Travel

It is better to travel hopefully than arrive. It is better to hope for a rival than to travel. To travel is to hope for better on arrival. To hope to travel is already to have arrived. Hope is the better part of travel. Travel reveals, we'd better hope. Travel! Hope! Arrive! Better!

The Night Ode

Nocturn: nocstrophe.

Booker Longlist 2012, 4: Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage ofHarold Fry

Harold Fry is a timid OAP, hanging on in quiet desperation (is the English way) in an unhappy marriage with Maureen, full of regrets about the emotional froideur he displayed to their only child, clever, angry David—now grown-up and lost to him. One morning at breakfast Harold gets a letter from an old colleague, Queenie: she had worked in accounts at the brewery that also employed Harold, and which had been run by the choleric, violent Mr Napier. In the letter Queenie reveals that she has terminal cancer and is living in a hospice in Berwick-on-Tweed, some 500 miles from Harold’s Devon domicile. He had lost touch with Queenie long before, and although she had never been anything other than a work colleague and friend, he is saddened to hear her news. He writes a reply and steps outside in his loafers to post it. Ah, but when he reaches the post-box he just keeps on going. He decides on the moment's spur to walk all the way to Berwick, believing that this pilgrimage will, somehow, cure Queenie’s cancer.

That’s the novel. Harold perseveres in his crazy quest. He meets various people on the way, and hears their life stories—indeed, Joyce’s England is one in which strangers are unfailingly eager to initiate conversations with a tramp-like elderly man, to open their hearts to him and offer him all manner of assistance, which, I’ll confess, doesn’t sound entirely like the England I inhabit. But perhaps we can just take that as the premise of the novel. The whole thing is certainly engrossing. There’s some light comedy (very light) a little light satire (so light as to be virtually weightless) and a good deal of pathos, some of which is heavily flavoured sentimental. It’s enjoyable stuff. It doesn’t deserve to win the Booker.

That's not to deny that there’s a degree of art to the way Joyce uses this narrative to reveal Harold’s mournful backstory (what happened at the brewery, what became of David), and so flesh out his life and to a lesser extent the lives of those around him. It’s just a little twee. Harold’s walk is a watered-down version of that scene in Tarkovski’s Nostalghia where the character tries to walk the lit flame through that swimming pool—but Harold’s walk lacks the sheer oddity, the leap-of-faith weirdness, of Tarkovski’s character’s. And although mundanity is precisely the theme of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, something that is one of the novel’s great strengths (I mean: the way Joyce refuses to inhabit the clichés of redeeming eccentricity; the way she steers clear of hugging and learning) it exacts a price in the end from the novel’s larger potential. Soon enough Harold has become a sort of national hero, and acquired a following of fellow-questers. ‘It’s rather English and very endearing’ one of them says, of his decision to walk to Berwick; except that this is also the author commenting, in slightly self-congratulatory mode, on her own conception. And The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is indeed rather English; it’s just that ‘endearing’ isn’t, I think, enough in the end.

The various characters Harold meets are carefully differentiated, and many have interesting lives or perspectives on his adventure. But none of them feel entirely alive; their various circumstances all a tad Radio 4 Afternoon Play-lite. And Harold himself is a problem. He comes across as, well, a simpleton. I wondered for a while if this was because he was autistic, or suffering from Alzheimer’s, but it seems not (his wife Maureen tells her GP that Harold has gone senile, but this is only a ruse on her part to get him sectioned and so returned to her). I fear that Harold is portrayed as simple because Joyce thinks old people are a bit like that: a little slow and obvious and child-like. This, I think, is very wrong; most OAPs are sharper, wickeder, ruder and cannier than many young men and women, having had all the experiences that make young people wicked, rude and canny, but having had many more of them. But this is the world portrayed in this novel. I’m not denying that it is touching, often; and that there are some nuggets of beauty in the progress—from descriptions of the landscape, to little insights into human loneliness and hope. But the metaphorical polystyrene of this novel feels too expanded. It lacks the density it needs properly to create the emotional effect for which it strives. A peripatetic novel emotionally and in terms of focus, as well as in theme.

Booker Longlist 2012, 3: Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012)

The novel begins thuswise:

On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan. Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did. He had left his home on the rim of the sunrise to come to the central highlands of Malaya. I was seventeen years old when my sister first told me about him. A decade would pass before I travelled up to the mountains to see him. He did not apologise for what his countrymen had done to my sister and me. Not on that rain-scratched morning when we first met, nor at any other time. What words could have healed my pain, returning my sister to me? None. And he understood that. Not many people did.

