in bushes, fording the river, sneaking across the lawn, doubling back on this road, that track, this path, that bit of beach or wood or orchard or whatnot, initially add atmosphere but eventually become very wearing.

Arguably, these long, long descriptions of the scenery the various protagonists traipse or creep or hurry through is a central characteristic of Buchan’s novels. All the kind of thing which would be immediately dropped if American scriptwriters got their hand on the plot, stripped out the persiflage and made it simpler and more coherent.

The comic climax, with the Die-Hards running round pretending to be the police, entirely makes sense, in its own terms, as a comic scene in a comic novel. But plenty of the other scenes – for example the immense fuss surrounding McCunn’s train trip to Glasgow with the princess’s jewels – feel clunky and over-detailed.

The basic premise, of a Russian princess bearing priceless jewels hiding in a remote Scottish house make reasonable sense and you can imagine it being the workable premise of a movie or TV series – but almost everything else about the story (starting with how she is imprisoned but her captives make barely any efforts to ask where she’s hidden them) would have to be radically rethought to achieve something like grown-up plausibility.

The rejuvenating effect of adventure stories

It’s a recurring theme in the six Buchan novels I’ve just read, that adventures make you young again.

But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. ‘I haven’t been doing badly for an old man,’ he reflected with glee. What, oh, what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a Bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor’s and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairy-tale Princess. I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud, and thirsted for many more in the same line. ‘Gosh, but I’m seeing life,’ was his unregenerate conclusion. (p.133)

But not just McCunn:

Sir Archie was never very clear afterwards about the events of the next hour. The Princess was in the maddest spirits, as if the burden of three years had slipped from her and she was back in her first girlhood. (p.183)

When I mentioned this to a friend she pointed out that it’s not just the character who is rejuvenated by these boyish adventures, it is the reader, too, who feels young again. The rejuvenation of the character in the text mimics or echoes the juvenilisation of anybody who reads what is, in effect, an adventure story for children.

And this is because, in this type of adventure yarn, we the readers know beyond any doubt that the good guys will win – and, indeed, that there are clearly identified good guys and bad guys. (Almost as simple-minded as US foreign policy.) There is a reassuring, comforting predictability about these ‘shockers’ so that immersing yourself means that all the complexities of adult life not only fall away from the characters, but from the reader as well.

After that Dickson leaves him [Heritage] and wanders among the thickets on the edge of the Huntingtower policies above the Laver glen. He feels childishly happy, wonderfully young, and at the same time supernaturally wise. (p.208)

And, of course, the stars of the story are a group of slum children, ranging from teenage years to toddlers. It is a child’s adventure story which features a gang of spunky kids, themselves readily envisionable as cartoon characters.

The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, currently on display at Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace at the Photographers’ Gallery until 2 June 2024

The character of Russia

‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘I cannot make any one understand – except a Russian. My country has been broken to pieces, and there is no law in it; therefore it is a nursery of crime … My people are not wickeder than others, but for the moment they are sick and have no strength … Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilising everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. Today that is true about criminals… It is not Bolshevism, the theory, you need fear, for that is a weak and dying thing. It is crime, which to-day finds its seat in my country…’ (p.142)

Exactly a hundred years later I’m listening to current affairs programmes which countenance the idea that Russia might trigger a third world war, while Putin’s security state works day and night to undermine the economies, infrastructure and culture of the West. So plus ça change…

In praise of the middle classes

In contrast with a Russia that has been run by proletarians, commissars, a communist tyranny, and now oligarchs and yet another dictator, Buchan has his character Alesha, the exiled Russian aristocrat, deliver a paean to the value of the British middle classes, which is also a tribute to the unflappable nature of the book’s hero, Dickson McCunn:

‘You will not find him in Russia. He is what we call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.’ (p.206)

1977 BBC Scotland dramatisation

Credit

Huntingtower by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1922. References are to the 2008 World Classics paperback edition.

John Buchan reviews

John Buchan reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on March 1, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Novel, Russia

Tagged A Glasgow fairy tale, adventure story, Alesha, Alexander Nicholson, Alexis Nicolaevitch, Antisemitism, Archibald Roylance, Auchenlochan, Auld Bull, Australia, BBC Scotland, Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, Carfrae, Carrick, Dalquharter, Dickson McCunn, Dobson, Dogson, Dougal, Dougal Crombie, Eugènie, fairy tale, fiction, Galloway, Glasgow, Gorbals Die-Hards, Huntingtower, John Buchan, John Heritage, Kirkmichael, Leithen, Lord Roylance, Lord Salisbury, Loudon, McGuffog, Mearns Street, Mr Caw, Mrs Morran, Mrs Phemie Morran, Napoleon, narrative, novel, Paton and Linklater, Peer Pairson, Phemie Morran, poetry, Quentin Kennedy, Robert Baden-Powell, Romance, Russia, Russian Civil War, russian revolution, Saskia, Scotland, shocker, Sir Archibald Roylance, Sir Edward Leithen, the Cruives, the Die-Hards, the Spanish Steps, Thomas Yownie, thriller, Wee Jaikie

Posted by Simon on March 1, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/01/huntingtower-john-buchan/

Zanzibar by Giles Foden (2002)

‘My dear boy, this is Africa.’
(Beaten-up old Brit, Ralph Leggatt, to naive young American, Nick Karolides, in Zanzibar, page 97)

This is a 389-page thriller about the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa:

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998. More than 220 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many a thriller it opens with short, elliptical sections devoted to a handful of disparate characters. Only slowly do we find out more about them and begin to realise that their paths are ‘destined’ to cross. They are:

Khaled al-Kidr, native of Zanzibar who, aged 21, comes home to find his mother and father dead with their throats cut. He wastes his inheritance on drinking and women until an uncle figure, Zayn Mujuj, confides that his father worked for a secret Islamic organisation and was murdered by American-Israeli agents (p.53). At which point Khaled signs up for jihad, travelling to work for ‘the Sheikh. in Sudan and then onto an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where, after extensive training, he is flattered to be chosen for a special mission.

Jack Queller, a former CIA agent and expert on the Arab world, conduit of resources to the mujahideen in the 1980s (p.306), who had his arm amputated after a firefight in Afghanistan, is now a consultant at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (known as DS), in his personal life haunted by the death from cancer of his wife who we wasn’t there to support, lives an isolated depressed existence on a seafront property on Martha’s Vineyard (p.141).

Nick Karolides, an American of Greek descent, a marine biologist, taking up a new job on a coral reef protection scheme off the island of Zanzibar. Unhappily haunted by the death of his father who was a keen diver till a shark bit off his arm and he died on the way to hospital, whereupon his mother retreated into (Greek Orthodox) religious fervour.

Miranda Power, keen young American State Department trainee who, as we meet her, has been given her first posting, as an Executive Assistant, Logistical and Security, to the American Embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By about page 50 we’ve been introduced to these characters and have a strong feeling that their lives are going to intersect.

(Notice how all the western characters are American. So quite apart from the extraordinary range and depth of research demonstrated in the text – about life in Zanzibar or marine biology or al-Qaeda – Foden is also ventriloquising the lives and speech patterns and culture of a range of American characters, a distinct new departure from the British or African characters depicted in his previous novels.)

A book teaches readers how to read it. By about page 70, we’ve realised that Foden is going to be interleaving, interweaving and interspersing narratives about these different characters. It’s going to be very episodic. This leads to several results:

it creates narrative tension, because you realise they’re going to meet and interact so the interest is in seeing how, and with what results
it creates dramatic irony i.e. juxtaposing characters who see the same thing but from different angles (the huge example is the completely different interpretation the Americans and al-Qaeda give to the previous 20 years of history)
this irony can be used for comic effect, as in the chapter which juxtaposes very short, half-page fragments of dialogue of the two enemies: between, on the one hand, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in their Afghan hideout; and lectures being given about Osama bin Laden by a series of CIA and security experts (we see these lectures because they’re attended by one of the central character, Miranda)

This kind of jumping between scenes featuring characters who are going to eventually meet up in a fateful event is standard operating procedure for many thrillers. Or you could describe the effect as musical, the deliberate counterpointing of different characters, atmospheres and motifs. Or maybe compare it to collage, in art – like cutting out images from magazines and pasting them next to each other in unexpected juxtapositions.

Cast

Page numbers refer to when someone is first introduced, or first speaks, or when a significant fact about them is mentioned. I suppose it’s a kind of index of characters. Or cast list.

Khaled al-Kidr, young recruit to al-Qaeda
Queller, retired badly injured American agent (p.7), now works at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS (p.47), first name Jack, used to be top Arabist under Reagan (p.52), full title (p.52)
Lucy, Queller’s wife who died from cancer and he feels guilty about not having been around to support
Nick Karolides, marine biologist, born and raised in Florida – tall, tanned, handsome, fit from his daily swim
his mother (unnamed), who’s become a religious fanatic since the death of his father (p.14)
Nick’s dad (unnamed), keen diver, who had his arm bitten off by a shark and died on the way to hospital
Dino, wiry 60-year-old owner of Dino’s Wine Shop, was diving with Nick’s dad when the shark attacked (p.20)
Inspector Chikambwa, unfriendly and (it turns out) corrupt marine policeman on Zanzibar, the USAID contact for the project Nick goes to Zanzibar to work on (p.27)
George Darvil, Nick’s predecessor who died in suspicious circumstances, found drowned, his boat riddled with holes (p.28)
Mr de Souza, proprietor of the Macpherson Ruins Hotel (p.29), very short and extraordinarily beautiful (p.32)
Leggatt, European clove farmer who also does boat tours, Ralph by name (p.82), made his money in copper and silver then diamonds in Sierra Leone (p.121), runs a clove farm, owns a yacht, the Winston Churchill (p.96)
Zayn Mujuj, changes Khaled’s life by recruiting him for jihad (p.45), big man, ‘enormous’ (p.230), Palestinian (p.222)
Ahmed the German, Osama bin Laden’s companion and cameraman (p.45) wears a Sport Team Osnabrück t-shirt, which becomes a leitmotif identifying him as the bomber (pages 143 and 282)
Yousef, al-Qaeda bomb maker (p.45), last name Mourad (p.295)
Ayman al-Zawahari, leader of Egyptian Jihad (p.62)
Muhammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military commander (p.62)
al-Qaeda, first mentioned (p.43), described (p.66)
the Taliban, keeping guard over the al-Qaeda base (p.50)
Miranda Power, executive assistant, Logistical and Security, American Embassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (p.51), Boston Irish, dad a cop (pages 151 and 184)
Morton Altenburg, Director of Operations, FBI (p.55), young and successful and scornful of Queller’s obsession with al-Qaeda
General Tom Kirby, Department of Defence (p.56)
Osama bin Laden (p.62) described by Queller (p.66 and elsewhere)
Tim Catmull, Brit working for the Department for International Development (DFID) (p.78)
Sayeed, boy accompanying the thugs who beat up Leggatt and tie him up on Lyly before Nick comes to his rescue; who they coax down from the rigging of Leggatt’s yacht; and who Leggatt gives a job
Ray Delahoya, American comms guy at the Dar embassy (p.103), cheerfully vulgar, likes junk food and low culture, apparently gay (fancies the tough Marine guards, pages 245 and 249)
Turtle Mo, a big imposing East African trawler baron, who Nick hires his diving gear from (p.126)
Olivier Pastoreau, Belgian land reclaimer who works for the European Development Fund, proud owner of a handsome white motor cruiser, the Cythère (p.130), amusingly pessimistic
Clive Bayard, only African American in the Dar Embassy (p.244)
Nisha Ghai, Asian employee in the embassy (p.244), killed in the bombing
Lee Denham, the one intelligence officer at the Dar embassy (p.245)
Corporal Rossetti, Marine on duty when the bomb goes off, helps badly injured Ray (p.247)
Juma, gate guard at the embassy
Dr Macintyre, embassy physician (p.259)
President Bill Clinton phones the chargé d’affaires’ house where the wounded have been brought to condole with them (p.262), condemns the attacks on TV (p.270), makes an extensive speech on TV (pages 305 to 306), forced to defend himself in the Starr investigation that he perjured himself lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (p.325), announces retaliation against al-Qaeda (p.331)
William Cohen, US Secretary of Defence, seen on TV condemning the bombing (p.270)
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, seen on TV (p.270)
National Security Director Sandy Berger, explaining America’s retaliatory strikes against Sudan (p.332)
Omar el-Bashir, President of Sudan, calling the American attack on the pharmaceuticals factory ‘a terrorist act’ (p.339)

Part 1

Nick settles into his new post as USAID coral guy in Zanzibar, meeting locals friendly and unfriendly. Miranda flies out and settles into her new job at the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Khaled undergoes further training in preparation for his mission to blow up the same US Embassy.

As usual Foden is very, very good indeed, supernaturally good, at imagining these people’s lives and thoughts, and the hundreds of details, interiors, accessories, food and drink, cars and bikes and boats and tropical stuff they interact with. It is incredibly well imagined.

Nick gets to know a raddled, grumpy old Brit named Leggatt via an adventure. He had observed Leggatt’s yellow boat slowly cruising across the bay in the same direction every day. The hotel owner tells him he (Leggat) is visiting a small island named Lyly. Nick decides to go explore in his dinghy and outboard. He finds the island and beaches his dinghy and walks along the shore where, through binoculars, he spots Leggatt digging up turtle eggs. The bastard! But then a native dhow approaches and two men and a boy get out, swim ashore. Nick thinks they must be nature wardens so is astonished when they beat up Leggatt, tie him to a tree, and take all the eggs themselves. The attackers head back to their boat, Nick runs over and unties Leggatt (he’s bleeding from the beating), they run back to Nick’s boat and start the engine and motor round the coast to find the boy up in the sails of Leggatt’s boat, ripping up the sails and rigging with a knife. He has the idea to fire a safety/rescue flare at the bad guys’ dhow, where it sets fire to their sails. Nick and Leggatt get to the latter’s yacht, climb up the side ladder, Nick tying his dinghy to the stern, Leggatt starts the yacht’s motor and they chug away from the island and the burning dhow. Nick corners the boy who is quickly subdued.

Leggatt explains that he is not the bad guy, he is the one trying to protect the turtle eggs by digging them up and moving them to a secret location. When Nick naively suggests reporting the egg thieves and boy to the USAID contact, Inspector Chikambwa, Leggatt snorts with laughter an says he’s corrupt and commission the stealing of the eggs, among many other scams (p.97).

Leggatt tells him the island’s named Lyly which comes from the Swahili lala which means sleep. It’s 2 miles wide with a lighthouse on the highest point, built by a Brit in the 1930s. Nowadays it’s owned by a rich Saudi. Leggatt tells Nick about the Black African slaughter of Arab civilians soon after Zanzibar became independent i.e. 1964 (p.99).

Zanzibar: Arabs, Africans and a forgotten legacy of slavery and ethnic cleansing

Leggatt’s an old hand, he’s been fishing and monitoring these waters for decades, owns a house and several boats, made his pile from diamonds. He drops Nick and his dinghy off at the hotel. A few days later Leggatt takes Nick fishing for barracuda, a strong fighting fish. This fishing expedition is a set-piece which makes you think Foden must have done it, and been shown how to do it, in order to produce such a detailed description (pages 112 to 115).

