"A Bit Late to Say 'Whoa' to the Horse": The Mythmakers: "Temple of Secrets"/"Small Prophet, Quick Return"/"Death of a Spy"/"Horse of Destruction"

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.”


The speech is given to Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and subverts the nobility of Homer's Iliad. Yet this speech provided the title for Simon Raven's scathing 10-volume depiction of life in Britain from 1945 through the 1970s. Raven's jaundiced eye is useful to us here.

***

After the rather flat farewell to Verity Lambert that was Mission to the Unknown, I had low expectations for The Mythmakers. It's a serial that is entirely missing, though the reconstruction by Loose Cannon feels much less static than many others. Possibly that's because so much of the story is powered by the dialogue, and the actors--especially the guest stars--are having a whale of a time.

That's in part because we are not in Homer's Troy, nor yet even Shakespeare's poetic, if scandalous and tainted. Troy. No, only Shakespeare's scabrous Thersites captures the Trojan war as seen by scriptwriter Donald Cotton; Cotton takes his cue from Thersites's description of the War:

Here is such patchery, such juggling and such
knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a
whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions
and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on
the subject! and war and lechery confound all!

The characters are neither Homer's nor Shakespeare's; Achilles is rash, but hardly the killing machine of myth or drama; Odysseus seems to be a barbarian, at first, but turns out to be clever as advertised, and cynical as Shakespeare's, but without the philosophy to back it. Agamemnon cries out to be played by Brian Blessed, but Jack Melford carries it off quite well.Menelaus doesn't even want Helen back, and knew what he was getting when he married her. (Talk about getting under the radar).

Hector is unimpressive (his brief duel with Achilles is more silly than thrilling), Paris a weak-willed coward who wants to be important (Steven has to goad him into a fight which Steven deliberately loses to get into Troy and rescue Vicki; Paris's newfound courage is, er, transitory), Priam is so innocent he needs a guardian--though he is quite nice-natured. As is Troilus, who falls hard for Vicki. Just as well, really.

The Greeks are bastards, the Trojans are dilettantes, they both really want to command the trade routes, and Helen is a pretext we never even see. (It would have been a perfect in-joke if they'd cast Jacqueline Hill).

It's a jet-black comedy with the Doctor trying to avoid suggesting the Trojan Horse (he can't believe Homer had it right and anyone would be that stupid--pro tip: they are), Vicki being renamed by Priam as Cressida and falling in love with Troilus (at least the script tries to earn this), and Steven just getting in the way. Oh, and episode 3, "Death of a Spy"--the title refers to Odysseus's mute friend who is killed by Paris's patrol for for not answering a soldier's question.

And yet it all works. These characters are funny, infuriating, silly, and steal the show out from under the regulars. Even Frances White's Cassandra is interesting, het petulance and frustration mounting throughout the storyline.

War isn't glorious in Doctor Who. Not in 1965. It's Shakespeare's wasteland, for wretched causes and stupidity run riot, minus the poetry.

Even without a single surviving episode, this one's a stone classic.

Written From the Right?

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, the eternal debate of "is there any good conservative popular culture" has re-ignited. Stretching to find examples of any, the commenters have posited Yes, Minister and House of Cards (UK original). To be frank, as fans of both, I think neither fits the bill.

In both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Nigel Hawthorne's Platonic ideal of the obstructive civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, is a quintessential cynic (see above), while the semi-competent (he fluctuates) is never identified as a member of a political party, although he is clearly leftward of Sir Humphrey. In both series, neither political party nor the Civil Service comes off well. This is not unlike The Thick of It (a spiritual descendant of Yes, Minister), in which both parties are satirized with equal vigor, and everybody is pretty deeply flawed. (Mind you, the store is considerably more gentle in Yes, Minister.) The system is the target, not one side or the other.

House of Cards is conservative, in its origins. But those origins stem from Tory-on-Tory political violence:

Before he began writing, Dobbs was a Conservative party backroom boy, scurrying up the chain of command from speechwriter to special adviser to chief of staff. He was serving as the latter when, on the eve of the 1987 election, he fell out spectacularly with his then boss, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was soon kicked into the political long grass, which was when he found time to write fiction.

