Realms of imagination

Cincinnati Subway, by Jonathan Warren. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners

Travis Elborough and Alan Horsfield, London: Aurum Press, 2021, 208pps. Hb, £24.99

Some years ago, I was on holiday in Iceland. We had hired a very inadequate car (limited budget) for a road trip from Reykjavik to the spectacular Vatnajökull glacier on the southern coast. Whilst driving through the wonderfully bleak, black volcanic landscape we spotted an orange tailfin of what looked like a fighter plane. We stopped to investigate and after a short walk came across a full size replica of a MiG-31; a balsa wood testament to Russian aeronautical ingenuity. No signs, no explanation. It was only later that we learnt that it was a left behind prop for a Clint Eastwood film, Firefox.

This spurred my interest in historical and geographical anomalies, such as the suburban bungalow in Essex that disguised the UK’s Cold War HQ beneath. When The Atlas of Improbable Places arrived on my desk, I devoured it in one sitting. It is a labour of curiosity and love by Travis Elborough and cartographer Alan Horsfield.

Lithuania’s Hill of 100,000 Crosses, by Diego Delso. Image: Wikimedia Commons

It details dream creations, deserted destinations, architectural oddities, floating worlds, otherworldly spaces and subterranean realms. I learnt about the Hill of 100,000 crosses in Lithuania. The crosses were planted to commemorate people who had died combatting their Russian overlords.  Often dissidents would just go missing, so in the absence of a body, a cross was erected on a small hill near the city of Siauliai. The first crosses appeared in 1831. The Russians ordered that the crosses be bulldozed but within a few days more had been erected. So they spread sewage over the hill but still the crosses appeared in defiance of cordons and KGB guards. Pope John Paul II planted his own cross on the Hill in 1993. It is now a site of political and spiritual pilgrimage.

Portmeirion gets a welcome mention as does the extraordinary underground postal railway in London, now a tourist attraction. Beijing’s abandoned Disney-land-style theme offers a rather different view of China, as does Teufelsberg, the abandoned US spy station in Berlin, a far from subtle eavesdropping nerve centre in the Cold War. You can also learn about Cincinnati’s still abandoned subway system and the illicit tunnels constructed by Chinese immigrants in Moose Jaw, Canada. When racism and economic decline hit the city, the Chinese were targeted. They went underground, reappearing to run a laundry in the daytime or such like, and bamboozle their oppressors.

For creepiness, you cannot beat the Ibaloi Mummy Caves at Benguet in the Philippines. The tribe favoured an embalming method of smoking and drying out bodies, leaving a sort of desiccated husk. When mummification was complete, they were laid to rest in wooden coffins and stacked in cave tombs. They await your visit.

Masters of the English musical renascence

Image: Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON reports from the 17th English Music Festival

Ever since 2006, except for the shortest of absences due to the Covid crisis, the Oxfordshire village of Dorchester-on-Thames has been hosting the English Music Festival, the EMF – the artistic creation of one dedicated Englishwoman, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck. The first-ever concert was held on an October evening, given by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by (the late) David Lloyd Jones – a conductor noted for his love of opera and Russian music, but also for the music of the English musical renascence: the era often seen as dominated by Elgar, but actually the time when Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Bliss, Ireland and many others shaped a national musical style (or styles) with their expansive symphonies and folk-infused song-cycles.

For an initially small Festival with great ambitions, but – inevitably – with limited funds, the participation of the BBC’s most versatile orchestra was a masterstroke of strategy by the Festival founder – ensuring a prestigious beginning to her concert series and an all-important broadcast on BBC Radio 3. At once the Festival was put on the map and thanks to many others being inspired by Em’s great enthusiasm, has grown in scale and scope through the years, with the BBC’s orchestra still the mainstay of the opening concert.

Today, the Festival takes place over the May Bank Holiday, a time when the countryside surrounding Dorchester comes into its own: willow cotton drifting on the air; the footpaths to the Thames laced with white cow parsley; meadows of buttercups leading to Iron Age embankments; and nearby, under the full canopy of churchyard trees, the welcome shade and cool recesses of places such as St. Peter, Little Wittenham. 

Here, among the tomb chests and brasses, the Oxfordshire of quiet parsons and fussy parochial church councils can be found – but also the dreamy, immemorial Thames-scape of William Morris and Kenneth Grahame, the immemorial England of T.S. Eliot, Sir John Betjeman, or Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. High above the hamlet, like a sentinel in the downland, stand the trees of the Wittenham Clumps: inspiration for Paul Nash – and welcome shade for grazing cows and OS-guided walkers who find themselves a little too warm after wandering to the ridge on a hot day. As was the case with Richard Adams’s rabbits of Berkshire-set Watership Down, the view here seems to take in ‘the whole world!’ – or at least, the Chilterns to the east, Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford to the north, and beyond, an outline of the beginnings of the English Midlands.

