Tag Archives: satire

Book review

Uproar!: Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton, 2024

Uproar! is a jaunty look at the work of the golden era of satirical printmakers in Georgian Britain. These are names you will have heard of – Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Gillray, you will definitely have seen some of their work, such as the famous and much copied sketch of Pitt and Napoleon carving up the world like a plum(b) pudding (below).

While writing the previous sentence I wondered whether this sketch would work if the characters were replaced with more contemporary figures such as Trump and Putin – and viola:

Previously I knew very little about these caricaturists, although many of their sketches were very familiar. Loxton charts their rise as important influencers of public opinion in the context of the technological changes (which allowed the prints they produced to be published quickly and cost effectively) and the political upheaval occurring at the same time – the loss of the American colonies, the French revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. It’s a compelling story briskly told alongside brief biographies of the main characters.

Being picky, I found the author’s attempts to make the account relevant by a liberal sprinkling of contemporary culture reference a bit annoying. The X Factor, Carry On films and The One Show are all referenced. (“If joining the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds was the chance to get a five-minute interview on The One Show, studying with Pigalle in Paris was the equivalent of being sent to Hollywood” and later “Much like the X-Factor starlets staying at Simon Cowell’s LA Mansion”). Do these images really add to the point being made, or do they feel like an author slightly desperate to make boring old history relevant? I could have done without them, particularly because most of the references are so out-of-date – would the average Millennial even know what the Carry On films were?

However, with this qualification, the author makes a compelling case regarding the importance of printmakers to Georgian politics and society. The comparison to Spitting Image is equally strangely old-fashioned, but for readers of my generation it works – Spitting Image definitely had a impact on late-twentieth-century politics. Arguably that impact was zero – politicians used to love being in the limelight by being portrayed in grotesque latex – but that’s the nature of satire; you can never be certain whether it influences political events. Certainly the image of a stone-grey John Major eating his peas has stayed with me!

The final chapter, in which the author attempts to summarise the impact and importance of the Georgian caricaturists, felt a bit confused. Their significance at the time did not outlast the Georgian period. Once Gillray, (Isaac) Cruickshanks and Rowlandson had died, all around the same time as George 3rd and the end of the Regency, society was ready to move on to a new era of Victorian conservatism, in which the extravagance of the caricatures was considered indecent and disrespectful. But to say they were ‘cancelled’ is to misuse a phrase from the era of social media. Reputations rise and fall but the work of these printmakers and satirists has definitely survived and remains relevant, as the Trump/Putin examples above demonstrate. Loxton I think fairly describes their influence as ” undeniably one of the most powerful forces in Georgian Britain; their prints not only reacted to world events, but propelled political change, they shaped public opinion; they built up careers; they shredded reputations.” She even goes so far as to claim that these printmakers were the reason Britain didn’t see its own version of the French Revolution, which seems quite a stretch, and argue they had a direct influence on artists as varied as Blake, Lewis Carroll, and even Salvador Dali.

One false note was the author’s claim that ‘Victorian commentators’ were responsible for inflating the reputation of William Blake above those of his contemporary illustrators. This is bizarre. Blake’s reputation rests largely on his poetry, which isn’t mentioned, and his art is as far from the satirical cartoons of Gillray etc as can be imagined. But that aside this is a really useful summary of the politics and history of this I think unfairly neglected art form and its impact on social change in Georgian Britain.

Uproar!: Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton, 2024

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Book review

The Constant Rabbit, by Jasper Fforde, 2020

Jasper Fforde is one of our most consistently inventive writers. In The Constant Rabbit he has once again shown this with a surreal allegory which at its heart is about difference. What could so easily have been a heavy-handed satire on Brexit and racism becomes a thoughtful discussion of how people cope with discrimination, both from the perspective of the discriminated against and that of the prejudiced. But I was left wondering whether Fforde at times overstepped the invisible line between dark humour and bad taste.

