Umberto Eco |
I do remember eagerly awaiting the
publication of the English translation of this, Eco’s fifth novel. I was a
huge fan of The Name of the Rose (1983), Foucault’s Pendulum
(1988), and The Island of the Day Before (1995). I also enjoyed Baudolino
(2001), although not as much as I’d hoped I would. I’m still not 100% sure why
I didn’t ... Again, I don’t recall much of the plot beyond the fact that it culminates
in the search for the legendary king, Prester John. Along the way, as I recall,
it contains some cinematically vivid descriptions of Crusader battles and sieges,
as well as the poisoning of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I. The last parts of the book,
the quest to get to the fabled land of Prester John, is where things get increasingly
more fantastical and disorientating. As such, the story feels a lot like Marco
Polo meets Terry Gilliam.
At the time it was intriguing to
find that Eco was heading in a new direction with this novel and its
strangely exotic title, but it seemed that not all the contemporary critics
reviewing the book were entirely pleased with The Mysterious
Flame of Queen Loana. There seemed to be a general consensus among them that
in essence it was a good idea for a book, but in execution it would have been
better if Eco had simply written it as a straightforward memoir, exploring his
own past and his personal nostalgias in the first person. The book’s lavish
illustrations were widely seen as props to reinforce the weaknesses of the text
within. I do recall it did feel like quite a change in gear, perhaps even an
imaginative slowing-down, and I’m fairly sure it was my reading of this novel
which has since long-stymied me in getting around to reading his two subsequent
novels, The Prague Cemetery (2011), and Numero Zero (2015).
Although I’m sure I will get around to reading them, eventually.
What has recently put me in mind of
this particular book, with its themes of a quest for lost literary and pop
culture memories, is the process of packing up my possessions ahead of an
imminent house move. Pots and pans, tables, chairs, and other items of
furniture are one thing, all easily sorted and quantified. But books and other
personal items are things of a different order of complexity. For me at least,
they form an inventory of memory that needs to be handled with utmost care and
a significant amount of forethought. This is because moving house is often the
(sometimes much needed) prompt to off-load. Hence, in ideal circumstances, you
would hope to be able to allow yourself sufficient time to sift through such
items, allowing the time to review their relevance to you, to decide whether or
not they are something you’ll need to keep and cherish into your future, or if
they represent an aspect of your past which doesn’t need to be retained,
something which can be jettisoned if not actually deleted. All too often though
we end up packing our personal effects in a clock-racing frenzy, compelled to
make fearlessly decisive choices, usually boiled down to the simple fact of
whether a cardboard box of books is too heavy or not.
It’s only after this process, once
countless bag-loads of things have been off-loaded at the local charity shop,
and, worse still, if many of the boxes you have packed end up in a period of
limbo in temporary storage as you transition from the old place to the new, inevitably
the fretting begins to set in. You didn’t have time to make a detailed
inventory. Hence you can’t help but mentally chase your tail, over and over, recreating
a mental catalogue of your most precious possessions, for these are the things
which define who we are. Whilst stuck in limbo you can’t help wondering what
you got rid of, and what you kept ... Hoping you made the right choices.
Wishing by some magic device you’ve actually not thrown anything away at all,
or at the very least that all those specific things you feel fairly certain you
have thrown away, which you now ardently wish you hadn’t, might somehow
magically reappear at the other end of the move when you finally re-open your personal stack
of Schrodinger’s boxes …
However, as we progress in life, moving
house and the culling of our possessions is something we are all destined to do
time and again, a ritual we’ll repeat at various key points in our lives. It’s
an exercise which is actually very healthy. Shedding some things, retaining
others. As I’ve said, the key thing is the process of evaluation, but an
overlooked element is the age at which we do these periodic sifts and culls.
