Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, 1901

Many of the classic novels I have been reading in recent weeks have been reasonably familiar to me. often this is through film or television adaptations, or from having read versions or parts of the novel decades ago. ‘Kim’ is an exception to that general rule – although I had heard of the novel, I had no prior knowledge of the plot or characters. I am sure it has been adapted as a film at some point, but not I suspect with any great success.

Kipling is notorious as a jingoistic supporter of Empire, and as this novel is set in 19th Century India, one would have expected the white men to be the heroes, and the Indian characters to be (negative) stereotypes or caricatures. In the event, nothing could be further from the truth. The novel follows the adventures of a young orphan – Kim – who is born of Irish parents, but who grows up assimilated into Indian culture, and who identifies as an Indian (when he first wears white men’s trousers, for example, he finds them uncomfortable and can’t understand why anyone would wear them). He is a classic street rat, surviving on his wits. He meets a Tibetan monk on a pilgrimage, and quickly strikes up a friendship which is the heart of the novel. They journey around India in a fairly leisurely fashion. India is shown in all its magnificent complexity, which many different races, religions and castes. The occupying English forces are also not portrayed simplistically as either all good or bad – they include a range of well developed characters, some of whom are benevolent, others less so. But there is not a hint of jingoism anywhere in the novel. Kipling quite obviously had a deep affinity with India, and while his portrait of the country is not rose-tinted, at the same time he demonstrates an understanding of the peoples, traditions and cultures that you would never have anticipated from someone with his reputation as a defender of Empire. Occupation is not a benevolent force for good in India – neither is it the opposite – it simply is part of the experience of the citizens of the country.

In the course of his journeys, Kim’s parenthood is revealed, and he is given an ‘English’ education. Because of his knowledge of India and its culture, as well as a natural quick wit, he is prepared for a career as a spy, a player in the ‘Great Game’. We are introduced to some of the other spies, all native Indians risking their lives to ensure intelligence is fed to the occupying English. Towards the end of the novel, as Kim’s spiritual journey reaches its anti-climax, this espionage sub-plot also comes to a slightly comic conclusion, as two foreign spies (French and Russian, in an unlikely alliance) are humiliated because of their lack of respect for and knowledge of Indian culture.

Given the period in which it was written, this is a surprisingly enlightened novel. But was it any good? Perhaps there is a reason why the novel is not in the first tier of classics, not part of the cultural zeitgeist. Because the answer is not really. It was a struggle to complete. Much of the action is conveyed through dialogue, and Kipling uses innumerable terms deriving from the Raj which are sometimes translated, but often not (in the particular edition at least (Wordsworth Classics) – I can imagine that there are other versions with more comprehensive footnotes that would have clarified some of these terms). So it was at points not easy to follow the plot. Kim is an endearing character, and his supporting cast are reasonably well developed, but overall I never fully engaged with the novel, and would probably not have finished it were it not for a streak of stubbornness. I can see why, when choosing a Kipling novel to adapt, Disney chose ‘The Jungle Book’, not ‘Kim’!

Money – a suicide note – Martin Amis – 1980

‘Money’ was written in the early 1980’s, and published in 1984. This was the highpoint of Thatcherism, greed is good, and ‘Money’ represents one of the high artistic points of that period.

This isn’t saying much, because while everyone else in the Arts at the time was pointing out with different degrees of vehemence that greed is not that good, ‘Money’ is far less didactic. Money is undoubtedly a corrupting influence, but absence of money is worse. John Self, the semi-autobiographical narrator of ‘Money’ is a whoring, alcoholic, masturbating monster, roaring around London and New York, ignorant of the chaos he leaves in his wake. He reads 1984, and sees himself as one of the Thought Police. He is involved in a very confused way in the casting and production of a film based upon an idea of his, but this is largely immaterial, simply providing a backdrop to the relentlessness of Self’s hedonistic orgy. There are some wildly excessive moments of hilarity, such as when he goes to a club one night. He is totally unaware of the chaos he causes, and of course is, as in most of the novel, extremely drunk:

There was a white-haired old robot at the desk, and we shot the breeze for a while as he checked me out on the intercom. I told him a joke. How does it go now? There’s this farmer who keeps his wife locked up in the – Wait, let’s start again,…Anyway we had a good laugh over this joke when I’d finished or abandoned it, and I was told where to go. Then I got lost for a bit. I went into a room where a lot of people in evening dress were sitting at square tables playing cards or backgammon. I left quickly and knocked over a lamp by the door.  The lamp should never have been there in the first place, with its plinth sticking out like that. For a while I thrashed around in some kind of cupboard, but fought my way out in the end.  Skipping down the stairs again, I fell heavily on my back. It didn’t hurt that much, funnily enough.”

