"You know him, he's yours ..."

For a writer so proud of his dog-like tendencies when handed a bone, the late, lamented Christopher Hitchens changed his mind on at least one great issue of our day: not the Iraq War, which of course was an unalloyed Good Thing; certainly not the trifle of God, claims to the existence of Whom were a Bad Thing; but on the relative merits of TV’s finest Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens. Here he is on Dickens in an Atlantic article of 2010: “a vain actor-manager type who used pathetic victims as tear-jerking raw material, and who actually detested the real subjects of High Victorian power and hypocrisy when they were luckless enough to dwell overseas”. The acorn of admiration in that article, however (“there is something formidable about Dickens that may not be gainsaid”), had grown into a rather more robust oak by the time of his final column for Vanity Fair, published this month:

But imagine the power that Dickens had. By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side.

This is the unacountable power of Dickens’s writing, of course, and it has been an influence, a sway, an accessibility, which his novels have – remarkably – retained over time. This year’s 200th birthday celebrations are so intense precisely because Dickens remains central not merely to the literary, but most importantly to the popular imagination. Or at least, this is my expalnation for the reason why Edith Wharton, whose 150th birthday was last week, has been so comparatively lost in the flood of Dickensia: for, with her supple style and acute psychological insight, her discipline and depth, is Wharton not the better novelist? Dickens is a chronicler, a Chaucer in stovepipe and cravat; his literary effect, it seems to me, is divorced from his form.

Take Our Mutual Friend, a book I read for the first time this month, as my own tribute to an author with whom I have never got on. Its pages are populated entirely by tools and tricks rather than characters: Mr Boffin, who exists in one state for most of the novel but, in order to enable an authorly flourish at its close, undergoes a transformation (or rather, reveals we never knew him at all); Eugene Wrayburn, the chancing young lawyer metamorphosed from uninteresting walk-on to uninteresting romantic lead; and Lizzie Hexam, the impossibly virtuous and eloquent daughter of a querulous, tyrannical waterman.

These are types, of course, and ones Dickens used more than once. Even his symbols and imagery are taken from the literary equivalent of clipart: the river standing both for death and rebirth, the cripple for incompleteness. Dickens’s particular vitality is instead that of episodic wit, of well-turned bon mots: “No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.” But even that sentence-for-the-ages focuses on the surface of things – on looking, on what people are, on unopened books for heaven’s sake. In a work about the brittleness, the untrustworthiness, of surfaces – two prominent characters are Mr and Mrs Veneering (geddit?) – perhaps this is fitting. But the novel’s art has been to burrow under. Dickens’s dioramas are too artfully arranged for him to disturb.

Not that this renders his work inert – far from it, Dickens continues to speak to us despite – because of? – his formal kinks. “As is well known to the wise in their generation,” he writes apparently yesterday, “traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares.” We might also add, “have opinions,” and, oh, how Dickens does. Reading Dickens – as opposed to Hitchens’s (laudable) Victorian preference, George Eliot – is to leave behind subtelty and sinew in favour of breadth and muscle. One might see, in the ecumenical cast of his novels, something of Shakespeare’s commitment both to the highest and the lowest; but where with even the rudest of mechanicals Shakespeare insists upon shades of meaning, for Dickens his boys with their bootstraps always insist upon one meaning, his old roués another.

This leads Dickens to make statements of authorial fiat which read at first as true and then, on reflection, as anything but: “The person of the house,” he writes of the doll’s dressmaker where Lizzie finds sanctuary following the death of her degenerate progenitor, “had attained that dignity while yet of very tender years indeed, through being the only trustworthy person IN the house.” Ah, yes, smiles the indulgent reader; wait, no, frowns the cynic. The novel is for Dickens a laboratory, a place to conduct experiments: real life has no sway here, and this is the root of the Jamesian criticism of his art. It is not one with which I hold much truck – Dickens never claimed to be a realist – but it goes some way to explaining why I have never got on with his novels as novels. Our Mutual Friend is a one-sided disputation, in which Dickens sets the terms of reference to arrive uncontested at the conclusion he lays on the line thus, in an appraisal of the (for the most part, until she isn’t anymore) unpardonably conceited Bella Wilfer: “the spoilt girl: spoilt first by poverty, and then by wealth.” Self-improvement, in the darkening days of a late work by a past master, is no end in itself. We are pummelled for a thousand pages to this end.

All of which is to howl at the moon. Dickens is far-sighted and wise. He prefigures Eliot – “The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from a goal” – and he revises Shakespeare himself – “they take the worst of us as samples of the best,” opines the kindly money-lender, Mr Riah; “they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say ‘All Jews are alike.’” The Hitchens of 2011, too, gives the great man his due: Riah is, like so many of Dickens’s sentimental totems, “almost too altruistic to be true, but it says something for Dickens, surely, that he would take someone who had the same occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was easy to stir up.” Quite so, and if Riah is again an example of Dickens allowing thesis to mar form, he is nevertheless a powerful (if limited) argument for why we still need him – although, I might argue, we should read him differently.

