Reading Notes: Anna Karenina

 

Now that I’m a few weeks clear of finishing Anna Karenina, it’s time to sit down and work out what I thought about it. It’s had time to percolate in the recesses of my brain. Why am I compelled to set my ideas onto digital paper? I certainly don’t expect many people to be interested in what I have to say on the matter, but it’s good to flex the old lit-crit muscles every now and then so that they don’t atrophy, and just like apparently dozens of better writers, I have to write to work out what I think about something. Besides, Anna Karenina is one of The Great Novels. The sort that People-Who-Lie-About-Reading lie about reading, so if I’m going to go through the trouble of actually wading through 800-odd densely populated pages of the thing, I want to make sure I have opinions of the thing.

I am being unfair to Tolstoy in implying that the novel is a slog. Despite its stature as a literary monument (door-stop length, ‘one of the most famous opening lines in literature,’ etc. etc.), it’s a surprisingly easy read. Anna Karenina is a novelist’s novel: the sort of book that other writers point to to demonstrate what can be done, but it wears its ideas lightly. In spite of its length, it never feels aimless or meandering, and while it has a cast of characters which would make Dickens feel crowded (and, thanks to Russian naming conventions, all of them with at least three different monikers to remember—thank goodness for my edition’s dramatis personae at the front!), each one of them feels distinctly drawn and psychologically ‘rounded’, and Tolstoy has absolute empathy for all of them.

This empathy is what carries Anna Karenina beyond being a ‘Fallen Woman’ novel, which seems to be what Tolstoy originally set out to write. True we have a woman who betrays her husband and is ultimately punished for it; we have a contrasting ‘good’ woman—Kitty—who initially falls for the same love interest (compare Eustasia and Thomasin in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native: another late 19^th century entry in the ‘Fallen Woman’ genre where the writer’s empathy and nuance prevents a simple moralistic reading). However, Tolstoy allows Anna to follow through on her intentions, not just as a physical fling—which seems permissible in some corners of the novel’s elite Russian capital-S Society provided that the parties are discreet—but in leaving her husband and child to live with the rakish cavalry officer, Count Vronsky[1].

By following their relationship across a long period of time and several locations, Tolstoy shows us the precariousness of Anna’s new situation. While Vronsky has to resign his commission, ending a promising military career, he is free to try on new personas in each place that the couple find themselves: a bohemian painter in their rented Italian villa, a benevolent lord of the manor in his country estate, and he can almost effortlessly pick up his old socialite hat when they return to city life. In each case Anna is entirely dependent on him. In Italy as ‘artist’s muse’ and on Vronsky’s estate as a sort of unofficial lady of the manor. Here she is at her happiest, involving herself almost as an equal partner in Vronsky’s project to build a new hospital, but in both locations there is a shadow: Anna knows her position can only last as long as Vronsky’s affection. She becomes jealous of his attention, creating tension between the two. In the city her position is worse: excluded from polite society her world shrinks down to a hotel suite and a small cadre of servants.

When Anna first leaves her husband, she views it as an act of freedom. Other women comment on her liberation or even fantasise about their own. But her liberation mirrors and even surpasses her marriage bonds. In tying herself to Vronsky, Anna has neither the legal and financial protections that a marriage would offer or the social status that a ‘good match’ provides. Worse, she now finds herself at the mercy of two men: Vronsky, who she fears she may lose, and the husband she has humiliated: the only person who can grant her the divorce that would allow her to shore-up her new relationship.

I’ll turn now to Kitty’s story. It begins with a ball and a choice between suitors (the aforementioned Count Vronsky, and Levin: too awkward and bookish to be a society-figure, too rugged and too invested in his agricultural labours to be a respected public intellectual). Kitty turns down Levin’s proposal in anticipation of one from Levin. When that doesn’t transpire, she plummets into a depression, tries on a new persona as a pious healer who gives all her attention to others, and ultimately finds balance and fulfilment in marriage to Levin (the ‘right’ suitor who she should have married from the start). All very conventional. But just as he does with Anna and Vronsky, Tolstoy carries the story beyond where other writers might have finished it. We see the difficulties of early marriage. The tentative steps in which we learn to live with someone—the humdrum practicalities which go beyond romance. The two get along fine left to their own devices, but when surrounded by other, they lose equilibrium and a beset by jealousies and misunderstandings. Just as with Anna and Vronsky, there is a dichotomy between the country/private and the city/public realms, but here it is the male partner who is suffers in the city. Levin’s attentions are pulled outwards in the city and when trying to do his duty in regional politics he is left confused and feeling inadequate. In both cases he loses something of himself.

Unlike their counterparts, Levin and Kitty are given a happy ending. They settle in the country, surrounded by friends. Levin has a spiritual awakening which puts him more in line with Kitty’s sincere religiosity, but even this is undercut: after a page or two of mentally embracing the Orthodox Church, Levin’s usual intellectualism cuts in. He may now feel there is more to this world than can be empirically measured and tested by science, but why should he see the church as the one true way of looking at things just because he happens, by accident of birth, to have been raised under its confessional tradition.

This theme—the difficult of understanding and being understood—runs throughout the novel. Yes, on one level it can be read as both a socially progressive critique of late-19^th century Russian marriage laws, and as a socially conservative demonstration of why it is better to be married than not, but the perils of communication runs through all of the relationships on display. Tolstoy deftly uses free focalisation to show the gap between the idea that one character meant to express, and how it is received by others. Romantic partners fear losing the interest of their paramour and cannot reassure one another. Levin feels distant with both of his brothers. Telegrams go astray, are not received in time. We are left with the uneasy sense that, between the inadequacy of language and our own fear of exposure, we can never truly be know, even by those who are closest to us. At least Kitty and Levin give hope that, through love and respect, we can transcend that gap, even if we can never really bridge it.

