Phillip Mann's Alternative History

[Phillip Mann: A Land fit for Heroes. Vol. 1: Escape to the Wild Wood (1993)]

• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 1: Escape to the Wild Wood. 1993. London: VGSF, 1994.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 2: Stand Alone Stan. London: Victor Gollancz, 1994.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 3: The Dragon Wakes. London: Victor Gollancz, 1995.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 4: The Burning Forest. London: Victor Gollancz, 1996.

On the one hand this seems a lot weaker than Phillip Mann's "straight" Science Fiction; on the other hand I find myself compulsively reading and rereading the various volumes in the series as if I were hoping to find some kind of master-key to their meaning.

One reason for this was (I suspect) because they were so difficult to obtain. The first one I bought in paperback quite straightforwardly, but after that copies of each successive volume seemed less and less easily accessible, until I was forced to wait to read the last one of all until it came up in a library sale! This might well have been an accidental impression, but I did get the sense that Mann's publisher was less and less behind him as the series continued.

Which is a pity, really. The division into volumes is actually pretty arbitrary. This is one long novel, divided into four parts, and I can't help wondering if the author wouldn't have preferred to see it that way: combined in one volume. That would be the best way to read it, I feel.

There are two basic aspects to the book. On the one hand it's a kind of British "wood-fantasy", in the vein of Alan Garner, or Ian Watson's Coming of Vertumnus (1994), or (above all) Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984) and its various sequels.

On the other hand, it's an alternative history novel, in the distinguished tradition of predecessors such as Keith Roberts' Pavane (1968), Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (1976), or (more appropriately, in this case) Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna (2003).

As a fantasy work, the comparison with Mythago Wood immediately puts it in its place, I feel. Holdstock's notion of a forest which entraps all past time in a kind of vortex of Jungian archetypes is so compelling that it has even survived a number of increasingly attenuated sequels to this fine first novel (Lavondyss is the worst, The Bone Forest probably the best, but it's hard to see that any of them add much to the power of this original idea). Mann's wild wood, on the other hand, never really seems really out of control, even at the end when supernatural forces somehow take over the defence of the Island of Britain against its rationalist Roman overlords.

His ecological credentials are impeccable, mind you. And I have the greatest sympathy for the set of priorities he's arguing for in this book (as in his work as a whole), but I never feel exactly frightened or threatened by it as I do by Holdstock's Ryhope Wood (or even Old Man Willow in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings).

As a work of science fiction, on the other hand, his conception of a world "12 seconds away" from ours is nicely managed, I think. It's certainly in no way inferior to Silverberg's own version of a Roman Imperium surviving into the modern world. I'm not sure if Silverberg knew that Mann had preceded him with this idea (not that it's a particularly novel one: Brian Aldiss, among others, had used it before either of them), but his own novel definitely made more of a stir.

Why? I think it probably came down to that decision to release the book in four separate parts, again. Silverberg's came in one massive volume: Mann's took me literally years (I'm not exaggerating) to collect together. I'm very proud of my set of Mann-ian Hardbacks, but it's a shame that so many of them appear to be discards from the public library system (albeit pretty well-thumbed ones).

I believe in Mann's Romans as I find it difficult to do with his Woodlanders (let alone his fairies or trees). Nor am I really confident that I understand the meaning of his title: "A Land fit for Heroes". The term, as I understand it, has generally been used ironically - as a contrast between the promised and real futures provided for World War One veterans once they came home from the front. Is that how Mann means it, too? The "heroes" in question must surely be his rather William Morris-like (News from Nowhere) working-class Englishmen. And yet throughout the book they seem more like victims of forces they can't control than intelligent shapers of their own destiny.

There is, finally, a lack of poignancy about the book: a kind of impersonal preachiness which dominates the fates of the individual characters: Coll and Miranda disappear into a kind of mystic haze at the end, and Angus too seems robbed of all revolutionary purpose by the huge black dome which threatens to swallow up his world.

The protagonists of Mann's earlier books - Pawl Paxwax, Jon Wilberfoss, above all Angelo the part-android - had the property of somehow transcending the books they were in. The same might be said of the trio of Angus, Miranda and Viti in the first few volumes of Mann's tetralogy, but not, unfortunately, in the last one.

