the fugitive (d. john ford & emilio fernández, w. dudley nichols, graham greene)

Ford’s Mexican movie is a curious, beautifully lit creature. Loosely adapted from the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, it tells the tale of a priest being pursued by the Mexican army during the religious persecutions following the Mexican revolution. Henry Fonda plays the priest with a deadpan solemnity. The whole movie feels as though it has been mounted and framed, which is gloriously effective during many of the beautifully shot action sequences, or the impeccably lit interiors, but makes for a slightly stiff human narrative. Ford seems to relish the visual possibilities of filming in Mexico, but his actors aren’t given scope to do much more than look the part. 

nb - curious to think of Ford and Buñuel filming in Mexico at more or less the same time.

la peste (camus)

Camus’ novels were mandatory reading when I was a teenager. La Peste possessed a mythic resonance, a book which talked about a past our grandparents knew, one which we were so lucky not to have experienced. The received idea that this is a novel about the war, and that the plague is a metaphor. Clearly, today, the metaphorical elements fade as we contemplate how Camus’ vision of the plague compares to our own version. In so many ways, it feels incredibly accurate in its depiction of the various stages of an epidemic, as well as the way in which it charts the psychological cost of the experience. Two things perhaps stand out. One is the way in which the internet has altered the experience. In comparison to the absolute isolation and claustrophobia of Oran’s plague, the internet has permitted us to experience our plague as a testing ground for what some would call the metaverse. Our world shrunk, in so far as planes and boats stopped moving, but the internet permitted a semblance of normality to be maintained, or even a new normality to be constructed. The second is that La Peste offers a heavily masculine view of the world that renders it, today, feeling as though it’s only offering a partial story. I recall, as that teenager, consuming the novel avariciously. Re-reading it I found much of the story, the detail and the characters, had stayed with me. But on a second read, it feels perhaps more limited in scope. The existential quest for meaning, or rather a reason to get out of bed in the morning, remains, but Camus’ philosophising feels less urgent now than it did then. Perhaps this is because I was only at the beginning then, I was grateful to find a writer willing to engage with these issues, guiding me towards the relevance of the everyday. Now that I have inhabited so many everydays, the novel’s Sisyphean defence of the value of a constant engagement with the banal demands of the daily struggle feels less inspiring. Furthermore, this is now an account of a life we have all lived over the course of these past two years, and Camus’s veneration of the small heroes, whilst apposite, feels tired. We want to move on, we want to start dreaming again. 

of love and hunger [julian maclaren ross]

Sometimes the quality of a novel can be measured by the paucity of the action. Nothing happens, and yet you’re still gripped. Of Love and Hunger, with its pretentious title, is one of those. The story is banal. The South Coast of England, 1939. Richard Fanshawe is a disillusioned vacuum cleaner salesman, who falls in love with Sukie, the wife of a man who has asked him to keep an eye on her whilst he’s away at sea for three months. The affair is desultory and doomed. War breaks out. The end.

At some point you think, something’s going to happen, there’s going to be a twist, but there isn’t and it doesn’t matter. The novelist has managed to conjure up a time and a place and a way of thinking and that’s all that’s required. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic and that doesn’t matter either.  What remains is a surgical evaluation of the way people get on with one another, men and women, men and men, women and women. It gets under the surface and traces the undercurrents that permeate any conversation; the way in which when we converse, our speech is an echo chamber for our thoughts.

There might be a dissertation to be written on the role of the vacuum cleaner in 20th century British literature. Like Greene’s Wormold in Our Man in Havana, the vacuum cleaner industry permits Fanshawe to earn a living, albeit a marginal, desperate one. Nothing seems to sum up the era more than the well-educated, supposedly middle-class graduate, resorting to giving comical demonstrations of primitive vacuum cleaners to get by. The desperation of the times is also captured in Fanshawe’s listless amorality. But this is preferable to the scene at a provincial dance, where the South English burghers express their approval of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in a manner which has terrifying echoes of contemporary Daily Mail mores. A ripple of fascism which hints at a different turn history might have taken. It almost feels as though everyone’s waiting for the war, which will be like pressing the reset button, creating a sense of order to replace the listlessness and re-establish some kind of moral compass. MacLaren Ross captures the time to a T. It doesn’t seem so very far from the world of Sartre’s Nausea, (which takes place just the other side of the Channel); only that the angst is kept permanently bottled up, existentialism always at arm’s length.