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[1] As an aside, Tolstoy is surprisingly frank about sex. I don’t mean to suggest that he was writing an early, Eastern European Bridgerton, or even that there are ‘bedroom scenes’ at all, but just in acknowledging that his protagonist has been physically intimate with Vronsky, and that it is something she has enjoyed, Tolstoy is in a different milieu to his British contemporaries. He is open about other bodily functions too: his depiction of the lurid, sickly atmosphere of Levin’s brother’s death-bed, and at the opposite end of the scale, Kitty’s labour both stand out. The latter is particularly remarkable for the empathy and understanding he is able to show as a male writer.

Reading Notes: 'Coming up for Air' by Olly Todd

 

A poetry collection by a former professional skateboarder and published by one of my favourite indie publishers. Rarely do niche interests allign so neatly.

Todd's other career has been as a luxury travel writer, and he draws on both sets of experience here, with one foot in the nowhere spaces and repurposed urban environments where skateboarding grows like a weed through the concrete and one foot in the world of high-end hotels. Both careers are nomadic, and there is also an eye cast homeward, to the post-industrial north of England where Todd grew up, and London and the South East where he lives and works.

At times he is specific, focussed on the here and now. Others he takes a panoramic view, sweeping across landscapes or even tipping into a kalidoscope with one place blurring into another. He is aware too of location as a palimpsest: its identity written and rewritten.

In interview, Todd speaks about an initial reluctance to write about skating in his poetry. I understand the reticence: on the surface they seem to belong in very different worlds. However, both disciplines involve looking at the world sideways and seeing possibility. And poetry benefits when it's voices speak from a wide range of experiences, particularly when they have their own resevoir of language and imagery to draw on. Artistic concerns aside, this book came to my attention not through browsing the library, or in the review pages of a literary magazine, but through a targeted Facebook ad from an online skateshop. If Todd had not decided to cross the streams in this way, I would not have found him. Perhaps his decision will bring more readers to ride through the halls of poetry when the grown-ups aren't looking.

Dad on wheels

 

I’ve been doing something foolish. Last summer, at the age of thirty-five, I started skateboarding again. It’s just so I can keep up with Freya on her scooter in the park, I said at the start. I don’t need to do tricks: this one will just be easier to pick up and carry around than the longboard, I told myself as I ordered new trucks for the 7.75” Habitat deck I bought from Ideal when I was 16 years old, back when it was on Corporation Street.

But as soon as my feet were on the griptape, I knew that wouldn’t be true. Now I’m sneaking out to the skatepark at night when all of the grown-up responsibilities have been put to bed. As I drive around town, I fantasise about how, one day, I’ll be able to ollie down that stairset or do something with that ledge. I’m turning up to work bruised and limping like I’ve been at fight-club and was matched against the floor. And I’m having a great time.

What’s more, I’m better now than I ever was. Still not good, but I can consistently get the board a foot into the air, and I’ve landed a couple of pop-shuvs from standing. It’s baby steps, but I’m making progress, and I’ve still got years ahead of me. As a teenager the challenge was part of the fun, but skating was mostly a social thing. Sometimes we were working on tricks, trying to one-up each other, but sometimes were lying face down on the board racing down a big hill, and a lot of the time, if I’m honest, we were sitting around in car parks
eating snacks and talking shit. And that’s fine. We were never good enough or focused enough to become professional athletes, and messing around trying to work out who you are and how that relates to everybody else is what teenagers are supposed to do. Now I usually skate alone, the challenge is all that’s left. And between work and family I don’t have those never-ending summer afternoons to fill. Tonight I might have a couple of hours, but I’ve got work tomorrow, so I need to get a reasonable amount of sleep. On a Saturday, I can take Freya out to the park early in the morning, but she might only want to ride her scooter* up and down the ramps for half an hour, and then she’ll want to go on the play area. It might be two weeks before the next time I get to go out: my time on the board is made precious by its scarcity, and my sessions are more focused as a result.

So far, this probably sounds like a midlife crisis, but I’m happy with where I am in my life: I like my job, and it feels purposeful. I love my family, and being a dad is the most fun thing. But it does have something in common with mid-life crises, and with those summers spent messing about on skateboards with my mates twenty-years ago: it’s partly about working out who I am at this point in my life. I went into parenthood during Covid, but I’m sure this experience is the same for new parents in more normal circumstances: a baby arrives and their needs are all consuming. Your hobbies and interests—the ways you define yourself—start  to fall away: the novel I’d been working on was shelved, I was reading less, cycling less, going out less. But then at some point you come out the other side and start to have more time again. And you realise that you contain multitudes. I am not just the triumvirate of dad, partner, worker. I am those things and I am skateboarder, reader, baker, history fan, poet, watcher of films, listener to punk and indie and trad-folk and prog rock and all sorts of other things. And those aspects all interact with each other: if not for Freya, I wouldn’t have picked up a skateboard again; if not for the convenience of having sandwiches for lunch at work, I wouldn’t have started baking (if I’m going to eat sandwiches every day of my life, they might as well be nice ones). Right now, I’m writing about skateboarding so that one interest can help guide me back into another. There will probably be other skateboarding related things here, there might be thoughts on books and films and music. Thoughts on politics and culture. The point is to flex these muscles again and build a habit so that soon, on top of blog posts (or whatever this turns out to be) there will also be new poems, new chapters of my novel, when I’m ready, new things in print. I just need to stop wasting time at the top of the ramp, and drop in.

