China Miéville’s new novel is, in the words of George Harrison, long, long, long. The proof-copy I read was two breeze-block-sized chunks of text, 1244 pages in all. The actual book is bound as one, and is, it seems, even longer: 1264 pages it says on the publisher’s website for the book. The sheer size of this book is a brave move by Pan Macmillan. Rec…

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The BBC is filming a new cosy-crime series, The Detection Club (written by Kit Lambert), starring, above left-to-right, Bryony Hannah as Agatha Christie, Miles Jupp as G.K. Chesterton and Cara Theobold as Dorothy L. Sayers. My friend Alan Jacobs (whose biography of Sayers comes out next month from OUP) notes:

The Detection Club looks like it might be fun, but I wonder about one thing: why did the creators decide to make Miles Jupp look exactly like Chesterton but make Bryony Hannah and Cara Theobold look nothing like Christie and Sayers?

For the record: Christie was tall (5′ 8″, unusual for the time) and fair, and somewhat formal in her public appearance; Hannah is short, dark, and petite, and is dressed like a dumpy schoolmarm. Sayers was also often called tall (though there’s no record of her actual height), increasingly stout from her late 20s on, with short dark-brown hair and a flamboyant eccentricity of dress often remarked on; Cara Theobold in the show is bright blonde and almost a fashion plate.

There’s no reason why the show should adhere to the facts in this matter — but it’s so particular about getting GKC right (the hair, the pince-nez, the cape)! I find myself thinking that she show would be more visually interesting if Christie’s traditionalism were contrasted to Sayers’s eccentricity.

I was struck that nobody knows officially what height Sayers was. As Alan says, she has been called tall, described by Vera Brittain as ‘long and slim’ during her university days at Oxford; and Janet Hitchman’s biography Such a Strange Lady calls her ‘tall and awkward’, and records that others spoke of her as ‘a large, commanding presence’.

This photograph does make her look quite tall: she is standing with three men, J A Kensit of the Protestant Truth Society, Dr J W Welch, Director of Religious Broadcasts at the BBC, and, in his Home Guard uniform, Derek McCulloch, producer of BBC’s Children Hour and radio presenter. The occasion was the BBC’s broadcast of Sayers’s The Man Born to be King (the play ran from December 1941-October 1942; this photo was from when the first installment went out).

It’s a slightly wonky framing: I assume all four are not leaning to the left (though if we angle the image right a touch to straighten them the door behind looks out of skew). But Sayers is a good half a head taller than Kensit, and a little taller than Welch and McCulloch (though McCulloch is leaning forward a little: if he straightened up he might be Sayers’s height). This doesn’t help us, since the heights of these individuals is nowhere recorded. We could estimate that Derek McCulloch, known to radio-listeners as ‘Uncle Mac’, was not a particularly tall person—in this photo it’s clear that the young woman at the piano would tower over him if she stood:

(Excuse the watermark here, and in the next image)—and in this photo, Sayers looks really quite small:

She’s standing directly next to actor Ivan Brandt (1903–1972; born Roy Francis Cook, he changed his name to make himself seem more exotic and so get better film roles). Brandt has his arm round stage designer Norah Lambourne, who seems taller than he (though she’s wearing heels, and is closer to the camera than Brandt and Sayers). The seated figure is Irish actor Veronica Turleigh, who is in costume as Saint Helena—the occasion of the photo was a rehearsal for Sayers’ play Christ's Emperor (a shortened version of her last play The Emperor Constantine) at St Thomas’s Church, Regent Street, January 1952. Brandt’s height is not recorded, but if he is 6ft then Sayers would be somewhere in the 5′ 3″, 5′ 4″ range. My estimate from this image is that if Turleigh were to stand she’d be of a similar height to Sayers, and Turleigh was a relatively short woman.1 Here, in a still from The Card (1952), she is standing with a seated Alec Guinness (height an accredited 5′ 9¼″) who, were he to stand, would manifestly be a lot taller than she:

She’s leaning forward a little, which makes it a little hard to gauge. Anyway: I’m making my official and scientifically rigorous judgment of Dorothy Sayers’s height: 5′ 3½″. I assume her forceful personality magnified her relatively small frame in the experience of others.

1

I would suggest Turleigh and Sayers had torsos of similar length: possibly they had different lengths of leg, but if not they’d be more or less the same height.

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The triptych is an artform with a long history. The word derives from the Greek—not a triple tych, whatever that might be, but tri, three, ptychs (πτυχή, “a fold”): a painting to be folded in on itself. A typical triptych is painted on boards that constitute three linked compartments, the central one usually being bigger than the two lateral ones, hinged so the outer flaps can fold-over the centre, concealing, or protecting, the whole. In some triptychs all three elements are the same size.

There are a great many medieval and Renaissance examples of triptych art, many of them altarpieces representing sacred or Biblical subject, made to be positioned at the altar in a church. In fact the triptych first emerged in Italy in the fourteenth-century, swiftly replacing the earlier preference for polyptych panels—that is, paintings with multiple panels, in pentagonal or gabled dossal patterns. It is not clear why the more limited triptych rose to such prominence at this period. Art historian Edward J. Olszewski thinks it had a specific numeric religious significance: ‘referring to the three pinnacles of Solomon’s Temple’ mediated via a later medieval Catholic medieval belief that ‘Solomon built a temple dedicated to the Lord that mystically prefigured the birth of the Blessed Mary. The temple had three pinnacles to signify Mary’s triple golden celestial crown’ [Edward J. Olszewski, ‘A Possible Source for the Triptych, Lunette and Tondo Formats in Renaissance Paintings’ Notes in the History of Art 28:2 (2009), 5-11].

After the Renaissance the fashion for triptychs fell away, although there are various later examples of artists employing the form, usually in conscious dialogue with its earlier vogue, as with British artist Francis Bacon’s various triptychs of the 1950s and 1960s, or French artist Edouard Vuillard’s diptyches or Vallotin’s The Bon Marché Department Store (1898) triptych. The connection between this fundamentally medieval religious form and science-fiction cover art might seem tenuous. But SF and Fantasy was, from the 1960s on, often published as trilogies, a reflection of the (adventitious, but influential) decision by Allen & Unwin to published Tolkien’s 1000-page Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of books, 1954-55. A great many trilogies have been published since then, and publishers have sometimes taken the opportunity to employ the triptych format for their cover art.

Asimov’s celebrated Foundation trilogy is a ‘fix-up’, that is a series of novels assembled from previously-published short fiction. Take volume 1, Foundation (published as a standalone ‘novel’ in 1951). This was comprised of a newly written framing story ‘The Psychohistorians’, and four stories that had originally appeared in the magazine Astounding, the first two in 1942, the latter pair in 1944. These stories were not especially notable on their first appearance: only two of them (‘Bridle and Saddle’, which became chapter 3, and ‘The Big and the Little’, renamed ‘The Merchant Princes’ in the novel, which became chapter 4) made the cover of the magazine.

The first book edition of Foundation, published by American small-press Gnome Books, carried a dust-jacket illustration by David A. Kyle (1919-2016). Kyle was not a professional artist, but rather the co-founder, with Martin Greenberg (1918-2013), of Gnome Press itself. He did the design to save having to pay an artist. It shows.

There have been many reprints and new editions of Asimov’s trilogy, and it continues to be republished to this day, aided by the success of the Phantom Four/Skydance TV adaptation. The edition in which I first read these books was the 1973 paperback edition by Panther books, with a triptych cover-art design in which a large Chris Foss canvas was split equally between the three books.

The cover for the first volume sets the tone. The author’s name is set in large sans-serif white letters, the initial letter reduced from a capital to lower-case to increase the sense of uniformity across the whole, and the ‘Isaac’ first-name elided altogether: as if this author was already so famous that he had become mononymical, like Elvis or Voltaire. Asimov is an unusual surname in the English-speaking world, which makes it stand out even more: a Russian name, Азимов, which ought to be transliterated Azimov (the spelling of the name in English was an error: when Asimov’s father arrived in the United States in 1923 he was told by immigration officials to transliterate the name into Latin characters: since he spoke German but little English, he believed that the letter S was pronounced Z in English, as it is in German).

The design of this cover is spare: a small-font superscript identifying the publisher, the author’s surname large in white, the book’s title smaller in yellow, then only the open-ended red-white-and-blue design by Foss: a spaceship, or perhaps (judging by the clouds in the background) rigid airship that, from its various details, appears enormous. It has nothing to do with the story of Foundation: Foss did not paint in an attempt to illustrate the specific action of the book. He was not a fan of science fiction and preferred not to read the works he was commissioned to paint, working instead purely from his own inspiration. The lack of fit between cover and story has puzzled some readers, although it adds a certain mystique and glamour to the novels. Indeed, some bought these books despite not especially liking Asimov’s writing, purely because the art was so splendid.

Foss, born in 1946 on Guernsey in the Channel Islands, trained as an architecture student before becoming a professional artist. He produced many deftly realist black-and-white illustrations of copulating couples for Alex Comfort’s erotic manual The Joy of Sex (1972), and also produced a large number of full colour paintings as book covers in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked with an airbrush, an adapted air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays paint with varying degrees of spread and focus, enabling him to create very fine gradations and shadings, mist effects and sheens, spotlights and starbursts. His architectural training is evident in the structural solidity and scale of his spaceships, the extrapolated flying-building quality.

The second fixed-up volume in the trilogy, Foundation and Empire (originally published in 1952) centres on what appears to be a huge, irregularly shaped tower of some kind. Illuminated windows, or portholes, suggest that this structure is occupied. A hazy starburst light and corona dominate the composition, and a mechanical umbilicus leads to what appears to be the rear-end of a dirigible.

With the third cover, for 1953's Second Foundation, 1973 Chris Foss's ‘dirigible’ is revealed to be a rocket-powered, or at least rocket-oriented monster craft, apparently constructed from rigid materials, steel perhaps. The moon behind looms much larger than our moon does from Earth, suggesting we are on another world, or else that we are in a far future in which the moon's orbit has become much closer.

The fit to Asimov’s trilogy is far from precise. Foss gives us no human characters, or individuals, at all; everything is on a titanic scale, two mammoth craft, one seemingly flying away from the plane of the picture, the other heading towards it at an angle; and in between a Babel-high tower. It is a beautiful, striking, rather overwhelming image that contains little within itself by way of exegesis. Asimov’s novels, on the other hand, contain very little visual description (this is true of all of Asimov’s voluminous writing, in fact). He is interested in human characters and their interactions, rendered largely through dialogue exchange, and with an abstracted theory of history, conveyed largely through excerpts from a fictional encyclopaedia, and occasional lectures.

And yet in another sense, this triptych captures somethng of Asimov’s distinctive qualities, and science fiction’s potential.

Asimov was not a religious individual. ‘I have never, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind,’ he wrote in his autobiography. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying.’1 In the Foundation trilogy it is the impersonal force of History as such that lies behind the phenomena of day-to-day living—and, in the later Foundation novels, we discover that the intelligence that has been watching-over, guiding and protecting human existence is not divine, but robotic: the robots humanity had invented and programmed with laws to attend to human wellbeing, having become in time vastly powerful and intelligent, had withdrawn from human affairs and were masterminding cosmic affairs. A kind of parody God, we might say.

The eighteenth-century theorising of the aesthetic of sublimity—in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—differentiated between the ‘beautiful’ (aesthetically pleasurable but small-scale, proportionate, charming, balanced) and ‘the sublime’ (aesthetically pleasurable but also terrifying, overwhelming, mostly large-scale, destabilising). A garden might be beautiful, but the Alps are sublime; a lake might be beautiful, but the mighty ocean is sublime; day might be beautiful but night, with its spread of millions of stars, is sublime. (And, though it strikes us as sexist and reductive today: a woman might be beautiful, but man is sublime. But let’s put that on one side). In essence sublimity has to do with the disproportion in scale between finite humanity and the infinite cosmos; the Alps, though they are gigantic, are only actually a kind of fragment of infinitude, they give us a sense, an intimation, of the grandeur of the infinite spaces and infinite timescales of the universe. And more specifically, for Burke, was the sublime does is give us a sort of glimpse of God’s majesty and infinity: for him the sublime affect is, at root, a religious matter.

Burke’s ideas were influential upon the development of Gothic Literature, a mode that began with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and which enjoyed enormous success in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. In Gothic the ‘terror’ of the sublime is foregrounded: mood and imagination, a subconscious rather than the rational, proportionate logic mind of neoclassical art—a dream logic, often. When Mary Shelley appropriated Gothic conventions to scientific extrapolation in Frankenstein science fiction as such was born: such, at any rate, is the argument of Brian Aldiss and others. We can certainly trace the eighteenth-century sublime into the ‘sense of wonder’ that is so prized by SF fans: the apprehension of scale and majesty, of magnitude and cosmic scope. Asimov’s prose may be grey, his characterisation rudimentary, he may lack the skill to write in a vivid or visually evocative manner, but he communicates giant ideas, mind-blowing concepts, brilliant galaxy-spanning stories. Foss’s paintings, though they do not relate to Asimov on the level of character or plot, are in themselves gigantic, sublime visual artefacts.

And that, in a sense, is religious at root. Atheist SF fans may like to think of ‘sensawunda’ as a secularised material sublime, but the distinction becomes, frankly, moot. There is always something in essence religious in the sublime. And to return to the question of triptychs: the form’s originally trinitarian, religious form, as much as its (almost always) religious, Biblical content, rode this fault line between faith and idolatry. At the end of the 6th century Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Serenus, bishop of Marseille, after the latter had ordered all religious art destroyed. Serenus was worried that the icons themselves were being worshipped by members of his congregation in place of the proper object of worship, God (a concern shared by Judaism, and Islam, then and since). Gregory rebuked Serenus. Don’t destroy altar pieces, he instructed: such artwork has value in teaching the illiterate about the gospel, educating them about the word of God—although, Gregory agreed that actual worship was due to God alone. From then until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth-century, altarpieces—often triptychs—were widespread. But the Protestant reformers tended to agree with Serenus, that such objects had supplanted God in the attention of worshippers, and mostly stripped them away. It became a hot issue at that time. The 1563 (Catholic) Council of Trent addressed it, justifying the use of painting and sculpture in holy spaces against Protestant criticisms, and issued the ‘Tridentine decree’ defending the practice, provided the focus was on explaining holy stories to those who could not read them: such images were to be venerated but not worshipped, because that would be idolatry. Religious art continued an important element in Catholic worship, although it is not coincidental that altar triptychs passed out of fashion around this time.

Foss’s art is, in this sense, Protestant (not doctrinally: there is nothing specifically religious about his images—but in the culturally structural sense). It does not ‘tell stories in visual mode for the illiterate’. It presents not pictures of saints, or virgin Marys, to be venerated (but not worshipped!). Instead Foss provides objective correlatives of futuristic technology and structures, high-tech starships, strange interstellar hulks and vast towers. The style is, we might say, techno-Gothic, rather than futurist-neoclassical: all about the detail and ornamentation, cathedrals in space: images of (to adopt John Ruskin’s words on the nature of Gothic from The Stones of Venice ‘massy and mountainous strength, iron-bound, block heaved upon block by enthusiasm and force; and cramped and stanchioned into such weight [and] by the same narrow crosslet the passing of the sunbeam’. Look again at that sunburst in the centre of his image. It folds—ptychs—the sublime into the technological, the religious into the secular-materialist, the abstract into the representational.

[Spoilers in this post for vols 1-4]

On The Calculation of Volume is an ongoing seven-volume novel sequence—so far Balle has published six of the seven in her native Danish, and four of those have been translated into English (volume 5 is due 5^th November 2026—one hopes that, when the final volume finally emerges, the publisher will issue it on 18^th November). Reacting to the novel when I’m only a little over halfway through the whole is surely premature, and possibly impetuous, but here we are.

Tara lives in north-east France with her husband Thomas.1 They run an online second-hand book business, have been married a while, are childless. The spark has departed their relationship, though they remain companionable. Tara travels to Paris to acquire some books to resell, and visit some friends. It’s the 18^th November. She returns to her hotel room, sleeps, and when she wakes it is again the 18^th November. Slowly she comes to understand that she is stuck in a situation in which every day is the 18^th November for her.

The novel (treating all the individual volumes as sections of one long 1500-page novel) is narrated by Tara in the form of a journal she keeps, each section headed by a number that indicates how many days since her experience began. We start on #121, with Tara recapping, at prolonged, rather tedious length, her memories of her first four months as a time-trapped individual. Book 1 (180 pages) takes us up to #366; volume 2 (200 pages) to #1144; vol 3 (200 pages) to #1892 and vol 4 (200 pages) to #3637, so you can see that Tara at no point in the story breaks out of her 18^th November prison (whether she will in vol 7 remains to be seen).

