He is Risen indeed!
Also… simnel cake.
All
A poem for Good Friday
At my church service this morning, we had various different ‘stations’ through which to worship, pray, or reflect. There was a communion table, a short film, a cross to which we could pin pieces of paper, and there was a poem/story table. In advance, I was one of the people asked to write something to go on the wall – basically any perspective on the Passion. I chose to write something from the perspective of a man who’d been in the crowd on Palm Sunday and at the Crucifixion – and I thought I’d share it here too.
I am an ordinary man,
And more I would not want to be.
The streets throughout Jerusalem
Are filled with people just like me.
Are filled with people just like me.
On Sunday I joined with the rest,
And laid my branches on the ground,
And saw him – and was unimpressed;
This man who passed without a sound.
No chariot? No royal throne?
No golden cloak or signs of wealth?
He rode a donkey like my own –
The twin of that I ride myself.
A short time later, tables turned,
Almost (it felt) in the same breath,
This so-called king (I quickly learned)
Was praised no more, but sent to death.
Again, I settled with the crowd;
A spectacle to pass the time.
Again, I shouted, just as loud.
The punishment must fit the crime.
But what, I wondered, had he done?
Why didn’t he put up a fight?
He told the priest he was the Son.
It struck me: what if he were right?
What kind of god, what kind of king,
Is strung up for a killer’s fate?
But still, in spite of everything,
I sensed him giving love to hate.
I watched, in awe, as night grew nigh,
And waited, and grew more perplexed.
“It is finished!” I heard him cry –
And yet he died! What next? What next?
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
If you’ve listened to the latest episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ then you’ll have heard that I’ve been reading The Moving Toyshop (1946) by Edmund Crispin. It’s always nice to read something that’s been on my shelves for a while, and the note inside the front tells me that I bought it in Edinburgh on 23 September 2009. Eventually somebody chose it for my book group (I don’t even think it was me) so I finally got around to it.
The Moving Toyshop is, in short, a very good novel and a rather poor murder mystery. And I don’t even think this is my usual comparing-things-to-Agatha foible. But more on that anon… The premise is undeniably fab. Richard Cadogan has wandered to Oxford, and somehow finds himself in a toyshop in the middle of the night on ‘Iffley Road’ (which he has put where Cowley Road is, according to the map in the front – yessir, I have local knowledge, since I live off Iffley Road). In said toyshop there is, it turns out, a murdered woman – but before Cadogan can do much about it, he is knocked on the head and put in a cupboard. (That becomes something of a motif in the novel, incidentally; people are forever being knocked on the head and put in cupboards.) He escapes in the morning, but when he returns later… the toyshop has gone.
It’s a brilliant idea, and it’s something of a pity that the resulting plot doesn’t live up to it. Ultimately (I think) this doesn’t stop The Moving Toyshop being a brilliant book – but it is a pity nonetheless. Cadogan enlists the help of reckless Gervase Fen, a witty Professor of English Language and Literature who jets about in his car, flirting and slighting left, right, and centre, and between them they try to unearth the culprit.
Things quickly become far more complicated, and we get into a quagmire of tracking down various legatees to a will, poetic code names and all, where coincidences abound and solutions are seldom interrogated too closely. The characters even talk about how often coincidences happen in real life, and that we never comment on them there… well, that’s as maybe, but even so I wouldn’t be certain that (when needing to find a woman with a spotty dog) that the first woman with a spotty dog that I saw was definitely the one I needed. And the ultimate solution to the moving toyshop is riddled with improbabilities.
But, as I say, this scarcely matters. What makes this novel such a delight is how funny it is. Neither Cadogan nor Fen are particularly sympathetic characters, but before have a great way with words and aren’t afraid of sarcasm. Their teasing of each other, somewhere between affectionate and barbed, is also echoed by the narrative. Crispin throws in lots of description wonders, such as this:
The ‘Mace and Sceptre’ is a large and quite hideous hotel which stands in the very centre of Oxford and which embodies, without apparent shame, almost every architectural style devised since the times of primitive man.