Dorchester Abbey is the largest building visible in the landscape (save for a lurking, distant 1930s-looking factory-type structure to the northwest). The Abbey has been a seat of Christianity since the seventh century and a survivor of the reign of Henry Vlll – its great window and towering arches a worthy rival to more famous landmarks, such as Gloucester Cathedral. As the Wittenham Clumps were to Paul Nash, so the Abbey became an inspiration to fellow artist, John Piper – and in our own time, for the orchestral musicians of the EMF, the great church offering a near-perfect acoustic and a truly inspiring setting for their concerts. 

And for the musical offering of Friday 24th May, Doreen Carwithen’s Suffolk Suite opened the BBC Concert Orchestra’s programme, the work based upon romantic and folk-reminiscent melodies originally penned for a short 1950s transport film, entitled East Anglian Holiday. A superior piece of public information-film scoring, the suite begins with a stirring ‘spirit of England’ theme, which gives the impression that you are back on the Wittenham Clumps, surveying the majesty of ‘this other Eden.’ However, East Anglia has no downland, so listeners find themselves rubbing shoulders with morris-dancers at a Suffolk festivity, or being lulled into an afternoon slumber by the waters of Orford Ness. A stirring, martial portrait of Framlingham Castle ends the sequence, but not before a brief reappearance of the moving opening tune – a pleasing farewell to the East of England on Carwithen’s bus or rail trip to the county.

Holst’s imposing and early (1899-1900) Symphony in F major, subtitled The Cotswolds, was the main work in the concert – its last movement, like the Carwithen, conjuring scenes of bucolic, open-air celebration and the atmosphere of a countryside where people still whistled folk-tunes. Yet the work’s other movements sometimes seemed to bypass the village green, with an altogether less scene-painting feel – although it has to be said that the brooding and dark slow movement is a memorial in music to the Arts and Crafts luminary, William Morris. Conductor Martin Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra played with deeply-felt intensity, with brass and the darker hues of the orchestra summoning the spirits of the Cotswold hills and combes.

Brass instruments were very much in evidence in the world premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Richard II – A Concert Fantasy, woven together from fragments of music and ‘cues’ written by the composer for a planned wartime radio play. The arranger and bringer-to-life of this Shakespeare scenario is Nathaniel Lew, Professor of Music at St. Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont, who – like conductor, Martin Yates (the arranger of RVW’s Falstaff suite, ‘Fat Knight’, also once premiered at this Festival) – has a fascination with the rescuing and revival of works once thought to be lost, or not to have existed at all. The performance fully honoured the EMF’s guiding philosophy of what can almost be seen as musical archaeology, or restoration.

Saturday morning’s chamber recital featured Rupert Marshall-Luck, violin, and Peter Cartwright, piano, doing their brilliant bit in bringing obscure works into the limelight, including Ernest Farrar’s Celtic Suite, Bliss’s Theme and Cadenza, and sonatas by Herbert Howells and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (whose Clarinet Concerto, played by Michael Collins, featured in the first-night concert). Known for his authoritative performances of Elgar’s famous Violin Sonata, Rupert Marshall-Luck, brought gravitas to the Howells and Stanford, aided by the concerto-like strength of Peter Cartwright’s piano playing. Both artists channelled huge energy and concentration into what was a lengthy, often heavyweight chamber programme, which allowed us to see the overlooked greatness of England’s heritage of smaller-scale works.

Hilary Davan Wetton, with the Godwine Choir. Image: Stuart Millson

My journey to Dorchester ended this year with the Saturday evening concert by the Godwine Choir conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, an effervescent, ever-youthful 80-year-old veteran of the concert podium. Addressing the audience on the desperate need for arts funding in Britain, and contrasting how Parisian politicians would authorise the pouring of money into any festival of French music, the Maestro went on to conduct choral masterpieces such as Vaughan Williams, O Clap Your Hands; Elgar’s 1914 Give Unto The Lord, but with time, too, for the enchanting Blake-inspired part-song by Havergal Brian, The Dream – with a folkish, fairy atmosphere of glades and glow worms. Dreamscapes were also created by the wonderful Godwine voices in the form of Holst’s Sanskrit-inspired Hymns from the Rig Veda, pieces that had the Abbey audience spellbound, especially one of my concert companions, a youngish (still under-40) relative newcomer to music. Proof indeed, should the Arts Council require it, that you stimulate an interest in classical music by playing to people… classical music.

With its Suffolk and Sanskrit music, its Cotswolds and choral contributions, the 2024 EMF may well go down as a vintage ‘season’ – but we say that every year.

Sex and the Enlightenment city

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis

Julie Peakman, Reaktion Books, 2024, 352pps., £25

With Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, Julie Peakman has given us an intimate portrayal of women’s sexual activity during the long eighteenth century, which ran from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to Waterloo in 1815. Peakman ends her long century in 1830, but I doubt if many readers will quibble at her fifteen-year addition, since many of the chapters that make up Libertine London are a fine introduction to the social history of the period, which aims to look at that magnificent yet squalid era through the eyes of the sex hustlers of the time.

