Book Review: Love, Nina, by Nina Stibbe

Love, Nina, by Nina Stibbe. Published by Penguin Books, 2013.
ISBN 9780241965092

This is the type of book I do not usually take to.
Ah, but then, it is a clever book, it juggles with the questions this ‘type’ of book prompts.

The book is usually classed as non-fiction. It is presented as edited letters home – from a nanny new to London, in the 1980’s.
But the book was published in 2013. And in between? A career in publishing, family, children. In between, then, were years gaining skills in ‘the literary world’, the social and political ‘worlds’ of London, work, motherhood. A honing of skills, purpose, sense of self, awareness of the world.
There is almost a Bridget Jones aspect here, but Nina does not do the knowing semi-metropolitan sophisticat.

She wished, Nina Stibbe said in an interview of the time of publication, that she had made… (a certain character – see below)… more funny. But she saw him at the time as just a middle-aged man. Made?
And also in this comment are clues to the workings of the book.

The book plays with the genre of epistolary novels, with the innocent abroad, with the ingénue.
It is a book of two parts: 1982 -84 working as a nanny in London; 1984-87 as full time student at Thames Polytechnic.
In both parts she lived in the same small part of London: Gloucester Crescent/Regent Park Terrace,  within range of the morning waking sounds of London zoo.

As a student she admitted to having pangs for the life her fellow students lived. She was fully aware by then of the cocooned and sheltered life she lived there. It cherished her abilities, and widened her life skills and knowledge, despite that.

Across the Crescent lived the writer Alan Bennett, a frequent supper visitor to their house (the middle-aged man, above). Next door was Claire Tomalin, critic and writer. Across the Crescent further down was novelist Deborah Moggach, and Jonathon Miller. Also on the Crescent was the widow of composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams (‘A composer called Ralph?’).
Alan Bennett’s driveway was always occupied – a passing comment. We only need to think of his The Lady In The Van, to see the significance of this.
Nina was nanny to MK, deputy editor of the London Review of Books, and her two young sons.
‘Who’s George Melly?’ she wrote her sister, Vic, back in Leicester. ‘I’m in his bedroom.’

With this set-up the character of the book must needs weave her ingénue path through influences and influencers, whilst retaining that innocence the reader identifies with. This requires very delicate balancing tricks.
And this is where the two-part structure of the book works. The ingénue nanny cannot remain uninfluenced by her environment. It would lose the reader’s trust, and the character’s credibility.
The nanny, Nina, began to study A Levels, in the vague hope of gaining more education. This is where the delicate balancing really comes to the fore. She could either come across as an unliterate boor and bore, blocking all attempts at knowledge, in order to retain the ingénue state. Or  change.
The book would be amusing, but limited, one-dimensional, if she had chosen the first path.

Scraping through her A Levels she gained admission to a degree course. But lived still in the same small cocoon. And here we see her grow: she loved the course, and her subjects – especially American drama and fiction. Instead of maintaining the suffocating and provincial self that she began with, the character-self was allowed to grow and develop.

One episode has the tutor take her students to a dress rehearsal; a Samuel Beckett play. It had Billie Whitelaw as actor.
Whilst watching the rehearsal the author was distracted by someone muttering behind them. Turning round she recognised Samuel Beckett himself; he’d come for Billie Whitelaw’s acting, of course.
She was the only one of the group saw him. Afterwards she had the task of persuading them it really had been him. The clincher was her description: Handsome but very old… symmetrical, upright, still, slight second-glass occlusion of the jaw’ (she had been a dental assistant at one point) ‘… a well-groomed fisherman.’
This, of course, is the classic photograph of Samuel Beckett, in – is it a pea jacket? – roll-neck seaman’s sweater.

Where do truth and fiction meet?
That is the question the book juggles with throughout. Her favourite course at Thames, was Autobiography and Fiction. Was there such a course? Or is this pure fiction, introducing us, the reader, to the inner dynamics of this book?
She ruminates on the balancing acts between autobiography and the requirements of fiction in the book. This is the biggest clue to the craft and skill she is employing here.
‘… writing truthfully is very hard…’ she writes…‘In the end the writing wins and you have you assume  it was the way it seems in the writing of it.’
‘Which is why you might be less than truthful… :to tell the truth you have to lie a bit.’
Lying is a major theme throughout the book: the little lies, the white lies, the inadvertent lies, the face-saving ones, the life-giving ones, and the whopping big ones.
‘Who threw newspaper all over your bed and floor? they ask young Sam in hospital.
‘Frank Bruno.He asked me how I was; I told him to f-off. He got annoyed and threw it all about’.

