Goldsmith on Puffins

 Last Wednesday was half term and a gloriously sunny day so my parents and I went to Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire to see the nesting seabirds.

The place was packed with guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes. We saw gannets performing their strange bowing, head-shaking and beak-fencing behaviours, and we also looked for puffins. Those adorable, colourful beaked fellas are really quite hard to see. They’re smaller than many of the other birds, have a tendency to nest deeper in the crevices and didn’t gather the same way the others did, scattered among the rest. I hear this isn’t the case in ‘puffin islands’ like Anglesey and Lundy, but it was the case at the cliffs in Bempton.

We looked and looked, enjoying the antics of all the other birds, the bright, blue sky and the turquoise sea and eventually our patience had results, we saw puffins. A few were chilling on the cliffs, whilst others flew around, their hurried flapping noticeable against the more relaxed flying of the other birds. It was pretty magical. 

Oliver Goldsmith, in his An History of the Earth and Animated Nature describes puffins, and it seems, unlike some of the other entries, that he might have even seen some before. He says that, “words cannot easily describe the form of the bill of the puffin,' before giving a paragraph on the size, shape and colour of it, warning that it “bites most terribly”.

Goldsmith describes how the birds nest in burrows and holes situated up large cliffs but that they aren’t terribly good flyers and sometimes need to make several tries to fly up to their nests. He also describes how a small number of puffins appear to scout out an area before the larger force comes (maybe it was these scouts we saw).

He says how puffins descend on Anglesey, kicking rabbits out of their burrows and making a nuisance. He then talks about a subject which never ceases to amuse me in his natural history book, whether puffins make good food or not. He describes the meat as rank, unless well salted and pickled and says how the church exempted the puffin from being described as meat on feast days.

Moving away from the description of puffin-meat, he celebrates their indefatigability, that after being preyed on and hunted by humans and other animals, they always come back in as many numbers as before.

I love reading An History of the Earth and Animated Nature for the odd and outdated details some of the entries contain, like the description of their meat, but (if Goldsmith’s sources are correct) I did also learn a little of the hard life of a puffin.

It was a pleasure to meet a few. 

Review: Two books by Iona McGregor

 I’m out of Leon Garfields. But this month I did read two novels by an author he recommended highly, Ioana McGregor. She wrote six novels, four of them were set in the eighteenth-century, the two I found were not. One is a historical children’s novel set in the 1500s, and the other a Victorian whodunnit for adults written when she no longer kept her Lesbianism in the closet. 

The Poppinjay is one of several children’s historical novels written by Iona McGregor while she worked as a teacher. it’s set in St Andrews during an invasion of the castle by protestants, following the murder of the unpopular Archbishop - the chaplain to these invaders being John Knox.

David Lindsay is the popinjay of the title. Born in Bordeux to a Scottish wine merchant and a French woman, he has travelled to St Andrews to get a job under the Archbishop. He’s daydreaming of a life of visiting fine courts, reading delightful books and seeing fine art and architecture. He’s dressed to the nines and very snobby about the outfits of everybody he meets. Unfortunately, his prospective employer is killed the day of the interview and he is in the castle grounds when it is invaded.

He sneaks out, but not without being injured and is taken in by an old woman and her grand-daughter, who barely make a living from fishing and odd-jobs. As he heals, he helps out, shedding his fine clothing and finding some satisfaction in doing work well. After Father Anthony leaves some medical texts with him, he begins to interested in medicine.

The town is in an uproar, the forces from the Regent (as Mary, Queen of Scots is four years old at this point) are both late and ineffective. Their attempt to mine the castle is pointless and, worst of all, lets people from the castle out - and they have the plague.

The people are suspicious of the old grandmother, who did curse the castle with pestilence, and David and friends are saved by a friend of theirs dying of plague in their outhouse, so now no one will come near. 

Will they survive the plague, the siege, the anger of the mob?

