The View in Winter
The View in Winter 1979, London, Allen Lane (Hardcover)
The View in Winter deserves to be equally well known. Blythe uses his considerable skills as a sympathetic listener and editor to present the views of a number of people who were old in the late 1970s. The voices represented are those of 'ordinary' people, in a variety of roles, including the district nurse, the retired engineer, Douglas Haig's former batman, and many others. Each is given their say, each has something interesting and useful to say about growing old and what the view in winter looks like from their own perspective. Not the least valuable is Blythe's own perspective. He weaves quotation and anecdote and acute psychological analysis into a narrative that is wide ranging, intimate and touched with a note of urgency. Reading his introduction is like having a conversation with an old friend before going for a walk in the village to meet the neighbours!
There is nothing trivial about his subject, or what he has to say, and he doesn't pull his punches when it comes to comment on how our behaviour will reflect the opportunities offered by increasing longevity in a technologically advanced society. As we reach the stage when almost a quarter of the population is aged 65 or over, "It may soon be necessary and legitimate to criticize the long years of vapidity in which a well, elderly person does little more than eat and play Bingo, or consumes excessive amounts of drugs, or expects a self-indulgent stupidity to go unchecked. Just as the old should be convinced that, whatever happens during senescence, they will never suffer exclusion, so they should understand that age does not exempt them from being despicable.”
This is far removed from the rhetoric of much discussion in the press and policy literature on 'the needs of older people.' It is also far removed from the contempt that is inherent in ageism, which is still rife. “At present there is much in our treatment of the old and our attitudes towards them which is scandalously similar to that which governed nineteenth-century attempts to solve the 'intractable' problem of the poor. They are not 'us', is what we are saying (politely and humanely, of course), and there are so many of them!” They are us, and we should live up to the fact. This book helps.
The Road Within
The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 2006, Picador. 307 pages.
The Road is a frontier novel of an awesome kind. An unnamed man and his ten year old son travel on foot through an America changed utterly by the impact of some cataclysmic event. We are not told what that event is. It is enough for us to know that it has happened and for us to inhabit the devastated landscape that remains. All that is left is grey, desiccated and, apart from a few human tribes, dead. Within these tribes life is reduced to primeval savagery and elemental survival, for they prey upon and literally devour each other. Apart from scavenging there is no other way to survive.
McCarthy’s novel focuses relentlessly on the here and now. History has gone; past events are dimly recalled at best. The future can barely be conceived. The boy was born just after the great event that changed the world, and his mother committed suicide shortly afterwards rather than be raped and killed by the predatory tribes. The novel owes more than a little to the tradition of American frontier fiction. The ‘Indians’ have been replaced by nameless and featureless gangs, but the same fears of natural savagery remain. The man and the boy carry a gun and two bullets as part of a suicide pact in case they should fall victim to the tribes. Their fears are well founded. On the way they encounter prisoners kept and farmed for their flesh. They witness a newborn baby being roasted on a spit.
Only one thing distinguishes the man and his son from the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit. Against all reason they continue to hope. They are trying to walk south to where they believe the weather may be warmer, and the boy can still find it in himself to want to help a lone straggler on the road, in spite of the risk. “If he is not the word of God,” the man says of his son, “God never spoke.” At the end of the journey, after his father has died, the boy is rescued by a nuclear family – father, mother and daughter – who have been tracking them on the road, and in whose society rests the last sliver of hope.
The Road is written in a pared down form of Englishthat eschews adjectives and all unnecessary punctuation. The novel provides no descriptions or insight into the society of the tribes. They are simply ‘other’. In a sense it describes an America under siege, not just by the awful landscape but by the moral codes of the enemies within. These are the consequences of a world stripped of civilisation, where there are only good guys and bad guys. Though it draws heavily on literary tradition and on key themes in the American psyche, it is arguable whether this book could have been written before 9/11. The Road portrays the social and environmental consequences of an America that has seen its darkest nightmares come true.
The Best Advice a Writer Can have
I've read quite a few 'teach yourself' creative writing books, and done some courses, and for the most part they are unsatisfying. They tend to deal with issues of technique, plot, character and so on, as if these things can be bought off the shelf. They work on the assumption that publishers / agents / readers know what they want and that writers are technicians there to give it. They aim for 'success' in the market place, and fail to address the point of creative writing and how the process of creativity really works.
This book is different. It addresses the reasons why writers (or painters, or musicians, or cooks - any form of creative identity) become blocked. It looks at the spiritual role of creativity in our wellbeing. Don't be put off by that. This book takes a rigorous approach to developing a creative practice that will suit the individual. Based very loosely on the twelve step programme used by recovering alcoholics and Jungian analysis this book looks at why we don't allow our creativity to flourish. It assumes we all have the power in some way but for the most part have lost it, and that anyone, with insight and a little discipline, can recover it.