And there it is, in a nutshell. The narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, is trying to come to terms with her personal sufferings, and the sufferings of her people, at the hands of the Japanese in World War II. She was the sole survivor of the POW camp in which her own sister died. By the late 1950s she is a judge, angry that the colonial British are doing so little to prosecute Japanese war criminals. But, despite her undisguised hatred of the Japanese, she decides to honour her sister’s wish to have a Japanese-style memorial garden made in her name, and so she seeks out ‘the legendary Nakamura Aritomo’, one-time gardener to the Japanese Emperor, to learn how to build it. Meanwhile the Malaysian Emergency breaks out; communist guerrillas and independence-minded nationalists go to war with one another. Yun Ling grows closer to Aritomo, and discovers why he left Japan (no spoilers: but it has to do with the kamikaze). Interspersed are other historical voices—a veteran of the Boer war, for example—presumably to add depth; and the actual reminiscence is happening, I think I'm right in saying, in the 1980s: Yun Ling looking back, and wanting to get the memoir out before her mind goes.

It’s a novel about forgiveness, but in an (I wondered: pointedly so?) very un-Truth-and-Reconciliation-Committee sort of way—I make the connection because although the author grew up in Malaysia he now lives in Cape Town. Forgiveness here is personal and spiritual, not collective, or performative; and it is extremely hard-won, if it is won at all. Though the novel doesn’t shy away from brutality, at its heart is the building of its garden, and the significances of that process. It's a novel that says: there’s also a sense in which forgiveness is a mode of self-deception.  A person hurt badly enough will find it almost impossible to let go of their hatred; and to cultivate the garden of their selves they need to follow Aritomo’s rather gnomic insistence that ‘every aspect of gardening is a form of deception.’

But—there was, I found, a but in my reaction to the novel. But. The whole thing is over-written—stylistically, I mean, although 450-pages struck me as more than the story needed to tell itself. It's very, sometimes cringingly and cripplingly, over-written.  Here’s the titular garden:

The high wall protecting the garden was patched in moss and old water stains. Ferns grew in the cracks. Set in the wall was a door. Nailed to the doorpost was a wooden plaque, a pair of Japanese ideograms burned into it. Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.

But only pseuds actually think like this; and the trowel-applied purple prose pulls awkwardly, and in the end congealishly, against the novel’s larger aesthetic of reticence and silence: ‘we are like every single plant and stone and view in the garden I thought’ the narrator tells us at one point. Are we? Really? “A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,” Yun Ling tells Aritomo: “your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.” Because that’s how ordinary human beings talk to other human beings. In real life. Yes indeed.

I concede of course that this may be a mismatch of sensibilities concerning which the fault lies with my European brain. I can see the healing power of gardens in the Voltairean sense of places of work; I was not able to tune into the spiritual significance of the two different modes of garden, Malay and Japanese, elaborated here. My loss, I don’t doubt.

And I have to admit both that some the writing is evocative, and more importantly that the whole will probably work even better for a reader whose heart is not, like mine, withered and unreceptive to the larger Spiritual One-ness Mystical Vibe thing. ‘The hollow of the valley reminds me of the open palms of a monk, cupped to receive the day’s blessing’ is nicely put; and some of the more contrived descriptions are good (‘Sparrows rise from the grass into the trees like fallen leaves returning to their branches’). But the inability of any of the descriptions of the natural world to be other than deeply imbued with Spiritual Significance began to pall on me pretty quickly (‘Swallows swooped from their nests in the caves, the tips of their wings brushing past my head. In the sky above me the last line of prayer from the mosque drifted away, leaving only silence where its echo had been’); and some of the similes are just naff. To return to the very first page of the book:

Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift towards the morning light of remembrance. Upon them, the polar bears of anxiety devour the seals of significance until the Titanic of imaginative constipation crashes into them.

Well, not that last sentence, of course. But the first two. And they’re I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue-ish enough.

In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

A little of this goes a long way, I feel; and there’s a lot of this.

Dryden's 'Theodore and Honoria'

I read Dryden's 'Theodore and Honoria' (1700): wow.  Theodore loves Honoraria, but she spurns him.  One day he chances upon the ghost of one of his ancestors, on the forest, hunting on horseback with dogs the ghost of the woman he loved in his life, but who spurned him.

I lov’d this haughty Maid;
What did I not her stubborn Heart to gain?
But all my Vows were answer’d with Disdain;
She scorn’d my Sorrows, and despis’d my Pain.
Long time I dragg’d my Days in fruitless Care,
Then loathing Life, and plung’d in deep Despair,
To finish my unhappy Life, I fell
On this sharp Sword, and now am damn’d in Hell.
Short was her Joy; for soon th’ insulting Maid
By Heav’n’s Decree in the cold Grave was laid,
And as in unrepenting 3 Sin she dy’d,
Doom’d to the same bad Place, is punish’d for her Pride;
Because she deem’d I well deserv’d to die,
And made a Merit of her Cruelty.
There, then, we met; both try’d, and both were cast,
And this irrevocable Sentence pass’d;
That she whom I so long pursu’d in vain,
Should suffer from my Hands a lingring Pain:
Renew’d to Life, that she might daily die,
I daily doom’d to follow, she to fly;
No more a Lover but a mortal Foe,
I seek her Life (for Love is none below:)
As often as my Dogs with better speed
Arrest her Flight, is she to Death decreed:
Then with this fatal Sword on which I dy’d,
I pierce her open’d Back or tender Side,
And tear that harden’d Heart from out her Breast,
Which, with her Entrails, makes my hungry Hounds a Feast.
Nor lies she long, but as her Fates ordain,
Springs up to Life, and fresh to second Pain,
Is sav’d to Day, to Morrow to be slain.

