Week Fifty-Three - Jeanette

 Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot (1909-1962)

Recommended by Jude

People spend years studying the poetry of T.S. Eliot. They don’t usually chuck it into their brain at Victoria Coach Station.

I did not even have a week in which to read this. The combination of adding an extra book to Two Readers and the cumulative effect of the occasional late post left me with eight books in December. But, 2013, throw all the shit you want at me (as I just wrote, today it’s a malfunctioning laptop power pack, meaning I’m racing to do this standing up in Hillsborough's Wetherspoons as the battery life ticks down and new year revellers start piling in) but, fuck you, I’m finishing Two Readers on time.

I want my world to end with a bang, not a whimper.

Jude writes, in her dedication at the front of my copy of Collected Poems 1909-1962, that Eliot’s poetry ‘made me realise the real magic of the English language.’ Perhaps, then, it’s not such a bad thing that circumstance has forced me to pelt through it. I’m reacting in a very primal way, thinking of the way the words dance on the page, feeling the direct relevance that the poems brought to my world.

            We shall not cease from exploration.

                        (‘Little Gidding’)

I saw Jude last night – the wonderful Jude. We were with others, so we didn’t get too long to reflect on the project, but I will tell her now that Two Readers has been one of the most satisfying creative experiences of my life. Even though Jude’s posts weren’t regular, they were brilliant and inspiring, and the credit for turning my idea for book recommendations from friends into a blog entirely lies with her. That’s what true friendship does: one of you has an idea, the other has an idea, you do something amazing together. Iron sharpens iron. I have felt her hands on my back, supporting me, in so many precious ways this year.

            What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

            Out of this stony rubbish?

                        (‘The Waste Land’)

‘The Waste Land’ came into Jude’s life when she was in sixth form, which provides a curious parallel with the book I recommended for her. We’ve often talked of what made us want to write, and what made us writers (two different things). That era, age sixteen-to-eighteen, is perhaps the key one of my life, and I know she feels similarly.

            The tiger springs in the new year.

            Us he devours.

                        (‘Gerontion’)

Jude and I have each had a very difficult 2013, for different reasons. But through it we have been there for one another. Writing about the people very very closest to me, of whom Jude is one, is not easy. Because there is so much to say about someone I love so very much. So perhaps less is more.

            Both intimate and unidentifiable.

                        (‘Little Gidding’)

Just as there’s so much to say about these bloody incredible poems. (And so little time to say it.)

The first of my favourites is ‘The Hollow Men’. I knew I’d love it just from the Heart Of Darkness epigraph. And then this comes…

            Between the idea

            And the reality

            Between the motion

            And the act

            Falls the shadow

                        (‘The Hollow Men’)

That’s exactly how I’ve felt this year. I’ve felt shadows in my mind, on my heart, in my creative process, coming between thought and result. How can one fight a shadow? I’ve tried. And I am hard on myself when I fail. But Eliot's words buoyed me, they swaddled me, they told me that I didn't need to hate my failure quite as much as I do.

Many of the poems have a strong religious element. There’s clearly a schooled element to Eliot’s Christian history, but there's also playfulness. Take ‘The Hippopotamus’. Its opening lines relate to how huge the animal is, but that it is ‘merely flesh and blood’ compared to the True Church. The poem vacillates between a seemingly genuine devotional fervour and a ludicrous piss-take, particularly with Eliot's glorious image of the hippo ‘performing on a harp of gold’.

For Eliot does have quite the sense of humour, and he sometimes tries to ‘help’ the reader with notes and references, particularly in ‘The Waste Land’.

I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

                        (‘Notes on The Waste Land’)

Cheers, Thomas Stearns.

But what of ‘The Waste Land’ itself? It is astonishing. Imagine everything in English literature from Sir Gawain And The Green Knight to Lily Allen. I am simply overwhelmed. The word awesome is so overused, but with reference to 'The Waste Land', I mean it in its original I-am-struck-with-awe sense. Written in 1922, my initial impression is that its some sweep of post-Great War British culture, putting it in the context of the long Christian epoch of the country: of how societies fracture and repair, how traditions break and form. I also loved the references to Dante's Divine Comedy, my only other poetry foray this year. I haven't had the time to research anything of Eliot or his literary intentions, but I have learned from the book jacket that he was an American who settled in the UK in 1915. Perhaps that completely scuppers my theory, but perhaps not: the eyes of the new sometimes open wider, and cry fresher tears.

