Skea's Bookshelf

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SKEA'S BOOKSHELF

England, England
Julian Barnes
Random House
ISBN:0-224-05275-6 $35.00 (hardback) 266 pages

"You - we - England - my client - is - are - a
great nation of great age, great history, great
accumulated wisdom, science and cultural history
-stacks of it, reams of it - eminently marketable,
never more so than in the current climate."

Julian Barnes has a really great idea. Recreate all that is
quintessentially English on the isle of White; provide tourists with a
condensed, time-saving, Heritage, Quality Leisure experience; and without the
tourist income England will languish, become depopulated, abandon such ideas of
nationhood as "economic growth, political influence, military capacity and
moral superiority", withdraw from the European Union, and revert to the old,
simple, village life.
It's an idea eccentric enough to be quintessentially English. As the
French intellectual in the book proves decisively (with reference, naturally,
to Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, Saussure etc.), a replica is profoundly modern and
infinitely preferred to the original. And it is an idea which is likely to
appeal to everyone who feels disenchanted with modern economic and
technological pressures and wants to "get back to nature" or to "the good old
days".
The trouble is, as Sir Jack Pitman explains to his England, England
Project Co-ordinating Committee, Nature in England is as much a result of human
intervention as any modern city: "The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the
undulating field a vestige of Saxon agriculture...the pheasant hand-reared by
the gamekeeper", and so on. And the traditional rituals and festivals were, and
are, as 'real' as the organisers and participants chose or choose to make them.
Throughout the book, Barnes is as concerned with the 'real' England as is
the loathsome Sir Jack. He is concerned, too, with the sense of loss which
creates nostalgia for the past and for vanishing traditions. He is too good a
story-teller to spoil his story with such serious matters, so he buries it in
the conceit of a lost jigsaw piece which, linked with the loss of her father,
has lasting significance in the memory of Martha Cochran.
Not that Martha places any reliance on memory: it could, after all be just
an "artfully, innocently arranged lie". Martha, from the moment we meet her, is
a cynic. Small wonder then, that she gains employment with Sir Jack as
"Appointed Cynic", although this is a position for which she needs more wit
than cynicism.
Barnes is superb at creating characters and displaying their personality,
strengths and flaws in their speech, thoughts and actions. Sir Jack, huge in
his own self-esteem, wielding supreme power over his chosen sycophants, canny
negotiator and vindictive enemy, is a caricature of some modern media moguls.
How will the inhabitants of the Isle of White react to his plans?: "...it is
not full of inhabitants, what it is full of is grateful future employees".
Jerry Batson, now "consultant to the elect" (ie Sir Jack and his likes), is the
consummate "ad-man, lobbyist, crisis-manager, image-rectifier and corporate
strategist": "So England comes to me, and what do I say to her? I say 'Listen
baby face facts. We're in the third millennium and your tits have dropped. The
solution is not a push-up bra.'". Martha and Paul are ordinary but clever
lovers and conspirators who bring about Sir Jack's (temporary) downfall but are
eventually outmanoeuvred. And there is a supporting cast of everyone who was
ever anyone in English Heritage history: Robin Hood and his merry men, Nell
Gwyn, Lady Godiva, Dr. Johnson, the King and Queen (third millennium editions)
and even Lady Chatterly.
For most of the time, this book is cynical, clever, very funny and almost
believable. The denouement of Sir Jack's pathetic sexual perversions comes
close to overdoing the caricature and engendering disgust, but this is
outweighed by the delight of hearing that the actors/smugglers are beginning to
take their roles too seriously, and that "Dr. Johnson" has become Dr. Johnson
and 'Visitors' who dine with him at the Cheshire Cheese are complaining that he
is smelly, belligerent and making inappropriate racist remarks: "I am willing
to love all mankind, except an American".
Somehow, Barnes walks the fine line between pure, unbelievable fantasy and
the grossly over-fantastic with ironic aplomb despite a few near-fatal wobbles.
At each end of the line is a solid place where reality is what we might expect
it to be - Martha's childhood memories at one end, and the mature adaptations
and compromises of her later years at the other. And it is Martha, the most
believable of all the book's character, who asks herself the question which
underlies all the pantomime in the middle of the book: "Could you reinvent
innocence?". Sadly, Barnes seems to be telling us that this is just not
possible.

