Tag Archives: fiction

Book review

The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, 2024

In his summary of The Proof of My Innocence, Jonathan Coe tells us that ” I felt like writing something contemporary, ironic and harder-edged. I wanted to return, if possible, to the tone of What a Carve Up!, with some kind of metatextual crime story which would also reflect on the current political situation.” If we judge the novel by these criteria, then I think that while certainly the metatextual crime story box can definitely be ticked, I would struggle to describe this as ironic or harder-edged. I will try to explain why in this review, but the good news is that the lack of a hard-edge is not a serious problem nor does it detract from the overall enjoyability of the novel.

Coe’s well-established method is to use contemporary real-life political events as a backdrop to his stories. The Proof of My Innocence follows this pattern by being set in the tumultuous period of Liz Truss’s premiership in the autumn of 2022. It opens with her election and ends with her resignation just seven weeks later, the shortest term of office of a British Prime Minister by some considerable distance.

The novel opens with a woman detective following a suspect on a train. Just as she is about to arrest him she is interrupted by a See It Say It Sorted announcement. Being infuriated by these announcements and then making a plot point out of them, is the kind of thing an observational stand-up comedian might ‘notice’, and pretend to get worked up about, when they really aren’t that obtrusive. This scene is then swiftly followed by an apparently unrelated story-line in which Phyl, who has recently graduated from university, works in a minimum wage job at a sushi bar at Heathrow Airport. She lives with her parents and misses the freedom of university life. Phyl watches old episodes of Friends as a means of reducing the anxiety caused by the lack of direction in her post-graduate life. The friction between millennials and their Boomer parents is one of the sources of humour in the novel. Coe is unquestionably one of the latter and I am not sure his portrait of the younger generation is entirely accurate, but the Friends obsession (or insert comedy programme of your choice – another favourite is the US version of The Office) seemed spot on.

The arrival of a guest disrupts the family dynamic. Christopher Swann, a friend from her parents’ time at Cambridge University in the 80’s, writes a blog on contemporary political issues. He is planning on attending TruCon, a conference organised by a dubious right-wing group pressure group. The conference is being held at a nearby stately home, Wetherby Hall. Chris is joined by his adopted daughter, Rashida, who quickly bonds with Phyl over a shared frustrating experience with the lifts at terminal 5. Phyl is toying with the idea of writing a novel, and in discussion with Rashida about this idea she jots down three possible genres for her work: cosy crime, dark academia (such the The Secret History) and auto-fiction. The bulk of the remainder of the novel is written in the form of these three genres. The reader can’t immediately tell whether these are fictions written by Phyl or by Coe, although this is eventually revealed.

The cosy crime third of the story is set at Wetherby Hall, the venue for the TruCon conference, which opens on the day Liz Truss becomes prime minister. This section opens with a parody of this genre which is somewhat over the top:

“Christopher Swann carefully steered his car between the yellowing drystone walls of the quaint old bridge that carried the road over the brook….Just a few hundred yards after crossing the brook he entered the village of \Wetherby Pond itself. At the sound of his engine (even though he was driving a quiet, hybrid model) the ducks on the eponymous body of water took flight with a volley of complaining quacks. Christopher followed the road around the edge of the pond, his eyes taking in every unlikely detail of the old post office, the red telephone box standing outside the village shop, the row of trimly thatched cottages and an elderly resident reading a copy of the Times while sitting on a weathered oak bench.”

I genuinely can’t tell if this is deliberately bad genre writing or not, but I will give Coe the benefit of the doubt and assume it is part of the parody. I particularly liked the description of his Swann’s ‘eyes’ taking in every detail as if any other body part could have fulfilled the same function! Swann is treated as an outsider by most conference delegates, which of course he very much is. Rather than keeping a low profile he goes out of his way to antagonise the various right-wingers present, all of whom feel jubilant at Truss’s appointment, feeling this is their moment. The conference is interrupted by the news of Queen Elizabeth 2nd’s death, quickly followed by Christopher’s brutal murder. Coe is treading a fine line here – he is incorporating all the cosy crime tropes he can think of – the rural setting, a locked room mystery, secret passages, a cryptic note from the victim, etc etc – and at the same time telling the underlying story of Swann’s forty-year pursuit of the far right in the UK and their plans for the day they finally take power, which seems to have arrived.

The next section of the story is told as an example of the ‘dark academia’ genre and is based around a manuscript memoir of one of Swann’s friends at university in the 1980’s. This section continues the delicate balancing act between parody – the author’s memories of his days at Cambridge in the 80’s include love affairs, glamorous young women, hidden identities, secret societies and a sinister conspiracy to support the Thatcher Government – and advancing the narrative, leaving clues about the present-day mystery. The final section written as auto-fiction completes the murder mystery element of the novel but leaves some loose ends dangling. These are picked up in what is in effect the novel’s postscript, which reveals that much of the preceding story has been a fiction within the fiction – hence the sound of the metatextual box being ticked.

The Proof of My Innocence is full of things that the reader is encouraged to notice for themselves, the novelists equivalent of Easter eggs. Clues to the identify of the murder form part of these things we are encouraged to notice, but there’s much more – references to contemporary culture, running jokes (the laboured joke about whether an Cambridge don had a harpsichord or a clavichord in his rooms is repeated about a dozen times) wordplay, and so on. Each time we spot one of these we get a small hit of dopamine – ‘clever me!’ – that keeps us reading. And The Proof of My Innocence was eminently readable – I got through it in just over two days. By way of example, the murder mystery element of the story has the victim surviving his attack just long enough to write a few cryptic symbols before expiring (this trope goes back to at least A Study in Scarlet. The message is “r 8 / 2.” Is this a reference to someone staying in room 8 (2)? Or something happening on 8th February? Or possibly even something happening on 2nd August (those pesky Americans with their different conventions for writing dates). Or something else entirely? (Clue, it’s something else entirely). Earlier a pub Swann visits is called the Fresh Lettuce, a wry reference to the tabloid joke that haunted (haunts?) Truss as to whether her premiership would last longer than a lettuce (it didn’t). I was patting myself on the back when I spotted the fact that a plot point would revolve around a novel within the novel called My Innocence and changes made to the proof copy (hence, the Proof of My Innocence, a clever play on words). Is the enjoyment of these ‘noticeables’ a feature of the genres Coe parodies, or of his writing more generally?

