Afternoon sun and A.S. Byatt

***EDITED TO ADD: WARNING - MILD SPOILERS****

This afternoon, courtesy of the Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, I sat in the shade in her lovely garden, overlooked by the Sheldonian and the Museum of the History of Science, with a group of other Exonians, listening to A.S. Byatt answering our questions.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favourite novelists. I devour her books, with a passion. But there are two things which have always niggled at me. Well, to be accurate one thing which has always niggled and one thing which niggled when I read her new book, which has been out all of a month. They are the same niggle, essentially. In The Shadow of The Sun the main character is a girl, the daughter of a famous novelist, in the D.H. Lawrence mode, who cannot really decide what to do with her life. In trying to free herself from his shadow, she goes to study at Cambridge, tries to write, starts an affair with the man who tutored her, who is also her father's greatest admirer and explicator. As is the way of things, she becomes pregnant, and the book ends with her decision, which is to have the baby and enter into domestic un-bliss with this rather unsympathetic older man. Her decision was the bit that niggled.

In her most recent book, The Children's Book, one of the main characters - of whom there are many - commits suicide. It's a character to whom I had become somewhat attached - of them all, that character had appeared to be the 'mainest' at the beginning, and the most sympathetic. I was cross about this too.

But when I asked about The Shadow of the Sun earlier today, A.S. Byatt's reply made me think. She talked of historical imagination, and said that it was a novel very much of the 1950s and 60s: one that in effect could have had no other end. The character, as she pointed out, was not as strong as she was herself, a rather battered girl, who took the only way open to her. I think that this is what makes A.S. Byatt a great novelist, rather than merely good: she takes hard decisions on behalf of her characters, that are true to who they are, rather than bowing to sentiment or desire for the world to be other than as it is. It rather fits The Children's Book niggle too - even before the suicide, when reading I had wondered how on earth this character could escape the corner into which their (used as an impersonal pronoun to avoid revealing the gender) personality had driven them.

So, hang it all, I think she's done for both those niggles. Byatt is a brilliant and intelligent writer. I cannot recommend her work highly enough.

Just a passing thought...

I don't know how many of you heard the interview with the Tory MP Anthony Steen, but you can certainly find it on the internet if you didn't. He claimed that the public interest in the fact that he had claimed £18,000 of expenses to spend on tree pruning on his estate was 'jealousy' because he had a big house that 'looks like Balmoral'... He also said the Freedom of Information Act should never have been passed and that the public had no right to interfere in his private life. Steen also claimed David Cameron had been 'surprised' when he said he would be retiring at the next election, and that he thought Cameron had been a little disappointed.

The cynic in me suspects that it was this bit that really annoyed Cameron, leading to his response when being interviewed for Radio 4, saying that 'another squeak' from Steen would lead to him being 'out on his (2) hoof.' Anyone else think that's a slightly odd expression? The pause shows that he's stopped what he was originally going to say, to substitute a different word. Now, to my mind, the phrase is to be 'out on your ear.' Which isn't offensive enough to swallow on Radio 4. So I suspect that the Right Honourable Mr Cameron was in fact going to say 'out on his arse.' Sometimes English Language study gives you that little bit of insight...

And a small postscript to my earlier rant. I got final approval on the review after about seven or eight rewrites, from the senior editor, describing it as a 'fantastic peace [sic].' Vindicated, moi?

Reviewing Rant - Just getting it off my chest!

This is a rant, and unashamedly so. I’ve been doing quite a lot of reviewing lately, and while some of it has been a delightful experience, one particular publication has made it difficult beyond belief. It is, naturally, the one run by amateurs, graduate students at my university, who are taking the opportunity afforded to be as dictatorial as possible, demanding multiple rewrites and frankly abusing the already frustrating Microsoft Word Track Changes. Bearing in mind that I have an editorial job on another publication myself, I know what thereof I speak. Of course, I would dislike them – they didn’t like my review! In fact, I accept that the editors have the right to ask me to change my writing – they are in effect the people who commissioned it. But I have a few specific ‘niggles’ to use their phrase:

1) People who have not read the book rewriting my sentences to be more to their stylistic taste and thus making them factually inaccurate.

2) People who bring up grammatical ‘niggles’ which they are wrong about (‘their is not a gender neutral third person pronoun yet’ (well, yes it is – it isn’t singular, it’s true, but I was using it to refer to a group of people some of whom were female and some of whom were male)) , and then changing my correct relative pronoun ‘which’ for the incorrect/ American, but preferred by Word, ‘that’. (I refused to bow to that one. Just call me a rebel.)