 

I have been wondering what connect there could be between a sophisticated L-R-Books deputy editor, and a nanny from the provinces with no higher education?
The big one was, of course, the children. The Nina-character went out of her way constantly to support and tend to them.
But there was also the ‘man’ issue. Nina came from a one-parent background, into another one.
This is one of the book’s big strengths, the taking down of men off their pedestal. God knows why and how they got up there to begin with.
Men are always presented as peculiar, ‘other’, strange. Hang on, isn’t that how some men see women? Still?
One of these peculiar creatures is the boyfriend who ‘must always masturbate before he can sleep’.
Yes, but he’s not being literal: a slave to his physiology. No, it’s code for him wanting a ‘hands-on’ girlfriend. How many have tried this one!
And Alan Bennett, unthreatening, homely, safe – yet he constantly surprises everyone, himself included, with his extensive and real knowledge of how household appliances work.
The oddness of others is a constant theme of shared discussion throughout the book.
And also I suspect – and here you have to know some of the Nina Stibbe backstory – the two women looked after and looked out for each other. MK looked after Nina the nanny, a young woman with much potential she had not been able to realise through the neglect that was the role of women in that period, that society.

One of my favourite episodes in the book occurs when she notices young Sam looking at his hands. ‘He does that a lot.’ says William, his brother. Are you looking at something? Or are you thinking?
Yes. No. Sometimes. Both.
So she tries it, it brings out in her a meditative mood. Up that point we have seen her quirky, hands-on, and impatient, even brusque, with abstraction, with the theory part of her degree course.
She discussed this eloquently with MK, her employer.
MK listened, then instantly turned to practical things, her mother’s recipe, for instance.

How do you read this? That is the key to the book – how you ‘read’ it. So much is suggested, by tone of voice, clipping of self-response, that the reader is drawn in to engage, fill in the gaps, the backgrounds, from clues given.

So, why do I not usually take to this type of book?
Well, look at the time and place: London, the 1980s.
What was going on in the bigger world? IRA bombings; Chernobyl in 1986 – I still hold that the need to be open about this disaster was the crucial factor behind Gorbochov’s later Glasnost and Perestroika programmes, and, well, the collapse of 1989.
Then there are the first instances of the AIDS disaster.
And what we get is a cocoon of closed-off lives.
An elite, living in their own shut-off world.
Except it isn’t, Alan Bennett had just published his book on Philby in Russia, An Englishman Abroad; he introduced current TV people into the little circle. The children were avid newspaper readers; their regular TV shows Coronation Street, The Young Ones, football: soaps, satire, and sport.

On a smaller scale we have the burgeoning 1980s music scene – apart from Prince’s Red Corvette, little makes any impact.
What we do get are the fashions in new foods going through London at the time: new menus and recipes. And we get make-up styles appearing, clothes styles, hair styles.
On the bigger scale there’s mention of someone wearing a checkered scarf, called an Arafat scarf.
This is the Labour and Socialist influence: both big supporters of the Palestinian cause. They always supported the underdog. In this case the Israeli State was the big aggressor, and the Palestinians the victims.
There are still repercussions of this in the current schisms in the UK Labour Party, now solidified into anti-Zionist tendencies.

It is this disparity between the small in the large, the small circle within the huge major City, gives the book some of its dynamic.

 

This little world set-up, impervious to the ‘moments’ of time and history, usually leaves me either cold or uninterested.
So why does this one get through? Because of its warmth, humour, and wry sideways glances at our usually hidden and discrete intellectual and cultural circles and elites.
For one.
And it is genuinely funny. It takes the tired, old ‘crazy things kids say’ to another level, adding pathos, and sheer brilliance. And, did I say, it is really very funny?

 

A TV series was attempted of the book, with Helena Bonham-Carter as MK. Many names were changed and characters omitted. It had a mixed reception.
That’s the trouble with TV adaptations, they are from one medium into another, and it is not always that easy.
With TV we have visual predominance, whereas with the book all is filtered through the perceptions of the main character. It is only visual further down the scale of perceptions. Initially we perceive from within character, what we see is already altered, re-coloured, re-balanced. The predominant engagement is language, the main character talking is to us.

 

See also: her follow-up ‘fiction’ books:
Man at the Helm, published by Viking/Penguin Books, 2014
Paradise Lodge, published by Viking/Penguin Books, 2016

Another excerpt from unpublished novel, ‘Gil’

from Gone South

It happens as soon as you step off the train. Everyone savours it, a look of pleasure lighting up chinks of harried business faces, care-worn mothers trawling lines of squabbling children. Gil couldn’t make it out. That smell. What on earth…? He topped the road outside the train station and was hit by a gleaming brightness; it shifted, twinkled, blinded.
The sea.
He had often heard about it. This was the smell.
The sea.
It drew him on, hungry as he was, drew him down those extra miles, to its gleaming wonder. He stood on the promenade holding the rail in the cooling inshore wind. He breathed deeply.
It was high tide, and crested waves lapped and licked at the sea wall a yard below him. He stood, mesmerised.

He clutched the steel rail tightly, but still the suck and surge below him pulled; it was as though the solid concrete of the promenade was almost liquid.
He looked at the green of the sea; it shone like a lizard’s back. But the smell that came from it, when it belched on the sea wall – something ancient and beyond musty, beyond rotten, something older than any of it.
The City and its concerns were not even a dot in its memory.

