Book review: Wolf Hall

(Published in the Business Standard, October 14, 2009)

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate
POUNDS 7.99, 653 pages

On June 30, 1540, a blacksmith’s son risen to power wrote in desperation to his king, Henry VIII of England: “I crye for mercye, mercye, mercye.” A month later, as Henry hastened to marry Catherine Howard, the fourth of his six wives, Thomas Cromwell, once chief minister and the most powerful man in the land, was executed. In a gruesome touch, Cromwell’s head was boiled and set on a spike in the Tower of London; and an inexpert butcher swung the axe for the blacksmith’s son.

This part of Thomas Cromwell’s tale is not told in Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning, acute, Wolf Hall, set in the turbulent court of Henry VIII. Historical novels don’t need to set down the ending, since we know that part of the story already. Anne Boleyn with her catlike-yawn and beguiling tempestuousness will be beheaded; Henry VIII chose an executioner with a sharp sword, for he loved her so much he wished her to suffer little pain. Jane Seymour will be—briefly—the next Queen of England. And Cromwell, having risen further and faster than most men of his time could dream of, will be killed by his king.

What interests Mantel, one of the most ambitious and technically brilliant novelists of the day, is larger than the story, however fascinating, of long-dead kings, queens and courtiers. Wolf Hall is a study in power, acquisition and lust—always fine themes for those interested in self-improvement—with Cromwell as an alpha among the pack. “The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.”

Cromwell’s father may have been an innkeeper or a blacksmith; Mantel chooses blacksmith for the purposes of this novel. Our first glimpse of the young Thomas is of a boy “felled, dazed, silent”, thrashed by Walter Cromwell, a commonplace occurrence in the Cromwell family. From this passage of physical violence, it’s an easy movement to the more sophisticated violence of the court, as young Cromwell climbs higher and higher. Mantel’s character list runs to five pages, and yet we feel we know them all, their entrances and exits are so well-managed.

This is familiar ground for a historical novel, but Mantel raises Wolf Hall well above the level of her competitors. If Anya Seton offered blood, guts and romance in the melodramatic Katherine and Philippa Gregory took a sideways look at the price of ambition in The Other Boleyn Girl, Mantel’s subject is the remorselessness pace of history.

Cardinal Wolsey appears by page 18, a man at the peak of his powers, a successful summitteer on the slopes of ambition, easy in his skin “like a leopard settling into a warm spot”. Less than forty pages later, Wolsey is deposed, his riches scattered, humbled enough to cry as an impassive Cromwell looks on, learning the lessons of power, and the loss of it. Over the next six hundred pages, Anne Boleyn’s ambition and control over the king will flash into vivid life. Mantel exercises supreme control over her material, letting the reader know what lies ahead with brutal clarity rather than appealing to our sense of pathos.

Here is Anne, three hundred pages before she rests her slender neck on the chopping block, contemptuously holding up a piece of paper found in the bed where she makes just enough love to Henry to drive the king insane in his quest for more: “The central figure is the king. .. On either side of him is a woman; the one on the left has no head. ‘That’s the queen,’ she says. ‘Katherine. And that’s me.’ She laughs. ‘Anne sans tete.’”

Mantel is unusual among historical novelists for her understanding of the past—which is to say that she understands that for the Tudors, their times were modern, contemporary. The courts of the Tudors, with their rich tapestries; the oaths of the day; the casual brutality with which a crowd will attend the burning of an old woman, a Loller, and then stove her burned skull and bones in with an iron bar for entertainment; all of these are described with the eyes of a traveller of the period, not from the perspective of a novelist looking back at the past.

Wolf Hall itself, the home of Jane Seymour and her family, is never visited, often evoked, but it is just the right brooding, forbidding presence for this book. In her previous work, Mantel has examined history with a merciless clarity—whether it’s through a memoir like Giving Up The Ghost, or through the story of a turn-of-the-millennium medium with her own posse of ghosts in Beyond Black. Wolf Hall shows the same pitiless curiosity, married to Mantel’s vivid imagination. It’s a great place to start for those who haven’t encountered her work. If man is wolf to man, Mantel’s the silent presence recording everything, loping alongside the pack.