Murder By Numbers: British Serial Sex Killers Since 1950
Ann Gekoski
André Deutsch
ISBN:0-233-99138-7 £17.99 (hardback) 310 pages

Murder with sex, as any newspaper editor can tell you, has a powerful
fascination. It breaks taboos and exposes the dark side of human nature, and
hundreds of ordinary people buy newspapers just to read the gruesome details
and to thrill with horror and revulsion at photographs of the monstrous
perpetrators.
My gentle, frail, church-going grandmother was an avid reader of the
notoriously gory, salacious and sensational newspaper, The News of The World
and as a child I would filch her paper and secretly read it whenever I could.
Anna Gekoski's book, then, with its eye-catching blood-red on black title
and its promise of detailed murder and sex stories, might look destined for
"best-seller" status. Her easy, journalistic style suggests this too, but her
original purpose in writing this book was quite different. It began as a Master
of Philosophy thesis on criminology at Cambridge University and was intended to
fill a gap in British research into the formative childhood experiences of
people who committed serial murders.
In an attempt to discover a discernible pattern which might have
predictive value for criminologists - to find a "general description of the
kind of childhood that may produce a serial killer" - Gekoski examined in
detail the lives and crimes of nine British serial sex killers.
She defined her parameters carefully. She was not interested in
rape-murderers for whom "the killing is purely a matter of utility" but in
lust-murderers who "take sexual pleasure in the killing itself". Her research
was necessarily grim and horrifying, and Gekoski admits she was "wrung out
physically and emotionally...physically sick, depressed" by the time she
finished it. Many who read her book may feel the same. For others, the
fascination of reading about evil will hold their attention, especially when
serial sex murderers so often seem to their neighbours, as John Christie did,
ordinary, mild and ineffectual.
The book details the lives and crimes of John Christie, Ian Brady, Myra
Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen, Robert Black, Colin Ireland and Fred
and Rosemary West. Gekoski also records her correspondence with Colin Ireland,
who responds "entirely truthfully" (as he assures her) to her questions about
his childhood, adolescence, sexual experience and his life up to the time of
his imprisonment for the murder of six homosexual men. She was not allowed to
ask him anything about his crimes, but gleaned this information from other
sources.
Clearly, perpetrators of such crimes as she describes are abnormal, but
are they insane? How could any sane person bathe and dress and get into bed
with his murdered victim, as Dennis Nilsen did? Imagine the investigating
police officers' feelings when, on investigating the discovery of body-parts in
the drains, they asked Nilsen, "are we talking about one body or two?" and he
calmly replied, "Neither, it's fifteen or sixteen...". Can that be sane?
Gekoski deals with this and other legal questions, and she writes tellingly of
the role the media plays in demonising serial killers...."the Devil fascinates;
angels bore". So, murderers are dubbed with nick-names - "The Yorkshire
Ripper", "The Boston Strangler" - and they acquire star status which, at times,
even encourages them to commit more murders.
Since the 1880s, when Alphonse Bertillon developed a systematic method of
taking body-measurements from people placed under arrest and using them to help
solve crimes, there have been few major advances in techniques which aid
detection of criminals. Finger-printing began in the 1890s; genetic
fingerprinting and profiling are comparatively recent. Profiling is, as Gekoski
says, still more of an art than a science, but it has provided crime
investigators with some remarkable successes.
The research Gekoski did for this book, however, showed no common
determinative patterns which would aid detection or prevent crime. It may, as
she notes, have "some, if limited, explanatory value" but, even though most of
her small sample of nine serial sex killers came from poor, disrupted, often
violent childhoods, there is no definitive condition which might have predicted
their future actions.
In the course of her research, Gekoski found that an excess of information
often hindered, rather than helped, investigators. She holds out no hope that
any more detailed study will change her findings. Rather, she concludes that
"human beings are so infinitely complex and unpredictable, their freedoms so
various, that we cannot be described as simply the products of our own
inheritance". This is a heartening conclusion for humanity, but a dismal one
for those with crimes to solve.

