Death comes to the Critic

In an idle moment (of which I have few, these days), I reread Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man, in which Death is fired and becomes a farm labourer while the universe tries to cope with an absence of expiration. It's funny and of course rather tender. Death himself is faced with the difficulty of understanding humans and they ways we cope with the knowledge of permanent oblivion, and he comes to admire us. He also has a keen eye for human nature:

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts. 

Which is rather perceptive literary criticism. Who'd have thought Pratchett was a Derridean post-structuralist?

I also remembered another good line from Miéville's Railsea, which uses Moby Dick to explore narrative and obsession, but with trains - it follows rather nicely from Pratchett's point. Here's Captain Naphi explaining her obsession with catching the giant mole:

'You know how careful are philosophies', Naphi said. 'How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggers, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation'.

Which is funny because Moby Dick's whale is a symbol onto which multiple interpretations are cast, and because it's what we literary critics do. Well, others do. I stay in port telling people that my last interpretation was THIS BIG.

Books in the post today? Glad you asked. Pratchett's children's book The World of Poo, Alan Warner's new one (again about trains, but also a Scottish bildungsroman), The Deadman's Pedal. Another Scottish classic, Kelman's The Busconductor Hines, and Sheila Rowbotham's history of radical industrial-period women, Dreamers of a New Day.

Kids' stuff?

In a break from the L. M. Montgomery marathon, I read Terry Pratchett's Nation yesterday. People can be snobby about Pratchett, but who else is writing consistently good, funny, socially-engaged books which tackle the big issues. Nation propounds the joys of liberal humanism and atheism in a thoughtful and sensitive way, amongst other things. Pullman does the same thing in a more dramatic fashion, but TP quietly explores them in this book. We'll miss him when his Alzheimer's takes over. Curiously, the author photograph is the only hint of Pratchett's condition. Instead of a full-frontal one, his face is turned away from the camera, making him unknowable. Given that he has a white beard and always wears a black hat and clothes, the effect is one of darkness - very poignant. 

On the theme of children's fantasy, I saw Inkheart yesterday. I'm a fan of the books (they're about the power of reading), and grew to like the film. They give away the central conceit in the first line of the voice-over which is ridiculous, and Brendan Fraser is the worst actor I've ever seen. Keanu Reeves would have put more primal energy into the role. 

Day of Remembrance

For lefty types like me, it's a special day. Firstly, Oliver Postgate died today - grandson of George Lansbury the Labour Party Leader, cousin of Angela Lansbury, the creative brain behind Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and many more. I've never seen Bagpuss and don't give a flying one for childhood TV nostalgia, the last redoubt of rugger-shirt wearing students, but I know enough of Postgate's work to understand that like Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman, they're responsible for the generations of enthusiastic, open-minded, imaginative and thoughtful cultural socialists we have: liberation socialists, we could call them. There might not be many of them, but they're out there.

UPDATE: Zoe Williams makes my points much more eloquently - but then she's a professional journalist. Channel 4 News last night also claimed that Ivor the Engine was set in Wales because Postgate was a huge fan of Dylan Thomas - and there is a (gentler) ring of Llareggub about the cartoon. Also, Professor Yaffle was inspired by meeting Bertrand Russell. Everything I learn about the man makes me sadder that he didn't run the country rather than make cartoons in a cowshed.

Which brings me on to Milton - not forgotten at all, as the Today programme's grumpy slot claimed. I teach Milton in an ex-Poly, and some of my colleagues specialise in his work. I'm not an unalloyed fan of JM - the mouthpiece of a genocidal regime as far as Ireland's concerned - and as Ackroyd's Milton in America suggests, he could so easily have become an Ayatollah figure, but he was also a Republican in body and spirit, and a force for rationality and liberation in so many ways. Here's Philip Pullman reading Milton and here's Terry Eagleton's summary of Milton's greatness (the poetry's pretty good too).