Robinson in Chronostasis by Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson

Posted on 08/06/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – June 2022

My mind settled on one turbulent year in my life in  which I moved home nine times. I wrote about a moment where, standing in a 19th floor council flat in Shepherds Bush, London, I felt confused and anxious, unsure if I was packing or unpacking the boxes and bags standing in front of me.

coverOpening the pages of Robinson in Chronostasis is like setting out on a psychogeographic dérive. You do not know where the journey will take you nor what you will see along the way. Discovering the route through this work is satisfyingly unclear. You can follow Sam Jenks’s narrative, a small block of text on each page, or perhaps read the story told by Koji Tsukada’s photographs, starting and finishing the sequence wherever you choose. Alternatively you can be drawn along by the looping threads, the puzzling symbols, of Dan Jackson’s graphic designs.

All three elements are offered up on each double-page spread and the reader is given a choice of routes to take. Indeed, with the whole volume coming in at less than eighty pages, it is possible for the creative reader to complete the book more than once, plotting a different route each time.

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Koji Tsukada

Jenks’s narrative takes the reader on a journey through the streets of Bath, mixing past and present, memory and sensation. In doing so he seems to raise questions about our perception of time and the nature of story-telling and memory. The answers, if there are any, are left for the reader to decide.

Robinson, of course, is the companion of the narrator in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films. He/she/they is an almost mythical figure, the archetypal flâneur. Jenks’s Robinson stalks a trail left by the artist Koji Tsukada, his commentary mixing past, present and conjecture.

Tsukada’s photographs, grainy and brooding, pepper the text. They were created using a 3D photocopy/facsimile of a folding pocket Kodak from 1904 that he bought in a Bath flea market.

Robinson in Chronostasis is a bold and challenging work; a slim but beautifully produced volume. Somehow, however, it feels unfinished. But, I don’t know, perhaps that is the whole point.

 

Sam Jenks

Sam is a writer, queering psychogeography, strayed from the path, hopelessly lost. He uses fiction-auto-fiction-non-fiction-mash-up to approach his interest in landscapes and strangers in strange places. His short stories have been published in Fruit Journal, Queerlings, and Litro.

Koji Tsukada

Koji is an artist based in Nagano, Japan. Between 2015 and 2018 he studied and practised art in Bath, UK. He has a particular interest in landscape, memory and myth.

Dan Jackson

Dan is a designer with an avidity for literature, poetry and stories. His practice centres around using design and illustration to accompany, embellish and evoke the written word in publications and book covers.

Robinson in Chronostasis: A Surrealist Psycho-Geographical Non Romance
Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson
Magdalen Yard Books
February 2022
UK – £5.99 (paperback)
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Nettles by Adam Scovell

Posted on 16/05/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – May 2022

I was weak and He was strong. I was shy and He was confident. I was afraid of violence, whereas He thrived on it. Yet, He would die, and I would kill Him.

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I read the first fifty or so pages of Adam Scovell’s Nettles in bed just before putting the light out. Big mistake. His harrowing account of his protagonist’s first day at secondary school and the campaign of bullying to which he was subjected was profoundly disturbing and kept me awake for much of the night. The bully in question has no name and is simply referred to as He and Him. He is the leader of a gang of fawning acolytes and presents as an almost mythical figure, one in possession of great physical strength and animal cunning.

The book’s central character is not named either. Like Scovell himself, this character spent his  childhood in the Wirral and now earns his living as a writer in London. Yet Nettles is presented as neither autofiction nor straight autobiography. It is simply an account of a writer making a journey back to the place where he was brought up and the powerful childhood memories that this stirs up. What makes Nettles so spellbinding, though, is the way Scovell seems to follow Emily Dickinson’s dictum to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’.

At the same time as having to deal with Him, Scovell’s protagonist has to cope with another crisis in his life: the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. Thus, at its heart, Nettles is a lament for the loss of childhood innocence and happiness. But the boy is not without his allies; the marsh and the motorway bridge just behind his school provide a place of refuge, somewhere to hide from the attentions of the bully during lunchtime and breaks. But it offers more than just a place of physical safety, the marsh offers a kind of spiritual sanctuary too. It speaks to him, it encourages him to endure and promises that in the end he will prevail and will defeat the bully for good: ‘He will die.’

But such an outcome demands a sacrifice in return, or so it seems to this desperate and frightened child. Speaking to a teacher or telling his parents about the bullying is never an option in the mind of the boy. Indeed, he makes great efforts to hide his cuts, bruises and torn clothing from them. He keeps covered too the angry weals on his legs where his bare skin was thrashed with nettle stems on the way back from games. To complain, he tells himself, would only result in more severe persecution. Instead he communes with the marsh and bides his time.