The Underpainter
Jane Urquhart
Bloomsbury
ISBN:0-7475-3521-3 A$17.95 (paperback) 279 pages

"Henri always says that brilliance is moving towards colour, not towards
white", says Austin Fraser to the eccentric Abbott Thayer. Yet, in his own life
and in his painting he seeks colours which camouflage and conceal him just as
surely as Thayer's blue jay becomes invisible in shadowed snow.
Always, Fraser has refused to look beneath surface appearances, to feel
emotions, to be curious about people or to open himself, in any way, to the
world. Like the 'erasures' he creates in his art, his life is scraped back and
hidden beneath multiple surface layers. As in his art, life becomes disturbing
only when some covered fragments seep through.
Yet it is not these seeped, blurred fragments of Fraser's life which
disturb the reader as he tell his story, but the absences, the subtle emotions
and connections which he ignores but which grow in the reader's mind so that we
begin to question Fraser's humanity, to imagine the feelings of those whose
lives he affects, and to judge him. In the end, we can only agree with his own
self-assessment of what his life has been: "You have used everything around
you. And for what? An arrangement of colours on a flat surface".
This book, however, is far more than a flat arrangement of colours. From
the opening lines of the book, I found myself seduced by Urquhart's writing in
a way I couldn't quite managed to explain. Her clear vision is reflected in
language which is plain and quite ordinary, yet her art is subtle, delicate,
multi-faceted and very moving. It is an art of shifting light and shade, as
Fraser's tries to be, but her engagement with humanity is deep and she uses the
language of painting in a sensual and erotic way which her narrator could never
achieve.
Although they are absent from Fraser's life, love and humanity glow
through this book. Urquhart's landscape is broad and yet intimately known. Her
story moves between Rochester, New York, and Thunder Bay and Davenport in
Canada, and it is set in the early twentieth century. Canadian mining history,
the effects of war service on ordinary lives, fascinating details of
china-painting and Victorian automata, art theory, social change - all form
part of the 'underpainting' of Fraser's life.
Urquhart's rich perception of life, then, is quite unlike that of her
narrator. How, I still wonder, can we agree so easily with Fraser's own
assessment and account of his life, yet know that Jane Urquhart has shown us
much more than a flat, smudgy surface. It is a trick which is elegantly and
artfully performed and beautifully achieved.

(and so forth)
Robert Dessaix
Macmillan
ISBN: 0-7329-0943-0 A$29.95 432 pages

Do you remember the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle
of her forehead? Robert Dessaix reminds me of her: when he is good he's very,
very good, and when he's bad he's..., well, you know.... But that's not quite
fair, because often Dessaix's horrid stuff is just something I disagree with
him about and want to argue over. And one of the best things about his writing
is that it invites argument and debate. He has strong views; he doesn't mince
his words; and he's not afraid to tackle sacred cows (or bulls, as the case may
be).
There are things in the book, though, which I do not like at all and which
I think do Dessaix a disservice. It is a pity, for example, that the book
begins with a selection of his short stories. If you want to read Dessaix in
his best fictional mode, forget these and read _Night Letters_ instead, it is
infinitely better. Otherwise, if you have spent long years, as I have, reading
books from front to back (post-modernists may not have this problem) you may
well abandon this book before you get to the best bits.
I found, 'His Neighbour's Ox', for example, so larded with male sexual
imagery that I ended up thinking the whole story distasteful when my aversion
should have been only to the central character. On the other hand, Dessaix's
'disquisitions' (I hope I pronounced this with my lip sardonically curled to
his satisfaction) are entertaining, thought-provoking and full of delightfully
barbed wit. I particularly enjoyed 'Anna Karenina', probably because Dessaix,
who has had a long love affair with Russian language, literature and life,
knows what he is writing about better than most, and is not afraid to wear his
heart on his sleeve.
In 'Tea With Matisse', too, Dessaix's very personal account of an
experience in the Australian outback is curious and puzzling. I'm still not
sure that I understand it, but that, I think, is the point he is trying to
make: you really have to go there yourself to even begin to understand how
alien the Australian interior is to a Western consciousness, and how different
is the Aboriginal peoples' perception of it. Dessaix discusses two Aboriginal
paintings and the complex process of their production. Both paintings are
reproduced in the book by permission of the artist and the Warburton Community.

