JRR Tolkien - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

passive-digressive

There are two kinds of people* – those who like forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps etc, and those who don’t. But we’ll get back to that shortly.

* there are more than two kinds of people. Possibly infinite kinds of people. Or maybe there’s only one kind; I’m never sure

A few times recently, I’ve come across the idea (which I think is mainly an American academic one, but I might be completely mistaken about that) that parentheses should only be used when you really have to (but when do you really have to?) because anything that is surplus to the requirements of the main thrust of one’s text is surplus to requirements full stop, and should be left out. But that’s wrong. The criticism can be and is extended to anything that interrupts the flow* of the writing. But that is also wrong. Unless you happen to be writing a manual or a set of directions or instructions, writing isn’t (or needn’t be) a purely utilitarian pursuit and the joy of reading (or of writing) isn’t in how quickly or efficiently (whatever that means in this context) you can do it. Aside from technical writing, the obvious example where economy just may be valuable is poetry – which however is different and should probably have been included in a footnote, because footnotes are useful for interrupting text without separating the point you’re making (in a minute) from the point you’re commenting on or adding to (a few sentences ago), without other, different stuff getting in the way.

*like this¹ ¹but bear in mind that people don’t write footnotes by accident – the interruption is deliberate² ²and sometimes funny

Poly-Olbion – that’s how you write a title page to pull in the readers

I would argue (though the evidence of a lot of poetry itself perhaps argues against me – especially the Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion kind of poetry that I’m quite fond of) that a poem should be** the most economical or at least the most effective way of saying what you have to say – but who’s to say that economical and effective are the same thing anyway?)

** poets, ignore this; there is no should be

Clearly (yep), the above is a needlessly convoluted way of writing, and can be soul-achingly annoying to read; but – not that this is an effective defence – I do it on purpose. As anyone who’s read much here before will know, George Orwell is one of my all-time favourite writers, and people love to quote his six rules for writing, but while I would certainly follow them if writing a news story or article where brevity is crucial, otherwise I think it’s more sensible to pick and choose. So;

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Absolutely; although sometimes you would use them because they are familiar, if making a specific point, or being amusing. Most people, myself included, just do it by accident; because where does the dividing line fall? In this paragraph I have used “by accident” and “dividing line” which seem close to being commonly used figures of speech (but then so does “figure of speech”). But would “accidentally” or something like “do it without thinking” be better than “by accident?” Maybe.

Never use a long word where a short one will do. The key point here is will do. In any instance where a writer uses (for example) the word “miniscule” then “small” or “tiny” would probably “do”. But depending on what it is they are writing about, miniscule or microscopic might “do” even better. Go with the best word, not necessarily the shortest.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Note that Orwell wrote ‘always’ here where he could just have said If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out. Not everything is a haiku, George.

Never use the passive where you can use the active. Surely it depends what you’re writing? If you are trying, for instance, to pass the blame for an assault from a criminal on to their victim, you might want a headline that says “X stabbed after drug and alcohol binge” rather than “Celebrity kills X.” You kind of see Orwell’s point though.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Both agree and disagree; as a mostly monolingual person I agree, but some words and phrases (ironically, usually ones in French, a language I have never learned and feel uncomfortable trying to pronounce; raison d’etre or enfant terrible for example) just say things more quickly and easily (I can be utilitarian too) than having to really consider and take the time to say what you mean. They are a shorthand that people in general understand. Plus, in the age of smartphones, it really doesn’t do native English speakers any harm to have to look up the meanings of foreign words occasionally (I do this a lot). The other side of the coin (a phrase I’m used to seeing in print) is that with foreign phrases is it’s funny to say them in bad translations like “the Tour of France” (which I guess must be correct) or “piece of resistance” (which I am pretty sure isn’t) so as long as you are understood (assuming that you want to be understood) use them any way you like.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. It’s hard to guess what George Orwell would have considered outright barbarous (and anyway, couldn’t he have cut “outright”?) but anyone reading books from even 30, 50 or a hundred years ago quickly sees that language evolves along with culture, so that rules – even useful ones – rarely have the permanence of commandments.

So much for Orwell’s rules; I was more heartened to find that something I’ve instinctively done – or not done – is supported by Orwell elsewhere. That is, that I prefer, mostly in the name of cringe-avoidance, not to use slang that post-dates my own youth. Even terms that have become part of normal mainstream usage (the most recent one is probably “woke”) tend to appear with inverted commas if I feel like I must use them, because if it’s not something I would be happy to say out loud (I say “woke” with inverted commas too) then I’d prefer not to write it. There is no very logical reason for this and words that I do comfortably use are no less subject to the whims of fashion, but still; the language you use is part of who you are, and I think Orwell makes a very good case here, (fuller version far below somewhere because even though I have reservations about parts of it it ends very well):

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read. (1945) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4. Penguin 1968, p.72

the fold-out map in The Silmarillion is a thing of beauty

Back to those two kinds* of people: I am the kind of person that likes and reads forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps and all of those extras that make a book more interesting/informative/tedious.

*I know.

In one of my favourite films, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), the protagonist Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), says “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.” Well, that is not me; but I do love a good bit of criticism and analysis as well as a good novel. One of my favourite ever pieces of writing of any kind, which I could, but choose not to recite parts of by heart, is the late Anne Barton’s introduction to the 1980 New Penguin Shakespeare edition of Hamlet*. I love Hamlet, but I’ve read Barton’s introduction many more times than I’ve read the play itself, to the point where phrases and passages have become part of my mind’s furniture. It’s a fascinating piece of writing, because Professor Barton had a fascinating range and depth of knowledge, as well as a passion for her subject; but also and most importantly because she was an excellent writer. If someone is a good enough writer**, you don’t even have to be especially interested in the subject to enjoy what they write. Beyond the introduction/footnote but related in a way are the review and essay. Another of my favourite books – mentioned elsewhere I’m sure, as it’s one of the reasons that I have been working as a music writer for the past decade and a half, is Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots from the Hip, a collection of articles and reviews. The relevant point here is that more than half of its articles – including some of my favourites – are about musicians whose work I’m quite keen never to hear under any circumstances, if humanly possible. Similarly, though I find it harder to read Martin Amis’s novels than I used to (just changing taste, not because I think they are less good), I love the collections of his articles, especially The War Against Cliché and Visiting Mrs Nabokov. I already go on about Orwell too much, but as I must have said somewhere, though I am a fan of his novels, it’s the journalism and criticism that he probably thought of as ephemeral that appeals to me the most.

*All of the New Penguin Shakespeare introductions that I’ve read have been good, but that is in a different league. John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet (1935, though the edition I have mentions WW2 in the introduction, as I remember; I like the introduction) is sometimes easy to disagree with but it has a similar excitement-of-discovery tone as Anne Barton’s essay

** Good enough, schmood enough; what I really mean is if you like their writing enough. The world has always been full of good writers whose work leaves me cold

All this may have started, as I now realise that lots of things seem to in my writing did, with Tolkien. From the first time I read his books myself, I loved that whatever part of Middle-Earth and its people you were interested in, there was always more to find out. Appendices, maps, whole books like The Silmarillion which extended the enjoyment and deepened the immersion in Tolkien’s imaginary world. And they were central to that world – for Tolkien, mapping Middle-Earth was less making stuff up than it was a detailed exploration of something he had already at least half imagined. Maybe because I always wanted to be a writer myself – and here I am, writing – whenever I’ve really connected with a book, I’ve always wanted to know more. I’ve always been curious about the writer, the background, the process. I’ve mentioned Tintin lots of times in the past too and my favourite Tintin books were, inevitably, the expanded editions which included Herge’s sketches and ideas, the pictures and objects and texts that inspired him. I first got one of those Tintin books when I was 9 or so, but as recently as the last few years I bought an in many ways similar expanded edition of one of my favourite books as an adult, JG Ballard’s Crash. It mirrors the Tintins pretty closely; explanatory essays, sketches, notes, ephemera, all kinds of related material. Now just imagine how amazing a graphic novel of Crash in the Belgian ligne claire style would be.*

*a bit like Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s fantastic-looking but not all that memorable Hard Boiled (1990-92) I guess, only with fewer robots-with-guns shenanigans and more Elizabeth Taylor

a scholarly approach to cautionary 1970s semi-pornography/horror: the expanded Crash

A good introduction or foreword is (I think) important for a collection of poems or a historical text of whatever kind. Background and context and, to a lesser extent, analysis expand the understanding and enjoyment of those kinds of things. An introduction for a modern novel though is a slightly different thing and different also from explanatory notes, appendices and footnotes and it’s probably not by chance that they mainly appear in translations or reprints of books that already enjoyed some kind of zeitgeisty success. When I first read Anne Barton’s introduction to Hamlet, I already knew what Hamlet was about, more or less. And while I don’t think “spoilers” are too much of an issue with fiction (except for whodunnits, which I have so far not managed to enjoy), do you really want to be told what to think of a book before you read it? But a really good introduction will never tell you that. If in doubt, read them afterwards!

Some authors, and many readers, see all of these extraneous things as excess baggage, surplus to requirements, which obviously they really are, and that’s fair enough. If the main text of a novel, a play or whatever, can’t stand on its own then no amount of post-production scaffolding will make it satisfactory.* And presumably, many readers pass their entire lives without finding out or caring why the author wrote what they wrote, or what a book’s place in the pantheon of literature (or just “books”) is. Even as unassailably best-selling an author as Stephen King tends to be a little apologetic about the author’s notes that end so many of his books, despite the fact that nobody who doesn’t read them will ever know that he’s apologetic. Still; I for one would like to assure his publisher that should they ever decide to put together all of those notes, introductions and prefaces in book form, I’ll buy it. But would Stephen King be tempted to write an introduction for it?

* though of course it could still be interesting, like Kafka’s Amerika, Jane Austen’s Sanditon or Tolkien and Hergé (them again) with Unfinished Tales or Tintin and Alph-Art

That Orwell passage in full(er):

“Clearly the young and middle aged ought to try to appreciate one another. But one ought also to recognise that one’s aesthetic judgement is only fully valid between fairly well-defined dates. Not to admit this is to throw away the advantage that one derives from being born into one’s own particular time. Among people now alive there are two very sharp dividing lines. One is between those who can and can’t remember the period before 1914; the other is between those who were adults before 1933 and those who were not.* Other things being equal, who is likely to have a truer vision at the moment, a person of twenty or a person of fifty? One can’t say, though on some points posterity may decide. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

*nowadays, the people who can or can’t remember life before the internet and those who were adults before 9/11? Or the Trump presidency? Something like that seems right

the book even of my secret soul (about books, again)

I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.

Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.

*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse

** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?

So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.

who wouldn’t want a beautiful Aubrey Beardsley ex-libris in all their books? But who would want to actually paste them into all their books?

On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.

the uninspiring cover that inspired me to read beyond my taste, strangely

Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.

*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away

It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.

Milan Kundera’s books are actually about 50% better when read with these covers

Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?

assorted Ian McEwans, graphic novels & Penguin Modern Classics

Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.

So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)

But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.

Book lover’s regrets – should have bought it but didn’t! Perhaps the greatest book cover of all time

jack told him about the thing – updating children’s books

There’s a strange moment near the beginning of the 1982 Puffin Books edition of Robert Westall’s Fathom Five (1979):

Dad never talked about Life and its Meanings; only fried bread and thrushes.
‘What’s got you up so early?’
Jack told him about the thing in the water.
‘It’ll be a mandolin, floated off a sunken ship mevve…’

Robert Westall, Fathom Five, Puffin Books, 1982, p.35

Strange that is, only because the hero of the book isn’t called Jack, he’s called Chas. I remember first reading this copy of Fathom Five as a child, being briefly puzzled, then moving on. It was only some time – possibly years – later that I read the blurb on the first page, before the title page:

Robert Westall wrote this book straight after his best-selling The Machine Gunners, and it features many of the same characters that appear in the earlier novel. However, when the book was first published the names were changed. In this Puffin edition the original names have been restored.

I have always uncharitably assumed that what actually happened was that Fathom Five didn’t sell as well as Westall had hoped and was then rebranded by him as a sequel to The Machine Gunners in order to boost its sales, but I may be wrong. But it’s apposite at the moment anyway, because a range of children’s books are being altered, apparently for various other reasons, but really for that same one.

It isn’t obvious from the (generally hysterical) media coverage, but re-writing or tampering with “much-loved” (and that bit is important) children’s books, ostensibly to remove any possible offensiveness, has nothing to do with being PC or (sigh, eyeroll, etc, etc) “woke.” l reluctantly use the word because currently it is the word being used to talk about this issue by every moron who’s paid to have a (they would have you believe) popular, intolerant opinion. Right-wing tabloids love “woke” because it’s a single, easy-to-spell, easy-to-say syllable that takes up less space in a headline than “Political Correctness.” I think there are also people who like to use it because saying “Political Correctness” feels dry and snooty and even the abbreviation “PC” has a certain technical, academic quality; but using “woke” allows them to feel cool and in touch with the times. It’s the same kind of frisson that high school teachers get (or did “in my day”) from using teenage slang or mild swearwords in front of the kids; and the cringe factor is about the same too. Hearing someone with a public-school accent decrying “wokeness” is so milk-curdlingly wrong that it’s masochistically almost worth hearing, just to enjoy the uniquely peculiar and relatively rare sensation of having one’s actual flesh creep.

But anyway, the editing of children’s books – high profile examples (and significantly, there are only high profile examples) being of course Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and various works by Enid Blyton, has nothing to do with people’s supposedly delicate sensibilities, it’s to do with money. Parents aren’t lobbying publishers to have books edited; “woke” parents generally don’t really want their kids reading racist or offensive books at all. And every year, untold numbers of unfashionable books (like, for example Fathom Five itself, which is great, regardless of the characters’ names) quietly slip out of print without any fuss being made. What it is, is that the books of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton have made, and continue to make, a lot of money. Publishers realise that some of what they wrote is now embarrassingly out of date and rather than just print a possibly-off-putting disclaimer at the front of the book, they prefer to prevent any chance of damaging sales by seamlessly – well, it should be seamless, in the case of Matilda especially, it seems to be pretty clumsy – editing the book itself. In an ideal-for-the-publishers-world no-one would even notice that it had been done, columnists wouldn’t pick up on it and the kids could go on requesting the books and the parents and schools could supply them and nobody would be upset. But this is precisely the type of trivial issue the (here we go again) “anti-woke” lobby loves. It has no major impact on society, no major impact on children and it has nothing to do with any of the big issues facing the modern world, or even just the UK. It also puts them in the position they love, of being the honourable victims of modern degraded values, defending their beloved past – plus, in this case there’s even – uniquely I think – an opportunity for them to take what can be seen as the moral high ground without people with opposing political views automatically disagreeing with them. Even I slightly agree with them. My basic feeling is that if books are to be altered and edited, it should be by, or at least with the approval of, the author. But it’s never quite that simple.

The reason I only slightly agree is because the pretended outrage is just as meaningless as the revising of the texts itself. It’s not a governmental, Stalinist act, the new editions of Matilda etc only add to the mountain of existing Matildas, they don’t actually replace it. If the racist parent wants fully-leaded, stereotype-laden, unreconstructed imperialist nostalgia, it’s childishly simple to get it, without even leaving the comfort of their home. Better still, if they have the time and their love of the past stretches to more analogue pursuits, they can try browsing second hand bookshops and charity shops. It’s possible, even in 2023, to track down a copy of the original 1967 pre-movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the most virulently offensive Enid Blyton books, not to mention long out-of-print goodies of the Biggles Exterminates the Foreigners type without too much difficulty. And in many cases one could do it as cheaply/expensively as by going into Waterstones or WH Smith and buying the latest, watered-down versions.

the big-format illustrated 1967 Charlie I knew as a child

But anyway, books, once owned, have a way of hanging around; I remember being mystified by Mel Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the second time I saw it, at some point in the early 80s. I had known the book well since I was very young and the first time I saw the film, at home, in black and white, I thought everybody looked and sounded wrong, especially Gene Wilder, but that was all. When I saw it again, a while later, in colour, I found to my bemusement that the Oompa-Loompas were orange.* This definitely seemed odd – but even so, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that burns away at you and so it was only this year, when the book caused its latest furore, that I discovered that, although my mother had read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to me in the late ‘70s and then I had read it myself in the early ‘80s, the edition I knew was the large-format 1967 UK hardback edition. This had Faith Jaques’s beautifully detailed illustrations – which is where all of my impressions of the characters came from – but more importantly, it had the original Oompa-Loompas. A pygmy tribe, “imported” from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle,” they were immediately controversial in the US, where the NAACP understandably took issue with them. Roald Dahl, who presumably wanted the book to sell as well in the US as it did elsewhere, agreed with them (he may have actually seen their point too, but given his character in general I don’t think it does him too much of a disservice to assume the money was the bigger issue) and changed the book. So, no problem there, even if Dahl’s solution – making the Oompa-Loompas a race of blonde, rosy-cheeked white little people, who still live some kind of life of indentured servitude in a chocolate factory – doesn’t seem super-un-problematic when you really think about it; but it was his decision and his book. The orange Oompa-Loompas were a more fantastical way around the problem, and one which enhanced the almost psychedelic edge of the film.

If the intention of publishers in 2023 is to make Roald Dahl nice, they are not only wasting their time, they are killing what it is that kids like about his books in the first place. If children must still read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and I don’t see why they shouldn’t – they are reading a story so mean-spirited and spitefully funny – and so outdated in so many ways – that it doesn’t really bear fixing. Though it was written in the 60s, Charlie’s poverty-stricken childhood with his extended family feels like something from the pre-war era when Dahl was a non-poverty stricken child, as does the book’s Billy Bunter-esque excitement about and fascination with chocolate. Are kids even all that rabidly excited about chocolate these days? And is a man luring kids into a chocolate factory to judge them for their sins something that can or should be made nice? I don’t think that’s an entirely frivolous point; as a child I remember Willy Wonka had the same ambiguous quality as another great figure of children’s literature, Dr Seuss’s the Cat in the Hat; which is where Mel Stuart went wrong, title-wise at least. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is all well and good, but it’s Charlie – a poor, harmless, nice kid who wants some chocolate – that’s the hero, not Wonka, a rich, mischievous adult man whose motives can only be guessed at. And in fact Gene Wilder captures that slightly dangerous quality perfectly. Almost all of Roald Dahl’s books are similarly nasty; but that’s why kids like them. Where necessary, a disclaimer of the ‘this book contains outdated prejudices and stereotypes which may cause offence’ (but hopefully less awkwardly worded) type is surely all that’s necessary. And anyway, where do you stop? Sanitising Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is patronising and weakens the power of Dahl’s writing, but to sanitise The Twits would be to render the whole book pointless.

*I had a similar epiphany when as a young adult I discovered that Bagpuss was pink and not the relatively normal striped ginger cat I had assumed; the joys of growing up black & white in the colour age!

JJ Fortune’s Race Against Time series – good 80s fun

Anyway; the thing that really makes the updating of books pointless is that kids who like to read, tend to read and understand. As a child in the 1980s, I had plenty of entertaining, modern-at-the-time books to read, like the Fighting Fantasy series, the novels of Leon Garfield and Robert Westall or even JJ Fortune’s slightly silly and very cinematic Race Against Time novels, but I also loved books that were much older and felt much older. I loved Capt. WE Johns’ legendary fighter pilot Biggles – especially the WW1-set Biggles books and The Boy Biggles, about the pilot’s childhood adventures in India. I loved Richmal Crompton’s William series (I wonder if William the Dictator (1938), where William and his gang decide to be Nazis is still in print?) I loved Willard Price’s Adventure series, about American brothers travelling the world to capture animals for zoos and safari parks. I even liked boarding school stories, especially Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books. I remember very fondly a book called The One-Eyed Trapper by (will look it up) John Morgan Gray (1907-1978; got to love the internet) about (the title says it all). Years later at high school, some of the poems of Robert Frost immediately recalled to me the vivid, bracing outdoorsy atmosphere of The One-Eyed Trapper, though I don’t suppose Frost would have appreciated the comparison. I was never much of an Enid Blyton fan, but I did read a couple of her Famous Five and Secret Seven books. My favourite Blytons though were the series about her lesser-known, more awkwardly-named gang of nosy children, the Five Find-Outers (presumably it was because of that awkwardness that the names of their books were slightly anonymous things like The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage etc).