The trapped-in-time idea is a common conceit in SF of course, and Balle spins some variations upon it. For one thing, Tara is not stuck in the same place every day, as Bill Murray’s Phil Connors character is in Groundhog Day. She can, and does, travel around—initially back to see her husband, although she gets tired of having to explain the situation to him literally every day (he is surprised every morning to wake up next to her in their shared bed on the morning of the 18^th because he believes her to be in Paris). After a while she leaves her husband and travels elsewhere. She visits various places in France. Because she yearns for November to end and winter properly to begin, she ‘fakes’ a seasonal change by travelling into the north of Scandinavia, where she can see some snow—she refuses to fly, anxious about what would happen if the flight takes longer than scheduled and her day resets whilst she’s in midair, so this is a long-drawn out journey by train and bus and car. Tara booked her Paris hotel room for the 17^th-18^th so she knows there won’t be anybody else in it on the morning of the 18^th, but when she stays in other hotels she has to spin a yarn to ensure she’s in a room that has been unoccupied for days, or risk disturbing some prior guest when she wakes in the morning. Later she scopes out unoccupied apartments, and afterwards a house, and stays there.

Although the rest of the world simply resets and goes through the 18^th over and over, Tara does not. She ages—at the end of the fourth volume, 3637 days into the experience, she is ten years older than she was when she started—and her effect upon her surroundings accumulates. If she stays in a place for a while and shops in the local supermarket for her food, that emporium’s shelves grow increasingly denuded with the things she takes but which the supermarket, forever reliving the 18^th, has no time to replace. She calls herself a monster, and likens herself to a locust, for this reason, and as her experience elongates she tries to find less destructive ways of feeding herself.

One other wrinkle: when she wakes every morning of the 18^th, herself, her clothes and anything she has close by is carried over. If she acquires something on the 18^th and leaves it somewhere else in her apartment, or outside, it is likely to disappear with the reset.2 She often goes to bed hugging food, or other items, under her duvet to ensure they’ll be there the ‘next’ day. At one point she buys a laptop, writes on it, and sleeps with it too; the computer is still there in the morning but, every morning, its memory is wiped clean.

This, then, is the premise. Balle’s treatment is slow, detailed, heavily focused on quotidiana and mundanity, and is of necessity intensely repetitive. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, boring. I don’t say so to be dismissive. On the contrary, the boringness (boringtude, boringosity) is a large part of the point. My English edition of vols 1 and 2 come with a back-cover endorsement by Karl Ove Knausgård (‘a fantastic book’) and you can see why he likes it (this blurb, strangely, disappears from vols 3 and 4)—Balle is doing similar things to the Slow Style school Fosse, Knausgård, Arudpragasam, etc;3 though, thankfully, she lacks Knausgård’s ego and narcissism.

Thomas returns carrying two thin plastic bags … He puts the cheese in the fridge, pops two tins of tomatoes in the cupboard and leaves a bar of chocolate on the worktop. When the bags are empty he crumples them up and stows them in the cupboard under the sink. During the day I hear him in the office upstairs. I hear the swivel chair rolling across the floor and the printer churning out labels and letters … I hear him in the bathroom and I hear a sound from the toilet that can only be made by a man peeing upright.

I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and the woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November … I open the window and throw out some bread for the birds. They show up when there is a break in the rain: first the blackbirds, who peck at the last apples on the tree and the bread I have thrown out, and then a lone robin. Moments later a long-tailed tit flies down, closely followed by some great tits who are promptly seen off by the blackbirds. Shortly afterwards rain comes on again.

Thomas has lit a fire in the living room. He has brought in wood from the garden shed and I soon start to feel the house growing warmer. [1:3-4]

And so on. Every little detail, and many of them many times. In the evening Thomas goes out into their garden, digs up a leek, comes into the kitchen, chops it up with some onions, and makes some soup. Balle describes these actions, in detail, multiple times.

Tara’s experiences are reiteratively laid-out because they keep recurring; they are tedious because the day-to-day of our human life’s habitus is often repetitively tedious. This, I take it, is one of the things the book is about and whilst reading can be a chore it captures this aspect of living well. (There are other aspects of life the writing doesn’t capture, though. I’ll come to that.)

Tara is remarkably incurious about why this strange circumstance is happening (‘I don’t know what is going on. Whether time is switched off at night, whether past and future disappear during slumber … maybe it is language that shuts down’ [1:57]). To begin with she she yearns to break through into the 19^th November. In Vol 1 she pins her hope to day 365, believing without evidence that one year will complete her sentence. It doesn’t. After that she gives up the hope that she’ll ever escape.

She continues writing (keeping the notebooks near her at night so they don’t disappear) in order ‘to feel as if [she] is no longer alone.’

My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased in the night, the paper remembers and on it I can see that it says day number this and day number that and the eighteenth of November but never the nineteenth. [1:95]

Why the 18^th November, specifically? I don’t know, but I wonder if it is a reference to ‘18^th Brumaire.’ This would be a sly gesture towards Marx’s famous opening line to ‘The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice; he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’—extrapolating this repeating ‘18^th Burmaire’ from a doubling to an ongoing seemingly endless reiteration.4

Tara adjusts to her new mode of living: she travels; she wanders cities as a flaneur; she becomes fascinated with the Roman empire, reads books and even attends university classes on the subject. She reflects upon the ways in which it’s not so different to the life she had before.

I think about Thomas’s grandfather who never moved from the house where he had lived with Thomas’s grandmother. Who lived alone for seventeen years before he himself died. Who always lived the same life, followed the same rhythm. Who grew the same vegetables, in the same amounts, according to a scheme that still hangs in the shed. [1:121]

#754 I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that’s what is happening. Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is life with no drama … I am safe, I have nothing to fear. [2:157]

At one point Tara burns her hand a little and it heals over many days; on another occasion she twists her ankle badly and has to go to hospital, to get a cast on her foot. These injuries heal, over time. Once a bicycling thief steals her handbag.

The whole story could, I suppose, have continued in this manner, Tara solus, recording the minutiae of her days, for years, even decades. Lean into the ennui. But after volume 2 Balle mixes things up a little. The first thing that happens is that Tara discovers she is not the only person trapped in 18^th November, chancing upon a man called Henry D. We get his backstory. Henry’s ex-wife and child have moved to America, and he flies over to spend long strings of 18^th-Novembers (18ths-November?) with them—obviously not worried, as Tara is, that a delay in his flight might strand him high in the air over the Atlantic one 18^th November morning—but he spends quite a long time with Tara too.

Henry is an academic (Tara meets him because she’s been attending university lectures on her sudden passion for Roman history) and speculates not about the cause of the temporal repeated-reset but its effects on those who experience them: ‘existential abruptions, as he called them. He had written an article I could read if I was interested: “Homo Abruptus: the Sociologist of Identity Ruptures”’ [3:33]5

They are very different people, Tara and Henry, and debate, somewhat tepidly, gender differences (Henry thinks Tara’s interest in the Romans is not genuine, since history is for men. ‘Women had always been relegated to the back seat, confined in closed carriages, in palanquins, in the pantry and the kitchen … Why should I be interested in history?’ [3:56]—he rows this back: ‘did he really believe that my relationship to history could be explained by my being a woman? No, he didn’t believe that, he said. But still …’) Henry goes back to the States, and Tara gives her marriage with Thomas another go. Then she leaves him again, he still none the wiser, and Henry returns from the US.

But if these two are trapped in time, then surely there will be others? Tara and Henry put up posters with contact details, moving them to different places to catch the eye of other 18^th-November inmates. This results in them meeting a new couple, Ralph Kern and Olga Periti. Ralph has a plan to take advantage of the strange situation in which they are stuck: to scout around, locate circumstances in which people have accidents, die, are robbed, where injustice or injury happens, to tabulate these and then to change them: to warn drivers not to take that corner so fast, to intervene to prevent muggings, to stop people slipping and falling and so on. Improve the world.

Rather than simply doing this, the four debate it endlessly, round and round. Tara, our narrator, who spent two whole volumes doing fuck all for the world (beyond an awareness that she ought not to locust-consume all the comestibles in any one area) is on the non-interventionist side. Still: the four move into a large house and do start making plans.

After two volumes of just Tara, and a third with two then four people, the scrum that piles into volume 4 feels indecently crowded: more and more November 18^th people rock up at the house Tara, Henry, Ralph and Olga have set up for themselves; in short order there are nine in the house, and soon after that nearly twenty. Volume 4 is largely made-up of these newcomers’ backstories, their various experiences of waking and realising they were trapped in the 18^th November. This (as above) is repetitive, often boring, of a piece with the earlier volumes despite the increased dramatis personae. The group spreads itself around the house, its basement, its outhouse, and spend most of their time in endless discussions as to what is going on, what they should do etc etc. They have various names for it (‘Marlice and Rosi have been together a long time: an anastrophe, that’s what they called the incident’ 4:19), various theories as to what caused it—several feel, guiltily, they are personally to blame—and various observations about it: Martine, one of the new arrivals, points out that ‘all of us in the house … were a fairly homogenous segment of the population. A small subset of society … No one old, no one poor, no one wealthy—at least not before the eighteenth, when we all became rich. Everyone speaks English or German and maybe French … people will loose-fitting identities and unsettled lives’ [4:144]. Towards the end of volume 4 the novel takes a turn towards mortality: a character called Milly Arcmole accidentally hits a cyclist with her car, killing them. This is sobering: the cyclist won’t come back to life. She is guiltstruck.

Not only were we monsters devouring out world, we were also monsters capable of ejecting people from time entirely … [and] we would die. Without a doubt, we would die. Either slowly, after a long journey in the eighteenth of November, or quickly, in an instant, if we weren’t careful … We were in constant danger and were a danger to others. [4:164]

Ralph’s plan to intervene in the world and save lives is superseded by Sonia’s plan to withdraw from the world, to minimise the chance of doing any more active harm. Then we discover that Sonia is pregnant with Peter’s baby—will the baby be trapped in the 18^th with its parents, or will it roll through to the 19^th and a one-day-old and hopefully be raised by someone else? I guess we’ll find out. There’s a flurry of speculation about the nature of the anastrophe: ‘were we suffering from a neural defect or lapse in consciousness? Was the halting of the eighteenth of November a form of hallucination?’ [4:176] Perhaps everyone else in the world has suffered a collective ‘cognitive malfunction’ that somehow ‘sucked all events of the eighteenth of November into oblivion, a crack in the night’? Had the group tripped into an alternate reality, bifurcated into a sheaf of the multiverse whereby the eighteenth of November was endlessly repeated? It’s not resolved and, as I say above, it’s possible the novel never will provide a resolution.

At the end of volume 4 Tara’s husband Thomas calls her mobile. This is unprecedented: he’s never done it before (it’s not part of his usual 18^th November routine). ‘He said he knew something was wrong. With time. That was why he called’ [4:189]. This oughtn’t to be possible. Tara leaves the group and heads home.

I’m glad I read 4/7ths of On The Calculation of Volume, though the actual reading experience was quite often a drag. I have read more boring books, certainly, and many of those were not, as this one is, about boredom, about routine and habit, about the endless ongoing. All this buttoning and unbuttoning, and so on. Although, having said that, its striking that at no point does Tara consider suicide.

Indeed, even though Tara is our narrator and we spend all these years inside her head, she is a curiously flat character, hard to get a handle on. Much of the time she is just affectless, recording her experiences. On occasion she becomes actively dissociated from the world, although mostly she just drifts through her bizarre experience.

One thing that struck me about this novel, or its first 4/7th, is the almost total lack of sex (maybe it will raunch itself up in vols 5-7, I don’t know: but I doubt it). There are two very glancing references of Tara and Thomas making love (one in vol 1 near the beginning, one halfway through vol 3), but for most of the getting on for 4000-days that she narrates Tara not only goes without sex, but makes no mention of being in the least bothered by its absence. I don’t know about you, but ten years of celibacy would not be my idea of fun, and the peculiar circumstance in which Tara finds herself would surely accentuate this. That circumstance would also enable her to manipulate situations, arrange hookups (if she wanted)—and when she starts meeting other time-trapped people, she could shag some of them. But she doesn’t. Maybe she doesn’t want to cheat on her husband, but then you’d expect her to record the temptation, justify the avoidance, or perhaps even just note how little sex troubles her. But it simply isn’t a part of the world of the novel. She’s a bloodless, strange, almost inhuman individual. On The Calculation of Volume is a novel entirely lacking in humour. Reading it is like wading through treacle, although not necessarily in a bad way.

Balle is writing a novel about repetition and recollection, but as that other Great Dane Kierkegaard said, ‘repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.’ This tension animates what could otherwise be a repellent piece of writing. By writing up her experiences, recollecting them, Tara aims to fix them, to render them inert, but at the same time she knows that she is doomed to repeat these very experiences, to relive them, and in this repetition inheres the chance to escape the melancholy inherent in recollection.6 There’s a late Robbe-Grillet novel called Le Reprise (2001) that takes this Kierkegaad quotation as its epigraph. It opens: ‘Ici, donc, je reprends, et je résume’: reprendre means ‘to take back, recover, regain; to resume (work), to carry on’ and résumer means to condense (eg a text) in fewer words, to sum-up, to boil-down: for a writer, carrying-on the work adds more words and condensing the work takes words away. Robbe-Grillet, of course, is a blessedly brief writer—no 1500 page mammoth ‘volume’ calculations in his oeuvre—and often a very funny one, which Balle is not. But it’s possible she is working over some of the same ground of Le Reprise, here. That novel is also a genre piece—Robbe-Grillet’s genre is spy fiction: an agent is sent to Berlin on a secret mission, meets his doppelganger, ends up repeating his experiences. A lot more ‘happens’ in Le Reprise than Calculation of Volume, in the sense of shootings and pursuits, kidnappings, encounters with double-agents and teenage prostitutes, but these happenings are, as ever with Robbe-Grillet, not in the least the point of the novel. Rather it is a text about the distortions applied to subjectivity by the equal and opposite forces of recollection of the past and carrying-on into the future. There is also (not to harp on about this, but) lots of sex in Le Reprise, because sex is itself a repetitive activity: we do more-or-less the same things over and over, and we engage in the act again and again. This, I think, is why the bleached absence not just of sex-acts but of any erotic charge or sexuality at all in Calculation of Volume seemed so strange to me, so denaturing to Balle’s fictional project. But as I say, it’s not proper to judge a novel when one has only read 4/7ths of it, so I’ll stop there.

[Newell Convers Wyeth, Odysseus’ Ship (1929)]

.

This, one of Tennyson’s most famous poems, is often discussed by critics in terms of whether it articulates a heroic striving against the depredations of old-age and decline—rage, rage against the dying of the light—or shows a selfish old man, abdicating his proper responsibilities and dooming his crew to death. Ulysses (that is, Odysseus) addresses the crew of his ship. He has returned to Ithaca, killed the suitors, reunited with his wife, but he is unhappy, he cannot stay, he must move on. He announces that he will turn over his throne to his son, Telemachus, and set sail again, voyaging this time not east to Troy, but to the undiscovered west. According to Dante, whom Tennyson knew, Ulysses (and presumably his crew, though we don’t meet them in Dante’s Hell) die on this voyages, drown-dead. Should he stay and do his duty by ruling? Is he heroic in sailing away, or cowardly? ‘Some see Ulysses as heroic,’ says John G Peters, ‘some see him as derelict, while others place him somewhere between these two poles.’ The standard Victorian reading of the poem took the former view, where the irony-loving New Critics and Deconstructionists of the 20th-century largely took the poem in the latter sense, full of subtle underminings and aporia, a critique of the ideology of heroism. What is, I suppose, the most famous 21st-century iteration of the poem returns it to being about grizzled heroism and undimmed will: I’m talking about Judy Dench’s improbable recitation of the poem’s final lines in Skyfall.1

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This sets-up agéd Daniel Craig2 to come running in, to strive with Javier Bardem’s Silva, to shoot, to fight and, of course, not to yield. And Christopher Nolan’s movie-de-jour ends with a Tennysonian gesture: as in Homer, Nolan’s Odysseus returns, kills the suitors and reclaims his wife (though he doesn’t hang all the slave-girls). But then he hands-over the rule or Ithaca to his son, and—which is not in Homer—takes Penelope onto his ship and the two sail away beyond the sunset and the baths/Of all the western stars.

I have never quite been able to parse the opening sentence of ‘Ulysses’, or grasp why Tennyson deforms syntax in the way he does:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

The ‘that’ in the opening line sets-up a subsequent clause that doesn’t come (as it might be: ‘it little profits that an idle king should rule among these barren crags’). If we take it that a ‘be’ has dropped out (‘it little profits that an idle king … [be] match’d with an aged wife’) we run up against the transition to the following clause, ‘I mete and dole’, which positions ‘match'd with an aged wife’ as a preliminary clause in a new sentence. Indeed, if we take ‘it little profits’ as meaning ‘there is little profit in …’ then we have to trace the sentence as ‘there is little profit in the fact that (by this still hearth, among these barren crags) …’ and we are left dangling for the rest.3 Parse it how you like, it doesn’t fit together. [Update: in the comments, several people provide one possible reading of the lines—the lack of the comma needful for this still irks me, but it does make sense of the opening.]