Dessaix's views on Western art are no less interesting, and he makes no
pretence to impersonal analysis. What he sees in an Emanuel de Witte Dutch
interior, or in a modern painting of a suburban family in a car, or seated
outside a suburban Australian home, grows from his own childhood experiences.
We may share some, or none, of his perceptions but he gives us an intriguing
example of the sort of reactions and emotions a painting can stir in a viewer.
Dessaix's first published writing was a book review, and he tells us that
this is still a genre which he enjoys and takes seriously. His approach is
still not impersonal. In fact, in one disquisition in this book he advises
would-be reviewers to be as personal and as non-authoritarian as possible.
However, only a man who is himself HIV positive might feel able to take Harold
Brodkey** to task for lack of humour in writing about his own death, as Dessaix
does. {**Brodkey, The Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, Fourth Estate]
And, as Professor Sod's law decrees, no sooner has Dessaix authoritatively
advised us that "authoritarian writing" is "language which totally disempowers
us" and that we should "avoid clichés, set expressions and specialist jargon",
than he launches into a discussion on sex and gender which is replete with
terms like 'gender neurosis', 'scientific discourse', 'canonical text' and
'post-modernism', and with telling reference to such authorities as Derrida,
Said, Foucault and Baudrillard. No matter that he is making some interesting
and controversial points, as soon as modernism, post-modernism and discourse
enter the discussion, I, who grew up in a Leavisite age, in spite of reading
all the right 'texts', feel immediately insecure and ignorant. Which proves
Dessaix's point about authoritarian writing remarkably well.
As you can tell, Robert Dessaix's writing is not for people who want a
quiet uncontroversial read. His home territory may be Australia, and some of
his references and jokes will be puzzling to people who do not know, for
example, that Sydneysiders and Melbournians have traditionally sparred with
each other over which is the best city in which to live (Sydney is, of
course!), but you don't need to live in Australia to have opinions on gender,
sex, colonialism, orientalism, pornography and art. Dessaix touches on all
these topics, and more. And I suspect that he won't be a bit disturbed if,
having read this book, you think he's horrid at times, too.

Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life
Barbara Brooks & Judith Clark
Macmillan
ISBN:0-7329-0903-1 $70.00 (paperback) 504 pages

There is no doubt that Eleanor Dark (1901-1985)is an important figure in
Australian literary history. She published ten novels, of which one, The
Timeless Land, became a best-seller in Australia and the USA and was later made
into a popular television series. Her work was translated into European and
Scandinavian languages; she won literary prizes, including the Alice Award from
the Society of Women Writers; and in 1977 she was awarded the Order of
Australia.
Eleanor's novels were popular, sometimes controversial and experimental,
and they reflected Australian history and culture in a way which was unusual
for the time at which they were published (1932-77). In articles and
broadcasts, she also voiced strong opinions on social justice, education and
women's issues. Eleanor Dark was an interesting and complex personality. It is
a pity, then, that this book, thoroughly researched and carefully objective as
it is, fails to bring her to life.
Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark discuss each of Eleanor's books in detail
and refer to as many letters and manuscripts as are currently available. They
place her writing in the context of the political and social events of the time
at which they were written - war, the Depression, censorship, anti-Communist
legislation, bans and book-burning. Eleanor lived through an important and
fascinating period of Australian history and she was very actively involved in
it. Also, through her father, Dowell O'Reilly, she was familiar with many of
the artists and intellectuals of the early 1900s - Christopher Brennan, Lionel
Lindsay and Julian Ashton, amongst others.
Judging by her very modern approach to choosing a husband, Eleanor imbibed
at least some of the unconventional attitudes of this artistic group. At the
age of twenty, when Eric dark proposed to her, she would agree only to a secret
three-week affair, after which she would make her decision.
Incidents such as this, photographs of Eleanor as a lively young woman,
and her nick-name, 'Pixie', suggest that she was not always the serious,
sensible, sometimes sharp-tongued woman she seems in this book. Even if this
accurately reflects her mature character, her independent opinions,
unconventional life and sharp tongue must have caused some more lively
incidents (and local gossip, one imagines) than we learn of here. At times, I
longed for a little subjectivity, a little speculation, to lighten the mood,
engage the emotions and offer food for debate.
Nevertheless, this book is an accurate and painstaking record of Eleanor
Dark's life and work. It will be an excellent resource for anyone interested in
Australian writing, history and social issues, and a fine example of the
determination and effort which has always been required by any author in order
to get their writing into print.

Anne Skea
Reviewer

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