There’s a lovely description of Nick rowing a rowboat back to his oceanside hotel (the Macpherson Ruins Hotel). I used to row at school, so I know exactly what he means (p.100).

Meanwhile Miranda settles into a completely new society. I think we are meant to register the decisions she makes as small moral compromises, accustoming herself to the grotesque poverty of most of the population, while she licks ice cream by the embassy pool. She soon hires a watchman and a ‘housegirl’ for her accommodation in Oyster Bay, as all the other ex-pats do. She falls in with Ray Delahoya, cheerful, fun, not a threat or boyfriend material (only a hundred pages later is it made explicit that he’s gay).

We’re shown security reports she files which are conscientious. If the reader is paying attention they’ll spot that a character described in bin Laden’s entourage is caught on security camera himself filming the Embassy layout, from outside the walls (p.123).

Part 2

Carries on in the same style. Khaled and the al-Qaeda team (Khaled’s mentor Zayn and Yusef the bomber) drive south through Afghanistan into Pakistan, fly to Dubai, to Muscat, then direct to Zanzibar (p.139). The movement of their van is picked up by spy satellites and the message sent to the CIA etc in America. Queller is asked to comment and thinks they’re embarking on an attack and need to be monitored. But his suggestion is shot down by his enemy within the CIA, Alternburg. Queller really hates Altenburg because he a) nixed a spy operation he’d set up and b) has been politicking to get Queller sacked as a consultant.

Nick and Miranda finally meet, as he’s in Dar to pick up the scuba gear he had sent on from the States. She bumps into him, they get talking, they go for a swim. She notices he is tall, dark, fit and handsome, almost like the hero of a movie. She gets into a bit of trouble in the sea; is pulled out by his strong arms etc. She gives him a lift into town and when he says he’s shopping, drives him past security into the Embassy where he fills up at the PX, the American supermarket found in all overseas bases.

Nick goes on a solo mission to Lyly, the deserted island where he and Leggatt had the adventure with the turtle egg thieves, ‘the island of sleep’. Beaching his dinghy he scratches his ankle. He has come surprisingly unprepared, without a toilet bag, for example or, more importantly, sunblock and a sunhat. He explores the small derelict house and abandoned mosque, manages to fire up the lighthouse light using paraffin he’s brought but half-blinds himself in the process. Diving through the spectacular coral, he finds a sea cave which, amazingly, appears to have Arab writing carved into the (slime-covered) walls (p.171). Later, Leggatt explains that it’s part of a whole cave and tunnel network where slaves used to throw recalcitrant or recaptured runaway slaves. Oubliettes. Hence the long-ago writing.

Nick invites Miranda to come visit Zanzibar from Dar for a weekend. He takes her (and the reader) on a tour of the sights. (I wonder if it’s a safe place for a tourist to visit, now, in 2023.) He takes the traditional male role i.e. showing her round, explaining history etc. She takes the traditional female role, passive, deferring to his knowledge. When they dance he has ‘strong hands on her hips’ etc. All very conventionally heteronormative and well mannered. In the refined, polite tone of this book no-one fantasises or masturbates or farts or menstruates, as they do in Leslie Thomas’s vulgar comedies. Makes me realise that the thriller genre is not only serious (obviously) but also, in a strange way, prissy, at some level, respectable. It’s the tiniest details but when Miranda is upset she doesn’t cry, as you or I might, but weeps, like the heroine of a Racine play. Even when it’s at its most gritty, there’s a kind of high-minded decorum about the thriller genre.

Anyway, I didn’t like this lovey-dovey stuff at all. Also the romance dialogue is very stilted and, well, boring. Next day, Nick takes Miranda to a beachfront restaurant then onto a tropical garden where he finally kisses her.

Something had happened, a change had taken place, the needle had swung around in the compass of her heart. (p.188)

Foden is a very savvy writer indeed, capable of deploying lots of different registers and styles. Surely he knows he’s writing Mills and Boon here. For the lolz I googled ‘Mills and Boon top titles’ and found the following: ‘Song of the Waves’; ‘The Emerald Garden’; ‘Tabitha in Moonlight’; ‘Rapture of the Desert’; ‘Whispering Palms’. To which could be added these passages from ‘Romance in Zanzibar’. The only slight fly in the ointment being that we know this is all heading towards a monstrous terrorist attack. I wonder if one or both of them will be killed in it. Or maimed. Both Foden’s previous novels contain scenes of brutal violence and bump off characters you’d become quite attached to. I suppose I should savour the kisses in the tropical garden while I can…

Nick persuades Leggatt to take him and Miranda back to Lyly. He shows her how to scuba dive, they frolic, find their way to an isolated spot of beach and have sex, mercifully passed over in silence and undescribed. Then an incident where they find a huge mamba snake uncovering the turtle eggs with a view to eating them, and Nick catches it with a forked branch and throws it into the undergrowth. More interesting that her being lulled and seduced is the way Nick starts to get on her nerves, a bit charmless, a bit clumsy, unempathetic, and then assuming masculine ownership of her.

The al-Qaeda cell

What happens next utterly transforms the tone and feel of the book. When they’d left Lyly, a powerful cruiser had crossed their path, apparently en route to the island. Miranda had looked at its crew and skipper through the telephoto lens of her camera and nearly taken a photo but then it veered away.

A day or so later Leggatt and Nick had gone back to the island and discovered there were two dhows and a cruiser pulled up. Nick had gone inshore in the diving gear and this section opens with him watching them from a distance, going in and out of the buildings where he slept, apparently Arabs, some sporting sub-machineguns.

Then a huge storm comes up which sinks the Churchill. Leggatt and Nick manage to abandon ship and get into the dinghy and cut the painted just before the big yacht goes down. With heroic strength Nick rows the dinghy through the coral barrier (guided by Leggatt) and ashore. Leggatt says they’ll never make it back to the mainland in a rowing boat; the only thing for it is to steal one of the dhows and to do it now, in the dead of night and while the aftersqualls of the storm are still making bad weather. They wade through the thick jungle, emerge on the side of the island where the Arabs are, try to sneak across the beach but are spotted. The Arabs open up with the machine guns, killing Leggatt and brushing Nick’s forehead. When he comes to, he is trussed up hand and foot and the enormous Arab, Zayn, whacks him with the flat of a machete, asking if he is American, hitting him, insulting him, till he says he’ll be back tomorrow to interrogate him and…throws Nick out the lighthouse window, attached by a rope, so that he is dangling upside down, his head bangs against the outside wall of the lighthouse and he loses consciousness again.

See what I mean by changing the tone of the narrative? We were in the western world of pampered tourists, all ice cream, skindiving and scotch on the veranda. Now we are in the world of jihad and unmitigated brutality.

Thing is, the way Zayn slit their throats reminded Khaled of how he returned home that terrible evening to find his parents’ throats cut. Zayn always told him it was done by Israeli-American agents but…but what if Zayn did it? Plus Zayn has been riding Khaled, pushing him and bullying and belittling him, on one occasion pushing his face right into their campfire. This isn’t jihad. This is sadistic bullying. And so…

So he goes up to the top of the lighthouse, hauls Nick’s unconscious body up and over the window sill, then leans down with a knife…Next morning the American is gone and Zayn angrily kicks and punches Khaled to find out what happened, at which Khaled shows him the American’s ear, says he cut it off as punishment then threw the body in the lagoon. Zayn is angry because he wanted to interrogate the American and also suspicious, as is the reader.

Miranda

Cut to Miranda at the US embassy and we discover that they didn’t have sex that time, on the island. I misread it. They were goofing in the waves, walked up the beach out of sight of Leggatt and lay down…there’s a gap in the text…which resumes with ‘Later, they walked back round to the fire’ (p.197). I misread this as them having sex. No. Because now, in this section, Miranda wonders whether she should have had sex with Nick, and worries whether the kiss she let him give her in the tropical gardens ‘meant more’.

I’m not sure, but I think all this fussing about lovey-dovey is meant to be an indicator of how shallow and naive Miranda is, on a par with her not understanding why America is so hated, and being upset by slavery and African poverty i.e. generally not understanding where she is. Conversely, maybe she is there to bring out the extraordinary distance between the poorest people on the earth and the richest.

7 August 1998: the bombing

Miranda is going about her normal day when, on page 252, the bomb goes off. It was 7 August 1998. The Wikipedia article gives forensic details about the make-up of the explosives then states that at Dar es Salaam 11 were killed and 85 wounded (p.260), considerably less than the bomb which went off at the Nairobi embassy, killing 213 and wounding about 4,000 (p.261).

Part 3

Hundreds of FBI, CIA, medical and forensics experts fly in from the Sates, including the prick Altenburg and kindly old Queller. These personality traits are on display when Miranda finds herself being given the third degree in an interview by Altenburg, and then horrified to find he has gotten her suspended for dereliction of duty for not inspecting the van which is now thought to have been carrying the explosives. Distraught, her world in tatters, her self confidence shot, she goes home weeping.

Queller sees all this and takes steps, calling up his old buddy Madeleine Allbright to ask for Miranda to be reinstated and assigned to him as his personal assistant. Which is what happens.

I thought the buildup to the explosion might be tense and exciting but it isn’t. It just happens, out of the blue, while Miranda’s going about a mundane morning’s work. If ‘grip’ or excitement there is, it comes from a completely different direction, which is The Hunt For Nick Karolides. Miranda becomes increasingly obsessed with the way he hasn’t been in touch, hasn’t replied to phone calls or emails. So flies from Dar to Stone Town (capital of Zanzibar) then taxis out to the Macpherson Ruins Hotel whose owner, Mr de Souza, is just as perplexed by Nick’s prolonged absence.

When she goes out to Leggatt’s farm she finds him also absent, but persuades the boy Leggatt hired, Sayeed, to organise a boat to take her back to Lyly. On the beach at Lyly they find the rotted body of Leggatt with an ear missing. So the reader realises it wasn’t Nick’s ear that Khaled cut off.

This happens on page 302. The book is 389 pages long. In these last 90 or so pages the interest focuses on two things: Miranda’s search for Nick; and the bitter contest between the two American intelligence operatives, Altenburg (who thinks the al-Qaeda connection is poppycock) and Queller, who is sure of it.

In a flashback we learn that Queller not only helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan but met Osama bin Laden several times, helped channel funds which not only armed the fighters but built airstrips, the cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains etc (pages 306 to 315). And then, extraordinarily, that it was Osama bin Laden himself who shot Queller in the elbow at their last meeting, as a warning to him, and all American ‘crusaders’ to get out of Muslim lands.

Where is Nick?

On page 317 (of 389) we discover what happened to Nick. We haven’t seen or heard of him since page 236, so he’s been absent for 80 pages or a fifth of the text. Presumably, one aim of this is to build up suspense about his fate, amplified by Miranda’s growing concern.

We find him cast adrift in a rowing boat without oars on the open ocean. He vaguely remembers someone bundling him into the boat then throwing away the oars and himself jumping overboard – presumably Khaled, saving his life. Over several pages we watch the effects of exposure, heatstroke, sunburn and dehydration. Nick has both ears and is unharmed except for the rope burns and where the bullet grazed his head but he quickly degenerates after a few days into a burned, blistered, hallucinating wreck.

Until he is picked up by a passing Greek cargo ship. He sees it emerge from the blurred horizon, stands up, waves his arms and shouts etc. The Greek crew wash him, slowly give him water, then soft food and restore him to health. Lucky, eh? Big ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Nick is of Greek heritage so when he starts speaking Greek, the crew and captain rally to his support. Presumably this is thrown in to explain/justify why the captain lets himself be persuaded to sail close to Zanzibar and not to dock in the main port – where he’d incur ruinous charges – but get close enough to the Macpherson hotel to be rowed ashore.

Which explains why, on the night when Miranda has flown to Zanzibar and taken a taxi to the hotel to enquire about him, and persuades the manager to let her sleep in Nick’s room…she hears the chalet door opening and…Grand Reunion! He staggers into her arms, tries to explain, she makes him have a shower while she gets a first aid kit from de Souza, makes him lie on the bed, tends his wounds like a good nursey, they lie facing each other, they touch, they make love.

His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more. (p.330)

Well…’Romance in Zanzibar’. Apparently, Mills and Boon novels are organised into sub-genres, one of which is ‘Heroes – Enjoy a thrilling story filled with danger and finding love no matter what.’ Well, these passages are a fine example.

He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her. (p.330)

I’m not sure this is what a man who’s just returned from days in an open boat, who’s still suffering from wounds to his head and knee, which are still bleeding, would be up for. But the conventions of the thriller genre override any kind of realism.

Bill Clinton

It’s a funny mix, this text, because it goes from ripe Mills and Boon-type soft porn to our newly committed couple watching President Bill Clinton on TV explaining why he ordered US air strikes on the al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a complex of training bases near Khost in Afghanistan (p.332). Nick and Miranda consume the TV news in puzzlement at the randomness of this target.

Passages describing the process whereby the targets were listed, assessed and agreed, and then the process of launching the missiles, read like magazine journalism, possibly from a military magazine. At one point Foden directly quotes a US Navy press release describing the operation of Tomahawk cruise missiles (pages 335 to 339).

Foden gives a roundup of responses to the US cruise missile attacks which reads like a Wikipedia article, giving quotes from the President of Sudan, the Taliban government, Arab newspapers etc, all of which describe the Americans as war criminals operating outside the law. Tony Blair gives Clinton his whole-hearted support. This is all very interesting but a) not really a novel and b) was all to be swept away in the vast tsunami of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The US retaliation prompted Foden to snide and snarky remarks about America being ‘one nation under God, indivisible etc’ which feel like cheap sarcasm, unworthy of his extraordinary gifts.

A passage describing Osama bin Laden’s thoughts as he rides a horse, far from where the missiles struck, with his closest lieutenants – Ayman Zawahari and Muhammad Atef – and personal bodyguards.

Khaled

A passage describing Khaled al-Khidr, praying in the mosque in Jambangona, on the island of Pemba where his parents came from and his jumbled thoughts, containing an impressive number of quotes from the Holy Koran and Khaled’s theological speculations, in particular whether Zayn, with his bullying and murder, led him from the path of righteousness.

The passage quoting Bill Clinton describing America as ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ (p.337) is deliberately paralleled by Khaled thoughts about the redeemed in Islam, ‘one nation, indivisible’ (p.345) – just one of many examples where Foden juxtaposes the value systems of ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ to bring out how their belief systems are so similar and yet so different.

Khaled is giddy with guilt, confused, wanders the streets of his home town in utter confusion, falls to his knees.

Cut to Zayn Mujuj, the big strong killer. He and Khaled had escaped after the bombing and gone to meet the cargo ship appointed to pick them up but it never showed. Instead they moored off the island of Pemba for a few days, Zayn calling the Sheikh for daily updates. We learn that Zayn, himself, is motivated by revenge, namely the wiping out of his family in Beirut, by the Israeli air force and the Christian phalange. Maybe he’s talking about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982. This is the source of his burning hatred. And now we learn Khaled was right to suspect that Zayn killed his (Khaled’s parents); he did, as punishment for embezzling al-Qaeda funds (p.348).

Now the boy has disappeared. Zayn phones the Sheikh on the sat phone. They speak in light code. Zayn says the boy (the finch) knows too much and must be eliminated. He takes a dinghy from the boat up the creek to Jambangona.

