Pages 28 and 29 relive the experience, in May, of watching season opener Space Babies for the first time, my son the then 12 year-old Lord of Chaos keen to see it at midnight - especially if we had crisps. Then, on page 68 and 69, we mark the 40th anniversary of The Who Shop on 2 December, with an interview with owners Alex and Kevan.
LXXIThe Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it. (p. 92)
Or, to put it another way, you can’t rewrite history — not one line.
In 1859, a reclusive, privately wealthy scholar called Edward Fitzgerald anonymously published 250 copies of a pamphlet containing his translation in English of 75 four-line rhyming poems, a form known as “rubāʿī”, attributed to a Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, in the 11th century. No one paid much attention to this pamphlet until, in 1861, the lawyer and literary scholar Whitley Stokes happened across a stack of copies at a bookstall near Leicester Square, where the original price of five shillings had been reduced to a penny.
Having bought one, Stokes showed it to his friends, including the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who duly bought their own copies. Swinburne’s account of what then happened (apparently from p. 188, vol 6, of The Swinburne Letters) is quoted in my copy of the Rubáiyát:
“Next day we thought we might get some more for presents among our friends, but the man at the stall asked twopence! Rossetti expostulated with him in terms of such humorously indignant remonstrance as none but he could ever have commanded. We took a few, and left him. In a week or two, if I am not much mistaken, the remaining copies were sold at a guinea.” (p. x)
Word gradually caught on. Fitzgerald produced an expanded, second edition containing 110 of the four-line poems in 1868, and further revised editions, each of 101 of these quatrains, in 1872, 1879 and 1889 — the latter published after Fitzgerald’s death.
By the end of the 19th century, “more than two millions copies have been sold [of the Rubaiyat] in over two hundred editions” (according to a facsimile of the first edition published c. 1900). It became “one of the most admired works of Victorian literature” and “in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the most influential [long poem] in the English language”, according to Melvyn Bragg, introducing a 2014 episode of In Our Time on The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
In 1961, David Whitaker drew from this book when he wrote the BBC children’s serial Garry Halliday and the Secret of Omar Khayyam, broadcast at Saturday teatimes over seven weeks in early 1962. I’ll dig into that more when I write up my notes for the corresponding entry in my Garry Halliday episode guide. But for now, it’s enough to recognise that this little book was still resonant a hundred years after Whitley Stokes first discovered it on that bookstall.
But why was this slim book of poems such a massive hit in the late 19th and early 20th century?
It’s effectively a day in the life; the opening rubāʿī describes the start of new day in the early part of the year, the dawn sun touching the Sultan’s Turret in an unnamed Persian town, a cock crowing and — in subsequent quatrains — a group of people waiting eagerly for the tavern to open. The poet wanders this town, enjoying a cup of wine and musing on the nature of existence.
XLVII
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.
(First edition, p. 56)
XXIV
Ah, make the most of what ye may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
(Fourth edition, p, 76)
There was, at the time Fitzgerald published his first edition, a long-standing interest in Persian culture and the wider Orient, not least because of British imperial interests across the east and into India. The Persian language was used by the East India Company in provincial governments and courts until the 1830s. Sir William Jones’s various translations and his A grammar of the Persian language (1771) influenced the generations that followed. For example, the Jones translation of the 8th century Mu’allaqat inspired Alfred Tennyson to write his Locksley Hall (1835). Tennyson was, in turn, a friend of Edward Fitzgerald.
That context is useful but doesn’t explain the particular appeal of the Rubaiyat. What made this text stand out?
Note that in the two quatrains quoted above there’s no mention of an afterlife. The In Our Time episode on the Rubaiyat and Sadeq Saba in his 2010 documentary The Genius of Omar Khayyam explore this issue of godlessness. Fitzgerald published his first edition in 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, at a time when there was already much interest in “long time” — ancient, geological history stretching back millions and billions of years, far further than accounted for by a literal reading of the Bible. These ideas were controversial. On In Our Time, the suggestion is made that Fitzgerald couldn’t have published a work of his own (supposed) agnostic, perhaps even atheistic, musings without inviting scandal; Khayyam enabled him to do so at a safe remove. Readers could also engage in such ideas without breaking from the Church.
