Kazuo Ishiguro – Blood and Porridge

July 29, 2024

Bernard Cornwell’s (the) king

© Martin Joseph

My reading has waxed and waned this year. Until March, I lived in an apartment that required a 40-minute ride on a single bus to, and from, my workplace every day. That meant each working day I’d spend more than an hour sitting on a bus with my nose stuck in a book. As a result, I read a lot – six books in January 2024 alone, for instance.

However, one house-move and change-of-address later, I now find myself travelling to work on one bus for ten minutes, and then either on another bus for 15 minutes or on Singapore’s MRT system for five minutes. And suddenly, my reading has been knocked for six. I’ve barely got my latest book out and started perusing its pages when it’s time to change bus or change transport-mode. Since then, in the past few months, the books I’ve managed to finish have numbered a measly half-dozen.

However, one book I’ve read lately has bucked that trend. It’s a book that, from the moment I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This didn’t just happen while I was in transit to and from work. I was sneaking reads of it at my desk in the office. I was also reading it at home, much to the disgust of my always attention-hungry cat. It’s been a long time indeed since a book has taken over my life this way.

The book was The Winter King (1995), the first volume in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy, his retelling of the legend of King Arthur.

It’s the first Arthurian novel I’ve read in a while. The last one was Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant (though I suppose it’s better described as a ‘post-Arthurian’ novel), which I read early in the days of the Covid-19 pandemic. A couple of years before that, I read T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, which consisted of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, the first book was turned into an underwhelming animated movie by Walt Disney in 1963, but the literary series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on.

From what I’d heard about the Warlord trilogy, The Winter King was going to be a very different proposition. The word people have used again and again in relation to Cornwall’s books is ‘realism’. Thus, I shouldn’t expect Merlin to tutor Arthur by turning him into a fish, hawk, goose, ant, whatever, as he did in the T. H. White books. No, I expected The Winter King to drip with grim, dark, bloody and muddy veracity, painting as authentic as a picture as is possible (1500 years on) of life in fifth-century Britain, after the Romans had departed and when the Britons found their way of life under threat from invading Saxons. And all the fanciful embellishments that, over the centuries and millennia, have been added to King Arthur’s legend would be shorn from the story.

© Martin Joseph

That was what I expected and in many ways it’s what I got. But the fanciful stuff isn’t banished altogether. Cornwall’s premise is that Arthur’s story is being written down after his death by an elderly man called Derfel. At the book’s start, Derfel is a Christian monk but, as a young man, he was both a pagan and one of Arthur’s most trusted warriors. He’s writing at the urging of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the – already exaggerated – tales of Arthur she’s heard. And while Derfel records the story, she badgers him about the enchanting bits he’s left out. What about Arthur, as a boy, pulling a sword out of a stone? No, Derfel patiently tells her, that never happened – though in a ceremony once, Merlin did sadistically make the young Arthur stand all night on top of a stone in the middle of Stonehenge, holding a heavy sword. And what of the gallant and romantic Sir Lancelot? Well, Derfel concedes, Lancelot did exist – but he was a complete c*nt.

Revelations like these obviously aren’t what Igraine wants to hear. You get the impression that, once Derfel’s completed manuscript is in her hands, she’ll have her own scribes alter it until the story is one she’s comfortable with. And so, Cornwell suggests, even when Arthur’s exploits were transcribed for the first time, revisionism was at work. As James Stewart’s newspaper-man declares in John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Cornwall’s treatment of magic and the supernatural is a little unexpected too. He doesn’t have Merlin performing magical feats in front of our faces, but in a way such things exist – supposedly at the behest of the druids and witches that lurk at the fringes of this primitive, violent society. They play a major role because, real or not, people believe in them. When, for example, Nimue – in traditional Arthurian mythology the main Lady of the Lake, but here a witch-girl who’s one of Merlin’s acolytes and with whom, throughout the story, Derfel has a strange, on-off love affair – constructs a ‘ghost-fence’ out of wooden posts and severed human heads along the flank of an army, it doesn’t matter if the fence possesses real magical powers or not. The fact is, the enemy soldiers are convinced it does and nothing will induce them to cross the thing. No wonder that when the novel’s various kings and warlords move their armies into battle, they’re usually accompanied by a gaggle of verminous druids who histrionically cast spells and curses at their foes.

