Three Bookshops

For such a small city, Wellington is well provided with second-hand bookshops, the three best of them being all within a short walk of each other. Each, as it happens, represents a different, very recognisable type. One is the kind of large, well stocked, well organised emporium that somehow mildly depresses the spirits; there is something about it - the layout, the scale, the lack of character? - that drains the pleasure from perhaps finding a book you want. The actual finding is, after all, only a part of the second-hand bookshop experience at its richest. And something much more like that is offered by the other two shops of the three. One has a relatively small stock, attractively displayed and clearly chosen with care. The atmosphere is relaxed and inviting, and you know as soon as you walk in that you're going to enjoy your visit and will very probably find something you wanted, or happen upon a new discovery. This is the type of bookshop exemplified by an establishment that I've often mentioned before - The Bookshop in Wirksworth, a small shop that I have yet to leave empty-handed.
 And then there is the third bookshop, which offers a perfect combination of chaos and order, quantity and selectivity, logic and eccentricity. It's one of those shops whose contents spill over onto stands and trestle tables outside - tables laden with so much interesting stuff that on my first visit, today, I didn't get far across the threshold. The very first volume I picked up outside was the Everyman Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici, Urne Buriall, etc.), which turned out to be one of many Everymans, including Hazlitt's Table Talk, Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, and even a volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Also outside were, to name a few, the Oxford Standard Authors Matthew Arnold, Richard Holmes's Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Aldington's Portrait of a Genius, But... (a biography of D.H. Lawrence, first edition) and a collection of Richard Ellmann's essays, A Long the Riverrun. All of these were going for a song.
 By the time I had finished my outdoor browsing, I could do no more than glance at what was inside, but it looked immensely promising and bountiful. As if to prove the point, one of the very first books to catch my eye was Butterflies of New Zealand, written and illustrated by W.B.R. Laidlaw (1970), a snip at $12NZ. Reader, I bought it - and I'll certainly be returning to that bookshop.

More for the Celestial Jam Session

The rock 'n' roll deaths are coming thick and fast just now. With much of the fansphere still reeling from the loss of David Bowie, news comes today of two more deaths: Glenn Frey, Eagles guitarist and co-founder, and Dale Griffin, drummer with Mott the Hoople. Bowie will overshadow both these deaths, though that of Dale Griffin will no doubt lead to plenty of replays of Mott the Hoople's version of Bowie's All the Young Dudes. For me, though, Mott must be remembered for one of the truly great anthemic rock 'n' roll songs - All the Way from Memphis. I think I saw Mott the Hoople at the Cambridge Corn Exchange around 1970, but I may well be wrong. Never mind - here is All the Way from Memphis set to a rather extraordinary video. Enjoy...

Groovy (and Wrong)

'She had started on the subject of progress. "We mustn't let ourselves be groovy, Canon Jocelyn," speaking to him as if he were deaf. 'We must have a scientific point of view."
 "Ah, yes," said Canon Jocelyn. He pronounced "Ah" as if it were "Myer", with an indescribable intonation of aloofness.
 "I mean, however much you object to it, we can't go back. We must be progressive. Eppur si muove."
 "Groovy", "scientific", "progressive", he winced at the words...'

This passage occurs in The Rector's Daughter by F.M. Mayor, published 1924 (which I am reading), and presents the word 'groovy' in a curious, to me hitherto unknown, light - as meaning, in fact, pretty much the opposite of what it came to mean in the Sixties: stuck in a groove, as against - well - groovy, baby.
 Another curiosity in The Rector's Daughter is a reference to 'such a wrong part of London as Kensington'. It is considered 'wrong' as against Hampstead, Chelsea, Bloomsbury, St John's Wood and (for heaven's sake) Hammersmith. Kensington has clearly come up in the world since the Twenties. I'm sure Ivy Compton Burnett - or indeed T.S. Eliot - didn't think they were living in a 'wrong' part of London. How times change...

Lakeside: Tender Ghosts

Back in Wellington after a (socially) busy few days in a lakeside resort on South Island, a small town lavishly furnished with motels of the kind through which Humbert Humbert and Lolita might have passed on their American wanderings.  We, however, were staying in a rented house with a garden planted with very English-looking lavender, Scabious (cultivars) and big white Asters. On the first sunny morning a Yellow Admiral was nectaring, among a multitude of bees, on the lavender. I had seen a couple of Yellow Admirals before, in Wellington, and they are rather lovely - not least because their beautiful 'cryptic' underwings closely resemble those of the English Red Admiral ('Nabokov's butterfly').
 Beyond the lavender was a down-sloping lawn carpeted with flowering white clover. At first it seemed there was no butterfly activity there, but, as I looked harder and got my eye in, I realised the whole lawn was alive with tiny blue butterflies - some smaller even than our native Small Blues (and,  like them, not very blue in colour). They were busily dashing from flower to flower, never flying more than a few inches from the ground, often sparring briefly in passing, occasionally pausing to bask,  before returning to those nectar-rich flowers. As far as I could make out, these little beauties were New Zealand Common Blues, though they might have had a few Southern Blues among them - and perhaps, I like to think, the odd Long-Tailed Blue (quite abundant in New Zealand).
 This lively lawn was a sight that might have cheered Nabokov - a domesticated version of his vision of the ultimate felicity, the 'ecstasy' of standing among nectaring butterflies on their native heath. And behind the ecstasy, 'something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal.'