The BS Column: The unbearable heaviness of the Nobel

(Published in the Business Standard, 12 October 2009)

Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has been a fierce critic of Ceauşescu's regime in Romania. She is highly regarded in Europe's academic circles. She had received over 20 literary awards, including the IMPAC, before winning the Nobel this year. And I must confess an unliterary complaint: having read only two of her books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, I have about as much enthusiasm for reading her as I do for swimming through a pool of cold porridge.

The Nobel Prize in literature is administered by the Swedish Academy, the process of selection is rigorous, and the shortlist of candidates will usually begin at about 25 names and then be whittled down to roughly five, before a winner is chosen. In a recent interview, Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee, revealed that an author's name will often come up for consideration for several years before a nomination finally finds acceptance. All of this is imbued with gravitas; but none of this explains why the Prize should be taken as seriously as it is, except for the fact of its longevity.

The Prize's track record over the first thirty years of its inception, from 1901 to 1930, was dubious at best, with a smattering of the Yeatses, Kiplings and Shaws making up for a score of now-forgotten writers (Mommsen, Hamsun, Spitteler—names no longer read, even in their home countries). It redeemed itself somewhat between the 1940s and the 1980s, yielding at least a reasonable reading list of authors whose works have endured the passage of time. In the last two decades, the Prize seems determined to make political points and to shine a light on the obscure.

An uncharitable critic might detect the undertow of an anxiety that Europe might be losing its influence, that the great writers who are undiscovered by the British, the Americans (and a handful of Indians) will sink into obscurity, taking part of the history of Europe with them. What else might explain recent awards to Imre Kertesz, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and now Herta Müller? And there's a sense of drift with some other choices: Dario Fo and Doris Lessing, for instance, may have deserved their Nobel nods, but both received the laurel long after their respective works had ceased to exert a once-powerful influence.

It is not that these are writers of no merit: truly bad writers don't make it to the shortlist. In different ways, Le Clezio, Jelinek, Kertesz and Müller have made their contributions to literature and literary history. Consider this, perhaps, evidence of this critic's poor taste and judgement, when I say that reading their works has not convinced me that these are writers who will last, or whose works I am astonished and pleased to discover. Perhaps pleasure is a frivolous thing to want from the Nobel Prize; perhaps its august list of writers is prescriptive, a judgement handed down from a great height to us lesser mortals, an injunction to go forth and have our minds improved. It is frivolous to complain, as I do having read two of Müller's books and all that is available of Le Clezio, Jelinek and Kertesz in translation, that they bring me no enjoyment as a reader. And yet I find that enjoyment is important to me, personally, as a reader, and that in the last two decades, I have had little of that from the Nobel.


The Nobel in literature has now been awarded for over a century; the Man Booker International has made just three awards since 2005. The Nobel is administered by the venerable academicians of the Swedish Academy, a committee that rarely changes the composition of its members. The Man Booker International has a shifting list of judges, chosen from among contemporary writers every award season: it is peer-driven, with all the benefits and faults this entails. The first of its three awards went to Ismail Kadare, whose works found a new and newly loyal readership; the second to Chinua Achebe, opening up his work to readers who were beginning to forget him, and the culture he came from; and the third to Alice Munro, establishing the worth of the short story as a literary genre in its own right.

If the Man Booker continues in this vein, it will outstrip an increasingly insular Nobel literature award in the next decade as the prize to watch. Until we get there, though, I have to locate and find the remaining works of Herta Müller. Perhaps reading her will be a voyage of discovery and wonder, but I suspect this will be more like trying to read the Wodehouse-created authoress so admired by Bertie Wooster, Lady Florence Craye, author of Spindrift. That book, says Wooster, went down “like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads round Bloomsbury way”, but he, like this critic, had a plebeian soul and remained unmoved by her craft.