The central premise of the novel is that in 1965 an “anthropomorphising event” in the UK transformed a small number of rabbits into intelligent, talking, human-scale rabbits. By 2020 their population has grown to over a million. In response to concerns about their impact on the country, the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party, originally a fringe protest group, has taken office in Westminster. Attacks on the rabbit community by hate groups such as TwoLegsGood (a nod to Orwell, of course) are frequent and the courts have decided that rabbits do not merit the protection of the law (any more so than any other animal). For their ‘protection’ the Government is planning to herd all rabbits into an isolated community ominously labelled the Mega-Warren. Society has subtly changed after the years of human/rabbit coexistence, with institutions such as RabCoT, the Rabbit Compliance Task Force, emerging to deal with the Event. Rabbits have developed their own culture of course, a blend of animal and human behaviours, which Fforde expounds on in detail – it’s a strangely recognisable version of our own society but adapted to cope with rabbit life-spans, libidos and compulsion for digging burrows.

Other animals were anthropomorphised as well, most notably foxes, who now murderously predate the human rabbit population without fear of consequences or reprisal. It must be pretty terrifying to be a rabbit in these circumstances, but (we are told) they are used to a life where sudden death is an every day possibility, so are not as bowed by the experience as one might expect. There’s a long and respected tradition of authors using animals as avatars for humanity, looking at our behaviour towards animals as a lens through which to see our behaviour towards one another. This tradition dates through Swift’s Houyhnhnms and beyond to Greek drama. Apart from Beatrix Potter and Watership Down rabbits have rarely been at the centre of this tradition – I suspect mainly because they aren’t very anthropomorphic.

The narrative is told from the point of view of Peter Knox, a rabbit “spotter”. As most humans are unable to distinguish one rabbit from another, spotters play a niche role in enforcing laws against the rabbit population. Knox is uncomfortable with his role within an oppressive state apparatus that spies on its population. He lives with his daughter in the village of Much Wenlock, a rural idyll full of small-mindedness and anti-rabbit bigotry. Into this dangerous and toxic environment comes Constance. Constance was Peter’s friend in university until she was expelled for the offense of being a rabbit. While at university Peter had a huge crush on her, and meeting her again caused all those feelings to come flooding back. Cross species relationships are frowned upon in this alternative reality, but not unheard of. We are invited to think of Connie as cross between Jessica Rabbit and the (inappropriately sexualised) Caramel Bunny. She is also several times smarter than Peter, and manipulates him very easily into supporting the rabbit resistance and leaking sensitive information from his work. Once Peter is sucked into this intrigue, forced to choose between his job and his sympathies for the oppressed rabbit-kind, the adventure rapidly accelerates towards a showdown between the apparatus of the state and the rabbit population.

This was at times a slightly awkward mix of political allegory and lowbrow humour. There are powerful echoes of different national and liberation struggles throughout the novel, from apartheid – the rabbits are prevented from going to university and forced to live in fenced-off communities; to Palestine, the civil rights movement in the USA – rabbits live in fear of sudden attacks from mobs in which they are ‘jugged’ (that is to say, murdered in a grotesque parody of lynching), and many others. Some of the targets are fairly explicit – the Anti-Rabbit Party, lead by Nigel Smethwick, is an obvious reference to UKIP/The Brexit party and Nigel Farage – indeed Rabxit is mentioned a few times.

I never thought I would say this of Fforde, who usually has a very deft touch with his humour, but some of this was in poor taste. Are lynchings, or ‘jugging’, the rabbit equivalent, really a source of humour? I must admit Fforde lost me here – to try to draw laughs out of the obvious parallels with the lynching of black Americans was tasteless (the term ‘jugging‘ comes from the traditional practice of cooking an animal inside a jug which is placed in a pan of hot water). I appreciate this is dark humour for the purposes of satire, and we will all have our own lines that should not be crossed, but this was for me inappropriate – the satire is dark enough as it is. In this world foxes are able to kill rabbits with impunity, and take pleasure in doing so – the main fox character Torquil Ffoxe (Peter’s menacing boss) is credited with killing several thousand rabbits before he meets his well deserved end, and at one point is shown with a bloodied corpse of a rabbit in a sack in his office. This is gruesome stuff, but the tone of the novel rarely acknowledges the bleakness of rabbits’ lives – they are shown as happy-go-lucky, sexually adventurous characters who make a significant contribution to society including serving in the military. They are the good guys from whom humanity could learn a lot.