The Poppinjay is a decent, if slight children’s adventure. David starts as shallow and uncaring, and grows to be a better person through his experiences. The girl who saves him is good fun and she has a pet monkey. The book is full of the fun little Scottishisms that were also in The Edinburgh ReeI. It’s a glimpse into a time and place I know very little of, the Scottish Reformation, and balanced the depiction of both protestants and catholics very carefully. Ultimately, it’s a decent workaday story, without the more interesting post-Culloden implications of The Edinburgh Reel.

Death Wore a Diadem is interesting because it’s the book Ioana McGregor wrote after quitting her job as a teacher, deciding to no-longer write children’s books and embrace her lesbian activism more openly. It’s billed as a ‘maverick historical whodunnit which satirises the snobbishness of genteel society.’ The blurb talks about how the main character, Christabel, ‘enlists the help of her lesbian lover and combs the foggy streets of the capital in search of a brutal killer’. 

Set in 1860, it sounds like a fun proto-Sarah Walters type of lesbian, crime fun. The blurb is misleading, however. The book is far more interested in satirising ‘the snobbishness of genteel society’ than it is being a knockabout crime romp. Christabel and her lesbian lover do very little detecting and it’s discovered pretty early on that the death is not the result of a brutal killer as much as a clumsy thief. The chief antagonism in the book isn’t the forces of law verses those against it, it’s Christabel the school student against the headmistress who wishes to cover things up.

It took me a while to realise what the book actually was, as I found the first half to be a very interesting look at the dynamics of a revolutionary school for girls in Edinburgh. At the head is Margaret Napier, who has detailed lists of all the transgressions of staff and pupil alike. She’s hoping to channel the visit of Empress Eugénie of France into a huge PR coup for the school and to cement herself at the top of it. She rules firmly, pressing her will on all the teachers, ready to bring up minor indiscretions. Her second in command, Miss Erroll, is a firm protestant and gets ill at the thought of the Empress’s visit. Her biggest headache is Christabel, who is defiant and has contracted a friendship with one of the teach assistants that might not be seen as wholesome. The school is leant a paste replica of a diadem, this goes missing.. later on one of the undermaids is found dead with one of the paste jewels in her bag. This seems cut and dry to Miss Napier, but Christabel won’t have the maid, Peggy, blamed for stealing the  diadem.

I assumed all these school dynamics were set up for us to solve the mystery, which they sort of were, but while I thought they were the base for thrills later, the dynamics were the book. The mystery is very supplemental to the politicking within the school. What’s more, the sizzling lesbian romance never gets more raunchy than ‘one thing led to another’.

Had the blurb been more explicit that this was a book about the society of a boarding school, with the theft and death of the maid as incidents within that, I’d have found it more enjoyable. There are many characters and they are all well delineated, with interesting relationships and powerplays, but I kept waiting for the book to get all lesbian girl detective, and it never really did. 

If anything, it seems Iona McGregor was working through her gripes with being a teacher, enjoying creating the monstrous headteacher in all her petty glory, the flighty and pretentious teachers, the vapid schoolgirls. If this was her big, freeing novel (she turned to writing study-guides after this) the demon she wanted to exorcise was not having to write for children, or of concealing her lesbianism, it was how annoying working in a school can be.  

An Afternoon of Eighteenth-Century Delights by The Grimsby Symphony Orchestra

I’ve had a little problem since moving out of London where my blog is concerned. Before, when I was stuck for something to write about, there was also some little building, curio or exhibition to attend and refill the eighteenth-century wells, that’s not really the case here. Grimsby has a fascinating early-mediaeval and later mediaeval history, and came into its peak years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but it had a real decline between those years and was something of a nowhere place. Online, the history of eighteenth-century Grimsby is limited to a sentence. This is also the case for a lot of the local area, they are places that were wealthy and important in the mediaeval era and became so again at the end of the nineteenth century but largely floundered in the eighteenth.

