The Reader Travels

Even with its long history, English writers are always looking to the future. Mary Shelley is sometimes credited with writing the first science fiction novel, and H.G. Wells helped to popularize the genre and make it what it is today.

I’ve read at least four different versions of London’s future, and they’re all thought-provoking adventures with lots of political, religious, sexual and social commentary. So I thought I’d do a short tour of alternate reality London, give us all some things to think about.

When you’re looking on the future, you’re looking on the unknown. You can look at it through the eyes of hope or the eyes of fear. Of course, fear makes for better story-telling. Also, you can’t deny that fear sells.

Join me. Don’t be afraid.

We took our little dog for a walk in the park last weekend, and as we were leaving, I looked out the window and said, “Golly, are those men playing cricket?” And indeed, they were.

Cricket may have originated in England, but it comes to Dallas/Fort Worth by way of India. Certainly, imperialism has its evils, but a world of common language and common sports can be a beautiful thing.

It makes me think of the movie Lagaan, if only because it’s about British people teaching Indian people how to play cricket. The story itself is a classic sports tale of underdogs beating their oppressors, all with the color, music, energy and long-lasting entertainment of Bollywood.

It was a strange thing for me to see cricket in Texas, so I had to look it up to find out how widespread the sport is here. It seems that lots of people are playing cricket in the Big D. And suddenly, I’m having the urge to buy the world a Coke, but only the kind you can buy outside of the US in places where they don’t put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

What a world.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway considers the meaninglessness of gossip and high society gatherings in comparison with all the wars, conquest and politics happening in the world.

Clarissa Dalloway is fluttering about all day worried about the party she is throwing that night, while her former suitor, Peter Walsh, walks around town thinking about how shallow and pretentious she’s become since he first fell in love with her. He’s gone off to India, become a world traveler, and here she sits with her cushy, sheltered life worried about her guest list. And that guy she married, what a simpleton he is.

Really, Peter’s just bitter that she didn’t pick him. And he’s a hypocrite, too. She may be consumed with her place in society, but he’s really no better. He reads the news and thinks about the importance of his own frivolous interests…

“But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case.”

A man has to have priorities.

Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is autobiographical, all about his life-long obsession with the Arsenal soccer team. After all, football is life to many Londoners. The book has been made into two different movies, an English version that stays true to Arsenal, and a US version that finds a common truth in Boston Red Sox baseball.

I look at fashion and high society sometimes, and I wonder how people can be so obsessed by something so entirely meaningless. Other people look at sports that way. But they’re both a form of art, imitating life, representing life on a stage, in caricature.

I had the pleasure of watching part of a Red Sox playoff game last weekend with a friend from Boston. Baseball is a game that takes dedication to really appreciate it. With so many psychological factors at play, if you don’t understand the subtleties, you won’t understand the art. On the surface, it just looks like a slow, boring game to be tolerated, and only enjoyed when accompanied by lots of beer.

But he made it fun. He talked about the rabid Red Sox fans, and we cheered when a Boston boy grabbed the ball just before it hit the opponent’s glove. He gave us full explanations of what was happening beyond the pitching and the batting and the running and the fielding, and through his words, I had a new taste for the sport.

I guess sometimes the best of life is in those details, in frivolous passions and common joys.

Oh, and one last thing? Go Cowboys!

I suppose my insensitivity is a defense mechanism. I use logic to keep my emotions in check. If I have a loved one who is suicidal, my logical side wonders which is more selfish, for him to put me through the pain of losing him this way, or for me to want him to stay alive in so much pain. It’s a sadomasochistic situation, no matter which way you look at it. Someone will be hurt. Plain and simple.

So my logic says, don’t take things personally. Let him go if he wants to go. Let him make his own choice. Doris Portwood’s book, Common Sense Suicide: The Final Right, argues that senior citizens should have the right to choose their own death without the risk of stigmatizing themselves. After all, they have lived a full life and they’re old enough to make these decisions for themselves. And why does it have to be a “sin”?

Early in the book, she talks about the history of our current attitudes toward suicide, in somewhat ironical terms. Isn’t this silly, then?

“In England in the 1860s, a man who had cut his throat was arrested for the crime and condemned to die by hanging. A doctor pointed out that such a procedure would open the slit throat, admit air – and foil the noose. But the hanging went on regardless, with the authorities determined to do their duty toward the sinning would-be suicide. His throat did open, as predicted, but he was bandaged and patched up sufficiently to keep life within him just long enough for it to be snuffed out by the prescribed punishment.”

Of course, the mistake I make again and again is in thinking that logic has anything whatsoever to do with it.

