In October and November last year, ‘er indoors and I travelled to Japan. We stayed in Tokyo, Kyoto and Kanazawa, and travelled to Hiroshima too. It was an absolutely fascinating trip, during which most of my preconceptions about the country were challenged, and I felt that I learned a lot, but also that there was so much more to learn. So, partly in order to debrief myself and try to make sense of what we experienced, I thought I would start a series of posts focusing on the country and our encounter with it.
Part of the preparation we did was to read a fascinating book by a Cambridge academic, Alan Macfarlane, which disarmingly starts with a confession that he feels he can never completely understand Japan, and that the “Alice in Wonderland” connotations of his title are intentional: “Japan is a one-way mirror out of which the Japanese can look, but which outsiders cannot look into. It also seems to be a world that even those inside the mirror find difficult to understand.”
That was quite encouraging in a way – if a distinguished anthropologist, who had visited Japan on numerous occasions over a twenty-year period felt like this, then the pressure was off: we just needed to enjoy the experience. And we did.
Our first stop was the Japan Rail office at Narita airport, where we were to pick up our rail passes. This was a valuable lesson in Japanese mores. First, we had ordered and paid for the two-week pass online. A courier had delivered two rather flimsy chitties, which we were to present at the office. We turned up, and were met by a charming woman, who asked us to fill in a form, in which we had to give all the information we had already given online. There seemed to be no point to this: our details were surely in the system, but here, as elsewhere, we found that Japan creates jobs for its people, and this woman’s job was to meet and greet, and sort out forms for tourists like us. This was our first taste of the Japanese fondness for bureaucracy and paperwork. Next, at the desk, another lovely young woman made, very deftly, the passes – stout card, with our details in ink – and then arranged, with astonishing speed and efficiency, a series of reservations for the Shinkansen bullet trains we were going to use to travel around, even making sure we had seats on the correct side to view Mount Fuji. More on the trains in a later post.
We travelled to our hotel in the business district of Tokyo, Shinjuku, and marvelled at the size of the station, and the huge numbers of people it contained – but also at the sense of calm that prevailed. In big stations in the UK, there’s always that sense of chaos just beneath the surface. Here, all was serene. At the hotel, another example of job creation: instead of just going to the desk, three or four people were employed to filter you to the next available desk clerk. Again, everything was done with a smile and with great efficiency. Our room was one with everything the modern traveller might need, but, because it was a ‘traditional’ room, with tatami matting, it felt as if we were staying in some old Samurai dwelling, rather than on the top floor of a chic hotel.
On the street outside the hotel, some work was being done on the road, so a section was coned off – except cones weren’t used. Instead, this:
Yes, the all-purpose Hello Kitty road traffic control device.
We spent just one day in Tokyo before visiting friends in Fussa, a small town to the west of the centre of the sprawling conurbation. But we returned at the end of the holiday, so more on Tokyo later. That weekend we travelled with our friends to see Mount Fuji. On a brilliant sunny day, we enjoyed some fantastic views, and also had our first temple experience. According to Japan-Guide.com, “clouds and poor visibility often block the view of Mount Fuji, and you have to consider yourself lucky if you get a clear view of the mountain.” So we can count ourselves lucky to have seen it like this, from Lake Kawaguchiko:
At the foot of the climbing trails up the mountain stand a series of shrines. We visited the Kitaguchihongu shrine where we saw our first glimpse of traditional dress:
Very quickly, the ultra-modern world of Tokyo seemed to fade away, to be replaced by something much more rooted in the past. Though that, as we shall see, was something of an illusion as well.
Spy novels have a long pedigree in English. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) can probably be counted the first in the genre. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, published four years earlier, is really a thriller, establishing the John Buchan style: plucky Brit gentleman adventurer foils dastardly plot by fiendish foreigners, a template taken up enthusiastically by everyone from Agatha Christie in her first Tommy and Tuppence adventure The Secret Adversary (1922) to the Bulldog Drummond series by Sapper (1920-1937). The spy novel proper comes of age with Eric Ambler’s atmospheric The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), made into a memorable film in 1944. In this novel and others, such as Journey into Fear (1940) and The Light of Day (1962), Ambler perfected a grittily realistic style, in which the hero is often amateurishly inadequate, but manages to achieve some sort of victory at the end. The moral universe of these novels is far removed from the complacent certainties of Buchan and Christie: here, the characters’ motivations are ambivalent, and their loyalties never certain. Peter Lewis, Ambler’s biographer, wrote that “Ambler raised the thriller from the subliterary depths, showing that the genre and good prose were not incompatible, and redeeming its conventions for more serious purposes than the display of macho derring-do. Virtually single-handedly, he redefined the thriller so as to make possible the achievement of such postwar realists as John le Carré and Len Deighton.” That comparison is significant, showing how Ambler paved the way for the establishment of the classic cold-war spy fiction of the sixties and seventies. Ambler was admired by Graham Greene, who said he was ”the greatest living writer of the novel of suspense” – not a bad item for the CV.