This means there simply isn’t much around to fill up the Grub-Street tank, so my eyes were instantly drawn to a poster advertising, An Afternoon of Eighteenth Century Delights. I knew I was going to go, though I was a little put off by the nature of those delights, three pieces of classical music by a symphony orchestra - I’m more into a broadside ballad, or even a Purcell and not very knowledgeable about the kinds of music played by an orchestra.

But, I went and I had an experience, and these are my thoughts.

The first parts was Overture to Don Giovanni by Mozart. This was my favourite piece, I liked the drama and seep of it. I also enjoyed the little tunes and motifs I picked up. I sat back in Grimsby Minster and let the music swirl around me, lifting me up and letting my thoughts and feelings be taken away and wander.

The second piece was Symphony 101 (The Clock) by Haydn. There were moments of ticking in various parts, but it seemed to smooth and slippery to be a clock most of the time, I have a clockwork watch you can see into and it’s a busy repetition of complex motion rather than long slides. This piece was written by Haydn when he was performing in London and was very enthusiastically recieved. I enjoyed it but it was more mannered than the Mozart and took me less high.

The third pieces was Beethoven’s Symphony No.1. He’d been taught by Haydn and was influenced by Mozart, so it was a fitting last piece of music. I have to say, I frequently find Beethoven rather annoying, he seems to pick an idea and repeat it, or pull it apart and repeat little bits of it in combinations. I imagine, if I were more musically inclined, I’d love this - I love when a writer does something similar, but it frustrates me as a listener and I was ready for it to finish.

That said, I was very grateful to the Grimsby Symphony Orchestra for putting on An Afternoon of Eighteenth-Century Delights. It’s been a year since I reviewed Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and it was  lovely to hear an orchestra play and feel the music fill the space of the Minster - and all that for a tenner, it was a delightful afternoon.

It's time to light the lights: A collection of puppet anecdotes

 I’m a big fan of The Muppets. The other day I didn’t skip an advert and watched the whole thing because it had Muppets in it and I was just happy to see them again. Of course, The Muppets do have an eighteenth century connection, via a nineteenth century novel, in The Muppet Treasure Island, which I made a video of. I was tempted to write a whole post of fantasy Muppet casts for eighteenth century novel adaptions but I shall restrain myself.

I like other forms of puppeteering also. One of the most magical experiences I had as a reviewer was going to the Puppet Theatre Barge and reviewing a fable there. Next time I’m in Prague, I’m definitely going to a puppet theatre there as well.

Eighteenth century London had at least three semi-permanent puppet theatres, with Martin Powell’s being the earliest, putting on satirical puppet shows from the 1710s on. There were also numerous touring puppet companies that played shows in towns and villages around the country. One such performance sparked a tragedy in 1727 in the village of Burwell in Cambridgeshire. A company set up in a local barn and offered tickets at a penny each. The village, clearly starved for entertainment crammed into the makeshift performance space. There were so many, people had to be turned away and member of the company nailed the barn doors shut to bar entrance to anyone else - apparently this was a fairly common practice. There was a fire. It swept through the wooden barn, spread through the piles of hay and the people inside had to batter their way out the barn. Seventy-eight people died, many of them children. There was no-one in the village who didn’t lose somebody. There’s also a tragic twist in the tale, but I’m planning on doing a little something with the story.

Henry Fielding wrote a puppet show. Technically, the puppet show was a play within a play. In The Author’s Farce, a down on his luck writer called Luckless is working on a show called The Pleasures of the Town. This was then performed by puppets. It features the Goddess Dulness choosing a favourite from the purveyors of what the Scriblerans would have seen as brainrot creations. There’s Dr Orator, obviously based on Orator Henley; Mrs Novel, based on Eliza Haywood and Sir Farcical Comic, a clear Colley Cibber parody. The Goddess gives her boons to Signor Opera, who sings an oratorio about how he likes money.