It is, of course, a very ambitious concept (Perhaps - I'm tempted to speculate - Phillip Mann was finally trying to rival his great namesake's tetralogy of monstrously complex historical novels, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) ...). The fact that it doesn't quite satisfy hasn't stopped me - as I mentioned above - reading and rereading it. There's so much to like and admire in Mann's 1,000-odd pages: Ulysses and the Emperor's strange visions in the Great Pyramid, the detailed account of the workings of the Battle Dome, Wildwood electrics as expounded by Angus ...

If it's a failure, it's a magnificent failure: one more on the scale of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables than your average Sci-fi series which fails to live up to the promise of its first volume (Farmer's Riverworld series, Niven's Ringworld, Clarke's Rama novels). I don't really believe it is a failure, though. It may not work quite so well as some of his earlier novels, but it leaves me full of hope for the next Mannian work we encounter.

[Phillip Mann: A Land fit for Heroes. Vol. 2: Stand Alone Stan (1994)]

Phillip Mann's Wulfsyarn

Or, The Ghost in the Machine

[Phillip Mann: Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (1990)]

Rather poignant, that "New Zealand Author" label, don't you think? Sounds more like a government health warning than a recommendation ...

Wulfsyarn is the first of Mann's books I read, and I still find it one of his most perplexing. The basic notion is simple enough: Wulf, a cybernetic autoscribe, is recording the story of John Wilberfoss, disgraced captain of the ship Nightingale, which disappeared on its maiden voyage. When it was found again there was no-one on board but its captain, and he was - to all intents and purposes - mad.

Lily, the robot nurse, and Wulf, the secretary to the abbot of the Pacifico Monastery, are trying to coax Wilberfoss back to health and sanity in order to find out what happened to him and all the others, human and extraterrestrial, who were on board the immense hospital ship at the time.

The problem (as usual in these cases) is that one becomes more and more interested in Wulf and his perceptions of the (for want of a better word) "human" world, and less and less interested in Wilberfoss's various dilemmas and crises of faith as the story continues.

Or at least that's how I felt the first time I read it. Rereading it with more knowledge of Mann's specific interests and concerns: the ecology of alien lifeforms, the dark effects of human lack of self-knowledge, I began to see the form of the book more clearly. It is, in essence, an updated version of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, complete with the crew of dead comrades, the death of the albatross (in this case the alien parasitic creature called Quelle [German for "source"], together with its host, the silly young shepherd Sandy), the "Nightmare death-in-life", and then the eventual return home. Wilberfoss's "crime" seems more and more attenuated and difficult to define as the narrative proceeds - but (like the Mariner's) it stems from some kind of arrogance and sense of self-sufficiency which inspires him to flout the laws of nature.

The actual blame for the destruction of the ship lies far more with the Quelle than with Wilberfoss - but it's really the consequence of a series of coincidences and mischances (the Quelle's decision to infect the ship's bio-crystalline computers with its own self-hatred and self-doubt; the sudden windstorm which confuses the ship's sensors on the alien planet just long enough to accomplish the destruction of every other living thing on board; and (finally) the noble self-sacrifice of the windborne alien, the Chi-da, which Wilberfoss has met and made friends with on the planet when the damaged ship is unable to reach escape velocity). About this last event Wulf makes a telling point:

I am struck by the fact that Wilberfoss, at all points in his life, had visions. The visions were an objective expression of his passions. Perhaps they have real existence in another world. Perhaps the human mind has access to this other world. I do not. Among Wilberfoss's visions I included his beloved Chi-da. I have come to the opinion that if I had been down there on that grey world with Wilberfoss, then I would not have seen any creature which covered the sky like a banner of rippling red silk. [286-87]

Did any of it happen at all? Where is the boundary between "real" and "visionary" events in Wilberfoss's story? It is, after all, literally "a tale told by an idiot" - or at any rate by the self-destructive, psychologically-damaged sole survivor of a cataclysmic disaster. It's natural both for him to blame himself, and to look for clues to what went wrong in his own nature (especially in this case, when the ship's bio-crystalline mind was organically linked to and modelled on that of its commander).

Wulf goes on to say of this benevolent Other, the Chi-da, at the end of his "mosaic", his reconstruction of Wilberfoss's story: "he did not kill it. You cannot kill such things. He allowed it fulfilment, at the last." [287]

•



[Noel O'Hare, "An Alien at My Table." NZ Listener (August 20, 1994): 38-40.]

