Eve's Alexandria

The point of a sword touching his spirit

This is what I know about George Mackay Brown.

1. He was a poet and a novelist.

2. He was born and lived most of his life on Stromness, Orkney.

3. He had incredibly lively hair.

The sum total of this knowledge was gained while watching Owen Sheer's excellent BBC series 'A Poet's Guide to Britain' a few years ago.  The program inspired me to load my groaning Amazon wishlist with various of his books, and then promptly forget all about them.  Until, that is, I had to come up with a suggestion of a 'viking' novel for my museum bookclub.  

I searched high-and-low online for a viking novel that wasn't a) a doorstopper set in Greenland, or b) a romantic saga, or c) an actual viking saga.  I toyed with the idea of option c, but balked at leading a discussion on a Classic text from outside my specialism.  Finally I spyed the name George Mackay Brown and remembered: Vinland.   Eleventh century setting; Viking Orkney; the passing of a pagan way of life and the dawn of a Christian future.  Perfect.

Vinland turned out to be a very different book than the one I expected.  I expected: longships, raids, daring-dos, battles, axes, raven banners, lots of ale quaffing.  And I got some of that.  I didn't expect the delicate, subtle and uneventful life of its protagonist, or the gorgeous poetics of the Orkney landscape.  Perhaps I should have, what with George Mackay Brown being first and foremost an Orcadian poet.

Ranald Sigmundson runs away to sea when he is eleven years old.  Adventures follow his life on ship like gulls.  First, he finds himself in the company of legendary Greenlander, Leif Erikson; then, he is amongst the first vikings to make landfall in 'Vinland', encountering native Americans; and then, he is taken into the confidence of the King of Norway on the return journey.  And all of this before he is twenty years old.   Finally he comes home to Orkney, to take ownership of his grandfather's farm at Breckness (which has fallen into the hands of a viking brigand in his absence) and to rescue his mother from a life of poverty on the hillside.  There he lives out the rest of his days, and the next two hundred pages of the novel.  At first he takes an active role in the politics of his country, which is ruled over by a sad, fat old Earl and then later by the Earl's four fractious and unruly sons.  But as time passes Ranald increasingly retreats from the world, and from the family of wife, sons and daughters that has grown up around him.

It is a weird and leisurely trajectory, woven out of two disparate narrative strands.  On the one hand is Brown's evocation of Ranald's personal experiences - the daring ones and the ordinary ones.  These are anchored in the landscape of Orkney, or in the rhythms of the natural world, especially the sea.  They are imbued with a deep, unspoken emotionality.  On the other hand is the detailed story of fifty years of Orkney's history - the machinations of the sons' of Earl Sigurd, their feuds, allegiances and deaths - and the inexorable creep of Christian culture.  The two strands are often separate, or seem so, to the extent that the historical content almost seems like a redundant add-on to justify the poetry of Ranald's biography.

Which is to say that no one should read Vinland because they are looking for a ripping plot.  It's the writing that is the greatest lure here.  At first this seems too crisp and clipped: 'There was a boy who lived in a hamlet in Orkney called Hamnavoe', it begins.  'The boy's name was Ranald.  Ranald's father had a small ship called Snowgoose.'   It is fairytale-like; almost naive.  It barely hints at the suppleness and poetic dynamism that Brown is capable of in parts.  For example,  later in Ranald's life, when he is at the battle of Clontarf in Ireland:

...a tangled forest of pikes and swiltering ale horns eddied back and fore, this way and that, opposite the quiet, vigilant columns of Ospak the disaffected viking and the sons of King Brian.  On the outskirts of the battlefield cooks were busy with pots and hunks of meat and fires, and blacksmiths' hammers rang and stammered, and a few hucksters had even set up their booths to sell fish and cheese and religious trinkets.  King Brian's cooks had only fish to grill that day, Good Friday.  Crowds had come in from the city and the countryside to see the battle, and in hope to pick up scraps of booty here and there, after the last horns of retreat had sounded out under the first stars, and before the blood-smelling wolves began to stir in the forest.

I like this passage very much, because I think it shows Brown's facility with language, and also the subtle ways in which he uses it to parse out the themes of eleventh century life.   We get a flavour of the armies (I love the word 'swiltering'), and their movement on the field; the noise and market atmosphere of the battle-site; and then we also get the opposition of Christianity (only fish on Fridays!) and the distinctly dark (and symbolically pagan) wolves.  Throughout this sequence at Clontarf Vinland sketches a society in flux, transitioning from one way of seeing the world - valkyries visit the dead on the field - to another, as Ranald and his friends take shelter in a church during evensong. 

