Articles
In praise of Karen Murphy, pub landlady extraordinaire
Review of Andrei Kurkov's The Milkman in the Night, published in the Financial Times 29th July 2011
NIGEL’S STORY – ‘I SAW HIM CLINGING TO A LAMP POST’ Published in The Guardian Aug 2007
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The Mill on the Floss
I felt very honoured to be asked to write the introduction for a new Vintage Classics edition of the Mill on the Floss.
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is possibly my all-time favourite book, but I have a reason for feeling special a closeness for The
Mill on the Floss.
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This year is the anniversary of Tolstoy's death. A number of contemporary writers, including me, contributed to this piece in the Guardian about his lasting influence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jan/06/leo-tolstoy-greatest-writer
Shopping at Oxfam
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/content/books/author-marina-lewycka.html
NIGEL'S STORY
- 'I SAW HIM CLINGING TO A LAMP POST'
Published in the Guardian August 2007
Before the floods in central England hit the news, we had some floods up in Yorkshire, you know. I was away from home when they happened, stuck on a train that couldn't get beyond Derby. I had to spend the night with a friend in Birmingham, and glued to the television, we watched the floodwaters rising in my home town. In one shot, as the rescue helicopter circled over the stricken area, you could see the figure of a man clinging to a lamp post with the water swirling around him. Today, Sheffield being the village it is, I met that man.
Nigel Robinson is thirty five years old, and does the books and payroll for a large taxi-firm. On June 25th he'd set out from the office to collect some paperwork from an office supplier. It had already started to rain. The traffic was crawling. "It's nothing but a bit of rain," he thought. At one point, when he seemed to be stuck, he decided to turn the car around and head back into town, where he thought he'd at least be able to get a bus home. He was still thinking it was just a bit of rain. The traffic was jammed, and the water was a few inches deep. His car - a trusty J-reg Astra - stalled, and he couldn't get it going again. By now, the water was lapping at the car door. It was obvious this was more than just a bit of rain. He had no choice but to get out and walk.
Suddenly, the water was up to his chest, rushing like a river. He tried to get across the road, but was swept off his feet and carried along in the flood, struggling to keep his head above the filthy sewage-tainted water. "I really thought this was he end," he said. But the water threw him up against a lamp post, and he clung on for dear life. This was the clip I saw on the news bulletin, endlessly repeated. "Oh, how embarrassing," he said when I told him. But what I wanted to know was - what happened next?
It wasn't the rescue helicopter, it was the workers in the Chamber of Commerce across the road who spotted him, and reached out with a long pole - maybe a flag pole - and hauled him to safety. Ok. Phew. That was it, then? Safe at last? No, Nigel's adventure had only just started.
As the water rose, the Chamber of Commerce building itself got flooded; they managed to attract the attention of the rescue helicopter and were winched up from the roof, Nigel included, and whisked to safety in the Meadowhall Shopping Centre, a few miles away, where an emergency centre had been set up. They were given blankets and hot drinks.
But the waters carried on rising. They were evacuated to the top floor of the shopping centre. By now, Nigel was shivering and throwing up uncontrollably - the filthy water he'd swallowed obviously hadn't done him any good. And Meadowhall itself, where dozens of people were sheltering, was at risk. So the helicopter was called in again, and Michael was winched up for his third rescue of the day, and flown to Rotherham General Hospital.
Meanwhile, just a few miles up the road, cracks had appeared in the giant Ulley Resevoir. If that was to be breached…
But it wasn't. Nigel went home the next afternoon to the maisonette in a nineteen fifties council estate in a suburb on the south side of Sheffield, where he lives with his partner, a nurse, and his teenage step-daughter, and tried to make sense of what he'd been through. The following day, he reported in to work as though nothing had happened.
'So what did they make of your story, at work?'
'The boss said, you'd better watch out - all the women will be after you.'
'And were they?'
He blushes bashfully.
'And so - how do you feel now?'
'Well,' he hesitates. His ordeal still weighs on him, but he doesn't want to be thought an attention-seeker. 'I wouldn't want to
go through it again, like.'
This week
I've been reading: Sandy Tolan's moving and painstakingly researched The Lemon Tree about the meeting between a Jewish woman
settler and the Palestinian brothers who had lived in the same house before the Israel occupation. I've also been reading
Dad's Mad, a blook (yeah, how cool is that?) by brothers Alan and Michael Cleaver: 'The terrifying but true account of how
Dad spiralled out of control into hypermania, jetted around the world, got scammed left right and centre and spent
£70,000 in just 12 months.' He also built a number of aviaries and killed or lost dozens of canaries.
I've been watching endless clips from YouTube, emailed to me by my dear husband who is 'working' in the next room. I can see that the nation's economy is grinding to a halt as this scenario is repeated in offices all around the country. I've viewed the trailer to Sicko, The Kiwi National Anthem with names of famous All Blacks players substituted for the words, grainy Soviet-era videos, Looking for my wallet and my car keys (a song about …er…people of my generation getting absent minded and losing things), and the Helsinki complaints choir. Hopefully he'll soon grow out of it.
I was introduced early to The Mill on the Floss, because as a child I lived in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, which is said to have been the model for St Ogg's, where this novel is set. We were given selected excerpts to read at school, and told that we should be honoured and respectful that our small nondescript town had been touched with the magic wand of Literature.
