Andrew Blackman

I got this as a reviewing freebie from LibraryThing, which was good because with its title and retro cover of cartoonish man emerging from jungle, I would probably never have picked it up in a bookshop. In fact, it turns out to be a postmodern pastiche of African adventure novels, with a strong metafictional element (the narrator has been told the story by a suspected murderer awaiting trial, and all along he (and we the reader) have to work out whether to believe the increasingly implausible tale).

Knowing all of that would have made me more interested, although metafiction has evolved from an interesting literary experiment into something of a craze, and this book raised no new questions for me about the nature of literary creation and the contradictions of the storytellers’ art. The twist at the end was therefore expected — I couldn’t predict the full details, but had some idea of the new information that would come to light, showing many of the narrator’s assumptions to be false, casting doubt on the rest of the narrative, etc. etc. Maybe I’ve just read too many similar works lately, but the “story within a story within a story” thing is getting a little tired for me. It detracts from the story itself and focuses attention on the storyteller and his art, about whom there is only a limited amount you can meaningfully say.

Of course, the novel instantly recalls “Heart of Darkness”, from its setting in the Congo to its journey deep, deep into the jungle, where the party meets with unspeakable horrors. And, of course, Conrad used the “story within a story” approach too, having his narrator tell the story as related to him by Marlow (although Conrad is less interested in the role of the unnamed narrator than the postmodern Pinol). Pinol’s attitude is much more critical of colonialism, though. The English aristocratic brothers who lead the expedition are not corrupted by the “Dark Continent” — they bring their barbarity with them (one was a fraudster, the other a paedophile, back in England). They are cold-blooded, vicious and amoral from start to finish, and Pinol has his narrator, Tommy Thomsen, express the appropriate moral outrage as the prisoner, Marcus Garvey, continues his story. (Apparently Pinol has a fondness for playing with famous names, e.g. Marcus Garvey, but for me it was offputting and I could see no good reason for it).

Yet despite the clarity of Pinol’s moral position, the troublesome images are still there. The “Negroes” in the book are still all dumb, docile creatures, too stupid to escape without the intervention of their marginally more intelligent leader Pepe (named by Marcus after a former pet bear). Their first appearance in the book is when they “sat apathetically, squatting like frogs with their elbows over their knees, waiting for someone to give them marching orders.” Apart from a slight variation in the animal images used to describe them, this is essentially how they appear throughout the book. Yes, of course, these are Marcus Garvey’s descriptions, not Pinol’s. Yes, later developments throw a lot of doubt on Marcus’s version of events. But Conrad, too, distanced himself from the descriptions by placing them in the mouth of another narrator, and yet they are still problematic.

Chinua Achebe famously denounced Joseph Conrad as a racist for his depiction of Africans in “Heart of Darkness.” I have no doubt that Pinol’s intention was to overturn this kind of depiction, but the trouble is that in imitating something, you have to take on a lot of its faults, and so a lot of the racist elements in the novels Pinol is parodying also infect his own. Achebe’s main criticism of Conrad was that he de-humanised Africans, reducing them to a backdrop for the psychological developments of European heroes. I didn’t really feel that Pinol overturned any old stereotypes in his book, and may inadvertently have reinforced some. Even the one African character, Modepa, who exists outside of Marcus’s descriptions, is not really human. He is silent, inert, completely lacking in initiative, waiting for years on the instruction of one white man for another white man to say the words that activate him and bring him into the plot.

My conclusion: if you want postmodern metafiction, read “Atonement”. If you want an antidote to imperial triumphalism, read “Britain’s Gulag.” This mishmash of different styles and stories is diverting for a while, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews african, congo, conrad, heart of darkness, Literary news, pinol, review

C.S. Lewis sets out to prove by logical argument that miracles are possible. The clear-headed writing style helps to draw you in, he anticipates a lot of the criticisms people will have, and I just like the attempt to argue from a position of rigorous logic something which mostly just comes down to “you believe it or you don’t”.