 

This was quite an extraordinary read. It is not for the easily offended – John Self is an equal opportunities offender, hitting out (in some cases literally) at women, minorities, gays, and the disabled. It is also over-long – once the pattern of transatlantic excess is established it doesn’t need repeating quite so often. And don’t read this novel for the characterisation, plotting, or dramatic incident either. While the fourth wall is broken quite regularly, with ‘Martin Amis’ making several appearances, this is not really a post-modern novel either – in many ways it is quite traditional, with a heavily broadcast ‘twist’ at the end, for what it is worth, long after the reader has stopped caring what is going to happen to John or any of the other minor characters.

 

What made this novel stand out to me was Amis’s wonderful use of language. It’s not just metaphor, although these are exceptional, with sometimes four or five on one sentence. But the quality of the writing is quite poetical. Take this description of the sky for instance:

 

“when the sky is as grey as this – impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour – and the stooped millions lift their heads, it’s hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.”

 

When I first started to sketch out this review I struggled to find a novel to compare this to. Then it dawned on me that the closest writing style is the first person narrative style that characterises gonzo journalism, which the Internet defines as

 

“an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire…Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that involves the reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism, which favours a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly-edited product favoured by newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a piece is as important as the event the piece is on. Use of sarcasm, humour, exaggeration, and profanity is common.”

 

Which summarises ‘Money’ very nicely thank you. So arguably the best way to read this novel as a piece of reportage from the frontline of the 1980’s class war. Amis remains very much on my list of authors that can write well, but can also produce some absolute stinkers, but this was in many ways a redemptive experience.

The Sign of the Four – Conan Doyle – 1890

Or, if you prefer, ‘The Sign of Four’, which is I think the better known version of this novel’s title. There is quite a significant difference between the former – meaning a sign which collectively represents four people – and the latter, which means simply 4. But as the sign itself plays no real part in the plot, other than contributing to the overall effect of mystery, the point is moot. (Just as a further irrelevant aside, in later short stories Watson refers to the case as The Sign of Four).

A quick plot summary might be a good place to start. This is an early Holmes story, where many of the familiar tropes of the sequence are just being established. Here we see the first incarnation of Holmes’ famous, if nonsensical, epithet “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. (140) We see Holmes, bored, and taking cocaine – a 7% solution – which he also offers to Watson. The method whereby Holmes is able to make fantastically accurate deductions about people from minor aspects of their appearance and behaviour is used at the opening of the novel, serving little purpose other than entertainment to relieve the boredom, and is disregarded once the crime is under investigation. And of course there are the Baker Street irregulars, the blundering police, and the mastery of disguise. All the elements are here, early on in his career.

The crime itself is, as usual with Holmes and Watson, obscure, yet easily solved. Indian treasure, pillaged from Agra during the First War of Independence, is hidden in a house in the London suburbs. One of the gang cheated out of his share of the prize returns to steal it, and in the course of the burglary someone is murdered. The villains hide on a boat on the Thames, but are chased down and captured. During the chase the treasure is thrown overboard and lost. In a lightly done parallel plot Watson falls in love with, woos, and becomes engaged to be married to the client who brings them the mystery – Watson is quite a fast worker!

Holmes’s powers are not taxed greatly. The murderer leaves footprints at the scene, and a trail of tar from the scene to their hideaway. The murderer’s accomplice has previously been seen shadowing the victim’s father, and leaves marks of his wooden leg outside the window. There is little attempt at concealment or deception. Holmes is slightly delayed in capturing the villains by their cunning ruse of hiding their boat in a boatshed, which it takes a particular genius to discover. It’s all done and dusted in less than a hundred pages, with plenty of time for some light drug taking and observational parlour tricks.