To which end, I’ll be tackling Great Expectations for the rest of the year. First published over nine months between 1860 and 1861, I’ll be following that schedule. What I hope is that reading Dickens occassionally over a longer period of time, as he wrote to be read, will better enable me to appreciate his strengths and forgive his trespasses. In a recent piece for the Guardian, Howard Jacobson wrote, “You don’t have to like Dickens. Literature is a house with many mansions. But if Dickens gets up your nose, as he clearly gets up the BBC’s, the question has to be asked why you simply don’t leave him alone.” I’ll take this permission for my philistinism and run with it. In answer to Jacobson’s appeal to my raging, disdainful, impotent frustration with Dickens, however, I’ll return to the Christopher Hitchens of 2010: “I can still think in this way if I choose, but I know I am protesting too much.”

Again, a hearty hmm.

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes may not be the best place in all of literature to search for vital, powerful female characters. Mrs Hudson is a classic nurturer, Mary Morstan shows not a care in the world that her husband is constantly on lad’s breaks with his dangerous old smoking buddy, and if Irene Adler is a curious and confused splicing of the Madonna and the Whore, she is also a woman led entirely by her age’s expectations of marriage. I’ve always been fond of Violet Smith from ‘The Solitary Cyclist‘, and Miss Hunter of ‘The Copper Beeches‘ seems similarly capable; but more typical are the women of ‘Thor Bridge‘ and ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax‘.

All of which means that perhaps it is no surprise when, as I noted in my last post, a modern retelling of Sherlock Holmes attracts criticism for its depiction of gender. It’s not even as if this problem is new to Sherlock: I noted in my review of the last episode of its first series that all its women can be categorised either as “bitter, soppy or useless”. Nevertheless, in its depiction of Irene Adler, it seems to me, the show was attempting something rather more complex than it was given credit for; it may have failed in achieving its goal, but that’s not the same as failing to set out to try at all. The writers of Sherlock are working from a source text in which almost every character of any agency at all is male. Gary Reed and Guy Davis did a rather brilliant thing in the 1980s with the comic book series Baker Street, but Sherlock it was not.

The difficulty with this reasoning, however, is that Sherlock is not a faithful adaptation. After reading Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, I noted why Sherlock Holmes could never become so compromised as that novel’s principle investigator, Escherich:

Holmes, for all his at times cavalier approach to human feelings (harsh words to Watson, sham romances with servant girls), never loses sight of the importance of a shared humanity: approaching Christmas, we might remember his act of charity in ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. This is a generosity and selflessness lost to Escherich, who questions the validity of the law only in his final moments. Holmes, on the other hand, is always aware that natural justice is higher than any human legal system.

Sherlock, on the other hand, is far from “separate but connected”. Abigail Nussbaum, in her post about Sherlock, has some intelligent things to say about the ways in which the show has recast, at times accidentally, its hero as a sociopath: its “emphasis on Sherlock’s need to be the smartest guy in the room–in the pursuit of which, not justice or the greater good, he humiliates Irene and leaves her to a gruesome fate–makes him seem a great deal crueler and less heroic” than even Steven Moffat might have intended, much less Arthur Conan Doyle himself. I write as someone who rather enjoys Robert Downey Jr’s turn as the great detective, and therefore not one who necessarily believes in the purity of adaptation – Sherlock Holmes can and should be refigured. The question must be, however, with what depth and consistency that is done.

In the very first episode of Sherlock, Rupert Graves’s likeable Inspector Lestrade intones that Benedict Cumberbatch’s detective is a great man, but not yet a good one. Vinette Robinson’s Detective Sergeant Sally Robinson (one of the show’s ‘bitter’ women) goes further, telling John that it will only take so long for Sherlock to start committing crimes of his own; in the final episode of the most recent run, she becomes convinced that he has begun to do so. This Sherlock is not our original Holmes, but nor is his sociopathy – or autism, as it is occassionally and rather randomly implied to be – particularly consistent. Much has been made of the toe-curling humiliation meted out to Molly (one of the show’s ‘soppy’ women) in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, and Sherlock’s subsequent climb-down, ending with his asking for her help in ‘The Reichenbach Fall’; but between these two presumed ‘arc’ points, Sherlock’s interactions with her resemble those from the first season. Likewise, John’s subtle little “ready?” as the two prepare to brave the photographers waiting outside 221B in that final episode also suggests something averse to strangers and crowds in his friend – the most we ever get from him, however, is an uncomfortable smile and a silly hat.

Admittedly, the deerstalker riffs are lovely – it was, of course, not Holmes’s hat, either, but likewise an imposition by an over-eager illustrator. But this sort of clever-clever reference comes to dominate Sherlock‘s style in the second season, with fear gases being transposed from one story to another, coming to stand for the inherited and inchoate fear of the Baskervilles from the original Hound, and curling back towards Sherlock’s own knowingness when he dangles the possibility of – gasp! – sending John to Dartmoor alone. There is something about the intensity of this reference – all the Rathbone stuff in ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, for instance – which is a little over-arch, a little (dare I say it – for Maureen Kincaid Speller certainly has) boyish.

Of course, it is also and primarily self-aware – that is, deliberately altering the source material when convenient for the writers. There, indeed, is the rub: after forty-five minutes of boldly updating ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, and doing so with flair and not a little exciting aplomb, Moffat and company tack on a further forty-five minutes of structurally weaker material which serves to deconstruct, or from one perspective undermine, what has gone before: Lara Pulver’s Adler veers from victorious dominatrix to grateful damsel, undone by the first of the series’ two over-simplistic passwords (which may or may not provide, in their absurd unsoundness, an excuse for Sherlock’s IT illiteracy in the face of Moriarty’s ‘key code’). This is new material quite beyond anything in the source texts – it is a choice on the part of the writers, and they have shown elsewhere how consciously they write. I remain in large part in agreement with Jon Blum that Moffat’s Adler does not represent the deconstruction of female power her critics argue her to be; rather, she is part of a deconstruction of how Sherlock imagines relationships. That she is put to the service of Sherlock’s story has nothing to do with gender – so even is the show’s greatest asset, Freeman’s John. But the fact remains that the choice the writers made was insufficiently developed, or inexpertly executed. Moffat shouldn’t need to explain his writing.

