As I say, a key issue is the ability to identify credible sources. Ironically - as if I've tempted fate by speaking out - I've recently learned that something I state as fact in my 2023 biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, and which I based on what seemed to be sound evidence, isn't true. More on that, and a full correction, soon.
"There's always another way, even for you."
The follow-up to Children of Time, first published in 2019, is another epic, mind-expanding treat. That first book ended with the sentient civilisation of giant spiders and the surviving remnants of humanity forging a last-minute peace after thousands and thousands of years.
This sequel sees some of their descendants (and one surviving character) voyage to a star system with two roughly Earth-like worlds. Humans already reached this place some millennia before, and the new arrivals are faced with the extraordinary consequence of that early intervention. Whereas, in the first book, one ancient human scientist affected the development of spiders, here another human has a thing for the octopus. By the time the spider-human team turn up, the octopuses have their own spacecraft...
I thought this started a bit slowly, retreading what we'd seen before - and then if completely blindsided me. It really picks up as we come to learn that the octopus people are not the only antagonist in this system. The other, relentlessly predatory species - details of whom I'll not spoil here - is absolutely bloody terrifying and a brilliant threat. We jump back and forth a bit in time to understand how this species developed, which only makes it all the more appalling and implacable.
We, as readers, come to understand the threat while the spiders and humans are still guessing at what it might be, so they plunge headlong into danger. I don't think I've ever read a book that achieves that thing of horror movies of making you want to shout "No!" about what a character is about to blunder into...
As before, a particular strength of all this is the way Tchaikovsky tells chunks from non-human perspectives, the physiology and biology of the observer defining their worldview. The octopus people are intelligent, curious and mercurial, in part because of the way an octopus's limbs can work independently of its central brain. They act, react and emote in a way that's separate from thinking. That presents challenges in communication: it's less a matter of finding a common language as expressing the right complexity of feels.
From the basis of this biology follows a whole load of logically reasoned but extraordinary stuff. I was wowed by descriptions of the octopus spacecraft that are effectively bubbles of water in space, and the practicalities this involves in such matters as docking and airlocks. There's an amazing, nightmare sequence near the end of the novel that reminded me a bit of Dead of Night, in which one character puts up a series of memory-based defences against an attack, each one at a personal cost. We understand the physics of what's happening in terms of computational power and yet the effect is an effective, unsettling noir.
Mel Hudson is again a brilliant reader for the audiobook version, nimbly personifying a large and diverse cast - humans, spiders, octopuses and the things I won't say more of. We're left at an intriguing point at the end and I'm very much looking forward to the third book, Children of Memory.
I started the book that afternoon but, like the film (and the novel it’s based on), it’s a vast sprawling epic and has taken a while to get through, not least because I’ve had a whole bunch of work stuff going on, too. Evry tells us at the start that he ordered the wealth of information so that we can skip to the bits of interest, whether that’s his detailed histories of pre-production, filming and what happened afterwards, the huge oral history of interviews with cast and crew, or the extra stuff like the merchandise and legacy of this peculiar, beguiling movie. I am hardcore and did the whole lot.
At first, I thought the book might have been better edited, even judiciously pruned, as there’s quite a lot of repetition. But as I read, on the repetition became important to our understanding: these are things on which people agree, in contrast to the many points on which there is less consensus.
Some witnesses, such as costume designer Bob Ringwood, are engagingly gossipy and forthright in their views. Others are more cautious in what they share. That is especially telling when their accounts are combined. For example, there’s the account of one male actor getting into character on set by shouting at and upsetting co-star Francesca Annis. Annis, cited in a contemporary interview (she did not contribute to this new book) declines to name the male actor. But here, publicity executive Paul M Sammon does (p. 223).
This is immediately followed by a contribution from another cast member, Sean Young, who doesn’t name the male actor or refer to the incident specifically. Yet by placing her words directly after Sammon, the implication is that she’s telling us what happened in response on set.
“As an actor, when I’m working with other actors, we all know who’s the deadwood. We all know who it is. We may not say it, but we’ll avoid them.” (p. 224)
There’s loads I found fascinating here. Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise screen-tested for the lead role of Paul. MacLachlan walked off set several weeks into filming because he’d still not received a contract. The rubberised stillsuits created for Dune were a big influence on Michael Keaton’s costume as Batman — also realised by Bob Ringwood — and superhero costumes ever since. Production on Dune overlapped a bit with Conan the Destroyer, using some of the same locations and sets, and at one point you could see both out in the desert on facing dunes. There’s stuff on the music and marketing and merchandise… There is a lot of detail.
These details could have been summarised or more concisely related but that would be missing a big part of the appeal of this book. A bit like the documentary Get Back where we sit day after day with the Beatles, the joy here is all the mundane, ordinary stuff as well. It’s the granular detail that really opens up the creative process. We gain a strong sense of what Lynch was doing, what he tried to achieve and what exactly went wrong.
A few days after receiving the book, I watched the movie with my teenage son, who had seen the Villeneuve Dune and Dune: Part II but came to this old film wholly new. He enjoyed it, I think, and found it interesting to see a different take on the same material, but his main issue was that the last hour or so is too rushed, too much happening too quickly for it to have an emotional impact. That, I now learn from reading this book, is because the production shot largely in script order; when money began to run out, they ripped our whole pages of what they still had to shoot…
Insights into the production and thus what we see on screen only take up the first half of this enormous volume. Evry has just as much interest in what followed, picking over the way the film was released, seen and received. More than that, there’s the sense of how it has haunted (or not) the people who made it.
“Dino took him [Lynch] and Raffaella on an impromptu (and speedy) car trip to Venice, arriving directly in St Mark’s Square.” (p. 61).
That’s not technically possible given how Venice doesn’t have roads. Besides, Bob Ringwood then tells us that they all arrived by plane (p. 111).
Since I’m quibbling over small stuff (minuscule!), we’re frequently told of scenes being “lensed” or hear of “lensing” as a synonym for shooting. I don’t think that’s ever in a quotation from cast or crew; it’s a term used by movie journalists rather than those who make movies, not least because you fix or modify a “lens” before you start the action. Referring to Lynch as “the helmer” rather than director is another journalistic cliché, and not quite appropriate in this case since a key element of the story is how Lynch wasn’t in overall charge of what made it to the screen.
At times, the prose is oddly colloquial, too. When discussing the possibility of a director’s cut of the movie, we’re told that Lynch was “initially enthusiastic about taking a mulligan”, which I had to look up (it means when a golfer is allowed to replay a stroke), and then that “the studio refused to pony up the right amount of dough” (both quotations, p. 293). That is quite the mixed metaphor.
