42. Muriel Spark - 'The Leaf-Sweeper' (1952)

'But it was still misty, and really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves.'
(Muriel Spark, The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 2001, p.190)

I had little or no idea what this was going to be about, or like; a good way to finish this extended week of stories from favoured writers. If a week is a long time in politics, I am not sure what Harold Wilson would make of my progress with this. I only got around to completing this story on Thursday 16th of July - as you will see the post has lain dormant for quite some time. ASSAD will reconvene shortly, on a week by week basis, perhaps without a theme to begin with - let's just get things started again!

In truth, I shifted to novel reading: Grant Allen, John Verney, Sjowall and Wahloo, E. Nesbit, Donald Barthelme... and only on Thursday managed to get around to reading this piece. One recent novel read spurred the choice of Spark, a new favourite: her Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), 64 years on, a distinct, droller bedfellow of Allen's The British Barbarians. This is a strain of literature probing the English in particular, their foibles, hypocrisies and absurdities. Dougal Douglas, like Bertram Ingledew, a stranger in a foreign land, is regarded with a mixture of fascination, admiration, horror and incomprehension - and like Ingledew, his role is freelance agent provocateur, sprite-at-large, observing . He is, however, more devious and machiavellian in his means of exposing folly and involving himself in these people's lives. He also takes on paid employment, given the brief of almost a 'blue skies thinker' in the modern parlance; he is given the task of taking the pulse of the workplace and approaches it in an idiosyncratic manner the bosses accept due to their perception of this Scot as an 'Arts Man'.

'The Leaf-Sweeper' is an even earlier work from Spark's career of over fifty years, published originally in The Observer - and will be far from the last I will read (there is an allegory of Watergate in a nunnery, a fictionalised account of Lord Lucan's later life and, of course, a certain novel that was filmed about a schoolmistress with fascist fixations... plz feel free to recommend any more, anyone!). She seems to me to be one of the key post-WW2 writers, along with Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis &c.

The first thing to state about this story is that, like TBOPR, this is bloody funny - Spark has an understated way with insinuation and absurdity. The premise itself rings true in its absurdity - the leaf-sweeper turns out to be an author and fanatic recently released from a mental institution. Johnnie Geddes's fanaticism revolves around his unshakeable opposition to Christmas and all its works. He has some success with pamphlets on the subject and then full-length books (including Abolish Christmas or We Die) outlining his apocalyptic vision, captured amusingly by Spark: 'He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless Churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years.' The effect is all the stronger because he rather has a point!

Spark introduces the concept succinctly and without ceremony - with something of the matter-of-fact quality that I observed in Dahl; after establishing the rather wistful, grounded scene of a man sweeping leaves in the mist for the local council, she throws in this: 'He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas.' (p.185) It gets one intrigued, right from the off, and Spark goes on to cover a lot of ground in a mere six pages. We get to know very little about the narrator who encounters Johnnie, and it simply does not matter in a vignette such as this is.

Quite how Spark turns it into a ghost-story is ingenious; amusing and melancholy at the same time: 'But perhaps you don't know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man. The ghosts of the dead may be all right, but the ghost of mad Johnnie gave me the creeps.' (p.189)

8/10

41. Robert Louis Stevenson - 'The Body Snatcher' (1884)

'To bodies that had been laid in the earth in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock; the coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.'
(Robert Louis Stevenson, 'The Body Snatcher', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, Penguin Classics, 2002, p.87)

Full Text: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/body.htm

'The Body Snatcher' was published a year after the immortal Treasure Island, a much-loved novel from childhood - aided also by an abridged tape version, featuring some urchin reading effectively as Jim Hawkins, backed by Bedrich Smetana's majestic Vltava (The Moldau).