How does one explain the enduring appeal of the Holmes stories? Victorian England couldn’t get enough of the curmudgeonly consulting detective, forcing Conan Doyle to bring him back after the Reichenbach Falls attempt to kill him off. It can’t be the thinly constructed plots. While Holmes and Watson (and Mrs Hudson) may have survived as characters, the novels and stories themselves are little read, and usually discarded in any adaptation. Holmes represents the victory of rationalism and reason against the forces of nature and the threatening world outside our borders. It is hardly surprising that the villains in Holmes’ adventures are invariably foreigners, threatening our great British institutions. Tonga, the Andaman islander with the feet of a child, is described in purely animalistic terms. When first spotted on the boat, he is “a dark mass which looked like a Newfoundland dog”. (178) Closer up he seems to Watson to be a “savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of a dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed, but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half-animal fury” (178) Only half-animal Watson? Holmes can defeat any puzzle, any challenge, with the application of logic and knowledge. The world can be tamed. The fact that this is all smoke and mirrors, and that the final resolution usually depends on a pistol or noose rather than a logic puzzle, is passed over quickly.

If you have read any of my previous attempts at close textual analysis you might want to try the game yourself. Here are two passages from ‘The Sign of the Four’ which jumped out at me. The first describes Mary Morstan, Holmes’s client and Watson’s love interest, seen from Watson’s perspective:

“She was seated by the open window, dressed in some sort of white diaphanous material, with a little touch of scarlet at the neck and waist. The soft light of a shaded lamp fell upon her as she leaned back in the basket chair, played over her sweet, grave face, and tinting with a dull metallic sparkle the rich coils of her luxuriant hair. One white arm and hand drooped over the side of the chair, and her whole pose and figure spoke of an absorbing melancholy. At the sound of my footfall she sprang to her feet, however, and a bright flush of surprise and of pleasure coloured her pale cheeks.”

The colours are interesting – virginal white, diaphanous like a wedding dress perhaps, but with some touches of scarlet at the neck and waist, suggesting something more carnal? None of these details are accidental, from the observation that she is sitting in a basketchair, (baskets usually being used for possessions) to the fact that her “white arm” is drooping over the side of the chair. Why the whiteness of her arm needs to be emphasised here, given we have already established her ethnicity and dress, is worth asking, and what is suggested by the fact her arm droops rather than rests?

In the second scene I have picked out, Holmes and Watson are watching the boat yard, and while they do so they spot some workmen coming from work: Holmes says:

“’See how the folk swarm over yonder in the gas-light’
‘They are coming from work in the yard’
‘Dirty looking rascals, but I suppose everyone has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori about it. A strange enigma is man’” (177).

This reverie is interrupted by the signal that the suspects are leaving.

The verb choice “swarm” is telling here, even though describing working men in these terms was not unusual – they are alien, threatening. But Holmes comes close to doubting their humanity. What does this tell us about the portrayal of class in late Victorian literature?

The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane – 1889

I am not sure whether this is really a novel in the traditional sense of the word. It’s very short – about 125 pages – and there is very little plot or characterisation. The events of the novel, (a term I will retain for convenience’ sake), take place over a couple of days during the course of a battle in the American Civil War. They are shown largely from the perspective of a raw recruit, who initially is terrified, and runs away, but once he gains his “red badge of courage” (i.e. a wound) he finds new reserves of bravery, and takes an active part in the remainder of the battle.

The novel was written over 25 years after the end of the war. You would in the normal course of events have expected the novel to be part of the healing process, the rebuilding of the nation – if not, why write it in the first place? The soldiers on both sides of the battle are shown as human and fallible – they show fear, lie, gossip, cuss, and die. They do heroic things and cowardly things side by side, they have a healthy contempt for their leaders, (although the narrator allows the reader to see that the officers are reasonably good at their jobs, even if that includes being cold-blooded about potential casualties) and rarely have anything other than the sketchiest of ideas what is going on in the confusion of the battle. The politics of the war are ignored completely, including the most obvious issue of slavery, which is not mentioned. This arguably gives the novel some verisimilitude, but the reality was the given both armies were volunteer forces, soldiers would have had some idea of why they were fighting, and may have cause to mention it from time to time. Ignoring slavery allows the novel to appeal to both North and South, but is still a puzzling omission given the novel is written entirely from a Unionist (northern) perspective.

