Author: MrM0untfield

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Edinburgh’s statues – keep, erect or chuck in the Forth?

 

 

It’s been an exciting week for Britain’s civic statues.  Normally, these often antiquated, discoloured and birdshit-splattered lumps of sculpted stonework, which adorn town and city centres across the land and commemorate important figures and events of bygone eras, go cruelly unnoticed by 99.9% of the folk who trudge past them.  Well, that’s changed after what happened a week ago.

 

On June 7th, in Bristol, a statue of the 17th-century Bristolian merchant and Tory politician Edward Colston got hauled down by a crowd protesting the police’s murder of George Floyd in the USA and was tossed into the drink at the nearby harbour.  It’s ironic that this monument of Colston’s time on earth should end up underwater, for that was where many of the victims of Colston’s business activities ended up too.  During his involvement with notorious slave-traders the Royal African Company, the company shipped an estimated 84,000 Africans across the Atlantic and 19,000 of them died en route and were thrown overboard to the waves and sharks.

 

Suddenly, everybody’s eyeing up the statues that, at some time or other and for some reason or other, have been erected in Britain’s public spaces.  Suddenly, everybody’s wondering about the virtue, or lack of virtue, of those statues’ subjects.  Do they deserve to occupy public space?  Or, like the representation of Colston, do they deserve to be dumped in the nearest body of water?

 

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the city I know best, Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh, and the chunks of stony civic artistry that decorate it.  In the manner of the old, risqué question-and-answer game kiss, marry, kill? (which was known in the less genteel parts I hail from as shag, marry, kill?), here’s an evaluation of Edinburgh’s existing statues and potential statues under the options keep, erect or chuck in the Firth of Forth?

 

The first statue many people see when arriving in Edinburgh – when they walk out of the bus station into St Andrew Square – is a strong candidate for being chucked into the chilly waters north of the city.  Perched on a 150-foot-high column in the middle of the square is a statue of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.  Melville started off as a lawyer and became Lord Advocate (Scotland’s chief public prosecutor) at the age of 33, but then moved into politics.  It was as Secretary of State for Britain’s Home Department in the 1790s that he was responsible for delaying the abolition of the slave trade.  By the time it was abolished, a decade-and-a-half later in 1807, a huge additional number of Africans had ended up in slavery, a half-million according to Dundas’s Wikipedia entry.

 

According to his descendent Bobby Dundas, 10th Viscount Melville, Henry Dundas was actually an abolitionist who’d been forced to be pragmatic.   He’d supposedly “provided the word ‘gradual’” so that abolition “would get through legislation and became law, and without that, it wouldn’t have passed for decades.”  But while there is something good to be said about Dundas during his time as a lawyer – which I’ll describe later in this entry – by the time of his political career I doubt if he was anything more than what J.M. Barrie described as ‘a Scotsman on the make’.  He saw his fortunes bound up with the rise and reputation of the ‘second’ British Empire and spent, for example, eight years as Director of the Board of Control over the East India Company.  Concern for the hundreds of thousands whose lives were blighted or ended by slavery was surely not high in his list of priorities.

 

I suppose you could make a case for Dundas remaining in St Andrew Square (with a giant plaque providing information about his misdeeds) as a rebuff to those Scottish nationalists, still too many in number, who kid themselves that Scotland was only ever a subject, a victim even, of the British Empire.  As the historian Tom Nairn memorably put it in 1968: “Scotland is not a colony, a semi-colony, a pseudo-colony, a near-colony, a neo-colony, or any other colony of the English.  She is a junior but (as these things go) a highly successful partner in the general business enterprise of Anglo-Scots imperialism.”  Dundas’s statue is an uncomfortable reminder of this.

 

From the Brown digital repository at Brown University Library

 

Meanwhile, another statue I’m not fond of stands close by, that of George IV at the intersection of George Street and Hanover Street.  This annoys me because it embodies the grovelling, forelock-tugging attitude that a certain, bourgeoise section of Scottish society has always shown to the British Royal Family.  In 1822 George arrived in Edinburgh on what was the first visit to Scotland by a British monarch in two centuries and was greeted by a grotesque, over-the-top display of kilts, bagpipes and tartanry stage-managed by that great Caledonian romanticizer Sir Walter Scott.  This helped cement the tartan-swathed Brigadoon image that the outside world has had of Scotland since (though of course Scott’s novels helped cement it too).

 

The fact that it went bonkers over a king as unappealing as George IV is rather humiliating for Edinburgh in retrospect.  George is best-known today as the vain, idiotic Prince Regent character played by Hugh Laurie in the TV comedy series Blackadder the Third (1987).  (“Someone said I had the wit and intellect of a donkey.”  “Oh, an absurd suggestion sir, unless it was a particularly stupid donkey.”)  However, Hugh Laurie was at least slim.  By 1822 George had become grotesquely obese after years of gluttony and drunkenness.  His vanity remained, though, and according to the artist David Wilkie would spend three hours getting dressed and corseted up but still resembled ‘a great sausage stuffed into the covering’.

 

Of course, the depiction of George IV on George Street / Hanover Street is a highly flattering one.  Perhaps the absurdity of 1822’s pageantry should be highlighted by having the current statue of George replaced with a more accurate one.  I’d like to see a statue of him as he really was during the visit – crammed into Highland dress with, under his kilt, his swollen gout-stricken legs wrapped up in flesh-coloured tights.  A sight for sore eyes, in other words.

 

Over in Edinburgh Old Town, within the precincts of Edinburgh Castle, you’ll find another statue that’s problematic.  This is of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the 1st Earl Haig and commander of the British Expeditionary Force during the latter three years of World War One, who was born in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square in 1861.  Haig’s reputation as a military commander and tactician has taken a battering posthumously, notably with the publication of Alan Clark’s damning historical volume The Donkeys in 1961 and the release of Richard Attenborough’s equally damning film Oh, What a Lovely War! In 1969.  These helped create the present-day image of Haig as a deluded mass-murdering incompetent, worthy of the nicknames ‘Butcher Haig’ and ‘the Butcher of the Somme’.  His reputation also got a kicking in 1989’s Blackadder Goes Forth, in which Geoffrey Palmer appeared as Haig, using a dustpan and brush to nonchalantly sweep up fallen toy soldiers from a battlefield diorama and toss them over his shoulder.  Yes, Edinburgh has cornered the market for statues of people who were in Blackadder.

 

But I wouldn’t throw Haig’s statue into the Forth.  It really belongs in a museum – a museum that illustrates the historical ebbs and flows of reputation as time moves on, events become distant, viewpoints shift and opinions change.  It’s easy to forget today that up until his death, Haig was massively popular among the British public, which included the many ex-soldiers who’d served under him, and his funeral in 1928 was marked by a day of national mourning.

 

And problematic too is the statue in Parliament Square, behind St Giles’ Cathedral, of King Charles II.  After he came to the throne in 1660, Charles and his brother, the future King James II, set up the Royal African Company of which Edward Colston was a key member.  During its operations, the company was responsible for the transportation of more slaves than any other institution – an estimated 212,000, of whom 44,000 died before they reached the Americas.  However, Charles II’s statue has just been the subject of a thoughtful article by Alan Ramsay in the web magazine Bella Caledonia, so I won’t say any more about it.  Here’s a link to the article.