Abigail discusses Sherlock‘s crush on Sherlock, and it is this which is at the root of the show’s problems: the show’s addiction to aggrandising reference, and its incomplete treatment both of other characters and Sherlock’s less formidable sides, lead to weaker characterisation, and weaker thematic treatments, than might be achieved with a clearer-eyed view of the hero. Sherlock’s journey from sociopath to ‘good man’, it seems to me, will be even bumpier than Adler’s from dominatrix to hostage. This leaves us, at the end of the show’s sixth episode, where we were at the close of its third: “As good as it has been, it needs to be more careful about its choices in the future.”

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are on the run. Hiding in a damp alleyway somewhere in the back-end of Marylebone, they catch a breath, handcuffed together, and regroup. James Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest enemy, has framed the world’s only consulting detective for a string of crimes, all of which he purported to solve; even his closest allies within the police force are now doubting that their erstwhile collaborator was ever anything more than an elaborate, sociopathic conman. “Everybody wants to believe it, that’s what makes it so clever,” Sherlock reflects. “A lie that’s preferable to the truth: my deductions were a sham. No-one feels inadequate, Sherlock’s an ordinary man.” Sherlock Holmes knows that we want him to be humbled.

Efforts to topple the great detective from his self-selected lofty heights have a long vintage. They began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, who famously attempted to rid his career of the success that had so blighted it by sending Holmes careering off the edge of a cliff; it is a need which has continued to be fulfilled right to the present day, in manners as disparate as Michael Chabon’s in The Final Solution or Mitch Cullin’s in A Slight Trick of the Mind, both of which imagine Holmes in his creaking senescence, and Matt Frewer’s in four TV movies for the Hallmark Channel, in which Holmes is a joke of a character, zany and cartoonish in a fashion that renders him a laughable caricature. Attempts to humanise Holmes – Rupert Everett’s turn in The Case of the Silk Stocking – or to uncover his psychology – Nicholas Meyer‘s The Seven Per Cent Solution -  have the same ultimate end: to find a chink in Holmes’s armour, and to prise him open.

It is to the credit of the latest series of Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis’s reimaginng of Conan Doyle, that it takes this trope and uses it for another purpose: to, on the contrary, re-affirm Holmes’s other-worldliness. To one extent or another, the gambit may be slightly weakened by its similarity to the plot of Moffat’s most recent season of Doctor Who, in which a disassociated super-being with few meaningful relationships has only one option if he is to avoid the power of his own myth is to fake his own death (and here Benedict Cumberbatch’s pitch-perfect Sherlock is given in ‘The Reichenbach Fall’ the motivation of Holmes’s creator), to recede from the immortal limelight. On the other hand, and with a hat tip to the reputedly “preternaturally urbane” Graham Sleight, I’ve been mulling over Jon Blum’s post about ‘A Scandal In Belgravia’, the first of the latest Sherlock trilogy, and along with much of the rest of his analysis tend to agree that beneath the surface resemblance between the Doctor and Sherlock beat three quite different hearts.

In fact, let’s begin with the Belgravian imbroglio. As Blum points out, the episode caused some consternation, since many viewers felt its depiction of Irene Adler – a character who appeared in the first of Conan Doyle’s short stories, got married, and left again – fell short in its gender politics of a literally Victorian forebear. Moffat’s Adler is a professional dominatrix with a string of high-profile clients (an early age may euphemistically have called her an ‘adventuress’) who seeks security not from a twist of gold around her finger but by blackmailing the British state. When Holmes arrives at her home, dressed as in the original story as a doddery clergyman, this Adler sees through him; when Holmes tricks her into revealing the location of her hidden valuables, this Adler has booby-trapped the safe; and, when orchestrating her escape, this Adler has no need to dress as a man and do a moonlight flit – she incapacitates Holmes, using his body against him.

That Adler is ultimately and rather triumphantly defanged is also true; but, it seems to me, her role is not to defeat the series’ hero (since nor does she achieve this in the source text): it is, in a manner far more potent than a few Watsonian lines at the end of a story, to test and undermine his commitment to reason and rationality (a characteristic so fundamental to the Holmes character than even Guy Ritchie’s foppish iteration shares it). Holmes’s feelings for Adler – again, so much more far-reaching and plainly stated than in the source text – lead even he to question the central, Spockish tenets of his existence. All limbs and rolling eyes, crashing to the floor, Holmes is out of control not because he cannot solve a puzzle, which of course he may always do at the very last minute, but because he has been incapacitated, literally brought low.