It is complex, despite the economy of its expression.  The same could be said for the way human relationships are portrayed in the book.  Everything is beneath the surface, not so much repressed or unexpressed, but simply not commented upon.  At the book group meeting this aspect of the book caused some dissent.  There were those who felt that the way Brown glosses over Ranald's feelings - his love for his wife Ragna, his pride in his children, his grief when one of them dies - was unrealistic, and detracted from the book.  Then there were others (and I was one) who felt that the feelings left unsaid were incredibly powerful.   If you took Ranald at his word - he says very little in the course of the book - and judged him by his outward showing, then it would be hard to understand why he warranted a novel writing about him.  Let's be honest, he's pretty ordinary, even a little boring and unpleasant by the end. 

Give him a little space to breathe between the lines, however, and his deep love of the landscape, his feelings of guilt, homesickness and loss, his inexplicable longing to be on the sea, are very powerful.   Often, it seems to me, the landscape speaks for him, and writs large his inner life:

Ranald said nothing. ... He sat, with his head on one side, as if listening.  There had been a week-long gale from the west, that had sent the breakers crashing into the base of Black Crag, and among the rocks of Braga.  Now the storm had quieted, but the Atlantic was full of noises still - surgings, cries, whisperings, gluttings, moans, sounds of lulling and longing and summoning, little bell-like sounds and occasionally, far off, a thunderous growl.  'It will soon be time for me to set sail,' said Ranald.

Vinland is one of those novels that seems to do very little with itself, when in fact it is doing and saying and demanding a great deal.  I can now add another thing to my list of things I know about George Mackay Brown:

4.  He is easy to underestimate.

~~Victoria~~

They Had Ceased To Be Men

I am persuaded that, if Your Highness [the future Philip II] had been informed of even a few of the excesses which this New World has witnessed, all of them surpassing anything that men have hitherto imagined even in their wildest dreams, Your Highness would not have delayed for even one moment before entreating His Majesty [Charles V, Philip's father] to prevent any repetition of the events which go on under the name of 'conquests': excesses which, if no move is made to stop them, will be committed time and again, and which (given that the indigenous peoples of the region are naturally so gentle, so peace-loving, so humble and so docile) are of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural, canon and civil law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned and proscribed by all such legal codes.

I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life as well as the infinite number of human souls despatched to Hell in the course of such 'conquests', and so resolved to publish an account of a few such outrages (and they can be only a few out of the countless number of such incidents that I could relate) in order to make that account the more accessible to Your Highness.

Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de la Casas (1484-1576) enjoys a reputation today as something close to an activist for social justice. Both in his writing - chiefly his fierce condemnation of Spanish colonial practices, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) - and in his (moderately successful) direct advocacy for changes to the laws governing colonists' activities, las Casas appears as a tireless and strident voice of conscience. The Short Account is a catalogue of horrors, but it is also an indictment of the institutions - and to some extent the attitudes - that allowed or even fostered such horrors.

Of course, in the understandable excitement at hearing an early modern voice speak out against brutality ("the atrocities [...] and, among other horrific excesses, the ways in which towns, provinces, and whole kingdoms have been entirely cleared of their native inhabitants") there has been a tendency to exaggerate the humanism and compassion of las Casas' position. What bothers las Casas is not colonialism itself, but colonialism done badly. He decries "the despotic and diabolical behaviour of the Christians [which] has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve millions souls, women and children among them"; he even criticises the naked land grab that had taken place at the expense, speaking with real passion of

the boldness and the unreason of those who count it as nothing to drench the Americas in human blood and to dispossess the people who are the natural masters and dwellers in those vast and marvellous kingdoms

But like his later counterpart Bernabé Cobo (1580-1657), about whom I wrote here last year, las Casas did not object to the concept of colonialism, and had no qualms about wiping out the indigenous cultures of Spain's new overseas dominions. Far from it; bringing Christianity to the benighted pagans of the Americas was, as far as las Casas was concerned, unambiguously a Good Thing:

They are innocent and pure in mind and have a lively intelligence, all of which makes them particularly receptive to learning and understanding the truths of our Catholic faith and to being instructed in virtue; indeed, God has invested them with fewer impediments in this regard than any other people on earth. Once they begin to learn of the Christian faith they become so keen to know more, to receive the Sacraments, and to worship God, that the missionaries who instruct them do truly have to be men of exceptional patience and forbearance; and over the years I have time and again met Spanish laymen who have been so struck by the natural goodness that shines through these people that they frequently can be heard to exclaim: "These would be the most blessed people on earth if only they were given the chance to convert to Christianity."