Interestingly, though Christianity has taken hold in fifth-century Britain and has many converts, including some among the powerful, it’s generally regarded as a curious, sometimes incomprehensible counterpart to the druidic paganism that pre-dates it. As Cornwell writes in the book’s opening pages about Uther Pendragon, king of the land of Dumnonia, he “did accept that the Christian god probably had as much power as most other gods.” Accordingly, as king, he decides to play it safe and employs a few Christian priests in his service as well as a few old-school druids.

This is underlined early on when we see Pendragon, desperate for his pregnant daughter-in-law Norwenna to give birth to a healthy male heir, rely first of all on the priests of his Christian advisor Bishop Bedwin, “chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna’s body.” When the birth-process takes a turn for the worse, Pendragon orders the priests out and replaces them with a delegation from Ynys Wydryn – Merlin’s abode – led by the pagan priestess Morgan (a more-disturbing-than-usual version of Morgan le Fay).

“Sebile, Morgan’s slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna’s bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child’s soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan… slapped Norwenna’s hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess’s breasts.” Meanwhile, on the ramparts outside, the pagans from Ynys Wydryn light multiple fires and create an unholy racket. “The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on a dozen blazing pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna’s labour.”

Incidentally, the baby that’s successfully delivered isn’t Arthur, but his nephew Mordred. Arthur is Pendragon’s bastard son and because of his illegitimacy is unable to inherit the crown of Dumnonia himself. He’s already an adult when Derfel begins his tale, is engaged overseas in Amorica – Brittany – and doesn’t make an appearance until about a hundred pages in, when he returns to Dumnonia to become the infant Mordred’s protector.

© Estate of Aubrey Beardsley

Also off-stage for much of the book is Merlin. He’s been on a quest to locate something called ‘the Knowledge of Britain’, and has been absent for so long it’s rumoured he might even be dead. In the meantime, life goes on at his base at Ynys Wydryn, a sort of demented, pagan hippy-commune supervised by Morgan and Nimue. There, Merlin, “for his pleasure… had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures…” One of its inhabitants is Derfel, who as a small child seemingly miraculously escaped a massacre carried out by the brutal King Gundleus, of the neighbouring land of Siluria. “The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us.” How Derfel ends up in his old age as a monk in a Christian monastery is presumably something the trilogy’s later books will explain.

Cornwall makes Merlin a memorable character, when he finally appears, and he’s responsible for much of the book’s humour. (Despite its realism, The Winter King is, in places, very amusing.) But Merlin is also, for me, one of the book’s few weaknesses. Specifically, the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, “Duh-dah!”

Anyway, that’s the set-up. After Pendragon’s death, Arthur becomes unofficial king of Dumnonia, keeping the throne warm for its official occupant, Mordred, who’s still an infant. Meanwhile, with the Saxons seizing large tracts of Britain’s east coast, Arthur knows he must try to build an alliance among the Britons’ kingdoms – Dumnonia, Gwent, Powys, Kernow and evil King Gundleus’s Siluria, i.e., what’s now modern-day Wales and western England – to fight the invaders off. That is no easy job given the rivalries and feuding that beset the leaders of those kingdoms. And Arthur ends up making the situation worse. He lets his heart rule his head and backs out of an arranged marriage designed to cement the necessary alliance – outraging everyone involved – after falling in love with a certain Guinevere. Of Guinevere, Merlin comments acidly, “it would have been better… had she been drowned at birth.”

Bernard Cornwall is, of course, best-known for his 24 novels about British soldier Richard Sharpe, set during the Napoleonic Wars. I haven’t read any of these – basically because for years I’ve been working my way through another lengthy series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin stories of Patrick O’Brian. Well, if the Sharpe books are as gripping and entertaining as The Winter King, I’ll certainly make a point of reading them eventually… But first I’m going to read the other two entries in the Warlord trilogy, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023

No fool like an old fool

© Vintage Classics

The death of Martin Amis on May 19^th this year brought forth a glut of media tributes that often included the claim he was the ‘greatest British novelist of his generation’. I have to say that’s not something I agree with. However, it did remind me that one generation before Martin Amis’s heyday, his father, Kingsley Amis, was also commonly feted as a major figure in British letters.

Neither was I greatly impressed by Amis Senior, although that’s no doubt an unfair opinion because, until recently, I’d read only one literary work by him. (I have also read a couple of Kingsley Amis novels that were classified as ‘genre’ fiction, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration by Britain’s snobby literary establishment, but I’ll talk about those later.) That book was his 1954 satire Lucky Jim, which I found awkwardly dated and, for a satire, not very funny. Yes, all literature is of its time, but good literature doesn’t feel dated the way that Lucky Jim did. And most books I’ve read by Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Graham Greene, contemporaries of Amis whom I do admire, don’t feel dated that way either.

