Fools and Mortals

Fools and Mortals
© 2017 Bernard Cornwell
384 pages

Brevity is the soul of wit, so here's an attempt at a quick  review.  Bernard Cornwell usually writes war novels, and he's magnificent at it. But he surely gets tired of it, and every so often he delivers a mystery or something that's not dashing heroics.   Fools and Mortals is such a book,  a celebration of the birth of western theater and of Shakespeare in general. Our main character is Richard Shakespeare, the struggling younger brother of much-hailed William.  In a age where only men acted on stage, Richard's days as an actor are seemingly numbered: he's too old to play most women, as his voice has already broken, but actors abound and male roles are competitive. What's worse, Will seems to be deliberately mocking Richard's desire to be taking seriously: his latest  role is a man...pretending to be a woman, and doing it clumsily.   But now isn't the time for jumping ship: the company is the middle  of rehearsals for a high-profile gig that the Queen might attend, and just showing up at practice gives him a chance to swoon over one of the serving girls.   Besides, he's too poor to take chances on pay:  Richard already has to make ends meet by nicking small articles and selling them on the side. When the company's plays are stolen,   Richard's moody resentment of his brother, not to mention his reputation for having sticky fingers, make him the obvious suspect. To clear his name, save the company's hides, and perhaps nail a proper male role, Richard decides to find out who stole the plays and get them back.

...and he does, within a few pages.  And then he exits , pursued by a bear.  The drama promised on the front cover is only a small, brief episode within the larger story of Shakespeare trying to deliver "A Midsummer's Night's Dream", and finish his script for "Romeo and Juliet". It's not easy, because  secret police keep breaking in to nose around, and why would priest-hunters be bothering an acting company?  Most of the novel's action takes place in and around rehearsals or performances. Cornwell notes in his afterword that the novel is largely a tribute to the men and women of his local acting company, who have given him so many happy evenings.  Fools and Mortals is thus a celebration of the English stage -- a novel that allows readers to experience the England which created and nurtured the likes of Shakespeare. Cornwell's usual strengths are here, in humor and in a few action scenes (I wasn't kidding about the bear),  but the weight of the story is its theatrical setting. I enjoyed it well enough, but I'm a regular patron of my local Shakespeare Festival and am thus an ideal audience for this kind of thing. I particuarly liked the way Cornwell included historical flavor: the inclusion of jigs after performances,  for instance, or the use of period slang.  I'm not sure that those who come to Cornwell for his Sharpes and Uhtreds will necessarily like this one, however, given how different it is from his usual work.

Well, so much for brevity. But Polonius was a rubbish advice-giver, anyway.

Related:
Ruled Britannia, another Shakespeare novel. This one is alt-history instead of historical fiction, and has Shakespeare incite  English rebellion against the conquering Spanish empire.
Gallows Thief, Bernard Cornwell. Another non-military work, this one a detective story set in 1817 England.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London
© 1933 George Orwell
224 pages

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

(A Christmas Carol)

In 1933, young George Orwell took a room in the warrens of Paris and was promptly rendered penniless when someone broke into his room and stole his savings. Struggling to find work teaching English, Orwell drifted into poverty, until he found himself back in England, living as a tramp. Or...did he?  Down and Out in Paris and London describes itself (in my edition) as a novel;   elsewhere, it is described as a memoir of Orwell's, one that took real events and made a proper story out of them.   Regardless,  Down and Out delivers a convincing picture of life in the dregs, both employed and not.

The story begins in Paris, where a struggling narrator links up with a Russian friend of his as they both try to avoid being thrown out of their penny flats. They try everything from the circus to  writing Communist propaganda, but most of these opportunities melt away as soon as they get close. (Orwell concludes that  the communists are swindlers; brother, you ain't see nothin' yet.)   At last they find work -- and plenty of it -- in the kitchens of a classy hotel, which is far from classy behind the servants' doors. There the scene is chaos, insults, heat, and staff wading their way around one another through floors wet with discarded lettuce leaves and oil.  Seventeen hours a day -- broken by a mid-afternoon break to relax in the bistros --  is not unusual.  This provides a secure existence until the two friends break away to help launch a Russian restaurant. It never ignites, and eventually Orwell drifts to England where he takes up tramping and tries various boarding houses and so on.

Most of this is strictly memoir, but Orwell pauses to reflect on what he is seeing from time to time. He notes, for instance, that the high class meals are an utter farce: if the gentlemen outside were to witness their food being prepared, they would hesitate to feed the result to their dogs -- what between the steaks being rescued from dustbins and the hair grease-tainted soup. The work was badly organized, Orwell wrote, highly inefficient, and he suspected motive at work. Keep the lower classes running hither and yon, and they wouldn't have time to get in trouble.  Similarly inefficient is the waste of human energy he sees in London:  the tramps spend their time on the move because they're only permitted to use a given relief house once, so they move from house to house. All of this time spent walking and waiting for hostels to open could be made more productive, Orwell muses, if lodging homes for the poor included some element of farming: those who stayed would work towards their own support.