This short-story was a precursor in some ways to his novella 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886), obviously one of the key works of horror and 'scientific romance', providing an enduring influence for literature, not mention criticism, pertaining to the Weird, the uncanny. There is a duality in Fettes and how he spends his days and nights: 'For his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring blackguardly enjoyment; and, when that balance had been struck, the organ that he called his conscience declared itself content.' (p.79)

As ever, Stevenson's style is bold and emphatic, revelling in macabre, exaggerated details; it is a blood and thunder storytelling with a florid vocabulary that grips you by the lapels with its urgency and gusto: 'sot', 'cerements' 'antecedents', 'interlopers', 'blackguardly', 'mattock'. As with his other seminal works, RLS establishes character with broad, burning strokes: Fettes is 'an old drunken Scotchman' with a mysertious past: 'We called him the Doctor; for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of medicine'. (p.73) The 'we' is ambiguous; the (potentially unreliable) first-person narrator is never named and can only be assumed to be an alehouse regular. The George inn in Debenham (code for Edinburgh, presumably?) is Fettes's abode, and it is from this sodden spot that the 'sot' relays his story, told to the narrator. Once this is entered into, there is no return to the present-day scene; RLS simply gets on with the story and ends it on a dramatic note characteristic of horror and romance.

The story is closely based upon the Burke and Hare case, with Edinburgh Doctor Robert Knox clearly the Dr K---- of the narrative, senior figure at the medical school and ambiguous facilitator of Macfarlane and Fettes's dark doings. It is implied that initially Fettes has to deal with Burke and Hare themselves, providing cadavers for medical research - 'he would open the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land'. (p.78) This prefaces his pact with the urbane, seemingly 'civilised' Macfarlane, which leads them to the graveyard and hands-on bodysnatching.

There is a sense of things progressing far beyond the everyday and humdrum, distorting into nightmare; like the 'human Juggernaut', Mr Hyde, treading a child down (p.13), Wolfe Macfarlane considers himself beyond good and evil: 'Hell, God, devil, right, wrong, sin, crime and all that old gallery of curiosities - they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them.' (p.88) This compelling expression of amorality perhaps expresses a concern at what was to come; the Century of the Self to come, Christian morality shattered. Indeed, the pair's climactic snatching is to take place in Glencorse, a 'rustic neighbourhood' representing placid, unchanging, traditional values; a godly old lady's corpse is to be uprooted from the earth, 'carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's best'. (p.87)

There is an ambiguity in the writing - it is unclear how RLS regards the sort of Victorian taboos and etiquette later assaulted by Grant Allen in his Hill-Top Novel, The British Barbarians (1895).

In 1884, or indeed 1881, when he composed 'The Body Snatcher' at Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry, RLS simply identifies traditions as under grave attack - whether bodily or societal. Science and the Self are part of a revolution that is not condemned, but reported. Stevenson's concern is to tell a vivid, page-turning tale, rather than primarily to attack, or take sides between, Science and Religion.

This is an extreme, uncanny melodrama divested of any didacticism; one is carried along by the narrative, gallows humour and the often staggering achievement of RLS's characterisation and drawing of extraordinary incidents and images: for example, the wildly bizarre finale, which I shall not spoil in its particulars other than to say that it marks a return to Edinburgh, finally named, and given its due place.

9/10

27. James Hogg - 'The Expedition to Hell' (1836)

'There is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is written than dreaming.'

(Peter Haining, ed., Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.496)

Another tale from the same Haining anthology as the Thackeray, and from the same year. This is notably more melodramatic, less satirical and creates a good deal of tension. Not a great deal to say other than that this is a notable piece of Scottish Gothic, rooted in Edinburgh - progressing to a subjective Hell.

Nice to see some accented dialect captured; this has been relatively rare in my survey; Barstow and Lawrence, obviously, but relatively few others that come to mind. Dialogue such as points the way towards Kelman and the like: 'Weel, weel, ye maun tell him that he mauna keep that engagement at no rate.' (p.504) 'no' rather than 'not', is another example.

Hogg plays with ambiguity and mystery in how he presents the central dream of George, the coach-driver, only being certain that we cannot be certain - and that the whole affair was of course extraordinary. A notable feature is the present narrator, seemingly Hogg himself, declaiming as in the epigraph above; pontification discounting rational explanations for dreams is followed by his telling of George's story.

