Life and works

After having enjoyed a spot of literary tourism during my holiday (one week still to go, thank Heaven) and having started on Jude Morgan’s latest – The Secret Life of William Shakespeare  – I have reason to ask myself: why are we (people in general, and bookish people in particular) so interested in the lives of famous authors? After all, they often lead pretty unremarkable lives. Shakespeare is a case in point. True, his existence in London must have been mildly interesting, what with belonging to a company of players, getting chummy with a reckless earl, creating a character (Falstaff) who is such a hit with the monarch that she actually requests a sequel (royally commanded fan fiction!) etc. But we know next to nothing about his personality, and for all what we know to the contrary, his plays and poems have nothing whatsoever to do with his “real life”. Jane Austen is another example: I’m sure she herself took the fact that she “never met her Mr Darcy” with equanimity (how do we even know that Austen would have fancied a Mr Darcy?), but the lack of romance in her own life does come as a bit of a disappointment to her devoted readers.  Even a flamboyant author like Dickens cannot hope to live a life that matches his novels in incident (or villain-intensity). So why do we insist on exploring our favourite authors’ lives – why can’t we be content with their works?

I think a lot can be explained by what I call the “passage to Narnia” factor. In the film Shadowlands, a small boy comes to visit C.S. Lewis (I believe it was a relative) and at once runs in search of the famous wardrobe. He finds it, but of course no passage to Narnia. Swallowing his disappointment, he reassures the author that he knew that it was just an ordinary wardrobe, really. This, of course, is perfectly true. But like the boy in the film, we can’t help hoping to find a gateway to the imaginary world of our famous authors, and we think getting closer to their lives will help us. After all, authors do sometimes use bits of their own life in their fiction, don’t they? Who’s to say that Viola, or Mr Darcy, or Uriah Heep never walked the Earth?

Because the primary interest is in the author’s creations, not him/herself, there is something melancholy about literary tourism, at least for my part. A chair that Dickens sat on can, sadly, never have the same apppeal for me as a chair belonging to James Carker, and I’ll never come across one of those because he never existed. And so I find myself having a great deal of sympathy with projects that try to link authors’ lives and works as much as possible. Flights of imagination in biodramas – such as making the foreman of the blacking factory in the TV series Dickens of London into an undeniably Heepian figure – are most welcome. But it can get out of hand. Remember the film Becoming Jane (one of the few Austen-related films I have not been able to sit through)? There, it was hinted that Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have written about love and sexual attraction without having experienced it first-hand. So whatever happened to the author’s imagination, then? As someone correctly and acidly pointed out, no-one presumes that Shakespeare had to murder someone in order to write The Scottish Play.

The greatest part of an author’s imaginary world will, I’m afraid, be available through their work only, and literary characters are for the most part figments of imagination. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with a bit of Narnia-chasing (if Morgan doesn’t go to town on Golden Youth-Dark Lady speculations, I, for one, will think it a lost opportunity). Even if we don’t find the passage to a magic kingdom, finding the wardrobe is nice enough in its way.

Holiday bubble

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a proper four-week Swedish holiday would give one more time to blog, instead of less? Not so – the days are just dreamily flowing away, while I attempt to do as little as possible. A long-planned journey to the south of England (I’ll be avoiding London and Heathrow because of the Olympics crowds) suddenly seems a major project. Fortunately, watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel put it all in perspective somewhat.

While on the subject of the Olympics – wasn’t the Opening Ceremony great? Ooh, how I loved those Victorian factory-owners/engineers in their smart suits and top hats, headed by a Kenneth Branagh who was obviously having the time of his life. And those chimneys plunging out of the ground! And the molten iron Olympis Rings! “Pandemonium”? Looked more like heaven to me.

Of course, it was a misrepresentation of history to show pre-industrial Britain as an idyllic place where sheep gambolled about and the sweet rustics had all the time in the world for a game of cricket. The population worked from dusk until dawn and starved in pre-industrial times. With friends like me, though, serious champions of the Industrial Revolution hardly need any enemies, because I can’t help being fascinated by the mythical, sinister way – call it “villain chic” – in which the industrial age is depicted by its detractors. It may not be fair to all those 19^th-century men and women (tons of them) concerned with making life easier for the Noble Working Man. But it’s a lot more fun than some balanced, complex view. Shut up, Noble Working Man, and put up another chimney.

My reading has hardly been ambitious since the holidays, or even before then. A Weekend with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly fulfilled my need of an uncomplicated happy ending after Through a Glass Darkly. I wasn’t sure about Matt Rees’s Mozart’s Last Aria at first – I couldn’t quite warm to the novel’s narrator, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, who’s looking into her brother’s apparently suspicious death. However, things picked up when a love interest and a suitably formidable minister of police made their entrance. The ending was satisfyingly twisty, there was a terrific character-shows-his-true-villainous-colours-scene, and you’ll be glad to know that poor maligned Antonio Salieri did not do it. In fact he wasn’t even in the frame. The most page-turning holiday read so far, though, was Revenger by Toby Clements, a thriller set in Tudor times and featuring decent spy John Shakespeare (brother of William). The baddies (an increasingly alarming hoodlum and a magnificently foul-mouthed arch-enemy) were rougher than I’m used to but contributed to making the book a cracking good read.

Right now I’m half-way through Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, and I must say I’m a bit disappointed this far. I confidently expected the crime plot to be a whodunnit with Pride and Prejudice characters as the suspects; sadly, though, the novel is more of a police procedural. The victim is not, as we are first led to think, George Wickham but his comrade-in-arms Captain Denny, and Wickham is the chief suspect. But apart from him and possibly Colonel Fitzwilliam (whom James plainly does not like), the Pride and Prejudice characters all have comfortable alibis: the coppers won’t be asking Lady Catherine to help with their inquiries any time soon. Thumbnail sketches of the harsh-but-fair magistrate and the medical expert prove more vivid than the Austen characters. A family of servants is introduced and will probably have some bearing on the case, but though I like Upstairs Downstairs-dramas, I must confess to having zilch interest in this plot-line. If Wickham and/or Denny has caused some domestic upset in the servant household and this proves to be the explanation of the murder, then why drag Pemberley into it at all? The book could in that case just as well have been about another regency estate altogether.

As I enjoy James’s usual prose style, I also thought it unnecessary of her to use a vaguely Austenesque style for this novel. It’s elegant but not as pithy as Austen, and I think it sould have been wiser to use the tried-and-true Jamesian psychological-crime-story-style. The crime story seems to take precedent over the sequel element anyway.