Exciting climactic chase

Foden reverts to small snippets giving different characters’ points of view: this is meant to jack up the tension. Thus, Queller gets a call from Altenburg back in Washington telling him SIGINT has picked up those sat phone calls off Pemba: could he go and investigate. He asks Nick and Miranda (instead of, say, some US marines or security forces) to help him. They putter off to Pemba in the Belgian guys’ boat (seeing as all the others have been lost earlier in the story). Meanwhile the killer Zayn has arrived in Jambangona with a big knife in his long boots. Who will get to Khaled first? Will Khaled recognise Nick as the American he saved? Will Nick recognise Khaled as the boy who saved him, dragging him half-conscious into the rowing boat and casting it adrift back on Lyly?

Zayn doesn’t find Khaled in Jambangona and so chugs upriver to Chake Chake, roaming the streets with murder in his heart. Nick, Miranda and Queller arrive at the map reference given by Alternburg to find nothing so they, also, chug upriver to Chake Chake, and here they spot the same motor cruiser they saw an age ago cutting them off as they returned from Lyly, the terrorist’s boat.

The climax comes when our heroes discover that they have arrived in town at the exact same moment when an annual festival takes place, the mchezo wa ngombe, the game of the bull, when brave youths taunt and try and jump onto two enraged bulls (named Bom-Bom and Wembe, I thought you’d like to know) in an arena. Lucky coincidence. Also improbable is that, at this moment of peril for his life, Khaled, throwing caution to the winds, tries his luck in the arena against the bulls. And that Zayn, attracted by the hullabaloo, sees him. And that Nick, amid the pressing crowd, sees both of them, tells Queller, and starts elbowing towards them. You can see how this has the logic more of a move than a novel.

Long story short: Zayn chases Khaled across the arena; one of the bulls gores and tramples him; Khaled escapes over the arena fence, through the crowd, and down backstreets, pursued by Nick, Miranda and Queller. First he’s cornered in a tourist shop, then escapes, then Nick tackles him, Queller steps forward with a gun, but Khaled grabs a dagger from a stall and Miranda and puts it to her neck, backing away as in ten thousand American movies. He drags her down to the quayside and into the terrorists’ boat, finds the key, powers up, casts off and motors away, hotly pursued by Nick and Queller, suddenly feeling his age, feeling tired, overcome by a sense of depression and failure.

Out of the crowded streets emerges Zayn, bleeding and furious to see his boat cruising away so he cuffs a white tourist off his jet ski and sets off in hot pursuit. Now the narrative has gone full James Bond.

Showdown on Lyly

Khaled steers out to the island of sleep, location of quite a few nightmares by now. Nick and Queller watch him beach and drag Miranda up the sand into the jungle. Queller shoots a way through the coral breach and they, also, beach their boat. Nick tells Queller to stay behind and guard the boat, takes Queller’s gun and sets off in pursuit. God, the excitement!

Khaled drags terrified Miranda through the caves at gunpoint. Nick gets lost pursuing. Queller investigates various jungle trails and on returning to the beach notices a jet ski lying on its side. Zayn is clearly badly injured, needs a stick to lean on. Queller, binocular distance away, takes a marlinspike out of the boat and slowly sets off in pursuit.

It’s called ‘suspense’ but what it boils down to is, Who is going to die? Khaled and Zayn, I’d guess, and possibly Queller, for his sins in aiding bin Laden. But it’s anyone’s guess; Foden is a brutal writer and hasn’t hesitated to wipe out sympathetic characters in previous books.

In the slimy caves Khaled undergoes a crisis, becomes hysterical , tells Miranda about Zayn killing his parents, admits involvement in the bombing, no longer knows what is jihad, what is righteous, drops the knife, pulls out a gun he found on Zayn’s boat, then disappears into the darkness.

On the beach Queller gets to the lighthouse then loses the trail. Turns round just as Zayn smacks him in the face with a plank of wood, grabs the marlinspike, lifts it to skewer Queller.

Nick finds Miranda cowering, shivering, in the caves.

Queller looks up at the man about to kill him when there’s a gunshot and, as in a thousand American movies, a hole appears in Zayn’s forehead, he shudders, and falls dead across the terrified American. Khaled appears, explaining – to Queller – who shot Zayn. He then delivers his Speech the speech which explains his Change of Heart. It is time for him to stop killing, to turn to do good work for Muslims. Queller asks him to come back with them but Khaled very reasonably says, just because I stop trusting al-Qaeda doesn’t mean I start trusting America. Then he’s gone.

Soon afterwards Nick and Miranda appear and pull the big heavy dead Zayn off Queller. Khaleed steals the Belgian’s very expensive cruiser and shoots holes in his own one, so our guys are stranded. Nick and Miranda wash the slime off themselves in the sea, they all sleep in the lighthouse, next morning helicopters find them.

The end

Nick, Miranda and Zayn’s body are choppered back to the mainland where they find themselves celebrities, the story of their chase and shootout somehow all over CNN. Then in a convoy of those huge black FBI SUVs which appear in all the movies, to some local base.

Miranda stares blankly out the window, Nick falls asleep and Queller has last thoughts about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Will he ever be tracked down? (Yes) Can such an organisation be defeated? (No) Queller reflects that globalisation only entrenches local elites, often working hand in glove with multinational corporations, to maintain most of their populations in resentful poverty, from which are spawned endless fundamentalisms (p.377). Improbably, he has an old man’s hope for a better world, more equality, defusing violence etc. Pipe dream. There are 8 billion humans alive today. In 20 years it will hit 9 billion. More crushing poverty. More grievance. More violence.

All improbable as it is an American security service official wishing for the end of capitalism or its superseding by a fairer system. Not very likely. Sounds more like the thoughts of some Limey pinko novelist.

(Oh, I spotted Foden’s placing of a micro-joke; the SUV convoy roars past a hoarding advertising ENVI skin cream (p.377). Now a hoarding advertising this same product plays a role at the end of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when Idi Amin, his regime overthrown, asks the novel’s protagonist, Dr Garrigan, to meet him at the ENVI hoarding to drive him to safety. Garrigan doesn’t go. I wonder if there are other sly echoes I didn’t spot.)

Coda

Miranda’s in Washington. Queller’s being investigated, for some reason. Nick didn’t want to stay, asked her to come back to Zanzibar but she didn’t want to leave, so they’ve split up and she wanders round Washington’s memorials feeling soulful.

Queller is being called for questioning in Washington about his links with al-Qaeda in the 80s. He knows he’s being set up as the fall guy. He writes a complete documentary account of his actions and sends it to Miranda. Tries on the latest spiffy prosthetic limb that’s arrived through the post. Has a drink. Reaches for his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

Nick after toying with staying in the States, has come back out to Zanzibar, done up the derelict cottage on Lyly and made it into a home. He is going to protect the turtles as homage to Leggatt. He is trying to be mindful. He is trying not to live in illusions. But he can’t help missing Miranda. It wasn’t true love but it was a lot.

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Because of the focus on the main characters at the start, because we are given such privileged access to Khaled’s life, tragedy, training and motivation, and because the book’s blurb says that Nick and Miranda become ’embroiled’ in a terrorist conspiracy – I thought they might have met Khaled, got to know and like him, then found out what he was going to do and there might have been some kind of agonising moral debate and so on when they try to talk him out of it, he goes ahead anyway… But no.

Inventive structure?

Again, Foden writes that ‘the event’ as the Americans quickly take to calling it, messed with people’s sense of time and place and identity, severely traumatising all involved, and so it crossed my mind that Foden could conceivably have run with that idea and created a postmodern jumping back and forth in time. At a few moments when Nick or Miranda were dazed and disorientated, the psychotic fictions of J.G. Ballard briefly came to mind.

But no. The narrative is much, much more straightforward than that, almost totally vanilla. This happened then this happened then this happened then this happened. The characters do stuff then there’s a big explosion then they rush off to catch the baddies. However brilliantly imagined and vividly written every scene is, and despite a few passages of tricksy juxtapositions, for the most part, structurally, it’s a very conservative book.

Al-Qaeda

The book contains several set-piece passages where the kindly old Queller gives straight explication about al-Qaeda’s history and aims, bin Laden’s speeches, the group’s structure and bases in Afghanistan. He describes how the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of training and munitions to the mujahideen, building secret hideouts, training them in guerrilla warfare etc, all skills and weapons which, with world-class irony, once the Soviets had finally quit Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda turned against their western backers.

I’m guessing that at the time Foden drafted the book, all this was relatively specialist, niche stuff, and his up-to-the-minute research was news, and it was cutting edge to include it in a novel.

Unfortunately for Foden, before his book could be published along came 11 September 2001 and the entire world’s media suddenly overflowed with everything known about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who became the subject of hundreds of books, thousands of documentaries, millions of articles – and the novelty of Foden’s book, its claim to shed light on a little-known terror organisation, evaporated overnight.

Must have been very galling. Then came the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq and the chaos they caused, covered on the telly and across all the media every night for years. So for the modern reader, the passages where Queller carefully explains bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Miranda (like pages 290 to 293), interesting refreshers though they are, can’t help but feel somewhat quaint and dated.

The risk of writing about contemporary politics or world affairs is that your text will be overtaken by events even as you write it. Compare with anyone half-way through writing a novel about Ukraine when Russia invaded and rendered the whole thing academic. Imagine you were just putting the finishing touches to your book about the current situation in Israel when Hamas attacked. It’s a high-risk strategy for a novelist. Safer to go that much further back in time, to when events are settled, complete, assimilated and contextualised – which is precisely what Foden did in his next novel, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika, set during the First World War. Can’t get more past, finished and over than that.

And yet…

For all my nitpicking, it’s an awesome book, an epic book. You really feel like you’ve been through the wringer, on a long journey, had an epic adventure. I felt quite shattered by the end of this long, dense book – informed about al-Qaeda and bin Laden, thrilled by the plot, and delighted by the thousand and one precise descriptions Foden encodes in his prose.

Swahili phrases

chamchela – hurricane squall (p.210)
chibuku – the local beer (p.252)
dar es salaam – haven of peace (p.243)
mlango – door
mnara – lighthouse (p.224)
mpuga za peponi – the gardens of paradise (p.220)
muzungu – white man
mchezo wa ngombe – the game of the bull (p.355)
pole-pole – slowly slowly
papabawa – Zanzibar vampire
twende! – let’s go (p.295)
zinj el-bar – coast of the black people (p.153)

Credit

Zanzibar by Giles Foden was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. References are to the 2003 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

The Last King of Scotland (1998)
Ladysmith (1999)
Zanzibar (2002)
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
Freight Dogs (2021)

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by Simon on December 22, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 1998 embassy bombings, 1998 United States embassy bombings, 9/11, Afghanistan, Africa, Ahmed the German, Al Qaeda, al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory, Alternburg, Arab world, Ayman al-Zawahari, barracuda, Beirut, bin Laden, Bom-Bom, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Chake Chake, chamchela, chibuku, CIA, Clive Bayard, CNN, Corporal Rossetti, Dar es Salaam, Department for International Development, DFID, Dino, Dr Macintyre, Dubai, East Africa, Egyptian Jihad, ethnic cleansing, European Development Fund, FBI, fiction, General Tom Kirby, George Darvil, Greek Orthodox, Inspector Chikambwa, Islamic terrorism, Jack Queller, Jambangona, James Bond, jihad, Juma, Kenya, Khaled al-Kidr, Khost, lala, Lee Denham, Lucy Queller, Lyly, Madeleine Albright, Martha's Vineyard, mchezo wa ngombe, Mills and Boon, Miranda Power, mlango, mnara, Monica Lewinsky, Morton Altenburg, mpuga za peponi, Mr de Souza, Muhammed Atef, mujahideen, Muscat, muzungu, Nairobi, Nick Karolides, Nisha Ghai, novel, Olivier Pastoreau, Omar el-Bashir, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, papabawa, Pemba, pole-pole, President Bill Clinton, Ralph Leggatt, Ray Delahoya, Romance, Sabra and Shatila massacre, Sandy Berger, sex, Sierra Leone, Sport Team Osnabrück, Starr investigation, State Department, Stone Town, Sudan, Swahili, Tanzania, terrorism, the Cythère, the Macpherson Ruins Hotel, the Sheikh, the Taliban, the Winston Churchill, thriller, Tim Catmull, Tomahawk cruise missile, Tony Blair, Tora Bora, Turtle Mo, twende, USAID, war on terror, Wembe, William Cohen, Yousef Mourad, Zanzibar, Zayn Mujuj, zinj el-bar

Posted by Simon on December 22, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/22/zanzibar-giles-foden/

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)

It is the spring of 1607 and a play is just about to start in the Blackfriars theatre. Unlike Shakespeare’s Globe theatre across the river, the Blackfriars is not open to the elements but roofed, and it is also small, meaning tickets are more expensive (sixpence compared to a penny admission at the Globe). Not surprisingly, it caters to a more upmarket audience, including courtiers and men-about-town who like to think themselves a cut above the middle-class merchants and artisans of ever-expanding London. The Blackfriars was a venue for ‘coterie drama’ for gentleman ‘wits’, in contrast to the more popular drama of writers like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood across the water in Southwark.

One last point. The Blackfriars theatre was associated with the fashion for boy actors who grew increasingly popular from the turn of the century, specifically the members of the troupe called The Children of the Queen’s Revels. These boy actors were generally between the ages of 8 and 12! Yes, boys originally played all the roles in this play and many like them. Girls, women, heroines, matrons and old ladies, dashing heroes and crotchety old men – all played by boys.

The prologue

Anyway, a new play is about to begin and the actor playing the Prologue steps forward dressed in a long, black velvet cloak and a garland of bays to address the audience, setting the scene for the troupe’s new play which is entitled The London Merchant. But he hasn’t even completed three lines of the prologue before he is rudely interrupted by a member of the audience, who climbs up onstage to talk to him.

It quickly becomes clear that this man is George, a London grocer, and he starts decrying the new play before it’s even begun, moaning that it’s another one of those satires which mock honest merchants like himself.

Taken aback, the Prologue asks what he’d like instead. The merchant replies he wants to see something which stars a merchant like himself, and tales of romance and adventure. At which point his wife, Nell, starts yelling from down in the audience that she wants to see a play about a grocer who is a knightly hero and kills a lion with a pestle! – a random, off-the-wall suggestion which the loudmouth grocer promptly takes up.

The Prologue complains that they should have told him this request month ago, it’s too late now, they’ve rehearsed the new play and have no boys free to play a merchant. ‘I’ve got the solution’, says the merchant, ‘let my boy Rafe play him, his acting and impersonations are the highlight of every party’. And he promptly gets Rafe to prove it by hauling him onstage and getting him to declaim part of Hotspur’s speech from Henry IV part 1, loudly and confidently.

The Prologue reluctantly agrees that Rafe is pretty good, and tasks one of the assistants to take him backstage to be rigged up in acting apparel, then the Prologue asks for the merchant and his wife to be seated. Comically, they hustle and bustle themselves among the stools on the stage. (This was another feature of the Blackfriars theatre – that supposed wits and gallants paid extra to sit onstage throughout the play, making comments on it or chatting among themselves or grandstanding to the audience.)