I raise this because the book is otherwise so often very good at explaining simply and clearly what were very technical procedures, such as the way the film was financed or the then-pioneering special effects. It makes us understand exactly how ingenious and revolutionary a lot of this stuff was for it’s time, as well as how influential. But also I am a jaded old hack who finds such grammatical stuff distracting and what I really want — in this book, in the film — is to lose myself in the weird, rich world of Dune.
Pedantic quibbling aside, this is an extraordinary, rich and insightful book. I’m tantalised by the details that remain elusive: how much footage actually survives; how possible it would be, with some new effects work, to produce a director’s cut, and how much of a screenplay for Dune II Lynch may have written.
The book ends with a short, sweet interview with Lynch himself, who just wants to say how much he enjoyed working with cast and crew for all he doesn’t much rate the film. My sense is of Evry trying valiantly to keep the call going, to draw more from Lynch and to somehow articulate something of what Dune means to him, the author of this exhaustive book. “Fantastic, man,” says Lynch, cheerily, and ends the conversation.
We’re left hanging. Now we always will be.
See also:
The episode includes an interview with me, struggling to remember whatever it was I was thinking at the time - other than "Eeeeeeeee I'm writing a book!"
Last year, I spoke to the same podcast about my 2007 Doctor Who novel The Pirate Loop and, separately, my new book Doctor Who - The Time Travelling Alamanac. And the year before, I spoke to them about David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.
Now Susan is marrying someone else — but, she tells Nancy, she’s received a threatening note from an ex. Susan wants Nancy, who kept notes in shorthand on Susan’s love-life when they lived together, to seek out her exes and find out who is making trouble. It might be the convicted thief Peter or the poet Laurence or the vain actor Mike… Nancy is sure it can’t be Donald.
When Susan is murdered, Nancy’s first thought is to ensure that the police don’t suspect her fiancee. But in tidying up the crime scene to protect Donald, she incriminates herself…
This is a fantastic return to form by Margot Bennett after the disappointment of Farewell Crown and Good-bye King. It’s at least as good as The Widow of Bath and probably better, my favourite of her books that I have read so far. I can see why it won the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Crossed Red Herrings’ award — since renamed the Gold Dagger (and presented to Bennett by JB Priestley) — and why Bennett was, in 1959, elected to the Detection Club. Fast-moving, twisty and suspenseful, this keeps us guessing to the end. Even the very last paragraph takes an unexpected turn.
In his introduction, Martin Edwards quotes Bennett herself on what made this and The Man Who Didn’t Fly “my best books”. The latter,
“had an unusual plot and a set of people I believed in. In the same way, Someone from the Past had five characters I might have met anywhere. The best of all my people was the girl Nancy. She was kind and cruel, and loyal and bitchy. She was a ready liar, with a sharp tongue, but she was brave and real. All through my books, the best I have done is to make the people real.” (pp. 9-10, citing John M Reilly (ed.), Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers)
Nancy is a compelling protagonist. We never know what she might do next. She is observant and reckless, intelligent and yet capable of extraordinary folly. Sometimes she tries to fix things in ways we can see (and want to shout) will only make things worse. But we are with her all the way as she faces multiple dangers.
As so often with Margot Bennett, characters attracted to one another bicker and fight, but here the stakes are raised because any one of these men Nancy is winding up could be the murderer. Whether or not they did for Susan, they can be violent with Nancy, or treat her appallingly in other ways. In fact, she is not the only woman here who puts up with variously crap men.
This British Library Crime Classic edition, first published in 2023, is subtitled “a London mystery” and it boasts a few good descriptions of places such as Soho. More than that, it offers an extraordinary snapshot of the mores of 1958, the year the novel was originally published. As well as a lot of smoking and drinking, there’s a surprising nonchalance about drugs. Tired and wound-up after a row with Donald, Nancy tells us:
“I knew I should take a couple of strong sleeping-pills. They would give me four hours’ sleep, and a heavily-doped morning that would make work impossible, unless I took a stimulant. After that, a couple of tranquilizing tablets would level me up for the day.” (p. 37)
She has all of these to hand as, a few pages later, she offers them and “a confidence drug” to her fiancee, who tells her he’s already taken “knockout pills” (p. 45). These, we learn, are “blue things, sodium amytal” (p. 47). Elsewhere, Nancy seems familiar with benzedrine. The drug-taking is part of the plot (one suspect was apparently doped and unconscious at the time of the murder) but also part of everyday life.
I’m intrigued by elements of the novel that Bennett may have drawn from her own (fascinating) life, such as her years as a writer for the magazine Lilliput (while her husband Richard Bennett was editor).
“From the moment that I got the job on the Diagonal Press and scrawled out my first paid illiteracies I saw myself as a great writer, one who kept notebooks and would soon be guest of honour at literary luncheons.” (p. 27)
Again, the notebooks are part of the plot but I wonder how much this attitude — to her earlier work and to her career — matched Bennett’s own. When the murder case bears down on Nancy, the publisher she works for offers her a chance to get away with a job in Spain (p. 248). Is that a nod to Bennett’s own history, as she served as a nurse (and publicist) in Spain during the civil war?
Then there is what the novel says about Television, which in those days still had a capital T. Bennett had already made her debut as a TV writer: her one-off drama The Sun Divorce (dir. Philip Savile) was shown as part of London Playhouse on the ITV network Associated-Redifussion on Thursday 26 January 1956, just four months after the launch of ITV. Writing of Someone from the Past must have overlapped with the agreement of rights for a TV adaptation one of her earlier novels: The Man Who Didn’t Fly, starring William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, was adapted by Jerome Coopersmith and broadcast by NBC in Canada on 16 July 1958.
Since it was made and broadcast in Canada, Bennett probably had little involvement in this and she may never have seen it. But, excitingly, we can watch that production of The Man Who Didn’t Fly on YouTube. It even enjoys a bit of a following because it stars both William Shatner and Jonathan Harris, later stars of Star Trek and Lost in Space respectively.
Margot Bennett was soon writing for TV herself, with work on ATV soap opera Emergency-Ward 10, perhaps making use of her own nursing experience. IMDB credits her on 15 episodes of the soap, broadcast between Tuesday 23 September 1958 and Friday 22 May 1959. The implication is that she moved into soap opera soon after completing work on this novel.
