Treacle Walker

 

A wind threw the door onto him, shoving him against the stack. And night spilled in. Snow stung his face. He forced the door against the wind and the latch clanged shut. He clung to the chimney post. But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joists and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor snow melted to tears.

“My name,” said the man, “is Treacle Walker.”

Other reviewers can tell of how Treacle Walker is the capstone to author Alan Garner’s career — others do explain how this interplays with Garner’s children’s books and carves its place in the history of English folklore — but I haven’t read Garner before, I am not particularly knowledgeable about English folklore, and taken as a standalone artefact, this read was pleasantly weird, but made no deep impression on me. I am glad to have picked this up — I was completely entranced for the short while this took to read and would not speak against the reading experience — but there was no payoff for me in the end. From my own limited perspective, not a Booker winner.

“Treacle Walker?” said Thin Amren. “Treacle Walker? Me know that pickthank psychopomp? I know him, so I do. I know him. Him with his pots for rags and his bag and his bone and his doddering nag and nookshotten cart and catchpenny oddments. Treacle Walker? I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.”

Young Joe Coppock has a lazy eye and a collection of eggs and a pocketful of marbles, and when from his bed by the chimneypiece he hears the call of rag and bone for donkeystone, he scrambles out to the yard with some old pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder, meeting Treacle Walker for the first time. They make an exchange (Joe chooses a cracked and crazed old jar and the promised donkeystone [an embossed brick used for polishing stone steps]), and Joe accidentally unleashes magic upon himself (the jar contains paste that charms his weaker eye and the donkeystone enchants his doorway), and strange events ensue. There’s something otherworldly and othertimely about the narrative and it’s unclear whether the events are even happening in our known world (Is Joe dead and in some kind of limbo, are these characters from a fairytale where magic exists, or is Joe merely an actor in Thin Amren’s dream?). And with language that bordered on the Jabberwockyish, there was an off-kilter vibe that I enjoyed in the moment — I definitely wanted to know what was going to happen — but again, it didn’t seem to go anywhere.

“You have the glamourie,” said the man. “In just the one. And that’s no bad thing, if you have the knowing. She’ll be the governor while you learn the hang of it, and when you’ve got that you’ll be fine as filliloo. But you need the both of them. What sees is seen.”

Much of what Garner writes about is from real life — from the donkeystones to old comic strip characters that come to life — but while I was a big fan of Max Porter’s Booker-nominated Lanny (which similarly pitted a youngster against a character from traditional English folklore), there was no foothold in reality with Treacle Walker, and as a result, I felt no stakes for Joe Coppock: he could summon the cuckoo with a bone flute and follow it through the Chesire bogs with his glamourie ‘til the Brit Basher caught Stonehenge Kit, and none of it made my heart race. A fine and pleasurable reading experience, but it doesn’t add up to much (for me) in the end.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

The Moon and Sixpence

 

It’s a preposterous attempt to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.

I want to start with a note on the title (which does not appear in the novel). Apparently, a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage that its protagonist was "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet”. I haven’t read any other Maugham, but this must be a common theme for him (if he reused the phrase as the title of this, his next book) and this quote about yearning “for the common bonds of humanity” seems to hearken back to “of human bondage” (making me think that Maugham wanted the reader to consider these novels together and I had a pleasantly informative time googling about Maugham and his writing and Gaugin and his art.) To the review proper:

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.

Loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, The Moon and Sixpence has a narrator (whose life experiences are broadly those of Maugham himself) who finds himself crossing the path of a misanthropic painter over the course of his hermetic and uncelebrated career. I liked that the narrator only reports known facts — his own conversations with this Charles Strickland or conversations that he had with others about the man — and I liked the irony of him saying that if this were a novel he’d imagine a childhood backstory to explain the man’s prickly personality, or his apologies that he needed to invent dialogue for Strickland because so much of what the artist conveyed was in grunts and gestures. I don’t know if this was a common concept in 1919, but everything about the narrator (even quoting from invented biographies of Strickland) trying to add to the body of knowledge about a genius painter who wasn’t appreciated until after his death felt fresh and modern. As Strickland had left his job as a London stockbroker and abandoned his wife and children, at the age of forty, to pursue his painting, the question at the heart of this novel is: Does genius alone excuse a man for throwing off the bonds of humanity in order to pursue his passions outside the bounds of society? (As Maugham himself left his wife and child to explore the world with his gentleman companion/secretary/lover — travelling from Paris to Tahiti in the footsteps of Gaugin — he seems to be making the case for his own life as much as the painter’s; when Maugham writes about “artists”, he is obviously including himself.)

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.

As much as the concept felt modern, the attitudes were very much of their time, with offputting racism, classism, and frequent misogyny. (It is not incidental that I wrote the question is about a man’s right to pursue his passions; Maugham [or at any rate, his narrator] does not seem to like the ladies very much.) Some representative passages:

• I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.

• Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.

• “Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.”

(Perhaps even in 1919 the idea of Gaugin taking a thirteen year old Tahitian wife, while still married, was creepy; in this novel, Strickland’s bride is seventeen. Better?) From people not understanding Strickland's painting within his lifetime (such that he was always just one step ahead of starvation) to people kicking themselves for not buying up his work cheaply when they were deemed priceless masterpieces after his death, the point can be made that the genius was always present in the work; the pursuit of truth and beauty is its own reward, separate from the opinions of others:

The moral I draw is the artist should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in the release of the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.

Back to the title: Perhaps the true lesson is to support those who would ignore the sixpence at their feet in pursuit of the moon. This was a very compelling read (even if the racist bits were totally offputting) and I am interested in reading more from Maugham.

