ndrosen

I continue to read The Tale of Genji, a few pages at a time, and am now well into the chapter “Evening Mist.” Among other threads, a highborn and married nobleman has tried to make himself agreeable to a widowed princess, leading to a scene in which she, accompanied by her gentlewomen, attempts to escape his advances, and he berates her for not letting him have his way with her. Her elderly and sickly mother lectures her on the shame of it all, and how her being pursued by this creep could become the topic of gossip.

To my way of thinking, the lady has nothing to be ashamed of: she did not lead the man on, and when he tried to seduce her, she refused him, and remained physically unsullied. By the standards of the Heian Court, however, her being the target of the man’s advances is a terrible shame to her (not that they were puritanical about sex as such; a man might have several concubines in his house, and chase yet another girl). I wanted to reach across time and space, and into the world’s first great psychological novel, to assure the lady that improper and unwelcome behavior by someone else was no blot on her character.

Still, one reason to read exotic literature is to be reminded that people in other cultures did not and do not always see things in the same way as ourselves.

I have been reading The Tale of Genji for months, a few pages at a time when not occupied with other books and magazines, and I am now more than halfway through it, at six hundred pages. It can be difficult to keep the characters straight, partly because someone can be referred to, not by name, but by his current title, something like “the Consultant Captain,” or the lady of a certain wing of the house. Still, I’m not reading it because it is easy and in harmony with current sensibilities, but because it gives a window, even in a translation which may not be able to fully convey the Old Japanese original, a portrait of the beliefs, interests, manners, and ambitions of courtiers and their ladies in the Japan of a thousand years ago. It contains some timeless and cross-cultural observations on human behavior as well; not for nothing is it called the world’s first psychological novel.

It is interesting to speculate on what a companion novel might have been like, written by a lower class contemporary of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, and portraying some of the peasants and salt burners whose labors made possible the lives of leisured esthetes like Genji, but such a book probably could not have been written. Lady Murasaki’s peasant sixth cousin would not likely have been literate, and would have possessed neither leisure to write nor a supply of affordable paper.

I’ve read the estimable Jo Walton’s latest novel, Or What You Will, and I was rather impressed. I’ve said of Ms. Walton before that one thing I like about her is that she doesn’t keep churning out the same book under different names; she writes quite different books. That said, some interests of hers are evident, and can be found in more than one novel, so a reader should not be surprised to find the city of Florence or the plays of Shakespeare in the new novel.

Jo has played literary games before, as in Lifelode, and the latest book is self-referential, being partly about a woman writer who is writing a book about some of the other characters in Or What You Will, and the novel is partly narrated by the writer’s alter ego, someone from the mists of her mind who has been various characters in previous books. Unlike some people who play literary games, Jo (she once invited me to call her Jo when I addressed an email to “Ms. Walton”) can actually write a story of interest to civilians. There are characters in the book, some of them familiar from The Tempest and Twelfth Night, with lives and problems and ambitions that the reader cares about, and then there is the narrator himself, who is concerned about being trapped in the bone cave and dying when the writer dies; the writer is suffering a recurrence of cancer.

I won’t try to explain how these various stories interact, but Jo, who has come a long way since The King’s Peace (by no means a contemptible first novel), weaves the threads together successfully.

I have wondered if I could manage to save up enough annual leave to take a trip to Florence, which I visited as a child but do not really remember (even though my first sentence was “The taxicabs in Florence are green”). The city’s tourist board ought to pay her a commission.

I haven’t posted lately (I’ve been applying my nose to the grindstone), but I have been finding a few minutes here and there to read This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which the No Strings Attached Book Club will discuss on Tuesday. I’m part of the way through, and I find it delightful, with magic prose and vivid images. Two agents for opposing future societies are supposed to be intervening in history (in various possible histories) to try to affect events to lead to their own worlds, but they start exchanging letters, and develop a real mutual fondness.

I’m not even halfway through, but I expect the narrative to spin off in a different direction somehow, although I’m not sure how. Maybe the two agents (both women, by the way) will be in grave trouble with their superiors for their unauthorized correspondence, or they will work out some kind of peace between their opposing societies, or something else which I am not clever enough to foresee will happen.

In any event, I recommend the book.

I have finished reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel, a historical novel taking place in the mid- fourteenth century, and centered on a young man of distinguished, although now impoverished, family, and his adventures as a squire on the road to knighthood. He has his conflicts with the greedy Cistercians at the local monastery (the book is generally anticlerical, although one priest who seems sincere and decent enough appears), makes friends with a young yeoman who serves and follows him, going to war as an archer, and meets various real people of the time, from King Edward III and Sir John Chandos to Thomas Lackland, author of “Piers Ploughman.”