That said, I was always keen to read Amis’s 1986 novel The Old Devils. Partly this was because its basic scenario, about a bunch of boozy, cantankerous Welshmen and Welshwomen refusing to grow old gracefully and instead doing so disgracefully, sounded like one I could identify with. Various people have accused me of being boozy and cantankerous and disgraceful in my old age too. Admittedly, I’m not Welsh, but I’m from an Irish-Scottish background, which is surely the next best thing. And in its day, The Old Devils received much praise. It prompted Anthony Burgess, for example, to say of Amis: “There is one old devil who is writing better than he ever did.” And in its year of publication, The Old Devils won the Booker Prize. So it had to be good. Right?

Well I’ve just read the book, and… Wrong.

But first, here’s the plot, such as it is. A small, tight-knit group of married couples live in the town of Dinedor in southwest Wales. There’s the frail, beleaguered literary scholar Malcolm and his wife Gwen; the greatly-overweight retired engineer and one-time lecturer Peter and his wife Muriel; the seriously alcoholic and panic-attack-prone restauranteur Charlie and his wife Sophie; plus a few associates. If I haven’t described the women in detail, there’s a reason for that, as we’ll see. The men spend their time in a snug-room of the local pub, the Bible and Crown. The room’s decorated with memorabilia from the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, which they’d been members of in their long-ago primes. The women devote themselves to a circuit of get-togethers at each other’s houses where cups of coffee rapidly give way to ‘one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Soave Superiore’ and the air soon fills with a fug of cigarette smoke.

The routineness and predictability of their existence is disrupted by the return of Alun and Rhiannon. They are members of the gang who relocated decades before to London, where Alun has done very well as a TV presenter. In particular, he’s become a ‘professional Welshman’, fronting shows about his home country that paint a mythologised and caricatured picture of it, and also establishing himself as an expert on an influential Welsh poet called Brydan. (Brydan is clearly based on Dylan Thomas, whom Amis once dismissed as “an outstandingly unpleasant man who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets.”)

Back living in Dinedor, Alun and Rhiannon soon stir the emotional pot. Firstly, Rhiannon has a history with Peter. He ‘wronged’ her while he was a young lecturer and she a student, and he’s still tormented by guilt about it. Also, the meek Malcolm has always secretly carried a torch for her and finds his old feelings bubbling up again. But Alun’s impact is more immediately dramatic. He’s a randy old goat and, before long, his insatiable carnal hunger has him cuckolding his supposed mates left, right and centre.

And that’s about it. The book mostly held my interest for the first 200 or 250 pages – it’s nearly 400 pages long – but eventually I realised how meandering and predictable the plot was. The likely climax would involve one of the male characters popping his clogs, either Malcolm with his general infirmity, Peter with his obesity, or Charlie with his alcoholism and panic attacks. Or indeed Alun, who despite his obvious, continuing virility has been subject to brief but worrying ‘funny turns’. My prediction proved correct, but I won’t say who snuffs it at the end. Meanwhile, the female characters are sketched with a perfunctory sameness – world-weary, gossipy, bitchy, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling – and even late in the book I was having problems telling them apart and remembering which marriages they were in.

The one female character Amis draws distinctly is Rhiannon, since she’s got baggage with Peter and Malcolm, the former regretful about his past treatment of her, the latter still worshipping her. The book’s most heartfelt part is where Malcolm persuades her to go for a drive with him, around some of their old hangouts during their youth, when he was close to her and hopeful of getting closer. Needless to say, and sadly for Malcolm, Rhiannon doesn’t remember them with anything like the same clarity.

It’s here that we get a jolting reminder that these characters, for all their affairs, dissolution and bad behaviour, are actually old. Rhiannon retreats into the ladies’ toilet of a restaurant, where she gets “down to work on her falsies,” i.e., picking tomato seeds from the meal she’s just had out of her dentures: “…she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression… the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing…”

Mind you, given the time, false teeth might not be a sign of elderliness. I’ve recently finished reading another Booker prize-winner, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which was published in 2020 but set like The Old Devils in the 1980s. That book’s a reminder of the astonishing fact that not so long ago, in Britain, many people believed it was desirable to get every tooth pulled out of their heads at as early an age as possible.