Since ‘The Waste Land’ is so impossible to sum up, perhaps I should just leave it there before I embarrass myself, and conclude with mentioning my other favourite poem, ‘East Coker’, part of Four Quarters.

            As we grow older

            The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.

                        (‘East Coker’)

This long poem feels like a very personal reflection, a song of experience, one which lights the bonds of humanity. Those ties that transcend the spoken and pull us on to the new. I expect that’s why it has hit me so very hard on this, the old year’s night. I have read fifty-three books and I have loved fifty-three people. I'll never do it again. But I'll never forget it.

            In my end is my beginning.

                          ('East Coker')

Week Forty-Six - Jeanette

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)

Recommended by Sharron

The Cuckoo Sister, The Secret Garden, Moondial, The Children Of Green Knowe, the decidedly patchy Dramarama… I loved the one-off and short-run children’s TV dramas of the 1980s. Even the ‘school programmes’, the ones ruined by puppets teaching you what a consonant was (How We Used To Live, Dark Towers, The Boy From Space) – all amazing.

Many of these shows had a spooky sci-fi element to them, so it’s no surprise that John Wyndham had a foothold in this market. While The Day Of The Triffids was a big(gish) budget thing on the BBC at 9pm that I wasn’t allowed to watch (‘Muuuuuuum… how scary can it be?’ ‘You won’t like it. You’re scared of the Smash advert aliens’), Chocky, and its sequels, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge, were on at squash-and-Club-biscuit time. I watched all three.

It’s surprising that The Chrysalids never got made into a kids’ TV drama, too. It has all the golden elements of that era – psychic power, a future dystopia, social comment about tolerance – and a very believable boy hero. I can picture the title sequence; a neon green BBC Micro font over a Lidl Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.

The Chrysalids is set generations after the world has suffered Tribulation (a Nausicaä-style environmental crisis). Much of the earth is now uninhabitable; the Badlands are barren, while the Fringes are full of semi-feral beings. In the supposedly civilised areas, society is strongly theocratic. People believe (or at least are told) that the Tribulation was dealt directly by God.

This God is a vengeful God, and nothing apparently riles Him more than irregular flora and fauna. Genetic deviations occur far more frequently now than they did before Tribulation, and this brave new world is anti-evolutionary and eugenic. If any animal, plant, or person, is deemed physically nonstandard then it is immediately culled. The reasons for this are never explicitly stated, but it seems partly as a method of societal control, partly out of a pragmatic but misplaced concern that allowing different takes on humanity will weaken it, and partly out of a genuine religious impulse.

There is a Definition of Man that every citizen is expected to know off-by-heart.

‘…and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail…’

I was reminded of H.G. Wells’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau. In that, sad vivisected animals have it drummed into them that they are human. In The Chrysalids, recognisable humans have it drummed into them that, because of something as minor as a hairless head, they are not. In both of these books, humanity is fluid. It is in itself a man-made concept, defined according to the requirements of society. What we may think of as fundamentally natural – our very status as people – can be successfully cast aside by ideological regimes.

As with real-life fascism, the most powerful tools of government are not its soldiers. It’s the everyday zealots and the quiet majority. Joseph Strorm, father to the book’s sensitive boy narrator Davie, is all Piper-Laurie-in-Carrie: a God squadder who skirts over the be-kind-to-the-unfortunates aspect of religion and uses his faith to dominate his family. In one memorable scene, Davie is struggling with a task, and shouts in frustration.

                             ‘I could have managed it all right by myself if I’d had another hand.’

My voice must have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.

[…]

I was aware that the rest had stopped gaping at me, and were now looking apprehensively at my father. His expression was grim.

‘You – my own son – were calling upon the Devil to give you another hand!’

Joseph Strorm soon has bigger problems on his (two) hands. Genetic mutations are not only physical, it seems. Davie and his baby sister Petra have extraordinary mind powers.

                              ‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.

‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are – well, sort of shapes.’

Those with this mental variation are able to communicate with each other, undetected by others. The second half of The Chrysalids concentrates on the relationships within this group of psychics, and of the increasing danger of discovery.

I liked the second half less than the first. I wonder why.

It’s nearly as well-written, however there do seem to be a few more portentous speeches, and some tiresome dashing around the Fringes, which didn’t hold my interest. But I think it’s more to do with the way the telepathy itself is brought out.

I’ve discussed the unexplained a little with Sharron, who goodness me is only Sharron Kraus, one of the country’s finest and most consistently evolving folk artists.