By the time she finished on Emergency-ward 10, Bennett had made the switch to BBC — and more prestigious drama — with her six-part adaption of her novel The Widow of Bath, which began transmission on 1 June 1959. But Someone from the Past suggests she was already familiar with the mechanics of BBC television more than a year before that.
In the novel, actor Mike Fenby, presumably used to late nights on stage followed by late mornings (as described in Exit Through the Fireplace), complains of the “brutal creatures” of “Terrivision” who have him up at “ten o’clock” in the morning for rehearsals in Shepherds Bush — which is where the BBC was based.
“And you should see, I really wish you could see, the producer. Temperament! He thinks out the sets with a kind of telescope, and when he wants to concentrate, he blows bubbles. … He has a tin. He shakes the bubbles off with a bit of wire. They help him to relax. When they burst, they cover the floor with slime, like invisible banana skins. There’s practically no one in the cast who hasn’t a sprained ankle or a broken neck. You ought to see us, skidding about the place.” (pp. 39-40).
That “telescope” was a director’s viewfinder, enabling the director to see how much of the actors and set would be visible through different diameter lenses, and to plan and block their shots ahead of studio recording. Viewfinders had been in use since at least 1938: the Tech Ops site boasts a clipping from Radio Times that year, a photo of one in use and some other details. But this is not the sort of thing people outside the world of TV were likely to know about,.
Actor Mike can escape from rehearsals for lunch with Nancy at one o’clock, suggesting “a pub called the Blue Unicorn”, which is surely a play on the real-life White Horse at 31 Uxbridge Road, where I’ve also sometimes met up with actors. (For those with an interest in the drinking habits of old TV people, the late Alvin Rakoff says in his memoir of working for the BBC in the 1950s that after recording at Lime Grove he’d take the crew for a pint at the end of the road, in the British Prince at 77 Goldhawk Road.)
Later, Mike can’t believe Nancy didn’t see his TV performance go out.
“‘I thought you might have been interested enough to watch me on the new medium.’
‘It’s a fairly old medium by now, isn’t it?’
‘But Nancy, this was terrific. I’m a brain surgeon, you see, who takes to drink, and just when I’m having a terrible fit of the stagers, my former loved one is wheeled in with her brains dashed out. I’m supposed to shake so much, the forceps clash together like a steel band as I approach the operating table. The trouble was that I really was shaking so much I dropped the whole kit of instruments on her face. It was Sylvia, you know, she’s got a shocking temper, I cracked the porcelain jacket on one of her front teeth, she’s going to sue me. If I hadn’t got between her and the cameras and ad-libbed, the viewers would have heard every word she said. You certainly missed something. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.” (p. 95)
There’s a lot of interest here (to me): Television no longer a novelty, favouring melodramatic productions in which the viewer might enjoy the emotional crisis of characters in close-up, all within the lively, stressy chaos of live broadcast. The depiction is a bit pointed, even satirical — as is Mike buying up all the papers to bask in the contradictory reviews — but the details are all right, and so surely based on direct observation.
Did Margot Bennett have first-hand experience of BBC drama production when she wrote Someone from the Past, more than a year before her first writing credits at the BBC? Her husband had worked in BBC radio since the war and also sometimes wrote for listings magazine Radio Times, such as his interview with Jimmy Wheeler ahead of a TV comedy show in May 1956. Yet it seems unlikely that Margot tours of TV rehearsals through that connection.
More probable, I think, is this came through her own efforts. Was she meeting with BBC people about writing for TV, and getting tours of production, long before her first screen credit there? Or perhaps, like Nancy, Margot Bennett simply met an actor friend for lunch while they were in rehearsals…
Whatever the case, and for all Bennett might have mocked TV drama, something extraordinary happened after the publication of Someone from the Past. Despite the accolades it won, she never published another crime novel. According to her family (and detailed in the introduction to the British Library edition of The Man Who Didn’t Fly), she didn’t earn enough from novels to continue; crime didn’t pay. Instead, she spent the next decade writing prolifically for TV.
More investigation to follow...
Novels by Margot Bennett:
Non-fiction by Margot Bennett:
“Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard.” (p. 2)
When this short, 136-page novel won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024, I saw some commentary that it was clearly a work of science-fiction just not marketed as such — the implication being out of shame. Sci-fi, after all, is genre and lowbrow while this book aspires to art.
Having read it, I don’t think that’s true. Yes, it is set in the future — just — given that it includes the launch of the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. In real life, Artemis III is currently scheduled to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in mid 2027 (I suspect it may be delayed). The typhoon that here devastates Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines is also a thing still-to-come — but given recent news of extreme weather in the UK and abroad doesn’t seem very distant.
More than that, I’d argue that the technology here, the apparatus of the world depicted, is as it currently exists. There is no “novum” or new wossname to differentiate this world from our own, a novelty whose consequence we then explore. Instead, the launch of the Moon mission, the typhoon and other things — such as the death of one astronaut’s mother down on Earth — help to clarify the sense of scale, distance, remoteness and connection of these six people aboard the small, creaky H. It shapes how we observe them and what they, in turn, observe.
The unnamed H space station here is not, explicitly, the International Space Station — which, in real life, has been permanently occupied by humans since 2 November 2000. But the tech and practicalities are the same. The novel details 24 hours on board, in which the H makes 16 orbits of Earth. We cover the crew’s schedule: scientific experiments, exercise regime, sleeping and toilet arrangements, a shared movie. We dig into their thoughts and fears and dreams. There’s a thing about exactly who and what is being observed in Las Meninas, the painting by Velázquez, as seen in a postcard on board the H. We skip occasionally back to Earth to get a contrasting viewpoint: the dying mother thinking of her daughter in space, the people sheltering from the devastating typhoon that, from orbit, looks serene.
In all this, I’m struck more than anything by a profound sense of fragility: the six people in their slowly eroding H; the people on Earth under threat from the elements; our relationships and loved ones and inevitable loss. So much meaning, all gained by taking a vantage point that provides perspective.
My copy of the book, published (very quickly!) after it won the Booker Prize, includes an afterword from the author which is just as insightful as the novel itself. It’s largely on the subject of what words can do and add and illuminate, as the poorer relation of music, but she also addresses the issues of sci-fi:
“Perversely, perhaps, though Orbital is a book about space, its blueprint wasn’t 2001 or Dune, but A Month in the Country. I thought to myself: I want to write A Month in the Country in space.” (p. 143)
This seems to have been inspired by online videos of the Earth seen from the ISS:
“There’s never a bad view. You never think: oh, this is the boring bit, more ocean, more desert, blah blah; never, no — every view begs for your fresh attention.” (p. 141).
