herman melville – Mark Bould

Reading The Great Writers, part six (the last one at last)

Back when I started this, I was pretty sure

it wouldn’t be listy;
some point would have emerged; and
I would end by announcing my plan to read all the still-unread titles in the series in 2024.

Such optimism!

Looking back, it is funny – to me at least – to see how some of my ongoing work patterns came about. My partner is constantly amused/appalled at how much time I devote, when working on some project or other, to reading absolutely everything. For example, This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook (forthcoming) contains 51 lists of 5 recommended books. I had already read about 140 of them so was confident they were appropriate examples for the multiple dimensions/agendas of the project. But none of the other 115, regardless of their critical reception, made it onto a list until I’d read it to ensure it did what we wanted it to do. Which of course also involved reading and rejecting some titles and then reading alternatives. Add in the reading to select books for the contributor chapters, and the reading for the chapters I wrote, and in total, I read 200 or so books for this one project . Which is part of the reason it took a year and half to complete, rather than the six months I’d imagined. (There are also 35 lists of 5 recommended films or TV shows, but that only involved needing to watch 11 things.)

Next year I am giving several talks on climate fiction, but at least I’ve had the good sense to look specifically at short fiction. Although not enough sense to come up with a promised sample size of less than 200 stories.

When I’m caught up in such obviously mad behaviour, I tend to think of it as doing due diligence. But really it is a kind broken-ness rooted in class anxiety. The need to feel not a sham. (I think this also explains the earnest tone of much that I write, and the flippancy with which I tend to present my work. Constantly trying to prove I’ve earned my stripes, desperately trying to please.)

(Academic friends, I might sometimes be the dreaded reader 2, I’m sorry, but at least I will have (re)read and/or (re)watched your primary texts before writing my report recommending changes that directly contradict everything reader 1 said.)

***

As I looked back over all those years of reading, I thought I would find myself wishing that it had been easier to find my way. And for sure, there are some things I would rather not have gone through (and I don’t just mean Henry James’s later novels, though they are on the list).

But then I think of all the moments (and days and weeks and years) of kindness and generosity I would have missed out on from all those (often somewhat bemused) teachers, librarians, friends, bookstore workers…

(And all those moments of absurdity, too. I mean, who reads Sir Charles Grandison when there’s no pressure on them to do so? Who contemplates getting inked with a Moby-Dick barcode? (My professorial inaugural lecture, which should finally happen late next spring, will climax with the utterly inappropriate unveiling of a far more visible and even more absurd tattoo. Just need to work out the fanfare music. (I’ll definitely enter like a boxer through dry ice and dancing spotlights to Rollins Band’s ‘Shine’.) Just need to schedule getting the ink done at the right time once the date of the lecture is finalised.))

Part of my motivation as a teacher and my commitment to working in the less privileged parts of the sector has been to try to make it easier for working class and other marginalised students to find their feet at university, to navigate institutions not designed for them and cultures that are new to them, and to become confident about their own worth. (Although the long war on HE makes that harder every year, as of course has my own becoming-middle-classness and, ironically enough, the cultural capital it entails. Oh, and getting old and being perpetually exhausted by the job.)

On some level, of course, this commitment and motivation is inspired by that Oxford interview wanker. No one should have to go through that sort of thing. But it is much more rooted in the actions of those who, with no obligation to care, cared.

I just read an interview with my friend (and, as this quote suggests, a role model to strive and fail and strive to live up to) Tom Moylan, in which he says

First and foremost, I’ve always considered my primary role to be that of a teacher (with research and writing necessary for good teaching) and not that of an alienated ‘academic’. I consider teaching to be a matter of imparting knowledge in the context of facilitating with compassion a learning process that helps each individual break with their normative development and come to see the world freshly in order to develop a responsible sense of their place and path in that world.

Could you imagine if universities were actually organised to encourage and support us to do that? Rather than making us squeeze it in around all the bullshit?

***

But I guess the real reason you’ve hung around this long – if you have, which of course you have otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this bit – is to find out whether I will read those last 22 titles next year.

The answer was a definite ‘yes’ back when I started thinking about The Great Writers, but now it is more of a ‘probably’.