I hope the Listener doesn't mind my reproducing this Jane Ussher photograph from the feature-article on Phillip Mann they published back in the Nineties. If so, I apologise. Some interesting things came up in Noel O'Hare's interview, which is why I cut it out and kept it at the time.

"If I'm not careful, I could let the characters becomes too forceful," he says. Mann has a reputation for doing really good aliens. The most unlikely creatures populate his pages: the Hooded parasol, a floating canopy that kills its prey by smell; Diphilus, a jelly ball of illogic logic that devastates computers: the Hammer, a weta-like alien with a deep sense of humour; Wulf, a mechanical autoscribe and analyst of human psychology .. the alien parade goes on. [39]

It's interesting that O'Hare includes Wulf among this "parade" of aliens. I'm not sure that's the point Mann means to make with him. He is, after all, a robot - albeit a "semi-sentient" biocrystalline brain has been implanted in him along the way. Is that the same thing as these other organic, albeit wildly exotic, species?

Mann lives his work, and is possessed by the tale he is telling. "When I sit down to write, I very quickly go into a bit of a trance. I slide into that world very easily, and what I'm doing is totally real to me." [39]

Perhaps that's one reason why it's very hard to distinguish visionary experience and "real" events in the SF landscapes he creates - particularly in Wulfsyarn. This deliberate confusion of levels, somewhat bewildering (I suspect) to fans of (so-called) hardcore science fiction, seems inspired as much by ideology as the demands of the story (if one can draw so facile a distinction between the two, that is):

"I don't have a platform, a political point of view. I'm inconsistent. I'll contradict myself, but sweeping through everything is a worry about what happens if you destroy things, what happens if we destroy this wonderful bloody world." [40]

Mann's "novels of ideas" (to use O'Hare's phrase) are, nevertheless, novels - and ought to be judged and assessed as such:

" ... The rules that govern the writing of a science-fiction novel are exactly the same as for any other literature. Absolutely.

"I don't think science fiction's easier. It's often harder, because you have to maintain the reader's confidence in your ability to stay up there like a balloon. You're floating there and you don't have normal everyday life to support you." [40]

•

Which brings me to my next point.

I guess that New Zealand readers still know Samuel Butler primarily as the author of Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), and those as much for their New Zealand setting as for their - somewhat laboured - dystopian satire. He was also a considerable Classical scholar, and turned his hand to a translation of Homer (as well as writing a number of books and essays elaborating his theory that the author of the Odyssey - at least - was, in fact, a woman).

Here's a passage from his version of the Iliad (Bk XVIII: ll.368 and following):

Meanwhile Thetis came to the house of Vulcan, imperishable, star-bespangled, fairest of the abodes in heaven, a house of bronze wrought by the lame god's own hands. She found him busy with his bellows, sweating and hard at work, for he was making twenty tripods that were to stand by the wall of his house, and he set wheels of gold under them all that they might go of their own selves to the assemblies of the gods, and come back again - marvels indeed to see. They were finished all but the ears of cunning workmanship which yet remained to be fixed to them: these he was now fixing, and he was hammering at the rivets.

- Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. 1898. Great Books of the Western World, 4. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. 1952. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1989.

This passage, from the long description of the forging by the lame god Hephaestus of a new set of armour for Achilles, seems exceptionally interesting to me (especially given Mann's description of Wulf, the autoscribe: "I am told in shape I resemble a helmet of the type used by the Greek warriors at the battle of Troy. If that helps you visualise me, all well and good. But you must also realize that I am four and a half feet high from my base to the top of my crest." [12], though I doubt any direct reference was intended).

While it may not be the very earliest allusion in literature to something resembling the modern conception of a robot (that honour should probably go to the stone rowers destroyed in a fit of pique by the immortality-seeking hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh), it's fascinating to see how far back the idea does in fact go.

These twenty wheeled tripods, whose sole function is (apparently) "to go of their own selves to the assemblies of the gods, and come back again," in fact resemble modern Mars rovers and factory automatons far more than the original "robots" of the Čapek brothers' 1920's play (R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robots - to be exact).

One could go on to trace the idea of semi- (or wholly) sentient artificial life-form through the medieval Golem legend, through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the life-like animated doll Olimpia in E. T. A Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (1816), through the surgically altered beastmen in H. G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), through Maria's evil android alter-ego in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), all the way up to Data (in Star Trek) and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator. But what makes them so perennially fascinating to us? Why do we keep on returning to this topos: the "android theme" (for want of a better term)?