I can see, too, that there’s an appeal in the world conjured here: a rich culture different from that of the late Victorians, and seemingly more free. The In Our Time episode talks about the wider allure of Orientalism to the late Victorians, notably in the sensuous hedonism of the harem. I don’t think there’s much licentiousness in the Rubaiyat, beyond the idea that the poet says to drink and enjoy wine while we can. But there’s an allure in any different, rich culture in which we can escape and be immersed — like the appeal of Middle Earth or sci-fi or Regency novels. Once entranced, there’s always more to steep yourself in: the history and rules, the minutiae, the power politics in wrangling among other true believers. (The same might be true of the football terrace, too.)
There are often good reasons why someone actively seeks such escape. In Our Time cites Fitzgerald’s close friendship with Professor Edward Byles Cowell; the first edition is in part a translation of the Persian quatrains Cowell found while in Calcutta and sent to Fitzgerald, their correspondence apparently suggestive of how keenly the two men felt their separation. We can read something into this, just as readers of the Rubaiyat could read their own hopes and desires into the tantalising world it conjured. It’s a frame in which things are possible that would not be dared outside.
But maybe the appeal isn’t nearly so immersive. This kind of “enjoy life while you can” stuff is not a world away from “live, laugh love”. That such aphorisms here derive from some ancient, eastern scholar confers authenticity and value to what a cynic might otherwise see as greetings-card wisdom. And there’s also something haunting in this voice from what’s now almost a thousand years ago exhorting us to enjoy our existence and to live while we can.
In fact, we’re not sure Omar Khayyam really said the things attributed to him. It’s not just that many of the surviving quatrains in Persian give no indication of author, but Fitzgerald took a very free hand in translating the texts he had to hand, reordering and rewording them, grafting in bits that sound like the Book of Common Prayer (compare the last quatrain I quoted to the famous “dust to dust...”) and Shakespeare. That might not resonate so much with us now as it did with late Victorian readers. Moulded in their own language, no wonder they felt that this text out of the long past spoke to them so directly.
The real Omar Khayyam — full name Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī — is no less fascinating than this mythic version.
“Better known for his poetry, it often surprises many to learn that Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was one of the greatest of all medieval mathematicians,” says Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders — The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010). He cites Khayyam’s work on cubic equations in Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, including “both algebraic and geometric methods for solving them systematically and elegantly, using the method of conical sections (which involves slicing through a cone at different angles to produce different types of curves such as circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas)” (p. 122).
I’m familiar with conic sections being used to make sense or orbits, whether those of celestial bodies or the rockets and craft trying to reach them, and wonder how much of Khayyam survives in the mechanics of the space age.
Khayyam was also part of a team that, with cutting-edge technology such as the astrolabe, calculated the length of the year with much greater accuracy than the contemporary Gregorian model; indeed, the Jalali calendar devised by Khayyam and his colleagues was still in use into the 20th century. In addition, Al-Khalili quotes a long passage from one of Khayyam’s other surviving works, more reliably attributed to him than his poetry, extolling the virtues of seeking the truth — and acknowledging that people will mock you for doing so. It’s quoted at length because it expresses a sentiment that Al-Khalili recognises now, the voice of the exasperated scientist ringing down to us through the ages.
But perhaps I’m just the latest in a long line to read into this little book what I want to see.
I've not read The Left-Handed Hummingbird since it was first published in November 1993 - the official publication date was December, but there's a moment in this that I suddenly, madly remembered first reading the night before my driving test so it must have been out the month before. Yet this odd, extraordinary book scored its way into my brain. Reading it again after more than 30 years, it was immediately, vividly familiar, like catching up with an old friend.
Two things surprised me. First, for what I remember as Kate Orman's radical debut, the plot is quite straightforward, even slight. The Doctor and his pals Ace and Bernice are on the trail of "the Blue", ie Huitzilin, which has the power to take people over and make them violent. That includes the Doctor and his friends - all providing Huitzilin with fuel so that he can become corporeal once more. But the more the Doctor is taken over, the more he can see what Huitzilin thinks and feels. And the more Huitzilin becomes corporeal, the more he can be tackled head on...
What makes this so different is the way that it's told, beginning in 1994 - the future, when the book was published - and then dancing back to multiple points in time to piece together the story. Telling a story out of order was a big innovation, perhaps oddly for a long-running series about gadding back and forth in time. And then the novel makes us realise that the pieces don't quite fit because time is in flux and changing. I'm conscious now, as I wasn't at the time, how big an influence this was on my debut novel.
