Category: Story-telling

I frequently travel back and forth these days between my home in Cambridge and London, in order to spend time with grandchildren. I rather enjoy being part of that enormous tide of people that flows into London every day, and across it, and then flows back out again every night, train after train from all those mainline stations, each train filling up with people and rushing out into the home counties, only for another another train to arrive and fill up in turn. What a strange thing: all those thousands of human souls on the move, each one an entire universe!

My favourite station is Blackfriars, which (uniquely as far as I know) straddles the Thames on its own bridge. As you emerge from the train on Platform 1, you are faced with a single enormous window, the length and height of the station itself, which takes in, to your left, St Pauls and the prestige office blocks of the City, and to the right, the Tate Modern building in the foreground and the Shard behind it, while between them the wide river, sparkling in the sun, is spanned by a series of bridges, each slightly more hazy than the last, stretching back to Tower Bridge in grey silhouette in the distance. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, and it puts me in mind of a poem by Wordsworth that my father liked to recite, about the morning view from another London bridge:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty…

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I was talking to a writer friend, Colette, about the Neapolitan Quartet and I said one of the things I felt the lack of when I was reading it was sensory information of any kind. The narrator just talks about relationships and interactions and, if she mentions the material setting at all, does so only minimally, in the way that a dramatist does in stage directions. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a personal choice. What you exclude is as important as what you include in any sort of work of art. Colette likes pared-down writing and, as she says, descriptive passages in books are often boring and can feel quite self-indulgent on the author’s part. But my own personal feeling is that I want a novel to evoke, as far as possible, the full breadth of the feeling of being alive, and experiences such as standing in front of that window, or being part of the flow of people in and out of London, are as much a part of that, as are personal interactions.

It seems to me (and this probably isn’t an original thought) that of all art forms, novels are uniquely well placed to encompass the whole picture: interior and exterior worlds, human relationships and material reality… Other art forms can arguably portray any one of these things better than novels can, but novels (and even short stories for that matter) have a sort of ‘jack of all trades’ quality that means they can bring everything together in a way that no other form quite can.

* * *

The other day on Platform 1 of Blackfriars station, with a few minutes to wait for the train to Peckham, I was standing by the glass taking in the view next to a smartly-dressed woman who was doing the same thing. I made some comment about how beautiful it was and she said ‘You know what? I pass through this station every single day, and I never grow tired of it.’

See also (while on London bridges): Waterloo Sunset

Astronomers believe they may have discovered signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. The planet itself is only known to them because of the slight flicker that occurs each time it passes between its sun (K2-18) and us, and the indicators of life are the tiny changes in the colour composition of that light that occur at the same time, assumed to be the result of light passing through the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopy suggests that these changes indicate the presence of dimethyl sulphide and/or dimethyl disulphide, both of them gases which on Earth are produced by marine algae and bacteria. The planet is so far away that the light being analysed has been travelling towards us for 124 years.

There have been claims like this before which haven’t stood up to further examination -claims, for instance, that the imprints of bacteria had been found found in meteorites of Martian origin – so too much excitement is premature. Also, even supposing that the biological origin of these chemicals is somehow confirmed, this doesn’t mean that K2-18b is populated by organisms like our animals and plants. On Earth, as I understand it, these chemicals are produced by simple prokaryote organisms, and there is a really huge evolutionary leap involved in getting from prokaryotes to the much more complex eukaryotes that are the basis for all large multicellular organisms on Earth.

Nevertheless, even the discovery of something resembling bacteria or algae on another planet would represent an enormous change in our knowledge of the universe. As far as we’ve known up to now, life could be unique to our own planet -the result perhaps of a set of coincidences so unlikely as to literally never have occurred anywhere else. But if we know that life also exists on another planet only 124 lightyears away (‘only’ is an odd word to use for such an immense distance, but bear in mind that our galaxy, itself one of billions, is some 90,000 lightyears wide, and 1,000 lightyears deep), it becomes clear that life must be present all over the place. Like the Copernican revolution, proof that this was the case would represent a futher radical decentring of our place in the universe. Or at least it would do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that it doesn’t feel all that surprising. We have been familiar for a long time, after all, with the idea of life on other planets, which has been a staple of science fiction for a century and more.

