Sunday, March 3, 2024

Review of Seven of the wildwood, Mary Youmans. Wiseblood books.

This review first appeared in The Brazen Head, December 2023



Seren of the Wildwood  Marly Youmans. Wiseblood books. Illustrated. 72 pages. HB 16 USD

 

 

The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past,

Strange ceremonies that the fays still love

To watch-the rituals of demon tribes

Who once played havoc with the universe,

And everything that says the world is not

Exactly what it seems is hidden here,

But also there are paths to blessedness

 

So begins Seren of the Wildwood, Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange. 

 

Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience[i].

 

The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. [ii]

 

Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is. 

 

Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story. Rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home. 

 

The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally . They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement: 

 

[…]Next, a King

Not young but middle-aged his curling beard

Gone steel,

His mind turned lunatic,

His body no ideal

Of grace and charm to prick

Desire: man as ordeal.

 

The Bob and Wheel, most famously used is Gawain and the Green Knight, inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.

 

Her poem is full of good lines:

 

Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight

But then forgotten, Seren moved slower 

And slower. 

 

The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:

 

And so she travelled toward the roar of rain

With thunder , apprehensive as she neared

The lip where torrents catapulted free

From stone and merged into a muscular

And sovereign streaming force-the energy

That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight

And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.

 

Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t.  

 

The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters but what does it mean? 

 

This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy. 

 

Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.[iii]

 

Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped  in the story  by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion. 

 

In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading. 

 

Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, Seren of the Wildwood is illustrated by Clive Hick-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.



[i] There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.

[ii] There are still places where the animals are dangerous and the landscape hostile. 

[iii] The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, January 18, 2024

King's Champion. A Ballad of sorts.


This Is the companion piece to 'Taking Possession'. (See previous Post) First published in The Rotary Dial. I had been reading Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', one of those rare books that were influential in their own time and still readable today. I wanted to try a ballad style story, knowing that half the effect of such a form is lost if there is no tune and no singer.  I am also intrigued by the phenomena of trial by combat or ordeal. There is a story of William Marshall, the most famous knight in his day, being accused of treason by King John. The Marshall demanded he be given the right of trial by combat. Since no one was willing to face him, the charges were dropped. The same phenomena is evident in Malory's book, where Lancelot demands the right to prove the queen's innocence in single combat, despite the fact that everyone knows she's an adulteress. 
End of Prologue. 

King’s Champion.

 

1

The journey made, his duty done,

the invitation to remain was not refused

while winter raged and sulked 

about the castle walls. Humming  

a minor key in passages and towers 

the wind fumbled the tapestries.

 

Beside the brazier keeping watch 

on a land gone hard and white,

everything seemed dead 

or waiting to be born. Summer,

stories they remembered

for this stranger from the south 

 

who joins the winter games   
and watches m’lord’s daughter.  

Nothing to soften the darkness, 

until spring, then mounted, armed, 

into bright sunshine and bitter wind 

taking the princess to her wedding. 

 

2

The journey done, the prize delivered.

The king’s doubts laid to rest 

in private conversations: 

the land’s well-run, the castle’s sound.

So the wedding goes ahead

But first, obligatory festivities. 

 

He is the King’s Champion 

and he kills not for pleasure: 

it’s just what he does. On the first day

he won everything and all the women 

would have thrown their honour 

in the moat to be with him. 

 

On the second day he was undefeated. 

When the Princess smiled he fled, 

risked his life on the point of a spear 

and hurtled down the lists. 

On the third day the stranger came.

Wind tugged the bunting, swirling the dust.

 

His shield was black, his armour black

his herald, dressed in black, rode to the stands

saluted the young King, and said:

My master says: this woman is my wife.

She is no maid. He claims his right

to prove this truth in combat.

 

The King called for his Champion: 

You lied! You found the rumour true: 

a Knight came courting for his Lord 

and won the Lady’s heart instead. 

You will defend the honour 

of this woman I must marry. 

 

Your skill must prove her purity

stainless as the robes she’ll wear 

on coronation day. And if you fail, 

I’ll feed them to the royal pigs.  

 

3

 

Spears shatter, horses buckle, 

scrambling clear they pound away. 

His enemy anticipates each stroke. 

But he predicts the Knight’s attempts. 

 

A mirror image of himself,   

who tip-toed passageways 

who risked the terrifying consequence

and wanted his reward. 