“It all started because Maggie Thatcher beat me up and was actually rather cruel to me,” he says, looking softly out onto the Thames from a sunny spot on the Lords Terrace. “I don’t complain about that – politics is rough and tough. But it caused me great unhappiness for a while . . . [Despite] the fact that she could be absolutely horrid to me, I still regard her as being probably the greatest peacetime prime minister in the 20th century.”

It was on the day known as Wobble Thursday, exactly a week before polling day in ‘87. Thatcher was convinced she was losing the election (spoiler: she wasn’t), and “she took out all her pain and anger and frustration on me, when in fact I was perhaps the most innocent person in the room at the time”, says Dobbs with a sweet smile.

Soon after, the bruised former chief of staff found himself on holiday with his wife, sitting on the beach and scrawling two letters onto a piece of paper: “F U” – his soon to be protagonist’s initials, and a none-too-cryptic two fingers up at the page.

Dobbs now denies that the book was a revenge novel--but the picture he paints of his fellow Tories is darker than even most liberals would imagine. Also, to be frank, Dobbs's book ain't a patch on Andrew Davies's adaptations (and in fact Davies has offhandedly junked key components of Dobbs's plotting, rather hilariously transforming not one but two fatal defeats for FU into triumphs, leaving Dobbs in rather an awkward place in writing the sequels), and Davies self-identifies as a liberal.

For what it's worth, though I am emphatically not a conservative, I think there is good conservative popular fiction. It's never the stuff one thinks of, though, no more than is good liberal popular fiction. That's because fiction written to a thesis is almost always tendentious. It suffers from "try too hard" syndrome, whatever the political slant. But R.F. Delderfield's views are gently conservative, and those views inform his work. But he has a broad enough view of the world that non-conservatives can read his writings without feeling attacked. So, for example, To Serve Them All My Days may have a firebrand socialist minder's son as its protagonist, but his integration into a traditional boarding school as its Headmaster is its story arc. "Pow-Wow" never recants his socialist views, but they become less important to him than the well being of the local community of which he is the steward.

Likewise Simon Raven spreads the satire fairly evenly--he has Labour white hats as well as Tories, though the narrator's asides are pretty consistently conservative--sometimes acidly so. Likewise Susan Howatch's theology trends traditionalist in nature, though, like her fictional mystic Jonathan Darrow, I suspect that she is beyond party affiliation. Another favorite of mine, George MacDonald Fraser, was a crusty old Tory long before he was old. So I think it's fair to acknowledge that there is first rate writing from conservatives. I just don't see either House of Cards or Yes, Minister as fitting that category.

However, most of my examples are from a time of greater consensus. And this brings me back to my earlier point: Tendentious novels usually are less well done than those where character (or plot) drive the storyline. Ideological purity is bad for art. I would suggest that much American conservative writing in the last few years has been just that--ideological, and thus mostly bad art. The current conservative movement's sense of being contra mundum is just not good for the muse, unless held in check, any more than is a liberal sense of grievance. In Phineas at Bay, Sir William McScuttle, was a sincere effort to try to depict a 19th Century Social Darwinist, but, because I didn't spend as much time with him, lacked enough roundness to be entirely successful. (I think I did considerably better with Tories Savrola Vavasour and Frank Greystock).

Conservative art tends to not work because it's conservative before it's art.

Raven's Study of the Crown

Since last December, I've been on a bit of a Simon Raven tear, re-reading Alms for Oblivion and now the first of two novels linking that sequence with his last major work, the seven novels collectively called The First Born in Egypt. Raven's cynicism, joie de vivre, despair, and stubborn clinging to a shredded sense of honor in what he viewed as a deeply dishonorable age has moved me in a way it didn't first time around. He was a man who loved pleasure too much, but hoped for more than pleasure, only to find himself profoundly at odds with his own times. As I mentioned last post, the barely suppressed rage at what he saw as the decadence of his times, even as he sought to enjoy them, sometimes surfaces in his works, and when not overly didactic, adds a power to the books. He's like the guest at the funeral meal who drinks too much, and shares his grief and fury too freely.

Meanwhile, I had been watching Netflix's The Crown, which I found very interesting, in part because so many of the casting choices were risky, but they all work--John Lithgow is superb as Winston Churchill, Matt Smith is showing a whole new level of depth as Prince Philip, and Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby are magnificent. (By praising these actors, I don't mean to slight the rest of the cast; the quality of the performances is admirable throughout.)

