Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn

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So we now get to the Booker Prize short-listed instalment of the Patrick Melrose novels, and I find little to set this apart from the earlier books.

It begins by giving a new born baby the internal monologue of a whining self-possessed teenager and from there it doesn't get any better. It did manage to instil a certain level of pity for Mary, the wife of Patrick, and I guess that achieving an emotional response does perhaps put this marginally ahead of the others.

The problem is that Patrick (and indeed most of the rest of the characters) goes through life with a chip on his shoulder because he feel life somehow owes him something. This is despite the fact that in his reduced circumstances he is still comfortably off, indeed would appear to remain well within the bracket of wealth. The lost of a big house in the south of France is clearly a disappointment but it is hardly the equivalent to destitution. Perhaps all ills on Patrick's part are supposed to be forgiven due to his abuse at the hands of his father, but that does not explain the behaviour of the rest of them.

I remain puzzled but the wide range of praise that it attached to these novels.

Mud, Blood and Poppycock by Gordon Corrigan

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The edition I have declares on the cover “This will overturn everything you thought you knew about Britian and the First World War”. This is a bold statement, “everything” is a big claim”! I did my best to set this aside, remembering not to judge a book by its cover and all that...

However this book's intent is a myth-buster, and so at a certain level it wills you to be a fully paid up subscriber to the myths to give fullest effect to its party trick of demolishing them. Corrigan is a retired solider and a large part of his argument is based on, what he sees as, the inherent inability of civilians to understand the military.

There were some “myths” which I was aware were not true – such as the notion that men spend the whole war in the front line trench. This is an idea that pervades, for instance my secondary school had a mock-up of a trench built on the sports field – but this was a small section of the front line, and gave no sense of the supporting network of rear teaches, communication lines and reserves etc, and so the idea was naturally bred from it that what we saw in our field was all there was. That men were rotated in and out of the trenches, spending only a couple of days at time in the “firing line” is am important point to your wider understanding of the experience of the war.

The issue of those shot for cowardice or desertion is one of the hardest to approach, I think that Corrigan gives a helpful insight into the conduct of the Court Martials, showing the while it might have been swift military justice was far from summary. While I think it might be valid to review of individual cases I have always been troubled by the call for a general pardon of all those shot. To do this seems a disservice unless there was certainty all, each and every one, of those shot was wrongly accused. For to pardon one who was wilfully deserting would still leave those who should have been subject to the army's medical rather than criminal systems diminished if we continue to hold them as a collective. I am perhaps not as confident in the good order of Military justice as Corrigan, but he confirms the basis on my unease about the idea of a general pardon. It might win present day politicians some cheap points but it would not be an expression of the fundemental truth.

Corrigan is also helpful in unlocking the way in which the geographical recruitment, and in particular the “Pals” battalions, heightened the experience of collective grief. The sense of a lost generation was not so much a product of the absolute numbers of lives lost but the way in which a town, village, or street was likely to suffer its lost due to a single engagement. In the Second World War the army had moved away for geographical recruitment. So while the casualty rate after D-Day was comparable to that to the major battles of the First World War, the bereaved were unlikely to be known to one another, and so grief remained more personal. There was not the cumulative factor at play.

Corrigan's historical accounts are clear and well written, it is his interpretive passages that are less comfortable. The facts, for the most part, speak for themselves, but Corrigan's ranting add a feeling of trying too hard. Corrigan generally seems to view the myths as the product of deliberate attempts to distort the memory of the war, and in most cases this doesn't stack up. Misunderstandings have been perpetuated, but this is a error of a different order from that that Corrigan rants against. For example at one point he disparagingly refers to “poets who wrote for money”, while a large part of the book is given over to the defence of Field Marshal Haig (and hand in hand with that an attack on Lloyd George), I accept that history has been unfair on Haig but I have the sense that Corrigan is pushing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

Poems by Richard Skinner

Richard Skinner gave a talk at the Small Pilgrim Places Network gathering back in October, and I was really touched by his poetry and so got hold of a number of his collections.

There was a lightness of touch to his work, the ability to give a subtle twist to a familiar idea.