I’m not sure which actual hotel this was referring to, if any, but I do hope it was The Mitre, where my book group meets. That would be wonderfully appropriate.
I didn’t write down many instances, but this sort of thing recurs throughout the book, making it a patchwork of gleeful sentences that more than excuse the plot. Some of the most fun came when Cadogan was talking about poetry or Fen was talking about academic English. I particularly loved Crispin’s riff on a lecture that Fen gave, and the undergraduates’ longing for opportunities for wild conjecture. Oh, and the policeman who always wants to ask Fen about Measure for Measure! It’s all such fun, particularly for anybody who has studied English literature – though a late speech in the novel is quite moving about the creation of literature, somehow without feeling out of place.
Also, speaking personally, it’s such fun to read a novel about the city where I live. I’ve actually read surprisingly few novels set in Oxford, given how many there are out there, and certainly not many where a knowledge of the layout of streets is useful. Plus it meant we got lines like this:
Oxford is the one place in Europe where a man may do anything, however eccentric, and arouse no interest or emotion at all.
I can’t speak for all of Europe, but this is certainly still true in Oxford. I long ago learned, particularly, that people could wear anything at all on the street – from ball gown to horse costume – without anybody turning a hair. Oxford’s acceptance of eccentricity and general live-and-let-live attitude is one of the reasons I’ve found it impossible to leave yet.
Apparently all of Crispin’s novels were detective novels – though detection is rather a kind word for what Fen does. I would rather he had written a different sort of novel, where he could concentrate on the comedy and forget about plot, but perhaps others of his are more watertight in this respect. Either way, this was a complete delight, and I’m glad it came off my shelf after 5.5 years.
Song for a Sunday
Last week I went to my fourth gig/concert ever; I am not prolific at such things, for the mixed reasons that my favourite singers don’t tour in the UK, and I don’t know who would agree to go with me. BUT I did know a few folk who thought that Postmodern Jukebox sounded fun.
PMJ take pop songs and reimagine them in a vintage style, from 1920s to 1960s. The singers and band were all astonishingly talented, and it was a great night. To get a taste of it, here is their take on Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself’…
Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin
I love Calvin Trillin’s fiction and his non-fiction, and picked up a couple of his books when I was in America last year (do other people see him on shelves in the UK? I don’t think I do). I wasn’t sure quite when I’d want to read an account of the downfall of a highschool sports star, but something about the unusually specific nature of this biography appealed to me when I picked it up a couple of months ago. That unusual memoir angle seems to be the theme of this week, doesn’t it?
Remembering Denny (1993) is a peculiar choice for Trillin. The book is about Denny Hansen, somebody Trillin knew at Yale, and the account of how he went from being a high school star to taking his own life in his fifties. Despite only knowing him for a short period of that time, and certainly not being a close friend for life, Trillin wanted to document the journey – speaking with various people who knew him at different stages, putting together a composite image of a single Hansen from many seemingly irreconcilable Hansens. (The title of the book seems one that reflects friendship, but to call him Denny in a review would feel patronising, so I shan’t.) And then: could Trillin discover exactly why it was that Hansen killed himself?
Trillin is such a fine, intuitive, and sensitive writer that he can take the ordinary and mundane and somehow turn it into gold – without ever seeming to overwrite or even display a style. It is the writing of a very talented journalist, rather than a novelist (though in his novels, style and timbre come to the fore); we hear about Hansen’s warm smile, his popularity, his promise, and Trillin makes it seem original. Even more impressive, he makes it seem personal even when writing about a Hansen he had not yet met. Of course, at Yale we get a closer view of Hansen – from Trillin’s own eyes. There are more anecdotes – or perhaps, rather, more evidence to back up the summation of traits, since nothing here seems framed in the ‘here’s-a-funny-story-you-should-hear’ that one expects from a biography. Instead, they compose a narrative of a successful, kind, loved, but very pressured man:
As Denny, he seemed to have a limitless future. We emerged from Yale in June of the year that has since been called a high point in American prosperity. With the peace-making general in the White House and the Cold War having settled into what seemed to us to be a more or less permanent struggle between the good guys and the bad guys, there were reasons to see limitless futures for a lot of people. When I talked to Andre Schiffrin after Denny’s death, he said the picture that comes into his mind when he thinks about how Yale undergraduates viewed the future in those days is Stairway to Heaven – moving up through the clouds on a blissful escalator. We had the usual problems of deciding what we wanted to do, of course, but those problems came partly from the assumption that very little was shut off.