Submission

Well, I have finished reading Michel Houellebecq's Submission, a novel that is, I think, finally defeated by the very cynicism and pessimism that propel it so effectively and enjoyably through its early and middle stages. The theme is, as all the world knows (this book had a sensational birth, published on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo attack), the Islamisation of France. This comes about following a general election in 2022, won by a charismatic, cosmopolitan, eminently electable Muslim (with no Islamist or antisemitic baggage) at the head of an alliance including the Socialists and the rump of the old Republican right. This alliance, represented as the only hope of securing the survival of the Republic (and of the EU) in the face of the threat from first-round winners the National Front, wins a landslide victory - and, in these particular circumstances, with this particular leader, that seems an all too believable outcome.
 However, Submission is not a political novel in anything like a standard sense; it is a Houellebecq novel, in which the politics takes place off-stage while the narrator - the familiar authorial stand-in, solitary, decrepit, sex-mad, cynical, terminally disenchanted, addicted to booze and cigarettes (and, this time, something of a gourmand) - pursues his preoccupations, casually thinking the unthinkable as he goes along, and saying the unsayable with unblinking frankness. Which is very bracing, quite unlike any other living writer I can think of, and often startlingly funny - Houellebecq is nothing if not a satirist, and he cuts through our delusions about ourselves and our society like a knife through the softest butter.
 The narrator, François, is an academic with a decent university teaching post, a respected expert on J.K. Huysmans (best known to English readers as the author of A Rebours - Against the Grain, Against Nature), a writer with whom he is still obsessed, this fixation providing one of the strands of the novel. François's personal life is, needless to say, a shambles: the nearest thing he has to a genuine relationship with a woman - or anyone - is about to collapse, largely from his inanition, and he is soon availing himself of other sexual possibilities in an effort to revive his flagging libido. No one can make sex quite so profoundly unappetising as Houellebecq...
 Meanwhile, François keeps finding himself thrown into contact with various mysterious figures - all men, of course (Houellebecq can't really write women, one of his major weaknesses) - who have the inside story of what is going on in France and beyond, and who are happy to spell it out. A remarkably large part of Submission is in the form of exposition by these enigmatic insiders, either in direct conversation or through their writings. They present a chilling picture of western civilisation in suicide mode, willingly being destroyed by the very freedoms it cherishes, succumbing to its own internal contradictions and to the brute facts of demographics: once a population ceases to replace itself it will inevitably be swallowed up by a more vigorous one - and in a democracy that means the end of the old order. Islam, by all these accounts, will inevitably take over, in France and in much of western Europe.
 And so it comes to pass in France in 2022 - and the remarkable thing is (in Houellebecq's version of events) how little difference it makes, and how easy the members of the various power elites find it to accommodate to the new realities, make the necessary adjustments, go through the required formalities. This is all too plausible, but Houellebecq doesn't have anything like the kind of panoptic imagination to grasp the wider impact of Islamisation, especially on its principal victims - women, who are largely to be removed from the workplace and set to work raising families in polygamous marriages. This is merely stated as so much information, and doesn't unduly bother our narrator - well it wouldn't, would it? He, for his part, finds that the new order presents him with the opportunity to revive not only his stalled career but his flagging sex life. He even, after a half-hearted flirtation with Huysmans' Catholic spirituality, proves strangely unresistant to the fundamentals of Islam - especially the pleasing prospect of polygamy and sex with submissive underage girls. What's a clapped-out, sex-crazed old cynic to do?
 This is all very well, and quite in keeping with what we know of our deplorable narrator, but it does mean that the novel peters out, rather than reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Cynicism, that universal solvent, finally dissolves even itself. The latter stages of Submission are thin and lifeless compared to what came before. As a novel it must, I suppose, be counted a failure, but as an examination of what his happening in Europe now, as a ventilation of issues that are barely regarded as legitimate but may well prove crucial, it is a typically brave and fiercely stimulating piece of work. Prophetic too?  Well, all prophecy is ultimately a matter of taking a hard, clear-eyed look at the present, and that Houellebecq - untainted by the slightest whiff of political (or emotional) correctness - does like no one else currently writing fiction. Events since the publication of Submission - events in Germany and Belgium as well as France - certainly suggest that he wasn't barking up entirely the wrong tree. For just one example, the German media's failure to report the events in Cologne on New Year's Eve until the story began to come out via social networks - this is exactly the scenario Houellebecq presents in Submission, where a kind of sporadic low-level civil war is being fought in France, quite unreported by the official media. Happy new year!

Copper

Much of the land around Wellington harbour is reclaimed, some of it thrown up from the sea in the great earthquake of 1855 (our taxi driver yesterday had a great-great-grandfather who was Inspector of Police in Wellington at the time of that one). A small part of the reclaimed land, near Te Papa, has been turned into a pleasant natural park, planted with native shrubs and bushes and saltmarsh plants. There, as I discovered yesterday, lives a thriving little colony of the Common Copper (Pepe Para Riki in my new second language), happily feeding on its favourite Wire Vine (Pohuehue). It's a pretty little thing, rather like our own Duke of Burgundy, but paler and with the definite look of a Copper, if not the burnished colouring of our beautiful Small Copper. The Common Copper - as abundant as its name suggests - has a clever way of adapting its life cycle to cope with the unpredictability of the New Zealand weather, some of each brood of larvae going into a quiescent phase for several months while the rest proceed to maturity. It's one of those busy, happy-seeming butterflies that tend to bustle about in one place rather that whizzing past one's head at speed, so it's a joy to watch. And this morning I rescued one from a spiderweb, carefully pulling the strands of silk off until it was able to clean itself and take off, flying happily back into the Wire Vine bush. My conservation good deed of the day.

Monarchical

Being out here in the Antipodes, I didn't see yesterday/today's Google doodle commemorating the discovery of the Mountain of Butterflies, the overwintering place of America's Monarchs - one of the most dramatic stories in the history of lepidoptery (and surprisingly recent). Happily, the indefatigable Dave Lull sent it to me - and, equally happily, I saw a real live Monarch flying in Central Park...