Because I'm not Eve, and because this isn't teasing

Here's a simple grammatical exercise. Replace the term "eve-teasing" with a more accurate word, and this is what you might get:

"The eve-teasing incident which further sparked of to tensions between the two communities has forced the authorities to increase the police presence in the area. Reportedly, few unidentified youths passed some lewd remarks on women passing through the area."

"The sexual harassment incident which further sparked tensions between the two communities has forced the authorities to increase the police presence in the area. Reportedly, few unidentified youths verbally abused some women passing through the area in sexually explicit terms."

Instead of the chatty 'Eve Teasing with Bipasha Basu' (so reminiscent of Koffee with Karan), how about 'Bipasha Basu physically assaulted'? And "groping" is another convenient euphemism to describe an unwanted and unwelcome act of sexual aggression.

And "teased her" sounds mild, compared to the reaction of the "tribals" in this story. The problem with this school of reporting is that it leaves you with absolutely no idea of what happened. Was the woman in this case verbally harassed, hit, abused, threatened? Was her physical space invaded, was she touched against her will, was she actually attacked?

And here's Bhaskar Ghose complaining that "eve-teasing has become a fine art", in a story that outlines many familiar issues about violence against women. It also illustrates why I hate the term eve-teasing: because it's such a mild, obfuscatory term for the acts of sexual aggression and intimidation it's supposed to describe. And it's blinding in its mildness. A woman being eve-teased--yeah, we all know what that means. But do we really, when even the language we use doesn't allow you to see what is really happening in each case?

There are subtle differences between the man who wolf-whistles at you from across the road, and then pays no further attention; and a ten-minute barrage of sexually explicit, demeaning suggestions and threats of violence unleashed at you by men who will follow you all the way down the road, until you reach a "safe" area. Being "groped" is an unpleasant, and for young women especially, a frightening, violation of physical space; being grabbed, pinched or held so hard that the act leaves bruises is not something that can be described as being "fondled", "caressed" or even the relatively more accurate "groped". If a man or a group of men--there seems to be little need for the term adam-teasing--surrounds, follows, threatens and then attacks you in such a way as to cause hurt, pain and shock, that would be assault. If they punch hard enough, then that would be battery. And further down the road, there's always the old standby, rape: we don't yet use eve-teasing as a euphemism for being raped, though we have useful euphemisms in most Indian languages, usually containing the terms "honour" and "looted" in conjunction.

It may seem that there are more important battles to be fought on the violence-against-women front than a linguistic war. But I would also argue that language shapes the way we think. Eve-teasing is a word that reminds me of a chador, or a blanket; a word designed to conceal far more than it reveals. It's telling that the second most frequently used euphemism, in the language used to describe assaults against women in India, is "molestation", defined as "unwanted and/ or improper sexual advances". It's another mild word that should be used to describe relatively mild acts, but I see it often used to describe acts of actual violence, aggression and sexual assault.

Molestation, harassment, verbal abuse, unwanted sexual advances, physical aggression, attacks, assault, battery, sexual violence, attempted rape, rape: that is a more accurate, if incomplete, range of terms that might begin to describe the violence that many women face, far too often. Would you, perhaps, think harder about what happens to a girl or a woman when she's attacked, if it was described as an attack, rather than another incident of eve-teasing? I would. I do. And in all the years I've been living in Delhi, I've seen women who have survived everything from simple harassment to severe battery to rape to post-rape attempted murder. None of them have ever used the term "eve-teasing" to describe what they have experienced. It's been fifty years since we first started using that euphemism; it's time we stopped. End of rant.

The BS Column: The evolving Oriental marketplace

(Published in the Business Standard, October 6, 2009)

This is prize season as the winners of both the Booker and the Nobel are to be announced this week. India has a strong, though not entirely healthy, fascination with both the prizes, slightly dimmed this year because we don’t have a horse in the Booker race.

The two hottest contenders for the Booker, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and J M Coetzee’s Summertime, are doing well in bookshops. There’s mild speculation—against long odds—that Mahasweta Debi or Salman Rushdie might get the Nobel nod. But if you ask the average Indian what s/he’s most interested in this week, the answer would be Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States-The Story of a Marriage, already a bestseller before it has reached the bookshops.

