Fiction
'Beowulf: A Verse Translation' by Michael Alexander
There have been more recent translations including the prize-winning one by Seamus Heaney in 1999, this is the one from 1973 that was part of a collection of black-spined Penguin books that my father collected. The poetry generally works well, giving a feel of the original styling without really contorting the text or needing loads of footnotes. It also shows how close to the original the movie 'Beowulf' (2007) was. It is an 9th/10th Century West Saxon story ostensibly set in 5th Century western Baltic, featuring the Danes and the Geats of southern 'Sweden'. However, its formation in this form is made apparent with overblown references to the Christian God even when it is clear that many of the characters featured in the story are not Christian.
The story is simple. It is effectively a superhero story. Beowulf, a Geat hero not only rips the arm out of the monster Grendel who has been slaughtering the entourage of King Hrothgar of the Danes, but also goes on to kill Grendel's mother who comes to revenge herself on Hrothgar for the loss of her son. She lives beneath a lake and can only be killed by an ancient sword. Beowulf has incredible abilities when it comes to water, recounting other feats such as a swimming race which goes on for many hours. It seems he can fight underwater. His final encounter is set 50 years after the fights against Grendel and his mother when Beowulf faces a dragon and while he kills it, he is mortally wounded.
The story is important for being one of very few stories from the time. It is interesting that Saxons settled in the West of England held on to a story from centuries earlier back across the North Sea while bringing it 'up to date' with the Christian declarations. We will probably never know if there were other stories that were lost. However, this is a superheroic story which has a rather bombastic, strong character at the centre with powers that are beyond the 'normal' warrior hero. Perhaps audiences of a millennium ago were as enamoured with the larger-than-life characters as much as cinema audiences seem to be today.
'The Death of King Arthur' translated by James Cable
This was another book from my father's 1970s collection of what were then termed the 'Penguin Classics' though that term now has a different meaning. It is the third component of what we know as the Arthurian arc, showing events after the quest for the Holy Grail and as the title indicates leading to the death of King Arthur and indeed the whole set-up of Camelot and Knights of the Round Table, which are in decline anyway due to the losses during the Grail quest. The story was assembled in the early 1230s probably in now what is eastern France.
The time period in which it is set is not clear. It is believed that the basis of King Arthur probably refers to a leader in Britain in the 5th or subsequent centuries following the departure of the Roman legions. There are references in this story to Arthur though just a king ruling over 12 kingdoms. Many are referred to in the story. He is king of Logres which may have been envisaged as overlapping what became Mercia and Wessex. Camelot is envisaged as being in Dorset or Devon. Other kingdoms referred to include Wales, North Wales, Scotland, Cornwall (where Arthur was born), the Distant Isles, the Strange Isles and outside the British Isles: Gaul, Benoic (between Brittany and Gaul, where Sir Lancelot was born), Gaunes (probably covering Normandy and Maine) and Saxony. The Roman Emperor turns up from Rome, towards the end, invading Burgundy and Champagne where he is killed by Arthur.
Despite this very early medieval kind of political geography many of the details of the weaponry and armour, plus the way the knights fight are clearly drawn from the early 13th Century. The main armour is chainmail and the knights wear metal helmets and carried shields. The initial combat is always through charges with lances which often pierce shields and armour but also typically break, as in jousts. Thus, the knights are clearly using the couched lance approach which appeared in the late 11th Century and are distant from the platemail armour of the later medieval period.
King Arthur has a clearly feudal relationship with the 'kings' of the British Isles and is able to summon them because they hold fiefs from him. His bastard and ultimately treacherous son, Mordred, also enlists many nobles and has them swear fealty to him. We might thus see Arthur and then Mordred as more an emperor or view these other 'kings' more accurately as dukes and counts. There is also a lot of crossing back and forth across the English Channel and prompted by Sir Gawain, seeking revenge for the killing of his brothers, Arthur goes into Gaul and Gaunes after Sir Lancelot. He also owns a castle on the River Tweed right up the North of what would become Northumberland. Thus, this connection between 'England' and parts of 'France' is seen as natural, as would fit the world view of someone writing in the post-Norman Conquest era.
James Cable portrays the story as one of Lancelot's redemption. He does end up as a religious hermit shortly before his death. However, it is his sustained adultery with Arthur's wife, Queen Guinevere which drives on the action and indeed the violence which destroys the whole Camelot structure and leads to the death of almost every remaining knight of the Round Table. Thus, it is difficult for a modern reader to pick up the elements of Lancelot's redemption. Yes, Sir Gawain can be criticised for driving on the revenge by Arthur leading to a sequence of bloody battles but to some degree we can be surprised that Arthur was not pursuing such a path himself. Lancelot had sworn off adultery in the second, Grail section of the arc, but then actually continues with Guinevere even more openly than before, in part to counteract the intense jealousy Guinevere feels when she believes that Lancelot, severely wounded in a joust, is actually now residing with a young noblewoman who has so fallen in love with him she dies of heartbreak when he rejects her.
