Kate and The Other One Get Married, Souvenir Edition (with apologies to Tristram Shandy)

Covers I Have Gazed At

For this Thursday's entry, I thought I'd return to the superficial. In case anyone thought the real me had been kidnapped these last two weeks and replaced by a thoughtful imposter...

Now it's true that you can't judge a book by its cover. Put another way, a nice cover is a thing apart, and I'd wager that many of those who'd have dismissed covers as facile and trivial a few years ago would now leap to their defence now that the physical beauty of a real book is one of its last defences against the electronic form. Some books have great covers and equally great insides; I think this is a happy coincidence, when it happens. I've just done a survey of my favourite covers from bookshelves - results shown below:

Fig. 1 Cool cover, good writing.

Fig. 2 Unknown Pleasures-ish cover, interesting story

 Fig. 3 Pink cover, but very good novel (wooo!)

Fig. 4 Fabulous cover that actually rather put the novel in the shade, when it came to it

Fig. 5 Strangely soothing cover, interesting and spiky set of novels

Fig. 6 Subtly disturbing cover, unsubtle but admittedly well-written novel

Fig. 7 Truly beautiful cover, and slightly depressing novel that probably ended a friendship of mine due to a daft misunderstanding that arose when I explained the plot...

Huck Finn

Let's be honest. Little makes the heart sink faster than the words 'Great American Novel'.

Notwithstanding this, I set upon reading Huckleberry Finn recently. My primary motivation was that I liked the sound of the title, and have always had a strong attraction to stories named after protagonists - I'll always remember a good strong, metrical Huckleberry Finn over the The [Insert Noun] Of [Insert Noun] formula, or anything that relies on the words 'Tiger', 'Heart', 'Love', 'Book', 'History' or 'Piano'. Does this make me shallow?

I'd heard dim rumours of its controversy in book groups, around the use of the 'N' word and the possibility of censorship. Laziness prevents me googling to put flesh on these rumours, but suffice to say that the use of offensive language is if anything the least potentially offensive thing about the novel. Publishers dream of novels that have 'Book Club Potential' - that will divide opinion and provoke debate, and if ever there were a novel that could do that, this must be the one.

Like many others, my own idea of discussions of American race issues was initially informed by Harper Lee at school. While To Kill A Mockingbird is undoubtedly a fine novel, its black and white treatment of black and white seems to reflect something like a patrician attitude on behalf of white people. I think can think of enough reasons why I might have written the story the same way - not least that it is dramatically stronger for a persecuted minority to be defended by another party whose selfish interest lies elsewhere, than for each character to simply be fighting for their own interests. Yet one can't be human without feeling uncomfortable about the rather cardboard nature of black representation in that novel.

This is at least as true of Huckleberry Finn. There's no doubt that the escaped slave Jim is described in terms that have him childlike in his ignorance and innocence, and it's not merely the attitude of the narrator colouring our perception of him. But this is a different kind of novel - one both bolder, and more subtle. There is not a white character to be found who we could acquit of racism; not one who would consider an accusation of 'abolitionist' to be anything other than the vilest slur on their character. Even Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, though risking all to protect Jim, are products of their environment, and Twain does not flinch from showing us Huck Finn's upside-down moral struggle of what he believes is right (ownership of slaves as property) against what he feels is right, but to him is intellectually immoral (helping Jim to evade capture). Under Tom Sawyer's direction, there is the darkest satire of good intentions; the two boys conspire to free Jim in the most inefficient, 'stylish' way possible, such that Jim is reduced to the status of a plaything in a children's adventure. There is apparently no 'learning' to be had; the boys appear not to achieve any kind of conscious moral epiphany. The decent, brave, loyal Huck Finn, even though he has effectively endured slavery himself under his vicious captor and father, never makes the intellectual connection between his experience and escape and Jim's.

The genius of Mark Twain is in telling a tale in which his own view is entirely invisible, and the lessons, such as they are, are revealed only through events and irony. In the end, apart from a rollicking, absorbing adventure story, this is a tale in which the heart is shown a surer guide to morality than the intellect. Twain describes it better; it is "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".

It's not a Great American Novel, thank heavens. It's a great novel, full stop. And that, without the capital letters to lessen it, and without a nation, is something altogether greater.

Walden In The City

Today, I thought I'd justify the tagline for once. So, for the same reason we don't sit atop Greek ruins to read the classics, or stand in queues in a nest of bags to read chick lit, I've been reading Walden in the inner city. After all, without the contrast, where would be the journey?

Sometimes, Thoreau is like a poet; sometimes a naturalist, or a philosopher, or a libertarian; and sometimes he is Holden Caulfield. His early declaration that 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', though beautifully expressed, seems to fall into that final category. Isn't it just the voice of a young man justifying his superiority over 'phonys'? In a previous post, I even attempted to find a word to describe this shade of purple, and all I can suggest is that this is an example of prose being well-observedose instead of well-observed. There must be something impregnated in the cover of the book that does this to the book-end pages. The end-piece of this work, the lectures of a man in a hut on the evils of big government, merely serves to illustrate the spraining effect of isolation on sanity. It is not so much observed as declared.

But... the main body of the book is a calmer and mercifully less considered affair, and the insecurity of the slighlty older man introducing his experiences gives way quite unconsciously to the finer observation of a naturalist in the moment. When he talks of men always coming home from the nearest field, with their shadows having travelled further than their steps, there is humanity of a kind you might struggle to find in Oscar Wilde's otherwise similarly broad-brush epigrams. For the most part, it's a pleasure to read. Thinking as an ecologist by training, I wonder quite how Walden Pond was created and survived in woodland without eutrophication destroying its clarity. Equally, I wonder how this kind of writing survives in modern forms. I have no doubt that it does, in little pockets that have not yet been trammelled by the wheels of mass publishing. Thoreau does like that word, 'mass'.

I wonder whether Walden, which seems in its quieter moods to be more relevant than ever, could quite be published now. In my opinion it isn't for the most part an intellectual work, least of all successfully so; but largely it talks to the human being and not their economic fingerprint. Other times it is political, partial, frequently wildly unconvincing, and in all honesty, it probably doesn't have a lot to say to the average modern reader (if, as we are told, she is an aspirational woman juggling concerns of career and family). It does not address the concerns of key publishing demographics very well at all, and perhaps is all the more worthwhile for it.

Though I like the thought of his editor asking whether there might be more shopping in it.

This Writing Life

I saw a novelist and self-proclaimed 'New Puritan' do a reading the other day. Apparently he even has a film being made of one of his books. When he finished and was offering to sign his books, I went straight to the gents (and yes, I did wash my hands), came out again, gave my regards to the host and walked off to the tube station. To my surprise, New Puritan was already there on the platform, cutting a forlorn figure with his carrier bag full of unsold books. What a life.