Philosophy

Why do I write these incomplete, inconsequential little book reviews? Sometimes I wonder what the point is.

I can think of three reasons. First, I have such a bad memory that writing down my reactions after finishing a book is the only way of ensuring that I have any recollection at all of what I read.

Second, it is a discipline for me as a writer. Sometimes I have time to write a review that is a little more polished than the others, but usually they are simple and undistinguished. The act of sitting down to write at all is usually the hardest thing for writers, and I consider each book review a triumph in that respect.

Third, I would like to be someone who creates more than she consumes. I find myself going crazy with all the information I feel like I should take in, and taking stuff in always seems to take priority. Perhaps I feel like it is a preparation before I am equipped to say anything. But there is no way to consume everything! At some point we must stop. I hate feeling like I am just going from one book to the next without time to reflect and absorb it into my life. These book reviews are a response to what I have taken in, a minor creative endeavor. I submit that if we don’t have time to respond to the books we read, we don’t really have time to read.

In sum, these book reviews are simple, safe, and not too revealing; and perhaps they are somewhat interesting for the few people who read them. I can find nothing to say against the habit of writing them.

Sword Song

Sword Song is a marvelous tour of northern Great Britain during the Viking age, prior to the coming of the Normans. The main character, Bjarni Sigurdson, is expelled from his home settlement for manslaughter at the age of 16 and sells his service as a bodyguard and warrior to a series of seafaring captains, seeing the world as far south as Ireland, along the coasts of Scotland, and up to the far northern Orkney Islands. He encounters not only other Scandinavian expats, but such diverse characters as wild Pictish warriors, Welsh farmers, Irish thralls, and Ionian monks.

Rosemary Sutcliff is, as far as I know, the preeminent author of British historical fiction for young adults. I have only read one other of her books, The Shining Company, but it made a profound impression on me and it remains one of my favorite books.

Sutcliff was disabled, beginning in early childhood, with severe arthritis. Some of her thoughts about the condition are quoted on the August 21, 2005, entry of a lapsed blog devoted to her. She did not learn to read until she was nine years old, partly because of this disease and partly because her family moved a lot; her father was in the British Navy. She died in 1992. Sword Song was in its second draft and posthumously became her last published book.

Biographer Margaret Meek described the author’s writing process: Once she had the idea for a book, she began with the encyclopedia and checked out all the works cited in an entry from the library. She continued likewise with these books’ bibliographies and wrote down all the information she collected in red notebooks. According to the Historical Novel Society’s Sandra Garside-Neville, “Then Sutcliff would start to create a picture of the daily life of the era her idea was set in. This was the most enjoyable part for her. Not much of the plot would find its way into the notebooks.”

Her painstaking research is clear in passages like this, where a simple walk through the village en route to the next action scene is a detailed tableau:

Men were at work in the wood-wright’s yard and the smithy, someone was driving a pig up the stony street, women with their cloaks huddled about them against the thin rain were moving between house and byre and gathered bucket in hand around the spring head, children and dogs were busy about their own affairs.

The book is alive with sights, sounds, smells, and unobtrusive facts that tell the contemporary reader what that world was like.

No mother is mentioned in Bjarni’s narrative, and it is interesting to watch his understanding of women develop as he slowly encounters them one by one. I appreciate that Sutcliff doesn’t present them as exotic objects of desire for a starved male appetite, but instead as people he sympathizes with. Their situations as well as Bjarni’s are presented matter-of-factly. His saga of exile is different from those usually proceeding from the Viking age, showing how the greatest virtue for these land-poor people was not glory in warfare but the ability to adapt.

Bjarni is a stubborn young man, more critical than accepting of other people, especially those in authority. This is apparently typical of Sutcliff’s heroes; she described one of her own favorite characters as “difficult and prickly.” The world she draws is thus not idealized but natural and human.

The portrait of religious attachment in Sword Song is interesting in this light. Sutcliff said in an interview:

The Middle Ages I am not at home in. I am interested in them and love to read about them, but I can’t write about them, or practically not at all. I think it is because I can’t take the all-pervasiveness of religion which has a stranglehold on life. The more level-headed viewpoint of the Romans is nearer to our own way of looking at things.

