I'm a devotee of early 20th century Weird Fiction. I got there via H.P. Lovecraft and the game Call of Cthulhu, but that was just the beginning, and over the years I've expanded my horizons to the rest of the 'Lovecraft circle' - August Derleth, Robert E Howard, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Bellknap Long, and from there into their antecedents and successors. There are threads that twist in and out of this genre, including a particularly downbeat and British form of paganism, ghost stories and spooky happenings, via Welsh journalist and mystic Arthur Machen (a big influence on Lovecraft) and Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell (who in turn started his career writing Lovecraft pastisches), as well as the kind of American Gothic that began with Edgar Allan Poe and ran through Lovecraft to Stephen King, and even the fantastic faerie imaginings of Lord Dunsany, a prototype for everyone from Fritz Lieber to J. R.R. Tolkien. But one of the currents is a peculiar thread of so-called 'yellow' literature from the 'Naughty Nineties' (i.e. 1890s), a queasy blend of fin de siecle decadence; absinthe, ladies of the night, madness, aesthetes, ennui and the limits of human experience. The ur-novel of yellow literature is A Rebours ('Against the Grain') by Joris Karl Huysman, a kind of manual for decadent aristos of the end of the 19th century, while its most famous product is The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde - Gray goes off the rails after having read a 'yellow book' which Wilde later admitted was, as everyone had suspected, A Rebours. But its apotheosis came in a handful of short stories written by Robert W Chambers, an unsuccessful American artist living in Paris and himself a devotee of another 'yellow' author, Ambrose Bierce. In 1895 he took Oscar Wilde's notion of a forbidden book that causes madness to its logical conclusion, via the invented play The King In Yellow, a forerunner of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The play is only ever sketchily described, and seems to take place in a weird, possibly extraterrestrial city called Carcosa, lit by 'black stars', where bickering nobility attend a Venetian-style masked ball (it's been suggested that Wilde's play Salome provided a lot of the decadent 'window dressing'), and The Stranger in White pronounces a terrible Revelation of some kind, possibly to do with the mysterious King in Yellow, and reveals the Yellow Sign.
If any of these terms sound familiar to you, it may be because the strange unearthly mythology of Chambers has recently found its way into HBO's offbeat police procedural series True Detective. Detectives Hart and Cohle are on the face of it trying to atone for shooting a suspect 20 years earlier who took with him to the grave the identity of a serial killer with a line in bizarre Blair Witch meets voodoo/santeria-style window dressing. But as the series progresses, little hints and mentions of the Yellow King, Carcosa, the Black Stars and so on reveal that there's something bigger and darker out there, via a secretive church that has gone off the rails and descended not into common or garden Satanism but something altogether stranger.
I watched the final episode last night, and there was a resolution of sorts, although as in Chambers' stories, Carcosa and the Yellow King remained tantalisingly just out of reach. The closest we got was the confrontation in the overgrown remains of what looked like an 18th century fort filled with strange wooden constructions and mummified bodies which hillbilly serial killer Errol Childress (himself very much in the tradition of Lovecraft's twisted New England backwoods sorcerors like Joseph Curwen) said was 'Carcosa', or perhaps at least its reflection on Earth. And Cohle, closer to the dark heart of the mystery than his partner, began hearing voices and finally looked up to see a giant spiralling vortex of nothingness. As with Chambers' stories, we are left to ourselves to decide whether these things have an objective existence, or whether they exist only in the mind of the beholder. Nevertheless, I believe that this was the Yellow King, and the spiral tattoos and brands on the backs of the various cultists and victims were the programme's version of the (never described in the books) Yellow Sign, in effect a crude depiction of their extradimensional deity. Winningly, as Childress stabbed Cohle, he shouted at him to "take off your mask!", a line from the climactic scene in the play The King In Yellow (the Stranger subsequently reveals that, in fact, he is not wearing a mask).
Many commentators on the series have mentioned the series' nihilism. That might be a philosophical step too far for godfearing middle America, but it's very much in keeping with the whole Lovecraft circle and its writings. However, such ideas have lost their power to shock us as much as they perhaps did in the 1920s; a time when the carnage of the First World War had led people to question everything; religion, politics, society itself. Out of it came new philosophies, new ways of looking. Indeed, one Lovecraft scholar whom I once heard lecture said that, in a way, post-modernism has been the 'cure' for Lovecraft's idea of 'cosmic horror'. We are no longer shocked as people were in the 1920s by some of the concepts. Tell people today that the universe is a bleak and indifferent place, that that there is no God, no meaning, no objective reality, only shifting perceptions, and they will shrug and say "yes, but so what?" I wonder if this is why Lovecraft, and more particularly his arch-daemon Cthulhu, has become almost a default secular religion of the internet. Cthulhu has become ubiquitous - you can buy t-shirts and cuddly toys. We knowingly wink and say to ourselves; "yes, we know it's all just make believe, but then, isn't everything?"
Lovecraft, and perhaps Chambers before him, fretted that if we looked too hard at reality and saw it for what it was, we would; "either go mad from the revelation, or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age". That was what Chambers and Lovecraft imagined that the true meaning of those terrible books, the King In Yellow and the Necronomicon, were - that they brushed aside our complacent veil of cosy asusmptions and laid The Truth bare for us, truth which they thought could drive us to the very brink of madness; that we are cast adrift in a godless, purposeless universe. But it didn't. The truth is, we have all seen the Yellow Sign, and - for the most part - survived the experience.
Happy New Year.
Thursday, 1 January 2015
Saturday, 8 November 2014
Funeral in Maidenhead
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it
had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark
moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed
exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the
sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the
struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big
Brother.”
George Orwell, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.As a child, I loved Gerry Anderson's puppet shows. They were part of an optimistic, science-led vision of life in the 21st century that drew on the Jet Age, the Atomic Age and the Space Age; Concorde, the Moon landings, and a future where power would be "too cheap to meter". I loved the various planes and rockets of International Rescue in Thunderbirds, bankrolled by billionaire philanthropist Jeff Tracey from his secret Pacific volcano island (a set-up which under other circumstances could easily have been a Bond villain headquarters). I loved the slightly dark and sinister world of Captain Scarlet, missing as I did at the time all of the 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' undertones and focusing instead on the cool cars and planes, the flying aircraft carrier of Cloudbase. I had a model of an Angel Interceptor on my windowsill. And I especially loved Joe 90, as it seemed (as it was no doubt supposed to) to be almost within reach even of a slightly nerdy kid in the West Midlands - a boy (in NHS glasses!) who gets to be a real secret agent courtesy of his professor father's strange machine, which can implant any knowledge in his mind from a bank of magnetic cassette tapes (hey, it was the 60s, okay?)