Hanged in Medicine Hat: Murders in a Nazi Prisoner-of-War Camp, and the Disturbing True Story of Canada’s Last Mass Execution

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride placing him above one of the two steel trapdoors. As December 17 ended and the new day began, the hangman still waited, but no telegram arrived with a reprieve. At 12:10 a.m., the hangman with practiced hand “pinion[ed] their legs, dropped the hoods [over their faces], adjusted the ropes and pulled the lever.”  Twenty minutes later, Perzenowski’s and Busch’s bodies were cut down, examined by the coroner, pronounced dead, and carried directly to the common grave they had been forced to dig the previous day. At 12:45, Walter Wolf and Willy Müeller were executed. Their bodies too were brought to the common grave. The child murderer, Donald Sherman Staley, was hanged at 1: 30 p.m., bringing an end to what would be the last mass hanging in Canadian history.

Hanged in Medicine Hat is a book I requested more or less on a whim — I spent my teenaged years on the “bald prairies” of Southern Alberta without ever hearing the story of the Nazi POW camp that once was there, let alone the story of the last mass execution in Canadian history, so my interest was piqued — and historian Nathan Greenfield’s account is well-researched, well-told, and presents a nuanced question: In the immediate aftermath of WWII, what should justice have looked like in the handling of unrepentant Nazis who killed some of their own “within the wires” of Medicine Hat’s Camp 132? Full of fascinating details, shining a light on a near-forgotten episode in Canadian history, what’s not to like?

Opened early in 1943 and representing a sizeable increase in employment and economic activity for the city, Camp 132 was welcomed by Hatters. That the prisoners were available for farm labour and the occasional hockey game only made their presence more welcome. The locals treated the captives with courtesy, and their manners were reciprocated. The existence of Camp 132 was as positive an experience as could be expected for both sides, except for the shocking killings of Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Sergeant Dr. Karl Lehmann a year later.

Along with the interesting history behind how German POWs (including members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, surrendered to British troops) ended up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, I was fascinated to learn that, because Canada had signed the Geneva Convention, not only did these POWs receive 3500 calories a day (most prisoners would gain fifteen pounds over the course of their detainment), but they would have complete control of their own leadership and policing (which meant senior Nazis and the Gestapo ran the show within the camp). With coded messages and a secret radio bringing orders straight from Berlin, the POWs remained under German military command, and as the Russians marched on their capital and things began to look dire in the Fatherland, any POW who whispered that Germany might lose the war could be accused of treason and risk being dealt with by military tribunal. So when prisoners were found murdered within Camp 132 — and the Canadian government decided to treat it as a civil matter and subject the perpetrators to our civil justice system — was that a miscarriage of justice? Should the Germans, per the Geneva Convention, have had the right to administer punishment according to their own military rules? This is the crux of Hanged in Medicine Hat and with the presentation of court transcripts, newspaper articles, and interviews with eyewitnesses, Greenfield makes a persuasive case that the Canadian government didn’t have the right to bring these men to civil trial, let alone subject them to capital punishment.

The government’s intention and the appeals court’s decisions may have settled the matter in 1946 but they do not do so today. The violation of the Geneva Convention and the War Measures Act may seem to be technical legal points. They are not. For, by trying the POWs in civilian court, Canadian authorities deprived them of something vitally important: jurors of their peers, that is jurors who understood military ethos.

On the other hand: I was telling my family about this story over dinner last night and both my husband (an old conservative) and my daughter (a young progressive) said that the Nazis murdered within the camp and the Nazis hanged for their crimes were simply fewer Nazis in the world and they couldn’t get worked up about their deaths. I tried to explain that Greenfield presented some of the POWs as radicalised youth who had never known another way of life (which I thought might sway my daughter’s stance, but she just said it was less likely someone like that could be reformed after the war), and while at least one of the hanged men went to his death calling out, “My Führer, I follow thee”, Greenfield didn’t believe any of them deserved the death penalty (and especially not as the consequence of a civil trial). Perhaps it takes a book length explanation to be persuaded by Greenfield’s position (as I was), but at any rate, I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. I'm so glad this caught my attention and that I had the opportunity to read it.

Last Hummingbird West of Chile

 

A small pleasure, some might think, to stand upon a horse’s head. To those doubters I would say, “Imagine yourself to be the last hummingbird west of Chile, caged and uncaged at the whim of others, powerless, blown about like a feather, and then tell me what is a small pleasure and what is not.”

A friend said, breathlessly, that I had to read Last Hummingbird West of Chile, and when I saw that its author, Nicholas Ruddock, lives in the next city along the highway from us, I was even more intrigued. And I certainly thought that it began with a bang: set in an English manor house in 1832, there’s an initiating frenzy of births and deaths and schemes and secrets. When the timeline then skips ahead nineteen years and a young man renounces his vast inheritance, vowing to make his living upon the open waves as an ordinary seaman, Ruddock adds in colour and danger — shipwreck, slavers, tigers, and assassins! — from around the world (mostly to the good), but he also adds in constant commentary on the evils of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy (fine observations, but made without subtlety or nuance; told, with only glimpses of show). Still: a totally readable historical adventure story, and while it does have some interesting flourishes, I’m looking forward to learning what my friend thought I’d get from this.

So what, I thought. (We) had nothing to fear. Unless we broke rank and confessed, he would never know. He would never know unless walls and floors and the night itself could talk, and only my grandfather believed that possible. “I have heard the trees whispering to each other a thousand times,” he said, “and never do they sound the same.”

