The Master, Kermode and Mayo, and "cults"

As a follow-up to the last post, which dealt with a novel about a "cult" (not my words), we went last night to see The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film. This is not a review of the film, but it was a slight vindication of a point I made in my previous post, that religion deserves to be treated with intelligent consideration. The "Master" of the title, a character called Lancaster Dodd, is substantially based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology -- arguably a far more damaging cult than that represented in The Revelations -- and yet, in an interview on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's show, Paul Thomas Anderson was quite adamant that the character, and the cult (named "The Cause"), do not have a wholly negative impact.

It's also interesting to consider that Kermode and Mayo, who review films on 5Live on a Friday afternoon, also have a "cult" following: people who write to the show with their own reviews usually try to show off by referencing the in-jokes and personal foibles of the two presenters (which the podcast amplifies even further). Kermode, who has a PhD in film studies (he's a massive horror fan), is affectionately referred to as "the good doctor". And, in a serendipitous cycle of themes, it turns out that both Kermode and Mayo are regular churchgoers.

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip
Seymour Hoffman in The Master

This is not to dispute the fact that, if the John Sweeney Panorama programme is anything to go by, Scientology does sound like it's fucking crazy. And of course there are different degrees of "cult"-ishness, Kermode and Mayo being at the harmless end of the spectrum. But it is ignorant and unhelpful to ignore the numbers of people who become involved in these movements, without exploring why they might want to do so. The Master is a beautiful, superbly-acted movie (though "low on plot", as Anderson admits), which reserves judgment in an admirable show of reflectiveness and restraint.

One last thing. I am currently reading (Samuel-Johnson prize shortlisted) The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane, about which I shall no doubt be posting soon. It is brilliant. It's about how rational and non-rational views of landscapes -- specifically ancient paths and roads -- might interact and complement each other,  and MacFarlane is so wide-eyed and open-minded, as well as being a beautiful writer, that it is a joy to read.

Book-jacket publicity, and doing mental illness a disservice: Alex Preston's 'The Revelations'

One of my first thoughts after finishing The Revelations was that it has not been particularly well-served by the various taglines, blurb and quotations adorning its book-jacket, many of which make it out to be far less subtle and ambiguous than it really is.

For a start, there's the phrase "one weekend", which you can see in the image on the right. The book is essentially marketed as a psychological thriller (see dramatic lighting and mysteriously back-turned figures on the cover), and it tends towards this in the later stages, but it spends a chunky amount of time doing some quite admirable exposition, exploring who the "four friends" are and narrating some scenes in a lot of detail, before we get to the "weekend". In the thriller mode, it does end up being the weekend --  a spiritual retreat to a country house -- that is important, but in terms of the wider questions this book poses, I think the early stages are just as important.

The other thing that annoyed me is the use of the word "cult", which appears twice on the back of the book, both in the blurb and in a quotation from the Daily Mirror. I therefore expected to read a book about something like Scientology, or a live-in commune -- and, more importantly, I expected Preston's portrayal of it to be very much an exposé of its evils and the way it ruins people's lives. In fact, the "cult", which is called The Course, is an evangelical strain of Christianity seeking to convert people who are struggling to find meaning in life, and there are several instances in the book where it seems to do great good.

Exeter College Chapel, Oxford

I think this book is more intelligent than its packaging suggests because it acknowledges many truths that a more militant author wouldn't have done. There are many highly-educated, young, evangelical Christians who gain great strength from their religion. There are also many non-religious young people who do struggle to find meaning in their lives. And there are many people who are touched by experiences that they can only describe as spiritual, often when they would least expect it. Preston goes into some detail about one character's conversion being helped along by the beauty of a college chapel in the early evening, candlelit, filled with sacred choral music. Having experienced this particular sensation myself, my feeling is that Preston knows what he's talking about and understands that religion is more than about accepting or rejecting a set of values -- there is also "the mystery of faith", as the Christian liturgy expresses it, something beyond the purely rational and ethical that helps you accept that life is inherently complicated, imperfect and difficult.

I still haven't worked out what the author's personal position on this is, and obviously there's a debate to be had on whether it matters. In the acknowledgements, Preston refers to Karen Armstrong's The Case for God as "remarkably sane", and references some "bizarre spiritual excursions". It is tempting to view this as a closed-minded approach to something which has brought a lot of benefits for a lot of people, both intellectually and emotionally, but luckily the novel does make an attempt to explore these benefits properly.