I hadn't seen an episode of Joe 90 for more than 30 years, but YouTube brings all our yesteryears back to life, and so in a slight 'gin and tonic just before bed' kind of mood, I found myself watching the first episode last night, and, bringing my adult knowledge and range of cultural references to it, it was a very different experience from the one I had had as a child. As a young boy, I hadn't appreciated Anderson's future set-up, with its World Government and World Intelligence Network, or that, as is revealed in the closing scene, that the USSR is now (the programme is set in what was then the distant future of 2013) allied with the West against an insidious threat from the East (ie China). But most of all, I hadn't realised just what a rip-off of the Ipcress File it all was! It seems blindingly obvious now; an agent with dorky NHS glasses and an east London accent is brainwashed by a massive, psychedelic machine. The ground-breaking film of the Ipcress File, Len Deighton's downmarket jab at James Bond, had been released in 1965, just three years before the first episode of Joe 90 hit the screens. Joe is, essentially, Harry Palmer Junior, and the BIG RAT (Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer) is just a slightly more benign rendering of the IPCRESS (Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS) process. The clincher is that the original book mentions secrets about the first Soviet atom bomb test, codenamed 'Joe 1' by the West - 'Joe' there being Josef Stalin, of course. The leap from Joe 1 to Joe 90 is not a large one. The Harry Palmer films continued with more conventional plotlines like Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, and Gerry Anderson's Maidenhead-based Century 21 Productions turned instead to alien abductions with his live action 'UFO', but for a moment at the end of the 60s there was a strange crossover between spy fiction, sci-fi and psychedelia.
Because of course Gerry Anderson, like Len Deighton, were both just tapping into a wider zeitgeist about 'brainwashing' that had occupied the late 50s and early 60s. Its origins go back much further, as the quote from Orwell at the top indicates. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1948, but Winston Smith's conditioning in the Ministry of Love is based on a kind of Pavlovian training whose research goes back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s. The idea burst into popular western consciousness during the Korean War, when some US prisoners of war were found to have cooperated with their Chinese captors, and some even defected. China at the time believed wholeheartedly in the kind of 're-education' that Orwell described just a couple of years earlier, and they described it in Mandarin as xi nao, which translates as 'mind cleansing'... or of course, 'brainwashing'.
The fear that China had stumbled across the way to 're-programme' human beings to behave as obedient automata seemed, to western governments of the time, to explain the success of an ideology like communism in infecting even the minds of dutiful US G.I.s. The idea reached its logical conclusion in 1961's The Manchurian Candidate, where a US prisoner of war from Korea is brainwashed into assassinating the US president. The fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had spent time in Russia seemed to confirm how prophetic the film had been when two years later he shot JFK. The only twist that Joe 90 makes is to try and imagine how brainwashing might be used for good, rather than evil. The psychedelic nature of the sounds and images of IPCRESS and the BIG RAT are also a nod towards the explosion of use of LSD that had occurred in the 60s, and the use of LSD as part of brainwashing experiments became very much a trope of the time, and even seriously experimented with for a while by the CIA as part of their MK-ULTRA programme.
And this is where the story turns dark, because although the psychological research behind it has been comprehensively discredited, and although LSD proved to be useless for pretty much anything other than appreciating early Pink Floyd and making you stare at the patterns in your jeans for 12 hours, brainwashing never quite went away. The allure of being able to turn your enemies into your own assets is so appealing that it is still a carrot dangled in front of intelligence agencies and military special operations groups to this day. There is, as Jon Ronson discovered in The Men Who Stare at Goats, a thread running from Big Sur and the Esalen Institute through MK-ULTRA and the bizarre psychic theories of Lt Col Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion all the way to Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo Bay, interrogation by "disorientation techniques" like sleep deprivation, loud, repetative sounds and waterboarding. What is Homeland, if not a latter-day Manchurian Candidate, where Al Qaeda captive Brody is turned from a US Marine into a deadly terrorist?
Sunday, 19 October 2014
A surfeit of peaches
"[The King] on the following night travelled to the abbey which is called Swineshead. There, as it is thought, he was seized with so much sorrow of mind at his baggage being destroyed by the waves, that being attacked by acute feverish symptoms he began to be very ill. But his very hurtful gluttony increased the troublesome nature of his illness, who, having indulged too much in eating peaches and by drinking new cider, strongly intensified and inflamed the fevered heat within him."
Roger of Wendover
To contine our tale of King John, we move now to October 19th 1216 - the day of his death (or possibly 18th or even 17th, depending on which chronicler you believe). As you may recall, John had had a difficult journey to Swineshead Abbey on the 12th, during which some of his baggage train seems to have been lost in quicksand. He spent the 13th at Swineshead, according to Royal papers, the 14th and 15th at Sleaford, and on Sunday 16th reached the Bishop of Lincoln's castle at Newark.
More problematically for John, however, he was also extremely ill, which probably accounts for the slow pace of his movement over that week. Once again, there is more than one version of this. Roger of Wendover, as quoted above, puts his night at Swineshead as the start of his troubles. Although he mentions acute feverish symptoms, he says it was exacerbated by John's "gluttony", in this case a surfeit of peaches and "new" cider. Peaches were not unkown in Europe at the time, although they were not known to be cultivated in England for ranother 60 years or so. This being October, it would presumably make the peaches pretty over-ripe, although they may have been already cooked into some dish or another. Swineshead Abbey was famous for its pears, and there are some who have suggested that that was more likely than the exotic dish of peaches, and Wendover, as he had with the accident crossing the Wash, may have been exaggerating for sake of effect. On the other hand, if anyone could get hold of peaches in England in October, it would surely be the King. Anyway, the fact that Wendover mentions John's food making him ill, and the fact that he died a week later, have led many to suspect poisoning. Shakespeare repeats the allegation that a monk at Swineshead poisoned the King in his play King John, almost as an aside. There are sources as early as the 13th century which repreat the gossip (attributed to a "Brother Simon"), although it remains one of history's imponderables. Certainly John had faced assassination plots before; he was warned of a plot to kill him in 1212, allegedly orchestrated by Eustace de Vesci and Robert fitzWalter, who later became leaders of the Barionial opposition, and by 1216 he was even more unpopular. The poisoning story grew in the telling over the centuries, acquiring details about the monk using the poison of a toad, a falling out over John wanting to sleep with the monk's sister, or a dish of pears with all but three poisoned so that the monk could partake of the same dish, and even of Brother Simon being a Templar in disguise, but these are all later accretions, and no more reliable than the story of Friar Tuck being responsible, in revenge for the killing of Maid Marion.