Central to the programme are the morning pages and the artist's dates. These and a series of graded activities take you gently where you feared to go. Don't worry - it is wonderful when you get there, and fun. But also be prepared: the Artist's Way asks you to take seriously your own impulses and work with them. It will teach you how to do that.
Since starting this course a few weeks ago I have met so many people who acknowledge that they practice morning pages. As you work with the course you will find that things start to happen that confirm the value of it. Those with a religious inclination might say it is God, or the universe, acknowledging that this is the right way to go. Those without such inclinations will just say, hey, this is working.
I'm not going to tell you what morning pages and the artist's date are - read the book for yourself and discover something inside yourself you had forgotten you had, but you'll be delighted to find was there all the time.
Marsh Fever
Salt, Jeremy Page, 2007, Penguin Books, 323 pages.
Anyone who has travelled through Norfolk and the Fens will hardly have failed to notice the skies. They’re somehow bigger, better, more dramatic than anywhere else. In Salt, as in a painting by Constable, the skies are part of the action. They’re a chorus, nudging the action along, commenting on and presaging events. They are rarely benevolent. When Goose, natural sage of the North Norfolk marshes and eccentric grandmother to Pip, the narrator of Jeremy Page’s debut novel predicts the coming of the great storm of January 1953 that wrecked the north Norfolk coast, he describes her doing so by reading the clouds, like a shaman:
“So here comes the cloud, freeing itself from the tangle of trees, heather and gorse above Blakeney. Fat, full, a couple of hundred feet above the saltmarsh. Goose’s cloud eye is on it straight…It’s a small fractonimbus known as a rag cloud. Rag clouds play a crucial part in my family’s story. There’s a rag cloud painted on the hull of a boat, and there’s a rag cloud in human form walking across a fen, dressed in heavy waterproofs. They’re always tricksters…” (p38)
For the most part Pip, a selective mute, can only communicate through writing. His story covers the arrival of his grandfather ‘Hands’, a German airman discovered by Goose stuck in the mud of Morston Marsh after falling from a bomber in 1944; through the birth of his mother, Lil’ Mardler, to her eventual suicide, a victim of ‘marsh fever’ that is the natural effect of living so close to the sky and to the uneventful flatlands; and his lifelong infatuation with Elsie, the red haired girl who is the only one to whom he can speak and with whom he eventually sleeps, and who may or may not be his sister.
The effect of the landscape is evoked through the slow accretion of detail, like silt falling upon a river bed. Images of escape recur and diminish: boats, fire, storms. Nothing is constant except the fact of the marshes themselves. The only way to make sense of things is through the telling of tales, which become as convoluted, shifting and elusive as the tides that govern this salty wilderness.
The location of the novel and the flora and fauna are observed in minute detail. Salt is a taleof tiny figures locked within a vast landscape on the edge of the known world, where jealousy, passion and murder burst like fireworks beneath the stars.
A Poisoned Inheritance
Mother’s Milk, Edward St Aubyn, 2006, Picador, 279 pages
As the title suggests, Mother’s Milk is an ironic take on the influence of inheritance. The Melrose family are the inheritors of their parent’s neuroses. Patrick’s upbringing featured in the trilogy, Some Hope, which describes in the first volume a childhood blighted by abuse from his father; in the second, Never Mind, two days of drug fuelled madness centred on Patrick’s attempts to arrange his father’s funeral in New York, and finally in Bad News, his return to relative stability
In an interview for the Observer, St Aubyn claimed that, though Mother’s Milk features the same poisoned and poisonous family as the trilogy it is a new story, not a sequel. “Some Hope is complete,” he remarked. “This is the starting of another story. But at the same time I didn’t want to go through the pseudo-originality of creating another person.” There is meat a-plenty for a dozen novels exploring the inherited neuroses of the Melrose family, about the likeness of which to St Aubyn’s own family a great deal has already been said. Here Patrick has settled down into a sort of tenuous respectability that is little more than skin deep. He is a barrister who never seems to do any work but manages to feed nevertheless a heavy drink problem; his wife Mary is devoted to their two children, Robert and Thomas to the virtual exclusion of her husband. Part of the story concerns Patrick’s desperate attempt to prevent his mother Eleanor from squandering the last remaining piece of the family estate, their holiday home in France, by giving it away to a bogus New Age foundation.
Maternal influence in St Aubyn’s writing is hardly benevolent. Eleanor’s gift of the family home is an act of sublime naiveté, which would be cruel if it she was aware of the cruelty. The last part of the book has Patrick investigating options for assisted suicide for his now completely dependent mother: at the last minute she withdraws from her professed desire, leaving Patrick free at last to “Do nothing.” It is the liberation he has been looking for all along.