I don’t mean to get too tangled up in this: broadly we can see that the poem’s opening sentence is saying ‘I, Ulysses, am stuck here on this barren island with an aged wife ruling a savage people, and there’s no profit it this for me’. But the dislocation of the syntax wrongfoots the very opening of the poem, and destabilises what follows, even though what follows is perfectly comprehensible.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea:

The Hyades are a star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, and Tennyson took the ‘rainy Hyades’ from John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary (1788):

Hyădes, five daughters of Atlas king of Mauritania, who were so disconsolate at the death of their brother Hyas, who had been killed by a wild boar, that they pined away and died. They became stars after death, and were placed near Taurus, one of the 12 signs of the Zodiac. They received the name of Hyades from their brother Hyas. Their names are Phaola, Ambrosia, Eudora, Coronis, and Polyxo. To these some have added Thione and Prodice, and they maintained that they were daughters of Hyas and Æthra, one of the Oceanides. Euripides calls them daughters of Erechtheus. The ancients supposed that the rising and setting of the Hyades were always attended with much rain, whence the name (ὑω pluo). Ovid, Fasti, bk. 5, li. 165.—Hyginus, fable 182.—Euripides, Ion.

These are superbly euphonious, measured, evocative lines of verse, amongst my favourite in all Tennyson: when/Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades/Vext the dim sea. If I could write poetry so amazing I’d die happy. It has something to do with the balance of monosyllables and polysyllables: ‘Ulysses’ has a high proportion of lines composed of eight monosyllables and one disyllable (from ‘Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole’ through to, here, ‘I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d/… That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when’) and many lines entirely made of monosyllables, such as the poem’s superb final couplet. Tennyson usually balances these two types of line, as in:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.

It means that when he disposes a line containing several polysyllables it draws and slows the flow, focalises the words: in Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades/Vext the dim sea the vivid ‘scudding drifts’ (a disyllable and a monosyllable, but three short vowels) leading into ‘the rainy Hyades’ (a monosyllable, a disyllable and a trisyllable, a sequence emphasised by the passage from short ‘the’ through the dipthong in ‘rainy’ and the long ‘y’ in Hyades) builds to the enjambment and is completed by the wondrous vext—an unusual, evocative word, rendered more striking by the use of -t rather than -ed—and the dim sea. It’s one of those moments of poetic flawlessness that are common in Tennyson’s verse.

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[Miniature of Sappho and her companions, from a Dutch translation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames, Bruges, 1475]

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A few years back an abortive project of mine (one of many) was prompted by reading Constantine A. Trypanis’s Penguin Book of Greek Verse: Dual Language Edition (Penguin 1988), in which a wide range of Greek verse from Homer up to the 20th century is anthologised, with Greek text and English prose translations at the foot of the page. These translations are all into contemporary English: fine as far as getting at the meaning goes. But I was struck by the ahistoricality of this as a translation strategy, the way it necessarily flattens and erases our sense of the poetry as a developing tradition—because of course the Greek of Homer is two and a half thousand years older than the Greek of Seferis, as different linguistically as Old English is from Simon Armitage. ‘What would an anthology look like,’ I thought to myself, ‘that translated Homer into Old English, Hesiod into Chaucerian English, the Attic tragedians into Shakespearian English, Hellenistic poets into the idiom of the metaphysicals (or maybe into 18th-century English) and so on?’ It would be a curious and absorbing task to generate so much text; but would the result be worthwhile in any sense?

I decided to give it a go: I turned a few dozen lines from the beginning of the Iliad into Old English, put some Hesiod into Early Middle-English, did Sappho into Chaucerian English, Pindar into Early Tudor English (rather dully, as it turned out) and then Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides into Elizabethan English: Marlowe, Shakespeare and Middleton respectively. I quite enjoyed these three, actually, and wondered about rendering an entire Attic tragedy into this cod-Elizbaethanism, seeing how it would play out on stage. It would be a fake-antique, but might achieve certain things, dramatically, that a clear modern-English translation could not.

Then I pushed on a bit further: some of Aristophanes’ Frogs into Jonsonian English, but I was running out of steam. I gormblimeyed up some Theocritus in late 17-century dress, and then threw the whole project over. Part of the problem was that I was running into redundancy issues: it’s possible to find later Greek authors translated into the idiom of the 18th-, 19th and 20th centuries (by English writers working in those centuries), rendering the necessity of my pastiche less pressing. But more I found myself whether what I was doing was worthwhile at all. The quality is certainly very variable, and it will be a rare reader actively eager to read a chunk of confected Old English Homer etc.

But in one case I was pleased with what I managed: by turning Sappho in Middle English I think I brought out something quite striking and effective from the original. Sappho was not unknown in medieval Europe, although in Latin rather than her original Greek,1 and her lesbianism made her a contentious figure.2 There are no contemporary medieval English translations of her poetry, so far as I know, which adds to the appeal of providing one (and all the later papyrus discoveries from the later 19th and 20th centuries are entirely outwith the ken of the medieval world, which makes it more imperative to medievalise them). Here’s Sappho’s most famous poem, the ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ which survived antiquity pretty much entire, as quoted in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatise On Composition:

Ποικιλόθρον᾽ ἀθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφρόδιτα,
παῖ Δίος, δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε
μή μ᾽ ἄσαισι μήτ᾽ ὀνίαισι δάμνα,
πότνια, θῦμον.

ἀλλὰ τυίδ᾽ ἔλθ᾽, αἴποτα κἀτέρωτα
τᾶς ἔμας αὔδως ἀίοισα πήλοι
ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα
χρύσιον ἦλθες

ἄρμ᾽ ὐποσδεύξαια• κάλοι δέ σ᾽ ἆγον
ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γᾶς μελαίνας
πύκνα δινεῦντες πτέρ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ὠράν᾽ αἴθε-
ρος διὰ μέσσω,

αἶψα δ᾽ ἐξίκοντο• σὺ δ᾽, ὦ μάκαιραv
μειδιάσαισ᾽ ἀθάνατῳ προσώπῳ,
ἤρε᾽ ὄττι δηὖτε πέπονθα κὤττι
δηὖτε κάλημι

κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι
μαινόλᾳ θύμῳ• "τίνα δηὖτε †πείθω
ἄψ σ᾽ ἄγην† ἐς σὰν φιλότατα; τίς τ᾽, ὦ
Ψάπφ᾽, ἀδίκηει;

καὶ γάρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ᾽, ἀλλὰ δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει,
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα".

ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλέπαν δὲ λῦσον
ἐκ μερίμναν, ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι
θῦμος ἰμέρρει, τέλεσον• σὐ δ᾽ αὔτα
σύμμαχος ἔσσο.3

Here’s the poem as Chaucer or Dunbar might have rendered it:

Glytering-troned and dethlesse Afrodytte,
Gods dowhter, wunder-wicche, on me haf pitee,
Let passe me, queene, thes agonie and thole,
Grinde not my soule.

Wheneer byfor thou hast mi hearkenéd—
And ploumbed the distans heering that I said,
And heeding, thou hast com, and left behand
Gods golden land,

In char moste flete bi wingéd steedes drawn,
Upon the skye al dark afore the dawn,
Throgh hevenes hy and wide espace in glyde
Doun to erthside;

Than soonest com thou blessedest ladie,
With contenance devyne and asketh me
Asmile, what wo anonder me did falle,
That I thee calle?

What in my leesting hertes maddenesse
Who now most feele my ane besechenesse?
Who is it most thir own hertsease ago
For wreyed Sapfo?

For yif she fleeth, freshly shal she folowe,
Today turn giftes, yet offreth them tomorwe,
She chues nat love, yet loving shal her chues
Thocgh she eschewes.

Com then, I preye, gyf me an ende to grief,
Remoeven care o godess yif thou leef,
What I moste coveite an it be provyde,
Thou at my syde!

I do think this rendering works well, as a poem. It is close enough to contemporary English that a modern-day reader can read it and understand it, although different enough to make that reading a little more effortful, and to retain some flavour of the process of translation out of text into comprehension, to estrange the verse a little and so record the difference of the original. I also think the habitus of medieval versifying (word-order inversions, the variable spelling, the vocabulary choices the era permits, the way comparatives and superlatives are construed) add fluency and expressiveness.

[Vénus, from a 15th-century French edition of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus / De cleres et nobles femmes (1362)]

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So, that abortive project was aborted, leaving a few stubs here and there online. But lately I have come back to middle-english-Sappho. Not that I think the whole is worth resurrecting: it’s too niche, and too over-elaborate a demonstrate of its central point (as outlined in the first paragraph, at the top there). But I like the effect of Sappho in Chaucerese.

So here are a couple more. First Sappho’s famous, long-ish fragment generally known as ‘31’: also known as phainetai moi (φαίνεταί μοι) after the opening words of its first line—‘he seems to me’, ‘he appears to me’—or as Lobel-Page 31, Voigt 31, Gallavotti 2, Diehl 2, Bergk 2, after the location of the poem in various editions of Sappho’s work. This poem is the other of the two substantially complete poems by Sappho to survive from ancient times.

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν' ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ' ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν·
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ' ἴδω βρόχε', ὤς με φώναί-
σ' οὐδ' ἒν ἔτ' εἴκει,

ἀλλά κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ' αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ' οὐδ' ἒν ὄρημμ', ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ' ἄκουαι,

κὰδ' δέ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ' ὀλίγω 'πιδεύης
φαίνομ' ἔμ' αὔτᾳ.

ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ καὶ πένητα...4

This doesn’t work quite as well in Chaucerese, I think: though there are a couple of nice touches:

Meseemeth him of goddes lykenness
That man beforen thu
Who sitten close and speking sweetenness
Aye listneth to;

And thine the laughter that beguyles my breest
Thrusting my hart aflyte
For at the verie moment thee I seest
Myself am quiet

My tonge it seiseth fast, and in fyn ore
Hete reds aflame my skin,
Mine eyen blinded and a drowning rore
Mine earres in:

Peerspiring wett I shuddre with the forse
In color country greene,
Close ene to dying I have run my corse
So I am seene

Swich al in venture, peyne of being poor …

One final example, to round-out this superfluous post. Two ‘new’ Sappho poems were recently discovered in papyrus form (you can find the text and literal translations here). After its discovery the TLS ran an article about these two lyrics, including Christopher Pelling’s translation of them. Here’s one of the two, the ‘Brothers poem’:

[…] ἀλλ’ ἄϊ θρύλησθα Χάραξον ἔλθην
νᾶϊ σὺν πλήαι. τὰ μέν οἴομαι Ζεῦς
οἶδε σύμπαντές τε θέοι· σὲ δ᾽οὐ χρῆ
ταῦτα νόησθαι,

ἀλλὰ καὶ πέμπην ἔμε καὶ κέλεσθαι
πόλλα λίσσεσθαι βασίληαν Ἤραν
ἐξίκεσθαι τυίδε σάαν ἄγοντα
νᾶα Χάραξον

κἄμμ’ ἐπεύρην ἀρτέμεας. τὰ δ’ ἄλλα
πάντα δαιμόνεσσιν ἐπιτρόπωμεν·
εὐδίαι γὰρ ἐκ μεγάλαν ἀήταν
αἶψα πέλονται.

τῶν κε βόλληται βασίλευς Ὀλύμπω
δαίμον’ ἐκ πόνων ἐπάρωγον ἤδη
περτρόπην, κῆνοι μάκαρες πέλονται
καὶ πολύολβοι·

κἄμμες, αἴ κε τὰν κεφάλαν ἀέρρη
Λάριχος καὶ δή ποτ᾽ ἄνηρ γένηται,
καὶ μάλ’ ἐκ πόλλαν βαρυθυμίαν κεν
αἶψα λύθειμεν.5

And here is the poem in cod-med.:

… Sett ay again; say Cracksus cometh soon
His boet al ful of buty; Jovis wat
And al the eother goddes swich are knoown
Think not of that!

In sted of it: go gush out many praoyers
To Hera Queene Divine; and fro her crave
To bring this boet back whol to these shoars
To porte and safe.

To chanse upon us stationed at the side
The rest let leave to Goddes keping balme
Great stormblastes fill the skie and quicker ride,
Yet cede to calme!

Erst King Olympus send a gide to bless
The paysage home, and piloted from far
To safe againe: whens wealth and blessydness
Achevéd are.

And us: yif Lareycus but ley his head,
And be the man of ydle eses loy
From souls in dragging deeps encarcerréd
We rise to joy.

That’s enough fake-antiques for now, I think.

Coming a little late to this much-praised movie, and I enjoyed it very much: as all the reviews have said, it’s genuinely unnerving and creepy, a couple of slightly-broad brush character-parts (the sad-faced therapist carrying within her childhood trauma from a mad mother and the destruction of her home; the sad-faced architect whose alcoholism and down…

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[The news that John Crowley has died, at the age of 83, has rolled around the world of Fantasy in which he was so important and unique a figure. I never knew him, and his reach was I think less (less than it should have been) in the UK than his home nation; but he figured largely in my Fantasy: a Short History, as one of the most important counter-balances to the Tolkienian/post-Tolkienian tradition of the 1960s-2000s. I could have given Crowley a lot more discussion and space in the book, but: ‘short’ was in the title, and Fantasy is large. In the end my discussion mostly looked at Little, Big. Below is my initial blog-reaction to this magisterial novel: it was considerably boiled-down and essential-oiled to fit into the tight word-limit of the finished book.]

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John Crowley’s Little, Big is a large, complex book about, at its heart, the interaction between contemporary humanity and the kingdoms of Fairy, which exist, we discover, in a kind of topographical fold, or series of folds, within our regular world. Or vice versa.

The first half of the novel reads like a family saga. By the time you finish reading it you realise that this isn’t really a family saga at all. That, though, is how it starts. We open with Evan ‘Smoky’ Barnable, an innocuous young man, (he’s called Smoky because he is so easily ignored, so existentially tenuous) from an unremarkable family who works in the 1980s [or perhaps some earlier decade: I’m not sure it’s clear] as a clerk in New York City. He befriends another clerk, George Mouse, and through him meets Alice Dale Drinkwater, known as Daily Alice, a scion of the ancient, wealthy Drinkwater family. He falls in love. To marry Alice Smoky must walk into the countryside north of the city and find the family home, Edgewood, though it is not on any maps: a big house set in large grounds. He manages this, and meets Alice’s family, about whom there is something uncanny, something other-wordly, folk-tale-y, ‘away with the fairies’ as the old idiom has it.

Then the story flashes-back to the building of Edgewood, at the beginning of the 20th-century: wealthy American John Drinkwater marries a much younger English girl called Violet Bramble and builds the house for her. Drinkwater is an architect, best-known for designing a gigantic Manhattan tower, a modern cathedral of glass and steel. But after meeting Violet he turns his back on his practice and instead makes Edgewood, a topographically-complex country manor in an overlapping series of older styles. Violet, we discover, is in communication with the fairy folk, who are hidden in the interstices of our world. Drinkwater becomes increasingly fascinated by her visions and communications, and the nature of the fae. He revises and republishes his book The Architecture of Country Houses multiple times, turning it from a conventional architectural description into a disquisition of fairy spatiality: Drinkwater believes that ‘space’ is actually a vast, possibly infinite series of concentric spheres, with the corollary that each sphere, as we go inwards towards the centre, is actually and counter-intuitively larger than the one before. In the centre of this nested geometry live the fairies, a kind of parallel evolutionary life-form, unnoticed by science because they have left no material artefacts in the fossil record.

The novel then fleshes-out the family tree of John and Violet’s children. Through their mother the family inherit the ability to see, and sometimes interact with, the fairies. They possess a magical pack of tarot cards that can predict and in some cases determine the future. The Drinkwaters think not of ‘history’ or ‘family history’ but of Story, which folds back upon the novel itself, whose story Crowley is shaping and we are reading. The novel reverts several times to sex-scenes, often with a rather queasy vibe, under-age girls frolicking naked in the open-air and the like.

In a scene reworked from the Nibelungenlied John Drinkwater’s son August tastes blood (from a fish he has caught in a local pond, not from a dragon) and discovers he can understand the song of the birds. A talkative kingfisher strikes a deal with him: if he steals and hands-over his aunt’s tarot pack, August will get what he desires — which is, as August tremblingly confesses, sexual irresistibility to the local girls. The deal is sealed. This leads to August having many illegitimate children, whom settle in the land around Edgewood, and one of whom is adopted into the family (he becomes Daily Alice’s father) but August discovers that his bargain does not make him happy. He is as driven as are the girls by the ruthless force of sexual desire, and hates the unhappiness his promiscuity spreads around. He goes missing.

We return to Alice and Smoky, and the present-day. On their honeymoon, hiking through the wilderness, Smoky loses his way and ends up in the cottage of ‘the Woods’, a fairy couple, who gift him a golden necklace and a fine bag in which to keep his wedding-present from Alice (that present is: a childhood, since Smoky never really had one). When he finds his way back to Alice out in the wilderness the necklace is a twine of creeper and the bag mouldy and full of insects.