 

They paused. Leant on their swords.

Blood dripping on the troubled dust. 

All summer long I had her, gasped the Knight.

We plighted troth. I am her spouse. 

 

I know you did, the Champion replied,

and that is neither here nor there.

Her father won’t acknowledge you:

he wants a grandson on the throne.

 

My master was impatient.

he proved if she were maid  

the first night that she came 

and that is neither here nor there.

 

He needs her father’s castle

his lands, his loyalty, his men 

to keep the northland settled

at this stage of his reign.

 

What matters is not

the truth of your claim

but this ritual proof

we both know proves nothing.

 

He had not trained to parry words.

Edge striking battered metal 

slashes the knight’s head from his body.

The Champion paused to breathe, 

and bleed, then straightened up

and turned to the applause 

 

The King and Princess came in finery

to stand above the metal and the meat. 

A royal gesture had it dragged away: 

blood spatters on the Ermine 

from the puddles round her dainty feet.

He took her hand. Gentles, the liar shamed

tomorrow this false-slandered lady 

shall become your Queen and mine. 

 

 

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Taking Possession. A story of the Norman Conquest.

 This poem, the second experiment in telling a story in verse, aiming for a scrupulous meanness in the diction, was first published in The Brazen Head.

 

Taking Possession.

 

Normans on the great north road

somewhere in England in 1071.[i]

Hubert, lord of these grey riders,

fought at Senlac, and since then

has been useful to the King

His reward, the manor he rides towards,

larger than the home he left in Normandy.

 

Walter, his seneschal, riding beside him, 

fought at Senlac with distinction,  

rallied the savaged in the Malfosse .[ii]

Between them, non-armoured, long haired, 

Aelfric, an Englishman. Their local guide.

Their translator. He makes them awkward

in ways they’d struggle to define. 

If pushed, Walter might reply; 

he has no scars: his hands are soft.

 

The manor is wooden, unfortified.

Too easy to attack and futile to defend.

All this, thinks Hubert, I will change.

After the automatic military appraisal, 

the childlike revelation: this is mine.

All mine. A group waits, women, children,

men so old they can’t stand straight.

 

The lady of the manor steps towards him.

Hubert remembers that in the English time

she could have run this place without a husband.

Now she and it are forfeit to the crown, 

the crown bestowed them both on him

and he has come to take possession.

That thought will take a long time growing old. 

He examines her the way he will inspect the cattle,

fields, fish weir and the little mill.

Tall, straight, young, blonde: she will do.

 

‘Where are the men?’ Vague images  

of those long legs, fine hips and breasts

do not make him stupid. ‘Where are the men?’

He has lost friends who were not so cautious,

in this green folded landscape, where the trees

and ditches hide those desperate for revenge. 

Aelfric translates the question.

‘Where you should be.’ He ducks his head

til he remembers he rides with the victors

and she’s the one who lost and all her pride

will not avert the fate that rides towards her.

 

‘Her brothers, father, uncle, nephews died 

at Stamford bridge and Senlac hill.

Their tenants and dependants died with them.’[iii]  

 

The idea that Englishmen are long-haired, 

beer swilling, effeminate, will creep 

into the Norman mind but not in Hubert’s 

even if he lived a long and idle life.

Those longhaired drunkards stood their ground,

all day. Charge after charge breaking 

on that obdurate line of shields.  

Anyone who’d seen a horse and rider split

by one swing of an axe would think twice 

about disparaging the man who swung it.

But Aelfric swung no axe. That much is obvious.

 

2

 

After inspecting the boundaries, 

a wary country ride with scouts,

after the inspection of the manor house, 

after the welcome meal, Hubert decided 

it was time to inspect his human property.

The men at arms were organised.

Guards posted, tasks allotted.

Walter thanked, allowed to leave.

 

Hubert talking to his Lady through Aelfric

was reminded of those shields.

When he was polite, she seemed insulted.

When he had tried to show an interest 

she had seemed offended. He sensed 

that what he said was not the words she heard.

She was nobility, understood the world

and what would happen next and so he doubted  

his tame Englishman was being honest.

He would have to learn her language,

some words at least, while she learnt his. 

Bed, he thought, could be his classroom.

 

He stood up, took her hand. She did not move. 

