fictionwitch's posterous

The Servant Question

Lovers of period drama are in for a potential treat this coming autumn with the BBC and ITV going head to head with star studded slices of costumed loveliness, with the BBC reviving Upstairs Downstairs, with Jean Marsh as the housekeeper, and the ITV offering, pictured above. 

How successful these two offering prove remains to be seen, but it reminded me I had reviewed a previous revival of this particular genre, which we might the period domestic soap opera. This was Servants, written by Lucy Gannon.. Servants, if you don't remember it, was an attempt explore the life of domestic servant in the nineteenth century in a very radical way, and ran for only one series. My article below suggests some reasons for its failure. I shall be watching with interest to see how the two new autumn offerings deal with their subject. It was written in 2003, and there has been a lot more tv drama and living history that has flowed under the bridge since then, but I stand by many of my original observations. I am intending to cover some of the more recent attempts to deal with history on television in a future post.

On the foredeck of the C.A. Thayer, a 1895 schooner moored in San Francisco harbour, a group of well-nourished 13 year old girls are being put through their paces by the first mate. He has such a tyrannical manner you want to knock him down with a mop head rather than get on with squabbing the deck. He is dressed in the rough heavy clothes of the nineteenth century seaman, while the girls stand to attention in this season’s designer label trainers and sweats, their squeaky-clean, well-cut hair tied back in ponytails that are fathoms away from a sailor’s pigtail. This junior high pep squad has been press-ganged into the hard life of the high seas in the interests of their history studies in an award winning educational programme.

 At the cookhouse door, a young woman, also dressed in a double breasted pea jacket and wool trousers, is only keeping half an eye on the pot of potatoes on the coal firedrange. She has a male visitor from the twenty-first century and, while her first mate barks at his new cabin girls, she is discussing the complex and very contemporary business of graduate school admission. Behind them the redeveloped San Francisco waterfront hums with life.  It’s a little brash in places, but it’s safe and cheerful.  Things must have been very different a hundred years ago,  the moment in time that this exercise in living history seeks to recreate. 

 Moored nearby is the Balclutha. Here a documentary video plays in the cramped space where the crew and fishermen lived, and the story it tells it is a haunting one – a final voyage for the ship into the Alaskan salmon fields, and a recreation, by someof the last surviving fishermen, of the daily torture that constituted a working life for these extraordinary brave and hardy men. Cast out in tiny boats from the side of the ship, alone in the ocean for hours on end, as long as there was light to see by, returning only for a midday meal and to unload the catch, they were paid only for what they caught.  Watching this documentary, in the swaying bowels of a rough hewn, old ship, you find yourself longing for the giddy decadence of contemporary San Francisco. This is living history that hits hard.

Living history is fashionable these days. All over the world,  from Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts to Lunt Roman Fort in Warwickshire, authentically costumed interpreters strive (sometimes with embarrassing earnestness) to give the visitors an insight into vanished eras. Historic battles are laid on again, bread is baked, candles are dipped and disused coal mines opened up for the benefit of families in shorts and trainers looking for a bit of education mixed in with their entertainment.

 Television, naturally enough, has picked up on this trend - beginning modestly in 1987 by the BBC with The Victorian Kitchen Garden. This was an unassuming but charming exploration of nineteenth century horticulture, where TV gardener Peter Thoday and former country house gardener Harry Hodson recreated a traditional kitchen garden in  walled garden in Berkshire, resurrecting old growing techniques and old varieties. This series spawned various offshoots - especially notably being The Victorian Kitchen, which took the viewer into the house for the first time.  Ruth Mott a retired country house cook was provided with a kitchen maid. Although the recreation of the elaborate food was fascinating, it was the domestic interplay, the recreation of an upstairs downstairs world that viewers tuned in to see. For Ruth's willing volunteer, Alison Arniston, found herself condemned to a life of on screen drudgery at the direction of the gently authoritative Ruth. By the time of The War Time Kitchen and Garden in 1993, the formula was well established, and Ruth was cooking Woolton Pie for an evacuee and a land girl. It was almost an archaeological authentic soap opera with lavish production values.

 It was only a small step to complete immersion in a historical period, beginning with The 1900 House, where life in North London terraced house was recreated in a peculiar hybrid of reality TV and living history. In a house supposedly robbed of anything modern, hidden video cameras allowed the family to make video diaries. They were also periodically invaded by a film crew, which hardly added to the authenticity of the experience.  It was a big hit - mostly because of the sheer struggle and drama of day to day survival that the programme depicted – life in a house where the range will never heat enough water to wash the hair of three teenage girls who are already lamenting the lack of modern shampoo proved a draw for many viewers. This success has spawned other "historical" experiments culminating in The  Edwardian House where a group of volunteers spent three months living as the occupants of a country house in a recreated 1908. Again is it easy to see that the entertainment value of such programmes - the human interest angle is what draws the viewers in rather than the historical authenticity - they are  Big Brother for the thinking classes. It would probably be difficult to quantify the value of these experiments in hard historical evidence, beyond providing a ragbag of fascinating hints.[1]  But for social psychologists they are probably priceless - and the participants themselves saw them as social experiments, and regretted the way the programmes had been edited to emphasise human interest stories rather than the history.

 As this is being written, another group of volunteers is experiencing life in a country house of the Regency period, where the producers are probably hoping for interpersonal conflicts to speed along the explanation  of Jane Austen style domestic minutiae. A love affair or a good argument will ultimately be more interesting to more people than an authentic recreation of a Georgian dinner table, complete with corner dishes and white soup. However, the quest for authenticity in these docu-dramas and also in the worlds of museolgy and social history, has made period costume drama itself strive for greater accuracy - something which has affected both the look and feel of such series, but also the way stories are told and indeed chosen in the first place.

The supreme example of this is the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which has been a phenomenal popular success. This production had a raft of experts attached to it to ensure all the details were right - from the calico prints worn by the Bennett sisters to the dance steps in the Longbourn ballroom.  The role of these experts was featured in the publicity material for the series, and forms a substantial part of the accompanying book: The making of Pride and Prejudice. The guarantee of authenticity is something that companies producing such dramas are often keen to promote.