I spent a little time in London this year, an adventure that started on the roof of a “Toppers’ House” on New Year’s Eve, a place where people go to off themselves. A Long Way Down was the first Nick Hornby book I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.

It was a quick, fun read, mostly dialogue, and I can see why his books translate so well to movies. I’ll have to read High Fidelity and About a Boy and Fever Pitch, sometime in the future when the movies aren’t so fresh in my memory.

Anyway, Hornby has a way of turning tough situations into comedy. I have a small obsession with the subject of suicide, so I really loved how he handled the topic in A Long Way Down.

Every one of the characters is suicidal and sad, each in a unique way. I have never been suicidal, but I have a lot of loved ones who have been plagued with thoughts of suicide. So, I often wonder what makes them feel that way, other than having a crappy life in general.

Although A Long Way Down is funny, all four of the characters are well drawn, real people with real motivations. I guess it really helps to step back and laugh at yourself sometimes, stop taking yourself so seriously. Or consider some good medication anyway.

Graham Greene actually worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone during World War II, so he had some real life experience to back up his stories of Africa and espionage.

In The Human Factor, Agent Castle spent some time in South Africa, but now he’s back home in London, working in an intelligence office deciphering intercepted messages. As I mentioned before, Graham Greene converted to Catholicism for his wife, and like Greene, Castle also makes certain sacrifices in his life for love. He’s bored in his office job, but that’s what he gets for marrying an African, right?

There’s a job opening up in Sierra Leone, but he won’t get it. He and his wife simply wouldn’t do to represent the British government in Africa. Besides, it’s just too dangerous. They’d be too hard to protect.

The black woman and the white man create a visual symbol of love that unites across diversity. So, Greene was a Protestant and his wife a Catholic. Love found more common ground, something deeper and more meaningful than those outward labels.

And yet, he dwells on the sacrifice. It certainly makes for interesting fiction, though.

Like Amy Tan herself, her main characters are Americans. They lack any insights into the spiritual world because their land is shiny and new, whitewashed and sometimes superficial. It is only back in the old country that we see spirits come to life, in a land with centuries of custom, tradition and ancestors who watch over their families on earth.

I’d like to keep traveling west from China, all the way to England, another place with a long, long history and their own connections to the new world of America. Although Henry James pre-dates magical realism, I can’t help but think of his novella The Turn of the Screw, when we talk about the fuzzy borders between the “real” and the spiritual.

Many a college literature course asks students to answer the question, is James’s ghost real, or is it simply a product of a disturbed mind? It’s funny to watch the different film adaptations of the book to see which took the ghost angle, and which was from the crazy school.

I like to think James’s ghosts were real, and here’s why. James was born in the US, but moved to England and claimed it as his home. An anglophile to the core, James would have rejected the shiny newness of his birthplace and embraced the fact that more people take their ghosts seriously in old England.

Who knew Henry James was a magical realist?

The badger thought he would be defeated by a big burly blonde German warrior, not nerdy little Malcolm Fisher in his beat-up car. He really was Expecting Someone Taller.

Tom Holt brings the cursed Rhine gold ring to modern-day England by way of Ingolf the giant, disguised as a lowly badger to escape the greedy hands of Wotan and his army of valkyries. Malcolm’s life is turned upside down when he runs over the talking badger, inherits the ring of power and unleashes the wrath of gods who all think the ring is rightfully theirs.

Holt is a fan of Wagner, who composed a whole series of operas called The Ring of the Nibelung. He’s also quite the comedian, and Expecting Someone Taller will make you laugh out loud (if you’re one of those people who laughs out loud).

Of course, when I think of Wagner’s viking operas, I have another funny image in my head. The song goes, “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit…” I think Holt just had a thing for rabbits and decided to kill a badger instead.

I love to watch Mira Nair’s movies, especially the ones filled with the color and beauty of India, like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. One movie she directed that didn’t take place in India was Vanity Fair, but it too had her color and beauty infused into it.

I had a problem with her take on the story, though. The vivid colors and the Indian imagery were great, the production splendid, but she made the main character into a heroine, when Thackeray specifically stated in the subtitle that his story had no hero. Nair white-washed the utter bitch that was Becky Sharp, back stabbing, trash talking, shallow, lying, cheating… And on top of that she was a truly crappy mother, but even that was someone else’s fault in the movie.

Okay, so after watching the DVD interviews, it seems that Nair was bewitched by Becky as a young girl and always saw her as a great, yet flawed heroine. So, maybe she just wanted the rest of the world to see Becky with her same delusion. That’s okay, right? Image is everything.