I’m not sure I want to spend much more of my life grinding through unrewarding books. But the only way to find out if they are unrewarding is to give them a go, and I do already have copies of ten of them (though one is in a box somewhere and thus not in this picture).

Monmouthshire libraries can provide another eight, and my university library another one on top of that.

Which means I’d only have to buy three books:

Greene’s The Comedians, which is fine with me,

but,

for

fuck’s

sake,

James’s Portrait of a Lady and Waugh’s Vile Bodies?

Reading The Great Writers, part four

Reading The Great Writers, part three

Another shorter middle bit
While my experience of reading The Great Writers’ novels had always been a little marred by their layout and print, something far worse awaited at university.

Condescension.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
This was the very first novel we were required to read on my degree (and one of the very small number by women). I had not read anything quite like it before. Despite my forays into ‘literature’ and ‘literary fiction’, I still mostly read genre fiction. I got through a lot of those 180ish-page sf paperbacks, often at a rate of one or more per day, so I was not at all used to having to keep track of large numbers of characters and their relationships with each other. I remember breaking off after several chapters to jot down their names and draw a diagram mapping how they connected to each other.

I remember a fellow student getting a glimpse of it and laughing.

But mostly I remember being the only student in the seminar without a brand-new Penguin Classic, and the looks on (some of) their faces when they saw my manifestly cheap ‘fancy’ hardback. It was that Oxford interview all over again.

When I was growing up, Plymouth was one of just a handful of places that still retained the 11+ exam, the already archaic post-war system for streaming pre-adolescent children into secondary education at technical schools, secondary moderns or grammar schools. It pretended to neutrality but was really a system for maintaining economic and social class hierarchies while allowing limited social mobility for the ‘worthy’ few. We moved to Plymouth right at the end of 1979 and I started my half year at Hyde Park Juniors on the January day the rest of the class were taking the second part of the 11+. So a couple of months later, after which most school places in the city had already been assigned, I had to take an alternative exam. The outcome was I had done well enough to go to a grammar school but there were no places available, so I could either

commute to the anomalous Southway Comprehensive (which also was not quite a comprehensive, either, since it streamed some subjects) on the northern edge of the city; or
apply for a scholarship to Plymouth College, the public (i.e., private) school less than a ten-minute walk from home, not quite opposite my junior school.

No way was I going endure being patronised and mocked as a scholarship boy!

By not going there or to Oxford, I really thought I’d dodged the bullet of class condescension.

After that Austen seminar, I went back to my room in Mansfield Hall and looked at the reading list we’d been sent in advance and at the shelf of books I’d brought with me. Every one of them was second-hand, and most of them editions which were less than infra dig (a phrase I’d never encountered before, let alone heard being bandied about, and had to look up in a dictionary). And some of them were so embarrassingly bulky and mouldering that I went scouring Reading’s second-hand bookstores for replacements, which of course meant it would probably have been cheaper to buy new editions in the first place.

Anyway, Austen. Took me a while to get it. But then quickly became quite fascinated and read all the novels – except, for some reason, Northanger Abbey (1817), which I only got to maybe five years ago. Predictably, I guess, sarky Emma (1815) was my favourite, but I’ve only ever re-read Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), both for things I was writing. Maybe when I’m through (re)reading the Brontes (and George Eliot), I’ll move Austen into the rotation.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
What can I say? It is an absolute monster of a book. I fell in love immediately. So much so that my first tattoo was very nearly the Penguin edition barcode on the back of my neck. (Again, I wish I was making this up but am also quite delighted by my own ridiculousness. And both relieved and saddened that I never managed to scrape together the cash.)

For my first essay on my American Literature module – which anthology-wise was thoroughly Norton not Heath, so Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, early Henry James and our token woman, Emily Dickinson – I decided to develop an angle on Moby-Dick by holding it up alongside Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which I also read for the first time. Quite why I thought Moby-Dick could not sustain a 1500-word critical treatment on its own, I have no idea. Maybe Melville’s encyclopedism was contagious.

I read Moby-Dick half a dozen times over the next decade, a couple of them for teaching. After my MA at Warwick, I returned to Reading for my PhD and a couple of years in a row I taught the same American literature module – literally the same, completely unchanged – I’d studied five or six years earlier. Each time, at some point in the first seminar, I advised the class that it was a really big book but they would only need to read so many pages per day to have it under their belts by the time we got to the two weeks we would spend on it. And each week, I updated the increasing page-count if they were to start from that day. Of the 25 students I taught over those two years, not one of them took my advice. But more than half skipped class during the Moby-Dick fortnight… Their loss.