Of Love and Hunger might be a minor work, but it’s also a minor jewel. This is the word employed as scalpel, the writer as surgeon. 

alone in berlin [hans fallada]

The war, the war. I’m not sure why the second world war suddenly feels so immediate. Of late, so much of my reading seems to return to that point. It might be connected to the fact that in a few weeks I am to return to the city of my great grandparents, which I would visit as a child, the city where they spent the second world war, which is the first tangible point in history where my identity begins to be recognisably formed - genetically, psychologically, spiritually.

That city is Berlin. Fallada’s novel captures it during the course of the war. Fallada’s Berlin is a cruel, suspicious city where the venal are rewarded and the good lurk in the shadows. People still drink in bars, there is still a discernible communal life, albeit one that revolves around suspicion and fear. Those who seek to live in something akin to normality head to the rural outskirts, which then turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, than the city. This is a 1984 world with a snooper’s charter, where the punishment for non-conformity is likely to be death. 

The narrative is a gritty, perhaps even Loachian tale of a common man who resists the machine. The machine being nothing less than the Gestapo and the apparatus of National Socialism. Otto Quangel decides to take on the system via the simple mechanism of producing letters which he drops around the city, hoping to create a viral campaign of resistance. HIs wife, Anna, joins him in his campaign. Ultimately, their failure, and the doomed fate of the couple, are secondary to the significance of the instinct being acted upon. Fallada would seem to imply that the act of resistance, no matter how impotent, is never futile. The novelist commemorates the Quangels and dignifies their actions in spite of their apparent futility. The fact that this narrative is “based on a true story” makes it all the more poignant.

In Fallada’s novel, the Kantian imperative to act is weighed against the societal drift towards inert corruption. The Second World War might have been the last time that the notion of the individual had such little currency in Europe. Wartime is a time when the notion of personal destiny is subsumed to the notion of national destiny (or the destiny of the chosen cause). It’s probably the greatest misunderstanding regarding the concept of terrorism. The terrorist believes him or herself to be at war. War suspends the normal rules of ethical society, primarily that saying “thou shalt not kill”. The Quangels are also terrorists. Their actions are not predicated on the notion of a ‘productive’ result. Instead the action itself is definitive. Their individuality is sacrificed to a greater cause. It’s notable that very little of the novel actually focuses on the potential drama (or dramatic tension) of the Quangels’ actions: instead it looks at the impact their actions have on themselves and others. Within the grand scale of the war, theirs is a minimal tale, one whose impact, measured by spreadsheets, is negligible, but measured by another less definable standard, contains the real stuff of glory. 

Perhaps I find myself returning to the war because I’m trying to understand the societal logic in a world where the individual has become king to such an extent that almost anything can be sacrificed on its altar. On a psychological, spiritual and ultimately even genetic level. Which, in a way, would seem to be far more of a reflection of the Nazi culture Fallada demonstrates in his novel than that of the Quangels, who resist it.

the setting sun [osamu dazai]

Donald Keene’s excellent introduction to Dazai’s book offers some insight into the nature of the enfant terrible author, who drowned himself at the age of 39, his books scandalising his society and marking the moment  of a shift in the cultural paradigm as Japan began to embrace what might retrospectively be termed ‘modernity’.

Like many a ground-breaking text, The Setting Sun is somewhat schematic. Kazuko, the daughter of impoverished aristocrats, joins her elderly mother as they relocate to a poor house in the countryside. Her brother Naoji returns from war in the South Pacific to renew his dissipated life, recklessly spending any money the family has left. Most of the novel is narrated from Kazuko’s perspective. She is a fascinating character, in so far as she appears to embrace her change in circumstances and the debasement of her nobility. This permits her to enter into a near-fantasy world where she offers herself to her brother’s even more dissolute and cynical friend as his lover, in spite of the fact their relationship has been tangential, to say the least.