The way it's told includes things we'd never do today. The violence is horrific and vivid, rather than PG or 12A. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms and LSD to communicate with his enemy. One of his companions is a gun-totting solder who kills people with little qualm and reneges on her agreement with the Doctor not to use violence; the other companion kills a man by bashing him with a cooking implement. This book is all set on Earth and yet reading it is a journey to another world.
Secondly, the book is chock-full of references to other Doctor Who, on TV and in print. That's not a criticism - these were books squarely aimed at fans, and I ate up this continuity with greed at the time but was grateful to the entry on this novel in the Cloister Library when trying to remember other books I've not read in more than 30 years. For the most part, you don't need to be able to place these references to enjoy or be caught up in the story. But then there are the exceptions.
I think the assumed/required knowledge of the reader is 1964 story The Aztecs, which was readily available to fans at the time of publication having been released on BBC Video on 2 November 1992, and 1974 story Death to the Daleks, released on video July 1987. These TV stories also inspired two of the best novelisations, too. This kind of thing occupies my head a lot in what I write day to day - how much we can assume fixed points of Doctor Who, the nodes by which we all navigate, as opposed to the obscure stuff that is manna for the dork hardcore (my people). See, for example, what I said about authority as it relates to The Unfolding Text.
But also, amazingly, there are several references to other Doctor Who stories here that the Cloister Library doesn't cover. Perhaps fittingly for a story that plays with chronology and the unfixedness of time, there are the references in this novel to multiple Doctor Who stories from after it was published. When the Doctor is gravely wounded, his friends are asked why they don't rush him to hospital.
"'Because he's from outer crukking space,' spat Bernice. 'A crukking twentieth-century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him.'" (p. 177)
Which, of course, is exactly what happens to kill off this incarnation of the Doctor in the TV movie Doctor Who (1996). Later in the novel, Ace pulls out her gun only to find that the Doctor has swapped it for a potato, years ahead of him pulling the same trick (with a banana) on Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances (2005). Then the TARDIS lands on Abbey Road (p. 201), as it does in The Devil's Chord (2024).
A few other small things occur. Bernice Summerfield, a 26th-century archaeologist of the 20th century, doesn't know what pizza is (p. 71) or how to open tins (p. 73), and doesn't have much to do. When she reveals, at the end, that she doesn't get to do much archaeology while travelling in time and is thinking of leaving the TARDIS, I could well understand why. I doubt I was conscious of all this when I first read the novel; now I'm all too aware of the note from my editors to ensure the regular characters are always well served.
Something very of its time is the frequency with which the author refers to the Doctor as "the Time Lord". Yes, she also refers to Bernice as "the archaeologist" (p. 238) and Cristian as "the Mexican" (p. 259), but there are far more second mentions of the Doctor as Time Lord, which I don't think a Doctor Who novelist would do now. If nothing else, this incarnation of the Doctor, in the crumpled linen suit of the novels, is one of the least assuming Doctors visually, a man we'd fail to notice in a crowd who is yet a near god-like alien in our midst. Referring to him, a lot, as "the Time Lord" is a convention, a fashion, of the time when this novel was written but I think it'a also the wrong cue for what we "see" - as if this unassuming fellow were wearing a big robe and collar.
And then there's the other strong visual elicited by this reread: of me, aged 17, utterly absorbed by this book, this series, this gang of authors I so much wanted to be part of. There's a bit towards the end of the novel where the Doctor handles a powerful book that glows with light. It's been fun to return to this book that shone so brightly in my formative years and has stayed with me so long after. Thank you, Kate.
See also:
My interview last month with Sefi Atta, author of A Bit of Difference, is now available in full on YouTube.
The interview was part of Macfest; last year, for the same festival, I interviewed Fatima Manji about her book Hidden Heritage.
Sadie Green meets Sam Masur (later Mazur) in hospital when they’re both children. They’re each going through some horrible, serious stuff at the time but bond while playing computer games. Sadie has also not been entirely honest with Sam. Despite a falling out, they reconnect during college and collaborate on a game of their own…
We follow them for two decades through the highs and lows of their lives, the loves and losses and games.
It’s beautifully written and wryly observed, noting changes to games and the surrounding culture over the period. It’s also full of nuance: we can see Sadie’s tutor is a manipulative predator; she learns to see that, too, but remains his friend. For all he’s a monster, he’s a person, too.
At the heart of the novel is Sam and Sadie’s sparky relationship. At best, they are funny and supportive; at worst, they are jealous or brood on perceived slights. There are several recurring jokes, such as one — based on an old computer game — that Sadie has died of dysentery, which is part of their childhood banter and then gets dropped to blinding effect again on page 440.