Sadly, the novel slightly fizzles out. The big conspiracy Swann is planning to expose, the far-right’s plan to privatise the NHS, never sees the light of day. A memory stick with details of the plan is stolen and back up copies are quietly forgotten after his death. An alternative right-wing plan revealed within the 1980’s memoir, to defeat a strike by the NUM, is also forgotten (this was hardly a secret plan, more a statement of the obvious). Coe’s portrait of the far-right of British politics, and the extent to which it is influenced by the American right, is usually spot on, but the absence of any reference to Farage or Reform was puzzling. Wagstaff, a Tory politician who plays the role of villain in the novel, is the nearest we come to a portrait of Farage, but he is a Cambridge graduate and a life-long Tory, so not anywhere near an equivalent. Reform need the Jonathan Coe treatment. Once the meta-fictions end and the novel switches to the principal storyline we find out that the murder-mystery narratives were Phyl’s attempts at making sense of Swann’s death in a car crash before he even reached the conference. Not a particularly sensitive way of processing someone’s death I would have thought.

Coe is an author I have been meaning to read for some time. He is quite prolific having published 15 novels, roughly one every three years. His writing style is engaging and accessible. So I will definitely be reading more of his work in future. I enjoyed The Proof of My Innocence and look forward to reading Coe’s thoughts on Starmer’s Labour.

The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, 2024

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Book review

No-one writes to the Colonel, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1958

No One Writes to the Colonel is a long short story or short novella, coming in at under 70 pages. Famously Marquez said that he had to write One Hundred Years of Solitude so that people would read No One Writes to the Colonel. Which is really a throwing down of the gauntlet, challenging any reader who admires his longer form work to love this short story.

An unnamed retired Colonel, a veteran of earlier Colombian wars, lives in poverty with his wife and his rooster. The rooster has been bred to fight on cock-fights, and could potentially be worth a lot of money, either in prize money or sold on to other trainers. The rooster previously belonged to the colonel and his wife’s son, who has been killed in the political violence gripping the country.

For fifteen years the Colonel been waiting for the Government pension he was promised (or perhaps more accurately he believes he was promised, because his lawyer seems to be very unsure of his eligibility). Every week he meets the mailboat and each week he is sent home empty handed, because no-one writes to the Colonel. His wife has asthma, making their daily lives all the more difficult and miserable. The story opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician. The reader is told that this death is significant because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. Initially it is unclear why natural causes deaths should be so unusual, but it soon becomes apparent that most other deaths have been as a result of political violence. Their small village is under martial law – there is a nightly curfew at 11, and the funeral procession is forbidden from passing in front of the police station.

The centre of the story is dominated by the decision as to whether or not to sell their prize rooster. Potentially it could be very lucrative once the cock-fighting season starts in the new year, but they have to find a way to get through the winter first and without jobs or the long-awaited pension, they fear they may starve before that happens. So they are forced to consider selling the rooster for well below its actual value just to survive. There is also the complication that the rooster itself eats a lot of corn, taking food out of their mouths. The Colonel’s wife sometimes has to boil stones to try to convince their neighbours that they have something to eat. So this is not a community where the old and hungry feel able to ask for help from others – whether or not that help would be offered.

Despite the eternal non-appearance of his pension, the Colonel still lives in hope, hope that one day a letter will arrive, one day his rooster will win. The story ends on a defiant upbeat note. Having decided to keep the rooster until the cock-fighting season starts, he is berated by his wife who asks

“And meanwhile what do we eat?”.

“It had taken the Colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:

‘Shit.'”

No-one writes to the Colonel, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1958

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Book review

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, 1958

The central plot point of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana involves an unlikely spy, James Wormold, a middle-aged English vacuum salesman, making up details of secret military installations he claims are being built in the mountains outside Havana. Absurdly he sends his handlers in London detailed drawings of the rocket base using the schematics of the vacuum cleaners he sell, presciently named the Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner. What is strange is that I knew this detail before I opened the book, and it was one of the very few things I know about Greene’s work. But I found it frustrating that I can’t for the life of me remember how I knew that fact! There is a wider point here about how novels work their way into the cultural subconscious (so that, for example, Kate Bush could write a song about Wuthering Heights without ever having read the novel). I suspect the main reason this detail stuck in my head for so long (however it got there) is because of the way the novel strangely anticipated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The novel draws its humour from the gullibility of MI6. The central character, Wormold, is a vacuum cleaner salesman, selling only one company’s product (he seems to have only two different models of vacuum available). It shouldn’t matter, I know, but the idea of an Englishman selling vacuums in 1950’s Cuba just struck me as profoundly improbable. Who is buying these things? Greene himself had worked for British Intelligence during the war, and came to realise how easy it was for spies to file fictitious reports – who could check them for accuracy? This idea seems to have originated with the notorious case of Garbo, a Spanish double agent who pretended to have up to 27 agents working for him all over England, and who came to play an important role in misleading the Germans about the location of the 1944 landings. Greene wrote a first draft of the story in 1946 but it was the outbreak of the Cold War that gave the novel a new, more absurd, dimension.

The novel opens with our rather pathetic anti-hero struggling to keep his head above water, financially, mainly due to the demands of his spoilt teenage daughter. His wife has long since left him, leaving him to bring up his strictly Catholic daughter on his own. When he is clumsily approached by Hawthorne, an English spymaster, he becomes a spy himself almost accidentally. His initial doubts about the job are quickly overcome when he realises that this could be a lucrative profession if he recruits enough fictitious agents and claims enough expenses. His masterstroke comes when he concocts the idea of a secret mountain missile base using drawing of vacuum cleaner parts. Although British Intelligence is presented in this novel as incompetent and overly-trusting, it is very hard to see how else they could have dealt with the situation Wormold presents them with. They take his reports seriously – to do otherwise would have been reckless – and insist on him providing proof, suggesting different ways he can do so. They also send other agents out to Cuba to help him. That all seems fairly reasonable to me. Of course their main mistake is there inability to notice drawings of a vacuum clear when presented with them.