 

However, not far away, in the New College Quadrangle on the Mound, you’ll find a statue of a slave.  The subject of this statue spent two years toiling in a galley.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he and his fellow slaves ‘were chained to benches and rowed throughout the day without a change of posture while an officer watched over them with a whip in hand’.  Wow, you’re probably thinking, well done, Edinburgh!  You made the right choice with one of your statues!  Well, don’t get too excited.  For that slave was none other than the minister and theologian John Knox, who led the Reformation in Scotland and founded the Church of Scotland.  Earlier, from 1547 to 1549, he’d been a galley slave under the French.  Obviously, Knox is someone whose views on women (in 1556-58 he penned the memorably titled treatise First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women) and on practitioners of other religions (he described the Catholic church as ‘a synagogue of Satan’ and a ‘harlot’ that was ‘polluted with all kinds of spiritual fornication’ and full of ‘pestilent papists’) are ones most people find unpalatable today.

 

From the National Library of Wales

 

I really don’t know about Knox’s statue in Edinburgh.  He established Scotland’s national church and indirectly shaped the nation’s character for centuries to come, so you can’t really not have a statue of him there.  But it’s like have your reactionary and slightly Alzheimer’s-addled granddad at the table for Christmas dinner.  He may be coming out with a stream of racist inventive, but you know you owe your existence to him.  So you just smile at him and pretend not to hear what he’s saying.

 

To be more positive – there are statues in Edinburgh I like too.  Unexpectedly but pleasingly, the Old Calton Cemetery on Calton Hill has one of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, the man who delivered the Gettysburg address and preserved the American Union during the Civil War, and surely a contender for the title of Most Awesome US President Ever.  (Not that he’s had much competition for that title recently.)  Honest Abe’s statue stands magisterially atop a memorial to Scottish-American soldiers.  Nearby in the cemetery is an obelisk – okay, not quite a statue – erected in memory of the members of a universal suffrage group called the Friends of the People, who were persecuted in 1793.  Nowadays, of course, their ideas are seen as the stuff of basic Human Rights, but to the establishment of the time the Friends of the People were unspeakable subversives.

 

I like the fact that Edinburgh has some statues of writers.  So it should do, as it was designated the first ever City of Literature by UNESCO in 2004.  There’s one of Sir Walter Scott on Princes Street, at the bottom of the Scott monument, and one of Robert Burns at Leith (in addition to the Burns Monument on Calton Hill), and one of Robert Louis Stevenson at Colinton, and one of Sherlock Holmes commemorating the Edinburgh-born Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Picardy Place.  A few less well-known scribblers have statues too.  For example, the poet Robert Fergusson has one pacing past the entrance to the Canongate Cemetery, the poet and playwright Allan Ramsay has one in Princess Street Gardens, and the 19th-century children’s novelist Catherine Sinclair has a gothic, tapering structure in her memory standing on the corner of North Charlotte Street and St Colme Street.

 

 

I’m also glad the city has paid tribute to its most famous philosopher David Hume, who has a statue on the Royal Mile, to its most famous economist Adam Smith, who has a statue on the Royal Mile too, and to its most famous mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who has one on George Street.  And let’s not forget James Braidwood, who created Edinburgh’s – and the world’s – first municipal firefighting service and is honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.

 

And what statues should be erected?  Well, it seems a no-brainer to have a statue somewhere in Scotland’s capital city commemorating the man who established the illegality of slavery in the country.  This was Joseph Knight, an African slave purchased in Jamaica by the sugar-plantation owner Sir John Wedderburn of Ballendean, 6th Baronet of Blackness.  Wedderburn brought Knight back to Scotland as a servant in 1769 and when Knight protested his freedom, the pair of them ended up in court.  A final decision went in Knight’s favour in the Court of Session in 1777, when it was decreed that slavery was not recognised under Scots Law.   Indeed, a statue of Knight in Edinburgh might even improve Henry Dundas’s reputation by a smidgeon, for it was Dundas, Lord Advocate at the time, who acted as Knight’s counsel in the Court of Session.  According to the famous lawyer and biographer James Boswell, Dundas gave a stirring speech in support of Knight’s cause.  Which makes his subsequent actions regarding the abolition of the slave trade seem even more depressing.

 

From the statues I’ve listed so far, there’s obviously a dearth of female ones in Edinburgh.  So I’d also like to see a statue of Elsie Inglis, the Edinburgh-educated, late 19th century / early 20th century doctor and surgeon who founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and did much to improve healthcare for female patients.  She was also involved in the Suffrage Movement and during World War I set up Scottish Women’s Hospital units to care for injured soldiers in Belgium, France, Russia and Serbia,  That last country awarded her the Serbian Order of the White Eagle a year before her death in 1917.

 

© Penguin Books

 

The great Edinburgh novelist Muriel Spark should be honoured too.  Why not have a statue of her most famous literary creation, Miss Jean Brodie, swanning around Marchmont, where Spark went to school and supposedly got some of her inspiration for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) from a teacher there?  Mind you, I could see people objecting to the statue on account of Brodie’s politics, for in the novel she was a fan of Benito Mussolini and an admirer of fascism.  Finally, I don’t see why the much-missed parliamentarian Margo MacDonald shouldn’t be commemorated with a statue outside Easter Road Stadium in Leith, home of her favourite football club, Hibernian.

 

And now for a few more personal choices…  If his hometown of Salford doesn’t get around to honouring him with a statue, why can’t Edinburgh stick up a statue of Mark E. Smith, the driving force behind the great punk/post-punk band the Fall?  Smith lived in Edinburgh in the late 1980s, wrote a song about the city, 1991’s Edinburgh Man, and is rumoured to have supported Heart of Midlothian Football Club.  Meanwhile, two of Edinburgh’s greatest bands, the Exploited and Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, could be jointly honoured by a statue of the man who played in both of them (as well as performing briefly with Nirvana), guitarist Big John Duncan.  Yes, a statue of Big John would be… imposing.  I’d also like to see a statue in Morningside of the Scottish trade unionist Alec Kitson and the young Sean Connery delivering milk on a cart together, as they famously did there in the 1940s.  And while I hate the man’s politics, I’d like to see a dynamic statue of Nigel Farage fleeing into the Canon’s Gait pub on the Royal Mile in 2013, to escape protestors who were chanting, “Nigel, you’re a bawbag.”

 

However, for visitors to Edinburgh, there’s one statue that’s famous above all others.  This is of course the one of loyal wee Scots terrier Greyfriars Bobby, which stands on the corner between Candlemaker Row and George IV Bridge, outside Greyfriars Kirkyard.  Poor Bobby has had it rough lately because a modern custom has evolved whereby sightseers rub his bronze nose to bring themselves good luck.  As a result of continued, countless rubbings, the nose has been gradually eroding away.  If Henry Dundas is ever removed from the top of his column in St Andrew Square, we’ll know where to move Greyfriars Bobby for the sake of his health.