‘If you don’t go with him’, said Aelfric  

he’ll strip you for his men at arms.’

It was a stupid lie. This Norman was no fool

who’d break his prize possession out of spite.

Aelfric ignored the look she cut him with.

Once she’d been too proud to notice his existence

now she was this Norman’s mattress 

and whatever in his character was broken, 

or unfinished, rejoiced at her humiliation.

 

The curtains closed behind them. 

Aelfric edged towards the drapery, 

heard the sound of fabric falling, 

imagined the pale body emerging. 

He heard Hubert’s belt and sword unbuckled  

then set down, heard them move together.

Imagined his hands, heard Hubert grunting, 

then making garbled noises like a stricken pig.

 

A female hand, the curtain parted. 

She was naked, radiantly naked, 

white flesh tinged pink about the throat.

Aelfric moved. She was majestic, 

desire erased the thought that he’d been caught

erased the room, erased his name 

and everything except desire

for the body moving closer to him

small hands reaching for his belt. 

 

Who knows a dead man’s final thoughts?

Perhaps he was thinking mine at last,

perhaps he heard her say, ‘You should have died

with all the others’, and perhaps, before the knife 

sliced the artery in his throat and geysered blood, 

he realised she had spoken flawless Norman-French. 

 

She caught him as he fell, pulling him down

screaming in English, help, help, murder, help.

Walter, sword drawn, running, saw 

the Englishman raping the frantic lady

thrashing on the floor, hauled him away 

one quick blow striking off the head.

 

The woman, sobbing, pointing at the curtains.

Behind them Hubert’s naked corpse, 

twisted, reaching for the knife stuck in his back.

 

While the bodies were removed

Walter held the shuddering woman. 

The King still owed him for the Malfosse. 

Perhaps this manor. He would need a wife. 

Hands skilled in settling a skittish mare

gentled the shaking body 

aware of its taut lines, soft curves, 

its bloody promise. She would do

when he came to take possession.

 

 

 

 

 



[i] This date is entirely arbitrary. 

[ii] When the English army finally broke and ran at the Battle of Hastings, a small group turned and savaged the pursuing Normans at a place the Normans called The Malfosse.

[iii] Fulford Gate, Stamford bridge, Senlac, the three battles fought by the English in 1066. Many of the victors at Stamford Bridge died at Senlac (Hastings). 

Friday, January 5, 2024

The Buried Giant by Kazoo Ishiguro. Puzzling over value. Literary Allusions.

The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber  2015

 

‘The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.’ Blurb.

 

Discussions of literary allusions usually disappear into theories of intertextuality, rather than discussions of the effects specific examples have on the reading of a particular text. 

The Buried Giant is a good example of conscious intertextuality, where elements of the story are deliberately waving in the direction of any number of famous texts. 

 

A Saxon warrior brandishes his trophy: ‘…what they were looking at was not a head at all, but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human like creature.’(p76). In case the reader misses the reference, a character explains: ’Our hero killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black water.’ (p.76) 

 

A Saxon hero, two monsters, one with its arm ripped off sinking into the black water. Minor variations, but too close to Beowulf to be anything elseLater, the same hero will go into combat with a dragon. But if Beowulf is being alluded to, knowing the poem adds nothing to an understanding of The Buried Giant, and The Buried Giant doesn’t offer any kind of insight into Beowulf.

 

While our Saxon hero points pointlessly towards a specific text, there are other examples where so many allusions are in play the result seems self defeating. There is a knight called Sir Gawain, a recently dead king called Arthur, a magic wielder called Merlin, there are wild women to be met on a blasted plain, a dragon to be killed….but what are all these allusions doing? Instead of adding significance, the ceaseless, enthusiastic pilling up of literary references empties the words of meaning. 

 

All the aging Sir Gawain has in common with the hero of Arthurian romance is the name. A cross between Don Quixote and one of the Knights Alice meets in Through The Looking Glass, who just might also have spent time in Browning's Child Roland. He is every literary Knight and no one in particular.