Still, Alice and Smoky’s marriage proves happy, except when it isn’t, which is, I suppose, pretty much the model for a marrige as such. They have three daughters, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and a son, Auberon. Alice’s sister Sophie has an affair with Smoky and becomes pregnant — with his child, she tells the family, although actually the baby, a girl called Lilac, was fathered by her cousin, George Mouse. Lilac is stolen by the fairies and replaced with a changeling. It is her destiny to become queen of fairyland.

The narrative moves on a generation: Smoky and Alice’s son, Auberon, grows to adulthood and moves to Manhattan, staying in George Mouse’s gigantic compound of tenements in the city. He falls in love with a Puerto Rican woman called Sylvie, and when Sylvie is lured away by the fairies he is inconsolable.

I had not read this book before, for though it was a big deal in the States — I know people who consider it perhaps the finest postwar American novel — it really didn’t make any kind of impact this side of the pond. I’m not sure why it didn’t: it is extraordinary. Perhaps it’s too distinctively American in focus. As I was reading the first few hundred pages — the whole book is over 600 pages long — I found myself thinking: oh, this is kind-of like A Hundred Years of Solitude, only better, because better written (sometimes Crowley’s writing grows over-fruity and over-insistent, but mostly the prose is very finely styled, evocative and striking and wonderful) and because the magical adjunct to its realism, rooted in the traditions of faerie imported from Old Europe, is more resonant and enchanting and charming than whatever random gubbins passes for the magico that is añadido a el realismo in Gabriel García Márquez’s book. But in its second part the story takes a different, unexpected turn, and I had to revise my opinion.

We seem to have moved into a near-future collapse-of-society dystopia. New York is decaying, poverty and crime are everywhere. A charismatic politician, Russell Eigenblick, becomes President of the United States, promising to wage war on the mysterious forces that, he claims, are behind the general decay and ruination. In a bizarre turn we discover that this person is actually a reincarnation of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who has been reawoken not to help humanity but to protect Faerie from human depredation. A female wizard called Ariel Hawksquill, a distant relation of the Drinkwater family, becomes Eigenblick’s adviser. Civil war breaks out in America, although few understand exactly what they are fighting for.

Auberon has, since losing Sylvie, become a homeless alcoholic. Recovering some of his former life, he learns the ‘arts of memory’ — these are memory-palace techniques, ultimately derived from Giordano Bruno, though perhaps better popularly known now than they were in 1981 (Hannibal Lecter uses a similar scheme in Harris’s novels) — from Hawksquill; in fact she is using him to learn how to get to the hidden Edgewood. Restored to respectability, Auberon becomes a writer for TV soap opera, of all things. He comes to understand that President Eigenblick is the emissary of the fairies, and that what is at stake in the ongoing war is the rolling-back of human civilisation and the restoration of the wilderness.

The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, Auberon knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands. [Little, Big, 338]

This second half of the novel reminded me not in the least of Márquez, but somewhat of Gene Wolfe’s Byzantine fantasy series Book of the New Sun— and more directly of Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) and of Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), though bigger, shaggier and more baroquely constructed than either of those two. Really, comparison is misleading when it comes to Crowley. He is sui generis.

As the book moves into its final act the contention between the human realm and fairyland comes to the fore. President Eigenblick has Ariel Hawksquill killed, and afterwards disappears himself, though the civil war has acquired its own momentum and no longer needs him. As the human world collapses, the fairies, who can see the future (but have a much hazier sense of ‘the transitory forms of the present’ and are almost entirely blind to the past) prepare to retreat further into their wildness. The novel’s subtitular fairy parliament is called to facilitate this migration—it happens at Edgewood, at Midsummer, and is attended by the entire Drinkwater family. Daily Alice departs for fairyland, and the rest of her relatives agree to follow her, to take the place of the retreating fairies — all except Smoky, who elects to stay (‘I was never really part of this, you know’ he tells the family). So he stays, and mends the magic orrery that provides electrical power for the house. But then, at the last moment, Sophie manages to persuade him to come along after all, and so he goes. Or he tries to. As he steps out of the house, he dies (I think of a heart-attack):

But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; and by her face he knew that he was right. The Tale was behind him.

“Back there,” he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction; back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the arches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless woods, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn’t matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summers house, and on a balcony there Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show hm her nakedness behind the shadow of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride. Dame behind, goddess of the land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch, there turning over cards. [Little, Big, 619–620]

His funeral doubles-up as the wedding of Auberon and Sylvie. Then there is a coda, entitled ‘Once Upon A Time’: a description of now empty Edgewood decaying into the wilderness, although still shining with light (because Smoky mended the orrery-generator) which, since electricity is a rare thing in the socially-collapsed human world in which the novel concludes, makes the place a legend.

The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circumstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels’ who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixty-five stairs, fifty- two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and populous with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one.

Little Big is, I think, too long; the plotting too intricate and complicated, especially in its middle-and-latter sections, representationally over-busy, too easily distracted by this or that shiny element or possibility. But I found the death of Smoky extremely moving and affecting, and I concede that it probably wouldn’t carry the weight it does without the momentum of so long and detailed a tale behind it.

Earlier I called the book baroque, and that, I think, is the key — and that’s its connection with Wolfe’s New Sun books, in my mind, though those Dying Earth fantasies are, in many particulars and in general vibe, very different— baroque not in the sense of rococo over-ornamentation and kitschy artifice with which the term, as an aesthetic signifier, is associated (although there is a good deal of rococo over-ornamentation in Crowley’s writing and plotting) but in the sense that Gilles Deleuze argues in The Fold (1988). For Deleuze (to quote Tom Conley’s summary)

The Baroque does not comprise what we associate with Bernini, Borromini, or Le Brun. “The Baroque state reveals identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time. Baroque was not reserved exclusively for the Europe of the last three centuries any more than classicism was the unique privilege of Mediterranean culture.” ‘Baroque’ designates a trope that comes from the renewed origins of art and has stylistic evidence that prevails in culture in general. Under its rubric are placed the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, intense taste for life that grows and pullulates, and a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement. It could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble, and atomize when they crack along an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of a shoreline; in following the curls and wisps of color that move on the surface and in the infinite depths of a tile of marble; or, as Proust described, when we follow the ramifying and dilating branches of leaves piled in the concavity of the amber depths of a cup of tea. [Tom Conley, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Gilles Deleuze The Fold [1988] (University of Minnesota Press 1993) x-xi]

Everything is folded, infolded, and the art of the Baroque — the pleats and flexes of the painting, the curlicues and grace-notes of the music — captures this. Deleuze’s original French title is Le Pli — from this word we get implicate, explicate, complicate: all relevant — and his book is in large part a reading of Leibniz — (‘le pli-bniz’) — styled as the quintessential baroque philosopher. Leibniz’s monads are at once separate, indivisible, windowless isolations, and universal interconnectedness, at once multiple and singular, fragments of God and elements of the absolute wholeness of God. This is Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s monads:

If the differential mechanisms of our clear perceptions are checked, then the minute perceptions force selection and invade consciousness, as in drowsiness or in giddiness. A dust of colored perceptions falls on a black backdrop; yet, if we look closely, these are not atoms, but minuscule folds that are endlessly unfurling and bending on the edges of juxtaposed areas, like a mist or fog that makes their surface sparkle, at speeds that no one of our thresholds of consciousness could sustain in a normal state. But when our clear perceptions are reformed, they draw yet another fold that now separates the conscious from the unconscious, that joins the tiny edges of surface to a great area, that moderates the different speeds, and rejects all kinds of minute perceptions in order to make from all the others the solid fabric of apperception: dust falls, and I see the great fold of figures just as the background is unfurling its tiny folds. [Deleuze, The Fold, 93]

Fairy-dust! This is not entirely a facetious comparison on my part: for though he doesn’t mention fairies, part of Deleuze’s argument is that the trandscendent, the miraculous and spiritual worlds (which Leibniz, devout Lutheran, identified with the God of Protestantism) are folded complexly into the material, mundane, ordinary worlds. It is not a matter of simple revelation, or of one magisterium subsuming the other; it is a striated and pleated surface, like the surface of the brain. This is also Crowley’s sense of things: magic, faerie, is there, but tucked away, easy to miss. Or to put it another way, we mundane beings are tucked away in the logic of wildwood and fairy glamour.

Crowley’s universe is one radically folded, fairyland into mundane reality and vice versa, just as his novel folds a wide range of story-elements and allusions — Grimms’ tales, Carroll’s Alice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Barrie, Wind in the Willows, the Cottingley Fairies — into its cinched textual surface. The two sizes specified in the novel’s title are not opposed, but complimentary. Alice, named (we can see) for Carroll’s heroine, whose own size keeps changing, who shrinks down and shoots up, who interpenetrates her wonderland and is interpenetrated by it, thinks so:

Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. [Little, Big, 207]

Alice’s sister Sophie has a number of dreams through the novel. This is the first:

I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctors office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus — all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story. [28]

Edgewood itself is a TARDIS-like structure, not just a combination of different architectural styles but of different topographies and dimensions, all folded into one another.

[Smoky] had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible) that once on a summer afternoon having entered through the screen door into Edgewood, he had never again left: that the various doors by which he had afterwards seemed to go out had led only to further parts of the house, cleverly by some architectural enfoldment or trompe-oeil (which he didn’t doubt John Drinkwater was capable of) made to look and behave like woods, lakes, farms, and distant hills. The road taken might lead only back around to some other porch at Edgewood, one he had never seen before, with wide worn steps and a door for him to go in by. [157]

The architectural enfoldment is also the principle upon which the book is structured: the reader passes from chamber to chamber, some tiny, some vast, each linked to the preceding in a way that feels intuitively right rather than linear or conventionally emplotted. Dreams are folded into the novel, just as they are into life, and as in life what dreams work is the pliable tucking-away of whole universes into our minds:

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: “There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.” This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn’t be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. [112]

Stories within stories, worlds within worlds, oak and thorn double-helixed around one another. Crowley is working towards a form that enables him not just to denotate but to embody, formally and evocatively, the way marvellousness and ordinariness are intertwined, one with the other. His success in this is the splendour of Little, Big, though it doesn’t work all the way through, or on every level. And there is another aspect: for I wonder if the ending Crowley chooses, after so much textual busy-ness, doesn’t weight the balance towards elegiac, even tragic disconnection: the pleat that cannot quite fold itself over. Like Moses, Smoky sees but will never enter the promised land. Fairyland is not incorporated into our world, as in Lud-in-the-Mist, nor does it stage a kind of land-grab as in The King of Elfland’s Daughter — leaving only a few religious hold-outs, but otherwise infusing the human kingdoms with glamour. Instead the situation is that the fairies have withdrawn further into fairyland, and the kingdoms of humankind have declined and fallen into desuetude. We cannot, the novel seems to be saying, connect, only or otherwise. At most we can glimpse, comfortably numb-style, out of the corner of our eye. Perhaps Crowley is saying: that’s enough, as Smoky acknowledges the brevity and incompletion but also the authenticity, the magic, of his time with Alice. But I don’t know. I put down the novel feeling sadness. Sunt lacrimae rerum.

+++

I come, as I say above, rather belatedly to Crowley. I’ve read Beasts, and Aegypt (though not its three follow-up titles) plus, now, Little, Big; but that’s all — I will read more, and I see why he is so highly praised by American literary critics, although not why he has been so neglected in the UK. But I am, I must say, struck by how little secondary criticism there is of him, or at least how little there is that’s any good. There’s a collection of essays by diverse hands, edited by Alice K. Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi [Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley (Canton, OH: Cosmos Books 2003] but it is very variable, quality-wise. There’s a chapter in Paul Kincaid’s Call & Response (Beccon 2014). There are various pieces on JSTOR, but none that seem to me really to get at the distinctiveness or worth of Crowley’s writing. There’s quite a lot of identifying of sources which, since Crowley is undoubtedly a highly allusive and intertextual writer, is an understandable academic reaction. But it’s also point-missing: Crowley does not set up his allusions as a grid for us, as readers, to tick-off. Something more pli-able, more foldy, is the point here. The best essay, as in the essay that chimes with my sense of what Crowley is doing is Colin Burrow’s piece in the London Review of Books from a few years back. For Burrow the key to Crowley is the ‘impurity’, the askewness, of his approach to matters of generic convention — Fantasy, for instance.

John Crowley’s novels are hard to describe. His best one, Little, Big (1981), is probably something you might call ‘fantasy’. It contains talking trout, and little people, and witches in New York, and an attempt by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to rule the world again, which is thwarted by a family who possess a magic deck of cards. What makes it not quite fantasy, or perhaps fantasy askew, or impure fantasy, is that its magic is invariably seen only out of the corner of the eye, as a flicker in the undergrowth; most of its characters aren’t quite sure they believe in what they think they might have seen. I haven’t read a book quite like it. It flirts with a slightly donnish whimsy and yet persuades you that a possible way of seeing the world is to believe that there are alternative worlds inside or alongside what we think of as the world. A lot of Crowley hallmarks were first seen in Little, Big: an interest in hermetic knowledge, a fascination with Giordano Bruno’s elaborate mnemotechnic schemes, and a belief that our world sometimes shifts its shape, even though hardly anyone notices it doing so. It all sounds unbelievably tiresome, but it is saved by its own wishful uncertainty as to whether any of it is true.

For Burrows, Crowley is a fundamentally Apuleian writer. I can sort-of see what he means, although at the same time, Apuleius’s Golden Ass moves through its various magical, freakish, comic, burlesque and macaronic adventures towards a genuine, a heartfelt religious conversion: embracing Isis as goddess and queen of heaven and dedicating himself to her cult. This, it seems to me, is not Crowley’s way.

Pope was born in London, but when he was 12, in 1700, his family moved to Bracknell. Well: not Bracknell as such—modern Bracknell, near where I live, is a New Town: in 1949 the original tiny village was slated for development, to provide accomodation for the many people bombed-out in the war (nearby White Waltham was also considered, but building Brackn…

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Robert Southey edited two volumes of his Annual Anthology (1799, 1800)—click on that link and you’ll see that James Cummins Bookseller is offering the pair for sale at the low-low price of $3500. Bargain!

Herein were first published of a good number of poems by Southey himself, and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge too (not to mention Charles Lamb, George Dyer, Joseph Cottle, Sir Humphry Davy and others), including some very famous pieces: Coleridge's ‘Lewti’ and ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ and Southey's ‘Battle of Blenheim’, as well as his ‘The Old Man's Comforts’, so famously parodied by Lewis Carroll as ‘You Are Old, Father William’. Southey planned a third annual, but in the event it didn't happen.

Many of the poems in the Anthology are attributed to their authors either by direct name, or transparent pseudonym (several of Coleridge’s are signed ‘Esteesi’ for instance—that is ‘STC’, a common pseudonym he used). Others are not attributed, but scholars have tracked down authorship, using Southey and Coleridge’s own annotated copies of the volumes, later collected editions of poets and so on.

Four of the Annual Anthology poems are signed ‘William Case Jr’, all of them appearing in vol 2: ‘Gorthmund’, ‘Sonnet VIII’, ‘Sonnet IX: to a Friend on presenting him with a Volume of M.S.S. Poems’ (at the head of this post) and ‘A Winter Sketch’. Nobody knows anything about this geezer; not who he was, nor how he knew Southey or Coleridge (if he knew Southey: maybe he offered his submissions out of the blue). ‘Not otherwise identified,’ says Kenneth Curry, adding: ‘no books of Case are in the British Museum or Bodleian.’1 He's not a very good poet, I think; but I was curious about him, so I had a rummage around.

I didn’t find much, but I found a couple of things.

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I’ve undergone, speaking personally, something of a volte face with respect to the role SF fandom, and more specifically that fan-labour of interrogating the in-text worldbuilding of this or that SF work with a view to reconciling apparent contradictions, might have in criticism more generally conceived. Why Klingons have smooth foreheads in The Original Series and big crinkly ones in subsequent Trek franchises: that kind of thing. I used to think addressing such questions fun, but outwith the proper business of criticism, a naive obsession with in-text plot and worldbuilding instead of attending to form, context, intertextuality, discourse and so on. Now, though, I find myself thinking that the intensity of hermeneutic pressure this kind of fan-attention manifests (at its best), combined with its special mode of suspension-of-disbelief unirony, treating culture industry ephemera as if they were at once holy texts and windows into a really existent world, can sometimes combine into something diamond-distinct and odd, something often surprisingly illuminating where texts are concerned.

At any rate: here’s Huxley’s Brave New World. You know the drill: Huxley’s hygienic, sex-positive, radically happy utopian-dystopia is set AF (After Ford) 632 (which is to say, AD 2540). Citizens are hatched from artificial wombs rather than being born vivipariously, and are treated chemically and psychologically via Pavlovian conditioning in the hatcheries to create perfectly social individuals disposed into five separate classes (or castes). At the top are the Alphas who dress in grey and Betas who wear magenta, who do all of society’s intellectual and managerial work. Then in decreasing status are the cloned Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons (dressed in green, beige and black respectively) who do all the menial, boring or repetitive work. Oxygen is deprived from these latter foetuses to varying degrees in their artificial wombs, creating a gradient of brain damage, so that the Gammas are dim, the Delta’s stupid and the Epsilons near moronic. All, though, are conditioned to love and feel happy in their pre-allotted roles, to shun solitude and seek out company, and to consume the products of capitalist production with unthinking enthusiasm.