© From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Anyway, Amis portrays his male characters more vividly. But it’s hard to like them, especially as they’re such a moaning and reactionary shower of old farts. For one thing, they spend a lot of their time whinging about everything has changed for the worse. Now admittedly, the belief that modern life is rubbish seems an inescapable trait of growing old. Well, I should know… But you don’t feel much sympathy for them when they start discussing politics and have “a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth… They varied this with eulogies of Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was that ran Singapore.”

Elsewhere, we hear how Alun “dreamt that Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk…” That actually sounds like one of Kingsley Amis’s real-life wet dreams, as he once described the dreaded Maggie as “one of the best-looking women I had ever met… The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty…”

In my view, British life did change and take a definite turn for the worse in the 1980s, with Thatcher’s Conservative government abandoning traditional industries and ushering in mass unemployment, squandering oil revenues from the North Sea, and basically marketizing and monetarising everything. The latter policy included selling off publicly-owned infrastructure to the highest bidders, the legacy of which is the terrible transport system, sewage-filled rivers and exorbitant energy bills that bedevil Britain in 2023. From Thatcher onwards, for a party that called themselves Conservatives, they weren’t very good at conserving anything, which makes Amis’s right-wing-Tory characters’ bellyaching about everything going to the dogs sound hollow. Still, Thatcher won the Falklands War in 1982 and emasculated the unions, which I suppose was good enough for them.

That brings me to my other bone of contention with The Od Devils. Its characters spend a lot of time prattling on about being Welsh, but they don’t feel very Welsh. They don’t come across like any Welsh person I’ve ever met, either on a cultural level – for instance, there’s barely a mention of the country’s beloved sport of rugby – or on a political one. Okay, they’re Tories, so you’d expect them to be dismissive of Wales’s main political traditions, exemplified by the likes of Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, the Liberals’ David Lloyd George, and Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans, and they carp about the ineptitude of local Labour politicians and describe the Welsh nationalists as ‘c*nts’. But you’d expect the trauma of Wales’s 1980s industrial decline – following the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, 25,000 Welsh miners lost their jobs in pit closures – to register at least a little on their radar. It doesn’t, though.

I knew plenty of Scottish Tories back in the 1980s who, while they thought Thatcher was the bees’ knees and regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty and the Union Jack, saw themselves too as Scottish to the core. Maybe some of this was a pose – tartan, whisky, golf, Burns’s poetry – but deep down they seemed to have a genuine love for Scotland’s traditions and fiercely supported the country in its cultural and sporting endeavours. I suspect these dual loyalties had often been forged by military experience during their youth, when they’d proudly served in Scottish regiments whilst also fighting for Britain.

But I didn’t get that feeling with Amis’s characters here. It’s like they’ve been transplanted from the English Home Counties, with Welshness slathered over them like the trappings of some prestigious club-membership they can show off and banter about, but underneath means nothing to them – unless, as with Alun, it can be turned into money. And there’s little or no talk in the book of World War II. Given the book’s setting and the characters’ ages, shouldn’t this have been a big thing for them? Wouldn’t the men have served in the Welsh regiments?

So, The Old Devils neither impressed me as a book nor convinced me as a representation of life in Wales nearly 40 years ago. Indeed, when I look at what else was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1986, I find it mind-melting that this beat both Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Margaret Atwood’s prescient The Handmaid’s Tale to the title. And it won’t improve my opinion of Amis as a writer of mainstream literary fiction. However, I’ll qualify that by saying that as a genre writer, I’ve enjoyed his output. I highly rate both his James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun (1968) and his supernatural novel The Green Man (1968). If only old Kingsley had written more spy and ghost stories, and crime, horror and science-fiction ones too…

Meanwhile, as the antics of Alun, Malcolm, Peter and co. increasingly set my teeth on edge, I found myself thinking of something my Dad liked to say: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

October 15, 2021October 16, 2021

Just a flesh wound

© Ley Line Entertainment / Bron Creative / A24

It’s fair to say that the regal, if probably hypothetical, legend of King Arthur has suffered more than a few flesh wounds from filmmakers over the years.

At least in the case of the Monty Python team, the filmmakers were deliberately taking the piss. Their 1974 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail inflicted on poor Arthur such indignities as the Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, the bloodthirsty Rabbit of Caerbannog, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Dennis of the Autonomous Collective (“Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”) and the outrageously rude French guard (“You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!”).

