More Art

Noi's youngest sister, Tina, is staying with us over the weekend with her friend, Haslinda. The girls (really women, in their twenties, I think, but I'm not trying to be patronising - they look and behave like young teenagers, as so many Malay women of that age do) are here to enjoy a weekend of art. They are both practising artists, Tina is involved in all sorts of pottery-related activities, and as far as I can tell spent most of yesterday, before we met them in the evening, scouring the island for art and food. Now they're out again doing the same, having only gone to bed after two in the morning, following a trip to the beach with my missus. I was safely and insensibly tucked in bed at that stage of the proceedings.

Just now I was looking at their catalogue for ARTSingapore - the Contemporary Asian Art Fair 2008. It's all very glossy, very commercial, I suppose, yet brimming with energy and oooomph. I loved it, but indiscriminately so. I just have no taste but lots of appetite.

I'm not quite sure why, but I associate most of what I see with a sense of youth. The girls' own appetite for taking all this in is dauntingly intimidating but vaguely galvanizing. And that's had me thinking about how enjoyable, tackily but truly life-affirming it is to be around young people. Editing the testimonials for the students who'll soon be leaving my school has been another reminder of this. They get so much done! Of course, it helps that teenagers generally in Singapore don't conform to the sullen stereotypes of their counterparts in the UK. Like their country they remain, for the most part, stubbornly, occasionally remorselessly, sunny.

Told

Alan Bennett's Untold Stories are now told in my case, and I'm very glad they have been, though in some ways sad to lose the companionship of the collection. For such an avowedly shy person - and he is particularly good in teasing out the implications of that all too common condition - he makes a remarkably good companion. The voice of his prose is that of an observant, honest friend, the kind who illuminates the most ordinary of our experiences in a way that seems curiously ordinary - not really adding to what was already there - but which you recognise as brilliantly perceptive. I suppose the role is more that of what these days is termed a mentor, but I can't imagine Bennett employing this term, so I won't.

Now I'm devoting my full attention to Atwood, having almost reached the halfway mark in The Blind Assassin, but I'm thinking of what I might balance against this. I seem constitutionally unable to have only one book on the go.

Excellence

Got back early enough in the afternoon to bang on my DVD of Richard Thompson playing live in Austin, Texas (just guitar, double bass and drums). Why is this man not a national treasure? I ask fellow Brits. Then I buried my head in the wonderful and wondrous The Blind Assassin before thinking about getting ready to go jalan jalan raya with the missus & nieces, which is what I'm now doing. Kak Kiah's will be our chief port of call, which means overwhelming amounts of remorselessly wonderful grub. And I can't honestly say I'm really upset about that.

2 Questions...

… brought about by listening to The Turangalila Symphony. What was Messiaen on when he wrote it? And where can I get hold of some of that stuff?

Rats

Caught a glimpse of what I took to be either quite a large rat or a fattish squirrel at work today. At the time I was gazing out of one of the windows in the canteen area (known as the SAC for some reason) in a zen-ish attempt to become one with my cup of tea. The area beyond the window is home to a bit of landscaping and vegetation, including a couple of trees with a fascinating set of mangrove-style secondary roots, so the creature was in a suitable sort of creaturely environment.

It's odd but I can't recall ever seeing a rat 'live', as it were, back in England. In Singapore I've seen quite a few. I saw one positively avuncular specimen strolling around an area in which I taught drama some years back, in the all-girls' school I worked in. Broad day-light as well, shameless fellow. And then there was the time I was walking to the same school, about twelve years ago, along East Coast Road (I lived quite close) when I saw a crowd (tribe? posse?) of about ten rats scavenging around a couple of bins below an overhead bridge. I took a few steps towards them, assuming they would scatter, and they just ignored me and carried on with their ratty business. Discretion proved the better part of valour on my behalf and I found myself walking down the middle of the road to leave them in peace.

I can't say I'm overly fond of them (pace the estimable Ratty in The Wind in the Willows) but I must say the sheer otherness of those with whom we share this world feels, in some strange way, like something to celebrate.