 

*update: I've been sitting on the first draft of this piece for a few months: since then, Freya has had a skateboard for her birthday (I didn’t push; she asked), and while Dad’s skate-school is different from a session focused on my own progress, sharing something you love with your child is another great thing about being a parent.

 

Glossary for the uninitiated:

Trucks – the metal hangers that allow you to steer a skateboard, and where the wheels are fixed.

Deck – the wooden surface that you stand on when skating. Usually sloped on one or both ends to allow for tricks. Generally has a design on the underside.

Ideal – a much loved Birmingham skateshop. It used to be located by the law-courts, now they’re down in Digbeth. On top of supplying generations of Brummie skaters, they’ve been organizing competitions, repairing the ramp at fastlands (the roundabout by the old-fire station) and generally being a hub of the community since the 90s. Support your local skateshop.

Griptape – probably self-explanatory. The black, sandpaper-like material on the top of your deck that gives some amount of grip when you are plummeting down a vertical ramp on a plank of wood. Tends to tear shoes into shreds so that you can identify serious skateboarders by the ruined state of their footwear.

At this point, you may have noticed that quality skateboards are bought piecemeal with different components coming from different specialist manufacturers. Like guitarists, cyclists, runners or almost any other niche interest groups, the skateboarding community can be a bit of a cargo-cult, obsessing over deck width, wheel softness, the exact curvature of the board etc etc etc.

Ollie – a jump. But it’s harder than that: you have to snap the back of the board down with your back foot so that it flicks into the air and get out of the board’s way by leaping upwards at the same time. Skateboarding is applied physics.

Stairset – Simple enough: a set of stairs. Skaters usually classify them by how many steps there are (and thus how difficult they are to trick down). A two-set is probably almost within my ability range, if I can go fast and commit. A nine-set is best left to fast-healing teenagers who have not yet developed a sense of their own mortality.

Pop-shuvs – short for pop-shuvits. Pop the board like you’re doing an ollie, and at the same time flick it around so that it rotates on the horizontal plane. The nose ends up where the tail was and the tail ends up where the nose was. This is considered one of the simpler flip-tricks. Technically I lied. Sometimes I pop, but mostly I just shuv-it.

Taking a five-year-old to Ozzy’s funeral cortege (and some thoughts of pop-cultural capital).

The trains weren’t running, so we took the bus to town, alighting at the back of the old Argos building on the Priory Queensway, where the bridge crosses Dale End and overlooks HMV vaults (where Toys R Us used to be) and the space previously occupied by the O2 Academy. Our root took us Hobgoblin music and the Old Square, where Tony Hancock glowers from under his Trilby, through the Victorian Arcade where the refugees from the much-mourned Oasis Market have gathered, and along the side of Pigeon Park. We arrived at around 12:15, forty-five minutes before the cortege was due to make its way down Broadstreet. People lined Centenary Way, standing on the flower beds to look over the sides of the bridge. A tram parked up outside The Exchange had been given a new name to mark the occasion, and fans paused to take a picture next to it. We joined the crowd—perhaps a dozen ranks deep—before the barriers at the junction where Broad Street meets Centenary Square. As the appointed time approached, the crowd lining the route swelled until it numbered in the tens of thousands. Others stood in the rooftop gardens above the library to get a view of proceedings, and people working in the office blocks took to the balconies to see the local hero on his way.

Forty-five minutes is a long wait for a five-year-old, but once she’d had a sandwich and was settled on my shoulders where she could see things, Freya stopped telling us she was bored. We had explained, in simple terms, who Ozzy Osborne—the man up on the screen—was, that he came from Birmingham, that he and his band had invented Heavy Metal (‘the shouty music that mommy likes’) which made a lot of people happy, and that he had died. We told her that all these people were there to say goodbye. We played a little bit of eye-spy and ‘what animal am I?’ while we waited. Freya looked around at the crowds and asked what happened to the gold men (Boulton, Watt and Murdoch. ‘They’re statues, Freya: they were important people for Birmingham too. Birmingham used to make lots of different things, and they were inventors’), occasionally asked questions about why Ozzy died and ‘what he was doing’ (this latter inspired, as far as I can tell, by the idea that if we were waiting this long he must be doing something, rather than any curiosity about the afterlife).

When the procession came into view, she understood that something was happening, and asked for my phone so she could take pictures (the one above being the best one). For me, at ground level, proceedings were passed on as rumours through the crowd, glanced between the backs of people’s heads or mediated through strangers’ phone screens. The motorcade of police bikes, the tops of the black limousines—as they came into view, the crowd’s football chants were replaced with a respectful applause—and tailing behind, the Villa-kit clad Bostin’ Brass Band, playing an oddly joyful New Orleans Jazz rendition of ‘Crazy Train’. I’m not really a metal head, but I’ve been metal-adjacent since my mid-teens and as a proud Brummie I’m glad I able to mark the passing of someone who had such an impact on music and on the cultural life of this city. As the gathered masses started to dissipate, we made our way to the library, feeling sorrow but also connection to our community. I’m not sure how much of this Freya understood, but it’s something she will be able to look back on and say, ‘I was there’.