However Anne Hollander, the costume historian, points out: "Costume designers for the commercial stage or screen must pay attention to what has proved successful. For historical drama they must make use of historical signals to which the public responds, which continues to include current taste in reality - conventional natural' behaviour and emotional expression that all stage clothing must now encompass." [2]

The dilemma of the costume designer sums up the dilemma of anyone approaching historical material with a view to turning it into fiction. Historical accuracy must be served but also the demands of drama, as defined by the particular moment in time that the piece is being created. And there is the added challenge of making history palatable as well as accurate to the desired audience. Both history and drama are mirrors of our current preoccupations. One generation's painstaking historical accuracy is the next generations embarrassing solecism, while the shocking subject matter of one era is the commonplace of the next. A comparison between the fictional worlds created in Servants of 2003 and the hit ITV series of 1971-75 Upstairs Downstairs demonstrates this clearly.

Upstairs Downstairs was  created by two actors, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins. Jean Marsh in an interview stated "I remember very clearly when the idea came. Eileen Atkins and I were having Sunday lunch. We were both sick of playing smooth, middle-class ladies and, being Cockneys, felt that the working class got as rough a deal on television as they did in real life. The seed of the series really came from looking at some photographs of Eileen’s family - pictures of an Edwardian servants’ outing and one of those servants was a relation of Eileen’s. At this stage, we were just talking about it, taking notes. It was more of a hobby than anything else. Actresses were usually regarded as pretty but brainless and we just didn’t think it would get past a secretary’s desk." However John Hawkesworth at LWT was impressed with the idea. Jean Marsh recalled he "said, "Bring us everything you’ve written down - bring all those outlines." I said, "Yes...right." So I went to my agent’s office and I sat up, I think for about 24 hours, and their secretaries typed it out. I gave it to him the next day - these were the ideas, little bits of dialogue. I was very keen on the downstairs people not being comic cuts. I didn’t want the butler only to say, "Dinner is served." '[3]

John Hawkesworth outlined the idea for the series: "We wanted to see the servants as people. To look at downstairs as carefully as upstairs for the first time. This was the pearl in the oyster, the brilliant thing. Up to then servants had really just been mobile props." [4] The BBC adaptation of the Forsyte Saga[5] had shown that there was a tremendous appetite for period drama on television but Upstairs Downstairs had the pull of a fresh approach that was in tune with the social trends of the period.  Marsh and  Atkins' observation that "the working class got as rough deal on the television as they did in real life" enshrines the liberating spirit of the sixties, where class boundaries and the value of knowing and keeping to one's place had been seriously questioned. 

However hand in hand with this desire went the urge to recreate a lost and fascinating world in a time of rapid social change. Edwardian England, although within living memory for some of the viewers, was now for most, remote, fascinating and glamorous. A seductive nostalgia was at work in fashion in general - scrubbed pine tables and Laura Ashley lace trimmed frocks were current and Victorian houses were becoming appealing again. Alfred Shaughnessy, the series' script editor, hints at this when he indicates that escapism was on the agenda when describing some of the early rejected scripts which "started building up this below-stairs hell - rats and cockroaches and grime - making a sociological drama out of it, and I had to say, "This isn’t Maxim Gorky; we’re not doing The Lower Depths.""[6]

What was achieved was four seasons of well made three act dramas, with some serial elements, but in each episode the story reaches a satisfactory resolution. Despite their television format, the series has more in common with traditional theatrical forms than with film. Hawkesworth is recorded as regarding television as 'electronic theatre' and this philosophy underpins Upstairs Downstairs as firmly as Mrs Bridges' washing stays. The sets, beautifully designed and period authentic though they might be, are very obviously sets and the use of external locations is minimal. The writing is also firmly the tradition of such playwrights as Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham, and this is perhaps one of the things that gives Upstairs Downstairs such a feeling of period accuracy: it employs many of the theatrical conventions of the very period it strives to portray. In fact it isn't hard to imagine an episode where Lady Marjorie and Mr Bellamy go out to see a daring play about master and servants, and then return to the morning room for a brisk discussion about the shocking and uncomfortable realities they have seen depicted.

Most noticeably, there is no sharp cutting between scenes. Often the scenes lasted 20 minutes. Instead the action unfolds almost continuously, where possible. In the pilot (written by Fay Weldon)  for example the following events occur without a formal scene ending in the modern sense: Sarah, the new maid sent by the agency, walks up to the front door, only to be sent downstairs to the basement entrance by Mr Hudson the butler. She walks down, knocks at the back door, is admitted by Rose, the housemaid, and put to wait in the Servants Hall. Despite being told to stay put she walks through to the kitchen where the other staff are introduced, before Mr Hudson comes down again and tells her she is expected upstairs by the mistress.  He then accompanies her upstairs to the hall, where she sits and waits on a hall chair while Mr Hudson announces her to Lady Marjorie. The camera follows Sarah into the morning room and their interview as she is hired as a maid. The scene only ends when Mr Hudson and Sarah leave the room. In the next scene the other servants are sitting down to their midday dinner in the servants hall when Sarah and Mr Hudson come downstairs to join them, in chronological terms, that is, immediately after the morning room scene. The effect is that this is a huge stage and because of the leisurely pace, you are relaxed gently into the world of the story. The protocols of this strange world are made clear and the conflicts which are inherent are introduced with quiet subtlety. 

Because of this length, each unfolding scene can embody several twists and turns, allowing the actors to show a range of characteristics and emotions so that the audience really learns what they are like. For example In the climax scene when Mrs Bridges declares that a chicken has been stolen from the pantry, Hudson shows a Sherlock Holmes like glee as he investigates. When Sarah returns and is proved to be the culprit he behaves with appropriate severity only to be moved to mercy when it is revealed that Sarah can neither read nor write. One is left with a satisfying impression of a rounded character. The final scene in terms of today's television is even more remarkable. It involves Rose the head parlour-maid and Sarah, the new maid getting ready for bed in their rather miserable attic.  They discuss their differing attitudes to their lives, and Rose expresses regret and also resignation at her lot. "I like the house to run nice," she explains while Sarah is still lamenting the fact she has ended up in service.  Rose consoles her and soothes her to sleep by brushing her hair, on which muted note the episode ends.