A few years ago, we went to Inverness for our Xmas/New Year’s break, and I decided to read Moby-Dick for the first time in at least 20 years. Once again, I was utterly smitten. Fortunately, it was fucking freezing outside, and the days were much shorter that far north, so my partner didn’t really mind that I basically sat and read it in 4-or-more-hour chunks.

At the start of lockdown, I decided to read all of Melville. Breezed through Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), both of which I’d previously read and this time liked even more. And I finally got through Mardi (1849), which had defeated me several times before, and which this time broke me of Melville for a while. However, I’m determined to bring him into the rotation – Redburn (1849) is cued up for 2024, which means I should get to my Moby-Dick reward-read around 2030 or 2031 (depending on what I do about the short stories and poetry). I seriously cannot wait. Such are the schemes of mice and men.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
I must have read a version adapted for younger readers at some point, because parts of it were already familiar. I have not reread it since I taught it in 1996 at Exeter University on an American Literature survey course which was very Heath, not Norton, in its orientation. I feel no particular desire to read it again.

Except.

How the hell you abridge Huckleberry Finn. Surely, I can’t be daft enough to track down a children’s version and read it alongside the complete text.

Reader, that’s precisely how daft I can be.

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
We read this on the Literature, Film and Television module alongside the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford. The one good thing about Fitzgerald’s novel is that it is quicker to read than it is to sit through the 1974 Coppola-scripted, Jack Clayton adaptation, starring Robert Redford.

And it turns out, a quarter century later, quicker to read than to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So that’s two good things.

But it is even quicker to watch Elliot Nugent’s 1949 version, starring Alan Ladd, which regardless of the liberties it takes with the novel, but also mostly because of them, makes it way better than Fitzgerald’s effort.

Which is to say, I not only don’t like the novel – the ash heaps and big googly eyes are fine – but am mystified by its critical standing. It’s right down there with JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1945–6) and that whiny little fuck Holden Caulfield, the literati’s Danny Rand.

Not a still from the 1985 BBC adaptation of *Tender is the Night*

However, being a dutiful student, I also read Tender is the Night (1934) and re-watched the 1985 BBC mini-series adaptation – I saw the initial broadcast of it because of: a) flailing around re. cultural capital, but also really b) Peter Strauss (i.e., Wolff aka Spacehunter, of Adventures in the Forbidden Zone fame) was in it.

I’d found a cheap paperback Gatsby to switch in for my Great Writers version but did not keep it once we were done with Finals. Of course, a few years later I found myself teaching on an updated version of that module, and equally inevitably, the one bit that had been kept unchanged was the block on Fitzgerald. His estate has made a (very small) fortune from me, and I resent that.

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Our 18^th Century Literature module was an intoxicating brew of bawdiness, wit, humanism, misanthropy, scepticism, formal experimentation, moralising, mockery of moralising, refusal to moralise, baby-farming and horse-people. Fortunately John Dryden died in 1700, so there was Alexander Pope instead, with The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728). There was Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) and Gulliver – so I finally learned how to pronounce Houyhnhnms. And for novels, there was Tom Jones, which I liked most of all, with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) a close second and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) some way back in third place. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), trailing the field by quite a distance, was in danger of being lapped. Which makes it all the odder that rather than reading Fielding’s brief spoof, Shamela (1741), or any of his other novels, I voluntarily ploughed through Richardson’s breezeblock response to Fielding, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and his other doorstop, Clarissa (1748). Of them, I remember nothing beside their immensity.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Our module on The Novel gave us Austen, George Eliot, later Henry James, Conrad, Lawrence and Hardy. See, I told you it was a devotedly Leavisite department! (Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence will return in part five.) I found Tess a bit meh, not Far From the Madding Crowd meh, but meh nonetheless. Jude the Obscure (1894–5) seemed stronger, undoubtedly because Jude’s struggle for and with social mobility struck a chord. Also, pig pizzles being lobbed over hedges always puts me in a cheery mood. But it was The Woodlanders (1887) that won me to Hardy’s corner. That and him not being James or Lawrence. (I eventually got to write about The Woodlanders in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture – alongside Groot, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, because I’m nothing if not classy.)