Each type gets a chapter devoted to her, starting with the drabs who worked the streets to the bawds who managed the brothels, then up to the courtesans. Finally, the volume culminates with the royal mistresses who were at the pinnacle of the oldest profession.

By dividing these women up into categories, Peakman shines a light on the niche each one inhabited, as well as open up the broader society to the modern reader. The raddled street prostitutes inhabited a world of extreme poverty, as did tens of thousands of Londoners in those days. It was a world where a child could have his head crushed under the wheel of a cart and where street crime was so ubiquitous that even the link boys who carried a blazing torch and were hired to light the way often worked with street thugs who relieved the victims of their wealth.

Many women were actually semi-whores. “Milliners…were particularly known for their sideline in prostitution,” Peakman tells us – as indeed they were until well into the twentieth century. The actresses who trod the boards often supplemented their income with acting of a different kind, as did the girls who sold fruit and nuts at the theatres, which reminds this reader of the legend of Nell Gwynn who took the fancy of Charles II when she offered him an orange from her basket.  Of course, there was also the army of seasonal workers who brought in the crops, along with the milkmaids who sold their product on the streets. Peakman doesn’t mention the milkmaids who were seen by many as innocent country girls, ripe for the plucking, but who this writer suspects knew exactly what they were doing and the role they were expected to play.

Peakman does touch on that theme when she reminds us that brothels could charge extra for a guaranteed virgin and that many a whorehouse bed had a secret compartment with a cloth soaked in red juice that the highly experienced trollop could use to show to her client that she had indeed just been deflowered.

One chapter that jars as it is so unconnected to the rest of the volume is the one dealing with homosexualism during the period. The chapter presents upper class homosexuality between consenting adults as being the norm, and ignores the, frankly, odious nature of the abuse that went on between wealthy pederasts and young boys. When it comes to the rape of servant girls by their employers, Peakman gives us chapter and verse on matters such as the trial of Colonel Francis Charteris in 1730 on a charge of raping a maid. She concludes: “Sadly, as with most aristocratic men who had committed rape or other crimes, Charteris managed to wheedle his way out of the death penalty.” That is true, as he got a royal pardon, but he still had to pay his victim £30,000 and when he died in 1732 his coffin was covered in dead cats before the gravediggers could shovel the earth over it. Libertine London also gives us horrifying accounts of the rapes of young girls, many not even in their teens and discusses the ways in which wealthy, well-connected abusers escaped from what passed for justice in those days.

However, what it does not do is even consider the equally vile crimes committed by wealthy homosexuals against lower-class boys. Two cases spring to mind, and both were covered by the pamphleteers and newspapers of the day, but neither is mentioned by this authoress.

The first is so famous that from the date of the trial in 1772 right up to the Oscar Wilde scandal over a century later, it was debated and chewed over long after all the participants were dead. Captain Robert Jones of the Royal Artillery (he may have been a lieutenant, but is usually given the rank of captain) was convicted of the buggery of a boy of 12. His victim was Francis Henry Hay who spoke clearly and bravely at the trial and almost certainly helped the jury return a guilty verdict, whereupon Jones was sentenced to death. Perhaps needless to say, he was pardoned on condition that he left the country and never returned, and left to live his life in Florence, although it is possible that he never got further than Lyon.

Then we have the matter of General Sir Eyre Coote in 1815 who was involved with some boys at Christ’s Hospital school. This involved the giving and receiving of the birch and did not lead to a trial, but Coote was dismissed from the army. Throughout the nineteenth century, the fictional character of Rosa Coote was used by Victorian writers of pornography as a stock figure that was presented as either the general’s daughter or his niece. It is unlikely that this character would have been created had the readers not understood the reference to the general, even many years after the scandal.

It is impossible to believe that Julie Peakman did not know of these cases as people were writing about them for decades afterwards. Why she chose to ignore them is a matter for her, but it does leave this reviewer wondering why this carefully curated account of upper-class homosexuality was even included in a volume that aims to show the lives of women in the sex trade.

Julie Peakman’s argument as she expresses it is to show us the lives of those women who had transactional virtues by presenting them as the victims of “misogyny,” a word that was not even invented until this century and a concept that was as alien to the long eighteenth-century as it is to many of us in the twenty-first. This was a world of utter poverty for the many and fabulous wealth for the few. Women, being great survivors, have always been aware that they have a commodity in their own bodies and when times are bad they will rent out that commodity to ensure their survival. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the going rate for sex in Vienna was three cigarettes. That is not three cartons of cigarettes, or even three packs, but three individual cigarettes. A girl with three cigarettes could exchange them for three eggs, or three loaves of bread: she could survive another day in other words. It was this need to survive, rather than “the prevalence of men’s unabated lusts and the sexual vulnerability of women” that was at work in Libertine London. That said, this reader did find the conjuration of the spirit of Mary Whitehouse that is implicit in that sentence very entertaining.