By sitting on the stage you have a signd patent to engrosse the whole commodity of Censure; may lawfully presume to be a Girder; and stand at the helme to steere the passage of scaenes; yet no man shall once offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of an insolent over-weening Coxcombe…. If you know not ye author, you may raile against him, and peradventure so behave your selfe, that you may enforce the author to know you.
(The Gull’s Horn-Book by Thomas Dekker, 1609)

The grocer and his wife now rudely push themselves and their stools in among these posh gentlemen, presumably causing amusement in the wider audience down in auditorium at this breach of decorum.

Now the Prologue recommences his speech and out of this initial confusion it emerges that the play is going to have three distinct strands:

The original plot of The London Merchant in which two young men – gentle but stupid Humphrey and charismatic but unpredictable Jasper Merrythought – vie for the hand of the merchant Venturewell’s daughter, Luce, with the usual round of complications.
Rafe’s narrative – The Knight of the Burning Pestle – in which he dresses as a traditional knight errant of romance, is assisted by his squire and page (a fellow apprentice named Tim and a dwarf named George), declaims high heroic poetry and has a series of mock heroic adventures, some of which are based on Cervantes’ recent novel Don Quixote, but many of which stem from the same Iberian romances and mock heroic romances.
Finally, the continual interruptions and commentary from George and his wife, specially whenever Rafe enters – applauding his every move when he’s onstage, and barracking the other actors and demanding his return whenever he’s absent, plus their running commentary on almost everything else, including the reactions of the audience and the gentlemen on stools.

It’s funny but it’s a real ragbag. Jasper, the rascally apprentice, is fired by merchant Venturewell, but manages to ravish young Luce off to the romantic venue of Waltham Forest. There’s an episode where the couple lie down to sleep, and Luce indeed falls asleep, at which point Jasper undergoes a curious transformation and decides he will wake her, threaten her with his sword, declaring he must have her blood to avenge her father’s wrongs (in booting Jasper out of his apprenticeship). This is ludicrous to begin with but is made doubly so by the immediate intervention of Nell the grocer’s wife, who’s never liked him and now starts damning his behaviour.

Later the pallid, useless apprentice Humphrey enters and confronts Jasper, who promptly beats him black and blue, leading Nell the grocer’s wife to not only berate him again, but cross over to poor HUmphrey and offer him several herbal remedies for his poor bruises.

Meanwhile we learn that Jasper’s parents are Old Merrythought and Mistress Merrythought, and their younger son, Michael, still lives with them. Old Merrythought is a strange ‘comic’ creation, he speaks almost entirely in songs, unstoppably answering every question and accusation and request by singing an excerpt from one of the many popular songs of the time.

OLD MERRYTHOUGHT: I would not be a serving-man
To carry the cloak-bag still,
Nor would I be a falconer
The greedy hawks to fill;
But I would be in a good house,
And have a good master too;
But I would eat and drink of the best,
And no work would I do.

He is utterly spendthrift, gay and merry, giving absolutely no thought for the morrow, and so drives his wife mad with his careless insouciance. In fact his wife has determined to leave him because he has spent all their money on drinking and partying.

OLD MERRYTHOUGHT: This it is that keeps life and soul together, mirth; this is the philosopher’s stone that they write so much on, that keeps a man ever young.

Nell, the grocer’s wife, once again is fiercely critical of Old M, not least in the scenes where he shows his complete indifference to his wife, for being ‘an ingrant old man to use his bed-fellow so scurvily’.

The London Merchant moves towards a big scene in the final act, where Venturewell has recaptured his daughter Luce, from Jasper, and locked her in his house, preparatory to her marrying the good apprentice, Humphrey. Jasper concocts a Cunning Plan, which is to pay a boy and some carriers to convey a letter to Venturewell saying that he, Jasper, has died and he has one dying request, can his corpse be conveyed into Venturewell’s house so that Luce can pay her last respects, say goodbye, and be ready to marry Humphrey.

As you might expect, this is a scam, the coffin arrives and Jasper is in it alright, lying still under a black velvet cloth. Venturewell allows it into the living room and leaves Luce to weep and mourn and declaim a page of sad verse over the body of her beloved, before Jasper suddenly leaps up out of the coffin and nearly scares her to death. He quickly gets her to swap places, covers her with the velvet cloth and gets the boy and carrier to convey her out, as if carrying Jasper to a cemetery.

Meanwhile, Jasper hides and covers his face in white flour so that, when Venturewell comes back on stage, Jasper suddenly appears like a ghost, terrifying Venturewell and threatening to haunt him for the rest of his life until he makes things right, beats and punishes Humphrey. Poor Humphrey enters at this stage and is promptly beaten for the second time in the play.

This is more or less the climax of the main play as Venturewell promises to do absolutely anything to make things right with the ghost and avoid being haunted – at which point Jasper reveals that he is not in fact dead, invites Luce back onstage, and gets the relieved Venturewell to agree to their being married. Finally.

Meanwhile, this narrative has been interwoven with a series of comic mock-heroic escapades featuring Rafe.

RAFE: My name is Rafe; I am an Englishman,
(As true as steel, a hearty Englishman,)
And prentice to a grocer in the Strand

It is clear from the moment he comes back onstage, hurriedly dressed up in the best knightly costume that the boy players can be spared, and sets about telling his squire (Tim the apprentice) and George the dwarf that they must no longer call him Rafe but address him as ‘the Knight of the Burning Pestle’ and so on, that his segments are going to be the most amusing.

RAFE: I charge you that from henceforth you never call me by any other name but “the right courteous and valiant Knight of the Burning Pestle;” and that you never call any female by the name of a woman or wench, but “fair lady,” if she have her desires, if not, “distressed damsel”; that you call all forests and heaths “deserts,” and all horses “palfreys.”

Three of his adventures stick out. He and his liegemen travel out to Waltham Forest (where their tracks cross, at various points, Jasper and Luce, and Mistress Merrythought and her son, Michael) and put up at the Bell Inn which is transformed, in his imagination, into a castle.

The host of the Bell twigs to the joke and then Rafe to visit the cave of the monster Barbaroso who is, in fact, the village surgeon-barber, and where they find three ‘victims’ languishing in his ‘dungeons’, who are in fact a customer having his hair cut and two others undergoing the totally quackish treatment Elizabethan surgeon-barbers were famous for. (The red and white swirly pole outside barbershops to this day recalls the times when surgeon-barbers let blood as well as shaving and trimming their customers.)

And lastly Rafe leads a number of his fellow prentices out to Moorfields in what, onstage, amounts to half a dozen small boys drilling with toy weapons, but in Rafe and the grocer’s imagination, becomes an army training before setting off to the wars in France.

But, Nell, I will
have Ralph do a very notable matter now, to
the eternal honour and glory of all grocers.

All the way through Rafe’s high-blown heroic poetry and noble sentiments, especially when he meets a damsel in distress (for example Mistress Merrythought when she gets lost in Waltham Forest), are undercut by the fact that he occasionally lets slip that he is in fact a grocer’s apprentice whose girlfriend is Susan, a cobbler’s daughter from Milk Street.

What’s odd because it’s inconsistent about these scenes is that we all understand they have been extemporised i.e. they’re not part of the rehearsed play being performed for us – and yet Rafe and the other characters in his ‘romance’ parts of the plot – the innkeeper and his daughter, the barber Barbaroso and his victims – all play along with the gag. This doesn’t really make sense – how could all these people be prepared, dressed and rehearsed with no time?

And it’s even weirder, because they are not only – on the face of it – extemporising with impressive speed, they are extemporising a play within a play within a play: because not only is Rafe 1. performing a play whose scenes 2. have been inserted into The London Merchant, but 3. he is shown explaining to the actors playing an innkeeper or a barber, that they in fact need to 3. speak and act on another level, as heroic characters from romance.

Some of Rafe’s scenes closely echo scenes in Cervantes’ long fiction Don Quixote, the first part of which had been published only a few years earlier, in 1605, although there is scholarly argument about whether Beaumont took the scenes from Cervantes or from earlier mock heroic comedies which are common sources for both.

The Rafe plot concludes after the grocer and his wife loudly demand a heroic ending for their Rafe and so, once the Jasper-Luce-Venturewell happy ending is tied up and they’ve exited the stage, Rafe staggers onstage with a fake arrow through his neck, as if mortally and heroically wounded in the wars, before delivering a long and ‘moving’ death speech and expiring to the floor – despite the disapproval of one of the main players:

WIFE: Now, good husband, let him come out and die.
CITIZEN: He shall, Nell.—Ralph, come away quickly, and die, boy!
BOY: ‘Twill be very unfit he should die, sir, upon no occasion — and in a comedy too.

Nell the grocer’s wife is beside herself with emotion, and immediately makes Rafe get to his feet and take a bow and introduces him to the fine gentlemen sitting on their stools and commends him to the audience. Everything has a happy ending and the audience go away happy.

The title

The title has about three sources and/or meanings. The pestle was one of the many signs hanging outside the shops of tradesmen in London, the pestle from a mortar and pestle used to grind up the spices sold at a grocer’s shop.

The pestle can also be thought of as a kind of weapon, along the lines of a club, and appears as such on the heraldic shield which the players quickly knock up for Rafe. And on the level of sexual innuendo which absolutely drenched Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, it symbolises a penis, and the burning sensation can be attributed to the very common sexually transmitted diseases of the period, syphilis and gonorrhea.

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

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by Simon on September 21, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 21, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/the-knight-of-the-burning-pestle-francis-beaumont/

Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds (2018)

Cassandra Darke is 71 years old, which is an immediate change and relief from the protagonists of Posy Simmonds’s two previous graphic novels, Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, who were both nubile, lithe, sexy, twenty-something young women whose lives revolved around a series of romantic ‘liaisons’.

By complete contrast right from the start of this book we are in the company of, and listening to the narrating voice of, plump and bustling, grumpy old misanthrope Cassandra. She is more than usually bad-tempered because it is Christmas-time and, as we know from her previous cartoon strips, Posy Simmonds particularly dislikes Christmas, as does her Scrooge-like creation.

However, if the reader thinks they’ve escaped from ‘Simmonds World’, a smug, self-centred world of upper-middle-class white London professionals, where all the women are obsessed by men and define themselves by their sexual relations (or lack of) with men – they would be wrong.

The character of Cassandra is great – she doesn’t give a stuff about anything, swears freely and has a bad word for everyone – but barely had I started enjoying her rude obnoxious character than, alas – like all Simmonds’s women – she begins to define herself, and her life and career, in terms of men, starting with her husband, Freddie.

Thus we learn that it was forty years earlier that Freddie and Cassandra set up a swish art gallery together. However, some time later Freddie ran off with Cassandra’s half-sister, Margot, and the pair got divorced. Cassandra was able to carry on earning a living by dealing art from home, and from writing. Then, decades later, Cassandra bumped into Freddie at an art fair and he told her he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and asked if she like to take over the old gallery from him. She agreed to.

Anyway, this is all background to the issue which dominates the opening pages, which is that Cassandra has been caught dealing in fake copies of valuable sculptures. She has charged a rich American collector £400,000 for an illegal copy of a limited edition modern piece of sculpture and he has found this out and sent her a letter threatening to take her to court.

Thus the book opens on a note of unease as Cassandra, although in posh Burlington Arcade surrounded by happy Christmas shoppers, is shown trying to avoid the widow of the sculptor in question, who has come to pay a call, and delays going back to the gallery, strongly suspecting that bad news is waiting for her there. As it is.

In a sequence which is not shown but briefly referred to, Cassandra is duly tried and convicted of fraud, her case being reported in sundry newspapers. She might well have gone to prison but – being posh – is let off by the (woman) judge with a hefty fine and told to do community service.

Nonetheless, she still has to sell off her private art collection and the house in Brittany (I know: imagine the heartbreak of having to sell your house in Brittany!) to pay the fine.

Here is the first page of the book, establishing Cassandra’s look and character, and the central London setting of most of the story, and straightaway the sense that something is wrong. Cassandra is trying to avoid Jane McMullen, wife of the sculptor whose work she has fraudulently sold, and who – it turns out – is looking for her in order to deliver the letter which accuses her of dealing in fakes.

First page showing Cassandra emerging from Burlington Arcade and spotting an old acquaintance she wants to avoid © Posy Simmonds

December 2017

The accusations, her arrest, and trial and conviction and sentence are all dealt with very quickly, and the narrative jumps to a year later, December 2017, as Cassandra is nearing the end of her community service.

We now find Cassandra without work but still living in her nice house in ‘Osmington Square, SW3’ i.e. Chelsea, nowadays populated by rich Chinese and Russian billionaires and their wives and nannies.

Osmington Square, where Cassandra lives, mostly empty apart from a few Russian or Chinese nannies and their charges © Posy Simmonds

Cassandra gets home to find an invitation to Freddie’s memorial service – the Alzheimer’s has finally killed him. She takes a taxi to the service and hides up in the gallery of the Mayfair church, making acerbic comments about all the other attendees, including her half-sister Margot (who Freddie ran off with all those years ago) and Margot and Freddie’s grown-up daughter, Nicki, who Cassandra cheerfully refers to as a ‘shit’.

Then Cassandra sneaks out and walks through the dark Christmas London streets, morbidly reflecting on Freddie’s sad decline into senility, thinking how she would prefer to commit suicide than end up like that, and then weighing the different methods of killing yourself. Cheerful stuff!

Once home, Cassandra finds gravel in her kitchen which looks like it must have come from her small back garden, and at first panics and thinks someone has broken in. But she discovers nothing has been stolen, calms down, and then decides it must be Freddie and Margot’s grown-up daughter Nicki, who she let stay in the downstairs flat the previous year, and for some reason has come into the main house.

Cassandra goes down to the basement flat to explore, and finds some dirty clothes and then, rummaging in the linen basket – finds A GUN, a pistol! Christ!

A gun and a peculiar pink glove with kind of raised blotches on it, and a little make-up bag, all bundled up in dirty linen and stuffed at the bottom of the bin! What is Nicki involved in?

Cassandra goes back to the house and sits obsessively running through all the other people who have had access to the flat, for example the two different cleaners she’s used, any other friends or relations… but keeps coming back to Nicki, bloody Nicki. A GUN! What the hell is she doing leaving a GUN in her flat?

The events of 2016

In order to discover how we got here the narrative undergoes a big flashback, going back in time a year to the middle of 2016. It was then that Nicki Boult, Freddie and Margot’s daughter, turned up out of the blue at Cassandra’s gallery, saying that she was broke, had lost her studio in Deptford and her share of a flat, and asking Cassandra if she can stay?

After initially saying No, Cassandra relents and says Nicki can stay in the basement flat providing she earns her keep by doing regular chores for Cassandra.

(As a side note, Cassandra tells us about Nicki’s art, which is a kind of performance art. Nicki goes to galleries and stands in front of paintings of women being harassed, attacked or raped, copies their poses or has written on her body or clothes the message RAPE IS NOT ART and has a friend video it all. Radical, eh? As Cassandra sourly points out: ‘And you think that people can’t work that out for themselves?’)

Anyway, Nicki moves in and is soon helping Cassandra with all sorts of chores from walking her repellent little pug, Corker, to helping with prints and such. We see Cassandra going about her usual day, being rude to everyone she can – telling kids cycling on the pavement to get off, calling a jogger a ‘prancing ponce’, insisting a woman pick up the poo her dog has just deposited, and so on. She’s a great stroppy old woman.