This, for me, is a reminder that science fiction, dismissed by many as a rather lowly form of writing -escapist entertainment and no more- is a modern form of fantastical literature that burgeoned in the wake of the incredibly rapid scientific and technological changes of the past two centuries, and perhaps serves a rather important cultural function for such a constantly changing world. Interplanetary travel, robots, artificial intelligence… all were explored in fiction long before they actually existed. (Social media, admittedly, not so much!) And, just as children’s play helps prepare them for adulthood, science fiction helps us deal with the fact that, unlike people in earlier ages, we live in a time where, within a single lifespan, things will be discovered that will turn upside-down the way we see and interact with the world.

And science fiction also provides a way of visiting, if only in our imaginations, the places in the universe which we know might well exist, but which we know we will never actually see. I mean, how could we bear knowing that there is, or may be, other life out there, without at least speculating about the forms that life might take? And isn’t it the function of all fiction, in fact, to take us to places where we couldn’t otherwise go?

So, just as branding can add value to a manufactured product, so can the ‘brand’ resulting from fame and adulation add value to a cultural artifact: a book, a film, a painting, a piece of music… (I’m avoiding the term ‘work of art’ because that tends to imply something highbrow, and this is equally true for works at every level of ‘brow’)

But it’s possible to flip the comparison right over and argue that these cultural products themselves function as a kind of branding that adds value to everyday life.

For instance, I sometimes like to listen to music when I’m driving. Get the music right and it works with the passing scene like the soundtrack of a movie. Life feels that little bit more interesting and intense, and I feel a bit like I’m a character in a story and not just – you know- little inconsequent me.

There was a time once, I remember, when certain young men would put speakers on the outside of their cars with the idea, or so I imagine, that the rest of us, too, would see them as being like characters in movies, and that this in turn would enhance their own sense of being so – their sense of being someone, in other words, and not just anyone, which is an important thing to have, even if putting speakers outside your car is rather narcissistic.

So a cultural artifact, music, is adding richness to a car journey, and therefore adding value to life itself, in the same way that music, words and images can be used to add value to a product advertised on TV.

It may do this just by being pleasurable to listen to, and evoking various moods and feelings which we find engaging, but it may also function by making us feel like we are inside another cultural artifact, a movie, a story-world, a place where life is more vivid and intense. Advertising does this too. Look at car ads on TV, or perfume ads, and, in pretty much every case, you are being invited to think of the product as something that will admit you to a story world. And this is not even a con, exactly.

While on the subject of ads, let me admit that there is a copywriter inside me, crying to be let out. I once whiled away an hour on a train by devising in my mind an entire advertising campaign for McCoy’s crisps, including TV ads, posters and merchandise.

I did actually think about being a copywriter when I was a kid, inspired, as I said before, by The Space Merchants – in spite of (or, to be honest, probably because of) that book being about the dangerous power of advertising. Unfortunately for my advertising career, I did also internalise the book’s political message, and by the time I was old enough to need a job, I didn’t feel able to give over my life to helping giant corporations sell harmful things.

But I think I would have been good at copywriting. It certainly would have been a better fit with my skills than being a social worker, and an excellent training for being a writer, at least in the narrow sense of honing my skill with words, because the best advertising copy has something in common with poetry – it has to be as succinct as possible and make every word count – but with the added twist that, unlike poetry, it has to work even when its readers have barely noticed that it’s there.

This ad from a while back seems very simple, but is a small masterpiece of compression.

The final sentence – ‘We’ve got sales targets’ – is disarming and funny because it frankly admits the real purpose of the ad, and yet it doesn’t in any way reduce the impact of the sequence set up by the previous sentences and the picture of the drink: summer (hot), thirsty (unpleasant), and Oasis (a cool and refreshing release from heat and thirst – and, speaking of release, isn’t that image quite blatantly orgasmic?)

In fact, far from reducing its overall impact – the ‘sales target’ sentence allows the rest of the ad to slide gently into your consciousness (and, more importantly, into your unconscious), like the smooth coating on a pill, without seeming too bald and shouty.

And notice how ‘You’re thirsty’ is in a larger font. So often when we’re busy, we don’t notice our bodily sensations until something draws them to our attention. (When I was a social worker, I would often notice right at the end of the afternoon that I felt quite light-headed, and realise that I’d forgotten to eat my lunch.) Also, though I don’t really know why this should be, ‘thirsty’ is a particularly powerful word with lots of bite. Much more so than, say, ‘hungry’ or ‘tired’.

Brilliantly effective writing. And all done in eight words – or nine including the bottle. I can’t stand those kinds of drinks as it happens, but it would have worked on me otherwise, no question about it. And, if only it wasn’t for my political scruples, I would have loved to have worked on ads like that.