Crane uses some interesting techniques to give atmosphere and credibility to his novel, making it in some ways similar to a survivor’s account of the battle. He uses short chapters, making the narrative move quickly. The principal character – Henry Fleming – is almost always referred to as “the youth”, giving him an everyman status, and the other characters are usually referred to in a similar way – the tall soldier, the loud soldier, etc. – to depersonalise them. The soldiers’ heavily accented language is recorded phonetically to give the narrative a sense of authenticity. The point of view stays closely with the youth, and we see what he sees, feel what he feels. The novel’s language focusses on colour, giving an almost impressionist feel to the descriptive passages that form the core of the narrative.

Given the absence of plot or characterisation, it is hard to understand why this is considered a great American novel, or one of the definitive novels of the American Civil War. It seems a calculated attempt to show the war not as a series of great set piece battles where the field of combat was bestrode by might men doing might deeds, but as peopled by real, flawed, people, pushed on by fear of death and failure. I can only speculate, but I suspect the answer is somewhere in this mix. The Civil War was, and remains, America’s bloodiest conflict. The scale of the national trauma was hard for Europeans to imagine, particularly given that America had only been an independent country for less than a hundred years. Civil wars must be much harder to recover from as a country than wars fought against a common enemy. Once the war is over you have to somehow carry on living and accepting the defeated enemy, which remains part of your country. So showing that the war wasn’t a struggle of good versus evil was probably part of that healing process. I read this novel in a Wordsworth edition, which includes two other short stories by Crane. The first, The Veteran, published in 1893, shows Fleming, the protagonist of the Red Badge, much later in life, and acts as  a useful coda to the Red Badge. As a survivor of the war he is a greatly respected member of his community, but he refuses to romanticise his experiences:

“Could you see the whites of their eyes?” said the man who was seated on a soapbox.
“Nothing of the kind” replied old Henry warmly, “Just a lot of flitting figures, and I let go at where they ‘peared to be the thickest. Bang”
“Mr Fleming” said the grocer – his deferential voice expressed somehow the old man’s exact social weight – “Mr Fleming, you never was much frightened in them battles, was you?”.
The veteran looked down and grinned…”Well I guess I was, he answered finally”. Pretty well scared, sometimes”. (121)

He even has the courage, in old age, to admit his cowardice in his first battle, despite his tarnishing his image in the eyes of his grandson. So the civil war wasn’t a romantic struggle, it was at best a necessary evil.

Three Men in a Boat (not to mention the dog) – Jerome K Jerome – 1889

Mildly amusing. Whimsical. Harmless  These are the words that come to mind when I reflect on the experience of reading this Victorian “classic”. For some reason, while many comic novels age appallingly, Three Men in a Boat seems bullet-proof against the passage of time. It is feather-light – there is no plot to speak of, very few events, no characterisation, or only the barest. The title sums up pretty much all you need to know about the novel – three middle class single men of indeterminate age or occupation take a short trip in a rowing boat up the Thames. It rains. They fall in occasionally. The narrator tells several stories of similar incidents on similar trips. These stories all follow the same pattern – the principal character is hugely over-confident in his own abilities – to sail, hang a picture, pack a bag, navigate a maze etc. – and retains this over-confidence in the face of every failure.

I am clearly missing something, because many online reviewers describe this novel as “laugh out loud”, and it has never been out of print. The lead review in Amazon goes to far as to say “If you don’t love this book, and don’t weep laughing whilst reading it, then there’s something wrong with you”. I can’t recall ever weep laughing at any novel, let alone one with so flimsy an appeal. There is admittedly a whimsical charm to the whole enterprise, and the appeal to a late Victorian bygone era where the outside world rarely intrudes is clear. There are however a few points in the novel where this approach is discarded, and these jar badly. Mostly these are the scenic descriptions which were the novel’s original premise, (it was commissioned as a travel book) and they do not fit at all with the tone of the rest. But there is also a casually gratuitous use of a racial slur – the n-word – which may have been acceptable in the 1880’s but is hateful now. Possibly even worse, there is a description of a suicide. I can only assume Jerome included this distressing scene – a woman falls pregnant without being married, and, shunned by her family and friends, she finally ends it all by drowning herself in the Thames, to be discovered by our three men – as a contrast to the nonsense about frying pans and banjos. Victorians were famously mawkish and sentimental, so presumably this also seen as justification for this scene, but to a contemporary reader it is deeply uncomfortable.