I had fallen into the habit of talking to the marsh, aiming words under the motorway but firm in the belief that they were heard. Sometimes the marsh replied, but I could never remember what was said.

The boy, now a writer in London, returns to the Wirral for a few days and stays with his mother in the old family home which she shares with her new partner. The couple are due to move to another home in North Wales very shortly and the writer needs to sort through the many boxes of stuff stored in his old room. This is the detritus of his childhood and teens, the things accumulated by by a bright, sensitive youngster obsessed with film, horror and science fiction.

motorway_and_marshThe writer ponders his childhood, exploring his memories of his parents, school, the marsh and Him. He revisits some of his old haunts and takes polaroid snaps, several of which are reproduced in monochrome in the book. He walks to the Breck, a rocky outcrop in a disused quarry near his old home, a place which played a significant part in the battle against Him.

 

 

Nettles succeeds in capturing the very essence of the Wirral, its strangeness. It is a place between two estuaries, a peninsula facing the Welsh hills in one direction and Liverpool and the shores of the Mersey in the other. Not quite England and decidedly not Wales. It is a Viking outpost; its coast, semi-urban settlements, woodlands and marshes holding memories and nurturing myths. Adam Scovell delves into his own memories, but touches on something deeper, more universal. In doing so he gives us a hint, a brief glimpse, of that which lies beneath the primordial soil of the place he calls home.

Adam Scovell

authorAdam Scovell is a writer from Merseyside now based in London. He completed his PhD in Music at Goldsmiths in 2018. He has written for the BFI, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Little White Lies, and the BBC as well as many other outlets. He is the author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019), and How Pale the Winter Has Made Us (Influx Press, 2020).

Nettles
Adam Scovell
Influx Press
April 2022
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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Shalimar by Davina Quinlivan

Posted on 01/05/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – May 2022

Years on, the boy will think about the mangoes again when
his daughter is all grown up and he is seven decades old and
dying of cancer. He will know that his lungs are failing and
he is unable to cease the muddling of time and space, the
drifting through little corners of his unconscious. Waking
moments are gauzy vignettes fuelled by morphine. Childhood
memories swim up inside him like protective armour.

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Davina Quinlivan is a writer and lecturer whose background embraces a rich cultural heritage. Her extended family melds together strands from Burma, India, Ireland, Germany, Portugal and the Shan hill people of South-East Asia. Shalimar explores the history of this family, comprising forebears from Europe and Asia, and takes us through to Quinlivan’s present life in rural Devon with her partner and children. At the heart of the book, ever present even after his death, is the writer’s father.

Do ghosts breathe?

Quinlivan’s father lived in Burma until he was 18. His own father was a senior executive in the Burmah Oil Company. When the Japanese invaded in 1942 the whole family was interned. This experience, though never acknowledged or discussed with Quinlivan or other members of the family, stayed with her father for the rest of his life. It left him with agoraphobic tendencies and he always felt more comfortable staying indoors and sticking to set routines.

Once the Japanese left Burma, Quinlivan’s father was able to return to school at a monastery near Rangoon. But he was expelled from there for stealing mangoes from the sacred orchard; a life-changing encounter with forbidden fruit. He was sent to an American boarding school in Darjeeling, India and spent his school holidays with his older sister and her husband in Shalimar, where the husband was an engineer at the Shalimar Paint Company. This was a happy time for Quinlivan’s father, despite an extended bout of illness with typhoid fever.

Father

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After school he moved to England and worked in a number of factory jobs before he secured a post as a warehouse manager. He also met Quinlivan’s mother and they lived together at a number of addresses in West London. The writer was born in London and the family eventually settled in Hayes.

Years later, while Quinlivan was studying for her PhD, her father became ill with cancer. She and her music teacher husband, Dylan, were living with her parents in their small home at this time. They decided that the right thing to do was for them to move out in order to give her father the quiet and stillness in his daily routine that he seemed to need. It was also, she realised later, her own way of coping with the impending bereavement.

To be near Dylan’s work, but not too far from London, they rented a studio flat in a large old house in rural Surrey. This was a major culture shock for a city girl like Quinlivan, but life in the countryside was something that she gradually came to appreciate and embrace.

At a social and political level Shalimar is about race, colonialism and migration. At a more personal level it is an exploration of the meaning of family and home. Like the rest of us, Quinlivan’s life is an outflowing of the influences of her family history. Unlike most of us, she is able to express this profound truth in achingly beautiful prose:

Even if you pull a tree out of the ground, its roots will have threaded through the other trees around it and will go on providing a scaffolding to the living systems it has dwelled within for years to come.

