Sunday, December 03, 2023

David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine - Nicholas Royle (1)

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MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS 2023

My previous review of this author’s novel QUILT: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/novel-doodlings/

…and his THIS THING CALLED LITERATURE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/this-thing-called-literature-andrew-bennett-nicholas-royle/

….and his AN ENGLISH GUIDE TO BIRD-WATCHING: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/an-english-guide-to-birdwatching-a-novel-by-nicholas-royle/

…and his THE TRANCE OF READING and ELIZABETH BOWEN AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE NOVEL: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/12/the-trance-of-reading/

When I read this book, I intend to comment on it in the comment stream below…

10 thoughts on “David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine — Nicholas Royle”

  2. I was born around the same time as David Bowie.
    The Daddy in this book enters the virus pandemic era that he calls Metamorphosis, those days of M girls in Henry Green? No, Kafka, more like, my very recent review of a theatrical version here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/a-theatrical-performance-of-kafkas-metamorphosis/
    But my kids were brought up in the 70s and 80s with my equivalent of Mole and Camel, this being the Daddy Lewis Shows whereby I DJ’d music and read aloud as recorded on many cassettes, still extant, as well as real life jamming improvised sessions with piano, clarinet and Casio organ. Mummy looked through the hatch. That was in the Coulsdon area of Croydon where we lived at the time and where David Bowie’s step-brother had once been put in Cane Hill Hospital.

  3. “Why do you don’t like Jews? Why do you don’t like Palestinians? Why do you don’t?”

    This is first lockdown and a husband and wife with two such hard questioning little boys frustratingly constrained within doors along with childhood’s screen dependence; is it the author approaching VS (not Pritchett) as Professor of English or someone else who is set on setting out on an endless series of lectures via the very same obsessive screen facility? Whatever the case, meanwhile, it was Blyton’s Famous Five books that happened to be the ones that captivated me in the 1950s, and I also was surprised initially that one of the five was a dog, and, as unmentioned here, that one girl called herself by a boy’s name. 

    “Then Bowie appeared. His presence sparking delirium. […] He reposed. […] Resting on one elbow on the floor.”

  4. I have read up to: “What is a sun machine?”

    This has started as a very engaging first lecture, just up my street about literature and music, although my music listening habits are more Berg or Berio than Bowie. I am a great fan of Nurse with Wound and later Scott Walker and, indeed, Bowie. I shall now listen on Apple Music to the specific Bowie song strongly referenced here.

    Also I now try to factor in the fashion for ‘Pure Cremations’, with no eye for place or posterity or ceremony, especially following Covid. I love the phrase ‘RIP riposte’.

  6. “I mean, for instance, when Michael Gove studied English Literature at university, do you think he read any books? If he did, they appear to have left no impression.”

    During this second half of Royle’s first screen lecture, I weighed the above question in the balance with many references to Gove in Nadine Dorries’ recent book THE PLOT: The Fall of Boris, or whatever it was called, where he is described, along with a shadowy third called Dr No and someone called Duggie Smith (?), as all paths led to Gove in various conspiracies! Whatever the case, much here on education and the GOVErnment, and the fiction novel as a ‘sun machine’. This morning, I happened to start reading a brand new book (reviewing it HERE), SOLAGE, that I anticipate perhaps approximating what Royle is talking about here. Also, I had already thought, in this context, of Ishiguro’s KLARA AND THE SUN (my earlier review HERE) before Royle mentioned it in this section. Another book he mentions in this context is A WORLD OF LOVE by Elizabeth Bowen that I reviewed HERE. I shall now listen to ‘Space Oddity’, as urged.

    PS We are told here that when Bowie was asked about prefect happiness, he answered: ‘reading’. “Very Bowiesque”, this lecture states. Bowenesque, too, I suggest, while recognising for the first time the assonance between these two names!

    The Undermind (second lecture)

    “It’s a poetic and musical thing. A book that stays with you, or a book that you love, or once loved, is a sun machine.”