After dangling the laughable possibility of the walls and floors identifying a pair of murderers, the narrative goes on to give voice to a wide range of narrators, human and otherwise (we hear from a coral reef, a feral pig, a giant white oak transformed into the stern of a frigate; despite the many POVs, the plot revolves around Andrew — the young aristocrat who went to sea). The storyline is completely linear — with each narrator taking up the story where the last left off — and throughout it all is Zephyrax: a three-year-old ruby-throated hummingbird, separated from his flock due to errors in avian leadership, who meets and then accompanies Andrew on his travels around the globe. And while I appreciate that the hummingbird serves as a sort of objective observer of human activity, I couldn’t quite buy into these observations, or the voice, as his own:

• Fly on, Zephyrax, zoom at speed. I dropped to one hundred feet and entered what appeared to be the poorest quarter. A few citizens were leaning over the seawall, pouring fecal matter from wooden slop-buckets into the harbour. Babies cried, women cried, men cried or shouted. Enough, Zephyrax. I returned to the wider avenues. There, at intervals, box-like carriages on horizontal poles were being carried at a trot by quartets of dark-skinned men. White hands tap-tapped from curtained openings. We were in Asia, I understood, but racial privilege seemed unaltered, identical to that of Brazil or the Carolinas.

• I pondered the coincidence that there were “Indians” in North America and “Indians” in India, yet they were culturally and linguistically worlds apart. Someone must have made a mistake, historically, to give them the same name. Or, alternatively — more likely — white people made up the name for the North Americans. Looking at darker skin, they saw nothing worth differentiating. “Let’s call them all Indians, whoever they are,” they said, and so it came to pass.

• He was too hurried, thoughtless at the speed of his movements. If women were anything like female hummingbirds, I thought, then go slower, Andrew, go slower, bury your head in her neck, and whisper, whisper to her.

With the narrator changing so frequently (passages range from a paragraph to a few pages), and with assassins, perverts, and ne'er-do-wells threatening at every port-of-call and outpost, the storytelling was quick and compelling: even if I didn’t completely surrender myself to the conceit, I did want to know how everything would end. And: it does end.

If I could complain about the formatting: the following (a little spoilery) is copied as found, with the dialogue and narration all jumbled together —

”Well,” I said, “I asked for this, and now I know what my husband truly is.” I reached for a teaspoon without shaking. “Nothing will be easy now. By marriage I have passed all of my possessions into his hands. He could throw me under his carriage, run me over with impunity.” “I doubt he would go to such extremes,” replied Emerson.” “Your wife and Miss Albertson,” I said, “have already concluded that he has tried to kill my father and brother. Why should he stop at them?” My footman did not bat an eye. He advised me to visit my London solicitor, to ascertain my rights. I had already thought of that of course, and I would do so. “We’re not leaving London, Emerson,” I said, “you never know, we might even run into Andrew on the street. It happens in novels, it might happen to us.”

(Am I the only one who cringes at “It happens in novels, it might happen to us”?) Anyway: there was much to like in the historical colour and globe-trotting adventure, something a bit ham-fisted about the social commentary (I agree with Ruddock’s observations, but found little artistry in their presentation), and as my friend was a bit breathless about Hummingbird (and I see it is well-rated), I can only encourage others to make up their own minds about it.

The Jane Austen Remedy

 

It occurred to me that my greatest love outside family and work had always been a love of reading fiction; of all the novels I had read, Jane Austen’s were my benchmark for pleasure as her heroines had been models for the sort of woman I wanted to become. A nostalgia for those books swept over me. So I decided to think of recovery as a rehabilitation of my reading life, and to start by revisiting the six novels. I wanted to re-read those passages that had made Austen’s fiction important to me: the bons mots, the well-worn quotations and the lively conversations. I didn’t know it then, but I was embarking on an untested approach to reading. I was making Austen’s novels a starting point for exploring the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of my own life, framed and illuminated by her fictional universe.

On our daily dog walk the other day, I explained to my horrified sister-in-law what I had learned about The Jane Austen Remedy from its Introduction: When Ruth Wilson turned sixty, she started developing vertigo (diagnosed as Meniere’s syndrome, Wilson would think of it as more a metaphysical disease of the soul), and when she turned seventy, she realised she was still not well, “In a revelatory surge, I had stumbled into a moment of truth: I was out of love with the world and I was not happy.” With a family legacy that allowed her to buy a cottage in Australia’s Southern Highlands — and with no small dose of inspiration from writers like Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer — Wilson decided to leave her “bewildered” husband of over fifty years and live in her cottage, alone: “It was, I thought, time to take my turn; a last chance to examine what had become of a girl’s once-upon-a-time great expectations of life.” I knew from the Introduction that Wilson had seemingly known domestic happiness with her husband and four children, she had had a fulfilling career and a life of travel, continuing education, and lively interactions with a large circle of friends, but at seventy she felt it had not been enough (she had always felt the patriarchal power imbalance in her marriage and wanted to finally have the last word on matters that concerned her) and she determined to do something about it. And in this initial conversation with my sister-in-law, we couldn’t decide if this was bravery or madness: when is selfishness the ultimate act of kindness towards oneself, and when is it an antisocial assault on the world around you? Happily, this is just the Introduction, and throughout the rest of her memoir, Wilson relates the story of a fascinating life — tying events to lessons learned from a lifetime of reading, but especially to the rereading of the novels of Jane Austen; her passion project for the next decade — and she certainly makes the case that even at seventy it’s not too late to create the life one has always wanted (Wilson eventually turned elements of her Austen reading project into a doctorate dissertation at eighty-eight and the publication of this memoir has coincided with her ninetieth year). The biographical bits were engrossing, the social commentary was wise, and the intertextual connections were exactly to my taste. The writing, the thinking and lived experience behind the writing, and the connection to the greater human project are all of the highest level: I can’t give fewer than five congratulatory stars for a life well-lived and well-told. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In real life we read both for pleasure and beyond pleasure. We read to pick up clues that help us to navigate our lives and relationships, and expand our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. And on re-reading Northanger Abbey as I undertook my reading cure, I became convinced that this novel, like the others that Austen produced, was doing that for me, stimulating me to ruminate on fiction with a renewed awareness that what had been missed in the past might now be a guiding light for the future.