Satire has no obligation to identify solutions – it points out what’s wrong with the world but doesn’t have to tell us how to sort it out. True to form there’s no call to action here other than to be nice to one another, the standard liberal response to racism and bigotry. The novel’s ending suggests that there is no solution other than escape, an option not available to most oppressed sections of society. If it makes us look afresh at the oppression of marginalised people across the world then it has done its job.

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Book review

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, 1948

This was an umpteenth re-read – I revisit The Loved One (subtitled An Anglo-American Tragedy) for a chuckle every now and again. It’s not a novel (Waugh called it a novelette) that takes itself very seriously, but it is all the better for that. It also has a lot of fun at the expense of both Americans and English ex-pats in America, so what’s not to like?Image result for loved ones waugh

Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, august representative of the British community of ex-pats in Los Angeles, descends upon Dennis Barlow, a minor poet brought to Hollywood to write the script for a film biography of Shelley, to express his concern about Barlow’s new job and how it reflects on the British community in Hollywood. Barlow has abandoned his script writing for something much more valuable to society – he works at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery.

Barlow, tasked with the funeral arrangements of his ‘housemate’ who has killed himself having been dismissed from his job in one of the studios, “developing scripts”, (there are a lot of euphemisms and avoidances such as this in this novel) visits Hollywood’s famous funeral grounds, Whispering Glades. There he quickly falls for cosmetician (she puts make-up on corpses) Aimée Thanatogenos. He woos her with quotations from the British classics, passing them off as his own. But he has a rival, the senior mortician Mr Joyboy. Aimee is torn between her feelings for Barlow and Joyboy, but despite the helpful advice columnist of local agony aunt “Guru Brahmin” she gets engaged to Barlow. Subsequently, when she finds out his poems are plagiarised, she dumps him (in fact, she ghosts him!) and returns to Joyboy. The coffin is nailed firmly shut when she attends the funeral of Mr Joyboy’s mother’s parrot at the Happier Hunting Ground, where Barlow is in attendance. The scene is set for a macabre, blackly comic finale.

Waugh was at his comic best when he gave his satirical targets both barrels, holding nothing back. Here his contempt for Hollywood, Americans, ex-pats, you name it, is out in the open and given full rein. This is more a sketch than a fully developed novel, lacking the depth of Waugh’s other work, but it is fun despite the darkness.

 

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Book review

The Cockroach, by Ian McEwan, 2019

The Cockroach runs to less than 100 pages, and was obviously written quickly, in a state of intense anger. It takes as a starting point Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and cleverly turns it on its head – a cockroach is turned into a human being. At first he finds the cockroachclumsy nature of the body he has acquired, with its floppy limbs and internal skeleton hard to cope with. In his mouth “a slab of slippery meat lay squat and wet”. Because he no longer has compound eyes, everything appears “oppressively colourful”. His head is large, and his eyes can move. His skeleton is covered in flesh. Slowly it is revealed that this isn’t any random human that he has been turned into, but the Prime Minister, Jim Sams, who bears a profoundly close similarity to the man who is at the time of writing, but hopefully not much longer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Kafka is fairly quickly left behind, as the new Prime Minister launches a plan to implement an economic policy so insane that only a thinly disguised President Trump can support it. The UK is driven through the looking glass into a world in which up is down, lies are truth, Parliament is the enemy of democracy, and the constitution is there to be ignored. McEwan’s solution to how Brexit could be forced through Parliament even though the Government doesn’t have a majority was inspired. For months we were told that Johnson and Cummings had a cunning plan which only four or five people had been told about, but that would see Brexit delivered on 31st October. That was all horseshit, but McEwan could have worked it for them it he had been so inclined. I bet they are kicking themselves! Job done, the cockroaches return to their previous form, but not before one is trodden on, thereby providing a tasty snack for his partners in crime.

