“We Had Thought It Some Wild Tale Of Foreign Parts”
Posted by: danhartland on: November 11, 2009
Holmes had read carefully a note which the last post had brought him.
"I chanced to glance at Holmes and saw a most singular intentness in his expression."
The Sussex Vampire is notable for the manner in which Conan Doyle allows Sherlock Holmes the last word. The author, of course, was in later life a great believer in the supernatural and occult. Holmes, naturally, is far more sceptical: “The world is big enough for us,” he says. “No ghosts need apply.” This is why the Granada adaptation of this case, in which the master is asked to investigate an apparent case of English vampirism, got it so disastrously wrong: the point of this story, unusually for Conan Doyle’s more flamboyant concepts, is not the sensationalism of the set-up but the rationalism of the denouement.
That is not to say the story is particularly good: there are a number of unanswered questions about the actions of the characters which probably don’t have any sensible answers. What struck me about the story, though, was its similarity in many ways to the Road Hill case as written about by Kate Summerscale in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: set in 1896, there is here, as was not apparent in The Three Gables, a properly Victorian modesty. Outsiders aren’t welcome, and the scandal must not get out. As usual, the other fall-back position is the exotic history of one of the house’s inhabitants.
The lady of the house is from Peru, and her resultant inscrutability is key to the story’s success (or otherwise). If we can believe that, alien as she is, she may well hold “this horrible, this incredible secret” of vampirism, we will be gripped. If, as modern readers are likely to feel, we find Conan Doyle’s insistence on the strangeness of the Latin unconvincing, we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop. Holmes, too, is not as obfuscatory as he sometimes is, aiming almost all of his questions in the direction of his client’s elder son.
For all that, however, Holmes’s method is at the centre of the story – as if the occultist author is testing the rationalism of his character. Conan Doyle’s integrity is too great simply to use Holmes as a fall-guy, however, and thus the great detective’s methods are vindicated. He protests that Watson “has given an exaggerated view of my scientific methods.” Certainly there is imagination at work, too – “It has been a case for intellectual deduction,” Holmes explains, allowing that his method is essentially to make up a story and then see if it fits. As most notably in Silver Blaze, however, this concoction of a theory, and then the testing of that theory “point by point by quite a number of independent incidents”, is of course a fundamentally scientific method.
The telegram with which this story opens is replied to in its final lines. Characteristically, Holmes’s response is terse, matter-of-fact and without sensationalism. It is to Conan Doyle’s credit that he allowed his characters such strong and consistent voices, even when he himself might have disagreed.
Why A Fox?
Posted by: thestoryandthetruth on: November 9, 2009
- In: film
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Ocean's Eleven.
We saw Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox at the weekend. It was a curious experience: the film looked and sounded beautiful, and naturally Anderson is superb in styling his world. Mr Fox’s corduroy,and Mrs Fox’s dresses, were all beautiful stuff, and the vaguely 1970s feel was offset by the antiquey furniture – tiny replicas, apparently, of Roald Dahl’s own home. At the same time, though, we had to ask, ‘why?’ Why make a film of this wonderful children’s book (Dan’s favourite when a tot), and turn it into a wise-cracking, neurotic, referential film with terrorist analogies and heartbreaking rat death scenes? It wasn’t that the film wasn’t good; it was just a strange prospect.
Mr Fox himself was clearly depicted as an untrustworthy fantasist (particularly in that scene with the fully animalistic wolf), which in and of itself is enough to make the whole affair more morally complex than Dahl’s original – and not the same story at all. Throw in the school angst (Rushmore with fur), the aforementioned Western redemption scene, and a whole lot of dialogue – characters in this film talk a lot – and you have, well, a Wes Anderson movie. No bad thing, but you still wind up asking, ‘why use the title at all?’
We enjoyed it, though. It is, as it were, worth a gander. (Anna would like to note that was Dan’s pun.)