Our other major chronicler, Ralph of Coggershall, who seems to have been more contemporary than Roger and who writes in more understated fashion, says instead that John's illness, which he names as dusentary, began at Lynn, before he even set out for Swineshead, although he also attributes it to John's gluttony and over-indulgence in drink at a feast there. Still another writer, the unnamed Barnwell annalist, puts the onset of the illness to John's stop at Sleaford, when he learned that the garrison of Dover was negotiating surrender terms. Again, we can't be sure - only that John was clearly in pain with stomach complaints during the last week of his life, and given the exigences of medieval hygiene on campaign, even for a King, tales of dysentary are perhaps the most plausible.
Ralph also mentions one other little snippet - a tale told him by John de Savigny, a monk travelling to Newark, who arrived at night in the midst of a great gale, and who saw suspiciously heavily laden men, some of them part of John's household, leaving after John's death. It is quite likely that these were some of John's servants and possibly mercenaries escaping with valuable items, and puts a different complexion on the 'lost in the Wash' story of John's treasure. John had up to 400 Flemish knights serving him at the time, most of who made themselves scarce in the wake of his death, as well as sundry mercenary companies led by John's captains like Philip Mark and Robert de Gaugi, men who had risen by their service to John, but who were unlikely to see much favour after his death (indeed, the previous year Magna Carta had named nine mercenary captains and their retinues who were to supposed to leave England as part of the deal).
Roger of Wendover
To contine our tale of King John, we move now to October 19th 1216 - the day of his death (or possibly 18th or even 17th, depending on which chronicler you believe). As you may recall, John had had a difficult journey to Swineshead Abbey on the 12th, during which some of his baggage train seems to have been lost in quicksand. He spent the 13th at Swineshead, according to Royal papers, the 14th and 15th at Sleaford, and on Sunday 16th reached the Bishop of Lincoln's castle at Newark.
More problematically for John, however, he was also extremely ill, which probably accounts for the slow pace of his movement over that week. Once again, there is more than one version of this. Roger of Wendover, as quoted above, puts his night at Swineshead as the start of his troubles. Although he mentions acute feverish symptoms, he says it was exacerbated by John's "gluttony", in this case a surfeit of peaches and "new" cider. Peaches were not unkown in Europe at the time, although they were not known to be cultivated in England for ranother 60 years or so. This being October, it would presumably make the peaches pretty over-ripe, although they may have been already cooked into some dish or another. Swineshead Abbey was famous for its pears, and there are some who have suggested that that was more likely than the exotic dish of peaches, and Wendover, as he had with the accident crossing the Wash, may have been exaggerating for sake of effect. On the other hand, if anyone could get hold of peaches in England in October, it would surely be the King. Anyway, the fact that Wendover mentions John's food making him ill, and the fact that he died a week later, have led many to suspect poisoning. Shakespeare repeats the allegation that a monk at Swineshead poisoned the King in his play King John, almost as an aside. There are sources as early as the 13th century which repreat the gossip (attributed to a "Brother Simon"), although it remains one of history's imponderables. Certainly John had faced assassination plots before; he was warned of a plot to kill him in 1212, allegedly orchestrated by Eustace de Vesci and Robert fitzWalter, who later became leaders of the Barionial opposition, and by 1216 he was even more unpopular. The poisoning story grew in the telling over the centuries, acquiring details about the monk using the poison of a toad, a falling out over John wanting to sleep with the monk's sister, or a dish of pears with all but three poisoned so that the monk could partake of the same dish, and even of Brother Simon being a Templar in disguise, but these are all later accretions, and no more reliable than the story of Friar Tuck being responsible, in revenge for the killing of Maid Marion.
Our other major chronicler, Ralph of Coggershall, who seems to have been more contemporary than Roger and who writes in more understated fashion, says instead that John's illness, which he names as dusentary, began at Lynn, before he even set out for Swineshead, although he also attributes it to John's gluttony and over-indulgence in drink at a feast there. Still another writer, the unnamed Barnwell annalist, puts the onset of the illness to John's stop at Sleaford, when he learned that the garrison of Dover was negotiating surrender terms. Again, we can't be sure - only that John was clearly in pain with stomach complaints during the last week of his life, and given the exigences of medieval hygiene on campaign, even for a King, tales of dysentary are perhaps the most plausible.
Ralph also mentions one other little snippet - a tale told him by John de Savigny, a monk travelling to Newark, who arrived at night in the midst of a great gale, and who saw suspiciously heavily laden men, some of them part of John's household, leaving after John's death. It is quite likely that these were some of John's servants and possibly mercenaries escaping with valuable items, and puts a different complexion on the 'lost in the Wash' story of John's treasure. John had up to 400 Flemish knights serving him at the time, most of who made themselves scarce in the wake of his death, as well as sundry mercenary companies led by John's captains like Philip Mark and Robert de Gaugi, men who had risen by their service to John, but who were unlikely to see much favour after his death (indeed, the previous year Magna Carta had named nine mercenary captains and their retinues who were to supposed to leave England as part of the deal).
Sunday, 12 October 2014
Lost in the Wash
"John finally demonstrated his utter incompetence by losing the Crown and all of his clothes in the wash and then dying of a surfeit of peaches and no cider."
Sellar & Yeatman, '1066 And All That'
King John was, as we all think we know, a Bad King, and apparently a careless one too, managing to lose first Normandy, in 1204 - some people think this is why he was called 'Lackland' (Sans-terre), but that was actually due to him not having any lands assigned him by his father in his early years, at a time when he had three surviving elder brothers. After Normandy he lost his nephew Arthur (probably actually murdered earlier by John's own hand in late 1203), then during his ill-fated attempt to recover Normandy in 1214 he also lost his ancestral lands of Anjou and Poitou, and finally in October 1216, just a week before his death, he lost the Crown Jewels during an attempted crossing of the marshlands of the Wash, west of Kings Lynn. Today, October 12th, marks the 798th anniversary of that disaster.
Losing the Crown Jewels in the Wash is one of those things that everyone knows about John, and that's why Sellar and Yeatman jokingly mention it in '1066 And All That', but did he really lose the Crown Jewels, and if so, how? Our evidence of this comes from two contemporary chroniclers; Abbott Ralph of Coggeshall, in Essex, and Roger of Wendover, one of the keepers of the great chronicle of St Albans Abbey. Ralph's note, in his Chronicon Anglicanum, reads:
"The greatest distress troubled him, because on that journey [from Lynn] he had lost his chapel with his relics, and some of his pack horses with diverse household effects at the Wellstream, and many members of his household were submerged in the waters of the sea, and sucked into the quicksand there, because they had set out incautiously and hastily before the tide had receded."
Roger of Wendover puts it as:
"Then, heading for the north, he lost, by an unexpected accident, all the wagons, carts and pack horses, with the treasures, precious vessels, and all the other things which he cherished with special care; for the ground was opened in the midst of the waves, and bottomless whirlpools engulfed everything, together with men and horses, so that not a single foot-soldier got away to bear tidings of the disaster to the king. The king, however, barely escaping with his army, spent the following night at the abbey called Swinehead."
Sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? And yet and yet, neither of them actually mention the loss of the Royal coronation regalia (which you would have thought would be something of a big deal), and John himself makes no mention of the incident at all. John was travelling with his army, probably some 3,000 men, plus their logistical 'tail' of wagons, and no doubt various funds and valuable items, and of course the nucleus of Royal administration - although the country was in civil war, he had to keep running it, and there are frequent dispatches arriving and being sent which are preserved in the Royal patent rolls - the scribes' version of Hansard. We know from letters that John sent that he was at the major seaport of King's Lynn (then just called Lynn) on the 11th of October, and that he was at the small fishing port at Wisbech on the 12th, where he ordered a ship to take some 'goods and merchandise' - possibly supplies for the army - on to Grimsby, and that he had reached the abbey at Swineshead, southwest of Boston, some 15-20 miles away (the coastline is uncertain at that time and has receded since) by nightfall on the same day. This doesn't sound like a man burdened by losing half his army and most of his baggage train to the waves and barely escaping with his life. It's also not clear why it would matter whether anyone escaped to tell John, as Roger puts it, if the King had been there personally. It's also notable that Roger of Wendover's account is rather more apocalyptic, or perhaps Biblical, than Ralph's own rather understated and credible retelling. Is there a touch of God's vengeance upon Pharaoh and his army at the Red Sea in Roger's version?
Perhaps one of the strongest arguments in favour of some kind of accident is one of absence; the crown and regalia were certainly missing when John's son Henry III was crowned in Gloucester on October 28th - the boy king had to make do with one of his mother's old bracelets as a diadem. The Royal regalia and a variety of other gifts John had received during his reign were also still missing during an inventory taken in 1220, so they hadn't just not yet arrived at Gloucester. And after all, this was the coronation of a 9 year-old boy during a civil war, with a rival claimant already crowned at Westminster - it would be difficult to imagine a time at which symbols of Royal authority like the crown would have been more important to display in public, so we must conclude that they had gone missing. This led early historians to link the account of being caught by quicksands in the Wash with the absence of the Crown Jewels. But is that the best explanation? We also know that John had died - most likely from the dysentary that had been plaguing him for a couple of weeks - only a week after crossing the Wash on October 19th at Newark, just 20 miles away. At that time, Sidney Painter has calculated that around 75% of John's barons were in open revolt. Prince Louis, the French Dauphin, who had been invited over by the baronial party, controlled London and most of the southeast (with a few important exceptions like Dover Castle, in which a loyalist garrison was still holding out) and was in alliance with the Welsh and Scots. The History of William the Marshall, who became Regent on October 29th, paints a bleak picture of Royal fortunes at the time. Marshall's own household suggests he should decline the job and retire to Ireland, and Marshall himself admits tearfully that; "I have embarked upon an open sea.. from which it is a miracle if [a man] reaches port and a safe haven." Such is the measure of the man that he takes the seemingly impossible task anyway, out of loyalty to the Plantagenets, but as the History tells us, under similarly difficult circumstances in 1189, the still warm body of Henry II, John's father, had been stripped of its jewels and finery by his own fleeing servants. If John did have the Crown Jewels with him - which is by no means certain in itself, but given the state of the country at the time not a bad hypothesis - it is not so very hard to believe that John's gold and jewels mysteriously 'vanished' in much the same way as his father's had done. We needn't invoke some of the conspiracy theories that have been postulated since about a plot to murder John and steal the Crown Jewels, or an attempt by John at explaining away how he had pawned the Jewels to foreign merchants to raise cash for his struggle for power. Simple greed and fear among John's largely mercenary army would have done the job.
Ralph's account does sound quite credible, and it may very well be that there had been a mishap during October 12th by part of John's baggage train during its crossing of the Wisbech estuary which had carried away part of it. Perhaps, indeed, as Ralph of Coggeshall puts it, including some pack horses bearing church plate and relics from the Royal chapel. We know that Roger of Wendover had seen Ralph's chronicle (which ends in 1218 with Ralph's death) and in various places he re-hashes parts of it. This may be another incident which he has borrowed and elaborated upon, with his whirlpools and swept away foot soldiers, to draw a Biblical parallel with Pharaoh. And it is probably true that John's treasures and much of his army did indeed go missing at this time, but we needn't invoke natural disaster for that, merely desertion and self-preservation in the face of what probably seemed - after the King's death - like a lost cause.
So did John lose the Crown Jewels in the Wash? It's possible, but no more than that. No-one mentioned it at the time, and while some items may well have ended up in the sinking sands, given the chaos that England was in at the time, a more likely explanation is just that they were appropriated by various servants, courtiers and mercenaries after his death, never to be seen again.
A curious footnote is that according to Gerald of Wales, during the reign of Henry II, graves purporting to be King Arthur and Guinevere had been unearthed at Glastonbury Abbey. This was almost certainly a put-up job by the monks, designed to flatter Henry and gain kudos for Glastonbury, but among the artifacts recovered was - allegedly - Arthur's sword, Excalibur. "Excalibur" most likely travelled with the Royal regalia, and so may also have been part of the consignment lost in the Wash or subsequently looted (although another story has Richard I giving it away as a gift to the King of Sicily, which may show that Richard was, shall we say, not convinced about its provenance).
Sellar & Yeatman, '1066 And All That'
King John was, as we all think we know, a Bad King, and apparently a careless one too, managing to lose first Normandy, in 1204 - some people think this is why he was called 'Lackland' (Sans-terre), but that was actually due to him not having any lands assigned him by his father in his early years, at a time when he had three surviving elder brothers. After Normandy he lost his nephew Arthur (probably actually murdered earlier by John's own hand in late 1203), then during his ill-fated attempt to recover Normandy in 1214 he also lost his ancestral lands of Anjou and Poitou, and finally in October 1216, just a week before his death, he lost the Crown Jewels during an attempted crossing of the marshlands of the Wash, west of Kings Lynn. Today, October 12th, marks the 798th anniversary of that disaster.
Losing the Crown Jewels in the Wash is one of those things that everyone knows about John, and that's why Sellar and Yeatman jokingly mention it in '1066 And All That', but did he really lose the Crown Jewels, and if so, how? Our evidence of this comes from two contemporary chroniclers; Abbott Ralph of Coggeshall, in Essex, and Roger of Wendover, one of the keepers of the great chronicle of St Albans Abbey. Ralph's note, in his Chronicon Anglicanum, reads:
"The greatest distress troubled him, because on that journey [from Lynn] he had lost his chapel with his relics, and some of his pack horses with diverse household effects at the Wellstream, and many members of his household were submerged in the waters of the sea, and sucked into the quicksand there, because they had set out incautiously and hastily before the tide had receded."