So the pair’s daily routine is established and settled by the time of the first big important sequence in the plot, which is the hen party of Nicki’s friend, Mia. Nicki doesn’t really want to go, not least because Mia’s booked a burlesque session to kick-start the evening, but reluctantly she dresses up as a cowgirl, wearing kinky boots, a pink tutu, a pink bra and pink cowboy hat. She looks like a strippagram.

She is, in fact, another one of Posy Simmonds’s nubile, leggy, twenty-something, single women who look so sexy in a bra and panties (cf all the pics of Gemma Bovery stripped naked or in black stockings and suspenders.)

Nicki goes to the party but is ill at ease and drinks too much. The girls play a game of Dare and Nicki’s dare is to get a phone number off a complete stranger, so she is egged on to go up to the bar and approach a rough but handsome dude for his number. Drunkenly, Nicki gives him Cassandra’s name and phone number, but when it’s his turn to give his, as the dare demands, the guy refuses. He and his mates are moving on so he asks if she wants to come? But Nicki realises she’s drunk too much, is going to be sick, and stumbles downstairs to the loo.

Suddenly the stubbly guy from the bar appears behind her, puts his hand over her mouth and pushes her into a side room, presumably intending to rape her. Nicki bites the hand over her mouth drawing blood. The guy slaps her and grabs her again but she reaches down and back to grab his balls and squeezes. The guy loses his hold and staggers backwards, allowing Nicki to escape into the girls toilet. Here she waits and waits until the coast is clear, stumbles back upstairs to her friends, half explains what happened, wraps her coat around her, they’ve called an Uber for her. But!! The guy and his mates are still hanging round outside, so she dodges into an alleyway.

Here Nicki is terrified to discover another young man lurking in the shadows (men! they’re everywhere!) but this one is friendly and guesses she’s hiding from the three bad guys. He tells her when they’ve gone and she stumbles back into the street, orders another Uber, staggers out of it up to Cassandra’s front door because she realises she’s lost her keys… incoherent.. Cassandra looks at the state she’s in with disgust.

Next morning Cassandra is going about her business when she is surprised to get a text on her phone: ‘Big mistake Cassandra!! Break yr fucking legs thats a promise cunt’. It’s from the would-be rapist – remember, Nicki gave him Cassandra’s name and phone number. Amusingly, Cassandra thinks this text might be from a rival art collector and sends a rude text back, only to receive another: ‘ur dead meat whore’.

Much puzzled, Cassandra returns from a little walk to find a young man on her doorstep, very polite, looking for ‘the young lady’. Cassandra guesses he means Nicki and explains that Nicki lives in the basement flat.

Cassandra gets on with her day. It’s a Sunday and since her ‘lady who does’, Elsa, doesn’t come at the weekend, Cassandra has to fix her own lunch (fix her own lunch! I know, how dreadful! Personally, I am continually brought up dead by the little details in all Posy Simmonds’s graphic novels which indicate just how posh and privileged her character are: not actual aristocracy, just used to a certain level of culture and education and savoir vivre – fine food, fine wine, fine art, fine writing.)

Cassandra phones the rival art dealer and quickly discovers it’s not him sending the texts. In fact, while they’re talking, another abusive txt arrives, plus a photo of whoever it is’s dick. Cassandra is too mature to be offended, just startled and puzzled.

Later Nicki surfaces. She has been for a walk and a chat with that bloke she met briefly in the alleyway, now we learn he’s called Billy. How did he find her? Last night, drunk, she dropped her keys in the alley, which had her address on them. Now Billy tells us more about the would-be rapist and txt abuser. He’s Dean Hart, a nasty piece of work. Billy gives her a full profile: he and Deano grew up together, they used to hang out and do graffiti together, then Deano went a bit mental, took to snorting coke and gambling, supported by his family who are East End crooks.

Later, we see Billy on his way home, back to his mum’s flat in a tower block. He is waylaid by some of Deano’s sidekicks who tell him Deano wants to see him. (This and the subsequent conversation Billy has with his plump, working class mum are a welcome change from the bourgeois writer-and-art-dealer class Simmonds usually deals with.) Billy’s mum said someone called round asking for him, a Dean something. Billy says, ‘Next time tell him I don’t live here any more, I’ve moved out.’ He packs his things and leaves, walking away from the East End council flats…

Simmonds and her young women: love love love is still on Nicki’s mind. It is, after all, weeks since Nicki’s last relationship, weeks, people! So she obviously needs a new man in her life asap. All Simmonds’s heroines can’t function without a man (Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and now Nicki). Thus she goes out for a drink with Billy, their eyes meet, she wonders whether he fancies her? Ooh-er, it’s so exciting! They leave the pub, snog, walk, then run back to the basement flat for a shag.

Trouble is, Billy’s in a fix. Not only has he not gone to meet Deano as his minders told him to – he’s got something that belongs to Deano – a GUN!

Down in the basement, after the shag, Billy tells her more. A while ago Deano bumped into him in some pub and persuaded him to go with his minder – his uncle ironically nicknamed ‘Nanny’ – to Newbury races. They gambled and made money, get bored, drive home in gathering mist, get lost looking for some country pub and pick up a girl hitch-hiker.

Billy falls asleep, wakes up as they arrive back in London, turning into Billy’s family’s scrap metal yard. Deano gets out with the girl and heads into the house, ignoring Billy, telling Nanny to bring his fags and the tripod. (Tripod? Maybe to film him and the girl having sex.) Billy is rooting around for the fags when he finds some odd kind of pink glove, and a little make-up bag, and a jacket, heavy, with something bulky in it. It’s A GUN! What the…?

Billy suddenly wonders what he’s doing hanging round with these people and… here’s the crux and the slightly implausible thing about the entire plot – he pockets the gun and the glove and the make-up bag. Nanny doesn’t notice, he’s busy in the boot getting the tripod out, now he locks the car with a remote and walks off across the yard ignoring Billy and Billy thinks… screw it! and runs off in the other direction. With the gun and the glove and the make-up bag.

Now he’s on the run from Deano and his mob, with a gun of theirs. He tells Nicki all this, says he’s moved out of his mum’s place, is kipping on a mate’s floor. And so Nicki asks him to move into the basement flat.

Back to Cassandra’s narration. Cassandra spends the day visiting three old ‘friends’ who might possibly be behind the mystery texts, but they are all quite frank and friendly, it’s obviously none of them. Mystery.

Nicki explains her next art project, making objects out of the cardboard boxes the homeless sleep in on the streets of London. Nicki on the phone describing how wonderful Billy is to a friend. Then Nicki has a call with Billy while he’s at work on set. Via basic electrics and wiring he’s got himself a career as an electrician on TV productions.

Cassandra hosts a dinner for gay Teddy Wood and his partner Yves – wonderful food and wine ruined by the very loud love-making of Nicki and Billy downstairs. Amusing pictures of a furry of bodies and limbs – Cassandra envisions two pigs rutting and is furious that her evening is spoiled.

Next day, walking in the square, Billy admits to Nicki that he lied about his family situation. In fact he was once married and has a son, Jack. Nicki berates him for lying, and asks if he’s telling the truth now? Of course, he smiles at her. OK, she says.

Cassandra books her regular Christmas trip to a five star hotel in Biarritz – she usually loves the bracing winds and isolation, but this time has bad dreams, cuts the trip short and returns to London.

Arriving home in Osmington Square earlier than anticipated, Cassandra is horrified to find her house festooned in fairy lights and illuminated Father Christmases and a crowd gathered outside. A friend of Nicki’s is collecting donations in a bucket because they are putting on a show in support of the homeless and the show is… Nicki doing a striptease in the window! At the show’s climax Nicki removes the big feathery fans to reveal her bare breasts each adorned with a shiny star over the nipple! Posy Simmonds does love drawing naked foxy babes.

Cassandra doing a burlesque strip tease in the window of Cassandra’s house to raise money for the homeless © Posy Simmonds

Furious, Cassandra storms inside, turns off the power and the lights and gives Cassandra a good talking to, accusing her of caring bugger-all for the homeless but putting on the show to promote herself, her brand, on social media.

She also makes the fairly obvious point that how can doing a strip-tease be considered an act of the ‘feminism’ that Nicki is always going on about? Surely she is ‘playing out male fantasies’, ‘objectifying the female body’ and all the other things she claims to be vehemently against?

Anyway. Cassandra gives her until Saturday to clear out.

December 20 17.15 One of Deano’s associates, Pete, tracks down Billy’s ex, Dee, and tells her that Billy won a packet on a long-term bet on the horses, and he and Deano want to give him his winnings. Naively, Dee tells Pete that Billy said something about a party in a pub in Soho tomorrow.

December 21 20.15 Pete waits at the Jutland pub, in phone contact with Nanny in a waiting Range Rover. He spots Billy, then follows him through the West End to catch a bus west, phoning his movements through to Nanny who follows.

Meanwhile, this is the same December 21st that the novel opened with, the one where Cassandra is in Burlington Arcade, avoiding Jane McMullen because she knows she is going to hand her a letter telling her her fraud has been discovered and her wronged client is going to sue.

Now, having arrived late at the gallery and been handed the letter and reading it and realising her world is about to come tumbling down, Cassandra arrives back at her house same time as Nicki, disgruntled and worried. She, absent-mindedly asks Nicki to take her ugly little pug Corker to ‘do his thing’ in the square.

Nicki does so but at that moment her mum (Margot, Cassandra’s step-sister who stole her husband Freddie off her 40 years ago) rings on her mobile, to tell her the news about Cassandra i.e that she’s been caught out in her fraudulent dealings. Distracted, Nicki lets the little dog, Corker, wander off.

Meanwhile, Billy has got off the bus from the West End and walks through the snow and darkness towards Osmington Square, followed by Pete, who is giving directions to Nanny who is following in the Range Rover. They pull up in the square and the next thing Billy knows he’s confronted by Pete and Nanny, who punches him in the face, knocks him down and kicks him in the ribs. The dog barks so Pete kicks it in the head. The thugs wander off as Nicki comes running up. She calls an ambulance. She realises Corker is dead.

Next day we see events from Cassandra’s point of view. Nicki’s mother (Margot) turns up to collect Nicki and drive her to their home in the country. With Billy in hospital, Nicki had gone through his rucksack and found the gun and a weird pink glove. She wraps it all up in an old sheet and shoves it in the bathroom bin of the basement flat and gets in the car with her mum. On the drive west she finds herself telling her mum about Billy and his, er, ‘involvements’, triggering a lecture about getting mixed up with the criminal classes.

December 2017

So this brings us back to where we started – to a full year later, and to Christmas 2017 (all the previous section happened in the run-up to Christmas 2016). (Does that mean the gun and the glove have lain hidden in the downstairs flat for a whole year? I am slight confused by this or, if I’ve understood it correctly, slightly incredulous.)

So here we are right back at the scene from near the start of the book where Cassandra has just found the gun and glove and make-up bag in Nicki’s bin and is wondering how the hell it got there. On impulse – and a bit drunk from drinking most of a bottle of claret – Cassandra brings the gun and glove and the clip of bullets up from Nicki’s flat, handles it drunkenly, before stashing it in her own washing machine.

Next day (the day after Freddie’s memorial service which we saw at the start of the book) Cassandra phones Margot, Freddie’s widow, to find out where Nicki is so she can question her. She finds out that Nicki is now living in a shared house in Tooting and working at a swanky art dealers in Dover Street. Cassandra goes to the dealers and confronts Nicki about the gun. Nicki bombards her with explanations, about it being Billy’s, well, not Billy’s it really belongs to Deano who she’s never met, and Billy took it and she was etc etc. Cassandra becomes very confused and threatens to call the police. Nicki say that’s rich, coming from a convicted fraudster.

Cassandra turns away in fury. Too angry to catch a bus home, she pads the streets of London at Christmas-time – thus allowing Simmonds to give vent to one of the most consistent of her themes – something which appears throughout the Posy comic strips – a really jaundiced, venomous hatred of Christmas. ‘I pad past Christmas windows, their sterile perfection contrasting with the scrum of shoppers inside, racking up debt, sharing their seasonal bugs – norovirus, coughs, colds, flu.’

Back home in bed, Cassandra has a nightmare in which she is back in court and the judge accuses her of pandering to rich art collectors, price fixing, knowingly taken part in the laundering of money by criminals until the judge finds her… ‘a waste of space’. Reflecting that maybe her whole life has been a waste.

Cut to Billy at MacDonalds with his mum and son Jack. He’s surfing through the news on his phone, as you do, when he stumbles across a news item about a woman’s remains recently found in a wood, with a quilted coat and a distinctive pink glove! Same as the one he took from the car! Same as the one belonging to that hitch-hiker! God, is the body hers?

Billy is stunned. He immediately leaps to the conclusion that Deano and his lot must have murdered and dumped the hitch-hiker.

He texts Nicki and they meet on the Embankment. Now it is that we learn for the first time that, after he got beaten up and hospitalised, it was Billy who suggested they break off the relationship. If it was a relationship. As usual for a Simmonds heroine, Nicki is confused about her emotions and her feelings etc.

Sometimes Nicki wondered if all that stuff hadn’t happened, would she and Billy still be an item?They’d never examined their relationship at the time, had left their feelings for each other unspoken. It wasn’t just sex, there were feelings, Nicki knew. Quite strong feelings. (p.76)

(Maybe this is what helps the book feel like ‘chick lit’ – the heroine’s endless agonising about whether she has feelings for a handsome man, and what kind of feelings they are, and whether he shares her feelings and, you know, they need to talk about their feelings and their relationship, we need to talk, I need to talk, are we an item, do you have feelings, is this just about sex or about something more…? Repeat ad infinitum without ever getting anywhere, as the Bridget Jones’ column and books and movies amply demonstrate.)

Back to the plot: Now, at their rendezvous on the Embankment, Billy tells Nicki that Nanny and Pete have been keeping tabs on him, sending him photos of places he’s been to. They’ve turned over his flat twice and demanded to know where the gun is. But he just keeps lying and saying he never took it. (I find it a little hard to believe this has been going on for a year: if I was them I am sure I could hurt him until he admitted nicking the gun and… simply handed it back over. Wouldn’t that be the simple thing to do?)

Like a good middle-class young lady, Nicki tells him he should go to the police. Like the working class boy he is, Billy says no, it’ll be Deano and Nanny’s word against his, and whatever happens, sooner or later they’d get their revenge.

Cut back to Cassandra and some tiresome feminism is injected into the story. She is sitting at home at Christmas feeling sorry for herself, feeling that the world finds her a ‘failure as a woman’ because she hasn’t lived as ‘a woman ought to live’ i.e. got married, had children, grandchildren. I’ve news for her: the world doesn’t give a toss what she does with her life. Only in her head does this self-condemning monologue grumble on. Meanwhile she has led a pampered, privileged life most of us could only fantasise about: she’s had more than enough money, a good education, choice, freedom, travel, comfort, art, opera, theatre, films, books… Ah yes, but ‘society’ (whatever that is) considers her ‘a failure as a woman’ (whatever that means). This is what my daughter (the 17-year-old feminist) calls ‘white feminism’ i.e. the self-centred grumbling of privileged, white, middle-class women. As my daughter regularly puts it, ‘Get over yourself’.