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
This wasn’t actually on my degree. It’s best shot was the Modernism module but, although that somehow (and somewhy) devoted two weeks to Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), there was only room for one woman, which was Woolf, represented by one novel, which was Mrs Dalloway (1925), but I liked it so much I read Lighthouse and The Waves (1931), too.

And that was it. My degree was over. More house moves – Plymouth, Coventry, Reading, Reading, Reading, Exeter, Exeter, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, High Wycombe, Bristol – and my parents wanting to reclaim some space in their own house (the nerve!) and somewhere in all of that The Great Writers (and many other books) found their way to charity shops.

But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…

Which I realise is not much of a cliffhanger, but it’s the best I can muster right now.

Reading The Great Writers, part five

Reading The Great Writers, part one

The lrb; or long, redundant beginning

This spring and summer, I spent several months reading for and writing a chapter on ‘Class and Horror’ for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Horror. It was the first time I’ve dived deep into critical/theoretical work on class for probably the best part of twenty years. One key shift is the now general acceptance of the need to incorporate Bourdieu (or Bourdieu-like) work into models of class, which meant I found myself thinking a lot more about social and cultural capital. The other key trend was hardly new: marginalising/excluding Marxist traditions of work on economic class, often in favour of Weberian or neo-Weberian approaches, which is odd given how very little Weber actually said about class, but also for other very obvious reasons not remotely odd.

I also found myself baffled (i.e., not remotely baffled but fascinated) by social scientists who present social mobility as an absolutely incontrovertible good (even if the only argument they can muster is that it improves GDP) but are at the same time appalled by the notion of absolute social mobility. Even though it is the obvious end-point of their social mobility enthusiasm, they devote absolutely no words/time/energy to imagining what meaningful equality might look like. Instead, they just brandish terrifying (that is, hilariously clichéd) images of totalitarian states. Harrison Bergeron, eat your heart out! It’s almost as if their main interest is maintaining a slightly tweaked and marginally more palatable status quo (and securing future research income streams from similarly committed funding bodies).

Anyway, the point is, I found myself engaged in autobiographical ponderings about social capital, cultural capital and autodidactism.

I come from a dirt-poor West Midlands working-class family. I was born in Staffordshire but we moved to Devon when I was four years old, which further limited the already negligible social capital to be derived from my now attenuated extended kinship network.

My parents were Methodists (which is why I have absolutely no idea how to gamble although I did, after no struggle whatsoever, overcome teetotalism). And they were aspirational, at least to the extent of wanting a better life for me and my brother and of taking on a crippling mortgage to own a home rather than rent a house (they were so ripe, sadly, for Thatcher). Their new circle of church friends – middle class folks from the wealthier parts of the village – obviously lived in a different world to us and, despite many kindnesses, were defensive of their relative privilege. While my dad left school aged 15 and with no qualifications, they were mostly graduates from middle class families. Thus they had higher levels of economic, social and cultural capital, the latter of which was often deployed against my ‘uneducated’ dad. Especially when he did things like trying seriously to discuss with them that bit in Acts about the early church sharing all things in common. They were really not up for that! (In this mid-1970s context, my dad was quite radical in trying to square a Co-op/Labour upbringing with the evangelicalism into which he had fallen, which was only just then turning from a vaguely countercultural centrism to the pronounced right-wing attitudes that now define it – and which shifted my parents’ politics: they cried when Callaghan lost in 1979 but have voted Conservative ever since, albeit with growing disillusionment over the last decade of unignorable Tory corruption and incompetence.)

So I grew up with no economic capital to speak of, and very little social or cultural capital. But my parents’ aspirationalism bought into the post-war promise of social mobility (I am old enough to have benefitted from those limited openings, which have in real terms been whittled down to nothing since the 1980s) and thus they insisted on the importance of education and of reading. However, the latter, amply supported by school and especially public libraries, took place in something of a vacuum: limited cultural capital meant I had little idea of what to read.