Likewise, in ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (the first of two titles this season which play with plurals), Holmes is confounded by the barrier which exists between the world and his mind. In this case, his senses are assaulted by a non-corporeal influence, glimpsing a gigantic hound on the moors – even though, as he insists, ‘hound’ is an archaic term wildly out of place in a world SMS and first-name-terms, and despite the fact that, to paraphrase Jeremy Brett’s dyspeptic Holmes of ‘The Last Vampyre’, “werewolves don’t exist!” How to respond, then, to a problem which does not yield to the rationalistic observation method Sherlock brings to bear upon every problem? He is for a while at a loss, and confesses an extended moment of real doubt to John (a masterful Martin Freeman, who will not receive the attention of Cumberbatch but deserves all the plaudits). Holmes – naturally – ultimately solves the mystery. But he does so by passing through a Gethsemane, and the audience enjoys it. We – and here we should sigh a sad, patronised, joyless sigh – ‘identify’.

All of this leads to a new kind of precipice, both figurative and literal: Sherlock, defeated and check-mated, is goaded to self-annihilation by Moriarty, atop the roof of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital. At the end of an episode which gleefully retells The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first of Basil Rathbone’s appearances as the detective and the source both of the courtroom drama and the Tower of London heist, the site of Sherlock’s first contact with John is refigured as an alternate location for what Conan Doyle long ago wished would be his last. The Reichenbach fall of the title, however, is not a torrent of water but a movement from unconquerable rescuer of a stolen Turner to potential suicide standing at the edge of a tall building as his greatest enemy brands him a less than worthy adversary. “I’m disappointed in you, ordinary Sherlock,” groans Moriarty, chagrinned that even his finest adversary is, in the final analysis, no match for his genius – just normal, just human. Just a sham.

Of course, all that follows  – with different moves, but the same shape as Conan Doyle’s original Swiss tango – exists, as it exists in the real world which so confounded Conan Doyle’s assumption that Sherlock Holmes was mortal, to disprove Moriarty’s thesis. Sherlock, like Holmes, is extra-ordinary, capable of evading certain death, of solving every puzzle, of championing the power of human faculty. This is how we should understand and embrace him – not as an impossible ideal, a tabloid celebrity whom we, like Katherine Parkinson’s Kitty Reilly, are desperate to tear back down (see that issue with Moffat and women? It’s there, but let’s leave it for another day). Sherlock Holmes offers us necessary hope: we leave Freeman’s John walking into a bleak landscape of duller colours, having begged a tombstone to perform one last restorative miracle.

Across the churchyard, hidden and unseen – but prepared, like another figure of British legend, to return when we are most in need him – Sherlock Holmes, unhumbled, abides.

Like so many others, when reading a novel I hold the book in one hand and a pencil in the other. I underline and scribble, and, modest though my marginalia may be, the act of scrawling helps me wend a way through the prose. There are, however, times when a book is so involving, confounding or both that the pencil is cast aside for a second read: no amount of exclamation marks beside the text will help when a text reads at first so elusively.

Christopher Priest’s The Islanders is one such novel. My last book of 2011, it was also one of the strangest. Indeed, it has troubled reviewers, leaving Le Guin frustrated, Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone with self-contradictory fragments, and even the inestimable Adam Roberts mostly searching for comparators. On one level, this is simply a function of Priest’s formal invention: not a narrative, and not a collection of short stories, The Islanders is a kind of travelogue – it features alphabetical entries guiding the readers around the various outcrops of the Dream Archipelago, a location of dubious reality which has cropped up before in Priest’s work. At the same time, however, it features several longer entries which do not pretend to guide or inform, but read more like traditional vignettes told from and by a range of views and voices: characters mentioned in a gazetteer piece recur as the first-person singular of a narrative passage, or artists described and located in the guidebook sections are complicated and humanised in extracts from a piece of journalism or a judicial report.

It is, then, hard to know how to read The Islanders (thus the enforced vacation for my pencil hand). What might it mean, for instance, to follow the REFERENCES clearly indicated in the text, to treat this novel as hypertext rather than start at page one and go forwards? Should we hang our interest on the peaks of narrative which rise above the topographical detail, following the relationship of the reclusive novelist (and author of The Islanders‘ introduction), Chaster Kammeston, and the revered social revolutionary known to the public only as Caurer? Can we read this novel, as we did The Prestige, as a story about public rivalry, doubled identity and the cost of creation, and is the murder of a stage magician part of that tale or to one side of it? Indeed, might this whole ‘novel’ in fact be a form of self-reflective criticism, with a character who writes a novel called The Affirmation, others artists who in some cases literally disappear into their own works, and cartographers attempting to map impossible landscapes? Is the book all of these, or none of them?

In one of the best reviews of the book I have read, Niall Alexander at Strange Horizons emphasises this intense uncertainty, arguing for the multivalence of Priest’s text, the endlessly movable frequency of its concerns. He personally opts for a vision of the book as a disputation on art, but I rather agree with (for it is again, Pimpernel-like, he) Adam Roberts when he urges specifity and uses the word ‘connections’; on the other hand, I think the connections of art are only one aspect of the way in which the novel interrogates the ligaments of its world – after all, Priest lingers over interpersonal connection, too, and indeed his entire text tests and teases how we understand narrative causality.

The novel ends with an elegiac chapter focusing on the relationship between a Yin- and Yang-ish pair of conceptual artists named Yo and Oy. Yo tunnels – at times so vociferously and inspirationally that she inspires one island to sink itself – and in doing so creates connections that would otherwise not exist. Like the time vortex that lies at the heart of the archipelago, Yo’s installations weird distance, toy with transit. They do so not just as art but as physical paths from one place to another – you can walk across the surface, but you might also follow an entrance to an exit.