One does not need to over think what was going on during this era, and in most of her individual chapters, Julie Peakman presents clear, thoroughly researched and well-written accounts of the lives of many London women. It was a time when men murdered and robbed, with many ending their days dancing the hempen jig at Tyburn Tree, and women survived by renting themselves out. It was a hard time to be poor, is the conclusion that this reviewer took away from Libertine London.

Clever and cheerful, like a lizard in the sun

Friedrich Nietzsche, by Edvard Munch (1906)

Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80-Spring 1881)

Friedrich Nietzsche, J.M. Baker Jr, Christiane Hertel (trans.), Stanford University Press, 2023, paperback, 530pp, $28

The thirteenth of nineteen volumes in the Stanford University Press edition of the German-language Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke covers the notebooks from late 1879 to early 1881, at a time when Nietzsche was writing Dawn (Morgenröthe, 1881), the second book of his “free spirit” trilogy. Even a well-informed Nietzsche reader may draw a blank at that, as it is the least widely read of his books. These notes relate to a critique of the generation of morals, particularly the topics of dissimulation and self-deception, the subjects of Dawn. The title refers to the potential rebirth of modern man, freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion and worldview, led by great self-actualised men – the Übermenschen.

The philosopher succinctly summarises his primary concern in this period so: “The greatest problem of the coming age is the eradication of moral concepts and the cleansing from our representations of moral forms or colors that have crept into them and are often difficult to recognize.”[i] He meditates on the nature of morality and how it arises and if some different system of values can govern man’s conduct. Christian morality divides people (according to their characters) into obedient slaves or mindless enforcer. Both act from character, rather than making value judgements based on personal and social good. The claims that Christian morality has the right to be considered normative (as per Pascal) are spurious, Nietzsche contends – as outlined in many of his published books. “[…] Christianity takes no pleasure in the human being.”[ii]

Nietzsche rails against misguided egalitarianism, democracy, socialism and (of course) Christianity, which he sees at the root of modern European man’s slave morality and the ultimate cause of many of civilisation’s parlous state. He sees a levelling of people as a rebellion against natural inequality and exceptional men. It makes men manageably pliable. However, Nietzsche opens the door to individualism for its own sake – the myth of meritocracy, which allows the collectivised minority to seize its power and advantages and (ultimately) its supremacy, as Gaetano Mosca argued. There are few autobiographical comments, but these are indirect and brief, so only the reader averagely acquainted with the philosopher’s life will be able to glean anything from them.

He wonders at the alienness of Judaism, which has been incorporated into European thinking through Christianity, and notes that the words of the Old Testament are (perhaps paradoxically) more accessible to us than the ancient Greeks and Romans. He repeatedly describes morality as Asian – i.e. derived from the Semitic people of the Near East – and finds it unfitting for Europeans; he also adds that he considers Stoicism Semitic. Valuations determine both our personal responses, interpersonal relations and society as a whole; if moral valuations can be altered, or the whole system abolished, then human capacity is freed. Nietzsche is no Panglossian optimist, but he sees human capacity as much greater than what the constricting morals and customs of his day permitted. Incorrect valuations wage war against each other, distracting and confusing; these conflicts demonstrate the faulty foundations of morality and must be seen clearly.

Nietzsche is ever aware of the need for geniuses; these exceptional men will lead, instruct and inspire. “To use and recognize chance is called genius. To use the expedient and familiar – morality?”[iii] He assesses the possibility of describing “an extra-moral view of the world” that is “an aesthetic one (veneration of genius)”. Tantalisingly, the fragment breaks off there. He is aware of the bad character and suffering great men cause and admits that “veneration of genius has often been unconscious devil worship.”[iv]“[A]rtists are usually intolerable as persons, and this should be subtracted from what is gained from their works.”[v]

Of the hundreds of entries (mainly in the form of notes and aphorisms) few extend longer than one page. Every page has an insight into the human condition. “Compassion without intelligence is one of the most unpleasant and disturbing phenomena […]”[vi] There are oddities, such as the author’s contention that there is no instinctive fear of death, merely aversion to the pain of dying and the unknown and that the appetite for life’s pleasures acts as more of a stimulant. Hence there is no life-preservation instinct per se. Another bon pensée is “Clever and cheerful, like a lizard in the sun”, although Nietzsche never seems such a lizard – at least, not on this splenetic showing.

The style is brusque, the diction non-technical, with entries compressed to the extreme. Yet, he allows himself digressions and occasional exclamations. As the translator explains, this directness actually generates difficulties. Unlike his published works, which are models of clear prose and precise argumentation, the notes are littered with general words that can bear several specific meanings, introducing a degree of ambiguity that the translator must adjudicate. Many of these points were never subsequently taken up again by the author, so it is hard to know which meaning he had in mind.    