All Europe, All The Time
Posted by: danhartland on: November 6, 2009
Thinking Dave is thinking
This has been another political week dominated by foreign policy, and by Europe in particular. In the latter case, the focus was almost entirely on the Tories. In a sense, this is good for Labour – as Natalie Haynes said on Question Time last night, we’re just months away from a General Election, so it must be time for the Tories to tear themselves apart on Europe. But it’s also bad, because such a sundering is unlikely to happen in the same way we have known them to in the past, and any focus on the Tories simply positions them as a de facto government-in-waiting. There was a time when all we wrote and read about was Labour, except when we were staring in gawping amazement at the Tories’ idiocy. It ain’t so now.
The Tories must have known it was coming for a long time: when Václav Klaus signed the Lisbon Treaty on behalf of his country, he was doing only what both his parliament and his court had told him he must. Yet Cameron has for months parroted the line that his party would only announce their post-Lisbon European policy when Lisbon was indeed ratified by all 27 member states. Whatever the wisdom of this strategy – and it surely leaves him resembling his own caricature of a vaciliating and Prime Minsiter more than he allows – the news that no referendum would be held, but that this would never be allowed to happen again, was not welcome in some Tory quarters. Tim Montgomerie, for one, finds the policy unconvincing and insufficiently Eurosceptic. (Iain Dale, on the other hand, is predictably with Cameron.)
As usual, Bagehot eloquently sums up the conventional wisdom: this was a necessary decision, and Cameron is right both to avoid full confrontation with Brussels (and closet Tory fan Nicolas Sarkozy is responding, if nore supportively, then conciliatorily) and with his party. But the debate between Montgomerie and Dale is writ larger in the party as a whole: Guido tells us that Daniel Hannan, one of the two front-bench Tory MEPs who resigned this week over Cameron’s Lisbon move, doesn’t want a confrontation with Cameron, but at the same time says Hannan (a noted swivel-eyed loon, of course) is preparing a “long march”. Against whom, exactly? His post-resignation blog post makes it sound like a rearguard action against his own party: “We need a broad movement within the Conservative Party that will push for referendums, citizens’ initiatives and the rest of the paraphernalia of direct democracy.” Meanwhile, Cameron is urged to sack Hannan and fellow rebel Roger Helmer by the form Tory leader in Europe, and warned he risks losing votes to UKIP by Lord Tebbit. Even David Davis came out of the woodwork. The spin, as so often, is not quite the substance.
Of course, all of this is played out in the context of a likely General Election victory. Cameron is, like his Foreign Secretary William Hague, one of the most Eurosceptic Tory leaders ever, but he knows that Eurosceptic campaigns do not win General Elections. His party knows it, too, and will stave off the big debate until they have won – hence the first phase of Hannan’s long march. The new ‘policy’, announced in a deliberately underwhelming and unshowy speech by Cameron on the same day that news about Sir Christopher Kelly’s expensesgate recommendations broke, is, like the mealy-mouthed referendum talk before it, at best a soft-headed place-marker, not a proper policy at all. He is biding his time.
Which leads us to Gordon Brown’s travails this week on Afghanistan, where his continued inability – or unwillingness – to offer a decent narrative of why Britain is in that poor, put-upon country, did himself and his parties no electoral favours. Reviewing the rather well done Into The Storm this week, Sam Woollaston made a cheap-but-true quip that Brown could learn something from the rhetorical ability of Sir Winston Churchill. In an interview with the Evening Standard today, meanwhile, Cameron, whilst squarely aiming at renewing his appeal to True Blues, continues to be more eloquent and more likeable. (“If you spend your life in a poorly-lit bunker surrounded by your aides you are not going to make very good decisions,” he snipes innocently.)
The always excellent Johann Hari reminded us in this morning’s Indie why a Tory government would be a Bad Thing. But as long as he remains the best communicator on the political scene, his party will stick uneasily with him, and Labour will wander further and further into the wilderness. The EU – and the British electorate – might miss those nice social democrats when they’re gone, but it’ll be too late then.
