Ebenezer Good

It's not often I come across a novel that I can truly say is like no other I've ever read - but The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which I've just finished (it's a long read), is one such book. An old friend has been recommending it to me at intervals for years, but I had somehow never got round to it (it's not the easiest book to find) - then one day I was idly browsing in an Oxfam shop and there it was, in a paperback American edition (Moyer Bell, 1995). Naturally I snapped it up and, as soon as I started reading, I was gripped, enthralled. It is a wonderful book...
The Book of Ebenezer le Page was the only published work of its almost wilfully obscure author, G.B. Edwards. It was finally written, at a friend's urging, when the author was already in his late 60s, and it wasn't published until after his death. Told entirely in the first person, it is the fictional memoir of an elderly, shrewd, cranky, fiercely individual Guernseyman, looking back on his long life - lived entirely on Guernsey, but for one short excursion to Jersey. He seems to be in full flow when we join him, and he never lets up, relating a meandering saga of family quarrels, tragedies, bitter feuds that last for generations - all interwoven with moments of vivid happiness and, especially, with deep and enduring friendships. He is (like William Maxwell, oddly) especially good on the intense friendship - love indeed (of a non-sexual kind) - that can grow up between boys and men. A lot of the emotional life of the book is in the love between Ebenezer and his boyhood friend Jim, and the rather different love between Ebenezer and his strange, sweet-natured cousin Raymond, who has a highly original take on Christianity (Church and Chapel are big presences in this book, though Ebenezer has little time for either). Raymond trains and fails as a priest, and makes an unfortunate marriage... But I'm not going to start rehearsing the plot here - apart from anything else, there's so much of it. This is a big, compendious saga, incorporating in its decades-long span wars, Nazi occupation and the complete transformation - or ruin, in his view - of the island Ebenezer loves.
The magic of the book is in Ebenezer's unique, inimitable voice and the distinctive language that he uses, peppered with Guernsey French patois. The voice is so beguiling that when he's in full flow you don't want Ebenezer ever to stop, don't care how complicated and populous the story is getting, or what's to happen next... Unfortunately the voice is also so beguiling that, towards the end, as the action approaches the (fictional) present, the author himself falls in love with his creation, cannot resist softening and simplifying him, making good things happen to him and contriving an ending in which happiness is piled on happiness. The critic Guy Davenport wrote that 'I know of no description of happiness in modern literature equal to the one that ends this novel'. I fear I'm more inclined to agree with John Fowles (who provides an Introduction to the edition I read) that by the end, the story has lapsed into sentimentality. It is a great shame.
Davenport also describes The Book of Ebenezer LePage as 'a masterpiece' and I'd agree there; it is a masterpiece indeed - but a flawed one, thanks to its closing chapters.
Never mind. Here, to give a flavour of this extraordinary book and its unique voice, is a passage describing the death of Ebenezer's best friend Jim's beloved dog:
'Victor died. He wasn't all that old for a bull-dog and I have always thought he must have got himself hurt inside on his last gallivant. He lost interest and wouldn't move, but lay in his basket all day long and got fat and wheezy. The vet said there was nothing wrong with him: it was his breed and he would get over it; but he began to have shivering fits and had a hot nose. He wanted to drink a lot of water, but went off his feed. Jim's mother said she was sorry but she couldn't have him in the kitchen any longer because he smelt; so Jim put his basket in the stable and gave him plenty of straw. One Saturday afternoon we was all having tea in the kitchen when out comes Victor from the stable and trots across the yard. He was as lively on his bandy legs as when he was a pup, and grinning all over his ugly face. 'Victor's got better!' said Jim. In came Victor and Jim's mother patted him and Wilfred, who was there, said, 'Hullo, Victor!' though he didn't like him much, and I said, 'Well done! Good boy!' and at last he got round to Jim, jumping and licking and wagging his tail; and Jim was nearly in tears, he was so happy. Victor went quiet then and rolled his black eyes at the rest of us and trotted back across the yard to the stable. Jim couldn't wait to finish his tea but must get up from the table at once and make a mash of meat and potatoes to take to him. 'He'll eat this now,' he said, as he went out with it. He hadn't been gone two minutes when he came back out of the stable with Victor dead in his arms.'

This Is Getting Silly...

