The Restraint Of Beasts ~ Magnus Mills

This is a funny novel about three fence-builders in rural Scotland.

Tam, Ritchie and the unnamed narrator work for a small fence-construction company, run by the tyrannical Donald. As “Gang No. 3” their fates are inextricably linked – they work, they drink, they work again. Tam and Ritchie are Scottish – both dour, monosyllabic heavy-metal enthusiasts. Early on we are informed they look like Vikings. The narrator is English, from the off an outsider, and at the start of the novel is made foreman of the crew. We follow them at their work in the vicinity, before getting sent to England on a special fencing project. Here they drink, work and drink again – all the while living on site in a squalid company caravan. They somehow manage to kill three people. On this assignment the work-drink cycle goes to extremes – each payday merely clears the debt they have accumulated at that point on drink. The English town is inhospitable, and everywhere they are aware of the sinister presence of the mysterious Hall Brothers – fencers, butchers and local heroes.

The style is deadpan. The comedy derives from the repetition of ridiculous acts and tics. Tam and Ritchie abound with idiosyncrasies. Tam always screws on the lid of his empty Irn-Bru bottle before throwing it out the window. Ritchie keeps his cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but his lighter in the back of his too-tight-jeans, requiring contortions and squirming to liberate it. Both are comically lethargic, sullen and unmotivated.  The squalor in the caravan is horrific and hilarious – all three are painfully unprepared for working in the rain. The work is tedious and monotonous and the three have their spirits slowly ground down by it. It is, along with Flann O’Brien and Catch-22, among the funniest novels I have ever read.

However, and I may be the only person ever to subject the novel to this level of scrutiny, I believe the novel is deeper than the mere farce that it appears on the surface. Like “The Wizard of Oz”, I believe this book is actually an allegory of economics and, in particular, capitalism and Marxism.

Here we have the stark contrast between those with “Capital” (Donald, the Hall Brothers) and those that, lacking Capital, are the “Labour” (Tam, Ritchie, the narrator). The lot of the Labour is to work their lives away in tedious work for the owners of the Capital – their wages merely cover the debts of their vices (the booze). It is a life of circularity – work, drink, work. Never have the Labour any chance to break from this vicious circle. The owners of the Capital put the Labour to work, to further their ownership of the Capital. It is not an accidental metaphor that the niche of Labour in which the three unfortunates ply their trade is the building of high tensile fences. They are constructing their own cage – they are told it is for “the restraint of beasts” that they are to build, and it is no lie. Even the narrator, getting a promotion to foreman, is really no better than the lowest rung. The whole life is a farce, there is no real power in this world, except for the owners of the Capital. The novel is a description of the Author’s view of how the world works. It is not so much a call to arms to change the system, but an honest appraisal. It offers no solutions to the unfairness of this system, but a cynic would certainly draw from it the suggestion that one should make every effort to be an owner of Capital, than a labouring drone. It is in a sense a nihilistic message. The portrayals of the Labour are affectionate, but there is no hope for them in this system. It is a Beckettian view of the world – hopelessness laced with humour.

I could be reading too much into it, but having read the rest of Magnus Mills’ novels, I believe that I am correct.  His other notable novel is “All Quiet on the Orient Express” and the themes and metaphors are so similar that it is hard to believe that the author does not have a grand design and message. In this novel, the (again) unnamed narrator goes to a Cumbrian campsite for a week’s holidays. He does some oddjobs for the campsite owner and, by a bizarre serious of events, ends up practically indentured as the campsite owner’s serf. The narrator has his dreams, but they recede by the work-day. This novel is as grim and humorous as “The Restraint of Beasts”, but it is the lesser novel. In some ways it is more successful at conveying the Author’s pessimistic take on the human condition – the conclusions are more obvious – but is suffers in the comedy compartment, as it lacks the comedic interplay between the opposite characters of Tam, Richie and the narrator.

I really enjoyed this novel and have been back to it many times, for entertainment and education both.

Accordion Crimes ~ Annie Proulx

Proulx is more famous for her short stories, the form in which the majority of her output takes. She is a recognised master of the form – her stories are funny and shocking, and laced always with her unique western vernacular. However she also has a number of novels under her belt – I’ve read all four. Only two could be said to be true “novels” in the sense that they concern a handful of characters and their fates for all their pages – the enjoyable “Shipping News” and the disappointing “That Old Ace In The Hole”. The other two novels, “Postcards” and “Accordion Crimes” are more akin to an extended set of short stories, each chapter related only by the underlying theme.
 