I suppose that Descartes and Cartesian rationalism has to take at least part of the responsibility (or the blame). For Descartes (as I understand him, at any rate), what you do is the only valid source of information on what you are. Thus, there can be no useful discussion of essence separate from function. His famous apothegm "I think, therefore I am," is therefore intended to define humanity in terms of its capacity for rational thought.

The Wikipedia article on Descartes has (characteristically) a great deal more to say on the subject. I quote:

Descartes ... suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of physics. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of physics. Descartes argued that only humans have minds, and that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion.

This body-machine gives us (in a sense) our robot: Cartesianism made apparent (I was about to say, made flesh - made metal, rather). But where, then, is the soul in such an entity? Even a machine must (after all) have some kind of mind to guide it if it is to exhibit independent choice. Can it also, then, be subject to human passions? Hence Wulf's somewhat awkwardly-phrased disavowals of pure "objectivity", in the opening pages of his story:

... I want to warn you that though parts of this book will seem objective, even one might say God-given, they are not. My serviced and elaborated brain, almost I want to say my mind, like a colour filter placed over a camera lens, has given the entire work a peculiar cast of thought. As I have discovered, it is one of the paradoxes of biography that in straining to reveal my man, I have unavoidably revealed myself. So be it. [9]

The robot, then, is a kind of metaphor for interrogating reality. If something intangible can survive the process of manufacture, can manifest itself in a non-human intelligence, might that not offer us some clues about the nature of things as they are, not simply as we perceive them? For Descartes (like the cylons in Battlestar Galactica this meant, above all, one possible way of gathering clues about the identity (or existence?) of God.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" ... although [he] realized that both humans and animals have pineal glands, he believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes' practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment. Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem for many years after Descartes' death.

Wulf puts it somewhat differently:

Wilberfoss's only comment when he read my manuscript was that he was surprised at how human I sounded. I think he meant it as a compliment. Let me turn it on its head .... it is not difficult to sound like a human. But being a human is not easy. I know., I have watched the struggle. I have heard humans affirming lies and denying truths. I have seen people choose hell over heaven and rejoice in the fact. [15]

"How human I sounded." Wilberfoss's compliment brings me to another locus classicus for the cybernetic intelligence: the Turing machine.

Alan Turing is well-known, of course, as the mathematician who was hounded to death by the British establishment after the Second World War because it was thought that, despite his undoubted brilliance, his homosexuality made him an automatic security risk. The "Turing machine" began as a hypothetical device capable of infinite numbers of calculations in finite time which he postulated to get him around a problem in mathematical logic. This initial concept grew, partly as a result of his work on the code-breaking machines at Bletchley Park during the war, into something like a blueprint for the modern binary computer.

One extension of this idea was the (so-called) Turing Test (pretty familiar territory to all readers of classical, golden-age science fiction, but maybe not so well-known to everyone else). In essence, the Turing test says that if you can't tell the difference between a real person and an intelligent machine after conducting a fairly extensive conversation with both of them through a text-only medium such as a computer screen and keyboard, then there is no difference. The perfect simulation is the thing itself (you can see why this notion has so delighted SF writers and readers down the years).

Certainly this is the territory within which Wulf is operating in the opening chapters of Mann's novel. As he himself puts it:

I know a great deal about human love from observation. I know for example that love and vanity can have a close relationship in the human psyche though superficially they are frequently seen as opposed. [14]

Is there any real difference in practice between Wulf's observations and "real" people's practice, though? Like Max Beerbohm's happy hypocrite, has he not become the thing he set out to counterfeit? Certainly he and his fellow automaton Lily have shown greater love to Wilberfoss than any of his fellow humans appear to have been capable of, given their automatic assumption that, as its captain, he was solely responsible for the loss of the Nightingale and its crew.

These are deep waters. Wulfsyarn is a fascinating meditation on the nature of the "human" and the "alien" (whether cybernetic or organic), and - above all - the maddening perversity of the former:

People sometimes miss the point. "Aliens are always ways of talking about us. Okay, they might be a bit strange, but really, if you look at them closely, they're us in their passions, in their complex situations." [O'Hare interview, 39]

•


[Phillip Mann: The Eye of the Queen (1981)]

That, I think, is as far as Wulfsyarn can take us in this particular direction. It's not the limit of Mann's thinking on the subject, however. His first science fiction novel The Eye of the Queen (1981) still probably remains his most philosophically dense.