Our perception of our possessions changes with time. At the tail end of
childhood getting rid of our comic books and toys can feel like a liberation,
lightening our passage into adulthood. But later on in life these books and
objects might be the very things we rather unexpectedly find ourselves
returning to once again – like Charles Foster Kane shallow breathing the single
plaintive word “Rosebud” on his deathbed in Orson Welles’ most famous film –
realising that what is most precious to us is perhaps something we lost a long time
ago; something which, alas, we might never be able to retrieve, save for the
memories we have of it.
Citizen Kane (1941) |
This latest exercise in “life
editing” – rather like Eco’s protagonist, the antiquarian bookdealer, Bodoni – set
me pondering upon the thematic continuity running through my lifetime’s library.
How each of the books currently sitting on my shelves (and those I recall which
I once owned) are all connected by distinct threads of similarity. There’s an
essential equivalence, a kind of continuity which refracts in different ways
over the course of time. Staring at the spines now looking up at me from
cardboard boxes during the process of packing up and emptying my home of the
last sixteen or so years, I began to see a picture of myself passing from
childhood to adulthood, yet essentially remaining a static point throughout
that self-contained continuum. In many ways I am the same me that I’ve always
been. My literary likes and interests have fundamentally remained unchanged
since day one. But this realisation only served to get me thinking: what was the initial catalyst for my
interests? … What one book (at some point) in my possession was, so to
speak, the essential “lode-tome” which first set all of this continuity into
perpetual motion? … And, perhaps more intriguingly, do I still own it?
Most of my interests have happily crystallised
into the topic of my PhD, these being: history, culture, exploration, science,
adventure, writing, maps, travel – all topics which aim at elucidating people’s
experience of the wider world, the drive to cross boundaries and borders in
order to seek out the unknown, and thereby to create some form of lasting
knowledge which can be shared. My first degree is in anthropology. Originally
my main academic interest was archaeology, and it was something which I’d gained
quite a bit of practical experience of before I went to university. I had hoped
to study archaeology and anthropology combined, but, inadvertently, I got
diverted into the lesser-beknownst-to-me of my two allied interests.
Finishing university and beginning
to work full-time in a big museum channelled that practical side of my
interests (from archaeology) into material culture, but over time I slowly
began to realise that I was never much interested in the technical aspects of
manufacture or the evolution of typologies across the ages. I suspect this was
because I never really got shot of my more anthropological leanings, instead I constantly
found myself wondering about the person who made this object: why did they make
it, and what did they think of it when they put it to use; how was it perceived
by those around them; what did their world look like through their eyes, and how different or similar
was it to ours?
These are just some of the ways in
which archaeology and anthropology can coincide and collaborate, but as we get
closer to our present time these two aspects can be augmented by a third
element – the archive. If those past peoples we are interested in have
left some form of written record, attesting to their thoughts, feelings,
reactions, responses, justifications, pontifications – we can get a different
angle on the material things they have left behind. All three elements
combined, with a little imagination added in, can help us to visualise how the
world might once have been.
As a young kid the books which
helped me best achieve this sort of visualisation of the past were those
published by Usborne. This publisher’s books managed to combine the perfect
balance of information and images, telling stories through visual snapshots or
windows into the lives of past peoples using intricate drawings which buzzed
with lively interest, rather like comic books. They were filled with the kind
of drawings in which your imagination could roam freely and all too easily get
lost deep within. The Usborne Book of World History was a fantastic,
large format, magazine-style book which spanned the globe in both time and
culture. There were also lots of smaller format books which achieved the same aim
but on more specifically focussed topics, such as Ancient Greece or Rome. A
slim, large format book in their ‘Young Scientist’ series on Archaeology
was a book which I read repeatedly, so much so that even now I can close my
eyes and clearly see some of its pages.