Quinlivan moves from house to house across rural southern England, seemingly in search of her true home. Finally she settles in Devon, having lost her father and started a family of her own along the way. Much of Shalimar flows along with a dream-like quality and Quinlivan’s tale is peppered with symbolic objects: birds, plants, fruit, a bracelet of pigeons-blood rubies. She is a writer and lecturer about film and there is, indeed, a visual, cinematic quality to Quinlivan’s descriptions of people and places.

Shalimar is a fairly short book, but is by no means a flimsy one. Indeed, the story that Qunlivan tells lives on in the memory long after having read it. Her descriptions, and the places and people that she evokes, haunt one’s imagination.

 

Davina Quinlivan

authorDavina Quinlivan is the author of several books on cinema. She has taught at Kingston School of Art for over a decade and is a regular lecturer at The Freud Museum. She lives in Devon, with her family.

 

Shalimar
Davina Quinlivan
Little Toller Books
March 2022
UK – £16.00 (hardback)
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Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair

Posted on 20/04/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – April 2022

She knew now what had happened to her. She was afraid of Harding Powell; and it was her fear that had cried to her to go, to get away from him. The awful thing was that she knew she could not get away from him. She had only to close her eyes and she would find the visible image of him hanging before her on the wall of darkness.

Mary Amelia St. Clair, better known as May Sinclair, was one of the key figures in early modernist writing. She is known for works such as The Divine Fire and Life and Death of Harriett Frean and, in the early years of the twentieth century, had a reputation as prominent as that of Virginia Woolf. She was also a respected reviewer and wrote extensively on philosophy. By the mid-century, however, she fell out of fashion, only to be discovered and celebrated once more  by the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Sinclair was born in Liverpool and spent much of her creative life at the centre of literary society in London. But for several years when she was a young woman, she lived in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham in North Wales.

Gresford

Gresford

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uncanny Stories is one of May Sinclair’s lesser known works but, as a collection of odd and supernatural tales, I would put it on a par with the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and M.R. James. Indeed, for her psychological insights, I would place Sinclair’s stories on a level of sophistication above the work of the other two writers.

Uncanny Stories is a collection of eight tales covering the themes of death, belief, the afterlife, possession and haunting. Life in the world Sinclair evokes is uncertain and terrible things happen without warning. This is a world where the carefully laid plans of her protagonists do not work out as they had expected.

Both love and malice are capable of reaching beyond the veil of death. In Where their Fire is not Quenched two former lovers, now dead, are doomed to repeat the details of their affair for all eternity. While in The Intercessor a child is abandoned by her mother and carries her longing for reunion beyond the grave and stretches the boundaries of hope into obsession. Later reviewers saw the roots of this theme, which was repeated in other stories, in Sinclair’s emotional estrangement from her own mother. The truth is more complex, but many of the themes she explores in Uncanny Stories can, indeed, be traced back to Sinclair’s earlier life, and in particular her time in Gresford.

May Sinclair spent her early years in Rock Ferry on the banks of the Mersey. Her childhood was blighted by her father’s bankruptcy and his subsequent alcoholism and early death. The family moved to Ilford and Sinclair gained a place at Cheltenham Ladies’ College where her quick mind was noted and her academic rigour was developed. They then moved to Gresford and, as money was tight, Sinclair had to leave college.  She and her mother were constantly at loggerheads and the younger woman, who was in the process of questioning her Christian upbringing, railed against the version of faith espoused by her mother, whom she referred to as ‘an unimaginative and inflexible woman’ who created a ‘cold, bitter, narrow tyranny’ in their family home.

May Sinclair’s time in Gresford was a traumatic and deeply formative period in her life. Her brother Harold died in 1887 and another brother, Frank, died two years later. Both succumbed to a congenital heart defect and are buried in Gresford churchyard. The trauma of these deaths is, perhaps, reflected in the story The Token in which the young wife Cicely Dunbar dies of heart failure.

May lost her faith at this time and became opposed to all forms of religious and political dogmatism and frequently spoke out against the oppressive nature of  Victorian patriarchy. In his introduction to Uncanny Stories, Paul March-Russell refers to Sinclair’s dread of ‘the horrors of family life’. By the time these stories were written Sinclair had already developed an interest in the new science of psychology, as well as a fascination with the paranormal.

grave

Harold and Frank Sinclair’s grave at Gresford

churchyard

Gresford Churchyard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although she will no doubt have read more traditional ghost stories, Sinclair’s writing in this collection is clearly more influenced by the style of psychological hauntings explored in works such as The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Uncanny Stories displays an awareness of the conventions of Gothic horror which is reflected in the narrative structure of several of the tales, most notably The Flaw in the Crystal and The Nature of the Evidence. But Sinclair’s key contribution to the development of the ghost story comes from her use of modernist tropes and structural experimentation that are both clearly evident in this collection.