He looked into it, and it looked back, into him, found a kinship there somewhere.
Then it released him.
He was doused in a cold sweat, mouth and throat dry as sand, muscles taut. It released him, and he sagged, still holding the rail.
He could turn away at last; he turned and never came back again.

This was Eridu, city by the sea.

First Things – from Gill

Opening of first chapter of my new unpublished novel, Gil

FLYING LESSON

FIRST THINGS 

‘First thing they did. I mean I was already pretty freaked by then,’ he was saying. It was a warm, calm night in The City, and they were sat on the old river wall, a part not closed off, a part not structurally unsafe. ‘They took me up the Tower. You know…’ he nodded towards it in the distance, black on black in the night, its two upper floors dimly lit; watchful.

‘I’d been running wild, getting into bother, just the usual sort of things. You’d know. Only, I kept getting told, I always took it too far. Then the Men in Suits called round. It was at my ma’s. I was trying to squeeze home nosh out of her, ok, but I was in. Knock at the door. Shapes outside the back door too. I was ready for shinning up the loft ladder, skylight onto the roof, and over. I had this all planned out. Just in case. Then a lamp post and down. And I had on my Angry Antonys; I was good. It was quite a jump; not sure I’d make it.’ He looked down at the river, watching slick after foamy slick coasting past.

‘The daft… opens the door. And they were in. One grabbed my ankle on the loft ladder. He was a strong monkey, that one; built like an office block too. Yanked me clean off to his manly bosom.’ He paused, grinned, his teeth a sudden flash in the dim light from the street lamp below. ‘What was the point in struggling? Let him hold me.’

‘Boss wanted me.’ He looked across at his friend, his cheek, the line of his jaw, the slightly crooked nose,

‘They gave my ma a funny look – and she stared them out.’

‘Let him see the lad.’ she said. ‘Then he’ll believe.’

‘What the…? What was all that about? I was thinking.’ He laughed.

 

HIS SECRET – from my ebook Queen of the City

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queen-City-Michael-Murray-ebook/dp

 

Tipitia was standing in deep thought by a window on the sixth floor of the university tower, it was by the Archeology Department elevator. She did not notice a shadow behind her, then a gentle voice said,

‘I do believe you have discovered one of my little secrets.’ It was Professor Farnum. The view from the window was across the city, and from their position on the university campus to the south of the centre the view was stunning, especially in sunlight: the white buildings shone in the light. Smoke rose from last night’s fires around the city centre.

‘The queen of the city.’ she murmured.

‘I always come here when I need reminding why we are doing this.’

‘Why? Professor?’

‘All the sacrifices. I have a theory,’ he said as they walked into the department, ‘that there are seven challenges in our profession.’

‘Challenges? Professor?’ she was gradually tuning into the conversation, and away from her private thoughts.

‘Some are just simple, basic things, like just getting through the undergraduate course. It isn’t the workload, not the intellectual struggle, No, that comes later; at undergraduate level it is just the challenge of sticking at it. Of not giving in and… well, you know the drop-out rate at this university as well as I.’

‘You always have seemed so…’ she looked for the word with the right shadings,

‘Committed?’ he offered. No, that was not quite the one.

‘Have you wondered why I do not do field work any more? Surely there have been rumours?’

‘I had thought it was the volume of administration, running a department in these times.’

‘And you have indeed shouldered your part of that,’ he said. ‘I call that challenge number five. No, it isn’t all because of that.’ He was ushering her into his office; the view was into the university quadrangle and the anonymous concrete admin section over the way.

‘You must have heard of the Sudan debacle?’

‘Yes, sir; well, as much as was needed.’

‘It was the tenth day, and we were struggling to fulfill our obligations; findings were few, and low quality. I had co-opted local children who were hanging around, getting in our way, you know the sort of thing. They were carrying baskets of diggings away from the sorting table, when one little girl, she must only have been nine or ten, suddenly collapsed. She died on the spot.’

He was silent for a good while; Tipitia sat quietly.

‘Apparently,’ he continued, ‘she had been up from before dawn, traipsing three miles, with a big… plastic container, to the spring, and then returned with it full and strapped to her back. Another three miles. Every morning. The boys, of course… it was the girl’s job. And our transport standing idle. Our own water supplies….’

He was silent again. ‘Tim Johnson was with us… you’ve heard me talk of Tim, our best field worker. He quit. Didn’t finish the dig, I… don’t know if he blamed me….. I heard about him some years later, he had been working with an Aid company. He had been kidnapped by rebels. They found him, what was left, a month or so later. That was my last dig, too.

They sat for a while avoiding each other’s eyes.

 

‘You never married, sir.’ she said. The tension eased a little.

‘Ah, no. Came near it once; very near. Anthropology research student at St Columb’s. Ah yes.’ He opened a drawer in his desk, brought out a framed photograph. Tipitia caught the colours of an academic gown with Masters cap and collar. Black hair… she peered closer.

