Dickens, Charles (1841) Barnaby Rudge or A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty

Barnaby Rudge or A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty (1841)
Charles Dickens
Oxford University Press, 634pp

Barnaby Rudge, the second serial from Master Humphrey’s Clock (the first being The Old Curiosity Shop), was Dickens’s first idea for a novel, but was published as his fifth. He conceived of it alongside The Pickwick Papers, and though he sold Pickwick first, his mind was obsessed with the Gordon riots of 1780. He secured a publisher for his tale, but Pickwick’s popularity delayed Barnaby. Further renegotiations of his contract for this novel kept stalling, and he instead wrote the three other novels that precede Barnaby. Finally, in late 1840, he secured a deal with the Clock, and in February 1841, the first instalment of Barnaby appeared.

The title of the work is Barnaby Rudge, but this is somewhat misleading: Barnaby is but a small player in this work, and disappears for over three hundred pages. One of his earlier working titles was ‘Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London’, which at least would concern a more major player. Though Barnaby is absent from much of his narrative, it is treatment and his actions that form the moral and critical centre of this novel.

The Gordon Riots of 1780 were an anti-catholic uprising, led by Lord George Gordon who created a Protestant Association to fight the recently introduced law that absolved Catholics the requirement to take religious oath when joined the armed forces. Lord Gordon felt that this action would allow Catholics to join with those in Europe and form a coalition that could attack or destabilise the British government, bring about absolute monarchical rule and a return to Papal control of the country. On the second of June, 1780, a crowd – some say 60,000 strong – marched on the Houses of Parliament and demanded a repeal of this law. They attacked Newgate Prison, taking the locksmith hostage and demanding he open the gates of the prison to allow captured protestors freedom. At the end of a week of rioting, 285 people had been shot dead; thirty were arrested and later hung. Lord Gordon was also arrested and tried for High Treason; he was found not guilty and allowed to walk free. It is a dark passage in British history, and one that fascinated the historian in Dickens. He was always going to write about it.

Barnaby Rudge sees the interaction of the real and the imagined. This dualism gives the work a frisson not found in Dickens’s earlier works. Lord Gordon appears, as do other key figures in the Gordon Riots, but for the necessity of the story, the majority of the cast are imagined. These are the people that are centred around The Maypole, a local public house, just south of London, near Epping Forest. A large cast of characters is introduced, and this section of the novel (the first half of the work) is highly Dickensian – there are family secrets, tales of murder, romantic entanglements, criminals, wanderers, and a talking raven named Grip (and yes, this is the influence on Poe’s famous poem). By allowing the novel time to luxuriate in the intricacies of village life, Dickens gives us time to know these people, their interests and their fears so that when the Gordon Riots begin in force, all our players are entangled and forced to act.

I admit to feeling rather underwhelmed during the first half of this novel: the opening, which describes a murder, I thought well done, but then it seemed to meander, cutting between these various characters with often little advancement (Dickens is, of course, waiting to get to the riots); but when the riots begin, his novel takes on a whole new level. The prose is electrifying, and the action tense, rapid – highly unusual thus far in Dickens career. He described the riots with precision, and the events hurry along at a great pace. The finest writing – at least for me – is in the final quarter, after the riots have ended and the key players are facing death for their roles. The descriptions and emotions evoked by Newgate Prison are formidable, and may just contain Dickens’s best writing yet. I read longer into the night than I normally do – finally finishing the book at gone three in the morning, as snow flurried down outside, and the window seemed to crackle with cold. An atmospheric mood in which to read such things.

There is a criticism of this novel from Poe in which he states that the raven should have been more symbolic. In the first few chapters it seems Dickens is lining the raven up to be so – but realising he needs us to know more about the rioters, he spends the next two hundred and fifty or so pages exploring them that when he finally returns to Barnaby and Grip the nuances he was setting up have been forgotten. This creates the same problem that some of his earlier novels have had: they end poorly, with a simple summing up of where each character has gone. What I think this needed, and which would have worked more powerfully, is if Grip’s symbolic purpose had been realised.

