Book 241: Svalbard (English) – Dark Matter: a ghost story (Michelle PAVER)

Hugo, the keen glaciologist, asked Mr Eriksson to head into the fjord to get nearer the glacier, and we craned our necks at fissured walls of ice and caverns of mysterious blue. From deep within came weird creaks and groans, as if a giant were hammering to get out. Then came a noise like a rifle shot, and a huge segment of ice crashed into the sea, sending up spouts of water, and a wave that rocked the ship. Shattered ice turned the sea a milky pale-green. The hammering went on. Now I know why people believe that Spitsbergen was haunted.

I have to admit that ghost stories are not what I normally read. Perhaps the closest I’ve gotten in Tirelessreader so far was my zombie story from Haiti. But I always intended this to get me reading outside my ‘comfort zone’…

Svalbard (also known as Spitzbergen) is part of the Kingdom of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle. It has the most northerly permanent population on Earth.

This is the story of a small 1937 scientific expedition to Svalbard. The main protagonist, 28-year-old Jack Miller, is poor and from a lower social class than his companions. This gives him somewhat of an inferiority complex. He hero-worships the expedition leader, Gus, and craves his approbation. In fact, class is a major theme of the book.

“I suppose what Gus was trying to say is that here in the Arctic, class doesn’t matter. I think he’s wrong about that, class always matters. But maybe up here it doesn’t matter so much.”

The young scientists are to base themselves at an isolated uninhabited site called Gruhuken but which had the remains of defunct whaling and mining activities. We come to learn that these had also left another unpleasant legacy. (Perhaps the name of the place should have given them some warning, since ‘gru’ means ‘horror’ in Norwegian – no doubt related to the ‘grue’ in ‘gruesome’).

While they stay there, the midnight sun turns into endless night. When he is left alone by his companions (Gus had become ill and needed to be evacuated), Jack’s mental state clearly deteriorates and the horror increases. Whether the one is linked to the other is up to us to judge – since nothing concrete happens to him to cause this, maybe it was just a case of cabin fever? Jack’s terror centres on a ‘bear post’ outside the leftover hut.

Dark matter seems to have become deeply entwined with Svalbard! Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (whose ‘dust’ is dark matter) also visits the islands. As Jack says,

In one of my periodicals, there’s a paper by someone who’s worked out that what we know of the universe is only a tiny percentage of what actually exists. He says what’s left can’t be seen or detected, but it’s there; he calls it ‘dark matter’. [This might be a reference to the Swiss Fritz Zwicky in 1933]. Of course, no one believes him; but I find the idea unsettling. Or rather, not the idea itself, that’s merely an odd notion about outer space. What I don’t like is the feeling I sometimes get that other things might exist around us, of which we know nothing.

Jack obviously believes in the supernatural…

Once or twice, I felt that there were anachronisms – for example I don’t think people in the 1930s knew the correct scientific explanation for the aurora borealis (northern lights), that’s only been confirmed fairly recently.

Each chapter ends with a lovely illustration – these weren’t attributed, so perhaps are from the author’s photos?

If I found the plot sometimes predictable, along with what I suspect might be common in horror writing (suggesting rather than saying that something is happening – for example, the Norwegian ship captain warns them off going to Gruhuken, but won’t say why), and as I said horror is not my preferred genre, this was still a good read, and it has received very good reviews.

Michelle Paver was born in Malawi (then Nyasaland) and now lives in Britain. She lived in Norway and visited Svalbard.

Paver, Michelle (1960 – ), Dark Matter, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion, 2011 (originally published 2010), ISBN 978-1-4091-2118-3

Book 216: Dominica (English) – Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean RHYS)

Yet one day when I was waiting there I was suddenly very much afraid. The door was open to the sunlight, someone was whistling near the stables, but I was afraid. I was certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it. No one had ever spoken to me about obeah – but I knew what I would find if I dared to look.

It’s maybe a surprise to find some top-class literature from one of the world’s smallest countries (I have only the last few still to publish), but here we are in Dominica with Jean Rhys. I didn’t realise when I chose Wide Sargasso Sea (despite having watched the film) that this masterpiece is actually an extension (or rather a prequel) of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – which I sadly haven’t gotten around to reading yet, although I’m familiar with the story. It is set in Jamaica, Dominica and England at the time when slavery was abolished (in theory at least). Rhys takes Brontë’s insane, imprisoned Bertha Mason (whose real name, in Rhys’ story, is Antoinette) and imagines her back story, giving her a voice, along with that of her fascinating but intimidating husband Edward Rochester (not actually named in this novel). He insists on calling her Bertha against her will – which is equivalent to cursing someone in obeah (‘sorcery’/spirit worship).