Usborne books were never weighed
down with words, but there was always sufficient text to elucidate the things
the images were illustrating. And it wasn’t just history books they excelled at
– one of my most treasured early possessions was Usborne’s Dictionary of
Science. This was a hefty tome and delving into this book felt like
serious-minded study indeed. Drawing was one of my fortes and so I used to love
copying and recreating some of the magnificent scientific diagrams from the
pages of this book, such as the cell structure of our skin and its pores (the
epidermis through which we perspire) or the leaves of trees (the means by which
plants similarly conduct evapotranspiration) as seen under a microscope. The
format of Usborne books were their true genius – I think visual stimulation is
key to teaching kids. It is a clear and concise way to convey certain facts and
ideas, and it helps to harness and fix attention with arresting immediacy. The
genius of Usborne books though was that they weren’t simply limited to straight
educational topics, but that they similarly extended to books and guides on
such off-the-wall topics as Ghosts, UFOs, and Monsters too!
Comic books, far from being
mindless juvenile diversions, are a classic visual way to enter into reading
more broadly. Like most British school kids I had a subscription to The Beano
at our local papershop. Catching up with the antics of Dennis the Menace and
his dog, Gnasher, as well as Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, and Lord
Snooty, was the highlight of every week. Later on, Superman and Green Lantern comics were added to my weekly
subscription, Hal Jordan being my favourite of the Green Lantern Corps. The
bite sized chunks of scene directions and character dialogue were far less
daunting than a page of closely spaced text. This made it easier to see how certain
words could be stressed or inflected with an accompanying illustration. Word and
image once again working in tandem.
Having grown up watching the
original Star Wars trilogy coming to a close at the cinema with the Return
of the Jedi (1983), science fiction was a large part of my imaginative early
world. Old TV show repeats such as the original Star Trek, Lost in Space,
and The Invaders – even Mork and Mindy, were some of my
favourites. There were also Sci-fi elements to some of the storylines in The Avengers,
with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, such as the Cybernauts and a carnivorous
triffid-like plant from outer space. Older Sci-fi movies too, such as Robinson
Crusoe on Mars, This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and War
of the Worlds, were just as familiar to me as ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982),
and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977). V was a rather chilling TV
phenomenon of the mid-1980s which spooked me and my friends no end. And, of
course, whilst “hiding behind the sofa,” I watched Dr Who from Tom Baker’s tenure to that of Sylvester McCoy. Red
Dwarf, which first aired in 1988, quickly got itself a similar cult
following.
The Avengers |
The Tripods |
Around this time the BBC also made
a fantastic adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ trilogy, which prompted
me in my early teens to read the original books. I think these could well have
been the first science fiction stories I read, but it was also around this time
that I discovered Isaac Asimov’s ‘Space Ranger’ series. These were fantastic,
fast paced tales of adventure which spanned the solar system – following the
Space Ranger, David ‘Lucky’ Starr on his adventures for the Council of Science
with his sidekick, John ‘Bigman’ Jones. It made little cognitive dissonance
that some of the actual science was outdated, vide: The Oceans of Venus.
If anything, that’s what made them all the more interesting; realising how much
our knowledge of space and the solar system had changed since they were first
written (astronomy being another one of my earliest and longest running
interests). Plus, reading a name like Asimov felt very grown up at the time!
It wasn’t long before I’d graduated
onto the first of Asimov’s Foundation books, as well as Arthur C.
Clarke, whose Fountains of Paradise was suitably mind-blowing given the
scope of time it covers, with Voyager returning to Earth millions of years in
the future, barely recognisable for all the hybrid extra-bits of alien kit
which it has accrued on its journey around the galaxy. Sci-fi again offered
that potent combination of the visual to illuminate words and ideas. My school
friends and I were all big fans of the comic book, 2000AD, which
famously features the futuristic lawman, Judge Dredd. I loved the combination
of the bizarre in storylines such as ‘Attack of the Fatties’, with the macabre
in ‘The Body Sharks’ and the ‘Block Wars’, as well as the oddly transposed contemporary
Cold War geopolitics of Mega City One’s on-going battle with Sov City. The peak
of our enthrallment with all things Judge-Dredd-related came with the advent of
graphic novels in the early 1990s and with the release of the seminal Judgement
on Gotham in particular. SF, as Sci-fi is now known, is still a favourite
form of light relief for me – with an expanded orbit which nowadays
also takes in the likes of Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, and others – Gollancz’s SF
Classics series is my favourite place of refuge when all the academic PhD
stuff gets too heavy.