Where Le Guin’s disappointment finds its justification, however, is in her criticism of the book’s heart. Alas, for a novel so clearly about connection it can at times fail to, well, connect: its characters, from the apparently (but not conclusively) serial-killing painter Dryd Bathurst to the campaigning journalist Dant Willer, can at times feel more like literary tools than real people. And yet. The Dream Archipelago is precisely that, a device of prosody: in The Affirmation, it is the fictional space of the schizophrenic novelist Peter Sinclair; Priest himself has written a sequence of short stories named after the islands the current book proposes to describe. “Reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm,” writes Chaster Kammeston in his introduction to the book-within-the-book (an introduction he would be incapable of writing was the book, which depicts his death, entirely rigorous). The way in which The Islanders leaves the reader feeling distanced and disoriented, then, is part of its effect, one of its many means of interrogating what it is we mean when we say, write or read ‘connection’. This gives it a weirdly unsatisfying sort of completeness.

The Islanders attains its depth from the intricacy of its formal invention – it shouldn’t work, but it does, and it is this quite magnificent structural achievement which off-sets what might traditionally been seen as the weaknesses arrayed against its success. Also at Strange Horizons, both Paul Kincaid and Duncan Lawie write of second reads, and I might add that a fourth, fifth and sixth would also probably reward. This is a measure of Priest’s cold kind of boldness, and ultimately of what is a remarkable novel. It deserves reams of marginalia – next time.

I’ve written (albeit briefly) about translation before, but it struck me that in discussing The Prague Cemetery last week I didn’t mention the name of Richard Dixon. Peter Conrad’s review of the English edition of the novel, which I bounced off sceptically in that post, is criticised in the comments for committing precisely the same omission, and I duly hang my head in shame – not least because, of course, Eco has written himself about the problems of translation.

In a piece from a twenty-year-old edition of the Guardian Weekly, Eco (mediated, of course, through a translation) discussed the relative merits of the source- and target-oriented method of rendering a text from one language to another. It feels to me that Eco supports the target-oriented approach: though he defends the retention, for instance, of repetition in Homer, he advocates the retention of effect over sense in Tolstoy. Similarly, he provides a lovely example of a moment in Foucault’s Pendulum strictly mis-translated in English in order to retain the passage’s instantly recognisable allusiveness. Eco is not being entirely consistent: The Iliad, he argues, is culturally separate enough from us that we should respect what we might today perceive as its formal limitations; yet a modern Chinese reader must not be expected to know Russian aristocrats of the Napoleonic era spoke French, and instead have the first chapter of War & Peace translated anew into some fittingly familiar-but-alien script.

Nevertheless, this is a position held, too, by Julian Barnes in my previous post about translation. He found Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary too close to the original French – a shame, then, that he didn’t subsequently review Adam Thorpe’s translation, which followed hot on Davis’s heels and sought not to ape the French so much as mirror the disruptive, radical effect it might have had in 1856, but – ahem – did so by sticking to period language (“A good translation holds faith with the original’s aura,” wrote Thorpe in the Guardian, orienting around a target).

I recently reviewed Lemistry, a celebration of the famously under-translated Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, for Foundation Vector. One of my favourite bits of what is a rather neat little book is, fittingly, the translator’s note:

“The relationship with a book seems straightforward, when you reside in your favourite location, be it a chair, a train, a bed or up a tree, you and the author seem to have an intimacy, a direct relationship which allows the alchemy of conjuring a static fiction into something that swims in the mind. However we are also there, in fact the words and the language of your homeland are ours. We are part of the futurological entropy of Lem’s ideas, as is his dissemination into other forms and materials. [...] We are the entities that have taken those ideas structured as words, from their native language to that of yours, we have made them into films, we have constructed new worlds from them using the everyday that surrounds our own.”

All of which is simply by way of apologising to Richard Dixon, of whose orientation, whether focused on source or target, I am entirely ignorant. Given how embedded The Prague Cemetery seems to be in particularly Italian notions of the nineteenth-century, one might imagine Dixon attempted to spark the English-speaking Victorian imagination; but, equally, The Prague Cemetery is a forbidding novel which does not find much space for Anglophone culture. If Dixon has made remarks somewhere, I’ve missed them and would appreciate a link or a reference.

Nevertheless, a few records – and, as in years past, not necessarily those I’ve most listened to – stand out as complete, intriguing, and multi-layered. Here they are, in no particular order.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

Robin Pecknold’s troupe of bearded revivalists have always had an ear for a pretty tune (‘Blue Ridge Mountains’) or mesmeric harmonies (‘Sun It Rises’), but it was hard not to credit Helplessness Blues as a serious step-change. It wasn’t that this, their second full-length record, was in any way less indebted to the sort of folk forebears to whom the band had previously paid homage; it was simply that they did more with the heritage, and did so with more depth, than previously. The title track may well be one of my favourite songs of the year, but from opener ‘Montezuma’ to the closing ‘Grown Ocean’, this record ebbs and flows with pitch-perfect control. Fantastic arrangements and superior lyrics complete a pitcture of what is a properly splendid album – with,  admittedly, all the slight post-ironic fustiness that description might suggest.

