Month: February 2024

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The magnificent Seven Moons

 

© Sort Of Books

 

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.  The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

 

  • Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020.  Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read.  One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

 

  • Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch.  Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original.  Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending.  But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

 

  • Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013.  Parts of this 19th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places.  Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

 

  • Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986.  Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

 

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day.  No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel.  It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages.  That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the  things I now miss most about the place.

 

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in.  Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

 

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost.  He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds.  The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

 

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened.  As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered.  And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

 

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

 

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants.  In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man.  In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

 

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed.  But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement.  It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements.  Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour.  For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan.  Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

 

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”  In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

 

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War.  This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.”  These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then.  It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

 

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s.  “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents.  But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms.  We all pray it stays that way.”

 

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example.  Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).  Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost.  (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie.  It came out in 1990.)

 

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

 

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury.  I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space.  It’s the perfect hiding place.  Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

 

© EMI / Elektra

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A water garden, plus ghouls

 

 

Another holiday dispatch from Bali…

 

After the atmospheric, scenic but heavily tourist-orientated experience of Bali’s Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to visit Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden (or Water Palace, depending on which travel book or website you read) in the same area.  You weren’t shepherded around, you didn’t have to queue, the be-all and end-all of the place wasn’t to have some cute pictures of yourself taken that you could slather over your social media pages.  Although, inevitably, there were some folk at the Water Garden obsessed with taking cute pictures of themselves.

 

Rather, this was a place where you could wander freely and immerse yourself in the gorgeous surroundings – whilst keeping a sensible distance from the selfie-fanatics.  Also, for a morbid creature like myself, there were some unexpectedly dark things lurking in a back corner of the site, which I found fascinating.  More on those later.

 

The antiquity of the garden’s appearance hides the fact that it’s a relatively recent construction.  It was designed and built by the King of Karangsem in the late 1940s.  (So enthusiastic was the King about the project that he literally built it, for he was one of the labourers digging out its pools and ponds.)  However, despite its modernity, it already has a history of being razed and ruined.  In 1963, the nearby volcano Mount Agung, the scenic backdrop for the countless photographs being taken at Lempuyang Temple, erupted and destroyed it, and it had to be rebuilt.

 

 

After passing through the entrance, which contained a tall, narrow candi–bentar-style gateway with different-coloured, florally-patterned ceramic plates embedded in its brickwork like lines of giant buttons, we descended into the garden.  Across to the left was South Pond, a large, rectangular body of water with a long, thin island stretched across its middle, almost dividing it in two.  The island had the dramatic name of Demon Island, although rather than demons the only things on it were a row of fountains.  The bridges attaching Demon Island to the ‘mainland’ at either end were decorated with dragon-cum-sea-serpent creatures with scaly, rippling bodies.

 

 

The garden’s main attraction, however, was to the right of the entrance steps and paths.  This was the smaller but more ornate Mahabharata Pond, whose attractions were threefold.  First, its waters were full of grey and pink carp, some of them truly big and torpedo-like.  People were buying bread and throwing chunks of it at the carp, causing much tumultuous splashing as they surged up to feed.  Secondly, the pond’s surface was dotted with statues, maybe four or five-feet tall, depicting sitting or crouching figures in elaborate Balinese headgear.  They were slightly dilapidated, in a picturesque way.  Their white surfaces were partly discoloured and scabbed with flaking grey or brown lichen.  Little fern-like plants sprouted from their bases just above the waterline.  Their faces occasionally had so many blotches they resembled Harlequin masks.

 

 

And thirdly, running along the pond’s surface and threading between the statues were lines of stepping stones.  Really, these were the tops of octagonal stone pillars standing on the pond’s bed, which poked a couple of inches above the water.  Needless to say, the stepping stones were a big draw for the photo-obsessed visitors and lots of people were posing for pictures on them.  Sometimes couples tried to pose together on the same stone and looked in serious danger of tipping over into the pond.  I assumed the carp weren’t carnivorous.