There are some interesting factors at work in the current situation. As a country, we suffer from massive performance anxiety on the literary front, as on most other fronts. Each Booker winner of Indian origin is hailed as an A+ on the report card some invisible committee is keeping on us. A Pulitzer win by Jhumpa Lahiri spikes a brief but fading interest in the US literary prize. The presence of a Rushdie or a Mahasweta Debi in the discussion of possible Nobel laureates is a reassuring reminder that we once won the Nobel, courtesy Tagore.

Any discussion on prize-winning books by authors of Indian origin often follows a completely different and parallel track—we applaud their achievements even as we dissect, or ignore, or argue with their work. We compartmentalise our applause as proud Indians; it’s separate from our reaction as Indian readers. Perhaps that’s why many Indians will buy a book such as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, feel free to dismiss it or call its authenticity into question—and then buy more copies for friends.

What do we really want to read, though? A Chetan Bhagat who says he’s in the entertainment, not the literary, business, is far closer to the pulse of the Indian reader than his more feted literary peers; and writers like Amit Varma now pay attention to the demand from Indian readers that they be entertained, but not condescended to.

Keep the focus on the marketplace for literature—it’s more powerful than we might wish to acknowledge—rather than writers and writing, and what emerges in the Indian context is wonderfully strange. (This will be a paragraph of broad generalisations; bear with me.)

The working models for publishing have been the European and the US marketplaces—large, beleagured but still vibrant, often closed to authors in translation, attempting to market the products of a glut of writers in both continents. It is fiercely competitive, but hobbled by many imperfections.

Africa and Russia are illustrations of how a dying, or troubled, marketplace has a direct negative effect on literary productivity.

There are fewer Achebes, Soyinkas, Solzhenitsyns and Dostoevskys today, because the markets in both territories have been rocky for the last four to five decades.

Japan and China have thriving internal publishing markets, and both have evolved their own blend of genres and a national literature—hampered by censorship, in China’s case, but still alive.

Both export, so to speak, some of their writers, but most of them have a thriving readership in their home territories and aren’t dependent on the export market.

Australia and India are outliers, comparable in terms of size and historical background of their English-language publishing industries.

India has a thriving but deeply insular smorgasbord of regional markets, where cross-translation exists but is not the norm, and where most writers do not produce works for export. (This doesn’t mean that they don’t produce quality writing. It’s just not export-oriented.)

The Indian market in English-language writing has, as in Australia, produced a few contenders for the Great Novel title, and then got back to the delicate process of evolving a national literature.

Many writers, in both countries, have to balance the need to produce work that’s export-oriented, while still remaining true to their need to tell the stories they find compelling. There isn’t always a market abroad for the latter, and it’s telling that Indian writers feel less pressured to produce the great Indian novel these days. There’s a willingness to experiment within genres, or to tell quieter and apparently less “important” stories.

The real question is not why we haven’t produced more Rushdies, but why we haven’t produced more Chetan Bhagats. The answer might lie in the fact that we’re not just a post-colonial market—we are an evolving, under-developed literary market, where the supporting infrastructure (creative writing courses, literary magazines, demanding editorial standards) is only just coming into being.

We don’t control the international literary markets; we haven’t yet evolved a robust domestic market of our own. Until one or the other of these comes to pass, our writers will continue to write for export, or for a very small, patient audience. And we’ll continue to need the ratification of the odd Booker win and the occasional nod from the Nobel.

Margaret Atwood on mortification

From Curious Pursuits:

(Atwood's US publisher arranges for her to get on an American talk show.) It was an afternoon show, which in those days--could it have been the late seventies?--meant variety. It was the sort of show at which they played pop music, and then you were supposed to sashay through a bead curtain, carrying your trained koala bear, or Japanese flower arrangement, or book.

I waited behind the bead curtain. There was an act on before me. It was a group from the Colostomy Association, who were talking about their colostomies, and about how to use the colostomy bag.

I knew I was doomed. No book could ever be that riveting.