When I first met her, it was in an Oxford graveyard. I interviewed her there for Seasons They Change. As we discussed the influence of cinema and literature on her music, she talked about magic in everyday life. This wasn’t in a Harry Potter­-esque childish fantasy way, or couched in spaced-out hippy lingo, both of which are easy to dismiss. Rather, she has both an academic philosophy background, and a reflective nature which is happy with ambiguity. She is interested in the way that the dark mysteries of thought processes, of the natural world, of emotional connections, manifest themselves. Some things, she said to me, they just may make the most sense as a magical phenomenon. This is an influence on her, and funnily enough I hear it most in her wordless songs.

I remember the next time I saw her, which was just after submitting the Seasons manuscript. I went to Wales to stay for a wonderful few days. Our natters really rambled free. For instance, we discussed Lady Gaga at length. Her manipulation of image – did it mean anything? Did its very hollowness mean anything? Was the sexual element really that confrontational, when Gaga has a very conventional celebrity body type? After eighteen months of using my brain almost exclusively for psychedelic folk, this conversation was the mental equivalent of a weekend away in Paris. And that it was with someone else who dealt in psychedelic folk made it even sweeter.

Sharron lives in Sheffield, now! I get to be both her friend and her fan. We talk and drink red wine and listen to music lots, plus I get to see her perform live regularly. The picture below was taken a couple of months back: as part of the Sensoria festival, Sharron sang with the lovely Nancy Wallace, and Sharron and I were on a panel discussing folk music. The event took place in a disused department store! We saw a mummified bat, arsed around pretending to be mannequins, and then I kicked a hole in a wall.

Anyway. Away from spooky abandoned shops and back to spooky dystopias. The Chrysalids depicts people with real telepathic ability, and the other characters accept this power unquestioningly (they are either afraid or in awe of it), even though, for the most part, they don’t see it. In some ways, this fits squarely with a monotheist religious society: any competing mythical concerns are rooted out as viciously as a potential earthly rival. However, I think the odd skeptical voice would have worked well with Wyndham’s realistic depiction of human behaviour. You try telling a neighbour you’re telepathic; chances are you’ll not be deemed a deity or a devil, but get a derisive snort and a cup or tea to sort yourself out.

I also think it was a bit of a missed opportunity, given how Wyndham explores evolution and human mutation, to explore why this ability has developed in this society. Let me tell you something, and promise me you won’t respond with a derisive snort.

I have – only once – had an ‘out of body experience’. I felt myself lifting from my flesh, whirring away to somewhere else, seeing that somewhere else as if I was actually there, then bumping back into my bones. Now, I don’t think anything supernatural actually happened – for instance, I don’t think that my soul left my body and travelled, or that what I saw in the ‘travelled-to’ place was really occurring – but I do know that I experienced this at a unique time in my life. It was at a point when I literally wanted to be in two places. My mind was split like never before, and therefore it powerfully hallucinated, making me momentarily feel that my body was split, too.

And that’s I suppose what I’m interested in in terms of psychic phenomena, and what I would have liked to have had more of in The Chrysalids: Wyndham exploring telepathic ability as a potent reaction of the mind to a situation, rather than as a randomly bestowed paranormal gift. Davie and his cohorts live in an oppressive society, and it would be fascinating to consider whether this ability evolved as a result of that tyranny. Perhaps it’s there implicitly – Davie and Petra have it, and they are particularly subjugated by their father – but developing this strand more would have been very satisfying. As it is, the telepathic component of The Chrysalids seems similar to a number of other works that deal with the subject.

Having said that, this is a very brief book that tries to do a lot, and the amount it does squish in is impressive. It’s almost Orwellian in its success as both a powerful critique of conformity, and as a great read. It is unafraid to comment on destructive regimes and powerful vested interests.

‘They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils…’

Dystopian books. We need to pay attention to them, for they are never about the future.

Week Thirty-Four - Jude

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951) 
Recommended by Mark Hooper

I read four books on holiday. Four! Three were for this blog, and one wasn't (unless anyone wants to belatedly recommend me Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, as I'd love to write about it).

So first up: Graham Greene. I've loved Graham Greene ever since I picked up a copy of Brighton Rock from Gorseinon Library in my mid-teens. Oh, Gorseinon Library! I read practically everything  there – kids' books, history books, everything about nuclear war, stuff on Welsh poetry, a copy of 1984 that some rotter had hidden in the teenage fiction section (I was 12; I was terrified). I also ordered books in, which seemed to lose themselves into the permanent shelves. That's why I hope a copy of The Cure's song lyrics and Marcus Gray's R.E.M. biography are still there, anyway.

