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 continue to read this book, I intend to comment on it in the comment stream below…
Picture break
“…this Cartesian or post-Cartesian ‘while I write’ — in how writing involves chance, the unforeseeable. It’s about how strange things crop up while you are writing…[…] …you’re under the covers listening to Radio Luxembourg or some pirate radio station… […] …station to station…”
This whole passage, including the missing bits and beyond, means an enormous amount to me and my gestalt real-time reviewing process of reading a book. In fact, this whole book is turning out that way! It’s just that I was old enough to listen, without bedcovers, to these Luxembourg fadings and stronger pirate signals near the coast of Essex. Here, too, in this section, we are gifted Google coordinates for an amazing painted portrait of Bowie I had never seen before, and the circumstances of eight actual, I think, Polaroids in colour of Bowie as shown on glossy pages at the end of this section. There is much detailed material, too, about Bowie the person and his music for me the Bowie almost-neophyte. As an aside, I just wondered, to be honest, whether “apocalyptically honest” somewhere in this section should not have been ‘apocryphally honest’? Perhaps a dumb question.
What a big memory you have, Grandmother! (sixth lecture)
“How are you going to spend your interval?”
Three options, stemming from early or later Pater, certainly from the still unsettled and unsettling music of Bowie, an example of ‘music’ that all eventually becomes, but here becomes another engaging puckish lecture, in supreme language, given by someone, I infer, roughly of my own age if a bit younger — peppered by equally inferred complaints against political Blobbery that prevailed through lockdown and now beyond, as well as mourning that the unquestionable miracles of English Literature are threatened by interference, even curtailment — a lecture or meditation upon the nature of life and death, and although I considered myself to be a Bowie neophyte, I found myself, upon the sudden announcement of his death, going to Tesco and buying his last, then brand new, CD, something otherwise I hardly ever did and have never done so since! It felt to me then that his death had opened some unwelcome floodgates, and I was later proved right… and with that ellipsis, I have so far read up to: “Do I need to explain what and where, and how it doesn’t, how it never . . .?”
“…in an era of ‘alternative facts’, ‘post-truth’, fake news, misinformation, deep fakes and synthetic media, sun machines matter.”
…which tantalises me why some expressions deserved quote marks and not others, a few being more borderlines cases of needing or not needing them than others. Meantime, the second half of this sixth lecture is teeming with such tantalising things, about ‘memory of’ and, inter alios, my beloved Proust. And to Ishiguro and W.G. Sebald I would add W.E. Johns. There is much else, including the potential bombshell relating to what the lecturer had been cursorily and, yes, tantalisingly told by his mother about his paternal grandmother with regard to Enid Blyton…
I love ellipses. Amber not red.
But the clouds (seventh lecture)
“It is Anxiety, a messed-up principality under constant threat of Death’s invasion.”
The first half of this lecture is about regret rather than Proust’s remembrance, here triggered not by cake but by Beethoven’s Moonlight, and I noticed that Beethoven and Beckenham have a rough assonance, well maybe not! And the character Grettir seems to have relevance, my observation, not the lecturer’s.
Despite the lecturer and myself only seeming to be a few years apart in age, this book’s Father-Son ‘bonding-loop’ (see my ‘Solage’ review entries yesterday and today here before reading this lecture) seems — especially vis à vis the Croydon Bookshop — to entail the lecturer being the son to his father, and me being the father to my son, especially in the light of the ‘bibliography illness’ and of me ever ludicrously trotting out the famous Pangloss homily (quoted in the lecture) to my son in those days, and still do! And I, too, hardly ever exchanged small talk with ‘Alan’.
“…the sense that even in the few years since Bowie’s death our world has changed in horrible ways.”
Suddenly reminded by a Christmas card just received that I once regularly drove over to a horror and ghost story writers’ group in Beckenham during the early 1990s!
The second half of the seventh lecture gives us more information about what this son and his father sought in Alan’s ‘’Carshalton’ bookshop outside of which I shunted a car not far from Coulsdon where I then lived. These included illustrated books, and, just as one example, a reference to ‘Ackerman’s aquatints’, indeed, many enticing books, and cloud pareidolia in sketches, plus memories surrounding the lecturer’s grandmother born in 1898. Mine was born in 1899, the same year as Elizabeth Bowen, recorded by me HERE, an important anchor in my now distant past. Secret tunnels in real life, if not always in the Famous Five and criss-crossing the books I choose to review. And ‘The Tower’ by W.B. Yeats reminding me that a writer friend of mine sadly died at the age of 56 a week or so ago (my obituary of him HERE), a writer who also wrote a work called ‘The Tower’ perhaps to resonate with the currently more famous ‘The Tower of Moab’ (review HERE) by L.A. Lewis (no relation, except via nubilous nuance?)