The trouble is that, in the end, it comes down to that anyway. The calm logic proceeds slowly from step to step, and I am with him all the way, until he makes a big leap, which is that scientific theories of evolution cannot explain the development of human rational thought. Because the process of reasoning is so completely different from anything we can find in the animal world, he argues, it cannot come from that world. Therefore it must come from outside, i.e. from God. On this point his whole argument rests – because each human brain is an intrusion of the supernatural into the world of Nature, so other intrusions are plausible too. He sees miracles in this way – not as breaking the rules of nature, but as sporadic intrusions by God, after which the rules of nature continue to work with the new situation.

In the framework he has constructed, most of his arguments are logical. But his framework is based on a logical leap I don’t think is justified. It’s very hard to understand a lot of evolutionary theory intuitively. I can’t imagine basic organisms evolving into giraffes, or a fish coming out of the water, developing the ability to breathe and becoming an amphibian. But I can accept that over countless millions of years, countless tiny, incremental changes could add up to huge, incomprehensible changes. The development of reason doesn’t seem to me so different from anything else that we have to give it a supernatural cause.

Another problem with the book is that all of the miracles are Christian. This is Lewis’s belief system, so it’s understandable that he would be interested in proving the viability of the virgin birth more than anything else. But he is completely dismissive of other religions, without making any attempt to explain why. If Christian miracles are possible, then are Hindu or animist ones possible. Presumably not, because Christians say there can only be one God.

But the reason for believing the Christian miracles specifically comes down to an absurd criterion called “our innate sense of the fitness of things.” The last few chapters are devoted to trying to prove that the Christian miracles meet this bizarrely vague standard of “fitness.” Lewis does not seem to consider that his own assumptions of how the universe should be are unlikely to be the same as someone else’s. People like him, the “we” of his definition, white male Oxford dons, might agree with his “innate sense of the fitness of things”, although many, clearly, would not. As for people all over the world of different origins, different religions, different social status, etc etc, surely they would have their own sense of what is “fit”? And, perhaps, they would have their own ways of describing the supernatural, and different religions would form, each as valid in its generalities and false in its details as Christianity.

I am willing to believe that miracles could happen, but not because of this book. C.S. Lewis raises some interesting ideas, but after all the long philosophical arguments it comes down once again to a question of belief.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews miracles, philosophy, religion, spirituality

I took a long time to write about it, but a week ago I went to see Ngugi wa Thiong’o in conversation with Alexis Wright at the Southbank Centre. It was great to see Ngugi, and to learn about Alexis Wright, an aboriginal writer who I had never heard of until now but would like to read in future. The event wasn’t very well organised, though, as it started late and wasted a lot of time on unnecessary introductions. The moderator/questioner, Ken Olende, also waffled a lot and didn’t control things very well.

He did, however, ask one very good question. He observed that both of them are political activists, and asked why they also choose to write fiction. This was a very relevant issue for me, as I have been thinking a lot lately about why I am writing fiction and how it relates to my political beliefs and aspirations to change things. Alexis Wright said that she felt a lot more freedom in writing fiction, giving an example of a non-fiction book she wrote where she had endless problems with people not wanting their stories published or their real names used.

I could certainly relate to that from my journalism years, but I found Ngugi’s answer much more interesting. He took an example from Alexis Wright’s book Carpentaria, where a character called Angel Day was rummaging through rubbish on a dump. It’s so vivid, he says, that whenever you pass a rubbish dump, or see a person dressed in rags, you will think of Angel Day, and you’ll think of that person as a human being with thoughts, feelings and emotions, instead of generalising about them in an attempt to brush off the problem. Good fiction, then, humanises us. It changes the way we see the world. We may be immune to intellectual arguments because we can come up with other intellectual arguments to counter them. But stories speak to us on a much deeper level.

Andrew Blackman Literary events alexis wright, event, Literary news, ngugi wa thiong'o, southbank centre

I went to see Salman Rushdie in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi at the Southbank Centre last night. I have never been a particular Rushdie fan, so was pleasantly surprised by his wit, intelligence and affability. He was talking mostly about his new book the Enchantress of Florence, and made me want to read it.

I was struck mostly, though, by a comment he made right at the end, when he was asked by a member of the audience for his stand on the recent Martin Amis controversy. His answer was to say that it’s not helpful to make accusations of racism against one of Britain’s most serious literary figures. Amis has a right to find certain things hateful, he said, and has a right to hate those who perpetrated them. He then launched into an impassioned defence of Martin Amis’s right to freedom of speech, saying that freedom of speech is not a tea party — it begins with defending the right to remarks you find offensive. Being offended is not nice, but the only alternative is totalitarianism. (I am not using quote marks because I do not have a recording or transcript to refer to, but I’m confident this is very close to what he actually said).