These were books from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that were set in those eras and written in outdated language and, as they say ‘reflected the values and attitudes of the time.’ Relatability is important in fiction up to a point, but it doesn’t need to be literal – children have imaginations. I didn’t want William or Jennings without their school caps, wearing trousers instead of shorts, I didn’t need Biggles to talk like a modern pilot (in fact the occasional glossaries of olden-days pilot talk made the books even more entertaining) or the one-eyed trapper to have two eyes and be kind to wildlife. My favourite member of the ‘Five Find-Outers’ was Fatty, which is probably not a name you would have given a lead character in a children’s book even in the 80s. The idea that changing “Fatty” to something more tactful, making him thinner or even just using his “real” first name, Frederick – would make the books more palatable or less damaging to the young readers of today is ridiculous and patronising. And possibly damaging in itself, to the books at least. Children’s books are mostly escapism, but they are also the most easily absorbed kind of education, and a story from the 1940s, set in a version of the 1940s where the kids look and speak more or less like the children of today and nobody is ever prejudiced against anyone else doesn’t tell children anything about the actual 1940s. I’m reminded of the recent movie adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. In the novel, one of its heroes, Mike Hanlon, who is black, is mercilessly bullied and abused by racist teens when he’s a kid. In the movie version he’s just as bullied, but without any racist abuse. I understand why it’s being done – more explicit racism onscreen is obviously not the solution to any of the world’s problems, especially in a story which only has one substantial black character – but at the same time, making fictional bullies and villains more egalitarian in their outlook doesn’t feel like the solution to anything. But even more to the point, there’s only so much altering you can do to a piece of writing without altering its essential character. There are many problems with the much-publicised passage in the latest edition of Roald Dahl’s Matilda where references to Kipling and so forth are replaced with references to Jane Austen etc, but the biggest one is that it doesn’t read like Roald Dahl anymore.

All of which is to say that, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, a third party “fixing” literature (or any art form for that matter) has its limitations. I remember reading an interview with the director of the British Board of Film Classification back in the early ‘90s, discussing John McNaughton’s notorious Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. He was concerned about the film – though he didn’t dismiss it as worthless trash – but his main worry was that it couldn’t be meaningfully cut to reduce its horrific elements because it was the movie’s tone, rather than its content that was worrisome. A few years earlier, the BBFC had unwittingly made Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop more brutal by editing a few seconds from the scene where the giant robot ED-209 shoots an executive for a ridiculously long time in a botched demonstration. In the original cut, the shooting goes on for so ludicrously long that it becomes pure black comedy; cut down a little it becomes a lot less funny and therefore far nastier and (negating the point of the edit) more traumatic for a young audience. There is a reasonable argument that seeing someone get shot to death by a giant robot should be traumatic, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the BBFC’s motive in making the cuts, since the movie was rated 18 and theoretically not to be seen by children anyway.

A children’s novel (or at least a novel given to children to read) that comes under fire for mostly understandable reasons in American schools is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But though the casual use of ‘the N word’ is possibly removable, what would removing it achieve? What people are objecting to isn’t really/hopefully just the language, it’s the era and the society that Mark Twain was writing about; how could you and why would you want to remove that context from the book? Making it into a story where African-Americans are, in the narrative, demonstrably second class citizens but no one ever refers to their status by using nasty names seems in a way more problematic than the racist language itself. Similarly, The Catcher in the Rye has been controversial for decades, but what difference would taking the offensive words out of it make? The only real solution, editing-wise for those who object to the ‘offensive’ material in the book would be to make it so that Holden Caulfield doesn’t get expelled from school, doesn’t hang around bars drinking while underage, doesn’t hire a prostitute and get threatened by her pimp, doesn’t continuously rant about everyone he meets; to make him happier in fact. Well, that’s all very nice and laudable in its way and it’s theoretically what Holden himself would want, but it’s not what JD Salinger would have wanted and whatever book came out of it wouldn’t be The Catcher in the Rye.

Fathom Five 80s rewrite – terrible cover, good book

But, since there is no Stalinist attempt to destroy the books of the past, it’s not all negative. To go back to the Fathom Five example; as a kid I thought there was something fascinating about the phantom “Jack” and had the internet existed at the time I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist trying to track down an un-revised edition of the book. I still might – but would it be worth it? Well possibly; authors and artists tampering with their old work is always fascinating, but usually it’s the revised version that is less satisfying. In the preface to the 1928 edition of his then ten-year-old novel Tarr, Wyndham Lewis wrote;

turning back to [Tarr] I have always felt that as regards form it should not appear again as it stood, for it was written with extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence. Accordingly for the present edition I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision.

Reading that, you already know that the 1918 text is better, and it is. Lewis was a restless reviser of his written works, but for every improvement he made – and he did make many – he lost some of the explosive quality that keeps his often over-elaborate writing alive. As with Lewis, William Wordsworth tampered with his The Prelude – Growth of a Poet’s Mind throughout his life. Like Lewis, some of the changes he made were less to do with the character of the poem than the evolving character of the man who wrote it. The Prelude is an autobiographical work and when Wordsworth first completed the poem in 1805, he was in his mid-30s, a successful youngish poet with some lingering radical tendencies. When he completed the final version, somewhere around 1840, he was a respected, conservative and establishment figure with very mixed feelings about his wilder youth. Both versions are equally valid in their different ways and if the later version doesn’t really eclipse the first – and has shades of the Oompa-Loompa redesign about it – the reader is glad to have both. The point with these examples is that all remain available; if Wyndham Lewis had managed to destroy all the copies of the 1918 Tarr or Wordsworth had somehow “taped over” the 1805 Prelude the world would be a poorer place. When it comes to reworking previous triumphs (or failures) literature is no different from the other arts. Some visual artists – Leonardo Da Vinci is the classic example – can never stop messing with their work, and the film industry (think of the phenomenon of the “Director’s cut”) and the music industry frequently have these moments too. In 1988, after 8 years of complaining about the cheap production of their debut album, Iron Maiden finally decided to re-record its opening track, “Prowler” with their then-current line-up and the expensive studios now available to them. Even if original singer Paul Di-Anno hadn’t sung the song better (but he did), “Prowler ’88,” oddly tired and flabby sounding, would still be vastly inferior to the basic-but-vital original; sometimes artists just aren’t the best judges of their own work. U2’s latest venture, essentially re-recording and reworking their greatest hits, has received mixed reviews; but though one has to accept in good faith that the band thinks it was a worthwhile exercise, it’s unlikely that they have enough confidence in the new versions to replace the originals on their actual Greatest Hits from here on in.

A similar, but backwards version of the above has taken place with JRR Tolkien. A whole industry has been generated from his decades-long struggle with The Lord of the Rings, but the difference here is that the earlier material was only posthumously published. Tolkien himself probably wouldn’t have been hugely enamoured with the idea of the public reading about the adventures of Bingo Bolger-Baggins, “Trotter” et al, but as a fan it’s fascinating seeing the slow evolution of not only the book and its characters, but Middle Earth itself, with its re-drawn maps and growing sense of newly-uncovered history. In this case though, Tolkien was the best judge of his work; The History of Middle Earth is vast, an even more, but very differently, epic journey than The Lord of the Rings, but the final draft has, unlike the 1928 Tarr, a sense of life and completeness missing from all of the previous drafts and half-drafts. Partly no doubt this was because – again unlike Tarr – The Lord of the Rings remained a work-in-progress and Tolkien’s main focus for many years – the characters and setting ‘grew in the telling’ (as Tolkien puts it) and reached a kind of three-dimensional quality that is missing from most epic fantasy novels, despite Tolkien’s reticence in so many areas, notably (but not only) sex.

Alongside the concern/faux concern of “wokifying” children’s books, there’s a similar list of complaints from the usual people about the “wokifying” of TV and film adaptations of classic literature (or just literature), but here I think they are only wrong with nothing to redeem their wrongness. Firstly, because adaptations are always collaborations – and in a movie adaptation of, say, Barnaby Rudge, the artist isn’t Dickens, whose work is already complete, but those making the film. Adaptations are just that, they adapt, they don’t and can’t precisely transcribe from one art form into another. Early-Primary-School-me thought that Gene Wilder was the wrong guy to play Willy Wonka – adult me can see that in the most important way, the spirit-of-the-text way, he’s completely right. He just doesn’t look like the illustrations I knew or sound the way I thought he should sound. I would say the same (in the capturing-the-spirit sense) about Dev Patel’s David in The Personal History of David Copperfield and Fiona Shaw’s Richard II or the fact that Tilda Swinton could give a note-perfect performance as all the incarnations of the title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando. Colour and/or gender-blind casting (and all the variations thereof) can give directors and performers ways of finding the real heart of a story – or just revitalising something that has grown stale through familiarity – that conventional casting might not – and unlike replacing the word ‘fat’ with ‘stout’ or ‘large’ in a kid’s book, it keeps the work alive for a new audience, or even an old one.

Secondly (I think I wrote ‘firstly’ way back there somewhere), time, scholarship and cultural evolution give us a greater understanding of the context of a novel or play. It’s now clear that Britain, through the 20^th century, back into Victorian and even medieval times and beyond, had a much broader ethnic and cultural mix than you might ever suspect from the country’s artistic record. And with that understanding, it becomes clear that characters that occasionally did appear in British fiction of the 19^th century and earlier, whether Jewish, Chinese, Black, gay, whatever; tend to be represented stereotypes to stress their otherness, but in those stories that otherness has grown rather than lessened over the years as the real-life otherness diminishes. In addition, through the passage of time, the gradations of apparently homogenous British characters, even in relatively recent fiction, tend to blend into each other. Nowadays, Dickens seems to many of us to be full of rich and poor characters, but for Dickens’s audience the social differences between the upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, working and under-classes would seem far more marked than they do today and therefore even a caricature like Fagin in Oliver Twist would be part of a far richer tapestry of caricatures than now, when he stands out in ever more stark relief. We can’t, hopefully don’t want to and shouldn’t change the novels themselves – indeed, the idea of a modern writer being tasked with toning down the character of Fagin or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice highlights how ridiculous the treatment of children’s books is, as well as the devalued position they have in the pantheon of literature. But in adapting the works for the screen, the truer a picture we can paint of the society of the time when the works were written or are set, the more accurately we can capture what contemporary audiences would have experienced and perhaps gain more of an insight into the author’s world-view too.