Dazai captures a world not so far removed from that of Sebastian Flyte, where the removal of the security of wealth contributes to an existential crisis of morality. Kazuko is a great reader of French and other European literature. At one point she reads Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Introduction to Economics’. The economics leaves her cold but, she writes, “as I read this book I felt a strange excitement… the sheer courage the writer demonstrated in tearing apart without any hesitation all manner of conventional ideas”. Dazai places Kazuko on the brink of existentialism: these characters could easily have come out of a novel by Camus.

The term ‘globabalisation’ has been bandied around a great deal since the emergence of the internet. It’s sometimes easy to forget that literature has been playing the same role, perhaps with more profundity, since the invention of the printing presses and before. Dazai’s novel is testament to the way in which the changes in Japanese society were not caused by the events of World War 2 and its aftermath. The war merely consolidated developments which had already been unleashed, with the whole structure of society, moral, hierarchical and financial, already in flux.

the palm wine drunkard [amos tutuola]

I had already come across Tutuola without realising it. In this book he refers to another book, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which he had, at the time of writing this book, not yet written. This is indicative of the way in which Tutuola's writing seems to take place in the fifth dimension, beyond the petty confines of time. (Which has implications for the idea of narrative.) In 1995, during a peripatetic phase of my career, I was given the job of looking after a group of Nigerian actors who were in London at the behest of the Royal Court, to perform a version of Tutuola's later novel. When I arrived to collect the company to drive them back to Heathrow, it turned out that almost half of them had absconded, vanished into another bush of ghosts. Which might suggest I had failed in my duties; at the same time I learnt more about being African from those weeks with the Nigerians than from any other source.

Tutuola's first novel is like a spotlight being shined on a way of using the language we never knew existed. Straightaway we are propelled into a land where Fear is both an emotion and a character, alongside Heaven and God. You will meet them along the way. The narrator's ostensible journey is to find his tapster who's vanished, gone to the land of the Deads. As a result his life, which up until that point had consisted of drinking palm wine and having parties, is rudely interrupted. The key point, perhaps, is that this is his life: just as in our world we might go to the office or till the fields, his life is to get up and drink. However, the disappearance of his tapster means he has to go on the road to find him.

This notion of a search, the original picaresque narrative, is repeatedly encountered in African literature. On the road you will see things that appear to be beyond belief. The story is bounded only by the imagination of the narrator, and Tutuola has no shortage of imagination. At the same time, as a Western reader, the lack of all those narrative elements we have come to expect in a novel make for a sometimes painstaking read. As though we are not yet ready to enter a realm of pure imagination, where the novel is made poetry and the reader has to engage with the previously unimagined on almost every page. Where is this going? What do we learn? We learn that there are things under the sun and moon (and witnessed by Sun or Moon) which we had never imagined. Which, because they have been imagined, possess the possibility of being real.

If I was to curate a literature course, this would be one of the first books I would put on the reading list. I would hazard a guess that Tutuola is writing under the influence of an oral storytelling tradition. A world where the story has no beginning or end, it is a restless continuation, which the audience can drop in or out of at any moment. Stories lurk within stories and every new stop along the road is a field of play, a space for the storyteller to dazzle you with the unfeasible; to bring the unimaginable to life. Our culture, trapped in the teleological narrative, is consumed by beginnings, endings and middles. Does life really work this way? Or do we shape the narratives of our lives to fit this model? Surely it's truer in some ways to see the world as a constant space of non-learning, a constant encounter with the remarkable, lurking around the corner, Superwomen and giants, famines and plenty. Tutuola's text often feels as though it lacks all direction, as though it's in danger of suffocating beneath the weight of its invention, but then you keep going, you round a corner, you discover something new...