'Quite an Accomplished Baker'

I found this item - which came to me via Frank Wilson and Dave Lull - strangely cheering. There's something about the image of Emily Dickinson in an apron working up a healthy glow as she gets to work on her cake mixture (no food processors then) while the oven heats up... I wonder which other great writers might have made good bakers - apart, of course, from Mr Kipling with his exceedingly good cakes. My cousin suggests Emily Bronte - 'given the right ingredients'. Charlotte too was probably a safe pair of hands in the kitchen. I doubt George Eliot could bake a cake...

Augustus: Depth of Field

Having read and raved about John Williams's Stoner and Butcher's Crossing - the latter of which has haunted me and grown in my imagination ever since I finished it - I couldn't resist the opportunity to read the third of his acknowledged novels (a fourth he more or less disowned), Augustus. This is a 'historical novel' in much the same way that Stoner is a 'campus novel' and Butcher's Crossing a 'western' - i.e. it is something greater, stranger and vastly more accomplished than the run of its genre. And it is, of course, quite unlike Stoner or Butcher's Crossing - to the point where you'd hardly know it was by the same author (an author one of whose gifts is to remain resolutely absent from his works).
Augustus tells the story of the life and reign of Octavius, the unpromising youth who became Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. A rich, complex picture of Octavius and his world is built up, mosaic-style, by Williams's deft use of (fictional) letters, memoranda, personal writings and official communications. Some of these - and this is the key to the depth of field that gives Augustus its special quality - are contemporaneous, while others look back over years, decades even. The writers range from unfamiliar (and invented) figures all the way to the great names of Augustan Rome, including Virgil, Ovid and Horace. Williams's gift for clear-eyed characterisation, for imaginatively entering into his creations, keeps a wide range of characters and their often conflicted motives fully alive and individuated across the stretch of a sweeping historical narrative. This is a tremendous achievement - I can't recall another historical novel with so many voices issuing from so many convincingly realised characters, great and small.
Octavius himself, by contrast, comes to life largely in the accounts of others - he is the observed of all observers. We share the initial bewilderment of those around him as they are forced to acknowledge an extraordinary, almost superhuman force of character in the withdrawn, apparently negligible youth who initially crosses their path. Eventually he is the hub around which the world revolves, a brilliantly intelligent manipulator, an expert thwarter of conspiracies, a man capable of the utmost ruthlessness if it is called for. The exalted position of Emperor and the power and responsibility that go with it seem to hollow him out as a man, and we learn more of him from his actions than from his own testimony - until, in one sustained and moving final passage that (all but) closes the book, the dying Augustus speaks at length in his own voice, looking back over his life and all it has demanded of him, and finding at last a kind of rest.
If the book has a flaw, it is (I think) that we get rather too much of Julia's account of her life - Julia, Augustus's beloved daughter whom he banished into exile for reasons of state. Her voice I found the least compelling and the least convincing in the book - as if Williams hadn't quite managed to inhabit her, to feel what it was like to be Julia. Maybe that's just a personal reaction on my part... Anyway it does little or nothing to detract from Augustus's stature as a historical novel of quite extraordinary skill, depth and imaginative power.

Disappointments

Just to alert my regulars - it seems the End of the World (an event delayed from May 21) will take place today, so I hope your affairs are in order. It's been fun...
Of course there's an outside chance it might not happen. Apocalypse fanciers will need no reminding that tomorrow, October 22, is the anniversary of the Great Disappointment, when in 1844 Jesus Christ rather discourteously missed an appointment with William Miller and his followers. Wikipedia tells the sorry tale here. Today, I suspect, will be at most the Mild Disappointment.

The Joy of Pylons

One of the incidental pleasures of hurtling through France on a TGV is the sight of all those fine pylons marching past. They are so various, so charming, so French, so unlike our own unvarying, sternly utilitarian pylons. The French style in the picture, with its suggestion of a feline or Flookish face sweetly snoozing, is a favourite, and it's often complemented by a much more masculine, broad-shouldered model, suggestive of a muscle-man holding weights in either hand. No such fun with our British pylons - but now, it seems, we're going to get some new designs. A competition has been under way, and the winning entry, a Danish design, is really rather elegant - an army of those marching across the landscape would not offend the eye. However, I don't like the look of the Totem design that is also under consideration - it smacks of the notorious perforated Olympic torch...

First-Person Bookers

On last night's BBC News, our old friend Will Gompertz - ever the dangerous outsider, a man living on the edge, playing by his own rules - reported from the black-tie Booker Prize dinner in his trademark open-to-the-chest shirt and jeans (let's hope he'd been thrown out and was standing in the street). He brought us the shock news (hem hem) that Julian Barnes had won, at the fourth attempt, with The Sense of an Ending, a work described by the chair of the judges, Dame Stella Rimington, as 'a beautifully written book that speaks to humankind in the 21st century'. Martin Amis was unavailable for comment... Our Will delivered his usual string of consensual banalities, and played us a dispiriting clip of Barnes reading from his masterwork - but Gompertz's report included one interesting tidbit: all six of this year's Booker finalists were written in the first person. Why is it that today's novelists are so helplessly attracted to the first-person mode? Is it that they daren't risk the distancing effect (however slight) of the third person? Do they believe it is more 'vivid'? Is it a publisher's fad? Or is it just that, for a writer of limited imaginative powers, the first person is just, well, easier?

Most Relaxing?

They say it's the 'most relaxing music ever' - which seems a large claim. Having heard some of it on the radio last night, I suspect they might be blurring the fine line between 'relaxing' and 'stupefyingly boring' (as in, for example, Enya - number 4 in the Top Ten at the end of that piece). The definition of 'relaxing' here is narrowly physiological, based on heart rate, brain activity (or inactivity), etc - and of course no account is taken of musical merit. Great music that could be classified as 'relaxing' is relaxing in a far more profound way, relaxing our grip on the things of this world and easing us into a weightless realm of fictive beauty, where nothing holds us but the music. Something, perhaps, like this...

Over There

I see I've turned up again in Dabbler Country, via the Piccadilly Line.