Thirdly, and on a more trivial level; why not make adaptations more free and imaginative, not only to give a more accurate and nuanced picture of the past, or to ‘breathe new life’ etc, but just for the joyous, creative sake of it? The source material is untouched after all. Fairly recently, a comedian/actor that I had hitherto respected, complained online about the inclusion of actors of colour in an episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor travels back in time to London in some past era, on the grounds that it was ‘unrealistic.’ Well, if you can readily accept the time-travelling, gender-swapping Timelord from Gallifrey and its logic-defying time/space machine, but only for as long as olden days London is populated entirely by white people – as it probably wasn’t, from at least the Roman period onwards – then I don’t know what to tell you.

So maybe the answer is yes, change the books if you must; remove the old words and references, make them into something new and palatably bland as fashion dictates – but just don’t destroy the old ones and please, acknowledge the edits. Let the children of the future wonder about that strange note that says the book they are reading isn’t the same book it used to be, and maybe they will search out the old editions and be educated, shocked or amused in time; it’s all good. But until it happens to obscure books too, let’s not pretend the motives for ‘fixing’ them are entirely humanitarian.

cycle; woods and fields and little rivers

With apologies to Paul Gorman, whose beautifully written accounts of bike rides partly influenced this article, although Paul actually knows about cycling and I don’t; this is essentially a surrogate fast walk.

I thought I’d take to the roads early (just before 7.30 am) because it was a beautiful morning that was forecast not to become a beautiful day, and because, even in 2021 there’s not much traffic on the road early on a Sunday morning. A recent bout of not atypical heavy rain and not unprecedented (one of the overused words of the last 18 months of so) but still definitely unusual-in-May extreme hailstorms left the roads shining in the morning sun and the fences strung with light-catching water droplets; it was very pretty.
Once out of the village, the landscape here is so flat as to look almost Dutch, aside from the Lomond Hills; still half buried in morning mist. In fact, despite living here most of my life, this was really the first time I had considered that this must be what is meant by the ‘Howe of Fife’ and indeed a quick googling confirmed it; “The term ‘howe’ is derived from an old Scots word meaning a hollow, valley or flat tract of land.” The Lomonds themselves, and Bishop Hill on the far end (not visible from my viewpoint) are really not particularly big, but almost give the impression of mountains from the vantage point of the plain below.

the Howe of Fife looking towards East Lomond

The nice thing about rural cycling is that, although much faster than walking, it doesn’t disturb anything much around you, and on a quiet morning (on my 8-10 mile cycle I was passed by one car, one proper cyclist and rode past one dog walker and a jogger) like this, nature seems not to pay much attention to you. It turns out that this area is infested (not the right connotations, but there were so many of them) with Yellowhammers, looking almost canary-like in the spring sunshine, plus innumerable sparrows, blackbirds and the odd village idiot-like pheasant shouting in the middle of a field.
The natural landscape is pretty enough on its own, but because, presumably, of the sort of person I am, I love the unexpected moments of geometry caused by human interference (ploughed furrows deep in shadow in one field, strips of plastic sheeting over rows of berries* in another) and of course the semi-wildlife, like a paddock with three huge, but mellow looking bulls that made me think of the work of Rosa Bonheur.

Although her work – and her life – is 19th century in almost every respect, Bonheur is a potent figure for the 21st century. Brought up in an egalitarian Christian-Socialist sect by Jewish parents, Bonheur was a troublesome child who developed a love for animals and for painting and as a young woman studied animal anatomy (in abattoirs) and dissected animals at a veterinary school as well as studying live animals. She was openly lesbian at a time when it was, if not illegal, certainly frowned upon by the French government; so much so that she had to request permission from the police to wear trousers, as cross-dressing for women was forbidden by law (until 2013!) Her official reason was that it was better clothing for attending sheep and cattle markets, where she made studies, but although that was certainly true, she was generally known among her friends for her masculine clothing and short hair; both very much against the conventions of the time. Nevertheless, she went on to become a mainstream success and in her own way an establishment figure, both in France and (especially) in the UK, where she met Queen Victoria and painted some anachronistic Highland scenes; she may have been revolutionary by nature and personality, but she seems to have been quite conservative by taste and inclination; never underestimate the complexity of people.

*I mean, maybe berries? Despite growing up in the countryside and actually on farms for a fair bit of childhood, I’m none the wiser about that

Rosa Bonheur – Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849)

Looking at the scenery, the wildlife, the roads, you have to wonder; why would anyone not care about this? I don’t mean the Howe of Fife, or Fife, or Scotland, or Britain, or Europe, or the world (although those too); just wherever you happen to be; place. Landscapes should and must change, as we change; not just the geometries and geographies we impose on them, like the furrows and plastic (though it would be nice to do away with the plastic itself), but everything. 500 years ago the Howe of Fife was covered in forest and the monarchs of Scotland hunted wild boar here. A thousand years ago, a Scotland that was different in shape, size and culture was being ruled by Alexander I, then near the end of his life, having recently lost his wife Sybilla of Normandy, the French child of Henry I of England; Alexander would be succeeded by his brother David, then Prince of the Cumbrians; by James’s time all of these details would seem strange. Two thousand years ago, the Howe of Fife was part of southern Caledonia, that is the land to the north of the river Forth; at least the Romans, still fifty years from their attempted conquest, called it Caledonia, whether the inhabitants of Caledonia had any name for the landmass in general, as opposed to their own local chiefdoms, isn’t recorded.

These back roads are quiet, but although nature is everywhere, it’s deceptive, hardly a natural landscape at all. It has been shaped by generations of human beings, by agriculture and the politics of land ownership, no less in King James’s day, when forests belonged to the King and had their own laws, than now. It reminds me both of my childhood love of Tolkien and of a line from The Fellowship of the Ring; where Bilbo says “I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains; but he [Frodo] is still in love with the Shire, with woods and fields and little rivers.” Tolkien loved both the wilderness and the smaller, more familiar (Oxfordshire-like) scenery of the Shire, but in his landscapes change is almost always bad; both on the larger scale of the desolation that evil brings to Mordor and the fiery chasms opened in the earth when the Dwarves delve ‘too deep’, and on the local level where the Shire is ruined by the arrival of industry. Michael Moorcock writes perceptively in his I think overly scathing (“The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle-class“ ‘Epic Pooh’, in Wizardry and Wild Romance, Gollancz, 1987, p.125), but often right and always funny essay about Tolkien, Epic Pooh (1987) about the essential conservatism of much of heroic fantasy fiction, and the points he makes are even more relevant today. The climate emergency will – regardless of the political will to do so – at some point need to be dealt with, as the pace of change outstrips the ways in which our society functions, and it’s important that the necessity to move forward doesn’t become an attempt to turn the clock back; always attractive in ever-nostalgic Britain. What Tolkien only reluctantly accepts – or accepts in a tragic way that fits with the more fatalistic (and Christian) aspects of his vision – is that change is inevitable. In Moorcock’s own heroic fantasy fiction, he not only takes change for granted, it becomes the backdrop against which his series of heroes who make up ‘the Eternal Champion’ fight their never-ending battle for equilibrium in a multiverse where change – in itself neutral – is the only constant:

“Then the earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years – The High History of the Runestaff”

(quoted from Count Brass, 1973, but appears lots of other places too)

the Lomond Hills after the mist burned off

The landscape of the Howe of Fife is not yet – the odd wind turbine aside – whimsical and strange, but there was a certain surreal quality in the way the beautiful spring morning (which felt more like early spring than early May) followed days of hailstorms and thunder. Surreal anyway to someone old enough to remember when seasons seemed to have a set pattern. In another twenty or thirty years will British Christmas cards still have snow scenes on them, even though most of the heavy snowfall seems to happen now in March or even April? Human culture is perhaps slow to catch up with the changes it creates; bearing in mind that the traffic on the roads today is light because even after decades of change there’s a convention that people don’t work on a Sunday, for the most archaic of reasons – but I’m still glad of it. These kinds of thoughts, and Rosa Bonheur too, were partly on my mind because this week there were elections which, although not regime-changing, were important. The results were locally, fairly positive, nationally (Scotland) pretty much as expected and extra-nationally (UK: not quite international, yet at least) a bit disappointing. The collapse of any real kind of left-wing movement has been happening over a long period of time and I suppose at this point all you can say is that people in general don’t want one; or not enough of them to make it happen. On the other hand a general liberalisation has taken place that possibly just makes it seem unnecessary to large numbers of people. And of course, the left eats itself, as always; yesterday I saw online a list of “people that socialism needs more of” (working class people essentially) and “people it needs less of” (non-working class people, basically), whereas surely the whole point is, it needs all people, if it’s going to work. But whatever.

