Hoping to get on-line when in England (and France!) a bit more than this time last year, but you never know.
But I enjoyed prayers here at the little mosque today – twice, in fact. Once for Haji, and then for the usual Friday Prayers. Last time I was here Fuad and I attended prayers at the rather grand state mosque, a fine building but perhaps a bit over-elevated for the likes of me.
Finished Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this morning, before going to the mosque, leaving Victor expiring in the desolate cold of an ice-packed northern sea – one of the best bits of the novel – and the monster planning his (the monster’s) funeral pyre in the same location. Great stuff! Now embarking on Ackroyd’s new version of the myth, which will be my reading on the long flight to Europe. Ackroyd begins with Victor meeting Percy Shelley at Oxford. Again, great stuff, or it certainly looks that way. Some learned cove on the book jacket compares it to Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Hope he’s right!
More importantly, it’s generally abominably written. The dialogue, where you get some as a relief from the tedious explication of Victor’s account, is stagey at best, and it’s often not as good as that – the sort of thing a teenager might write for the stage. The inconsistencies of plot are startling – how exactly does the monster cross the waters to get to England? And when it’s not being inconsistent the plot manages to lurch into utterly superfluous digressions, like that of Felix and his tiresome family history. All of this though is better than those moments, of which there are more than a few, when the novel seems to turn into a kind of travelogue.
And the strangest thing of all? Despite all the above, Frankenstein is a wonderful novel simply as a result of the mythic power of Mary Shelley’s big idea. In fact, the idea is so powerful it shatters the timid frame of the fiction that attempts to contain it. The monster, the daemon, the fiend – all Victor’s terms for what his tiny mind cannot contain – is startling in the reality of its pathos and the truth of its needs, for a mate, for understanding, for revenge. No wonder it came to take even Victor’s name away.
I’ve got forty pages left and I’m relishing everyone of them.
Or is it? A couple of days ago I chanced upon this interesting interview with philosopher Roger Scruton here. I've always enjoyed reading Scruton, even though his generally conservative, right wing stance is not a position I can find much sympathy for. But he's the kind of opponent who thinks with a clarity that can only help you make your own ideas clearer (and make you aware that it's quite reasonable for others to hold views almost diametrically opposed to your own.). And in the realm of ideas related to aesthetics I find him enormously fruitful as a thinker. In the interview Scruton makes some interesting points about the value of serious/classical music in relation to the general lack of such value in popular music and I must say I think he's essentially on the right track.
Where he goes a bit wrong, I think, is in not recognising the range of nuance in the best of popular music. He gets close to this in an attempt to appreciate The Beatles and the great songwriters like Cole Porter, and it's interesting and laudable that he tries to stretch to some understanding of Metallica. But he clearly doesn't know the field. However, I think he's absolutely right in citing Oasis as an example of the narrow range of expression of most rock music and its concentration on the self and the performer. And I believe he's got something when he talks about the educational power of pure music in terms of implanting some kind of emotional rhythm or movement within that unfashionable facet of our being, the soul
But the film had the virtue of being relatively short, at forty-five minutes, and thus within my attention span - and that of the girls. It was achingly sentimental also, in a Disneyesque manner, but its heart was in the right place. Entitled The Call of the Wild it rather neatly embedded Jack London's classic within a modern narrative of a somewhat spoiled little girl being sent to a small town to stay with grandfather and discovering the joys of bonding with a sort of half-dog-half-wolf she calls Buck, after London's dog which she learns about through grandad's reading of the tale. Interestingly the genuine harshness and realism of London's idea of the wild comes across through the re-telling - at one point the girl doesn't want to know what happens next - and the reality of the modern Buck's wildness is not played down (though the ending is, sadly, a cop out.) I was reminded of watching Born Free, about the lioness Elsa, when I was a child and feeling very uncomfortable at the uncompromising ending. (Elsa does, inevitably, return to the wild.)
The other great virtue of the film lay simply in the shots of Buck. No need for gimmicks like 3D. The animal looked stunningly beautiful, and gloriously wild. Sometimes just knowing that something of the world outside our human scope is still going strong is enough to make one optimistic in a (very) small way.
One of the triumphs of the series is the way in which the writer avoids repeating herself. Instead Barker gets us involved in new and unexpected ways of looking at the conflict that forms the backdrop to the three novels. As I've mentioned before, the avoidance of any kind of cliché about WW1 is in itself a remarkable achievement.
