On fishing and other essays

I am – here – now  – warming up for a morning of admin, or at least admin-type activity (proofreading for students; marking essays; email …).  Every fibre is railing against this.  I want to spend the morning with good book; not a ‘work’ book, but the new book by Andrew Greig, At the Loch of the Green Corrie. (Could I claim this as sort-of-kind-of-work  because it’s Scots lit?  Probably not ~~~). I splurged in a fairly small way in the campus bookshop earlier this week, and bought the Greig in hardback (which was sitting above the recent paperback edition of  Wolfe Hall, reminding me that patience would pay, or at least reduce the outlay).  I also bought Homer and Langley, E.L Doctorow’s most recent book, and, just because the idea intrigued me, Brian Clarke, On Fishing (London: Collins, 2007), not unexpectedly, a book of essays about fishing.

I doubt very much that Clarke’s essays will inspire me to take up a rod, or even find out how to put one together, but fishing seems to be an occupation which would both engender odd thoughts, and give the thinker time to pursue and develop them, so fishing essays sound promising.  I have such sharp memories of the utterly unexpected  pleasure of an essay by Ian Hamilton, on Paul Gascoigne,  in Granta 45 (1993).  I barely knew who Gascoigne was, and certainly had (or have) no interest in football, but was so intrigued, that I read the essay non-stop – twice!  Ever since, I’ve sought out and read essays on subjects about which I know nothing.  I suppose I approach them in much the same way as I do BBCR4, happily imbibing material on subjects about which I’d never claim knowledge or have any inkling of why I might find them interesting; and with no expectations about what I shall or should remember afterwards.

Anyway, I’ve earmarked both the fishing essays and the Doctorow for June’s week lounging in the Med, but want to start the Greig immediately. 

I may be able to  open it this afternoon

– but only if I’ve completed those admin tasks. 

To which …

Louise Welsh, Naming the Bones

(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010)

Drowsiness is mandatory when reading this book, preferably that resulting from life on a sunbed by a pool in the Canaries, but the kind induced by a long overnight bus ride would do. The  storyline is light, rather tired, and peopled by stereotypes, while the writing is simply mediocre.  Since the sole source of suspense is the back-cover blurb, it’s not exactly a page turner, and I’m afraid I failed to spot any of Welsh’s alleged trademarks: wit, insight and gothic charisma. 

The plot centres on Murray Watson, a lecturer in English literature at Glasgow University.  Watson is  researching the life of Archie Lunan, a young Scots poet who published only one slim collection of poems, Moontide, in the 1970s, before he died, aged 25, in a boating accident off the Lismore coast.  Watson takes a sabbatical with the intention of writing a  literary biography of Lunan, and the novel follows Watson as he tracks down Lunan’s associates, and unwittingly uncovers sordid truths about Lunan and his contemporaries.  

Watson is astonishingly bland and uninteresting.  He appears to have little or no intellectual curiosity –  for example, he is said to have in the past, spent more time than he was happy about exploring ancient monuments with his then girlfriend, but nonetheless archly displays ignorance of the meaning of broch (p. 209).  His preoccupation with sex is initially irritating and then boring.  He displays a remarkably weak imagination – his description of sheep running down a hill as looking like fat women running in high heels is grating.  I can only assume the chapter spent in the pub with his colleagues, chapter 6, is an attempt to round out the man.  If it isn’t, then it’s a very longwinded way of introducing a sliver of plot development (Rab Purvis’ one-night stand with Rachel Houghton).  The brother, Jack, lurches in and out of the story for  no obvious reason bar that a saviour is needed at the end.  Jack’s glamorous fellow artist, Cressida Reeves is part of this clunky sub plot as is Jack’s girlfriend Lyn,  whom, for reasons I fail to see, we accompany while she helps a paraplegic ex-drug addict do his shopping. 

There is much that is derivative: the opening chapter set in Edinburgh is weak Rankin; the art exhibition in chapter 2 appears to be a bad replica of Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved; once the action moves to the island of Lismore, it becomes The Wickerman, while AS Byatt has covered the general storyline so much better in Possession.  Taken with together with the countless threads, burgeoning with potential, which Walsh introduces only to allow to fade away, you are left with a lazy attempt at a thriller, and an author who appears to assume a readership undiscerning enough to be satisfied by reputation alone.

Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition

(London: Harper, 2008)

I’m not quite sure that I agree with Stephen Fry’s description of the book as ‘complete perfection’, but it’s a delicious read.  It’s located around Falmouth - a beautiful part of the country and one which I know well, and although I’m not sure how well the descriptions will evoke the place for whose who are unfamiliar with the area, there were enough details to prompt memories of the coast, and the light that painters so delight in.  It’s the story of the Middletons: Rachel, a brilliant but mentally unstable painter from Canada, who exhibits under the name Rachel Kelly; Anthony, a Cornish birth-right Quaker schoolmaster, and their four children, Garfield, Morwenna, Hedley and Petroc; and more specifically, of how the children individually respond to their upbringing by a bipolar  mother for whom the mania of the illness is necessary for artistic fulfilment, and a father whose equilibrium is sustained by his Quaker beliefs. 

I love the structure chosen for the book.  As becomes evident as the book progresses, each chapter is an explication of the notes from a retrospective exhibition of Kelly’s work.  The narrative follows the order of the exhibits rather than the chronology of events, allowing the author to introduce questions over the identity of Rachel and over the cause of tragedies in the family’s life, and to create momentum for the story by remaining silent on key questions until the final page. 

The novel takes on many enormous issues – mental illness, gender, artistic drive versus social expectations of motherhood, and although not tackled, they are treated with delicacy, resulting in a respectful and sympathetic portrayal of mental illness, and a portrayal of Quaker beliefs and attitudes that left me envious.  It’s a novel for which mood is as important as action.  Trying to think about events independently of their perception by the characters, the story becomes melodramatic, even though centring on the extraordinary character of the mother, simply because the mother is so extraordinary – showing both how much care was required to create both balance in events and the children’s response.   

The book excels in the treatment of Kelly’s abstract art – both in the descriptions of her work and the source of their abstract content. 

Gale foundered on the story behind Rachel’s arrival in Britain, and one or two elements jarred slightly, and with hindsight seem to trade too heavily on the stereotype of an artistic community as essentially eccentric. 

Al;though this isn’t great literature, it’s a thoroughly absorbing read, and, I imagine,  will be enormously successful as a book-group book.

More on the silence of running

… social silence, that is; prompted this time by Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition which I picked up at Stansted airport on Friday, having had to wait so long for my flight from Glasgow, that I finished the book I thought would last for the whole trip just as we were landing in London, and needed something for the next leg of the journey to Cambridge. A serendipitous choice: the selection was so poor that I fully anticipated coming away with something unnoteworthy, but it’s so well written and storyline is so good that I’ll look for more of Gale’s books.  However, what prompted me to think more about running and silence are the Gale’s descriptions Friends meetings – Quaker worship. 

I first learnt about Quakers from a post grad supervisor from the Faeroes who was a Birthright Quaker; then learnt more from a close friend after she began attending Quaker meetings for their peacefulness.  I’m both curious and  unnerved at the thought of sitting in silence for an hour with people I don’t know. Would I  find the atmosphere too stifling, too claustrophobic?  alternatively, would I become so comfortable in that setting that I’d begin to talking aloud to myself  (and would that be seen as self-absorbed or ‘sharing’)? 

Yet silence as the ‘default’ is preferable – think of the preference for running with a visitor, or taking them on a dog walk, for example.  It makes the visit so much easier, because it is then perfectly acceptable to not-talk (and, probably, not-listen), which it most certainly when meeting, or visiting, or being visited by, someone ‘for coffee’ (in scare quotes because coffee is usually a euphemism for ‘gossip’, ‘complaint’, etc. (and, if being pedantic, is inaccurate in my case, not drinking coffee)).    

What is the difference between walking or running in silence with a  companion, and sitting in silence with other people?  Would the silence of a Quaker meeting be like of a London tube – with concomitant disapproval for staring?  Or gentler, like a yoga meditation group? 