Rather, las Casas' objection to the activities of his fellow Spaniards lay in the way they carried out their mission. He discusses how the slaughter harms both victims and perpetrators. The 'Indians' - whom God, he says, has made "[t]he simplest people in the world - unassuming, long-suffering, unassertive, and submissive - they are without malice or guile, and are utterly faithful and obedient" - have suffered violence on a massive scale. Las Casas catalogues the incidents by region, describing how the blood-crazed conquerors hunted people with dogs or impaled them on spikes; he says,

I saw with my own eyes how the Spaniards burned countless local inhabitants alive or hacked them to pieces, or devised novel ways of torturing them [...] Indeed, they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper

Obviously, noting that something is too vast or terrible to recount - although, with that indefatigable early modern appetite for the grotesque, las Casas nonetheless does his best - is a well-worn rhetorical trick, and it is important not to forget that this book was intended as an argument, not a disinterested record. Often las Casas is relying on hearsay, and he plays with tone and trope alike to enhance the effect of his message: the law must be changed. (His material would be used, in turn, to other propagandistic ends, notably in anti-Catholic writings in Protestant-leaning areas of Europe.) Yet las Casas was also an eyewitness to some of the events; he had travelled and lived in the Spanish possessions for himself, and had taken part in some of the military campaigns before turning against the colonial elites in moral disgust. He is careful to emphasise his authority to be producing this account; discussing incidents that took place on Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he notes, "I saw all these things myself and many others besides".

Worse than the violence, however, was the fact that the indigenous peoples were dying before they had the chance to convert to Christianity; as las Casas puts it in the quotation with which I began this post: "the enormous loss of life as well as the infinite number of human souls despatched to Hell". He sees it as "blindness of the most pernicious kind" that, even though there are regulations in place which "maintain that conversion and the saving of souls has first priority", the local peoples are instead simply being killed outright, or else forced to convert at the point of swords.

Above all, this is bad PR for Christianity:

The reader can judge for himself the reaction of the local people to such messengers, their great love of Christians, their certainty of the goodness and justice of the Lord, and how pure they must think the law and religion professed with pride by disciples such as these.

As noted above, las Casas is also concerned for the effects of the violence on the people carrying it out; in a striking passage, he says that the Spanish colonisers have "become so anaesthetized to human suffering by their own greed and ambition that they had ceased to be men in any meaningful sense of the term". They have been led to this, las Casas explains, by "insatiable greed and overweening ambition", a desire to make their fortunes in gold and land. I'm inclined to think that the aggressively ideological militarism brewed for centuries in 'reconquest' Spain, starved of an outlet since the last remnant of Muslim Iberia had been extinguished only a few decades before, must have also played a part.

In any case, these men's sins have grown so great, las Casas says, that God has abandoned them to their damnation. The fact that the invaders "have had as little concern for [the indigenous peoples'] souls as for their bodies", such that "millions have perished [...] with no knowledge of God and without the benefit of the Sacraments", is something that imperils these same invaders' souls - and, moreover, something that threatens Spain itself. If you assume that the world is run according to a divine plan, as las Casas and his contemporaries obviously did, then doing something that might be contrary to God's will was a bad idea indeed. Not for nothing had much of the historiography surrounding the Reconquista sought to find sins committed by the Spanish people or their Visigothic kings back in the eighth century. It was an essential part of understanding how the Muslim invasion and settlement of Iberia could possible have happened: the Muslim conquest of Spain had been a punishment from God, and its reconquest a reward for their repentance.

There are undoubtedly echoes of this thinking when las Casas warns that action must be taken against the colonial elites in the Americas "if God is to continue to watch over the Crown of Castile and ensure its future well-being and prosperity, both spiritual and temporal". In Guatemala, he notes with a certain thrill of fear, an unnamed city that the Spaniards built

has only recently been visited by the full force of Divine Justice and been utterly destroyed by three violent disasters, the first lashing it with heavy rain, the second burying it beneath a deluge of earth, and the third pulverizing it with hailstones the size of ten or twenty oxen.

As a record of events in Spanish America, the usefulness of las Casas' Short Account is questionable; as a window onto sensibilities, though, it is fascinating.