‘That’s Professor Hernandez!’ she said. ‘She has always been my role model.’

‘Janis, yes,’ he said, and a surprisingly intimate light came into his face.

‘Challenge number four.’ he said.

‘Why a challenge, sir?’

‘Who knows if either of us would be where we are now, if…’

‘You gave up your marriage.’

‘It may not have come to that.’

‘But she is married now, sir.’

‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But her husband is not an academic; there is no… conflict.’

 

Shadows – from Queen of the City

from my ebook Queen of the City
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queen-City-Michael-Murray-ebook/dp

 

‘What do you mean?’ asked Carmichael. His alertness was topping the scale, but he fought to remain calm, unperturbed. He felt his fellow travellers struggling inside.

‘Come on, now. This is First-Home stuff. You must know this.’

A lot was going on inside Carmichael, and he fought for an even demeanor.

Ok,’ he said. ‘Well, just play along a moment; why don’t we… run through the story again — memory got a little scrambled in transport.’

‘Well, it’s the Seven Worlds’ Quest.’

‘Of course it is. And?’

‘First world — you know, our first home of course.’

‘Then the second is… here?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Third?’

‘Well, they’re still working on that. It should be that place, there,’ he pointed with a hand not divided into fingers, at screen in the wall, and the Earth came up. ‘I suppose that is where you were due to go. Supposed to be continents and… but they keep shifting around, they can’t get them to hold still long enough, you know. They seem to be having trouble getting the time scale to settle down, I think. Then there’s all that, ugh, water. Most of it is, really. Pretty yucky. And there are those, you know, plants, and stuff. Not very inviting.’

‘Earth.’

‘Earth, you say. Seems more…’ he shuddered again, ‘water. Well the one after that will be that red one there.’

‘Mars.’

‘That what you call it. You are making this up.’

‘No, no. Go on.’

‘Then the biggy.’

‘Jupiter.’

‘Ju… ter.’

‘Then Saturn, er, rings?’

‘Yeh, yeh. Next though… you will not guess what that is. Go on, guess.’

‘Uranus.’

‘U-a-sus — means nothing to me. No. Guess. You can’t. Because you can’t see it, that’s why. That one is it, the ultimate mystery of all life.’

‘Ok, we’ve… I’ve got all that. It’s just, well…’

‘That’s the Quest.’

‘There are more than seven.’

‘M…more than….’ It was the nearest he got to a question.

‘Well, yes, there’s Neptune and Pluto, even, maybe, it is debated, though the arguments against are…’

‘Another….  More than seven?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Someone always gets it wrong. Don’t they. We’re brought up on this stuff. Our Noble Quest. And now you say… there’s more than seven. They spoon-feed us this great noble quest. They purposely give the wrong information. They really want us to fail, behind all the big ideals.’

‘Look…’

‘I feel ill.’ he said. His colours were all swirling, churning.

‘Give him a few minutes.’ a voice said inside Carmichael.

‘He needs a nice cup of tea.’ said the tea voice.

‘We need to know…’ a soft voice began, and 

‘… how to get home.’ another voice butted in.

‘Tell us, tell me, about world, er, three.’

‘They’re still working on it,’ he said, faintly. ‘Can’t quite get it right, yet. Sort of thing.’

‘Oh? Who is?’

‘The Mariners. Still hunting out the warm clothes, you might say. Going to be pretty cold, and, er, wet. Very wet. Ugh.’

‘Hm.’

‘They’d better hurry up though.’

‘Oh, and why is that, then?’ his sense of irony was piqued.

‘Well, you can see. Look.’ he gestured all around. The walls were briefly transparent: they looked at a featureless landscape.

How did he do that? Carmichael was intrigued.

‘We’ve ruined this place. Like we did the first one. They used this place as a dump for waste, spoil; then it turned out we had to live here because the first had become worse. It’s even worse there, now though. I went back summer hols before last. Visit the old place. Never again. All the heavyside’s gone now. Freezing and I mean freezing, on the dark side, the poles, that sort of thing.’

‘Can you just.’ the sober voice whispered, ‘ask him how he got there?’

‘Yes, ahem, how did you get there? You know, old home?’

‘Oh, the shuttle. The vacuum shuttle.”         ‘

‘And can you use it to number, what is it, three?’

‘No. Well, they’ve talked about it. And, well, no one knows what’s there. We could just plonk down into… anything. Might be big scary monsters.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I’m not supposed to say this, but, well, they did try it. Made a bit of a mess of the place.’

‘What… sort of a mess?’

‘Oh, you know… mass extinction kind. Ahem.’

‘When… when was this?’

‘Ages ago. About six. So far.’

‘And after the first two or three… mass extinctions. They kept on trying it?’

‘Well, you know, little loss, really. Boiling seas, acid seas, frozen seas, no seas. It’s only water. Ugh. What’s water anyway.’