Of course, especially since this was an event organised by PEN, the free speech argument went down a storm, and after a strong round of applause the evening was brought to a close. But I was left a little unsettled.

First of all, his characterisation of Amis’s remarks was not accurate. Of course Amis is justified to hate people who commit terrorist atrocities — almost everyone does, and if Amis had confined himself to hating Mohamed Atta or the 7/7 bombers there would have been no trouble at all. What made it racist was when he extended the hatred to the “Muslim community”, and advocated open discrimination and harassment of “people who look like they are from the Middle East.” That’s racism, no matter which way you slice it. To move from hatred of specific people to demonisation of a whole group is racism. It’s just like many people’s racist demonisation of African Americans as all being criminals or on welfare because of a few media-hyped examples. When you make that leap from criticising some people to generalising about a group, you’re going to get slammed for it, and rightly so.

The second thing that bothered me about Rushdie’s answer was that nobody, to my knowledge, has suggested that Martin Amis be locked up, or prevented from speaking or writing more books, because of his odious views. All that people have said is that his views are odious. So Rushdie’s argument against totalitarianism and in favour of Amis’s right to freedom of speech was completely irrelevant. It was the classic ’straw man’ argument. Rushdie is clearly an intelligent man so I’m sure he was aware of this — I guess he just wanted to slide out of answering an awkward question.

The shame of it is, though, that if he wanted to make the free speech argument about Amis, there’s a much better, subtler way to do it. Rather than championing Amis’s right to advertise his ignorance, he could have made the argument that if you did silence people like Amis, you would take away not only his freedom but also, more importantly, the freedom of sensible people to point out his errors. If, hypothetically speaking, we did live in a society where Amis could be locked up for saying what he did, then of course he would keep quiet, but his views would not change. Indeed, he would probably keep sharing his views, but only in secret, with people he could trust. The ideas would spread underground, without being published and so without giving the Guardian opinion-page editors a chance to trash them. It’s not Amis who is the loser in this scenario, but the crowds of people who would write articles and blog posts refuting his ideas. It is our freedom of speech which is under threat — the freedom not just to have an idea, but to disagree with it.

To me, this is the most important part of freedom of speech. Of course people should be allowed to express offensive views. But then it is all the more important for people of good conscience to point out precisely why they are offensive, and why they shouldn’t be adopted. Rushdie seemed to suggest that because Amis is one of Britain’s most serious literary figures, he shouldn’t be accused of racism. I believe the opposite — precisely because he is a serious literary figure, his views will be taken seriously by many people, and so he should be loudly criticised when he talks nonsense. If Salman Rushdie had really wanted to strengthen freedom of speech last night, then instead of just talking about it, he should have taken his cojones in his hand and used his freedom of speech to call Martin Amis an ignorant, bigoted old fool.

Andrew Blackman Literary events free speech, Literary news, martin amis, pen, racism, salman rushdie, southbank centre

It’s good that Edward Said got far enough with the writing of this book to allow it to be published posthumously. It’s sad, though, that he was not able to finish it himself. The editors spliced together notes, lectures and essays into a book, without having to add any bridging paragraphs or explanations — all the words are Said’s.

But the trouble is that it reads like a bunch of essays and lecture notes spliced together. There’s nothing really tying it all together, apart from the overall theme of ‘lateness’. For Said, this means artists who towards the end of their careers do not bask in their achievements but remain dissatisfied: ‘artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.’ He is interested in artists who find themselves apart from their contemporaries, yet refuse to age gracefully. ‘It is as if having achieved age, they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language and the asthetic.’

Unfortunately, such passages are few and far between in ‘On Late Style.’ The book is mostly just an essay on Beethoven followed by an essay on Glenn Gould, followed by one on Benjamin Britten. All are interesting in their way, although I suffered from not being familiar with many of the examples he draws on. With a few months more work, they could have been shaped into a book, with a strong theme developed and the relevance of each essay made clear. Sadly that is just what was lacking, and so we are left with a half-formed book, promising much but leaving this reader wanting more.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews