{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Art Kavanagh", "icon": "https://micro.blog/artkavanagh/avatar.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/", "feed_url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/27/i-bought-a.html", "content_html": "
I bought a copy of Tana French’s The Wych Elm about 4½ years ago but have only now got around to reading it. It’s devastating, even if you find the narrator unsympathetic, as many reviewers did. There are parts of it I liked very much but overall it leaves a sour aftertaste 📖
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-27T09:33:47+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/27/i-bought-a.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/25/maybe-its-actually.html", "content_html": "Maybe it’s actually a good review: clearly letting me know that this book is not for me!
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-25T10:03:24+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/25/maybe-its-actually.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/25/heres-an-extremely.html", "content_html": "Here’s an extremely irritating book review. I’ve read just 2 of Nicole Flattery’s short stories and didn’t like them. I suspected she might be a better novelist than a short story writer. But this review leaves me with no inclination to find out for myself.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-25T10:01:18+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/25/heres-an-extremely.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/24/heres-yet-another.html", "content_html": "Here’s yet another good reason not to buy books from Amazon 📚
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-24T12:32:20+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/24/heres-yet-another.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/20/the-new-talk.html", "content_html": "The new Talk about books post (on time, for the first time in ages) looks at Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📖. A filmmaker in her late 20s tries to find out what happened 60 years earlier, when her father was the lone survivor of a school tragedy.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-20T16:57:12+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/20/the-new-talk.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/20/caroline-odonoghue-scenes.html", "title": "Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature", "content_html": "Caroline O’Donoghue has written three novels for adults and a YA series. So far, I’ve read only the second of the adult novels though, based on reviews of the third, I intend to read The Rachel Incident (2023) as soon as I can get it in B-format paperback.
\nThe second adult novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature (2020), is the first-person narrative of Charlotte Regan, who is just about to turn 29. She has already directed a feature film based on her father’s childhood experiences but her career has stalled and she now works in a coffee shop. She has a side-hustle too, one she’s not keen to publicize.
\nCharlie’s father, Colm Regan, was born on a small island in County Kerry in the south-west of Ireland; he left there as a teenager in the 1960s, never to go back. He married an Englishwoman and Charlie is their only child. Charlie is very conscious of being half-Irish though, unlike the other people of Irish descent that she was at Catholic school with, she has never visited the country, until her film is selected to be shown at the Cork Film Festival.
\nIt’s while watching the film at the festival, among an audience largely made up of Irish people, that Charlie has what she calls an epiphany: she has made a bad film. It’s bad because it was trying to tell a story whose details she didn’t know, and whose context she didn’t understand. Her film is based on the reminiscences of her father, who was the lone survivor of a school disaster in which 18 young pupils and their teacher were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.
\nColm is now 70 and being treated for cancer. When Charlie leaves for Cork (against her mother’s will), her father has been hospitalized for the third time.
\nCharlie comes to see that, though she recorded a lot of her father’s memories about the disaster, there were some aspects of the tragedy that he was unwilling or unable to recount. She persuades her friend Laura to skip the festival awards ceremony — their film wasn’t going to win anyway — and travel west to Colm’s birthplace, to try to learn more about the history. Colm had been enthusiastic about her going to Cork, and to Ireland generally, but had tried to discourage her from continuing to the island, which he calls a “miserable old rock”:
\n“Clipim is three old men with four teeth between them. Trust me. It’s not somewhere you want to visit. You’d only be wasting your time. (p. 31)\r\n
When Charlie and Laura get there, Clipim turns out to be more interesting and more lively — if also more dangerous — than Colm’s description has led Charlie to expect. There are two pubs, several shops, a mobile home park, a busy “house-flipper” (p. 117) and, at least during the summer, a thriving tourist business. Oh, and a “button museum” which turns out to have a distressingly sad history.
\nAt first Charlie is given a warm welcome by the older inhabitants of the island, those who remember the school catastrophe and her father’s lucky escape. However, when her stay on the island is extended beyond the initially planned weekend, attitudes change. People who were friendly and welcoming just the day before are now hostile and unforthcoming. Charlie is accused of interrogating a vulnerable, drunken woman, and of gathering material to make a documentary which will disinter traumatic memories best left buried.
\nCharlie denies that she’s making a documentary, but it’s true that, whether or not she’s fully conscious of the fact, she has been trying to unearth the truth about what happened to her father’s classmates. She realizes that she had, indeed, been looking for the drunken woman to try to get more information out of her, though she doesn’t admit that their earlier conversation was an “interrogation”.
\nIn the end, Charlie learns the whole sad story because she hears it from a man who is slightly younger than her father and remembers him. Joe missed the disaster because he was too young at the time to have started school. In the years since, he has worked out what happened, and he eventually concludes that he’s going to have to explain it to Charlie if she’s to be prevented from insulting and enraging all the older islanders and getting herself lynched.