How brilliant and how true, putting in words what I realise I’ve long felt but never consciously articulated. In fact, how extraordinary to look from an orbiting space station — at an altitude of between 413 and 422 km above mean Earth sea level — yet gaze right into my head and explain to me what it is I can see.
Some other books I've read recently:
“The funny thing is that getting the morning-after pill the first day of a zombie apocalypse is really no easier or harder than on a previously average day. No bigger a deal, the obstacles are just… different. More slow-moving, brain-eating hordes, sure, but fewer overtly religiose or obstructive pharmacists. The baseball bat I brought to use in case of the former was also effective on the triple-lock cabinets erected by the latter.” (p. 224)
This is a rich, intoxicating anthology of 19 short stories and musings. Several of the stories are set in the near future, such as the one in which the invention of new kinds of artificial dick leads, through one thing and another, to the collapse of capitalism. Other stories spiral backward — to the pogrom in York in 1190, to The Black Cap gay pub, to the narrator’s own history. There are ghost stories and ghostly stories, and a lot of it is strange and unsettling.
The last story, Dune Elegies, is one of several set in a bleak near-future, a world just beyond our current grasp. The narrator, “terfed off” their own radio show, takes up residence in a lighthouse near the stone mirrors at Denge and continues to transmit a podcast, but with a pervasive sense of lost connection. The narrator is unable to recall the names of Conrad Veidt and Derek Jarman while detailing their importance in queer history — we fill in the blanks as readers. Then there’s a response from listeners to the podcast, transmission of which triggers something in stones taken from the area, wherever they might be now. It’s such an odd, beguiling idea, the sort of story that sits with you long afterwards.
As well as what’s happening, there’s the way these stories are told, dense with allusion and word play, poetry and punning. There are references to films and TV shows, novels and academic texts — I’d have quite liked a bibliography and/or end notes for further reading. It’s not just that stuff is referenced; it is toyed with and spun. For example, one passage about the lives of particular pirates includes the phrase “our flag means life” (p. 229) reversing the title of the 2022-23 TV series while at the same time making a connection to its own exploration of sexuality and identity.
We frequently explore derivation and etymology, how meaning is constructed, generating history and identity. With that in mind, I think the cut-up technique of quotations and references may be a way of shaking things up to create new meanings and ideas. That took me back into my own past when, as a university student some three decades ago, I got hooked on linguistic relativity and the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that language shapes or even determines our thoughts and perceptions.
(In fact, it’s an axiom, not a hypothesis, and not one put forward by the linguists Sapir and Whorf as such, who never wrote together. But perhaps that makes it more fitting as a label, evidence that we need a name, any name, to be able to remonstrate with an idea.)
It’s not just about words in the stories here: in dreams of being Joan of Arc and her insistence on wearing trousers, or in detailing why Artemis wore a short skirt, we’re exploring the construction of gendered and non-gendered identities.
By chance, I was reading this as I saw the new documentary From Roger Moore With Love, which details how movie-star “Roger Moore” was an invented persona; Moore learned to play this persona and then, from The Spy Who Loved Me, applied that to his role as James Bond. At one point, Moore’s friend Christopher Walken says this shouldn’t be a surprise because we’re all self-invented people — there’s a point in our lives, perhaps more than one, where we choose who we are. How fascinating to see archive interviews with Moore uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of Bond or — in an episode of Hardtalk which so yielded something new from its subjects — voicing concern about the “heroic” image of his Bond wielding a gun. I’m not sure I’d have picked up on that if I’d not been reading this book…
Like the world of James Bond, the stories in this book are frequently lusty, even graphic. But Bond is about gratified desire, sex just part of the mix with exotic locations, stylish clothes, fancy food and gadgets. In the book, desire is, I think, less external but bubbling up from within. There’s a lot here on the bloody, visceral heft of bodies — of ourselves not just as contracted identities but as physical things.
“What it means to be in a body, differently, is what the Crusades take aim against,” (p. 61).
So much of this book is exploring that haunting idea, the half of the sentence before “is” and the sentence as a whole.
You can buy Truth & Dare by So Mayer direct from Cipher Press.
For those who might not know, in 1985, the Observer magazine sent Douglas Adams, best-selling author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine to Madagascar to look for the endangered aye-aye lemur. Enthralled by this encounter, they followed it up in 1988 with a longer trip looking for a range on endangered species including the northern white rhinoceros and the kakapo. That trip led to a BBC Radio series first broadcast in 1989 and the book published a year later. In 2009, Stephen Fry and Mark Cardwardine made a TV series retracing the original trip.
Fry's introduction to the 2019 edition of the book included things I didn't know, not least that one inspiration for a lengthy trip around the world looking for different endangered species was Adams's tax situation. By spending a year out of the UK, he saved himself a six-figure sum. We learn, too, of Fry's own role in the original endeavour, as house-sitter for Adams and the emergency contact when things went awry.
The main body of the book is a masterpiece, at once killingly funny and shrewdly, beautifully observed. Much of it has long been lodged in my memory; many speak of Adams's ability to correctly predict the future but he's also skilled and sharing ideas and stories in ways that stick. One thing, I think, I'd not picked up on previous readings is how much this is about human foibles and bureaucracy. By detailing all the things that get in the way of Adams and Carwardine getting to see these creatures - of Things Getting Done - these frustrations illuminate the problems faced by conservationists.
Mark Carwardine's last word updates the one in my dog-eared paperback and makes depressing reading: one of the species he and Adams went to see is now officially extinct, another is near as dammit, and the rest all teeter on the verge of extinction, along with countless others. What a world we are passing on to our children.
See also:
“How can we trap them?” (p. 589)
But something goes wrong with the experiment. Instead of monkeys, the nanovirus sets to work on another population on Kern’s World: the spiders. Over thousands of years, alternating been chapters set on the planet and chapters involving the last human survivors of Earth, we follow what happens nexts…
This is an absolutely brilliant book, epic and thrilling and rich. It’s the sort of novel you want to hare through to find out what happens next and yet never want to end. It’s big on ideas and emotion. For all the enormous scale — it sprawls across space as well as time — it is grounded in compelling characters, human and spider. Their respective civilisations are very different from our own, yet we’re drawn in by relatable fears and desires, tensions and challenges.