More worryingly, other filmmakers have tried to be serious, though with cringeworthy results. I’m thinking of 1967’s Camelot, which has Richard Harris’s Arthur bursting into song and warbling, “You mean a king who fought a dragon / Whacked him in two and fixed his wagon / Goes to be wed in terror and distress? / Yes!” Or 2004’s King Arthur, which has a grimly wooden Clive Owen in the title role and which, according to the Times’ reviewer Wendy Ide, ‘attaches itself to the Arthurian legend like some parasitic worm’. Or 2017’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, which was directed by Guy Ritchie in the manner you’d expect from Guy Ritchie, complete with a cameo appearance by that well-known icon of the Dark Ages, David Beckham.

Actually, I’ve immersed myself a lot in the King Arthur legend recently, not through films but through books, which I’ve found much more rewarding. Not long ago, I managed to finish off T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, comprised of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, I know, the first book was the basis for the underwhelming 1963 Walt Disney cartoon, but the series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on. I’ve also lately read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, set a short period after the death of Arthur. Come to think of it, The Buried Giant could almost qualify as a postscript to White’s series, although there are a few differences in continuity. (For example, Merlin is said to be dead by the time of Ishiguro’s novel, whereas in the timeline established by White he’d be alive. His ability in the Once and Future King books to live through time in the opposite direction from human beings, from the future to the past, would ensure that.)

© Faber & Faber

A figure from Arthurian legend who plays a major role in The Buried Giant, as an elderly man, is Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain. Gawain, of course, occupies his own niche in the Arthurian mythos because he’s the main character in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the late 14^th century poem written in a North West Midlands dialect of Middle English. The poem has Sir Gawain respond to the mysterious Green Knight who arrives at Arthur’s court one Christmas Eve with an unusual challenge: who is prepared to strike him a blow with the axe he is carrying, on the condition that one year from now the Green Knight gets an opportunity to return the blow on his home turf, a place called the Green Chapel? Gawain takes up the challenge and uses the axe to whack off the Green Knight’s head. That, however, doesn’t resolve the matter, because the Green Knight refuses to die. He picks up his head and rides off, leaving Gawain honour-bound to keep the appointment at the Green Chapel next Christmas. Obviously, there, he’ll receive an equivalent blow that he’s less likely to be impervious to.

The poem was filmed twice in the 20^th century by the director Stephen Weeks, first in 1973 as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with singer Murray Head as Gawain and Nigel Greene as the Green Knight, and again in 1984 as Sword of the Valiant. Both versions made little impact and the clearly well-intentioned Weeks was hampered by low budgets. With the second version, he was no doubt hampered too by the fact he made the film for the notoriously schlocky Cannon Group, whose co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus overrode his choice of Mark Hamill to play Gawain and instead foisted on him Miles O’Keefe, who’d previous played the Lord of the Jungle in 1981’s dire Tarzan the Ape Man. A better casting choice was Sean Connery as the Green Knight.

Now, however, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has received the big budget treatment. Well, at 15 million dollars, not that big, but certainly a lot more than Stephen Weeks had to play with. David Lowery has written and directed a new version with Dev Patel, of 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, stepping into Gawain’s armour. I have to say the resulting film, with the shortened title The Green Knight, isn’t perfect, but nonetheless it does justice to the poem at last. It also qualifies as that rare beast – a quality King Arthur movie.

The Green Knight doesn’t present a fanciful or idealised picture of Arthur’s court, if that court had ever actually existed. While it doesn’t wallow in medieval dirt, muck and shit like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Dennis! There’s some lovely filth down here!”), it does show life in and around Arthur’s citadel as wintry, draughty, farmyard-y and unglamorous. Accordingly, Arthur and Guinevere (Sean Harris and Kate Dickie) are portrayed as an ageing, rather threadbare couple, who don’t even get the accolade of being referred to by their legendary names. They’re just ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’.

On the other hand, the film is keen to show how unspectacular characters, settings and events get exaggerated and mythologised and turned into legends. It makes much of story-telling and myth-making. For example, no sooner has Gawain had his first encounter with the Green Knight than the tale is being retold as a puppet show for the neighbourhood’s children. On a battlefield strewn with newly-dead corpses, a scavenger (Barry Keoghan) is already recounting stories of derring-do about the battle that are clearly over-the-top bullshit. And Arthur himself pleads with his court, “Friends, brothers and sisters, who can regale me and my queen with some myth or tale?” When he asks Gawain, “Tell me a tale of yourself so that I might know thee,” and Gawain replies, “I have none to tell,” Guinevere interjects with: “Yet. You have none to tell yet.”