But I was particularly grabbed by Alex Jennings as the Duke of Windsor and Lia Williams as the Duchess. Williams in particular manages to make Wallis a powerful presence even before she is given any spoken lines. Their complex portrayal of the almost-royal couple piqued my interest in the real people, and with my copies of Ziegler's and Donaldson's biographies unavailable to me just now, I went online, and came across the 1980 drama, Edward and Mrs. Simpson, written by--of course--Simon Raven.

It too is brilliantly acted--Edward Fox has never been better, and Cynthia Harris--now here's the odd bit: At first, I didn't see what she was doing with the part. She seemed too sweet, too deferential for Wallis Simpson, as I have read about her (admittedly some 20 years ago). But as the story unfolds, I began to grasp it.

The Wallis Simpson of popular imagination s not the woman we first we meet. Indeed, the Wallis we see in newsreels is not who we first meet; the experience leading to the Abdication changes her public persona, and she becomes what we think we know in stages. Beyond that, there is an interesting meditation going on in Raven's script about sexuality and power. Everyone defers to Fox's David, except for his parents, and Wallis. And David likes her lack of deference, her assumption of prerogative. Their relationship has a reality for him that neither of his other amours can provide.

Waris Hussein paces the unfolding story just right--slow enough to create the world of 1930s upper-class Britain, and yet brisk enough to not flag. The beauty of many of the sequences is sumptuous, creating the reality of the world depicted.

I'm struck by the parallels between David and Wallis as conceived by Raven and his Alms characters Gregory and Isobel Stern. Like David and Wallis, Gregory and Wallis are seemingly ill-assorted (he, a Jewish publisher of serious literary fiction, she, the daughter of a very establishment, and thus Anglican, Tory power-broker--not nobility, but very upper class), but they form the one enduring and mutually satisfactory relationship in the series. As with Wallis and David, power within the relationship is very much at issue with Isobel and Gregory; they shift roles depending on circumstances, and with mutual trust (and occasional teasing). The failed relationships in Raven's depiction in Alms are those which try to hew too closely to the conventional molds of the 1950s and 1960s.

Not unlike the world of Alms for Oblivion, that of Edward and Mrs. Simpson is profoundly compromised and tainted; the Archbishop of Canterbury winks at David having a mistress, husbands are complicit with their wives' affairs and vice-versa. Edward, in inviting Thelma Furness to come on safari with him, is reassured by her telling him that her husband Duke will find his own distractions in her absence; he answers almost wistfully, "I like everyone to be happy."

Whether anybody in this glib, glittering world is happy is the unanswered question of Edward and Mrs. Simpson; there is significant reason to doubt that all the high-living elite characters chasing distraction and fearing boredom above all other evils are. It's based closely on Frances Donaldson's biography, Edward VIII (Donaldson was an adviser for the series), but it is very much steeped in Raven's tragic-comic weltanschauung. As in Alms, one feels the old order cracking up, while those who ostensibly rule it close their eyes to the slowly building and approaching avalanche that will bury their world forever.

Quoth the Raven...a Brief Blog on Borrowing

I've just re-read Simon Raven's last novel, entitled The Troubadour (1992), which ended the sequence of seven novels grouped under the general title The First Born in Egypt, generally considered lesser work but connected to and sometimes as vital as his justly praised and unjustly neglected Alms for Oblivion sequence.

There's a lovely little moment after the death of Captain Detterling, the caddish and yet somehow impressive cricketer, soldier and pretender to the marquisate, rejoicing in the absurd title Captain the Most Honourable Marquess Canteloupe of the Aestuary of the Severn, when one of his fellow former members of the regiment tells his wife that he has decided not to attend Canteloupe's funeral:

"But surely he counted as a friend? The girls wrote to me that you seemed very pleased to see him at that cricket match at the school the other day."

"So I was. I like being reminded of the past. And Canteloupe never fails to arouse in me a kind of pleasurable astonishment, that creatures such as him are still permitted to exist. But I am not and never have been his intimate, and truth to tell I have always disapproved of him. What was it that Trollope said of the old Duke of Omnium--the one played by Ronald Culver in that admirable dramatization by Simon Raven? 'No man should dare to live idly as His Grace had lived--something like that. Whether as Detterling or as Canteloupe, this man has lived idly. I doubt if he ever performed a single useful act.