There are meditations upon the greats, such as Plato, Christ, St Paul, Martin Luther, Goethe, Napoleon, Schopenhauer and others, viewed in light of their limitations as well as their achievements. Napoleon was more intent on seeming superior to others than on being superior. Nietzsche was reading a biography of Napoleon at the time, so there are extensive comments relating to Napoleon’s conduct, character and significance. Wagner – his aspirations, his ambition, his vanity – is wrestled with at length:

Wagner courts being named the German artist, but, alas, neither the grand opera nor his character is specifically German: which is why he has not as yet become dear to the populace, but instead to a class of refined and over-cultivated people – the circle to which, say, in the last century Rousseau appealed.[vii]  

The appearance of these Stanford University Press translations keeps Nietzsche vitally alive, able to dazzle, surprise and shock. As usual, the annotation and index are accompanied by an extensive and illuminating afterword on the subjects of the texts. The critical apparatus is first class and the references well judged.


[i] P. 5

[ii] P. 262

[iii] P. 18

[iv] P. 47

[v] P. 95

[vi] P. 6

[vii] P. 163

Refracted future

Humani Victus Instrumenta – Ars Coquinaria. 1570s engraving

The Mirror

Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10

Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (from which we get the word ‘robot, based on a Czech word, robota, meaning ‘forced labour’) made many people anxious about out-of-control technology – a theme revisited every generation since, as seen for example in the 1984 action classic, Terminator. Today, the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence has turned a trope into a cliché, the subject of articles, books and documentaries which often really tell us more about contemporary concerns than they do about possible futures. Musician-novelist Tim Bragg’s newest book is therefore in a certain idealist-nostalgic-pessimistic vein; this does not mean it is not distinctive or worthwhile.

As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society, where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, and androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticised threshold that must be crossed. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the authorities limit fertility. Like The Matrix, almost nothing is what it seems. As in many dystopias, there is an unjust government with a privileged ‘Inner Party,’ sinister secrets, ecological impoverishment, and bleak living conditions for the lowest echelons – and of course ‘red-pilled’ rebels seeking to upturn the system. This highly literate author imbues all these obvious influences with ideas of his own.

He brings the genre up to (future) date, setting his story in 2073, and reflecting upon today’s worries about self-image, the control of data, the time we spend online, the cashless society, the food we eat (insects bulk large in The Mirror’s meals), and the erasure of the past. Every citizen wears a ‘mirror’ device, which delivers a limited range of computer-generated entertainment and information, but most importantly allows the authorities to monitor the population. Emotions and sensations are all suspect – except those provided by pills or virtual reality, from ‘conversations’ with ancestors to sexual intercourse. There seem to be no local or national identities, or even any kind of economy.

The pivotal relationship is between two girls, Mia and Karella, who are arriving at physical and sexual maturity; there seems to be no ‘transgenderism’ in The Mirror world (which is plausible, as those who are so exercised by this today will have exited the scene by 2073). Both characters are well thought-through, and nuanced. Bragg’s emphasis on youthful female sexuality however feels slightly discomfiting, even though of course novelists must always be permitted to imagine themselves in guises or roles other than their own. It is however germane to this story, because both girls are being exploited by a highly intrusive state, with Karella the subject of life-long transhumanist experiments, and Mia being viewed as a brood-mare for a eugenics programme. Their every emotion is parsed for psychological significance, and there are constant interventions – for example a dogged therapeutic insistence on treating Mia’s phobia about swimming (a happy intervention, because her instilled ability to swim matters greatly later).

Like everyone else, Mia and Karella are under the purview of a panoptical ‘Hub,’ and an elite organisation called Earthly Living Kingdom (ELK). Mia’s own mother is an ELK Guardian, a senior operative of a group whose sinister plans become increasingly apparent, and the mother-daughter relationship is consequently complex. Mia’s father is absent – or is he?

There are menacing ELK operatives, partly countervailed by a sub-world of gathering rebellion, led by Ned, an IT expert who convenes a secret cell to keep alive fast-fading arts – in effect, the authentic human spirit, at risk from rationalist thinking, cultural coarsening, and technological reductionism. Mia finds especial inspiration and solace in the music of Bach, which although available through approved channels, has fallen into desuetude. In 2073, those who wish to hear such antediluvian sounds risk seeming at best eccentric – and at worst, refuseniks in ‘need’ of pharmaceutical intervention, or biotechnological ‘rebooting.’ Bragg has clearly thought a great deal about the psychological benefits of music for everyone in all ages, here showing synaesthesia as a means of inner escape from one-dimensional mundanity.

