other people write things too...

Just while I'm vaguely on the subject of literary ventures, let me point you in the direction of a friend of mine who's currently preparing his first novel for publication.  It's always difficult to engage in log rolling when you are part of the struggle yourself, but in the spirit of doing something unusual/out of character on February 29th, I do urge you to go and have a read of what it's like to be a struggling author (albeit one with a multibook deal immediately on graduation.....):

http://henryvr.wordpress.com/

Oh, and happy leap year!  I'm always rather glad to see the back of Februaries - they're never very happy times (or, at least, they haven't been for the last couple of years....)

In which I get a short story published...

One of my resolutions at the back end of last year was to really try and push forward with my writing, and to that end I'm forcing myself to enter at least one short story competition a month.  Five Stop Stories is a new app for smartphones/tablets, which aims to introduce new writers to a wider readership through its monthly competitions.  The stories are, as the name would suggest, designed to be read in the time it would take to travel five stops on the Tube.  Anyway, I got an honorary mention in the December entry for for a bit of sub-Wilbur Smith nonsense, with a nod to early Nadine Gordimer (across a wide gulf of competence...)

Anyway, it has now been published and you can, should the mood take you, read it here:

http://www.fivestopstory.com/read/story.php?storyId=1293

Feel free to like it if you do!

The Wooden World

I suppose I was always going to join the navy, or do something equally silly in that vein at the very least.  Having been brought up on a diet of Rider Haggard and GA Henty it seemed the most natural thing in the world to go and take the shilling when the time came.  The taste for adventure stories has never really left me, but I keep returning to the sea in fiction, even though I no longer spend my life on it.

I still think that Arthur Ransome has a lot to answer for - how else does one explain this desire to go to sea when being brought up about as far from it as you can be in the UK?  Peter Duck was good, but I was always a big fan of Missee Lee personally.  Hornblower has always left me cold - the battles are good but the whole thing is a little too one-dimensional; Hornblower himself just a little too perfect.  As a child you can identify with his courage and devotion, but at the same time the action never really rises above what the BBFC would no doubt these days classsify as "mild peril.."

Captain Marryatt made a big impression on me when I was ten or so - I could never quite get to grips with The Children of the New Forest, but Mr Midshipman Easy was another story entirely.  Here at last was Hornblower action with character development, and I remember being heartily sorry that it is a standalone book, and that I wasn't going to discover the further adventures of Mr Easy in due course.

Which, of course, leads naturally enough to Patrick O'Brian.  I came to him incredibly late, just a couple of years ago via the second hand bookshop in Burnham Market, but managed to read the whole canon in 2 years.  O'Brian tends to split people down the middle a little bit like Marmite; between those who can't see past the first bit of nautical slang and those for whom he represents near perfection in a writer.  Personally, I think there is a strong case to be made that he is the finest British writer of the 20th century - if the terribly snobbish end of the critical spectrum hadn't ghettoised him for the heinous crime of writing "historical fiction," then he probably would have been recognised as such in his own lifetime.

Indeed, even if we take the literary world's estimation of historical fiction at its face value, then O'Brian is clearly the leader of the field.  One someimes pulls up short when buried deep in the early nineteenth century with the realisation that O'Brian is a contemporary of the 20th century world, not Jane Austen, such is the perfect pitch he reaches in recreating/creating his vanished world.  Anachronisms are conspicuous by their absence, and the whole strata of the eighteenth and nineteen century Royal Navy, and the social round ashore, is perfectly delineated.

Quite apart from anything else, the sequence is a study of a friendship, in some ways an unlikely one, between a seafaring man and a government agent with a sideline in botany.  Over the course of the the novels we see what are initially lightly drawn characters become fully realised, until a point is reached at which it is genuinely difficult to believe that all of this is the product of one man's mind, and we have to remind ourselves that O'Brian is a novelist and not a particularly lucky Boswell who has stumbled upon the cached letters of two real gentlemen.