We also need to remember that Mordred, who is given power but makes himself king while Arthur is in 'France' is an illegitimate son of Arthur, the result of Arthur's incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Morgause, Queen of Orkney (not to be confused with Morgan, another of Arthur's sisters who he stays with in this story and who reveals much of Lancelot's adultery). It is only towards the end of this story that Arthur admits his paternity. Thus despite all the regular protestations about who fine all these knights are, in fact often they are simply self-centred, lustful fighters.
While there are references to Christianity and to knights being 'fine' and 'noble', in fact if we look objectively at them and especially their behaviour, we see something which is much more akin to a Greek tragedy. For modern readers it might even seem rather like the soap operas of the Dynasty and Dallas era, or the more recent Succession series. There are occasional stretches when we might see what is deemed Christian or chivalric behaviour, notably when Lancelot and Gawain stopped their single combat when both are exhausted. However, most of the time everyone behaves in a vengeful and jealous way. Lancelot's adultery, like that of Paris of Troy, is done for personal lust and yet leads to the death of thousands of people as a result. Yes, Lancelot is praised as the finest of knights, and he is a skilled combatant, but it is difficult to see more than a meagre portion of chivalry in him. Ultimately his unwillingness to stop his love affair with Guinevere wrecks kingdoms and kills a whole generation of supposedly noble knights.
Cable commends the fact that there is minimal magic in this story, something which he feels is unnecessarily overdone in other medieval romances. The lady in the lake, or at least her arm up to the elbow appears at the very end of the story. However, there are regularly miraculous winds allowing rapid crossing of the sea. In addition, despite the fact that they are able to fight for entire days even when wounded, the story explicitly states that Arthur is 92, when the story is set, Sir Gawain is 76 and Sir Lancelot is 55. Queen Guinevere is reckoned to be around 50. Thus they are all elderly for the era when the story was assembled. In addition, Sir Gawain gets magically refreshed as the day approaches noon, allowing him to fight on with Lancelot through the afternoon. This is given a Christian explanation about when he was baptised, but certainly sounds like magic.
Overall, coming to this book means reading something actually very out-of-step with the chivalric portrayals that are commonplace. We see tropes, notably a leading character appearing at a tournament in disguise, which have gone on to be well established in stories set in medieval times. Still, it portrays characters in a way which would have been critically judged in the 13th Century and the repeated emphasis on how noble and fine they are really falls flat. It seems that 'noble' better translates as 'fights skillfully in battle' rather than what we might now attribute to noble. It is an interesting story with lots of bloody battle scenes which rather become repetitive. However, rather than what we might feel to be Arthurian traits, instead it is a story of very base soldiers whose prime motives are lust and seeking power rather than anything more 'worthy'.
'The Shape of Water' by Andrea Camilleri
This is the first book in the Inspector Salvo Montalbano series of police procedural novels which were published 1994-2020 and led to a TV series (broadcast 1999-2021) and a spin-off TV series (2012-15). It should not be confused with the fantastical movie 'The Shape of Water' (2017). You can understand why the books have been so successful. I was passed many of them by my parents who enjoyed both the books and the TV series. The writing is crisp and brisk. Some readers may dislike this feeling they want more 'weight' and to see more of the details of procedure. However, the case is no less engaging for that and actually manages to communicate a lot to the reader without a sense of info dumping. Readers familiar with the writings of Dibdin and Sciascia will feel at home in the context. The setting is in a fictional Sicilian town in a fictional province, but the context of the political situation and the power of various institutions in Italian society is well realised.
This first story is about an ageing politician found dead in a car on wasteland near an abandoned factory, which is called 'The Pasture' known for its use as a dogging and prostitution site. It soon transpires that the man died naturally so it is a question of why his death was made to look as if it was as the result of an encounter with a prostitute. It transpires that perhaps unsurprisingly it is about a political power play in local government and seeking to put the blame on to a foreigner.
The pace and style is refreshing and it is an engaging book. I think other detective authors could learn a lot (some probably already have given the duration of his publishing career) from Camilleri's approach. It is probably a good thing that I feel that way given that I have quite a few of these books lined up to read.
'On Stranger Tides' by Tim Powers
This novel was published in 1987. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland opened in 1967. The first 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' was released in 2003. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' did not come until 2011. Its focus on seeking the Fountain of Youth was apparently inspired by this novel though it goes down very different paths. The term "on stranger tides" comes from the fictional poet William Ashbless, a character Powers and fellow author James Blaylock invented in the 1970s.