The ‘biohacker’ artist Neil Harbisson, by Hector Adalid. Wikimedia Commons

He handles generally well one of the perennial problems of dystopian literature – accustoming readers to invented concepts and specially coined terminology without interrupting the narrative with long screeds of explication. He has tried hard to come up with new idioms. French phrases are unexpectedly widely used. Anglo-Saxon expletives however appear to have gone out of vogue, to be replaced with what seem now insipid new terms of emphasis (“sparking uterus”), which seems an unlikely eventuality – but maybe this symbolises his surmised society’s distance from earthy realism. Some are more believable, such as “abundant” to express enthusiasm. There is admirable restraint and wit in the conversations between the human protagonists and the Rai robots who do much of the work (and are constantly being ‘improved’ by technologists and theorists obsessed with ‘migrating’ consciousness from human to machine, and even more worryingly back again).

The Mirror is a deeply well-intentioned book, and what is even more important, sensitively intelligent – a worthy reflection on issues which are swiftly becoming salient, and which seem certain to become even more so.

A charm of Ffinches

Alexander Ffinch, by Harriet Lloyd-Smith (2011)

Parallels

Alexander Ffinch, the organ of Cheltenham College Chapel, Divine Art Recordings. DDX 21112

RICHARD DOVE is transported by a new album of organ music

My father adored church organ music. At the weekend, I would often wake to the grand noise of Nôtre Dame, Rouen, or the three manual, 44 stop organ at Freiburg Cathedral (a particular favourite). I was constantly reminded of him as I listened to Parallels, a new CD by Alexander Ffinch.

Ffinch is the organist at Cheltenham College and oversaw a complete rebuild of the organ in 2017. There is an intimacy between player and instrument which is both rare and wonderful. There is also a refreshing boldness in the selection of compositions. Where else could one find Gustav Holst alongside Coldplay’s Chris Martin? As Ffinch explains in the sleevenotes:

Today, one of my daily duties is to play to 700 students at the start of their working day. I am facing a generation with the power to instantly access the music they want at any time and trust me, it’s not likely to be original organ music. So to capture their attention, I have enjoyed turning to classical some pop/rock arrangements to present music they hear elsewhere.

The Coldplay song ‘Paradise’ soars around the college chapel, stirring even the most indolent student.

There are other surprises on the recording – a Suite by Florence Price, an African-American composer who combines her classical training with Southern black American culture. Her ‘Symphony No 1 in E Minor’ was premiered at the Chicago World’s Fair by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. The concert was the first performance of a composition by a black woman by a major orchestra in the US. The ‘Suite’ is jaunty, mellifluous and immediately engaging, with jazz phrasing and gospel singing inspiration.

There is a wonderfully atmospheric, gently-paced interpretation of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod,’ benefiting from the resonance of the chapel’s ancient stones.

Dan Locklair’s ‘Rubrics’ is another surprise, and requires Ffinch’s masterful dexterity. After a tumultuous first movement, we move to a gentle second movement using silence as a sort of leitmotif. As the composer explains in the excellent accompanying booklet: “To be sure, it is impossible to have true silence when music is sounded. But the illusion of silence can be suggested.”

The recording closes with Leon Boellman’s ‘Suite Gothique.’ It was early morning when I listened to the Suite and its third movement ‘Prière a Nôtre-Dame.’ My father was almost with me in the room as the melody floated and swirled. Nôtre Dame was his first port of call on any visit to Paris. From this embracing reverie we launch into the thunderous final movement, the Toccata. It awakened the household as Dad was prone to do. Time to put the kettle on.

Is this a dagger they see before them?

STUART MILLSON is appalled to find Mid Wales Opera facing closure

Founded 35 years ago to bring the finest music and drama to rural towns and communities, Mid Wales Opera is a company specialising in bringing pared-down versions of the greatest music-dramas to far-flung parts of the country. 

On Saturday 23rd March, their run of Verdi’s Macbeth came to an end at the c. 500-seat Brecon Theatre (Theatr Brycheiniog), with a capacity audience enjoying Jeremy Sams’s English version of the score. Directed by Richard Studer – and full marks here for the stage lighting and ‘recycling’ of roles among the chorus – Mid Wales’s own glorious opera company succeeded in generating a dramatic effect, just as overwhelming as anything you might hear at Welsh or English National Opera.

How was it possible for an orchestra-pit ensemble, just 15-strong, to conjure much of Verdi’s lush orchestration? Under conductor Jonathan Lyness the resident chamber orchestra, Ensemble Cymru, achieved this miracle – the timpanist also playing the side-drum, and their splendid cellist generating a rich, resonant sound in those dark moments of the drama. 

On stage, meanwhile, Macbeth’s court, began its disintegration: soldiers with a Fascistic air, reminiscent of Richard Loncraine’s film of Richard lll, marched up and down, Lady Macbeth – the brilliant stage presence of Mari Wyn Williams unleashing her amoral powers, and Macbeth himself, sung by Jean-Kristof Bouton, descending into his ‘feverish visions’ as the apparition of the murdered Banquo appears at a castle feast.