In fact, it is constantly smart and funny, the wit all from the perspective of particular characters so also revealing about them and their understanding of the world. For example, there’s Sam in a particular crisis wishing he could reprogram his brain in the way he might fix a game.
“Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.” (p. 228)
There’s lots of telling details, too, on the games these characters play — real and imaginary — and on their respective, mixed heritage: Sam’s Korean grandparents run a pizza place in K-Town, a district Sadie has never heard of when she first meets him, though she lives in a nearby part of LA. Later, they make a game out of separate but intersecting worlds.
The novel isn’t quite in chronological order, which allows it to tease the reader with key revelations to come. We jump ahead to interviews with Sam and Sadie looking back on their life and work. Or there’s the moment on page 190 when, in a scene set in the pizza place run by Sam’s grandparents, there’s the briefest mention of a poster on the wall: a 1980s advert showing a woman drinking a Korean beer. Twelve pages later, we learn the significance of this photograph — a gut punch of a revelation.
For a book about something as apparently unserious as playing games — a viewpoint it addresses several times — it is richly profound. More than once, we see the way games help people in real-life crisis. Sometimes, games have other impacts on real life, which I won’t spoil here. But it’s all utterly compelling; I read the last 100 pages on a plane yesterday, my heart in my mouth.
On that point, I can understand why the blurb and publicity don’t make a thing about this all being about games. That might put off readers who aren’t into games (I’m not, especially) — but can still be enthralled by the story being told.
One last idle thought. In her notes and acknowledgements at the end, author Gabrielle Zevin says that in referencing life-life computer games throughout the novel,
“I chose the games that made the most sense for the story, even when the dates were slightly wrong.” (p. 481)
That may illuminate an early reference that caught my eye. We’re told that Sam’s possessions in 1995 include,
“an aging desktop computer with a Doctor Who sticker on one side and a Dungeons and Dragons sticker on the other” (p. 67)
I wonder when Sam, aged 21 at this point, got into Doctor Who — a year before the TV movie kindled a new fandom and brought many lapsed fans back from the fray. I assume he was watching late-night on PBS. Did he find other like-minded fans, in real life or online, in the way he played Dungeons and Dragons with others? And when did his interest wane? Doctor Who never gets mentioned again.
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| Issue 43 |
Nancy says:
The Evolving Landscape of AI in the Arts
My guest this week is Simon Guerrier, a writer and producer who has written numerous books related to Doctor Who, produced five documentaries for BBC radio, and more than 70 audio plays for Big Finish Productions, as well as comics and short stories. He also chairs the Books Committee for the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. Simon talks with me about how he got his start in writing and producing—including just what a producer does—the value of negotiating arrangements that work in everyone’s best interest, the impact of new tools like ChatGPT on creative careers and the creative process, his new book about television pioneer David Whitaker, and more.
 |
| Standing: John Peel, Jeremy Hoad, Colin Brake, Nick Walters, Daniel Blythe, Peter Anghelides, Steve Cole, Simon Guerrier, Paul Magrs, Martin Day, Mark Morris, Andrew Hunt, Simon Messingham, Paul Ebbs. Seated: Mags L Halliday, Robert Dick, Steve Lyons, Nigel Robinson |
Voting is open to members of the BSFA, who can select up to four works per category. There will then be a shortlist, and winners announced at the Levitation Eastercon event over the weekend of 29 March - 1 April. Details and voting form at the BSFA site.
What with life and lockdown, I've been a bit out of the loop with all things BSFA, though I used to regularly review books for its magazine Vector and attend its events in London. In September 2015, I was the subject of one of those events, interviewed by Professor Edward James, who'd overseen the Masters degree in science-fiction I did 1997-98.
Here's an on-its-side recording, from that ancient bygone age.
This week, a post by Letters of Note started off a chain of thoughts. Following Kennedy's death, his widow Jacqueline wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union:
“I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches - 'In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.'”
Khrushchev seems to have been credited for this evocative phrase in the 20 July 1963 issue of Pravda (I've not been able to check this but it says so here). Whatever the case, President Kennedy quickly picked up on the phrase, quoting it on 26 July in his radio and television address to the US people on the nuclear test ban treaty - a transcript and recording can be found on the website of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
“A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, 'the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors.”