This novel is very well written. It has a lot of tropes that we are now all highly familiar with from the Pirates of the Caribbean series of movies indeed many pirate novels/movies, though with this magical aspect that has come in lately. A lot of the story pivots around I suppose what we might call wizards, including the actual pirate Blackbeard himself, plus two other middle aged men from Britain come to the Caribbean to exercise voodoo magic to gain greater powers. There is a young man, a French puppeteer, John Chandagnac going to reclaim the inheritance he has been cheated out of by his uncle, and a young fellow traveller, Englishwoman Elizabeth Hurwood who is being prepared to be an element of her father's primary magic goal.
Chandagnac soon rebranded Jack Shandy, and Elizabeth become wrapped up with pirates, initially a Captain Davies and later Blackbeard himself. The various battles with pirate and Royal Navy ships are well described. Powers at times includes as much detail on all the parts of an early 18th Century sailing ship as you would find in a technical manual, though fortunately he does not info dump either on these or the details of the voudou magic which almost all the pirates use. It features a journey to a mystical fountain in Florida, ghost ships, zombie crews and an immortal explorer. Yet, it handles these in a matter of fact way so that the supernatural does not become 'ordinary' but you are soon accepting it as a standard part of what is going on.
Overall the novel is fast paced and despite the fantastical elements, the characters are well developed and credible. The historical detail is blended in well with the supernatural and magic elements. Powers has not written any others in this setting, but certainly the quality of the writing would encourage me to pick up another book by him that I saw.
Non-Fiction
'Social Problems of Modern Britain: An Introductory Reader' edited by Eric Butterworth and David Weir
As the title suggests this is a book of articles and extracts covering broad themes such as housing, race, the elderly, health, etc. as perceived roughly 1959-71. My copy was the 1982 edition of this book originally published in the 1972, though it appears that nothing was brought up to date between those two years despite the fact that the first Thatcher government was in power and was already exacerbating many of the challenges that the book highlights from the 1960s. In particular the concerns about youth unemployment in 1972 seem paltry when set against the situation a decade later.
In addition, many of the writings were produced at a time when it was assumed that social, primarily, council housing was going to play an important part in housing the UK population indefinitely which means that poor quality privately rented accommodation was seen as part of the slum culture of the past or restricted to people in crisis at the very bottom of society. The 'right to buy' scheme in the 1980s was to almost totally destroy the social housing sector putting much more power into the hands of private landlords and an associated fall in housing quality and rise in rents, that the writers of 1972 had been unable to foresee. The same goes for poverty. There was a sense that it would always be around but not that the number of people, especially children would be in it or that steadily we would move towards the US model of the 'working poor'. In 1971, even if not in 1982, it was possible to believe that a family with a man in a job could afford a decent place to live, let alone pay the utilities (still nationally owned then) and buy food.
Some factors in the passages remain a concern today, e.g. graduate unemployment. The 1960s had seen a boom in higher education with the 'plate glass' universities opening up, but this was to be nothing compared to the huge expansion in numbers of young people attending universities after 1992 though also the steady fall in mature students from 2001 onwards. Interestingly there is an articled by T. Szasz which portrays mental illness as a 'myth', something that sociologists of the time would have dismissed as wrong. While acceptance of mental health has received a boost in the late 2010s and through the 2020s, especially coming out of the USA but also in UK work places we have seen a similar dismissal of mental health as not 'genuine'. The authors predictions of 8 billion global population by 2000 and it rising to 10-15 billion fortunately have proven to be out by coming up to three decades. In addition, contrary to the authors' beliefs there has been a fall in birth rates across industrialised countries and even a loss of interest in sexual activity which they thought highly unlikely. Naturally they did not foresee the natalist rhetoric which has appeared both in the USA and UK, as a result.
While there was not a clear awareness of global warming, there is certainly analysis of the challenges of air, water and noise pollution, that remain no less grave today as at the time the book was assembled. Indeed after a period of cleaner rivers and shores in the UK of the 1990s, with private water companies being so negligent, grave water pollution has hit the country again in a way the writers of forty years ago would have quite expected. Despite the slow rise of electric vehicles, noise and air pollution remain grave threats and the latter has been connected to climate change bringing challenges globally as well as the local impacts.
Overall the book does have the kind of 'The History Man' (1975) well-meaning, 'cool' sociologist vibe to it. It sees problems in UK society but retains a degree of optimism that with effort and sensible policies these challenges could be overcome. Of course, policies went in the opposite direction meaning that the social problems identified in this book were to be gravely exacerbated, notably in race relations, health, housing and education.
