He Ain’t Heavy

Just imagine the familiar nativity scene of Mary and Joseph in the innkeeper’s stable, with the animals keeping patient watch as Mary gives birth not to one child to be wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, the forthcoming savior of humanity, but to twins, one strong and healthy, one weak and retiring, whose destinies clash and collide but ultimately unite in dark ways to create the story we know so well. This is the audacious move that Philip Pullman makes in his rewrite of the gospel story, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and he pulls it off brilliantly. If I were a gambling woman, I’d place bets on this book finding its way almost instantaneously onto the list of modern classics, it’s that good.

So Jesus of Nazareth has a twin, whom his mother calls Christ, and the boys grow up together displaying very different characteristics. Jesus is a normal, lively, naughty boy, always getting into scrapes, whilst his brother is quiet and learned and devoted, following around after Jesus and managing to clear up the messes he makes by miraculous means. As the boys grow, however, Jesus starts to come into his own, his passionate, engaged nature making him into an electrifying teacher. Wherever he goes, trouble and excitement follow. Christ stays back in the shadows, watching the effect he has on people and listening to his uncompromising message of humility and extreme goodness. Jesus demands that the people look to their deeds before all else, reviles wealth and importance, insists that the lowliest, least superficially deserving of beggars is more readily accepted by God than those who trumpet achievement and virtue. When Jesus heads out to the wilderness to see whether he can hear the words of God, Christ follows him and attempts to persuade him to temper his performance with the use of miracles and wonders. What if there were an organization of men like Jesus, who could establish a Kingdom of the faithful? Who would set up ethical laws and see they were enforced, who could convert others to the cause, who would make sure no one ever went hungry and unloved again? How much more powerful it would be than one man, how much more good they could do. But Jesus angrily refuses to even consider such a thing. There is only one way, and that way is solitary and passionate.

And so Pullman cleverly sets up a divide between the religious spirit and the organized Church, and to begin with it looks as if Jesus with his stubborn principles is in the right, and Christ, with his manipulative PR is in the wrong. Christ is visited by an angel, who tempts him with the idea that he should be as famous and important as Jesus. The angel encourages Christ to be a chronicler, to write down all that happens to Jesus, so that his teachings should not be lost to future generations. But there is a catch here, as what matters is the coherence of the story, the power with which it is told. ‘There is a time and there is what is beyond time,’ the angel says to Christ. ‘In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.’ And so Christ doctors his testimony, adding details here and there to make the story better, to draw out and emphasise the message it contains. Already the opposition of Jesus as good and Christ as bad is troubled – the story is not exactly what happened, stories always shape reality up, tidy it up, in order to reach a truth that could not be seen without such editing. So how are we to judge stories, when the crimes they commit are precisely what results in their value? Indeed, how are we to judge a story that questions the ethics of storytelling? As the narrative progresses, Christ will be drawn into committing terrible deeds for the sake of the story, but because we know what that story is, and how powerful its effects, we cannot easily judge his actions.

In the meantime, Jesus, with his insistence on the literal and the real, sinks ever deeper into an existential stance, one that approaches life as a perpetual call to heroism in the face of its injustices. He ends up inevitably questioning the very existence of God as it is something he cannot see or touch. Jesus loves the world, and has nothing but profound admiration for every part of creation, but he comes to the conclusion that it is a world vacated by God, who has abandoned his children for unknown reasons. What is intriguing about this portrayal is that Jesus doubts, but his angry, questing righteousness leaves no room for sorrow and suffering, or for being humbled by love. It is Christ who will really suffer, who will understand the torture of not being good enough, of making mistakes and being forced into awful situations against his will. Christ will be the sinner whose genuine regret makes him forgivable, whilst these humane positions are never ones that Jesus, in his undeviating trajectory towards holiness, will ever inhabit. Jesus and Christ together make the one man who reaches down through history towards us, Jesus embodying the ethical principle in a way that often seems untouched by genuine, complex emotion, Christ embodying the contemplative, overarching meaning, in a way that is undermined by human weakness and by ends justifying means. The life of the spirit is one of endless paradox, in which there is no good intention without unwelcome consequence, no vision without arrogance, no humility without error, no truth without lies.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this book, it is so rich. It doesn’t matter if you have no interest in religion whatsoever; at basis, it’s a story about right and wrong, about the uses and abuses of power, and about the things we do in the name of love. It’s a book that provokes you into thinking and the conclusion is as moving and extraordinary as you might expect. I was completely blown away by it, as you can probably tell! And in awe again at what stories can do when they are placed in the hands of incredible writers

