In Memoriam T.H.

Years ago my centaur’s random course through life crossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days – the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and went along, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead a figure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with a modest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of the Lyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyage of discovery, understanding, memory and passion.  Later on, in the bar, he was great company - & when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlingly stimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit, she said that I’d got him about right.  Learning that in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits of poets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken years earlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and with the shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’m satisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death with lidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmitting to us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and out of hell.  At our next meeting the poet was kind enough to thank me for the gift.  This was at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, a verse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixed classical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of high and low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truth and power.  (My abiding memory of that meal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had given each of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creating wildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises they sported). 

And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return – a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf War of 1991.  The cover photograph was an image straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killed by American fire during his retreat from Kuwait.  (The picture is well-known in the UK, but never seen in the USA according to American friends).  In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, being upbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, and then going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers who killed him.  It’s a chilling, terrifying tale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond its control.  And it takes as its departure not just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at the time – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and then reaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where you encounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know the right words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.  

And this poem was published on the news pages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note  – of a national newspaper.  It’s difficult now to imagine, in our world of enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readership and speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible and in language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition and compassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But Tony Harrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face of evil.   

But we live in diminished times, and a time diminished still further by his passing.  Where now the scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, the bursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin and more Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about our condition?

I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shine back to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate every one of our tomorrows.

 

A Northern Voice

The estimable Jen Bowden produces an outstanding regular podcast 'Northern Voices', in which she interviews writers from the north of England about their work, their craft and the challenges and beauties of being a 'northern writer' (however you may frame that particular label). I'm delighted to report that in Episode 87 Jen & I talk about my historical novel 'The Judas Case', the odd biases against partnership publishing and other challenges facing writers in the north.

You can find it here: https://soundcloud.com/northern_voices/episode-87-nicholas-graham

Review - The Lamb by Lucy Rose: Cumbria On A Plate

You probably have to go as far back as the Brontes to find three women having as dysfunctionally miserable a time of it in the uplands of the north as Margot, Mama and Eden, the bizarre love triangle at the heart of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb.

First a disclaimer: I’m prejudiced against serial killers.  Time was, the better class of murder involved the violation of complex knots of financial, familial or sexual obligations; betrayal, intrigue, the deep roots of personal and social dysfunction, long-hidden animosities and ancient or tribal hatreds.  Then along came the serial killer, blown in from the anonymous, asocial wildernesses of the Empty Quarter of America, at just the moment that Margaret Thatcher announced there was no such thing as ‘society’ and the value of a life was reduced to its position – or lack of one - in the marketplace.  The age of consumer entitlement made the psychopathology of the compulsive killer the focus, and murder fiction became a sort of action-painting.  At its worst, plot became a crossword puzzle to be cracked by ticking boxes and recognizing patterns not meanings.  At its best, a tool for the dissection of the enflamed horrors of the human soul.  The interiority of the killer, not the social relations of the victim, became the focus of narrative discovery.   (I exclude from this opinion the work of the excellent Patricia Cornwell, whose Scarpetta is, throughout, a deeply political figure).*

What Rose does in The Lamb is take that interiority to a new level, if only because she brings the intense social relations of the killers’ family romance into play, and watches unspeakable horror play out through the eyes of a not-that-innocent child. 

The Lamb is, at its most basic – and it is about basic urges, no doubt – a sort of post-feminist eating-disorder retelling of Sawney Bean, the Galloway cannibal who lurked in the darkness at the edge of Renaissance Scotland.  Here the family occupy a cottage somewhere anonymously remote in the Cumbrian fells (it’s probably no coincidence that Cumbria is currently a serious foodie destination, with 13 Michelin-starred restaurants and many more adorning the Good Food Guide), though a convenient bus-ride away from Margot’s school, which she continues to attend without care-workers batting an eyelash while the culinary horrors play out at the other end of the line in broken Britain.  The route between these two worlds, from the oppression of the mundane to the horror of the underworld, is important: its overseen  by the driver of the school bus, and it says a lot for Rose’s adeptness with ambiguity that we can never be quite sure whether he is genuinely concerned for Margot’s wellbeing – or subtly grooming her. 