 

 

The garden’s other features included a handful of further ponds and pools, an amphitheatre and an auditorium.  But the most impressive item was Nawa Sanga Fountain, which stood at the far end of Mahabharata Pond and resembled a tall, slim, eight-tiered pagoda.  Seen from a distance, the water weeping past the edges of its tiers enclosed it in a shimmering halo.  Green, mouldy growths had gathered on the eternally-wet segments between the tiers, but somehow the mould didn’t diminish its elegance.

 

 

Oddly, the accounts of Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden I’ve read online have all failed to mention something I discovered at the far right-hand corner of the premises.  This was a compound that had at its centre a ring of seven statues, presumably representing Balinese and / or Hindu deities.  Four of the seven, endowed with physical attributes typical of deities in this part of the world, such as having four  arms, or having three faces, or having unfeasibly big hands, looked fairly innocuous.  Their faces were serene, their heads topped with Balinese crowns or tiaras.  But the other three statues were, frankly, monstrous.

 

In the notes I made at the time, I described one as having ‘…splayed, scalpel-ended fingers… a skirt of long, dangling things, like headless snakes… a mouth gaping horribly, a tongue pouring out of it… goggling eyes, long, matted hair’ and looking ‘…like a marauding zombie.’  Another, I wrote, was ‘…less monstrous…’ but ‘…still alarming… like a particularly rabid vampire…’ with ‘…a gaping mouth, snaking tongue…’ and ‘…long, scratchy fingers.’  Its hands were like ‘…clusters of carrots, Nosferatu-style.’

 

 

The third statue was ‘…a truly ghastly thing…’ with ‘…fingers so long and sharp its hands resembled tree-roots.’  It was ‘…seemingly neckless and shoulder-less, its head a mound of horribleness piled on top of its torso.’  The head had ‘…a mane of long, worm-like things…’ that I wasn’t sure were supposed to be ‘…weird, sprouting growths or just tresses of (very manky) hair.’  Its mouth contained ‘…a big row of upper teeth…’ and a ‘…protruding tongue bifurcating and bifurcating again until it resembled a cluster of starfish.’  This shambling creature would have given H.P. Lovecraft sleepless nights.

 

 

On the site’s map, I think the compound was described as a ‘meditation centre’.  I would have found it difficult to meditate there in the presence of three of its residents.

 

And that was my unexpectedly-creepy last port of call in the grounds of the otherwise beguiling and decorous Tirta Gangga Garden Royal Water Garden.

 

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Daphne’s up the creek

 

© Penguin Books

 

Daphne du Maurier’s 1941 novel Frenchman’s Creek comes nowhere near the standard of her best work.  It lacks the growing unease, troubling ambiguity and general intensity of, say, Rebecca (1938) or My Cousin Rachel (1951).  Even as a historical potboiler, it falls far short of Jamaica Inn (1936) because it doesn’t have a main character as monstrously memorable as Jamaica Inn’s villain, Joss Merlyn.

 

That said, with its twists and turns and skin-of-the-teeth escapes and rescues (predictable though they were), I found the book enjoyable as an undemanding romp.  Also, its cultural politics seem amusingly ironic when viewed through the prism of 2024 Britain, insecure at home and diminished abroad after the fiasco of Brexit.

 

Frenchman’s Creek starts with its heroine Dona St Columb, basically a 17th-century desperate housewife, fleeing London for the wilds of Cornwall.  Dona has been living it up in the capital with her doltish and drunken husband Harry and his circle of friends, but now she finds their company monotonous and shallow.  Among them, only the smooth and confident Rockingham has much personality, but as he flirts aggressively with Dona behind her husband’s back and even enlists her help in perpetrating a cruel joke against an elderly Countess – they terrify the old dear one night by disguising themselves as highwaymen, stopping her coach and pretending to rob her – he’s obviously a bad ’un.