Up to the point at which Wormold starts his campaign of deception, the novel has been lightly comic, with Wormold being an accident-prone loser who is making things up as he goes along. He seems destined to be exposed as a fantasist at any point. But he reveals an inner strength when his improvised plans start to fall apart. Back in London, nobody knows he sells vacuum cleaners and has no reason to suspect his worrying reports. A secretary, Beatrice, and a radio assistant are sent out to join him and scale up his operation. As his lies become more outrageous Beatrice comes to suspect his elaborate fictions. She asks to speak to one of his agents, a pilot named Raúl. When a real-life pilot named Raul is killed in a ‘car accident’, but which is almost certainly an assassination, Wormold begins to panic. It is almost as if his lies are becoming reality and he sets out to save his fictional contacts, exposing himself to real danger while doing so. The reader is able to infer that his reports to London have been intercepted and decoded and his ‘operation’ is now under attack. Things get real very quickly and in the novel’s climax Wormold only narrowly escapes an attack on his own life.

An accidental spy who finds himself in the thick of an adventure, surviving encounters with assassins through dumb luck, sounds like a summary of a James Bond parody such as Johnny English or Austin Powers. Our Man in Havana was published only a few months after Dr No, the sixth in the James Bond series which started with Casino Royale in 1953 and seems to have been influenced by many of the tropes Fleming uses. I think it is best seen in this light – as a response to the portrayal of English spies as suave, sophisticated and almost unstoppable. But both Bond and Wormold get the girl in the end, and both beat the bad guys when it matters. Wormold discovers a surprising inner core when he and his family are threatened.

As I have mentioned several times before, I am not a massive fan of trigger/content warnings, but it comes as a shock when Greene uses the n-word in the novel’s opening sentence. The word is used casually by a character rather than the narrator and emphasises his background (he is a refugee from Germany). Other than the general contempt that British people casually treat all ‘foreigners’ in books from this period, the racism shown here does not reappear regularly, so if you can get past this instance you should be able to stick with the rest of the book. This is not Greene’s most sophisticated or complex novel and it is hard to warm to the principal characters, especially Wormold, but it has moments of light comedic touch, and is an interesting portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Never has vacuum sales been more interesting.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, 1958

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Book review

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis, 1973

The Riverside Villas Murder was written in the 1970’s, is set in the 1930’s, and is infused with the dominant social attitudes of the 1950s. Which all adds up to an uncomfortable mix. The story is told principally through the eyes of 14-year-old schoolboy Peter Furneaux. He is a typical 14 year-old, unable to go more than a few minutes at a time without thinking about sex. The mystery element of the story begins with a burglary at a local museum, where a mummified body and some Roman coins are stolen. Later, at a village dance, one of the Riverside Villas residents, a Mr Inman, provokes his neighbours by suggesting he has damaging information about them. During the dance, Mrs Trevelyan, a bored housewife, dances with Peter. Later she invites him to tea at her home, where she ‘seduces’ him. In the 1970’s this may have seemed comical, but fifty years on the scene is quite shocking in many ways. While it is Peter’s first sexual experience, Amis treats it as slapstick comedy: “What he had imagined so often and so long, and what actually happened on Mrs Trevelyan’s bed, resembled each other about as much as a fox-terrier and a rhinoceros.”  

A few days later, Inman is murdered. He staggers into the Furneaux home, soaking wet from having fallen into a nearby river and bleeding from a head wound. Peter calls Mrs Trevelyan for help, but Inman dies shortly after. The rest of the novel comprises the police investigation, led by a cast of policemen who I think we are supposed to find comic but to me were one-dimensional and unconvincing and whose investigation is chaotic.

As a murder-mystery the novel is dull – the explanation as to whodunnit, when it is finally revealed, manages to be both predictable, because it follows the traditions of the genre, and at the same time impossible to deduce, given that the murder weapon turns out to be an improbable Heath-Robinson contraption that no-one could possibly have foreseen. The murderer’s motives are also transparently thin.

But there is a much more serious problem with the novel. Amis clearly set out to write a traditional detective novel, with the central character being a young teenage boy. It follows all the tropes of the genre quite carefully, as if the novel were an exercise in nostalgia. The 1930’s setting – Amis was born in 1922, so would have been a teenager himself in the thirties and therefore very familiar with the popular culture reference which litter the novel – allows him to wallow in nostalgia for an England where murderers are executed, housewives are almost invisible unless they are sexual predators and gay men are the object of scorn and disgust. The novel also contains a scattering of casual uses of the n-word and gay slurs, which, when placed in the mouths of old-fashioned men such as Peter’s father or the police provide the excuse of authenticity but at the same time allow Amis to break social taboos. In other words the novel is pointedly offensive. This isn’t social observation, it is autobiography.

Which poses two questions: why read a book with such objectionable ideas, and why review it? I loved Lucky Jim, and while I have developed a much better understanding of some of its problematic aspects, I still have a fondness for it. Amis can craft a striking phrase – the fox-terrier/rhinoceros quote above for example – and he did go on to win the Booker Prize. So it is hard to dismiss him as an author, and I still read him occasionally to see if he could ever recapture the brightness and humour of Lucky Jim. So far there have only been glimpses. As to the question of why one would review a book that deserves to go out of print and remain so, that’s more straightforward. These are not recommendations but posts noting what books I have read. No more no less. I don’t post about every single book I read (although I should according to my self-imposed rules) but I try to miss as few as possible. And if I have saved anyone the experience of reading the Riverside Villas Murder then it will have been worth it.

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis, 1973

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Book review

When Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler opens, Hedda and her husband Jorgen have just arrived in their new home from an extended – five or six months – honeymoon. Jorgen’s aunt, Julle, is keen to know whether Hedda is already pregnant and drops many hints on the subject, such as “I don’t expect you wasted your time on your honeymoon, did you, Jorgen?”. At first Jorgen completely ignores her. When he later wonders what they are going to do with their spare rooms, Julle says “You might find a use for them, when the time comes”. He perks up at the idea that the rooms could be used to store his books and papers! As she is preparing to leave, Jorgen says of Hedda, who has by this point joined them, “Have you noticed how well and bonny she looks? I declare she’s filled out beautifully on the trip.” “Filled out” is a strange expression to use of a 29 year old woman (obviously a potential translation issue) but is typical of the way Jorgen infantilises Hedda. It would not be surprising for a nineteenth-century couple to fall pregnant on their honeymoon given the lack of readily available effective contraception (and the long cold Scandinavian nights!). But Hedda angrily rejects any such suggestion: “Oh, do you have to…“. When Julle leaps eagerly on the hint: “Filled out?“. Tesman replies “Yes, Aunt Julle, you don’t notice it so much when she’s wearing that dress. But I…well, I have occasion to….” Tesman is scandalously suggesting he has seen her naked and is therefore better able to judge whether she has ‘filled out’. Hedda again rejects the idea, insisting “I’m exactly the same as I was when we left“. Is this because she is indeed not pregnant, or is she in denial?