My biggest problem with the book is the character of Lee, a (female) PhD student researching female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. There is a colloquial lit-crit term, a "Mary Sue", which is relevant here: a female character who is so perfect as to be two-dimensional, usually a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the (female) author. The term emerged from fan-fiction, but I have found several instances of where it is applicable to mainstream fiction, and this is sort of one of those cases.

Lee is not a Mary Sue in the traditional sense, but she certainly seems a fantasy to me compared to the other three characters. Mouse, Lee's closest friend, describes her thus:

Everyone who met her thought she was this wonderful, lively girl. Those eyes ... I'd see people look into her eyes and be transported. But behind it all she was struggling with terrible demons, unable to face the world.

This quotation exemplifies another problem with the book -- unrealistic, over-angsty dialogue -- but it was the characterisation of Lee that really irritated me. She is very skinny, highly intelligent, super-promiscuous, and above all deeply troubled. One (male) character is in love with her, another is hopelessly sexually fascinated by her.

Now, if I met Lee and she behaved the way she behaved in the book, I'd find her really bloody difficult. She is clearly very depressed, but no one seems to want to help her (unless sleeping with her/ going down on her/ secretly masturbating while she swims naked counts), and almost no one expects her to take responsibility for her actions (except, interestingly, David, the leader of the Course, and one other fairly minor character). The implication is that she can't be expected to behave properly or discuss her actions or seek help, because she's just got all these problems, you know, and, like, we just can't ever understand them, and one day she might kill herself, but hey, that's just who she is. It's deeply infantilising, and it romanticises mental illness in a way I find really distasteful.

'Universally Speaking' is the second
track on the album By the Way.

 Lee is an example of what could be described as an anti-Mary-Sue -- deeply flawed, but in a highly idealised way. Severely depressed people are not, and ought not to be, objects of sexual fascination, no matter how promiscuous they themselves are. They should be treated with respect and given support -- and that includes, to my mind, not simply ignoring selfish and destructive behaviour because it happens to cater to one's sexual desires. She reminds me of the girl described in the song 'Universally Speaking' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- damaged, yes, but desperately romantic and beautiful.

In short, whilst this is an intelligent book in many ways, I felt short-changed as a reader by being forced to regard this character in such a misty-eyed way. Lee represents the intellectual approach to religion in the novel, and I hoped to see a serious consideration of the fact that many, many highly intelligent people (including many academic professors) are religious. Instead we get a rather lazy association between visionaries and mental illness, and a view of the latter that sits uncomfortably and unconvincingly between science and sentimentality. Recommended if you're interested in the issue of modern religion -- but otherwise, probably not.

Henry James -- a masterclass in plot recycling

When I last updated this blog, I was very slowly progressing through The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Since then, I have found a job, passed the 80,000-word mark on my novel, and seen a woodcock for the first time -- I'm undecided on which of those is the most exciting -- and I've also finished reading Wings, about which you can read below.

WARNING: This post includes spoilers for both The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady.

Although James published Wings (1902) twenty years or so after Portrait (1881), the two plots are extraordinarily similar. A greedy woman and her lover/fiancé conspire for him to get close to, and eventually marry, a rich American heiress, in order that they might both have access to the money. In Portrait, the 'Lady' of the title, Isabel Archer, is the victim of this scheme, only realising exactly how cruelly she has been treated towards the end. Similarly, Milly Theale, the young American in Wings, upon realising that Merton Densher's attentions are motivated by money, not affection, experiences intense despair, "turn[s] her face to the wall," and succumbs to the illness which has threatened her life throughout the book.

James's preoccupation with the figure of a genial, intelligent, rich young woman suffering at the hands of others can be explained in biographical terms, especially as regards Wings. The character of Milly Theale is based on his young cousin, Minny Temple, who died of tuberculosis in her mid-twenties, in 1870. James was open about his interest in the immense potential that had been lost, and the strange fact that his affection for her increased after her death (as Merton Densher's does in the novel). The qualities of Isabel Archer and Milly Theale -- both are good-humoured and almost universally liked -- reflect the author's very personal feelings towards the young woman who inspired them.