Which I only really began to realise in my mid-teens, thanks to Rob. An extremely middle class friend met through church stuff, he was a couple of years older than me, went to a grammar school and was the most flamboyantly camp person I’d ever met: he ‘simply adored Dickens’ and, he declared, flaunting a Penguin paperback of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), was ‘reading the Russians now’. How did he know about these things? They were simply part of the atmosphere in which he grew up, at home and in school. (He urged Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) on me, and something green-covered from Grove Press, but it only very slowly dawned on me that this was a kind of courtship: that he was using books – and cultural capital – to hit on me. Last I heard of him, he moved to South Africa at the turn of the 90s to become a croupier at – unforgivably – Sun City.)

In the absence of such social and institutional networks for inheriting the kinds of cultural capital Rob enjoyed, the only real alternative for me was autodidactism, with all its perils and pitfalls – and potentials for embarrassment: at some point in my mid-teens I asked Plymouth Central Library if they had a copy of ‘Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’ (1973) – I’d read, rather than heard, about it somewhere so only knew how to pronounce one of those five words. (It took a couple of decades before I could start to enjoy mispronouncing ‘archipelago’ as if it were a kind of sausage.)

Plymouth Central Library, the location of my chipolata embarrassment

Autodidactism took many forms:

Discovering Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) and trying with the aid of the library to work through its list of titles. A quick google of the contents page shows there there are still forty-odd of them I’ve not read. Andrea remains constantly appalled at me for never having read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), as now does my mate Dan since she blabbed to him this summer. But I did finally read Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1952) last year in Brazil in the old densely-packed A-format paperback that had travelled tens of thousands of miles in my luggage over the years as my emergency back-up should I be ever stranded in an airport or train station with nothing to read.
Watching The Great Philosophers (1987) on TV and reading Brian Magee’s book version and then finally finishing that copy of Betrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy I’d got bogged down in a couple of years earlier.
Randomly picking up second-hand Penguin classics (or the usually cheaper imported American paperbacks of the same titles).
Seeing a Vincent Price movie and setting out to read all of Poe.
Hearing Apocalypse Now was based on Heart of Darkness so starting to read Conrad.
Watching The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), reading Malcolm Bradbury’s book version and turning them into reading lists….

Lists. All the time lists. And following up those leads in libraries and second-hand bookstores. (New books were things you received as gifts.)

Just in case any of this makes me sound adorably (or agonisingly or absurdly) precocious (or dunderheaded), let me be clear: I had not exactly left childish things behind.

I still regularly re-read my full set of The Incredible Hulk Weekly and my stack of movie novelisations (though some passages in Arthur Byron Cover’s Flash Gordon (1980) were definitely not intended for the younger reader).

And although I stopped buying second-hand Doctor Who novelisations with number 68, Terrance Dicks’s An Unearthly Child (1981), I carried on rereading my until-then complete set. And reading the new ones until, I think, number 113, Terence Dudley’s Black Orchid (1986), even though that entailed humiliating returns to the kids’ section of the library I’d eagerly abandoned half a dozen years earlier (and even though I’d freakishly stumbled upon, read and had the veil of illusion torn away by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), the first proper academic book I’d encountered).

I was also, like every adolescent male I knew, although perhaps more assiduously, reading James Herbert and Richard Allen and Sven Hassel, and exercising an even less discerning penchant for Patrick Lee’s Six-Gun Samurai (1981–82) novels and Guy N. Smith (probably more for the knee-tremblers in alleys and doorways than the slime beasts and giant crabs). I’d given up on Agatha Christie after reading all the Marples I could find (I never liked Poirot) but was starting to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett by about 1983. I discovered Mick Norman and Mick Farren, as well as Michael Moorcock (except Elric, could never get into Elric) and grumpy oddball Peter Van Greenaway. Curiously, although my mate Stewart was a huge fan, I never got into Stephen King, and I still find his fiction utterly unengaging. But I did get totally into JRR Tolkien in 1980. And out again completely by 1984 or thereabouts, after many re-reads, even of the appendices and The Silmarillion (1977). I gave up on David Eddings and Raymond Feist by 1985, the year I also ditched Frank Herbert: I was sufficiently loyal to slog through Chapterhouse: Dune (1985) but had been bored since at least God Emperor of Dune (1981). But the overlapping and intertwined story of my autodidactic route through sf and fantasy – similarly thrilling-yet-full-of-pathos – is something for another day.