Some of the Christian believers Bjarni meets, like the great lady Aud the Deep-Minded, are extremely attractive characters. His experience on Iona appears to stir his soul more than anything else in his life’s travels. There are also the monks sprinkled throughout who bring more inconvenience than blessing. Indeed, it is a monk who drowns a little too easily in the first chapter, providing the occasion for Bjarni’s five-year exile. But the pagan priest portrayed in the story is by far the most unpleasant religious figure.

Eventually, Bjarni takes the mark of the White Christ in a ceremony called “prime-signing”: a pre-baptismal step involving little to no religious commitment but offering one slight advantages over complete pagans when trading with Christians.

And eventually Bjarni finds a bride, in developments that are both romantic and pragmatic. Towards the end of the book Bjarni is called upon to entertain two young girls with the harp, and he hesitantly recognizes the potential of embellishing his life story, making a dramatic song from it. His story in Sutcliff’s hands is a fascinating thing, with plenty of excitement for the young reader and also plenty to reflect upon, since it is presented in a thoughtful and historically sensitive way.

A Times review of The Shining Company in June 1990 expresses her ability to evoke feelings of honor and tragedy along with her admirable realism:

[Sutcliff] is moved by simple concepts of loyalty and integrity that may be as foreign to today’s children’s literature as they were to the no-baby-talk Gododdin. But by admitting their possibility, while not shirking the real facts of ferocious woundings and pragmatic betrayals, she still persuades us that a bardic reading of the past is sustainable alongside an awareness of its squalor and its indifferent, but unpolluted, landscapes.

Forests of symbols

I’ve been reading Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing ever since Christmas and finally finished it. It’s sort of hard to follow (I think he could have used a more systematic editor), but it has prompted much reflection on the nature of writing.

Writing fascinates me. Learning new alphabets is fun; handwriting is important enough to experiment with and remodel from time to time. Letters are exciting. Living in another era, I would have been temperamentally inclined to credit the myths that described writing as a sacred gift from the gods.

In truth writing probably began with accountants, who made knots in ropes, scratched notches on sticks, or inscribed clay tokens to symbolize unwieldy animals. It was when the marks they made assumed a phonological significance apart from the objects they represented that this became complete writing. Fischer emphasizes that this was a groundbreaking technological innovation, not an evolutionary process. He suggests that complete writing was invented only once in all history: a rare idea indeed. All the diverse instances of it around the world, from the most awkward to the most ingenious, are variations on the unique idea of complete writing that popped up in Sumer around 3700 BC:

1. Its purpose is communication.
2. It consists of artificial graphic marks on a durable surface (or electronic medium).
3. It uses marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech.

It is not that unromantic that we owe accountants for the concoction of letter magic. After all, what is a story but an account? In French, a compte rendu is a summary of something you’ve heard. And a conte is a pure fairy tale.

To populate our tales (a word that used to mean counts, just like tallies,) we need all the races of letters―gothics and grotesques, romans and moderns and humanists, capitals and uncials and minuscules. We delight in their anatomy of bowls and crossbars, ears and crotches, legs, arms, apices, vertices, tails, terminals, hairlines, stems, spurs, and spines. Not to mention heng, shu, and the other limbs I haven’t learned yet, to make beautiful creatures I mentioned earlier.

With picayune pecunia we assemble the words that form our armies of arguments. We can take nothing for granted in our accounting. The tale of writing is rich.

Copy Editing Blog

The copy-editing blog we’re linked to cracked me up. How cool (and really really strange) is it that people sit around posting esoteric facts on when to use “blond” vs. “blonde” for all of cyber space to see.

Currently I’m fascinated by how rap is changing my students’ writing. They do journals regularly and I have more and more males writing peotry–really good poetry–that’s clearly inspired by rap. One even wrote about how he and his friends “freestyle” in their free time–they improvise raps. I can only think that this is fabulous news for the future of English. My students are spending their free time improvising very edgy poetry.