May Sinclair

May Sinclair was born in Liverpool in 1863 and died in 1946. She was a novelist, poet, philosopher, translator, and critic. She was both popular and extremely prolific, writing twenty-three novels, thirty-nine short stories, and several poetry collections throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a critic she promoted the work of Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets, and the novelist Dorothy Richardson, among others. She also wrote works of philosophy, and was actively involved in the key issues of her day: writing pamphlets for the suffrage movement, studying and propagating psycho-analytic thought, reviewing and responding to the birth of modernism, Vorticism and imagism.

 

Acknowledgements

Opening Quote is from May Sinclair’s story The Flaw in the Crystal

May Sinclair biography is by Rebecca Bowler

Gresford pictures by Bobby Seal

Uncanny Stories
May Sinclair
Wordsworth Editions
2006
Note: The Wordsworth paperback edition is currently out of print, but second-hand copies are widely available. I would suggest avoiding the 2012 Tillman Library edition currently on Amazon as it does not include the short story The Intercessor nor does it feature Paul March-Russell’s excellent introduction to the collection.
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Rocketman by Lizzy Laurance

Posted on 29/03/2022 by Bobby Seal

Through songs I dreamt the stories of the boat, listening to its sounds and its silences.

Rocketman is the debut album of London-based sound artist and composer, Lizzy Laurance. To work on her project, Lizzy took up temporary residence in a dilapidated dredger which was home to Illutron, an arts and technology institute in Copenhagen. Only after she commenced recording did she realise that the boat was moored on the site of the infamous ‘submarine murder’ of journalist Kim Wall by Illutron member Peter Madsen in 2018. The final track on the album is written in memory of Kim Wall.

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Laurance’s album is a collage of found sounds, library samples, rhythms and beats all held together by her otherworldly vocals. Many of the recordings were made in and around the boat. Through these Laurance was able to tune in to the boat’s stories and temporal echoes; stories then expressed in her recordings and her extraordinary vocal performance.

Through the album I explore themes of gender, power, technology and violence as I try to reconcile the visionary ideals and technological accomplishments of Madsen, Illutron and our society more generally, with the destruction left in its wake.

The  titles of Laurance’s ten pieces seem to suggest  a grounding in the traditional pop song. But from the first track, Promenade, the whole pop form is subverted. Promenade opens with an intrusive male voice and a female sigh that suggests an unwelcome approach or interruption. It builds with the sound of water, piano and excited shouts and is driven by the rhythm of bass drum and scratchy snare.

Baby Loves echoes with claustrophobic, below the water-line sounds. Further layers are added with keyboards, hammering on wood and an ominous sound like exposed piano strings being bashed. Laurance’s achingly beautiful vocals are threatened with being totally overwhelmed by the background sounds, but somehow they remain defiant.

Come Down is a piece driven by pulsing percussion and soulful vocal washes. Accents of sculpted horn sounds enrich the mix.

The title Gasoline Blue Jeans suggests a trip into Americana, but the piece actually serves up an industrial landscape of sound with evocations of physical and spiritual emptiness. Vocals flood over this landscape while a dark undercurrent of the male gaze threatens from beneath.

Too Hard to Die is an unsettling piece driven by the pulse of an engine room.

White Nights, meanwhile, seems to emerge from deep underground and arrives with a roll of machine thunder. Laurance’s vocals swoop above the storm of sound and refuse to be submerged.

Shine features another extraordinary vocal performance, while other voices lurk in the shadows behind a robotic industrial soundscape.

Famous opens with the sound of gulls and continues with an ever-present industrial hum. It was a 2020 single release and is, in many ways, the stand-out track of the album. Laurance relates the story of its inception:

It’s written largely from the perspective of a man who stalked me while I was staying on the boat [in Copenhagen] last summer. He had this delusion that I was hanging around public libraries with the sole aim of trying to seduce him. I wrote this song, in part, about the version of me that he had in his mind. It’s also about other things as well though, like … what perpetuates toxic masculinity when it’s so obvious that no one benefits? Or, why, as a society, do we keep falling in love with bad men?

Rocketman, the title track, evokes a huge landscape of sound and sky and open spaces. We hear a jet engine, industrial hum, a screeching of guitar and an assault of metallic percussion. Despite the similar song title, this is a long way from Elton John.