Barnaby Rudge, then. In the end an entertaining and exciting read. I just think it meanders a bit too much near the middle and never quite fulfils the promise it shows at the start. It is uneven – perhaps, I think, we needed to know less, not more, about the people involved.

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (2009)

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (2009)
Introduction by Marcela Valdes
Melville House Publishing
123pp

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a great admiration for the Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño died in 2003, leaving behind him a series of novels (some already published, others forthcoming through the next few years), at least one of which will last: 2666 (2004). This collection of interviews Bolaño held with Capital, Bomb, Turia and Playboy (the Mexican edition), introduced by fellow Bolaño-ite Marcela Valdes has clearly been assembled to benefit from the recent interest shown by the wider reading public in Bolaño. Before reading these interviews, I had not heard Bolaño’s views other than those expressed through his writing, and consequently I purchased this with great interest.

First of all is Marcela Valdes’s introduction: a superb introduction to this writer and to Bolaño, specifically his interest in the Juárez killings that inspired 2666. Much of his level of interest in them was new to me, and I think in future editions of 2666, Valdes’s introduction should be included – it has certainly expanded my thinking on this great novel. Sadly Bolaño was still finishing 2666 when he died, so the interviews that follow this make no mention of this work; instead Bolaño talks about The Savage Detectives and his other works.

The first of the interviews, conducted for Capital magazine, in Santiago, in 1999, is a short interview – as most magazine interviews are – but there is depth here: Bolaño talks about the importance of reading and his own writing, but avenues of thought are left unexplored – Bolaño almost seems to be setting things up and the interviewers miss them. The second interview, with Bomb, a Brooklyn based magazine, is much more detailed – though the interviewer seems to show-off to Bolaño with his own learning. The interview with Turia expands upon the Bomb one, and is again more detailed. It comes as such a shame, then, that the last interview, for Playboy, doesn’t allow much room for Bolaño to really speak – the interviewer keeps cutting him short, and asking him stupid questions: “What makes your jaw hurt laughing?” “What makes you cry?” Stupid, stupid questions that Bolaño swats away with short, curt answers. It reveals nothing. A shame that it ends the collection as there is much to savour here: for the fan of Bolaño, for the general reader, and for the writer.

There is much to be written on Bolaño, and these few interviews will provide some form of initial basis upon which to build that critical commentary: as such it is a useful volume. I do not know how many interviews Bolaño gave in his lifetime, but that some can be gathered (and annotated wonderfully by Tom McCartan) and distributed by a small, but brilliant publishing house, Melville, well, we should be grateful. Congratulations to them.

There is more on Bolaño at their website, http://www.mhpbooks.com/index.php – where you can also browse their small collection of publications.

Patterson, James (2008) Cross Country

Cross Country (2008)
James Patterson
Arrow Books, 406pp

Off ill for a month with a nasty, virulent virus (aka The Flu), I found my concentration lacking, but still desirous to read, I picked up the latest volume from “The World’s Bestselling Thriller Writer” (as the cover deems him), James Patterson. This is the thirteenth Alex Cross novel – the character created by Patterson in Along Came A Spider, back when Patterson wasn’t the commercial factory he is today – and sees Cross trailing an African killer, The Tiger, who swarms with a legion of killer children. Patterson, then, is commenting upon the civil wars of Africa, using their horrors to create entertainment.

Like many of the bestselling thriller writers – Dan Brown et al – Patterson is a poor writer. His prose is striped to the bare essentials, with chapters of no more than two pages (though some appear longer because of the print size, the white space and huge chapter headings. I’ve not read much of Patterson’s work outside of the Alex Cross range (of which, I’m almost ashamed to admit, I have read them all), but it does strike me that this is his most successful brand (and it is a brand now). Cross, a detective and psychologist for the Washington DC police force, has faced his fair share of brutal killers – the common criticism of these kinds of books comes into play here: just how many psychopaths can there be to stalk just one man?