At the end, Luckless is nearly arrested by a man called Murdertext but is saved when he marries his landlady’s daughter and his landlady finds out she’s the rightful queen of Brentford. It’s a work clearly from the Scribleran said of the eighteenth century culture war, with Luckless saying;

“If you must write, write nonsense, write operas, write entertainments, write Hurlothrumbos, set up an oratory and preach nonsense, and you may meet with encouragement enough.” I can’t say it’s worked for me.

Foote also leant his talents to satirical puppet shows. When he returned from Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee with loads of material for a play, Garrick made a not-too-subtle threat that such a play would get him in trouble. Foote countered by saying that he only planned for it to be a puppet show. When he was asked if the puppets were going to be life-sized, Foote said they wouldn’t, only Garrick-sized.

One of the more famous Goldsmith anecdotes comes from a puppet show. He and some friends were watching one where the puppet of a soldier performed impressive baton-wielding tricks. Goldsmith nudged the person next to him and declared that h could do it better, not that he could manipulate a puppet to do the trick better, but that he could twirl a baton better than the puppet. This was taken at the time, and even in all the biographies I’ve read of him, as an example of Goldsmith’s ridiculous jealousy, that he had to be best at everything. I think it’s more an example of Goldsmith’s talent for absurdity. Honestly, I think Goldsmith was wasted on Boswell and co.

I think we should have more access to puppet shows, they are great fun and when done right, can be really beautiful and atmospheric. I also think there should be more Muppet takes on eighteenth century literature.

I suggest a Tom Jones with Kermit as Tom and Miss Piggy as Sophia. Squire Western would be played by the requisite human, Allworthy would be Sam the Eagle and Gonzo and Rizzo would be Thwackum and Square. 

Or a Beggar’s Opera, Kermit as Macheath and Piggy as Polly Peachum, Mary-Sue Pig as Lucy Lockit and Gonzo as Mr Lockit and the requisite human as Peachum.

Or how about Clarissa? I picture Pepe the Prawn as Lovelace and Miss Piggy as Anna Howe. Couldn’t find a part for Kermit though…

Review: Peter & the Serpent: A Screenplay by Ralph W Osgood II

Peter and the Serpent is a screenplay written by film-buff and accountant turned writer, Ralph W Osgood II - as the name suggests, he is American. He’s written a number of screenplays, novels, children’s books, poetry collections and even a musical which all have a religious aspect to them and are found at his Barnabas Press.

I found the Afterword of the book very interesting. Osgood was transitioning from numbers work to writing work and, being very fond of film (and in the industry), he started a screenplay about the hugely popular Christian preacher, George Whitefield. During the course of writing it, he became a beta-tester for the very influential scripting programme, Final Draft. Begun in 1990, the script was finished by 1996 and shopped around. As is the case with most screenplays, it ultimately didn’t find a home but Osgood did receive a positive memo from Lucasfilm producer, Howard Kazanjian, which is included in the book. 

It’s about a boy called Peter, who runs away from a terrible apprenticeship and originally wants to join a highwayman called Roger. Unfortunately, the people who are after him find a bigger fish in Roger and he’s sent to Newgate. Peter also comes under the eye of a kindly but ostracised preacher called George Whitehead, who helps Roger repent before he is hanged, and helps Peter to come to terms with Roger’s death and see a hope in Jesus. There’s also a human-trafficker called The Ratcatcher, a comic duo of a heavy called Jerry and a mountebank’s fool called Andrew, as well as evil lords, pickpockets and the wonderfully named, Phillip-iin-the-tub (the role I’d want).

I’ve come to a point where a try to avoid thinking of things as bad, because I’m not in a position to judge most of the time. What might seem bad to me might be absolutely right for the audience it has in mind and the effect it wishes to have. I don’t read screenplays, this may be my first ever, nor do I even watch that many films any more - but this is a bad screenplay.

