A Fisherman's Tale

I'm not sure whether this is a self-contained short story or the first chapter of something bigger. I haven't quite worked out what happens next. Bon appetit.

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Gaius was hungry. He twisted the coarse fibres in his hands, and hefted the weight of the net again. He'd been fishing all afternoon, and as he turned, coiling his muscles, he could feel his strength waning.

He watched as the net bunched and flared, carving diamonds into the water and closing like a flower. Despite his hunger and fatigue, the beauty of it still moved him.

As the net sank, Gaius' hungry mind compiled a hypothetical inventory of the waters beneath him. He thought of the darting minnows that would escape his clutches, and the sleek, fat mackerel that would futilely struggle for freedom in the narrow places of the net. And deeper still, the prehistoric introverts of the sea floor, gnarled spider crabs and sea urchins that had to be cracked with a rock, like a nut, before yielding their flesh.

He began to haul in the net with the unassailable optimism of the hungry fisherman. When the slack was gone, Gaius raised his eyebrows in excitement, for the net at the bottom of the sea was heavy.

Very heavy, in fact. Surely heavier than the largest spider crab he'd ever seen - now distorted with time and memory, the enormous crab his father and uncle had caught when Gaius was just nine years old. They had carried it back to the village between them, such was its weight. The diminutive Gaius had stared at this leviathan for hours, reconstructing the splinters of its shell by firelight, after the entire family had been satiated.

These memories flooded through Gaius' mind as he bent his tired limbs to the chore of hauling the net in. He could not possibly believe that he had caught anything so heavy. The net must have just snagged on a rock.

But a fisherman is by his nature superstitious, and a hungry brain is an unpredictable creature. Gaius was unable to completely extinguish his hopes of so large a meal. He sweated as he hauled in his net.

After several minutes of feverish effort, his shoulders slackened. The water was dark with the dying day but clear, and he could see that the net contained nothing more than a large, round rock. Gaius sighed, and hauled his catch ashore. At least there was bread at home.

The rock was somewhat larger than a man's head, and as it emerged from the sea Gaius' interest was re-engaged. What a perfect pattern the sea had wrought on it! The ceaseless efforts of tides and sands had created luxuriant curls over its surface. In the water and the evening sunlight, it shone like marble.

The dragging net rolled the rock along the sand, and Gaius was transfixed. An eye. An unmistakable eye stared at him through the crust of sand.

No spider crab this, but no round rock either. The fisherman's cold hands clumsily freed the head from its confinement and brushed the sand from aristocratic cheekbone and flowing beard.

Gaius looked around thoughtfully. He would not carry the head home, not on an empty stomach, not to an expectant family who would see him bearing a burden in the half-light. He returned to the small grotto, little more than a hollow in the rocks by the shore, where he had earlier placed his knapsack, canteen and pocket knife. Removing his belongings from the small shelf, he placed the head there and returned to his net, coiling it about his arm.

As he turned for home, he felt a pang of the same superstition that had made him keep hauling that net in all day, the superstition that had been so intense following that final cast. The head stared at him reproachfully, sand on its wide brows, sand still in the artful curls of its hair.

Gaius took his canteen from his knapsack and finished what little fresh water he had left, before kneeling on the rocks and filling it from the sea. He carried it over to the relic and, with a reverential air that made him feel self-conscious, poured the water over the head.

The saltwater pooled like tears in the blank, marble eyes. The oblique evening light pooled in the water and lay there winking. The great grey eyes blinked.

Gaius took a step back, convinced that the light was playing a trick on him. The eyes blinked again and their marmoreal emptiness vanished. They were the colour of oceans.

Fiction for the Unemployed: my five favourite charity bookstore bargains

1. Cervantes – Don Quixote

Although it has only featured indirectly in this blog, Cervantes’ weighty masterpiece was the fruit of one of my first visits to the Oxfam bookshop in Muswell Hill. It’s hard to underestimate Cervantes’ influence on countless later authors, including – glancing down this list - Eco and Burgess. And in terms of the sheer quantity of book for the price, this one is a winner. Don’t sneer; it’s an important factor.

2. Umberto Eco – Baudolino

I think Eco has gained a boost from the fact that I read Baudolino very recently. However, it is an excellent novel, and might even be credited with rekindling my enthusiasm for medieval history after my dissertation poured cold water all over it. Swashbuckling adventure and dusty manuscripts can sit comfortably alongside each other, as this novel proves.

3. Martin Amis – London Fields

This is a work in progress, a novel I’m reading at the moment, but it is pretty phenomenal. A murder story set in the seedy Portobello Road, where murderer and murderee are marked out from the outset. Keep your eyes peeled for a post on it in the near future.

4. Anthony Burgess – The Devil’s Mode

Anthony Burgess has very rapidly become one of my favourite authors. His novels are both witty and sophisticated, and his short stories share this excellent balance between serious learning and human life with all its bodily functions. This collection resurrects a host of characters from history, literature and music, and delivers them all in vivid, bite-sized stories.

5. Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

If Cervantes won the prize for number of words vs. capital investment, Calvino’s slender tome is the exact opposite, but is nonetheless full of very interesting ideas. A light book, but containing some philosophically dense concepts of utopian societies, Invisible Cities really benefits from being viewed as a collection of short stories united by a broad theme, rather than a novel as such.

Well, there we go. I’m afraid this list is very Eurocentric, and it doesn’t really reflect a lot of great American literature. But Melville, Hemingway and Vonnegut would all be contenders if I’d actually got them from charity shops. I’d like to thank the Oxfam bookshops of Muswell Hill and Crouch End, and the upstanding and thoroughly middle class citizens of those areas who read so widely and pass their books on to a good cause: me.