Literary Texts and History
Posted by: danhartland on: November 5, 2009
- In: History
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Obviously a great historian.
Remember the fun I was having with Thomas Corn’s edited collection, The Royal Image? It closes with an afterword by Kevin Sharpe, who naturally makes the case for the contribution of critics – literary and otherwise – to historical study. “What we now need,” he writes, “is to combine the skills of critics and historians in a full history of the relationships of courts and kings (and republics) to the images and representations of those courts and rulers over the period of the English Renaissance.” [pg. 290] You could, if not constrained by the theme of a collection, make the wider point that critics, with their sensitivity for genre and mode, are well-placed to identify cultural contexts where the specifity of historians may not do so.
Sharpe himself wrote in his Criticism and Compliment, “it is my purpose to [re-read] literary texts as documents of the culture and values of Caroline England.” [pg. ix] That book was published in 1987; The Royal Image, meanwhile, was published in 1999. Since then, we’ve had David Norbrook’s Writing The English Republic, but the use of seventeenth-century literary texts as historical sources still seems (with the possible exception of some writing on Milton, or the work of historians like James Loxley), in academic historical circles at least, to be a relatively niche activity. There are good reasons for this, of course, not least that such texts tend to prioritise artistic effect over fidelity to their particular age; but isn’t there a broader context yet, in which culture is generative as well as reflective, to which literary material might well be a useful guide?
I was struck by Blair Worden’s particular permutation of an old argument, in his Roundhead Reputations, that, “historians, like novelists, are makers of order.” [pg. 19] Naturally, Worden wasn’t suggesting that this makes the two professions identical in method or intent, but there’s still a hint in those bon mots that the old walls are not as impermeable as they are often still taken to be. You might not be surprised to hear, then, that I’ll be trying to take part in Early Modern Underground’s collaborative reading of ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. Probably mostly for the great beauty of Ford’s masterpiece; but, also, perhaps, for a bit of historical insight…
“You Have Overdone It On This Occasion.”
Posted by: danhartland on: November 4, 2009
“I don’t think that any of my adventures with Mr. Sherlock Holmes opened quite so abruptly, or so dramatically, as that which I associate with The Three Gables.”
"He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. "
The Three Gables in truth starts not so much with a bang as a sterotype: Steve Dixie, the “negro” who barges in on Holmes and Watson and proceeds to inflict upon them threats of violence and tortured minstrel grammar, is one of the most embarrassing characters in the canon – and quite at odds with Conan Doyle’s earlier treatment of African-Americans in The Yellow Face (although admittedly closer to his treatment of Tonga in The Sign of Four). We only need Dixie to burst into a rendition of Old Man River and all would be complete.
This incongruity is part of the fabric of the whole story – another which, along with The Mazarin Stone, Meyer’s Watson will dismiss as a forgery. It would be happy if such were the case: many of the stories collected in The Casebook, as the last stories an increasingly weary Conan Doyle would every write about Holmes, reek of fatigue and laziness. So, for instance, the central story here, revolving as it does around femmes fatale, sex and impropriety, feels far more like a story of the period in which it was written than the one in which it was set; likewise, Holmes’s presence is thin and at times poorly characterised – the moment he pulls a woman into a room by the arm feels most unlike the gallant-if-aloof detective we’ve come to know. Small details, too, echo this larger malaise – Lucerne is not in Italy.
“I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual,” Holmes breezily declares at the story’s end, and as he often does lays down his own particular – and extra-legal – kind of justice. The mystery preceding this dispensation, however, is so potted and ill-constructed (Conan-Doyle has done many ‘missing document’ mysteries, but this is by far his most soft-headed) that the reader has long since given up. It simply doesn’t feel like our Holmes. 48 short stories into our acquantance with him, this is a little much to take.
