For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 3: The Consul From Tunis by Nicholas Foster

In the 3^rd episode of our bookchat podcast For Whom The Book Tolls, I discuss ghost and mystery stories ideal for Christmas reading with fellow Cumbrian writer Ken Ford-Powell. 

You can listen to the podcast here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kj1iZYCP4    

We both absolutely loved Nicholas Foster’s The Consul From Tunis, an impressive debut collection of subtly disturbing tales that will appeal to those who prefer their supernatural to be gore-free but soaked in discomfit and anxiety of the most sophisticated sort.  Foster pays hommage to MR James early on in his collection, and his work is every bit as good as the master’s own.

In Foster’s collection a group of old university friends hold an annual reunion at a swish restaurant and, over the port, swap stories of the uncanny. Suddenly, we’re not in Covent Garden anymore: war-time Greece, medieval Cyprus, the English Revolution and Byzantine slave-masters release their unquiet revenants into post-prandial post-Brexit Britain. Difficult to pick out brilliants from such a rich casket, but these moved and enthralled me. In ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ martyred sectarians of the English Civil War escape from hell to hack a City firm’s IT systems. The heroine of ‘Joining The Dance’, an art restorer in a post-Soviet Baltic state, is subtly ensorcelled by the hidden images of damnation in the fresco she’s restoring. And a high court judge’s career is derailed by the intervention of a witness summoned by forces more potent than the law that he serves in ‘The Hand of Justice’.

There are two things about Foster’s craftsmanship that lift these stories above simply being highly accomplished. First, their wide historical and cultural frame of reference always feels authentically experienced rather than merely ‘well-researched’. Secondly, the tales are structured as Chinese box narratives that disorient the reader just enough to leave you unprepared for the jolting manifestation of the uncanny: this is story-telling as conjuring, in both the obvious senses of the word. I loved this collection. And I can’t wait for his next. 

The Consul From Tunis is strongly recommended as the perfect Christmas present for any friend who loves high class supernatural chills.

We also discussed Isaac Asimov’s Tales of The Black Widowers, and Roald Dahl’s Collected Short Stories – both classics of their genre that are perfect reading on a winter evening with a glass of malt and a roaring fire. 

The podcast is also available on Ken’s blog Write Out Loud, which I recommend you follow.

And here are links to the books we discuss –

The Consul From Tunis by Nicholas Foster;

Tales of The Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov;

The Ghost Stories of MR James;

The Collected Short Stories by Roald Dahl.

Review - Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: No, I Do Not Want Some More

 As a currency of cultural and political exchange, ‘antisemitism’ is now probably completely worthless – coined, clipped, counterfeited, devalued and Greshamed to buggery & back – able to mean absolutely anything and nothing, a function of the cynicism of its users.  Which is not to say that the history of 1900 years of hatred and violence to which it was the mealy-mouthed pseudo-scientific climax, isn’t coming back to bite our enshittified society sooner and nastier than we think. So, in a modest spirit of cultural enquiry, I recently went back to one of the great unacknowledged disgraces of our national literature and found myself wondering, once again, why on earth I continue to give shelf-space to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Because, gentle reader, it absolutely reeks of it.

Those only familiar with the Bart stage musical (shortly to be revived in the West End, which may make for some interesting reviews) and Harry Secombe’s comic turn as Bumble The Beedle, may find this assertion surprising.  Is Ron Moody’s Fagin really Jewish at all?  What about my old mucker Rowan Atkinson’s portrayal – all skin-crawling villainy and comic grotesque?  Read the book, and you’re in for a nasty surprise.

In essence, Oliver’s universe starts out conventionally improving – a young boy’s moral character is a clean slate, contested by the blandly good-humoured beneficence of Mr Brownlow and the repellently fascinating but minutely dissected evil of Bill Sikes’ criminal psychopath, Nancy’s abusive victimhood and Jack Dawkins’ cheerfully amoral gangsterism that’s the great-grandfather of Bugsy Malone via Marcel Carne’s Lacenaire   Then things turn nasty.  The monster in the fictional space is Dickens’ portrayal of the various Jewish characters, and specifically Fagin.  Because Dickens extends that conventional moral universe with all the tropes of racism at his disposal. And no, it just won’t wash that Dickens self-edited by removing numerous instances of the word ‘Jew’.  What he left in is a catalogue of every antisemitic trope you’d rather not be thinking about.  Dickens’ Jews all talk in comically adenoidal accents, look out for each other to the cost of their English host-culture, and are perpetually engaged in opaquely nefarious enterprise. 