Reneging on the Devil

We are in Naples in 1926 and the great Italian tenor, Rocco Campobello is recovering from an illness that nearly killed him. In fact, there was one moment, in the depths of his emergency operation, in which he did momentarily cross over to the other side, and in this moment he experienced a revelation that was also a brokering of a spiritual deal. He would survive, and when his life was restored to him, he would settle his account on earth, he would ‘put his house in order’. The story of The Maestro’s Voice by Roland Vernon is about the afterlife of ambition, about what happens when the delusions of fame and fortune are revealed as insubstantial and damaging to the genuine joy of living. But this is far from being a philosophical novel. It’s much more of a thriller, as Rocco Campobello must fight for his right not to sing, when so many people are determined that he should make a magnificent comeback.

Rocco Campobello has become a legend. Mostly this is due to his marvelous voice and his talent for dramatization, but he’s also been in the right place at the right time, able to take advantage of the earliest recording techniques to become a household name. He has changed the sound of opera and become a prototype to be followed for decades to come. But such success has inevitably been costly in other ways. In a series of flashbacks, the narrative shows us the route Campobello has taken from his early days in the backstreets of Naples when he and his friend, Gabriele Tomassini, dreamed of being taken into the one good choir in their area. Both are fine singers, but it’s Rocco who is ambitious and who will do anything to leave behind poverty and the blacksmith’s job for which he is destined. Gradually we learn about the early betrayals that Rocco commits in order to further his career, and which haunt him now. And we gain a picture of a man who has sacrificed everything that is gentle, loving and ordinary to the cultivation of his precious and extraordinary Voice until it has become a monster of demands, adored and fêted by the public, cosseted and spoiled by Rocco himself, an entity in its own right that is repeatedly represented as the symbol and the site of a Faustian pact.

In fact, Faustian pacts abound in this narrative, as Rocco has made any number of them to gain his monumental career. Now that he is aware he was doing business with the devil, how can he break the agreement in a way that saves him and spares those he loves? His biggest difficulty lies with his allegiance to the mob, and to the elderly but still powerful Don Graziani, who controls every element of his life. But Graziani has his own problems, notably the rise of Fascism, with its a new breed of men determined to wrest control of Italy away from the old networks, and a son, Bruno, who has recently come running back from New York, where he has left a trail of heinous crimes behind him. Bruno lacks his father’s subtleties and his good sense and has only inherited his taste for violent means of manipulation. He has seized on the idea of Rocco’s comeback as a vehicle for his own ambitions in theatre management, and of course there is a great deal of money at stake. Rocco’s resistance to the whole idea of resuming his career is an obstacle he refuses to acknowledge.

So it’s Rocco versus the mafia, with the secondary characters of the narrative lining up their loyalties on either side of the divide. The Grazianis have two doctors on their pocket, who are ready to falsify the medical reports and lie to Rocco about the state of his health. But Rocco has some devoted members of his household, notably his secretary Pietro Boldoni and his accompanist, Wallace Pickering, although these are men with secrets to hide. Then there’s Rocco’s disenchanted wife, Molly, who is only interested in making sure her life of luxury continues. And finally, Rocco traces the son of his old friend Gabriele Tomassini, who turns out to be a highly promising opera singer himself. The plot twists and turns as each character fights for nothing less than their survival.