 

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Cinematic heroes 1: Jon Finch

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Anglo-EMI Film Distributors

 

The film and TV actor Jon Finch died seven-and-a-half years ago.  At the time of his passing, late on in 2012, he hadn’t worked for several years and had lived quietly in the English town of Hastings and his death had apparently gone undiscovered for some time.  Word of his funeral wasn’t announced until January 2013.  For that reason, obituaries for him in the British media were intermittent and patchy.  I decided to pen a few words of tribute on this blog and the resulting post seemed to rank high on Google searches about Finch – as I’d said, obituaries for him were intermittent and patchy.  Gratifyingly, a number of people who’d known Finch over the years came across my post and left comments on it.  In fact it was one of this blog’s most commented-on entries.  (And I’m kicking myself that, because this blog had to recently get a post-hacking reboot, those comments from Finch’s friends have now been lost.)

 

Anyway, I thought I’d revisit, rewrite and update what I originally wrote about Finch in 2013 and repost it.  Annoyingly, though, I still haven’t managed to see 1973’s The Final Programme…

 

Jon Finch began his career in television, went into films and ended up back in television.  For a couple of years in the early 1970s, while he was doing film-work, he had the opportunity to become massive, but that didn’t happen.  Finch, who valued his privacy and had a low opinion of the celebrity circus, may well have preferred it that way.

 

He began acting on television in 1964, appearing in ITV’s notoriously dire soap opera Crossroads.  In 1970, like many a British TV actor at the time, he got his break in movies thanks to Hammer Films – who were always looking for cheap acting talent to appear in their low-budget but cheerfully sensationalist horror movies.  He duly provided vampire-hunting support to Peter Cushing in Roy Ward Baker’s okay The Vampire Lovers and appeared in Jimmy Sangster’s dreadful Horror of Frankenstein.  Then Roman Polanski hired him to play the title role in his version of Macbeth, released in 1971, and suddenly Finch’s career trajectory had become exponentially steep.

 

Polanski’s take on Shakespeare’s Scottish play was bloody, dark and bleak – everything that a good production of Macbeth should be, in my opinion.  In this film, what works in favour of Finch as Macbeth, and of his co-star Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth, is the fact that they’re both so young.  The audience therefore feels they have little power over their destiny.  Rather, they’re swept to their tragic ends by dark forces both political and supernatural.

 

Polanski’s Macbeth got an unsympathetic appraisal from many critics, who couldn’t see beyond the film’s high level of violence and who linked it with what Polanski had gone through in August 1969 – when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others were slaughtered at his house in Beverly Hills by acolytes of hippie-cult nutcase Charles Manson.  New Yorker critic Pauline Kael even wondered if Polanski’s staging of the murder of Macduff’s family was an attempt to recreate the carnage that Manson had orchestrated.  In fact, the film’s screenwriter, celebrated theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, is reputed to have challenged Polanski about the amount of blood displayed in this scene, to which the director retorted, “You should have seen my house last summer.”

 

From Roman Polanski, Finch moved on to Alfred Hitchcock and landed the lead role in 1972’s Frenzy.  Although Frenzy hardly represents Hitchcock at the peak of his artistry, it’s by far and away the best of the director’s last clutch of films, which include Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969) and Family Plot (1976).  It also shows Hitchcock at his most disturbing.  The murder sequence involving Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who plays Finch’s ex-wife, is the most brutal thing he ever did, and the potato-truck ride (where serial strangler Barry Foster tries to retrieve an incriminating piece of evidence from a corpse he’d concealed earlier inside a huge sack of potatoes) is gruelling too.

 

Playing an innocent man accused of and hunted down for Foster’s murders, Finch bravely refrains from making his character sympathetic.  Indeed, he’s something of a shit and has a violent streak, and for a period at the start of the film we think he really is the strangler.   By the time it becomes clear that Foster is actually the culprit, Hitchcock – a master manipulator of his audience’s emotions – has presented him as a chirpy, likeable chap.  Thus, we find ourselves siding more with him than we do with Finch.

 

© Universal Pictures

 

Having worked with two of the world’s greatest directors, Finch seemed destined for international fame and indeed he was soon offered the chance to replace Sean Connery in the James Bond series.  Finch, however, declined and the role went instead to the somewhat less invigorating Roger Moore.  Around this time he also turned down the role of Aramis in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) which, tantalisingly, would have seen him acting alongside another actor with a low opinion of movie stars and movie stardom, Oliver Reed.

 

In fact, in 1973, Finch did play a vaguely James Bond-like character when he took the role of Jerry Cornelius in Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme, which was based on the first of the four Cornelius novels written by Michael Moorcock, set in a surreal, 1960s-esque and science-fiction-tinged world where the fabric of reality is beginning to fray.  I’ve never seen The Final Programme, though from all accounts Fuest did a pretty cack-handed job of it.  In stills, though, Finch at least looks the part of Moorcock’s enigmatic hipster-cum-secret-agent hero.  Moorcock himself disapproved of the film adaptation, although he liked Finch’s performance and paid tribute to him on his website / discussion forum Moorcock’s Miscellany when he heard of his passing: “I was very fond of Jon and was sorry we lost touch…  He was genuinely modest.”

 

Towards the end of the 1970s, Ridley Scott lined Finch up to appear in his ground-breaking sci-fi horror film Alien.  Finch was supposed to play Kane, a character who doesn’t last long in the movie’s script but is certainly pivotal to it.  He’s the unfortunate crewmember who goes exploring the mysterious crashed spaceship and ends up with an alien egg inside his chest.  Two days into filming, however, Finch became too ill to work – either from bronchitis or from complications caused by his recently-diagnosed diabetes, depending on which story you believe – and was replaced by John Hurt.  Thus, he missed appearing in the infamous ‘canteen’ scene where Kane expires and the alien makes its first appearance, one of the most (literally) explosive scenes in horror-movie history.

 

From there on, it was through his television work that Finch remained in the public consciousness.  In the late 1970s, he appeared in the BBC Television Shakespeare, a series of adaptations of all the Bard’s plays.  Though they were criticised for their staginess and the generally conservative manner in which they were brought to the screen, the adaptations certainly couldn’t be faulted for the top-notch acting they contained.  In Richard II (1978), Finch played Henry Bolingbroke to Derek Jacobi’s Richard and John Gielgud’s John of Gaunt.  With Bolingbroke elevated to monarch, he then played the title role in the sequels Henry IV Part One and Part Two (1979), with Anthony Quayle as a jovial, red-cheeked Falstaff and David Gwillim as Henry’s offspring, Prince Hal.  (In reality, Gwillim was only six years younger than Finch.)