One clever way in which we are ensnared is that Tchaikovsky retains a number of characters through the enormous span of the novel. Humans are stored cryogenically or by other means (it would be a shame to spoil exactly how), so sleep for thousands of years and then awaken for the next chapter, catching up as we do on what’s changed in the meantime. With the spiders, Tchaikovsky repeats a number of names among different generations, so we follow the adventures of various Portias, Biancas and Fabians, some the descendants of others. In effect, we inherit a connection each time. That in turn matches something the spiders can do in inheriting memories and “understandings”, so it’s a structural device that also helps us understand the psychology of these creatures.
The alien perspective rendered as normal and humanity seen as other is an old trick from science-fiction, one I first encountered in the opening chapter of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (1974), which involves a similar clash between human civilisation and a species of intelligent “monsters” with just as much claim to the world. But the span of the novel, that long view of developing society and culture seen through a few long-lived characters so that each challenge is deeply affecting, is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. In some respects, this is the Mars trilogy with monsters, which I mean as the highest praise.
The audio version is expertly narrated by Mel Hudson - who makes the various characters distinct and recognisable. I’m pleased to see she has also narrated the two subsequent novels in the series, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. I will not leave those so long.
Darrelhyde attempts to fight the bureaucracy and rouse the interest of the press in his efforts to save Percy. When this fails, he teams up with a young pick-pocket called Gloria to free Percy from his cell…
This short (125 page), funny novel begins with a neat reversal, describing the behaviour of a particular species of ape which, we come to realise within a few sentences is us. I’ve seen this kind of anthropological inversion done elsewhere, such as in David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979), where the final, 13th episode looks at human beings from the same objective viewpoint it has applied to other creatures.
This sort of thing is quite common in science-fiction, too; our ordinary, unthinking behaviour suddenly strange. (I’m near the end of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s amazing Children of Time and will have more to say in due course…)
While the conceit only lasts for those first few pages, we frequently see events from Percy’s perspective. The effect of this inversion is, said a review in Time quoted in the front flap, “a pointed and amusing satire”, while the Herald Tribune thought it, “a brilliantly accomplished small book which widens out into large meanings.”
The lightness of touch surprised me given what I know about Brophy’s later campaigning on the issue of animal rights. Her name came up when I was looking into issues of personhood and reading around the documentary Project Nim, which I reviewed for the Lancet.
The novel was apparently inspired by Brophy’s time living close enough to London Zoo to hear the cries of captive animals. She later wrote a piece, “The Rights of Animals” (1965) for the Sunday Times, subsequently republished by the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, and contributed to such publications as Animal, Men and Morals (1971) and Animal Rights: A Symposium (1979).
I’m also aware of Brophy’s effective campaigning in other areas. With Maureen Duffy she was instrumental in seeing the Public Lending Right enshrined in law, so that authors receive payment for their books being borrowed from public libraries. I’m a direct beneficiary, a fact I have to declare at each meeting of the British Library’s advisory committee to PLR. As I linger over the complimentary sandwiches, I think of Brophy and Duffy and all they achieved.
Yet this novel is not a polemic or even particularly campaigning; indeed, an anti-vivisectionist is one of the targets for satire here. Colonel Hunter of the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practices to Animals is more keen to collect and share photos of animals in distress than to stop such things actually happening. There are no goodies or baddies, just a lot of different frail and fallible people with their foibles.
Elsewhere, a newspaper won’t get involved because they’ve already decided to support the nascent space programme and run a “Space corner” each Saturday. This, we’re told is,
“For the kids. It does them less harm than sadistic comics.” (p. 43)
That’s a sign of the time in which this was written; the anxiety about American comics warping impressionable minds led to the creation of the far more wholesome, home-grown Eagle, launched in 1950. This novel is a counterpoint to the optimistic future lavishly displayed each week in the Eagle’s cover strip Dan Dare. The idea that the space programme could conscript an ape from the zoo is perhaps informed by the shadow of war. The professor’s boarding house and the niceties of dinner with his sister all seem from another age.
It’s been interesting to read this, by chance, after another novel from the same year. It is very different to Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, more in tune, I think, with something else from 1953: Nigel Kneale’s TV serial The Quatermass Experiment has a similar ambivalence to the space programme and the costs involved. But what really struck me about this novel was how modern it feels. I can see why it still felt relevant enough in 1979 to be republished in hardback — the edition I read.
One reason for that is the treatment of impulse and desire, whether ape or human, unworried by social convention. At one point, Gloria daydreams of an encounter with an imagined, handsome young man, who she tellingly gives the name of the aged professor. When, in reality, a young man then asks her out, the relationship lasts only briefly.
“I wasn’t flash enough for her,” (p. 124).
Percy being at liberty transforms his sex drive but his freedom is short-lived. Kendrick, the young man from the space programme, has to hastily improvise an alternative to using Percy that further blurs the distinction between primitive ape and sophisticated human. There’s something both comic and disturbing in all this. When Percy returns to his enclosure of his own volition, Gloria asks what he’s up to.
“Darrelhyde repressed the first word that came to mind. ‘Mating,’ he answered.
“Oh.” Perhaps with cold, Gloria shuddered, and then giggled slightly. “Aren’t animals awful?” (p. 92)
The plot is quite involved so I’ll endeavour to explain the set-up. In the first chapter, we meet wealthy Barry and Vanessa Bone as they return home late from a posh party, arguing about the cheque for £2,000 that Barry has just given Roger Maple. The money, insists Barry, is as an investment in a new railway in an eastern European country called Ardania, where copper has been found; Maple is a friend of the local king.
A young woman called Kate Browning returns home from the same party and admits to her sober, level-headed sister Julia that she overheard Maple and the Bones, got mixed up in their conversation after she claimed to know the king as a friend of a friend, and has herself invested £100 in the scheme. Yet Kate believes that the money is an investment in a deal to distribute Ardanian oil.
Vincent and Frances Roydon were also at the party. Vincent is features editor of the Vigilant newspaper, which is ironic as he, too, has been hoodwinked by Maple, investing £250 that he can ill-afford in what he thinks is a paper-making scheme to exploit Ardania’s plentiful soft woodlands.
In the second chapter, we meet Maple himself, calling in on his old friend Duncan Stewart, an impoverished documentary film-maker who finds £250 to invest in what Maple describes as a scheme to dam Ardania’s Lixaman Falls and supply hydroelectric power across the border.
By now the reader is sure of what Duncan only suspects: that all of this is a scam. Maple conspicuously leaves the remains of a letter from a mystery woman, Elvira, in Duncan’s wastepaper bin and then heads off to meet his wife, Jenny Maple, so they can leave the country.