The beginning of Brighton Rock is still one of the best things I've ever read, though. The tension, the characterisation, that drawing of that eerie, compelling seaside scene...argh! The rest of the book isn't half bad, either. Then last year, I read Our Man In Havana. Such a different, dryly funny story from the same writer, making brilliant fun of the British intelligence services....and now comes The End Of The Affair.

These three books have such a separate sense of voice and style, it's staggering really. But perhaps that's Graham Greene's thing: sustaining different approaches to subjects smartly and effortlessly.

The End of the Affair was recommended to me by Mark Hooper. Mark is lovely – a great magazine editor and writer (I've worked for him), currently editing a great quarterly brick called Hole and Corner, about "people who spend more time doing than talking, for whom content is more important than style, whose work is their life". That pretty much sums Mark up for me. As for this book, I'd seen the 1999 Neil Jordan film adaptation already, so knew roughly what happened in the narrative (single man and married woman have a catastrophic affair), although I found it fairly easy to dislodge Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore from my mind. (Saying that, I have refreshed the memory of seeing them today, by watching the awful trailer on YouTube – I particularly recommend the scary-voiceover-man's "IN A TIME OF WAR" section.)

 

 

The book is something else. Although it's pretty obvious what will happen to Sarah from the off, Greene's book is a masterclass in how to create heavy claustrophobic atmospheres. Here we are experiencing "black wet January nights on the Common", further darkened by them being in London in the Second World War, and similar states in the mind: when "in that state of blackness one can no more tell the days than a blind man can notice the changes of light".  The structure of the story is also interesting, shaped by a writer-character who is conscious of the limitations of his narrative ("a story has no beginning or end", the book begins, "arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead"). 

The swings between past and present time also demand that the reader involves themselves deeply in the characters' minds, and becomes part of their webby, messy world.

The novel begins with our protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, an upcoming writer, meeting Sarah husband's Henry on Clapham Common (they live at opposite sides of it, a detail that has a certain knowing, oppressive poetry about it). Henry is worried about Sarah, and thinking about hiring a private detective to find out what is wrong with her; Maurice does so himself. It quickly becomes obvious that Bendrix has some history with Sarah, although he is loathe to admit it, but the details of their passionate past slowly, and painfully, start to seep out. 

The hurt I felt while reading this book reminded me of Brief Encounter, one of my favourite films. It's such a stark, modern film in some ways, especially at the point when Celia Johnson (as Laura) talks about not thinking about her children while she is away with her lover, and when you realise her her husband is such a nice, unknowing soul. Greene's story also has an unknowing husband (Henry), but many more physical details that deepen that sense of dread. Take the pages when Maurice and Sarah are having sex in the house in which Henry is also in – I barely breathed.

The last scene of (the wonderful) Brief Encounter

What's not obvious early on, though, is how huge a part religion will play in The End Of The Affair. Catholicism is the real cheat of the hour that enters the frame and rips this relationship apart (I won't say much more here; you'll have to read the book to appreciate what happens). It's also impossible to see this when the narrative starts, and that's one of many things I love about this book. You look at the heavily-loaded title, and Sarah's nasty cough, and all signs point to an obvious melodrama. What we actually get is a story when nothing is truly as it seems, or will work out to be, for both character and reader. 

The last section even takes us somewhere very gothic and strange, where miracles happen, while others implode. Plus, the last line is also surely a contender for the bleakest ever:

"O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever."

 
And if this isn't dark enough... Greene lived at 14 Clapham Common Northside. His house was bombed by one of the first V1s, just as Maurice's was. Graham Greene had an affair with Lady Catherine Walston. Her husband was called Henry. 

The English edition of the book is dedicated to C.

Week Five - Jeanette

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (1957)

Recommended by Timothy

When I finished writing Seasons They Change, I had had eighteen straight months of acid folk. I loved the music, but I was replete; I simply couldn’t listen to another Donovan B-side or Sunburned Hand Of The Man CD-r. As soon as I pitched my baby off to my editor I listened to TLC and Mary J. Blige and Luv’ and Rah Digga and Sylvia Striplin and Roisin Murphy.

And one acid folk act. I never have wanted, and I never will want, a break from Stone Breath.

If you’re reading this and you know me personally, you’ve almost certainly heard me talk about this band. They’re very important to me. It was an absolute honour to interview Timothy Renner, Prydwyn and Sarada for Seasons, and Timothy again for a fRoots piece. I still can’t really believe I’m in contact with Timothy. Do meet your heroes: sometimes it works out.