Cross Country, like all those previous books, roars along. There is barely time to catch your breath. It jumps continents and countries with almost no regard for the laws of physics, and the characterisation is, as ever, sketchy at best. The writing is almost unilaterally bad. Yet for the three hours I submit to this character, once a year, it’s entertaining in a bad movie manner, it’s entertaining in a way other novels are not. Never would I reconsider rereading one, or would I ever class them as good – even for their genre (there are much much better crime writers) – but I like Alex Cross – a good father and good son in a genre where many of its ‘heroes’ are flawed, alcoholic and damaged – and I think Nana Mama a hoot.

So not great literature, but for a few hours downtime, good fun.

Doctor Who #41: Nekromanteia (2003)

Doctor Who: Nekromanteia (2003)
Austen Atkinson
Big Finish #41
Starring: Peter Davison, Nicola Bryant, Caroline Morris

How unfortunate Austen Atkinson is: to have his debut story for Big Finish follow Jubilee. Following that masterwork is an impossible task: made doubly worse when the story you have is at best workmanlike, at worst derivative and dull.

I would summarise this story for you – I did listen to all four parts – but somewhere near the end of the first I lost interest. I kept going, hoping it would click, but it didn’t. It involved witches and space crafts and an alien planet. The Doctor got decapitated, only he didn’t, and well, I am so sorry Austen Atkinson, I can’t recall much else – and I only listened to it three days ago. Its details have already fogged over. There was a trader on a planet the Doctor helped escape. There was a rape (or almost rape, I’m not clear) of either Peri or Erimem that seemed to hold no consequences. It was a jumble, a mess – even the actors seemed to be coasting – perhaps they’d all read the script for Jubilee and were envious and consequently in a mood. Who knows?

It is also a sad thing to say this is the first truly negative review I have written. There is, I am sure, much to enjoy in this story, but with my interest in it completely withdrawn by the start of episode two, I became lost to it. Because of this, I will one day revisit this story, but for now I must leave it with this damning review.

Doctor Who #40: Jubilee (2003)

Doctor Who: Jubilee (2003)
Robert Shearman
Big Finish #40
Starring: Colin Baker, Maggie Stables

The reputation of this Big Finish adventure is what drew me to the range. Jubilee, the fortieth story in the series range, was adapted by its writer for Russell T. Davies as Dalek – the story where Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor met his old adversaries for the first time in the series revival. Dalek was the best story in that season, and Jubilee is often held up as the best story in Big Finish’s range. So imagine my trepidation in approaching it. Deliberately I read nothing about it first: all I knew was this, there would be The Doctor, and there would be a Dalek. The CD cover told me that the TARDIS was immortalised a stain-glassed window. Excitement as grew as it started. What is this? A trailer for Dalek Empire II? No, the Daleks are shouting “SCARPER!” They do not shout that! The Doctor is a billowing, muscular hero for the people. It is funny, unexpected. It seems to have nothing to do with the story that follows – or at least it doesn’t, not straight away.

Like in Dalek, the big reveal is kept until the end of the first part – we hear men torturing it (as in the television episode) but already things are different: we are on earth, but not our earth. The Doctor has lost control of and lost his TARDIS and fears something very bad has happened. The United Kingdom is the dominant power on Earth, we are led by a President, and the United States are led by a cowardly and obsequious Prime Minister. The UK, we will learn, repelled a Dalek invasion force in 1903, and one hundred years hence, the empire is to destroy the last Dalek survivor for the Jubilee celebrations – they just need it to talk first…

Unlike Rose in Dalek, Evelyn Smythe has met the Daleks, in The Apocalypse Element, and yet like Rose she refuses to believe that there cannot be just evil in these creatures, and an unlikely friendship develops between monster and woman – the Dalek refuses to exterminate her.

I mentioned in my review of Bang-Bang-A-Boom! that humour in Doctor Who can be either lampooning or black – this is black of the blackest kind. The President disfigures people so they can become his playthings, the Daleks have been turned into toys – there is a wonderfully critical commentary on the merchandising of evil things – and blood is shed in skin-crawling manner. The last cross and double cross of the leaders in the wastelands of London after the Daleks reprisals is wonderfully macabre.