It's a good joke, and a nice bit of metafiction, making Simon Raven a character in a Simon Raven novel. (It's also as close as Detterling gets to an epitaph, although his death scene is rather mythic in nature.) But my own borrowings in Phineas at Bay go well beyond the world of Trollope--there are real historical personages hob-nobbing with their own fictional analogues, or the characters they created, in the case of Bernard Shaw. There are characters from good novels now obscure and from literary curiosae (which may have more meaning than they seem to at present). And there are several doffings of the hat to Raven, and through the actors who enacted his adaptation, to Doctor Who. A plethora of references flew through my mind and into the book as I wrote--and I left most of them in place. And most of them unflagged. (Though I did do an essay on sources.)

It's been suggested to me that an annotated Phineas at Bay might be desirable--to explain some of the topical references I didn't address in the essay, and to reveal the "Easter Eggs" as I called my little tributes. But I don't know. I'm rather pleased at how many have gone uncommented on--that suggests that they didn't feel out of place, or squeezed in.

Still, since I'm working on a follow up, the question seems relevant--to annotate or not to annotate?

Who Will Walk Through the Mirror Door?

This song from the Who's 2006 album Endless Wire (which doesn't get enough love, by the way; see David Fricke's perceptive review) gets something about the creative process, as far as I can see.

There's an unpredictability, and a vulnerability, when you--ok, when I--undertake something creative. I don't know what's coming out. Oh, I have a vague plan, some bullet points, I admit--but something takes over; a typo leads to a whole new digression, a prior character changes from his planned arc, an unplanned character announces her arrival.

The mind and spirit are effervescent, I follow, as bemused any future reader will ever be.

And, like the Who in "Mirror Door," I find myself invoking my specters--my predecessors in writing, my teachers, even though I have only met them from their books.

They enter through my own mirror door….

Tony Trollope, RFD;
Powell, A and Snow, CP;
GBS and Mark Twain;
Saki bearing extra dry champagne.

Simon Raven, still unhailed;
Oscar Wilde, who thought he'd failed;
Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, J;
Alex Dumas, Bronte,A;
Jane Austen by no means least,
Make room for TH White at the feast.
AS Byatt and Barbara Pym,
Conan Doyle and Newman, Kim.

There are legions more, of course, but I'm no Townshend. It's just that his song gets across the strange solitary intimacy of writing better than anything else I've ever read.

But enough--time to start the next chapter...

Trollop's "Butchered" Book Returns to Life

This is something to look forward to, all right:

He's one of the best-loved novelists of the 19th Century, whose work has been read and studied by academics and an army of fans, including Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
But remarkably, none of them has been getting the full story of Anthony Trollope's work – until now. A novel 'butchered' at the time of its original publication has been restored after 135 years, and is being hailed as virtually a whole new book.
When The Duke's Children was submitted for publication in 1879, Trollope was forced to hack away more than 65,000 words – a quarter of the original text. But now the sixth and final instalment in his series of novels about the Palliser family is to be published as he intended.
Last night Lord Fellowes said: 'I couldn't be more pleased. The truncated version is an ineffective conclusion to the Palliser novels but this is tremendous and does justice to the series which came before.'

Now, I'll disagree with Julian Fellowes calling the present text of The Duke's Children "ineffective," but I will agree that it is something of an anti-climax. Certainly the descending action of the book, which focuses more on the next generation with the Duke acting as a foil to his children, loses some of the impetus that the preceding novels had created. Also, losing Lady Glen (oh, all right, the Duchess) in the first chapter, while a truly gutsy move, also deprives the move of Trollope's most reliable source of action and warmth in the series. Lady Glen is missed sorely. As Ellen Moody has pointed out, Simon Raven's adaptation of the novels puts off Lady Glen's death, and extends her role fairly dramatically.

But the novel has its glories. The Duke's jealousy and his anger at Glencora's championing of Frank Tregear's courtship of Lady Mary (which he sees as a repudiation of their forced marriage) is excellently portrayed, and his injustice to Marie Finn (the former Madame Max) is even more so. We see Plantagenet's shadow side here, and Marie stands up to him with vigor. He is entirely in the wrong, and, ultimately, his own decency forces him, most reluctantly, to admit it.