Away from Yale, particularly as the decades move on, the portrait becomes less clear. People lost touch with Hansen; those who met him for the first time in these later years gave less detailed pictures, and seemed less close. Hansen’s character becomes more of a mystery to the reader, presumably because it was a mystery to those who had known him. If Trillin wants to join the dots between the high school success and the man who took his life, then he doesn’t quite succeed. The trail runs cold, because the character becomes less vivid.
Hansen is described as depressive, in debilitating back pain (requiring several, ultimately unsuccessful, operations), and struggling with his sexuality. Any or all of these could have contributed to his decision to kill himself, Trillin writes. But for him, it seems almost as though suicide were the inevitable end to the downward trajectory that Hansen’s life had taken. And this is where I take issue with Remembering Denny, for all of its excellent and often very sensitive writing.
My main problem with this book – but it is a problem that came up on almost every page – was that Trillin took it for granted that Hansen was a failure in his career. He was supposed (so goes the high school reputation) to be a part of a government, if not the President himself. He was not these things, but he was a respected professor with many publications to his name, still working and teaching in his field. I cannot emphasise enough (from the perspective of somebody who has done graduate study and has many friends who are or want to be professional academics) that this is a huge success that relatively few aspiring academics achieve. There must, of course, have been factors that led to Hansen’s suicide, and perhaps he viewed his own career as a failure – but there is no reason for Trillin to consider it that. It really wasn’t. The stumbling block seemed very strange, given Trillin’s usual sensitivity and empathy.
But if one can overlook that, Remembering Denny is an interesting and unusual book. Only Trillin could have written it, I think, and – for any faults it has – that is something rather special.
How quirky is too quirky?
I’ve had a lovely long weekend in Shropshire – more on that before too long, hopefully – but remembered last night at 11.30 that I was supposed to be writing at Vulpes Libris today…
WELL I have – it’s on All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman, but more broadly on… how quirky is too quirky? Do let me know your thoughts there or here.
Happy Wednesday!
The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller
Hidden away, high on a shelf, in a secondhand bookshop in Bath, was a plain green volume. I can spot a 1930s hardback at a hundred metres, and thought it was worth pulling it down, to see what it was… well, truth be told, when I saw the title The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller (1931), I was hardly likely to leave it where I found it.
It claims to be anonymous, but is actually by William Darling – as somebody has inscribed in the front of my copy. I thought perhaps it was signed by the author, but the pencil note underneath (‘let’s hope I don’t have to write one!’) makes me think that perhaps the Bath bookshop owner put it in there himself.
The book is a collection of very short essays and observations, often no more than a couple of pages long, and give the life of a bookseller. It’s not easy to see how much of it is fiction (it’s certainly not the non-fiction account the narrator asserts), but I’m going to assume that Darling had at least some familiarity with running a bookshop. Sometimes it is about the customers who come in. Sometimes about ordering stock. Often he is diverted into talking about books in general, whether madness in books, books with pictures, blue books, etc. Here, as an example, is part of an enjoyable explanation about the life cycle of unfashionable books:
The first stage is when it arrives – after much of Sunday Times and Observer heralding. It is almost hot from the printers and, if it is a great success, I may sell my three or maybe six. I am encouraged. I believe the book is going to be the big book of the year. I buy another six, and the comes the frost. I am left with them. Strenuously practising salesmanship, I sell – on credit – one – maybe two – more, but the four remain. What can I do with them?
Their jackets – they have always wonderful jackets – coats of many colours – get rubbed and torn and they languish. They become tired and weary. I lose taste of them. I ignore them.
Some Monday I put them into the window. I expatiate to any who will listen on their claims to attention. They are worth buying, if only as representing a phase, I plead. It avails nothing.