~~Nic

Not quite a newsflash

Tea Obreht won the Orange Prize.  It feels almost redundant to say it, nearly a week late.  

I had a sneaky feeling The Tiger's Wife would carry the day, even though I still haven't quite finished reading or thinking about the whole shortlist.  Sometimes a book simply ticks too many boxes not to win, like Half of A Yellow Sun in 2007; and in this case none of the other shortlistees were quite so complete a proposition as Obreht's debut.  Each had something against it.  Great House = too literary; Grace Williams = too small-scale; Room = too obvious (like Wolf Hall last year!); Annabel = too determinedly about gender; The Memory of Love = too like Half of a Yellow Sun.   The Tiger's Wife was very polished, very elegantly balanced; yes, a tad overworked in parts, and perhaps a little too neatly plotted, but oh so accomplished.  And, let's not be too cynical about it, but it never hurts if the quality of the novel itself can be enhanced by the profile of its author.  Being 25 years old and pretty, with an emotive familial connection to the Balkans conflict, doesn't hurt.

I think I'm satisfied with this year's winner on the whole.  The Tiger's Wife may not be my favourite book of the longlist - Anne Peile! - but it is certainly a worthy piece of work, and my less-than ecstatic response last Wednesday night was all of piece with my response to the prize as a whole. I've had a strange, distanced relationship with it this year.  At first glance the longlist had me on tenterhooks - so many interesting looking books - but thus far my experience hasn't matched the anticipation. 

It's true that I haven't been able to give my full attention to the buzz around the list, and my reading of it has been quite haphazard.  Work, work, work has been at the forefront of my mind. I think this is probably why I haven't been able to engage properly with the books, or to blog more about them.  I still mean to write about those I've read, especially Great House (about which I have strong feelings) and Grace Williams (which I admired far more than I expected).  And I still mean to finish reading the longlist in its entirety, as I've saved some of my most anticipated books until the end, including Joanna Kavenna's The Birth of Love and Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch. 

At this time of year the question always arises: should I continue to read the Orange longlist in this way?  Instead should I tackle something outside of my comfort zone like the IMPAC?  Looking back on my New Year's resolutions (more male authors, more books in translation, more from the TBR pile) I can see that I'm slipping again. Always, always towards women writing in English.  So after the Orange it's back to the TBR pile, and back to the men in translation.  As an Orange break I just finished a book by a man from the TBR: Vinland by George Mackay Brown.  Good stuff.

~~Victoria~~

 

Orphaned by Our Own

Tea Obreht is everywhere at the moment: one of the 'Waterstones' 11' debut writers, one of the New Yorker's '20 Under 40' and now her debut novel is on the Orange Prize shortlist.  Every where it goes The Tiger's Wife seems to be garlanded and liberally adored.  Though somewhat tempered and at risk of spoilering my post, my own feelings continue in the same vein - how boring!  But what can I say: it's a polished first novel. It oozes confidence.  If there was still an Orange Prize for New Writers I'm pretty certain this would be our winner in 2011.   

It is a novel that has both body and soul.  The body is the framing narrative, the story of a young doctor named Natalia, whose grandfather has just died.  The soul is the intertwined folklore-esque stories of the tiger's wife and the deathless man, originally told to Natalia by her grandfather and now narrated to us as a way of exploring her grief.  As one would expect, it is the soul that gives the novel it's soaring power and feeling, while the body anchors us firmly to the earth.  

The scene is set in the post-war Balkans, in an unnamed country recently divided into two autonomous nations.  Two doctors - Natalia, and her close friend Zora - set off from 'the City' to cross the new border in order to immunise children at a seaside orphanage (populated, no doubt, as a result of the recent conflict).  In the first stages of the journey, at the point of border control, Natalia receives an urgent message from her family: her beloved grandfather has died in a distant clinic, apparently while on his way to see her.   She has the choice to turn back to his funeral, or to continue on regardless.  She doesn't turn back.  It is a puzzling decision, quickly made and barely questioned; but in a novel full of emotional detachment and dislocation, it makes a sort of sense.  What follows is an exploration of their relationship, through story and action; in any number of ways it is also an exploration of the pain, longing and horror of conflict.

