Week 65: Fly Me To The Moon

Woo woo!! Let’s hear it for plucky little Philae – because how can we resist anthropomorphising such a frankly cute little thing with gangly legs. This week’s landing of an extremely mobile science laboratory on a comet hurtling around some unimaginable distance from here is a moment to bask in some reflected glory and think, you know, we humans aren’t entirely a pointless waste of space after all. If only more of us could work harmoniously together over long stretches of time to achieve positive goals with no plan to make loads of money out of it or appear on a (using the term loosely) reality programme. Call me naïve, but I don’t think there is even some dark sinister military purpose lurking in the shadows behind the Rosetta mission. No, the whole thing is inspiring and educational and makes me want to think outside the planet (but first, of course, I must pause for a quick re-read of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wonderful Le Petit Prince, which this week looks more prophetic than fantastic).

We have long tried to imagine ourselves onto a different rock. Once Galileo Galilei looked through his telescope and, crucially, published what he saw, our place in what Douglas Adams christened the Total Perspective Vortex shifted and we became a much, much smaller dot on the ‘You Are Here’ map. (Incidentally, if for some mysterious reason you have not encountered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy … but no, you can’t not be familiar with it. Just in case, let me urge you to listen to it rather than read it. And certainly don’t watch it. The pictures are rubbish). I still mourn my failure to see Ian McDiarmid in the RSC production of Brecht’s A Life of Galileo last year.. Mark Ravenhill translated Brecht’s original Leben DesGalilei for this, and, quite apart from all the other reasons for kicking myself for missing it, I would have been fascinated to see and hear the differences between that pre-war text and Brecht’s own post-war version which he wrote in English with and for Charles Laughton. It is this version that we Anglophones know, not least because it is the text published by Methuen.

Galileo’s discoveries put rocket-boosters under the dramatic and poetic visions of his contemporaries. Ben Jonson’s masque, News From the New World Discovered in the Moon, written for the Court of King James in 1620, pictures a lunar landscape of fields and meadows, rivers and mountains, different mostly from our own world because the people there do not speak. Being Jonson, the play is a satire, with lawyers and the newly-emerging crocodiles of the journalistic trade in its sights; and being a masque, it is full of dances, spectacular costumes and over-the-top praise of the royal audience. Think of it as plush pantomime mercifully bereft of nonentities from television.

At the same time as Jonson was entertaining the Court, John Donne was fizzing with new metaphors from astronomy and the new science. Not just stars, comets and moons, but compasses, telescopes and sextants gave him his startling material for his urgent, compelling poems. Oh, if you happen not to have read any Donne, I envy you for the moment of first encounter you are about to experience. Switch off your computer and your phone, tell the world you’re out, and curl up with Donne’s poems. Be warned: you are about to lose your heart.

A surprising amount of science fiction seems to deny the possibility of metaphor in favour of a rather plonking alternative reality. Terry Pratchett’s first books were very straightforward science fiction of the kind that, were you to change the Slartibartfast-type names to Gerald or Marjorie, would stand revealed in all its suburban mediocrity. But then – o joy! – he lit upon the glorious wheeze of the Discworld, a planet of enormous improbabilities and resonating familiarities that has enabled him, through about a trillion volumes, to satirise our life here on earth, showing it to be hugely peculiar: often hilariously, and sometimes heart-breakingly so. Pratchett’s great precursor was HG Wells, who is perhaps more remembered now for the legend of Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds to a credulous America than he is actually read. His novel, and Welles’s 1938 dramatisation, signal the very depressing tendency of the twentieth century to drop the wonder and excitement when contemplating the possibility of other cultures out there in favour of all-out paranoia. It does seem a shame and a mystery that the century that saw extraordinary scientific and social advances, including access to rational

Thank you, Bill Watterson

education for more people than ever before, should have opted so merrily and clung so fiercely to a fear-haunted ‘burn them! Burn them!’ mentality that has kept us out of the inter-galactic Good Places to Stay guide to this day. We the people who can look up into the night sky (especially here in the Dark Sky Park of Northumberland) with an intelligent and informed eye can find more than enough to enthral us without needing to invent little green men (no, I don’t know how they came to be little, or green, or particularly associated with Mars). If I want something to frighten myself with, I can read about the behaviour of jihadists or bankers. No, tonight, as I peek out between the clouds to a far-distant universe, I shall be a watcher of the skies seeing a new comet: not like Keats, using astronomy as a metaphor for the marvelling wonder to be found in books, but really, looking up and out. Little Philae, sweet dreams and goodnight.