Watching Upstairs Downstairs today in some ways seems as much an exercise in nostalgia as the series once aimed to be, as the style of television drama has changed so much. In fact it seems almost like an artefact of the period, strangely enough, with its 'problem play' format and veiled but tangible depiction of human sexuality. Of this, Rosemary Ann Sissons wrote: "I am sure that our Edwardian forbears indulged in sexual practices just as colourful as those which are filling so many columns of newsprint and so much radio and television time today. But somehow it seemed so much more important to us then to write about human relationships, about love, trust, betrayal and reconciliation. And, right or wrong, it seems to me now that our state was the more gracious."[7]  Certainly the series does seem to have a charm [8] which has allowed it to maintain an extraordinarily high profile,  with cable repeats and video sets reinforcing its place as a classic. A recent documentary about a cast reunion attracted large audience. Its characters have entered the public domain - Hudson an archetypal butler in the same league as Crichton and Jeeves, [9] while Mrs Bridges has given her name to commercially produced jams and biscuits.[10] 

It also spawned a generation of related drama products from The Duchess of Duke Street, to The House of Elliot[11], and later Berkeley Square which chronicled the lives of nineteenth century nannies. Servants must be seen in the light of this tradition and because there is a tradition, Servants goes out of its way to break with it.

The most striking difference between the two series, and the one which has been discussed in the press is that Servants is very consciously a downstairs only view of this particular world. In Servants the Earl and his family are anonymous, distant figures, who are not players in the drama.  They are like a temperamental engine which needs constant servicing but in terms of character and personality they are nothing more. The Earl is glimpsed with his trousers down,  masturbating over pornographic engravings or forgetting the name of his footman, or coming into the servant’s hall to recite the Lords Prayer with indifference haste.[12]  This is not a study in the relationship between those upstairs and those who serve them.  It is a drama about people in the workplace and all the unpleasantness contained therein. One might even see it as an attempt to do The Office in terms of period drama, for what the office worker is today, the domestic servant was in the nineteenth century.  

Like the first episode of Upstairs Downstairs, the pilot of Servants also deals with the arrival of an unconventional outsider, George Cosmo, who has arrived with false references.  But where in Upstairs Downstairs the story turns solely on Sarah's arrival and the unfolding of her character,  Servants plunges the view into a maelstrom of rival storylines: - the departure of the under butler, his fiancée Grace's dilemma about wether to leave with him, the arrival back of the family from Italy and the awkward business of getting a large marble statue up onto the roof.

Servants is shot on location in a suitably lush country house, and is jam packed with authentic details of nineteenth domestic century life. Chamber pots, dustpans and grubby towels are prominent. The second episode involved an outbreak of food poisoning complete with graphic vomiting.  Grace, trying to getting a job as a still room maid, was seen laboriously straining fruit jellies through muslin – a technique called tammying. But somehow the details fail to follow through into a sense of an authentic experience of the past. The modern boppy soundtrack doesn't help, neither do some howling mistakes. The severely handicapped son of the Earl is referred to as Lord Harry, when he would actually be an honourable - but oddly this mistake goes hand in hand with a laudable lack of modernity in his being referred to as 'the idiot' by everyone concerned. However the two black foot men, Joseph and Frederick, seem to encounter no racial abuse of any kind. There was merely some concern expressed in episode three, when Joseph was pitched against visiting footman in a hill race, that they would both lose their places if he lost the races as they were employed as a matching pair - again a perfectly accurate observation, as footmen were chosen for their looks as much as anything.  Religion is also similarly absent as a concern, for most of the time.  There is a superstitious Catholic maid, Charlotte, who incurs the wrath of the butler Mr Jarvis for keeping religious images but as a story it is tossed away.  In Upstairs Downstairs this conflict would probably fuelled a whole episode.

In Servants, the stories are about jockeying for position and getting the best out of the system. It is a corrupt world where the footmen are on the make and the maids are spiteful.  The upper servants are extremely authoritarian, and even at the upper servant level, where life was fairly luxurious, there is constant rivalry between the various departments. Jarvis the butler has been embezzling for years (again perfectly accurate)  and the housekeeper Mrs Ryan is forced to decide whether to turn him in.  She decides not too, only when she observes the Earl failing to remember the name of black footman who has just won twenty guineas, and accepts Jarvis' offer of a cut of the proceeds.  All the characters walk on glass, constantly in fear of loosing their places, which given, the conniving nature of the other characters, is understandable.  In Episode 3, Grace took revenge on Esther Spicer for bad mouthing her by picking all the flowers in the conservatory, scattering on the dead Honourable Harry, and then planting an incriminating sprig on Esther's skirt.  "If anyone does you down, you do'em down, only ten times worse," she tells her. This is a long way from the working class solidarity shown by Rose's tender treatment of Sarah.  What is being argued I suspect is that it is the system that has made them this way.

However, Servants greatest failure as a critique of a system lies perhaps in what has been touted as its most innovative feature: the absence of any real  presence in the story of the aristocrats at Taplows.

1850  is an interesting moment of history for Gannon to have chosen to depict - in historical terms it marks the end of the old intimacy between master and servants.  A historian of Blenhiem Palace points out "In Sarah’s (the first Duchess) day, (i.e. the seventeenth century) the servants at Blenheim had mingled much more with their master and mistress, and some of them such as Sarah’s personal maid, Grace Ridley, had themselves been gentry. But as actual power slipped from autocratic to middle-class hands, the rituals of subservience and the barriers of class were firmed up to offset the ongoing erosion. The yeoman farmer’s son who was valet to the 7^th Duke of Marlborough tried his best, as he went about the bedroom picking up wet towels and last evenings dress clothes had to be invisible. Every servant at Blenheim when the Duke stalked past had to flatten himself against a wall.” [13] She goes on to relate how the Duke of Abercorn insisted that the housemaids wore gloves to change the sheets on his bed and how the Duke of Welbeck sacked any housemaid he met in the corridor.