 

Thus, bored and disgusted, Dona leaves Harry behind and travels to his country estate on the Cornish coast, hoping to lead a quiet life.  This doesn’t happen, of course.  One of her landowner neighbours, Godolphin – who’s as oafish as her husband and suffers the additional disadvantages of having ‘bulbous eyes’ and a ‘growth on the end of his nose’ – informs her that the local countryside is in uproar, thanks to raids being carried out by a French pirate-ship, captained by a figure known only as ‘the Frenchman’.  Meanwhile, Dona is puzzled to find the estate emptied of its servants, save for one enigmatic character called William, ‘with a button mouth and a curiously white face’, speaking with ‘a curious accent, at least she supposed it was Cornish’.

 

It soon transpires that William is in the employ of the Frenchman, and his ship La Mouette – The Seagull – is anchored within Harry’s estate, in a hidden creek off the side of an estuary.  The pirates have been sneakily hiding there between their assaults on the neighbouring coastline.  Dona falls into their clutches, but discovers that – quelle surprise! – the Frenchman, one Jean-Benoit Aubéry, is actually a dashing fellow.  As well as having the requisite amounts of tallness, darkness and handsomeness, he wears ‘his own hair, as men used to do, instead of the ridiculous curled wigs that had become the fashion…’  (Needless to say, all the pompous Englishmen Dona knows wear wigs.)  Even better, he has an artistic temperament – he loves drawing pictures – and he’s at one with nature – his pictures are of herons, sanderlings, herring-gulls and other birdlife.

 

Trusting Dona to keep her mouth shut, Jean-Benoit releases her from captivity.  And before you know it, romance blossoms between the two of them.  Not only is she inviting him up for dinner at her husband’s manor house, and he taking her on fishing expeditions, but she becomes a member of his crew.  She’s on board La Mouette when it sallies forth from the creek, in search of booty.  She even takes part in the raids on her neighbours’ coffers.  Meanwhile, as one of the local gentry, Dona gets to hear all the plans Godolphin and his fellow landowners are hatching to trap and catch the Frenchman.  The Englishmen never imagine that one of the supposedly silly, frivolous women in their company is secretly channeling this information to their enemy.

 

For a while, Dona lives the dream.  She enjoys the charms of a hunky, creative and sensitive man and gets to participate in swashbuckling adventures.  Then, however, Harry arrives from London to aid his neighbours in their efforts to apprehend the Frenchman – never suspecting that the naughty pirate is holed up in the nearby creek, right under his nose.  Also, he brings Rockingham with him, and it’s his shrewd, caddish friend who begins to smell a rat…

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

 

It’s fun to speculate on the audience de Maurier had in mind for this tosh.  Frustrated 1940s English ladies, fantasizing about a hot-blooded continental man whisking them away from their humdrum middle-class lives?  Especially, whisking them away from their repressed, pipe-smoking, cardigan-and-slipper-wearing husbands, chaps who probably found David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) a bit too raunchy?

 

Maybe she was trying to exploit an inferiority complex that lurks in the British psyche regarding the French.  Well, in the English psyche – mention ‘France’ to Scottish people and many will simply enthuse about ‘The Auld Alliance’.  There’s always been a feeling that compared to the average English bloke, the average French bloke is more suave, elegant, cultured and aware of what it takes to sweep les dames off their feet.  (Mind you, the recent publicity surrounding the 20-stone horribleness that is Gerard Depardieu suggests that French male superiority in the charm stakes is just a myth.)

 

As a recent example of this Anglo-insecurity, when faced with Gallic masculinity, look at the anger with which Britain’s stupidest right-wing newspapers reacted to French president Emmanuel Macron turning up in London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022.  Macron – of whom, I should say, I’m not usually a fan – wore sunglasses, a blue blazer and blue trainers and came accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards who strutted with nonchalant Jean Reno-style coolness.  He was accused of being disrespectful with his ‘casual’ attire, but come on…  The real issue was cringing English jealousy.  Compare Macron’s chicness with the appearance of former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who shambled to the funeral looking like a cross between an ambulatory compost heap and an electrocuted yeti.

 

No doubt this inferiority complex towards the French (and all things continental) has been compounded by the Brexit vote, which has left England / Britain on the fringes of Europe, looking rather daft and deluded.