Aside from achieving a fully realised picture of the Georgian navy, O'Brian frequently employs certain narrative devices which set him apart from his genre near rivals.  Action is described sparingly, and frequently not at all - and is rendered all the more powerful for it.  My favourite novel, Treason's Harbour, describes perfectly the claustrophobic enclosed world of the senior officers waiting in Malta for news, rather than great fleet actions.  Similarly, O'Brian spends a good portion of Desolation Island setting up a pursuit between HMS Leopard and the Dutch Waakzaamheid, only for the incident to be over in a sentence - real blink and you'll miss it stuff which is all the more devastating for it.

The Aubrey-Maturin saga is one of the greatest achievements of British fiction, and deserves a little more respect than that grudgingly granted to other tellers of superior sea tales.  Many have tried to emulate O'Brian since, but Sharpe didn't really work at sea.  The only one to have come really close is Alan Mallinson, whose Hervey novels are perhaps best viewed as sub-Aubrey on land, but who did send him to sea in Man of War, with pretty decent results.  Ultimately though, I don't think that we need another O'Brian - there are more than enough books in the sequence to repay re-reading over a long period, and Jack Aubrey does make a fine shipmate.

The clock struck 15 hours ago....

If you'll forgive the extremely obscure Ocean Colour Scene reference (B side to the single of The Day We Caught the Train), things at work have been ludicrious lately, and there hasn't really been time for sleep, let alone blogging.  However, astonishingly, there is a readership of sorts for this blog, and I haven't abandoned it.  When the fog lifts, as we said in the Fleet, normal service will be resumed...

Edited to add - thanks to whoever read the blog in Egypt the other day - I've got no idea which post they read, or what brought them here, but for some reason they're the first person in the entire African continent to drop by.  I've had good readership from both north and south America, Asia, the far east, Europe, and the Pacific, but no Africa until now....

Small is Beautiful

One of the great last hurrahs of the British film industry can be seen in retrospect to have been the run of exquisite little comedies turned out by Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Although there is a wide variation of setting between, say, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico, the theme remains the same: the virtue of the small local community standing up to bureaucracy.

Although it is not one of the better known ones, my favourite, The Titfield Thunderbolt, has this central thesis in spades.  Partially inspired by the real-life events at the Talyllyn Railway in Wales, TTT is at first glance a routine farce centering on a group of villagers trying to preserve their branch line railway service in the face of government indifference and the antics of a predatory local bus company.

However, Titfield is a joy - beautifully shot in colour (the first Ealing comedy not to be black and white) it has a fine central performance from John Gregson, and able support from Stanley Holloway and Naunton Wayne (to say nothing of Sid James before his Carry on descent into a parody of himself). The line's supporters are a cross-section of the local great and good - squire, vicar, bank manager, bishop, millionaire alcoholic - all united in the love of their village and a shared aim to keep it the same.  

Whilst the main message is that people should be able to make their own decisions about how to run their community - in this case coming up against the exasperated officials of the Ministry of Transport; the message of localism is bound tightly up with a yearning for the old ways of doing things and the challenges of technological progress.

 One of the turning points of the flim is where John Gregson makes an impassioned plea to a public meeting, railing against the idea that buses are a better form of transport than trains and represent the thin end of the wedge.  For Gregson's squire road transport means nemesis "don't you realise you're condeming our village to death....our houses will have numbers instead of names - there'll be traffic lights and zebra crossings..."  For the squire, only the preservation of the past can guarantee the future - and that sort of decision is best taken by the people that are going to be directly affected.

Of course, the time for Britain's branch lines passed, as they were decimated throughout the 1960s in favour of an incredibly short sighted trunk route focused strategy.  But the spirit of Titfield found an echo up and down the country in the numerous societies which sprang up to reopen their lost lines as museum pieces.  It's not quite the same as riding from Titfield to Mallingford, but in no small part due to this little film one can still buy a ticket from Kidderminster to Bridgnorth, or Towyn to Nant Gwernol.  Sometimes even the byways of British cinema can have an effect far beyond the foyer of the local Roxy, Gaumont or ABC

Happiness

There's always one book I never go anywhere without - it's not that it's a talisman as such, more that I don't know of a time when I haven't felt better for having it to hand.  It's rather unlikely, being, as it's own author describes it, nothing more than the "annals of an ancient actor."