His hero's final choice to be absorbed into an alien "queen" in order to reemerge - through the complex processes of her digestion - as an altered form of intelligence has a kind of extremist fervour about it which appears to have died down a little in his subsequent, more nuanced (arguably less passionate) works.

The Master of Paxwax series, too, belies its resemblance to other intergalactic empire sagas such as Asimov's Foundation or (above all) Frank Herbert's Dune series, by ending with a neat volte-face where the aliens end up triumphant over the apparently all-powerful - but actually enslaved by their own limited, technological viewpoint - imperialist human "Families."

I don't have space here to go on to talk about his next vast project, the four-volume alternative history A Land Fit for Heroes (1993-1996). Some have seen that as turning away from this fruitful territory of the questions raised by the alien and the robot in favour of a more limited ecological agenda, but that, I think, would be a misreading.

In any case, check the shelves for copies of his books next time you're in a bookshop. I'm sure you won't regret any time you spend on them. My only criticism of Phillip Mann is that he doesn't write - or publish - quickly enough. I for one would love to have a new novel (or set of novels) to pore over.

Miss Herbert:

or, Some Thoughts on the
Art of Fiction

[Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert (2007)]

I bought a book the other day called Miss Herbert, by Adam Thirlwell, an up-and-coming young English novelist. It purports to be a part-novelistic / part-critical study of the phenomenon of style in fiction, as revealed (principally) through the medium of translation.

Those are all positive terms in my book, so I was happy to pay the twelve dollars odd it cost (fortunately I found it second-hand). There were lots of pretty facsimile pages from Madame Bovary and Tristram Shandy and Ulysses and other classics of the smart-arse canon scattered about the text. What's more, it had another book soldered onto the back, like one of those old pulp science-fiction doubles - only in this case it was Thirlwell's new translation of the original French version of an early short story / autobiographical vignette by Vladimir Nabokov, "Mademoiselle O".

How strange I haven't heard of this delightful book before, I thought. Surely so ingenious and amusing a volume would have come up somewhere?

Thirlwell, Adam. Miss Herbert: An Essay in Five Parts. 2007. Vintage Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2009.

So I went online to check it out. The American edition was apparently entitled Miss Herbert aka The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, ... & a Variety of Helpful Indexes, which sounded ominously reminiscent of some of the books which used to be sent out by the Readers' Digest. Even more disturbing, though, was the nature of some of the reviews it had received (linked to from Thirlwell's own Wikipedia page):

The design department at Cape has gone into overdrive to produce some lovely layouts, with headings in red ink and the enlarged title pages of famous books - Madame Bovary, Ulysses, War and Peace - reproduced at pleasing intervals. Only a major charmer could secure this level of collaboration for such a monumentally annoying book.

- Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer (4/11/07)

Ouch! So what's so "monumentally annoying" about it, then? Mars-Jones (incidentally, what a great name!) goes on to explain:

His conceit (the word is the right one) is that his book is a sort of inside-out novel, whose characters are famous writers. Miss Herbert ["Flaubert's niece had a governess, apparently, called Miss Herbert, who worked with him on a translation of Madame Bovary, now lost"] is full of affected references to itself ('according to the logic of Miss Herbert' and so on) ... This may be baby talk suited to high table rather than high chair, but baby talk it is. When an academic intellectual writes that he'd like to think that Chekhov read Diderot, but it doesn't really matter if he didn't, since 'through Miss Herbert, they're friends', the only response must be a curling of the lip or the toes.

Cringe-makingly coy, appears to be the verdict. Which is in itself a little disconcerting in a book ostensibly about style. Thirlwell's own style doesn't come out of a cornflakes packet, exactly, but it does bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the annoyingly trite repetitions which bedevilled poor old Kurt Vonnegut's last, weakest novels ("so it goes," repeated at regular intervals, was the principal offender).

You can tell that Mars-Jones has conceived a real dislike to Thirlwell:

Thirlwell mentions more than once his similarity in shortness of stature to Pushkin, and emphasises at one point (as if to quiet frantic fans) that he is a less important person than Gombrowicz or Flaubert.

