Tag Archives: novels

book report: Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe

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I’m on an academic-themed novel run at the moment, after Donna Tartt’s Secret History. Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue is, in its way, as concerned with tradition as Tartt’s novel, but has a totally different tone, one of rambunctious satirical comedy. In short, a Cambridge college, Porterhouse, acquires a new Master, who attempts to modernise affairs much to the chagrin of the old dons and staff.

Like all really good, enduring comedies (e.g. Withnail & I), it’s also about something – in this case, the absurdity of tradition and the absurdity of modernity. In our ghastly modern times, it is fashionable to critique tradition by pointing to its silliness & occasional inhumanities, without admitting modernity’s faults (a regulated, inescapable inhumanity, among others). Much of the novel is seen through the eyes of Skullion, a loyal college servant who has overseen decades of tradition.

He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with ‘Message for Dr Messmer’ scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the Nelson with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damn treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s ‘Good morning, Skullion’, Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.

When I think over the past, and what I miss, it is of course the architecture, the ethos of the old scholars (now mostly dead or retired or fired, to make way for the fashionable new academic), but also the people, the type. It once made sense to talk of a “gentleman”, of a man who acts according to a higher standard where it counts. Today, were one to say a coarse TV presenter or a traitor like Tony Blair is “not a gentleman” people would simply jeer. The notion of being a gentleman has been replaced by being a good SJW, a shrieking blue hair with BPD, or a smirking Blairite bureaucrat parroting the latest buzzwords (tolerance, respect, diversity, etc.)

Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. […] He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.

‘What gentlemen?’ the lad had said. ‘A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.’

And Skullion had put down his pint and said, ‘A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.’ Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.

It’s not that the past was perfect, merely that the flipside of pointless snobbery was a reverence for the things that really mattered. And there is something endearing about the snobbery; for example reading this passage in 2020, where every grubby polytechnic calls itself a university, is an amusing experience – it concerns a research graduate called Zipser, with an undergraduate degree from Durham:

The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.

I rather like a world where the University of Durham is regarded as a made-up institution. That’s snobbery done right. Even at my alma mater, which was not Cambridge, there was a pleasant sense of being excluded, by not having gone to one of the very best public schools, not having a Norman family tree, and so on. For me, it was somewhat like going to the theatre and knowing that I would always be in the audience, observing the curious ceremonies of those on stage:

‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality.

Of course all this has been undone now, and the parodic old dons have been replaced by parodic SJW blue hairs and their ilk. For example, the University of Durham’s website is full of such multicultural wonders:

No commentary required.

book report: Martin Amis, The Information

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A book I found in a charity shop in Munich. I’d only previously read one of Amis’ novels,  Money (enjoyable), his memoir Experience (very good) and his essays (superb). He is probably a better essayist than novelist, but that’s not exactly an insult to his novels – like Gore Vidal, his essays are so brilliant (and brilliantly wrong at times) that his novels can slip a degree or two down the ladder of excellence, while heaving their skirts well above the stain of mediocrity.

The plot of The Information isn’t important, it is merely a frame on which Amis weaves his various observations and set-pieces. But in brief, there are two ghastly novelists called Richard and Gwyn, the former a loser who writes unreadable drivel, the latter an equally conniving but, by chance, successful Author who writes blandly readable works about Politically Correct utopias. Both men are total shits.

Amis a great observer. I would love to read an Amis novel about multicultural London, where whites are a minority and terrorist attacks are to be expected “as part and parcel of living in a big city”. Here he is on a pool hall in, presumably, the early 90s:

Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Centre, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker. In the ferrety light of poolhalls everyhwere. Gwyn himself had had several beers, and Richard, naturally, was completely smashed. Eighteen tables, all in use, eighteen lucent pyramids over the green troughs and the bright bone balls; and then the multicoloured competitors, Spanish, West Indian, South American, Pacific Rim – and the no-colour Brits, indistinguishable, it seemed, from the great genies of cigarette smoke that moved between the tables like the ghosts of referees…England was changing. Twenty years ago Richard and Gwyn or their equivalents could never have gone to a snooker hall – Gwyn in his chinos and cashmere turtleneck, Richard in his (accidentally appropriate) waistcoat and lopsided bowtie. They would have stood outside, blowing into cupped hands, smelling the bacon grease, and scanned the stubbornly just-literate lettering on the basement placard, and moved aside for the donkey-jacketed and zoot-suited cueists weaving through the dead and wounded on their way down the crackling stone steps. Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn’t have got out. In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you liked.

It is all very British, even in its galling modernity. Nothing much really happens – just a sequence of scenes where Richard tries & fails to fuck Gwyn up, out of pointless rivalry, but it is a highly enjoyable book all the same. After I finished, I wondered at the title: The Information. Not “Information”. No, this is “The Information.” I was reminded of TS Eliot’s:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Amis is very modern in this sense: he inhabits a world of minimal significance. The closest I’ve seen him come to spiritual reality is in Experience, where he writes of his cousin’s rape and murder at the hands of Fred West; but even here, he is merely horrified – he does not understand that evil is a real, material effect and power, a spiritual force.