    I am playing, as urged, the second movement of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, but not on an old HMV with its own horn and dog’s Bach label!

    This work is increasingly seminal, chiming with the very core of the apple in music. I, too, was set alight by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (in the 1950s), but not with the ‘Treasure Island’ one; it was a teacher, reading aloud to the classroom of kids, the ‘Run Away Together’ one. Which seems to fit this book’s theme even better! A VS to eat your heart out about, I guess.

    Read up to: “…severance of your entire body and being.”

    PS Wasn’t it Hancock who lived in East Cheam?

    Enid Blyton as a forgettable disimagining or as a fulsome lifetime in literature’s reappraisal while severing? I am in tune with this completely. Her works’ charms, adventures and their woke/ unwoke minutiae, a nearness to the (sun) machine, whether, I infer, we collude with — or hate — AIs today who may or may not be employed to continue her formula of sunniness in all weathers or whethers. I had forgotten about her Sunbeam Society but now it all came flooding back. And her ever old-fashioned ‘machines’ the children and dog saw or used. And I did not know that she once had poems published alongside Walter de la Mare — I was greatly impressed recently at the latter’s short stories all of which I reviewed HERE and, now in hindsight, I see their soul sown with certain aspects of Blyton! 

    Read up to: “But if every Famous Five begins and ends in the sun, it has shadowy innards.”


    The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and The Shadowy Three?

    This is absolutely fascinating material about The Undermind, and the Enid embedded in this word she once used, but I hope my own gestalt real-time reviewing processes are not undermined by also thinking there is something mystically preternatural about this, and the connections, say, between the huge sun in Iceland, Beckenham, Blyton and Bowie, and much else about this and other literature, fiction, non-fiction and literary philosophy such as Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy… From the Castle of Adventure to the (Charles) Fort of Fortune?

    Read up to: “…there’s no art or song without coincidence. That’s life…exposed to chance, the quick, the speed, the paths it lights.”


    As I reach the end of the Second Lecture, I am fascinated by more comparisons between Bowie and Blyton, and should they have ever met. And regarding the UNDERMIND, I think of this quote I have often quoted before:

    ”The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.”
    – John Fowles (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’ 1964)

    The EGO, the En-ID and the NEMO? Which, then, the shadowy third? Which the undermind?

    Telepathy (third lecture)

    I’m in full empathy with this lecture (well, its first third so far), and it’s as if these are obvious truths rather than what they really are: new concepts to most people. Or old things, like an old telephone whence its verb is intransitive made to seem new — like loading a ZX81 computer by cassette, I wonder, as I used to do with my son. And Enid’s lap-cushioned typewriter loading a daemon muse, her form of telepathy, typewriter as sun machine, the party line of the gestalt, whereupon she takes a spontaneous journey with her first FF book to a treasure island. I have known this with literature, when trying to write it and when reading or critiquing it in serial real-time so as to reach that gestalt by an invented process of telepathy and synchronicity…

    Each lecture tells you which piece of music to hear while absorbing what is said, but I no longer will impart that information here. Just leave it to your telepathy, or ‘clairvoyance’ as Robert Aickman the fiction writer said when channelling Delius. Or perhaps, more dependably, you should instead read this book for yourself!

    2. “The ‘Famous Five’ books are like a party or group outing that includes the reader.”

      Or a ‘maroon party’? — which I believe is a pre-existing term for an extended picnic over several days, perhaps also reminding one of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
      The next third of the third lecture – and I shall now endeavour to seek out my few old FF books, as I think I have been given a new uncanny way to look at them. And that is a great compliment to the author of this book whose -ly is reversed in RoYLe.
      And as with Bowie…

      “The books are full of improbable things that, consistently, in one way or another, fall to earth.”


  8. As I finish reading the third lecture, I recognise many eye-opening observations about the Famous Five and the characters involved, particularly Timmy the ‘doG’, about telepathy and omniscience in literature, and, I now see, also about the ‘picnic’ after I mentioned it yesterday above without realising it was going to crop up later in the lecture! I wonder if my above reference to the ‘maroon party’ will later to be connectable when I read this book in future. And there is more about Bowie, and further engaging suggestions of music to listen to while reading it.

