Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain

‘Just throw the paint, Spencer!’
(Frank Bowling to his assistant, Spencer Richards, as told by Richards on the exhibition’s visitor audioguide)

This is a really good exhibition. Bowling isn’t a genius – this show doesn’t compare with the van Gogh exhibition downstairs at Tate Britain – but he is a consistently interesting and experimental artist, who has produced a steady stream of big, colourful and absorbing paintings. I found it hard to finally leave, and kept going back through the rooms to look again at the best paintings in the show.

Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling is a black British artist. He is still going strong, painting every day at the ripe old age of 85.

Frank Bowling. Photo by Alastair Levy

Bowling was born in Guyana in 1934 and moved to England with his parents in 1950, when he was 15. After experimenting with poetry, and doing his National Service, Bowling decided to pursue a career in art and studied at the Royal College of Art. His contemporaries were David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. In fact, at graduation in 1962, Hockney was awarded the gold medal while Bowling was given the silver.

Back in those early years he was caught up in the expectation that he would be a ‘black’ artist and concern himself with colonial and post-colonial subjects – an expectation, he admits in modern interviews, that he at first played along with, doing a painting of African politician Patrice Lumumba and in 1965 at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Senegal, winning the Grand Prize for Contemporary Arts.

It was only when he moved to New York in the mid-1960s that Bowling discovered the light and space and artistic freedom of contemporary American art. Encouraged by American critics, he changed his style, adopting the prevailing mode of abstract art, alongside the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

As Bowling’s assistant, Spencer Richards, tells us on the visitor’s audioguide: ‘he didn’t want to be hemmed in by race and origins and that kind of stuff.’

This is the first major retrospective ever held of Bowling’s work in Britain. The gallery says it is ‘long overdue’ and seeing that he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005 and awarded an OBE as long ago as 2008, it does seem extraordinary that this is the first major retrospective devoted to his work.

Nine rooms

The exhibition is in straightforward chronological order. It is divided into nine rooms each of which addresses a particular phase or style. But as I’ll explain later, in fact the show can be divided into two halves – flat surfaces, and gunky, gooey, three-D surfaces.

Room 1 Early work

This selection of early paintings includes works heavily influenced by Francis Bacon, the number one British artist in the early 1960s. Others use geometric patterns, referencing the Op Art of Bridget Riley. He did a series using the motif of a swan, its neck and head realistic, but its body exploding, as it were, into abstraction, set against neat geometrical figures. Unsettling.

Swan 1 (1964) by Frank Bowling © Frank Bowling

Room 2 Photographs into paintings

It was the Swinging Sixties. The room contains the original Observer magazine front cover of a Japanese model in a Mary Quant dress typical of the period.

Very reminiscent of David Hockney’s kind of ‘wrecked Pop Art’ of the period i.e. taking images from fashion and pop culture and kind of smearing and subverting them. More obvious is the ghostly outline of the house at the top. What is that? It is based on a photo of the big house which contained the Bowling family business (Bowling’s Variety Store) back in his home town of New Amsterdam, Guyana.

A friend sent Bowling the photo (the original is on display in one of the several display cases devoted to notes and letters and magazines and other ephemera which shed light on his career) and he used it obsessively in a whole series of paintings which contain the house motif superimposed on maps and abstract shapes.

Room 3 The map paintings

These are enormous. Suddenly we are in a huge white room on the walls of which are hung some truly enormously huge paintings. They are made of acrylic paint on flat canvas. In the second half of the 1960s Bowling was in New York and liberated by the scale and ambition of American painting, especially the abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.

Just like them, the works are enormous and almost abstract, covered in great washes of paint, to create dynamic forcefields of colour.

Installation View of Frank Bowling at Tate Britain. Photo by Matt Greenwood

The gallery guide points out that almost all of them contain maps and that they mark ‘Bowling’s rejection of the western-centric cartography of many world maps’. I think this is wrong, and a typical attempt to shoehorn politically correct sentiment into the art. It stands to reason that many of the paintings feature a map of South America. Bowling is from Guyana which is in South America. And some of the others feature the ghostly stencilled outline of Africa. Ultimately he is of African heritage.

But quite a few of the others – like Dog Daze (1971, on the left in the photo above) feature a map of the entire world, laid out according to standard convention, exactly as you see it in any atlas or poster – with the Americas at the left, then the Atlantic, then Eurasia with Africa dangling down. Not subverting or rejecting anything in particular. I bought the audioguide to the exhibition and this contains quite a few quotes from the man himself, and Bowling makes it perfectly clear time and again, that his art is not about a ‘subject’.

Art is to do with painting colour and structure

If there are maps in the huge map paintings it is not to make the kind of politically correct, left-wing political point which the curators want him to make. It is because they offer a motif around which the art can constellate and come into being. Maps can be given meanings. Then again, they may just be shapes and patterns. Some of these works are stunning, comparable to the Rothko room at Tate Modern, made to fall into, to meditate on, to create a mood of profound calm and wonder.