In the novel everyone is happy except Bernard Marx, a clever but short and ugly Alpha Plus, living out an unconventional sexual morality. Bernie is surely Huxley’s unkind caricature of H G ‘Bertie’ Wells (whom Huxley knew and disliked).1 Real-world Bertie was clever but short, ugly and sexually unconventional in terms of his repeated extra-marital affairs. Since Huxley’s satire inverts 1930s sexual convention, making monogamy a shocking moral delinquency and sexual promiscuity the social norm, Brave New World saddles his Bernie with a shameful singularity of desire, fixated as he is on the pneumatic but vacant Lenina Crowe. Marx takes Lenina to New Mexico, to visit a reservation where dwell a small population of primitive natives, still living by the old ways. Here they chance upon a Brave-New-World-er called Linda, who had been abandoned in the desert by misadventure some decades before, and has, without the benefit of Brave New World science, grown old and fat; together with her son John, who—improbably enough—has (a) learned to read, (b) chanced upon a six-century-old edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works that somehow hasn’t crumbled to dust and (c) has not only read but memorised and utterly fallen under the spell of said Shakespeare.

Marx brings them both back to Britain, where Linda quickly overdoses on the (legal) happy-drug soma and dies. Meanwhile her son tours the new world and is suitably horrified by the vapidity and shallowness of things. John the Savage is a literary device, of course (which is fair enough) by which Huxley can test the balance of banal-but-happy and profound-but-miserable in different iterations of the human condition. The novel’s climax, effective if talk-y, is a long interview with one of the New World’s rulers, Mustapha Mond, who politely but firmly banishes Bernard Marx to an island and debates the novel’s issues with John the Savage. John’s immersion in Shakespeare has (one of Huxley’s not-so-little ironies, this) conditioned him to yearn for beauty and tragedy, the numinous and sublime, for all those echt Shakesperian intensities, including intensities of suffering and anguished sexual frustration—all the things that the set-up in the New World is designed to smooth over and erase.

“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”

... “But I like the inconveniences,” [said the Savage]

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right, then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said. [ch. 17]

The older I get the more I find myself agreeing myself with Mond on this matter, I have to say. The bourgeois-sentimental attachment to ‘suffering’ seems to me always one of two things. It might be a sham, or if perhaps sham is unfair then a titillation: a touch of hot chilli powder on the tongue (which is to say: absolutely not a life lived malnourished, crippled by preventable disease, overworked, trapped with your family in a war-zone, raped, tortured and murdered as is the lot of too many millions of ordinary human beings in the world, even today). Or it might be, much more rarely, something morbidly masochistic. Either way it seems to me that the baseline comforts of life are that which not only validate but make fundamentally possible these artfully staged ‘I-fall-upon-the-thorns-of-life-I-bleed’ pressing-of-the-back-of-the-hand-to-the-brow poses. Then again, Brave New World succeeds or fails, I suppose, on the extent to which we concede that John the Savage has a point, actually: the sublime, Otto’s numinous affect, something transcendent is precisely the element missing in this dystopian-utopia.

Anyway: the last time I read the book (to teach it again) something else came to my attention, something I’d not noticed before, more along the lines of SF-fan consistency policing. In that same end-of-book megachat, John asks Mond why his society must be socially stratified. Why starve the majority of foetuses of oxygen to diminish their mental capacity? Why mutilate four fifths of your otherwise perfectly potential population? Why not a society entirely comprised of Alphas? Mond replies that a society of Alphas has been tried, and found to fail:

“It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work—go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized—but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself ... You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It’s obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.”

“What was that?” asked the Savage.

Mustapha Mond smiled. “Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn’t properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.”

This has a patina of plausibility, I suppose. But a few lines later Mond reveals something else about the design of the brave new world he runs:

“The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”

“And they’re happy below the water line?”

“Happier than above it. Happier than your friends here, for example.” He pointed.

“In spite of that awful work?”

“Awful? They don’t find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,” he added, “they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes--because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive.”

But hold on a moment, Mondy boy. So you’re saying you do have the technology to generate food and to dispose of menial labour, but that you don’t deploy it? And when you shipped those 22,000 Alphas to Cyprus, did you maybe provide them with such technological marvels, such that they didn’t need to try and divvy out the menial work and so fall to blows? What’s that? You didn’t? It’s almost as if you were deliberately sabotaging your ‘Society Of Alphas’ experiment ahead of time!

I know: the very idea. You are welcome, sirs, to Cyprus goats! and! monkeys!—except that, perhaps, rather than this being just Huxley compartmentalising different elements of his satire-leading-into-proper-novel project more or less roughly, with attendent worldbuilding inconsistency, maybe it’s possible this inconsistency speaks to something more profound about the society of Brave New World. Perhaps Huxley’s plastic utopia is predicated not upon comfort, or sex, or even soma, but instead upon precisely social hierarchy? Conceivably the core of this future society’s stability is in the feeling of superiority that being an alpha offers, and which in turn depends upon the sheer existence of these lower orders. Rather than dissolving the distinctions of class, Brave New World absolutely concretizes class. And maybe that’s the very point of this novel. The reification and eternalisation of class as such. Deeply English, I’d say.

Since Huxley’s relationship to Wells was, in part, mediated by class, it’s worth noting that elements from Brave New World are anticipated in Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow (1921), put into the mouth of another Wells-satire-character: this is Scogan, with his utopian, or dystopian, speculations of a future ‘Rational State’.2 Mixing elements from Wells’s very popular Anticipations, his Open Conspiracy and aspects of his science fiction, Huxley has Scogan lecture the other weekend-guests at the novel’s titular stately home:

Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption. “There’s only one thing to be done,” he said. “The men of intelligence must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct us. They must found the Rational State. … In the Rational State human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind and temperament. … I will indicate the three main species into which the subjects of the Rational State will be divided: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd. Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of thought, those who know how to attain a certain degree of freedom—and, alas, how limited, even among the most intelligent, that freedom is!—from the mental bondage of their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who have turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will be the governors of the Rational State. They will employ as their instruments of power the second great species of humanity—the men of Faith, the Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die for their beliefs and their desires. These wild men, with their fearful potentialities for good or for mischief, will no longer be allowed to react casually to a casual environment. There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks … In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited. Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness to be found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy ... Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in the Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been.”

Scogan anticipates other specific Brave New Worldisms, pegged to Wells’s notorious sex-life:

“With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these—the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically. … Our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”

One more thing: late in Crome Yellow, at a fair, Scogan dresses in female clothes and pretends to be a fortune teller, ‘Madame Sesostris’:

Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked—sharp-nosed, brown, and wrinkled—like the Bohemian Hag of Frith’s Derby Day.3 A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the tent of “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana.” Seated at a table, Mr. Scogan received his clients in mysterious silence, indicating with a movement of the finger that they were to sit down opposite him and to extend their hands for his inspection. He then examined the palm that was presented him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles. He had a terrifying way of shaking his head, frowning and clicking with his tongue as he looked at the lines. Sometimes he would whisper, as though to himself, “Terrible, terrible!” or “God preserve us!”

Scogan uses this role to seduce a village girl.

Huxley includes this scene to mock Wells’s masculinity, his sexual promiscuity, and to make fun of his futurological predictions by suggesting they’re no better than the patter of a fairground fortune-teller. The name Sesostris is from Herodotus: in the Histories [1:102] Herodotus tells of an Egyptian Pharaoh of this name who led an army out of Egypt, north and into Eastern Europe, conquering all the way. When his opponents fought him bravely, Sesostris honoured their defeat by erecting a phallic statue; when they were cowardly, or capitulated too easily, he erected a mocking statue of a vulva. Huxley is having fun with all this gender confusion at Wells’s expense, but T S Eliot took it seriously. The first part of The Waste Land (1922), ‘The Burial of the Dead’, reuses Huxley’s character:

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Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

‘Madame Sosostris’4 is one of the many characters in this mosaic poem, and the connection with the phallic-vulvaic, man-dressed-as-woman thematic that runs through the poem, finding in Tiresias (another future-seer, another man-woman ambiguity) its major focus. Eliot’s own footnote identifies Tiresias’s centrality: ‘line 218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.’

Wells gets everywhere.

3

Huxley specifies this figure because she looks like Wells.

                                   were broken;
He then told those heroes:       “hold back the horses,
send them far off       for we're forging forward,
think now of what your hands       hold, and God on High.”
For then Offa's folk    first found-out
that their famous earl       was fully fearless.
He freed from his wrist       his much-loved flier
h…

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A pendant to this post. Above you have Nolan’s versions of the Laestrygonians: cannibal giants who kill a number of Odysseus’s men and destroy several of his ships. The original giants, unarmoured, appear in Odyssey Book 10:

For six days we sailed, night and day alike, and on the seventh we came to the lofty citadel of Lamus, even to Telepylus of the Laestrygonians … when we had come thither into the goodly harbor, about which on both sides a sheer cliff runs continuously, and projecting headlands opposite to one another stretch out at the mouth, and the entrance is narrow, then all the rest steered their curved ships in, and the ships were moored within the hollow harbor close together; for therein no wave ever swelled, great or small, but all about was a bright calm. But I alone moored my black ship outside, there on the border of the land, making the cables fast to the rock. Then I climbed to a rugged height, a point of outlook, and there took my stand; from thence no works of oxen or of men appeared; smoke alone we saw springing up from the land. So then I sent forth some of my comrades to go and learn who the men were, who here ate bread upon the earth—two men I chose, and sent with them a third as a herald. Now when they had gone ashore, they went along a smooth road by which wagons were wont to bring wood down to the city from the high mountains. And before the city they met a maiden drawing water, the strong daughter of Laestrygonian Antiphates, who had come down to the fair-flowing spring Artacia, from whence they were wont to bear water to the town. So they came up to her and spoke to her, and asked her who was king of this folk, and who they were of whom he was lord. And she showed them forth with the high-roofed house of her father. Now when they had entered the glorious house, they found there his wife, huge as the peak of a mountain, and they were aghast at her. At once she called from the place of assembly the glorious Antiphates, her husband, and he devised for them woeful destruction. Straightway he seized one of my comrades and made ready his meal, but the other two sprang up and came in flight to the ships. Then he raised a cry throughout the city, and as they heard it the mighty Laestrygonians came thronging from all sides, a host past counting, not like men but like the Giants. They hurled at us from the cliffs with rocks huge as a man could lift, and at once there rose throughout the ships a dreadful din, alike from men that were dying and from ships that were being crushed. And spearing them like fishes they bore them home, a loathly meal. Now while they were slaying those within the deep harbor, I meanwhile drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh, and cut therewith the cables of my dark-prowed ship; and quickly calling to my comrades bade them fall to their oars, that we might escape from out our evil plight. And they all tossed the sea with their oar-blades in fear of death, and joyfully seaward, away from the beetling cliffs, my ship sped on; but all those other ships were lost together there. [Odyssey 10:80-132]1

So that’s the Laestrygonians, and you can see how Nolan adapts the scene for his moviefilm.

But I want to concentrate on another detail from this episode. On arriving at the bay of the Laestrygonians, Odysseus (who is narrating) says this:

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ἑξῆμαρ μὲν ὁμῶς πλέομεν νύκτας τε καὶ ἦμαρ,
ἑβδομάτῃ δ᾽ ἱκόμεσθα Λάμου αἰπὺ πτολίεθρον,
Τηλέπυλον Λαιστρυγονίην, ὅθι ποιμένα ποιμὴν
ἠπύει εἰσελάων, ὁ δέ τ᾽ ἐξελάων ὑπακούει.
ἔνθα κ᾽ ἄυπνος ἀνὴρ δοιοὺς ἐξήρατο μισθούς,
τὸν μὲν βουκολέων, τὸν δ᾽ ἄργυφα μῆλα νομεύων:
ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματός εἰσι κέλευθοι.

So for six days we sailed, night and day alike, and on the seventh we came to the lofty citadel of Lamus, even to Telepylus of the Laestrygonians, where herdsman calls to herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other answers as he drives his forth. There a man who never slept could have earned a double wage, one by herding cattle, and one by pasturing white sheep; for the out goings of the night and of the day are close together.

What does the line about earning double wage by herding at day and night ‘because the goings of the night and day are so close together’ mean?

There are two theories, one of which is fantastical, one mundane—as per my discussion of the balance of these things in Nolan’s adaptation. The fantastical interpretation of the line is that Odysseus has strayed far beyond the Eastern Mediterranean in his voyaging and into fantastical territories. J A Davidson reads this episode as an actual memory of exploration beyond the Med. What’s being described here, says Davison, is a land of fjords, cannibalism and the Midnight Sun—Scandinavia, in other words. Homer, or ‘Homer’, is aware of these travellers’ tales which seem fantastical to him, and that’s what he composes: a place so distant that night and day are no longer distinguishable, the people are gigantic cannibals who nonetheless (unlike the Cyclops) live in magnificent palaces, and huge boulders are used as weapons of mass destruction. Nolan leans into this by adding-in additional magical elements: the steel armour (in a bronze-age world), the power the Laestrygonians to move trees by, it seems, telepathy, trapping Odysseus’s crewmates inside tree-cages and killing them. Davidson’s point is that ‘there is much evidence (see, for example, A. Lesky, Thalatta, 1947, pp. 15I ff., and G. Germain, Genese de l’Odyssee, 1954, pp. 5I1 ff.) that most of Odysseus’ wanderings are to be understood as taking place outside normal geography altogether.’2

That’s the fantasy hypothesis. In reaction against it is the thesis that everything described in the Odyssey is Mediterranean, and is grounded in reality, gods and monsters notwithstanding. One critical tradition stresses how precisely observed and mimetic Homer’s descriptions are and, going through the whole poem locating its episodes in actual places. L G Pocock thinks that most of the scenes in the Odyssey are actually real locations in Sicily and the North African coast west of Sicily.3 He reads this episode of the Laestrygonians mimetically, as reflecting practises of Sicilian herding.

The swarms of gad-flies there made it dangerous for the cattle to feed except after sundown; while the sheep, being protected by their woolly fleeces, could pasture during the day. My own limited knowledge of livestock and insect pests led me to [write] to Professor M. M. Burns, and received from Mr. L. J. Dumbleton, Lecturer in Entomology, in Canterbury Agricultural College, information to the following effect: ‘Even in England and Scotland it is often desirable or even necessary to stall cattle during the heat of the day to prevent them being worried or stampeded by gadflies. ... Horses, cattle and man are most affected: sheep are not mentioned, but I believe they would be pretty well immune. In hot climates a good deal of feeding is done by cattle at night .... Pasturing at night would have no disadvantage as far as obtaining food is concerned and if gadflies were present there would be an additional advantage in night pasturing.’ In South Africa, while cattle are frequently grazed at night and brought in in the day-time, sheep-even in very large numbers are, in certain districts at any rate, brought in and counted every evening, as being more liable to molestation both by beasts of prey and by man.4

This, says Pocock, is the meaning Homer’s line: livestock are pastured both in sunlight and moonlight, with cattle being taken out at night to avoid the gadflies—so an enterprising herdsman could earn twice the regular pay, provided of course he was prepared to do without sleep. In this reading ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματός εἰσι κέλευθοι, ‘for here the roads of the night and the day are close together’ would only mean that the flocks of cattle and sheep would pass one another as day ends and night begins. The Laestrygonians would be taller than average Greeks, but not actual giants (the queen is not literally the size of a mountain: that’s just hyperbole).

Is this line a reference to time—the midnight sun, the superposition of day and night—or about flies? This is a larger question than merely herdsman in Laestrygonia. It is, fundamentally, as whether we read the Odyssey as fantasy, or not. On the one hand we could say: how could we not, whe it contains so much magic and so many marvels, gods and monsters, witches and giants? Well, we might note that many of the most fantastical elements in the story are part of Odysseus’s narration of his own adventures (books 9-12), a story without corroboration (his crew are all dead) and Odysseus is a notorious trickster and liar. Gods appear throughout the poem of course, but the Greeks believed literally in gods, so that does not move the work into fantasy on its own. Perhaps the Odyssey is a masterpiece of mimesis, and not Fantasy at all.

Dumas and Maquet’s enormous novel is not really what you think it is.1 You have not read it. You have, perhaps, seen the movie adaptations, the TV serials, maybe the comic book version. You have a sense of the story from hearsay or reputation. These, believe me, do nothing to capture the range, scale, detail, specificity and above all the sheer, brute, glorious interminability of the actual novel.

It is, you see, very long. Longue durée. Serialised first between August 1844 and January 1846 in the Journal des Débats it was then issued in an eighteen-volume edition. It’s available in two very-fat, close-printed Livre de Poche volumes, or in one large format, tiny print 1276-page Penguin translation, in which I recently read it. The story fills these pages by a combination of monstrous deferral of the expected revenges, and a variety of digressions; but fill it, it does. It is amazingly readable, a genuine page-turner.