The wiring of country houses with a bell system was crucial to the reinforcement of this system.  Previously servants had been forced to wait around in the vicinity of their masters, and were consequently far more likely to observe, overhear and interact.  Bells, connected to the servant hall were standard in England by the 1820’s – something which impressed foreign visitors. Prince Pückler-Muskau recorded: ‘They are suspended in a row on the wall, numbered so that it is immediately seen in what room any-one has rung; a sort of pendulum is attached to each which continues to vibrate for ten minutes after the sound has ceased, remind the sluggish of their duty.’[14]

Such technologies contributed greatly to the to gradual separation of the two worlds and the erosion of the old intimacies.  Beau Brummel had pointed out at the turn of the nineteenth century that “no man is a hero to his valet” but for many Victorian aristocrats, it was clearly important to attempt to prove the opposite.  Houses were altered or specially constructed to enforce the separation as the century wore on, and the practical, pragmatic thinking of the day was called into service on the home front. The period saw in effect the industrialisation of domestic life. Long before le Corbusier coined the phrase, the Victorian Country house was a machine for living in, as carefully designed as a Manchester Manufactory. Vast wings containing specialised rooms were built,  carefully sited so as not to give domestics a good view of the gardens, and to be invisible from the main house. There were rooms for cleaning knives and storing brooms, for maintaining lamps and mending linen. At one house, there was even a room for ironing the newspapers.  It is this system at work that Servants is attempting to recreate within the terms of the drama, and to banish the masters from the stories must have seemed a logical step.

However to show the owners of Taplows at such a distance, indeed to make them all but irrelevant seems misguided in dramatic terms, when they are the most relevant people of all - they are the reason for this great assemblage of people and this hive of activity. The subtle portrayal of a woman like Lady Marjorie Bellamy in Upstairs Downstairs, who, as the daughter of an Earl, would have spent her youth in a house like Taplows[15] would have added a great deal to a critique of the system. For Lady Marjorie, far from being a idealised creation representing of the virtues of the ruling classes, is actually a monster for all her soft spoken elegance. She toys with the feelings of her staff like a cat playing with her prey, encouraging their intimacies and then repulsing them if they cross an invisible and ever moving line, determined as much by her own whims as by social convention.  Her husband, equally interestingly, is a working politician, who is as prepared to cut a deal as he is to uphold an ideal. Their children are disasters - especially James Bellamy who vacillates between irresponsibility and depression, and does exactly what gentleman always did and seduces the maid.  Yet they are memorable disasters and portrayed with the same attention to detail as the servants downstairs.

Servants is frank and earthy in its portrayal of sexual matters - the footmen have a woman in the village to go to as well as a heap of pretty maids to offer them favours. This is no more than the truth for the period. A letter from the owner of Hesleyside House recorded “Scandals in the laundry, which was nothing but a brothel until a new entrance was built and gates put up to keep the intruders out. The names of some of the upper servants were among some of the most licentious.” [16]        

Separation and segregation between genders was one the preoccupations of the nineteenth century country house. Taplows seems to be very lax in this respect - Cosmo the footman manages to see the object of his desire Grace in her night-gown for example, and there seems to be endless canoodling which fails to convince - possibly because one is not sure any of them would have had the energy let alone the leisure time for such activities.  But Servants, like Upstairs Downstairs, has a mission to entertain as much as educate, and the budding romance between Cosmo and Grace is about the only relief the viewer gets from the Machiavellian style machinations of the other staff members.

Perhaps to ask drama to be satisfying on a emotional level and convey trenchant historical truths at the same time, is to ask too much. Yet the lure of historical fictions is strong -  the challenge of recreating a lost world a very tempting one to any writer. These two series show two very different approaches to the problem.  Servants with its blood and guts realism combined with a very modern approach to story telling and pace, tries to set a new standard for historical drama but in its striving to be relevant and contemporary fails to deliver authenticity. This is perhaps because we want nostalgia as much as accuracy when we turn to history for our entertainment. In Servants nostalgia is as conspicuous in its absence from Taplows as the aristocrats upstairs, and the dish seems ill seasoned as a result, and unlikely to command the long term affection of the viewer. Upstairs Downstairs however shrewdly gave its audience all the nostalgia it wanted, but concealed in it a well argued critique that explored the issues of the time in a way that was both just and thought provoking.

But in the end Upstairs Downstairs became an institution because of the characters, all of whom were both recognisable archetypes and endearing individuals. Whether Servants has laid its own table so judiciously and elegantly remains to be seen.

Pictures and Conversations

On Saturday afternoon at the Kingston University annual publishing conference at the end of my talk about ebooks,  I nailed my colours to the mast, came out of the closet and embraced literally scores of well know phrases and sayings as I made a public declaration about Naked Angels. I told the audience that this is the serialised historical novel which I had just started writing  but which I have decided to go public with  episode by episode, rather than store it all up and then dither about what to do with it. It has been, so far a quite a liberating experience, and making this somewhat public commitment to carry on with it

I’ve talked about why I am doing this in my last post, http://fictionwitch.posterous.com/the-book-as-a-product  but since then I have begun to see that there are many other advantages to this form. One of which is that I can chose appropriate illustrations for it.

One of my favourite bits at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland is the bit where she discards her sister’s book because it has no pictures or conversations. “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” she thinks. 

Alice has here picked up on one of the great conventions of popular fiction; there should always be plenty of dialogue in a story. As a novelist, I always enjoy writing dialogue :it is to be to be a great way to move the story along, to create character, to build up the tension. And I certainly love to read novels where the dialogue just whisks you along through the narrative and entertains you at the same time. If I throw down a book in annoyance it is usually because I feel “people just don’t talk like that.”  It is not easy to do well. It requires lots and lots of rewriting, and muttering over the keyboard, and sometimes the adoption of silly accents to get the rhythm and sentence construction right. One person ought to talk quite differently from another. This is probably not something I always achieve, but I do attempt it.