 

Still picky about his roles, he passed on the opportunity to play Doyle in Brian Clements’ hugely popular espionage / action series The Professionals (1978-81).  Ironically, the role eventually went to Martin Shaw, who’d played Banquo to Finch’s Macbeth.  On the other hand, out of loyalty to Hammer, he starred in the first episode of the studio’s 1980 anthology series The Hammer House of Horror, in which he played a modern-day composer haunted by a witch who’s popped forward through time from the 17th century (a role performed with memorable relish by Patricia Quinn).  And for a quarter century he gave guest turns in popular shows like The New Avengers, The Bill, Maigret, New Tricks and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

 

Frustratingly, Finch’s role in a 1994 episode of Sherlock Holmes, a combined adaptation of two of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, didn’t see him appear alongside Jeremy Brett, the actor widely regarded as the screen’s best-ever Holmes – Brett had to be written out of most of the episode due to health problems.  However, as a villain, Finch did get to face up to the almost-as-good Charles Gray, playing Sherlock’s brother Mycroft.

 

Finch’s final appearance was a film one, in Ridley Scott’s 2005 crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, so at least he got to work with that director nearly three decades after his gig in Alien fell through.  Thereafter, he kept a low profile in Hastings, in declining health but seen now and again in some of the local public bars.  I wonder if the regulars in those Hastings pubs were aware that old ‘Finchy’, as he was known, had once headlined films directed by Hitchcock and Polanski and had come within a whisker of being 007.

 

© Playboy Productions / Columbia Productions

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Hello, yellow brick road

 

 

I suspect that the editors and publishers of Colombo’s Write magazine, which features poetry, short fiction and literary articles by Sri Lankan and Sri Lankan-based writers, must have felt cursed recently.

 

Production problems meant that their latest edition, Volume 2 Issue 2, was delayed for over a year.  Then, in March 2020, just as the new edition was about to go on sale, the Covid-19 virus made its unwelcome but inevitable appearance in Sri Lanka.  As a result, the authorities declared a curfew and the outlets that would have sold the magazine were temporarily closed down.  Not that potential customers would have been able to venture out to buy it, anyway.

 

This was a wee bit frustrating for me, as my short story The Yellow Brick Road was due to appear in that issue of Write.  (Well, I am a Sri Lankan-based writer…)

 

Happily, I can now report that the curfew has been eased somewhat and many Sri Lankan workplaces, businesses and retailers have reopened.  This includes the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which is the best-known outlet where you can pick up a copy of Write.   I popped in there the other day and saw the magazine’s newest issue, containing The Yellow Brick Road, stocked on its shelves.

 

In addition to some 40 general poems and stories, the issue features a section with poignant tributes to the victims of last year’s Easter Sunday bombings in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa.  It also has articles remembering three major figures in the contemporary Sri Lankan literary and arts worlds who sadly passed away in 2019: the poet and writer Jean Arasanayagam, the theatre director and producer Vinodh Senadeera, and the writer, poet and journalist Carl Muller.  (I was particularly a fan of Muller, whose work, besides being very amusing, served as an invaluable record of the minutiae of traditional life in Sri Lanka’s Burgher community.)

 

The Yellow Brick Road isn’t attributed to my usual nom de plume Jim Mountfield, as it doesn’t contain any of the grim, macabre stuff that Mountfield specialises in – for example, children with worm-like and super-intelligent conjoined twins growing out of their shoulders, or elderly farmers’ wives with Alzheimer’s who are haunted by the ghosts of the husbands they murdered and fed to their pigs 30 years ago, or Tunisian medinas in alternative universes that are inhabited by vampires who inhale blood-fumes out of shishas.  Instead, it’s published under my real, ordinary and boring name, Ian Smith.

 

While it isn’t a horror story, The Yellow Brick Road was slightly inspired by those dark gambling stories that Roald Dahl liked to write, such as Taste (1945), Man from the South (1948) or Dip in the Pool (1952), wherein someone gets involved in a highly unusual wager, with potentially ruinous consequences.  However, unlike Dahl’s protagonists who, if they lose, face marrying off their daughter to a complete creep, or having a finger chopped off, or parting with their entire life savings, the main character here is an unhappy and superstitious man who simply makes a bet with himself – one night when he’s alone on Colombo’s Duplication Road and a little bit the worse for drink.

 

Handsomely printed, and containing some gorgeous colour illustrations, Volume 2 Issue 2 of Write is a bargain at 500 Sri Lankan rupees.  The magazine’s Facebook page can be accessed here.

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Jim Mountfield hears the patter of tiny feet

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Here’s a plug for another short story by Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for works of horror, supernatural and generally dark fiction, which has been published this month.

 

The story’s called The Four-Legged Friend and it’s featured in Volume 16, Issue 5 of Schlock! Webzine.  It’s set in modern-day Bangkok – well, Bangkok until a couple of months ago, when tourists were still able to go there – and is inspired by a visit I once made to an antiquated surgical museum at one of the city’s hospitals.  My horror writer’s antenna started buzzing (and I started thinking, “Hey, I could use this idea in a story!”) when I noticed how little shrines consisting of flowers, pictures, toys and other knickknacks had been set up around some of the exhibits.  These were in honour of the people who’d donated their bodies, or parts of their bodies, that’d become those exhibits.

 

Surgical museums in the Western world are usually clinical, dispassionate affairs.  With its shrines, however, this one in Bangkok seemed to remind its visitors of two things: that the exhibits had human origins and that there was a spiritual aspect to them too.  What you were looking at in those glass cases once belonged to people who’d had souls.  Indeed, depending on your belief system, you might argue that those souls were still present…

 

As well as being inspired by something I saw in a Thai museum, The Four-Legged Friend is influenced by one of the greatest of all ghost story writers, M.R. James, and in particular by the paranoia that James was able to evoke in stories like Casting the Runes (1911) and Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904).  James skilfully exploited the basic human fear of being followed.  His characters frequently aren’t just haunted – they’re being hunted.    I should say too that after I finished the story and read it through, I was surprised at how much it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s masterly, Venice-set novella Don’t Look Now (1971), with the protagonists being tourists, the presence of a child-like apparition and the references to water – some of the action takes place on board Bangkok’s river ferries.

 

A quick word of warning, however, to manage expectations: my story may not be quite as good as M.R. James or Daphne du Maurier!

 

For the rest of June 2020, The Four-Legged Friend can be accessed here.  The main page of Volume 16, Issue 5 of Schlock! Webzine, in which the story appears, is available here.

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Jim Mountfield looks ahead to strange days

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

Jim Mountfield, the name under which I write much of my fiction, has a new short story called New Town Tours featured in Strange Days, a 500-page, 36-author anthology that’s just been published by Midnight Street Press.

 

The writers submitting work to this anthology were asked to consider and build stories around the following theme: “The world is in a mess.  It seems that from a human perspective, we’re pretty well screwed…  Greed, political imperatives, narrow-minded thinking, poverty, ignorance…  we are experiencing very strange days.  There’s a mass extinction happening and it may well include our species.”  Thus, the fiction featured in its pages should “reflect the strange times we are living in and… sum up the precariousness of modern existence.”

 

Ironically, the deadline for submissions to Strange Days at the end of February coincided with the growing international panic over the Covid-19 virus.  It came just before many governments imposed lockdowns and curfews to thwart the virus’s spread.  Thus, the three months between that deadline and the publication of the anthology itself, in late May, have witnessed some strange days indeed.

 

To promote Strange Days, its editor Trevor Denyer has invited the contributors to record themselves introducing and reading extracts from their stories.  The resulting film clips have been placed on a webpage that is accessible here.