Since that solitary swift on Thursday, my swift count has been as follows: Friday 2, Saturday 4, Sunday 2 (so far). This is of course very cheering, but I don't recall ever seeing so many stragglers before. I wonder what is going on and when the last swift will be... Anyone else still spotting them?

Endless Summer

'The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable..'

Actually, today the sun is shining in London and the sky is blue. But yesterday was utterly grim - cold and grey, with rain siling down for much of the day. And yet, in the evening, as I headed homeward, staring glumly out of the train window - suddenly, somewhere around Mitcham common, there was another swift! One solitary bird, charging bravely through the gathering gloom... That's another four days added to my swift summer! Will it ever end?

Blog Thoughts

In the comments under my Dabbler piece on The Rings of Saturn, Jonathan Law suggests that it's a book that is really a 'frustrated blog'. I think he's right - it would have made a brilliant blog, illustrated with those grainy black-and-white pictures, and with links ramifying out in every direction. Looking back, there have been many literary writers who, in another age, might have made great bloggers - imagine the likes of Montaigne or Sir Thomas Browne or Lamb or Hazlitt let loose in the blogosphere; or, nearer our own time, Chesterton or Orwell - or the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose multiple identities and fragmented writings might be made for the age of the blog. Some writers' works now enjoy a posthumous existence as blogs - e.g. The Blog of Henry David Thoreau and The Diary of a Nobody in blog form - and some blogs can be seen as works (in progress) of literary art in themselves...
There was wild talk recently of the 'death of the blog' - that it was a form that had been superseded by newer, snappier means of communication. Well, it may be that the neophiliacs have moved on - they won't be missed, nor will those who really were born to tweet, not blog. Rather that dying, I think (or rather hope) there might be a long-term trend across the blogosphere towards a winnowing out of the dross - especially of the more combative, up-for-a-scrap stuff - leaving the higher-quality content intact. This may be a fond dream, and the whole blogging business might be an ephemeral phenomenon, a passing fad that will leave no legacy. The British Library, however, doesn't seem to think so, and is busy archiving some of the more worthwhile UK blogs for future generations. Well, I say worthwhile, but I note they've archived some curiously named stuff...

Riveted

Did anyone else see the documentary Surviving Hitler: A Love Story on BBC4 last night? The story of the love affair between a half-Jewish girl and a young soldier involved in the Valkyrie assassination plot, I found it completely riveting (and it takes a lot to rivet a mental gadabout like me). Indeed I'd say it was one of the most remarkable documentaries I've seen in a long time. Partly this was because the then teenager, Jutta Cords, was still alive to tell the amazing tale - and tell it calmly, engagingly and well - but also because so much of her family life and her time with the soldier, Helmuth, was preserved in photographs and informal cine footage. The delicate way this footage was edited into the story, so that it exactly matched the action and intensified the emotion was quite brilliant (great work by director John Keith Wasson), the gradual revelation of the story was perfectly paced, and the overall effect of the film was, as I say, quite riveting.
There is talk in the air of cutting back on BBC4's content, as part of the BBC's cost-cutting proposals. I can only hope this is a ruse designed to spark a mighty backlash and lead to a hasty reversal (as with BBC 6 Music). BBC4, after all, is most of the time the only BBC TV channel worth looking at.
(By the way, if you missed it, Surviving Hitler should be on the BBC iPlayer.)

Over There...

I see my 1p Book Review of Sebald is back on The Dabbler.

Old Lady

It's surprising what you see if you keep your eyes peeled. As I was making my way out of Victoria station this morning, part of the usual commuter throng ('I had not thought death had undone so many'), I looked up and saw a large dark moth flying - or rather blundering - around under the roof, just a few feet above the heads of the crowd. This would almost certainly be an Old Lady moth, a species that seems to like living more or less indoors and not to mind being endlessly flushed by human activity from wherever it happens to be roosting. I remember how, in my boyhood, Old Ladies used to haunt the grotto (a remnant of an over-ambitious 18th-century scheme of landscaping) in Carshalton Park. I believe they still do, but the grotto has been wire-fenced off, doubtless on health and safety grounds, so adventurous children can no longer scare themselves in its dank and mysterious depths. Ah the lost pleasure of crawling on your hands and knees in total darkness along a rubble-strewn brick tunnel, with a fine trickle of decaying mortar falling on your head. Kids today, they don't know what they're missing...