High-Class Confectionery

Sweet Tooth

by Ian McEwan

I think this must be what the critics call a tour de force.
     Ian McEwan dines at the high table of contemporary English authorship. You expect his stuff to be good, and he rarely disappoints. He exhibits all the conventional auctorial virtues. His observant, insightful psychology is second to none. If he has a weakness, it is that his writing is so absorbing and instantly digestible that you devour it unreflectingly and may find it hard to remember anything about the plot or the characters afterwards. In other words, he’s the ultimate ‘good reads’ author – so good you may fail to notice his artistry.
     Sweet Tooth is a good read, to say the least. Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’)—Anglican bishop’s daughter, Cambridge maths graduate, MI5 employee and self-acknowledged beauty—is sent off to recruit T.H. Haley—redbrick university lecturer, writer of incisive essays and short fiction, reputedly hostile to Communism and the Soviets—into a small stable of authors it intends to support as a counterweight to the dominance of left-wing thought in Western cultural circles (the year is 1973). The support is extended through a dummy foundation and the authors don’t know they’re being used.
     Naturally, Serena falls in love with her target, and complications follow.
     Espionage, love, sex, betrayal, mystery, an artful intermingling of real life with fiction—Sweet Tooth has it all. But there is more to it than a mere rearrangement of well-loved fictional themes. McEwan, the master of the good read, has taken on the challenge of writing a novel that experiments in a postmodern way with the conventions of fiction. In other words, he has taken on the challenge of making a good read out of the kind of literary showing-off that usually results in a very bad read.
     And he has succeeded brilliantly. Sweet Tooth reads just like any other Ian McEwan novel—engaging, easy to swallow, so true to life that disbelief is not so much suspended as abandoned altogether on the very first page. The story is never compromised, never fails to entertain and make you want to read on to find out what happens next. There is not the faintest hint that anything highbrow and postmodern is happening.
     Oh, but it is. The literary experiment is hidden, as Americans say, in plain sight. McEwan leaves plenty of hints in the text to let suspicious readers know something is up. For example, when Serena and her lover are discussing books, we get this:

 Without leaving the chair he stretched forward and picked up John Fowles’s The Magus, and said he admired parts of that, as well as all of The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.’

Sweet Tooth features a manipulated reality like the one in The Magus and a readers’ choice of endings like The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It also has an unreliable narrator (whose identity, too, may not be the one we are given) and sundry other postmodern auctorial tricks. However, none of these are apparent to the reader until the end of the book. And when they are revealed, the result is not the usual disappointment – a breaking of what Serena, a voracious reader of novels herself, would call ‘the contract between the writer and the reader’. It actually redoubles the reader’s pleasure in the book, making it an even better read than it was before. And this, I think, is unique. I've never read an ‘experimental’ work that fully satisfied the terms of that contract before. In fact, it works so brilliantly that today, three days after I finished Sweet Tooth, I keep looking at it and wishing there was some of it still left to read.
     What an absolutely marvellous book this is.

Humour in Chainmail

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain

Re-reading this after 35 years or so, I found it alternately entertaining and tedious. The amusement-value of dropping a nineteenth-century Yankee technophile into chivalric society and making the most of the ensuing fireworks has not diminished; but neither have the preachiness, political naivety and frequent spells of tedium that mar this not-so-great novel by an undeniably great author.

Mark Twain employs three different styles in this book. There’s his usually zippy, hyperbolic, idiosyncratic but unmistakably American humorous voice, familiar to readers of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Then there’s a second, less showy, more conventionally Victorian style that he uses for the framing narrative (attributed to ‘M.T.’, no less). He also falls into this style when Hank Morgan, the hero, launches into yet another homily about the evils of monarchy, established churches, social stratification and inherited privilege, or rhapsodises upon the great superiority of democracy, egalitarianism and nineteenth-century gadgeteering. Some of Hank’s harangues are very trying, and I found myself skipping them with ever-increasing frequency as I advanced through the book.