It is in this novel that we get a glimpse into the Duke's feelings for Phineas Finn, in his answer to a question posed by his son over dinner at the Beargarden:

"To tell the truth it's a matter I don't care much about. They've got into some mess as to the number of Judges and what they ought to do. Finn was saying that they had so arranged that there was one Judge who never could possibly do anything."

"If Mr. Finn said so it would probably be so, with some little allowance for Irish exaggeration. He is a clever man, with less of his country's hyperbole than others;—but still not without his share."

"You know him well, I suppose."

"Yes;—as one man does know another in the political world."

"But he is a friend of yours? I don't mean an 'honourable friend,' which is great bosh; but you know him at home."

"Oh yes;—certainly. He has been staying with me at Matching. In public life such intimacies come from politics."

"You don't care very much about him then."

The Duke paused a moment before he answered. "Yes I do;—and in what I said just now perhaps I wronged him. I have been under obligations to Mr. Finn,—in a matter as to which he behaved very well. I have found him to be a gentleman. If you come across him in the House I would wish you to be courteous to him. I have not seen him since we came from abroad. I have been able to see nobody. But if ever again I should entertain my friends at my table, Mr. Finn would be one who would always be welcome there." This he said with a sadly serious air as though wishing that his words should be noted. At the present moment he was remembering that he owed recompense to Mrs. Finn, and was making an effort to pay the debt.

In Raven's screenplay, they have become closer than this; however, for Palliser, this is not nothing. It is the primary basis, in fact, from which I projected the relationship between the Duke and Phineas in Phineas at Bay.

An expanded text will certain;y be richer with those character moments that make Trollope unique among his contemporaries. I'll be buying mine as soon as it's available, with thanks to The Trollope Society for keeping on it!

Both Sides Now

Read those lines for yourself:

Adelaide:But you said we die. For the future. For the human race!
The Doctor: Yes, because there are laws. There are laws of time. Once upon a time there were people in charge of those laws but they died. They all died. Do you know who that leaves? Me! It's taken me all these years to realize that the laws of time are mine and they will obey me!

That's it. The moment when the Doctor unconsciously (?) echoes the catchphrase of his long-term nemesis, the Master.

I wrote about this parallel back in June; but I think it's worthwhile to reaffirm that the best villains often have more in common with of their adversaries than meets the eye. That's certainly true in Phineas Redux, and, by extension, Phineas at Bay, in which I brought back the Rev. Joseph Emilius.

When you have a character like Emilius, who contains stereotype and rote villainy, but also--something more, what else can you do but explore the something more? In Emilius's case it's his coolness under fire, his nerve, and his surprising ability to survive adversity. There's a real grit to the man, beneath all the playacting; he never cracks, displays fear, or loses his head. And so, in Trollope's novels, he escapes conviction of murder, only to get caught up in bigamy.

He's also a rather distorted mirror image of our hero--name games on Trollope's part: Phineas, Emilius. He's an outsider, like the Irish Roman Catholic, who makes his way by charisma and charm--especially charming women. You could say that Emilius is Phineas as seen through Kennedy's or Bonteen's eyes. In the television adaptation, as I have pointed out, Anthony Ainley goes with that, works the charm and charisma of the inferior copy as much as he can, and hints at a very different man belief, whose nature we don't see--because neither Trollope nor Simon Raven in scripting the adaptation have gone so far as to provide it. But this left me with the task of trying to intuit what lay beneath.

How well did I succeed? Ah, that judgment is for you to make, not me.

By the bye, within a week, the Kindle edition of Phineas at Bay will reflect the changes currently made to the paperback; the Rare Misprint Edition will only exist in the hands of the lucky few who have purchased it, and all new copies will reflect the corrected text.

Mind the Gap!