‘Yes, er, quite.’

Review: The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.

The Great God Pan, was published by Arthur Machen in 1895, London.
Arthur Machen was the son of a Welsh clergyman, and was born in 1863, near Caerleon, in Monmouth, Wales. He died in 1947.

Arthur Machen is one of those interesting people on the sidelines. And yet he had his own moments in the spotlight. In 1895 he published his ground-breaking novella The Great God Pan.
Even today the novella has its admirers – Stephen King reckons it one of the best horror stories in the language.
His roll was brought to a halt in the moral backlash brought about by the Oscar Wilde court case. Arthur Machen’s stories had already raised hackles by his themes of lust, unpleasantness, in fact for being ‘decadent.’ After that court case decadence was to be swept away by moral outrage, the re-imposition of sound Victorian values.

It was only later, about 1899, he was invited to join the Golden Dawn through his friendship with A E Waite. It has to be admitted, for all the themes of his writing: the deciphering of lost texts, diabolism etc, he was not particularly enamoured by the Order, and contributed little to nothing.

What is it about, The Great God Pan, then?
It is a story that is pieced together from fragments, inching its way to a clearer picture. What obscures the picture? It is the outraged morals and also the lack of clues, information, of the observers and narrators.
It is a story whose power and impact are created by the breaking apart of the atoms of Victorian morality.
Ok, I am using metaphors from a later time. But on purpose: Arthur Machen was fully engaged with Darwinian theory, with contemporary medicine, with the dualities of perception of his age.
Without the moral high ground of the detractors to decadence, a stance that all ‘right-thinking’ Victorians were supposed to have some measure of a share in, without that high position, the story’s depiction of a fall to the ‘depths of depravity’ that was the supposed mind-set of savages, the story makes no sense.
Wikki writes:
Historian Harold Perkin wrote:

Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.

 

The story opens with the narration of ‘just a little medical procedure’, recorded by the ‘dry man’ Mr Clarke. The outcome of this operation on the brain of a young and trusting young woman (one of the lower classes, naturally), reverberates throughout the story. We piece together the incidents, connect the dots, while the well-meaning but at times a little too slow, a little too ‘upright’, characters in the story try to make sense of a series of suicides of eminent and honourable young Victorian men.

It is this slow procedure, and also the puzzle-solving, that actively engages the reader, and creates atmosphere, the feeling of impending horror.
It could well be, also, this active engagement of the reader in such a morally deplorable tale, that upset the authorities: to become unwitting participants in immoral activities.

One theme that returns again in another story, The Novel of the White Powder, is that of the human body, through an outside agency, reverting to its protozoan origins before ones eyes.

This may lack impact to us now, we who have seen regularly such ‘special effects.’ But when one’s sole vision-viewer was one’s own imagination, apart from the early cinematograph, and the first picture newspapers  like the Daily Graphic, black and white illustrations pre-Beardsley, then the intent of the author would be more readily apparent. The author is in reality introducing such ideas and scenes into one’s mind.

That, and the Darwinian challenge to the hammered-home Christian view, of the body as sacred, a temple of chastity, to be strictly curbed, disciplined.
You can also see here perhaps, the development through borrowing the concept for corporal discipline, for abuse of the body and soul.

The Great God Pan is described as the experiencing of the world in its original state, when lusts ran free, and keeping to the classical archetypes, bachanites actually tore men to pieces.
The ethical and moral concepts of human progress from savage times to modern man, provide the scaffolding to the story.
It is extremely doubtfull such savagery as was envisioned ever existed. Even as the early hominids emerged they carried with them respect for the dead, disciplines, and rites. Sea pirates had their own codes, honourable behaviour – wooden ships were extremely disciplined communities, they had to be.
The Christian stance created such moral distances as the depth of the fall into depravity. ‘The Old Adam,’ was the phrase used to euphemistically describe unbridled lusts.

The story has many enlivening details. There is described at one point how, walking home in  the early hours of a London morning to Holborn, the streets were silent, empty, but for the occasional horse-drawn Hackney cab over cobbles. And how the  horses’ shoes struck ‘fire’, in the night.
Is a hellish image implied? It is certainly one of surprising clarity, maybe a little unsettling, but also lively because of that.
The suicides are by hanging, mostly from bedposts. It may well be that auto-eroticism is being implied here.
Behind the seeming prosperous and morally upright, ‘advanced civilisation’ of late Empire London, lurk the old terrors waiting their time.

They had their prelude, of course, in the Boer War, shortly to erupt.

Book Review: Out Damned Spot, by F J McQueen

Out Damned Spot, William Shakespeare Crime-Scene Cleaner , by F J McQueen. Published by Urbane Publications, 2016

https://urbanepublications.com/our-books/
https://urbanepublications.com/authors/?s=F+J+McQueen&book-authors=&order=

This is the most extraordinary work of fiction that I have read in a long, long time.