I first read David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" when in the sixth form.  One of the advantages of spending half your life on a train to or from school, as well as being able to read reasonably quickly, was that you certainly got through a lot of lengthy books.  The Crowthers of Bankdam, which would now probably be regarded, if it is remembered at all, as a deeply unfashionable sub-Galsworthy saga, is one that has stayed wih me particularly clearly: the politics of a nineteenth century mill-owning dynasty in northern England is not perhaps obvious reading matter for your average seventeen year old public school boy, but I was never one for convention....

Anyway, back to Mr Niven.  I remember being struck at the time by how much he managed to pack into his life - representing Britain in yachting; war hero; oscar winner; womaniser; Errol Flynn's flatmate.  If you're at an impressionable age, a chap can dream about his future as all of those (except the last one, obviously).  I think I read it in about half a day, and was left slightly bereft at the end of it.  I think the key thing is that Niv was such a good story teller.  I wasn't in the least upset when reading Graham Lord's later biography to discover that some of the anecdotes were "embroidered," there was always enough of the truth in them to mean that you could forgive the exaggerations as just helping to make the smile on your face that bit broader.

I'm not going to give you a great stream of examples, except to say that the story of how he eventually broke into Hollywood, aboard a replica of HMS Bounty into which he had been decanted off the coast of California after a particularly boozy night aboard HMS Norfolk, sets the tone for the whole book - imbued as it is with an utterly infectious joie de vivre.

Since that first reading 13 years ago my battered copy of this great little book has made it's way through my training at Dartmouth; been on deployment to the Red Sea, the Falklands, Antarctica, and, admittedly without me, travelled to the Gambia from Oxford in the back of an ambulance.....  Quite simply, it's a wonderful thing to have around, and there's not much excuse for not reading it as soon as you get a minute.

It will make your life a little bit better.

Happy Birthday Mr Dickens

Blogging is a bit light at the moment, as a result of the twin pressures of work and short story writing  - at the moment if it's not one, it's the other.  Anyway, I thought I ought to acknowledge his 200th birthday  - and look forward to that of Mr Trollope (who was much better) in 2015.  Sadly I missed Surtees' in 2005, as he knocks them both into a cocked hat.... 

There was an interesting discussion on the radio this evening about whether all these anniversaries are simply an excuse for creative laziness - hacks and marketing types simply looking for the next hook to the past, rather than genuinely progressing.  I think there's probably something in that, although it all depends how you do it, and what your take on the continuining relevance of the anniversary being commemorated is.

Dickens of course was the preeminent hack of his time - writing to order and publishing magazines as outlets for his own work.  Unlike Trollope, he never made the mistake of putting down his writing routine in an autobiography (which was the kiss of death for Mr T's reputation amongst those who maintained that the muse doesn't appear to fill a quota).  It's trite to say that the work of either is the nineteenth century equivalent of a soap opera, but it's also true.  The recent BBC adaptations of Bleak House, and more particularly Little Dorrit, show only too well how Dickens was the master of suspense, melodrama, and good plot driven character development.  He deserves his place on the shelves of the 21st century booksellers, even if the educational establishment worries that he's no longer suitable for the A level curriculum.

But, he still didn't write The Way We Live Now....

Coming soon, my Grandfather's journey from Cape Town to Kariba, by tractor, in the 1950s.  I might even get a short story out of that as well - two birds with one stone and all that!

What If?

Over Christmas, I saw a couple of episodes of 'Allo 'Allo, for the first time in a while.  Although it is obviously bawdy farce, there is a thread running through of making light of a pretty awful situation, the Nazi occupation of France.  One can make a case that half of Britain's issues with Europe at a political level are because we weren't invaded in the twentieth century; there is no folk memory of the tanks rolling across the border, of the mass displacements or refugee crises as the blitzkreig swept through, or of the enemy living amongst us, drinking in our pubs, and consorting with our women.