A nice thing about cycling is that, aside from looking around, you can’t really do very much. It clears the mind in a way that car travel, with its technical aspects and its music or radio, doesn’t usually do. It would be possible to listen to the radio while cycling, but probably not very sensible; and in an election week the lack of human noise is very welcome. After watching/listening to/reading political propaganda and analysis before and after an election it becomes clear just how versatile “the media” seems to be. This week I’ve seen people criticise it essentially to suit their own viewpoint; it’s too right/left wing, too politically correct, too reactionary, too critical, not critical enough. Which makes it seem as though the UK media is pretty good at covering all bases. But TV, radio and the newspapers are a distorting mirror at best. Witness the way that the ‘working class’ – whether positively or negatively – is treated as a monolith. The viewpoint of the media (understandably, given most of its staff and ownership) is middle class; and therefore on TV, on the radio and in newspapers the middle class becomes the norm from which everything and everyone else (both working class and upper class) are observed and commented upon. “Reality TV” features the rich or the poor as something other, something to be looked at and entertained by. But it’s a norm that ignores the facts. The working class, insofar as there is still such a thing (I am of it and I’m not even really sure) is technically the norm, in the sense that it’s the majority, just as it always has been. The UK is (albeit in a less precise way than a century ago) a pyramidal structure, with monarchy and government at the top, the middle class – bigger and both richer and poorer than before, but still identifiable – in (yep) the middle, and the working class as the wide base, incorporating a layer of underclass which fluctuates depending on which government is at the top (it’s bigger now than it was a decade ago). How do you change that false picture the media presents? You don’t really; not without changing the society. Marx and Engels wanted the means of production to belong to the workers; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that stood for something real and meaningful, but while its egalitarian spirit is eternally relevant, in the 21st century the statement itself needs so many qualifications as to be almost meaningless. What are the means of production? Producing what? Who are the workers? The working class of Marx’s day would barely recognise the working class of today – and they might well look at our lifestyle and be encouraged that the struggle wasn’t in vain. And of course it wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the post-industrial 21st century is really much more fair than in the industrial age, certainly capitalism is even more rapacious and entrenched than ever before, and as callous too. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the tedious saying goes.

People of course do want change; the right kind of change anyway. And elections are one way of securing it. But this week people who were asked on TV for their reasons for voting gave ‘change’ as a reason for voting for parties who have been in power for 14 years (Scotland) and 9 years (UK) – which seems at best like wishful thinking or at least suggests a lack of exciting or convincing alternatives, to say the least. Arguably of course, a vote for the SNP in Scotland is a vote for a bigger change than just who currently sits in parliament, but familiarity breeds indifference and at this point it’s probably good for their cause that they are no longer the only party in favour of an independent Scotland. And in a depressing kind of way, circumstances have aided them too. In 2014 it was easy, personally speaking, to vote against independence on several grounds; a disliking of Nationalism as a principle, so closely related as it is to xenophobia and intolerance. As someone who was very happy to belong to the EU too, independence seemed (laughably in retrospect, though still not wrongly) to endanger Scotland’s membership, since the UK and not Scotland was the member. And there were niggles about the economy, not because Scotland couldn’t function outside of the UK – one of the most irritating arguments for the status quo; I think it’s pretty obvious that it could and can – but because the Salmond leadership seemed to be saying (ie he was saying) that he wanted nothing to change regarding the currency etc. Which would seem to put Scotland in the surreal position of being a supposedly independent nation which has its economy regulated by the Bank of England. Why the Bank of England would accept that, or anyone on either side of the border would want it is mysterious, to say the least. But anyway, here we are in 2021; nationalism and xenophobia look like being worse and more virulent in the UK than outside of it. We are already out of the EU and, while an independent Scotland being a member state is far from a foregone conclusion, the UK rejoining is definitely not about to happen anytime soon. And Covid-19 has given the economy a beating that will take a lot of recovering from, whatever we do. So why not independence? I would of course prefer to have a democratic socialist party in charge of it, but not having a rabidly inept right-wing one would be a step in the right direction.

Without wishing to get bogged down even more in the minutiae of British politics, the story of the Labour Party (it’s probably not quite dead yet; it always has a far more cyclical life than the Conservative Party) is an instructive one. There’s always been a tug of war between the left and centre elements of the party, but since the 90s there’s always been the dubious argument that veering to the right is the way to win votes and power. But although New Labour was definitely uncomfortably right-wing for a supposedly socialist party, that wasn’t what brought it success. It was the ‘new’ part; drawing a line under history and saying ‘the past ends here and this is what we stand for’ was a big, optimistic step at a time when British politics – as now- had become stagnant and unappealing. The Corbyn left managed something similar, with a younger demographic, but for all its radical ideas, it was immediately familiar to anyone over a certain age. Much as Blair and co’s propaganda looks vapid and empty in retrospect (because it essentially was), not invoking Marx or even socialism was a key to their success, not because of where they or their supporters sat on the political spectrum (I think it’s true that the majority of the British public probably don’t think of themselves being especially political), but simply because people will, every now and then, give new ideas a chance, if they look exciting enough and if they’re bored or disgusted enough with the status quo; It’s worth bearing in mind. None of which has nothing obvious to do with this road on this morning, with the patches of bluebells under the trees, which might be left over from the great forest of King James’s time; where wild boar hid, evading the men and the dogs, before they were hunted to extinction.

chosen ones and dark lords and everything in between

To start with, this was mostly about books, and I think it will end that way too. But it begins with a not terribly controversial statement; hero worship is not good. And the greatest figures in the fight for human rights or human progress of one kind or another – Martin Luther King, Jr, Emmeline Pankhurst, Gandhi – without wishing to in any way diminish their achievements – would not have achieved them alone. Rosa Parks is a genuine heroine, but if she had been the only person who believed it was wrong for African-American people to be forced to give up seats for white people, the practice would still be happening. These individuals are crucial because they are catalysts for and agents of change – but the change itself happens because people – movements of people – demand it.

a bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes

This is obviously very elementary and news to nobody, but it’s still worth remembering in times like these, when people seem to be drawn to somewhat messianic figures (or to elevate people who have no such pretensions themselves to quasi-messianic status). One of the problems with messiahs is that when they don’t fulfil the hopes of their followers, their various failures or defeats (of whatever kind) take on a cataclysmic significance beyond the usual, human kind of setback and re-evaluation. It’s only natural to feel discouraged if your political or spiritual dreams and hopes are shattered, but it’s also important to remember that the views and opinions that you were drawn to and which you agree with are yours too. They are likely to be shared by millions of people and the fact that they are also apparently not shared by a greater number in no way invalidates them or renders them pointless.

The history of human progress is, mostly, the history of people fighting against entrenched conservative views in order to improve the lives of all people, including, incidentally, the lives of those people they are fighting against. This obviously isn’t the case in ultimately ideological revolutions like those in France or Russia, which quickly abandoned their theoretically egalitarian positions in order to remove undesirable elements altogether, or the Nazi revolution in Germany, which never pretended to be inclusive in the first place. Hopelessness, whether cynical or Kierkegaard-ishly defiant, is a natural response, but the biggest successes of human rights movements – from the abolition of slavery to the enfranchisement of women to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the legalisation of abortion or gay marriage – have often taken place during eras which retrospectively do not seem especially enlightened; if you believe in something, there is hope.

Rome is a place, but this is mostly about people

But when change is largely driven by mass opinion or pressure – and when we know that it is – why is it the individual; Rameses II, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Lenin, Hitler, the Dalai Lama, Queens, Kings, political leaders – that looms so large in the way we see events historically? Anywhere from three to six million people died in the “Napoleonic Wars” – Napoleon wasn’t one of them, his armies didn’t even win them; but they are, to posterity, his wars. The short answer is I think because as individuals, it is individuals we identify with. We have a sense of other peoples’ lives, we live among other people (sounds a bit Invasion of the Bodysnatchers), but we only know our own life, and we only see the world through the window of our own perceptions.

The artist Sara Shamma – who, significantly has undertaken many humanitarian art projects, but has also done much of her most profound work in self-portraiture – said “I think understanding a human being is like understanding the whole of humanity, and the whole universe” and the more I’ve thought about that statement the more true it seems. If we truly understand any human being, it is first, foremost and perhaps only, ourselves. And, unless you are a psychopath, in which case you have my condolences, you will recognise the traits you have – perhaps every trait you have – in other people, people who may seem otherwise almost entirely different from you. When you look at the classifications humankind has made for itself – good/bad, deadly sins, cardinal virtues – these are things we know to exist because, in varying degrees, we feel them in ourselves, and therefore recognise them in others. Even that most valued human tool, objectivity, is a human tool, just as logic, which certainly seems to explain to our understanding the way the world works, is a human idea and also an ideal. Interestingly but perhaps significantly, unlike nature, mathematics or gravity, human behaviour itself routinely defies logic. When we say – to whatever extent – we understand the universe, what I think we mean is that we understand our own conception of it. It’s easy to talk about the universe being boundless, but not limitless, or limitless, or connected to other universes as part of a multiverse (though not easy to talk about intelligently, for me), but regardless of what is ‘out there’, what we are actually talking about is all ‘in here’, in our own brain; the universe that you talk about and think about is whatever you think it is, however you perceive it. If what you believe dictates the way you live your life it may as well be, to all intents and purposes ‘the truth’. For Stephen Hawking there were black holes in space/time, and whether or not there actually are, for a creationist there probably aren’t.

This is not to say that there are no actual solid facts about (for example) the nature of the universe; but nonetheless to even prove – to us personally while alive – that anything at all continues to exist after our own death is impossible. We can of course see that it goes on after other people’s deaths, but then I can say with what I believe to be complete conviction that there is no God and that human beings are just (well I wouldn’t say “just”) a kind of sentient hourglass with the added fun that you never know how much sand it holds to start with – but that doesn’t change the fact that a whole range of Gods have made and continue to make a decisive difference to the lives of other people and therefore to the world.

But whereas that might sound like the background for some kind of Ayn Rand-ish radical individualism, I think the opposite is true; because if any of what I have written is correct, the key part is that it applies equally to everyone. The phrase ‘we’re all in the same boat’ is being bandied about a lot lately for pandemic-related reasons, and it’s only vaguely true as regards that particular situation. We aren’t in the same boat, or even necessarily in the same kind of body exactly, but what we do all share – if broadly – is the same kind of brain. We are all individuals, and If we are conscious, we are probably self conscious. And given that we live our – as far as we can safely tell – single earthly life as an individual human being, the idea that any of us is powerless during that lifetime is nonsense. When asked to name someone who has made a difference to the world, the first person you think of should be yourself. There would be no world as you know it without you in it, and that is not a small thing; by existing, you are changing the world. Whether for better or worse, only you can say.