 

Arthur was a gift to medieval storytellers because he provided them with a ready built story world. And the basic outline of the story, established by Geoffrey of Monmouth, gave the world a beginning and end. But since Arthur became a character in modern films and fiction, the Arthurian story world is no longer coherent. Gesturing towards it gains the writer nothing. There are so many characters called Arthur, in so many divergent versions of ‘his’ story. The recent film ‘King Arthur: legend of the sword’ could have been called King Bob and his magic stick. Prior knowledge of King Arthur is of no help in understanding either that film or The Buried Giant

 

The allusions do create an air of familiarity.  A post ‘Arthurian’ world of villages and knights, Britons and Saxons, evil lords and inevitably crazy sado-masochistic monks. But nothing in the story alludes to anything specifically Arthurian except the names. The king could just as well be Good King Billy Joe Bob. Sir Gawain could be Barny, Billy Joe Bob’s nephew. Change the names, leave the story set in a fantasy world set in pseudo medieval times, and lose nothing.  It would still be a fine story. It just wouldn’t feel quite so superficially self-consciously ‘literary’. 

 

The Beowulf character Saxon tells his apprentice that the stone monastery was once built by Saxons as a defensible hill fort, which includes an ingenious stone tower to trap the attackers. If this is immediately post Roman Britain, then the Saxons didn’t build in stone until very much later.

 

The Saxons and Britons could be Twiggles and BogglesThe story world would then create and define the Twiggles and Boggles. Instead nothing in the story distinguishes them, they are labelled Saxons and Britons, but they have very little, if anything, to do with any meaning those words have outside the story in either history or literature.

 

The Arthurian/Beowulf background is short hand wall paper, a cheap set dressing, not to be taken too seriously, not to be examined too closely. It gives the book a ‘literary air’, in which the writer shows off his reading and a certain type of reader gets to feel literary because they recognise the texts. But the names and the words have been emptied of meaning. They point everywhere. They are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 

 

Monday, January 1, 2024

Lost Realms by Thomas Williams. Puzzling over value Style #2

 Part two.

Lost Realms by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) 

 

Does style matter in non-fictive texts?


I think it does. I may be wrong. 

 

To restate the obvious, the period from the fifth through to the seventh century in Britain was very different to what preceded it and what followed. A well-known lack of evidence makes it a very dim age. But the institutions, social organisations, and assumptions of the Imperial world disappear (although not entirely), and what had replaced them by the eighth century (give or take) is only starting to emerge in this period.  

 

The difficulty of understanding the differences is compounded by the modern words we are forced to use to describe them. This is particularly true of those words related to social organisation and military activity.

 

But an historian compounds the problem when he or she starts to become enamoured of similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. The desire to explain by comparing the unfamiliar with the familiar is natural, but nothing is ever exactly like something else that isn’t itself. Often the differences are more important than the feeble similarities.  

 

Thomas has a habit of comparing something (unknown or in the past) to something fictive. (See previous post). This seems to be a trend in publishing at present. It may reassure a certain type of reader that there is no substantial difference between Lord of the Rings and Anglo-Saxon history or Game of Thrones and the Wars of the Roses, but that’s an obvious lie. More significantly, precision is sacrificed for effect. 

 

Stephen of Ripon presents Cædwalla’s visit to Wilfrid as one of student to teacher, the young prince ‘vowing that if Wilfrid would be his spiritual father and loyal helper he in turn would be an obedient son’, a Luke Skywalker to Wilfrid’s Master Yoda. […] What Stephen glosses over, however, is the manner in which the young West Saxon fugitive came to Sussex in the first place. As Bede tells it, Cædwalla swept south into Sussex with an army, killing King Æthelwealth and ‘wasting the province with slaughtering and plunder-rather more Darth Vader than young Jedi’. p. 319

 

[Due to a proof reading error in the original the final quotation, attributed to Bede, is completed after Jedi, not plunder as you’d expect.) 

 

As noted in a previous post, you could omit the words I’ve underlined and lose nothing. Not only does their presence add nothing significant, it distorts the material. If you were to stop and make a list of similarities and differences, which realistically no one ever does, then the similarities between Cædwalla and Wilfrid and Luke and Yoda, are so slight as to be meaningless. The differences, starting with one pair existed and the other is fictional, are great. What a King and a Holy man had to offer each other in this situation is not a one sided apprenticeship in a fantasy martial art, but an increase in the kind of power each is looking for: Wilfrid was no more disinterested in this than the king. Whatever the incident reveals about that particular contingent power relationship is destroyed by the Star Wars reference.  

 

The desire for the sound grab works its way into the texture of sentences. 