These words were very widely reported, such as in the Daily Telegraph the following day (it's a front-page story, but the line about survivors is on p. 16 where the news story continues). That was on Saturday, 27 July 1963 and, despite what Kennedy said, I think people could very well imagine the horrors. Surely it can't be a coincidence that this was probably also the weekend over which Terry Nation wrote his 26-page storyline for a Doctor Who serial at that point entitled "The Survivors".
It's a fascinating story of a fascinating life. Highsmith is a complex, contradictory subject - on several occasions we're given completely different accounts of her, by turns cruel or kind, quiet or outspoken, fearful or bold. There are lots of reasons not to like her - the racism, the snobbery, the meanness with money when she was so wealthy. Yet understanding her background, her relationship (or lack of it) with her mother and her various struggles and heartbreaks makes this a compelling read.
There are all kinds of odd, striking moments. As well as the snails, there's her short-lived relationship with Tabea Blumenschein,
"the 25 year-old star and producer of the lesbian avant-garde pirate adventure Madame X" (p. 366).
Highsmith and Blumenschein spent six days together in a flat in Pelham Crescent, South Kensington, in May 1978 and at one point browsed the record shops. Blumenschein told Wilson that,
"Pat bought me the Stiff Little Fingers record" (p. 367),
presumably the band's debut single "Suspect Device" (released 4 February that year), before they went to dine with Arthur Koestler. The incongruity of that is even more striking when compared to Highsmith's selection the following year for Desert Island Discs: Bach (twice), Mahler and Mozart, and George Shearing's "Lullaby of Birdland".
A number of things made me begin to suspect that Highsmith was neurodiverse, and late on in the book her friend and neighbour Vivien De Bernardi told Wilson,
"In hindsight, I think Pat could have had a form of high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome. She had a lot of typical traits. She had a terrible sense of direction ... She was hypersensitive to sound and had these communication difficulties. Most of us screen certain things, but she would spit out everything she thought. She was not aware of the nuances of conversation and she didn't realise when she had hurt other people," (p. 394).
De Bernardi said this explains why Highsmith's relationships did not last; I think that's a bit glib - and that Highsmith may also have had some kind of attachment disorder, not helped by her (lack of) relationship with her mother. But I'm struck by De Bernardi's perspective of how this neurodiversity impacted Highsmith the writer:
"Although she didn't really understand other people - she had such a strange interior world - she was a fantastic observer. She would see things that an average person would never experience," (ibid).
Wilson has much to say about the content of and responses to Highsmith's lesbian novel The Price of Salt (1952), later republished as Carol and adapted into the acclaimed film. Highsmith originally published the book under a pseudonym and even when it went out in her own name was guarded in interviews about her sexuality. Often, people who knew Highsmith speak of her attitude to women as if from an outside perspective - as if she were a man. Wilson quotes Highsmith's own cahiers (notebooks) at great length, including a passage from 1942 that is ostensibly about other women and yet surely about herself.
"The Lesbian, the classic Lesbian, never seeks her equal. She is ... the soi-disant [self-styled] male, who does not expect his match in his mate, who would rather use her as the base-on-the-earth which he can never be," (p. 48, quoting Highsmith's Cahier 8, 11/18/42, Swiss Literary Archives in Berne).
Repeatedly, Highsmith identified with her most famous fictional creation Tom Ripley, signing a copy of Ripley Under Ground for her friend Charles Latimer as "from Tom (Pat)," (p. 194, but see pp. 194-6, 199, 350 and 454 for further examples). I now want to reread The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) with all this stuff in mind - from a queer (in the sense of both "strange" and "homosexual"), autistic, trans perspective. It's a book about somebody wanting to be and transforming themselves into someone else; an act of disguise that I think, having read this biography, might be very revealing.
Last week I hosted an event for the Writers' Guild of Great Britain with the last two winners of our Best First Novel Award - Aamina Ahmad for The Return of Faraz Ali (Sceptre, 2022) and Eli Lee for A Strange and Brilliant Light (Quercus, 2021). You can see the full thing here:
Waiting for me at home was issue 5 of the excellent fanzine Vworp Vworp!, which includes my short piece, "Dalek December" on the 1965-66 stage play The Curse of the Daleks written by David Whitaker and Terry Nation, the focus being on whether it was any good. There are lots of other Whitaker-related goodies, not by me - and I gasped at the colourised photo.