That eidetic marriage of text and
images with other world-building imagination, essentially anthropology
projected into space, which so absorbed my friends and I during my high school years
also came together in fantasy role-playing game books, which reached their peak
of popularity around this time in the mid-late 1980s. In the Dungeons and Dragons-type gaming
tradition, these were essentially story books which you interacted with,
directing the narrative yourself either by the choices you made at the end of
each chapter, or by random number selection from a chart printed in the end-pages of the book,
or a roll of the dice. They were the paperback equivalent of early computer
games, or a sophisticated step-up from Top
Trumps card games. The most well-known series of this genre were the Fighting
Fantasy books, such as Death Trap Dungeon, but my friends and I were
always more taken by the Lone Wolf series.
Part of the attraction of
these books was very definitely their elaborate cover art. I spent what felt
like hours stuck in a mesmerised contemplation of the cover of The Jungle of
Horrors, which seemed like a hyper combination of the swamp planet of Dagobah
from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the David Bowie /
Gothic Muppets movie, Labyrinth (1986). However, the main frustration of
these books, for me at least, was how I always seemed to die the very instant I
came into contact with a monster, hence it was often more expedient to thumb
back and forth through the sections and cheat your way to the end of the book
in order to get any sort of narrative satisfaction from the underlying story.
It was a losing trait which I somehow dexterously transferred over to actual
video games, at which I am frankly totally inept. Little wonder then that I
eventually gave up these role-playing books and similar games, instead immersing
myself in more straightforward story books and movies.
The novels which had always hooked
me the most before I graduated to fantasy game books were simple kids’
adventure stories. In the school holidays I used to pester my older sister into
reading me Enid Blyton’s eponymous ‘Adventure’ books, such as The Castle of
Adventure and The Island of Adventure. My mother says when I was
very young, about four or five years old, I used to like hearing stories read
aloud Jackanory-style, particularly listening to her reading C. S.
Lewis’s books at bedtime. Around the age of eleven I discovered a series of
books in our local bookshop which I went on to collect and read avidly – Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators. Rather like the better-known Hardy
Boys books, they were the stories of three boys – Jupiter Jones, Bob
Andrews, and Pete Crenshaw – who operated a private investigator firm from
their ingeniously hidden and carefully booby-trapped headquarters in an old
junk yard run by Jupiter’s aunt and uncle in Rocky Beach, California. They were
forever going off on detective-style adventures, investigating haunted houses
and thereby uncovering criminal smuggling operations and the like. As with
James Bond movies, or TV programmes such as Airwolf and Knight Rider, there was always a moment of peril before the denouement in
which the boys triumphed and saved the day.
However, there was one mystery
which always intrigued me and my school friends at the time we were reading
these stories, and that was who they were actually written by. The Three Investigators
books were published in the UK in the 1980s by Armada and the covers always had
the name of Alfred Hitchcock prominently at the top, which initially led us to
believe they were penned by the inimitable film director himself. After all,
the introduction was always signed by him, and he usually made a cameo
appearance himself as a character at the start and end of each story; but a
closer inspection of the front matter of these books credited the text as being
created by a man called Robert Arthur. A mysteriously nondescript name if ever
there was one. We were intrigued. Most of the books in the series were
attributed to him, but later numbers were credited to a variety of other names,
and often weren’t as good in our estimation; hence Robert Arthur was clearly
the most authentic of them all. It wasn’t until many years later, when the
internet was fully up and running, that I read more about who Robert Arthur was
and how he had come to create these wonderfully captivating characters and stories,
which Alfred Hitchcock seemingly endorsed. They really were the first books I
read which I found utterly unputdownable!