 

The Northumbrian King found more than a thousand monks from Bancornaburg arrayed against him, all ready to deliver their weaponised prayers on behalf of the Britons-a sort of holy artillery deployed in the face of the pagan Northumbrian war machine. P278

 

Delete everything after the dash? In English, writers should visualise their metaphors. What does the word ‘artillery’ evoke? Something big and loud and mechanised. The lead up to the Somme? The Germans shelling Verdun? Soldiers operating machinery, with lines of supply bringing up ammunition, or ammunition dumps. 

 

Now try imagining a group of monks as ‘artillery’? The image slides towards farce and trivialises the event. 

 

More insidious is the effect created by describing the Northumbrian army as a ‘war machine’. What do you think of when you consider the phrase ‘War Machine’? Machines of War? Tanks, Bombers, Drones? Planes and tanks rolling inexorably off production lines; factories mass producing bombs; a society geared to war: recruiting offices, training, drill, marches. 

 

How much, if any of that, applies to the Northumbrians? ‘Army’ is unavoidable, a convenient shorthand for ‘group of armed men’. Most of those armed men weren’t soldiers in either the Roman or the modern sense, they were farmers, and why they were there is unknown. They were probably 'armed' with knife and spear, items of daily use. Did they have any ‘military training’? There would have been a smaller group of armed men who had better weapons, and perhaps training in their use. 

 

How they organised their army, how many men it contained, how it fought a battle, how it was supplied, are all unknown, but it was a long way from the military organisation of classical or modern armies or any kind of production line. There was nothing mechanical about it at all. A loose modern term like ‘war machine’ simply destroys any possibility of getting at the truth of the matter. 

 

This is not an isolated example. 

 

The so called Mercian supremacy was really an exercise in early Medieval gangsterism the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse p. 287

 

The throwaway ‘so called’ implies the term ‘Mercian Supremacy’ is somehow suspect. Why? But in what way was the Mercian supremacy different to the Northumbrian? Groan at the ancient joke about Offa, and then ask why ‘gangsterism’ is a better term? A gangster is a criminal; which laws and whose laws were the Mercians breaking? If they were gangsters who were the police, or the upholders of law and order? How was Offa more a ‘gangster’ than Edwin? The nature of kingship in the early Anglo-Saxon period is difficult enough to discern, without the construct being hauled off in the wrong direction by a loose evocative modern label like ‘gangsterism’.   

 

I think style matters. In Lost Realms it limits the author’s ability to write accurately and clearly about his subject. His imagination is inspired by the thought of ruins and loss. But beyond the descriptions of fallen masonry and weeds there are people acting in the landscape, And they go missing due to his exuberant use of figures of speech and references to his favourite fictive texts. 

 

 

 

  

Friday, December 29, 2023

Lost Realms by Thomas Williams puzzling over value: style

 



Lost Realms by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) 

Warning: Opinionating in progress.


Lost Realms  is a book with much to recommend it. The basic approach, ‘histories’ rather than ‘history’ is the only one that can deal with the ways in which Roman Britain became something else.  

What intrigues me most is two aspects of William’s style. He can write very well; evoke the landscape of post Roman Britain; negotiate the tangle of evidence and contending theories that characterise the period in clear and unambiguous prose. But so much of the book relies on the reader not paying attention. 

 

The following is a characteristic example of general style, and it illustrates two problems. The author is remembering climbing the steps to Tintagel as a child:

 

It felt endless that stairway-like the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. (p.146)

 

You could delete everything from the dash to the full stop and the information would be conveyed successfully: 

 

It felt endless, that stairway.

 

It’s a common experience, especially for children. The author can rely on most readers  to understand his point (even if his intrusion of the memory into the narrative adds nothing especially relevant to the subject at hand). What follows the dash is superfluous in terms of information and is an attempt at ‘style’ but it's a strange thing to find in a history book. 

 

If this were a personal memoire of reading Tolkien, then the comparison would be at home if it were reversed. ‘When I read about the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers I remembered the steps that lead to Tintagel.’ p.146

 

This would be the normal movement, illuminating the fictional by comparing it with a real, repeatable experience that is not unique to the individual. Williams consistently goes the opposite way, trying to illuminate the historical by comparing it to the fictional. (More about this in the next post.)

