Over Christmas I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s ‘Royal Highness’ (first published 1909)– which is published in the UK by Vintage. It’s rather different from the rest of Mann’s work – though he actually wrote it about the role of the artist in society – an early-twentieth-century conception of the artist which saw him/her as a being essentially set apart from everyday life – it’s a Ruritanian romance – impoverished grand-ducal prince falls in love with American millionaire’s daughter and finally marries her. Though themes of madness, disease, a crazy dog, an insane countess, and a rose that smells of decay run through the novel, its subject-matter is an up-market treatment of one of the penny-novelette themes of the time.
Re-reading it for the first time since university – and for the first time since I became a published author – I found it hard work. Granted, I find ‘The Magic Mountain’ hard work, but that is for different reasons. There are many touches of humour and wonderful writing that show that the novel is really written by the Thomas Mann who wrote the wonderful ‘Buddenbrooks’ but my judgement, after reading it was that a novel of 381 pages (this comment, as Amazon likes to say about customer reviews, refers to the German version, the length of the English one may be different) has about as much proper, publishable material as a novella. It should have been cut, cut, cut.
Now Thomas Mann’s work is not where you would expect to find brief, punchy writing, but whereas his other works are meaty, and all those pages are stuffed full of intelligent and and thought-provoking subject-matter, I found this one sadly repetitious and full of empty narrative spaces. He spends far too much time describing domestic interiors, for example – I kept thinking I was reading World of Interiors magazine and wondering where the photographs would come. (They’d be taken by Fritz von der Schulenburg of course.)
Mann famously (well, famously in Germany) refused to cut ‘Buddenbrooks’, and I think there he was right. I wouldn’t miss a word of that wonderful novel. But he should have cut ‘Royal Highness’. Mind, the early twentieth-century critics had different reasons for greeting it with less than enthusiasm: the ‘Happy End’ and the operetta-atmosphere of the whole thing. ‘A descent into the flat land of optimism,’ one critic called it, while another remarked that ‘German novels should end tragically, in downfall, in the twilight of the Gods.’ (The history of the next thirty-six years provided plenty of material for such literature, but I won’t go there now.)
Of course novels were much longer in the past, and that it’s wrong to apply modern-day criteria to them – but I do honestly think that ‘Royal Highness’ has survived hostile crits, is in the canon, still published even – and translated into I dunnamany languages – just because it’s been buoyed up by the author’s other work. And of course because it provides material for students of German literature to chomp.
My question is: does it matter? Does it matter if some ordinary person picks up this slightly flabby novel and thinks this has to be good writing, because everyone respects it, because the rest of Mann’s work is brilliant? Clearly it doesn’t matter to the publishers. They can sell it. If they couldn’t, it’d be for the scrap-heap licketty-split. We all know THAT.
But that’s my question for the New Year: is a work of fiction good if the public has been persuaded it is, or is there such a thing as intrinsic literary merit?
‘What is your soundtrack?’ Miriam Halahmy wrote on Monday. My soundtrack is often the noise of bombs whining down, of artillery bombardment, of planes strafing civilians, things I’ve never heard, but that my mother – she told me once – relived when I was in utero, which maybe explains why all through my childhood I was terrified when I heard a siren. I mean the air-raid type sirens which were in use in the ‘50s. There was one that used to go off from Kendal quarry every day and I never got used to it. Maybe it was an air-raid siren working out its time. But the bells that ring out over the ruined city of Berlin in Saving Rafael – German churchbells, not the severe mathematical patterns we hear in this country, but a cluster of notes rung together in harmony – come from the Christmas record that was always played in my childhood home. I can hear them in my mind now.
Music affects me in two ways when I’m writing. Firstly, there’s the music that actually occurs in the novel – a lot of Django Reinhart and Louis Armstrong in Last Train from Kummersdorf and there’s a particular track on my Charlie Parker box set from the ‘40s – ‘Dizzy Boogie’ – which has really lit up the jazz I write about in the novel I’m working on at present. But I will say no more about work in progress.. When I was writing Saving Rafael, I had a cd called ‘Berlin by Night’ which contained popular music from Germany in the Nazi period. Not, I hasten to add, Nazi songs, but songs ranging from ‘Lili Marleen’ to disguised jazz, given a German title and lyric to make it more acceptable to the authorities. It has ‘Es geht Alles Vorüber’, the smash hit of the end of the war, the one that people kept listening to. Its message: ‘Everything passes, everything goes by, and every December is followed by May’ annoyed Propaganda Minister Goebbels – not martial enough – but that made no difference. My mother associated it, bitterly, with the letter she got telling her her first love had been killed in action – but she did have her Maytime after all, when she met my British father.
I listened to that cd over and over again, and composed the ‘theme lyric’ for the novel, in slight imitation of a terribly shlocky number that had me frankly laughing my head off. Jenny, in the novel, knew it was trash, but because it was playing the first time she realised Raf was interested in her, it got terribly important to her.
And yet – the scene where my young hero reaches across the table and starts playing with Jenny’s fingers comes, not from any of those contemporaneous songs, but from Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto (in D Major, I believe). I’d been wondering how to write that scene just before I was taken abruptly into hospital to have a tumour taken out of my spine. The second night after my surgery, I had a dreadful moment when I woke up and thought: ‘Somebody’s in pain,’ and then realised it was me – just as authors describe in many novels, and I always thought they’d made it up! But the thing that made me cry was that I thought I’d lost my novel.