Jeremy Duns, I know, is a great fan of Ambler, and has clearly read his Le Carré and Deighton too. His series of novels featuring the spy Paul Dark is set in the late sixties, when the Cold War was at its height, and the British secret service was still recovering from the antics of Kim Philby and his colleagues. So Free Agent is clearly indebted in some ways to its sixties predecessors, but in my view Duns has hit upon an original and winning formula. Dark’s surname is a clue to his hidden depths, and he can certainly surprise the reader. The novel is written, unusually for this genre, in the first person, so we experience everything through his eyes. After an intriguing opening chapter which might at first appear to be quite derivative – rogue spy is summoned to see the chief – we are hit by an enormous shock which propels the narrative forward, and the novel gathers pace from there, involving a series of twists which all ultimately derive from the young Dark’s adventures in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, aspects of which we see in flashback. The tension is maintained throughout, as we accompany Dark on an improbable, but just-about-possible adventure involving devious and grubby diplomacy in Nigeria, during its civil war. Duns is very adept at using historical detail, so we encounter some real-life figures as well as his creations. I was interested to see several pages of notes at the end of the book, detailing the sources used by the author, and explaining some of his decisions. That insistence on locating the narrative in a well-documented historical context lends credibility to a story that might otherwise be fanciful. It never strays into James Bond territory, but there are a few passages which might raise an eyebrow. It’s the attention to detail that keeps it grounded – for instance, Duns notes that Lagos is normally one hour ahead of London, but he has it at the same time, because Britain experimented with British Standard Time (GMT +1) during the relevant period. Would any reader have noticed this? I doubt it, but it shows how keen Duns is to get his period detail correct.
It’s difficult to say more about the plot without revealing too much, so you will just have to take my word that this is a terrific, action-packed read, that manages also to present agonising moral dilemmas alongside the mayhem. Dark is a damaged figure, like the protagonists of Ambler and le Carré, and this is crucial in lifting the novel out of the “rattling good yarn” category into something more thought-provoking and complex. He is an intriguing and fully-realised character. I am looking forward to reading the next two books in the series, which are set in the months after the conclusion of this one, and then will be on the lookout for the fourth book, set some years later, due out in the new year. Highly recommended, even if you are not a fan of spy fiction. This is intelligent, literate story-telling, featuring a truly gripping narrative that never fails to surprise.
I am very grateful to my friend and former colleague Kym for the gift of this brilliant book. Robert Macfarlane is one of those sickeningly talented renaissance men, who can, in his case, maintain a high-profile academic career at Cambridge, and produce a series of startlingly original books, while filling in his spare time with such activities as writing opera librettos, making TV documentaries and chairing the Booker Prize committee. Not that I’m envious, you understand. Landmarks is an unusual book, in that its avowed subject is the examination of the language we use to describe landscape, but it is about as far from a dry academic tome as you are likely to get. Macfarlane combines his interest in the countryside, and the way in which writers have represented it, with a fascinating exploration of the evocative language, often dialect, used to describe particular conditions. He adopts an innovative format to present his ideas: the book is divided into chapters which focus on some of his favourite nature writers, and examine both their work and the landscapes in which they are situated; then, after each chapter, is a glossary themed around a particular aspect of nature – Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands and so on. The glossaries are eclectic, with items drawn not just from the writers he considers, but from the folk tradition and from literature. The great landscape writers under consideration here are not the obvious ones, or at least, not to me. Indeed, some of them were completely new names as far as I was concerned. One such is Nan Shepherd, whose book about her life in the Cairngorms. The Living Mountain, was written in the forties, but not published until 1977, a few years before her death. Shepherd seems to be one of those fiercely independent women of the late Victorian era – she was born in 1893 – who forged their own life, irrespective of society’s expectations. She was, I learn, a writer of modernist fiction – but not one who figures in any of the standard accounts with which I’m familiar – whose novels are clearly autobiographical and might, on first glance, bear some comparison with Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence.