 People in fiction, no matter what their socio-economic background, are of course far more articulate than people in real life. Sometimes they are dazzlingly funny. They are never short of that wonderful put down we only think of three hours after the awful meeting. Elizabeth Bennet for example never says the wrong thing.  Even people saying the wrong thing are funnier in fiction than they are in real life. Such are the joys of dialogue in fiction.

So much for conversations. What about pictures. In Alice’s day, grown up novels as well as children’s books often had illustrations, often by quite distinguished artists. Millais for example did a series of gorgeous illustrations to Trollope. It was clearly regarded as part of the package of a piece of fiction, and there is still something rather pleasant about looking through old books to see if they have pictures.

Some even had coloured frontispieces. I have some Edwardian mass market novels, which would probably today be branded as chic lit today. They have wonderful coloured plates at the beginning, a little like this one.

Now obviously I can’t commission an illustrator at this stage, but I can throw in a few pictures to set the mood of the story, and it is quite a pleasure (and an act of procrastination, no doubt) finding the perfect image to reflect each episode. They can act as visual footnotes. For example in an episode other day the Frazer family were eating shape for pudding, because it was Wednesday.(see http://fictionwitch.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/the-richest-man-in-pitfeldry/) I was able to find a lovely illustration of a Victorian blancmange mould, complete with recipe on the side, so that you too, can make shape.

I am sure this is exactly the sort of dull, economical food that Mrs Frazer would serve, and that such a mould (perhaps got free by cannily saving coupons) sits on the dresser waiting for Wednesdays. You will note it can be served with jam or marmalade, but I wonder if they would go so far. It would have been too enjoyable.

Naked Angels has moved, if you are interested in catching up with it to www.fictionwitch.wordpress.com.  Please subscribe, and comment if you find it of interest. I am still keen to hear from anyone who has any ideas about what might happen next.

The book as a product.

This is a horrible subject. Anyone who loves books will have shuddered at the title. The book is a sacred object, it is not a product. It is not processed cheese or a package holiday.

However we live in a world where books have become products. They are as subject to the laws of the market as any other commodity.

Printed books that is: the ones that require to be printed, warehoused, distributed before they can finally be stacked on the shelves of bookshops or increasingly supermarkets, to enjoy a brief window of opportunity, where they may or may not catch the fancy of consumers, before the unsold copies are packed up, replaced with something new, sent back and often, extremely depressingly for their authors, they are pulped.

 So if you want to sell your novel to a publisher now, you have to bear this cycle in mind. You have to be aware from the start, that as well as a compelling story, beautifully written, with a convincing setting and unique, unforgettable characters, that what they want from you is not just a novel, but a product.  Something that can be packaged up and promoted.  They will want the product to be summed up in a few lines, just like the Dragon’s Den want the bizarre invention summed up in a few lines.  They want to know in a flash what it is all about. This is of course the pitch, the calling card that any  product now hitting the market now needs. “It’s an organic face cream that uses wild thistles in a proven wrinkle reduction programme” or “It’s a dark police procedural set in contemporary Leeds where a menopausal DCI leads the hunt for a serial killer who targets menopausal women.” or in the case of the sort of book which is going for a literary prize: “It’s written from the point of view of a 12 year old asylum seeker who escapes the brutality of his present life by constructing a series of dioramas from Dante’s inferno, out of sweetie wrappers.” You only have to look at this year’s Booker list to see that the ‘issue’ is what makes these books easier to pitch. Or for women’s commercial fiction “While attending a family reunion in Cornwall, following the collapse of her successful PR/hat making business, Violet is forced to come to terms with the dark secrets that have cast a long shadow over her relationship with her siblings.”

This is not to say that weird and wonderful product defying books that cannot be summed up in a handy phrase are not getting out there, and being published, because there are plenty of agents and publishers who love books, and they do still take risks. But those that can be summed up neatly, even in the literary field, have a better chance of being published. There is less and less room for risky projects in publishing. The old idea of the bestseller funding the arty books, and the mid list steady in the middle, the books and the backlist practically selling themselves, is long gone. The book business has become the book biz, and it is driven by the bottom line. And writers, who want to be published will conform.

 That isn’t to say they will write badly. But they will be writing within constraints. For some that will be easier than other. Crime writers have long used the market friendly constraints of the crime genre to explore modern society but in the end its the “discovery of the body of prominent local philanthropist on the altar of the parish church”  that is going to make the sale of that book economically viable, not the searing social critique. It’s a sort of artistic trap but one that can be very good for some writers, because it makes them light on their feet, adaptable and inventive. They have to work their way round it and that can get great results. But it can also lead to blandness.

But what about the stories that can’t do this? The stories that, no matter how hard you try, refuse to be neatly packaged up. The ones that will not fit into the suitcase?

All writers of fiction I imagine have such projects. A set of characters, a place, a collection of impulses and conflicts which they would like to explore, but which seem to defy the necessary packaging of a marketable project.  What do you do with such an idea?

I have had one of these annoying things in my notebooks for ten years or so. The characters and their situations evolved over time. I have  a very rough idea of how things work in their lives but it takes place over forty years though, and there is no single protagonist with a driving goal.  It cannot be pitched as anything in particular. The best way I can describe it is as a high class soap opera..

And thinking of high class soap opera, I turn to Alexander McCall Smith and his very popular Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series.

Scotland Street began as a daily serial in 2004 in  The Scotsman newspaper, after McCall  Smith’s series of crime novels, beginning with “The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency” became a hit. You’ll note that a book in a distinct genre, that is crime, was what put in him in the big league. “The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency” was a very easy book to promote and create buzz. As well as having great literary merit, it is very easy to answer that “What’s it about?” question about it. 

McCall Smith chose for his serial a group of individuals living in and around Scotland Street, a very smart but still diverse street in Edinburgh’s New Town. He created the characters and some basic situations to drive the stories.  He then wrote a chapter each day about the on going lives and dilemmas of these characters.  Each episode is approximately 1300 words  and just long enough for the reader to enjoy with a cup of coffee, or on the bus.