Listening to Stone Breath is like walking through a thicket of densely patterned vines. Go too quickly and you’ll miss the detail. Go too slowly and you’ll never get out.

I was fully prepared for Timothy’s book recommendation to be… intense.

Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.

So writes Ray Bradbury in the later (1974) introduction to Dandelion Wine, a book widely considered one of his most personal and autobiographical. ‘From the age of twenty-four to thirty-six’, Bradbury continues in the introduction, ‘hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass.’ Bradbury uses his grandparents’ small Midwestern town, Waukegan, as the model for Dandelion Wine’s Green Town, and he uses himself for Douglas Spaulding, the twelve-year-old at the heart of the book.

‘Some people turn sad awfully young,’ he said. ‘No special reason, it seems, but they seem always to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.’

Douglas is cipher and observer as much as protagonist, for the book has a vibrant ensemble cast of Green Town residents. There’s Douglas’s grandfather, mortally opposed to a new scientific type of grass because it stops growing at a certain height (‘I want you to deliver this load of unromantic grass into the ravine’). There’s Leo Auffmann, who builds a Happiness Machine (‘How have we used machines so far, to make people cry?’). And then there’s his wife Lena with strong opinions on such a contraption (‘Leo, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all gotta climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes’). I found myself wondering about everyone’s back stories, everyone’s future; the world of Green Town is intoxicating.

Bradbury relates all this from a child’s, but not a childish, viewpoint. The vignettes are soaked in wonder and magic. It’s that particular young perspective that’s the soul of Bradbury’s writing: tremendous detail, a high-stakes outlook and concrete patterns of thought, whilst still believing in the most outlandish possibilities of life. This seems to me a very difficult thing to pull off. I can only remember one other author – George Eliot, at the beginning of The Mill And The Floss – evoking childhood so perfectly through the structure of language itself (as opposed to merely describing childhood, or letting the youngsters speak for themselves, which of course many do very well).

I can understand why all this appeals so much to Timothy. In 1996, at twenty-five, he lived on his parents’ farm in rural Maryland and shared summer evenings with his partner, Alison. Songs Of Moonlight And Rain, the first Stone Breath album, came from this time. It is the most straightforward and hopeful of all their releases and, if it has a theme, it seems to be of the transition from innocence to knowledge. Songs such as ‘To Cull Undying Flowers’ echo Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine introduction.

              Dark reflections of summers passed

Of paths of joy and roads of pain.

And I can understand, too, why Dandelion Wine has stayed with Timothy through the years. My favourite track on the latest Stone Breath album, The Night Birds Psalm, is ‘This Is What The Sparrow Sings’, a short curio about growing older.

            What once was black is silver now

            The spiral changes everything

            What once was smooth is tangled up

            Add another ring. Add another ring.

What I loved most about Dandelion Wine was the depiction of the older people. Reading their stories brought forth a similar reaction as to when I saw Amour at the cinema recently: I felt enriched. It was enriching to see people over sixty (especially women) even treated as human beings with thoughts, emotions and passions. It’s a depressing comment on our culture that this is so very, very, very rare, and it is something Bradbury consciously chose to do in Dandelion Wine.

            Helen Loomis, ninety-five, relates the best description of ageing I have ever read.

When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That’s what it is – a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years.

A much younger man, William Forrester, falls in love with her.

            ‘For just a moment,’ he said, ‘I saw it.’

            ‘Saw what?’

            ‘The swan, of course.’

(I would imagine Colin Higgins, the writer of Harold And Maude, paid attention to Helen and William.)

So I was wrong about Timothy’s recommendation being intense – or, rather, I was wrong about it being intense in the way I expected it to be. Dandelion Wine is that same Stone Breath thicket, except replace the profuse vines with a carpet of wild plants. Go too fast, and you trample on them. Go too slow, and watching their every sway becomes an addiction.

Week Four - Jeanette

The Ascent Of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman (1956)

Recommended by Phil

One may be misled by book knowledge. It was a lesson to me, as a reader, to take nothing on trust.

The nearest thing I can compare The Ascent Of Rum Doodle to is The Blair Witch Project.

Both are innovative takes on a specific genre. Both are, in their own twisted ways, adventure stories. Both play with the notion of ‘truth’: of how the conventions of reportage, and of personal viewpoints, can and do mislead. And both feature shonky navigational skills.

The Ascent Of Rum Doodle is a parody of mountaineering literature, of boys-own explorations, of – since the Empire was falling around British ears at this time – the idea that plucky Brits could conquer just about anything.