It reminds me of another movie with a focus on myth-making, but a very different setting, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Ford’s meditation about the end of America’s Wild West. As Carleton Young’s newspaper-editor character says in that film, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”

I thought the first hour-and-a-bit of The Green Knight was splendid. The Green Knight himself is presented wonderfully as a proper green man, all gnarled wood and straggly tree-root beard, and his appearance is complemented by his voice, which is that of gravelly Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson. Actually, it’s nice to see Ineson and Kate Dickie together in a film again after they played the doomed Puritan parents in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Once Gawain sets off in search of the Green Chapel, to keep his unwanted appointment, he has several phantasmagorical adventures that involve phantoms, giants and supernaturally intelligent animals and that are gorgeously shot by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. However, it’s the episode with Barry Keoghan and his grubby little band of thieves that’s perhaps most haunting, thanks to an amazing sequence with a rotating camera-shot and time-lapse special effects that makes you wonder if anything else you see in the film is going to be true.

But The Green Knight does, in my opinion, have a structural problem. This is because in the original poem the adventures Gawain has during the first half of his journey are not described in any detail, and what we see on screen presumably comes from Lowery’s imagination. However, later events in the film are based on the poem and form an important part of the plot. These involve Gawain coming to a castle near the Green Chapel and enjoying the hospitality of its lord (Joel Edgerton) and lady (Alicia Vikander) during the last few days before his appointment. His experiences there become strange and prove to be a series of tests. That’s fine, but after the fantastical episodes that Gawain’s been through earlier on, these castle-bound scenes feel something of a let-down and act as a brake on the film’s momentum.

The climax bravely departs from the denouement of the poem (which had Arthur’s sister, and Gawain’s aunt, Morgan Le Fay popping up as a sort of medieval deus ex machina). Instead, it does something that had me thinking of the climax of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This neatly echoes the earlier themes of storytelling and myth-making.

The Green Knight certainly isn’t to everyone’s tastes. For example, a certain well-known science-fiction author, clearly more a Guy Richie / King Arthur: Legend of the Sword man, denounced it on twitter recently as “the worst film I’ve watched this year… What a waste of good actors. I want my two hours back.” However, if you’re in the right frame of mind, not expecting anything like the usual cinematic Arthurian fare, and willing to tolerate some ruminative, slow-moving stuff in the second half, you may find it magical.

September 9, 2020September 9, 2020

Kazuo in Kafka Country

For me, one thing that’s suffered due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been my reading. Before the appearance of the virus, on average, I was able to get through one book a week. However, since the pandemic forced some lifestyle changes – starting with two months of strict lockdown, and then a period with more freedom but limitations on my social life and ability to travel, and also a new working life where I have to do everything on a laptop at home with the result that I sometimes don’t go outside for three days at a time – my reading ability has diminished and it commonly takes me twice or three times as long to read a book now. I suppose it’s something to do with my brain receiving less stimulation than it did in the old days. In the current situation, my brain has grown lethargic, its processing muscles have atrophied, and reading has become a struggle for it.

That said, even back before anyone had heard of Covid-19, I think I would have found the book I’ve just finished reading, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel The Unconsoled, hard going.

I’d previously read only three of Ishiguro’s novels – 1986’s An Artist of the Floating World, 1989’s The Remains of the Day and 2005’s Never Let Me Go – but I’d enjoyed them and was looking forward to reading The Unconsoled when someone recently bought it for me as a present. It tells the story of a world-famous pianist called Ryder who arrives in an unnamed city in the Germanic part of Europe a few days before he’s scheduled to top the bill of a concert there. It gradually transpires that this concert has much invested in it. It’s supposed to mark the rehabilitation of a local composer called Brodsky who, after many years as a chronic alcoholic, appears to be on the mend. Brodsky occupies a talismanic position not just for the city’s artistic community but for the city as the whole, and the citizens whom Ryder encounters assume that Brodsky’s success or failure at the concert will lead to the city’s future well-being or decline.

This basic scenario is curious, then, but more curious still is what happens to Ryder after he books into his hotel in the city. For he finds himself deep in the heart of what can only be described as Kafka Country. Yes, Ishiguro drops his main character into a labyrinth of improbable confusion and frustration, like those that feature in the pages of the great Czech author’s The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926).