I am re-reading “Accordion Crimes”, her biggest novel, enjoying it immensely. I believe that with its scale and ambition, and astonishing breadth of characters, locations, history, timeframes, humanity – it must be a candidate for the Great American Novel, whatever that is. Eschewing metaphor, it is quite simply an examination of the American immigrant experience from every angle, and thus an examination of America itself.
 
The thread relating all the chapters is a green accordion, made by a Sicilian emigrant to America, and its various owners throughout about two hundred and fifty years of American history. It accompanies the Sicilian and his son to their new life in New Orleans, circuitously comes into the ownership of Protestant German immigrants somewhere in Pennsylvania, winds up in the hands of a French-Canadian orphan in the borderlands, Mexican-American cotton-pickers, becomes possession of a series of African-Americans (formerly slaves)…
 
It sounds twee – a collection of immigrants of all backgrounds, languages and skin-colours, united in their humanity and common cause by their shared love of, and possession of, a green accordion! It sounds equally contrived – how could such an object manage to traverse such geographies and peoples plausibly!
 
But like all Proulx’s writing, it is not at all sentimental. She writes like a man, a colourful Hemmingway – coincidence, chance, serendipity are shorn to a minimum – most of the characters have ugly ends, struggle to get by, live in a violent, racist and sexist places, are violent, racist or sexist themselves; most have loveless existences, are cruelly crushed by circumstance or by history or by ignorance. Most have painful ends, most fail to fulfil even the most basic of human potentials – fleeting happiness. Time and again you have to marvel at Proulx’s propensity for inflicting the most savage of fates on her lovingly constructed characters… And always the accordion passes through hands in a plausible manner – hocked in pawn shops, sold for food, or passed on unwanted in junkpiles on someone’s death. For the most of its life it sits gathering dust, and the characters briefly orbit around it. (Indeed, Proulx employs an idiosyncratic device to tell of the character’s fates once the accordion has left their possession – she tells the rest of their (usually short and painful, always quirky) existences in paragraphs in brackets – like this).
 
It is slow-moving, the text is knarled and requires slow-reading. But the characters are vivid and real; you care for their fortunes, are sympathetic to their flaws, are shocked by their inevitable downfall. It is clearly painstakingly researched – all the pogroms and heaves have the ring of authenticity.
 
My favourite episode is of the orphan immigrant of French-Canadian parents, Dolor – who has a childhood of such misery that Oliver Twist would wince. He somehow claws out a passable existence for himself, consoled by bluegrass music and the accordion, until afflicted by a mysterious illness. His demise is horrific (and only revealed for what it is in a subsequent chapter). He is a real character, his travails desperate and heart-rending. The brief happiness he achieves before his death, was merely a mirage, a self-delusion… I also enjoyed the Mexican-American chapter.
 
In fact, the abiding memory of the novel is the wonder at how badly Proulx treats her characters – she invents them, creates their characters, backstories, loves, losses, makes them real, and then destroys them without mercy. Each demise is more shocking than the last.
 
Finally, although I loved the novel, I wondered why there was no Irish-American owner, nor Jewish-American owner. I suppose that these two experiences have been well chronicled, and these two tribes didn’t venture as far west as others, and it is the wild west that Proulx is concerned with.
 
A wonderful novel – original and weird.

Retiring at fifty, you must be mad!

A roadmap.

To retire at fifty requires an income for the remainder of your life.

Income can be provided by one, or a combination of, the four main asset classes, or other asset classes not under these brackets.

So, to amass the requisite portfolio, it requires an intelligently (and perhaps fortuitously) acquired set of investments at age fifty.

The four main asset classes are equities, property, fixed interest and cash. To supplement these are the non-standard asset classes – hedge funds, private equity, art, antiques, commodities, the lotto, venture capital, or organic businesses (there may be more of these).

I will consider these in turn.

We need to talk about investment.

Conor said something a while back that struck home. He said that as individuals we can achieve more than we can possibly imagine, but we can’t achieve what we set out to do unless we clearly define at the outset what exactly that something is.

