Adam Thorpe - Missing Fay

Adam Thorpe, Missing Fay (Jonathan Cape)

A novel like this needs to convince us with its 'authenticity'. I haven't heard the phrase 'beer-off', meaning 'off licence' in Nottingham and the East Midlands, for several decades and certainly not from anyone outside my family, but that and the 'me ducks' and suchlike are good. I take it that Adam Thorpe knows Lincolnshire. I'm less prepared to believe the badly-spelt graffiti authored by those characters who didn't benefit from his Magdalen education. I'm not saying they'd have got it right but they wouldn't have got it wrong like he tells us they did.
At halfway, I wasn't convinced either way, with its chapters focussing on a variety of characters, all with some connection to the girl advertised as missing on the posters. Like an episode of Midsomer Murders, you realize there is good reason to suspect they know something or 'did it' but also know it can't be all of them. One is as ready to expect a red herring as our old Latin teacher was as he recognized a question designed to distract him from his exegesis of the ablative absolute onto some more arcane and less demanding issue that might occupy him until the bell sounded.
There is the secondhand bookshop proprietor with more than is healthy residing in his beard, fixated more than he should be on the Romanian careworker; the children's clothes shop owner whose middle-aged self-esteem needs the attention of younger men to sustain it, I really saw little wrong with her until Thorpe showed us what those with the shop units nearby thought of her. And you can't be expected to take to Ken, the busker and failed session man, except that he is so heavily flagged up as a prime suspect that no Midsomer watcher would ever think it was him.  
That is until Chapter 10, Chris, about the fretful monk in the abbey. he has something on his mind and the posters aren't helping. A beautiful and captivating chapter - and who am I to comment on the authenticity of Thorpe's portrayal of monastic life even though I do know a monk - and then it's time to accept that this is a very fine novel indeed.
Set in 2012 in Lincolnshire, the heartland of the Leave vote, the Romanian girl is a relevant contemporary reference in a downbeat novel, haunted by themes of our difficult times and Thorpe is a tremendous observer of social detail. But on a more literary level, the climax of the book is an episode involving Chris, the monk, by a lake and one wonders, and I think we are meant to wonder subliminally, about there is a willow grows aslant a brook and Gertrude's report on the drowning of Ophelia. If it's there enough for me to notice it, it's there.  
Of course I can't tell you what happened to Fay here but the ending is to be admired not only because, in a way, it ends like my own paltry, completely unworthy of comaprison, novel ends. And you haven't read that, either, have you.
It may not be quite Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday or Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending but it isn't far away. This is what it is like now. I don't know how many of us dare say if the future will be any better.

Mozart Apollo et Hyacinthus

On the wireless this morning.

Written when the lad was 11.

Oh, my giddy aunt.

Not only that but the waves rolling in behind them.

Phenomenally Canonical

Thinking about 'the canon', as I reluctantly was recently, this week's TLS includes a reference to how Spenser 'canonized' Chaucer. Didn't actually make him a saint but, oh yes, of course, I never made the connection.
In the same review, Bernard O'Donoghue, who I was lucky enough to meet once in Oxford because I was wandering round with an ex-student of his, draws our attention to The Miller's Tale,
He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude.
which is a fine example of why I like Chaucer now if not when it might have been more useful at A level. It doesn't mean that the miller was a bit like Roy 'Chubby' Brown but it sounds to me as if it does.
Also in the TLS last week, an article by Clive Wilmer looking suspiciously like a trailer for his long, long, long awaited Selected Thom Gunn, which is due next week, useful above all else for the photograph of Charlotte, the poet's mother. It is not usual these days for the poetry world to be inundated with good-looking poets but most would probably agree that Gunn was handsome and now we can see where he got it from. So the TLS, providing it goes on providing such things, survives as a subscription.

This weekend should see me finish Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe, a novel about which the verdict is likely to stay in the balance until it resolves itself into what is due. Just can't say yet. And then the decks are cleared to take some minor things, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and the Collected Charlotte Mew (to perhaps have a look at the stories) away while I flatter myself that my input is useful as my nephew obliterates the mark I set 22 years ago for 12 Hours of riding a bike. It's likely he will go beyond my 217.888 miles with about an hour to go, which is fine by me. So we had better make sure he does.
It's hard to believe that I ever did such a thing but I was reminded on the radio not long ago that the cells that comprise us are constantly dying off and being replaced by new ones. I think what has happened with me is that the cells that made me do sport, take an interest in the football or cricket scores or even, once, support Bjorn Borg against McEnroe or Jimmy Connors, have been replaced by others that make me want to buy a CD of The Magic Flute for my new great nephew. Maybe none of us are who we used to be and that might be a good thing. It might be disconcerting but it is more interesting than being the same person now that I was 40 years ago. And I'm grateful for that.