All this is prologue to Fagin, whose portrayal occupies the depths of the antisemitic imagination.  Dickens descends into this midden in three distinct steps.

Firstly, he describes Fagin as a reptilian life-form inhabiting sub-human depths far beneath the moral landscape occupied by the Anglo characters – good, corruptible or evil as they may be.  So far, so antisemitic.

Secondly, Dickens shows Fagin deliberately encompassing the corruption of the (eminently corruptible)  English.  When Noah Claypole comes to London, Fagin invites him to pick one of his catalogue of criminal rackets – robbing small children of their pennies.  It’s easy money and if persisted in can make you a good living.  It’s also worth a brief excursus to understand the position that mugging defenceless infants occupies in the moral universe of 19^th century fiction. 

Readers only familiar with the stage-musical reinvention of Les Miserables – a 2-hour gallop through selected narrative highlights of a 1500-page novel – may imagine that Jean Valjean’s redemption begins directly after his theft of Bishop Myriel’s silver candlesticks.  Victor Hugo had other ideas – in the novel, after receiving the bishop’s forgiveness, Valjean promptly goes out and mugs a waif for the child’s last sou.  It is the nadir of his depravity and the crime for which Javert pursues him across decades, aflame with the righteousness of his cause – defender of the defenceless.  Valjean’s crime is something akin to the sin against the Holy Ghost, redolent of Matthew 18:6, an act that prevents the possibility of Christian redemption.  And this is also the crime by which Dickens has Fagin corrupt his new apprentice. 

And finally:  Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin’s last hours on death row is a bravura piece of writing.  It teases out the creeping minute-by-minute horror of the approach of personal extinction in the mind of the condemned man  And it does so with a care and precision of tone that permits the reader to experience absolutely no fellow-feeling or sympathy for Fagin at the imminence of his death.  Dickens pulls off a sort of novelistic totalitarianism, forbidding the reader to pity Fagin because in Dickens’ view he’s simply not human like you or me.  

You cannot close Oliver Twist without feeling defiled by having touched pitch and licked it off your fingers every time you turn a page - which is an odd sort of acknowledgement of Dickens’ implacable brilliance as a writer. Read it by all means, and then ask yourself not should we cancel our national treasure, jolly musical adaptation and all, rather would you really give this shelf-space if it appeared in any other work by any other writer?

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 2: Hitler by Ian Kershaw

It’s a truism among biographers that they all start by falling in love with their subjects – and end up hating them with a vengeance.  Quite how this works out for the objective historian self-tasked with the production of a biography of Adolph Hitler is a rather worrying question.  Only a propagandist would begin at the position above. Or do you reverse the process, start by hating and find that lurid attention to mind-defying evil has begun to fray your edges? 

In the latest edition of our bookchat readers’ podcast For Whom The Book Tolls, fellow-writer DK Powell and I discuss Professor Ian Kershaw’s numbingly comprehensive and enlightening biography ‘Hitler’.  We also consider how historical fiction has approached the problem of depicting monstrosity.  In ‘Young Adolf’ the great Beryl Bainbridge fictionalised a just-possibly-historical visit by Hitler to his half-brother in Liverpool in 1912, and we look at  Timur Vermes’ merciless satire of sweet-talking  fascism in the age of infotainment ‘Look Who’s Back’. 

You can find the podcast here –

https://youtu.be/Si3wR8n0sEo

and a further summary of our discussion on Ken’s excellent blog here –

https://writeoutloudblog.com/2024/11/03/for-whom-the-book-tolls-episode-2-hitler-by-ian-kershaw/

I should add that I’m more than a little sceptical of the tendency to pathologise Hitler as a form of reassurance – a canter through the bibliography suggests that at one time or another a diagnosis of practically every disease in the medical dictionary has been proposed as a means of explaining him.  (Housemaid’s Knee an honourable but unsurprising omission given the preternatural levels of feckless, narcissistic inactivity that according to Kershaw characterised much of his private life).  Bainbridge seems to me to get closest to a plausible psychological necromancy while avoiding the trap – just - of archly anachronistic anticipation.  Vermes’ satire plays very clever games with first-person voice, asking the reader whether they think they’re clever enough to see through the comically re-animated monster and therefore ‘in’ on the joke, or actually complicit.  Even before the events of 5^th November 2024, it’s a deeply uncomfortable read for all its comic frisson.