This is the bit you’ve heard of: Edmond Dantès, a virtuous sailor, gets betrayed by three acquaintances when he docks at Marseilles. One of the subordinate officers on the ship, called Danglars, is merely jealous of Dantès’ preferment at the hands of the ship’s owner, Morel. A Catalan called Fernand loves Dantès’ fiancée, the beautiful Mercedes, and wants Edmond out of the way in order to be able to press his own suit. A third individual, Caderousse, has less concrete reasons for wishing Dantès harm, but he gets drunk and goes along with the others. Their plan is simple: they write a letter to the local Crown Prosecutor denouncing Dantès as a Bonapartist (this, in January 1815, is a state crime). The local Prosecutor, Villefort, in order to protect his father – who really is a Bonapartist – goes along with this charge, though he knows it to be baseless, and commits innocent Dantès to the terrible Chateau D’If. There Dantés rots in a dark cell for fourteen years. During his incarceration Dantés swears a great oath of revenge on those whom have betrayed him.

In prison he befriends the occupant of the adjacent cell, an Abbé who happens to know the location of an enormous treasure, and who has dug a tunnel between the two cells as part of a long-drawn-out escape attempt. But the Abbé is an old man, and he dies. Dantés waits until the corpse has been tied into a sack prior to burial, creeps into the cell and substitutes himself for the old man’s corpse. The sack is thrown into the sea, but Dantés gets free, swims to a nearby island, is taken on as a crewman by a smugglers’ craft, locates the treasure on the uninhabited island of Monte Cristo and becomes impossibly wealthy.

Believe me, the story has barely begun by this point (we’re about 250 pages into the Penguin edition, with the best part of a thousand pages still to go).

Most of the remaining textual bulk narrates events in Paris. Now going under the assumed name of the Count of Monte Cristo (and sometimes under other aliases, including ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, ‘Abbé Busoni’ and ‘Lord Wilmore’) he seeks out his accusers. Although one of them, Caderousse, is still bumbling along in the humble station in which all the main characters began the novel, the others, rather improbably, have climbed the ladder of social station. Danglars has become one of the wealthiest speculators and bankers in Paris. Fernand, who now calls himself ‘Morcerf’, has married Mercedes and somehow become one of the wealthiest and most powerful politicians in France. Villefort has become the leading Parisian Crown Prosector.

They all surely deserve the revenge Dantès is plotting. But despite the fact that Dumas and Maquet, having established various opportunities, and having stressed the Count’s almost supernatural abilities of disguise and manipulation, could bring about that consummation as soon as they like, they delay the process. Delay is the narrative watchword. Monte Cristo goes to amazing lengths not to avenge himself directly, by (for instance) killing his betrayers with his own hands. Instead he arranges situations, via complex machination, in which his betrayers become hoist, as the cliché has it, on their own evil petards. If you can have an evil petard. Which, now that I come to think of it, I doubt.

Monte Cristo: Christ Mountain. Dantès takes his title from the Mediterranean island (an actual place) on which his treasure had been hidden; but the nobs of Parisian high-society don’t know this. ‘Perhaps he comes from the Holy Land,’ one high-born Parisian speculates: ‘one of his ancestors might have owned Calvary, just as the Montemarts did the Dead Sea’ [The Count of Monte Cristo, 451]. Calvary figures on the Count’s concocted Coat of Arms: ‘une montagne d’or posant sur une mer d’azur, avec une croix de gueules au chef, ce que pouvait aussi bien être une allusion à son nom rappelant le Calvaire, que la passion de Notre-Seigneur a fait une montagne plus précieuse que l’or’ [Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, II: 352]. The Count himself, as his messianic fantasies of God-directed revenge swell larger and larger, does not shy away from identifying himself with Christ: ‘moi, trahi, assassiné, jeté aussi dans une tombe, je suis sorti de cette tombe par la grace de Dieu, je dois à Dieu de me venger’ (I have also been betrayed, assassinated, thrown into a tomb, I have escaped this tomb by the grace of God and I owe it to God to revenge myself!’) [Monte-Cristo, II:400]. Dumas-Maquet underline the almost blasphemous nature of this frame of mind on several occasions.

I think the references to Calvary are a red-herring. I think the novel works symbolically around another Christ-mountain, and the name of that mountain is Purgatory. There’s a good reason, I think, why Dantès is called Dantès. The mountain that Dumas and Maquet’s novel climbs (the mountain, in fact, that the novel constitutes) is not the road to death, but the road after death. After his prison experience Dantés is unrecognisable to everybody who knew him before; a man of skeletal gauntness (a gauntness exacerbated by a remarkably unrestrained opium habit: that’s the 1840s for you) and severity. He strikes those he meets as undead, as cursed (‘“he is a vampire!” “Laugh if you wish. That was precisely the opinion of Countess G—.”’ [453]); he is ‘some kind of Byronic figure, branded by fate’s dread seal’ [478]. The many high society occasions, dinners, balls and other brouhahas through which he travels becoming illuminated by his presence as barren and void.

Indeed the book as a whole tropes the world and especially polite Parisian society as death – as the underworld. This explains, I think, a number of curious features in the novel. I’ll give you a for-example. During his time in Paris Dantès refuses to eat anything in anybody’s house, declining all hospitality, not even so much as (as Mercedes, ventriloquising Persephone, observes) ‘a pomegranate seed’ [p.768]. At one point we’re offered the explanation that he doesn’t wish to compromise his revenge by becoming obliged to anybody—‘Monsieur de Monte Cristo is almost a man of the East and an Oriental; in order not to interfere with his freedom to take revenge he never eats or drinks in his enemy’s house’, [972]—but this doesn’t ring entirely true. Or rather, there is a deeper sense in which this explanation is true; that the whole of our world is a ‘house’ inside which the Count does not wish to sup. He is travelling through. This is an epic novel that has been taken over by (as The Waste Land is an epic poem taken over by) the visit to Hades. The subject keeps reasserting itself in the novel. It’s one of the text’s unavoidables (‘“Again this idea of death, Madame!” said Villefort’ [780]).

The novel balances a logic of equivalences, in part because it is in the nature of revenge to require such equivalences. In the sequence ‘you wrong me, therefore I revenge myself upon you’ there is an inescapable need for the latter quantity to balance-out the former. That, in a sense, is what revenge means. At one point Monte Cristo has the following conversation with Mercedes:

’Yes, Madame, I have suffered a great deal.’
‘But are you happy now?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the Count replied. ‘Nobody hears me complain.’
‘And does your present happiness calm your soul?’
‘My present happiness equals my past misery,’ said the Count. [p.771]

The odd precision of this last statement expresses the restrictiveness of the logic of revenge, which must perforce parse unlikenesses (lets say: misery, happiness) into an equivalence. In a way this captures the symbolic or thematic economy at the heart of the novel, except to say that all these equivalences are subordinated to a prior one: crime and death. ’There is no crime in my house,’ Villefort frantically declares, trying (against all the facts) to assure himself of this innocence.

Do you hear me: I do not want there to be a crime in my house because when crime enters somewhere, it is like death, it does not come alone. [p.894]

There is crime in his house, of course; his whole house is founded upon his crime, and so atonement—death—becomes inevitable. Crime equals death in the symbolic logic of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. But of the four wrongdoers who so blighted Dantès’ life, only one, the ruffian Caderousse, dies a shameful death, and then only because he compounds his guilt with a number of other terrible crimes. All the other guilty parties, whether they die at the end of the novel or not, are offered some form of redemption. Even Cristo himself, at the very end of the story, feels the curse of his own deadness rise from him. ‘God who roused me against my enemies and gave me victory, God, I can see, does not wish my victory to end with that regret. I wished to punish myself. But God wants to pardon me’ [1241].

This post-mortem narrative, in other words, spirals painfully and slowly upwards, as does the path through the terraces of Purgatory Mount. The very last sentence in the novel articulates resignation to Divine in a way that also expresses the principle behind the ‘make-em-wait’ deferral-as-plot logic of so many nineteenth-century novels: ‘“My dearest,” said Valentine, “has the Count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words – ‘wait’ and ‘hope’?”’ [1243].

The book enacts what it describes, and what it describes is just how long-drawn-out and effortful the journey must be from peripeteia to resolution: from setback to triumph. A great many things must be gone through, a whole lot of educative suffering. The Bildung that turns naivety to the ripest form of experience cannot be accomplished overnight. There is a reason why Mt Purgatory is not a hillock, and it’s the same reason why Le Comte de Monte-Cristo is so very lengthy.

Now, to call reading the novel a Purgatorial experience sounds merely insulting, I know: as if it is an onerous duty that must be strenuously worked through before greater pleasures can be enjoyed. But I don’t mean the phrase in this sense. Indeed, part of the point of the book, and one of the ways it remains true to Dante’s poem, is that working one’s way up Purgatory is not seen as a strenuous or pointless task, not merely filling time until eventually one can run gasping into Paradise. On the contrary, working away at whatever Purgatorial task one has been allotted is a joyful business for Dante Aligheri’s souls; it is embodying and aligning oneself with God’s will. Similarly there is something joyful in the seeming-interminability of the textual mountain that Dumas Père and Auguste Maquet built. Working your way up the slopes of the novel, though not a rapid or necessarily easy progress, is an intensely satisfying, and even a purging journey.

Nolan’s Odyssey is a mixed bag: overlong, patchily great and sometimes not. In honour of that what follows will be overlong, and I will mix in good points with rubbish ones. You are forewarned.

The Nolan schtick—viz. chopping his narrative into various sections and mixing them around so that scenes in which the film moves the story on are repeatedly intercut, often abruptly and briefly, with flashbacks and remembered moments—doesn’t serve The Odyssey very well as a storytelling strategy. In interviews Nolan has said that he regards Homer as licensing his approach, since formally The Odyssey is not a straightforward a then b then c narrative—as, indeed, it is not. But neither is it a Nolanesque patchwork of out-of-order present and past. It’s a structure of three main acts. The poem starts on Ithaca, where Penelope is fending off the 108 suitors, her husband having been away twenty years. In disguise, the goddess Athena persuades Odysseus’s son Telemachus to voyage, to discover what’s happened to his Dad, which he does, meeting first Nestor and then Menelaus in Sparta. In doing so he learns that Agamemnon has been murdered by Clytemnestra (Nolan, bizarrely, makes her Helen’s identical twin sister: what?) and that Odysseus has been imprisoned on the island of the nymph Calypso. Athena then petitions Zeus to free Odysseus, which he does, but Poseidon, still angry with the Ithacan because he blinded his son Polyphemus, wrecks his raft. Odysseus then washes up in the land of the Phaeacians, where the beautiful Phaeacian princess Nausicaä, and her serving maids, discover him, naked on the beach. She brings him back to the palace, where the Phaeacian king Alcinous entertains him royally. This episode occupies the middle third, roughly, of the poem.

The original Odyssey was put together out of a number of prior elements, folk-tales, stories and myths, and sometimes the joins show. The Phaeacian episode is one such: evidently a prior folk story about a princess discovering a wrecked, naked man on the beach, taking him home and discovering that he is actually a king and a hero, and marrying him—but Odysseus can’t marry Nausicaä, because he already has a wife, so the story simply breaks off, Alcinous gives Odysseus a ship and he sails back to Ithaca to take revenge upon the suitors and reunite with Penelope.1

That conclusion is the last third of the poem. The middle third is an inset story, Odysseus telling the tale of his own voyages to the Phaeacians. As critics often note, it’s this middle section that contains all the marvels and wonders, the monsters and witches and magic of the epic; the beginning and the end of the poem are much less fantastical, more mimetic. There are interesting possibilities here to do with the reliability of Odysseus as narrator, and the relationship of this tale-within-the-tale to the larger story. But this single embedding, bracketing the wonders and marvels away, is not the same as Nolan’s multiply-laminated chopping and cutting. More, Nolan’s film has a problem with the marvels-and-wonders aspect of the epic. I’ll come back to this.

Nolan’s adaptation omits the Phaeacian episode altogether. He alters other episodes (the prerogative of an adaptation of course)—for instance, the Laestrygonians in this film are all dressed in huge stainless steel armour for some reason, and they have the magic power to move the trees of their forest around in such a way as to trap Odysseus’s men inside tree-cages (Nolan doesn’t do very much with this intriguing notion: mostly the episode is just another example of Odysseus and his men doing a Monty-Pythonesque running-away). With other episodes Nolan combines elements, such that the episode of the Lotos-eaters becomes folded into the Calypso’s island episode. In other respects he does the greatest hits: Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops, meet Circe and are turned into pigs, and visit the land of the dead to talk with Tiresias. Odysseus fills his crew’s ears with wax to get the ship past the Sirens’ isle, sails past Scylla and Charybdis and stops at the island of the Cattle of the Sun. Frankly some of these episodes are better handled than others: Circe—an amazing performance by Samantha Morton—is excellent, and the sojourn with Tiresias properly spooky. But the Cyclops’ episode is clumsily done, the Laestrygonians underbaked and the creature-effects for Scylla are lame.

The marvellous, as opposed to the mundane, is a problem in this film. I think this is because Nolan is fundamentally a realist film-maker, for all that he has made so many superhero and science fiction films. His take on Batman and interstellar travel is to emphasise a kind of rendered plausibility via a cinematic idiom drawn from nouvelle vague mimesis. His is a stylised kind of realism, but it is a realism, and his approach to the Odyssey foregrounds his style of ultra-HD verisimilitude throughout.

Famously Nolan eschews CGI and downplays special-effects. He wants almost everything shown on the screen to be actually captured by the camera—in this movie, a hulking iMax camera—such that if we’re watching hundreds of men swarming through the breached gates of Troy, Nolan actually filmed hundreds of extras doing just that. This works for some aspects of the Odyssey: the locations are all real, the palaces and buildings have the vibe of actual lived-in places, Odysseus’s battle against the suitors at the end is excellent cinema. Insofar as this is a movie rehearsing Nolan’s preoccupations—as much about war-guilt, like Oppenheimer, as about voyaging and endurance, like Interstellar—this works well, although it does mean that the treatment of the marvels and monsters is flattened. The cyclops is an ungainly on-set giant puppet: its motion is not lifelike, its rendering not convincing and therefore not scary. Scylla is a visually incoherent and awkward network of dry-looking tentacles. With the exception of Circe (the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine and back again is the exception that proves my rule: treating it in a mimetic manner rather than with CGI fantastika produces a viscerally effective scene) this leeches the movie as a whole of wonder.

Nolan’s Odyssey is not a marvellous film, not a film that gleams with the numinous, the wondrous, the magical. Not that it lacks visual beauty: many of the shots are gorgeous, the seascapes in particular. But it’s not numinous. Indicative of this is the way Nolan handles the gods: apart from Zendaya’s glum-faced Athena, who appears to Odysseus at various moments, and is portrayed more as a hallucination than a manifestation, there are no gods in this film: Poseidon is simply the sea, Zeus (pronounced to rhyme with Bruce, the American way, in accordance with the Americanisation of the whole: Zooss) a flash of lightning.

We might argue that Nolan’s film is deliberately avoiding enchantment, the wondrous and transcendent, because it’s treating its subject in other ways (although we might then ask why Nolan decided that the Odyssey was what he wanted to adapt in the first place; or at least, why he doesn’t follow the original in siloing the marvellous elements away inside the protagonist’s tale-within-a-tale). Nolan’s Odyssey is not about transcendence, but about guilt and regret. It’s about xenia, or more precisely the violation of xenia, and not about kleos.

There’s much guilt in this, long tortured monologues by Damon’s Odysseus about how unhappy he is by what he has done, lots of complaining on-board ship by Odysseus’s crew—‘whine dark sea’—lots of dour unhappiness and moaning. As Mark Kermode argues, it is a film fundamentally about PTSD, which it both represents in its characters and allegorises in its set-pieces, externalising the ongoing horrors of the suffering postwar soldier as a series of devouring monsters, giant chrome-armoured warriors, swarms of pursuing dead and so on. The most characteristic action of Odysseus and his men for much of the movie is running away, sprinting desperately back to their ship to escape another such attack: all, the film in effect says, echoes of the originary trauma, the war itself, the destruction of Troy, the comrades who died, the violence and horror you yourself inflicted, the psychic wound. If Homer’s Odyssey is a story about going home, Nolan, boldly, reconfigures its throughline: Nolan’s Odyssey says: the soldier can’t go home. His experiences have changed him, and home isn’t what it was.