The witches, dressed as 1950s’ office secretaries, but with demonic eye make-up reminiscent of Kathleen Byron’s unsettling appearance in the 1947 film, Black Narcissus, deserve great praise for their unsettling performance. Finally, the end comes for Macbeth as a forest supernaturally advances upon his fortress – actually, the English army in camouflage, although on stage at Mid Wales Opera only the Scottish saltire was raised. (Surely a major omission that the Cross of St. George did not appear?!)

What next for Mid Wales Opera? A real-life dramatic crisis, no less: the shocking removal of one hundred per cent of their grant from the Arts Council of Wales, casting doubt over whether productions of this kind could ever be staged again. Is this a dagger they see before them? It would seem so. But the story is the same, everywhere. Last year, the BBC tried to disband its own elite choir, the famous BBC Singers, and cut its symphonic strength across three ensemblesMeanwhilethe length and breadth of these islands, from Birmingham to Bournemouth, our orchestras and theatres struggle to convince those in power of the vital need for the arts. 

Quite simply, Britain now has a choice: do we just become a TV/consumer society, turning our backs on the splendour and enrichment of music and the arts? Or do we challenge the Arts Council and those in political office for a change in direction? As the wise Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger put it: “Neglect the civilised arts at your peril…”

To support the appeal for Mid Wales Opera, write to Bryn Wgan, Caersws, Powys, Wales, SY17 5QU

Un-harkened Angel

Angel

Alex Kurtagic, London: Spradabach, 2023, hb., 997pps.

DEREK TURNER finds mordant fun in a tale of modern alienation

In 2009, Alex Kurtagic published Mister, his novel of a highly-cultured IT consultant operating within what he saw as the hellscape of contemporary Europe – a man too intelligent for an age suspicious of intellectual distinctions, and too independent-minded for a continent in thrall to neurotic pettifoggery. In Angel, we meet a similarly misfitting man, but one with even less adaptive ability – indeed, a man almost without agency. This is a behemoth of a book about a midget of a man, wandering solitarily in the drab wasteland of these times.  

Angel is a student of 17th Century literature at an English university, whose unhappy fate it is to combine refined tastes and fastidiousness with an inability to impose these on even his immediate surroundings. He is physically slight and correspondingly cowardly, chronically short of money, and not even compensatingly articulate. Traditionally, angels enunciate glad tidings, but this one (aspiring poet though he may be) can barely sustain a basic conversation. He is announced to, rather than an annunciator. His most obvious resemblance to Biblical or Hebrew angels lies in his essential insubstantiality.

Angel is surrounded by people infinitely more impressive than he is – especially women, from his formidable mother and sister, and brilliantly inductive fellow-students to the mothering Amelia who (for some incomprehensible reason) pants to enfold Angel in her ample embonpoint. He is an incel, but unlike some incels, not potentially dangerous. He is not even angry – although the debased nature of his university, and society, deserves almost unlimited contempt. Kurtagic’s front-cover oil of his Van Dyck-bearded subject excellently conveys the nervy nature of his character, his twitching worriedness and state of blinking surprise at the awfulness of almost everything.

We do not lose sympathy for Angel as the tale unfolds, because we never really develop any. Even if somehow we could, he would haemorrhage it with his every action, or more precisely inaction. It is only at the very end that we start to feel sorry for him, but we can never feel respect. He is epically inept and wholly dependent on others, unable to perform the simplest task without mishap. He gets a menial job, but can’t manage the hours. He is given expensive things, and loses them. He is given excellent advice, and makes no attempt to follow it. He gets blamed even for things that aren’t his fault – and we are neither surprised, nor particularly perturbed. The reason he has no money is that he burned through a generous grant from his wealthy and influential parents in pursuit of an American woman (Madison) so obviously unworthy that people who have never met her instantly smell the gold-digger.

Huge events unfold around him, which culminate in unexpectedly dramatic style, but he is so busy mooning about his love-interest (and feeling sorry for himself) that he misses all the portents. And yet this over-specialised evolutionary aberration ends up as one of his cohort’s rare survivors. His near-invisibility ensures that he is mercifully overlooked by the most malign influencers, except when he accidentally offends à la mode ‘activists’ of one kind or another. He does encounter real rebels, but (probably luckily for him) never capitalizes on these encounters, through distractedness or pusillanimity.

But if we cannot admire Angel, we can smile at some of his pratfalls and predicaments. The author’s mordant sense of humour is abundantly in evidence, as his protagonist lurches from one petty indignity to the next – building up debts, humiliations and resentments, borrowing money he can’t repay, exasperating his family, failing his few friends, irritating his tutors, losing all his clothes at the launderette (and all his illusions about Madison), and vomiting all over the fragrant front of the only woman in the world who wants anything to do with him. Angel’s phobias are Ruskinian in their rarefaction, as he registers disgust with bad table manners, dirt, drunkenness, earrings, oxter hair (on women), tobacco and tattoos.