Having faith in other people (or even just getting along with them) makes both your and their lives better, but the belief that one particular individual outside of yourself may be the solution to the world’s (or the country’s, etc) ills is worse than feeling powerless yourself; not only because it can reinforce that sense of powerlessness, but because it’s blatantly untrue and (I hate to use this completely devalued word, but never mind) elitist. And it reduces every issue, however complex, to a finite, succeed-or-fail one, which is rarely how the world works. The idea of the hero as saviour probably has about as much validity as the idea of the lone villain as the cause of whatever ills need to be cured. Hero-worship is both logical (because we see the world from the viewpoint of “I”) and also an oddly counter-intuitive ideal to have created, since in reality as we know it, the lone individual may be us, but is largely not how we live or how things work. We have structured our societies, whether on the smaller level of family or tribe, or the larger ones like political parties or nations, in terms of groups of people. But I suppose it is the same humanity that makes us aware of and empathetic to the feelings of others that makes us want to reduce ideas to their black and white, bad vs good essentials and then dress those ideas up in human clothes.

And so, to books! Reading fiction and watching films and TV, it’s amazing how the larger-than-life (but also simpler and therefore ironically smaller-than-life) hero/ine vs villain, protagonist vs antagonist and – most hackneyed of all (a speciality of genre fiction since such a thing existed, and the preserve or religion and mythology before that) – the ‘chosen one’ vs ‘dark lord’ narrative continues to be employed by writers and enjoyed by generations of people (myself included*), long past the age that one becomes aware of the formulaic simplification of it.

*for people of my generation, the mention of a ‘dark lord’ immediately conjures up Star Wars and Darth Vader/The Emperor, though the ‘chosen one’ theme is thankfully underplayed in the original trilogy. George Lucas doesn’t get much credit for the prequels, but making the chosen one become the dark lord is an interesting twist, even if Lucifer got there first.

Whatever its origins, it seems that people do want these kinds of figures in their lives and will settle for celebrities, athletes, even politicians in lieu of the real thing. Hitler was aware of it and cast himself in the lead heroic role, ironically becoming, to posterity, the antithesis of the character he adopted; Lenin, who by any logical reading of The Communist Manifesto should have been immune to the lure of hero worship, also cast himself in the lead role, as did most of his successors to the present day (and really; to enthusiastically read Marx and then approve a monumental statue of oneself displays, at best, a lack of self-awareness). The Judeo-Christian god with his demand, not only to be acknowledged as the creator of everything, but also to be actually worshipped by his creations, even in his Christian, fallible, just-like-us human form, is something of a special case, but clearly these are primordial waters to be paddling in.

Still, entertainment-wise, it took a kind of humbling to get even to the stage we’re at. Heroes were once demi-gods; Gilgamesh had many adventures, overcame many enemies, but when trying to conquer death found that he could not even conquer sleep. Fallible yes, but hardly someone to identify with. And Cain killed Abel, David killed Goliath, Hercules succeeded in his twelve tasks but was eventually poisoned by the blood of a hydra, Sun Wukong the Monkey King attained immortality by mistake while drunk, Beowulf was mortally wounded in his last battle against a dragon. Cúchulainn transformed into a monstrous creature and single-handedly defeated the armies of Queen Medb. King Arthur and/or the Fisher King sleep still, to be awoken when the need for them is finally great enough. These are heroes we still recognise today and would accept in the context of a blockbuster movie or doorstop-like fantasy novel, but less so in say, a soap opera or (hopefully) on Question Time. I knew some (but not all) of these stories when I was a child, but all of them would have made sense to me because, despite the differences between the settings and the societies that produced them and that which produced me, they are not really so vastly different from most of my favourite childhood stories.

Partly that’s because some of those were those ancient stories. But even when not reading infantilised versions of the Greek myths (I loved the Ladybird book Famous Legends Vol. 1 with its versions of Theseus and the Minotaur and Perseus and Andromeda*) it was noticeable that, although there still were heroes of the unambiguous superhuman type (in comics most obviously; like um, Superman), in most of the books I read, the hero who conquers all through his or her (usually his) all-round superiority was rarely the lone, or even the main protagonist. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of Christianity (or just of literacy?) but presumably at some point people decided they preferred to identify with a hero rather than to venerate them. Perhaps stories became private rather than public when people began to read for themselves, rather than listening to stories as passed down by bards or whatever? Someone will know.

.*I remember being disappointed by the Clash of the Titans film version of Medusa, too monstrous, less human, somehow undermining the horror

not the original set of Narnia books I had; never quite as good without Pauline Baynes’s cover art

The first real stories that I remember (this would initially be hearing rather than reading) are probably The Hobbit, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – all of which have children or quasi-children as the main characters. Narnia is a special case in that there is a ‘chosen one’ – Aslan the lion – but mostly he isn’t the main focus of the narrative, Far more shadowy, there are books that I never went back to and read by myself, like Pippi Longstocking and my memory of those tends to be a few images rather than an actual story. As a very little kid I know I liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its ilk (also, vastly less well known, The Hungry Thing by Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler in which, as I recall, some rice would be nice said a baby sucking ice). Later, I loved Tintin and Asterix and Peanuts and Garfield as well as the usual UK comics; Beano, Dandy, Oor Wullie, The Broons, Victor and Warlord etc. The first fiction not reliant on pictures that I remember reading for myself (probably around the Beano era) would be the Narnia series (which I already knew), Richmal Crompton’s William books and, then Biggles (already by then an antique of a very different era), some Enid Blyton (I liked the less-famous Five Find-Outers best), Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and Willard Price’s Adventure series. Mostly these were all a bit old fashioned for the 80s now that I look at them, but I tended then as now to accumulate second hand books.

Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain; perfect marriage of author and cover art (Brian Fround and Ken Thompson)

Biggles Flies Undone! Very old even when I was young, I bought this book from a jumble sale when I was 8 or 9

There was also a small group of classics that I had that must have been condensed and re-written for kids – a little brick-like paperback of Moby-Dick (Christmas present) and old hardbacks of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Kidnapped with illustrations by Broons/Oor Wullie genius Dudley D. Watkins (bought at ‘bring and buy’ sales at Primary School). Watkins’s versions of Crusoe, Long John Silver etc are still the ones I see in my head. More up to date, I also had a particular fondness for Robert Westall (The Machine Gunners, The Scarecrows, The Watch House etc) and the somewhat trashy Race Against Time adventure series by JJ Fortune; a very 80s concoction in which a young boy from New York called Stephen, is picked up by his (this was the initial appeal) Indiana Jones-like Uncle Richard and, unbeknownst to his parents, hauled off around the world for various implausible adventures. I liked these books so much (especially the first two that I read, The Search for Mad Jack’s Crown – bought via the Chip Book Club which our school took part in, and Duel For The Samurai Sword) that I actually, for the first and last time in my life, joined a fan club. I still have the letter somewhere, warning me as a “RAT adventurer” to be prepared to be whisked away myself. Didn’t happen yet though. And then there were gamebooks (a LOT of them), which have a special place here because they fundamentally shift the focus of the narrative back to the direct hero-conquers-all themes of ancient mythology, while also recasting the reader themselves as that hero.

80s Hollywood blockbuster design comes to childrens’ fiction

There were also books I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen but was given at Christmas etc, books by people like Leon Garfield (adventures set in a vividly grotty evocation of 18^th and early 19^th century London), the aforementioned Moby-Dick, a comic strip version of The Mutiny on the Bounty, a Dracula annual. Also authors who I read and loved one book by, but never got around to reading more of; Anne Pilling’s Henry’s Leg, Jan Mark (Thunder and Lightnings; there’s a moving article about this beautifully subtle book here), Robert Leeson (The Third Class Genie). And there were also things we had to read at school, which mostly didn’t make a huge impression and are just evocative titles to me now – The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler and The Kelpie’s Pearls by Molly Hunter, Ian Serralliers’s The Silver Sword, Children on the Oregon Trail by Anna Rutgers van der Loeff and The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden. What did I do as a kid apart from reading?

Anyway; that’s a lot of books. And in the vast majority of them, the conclusion of the plot relies on the main character, or main character and sidekick or team to take some kind of decisive action to solve whatever problem they have. Heroism as the ancient Greeks would have understood it may largely have vanished, but even without superhuman strength or vastly superior cunning (even the fantasy novels mentioned like Lloyd Alexander’s which do still have the chosen one/dark lord idea at their heart, tend to have a fallible, doubt-filled human type of hero rather than a demigod) there is still the idea that individual character is what matters.

it’s hard to remember a time I didn’t know these stories

And this makes sense – something like the ‘battle of five armies’ towards the end of The Hobbit is dull enough with the inclusion of characters that the reader has come to care about. A battle between armies of nameless ciphers (think the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ sans Napoleon) would be hard to get too involved in (cue image of generals with their model battlefields moving blocks of troops about, with little or no danger to themselves). Which is fair enough; after all, being in a battle may feel impersonal, but reading about one can’t be, if the reader is to feel any kind of drama. And maybe this is the key point – reading is – albeit at one remove – a one-on-one activity. Stephen King likens it to telepathy between the writer and reader and that is the case – they think it, we read it and it transfers from their minds to ours. And since reading is something that people seem to think children have to be made to do, often against their will, children’s authors in particular are understandably keen to engage the reader by making them identify with one character or another. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful writers for children from CS Lewis to Enid Blyton to JK Rowling (to name just notable British ones) have tended to make children the protagonists of their books and surround their main characters with a variety of girls and boys of varying personality types. And children’s books about children are (I find) far easier to re-read as an adult than children’s books about adults are. As an adult, even JJ Fortune’s “Stephen” rings more or less true as a mostly bored tweenager of the 80s, while his Uncle Richard seems both ridiculous and vaguely creepy. “Grown up” heroes like Biggles, very vivid when encountered as a child, seem hopelessly two-dimensional as an adult; what do they DO all day, when not flying planes and shooting at the enemy?

the unasked-for Christmas present that began a few years of obsessive game-playing

I mentioned gamebooks above and they – essentially single-player role playing games, often inspired by Dungeons and Dragons – deserve special mention, partly just because in the 80s, there were so many of them. There were series’ I followed and was a completist about (up to a point) – first and best being Puffin’s Fighting Fantasy (which, when I finally lost interest consisted of around 30 books), there was its spin-off Steve Jackson’s Sorcery (four books), Joe Dever and Gary Chalk’s Lone Wolf (seven or eight books), Grey Star (four books), Grailquest (I think I lost interest around vol 5 or 6), then series’ I quite liked but didn’t follow religiously – Way of the Tiger (six books), Golden Dragon (six books), Cretan Chronicles (three books) and series’ I dipped into if I came across them: Choose Your Own Adventure (essentially the first gamebook series, but they mostly weren’t in the swords & sorcery genre and felt like they were aimed at a younger readership), Demonspawn (by JH Brennan, the author of Grailquest, but much, much more difficult), Falcon (time travel) and Sagard the Barbarian (four books; the selling point being that they were by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. They were a bit clunky compared to the UK books). Sudden memory; even before encountering my first Fighting Fantasy book, which was Steve Jackson’s Citadel of Chaos, actually the second in the series, I had bought (the Chip club again), Edward Packard’s Exploration Infinity, which was one of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, repackaged for the UK I guess, or maybe a separate book that was later absorbed into the CYOA series? Either way, there’s a particular dreamlike atmosphere that gives me a pang of complicated melancholy nostalgia when I think of the book now.