Finally, Song for Kim Wall is a piece suffused with a palpable feeling of sadness. A sense of sinister claustrophobia seems to surround it and the track, and with it the whole album, comes to a sudden, shocking end. It feels unfinished, perhaps deliberately so, as an acknowledgement of the unfinished life it celebrates.

The idea of the concept album fell into disgrace forty-odd years ago, its bloated excesses kicked into touch by the three chords of punk. I was a punk, am a punk, but I think the term concept album is due a revival and Rocketman is a good place to start. Listen to it outdoors if you can. Listen to it below deck on an old boat if you dare.

Lizzy Laurance

artist_imageLizzy Laurance makes grainy pop-collages inspired by spatial locations; inner, outer and cyber. Stitching together “found” music, ambient sound, over-familiar music sample libraries and songwriting, she explores the mythology of pop music and the icons that inhabit it. These icons tell stories of female identity, image-making and toxic masculinity.

 

Hear Rocketman at Bandcamp here

Lizzy’s website is here

Instagram: @lizzy_laurance

 

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The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic by Sara Wheeler

Posted on 16/03/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – March 2022

Herds of reindeer move across ice and snow. Slim-shouldered Lapps squatting on skidoos nose their animals towards an arc of stockades. A man in a corral holds a pair of velvet antlers while another jabs a needle into a damp haunch. I make my way towards the outer palisades, where Lapps beyond working age stoke beechwood fires and gulp from bowls of reindeer broth, faces masked in musky steam. The first new snow has fallen, and the Harrå Sámi are herding reindeer down to the winter grazing.

Book Cover

Until the publication of The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler was best known as a writer and explorer of the Antarctic. This book, however, takes her to the lands and seas of the other pole, the magnetic north of the title.

She commences her travels in the Russian far east, in the region of Chukotka. From here The Magnetic North circles the pole in a clockwise direction with sections on Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Crossing the Arctic Ocean, Wheeler visits Svalbard to the north of Norway, the Sámi lands of Scandinavia and the far north-west of Russia before ending her journey along the edge of the White Sea and European Russia’s Arctic coast.

In Chukotka, Wheeler stays with a Chukchi family, a people who are the ethnic brethren of the Inuit of Alaska, just across the surprisingly narrow Bering Strait. The traditional way of life of the Chukchi, nomadic and based on hunting and gathering, has been systematically destroyed by Moscow. First by Czarist expansionism and then by the forced collectivisation of the Soviet era when the Chukchi were compelled to live in towns. More recently the forces of state and private capital have turned their attention to the region’s mineral wealth.

Wheeler describes how this same story, of the way of life of indigenous peoples being squeezed out by incomers from the south, is played out in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia too. Traditional ways of sourcing food and earning a living through trade have been replaced by mind-numbing jobs and supermarkets full of fatty, processed foods. The kinship ties of Arctic communities have been broken down and replaced by an epidemic of obesity and drug and alcohol abuse.

But not all the news is bad. The Inuit peoples of Canada have managed to secure a degree of autonomy over at least some of their traditional lands, Greenland has enjoyed self-rule since 2009 and Wheeler notes that, in the Finnish north, many of the Sámi people still cling to their traditional ways. But the Arctic lands, even more so than the rest of the world, are facing an existential crisis resulting from anthropogenic climate change.

Since 1900, the mean global temperature has risen by 0.6°c. In the Arctic, the figure is 2-3°c.

Global warming, Wheeler reports, has reached a critical point for the Arctic. There is a broad scientific consensus that a rise in global temperature of 2°c or more above pre-industrial levels will bring about dangerous climate change effects. There is almost complete consensus on the cause of this rise in temperature too:

Almost all the data yields revealed some kind of correlation between anthropogenic emissions and temperature increase.

The Arctic lands and sea also suffer from the effects of industrial pollution, from emissions made elsewhere, often thousands of miles away. Because of the Earth’s prevailing ocean currents, river flow and air movement the Arctic has become a sink for contaminants and toxins produced elsewhere. Long-banned agricultural pesticides, such as DDT, and a host of historic industrial poisons still pollute the Arctic and find their way into the food chain by a process of bioaccumulation. They become concentrated in animal fats, a key part of the traditional diet of the Arctic’s indigenous peoples.

Other pollutants include PCBs and PBDEs. PCBs were used as coolants, in insulation and as hydraulic fluids, but were banned in most countries in the 1970s. PBDEs are used as flame retardants. Traces of both these substances are found in every species of Arctic creature tested. Heavy metals, such as mercury, are present too, while acid rain from the south brings in sulphur and nitrogen oxides. Far from being a pristine wilderness, laments Wheeler, the Arctic is fast becoming an industrial drain.