Amis is a great writer because he works within, and reflects upon, his framework; so The Information is in some ways a superficial novel, but also a novel about this very superficiality. It reminds me of Camus’ The Fall, except that the penumbra of the spiritual constantly presses upon Camus’ protagonist and his limited, narcissistic world, to the point where he himself is dimly aware of that which he denies. Amis’ characters are splendidly, horribly oblivious.

Amis delineates an utterly materialist world. There is no morality beyond that momentarily chosen, for self-aggrandizement or virtue signalling, by talking apes. Thus, a concomitant spike in empty, exhausting materialistic pleasures, for example sex or smoking; the chainsmoking protagonist:

Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met.

A nicotine nymphomaniac – physical pleasure, without an embracing spiritual armature, is a toxic gratification. Without any spiritual substratum, the entire physical world is an absurd world of colliding objects:

Christ, the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?

It is a world of purely internally-generated meaning; a world of competition without appeal to higher, unworldly authority. As with Communism, any system that denies the immaterial must focus obsessively upon minor gradations of rank and privilege, on money and status:

Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let’s all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard – for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind being old if no one was young. 

Most likely, this is central to Amis’ peculiar genius: he observes so closely, so enviously, because there cannot be a god or extra-material value in his world – there is only the material, only status, age, sex, cigarettes. There is no knowledge, only information. And so, it is granted the definite article; it is The Information.

book report: Cloud Atlas

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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: another of the books I’m reading so I can throw it away before I leave Germany. It was a gift from a friend and for a long time I thought, I will never read this undoubted shite, based mostly on the cover

I’ve had enough fokcen horrible experiences with “bestsellers” which turn out to be okay but forgettable (Netherland), supposedly hilarious but actually dull (Rancid Aluminium), tediously well-crafted & lifeless (The Little Friend), pretentious, unconvincing, and badly-researched (Tree of Smoke), “creative writing workshop exemplar” (Enduring Love), wearyingly insubstantial (Birdsong), quite fun but nothing more (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), boring pastiche (The Unconsoled), depressingly pointless & joyless (2666), competent but somehow meagre (The Plot Against America), aggressively unpleasant (The Wasp Factory), disappointingly trivial (Possession).

So I was quite surprised by Cloud Atlas. It’s very good. Not sure I’d re-read it but then I mostly only re-read poetry, philosophy and beyond-very-good fiction. The structure is initially confusing: it begins with the journal of a lawyer at sea in the 1800s, cuts to the letters of a young musician in the 1920s, then a journalist in the 70s, an elderly publisher in the present, then some sci-fi future of Blade Runner-esque androids, then lastly a post-apocalyptic future of rape and cannibalism. There is a connection running throughout, so the musician finds the lawyer’s journals, the journalist meets the recipient of the musician’s letters, the publisher receives a novel by or based on the journalist’s tale, and so on. The connective ligaments are not so explicit as to render great satisfaction to the more obvious reader; indeed, I found myself wondering just what manner of underlying structure there was, beyond a birthmark common to each time-segment and the overlapping narrations, so something of each protagonist (journal, letters, novel, film, video) is encountered in the next sequence; but this is not, in itself, very satisfying.

I think that while the film trailer talks about love and redemption and what not, the real connective matter is connection itself – it’s not a story about love or heroism or anything of that sort; it says rather: “each life & time is connected to others, in some manner”.

Mitchell has a stammer and an autistic son, suggesting that connection, coherence, fluidity, does not come naturally in his world. Had he created a more coherent ligature, perhaps I would have thought it a great novel; as it is, it’s possible I would re-evaluate, were I to read it a second time, and I enjoyed the prose and situations so much I dare say I will read it again, in a few years. The ultimate test of a novel isn’t “does it have profound meaning” but rather “did you enjoy it”. Balls to profundity if it gives no pleasure.

My own sense of slight disappointment most likely comes from my own odd perspective; that is, I remember fragments of another (relatively recent) life and have been told of others. Mitchell seems to be hinting at reincarnation as the underlying structure; but I noted none of the similitudes & ironies of our many lives – the characters of Cloud Atlas seemed to bear no real kinship, beyond a certain outsider, often outcast role in society. The only novel I know which uses reincarnation as a plot device, and comes very close to the reality, is Katherine Kerr’s Deverry series, especially the first four books. But since Mitchell does no more than hint, I can hardly criticise him for something he probably didn’t intend.

And there is a passage – which I failed to mark – where one character says something like “I would like a map by which to guide myself here, a map of the ephemeral and vague, the constantly shifting forces of our destinies & purpose, an atlas of the clouds” (my wording, as I can’t find the original now). It’s very modern in the sense of pointlessness, of history as a mechanical process within which we are churned up & destroyed, from life to life. It is, in a sense, accurate: there seems (as far as I can judge) no linear progression to reincarnation, no divinely-ordained karma; but there is certainly more structure and purpose than one would think from this excellent and enjoyable novel.