Over the course of The Jane Austen Remedy, there are chapters devoted to each of Austen’s six novels, with Wilson discussing the plots, the universal lessons that might be learned from each, and how she relates the various storylines and heroines to her own life (while one doesn’t need to have read the novels to understand Wilson’s discussion of them — I haven’t read them all — I suppose this would be of ultimate interest to the diehard Austen fan). Wilson also shares what other novelists and biographers have written about Austen, but ultimately, this is Wilson’s memoir; the story of how she found herself living with the consequences of “being born on the wrong side of feminist history”, and I was fascinated by the whole thing. The heart of this work — and what sounds like the heart of Wilson’s career — might be found in the following:

Elie Wiesel’s novel Night is one of the earliest and most powerful testimonies to the enormous void in moral awareness in the absence of empathy. The Nobel prize-winning author reflected on why the heirs of Kant and Goethe, Germans who were among the best-educated people on earth, were not inhibited by their education from behaving as they did when they set out to exterminate whole human populations — not just Jews, but Romani, homosexuals, and people with intellectual or physical disabilities and mental illness. According to Wiesel, it was made possible by the fact that education — including education constructed around great literature — took the wrong direction. By emphasising theory and concepts and abstractions rather than values and consciousness and conscience, it subverted its own intentions. He was implying, I believe, that the factors contributing to the development of an empathetic consciousness were discouraged by the educational approach.

Wilson's background is as an educator, and not only did she lead a celebrated project on recording the stories of Holocaust survivors, but the emphasis on empathy over theory in her approach to education eventually led to a dissertation that “positions Jane Austen in the field of empathy”. (So while reading the six Austen novels and using their storylines to tell her own life story may seem slightly gimmicky, Wilson actually did re-read those novels in her eighth decade and became a published Austen expert; this is not so much gimmicky as a well-crafted exemplar of Wilson’s theories on empathy; I absolutely came around to seeing life through her eyes and recognise the bravery that it took to reclaim her life.)

That’s the thing about reading: our brains hold an archive of everything we have ever read. I have noticed that, in some mysterious way, reading memories surface from nowhere to connect with a random present moment. From Austen, Elizabeth, the Bennet family and marriage I wander into Margaret Drabble’s and Penelope Mortimer’s territory; I tune into remembered resonances with Graham Swift and Mothering Sunday, wander on to comparisons with Henry James and Isabel Archer, and then reflect on my own life and my own memories, pleasant and otherwise. That’s the rather messy business that we readers engage in as we look for coherence in what we are reading. It is also how many of us come to terms with our own lives, making some sort of sense of our life stories as we read.

 

Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today

 

What follows on tactile paper and in print, and through words and pictures, if even perhaps accessed digitally, is a survey of landscape and locations transformed by circumstances, some much disputed, or improbable and entirely unexpected; others, depressingly, almost grimly predictable. As such it ideally serves as a reminder of the mutability of existence but also a clarion call for the urgency of preserving what we hold dear for generations to come.

I read a digital ARC of the upcoming re-release of Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today, and while it was maybe not as consistently fascinating as I had hoped, I must note that this format didn’t include the “beautiful maps” and “stunning colour photography” promised in the publisher’s blurb (there are some black and white photos, but, alas, I read an atlas without maps; perhaps unfair to rate). As for the writing: Recounting the stories of some three dozen or so “vanished and vanishing places”, author Travis Elborough’s approach and tone throughout is rather inconsistent — sometimes professorial, sometimes colloquial — and as each story only lasts a few pages, there’s not a lot of depth here. Again: it feels unfair to rate this without the maps (the original release won Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards), but this book feels more like a jumping off point than the final word; coffee table book, not text book. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

Spanning from Xanadu to Timbuctu, Atlas of Vanishing Places is divided into four sections: Ancient Cities (familiar ones like Petra and Alexandria; new to me: the lost cities of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan and Leptos-Magna in Libya); Forgotten Lands (like Chan Chan in Peru and the River Fleet in London); Shrinking Places (the River Danube and the Florida Everglades); and Threatened Worlds (Venice and the Great Barrier Reef). And initially, I thought this was exactly what I hoped it would be: An early entry is about the Hittites — mentioned in the Old Testament and said to have been as powerful as the Assyrians and Babylonians, archeologists wondered how they could have disappeared without leaving behind so much as a shard of pottery — but eventually, ruins were uncovered in the Anatolian region of Turkey that would be identified as Hattusa: the epicentre of the Hittite Empire, which had been settled as far back as the sixth millennium BC. That was a wow to me: the actual rediscovery of a vanished, but once powerful, empire. But some entries are like the “vanished'' city of Shi Cheng in China: founded in the Tang dynasty around 1,300 years ago, the city was intentionally flooded in 1959 in order to create the Xin’anjiang Reservoir and Xin’an river hydroelectric station. Shi Cheng disappeared beneath the newly manmade Qiandao Lake and “for nearly fifty years Shi Cheng was almost entirely forgotten”. It was “rediscovered” by divers in 2001, and now known as “The Atlantis of the East”, Shi Cheng has become a popular scuba diving tourist attraction. Huh. Lost for nearly fifty years. Not a mind-blowing wow to me.

