God Bless Us, Every One!

Books read this week: A Christmas Carol 8/10 (Charles Dickens), Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes 7/10

Strange to say, I've never actually read any Dickens before now, and yet A Christmas Carol seems very familiar - a little like reading A Midsummer Night's Dream or Julius Caesar for the first time so many of the phrases and ideas in the book have entered the popular conscience that it feels like reading a book I already know. There is, near my parents' home, a church which goes by the wonderfully Dickensian name of the "Ebenezer Strict Baptist Church", a name which I can associate in my mind only with an elderly miser shouting "television is the work of the devil!"; indeed it's probably true to say that Dickens has ruined Ebenezer as a name forever more.

It is, of course, extremely good, and when I get time I'm going to work through some more Dickens (probably starting with some of the shorter stuff), and Dickens knows exactly how to push our emotional buttons. That said, whilst reading A Christmas Carol I was struck by the essential bankruptcy of the Dickens' nineteenth century liberal approach to social problems, and of the political philosophies which base themselves on it today. It's all well and good that Scrooge has his epiphany, and obviously it is a good thing for Scrooge that he starts doing good works to counteract his previous ill deeds, but it is a terrible thing that Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim are so totally dependent on his whims in the first place.

Indeed this is the fundamental problem with relying upon philanthropy to provide social services: the emphasis tends to be upon making the philanthropist feel good about themselves, rather than actually relieving distress; we can see this in that the Christmas Carol is about Scrooge's redemption - it's not about the Cratchit family's survival, except in so far as that impacts upon Scrooge's state of grace. Add to that the voluntary nature of philantropy, and the requirement to adhere to social norms that tends to be an unspoken requirement for receiving charity, and you have a system I can't embrace; indeed, one of the better passages of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a brutally cutting attack on the Organised Benevolence Society from someone who's had to sit on the other side of the table.

Gaslight Arcanum is a compendium of short stories which pit Sherlock Holmes against the weird, the wonderful and the exotic. I do like short stories - they are a format not much used today, and I do not read so many as I would like. However I was torn about what grade to give it; most of the stories in it are actually pretty bad, some because they miss the fundamental point of Sherlock Holmes, which is his mighty brain and his ability to always to know more than both Watson and the reader (something which could be done well with supernatural themes, but really isn't here), and some because they really aren't anything to do with Sherlock Holmes, but he's been shoehorned in so they fit into the anthology (the story in which Holmes is murdered before the first line by superintelligent killer bees is a particular low point. And yes, it is quite as bad as it sounds). This reinforced my usual resolution to avoid fan fiction, in all it's forms (except when it's written by William Makepeace Thackeray).

On the other hand the book only cost £2 and concludes with a marvellous tale by Kim Newman, "The Adventure of the Six Maledictions", which is absolutely brilliant, laugh out loud funny and gleefully dark. Of course, the reason it can manage this is that it is not, strictly, a Sherlock Holmes story - in fact the man himself does not appear once - it is, rather a Moriarty story. This gives Newman an almost blank canvas to work from; all Conan Doyle tells us of Moriarty is that he is i) "A Napoleon of Crime" and ii) formerly a mathematics professor. And of course we also have Colonel Moran, who (in Newman's tale) fulfils the role of Watson, giving a wonderfully cynical and roguish perspective on life, which is (I'm fairly sure, although I've not actually read the books) modelled on the Flashman series. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the only other Holmes story not written by Conan Doyle I've really enjoyed is Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" - also a Moriarty story. I think using characters connected to, but not fully described in a work of literature in a homage helps because I don't know enough about the characters to know that they're not acting right - if I did know that it would wreck my enjoyment of the story. Of course, I'm now going to have to track down Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (and read Hamlet) to test my theory.

At The Movies

Books read this week: Your Movie Sucks 5/10 (Roger Ebert)

So this week I'm reviewing a book of reviews: slightly post-modern I know. Your Movie Sucks is a collection of reviews of bad movies: some of which I have seen and liked (51st State, Constantine), some of which I have seen and hated (Fantastic Four, Doom) and some of which I have no desire to see (Crossroads). A truly scathing review can be a thing of beauty to behold: it's unfortunate that none of the reviews here rise to that level - partly I think because Ebert strives to be fair and even handed, which, whilst laudable, prevents him from rising to the true heights of invective which make a bad review a work of art. What is more surprising really is the strange gaps in Ebert's knowledge of popular culture: I find it hard to believe that someone could never have heard of Scooby Doo, and never seen the Thunderbirds. Still, I finished the book so it wasn't that bad, and I now have a larger list of movies to avoid. A short post this week I know: hopefully I'll have finished something a bit more beefy next week.

Poppies

Books read this week: Up The Line To Death (9/10)

I think it was Orwell who said that the Great War carefully selected and murdered the million best men in Britain. Around this time every year, I make it a habit to reread Brian Gardner's Up The Line To Death; it's by far my favourite poetry anthology and it never fails to move me.

There's a wide range of different poets here; Sassoon and Owen, obviously, but also Thomas Hardy, Kipling and Yeats, as well as a dozen or so lesser known poets, some of which are superb. As Gardner points out in the introduction, it's impossible to know how many first class poets were cut down, their masterpieces unwritten. It is the feeling of waste, of a criminal waste of talent and youth and innocence, that defines this book.

T.M. Kettle's "To my Daughter Betty" ends with the note "written four days before his death in action, 1916"; even the footnotes are tragic. Looking through the potted biographies at the end, I was struck by how many of the poets were younger than I am now when they died, and it just served to heighten the sense of wasted youth. Wilfred Owen is probably the best poet the English language has ever produced, and he was dead at 25.

The different responses to the horror of war are fascinating; we have Sassoon's bitter satire, Owen's despair, Gibson's superb blending of the horrific with the mundane ("Ginger raised his head/And cursed, and took the bet, and dropt back dead./ We ate our breakfast lying on our backs / Because the shells were screeching overhead.") and Kipling's all-encompassing grief and guilt ("If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.")

Particular standouts are Owen's Strange Meeting (oddly prophetic in retrospect: I can never read the line "None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress" without thinking of the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s) and Dulce Et Decorum Est, obviously, as well as The Sentry, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's Untitled poem, which contains one of my favourite couplets ("Was it so hard Achilles, / So very hard to die?"), Wilfred  Gibson's three poems Breakfast, Mad and In The Ambulance, Gilbert Frankau's The Deserter ("And the shameless soul of a nameless man / Went up in the cordite smoke."), Isaac Rosenberg's The Dying Soldier ("We cannot give you water / Were all England in your breath."), Richard Aldington's Sunsets, and most especially E.A. Mackintosh's In Memoriam, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. There isn't really anything more for me to say, so I'll close with the first verse of In Memoriam:

So you were David's father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

It could stand as the epitaph of a generation.