I take them out of the window. I try a little longer with them on the counters and then – they are in the old shelves at the back shop incurably, definitely bad stock.
And so it goes on! The narrator/author/character is a genial man, though he has a few stern words to say about the draper working next door, and the draper’s customers. This (inevitably fictitious) draper is also the writer of the preface. This lends some amusement to a volume that remains amusing, even when we learn at the outset that the supposed bookseller has died, penniless, before his papers were discovered.
Alongside the lighthearted tone, the author has created an entertaining and likeable character. Is he the mouthpiece for the authors opinions? One has to assume so, when he recommends books (and this is one of the chief joys of the collection – the number of recommendations from a 1930s perspective, though perhaps not always entirely up my street) though perhaps not at other times.
I love what an unexpected find this was, and how unusual. Who would publish this sort of book today? Those of us who love the 1930s are always after different perspectives on it, and something like this very clearly ticks all sorts of boxes for me and my tastes.
So why hasn’t it escalated into my all-time favourites? Hard to say. Perhaps I would have preferred it to be clearly fictional, or to be actually non-fictional. Maybe the joke wasn’t carried quite far enough, or the mix of satire and sincerity didn’t quite work perfectly. But, if not an all-time favourite, it’s definitely on the second or third tier – extremely enjoyable to read, and a gem for my ever-growing books-about-books shelf.
Celia’s Secret: an investigation by Michael Frayn and David Burke
I seem to be rather a fan of niche non-fiction. One of my favourites is the biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett written by her secretary, but I love the idea of books looking at one aspect of a career or a very particular angle on a person. This being the case, I couldn’t resist picking up Celia’s Secret (2000) by Michael Frayn and David Burke last year on Charing Cross Road. And that’s despite its frankly horrendous title, sounding like the worst sort of romance novel.
I’ve only read one novel by Frayn (Spies) and have seen none of his plays; I certainly know nothing the play Copenhagen, around which this book centres. It doesn’t really matter, though I’m sure fans of Copenhagen will enjoy this even more; Frayn quickly glosses it as characters ‘discovering quantum mechanics and developing nuclear fission, then exploring some of the philosophical darknesses of the human mind’. And then he less quickly glosses (in the introduction)…
The subject of Copenhagen, I should explain, is itself a mystery – the strange visit that the German physicist Werner Hesienberg paid to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. They were old friends and colleagues, but Denmark was now under German occupation, and Hesienberg had become an enemy. Though he couldn’t say it openly to Bohr, he had also become the head of the Nazi Government’s nuclear programme. The two men had a private conversation which ended abruptly and angrily, and their great friendship along with it; but no one has ever been able to reconstruct what they said to each other, or to agree on what Heisenberg’s intentions were in making his unwelcome but evidently pressing visit.
To be honest, the play sounds pretty boring – but the aftermath of it is very interesting. The director of the play received a letter from a Celia Rhys-Evans, the current resident of the house where the physicists were interned in England. Celia had discovered notes in German, hidden under the floorboards, and thought the director of the play might be interested in them. The director spoke no German, so he passed them onto Frayn.
From here, Frayn begins a correspondence with Celia. She is an odd character, only giving one sheet of paper at a time, filling her letters with eccentricities and even suggesting that Frayn start paying her for the letters. He deals with these eccentricities because he is so intrigued by the documents he is being sent. And those documents are bizarre. The first seems to be instructions for assembling a table tennis table, but with curious lists and amendments that indicate a code…
The book is divided between Frayn and David Burke, one of the actors in Copenhagen, with whom Frayn discusses the issue. I shan’t spoil what happens in the book, but Celia’s reasons for sending the papers are not all they seem. There are winding paths here, and more surprises and character development than many novels. Indeed, it could easily have been the plot of a novel.
I imagine this was a bit of a gamble for the publisher, as the natural audience for Celia’s Secret might be quite select – but I am evidence that one doesn’t need to have any prior familiarity with Copenhagen to enjoy it.
StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany
Happy weekend! Hope you’ve got lots of lovely things planned. Mine will hopefully include editing a podcast at some point, so that will be out early next week, but for today… let’s have a book, a blog post, and a link.