Wheeler’s style of research is to embed herself in local communities. She has a knack for befriending the people she meets, winning their trust and enabling them to tell their story in their own way. She is not quite so good at describing landscapes. She gives us the many local words for different types of snow and ice, but the landscape pictures she paints with her words are not quite as vivid as they might be in the hands of another writer: Nan Shepherd or Jan Morris, for instance. But her insights into the people she writes about and her descriptions of what makes each one of them unique are first-rate.

Wheeler’s journey starts and finishes in Russia, taking her from the Russian far east around the globe and to the shores of the White Sea in European Russia. She describes a region, a world, that seems to be on the very edge of a tipping point. What we do about that, whether we do anything at all, is in the hands of all of us in this present generation.

Although Earth has become dramatically both hotter and colder many times, it has only rarely been warmer than it is now. And the greatest warming ……… has taken place above 40° of latitude in the northern hemisphere. Sure, the Antarctic is melting. But the Arctic is melting faster.

 

Sara Wheeler

AuthorSara Wheeler’s books include the international bestseller Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. She has published two biographies of travellers: Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, and was immensely relieved to write about women at last in O My America!

The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic
Sara Wheeler
Vintage
May 2010
UK – £10.99 (paperback)
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Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo

Posted on 04/03/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – March 2022

My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn’t accept defeat.

Manifesto is part memoir and part handbook providing insights into Bernardine Evaristo’s creative process. This inspirational work tells the story of her life and the influences, attitudes and ways of working that led to her eventual success as a writer. Recognition was a long time in coming and winning the Booker prize at the age of 60 was testimony of Evaristo’s commitment to never giving up.

She was born in London and raised in a family of eight children in Woolwich, a primarily white suburb. Her father was a welder from Nigeria who was active in the trade union movement and her mother a white English schoolteacher. Evaristo also embraces Irish, German and Brazilian strands in her ancestry.

As a child in the 1960s Evaristo encountered racism on a daily basis; from the thugs who regularly smashed the windows of their family home to the more subtle, but equally cruel, racist attitudes she experienced at her school and the local catholic church. But the most hurtful rejection on account of the skin colour of Bernardine and her siblings was from members of her mother’s white family who opposed her marriage to a black Nigerian.

I am first and foremost a writer, the written word is how I process everything—myself, life, society, history, politics. It’s not just a job or a passion, but it is at the very heart of how I exist in the world, and I am addicted to the adventure of storytelling as my most powerful means of communication.

Evaristo was a bright, outgoing young person who loved the theatre, literature and poetry and longed to gain a place at drama school. Her ambitions were initially thwarted and she found that too many doors at that time remained tightly shut for someone who was black, female and working class. But, true to her concept of never giving up, she kept trying and eventually secured a place at Rose Bruford College.

Once she had finished her drama degree, Evaristo found there were limited opportunities for black actors in the early 1980s. So, with two fellow graduates, she set up a black women’s theatre company. As well as acting Evaristo became involved in the management and promotion side of the company and, crucially, she found she had a talent for writing for the stage. This led eventually to becoming a full-time writer, at first creating poetry and later verse fiction. She found herself constantly pushing against the boundaries of race and gender and experimenting with new literary styles.

As a child Evaristo was a voracious reader, discovering new worlds within the covers of a book. In her teens and early twenties she sought out books that examined the reality of her own experience as a woman of colour.  Very few such books were published by UK writers, but she took inspiration from the works of African American women writers and some from Nigerian writers. Later Evaristo herself wrote and published the kind of books she wanted to read but had failed to find in 1970s Britain.

In the last few chapters Evaristo lets the reader into the secrets of her creative process. Although there are no great secrets, just a set of core principles and a dedicated work ethic. She emphasises the importance of self-belief and ambition and underpins this with an openness to constructive criticism and a willingness to edit and rewrite for as many times as it takes to make one’s writing the best it can be.

In 2019 Evaristo won the Booker prize for fiction for her novel Girl, Woman, Other and now combines her own creative work with teaching and encouraging others. Despite her current status as part of the nation’s literary establishment, Bernardine Evaristo has spent most of her career as an outsider. Her race, gender, sexuality and class all provided sticks with which she was regularly beaten, But, rather than cave-in to rejection and scorn, Evaristo used it to make herself stronger and more resilient. Manifesto is a portrait of a woman who has dedicated her life to breaking down barriers and bringing people together.

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other made her the first black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019, as well winning the Fiction Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 2020, where she also won Author of the Year, and the Indie Book Award. Her writing spans reviews, essays, drama and radio. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and President of the Royal Society of Literature.