There are issues with this. For one thing, the film overplays it: it’s not just that Odysseus can’t go home, it’s that nobody can: civilisation as a whole is collapsing, the entire world is ending—because, by sacking Troy, the Greeks broke the social contract, which the screenplay, repeating the phrase ad nauseam, calls ‘Zeus’s law’—Zooseslaw. This is a kind of hyperbolic version of, or distortion of, the Greek code of xenia, which the film sometimes spins as a simple ‘do as you would be done by’, sometimes as ‘you are obliged to entertain strangers as guests, no matter how obnoxious they are, because the stranger might be a god in disguise’. There are repeated references to ‘the people from the sea’, mysterious raiders who are about to comes barrelling in and will dismantle Greece from the ground up, but have not yet arrived (Menelaus says something about how their raids are ‘getting closer’: how does he know?) We never see these sea-people, and the references to them feel a bit thumb-in-the-balance. Odysseus predicts darkly that soon people would forget how to read and write. Humans will turn on one another, homo homini lupus. The extent to which that has already happened is unclear: the suitors occupying Odysseus’s palace and devouring all his goods are lawless, but they persist not by virtue of their numbers and strength (‘the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must’) but because it would be against the law for Penelope to rid herself of them—as she says at one point, she could for instance lock them all in the dining hall and burn it down. In Homer, Odysseus returns, slays the suitors (and hangs all his serving girls, cruelly) and reclaims his home, but Nolan alters this:—now we’re told that Zoosse-slaw, like Coleslaw, is so potent that for him to kill these ‘guests’ (they’ve been there a decade, they’re hardly strangers!) would result in him being exiled as a criminal. Exiled by whom is fudged: the film several times refers to, without ever showing, a council of elders—how do these elders have power over the island’s actual monarch, we wonder? Who are they? If civilisation has broken because of the sack of Troy then why do they have any authority at all? But at the end of the film Odysseus does, of course, kill the suitors, and then into exile he goes, his wife by his side.

Homeric Greece was a warrior society, but Homeric qualities of kleos, of the glory and fame to be won in battle, are entirely absent from Nolan’s flick. It’s an anti-war movie that presents one act of war—sacking a single city—as if it is a world-ending apocalypse. This over-inflation debilitates the resonance of the whole. Clearly there must have been battles and wars before, or what is all the armour, why are all the weapons, why does Mentor go to the bother of training Telemachus in swordplay? War was part of the Greek world, and xenia not part of it: soldiers meeting on the battlefield were not obliged to offer one another a cup of tea and a biscuit first.2 But Nolan’s Odysseus is wracked, wracked I say, with guilt. Nor does he actually manifest what is, in Homer’s poem, his defining characteristic: his cleverness, his wiliness, his twisty-turny-ness. He is on the contrary ashamed of his nimble wits—that he lied and tricked others, that he dreamt-up the clever deceit of the Trojan Horse in order to win the war, are to him ghastly faults in his integrity as a person. This isn’t incoherent in terms of characterising a wartime veteran, perhaps, but again: why is this hoisted on Odysseus, of all figures?

There’s another regard in which Nolan departs from Homer’s characterisation of Odysseus. He frames his movie as a grand and epic love-story between Penelope and her husband—separated by his sense of duty, his obedience to the Greek king, and thereafter by war, happenstance and fate. Hence Nolan’s addition of the Tennysonian coda in which Odysseus, having come home, immediately departs to the west, with Penelope, so the two of them can enjoy their happy-ever-after together, whilst presumably the Sea People ransack Greece behind them. In this respect Nolan has a problem: because in Homer Odysseus spends seven years bonking Calypso on her island. To get round this Nolan combines the lotos-eater episode with the Calypso episode: to excuse his hero for his adultery. So traumatised has PTSD’d and shipwrecked Odysseus become that Calypso feeds him the lotos flower to opiate his mind. Accordingly he doesn’t remember that he even has a wife, or that he had a crew. After seven years Calypso, for reasons that the movie doesn’t divulge, decides to wean him off the magic flower so that his memories can return, and even advises him on how to get home—by surrendering himself to Poseidon’s wrath, lying on his back on a flimsy raft and letting the ocean overwhelm him. This is contrivance on Nolan’s part, to absolve his hero. It’s one thing for a man to be grief-struck by the things he did as a soldier; it would be another to be guilty for cheating on wifey.

It’s a big film, and it does, as I say, have some memorable and striking moments and set-pieces. But bigness is not, in itself, an absolute virtue. Huge cameras, colossal iMax screens, enormous run-times, giants on-screen crashing and bashing ordinary sized men, and biting their heads off, huge seascapes—watching it I started to wonder if it was, in some sense, a film about bigness. A film informed by a disorder of the cinematic pituitary gland, via which an excess of growth-hormone’s hypothalamic precursor (GHRH) has created a gigantism. Like Mallory at the foot of Everest, we could ask Nolan why he made such a big movie, and he might reply: because I could. Epic, though, is not a synonym for enormousness.

My PhD (at Cambridge, back in the dying years of the 1980s) was ‘Robert Browning and the Classics’ and was very largely concerned with three of RB’s late book-length publications. Two were Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) and Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), works I know extremely, one might say freakishly, well. The former is a narrative poem set in 5th-cent…

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So it’s a question of how to render ‘sligt noget gør man da ikke!’ into idiomatic English.

At the end of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s 1891 masterpiece, Hedda shoots herself in the head. Oh, sorry: I meant to say—SPOILERS.

Hedda is a free-spirited woman, married but bored with her dull academic husband Jørgen Tesman (in English translations this character is often called ‘George Tesman’, which seems to me a shame:—nobody translates this play’s title as Hilda Gabler, after all). The play starts with Hedda and Jørgen recently returned from their honeymoon, and Hedda already realising that her marriage has been a mistake. She doesn’t love Jørgen, and only married him because she felt her youth was over and she needed to settle down. She is looking for material comfort, but now discovers that Jørgen has less money than she believed—but perhaps, if he is promoted, he will be richer.

George’s academic rival, Ejlert Løvborg, arrives: a man who had wasted his life and career with drinking, though now a relationship with Hedda’s old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (she left her husband for him), has turned his life around. He has stopped drinking and is working towards a significant piece of scholarship, his ‘masterpiece’, with which he hopes to win an impending professorship—the same position Jørgen hopes to gain, or more pressingly that Hedda hopes he will get, to augment their financial situation. As the play goes on we realise that Hedda and Ejlert were, formerly, lovers, and she, motivated it seems by jealously that Eilert is now happy with Thea, complicated by rivalry on behalf of her husband, persuades him to go, with Jørgen and another friend Judge Brack, to a party and start drinking again. Falling off the wagon, Løvborg loses the only copy of his manuscript, which Jørgen Tesman finds and brings home. The next time Løvborg sees Hedda and Thea he tells them he has destroyed the manuscript, ‘torn it into a thousand pieces’—he means that he might as well have destroyed it, by being so careless as to lose it—at which point we discover, through Thea’s horror at this news, that she was co-author on the project. Løvborg compounds her shock by breaking-up with her (‘our ways must part … because I don’t need you any more, Thea’). Thea leaves, heartbroken. Løvborg considers his life over. Hedda does not tell him that she has the manuscript. Instead she gives him her father’s old pistol, urging him to commit suicide, and to do so ‘beautifully’. After he leaves to do precisely this, Hedda burns the mansucript.

In the final act news comes that Ejlert Løvborg is in the hospital, dying. Hedda is delighted, ‘a feeling of release,’ as she puts it, ‘that there really can be such a thing in the world as free and fearless action. That Ejlert Løvborg had the courage to live life in his own way. And now this great deed, with all its beauty! That he had the strength and will to break away from the feast of life.’ Judge Brack bursts her bubble: ‘I am very sorry, Madame Hedda, but I must deprive you of your petty illusion.’ It turns out that Løvborg had gone to the brothel he had previously visited, drunk, convinced that they had his manuscript, demanding it, and that the gun had gone off in his pocket by accident, shooting him in the stomach. Hedda is disgusted: ‘the ridiculous and the sordid lies like a curse on everything I so much as touch!’ Brack tells her that the fact that Løvborg used her pistol will cause a scandal: but implies that he will keep this fact secret, in return for Hedda’s sexual favours. Jørgen Tesman comes home with Thea, and Hedda excuses herself. The next thing that happens is that the three of them—Thea, Tesman and Brack—hear a gunshot from the adjoining room.

This brings us to the final line. Here is Edmund Gosse and William Archer’s 1907 translation (Berta is the maid):

TESMAN: Oh, now she is playing with those pistols again.

[He throws back the curtains and runs in, followed by MRS. ELVSTED. HEDDA lies stretched on the sofa, lifeless. Confusion and cries. BERTA enters in alarm from the right]

TESMAN: [Shrieks to BRACK] Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Fancy that!

BRACK: [Half-fainting in the arm-chair] Good God!—people don’t do such things.

THE END

Not perfect. ‘Fancy that!’ is too throwaway a phrase, and ‘people don’t do such things’ too flat. ‘Sligt noget gør man da ikke’ means, word-by-word, ‘such things, done by people (man in Norwegian means “you, one, they: a general, unspecified person”) are not!’ The statement is not a simple denial: it is an expression of shock that Hedda has acted in so unconventional, so improper a way. Una Ellis Fermor’s 1950 translation is better:

TESMAN: [Shrieking to BRACK.] Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Think of it!

BRACK: [Half-collapsed in the easy-chair.] But, merciful God!—one doesn’t do that kind of thing!

Eva Le Gallienne (1965) copies this, with the addition of a ‘but’ (‘But, merciful God!—but one doesn’t do that kind of thing!)’. Michael Meyer translation into French (1994) has: ‘Dieu de miséricorde,—cela ne se fait pas!’: ‘Merciful God! that simply isn’t done!’

The problem is that this phrasing is dated. People don’t object to things by saying ‘this simply isn’t done!’ any more. It is a phrasing with the flavour of a period piece. How would we express the sentiment in modern English?

This is how Andrew Upton concludes his 2006 Hedda Gabler adaptation:

[There is a shot from Hedda’s room]

JORGEN: Oh, Hedda. Really. Just tonight can we calm down a little. Sorry, Thea. Hedda please. [He looks in. Stops and steps back. He looks over to Thea who rushes to him. She too looks into the room and moves away horrified. Brack is standing.] She shot herself. In the head. Like. Judge?

BRACK: But. People don’t …

This phrasing, however, implies that Brack is genuinely shocked and broken by the revelation: he can’t even finish his utterance. The original doesn’t suggests this, I think: there Brack’s reaction is more an expression of his conventionality, the shock to his expectation of how people ‘should’ act.

How to translate the line for a 2026 performance of the play? Something simple perhaps: ‘God: but that’s not what people do.’ ‘Merciful God, that’s not the way.’ ‘Great God, that’s not appropriate behaviour.’ (This last is too lame, even for what is a deflating line, although ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ have become embedded in contemporary discourse). ‘God, no—that’s not the right way.’ This is tricky.

This very famous poem from the late 13th-century is a rota (Latin for ‘wheel’), a type of song sung as a roundel, with one singer beginning, the second starting the first line as the first sings the second, and so on. The mighty Richard Thompson doesn’t sing it as such, but his version is superb nonetheless.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!1

It’s a mistake to translate the first-line as ‘summer is a-coming in’, though I’ve seen plenty of people doing so. Actually that ‘i-’ in ‘icomen’ is a marker of the perfect tense form of the verb (it’s related to the German ge- prefix). So the first line is that summer has already come in. Line 12’s pes, is Latin for ‘foot’ (long ‘e’, so pronounced ‘peas’), and the meaning is that these two lines are to sung together repeatedly underneath the main verse.

Here’s my translation:

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Viktor Rydberg’s first novel, The Freebooter of the Baltic (1857), is a heavily Walter-Scott-ish historical novel, an account of the political upheavels of Sweden in the 1600s, with piracy, alchemy, swashbuckling and the Katarina Witch Trials of 1676 mixed it. It is something of a mess, as a novel, though readable (I write about it here). His second novel, Singoalla (1858) is very different: a Gothic romance set in the fourteenth-century. Its more focused throughline is a supernatural love-story with vampiric overtones, full of poetical nature-writing and the conflict between Pagan mysticism and Christian conventionality.

We’re in Småland , in southern Sweden, and the year is 1340. Our hero is young Erland Månesköld, son of Riddar (that is, knight) Bengt Månesköld, who holds the castle of Ekö, on the shores of the lake, on the far shore of which stands a monastery. Rydberg notes that this castle is now (that is, in the 19^th century) a ruin: ‘I have sat there,’ he tells us, ‘on a late autumn day, the sky gloomy above me, while the damp breath of the wind rustled and sighed through the pale reeds of the shore.’ But back in the fourteenth-century it is a stronghold.

Erland is betrothed to the Lady Helena Ulfsax, and his parents are planning this respectable, Christian wedding.

One day Erland is out hunting. Coming home through the forest he meets the beautiful Singoalla. One of his dogs rushes angrily at her, snapping, ripping off part of her dress, but she pulls out a knife and stabs it in the neck, killing it. As she stands there, blood dripping off her knife, Erland is struck by her beauty. It’s an unusual meet cute. The two fall in love.

Rydberg calls Singoalla a Gypsy, a word now considered a slur and one which I won’t use in this post beyond here, where I note its origin as an abbreviation of ‘Egyptian’. The novel repeats the legend that these particular Egyptians were cursed to wander, because their ancestors had denied hospitality to the Virgin and her child on their flight from Herod. Rydberg’s Romani carry a letter of safe-conduct from the Pope himself, who, granting them an audience in Rome, was impressed by the story of their ancestral connection to the Holy Family. Singoalla’s people camp in Riddar Bengt’s land, and Erland and she meet repeatedly, nights in the forest. They agree to marry by the pagan lights of the Singoalla’s people—they worship a moon-goddess called Alako, and Singoalla wears a stone charm marked by the goddess’s crescent around her neck.1 Swearing upon this ‘in the twilight by the forest brook’, the two marry, and Erland agrees to run away with Singoalla’s people.

This infuriates Assim, a Romani lad who had hoped to marry Singoalla himself. He tries, and fails, to kill Erland.

Wat happens next is that the Roma pack up their camp and depart. Erland and Singoalla hope to travel with them, but the elders of the tribe are angry that Singoalla has ‘married out’, something forbidden, and expel her. Worse, an old woman—Assim’s mother, who shares her son’s resentment about the Swedish knight—poisons Erland, leaving him tied to a tree to die as they all decamp. Unknown to Erland, or Singoalla, the group has stolen a large quantity of valuables and silver plate from the monastery, and when the theft is discovered Riddar Bengt rides out with his men to track them down. They discover Erland and take him back to the castle to nurse him back to health, although in doing so they have to relinquish the pursuit of the Romani.

Singoalla tries to go to Erland’s castle to be with him, but she is driven away by a hail of arrows from Bengt’s retainers. She retreats to the forest to live in a cave. Erland marries Lady Helena in a good Christian ceremony, and they have a child. His only memories of Singoalla are tinged with the horror of his poisoning.

Now: Act 2 of the story. Ten years have passed, Erland’s parents have died and he is the lord of the castle, where he lives with his wife and son, young Erland. A child, Sorgbarn, arrives at the castle and begs to be taken into Erland’s service. His arrival is mysterious, he can give no good account of his origins and he spooks the inhabitants by singing weird songs (the Abbot says: ‘you hear him singing? Believe me, it is a song of witchcraft … he sings of Satan, whom he called Odin, at the head of the ancient Swedes and Goths’) but Erland takes him in anyway. He doesn’t realise it, but Sorgbarn (the name means ‘child of sadness’: ‘sorrow-bairn’) is his son, fathered upon Singoalla. The boy has a ‘secret power’—hypnotism!—and at night he uses this to compel the sleeping Erland to rise and accompany him through the woods to meet Singoalla. In this dream-state Erland renews his love with his former partner. But the next day, waking in his bed in the daylight, Erland experiences his old horror. ‘The Knight awoke with an oath. “I dreamed a fearful dream last night. Evil spirits have harassed me. One of them bore the features of—you Sorgbarn!”’

The boy continues exercising his ‘secret power’ and leading Erland out at night to be with Singoalla, and the knight enters into a double life: at night, under hypnosis, Erland remembers that he loves Singoalla and acknowledges Sorgbarn his son; but during the day he is with his daytime wife and child, he increasingly loathes Singoalla and Sorgbarn. One night a crisis is reached: Erland rages in the forest, and curses the moon:

He stopped and looked with wrath and a shudder up at the moon, and the face on it seemed clearer than ever, a face stamped with riddle and mystery. The Knight lifted his arm with fist clenched towards the silent watcher in the sky, and his soul spoke through tightened lips: ‘You, yes, you, with the cursed gift of the silver sickle tied the spirit of my kin to yours by night, Singoalla and in the depths of the forests; you, who would revenge our conversion to the Lord Christ by driving the heathen woman, a black-eyed vampire, to suck my heart’s blood! Oh, Alako, my curse upon you!’

He commands Sorgbarn to take him to Singoalla. The boy begs him not to hurt his mother, and addresses him as father. At this, Erland rants: ‘Father? You who with your devilish tricks have long spell-bound and ruined my soul, you the scum of hell, bastard of devil and witch, you dare to defile a Christian with the name of father! You shall die with your mother.’ He stabs the boy in the chest, killing him.