Week 39: Reading the French

Goodness me. Dommage in fact. A level French in England and Wales includes no literature. It also seems to be possible – incroyable – to obtain a degree in French at British universities without reading any fiction. Je suis desolé: in fact, je suis flabbergasted. Here are the NorthernReader suggestions for a starter pack. We might call it, ‘How to Have a Glimpse of What It’s Like to Be French’.

Before we start, let’s get the tricky bit out of the way. I’m not suggesting you should read all, or even any, of these in French, really I’m not: but, even if you don’t have a word of the language, please try a sentence or two, just to get the sounds and rhythms swirling around in your mouth. Humour me.

Right. Which books shall we put on our shelf this week? We already have one: Le Petit Prince by the extraordinary, romantic and really rather heroic Antoine de Saint Exupéry (see Week 5): and in Week 23 we added Terre Des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars) and Vol de Nuit (Night Flight). Saint Exupéry scatters Gallic je ne sais quoi through every page. You may need to take up smoking Gitanes.

But, even more essential to our Instant-Being-French kitbag, we need Madame Bovary (and read Julian Barnes’ acute observations in the London Reveniew of Books on choosing an English translation). You have to read Madame Bovary. It’s as simple as that. It’s up there with Pride and Prejudice, Hamlet and Nineteen Eighty-Four as stories you must have under your belt. But – if you happen not to have got round to reading it yet – prepare to have your heart broken. While we’re about it, can we have Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir please? It does perhaps demand some quick swotting-up on Bourbon post-Napoleonic France (and what could be more fun?), but really its power lies in its psychology. If you have ever wiled away an hour or two pondering the nature of sincerity, this is the book for you.

We could do this thing thoroughly and read Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (known, not terrifically politically-correctly, as The Hunchback of N.D. in English and as Le Hunchback in the NorthernReader household). Les Misérables – or The Glums, as some of us like to think of it – is apparently one of the world’s most-read books. Well, I bet it isn’t. I think we have a statistic there that is muddling ‘books I ought to pretend to have read’ with ‘books I have actually read’. I did, many years ago, get inveigled into taking KatePonders and my mother to the musical. The book is one of the longest ever written. So is the musical. Take a picnic (and perhaps an i-Pod so that you drown out the noise coming from the stage as the long hours drag by).

Much more riveting to read Émile Zola, a courageous and clear-sighted man who put everything on the line with the publication in L’Aurore of his article, ‘J’accuse’, his forthright denunciation of the mess that was the Dreyfus Affair. He achieved what he had set out to do, which was to be prosecuted for criminal libel, which meant that the whole tawdry tale of wicked connivance and conspiracy at the very highest levels of the French Establishment was aired in open court. Zola was stripped of his Légion d’Honneur, and avoided jail only by hopping nimbly onto the first boat-train to London, arriving with only the clothes he stood up in. It is still thought that his death, by carbon-monoxide poisoning, was arranged by his government enemies, who, in France as elsewhere, have so often shown themselves to be poor losers. For this alone we can elect him to the Hero shelf, but his novels – perhaps especially Thérèse Raquin – earn their place on their own merits as ripping yarns. Talking of which, why ever do we not have

merci, the person who drew this

Alexandre Dumas’s Trois Mousquetaires? It is pacy, gripping and funny: and as the years go by I have very nearly got over my childhood disappointment that it is not, despite my slight misunderstanding of the title in French, about mice.

What of the twentieth century? I’m not sure that anyone, either side of La Manche, reads Colette these days, but both Chéri and Gigi have been huge best-sellers in their time. Let us have Le Grand Meaulnes instead: and we could do a lot worse than pop a copy of Proust on our shelf, even if it is with intention rather than determination (why do long books, or series of books, so make us quail?). And we must have some Simenon: we will get nowhere on our great project of Trying to Be French if we only read classics – although, of course, Simenon’s Maigret is a classic. And so, quite rightly, is Franҫoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. It has something of the same affecting ability to capture the world through adolescent eyes that I love in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding: but in plot, if not in atmosphere, it is darker.

And we could have a very French evening in, with a bottle of wine, some fabulously garlicky sausage, and a film. My choice? A tough call, because j’aime French films: but the best celebration of Paris that I know isn’t French, but Hollywood: Woody Allan’s Midnight in Paris. It’s beautiful, it’s romantic, and it’s quietly thought-provoking. But you can’t not see Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule, so if you haven’t, that’s your evening sorted. Santé.