\nIt’s not as if it’s a great mystery. The truth has remained hidden for 60 years not because it’s complicated or the result of a cleverly woven intrigue but because it’s so appalling that everybody — including Charlie at first — balks at facing it head-on.
\nIt would have been fairly straightforward for O’Donoghue to have Charlie discover the secret as the result of her own investigation. She’s already found old sheets of newspaper in the derelict school building and a photograph in the button museum brochure that tell most of the story. By having another character explain it all to Charlie, O’Donoghue avoids presenting this as a mystery story, a puzzle. To turn it into a whodunnit would be to treat the tragedy less seriously than it deserves.
\nThe publisher’s description on the back of the paperback obscures this aspect of the story. It reads:
\nBefore long, she’s embroiled in a devastating conspiracy that’s been sixty years in the making … and it’s up to her to reveal the truth. (original ellipsis)\r\n
But “conspiracy” is highly misleading. It could be argued that there’s been a conspiracy of silence, but it’s not really the case that people have agreed to suppress the knowledge of what happened. Rather, none of them knows exactly what happened because they all know enough to keep their gaze averted.
\nThat template of “knowing not to know” can be discerned in many episodes in recent Irish history. When, in the 1990s, the corruption of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey was finally exposed, we all ruefully agreed that it had always been obvious that his apparent wealth couldn’t be legitimate. The former accountant must have had some clever scheme, too complex to be understood by any but the most financially astute, that regularly topped up his coffers. When the truth was revealed, it turned out to be brazenly straightforward: Haughey had simply demanded large payments from rich businesspeople — and they’d obediently handed the cash over to his bagman.
\nSimilarly, the sexual abuse of children in industrial and other schools and in institutions of the Catholic Church, the effective imprisonment of and extraction of slave labour from “fallen” women in the Magdalene laundries, the unregistered deaths and burial of children in an unmarked mass grave: all of these were able to continue as long as they did because of semiwilful ignorance on the part of the citizenry.
\nO’Donoghue ingeniously links one of these scandals to the smaller-scale but still devastating Clipim school disaster. The tone of the story, which has seemed lighthearted, at times comic, a bit of a romp — Laura at one point compares their search to a Nancy Drew investigation — has by the end turned distinctly bleak and chilling. O’Donoghue handles the tone shift, which I really wasn’t expecting, very capably.
\nThe book’s other main theme, apart from the partially buried tragedies of recent Irish history, is the changing nature of the friendship between Charlie and Laura. They met at university and the friendship has been close and intense throughout their 20s but that intensity is not going to last forever.
\nWhile working on the film — Charlie is credited as director, both of them as producers — they shared a drab, badly heated flat in London. Afterwards, Laura moves in with Mike, who also worked on the film. While they lived together in the flat, they were in the habit of sharing a bed, partly because of the cold. Charlie, a lesbian, doesn’t see anything unusual in this, and Laura doesn’t seem to either, at least at first.
\nI’d had a crush on her when we first met. Of course I had. But it had waxed and waned accordingly, the way it does when your best friend is beautiful, charismatic and very straight. By the time we were living together, the door in my head marked “Laura” had been closed for so long that it was rusted shut. (p. 56)\r\n
On the eve of her moving in with Mike, Laura starts to push tentatively at this rusted door, only to change her mind suddenly and tell Charlie “You need to stop” (p. 58). Charlie doesn’t really know what to make of her friend’s blowing hot and cold. We readers are seeing things only from Charlie’s point of view, and are left to speculate as to why Laura behaves as she does.
\nIt seems likely that Laura wasn’t expecting Charlie’s response to her overtures to be quite so eager or so strong. Perhaps she’s seeing for the first time — and more clearly than Charlie does — the strength of Charlie’s attraction to her, and that this worries her about what she might be getting into. Anyway, it’s from about this time that they begin to “grow apart”. By the time they’ve arrived at the Cork Film Festival, Laura has been offered film-related work in Los Angeles, while Charlie is on the point of realizing that she might not be as talented a film-maker as she had thought and that her future may not be in the film industry after all.
\nCharlie is in many respects a fish out of water in the unfamiliar rural society. Maria, an American woman who has taken refuge on the island after husband broke her heart and her collarbone while they were on honeymoon in Dublin, has to tell her when the Troubles started. (Some six years after the school tragedy, so the possibility of any IRA involvement in that event can be ignored.) The author is on much surer ground than the character she has created. O”Donoghue was born in Cork and, if I understand correctly, went to university there before moving to London where she has lived for many years, so she’s well placed to see Charlie’s situation from several angles.