(Barbara Murray and Donal McCann as Madame Max Goesler and Phineas Finn in The Pallisers)

Although no precise date is given, textual evidence, as well as the couple's childlessness, suggest that Marie ("Madame Max") Goesler is roughly a decade older than her second husband, Phineas Finn. Refreshingly, this was honored in Simon Raven's adaptation of the novels; Barbara Murray (who died earlier this year, alas!) was born in September, 1929; Donal McCann in May, 1943. The almost 14 year age gap shows on screen, but the actors have tremendous chemistry, even in the early episodes where McCann's Phineas is a bit raw. In the later episodes, especially as Phineas's woes mount, the ageless elegance Murray brings to the role (she was 45 at the time the adaptation was filmed, McCann was 31) and her charisma, as well as McCann's impetuous performance, rule out any mercenary motives; Phineas wants her, in this adaptation, as well as in the text.

Now, this is far from the usual pattern in Victorian mores; quite to the contrary, according to Ginger A. Frost:

Age differences were common among late-Victorian couples. According to Jalland in her study of the upper classes, 'The husband was expected to be older than the wife; ideally by three to seven years, since women were supposed to age faster than men.'. . .[In the breach of promise here under study,] defendants were older than plaintiffs 84 percent of the time, but the ranges were quite often higher than the ideal, since half of the older defendants were more than ten years senior to the plaintiffs. However, few people involved in the trials disapproved of these age ranges. In several cases a woman in her twenties was considered well suited to a man in his forties or fifties.

In fact, the older woman-younger man pairing is rare, and usually either comic or critical; as John Mullan notes,"Only one man in all Jane Austen’s novels marries a woman older than himself: Mr Collins, aged 25, marries Charlotte Lucas, aged 27. The disparity speaks of the unselectiveness of both parties. Yet three of Jane Austen’s own brothers married women older than themselves."

So one thing about Marie's and Phineas's marriage from the start--it's subversive. She is older--considerably so--and she is wealthy, with all the power that money brings. A total inversion of the Victorian patriarchal ideal, no? And both are from normally despised minorities--the Viennese Jewish woman, the Irish Roman Catholic man.

In trying to project out this couple's future after Anthony Trollope drew the curtain, I thought quite a lot abut their atypicality. Marie and Phineas are an uncommon partnership in Victorian literature. Much of the obvious power resides in her, yet he is not diminished thereby. Phineas has the virtue of ease in his own skin, most of the time; it it enables him to cheerfully accept the benefits of Marie's money and power just as he was willing to learn from Lady Laura the arts of politics. In continuing that trajectory and projecting it out two decades, I believe that Phineas at Bay keeps faith with the creator of these wonderful aberrations from the norms of Victorian fiction.

Return of "The Pallisers"

I see that Acorn Media has re-released (last year, in fact, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original airing) a new DVD edition of The Pallisers:



For all of its deviations from the novels, the series does a wonderful job at evoking Trollop's characters, especially the two lead couples--Plantagenet Palliser, later Duke of Omnium, and his wife Glencora, and Phineas Finn and Marie "Madame Max" Goesler.

The series does not shy away from the outsider status of Phineas and Marie--she is older, foreign, Jewish, he an Irish Roman Catholic. Even when Phineas's attention is directed elsewhere, the chemistry between them, as portrayed by Donal McCann and Barbara Murray is striking:



The adaptation was written by Simon Raven, an interesting, and under-appreciated novelist in his own right. The relationship between Trollope's texts and the adaptation has been elegantly illuminated in a series of blog posts at Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too.

Although I had read the novels long before I ever knew there was a television adaptation, I enjoyed the adaptation very much, and it was marathon re-watch my wife and I did of the series that awoke my slumbering interest in continuing Trollope's story.

So, with last year the 40th anniversary of The Pallisers, the forthcoming graphic novel version of Trollope's John Caldigate, and next year Trollope's own bicentennial year--it's a good time to celebrate Anthony Trollope, whose sympathy melted even the prejudices he had imbibed from his culture.

Edited to Add: Of course, as the book to which Phineas at Bay is most directly a sequel, Phineas Redux, was published in book form in 1874 (the serialization ran from 1873-1874), my timing could only have been better if I'd waited another decade.

Musings from a County Dock

So la Caterina and I are down in North Carolina, from whence she hails, and we're staying at her sister's beautiful home on a lake. We came down for a family funeral, and I was once again reminded of how remarkably warm and embracing her side of our family is--the extended family, too, I mean; her two sisters and my brother-in-law and their children took me in from day 1. But the network of cousins, aunts, uncles, &c., found time, despite their grief, to make sure I was made very welcome.