He promptly disappears. Jenny tells Duncan that her husband stood her up but she refuses to go to the police, even as days turn to weeks without word from him. Duncan instead meets the other hoodwinked investors and together they investigate what has been going on. Their first move is to try and meet up with Ardania’s former king, now living in London under the name Mr Forster and busy trying to agree the sale of his unrivalled collection of paintings by Vermeer…
Even so, the novel is full of brilliant details and Bennett shows her usual sharply observational eye. Roger Maple, before he disappears, is a beguiling rogue with a neat line in tradecraft. For example, he advises Duncan Stewart not to buy beer on credit from his local shop:
“It gives you a reputation of being hard up, and in your own street, too.” (p. 22)
It doesn’t matter that Duncan is hard up; the important thing is appearance. Maple instead recommends being bold and try cashing a cheque for £100 in the same establishment to give a contrary impression. Then there’s the artful way Maple gives the names of his other investors — Bone, Browning and Roydon — to sufficiently impress Duncan that he wants to put in money himself, while thinking this is his own idea (p. 28). In doing so, the author also provides Duncan with leads to follow when Maple disappears, bringing the different investors together to compare stories and so form a bond. That is elegantly, effectively done.
Speaking of bonds, I wondered at first why Duncan was so easily taken in by Maple, given he’s such an evident rogue. How did these two so very different men ever become friends? Just as I wondered this, the answer came: on p. 34 we’re told that they were in the army together. The implication is that this formed an unshakeable bond between two people otherwise from completely different worlds. Now I wonder how relatable that would have been to readers of the time, so soon after the end of the war and with National Service ongoing. I’m aware that the services threw together people from different backgrounds and classes who might never otherwise have met. But I’d never thought of the lasting relationships so created, akin to friends made on holiday that you can’t then shake, but with a stronger, faced-death-together connection.
Another contemporary insight is Duncan’s own frustrations. As a filmmaker, he’s keen to find truth, avoid cliche and to document ordinary, real life. There's a sequence late on where he’s being briefed on an advert for serial. When he offers his view on how to lift this above cliche, he is told “This is meant to be an advertising, not an art film” (p. 166) — though the implication is that his suggestions will be taken on and will prove effective.
This and the sequence where Roydon is faced with the sack, apparently on the whim of the publisher, may reveal something of the real-life experience of the author, or her husband who was editor of Lilliput between 1943 and 1950, when Margot wrote regularly for it. How much could the Bennetts do what Roydon does here, his threat to take a scoop to a rival publication earnings him promotion and a raise? My guess is that this was wish fulfilment, even revenge for real life.
On another occasion, Duncan rails against the nannying welfare state, in much the way as might the protagonist of novels from the same year such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Nevil Shute’s time-travelling In the Wet.
“‘I can’t leave the country, drive a car, open a shop, buy a pound of butter, not without permission. There are places where I can’t cross the road until a policeman lets me. I know I’m a man and not a unit,’ he said satirically, ‘because I’m allowed to register a vote for Holborn Borough Councillors. I’d like to do something more. I’d like to find Roger and not just run bleating to the police. I’d like to be a man on my own.” (pp. 62-63)
But Duncan isn’t alone; the whole wheeze of the book is that it’s an investigation by a group of amateur detectives, all from different backgrounds but linked by common cause. Though Duncan crave adventure of a John Buchan/Richard Hannay sort, it is Roydon who enjoys racy antics abroad.
There are lots of fun supporting characters, best of all Derek Vaughn, the burglar battling with his own conscience. Here’s a typical monologue from him, all sex and violence and comedy:
“When I was a lad, I was one of the roughest types on God’s earth. I’ve done five years for rapping a harmless old woman on the head. But I used my time to educate myself, and before the end I was the prison librarian. Some of the least educated men used to be great readers They’d get me to mark off the dirty bits for them, and even if it was just the lights going out or a description of a woman’s brassiere they’d read it till the page dropped off. That way, sir, I gradually got a lot of them interest in literature for its own sake.” (pp. 73-74)
Something of this echoes in a later sex scene just kindling as a chapter ends:
“She drew his hard, reluctant body closer to her and held his head against her soft, generous breasts. She soothed him with her loving, expressive hands until he was utterly relaxed in the ambience of her kindness. He was weak, and knew for the first time the peace that comes from abandoning the painful disguise of strength.” (p. 217)
How different, I thought, to the gruff, masculine perspective of bonking in Fleming or Shute, sex as surrender rather than attack. And yet, this sex is also victory, an accomplishment and something got away with for the lover who is married to someone else.
That is more interesting than the way the novel ends for Duncan, rejected by one woman so he immediately proposes to another. We leave him and his fiancee on an ostensibly happy note, but the cold exchange of one woman for another simply doesn’t sit right. The Widow of Bath neatly tied up all the threads of its plot and added an unsettling coda to haunt us after the close of the book. The ending here is is unsettling because it is unsatisfactory, not quite tying things up. The basic trick behind this novel isn’t as clever or as satisfying as her last book, and it’s not quite so well done.
Bennett followed Farewell Crown and Good-bye King with two novels both published in 1955 which I’ve already read: unconventional mystery The Man Who Didn’t Fly and the science-fictional The Long Way Back; my friend Matthew Sweet calls the latter her masterpiece. I’ll be back to read what’s considered the best as well as the last of her detective novels, Someone From the Past (1958).
I spoke to Kenny last year about another of my books, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television; that podcast is available here and you can still buy the book.
(The photograph above right shows two copies of the Time-Travelling Almanac plus my copy of Kate Orman's 1994 Doctor Who novel The Left-Handed Hummingbird.)
“There are a dozen clever deceptions in the book, twice as many as most writers would have given us.”
I’ve seen some criticism that The Widow of Bath is too complicated, or its protagonists too unlikeable, or that it’s too funny (when, it is implied, murder is a serious business). But I found it fun and then compelling; the last third held me utterly gripped.
We start with Hugh Everton, dining in a down-at-heel seaside hotel — we’re never told where, only that it’s not Bournemouth (p. 25). He is caustic with the Italian waiter about the meagre fare. Then, by chance, in walks Jan Deverill, who has history with Hugh but hasn’t seen him in years.
Jan’s uncle, Gregory Bath, is with her. He’s a respected judge and married to the much younger Lucy, who also has history with Hugh (we learn later that she’s why Hugh and Jan split). Lucy arrives in the company of some other men, one of whom Hugh is certain he recognises — they had some rough dealings previously. Yet he is told he’s got this wrong; this isn’t the same man.