Act One ends with Hedda playing her favourite game of winding up those around her. She says to her husband “Oh well, I’ve got one thing at least that I can pass the time with“. He leaps to the assumption that she is hinting at a pregnancy and is crushed when she reveals she is talking about “My pistols, Jorgen“. This scene is also the reveal that Hedda was Lovberg’s secret lover, the punchline to Mrs Elvert’s earlier reference to “a shadow of a woman that stands between us (her and Lovberg). Someone from his past…He said that when they parted, she threatened to shoot him with a pistol”.

In Act two, the Judge joins in the hectoring of Hedda about her putative pregnancy, condescendingly telling her that her boredom with married life will pass “When you’re faced with…what may I … perhaps a little pompously…refer to as a sacred and ….and exacting responsibility? (Smiles). A new responsibility, my little lady.” Such language again infantilises Hedda, denying her agency, and once again, she rejects the idea immediately: “(angry) Be quiet! You’ll never see anything of the sort!” The Judge is as keen as Julle on the idea and won’t let it lie, responding “(carefully) We’ll talk about it in a year’s time… at the very latest”. This is met with yet another absolute rejection: “(shortly) I’ve no aptitude for any such thing, Mr Brack, No responsibilities for me, thank you!” And when he tries to continue the conversation, she shuts it down once more: “Oh, be quiet I say!”

If Hedda treats her pistols as substitute children, for Lovborg and Thea, the manuscript is their ‘baby’, one Hedda manically destroys, saying as she does so: “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks! [Throwing one or two more quires into the stove.] Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s. [Throws the rest in.] I am burning—I am burning your child.”

Lovborg and Thea agree that this manuscript was their child: (Mrs Elvsted): “Do you know, Lovborg, that what you have done with the book—I shall think of it to my dying day as though you had killed a little child.

Lovborg. Yes, you are right. It is a sort of child-murder.

Mrs Elvsted. How could you, then—! Did not the child belong to me too?”

In the play’s final act, there is a scene which is almost universally interpreted as confirmation that Hedda is indeed pregnant. She has just confessed to Tesman to having burnt Lovborg’s manuscript and continues:

“Well, I may as well tell you that—just at this time— [impatiently breaking off.] No, no; you can ask Aunt Julle. She will tell you, fast enough.

Tesman. Oh, I almost think I understand you, Hedda! [Clasps his hands together.] Great heavens! do you really mean it! Eh?

Hedda. Don’t shout so. The servant might hear.

Tesman. [Laughing in irrepressible glee.] The servant! Why, how absurd you are, Hedda. It’s only my old Berte! Why, I’ll tell Berte myself.

Hedda. [Clenching her hands together in desperation.] Oh, it is killing me, —it is killing me, all this!”

If this ‘confession’ is intended to ensure Jorgen’s continuing devotion, it is short-lived, as he almost immediately throws himself into the attempt to recreate the burnt manuscript with Mrs Elvsted. His hypothetical child-to-be is quickly forgotten. But it is far from explicit.

If you google ‘Is Hedda Gabler pregnant?’ all the online sources agree – yes, she is pregnant, but she is in denial about it. But wait a minute – have you spotted the irony there? This argument suggests that Hedda doesn’t know her own body. All the characters who assume she must be pregnant after her honeymoon are quick to pick up on any indications she might be gaining weight (and some productions add detail such as her having morning sickness, to press the point home). Both characters within the play and critics seem to agree on this point – but Hedda herself has no agency in this issue. We are told very little about the honeymoon or the characters’ intimate life, other than the fact that Hedda finds her husband “horribly tedious”, (his academic focus is on “An Account of the Domestic Crafts of Medieval Brabant”) but we go along with the nods and the winks, the innuendo implicit in phrases such as ‘blossoming‘. Are we the audience being cast as avatars of Aunt Julle and others, clucking over an anticipated ‘happy event’ without ever once listening to Hedda?

Why does this matter? Hedda’s decision at the end of the play is usually interpreted as a form of escape, a decision to leave a situation in which she feels trapped without any other option. I tis worth remembering that the murder (as they would have seen it) of an unborn child would have been an abomination to a Victorian audience. Norway was a largely Evangelical Lutheran society (so the internet tells me) but most nineteenth century audiences would have been shocked and appalled at Hedda’s actions, both towards herself and her unborn child. While generalisations are difficult I expect she would have attracted little sympathy. This is borne out by the initial critical reactions to the play which were a mixture of bewilderment and hostility, with critics calling its 1891 premiere in Munich a “hideous nightmare of pessimism,” ‘immoral’, and Hedda herself a “beast”. Despite this reception audiences kept coming, compelled by the drama of the piece.

This is of course one of those literary puzzles to which there can never be a definitive answer. Ibsen leaves enough evidence for the reader to conclude that Hedda both is and isn’t pregnant, with the actors and producers being given a form of casting vote in terms of how they portray the character. But I would suggest this is not a simple choice and is one which can potentially influence the impact of the whole play on audiences.

Postscript

It occurred to me a while after writing the above that it treats the issue of pregnancy in a very binary way. Technically that may be true – a woman is either pregnant or she is not – but in reality the situation can be and often is more complicated. For instance, a woman may be pregnant but not realise it – quite possible in Hedda’s case. Equally the reverse can be true. More commonly, a woman might simply not be sure whether she is pregnant or not. In the days before modern pregnancy testing that must have been an almost universal experience in the early weeks of pregnancy. It is also quite possible that Hedda is unable to have children – this would explain her attempted ‘confession’ to Jorgen in Act Four – or that she had been pregnant but had miscarried – again, something that she would probably feel merited a confession. It is also not beyond the bounds of possibility that Jorgen is not the father of Hedda’s hypothetical baby, which would go some way to explaining her cry that it is killing her. So the ‘Hedda is pregnant but in denial’ interpretation of this aspect of the play is one of many supported by the text if the reader and performers are prepared to open themselves up to alternative and arguably more interesting readings.