The other thing that's so striking about the trilogy is the spareness and restraint of the writing. Nothing is over-written or goes on too long. In fact, I had the odd feeling that what the writer was not saying, was leaving out, was almost as important as what was in the texts. One example of this is the way in which Wilfred Owen is dealt with in the final segments. You cannot help but think of his poetry as you read, but none of this makes it into The Ghost Road so that the poetry becomes itself a kind of ghostly presence haunting the novel.
I found the final pages the most potent I've read for quite some time in terms of their emotional power. Reviewers tend to bandy words like 'shattering' around rather too freely for my tastes - but it's the only word I can think of that does justice to just how devastating the ending is - even though you know it's coming.
I'm now considering rereading Ackroyd's novel English Music. I found it the most difficult of all his novels when I first read it but I remembering enjoying it, especially the brilliant pastiche of Blake's prophetic books. The problem is though that I frequently consider rereading Ackroyd's early novels and can't afford the time for such a digression. I think if I had to name my favourite novels then First Light and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem would be vying for places right at the top of the list. As it is, though, his latest book The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein lies enticingly on the shelves and I've promised myself a reread of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus before I let myself loose on it.
And all this in the shadow of our imminent trip to England (and France) on which I've vowed to take only one or two books to read in recognition of the fact I'll be buying more when we get there.
Meantime I'm pressing on with the very English Pat Barker and her distinct music, but finding The Ghost Road heavier going than I expected.
Noi parting words to me involved, amongst other things, a quip about my being able to play 'my music' extra loud. She knows me well. Although I don't really consider the present volume (I'm playing Yes's Relayer in the other room) particularly loud. Others might, I suppose. Anyway I must say I've been enjoying a fairly disparate variety of disks today, generally accompanying me as I've been working. (Quite unusual for me, actually. I can't listen to music as I mark, for example. But today's work was, for the most part, utterly routine to the point at which real thought was hardly necessary.)
I kicked off with a bit of Bax, Symphony No. 5 and the tone poem The Tale the Pine Trees Knew. I'm thinking of playing this again later, after the Liverpool - City game as a way of signing off for the day. After that came Pink Floyd's Umma Gumma (the studio album) Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Gentle Giant's Octopus, Depeche Mode's Exciter and Yusof Islam's Roadsinger. All of which, including the stuff from Yes now shaking the living room, reminded me of how much I've got that I don't get round to playing anything like enough. Riches indeed, at whatever volume you choose.
Ironically, on my way to the mosque I had been congratulating myself on the fact that it was not going to be necessary to carry an umbrella with me as it was an unusually fine day for this wet November, with no sign whatsoever of any imminent precipitation. How wrong I was, though I was not aware of the fact until I was on the way out. Normally you can hear the rain coming down from inside the mosque but today there wasn't a sound or any kind of hint of a storm, so I'm assuming it began just as I was leaving.
But this is a story of celebration - for two reasons. First of all, although I was fairly wet by the time I made it to the car, it took less than fifteen minutes to get almost completely dry. It's the climate. Even the greyest November day here is essentially warm. In Manchester I'd have suffered for hours if I'd got that wet.
And secondly, I was actually running, and do not appear to have done myself any harm. I've been pain free now - I'm talking of sciatic pain - for two weeks. I'm starting to believe that the trapped nerve has mysteriously and wonderfully untrapped itself. If this is the case I can seriously begin to consider seriously exercising this tired old body of mine. And I didn't think that would have been possible even a month ago.
And duly perused over a less-than-routine weekend, basically because with the usual pattern of things disrupted, a book that could be easily, painlessly dipped into at random was about the only thing I could really settle to read.
And for once the blurb was spot on. It's a great book, a real labour of love. MacDonald is illuminating in every respect but particularly on the musical content of the songs. He brings a genuine sense of expertise to what one might loosely term popular criticism.
But there's one aspect of the book that puzzles and fascinates me in roughly equal measures, with a dash of something like irritation thrown in. He is extremely clear in his judgments of almost every song and not afraid to rubbish what he regards as rubbish. But the problem is that quite a bit of what he rubbishes seems to me to be well worth equivocating over. Whilst his expertise, and obvious love of the group, might seem to earn him the right to judge decisively, it's a bit hard to take scathing dismissals of songs like Helter Skelter. In this particular case it had never occurred to me that anyone might dismiss a track I just assumed was universally accepted as brilliant. Oddly enough I can relate to his particular criticism here, cannily related as it to the development of heavy metal and the song's relationship to that dubious genre, but it seems to me that to belittle a track that has meant so much to so many - presumably to the likes of U2, for example, electing to steal it back from Charles Manson - somehow is missing something about the music somewhere.
As I have noted before, the deep-seated need we seem to have, in matters of artistic judgment, to divide the sheep from the goats is one that we might all usefully question, and possibly restrain.