Putting a real person – the reader – at the centre of the action ironically dispenses with the need for “character” at all, and even in books like the Lone Wolf and, Grailquest series where YOU are a specific person (Lone Wolf in the former, Pip in the latter), there is very little sense of (or point in) character building. You are the hero, this is what you need to do, and that’s all you need to know. In many cases, the protagonists of the heroic fantasy novels I devoured in my early teens – when I was drawn to any fat book with foil lettering and a landscape on the cover (the standard fantasy novel look in the 80s) – were not much more rounded than their lightly sketched gamebook counterparts. These books often achieved their epic length through plot only; the truly complex epic fantasy novel is a rare thing.

Thanks, presumably, to Tolkien, these plots generally revolved around main characters who were rarely heroes in the ancient mould (though Conan and his imitators were), but were mainly inexperienced, rural quasi-children, thrust into adventures they initially had no knowledge of (Terry Brooks’s Shannara series being the classic Tolkien-lite example). But even when, as in Stephen Donaldson’s also very Tolkien-influenced Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the hero was a cynical, modern human being, or in Michael Moorcock’s deliberately anti-Tolkienesque Eternal Champion series, where s/he was a series of interlinked beings inhabiting the same role within different dimensions of the multiverse, the ‘chosen one’ vs some kind of implacable ‘dark lord’-ish enemy theme remained pretty constant. But this underlying core or skeleton is only most explicit in self consciously fantastical fiction; whether or not there’s an actual dark lord or a quest, in most fiction of any kind there’s a ‘chosen one’, even if they have only been chosen by the author as the focus of the story she or he wants to tell. Holden Caulfield and Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood have this in common with Bilbo Baggins, Conan the Barbarian and William Brown. But really, what’s the alternative to books about people anyway? Even novels in which people (or surrogate people like Richard Adams’s rabbits or William Horwood’s moles) are not the main focus (or are half of the focus, like Alan Moore’s peculiar Voice of the Fire, where Northampton is essentially the ‘hero’) rely on us engaging with the writer as a writer, a human voice that becomes a kind of stand-in for a character.

But books are not life; one of the things that unites the most undemanding pulp novelette and the greatest works of literature is that they are to some extent – like human beings – discrete, enclosed worlds; they have their beginning, middle and end. And yet, however much all of our experience relies on our perception of these key moments, that’s not necessarily how the world feels. Even complicated books are simple in that they reveal – just by seeing their length before we read them – the sense of design that is hidden from us or absent in our own lives. Even something seemingly random or illogical (the giant helmet that falls from nowhere, crushing Conrad to death in Horace Walpole’s proto-gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) for example) is deliberate; recognisably something dreamlike, from the human imagination, rather than truly random as the world can be.

What we call history (“things that have happened”) usually can’t quite manage the neatness of even the most bizarre or surreal fiction. There have been genuine, almost superhuman hero/antihero/demigod figures, but how often – even when we can see their entirety – do their lives have the satisfying shape of a story? Granted, Caesar, stabbed twenty three times by his peers in the Senate chamber, has the cause-and-effect narrative of myth; but it’s an ambiguous story where the hero is the villain, depending on your point of view. Whatever one’s point of view in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, to have sympathy with someone referred to (or calling themselves) a ‘dark lord’ is to consciously choose to be on the side of ‘bad’, in a way that defending a republic as a republic, or an empire as an empire isn’t.

Or take Genghis Khan – ‘he’ conquered (the temptation is to also write ‘conquered’, but where do you stop with that?) – obviously not alone, but as sole leader – as much of the world as anyone has. And then, he remained successful, had issues with his succession and died in his mid 60s, in uncertain, rather than dramatic or tragic circumstances. The heroes of the Greek myths often have surprisingly downbeat endings (which I didn’t know about from the children’s versions I read) but they are usually significant in some way, and stem from the behaviour of the hero himself. Napoleon, old at 51, dying of stomach cancer or poisoning, a broken man, is not exactly a classic punishment from the Gods for hubris, or an end that anyone would have seen coming, let alone would have written for him. As ‘chosen ones’ go, Jesus is a pretty definitive example, and whether accepted as history or as fiction, he has an ending which, appropriately for god-made-man, manages to fit with both the stuff of myth (rises from the dead and ascends to heaven) but is also mundane in a way we can easily recognise; he isn’t defeated by the Antichrist or by some supreme force of supernatural evil, but essentially killed by a committee, on the orders of someone acting against their own better judgement. More than anything else in the New Testament, that has the ring of truth to it. A significant detail too for those who want to stress the factual basis of the gospels is that the name of the murderer himself* unlike the nemeses of the ancient heroes, wasn’t even recorded.

* I guess either the guy nailing him to the cross, or the soldier spearing him in the side (much later named as Longinus, presumably for narrative purposes)

And if Jesus’s nemesis was disappointingly mundane, when on occasion, the universe does throw up something approximating a “dark lord” it doesn’t counter them with ‘chosen ones’ to defeat them either, as one might hope or expect. Living still in the shadow of WW2, Hitler’s messy and furtive end, beleaguered and already beaten, in suicide, somehow isn’t good enough and there are a variety of rival theories about what ‘really’ happened, all of which more pleasingly fit with the kind of fiction we all grow up with. Mussolini was strung up by an angry faceless mob and his corpse was defiled. Hirohito, meanwhile, survived defeat as his troops were not supposed to do, and presided over Japan’s post-war boom to become one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs. The moral of the story is there is rarely a moral to the story. For proof of that, did the ‘heroes’ fare much better? The victors of Yalta lived on to die of a haemorrhage just months later on the eve of the unveiling of the UN (FDR), to be voted out of office, dying twenty years later a divisive figure with an ambiguous legacy (Churchill) and to become himself one of the great villains of the century with a reputation rivalling Hitler’s (Stalin).

Entertainment programs us to view history as the adventures of a series of important ‘main characters’ and how they shaped the world. It’s perhaps as good a ‘way in’ as any – like Frodo taking the ring to Mordor when no human can, or Biggles (almost) single-handedly defeating the Luftwaffe, it makes a kind of sense to us. But the distorted version of history it gives us is something to consider; think of your life and that of (name any current world leader or influential figure; apologies if you are one). If the people of the future are reading about that person, what will that tell them about your life? And what is ‘history’ telling you about really? Things that happened, yes, but prioritised by who, and for what purpose? This is an argument for reading more history, and not less I think. Other people may be the protagonists in books, but in our own history we have to take that role.

Artists (and historians too, in a different way) share their humanity with us, and there are great artists – you’ll have your own ideas, but William Shakespeare, Sue Townsend, Albrecht Dürer, Mickalene Thomas, Steven Spielberg and James Baldwin seems like a random but fair enough selection – who somehow have the capacity or empathy to give us insights into human being other than (and very different from) themselves, but somehow created entirely from their own minds and their own perceptions of the world. But just like them, however aware we are of everyone else and of existence in all its variety, we can only be ourselves, and, however many boxes we seem to fit into, we can only experience the world through our own single consciousness. If there’s a chosen one, it’s you. If there’s a dark lady or a dark lord, it’s also you.

Play For Today – Current Playlist 25th November 2016

After many delays, another week, another playlist…

1. Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books, 2016) Review here!

2. Stench Price – Stench Price EP (Transcending Obscurity Records, 2016)

3. Baby Tears – Succubus Slides (Choice Records, 2016)

4. Bethlehem – Bethlehem (Prophecy Productions, 2016)

5. The History of Colour TV – Wreck (Cranes Records / Weird Books, 2016)

6. Lush – Gala (4AD, 1990)

7. A Tree Grows – Wau Wau Water (Rufftone Records, 2016)

8. Kristin Hersh – Sunny Border Blue (4AD, 2001)

9. LL CoolJ – Radio (Def Jam, 1985)

10. Rachel Mason – Das Ram (Cleopatra Records/Practical Records, 2016) Review here!

11. Ela Orleans – Circles of Upper and Lower Hell (Night School Records, 2016)

12. Eric Dolphy – Out To Lunch! (Blue Note, 1964)

13. Wu-Tang Clan – Wu-Tang Forever (BMG, 1997)

14. Paul K – Omertà (2016)

15. Christine Ott, Tabu (Gizeh Records, 2016)

16. The Raspberries – The Raspberries (Capitol Records, 1972)

17. Isasa – Los Días (La Castanya, 2016)

18. Daniel Land – In Love With A Ghost (2016)

19. Miles Davis – Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971)

20. Matriarch – Revered Unto The Ages (self-release, 2007)

Ride On A Golden Wave: Uriah Heep’s …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble

Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble (Vertigo/Mercury, 1970; Bronze shortly thereafter)

This year (2016), BMG begins an extensive reissue campaign of releases by one of the original Spinal Tap-influencing ‘rock dinosaur’ bands, the mighty Uriah Heep. Along with an anthology, the first of these releases is, logically enough, the band’s 1970 debut – one of my favourite albums of all time – …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble. This album is probably not cool. Judging by the mostly negative reviews it got in 1970 (‘If this group makes it I’ll commit suicide’ and ‘it’s too loud, too repetitive, too predictable’ are representative quotes) it never was cool, but 46 years later it can stand proudly alongside any of the hard rock, blues rock, progressive rock or rock-rock albums of its era.