The novel is divided into three parts: first Antoinette tells of her sad childhood, then Rochester recounts his first marriage, and in the third we are in England following Antoinette’s chaotic mentality.

Antoinette’s mother was from French-speaking Martinique. She is a Creole, so halfway between the black and white worlds but accepted by neither, for the blacks despise the poor whites too, and her life seems equally tentative. She grows up in a haunted house in Jamaica with the black ‘obeah woman’ Christophine.

Here we are much more aware than in Brontë (I think) of the colonial relationship between Jamaica and Dominica, on the one hand, and Britain on the other, both obviously in the real world and more subtly in the power relationship and lack of mutual trust between Antoinette and Rochester. Both of them seem to be always lying and concealing. In fact, it seems as if everyone is lying, or at least unreliable. Each other’s world seems unreal and inexplicable to them. Maybe both of them are mad, or is he ‘just’ a drunkard? Rochester hates the night – and blacks. As for her, is she innocent? devious? mad?

For such a short novel, this story is brilliant, adding a lot of depth and different perspectives to the Jane Eyre story. There is a lot of cleverness, like the pun between Antoinette and Marionette (for that is the way he manipulated her), and beautiful writing. It is unsettling, mysterious, and spooky. Yes, a small masterpiece.

Rhys, Jean (1890 – 1979), Wide Sargasso Sea, London, Penguin, 2001 (first published 1966), ISBN 978-0-140-81803-1

Book 204: French Guiana (French) – Papillon (Henri CHARRIÈRE)

We didn’t heave [the warders] into the ward: we went straight off with the three rifles. Clousiot first, then the kid, then me: down the stairs, half-lit by a lantern. Clousiot had dropped his iron; I still had mine in my left hand, and in my right the rifle. At the bottom of the stairs, nothing. Ink-black night all round us. We had to look hard to make out the wall over on the river side. We hurried towards it. Once we were there, I bent down. Clousiot climbed up, straddled the top, hauled Maturette up and then me. We let ourselves drop into the darkness on the far side. Clousiot fell badly into a hole, twisting his foot. Maturette and I landed properly. We two got up: we had left the rifles before we went over. Clousiot tried to get to his feet but couldn’t: he said his leg was broken. I left Maturette with Clousiot and ran towards the corner of the wall, feeling it all the way with my hand. It was so dark that when I got to the end of the wall I didn’t know it, and with my hand reaching out into emptiness I fell flat on my face. Over on the river side I heard a voice saying, ‘Is that you?’  

From one country where a small island (Príncipe) was used as a cruel prison to another…

Sadly, French Guiana is one of the few countries in South America that I haven’t visited. From Porsche’s take on Cayenne, I assume that the capital has very bad roads on which the locals drive very fast…

I’m sure that Papillon (Charrière) would have loved to have a Porsche Cayenne. It would have helped him on his escape attempts, of which there were so many that I lost count!

In reading all the independent nations of the world, I stuck to novels. Although I’ll still try to preference novels when reading the non-independent ones, I might occasionally be a bit more liberal. In Papillon, Charrière claims to be telling the true story of his life. Though it is substantially true, it subsequently turned out that he had fictionalised it somewhat (or quite a lot), which is why I’ve included it here – apart from the fact that it’s one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. (Wikipedia describes it as an ‘autobiographical novel’ and discusses its authenticity). Papillon spent a total of 13 years in prison (between 1931 and 1945), in Colombia and Venezuela as well as in France and French Guiana (including on Devil’s Island), and they all seem to have been brutally inhumane. What kept him going (when so many others died), apart from the help of his friends, was his burning desire for revenge, and yet, once free, he gives that up and is determined to prove his goodness by living as a model citizen.

If we can believe what he tells of himself, Papillon comes across as an honest and honourable man, towards his fellow prisoners, the outsiders, and even his jailers. He passes over his life before his sentencing, but he admits (at the end) that he was part of the Paris underworld and a criminal, though he always insisted that he was innocent of the murder for which he was convicted and transported to French Guiana.

When I read Papillon, it was a bit of a jolt to realise that France was still transporting convicts to its colony until 1945 (Britain sent its last convicts to Australia in 1868), and that the European Space Agency spaceport in Kourou was then one of the prison camps – the description of it here was fascinating.

I did feel that some of the reported conversations were slightly unbelievable (sometimes a bit too moralising). But they must surely be reconstructed rather than remembered verbatim.