All journeys into the world of childhood enchantment begin with the absence of the father, and the identity & whereabouts of Margot’s are subjects of persistent mystery and reticence. (There’s an early clue to Margot’s own withholding of information from us in a family of rampant appetites when they have the local gamekeeper – father of one of Margot’s schoolfriends – for dinner and the identity of exactly which body-part Margot consumes is coyly elided in a way reminiscent of how we’re never quite told exactly what Heathcliff actually does with the exhumed body of Catherine Earnshaw). 

Release from this double hell comes when Margot reaches puberty.  I’ll maintain my own reticence on the details of the denouement, but will say that while there is a pitiless logic to the plotline – the astute may have seen it coming for some time – the voice and viewpoint by which it is  transmitted raises some deep questions for the reader.  Have we, after all, been participating in a fictional abuse memoire (well, yeah, unavoidably)?  And the continuation of Margot’s voice by other means implies the omniscience of eternity, quite the shift after the relentlessly visceral, corporeally messy details of the narrative.    

*Fun fact: I had the good fortune, many years ago, to study creative writing under Anthony Abbott at Davidson College, a year or two after Cornwell had graced his seminars.  Tony's influence and encouragement had a profound effect upon my own work.

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 5: End Times & The Leopard

Just how long does it take for gangsters to be mistaken for aristocrats?*

In the latest edition of For Whom The Book Tolls, DK Powell & I discuss two seminal books for our age – End Times by Peter Turchin and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

Watch the podcast here:  https://youtu.be/948ZNduVtCc

In End Times Turchin claims to have invented a new science – ‘cliodynamics’, effectively the crunching of large sets of historical data that suggests history is predictably cyclical after all.  So far, so psychohistory & Hari Seldon / Isaac Asimov.  ‘Real’ historians of my acquaintance when told about him tend to sigh and say ‘Oh no, not another one . . .’

But Turchin is originally a studier of animal population behaviours, and he’s brought scientific rigour to his thesis.

His point: the accumulation of wealth upwards leads to 3 things fatal for any society – gross inequality, the immiseration of the majority of the population, the over-production of new elites who compete for power. Result: political disintegration followed by the persistence of the underlying conditions.

Now, do those three things remind you of any societies either on this side of the Atlantic or the other? 

And on the subject of new elites replacing old, it’s time for you to read – or re-read - one of the great historical novels, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.  Set in Sicily during the 1860s revolution that led to the unification of Italy, it charts the managed decline – and persistence by other means – of Fabrizio, Prince of Salinas, whose nephew Tancredi recognises reality early on – “If we want things to stay as they are – things will have to change.” 

The novel has been filmed twice – once in 1963 by Italian aristocrat and Marxist Lucino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster as the prince, Alain Delon as Tancredi and Claudia Cardinale as Angelica.  This version is hypnotically ravishing & I warmly recommend it.

Available via Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B00FYGUMKS

There’s also a new adaptation available on Netflix that really opens out the book’s oblique, interior narratives – we get a lot of wartime action scenes - and re-casts Tancredi’s romantic relationships in a way that’s not encumbered by the social codes of 19^th century Sicily  (if you so much as glance at a girl with living male relatives, be prepared either to marry her or to fight for your life). 

Available via Netflix:  https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81392676

You can find End Times here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Times-Counter-Elites-Political-Disintegration-ebook/dp/B0BFB71KPC

And The Leopard here:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leopard-Revised-material-Vintage-Classics-ebook/dp/B0041RRH6S

 *Two generations at most, in either direction, judging by the above. 

For Whom The Book Tolls - Episode 4: Solaris & The Spittle Of Zimolax

In the latest edition of For Whom The Book Tolls, Ken Ford Powell and I pitch a couple of recent must-read books to each other.  Ken talks about The Spittle Of Zimolax, a between-the-wars mystery featuring an intrepid female sleuth working for MI5 in pursuit of a tantalisngly well-imagined McGuffin.