Reviewers have consistently compared this novella to the work of Jonathan Swift, which is extraordinarily high praise indeed. Swift’s work often seems driven by anger, and here McEwan rages at the stupidity of Brexit (without mentioning it) as a massive act of national self harm which can only be rationally explained by metaphor. There are of course many economic and political explanations for the forces that led to the Brexit vote (and Trump’s election) but you won’t find any analysis of those forces here. Instead this is a cathartic rage against the forces of darkness threatening our country, forces that don’t read novels and don’t really care for reading anything else much either.

McEwan’s website helpfully summarises his motivations in The Cockroach, although we could probably have worked these out for ourselves – nevertheless the clarity is useful:

‘As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a no deal, and English national extremists are attacking the police in Parliament Square, a writer is bound to ask what he or she can do. There’s only one answer: write. The Cockroach is a political satire in an old tradition. Mockery might be a therapeutic response, though it’s hardly a solution. But a reckless, self-harming, ugly and alien spirit has entered the minds of certain politicians and newspaper proprietors. They lie to their supporters. They express contempt for judges and the rule and norms of law. They seem to want to achieve their ends by means of chaos. What’s got into them? A cockroach or two, I suspect.’

Reviewers struggled to appreciate this novel, despite it being a very simple parable and despite McEwan’s even simpler translation above. The New Statesman’s judgment was that:

“If the book cannot be considered any kind of addition to the oeuvre, it is at the very least a coda to more substantive ventures, and another clue in the ongoing quest to understand what really matters to McEwan”

This misses the point spectacularly. Literature is not a guessing game where the novelist,  slowly reveals text by text clues to “what matters” to him or her. If you manage to read The Cockroach without working out within a few pages that McEwan is angry as hell with the state of the United Kingdom in 2019 then all the clues in the world aren’t going to help you divine what matters to him. 

The Guardian had reservations about McEwan’s use of cockroaches as an image for the Cabinet:

“Comparing one’s political opponents to cockroaches is a toxic metaphor with a nasty political history and it is hard to read McEwan’s novella without a degree of discomfort.”

The Spectator, formerly edited by the Cockroach in chief himself, had similar reservations:

“For many of us, it will never be at all OK to describe democratically elected politicians as ‘cockroaches’. It was the word by which the génocidaires in Rwanda called their adherents to action”

This is the same Spectator that ran an article in 2015 headed “She’s wrong but Katie Hopkins has a right to call migrants cockroaches”. Satire may be on the critical list, but irony is not dead!

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Book review

The Second Coming by John Niven, 2011

John Niven’s ‘The Second Coming’ is not for the easily offended. Yes, the second coming of the title is indeed the return of Jesus Christ to earth. God is appalled at the mess we are making of things down here and decides to send Jesus back down to have another go at sorting us out. This is not the millennial second coming of prophesy, but a rerun of the first attempt. Niven

Niven’s satirical approach is raw and uncompromising – think Frankie Boyle or Bill Hicks. God is the CEO of Heaven, a charismatic leader who despises organised religion, doesn’t need to be worshipped (why would he?), and loves gays and cannabis. His message to mankind is “Be Nice”, not the monstrously clumsy ten commandments of the Old Testament. Satan is akin to the boss of an opposing company and hell is the nightmarish vision of Dante and Bosch combined, a place where the eternal anal rape of homophobes is just a little too gleefully described. Did I mention Niven doesn’t do subtlety?

Jesus returns to earth as a New York hippie, trying to help the dispossessed and the disadvantaged, at first making very little difference. “Be Nice” is not a message that gets much traction, so Jesus enters a musical talent competition – a very thinly disguised American X Factor – masterminded by a stunningly unpleasant boss. Niven’s publisher’s lawyers must have had some sleepless nights worrying about getting a call from Simon Cowell’s legal team. At one point it looks as if Niven is going to suggest that the Cowell figure is Satan’s representative on earth – he might as well be, such is the depth of his evil – but he backs away from that idea – on counsel’s advice perhaps? I enjoyed the anarchic road-trip across the States that Jesus and his assorted disciples take and the talent content was also fun, with Jesus each week wanting to perform an indy song a long way from the classic ballads favoured by the show’s producers.