I got some more opiates from the nurses, pulled myself together – they were dealing with an emergency in the room and the last thing they needed was an author agonising – and then the next morning I was listening to the Tchaikowsky on my personal stereo and suddenly I was in the Café Kranzler again. I’d found the novel! Such a relief, because honestly, it was an awful moment, and I realised how important a companion the novel I’m working on is to me.
Tchaikowsky wrote the concerto as a love-letter to a young violinist – who didn’t reciprocate his affection – but it is the most passionate, flirtatious, wonderful bit, and the part of the slow movement I was listening to was just like someone playing with their loved one’s fingers. I had something to write on, so I reached out – I had to lie flat in bed – and scrawled it down.
There’s a ja
The picture is of my grandfather in German police uniform in Cologne after the war. If you enlarge the image you'll see the little puncture marks where the Nazi-era medals have been removed.
I was commenting on extreme departures from historical fact in a kids’ book about the Holocaust, and somebody said to me: ‘Leslie. It’s fiction.’ I didn’t answer that, just thought about it. Because I have written two books about Nazi Germany myself, and getting it as right as possible really matters to me.
Before I go further, I have to say that I do view what I write as fiction, absolutely not works of history. Entertainment, even. I invent characters, and even if I wrote about people who actually existed, I’d still want to use my imagination to write scenes for which there is no documentary evidence. But – and this is very important to me – I like to know that the documentary evidence makes what I write probable and therefore feasible. So, when I wrote about a young girl who has a romantic relationship with a Jewish boy she’s hiding, I feel happier because I have read accounts by survivors who were hidden by their girlfriends. And I have on my shelves approximately 3m of books about Nazi Germany, ranging from the wonderful 4-volume Noakes and Pridham: Nazism, A Documentary Reader, to survivor stories in English and German; my mother’s memoir of her childhood in Nazi Germany; family letters, dvds of the bombing of Berlin, historical maps and timetables; and analytical books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, which should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how people can commit atrocities.
Does this mean that I am hampered in my writing by so much research? No, I don’t think so. I use the books, sometimes to read myself into a sense of the period, sometimes because I need to check the facts. If I’m going to say that certain restrictions – like not being able to buy meat or new clothes – were inflicted on Berlin’s Jewish population at a particular date, I check it out in Noakes and Pridham. The fact-checking certainly makes me a slower writer. But I don’t, I hope, ever bludgeon my readers with chunks of information just to show that I’ve done my homework. The story is paramount, but it must be founded on something real.
In addition, one often finds things out that are better than anything one could make up, or which solve narrative problems. Like the escape hatches between cellars that were part of German air-raid precautions. I saw the construction of one on a German dvd of the bombing. That became part of a scene in Saving Rafael which I based on a story my mother told me, about being trapped beneath a blazing hotel in Berlin. Her story was far too good not to use, but her experience had been so traumatic that her memory had blanked some parts of the story out. I had to do quite a lot of reading – from a book I have called Berlin Im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin in World War 2) and watching the dvd, to work out how she and the others could have escaped. Also, on the topic of bombing, I read a diarist of the period saying: ‘I’d never seen so many people weeping on the streets,’ which gave me the image of people walking through the blazing streets, dragging stuff they’d managed to save from their homes, crying. Why make that up, when the facts are so powerful?
But do I regard myself as better than people who aren’t so thorough in their research? No, that would be very arrogant of me. I said in my July blog, that I love to time-travel. It’s my adult equivalent of going through the wardrobe door into Narnia. But I have always been fascinate
It feels strange, writing in august. Back when my kids were little, or even young, I usually abandoned the attempt and just became Mum for the period of the holidays when we weren't on holiday, as well as when we were. I used to start writing again in September, when we returned, the weather was cooler, and they were back at school.
Now August is when everyone else is away, my email box fills up only slowly, and the traffic in town is non-existent. It is easy to get parked in Waitrose - I don't need to go on a writer's retreat, the world has ebbed away from me. Unfortunately this year there are a lot of things that need doing to the house, and a major window-replacement-operation looms towards the end of the month - but I am still enjoying the sense of freedom. A holiday! I can get on with Writing my Stories.
In addition, I have the garden. August is harvest, beans, mangetouts, courgettes, onions, spinach beet, kohlrabi, tomatoes, chillies and aubergines. The figs and autumn-fruiting raspberries are coming on and ripe windfall apples are bumping off the Tydeman's Early Worcester tree. Soon I shall just be able to wander out and pick myself an apple when I want a snack while writing! We harvested the garlic in July and I can go and admire the 50-odd bulbs which will take us through the year. And there are the pumpkins.