It's interesting to reflect that, despite the similarities in the two characters and plotlines, it is only Isabel Archer, not Milly Theale as well, who has become the most famous and beloved of James's protagonists. And, despite my using the word 'recycling' in the title of this post, the two novels don't feel at all similar to read. This is partly because James's prose is extremely dense, though rich and expert, in Wings and comparatively light and fluid in Portrait -- but it is also because of a couple of key structural differences in the novel:

Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich 

in  The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

1. Point of view. The Portrait of a Lady is very substantially from Isabel's point of view. We see her handling Caspar Goodwood, her suitor who keeps popping up from America, her increasing regard for Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, her unhappiness and disillusionment after her marriage, and, finally, the moment of anagnorisis (shocking recognition) when she realises that Osmond and Madame Merle are lovers. (She realises this, by the way, through the simple fact that Osmond is sitting whilst Madame Merle is standing -- a level of familiarity completely inappropriate to mere friends, and only possible with a truly intimate relationship. A stunning use of gesture.)

By contrast, Wings is mostly from the points of view of the couple, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, with only a few chapters entirely from Milly's. Towards the end of the novel, we follow Densher almost exclusively, which means we become more interested in his moral crisis than in Milly's cruel situation. Gilbert Osmond in Portrait has no such obvious crisis, and so the moral dynamics of Wings are far subtler.

Alison Elliott and Helen Bonham-

Carter in The Wings 

of the Dove (1997)

2. Proximity (or rather, the lack of it). Not only do we rarely see Milly Theale's point of view -- we are not even in the same city with her when she dies. Merton Densher, after Milly finds out about the plot to get her money -- which we don't see -- has one last, painful meeting with her in Venice -- which we don't see -- and returns to London, leaving Milly to die -- which we don't see. Her death is reported to Densher by other characters who have themselves merely received a telegram. James adds remove after remove to make Densher, and the reader, as detached from her death as possible. He challenges us to fill in the gaps, to imagine her despair.

For an author to kill off a main character is commonplace, sometimes even necessary, to turn up the emotional volume, to raise the stakes. (The deaths of increasingly important characters in the Harry Potter series is a particularly apt example.) But to keep the reader at such a frustrating distance from it, as James does, is phenomenally brave. James is choosing not to cash in on the tear-jerking moments, and implicitly argues that Densher's experiences are more interesting at this point. The difficulties he had in getting the book serialised, ironically, helped him here, enabling him to revise the book and structure it more freely. He chastises himself in the Preface for making Milly's background so scanty -- we know next to nothing about her life in America, for instance -- but the fact that we don't get to be in the room with her at her most crucial, devastating moments is surely deliberate.

3. Milly's illness. At the start of Portrait, Isabel Archer is healthy and happy and determined to have an interesting, full life. Milly takes a similar attitude, but it is given an edge of desperation by the fact that, as is slowly revealed, she knows that she is ill, and suspects that it might be very serious. The fact that the illness is never named, and that she only shows her weakness by her absence at various social engagements -- when she is present, she is vivacious and charming -- intensifies our sense of this threat through James's, and Milly's, teasing. The reader develops a creeping awareness that Milly will not find the happiness she deserves.

Isabel Archer, on the other hand, has no such doom hanging over her head. You feel that she could make a good decision, with enough perspicacity, and find a mode of living that would really suit her. But she doesn't. She marries Gilbert Osmond, and then stubbornly refuses to take any steps to lessen her own misery (until the ambiguous ending). She is complicit in her own downfall, whereas Milly makes no obvious false steps, and is simply the victim of others' schemes.

That this should lead to Isabel becoming such a cherished protagonist is surely natural, considering that she takes her place amongst Dorothea Brooke, Tess Durbeyfield, Elizabeth Bennet and so on, heroines who suffer long and hard (with or without a happy ending) because of a simple error of judgment. We like characters who make mistakes. Milly Theale is likeable, and her situation is tragic, but she is perhaps just too nice for us to get a handle on her -- compared to Merton Densher, who feels the weight of his own guilty profoundly by the end.



The Wings of the Dove takes a while to decide on its protagonist, but the sense of satisfaction I found at the end, when Densher rejects the money Milly has left him and dismisses the success of their scheme, proved to me that Henry James's choice to go back to the plot of Portrait, rearrange things a bit, and thus find a whole new area of fictive potential, is yet more evidence of a bold, masterful writer.