 

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up
Bernardine Evaristo
Hamish Hamilton
October 2021
UK – £14.99 (hardback)
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In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer

Posted on 26/01/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2022

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What else lives here, among these trees? You recall the stories, your father’s gentle voice. There was no need to shout in the forest, he said, as he explained all the living beings that surround you. Just because we’ve never seen them, he said, doesn’t mean they’re not here. After all, what happens to things when we discover them? The hunters’ pulpits were evidence enough of that. Why would you show yourself, if to show yourself was to issue your own death sentence?

 

 

 

With In the Pines Paul Scraton presents us with a strange, brooding collection of literary fragments. They are drawn together by an unnamed narrator and haunted by the ever-present forest that dominates the narrator’s life. We are not given the name of the forest, nor is it made clear in what country Scraton’s stories unfold. Neither are we given the name of the narrator and even their gender is left unclear. Although, in a German magazine interview, Scraton refers to them as ‘she’ and ‘her’. We are being led, perhaps, to concentrate our attention on the story rather than the storyteller.

I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines *

The viewpoint of the central narrative switches regularly from the first person to the third, often within the same fragment. The only constant is the forest; its presence underpins everything. The forest, of course, is integral to the German imagination, to that nation’s sense of itself; and Germany is where Scraton has made his home. But he deliberately avoids suggesting Germany is the location of In the Pines, as if to stress the universality of his themes. In doing so he has created a work of great imagination and verve.

Integral to the book is the black and white photography of Eymelt Sehmer. She uses a photographic technique called the collodion wet plate process. This requires a black tin plate to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. Before working on In the Pines this was a technique she only used in the studio, so Sehmer’s greatest challenge was to construct a mobile dark room and drag it into the forest with her and Scraton. The result is a series of startling, ghostly images.

Sehmer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sehmer’s images are at once crystal clear and at the same time disorientatingly hazy. The imperfections created by the analogue process serve to heighten the sense of the uncanny in her compositions. Gazing at each image, one finds one’s imagination seeing things that are not really there. In a very visceral sense, these pictures bring the text to life.

For Scraton’s narrator the forest is always there, a brooding presence. But it is also a metaphor for something else. In The Divine Comedy, Dante’s narrator describes the ‘dark wood’ as a period of pain and loss in his life:

I was in the middle of my life when I found myself in a
dark wood, for I no longer knew the way **

In the human imagination the forest is the stuff of fairy tales and nightmares, the home of wolves and witches. It is also a place of life and renewal. And yet, with our roads and factory farms, we persist in razing it; destroying trees, destroying the land, destroying our climate. But the forest, Scraton seems to suggest, is capable of restoring itself and will no doubt do so when the age of human dominance has passed.

* Traditional American folk song, now best known for its incorporation into Nirvana’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night
** Translated by Kathy Acker, 1986

 

Paul Scraton

writerIs a Lancashire-born writer and editor based in Berlin. Paul is the editor-in-chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels Along Germany’s Baltic Coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His essays on place and memory have been published as the pocket book The Idea of a River: Walking out of Berlin (Readux Books, 2015), and in Mauerweg: Stories from the Berlin Wall Trail (Slow Travel Berlin, 2014).

Eymelt Sehmer

Is a Berlin-based pphotographerrofessional photographer, artist and filmmaker. Growing up in a densely wooded area in West Germany the forest always fuelled her imagination. In her works she mainly focuses on mythology, fairy tales and folklore. She is particularly interested in old analogue photographic techniques. Together with Icelandic artist Mr. Arnarson she runs an art gallery and photo studio in Berlin.

In the Pines
Words – Paul Scraton
Photographs – Eymelt Sehmer
Influx Press
October 2021
UK – £8.99 (paperback)
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John Bull Redux

Posted on 13/01/2022 by Bobby Seal

The United Kingdom left the European Union almost two years ago, but apparently everything that befalls us is still the EU’s fault. There is a British, or more specifically English, attitude to the rest of Europe that William Hazlitt succinctly described in his 1816 essay Character of John Bull. Listen to the current UK government, most of the British press or one particular TV news channel and his words still seem to ring true.

John_Bull‘John Bull is pleased with nothing, and that is a fault. He is to be sure,  fond of having his own way, till you let him have it. He is a very headstrong animal, who mistakes the spirit of contradiction for the love of independence, and proves himself to be in the right by the obstinacy with which he stickles for the wrong.’

‘You cannot put him so much out of his way, as by agreeing with him. He is never in such good humour as with what gives him the spleen, and is most satisfied when he is sulky. If you find fault with him, he is in a rage; and if you praise him, suspects you have a design upon him.’

William Hazlitt, Character of John Bull, The Examiner, 19th May 1816.

 

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print.