I've now got to get back to writing my forthcoming biography of Whitaker, and a bunch of other stuff. Tomorrow I'm interviewing Eli Lee and Aamina Ahmad, the last two winners of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain's Best First Novel award. It's a free event, you just need to sign up.
"After leaving England, Highsmith moved to continental Europe, but crossing international borders with her pets presented a serious challenge. She rose to it, as she explained to her American editor, by smuggling her snails in her bra, six to ten a breast, he reported: 'That just wasn't on the one trip - no, she kept going back and forth ... And she wasn't joking - she was very serious.'" (p. 411, editor Larry Ashmead quoted from Andrew Wilson's biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2009))
Or there's the six well-known crime writers - Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Hugh Walpole, EC Bentley and Father Ronald Knox - who wrote an episode each of Behind the Screen for BBC Radio in 1930, the audience at home challenged to solve the mystery as it unfolded over six instalments, aided by each episode also being published in The Listener the same week as broadcast. However, Walpole, responsible for writing and reading the first episode, wanted to be spontaneous and insisted on reading from notes.
"So Hilda Matheson, in charge of the [BBC] Talks Department, arranged for two parliamentary reporters to take down his words [during the Saturday-evening broadcast], and type them up on the Sunday morning, so that she or [producer Howard] Marshall could check the transcript that afternoon, and post the corrected version to the printers so that they had it at half past seven on Monday morning. Even then, publication of The Listener was delayed." (p. 260)
Hooray for Hansard, and for quick, efficient postal service even on a Sunday night!
Then there's Val Gielgud, BBC director and brother of John, whose,
"exotic lifestyle - he married five times, and often wore a cloak and carried a sword-cane - was certainly a gift for the gossip columnists." (p. 261)
What an image! This was in the 1930s; Edwards is talking about Gielgud's radio version of Rope and his collaboration, with BBC colleague Eric Maschwitz, on Death at Broadcasting House (1934). But it conjured in my head a vision more like the '60s, all Avengers and Adam Adamant. And that's what this book is so often about - writers and contributors who pushed the genre forward, who were ahead of their time.
The serious and thorough history is peppered with this odd, enthralling stuff, but Edwards also has a wry line in humour, such as describing the premiere at Carnegie Hall on 10 April 1927 of Ballet Mecanique by George Antheil.
"Unfortunately, everything that could go wrong on the night did go wrong. There weren't even any riots." (p. 200)
His enthusiasm is also infectious, such as his wholly understandable awe in describing the novel The Living and the Dead (1994) by Awasaka Tsumao, a pseudonym of illusionist Masao Atsukawa. The book was published with its signatures uncut so that only 24 of the 215 pages could initially be read - basically every eighth verso and recto, if I've got my sums right. The title page then gives instructions on,
"HOW TO READ THIS BOOK: First of all, please read the book with the sealed binding. You'll read a short story. Next, cut each page and enjoy a full-length novel. The short story has disappeared. (signed) The Author. The Disappearing Short Story." (pp. 541-2)
Edwards tells us that,
"The short story involves a small group of people at a bar, one of whom is a sad young man who seems to have psychic abilities. But when the pages are cut, that character disappears. There's at least one gender switch, the setting becomes a magic club rather than a bar, and Yogi Gandhi (who doesn't appear in the short story) is the hero. The magic only works because of the nature of the Japanese language. It would be impossible to translate while maintaining the effect. It also can only work in a print version." (p. 542, and based on the author's discussions with Steve Steinbock)
Like Edwards, I'm now haunted by this outrageously ingenious artefact, and keep turning over how it might be restaged in English. A book to haunt a writer's dreams.
All in all, it's a fascinating and detailed history, and also a rich source of inspiration. It covers an enormous range of material and themes. If I'm being nitpicky and selfish, I'd have liked more on the overlaps between the detective story and science-fiction, if only because that's continually churning through my head - see my thread on science-fiction and Sherlock Holmes. Edwards makes four references to Isaac Asimov, whose The Caves of Steel (1954) features a robot detective, but three of these references are in end notes, only one in the main body of text. Really, I just want him to recommend me more in that vein.
And then there's the devastating statement on the fundamental paradox of genre, taken from Janwillem van de Wetering's Robert van Gulik: His Life His Work (1987)...
"The true artist yearns to grow and move forward. The general public has an insatiable appetite for more of the same." (p. 500)
More:
How brilliant, for example, to note Angela Thirkell's "blithe lack of sexual awareness" by quoting from a scene in The Brandons (1939) in which characters at a village fete take a ride on a merry-go-round made of wooden animals:
"'I knew it was you on the ostrich,' she [Lydia] said to Delia ... 'I say, someone's on my cock.'