Down and Out is utterly readable in the Orwell way and despite its subject is funny from time to time. One man is described as rather ambiguous, for he wore sidewhiskers and those were the mark of either an apache or an intellectual -- and no one knew how to place him.  In the Paris segment, when the narrator considers a job at the circus, the requirement include: cleaning up litter,  moving benches, and standing astride two chairs so that a lion might pass through one's legs. One of those things is not like the other.   Orwell captures a great many human stories, some of them curiosities of the time -- like the Russians who fled Stalinist Russia.  Part of his argument made a certain sense and others do not. He writes that beggars' labors should be considered as work, since they perform actions -- wailing a song, or drawing on the sidewalk -- that are responded to (albeit grudgingly) with money.  What's the difference between that and a man swinging a pick at the railroad, he asks -- they're both labor.  That would be the labor theory of value, which is of interest to middle schoolers who spend all day half-hardheartedly picking at their bedrooms and then claim they've worked all day at it.   The difference between a man paying to go to an Enrico Caruso concert and a man giving a dollar to a street yodeling is that he actually wants to listen to Caruso, and he wants to get away from the yodeler.  The London system does seem inefficient, but equally counterproductive is encouraging unemployed people to remain in one county forever through social support, when there are neither jobs nor the prospect of jobs in then near future. People used to move away when opportunities failed; now problems just fester.  It just goes to show that there are no solutions, merely trade-offs.

London at War

London at War
© 1995 Phillip Ziegler
372 pages

"London doesn't look down at the ruins of its houses, at the remains of its churches and houses; London looks upwards, towards the Dawn,  and faces the new day with calmness and confidence." 

On April 9th, 1940,  Hitler’s Germany launched its great assault on the west, and by June had taken possession of  Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. England stood alone, as she had centuries prior when another jumped-up corporal seized control of Europe, and in that summer all of Hitler’s mechanical wrath and the hopes of the world were both centered on London.  London was then the largest and greatest city in the world, capital of not just the United Kingdom, but of a global Empire.  Peter Ziegler here uses the stories of Londoners who  stuck it out in the City through the war to deliver the story of the home front, as London experienced it.

London’s most famous association with World War 2, of course, is the Blitz. Though Hitler’s air strategy initially focused on destroying the RAF, after an errant bomb fell on Berlin he switched to bombing English cities instead.   While  the population at large wasn’t surprised by the idea of the Blitz,  concrete preparations left much to be desired. The ‘air raid trenches’ dug into the city’s parks had been excavated months prior, and were by then partially eroded and filled with water. Small wonder the Underground system was used instead, and so frequently that people began staying in the Underground even after the threat of bombing was past:  as late as April 1945, when the Nazi goose was well and truly cooked (and the Berlin wishbone about to be torn in two by the Allies and Soviets), some people still insisted on spending the nights with their regular shelter-mates.  Sleeping in the subway bunks had become an unexpected source of civic solidarity.

Although supplies would steadily dwindle throughout the years of the war,   Kriegel demonstrates that much of normality was preserved. The theaters, cinema, and even ballet stayed open most of time, even though the war’s absorption of most of the men --  the troupes were harvested for the troops --   disrupted    staffing considerably. Opera was less able to cope.   Holidays like Christmas were pursued with their usual enthusiasm, even as trade from the Continent largely disappeared. Not until the Christmas of 1944 were the shelves really destitute, judging by this.

 Another source of disruption to ordinary London life was the presence of so many refugees and soldiers.  Prior to the great invasion of 4 June 1944,  the whole of England was clogged with American airmen involved in the bombing of Festung Europa, and soldiers waiting for that singular moment of D-Day.   Although Kriegel records some conflict between the American warriors and the English,  stemming from romance and money, on the whole he concludes that relations were amicable.  (He takes the same stance regarding London stoicism and the Blitz;  yes, there was a little looting, but on the hole the city kept its head  in such a manner as to bewilder a few Polish visitors.)   One source of tension between Americans and the English was race, for the racial segregation of the United States was absent in England.  On the opposite  side, Americans cheerfully ignored the formal class striations of old England – distinctions that were also weakened by the communal life in the air raid shelters , for there was no upper class in the Underground.

In addition to experiences which England at large experienced, bombing and supply deprivation, Kriegel also shares stories particular to London.Although many government services were sent out of the city to preserve them in the event of a truly devastating Luftwaffe attack,  As the nation's capital,  London held the commanding spot in the United Kingdom's patriotism --  for there, despite the bombs of the Luftwaffe, the Royal Family had fixed their standard, and there the prime minister took to the streets amid bombings to remind people that they'd soon be on their feet again.   Open spaces formerly reserved to society's elite were opened up, their fencing taken to use in the war efforts. Building after building fell prey to the Nazi bombs, or the V-weapons, and people promised to use the war's destruction as an opportunity to create a better city -- one with fewer slums and more attractive housing to replace them. (Here the author adds a sad note that no,  what replaced the old buildings was not more attractive, and here London was failed.)

London at War's heavy use of civilian journals commends it as a look at the home front during WW2, and a look at a proud city in a dark moment.

Related Video:  "London Can Take It", 9 minutes.  1940

Those are not Hollywood sound effects. That is the music heard every night -- the Symphony of War.