\nIn the last 20 years or so there’s been a remarkable increase in the number of Irish women novelists, many of them writing crime or mystery fiction, others about young women making their way in the world, still more about the struggle to escape from the country’s often oppressive past. In this novel, O’Donoghue has combined several of these strands into a novel which is not really a mystery story, not only about a young woman’s journey and in which the shadow of the past doesn’t entirely overpower the other elements. In doing so, she has found a voice that is individual and distinctive. I’m looking forward to hearing more of it.
\nEdition: Virago paperback, 2021.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-20T16:26:23+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/20/caroline-odonoghue-scenes.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/18/flying-six-people.html", "content_html": "\n\nFlying six people to space is cheaper than sending an asylum seeker to Rwanda, an MP has said.
\n
Cheaper to send people into space than to Rwanda, MPs hear Flying them there, maybe, but what about food, shelter, oxygen, protective clothing etc? I don’t think he’s thought this through.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-18T19:15:54+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/18/flying-six-people.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/18/ive-just-deleted.html", "content_html": "I’ve just deleted my Substack account, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. That means cancelling my one paid subscription. The unpaid ones I can continue to read via RSS 😎 I had been thinking of going paid on Jeremy Noel-Tod’s Some Flowers Soon but I’ll have to manage without it.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-18T14:30:22+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/18/ive-just-deleted.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/17/i-dont-see.html", "content_html": "\n\nI don’t see how you could spend even an hour in Dublin and not see the ruinous impact of the tech industry. We sold the city to these companies and made it impossible for anyone else to live here.
\n
Nicole Flattery. When I lived in London for 18 years I missed Dublin. Reading this, I see that, more than 12 years after I came back to Ireland, I still do ☹️
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-17T11:43:43+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/17/i-dont-see.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/17/my-iphone-minis.html", "content_html": "My iPhone 12 Mini’s small screen means that I use Safari’s reader view a lot. But the way it leaves out author names/bylines is really frustrating. I know the fault is largely the publishers’ who don’t necessarily mark up such things “semantically”. I know I’ve said this before.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-17T11:41:23+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/17/my-iphone-minis.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/17/so-it-was.html", "content_html": "\n\nSo it was easy for me to be the titular lead director.
\n
Hey, a rare sighting of “titular” used in the old-fashioned (IMO “correct”) sense. These days, people say things like “titular character” where they would once simply have said “title character”. That drives me nuts, I’m afraid 🍿
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-17T09:14:47+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/17/so-it-was.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/16/i-regularly-mix.html", "content_html": "I regularly mix up names that aren’t at all alike, so you can imagine how confused I was, having seen posters around Westport for a concert by Cara Dillon, I just read that Clara Dillon recently published her first novel.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-16T12:15:21+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/16/i-regularly-mix.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/16/i-really-wanted.html", "content_html": "I really wanted the Autonomy fiasco to be HP’s fault, not Lynch’s. Of course, it’s possible for both things to be true: even if Lynch inflated the value, it doesn’t necessarily follow that HP didn’t screw up.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-16T09:55:12+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/16/i-really-wanted.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/12/my-phone-service.html", "content_html": "My phone service provider regularly sends me emails urging me to “go 5G”, though there’s no 5G coverage in this area. Even 4G is a bit spotty since the storms earlier in the year ☹️
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-12T10:15:02+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/12/my-phone-service.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/10/late-again-heres.html", "content_html": "Late again, here’s the most recent post from Talk about books, Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam. Two years ago, I wrote about her short stories; now, I’ve got around to the novels 📖
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-10T21:42:02+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/10/late-again-heres.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/10/taking-oneself-seriously.html", "title": "Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam", "content_html": "Candia McWilliam published three novels over a seven-year period starting in the late 1980s: A Case of Knives (1988), A Little Stranger (1989) and Debatable Land (1994). These were followed in 1997 by a collection of short stories, Wait Till I Tell You. I wrote about that collection in Talk about books almost two years ago. Since 1997, there’s been no more fiction from McWilliam, though in 2010 she published a memoir, What to Look for in Winter, which I haven’t read.
\nI decided I ought to read her fiction when I read a review by her in (I think) the Independent on Sunday, of (I think) Roy Hattersley’s The Maker’s Mark (1990). It was not a favourable review. A friend commented that McWilliam’s first book had been titled A Case of Knives, and that several of them seemed to be stuck in Hattersley’s back.
\nA Case of Knives consists of the first-person narratives of four characters. The first, told by the eminent, recently knighted heart surgeon, Lucas Salik, is the longest; the two middle narratives are of roughly equal length and the final one is just 8 pages long, a kind of epilogue.