'It's only my cousin Hilary,' said Delia. 'He won't mind changing, will you, Hilary...'
Mr Grant, really quite glad of an excuse to dismount, offered his cock to Lydia, who immediately flung a leg over it, explaining that she had put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always felt sick if she rode sideways...
... 'I know that once Lydia is on her cock nothing will get her off. I came here last year ... and she had thirteen rides." (Lee, p. 180, quoting Thirkell pp. 260-2)
This is all the more extraordinary when Lee then tells us that Thirkell was the mother of Colin Macinnes, author of Absolute Beginners (1959) and other bold works exploring sexuality and decadence. As a result, the quoted passage becomes something else, indicative of the clash between mother and son.
Lee quotes juicy bits from a number of other biographies, and like her I'm drawn to what she calls the "brutal, funny and helpful" advice given by the writer Colette to actress Marguerite Moreno:
"You lose most of your expressiveness when you write... Stick in a description of the decor, the guests, even the food... And try, oh my darling, to conceal from us that it bores the shit out of you to write." (Lee, p. 117, quoting Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh - A life of Collete (1999), p. 543)
Or there's the way she explains the shock that met Ellen Glasgow in the 1930s writing stories about degeneration, extramarital love and scientific arguments against religion etc, then quotes one of Glasgow's characters - "failed philosopher, John Fincastle" - to get a sense of the impact on the author's own career.
"Nobody could earn a livelihood in America by thinking the wrong thoughts." (Lee, p. 124, quoting Glasgow's Vein of Iron (1935), p. 38)
Body Parts is peppered with this stuff. Even the briefest reference to Jane Porter's 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw (p. 125) ignited my interest, prompting additional reading and connections - and perhaps a new project to lose myself in...
But what about things I'm writing now? Two essays in this collection, "Virginia Woolf's nose" at the start and "How to End It All" at the conclusion, address the ways that accounts of a person's death are often written to cast light or reflection on the life as a whole. Imagining the subject looking back over their lives is a a conceit, imposing neatness on what can be untidy ends. In fact it's not just death: lives are often untidy and inconsistent, and Lee is good on exploring that - how to address contradictory or outlier evidence, or the way a theory about someone's life can be repeated by biographers until it takes on the authority of "fact". Lee says,
"this process of cumulative reiteration happens all the time" (p. 135)
I'm mindful of that as I write my biography of David Whitaker - and also my book on his 1964 Doctor Who story, The Edge of Destruction, where I can see such reiteration in the "facts" about early Doctor Who. I'm not sure Lee provides answers to the knotty questions that she raises about how we go about telling a story without fictionalising real life - but I think that's the point. There is plenty to think about; she directs us towards the things to worry at.
A police officer is sent to Lahore to cover up the murder of a young girl, and in doing so stirs up all kinds of history — some personal, some family, some national... We were spellbound by this haunting, tragic and beautifully told story.
Also shortlisted for the award were Braver by Deborah Jenkins -
Hazel, suffering from anxiety and OCD, forms an unlikely friendship with Harry, a troubled teen, and Virginia — a church minister facing a crisis. This warm, funny novel is also inspiring and very moving. A delight to read.
- and An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie:
Sayon dreams of escaping the “Ends” in Bristol and living in the big house his Mum once pointed out to him — but achieving his dream won’t be easy as he’s just killed someone. A gripping, richly told thriller full of life and character.
And there were lots and lots of very good novels which sadly didn't make the shortlist. Thanks to everyone who submitted novels to the award, and thanks to my amazing fellow judges (Martin Day, Tim Glencross, Merle Nygate, Qaisra Shahraz and Ceriann Taylor) for their hard graft in reading so many books in such a short space of time last year.
David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television will be out in the second half of 2023. More details - a great wealth of more detail - to follow.
The book couldn't have happened without director Chris Chapman employing me as consultant and talking head on the documentary Looking for David, recently released on the Blu-ray collection of Doctor Who's second year of adventures.
I'm also grateful to the team at the official Doctor Who Magazine who've published some of my research into Whitaker and his world. And it all sprang from the research I did for my Black Archive book on The Evil of the Daleks, a 1967 Doctor Who story written by David Whitaker. My book on his 1964 story The Edge of Destruction for the same range will also be out later this year.