They are magic, though I'm not sure if I can fulfil my daughter's request to reserve one as transport to her wedding next May. It might have got a bit wrinkly by then. I grow two kinds, one large, one small. The large one is illustrated above, this is the Enormous Pumpkin, the biggest of all, which must weigh close on five kilograms. It's a Crown Prince, and ripens to steel-grey, at present it is like the sea on a dull day, silver-green - I love it. The little ones are the apricot-coloured ones, they fit in the palm of your hand, they are called Jack Be Little, and would actually be perfect to take a miniature Cinderella to the ball in. They mature to a rich orange, and come ripe all the time, a lovely alternative to courgettes. But they keep too, and when I find unsuspected ones they won't have rotted. My pumpkins are like free-range hens, they ramble around and decide for themselves where to lay their massive or small eggs. Up to me to find them - I recently discovered a whopper smugly lying against the fence, shielded by leaves. Though shortly the leaves will have to come off, to assist the ripening process.
What has this got to do with writing? Well, it's odd, but it feeds into it. Of course the pumpkins also feed me in the literal way, but there's something about having them - they are planted in a raised bed just outside my study window, though (see above) they have sprawled away from it to actually fruit - the excitement of seeing them get huge, seeing the colours change, gloating over their size and weight - that helps me to write. So, the current answer to the question so frequently asked of writers: 'What do you do when you get stuck?' is: 'I go outside and inspect my pumpkins.' Later I shall inspect them stored in the house. Some people grow decorative gourds and don't eat them. I grow lovely pumpkins and then they get eaten. You opens your seed catalogue and you takes your choice.
I dreamed last night that I was accompanying a woman around, who needed my help, who was, indeed, in the grip of a severe emotional crisis. This wasn’t surprising, since she was composed of slices of chicken breast that needed to be reassembled. I spent a little time pondering this after I woke up, but it didn’t solve any of my current plot problems.
You might well say that it wouldn’t, but it’s odd how often solutions do come out of dreams. In many cases (like the chicken-slice woman) I’d find the solution by reflecting on the symbolism. In her case it could signify some sense of inner fragmentation, perhaps, but this doesn’t ring any bells with me. Leave her aside, however, and I can often jump from a dream about a tidal wave full of horrible fish to realising that my character’s repressed feelings about something or other must now leap out and grab her (or him) round the throat. Sometimes there’s no apparent connection at all, but thinking about the dream gives my imagination a nudge nonetheless, the dream has geared me up, maybe?
On at least one occasion, a major plot component was given me by a dream. This was years ago, when I was working on a novel for adults The Mountain of Immoderate Desires, and I took a nap in the afternoon because I wasn’t feeling very well. I woke up with a start, with my heart thumping, and a sense of terror, while a voice spoke to me: ‘You have come a long way to end outside a Chinese city wall.’ When I’d recovered from my fright, I thought: That’s it, Lily, the character in my novel has been abandoned outside the walls of a Chinese city, and she almost dies there. Of course I wasn’t taking exact dictation from the dream, but it was pretty apposite, and I was very pleased with the nudge from my subconscious.
I have other, less helpful dreams, in which I am writing a novel which, I know, is the same as one already written, and have this moment of horror when it gets through to me. Or else I’m just writing a different novel from the one I’m actually working on, and I know it’s rubbish. Then there are the strange published novels that pop up in my dreams, books I’ve written that I don’t recognise – and usually they’re not up to much, either. I have no hesitation in ascribing these dreams to the insecurity of the writer’s life, and I wonder if other writers have them?
Some dreams come, recognisably, out of a particular writer’s plot-bag. I dreamed the night before last that I was Death’s granddaughter (though not at all like Miss Susan) and subsequent to the End of the World – which was, however, only temporary, for reasons perhaps known to Terry Pratchett – I had to tidy up all the mess people had left behind them. I remember making beds – literally, I had to staple ticking onto divan covers and assemble mattresses (such is the quaint verbal literalness of the dreamer’s mind) clearing up kitchens, weeding gardens – for as long as the world stayed ended, the beds stayed tidy – and then the Last Trumpeter appeared again and played, presumably, the Reveille. And everyone got up and the world un-ended. The interesting thing about this dream was its close attention to plot and thematic consistency, whereas most dreams jump from one plot to another like a grasshopper making its way across the field. I also woke at the trumpet, and heard my alarm going off.
And not so long ago, I dreamed I was watching the hobbits arrive at the Bridge in Rivendell. They came there, not on ponies, but in an old VW dormobile, the kind that was painted all over with flowers and CND symbols. They had to leave it in the car park (National Trust, of course) and run up the marked trail to the river, and when the Black Riders arrived in pursuit they came in a stretch limo and got out, all dressed in dark suits and dark glasses like Mafiosi. This surely indicates a distinct cultural connection between The Lord of the Rings and The Godfather.
Quite a while ago, there was a quote on an ABBA blog fr
This is World Book Day, but it’s also still Fairtrade Fortnight, and books and Fairtrade go together – not because authors are underpaid, though most of us are – but because there are thousands of kids in the world who never get a chance to learn. This is sometimes because they are girls, but mostly because they’re poor, and the children work and help keep the family going. I wrote in an earlier blog about the wonderful work that’s being done in Cairo, educating the children of the waste recyclers. But every time you buy a Fairtrade product, you're not only giving producers a fair price for their product, but also subscribing to a raft of benefits for the community.