Bill Callahan – Apocalypse

It is Callahan who deserves the ‘most important living American songwriter’ title often applied to Ryan Adams, and on Apocalypse he shows why. Though this is a fractured and at times challenging seven-track sojourn into a not always coherent dreamscape, it is simultaneously a prolonged and convincing meditation on the modern (American) condition. Most obviously ‘America!’ sees Callahan worrying over questions of patrotism and identity; but in opening track ‘Drover’ he spins a long metaphor about cattle-driving into something with broader and more diffuse relevance. Not only that, but in such a short and spare record he covers a variety of modes and moods: from the flighty jazz of ‘Free’ to the spiky soul of ‘Universal Applicant’, Apocalypse achieves a rare and rather grand fusion of disparate lyrical, generic and imagistic elements – and it puts Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, an album good enough to reach my 2009 top five, a touch to shame.

Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know

Indeed, I risk looking narrow in these selections, because here’s a second reappearance: Marling was in last year’s top five, too, and yet in 2011 she like Callahan released a record of such disciplined intent that it made that previous effort look thin. As I said in my capsule review of the album published in this here blog’s sidebar in October, with this LP Marling surely enters the pantheon of canonical English songwriters. Not only are the performances energetic and characterful; her craft has matured to a point at which all its flab and fat has been removed. I may here be rewarding the perfection of a sound I enjoyed already – but few British ‘best of 2011′ lists would be complete without this record.

Frank Fairfield – Out On The Open West

Another entry from the sidebar, this time August’s, Fairfield’s is in many ways the simplest record on the album: very often solo pieces recorded directly and subjected to minimal post-production, these 12 songs have titles like ‘Texas Fairwell’ and ‘Up The Road Somewhere Blues’; they include traditionals like ‘Turkey In The Straw’, and no instrument more complex than the bull fiddle. Uncompromisingly pre-modern, it is undoubtedly a record unsuited to some tastes, and its principle strength – that it sounds as if it could have been record in 1921 – may seem an antediluvian reason for placing it in a twenty-first century list of the year’s best albums. So it may be, but there’s something serious about Fairfield which goes beyond the hi-jinx of Pokey LaFarge or the supple soundings of Gillian Welch: there is in these songs, as in Callahan’s, a kind of critique of the world of 2011. They’re also terrifically pretty if you listen for long enough.

Josh T Pearson – Last Of The Country Gentlemen

Pearson, meanwhile, gives you no choice but to listen long, with four of these seven tracks breaking the ten-minute barrier. Like Fairfield, he sticks for the most part to solo performance rooted in received forms. Unlike Fairfield, he breaks down the pre-conceptions one might have about the acoustic singer-songwriter and rebuilds the concept from the bottom up, manufacturing a howling, droning, plaintive sound, most clearly evidenced on opener ‘Thou Art Loosed’, which is sly in its abuse of our familiarity with the guitar and the voice. ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’ is a great, keening prayer of a song, and Pearson’s resemblance to Alfred Lord Tennyson only heightens his image as a sort of wry, post-romantic sage (“The only good thing I’ll ever give to you is my good grief,” he sings on ‘Country Dumb’). Delivered by a prog-rock Lefty Frizzell, and including some of the most startling acoustic guitar sounds heard in some time, this is a remarkable album which doesn’t sound like anything else released this year or in any other.

There’s a chapter in Alexandre Dumas’s most famous work, The Three Musketeers, in which the conniving villain of the piece, the pitiless Milady, is chased down on a dark and stormy night and executed without either fair trial or last rites. On first read and subsequently, I’ve found the whole section, which is in many ways the culmination and triumph of the novel’s lengthy and discursive narrative, rather more than a tad difficult:  the implacability of my erstwhile heroes, the gothic ugliness of the setting, conspire to rob the protagonists of my sympathy. There is something too grim for my tastes, too remorseless, about the demonisation by the musketeers of their antagonist. In the face of their hatred, they seem to lose their moral bearings.

Umberto Eco places this effect far earlier in his new novel, The Prague Cemetery – which takes another of Dumas’s novels, Joseph Balsamo, as one of its founding texts. It begins with an arresting explosion of racist invective. Perhaps the shock of the bile and poison spilled over the page is less in the idea that it was once (is still) believed, but in reading it on a page unyellowed by the passage of time: Simone Simonini, the protagonist of The Prague Cemetery for whom we immediately rather than belatedly lose all sympathy, is an anti-semite of fulsome proportions, and Eco revivifies the full horror of his beliefs, shared by many throughout the course of his narrative, by pulling them from the 19th-century texts which act as the novel’s source material, and placing them on a freshly-turned 21st-century page.

This willful transgression has rightly discomfited many critics. In the Observer, Peter Conrad worried Eco would be misread: “Would it bother him if … credulous readers missed his postmodern irony and took The Prague Cemetery a little too seriously?” In the Jewish Chronicle, meanwhile, David Herman fretted about relativism: “One of the accusations made against postmodernism has always been that its playfulness trivialises real history and real suffering.” Most famously, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, labelled Eco a “voyeur of evil”.

There is something in all this: The Prague Cemetery is the story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps the most damaging forgery in all of history, and its emergence from a century’s worth of conspiracy theory and bigotry. Eco does not spare us the details: “My grandfather described those eyes that spy on you, those unctuous smiles, those hyena lips over bared teeth, those heavy, polluted, brutish looks, those restless creases between nose and lips, wrinkled by hatred, that nose of theirs like the beak of a southern bird” [pg. 5]; he reproduces, at regular intervals, contemporary cartoons of Jewish men and women, the lurid caricatures of the most racist of artists; and, later in the book, a main character proves to be the Frenchman Edouard Drummont, the founder and editor of the infamous anti-semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole.