 

You can hear me – as Jim Mountfield – talking about how New Town Tours, my dystopian contribution to Strange Days, was based on experiences I had years ago living in Edinburgh.  Scotland’s capital city has always struck me as a perplexing place because it has a famously grand, affluent, historical and cultural city centre but also a periphery of housing schemes “which were built in recent history… suffer from a lot of poverty, from a lot of social problems, and for a lot of the people living on them, they’re not easy places.”  And I point out that Edinburgh was, appropriately enough, “the hometown of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde… it always seemed to me like a Jekyll and Hyde town.”  I also mention that when I stayed in Edinburgh, I was working on what would be called today a zero-hours contract, I wasn’t a particularly happy bunny at the time and New Town Tours was coloured by the negativity I felt.  It takes a bleak view of humanity and none of the story’s characters, whether they’re from the poor side of the tracks or from the rich side, come out of it well.

 

Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days is now on sale.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.

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The land of thieves and phantoms

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

 

My previous blog post was about disgraced spin-doctor Dominic Cummings.  This post is also about a bald, sinister and shadowy figure who doesn’t take well to being exposed to the light.  I’m talking about Count Orlok, the central character of the classic 1922 German chiller Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

 

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was famously the cinema’s first (surviving) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), although the filmmakers sneakily tried to duck copyright responsibilities by changing the character-names and localities – retitling Dracula as Orlok, for instance.  In the event, Stoker’s widow successfully sued them anyway.  Nosferatu is one of those films I’ve seen so many clips of over the years that I’d assumed, wrongly, that I’d seen all of it.  When I came across a remastered version of it on YouTube the other day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen it in its entirety.  So I immediately made amends.

 

Nosferatu is an immensely atmospheric film and the technical aspects of it that have become dated in the century since its making just seem to add to its strange atmospherics today.   For one thing, there’s the over-expressive silent movie acting.  Gustav von Wangenheim as the estate agent Hutter, who corresponds to Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s novel, grins disconcertingly like a young Brian Blessed – although as the film progresses and he’s dispatched to Transylvania, ‘the land of thieves and phantoms’ as he calls it, to facilitate an unusual property deal, he predictably gets less to smile about.  Meanwhile, Alexander Granach as Knock, who stands in for the novel’s lunatic and vampire-minion Milo Renfield, is unnervingly off the scale in his manic-ness.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

 

Then there’s the special effects, which involve Keystone Cop-style speeded-up footage and crude stop-motion animation.  Viewed today, they give the film’s events a discomfortingly bizarre quality.  Whether it’s the beetling movement of the vampire’s black coach, drawn by black-draped horses, or a coffin lid shifting jerkily of its own volition, such things look like they’re happening in another, spectral world.

 

One supreme moment of oddness comes while Hutter is journeying through Transylvania and a ‘werewolf’ is glimpsed prowling through a forest.  This is presumably meant to be Count Orlok in lupine form though it’s obviously a hyena the filmmakers must have procured from a circus or a zoo.  A hyena loose in an Eastern European forest should seem ridiculous in 2020 but, like so much of Nosferatu, it just seems strange.  (A werewolf, incidentally, featured in the original first chapter of Stoker’s Dracula, which was excised from the completed novel.  In 1914, this missing chapter was published as a self-contained short story Dracula’s Guest.)

 

If Nosferatu has a glaring technical problem, it’s the preponderance of day-for-night shooting.  This means that Orlok greets Hutter in the courtyard of his Transylvanian castle seemingly in broad daylight and thereafter he’s often seen stalking around in what is supposed to be darkness but is obviously sunlight (and even casting a shadow).  The sun is commonly supposed to be fatal to vampires, but it doesn’t have to be – in Bram Stoker’s novel, it’s stated that sunlight merely weakens Dracula, depriving him of his supernatural powers but not destroying him.  However, Nosferatu ends with Orlok disintegrating as he’s struck by an early-morning sunray, so the day-for-night shooting makes a nonsense of the vampire mythology that the film’s set up for itself.  (The remastered version of Nosferatu I saw was very cleaned-up and I’d heard that in the original version the night-set scenes had been ‘tinted’ to make them look darker.  But I’ve checked older uploads of Nosferatu on YouTube too and the day-night issue is still problematic.)

 

While I’m on the subject of illogicality, I should say I don’t understand the mindset of the crew of the schooner tasked with transporting some crates of soil, among which Orlok has concealed himself, to Wisborg, Hutter’s hometown in Germany.  They already know that a mysterious ‘plague’ is ravaging the coastal area that they’re sailing from.  And before they set off, they notice that the crates are swarming with rats as well as being full of soil.  So why do they accept this potentially lethal cargo?

 

On the plus side, of course, Max Schreck’s performance as Count Orlok is still utterly memorable.  Devoid of any of the gentlemanly or aristocratic suaveness that later actors like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman would bring to the role of Dracula, Schreck’s Orlok is a pure creature of the night – bald, pale, sporting rat-like incisors and pointed ears and wielding clawed hands that resemble clumps of albino carrots.  He’s not entirely hairless, having some shockingly unruly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair.  (There are no vampire brides in this version of the story.  Orlok, like many a bachelor living alone, obviously neglects his facial grooming.)

 

When he’s wearing a crumpled hat and trying to act the welcoming host to Hutter, he’s ghoulish enough.  When he appears in his full, thirsty, vampire-ish form, for example, on board the schooner, he’s the stuff of nightmares.  Also interesting is how he’s much more supernaturally powerful than the average movie vampire – Knock and Ellen (Greta Schröder), who’s Hutter’s wife and the film’s equivalent of the book’s Mina Harker character, sense and react to his presence long before he even sets sail from Transylvania to join them.

 

Knock is particularly interesting as, unlike other Renfields and other minions of Dracula in other films, he never actually crosses paths with his master.  In the plot, his function is really to serve as a scapegoat for the slayings that occur in Wisborg after Orlok arrives.  The townspeople believe that Knock, who’s just escaped from the asylum he was incarcerated in, is the real vampire and a mob of them pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside.  Indeed, you’d feel sorry for him if he hadn’t throttled an asylum attendant during his breakout.  The chase provides Nosferatu with some of its most memorable images – Knock perched gargoyle-like on a vertiginous rooftop, for example, or the mob racing towards a figure they believe is him in the middle of a field, only to discover that it’s a scarecrow (which they tear to pieces in a rage).

 

To audiences in 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror must have seemed sensational.  Jaded, hardened film-watchers a century later won’t find it a symphony of horror, of course.  But with its strange images and sequences, the film still has a way of getting unsettlingly under your skin.  You’ll feel you’ve at least experienced a symphony of haunting Germanic weirdness.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

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Millennium Dom

 

From the Cyprus Mail

 

Spin doctor Dominic Cummings, the Svengali to Boris Johnson’s Trilby, the Rasputin to Johnson’s Tsarina Alexandra, the organ-grinder to Johnson’s dancing monkey, the puppet-master to Johnson’s, well, puppet, has become Britain’s Most Hated Man.