Part of the price of Fairtrade goods is what's called the Fairtrade premium, and the producers choose what they will spend this on – examples are farm inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, but also, importantly, medical expenses and school fees. To give one example, the Kavokiva cooperative in southeastern Côte d’Ivoire, which produces cocoa beans. In this region, the illiteracy rate among agricultural communities is as high as 95%. Many schools are badly equipped and too far away for children to attend every day. Kavokiva was Fairtrade certified for cocoa in 2004. Although the global recession has hindered sales, the Fairtrade premium has helped the cooperative to build schools in some villages where the government school was too far away. It has helped furnish classrooms and blackboards, and other supplies. It also distributes scholarships to that the members’ children can pay school fees.
Clearly, one still has to scout around to find Fairtrade products in many areas – though the Waitrose coffee and tea shelves are a joy to behold – but things are looking up. You can buy Fairtrade avocados, fruit, chocolate, coffee, tea, honey, nuts, apricots, beauty products and goods made from Fairtrade cotton, to name but a few. Tate and Lyle, Cadburys, and Kit-Kats are some mainstream companies who have recently made Fairtrade commitments. I bought several T-shirts made with Fairtrade cotton from Marks and Spencers last year. I plan to email people like Marks and Sparks and say you’d like to be able to get more Fairtrade products even than they sell at the moment. I also mean to write to other chocolate producers and egg them on to go Fairtrade – but the Co-op does a nice chocolate bar, and Traidcraft Swiss chocolate is brill! Green and Blacks’s Maya Gold chocolate is Fairtrade, of course.
On the topic of books, I’m shamelessly using the column to make a plug for another charity, which is Bookaid International. They make books available to kids in Sub-Saharan Africa, Palestine and Sri Lanka. You can find out more on their site, url below. In Kenya, they help provide a camel mobile library service!! This is an idea that appeals to me greatly.
For as long as I can remember, books have lit up my life, but I had the benefits of being brought up in a highly literate family, having a good, state-funded education, and having, from the time I was very small, access to free libraries. I know many of you will have had similar advantages. But the relative wealth and privilege of our own country – the recession notwithstanding – has too often been bought at the expense of other people in poorer countries. The Fairtrade Foundation - and Bookaid - are working to change all that.
Look for the Fairtrade marque on Fairtrade products - I meant to put it in here, but couldn't manage the technicalities of downloading it! I'm sorry, daffy authors... But you can see it on the products I've mentioned above, or at their website.
I've found out one can help fund Bookaid (and other charities) by shopping at a range of online retailers, Amazon, Tesco, Asda, Next, M and S, John Lewis, Ebay, Comet – and more – via a site called The Giving Machine. There’s also a thing called the Reverse Book Club. For three pounds a month you can buy 36 books every year for people who need them.
Nobody else has done it yet, so I’m going to write about snow! And maybe a lot of you are sick of it by now – I have to admit the not being able to go to Waitrose, etc, is beginning to get a bit annoying, though my neighbour works for Thames Water and has a 4x4 and he’s promised to get us shopping – which is very nice of him. Thank you, Jon! His kids currently have our sledge, since we have no young at home to use it, and I hope they are enjoying it. However, it’s not they who are the authors of this quirky snowman and his igloo home, which I feel deserve display here!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
One difference between this Big Snow, so far, and 1963, as far as I’m concerned, is that there aren’t the sculpted drifts – though if the weather forecast’s correct we may well get them, and horrid wind-chill. I do remember them, meringue-topping dry stone walls when we drove out to toboggan in one of the Lake District dales, and that lovely cerulean blue sky which I’ve seen here in the last few days, which otherwise you’d only get in really cold countries. I can remember that headlong rush down the long field into the iciness of a drift, picking ourselves out, my brother and me, and setting off up again for another swoop!
I loved the landscape your eyes can travel over, and the sense of those spaces of white, and the danger of it – we always knew the landscape was dangerous. The sheep huddled in the shelter of the drystone walls, canny as they were, the hard weather could kill them. I remember a tarn frozen, it seemed, in the act of bucking in the wind, ice-waves all across it. My parents got out my father’s old army skis and used them till one of the leather straps broke, and Mum told me about the winters in the Riesengebirge/Krkonose Mountains in Lower Silesia, when the snow came up to the first floor of my great-grandfather’s house and she’d ski out of the bedroom window.
When we get up at night, David and I peer out at the garden in the sepia snow-light. In the first half of the night the solar tree-lights we put up for Christmas still hang in the rowan tree, glowing blue-white, then later they fade. Walking the dog this morning we looked at a pale-green sky separated from the blue by a swath of thick white cloud. Even down here in the Thames Valley the snow seems to stretch distances out, the fields of our dog-walking park seem much wider than they usually do, and the trees, cluttered with lumps of snow, a
When I was young and dreamt of being a children’s writer, I never imagined it would take me to China but that’s where I have recently been, invited by the British Schools of Beijing and Guangzhou to do my author/drama practitioner stuff for 3.5 days. Of course, by the time I’d added a couple of days sight-seeing in both Beijing and Hong Kong plus my time in transit, the whole trip took 11 days and I doubt if I’ll have made much profit but I have had an amazing, mind-expanding trip, moments of which I’ll never forget (especially three of us crammed into a motorised rick-shaw built for two, being driven down three lanes of heavy traffic in the Beijing rush-hour. Or my encounter with a taxi driver who, quite typically in Beijing taxi drivers doesn’t know where anywhere is but isn’t going to lose face by admitting it!)