I’m not sure, however, that any topic, however revolting, should be off-limits to a writer so inclined. Certainly, as Conrad seems to fear, The Prague Cemetery speaks to our own age; but it does so less as clarion call to the neo-nazis and thugs emerging from under their rocks as it does a kind of meditation on the ways in which such worldviews came and – crucially – still come to proliferate. Eco places his novel at the dawn of modernity – Simonini’s grandfather was old enough to remember the ancien regime, the world disappeared by the French Revolution, and his conspiracy theories, which (real history here) he writes in a letter to Augustin Barruel, whose Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme is the first of the novel’s many othering tracts aimed at exploring and explaining the degradations of a new modernity.

For Simonini’s hatred is reserved for all ‘others’ – for Germans and Englishmen, Frenchmen and Italians, Russians and Jesuits, Jews and Jacobins, women, socialists, and homosexuals. His narrative, pieced together by another voice identifying itself only as the Narrator, takes the form of a dialogue between himself and a certain Abbé Dalla Picola, a priest who seems to share not just rooms but elements of a life with Simonini. It is a story, not wholly as satisfying as some of Eco’s other novelistic puzzles, which pivots on the sad story of Diana Vaughan, a woman rather sleazily objectified throughout the book (alas, the demonised others are never given even the smallest of countervailing voice). Vaughan is shown to be a figure not invented by the hoaxer known as Leo Taxil, but in fact a young woman living with a kind of violent bipolar disorder, first treated and then exploited by one of Eco’s many awful hypocrites. As the alter egos of Simonini and Dalla Piccola debate their condition through Sigmund Freud’s suggested medium of the dream diary, The Prague Cemetery, it seems to me, makes a case for a pathological Europe which has likewise sublimated and separated, rather than dismissed and dealt with, its basest urges, its beastliest sickness.

Simonini, trained as a forger under a provincial lawyer, tours Europe in the employ of a variety of secret policemen: he attempts to undermine the work of Garibaldi in Sicily and Naples, double-crosses nihilists on behalf of the Russian authorities, provides the raw material behind the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus, and is responsible for the suspicious death at sea of the Italian Novelist, Ippolito Nievo. Most significantly, he draws on a century’s worth of anti-semitic rants, novels and tracts to pen the Protocols, which he sells to the Russian secret police – who know they are false, but seek to harness the prejudices of the laity regardless.

In his rather positive review of the book, David Aaronovitch has remarked that, without a strong grounding in 19th century European history (which, you should know, I do not entirely possess), The Prague Cemetery can be hard-going. In part, I think this is the point – most readers will be lost in the detail at some point, and discover that they, like many before them, have only conspiracy theories to guide them. On the other hand, Eco’s argument – his conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories – is fairly plain: that the hypocrisy of the modern state is guilty of encouraging, rather than dispelling, the ignorance and confusion which give rise to bigotry. “We don’t want to repeat the farce of the man in the iron mask,” intones one French authority, suggesting that they’ve been at it for centuries. [pg. 155] A recurrent motif in the book is that truth is distorted into fiction, which is then recycled as fictionalised truth (the meta-textual games Eco plays here are amongst his most exuberant). “The secret service in each country believes only what it has heard elsewhere,” reflects Simonini [pg. 173], confirming what the novel has already shown us – that the most powerful lie is one which confirms a prejudice. The picaresque style, which is rather broad and can often drag, may not be the best vehicle for conveying this message – but here it at the very least does the job, albeit in an uneven sort of way.

Regardless of the formal niggles, in a Europe in which the north resents the south, and the south the north; in which the British veto a treaty and the French spit back that their economy is finished anyway; in which, from Italy to Austria to the Netherlands, far right political movements are again finding a voice; The Prague Cemetery offers a timely anatomy of the European problem. That first substantive chapter, which does so much simultaneously to destroy and revive our connection with its protagonist, is entitled ‘Who Am I?’. In truth, the subject of its screeds is ‘Who I Am Not’. It is that lack of a positive Europe identity, whether proceeding from the jaded cynicism of the elite or the put-upon despair of the poor, that remains the continent’s great enemy – the dark space between known knowns, which is filled by the malicious and the credulous with poison and conspiracy.

“History is a nightmare,” Conrad writes in his criticism of the novel, “and Simonini’s enfevered babbling won’t help us to awaken from it.” It is true that Eco plays a dangerous game in this novel, and he sometimes enjoys rolling the dice overmuch  – but it is a game which, knowingly or otherwise, Europe, too, still plays. That makes The Prague Cemetery a necessary, even when imperfect, novel.

Having spent many years being an on-off vegetarian, at school, University and beyond – I could never quite achieve full vegetarian status.  Meat was everywhere: part of my family life and social life.   And my blatant inability to cook, or to dream up recipes that would be tasty and nourishing alternatives to meat, didn’t help me with my ever-failing mission either.  I’d always known, in my mind, that I wanted to give up, that I didn’t want to eat animals – and one Christmas I decided to forego the turkey (I never really got the relationship between turkey and goodwill to all, anyway!) and I’ve never looked back – or touched another morsel of meat.  Fish was a longer battle, for various reasons.