\nLucas is infatuated with a much younger man, Hal, who is not, however, quite as much younger as he claims. Hal, indeed, is in several respects not at all what he seems. In some others, he is very much what he seems to some of the other characters, but Lucas is blind to those appearances. Hal and Lucas are not lovers, not by Lucas’s choice, but the younger man accepts gifts and hospitality from the older one.
\nWhen Hal tells Lucas that he wants to get married — “Married to a girl … one of those things with dressing tables” (p. 24) — Lucas is not dismayed, though he has no intention of simply letting Hal go. He will find the suitably unsuitable “girl”. As he put it to himself, his aim is to give the young man “a doll for him to break” (p. 24), before coming back to Lucas.
\nThe young woman he selects is Cora Godfrey, 20 years old, unusually tall, broke and with a pressing reason of her own for thinking that Hal might be a suitable marriage partner, even though she distrusts and despises him on sight. Cora’s a more complicated character than she appears to either Lucas or Hal. She’s at once diffident and resourceful, introverted and (to judge by the way she is dressed when Lucas first spots her) an exhibitionist. She’s intelligent and perceptive but with some curious blind spots.
\nAt the end of the novel, Hal says of her:
\nI got fond of her in a way. She was a bad liar and blind as a bat and talked too much, but she did have what the visitors here call a low self-image, and I love that. It’s something to stand on, it gives you a little rise. (p. 262)\r\n
This hardly does her justice, of course. On his first meeting with Cora, Lucas is more willing to admit to puzzlement, though he remains confident that the enigmatic young woman is suitable for his purposes.
\nI felt that she was either drunk or possessed. She did not know me and she was making her reputation hostage to me. I could not see why she spoke in this appalling way … I wondered how this hussy could have struck me earlier in the evening as dovelike. (p. 27)\r\n
And later, when she’s come back to his flat with him for something to eat, he asks her:
\n“Do you hear the terrible things you say? I could have gathered from your callow lineshooting this evening that you were a whore, a drudge or a masochist. I am sure you are none of these. I think you are just a young thing awaiting your vocation, and, just as your brothers have no war, you have no arranged marriage, no baby for your fifteenth birthday.” (p. 34)\r\n
One of Cora’s more noticeable blind spots is that she fails to notice until quite late in the story that Lucas is gay, and until she meets Hal she thinks of Lucas as a potential husband, though he’s much older than she is.
\nLucas has met Cora through his old friend Anne Cowdenbeath, a wealthy Scots widow who has a large house in Scotland and another home in London. Anne is horrified at his intention to use Cora in his plan to keep Hal, and initially refuses to help him. But Lucas knows Anne’s potentially very damaging secret (because she told him) and is willing to twist his old friend’s arm rather than lose Hal: “I ask you to permit me to blackmail you” (p. 71). Surprisingly, the blackmail doesn’t seem to damage their friendship irreparably.
\nCora has several parttime jobs, which cumulatively take up more of her time than a fulltime one would. One of these is in a charity shop run by Angelica Coney, known to some, including Cora, as “Angel”. Angel does not feature centrally in any of the four narratives but the reader learns that she is a malevolent manipulator who is behind most of the viciousness in the story. She is an antivivisectionist who campaigns militantly for animal rights.
\nAngel wants Lucas dead because the heart surgery that he carries out depends on animal experimentation. It’s at her urging that the would-be killer knifes Lucas while he is cottaging, resulting in the surgeon’s months-long hospitalization. Before, when Anne’s husband, Mordred, shot himself on finding out that he had cancer, Angel told their young son, Alexander, that it was Anne who had killed his father. She successfully encouraged the boy to kill himself.
\nWhen an employee of Angel’s charity is arrested for vandalizing a furrier’s shop, destroying the value of all the man’s assets, Angel comments “These people are no better than animals” (p. 231), a statement calculated to be taken in a different sense from the one she means.
\nMcWilliams’s second novel, A Little Stranger (1989), is the shortest of the three, at just 125 pages. It’s another first-person narrative but this time there’s only one narrator, a wife and mother. She has a four-year-old son named John, a rich, busy husband named Solomon and a rather grand house on a country estate. Her old nanny is leaving, so she takes on a new one to look after John. The new nanny, Margaret Pride, is in many ways the narrator’s opposite.
\nWhere the narrator — we learn quite late in the story that her forename is Daisy — likes “fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness” (p. 36) — earlier, she has mentioned “black olives, of the type which is wrinkled and black as tar on a summer road”, and the need to avoid splashing “smoked roes or raw steak or the vinegar of capers” (p. 14) on the periodicals that he husband might want to read — Margaret favours “strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment” (p. 35). She shops for “weightless, hefty meals of cloud and promise” (p. 36).