Reading this book was exactly like watching one of those lavish drama productions that the BBC occasionally puts on. There isn’t much psychological depth, but this is more than compensated by the vividness of the landscape in which the story takes place. The writing is lush and sensuous and highly evocative. The characters are richly created, despite being essentially goodies and baddies, and the plot brings them cleverly into conflict. Naples in the early years of the twentieth century is brought beautifully to life, its slums, its underground passages, its glamorous villas and its scintillating scrum of rich and poor. Vernon writes about opera with authority that clearly comes from experience and passion. Altogether it’s a bouillabaisse of a book, a thick Mediterranean stew in which all kinds of disparate ingredients come together in satisfying harmony. I do have a few quibbles: sometimes the sheer weight of exposition kills the pace of the book (although the descriptions are uniformly good), the initially intriguing character of Molly becomes a bit incoherent, her development somewhat sidelined in the plot, and a very promising inquiry into the links between religion and celebrity is only ever hinted at when I would have liked to have seen it pursued. But these are minor concerns and didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the narrative. This is a good intelligent holiday book, one to swallow you up in the experience of a different world and to dazzle you with some vibrant prose.

On Heinrich Boll

I love blogging exercises that bring much deserved attention to books languishing almost forgotten on publisher’s back lists, particularly ones that were once rightly heralded as classics.

What is the neglected classic?

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll (1974). Boll is a German writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, who died in 1985. His writing was often preoccupied with the problem of authority, and his literary villains tend to come from the church, the government or the world of big business. He was quick to condemn lack of moral courage, abuse of power and self-righteous smugness, all of which made him an important author in the wake of Nazism. His work was termed ‘the literature of the rubble’, as he and several other authors in his era struggled to come to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. Like most writers who have achieved renown in their own lifetimes, Boll has been somewhat forgotten after his death.

When did you first read it?

I read it when I was preparing for my admissions interview for Cambridge, so that would have been….ooh, 1985? 1986? A long time ago, in any case. I had never read anything like it in my life before, and it was all the more powerful because it was a short little book written in a style of maximum accessibility. I’d read Jane Austen and found her charmingly clever and fun, and the Bronte’s who had been emotionally fraught. But I had never come across a book that contained and channeled its emotion into a whipcrack of cold disdain. It burned the way ice burns. It made me angry. I wanted to get to Cambridge very badly and have someone tell me what to do with what I’d read.

Give a brief summary of the book.

This is what it says on the back:

The first facts to be presented are brutal.

On Wednesday, 20 February 1974, a young woman of twenty-seven leaves her apartment in a certain city at about 6.45 p.m. to attend a dance at a private home.

Following a brief encounter with a man wanted by the police, the hitherto unremarkable Katharina Blum becomes the object of an smear campaign conducted by an unscrupulous newspaper. Labelled a whore, communist sympathizer and atheist, her life is ruined; her privacy and reputation systematically destroyed.

In the formal, but not unsympathetic, manner of a police report, Nobel Prize Winner Heinrich Boll traces events as they lead to their violent conclusion.

What makes the book stand out to you?

It’s a stylistically simple narrative, no pretensions, no tricks, a complete absence of emotional manipulation, and it is all the more forceful for that. It’s one of those stories where you don’t have any idea what is going to happen, but you can feel the net closing and just about every action the characters take makes you feel like yelling ‘NO!’ at them. I wanted to climb through the bars of the sentences and get involved.

Name some similar authors.

It has crime and thriller elements, so might appeal to those who like Barbara Vine. Maybe a bit of early John Updike, or one of Joyce Carol Oates’ novellas show similarities, with a taste of the darkly satirical in the manner of someone like Vonnegut. But if a woman had written this, it would definitely have been Marilyn French.

What sort of person would you recommend to read this book?

Hmm, tricky one. I don’t think anyone is barred from liking this as it is written in a very plain way. But I think you’d enjoy it more if you had at least a mild interest in political issues – particularly feminism and the portrayal of women in the media. Be warned that there is nothing fluffy or comforting about it, either, and not much in the way of a happy ending.

Do you have any quotes you would like to share?

It’s more of a taster, as the book isn’t linguistically rich or expressively emotional in a quotable way.

‘The prolonged nature of the investigation was explained by the fact that Katharina Blum was remarkably meticulous in checking the entire wording and in having every sentence read aloud to her as it was committed to the record. For example, the advances mentioned in the foregoing paragraph were first recorded as ‘amorous’, the original wording beng that ‘the gentleman became amorous’, which Katharina Blum indignantly rejected. A regular argument as to definition ensued between her and public prosecutors, and between her and Beizmenne, with Katharina asserting that ‘becoming amorous’ implied reciprocity whereas ‘advances’ were a one-sided affair, which they had invariably been. Upon her questioners observing that surely this wasn’t important and it would be her fault if the interrogation lasted longer than usual, she said she would not sign any deposition containing the word ‘amorous’ instead of ‘advances’. For her the difference was of crucial significance, and one of the reasons why she had separated from her husband was that he had never been amorous but had consistently made advances.’