 

That’s because everyone in Britain now knows that Cummings didn’t just break the coronavirus-lockdown rules that he himself helped draw up for the population, but pulverised them.  The Gollum-like governmental advisor apparently believed that rules exist only for plebs and he, as a superior being, had a divine right to flout them.  In late March he drove his wife and child 260 miles from London to his parents’ farm near Durham in northeast England, while his missus was displaying coronavirus symptoms.  He developed symptoms soon after.  Also, while in the northeast, he drove 30 miles to local tourist attraction Barnard Castle, an action he subsequently justified by claiming he’d done it to check if he could drive safely even though the virus was affecting his eyesight.  I guess that’s the equivalent of a brain surgeon performing an operation to check if the palsy he’s been suffering from isn’t making his hands shake too much.

 

I should say not quite everyone in Britain is baying for Cummings’s blood, for I’ve noticed a few right-wing folks complaining on social media that Cummings has been the victim of a stitch-up by Britain’s hideous lefty mainstream press.  Such people regard Cummings as the Messiah, thanks to him being Campaign Director of the Vote Leave movement in 2015-16 and playing a major role in getting Britain out of the European Union.  According to them, the lefty newspapers that have it in for poor Dom include that notoriously socialistic organ, the Daily Mail.  Looking at the state of the comments posted by those fulminating right-wingers, I just hope they cancel their subscriptions to the Daily Mail and invest the money they’ve saved in taking punctuation courses where they learn how to use apostrophes correctly.

 

Anyway, reading the screeds of print written about Cummings in the past week, I’ve been reminded that Cummings first made a name for himself during a little-remembered episode in recent British political history.  It happened shortly after the advent of the new millennium, in a part of the world where I was living.  I’m talking about the referendum on setting up a regional assembly in northeast England, held in 2004.

 

Soon after Tony Blair’s New Labour government arrived in power in the late 1990s, devolution was implemented in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom, with the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and Northern Irish Assembly.  This left England as the only part of the UK without devolved government, which caused some awkward anomalies.  How, for example, could Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians turn up at the British parliament and vote on issues affecting the English population, when English politicians weren’t allowed to attend the three devolved parliaments and have a say on equivalent issues affecting the populations there, like health and law enforcement, entrusted to those parliaments under the devolution settlement?

 

The Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act of 2003 was meant to restore constitutional balance.  It was envisioned that, eventually, eight regional assemblies would operate across England.  As England had a population five times the size of that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, a patchwork of small English assemblies would ensure that too much power wasn’t concentrated in a single, huge English assembly.  And the first English region to get the chance to approve the establishment of its own assembly was northeast England, which had an all-postal ballot on the matter on November 4th, 2004.

 

Cynics would say that the northeast was given first say because it seemed highly likely to do what the government wanted it to do.  It was deeply pro-Labour at the time and contained Tony Blair’s constituency, Sedgefield.  Also, it seemed the English region with the strongest local identity – a place that’d want its own assembly making decisions on its behalf rather than having decisions imposed on it from faraway London.  At the time I was living in the northeast’s biggest city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and, without wishing to confuse the city with the region, I have to say the Geordies of Newcastle did seem a complete race apart.

 

I’d spent most of my youth in Scotland, where devolution had been a burning political issue for a generation.  There’d been a referendum about establishing a Scottish parliament back in 1979 and a majority had voted in favour of it.  Due to some disgraceful rule-bending by the Labour government of the time, though, it was decreed that the majority wasn’t big enough and the parliament wasn’t delivered.  Soon after came the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which massively reshaped the economy and culture of the UK in the 1980s.  Most people in Scotland didn’t vote for Thatcher but the existing constitutional set-up left her free to do what she wanted with the place – a sorry state of affairs that resulted in the nadir of the Poll Tax, imposed solely on Scotland in 1989 as an experiment to see how it was likely to go down in the rest of the UK.  A great ‘what-if’ of Scottish political history is how a Scottish parliament, if one had been created at the end of the 1970s, might have stood up to Thatcher.  I certainly can’t imagine things being any worse than they were.  Anyway, it seemed to me a no-brainer that people in northeast England should get their own assembly in 2004.

 

However, in the run-up to the referendum, I realised my devolutionary enthusiasm wasn’t mirrored in the Geordies and north-easterners around me.  This was largely due to the influence of the anti-assembly campaign North East Says No, chaired by local businessman John Elliot and with a certain Durham-born, Oxford-educated character called Dominic Cummings as one of its prime movers.  The anti-assembly campaign whipped up resentment against the proposed establishment.  It warned that an assembly would be an unnecessary extra layer of government, diverting yet more public money into the pockets of yet more politicians – and diverting it away from areas that really needed it, like health.  “More doctors,” declared one of its ads, “not politicians.”  Actually, that sounds familiar.  Didn’t Dom peddle a similar message in a more recent political campaign?  Although in Newcastle in 2004 I didn’t see it emblazoned on the side of a bus.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

It didn’t help the assembly’s cause that the senior politician entrusted with overseeing its creation was deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who famously had not one but two princely Jaguar motor cars at his beck and call and generally wasn’t known for his frugality.

 

Cummings’s anti-assembly message certainly got through.  With hindsight it was scary how many left-wing, liberal-minded people I knew in Newcastle, who’d normally have detested everything Cummings stood for, unconsciously parroted his rhetoric.  I remember in my workplace a Russian woman, who had British citizenship and the right to participate in the referendum but wasn’t too clued-up on local politics, asking a colleague for advice on how to vote.  The colleague, a Guardian-reading progressive if ever there was one, promptly told her the assembly was a nonsense and to vote against it.  Meanwhile, my best mate in Newcastle, also no right-winger, dismissed the proposed assembly as a ‘white elephant’ designed to ‘line politicians’ pockets’.

 

It didn’t surprise me, then, when Prescott and company lost the referendum and a majority voted against the assembly’s establishment.  It did surprise me how emphatic that majority was – of those who bothered to vote, 78% voted against it.  And that wasn’t only the prospect of a north-eastern assembly killed stone dead, but the prospect of any future devolution in England generally.  No politician would touch the project after that whipping.  Dominic Cummings had secured his first and, alas, not his last big victory.

 

Although Newcastle is pictured by some as a drunken hellhole where ghastly nightclubs are pillaged by stag and hen parties clad in little more than jockstraps and G-strings while freezing easterly gales howl around them from the North Sea – an image that admittedly isn’t wide of the mark if you venture into the city’s Bigg Market district on a Friday or Saturday night – I thought it was a great city.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time there during the first half of the noughties.  It had some great pubs (away from the Bigg Market), a good live music scene, decent shops and easy access to libraries and galleries.  You could generally find whatever it was that floated your boat, be it antiques markets or creative writing groups or comedy shows or whatever.  And I loved how you were mere minutes away from some of the most scenic landscapes in England.  And the Geordies were great company.  Indeed, I would have stayed for longer if the money I was earning in my job there hadn’t been so crap.