I once heard an advertising professional making the case that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it adds value to them – we enjoy products more because of the associations that advertising has added to them. I’m quite certain this is true (and not just because, ever since I read The Space Merchants as a kid, I have had a fascination with advertising’s dark arts).

For instance, my youngest daughter and I used to love Hobgoblin Ale’s ‘What’s the matter lager boy?’ ads, and bought the beer accordingly. I have no doubt the ads made the drink seem more fun than it would have been if we had drunk it from an unmarked glass without knowing what it was. We would still have liked it it, no doubt, but it would just have been a beer.

This podcast discusses the possibility that Stradivarius instruments might be a spectacular example of this effect. Many people are convinced that these centuries-old violins and violas, which can sell for tens of millions, make a uniquely beautiful sound. And yet, as the podcast shows, musicians involved in blind tests did not favour the Strads over modern violins, or even correctly identify them more often than you’d expect them to do by chance. In the podcast, a professional musician who actually owns a Strad refuses to accept the validity of this finding, but it is very difficult to separate a product from its branding unless you do a blind test (especially if you’ve spent a fortune on it). And, as that advertising man might ask, why would you even want to separate a product from its branding, when the branding really does make you enjoy the product more?

How much does this branding effect apply in the cultural sphere generally? There can’t be much doubt, for instance, that a simple sketch attributed to Picasso will be worth far more, and receive far more attention and praise, than would be the case if that exact same sketch had been made by an artist no one has heard of. (Duchamp famously showed that, just by signing it, he could turn a urinal into a work of art.) I’m pretty sure that I have often given films, books, paintings etc a much more sympathetic hearing when I’ve known in advance that they are considered to be masterpieces, than I might otherwise have done. In fact, it’s hard to see how our appreciation of books and films could not be affected by their reputations, given that books and films only work at all by triggering associations in our mind, and their reputation will inevitably play a part in those associations. (Being perverse and prone to jealousy, I sometimes dislike books and films more than I otherwise would have done, precisely because of the kind of praise they’ve been given – but that’s still a branding effect. It’s still me being influenced by the book or film’s reputation.)

Nevertheless it is still meaningful to ask if it’s the reputation of a work of art, or the associations that would be set up anyway by the work itself, that is the main contributor to the value that’s attributed to it. Watching a particularly good episode of Succession, my wife asked ‘Is Shakespeare really so much better than this?’ I think it’s a good question. If you make up your mind that something’s wonderful, whether it’s Shakespeare or the Beatles, Ulysses or the Bible, then you will find wonderful things in it, and you are much more likely to make up your mind that something’s wonderful if everyone keeps telling you so. In the case of those four examples, there are whole industries devoted to celebrating their wonderfulness.

I turn 70 at the end of this year. It’s an interesting time of life. In some ways I feel more myself than I ever did. This is perhaps in part because of not having a day job of any kind – I haven’t had one for 9 years- so I don’t have to play a role, or fit into a system in the way I once did, and I have a lot of time when I can think, or write, or see people, or do whatever I want.

(I’ve sometimes noticed in the past when I’ve met up with people who still work in a place I used to work, how intensely involved they are in the politics of that world, the machinery of it. It seems to be so BIG for them, just as it once did to me, yet now, from outside, it seems so small, like an ants nest on the floor of a forest, and it seems almost comical that they should take it so very seriously.)

Another thing is that a lot of options are closed to me. For instance, I’m not going to begin a whole new career at this point, or start a whole new family. I have had most of my life (I’d have to live to 140 for that not to be true!), and I have to recognise that in many ways, this is it – I’ve got as far with this thing or that thing as I’m ever going to get, whether or not I’d hoped to get further. So I’m sort of stuck with being me.

One thing I do a lot of, though it can be painful, is review my life so far, almost as I might look back at a novel when I’ve reached the end: So those were the main characters! So this was the story arc!

But when I do this, I realise that life doesn’t really work like a novel. For example, if, in a novel, there was a character who met with the protagonist regularly for a chat, but didn’t advance the plot in any way – didn’t have an affair with the protagonist, or set up a business with him, or say some wise or devastating thing that changed the course of his life…- you’d either cut that character out, or give them something to do. I think this is true even in a literary novel which likes to think it’s above the vulgarity of plot, but still has to show the protagonist progressing.

This is why characters in novels often seem to have a rather limited number of friends, and we seldom hear much about the conversations they have with their children or grandchildren, even though friends, family, children are probably for most people the main thing that give their life meaning.