This is a clever book that a writer would love, so it’s no surprise that it was an amazing scribe who recommended it to me: Phil McMullen, the creator of Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine. I remember well how nervous I was in approaching Phil for the first time. I wanted to interview him for Seasons They Change, knowing how influential the Terrascope, and its Terrastock festivals, were for the new wave of psychedelic folk music.

Phil’s going to think I’m a massive charlatan, I thought. I am a massive charlatan! He should be writing this book, not me! I fretted over my approach, and eventually sent what I hoped was a humble message to him, hoping he’d be kind to my efforts.

He was! We met, shortly afterwards, in a pub near Whitehall. I brought my Dictaphone along, but it stayed firmly turned off; I even removed my spectacles, the familiar sign that I am enjoying a social occasion rather than conducting an interview. We found out about each other’s lives as well as each other’s music tastes. We tried to get some olives from the bar but they’d run out. We ordered another bottle of wine instead.

We conducted the interview, sober and via email, a week later.

Phil not only supported the creation of Seasons, he helped to spread the word when it was published, too – in a thrilling twist, I was interviewed by the Terrascope itself! Phil and I don’t chat much, but when we do it’s as if we’re back in that Whitehall pub: unbridled enthusiasm for the music we each love, no olives, lots of wine. Even if we are simply sharing a text message exchange.

Mont Blanc might be climbed by a disunited party; Rum Doodle, never.

Rum Doodle, discovered in the remote country of Yogistan by Allied airmen during World War II, is the world’s greatest unconquered peak. Binder, expedition leader (and narrator) is determined to be the first. He has a team of six at his command: the burly Burley, scientist Wish, photographer Shute, navigator Jungle, linguist (and Yogistani expert) Constant and the doctor, Prone.

Prone immediately comes down with a severe cold in the head. Jungle is still in London, having caught the wrong bus and ended up in Cockfosters (or is it Richmond?). Constant mispronounces so many Yogistani words that riots break out among the local people. You begin to see where this is going.

But it’s not simply cheap laughs (albeit told in a sophisticated, P.G. Woodhouse-esque fashion). As the book progresses other, subtler, tensions arise, for instance the dislike all the team has for our narrator, and their increasing efforts to avoid his conversational gambits.

Prone, with his usual unselfishness, refused to let me share his tent; he said that Constant and I, who would climb together, ought not to be parted. […] As it turned out, the only thing I was able to learn about Constant was that he was a good sleeper, for he dropped off as soon as I had settled down in my sleeping bag.

This is particularly true for Burley, who seems rather to be the object of Binder’s charged affection. Burley himself is engaged to a woman with a hare-lip and club-foot, and this surreal fiancée is a creation worthy of David Lynch or Knut Hamsun.

She had been studying the structure of the sideboard on behalf of the local antiquarian society, but had unfortunately got stuck and had been there a fortnight when Burley found her.

Although its language is often playful, Rum Doodle bites. The blustery, quite useless Brits are silently watched and implicitly mocked by the local Yogistani porters (based on Sherpa guides, a staple of the adventure literature Bowman was satirising) while Pong, their Yogistani cook, makes his own comment on the ‘essentials’ the expedition had brought along.

All our choicest titbits had gone into Pong’s awful pot: our luscious breast of chicken, the tinned apricots and cream which we had so often tasted in anticipation, the sardines, the caviar, the lobster, the lovely gruyere cheese, the pickled walnuts, the curry, the salmon, even the coffee and chocolate biscuits; all these were reduced to a nauseating brew which might have sent Macbeth’s witches shrieking from the place.

The fictional locations notwithstanding, it would be possible, just, to read The Ascent Of Rum Doodle as a straight work. ‘Sixteen illustrations in photogravure’ go towards the realism of the tale. Just as The Blair Witch Project’s videotapes supposedly prove the fates of Heather, Josh and Mike, these photos – a mixture of genuine climbing material and dramatic illustrations – help locate the story in its ambiguous place between fact and fiction.

There is a disclaimer on the copyright page of the book:

           

No criticism of any mountaineering book or method, and no reference to any mountaineer past or present is intended.

I believe him. The portrayal of mountaineering literature is affectionate ribbing. However, The Ascent Of Rum Doodle reads as far more than a spoof of a literary sub-genre. Bowman also parodies contemporary British hubris, taking a snapshot – in photogravure – of how the country struggled with the transition from imperial overlords to insignificant island.