1.) The blog post – is the always-funny Jenny from Reading the End being extra specially funny about the Brontes. What’s the Bronte-est thing that happens in Claire Harman’s new biography of Charlotte? Find out…
2.) The link – who doesn’t love interspecies friendship? And etymology? I don’t think I’ve shared this, that I wrote a couple of weeks ago for OxfordWords about words you didn’t know shared an etymological origin.
3.) The book – coming out in a few days (if you’re in the US) and in late April (in the UK) is Helen Oyeyemi’s first collection of short stories, called What is Not Yours is Not Yours. Coming full circle in these three points (triangle?) is that I heard about it on Jenny’s podcast. A proof copy is now in my hot little hands, and I’m looking forward to starting it soon. I think it’s two different publishers on either side of the Pond, and the US and UK covers are very different. Which do you prefer?
I, Messiah by Donald Southey
I wonder how many of my readers expect me to write a review – and a positive review, no less – of a sci-fi novel-cum-parable? Full disclosure: the author is a friend of the family, but I had resolved not to write about it at all if I didn’t like I, Messiah (2011). Luckily, and rather to my surprise given my allergy to sci-fi, I thought it a really good book.
Even before we get to the title page, we know this is about robots. Indeed, from the title alone you might have spotted the reference to I, Robot and on the first page (and essential to know before going any further) is a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov’s famous laws of robotics, as follows:
First Law: a robot shall never cause any harm to a human being; nor, by his inaction, endanger or allow harm to come to a human being.
Second Law: subject to the First Law, a robot shall obey every direct command of a human being; firstly of his master, then of any other human.
Third Law: subject to the First and Second Laws, a robot shall always endeavour to preserve his own safety and that of other robots.
I, Messiah is set in a world where robots are fairly common as aids, but their development is still very much a matter of scientific research and subject to change. The narrator, John Smith, has recently gone through a divorce and decides to get a Self Instructing Decision Making Intelligent Cyber Servant, version 3 (SIDMICS-3), known as Sid. A scientist, ‘Davy’ Jones, is in charge of customising robots for buyers, and he is the main contact for John throughout.
From the outset, Sid is immaculately helpful and companionable. He not only follows all Three Laws of Robots, but is something of a friend too. John quickly has him charge himself in comfort in the house, rather than isolated outside, and they have conversations rather than simple command/obey exchanges. Lest you’re thinking this is like the film Her, they don’t fall in love – but things do start to develop bizarrely.
Sid starts to see things in his sleep; they realise he can dream. But it is not this which brings him to John’s side several times in the night…
That night, there was another soft knocking at my door.
“Sid, is that you?”
“Yes, John, you called me.”
“Look, Sid, I did not call you. Go back to your room and don’t disturb me again. OK?”
If you know your Bible, you’ll probably recognise an intentional parallel to the account of Samuel and Eli in 1 Samuel, where the boy Samuel thinks that he is being repeatedly called by Eli. Each time Eli denies having called him, and eventually realises that it is God calling Samuel. The same thing is happening here; it is God (or ‘the voice’) who is calling Sid.
Sid takes this in his stride; he is well aware of his human creators, and it isn’t much of a leap for him to accept God as creator. John Smith finds it much more of a struggle, as an avowed atheist. From here (because I don’t want to give away all the plot) things develop in the direction of tragedy, but with a few twists and turns. It’s not precisely a parable of the account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – because it is a world where Jesus exists and where Sid could be considered a representation of Jesus – but it works well without falling neatly in either direction. And it’s quite a poignant and moving story, even without a comparison to the Gospel.
So, I’m as surprised as anybody that I enjoyed this – if you can get me on board with a novel about robots, then you’ve done extremely well. You may not think this sounds like your cup of tea (let’s face it; we’re most of us more at home with novels about 1930s housewives gossiping over tea) (I instantly want to read that hypothetical novel) but, if you fancy dipping a toe into new territory, I very much encourage you to give I, Messiah a go. You can find out more about the book here, and buy it there too, if you’d like.