Hard Lives

Depressing article in today's Straits Tines concerning Bangladeshi workers in Singapore who have valid work permits, having paid 'agents' big sums to come over here (like $8,000), only to find there's no actual work for them. It seems the agents make so much from the fees that they deliberately hire more of the guys than the companies they represent need. When the guys complain to the Ministry of Manpower their work permits get cancelled by their so-called employers. Since they're not getting work they cannot pay off the debts they've incurred to pay the agents (in the form of loans from money-lenders in Bangladesh) so when they eventually go back, which it looks like most will be forced to do, they face crippling debts. They left Bangladesh originally due to the unemployment rates there, so there is absolutely nothing they can do to get out of the mess.

Well, at least this made it to the newspaper and possibly someone in a position to take action and right a terrible wrong might be able to do so. I suppose somebody somewhere will tell us this is all part of the benefits of globalisation.

Also heard on the BBC this morning: a quarter of the world's species of mammals are under direct threat of extinction. Fortunately or otherwise, depending on how you look at it, our own species does not seem to be one of them.

For Art's Sake

Made reasonable progress in both Untold Stories and The Blind Assassin over the weekend. I've now passed the central section of Untold Stories with all the diary entries, these proving such easy, enjoyable, rewarding reading that I had to consciously slow down to extend the pleasure of the text. A little bit of that pleasure comes from the referencing of aspects of British culture (especially of the more popular variety) with which I am familiar, though now at some distance. I'm not sure his essay on Thora Hird would mean much to someone who'd never seen her perform, but I have and found myself pleased to be able to recall her work, though I've never been a particular fan. He writes so well about her (well, about pretty much everything that catches his attention) that I'm sorry I didn't pay all that much attention to her when I was in a position to watch her regularly on tv. His play, or rather monologue, for her, The Last of the Sun is one of the best things in the collection.

Incidentally, I had no idea that Bennett is such an art (as in the visual arts) -buff. He's got an ability to communicate his enthusiasm in this regard that marks him as a natural, real teacher. It was a little strange to get into this aspect of his work just after completing The Sea, in which the appreciation of visual art is a key idea. It's been a long time since I've thought seriously about developing my sense of the history of art, something I was consciously attempting some years ago. I suppose that living in a place where there's little sense of the routine of going to galleries and exhibitions has dulled my appetite in that direction, but I can imagine it reviving under the tutelage of a Bennett.

Actually the problem I have is recognising quality. It all looks good to me, unless I don't get it (the conceptual/performance art stuff, which I still sort of enjoy even when it's just silly, or pretentious, or both) and I'm completely unable to make valid discriminations. In contrast, I think I recognise good writing, and there's heaps of it in Untold Stories.

Travelling Man

Setting off at 4.00 pm from Melaka, I wondered whether we might have something of an epic journey ahead of us before the welcome familiarity of Still Road, and meeting a substantial jam after Machap, only two-thirds of the way back, it looked as if we might be in one of those situations characterised as memorable for all the wrong reasons. The fact that there'd been bit of a hold-up at Tuas on the way over on Friday, even though we were there in the very early evening, added to my sense of doom. I surmised that a lot of Malays were heading to Malaysia over the weekend to visit family for Hari Raya, like ourselves.

Our last few trips north have tended to involve jams, snarls and the like, with some particularly irritating situations in which we'd chosen the wrong lane and felt life's unfairness weighing us down, and I think all that was fueling my pessimism. But at least I was mentally prepared.

For nothing - as it turned out. After about half-an-hour of stop-start stuff the highway, all two lanes of it, mysteriously began to clear and we sailed through Tuas to sunny Singapore, arriving at the door at 8.00 pm. My guess is that we'd been caught in a lot of Malaysian traffic comprising those visiting relatives and those heading home to Johore after spending time in villages to the north, it being the last day of the week's public holiday in Malaysia.

So this is all much ado about nothing, I suppose, except to serve as a reminder to be grateful when the journey goes well - which, as long as you get there in one piece, is always.

The Funds

We're engulfing ourselves in the usual mildly frenetic preparations for a journey north, this time just as far as Melaka where we'll be spending the weekend in a Malaysian continuation of the celebrations for Eid. I know our visit is being looked forward to by the smaller residents of Mak's house (of which there are many) not because we're terribly popular with them but we are carrying precious envelopes loaded with the necessary funds.

Noi was telling me the other day about reading about one child who cashed in over three thousand last Hari Raya. And speaking of being flush, Mum reported winning yet another forty quid at bingo the other night. Financial crisis? What financial crisis?