Though Hugh is caustic with everyone, he’s invited back to the Bath residence for more drinks and is the last person to speak to Gregory Bath before the judge is shot dead. But by the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared…
The novel is narrated in the third person from Hugh’s perspective, so really it’s he who observes that this situation is,
“the reverse of the sealed room murder” (p. 47).
Then, when questioned by Inspector Leigh of the local police about the late Judge Bath’s beloved dog, heard outside the house just before the gunshot, Hugh responds,
“He did bark in the night” (p. 50).
This is, of course, a reference to the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892), but it's striking that these two references to staple of the crime genre follow in such quick succession. It’s as if the author is offering her credentials: this, she’s saying, will be a reversal or twist on the classic model of a murder mystery.
Agatha Christie did something similar in creating Hercule Poirot; on page 11 of his debut adventure, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), she compares Poirot to Sherlock Holmes and so indicates to the reader that this will be the same kind of story. It’s not just that Poirot is a similar kind of detective (with his own individual quirks) but also the “rules” of the story are the same as in the best of Holmes, allowing the reader a fair chance to crack the case ahead of the detective.
Ronald Knox famously codified these rules in an introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year 1928 (1929), in what is sometimes known as his “10 commandments” of detective fiction, or the detection decalogue. The Widow of Bath doesn’t break any of these, as such, but I think it comes pretty close.
Hugh doesn’t light on any clues that are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. Yet on several occasions, some new fact or revelation means more to him that it does to us — for example, it relates to his rough treatment with the man he recognises at the beginning of the book, or it’s something he remembers reading about in the papers. It’s not quite playing the game, which I think is why I think aficionados of crime might object.
But I also think this stuff makes the novel more than just a game. What starts as a cosy crime caper riffing on a version of the locked room becomes something a bit stranger and richer.
It’s an odd mix of ingredients. The austere, respectable judge and his young, flighty wife are rather stock characters. There’s a rather Dickensian father, so obsessed with a legal case and his old, out-of-date papers that he neglects his daughter. And then there’s stuff that feels very contemporary.
The plot reminded me of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, published two years later, which also involves a group of people who are hiding in plain sight. Like Nevil Shute’s The Far Country — from the year before this — there’s an unease about the post-war settlement. Here, Inspector Porthouse notes that, unlike everyone else, criminals are able to save money, in what feels like side-eye at the post-war Labour government:
“They don’t get it all taken off them as tax” (p. 201)
Rather than things being settled by the end of the war, the world continues in chaos, with Hugh listing multiple competing tensions:
“Even now there were plenty of people on the run in Europe. Communists were chasing capitalists; dictators hounding democrats; socialists hunting fascists. People on top everywhere were persecuting the people who had fallen to the bottom; the old scores were a short list compared to the new scores; the secret police were, as usual, being secret only up to a point; their intentions were frequently public and alarming; the results then achieved gave only slender assurance to the law-abiding. The mass activity of armies was restricted; the private efforts of generals, and even, sometimes of corporals, were disastrously free.” (p. 176)
For all this is going on “in Europe”, some of it reaches this quiet seaside town — if only the people there will take the trouble to notice. Early on, Judge Bath is shocked by Hugh’s lack of morality when presented with evidence of a crime. The judge sees things simply:
“And I also advise you that it is the duty of every citizen to expose and so help to destroy evil.” (p. 31).
It seems odd to hear this case being made with no reference to Hugh having recently been demobbed — we presume — from battling Nazis. Notably, there’s little sense of what the various characters did during the war. But I think this is all informed by something else: the author’s time in Spain during the civil war, and her efforts to campaign in London to raise money to battle the fascists. There’s something a little like Casablanca (1942) here: an amoral man hidden away in a coastal resort who encounters an old flame and discovers a cause he will fight for.
I wondered at first if Hugh’s experience of war explained his caustic nature; he;’s a sort of bitter Bertie Wooster. “If you go on like this I’ll have to hit you,” Hugh says to the the grieving widow Lucy (p. 42). He then tells her to think of something cheerful such as what she’ll wear to the murder trial, before adding that this is all a “kind of verbal anti-hysteria slap, containing no malice.”
To some extent, this is a defensive response following his previous rough treatment. We learn that while previously involved with Lucy, Hugh got caught up in a scam that saw him disgraced at work, he was then pushed into the Seine and nearly drowned, before ending up in prison. But this caustic stuff is also familiar from the other Margot Bennett novels I’ve read. As I said of her The Long Way Back (1955), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each other and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.
Despite Hugh’s instincts to protect himself and not get involved in this mystery, he is drawn into investigating the crime. He generally blunders around and at one point it looks as though he has thwarted years of painstaking police work. The inspector duly explodes,
“God spare me from amateurs” (p. 202).
It’s a fun twist on the form to suggest that the amateur detective has in fact hampered the investigation. Yet on the same page it’s suggested that perhaps the police had no idea about the scheme Hugh has uncovered but are pretending otherwise. We’re not sure who to believe.
Things take a more serious turn when Hugh realises that someone else is at risk. There’s palpable horror when it seems Hugh has endangered them. Another character dies and their body also disappears — and the story really picks up. By the end, Hugh has taken on the moral imperative that he dismissed at the start of the novel: he is determined to catch the criminals and see them brought to justice.
We then get twist after twist, pop-pop-pop. I correctly guessed one villain — I’m not sure it’s much of a surprise. But then it turns out that the death of Gregory Bath is not quite what people have assumed. Hugh gets a happy ending but then there’s a coda in which we learn the cost to someone of this cosy caper.
This is a bleak note to end on, again with some ambiguity about exactly what this person will now do. It’s unsettling and lingers in the memory; it is highly effective.
Margot Bennett adapted her novel for television, broadcast by the BBC over six weeks from 1 June to 6 July 1959, with a preview written by Bennett published in Radio Times. John Justin played Hugh, with his real-life wife Barbara Murray as Lucy. Jennifer Wright played Jan (a few months ahead of joining the cast of Garry Halliday in the regular role of Jean Wills). Sadly, the serial doesn’t survive in the archives but it marked a significant shift in Bennett’s career.
She’d previously written a one-off, hour-long TV play, The Sun Divorce, broadcast on 26 January 1956 as part of Associated Rediffusion’s London Playhouse on the relatively new ITV (which launched the previous October), and then wrote 15 episodes of the soap opera Emergency-Ward 10 (1958-59). She also co-wrote two films: The Man Who Liked Funerals and The Crowning Touch (both 1959).
But the adaptation of The Widow of Bath was her first work for the BBC, presumably under the auspices of the head of script department there, Donald Wilson. Over the next few years, she went on to write for a number of major BBC crime and thriller series: The Third Man, Suspense and Maigret.