But for tedium, nothing can compare with the third style Twain favours, which is Malory’s style from Le Morte d’Arthur – sometimes presented as pastiche, sometimes quoted directly from the source. In fact, its tediousness is commented upon in the text itself – but that doesn't make reading it any less stultifying. The quality of storytelling, too, declines steadily through the novel. Somewhere along the line Twain seems to have stopped caring about the plot, perhaps having growing too wrapped up in all the secular sermons he wanted to preach. Towards the end of the book, he completely takes his eye off the narrative ball – for example, when Hank Morgan and King Arthur are captured by slave-traders, the King never thinks to ask why Hank, whom he regards as a magician with powers superior even to Merlin’s, cannot use some enchantment to free them from their captivity; it would have been the natural question to ask. And when Hank finally escapes by picking the locks of his manacles, he immediately buys new clothes to disguise himself – where did he get the money? Surely the slavers would have taken all his possessions when they captured him? Straining credibility yet further, Hank’s escape is viewed by his gullible fellow-prisoners as magical – as if lock-pickers had not been in the world as long as locksmiths!

And while we’re on the subject of magic: right through the book, it is presented as mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry, and the great Merlin is shown to be an incompetent fake and a dotard into the bargain. Yet, when the time comes for Hank Morgan to leave the sixth century and return to the nineteenth, it is Merlin's magic that effects the displacement. Surely the author could have found a better recourse than this?

And, finally, a word about centuries. Twain put Camelot and King Arthur in the sixth, smack in the middle of the Dark Ages. That would be about right, I suppose – just before the coming of the Saxons to Britain – if Arthur had, in fact, existed at all. However, the Camelot Twain describes – and it is recognisably the same one we visit in Malory, Tennyson and every other conventional re-telling of the Arthur legend – is a mediaeval society, and one that had to have existed after the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century, indeed after the Crusades, which is when the concept of chivalry was elaborated. Of course this tells us nothing except that Malory anachronised, like all authors of his era, and his successors followed his lead. Still, it might be amusing to imagine what a real sixth-century Camelot might have been like; pretty foul, I imagine. Has anyone written a King Arthur story like that?

Blotched

A review of the inaugural issue of Ink magazine.

Some people think you have to know a lot about culture and the arts to write about them in a magazine. Not true. I wrote ignorantly about art and culture for years and nobody ever called my bluff. The real qualification for writing about culture and the arts in magazines is being able to write a good magazine article.

What makes a magazine article good? I reckon if it makes people want to read it, and they’re satisfied after they’ve finished it, that’s a good magazine article. Very simple.

Or maybe it isn’t so simple. I’ve just seen the inaugural issue of Ink, which somebody left behind at my house the other day, and it’s pretty bad. It calls itself the March-April issue, though it only came out on 5 May, and at Rs. 200 per glossy copy and very few ads inside, it probably cost more to publish than it will ever make at the newsstands. You can download the whole thing free from their web site, too. Makes you wonder whether they’re really in it for the long haul.

The first thing that jumps out at you from the cover of Ink is a big yellow belly. Was the symbolism intended? I’m pretty sure they didn’t intend for the belly to upstage the magazine’s own masthead, but that’s what it does. Not what I’d want for the first issue of my magazine – but Ink seems to be run by unusually shy and retiring people. They won’t even tell us what their magazine is about. I searched the cover in vain for some paraphrase of the words ‘the hot new arts and culture mag.’ None to be seen. Nothing on the editorial page, either. Why the big mystery? Don’t they want people to buy their magazine?

It gets worse inside. The table of contents is a guessing game: what do you think ‘Beating War with Drums’ is about? Or ‘Dubbed Out Concert Footage?’ Don’t look for explanatory subtitles; you won’t find any. Worse, the table of contents is laid out in some bizarre arrangement comprehensible only to the person who designed it, with some articles left out altogether. Why?