\nDaisy soon becomes pregnant with a second child and, as we learn at the end of the story, her eating habits change. She still likes the salted, pickled and strong-flavoured foods she always has, but she consumes a lot more of them, in addition to some of the sweeter foods that appealed to Margaret. One night, alone in the house while John, Soloman and Margaret are in London, she eats:
\nSeven loaves with chocolate hail, white milk bread paved with butter and the pastel sugared aniseed the Dutch call little mice, mob caps of jelly and lakes of cream, egg sandwiches for a team of hungers, and shoals of herring, pink, silver, white, grey, and the morbid maroon which is so delicious eaten with warm yellow potatoes and cold soured cream off a hot spoon. (p. 126)\r\n
She is supposed to be eating for two, but she hasn’t been able to stop there. At the same time, Margaret has slimmed down noticeably, to Daisy’s surprise. The nanny is suffering from bulimia, something she understandably tries to hide from everybody except young John.
\nAfter the crisis has passed, Daisy recognizes that she has been so self-absorbed that it has blinded her to a threat that should have been obvious: “I had taken myself seriously, but had not at any point taken seriously that self.”
\nUntil the end, it hasn’t been clear that this is a story (not wholly, but in large part) about eating disorders, just as, in the first novel, the reader hardly notices until Lucas’s attacker is about to go on trial, that all the significant male characters in the book are gay and that they are living under the ever present threat of HIV, at a time before effective treatments were widely available. McWilliam is adept at deflecting attention from her most significant themes.
\nFinally, Daisy admits that she should have been wary of Margaret from the start:
\nWhat was the strangest thing of all? I took her in because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so … Together we had turned the gingerbread house of family life into the smelt blood and ground bones of the most cruel tales. (p. 135)\r\n
The third novel is a departure from the first two in several respects. Unlike them, it doesn’t include any first-person narrative. It’s the story of six people on a yacht, sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand. Reviewing the novel in the London Review of Books, Janette Turner Hospital wrote:
\n… if her first two novels could be said to be explorations of the mysterious and elusive nature of evil, this one is certainly about the even more mysterious and elusive nature of goodness.\r\n
Clearly, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the first novel’s Angelica as evil, and Margaret in A Little Stranger turns out to be “a scheming fantasist” (p. 123) who, though she’s much less blameworthy than Angelica, makes a conscious attempt to destroy a family. Debatable Land doesn’t include a comparably malevolent character. The closest it comes is in Logan Urquhart, the wealthy Scots-American (born in Glasgow, resident, when not at sea, in New York), the owner of the yacht which his wife named Ardent Spirit.
\nLogan is a contradictory character. Until the terrible and prolonged climactic storm — which is exactly what he has been looking for — Logan is controlled and disciplined, insisting that everything is secured and tidied away, every eventuality prepared for. He knows that the ocean is unforgiving, and regularly reminds the crew of the “capacity of the sea to do harm” (p. 210). When the storm comes, though, his behaviour changes:
\nPurblind, bedevilled and bewitched by his affinity with the sea, Logan was plunged into himself. He could see nothing but the dark. He felt the weight of the sea on the boat and the weight of the boat on himself. He made no weak pact with the sea, nor a bargain for peace … He spent hours in the bow, looking out over the sea as it did nothing but increase in height and violence. Logan shouted at it, not in defiance, it seemed, but pleasure. He surveyed the huge waters and reduced sky as though they bore a harvest for him. (p. 209)\r\n
It’s as if he’s been looking for a challenge, to prove himself. The most experienced crewmember, Nick, thinks that this is mad, and hopes that they will get through the storm before Logan “cracks”:
\nNick knew that the sea had no will, no self, that to give it personality was to underestimate its power. (p. 210)\r\n
But when a boom, loosened by the waves sweeping over the yacht, hits another crewmember, Sandro, on the side of the head, making him lose consciousness and bleed from his eye sockets, Logan is suddenly calm, quiet and thinking clearly:
\nThe raving, exalted hero figure who had been all risk and mania ten minutes before had gone. In itself this was the passing of a storm. Logan seemed to have found the courage to be quiet. (p. 214)\r\n
The character at the centre of the novel is Alec Dundas, a visual artist (painter) from Edinburgh, who has exaggerated his experience of sailing to get a place on the voyage. Through his memories we learn about his parents and childhood, his friendship with an elderly brother and sister and the beginnings of his relationship with nurse named Lorna.