Just a couple of extra things to tack onto the end of this post. The first is that the Slaves of Golconda group has chosen its next read, scheduled for discussion on 31st May. The book is Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, which won the Whitbread Prize for biography.

‘In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Lorna Sage brings alive her girlhood in post-war provincial Britain. From memories of her family and the wounds they inflict upon one another, she tells a tale of thwarted love, failed religion and the salvation she found in books.’

‘Lorna Sage may be the proof we need that literature really can make something happen…Bad Blood tells a story about books as passports our of a childhood hell.’ Marina Warner, Independent.

Do join in with us if you would like to.

The other thing is that I’ve become involved in an online radio review programme. I’ll tell you more about this when I have some proper details, but one of the topics up for discussion is going to be the recent rash of Jane Austen spin-offs. I would be so very grateful for any recommendations; there are so many sequels and rewrites and Austen-obsessed novels to choose from, I don’t know where to start! But please, no zombie mash-ups; they give me a sense of humour failure. Thank you in advance!

More Honest Scrapping

The blogging world’s sweetheart, Grad, was kind enough to pass onto me the Honest Scrap Award, which you will all know comes with a meme attached. I have to write ten things about myself, and frankly if you’ve been around the Reading Room for a while, I am an open book to you all. But I will tell you about an incident that happened here last night, and which could be filed under the heading of ‘multiple maternal dilemmas’.

1. What set it off was a classic dilemma for a mother of a 15-year-old boy. My son very much wanted to see the film Watchmen, from the graphic novel of the same name. It’s an 18 certificate and I was not at all sure about it. However, my son has never been one to have bad dreams or to find television programmes or films particularly frightening. He said he would watch it with his father and Mister Litlove was keen (I don’t think they’ve made the film he won’t watch). He said having read the book he even knew when to close his eyes. And then I saw a cheap DVD for sale and so…

2. Yesterday evening my son asked me if I thought his dad would like to see the video. I went off to ask my husband who was at that point cooking dinner. For some reason my son likes having me carry messages this way. He likes to tell me incidents from his day so that I can then recount them to his father in his hearing. It must be like having your own special envoy. Anyway, I conveyed the message, my husband was delighted to relinquish control of the cooking utensils and I united the two domestic superpowers on the sofa. They looked very sweet all cuddled up together. I refused point blank to watch anything so violent and retired to read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in peace over my dinner. I think that’s called irony.

3. A couple of hours later they emerged. ‘Was it really bad?’ I asked Mister Litlove. ‘It had its moments,’ he replied. But it transpired that my son was not upset over what he’d seen but over the ending of the movie. ‘It was a terrible ending,’ he grumbled. ‘It sort of tailed off. Nothing was resolved and there were no real conclusions. I hate endings like that. I like everything to be clear at the end and sorted out.’ ‘You want closure,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said my son. ‘That’s what I like stories for because they have closure. The ending on this one was really disappointing.’

4. Meanwhile, Mister Litlove had been searching around on the internet for a review or a reading of the movie. Now I’m not about to recount the plot of a film I haven’t seen. But if I’ve understood the menfolk correctly, there’s a clash in the story over modes of retribution. One of the superheroes picks the baddies off individually and metes out justice personally and with great violence. The other superhero, and his enemy, doesn’t see things as black and white, but as shades of grey. Near the end of the film he arranges for New York to be destroyed, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but saving in the process, apparently, the lives of billions who might have been drawn into the conflict. This probably makes no sense as it’s not at all clear to me, but I could tell the problem was over a sticky moral compromise, and my son is not keen on compromise at all. ‘No one innocent should have died,’ he complained. ‘They should have found a way around the problem so that there was a good ending.’