Can’t Help But Smiling
Posted by: danhartland on: November 3, 2009
What Will We Be, by Devendra Banhart
Devendra Banhart is a funny old bird. His most successful release to date is probably Cripple Crow, a 22 track monster which defied the listener to develop an intimate relationship with it. Habitually, he skips from one form of folk to another, offering Latin rhythms at one moment in a song, and the next seguing into some Appalachian moan; this makes him a unique voice, but also a frustrating one. It sometimes feels as if Banhart never stays at one vein long enough to mine it properly.
What Will We Be, his latest record, is no different. In the space of one song – ‘Angelika’, for example – he can go from lilting pop folk to a 50s jazz shuffle, from one language to another, and then sidestep into bluegrass. He’ll follow a straight-forward indie folk piano piece (‘First Song for B’) with a more shapeless offering (‘Last Song for B’) – deliberately, and cavalierly, toying with the structure of his own record. Banhart does not wish to be captured in any one moment or any one song. Even, one might hazard a guess, any one album – his first release for a properly major label, What Will We Be still steadfastly refuses, like all the others before it, to have anything like a defining characteristic.
Yes, it’s perhaps smoother than anything he’s done before; and, sure, this makes in a way for a more unified listen. But pay anything like closer attention – that beautifully restrained brass solo in ‘Chin Chin & Much Muck, the chugging rock of ‘Rats’, the hyperactive reggaeish closer of ‘Foolin’ – and the whole thing is curling at every conceivable edge. Does this make the record a mess? Yes, undoubtedly. And is Banhart’s wilful kookiness wearing a little thin in places? Possibly. But I’m charmed by this record despite myself. It might well help you enjoy this record more if you’ve never come across Banhart before – which may well be Warner Brothers’ plan. Either way, I dissent from Pitchfork’s view: if you can listen to it with fresh ears, What Will We Be is a very sweet little record.
Review Nicely, Children.
Posted by: danhartland on: November 2, 2009
If it's rubbish, should we say so?
A review of Neal Asher’s latest science fiction adventure, Orbus, was published on Friday by Strange Horizons. It was written by me. I didn’t make many bones about my view on the novel, which was pretty negative. Especially in sf reviewing, there seems a strong tendency to praise more than criticise; a sense that the genre needs encouraging, or reviewers need not to abuse their position, pervades many review outlets, to the extent that even a poor book gets a review of which several paragraphs are devoted to what it does well (for which we should read ‘averagely’, or simply ‘not quite as badly’). I’m guilty of that, too: towards the end of the Orbus review, I did my best to give Asher some credit for a few interesting ideas and his knack for scary monsters.
Still, the eminently reasonable and sensible Paul Raven tweeted this about the review: “[...] the almost complete lack of punch-pulling from Hartland was a real eyebrow-raiser.” In response, Ian Sales made the point I make above: “sadly, too many reviews these days are dishonest – yes, find something nice to say, but don’t ignore the bad.” The final part of the he said/he said I’ll quote here is Paul’s reply: “Troo dat – but even so, I’d flinch from giving a kicking that thorough, possibly because I’m not a published writer.”
I know exactly what Paul means: my own eyebrows were raised by a review this weekend, namely Hilary Mantel’s take-down of Lindsey Davis’s new British Civil Wars romp, Rebels and Traitors. Rather than leaving the good bits to a consolatory end, Mantel gets the sweeteners out of the way early: “Her research has been assiduous and detailed, her commitment to the subject is impressive, and the background detail is often eye-opening.” Her final sentence, though, is a real wounder: “Perhaps it is just as well that there is no sentence in it that you would want to read twice.” Ouch.
The eyebrow-raising in this case, at least for my own part, was more a case of seeing a recent Booker-winning writer of historical fiction laying into another writer of historical fiction with such abandon. In a sense, then, my problem was the opposite of Paul’s: Mantel, unlike for example me, is a published writer – indeed, in the same ‘genre’ (for more on which thorny question, go here) as the book she is reviewing – and her take-down could well be read as more problematic as a result. I assume Paul’s point (if it isn’t about careerism!) is simply that Tor publish Asher and don’t publish Hartland, and that therefore Hartland should doff his cap a bit more. Fair cop. At the same time, though, is a published fiction writer – if (and I don’t buy this) more qualified – more trustworthy as a critic, particularly of a work close to her own patch? The published writer thing seems to me a red herring on more than one level. Had Tor published my (non-existent) rip-roaring sf manly adventure, does that make me any better a critic of Asher’s? Might it not make me worse?