So he does. Theodore persuades the haughty Honoria to the forest the following week to see this spectral spectacle, and it is enough to persuade her to change her mind: she marries Theodore and they live happily ever after. The moral is clear: any woman who repulses the advances of a man she finds repulsive, particularly if he is a violent and sexually harassing sort, faces a simple choice: die and go to hell, or give way to the man.

The colour, honey

The colour, honey possesses no flavour
Nor any texture, not gluey or dense:
It is only a colour, and as such it knows
Neither sour nor sweet, heft nor tang.

When the night has grown bored with its darkness
And the first yellow pallor comes up
from over the horizon where the east is
it tastes of nothing at all. It has no taste.

Booker Longlist 2012, 2: Michael Frayn, Skios (2012)

Frayn's farce has a mildly amusing (though not actively funny) set-up: middle-aged, self-satisfied, internationally famous expert on the management of science Dr Norman Gilbert has been invited to give the Fred Toppler Foundation’s annual lecture at their facility on the island of Skios. Gilbert's pomposity is ripe for the puncturing. Also arriving on the island is Oliver Fox, a monstrously selfish (but young-ish and good looking) fellow who likes to seize the moment, is happy to con people, and who is coming to spend a week at a friend's villa with a woman he has picked up in a bar. These two men happen to have very similar-looking luggage. Luggage!  My aching sides.  At the airport Oliver picks Gilbert's bag by mistake; and then when he sees an attractive woman (Nikki Hook, the Foundation's "discreetly tanned, discreetly blonde, discreetly effective" administrator) holding up a sign saying 'Dr Norman Gilbert' he decides, on a whim, to pretend to be Gilbert in the hope of later getting her into bed. Meanwhile Gilbert meets a Greek taxi driver who is there to pick up Fox, Oliver. When he asks Gilbert 'you Fox Oliver?' Gilbert thinks he is talking Greek ('euphoksoliva?') and goes along with him, ending up in the remote villa.

So there you have it: not actively funny, but sometimes mildly amusing.  Gilbert suffers a series of indignities in the villa with the woman who was hoping to spend a week with Oliver, who at first believes him to be a rapist.  Oliver does the Being There thing of uttering banalities that are taken to be profundities by the various eminent guests assembled at the Foundation to hear his lecture.  But about sixty pages in, the farce runs out of steam, and Frayn props and pokes the plot along with increasing contrivance and decreasing charm: characters scurry about, the 'euphoksoliva?' joke is squeezed again for any last dribbles of humour when a Russian lady who speaks almost no English hears Oliver Fox introduce himself and thinks he is saying 'I-like-da fucks'.  The characterisation is thin as an oliver biscuit, and the whole set-up is faux. National stereotypes stray perilously close to outright racist caricature.  Frayn drags his story to the moment Oliver stands up to deliver Gilbert's big lecture; then the novel knight's-moves into a gun-fight/panic/tumbling statues climax that baffled me much more than it amused me, which wouldn't be hard, since it didn't amuse me at all.

How in the name of holy Feydeau did this meagre, forced, unfunny book get onto the Booker longlist?  It does not bode well for the prize this year.  Perhaps a better question is: how did Frayn, who wrote Noises Off, a genuinely great and actually laugh-aloud funny text, sink so low?  There's some jibber and a touch of jabber of pretension (about identity, and social roles, and ... no, that's all I got) that does nothing to leaven the weakness of the gags and the filligree superstructure of story.  Noises Off, when I first saw it, struck me as not only actually hilarious, but in its way as profound.  I think it was the way the actors in the drama struggled to carry on in the face of the increasing absurdity of their situation, despite not only the difficulty of doing so but its pointlessness -- the triviality of the play they're in.  More, I think 'the play' is a metaphorical vehicle with actual purchase for the articulation about truths concerning the world.  But the set-up in Skios feels artificial in a bad way.  The irony is that, where I have never starred in a theatrical farce, I have done the Dr Norman Wilfred thing of being invited to sunny climes to give a guest lecture, of being met at the airport and so on,  I assume Frayn has too, to more prestigious venues and many more times than I.  And whilst many of the details of Skios's account of this world are well-observed the overall effect floats free from actual lived experience.  Weak beer; very weak beer.  If it makes the shortlist I'll roll my eyes. I will.