Papillon comes across as a man almost addicted to escaping. Even when there is nothing to escape from, he has to get away – most stupidly, to my mind, from the paradisaical sojourn with the Guajiro American Indians in Colombia with two lovers (sisters), one of whom is pregnant with his children (did he ever meet them?) Again, we don’t know whether life among them is truly as idyllic as he portrays – it feels like part of the long French tradition of admiring the ‘noble savages’ and contrasting them with the corruption of Western society, which goes back to Rousseau. But I have no reason to doubt it. In any case, he abandons them with barely a thought, as he does later to his equally lovely (Asian) Indian wife – not to mention the wife he already had in France. Still escaping.

Papillon’s lauding of his adopted homeland Venezuela seems a bit at odds with what he witnessed there (and was it really so much better than Colombia, for example?) I couldn’t help feeling that he was trying to ingratiate himself with his new countrymen. I would have thought that he would have learnt good Spanish while living in Venezuela, but there are still lots of mistakes in his reported Spanish conversations from the escape attempts.

I won’t spoil the tale by repeating any more of what happens, you have to read the story for yourself if you haven’t already. (By the way, the plots of the two movies are quite different from what Papillon relates). Charrière is a great writer and story-teller, and unlike most prisoner memoirs his book counts as great literature too. It is enthralling. (I’m now reading the sequel, Banco).

Charrière, Henri (1906 – 1973), Papillon, Paris, Pocket, 2002, ISBN 9782266118354

(originally published 1969)

English translation:

Papillon, translated from French by Patrick O’Brian, London, Panther, 1970

Book 171: Estonia – The Czar’s Madman = Keisri Hull (Jaan KROSS)

So, back to the first question: should I support him in his madness or in his sanity?

            That would seem to depend on whether he is, in fact, mad or sane. I can’t tell – I don’t even know what I consider him to be. Is it possible to recover from such a state, in such circumstances? I believe (while being aware of my deep ignorance, I still have to voice an opinion) – I believe that such a recovery may well be rare but not impossible.

Timo has been released from prison into house arrest but is still in danger from police informers. He is generally considered to be insane (if you criticise the tsar, not to mention if you are a noble who marries a peasant woman, ipso facto you are mad), and it was his madness that got him out of prison. He has written a dangerous critical memorandum to the then Tsar (Alexander I) – posing a dilemma for the narrator, the brother of his wife (Eeva), who has discovered it in its hiding place and has to decide what to do (most of all, whether he really is mad, or just pretending to be for his protection). And what is the secret link between Timo and the tsar?

The narrator, Jakob, keeps an equally dangerous secret diary over the decades, which is this novel, supposedly found long after the events.

The characters in the novel are great, especially the enigmatic Timo, who has the enormous courage, morality, brainpower and luck – in short, ‘character’ – needed by the dissident. He is ‘guarded’ by the clever, beautiful Eeva (who is nevertheless not a comfortable fit in her newfound nobility), then also by the much less sympathetic Peter Mannteufel (whose surname aptly means “man devil” in German).

Kross is one of Estonia’s best writers, who was himself imprisoned by the Russians (under the USSR), and this novel, written during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, carries clever criticism of Russian authoritarianism, though it is far more than that. He, and his novel (one of the best historical novels I’ve read, though you might like to brush up on your Russian history of the period before starting – it’s based on a true story), deserve a much wider audience abroad.

Kross, Jaan (1920 – 2007), The Czar’s Madman, translated by Anselm Hollo, London, Harvill Press, 2003, ISBN 9781860465796

(first published in Estonian 1978 as Keisri Hull)

Book 83: Rhodesia (English) – The Grass is Singing (Doris LESSING)

She realized, suddenly, standing there, that all those years she had lived in that house, with the acres of bush all around her, and she had never penetrated into the trees, had never gone off the paths. And for all those years she had listened wearily, through the hot dry months, with her nerves prickling, to that terrible shrilling, and had never seen the beetles who made it. Lifting her eyes she saw she was standing in the full sun, that seemed so low she could reach up a hand and pluck it out of the sky: a big red sun, sullen with smoke, like a shining plow disc or a polished plate, ready for plucking. She reached up her hand; it brushed against a cluster of leaves, and something whirred away. With a little moan of horror she ran through the bushes and the grass, away back to the clearing. There she stood still, clutching at her throat.