1

We expect fiction to be set in our known world, where responses to environment are known, our own experience, and as ordinary. In a fantasy work the same applies: they are all recognisable people in recognisable situations, it is the details that are different.
But what if one’s responses to the environment became other than the known? What if the environment became other than our experienced world?

The shift, here, is in cognition: something is different, something is ‘other’, and nothing becomes accessible to the ‘predictive text’ of our inner narration.

The story centres around the nodes of Shakespeare’s main plays. We navigate a world that opens, like the Shakespearean world discovering its America.
Will Shakespeare is on the last day of his work as a hospital doctor. What had gone wrong? We presume that something had. And why was he woken once more at midnight with that terrible sound? One that no one else could hear?
The ordinary of that world, though, was not our ordinary.
He set up next day as a Crime-Scene cleaner. The crimes? The plays are littered with the wrongfully dead.
His cleaning fluid – and here we enter a world truly chilling – is mysteriously provided for him by nine seriously unsettling people. Or are they all emanations of one? And their price? A meal of oneself.

2

There is a short story by Leonora Carrington, Cast Down By Sorrow, where the narrator meets the elderly but coquettish Arabelle Pegase. She speaks of her clothes, and mentions a dress she has that is made from cat’s heads,
What was your reaction to that? Horrified, like mine? And yet I think that her intention with this image is something else – it is a changed aesthetic, even a changed system of ethics, that she is describing.
It is used as an artistic, painter’s, image, visual and tactile, rather than humanistic.
And similarly here, the images in this book have their own wholeness, inner logic, that is not literary in the narrow sense that it is being used more and more at the present time.

There is an incident where a soil boat appears – or is it a grave? It takes you places; it takes you to the river of time where golems struggle to hold back a certain day. Made of clay they crumble constantly as they strain and struggle to keep hold against the flow of time. As they crumble new ones take their place, a constant renewing. But you sense the struggle, the need.
These are not literary images, but visual images – they could work as graphic images in a graphic novel. The visual, this is where the where the book’s Venn-structure overlaps the most.
But, some might say, golems do not appear in The Plays. No, but they are part of the sensibility of the period, of the wider environment of the time. And also of our time.
This is one of the many aspects of the book I especially like, it’s willingness to not stay harnessed to ploughing the narrow furrow of what we now take to be The Plays.

Take MacBeth’s three witches, they make their appearance early on in the tale, transposed as oracles, in a hospital cupboard. And they prophesy… impossible things. But the impossibles become increasingly possible as the tale deepens into itself.

How does it work? One crack in the world-self narrative we spin for ourselves – one crack, and a different take on reality becomes possible.
It is a cognitive shift.

In another’s hand the story could become whimsy – but that does not happen. The images are impactful, the writing of a very high standard, and the overall imagining quite devastating in its range and implications.

 

 

Echoland

In the beginning was silence.
Ok, waves smashed on rocks long ago eroded, and great winds whipped trees out. Avalanches roared.
When the great Silures climbed out of stifling swamps, the hectic seas, they grew up and developed into monstrous beings among the plenty of the lands, and all those sounds around them.
And so, when eventually their small hunting area became scarce of game, they needed wider ranges.
They noticed the sounds around, noticed how it was the louder and more fierce sounds, made them all run, leave empty grounds. And the louder better. And so,
‘Rumble, ruMBLE, CRASH, CRASH!’ they roared.
‘AAARGH! WHOOP-AAAARGH!’
It worked, the others fled. Was that an avalanche? Was there a storm coming?
The new hunting ground was theirs.

Of course, other Silures had developed these tricks long ago, though some were only just catching-on. Was there one progenitor of tactics, trickery? You could say it was the most idle, or arrogant, the most selfish, unpopular, most ignorant, the bullies of the groups, tried this out. All to different degrees of effectiveness.
And so a competitiveness developed between them; each marshalled their weaker siblings and those who hung around for the pickings.

In the beginning was… relative… silence.
It was when the apes came down from the trees…. This happened wherever there was a long period of bad years, of droughts, fires, and the trees died a long way back. It happened everywhere the new weather patterns created from scrub and forest, bare pasture and grasslands.

The apes were crammed into smaller areas – they needed space. And also, they were curious. Their times of plenty, in the distant past, left them hungry, with a hunger they could not recognise, and nothing could assuage. Maybe if they searched in these lands, so antithetical to their natures, they could find the lost things.

And they chittered and chattered as they went, bonding their groups across the distances of the plains, deep in the grasses.

Who was it copied whom? Did the animals pick up on this new noise coming into their lands? And was this how bird calls began, imitating the morning calls of the roving bands, and the evening calls to rest? Or did the upright apes copy the new noises of birds, animals, they found themselves amongst? Then they could lure them to a sense of safety. Catch them.
Or was that for their own protection: the trickery and tactics of the Silures coming down to them in remote genetic patterns? Or was it that if they could imitate those around them, blend in, then maybe they’d be accepted?