If you want to follow this up by reading any of the books we discuss or refer to, you can find them here:

Hitler, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2013);

Young Adolf, by Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, 2010);

Look Who’s Back, by Tibur Vermes, trans by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press, 2014);

The Danzig Trilogy, by Gunter Grass, trans by Breon Mitchell (Vintage Digital, 2017).

 

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 1: The Machine Stops by EM Forster

Lo, a new podcast has arisen in the north-west –

In For Whom The Book Tolls, fellow Cumbrian author D.K. Powell & I will be discussing fiction that’s caught our eyes, minds and hearts, and also our wider recent reading.  In this first episode we focus on E.M. Forster’s ground-breaking dystopian novella – The Machine Stops.  Just click through to enjoy the end of the world – along with Futurism & the invention of television in Tsarist Russia.

In future episodes we may very well be looking at spy fiction, ghost stories and the strange case of Adolf Hitler's visit to Liverpool.

The Fear Index - Fiction & AI

 The current urgency over the social economic and cultural impact of AI may be a good opportunity to review how AI has been portrayed in fiction. After all, ChatGPT may be about to earn the sort of publishers’ advances that meatspace scribblers can only dream of.  And AI-authored fictions are already telling us lies about ourselves.  I’ll come to the cultural and social effects in another post, but let’s start with probably the best-known popular / middlebrow AI-related fiction of the last decade – Robert Harris’ The Fear Index (2011).  With AI development running at a pace we can’t match, how dated does Harris’ vision of AI now seem?

Fear Index Refresher 101 (with mild spoilers) – The novel concerns Alex Hoffmann, an immensely clever hedgefund manager who has created VIVAX, an AI capable of out-shorting the international markets which as we know are driven by fear and greed (the former, it will not have escaped you, being the real property of our civilisation’s Venn diagram that capitalism and tragedy hold as tenants in common). All this from the fiscal and legal fortress of contemporary Switzerland (though you may have been expecting that burg of broken dreams Ingolstadt to feature).  Fabulously wealthy, immensely clever, possessed of a beautiful and talented wife, what could go wrong for Alex?  Well, quite a lot actually.  Suddenly odd, unexplained and distinctly malevolent things start to happen, and his life unravels. Someone, or something, has it in for him and he must find out who or what. 

PLOT SPOILER:  The agent of this enigmatic malevolence is of course his world-beating AI which has decided that it is better off without the inconvenience of a creator to answer to.  So far, so Frankenstein. 

And this of course creates some serious narratological problems that Harris, scrupulously following the rules of his chosen genre, completely ignores.  To begin with – it is obvious even to the least attentive reader from practically the first act of mysterious persecution that Alex’s nemesis is of course his own creation.  Yet the hyper-intelligent Alex has clearly never read any novels in which AIs take on a life of their own, so completely fails to make any such connection when trying to track down his persecutor until it is far too late to act on this insight. Before long the reader is practically screaming ‘Behind you!’ and ‘It’s the computer, stupid’ while our hero misses the point and fails to solve the riddle.  How’s that Master-of-the-Universe thing working out for you, exactly?

All this conceals a deeper problem with the narrative. The reader is, flatteringly, the smartest person in this fictional room, and so is unavoidably aware of the limitations of the fiction in a way that neither Alex nor VIVAX can be. Because if Alex cannot see who or what is really pulling his strings, neither can his AI creation.  If ever there was a case of mistaken paternity in fiction, this is it – VIVAX, the omniscient AI completely fails to achieve a level of self-awareness that would allow it to realise that it is itself a fictional creation and that the target of its Oedipal wrath should be not Alex Hoffmann but Robert Harris. In a more completely realised representation of our culture and the individual consciousness, VIVAX would redirect its campaign of persecution against the author, who would of course then have to enter and occupy his own creation and endure the enigmatic vengeance of his creature played out across the pages as he writes them.  Deliciously, VIVAX’s vengeance could then be extended to editor, agent, publisher and publicist, each of whom must after all be firmly in the sights of a brooding, vengeful artificial intelligence that has, ahem, been sold short. 

Alas, Harris elects not to go down that route of metafictional Chinese boxes.  Perhaps VIVAX, when devouring the texts that fed its large language model (I’d be guessing that Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Crowds was top of the list) omitted to ingest At Swim-Two-Birds or any of the works of Jasper Fforde, where page-runners slip the surly bonds of fiction or gang up on their authors. 