\nAt one point, when the voyage has unexpectedly (and briefly) come to seem like a holiday, Alec reflects that “He had come on this boat to repossess his innocence” (p. 172). Earlier, he has confided in Nick that his relationship with Lorna has suffered. He has been attracted to other women and she, seeing this, has resorted to heavy drinking. She has had a son, Sorley, who is not Alec’s biological child, but whom he loves. Alec tells Nick that Lorna had almost died of not taking herself serious,ly:
\n“… We were the lot that took other people seriously in a rather priggish way and then got selfish.” (p. 100)\r\n
Logan asks Alec to fly from Bora Bora back to Tahiti to finish some business on Logan’s behalf with his bank. Logan suggests that Elspeth should go with him. While Alec and Elspeth are away, Logan begins to sleep with the boat’s cook, a very young Englishwoman named Gabriel. He is thinking of Gabriel as his next wife and was presumably hoping that some kind of relationship would develop between Alec and Elspeth that would make it easier for Logan to extricate himself from the marriage.
\nAlec and Elspeth get on well but don’t become lovers. They’re both Scots, he from Edinburgh, of course, and she from the formerly “debatable land” near the border with England. When they have helped to restore Sandro to consciousness after the storm, Alec regrets “not having been homesick enough to hold her in that bleak hotel” (p. 213–4) in Tahiti. But by this time he knows that he’s going home to Lorna and Sorley. In the aftermath of the storm, Nick has told him that Sorley is his son:
\n“She made him for you. Take him. Or are you still so attached to letting life go? It’s Lorna you were hunting down, like it’s Scotland you found at the back end of the Pacific”, said Nick. (p. 215)\r\n
During the storm Gabriel has decided that she’s a homesick land person (as Alec is too); and Elspeth has discovered that she’s not willing to let Logan go as easily as she had seemed to be, so it appears that their marriage will continue, if not quite as before.
\nIt seems to me that, without an obvious villain, Debatable Land is a more ambitious novel than its two predecessors. To say that isn’t at all to disparage the first two books. And, if a villain is insisted upon for the third, Alec himself must be a candidate: a philanderer who admits to having graduated to selfishness from priggishness. Indeed, it could be said that all of McWilliam’s protagonists are partly to blame for the bad things that happen to them. A Little Stranger’s Daisy lacerates herself for her failure to perceive and avoid the threat to her family. All of the narrators of A Case of Knives (except possibly Anne) have behaved badly.
\nEditions: A Case of Knives, Abacus (Sphere Books) paperback, 1989; A Little Stranger, Picador paperback, 1990; Debatable Land, Picador paperback, 1995. All ellipses added.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-10T20:58:54+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/10/taking-oneself-seriously.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/07/i-just-noticed.html", "content_html": "I just noticed that someone whose Substack Notes I follow (I get their newsletter by RSS) has posted several Notes that I hadn’t seen, but would have liked to. Meanwhile, Substack’s algorithm serves up endless nonsense about how to write, build your following and cook Instagrammable dishes 😡
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-07T18:17:41+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/07/i-just-noticed.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/06/i-got-out.html", "content_html": "I got 8 out of 12 and it said “in the middle of your flop era”, but I thought 8/12 was good, actually. I was pleased with my performance; it wan’t bad at all. What actors said about major movie flops
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-06T23:06:29+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/06/i-got-out.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/03/05/sad-to-hear.html", "content_html": "Sad to hear that Edward Bond has died, though at least he had a long life. I think I only ever saw one of his plays — The Sea 🎭 — in performance, though I saw at least 3 different productions of hugely varying quality; I read (and compulsively reread) many others in Methuen editions.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-05T19:01:28+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/03/05/sad-to-hear.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/28/substack-now-has.html", "content_html": "Substack now has direct messages. It’s not a feature I’m likely to use very much (I sent maybe one every two years on Twitter) but we’ll see.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-28T18:38:42+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/28/substack-now-has.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/27/this-years-choice.html", "content_html": "This year’s choice for One Dublin, One Book is Louise Nealon’s Snowflake 📖. The idea is that as many people as possible should read it during April. I’ve already read and written about it but it’s probably not too early to reread it.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-27T13:06:39+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/27/this-years-choice.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/25/bernard-kops-is.html", "content_html": "Bernard Kops is dead. He was 97, but it’s still sad. I fondly remember a playwriting workshop he led at the CityLit, early 1990s, and I went with my mother (who was visiting from Ireland) to a performance of Playing Sinatra 🎭 in, my unreliable memory is convinced, Croydon.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-25T20:54:56+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/25/bernard-kops-is.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/25/i-just-posted.html", "content_html": "I just posted the latest Talk about books. It looks at philosophical materialism in Paradise Lost: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost 📖
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-25T18:20:58+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/25/i-just-posted.html" }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/25/material-particulars-spirit.html", "title": "Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost", "content_html": "John Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic poem in 12 books (10 in the first edition, 1667), running to over 10,000 words lines, about original sin, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for disobedience to God’s command. It contains many surprises. Its author had, in Eikonoklastes, defended the execution of the former king, Charles I. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he had advanced a remarkably liberal theory about the conditions in which a people can depose and replace their monarch, and choose the mode of government. His views on many questions of religion were highly idiosyncratic and in some cases heretical. In spite of these facts, more than 3½ centuries later, the poem is still seen as one of the towering works of English literature.