So in a way I feel that, as does happen sometimes, I have failed. Failed to unlock this novel, to find a way of reading it that gives it some value, the value others clearly believe it to have. Which is of course nagging me. I was tempted to try to read this as social commentary, a reflection on late Victorian England, a period of change of course as technology gathered pace and the lower classes began to find their voice. The three men are clumsy buffoons, but there are closer to Grossmith’s Mr Pooter, or indeed Wells’ Mr Polly, than Wodehouse’s much later creations. This is a confident, relaxed country, peopled by citizens not afraid to assert their challenge to order – the boatmen for example are very clear that fencing off backwaters on the Thames is reprehensible, and signs denying picnickers the right to rest on land adjoining the river are to be ignored – no great respect for property rights are shown. But in all honesty this remains thin stuff, nostalgic and comfortable compared to much of the challenging literature being written elsewhere around this time. So for now I admit defeat – there must be a reason why this novel remains so popular, but what that is I cannot tell.

 

Supplementary: A Passage to India – E.M.Forster (1924) (2)

This blog entry follows on from the previous review of A Passage to India, and focuses on the novel’s opening paragraph. This kind of detailed, deep dive analysis of text is a different approach to the reviews I have been writing over the last couple of weeks.

“Except for the Marabar caves – and they are 20 miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

This is an unusual opening. Novels usually tell us that the scene they are about to describe will be interesting, not “nothing extraordinary”. The term “presents” is a hint that there will be a difference between the outward appearance of the city, and what is to be found behind the façade. Obviously, the reference to the caves is a hint that these are to play a key part in the novel’s events, and come back to mind when the trip to the caves in being planned, and underway. Overall the tone here, deliberate I suspect, is of a sneering Victorian tour guide, summarising the merits or otherwise of this backwater for the benefit of our incoming tourists, Mrs Moore and Miss Quested.

Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely.

Here the description strikes an even more unusual note. Firstly, what is the difference between edged and washed, a distinction the narrator takes care to point out. The simple answer is dirt – the river runs past the city, regardless of verb choice, but does not flood, and therefore the city remains filthy. This description is reinforced by the verb choice “trails” – the city lacks energy, spreading itself pointlessly along the banks of the river. It – the city – must be relatively small if it only runs ( a more traditional verb choice) for two miles, but it is “scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits”. Hold up – the narrator tells us that he cannot tell the difference between the city and the rubbish it produces. It is a rubbish tip. In any other context this would be dismissed as ridiculous hyperbole – no city in the world, however polluted, is indistinguishable from a rubbish tip. This is more than hyperbole – it is abuse.

There are no bathing steps on the river front as the Ganges happens not to be holy here;

Another sentence that is easy to pass by, but once more, hold up. The Ganges is the holy river of Hinduism, and that holiness doesn’t switch on and off as the river passes through the landscape. Forster must surely have known that. So what is he doing saying this? Is the reader being invited to question the narrator’s veracity (this early in the novel)? Is Forster assuming lazily that his readers will allow this to pass, being ignorant of other faiths? This is part of the “nothing to see here” lacklustre description of the city, but I find this approach puzzling – if Forster wanted to imagine a non-descript city in the middle of India, why set it on the banks of one of the greatest rivers in the world? And then proceed to ignore this setting for 300 or more pages?

indeed there is no river front,

What? For an innocuous piece of description this is the third time in two sentence that I have to ask that question. No river front? Ignoring the fact that a few lines earlier we have been told that the city trails along the river bank (I appreciate that there is a subtle difference between a river bank and front), why would a city be built on the bank of (to repeat myself) one of the greatest rivers in the world, and then effectively turn its back on it? Surely one of the reasons the river is worshipped as a God is because of its life-giving properties. The citizens of Chandrapore would need access to the river for water, for washing, for cremations, for leisure – the idea that they would ignore this incredible resource beggars belief. By now this narrator is losing credibility. This is not a realistic portrait that is being painted, which alerts the reader to the fact that there is more to Chandrapore than we are being led to expect.

and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest.

Here we have filth again. The narrator/Forster’s sense of disgust with this city is palpable. One has to ask, in what sense are the temples “ineffective”. Presumably architectural, although there may be a small comment on the spiritual ineffectiveness of these foreign religions.

Chandrapore was never large or beautiful but 200 years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the 18th century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars.

Confirmation, if it were needed, that this is a tour guide, or an effective parody of one. The emphasis on the absence of tourist goods in the bazaar and the imperial history of the town put the reader in the role of armchair traveller, learning about the city by proxy, but guided by a very unreliable mentor.