(Image: By Graham Lewis (The Cairngorms) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) But it is her nature writing that attracts Macfarlane’s attention here. In this early chapter, he establishes a principle which holds both for the writers he discusses, and his own work: the importance of precision. In their different ways, all of the writers Macfarlane presents exemplify that principle in their work – they observe the world around them in minute detail, and are sensitive to tiny changes in its fabric. It’s all about attention – Macfarlane and the others attend to the landscapes they encounter, and reflect on significances that would escape the casual observer. I was reminded more than once when reading this book of Sherlock Holmes’s terse comment: “You see, Watson, but you do not observe.” Macfarlane and his heroes are the Holmeses of nature writing, and we are the Watsons. Macfarlane recounts a moment on a climb in the mountains where he is reminded of a passage in Shepherd’s book where she describes the sound of moving water:
One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes – the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn one may distinguish a dozen different notes at once.
Macfarlane goes on to show the same kind of attention to detail he sees in Shepherd, and weaves a personal story of his own encounters with the Cairngorms around an astute and sympathetic account of Shepherd’s writing. Other writers on show here include the curious figure of J.A. Baker, whose book The Peregrine I read, I now realise, just after it was published in 1967. Baker, an amateur, and disabled, pursued the peregrines he saw hovering over the Essex marshes with a determination bordering on the obsessive. His book, which distilled a decade’s worth of observations into a year in the life of the bird, is almost his only monument. Macfarlane writes about the newly opened archive of Baker material at Essex university, and speculates on the nature of the man revealed in the journals kept there. Other writers considered by Macfarlane include the unexpected (Jacquetta Hawkes) and the obscure (Richard Skelton) but each more than justifies their place as their contribution to the rich language of landscape is explored. I was intrigued to be introduced to these writers, and delighted that Macfarlane has also added a bibliography of relevant works to follow up on. The TBR pile grows again… The glossaries are a separate joy in this book. It’s good to be reminded of the inventiveness of Hopkins (endragoned – a raging sea) , but even better to discover some of the evocative words for landscape collected by Macfarlane from a variety of sources. He tends to favour some geographical areas over others – lots from Shetland, none from Orkney, lots of Celtic – Cornish, Breton, Welsh, Gaelic – but not much from the eastern side of England, though there are a few glorious words from the north-east miners’ Pitmatical slang dialect (canch: the stone above or below the seam that has to be removed to get at the coal) and from more exotic sources, such as the Anglo-Romani word for Yarmouth, matchkani gav, literally “fish-village.” At the end of the book, Macfarlane reveals that he has been contacted by a scholar who had been working for fifteen years on a global glossary of landscape words. The scope of this enterprise can be imagined when one considers that “B” section alone, beginning with ba the Akkadian for water, of the Topoglossary comes to 343 pages. So – lots more to be done, and read and recorded. This jewel of a book is one I’ll return to, I’m sure, and it’s opened up a treasure trove of further reading, which will take some time to compass.
For reasons over which we will draw a discreet veil, our soundtrack on a recent long drive was a CD of early Perry Como songs. The opening track, called ‘Dig You Later’ was a topical song of 1945, in which Perry and a vocal group, The Satisfiers, sing a lyric which tries to shoehorn as much ‘hip’ slang as possible into three minutes. What is also does, and this made me almost swerve into oncoming traffic, is celebrate the recent end of the war with some hilarious lines about the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. It’s mighty smoky over Tokyo, indeed. Have a listen.
My latest review at the excellent Shiny New Books is now up. Go here for my thoughts on the latest volume of A David Moody’s magnum opus on old Stetson.
It used to be that ‘showing respect’ was something children were supposed to do to adults, or farm tenants to the inhabitants of the big house. In recent times, it’s become a catch-all phrase beloved of gangsters, sportsmen and bullies. Not ‘showing respect’ can mean anything from looking at someone in a bar in a way someone else finds offensive (“you looking at my bird?”) to a football team assuming it can beat some inferior lower-division outfit in the cup. The change in use probably stems from the “Godfather” films, where not showing respect results in sudden death.