Is Hedda Gabler pregnant?

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Book review

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a psychological portrait of the central character, a young wife tortured by the restraints of social expectation, bored silly by married life and dreading the future. She attempts to find relief from her stifling marriage – even though this is a life of privilege compared to those of many – by manipulating the weaker minds around her, not least her rather dim husband. The play opens with Hedda and Jorgen Tesman arriving home from an extended honeymoon. They are soon visited by Tesman’s aunt, Julle (in many translations this is written as Julie), who is her sister’s carer, and soon thereafter by Mrs Elvsted, a friend whose marriage is in trouble. Later Judge Brack, a friend of Tesman’s, comes to invite him to a drinking party. The ensemble is complete by Ejlert Lovborg, (“a poor depraved creature”) a writer, reformed alcoholic and former lover of Hedda’s, who is now in a new relationship with Mrs Elvsted.

In other hands this would be the stuff of drawing room comedy. But Ibsen’s vision is dark, and things start to get complicated very quickly. From the moment she is introduced it is clear Hedda is what we would now call ‘high maintenance’. She complains that there are too many flowers in her sitting room and she bosses Berte the maid around: “All the things the young mistress wanted unpacked before she could get off to bed”. She tells Berte off for forgetting to use her husband’s academic title and is then sharp with her husband’s aunt, saying “Such an early visit” and teases her quite cruelly about her new hat, pretending to mistake it for the maid’s. But she reserves her seriously sadistic side for her ‘friend’ Thea Elvsted.

Thea’s story is an important analogue of Hedda’s. She was once romantically involved with Jörgen. Thea is now trapped in a loveless marriage, to a man twenty years her senior, looking after his children by his first wife who she was originally employed to care for. By her marriage she has simply become an unwaged servant. Lövborg came to their house in the country as a tutor for the children and they quickly became romantically involved. When the play opens Thea has left her husband to join Lovborg, ignoring the inevitable scandal that will follow. She went to school with Hedda – this is a close knit community – where Hedda obviously bullied her, pulling her hair. She reminds Hedda that “you once said you were going to burn it off”. Later Hedda says “I think I’ll burn your hair off after all“. Is this a sick joke, or a serious threat? Thea has the courage to do what Hedda seemingly cannot, that is to leave her unhappy marriage and follow her lover.

Hedda is jealous of and angered by Thea’s relationship with Lovborg. When she and Lovborg were lovers, he lived a life of excess, and she lived vicariously through him. But now he has found some stability with Thea, has sobered up, and has published a successful book, with another nearly complete. Hedda attempts to undermine this relationship, goading him into drinking despite his well-known struggles with his sobriety. Initially she tries this by offering him punch, which he declines. When he proves strong enough to resist this temptation she argues that he should drink “otherwise people might so easily get the idea that you are not…not really confident, really sure of yourself“. In other words you need to drink to show you are not an alcoholic! This distresses Thea, causing her to cry “Oh God, Oh God, Hedda! What are you saying? What are you trying to do?” I think it is very clear what she is trying to do – she is pulling the wings off flies, just because she can. Hedda may not be a monster, but she does some monstrous things. At the end of the Act the Judge, Tesman and Lovborg head off for a party at the Judge’s house, while the womenfolk stay at home, waiting for them to return.

Act Three opens the morning after the party – ‘almost an orgy’, in Tesman’s eyes at least, but clearly the scene of some excess. Hedda and Thea have been up all night, waiting for their men to return in good time, as promised. Some of the members of the party, Lovborg included, have headed off to a brothel to continue drinking (and, it is implied, so on.) Tesman comes home, but quickly goes out again on receipt of news about his ailing aunt. He only has time to give Hedda the manuscript of Lovborg’s brilliant new book, which he has lost during the night’s bacchanalian excesses. (When I go drinking I always take with me the only copy of a precious manuscript for some light reading). Lovborg does not know he has found the manuscript. He leaves Judge Brack and Hedda to chat. She tells him that she understands that he has aspirations to be “the only cock in the basket” an expression meaning dominant male in a group of females. He admits “Yes, that’s what I want. And I’ll fight for that end with every means at my disposal“. Hedda responds “I’m content, so long as you don’t have any sort of hold over me“. As Brack goes to leave, this innuendo-laden (and at the same time ominous) exchange concludes their conversation:

“Hedda: [Rising.] Are you going through the garden?

Brack: Yes, it’s a short cut for me.

Hedda: And then it is a back way, too.

Brack: Quite so. I have no objection to back ways. They may be piquant enough at times.

Hedda: When there is ball practice going on, you mean?

Brack: [In the doorway, laughing to her.] Oh, people don’t shoot their tame poultry, I fancy.

Hedda: [Also laughing.] Oh no, when there is only one cock in the basket—“

The Judge is quickly replaced by Lovborg and then Thea. The Tesman’s drawing room is the centre of much coming and going throughout the play – the only person who never leaves is Hedda, emphasising how trapped she is. Lovborg confesses he has lost his manuscript, although he lies to Thea saying he has deliberately destroyed it. When she leaves Hedda gives him one of her pistols, explicitly encouraging him to kill himself. When he then leaves, she quickly and impulsively burns the manuscript, saying “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks!… Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s. [Throws the rest in.] I am burning—I am burning your child”

Act Four sees Hedda face the consequences of her actions.When told of Lovborg’s suicide (between the acts), she initially celebrates:

Hedda. [In a low voice.] Oh, what a sense of freedom it gives one, this act of Eilert Lovborg’s.

Brack. Freedom, Mrs. Hedda? Well, of course, it is a release for him—

Hedda. I mean for me. It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world,—a deed of spontaneous beauty.

But when Brack reveals he knows that she gave Lovborg the pistol, and that he intends to use this knowledge to exert control over Hedda, effectively to blackmail her, she realises she is running out of options:

Hedda. [Looks up at him.] So I am in your power, Judge Brack. You have me at your beck and call, from this time forward.

Brack: [Whispers softly.] Dearest Hedda—believe me—I shall not abuse my advantage.

Hedda. I am in your power none the less. Subject to your will and your demands. A slave, a slave then! [Rises impetuously.] No, I cannot endure the thought of that! Never!