It was a huge success, not least because McCall Smith affectionately but brilliantly sent up middle class Edinburgh and all its foibles. The serial was re-commissioned and the first set of episodes became a book, and has been followed by six more collections.  Then the Telegraph commissioned Corduroy Mansions, set in Pimlico, with the online newspaper readership in mind and that too seem to have hit the spot with large numbers of the public.

But can you imagine McCall Smith, pre the Precious Ramotoswe, attempting to pitch Scotland Street? “Well it’s about a group of quirky individuals living in a tenement in the New Town of Edinburgh. Nothing much happens - a woman takes her clever toddler to a therapist, a very rich hopeless young man has misadventures in love, there is a dog that gets lost...” “No banding together to fight off evil property developers?” “No.” “Any murders?” “Er no.”

So taking McCall Smith as my inspiration I had a look at my high class soap opera again.  I realised that the parts which I had already written broke down nicely into 1300 word chapters, and that just thinking about the material in that way, as a slow increment of stories, driven by small things, was incredibly inspiring. It seemed possible to begin to tell the story of these people in the way I wanted to tell it, without recourse to a driving, over arching narrative structure.  Rather I would be letting the characters control the story, allowing them to be the story, in fact. 

So in this spirit, I posted the first few bits here on August 21^st: http://nakedangels.posterous.com/  I have done this in a very minimal way, just to spur me into action.  I don’t think I will manage a chapter a day, but hopefully at least once a week. If you feel minded to read it, I hope you like what you find, and I’d love to hear your suggestions and comments about what you think ought to happen. 

Fashionable Fiction: The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin

In the book pages of the broadsheets I’ve noticed that there is a selection of topics that crop up over and over again. These are topics guaranteed to produce lots of opinionated columns and plenty of polemic in the comments section of the online editions. They can never be satisfactorily resolved and therefore can come out again, be dusted down and milked another time.

They are as follows: 

• The novel is dead. Or is it?
• Genre X is fundamentally rubbish and anyone ought to be ashamed to be seen reading it. (most commonly attached to women’s fiction or romance fiction, but crime fiction often gets a  good bashing then a spirited defence)
• Why, oh why, won’t people read literary fiction and will insist on reading Dan Brown?
• Why do women need their own book prize (ie the Orange)?
• Why is no-one today writing the great books that reflect contemporary society the way Dickens and Tolstoy did?

We are currently in a cycle of “The novel is dead”  This reached its apotheosis in a late night discussion from the Edinburgh Book Festival on BBC’s Late Review the result of which was that the novel was declared neither dead nor alive. Certainly I felt none the wiser.

At the end of this discussion, one of the panelists Ian Rankin pointed out  that there were still no crime novels on this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. When I saw this I’d just finished reading The Naming of the Dead, and it struck me as grossy unfair that Rankin had not made the shortlist previously because of the snobbery attached to the genre he writes for. Because for me, The Naming of the Dead answers a lot of those questions that the book pages love to kick around.

In Rankin’s skilful hands the novel is not dead. He completely transcends the limits of his genre, while remaining fastidiously true to it.  His adept story telling provides such diversion and shows why people will always read for a great story. And I think this story, set as it is against real life events - the G8 summit, shows him exploring and critiquing contemporary life, just like those nineteenth century greats did.

The Naming of the Dead is the 16^th Rebus Novel, but since I haven’t read any of the others, I could take it as a stand alone, almost as if it were a Booker contender.It didn’t feel like a novel in a series and you didn’t need to have read all the others to understand what was going on.

It took me a while to get into it. His pace is leisurely. You do get a good wander about seeing how the land lies, but really what he is doing is coaching you to go at Rebus’s pace:  steady, but always acutely observant. Then you start to relax into the stream of consciousness, seeing and feeling the way the world appears to Rebus. Rebus is perhaps numb and slow to warm up at the beginning because he’s just buried his brother and doesn’t quite know what that means to him yet. But as the case unfolds and he has a murderer to chase the pace heats up slowly.  But it isn’t breathless. There is time to pause and consider. You can put the book down, but you know you will come back to it. Rebus beckons you back to tell you what it was he did next and how that all transpired. About a third of the way though you start to long for a train journey so you can really get your teeth into it. But yet you are allowed to put it down, the rests are there. You can go away and think about what you have read, let the scenes resonate in you mind. 

I think the very breathless school of story telling, where you gobble a novel down like junk food, desperate for the answers, has its place, but Rankin’s approach is far more satisfactory. It is companionable, like having a drink with a friend. You want to take your time. It’s like a lovely piece of rich fruit cake or dark chocolate. You can nibble at it very slowly and be deeply satisfied.

And all the while, he’s being sneaky and clever with you. He’s doing real literature, Man Booker judges, take note.

Take the character of Big Ger Cafferty, the gangster. Now I am not one to read anything with gangsters in it. I do not want to be disturbed by organised crime and all its horrible implications, but Rankin makes me look at this stuff, and consider it.  At first Cafferty is horrible, a monster, and I am rightly repulsed. But then he appears again and again and I begin to be seduced by him, by his devil-like power.  Rebus speaks of Cafferty getting his claws into people and I realise the writing has done the same. Cafferty is no longer just a horrible gangster, he’s a fully rounded human being, who has to use the banisters to get himself back up the stairs.  Furthermore we learn he lives in Merchiston and has a baby grand piano.  I find myself wondering if he ever plays and if he does, what does he play? What do his neighbours think? Do they even know what he is? The unspeakable has become utterly real, and is revealed in all its complexity. I find I am thinking about James Hogg and the Memoirs of a Justified Sinner where the devil is so attractive. Rankin is making clever allusions here, but deftly.  Remember he’s doing all this in a crime novel, a genre that the snobby judges of the Booker won’t consider worthy of their consideration.

And when the crime is solved, you see evidence of how sophisticated a piece of work this is. You realise how all the themes link up and echo. You could set this as a set text in schools - there would be plenty for students to get their teeth into, endless issues and angles to discuss and consider. There is nothing slight about it.It is deeply felt, full of humour and compassion for the human condition, all in a skilfully wrought package that obeys all the rules of a crime story. When you consider Rankin's popularity you can't help but think that in such hands the novel can only be in rude health. It is about time that the literary establishment recognised his considerable achievements.