It’s the same precious, sloppy, amateurish story all the way through. This is a glossy magazine, often with several pictures on a single page. The pictures are interesting, yet not one of them – not one – has a caption. Three members of the group of artists known as Theertha are pictured separately in an article on the group, yet none of the photos tells you which man is which! Even reading the article won’t tell you, unless you happen to know – as I do, because I know the man himself – that the founder of Theertha, Jagath Weerasinghe, is not pictured in the article at all. Why was that?

There really is no excuse for this kind of incompetence. It’s not just lousy journalism, it’s commercial suicide. An important reader segment for this sort of publication is made up of the friends and relations of people featured in them. By treating their feature subjects so shabbily, the editors of Ink are deliberately turning away paying customers.

This peculiar reticence also extends to the articles themselves. There are no author bios, no introductory blurbs to tell us what the articles are about. There’s a feature on the filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara, with a big photo of him and all, but his name only appears in the body copy of the article – and you have to read up to the fourth paragraph before you even find that. Unforgivable.

As for the articles themselves – the meat of the magazine, the thing you pay your two hundred bucks for – they range from high-school-essay bad to absolutely unreadable. There are three exceptions. Two are by Pradeep Jeganathan: a restaurant review and an article about sushi which seems to be the first in a series entitled Pradeep Jeganathan’s Tastefusion. I say ‘seems to be’ because the magazine designer has got the type sizes and weights wrong again: the series title, which should appear as a header bar, has become the headline, and the headline looks like a subhead. Despite this, the article itself is great. I hope we’ll see a lot more in this line from Dr. Jeganathan: he writes about food elegantly and mouthwateringly and he seems to know his stuff in the kitchen. Best of all, he knows how to write a magazine article. His restaurant review, too, was first class. Absolutely no quibbles with either of these.

The third exception was a review of Blue, a bad and silly book. This was by A.S.H. Smythe, an Irishman (which seems to make nonsense of the editor’s claim that Ink is ‘entirely a Sri Lankan enterprise’, not that it matters). Mr. Smythe’s review is an amusingly-written hatchet job, one that Blue richly deserves, but it is much too long. A piece of fluff like Blue doesn’t deserve more than a paragraph or two – to give it two whole pages is to dignify it above its station. Here again, it is the editor, not the author, who is to blame. The Blue review should have been given some blue pencil.

As regards the other articles, the less said about them the better. Though I’d like to know why some unknown graphic-design student gets a such big feature. Maybe her daddy owns the magazine. Apart from this piece of nepotistic tripe, the other articles are just plain amateurish – written by people who know (or think they know) a little bit about art and culture, but who can’t write a magazine article for toffee.

The above is supposed to be salutary, meaning (as perhaps only Mr. Smythe will understand) that it is intended to cure and preserve. If only for its audacity, Ink deserves to survive. It would be nice to have a real Sri Lankan arts magazine succeed. The chances are slim, though. Our arts and culture scene is tiny, and most of it is not very good. How do you write about dull, unoriginal or ugly art in a way that holds readers’ interest? You can be honest and put everybody down, but how long can that last before people get sick of your ranting? Or you can try to be kind to the undeserving, and end up sounding like one of those magazines which are given away free to anyone passing by, the ones in which all the articles are thinly disguised advertorials singing the praises of the restaurants and other firms that place ads in the magazine. Either way, the reader feels cheated, and won’t come back for a second helping.

If Ink is to survive, it has to go beyond all that crap and become what it really wants to be, and what we all want to see: a really good Sri Lankan arts and culture magazine. To achieve that, it will need a professional editor, a professional designer and some grown-up writers to write for it. It will also need a professional advertising and marketing person with enough power to make the editorial team face a few bald commercial facts. With a makeover like that, Ink may actually have a life beyond its second or third issue. I hope it does, but you won’t find me putting any money on it. Not yet.