Again the cover art of this type of
kids’ adventure books amplifies the interest of what treasures are to be
discovered in the text within – echoes of which can be found in the poster art
for contemporary children’s adventure films, such as The Goonies (1985) or
the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981-1989). I remember on one
holiday in 1989 I read the novelisation of Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade over and over. At the time, lost in my own abstractions, I lived
and breathed these stories and films ad nauseam, so much so that I can still
pretty much quote my way word-for-word through all four of these particular movies
even today! – Since then people have often assumed (as with many of my contemporary
colleagues) that it was the character of Indiana Jones who inspired my choice
of career, but this isn’t true – he merely augmented something I was already
deeply interested in and already reading about. As I’ve described above, the fire
already had ample fuel, not least in the form of Usborne history books. But
these weren’t the only non-fiction books which I was reading.
In tandem with my love of The
Goonies and The Three Investigators, the real history of pirates was
a topic which deeply fascinated me, hence I read books such as Captain A. G.
Course’s Pirates of the Western Seas just as avidly. Frequently
returning to a specific book (whose title and author I can no longer recall)
about genuine treasure islands, such as Cocos Island off the coast of Chile, or
Nova Scotia’s Oak Island Money Pit, in my school library. Documentaries such as
John Romer’s Testament and the Blair brothers’ voyages around Indonesia
in the Ring of Fire also aided in furnishing the reality and thereby
helped to consolidate the fantasy. David Attenborough’s natural history
programmes brought the adventure novels of Rene Guillot’s Mokokambo – The
Lost Land, and The Mountain with a Secret, all the more vividly to
life. – But, on further contemplation, the real root may well still lie within
that realm of awakened imagination, in the form of a different Hollywood
adventure movie altogether, one which was released much earlier – and that
movie was The Island at the Top of the World (1974).
It must have been around 1981-1982
or thereabouts. I was playing at a friend’s house when his mother unexpectedly
announced that we were going out for an adventure. I remember the thrill of not
knowing where we were going, or what we were going to do when we got there, as
we put on our coats and set off down the road. After a short walk I recognised
the place we were heading to – it was a huge old Art Deco cinema, which I
usually visited with my older brother or sister. They still showed afternoon
kid’s matinees in which the main feature was always preceded by one or two Children’s
Film Foundation-type short movies (I very vividly remember one such film about
a young, wheelchair-bound boy who kept homing pigeons). The main feature on
this particular occasion was The Island at the Top of the World, in
which an eccentric English aristocrat, played by Donald Sinden, goes in search
of his lost explorer son with the aid of an American archaeologist in a
magnificent airship. They eventually find the wayward explorer on a hidden island
in the Arctic which is also home to a lost civilisation of Vikings. But the
Vikings take them hostage and so they have to fight for their freedom, winning
the respect of the Vikings and learning a number of lessons about humanity and struggles
for power in the process, before they are able to depart and return to the
modern world. It was the airship which captivated me the most, for weeks
afterwards I used to make paper cut-outs of it with its trailing lines, its gantries,
and its aquiline netted balloon. The idea of sailing off over the clouds to
adventures in far off distant lands was very probably a seed which was planted
in that very cinema watching this particular movie which later grew into a real,
globe-trotting career of working in museums around the world.
The first book was Leila Berg’s Little
Pete Stories. It helped that Little Pete, as depicted on the book’s cover
and in the illustrations inside, looked a lot like me. He also took an uncanny
fascination in the same kind of things that I did, for instance on similar
trips to the shops or to the park. There was one story in which Pete is
fascinated by a steamroller he finds chugging slowly but heavily up and down
the street. Just like Little Pete, before I started going to school I was forever
sauntering up to grown-ups – park keepers, road menders, or just old folk
sitting on benches – and asking them what they were doing, or what they thought
about unusual things, such as how was it that the Moon could be out in the sky
at the same time as the Sun?