This, however, is not the place for a travel blog. What of all of this, is relevant to children’s writing? Well....possibly the books I read. Late at night and on journeys, there was the luxury of time to read. On the flight out, I sweated my way through ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Very gripping. I would like to write gripping books for children, but without making readers nauseous with terror, without depicting scenes of violence degrading to women, without having a mind which pictures these things. I see from the sequel sample that the opening chapter is more of the same. Thanks but I think I’ve got the message!
With some relief I turned ot ‘The Roar’, the summer choice of my children’s book group by newcomer Emma Clayton. I enjoyed it. I had issues with the structure and the ending, all too frustratingly set up for what I expect will be a trilogy, but there was much to admire, not least the terrifyingly convincing picture of another world where the rich have quite literally built on top of the poor, condemning them to a life in the dreadful ‘Shadows’, a subterranean world of mould and darkness and squalor.
And then there was Leslie Wilson’s ‘Saving Rafael’, a refreshing spin on the holocaust novel – which I dropped in the bath! Really sorry, Leslie, but at least I was so gripped that I carried on reading and kept it in a plastic bag!
What connects there 3 books? Well...moral outrage, I think. It’s there in all of them. Steig Larsson, though I question his methods, is quietly ranting about violence against women and fraud, the strong terrorising those they perceive as weak. Emma Clayton is outraged by what we are doing to our world, both physically and socially. And Leslie, of course, is outraged by the holocaust – by our inhumanity.
We bloggers are all creators of story. We are all entertainers. But so many of us are also something else. Reflectors. Commentators. Prophets. Preachers. Voices crying in the wilderness?
So what, as I turn to story making again, be it on page or stage, should I be writing about? I could do moral outrage a-plenty after this trip. I have been treated with the utmost respect and courtesy throughout my stay in China – but supposing I had been a Chinese writer during the cultural revolution? Hmm. And Chairman Mao is still hugely honoured as a great hero by the ordinary Chinese. In Hong Kong I found a market full of stunning tropical fish, hung up in plastic bags, terrapins and turtles in tiny crates and puppies for sale in Perspex boxes measuring about 60cm beneath little dog jackets bearing the words. ‘We love all pets.’ Not far away, another market sold caged birds by the hundred.
A couple of weeks before I left, I stopped a child from kicking a plastic water bottle around during our break at Youth Theatre.
I’m in a school, but not as visiting author this time. I’m with a group of waste management specialists (including my husband) who are visiting the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Recycling School in Moqattam in Cairo. It’s an unusual, but exciting school. It caters for the boys of the Zabbaleen community of informal recyclers – they used to be informal garbage collectors – what we’d have once called rag-pickers - but things have moved on.
The Zabbaleen originally came to Cairo from the countryside, and started to work sorting through the refuse of the more prosperous neighbourhoods, picking out whatever could be recycled, and selling it to middlemen. They lived in shanties, with heaps of waste lying in front of the dwellings. Here the families sorted the refuse and the pigs rootled through to pick out the organic matter and eat it. It wasn’t a bad system, especially not the input of the pigs, who produced both meat and fertiliser, but it wasn’t very healthy, and child mortality was high. Enter Laila Iskandar, who started off the girls’ school here. The girls recycled clean paper and textiles and learned, at the same time, literacy and basic hygiene. Nowadays, you may well buy the handmade paper they make in outlets in the West – lovely paper in beautiful colours and patterns. Their textile products – recycled from industry’s offcuts - are selling to fashion outlets in Europe. The Zabbaleen are intelligent, resourceful people who have taken every opportunity that’s been given them and run with it. Some of the first graduates from the girls’ school have gone on to university.
So, twenty-seven years on from Laila’s first visit, things look very different. The Zabbaleen now have brick-built houses, from whose windows and balconies hang beautifully clean laundry. There are still people sorting refuse, but that is done, largely, in workshops, separate from the dwellings. And now much of the actual recycling is done in Moqattam, which means the Zabbaleen can sell plastic pellets on to factories, though in some instances they make plastic products too. We visit one of the recycling workshops, where a £50,000 machine melts the plastic into an endless sausage of curiously pleasing hot gunk and feeds it into an extruder, fro
I’ve just read ‘Heidi’ in German for the first time ever, which is odd, considering my bilingual state! As a child, I had a delightfully-illustrated English translation, long gone, alas, how I’d like to see some of those pictures again.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
However, this blog is not about the pleasures of reading it in the original – I’d been hoping for Swiss dialect, and was disappointed. It did engage me, though. I loved, once again, the description of the child’s arrival at the Alm, of the grandfather’s care for her, of the high mountain pastures and the goats – all described so vividly, I could feel the wind, smell the flowers, see the blue sky. The goats were engaging, too, especially since I’ve been accompanying my small grandson to various city farms, where I’ve seen how nice they can be with children.