Horror

Horror

Lone cat cries in the ragged night,

detached from syntax, mess the thoughts

one might have had of decorum

or sentences that could make sense.

But we know well enough the place,

unfit for the lovely, somewhere

we know from cheap films long ago

set deep in Transylvania.

There is only one universe,

and I’m afraid that’s what it means,

and so this is no fiction made

to scare you on a Friday night

with popcorn and cola to hand.

The madness dispersing inside

us is astronomy and, for all

we know, the next cupboard or door

opened will contain Vincent Price,

the music that you loved to dread,

or all your nightmares come at once,

a tortoiseshell so nervous that

you know it’s you that you have found

but not quite as you thought you were.    

 

Michael Longley - Angel Hill

Michael Longley, Angel Hill (Cape)

As has happened before with Michael Longley's poetry, it dawns on me to ask exactly how much is going on in his poems. Disarmingly gentle, without the pyrotechnics and showy techniques of so many among the generations that followed him, his compatriot Paul Muldoon most notable among them, one is tempted to wonder if the 'poetry', whatever that is, will gradually be removed entirely from his work and we will be left with only the notes, the observations, the sense of place and family.
And, yes, perhaps we will. Because here, in a beautifully, apparently undemanding book, he's almost telling us so. In Age, he concludes that,
Poetry is shrinking almost to its bones.

That is late in the collection, long after the opening poem, The Magnifying Glass, about a gift from Fleur Adcock, which is a fine metaphor for his poetry in the close scrutiny of plants that he uses it for and the observation and deep appreciation of his natural environment, and we might remember how The Stairwell provided an alternative manifesto poem in his previous collection, as if some poets, quite rightly, can't help but justify their methods with some sort of parallel from life itself.
And if poetry itself is a theme that recurs here then so are other familiar subjects- the ornithology, nature, World War 1, family, now his fiftieth wedding anniversary and, inexhaustibly, Carrigskeewaun.
Blessed with the place names that they have, Irish poets rarely turn down the opportunity to cash in on them and Longley has one of his very own. At its best, though, poetry does more than would usually be expected with ordinary words and wouldn't rely on ready-made items available in the dictionary or on sign posts. All of which is a petulant objection to the work of an author who can provide Donkeys, that are 'obstinate, immune to wallopings', probably not unlike their author would be.
Longley's strength is the way he makes it look so effortless and is thus entirely convincing. He is not the only one who wasn't Seamus Heaney but you look, look again and wonder how much more is being achieved than first met your eye.
 

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton)

Thirty years ago I submitted a story to a local fiction magazine and subsequently received the inevitable rejection letter that offered the advice that the piece didn't use enough dialogue. They needn't have worried, it was a lousy effort. But I've sometimes wondered how much dialogue Virginia Woolf puts in and whether somewhere there is an index of fiction writers to show their ratio of dialogue to non-dialogue and who is at either end of the scale.
It struck me again here that pages seemed to be going by without dialogue. I don't think there's anything wrong with that but the reason for it in Arundhati Roy's long-awaited second novel is that it is filled with characters all of who have to have their back story told as they appear. It is understandable that modern India needs to be comprehended as a teeming population of many varied histories and how else does one do it but present as many of them as it takes.
The war in Kashmir provides the context for many of the atrocities described in often captivating prose that is at odds with the horrors it brings with it. If there it is sectarianism that causes the inhumanity and horror, it is more generally an essay on the faults of capitalism, which would not be to say that similar things didn't happen under other prevailing economic systems, but,
On TV they said that that summer homeless people had taken to sleeping on the edges of roads with heavy traffic. They had discovered that diesel exhaust fumes from passing trucks and buses were an effective mosquito repellent
and the outbreak of dengue fever.
But, not having had time to re-acquaint myself with The God of Small Things, this book seems more ambitious but also, in line with Arundhati's writing and campaigning since, more polemical, less well-formed and possibly less successful. Expectations were so high, though, that it was always going to be up against it.
One of the more notably gorgeous passages comes in the relationship of Musa and Tilo,
    -the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him.
I hadn't intended to make this a comparative study of Arundhati and Virginia but it brings to mind the 'arid scimitar' of the male contrasted with femimine intuition in To the Lighthouse and is one of any number of passages that convince us that Utmost Happiness would be a great book by most standards but we are reading it in the shadow of such impossible hopes (assuming that The God of Small Things is still the mmiracle we thought it was twenty years ago).
The ending presents some kind of resolution, some pages of closure but, given what we've been though, I'm not convinced. Having been unflinching in the catalogue of torture, murder, violence, prejudice, injustice and maladministration, impressive and undoubtedly 'true' as it all is - and few will idealize the sub-continent as a soulful, spiritual retreat having considered its downside- one isn't ready to accept any sort of happy ending gloss. It is magnificent but, perhaps wrongly, I prefer poem to polemic by now and though few admire an anti-capitalist foot soldier more than me, I did spend too much of the 1970's reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his reportage from Soviet Russia had themes in common with Arundhati's.      
  