Roger of Wendover puts it as:
"Then, heading for the north, he lost, by an unexpected accident, all the wagons, carts and pack horses, with the treasures, precious vessels, and all the other things which he cherished with special care; for the ground was opened in the midst of the waves, and bottomless whirlpools engulfed everything, together with men and horses, so that not a single foot-soldier got away to bear tidings of the disaster to the king. The king, however, barely escaping with his army, spent the following night at the abbey called Swinehead."
Sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? And yet and yet, neither of them actually mention the loss of the Royal coronation regalia (which you would have thought would be something of a big deal), and John himself makes no mention of the incident at all. John was travelling with his army, probably some 3,000 men, plus their logistical 'tail' of wagons, and no doubt various funds and valuable items, and of course the nucleus of Royal administration - although the country was in civil war, he had to keep running it, and there are frequent dispatches arriving and being sent which are preserved in the Royal patent rolls - the scribes' version of Hansard. We know from letters that John sent that he was at the major seaport of King's Lynn (then just called Lynn) on the 11th of October, and that he was at the small fishing port at Wisbech on the 12th, where he ordered a ship to take some 'goods and merchandise' - possibly supplies for the army - on to Grimsby, and that he had reached the abbey at Swineshead, southwest of Boston, some 15-20 miles away (the coastline is uncertain at that time and has receded since) by nightfall on the same day. This doesn't sound like a man burdened by losing half his army and most of his baggage train to the waves and barely escaping with his life. It's also not clear why it would matter whether anyone escaped to tell John, as Roger puts it, if the King had been there personally. It's also notable that Roger of Wendover's account is rather more apocalyptic, or perhaps Biblical, than Ralph's own rather understated and credible retelling. Is there a touch of God's vengeance upon Pharaoh and his army at the Red Sea in Roger's version?
Perhaps one of the strongest arguments in favour of some kind of accident is one of absence; the crown and regalia were certainly missing when John's son Henry III was crowned in Gloucester on October 28th - the boy king had to make do with one of his mother's old bracelets as a diadem. The Royal regalia and a variety of other gifts John had received during his reign were also still missing during an inventory taken in 1220, so they hadn't just not yet arrived at Gloucester. And after all, this was the coronation of a 9 year-old boy during a civil war, with a rival claimant already crowned at Westminster - it would be difficult to imagine a time at which symbols of Royal authority like the crown would have been more important to display in public, so we must conclude that they had gone missing. This led early historians to link the account of being caught by quicksands in the Wash with the absence of the Crown Jewels. But is that the best explanation? We also know that John had died - most likely from the dysentary that had been plaguing him for a couple of weeks - only a week after crossing the Wash on October 19th at Newark, just 20 miles away. At that time, Sidney Painter has calculated that around 75% of John's barons were in open revolt. Prince Louis, the French Dauphin, who had been invited over by the baronial party, controlled London and most of the southeast (with a few important exceptions like Dover Castle, in which a loyalist garrison was still holding out) and was in alliance with the Welsh and Scots. The History of William the Marshall, who became Regent on October 29th, paints a bleak picture of Royal fortunes at the time. Marshall's own household suggests he should decline the job and retire to Ireland, and Marshall himself admits tearfully that; "I have embarked upon an open sea.. from which it is a miracle if [a man] reaches port and a safe haven." Such is the measure of the man that he takes the seemingly impossible task anyway, out of loyalty to the Plantagenets, but as the History tells us, under similarly difficult circumstances in 1189, the still warm body of Henry II, John's father, had been stripped of its jewels and finery by his own fleeing servants. If John did have the Crown Jewels with him - which is by no means certain in itself, but given the state of the country at the time not a bad hypothesis - it is not so very hard to believe that John's gold and jewels mysteriously 'vanished' in much the same way as his father's had done. We needn't invoke some of the conspiracy theories that have been postulated since about a plot to murder John and steal the Crown Jewels, or an attempt by John at explaining away how he had pawned the Jewels to foreign merchants to raise cash for his struggle for power. Simple greed and fear among John's largely mercenary army would have done the job.
Ralph's account does sound quite credible, and it may very well be that there had been a mishap during October 12th by part of John's baggage train during its crossing of the Wisbech estuary which had carried away part of it. Perhaps, indeed, as Ralph of Coggeshall puts it, including some pack horses bearing church plate and relics from the Royal chapel. We know that Roger of Wendover had seen Ralph's chronicle (which ends in 1218 with Ralph's death) and in various places he re-hashes parts of it. This may be another incident which he has borrowed and elaborated upon, with his whirlpools and swept away foot soldiers, to draw a Biblical parallel with Pharaoh. And it is probably true that John's treasures and much of his army did indeed go missing at this time, but we needn't invoke natural disaster for that, merely desertion and self-preservation in the face of what probably seemed - after the King's death - like a lost cause.
So did John lose the Crown Jewels in the Wash? It's possible, but no more than that. No-one mentioned it at the time, and while some items may well have ended up in the sinking sands, given the chaos that England was in at the time, a more likely explanation is just that they were appropriated by various servants, courtiers and mercenaries after his death, never to be seen again.
A curious footnote is that according to Gerald of Wales, during the reign of Henry II, graves purporting to be King Arthur and Guinevere had been unearthed at Glastonbury Abbey. This was almost certainly a put-up job by the monks, designed to flatter Henry and gain kudos for Glastonbury, but among the artifacts recovered was - allegedly - Arthur's sword, Excalibur. "Excalibur" most likely travelled with the Royal regalia, and so may also have been part of the consignment lost in the Wash or subsequently looted (although another story has Richard I giving it away as a gift to the King of Sicily, which may show that Richard was, shall we say, not convinced about its provenance).
Friday, 19 September 2014
Parnell
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
"Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone."
William Butler Yeats, 'Parnell'
So, the United Kingdom endures, although it nearly didn't. Independence is one of those strange and fickle things. It's seductive, because you can hold up a blank sheet of paper, and like one of those vacuous motivational posters or an aspirational advert, you can say: "your dreams here", "just imagine", "be all you can be", "just do it" etc etc. That way you can be all things to all people, and handwave away the potential problems as "not being positive enough". But it also dodges some of the harsher realities of life post-independence, which Yeats alludes to in the above poem. Charles Stuart Parnell was the charismatic Irish independence campaigner who nearly achieved Home Rule for Ireland in the 1880s - perhaps the Alex Salmond of his day, or at least the Donald Dewar. But when Irish independence was finally achieved, in 1922 (25 years after Parnell's death), it proved to be a traumatic and dislocating time; civil war was followed by partition, the great depression and a trade war with the UK in the early 30s. Yeats wrote his little two-line poem in 1937, and it's portrayed as a warning from the past about the disillusionment that inevitably follows independence; Parnell is cautioning a road mender breaking stones by the side of the road that he'll still be doing his poorly paid and back-breaking job whatever happens to the country's governance. This was the flip side that the Yes campaign in Scotland tried to brush aside in favour of the promise of the clean sheet of paper; no, not a civil war, but that you'll still get a government that you disagree fundamentally with 50% of the time, that EU accession would likely have been protracted and painful, that taxes would probably have to go up or benefits be cut in order to shore up Scottish monetary reserves - an independant Scotland, as the Irish Free State did in the early 20s before it introduced its own (Sterling-pegged) currency in 1926, would probably be using Sterling but without a formal monetary union, at the mercy of Bank of England rate setting. This was not just "fearmongering" but real and very serious issues that it suited the Yes campaign not to engage with.
