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.

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.