    • Coincidentally, I have just noticed, CBBC TV has just started a new series of FAMOUS FIVE extended adventures slickly filmed, with a half-caste George as strongest character. The story line about Knights Templar and seeking power-magick from treasure in caves and tunnels on Kirrin Island and elsewhere has a type of villain more evil than I recall the original FF books conveying with a darker plot, too, but with a tinge of tongue in cheek.
      Timmy’s bark scares off two fierce-looking dogs much bigger than him! Which reminded me of the previous lecture above.

  9. The time machine (fourth lecture)

    “…seriality, the extempore […] And so to the question of sex . . .”

    From the sound of Chopin to my beloved serialists, this is a quite breathtaking beginning to the lecture, all-consumingly expressed, viz. the seriality of Blyton combining above thoughts as quoted to the seriality of FF books and the recurrence of the enchanted annuals I received each Christmas as a small boy, and the later perhaps dreaded sex, and the ”lingophilia’: “He [Timmy] is a figure of the author with the bone of the book.” Plus the once ‘far-fetched’ connections and more obvious contrasts of Blyton and Bowie.

    I have so far read up to “Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel” in the text of this lecture.

  10. As I reach the end of the fourth lecture, I am wondrously consumed by the wordplay that the author self-consciously uses, as if it is a necessary evil, to convey his thoughts on the ‘coincidences’ here involving Bromley, Blyton, Bowie, Bowen*, and H. G. Wells, the reader as time machine, the novel as son- or sun-machine, and also a perception of the father-son/ sun relationship as ‘deferred obedience’ which is a hidden coincidence with my having happened to start reading my own son’s huge novel that he has been working on since 2011 simultaneous with my reading this Royle book, each turning out to have the beginnings of as yet vague but co-resonant themes.
    Also, I have already noted that the next, as yet unread, lecture, is entitled ‘the Croydon Bookshop’, an area where I lived from 1971 to 1994, and South Croydon is where I brought up my son (and daughter), and where I often visited secondhand bookshops!

    *My review some time ago of Bowen’s MYSTERIOUS KÔR that is relevant to the third lecture: here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/08/moon-city/ and here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/08/mysterious-kor-finally-solved/


    1. The Croydon Bookshop (fifth lecture)

      Much talk of different sorts of silence vis à vis Bowie music made me think of Cage’s 4’33” and the world’s first blank story (and with 4’33” as title) that I published in ‘Nemonymous’ in 2002. And a dream the author had featuring an old dead friend and the nature of dreams, and much else. Regarding my own love of Blyton’s ‘Of Adventure’ adventures and such dippable-in-books (‘dipping is a form of swimming’), I have now dredged up this quote:

      The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him — a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured — captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
— Elizabeth Bowen

      But the most amazing thing about all this is that I regularly haunted, in the 1970s and 1980s, the bookshop on the A232 near Carshalton near where I once had a memorable shunt in a car when driving back to Purley!! …at which point of first mentioning I needed to finish reading this lecture till next time.

    2. “— that’s what so fucking Croydon.”

      As well as the engaging, puckish, collusive, sometimes curmudgeonly sense of these lectures, this sixth lecture ends with a brilliant pen-picture of the eponymous bookshop, with its cockpitted keeper, its books, the author’s father-son trips there with his father, and the question its name demands because it was nearer other places than Croydon! It talks of Croydon’s connecting factors in this book like Bowie, and his half-brother, and much else, and I would add, Croydon aerodrome in Bowen’s TO THE NORTH, and myself and my own son’s strong connections with Croydon by living in Purley and then Coulsdon for 23 years, and our relatives we once visited in Beckenham.
      This book is the comic classic of apophenia, I guess. But I have not yet finished it!(Using the link at top of the page above you will find my old review of this author’s ‘birdwatching’ book that is referenced in this lecture.)

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