It puts me in mind of UKIP, which likes to wave a similar magic wand over UK membership (or otherwise) of the EU. It was quite amusing to see Nigel Farage making all of the arguments in favour of the Scots staying in the Union that he uses against the UK doing so in Europe. Like the SNP, UKIP has some good points to make about democratic deficit. But like the SNP, it doesn't really have any answers beyond walking away and hoping for the best. A lot of the Scottish Yes vote came, I suspect, not from a romantic yearning about "A Nation Once More" and the re-creation of a state that was abolished by mutual consent (for all of the 'Parcel of Rogues' grumbling) in 1707, but from a Scottish, largely socialist disillusionment with the neoliberalism that has become the default option for successive British governments, both Labour and Conservative. And UKIP likewise depends on a southern English neoliberalism at odds with the generally centre-left welfare-ist and 'green' tone of European politics. They're assisted by the fact that the three main British political parties certainly haven't engaged their own core voters - the Tories have a leader who understands that elections are won on the centre ground, but who is thereby far too liberal for the tastes of most of his party, the Liberals have discovered that the kind of coalition politics they have been pushing for for decades actually involves messy compromises in real life and occasionally having to backtrack on campaign promises, and Labour have somehow managed to pick the blandest leader I can ever recall in an attempt to paper over the Blairite-Brownite cracks.The contrast between Milliband's panicked exit from a scrum of Yes supporters and Brown's defiant speech in favour of the union last week was a very striking one. God knows Brown has his myriad faults, but he wasn't the strange personality vacuum that is Ed Milliband.
So now where? Probably the optimal solution for the UK, as it is for Europe, is more devolution of powers from the centre. The telling difference, I suppose, is that the UK seems up for a more federal constitution at the moment, but in spite of the warning shots delivered by the past round of European elections and the chaos caused by the euro's straightjacket on Mediterranean economies, I'm not sure that Brussels is just yet. The next election, and the next parliament, promises to be a very interesting one.
"Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone."
William Butler Yeats, 'Parnell'
So, the United Kingdom endures, although it nearly didn't. Independence is one of those strange and fickle things. It's seductive, because you can hold up a blank sheet of paper, and like one of those vacuous motivational posters or an aspirational advert, you can say: "your dreams here", "just imagine", "be all you can be", "just do it" etc etc. That way you can be all things to all people, and handwave away the potential problems as "not being positive enough". But it also dodges some of the harsher realities of life post-independence, which Yeats alludes to in the above poem. Charles Stuart Parnell was the charismatic Irish independence campaigner who nearly achieved Home Rule for Ireland in the 1880s - perhaps the Alex Salmond of his day, or at least the Donald Dewar. But when Irish independence was finally achieved, in 1922 (25 years after Parnell's death), it proved to be a traumatic and dislocating time; civil war was followed by partition, the great depression and a trade war with the UK in the early 30s. Yeats wrote his little two-line poem in 1937, and it's portrayed as a warning from the past about the disillusionment that inevitably follows independence; Parnell is cautioning a road mender breaking stones by the side of the road that he'll still be doing his poorly paid and back-breaking job whatever happens to the country's governance. This was the flip side that the Yes campaign in Scotland tried to brush aside in favour of the promise of the clean sheet of paper; no, not a civil war, but that you'll still get a government that you disagree fundamentally with 50% of the time, that EU accession would likely have been protracted and painful, that taxes would probably have to go up or benefits be cut in order to shore up Scottish monetary reserves - an independant Scotland, as the Irish Free State did in the early 20s before it introduced its own (Sterling-pegged) currency in 1926, would probably be using Sterling but without a formal monetary union, at the mercy of Bank of England rate setting. This was not just "fearmongering" but real and very serious issues that it suited the Yes campaign not to engage with.
It puts me in mind of UKIP, which likes to wave a similar magic wand over UK membership (or otherwise) of the EU. It was quite amusing to see Nigel Farage making all of the arguments in favour of the Scots staying in the Union that he uses against the UK doing so in Europe. Like the SNP, UKIP has some good points to make about democratic deficit. But like the SNP, it doesn't really have any answers beyond walking away and hoping for the best. A lot of the Scottish Yes vote came, I suspect, not from a romantic yearning about "A Nation Once More" and the re-creation of a state that was abolished by mutual consent (for all of the 'Parcel of Rogues' grumbling) in 1707, but from a Scottish, largely socialist disillusionment with the neoliberalism that has become the default option for successive British governments, both Labour and Conservative. And UKIP likewise depends on a southern English neoliberalism at odds with the generally centre-left welfare-ist and 'green' tone of European politics. They're assisted by the fact that the three main British political parties certainly haven't engaged their own core voters - the Tories have a leader who understands that elections are won on the centre ground, but who is thereby far too liberal for the tastes of most of his party, the Liberals have discovered that the kind of coalition politics they have been pushing for for decades actually involves messy compromises in real life and occasionally having to backtrack on campaign promises, and Labour have somehow managed to pick the blandest leader I can ever recall in an attempt to paper over the Blairite-Brownite cracks.The contrast between Milliband's panicked exit from a scrum of Yes supporters and Brown's defiant speech in favour of the union last week was a very striking one. God knows Brown has his myriad faults, but he wasn't the strange personality vacuum that is Ed Milliband.
So now where? Probably the optimal solution for the UK, as it is for Europe, is more devolution of powers from the centre. The telling difference, I suppose, is that the UK seems up for a more federal constitution at the moment, but in spite of the warning shots delivered by the past round of European elections and the chaos caused by the euro's straightjacket on Mediterranean economies, I'm not sure that Brussels is just yet. The next election, and the next parliament, promises to be a very interesting one.