 

Looking back, though, I was probably lucky that I left Newcastle when I did and avoided the years of austerity that were inflicted on it by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 onwards.  The newspaper reports I’ve read about what happened to Newcastle make grim reading – slabs of money hacked off its budget every year, a total of some 300 million pounds lost by 2019, with a resulting cull of libraries, youth clubs and children’s centres and a general neglect of public services.  Even the city’s lollipop men and ladies weren’t spared – their numbers declined from 64 to seven in the space of five years.  Would a north-eastern assembly have been able to protect the city against some of this savagery?  Like the hypothetical 1980s Scottish parliament and Margaret Thatcher, I doubt if it would have made things any worse.

 

 

Incidentally, I think the missed opportunity of the English regional assemblies will contribute eventually to the breakup of the United Kingdom.  Occasional senior Labour politicians – Gordon Brown especially – still talk up the prospect of a federal UK as a way to keep Scotland British.  With their parliament nestling amid a bunch of similar-sized English ones where power is equally distributed, the Scots, the theory goes, will neither feel neglected nor get ideas above their station.  They’ll accept they’re fairly treated and accept their lot as happy Brits.  That might be true in an alternative universe, but it isn’t going to happen in this universe.  There won’t be a properly federal UK because people in England, as 2004 proved, aren’t interested.  And with so much power entrusted to dolts like Boris Johnson in London, I can’t see the Scots putting up with the existing constitutional status quo for much longer.

 

Modern right-wingers adore Dominic Cummings for what he’s supposedly done to restore British sovereignty.  But he’s actually done more than most to crock the whole concept of Britain.  Thanks in part to his exploits, including those in 2004, Britain as a union of four nations is doomed.  Dom-ed, in fact.

Posted on

Est-ce qu’on vous sert?

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Anyone born at a similar time to me, and in a similar part of the world, and who therefore grew up watching 1970s British television, will have difficulty reading a novel about a department store without being reminded of the saucy British TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, created and written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, broadcast from 1972 to 1985 and, yes, set in a department store in contemporary London.

 

Even though the novel in question is the classic French one The Ladies’ Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames) written by Émile Zola, published in 1883 and set in Paris, I’m afraid that while I read it I kept hearing in my head Ronnie Hazelhurst’s theme song from Are You Being Served?  This was a simple but maddeningly relentless number wherein a lift-girl talks over the non-stop chiming and chattering of a cash register: “Ground floor, perfumery / Stationery and leather goods / Wigs and haberdashery / Kitchenware and food / Going uu-uup…!”  I’ve heard people claim that the Are You Being Served? theme invented rap music, but maybe that’s pushing it a bit.

 

Anyway, on a more serious note…  I admire Émile Zola because of his variety.  He didn’t confine himself to writing about one particular section of society but gave each of his novels a different and distinctive focus.  For example, Nana (1880) is set in Paris’s theatrical world while Germinal (1885) is set in a mining community in northern France.  The Beast in Man (1890) deals with workers on the French railways while The Debacle deals with soldiers fighting and civilians caught up in the Franco-Prussian War.  Thus, his body of work becomes a massive, fictionalised document of French life in the mid-to-late 19th century.

 

With The Ladies’ Delight, Zola turns his attention to retailing industry and the changes it was undergoing at that time.  He tells the story largely through the eyes of young woman, Denise Baudu, who arrives in Paris from the provinces in the 1860s and finds work as a saleswoman at a booming department store, the titular Au Bonheur des Dames.

 

Denise’s job at the store is troubled from the start.  By working there, she incurs the displeasure of her only Parisian relatives, her uncle Baudu and his family, whose little draper’s shop has the misfortune of being across the street from Au Bonheur des Dames and is quickly being put out of business by it.  She comes to the capital with her two younger brothers, teenaged Jean and little Pépé, and Jean – with an irresponsibility typical of many of Zola’s male characters – is soon sponging off her while she barely earns enough to keep Pépé fed, clothed and in school and keep herself alive.  In fact, she almost doesn’t get employed at Au Bonheur des Dames at all.  On the day she applies for a job, the general overseer Bourdoncle rejects her for being ‘too ugly’.  But he’s overruled by the store’s owner, Octave Mouret, who hires the rustic-looking and waif-like Denise on a whim.

 

Nor does Denise – gentle, principled and clean-living – prosper in the licentious and back-biting environment of Au Bonheur des Dames.  The intensity of her workmates’ carnal obsessions is matched only by their determination to shin their way up the promotional ladder, usually by plotting against and undermining whoever’s immediately above them.  She’s eventually dismissed and finds a new job with Robineau, a one-time buyer at the store who was himself elbowed out and has now taken over a shop selling silk garments.  But Robineau’s business is unable to compete against the remorselessly growing, evermore popular establishment he once worked for, and he’s soon forced to let Denise go.  However, she manages to get back onto Au Bonheur des Dames’ payroll and this time she gains the ear of her boss, Mouret.  Though she’s naïve, Denise has excellent common sense and an unerring instinct for knowing what the public wants.  The advice she gives Mouret about how best to treat his customers, and his employees, leads to her rapid promotion.  Meanwhile, the cynical, worldly-wise Mouret starts to find himself unaccountably attracted to her…

 

From wikipedia.org

 

As well as relating the ups and downs of Denise’s career in and outside Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola describes Mouret’s efforts to expand his business and reel in more customers.  His activities include becoming the beau of society widow Madame Desforges, in order to get access to the super-powerful Baron Hartmann, who’s another of Madame Desforges’ lovers.  (Well, these folks are French.)  If he can secure Hartmann’s financial and political backing, Mouret believes he can grow Au Bonheur des Dames until it encompasses an entire city block.  Mouret’s romancing of Madame Desforges, and the flirting and flattering he does with the wealthy ladies who make up her social circle, become a metaphor for the seduction of Paris’s female shoppers that his store is performing on a commercial level.

 

However, it’s the novel’s third strand that’s the most powerful.  This describes the impact that Au Bonheur des Dames has upon the traditional shopkeepers who specialise in one particular type of good and are unlucky enough to share a neighbourhood with it.  The store begins by ruining the drapers but, as it gets bigger and Mouret creates more departments and sells a wider range of products, it also threatens the local furriers, glovers, hatters and so on.  Mouret even encroaches on the business of an old man called Bourras who looks ‘like an Old Testament prophet’ and makes and sells umbrellas and walking sticks.  Bourras’s decrepit shop occupies a sliver of one of the street-fronts that Mouret is expanding his premises along.  The old man refuses to sell and move out, so that his shop ends up with Au Bonheur des Dames on either side of it and resembles a ‘wart’ in its grand façade.

 

Denise’s Uncle Baudu not only loses his draper’s business but also his daughter Geneviève to the store.  Geneviève’s fiancé abandons her after becoming infatuated with a coquettish salesgirl working across the street, and the broken-hearted Geneviève wastes away and dies.  Her funeral provides the novel with its most effective scene.  The mourners include all the shopkeepers who’ve had their trade pulverised by Au Bonheur des Dames and they’re obliged to follow the coffin past the building that’s the source of their misery.  Old Bourras laments, “Oh, we’re a pretty sight; a fine cortege of carcasses we make for the dear child!  It must be odd, for people watching this line of bankrupts going past.  And it seems that the clean-out is continuing.  The scoundrels are opening departments for flowers, for fashions, for perfumes, for shoes, and who knows what else?”