***

There’s a concept in education called ‘Cultural Capital’. It posits that when we’re choosing what texts to teach, what composers or artists to study, we are building children’s stock of ‘cultural capital’; ensuring that everyone who passes through our school system has some knowledge and awareness of the artwork that we, as a culture, have decided is important. Usually when we talk about it, it leans towards ‘high culture’, we’re talking Shakespeare and Dickens, Van Goch or Beethoven. Critics of this idea say it is elitist, and of course there is an important debate about ensuring that the canon of works that we teach in schools includes voices that are not exclusively straight, male and Western European, but if we agree that there is such a thing as an important piece of art, then it is right that all our children should have some way to access it: we are saying ‘this does not belong to the rich and powerful, or to those who have studied/intend to study literature or music or art at University[1], it belongs to all of us as part of our heritage as human beings.’ It allows them to engage more fully when those things are referenced in public debate or in other artworks, or when it speaks to some circumstance in their own lives.

This does not negate the importance of all the cultural knowledge that a child will pick up from outside of school. The things that tie them into their communities, whether these be religious, civic, traditional[2], pop-cultural and even sub-cultural.

Thinking about the varied cultural experiences of the children I work with has made me quite aware of the things we share with Freya and how that will shape her as she grows up. We've supplemented the canon of Disney Princesses with Studio Ghibli and Matilda. She recognises Darth Vader (although when she asked to watch Star Wars, she got bored before the Death Star Trench Run) and can name at least a dozen Pokémon. She lists Rammstein and The White Stripes among her favourite bands and we came up with a dance to 'Cherry Bomb' by the Runaways which involves throwing her up in air a lot. She's been wassailing and apparently loves watching the Morris dancers at Warwick Folk Festival. I've been teaching her skatepark etiquette and which one of the mini-figures that came with my Lego Yellow Submarine is John, Paul, George or Ringo; Vicky has taught her to fly a kite and how to catch crickets in the long grass. By nature, some of these things will be ephemeral (Freya is now one of perhaps a thousand people globally who are aware of the mid-2000s Welsh indie act The Hot Puppies) some will have staying power within a particular niche interest group (Freya has commandeered a set of pink polyhedral dice from my tabletop-RPG stuff. She can identify a D20, and one day I will teach her to play Dungeons and Dragons), and some things have a big enough cultural impact that they cut close to that high cultural-capital (like when my dad sat me and brother down to watch The Godfather).

Of course some of the things we pick up in this way, we jettison or reject when we are teenagers and we are trying to work out who we are outside of the context of our families, but some of it will stay with us, and some we will return to later with a sense of nostalgia. And it all still helps to form our value our sense of self and our connection to the world around us. I’m not sure how many of the people who pass by that Tony Hancock statue in Old Square every day know who he is, but when I pass by, I am reminded not just of his unmistakably Brummie humour, but of listening to tapes of Hancock’s Half Hour with my granddad when he drove us to caravan holidays in Barmouth or Paignton.

I don’t really have a conclusion or an argument to make beyond this: share the stuff that matters to you with your children. Human culture is rich are multi-faceted and offers myriad ways to connect with each other.

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[1] I’m deliberately separating these categories: most people who have studied at university (including myself and all of the hypothetical teachers referred to in this paragraph) are neither rich or powerful.

[2] It took me ages to choose this word, and I’m still not sure it’s right one, but it’s better than the alternatives: Ethnic sound far-right and icky when talking about white people, and patronisingly othering when talking about people of colour; national puts too much emphasis on political boundaries; I like the word ‘folk’ but in this context it has a bit of an unfortunate blood-and soil feel too it, and can’t be applied to other cultural groups without dismissing the idea that those groups and places have their own ‘high’ cultures too. Basically, I want Freya to feel connected to her heritage without thinking that makes her better than anyone from a different heritage, and understand that these things can zoom-in and out, and can mix. I also want her to be able to experience things from other cultures, and Birmingham is a great place for that.

A review of Kate Fox's 'Watching the English' and some additional thoughts on Englishness

Maybe it’s the world cup, maybe it’s Brexit, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Englishness recently. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how those of us on the political left might reclaim Englishness from the right. At this point you might be wondering what good a sense of national identity is to a liberal, internationalist remoaner. In ignoring the problem of Englishness for so long, we have excluded those for whom a sense of Englishness is important while also allowing the right to entirely control the narrative of what Englishness means. And while an excess of patriotic pride can lead to a whole host of problems, there is nothing inherently wrong with feeling a sense of belonging to a place, a people or a history, so long as we do not start to believe that this makes us better than those who do not share these things. I picked up Kate Fox’s Watching the English partly because there were no relevant George Orwell books in the library at work, but it turned out to be a great place to begin my investigation. Fox is a social anthropologist, and in this book she sets out to uncover the hidden rules which define English culture. This analytical attempt to define Englishness as it is, rather than as any nostalgic or political viewpoint would like it to be, is a necessary starting point in imagining what a progressive, forward looking Englishness could become.

Fox is an entertaining guide, pitching her writing towards what she claims ‘used to be called the educated layman’. Her writing is peppered with personal anecdotes, amusing observations and an undercurrent of the sort of humour which she sees as our ‘default mode’. There is a touch of Douglas Adams’ biscuit story to her account of pushing into queues or bumping into strangers for research purposes. Balancing her light-hearted prose, Fox structures the book like a serious academic investigation, defining key anthropological ideas in her introduction before systematically applying the ‘participant-observer’ methodology to different aspects of English society and identifying patterns and themes along the way.