At one end of the room is a stunning work titled Polish Rebecca, dating from 1971. You can make out the stencilled shape of South America at the centre and the wall label tells us that the Rebecca in question was a Polish Jewish friend of Bowling’s, and that the work is a meditation on the shared history of the African and Jewish diaspora – revealing ‘Bowling’s interest in the way identities are shaped by geo-politics and displacement’.

To me this is reading the liberal political concerns of 2019 back into a painting from 48 years ago. Maybe it is so. Maybe not. What’s not in doubt is that it is a stunning composition, dominated all the tints and shades of purple, the strange beguiling white feathering effect spreading up the west coast of South America, and the random swishes of green, blue and orange paint. In the flesh this enormous painting is utterly entrancing.

Polish Rebecca (1971) by Frank Bowling. Courtest of the Dallas Museum of Art © Frank Bowling

Room 4 The poured paintings

As if to prove that Bowling is more interested in art than in bien-pensant, liberal, progressive political theory, the next room is devoted to paintings with absolutely no figurative content. He set up a tilting platform that allowed him to pour paint from heights of up to two metres. As the paint hit the canvas it cascaded down in streams of mingling colour.

Structured accident, not unlike the spatter paintings of Jackson Pollock and then the hundreds of random spurting spattering throwing flicking shooting artists of the experimental 1960s and 70s. The titles also became less meaningful, more accidental, referencing people who were in his thoughts or events during the day, totally random.

Room 5 – Cosmic Space

Each new room has been marked by technical experimentation. In this once are works from the later 1970s where he began a set of further experiments. He began using ammonia and pearlessence, and applied splotches of paint by hand, producing marbling effects. He embraced accidents, which sometimes hardened into mannerisms. For example it was at this time that he took to leaving buckets of pain on the surface of the wet canvas, creating a circular ridge.

In Ah Susan Whoosh Bowling added water, turpentine and ammonia to the acrylic paint to create complicated chemical reactions. He poured the paint directly onto the canvas and then manipulated it with a squeegee. The technique forced him to work quickly, making strategic decisions to exploit the random combination of elements. It’s testimony to his skill that so many of these works, created under demanding conditions, with little or no planning, come out looking so haunting and powerful.

Ah Susan Whoosh (1981) by Frank Bowling. Private Collection, London

No reproduction can convey the shiny metallic tint of many of the colours, the sparkle on the surface of the paintings, which changes as you walk around them.

Three D

This brings me to the big divide in Bowling’s career which I mentioned at the start. The first four or five rooms are full of works where the paint lies more of less flat on the canvas. But in latter part of his career, from about 1980, and certainly in the last four rooms, Bowling’s canvases become thick and clotted three-dimensional artefacts.

He started using acrylic gel to create waves and ridges of colour and goo. And he started embedding objects in the paint. At first he used acrylic foam, cut into long strips, creating zoomorphic swirls and spirals.

In fact the ribbed nature of this foam reminded me a bit of fish skeletons, and the way some of these skeletal ruins emerge from a thick goo of paint, reminded me sometimes of the movie Alien. According to the wall labels:

Bowling also started to use a range of other materials and objects in his work. He applied metallic pigments, fluorescent chalk, beeswax and glitter to his densely textured surfaces. In several works, found objects such as plastic toys, packing material, the cap of a film canister and oyster shells are embedded within the paint. These items are rarely fully visible but add to the complexity and mysterious quality of the work.

Spreadout Ron Kitaj is so named because the artist Ron Kitaj saw an exhibition of Bowling’s works in 1986 and got in touch. Bowling describes the strips of acrylic foam he embeds in the surface of works like that as ‘the ribs of the geometry from which I work.’ The painting also includes shredded plastic packing material, plastic jewellery, toys and oyster shells. It’s not one of the best works here – its effect is too dark and dingy for me – but it’s very typical of his modus operandi.

Room 7 – Water and Light

In 1989 Bowling went back to his childhood home in Guyana, accompanied by one of his sons. He immediately noticed the quality of the light in South America.

‘When I looked at the landscape in Guyana, I understood the light in my pictures is a very different light. I saw a crystalline haze, maybe an East wind and water rising up into the sky. It occurred to me for the first time, in my fifties, that the light is about Guyana. It is a constant in my efforts’ (1992).

As you might expect, the trip resulted in works which try to capture the effect, using Bowling’s (by now) trademark effects of acrylic gel swept into ridges, themselves arranged in very loose box or square shapes.

From the later 1960s Bowling had studios in London and New York. His London studio is in East London and here he has made a series of paintings titled Great Thames which do just that – reference the mighty river Thames, invoking the long line of landscape painters who Bowling is well aware of – Gainsborough, Turner and John Constable.

In the way they adapt his by now trademark use of gel to create boxes and ridges, scattered with metallic pigments, scored and indented with all manner of objects found around the studio and pressed into the surface – nonetheless, the Great Thames paintings on display here prompt comparisons with Monet – not so much in technique or even in aim, but in the shimmering evocativeness of the finished product.