So the phrase has really lost any meaning it might once have carried.It’s difficult to overcome something like this:
Even so, I think it reaches a new nadir in the usage I observed today on the back of a DHL van:
Leaving aside the redundant inverted commas, how, exactly, is one supposed to drive with respect? Perhaps the courier could doff his DHL cap every time someone overtook. Or seek out funeral processions to drive slowly behind. I don’t know – and like all these “how’s my driving?”-type notices, it’s inconceivable that anyone would ever actually phone the number. Although now, I’m tempted. “Your courier didn’t show me no respect. I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” And hang up… Pity there’s only an email address.
Man and boy, I’ve seen a lot of Hamlets, and I’ve taught the play more times than I can remember. So I know it very well, probably as well as I know any work of art. What to expect then, from Maxine Peake’s Hamlet, given at the Royal Exchange this autumn? That la Peake is a consummate actor with range and depth is a given. But could she scale this Everest of a part, especially playing against her gender in an over-three-hour largely uncut version of the text? Of course she could.
This production boldly offers two and a bit hours of intense action before the interval. As we wandered out, a little dazed, for a breather, I was thinking that this was easily the most gripping Hamlet I had ever seen, and then realised that, actually, this was the most gripping piece of theatre I had ever seen, full stop. Peake is magnificent from her first encounter with the ghost to “the rest is silence.” The energy and the intensity never let up for a moment, and, surrounded by a talented cast, Peake made you forget that she was a woman almost from the moment she appeared, in a Mao suit and a white shirt that remained her costume throughout.
The production, as does every play at the Exchange, made the most of that extraordinary theatrical space. The intimacy of the Exchange was very much to the advantage of this version of the play, in which the personal anguish of Hamlet and the other characters touched by the domino effect of Claudius’s treachery, was the central, relentless, focus. The Fortinbras political plot was jettisoned, leaving the end of the duel scene as the final moment, and bringing to a close the intense examination of guilt and innocence, action and inaction, morality and corruption.
The production is in modern dress – the watchmen at the beginning are in hi-vis jackets and carry torches. Claudius is in a business suit, and Horatio looks like a philosophy lecturer. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are punks, all ripped tee-shirts, tattoos and piercings. The casting of the central role is not the only gender change: Polonius becomes Polonia, Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz?) is a woman and the Player King is played brilliantly by Claire Benedict, who is also Marcella, not Marcello. It’s a tribute to the power of the production that none of this detracts from the impact of the play at all. The decision to use most of Shakespeare’s text means that Hamlet’s growing frustration at his own indecision is fully explored, and this ratchets up the intensity to almost unbearable levels. Peake handles the soliloquies well, without any of the anxiety that such well-known speeches might be expected to engender, breathing new life into “Oh that this too solid flesh would melt” and indeed “To be or not to be.”
The supporting cast are almost uniformly excellent. John Shrapnel’s Claudius conveys the “smiling, damned villain” perfectly. He is the reasonable, decent, CEO of the state on the surface, smiling on all, and only revealing his vulnerability in the prayer scene. He also plays, in a bold move, the Ghost – well, they are brothers – and distinguishes Hamlet senior from Claudius subtly. Thomas Arnold, who has a look of the young Ken Branagh, played Horatio sensitively, and spoke very clearly, a trait not entirely achieved by Katie West’s Ophelia, whose words were sometimes garbled as the madness took hold. But Maxine was the cynosure of all eyes as she dominated the stage in a bravura display of energy and intensity, the like of which I have never seen. Brava!
To Paris, for the annual Ford Madox Ford conference. As ever, the Fordies proved to be a congenial and collegial bunch, and the conference was a friendly and relaxed exchange of ideas. Also as ever, some of the really major Fordians were present, including the estimable Max Saunders and Joe Wiesenfarth, both of whom delivered, as might be expected, papers of authority and lucidity. It was also great to meet some younger scholars, exploring Ford’s work from often startling perspectives. The French context provided the impulse to look at Ford’s relationship with some of the great writers of France – Proust, Anatole France, Maupassant, Larbaud, Rimbaud – as well as his relationship to France itself, and particularly Paris. A pair of ancient rooms of the Sorbonne on the Left Bank, was where we made our camp. It was génial to be discussing Ford in the very streets where he had been a perhaps unlikely flâneur in the twenties and thirties. Paris was, as always, a joy to be in – the early autumn sun shone, and we had time for walks along the Left Bank, and around the quartier Latin. I even managed a visit to Shakespeare and Company, but nobly resisted the urge to buy even more books. A smooth journey home via Eurostar, having made some new contacts, had some stimulating conversations, found out much of interest, and with a big reading list of Ford related topics.