So I'm writing this looking out on a beautiful lake, far from home, and yet feeling quite at home.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for CreateSpace to finish re-formatting revisions to Phineas at Bay, and to finalize the book, and re-reading Antony Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume of his twelve-novel series, Dance to the Music of Time. After finishing Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" series and the linked "First Born in Egypt" books, as well as the two linking novels The Roses of Picardie and September Castle (which occur between the two series; a good conspectus may be found here), I felt the need of a change--something similar in scope but different in tone. So I returned to Powell.

As I near the end of this epic re-read, I've noticed much that I missed the first go, probably because Powell's narrative verve just carried me along. Some have criticized the ending, with Widmerpool falling prey to the young mystic Scorpio Murtlock, but it actually makes sense, in my opinion. Widmerpool has always had a self-destructive streak (his Cold War activities, his tangling with higher-ranking officers during the war), as well as a streak that Stringham describes as "slavish" that first surfaces in the minor incident of a banana thrown by the prestigious Budd which accidentally hits Widmerpool. His reaction to Barbara Goring's pouring a full canister of sugar on him at a dance, his engagement to Mildred Haycock, and finally his marriage to Pamela Flitton, demonstrate an escalation of the tension between Widmerpool's will to power and his will to self-destruction. He survives each, but in HSH, we see that he is seriously undermined by Pamela's final act: her suicide during a tryst with American academic Russell Gwinnett. (This is also entirely in character for Pamela, who, we are told, is like a corpse during intercourse. In Books Do Furnish a Room, at the Fission Party, Pamela asks Nick Jenkinsif he's attended any funerals recently, remarks that she's just awaiting her own; Nick answers, conventionally enough, "Not imminent, I hope?" only for Pamela to reply "I rather hope it is." When Nick asks her "How are you enjoying political life?" she replies, "Like any other form of life - sheer hell." Her thanatos-drive is already in high gear, in short) Widmerpool's loss of his actually rather precarious balance after this, and the reckless rush toward power through the youth movement combine to his undoing--and yet he breaks free of Murtlock at the very end. It's a superb ending, really; Widmerpool's survival instinct may have been overpowered, but he wrests his freedom back by a quick, tough, act of will, and dies in an echo of his introduction.

Even the cameos are masterful. The borderline-sinister Canon Paul Fenneau, who warns Widmerpool off Murtlock, but yields to his insistence at being introduced and puts the two in contact, has a surprisingly charismatic presence--Jenkins himself feels it. Fenneau carefully balances his obligations to his "cloth"--that is, his Christian orthodoxy--with his esoteric interests, and firmly disapproves Murtlock's heretical view of harmony. (He seems to me, for what it is worth, to have a touch of occultist and vampire folklore scholar Montague Summers about him, the description Powell gives of him even matches photos of Summers.)

In re-reading HSH, I was reminded of just how good Colin Baker's performance is in the fourth installment of the 1997 adaptation of Dance. A smallish part, but admirably enacted.

I'm not quite done with Powell, yet; I have his memoirs and journals yet to go, and his pre- and post- Dance novels.

Edited to Correct reference to Pamela and Nick's conversation; my memory played me false on the specifics.
Edited also to correct the state I was in. North Carolina is where I have family; South Carolina is Conroy Country. My bad, and I do know the difference.

Some Further Thoughts About Simon Raven

I have now read 20 volumes of Simon Raven's novels--his ten volume "Alms for Oblivion" series (10 volumes; my copies are a three volume paperback omnibus, alas), the related First Born in Egypt series (7 volumes, obtained in one fell swoop from a kindly book dealer in Ireland who had them all in first edition--and now has them no longer), two books that occur between the two larger series, and include characters from them, The Roses of Picardie and September Castle (patience and abebooks got me both in first edition, quite inexpensively--the same price as a paperback, really). Oh, and Doctors Wear Scarlet, which I have as an ebook on my Kindle.

Now, Raven is an oddity in so many ways that it is hard to say anything about him without being misleading. He is profoundly politically and socially conservative, profoundly cynical, profoundly irresponsible, and profoundly despairing. He is a traditionalist in every way, except for his utter flouting of tradition, rationalist except for his recurrent interest and absorption in the supernatural, funny as hell, except when being tragic--

See what I mean?