All At Sea

It wasn't all munching beef rendang and lontong yesterday. I found the time, in between visitors, to complete The Sea and greatly enjoyed doing so, and I also found myself savouring some of the central sections, the extracts from his diaries, from Alan Bennett's Untold Stories. I was a bit surprised at the ease with which I read Banville's novella having got the impression from somewhere that it was slow-moving, highly poetic and a touch unapproachable on those counts. (I wasn't entirely honest in the comment I made a few days back about knowing absolutely nothing about it - next to nothing would have been more appropriate. I suppose I must have picked up something when it won the Booker without being overly aware of what I was soaking in.)

Now the idea of a novel being poetic and slow-moving would probably serve as something of a recommendation as far as I am concerned, but I felt that, contrary to expectation, The Sea moved along quite briskly, thank you. In what is only a novella-length text Banville cunningly weaves three in many ways separate narrative strands each with its own momentum. As far as I was concerned it was a case of hardly a dull moment. The material from the narrator's childhood, memories of holidays at the seaside, had in itself sufficient narrative interest to hold a whole novel together, but in addition we had the death of the narrator's wife (in painful, sad, dreadfully convincing, detail - enough to get me quite shuddery) and the framing situation of the narrator in the 'present' back at the seaside, trying to make sense of it all, which itself involved beautifully observed details of a sort of run-down, genteel boarding house, and a painful descent into a sort of alcoholic stupor. As far as I'm concerned that's plenty to be going on with.

Stylistically it's fair to say we do get a lot of poetry, any number of set-pieces ranging from the beautiful to the morbid, but this is always at the service of the characterisation of the narrator. I'm tempted to call him 'unreliable' in the technical sense, but the twist here is that Max has the self-awareness to draw attention to his own unreliability. Events are often clouded in uncertainty simply because he is uncertain of what he saw and heard (and smelt - he's a great one for odours) and at a loss to understand other people and their behaviour. It's as if he can only pin down what is static and the descriptions have a forceful sense of stasis, a sense of the painterly. That Max is some sort of art critic fits beautifully. In fact, that's what's so striking about this work - it is a 'work', coming together in a highly satisfying manner as a very fine piece of craftsmanship. I'm not sure I was terribly moved on a first reading but I was engaged, and I suspect a rereading would find me responding more to the latent emotional power of it all. Oh, and it's not all poetry - there's a fair spattering of the dramatic and demotic.

Since finishing it yesterday I've looked up some comments about The Sea on amazon.com. (I find myself doing this occasionally these days. I like the democracy involved, just reading how a range of readers react, folk who are not in any way academic or literary. Just like me, in fact.) I've been taken aback by the number who, it seems to me, overstress the 'poetic slow-moving' bit. Banville even gets compared to Proust, which does justice to neither writer. I mean, have those making the comparison ever read Proust? Banville fits what would amount to enough material for a short story into the space Proust needs to describe a fountain in action (or in inaction.) And then there are (occasional) accusations of wilful incomprehensibility, the result of a deliberately arcane vocabulary. Yes, you do get the odd unusual word, but this is obviously a feature of the narrator's self-consciously fastidious style. It's noticeable that a fair number of the ones you need to look up (I'd guess about ten for the whole book) are drawn from the registers of art criticism and medicine, both fields of obsessional interest for Max. And surely it's not that difficult to open a dictionary or pop to one of the numerous on-line dictionaries available!?

The other oddly illuminating criticism the novel appears prone to is that the characters are not at all likeable. Offhand, yes that's true, but a moment's thought is enough to lead one to the realisation that this is because Max (really quite a nasty chap) sees them that way. In fact, he doesn't really 'see' others as anything other than subjects for his artistic observations. The astute reader surely gets a sense of far more going on under the surface of appearances than Max is able to be aware of. And Max gains our sympathy, well mine at least, because something of his limitations are in all of us, well me, anyway.

Mind you, having said all that, I didn't really buy the twins on a first reading - a bit too gothic for my tastes. And I suppose it might fairly be said that something of the success of the novel derives from how good it is within its limitations. This is not a terribly ambitious work in terms of the scope of its concerns. But within what (I assume) it's trying to do, it's brilliantly successful.

And now onto The Blind Assassin, which I picked up on Tuesday night and with which I am extremely keen to reacquaint myself, not least because there are more than a few bits I didn't really get the first time round.