I crave silence - or rather the absence of speech.  The bus to the airport, yesterday, was blissful, after two days of demanding listening and difficult talking (because at a conference).  I knew no one, needed to say nothing, didn’t even need to smile, 40 glorious minutes of wordlessness on my part – of mindlessness.  Thoughts come and go without any need to keep track, pursue, or judge them – less like thinking than watching clouds.  Today I haven’t the stamina even to write letters… 

Experiments

At a party last week someone asked me what it was like to run long distances – really they were asking why anyone would do this.  I wasn’t able to reply very coherently and muttered something about The Wall without explaining why it’s important. This morning, I realised that what I ought to have answered last week was that you gain a tremendous feeling of confidence and control from extending your boundaries.  You go through a curious argument with yourself , with one side driven to to go further or longer; while the other side finds good reason not to – it’s too tiring or too dangerous dangerous or you haven’t the time.  Then you just do go further or longer, and for  short while you’re conscious of this, and perhaps feel a little pleased, until another milestone pops up on the horizon, and the whole argument starts all over again. 

There’s no need to proclaim achievement in this; there’s no winning as there’s no race and so no one to beat;  it isn’t connected with generating praise or public esteem as there’s no one to tell.  It’s a little like yoga in that respect, even though it’s not usually something you can do completely out of the public eye, so people might recognise you while you’re en route.  However, they’ll have no idea how far you’ve run or swum or how much further you will continue to run (and you won’t tell them).  It’s a deliciously private realm of non-competitive rival-less achievement. 

And between the milestone wrangles there’s the hypnotic quality to the exercise itself.  Miles and miles of which you have little recollection, rather like driving on a motorway; hours in which you can think uninterrupted – or during which you don’t think, but instead, amble through and around  random ideas.  This kind of disconnection must be good for one. 

The Secret of Sherlock Holmes

Last night we went to see The Secret of  Sherlock Holmes at the King’s, Edinburgh.  Distressingly, the theatre was half empty - distressing because the play deserved better for the cast alone: Peter Egan as Holmes and Philip Franks as Watson.  The play was excellent: an excellent script (Jeremy Paul), excellent set (Simon Higlett) and a superlative performance by Egan and Franks, whose pairing had the same comfortable familiarity as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot.  Solid familiarity proves important for Holmes and Watson for the same reason as it is important for Vladimir and Estragon: fallings out needed to be convincingly intense but temporary.   

The play concerns the friendship between Holmes and Watson – how they met initially, why they continued to associate and in particular, the nature of Holmes’ dependence on Watson.  Franks’ Watson is interesting – guilelessness, sincerity and gratitude are woven into the more usual representation of him as guardian of Holmes’ arrogant and  wilful brilliance.  Holmes’s character has more melodrama, naturally, and more predictability.  However, this is not to detract from the play or the performance.  Both the extension of the narrative tale to embrace how the pair met initially, and the portrayal of Watson’s response to Holmes’s seeming resurrection after Reichenbach Falls are pleasingly credible.  I have no idea how fans of Holmes’s casebook would react to the play; as someone  who is familiar enough with the stories to be able to nod with approval at the plausibility of the reconstruction, and chuckle with delight at  Paul’s discrete display of his erudition (Watsons's catalogue of Holmes’ failings is particularly pleasing), the play was rivetting.

I loved the set, and Robin Herford’s use of the space.  The incorporation both the London skyline and the Reichenbach Falls into a set predominantly comprising 221 Baker Street is masterful; Holmes’ disappearance at Reichenbach Falls is striking, and the use of the residual smoke during Watson’s elegy for his dead friend is clever.   Sound was cleverly used too, but, Reichenbach aside, I found the lighting poor, as, all too often, it cast the characters’ features too sharply into into shadow.   The presence of a signer for benefit of the deaf was, at times, frankly irritating.  Indeed it is difficult to see how the deaf can have benefited, as they seemed to have been forced to choose between watching either the play or the signer, and, given how much meaning was added to the script by the actors’ body language, being confined to an either-or will have detracted enormously  from the experience.