I won’t spoil the ending, just in case you haven’t seen or read it, but it won’t come as a surprise.

So that’s what happens. But is it any good? Is the play entertaining, thought provoking, profound? Is Hedda theatre’s ‘female Hamlet’, as often claimed? (Incidentally I haven’t been able to find a source for this much-repeated claim). Is Ibsen really one of modern theatre’s greatest playwrights? There is no question of his dominant status in modern theatre. Equally there’s no question that the play is densely packed and full of incident, complex characters, drama and back-story. Yet the same time it is very static, set in just the one location. Many of the play’s most dramatic incidents occur off-stage. And the complex web of relationships between the characters has little time to further develop – the total elapsed time in the play is at most forty-eight hours.

Ultimately, the play stands or falls on whether the reader/audience finds the ending convincing or not. Is Hedda driven to such a state of extreme distress that she sees no way out, or is her decision (like many of the others she takes in the course of the play) taken capriciously? On the page, I didn’t find her decision was understandable. That may well be my problem – a failure to fully empathise with the character – rather than Ibsen’s. I also completely recognise that on the stage this concern could be swept away by a compelling portrait of Hedda and the rest of the cast. But in the absence of those factors, on the page alone, Hedda is hard to empathise with and even harder to understand. I recognise that the impact of the play on a Victorian audience would of course have been dramatically different to the way the play lands today. All stories age and change with time, and I can’t begin to imagine how a Victorian audience would have reacted to Hedda, other than it would almost certainly have been very different. (Of course I don’t need to guess because the contemporary reaction is fairly well recorded, but empathising with that reaction is almost impossible). Can the play be brought up to date in production? Well it continues to be performed at the highest theatrical level, so this surely isn’t a text that has aged badly. I confess that as of now, not having seen the play on the stage, the secret of what makes it so highly regarded eludes me.

Finally, a quick word on translation. I used two different translations in preparing this post: the Gutenberg project ebook translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, and the World’s classics edition translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. The internet tells me that the Archer translation is one of the oldest available, but neither of these appear when searching for the ‘best’ translation. But I make no comment on the value of either of these translations – I am the last person who could comment on such matters – the point is they are strikingly different. The Gosse/Archer translation uses the phrase ‘cock of the basket’ to translate Hedda’s last words; the McFarlane/Arup version translates this idiomatic phrase as “the only cock in the yard”. Neither phrase means very much in English – cock of the walk probably comes closest, but it means dominant in any group rather than a dominant male amongst a group of females. It is difficult to imagine the performance making the meaning of the phrase much clearer. If therefore any of the quotes used above do not appear in your copy of Ibsen, I blame the translation!

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, 1891

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Book review

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, 1985

Blood Meridian is an extraordinary novel. It is profoundly violent, and at the same time quite lyrically beautiful. It reminded me at various points of The Odyssey, The Inferno, and even Don Quixote, without ever being self-consciously ‘literary’.

The events of the novel take place in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. During that war, the US effectively conquered the north of Mexico, which eventually became the South Western states including Texas, New Mexico and California. But despite this victory US control of this area was limited. Native tribes including the Comanche and Apache were still active and represented a threat to Mexicans and ‘Americans’ alike. Effectively this vast area of land was lawless. Settlers were vulnerable to raids by these tribes, so local governments in both northern Mexico and the Southwestern US employed mercenaries to hunt down these tribes, offering a bounty for each grisly proof of a kill.

The novel follows the adventures of an unnamed, troubled teenager known only as ‘the kid’. Born in Tennessee, by the age of fourteen he has “a taste for mindless violence”. He runs away from home and soon meets Judge Holden – the Judge – a character who haunts the rest of the novel. When he first encounters the Judge he incites a crowd to attack a preacher. This incident could be the trigger for the kid’s subsequent life of violence. He joins a militia planning to travel into Mexican territory: this is presented as a campaign to protect American settlers but it is clearly just an excuse for the gang to go looking for plunder. However, the gang is poorly prepared and under-equipped and is quickly wiped out by a war party of Comanches. This is not going to be a straightforward Western where the superior firepower of the Americans can overwhelm the poorly equipped ‘natives’. Blood Meridian is informed by many of the tropes of the tropes of the traditional Western narrative but consistently subverts them in this way.

The kid survives the massacre and sets out through the desert looking for somewhere to rest and recover, the first of many such aimless journeys. When he does eventually reach a town he is arrested by Mexican soldiers and jailed without trial. His time on a chain gang ends when he signs up for another gang of scalp-hunters led by Captain Glanton (closely based on a real historical figure). Glanton’s gang (although it is never described as such, that’s clearly what it is) includes the Judge that the kid had met earlier in the novel.

Much of the rest of the narrative follows the gang’s campaign of mindless violence through the increasingly hostile landscapes of this part of Mexico. In theory the gang are authorised by the Mexican authorities to kill Native Americans and return their scalps for a bounty. But they quickly work out that it is hard to tell Native American scalps from those from Mexicans, and begin killing and scalping people indiscriminately. Some of the scenes of the massacres, including those in which women children and babies are slaughtered, can be hard to stomach. Consider that your trigger warning.

The narrative point of view McCarthy uses to tell his story is chillingly calm and totally non-judgmental. The massacre scenes are stripped of adjectives and atmosphere, emphasising their brutality. The gang have no conscience, no sense of humanity at all. People are just products to be harvested.

As the long journeys to find more people to kill continue, we learn more about the Judge. One of the gang members tells a story about how he once helped an earlier version of the gang manufacture gunpowder which they then used to massacre the Apaches chasing them. The Judge is an enigmatic, almost supernatural figure. At times he is an avenging angel, at others he takes an academic interest in his environment, making sketches of the landscapes. the flora and fauna, and the native American artefacts that litter the landscape. He is perhaps Western colonialism personified, wreaking huge damage on the peoples and countryside under the guise of academic analysis.