Of course, one piece of British soil was occupied by the Germans.  Any visitor to the channel islands can see the great concrete fortifications thrown up by the wehrmacht, or the site on Alderney which was home to the only concentration camp in Britain.  The Channel Islands experience ought to give the lie that there is any genuine British particularity; that the experience of being occupied would have been any different for the British subject than it was for the millions of Dutch, Belgians and French that actually had to live with the reality of foreign subjugation.  Yet the idea of what Britain would have been like if the Nazis had been successful in mounting an invasion is a subject that has provided fertile territory for film makers over the years, for a variety of reasons.

1) Film as propaganda.

At the height of the second world war, Alberto Cavalcanti made a film of a specially commissioned Graham Greene script - Went the Day Well?  WTDW is a shocking little film, which is quite nasty in many ways.  It tells the story of a German army unit disguised as Royal Engineers, on a mission to disrupt the British radar network on the South Downs, and their interactions with the villagers of Bramley End from arrival, through detection, to the final battle with the regular army.  Of course, being propaganda, I don't think I'm giving away to much of a spoiler to say that the German invaders are defeated, but WTDW does not make it easy, or say that there is anything inevitable about such an outcome.

The film deals with all the obvious points that you would expect the British authorities to want to hammer home to their population: careless talk, reporting anything that looks suspicious, etc, but then goes beyond that.  It raises the existence of fifth columnists in unlikely places, and throughout the film is perfectly clear about the sort of sacrifices which the ordinary citizen may be required to make - from the postmistress killing a German in her kitchen before being killed by another soldier in her turn, to the scene at the manor house where the village's very own version of Linda Snell saves the evacuees by calmly picking up the handgrenade which has landed in their bedroom and walking out onto the landing with it, no one has an easy time.  There's even an eight year old boy who manages to get shot while trying to escape.  WTDW does not pull its punches, and is in many ways a remarkable film - even if some of the acting is a bit dodgy (but full marks to Elizabeth Allen and the young Thora Hird!)

2) Film as escapist fantasy.

By the 1970s, most of the key events of WW2 had been filmed, with varying degrees of success, but the budgets and demand existed for a succession of thrillers, which began to deviate further and further from actual events.  Fitting into this canon are films like The Eye of the Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, and of course The Eagle Has Landed.

Based on the novel by Jack Higgins, TEHL uses the story of a Luftwaffe paratroop unit trying to assassinate Churchill during a visit to Norfolk as the backdrop for what is basically sunday afternoon popcorn fodder.  However, it does, consciously or otherwise, hark back to WTDW in many ways, including the difficulty of villagers trying to communicate their plight with the outside world, and the varying levels of competence displayed by their putative rescuers.  Like the earlier film, TEHL relies for its plot development on the existence of traitors within the local community (In this case Donald Sutherland and Jean Marsh), who are clearly outnumbered by "decent"British types who eventually see them off.  As with the wartime propaganda films, there is never any real doubt about the final outcome.

3. Film as historical counter-factual.

This is what we might call the Virtual History approach, and the exemplar is the most difficult of all the films in the German Invasion genre, Brownlow and Mollo's It Happened Here.  IHH sets out to provide a documentary style investigation of what it would have been like if a German invasion of the UK had been successful, and followed up with prolonged German occupation.  In the 40 odd years since its release IHH has never been very far from controversy; from its use of actual British fascists as extras, through to a clinical style which is totally non-judgmental about what it is portraying.  The result is a deeply unsettling, uncompromising thesis that turns the British national folk myth of WW2 on its head.

For Brownlow and Mollo, the British would have capitulated before the Germans every bit as readily as was the case anywhere else.  Of course, there would have been partisans and resistance, but the great majority would have settled down quietly under some form of crypto-Vichy regime (in this case under the aegis of the paramilitary Immediate Action organisation, which apparently works in support of a British puppet government, headed by Oswald Mosley).  IHH raises important questions about the role of free will and individual choice, as well as the capacity for realistic resistance in the face of totalitarianism.  Indeed, it asks (and answers in exactly the same way) the core question from Powell and Pressburger's Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - how far should people be prepared to go to fight fascism, given that the alternative to winning is no alternative at all? 