Disclosure: I haven’t read Davis, but Mantel is a reviewer I’ve agreed with in the past, and she isn’t currently having any problem with sales. Merely the coincidence of my and Paul’s responses struck me. Further for the record, I agree with Jonathan McCalmont in the comments to my original review: sf reviewers shouldn’t make nice with disappointing fare just because it’s been crafted in their bailiwick, published writers or no.
Hallowe’ekend
Posted by: thestoryandthetruth on: November 1, 2009
- In: life
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Photos from our weekend...
Anna has always been a big fan of Hallowe’en, so we try to celebrate it in style each year. This year’s All Hallows’ Eve coincided with a housesitting, so we abused our host kitchen to carve two pumpkin lanterns and use the proceeds to concoct a pumpkin linguine (the recipe for which we may have stolen from Anna’s friend, Katie). With organic bacon, garlic and onions added to the quantities of pumpkin, we managed to put together a subtle dish with some interesting flavours.
Most exciting, of course, were the jack o’lanterns, which we lit on Hallowe’en using children’s birthday candles which in no way made them less threatening.
Spooky, too, was our twilight walk in the Malvern Hills. Originally meant to be a pleasant afternoon stroll, we performed our usual tricks of misjudging the path, forgetting the time, and not bringing a map along. The waxing moon glowered down at us as we finally emerged into the comparatively bright lights of Great Malvern – rarely have we been as pleased to sit down in a Cafe Nero!
We hope you had a great Hallowe’en weekend, too. Just remember – always take a compass!
Britain, Europe and the Future
Posted by: danhartland on: November 1, 2009
- In: Politics
- 4 Comments
The Ghost of Summits Future?
Poor old Tony. Nicolas Sarkozy last week suggested that “the names that first come out of the hat are not necessarily those that are finally chosen”, signaling that – after initial championing of Blair’s candidacy for the Presidency of the European Council – he has crossed over to Angela Merkel’s position that the ex-British PM perhaps shouldn’t get the job. This is part of a wider rapproachment between the two counties, between whom relations have been strained recently. The bizarre ‘political balance’ bargain made across Europe – that the President should be right-leaning and the ‘foreign minister’, or High Representative, left-leaning – looks set to ally with this renewed Franco-German axis potentially to scupper Tony Blair’s long-held ambition to take the EU’s top job.
All this in a week in which, unusually, Europe dominated British political debate – and, even more unusually, British domestic politics impinged upon the highest levels of EU wrangling. David Milliband’s candidacy for the High Representative position (which incidentally would help his increasingly favoured brother Ed to stand for the Labour leadership free of David’s shadow) is strengthened as Blair’s is weakened – two Brits in the top jobs would, naturally, have been impossible. Milliband’s championing of the European mainstream is not just an attempt to draw domestic votes away from David Cameron. It is also surely a wading into EU issues for purposes of increasing his profile within it; even more specifically, his attack on the Tories will be well received by many in the European elite club. Both of the jobs upon which argument has been focused this week will be created by the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, which of course the Tories oppose. This opposition, however, has strayed into the realms of intervention, angering many in Europe committed to the Treaty. Domestic British wrangling over Tory positioning has become central to decisions being made about wider European matters.