Some may think my worldview is depressing, but I don’t. I believe there is so much beauty in the world, and so much joy, if you care to find it. But I also believe that the world is indifferent to each of our fates as individuals. We are, tragically (but equally amazingly), carbon-based receptacles for our genes. As far as our knowledge goes, there is nothing particularly significant about genes. They are a random bunch of proteins, themselves a random bunch of atoms that gained self-replicating traction in the primordial Irish stew.

Without beating about the bush, what I wish to achieve in my life is this: I wish to value friends and family. I wish to find fun in everything I do. I wish to eat well. I wish to enjoy music. I wish to quest for truth, and reject falsity (knowing always that Truth is not a destination, but a direction). I wish to always enjoy respectful disagreements with friends (that’s the spice of life).

Them’s the ideals. But the flipside of the coin is realism. We are ants playing snakes and ladders on a board on a table on a joltery train. To achieve my ideals I need to keep one eye on reality. In the modern world we exchange money for goods and services. Therefore to achieve most of my goals, honestly, requires some amount of money. Maybe less than most of us would imagine, maybe not. But some. To live, in this dog-eat-dog world, you need some sort of sustenance. Money can buy this.

Without beating further about the bush, I can achieve my ideals (enunciated above), only with the support of some amount of money and real-world agitation. My real-world goals, buttressing the nebulous ideals, are to retire at fifty, with a portfolio of assets that yield an income that enables me to enjoy life as I understand this enjoyment. For the rest of my natural life.

To do so, we need to talk about investment.

How can I achieve this set of investments, and of what should it comprise?

I need to think about this!

Patrick Collins – 1910-1994 – Irish Artist

For all that it is dirty, and populated by hairy savages, Dublin is not a bad old place to live.

Everything is small, including the distances between places. On a good day, the place looks like the postcards on sale in Carrolls – all those multi-coloured buildings on Bachelor’s Walk crisp and quaint, the Liffey clean and full-tided, the Spire worrying the clouds if there were any…

On a bad day, the place looks like a dystopian nightmare – junkies congregating on the boardwalk, bellowing at each other across streets, litter everywhere, the street pocked and poxxed with puddles, the Liffey low-tided and shopping-trolleyed.

More than most places, Dublin is reflexive. Dublin seems as you feel.

If you are in a good mood, when the world seems full of possibility, then Dublin’s streets vibrate with the same energy. There is curiosity around every corner, places to explore. Quirky history abounds, there are always parks you’ve never been to, galleries you’ve never been to. New restaurants you’d like to eat in, free events on, new flicks in the IFI. The banter in the pubs is witty. The sun is shining. Or if not, then the fat raindrops playfully plop on your unfurrowed brow, the lines to the sky like spiderweb gossamer, resonating to your happy thoughts.

If you are in a bad mood, when the world seems inconsequential, then Dublin is not the place to be. Its dull, you see the worst, you suspect all. Its smallness begets paranoia, claustrophobia. The pubs are full of wastrels and down-and-outs. History is ended twenty years ago. Character is dead. The streets are leaden, sodden with rain, sopping with concrete despondency. All is bland. The title of the Jimmy Cake album, “Dublin gone, everybody dead”, seems like wishful thinking. There’s nowhere you can get a good coffee. Anywhere good is crowded anyway. Its all like a skank midland town, a giant Mullingar, all traffic fumes and mute desperation.

It is in this headspace that I imagine Patrick Collins painted “Liffey Quaysides”, one of my favourite paintings, if not my favourite painting. It is on permanent exhibition in the National Gallery.

   

It  depicts a view from O’Connell Bridge, taking in the quaysides and Halfpenny bridge. It is painted in iron gray colours. It is not flattering to Dublin. The quayside edifices seem to loom and crowd over the waters, the columns in the Halfpenny bridge seem like prison bars. The painting’s borders crowd in, crimping the view and emphasise the menace of the view.

To me, this is a psychological picture. Collins, with the grey hues, has literally painted the city with the same negative brush. There is no redemption here. The view is blurred, as if Collins came to the conclusion that he needn’t bother go into any further definition – it’d all be crap anyway. But more, it seems as if the view he depicts is that of one through weeping eyes. (Or maybe he was just very short-sighted?) Why weeping?

As I said, Dublin is reflexive. I can visualise Collins taking in the view, preoccupied with whatever was eating him, oblivious to the hoards of people crossing sides behind him, the hustle and bustle, in his moment of melancholy.