I won’t spoil the plot for you, but the ending does not come as a shock. Niven is an atheist and certainly gives organised religion both barrels, but the portrait of heaven was surprisingly sympathetic and Christ’s faith in his resurrection is touchingly absolute and unquestioning, so much so that if you had told me Niven was an unorthodox Christian I would not have been surprised. I read this novel of almost 500 pages in less than 48 hours – it has great momentum, and you want to know how it all works out, even if you really know all along.

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Book review

Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, 1800

Maria Edgeworth was, in her time, an extremely successful author, and is claimed as an influence on a number of other writers, not least of which is Jane Austen. ‘Castle Rackrent’ is an early work, a short novella with a title suggestive of the gothic, but actually totally devoid of anything mysterious, other-worldly or supernatural. 

Castle Rackrent is the tale of how four generations of Rackrent heirs mismanage and squander their estate. The narrative is told through the family steward, Thady Quirk, who is sometimes cited as an example of an early if not the first unreliable narrator. Thady has only a limited grasp of what is going on most of the time; his one dominant interest is loyalty to his master, whoever that happens to be. The heirs are variously spendthrifts, litigious, gamblers and careless with money, but the end result is always a continuation of the slow decline of the castle and its estate.

There is very little here by way of a plot. Each Rackrent inherits the castle, makes a mess of it is fairly quick time, then expires. As a satire on the land-owning classes of the English aristocracy in Ireland the novel has some limited interest, but it is gentle satire indeed. When the novel was published the UK and Ireland were working to formalise a political union, and Edgeworth clearly illustrates the dangers or weaknesses of English dominance of Ireland, so the satire had some immediate relevance which has long since faded.

The novel is bookended by a preface and conclusion by an anonymous editor, as well as being interspersed with footnotes which provide an ironic commentary on the text. This has a distancing effect – the reader is invited to treat the novel more as a second-hand artefact, a personal memoir rather than as a narrative. Thady himself appears as only an otherwise minor character in the novel, and his voice seems unauthentic – there is little attempt to capture the accent or language of an Irish native. The text has some examples of local dialect but these seem shoe-horned into the text for local ‘colour’ rather than with any authenticity. 

The text also has a breath-taking example of anti-semitism. This is how Thady, admittedly not the most reliable observers, describes his first meeting with his master’s new bride:

I got the first sight of the bride; for when the carriage door opened, just as she had her foot on the steps, I held the flam full in her face to light her, at which she shut her eyes, but I had a full view of the rest of her, and greatly shocked I was, for by that light she was little better than a blackamoor, and seemed crippled; but that was only sitting so long in the chariot…‘Will I have a fire lighted in the state-room to-night?’ was the next question I put to her, but never a word she answered; so I concluded she could not speak a word of English, and was from foreign parts. The short and the long of it was, I couldn’t tell what to make of her; so I left her to herself, and went straight down to the servants’ hall to learn something for certain about her. Sir Kit’s own man was tired, but the groom set him a-talking at last, and we had it all out before ever I closed my eyes that night. The bride might well be a great fortune—she was a JEWISH by all accounts, who are famous for their great riches. I had never seen any of that tribe or nation before, and could only gather that she spoke a strange kind of English of her own, that she could not abide pork or sausages, and went neither to church or mass. Mercy upon his honour’s poor soul, thought I; what will become of him and his, and all of us, with his heretic blackamoor at the head of the Castle Rackrent estate? I never slept a wink all night for thinking of it; but before the servants I put my pipe in my mouth, and kept my mind to myself, for I had a great regard for the family; and after this, when strange gentlemen’s servants came to the house, and would begin to talk about the bride, I took care to put the best foot foremost, and passed her for a nabob in the kitchen, which accounted for her dark complexion and everything.

This bride then refuses to surrender her family jewels to her husband, so he proceeds to lock her in her room for seven years, until he finally dies in a duel and she is released, to quite understandably fly the country. 

I appreciate this description is Thady’s, not the author’s, and is being presented to the reader as an example of his prejudice and backwardness. The principle intent here seems to present the reader with a comedic situation rather than satirise or comment on attitudes towards anti-semitism or indeed the relationships between abusive husbands and their wives. Compare how Anne Bronte compassionately deals with the latter issue a few years later in ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall‘. 