But times, climates, terrains, change, and with them, the needs and requirements. Isolated groups sang morning bird calls to each other, becoming broken phrases, snatches of sound. A questioning note took on a certain gesture; an angry growl became a sneer.
– Echo-ing that which was inside themselves, as they clung to each other in their groups, as they passed through the dangerous places.

And cockerels copied the morning songs of the incomers. And when they themselves had long forgotten those songs, or even the state of mind, peace, appreciation, they drew those songs from, the cockerels remembered their own variations.
To try and retain some sense of wonder, some parts in the incomers grew religions from the ashes of those long forgotten camp fires.
Morning songs were now echoed in the calls summoning all to minarets, meetings, sacrifices. And the clicks of language, consonantal songs, were in the tocsin, the curfew sounds of night.

A Little Friction

“I have never understood this about parenthood,” he was saying.
She knew the signs, the worn, ragged expression on his young face, the pitch of the voice, thin and insistent, forcing itself beyond its strength. “This need to identify with them, like… like trying to open up some psychic doorway. Become them….” And them mumbling unformed thoughts he cannot quite reach:
“Sink into a general identity.”

She had learned patience; as though that was her doorway to him, them, the world.

“It’s always been my…” struggling for words they both know will not come, “ I’ve spent so much of my life trying to demystify them. Mum. Dad. See them as people. And it’s such a disappointment. Their petty squabbling all my life. Their insistence on hurt. And, you know, sometimes, Sometimes… Maybe I should have left alone. Which is the most disappointing, them, or finding them as that?”

She looked at him again, guarding her expression. “I have to go. You know that.”

“God yes.” He jumped, “The traffick’ll be murder. Do be careful… out there.” Lame smile, the Hill Street Blues thing. Shared things; nothings, things they have somehow given such a value to.

“Look, you get off. And I’ll get the shopping so you can come straight home, and no…”

“Bye, love.”

*

She sat, hands between her knees, all tight, staring at her empty cappuccino. Sammy waited. Something was coming. She caught a yawn peeping out behind her waiting.

“I… ah. Do you think Dave is ok?”

“Ok?”

“I… ah… Twice now… I’ve…  heard him in the shower. Crying.”

“What? Really crying?”

“Kind of quietly. You know… well, it reminded me of a child. In bed, alone at night.”

“God, Lil., that sounds so sad.”

“I know, I know, I…”

“Has he said anything? Have you…?”

“I tried to. That last time. I met him, you know accidently on purpose, coming out of the shower…”

“And?”

“It was the look on his face. I couldn’t read it. I thought a bit of resentment, blame, but it was washed away by something…. I couldn’t, after that. Maybe it’s a man thing!”

“They’re not that different from us.”

“You’d never have said that one time!”

“Ah, well.”

“Look. I know this is going to sound weird. Bad. But…”

“Lil! I don’t know what I can say!”

“Look, I’ve worked it out: we go for a drink, after. Then I make an excuse…”

“Lil!”

“It’s me taking the risks here. With your histories.”

“How do you know Tony won’t want to come too?”

“Because. Because if he did the state he’s in at the mo., one drink’d knock him sideways. He knows that, and I know that.”

*

“Well, Dave, I’ll have to be getting back too.”

“Oh, Sammy, Sammy. I’m getting old, Sammy. Can you imagine! Only, what, five years between us. Feels like a life-time.”

“You’re only…”

“I’m losing my hair, Sammy. Big time. The plug-hole…”

“It could be anything, change of season. Even alopaecia.”

“Not only that, though, is it. Everything droops. I’ve shrunk horribly where it matters, and everything else just hangs.”

“You’re just out of tone.”

“You and me, we had good times. Those evenings in Durham. Romantic evenings. Lovely romantic evenings”

“You certainly have a long memory, Dave.”

“Come on, you must remember that hotel, those nights.”

“It was draughty, the furniture was dusty; fingermarks…”

“Don’t spoil it, Sammy!”

“Well, who had to clean up, afterwards?”

“But they were perfect. Admit it, weren’t they!”

“You have really no idea, do you Dave! What’s so romantic about ending up douching in a grimy bathroom. While you slept the sleep of the dead!”

“Sammy, don’t be… that’s…”

“That’s how it was, Dave. That’s really how it was.”

“I don’t know why you have to be so viscous. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I can’t even do it anymore! She never comes near me, anyway. What have I got to raise a flag for.”

“And so you’re going to dribble into your drink for the rest of your life. Give it a rest, Dave.”

“So, and what’s your Tony got that I haven’t? From what I hear…”

“Ok, Dave. You’re on your own. Bye. Oh, and, don’t forget to give Lil my best wishes.”

*

Sometimes I catch myself hoping the car won’t start. I’d sit back, at my desk. A good hour before the cleaners come in. Fresh coffee; feet up. Cars chugging and honking five stories below. The quiet it makes.