And I pitch to Ken the great Polish sci-fi novel ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaus Lem (1921 – 2006).  Much-filmed, Solaris is that rare thing – a book that contains multitudes of other books, a sort of Borgesian multibrary.  It’s not ‘just’ science fiction, it’s a ghost story, a heartbreaking love story, a political satire, an enquiry into knowledge and how we think about the world, an exploration of consciousness, a warning on the dangers of AI – virtually everything that disturbs us about our contemporary world is contained within it, and it was first published in 1961.

It also provides the cultural missing link between George Clooney, a visionary Russian film director, and the Sex Pistols . . .

How, exactly?  You’ll have to listen to the podcast . . .

https://youtu.be/YrmbVZXwag4

 

 

Review - Sheila Fell: Cumberland On Canvas

 If you’re going anywhere for a day over Christmas and the New Year, head to Carlisle and Tullie House, where you’ll find an absolutely enthralling retrospective of the work of Cumbrian landscape artist Sheila Fell. And if you’re going to Carlisle, make sure you take the high road through the hills of the Lake District, where you’ll be able to experience the original landscapes – if you’re lucky, there’ll be snow – that she transmuted into some of the most powerfully moving visions of Britain in the 20^th century. Tullie House has over 70 of them on display, and they are unmissable.

Sheila Fell (1931 – 1979) was a West Cumbrian coal-miner’s daughter who studied painting at St Martin’s School Of Art, exhibited in London in the ’50s and ’60s, was elected to the Royal Academy in 1969, a time when the membership was overwhelmingly male, and died far too young, when she still very clearly had decades of visionary productivity ahead of her.  The retrospective at Tullie House is the first such of any size in over 20 years and really should be grasped, gazed upon and cherished.

Fell’s landscapes are demonic in their intensity and depth – farm-houses cower beneath lowering mountains, accumulations of mass and gravity that seem to bend out of shape the constrained, crushed figures of labourers, horse-and-cart or the empty space of a lane between bulbous haystacks where the figures seem to be struggling to escape.  And above all this the huge immensity of the mountains and the wild uncontrollable energy of cloud and sky convolves in fury.  The Lake District is, of course, a post-industrial landscape, strewn with the spoil heaps of abandoned mine-workings; Fell’s vision is chthonic, about as far from the chocolate-box scenery of the day-tripper as you can get, and utterly authentic.  And all this fashioned out of precise, weighty strokes of paint that seem to have been applied with the implacable slow violence of the geology that gave them their subject. 

And she brings the same precise intensity to her visions of the Solway and the industrial towns of the coast.  Seascapes of Allonby depict low houses battered by waves and light.  The show includes two of her paintings of Maryport harbour, where a sea of battered pewter hangs ominously above the town.  These, and the brooding townscapes of her home, suggest that an entire vision of nature and society can be conjured out of light within a bicycle-ride of  Aspatria.  Fell sketched rapidly, in Cumbrian nature, and then worked with paint and canvas back in her London studio – what you see is the turmoil of emotion experienced with rural intensity and then recollected amongst the tranquility of a great city. 

The show makes much of her friendship and sketching trips with LS Lowry, and while they’re arguably both visual poets of the industrial North, it strikes me that Fell has a power that far outdoes Lowry’s cold urban vistas and naïve automata.  If Fell’s images and colour have reference points then they’re the farm-labourers of Van Gogh, JMW Turner’s overwhelming skies and seascapes, the smooth light curves and contours of Edward Munch’s late-career agricultural paintings – brooding cabbage-harvesters under low skies. 

Don’t be fooled into thinking that this makes her merely an inheritor of titanic influences.  Fell is utterly and uncompromisingly personal and her work embodies the authenticity of Cumbria – a landscape that shaped and is shaped by its people. I left the exhibition intoxicated by the power of Fell’s vision, grieving that it was cut so abruptly short.  The show is, simply, unmissable.

Sheila Fell: Cumberland On Canvas – Tullie House, Carlisle, to 16 March 2025.

https://tullie.org.uk/events/sheila-fell-cumberland-on-canvas/

Those in search of more may also wish to track down the late Cate Haste’s sadly out-of-print Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Lund Humphries, 2010 – ISBN: 9780853319795). 

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.