At this Erland waxes more insane: staggers around the forest believing the trees are speaking to him. He stumbles over the corpse of a man who has died of the plague, and concludes that the Black Death has come to kill everyone. This relieves him of the need of killing Singoalla. With this somewhat odd logic he leaves Singoalla alive, even though she begs him to kill her, not wanting to live now that her son has been slain: Erland admits he has indeed come to kill her, but ‘the forest has changed my mind. The Plague has arrived, and it is idle to meddle with Death’s work. This and much more I have learned this night from the forest.’

Lady Helena and her son take refuge from the Plague in the monastery, though she is already infected, and dies. A week later, his sanity restored, Erland knocks on the monastery door, telling the Abbot that he has vowed never again to live underneath a roof. The Abbot tells him his wife is dead, that in her last days she was comforted by a strange, dark-skinned woman who sat at her bedside, and that afterwards this woman took young Erland away with her.

Erland spends the rest of his life as a hermit in the forest, living in a cave, praying, ‘deeply revered by the people’ as a holy man. Many years later, a group of knights pass by on a quest. What quest, you ask? Rydberg is evasive: ‘itself it can only be hinted at, for darkness broods over so much of the past.’ It seems this is

a pilgrimage which the Knights of the Vanished Temple and the Searchers for the Burning Pyre made to the North, to find there, if possible, the beginnings of an old-world worship, of which they had gathered portions from the pagodas of India, the pyramids of Egypt, the underground caves of Delphi and Eleusis, what remained of Solomon’s Temple, and the cromlechs of the Druids, and to blend them all in a halo of glory round the Cross. One of these pilgrims was the young son of an Indian priestess, an initiated Knight of the Vanished Temple, skilled in the wisdom of East and West, and owner of great treasure.

This pilgrim, ‘a youth of brown complexion, but fair hair’, makes a point of stopping by Erland’s hermitage, embraces him and then rides away. It’s his son, of course: raised by Singoalla. That’s the end of the story.

Actually Rydberg rewrote the ending of this novel several times. In the first version, Assim, the Roma man who wanted to marry Singoalla, lives with her in her cave. Assim is most unhappy with the renewal of Erland and Singoalla’s love (‘he gnashed his teeth with pain. He desired Singoalla’s happiness, but for him, the scorned lover, to see this happiness? He would rather die by fire!’). He takes revenge by breaking into the castle at night and murdering Lady Helena and young Erland. Then the plague then breaks out, infecting Erland and killing him. Singoalla nurses him on his death bed, catches plague from him, and dies herself. The first publication ends with this sententious concluding sentence: ‘Dost thou long for everlasting beauty, stainless innocence, imperishable happiness, seek it not on earth, but put thy trust in eternity!’ Evidently Rydberg considered this denouement too brutally tragic, and so rewrote it.

Swedish scholar Viktor Svanberg thinks Rydberg was influenced by Théophile Gautier’s La Morte amoreuse (1836), a story about a priest who falls in love with a vampire woman (Svanberg considers both stories to be about ‘a young man torn between his Christian duties and his forbidden desire for an attractive woman, who haunts him in hallucinatory visions at night’).2 There’s something in this, and the Gothic mood of Singoalla is fruitily evoked: moonlit haunted forests, forbidden love, hypnotic powers, violence. Then again, though in his raving Erland calls Singoalla a vampire, she isn’t actually one.

What she is, is Roma. As such she has to be two incompatible things: on the one hand othered, exotic, sexualised, one of a people who—the novel is clear—cannot be trusted, steal from churches, poison ordinary Swedes. But, on the other, as the heroine of the novel she has to be noble, worthy of Erland’s love (and so Rydberg goes out of his way to stress that Singoalla was not aware of her people stealing the holy valuables, and her desire is to get back to Erland and be with him).

Rydberg’s representation of the Roma in this novel was not based on first-hand experience. There was (and remains, today) a large Romani population in Scandinavia, but Rydberg drew his understanding of them at second hand. Two figures in particular: Englishman George Borrow and Norwegian Eilert Lund Sundt.

Borrow had a great facility with languages, and worked as a kind of missionary for the British and Foreign Bible Society, spreading the faith and disseminating the Good Book is various places, first Russia, then in Spain amongst the Roma people there. He became fascinated with the Roma, learned their language and translated bits of the Bible into it. He wrote up his experiences in a number of books that straddle memoir and fiction, and which contain a great deal of data about Romani life: The Zincali (1841), The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857). This missionary work informs the dynamic of Rydberg’s novel: in Singoalla the Roma are outside Christianity, pagan magic-workers, and the Christian world of medieval Sweden looks to incorporate them, to convert and regularise them. Erland’s oblique encounter with his grown-up son, quoted above, styles the latter as embarking on a quest to unify all the mythologies and systems Indian, Ancient Egyptian, Delphic, Jewish (‘what remained of Solomon’s Temple’) and northern European (‘the cromlechs of the Druids’) in order to bring them into a harmony with ‘the halo of glory round the Cross’ speaks to this. Rydberg himself devoted much of his life to compiling synoptic accounts of world mythology and religion.

Herbert G Wright thinks that Rydberg, though he draws on many elements from Borrow’s books, only knew them at second hand, via Eilert Lund Sundt.3 A minister and teacher, Sundt was giving religious instruction to prisoners in a ‘house of correction’ at Christiania, discovering one among them to be Romani, a people with whom Sundt had long been fascinated. He found it difficult to induce this individual to spill the beans on his people, but then heard of another imprisoned Roma, in the fortress gaol of Akershus, one Fredrik Larsen Hartman, who was much more biddable. From Hartman Sundt learned much of the speech and customs of Norway’s Roma people—later scholarship has cast doubt on how much of this was Hartman actually informing Sundt, and how much him lying, inventing or otherwise trolling the scholar. Through 1847-48 Sundt made a number of tours through Norway to discover what he could about the Roma culture and mode of life, publishing the result of his research as a book, Beretning om Fanteeller Landstrygerfolket i Norge (1850). Much of this was Sundt rehashing other printed sources on the Roma, especially Borrow;4 some of it was material he had obtained from Hartman. Rydberg certainly knew Sundt’s book and takes key details in Singoalla from it: the lunar goddess (perhaps a mere invention of Hartman, this), the notion that the Roma originally hailed from Egypt and had been cursed for not assisting the Holy Family, the contradictory notion that the original Roma were from India or the Himalayas, and that Romani speech was closely aligned to Sanskrit. Singoalla’s plot hinges on the Roma skill with poisons: not something part of the usual stereotype of Romani people, really, but something Sundt stresses at length.

Klaus-Michael Bogdal’s Europa erfindet die Zigeuner (2011: translated by Jefferson Chase as Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear [Allen Lane 2023]) paints a broad-scope history of the Roma in Europe from the Middle Ages up to the late 20^th-century, rooting the persecution (including the Holocaust) in a long history in which Roma are like and unlike Jews, and the othering is an invention of ‘Gypsies’ that was integral to the development of European modernity. Bogdal notes that prejudice, even murderous animosity, against the Roma went hand in hand with exoticised, often sexualised fascination. Archdeacon Claude Frollo’s contradictory hostility to and erotic fascination with the Romani Esmerelda in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) for instance. Matthew Arnold ‘Resignation’ (1849) incudes a band of ‘Gypsies’ as truants from the dutiful business of life, but his greater poem ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ (1853) finds in them a beguiling dream of escape from the drudgery of conventional existence, ‘this strange disease of modern life’. Singoalla’s symbolism of the two wives, somewhat heavily-handed through the story, sees one as the sun, daylight, Christianity, virtue, and the other as the moon, nighttime, enchantment and sex.

A particularly interesting aspect of the novel is Sorgbarn’s ‘secret power’: hypnosis. This is the first I’ve encountered the idea that Romani people have magic hypnotic powers. The cultural history of hypnosis in the 19th-century, from the late 18th-century vogue for ‘Mesmerism’ (named for Franz Anton Mesmer 1734–1815), through the early examples—Poe’s odd little story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), in which a man experiencing death remains conscious under hypnotic control, or Bulwer-Lytton’s obscure occult story The Haunted and the Haunters (1859). The major literature of hypnosis comes later in the century: the archetypal character Svengali in George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), in which hypnosis has a strong element of (male) sexual control and coercion, and of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which the vampire’s gaze has hypnotic powers, especially over young women. The cultural overlap of the negative stereotype of the Jew (as Svengali is), the Vampire and the Hypnotist sets the idea of a Romani hypnotist in interesting context. Not only is this ‘secret power’ not sexualised—it is operated by a secret son upon his sleeping father—it depends upon the pagan lunar religion of Rydberg’s Roma. Hypnotism is a ‘secret power’ that inheres in Sorgbarn, by virtue of his Roma heritage, but it is also activated by certain seeds gathered under a full moon: Assim, Sorgbarn’s step-father, instructs him: ‘“See,” said Assim, “on that large flat stone there are seeds that I have gathered at full moon. Put them into the Knight’s cup, and he will more easily obey you.”’ Sorgbarn hesitates, and his mother urges him: ‘“Take them,” said Singoalla; “the seeds Assim gathers are not all poisonous.” At these words Assim cast down his eyes. Benoni picked up the seeds Assim had gathered.’ I’m not aware of another tale of mesmeric power mediated in this manner.

Rydberg, once famous in the Anglosphere—though no longer—is considered one of Sweden’s most important 19th-century authors, and its last major Romantic (he was a notable poet as well as a novelist and mythographer). Singoalla is, the Internet tells me, and perhaps Swedish acquaintances of mine can confirm or deny, enduringly popular in Scandinavia, often adapted for stage and screen, with an opera adapted from it, and also a ballet, ‘Rydberg’s most published novel in Swedish [and] the only work by Rydberg which after the 1920s has largely remained published abroad.’ It seems there is a brand of biscuit named after the novel, ‘shortbread biscuits filled with raspberry jam and vanilla cream’. I have never tasted these, and it is not clear from online searching whether eating them makes a person more susceptible to hypnosis or not.

American artist Michael Whelan (born 1950) was inducted into ‘The Science Fiction Hall of Fame’ in June 2009, the first living artist so honoured. His Hall of Fame citation describes him as ‘one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism.’ In demand, and copiously productive, Whelan has produced a deal of work for DAW books, and much for other imprints too: SF, Fantasy and Horror. His run of awards is particularly impressive: he won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in seven consecutive years—1980 to 1986—and only didn’t win again in 1987 because he declined the nomination (he subsequently won the same award six further times, also receiving the 1988 Best Nonfiction Hugo award for his compilation, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder). Whelan has also won many Locus Awards, Chesley Awards, World Fantasy Awards and Spectrum Awards.

Whelan has identified this particular image, produced as cover-art for C J Cherryh’s 1986 novel Chanur’s Homecoming, as his ‘all-time favourite’ among his own creations: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the book,’ he reports on his blog, ‘and the experience of bringing to life the characters and themes of the beloved Chanur series’.

The book-cover art, cluttered with over-large lettering and curtailing the spaciousness of the original, does not capture the particular excellence of Whelan's original canvas. The image illustrates a scene from late in the novel: the crew of the spaceship The Pride of Chanur, captained by the titular Pyanfar Chanur, have just arrived at the docks of Gaohn, Meetpoint. They are walking out into a battle—you can see the scorching on the walls, and the constellation of blast-points on the far brickwork by the arch. Most of the crew are leonine ‘han’ aliens, like Chanur herself—he’s at the front—but there is also one (simian) ‘mahe’ alien, and a hooded ‘kif’ alien, pointing. There’s also one human—Tully, who has escaped captivity aboard a kif spaceship. The kif captured the human ship and tortured its crew to discover more about this, to them, new species; Tully alone survived—and has found refuge aboard the han ship The Pride of Chanur, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. The han only permit females to crew spacecraft, but Tully persuades Chanur to make him part of her crew nonetheless. The single kif is called Skukkuk, and has been seconded to Chanur’s crew. In the background, behind a forcefield, are methane-breathing aliens.

The appeal of this image has something to do with the way a fine-brush hyper-realism is applied to the fantastical humanoid beast-creatures that are the subject of this collective portrait. Whelan renders them as if they actually exist, and does so in a way unhindered by the need to apply prosthetics and make-up to fundamentally human actors, who thereby remain fundamentally human-looking, as was the pre-CGI practice in the other visual arts of SF TV and film. Chaur herself is a slightly unsettling combination of genuine lion-ness, and a buffed and sculpted human physique, and Whelan’s kif, Skukkuk, is creepily inhuman in his hooded dark-grey, like a figure of alien Death. He is pointing the way, and Chanur’s loyal han crewwomen crowd behind their leader, ready to launch forward. In a clever visual touch, Whelan has one of the han, and more noticeably the human Tully, looking out of the canvas directly at the viewer, breaking the fourth-wall.

This is striking, and one of several elements in the canvas that Whelan has adapted from the classics of Western Art:—in this case, from Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656; in the Museo del Prado in Madrid).

That great painting portrays a kind of reverse perspective: ‘we’, looking at it, stand where the King and Queen of Spain would be, as they are having their portrait painted by Velázquez himself (the actual pair is reflected in the mirror on the back wall). The image, with the back of Velázquez’s canvas as its left-side margin, shows the painter looking out at us, and the five-year-old princess, or Infanta, Margaret Theresa, accompanied by her entourage of maids of honour, her chaperone, her bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Most of the figures in the painting are involved in their in-world interactions, but the artist and one of the dwarfs looks, boldly, straight at us. It messes with the line of representation, illusion and reality, foregrounds the artificiality of art by, paradoxically, including something ‘real’ that art does not, an acknowledgement of its artifice. (This artistic trick, of a face looking directly at us, has been copied by many artists since, but Velázquez began it).

In Velázquez’s painting the illusion-breaking has a point, since the topic of the artwork is, precisely, the creation of an artwork, the artist’s gaze and its mediation, to the gaze of the viewer, via the artwork. In Whelan’s image it is more adventitious: there is no reason why Tully should catch our eye with his, the way he does—which is to say, no in-novel reason, for Cherryh’s writing style is uninterested in metatextuality, artistic self-awareness or experimentation: she writes a foursquare, traditional, descriptive prose, delivering most of her narrative via dialogue, the suspension of disbelief grounded in an earnest ‘this is my worldbuilding, these are my characters, here’s all the busy business they get up to’ writing style. But in the cover-art Whelan generates, in service of this unexceptional piece of writing, the fourth-wall-break of this out-image look, and thereby achieves a wonderful frisson. It’s as if the artwork itself is saying: look at this exquisite verisimilitude of technique, applied to this unreal fantasy of lion-men and ape-men and aliens—I am aware of its artifice, and that you are admiring its artifice. We exist in a special intimacy, you and I: the SF unrealism of my world represented and the reality of you, the viewer and reader, looking in on it.

Whelan’s image is also, formally, compositionally, very well made. In this I think it is also Velázquezian: Las Meninas is framed by its actual rectangular frame, but within that there are other inner framing lines: the canvas on the left, the window frame on the right, by the rightward wall and the low ceiling, and then by the two large canvases, both squarely framed, hanging on the far wall, and below them other paintings, the mirror and the gleaming rectangle of the open door. Las Meninas is, in one sense, about framing, about how we cut-off and delimit what we see, and the possibilities of superseding and penetrating past such framing. In its way, Whelan’s Chanur’s Homecoming does something similar: the image itself frames its central group with its actual rectangular dimensions, then underscores that framing with various in-image frames: the upward diagonal of the spaceship’s offramp, down which the crew are coming; the diagonal-to-vertical line of the body of the ship in the image’s top right, the architectural buttresses curving to support the port’s roof, and the various tiled insets. Then there is a gleaming mauve rectangle (like the door in Las Meninas), through which we can see the methane-breathing aliens, who cannot share space with the oxygen-breathing crew of the Pride of Chanur. It is cleverly put together, and Whelan deftly positions his elements to maximise their visual impact: putting the noble profile of Chanur, looking to the left, such that it is backed by the dark-grey and black form of the kif’s cloak and body, throwing the lion-face into sharp relief—and then, in reverse, the paling of the background to misty white to make the dark ape-like head of the male character stand-out.

Another intertext from classic art is, I think, David’s Le Serment des Horaces (1784). Whelan shares David’s neoclassical photo-precision of technique and brushwork, and there is a similar dynamism to the composition. But more, Whelan shares David’s compression of perspective in his group-work. Given the space mapped out by the tiles of David’s floor, it’s not easy to see how the three Horatii, swearing their oath, can coexist in space: they must be squeezed really tight up against one another, David’s way of stressing their unity of purpose and singleness of patriotic vision. Whelan does something similar with the crush of han, pressed into a mass of lion-y bodies. That, the gesture (mirror-reverse, and consolidated into the one figure in Whelan), the arches in the background, and the vividness speak to significant influence. Whelan's image benefits from being disposed, as we would nowadays say, in portrait not landscape mode (like David's): the verticality of the image, reaching up into the high arched ceiling of the space-dock, gives the whole a high-reach and spacious openness, as the protagonists, in their alien variety, step forward into adventure.