There’s a knock at the door and Cassandra opens it to find Nicki with Billy. Nicki admits the truth, about giving Deano Cassandra’s phone number at the hen night (thus explaining Deano as the source of the violent threats and the dick pic), explains how Billy is involved, swears he fled the scene with the gun, brought it with him in his backpack when he moved in with Nicki (which explains the existence of the gun), how they’ve come to the decision to tell the police, but they need the gun. Where is it?

Furious, Cassandra kicks them out, and then – Billy having told her that the body and suspected murder were reported on ‘Crimefile’ – she looks up and watches it on the BBC iPlayer. Through her eyes we watch as the programme interviews the couple out walking their dog who found the corpse.

Cassandra finds herself wondering who the poor woman was. She gets out the gun and glove and the little make-up bag from the washing machine where she’d stashed it. Rummaging through it she comes upon a pack of paracetamol with the label of a pharmacy still attached. She looks it up and discovers this pharmacy is way out East, so Cassandra catches the tube out there to go and investigate.

Cassandra wanders round the scuzzy district of Lowbridge Road looking for the pharmacy. The Asian couple who run it can’t remember any particular young woman buying it (and, anyway, wasn’t it bought over a year ago?) and neither can any of the other shopkeepers she tries, though she does pick up the knowledge that some of the houses in the area are packed with sex workers, foreign mostly.

In fact ill luck befalls her and Cassandra manages to lose her wallet, containing her cash and bank cards. Thus she experiences a whole 90 minutes of feeling poor and abandoned. It starts to rain. She begins to panic. No Oyster card, no money for a taxi. Finally she realises she can pawn her gold necklace, and makes enough money from it to buy a tube fare back to Knightsbridge, where she is once again safely among her people.

Back in her house, Cassandra gets the gun and glove out and ponders her next move. Thinking about the slimeball who sent her those vitriolic texts, she takes a photo of the gun and texts it back to him, a year after the original exchange: ‘Hi, remember me? Keeping your gun safe. And the left hand glove too. Vital evidence I’d say. What’s it worth to you, Deano? You tell me. Cassandra’

Cut to the office of Deano’s scrap metal yard where we learn that i) prolonged taking of drugs has half-unhinged Deano and ii) when the text arrives, it prompts another outpouring of regret, with Deano saying he never meant to kill that girl.

Soon afterwards, Deano goes for a drink and (incredibly fortuitously) sees Billy. Deano follows Billy to a bar where he’s meeting Nicki. Nicki tells Billy what Cassandra’s done i.e. only gone and texted a photo of the bloody gun to Deano, the silly so-and-so. Billy says he’ll go mental! Outside, Deano sees Billy and Nicki smooching and recognises her from that nightclub a year earlier, the infamous hen party evening when Nicki told him her name was Cassandra, and then bit him and squashed his balls.

When Nicki and Billy part, Deano follows Nicki down into the Tube, gets out at Knightsbridge stop with her, follows her along into Osmington Square. Simmonds does that thing where she uses just pictures, with no words, to rack up the tension, in this instance to portray the nagging anxiety of a woman walking on her own in the dark.

Now Deano makes his move, accosting Nicki in the street brandishing a knife, demands the gun, demands to know where she lives. Nicki starts screaming HELP! At that moment, Cassandra, who – as we have seen – had been playing with the gun, emerges from her front door holding it like an American cop, pointing at Deano.

Momentarily confused, Deano loosens his grip on Nicki who runs off. Deano recovers his nerve and crosses the road to Cassandra, who says, ‘Drop it, I’ll shot’, but he knows she won’t. Instead she throws it over the railings into the basement area, but Deano attacks her anyway and, after a tussle, stabs her in the stomach. ‘Stupid arse… what have you done?’ she gasps as she clutches the wound and falls to the pavement. Deano panics and flees. Nicki calls an ambulance and gives a statement to the police.

A wordless page follows which shows Cassandra in bed in hospital, sleeping, on a drip. Waking and talking to the police. Back to sleep. And then:

January Cassandra recovers and winds up the story, tying up all the loose ends.

She’s come to stay with her half-sister Margot in the country (a very idealised super-rural country, a country of postcards very like the perfect countryside around Stonefield in Tamar Drewe). She’s learned not to despise Margot so much, realising she has a lot in common with Margot and that what Margot calls ‘healing’ and ‘closure’ are actually quite enjoyable.

Dean Hart was arrested and confessed to the stabbing which, along with the bloody knife and the photos Nicki took of the fight, convicted him. He also confessed to strangling the girl during sex play a year before. Nanny and Pete were also arrested.

Best of all, Cassandra’s enquiries about the dead girl were followed up by the police who went to Lowbridge Road and on to a squalid flat inhabited by five other girls. Her name was Anca Radu, she was 23, grew up in a Romanian orphanage, was groomed and trafficked to the UK as a prostitute, escaped from the flat, hitched a lift, but was dropped in the middle of nowhere, which is where she had the bad luck to be picked up by Deano, taken to London and then killed, accidentally or not.

Lastly, in hospital the doctors discovered that Cassandra has pancreatic cancer. Given the gloomy thread running throughout the book in which Cassandra periodically worried about becoming senile like her poor husband, and pondered different ways of killing herself to avoid that fate, the reader understands when Cassandra says this diagnosis is a perfect solution. It comes as no surprise that she has chosen not to receive treatment.

She is selling the house in Osmington Square and will give the proceeds to charities, including refuges for women.

Thoughts

Issues

One of the pleasures of the book is the way that various contemporary ‘issues’ familiar to Londoners are dramatised via the characters.

Off the top of my head I remember the several places where Nicki and Cassandra discuss or argue about the purpose and merits of ‘feminist’ art.

Similarly, the ‘issue’ of homelessness is raised via Nicki’s burlesque strip tease fund raiser, but also in the paired moments when Cassandra refuses to give change to a beggar (at the start) and does (after herself being briefly moneyless in the East End).

And the entire plot rotates, to some extent, about sex trafficking from eastern Europe. Other thoughts – about art and class are snagged, or rise briefly to the surface of situations or conversations then disappear again. Taken together, these issues, large or trivial, and other references (to Uber taxis) make the book feel surprisingly contemporary. Gives the reader the simple pleasure of recognition, of recognising the rather mundane world around us transformed into art, well, comic strip cartoons.

White collar versus gangland crime

Implicit in the whole story is the contrast between Cassandra and her smart, Mayfair form of white-collar crime, and the much more brutal, unhinged crime of Deano and his family out in the East End. Two wrongs, two types of wrong, prompting broader comparisons between life in Chelsea and life out East in the endless tower blocks of East London.

Cassandra’s redemption

Obviously the narrative arc as a whole depicts Cassandra’s ‘redemption i.e. by doing one brave act she stops being such a grumpy so-and-so and sheds her grumpy, sourpuss persona. No more fretting about how ‘society’ sees her. No more dismissing Margot who, at the start of the book, she had found unbearably pompous and touchy-feelie. Instead, acceptance of her own mortality, acceptance of emotions and emotional intelligence.

It is a timeless stereotype that urban characters have to go to the countryside to be ‘complete’, to achieve ‘authenticity’.

Most of all, maybe, it wasn’t the act of bravery – pointing the gun at Deano and saving Nicki – so much as the sympathy Cassandra showed for the once-unnamed and now identified person of the murdered woman. It was discovering her identity more than anything that happens to wretched Deano, which matters most. Giving her a name, an identity, and so some respect.

Loose ends and problems

But many things are left unresolved and unredeemed. Cassandra is still a convicted criminal. We have no sense whether Billy and Nicki are going to live happily ever after, or even whether Deano will go to prison. Presumably…

In terms of plot there is a glaring hole which is the improbability of Billy nicking Deano’s gun in the first place. Even he can’t explain why he did it and it is left to the reader to conclude that he did it because otherwise there would be no story.

And the flashback structure – which worked so well in Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe – left me a bit confused. The mapping of two Christmases onto each other, the year long gap, forced me to go back and reread bits to understand the precise sequence of events. And also the way Billy split up with Nicki after he’d been hospitalised wasn’t told at the time, but reported a year later, in retrospect, so it took me a moment to fit that into the timeline, too.

Art

The use of colour makes for a deep and rewarding visual experience. But to be honest, although some pictures seemed to me to perfectly convey the intended atmosphere – especially lots of the scenery, of London or the countryside – there is an obstinate ungainliness or scrappiness about almost all of the frames which nagged at me, which held me back from going over the top and declaring it a masterpiece etc.

For example, here is Cassandra in a shop near Burlington Arcade, presumably Fortnum and Masons. The top picture of her mooching across a snowy road with her snub nose, pince-nez, slice of lipstick along her thin lips, and characteristic trapper’s fur hat, are all immediately grabby and evocative.

But in the pic below it, look at the girl standing on the right. She just feels to me anatomically incorrect and, stylistically, a throwback to the Posy strip of the 1980s. If Cassandra is fully imagined and drawn, many of the peripheral characters feel less so.

Here (below) is Cassandra arriving late at her gallery to find the gallery assistant furious that she’s been delayed getting away and organising her own Christmas. Look at the assistant’s face. It is oddly unstable, in the first picture she is characterised by enormous shark’s teeth and big angry eyes – throughout the sequence she has lizard eyes i.e. not with a circular human black pupil, but with vertical slits of pupils. But then in the right-hand picture she suddenly has much softer features and just dots for eyes, a reversion to the Posy strip style, which suddenly makes her seem much less offensive, much less real. In the bottom row second from the left, something odd has happened to her left eye. It’s an example of the way many of the faces in Simmonds are unstable and undergo sometimes striking variations.

I know I’m nit-picking but you will read articles claiming Simmonds is the pre-eminent graphic novelist in Britain and I’m not entirely sure. Although I liked the scenery and many of the settings, I still didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy her depiction of faces which too often seemed odd, inconsistent and sometimes positively cack-handed.

Still, that reservation apart, it’s a very enjoyable graphic novel and a very skillful weaving of so many contemporary ‘issues’ into what is, in the end, an extended cartoon strip. And the real point is Cassandra’s journey to redemption, to a form of happiness and closure. If you focus on that, on the skill with which she imagines, describes and draws the central figure – then nitpicking about details tends to fade away.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 20, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Cartoon, Graphic novel

Posted by Simon on June 20, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/cassandra-darke-posy-simmonds/

The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson (1892)

The auctioneer was surrounded by perhaps a score of lookers-on, big fellows, for the most part, of the true Western build, long in the leg, broad in the shoulder, and adorned (to a plain man’s taste) with needless finery. A jaunty, ostentatious comradeship prevailed. Bets were flying, and nicknames. The boys (as they would have called themselves) were very boyish; and it was plain they were here in mirth, and not on business.
(Chapter 9. The Wreck of the Flying Scud)

Robert and Fanny and Lloyd

Fanny Stevenson

Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne in France in 1876 and became deeply attached to her. She was ten years older than him (born 1840 compared to Stevenson’s 1850) and had three small children by her husband Samuel Osbourne, who she had married at the age of just 17. Samuel was an adventurer who headed to California to take part in the silver rush, brought his family out to stay with him, but was consistently unfaithful to Fanny until she decided to cut loose and took her children for a prolonged trip to Europe.

Fanny’s choice

In 1876 Fanny returned to America prepared to reconcile with her husband. So infatuated was Stevenson that he saved up for three years to have the fare to travel out to California there to woo her (the journey described in his travel book The Amateur Emigrant) and poor Fanny was faced in 1879 with the choice between unfaithful husband and ardent devotee – who just happened to be a literary genius into the bargain. Eventually she chose the sickly Scotsman and they were married in 1880, Stevenson acquiring two step-children Isobel (born 1858) and Lloyd (born 1868), the third, Hervey, having died as a child in Paris. They spent two months in the Napa Valley near abandoned mine workings, an experience fictionalised into the novel The Silverado Squatters.

Stevenson’s travels

The couple moved back to Britain for a while for Robert to patch up relations with his scandalised parents. For the next seven years they moved around England and Scotland, Devon, Bournemouth, spending the winter months in the south of France or Switzerland. These were the years of his masterpieces – Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Jekyll and Hyde, as well as The Black Arrow and much poetry.

The South Seas

In 1887 his father died and Stevenson returned to America, wintering in New York state. In 1888 he was in California charting a yacht to take him, Fanny and Lloyd to the islands of the South Seas and there began an extensive period of travel among the islands of the Pacific, getting to know customs, traditions, languages and politics. Lloyd was now 20 and very close to RLS. Stevenson restlessly wrote wherever he went, and in a wide variety of forms, children’s and adult poetry, adventure stories and romances, short stories, novels, travel books, essays and letters.

Collaborations with Lloyd Osborne

It was here during his south sea travels and after he settled on an island of Samoa that Stevenson collaborated closely with his step-son Lloyd on three novels: The Wrong Box, The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. And, whereas he wrote two more novels and a number of south sea stories which are part of the ‘canon’, it is maybe no coincidence that most people haven’t heard of these three collaborations.

The Wrecker

The Prologue of The Wrecker, titled In The Marquesas, describes the litter of whites, beach bums and local South sea natives who live near the harbour of Tai-o-hae, ‘the French capital and port of entry of the Marquesas Islands’. It has colour and flavour and promises much.

Outside, the night was full of the roaring of the surf. Scattered lights glowed in the green thicket. Native women came by twos and threes out of the darkness, smiled and ogled the two whites, perhaps wooed them with a strain of laughter, and went by again, bequeathing to the air a heady perfume of palm-oil and frangipani blossom.

A schooner enters the harbour and the captain, Mr Loudon Dodd, is invited along to the whites-only club, where they drink and roister and the inebriated captain finds himself boasting about all kinds of scrapes and semi-crimes he’s been involved in. His host, back at his house, says surely that was all bluff. Oh no, says Dodd, it was all true. ‘Pray tell’, asks his host. Alright, says Dodd.

Dodd’s life story

At which point the novel cuts away to become a completely different book from the one promised – a long, humorous, self-deprecating first-person narrative of Dodd’s life and times. Dodd’s dad was a typically boosterish American businessman who sends his son to college to learn how to gamble on the stock market. But the young boy wants to be an artist! They square the circle by sending Loudon to Paris to study sculpture – so that he can provide the statues needed for the new state capital the father is crookedly involved in.

Student in Paris

Loudon’s adventures in student Paris are all firmly tongue-in-cheek, told with a drollness which is completely at odds with the pithy, psychologically acute style Stevenson demonstrated in his classic adventures, The Black Arrow or Ballantrae.

At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter. The play of the Vie de Boheme (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been produced at the Odeon, had run an unconscionable time–for Paris, and revived the freshness of the legend. The same business, you may say, or there and thereabout, was being privately enacted in consequence in every garret of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard to their own incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us went far, and some farther. I always looked with awful envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of my own who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore boots, and long hair in a net, and could be seen tramping off, in this guise, to the worst eating-house of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and calling. It takes some greatness of soul to carry even folly to such heights as these; and for my own part, I had to content myself by pretending very arduously to be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and by pursuing, through a series of misadventures, that extinct mammal, the grisette.

San Francisco

In Paris he meets a fellow American art student, Jim Pinkerton, who is lousy at art but addicted to doing dodgy business deals, he nicknames him ‘the Irrepressible’ or ‘the Commercial Force’. This man is to loom large in his life because, when Loudon’s father dies after one business crash too many, Loudon, deprived of daddy’s monthly stipends, falls on very hard times and after trying all available options, is forced to travel back to the States and out to California where he becomes a side-kick and cultural fig leaf for Pinkertson’s numerous scams and cons: selling counterfeit brandy, organising a preposterous regular sea-side picnic, wild speculations on all and every business venture.