Reading his collections I found in general his poems were perhaps strongest when they address ideas about faith and spirituality, maybe these had an extra bit of grit with which to work around.

Of the poems Leaping & Staggering is perhaps Richard signature:

For some,

there is the death-defying leap,

clearing the chasm with one bound,

arms flailing,

a cry of triumph,

all terrors left behind

on the far side,

only joy and happiness

ahead.

For others,

(by which I mean you

and me)

there is no triumphal leap,

only a staggering lurch

to the edge of the chasm.

Dizziness strikes,

and a long, sliding, scrabbling descent

is followed

by a long, weary, scrabbling ascent,

until, arriving at the top,

we find ourselves, once again,

on the wrong side of the chasm.

And while we staggers stagger on,

the leapers continue to leap.

One day, perhaps,

we will learn to leap,

and they will learn to stagger.

While from his most recent collection "the logic of whistling", from a set of poems inspired by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam I found amazing power in the following

In the almost

of not touching

Adam holds his breath:

one slip and

annihilation

is assured. God's judgement

is perfect: His finger

tantalises.

After London by Richard Jefferies

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Many view “After London” as the first apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel and as such take note of it as the prototype of what has become a significant genre.

The novel is spilt into 2 parts, the first is a fairly short scene setter – giving the context and some sketchy history to the state of England, while the second part is the narrative “proper”. I noted when considering The Day of the Triffids that the events of the apocalypse itself are often very lightly treated, and that is certainly the case for After London which is set a few generations after whatever it was that wrought the collapse of civilisation. In the first part there are only dimly remembered myths of the “old” order before the apocalypse.

The post-apocalyptic world imagined by Jefferies has a significant resemblance to an early medieval world, perhaps the England of the Saxons during the Viking incursions – there is a suggestion of some sort of King or over-Lord but power and authority is primarily held by local Barons. It is difficult to decide it there is a particular moral message behind Jefferies tale. There is in an post-apocalyptic tale a message to the current civilisation of its own vulnerability – writing to a late-Victorian audience which had lived through such technological progress, and for whom the curve of civilisation was clearly on a continuing upward curve the mere suggestion that this could all come to naught (whether for good or ill) is in itself a radical thought.

One of the things that was particularly interesting was the way in which the hierarchy of the new order was founded on the literacy (or lack of it) of survivors. In this new society access to literacy is closely guarded by the ruling elite, and the descendants of those who were illiterate at the time of society's collapse have been reduced to de facto slaves. What was the contemporary message of this division? You can see it as a call for an expansion of literacy within Victorian society as a guardian of freedom for the “common man”, or perhaps, if you were one of the literate elite, you might see it as a reminder of the dangers of letting the masses have access to education which might illuminate for them the bondage in which you currently hold them?

Coupled with this division of society by education the most interesting point made by Jefferies is that in this new order it was only ancient texts that survived – that is those manuscripts which were hand written onto velum – the mass of “modern” knowledge that was contained only in printed books had been lost.

This was for two reasons, first Velum manuscripts had survived, while the cheap paper books had decayed to dust. But also, the new society had a limited capacity to copy out texts, and so could maintain as needed new copies of the inherently concise ancient texts written to be transcribed by hand, but without access to printing technology the often verbose “modern” writers works were simply too long to be retained. This insight, true when Jefferies wrote, is even more applicable to us, the Wikiepedia generation.

We now have unimaginable amounts of information at our fingertips, but only as long as the National Grid is up and running. How much of the riches (?) of the knowledge we have available via the internet would still be available to us a year, 5 years, 50 years after an “apocalypse” - the survivors would have to search their attics for dust covered and out of date encyclopedias for the remnants of our technical know-how.

And so while the story of Felix, which is the main narrative, was not particularly captivating to me there were with the set up some ideas which have really stuck with me.

Relationships with pictures: an oblique autobiography by Peter Lord

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Peter Lord is probably generally described as a “Welsh art critic” or “Welsh art historian”, and while the majority of his professional life has been spent in Wales working with a particular focus on “art” produced in Wales he is in fact English (in origin at least), and there is a sense in which it is only as an outsider that he could see the depth of artistic endeavour within Wales.