5. ‘I’ve found someone’s blog post about it,’ said Mister Litlove. ‘And they say that the whole point of the movie is that it is ambiguous and doesn’t deliver a clear moral message.’ ‘That’s what I want,’ said my son. ‘A clear moral message. I do think things are black and white, just like the superhero, Rorschach. And even if life doesn’t always end up the way it should, books and movies ought to. It’s so much more satisfying.’ I thought back to my own 15-year-old self. ‘I’m pretty sure I was just the same as you at your age,’ I said. ‘I liked books because they were clear about right and wrong and had the kind of really pleasing endings where bad people were punished. As you get older, you end up living through moral dilemmas and the experience makes any sort of clear cut judgement that bit harder.’ ‘Hmph,’ said my son. ‘We should talk about this again in 20 years,’ I joked.

6. Of course we kept on talking about right and wrong and black and white well past all our bedtimes. Eventually, Mister Litlove insisted the day was over and my son and I went to clean our teeth. He was by that point complaining that he didn’t have enough control over his life and couldn’t change the things he wanted to. ‘What would you change if you could?’ I asked. ‘People,’ he declared. Ahhhh. Then I began to see that the moral complexities of Watchmen had touched a sore nerve that had to do with school. That’s the thing about books and movies; it doesn’t matter if you’ve been transported to the Australian Outback or a distant planet in a different solar system, somehow or other you are so often being made to think about your own life.

7. My son is in a physics class with a teacher who can’t keep control. And rather than do something about it, the teacher seems to have given up, and simply keeps talking over the din of the boys talking to one another, ignoring him or worse. ‘Every time he turns his back there’s a hail of missiles,’ my son told me. This has somewhat ruined the class for my son, who is not an agitator or an instigator, but alas for him, one of life’s good boys, who only asks to be left quietly alone to get done what he must do. I was exactly the same. I never understood the jungle of the playground, or the wild, random aggression of the children. It left me bewildered and a little freaked. This is what they don’t tell you about parenthood: it is so hard to see your own flaws and weaknesses reproduced in your child in a way that you are unable to do anything about.

8. ‘You know you can’t change the disruptive children,’ I said. ‘You can only change your attitude towards them, and not let them get away with spoiling your day.’ Well, my son knows this, but of course it doesn’t feel that way. ‘I don’t know why people want to behave so badly,’ he said. ‘And it’s not fair that they can do whatever they like and get away with it.’  ‘They’ll get their comeuppance in time,’ I said. ‘You just have to believe in natural justice.’ ‘But I don’t believe in natural justice,’ he complained. ‘There isn’t any. There’s no reason why bad people can’t get through their entire lives with nothing awful happening to them, while good people have to put up with all sorts of tragedies and disasters. I don’t think there is any kind of retribution that you can rely on.’

9. Mister Litlove had been listening at the door and he said. ‘Oh I don’t know. There was a boy I knew in college and he was one of those types who seem to have it all. He was very confident and very clever, but he only did exactly what he wanted and often that wasn’t any work at all. But he got away with it all the time and no one did anything about it. Anyhow, he graduated with a good degree and went to work with Goldman-Sachs. And then we heard he’d been sacked for ‘practices that were not compatible with the culture of the organisation.’’ He grinned. ‘I enjoyed that.’
10. ‘And I think that people who behave badly have some sort of imbalance in their characters,’ I added. ‘I’ve seen a lot of miscreants in college, and whenever we really considered whether they were mad, bad or sad, we always ended up deciding they were basically sad. If that’s how you are, then I don’t think you enjoy life, not really.’ ‘They all seem cheerful enough to me,’ said my son, darkly. Ahh blogging friends it is so difficult trying to comfort children as they get older. Because on the face of it they have right on their side: life is fundamentally unfair, a percentage of the people you are obliged to deal with are fundamentally annoying, and there is no recourse to satisfactory judgement that would make things all right. And for precisely these problems we have stories, that pat life into a better shape and bring us the comfort of meaning and clarity. Unless, of course, their point is moral ambiguity. I wanted to find some argument that would comfort my son, whereas all he really wanted was to be confirmed that he was right. But how can any mother actually say, yes, my darling, this is the terrible world that I have brought you into, and for whose inadequacies I now feel obscurely guilty?

Still, it is clearly natural justice at work here, as I feel I have been taught a lesson about bringing violent films home: they clearly cause way too many difficult metaphysical discussions!