More to the point, though, he sees the basic problem is that Thirlwell is trying to write in a pretentiously simple, would-be epigrammatic style, when what he has to say is not original enough to warrant it:

Thirlwell's version of literary history is pretty standard, underneath the preening and the straining for effect. He leads us down virgin trails littered with crisp packets and undergraduate essays. Cervantes prefigured the modern novel. Austen does irony. Kafka's fictions are structured as dreams ... Early drafts tend to be inferior to final versions, but illuminating for that reason. All this is painfully mainstream.

It's tempting to keep on quoting, as Mars-Jones's is an extremely thorough-going and devastating hatchet job, the kind which should at least make you toy with the idea of simply sticking with the day job. He concludes by mocking Thirlwell's own attempts to "improve" on various standard translations of sentences in French and Russian (the only two languages Thirlwell can read with facility, it appears):

Thirlwell quotes a single sentence from Eleanor Marx-Aveling's translation of [Madame Bovary], and offers his own improvement. Her sentence is: 'Emma leant forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails.' His goes: 'Emma leaned forward to see him, scrunching with her nails the plushness of her box.' He adds, 'It isn't perfect; but it's a start.'

Sorry, that won't do. You can't claim, in a 500-page book, that you haven't had the time to produce even a single finished sentence of Madame Bovary in English. And is Thirlwell's version even an improvement? The neutrality of Marx-Aveling's sentence has been sacrificed, without much gain in terms of reproducing the assonances of the original ... The slight awkwardness of Thirlwell's version even hints at an obscene double meaning.

His re-translation of Nabokov from French to English isn't much cop, either, I'd add on my own behalf. Too obviously and self-consciously attentive to banal details of French word order.

Was there a chorus of dissent at the time, I wondered? After all, the book jacket of the paperback is peppered with high-culture endorsements from the likes of Tom Stoppard ("an interesting fact on every page") and A. S. Byatt (" a work of art, a new form") - it's even "the year's most richly pleasurable reading experience" claims the middle-brow Sunday Telegraph. Alas, no, it would appear not. The Times reviewer had this to say:

Thirlwell compares himself to Proust, declares that he is “going to take over” from Tristram Shandy, generously allows that “Joyce was right” and that “sometimes I agree with Eugenio Montale”. Such proprietorial presumption is perhaps meant to be comic but sounds ominously owlish.

- Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times (11/11/07)

He's a bit too up himself, is the conclusion, and over what?

At one point, we are told that the rhymes in Eugene Onegin “are not a side of fries. They are part of the Big Mac” ... We hear about “the grand French critic Paul Valéry”, “the Russian novelist and poet Alexander Pushkin” and “the famously stylish poet Stéphane Mallarmé”. It seems that Thirlwell can’t decide whether he is writing “an inside-out novel”, producing a look-at-me-mum firework display or instructing those less fortunate than himself in how to appear well read.

I guess that's the risk of publishing books like this in the UK. The reviewers have an annoying tendency to have read all those terrifyingly obscure and knotty texts one flourishes like war-scars.

Strangely enough, these swinging reviews didn't put me off (after all, I did invest $12 in the book - enough to make me want it to have been a good buy). I therefore set out to write a post disputing these uncharitable attempts at character-assassination. And it all seemed to be chugging along nicely enough for the first few chapters (or "books", as they're called in context - kind of like Tristram Shandy with its multiple volumes, you see). Stoppard is right. There is "an interesting fact" on (almost) every page, and Thirlwell does have some quite useful things to say about the characteristics of French and Russian, at least - if he can't read German or Czech or Portuguese or (I guess) Spanish there's no great shame in that. It does make it a bit difficult when he's making fairly precise points about texts in those languages, though.

Then I came across a couple of warning signs:

First was his chapter on "The Problem of the Small Language." His case in point being the (great) Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis:

The history of Machado de Assis's translations ["he translated the writing which the public in Rio de Janeiro wanted to read. They wanted romance, so he gave them romance, He translated the poetry of French romantic poets, like Lamartine. He also translated the bad libretti of bad romantic operas'] ... demonstrates the problems of provincial taste: they show what he was up against. [223]

There are a lot of interesting assumptions embedded in this passage. I guess that comment about the "problems of provincial taste" makes me see red because I am, myself, such a provincial. How can we delude ourselves, living in so obviously provincial a backwater as New Zealand, that such a sentence isn't meant to apply directly to us? Give the public whatever romantic tosh they want, that's the rule of life in the provinces ...