Symphonies

 It is twenty years and a few more since I bought two double CD's of Ashkenazy's Sibelius Symphonies with other useful bits attached. The intention at the time was to add other complete symphony cycles as I went but there were plenty of alternative things needed buying and so it never happened. I had, or had had, all the Beethoven in various formats but symphonies weren't necessarily my main interest, having originally, as a teenager, thought they were the main event. But one can't dismiss Puccini simply because he didn't write them.
And so it hasn't been until quite recently that the project was revived as an outlet for expenditure once the right horses have prevailed. In the last year or so, in roughly this order, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert have been added to the burgeoning collection in their cute little boxes. Haydn and Mozart were too prolific to expect to be invited in any time soon because the discs do need listening to; Mahler and Bruckner need not raise their hopes too high because I doubt I have world enough or time to indulge myself with them and Shostakovich is rather bigger than I can manage. So, the foray into that particular niche market might have reached a point at which it can rest for them time being.
But it is Harnoncourt's account of Schubert 5 that prompts me to write about what a luxury it is to have them all to hand and what a success the idea has been, finding these long-playing sets often for the price of one new release disc.
As one finds with listening to 16 discs of Chopin over a couple of weeks, one soon becomes attuned to each composer's nuances of style which, for most of the above, amounts to which bits of Beethoven they sound like because the C19th symphony is surely generated by the nine he left us.
Schubert 5 was only vaguely familiar but, like Brahms 4, which was more so, it will be returned to as a place of safe haven and is capable of giving more rather than a diminishing amount on each reprise. Brahms apparently destroyed large amounts of music because he didn't think it lived up to Beethoven's benchmark standard but I think the old boy would have been happy with Brahms 4 if he'd thought of it first, which he might have.
It is not universally accepted in academic circles that Franz Schubert didn't finish his unfinished symphony because 'everything stopped for tea', neither is it generally agreed why he didn't. It's probably not because he died, although of course he did die. Having heard it in full sumptuousness from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, I was prepared to accept that after two sublime movements, he had nothing good enough to add as third and fourth. But the notes on the Harnoncourt set develop that peremptory conclusion by explaining that the finale was recycled into Rosamunde because there were technical difficulties that couldn't be resolved in trying to forge a satisfactory third movement. D'oh.
Mendelssohn, as I never tire of suggesting, never gets sufficient credit and if the Italian is his best known symphony, it should be for its hypnotic Andante as much as the lively opening, but he offers more in the choral fifth. Schumann is currently struggling to demand his share of attention in this august company although his time will come and Dvorak beyond the spacious theme of the bracing 7th has not created the impression he might have beyond a certain surging and relenting of powerful outbursts on a series that, so far, merge into one. Whereas Beethoven, of course, belongs in a league of his own, not necssarily as an outright personal favourite but as the obvious class act.
So, given time, it is possible to become the person you wanted to be, surveying all your symphony cycles in among the choral music, the concertos, the solo piano, violin or cello, the opera, the mistakes one made and the Albrechtsberger Concertos for Jew's Harp.
And the only reason Berlioz doesn't get a mention is that Symphonie Fantastique doesn't require a box set. But there we are, the symphony, one ends up where one began, back in about 1971, with Mozart 40, and like that 45 rpm single, what goes around comes around.