Lies, damned lies, and medieval history

I tried to read Umberto Eco’s Baudolino once before and found it just too dense. That was before my MA. This time around, less perturbed by the author’s love of unnecessary Latinisms, I'm nearly there. Currently around three-quarters of the way through, I’m happy to report that Baudolino is well worth the effort.

Set during the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the novel is staged as a conversation between the remarkable Baudolino and Master Niketas, an official of the city whom Baudolino rescues from the rampaging Crusaders. In each chapter, Baudolino recounts a series of events from his past; his poor upbringing, his unlikely adoption by Frederick Barbarossa, his studies in Paris and his growing obsession with finding the mystical kingdom of Prester John, far to the east. We also learn that our narrator is a born liar with the gift of the gab and a talent for outrageous invention. He rescued Niketas, he says, because he needed someone to tell his story to in order to establish it correctly in his own mind.

Obviously, the question we’re meant to be toying with is to what extent Baudolino is making this all up, and the way the novel is constructed deliberately exacerbates this. (In fact, I seem to remember a similar device at the beginning of The Name of the Rose.) The frame between the reader and the story – the device of Baudolino retelling his tale to Niketas – sometimes seems a little cumbersome. There are noticeable and ever-so-slightly awkward shifts between Baudolino’s first person speech at the start and end of each chapter, and the omniscient narrator who describes ‘our friends’ and their adventures the rest of the time. Also, and I’m not sure why, Eco seems to like interspersing the tale with vivid accounts of Niketas’s fondness for luxurious snack food. Any takers for ‘four hearts of cabbage... a carp and about twenty little mackerel, fillets of salt fish, fourteen eggs, a bit of Wallachian sheep cheese, all bathed in a good quart of oil, sprinkled with pepper, and flavoured with twelve heads of garlic’? No? Oh, go on.

Perhaps this interest in gastronomy provides a counterpoint to the great deeds of the main story. It reminds me of Odysseus, who lamented his grumbling belly which kept landing him in trouble. Perhaps it also reminds us of the decadence of Constantinople, balancing the gross acts committed by the Crusaders. It also reminds me of Anthony Burgess’ cheese supper. Given Baudolino’s fondness for invention, perhaps the whole thing is one great indigestion-induced nightmare. Pardon me.

Fortunately, the plot is far more digestible, and as usual I won’t say much on that score. The historical scenery is very convincing, and once you get past the obscure vocabulary and the recurring scholarly debate about the existence of vacuums, this is a very absorbing novel.

So, at three-quarters of the way in, I’m wondering precisely how much of Eco’s make-believe is also Baudolino’s fantasy. Falsehood saturates this book. There are distant and probably non-existent princesses and kingdoms, there are parchments scraped and re-scraped, and poems, letters, maps and histories are written, stolen, re-written and completely made up. It’s enough to give you indigestion. But in a good way.

Kings and Fools

I have returned to Anthony Burgess, with his novel Any Old Iron, which follows the remarkable Jones family throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The old iron of the title is Excalibur, a.k.a. the Sword of Mars, once wielded by Attila the Hun before ending up in the hands of King Arthur, according to popular legend.

For a story ostensibly about Excalibur, the first major surprise is how little the sword itself features. It does, however, hang over the fates of the various members of the Jones family, and by charting their fortunes Burgess is able to cover an extraordinary variety of subject matter. The sinking of the Titanic, the Russian revolution, two World Wars, the struggle for Welsh independence, and the founding of the nascent State of Israel are all effortlessly and mercilessly scrutinised.

When Burgess writes about the Second World War, his acerbic wit is reminiscent of Joseph Heller. One Private Jones suffers so many bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia, and minor war-related injuries that, despite serving his country for several years, he never actually sees any fighting. There is a powerful sense of the absurdity of war. Another Jones, defending his classical education as a means to interpret the mad situation around him, reduces war and Homeric verse to the level of crapulent nightmares, concluding that “We’re all living in the aftermath of a cheese supper.”

Burgess’ view of Welsh independence and Zionism are just as jaundiced. The two struggling states are set up as parallels, with the bumbling Welsh independence movement robbing post offices and giving old ladies heart attacks. Perhaps because it is still a delicate political issue, perhaps because Wales is more integral to the plot, Israel is seen as a distant absurdity, used by the Welsh freedom fighters as an example of what could be achieved. This absurdity is brought out by discussions of the ethnic similarities between the two groups, and the suggestion that the Welsh are a fragment of the Jewish diaspora.

So, where does Excalibur fit in? Having been looted by the Nazis and captured by the Soviets it resides in a Russian museum. There Reg Jones, half mad with his love for a Russian woman and his fear that she will be sent to the Siberian work camps, liberates it from the icy grasp of the Soviets. He does so with no nationalistic intent, his wartime experiences having destroyed any such naive ideals. But when he returns it to Wales, and when the Luftwaffe unintentionally expose some apparently Arthurian ruins, the nationalistic fervour of others is whipped up. For Reg, the end of the war is sadly not the end of pointless quarrelling.

Clearly, for Burgess, the absurdity of war is inseparable from the absurdity of nation-building. Thousands of Russians were worked to death in Stalin’s USSR because they had been exposed to the decadence of Western society, and could have spread word of its success. Welsh nationalism seems the nostalgic province of petty thugs. Wars, and the thought of dying for one’s country, are absurd.

Any Old Iron tumbles majestically and mockingly through the terrible events of the twentieth century. The Sword of Arthur almost seems like an afterthought, until you look closely and realise that it symbolises all the nostalgia for conquests and golden ages that motivated so much of the bloodshed in our recent history. It is a rusty relic, quite out of place in the modern world.