As might be expected of the co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre, this investigation, however lightly written, is underpinned by thorough research, and the depth of Fox’s knowledge is evident throughout, although she rarely includes statistics (which would seem dry and out-of-place in a work of pop-anthropology). However, while Fox makes occasional references to ‘cross-cultural studies’, and is keen to point out that some of the traits she identifies are not uniquely English, I did feel in places that the book lacked enough specific references to other cultures to truly clarify what makes English culture different. A dog is not just defined by the fact that is a four-legged domestic animal, but also by the ways in which it differs from a cat or a horse, and in the same way it would have been nice to have some examples of how English attitudes differ from the attitudes of the Germans, the Vietnamese or our neighbours the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish. We are told in the introduction that, although a certain amount of overlap is to be expected, Fox is interested in Englishness rather than Britishness, but she never follows this up by suggesting how these cultures differ.

I particularly wonder about the pervasiveness of Fox’s core features of Englishness – what she calls our ‘social dis-ease’ – in other parts of our islands. For Fox, this social dis-ease is central to English identity, and she sees it as the key to two seemingly irreconcilable sides to our culture: our reputation for polite reserve and our notoriety as violent, drunken yobs. While I don’t see myself in the latter stereotype, I definitely felt a pang of recognition in many of the more ‘awkward’ behaviours – the potential for embarrassment, the negative politeness, the desire not to make a scene, the awkwardness of greetings and farewells. Turns out I’m not socially-awkward, just English. I do wonder whether this feeling might be more universal than Fox suggests though, in the same way that everyone on the internet self-identified as introverts a few years ago. Perhaps everyone has this sense of ‘social dis-ease’ and some cultures and individuals are just better at hiding it than others.

As you might expect from a book on English culture, social class features heavily. Fox chooses to include sections on class in every chapter, rather than devote a chapter to class in its own right, as she theorises that class norms and an awareness of social class pervades all aspects of our society. Fox is clear that she is making descriptive, analytical judgements on the distinctions between classes rather than prescriptive value judgements, but in parts of the book where she is not addressing social class directly some of her assumptions seem to be unconsciously based on middle class attitudes and norms. She also identifies the usage of ‘dinner’ or ‘tea’ to describe the evening meal as a class indicator, while I had always understand it to be a north/south geographic divide (and my tendency to switch between them as a midlands quirk). I was willing to defer to her expert opinion on the matter (and reassess my uncertainty as a symptom of my mixed class-background), but a recent YouGov survey seems to support my initial instinct. Perhaps English class consciousness is so deeply rooted that even when she is attempting to play the part of the detached observer, Fox cannot quite escape her own biases. I must also confess to these biases: while reading, I found myself unable to avoid measuring her descriptors against my own behaviour and being secretly pleased that I am more likely to say ‘sorry’ than ‘pardon’ if I mishear somebody, unwittingly providing evidence for Fox’s portrayal of the lower, less established middle class[1] unease with their status – their tendency to want to look ‘higher’ than they are. According to Fox, this tendency is more-or-less absent from the working classes and the upper-middle to upper classes, and most prominent among the lower-middles and (to a lesser extent) the middle-middles, who are both keen to distance themselves definitively from the class below. When introducing us to the idea that hidden ideological systems govern our thoughts, one of the lecturers on my degree course emphasised that, once we step outside of these ideologies and recognise them as constructs, we can never truly step back in. Apparently English class consciousness is so strong that attempting to dissect it only serves to make it stronger.

Focussing on a universal grammar of English culture, Fox does not really address English politics, and while it was interesting to see her lay out a grammar of Englishness, the book has little to say on how Englishness can be reclaimed from the nationalists. In fact, English nationalism is not mentioned at all and while Fox is happy to address a number of anti-social behaviours, the only reference to racism is in the context of how, in the ‘orderly disorder’ of Fresher’s Week or New Year’s Eve, ‘telling bawdy jokes is fine, but racist ones are inappropriate.’ It is tempting to imagine that overt racism and nationalism have become more prevalent since the book was published in 2004, but where I grew up not only were openly racist jokes fairly common, but so were far-right political candidates and pro-Combat 18 graffiti. Perhaps a playful examination of a culture is not the right place to examine truly serious socio-political issues. Neither does Fox really address the plague of nostalgia. While she identifies that, from washing machines to restaurants to politicians, we generally don’t expect things to be very good or work particularly well, she does not comment on the related fact that many of us believe things were better in the past. Depending on your political bent, that past might be the height of British Imperialism, or it might be the post-war Labour Government with its radical social policies. It might be the Thatcher years or the cultural explosion of the Beatles and the Stones. For many of us, perhaps perversely, Britain’s golden age comes in WW2, with all of us coming together through food shortages and bombs to show the Nazis what for. One thing is certain, the country is going to the dogs. The politics/music/people of tomorrow are bound to be worse than those of the past. I used to think this was a universal trait, rather than a particularly English one, but recent research shows that our island neighbours do not share this view. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, more people believed that their country’s best years were ahead of them.

One useful concept Fox does have, however comes right at the beginning of the book when she is defining her terms. Englishness, as described here is a cultural category rather than an ethnic one. To some extent this argument seems facile – ethnicity itself is a culturally constructed concept rather than one that has a real basis in science. But the way we talk about culture and the way we talk about ethnicity differs significantly. Culture is system of behaviours and attitudes – something we acquire, while ethnicity is bestowed upon us by accident of birth or perception. By thinking of Englishness not as an ethnic categorisation but as a set of cultural norms one can acquire or adopt, we can neutralise nativist attempts to define English identity as one that can only come from some sort of imagined pure bloodline, but this view risks encouraging those arbiters of Englishness to judge immigrants (and by extension, those who have been here for their whole lives, but who ‘look foreign’) by the degree to which the adhere to a particular pattern of English behaviour. This is all part of the knotty problem that humans naturally look for a sense of group identity, but that all group identities (national, sub-cultural, religious, sports team-related) are, by their very nature, exclusionary and divisive.