The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving.

What wood? The wood of the carvings which scarcely can be found? Or something else – this is ambiguous, but leads to the next thought – the people of Chandrapore are “inhabitants of mud”. Literally of course this means ‘people living in mud – that is, the mud-like wood” – but the very clear reference is to ‘people of mud’ – that is mud-people. This is an old racist taunt which JK Rowling references in her use of the term “mud-blood” as a deeply offensive term, as indeed it is.

So abased, so monotonous, is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil.

We return to the Ganges. I take the phrase “come down” to mean flood or burst its banks. Excrescence is a powerful word, expressing a sense of disgust, and the speaker here seems to anticipate a flood almost wishfully, looking to see a cleansing of the filth that appals him so much, back into the soil – note back into, not just into, again referencing the idea that the people of India have arisen from the soil, are people of mud.

Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

As throughout this paragraph, there is ambiguity here. The tour guide voice has been abandoned for something much more expansive. It is not clear whether “houses do fall” (as opposed to ‘houses fall’) refers to what happens when the Ganges comes down, or as something that periodically happens in any event. People are drowned and left rotting is also ambiguous – if people drown their bodies would normally be washed drown stream, or eaten by crocodiles. This phrase could mean either ‘people are drowned, and then their bodies are left to rot’ or ‘some people drown, and others die in the streets where their bodies are left to rot’. The ambiguity doesn’t rest there – people are drowned actively, rather than drown passively – is this something done to them, or something that happens. Leaving bodies to rot is unlikely to be something that actually happened in India other than in a major disaster, but the narrator gives the impression it is a common occurrence.

Here as throughout ‘A Passage to India’, the narrative voice shifts subtly, and can never be trusted. In an apparently innocuous scene-setting paragraph, numerous under-currents lead the reader to understand that India may seem harmless, but if you scratch the surface you will find it threatening, distressing, and dangerous. Miss Quested is about to find that out.

A Passage to India – E M Forster – 1924

The narrative point of view in A Passage to India is elusive. At points, particularly when describing (supposedly) neutral scenes such as landscape, Forster uses a traditional, omniscient narrative voice. The landscape (or similar) is not however simply described – the description includes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle – see below) judgments and observations. We are being shown India through the eyes of a distinct person or character, albeit one that doesn’t appear in the novel. Would it be safe to assume this point of view is as close to Forster’s as makes no difference?

I’m not sure, because when portraying conversations and interactions between characters, the narrative voice changes. The narrator tells the reader what the characters are thinking and feeling – sometimes even identifying feelings that the character is only dimly aware they are experiencing, such as when the romantic feelings of Ronny and Adela are re-kindled in their ride home and subsequently accident. But again this is not the whole story – the narrator may see all, but reveals the story’s events only as and when they are observed or participated in by the characters. There is no breaking of the fourth wall, no jumping forward in time, and scenes from the past are strictly confined to memories, such as Dr Aziz’s memories of his wife. We observed the complex interactions between the characters with an informed understanding of their nuances, but the narrator is a guide rather than a translator – we are helped to understand what the characters are thinking and feeling, but don’t simply step inside their heads.

The narrator’s partial omniscience takes a further knock during and after the “incident” in the caves. The scene is initially shown from Dr Aziz’s point of view, and then recounted to Fielding. Fielding notes that this initial recount is already beginning to get slightly confused. The puzzling departure by Adela is unexplained – the point of view is limited. This scene is immediately preceded, and foreshadowed, by a scene narrated from Mrs Moore (Adela’s prospective mother in law, and de facto guardian). When the narrative finally portrays the scene from Adela’s perspective, her recollection is clouded and incomplete. In fact the narrative is completely confused through this part of the novel – it is never explained what the charge/allegation against Dr Aziz’s is. The one thing Adela is consistent about is “the man had never actually touched her” (208), but the English community reacts as if she has been ravaged, and indeed the doctor tells them that her life is at risk.

Why does this matter? I think it is always important to ask questions about the point of view. Who is telling me this? Are they telling me the whole truth? Is there something that is being kept from me? Are my thoughts and feelings being manipulated, and if so how.