 

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The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

Posted on 12/01/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2022

It was an enchanted palace, She must try to find a way in! It was bound to be full of curious passages and doorways – and she must get in. It looked so extraordinary that Unn forgot everything else as she stood in front of it. She was aware of nothing but her desire to enter.

Cover

The Ice Palace is set in a village in rural Norway. Siss is a happy, outgoing 11-year old. She is popular with the other children at her village school and leads all the games in the playground.

A new girl arrives at the school. She is called Unn and is also 11-years old. Her mother recently died and her father was never around, so she has come to live with her auntie in a cottage on the outskirts of the village. On Unn’s first day ay school Siss and the other children try to encourage her to join with them in the playground, but she politely declines. Unn prefers to stand on her own away from the group, sometimes watching them at play but mostly just gazing absently at the wall.

Siss is both puzzled and beguiled; she feels some kind of deep connection with Unn, but does not understand what it means. She is aware, however, that Unn steals the occasional glance in her direction, as if aware of their connection, though she continues to remain detached from Siss and her group of friends. Every day Unn stands alone. She seems to embody, it occurs to Siss, a strangely serene inner strength.

Winter is fast approaching and the talk in the playground is of the ice palace, a local natural wonder that returns each year as the temperature drops. The palace is situated at a waterfall upriver from the village. Each winter all but the fast-flowing core of the falls freezes over forming spectacular castle-like ice formations. The ice palace attracts visitors from all over the district in the winter months and is a source of fascination for the children.

After several days of remaining silent, Unn approaches Siss and invites her to visit her at her auntie’s house after school. Both of them seem to feel the need to talk. After chatting briefly with Auntie, the girls go up to Unn’s room. They say very little, each of them unsure what to say, but they tacitly agree that there is a bond between. A strange, mystical atmosphere seems to hold them in thrall. Unn talks about her auntie, her mother and the father she has never met; all she knows is that he was handsome and had a car. At Unn’s suggestion, they gaze at a mirror together. Something seems to fill all their senses:

They let the mirror fall, looked at each other with flushed faces, stunned. They shone towards each other, were one with each other; it was an incredible moment.

But still, they find it difficult to express what they are feeling. Unn confesses that she has something she needs to share with Siss and tells her that ‘I’m not sure that I’ll go to heaven’. Siss is overwhelmed, too many emotions are rising and bursting out of her at once. She does not want to hear Unn’s confession, not yet anyway. She decides she needs to leave. Unn is reluctant to let her go at first, but eventually steps aside and allows Siss to do so.

The next day at registration Siss is dismayed to find that Unn is not there. Unn left for school as normal, but felt overwhelmed about seeing Siss again after the previous evening and decided to take the day off. She walks upriver and over the frozen lake in search of the ice palace. When she arrives she finds herself enchanted by its beauty. She enters an icy buttress of the palace through a small fissure and explores one gleaming chamber after another. Gradually Unn becomes lost and disorientated and is seemingly unaware of how cold she is becoming, and even discards her coat.

Unn does not return and, for the next few days, the whole village is out searching for her. They go to the falls, but find no sign of her. Siss is bereft with feelings of loss and guilt. She shuts out everyone: her parents, her teacher and her schoolfriends. It is as if she is trapped within her own ice palace. Her friends try to reach out to her, but she turns away from them. In the school yard Siss refuses to join in with their games but just stands, silently where Unn once stood.

Siss fears that Auntie will blame her for Unn’s disappearance, but she knows she must go to see her. As it turns out, Auntie is caring and supportive and Siss feels something within her beginning to thaw. Auntie confides that she has decided to leave the village as nothing remains for her here. A few weeks later she goes and, in her wake, the first signs of spring begin to emerge.

The Ice Palace is a short novel but it carries with it great weight and depth from Vesass’s lyrical prose and his subtle layers of allegory. He handles the themes of love, loss, change and sexual awakening with great sensitivity and finds a way to convey the complex feelings of people who do not have the words to express those feelings. In Vesaas’s hands, the Norwegian landscape in winter is a constant, icily evocative backdrop. This is a novel that is as relevant today as it was when it was first published nearly sixty years ago.

Tarjei Vesaas

AuthorVesaas was born in Vinje, Norway in 1897 and died in Oslo in 1970. He is widely regarded as one of Norway’s finest  writers and wrote novels, short stories, poems and dramas about loneliness, lack of communication and of growing up. His breakthrough came with the allegorical Kimen in 1940 and he is best known for his later novels Fuglane (1957) and Is-slottet (The Ice Palace) (1963).

 

The Ice Palace
Tarjei Vesaas
Penguin
1963 (English translation by Elizabeth Rokkan, 1993)
UK – £7.99 (paperback)
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