Big my secret...

“The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there.” So writes L.P Hartley on in the first line of his novel, The Go-Between. This is possibly one of the best opening lines in all fiction.  It says so much about the novel that is about to unfold and also about the nature of historical fiction. In fact, it pretty much sums up the genre and why it has such enduring appeal.

The past is a place where all those of us who enjoy reading history and historical fiction want to go. We want to do that big trip. If  only we could we would pack our backpacks with antibiotics, painkillers and water purification kits and set off, like hopeful gap year travellers, off into the past, knowing that it will be dirty and unpleasant and probably dangerous, but hungry for the experience.  Since we cannot travel there, we turn to books, and in particular the novel to give us what we want.

Everything is different in the past - the food, the clothes, the transport, the buildings, the furniture. Everything. All this should find its way into the pages of a good historical novel, but there should be more of course more than that.  The manners and the morals of the period ought to shape the story as well.

For writers, charged with making those stories, this is very good news indeed. We live in a world now where pretty much anything goes in terms of manners and morals. What our grandparents would have found shocking, we, generally do not. We no longer routinely condemn bastardy or have a fit of the vapours about pre-marital sex. This tolerance makes it hard for novelists dealing with the contemporary world. If you are on the look out for sources of conflict, the past with all its clear cut morality is very appealing. As a mechanism for creating tension and suspense it is hard to beat. Setting a piece of fiction in the past allows a writer to put metaphorical moral blinkers on the reader and then when characters break the rules and shocks his or her world, the reader is also shocked. It allows small sins that we would not think twice about to become big, dirty secrets that can then be revealed in all their sordid and surprising glory. The personal stakes are instantly raised when the rigid morality of a past epoch is invoked.

There is off course just such a shocking secret in at the heart of “The Go Between.” In this case the pair of lovers are crossing the class divide with their forbidden and very animal passion.  She is the daughter of the aristocratic household, he is a farm labourer. It is all very shocking, and they know they have to keep it a secret so as not to bring down the sanctions of society upon them.  The first time I read “The Go Between”  (at about the age of 14) I was suitably horrified.  How could that world be so cruel to them? How wrong was it that they had to be so furtive?  And the conclusion one must draw that such a story could never be so shocking now. There might be a bit of tut-ting but honestly, we are better than that these days, surely?

But revisiting the story now, I see that my reading of it then was hopelessly superficial and that L.P Hartley has done something far cleverer with his historical setting. The story is still shocking, deeply so, but for another reason all together. Yes the two lover are having a secret affair that transgresses their particular societal code, but what makes it disturbing is that they chose to involve an innocent child in their tangle of lies. That by anyone’s standards is unpleasant and unethical, and that is the message you take from The Go Between: how a pair of selfish strong willed adults can and will manipulate a weaker individual for their own ends. It is that observation that takes make “The Go Between” far more than a beautifully written exploration of a historical period. Put those characters in modern dress and remove the class difference and make them do the same thing and it still has the power to shock us.

That wonderful opening line, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” is then both true and ironic.  The past is not so foreign:  bad behaviour, cruelty, manipulation have not gone the way of carriages and the penny post.  They are with us still and will always be.  They are part of the human condition.

A great historical novel is always more than an excuse for the reader for wallow in a warm bath of nostalgia. Like the study of history itself, the aim ought to be to make us understand something of how the world really works. Yes there will be story, there will be suspense, there will be tears and laughter, but there will also be an attempt to make the reader more aware of the aspects of human life, for good or ill, that are universal and timeless. This “The Go Between” achieves quite brilliantly and it leaves a most unpleasant taste in the mouth, that the beauty of the white lace dresses of the heroine, as  worn by Julie Christie in the sumptuous and equally effective film version, can never quite dispel. 

Behold the works of William Morris...

Thanks to some intelligent thinking at the Victorian and Albert Museum, you can now once again have your refreshments in the original William Morris decorated tea-room. So on both my recent visits I have been able to eat in a place which was always intended to be an eating place, where quite a few iced buns, beef sandwiches and ports of strong, fortifying et have been drunk, under the soothing, dark green and gold embrace of dear Mr Morris and his lovely patterns. How many people have sat here and thought; "This might be just the thing for the drawing room?" This was of course what the whole thing was about in the first place - the V and A was conceived as a primer in visual good taste. 

It is very soothing because it is very familiar to me, but it also is wonderful fresh. It is very dark and bold, and rather glamorous. I'd love to see it by candlelight.

Across the way the wife of the dignified Italian couple has just taken a photograph of some of the details. These two are museum quality in themselves, slightly square and yet stylish in that European way that we Brits just cannot manage. He is almost raffish but still elegant with his open-necked shirt, but she wears a light grey checked suit, pearls and a bright coral sweater. The pearls are big ones and look luscious in the soft light.

Pomegranates, apples, oranges, cherries and squashes hang above my head, all in neat panels of green, on backgrounds of embossed gold, which I assume is to put one in mind of Spanish Gilded Leather. But they may me think of the backgrounds in medieval paintings of saints - a sort of  timeless, heavenly canopy. I love the almost religious significance this gives to these fruits. They are so absolutely, unashamedly decorative, as if decoration means more, is important, can in fact change the world.

I think William Morris did change the world and it was not when he tried being a utopian communist. It was when he set up shop as a high class house-furnisher and decorator, and did very well at it. It was financially successful, but I think he made wallpaper into something that is actually good for the soul.

It would be interesting to see if there was a demonstrable neurological effect when someone looks at something so beautiful, so balanced, so right within itself as a panel of Morris Willow Bough.

I wonder what Morris felt about his wall paper designs. Did he have any idea how powerful and enduring they were? 

Blane again

We have just launched a new e-editions of my novel the The Daughters of Blane, which you can buy from www.harrietsmart.com or here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/16334

One of the questions novelist are always asked is where the idea for a particular story came from. In the case of this novel, it was from a place and a painting.