I am sure Forster intended this story as a positive commentary on the Raj, and specifically the late colonial period when India was ruled, ineffectively, by the British. Forster portrays the effect that colonial power has on well meaning British people who come to India with the best of intentions – to be compassionate, to help the local population, to foster (near-pun intended) good relations between Hindu and Muslim, and so on. These intentions are eroded by the force of circumstances, until they become hard-faced colonial administrators, making decisions based upon what is best for Great Britain, not India, and living largely segregated lives apart from the local population. As the Collector says: “I have had 25 years in this country … and during those 25 years I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and |Indians attempt to be intimate socially.” (161). Newcomers quickly come to understand (or are taught) that mixing with the locals is harmful to both parties. His target is the Raj (and by extension, the Empire) not the people who kept it running.

You could see this all as liberal far-sightedness, Forster predicting the end of the Empire and the resulting inevitable partition between the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims, and commenting on the corrosive effect of Empire on the people administering it. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” makes similar points. But I am not sure this is the whole story. “A Passage to India” doesn’t simply portray the effects of colonialism. There is a portrait of India and Indians themselves which at points is unsympathetic. Indians are shown to be pompous, unreliable, volatile, and dishonest, not just as individual character traits but consistently. When the narrator claims “Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time, in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend. It is his demon, as the Westerner’s is hypocrisy” (272) it is unclear whether this is the narrator voicing a judgment of one of the characters, or Forster’s personal judgment. This racism is more subtle than that of many of Forster’s characters, but forms a backdrop to the novel. I wanted to illustrate this by looking in more detail at the book’s opening paragraphs, which unusually I am going to repeat here in full to avoid you having to go and look it up.  

“Except for the Marabar caves – and they are 20 miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing steps on the river front as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful but 200 years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the 18th century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous, is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

This analysis will follow in my next post, found here. 

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, 1915

This is the novel for which the phrase “what a load of old tosh!” was invented. Buchan, in a short introduction, described it as coming from a genre “which we know as the ‘shocker’ – the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible”. This is a thinly veiled attempt to pre-empt some of the more obvious criticisms of the utter implausibility of his story. Although having been told that the story will be wildly implausible doesn’t make the plot much easier to swallow.

Positives about the novel are elusive. If the plot is ludicrous, the characterisation is not much better. The descriptive writing, which some reviewers and readers enjoy, left me cold. And the politics of the novel are appalling – a point to which I will return. However, “The 39 Steps” is an important part of the “German spies in the UK” genre, which before the war was used to bolster the re-armament position, and which after the start of the war were all part of the literary attempt to portray the Germans as cunning and dastardly, but beatable, with the right amount of pluck and stiff upper lip. Hannay, the lead character, is thinly drawn – he is a Scottish ex-patriot used to hunting on the veldt, and finds the confines of London life boring and stifling. He treats the improbable events he finds himself engulfed in as an adventure – it would be no surprise to any reader to hear that this novel was first published as a weekly serial in Blackwood’s magazine, which not many years earlier had published Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

Through a series of increasingly outlandish plot twists, none of which are particularly inventive or entertaining, Hannay finds himself forming a thin blue line between the Great British Empire and the Hun. He slips through the fingers of his pursuers in a way that is so predictable as to deprive the novel of any suspense whatsoever, and the bad guys are eventually bested through a combination of Hannay’s intelligent deductions, clues left by his accomplice, and some good old British spunk. It almost defies parody. The novel is barely 100 pages long, and speeds along at a good pace, so if you have a couple hours spare I suppose there are worse ways of wasting them.

But be prepared for some really unpleasant racism and anti-Semitism, particularly the latter. This is more than simply the prevailing casual racism of the British upper classes of the early 20th century. Jewish conspiracy theories are referred to explicitly, and shown to be genuine. These ideas have no meaningful part whatsoever in the plot, other than to provide the vague suggestion that the plot underfoot is more than a simple case of one nation against another (the gang trying to steal British military secrets calls itself the “Black Stone” – amazingly the Black Stone have a secret base in the Scottish Highlands, right in the path of Hannay’s attempt to lay low). This all leaves a bad taste. It’s not thought through in any coherent way, and while done in an apparently off-hand way, without any apparent spite, represents more that the simple racist assumptions and language that were current at this time – they give a platform and credence to anti-Semitic ideologies that were to prove so poisonous only 20 years later.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1932

Read in a Vintage edition, with forewords by Margaret Atwood and David Bradshaw

Set 600 years in the future, Huxley’s “Brave New World” is run by a benevolent scientific despotism. Science has eliminated most diseases and the ageing process, but has also been used to socially engineer society. Many aspects of our present society are inverted, so drug taking is encouraged, as is promiscuity, books (other than instruction manuals) are forbidden or unknown, and, in a convincing piece of cod-science, parenthood has also been eliminated – children are instead grown in factories, and engineered to fill their pre-designated station in life.