Then I got to the bit where aunt Dete comes back and takes her niece, willy-nilly, off to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Frankfurt, where she is to be a companion to little disabled Klara. It was at that point that the adult in me woke up and raged. Heidi is acquired by the Sesemanns as a cat or a dog might be, and when she proves not to be the docile animal the housekeeper had expected, she’s bullied and abused by this female, accused of ingratitude when she feels homesick, forced to repress all her grief. The picture of her, sitting in her room all by herself, desperately trying not to cry for fear someone might hear her, is utterly heart-rending. And her ‘pranks’ – such as trying to find a tower she can see the countryside from, or bringing home kittens – are distorted into proof of insanity or an evil nature by the housekeeper. She has friends in the house, the butler Sebastian, Klara herself, but they can't really help Heidi because what she needs most of all is not to be in Frankfurt. Of course then the good grandmother comes and tells her to confide all her unspoken troubles to God, and when God doesn’t give her what she wants, tells her she must go on praying because God will give her what she asks for only if it’s good for her. Meanwhile the child stops eating and wastes away almost unnoticed, and if she hadn’t started sleepwalking, would presumably have died before it occurred to Fräulein Rottenmeier to concern herself about her well-being.
Leaving aside the rest of the story, and the rather gruesome abject piety, what struck me most was this narrative about poverty, and the way the poor are exploited by the wealthy. It made me think of the unfortunate ‘Swabian children’, the children of desperately needy peasants in the high Alps, both Swiss and Tyrolean, who were taken in droves to southern Germany and offered to farmers at so called ‘child markets’. This was the time when mountain people often lived on nothing but polenta, when a piece of bread was absolute luxury to the children. Concerned contemporary commentators described the 'child markets' as slave markets, and the children were worked like slaves, paid virtually nothing, and frequently abused- but their parents were spared the expense of feeding them. Like Heidi, they must have to repress their desperate homesickness. Nobody cared, anyway, they were another kind of domestic animal, probably worse fed than the oxen and the pigs. I do wonder whether Spyri had their plight in mind – though her own story of depression, an abusive husband, and docile acceptance of her lot, seeking help only from God, has clearly also fed into these parts of the novel.
Heidi is of course luckier than the 'Swabian children' – she gets back home, her rich pet-owners turn into rich patrons and assure her grandfather that they will always look after her, so she will never have to go out and earn her bread among strangers. The other family on the mountainside, goat-herd Peter, his mother and grandmother, also get some trickle-down effect from her good fortune, a bed and warm clothes for the grandmother, and a lifetime’s pocket-money for Peter. Luckier, too, than her creator, who only had a few years to enjoy independence and the friendship of other writers after her husband died. Her son predeceased her, too.
I've been away on holiday, and have, as always, taken a lot of books with me, but haven't read them all because when the weather's nice - as it was up in sunny Yorkshire and Northumberland - me and D. like to do a lot of walking. But there were two which I took with me and was determined to read, I've been looking forward to both of them for months. One of them is Ann Turnbull's 'Alice in Love and War.'
I first came across Ann Turnbull's work when her 'No Shame, No Fear' was shortlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize, along with mine. I was particularly interested in that book because it dealt with Quakers in the seventeenth century, and I'm a Quaker. I loved it, and its successor, which I was lucky enough to be able to review for the Guardian. Now she's written another book set in the seventeenth century - a period that fascinates me apart from the Quaker connection. Alice is a 'nice girl' who runs off with a soldier and becomes one of those most despised of women, a camp follower. Ann Turnbull draws her frankly but with total sympathy, so that you really care what happens to her - but through her eyes one sees the English civil war completely differently. I think this is exemplified in the scene where the Royalist army sets off for the battle of Naseby, which, of course, was to smash them to smithereens. There, up at the front, is the King, with Prince Rupert and the aristocracy, then the army follows, descending in rank and importance, and right at the end are the raggle-taggle of women. Through Alice's eyes, we see the wives of the Welsh mercenaries setting up their tents - like the Greenham Common 'benders - and scavenging food, dressed as men. Over and above Alice's own personal, gripping love-story - I don't want to give away too much about that here - Ann Turnbull shows us the pity of war, describing, with appalling honesty, the atrocities carried out by both sides; less luridly, but still importantly, she shows us the hardships and poverty the war caused England. It's a wonderful book.
The other book was Mary Hoffmann's 'Troubadour', also a story of love and war, and also dealing with an area of history that has fascinated me for a long time, that of the Albigensian Crusade - or the war against the Cathars of Southern France. Like most crusades, it was a pretty horrific affair, and, like 'Alice' this is not a novel for those who don't like to hear about man's inhumanity to man (and woman). But for anyone who's been to Languedoc and seen those white ruined castles rearing up at the top of scrubby hills, and wondered what it was like for their inhabitants when the northern French came, this will give you a fascinating, moving, and absorbing picture - and once again, the heroine will grip your imagination. Elinor, the daughter of a Cathar heretic lord, escapes from an arranged marriage disguised as a boy and becomes part of a travelling troupe of troubadours. At the same time, the Pope has called the crusade against the heretics. The focus of the novel moves between Elinor's adventures and the grim struggle of Bertran, the troubadour she's in love with, who has to fight the hopeless war against the northerners. This has to be the lost cause to trump all other lost causes, and there are some dreadful moments, though the courage of the Cathars is deeply inspiring. In addition, Mary Hoffman shows us the intellectual and artistic life of medieval women, a subject that's too often neglected. And, like 'Alice,' it had me gripped from start to finish.