As for the oddly colloquial writing style: In telling the history of Bodie, California — a gold mining ghost town that the state of California curiously maintains in the “state of arrested decay” it had when they took it over in 1962 (instead of preserving it to its “1880s heyday”) — Elborough writes:

Something like 90 per cent of gold rush prospectors are calculated to have been male. Who then can really blame them for wanting to kick back with a Scotch or a beer, play some cards, and seek the embrace of another, or the oblivion of the poppy pipe, after a day of breaking rocks. But almost inevitably in a town inhabited by armed, and not infrequently inebriated transients, some ‘madder and badder’ to tangle with than others, violent crime was a fact of life.

Or when describing the pressures currently experienced by the Chihuahuan Desert on the American-Mexican border — which is in a state of ecological decline due to the diversion of water from the bordering Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo — Elborough writes:

With a name believed to derive from the Nahuatl for ‘dry, sandy place’ (and subsequently bestowed on a local breed of small, hairless pet dogs) you’d expect the Chihuahuan Desert to be quite deserted. This, after all, is North America’s largest desert, and deserts, by and large, are typically arid places where a lack of living things (water, trees, people) tends to be fairly front and centre. But deserts, even the driest and least inviting to animals and plants, contain subtle multitudes. And rather like silences (outside of vacuums) and as John Cage demonstrated with his famous 4'33" piece, they are often noisy with life.

The latter sections — which primarily deal with places that are under threat of vanishing due to current human activity — are mostly depressing. We read about threats to the Great Wall of China (a study completed in 2014 found that three quarters of it was “poorly preserved”; in 2018 a section of the wall in Ningxia was even bulldozed for farmland without consequence); the Yamuna in India is ‘“one of the dirtiest rivers on the planet” (more than twenty drains dispense toxic chemicals and raw sewage directly into the Yamuna in Delhi alone), and at Agra, the filthiness of the Yamuna is causing the Taj Mahal to yellow as the river is failing to absorb air pollutants and other matter; there’s not much new to be learned about glacier loss in Glacier National Park, or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, or increasing flooding in Venice, but Elborough includes them and we are forced to acknowledge the looming consequences of our lifestyles.

On the other hand, I was intrigued (to the point of putting them on my fantasy travel bucket list) by the stories of two at-risk-of-vanishing locations: The first is Skara Brae (or Skerrabra to the Orcadians) in the Orkney Islands (I had no idea that the Orkneys were only 80 km south of Greenland and experience some of the most extreme winds and waves in the world). The site of Skara Brae (which was uncovered by extreme weather in 1850) consists of four circular dry-stone wall dwellings dating from between 3200 and 2000 BC and were, apparently, abandoned quite suddenly; leaving behind an incredible collection of Stone Age artefacts. As the weather becomes ever more extreme, this coastal site could be washed away at any time.

On the other end of the world, I was also intrigued by Tuvalu: “The fourth smallest nation on earth and comprised of six coral atolls and three reef islands flung across several thousand square miles of the South Pacific between Hawaii and Australia”, as far back as 1989 the United Nations declared them one of the “most likely groups to disappear beneath the ocean in the 21st century because of global warming”. Despite its tropical island setting, Tuvalu is the least visited place on Earth (drawing about two thousand tourists a year) and their chief source of income comes from licensing its highly desirable internet domain, .tv, to an American company. Yet, despite many of its residents relocating to New Zealand for fear of the islands disappearing due to rising sea levels, a study by the University of Auckland in 2018 “maintained that the atolls far from shrinking have, overall, gained ground, with rising waves actually depositing more sediment onto their shores”. Like Skara Brae, Tuvalu feels like a visit now or never fantasy destination, and I wanna go!

I do appreciate that Elborough chose sites from all around the world — there are many locales included in this book that I had never heard of before, and that’s what I was hoping for — and I’ll say again that, without the maps included, my experience is incomplete. I will also say: I was never bored (even if I didn’t always appreciate the weirdly joking bits) but I guess I wanted more.

Lapvona

 

There were only a few dozen families in Lapvona when Ina was a child, and they all worked and lived together peacefully until the plague took half of them to heaven. That changed everything. The houses were burned down with the dead inside for fear that burying the bodies would infect the ground. The survivors became infected with fear and greed. Guilt was extinct in Lapvona thereafter.

I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by Ottessa Moshfegh, until now. Reading like a fairy tale — vaguely set in some Mediaeval European village, written in short, declarative sentences, with cartoonishly bad guys, and a witch who smokes cannabis through a hollowed-out human bone — we are presented with a world (not unlike our own) in which common people are forced by unchallengeable systems to suffer for their daily bread while the fat cats gets fatter. There are many acts of depravity along the way (every imaginable content warning might be given), but overall, I found this dull and unedifying: nothing unique is revealed about humanity or society; the fairy tale ends with no moral; I was not entertained along the way. I would give 2.5 stars if I could, and I just can’t bring myself to round up. (And I wish to emphasise how disappointed that makes me.)

Marek was a small boy and had grown crookedly, his spine twisted in the middle so that the right side of his rib cage protruded from his torso, which caused his arm to find its only comfort resting, half bent, across his belly. His left arm hung loose from its socket. His legs were bowed. His head was also mishapen, although he hid his skull under a tattered knit hat and bright red hair that had never once been brushed or cut. His father — whose long, uncut hair was brown — admonished vanity as a cardinal sin.