Came up automatically today on my Facebook anniversary memories:
Fairy (eighth lecture)
“Tune into the comic cosmic strangeness of your voice as a shadow-show of accents, tones and registers, a play of other voices.”
This is not a book for absolute beginners, or is it? Whatever the case, you will need to read it to discover what neologism represents its particular genre of literature. You won’t hear it from me, but it sounds a bit Tolkienish. As you can see from my own ramblings above, I, too, have the ‘tethe implex’, but I actually met my grandmother, and she often looked after me, often brought me up, in fact. My reviews are also full of happenstance words and their even chancier metamorphoses. Tethe can be seen as a tether as well a Lethe.
Much in this book I am not covering in my real-time review of it. But I must mention the ‘bird-dreams, that is to say dreams of flying, and foreign song’ in this lecture — the point in the text up to which I have read so far — because last night in bed I happenstanced to listen (just before sleeping) to Michael Finnissy’s String Quartet No. 3 where the four string players are very gradually subsumed by the sound of real birdsong! Seriously.
The end of this eighth lecture presents a portal or porthole on the nuances of various F words, particularly Fairy as it pertains to Football Fan and Famous Five, &c. and LO! the painting above on the back cover of this book. Even fairy-footed Allan (not Alan) has his own LA LA land, I guess. Fairy as fickleness of the English spirit, both as foe or friend, maybe.
Coda
I often write codas. This is this author’s first coda, and what a coda! And it’s not even at the end of the book, but simply at the end of the so-called VS lectures. This:book is full of recurring leitmotifs like Wagner operas, or maybe not. From the previous F words above to the ‘future faraway’ of fairies that, Lo!, Enid forged with the Royle grandmother. There are revelations in this coda for which I will keep your powder dry. And encoded observations on the art of Bowie, if not on that of Bowen. I, too, love sixties music by never listening to the lyrics, although I do so now whenever I listen to the Tony Blackburn show on Radio 2 (I listened to Tony first from the Pirate Radio ships in 1964.) And I , too, know what it is to ‘read alone’ with another. Reading whole novels aloud, sometimes.
nullimmortalis Edit
As the foregoing had the ‘sense of an ending’, I have started re-channelling my own Daddy Lewis Shows, mentioned earlier, and have privately read the rest of Royle’s avuncular and durably unique book (the rest of it being a good quarter of the whole) without placing here any public comments upon it, other than now to list its contents: PART III TYPEWRITER, PART IV STRANGERS MEET WE WHEN, WHAT IS A SUN MACHINE? (Afterword by Peter Boxall), and generous NOTES plus INDEX.
I am not immune to any part of it.
My aforementioned son above has now finished the whole of this book and has added his own thoughts upon just the two end sections, as a CODA to my review wherein I do not review these last two sections in detail. His Coda below, he tells me, should be read while listening to Holst’s ‘Neptune.’
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The Typewriter –
Strangers meet we when –
Holst when he wrote The Planets suite expressly used the movement Neptune as a warm down, ourselves travelling further away from the Sun to the edges of the solar system and then beyond to the Kuiper belt, the dad still typing away or the magic of two ladies own particular ‘snow globe’ both instances relevant to the lock down during COVID. After the endorphin high felt from the sheer exhilaration of creativity regarding Bowie and Blyton, and that of the many fellow travellers within the author’s mind palace, a ‘sense of an ending’ is not abrupt, as with some books – a guillotine sheering off the reader and cutting all passage back to the ‘land of fairies’ (much like the effects of a blow to the solar plexus) nor does the reader feel marooned alone but sent like ‘clouds curling floating away,’ morphing, pixelating and transforming still dreaming and travelling into the distance. ‘A great old ship set sail for the deep blue horizon,’ seems much in tune with Tolkien’s Bilbo retiring to the grey havens at the conclusion of Lord of the Rings.
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My son’s “…the endorphin high felt from the sheer exhilaration of creativity regarding Bowie and Blyton…” in his Review Coda above puts paid to my glancing reference to ‘curmudgeonly’ further above, I guess.
END
In 2024, I hope to real-time review this author’s THE UNCANNY here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/the-uncanny-by-nicholas-royle/