I have a few things to add here, but none of them really go very far in solving this problem. Firstly, in any culture, no individual will perfectly embody all of the attitudes, values and behaviours associated with it. Whether your ancestors arrived with Hengest and Horsa, on the Windrush, or last Thursday on a flight from Krakow, there will be elements of English culture that you display, and elements you that you do not. Throughout her book, Fox refers to the underlying rules of English as a ‘grammar’, and I think this is a useful comparison. Linguists describe the rules of a language as it is used by its speakers, they do not prescribe how it should be used – if the language changes, the linguists will record this change and look for causes, but they will not tell the people who are using the new rules that they are ‘doing it wrong’. This brings me rather nicely to my second point. All cultures change over time. As people come from different places, bringing their own cultures with them, it will inevitably have an impact on the culture that is already there. But becoming the sort of country that tightly controls our borders, that tries to police a prescribed view of Englishness, would also have an impact, and, I believe, would tend to exaggerate some of our less desirable qualities. Finally, we should not confuse culture with citizenship, and we should not confuse citizenship with a right to reside in a country. As new people arrive, they will naturally adapt to their new cultural environment (and remember, it is perfectly possible to belong to more than one culture), just as their new environment will be changed in some way by their presence. A progressive version of Englishness would welcome these people into our land and into our culture as part of a new chapter in what it means to be English.

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[1] Although my own class background is probably more complicated than that – I could write a whole blog post trying to work it out. For now I’ll just say that I’m describing myself as ‘lower-middle’, not because I think that is better than being ‘working’ but because, despite having always lived in working-class areas, to describe myself as ‘working-class’ would be to claim a cultural identity that I don’t really have.

Re-reading 'The Lord of the Rings'

If you were a nerdy kid, you know The Lord of the Rings. Even if you haven’t read the books or seen the films, the characters and the most basic elements of the plot have entered our common consciousness. After being swept up in the excitement of Peter Jackson’s films, I read the books when I was around fifteen or sixteen, and I remembered them fondly, but I never returned to them – I read promiscuously, and three heavy volumes of ‘stuff I’d read before’ always felt like too much of a time investment. There are always more books to read and, increasingly, not enough time to read them. In the decade since I last read them, I have studied English Literature at A-level (initially just as a fun extra subject), developed a love for Literature with a capital ‘L’, become a not-very-good writer, completed a degree in English and Creative Writing, had a short but intense career teaching English, and become an older, wiser, hopefully slightly better writer.

It is in my role as an older, wiser, hopefully slightly better reader that I decided to return to The Lord of the Rings. In many ways it is the Ur-text of modern fantasy. Because of The Lord of the Rings, we know that if we choose an Elf in a video game, we will be a tall, somewhat aloof archer from an ancient, mystical culture, and not a midnight shoemaker or a pointy-hatted friend of Father Christmas. We now that if we open a fantasy novel, we are likely to find a world which very much resembles Europe in the Middle-Ages, but populated by wizards and dragons and filled with magical artefacts. We also know that it likely to have maps in the front page, and be part of a longer sequence. I’m not going to enter the debate about Epic Fantasy vs. Sword and Sorcery, or whether Tolkien’s pulp-magazine contemporaries have shaped the genre more than he has – these discussions are best left to people who know the genre much better than I do. Instead, I’d like to look at how The Lord of the Rings fits into the literary traditions that I do know about.

I’d like to start, as Tolkien does, in The Shire. The link above reveals that many dislike Hobbits for their tweeness, but the role they serve is clear. It is well established that The Shire represents an idealised version of England, and that the Hobbits, with their anachronistically domestic sensibilities, are audience stand-ins through whose nearly-modern eyes we first see the grandeur of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But they also serve a more fundamental function in the story. More than Aragorn or Gandalf, Frodo is the protagonist of the novel – demonstrating how heroism and strength can be found in an age where such things seem to have been left in the ancient past. In this reading of the novel, the Scouring of The Shire, left out of Jackson’s adaptations, is a crucial final act, where the four hobbits, returned from their travels, are able to draw on their newfound strength to challenge the sort of fascist state that Tolkien has been accused of advocating. I wrote yesterday about how Orcs represent a love of war and destruction; it is perhaps the Hobbits, not the Elves from whom Tolkien’s mythos says they are distorted, who represent the Orcs’ true opposites. While the Orcs love only chaos, the Hobbits are lovers of comfort and community. The pastoral Shire, with its fields, gardens and hills, is both geographically and thematically a counterpoint to the barren, craggy wastes of Mordor, but the Scouring of the Shire also serves to show how easily such things can be lost. Yes, Sam manages to repair most of the damage (with his and Rosie’s baby symbolising a new beginning, as babies at the ends of novels often do), but the novel’s strongly anti-industrial tones, and the sense of a lost past which pervades so many other aspects of the novel, make The Shire into a very English elegy for an idyllic past to which we, like Frodo, can never return.

As I read the novel, I often found myself wondering how much Tolkien could be said to be writing in the Romantic tradition. His stated aim – to create an English mythology – parallels the early nineteenth-century interest in national epics, his wildernesses and mountains approach the sublime, and his sense of a lost mystical past would not seem out of place alongside Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ or Coleridge’s ‘Kublai Khan’. Tolkien borrows from Romanticism’s successors: the Gothic, in his description of Shelob’s lair, and the Pre-Raphaelites in his magical medievalism. These are the more recent filters through which his more obvious influences – his deep study of ancient Germanic stories – are brought to us.