Although the POV is rotating omniscient (jumping between the minds of about a dozen characters), the point could be made that thirteen-year-old Marek is the main character of Lapvona. Raised by his abusive single-father, Jude — a brutish shepherd who only has love for his lambs and who self-flagellates every Friday for the glory of God — Marek believes that the only way to join his dead mother in heaven is to suffer on Earth, so his relationship with Jude involves provoking his father into beating him (for the glory of God!) and then enjoying Jude’s remorseful ministrations. Marek also finds comfort in spending time with his wizened old dried-up wet nurse (don’t ask!), and when he goes on an adventure with the handsome young son of the Lord of the Manor, events are set in motion that have long-lasting effects on the village. The main thing to know about Marek is: He may have been introduced as a sympathetic character — the village outcast with the horrifying homelife — but he’s as loathsome as any character here; high-born or low-, humanity is naught but a bushel of mushy apples, rotten to the core.

Moshfegh does a fine job of demonstrating how constricting societal systems are: The Lord, Villiam, and his right-hand man, Father Barnabas, are dim-witted, gluttonous, and self-satisfied. And although neither of them are capable of considered leadership, they set the rules — societal and religious — for life in Lapvona, and the villagers toil and suffer and follow those rules without question. If this is meant to be an allegory for modern society — buffoons rise to the top while the rest of us spin our wool, pay our taxes, and assemble like sheep for a Sunday Mass we don’t understand — it would work better if there was even one decent character to root for; if the plot led to a moral or character growth or a point. (There is one character — introduced in the beginning and not heard from again for two hundred pages — who smokes weed with the witch and has a sort of epiphany about the interconnectedness of people and the despotic nature of their strict society, but he doesn’t affect the plot or bring about change, so he doesn’t, ultimately, matter.)

Perhaps it is most miraculous when God exacts justice even when no human lifts a finger. Or perhaps it is simply fate. Everything seems reasonable in hindsight. Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by.

This quote from near the end is as close as Moshfegh comes to making a point, and it was too little and too late for me. I was not impressed by the sentences or the overall effort, I was often bored (and a little annoyed by my level of boredom), and I could have taken a pass on this read. I will, however, look forward to reading Moshfegh again.

Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment

 

“Johnny,” Thompson had reportedly informed him, “we were just sitting here talking about you, and then we started talking about my needs, and what I need is a 40,000-candlepower illumination grenade. Big, bright bastards, that’s what I need. See if you can get them for me. I might be coming to Baton Rouge to interview [imprisoned former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards, and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.”

I was so intrigued when I read that the title for Which as You Know Means Violence came from the above exchange between Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame that, despite not having a firm appreciation (or, really, understanding) of performance art as a whole, I was delighted to have been approved for an ARC and flew through this in a couple of hours. Writer and art critic Philippa Snow analyses the use of pain and self-harm in performance art — covering artists from Buster Keaton and Marina Abramović to Johnny Knoxville and modern YouTube stars — and her knowledge and enthusiasm went a long way towards growing my appreciation for the performance of violence as an artform. This was entirely satisfying as a general interest read, seems like it would be valuable for those with prior knowledge in the field, and I am enlarged for having read it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Because common sense dictates that hurting oneself is an idiotic act rather than one that can be radical, meaningful or creatively fulfilling, and because the players themselves were quick to distance themselves from performance artists on the grounds that categorising oneself as such was unforgivably pretentious, I had only been vaguely aware of the show when it first began to air, seeing it as a stupid joke for boys. Later, with the benefit of an arts education, I found it harder and harder to tell the difference between what Johnny Knoxville et al. did and what, for instance, Chris Burden had done in 1971 when he enlisted an anonymous friend to shoot him in the arm as what he called a commentary on “a sort of American tradition of getting shot.” Wasn’t Jackass, in its way, a kind of commentary on the directionless, uninsured and broke American slacker’s own tradition of, metaphorically speaking, getting kicked extremely forcefully in the balls?

I must confess: I have never seen an episode of Jackass, thinking of it, as Snow initially did, as a “bro-ish showcase of self-injury beloved by male lunkheads”. As an initial set-up, it seemed like a hard sell for Snow to convince me that fratboy stunts involving the abuse of rectums and penises could be considered “art”. But Snow quotes critic Uncas Blythe as writing in 2015, “The Jackass Decade, which began with the national wound of 9/ 11 and ended a hair early with the fiery crash of Ryan Dunn on June 20th, 2011, was a shamanic displacement of war trauma onto what looked to the untrained rationalist eye like idiot clowns, but who in fact were voodoo medics for the whole of American culture.” If Knoxville can elicit that kind of response, and attract the attention of Hunter S. Thompson, he must be culturally significant; but is he an artist? That — through an exploration of the history of self-harm as performance art by self-declared artists — is the question that Snow sets out to answer, and she satisfied me that the answer to the question must be “yes”.

A bad idea, executed with full commitment, can be transmuted into a good or even great idea if it is suitably interesting, unexpected, dazzling, or entertaining. It can also be transmuted into art — an act of conceptual significance, meant to elucidate some facet of society or culture that is in itself a bad idea, whether that facet is war, sex, love, patriarchal violence, or a yen for self-destruction. Whether the practitioner believes his or her bad idea to be conceptually significant rather than simply an amusing, violent goof is one way for an audience to determine whether they are watching art or entertainment.

I was recently introduced to the performance artist Bob Flanagan (whose The Pain Journal was excerpted by Eileen Myles in Pathetic Literature) and I was moved by his use of self-harm and S&M eroticism to make commentary on living with chronic disease (I didn’t need to look up the film to be provoked by the mental image of him pounding a nail through his own penis while singing If I Had a Hammer). Snow devotes a good chunk of space to Flanagan’s work and its meaning, and ultimately, if one accepts his self-violence as art, one must also make that determination about Knoxville and the Jackass crew, too.