In the end though, this was the New Year’s resolution that was most definitely worth keeping.  And, if I ever felt like straying off the path of meat-free life, the publication of Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’ was there to strengthen my convictions.  It may sound like a terrible cliché, but that’s one book that has changed my outlook on the way we live and our food chain (it changed Dan’s too).   And since my initial New Year ‘conversion’, vegetarianism has opened many doors, friendships and cooking adventures.  When you turn veggie, you suddenly meet all these other people who share the same beliefs, and find all these amazing eating places you’ve never been to before – and people around you come over to visit, and share your veggie food – it’s infectious.

Lots of people, charities and groups talk about why vegetarianism works – animals, environment, health – all these are good and true facts.  But, putting the sadness of the meat industry aside for a moment, vegetarianism provides a compassionate and positive way to live.  I’ve learnt to cook so many more types of food now.  Gone is the meat and two veg option (although, nut roast and veg for Sunday lunch is yummy!) and instead we regularly draw inspiration from so many different culinary traditions.  And our veg box and fruit bowls are full to the brim with foods we’d never seen before.  Vegetarian food is more aesthetically pleasing!  The kitchen is cleaner.  It’s generally cheaper.  And we don’t eat anything with a face.  What’s not to love?

I’m not sure I’ll ever find a resolution to stick to so passionately again (my blog posts may peter out by February) but this is one change I’m so happy to have made.

(Of course, and not for the first time, Holmes’s initial, and here gloriously playful, instincts are shown to be erroneous – there is indeed a dark story attached to Henry Baker’s hat. The season’s gift to him, then, is a crime – and he is, indeed, like a child at Christmas.)

“It’s surprising how few of the stories in the first collection, ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ contain murders,” wrote Anthony Horowitz of the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recently. Indeed, for a modern crime writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories must seem missives from a gentler time: few detective stories are now complete without a grisly corpse or two, and Horowitz’s own new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, is no exception. By its final page, Holmes and Watson have stood sadly over several dead bodies, one of them particularly gruesome, and solved a mystery involving many more. What is impressive about this and every other aspect of Horowitz’s Conan Doyle estate-endorsed volume, however, is that such a deviation from the usual Holmes template doesn’t feel gratuitious or even out of kilter with the canon.

To be sure, the pre-release hype that Horowitz had written The House of Silk in Conan Doyle’s style was misleading: the Watson of this novel, writing from a retirement home after the death of his oldest and dearest friend, is too reflective, and the narrative too economical, to remind one of the four canonical novels, or even any of the short stories. Horowitz is a little above Conan Doyle’s old trick of withholding information from the reader, too, and this makes his mystery a little easier to solve than many of Holmes’s cases. Crucially, however, Horowitz writes in the way that you might fondly remember Watson sounding: erudite but at times dogmatic, with an eye for the ladies but morally resolute, focused on action far more than context. Writing in 2011, on the other hand, Horowitz can’t let Watson get away with his flaws as a narrator, and has the good doctor criticise his own stories for ignoring the poor or the young, for skipping over the mise en scene in favour of the hackney chase. The gambit undoubtedly pays off: this is a nonagenarian Watson looking back on his life, writing the last of his reminscences of Sherlock Holmes, and allowing a suppler, more intimate, style to emerge.

All the details are here: the Persian slipper, the game proving to be afoot, Lestrade’s mixture of defiance and respect. Horowitz admitted in that Telegraph piece that he took Conan Doyle’s lead in paying little heed to chronology, and Baring Gould would indeed find it impossible to place The House of Silk in a chronology: the novel is set in 1890, and the ‘Adventure of the Red-Headed League’, we are told, happened just seven weeks ago; by the same token, one character tells Watson he recently read and enjoyed the ‘Copper Beeches’ which, though set in 1890 (according to Brad Keefauver, though Baring Gould puts it in 1889), wasn’t published until 1892. Indeed, many characters refer to their knowledge of Watson’s stories, and of course this plays total havoc with any journeyman attempt to play the Great Game; at the same time, however, the novel plays that game with abandon, making Watson’s publication history explicit in a way Conan Doyle never did – Waston and Holmes both have fans, and past adventures frequently receive a reference.

So, too, do past characters: from minor ones, such as Dr Trevelyan from the ‘Adventure of the Resident Patient’, to more major and predictable appearances from Mycroft and others. For the most part, bar one rather egregious appearance from the character you might expect, this is done well; other puns, such as an appearance by ‘Ephraim Hardcastle‘ seem a bit gauche. Still, Horowitz is having huge fun, and for by far the most part this transfers to the reader: The House of Silk is a thoroughly good read, and though Horowitz only works out how to make a Holmes story last as long as he needs it to by splicing two mysteries together, the final reveal is terrifically neat – and involves enough of the standard Sherlockian ingredients, from exotic backgrounds to double lives, to ring true.

I imagine, therefore, that the book will be read with pleasure by those who’ve never read a Holmes story in their life. It should also be read happily by Holmes enthusiasts, though no doubt some will find a purist’s reason for a glum face. For instance, at times Holmes seems to one side of this novel – in fact, Watson is probably its main focus. If this is Horowitz’s solution to tackling the most intimidating detective in fiction, one should give him a pass – and hope for another novel with more Holmes for its buck, because when Horowitz does zoom in close, he nails the characters brilliantly: “Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic,” Watson opines at one point. “Show it to me and I would look for a tap.” [pg. 180] This is a novel with precisely enough both of respect and of cheek to do the job. In a few weeks, Robert Downey Jr, one suspects, will give us rather more of the latter. Eat this up while you can.