Collins was from Sligo, but went to school in Glasnevin. He worked for twenty years in an insurance company, studying at night and painting in his spare time (maybe there’s hope for me). He was inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses. He lived in a tower in Howth Castle for a time. He moved to Brittanny in his sixties, then Normandy and finally Nice. He returned to Dublin after 6 years and died in Monkstown in 1994.

I haven’t seen much else by Collins besides “Liffey Quaysides”, but for me, this painting is more powerful than any by Yeats or by Orpen. I keep finding new things to admire in it, new points of speculation. I’d recommend a trip next time you pass through Clare St. Depending on your frame of mind, of course.

Parkinson’s Law

I recently came across this Law and, like a myopic slapping on a pair of glasses first thing in the morning, it has done much to illuminate why the ludicrousness of office life are so patently ludicrous.

Parkinson’s First Law runs like this: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Or, to paraphrase; The amount of time you have to complete a task, is the amount of time it will take to complete said task.”

Parkinson developed this law in his studies of the British Empire. His original observation was of how bureaucracies expand over time – he observed the number of employees of the British Colonial Office, watched it expand, and noted that as the number of colonies fell, the number of employees increased. The number of employees actually peaked at the time the office was disbanded for lack of colonies to rule. Two corollaries are presented - (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals”, and - (2) “Officials make work for each other.

Like the best observations, it is both profound and ridiculously self-evident. Yet it is true, and truer in the office than anywhere else (where Parkinson had in mind when he formulated it). If a project must be completed in three months, it will take three months. If the same project is to be completed in two months, it will take two months. The Law lifts the rock clean off, leaving human procrastinations, laziness, sloth, ego, motivations – running around like headless woodlice.

I believe one of my colleagues independently came to the same conclusion. When a project deadline was fast approaching, and yours truly started pulling at his collar, my colleague’s response was pure Parkinson: “Don't be stressed Hairycakes – everything always gets done.” EVERYTHING ALWAYS GETS DONE! Precisely! We got it done, as Parkinson and my colleague said we would. Quality may decline, but the deadline will always be met. The means may be different to achieve the end, but the end will be met. If there is the prospect of a deadline extension, then this does not invalidate the law. People will factor in the existence of the extension into their (subconscious) plans and work to the extended deadline!

So the corollary is, deadlines shouldn’t stress you out, because they will always be met!

Some of the corollaries to Parkinson’s Law are even more interesting. His theory of how hierarchies develop is so hilarious it must have something to it. Read an abridged version here:

http://www.spreadsheetdetective.com/berglas/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf

Are we really so shallow and so foolish? Probably. It also goes to show that big organisations are, organically, less efficient than smaller operations.

I was put in mind of these office laws by a recent whimsical article in the FT .

The FT article modified Parkinson’s Law of bureaucracies to Head Offices – “Planning the perfect HQ is undertaken only by institutions on the verge of collapse”, citing the League of Nations in  the 30s and extending it, worryingly to the EU today – which just completed its new HQ in Brussels. We could add Anglo Irish Bank’s quays monstrosity to this list, or the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall, or Easter Island.

A final corollary to Parkinson’s relativistic take on the world is applicable even to the non-Dilberts of the world: “Expenditures rise to meet income.”

Or, every time you get a raise, your expenditure will inexplicably jump to swallow it up.

Try to find fault with any of these Laws. Find them you will not. But dwelling on them may well make you wiser.

Derek Crozier – Irish Artist

Derek Crozier, cruciverbalist, died on 3rd April 2010. There have been warm tributes paid to his life and work.

Crozier composed the “Crosaire” cryptic crossword in the Irish Times for 67 years. The obituary tells a nice story of the column’s creation – his wife was a crossword fanatic and often complained about how easy she was finding her crosswords, how they no longer constituted a challenge. Nag, nag, nag.

So he set about designing a crossword that would cause her more trouble, a truly cryptic crossword. She was stumped (and impressed). A few days later, Christmas Eve in Emergency Dublin, Crozier met Big Bertie Smyllie, legendary editor of the Irish Times, in the Palace Bar on Westmoreland St. Crozier mentioned his crossword, Smylie had a look and was equally impressed and found him some space for a daily column. And so it began.