This is something the performance artist, the comedian, and the stuntman have in common: an ability to conjure, often using very little means other than courage and inventiveness, an immediate reaction from the viewer, whether that reaction happens to be laughter, relief, schadenfreude, horror, terror, psychic agony or spiritual ecstasy. It is shocking to consider how close Abramović came to being shot in Rhythm Zero, just as it is shocking to read about injuries sustained by famous men who trash themselves for entertainment. In both cases, we could broadly commend this as a commitment to the bit.

Ultimately, reading Which as You Know Means Violence is like attending an art lecture, and I leave the experience with greater knowledge and appreciation for the topic. What more could one ask?

The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us

 

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.

The Revolt Against Humanity is a fascinating exploration of the idea that humanity’s end is nigh, and that that’s not a bad thing. Compiling the recent history of this idea as written about by poets, scientists, philosophers, and novelists, columnist/editor/poet Adam Kirsch divides our impending extinction into two schools of thought: The Anthropocene Antihumanists (who believe that we are killing the Earth to the point that it can’t sustain us; and good riddance) and Transhumanists (who believe that we are approaching the “Singularity”; the point at which we will create the AI that replaces us as Earth’s so-called apex creation). At heart a philosophical treatise, Kirsch repeatedly makes it clear (through the writing of others) that there really is no point to the continuance of the human race: we are bad for the environment, bad to each other, not particularly happy as individuals, and there’s nothing inherently valuable in the way our species has evolved to interact with reality. I was surprised and provoked by many of the statements in this book, but I didn’t actually find it bleak: the events predicted by the assembled experts will either happen or they won’t, but there is value in contemplating how to find meaning in the present (at both personal and societal levels) if humanity doesn’t have a long future. I think that Kirsch definitely met his brief with this and I can’t give fewer than five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so. The attempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the thread that connects the figures discussed in this book.

I highlighted so many passages and ideas, and they are for the most part self-explanatory, so I’m just going to assemble some lightly edited copy/paste bullet points without commentary:

• Antihumanists reject any claim humanity might once have had to admiration and solidarity. Instead, they invest their admiration in the non-human: animals, plants, rocks, water, air. Any of these entities is superior to humanity, for the simple reason that it doesn’t destroy all the others.

• Patricia MacCormack, whose book The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020), calls for “an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.” The second part of this demand is to be met by “the deceleration of human life through cessation of reproduction” and by “advocating for suicide [and] euthanasia.”

• David Benatar appeals to our compassion for humans yet unborn, arguing that the best thing we could do for them is to make sure they stay that way. The title of Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (2006) captures the paradox at the heart of his argument…When it comes to pain and pleasure, he argues, our duties are not symmetrical : “While there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being.” But according to Benatar, there is no such thing as a life that contains more happiness than suffering. In the final account, every life runs into the red; “there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.”

• In Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019 ), Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson write that a child born today will reach middle age in a world that is “cleaner, safer, quieter. The oceans will start to heal and the atmosphere cool — or at least stop heating.” The combination of population decline with advances in green technology means that E. O. Wilson’s half-Earth proposal might come true even without deliberate action. By 2100, we might be using less than half as much energy and land as we do today.

I was surprised to read that the declining birthrate might so quickly lead to environmental renewal, but even so:

• A study of 600 people of childbearing age published in the journal Climatic Change in 2020 found that 92 percent believed that the future would be worse than the present, while less than 1 percent said it would be better.

The only thing that makes humanity unique, transhumanists believe, is our ability to compensate for our biological weaknesses with the power of technology. Slower than horses, weaker than elephants, less versatile than roaches, humans dominate them all because we are able to change ourselves, while they are stuck with the abilities nature gave them. It’s not recent technologies like pacemakers that make us cyborg-like; we have always been cyborgs, because technology has always been a fundamental part of human being.

• French thinker Julien Offray de la Mettrie, whose 1748 pamphlet “Man Is a Machine” made a witty but serious case that “the human body is a machine that winds its own springs.” There is no metaphysical gulf between human and animal, or between animate and inanimate matter; the only difference has to do with how matter is organized. As La Mettrie puts it, “Nature has only one and the same dough for all, she has only varied the amount of yeast.”

• In 2008, English longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey posited that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old had already been born.

• For transhumanists, the singularity serves the same imaginative purposes that the perpetual motion machine did for generations of engineers: it promises to give us something for nothing. Scientific problems that are currently beyond our ability to solve, such as mind uploading and interstellar travel, can be adjourned until the singularity, when a superintelligent AI will solve them for us. So it is tempting to conclude that, like perpetual motion, the singularity is an impossible fantasy. But AI violates no law of physics, and the best-informed researchers seem confident that it can and will be achieved.

• David Bostrom observes, “the expected arrival date for AI ‘has been receding at a rate of one year per year’ ever since it was first predicted”. But he describes his work as “philosophy with a deadline”: at some point, he is certain the question of how to coexist with nonhuman minds will have to be answered. What will become of humanity when we have to relinquish our position as the planet’s protagonist — when history is no longer identical with human history?

• For physicist Michio Kaku, a SIM (Substrate Independent Mind) translated into photons is what will enable us to conquer the immense distances of outer space. “One day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel,” he writes in The Future of Humanity. “I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.”