Although his form – a novel made up of a multi-stranded narrative with several protagonists – is modern, Tolkien’s writing is rooted in heroic myths. His essay on ‘Beowulf’, ‘The Monster and the Critics’, gives some insight on how Tolkien saw the tradition from which he was writing. While Greek heroes often have a tragic flaw which brings about their undoing, Tolkien sees a more general sense of doom as being central to the Northern heroes who inspired his own writing. Doom is used to mean fate generally, rather than in the more negative modern sense, but even when that doom brings good things, ulitmately ‘all glory ends in night’. For the creator of heroic narratives, this means ensuring that the hero’s death is equal to his life. For Beowulf, Tolkien says, this death has to come at the hands of the dragon – a monster equal to those he slew at the dawn of his heroism. This model has a number of implications for The Lord of the Rings. The heroic characters all accept the possibility of their own deaths against impossible odds: Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad Dhûm, Theoden on the field outside Gondor, Aragorn and his host at the gates of Mordor, and Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom – all are determined to continue fighting, even when their mission seems impossible to complete. This take on heroism might not stand out as particularly unusual in literature, but it is brought into sharper focus throughout by weaker characters who give up hope and either collude with the enemy directly or choose to stop resisting and passively accept Sauron’s victory.

Unlike the ‘Beowulf’ poet, Tolkien allows his heroes to grow old without it diminishing their glory. Aragorn need not die at the hands of a final dragon, but is allowed to live into the appendices before dying peacefully in his home; Frodo and Gandalf are allowed to sail west. In part, this may be a question of practicality – after the existential threat of Sauron is defeated, any foe of equal power would necessarily undermine the entire novel, but it also reflects a change in taste in the millennium between ‘Beowulf’ and The Lord of the Rings. We now prefer peace to war, and when Aragorn dies of old age, when Frodo and Gandalf leave the world, it is both a testament to the peace they have forged, and a reward for their efforts in creating it.

This sense of a slow fading is presented in a less positive light in other elements of the novel. The Elves sail for the west, knowing they can no longer live in Middle Earth. Naturally immortal, they had already seemed mythical to people like Sam, whose day to day lives are far removed from them. We see this loss from the point of view of those left behind with the sense that some fundamental wonder has been taken from the world. If Middle Earth is supposed to be our world, this represents an early stage in the gradual stripping away of the world’s natural wonders and mysteries, culminating in the post-industrial, post-war age from where Tolkien is writing. He may be deeply mournful of this loss, but he must also understand his own conviction – that all things, no matter how wonderful, must one day end. When applied to mortal lives, Tolkien shows how the ring bearers begin to feel ‘stretched’, with the risk of finding themselves in Gollum’s pitiful state of existence.

Structurally, Tolkien has often been accused of unnecessary length. We who spend our lives thinking about stories, whether they be Greek Tragedies or Hollywood blockbusters, often praise ‘tightness’ of plot. We like to feel as though all the elements fit together like a jigsaw. This is a quality which seems of little interest to Tolkien, or many of the fantasy authors who have followed in his footsteps. However, the length of the story, its frequent digressions, are usually seen as being crucial to what has come to be known as ‘word building’. At first glance, this seems self-evident: more words, more story, must mean more space to create the world. I do not think this entirely true. By way of contrast, I’d like to offer the example of Mad Max: Fury Road, which I watched recently. It is not entirely fair to compare a visual medium with a written one, and the stories are very different, but the film does demonstrate how audiences are able to accept and understand the complexity of a world that is put in front of them with sparse dialogue and very little need to explain it. This does not mean that Tolkien is wrong to write at such length – he is not merely explaining his world. To return to the ‘The Monster and the Critics’, he is creating a ‘many storied antiquity’, a larger web of narratives to which The Lord of the Rings is merely a part. Tolkien is using myth as his model, and real myths constantly refer to each other – each character, each location, has the potential to stretch off into myriad other stories. All that walking also serves a purpose – you always know exactly where you are in the world and how it relates to other places. Tolkien’s myth is ‘present[ed] incarnate in [a] world of history and geography.’ In fact, the weirder diversions (Tom Bombadil, for example), are some of the most interesting, and are where Tolkien most approaches the unplanned strangeness of real myth. That is not to say that there is no sense of structure in the novel – eventually a sense emerges that all paths, no matter how meandering, lead inevitably to the plains between Gondor and Mordor. This includes the paths of the Fellowship, but also those of the armies on both sides whose journeys we only see at their ends. The resulting siege successfully conveys the tension of war, the shifts between waiting and acting. It is here where the structural differences between Tolkien’s novel and Jackson’s adaptation are most pronounced – Jackson cuts between narratives to show how they connect to each other – a very cinematic way to build suspense. Tolkien divides his narratives in two so that the reader, like the characters, are unaware of what is happening to the other part of the fellowship, and underlining their bravery in the face of perceived hopelessness. Both artists make the right choice for the format they are working in.

And now I have meandered for long enough. Rereading is important; age and experience bring new life into old books. I’m sure there is plenty more to say about The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps in another ten years, I’ll let you know.

Some thoughts on race and politics in The Lord of the Rings

Recently, I re-read The Lord of the Rings. Tomorrow I will publish a fairly in-depth exploration of what I found there, but first I’d like to address the charges that Tolkien was a fascist (this link is mostly about Michael Moorcock – you’ll have to scroll down for the relevant part), and that the Lord of the Rings contains elements that are racist. Although the two suggestions could easily be conflated, I find it easier to address them separately.