 

Frenchman’s Creek was filmed in 1944, in a now-forgotten production whose one point of interest is that it was the only time Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce appeared together in a film that wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes adventure.  It’d be interesting, though, to have the book filmed again in the 2020s.  You could have some hot young French actor like Pio Marmaï or François Civil in the role of the Frenchman.  Matt Lucas, channeling Boris Johnson, could be cast as Harry, Dona’s hapless husband; and Matt Smith – in psycho mode, rather than Doctor mode – cast as the alluring but nasty Rockingham.  A range of bumbling and grotesque character-actors like Eddie Marson, Tom Hollander, Nick Frost and Reece Shearsmith could play Godolphin and the other English landowners.  

 

I suspect desperate housewives all over Middle England would flock to see a new Frenchman’s Creek movie; even while ridiculous newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph fulminated at how it cast aspersions on the manliness of Dear Old Blighty.

 

Before I finish, I should mention that the pleasure you get from Frenchman’s Creek possibly depends on how much you can tolerate the character of Dona.  I didn’t mind her, spoilt and self-centred though she obviously was, and just got on with enjoying the book’s narrative drive and historical colour.  However, my partner – Mrs Blood and Porridge – also read the novel and detested it.  This was due to Dona, whom she described as “insipid and childish… she’d marry a prisoner on death row because she’s rebelling against her oh-so-boring life… Meanwhile, people are starving and the bitch is f**king a murderer because it’s fun as long as she can luxuriate in her white upper-class ‘lady’ privileges.  She’s an abomination.  I hate her… her lack of a moral compass and her inability to imagine anything more for herself than a man.”

 

So, that’s me told, then.

 

© Paramount Pictures

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Some archery with Jim Mountfield

 

© The Sirens Call

 

Underneath the Arches, a short horror story I wrote a long time ago, is among the 167 pieces of fiction and poetry that appear in the newly-published Winter 2023 / 2024 edition of the magazine The Sirens Call.  The story was inspired by the arched cavities along the western side of the graveyard behind the Church of St John the Evangelist, which stands at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road in central Edinburgh.  In August each year – Edinburgh Festival time – the church’s grounds become the home of an art, crafts and design fair.  Stalls set up shop in the area between the church and its graves of illustrious, well-heeled Edinburgh citizens of times past.  According to its Facebook account, this is now known as the West End Fair.

 

What caught my fancy when I first encountered the St John’s craft fair in the late 20th century was how those western arches, underneath Lothian Road, had been drafted into use too.  During August, they became mini-shops, out of which vendors sold their wares to the market’s customers.  Thus inspired, I wrote a macabre story about a young man who buys something from one of the arches and, inevitably, lives to regret it.  (Hint: the market is sited in a graveyard…  A place of the dead!)

 

When I was looking for something to submit to the latest edition of The Sirens Call, I stumbled across Underneath the Arches on my computer’s hard drive.  Talk about a blast from the past.  It’d obviously been written by a much younger version of myself, angsty, pretentious, and in thrall to Edgar Allan Poe (and, indeed, Franz Kafka).  Predictably, the story itself was pompous and overwrought, ridden with adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes.  I ended up cutting about 2000 words – 45 percent of its original length – out of it before I submitted it.

 

Reading it now, I have to say I wish I’d been even more stringent in my editing of it.  There’s a sentence at the end where the word ‘ridge’ is used twice, and I manage to use ‘seemed to’ three times in the opening paragraphs.  (Coincidentally, the editor of a different publication recently told me: “Mark Twain famously said; ‘Anytime you have the urge to write the word ‘just’, use ‘damn’ instead, that way your editor will remove it for you.’ The same is true of the phrase ‘seemed to’.”)

 

Anyway, no matter.  As usual with my horror stories, Underneath the Arches appears under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.  And available for free, with all sorts of ghoulish goodies loaded into its 253 pages, the new issue of The Sirens Call is a rare bargain these days.  You can download it here.