Although largely operating with impunity, the gang eventually goes too far – after a fight at a cantina they attack a group of Mexican soldiers. Their contract with the local government is cancelled and a bounty is posted on Glanton’s head. The gang leave the area and travel to a neighbouring state, where they pick up another contract for Apache scalps. This is the cue for further scenes of brutality, although this time the gang meets more substantial opposition from both Native American warriors and Mexican soldiers. Eventually, at the Colorado River, they seize control of a key ferry crossing, and grow rich exploiting and robbing their passengers. This good life is abruptly ended by another attack from a local tribe, and most fo the gang are killed, including Glanton himself. The kid survives, albeit seriously wounded, and along with another survivor tries to escape. But now they are being tracked by the Judge, who has turned against them, and pursues them relentlessly.

Blood Meridian is shocking in its brutality, but also lyrically beautiful. McCarthy evokes the stark beauty of the landscape:

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.“

But as the novel unfolds the landscape becomes increasingly hellish, with more and more bodies littering the ground. This is a journey into hell.

The only element of the novel that for me fell a little flat was the Judge’s philosophising. He is presented to the reader as a guru, someone whose thoughts on life and existence are worth listening to.

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

Or

“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.“

Rather than these being profound meditations on power, good and evil, and so on, for me they were trite and out of place in the narrative. They weren’t needed. This didn’t in any way spoil the novel for me – I was more than happy to accept these speeches as brief interruptions soon passed by, but they felt heavy-handed, when everything the author wanted to say was already very clear. The wild west was not a place of adventure but a war-zone, devoid of morality. McCarthy has a bleak vision of humanity, but this is what makes him a prophet for our times.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, 1985

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Book review

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

The Road is a pretty traumatic read – if books came with trigger warnings, this would have lots of them. It is set in the nearish future after an environmental or some other disaster that has wiped out almost all plant and animal life on earth. The sun is blocked by clouds and ash covers everything. The landscape is hellish, blasted and burnt. The few human survivors hunt one another for food.

The story is told through the eyes of ‘the man’ and his son, survivors in an unremittingly bleak and hostile landscape. The only other survivors they meet want to kill them and eat them, or are enslaved and due to meet the same fate. At one point they see from a hiding point

“An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon…The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasselled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry…Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.”

The son was born just after the end of the world. Initially his mother was with them for some time, but in one of the novel’s many disturbing scenes the man remembers his final conversation with her where she confirms her decision to take her own life:

“Sooner or later they will catch us and kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You would rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t. I can’t.”

The novel is a dystopian version of the classic journey/quest story, its title ironically referencing Kerouac’s On the Road. While Kerouac’s characters travelled freely through a sunny, prosperous American landscape, the man and his son are on foot, hunted and starving. They travel south looking for a warmer climate, with the vague destination of the coast, when they can go no further, and an equally vague hope that they might meet a community of non-cannibals willing to take them in and help them. They carry their small amount of food and possessions in a shopping trolley, which explains the need to stay on the road rather than heading across country. The road is largely deserted but also very dangerous – it is where they are most likely to meet other, equally hungry and desperate people.

The boy – he is around ten years old – constantly asks his father questions, principally to seek reasurance and comfort. He believes his father when told that they will find food, somewhere warm, and people to help them, even though every day proves how profoundly unlikely this seems. As all plant life is dead, the only food left is tinned and this is obviously in very short supply. All the other necessities of life, including shelter, clothes and clean water, are equally hard to come by. At several points they come close to starvation; at many others they are nearly captured or killed. After every step they get colder, hungrier, thirstier. The world they live in is so vividly realised that the reader shares in the feeling of trauma. Hellish doesn’t begin to describe it. The only thing that keeps them going is one another, and the small, unspoken hope that somewhere there is a place of refuge. Extraordinarily, at one point they find just such a place, an emergency bunker full of food and other resources, but the man refuses to stay, refusing to believe they will be safe, even though the road is a much more dangerous environment.

Despite everything, the boy preserves a core of integrity. He wants to help people they encounter, and cannot accept the hard decisions his father has to constantly make. He is the voice of compassion, the conscience of a lost world he knows only through the memories of his father, which in hindsight seems a paradise:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

I enjoy dystopian fiction, and will watch just about anything involving zombies or end of the world catastrophes. Usually these involve a suspension of disbelief – the characters often survive for long periods without any obvious sign of food or water, for example, or find weapons in abundance just when they are needed. The Road offers no such false comforts. This is a terrifying world in which death seems an attractive alternative to the hardships of daily life. I read The Road compulsively in just over a day, all the time anticipating the end which I thought was inevitable – this novel was not going to have a happy ending. I am going to avoid spoilers and let you decide what you think about the ending, but whatever you do don’t read The Road unless you are feeling quite psychologically strong. Keep telling yourself it is only a story.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

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Book review

It has been a long time since I have read any science fiction, but while browsing in my local library, The Futurological Congress, a black humour science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem, caught my eye. I’ve long been interested in dystopian novels – 1984, Brave New World, etc – and I wondered what the future looked like in the early 1970’s, when 2026 seemed an impossibly long way away. It wasn’t a surprise that like most novels of its kind, some aspects of the future are captured with eerie precision and others are wildly wrong. Which always makes me wonder which of the technological innovations we think are inevitable – the rise of AI, self-driving cars, etc – will actually happen, and instead what undreamt of changes will occur in our future?

In The Futurological Congress, Lem’s protagonist, Ijon Tichy, attends the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica. The novel is set in an indeterminate future (but not too far ahead, because a later time jump takes Tichy to 2039). The conference is being held to consider the world’s population crisis. Futurologists predict the future from existing trends – and at this point in humanity’s story all predictions for the future of the world are bleak.

Lem’s description of this future is at first dominated by absurdity. Tichy’s hotel room is ‘guaranteed bomb-free’ and includes a palm grove and an orchestra. Conference papers are distributed in hard copy (paper always seems very resilient when people thought about the future of business or education) but speakers call out paragraph numbers to save time. The hotel’s water supply is drugged with a chemical that makes the user profoundly good-natured.

Shortly after the start of the congress, the hotel it is being held at comes under attack by protestors. After an attempt to ignore the bombs Tichy and some other attendees and hotel staff take cover in a sewer beneath the hotel. From here he is evacuated only to realise he is still hallucinating. The next rescue attempt ends with the helicopter taking him away crashing. He wakes up in a hospital to find his brain has been transplanted into the body of a young black woman. This then happens all over again – waking up from a hallucination, attack by mysterious forces, rescue and body transplant – which would I suspect make most people wonder about the nature of reality they are experiencing, but Tichy seems accustomed to a world in which bizarre things happen as a matter of course. Finally, in yet another hospital, he is cryogenically frozen (cryonics was just becoming a ‘thing’ in the US in the late 60’s) and wakes up (in scenes familiar from Austin Powers, Futurama and Sleeper – take your pick) in the year 2039.