Two of the principle heresies held by Milton, and evidenced (though not glaringly) in the poem are Arianism and mortalism. Arianism is the belief that Jesus, the Son of God, was not “of one being” or “one substance” with his Father, and was not coeternal with him, but had a beginning in time. See Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (1987) for … well, there’s a clue in the title.
\nMortalism, as I’ve discussed before in connection with Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”, is the belief that the individual’s soul and body are not separate or separable, but live and die together and are resurrected together on the Day of Judgment. Between the death of the individual and that last day, the soul has no more life or existence than the body has.
\nIn the note on Marvell’s “Dialogue”, I wrote that mortalism, though branded heretical by such otherwise unharmonious authorities as Jean Calvin, Pope Leo X and the English Parliament of 1648, was “really no more than mildly heterodox in its implications”. What I meant was that it didn’t require its adherents to believe anything fundamantally at odds with the normal tenets of Christianity. In particular, it does not preclude belief in the Resurrection of the body. Perhaps it would have been more accurate if I’d said that the belief is “no more than mildly heterodox in its religious implications”. Its implications for Milton’s philosophy, his world-view, are quite startling. Milton was a mortalist, I now believe, because he was, in philosophical terms, a materialist. His mortalism is part of the evidence for his materialist conception of reality.
\nWe know of Milton’s mortalism only because of De Doctrina Christiana a systematic working-out of his religious beliefs that was discovered and published only in the 19th century. De Doctrina was evidently compiled over a period of years, so we can’t say for sure when he arrived at the mortalist position, but at least it is clear that Paradise Lost is a late work, the second edition coming out in the year of his death, 1674. There is, as far as I can see, no direct evidence of mortalism in the epic, but the Father’s description in Book III of what will happen on the Day of Judgment is consistent with that belief. He tells the Son:
\nforthwith from all winds\n
\nThe living, and forthwith the cited dead
\nOf all past ages to the general doom
\nShall hasten, such a peal shall rouse their sleep.
\nThen all they saints assembled, thou shalt judge
\nBad men and angels, they arraigned shall sink
\nBeneath thy sentence; Hell, her numbers full,
\nThenceforth shall be forever shut. Meanwhile
\nThe world shall burn and from her ashes spring
\nNew heav’n and earth, wherein the just shall dwell … (III.327–35)
The first thing to note about this is that there’s no mention of souls being reunited with long-buried bodies: it simply says that “the cited dead” will “hasten” to the place of judgment, arguably without needing to be put back together first. The other point is that, if we take it that the sinful souls were already in Hell and the blameless ones in Heaven, though without their bodies, before the Son has pronounced Judgment, that would surely indicate a degree of prejudgment.
\nOn the other hand, I have to admit that there is one passage in the poem where it seems that body and soul become separated. When the Archangel Michael is showing Adam what will become of his descendants, he presents an image of the murder by Cain of Abel:
\nWhereat he inly raged, and as they talked,\n
\nSmote him into the midriff with stone
\nThat beat out life; he fell and deadly pale
\nGroaned out his soul with gushing blood effused. (XI.444–7)
To this, I’d answer that there’s no indication what became of the Abel’s soul. Did it immediately depart for Heaven or some other destination? Was it still alive, though the body wasn’t? Might it be the case that in this instance the word is being used as a metaphor for life?
\nIt would be wrong to claim that Paradise Lost provides evidence that Milton held mortalist views. I prefer to argue that, if one knows about his mortalism from other sources, and ultimately from De Doctrina Christiana (which I haven’t read), that knowledge enriches and complicates the experience of reading the poem.
\nIf the soul and the body live and die together, it follows that there is no such thing as a disembodied soul. That’s consistent with the idea that there is no “spiritual realm” separate and apart from the material one (parts of) which we can percieve with our senses. There are references to spirits in Paradise Lost but these spirits don’t exist in a distinct unsubstantial department of reality. Not everythig that is material is necessarily solid or tangible, any more than the medium through which radio waves, X-Rays or indeed light travels can be perceived by the unaided human senses.