Thursday, 4 September 2014
The Ronseal Psycho
I went on a trip around the Wye Valley with my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago. It was very pleasant - lots of nice rolling green scenery and historic towns, old inns and pubs and the like. One day we stayed in Hay on Wye - she shares my love of books and yet had never been to the country's second hand bookshop capital. So of course I ended up buying a few books - just musty paperbacks of a certain age. All four were, in some way connected with my love of early 20th century 'weird fiction' and the HP Lovecraft writing circle; two Robert E Howard, one Ramsey Campbell, and one Robert Bloch. All were part of Lovecraft's circle of correspondents; Campbell was, like Stephen King, a conscious imitator of Lovecraft, albeit filtered through a childhood on the wrong side of the tracks in Liverpool. Bloch was arguably the most talented of the circle and of course later went on to find fame and fortune in Hollywood by writing 'Psycho'.
The Bloch book I picked up, American Gothic, was not one I knew anything about, but just his name on the cover was sufficient. I've finally got around to reading it in the past week, and it's an interesting read. Set in 1893 during the Chicago World's Fair, it concerns a pharmacist with a shady past, G. Gordon Gregg, who has managed to have built for himself a weird 'castle' on the fringes of the fair, with numerous hidden rooms and passages that he has disguised by getting several different builders to work on the project and keeping the full plans to himself. He manages a succession of inventively grisly murders, mainly of heiresses for insurance money, and is foiled only when a local newspaper reporter, Crystal, takes an interest in him via her insurance clerk fiancee, and starts to unravel his past and crimes. Of course she nearly falls for Gregg's charms herself, and is at one point only narrowly rescued.
Well, the book is called 'American Gothic', and like the Ronseal advertisements, it certainly "does what it says on the tin". There is a haze of Edgar Allen Poe and his 'Murders in the Rue Morgue', a dash of 'Phantom of the Opera', and the weird castle folly is about as Gothic a setting as you could wish for, but there is also a large dose of American can-do pioneer spirit, and 'modern' devices like electricity, the telegraph and new chemical compounds. The trope - a mad doctor preying on gullible young women - in some way feels well worn - the staple of a dozen Hammer films, from House of Wax to the Abominable Dr Phibes. Indeed, finally, at one point the book's sheer preposterousness exhausted my patience, and I was ready to set it aside, but then, as I Googled others' opinons of the book, I discovered to my great surprise that it was, in fact, all - or very nearly all - absolutely true...
Yes, true. What Bloch was writing was not fiction, but a fictionalised life of a real American serial killer; H. H. Holmes. The weird castle, the multiple builders (some of whom he also murdered), the disappearing heiresseses and insurance scams - all true. Bloch, who had a lifelong fascination with serial killers, was writing the book in 1974, fourteen years after 'Psycho', and may have come across Holmes while researching his masterpiece (itself a fictionalised treatment of serial killer Ed Gein).
I was, it must be said, flabbergasted that the things about the narrative that had frustrated me had turned out to be the true ones. I guess that Holmes, like another of Bloch's obsessions Jack the Ripper, had existed just at the end of the period when it was possible to get away with that kind of thing, when uncertain communications and the difficulty in cross-correlating files and evidence between different police forces allowed criminals to play with what we would now call identity fraud, when a forged signature and a confederate willing to answer a telephone were enough to bamboozle an insurance company. The capture of Dr Crippen in 1910, after a radio message overtook him on his escape by fast ship to America, marked the start of a new era, when technology could outpace criminals and fraudsters in a way that had not been possible beforehand. Holmes is known to have killed 27 people, but may plausibly have murdered as many as one hundred. The only real anachronism in the book is Crystal, the spunky heroine, who is far more a creation of the 1970s (via His Girl Friday) than the 1890s.
And talking of anachronisms, I guess that buying a yellowing paperback from a heaving shelf of second hand books is something of that these days too. But how is the digital age ever going to duplicate that thrill of the serendipitous find that such places - dying as they may be - are able to provide? All the internet knows how to offer us is more of the same. People who purchased this book also liked... Will we ever find books like American Gothic that are out of print but not out of copyright, not scanned by Google's or Amazon's ever-widening maw, but simply lying on a few shelves around the world, waiting to be discovered?
The Bloch book I picked up, American Gothic, was not one I knew anything about, but just his name on the cover was sufficient. I've finally got around to reading it in the past week, and it's an interesting read. Set in 1893 during the Chicago World's Fair, it concerns a pharmacist with a shady past, G. Gordon Gregg, who has managed to have built for himself a weird 'castle' on the fringes of the fair, with numerous hidden rooms and passages that he has disguised by getting several different builders to work on the project and keeping the full plans to himself. He manages a succession of inventively grisly murders, mainly of heiresses for insurance money, and is foiled only when a local newspaper reporter, Crystal, takes an interest in him via her insurance clerk fiancee, and starts to unravel his past and crimes. Of course she nearly falls for Gregg's charms herself, and is at one point only narrowly rescued.
Well, the book is called 'American Gothic', and like the Ronseal advertisements, it certainly "does what it says on the tin". There is a haze of Edgar Allen Poe and his 'Murders in the Rue Morgue', a dash of 'Phantom of the Opera', and the weird castle folly is about as Gothic a setting as you could wish for, but there is also a large dose of American can-do pioneer spirit, and 'modern' devices like electricity, the telegraph and new chemical compounds. The trope - a mad doctor preying on gullible young women - in some way feels well worn - the staple of a dozen Hammer films, from House of Wax to the Abominable Dr Phibes. Indeed, finally, at one point the book's sheer preposterousness exhausted my patience, and I was ready to set it aside, but then, as I Googled others' opinons of the book, I discovered to my great surprise that it was, in fact, all - or very nearly all - absolutely true...
Yes, true. What Bloch was writing was not fiction, but a fictionalised life of a real American serial killer; H. H. Holmes. The weird castle, the multiple builders (some of whom he also murdered), the disappearing heiresseses and insurance scams - all true. Bloch, who had a lifelong fascination with serial killers, was writing the book in 1974, fourteen years after 'Psycho', and may have come across Holmes while researching his masterpiece (itself a fictionalised treatment of serial killer Ed Gein).
I was, it must be said, flabbergasted that the things about the narrative that had frustrated me had turned out to be the true ones. I guess that Holmes, like another of Bloch's obsessions Jack the Ripper, had existed just at the end of the period when it was possible to get away with that kind of thing, when uncertain communications and the difficulty in cross-correlating files and evidence between different police forces allowed criminals to play with what we would now call identity fraud, when a forged signature and a confederate willing to answer a telephone were enough to bamboozle an insurance company. The capture of Dr Crippen in 1910, after a radio message overtook him on his escape by fast ship to America, marked the start of a new era, when technology could outpace criminals and fraudsters in a way that had not been possible beforehand. Holmes is known to have killed 27 people, but may plausibly have murdered as many as one hundred. The only real anachronism in the book is Crystal, the spunky heroine, who is far more a creation of the 1970s (via His Girl Friday) than the 1890s.