WC Fields vowed never to share the stage with a child or a dog; I can add to that, "Never follow the Colostomy Association." (Or any other thing having to do with frightening bodily items, such as the port-wine-stain removal technique that once preceded me in Australia.) The problem is, you lose all interest in yourself and your so-called 'work'--'What did you say your name was? And tell us the plot of your book, just in a couple of sentences, please'--so immersed are you in picturing the gruesome intricacies of...but never mind.

The BS Column: A Nobel for Mr Dylan

(Published in the Business Standard, September 29, 2009. I wrote this yesterday, unfortunately before someone sent me the link to this piece today-but it's nice to know we had the same idea.)

How many roads must a poet walk down before he is awarded a Nobel? The odds on the Swedish Academy announcing in a week’s time that Robert Zimmerman is the 2009 Nobel Literature laureate are low-25/1, according to Ladbroke’s.

That gives the tambourine man little leverage over this year’s best bets. Amos Oz, Philip Roth, the poet Adonis, Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon make it to the top of the betting lists each year, with many saying Oz might get the nod. Given the Academy’s penchant for awarding the Nobel in literature to the obscurely erudite, Ladbroke’s and other Nobel-watchers always add in a handful of sternly literary contenders, just so that the rest of us can say “Le Clezio (or Jelineke) who?” when Nobel hour rolls around.

But Dylan’s stock, Nobel-wise, has been rising over the last decade—the current odds place him ahead of Salman Rushdie (80/1, and if they give him the wreath, can we please unban the Satanic Verses in celebration?), on par with Alice Munro (who’s already picked up the Man International Booker), and a hair ahead of Chinua Achebe, Carlos Fuentes and Mahasweta Debi (all at 50/1).

Dylan’s Nobel chances are often treated as a joke; it’s assumed that the austere guardians of the universal literary fame would never unbend far enough to award the Prize to a song-writer. Especially a successful one. And there’s the question of how Dylan, with his twin aversion to formal dress and formal speeches, would react to receiving the Nobel.

The reason why Dylan deserves the Nobel has nothing to do with his popularity, or the fact that his works are actually still quoted, discussed and in wide circulation today. Doris Lessing and Dario Fo, for instance, are classic examples of writers who earned their Nobels in terms of literary merit, but received the accolade perhaps a decade late, at a time when their best works no longer have the same impact as they once did.

The argument for Dylan would rest squarely on the quality and influence of his work over the years, and the fact that they have now become classics of modern poetry, decades after they were first composed. It’s not just that Dylan wrote great songs—he wrote songs that were deeply rooted in the history of his times, and in a musical and verbal folk tradition that goes back for decades.

The only reason he’s been kept out of contemporary compilations of world poetry is because of a kind of cultural blindness, a refusal to see that a song, however popular, however well-known, however frequently hummed, can be poetry as well. This is in many ways a bizarre barrier: poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Dylan’s fellow versifier, Adonis, have, like him, recited their verses in front of massive gatherings of fans, and have heard their lyrics chanted by thousands of voices.

Not convinced? Consider these two examples:

“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind…”


And:
“Now in the final act,
disaster tows our history
toward us on its face.
What is our past
but memories pierced like deserts
barricaded by what we see,
marching under clouds that move
like mules and cannon.”

The first is written by Dylan (from ‘Chimes of Freedom’), the second by Adonis. Both are poems that ask, in different ways, for justice and revolution—and you could argue, on the basis of metre and imagery, that both are equally powerful.

Try two more examples:
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread…”


And:

“I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.”


The first is W B Yeats, the second Bob Dylan—but the Irish poet and the American troubadour reach for a similar rhythm, a similar rhyme scheme and achieve the same effect of intimacy. Both are excellent poems; currently, only one of them is written by a Nobel laureate.

I know, it’s knocking on heaven’s door to ask that the Swedish Academy take Bob Dylan seriously, but you could make the case that he remains one of the most brilliant and enduring chroniclers of our times. It could happen. All it would take is a simple twist of fate.

Gluttony: Pandelicious

(Quickie on Puja pandal eating for the Business Standard; it came out last week, just in time to let the gorging begin.)