 

Nobel laureate (2007). Doris Lessing is an amazing writer. The breadth of her writing genres is breathtaking. She was born in Persia (now Iran), grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which qualifies her to represent that defunct country, whose racisim would have been anathema to her, and later lived in Britain. Apart from needing to give Rhodesia some representation, as one of the countries that has existed during my lifetime, Lessing is simply too important to ignore, although modern Zimbabwe is so different that I wanted to choose a ‘Black’ writer to represent it (hence, ‘Bones’ by Chenjerai Hove).
This, her first novel, is a murder mystery which begins and ends with the crime, while all the rest of the book fleshes out what caused the killing. The victim, Mary, is a city girl who should never have left her satisfactory urban life but (due to the needling of her contemporaries) marries an eternally struggling farmer, Dick Turner, who seems congenitally immune to success, and she buries herself on his isolated farm. So isolated are they that she does not even know about the war. The (distant) neighbours despise these ‘poor whites’, who in turn hold themselves aloof from them. Dick treats his land a bit better than the other rapacious ‘Whites’, likewise his ‘Black’ labour force (although partly because of the difficulty of acquiring and holding onto them). But Mary becomes an ever more virulent racist – yet we can understand (although not sympathise) because we have seen how she has come to be this way. Despite this, she is drawn into a highly charged relationship with her final male servant (having driven off a string of predecessors), Moses, who she had once abused.
Mary’s mental disintegration stands as a symbol for the inevitable breakdown of the racist Rhodesian regime. Lessing masterfully describes her boring life, yet I couldn’t keep from eagerly turning the pages. I would definitely say this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

 

LESSING, Doris (1919 -2013 ), The Grass is Singing, New York, HarperCollins, 2008, ISBN 9780061673740

Book 32: Spain (English/Spanish) – (El ingenioso hidalgo) Don Quijote (de La Mancha) (Miguel de CERVANTES)

In a place in La Mancha, whose name I have no desire to recall, lived not long ago an hidalgo, one of those with a lance in the rack, an old leather shield, a skinny nag and a greyhound…

Having lost his wits, he stumbled upon the strangest thought that has ever occurred to anyone in the world, and he fancied that it was just and fitting, both for the furthering of his honour and for the service of his country, to make of himself a knight errant, going forth into the whole world with his arms and horse in search of adventures, and to put into practice all that he had read of what knights errant did – righting wrongs, and putting himself in peril and danger, and from these, having accomplished them, he would cover himself in eternal renown and fame.

[my translation]

 

I read this through in English, and also in Spanish (which I’m still plodding through – the Spanish is not too difficult, but it’s a big work).

 

How often does it happen that the beginning of a new endeavour seems to remain the greatest? Don Quijote is one of the first novels, and is still one of the best. It seems like a miracle that this work was written at the time it was. Though it looks back the dying age of chivalry (to the extent that it ever existed), in some ways it seems an incredibly modern (even Post-Modern) work. I love the way Cervantes does not take himself, or his creation, too seriously – there’s a lot of fun in the way he editorialises and sends up all and sundry.

The basic plot, where the eccentric would-be knight sallies off seeking adventures and is dragged home by his more prosaic friends, is too well-known to go into here. It is a satire of the chivalric romances which were on their last legs, but this spoof turned out to be the greatest of them all. Courtly love, which was really a ridiculous conceit when all is said and done, was just begging for a send-up. There is still the danger of taking literature too seriously (I have to plead guilty in the case of Tolkien) and living in a dream world which is more colourful and beautiful than the reality (instead of just visiting it), of seeing world as we want it to be.

Here the narrator can see all points of view, like us he clearly loves Don Quijote despite making fun of him, and takes him seriously. There’s a lot of tension between the narrator’s editorialising and the exciting tale. For example he cheekily interrupts the thrilling duel between Quijote and the Basque traveller in full flight because, he tells us, the narrative breaks off there. Fortunately for us, he does ‘find’ the ending later!

Cervantes has created three of the loveliest characters in literature. Though he lives in a dream world, is impractical and crazy, it’s impossible not to love and feel compassion for Quijote, the man who dares to dream the impossible dream. His page, Sancho Panza, is steady and steadfast, the mascot for all those priceless people in the world who sacrifice themselves to care for someone unable to look after themselves. And lastly, there is the ennobled nag Rocinante.

It is funny, touching, very clever. The main question I kept asking myself as I read this wondrous work was, why did I wait so long? If you haven’t tackled it yet, don’t deny yourself the pleasure any longer!

 

CERVANTES, Miguel de (1547-1616), El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Ediciones Cátedra (Letras Hispánicas), Madrid, 1982, ISBN 84-376-0116-9 (2 vols.)