A stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill

In his second volume of autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton describes the Shaftesbury Avenue studio of cartoonist Michael ffolkes, as “a strange room of narrow triangular shape crammed with an astounding assortment of treasures” and draws particular attention to:

...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon painter Bouguereau was pasted on one wall, showing a crowd of naked nymphs, all identical, perfectly shaped, white-skinned, and of ideal nubility. This stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill amused Michael greatly; but it would be hypocritical to say that he – or any other man – did not enjoy looking at it.

Wharton does not specify which of Bouguereau’s ‘stupefying’ works adorned ffolkes’s wall, but it seems a reasonable guess that it was Les Oreades, which fits the description perfectly.

Dabbler Country - The Perfect Bedside Book?

Dabbler Country is The Dabbler's outdoorsy column.

Today, Nige finds the nature-noter's perfect book...

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I think I've found the perfect bedside book, at least for those of us of an outdoor-loving disposition. It came to me via my Derbyshire cousin, who found it - of course - on the shelves of the Magic Bookshop. It is Country Matters: Selected writings 1974-1999 by Richard Mabey, a collection of short pieces of a perfect length for the day's last dose of literary pleasure and - what? - 'natural philosophy' is perhaps the best term. Mabey ranges over subjects and places as diverse as Yarmouth (in winter) and the Yorkshire Dales, the Camargue and the Burren, Don McCullin's photos and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, the TV series Living In The Past and Madeleine Pinault's The Painter as Naturalist - but always the strongest thing is Mabey's quietly observant, thoughtful, appreciative sense of place. Always he has something interesting to say, some unexpected insight that is entirely his, and always he writes well, though never in any way drawing attention to himself in a 'literary' manner. This is by origin journalism, not literature - but (as is often the way with the best journalism) it is a whole heap better than much writing that passes itself of as literature.

The other night I happened on a short piece from 1988 called A Walk Around The Block (it first appeared in John Hillaby's Walking In Britain). A defence of walking - purposeless 'sauntering' - for its own sake, it quite took the words out of my mouth. Complaining of how walking has been hijacked by the sponsored hike, the mass marathon, the therapeutic claims of the health industry and the needless elaborations of consumerised hobbyism, he laments that 'Going for a stroll, one of the most civilised of pleasures precisely because it can be indulged in for its own sake, is now expected to do something, either for you or the world.' Mabey goes on to mount a pithy heartfelt defence of strolling for its own sake, enlisting along the way Samuel Johnson, George Borrow, Hazlitt and Thoreau - who always found himself sauntering towards the Southwest 'where the earth seems more unexhausted and richer' - with experiences of his own first strolls in places newly arrived at (always the most magical). He then considers the importance of the 'home patch', taking us briefly through the healing 'ritualistic' walks that root him where he is. Do styles of walking, he wonders, find their way directly into the style of written accounts? A thought which takes him off via W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, John Clare, John Cowper Powys and Bunyan, before arriving at 'the patron poet of strollers', William Cowper, with whom (and with ten lines from The Task) Mabey ends this richly rewarding essay - just one of the many treasures in this satisfyingly large bedside book. If you spot it anywhere, buy it.


The Dabbler alas can't seem to find 'Country Matters' on Amazon for a penny or any other amount, but there are other Mabey works to be had. If you know where to find it, do let us know in the comments.

Permanent and benevolent disorder

I came across this terrific description of a Roman Catholic home the other day:

The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile. The cottage lay at the country end of it, a tiny sandstone mansion with a steep narrow garden descending to a stretch of river, and they sat in the cluttered kitchen on wheelback chairs, surrounded by washing-up and vaguely votive bric-a-brac: a cracked ceramic plaque of the Virgin Mary from Lourdes; a disintegrating rush cross jammed behind the cooker; a child’s paper mobile of angels rotating in the draught; a photograph of Ronald Knox. While they talked, filthy grandchildren wandered in and stared at them before tall mothers swept them off. It was a household in permanent and benevolent disorder, pervaded by the gentle thrill of religious persecution. A white morning sun was poking through the Bath mist. There was a sound of slow water dripping in the gutters.

John le Carré - A Perfect Spy


My own Catholic heritage, alas lapsed, is of the dirtpoor Irish Merseyside variety, but having grown up in the affluent south I have spent formative time amongst such households and know their ‘permanent and benevolent disorder’ well.

The Tall Mothers invariably have long dark hair either descending in a straight ribbon to the waist or tied in a bun, and they carry on conversations while picking distractedly through hallways of strewn wellies and junior cricket equipment, generally assisted by the eldest daughter, a clone in miniature. Boys run about in unseasonal school uniform and hand-me-downs, appearing suddenly in doorways to make earnest announcements about meteor showers or dead rodents in the garden. The father is absent, or distant when present and often the first cousin of his wife.

There is always too much old furniture crammed into small, impractically-shaped rooms. Welsh dressers, egg cups, Guild of St Stephen medals ... apostle spoons, why not; and the general ambience is that of a true aristocratic bloodline in temporary exile, bumbling through a few generations until the world, which somehow took a wrong turn with Henry VIII, rights itself and the loyal are returned to their natural dominion.

What are libraries for?

At Touching From a Distance (now incorporated into The Spectator), guest poster Prof David McMenemy offers various arguments for the importance of public libraries. At least, he talks a lot about ‘learning spaces’ and ‘vital cogs in the wheels of societal development’ and says things like "in a digital world where publishers can put up paywalls at the click of a mouse, our collective ability to facilitate access to knowledge for our fellow citizens has become even more important." In the comments, Simon suggests that the gap can be plugged by dishing out iPads, which is very 21st Century I suppose.