Jubilee is rightfully held up as an example of how brilliant Doctor Who and Big Finish can be: it is, without a doubt, one of the strongest stories they have released – perhaps even the strongest (I will decide with a second listen to this and my other favourites in a year or so) – and Robert Shearman is the writer par excellence. There is much more I would like to say about this story, and yet I feel I have said too much already: if you want to listen to this, you are best going in knowing nothing.

Doctor Who: No Place Like Home (2003)

Doctor Who: No Place Like Home (2003)
Iain McLaughlin
Big Finish
Starring: Peter Davison, Caroline Morris

Given away with Doctor Who Monthly, No Place Like Home is a half hour adventure with Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor and Caroline Morris’s recently introduced companion, Erimem.

Erimem is being given the guided tour of the TARDIS, implying that this story takes place shortly after her introduction in McLaughlin’s Eye of the Scorpion, and her first full adventure in The Church and the Crown, though it was released after that story. Like the previous giveaway with DWM, No Place Like Home introduces into the Big Finish range a character from other Doctor Who spin-off material, namely Shayde from the comic strips in DWM. Having not read these, Shayde came across as a sketchy, under-drawn character – I’m still not clear on how he could so easily gain access to the TARDIS when other Time Lords cannot gain entry, especially as he is only an artificial construct. Perhaps those unread comic strips provide an answer. No Place Like Home, though, is not intended, I think, for the casual listener. It requires knowledge of Doctor Who mythology. Also, its villain is a bit crap. A rat. An overblown intelligent rat. The moment we knew that, and knew that Erimem has her cat on board, the tension was over. However, for the first fifteen or so minutes, as The Doctor loses control of his ship as it rewrites itself, opening doors into nothingness, increasing the threat of danger his own home holds to him, No Place Like Home has a lot going for it.

It is, as I said, just a short adventure and as such there is little to comment upon. Erimem is given some simple character development and there are some good moments between her and The Doctor. It is over as quickly as it begins.

Doctor Who #39: Bang-Bang-A-Boom! (2002)

Doctor Who: Bang-Bang-A-Boom! (2002)
Gareth Roberts & Clayton Hickman
Big Finish #39
Starring: Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford

In 2001, Big Finish released the panto-themed Doctor Who adventure, The One Doctor – obviously successfully, for now we have the second Doctor Who panto – Bang-Bang-A-Boom! The plot is sheer simplicity: at the Intergalactic Song Contest is being held on Dark Space 8, and someone is killing the contestants. The Doctor and Mel, impersonating the first two (and crucially unknown) victims, take control of DS8 and try to unmask the killer before he (or she or it) can kill again. This being a panto, each death is heralded with deliberately over-dramatic music and jokes, lots of jokes.

Humour in Doctor Who takes many forms – in Robert Shearman’s stories, it is dark humour, sometimes of the darkest kind. In Roberts & Hickman’s, it is farce and lampooning. They wrote The One Doctor so, and this so. The Intergalactic Song Contest is clearly the Eurovision Song Contest – signalled straight away by an Irish host modelled on Terry Wogan. The snippets of music we hear are dreadful – deliberately so – and everything is so over-the-top, one barely has time to breathe.

With The One Doctor I was initially reticent – with the humour being so scattershot, some worked, some failed, and it is true here: Roberts and Hickman can set up a good joke, it’s just sometimes they fail to knock them out of the park. They have a formula, and sadly that formula failed to work so well here: in The One Doctor they had the entire Doctor Who mythos to lampoon: here they have a terrible television event and the murder mystery genre – a combination that could have worked – perhaps should have worked – but just did not. Perhaps I was unduly influenced by having watched the television adventure, The Unicorn and the Wasp, just days before – a story that lampoons the murder mystery genre with far more panache and skill than this manages. Where did Roberts and Hickman fail? I think in that after the bomb on the ship, one never felt that The Doctor or Mel were in any real danger, whereas Tennant’s Doctor in the TV episode was (but more on that later). This is my problem with the genre as a whole – the hero can never die, for the killer must always be unmasked. The genre works if the unmasking is good: and the neat solving of the crimes turning out to be not so neat is a good twist, but… but sometimes just failed to gel here. I couldn’t care less who the murderer was. The final race against time had no tension – but a couple of good laughs – and perhaps that is the problem: when they went for comedy they should have gone for seriousness. Even a comedy needs its tension.