Despite opinions to the contrary, Durga Puja isn’t an occasion for senseless gorging. The true gourmand’s responsibility is to pack in as much good eating as s/he can in this week—and that’s harder than it seems.

For many, the most insistent taste memories of Puja come from the legendary pandal “bhogs” served for lunch and dinner at these places, some of which can boast of third-and-fourth generation master chefs. For others, Puja food is snack food, as Bijoli Grill, Benfish, Nizam’s and a dozen redoubtable biryani joints put up stalls that sell everything from fried fish to Mughlai paratha.

And for the last decade, restaurants have joined the Puja feeding frenzy, offering special menus for each day of the festivities. This is, even for the intrepid Bengali armed with a cast-iron, bottomless pit for a stomach, not an easy labyrinth to negotiate. Here’s a day-to-day guide to navigation.

Sasthi: Most puja pandals kick off the first public day of Durga Puja with a local Ananda Mela tradition. In Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park and Calcutta’s larger pandals, the Ananda Mela is a near-corporate affair with some of the city’s biggest Bengali sweet-and-savoury makers participating. The smaller pandals offer a far more home-style experience, with the local Mashimas bringing in home-cooked delicacies for sale. Look for the great Mughlai-style specialties and the old coffee-house/ adda classics.

Aside from the jhalmuri and bhelpuri sellers and the omnipresent biryani and kabab rolls, fried fish and fried chicken chops are big on the menu. So is fish orly and kabiraji cutlets with their frills of egg. If you’re in luck, there’ll be home-made ghugni—a chickpea-and-mutton concoction in a thick sauce (with vegetarian versions)—or dimer devil (devilled eggs) and mochar chop (banana flower chops) besides an array of sweets.

Saptami: This is a good day to stick to vegetarian delights, and sample the overlooked labra. This is a classic vegetable curry, the Bengali equivalent of the Gujarati undhiyo (I say this at the risk of setting both communities at each other’s throats) and requires the skill of a master chef in terms of combining the different kinds of pumpkin, spinach and other leaves in just the right proportion. Timing is everything: a mediocre cook could end up with a messy pulp, but a great cook will stun your palate with a complexity of flavours, no one spice or vegetable overpowering the other.

Ashtami: This is a great day to take advantage of the restaurant specials. In Calcutta, Kewpie’s Kitchen runs classic and delectable menus during each day of the pujas. Tero Parban, Bhojohori Manna and 6, Ballygunge Place in Calcutta have their own set of faithful followers. In Delhi and Bombay, Oh! Calcutta chains have been running puja buffet lunches--good value for money. I associate Ashtami with khichudi, which bears the same relationship to everyday khichdi that a Tagore poem does to doggerel. This is a day of sumptuousness—gorge on the more sinful Bengali sweetmeats—but also a day to celebrate the simple goodness of begun bhaja, perfect quarters or rounds of aubergine fried just as you sit down to eat.

Nabami: Fish rules Nabami, no question. Chital maacher muthai is a dish venerated for its taste as much as for the difficulty involved in scraping the flesh off the very bony frame of the chital fish. Unabashed fish lovers prefer the classic—and hard to get in most restaurants—fish-head curry with moong dal. If you’re wimping out, do it in some style with a smoked hilsa paturi or a prawn malai curry.

Dashami: Cauliflower curry sounds like the most boring vegetable dish on earth, but only the Sikh langars and the Bengali pandals make it as it should be—masses of cauliflower, introduced to quantities of oil and spices, and allowed to get their sizzle on. But Dashami, the final day of the pujas, is also luchi-mangsho day—puri with meat curry to North Indians. Ideally, the meat curry should be kasha mangsho—only very young goats need apply to be the key ingredient for this dish—and the supply of luchis should be inexhaustible, with one cooling luchi held in reserve as a scoop for your post-meal kheer.

For those of delicate stomachs, following this five-day plan might bring other things than satiety in its wake. The hardcore Bengali would have two words for you: Isabgol, and Gelusil. Trust to this combination (and a few prayers in between meals) and all should be well.