All of which theorising fails to address the reality of what public libraries are for. Have you had this discussion? Do you find that nearly everyone you know thinks they’re outmoded now that we have Wikipedia and Amazon selling great books for 1p?

Me too, but then I discovered the startling fact that in Britain more books are borrowed from public libraries every year than are sold in all shops.

The top ten authors are here, and their identities tell you all you need to know about how the above startling fact can be. Public libraries are used enormously, but almost entirely by OAPs and parents of young children, two of the least fashionable and most blog-ignored groups in society.

I suggest that the debate about public libraries should therefore start by looking at the needs of these actual library users, rather than with academic theories about learning spaces or the potential of the latest Apple products.

The 1p Book Review: Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

The 1p Book Review will be another regular feature on The Dabbler. The strange ways of internet commerce have meant that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. The Dabbler will be recommending some of the out-of-print, forgotten or neglected gems that can be yours, at the time of writing, for a penny.

For the debut instalment, Nige recommends Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage.

Nick Hornby has called Tyler 'the best line-and-length novelist in the world' (this, I should explain for American readers, is a cricketing term which applies to bowlers who reliably land the ball close to the batsman and in line with the stumps) - and she does indeed have the solid, reliable virtues that so many of today's novelists woefully lack. All those virtues are evident in The Amateur Marriage.

Her characters come alive in a way few writers manage - yes, they are drawn from a repertory company that gets replayed with variations, but each of them is someone you would know if you met them on the street. In the old phrase, they 'walk off the page'. Her psychological insights are often startlingly acute. She creates, with minimal fuss, an entirely credible world around her characters and deftly manages a narrative that is essentially driven by who they are. The Amateur Marriage works by particularly clever and subtle manipulation of point of view, across a series of vignettes that cover six decades. Tyler is, as John Updike once said, 'not just good, but wickedly good'.

Her masterpiece, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is surely up there with the greats, but she is probably underrated because her subject matter is too close to 'ordinary' people's experience, her books are too popular, and she works in a disciplined way on a narrow canvas (but so did Jane Austen). Oh and she does write rather too much - but The Amateur Marriage is not one to be missed.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is also available for 1p here.

If you would like to recommend any books (fiction or non) that can be bought for 1p (or 1 cent?), send your nomination and justification to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk

River views

Let us start with the river - all things begin with the river and we shall probably end there, no doubt - but let's wait and see how we go.

So begins William Boyd's most recent novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms. It began with the river in more ways than one according to the author:

The idea for the novel started when I read that every year in London they take 60 bodies a year out of the Thames, usually at the bend in the river near Greenwich. That's more than one a week, but you never hear about them. And then I thought immediately about the opening scenes of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and the body being pulled out of the river. And I figured out that there was a way of writing a novel in the way that Our Mutual Friend does, from the very top of society to the very bottom. It all began to come together.

I found the book curiously underpowered and often sloppily written, from the very first sentence: '...we shall probably end there, no doubt'. Well, what's it to be?

I went back to Our Mutual Friend, which contains passages like this one:

The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.

The were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself, craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut, and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses "looked." said Eugene to Mortimer, "like inscriptions over the graves of dead businesses."

This was Dickens' last completed novel and passages like the one above strike me as very modern. It appears to sit just a little upstream of another description, perhaps the most famous of the estuarial Thames, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Perhaps it's unfair on Boyd to measure him against these two masters but there's really nothing in his book to compare - almost literally. It's a thriller so we shouldn't expect too many literary extravagances but nevertheless the language is so flat and indistinct it fails to draw us in. Here's the main description of the river from the first couple of pages:

Adam walked over to the high stone balustrade that curved the roadway into Chelsea Bridge and, leaning on it, looked down at the Thames. The tide was high and still coming in, he saw, the normal flow of water reversed, flotsam moving surprisingly quickly upstream, heading inland, as if the sea were dumping its rubbish in the river rather than the usual, other way round... [H]e didn't feel as if he were in the middle of a huge city at all: the trees, the quiet force of the surging, tidal river beneath his feet, that special luminescence that a body of water throws off, made him grow calmer - he'd been right to come to the river - odd how these instincts mysteriously drive you, he thought.

Not bad but hardly captivating. It's imprecise, it lacks particularity: 'high' (repeated), 'normal', 'surprisingly', 'usual', 'a body', 'special', 'mysteriously'. It tips its hat to the river's mystical influences but can't be bothered to do any more. You feel neither the reality of the river nor its resonances and, as a consequence, the character and his context are deprived of depth and meaning.

But how about a more contemporary comparison? This is from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:

He steps into his barge for the first time, and on the river, Rafe tells his news. The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green. He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as the light catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, the weeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming. On the mud and shingle there are cast up belt buckles, fragments of glass, small warped coins with the kings' faces washed away. Once when he was a boy he found a horseshoe. A horse in the river? It seemed to him a very lucky find. But his father said, if horseshoes were lucky, boy, I would be the King of Cockaigne.

Pointing out the differences seems superfluous (the river is treated brilliantly throughout her novel).

Ordinary Thunderstorms isn't a bad book; it's readable and diverting. But one gets the sense of an opportunity missed. As the doorman of a riverside tavern remarks in Our Mutual Friend, "There's ever so many people in the river." But you will look in vain for them in Ordinary Thunderstorms: the river remains firmly confined by its own pages. When Boyd begins, 'Let us start with the river...,' he's stepping into a tradition in which he barely even dabbles.