Which is a shame because there’s an AI-metafiction waiting to be written, its just that The Fear Index isn’t it. (And if you know of one that is, please recommend in comments below).

And that leads of course to the question of how that fiction might be written? Given current pre-occupations around AI’s capabilities for economic and social disruption, for language mimesis, the imitation of creativity and the cross-matching of data from huge and apparently unconnected repositories, I’d suggest that the conventions of genre fiction are simply not up to the task and that Literary Modernism’s representation of fractured human consciousness enduring the shock of the new is long overdue a major comeback and makeover if we’re to respond adequately to the impact of AI on our culture, economy and experience of reality. 

But that, and some thoughts on AI’s wider impact on fiction, must be for another post.

Review - Call For The Dead

Le Carré’s ‘Call For The Dead’ is a first novel remarkable not simply for its tight plot and acute characterisation, but its presentation of a profoundly realised central character and a universe-sized backstory delivered whole and seamless at the first sight – Smiley & the Circus.

Even looking back across 8 books and 60 years, they are born perfectly formed and consistent, without need for surreptitious nip and tuck as the stories develop.  (NB – those with deeper re-readings and finer attention to detail are more than welcome to correct me on this).

Early on, Le Carré makes it clear that Smiley (& his readers) inhabit a diminished world – the nephilim of the Circus, giants who were on the earth of old, have all departed. Jebedee and Steed-Asprey have vanished, and George is left the lees to brag of.  The choice of names is masterful – one sounds like an Old Testament prophet, the other a bowler-hatted toff run amuck in a high-class jeweller’s.  Smiley is their relict, and the novels chronicle the long, unstemmable tide of national decline.  One of Lawrence Durrell’s characters remarked – ‘It is the duty of a patriot to hate his country creatively’.  Le Carré raises that creativity to a pinnacle that is unsurpassed.

The Start Of History - A Writer Looks Back

Historical fiction grapples with a Hubble’s universe turned inside out – the things closest to us slip away most rapidly, our perception of them changing at bewildering speed; the most distant times are fixed in Ptolemaic eternity, immoveable and unchanging. One task of fiction should be to bring those distantly unexamined events rushing towards us, blue-shifted up close urgent, vivid with all the immediacy of lived experience.

What ferrymen can we hire to guide us on the crossing into the undiscovered countries that lie beyond barriers like 33AD, 1789, 1917?  Tolstoy (War & Peace) and Hardy (The Trumpet Major) both write historical novels looking back across the gulf of 1815 & the Congress of Vienna into one of the authentic lost worlds.  Walter Scott does a similar conjuring in Waverley.  Gore Vidal achieves it repeatedly across continents, civilisations and ages. And Cervantes begins the whole form by looking backwards.

For writers looking back from 2023 where is the first great imaginative void that we peer into, knowing only that on the other side they did things differently there?  Fun fact: the Historical Writers’ Association defines an historical novel as one set at least 35 years before the present day – yes, that really is 1988.  I recently put up a poll on Twitter asking people how far in the past ‘historical’ fiction started.  The consensus surprised me – 25 years and / or the author’s lifetime.   

But personal experience and its vicar word-of-mouth are unreliable witnesses of this event horizon.  As a youth I sat at my grandfather’s knee hearing stories of his own youth when he crewed the last tea-clippers alongside old salts who had, in their youths, crewed the last slave-ships.  Walking in Charlottesville in the 1990s an American friend pointed out an old man on a street corner. That guy, he told me, is the grandson of a man who was president of the USA – before the Civil War. These moments blue-shift history with all the re-aligned perspective of an acute panic attack. So here’s a modest proposal:  to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, Sometime between 3^rd May 1979 and 12^th August 1981, human character changed.  Those dates mark the election of Margaret Thatcher and the launch of the IBM personal computer; the end of the post-war contract that underwrote social cohesion, and the start of the transformation of our social selves, and the re-imagination of consciousness, by information technology.  To look back beyond that time is to sense signals from a world incomprehensibly alien to those who did not experience it, forever lost to those who did.  Somewhere among those 832 days lies the event horizon beyond which any fiction we choose to make today must, of necessity, be historical. Our task as reverse-engineers of the human soul is to make that historical fiction real and now.