3) The same people reviewing my review and making directly opposite comments on the two drafts – eg, I like this sentence/ paragraph in the first draft, and then saying they don’t like it and it’s unnecessary in the second draft….

There, I feel better now. And it’s better to get it off my chest here, than to send it in an email to them!

Reading Between the Lines

I had intended to blog today about the wonderful fact that Carol Ann Duffy is our new Poet Laureate. It's a poignant joy given that U.A. Fanthorpe died earlier this week, but I think she's probably smiling right now, anyway.

Instead, I'm very very cross. The reason is this BBC News article which is naturally based 'on figures published by the Conservatives.' It's all about dropping numbers taking English Literature GCSE. The fact that 37% of those on Free School Meals (used as a proxy variable for socio-economic status in education research) do not take the subject, compared to 28% overall, is seen as 'evidence' that the 'poorer pupils' are missing out on 'our country's cultural heritage.' I imagine that the Daily Mail will be reporting this story with the tag question 'has the world gone mad?'

The answer is no, it hasn't. Nor are those pupils who do not take English Literature GCSE missing out on Shakespeare and other great literature. Near the bottom of the article, in a quiet sort of way, the BBC does manage to put in Schools' Minister Jim Knight, who rightly points out that English GCSE contains elements of both English Language and English Literature study. (Incidently this is the reason why anyone who claims to have a GCSE in English Language is lying. There is no such thing.)

Lots of people don't take English Literature for good reasons. Such as the fact that they are struggling with English in the first place and need the time to make sure they get a good grade in the subject which is going to be an essential qualification for them to get a job, get into sixth form, get 'five good GCSEs.' Most schools teach English and English Literature in the same space of time that Maths gets to do one GCSE. It's a squash and forcing everyone to do English Literature will in fact have the effect of disadvantaging, not advantaging some pupils.

Then there's the fact that some pupils do Media Studies instead. (Cue shouts: Has the world gone mad?) Actually, studies have shown that for some pupils doing Media Studies instead of English Literature boosts their English result. Studying something that is both of interest to them and ties in with their strengths makes them better learners of allied subjects.

It might seem an odd stance for an English teacher to take, but honestly, the Conservatives are just being lazy in declaring this 'shocking.' They're looking for cheap shots, but like the good critical reader and media student that I am, I can read between the lines to tell you... don't believe everything you read!

March's Poet: Leontia Flynn

So, as promised, slightly out of the month, the first poet, who is 35 and Irish, and certainly female. Leontia Flynn's Drives is her second book, and the title encapsulates many of her themes. There are poems about literal drives, journeys taken at home and abroad, and about the personal ambitions and needs which drive us on, interspersed with poems about the driven - authors and artists explored through the first person voice.

I liked this book, liked the poems in it, but I didn't love it, or any of them. There's no individual poem which leapt out and grabbed me, demanding to be revisited when needed. My favourite, and the one which came closest, was a poem on Rome:

Rome wasn't built in a day. 'Rome?
We will take the lot in one short afternoon.'

There were others that came close too. 'Song' which can be found online here and an ironic poem about parodies of country songs which ends with the abandoned narrator quoting 'if the phone doesn't ring, baby you'll know it's me...' For me, the strongest images were the ones from her own life - the domestic heartbreak of a father suffering from dementia, or the aftermath of his death, and the glorious triumph of the poem addressed to her unborn child, a note of hope on which the book ends (rather like Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife). The sonnets about Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf all resonate too.

And, I have to say, there are moments when you really like her. The idea of a 'pastoral' being a Sunday morning with the papers, cds and coffee; Ozymandias mixed with the White House, and a Christmas poem that likens Christmas to cholera. Reading the book again, to write about it, I find myself warming to the poems anew, and thinking maybe I've been too damning with faint praise. Perhaps these are drives which need to be familiar journeys before you can really see the details of the countryside as it whizzes past.

A post which takes longer than expected to get to the point

About a month ago, I came up with a new New Year's Resolution. A bit late you may argue, so maybe I should just call it a March Resolution.

I was browsing on guardian.co.uk, as I do from time to time, when a blog article caught my eye, entitled 'Why we need a female poet laureate'. It all seemed eminently reasonable. And there are a nice selection of eminent women from whom to choose. But not as many as there are men. So naturally I started looking around, and I found that in general male poets are more likely to be celebrated. The Guardian's own 'great poets' series included only one woman: Sylvia Plath. Their critic Frances Leviston, who is also a poet herself, wrote to justify this.