When the novel jumps forward to 2039, the tone switches dramatically from being a freewheeling comedy to a rather bleak dystopia. From this point the novel is written in the format of a journal. Initially, 2039 (presumably 2039 Costa Rica?) seems utopian. Everyone is happy, all society’s ills have been cured, war is no more, and everything is abundant. Drugs are used to control everyone’s perception of reality and can do just about anything:

“The most recent of the iamides, heavily advertised – authentium. Creates synthetic recollections of things that never happened. A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with a deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy. Why anyone would want that is another matter and quite beyond me.”

But slowly Tichy becomes disillusioned with this chemically enhanced ‘paradise’. He stops taking any drugs but doesn’t realise that the air itself is suffused with perception-altering chemicals. Finally his friend, Professor Trottelreiner, tells him a terrible secret:

“By introducing properly prepared mascons (reality-masking chemicals) to the brain, one can mask any object in the outside world behind a fictitious image—superimposed—and with such dexterity, that the psychemasconated subject cannot tell which of his perceptions have been altered, and which have not. If but for a single instant you could see this world of ours the way it really is — undoctored, unadulterated, uncensored — you would drop in your tracks!”

A small dose of an unmasking drug allows Tichy to see the world as it really is: instead of being in a five-star restaurant he is in a dank concrete bunker eating “the most unappetizing gray-brown gruel, which stuck in globs to my tin“. No-one drives a car – they run in the road believing they are doing so, and instead of travelling up and down in lifts they climb the empty elevator shafts. Everyone lives in abject squalor eating horrible muck, all the time believing they are living in luxury. The world is being destroyed by over-population – the very problem that the original Futurological Congress was intending to address. Only a small number of soothseers know the real state of the world. This is Tichy’s red pill moment – the terrifying realisation that the world is actually squalid and disgusting. When finally he is returned to his original time, hiding in the sewers from the bombers attacking the conference, we are left in doubt as to whether this is a return to reality or yet another chemically induced nightmare.

As well as its bleak portrait of the future, the other predominant feature of The Futurological Congress is its experimental use of language. I can imagine that translating the text from Polish to English must have been challenging to say the least, and many of the words must surely be approximations, given that Lem made many of them up in the first place. Take a paragraph like this for example:

In just the last issue of Science Today there had been an article on some new psychotropic agents of the group of so-called benignimizers (the N,N-dimethylpeptocryptomides), which induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. Yes, yes! I could practically see that article now. Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felicitine, Empathan, Ecstasine, Halcyonal and a whole spate of derivatives. Though by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl, you obtained instead Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine, Dementium, Flagellan, Juggernol and many other polyparanoidal stimulants of the group of so-called phrensobarbs (for these prompted the most vicious behavior, the lashing out at objects animate as well as inanimate—and especially powerful here were the cannibal-cannabinols and manicomimetics).

In the 1970s Poland was still part of the Soviet bloc. The Futurological Congress is (at least in part) a commentary on the communist state that told its citizens they were living in a socialist utopia, but where their actual experience of life was of hardship and want. In 1984 George Orwell makes a similar point – in that novel, instead of chemicals, the state uses terror to force its citizens to believed that rations are being increased even as they are cut. Perhaps Lem was telling us to wake up and take over-population seriously, and not put our faith in political ideologies?

The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, 1971

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Book review

The Dumb Waiter, by Harold Pinter, 1957/1960

I think I am going to try and read, and review, more plays this year, even though I remain steadfast in my view that plays are for watching not reading. Sure you can read them, but in doing so you could easily miss much of the nuance and subtlety of a play that would be brought out in performance.

Just to explain the dates above, the internet tells me that The Dumb Waiter was written in 1957 but not performed until 1960. Either way that makes it one of Pinter’s earliest works. It is a short one-act play in which two men, Ben and Gus, wait in a basement. Ben, apparently the senior member of the two, reads a newspaper, while Gus fusses around nervously. Tea is mentioned but never quite made. As their conversation progresses it emerges that they are hit-men, waiting for an assignment and instructions on who to kill. Their conversation is dominated by mundane, everyday nonsense such as the difference between the phrase ‘light the kettle’ and ‘put on the kettle’. There is almost a vaudeville, back and forth element to their conversation, but at the same time there is a sinister undertone.

Pinter’s stage directions are very detailed and one of the reasons for this emerges when the men realise that at the back of the room is a dumbwaiter, a small lift for carrying food between floors. The waiter starts to deliver a series of food orders, as if to a restaurant kitchen – at first for plain café food – soup of the day, liver and onions, jam tart – and then for more complex orders – macaroni pastistsio, ormitha macaroundada, and scampi. Ben and Gus are dumbfounded by this turn of events, but are so used to doing what they are told that they send up what food they have – milk, biscuits, crisps and chocolate – in a pathetic attempt to comply. . In production I can imagine that this part of the play would be essentially comic, but on the page the tragic element also comes across – they are unable to understand what is happening to them, but still try to do their best. Next to the dumb waiter is a speaking tube which they try to use to communicate with whoever is sending down the orders, but to no avail.

In a break from the dumb waiter’s interruptions, the men start to rehearse the impending assassination, which complies with a strict sequences of events. In doing so they casually but shockingly reveal that their last ‘job’ was to kill a girl.

The impact of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on this early work by Pinter is immediately obvious – two anonymous characters waiting in a remote location for something to happen, passing time with inane chat that reveals their concerns about their purpose in life. There is no conventional narrative or storyline (although in Pinter’s play there is a dramatic denouement) and absurd and unexplained events challenge the characters’ ideas. Long periods of silence allow space for the claustrophobic tension of the setting to develop. The Dumb Waiter is often produced alongside another of his one-act plays, but I can’t help wonder whether a contrasting text – something by Joe Orton for example – might work as effectively? If you want to read more British post-war plays then The Dumb Waiter is an excellent starting point. Pinter was a key figure in post-war British drama and went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, being cited for work that “”uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

The Dumb Waiter, by Harold Pinter, 1957/1960

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