 

But what happens to the reader (me, for example) who has no idea what Morgul Vale or Cirith Ungol are? That question points to an underlying assumption, and an impossible one: the assumption that the reader shares the writer’s fictional knowledge and his attitudes. Williams’ range of reference is eclectic: The Wicker Man, the Shining, Star Wars, the complete works of Tolkien. But no concession is being made to the reader. At one point rather than rewrite an unimportant but obviously obscure reference, he would rather add a footnote to explain his explanation. 

 

…that will embody an oddly retro-futuristic aesthetic, like the neo-Byzantine fantasies of the Trigon Empire…(p178)

 

The overall impression is that the author is not making an effort to communicate, rather, he is putting on a performance, and the performance assumes the reader shares his references, his fascination with his own memories, and his opinions. Which effectively means the Model Reader of this book can only be a model Thomas Williams. 

 

Sometimes this positioning is insidious: an anecdote will be introduced as ‘comic’ or ‘blackly comic’ rather than simply left to stand alone. Sometimes it’s unintentionally funny.

 

The story of Uther and Ygerna is, for modern readers, an uncomfortable read.

 

Stop. Which modern readers? All modern readers? Are we expected to believe that those who watched Vikings and Game of Thrones, or read Fifty Shades of Grey are disturbed by this? Some modern readers? Students in universities who are told to feel uncomfortable? 

 

But our author confesses:

 

I remember finding it troubling as a child and it stills leaves me feeling queasy. Not I think because the tale is in itself unusually unsettling (there are many, far more violent sentiments expressed in older Welsh and English poetry) but more for the horny relish with which Geoffrey tells it and the enormous appeal he clearly expected it to have for its intended audience…p146

 

I must admit I laughed aloud at this. The thought of Geoffrey writing 12th century erotica is almost as funny as thinking that what he wrote could have aroused your average clerical reader or titillated his ‘aristocratic’ listeners.  

 

Leaving aside the thought that horny relish sounds like a strange kind of novelty pickle, I wonder how many people reading this have read Geoffrey, or how recently or how carefully Williams has? If you’re reading this and have a copy of Geoffrey handy, stop now and read what Geoffrey wrote about Uther in Tintagel. It’s only a few lines. Does this sound like ‘horny relish’?  Then go back and read Vortigern’s meeting with Rowena it’s not long either. Then remember what Geoffrey did in his day job. 'Deceived' is not a positive term.

 

But most people won’t stop and read Geoffrey. They won’t wonder which readers are disturbed, or whether horny relish is an accurate description. It sounds good. It sticks in the memory. The book, like many recent ones, relies on the reader never stopping to consider what the words on the page mean. The glib references aren’t meant to be examined, or even given any thought. The author is entertaining himself and scattering his references with no real interest in ‘meaning’. If the reader isn't meant to think too deeply about this; did the author? 

 

This might sound like I’m being over critical about trivial detail, but it leads to a discussion of how the material is presented and understood, for which see next post. 


Thursday, December 21, 2023

Review of A Man of Heart by Liam Guilar



A Man of Heart is reviewed in the December print edition of Quadrant. The text of the review is on line, you can read it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page, which will open a new window. 



Heart of the Island Nation

 ..'.a celebration of long-neglected narrative traditions – an epic for an era which ironizes everything, a tribute to this once and future island and its stoically enduring people.'

...Guilar tells of Vortigern, king (flca. 425-450) of the newly independent Britons who, according to traditional historiography, used the Saxon leaders Hengist and Horsa to protect his kingdom against Picts and Scots, and granted them land. Vortigern has been mythologised, but here feels eminently real, thanks to the poet’s sweeping historical sense, and convincingly gritty detail of how those long-lost landscapes must have looked, how those nation-building lives might really have felt.

...We open in shadows suited to descending ‘Dark Ages’, as kingdoms fade into view, and a strategic marriage is being considered sadly in a crepuscular columned room:

“There was never enough light. / Even in summer, shade / and shadows contour brightness. / At night, torches and lamps / shiver the edge of sight.”

A Romano-British matron is thinking of her daughter courted by unrefined “men of power” – regrettably necessary allies in a province turned upside down, where the uncivilized hold the sword-hand, and sophisticates overnight have only squatters’ rights.   

You can read the rest of the review by clicking on the link. It will take you to the author's page. 

Review of a Man of Heart

Liam Guilar - A Man of Heart