Edgeworth’s novels remain widely in print, and seem to be read if Goodreads reviews are anything to go by. So far I have yet to see the attraction. If you have read any of her other novels that you can recommend please let me know. 

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Book review

Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh, 1932

In many of my previous reviews I have struggled to respond to texts that either contain offensive language – that use racially insulting terms, that denigrate gay people or women, or otherwise offend my twenty-first century sensibilities. I usually try to draw a distinction between those texts that use offensive language which was in common usage in the period in which the text was written – Huckleberry Finn, for example, with its widespread use of the n-word – and texts that are more broadly offensive, that perpetuate stereotypes or go out of their way to be insulting to racial or other groups. Sometimes I find offensive novels that have not generally been considered in that category – Perfume being the obvious example, which most reviewers found harmless but which I took great exception to. 

In almost all cases however, I have been able to find redeeming features in the text. The novelist may have been reflecting outdated attitudes towards race, gender or sexuality, but they have nevertheless managed to write something worth reading. But that is mainly because I have been careful not to read those books that should be forgotten and which don’t merit a wider readership today. History has edited these novels from our bookshelves. But this is not always the case with authors who have written otherwise well thought of work, such as Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Black Mischief’. Because ‘Black Mischief‘ is an embarrassingly offensive novel. 

The events of ‘Black Mischief‘ take place mainly in the island kingdom of Azania, one of the few independent countries in Africa between the world wars. Waugh’s intention appears overt – he sets out to demonstrate that allowing African peoples to run their own countries is a ludicrous proposition that leads to profound mis-Government, chaos, and conflict. His argument is that Africans simply don’t have the intelligence, judgment or ability to run their own affairs.

Seth, emperor of Azania, inherits his role shortly after graduating from Oxford. He determines to modernise his country, but his ambitions are portrayed as utterly unrealistic – not only does he not understand what modernisation entails, but his efforts are undermined by his people, who have no interest in the modern world, and his officials, who just want to steal anything not nailed down.

Basil Seal, a feckless college friend, journeys to Azania on a whim to escape his debts in London, and is quickly appointed Minister of Modernisation. His sidekick is the Armenian businessman Yokoumian, an equally unpleasant and racist portrait. The small group of Europeans in Azania, diplomats, businessmen and missionaries, do not escape Waugh’s satire – they are all crooks and bored idiots, particularly the British consular staff headed by Sir Samson Courtenay, but there is a venom in the portraits of the Africans in the novel that is missing when the focus turns to the Europeans. 

A pageant to celebrate birth control is used as cover for the launch of a coup against Seth, with the French consul planning to install a puppet Government headed by his senile uncle Achon, who promptly dies at his coronation. In the bloodbath that follows the League of Nations steps in and claims the country as a League of Nations Mandate. The natural order with the white man running matters is restored, and Basil returns to London, where his absence has passed largely unnoticed. 

Many reviewers claim this novel is a satire. I am not sure that is right – what precisely is it satirising? Certainly not colonialism – Azania is not a colony. Modernisation? Perhaps, but it is hard to see what aspects of modernisation are problematic. Or is it modernisation in Africa? Is Waugh telling the reader that modernising Africa is pointless, because they will just use mis-use whatever modern devices or ideas we ‘give’ them (the wires used in the railway’s construction are used as jewellery, for example). The most striking example of this is the poster drawn up to advertise the benefits of birth control, showing one family wealthy and healthy with one child, and another family with many children where life is hard and poor. These posters are misunderstood by the Africans – silly people unable to understand a simple poster – and they think the single child family is the one that is being presented as the one to avoid. 

Life is cheap in Azania – people are killed casually throughout the novel – and cannibalism is widespread. There isn’t a racist stereotype untapped. There isn’t a single positive African character, not even for contrast – they are all either evil, conniving, mercenary, or murderous. Or all four. 

Waugh is not a bad writer, but I can’t help thinking that this novel should be allowed to quietly fade away. It’s not funny, the casual and incessant racism is hard to take, and the ending is callously brutal. For the first time ever I was embarrassed to be seen reading this novel (with the front cover shown above) on public transport, which probably says it all. 

 

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