My curiosity about his writing stemmed from re-viewing The Pallisers with la Caterina. In this viewing, I noticed all of the changes, some subtle, some obvious, that Raven's script made in Trollope's storyline--the use of Dolly Longestaffe, a minor character in only one of the books, as a viewpoint character who prompts much exposition and comments on the storyline, the darker motives of Phineas Finn in marrying Mary Flood-Jones (in Raven's telling, he's gotten her pregnant, and so much do the decent thing; in Trollope, he feels bound in honor to Mary), etc. I wondered about his novels, and, after downloading and reading Doctors Wear Scarlet, wanted to grapple with his other works.

It's been quite a ride. His oddity as a writer reflects the man:

A pair of novel cycles, Alms For Oblivion and The First-Born of Egypt, eventually ran (somewhat loosely) to 17 volumes. They take on a mystical edge, and supernatural occurrences always held a fascination for Raven. He said of his writing, "I arrange words into pleasing patterns to make money", and although he never found a huge readership, he did grow more industrious.

The public became familiar with his TV adaptations of The Pallisers and Edward and Mrs Simpson, and he also wrote dialogue for the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. His memoir, Shadows in the Grass was described as "the filthiest cricket book ever written", and Prion Humour Classics recently published a selection of his non-fiction writings, which include a treatise on recognising rent boys.

A gambler, flâneur, cricketer, controversialist, imbiber and fine host, he revelled in pushing his restaurant bills to astonishing levels. Of gambling, he cheerfully described "the almost sexual satisfaction which comes from an evening of steady and disastrous losses". Passionate yet aloof, dissipated yet energetic, Raven represents the perfect paradox of a certain type of Englishness. After obeying his publisher's restraining order for 34 years, he returned to London and died in an almshouse for the impoverished, regretting nothing. He wrote his own epitaph: "He shared his bottle, and when still young and appetising, his bed."

Raven had an appealing honesty as a writer. His stand-in, Fielding Grey, is no hero--in fact he misses several opportunities to be one, and can be appallingly selfish. Yet he, like his creator, has a certain charm.

Raven was an inspired choice to adapt The Pallisers, departures notwithstanding, because he shared Trollope's interest in depicting characters changing over time--his Captain Detterling, for example, develops, decays, and dies most credibly--his flaws and virtues evolve and devolve over the years depicted. He waxes and then wanes, in just such a way as the real man would likely do. Most of his old standbys do; if and when they die, they die of beign themselves, rather like Trollope's Mrs. Proudie. Raven brings that sensibility to the series, and, as a result, the series feels Trollopian even where it strays.

House of Cards Addendum: The Growing Darkness

One thing I had meant to include in my prior post regarding the American House of Cards was that its sensibility is different from the more stylized, play-like original, but that the montage accompanying its opening credits, with a growing darkness overspreading various portions of D.C., from monuments to polluted riverbanks, was a splendid metaphor.

It reminds me of the end Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" series. In the last novel, The Survivors, at the memorial service for one of the few steadfastly moral characters in Raven's opus, Daniel Mond, all of the compromised, blackguardly, roguish, and even occasionally good characters are gathered together in Venice. As all of the characters stand about, exchanging witty banter, seeking to advance their own interests, or find a partner, Raven writes, "a curious thing happened." He provides capsule descriptions of the various conversations, involving all present, except for Piero, a young Italian prostitute, and adds:

while all this was going on:

A dark stain crept up the creek towards the landing stage, at first just a trickle of black, then spreading until it covered the entire width of the creek, coming fast and strong with the tide as more and more poured in behind it, lapping against the banks where the birds nested, lapping round the shining boats, finally coming right up to the steps of the landing stage and settling there, barely an inch below the bottom rung, silent, filthy and opaque.

And yet nobody noticed except Piero, who was staring down from infirmary window and saw that the black stain was all over the lagoon, whichever way he turned his eyes.

(Alms for Oblivion, vol. III, at pp. 510-511).

I'm not suggesting any direct influence; rather, its that the sensibility of the US version of House of Cards reminds me of that of Raven's series--the sort of deep cynicism, coupled with a sad recognition of the damage done by the show, irreversible tide of corruption caused by the characters we are following. In both Alms and House, that sensibility pervades the story, but is, in powerful imagery, made manifest in the physical setting.