 

While Zola doesn’t hold back in depicting Au Bonheur des Dames as a rapacious monster, his imagination is clearly besotted with the place as well.  He devotes many pages to describing it.  It’s variously likened to ‘an awakening beehive’, ‘an enormous fairground display’, ‘a sumptuous pasha’s tent’, ‘a cathedral of modern trade, light yet solid, designed for a congregation of lady customers’, ‘a monumental gallery’, ‘an enormous carnival’, ‘a vast, many-coloured architectural pile with gold highlights’, ‘a boreal vista’, ‘a great love nest’, ‘a white chapel’ and ‘a dream heaven, a window into the dazzling whiteness of a paradise.’  Whenever you think Zola has finished writing about its appearance, he has Mouret give the premises another upgrade and off he goes on another flurry of description.

 

In my mind’s eye, I found myself embellishing the store’s architecture and décor with flourishes of Art Nouveau.  I visualised the building as resembling some grand project designed by an Art Nouveau artist like Alphonso Mucha, Koloman Moser or Eugène Grasset.  But that would be wrong, since the novel’s 1860s setting precedes the Art Nouveau movement by at least 20 years and those artists would have been youngsters at the time.

 

From alphonsemucha.org

 

The Ladies’ Delight isn’t one of Zola’s best books.  His lengthy descriptions become tiresome.  This is especially true towards the end, when the reader is impatient to see how the various plot strands will be resolved and when those descriptions just seem to get in the way.  Also an issue is the characterisation.  Denise seems too innocent to be true, especially when there’s such a rogue’s gallery of schemers, chancers and letches inhabiting the store around her.  Correspondingly, it seems unlikely that somebody like Mouret could fall for her, even briefly – let alone become obsessed with her, to the point where he loses interest in everything else, including his business, as he does later.  (Predictably, the virtuous Denise rebuffs all his advances, which only leaves him more smitten with her.)

 

Enterprises launched by characters in Zola’s books tend to overreach themselves and come crashing down, both small-scale ones like Gervaise’s laundry business in L’Assommoir (1877) and grand ones like the title character’s theatrical career in Nana.  But that doesn’t happen to Mouret’s store in The Ladies’ Delight.  It simply continues to grow – the cash-register from Ronnie Hazelhurst’s Are You Being Served? theme was clinking particularly loudly in my head during those scenes where Zola describes the cashiers struggling to count and gather up and lock away Mouret’s ever-swelling profits.  In the absence of Mouret getting his financial come-uppance, I suppose Zola felt obliged to give him a romantic come-uppance instead, which is where he deploys Denise.  But as a plot device it doesn’t feel plausible.

 

The Ladies’ Delight is effective, though, when it chronicles how the new store tramples all over the businesses of the old-style traders and leaves a trail of bankruptcies in its wake.  It’s ironic to reflect that in 2020 the same department store would probably be a much-loved historical landmark.  It’d be regarded as an important, if vulnerable, part of its city’s commercial heritage.  Fearful that modern online traders like Amazon might trample all over its business, citizens would be calling on the government to subsidise it and keep it propped up.

 

Yes, this youthful monster of 19th century capitalism would now be regarded as, potentially, an elderly victim of 21st century capitalism.  The French saying ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose‘ isn’t quite true.

Posted on

Begin again

 

© Decca Records

 

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan,

He grew whiskers on his chin-e-gan.

Up came the wind and blew them in again,

Poor old Michael Finnegan.

Begin again.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan…

 

So runs a particularly disturbing children’s rhyme / song I remember from my boyhood.  It’s disturbing because it’s never-ending.  You sing those 27 words about poor old Michael Finnegan and the whiskers on his chin-e-gan, then you say, ‘Begin again’, and off you go again, repeating the same verse into infinity – or until you and / or your listeners go insane.  And I recall kids in the playground at my primary school who had nothing better to do but test their own endurance, and test other people’s endurance, by singing Michael Finnegan for as long as they could.  I even seem to recall the Irish singer Val Doonican, that knitwear and rocking-chair-loving easy-listening troubadour who had his own show on BBC TV from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s and who was much admired by ‘ladies of a certain age’, performing it on television one evening.   Wow.  Val Doonican singing Michael Finnegan over and over again, for all eternity.  That sounds like a very specialised version of hell.

 

Anyway, like Michael Finnegan’s whiskers, I’m afraid this blog has had to begin again.  In recent weeks it had been hacked into a couple of times.  Despite the efforts of the technical support people at the webhosting company, it was no longer possible to restore the site from back-up – too many longstanding files had been infected, leaving the door open for future hacking.  So, reluctantly, I agreed to have the site eviscerated of its files so that I could set it up again with a clean sheet.  That’s why it’s in the highly functional, impersonal-looking state it’s in at the moment, but hopefully I will be able to improve its appearance when I have time.

 

It’s a shame this happened, as the blog had been puffing along fairly happily since 2012 and I had posted over 750 entries, which of course are all down now.  I have, however, saved the majority of those past entries as Word files and I will hopefully repost some of the more interesting ones over the weeks and months to come.  (Obviously, though, there’s no point in reposting many of them as they were strictly ‘of their time’ – my ruminations about Tunisian politics after the revolution of 2011, written while I was living in Tunisia, for example; or my pontifications about Scottish politics in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.)

 

Meanwhile, to hold the fort, here are some updates on pieces of writing I have recently had published, under my various pseudonyms, with links to where to find them.

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield (the name I use for horror fiction and dark stuff generally):

 

  • My short story The Four-Legged Friend should be appearing in the June 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. Its home page is here.
  • My short story The Away Day was published in the March 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of this issue can be downloaded here.
  • My short story New Town Tours has been included in the new collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.  Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about and reading an excerpt from New Town Tours here.  Yes, I know the clip looks and sounds like it was recorded through a wet towel inside a portaloo, but I’ve been under a Covid-19-inspired curfew for the past two months and I didn’t have access to proper recording equipment.
  • Witch Hazel, a short story I had published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine, can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
  • The Lights, a longer short story with a Christmas theme, is still available to read on the December 2019 / January 2020 edition of Aphelion webzine, here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Rab Foster (the name I use for fantasy fiction):

 

  • Closing Time at the Speckled Wolf, a short story I had published in Aphelion webzine 14 months ago, was listed in its final edition of 2019 as one of the webzine’s best stories of the year. It can be accessed here.
  • My short story The World Builder was the featured story in the Halloween 2019 edition of Blood Moon Rising magazine and is still available here.

 

And published under my real and very boring name Ian Smith:

 

  • My short story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. Unfortunate timing meant that the issue went on sale just a few days before the Sri Lankan authorities announced an ongoing curfew in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.  However, there are signs that the curfew is now being eased slightly, and as far as I know, copies of Write are available at the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which has definitely been open in recent days.
  • Finally, my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike appeared last month on Write’s social media platforms. The first page of it can be accessed on Facebook here and the second page here.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

And that’s everything for now.  Hopefully, normal service will, as they say, be resumed as soon as possible.