I was delighted, on the first Wednesday of the holiday, to discover that Hilary Mantel's wonderful 'Wolf Hall' is on the booker shortlist. Considering that this author has written about five or more novels, all of which should have been there, I might well say 'not before time,' but anyway, it's there. I consider Hilary Mantel to be one of our best contemporary novelists, if not the absolute best, so for once, I shall be watching the Booker dinner on Tuesday week.
The last thing I want to say is that I must apologise to my brother. In my last post I talked about him terrifying me with stories of murderers and burglars creeping up the stairs. He tells me that he was just as scared, which was why he told me about his fears. So, if I made him sound like a heartless big brother, enjoying my fright, this was unfair. Actually, he was a very kind brother, with a few exceptions, such as the time he tried to persuade me to eat slugs. I'm happy to say that I didn't, however, they were black and looked like liquorice and I don't like liquorice.
On the left is a picture of my German grandmother, on the right is an image from my Jubilee Edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, three volumes in Gothic script, which I got when I was still quite young, but didn't actually read through till I was at university, when I read them all in quite a scientific way, noting the repetition of key motifs and mentally grouping them into 'story-sets'. Something I recently heard Sue Price say she had done too! I love the image, it is of course the story-telling grandmother, an old peasant woman, and it's replete with German romanticism. Looking at it now, though, I realise that since half my ancestors were German, Polish and Austrian peasants, it is like a picture of one of them. And I do see some similarity between it and my own grandmother's image, though I've always also seem a resemblance to Virginia Woolf, who, like Omi, had a severe psychological illness.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
It was she who first told me Grimm's fairytales, in German - my favourite was the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, and I still have in my mind the vivid picture I formed then of the wolf, his face covered with chalk, erupting into the middle of the terrified little kids, chasing them round and gobbling most of them up - except for the smallest, who I understood to be me - who hid in the cupboard. Interesting that I never tried to imagine what it might be like for the others inside the wolf, who were later scissored out of him while he slept off his feast. (I did later spend quite a lot of time imagining Jonah's life inside the belly of the whale.) The story plays, in my mind, against the background of the darkness of my bedroom. Omi used to sleep on the same floor as my brother and me, in the attic of our house in Kendal, and if I wanted to go down the scary stairs to the loo in the middle of the night, I'd wake her up, because she was always patient, and then demand that she told me this story. It never scared me, nor did any of the other Grimm stories. It was safely stitched up (like the stones in the wolf's belly) in the world of story. Whereas the ghosts and murderers my big brother had told me infested the stairs at night were indistinct, unconfined by any narrative, and therefore incredibly menacing. As was the roaring lion who lived in the flush - another story of my brother's.
I can hear Omi's voice in my head now, gentle, rather silvery, actually very beautiful, but I didn't categorise her voice like that. She told me Red Riding Hood (another scissored-open wolf), and Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella - oh, that sister cutting the heel off her foot - and various other gruesome narratives - odd for her, who was so gentle that she literally couldn't hurt a fly, I remember seeing her watch one, saying 'Such a tiny being.' She was a vegetarian because she didn't want animals to die to keep her alive. The other stories she told me I was less interested in, like the Heiligejungfraumaria, (Blessedvirginmary) who she went to visit in church, a plaster lady with a bland face, though I did, to do Omi the favour, take my new/old doll (my mother's before me) to show Mary when I got her for my third birthday. I didn't much like the Jesus my Dad was so keen on either, though I believed in God. I preferred the Divine to be unpictured, and I still do.
That last is a digression, but not totally, because, coming back to those stories told in the dark, where my imagination made the pictures, I'm really glad I heard Grimm in that way, in the oral tradition, heiress to the policing of generations of children who must have said: 'No, it goes like this - you've left out the bit about hiding in the cupboard - what about the chalk, Omi?' And so on.
I've put in a picture of a house in Berlin because that's the house I've chosen for the birthplace
of the heroine of the novel I'm working on at present. It's in Inselstrasse, for anyone who knows Berlin, near one of the arms of the river Spree and just a bridge-crossing away from the Fischerinsel, the island where all the museums are.
But I'm not posting about Berlin geography, but about language, or rather, about what it's like to write about Germany in English when you are yourself bilingual. It's complicated enough when you can hear your characters talking German and then have to render it into English, making the best fist you can of 'equivalating' - yes, I know that's not an English word - the English to the German, when there are some things that are best said in German, and some things best said in English, the same being true for French, and of course for many other languages that I'm not fluent in. And what do I do about Berlin dialect, the way Berliners have of turning all their 'g's into 'y's, hard into soft, like Uri Geller getting his fingers on a spoon? It's impossible to put this into English. It gets lost. Too bad. Some things one can just render into English, very satisfactorily - 'meine Olle' for example, translates perfectly as 'my old lady' - when one's getting vulgar, 'Arsch' is so easy to translate I'm not going to bother here, but Germans do tend to get scatological quite easily. That is, not nice ladies like my mother - and that's another problem, 'Gnaedige Frau' (irritating lack of umlaut-facility in this software, never mind) which literally means 'gracious lady,' but in my childhood it was still used quite frequently. 'Madam' is the best I can do, but it fails to give the flavour of the German.