Just so very sad to see him ill. Five years now. Improving. But now he knows that’s five years lost. Better, maybe, if he knew nothing about them; so hard to realise… We all live in out heads most of the time. So when something comes and… zonks you like that: nothing to remember when memory is our big resource.

 

My niece is doing Criminology; second year, now. God, I’d love to have done something like that. Options on our ACAS forms were post-war rationing.

Kids get all the best deals.

 

 

BRUTALISM

He walked out of there into a mechanical world. It should have been a new world, the old world new again. But it was a mechanical world.

The hearing aids were the new part; they were calibrated to the loss of the higher frequencies, and so upped the treble for him. The simple laws of materials and their resonances meant those upper frequencies had the tinny sound of some ipod ear pieces.

He walked out of there expecting to hear the world as he had known it; it was not that world. What he heard was a mechanised version: a bird flew by, flapping its wings for take-off and height-gain. There was instant visual and environmental recognition, here was an urban pigeon entering onto a length of flight, the road to the next junction, maybe. It was too built-up for wood pigeons, though they had the same flapping-slap of flight. But this time it sounded like a rustling newspaper, a large broadsheet. This was not that familiar sound to vision connect he knew so well.

His cotton trousers brushed soft cotton socks; it was a rasping sound. That was wrong. He was so intent on this hearing phenomena, these anomalies, the car just missed him. The slightly off-centre focus of his hearing, a little further to the back of his head, skewed his balance; he felt he was lurching around. By the side of a road this was not good.

He came to that junction in the road and turned, off the curb again, on then off.

‘Did you see that fool, then?’

‘Drink. Or drugs.’

‘Shouldn’t be out.’

‘What a tosser.’

He walked away quickly. This is what he got the aids for, to hear conversations again. But this…. All those times outside of conversations, anything not one-to-one, anything with background music, or just sounds blanking out all finer sounds…. And this is what he needed them for? To hear this kind of thing? Everything has its plus, and its minus.

He was in the shopping precinct now; all around were conversations. He was no longer shut out, separated by a blurred barrier of sound, now he could hear. And what did he hear? Conversation as social glue, as recognition codes among women, and among men; the youths uttered a kind of blank-faced vowel-heavy monosyllabic talk. Back with their girlfriends they were animated and fully vocal again. This was bonding, rather than intercourse: all had come outdoors to re-register themselves as social beings of a certain type, place, age, social level.

That hiss. What was it? It was the hair over his ears, the ear pieces. Whenever his ears moved, and it was surprising how often, or his scalp moved – that too – whenever all the continual physiological responses of his head occurred it gave a hissing sound, like a simmering. It should be a lower sound, a rustle of hair on plastic, on packed plastic, not hollow; but a rustle.

It was then he began to notice the changes in the new sounds, a mismatch of known sound from recognised stimuli, and this altered sound. His sense of balance, ok, that was expected and explainable: his mind listened to these new sounds despite himself. His mind was so taken up with this that it left his vision to fend for itself. And so, that object glimpsed for a second, and which he had glimpsed so many times and knew to be a faded flower head over his high garden wall, now gave him a sudden alert.

He was home, and brushing up the soil he had just walked in with a hand brush. What was that? A crow cawing somewhere close. It was his shirt brushing the flock wall paper as he moved. Nothing was matching with anything else. His mind supplied the correct explanations, but the cause was not the right one. Although vision was always king, sound was the council of ministers, the underlying sense and explanation to everything seen.

Now every sound had borders again. Things you are not aware of, things taken for granted, things slowly accustomed to, building up, accumulating, as your own sense of self grows. And now how very untidy this house – everything overspilling. My god, he thought, Where’ve I been?

The week was taken up with tidying, only, the clarity was like a razor. He became ruthless; everything went. His comfortable apartment became… stark, sharp edged, with high-lumin light bulbs that gave no mercy.

A part of him found he could not stay indoors longer than needed. He interpreted this as being focused, energized. This mismatch set up a sense of restless energy that frequently tipped into acts of anger, sudden bursts, that made no sense to him. He’d leave whoever he had hurt, and walk away amazed at himself, appalled at himself, and thrilled.

He searched out the cleaner parts of the city. The Business sectors? No; vacant buildings accumulated there, closed-downs. It became a tumbleweed centre. No, the places he gravitated to were the financial sectors. Behind their black windows they generated as much energy as they had before. This time, they did it clandestinely. Their offices were… sharp-edged, minimalist, with high-lumin light bulbs. This was his new home.

But even there, a part of him shrank away from full commitment.

The straight abrupt angles of the building in front of him was the promotion of common sense and business confidence, of four-square achievement; solid, dependable. This was the crown of the great city.

Now, however, it and many of the ones in this style, especially in close proximity like this, their own financial sector, now radiated to all an overbearing feeling of dullness, of deadness of spirit and enterprise. They had come represent the hubris and failure of an economic system that was flawed at heart.

His hearing was now like that; it dictated to sight a different, diminished repertoire of sounds to meaning.