Such omnivorous reading – more accurately described, in my case at least, as flailing around – is I think, characteristic of the autodidact. (By chance this morning, I read Michael Moorcock’s 2011 memoir-essay ‘A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz’ and recognised a little something of my own childhood in his ‘I learned from reading and not knowing what was respectable literature and what was not. I read everything.’) But it also resembles the ability to access both high and low culture now often attributed to middle class privilege, so perhaps this is not a story of autodidactism and cultural capital after all, but of ‘How I Became A Class Traitor’.

My local library was located just across the park on the top floor of Pounds House

The strange thing is, the sense of being an autodidact has never gone away, even though I’ve been in formal education, as student or teacher, every year since the age of five. Apart, that is, from 1987–88, when I took a year off between A-levels and university (because I was so disgusted by what I witnessed during my Oxford interview, but that too is another story). For about 14 months, I toiled as a motor insurance claims handler for the Co-op Insurance Service and the Cornish Mutual Association. I was less than mediocre. I never got beyond processing windscreen claims, and every day I hated that my job mostly consisted of getting claimants to use language that implied their broken windscreen was made of toughened rather than laminated glass, which meant they were liable for the cost of the replacement’s upgrade in quality, even if there hadn’t actually been one (not that this was how my role was described to me). As careers go, it was clearly not for me.

And all these years later, I still don’t drive. Which would have probably undermined my prospects for advancement.

Around that time, Marshall Cavendish published the Great Writers partwork. It was an image-heavy magazine, with broad brush historical context and biographical commentary on that issue’s author(s), accompanied by a hardback edition of a novel or collection or other book-length work. The books came, with no apparent rhyme or reason, in red, navy blue, bright blue, black, brown or green covers. Each bore a vaguely illustrative image and ever so slightly embossed fancy gold writing. They were cheaply produced in Spain. I can’t remember whether it was published weekly for a year or fortnightly for two (either way, there seems to have been 54, rather than 52, issues). I purchased it – but did not read it – diligently.

The magazines and later the books were discarded years ago, during the many moves between rented accommodation familiar to any student and early career academic. But by chance this year I read two of the books included in the series for the first time – Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) – which started me wondering how many of the 54 volumes I’d actually read during the intervening 35 years.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is the complete list of The Great Writers (not in order of publication). As you will see, ‘greatness’ is largely a function of having been dead long enough for your work to be in the public domain (although that does not explain the Bates, Forster, Greene, Hemingway, Huxley, Maugham, Steinbeck, Waugh, Wells or Woolf titles).

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1794)
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (probably just The Man of Property (1906)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1900–1)
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, and Other Stories (1920)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s/1840s)
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
William Shakespeare, Comedies (1590s–1600s)
William Shakespeare, Tragedies (1590s–1600s)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Anthology of Romantic Poets (early 1800s)
Anthology of the War Poets (1914–8)
Anthology of Fear (twenty ghost stories from 1824–1914)

I had, it turned out, already read 15 of them…

Reading The Great Writers, part two

China Miéville, The Scar (London: Macmillan, 2002)

[A version of this review appeared in Foundation 86 (2002), 132–4]

The Scar returns to Perdido Street Station’s Bas Lag, but it is not a novel about return: it is about departure and loss. Part of that loss is the sense that the author, with his bold opening move of denying New Crobuzon, has learned all he can from Mervyn Peake; and consequently it wobbles, or seems to wobble, in the first 60 pages.

Peake has often been criticised for leaving Gormeghast in the final volume of his trilogy – a criticism with which Miéville does not necessarily agree but to which he has clearly paid attention. New Crobuzon, that brilliant invention and potential albatross, does not appear in The Scar. For the reader wanting a consolatory return, New Crobuzon has become like M. John Harrison’s Egnaro; indeed, an alternative title for the novel might have been ‘A Young Man’s Journey to New Crobuzon’. Miéville is too ambitious to serve up just more of the same, and that is why the novel wobbles at the start (or seems to: I am not exempt from wanting consolation), why the world seems a little thin to begin with, why the visit to Salkrikaltor City seems skimped, curtailed. The opening pages reek of impatience. Like the protagonist Bellis Coldwine, the author needs to depart, to move on, and through her he transforms his refusal to return to New Crobuzon into part of his thematic complex about a mature regard for the universe and the compassionate identification with others that it demands of ethico-political beings.