Film is a very dense medium and often needs a firm focus to work. Peter and the Serpent has 29 named characters, al sorts of incidents and subplots but no firm plot - to try and summarise it, I had to impose order on the text that’s simply not there. It also isn’t in any particular genre. The main character is a child but the text includes a man wanting to put a rod up a dog, and suggesting he’ll do it to a girl; hanging, the throwing of a dead cat’s head - and slapstick. It’s a romp around 1740s London underworld but stops for multiple sermons about Christ’s redemption of the wicked. Characters appear from nowhere, or disappear. The ominous Ratcatcher turns out to be a damp squib, the wicked Lord Egbert simply vanishes. 

There are some good elements. I liked most scenes with Andrew and Jerry. Andrew is an acrobatic, unserious man who works as a Merry-Andrew for the Mountebank Dr Corbin. Corbin was one of the many villainous characters in the film who don’t get much time to be villainous. Jerry and Andrew are introduced by winning a flea race, then Andrew takes his winnings to his girlfriend, Jenny, who is currently in the pillory. The tiff they have in that public place is good fun, and so are many of the other antics - with Jerry being the gentle giant who really befriends Peter. This is sort of ruined when Andrew makes a sudden heel-turn at the end and tries to violently break up one of George Whitefield’s gatherings, getting a slapstick comeuppance as a result. Osgood gives a few casting choices for this film and suggest Jerry be played by John Goodman and Andrew by Jim Carey (remember, this was finished in 1996). I think those two could have made a really good double act.

He suggests that Mel Gibson would play Roger, the highwayman, which I imagine he’d like because he gets to be murdered by English people, but Roger spends too much time moping in Newgate to be a heroic enough role. I also think there’s something to the storyline of Peter seeing the highwayman as a father figure but seeing the limitedness of Roger’s life, begins to see more in George Whitefield. Leon Garfield could have done that story great justice, but it’s rather garbled and mangled in the sheer number of plots and tones.

It’s also not a very good depiction of the eighteenth century. There clearly is some research, Roger ends in Newgate, the fair happens in Moorfields, there’s stuff about the grim docks where people are ferried. Whitefield’s theology seems appropriately Calvinist for an early Methodist preacher. But they go to pubs with names like, ‘The Blue Cloud Inn’ and ‘The Globe and Urine’. They also speak in a cod-Shakespearean way, calling each other ‘sirrah’ and eating trenchers of beef. At one point a character says ‘zauns’, as presumably, Osgood has heard the word and doesn’t realise it’s ‘zounds’ - or that an eighteenth century person wouldn’t say it. It seems surprising that anyone reading about eighteenth century underworld characters wouldn’t come across flash, the criminal slang on the time. Thank goodness he didn’t, he’d have lathered it over everything like Jake Arnott’s The Fatal Tree.

I’m not sure how you could mix The Beggar’s Opera, a Leon Garfield adventure novel and a primer of Calvin’s ideas on original sin and forgiveness, it’s not one of those books where I feel I could have done it any better. I’m glad Osgood tried but this film would be unwatchable.  

Review: The Ministry of Time By Kaliane Bradley

   

I was very interested in The Ministry of Time because I find the premise not only very interesting but also very similar to a premise I had for a book over fifteen years ago. 

In my book, the narrating character (who was deliberately a self-insert character with my personality, interests and living conditions) failed military intelligence interviews (as I did). They are later surprised by being giving a job in a Intelligence department for failures which investigated the ludicrous. One of the things they investigate is a machine an eccentric old man made in his shed before dying. It’s a time machine. However, the rules of time travel mean that a person can’t change anything in any time they travel back to as it’s already happened from the point of departure, nor does anything they do in the future have any effect, as it hasn’t yet happened from point of departure. They can’t even bring technology from the future because it dissolves. In effect, it’s useless. 

My character suggests that the machine might be used to bring people from the past. They won’t be able to do much, or remember it when they are put back but they may have interesting perspectives on the present that may prove useful. If anything, it’s a huge resource of intellectual possibility. So my character fetches Samuel Johnson and lives with him as he processes the modern world. He becomes a couch potato, loving Eastenders because it revels in the fact that “life is more to be endured than enjoyed” and he’s a fan of Top Gear.