“It seems that Bennett found screenwriting more lucrative than producing novels at a time when she was also raising a family,” says Martin Edwards (p. 10) in his introduction to the British Library Crime Classics edition of another of her novels, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, originally published in 1955. That book was nominated for the very first Golden Dagger award for best novel of the year, as given by the Crime Writers’ Association. (Until 1960, the Golden Dagger was known as the Crossed Red Herring award).
A later novel, Someone from the Past (1958) won this coveted award and in 1959 Bennett was made a member of the prestigious Detection Club. “She had reached the pinnacle of her profession,” as a crime writer says Edwards, but “astonishingly, she never published another mystery novel, an extreme example of a crime writer going out at the top” (p. 9).
I’m fascinated by all of this: the range of an extraordinary writer, the economics involved, the practicalities, the implicit politics. More to follow when I finish Bennett’s Farewell Crown and Good-bye King (1953).
Often the focus is on hacker Roderick Ho: his personal and home life, the thoughts bubbling away in his head, the way his perspective is completely at odds with what's really going on or what people actually think of him. This works to great effect, at once funny and suspenseful because we understand what he doesn't: that's he's in genuine danger.
Just as we think we know where we are with all this, a leading character is killed in a clumsy, accidental encounter that has major repercussions - a good example of Herron's knack for keeping things surprising and suddenly upping the stakes. As we know from previous novels in the series, no one is safe in these stories and regular characters can be killed abruptly.
That makes the final act especially thrilling, with two regulars out on their own dealing with... well, that would be spoiling things. Herron keeps us on tenterhooks about which, if either of them, are going to survive. And then, in the closing moments of the novel, there's the tantalising suggestion that someone we thought dead in a previous book is still alive and there is more story to come...
It'll be interesting to see how this instalment is adapted for TV, not least because the last TV series ended on something of a cliffhanger about the status of Frank Harkness, the character played by Hugo Weaving. There's little mention of him here but I suspect he'll have more of a role on screen.
Again, I'm in awe of audiobook narrator Sean Barrett bringing so many characters to life. We're never in any doubt who is thinking or speaking. I made a note early on that it is sometimes confusing when we change scenes, or locations, without much pause in narration. Yet as things went on, I began to think that this was highly effective, the plot relentless and the listener required to pay attention. That and the constant guessing game of what's really going on and who is going to survive make this an immersive novel and rewarding to part of.
The machine, he is told, is incapable of making mistakes. His only chance to escape the drudgery of his assigned position is to volunteer for a much more dangerous scientific job: joining a survey expedition to the post-apocalyptic ruin of Britain...
The basic idea here is a reversal of recognised convention: African explorers and scientists venturing into Britain, measuring native skull size and sizing up local resources such as coal and precious stones. First published in 1954, and republished by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1957 (the edition I've got here), it's playing with anxieties of the time in which it was written.
Colonialism is just part of that anxious mix. The implication is that British, European and American civilisation has been wiped out by nuclear holocaust. As well as fear of the bomb, there is a fear about Britain's reduced status in the world; here, radiation has led to mutation and British people are now just four feet-tall. Their achievements are all but forgotten, too. The Africans have a mangled idea of the history of these people, who they think were at war with the Romans under Napoleon, and whose heroes included "Crom Well" and "Quix Ot" (p. 17).
The cave-dwelling Britons have no knowledge of or interest in history. They are parochial, timid and superstitious, most of them hostile to strangers or any suggestion of change. When one man suggests a better method of dental practice to save people from going mad with toothache, he is forced out of the community.
Grame and the other African explorers are no less short of foibles. They constantly squabble and fight, scientists governed by ego, desire and prejudice as much as by objectivity and logic. As in Margot Bennett's other, later science-fiction novel, The Furious Masters (1968), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each another and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.
My pal Matthew Sweet explored The Long Way Back and the life of its author in his 2015 documentary for Radio 3, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and wrote a piece about the novel for Unherd in 2020: "Was the British empire a curse?"; the comments under the latter made me think of the response to the dentist. Matthew calls The Long Way Back Bennett's "masterpiece" and likens it to Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a critique of empire.
In addition, it reminded me of other, latter fiction set in post-apocalyptic Britain, such as The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) and Riddley Walker (1980), in which vestiges of the world we know now survive the nuclear holocaust but lose their sense and meaning. Towards the end of the novel, Grame and the surviving members of his team reach the ruin of a once-great city where, in a vast but partially collapsed building, they find the remains of an inscription in stone.
"'There are figures,' Valya said. 'They look like 1993, but I couldn't be certain.' She took out her notebook, and copied faithfully the letter J, followed by nine or ten blanks. They all tried to discover, by fingering, what the letters might have been, but most of them were no more than a roughness on the stone. On the last line, the indentations grew deeper, and Valya wrote carefully, '—e p—a—e —f —od pas— — — a— —und— — sta— — —ng.'" (pp. 184-5)
This, they deduce by filling in the blanks, once read "The place of god's passage and understanding", on which basis they conclude that the whole city was considered holy. It's a joke, I think, playing on a cliche in archaeology, where a site whose purpose is not known is described as having ritual significance.
But also, this is another reversal. The indentations surely once spelled out a relatively well-known phrase from the Bible, in Paul's letter to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 7):
"The peace of god passeth all understanding."
They've failed to understand that there is no understanding, seeing certainty where there was none.
The novel ends with the surviving members of the expedition flying home - or, as the novel puts it, "flying into uncertainty", unsure of the reception awaiting them and with a looming threat of war. We finish with one of the Britons they've met, watching them go,
"with his heart rising up, while he dreamed of the future when Britain might raise itself, generation by generation, to become a nation that would conquer the earth." (p. 206)
Again, this dream is ironic because we, the reader, can see what conquest has wrought. Yet there does not seem to be much hope that the characters have learned the same lesson.
Speaking of hope, last night BBC Four showed the 1954 production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted by Nigel Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier. It begins with an introduction from BBC head of drama Michael Barry:
"To me, the most alarming thing in the play is the fact that it has no hope, and as the mortally ill author George Orwell preciously brought his one script south from Glasgow to London, he couldn't find it within him to give hope to the play."
The Long Way Back came out the same year as that TV adaptation. Margot Bennett was, like Orwell, in Spain during the civil war - there's even some suggestion that they knew one another while in Barcelona. I wonder how much their respective sense of humanity, or what Barry calls man's inhumanity to man, was forged there...
I have more reading to do.