To do him justice, that isn't quite what Thirwlell means. He goes on to explain, of Machado de Assis: "Like every novelist, he had to cope with his own provinciality, and learn an international technique." The stricture is meant to apply to everyone (though when one thinks of the kind of slop that was being churned out in the great cosmopolitan centres of London and New York in the 1880s, it hardly seems necessary to be so elaborately condescending to the poor inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro). His basic message is clear, though: "provincial bad, international good" - it's a bit like Animal Farm: "four legs good, two legs bad."

What's so wrong with being provincial? (Take careful note, fellow provincials):

As with every value, there is a flipside, a shadow, a secret twin to his value called cosmopolitanism. the opposite of cosmopolitanism is provincialism. And provincialism is emptiness. It is an absence of subject matter; a lack of local ephemera. [378]

Hmmm. Kind of like the dark side of the force, is it, then, Adam? The opposite of goodness and niceness and the international (or, here, "cosmopolitan") way? This seems a bit of a stretch from Borges's claim, in his famous essay on "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", which Thirwell quotes approvingly, that the less self-conscious "local colour" writers include, the more truly "local" they will become.

"A lack of local ephemera." I suppose that's one way to understand the idea of being "provincial." Another way to see it would be to note how obvious it is to Thirlwell that he himself could never be accused of being "provincial". He was, after all, born with advantages. He lives (and publishes his books) in London, and is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. How much closer to the centre can you get? No wonder it's so obvious to him that he should be the one lecturing the rest of us on Pushkin, Sterne, Nabokov, and Flaubert. Who knows if provincials will even have heard of such figures? We're probably still reading Warwick Deeping and Hall Caine. The great movements of history might otherwise completely pass us by.

The main problem with the kinds of authors people wanted to read in Rio de Janeiro in the 1880s (and which Machado de Assis was therefore forced to translate), though, was their sentimentality. These two words, "provincial" and "sentimental", make up Thirwell's axis of evil:

As he grew older he continued to translate - more of the French romantics, Baudelaire's translation of Poe's romantic poem 'the Raven', more romantic sentimental poetry.

Everything came via French and everything was romantic. It was just like Socialist Realism. [223]

I can't quite work out from this if Baudelaire is another one of those "romantic sentimental" poets or not. The basic problem with this kind of "sentimental" work is, I gather, that it aspires to be heartfelt. It lacks that fundamental international technique which Thirlwell revealed with a flourish in his previous chapter, "On Collage": irony.

So against these two negative values ("a flipside, a shadow, a secret twin") provincial and sentimental, we should set the shining lights of internationalism and irony. How fascinating! How original! How ... every stage one literature course since roughly 1955 ... How, fundamentally, boring and shop-soiled. Welcome to 1912, Adam! You've finally caught up with Messrs Joyce and Pound (if not yet with M. Proust).

Don't get me wrong. Thirlwell is not an idiot. He knows - he must know - how much of a cliché this is. Just because it's a cliché, though, does that make it untrue? Well, yes, I'm afraid it does. Even in Thirlwell's own terms. Later in the book he quotes approvingly from Nabokov's defence of Dickens's Bleak House "against the charge of sentimentality":

Nabokov deftly asked his students to distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. 'I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.'

People like Thirlwell, you mean? After all, he's just been denouncing sentimentality as a kind of cloying, ubiquitous stylistic imposition, "like Socialist Realism." Now, however, he's back in the camp of the angels:

... this is a crucial distinction for Nabokov. It's a crucial distinction for anyone, bit is is especially an important distinction for Nabokov - whose style, with its harsh elegance, its fierce nostalgia, is based on an often overwhelming sensitivity to pain. It is based on sentiment. That is why, simultaneously, it denounces the sentimental. [414-15]

Another term occurs to me here: one of Nabokov's favourites, one he hoped to transfer bodily into English: "poshlost." And what is poshlost (Naobokov preferred to spell it "poshlust") when it's at home (it unfortunately doesn't figure in Thirlwell's very full "index of themes and motifs" let alone his slightly slimmer "index of real life")?