Now, I'm definitely a proponent of people succeeding on the basis of merit, but I thought about the poets that I read, and specifically the poetry books that I own. A good half of them are dead, and of them all but Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop are men. I do better with established poets: Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope are three of my favourites, along with Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney (or 'Famous Seamus' as Mrs Greenwood would say in her broadest 'Norren Irish' accent), Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard etc etc. The list goes on. Unsurprisingly my collection shows a bias towards poets who have appeared in the AQA Anthology, although I'd like to plead that Armitage and Duffy were on my favourites list before that anthology existed, and that nothing on this earth would persuade me to buy a book by Gillian Clarke.

But when we get to emergent poets - people who you won't necessarily have heard of, or of whom I hadn't really heard, people just starting out, most of those kind of poets are men. Michael Symmons Roberts, for example, whom I heard reading jointly with Simon Armitage and loved. The books of poetry sent to me when I was a member of the Poetry Books Society were all by men. I do own a book by Lucy Newlyn, called Ginnel, which my mother bought me, because it's about a childhood spent in the same places we grew up, but I'm afraid although it's a first collection, Lucy Newlyn herself is an established academic, a good few years older than my imagination painted her on reading her poems.

The thing is, it's quite hard to get ahead in poetry. You need to have had plenty of poems published in journals and magazines, and ideally to have won a few competitions. There's only a few outlets for poetry publishing in this country, although Bloodaxe Books are doing a marvellous job (and in the North too!) and I urge you to support them. But without support, these young poets aren't going to get anywhere. They're going to give up and stick to the day job, or spend fifty years writing their first collection.

So this was my new New Year's Resolution. To buy and read one book of poetry per month written by a woman under forty. How to find books by women under forty turned out to be a whole new challenge. I had intended to use this post to review the first one, but it turned out that the introductory justification was much longer than I'd intended. So I'll leave you for now with the suggestion that you think about whether you want a world with poetry in it, and that if you do, you're going to need to support something which is not so much an industry, and more a service to the community.

An Inkling of another world

This morning I went to Narnia. Sort of.

C. S. Lewis bought a house in 1930, jointly with his brother and the mother of one his friends who was killed in the First World War, with whom he had lived ever since. The house in question was 'The Kilns', in Risinghurst, a suburb of Oxford which now stands immediately outside the ringroad, about ten minutes' drive from where I now live. The house then stood at one end of an 8-acre garden, which included a large pond or lake, which was a water filled clay-pit, with a number of brick kilns scattered around it, and a wooded headland. Five acres of this garden are now the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve, administered by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust, and open to the public to wander around at will.

Local lore* has it that this woodland is the inspiration for the Narnia books, written after Lewis moved to the Kilns. This morning it was quiet and empty, despite the sun. A couple of coots were making desultory circles on the lake, although a few ducks emerged later on. The trees were ankle-deep in dead leaves, and there were more than a few muddy holes, some of which were bridged, some not. Behind the lake the hillside rises steeply and there is a slightly clearer patch of woodland, with seats. It's only here that you really escape the feeling of being in a town - albeit at the edge, because you are away from the lower edges which abut people's gardens and are overlooked by the roofs of houses.

I didn't feel that it was Narnia, for that very reason. It was too close to this world to be in another. And to be fair, I suspect I may have had too high expectations of the place. I expected to walk in and suddenly recognise the places where the Pevensies met the Beavers, or where the Marshwiggles pitched their tents. And that was never going to happen. Narnia is not a real place, or not one on this planet: it exists more in a kind ur-imagination to which we all have access, but which we perhaps see in slightly different ways, complicated further by the television and film versions, which took our minds' eyes to Scotland and New Zealand, both a far cry from Oxford.



But when I'd released that wish to see 'the real Narnia', leaving myself open to just enjoying the woodland, things began to fall into place. This woodland isn't Narnia; it's the Wood Between the Worlds. It's the place from which you can get to other worlds - the place that Lewis leapt off from. And here and there I began to see where Narnia had crept in. In the clearing at the top I saw the place where Caspian encounters the mythic inhabitants of the forest dancing and vows to restore their country to them. Around the place lie round sandstone boulders, covered with lichen and mushrooms, known as 'doggers': a board tells of the legend that they were used as marbles by the giants who used to live in the mediaeval forests of England. The Silver Chair sprang to mind, and stayed there as I saw a series of stone pillars, diminishing in size, which looked like they had once supported a crossing over a stream, or the ravine that Eustace and Jill cross with Puddleglum, in the eye of my imagination.

And the best thing about it being the Wood Between the Worlds? It's not just Narnia you can get to from there. There's a forest full of other worlds just waiting to be discovered. I'll be going back to find them.

* I have to point out that it is only local lore, no matter how bandied about on the internet. It seems more likely that the inspiration for Narnia was the Mourne Mountains, located in Northern Ireland, near where C S Lewis grew up, at least when he wasn't away at school.