And it was an era of rock; bear in mind that that particular year also spawned Deep Purple In Rock, Black Sabbath AND Paranoid, Led Zeppelin III and many more and, while the mighty Heep are perceived to be a relatively underground cousin of Deep Purple & co, they too ponced around the US in Lear jets and limos in a way that few new rock bands do nowadays. Judged on those 1970 albums alone, the band were clearly up there with the best. Slightly less heavy (but who wasn’t?) than Black Sabbath, more jazzy and poetic than Deep Purple, more riff-centric and bluesy than (1970-era) Led Zeppelin, …Very ‘Eavy… is monolithic but nimble, straightforward but, except in its most bludgeoning moments, not at all simplistic.

Unlike most decades, the 60s is often felt, culturally, to have a clear and decisive ending; from the perspective of nowadays, the Stones at Altamont and the Manson Family in Death Valley ended the peace & love/flower power era that was already shaken by the revolutionary events and protests of 1968. But the pre-Uriah Heep story, that of a band called Spice, (essentially Heep sans organist Ken Hensley), talent-spotted while playing in ‘The Blues Loft’ in High Wycombe, could not be more redolent of the hippy era. To me, the best work of Uriah Heep always has a hazy aroma late 60s underground optimism and …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is a kind of time capsule of a world almost as distant and quaint now as the Victorian Age. This was a time when – as the great Charles Shaar Murray wrote (in a Cream magazine T-Rex article in 1972, just as the world moved into another cultural phase) – “Any gentle freak who believed that Nostradamus and King Arthur were alive and well in a UFO hovering somewhere over Glastonbury Tor, or who read Tolkien and Moorcock over his brown rice and apple juice, just had to own the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums...” It was these kind of freaks, one assumes, who in their less gentle moments, wanted to rock out to Spice. In High Wycombe. Incidentally, it may be this very hippy-hangover aura that prevented Uriah Heep from being as influential on the metal scene as their contemporaries, Black Sabbath (whose musical background in blues rock was very similar). Indeed, I can personally testify that the whole flared-trousers-and-moustaches vibe of the Heep (as well as the slightly bland rock they were putting out at the time) was enough to prevent some 80s metal kids from checking out their older work.

Anyway; Spice became a pretty well known band on the progressive rock circuit in the dying years of the 60s. In fact, their music as preserved on the first few LPs is very much ‘progressive’ in the late 60s blues rock sense (in which sense Led Zeppelin were also progressive), but not in the sense that ‘prog’ came to mean as the 70s wore on. Mick Box, founder, guitarist and, to this day the real heart of Uriah Heep, began as a jazz player and it was perhaps this more than anything, that coloured the heavy blues rock that Spice played; parallel to the British Blues boom but not really part of it, the band used elements of the blues, but they were never constrained by its structures.

The Band

Mick Box: guitar

(highly underrated as player, composer & all-round riffmeister)

David Byron: vocals

(a versatile, very English-sounding rock voice, equally at home with swaggering, earthy blues-rock vocalising and delicate fantasy

Ken Hensley: organ, guitar, vocals etc.

(Without Hensley Uriah Heep would have been far more like a standard late 60s blues-rock band)

Paul Newton: bass, vocals

(in the classic 70s tradition the bass is loud, clear & occasionally funky on this album; co-wrote lots of the songs.)

Alex Napier – drums (on half of the album)

(great, agile and subtle drummer, not as thunderous as some contemporaries, but for my money up there with the best; retired after leaving the band I believe)

Nigel “Ollie” Olsson: also drums, plays on a few songs

(another great drummer; went on to play with Elton John after his stint in the Heep)

THE ALBUM

1. Gypsy (Mick Box/David Byron)
The perfect opening track; after the busy little intro the simple, bludgeoning guitar/organ riff provides an excellent backing for David Byron’s authoritative vocal, establishing the Heep as a band of (for the time extremely) heavy sound and somewhat whimsical, romantic preoccupations; hippies in fact. Excellent organ and guitar soloing and harmony backing vocals by pretty much everyone make this a superb manifesto for the band’s approach. 70s heavy rock par excellence

2. Walking In Your Shadow (Paul Newton/David Byron)

An excellent funky drum intro which should be (has been?) sampled leads into a dynamic blues-rock song with another perfect vocal by David Byron. The song is a relatively understated version of the kind of pleased-with-itself blues rock swagger that Whitesnake were to excel in later in the decade, and it has an excellent Mick Box solo too.

3. Come Away Melinda (Hellerman/Minkoff)

A delicate and drama-filled version of the much-covered melancholy anti-war folk/protest song. Byron’s clear enunciation and expressive voice make the most of the (possibly slightly twee and pretentious) post-apocalyptic lyrics. Lovely mellotron-flute intro and lovely acoustic guitar; the key word is ‘lovely’. The great vocal is made even better by imaginative use of stereo.

4. Lucy Blues (Mick Box/David Byron)

A somewhat quizzical and sad blues-rock song, Lucy Blues is, despite occasional claims at the time that they were Led Zep clones, the closest Uriah Heep comes to Led Zeppelin on this album; not all that close. And with all respect to the iconic Robert Plant, David Byron managed the same kind of expressiveness without the melodramatic whimpering and screaming. As the original sleevenote remarks; ‘hardly unpredictable but rather pleasant’. Nice piano work adds to the barroom blues feel, far less epic than the usual Heep sound. Byron’s English accent gives the song a strange and unique flavour, as it tends to do on all of the more blues-based material – one of the features that makes early Uriah Heep so distinctive. Meanwhile, Ken Hensley proves himself master of the classic blues Hammond organ solo too.

5. Dreammare (Paul Newton)

Side two commences with one of the heavier songs on the album. Dreammare has an ominous organ intro, a strangely funky, reverby riff and a suitably feverish quality, enhanced by the speaker-to-speaker shimmer on the vocals. A nicely bad-tempered, squalling guitar solo too. This is perhaps the only song where the claims of sheer noisy unpleasantness could be deemed fair enough; for non-rock fans anyway.

6. Real Turned On (Mick Box/David Byron/Paul Newton)

Proto-Whitesnake swagger again (but even more so), Real Turned On is a cocky mid-tempo blues-rock tune with an angular riff, several good solos, tons of slide guitar by Ken Hensley and a good naturedly sleazy David Byron trying to lure a young woman with wine and so forth. Unreconstructed 60s freewheeling sexual (and arguably, but arguably not, sexist) revolution rock, it ends, oddly, with screeds of apocalyptic feedback.

7. I’ll Keep On Trying (Mick Box/David Byron)

Archetypically 70s flared-jeans hard rock, with organs, screaming guitar and an impassioned David Byron vocal. The tune skips between sinister-toned, portentious organ and wailing vocals and nimble-fingered fiddlyness during which every band member gets to show off, before settling into a heavy blues riff. There are tranquil interludes and dramatic, siren-like guitar and even a Zappa-esque wah-wah solo. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like Uriah Heep; fair enough.

8. Wake Up (Set Your Sights) (Mick Box/David Byron)

The final track on the album is also the most ‘progressive’, jazzy one, which manages to encapsulate all of the facets of early Heepdom in six minutes. The intro has David Byron intoning ‘aaahhh’s over a bass and organ scales before a dramatic, grandiose verse about justice prevailing, before the music becomes a kind of hoppity, percussive jazz with some excellent bass playing and very understated guitars. As the song builds (with some enjoyably silly vocalising; ‘justice, justice, just-iiiice‘ etc) it breaks not into rock but another jazzy verse/chorus and then a lovely soft pastoral interlude before fading out. Byron’s vocal is highly theatrical and generally one of the best he ever recorded and it’s just an excellent, dynamic end to a superb album that people don’t like as much as I do; their loss.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the album is housed in one of the great rock sleeves of the era: a fallen warrior (David Byron in fact) covered in cobwebs, the darkness surrounding him only broken by the (superbly-fonted) logo and title. The gatefold features a photo of the band onstage.

The album was released in the US in a different and slightly inferior form (missing Lucy Blues, and featuring instead the great Bird of Prey from the band’s second album, Salisbury). The US album is simply called Uriah Heep and its cover – a kind of dragon/wyrm thing – is not one of the great rock sleeves of the era.

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Although …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is one of those rare perfectly formed albums that can only be marred by adding bonus tracks to, it is also one of those albums I have to own on multiple formats, and the 1996 CD release adds bonus tracks, thus:

Gypsy (single edit)
What is says; a shorter version, omitting the organ intro & so forth. Pretty great, though unnecessary

Come Away Melinda
An early version recorded by Spice before they changed their name to Uriah Heep. Interesting, not hugely different from the album version really, but Byron’s vocal has less feeling and it’s generally not quite as good.

Born in a Trunk
A rocking Spice tune, this features the kind of dynamics that early Heep excelled in, plus another strangely English David Byron vocal and some great funky drum breaks.

BMG’s latest version is in all regards superior to the 1996 version: wisely retaining the whole of the original album (but with beautifully remastered sound) as disc one of two, it adds an entire (and to be fair, slightly inferior) version of the album on disc two. These are unreleased (earlier or alternate takes) of most of the songs, plus the US mix of Bird of Prey and a nice Spice track called Magic Lantern.

Although the earlier versions are, naturally, mostly not quite as good as the finished ones, they are nearly there and, while Spice without Hensley can never equal Uriah Heep, that late 60s atmosphere, an indefinable (and you would think incompatible) mixture of unpretentious ‘let’s just get up and play’ attitude and love of airy, fantastical romance is present in its most concentrated form.