As ever, this sort of thing fails to move the British people. In a poll for today’s Sunday Telegraph, most of them say they wouldn’t want to see Blair as President; almost half say the same thing about Milliband and his ambitions. But this will again inform European decision-making: the prospect of a rabidly eurosceptic Tory government in a few short months will pose a clear problem for Brussels, and Milliband is emerging – far more now than Blair – as a candidate able to tackle and deal with it. Whether the strength of his present attacks are rather weakening his ability to win concessions from a future Prime Minister Cameron is another matter; the tight concentration of big personalities, shameless Tory activism, and traditional British scepticism are having their effect in a Europe realigning for a new era. Blair has yet to give up on being the figurehead of that new period; but his self-styled heirs both looked this week like men with future influence as much as historical gravitas.
The Reformation of the Past
Posted by: thestoryandthetruth on: October 29, 2009
Matthias Flaccius
Yesterday evening, we attended an annual lecture at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, where Anna studied for her PhD. Always an interesting and civilised (!) affair, the annual lecture provides an opportunity to catch up with old friends and to listen to a well renowned speaker. This year’s annual lecture was given by Mark Greengrass, and was entitled ‘The Reformation of the Past: Protestants and the Middle Ages’. The paper was based largely on the research Greengrass and others have been undertaking as part of the John Foxe Project, and explored the ways in which early reformers and scholars tried to make sense of Christian past, and the enormous efforts they went to to make sense of and record Church history. The greatest problem for these sixteenth century academics was how to narrate the contentious ‘Middle Ages’, a period of, it was understood, darkness and spiritual regression, where the true Church was lost amid the teachings of Catholic ‘popery’.
A large part of the lecture focused not on Foxe himself, but on one of his key sources, the Magdeburg Centuries. Driven initially by Matthias Flacius, the Centuries were an attempt to compile all known documentary evidence for the centuries of Christianity, it sought to collate data for each 100-year block into 16 prescribed categories (heresies, rites and ceremonies, schisms and controversies, etc.). Dr Greengrass spoke interestingly about the historiographical and methodological problems with which these historians collided when undertaking this undoubtedly ambitious endeavour, but what came through most strongly was their sense of continuity: that the Christian past had been one of ever-increasing corruption, through which nevertheless ran a thin vein of true faith. The Centuries were an attempt to chronicle this new conception of the past in a sort of encyclopedic format.
Greengrass believes that Foxe used the Centuries and the work of John Bale as his principle reference works, using them as signposts to further reading. In this way, the Foxe Project – and last night’s lecture – illuminate both Foxe’s working pattern, and those of his sources. Greengrass pointed out that perhaps such scholarly endeavours were a little like PhD projects gone wrong…
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
Sounds We Like
Mumford and Sons - Sigh No More
Dan already wrote about this album here, but Anna's been loving it, too! Like a happier and more stirring Noah and the Whale, Mumford & Sons have a great way with arrangement and melody which makes for a great listen from start to finish. There are highpoints which you'll skip for, but the whole record hangs together perfectly. One of our favourites of the year!
Words We Like
Escaping The Delta, by Elijah Wald
We all know the cliches: Delta blues as the music of the downtrodden, a remnant of slave art, a holler-back to West African forms. Wald never pretends that he has not bought into, continues to buy into, the cult of the Delta bluesman, but shows they were in truth informed not by ancestral memory but by radio playlists. Robert Johnson in particular is assessed not as a unique genius but an accomplished magpie, able to assimilate the pop forms of the day - not just blues, but country and vaudeville - and regurgitate them anew. Escaping the Delta refashions the blues not as cultural fetish but as a particular product of its era and its people. Controversial among those who read books about acoustic blues, but a compelling and rewarding thesis.
Flicks We Like
Alice In The Cities (1974)
It helped that we watched this one together quietly on a calm, dark night. Wim Wenders's careful film, shot beautifully in a grainy black and white, follows a journalist with writer's block as he is left stranded in New York with a young girl, whom he must help find her grandparents back home in Germany. Nowhere close to a voyage of self-discovery, their journey instead feels like a walking round in a circle. Neither of the characters have a true sense of place in a globalising world, and with an inventive economy Wenders explores their resultant, reflective, wanderings.
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