Perhaps that should have put me off for life, for as a twelve year old I struggled with George Eliot's prose, yet in spite of that I can remember being captivated by the story of the brother and sister who clashed bitterly yet were finally reunited in death, drowned in the fearsome river that still surged around the outskirts of our town. I identified with Maggie, the stubborn dreamy heroine, her nose always stuck in a book, desperate for approval and love. Like me, Maggie couldn't do anything with her hair, and had 'problem' parents, her well-meaning suffocating mother and her kindly but obdurate father who brings the family to ruin. I say 'like me' for I didn't realise at the time that this was George Eliot's gift as a writer - to reveal the universal within the particular. I thoroughly sympathised with Maggie's attempt to run away from home - in fact I once tried something similar myself - and I was enchanted by Bob Jakins and his dog Mumps. But above all, it was George Eliot's quick precise sketches of the Lincolnshire countryside, the river, the willows, the "delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs", "the great chestnuts in blossom, and the grass all deep and daisies" that drew me in.
It wasn't until I revisited The Mill on the Floss, some ten years later, as a student, that I realised how much I had missed on that earlier edited reading. As school-children, George Eliot's 'philosophy' had been considered too difficult for us, and we had been given only the story to read. Now I saw that, alongside the story, the novel was brimming with ideas, with wisdom, with dry humour and pearls of insight. It was the 1970s, the birth of the women's movement, and one thing that struck me at that time was how much George Eliot had anticipated and articulated the struggles of women to be treated as the equals of men. When Maggie's father chooses to send her dull brother to school in preference to bright bookish Maggie, he says, "…an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep - she'll fetch non the bigger price for that." And towards the end of the book the lawyer Wakem uses another 'livestock' metaphor: "We don't ask what a woman does but to whom she belongs." Just as shocking to the feminist reader is the casual acceptance by both Tom and Maggie of their unequal situation. "I've got a great deal more money than you because I'm a boy," says Tom.
If my feminist sympathies saw Maggie as a model of a modern woman trapped in an outdated and stultified social order, my post-1968 radical sensibility warmed to George Eliot's critique of the narrow-mindedness of provincial bourgeois society, where religious allegiance "appeared to run in families, like asthma" and where "the worst that could happen (is) not death but disgrace." The scene in which Mrs Tulliver, humiliated by her husband's bankruptcy, must face the ignominy of her more fortunate sisters poring through her linen and silverware and deciding which to buy at auction is a remarkable metaphor of the way our possessions come to define us. The Dodson ladies are concerned less by their sister's suffering than by the shame of seeing property marked with the family initials sold into the hands of strangers. Yet George Eliot's gentle mockery of the complacent St Ogg's society seemed fresh and relevant in the seventies not because she predicted the great social upheavals that would follow, but because her observation of enduring human foibles is so acute.
Now many years later, re-reading the Mill on the Floss a third time, this time from the perspective of an author, I am awed by the feat that George Eliot has pulled off . This is a remarkable work, which can be enjoyed on many different levels, and remains as engrossing and moving today as when it was written.
The Mill on the Floss was George Eliot's second novel,and was a huge best-seller when it was published in 1861. Was this despite or because of the way George Eliot draws together the individual human narrative with the wider social and national picture, I wonder. The book is heavy with philosophical digressions in a way which few modern authors would get away with. Yet George Eliot does, in part because the moral lessons are utterly and convincingly rooted in the nature and behaviour of her characters,and partly because of the wit and passion with which she writes.
The opening chapter leads us straight into the perspective of a first-person narrator, a narrator who nowhere appears in the story except as an authorial voice which regularly interrupts the narrative to direct and guide the reader through the moral lessons she has prepared for us. At various points in the book another voice interrupts, the voice of 'St Ogg's' or 'good society' or, as she cuttingly describes it, 'the world's wife', for George Eliot observes that it is usually women who are the social and moral arbiters, inclined to pass judgement on their fellows. These two voices provide a contrasting commentary on the central story of Tom and Maggie, yet so compelling is the narrative that the moment George Eliot enters into the thoughts of a character or the description of a scene we are there with her, as though we had never digressed.
In Book 4, Chapter 3, George Eliot addresses this writerly dilemma directly, in a long passage describing the 'tone of emphasis' the author is apt to slip into in writing 'the history of unfashionable families'. This 'tone of emphasis … is very far from being the tone of good society….no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched on with a light and graceful irony." Her passionate polemic on the author's right to tackle 'unfashionable' subjects is one which I carry in my heart every time I sit down and face a blank page. "But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production, requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid - or else, spread over sheepwalks and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands where the rain looks dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis - the emphasis of want….it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion amidst family discords unsoftened by long corridors."
George Eliot does not shy away from 'emphasis', but she is also a mistress of light irony. The domestic detail, household clutter, hair and clothing fashions, figures of speech, that she describes with such amused relish are always more than just a catalogue of objects and styles, which would be meaningless to a reader a century and a half later. Through the prism of George Eliot's passionate commitment to the moral purpose of literature, they become the colours in a rich and subtle palette with which she paints for us a portrait of ourselves. It is George Eliot's ability to move fluidly between the 'wide national life' and the 'family discords' that makes her such a skilled and delightful chronicler both of the large picture and of the minutiae of the human soul.
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