It is all rather enjoyable; a before-its-time presentation and manipulation of the state of dreaming. Perhaps lacking that extra dimension Poe brings - as in 'The Facts of M. Valdemar' (1845) - but it is a canny old read, foraging almost unknowing into the uncanny.

7/10

10. Ian Rankin - 'Talk Show' (1991)

'It all seemed a long way from the Light Programme, a long way from glowing valves and Home Counties diction.'

(Ian Rankin, Beggars Banquet, Orion, 2002, p.165)

Rankin deploys an insistently engaging style, straightforward and familiar, in contrast to Hill's rather distancing subtlety. He uses reference points that are easily recognised (i.e. a character's glasses are round, 'NHS or John Lennon' style), whereas I felt that the particular Hill story chosen gave one little to latch onto. That is hardly to say that he overdoes this and things become played-out in the 'look at my empathy with pop culture' Nick Hornby manner. This is an Inspector Rebus story, actually published when the series of novels (which now is up to #17) was only two books in. It is also from the same year that Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King drew inspiration from the similar territory of radio phone-ins and 'shock jocks'.

Rankin makes use of his Scottishness, clearly setting the work in a recognisable Edinburgh - placing himself in the lineage of Scott, RL Stevenson and Muriel Spark, whom he wrote his thesis on, I believe. He writes with humour and understanding of the absurd modern media phenomenon of the talk show, here incarnated within Lowland Radio - represented by the polar opposite shows on the station, of confrontational highlander Hamish MacDiarmid and the more understanding, soothing approach of Penny Cook.

Looking over the stories read so far, there hasn't been a great deal of bona fide amusement; much laughter induced. I would argue this is the funniest I have read, dry humour like the Barthelme, but Rankin's satire here is less stinging - the guffaws tend to be more affable. However unhappy his vision of Scottish life is - the very lifeblood of such phone-ins is human misery, after all - it is conveyed in a manner which says: all is not lost. The grounding is in the bleak ebbing of ordinary lives - 'All these lonely, slightly deranged people out there...' that Penny deals with - but despair does not become the main tone. (p.170) This is certainly not James Kelman's A Disaffection (1989), which is casually and intensely harrowing in its delineation of one human being's disillusionment with society and work and distance from others.

I have the chance to go to Edinburgh and Glasgow next week; will certainly give it some thought. I am looking forward immensely to reading more Scottish shorts; naturally the formidable Glaswegian block of Gray-Kelman-Spence. But also the equally acerbic counter-culturalist Muriel Spark - whom the proprietor of Attica, the vintage clothing / artefacts shop on High Bridge in Newcastle was reading when I was last in there (when I bought a tie, several seventies editions of Films and Filming, a Spanish style shirt which reminded me of the cover of the Associates' Sulk in an entirely unscientific way, and, after a joint utilitarian / aesthetic purpose, an in-house Attica pen).

Rankin's story here impressed me; local observations (city-centre bars invariably reverting to a staple of beer, eg. the solid marker of an IPA pump) mixed with portrayals of people that show how the reality can be different from the perception - e.g. hearing somebody's voice and 'persona' via the radio. Rebus is confounded twice in terms of his expectations of the presenters. The detective himself is hardly explored in great depth in this story, but one gets the sense of a vaguely Columbo-esque operator, occasionally seeming absurd or clownish but gradually gaining an insight into things and then using melodramatic sleight-of-hand to push home his advantage.

Overall, the story subtly questions the assumptions behind phone-in radio; itself a forerunner of reality television and all that that entails. He uses the generic form of crime narrative and police procedural to expose folly - as in how ratings and cheap sensation always dominate over ideals of public service. Rebus exposes the lie upon which MacDiarmid and Cook's current success was founded; one is consigned presumably to 'a croft somewhere', but Penny is implied to be pursuing a more rewarding form of journalism. As thanks to Rebus she drops in at his flat in the curiously ambiguous final passage, nicely complicating this genuinely 'honest copper'. (p.167)

8/10