I do not think Tolkien was a fascist, but he (or at least his work) is deeply conservative. The idea of a nobility that is naturally suited to rule permeates the novel, but Tolkien is highly critical of those who misuse their power. The closest we get to a description of a fascist society is in the Scouring of the Shire, where a military police force brutalises the countryside, reduces the population to a barely subsisting serfdom, and any dissenting voice is locked up without trial or hope of release. This section of the books can feel like an afterthought when compared to the grand scale of the main narrative, but in its description of how ordinary hobbits get drawn into working as Saruman’s sheriffs (some because of ‘badness’, but some out of a desire for status and some just for the offer of steady employment) is perhaps Tolkien’s most nuanced look at power and its misuses, and one of the few clear links between the plot of the novel and the geo-political context of its writing (after the Second World War, during the Cold War). In contrast, the ‘good’ characters are noted for their mercy, and Aragorn – the novel’s archetypical king – shows, through his reluctance to enter Minas Tirith before being invited by the stewards of the city, and through his refusal to force unwilling men to follow him to a last stand at the gates of Mordor, an understanding of the legal and moral limits of even monarchical power. It would be difficult to say from this book alone whether Tolkien supported the idea of absolute monarchy in real life – he only supplies us with three types of government: the essentially self-governing pastoral feudalism of the shire, monarchs (good unless corrupted by outside influences like Denathor or Theoden), and tyrants. What can be said undeniably, is that he admires the idealised version of feudal monarchy that he presents. This is not the place to look for criticisms of feudal power structure, but Tolkien is at least critical of the sort of impersonal, oppressive and militarised power found in fascism and other forms of totalitarian regime.

On the other charge, that of racism, I must unfortunately find Tolkien guilty by modern standards, even if his racial views were relatively progressive among his contemporaries (according to his Wikipedia page, Tolkien was critical of the British Empire’s treatment of its colonial subjects, and he was critical of pre-war Germany’s anti-Semitism – let us not forget that until the outbreak of war, Hitler had many supporters in the Anglophone world). Even as a younger, less aware reader in a less PC world, I found some of Tolkien’s portrayals of non-white people uncomfortable. At the time, I thought that his one humanising description of a dead Southron soldier in Ithilien made up for the rest, but it does little to counter-balance all of the times that the Easterlings and the Haradrim are described as being cruel or barbaric, even if he does go out of his way to point out that they have been fooled by Sauron. The non-white humans of Middle Earth may not be naturally inclined to evil, but they are exotic and gullible worshipers of a false god, an ignoble ‘other’ to the fair skinned, noble people of the West. The best that can be said in Tolkien’s defence here is that he is perhaps no worse than other writers who grew up under the paternalistic vision of the British Empire, but where someone like Agatha Christie, for example, whose novels are set in roughly the time they were written, says something which seems backwards, it can more easily be recognised as part of the attitudes of her time. In Tolkien, whose setting is distant from his context, it is harder to see these attitudes as being ‘of their time’. Worse, Tolkien magnifies this problem through setting his story in an idealised past society where attitudes could have easily been different, and by emphasising the idea of racial superiority in his use of the Elven and Numenorean bloodlines. And it has to be said that while Christie might have her supporting cast of rakes and cads tell the occasional racist joke, at least she never penned a novel in which hordes of dark-skinned barbarians from a continent to the south ally with goblins and demons to invade Europe.

We should take a moment to discuss those goblins. A determined critic could argue that Tolkien’s orcs, while not as directly offensive as his Southrons and his Easterlings because they do not map onto a real world ethnicity, create an argument that evil is something which can be inherent in a culture – that evil can be so deep in a people that it passes through their DNA. When placed alongside his portray of non-European (and there is no denying that the North West of Middle Earth is a stand in for Europe) human characters, they draw attention to attitudes about race and moral strength that were prevalent at the time of writing. However, I think this is to put the wrong sort of emphasis on what is essentially a common storytelling technique. Tolkien uses orcs in the same way that George Lucas uses his masked Stormtroopers, or so many video games use zombies – as a faceless evil that can be killed without diminishing the innocence of our protagonists. Beyond this, they provide a counterpoint to the Early-Medieval societies that inspired Tolkien. Tolkien dedicated his professional life to studying the literature of warlike people, and his fictional cultures draw inspiration from them. While he makes a point of not having his characters love war, it is still a source of honour and glory for them. Weapons are treasured artefacts, and the great war-leaders are remembered in song. The nature of the weapons might have changed, but man’s warlike nature was just as evident as ever by the time Tolkien was writing. He fought in the First World War himself, and lived through the second. The orcs are a distorted mirror to Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves and Men, and to mankind throughout real history. They are a society in which all but war has been stripped away – they write no songs and have no love of beautiful things, either crafted or natural, despoiling the Earth in order to create more means to kill. Fighting orcs neither allows for, nor requires much moral complexity, but that is not the type of story Tolkien is trying to tell.

So, Tolkien is not a fascist, and his portrayal of Orcs is not racist, but his portrayal of non-European people probably is. While this made me a little uncomfortable in places, it did not ruin the book for me. Again, I do not believe that Tolkien hated people of colour, he may not even have had the same sort of ‘White Man’s Burden’ paternalistic views of his contemporaries, but in this book he does present a dangerous non-European other which is out of step with our times. However, this is far from being a central element in the books, and I think it should be treated the same way we would treat the racism of his contemporaries  – acknowledge it for what it is, then, so long as it is not the core argument, move on to looking at other elements of the work. This post is my acknowledgement – tomorrow I will begin a proper investigation of the novel.