Firstly, people he’s only just been introduced to pour out their problems to him and beg him for help – starting with Gustav, the hotel’s elderly porter, who believes that Ryder can somehow engineer a reconciliation between him, his estranged daughter Sophie and his grandson Boris. Also requiring Ryder’s assistance is the hotel manager Hoffman (who thinks Ryder can help thaw the icy relationship between him and his wife) and Hoffman’s son Stephan (who wants to enlist Ryder’s aid in winning his parents’ respect). Plus Ryder is soon being pestered by various city dignitaries in a panic about what Brodsky might do at the forthcoming concert, and by local journalists who for some mysterious reason want him to do a photo-shoot next to a controversial monument on the city’s outskirts, and by an embittered musician called Christof, whose fortunes have begun to wane as those of the now-teetotal Brodsky have begun to wax again.

Ryder agrees to help these many people out and soon ends up with a hectic pre-concert schedule. But – and here’s the Kafka-esque part – he rarely manages to get from one appointment to another without being waylaid by somebody else. The plot is a series of resolutions by Ryder to assist Person A by going to Place B, only to encounter Person C and get diverted to Place D.

From asianews.it

The laws of physics also conspire against Ryder. Distances unaccountably expand so that addresses and buildings that seem only minutes away become harder and harder to get to. But occasionally they contract too, so that function halls and restaurants in remote parts of the city turn out at the last moment to handily adjoin the very hotel Ryder is staying in. Further weirdness occurs when Ryder acquires a temporary omniscience and finds himself eavesdropping on conversations that are happening rooms away from him or witnessing events that happened in his new acquaintances’ distant pasts.

To make things more confusing, it’s not just the physical universe that’s collapsing around Ryder. His internal universe seems to be doing the same. Improbably, as he beetles about the city, he keeps encountering people he once knew during his childhood and youth in England. Even though he’s only just met Sophie and Boris, he somehow simultaneously seems to have known them for years, to the point where Sophie is his long-term partner and Boris his son. And his elderly and ailing parents have supposed arrived somewhere in the city, with the intention of watching him perform for the first time. But although he keeps hearing reports of his parents, he never quite manages to catch up with them.

So what is going on? I wondered if it was all happening in Ryder’s dazed mind and Ishiguro was trying to create a nightmarish satire on modern celebrity. Ryder, in other words, has gone mad whilst constantly having to fight his way through throngs of obsequious yes-men and hangers-on, all determined to exploit his fame in different ways. However, I don’t think it’s a spoiler with this type of novel to warn that you may not have got the answers by the end of it.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that The Unconsoled appeared in 1995, just before the Internet took off and just before the carrying of mobile phones became de rigueur for everyone. I can only imagine what a tangled plot The Unconsoled would have had if it’d been written a few years later, with the beleaguered Ryder also being assailed by phone calls, texts, emails and WhatsApp messages as well.

I’m a fan of the works of Franz Kafka and there are plenty of other books I admire that could be described as Kafka-esque. Alasdair Gray’s 1980 classic Lanark is one. But what makes The Unconsoled such a slog is that Ishiguro appears to have no ‘edit’ function when it comes to the dialogue. Or more accurately, the monologues, because the book has an endless succession of them. People approach Ryder, ostensibly to flatter and fawn over him, but really to unburden their problems on him, which they do in screeds of repetitive and obsessive blather. It soon got to the point where, whenever a new character appeared, I’d shudder and check out the pages ahead to find out how long the inevitable, pleading soliloquy would go on for. New York might be the City That Never Sleeps, but the anonymous city here is the City That Never Shuts Up.

Of course, this incessant, unstoppable prattling adds to the Kafka-esque quality of the situation enveloping Ryder. But it isn’t much fun to read, especially when the novel clocks in at 535 pages. That’s an awful lot of prattling to get through.

If Ishiguro had made The Unconsoled half its published length, he’d have created a novel with the same uncomfortable, disorientating qualities, but one that would have been far less of a chore to read.

Incidentally, I’ve just checked out the most recent Penguin editions of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle and found that they run to 208 and 320 pages respectively. Would they have had the same impact if Kafka had added an extra 200 or 300 pages to them? Or would this have diminished their effectiveness through overkill? I suspect the latter. As it stands, The Unconsoled doesn’t feel so much like a book influenced by The Trial as a book that’s just, well, a trial.