 

If Huxley had left it there, this would have made an interesting short piece of science fiction, a gentle satire on the way science could lead society. People are relatively happy with their lot in life, and society can even allow dissent, albeit dissent that is quickly isolated and neutered (rather than completely extinguished). There is a certain prurience in the portrayal of sexual liberation in life After Ford, (AF), but titillation in science fiction is nothing new.

 

However, at this point Huxley introduces a character, Bernard Marx, who is presented as an outsider, one who can see beyond the drug induced façade to the rottenness of society, the emptiness of people’s lives. During a visit to a reservation, Marx “discovers” a savage, John, living among a surviving population of unmodernised indigenous people in Mexico. John has read Shakespeare, and sees the world much as Miranda may have done when first discovering she is not alone on her island.

“Oh, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!”

John has been treated as an outsider all his life by the Indians he grew up with, but his reaction to the new world he finds himself in is anything but positive. He is repelled by the absence of romantic love, his perspectives having been distorted by his reading of Romeo and Juliet and the like. He finds the new world disgusting, and despite a long and didactic conversation with the Controller, Mustapha Mond, remains unconvinced about the merits of this new world:

 

“All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

 

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

 

There was a long silence.

 

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.”

 

When John’s desperate attempts to retreat from society fail, he kills himself in the novel’s final scene. Meanwhile Bernard does not emerge as the hero we originally expect him to be – he uses his notoriety as “discoverer” of the noble savage to sleep with a variety of important women, despite his previous objection to people being treated like pieces of meat, and offers no help to John as he struggles in his new environment.

 

While a more optimistic view of the future than the later “1984”, “Brave New World” is still bleak. Several of the characters are given the names of well known Communists – Marx, Lenina, Trotsky – suggesting that this world is a socialist experiment, where the attempt to nationalise parenthood and use science to eliminate difference, has failed.

 

Brave New World is a novel of ideas, where none of the characters are convincing or particularly interesting, and where few of the ideas are fully developed or followed through. The ending is predictable, unconvincing and melodramatic. It really only works as a companion piece to the infinitely darker “1984”. In “1984” the vision of the future is of a boot continually smashing into a face – in “Brave New World” the future is “seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies.” (197) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Earlier in the year, just after the Christmas/New Year break, I read “Treasure Island”, largely out of curiosity to see how close the TV adaptation was to the original. In some respects it was very faithful – for example in the way Silver kills the seaman (Tom) who will not join the mutiny once they land on the island – but in others it made massive changes, the most obvious ones being the death of Trelawney and the loss/abandonment of the treasure. Stevenson tells us almost nothing about what Jim and Co do with the treasure once home – the narrative slams shut once back in the UK, with only a paragraph about how Ben Gunn loses his money in 19 days – but that leaves it to the reader to imagine the high life they lead. One important thing the TV adaptation did reinstate was Silver’s black wife, although they make her a “tart” – possibly editions and adaptations from my childhood edited out references to this character because mixed relationships were frowned upon – just shows how racist the 70s really were. The TV version was careful to avoid all the pirate clichés, but they are there in the book, timbers being shivered, pieces of eight, Jim lad, etc. I guess this is from where they became clichés.

This was a very easy read – the narrative rattles along, with the only passages that drag being the technical/nautical descriptions of sails being unfurled, anchors being weighed and the like. The point of view is well manipulated to keep the reader in the dark as to the location of the treasure, what has happened to the rest of the crew, Silver’s sinister intent, etc.


However, ultimately this remains a children’s/young teenagers’ adventure story, with little to say on the issues of the time, unlike, say, Stevenson’s much darker “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. I recognise that Treasure Island is, like all texts, open to broader interpretation. The island can be taken to represent (for example) an alternative England where anarchy rules, and the struggle between the pirates and the other crew members could be taken as a comment on the ferocious class struggle rocking late-Victorian England. Islands are a great source of metaphor. But once you have made those connections, what then? I am not convinced that they give you anywhere to go in terms of understanding what was going on in the world, nor reveal subconscious attitudes to class or gender.