I have never been a lover of this kind of comedy, and sadly Bang-Bang-A-Boom! has done nothing to change my views. Roberts and Hickman, it seems, break their connection with Big Finish with this adventure – though, for those who know Doctor Who history, they both continue to write for Doctor Who. Gareth Roberts wrote that David Tennant I previously mentioned: so lessons were learnt from the mistakes this story made. Roberts, in the television stories, has proved himself an adept writer for The Doctor – and despite Bang-Bang-A-Boom! – I hope they return to Big Finish to provide some more laughs for the man.

I want also to take a moment to congratulate Big Finish again, for the audio design here was wonderfully done.

Orwell, George (1935) Burmese Days

Burmese Days (1935)
George Orwell
Penguin Modern Classics, 320pp

George Orwell is best remembered for two novels, Animal Farm and 1984, and perhaps his nonfiction works, A Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. A few years ago I read Animal Farm, my first introduction to Orwell, but it has taken me over two years to return to him. I purchased the Penguin Modern Classic collection, The Complete Novels of George Orwell, a wonderfully printed and bound collection. In this collection the novels are presented alphabetically, but in accordance with my original challenge, I selected Orwell’s first printed novel. Burmese Days, first published in America in 1934, appeared in Great Britain in 1935, by which time Orwell had already achieved fame with his non-fiction.

Orwell spent time in Burma – 1922 to 1927 – where, as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police, he became familiar with the country and its people. Under Imperial rule, Burma had become one of the most profligate of Britain’s colonies, and yet the native population were kept impoverished and at times torn apart by tribal rivalries and subjugations. Men like U Po Kyin, the corrupt Burmese magistrate whose machinations bring the downfall of good men and one pukka sahib (European white man), John Flory, whose story this is.

John Flory is a flawed man – physically, because of the large, blue birthmark on the left of his face that he tries to hide, and psychologically because his time in Burma has left him alone and lonely. When the daughter of a local prominent family arrives, Flory sets about wooing her. Elizabeth Lackersteen is not a beautiful woman, but she is unattached, and after Flory rescues her from the menaces of a water buffalo, she is enamoured. An unintentional deceit lies at the heart of their relationship: Flory thinks her cultured because she has lived in Paris, when in fact she loathed the bohemians and their lifestyle, and Elizabeth thinks him brave for he rescued her from a beast, in fact harmless, when he is timid. Whenever they try to reveal their true colours the other is repulsed. Yet Flory still plans to propose but is halted by an interruption from Elizabeth’s aunt and then an earthquake. Elizabeth’s aunt has other ideas – a new, single policeman, Lieutenant Verrall, is due in town, and Elizabeth will marry him, not the flawed Flory.

If the above plot description sounds too much like a romantic melodrama, then it is because it is, and yet Orwell has other plans. He is too clever a writer to stick to formula. U Po Kyin has been manoeuvring behind the scenes, and a riot is about to break out in their village, and it will tear into the very hearts and souls of Burma’s people, and destroy colonial rule. Burmese Days reveals itself not to be about love, but about the cost of colonial rule, and the crimes that can be committed in its name.

Orwell said in Why I Write that: “I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which my words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days…. is rather that kind of book.” It is a wonderful summation of what Burmese Days is: it is a gloriously overblown novel, full of seething sentiment, of grand moments and grander spectacles. “The extravagance of its language: a riot of rococo imagery that gets dangerously out of hand,” noted D. J. Taylor. Burmese Days, then, is a novel unlike much else in Orwell’s canon, and yet, feels distinctly Orwellian – the humanitarian is there, the writer with the concern for the freedom’s of the common man (this time the common man is the put upon Burmese). It may wear many of its influences freely: Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster particularly – and its ending may not be the one most readers will expect, but it is a good grand novel, and one I thoroughly enjoyed.