A taste of the South Seas

Suddenly in chapter eight we learn that Loudon has taken to exploring San Francisco, the secret slums and hidden places – there are rich descriptions of its multi-cultural shops and bars and dives.

My delight was much in slums. Little Italy was a haunt of mine; there I would look in at the windows
of small eating-shops, transported bodily from Genoa or Naples, with their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of ‘Mr. Owstria’ and ‘Mr. Rooshia’. I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of Little Mexico, with its crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous mountain
goat-paths in the sand. Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along Western gutters.

And in amid these he starts listening to tales of sailors and seafarers of the remote romantic south sea islands, visits a seafarer who has a collection of south sea island artefacts, gets bitten by the bug. So he enthusiastically falls in with Pinkerton’s latest scheme to bid for a ship which they hear has been shipwrecked on Midway Island, the brig Flying Scud. It’s meant to be a rigged auction i.e. Pinkerton has arranged to buy the ship from the auctioneer at the nominal sum of $100, so everybody is surprised when a well known, seedy lawyer, Bellairs, starts bidding against Pinkerton and the bidding climbs to the absurd and giddy heights of $30,000 then $40,000.

By now our boys have realised something very suspicious is going on – maybe the brig must have been packed full of Chinese opium! Loudon notices that the captain of the wrecked ship – Captain Trent – is at the auction, looking very nervous. Our boys eventually win the ship but at a budget-breaking cost of $50,000. In the corridor Loudon overhears Bellairs telephoning the man whose instructions he was obeying, a certain Mr Dickson. But when Loudon gets hold of his address and goes to visit and question Dickson, he finds he has beaten a hasty retreat from his boarding house. Why?

Voyage to Midway

Pinkerton and Dodds hire a schooner, the Nora Creiner, appoint a Captain Nares and hire a dodgy-looking crew. Pinkerton appoints Dodds his agent for the mission – which is to find the brig, find the opium, take it on to Honolulu to sell, and return to San Francisco with the profits. There is a brisk clear good humour about the narrator’s tone which seems different from any other Stevenson I’ve read. It has an often modern sense of comic timing and a brisk easy pace. Stevenson’s sentences are generally more broken up with semi-colons and edgy angular additions and clauses; The Wrecker‘s sentences run on smooth and debonair.

I was presented to the commissioner, and to a young friend of his whom he had brought with him for the purpose (apparently) of smoking cigars; and after we had pledged one another in a glass of California port, a trifle sweet and sticky for a morning beverage, the functionary spread his papers on the table, and the hands were summoned. Down they trooped, accordingly, into the cabin; and stood eyeing the ceiling or the floor, the picture of sheepish embarrassment, and with a common air of wanting to expectorate and not quite daring. In admirable contrast, stood the Chinese cook, easy, dignified, set apart by spotless raiment, the hidalgo of the seas.

The Flying Scud

Eventually they reach the site where Captain Trent said The Flying Scud ran aground and, sure enough, find it. The captain, crew and Loudon spend days ripping the poor brig apart and, sure enough, do eventually find boxes hidden in the mats of rice – and they do contain opium – but only a few hundred pounds of the stuff – value, at the absolute maximum, maybe $10,000. Whereas Pinkerton had bid $50,000 for the ship! It looks like a complete bust. Sadly captain Nares and Dodd conclude they’ve done everything they can, set fire to the hulk and sail on to Honolulu.

Illustration for The Wrecker by William Hole (1892)

The mystery

Here I didn’t quite understand some scenes but I think Loudon disposes of the opium to two agents Pinkerton has arranged to meet him. He then bumps into the captain of the British warship which found and rescued the crew of the Flying Scud, is invited to a party aboard, and quizzes the ship’s doctor, Urquhart. From all this he discovers that the survivor of the Scud, who later paid Bellairs to bid against Pinkerton, and who gave his name as Dickson, was in fact one Norris Carthew, an Englishman from a noble family. What the devil is this all about? Dr Urquhart gives the impression of knowing but Loudon fails to wangle it out of him and is left as completely perplexed about the mystery of the wrecked brig as we the reader, and the narrator is the intrusive kind who comes right out and confronts the reader with it:

I have never again met Dr. Urquart: but he wrote himself so clear upon my memory that I think I see him still. And indeed I had cause to remember the man for the sake of his communication. It was hard enough to make a theory fit the circumstances of the Flying Scud; but one in which the chief actor should stand the least excused, and might retain the esteem or at least the pity of a man like Dr. Urquart, failed me utterly. Here at least was the end of my discoveries; I learned no more, till I learned all; and my reader has the evidence complete. Is he more astute than I was? or, like me, does he give it up?

Pinkerton’s bankruptcy

So Loudon sails back to San Francisco and confronts Jim and his new wife, Mamie, with his failure to find treasure on the ship. Pinkerton, for his part, explains about his bankruptcy – an official receiver was called in, who could only secure 7 cents in every dollar for the creditors. Jim was thoroughly pilloried in all the newspapers and now lives in a shabby apartment with shabby clothes and is working as the meanest type of clerk.

Loudon inherits a fortune

Which is why, when Loudon receives a telegram telling him he’s inherited a fortune from his doting grandfather in Scotland, they all celebrate wildly with a champagne dinner and pack up and head to the country for a rest and recuperation. Within days Pinkerton is back to his classic best, a wheeling-dealing shyster, going to the office of the local newspaper, investigating mining operations, sniffing for new business ventures.

More Flying Scud mystery

Loudon leaves him and returns to San Francisco where he dines with Captain Nares who he got to like and respect during the long voyage. Nares says they still haven’t got to the bottom of this Scud business. Loudon is then buttonholed by the lawyer Bellairs, who reveals himself as a weedy, uneducated shyster but who menacingly says he knows all about Loudon’s inheritance and makes vague threats to undermine him or Pinkerton or both. In addition, Bellairs says he knows all about the fake mate on the Scud, Norris Carthew. What? Loudon is puzzled: what fake mate? Who is Carthew? Why does is matter?

Bellairs goes on that Carthew comes from a venerable family in England, in Dorset, aha yes you can’t fool old Bellairs. Loudon wonders what on earth he’s babbling about.

Chasing Bellairs

Next day, in a passage which I read twice but still didn’t understand, Loudon discovers that Bellairs has left his hotel and set off East, presumably to go to England and find Carthew, and decides to follow him. Why? I know the narrative has to take us to England and Carthew but Loudon’s decision to do so is extremely flimsy.

Across the Atlantic

Loudon and Bellairs find themselves on the same transatlantic ship and get to know each other more, Bellairs alternating between wanting to be friends and show off his miserably uneducated mind, and sudden bursts of aggression and threat. Loudon finds out the whole of the poor man’s life story, which I won’t bother repeating here.

Stallbridge-le-Carthew

From Liverpool the odd couple find themselves making American tourist day trips to local towns and then heading further south, to Gloucester, Bath and so by stages to Dorset. Bellairs disappears, presumably to get to Carthew first – and Loudon races to the fine ancestral pile of the Carthews arriving before the lowlife lawyer. Here Loudon is treated to a guided tour of the grand Carthew mansion, the gardens and stables and prize-winning horses and flower beds, and then the local village and the local inn kept by ex-servants of the Carthews.

From these people he learns that Norris was the black sheep of the family, the second son, wanted to be an artist (don’t they all) argued with the father and was packed off to the colonies. He has, apparently, only recently returned, promptly had a big fight with his mother, and has disappeared again. Through the roundabout method of examining the inn-keeper’s daughter’s stamp collection, Loudon gathers that Norris has gone to Barbizon, a village in France a little north of Paris and a popular hang-out for would-be artists. (In fact a place Stevenson knew well and visited when his cousin, the artist Bob Stevenson, was a regular visitor there in the 1870s.)

Barbizon

Loudon sets off straight away, across England to London and then across the Channel to France and so on to Barbizon. He arrives to find the place packed with art students as in his day, and even knows some of the older-timers who show him round. And as there aren’t many Anglos he is almost immediately introduced to the dapper Carthew, who is going under the false name of Madden. Loudon recognises him as one of the sailors rescued from the Scud and Carthew admits it and admits using a fake name in San Francisco.

They talk late into the night, with Loudon giving his side of the long convoluted story of The Flying Scud – rather wearing the reader’s patience by this time – before Carthew says he will tell his side of the story.

‘And now,’ said he, ‘turn about: I must tell you my side, much as I hate it. Mine is a beastly story. You’ll wonder how I can sleep.’ (Chapter 21)

Carthew’s life story

Once again, as in the switch right at the start of the text to Loudon Dodd’s point of view, we don’t get anything like a crisp narrative focused on explaining whatever the secret is behind the wrecked ship. The exact opposite: we get a long, long, long account of Carthew’s childhood and teenage years and prolonged arguments with his father about his wish to become an artist, the family force him to go to Oxford where he is kicked out with huge debts, after which he is packed off to Europe and makes even more debts gambling, before the disgusted family sent him even further away, all the way to Sydney Australia, to contact a lawyer who would pay him a living allowance only if he regularly visited the office. It is a strange kind of echo or just repeat of the life story of loudon which we had to crawl through in the early chapters.

Carthew puts up with this treatment in Australia for a while, spending all the money before he has it and ending up a homeless bum in a Sydney park, before he gets a tip to go and work on the railways where he discovers the joys of manual labour and rough proletarian company.

Scheme to do business in the South Seas

Back in Sydney with his pay saved up, he bumps into a well-known speculator, Tom Hadden, who gets him interested in the vast profits to be made trading in the south seas. They recruit a legendary old sea captain, Bostock, ‘a slow, sour old man, with fishy eyes’, who introduces them to another captain, one Wicks who was indicted for murder when he struck down a mutineering crewman and has been in hiding as a cabman in Sydney for three years. He says he knows a good schooner that’s been laid up rotting while a massive lawsuit fights around it which has finally settled and they can get her cheap.

The deal is done, they pool their money, buy the schooner, rename her Currency Lass, hire a Chinese cook, Carthew has a final interview with the lawyer who’d been paying him his stipend to inform him he’s off for six months trading in the south seas, and they set sail.

Business success and nautical disaster

After ten days sailing they come to an island where they are steered in by the drunk pilot and the captain makes a good deal with a susceptible white trader, enough to pay off the price of the boat and make a handsome two grand profit. The businessmen celebrate and are merrily sailing on towards San Francisco, when they are caught in a severe storm. The main boom swinging round hard cuts off the foremast at the root and then is blown overboard shattering the main mast. The ship now has no power of movement at least 1,000 miles for the nearest port.

Journey to Midway

One of them has been reading the maritime guidebook by Hoyt which claims there is a coaling station only forty or so miles away at Midway Island, so they pack the whaling boat with food, all their gods and the money, and row there, arriving next day to find no station, no people, no civilisation, just a low coral island haunted by gulls and driftwood. Here they settle in, building a fire, cooking meals and slowly despairing.

Rescue

Five or six days in they are in the middle of a despairing card game when they spy a sail. It is the Hull brig The Flying Scud which the second part of this yarn has all been about. They light a big fire with driftwood and to their amazed relief the ship comes up and anchors outside the reef. They take their whaling boat out to it and are helped aboard, asked questions, fed, to their great relief.

A hard bargain

But then the captain, Trent, invites them all down into his cabin along with the big Scandinavian first mate, Goddedaal, and the mood changes. Thoughtfully he puts it to them that there is a price for their rescue. Once he’s heard the story of the big profit they made at the island, he says his offer is this: hand over the entire £2,000 profit and he’ll take them to San Francisco; refuse, and he’ll dump them back on the island. Even his own first mate is appalled and sinks his head in his hands. But as he insists and even threatens them, Mac, the unstable passionate Ulsterman in the Lasses crew, whips out a clasp knife and in the ensuing scuffle it ends in Captain Trent’s neck, he collapses onto the table and bleeds out. At which the huge Scandianavian goes berserk, whipping up a stool, bashing out Hemstead’s brains at one stroke, breaking Mac’s arm at the next, at which point Carthew draws his pistol and shoots him, then a crew member puts his face round the door and they shot him and then – in a pitiful scene, unlike anything else in the book and destroying forever its sense of humorous deprecation – our crew hunt down and methodically slaughter the whole crew of the Scud, refusing their pleas for mercy but shooting them like animals and throwing them overboard. This has all the horror of a very modern sensibility, like something as cruel and amoral as a contemporary movie, but all told in incongruously Victorian prose. Our crew throw the bodies overboard, make an effort to clear away the blood, getting drunk on raw gin until they pass out.

Saved

The next morning they awake with terrible consciences and the psychological damage is described in depth by passages which must surely have been by Stevenson. They dispose of the last bodies, clear more blood, are going through the ship’s papers when they spot the smoke of a coal-fired ship approaching. In a mad panic they try and hide all evidence of the slaughter, search for the ship’s papers and dispose of as many as possible. Wicks comes up with the mad idea of stabbing his writing hand as if in an accident to explain why the most recent parts of the ship’s log were written by Goddedaal. And as the steamer anchors and a jolly boat rows towards them, Wicks hurriedly assigns them all identities from the slaughtered crew: he himself will impersonate Trent, Carthew with be Goddedaal, and so on.

Almost caught

All goes sort of well as the young officer sent to investigate accepts their story and takes them, with their chests containing the treasure, back to the ship which turns out to be a Royal Navy boat, the Tempest. Here they start like guilty things at the least questioning, Wicks is permanently trembling and the climax comes when someone taps Carthew on the shoulder and recognises him as Carthew; he faints clean away. Their saviour is the ship’s doctor, Urquhart. he realises Wicks’s stabbed hand is self-inflicted, he hears Carthew mentioning the dead shipmates in his delirium and eventually the two guilty men confess what happened. Surprisingly the doctor helps them cover it up, helps smuggle Carthew off the ship in San Francisco and carries on covering for them, even when Loudon tracks him down to question him.

Tied up threads

And thus almost all the mysteries of The Flying Scud, the ship Pinkerton and Loudon set out so innocently to buy and do a little trading with, are sorted out, from the nervous appearance of the crew in the Frisco bar where Loudon first saw them, to the crazy auction, where Bellair was under instructions from Carthew – masquerading as Dickson – to pay any sum to ensure nobody else came into contact with it. And when Loudon overheard Bellairs speaking to Dickson/Carthew on the phone and then rang the same number and asked him why he wanted to buy the Scud so badly – the conspirators in their paranoia took it as a sign that the authorities were onto them and scattered to the four winds, Carthew travelling back to England, revealing something of his disaster to his appalled mother, before hurrying on to France.

Where Loudon finally tracked him down to hear the whole of this long and grim narrative.

Epilogue

The final few pages consist of a letter to one Will H. Low, who I don’t think we’ve heard of before. The narrator of the letter seems to be a newspaperman (?) who has helped arrange the publication of this whole narrative. (There is a sarcastic aside where he claims to be ‘wholly modern in sentiment, and think nothing more noble than to publish people’s private affairs at so much a line’, a thought which sheds light on Henry James’s contemporary story, The Aspern Papers). He describes what became of all the participants. Pinkerton is now in business with Captain Nares, who keeps him on the straight and narrow. He’s bought a newspaper and has plans to become state senator. Dodds is in partnership with Carthew: Carthew bought another schooner and Dodds manages it, going on the voyages as super-cargo. Hadden and Mac (whose hot temper caused all the trouble) took a turn at the gold fields in Venezuela, and Wicks went on alone to Valparaiso. Why is he writing this letter?

Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste so modern;—full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable morals;—full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page in which the dollars do not jingle;—full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama—in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?

And he describes how the authors were discussing recent nautical tales and disasters – so maybe this letter is being written by Stevenson in his own character (?). Stevenson then explains how he and his collaborator thought to make the story into that modern genre,

the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end;

The risk of these is they often appear mechanical contrivances. Hence the decision to give such a very very long lead-in to the main characters – hence Loudon and his pa back in the States, and the long section about being an art student in Paris, and the long sections about Pinkerton’s preposterous schemes.

All this is meant to draw the reader in – but I defy any modern reader of this book who wouldn’t have found it do exactly the opposite and eventually tire and exhaust them so much that they give up reading the book before the mystery proper even appears.

Humour

Stevenson’s speciality is derring-do and adventure, risks and perils and threatening – often Gothic horror – tension. By contrast, this long book is written in a tone of urbane drollery. Once in Honolulu, Loudon goes to visit one of the men contacted by Pinkerton to take receipt of and fence the opium, a Mr Fowler.

This gentleman owned a bungalow on the Waikiki beach; and there in company with certain young bloods of Honolulu, I was entertained to a sea-bathe, indiscriminate cocktails, a dinner, a hula-hula, and (to round off the night), poker and assorted liquors. To lose money in the small hours to pale, intoxicated youth, has always appeared to me a pleasure overrated.

The last sentence is not exactly Wilde, but it is a deliberate epigram, intended to be dry and witty. The books is full of this kind of effect, far from the style used in Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae. Whereas the narrators of those books talk up the action, and contrive an atmosphere of tension and melodrama, the narrator of The Wrecker takes a self-deprecating view of himself and everything around him, with a steady stream of epigrams, witticisms and a self-conscious punning attitude to words.

In such a mixed humour, I made up what it pleases me to call my mind, and once more involved myself in the story of Carthew and the Flying Scud. The same night I wrote a letter of farewell to Jim, and one of anxious warning to Dr. Urquart begging him to set Carthew on his guard; the morrow saw me in the ferry-boat; and ten days later, I was walking the hurricane deck on the City of Denver. By that time my mind was pretty much made down again, its natural condition.

For all the thousands of times I’ve heard people having their mind made up, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make the fairly obvious joke claim that their mind is made down, and it is typical of Loudon to go on and joke that this is pretty much his mind’s natural condition.

In his humorous mode, the narrator is well aware that he is writing rubbish. When Loudon and Captai Nares are ransacking the shipwrecked Scud, they find some artists’ pencils which gives Loudon a moment’s pause.

‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘it’s been used by an artist, too: see how it’s sharpened–not for writing–no man could write with that. An artist, and straight from Sydney? How can he come in?’
‘O, that’s natural enough,’ sneered Nares. ‘They cabled him to come up and illustrate this dime novel.’

One small moment particularly struck me: Loudon creeps up behind him to eavesdrop on the lawyer Bellairs as he makes a telephone call to his client from the auctioneer house:

I scarce know anything that gives a lower view of man’s intelligence than to overhear (as you thus do) one side of a communication.

How prophetic, now that all of us have multiple moments on any bus or train where we are forced to listen to half a conversation as someone natters on their mobile phone and are invariably drawn to conclude that both participants are imbeciles.

Psychological acuity

A feature of Stevenson’s successful books is their psychological insight. Jekyll and Hyde is a sustained investigation of the human mind, but his other successes throw out all kinds of insights into human nature. In my review of The Master of Ballantrae – itself a sustained contrast between the two psychological types of the feuding brothers – I’ve mentioned the scene where the servant Mackellar tries to kick the wicked Master over the edge of the ship they’re sailing on in a storm – the acuteness comes in from the way the Master actually respects Mackellar for trying to kill him and Mackellar, in turn, can’t help admiring the master’s largeness of spirit, even while still detesting him. Peculiar insights into human behaviour like this litter the better books.

And so – through the essentially light and mostly dry ironic style of The Wreckers – there are occasional moments of something deeper, more visionary. Safely back in San Francisco Loudon takes captain Nares to dinner and both of them find it hard to reconcile the intensity of their hard labour dismantling the Scud in the harsh glare of Midway Island, amid the screeching seagulls and the crash of the waves, with the polite restaurant they now find themselves in, formally dressed and waited on hand and foot.

The same night I had Nares to dinner. His sunburnt face, his queer and personal strain of talk, recalled days that were scarce over and that seemed already distant. Through the music of the band outside, and the chink and clatter of the dining-room, it seemed to me as if I heard the foaming of the surf and the voices of the sea-birds about Midway Island. The bruises on our hands were not yet healed; and there we sat, waited on by elaborate darkies, eating pompano and drinking iced champagne.

‘Think of our dinners on the Norah, captain, and then oblige me by looking round the room for contrast.’

He took the scene in slowly. ‘Yes, it is like a dream,’ he said: ‘like as if the darkies were really about as big as dimes; and a great big scuttle might open up there, and Johnson stick in a great big head and shoulders, and cry, ‘Eight bells!’—and the whole thing vanish.’

If the plot and dialogue are given in an almost entirely even, sensible, sober, rather ironic style, it is the ‘strange’ moments like this which keep the reader reading… Just about.

Until the final grisly scenes. The massacre at the climax of the book comes in chapter 24 of the book’s 25 chapters. I.e. it is only at the very very bitter end of the text that we have anything like Stevenson’s characteristic psychological depth and this itself is a little overwhelmed by the amount of blood and gore. Still, the feelings of the sailors as they land on Midway and realise they are doomed to starve to death – and then their feelings in the aftermath of the massacre – are completely at odds with everything which preceded them and leave an odd, damaged taste in the mouth.

Old words and phrases

One of the main appeals of reading old books is they have a different way with the English language: individual words are used in a different sense from our contemporary meanings, and entire phrases appear which you can puzzle out but which have long disappeared. Therefore, reading old books gives you a sense on the wider possibilities of the English language and, even if only momentarily, expands your mind.

That was a home word of Pinkerton’s, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico of every school of art: ‘What I can’t see is why you should want to do nothing else.’

‘A home word’? Presumably meaning, a particularly telling or accurate saying.

‘Just let me get down on my back in a hayfield,’ said he, ‘and you’ll find there’s no more snap to me than that much putty.’

‘Snap’? Presumably meaning vim, vigour, zest, energy.

It was blowing fresh outside, with a strong send of sea.

‘Send’ being, apparently, the heave of the sea, the motion of the sea against a vessel.

Just before the battle, mother

In a typically comic touch, Loudon not only finds himself made the reluctant front man for Pinkerton’s surprisingly successful business venture of organised trips to have picnics on boats out of San Francisco, but after humming it once finds himself called upon to sing the full version of the classic American tune ‘Just before the battle, mother’ until his performance is advertised on the posters and becomes a regular part of the excruciating routine. Listening to it gives a sense of how long long ago this society, its values and morals, its fundamental beliefs and values, are from our own.

Conclusion

Very broadly speaking there are two Stevensons: Bad Stevenson rambles without focus, his plots unravelling into increasing preposterousness and he exhausts the reader in endless peregrinations which eventually make you vow never to read one of his justly-forgotten books ever again. The classic example is the awful New Arabian Nights and, I’m afraid, this novel jostles into that group.

Then there is Brilliant Stevenson – as in Kidnapped and Treasure Island – works which make you think you must track down and read every word this genius of atmosphere, pace and incident ever wrote.

Until you find yourself reading another long, gruelling, amusing but ultimately inconsequential folly like The Wrecker. And so the would-be fan finds himself ping-ponging from one pole to the other.

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by Simon on September 23, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Novel

Tagged 1892, adventure, Jim Pinkerton, Lloyd Osborne, Loudon Dodds, Norris Carthew, novel, Robert Louis Stevenson, Romance, The Flying Scud, The Wrecker

Posted by Simon on September 23, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/the-wrecker-robert-louis-stevenson/

Nada the Lily by Henry Rider Haggard (1892)

‘Nada the Lily’ is Rider Haggard’s sixth novel. Haggard distinguished between his ‘Romances’ – which included the She and Allan Quatermain series, both featuring a large element of fantasy and the supernatural – and his ‘Novels’, which are more naturalistic, where the emphasis is more on human relationships than the fantastic.

Blacks

The most striking feature of Nada the Lily is that it is set entirely among South African blacks. An (unnamed) white man only appears in the few pages of the frame narrative where he meets an ancient witch-doctor. I don’t know of any other novels of the time which are set only among blacks, and where the thoughts of black characters good, bad and indifferent are described in great detail.

Tragic romance

The last hundred or so pages of the novel describe the love affair between the the mighty warrior Umslopogaas and the beautiful Zulu maiden, Nada, which gives the book its title. (It’s true that, early in the book the narrator hints that Nada might have white blood in her, from a Portuguese trader who stayed with the Swazi tribe from whom Mopo’s wife, Mcropha, came.)

Chaka the tyrant

But this love story is completely overshadowed by Mopo’s long servitude to the Zulu tyrant, Chaka, and the multiple examples of Chaka’s appalling cruelty and sadism which dominate the first 200 pages. Chaka (nowadays known as Shaka) was a real historical character, founder of the Zulu nation as the predominant military force in south-east Africa, a dominance they held from his kingship (1816-28) until the Zulu wars with the invading British in the late 1870s. Chaka is portrayed as a precursor of Stalin, paranoid and cruel in the extreme, given to ordering the extermination of whole tribes, the casual execution of complete innocents on the slightest pretext. The Wikipedia article on Shaka says some of the legends about Shaka’s cruelty might be colonial and apartheid propaganda; but still says there’s plenty of evidence of the large areas laid waste, of murder, torture, cannibalism carried out under his unhinged edicts:

‘After the death of his mother Shaka ordered as a sign of mourning that no crops should be planted during the following year, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, though it wasn’t restricted to humans, cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like.’

Violent African novels

The novel is like this only more so, and for 200 long pages. It cast a cloud of misery and murder over me for the week it took to read. The sadistic cruelty and casual violence found on every page reminded me of other African novels I’ve read –

the psychopathic African leader, Sam, at the heart of Chinua Achebe’s 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savannah
the sadistic father, Eugene, at the heart of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, Purple Hibiscus
the psychopathic Idi Amin at the heart of Giles Foden’s 1998 novel, The Last King of Scotland
the sadism and cruelty taught to child soldiers during the war in Sierra Leone described in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s 2005 novel, Moses, Citizen and Me
several books about the Rwandan genocide, the civil war in the Congo, about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, about the Sudan and Darfur, about the civil wars in Mozambique and Namibia..
I might as well mention Heart of Darkness (1899)

Thus, most of the books about Africa I’ve ever read, whether fiction or non-fiction, detail a stupefying level of violence and cruelty, so Nada, extreme though it is, fits right in with what I’ve read elsewhere.

An African epic

However Haggard isn’t detailing Chaka’s psychopathic behaviour for racist reasons (unlike later Boer and apartheid propagandists). The opposite. Haggard is deliberately setting out to write an African epic, a genre which raises its characters to the level of archetypal heroes and is written in a high, unflinching and sombre style. The story of how Umslopogaas is rescued at his birth reminds me of the legend of Moses and even the childermass; the harsh man-to-man combats in the dust and heat of the African veldt remind me over and over of the unforgiving brutality of The Iliad.

Haggard, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by folk tales, ancient myths and legends but, unlike most, his vast output includes attempts to rewrite them or bring them into the modern age: Haggard actually wrote a Viking saga, Eric Brighteyes, and a continuation of the Odyssey, The World’s Desire. To my mind, in Nada, he is consciously striving for an epic oral style to give Homeric dignity to his Zulu protagonists. The long story is told out loud over a succession of evenings by the old witch-doctor, Mopo, to the anonymous white man who takes it down and publishes it. The opening echoes conventions of the epic form:

‘You ask me, my father, to tell you the tale of the youth of Umslopogaas, holder of the iron Chieftainess, the axe Groan-maker, who was named Bulalio the Slaughterer, and of his love for Nada, the most beautiful of Zulu women. It is long; but you are here for many nights, and, if I live to tell it, it shall be told. Strengthen your heart, my father, for I have much to say that is sorrowful, and even now, when I think of Nada the tears creep through the horn that shuts out my old eyes from light.’

It doesn’t quite invoke a Muse, but it does justify the purpose and form of the text, it foretells the tragic ending of the tale right at the start, and it uses multiple epithets to build up the heroic stature of the male protagonist, Umslopogaas. The whole text is cast in this style, an imagining by Haggard of the elevated yet also laconic style of a pre-literate, oral people. The deeper you read, the more completely convincing it becomes, and you find yourself entranced, sitting in the gloom of a cramped African hut, listening to the low voice of an eerie old man as he tells his long and tragic tale.

‘All that day till the sun grew low we walked round the base of the great Ghost Mountain, following the line of the river. We met no one, but once we came to the ruins of a kraal, and in it lay the broken bones of many men, and with the bones rusty assegais and the remains of ox-hide shields, black and white in colour. Now I examined the shields, and knew from their colour that they had been carried in the hands of those soldiers who, years ago, were sent out by Chaka to seek for Umslopogaas, but who had returned no more.’

I think it’s a triumph!

Henry Rider Haggard reviews

Henry Rider Haggard (1856 to 1925)
King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
She: A History of Adventure (1887)
Allan Quatermain (1887)
The Joy of Sets or, the Allan Quatermain stories
Maiwa’s revenge, or The War of The Little Hand (1888)
Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (1889)
Nada the Lily (1892)

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by Simon on August 13, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature

Tagged 1892, Africa, British Empire, Chaka, Nada the Lily, novel, Rider Haggard, Romance, Zulu

Posted by Simon on August 13, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/nada-the-lily-henry-rider-haggard/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Romance

The Decay of Lying: An Observation by Oscar Wilde (1891)

The dialogue form

The Argument

Provocation 1. The incongruous

Provocation 2. Anti-England

The contemporary scene

Art should be quite detached, quite useless

Life imitates Art

Nature imitates Art

Art doesn’t reflect its society and times – it creates them

A new world

Three principles

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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)

Overview

Central characters

A chapter per character

Politicians

Captain Antonio Corelli

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

2. The Duce

3. The Strongman

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

7. Extreme Remedies

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

9. August 15, 1940

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

11. Pelagia and Mandras

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

13. Delirium

14. Grazzi

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

22. Mandras behind the Veil

23. April 30, 1941

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

25. Resistance

26. Sharp Edges

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

29. Etiquette

30. The Good Nazi (1)

31. A Problem with Eyes

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

33. A Problem with Hands

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’

36. Education

37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

39. Arsenios

40. A Problem with Lips

41. Snails

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

44. Theft

45. A Time of Innocence

46. Bunnios

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

48. La Scala

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

50. A Time of Hiatus

51. Paralysis

52. Developments

53. First Blood

54. Carlo’s Farewell

55. Victory

56. The Good Nazi (2)