Week 5: cold comforts

My cousin David has died.  First of all, I want to tell you what a lovely man he was: brimming with interest in people and things, always kindly and gently good-humoured.  And now, of course, I need to read something.  What will help?

At my father’s funeral (sorry, going to funerals seems to have become my specialist subject over the last few years), I read John Donne’s magnificent, defiant sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’.  Talk about marching out all colours flying: it’s a poem that exactly hits the spot when you are damned if you going to let a little thing like death vanquish someone’s spirit. At my mother’s, I chose Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’.  The occasion felt like the reunion of my parents and that spare, quite ambivalent but ultimately affirmative poem could have been written for them.  Larkin is one of the great examples of the person you wouldn’t like who writes work that you do.  He seems to have been an unkind, verbally brutal misanthrope.   This is no doubt very unfair of me because I never met him and he may have been a poppet to his inner circle – but I don’t get the impression he went in for circles.  Or any shape other than the solitary unit.  And yet he wrote ‘What will remain of us is love’: one of only two contenders for the accolade, line-of-poetry-I-would-consider-having-tatooed-on-me (admittedly, would only consider for two seconds before moving on).  The other, should you be interested, is Auden’s ‘We must love one another or die’.  You must admit, I’m going to make a classy corpse.

There are readings to avoid.  Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ seems  – well, a bit late, really, by the time you reach the funeral.  Better, surely, to address death itself, or those of us left behind, than the now-indifferent body.  And I have a horror of the maudlin, which rules out quite a lot (though I do appreciate that, if maudlin were to be your thing, a funeral is not a bad place to unleash it).  There is a case to be made for Edward Thomas’s ‘Lights Out’: ‘I have come to the borders of sleep,/ The unfathomable deep/ Forest where all must lose/Their way’.  But then, there is always a case to be made for reading Edward Thomas (yes, we’d better talk about him quite soon).

I can see that all my choices seem to be poetry.  Well, it’s the right stuff for the moment, don’t you think?  Stripped down to an essence, saying what needs to be said with a quiet precision.  It gives you permission to use metaphor and allusion to say things that would be too bald if plonked down as prose.  And I can see, too, that I am only talking about the sad and regretted death of generations above one’s own.  I bow to no man in my conviction that reading conquers all, but even I am not sure that anything can offer even a shred of comfort on the death of a child.  If I have to, I would go to Ben Jonson and ‘On My First Son’.  But even that wouldn’t help.

But what to read later, on my own?  Any death in the family involves a gathering of the tribe, and any gathering of my particular tribe cannot fail to send me back to the models for all families – Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals – and for all family gatherings – the sublime Cold Comfort Farm. Dearest cousins-who-are-readers (and I know some of you are), this is praise indeed and a tribute to how gorgeous you all are.  Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate offer acute observations of a range of relatives.  There’s death and tragedy there too, wrapped into the comedy – a bit like life really and perhaps this is quite a good time to reflect on that.

So now, some solace please.  Julian Barnes’ Nothing To Be Frightened Of is a good start: wise and brave as you would expect of him.  Antoine St Exupery’s Le Petit Prince/ The Little Prince will not do because it makes me cry and I’m not going to.  If ‘much-loved book from childhood’ is the category I’m searching for comfort, I might be better off with ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (chapter 7) from The Wind in the Willows.  Children’s books are a perhaps surprisingly rich source of facing up to death.  We liked Posy Simmond’s Fred, about the funeral wake for a family cat (trust me, a lot warmer and funnier than I’ve made it sound).  And come to think of it, cats seem to be the go-to animal for lessons on dying: the incomparable Judith Kerr tackled the subject with gentle authority in Goodbye Mog.  I still remember Jenni Murray’s tear-stained tones on Woman’s Hour when she said to Mrs Kerr, ‘but Mog dies’, and the sweetly firm response, ‘Well, Jenni, everybody does.’

Otherwise, there might be something to be said for trivialising the subject of death.  Let’s not empathise: instead, let’s have bodies, heaps of them, festoons of them.  The comfort-criminals then: Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham (but not The Tiger in the Smoke, which belongs to quite a different category, that of ‘too scary ever to be read again’).  Or we could be cheered up by Terry Pratchett’s  Death – no, let me rephrase that, by the character of Death who is a glory of the Discworld novels written by Terry Pratchett.  Death speaks, if that is the word we are looking for here, in small capitals and without inverted commas.  And he tells us not to think of it as dying, but as LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.  Which is a tiny bit comforting.  See you later, David.