The problem for IHH is that it doesn't supply any easy answers, or offer much in the way of hope. Yes, the film ends with news coming over the wireless of a series of landings by the United States Army in the West Country (a sort of alter-D-Day), but this doesn't kick off delirious national celebrations so much as an orgy of score-settling on the part of the partisans, machine gunning British SS members and anyone that can be loosely defined as a collaborator in woodland clearings and generally setting the scene for a new dictatorship of the left, qua eastern Europe.

All of the films use the national myth of British exceptionalism for their own purposes - whether to stiffen national resolve in the face of external threat, or to provide a cheerful way of spending 2 hours in a cinema in the case of TEHL.  What makes IHH so unsettling is that it attempts to question the veracity of the stories that we tell about ourselves as a nation, and show that we are simply just another part of a wider humanity. 

In this analysis, there is nothing special about Britain or the British, except the luck of having 30 miles of water between us and a succession of European tyrants.

A Post for Folk

I've just staggered to the end of Rob Young's excellent "Electric Eden," which documents the evolution of "Britain's visionary music" over the twentieth century.  To a greater or lesser extent, this means the folk scene. 

Of course, folk has never really gone away, but it does swin in and out of the popular consciousness.  In the past couple of years no one has been able to escape the legions of fey north London types who have leapt aboard the folk bandwagon - think Mumford & Sons, Noah and the Whale, or Laura Marling.  However, away from the headlines and top ten there is a raft of good acts who are doing much more interesting things than what amounts in the most part to the new wave of British bluegrass....

For a window into the bleakness of the North East, The Unthanks stand unchallenged.  Their hauntingly beautiful ballads of lost love and broken hearts have captured hearts far beyond Northumberland.  They're also great live, and probably coming to a venue near you soon.  From a similar part of the world are the excellent Young'uns - who manage to make Hartlepool sound both appealing and poetic:  it's not often you get to say that. I saw them last summer at the Whitby Folk Festival and they deserve to have great things ahead of them (certainly they've just picked up a record deal).  It would be far too obvious to compare them to the Flying Pickets, so I will, but only in so far as they're very talented a capella singers.  They're not as overtly political, and they write some damn good tunes.

Away from the more trad end of the spectrum, I've always been particularly enchanted by the late sixties folk rock explosion, which Electric Eden covers very well. For a few years, if you knew where to look, you could soundtrack your life with Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span's first two albums, and the criminally short lived Fotheringay.  Folk rock is less overt in the modern scene, but one lot who do it very well are Trembling Bells.  If you do nothing else this year, beg borrow or steal whatever you need to get to see them.  They've got a short tour coming up in May with Bonnie Prince Billy, but tickets are already pretty hard to come by.  In Lavinia Blackwall they've got the archetypal late sixties folk rock frontwoman reborn.  I'm not going to fall into the trap of comparing her to anyone in particular, but this does lead me on to Sandy Denny.

For a generation of music fans Sandy, if she's known at all, is the girl who sings on Led Zep's Battle of Evermore.  However, in her short life (she died aged 31) she produced enough material to stake a claim as one of the finest singer songwriters the UK has ever produced.  From her early work with Strawbs, she progressed to Fairport (who famously remarked that it felt like they were auditioning for her, rather than the other way round), and her astonishing, bell clear voice was a key part of the seminal Liege and Lief; which set the template for a generation of folk rock and is regularly voted as one of the greatest albums of all time in any genre.

Her solo work is interesting; the first album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, has the atmosphere in places of someone lying dead in the next room, but is utterly compelling. Like an Old Fahioned Waltz is uniformly lovely.  Weirdly though, it's her last album, Rendezvous, which is the most upbeat, even though she was in a complete mess at the time and died shortly afterwards.

Interest in her work has picked up lately, with the release of an early demo album, the beatiful 19 Rupert Street, and last year's interpretation of her urecorded lyrics by Thea Gilmour.  I'm going to come bacck to Sandy when I've got time to do her proper justice, as she is one of those artists that gets inside your head and insists on being thrust to the foreground of your mind at all hours of the day and night.  I've just got tickets to see an homage that is being put on in the Baribcan in May, revisiting works from across her career and featuring Dave Swarbrick, Bellowhead, PP Arnold, Maddy Prior, and the aforementioned Lavinia.  I honestly can't remember the last time I was quite so excited....