We all know Wales is the “Land of Song” which Crowns (and Chairs) its Poets – and the counter point of this narrative is that Wales is a nation without a visual culture – a land of words not pictures. In this interesting book Peter Lord sounds a loud challenge to this (mis)conception.

Key to this challenge is a general challenge to the Art Establishment and any framework of ideas that attempts to police the boundary between “Art” and “not-Art”. This is a boundary that the Pop Artists of the 1960s kicked against – although I think the Art Establishment was phenomenally successful in neutralising that challenge. When Andy Warhol painted soup tins rather than seeing the Art in the ordinary the Establishment focused only on the status of a piece being a “Warhol” - content became irrelevant. (Although perhaps Warhol is a bad example, as clearly the greatest work of Art he ever produced was the persona “Andy Warhol”).

There is almost a quality of the detective novel about this, as from the starting point that there was no Welsh Art, Lord begins to discover more and more artists, stumbling across them, with a glimpse or a rumour, and then working to put their story together, to find their art. Maybe it is the equivalent of the BBC “Who do you think you are?” for a whole nation, a whole culture. While the BBC's celebrities come to terms with the drunks, adulterers, and war heroes among their forebears, the Welsh need to get to know their inheritance of artists.

It is also a tale of how the Welsh have in certain ways gilded their own prison bars – there is a psychological collusion, we may love Wales but deep down we don't really expect too much from her? There is today a story on the BBC news website headlined “Wales economy adds least value in UK” - but if you read the story it also states that Wales “showed the biggest growth”. So why was the headline not “Wales fastest growing economy in UK”? We might blame it on the London centric Beeb, but are the leaders in Wales actually aspirational enough to challenge the rhetoric – for you can bet if in the same position Alec Salmon would have raised a storm, a storm that would have more than likely broken to the advantage of the people of Scotland.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

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This is a classic “sci-fi” with more than one adaptation and I think these monster plants lurk behind many of our fears of Genetic Modification. It is often difficult to encounter the text of such classics free from the cumulated associations, to read with fresh eyes.

I will assume that the concept of “spoilers” does not really apply in this case however if you have escaped knowledge of the plot, and want to retain that status – at least for the time being, it might be best to stop here.

As well as the fear of the monster plants the plot also plays on the fear of the dark, as in the opening sequence the majority of the human race are left blind. The dark is a very deep seated fear, and the reaction of those left blind is extreme – OK there is chaos, but how quickly it seems that hope is lost and many of the blind decide to end their lives is, for me, a questionable aspect of the plot.

This is part of a need, in common with many post-apocalypitc narratives, to provide for a rapid depopulation in order to move on what is essentially a utopian (or in some cases dystopian) rebuilding phase. There is no desire to dwell on the suffering caused by the apocalypse and so millions are written off, written out, in the blink of an eye to make room on the canvass of the author's prime interest, whatever it is that will come next. I can recognise this as a necessary literary device but it certainly make me uncomfortable.

In this case the “next” is in fact a winding back of the clock to a “simpler” agrarian society and a reconnection of people with the land, and it turns out that the central hope for the continuation of civilisation lies on a move to the Isle of Wight (which depending on you point of view might be a stretch of the imagination...).

Overall the story is, I think, a critique of a society that has become enthralled to technology with a loss of connection not only to the land but also between human beings – how much more might we feel this critique can be applied today as it was when Wyndham was writing near 70 years ago.

Although it is interesting that it was first published at the very start of the 1950s, an era that I think we look back on as very optimistic. Many of the themes explored seems to fit more readily with periods of discontent, such as the late 1970s. These days we are told the 1950s was a time when people really believed that the future would all be jet-packs and sliver suits (although I know that my mum recalls a different story where the future was only filled with mushroom clouds).

But there is a tension, the turning back of the clock does not come without costs, not only the comforts and amusements of modern life but also in terms of health and security, existence in the new society is clearly fragile. The choice the author presents is to decide where the priority should lie, where is human dignity most likely to be found?