Incidentally, Kirsch sums up the position of each side through recent fiction (of particular interest to me as I’ve read both novels). On the antihumanist side, Kirsch relates events from Richard Powers’ award-winning ecofiction The Overstory (and in particular, a scene in which a scientist drinks poison “as a demonstration of how human beings can best advance the cause of nature”). By contrast, Kirsch examines Ian McEwan’s transhumanist novel Machines Like Me (in which early AI robots choose to turn themselves off once they learn the ugliness at the hearts of the humans they are programmed to emulate, “There’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.”) If the idea that humanity is facing extinction (and that that is a good thing) is a thoroughly twenty-first century concept, it’s unsurprising to read that it’s the novelists who are tolling the bell.

If rational thought leads to the conclusion that a world without human beings in it is superior to one where we exist, then doing away with humanity might be the consummation of humanism. There may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: “There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”

The Night Ship

 

Mayken listens to the nighttime noises of the ship. Nearest to her: Imke’s snores. Farther away: feasting in the Great Cabin, muffled roars and shouts. It’s the skipper’s night. And the constant rhythmic creak of the ship. It’s a plain, easy-sailing night. The night ship rocks everyone in her round wooden belly.

I find Jess Kidd’s writing incredibly engaging — the imaginative situations, the savoury characters, the plausibility of ghosts — and with The Night Ship, she brings her familiar sensibilities to bear on a fictionalised account of actual events. In 1629, the merchant ship The Batavia set sail for the Dutch East Indies (laden with riches, wealthy and poor passengers, and apparently, at least one monster), but never reached its destination. Foundering on a coral reef, the ship’s crew was able to ferry some two hundred souls to safety on nearby atolls; but between mutiny, mismanagement, megalomania, and murder, not many of those shipwrecked would live to tell their tale. In alternating storylines, Kidd tells the story of two children — a poor little rich girl who set sail on the fateful ship in the seventeenth century and a sad little boy who is brought to live with his fisherman Grandpa in 1989 — and beyond sharing time across the centuries on the same lonely spit of shingle and scrub, the experiences of these two children chime together in surprising and meaningful ways. Perhaps not quite as creatively dazzling as Kidd’s last (Things in Jars, which I simply adored), I was, nevertheless, more emotionally affected by The Night Ship (maybe because it’s about sad children, maybe because it is — at least in part — based on true and horrifying events) and I would give it 4.5 stars if I could but am happily rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The child sails in a crowded boat to the end of the Zuyder Zee. Past the foreshores of shipyards and warehouses, past new stone houses and the occasional steeple, on this day of dull weather, persistent drizzle and sneaking cold. There are many layers to this child: undergarments, middle garments, and top garments. Mayken is made of pale skin and small white teeth and fine fair hair and linen and lace and wool and leather. There are treasures sewn into the seams of her clothing, small and valuable, like her.

Mayken van der Heuvel — who has recently lost her mother and is being sent across the world to the rich father she has never met; a great man, though perhaps not a nice man — is nine years old and considered a “fine lady”; to be treated with the respect of her station so long as she keeps to her place aft-the-mast. But being nine and out in the world for the first time, Mayken can’t help but explore belowdecks, where she makes friends with everyone from the kitchenboy to the barber-surgeon to an English soldier who tells her the legends of sea monsters. The stink and stars and superstitions of these sections were wondrously wrought.

The child sails in the carrier boat to Beacon Island. The boat left Geraldton at first light. Now, late morning, they are nearing their destination and sea and sky are dazzling blue. Gil is made of pale skin and red hair and thrifted clothes. His shoes, worn down on the outsides, lend an awkward camber to his walk. Old ladies like him, they think he’s old-fashioned. Truck drivers like him because he takes an interest in their rigs. Everyone else finds him weird.

Gil Hurley — who has recently lost his mother and is being sent to the middle of nowhere to live with the grandfather he’s rarely met; a gruff loner and unlikely guardian — is also nine years old; sensitive and undersized, Gil is warned to stick to his grandfather’s camp as the old man isn’t well-liked among the island’s small community. But being nine and on his own for the first time, Gil can’t help but gingerly explore his surroundings when the loud men are out at sea, and he makes tentative friends with a local woman, a scientist (who tells him stories of the famous Batavia shipwreck), and a friendly deckhand (who fills the boy in on local legends through story and song). Perhaps because it’s closer in time, Gil’s losses and struggles felt more tragic to me, and these sections tugged at my heart.

In each section, the children learn the tales of slippery shadow monsters — call it an enormous eel, Bunyip, the Bullebak — and I was repeatedly enchanted by stories that began like: There was once this village, just like any Dutch village, only unluckier. Vegetables grew spindly, the animals were sickly, and the people were ugly. Being nine, both Mayken and Gil absolutely believe in the possibility of supernatural monsters, but as the scientist in the 1980’s warns the boy:

“The greatest shame of humankind is the failure of the strong to protect the weak. We don’t need monsters, Gil, we are the monsters.”

There are many chimes and echoes between the children’s stories — which sometimes charmed me and sometimes felt a bit forced — but it did feel organic to witness the historical events in real time and then reconsider them through a modern child’s sensibilities:

Gil imagines the survivors. Everyday people who probably moaned about the weather and having to eat bony fish. Then they battered one another to death as the water ran out. In Birgit’s book there’s a picture of a skull with a piece knocked out. He was killed running away, they reckoned. If you listened to that skull, held it up to your ear like a seashell, you might hear the clashing of swords and gurgling, then three hundred and sixty years of nothing. Why wouldn’t the dead Dutch be pissed off when the fishermen arrived, and the scientists, stirring up their old bones, trying to tell their story?

Historical fiction overlaid with Jess Kidd’s knack for a spooky campfire tale; I lapped it all up.