\nThe angels in Paradise Lost are material beings, though their “substance” is much finer than that of the humans:
\nFor Spirits when they please\n
\nCan either sex assume, or both; so soft
\nAnd uncompounded is their essence pure;
\nNot tied or manacled with joint or limb,
\nNor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
\nLike cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
\nDilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
\nCan execute their airy purposes,
\nAnd works of love or enmity fulfil. (I.423–31)
The flexibility afforded by the absence of joint and limb is mentioned again when Raphael tells Adam that the angels are able to find love and happiness with each other:
\nWhatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st\n
\n(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
\nIn eminence, and obstacle find none
\nOf membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
\nEasier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
\nTotal they mix, union of pure with pure
\nDesiring; nor restrained conveyance need
\nAs flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul. (VIII.622–9)
I take the last two lines of this passage to mean that souls could not intermingle without the “conveyance” of the body, and in this the angels are distinguishable from souls: they have bodies but ones so “soft And uncompounded” as to be capable of complete interpenetration. They also eat food, and are capable of digesting the same food as Adam and Eve:
\nTherefore what he gives\n
\n(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in part
\nSpiritual, may of purest Spirits be found
\nNo ingrateful food: and food alike these pure
\nIntelligential substances require
\nAs doth your rational; and both contain
\nWithin them every lower faculty
\nOf sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
\nTasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
\nAnd corporeal to incorporeal turn.
\nFor know, whatever was created, needs
\nTo be sustained and fed … (V.404–15)
That the angels have material bodies is made very clear by the battle in Heaven in Book VI, the details of which would appear preposterous if the combatants had been immaterial spirits. The rebel angels discover gunpowder and make cannon, which they fire at loyal ones, who fight back by tearing hills out of the ground — Heaven has a landscape! — and hurling them at their adversaries.
\nThe material nature of Heaven, Hell, Paradise and Earth is also evidenced by the manner of their creation. God, the omnipotent, does not make the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, but rather by imposing form on part of the “void”, which is presided over by Chaos and Old Night. In Book VII, God instructs his Son:
\nAnd thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee\n
\nThis I perform, speak thou, and be it done:
\nMy overshadowing Spirit and might with thee
\nI send along, ride forth, and bid the deep
\nWithin appointed bounds, be heav’n and earth;
\nBoundless the deep, because I am who fill
\nInfinitude, nor vacuous the space
\nThough I uncircumscribed myself retire,
\nAnd put not forth my goodness, which is free
\nTo act or not … (VII.164–72)
I put “void” in quotation marks because it’s clear from this that the deep is not empty (“vacuous”), though it’s referred to as “void” later in book VII: “Matter unformed and void: darkness profound | Cover’d the abyss (VII.233–4). It’s formless and chaotic but clearly there’s something there, including “black tartareous cold infernal dregs | Adverse to life” (VII.238–9). It’s through this abyss that the defeated rebels fell for nine days and nights before arriving in Hell, and through it that Satan painfully climbed back up as far as Earth, to look at the newly created humans and assess the possibility that they might be tempted into sin. Afterwards, Satan’s (very physical) offspring, Sin and Death, built a ready and easy way over the deep, to facilitate travel between Hell and Earth.
\nLines 168 to 171, quoted above, indicate that the matter contained in the abyss was formerly part of God, but from which he has withdrawn (“I … myself retire”) leaving it formless and “Averse to life”. This seems a roundabout way of providing oneself with building materials, and it may be at this point that Milton’s materialist account of the creation is least persuasive. It’s striking that here Milton spends only 4 lines on the origin of the chaotic material; the topic could certainly have supported a more extensive discussion. I’d like to write a bit more about it myself, but not until after I’ve read De Doctrina Christiana.
\nMilton lived in dangerous times. There were many on the Royalist side who, following the Restoration, believed (and said) that he deserved to be put to death for his defence of the regicide. He was, for a while, at real risk of death or longer imprisonment than he actually suffered. No one should be surprised therefore that he did not advertise his heretical beliefs. What he did advertise in Paradise Lost was his conviction that humans are endowed with free will. That wasn’t a heresy: it had been the professed view of the dominant faction — the Laudians — in the Church. It was surprising, though, to find somebody of Milton’s political outlook and history arguing so strongly for free will: in the England of the time, the relatively few republicans, the religious nonconformists, the opponents of the Restoration and the adherents of the Good Old Cause tended to be Calvinists.
\nHe was firm in his convictions, though many of them were peculiar to himself, and unexpected.
\nEdition: Penguin Classics paperback, ed. John Leonard, 2000, corrected 2003.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-25T17:02:44+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/25/material-particulars-spirit.html", "tags": ["Newsletter"] }, { "id": "http://artkavanagh.micro.blog/2024/02/23/unfortunate-bp-employee.html", "content_html": "Unfortunate BP employee gets fired because she wasn’t sufficiently suspicious of her husband: Insider trading.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-23T11:56:18+00:00", "url": "https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/2024/02/23/unfortunate-bp-employee.html" } ] }