Perhaps a thirteen year old would have liked it better than I did, which is not to say that I disliked it, or failed to be caught up in Nigel’s adventures; but I was too aware that valiant knights eager to worshipfully win worship by heroic feats of arms were not necessarily beloved of their peasants, or of the people caught in the middle of medieval warfare. To be fair, Conan Doyle does not hide that things could be grim for Breton peasants trapped between English garrisons, French garrisons, and local warlords, but the attitude seems to be that a gentleman of good blood and coat-armor can be forgiven a great deal, provided that he is valiant, debonair, and true to his lady.

I repeatedly found myself thinking of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, which may be tendentious in its own way, but is not dazzled by the glamor and valor of chivalry. Still, whatever the faults of his class and his time, Nigel has his courage, and is honorable by the standards of that time and class. Even a skeptical nineteenth century liberal like myself can root for such a hero.

Michael Dirda had a piece in the Style section of Thursday’s Washington Post, reviewing two books by Conan Doyle: The White Company and Sir Nigel, the latter providing the backstory of a character in the first. This seemed interesting, and, as I discovered from the Sherlock Holmes stories many years ago, Doyle could write. Furthermore, S.M. Stirling has written that a conceit in his Emberverse novels is that The White Company really happened, and descendants of the characters are alive in England.

So I called Barnes and Noble, and the local store didn’t have the paperback of Sir Nigel, but they did arrange to ship it to me. (There is a new annotated edition of the other book, costing four times as much, so I decided that that wasn’t the place to start.) In a week or so, I may be able to begin reading about the original, ancestral Sir Nigel Loring.

It will soon be January 2, 2020, the hundredth anniversary of Isaac Asimov’s birth (or possibly some number of days or weeks past the actual anniversary, but the great man celebrated January second as his birthday). I know that Asimov’s writing is open to criticism; subtle characterization was not his strong point, nor was understanding of religion. Nonetheless, he also had his merits and skills, and I remember reading books like The Currents of Space and The End of Eternity with delight as a child. I also remember going on to read many of his essays and other science popularization, to which I owe some part of my general knowledge of science and other topics.

Wherever you may be, Dr. A, and even if I don’t agree with you about some things, you did more than your share to educate the public, and to give literary experiences to those who can appreciate your kind of writing. “Mazel tov, it’s Asimov.”

I have downloaded and begun reading Bad Blood, a book about Theranos, which is the current reading for the No Strings Attached book club at the Patent and Trademark Office. So far, so good.

I have made some progress on The Tale of Genji, and I must say that if there had been a MeToo movement in tenth century Heian-kyo, our hero would have been in serious trouble. When a (married) woman whom he more or less raped (it isn’t clear exactly what went on between them, but she reluctantly went along with sex rather than commit the grave Japanese sin of making a loud fuss) wants nothing further to do with him, she is described as a cruel woman. This, in a novel written by a woman; I wonder whether a bit of irony is intended, or whether the court lady who wrote the book had accepted the values of her society to the point of thinking ill of a woman who refused to continue an affair with such a beautiful and high-ranking gentleman philanderer.

A few days ago, I finally finished reading Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and I have a few thoughts: Most of the book is just tale after tale of knights having adventures that typically involve doing battle with other knights, and sometimes getting damosels into bed with them; one can have a taste for adventure stories and still get tired of this, since one description of two knights each smiting the other over his horse's croup, and then avoiding their horses to fight with their swords on foot is much like the last one. Also, the knights tend to be thuggish, even when we are told that they are the good knights, as opposed to truly bad ones like Sir Turquin and Sir Breuse Sance Pitie. When two traveling knights meet, they don't need any cause for a quarrel to do battle with each other. A "good knight" seems typically to mean a strong knight skilled in battle, not a knight who is particularly ethical, even by Medieval standards.

And yet there are ideals and aspirations shining through; after hundreds of pages of ordinary adventure stories, Malory gives us the quest for the Sangreal. Even Sir Galahad is a fierce fighting man, but otherwise very pure and devout, and so he and Sir Percivale achieve the Holy Grail, and are taken up into Heaven.

And then we get some more earthly adventures. By the way, I find it hard to like Queen Guinever much, for she is not only unfaithful to her lawful wedded lord, but often unkind to Sir Launcelot, who is unfailingly loyal to her. An incident leads to a deadly division among the knights of the Round Table, who make war on each other, and things fall apart. In a sense, they have to: since the present isn't great and wonderful, but the past supposedly was under the reign of King Arthur, there needs to be some account of why the golden age didn't last. Finally, those knights (and the Queen) who didn't get killed in the civil wars get serious about religion, and take up great fasting and prayer; Sir Launcelot, for example, is ordained as a priest before his death.

The book ends with a plea to pray for Sir Thomas Malory, who seems to have been a violent and lawless knight. I wonder how many people over the centuries have done so, and whether it makes any difference. I wonder whether one should also pray for the anonymous peasants and the unliterary knights of fifteenth century England.