Poshlust is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol. 1944: 70.

Actually a running definition might just involve quoting those phrases of Thirlwell's attempting to characterise Nabokov's style: "its harsh elegance, its fierce nostalgia, is based on an often overwhelming sensitivity to pain. It is based on sentiment. That is why, simultaneously, it denounces the sentimental."

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature" — this is Nabokov's list of definitions, remember, not mine: "harsh elegance / fierce nostalgia / overwhelming sensitivity to pain" ... Give us a break! Cut the crap. We get the (obvious) point about the difference between sentimentality and sentiment (or feeling), but where does it leave your earlier trite distinctions? Isn't it all this a bit hashed-up, unclear, self-contradictory as a set of critical distinctions? Well, yes:

At this point, I think I need to contradict myself, ever so slightly.

You don't say!

As soon as the aesthetic is taken as seriously as Nabokov takes it, then something odd occurs. The aesthetic becomes something else as well: it becomes its opposite. As soon as the aesthetic is taken seriously, then it becomes an ethics, also. [417]

You can see why Adam Mars-Jones got quite so mad over this kind of patronizing babytalk. "The pace of the book is artificially slow, in a way that seems to be asking, 'Am I going too fast for you?' Many readers will find themselves gritting their teeth and saying, 'Not at all. Rather the reverse.'"

And yet it's rather an interesting point that Thirlwell is making, despite his irritating way of expressing it:

The effects of an absolute aesthetics - a concern for detail, for ironic particularity, for the suspension of immediate or conventional moral judgement, for the restoration to objects of their correct and small size - are ethical. They constitute a small, amateur but sincere ethical system - which teaches respect for the minor, the overlooked, the unsure.

For me, that passage is worth the whole rest of the book. It's interesting to notice that he suddenly forgot the babytalk and just started writing ordinary grown-up prose instead once he'd launched into it. This small (provincial?), amateur but sincere (sentimental?) ethical system which is the inevitable by-product of an "absolute aesthetics" is the reason why it's worth having these kinds of discussions in the first place. It's also the point of writing the kinds of novels that constantly interrogate - and accordingly undermine - their own aesthetic (or theoretical) assumptions.

Throughout this book I have been arguing for a separation of ethics and aesthetics. But I am not sure how easy this is to maintain. Unfortunately, irrevocably, the two turn into each other. The desire for an absolute aesthetic ... is itself a form of romanticism. It is absolute as well. It is a wish not to acknowledge the imperfect, haphazard truth about real life.

Quite so. Thirlwell has learnt on the job, while making his series of - finally bogus - distinctions between 'irony' and 'sentimentality', 'artifice' and 'real life', 'provincialism' and 'internationalism', but he has, finally, learnt. "Unfortunately, irrevocably, the two turn into each other."

One of the authors he quotes from most often and most approvingly, Witold Gombrowicz, specialized in the dissection of immaturity. Ferdydurke (1937), his first and still most influential novel, drags its hero back to school and the horrors of young idealism and puppy love in a kind of paroxysm of shameful and embarrassing detail. I fear that Thirlwell may look back on his own book (he was only 28 when he published it, after all) rather similarly - like an awful aberration of youthful arrogance and over-enthusiasm.

I can't bring myself to regret having persevered with it to the end, though. Something was definitely achieved. True, it's hardly Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, but then Nabokov had had more than twenty years to think about the art of fiction before he wrote those, and they did have a more straightforward function than Thirlwell's book. Nabokov's notes were directed to undergraduates in a university course, which entails a lot of contextual explanation and also has the advantage of demanding intense attention to detail and to pedagogical clarity.

The audience for Thirlwell's book is harder to define: people who've already read Proust and Joyce (if not Hrabal and Gombrowicz) and already know a good deal about literature? People who haven't read anything much, to whom all this is news? The tone of the book really has to accommodate both groups, with all the gradations in between, and that's not an easy balance to achieve.

It may have been a dumb idea to take on so ambitious a scheme at so early a stage of his own career as a novelist, but perhaps if he'd waited he'd never have written anything at all. I think that would have been a shame. There are a lot of good things in this book, a lot to be learnt from it - one of the main lessons, however, is how careful you have to be not to patronise and irritate your readers when all you really wanted was to have a conversation with them.

[Eamonn McCabe: Adam Thirlwell's room (2008)]