The second book is actually another
series of children’s books – the Rupert
Bear Annuals. Here again was another character with whom I could very
easily equate myself. Rupert was a small bear whose curiosity led him to embark
upon all sorts of unlikely adventures and discoveries. And once again, as with
the Usborne books much later on, here too was the winning formula of text and
image, for Rupert wasn’t simply a one-dimensional comic, it was a series of narrated
portraits. Each image was contained in and of itself, your eyes could read
whatever storylines or overlay whatever dialogue your imagination could
suggest. But each image was also accompanied by two types of text: one a
straightforward prose narrative, the other a shorter and more fluid text in
verse which zipped along with a lot more pace. As I recall the verse sequences
were always my favourites. In this manner the Rupert books were inexhaustibly
multi-layered. The stories were also about transformations, Rupert was forever
coming across mysteries which when looked into altered his perspective on the
world, making him see the hidden magic at its core in operation, simultaneously
astounding and entertaining him in equal measure. These transitions and
transformations were similarly echoed in contemporary kid’s TV programmes, such
as Jamie and the Magic Torch and Mr Benn, which were two of my
favourites, as well as the movies which captured my imagination when I was a
little bit older, such as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).
Jamie and the Magic Torch |
It’s no surprise then that the
subtext of these cartoons readily translate into the more mind-expanding
interests of anthropologists, many of whom have written about and studied cultural
transcendence, social-boundary crossing, and transformative ritual practices,
defining other worlds, other cultures and other ways of being from the supra-
to the supernatural. All of these things get codified in the stories that we
craft and hand down through the generations. It’s the magic formulae which
belies all our children’s story books and much of the celluloid which has
spooled itself endlessly out of Hollywood.
Thinking about it further, it was
probably because of Rupert Bear that polar bears were my favourite animal when
I was a child. I see now that the totemic significance of the polar bear to my early
childhood-self probably ran far more deeply than I’ve ever realised. If we all
have a spirit animal who guides us, shapes us, leads us, and helps us to
explore and interpret our own personal view of the wider world and our place
within it – it seems highly likely that my true spirit animal has always been a
little bear in a red jumper and yellow-checked trousers with a matching yellow-checked
scarf.
For many of us the interests we had
as children are the things which have shaped who we are in later life. For some
people cinema, theatre (pantos/musicals), sport, or music might have had more
of an influence than books. An amusing question to spark lively conversation
amongst friends in a pub is usually something like: what was the first album
or single you ever bought? (for me, album: Lovely, by The Primitives
(1988); single: Youth of Today, by Musical Youth (1982)). However, all
of these things to varying degrees undoubtedly combine as the cultural
influences which have shaped our characters.
For me it was definitely storybooks, movies, and comics more than most which have had the deepest influence. Looking into the mirror and delving deep into the roots of who I am, sifting back through all the accumulated layers of memory, conducting a kind of semiotic archaeology of the self, reflecting on all these lost elements of my past and the long forgotten personal possessions which have made me who I am, as I box all these things up, ahead of a move to a new life and a new chapter in a new home, it is a genuinely pleasant – and wholly unexpected surprise to find Rupert Bear looking back at me out of this mirror of my earliest memories ...
For me it was definitely storybooks, movies, and comics more than most which have had the deepest influence. Looking into the mirror and delving deep into the roots of who I am, sifting back through all the accumulated layers of memory, conducting a kind of semiotic archaeology of the self, reflecting on all these lost elements of my past and the long forgotten personal possessions which have made me who I am, as I box all these things up, ahead of a move to a new life and a new chapter in a new home, it is a genuinely pleasant – and wholly unexpected surprise to find Rupert Bear looking back at me out of this mirror of my earliest memories ...
As I tape up the last of my boxes,
ready to move 9000 miles across the globe, leaving my home country behind me –
I can’t help wondering if perhaps, one day (hopefully still sometime far off in
the future) when I eventually reach the end of my life’s personal road and
look back upon the long distances I’ve covered, when I breathe my last, like Orson
Welles’ Citizen Kane, the single word “Rupert” might very well be my “Rosebud”
… unfathomable to anyone else but me.
Citizen Kane (1941) |
~
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