The whole book fizzes and pops with violent subtext.   The recent war, fought along ethnic and religious lines, is made flesh in Natalia's own family.  Her beloved grandfather was an Orthodox Christian from one side of the border; her grandmother, a Muslim from the other.  Now, travelling over that same border she recognises an 'anxiety about how your name started and ended.'   Although the host family, who lost a son in the war, are friendly but they 'did not ask us about our drive, about our work, or about our families. Instead, in order to avoid any potential political or religious tangents, the conversation turned to crops.'  During the doctors' stay a sickly family from another village digs up the local vineyard, searching for the body of a cousin hastily buried there.  His ghost won't let their spirits rest. 

Raised in the 'City' during 'the war', Natalia's personality has been formed in aggressive opposition to the violent historic forces around her.  She is full of guilt - over 'the fact that something terrible was happening elswhere, and at the same time to us, gave us room to get away with anarchy.  Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven.  In the City, we weren't just affected by the war, we were entitled to our affectation.'   And of a kind of anger, because she was shaped by the war but was too young to have 'experienced it': she couldn't fight, or treat the wounded, or do anything except simply live through it.

These tormented feelings, as well as her personal grief, form the backdrop to the retelling of the two stories her grandfather shared with her: the tale of his three encounters with the 'deathless man', Gavran Gaile; and the story of the Tiger's Wife, in his long-ago childhood in the village of Galina.  Both stories are intricately connected, both to each other and to the history of Natalia's country.  They are both, in their way, very beautiful and full of longing (and, I think, the strongest pieces of writing in the book).  They have a definite flavour of folklore and fate about them; an unreality that is more like a hyper-reality.  Gavran Gaile is death's apprentice, a human man damned to spend an immortal life collecting the souls of the dead but never finding his own release.  While the tiger's wife is a young woman from Galina, whose husband beats her and who befriends a tiger that escapes from the zoo in the City during the second world war. 

War connects the stories together - WWI, WWII and then all the useless wars that followed them.  The book links 'the story of war - dates, names, who started it, why - that belongs to everyone' with the stories that 'belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.'   So, Natalia's grandfather's personal stories inform, interpret and shadow the grand narrative of the world, but are also far grander in their surreal, otherworldly profundity.  

The tiger of the title is the avatar that carries both of these narratives, figuratively, in his person. When he escapes from the City zoo (a deeply symbolic place in itself), he charges the novel with electricity:

'People must have seen him, but in the wake of the bombardment he was anything but a tiger to them: a joke, an insanity, a religious hallucination.  He drifted, enormous and silent, down the alleys of the Old Town, past the smashed-in doors of coffeehouses and bakeries, past motorcars flung through shop windows.  He went down the tramway, up and over fallen trolleys in his path, beneath lines of electric cable that ran through the city and now hung broken and black as jungle creeper.'

Arriving in Galina he is a completely alien creature, association-less, with the power of a God:

'A tiger.  What did that mean to a man like Vladisa?  I knew tiger because my grandfather took me to the citadel every week and pointed to show me, tiger, because the labels in the taxidermy museum where we sometimes spent quiet afternoons read tiger, because tiger crawled, in intricate Chinese patterns, all over the lid of my grandmother's knee-balm tin.  Tiger was India, and lazy yellow afternoons; the sambar, eyes wide, neck broken, twisting in the mangroves while Kipling's jungle creepers bent how to mark the killer's back.  But in my grandfather's village, in those days, a tiger - what did that even mean?  A bear, a wolf, yes.  But tiger? How fear came.'

Galina is very much like a fairytale village, a medieval settlement frozen in time, with the butcher, the baker, the blacksmith, the apothecary.  The latter is a 'tooth puller, dream interpreter, measurer of medicine, keeper of the magnificent scarlet ibis- the reliable magician, the only kind of magician my grandfather could ever admire.'   The entrance of the tiger is like a challenge from times of old, and men set out to vanquish him.  But they don't, and instead war comes, and German forces on its heels.  And Natalia's grandfather grows up and goes out into the world with the spirit and idea of that tiger still inside him, and meets the deathless man, and grows old, and gets cancer and dies in an out of the way place after a war that has divided his family in two.  It really is an extraordinary narrative arc for Natalia to travel, and us with her.

I'm not articulating very well how The Tiger's Wife fits together, how it weaves it's eery thematic cloth.  There are parts of it that jarred with me, despite its great strength - the protests at the zoo, the fate of the apothecary - and bits where I thought the writing lacked lustre.  It was tempting too to see it as a book with two parts that don't cohere - Natalia's story and the stories she tells - but in retrospect it is clear how they speak to each other.  This isn't a prediction, but I wouldn't be surprised if it won the Orange Prize next week.

~Victoria~