I had a great ending for the book. Another shady group of people were kidnapping beautiful women from history to act as courtesans but when they kidnap Helen of Troy, the Archaeans turn up and fight the metropolitan police. Also, King Arthur is back, and all the lost heroes of England, and a UFO hangs over London. It’s Samuel Johnson who puts it together, that the machine isn’t a time machine, it’s a machine that makes real (instantiates, you could say) elements of collective consciousness, and in the case of Samuel Johnson himself, the ideas my character has of him. To save the world from falling into chaos, Johnson realises the machine needs to be switched off, but to do that would kill him, something he is dreadfully scared off, so it’s a tremendous sacrifice when he does it and there’s not a dry eye left in the house.

I never finished writing this novel though, because although I had a beginning and an end, I had no middle beyond the self-insert character and the historical one to mooch about London and have high-jinks and fish-out-of-water gags. I think Kaliane Bradley had a similar problem.

She tries to solve this a number of ways. The first is that she has a group of historical characters and that a number of them become friends. This means that they are not only out of time now, but are out of time with each other and yet this friendship group is the most charming thing in the book. I loved how they’d have pot luck dinners together, go on picnics, go to nightclubs and compare notes on the twenty-first century.

I really liked Margaret, a housewife from 1665, who found great liberation in the modern era which she grabs wholeheartedly. I loved her fondness for film, her sartorial and sexual experimentation and the glee which she takes to I new life. I also loved Arthur’s kindness, quietness and slow opening up. He was the sweetest character. Then there was the main historical character, Graham Gore, who is omnicompetent, charming but clearly quite ruthless and pragmatic underneath. (I found it interesting that this books started after Bradley watched the series The Terror, if just because it seemed so recent to me to have written and published a story inspired by it.)

Bradley also tries to solve the problem of the middle by adding a love story. It comes a little late, seems a little sudden and is pretty explicit in a way that seems out of place with the rest of the book but less out of place if thought of as part of a possible The Terror fandom. Of course, I couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Samuel Johnson, we just don’t tickle each other’s funny bones in that way.

There’s a very sudden spy/timey-wimey turn to the last quarter of the book, full of attention grabbing but unlikely twists and turns, which suggests that Bradley didn’t have much of an ending planned to the book either. Even though clues are seeded earlier, they feel like inserts in a later draft as they are so tonally different to the first half of the book.

The Ministry of Time is best when it opts for descriptions of the historical characters acclimatising to the modern world. It’s fun to imagine how you’d explain the internet, or cinema, or to take someone from the past to a bottomless brunch. How would people from other time periods enjoy our music and culture? How would they feel about the sheer overload of information? How would you explain the horrors of the twentieth century? I really liked Graham’s reactions to climate change, to the bursts of heatwave or tropical storms hitting London - that’s a real and creeping horror that doesn’t appear in many contemporary novels.

I didn’t like the narrator though. I didn’t think her backstory of generational trauma from her mother’s experiences in Cambodia added much to the story. Apart from anything, her trauma, though real is one generation removed, whilst all the historical characters had experienced the trauma up close. Perhaps it’s my own lack of nuance, but I was hazy about all the stuff about how the narrator may have imbibed the colonial mentality, except to suggest that it would lead her future self into a kind of ruthless fascism. Was that what I was supposed to get from that? Also, her job was to monitor her figure from time, and she was terrible at that. There’s also the fact that she wonders why the technicians on the project hate Bridges like her, before than stating she gets paid more them then and rudely ignoring one - was that supposed to be irony?

The writing does try a little too hard to be surprising and overuses metaphor and simile, especially self-consciously ‘new’ metaphor and simile - I hope never to understand what “a noise like a slapped canary is.”

Ultimately, this was a book a enjoyed to a reasonable extent. I think I probably would have liked it more had it simply been a slow-burn romance between a modern woman and a man from the past with a happy ending.