Doctor Who #38: The Church and the Crown (2002)

The Church and the Crown (2002)
Cavan Scott and Mark Wright
Big Finish #38
Starring: Peter Davison, Nicola Bryant, Caroline Morris

One of the refreshing aspects of Doctor Who is the ability of the format to adapt to any type of story – so that one week we can have hard science fiction, the next a monster story, the next something else. The something else in this tale is that it contains no monsters, no science fiction (other than the time travel the characters undertake to arrive in 17th France) – it is simply a historical romp, a story of doubles, cardinals, musketeers, and monarchs: how very Dumas (who warrants a wonderful deconstruction from the Doctor). We are in Richelieu’s time, and an English duke, Buckingham, is beginning his invasion of France by kidnapping Queen Anne – only Peri is Anne’s double, and the men grab the wrong woman, and a comedy of errors begins.

As the first story to feature Erimem as a companion – following her leaving ancient Egypt at the end of The Eye of the Scorpion – this story has a lot to pack in: its dramatic storyline, but seeing how Erimem copes with finding herself in a new time, a new place, far from home. It is in these first stories that we see how a companion will handle themselves travelling with the Doctor – from the outset Erimem is taking charge, blagging her way into the Royal Court and pretending to be a princess of a foreign land (which, I suppose, she was). She handles herself well in battle. She is a confident young woman. I suspect this confidence will dismount her at some point in a future story, but for now Erimem is kick-ass and wonderful.

The story, by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, the duo behind the atmospheric Project: Twilight, rips along, full of some witty one lines, and a question the Doctor cannot answer: “Exactly how does one swash ones buckle?” There are moments here when it does appear somewhat slight – perhaps where the comedy should be highlighted more and is not – but overall The Church and the Crown holds up as a fun adventure – though the huge number of anachronistic words almost takes you out of the narrative.

Vann, David (2008) Legend of a Suicide

Legend of a Suicide (2008)
David Vann
Penguin, 228pp

David Vann’s debut novel, Legend of a Suicide, is six short stories on a theme: the suicide of a father. Autobiographical in tone – Vann grew up in Alaska, as Fenn does in these stories, and his father did take his own life – they are stories distilled through a McCarthy lens. In a recent essay Vann has praised McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: it is not hard to discern the lessons Vann last learnt regarding the treatment of landscape: the island of Sukkwan, on which the longest of these six pieces takes place, is drawn with such clarity and fever, when the snow comes down and the rest of the world is forgotten, it is men against nature, spirit against circumstance.

As every review of Vann’s novel has said, it is difficult to truly talk about this book without revealing the shocking turn of events in the middle of Sukkwan Island, the fourth of the stories. This event reverberates back through everything that has come and everything that will come: it is the key to Vann’s understanding of his father’s suicide. It also contains a much deeper philosophical thought – the idea that though one can die before ones time, ones time on earth is determined, and when you are supposed to go, you go. It is determined. It is inexorable. Vann’s language is equally fatalist.

From the end of the first piece in Legend of a Suicide, Ichthyologist: “he took his .44 Magnum handgun from the cabin and walked back to stand alone on the bright silver stern under a heavy, gray-white sky and the cries of gulls, his boots slathered with the dark blood of freshly caught salmon. He may have paused for a moment to reflect, but I doubt it. His momentum was made up only of air, without the distraction of ground. He splattered himself amid the entrails of salmon, his remains picked at by gulls for several hours before my uncle came up from the engine room and found him.”

In that extract you can hear McCarthy, Faulkner, the pantheon of American Gothic landscaping in literature. It has a sharp brutality. It is language unencumbered. You have the event and nothing more. It is the writing style I deeply admire – and that seems only to work within the mythos of America – and as such I found Vann’s debut extraordinary. I read it one evening, in two sittings (stopping at the midway point in Sukkwan Island), and as I read the last of that outstanding story, the winter wind howled up our street, rattling the windowpanes, and it was not hard to imagine being trapped in the wildness of Alaska, with the winter closing in, and the future so uncertain.

As I do not wish to spoil the surprises of Vann’s narrative, I shall say nothing more on it, other than to say this is a great American debut, a work I am sure will appear in the Penguin Modern Classics range in a decade or two, and one that all lovers of fine literature should seek out. A powerful, humbling, moving debut.