And talking of anachronisms, I guess that buying a yellowing paperback from a heaving shelf of second hand books is something of that these days too. But how is the digital age ever going to duplicate that thrill of the serendipitous find that such places - dying as they may be - are able to provide? All the internet knows how to offer us is more of the same. People who purchased this book also liked... Will we ever find books like American Gothic that are out of print but not out of copyright, not scanned by Google's or Amazon's ever-widening maw, but simply lying on a few shelves around the world, waiting to be discovered?
Thursday, 26 June 2014
How soon is now?
In my quest to read Every Time Travel Story Ever(TM), I recently passed through Greg Benford's Timescape. I quite enjoyed it, certainly enough to actually engage me to the point where I had to read the final few chapters just to see what happened, which is actually quite rare in books these days, but at the end of it I felt that sensation, like when you've enjoyed something like a MacDonalds or a whole bottle of wine, but you know at the end of it that it hasn't actually been a very satisfying experience. Somehow, in spite of the addictive quality that kept you turning the pages, there's something empty about the whole thing - something missing.
The book is about a future time - in this case 1998 (the book was written in 1980) managing to send messages back to the past, in this case 1962/3. The 1998 world is centred around a research project in Cambridge, UK and the 1962 world around various physics labs in southern California. Greg Benford is a physics professor in southern California, and so there's no prizes for guessing which bits come across as the most well realised, although actually I quite enjoyed his future England as well. The 1998 world is in the grip of one of those eco-catastrophes that used to occasionally break the surface during the 80s, when we could tear our attention away from The Bomb, like Ben Elton's Stark, and Alternative 3. In fact, there is something very old fashioned about the futuristic Britain in Timescape, even taking into account that it takes place among upper middle class suburbia, academia and civil servants. There's something very 1950s, John Wyndham, Quatermass-like about this slow apocalypse, although I also suppose that the idea of Britain ravaged by social disputes, power rationing and a general feeling of impending chaos will be familiar to anyone who lived here during the 1970s. Still, for all of his actually fairly credible nods towards future technology, bookshops closing because everyone does everything on screens and so on, it does all feel a bit twee.
The physics is quite well done, moderately interesting, probably quite scientifically valid (at the time) - he is a physics professor after all. But the book is let down by the characters and their relationships. Maybe we live in a different era now, but they all feel a bit perfunctory, and the women especially so - none of them have any agency within the plot. In spite of this I came to empathise with some of the characters by the end - even uptight 60s physicist Gordon Bernstein (with a New York Jewish mother straight out of central casting by way of Woody Allen), who does the right thing by his grad student (if not his free love, free thinking Californian girlfriend) and whose dogged insistence that the messages are from the future kills his career and social life. I also liked Markham, the brilliant but oblivious uptime physicist who works it all out just too late, and Peterson, the philandering Man from the Ministry who knows it's all going to end badly and who is determined to have a good time while there's enough of a world to have a good time in.
But the problem with the resolution of the book concerns its central paradox. If you're from a doomed future trying to tell an unsuspecting past about the mistakes you've made, then what possible effect can you have? If you successfully changed the past then you wouldn't be in this situation now, so clearly you failed. It's the Grandfather Paradox writ large. Benford devotes a lot of time to theories about tachyons and standing waves and interference effects, but even as he builds the tension, he goes for the obvious solution, and it was quite a disappointment as I saw it coming several miles away - although this may be as much a symptom that I've been reading too much time travel fiction recently as anything else. Still, as Gordon's Californian girlfriend might say, 'I was like, yah, multiple parallel worlds - like, duhhh!' Also, weirdly, in the light of the fact that I read Stephen King's present-day-to-1963 time travel story 11-22-63 recently, he makes the Kennedy Assassination one of the big nexus points (or at least the point where it becomes obvious you're now in a parallel past).
You know, I really do have to finish The Once And Future King (Uh Huh Huh) soon.
The book is about a future time - in this case 1998 (the book was written in 1980) managing to send messages back to the past, in this case 1962/3. The 1998 world is centred around a research project in Cambridge, UK and the 1962 world around various physics labs in southern California. Greg Benford is a physics professor in southern California, and so there's no prizes for guessing which bits come across as the most well realised, although actually I quite enjoyed his future England as well. The 1998 world is in the grip of one of those eco-catastrophes that used to occasionally break the surface during the 80s, when we could tear our attention away from The Bomb, like Ben Elton's Stark, and Alternative 3. In fact, there is something very old fashioned about the futuristic Britain in Timescape, even taking into account that it takes place among upper middle class suburbia, academia and civil servants. There's something very 1950s, John Wyndham, Quatermass-like about this slow apocalypse, although I also suppose that the idea of Britain ravaged by social disputes, power rationing and a general feeling of impending chaos will be familiar to anyone who lived here during the 1970s. Still, for all of his actually fairly credible nods towards future technology, bookshops closing because everyone does everything on screens and so on, it does all feel a bit twee.
The physics is quite well done, moderately interesting, probably quite scientifically valid (at the time) - he is a physics professor after all. But the book is let down by the characters and their relationships. Maybe we live in a different era now, but they all feel a bit perfunctory, and the women especially so - none of them have any agency within the plot. In spite of this I came to empathise with some of the characters by the end - even uptight 60s physicist Gordon Bernstein (with a New York Jewish mother straight out of central casting by way of Woody Allen), who does the right thing by his grad student (if not his free love, free thinking Californian girlfriend) and whose dogged insistence that the messages are from the future kills his career and social life. I also liked Markham, the brilliant but oblivious uptime physicist who works it all out just too late, and Peterson, the philandering Man from the Ministry who knows it's all going to end badly and who is determined to have a good time while there's enough of a world to have a good time in.
But the problem with the resolution of the book concerns its central paradox. If you're from a doomed future trying to tell an unsuspecting past about the mistakes you've made, then what possible effect can you have? If you successfully changed the past then you wouldn't be in this situation now, so clearly you failed. It's the Grandfather Paradox writ large. Benford devotes a lot of time to theories about tachyons and standing waves and interference effects, but even as he builds the tension, he goes for the obvious solution, and it was quite a disappointment as I saw it coming several miles away - although this may be as much a symptom that I've been reading too much time travel fiction recently as anything else. Still, as Gordon's Californian girlfriend might say, 'I was like, yah, multiple parallel worlds - like, duhhh!' Also, weirdly, in the light of the fact that I read Stephen King's present-day-to-1963 time travel story 11-22-63 recently, he makes the Kennedy Assassination one of the big nexus points (or at least the point where it becomes obvious you're now in a parallel past).
You know, I really do have to finish The Once And Future King (Uh Huh Huh) soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)