This is however not just a novel of amusing incidents, but also of serious ideas. The author is a determined logophile, and even those with above-average vocabularies may encounter words that are new to them, or that they have forgotten. These pleasing encounters contrast with sometimes over-long staccato dialogue sections when Angel is trying to attract the attention of barmen or shopkeepers, or, yet again, failing to explain himself to his supposed intellectual peers.

Sophisticated sociopolitical arguments are seeded through this book – about sex differences, elitism, the nature and purpose of universities, and freedom of conscience – but none of these viewpoints are expressed by Angel, although we infer that he generally agrees with their conservative-reactionary tenor. There are shrewd observations of today’s cry-bully tendencies, with their manic oscillations between psychological extremes, attacks on easy Aunt Sally targets, and protesting-too-much parading – and excellent evocations of cityscapes in all their Bladerunner alienness, or broken-down decrepitude. Strewn names of books, films, and paintings betoken authorial wide interests, and the book’s production values hint at his awareness of the importance of aesthetics in shaping worlds. Kurtagic is certain there is such a thing as ‘good taste’, and that it is at root a moral choice. This is weighty literature, in more than just a physical sense.

We eventually leave Angel all alone, contemplating the ruins of all his hopes and with no obvious avenue of escape, with even his once-powerful parents implicated in his downfall. It is a desolate outcome indeed even to so inglorious an odyssey, and even for someone not obviously deserving of respect – because behind his seriocomic unfolding can be seen substantive insights into 21st century society, and in his deeply-grained disappointment something of ourselves.

This review first appeared in The Miskatonian (Home page – The Miskatonian) and is reproduced with permission

Forest fantasy

Image: Leonhard Lenz. Wikimedia Commons

Seren of the Wildwood  

Marly Youmans, Wiseblood books, illustrated, hb., 72pps., US$16

LIAM GUILAR is beguiled by a dream of tangled trees

The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past, / Strange ceremonies that the fays still love / To watch – the rituals of demon tribes / Who once played havoc with the universe, / And everything that says the world is not / Exactly what it seems is hidden here, / But also there are paths to blessedness.

So begins Seren of the Wildwood, Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange.

Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience.[i]

The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology, or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is.

Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story – but is rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream-like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home.

The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally. They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement:

[…]Next, a King

Not young but middle-aged his curling beard

Gone steel,

His mind turned lunatic,

His body no ideal

Of grace and charm to prick

Desire: man as ordeal.

The Bob and Wheel, famously used in Gawain and the Green Knight, inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.

Her poem is full of good lines:

Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight

But then forgotten, Seren moved slower

And slower.

The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:

And so she travelled toward the roar of rain

With thunder, apprehensive as she neared

The lip where torrents catapulted free

From stone and merged into a muscular

And sovereign streaming force – the energy

That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight

And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.

Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t.  

The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters, but what does it mean? This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy.

Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.[ii]

Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped in the story by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion.

In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading.

Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, Seren of the Wildwood is illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.


[i] There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.

[ii] The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish, regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry. 

Uplifting falling

The Book of Falling

David McCooey, Perth, Western Australia: Upswell Publishing, 2023, 109pps. Aus$24.99

LIAM GUILAR says David McCooey’s poetry is intelligent, skilful, varied – and plain enjoyable

The Book of Falling is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programmes can’t write.

He’s very good at what he does. His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here…

Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:

The unseen night creatures – scaled and feathered

for their occult ceremonies – rasp and call outside

in the dark beyond the half dark that

surrounds this marbled, half lit house

(‘Questions of Travel’)  

Such deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in The Book of Falling and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th birthday; Marilyn Monroe divines the future and amongst other things, ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’

These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter is a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs. 

The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.

On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read, and unusual in single author collections, where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is. Take his ‘Rain Poem’:

And as if someone uttered the trigger word

rain begins without ceremony.

But it’s not ‘driving rain’;

it’s just sitting outside

engine idling over the neighbourhood.

The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.

It doesn’t give a damn

And then, like a poem ending

you look out the window

and the rain has stopped.

The birds have returned and the wind

has begun its invisible cover-up job.

Many of the poems present the everyday and familiar, but alter the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world – Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.

When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: “Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity”.

What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world – and above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required – or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.

If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example is ‘Australia’:

Dropping my son at school.

It is ‘Art Day’;

students are to dress up

as their favourite artist.

I see a kid dressed in white.

He has sunscreen on his nose,

And carries a cricket bat.

This is both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. There is the traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports-mad country – a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art – or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock-like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.

And finally – this may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day, but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review. McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable. You should read them.