Which is not to say that those pages are not full of the restless invention, exemplary prose and visualisation we have so quickly come to expect from Miéville. And even when Bas Lag does not seem as dense and filled as it might, there is still the sense of a dense, full world lurking out of sight, of whole other volumes that can only be hinted at. On the very first page we read that ‘Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water’; and on the next page that ‘There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes’. But that is all we are told.

Forced to flee New Crobuzon, Bellis (a former lover of Perdido’s Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin) plans to settle for a while in the colony of Nova Esperium, but her journey is interrupted, diverted, hi-jacked. She finds herself caught up in the plans of the Lovers, the sado-masochistic and megalomaniac rulers of Armada, and in the conspiracies and counter-conspiracies of Silas Fennec (aka Simon Fench), a secret agent, and Uther Doul, the Lovers’ right-hand man. She witness scab-mettlers fight in the mortu crutt style and displays of stamp-fighting; she walks upon Machinery Beach; she eavesdrops upon the Lovers sexualised scarifications; she is courted by Doul and hears him play the Perhapsadian; she learns about oceanic megafauna, the Ghosthead Empire and possibility mining. And she is used, and punished, and used some more.

But that is a mere fraction. There is the magnitude of the Lovers’ hubristic designs for Armada; the resistance of the Brucolac, the ab-dead vampir ruler of Dry Fall; the grindylows’ pursuit of Fennec; the story of Crawfoot and the Conch Assassins; the Remaking of Tanner Sack; Bastard John, the dolphin; the education of Shekel and his romance with the Remade Angevine; the peculiar adventure of the cactacae Hedrigall; awkward friendships and alliances; there is a none-too-secret message hidden in the open, an extraordinarily bad pun (471) involving the Maguffin which drives one strand of the action, and an obscure joke about the author’s doctoral thesis (417–21), which he was completing alongside the novel. There are moments of great tenderness (Bellis teaching Shekel to read; Sack repairing Angevine’s boiler) and tremendous set-pieces (the attack of the she-anophelii; the Brucolac’s revolt and punishment; breaking into the Compass Factory; Hedrigall’s vision). And there is the anxiety of influence, manifested in numerous allusions to The Matrix (a character called Carrianne, Uther Doul’s sword-fighting in bullet-time) and to other nautical fantasies (the Aronnax Lab, the Pinchermarn, Tintinnabulum, Captain Princip Cecasan of the Morning Walker, a godwhale). There are various echoes of Bruce Sterling’s Involution Ocean and a game of pitch and toss borrowed from Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard.

And, most importantly, there is a sustained critique of colonialism. The anophelii, isolated and under military guard, are remorselessly exploited by the Samheri cactacae, their access to information tightly circumscribed and their intellectual labours expropriated without reward. There are questions about who are the real slaves and who are the real pirates. There is a clear-headed explication of the mercantile motivation of exploration, and a revelation that changes our perspective on the grindylow. There is Machinery Beach, a complex image of ruination and potential, of the colonised world as both dumping ground and source of commodities:

Some way off were shapes she had taken to be boulders, huge things the size of rooms, breking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.
There were smaller rocks too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate and complete pieces, gauges and glass work and compact steampower engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts and screws … thousands of minuscule ratchets and gearwheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. … The beach was an imitation, a found-sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine. … She imagined the seafloor around the bay – reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore. … This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant, she realized. This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets mouldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade, two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand piece-puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have? (274-5)

And most of all there is the Lovers’ plan for Armada, in which they convince and cajole many to believe, regardless of its tremendous environmental and human consequences, because it might just bring wealth and power.

The Scar represents a further maturation of Miéville as a writer. If the novel lacks some of the profligacy which made Perdido Street Station such a joy it is made up for by a more disciplined approach to narrative and tighter control over intertextual riffs. His emotional and affective range has expanded, without abandoning the eyeball-kicks.

The Scar is the best nautical fantasy since John Calvin Batchelor’s The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica and the most important one since B Traven’s The Death Ship.

It is arguably the first major novel of the anti-capitalist movement, and as I’ve said elsewhere, it makes Moby Dick look like a big fat book about whales.