I suppose what I'm saying is that there's no such thing as a true translation, only a finding of equivalents, and it seems odd that I, who've always hated translating, am finding myself effectively doing it. And in the novel I'm working on right now I've given myself an even tougher problem, in that my main female character is a returned emigree, therefore bilingual like me in English and German, but the boy, who also has a point of view, is entirely German, therefore thinks in German. In the past I've translated German names into English 'Alexander Square' for 'Alexanderplatz', but this won't work when I'm inhabiting the head of someone who thinks in English but thinks of the place-names in German - but in the boy's head, they probably should be in English, because this is English masquerading as German.
I'll work it out in the end, but I'd be fascinated to talk to or hear from other bilingual writers who write about their two cultures, and hear how they manage it. The thing is, though I get frustrated not being able to use German, I couldn't write entirely in German. My German is very good, but English is my main language.
All the same, hearing the cadences and rhythms of the other language in my head does change the way I write in ways that I'd have to spend hours analysing to define, yet I know it is so.
Having been involved in a discussion recently about what online reviews are for ( to recommend to others books we really love? – to punish authors we hate when they write stuff we don’t like? – to point out their dreadful mistakes? – to provide a penetrating critique so the author can do a better job next time? ) – I’ve come down firmly for the first option. So here’s a recommendation from me for two recently published and brilliant books, both set in the context of the Second World War. I hope you’ll read and enjoy them.
SAVIN
G RAFAEL by Leslie Wilson, Andersen Press
This is an absolutely marvellous book, which had me gripped from the first page to the last. It’s first and foremost a love story between Jenny and Rafael, two young Germans whose families have always been friends – but because Rafael is Jewish and they are living in Nazi-ruled Berlin, their feelings for one another put them in terrible danger.
Jenny’s family is Quaker and pacifist, but in order to survive, first her father and then her brother are forced to join Hitler’s armies, leaving Jenny and her mother to struggle through the bombings and firestorms, trying desperately to protect their Jewish friends, and to retain some integrity in a world where simply refusing to say ‘Heil Hitler’ can bring the attention of the SS.
Jenny and Rafael are convincing teenagers: rash, passionate, sometimes even managing to have fun outwitting the ghastly system in which they live. I read the book with my heart in my mouth for them, dreading the outcome. Other characters too come to vivid life: families and communities torn apart by war.
Leslie Wilson, whose previous book LAST TRAIN FROM KUMMERSDORF was also set in Nazi Germany, brings us face to face with the dilemmas of ordinary Germans: the ugliness and moral cowardice which comes of living with fear, the cruelty of a perverted nationalism – but she also marks the heroism of small decencies and covert acts of kindness: the neighbours’ unspoken conspiracy to ignore the signs that Jenny and her mother are sheltering a Jew, when concealing that knowledge is in itself an act of extreme danger. This is a serious book, but not a depressing one. (Jenny’s little dog Muffi is a wonderful cameo character, and there are many touches of humour.) It upholds life and love, and I loved it.
ROWA
N THE STRANGE by Julie Hearn, Oxford University Press
A wartime novel with a difference, this time set in England - the third in a wonderful series which might loosely be termed a family saga (the first two were IVY and HAZEL) – but each novel can be read independently of the others.
It’s 1939, and Rowan, the son of Hazel and grandson of Ivy, is about to be evacuated from London. But Rowan’s not like other children. He’s subject to odd compulsions and terrors, and after he injures his sister in one uncontrollable outburst, his parents decide he will be safer in an institution where he can be treated.
So off Rowan goes to an asylum. But what is madness? Where is the sanity in a countryside where Rowan sees such surreal sights as farmworkers wearing gas masks while they pick apples? And in the asylum itself, where the doctors are ‘cruel to be kind’, using literally shocking therapies in the name of sanity, how important is it to ‘cure’ madness? And if a delusion is an essential part of someone’s personality, what will happen if you if blast it away?
Rowan himself is an attractive hero: introspective, willing and anxious to please. His friend Dorothea (who sees people’s guardian angels) is a fascinating creation, ‘as bright and as bitter as a lemon’ – cynical yet innocent, vulnerable yet indomitable. And then there’s the well-meaning therapist himself, Dr von Metzer – tormented by the knowledge of what is happening to mentally ill children in Germany.
This is a subtle and compelling story – with just a touch of magical realism – in which Rowan’s schizophrenia and life at the asylum with its terrible ‘treatments’, uncertain cures, and small but important rewards (a slice of cake which you are allowed to cut for yourself; a part in the Christmas pantomime) stand for the wider madness of a world at war.
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Very entertaining post! I can't think how I've managed without 'grabble' and I love 'misween'. I must really stop misweening David Cameron and Tony Blair - or maybe not...
Well done, Sue! Keep 'em coning.. the words depend on you.
Our blue roan cocker spaniel Trudy,first class pedigree, Kennel Club registered, had 8 pups. But my favourite was Sandy, the reckling; wrong colour, wrong tail, one leg shorter than the other three. I've always favoured the underdog, it seems.
The problem is, if course, that such words may be mere flosculation or even tortiloquy employed by snollygosters to gnathonize - or conversely to pudify or colaphize - the kexy egos of the insecure.
Such blateration may serve only to leave the average foppotee murklins.
(http://www.savethewords.org/. I think I'm addicted.)
After the castrametation and grabbling to put it into action, he pompeyed me and as I gazed upon his visnomy, I realised I had misweened his ponerology and hylithism at the tolsey and that he was a mere reckling.