The place was Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. If you are planning any summer trips in that part of the world, I would highly recommend at trip to Penrhyn which is utterly astonishing. Built in the 1820's by architect Thomas Hopper, with the stupendous profits from slate mining, the Castle is a neo-Norman fantasy of epic proportions. 

The interiors are especially jaw dropping.

I knew all about the place before I went, and had seen photographs but nothing could prepare me for the reality of it. I simply gawped and thought "I must use this in a story." The atmosphere was helped by the fact the NT had introduced audio guides which meant that although there were lots of people there they were not chatting but listening to their guides. And perhaps like me, they had been rendered partially speechless by the over-the-top-ness of it all.

The other thing was a painting: Sargent's very famous triple portrait of the Acheson Sisters.

In Blane, a similar picture is painted of my three heroines by aspiring young Scots painter, James Henderson. Unfortunately for him, his career is not as wildly successful as Sargent's and his story forms one of the sub-plots of the novel. 

When the novel was first published by Headline in 1994, it had a gorgeous cover design by George Sharp which combined the two elements, so that Penrhyn Castle appears in background  to the right of the sister with the black and white sash, who in the story is the middle sister Leonora.

In the story the painting is bought by John Cameron, Isobel's future husband and is last mentioned hanging in their palazzo in Venice. But, as the Telegraph always says, it can be revealed, the painting of course came back with Isobel when she moved into a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1900, and has been there ever since, the property of the Cameron family. Blane Castle, like its real life counterpart, has of course passed into the hands of the National Trust.

My perfect E-book reader

I haven't seen it yet, but I  will know it when I see it. And then I will buy one. 

• It will be about 13cm by 20cm and about 1cm thick. About the size of an ordinary UK paperback in fact. There is a reason real books are the size they are - they fit comfortably into human hands.
• It will not be too heavy to carry about.
• It will have a lovely clear full colour screen like the one on my Samsung phone or for that matter the iPod Touch.  The screen will be touch sensitive.
• The non-screen part will not be made of some shiny sexy material so highly polished that it slithers out of your hand (like the iPod).
• It will have some kind of a handle that makes it easy to hold for long periods, particularly if I have arthrtitic or unsteady hands.
• I will be able to plug it into the mains to recharge or via a USB cable to my laptop. It will have superb battery life of course.
• I will be able to get it in other colours than black.
• I will be able to store my music on it and listen via headphones.
• It will have full internet connectivity.
• It will have great library software so I can store, organise and bookmark all my reading.
• It will also store my photos - but probably doesn't need a camera
• It will be incredibly simple to operate.
• It doesn't need to make phone calls. It would be a bit silly at that size.
• All software developers can develop and sell apps for it without fear of censorship.
• It will be robust - I will be able to drop it and my child can smear jam over it. 
• The screen will be scratch resistant already so I don't have to buy, cut out and stick on that fiddly clear plastic sticky stuff.
• It will have a virtual keyboard.
• It might have a stylus and could operate as a graphics tablet/sketchbook.
• It will look gorgeous and be an object of desire.
• Clever people will make elegant cases/bags for it, not tatty plastic things.
• It will be sensibly priced to make adoption very widespread.
• It will be the book 2.0 really.

Bernard Fleetwood-Walker - All Known Works

via fleetwood-walker.co.uk

Although they're very stylised, I thing there is a great sense of individual character. Love the implications of their relationship in this one. A real novelist's painter I think.

Early reactions to The End of the Party

As a reward for completing my VAT early, I treated myself to a copy of The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley. As it was only two days after publication I also have vague hopes it might be worth something one day. I am only a few chapters in but it does seem to be a fairly momentous hatchet job.  Gordon Brown and co must be quite relieved that the huge size and expense of it will deter the many from finding the energy and cash to buy it, at least before the election which must happen this year.

Thoughts so far: this is a classic bit of narrative history, albeit only the history of the last ten years, with events at which he was often present. As a narrative it is as compelling as any novel. It has all the ingredients of a great novel - rounded, well drawn characters who are as flawed as they are talented, titantic amounts of conflict and something really important at stake.

Firstly those characters - Brown, Blair and Mandelson. Any novelist would have been proud to come up with a cast like this, and even more pleased to have drawn them so finely and freshness. These are familiar faces but now they seem quite new. There is a great sense of revelation, of going behind the scenes.  Even four or five chapters into the book,  I have a great sense of what makes them tick, what their goals are, and why that is problematic in relation to the others.

The conflict comes out of the characters, and their irreconcilable differences. This is always extremely satisfying in narrative terms. These three men are locked in a menage a trois. They have been comrades in the battle of opposition but  now they have now fallen out. They have acquired great power and all the  responsibility that implies, and they must try and share it. Except they can't. It is a toxic combination. Each seems to bring out the worst in the other and in all the people about them. This is all made  perfectly clear, as is the tragedy that will inexorably follow, with so much at stake -  the fate of the country no less. It is compelling.  I am desperate to read on.  I want to sit up all night with this book as if it were an airport thriller designed to keep me on the edge of my seat.  Rawnsley takes his raw material and makes it  sing.

But part of me does not want to read on. I am riveted but the writing is so good that the truths he expresses hit too hard. This is my country these men are messing up with their personal conflicts.  This is not Shakespeare. It is what has happened in Britain during the last twelve years. It is enough to make one throw the book across the room in despair. Which is not what Mr Rawnsley deserves. I just wonder if he has not done his job rather too well.  Could I stomach these truths better if they were presented, dare I say it, with less writerly panache?  But then would I ever read it? And is  it not his intention that I should feel such disgust and want something better from the political process.  Is it a call to action? I think it probably is.

And that shows us again the power of the essential ingredients of narrative: well drawn characters with attitude, great interpersonal conflict and something important at stake.  Rawnsley could have written a dull book even given his extraordinary material. I have read non-fiction books about sensational subjects that have completely failed to bring the subject to life.  But he is a master of his craft and he avoids the traps. I think I am going to be dragged kicking and screaming through it.  I can't wait.