I won’t pretend I could solve these brain-teasers. If ever we had consecutive day’s newspapers lying around the house, I’d read the clues, have a superficial think, and then look at the solutions in the following day’s papers and marvel, for there is no other word, at the ingenuity of the clues and answers.

To celebrate his life, the Irish Times published a booklet with a selection of his most brilliant crosswords (with, thankfully, solutions), and it truly shows how talented, and original, was this man’s work. Try these:

• Country Rot, I See (6). (Rustic)
• May be in the form of arcs (4). (Scar)
• The buck still goes to the bad when he gets the girl (9). (Stagnancy)
• It’s ridiculous to have anything so light with nothing on the end (7). (Lampoon)
• Does Garry sound as if he needs a wig? That takes the biscuit! (9) (Garibaldi)
• With him you’re got to buy your own drinks (7). (Vintner)
• ETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETSETS ones holds (6). (Tenets) – To explain this one; there are ten “ETS” here, hence “tenets”, principles  one holds.

The booklet is good enough to list some Crosaire conventions:

• clues can usually be broken into three parts
• Clues often employ anagrams, synonyms, homophones, palindromes or letter plays.

An example of the reasoning given: “That miserable accountant is worth his weight in diamonds (5)” Solution: The solution is CARAT – miserable = RAT, accountant = CA (chartered accountant); RAT+CA (anagram) = CARAT (diamond weight).

Reading through these, you really have to marvel at the ingenuity of this man’s mind!

In all the acclaim following his death, there were suggestions that the column should be continued forever, starting over from column number one when the last one is published. I wonder has anyone considered whether this man’s work should not be studied as literature?

To me, he seems the natural successor to Joyce; think of the wordplay and classical learning of Finnegans Wake, the multi-lingual, multi-level puns, the use of words to transcend utilitarianism. And if he would be candidate to succeed Joyce, then he fits naturally in the same bracket as Flann O’Brien, playful and irreverent, a multi-generational Irish Times institution?

He fits so neatly into the canon, that it would seem a shame not to light the fuse and at least see what sort of fanfare is loosed.

The only objections to such a course that I can think of  are:
Can crosswords be considered literature? In anguished voice: “But is it Art?” Would Crozier have called it Art himself? Was it ever meant as Art?

Had Crozier artistic purpose? Joyce embarked on his fiendish and unreadable masterpiece with an aim. I’ve read the first and the last paragraphs of Finnegans Wake, and this is enough to say with confidence that he had a schema, an outline of how it was to be and what it was to say. This is enough to qualify as a work of art. \it could be said that Crozier made crossword puzzles, clever granted, but mere diversion for Dublin’s polymath eggheads with too much time on their hands. I don’t doubt that Crozier, by all accounts a modest man with no pretensions to anything, would have himself considered his work Art.

But for something to be labelled Art, does it necessarily have to have been meant as Art by its creator? Obviously it usually is, but i can think of many examples where some work has been acclaimed as High Art and the original creator would have been both gobsmacked and tickled pink to know about it. For example, listed architectural structures like the Georgian redbricks in town. These were built for a utilitarian purpose – yet in time became a symbol of an era, and a mark of distinction to the venerable capital among European capitals, like a cragged face who claims with pride to his equally battered peers that he still has some of his original teeth in his head. Another example is of the original comic books, Spiderman or Batman, that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – a genre that dubbed itself “pulp fiction” but is now recognised as, culturally, a major influence on the second half of the twentieth century. These originals now reside in private collections alongside Picassos and Van Goghs, or in serious museums worldwide. Their original creators had no such pretensions; they were paid by the box, and the emphasis was on quantity, not quality. Graphic novels being produced now are the most innovative advance in literature since Joyce. More: the prehistoric cave painters in Lascaux were just simple cavemen. Outsider art?

No, lack of artistic intent does not disqualify a work from being called Art. “All art is quite useless” said Wilde. On this count too, Crozier’s crosswords qualify. Really, Art is Art when someone, anyone, says it is Art and appreciates it so. It needn’t be the creator. Ivan Goncharov disowned “Oblomov” thinking it was a piece of twaddle, and, indeed, threw the only manuscript of it into the fire. His horrified friends dived in after it, saving most of it, at their own skin’s expense. Its now considered a classic of Russian literature.

I, personally, look forward to a time when Irish students have a choice of Shakespeare or Crozier to study for the Leaving.