Room 8 – Layering and stitching

In the 1990s, Bowling continued to work with acrylic paint and gel and continued to experiment with incorporating different materials and objects into his paintings. he experimented with stitching canvases together and attaching the main canvas to brightly-coloured strips of secondary canvas, to create a distinct border to the work.

He took this further by cutting up earlier canvases, and stapling sections together, juxtaposing different paint applications and colours. Like the many found objects embedded in the gloop, this stitching is very evident and all tends towards emphasising the materiality of the work of art. And, in some sense, its contingency. It is like this. But it needn’t have been like this. Meditate not only on the work. But on the arbitrariness and contingency which leads to the work.

Room 9 Explosive experimentation

This last room is devoted to works made over the past ten years. My first reaction was I didn’t like them so much. Nowadays confined to a sitting position, Bowling has used assistants to help him, and has continued his experimentation. He uses washes of thin paint, poured paint, blotched paint, stencilled applications, the use of acrylic gels, the insertion of found objects, and stitching together of different sections of canvas.

This results in what, for me, are rather a departure from the work of the previous three or so rooms. In a work like Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton the stitching is very much on display, in the sense that the canvas with the great pink crescent on it has been roughly chopped in half and stitched onto another canvas underneath, which appears to consist of a regular pattern of coloured stripes which provide a striking ‘interval’ between the top and bottom halves, and also, when you come to look at it, a frame around the ‘main’ canvas. And that’s before you get round to processing the complicated imagery, the vibrant colours and the scoring and striking into the surface, which characterise the ‘main’ image.

Iona Miriam’s Christmas Visit To and From Brighton (2017) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy Frank Bowling and Hales Gallery, Alexander Gray Associates and Marc Selwyn Fine Art © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved DACS 2018

I think that I was still too in thrall to the box or square gel ridge shapes of the earlier works, still processing the effect of them, to really appreciate these more recent works. Maybe you need to visit the exhibition several times to really absorb Bowling’s variety and inventiveness. These last works seem to be going somewhere completely new. I hope he lives long enough to show us where.

Summary

The works in the first part of the show are interesting and good, but often feel very much of their time like the Swinging Sixties cover girl and other works which feel like mash-ups of Hockney, Bacon, Kitaj with patches of Op Art thrown in.

The enormous map paintings – some of them over seven yards long – riffing off the abstract expressionists, are very powerful and absorbing in their own right.

The poured paintings reminded me a bit of school art projects. An interesting idea but the results weren’t that great.

It is only when Bowling starts working with acrylic gel and metallic tints, and embedding foam and then all kinds of objects into the surfaces of his paintings, that something weird and marvellous happens to his works.

Words cannot convey the rich and strange results of these experiments. The dense gloop, the metallic tints, and the strange clotted surfaces, alive with all sorts of half-buried objects, create enticing effects. I walked back and forth through the show half a dozen times or more and each time one particular painting stood out more and more strongly – spoke to me.

Philoctetes’ Bow (1987) by Frank Bowling. Courtesy the Artist and Hales Gallery © Frank Bowling

This reproduction in no way conveys the richness of the colour of this huge painting (it is 1.8 metres tall by 3.6 metres wide; it would cover most of the wall of an average sitting room).

And also doesn’t convey the way the long curve along the bottom which dominates it, actually sits proud of the surface. It is a characteristic slice of acrylic foam which also looks like a long, thin strip of corrugated cardboard. It not only creates the composition, but it projects it forward off the wall, and into your imagination. I kept being drawn back to look at it again and again, to sit in the bench placed in front of it precisely so the visitor can let it permeate every cell of your imagination.

Wow! What an amazing body of work.

Demographics

When I arrived at 10.30 the exhibition was almost empty. When I walked slowly through it at 12.30, there were 38 visitors, including me – 12 men and 26 women. There were no black or Asian people at all. The only two black faces belonged to two of the Tate ‘visitor assistants’. There were half a dozen or so teenagers who seemed to be on a school trip, and one or two 20-somethings. The rest of us were white, middle-aged, grey-haired old dudes. Which reinforces the impression I’ve gained from reviewing some 150 art exhibitions: the gallery-going public in London is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, old or retired, and two-thirds female.

Curators

Frank Bowling is curated by Elena Crippa, Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art and Laura Castagnini, Assistant Curator.

The promotional video

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

Franz West @ Tate Modern (May 2019)
Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)

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by Simon on July 18, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on July 18, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/frank-bowling-tate-britain/

The Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward (1978)

There is full many a man that crieth “Werre! Werre!”
That wot full litel what werre amounteth.

(Geoffrey Chaucer, captured in France on campaign with Edward III in 1359 and ransomed – with a contribution of £16 from the king)

The hundred years war lasted more than a hundred years

The Hundred Years War did not last a hundred years, it was really a sucession of conflicts between successive kings of France and England which are generally agreed to have started in 1337 and trundled on until a final peace treaty in 1453 (same year that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks).

It see-sawed between prolonged periods of war, and long periods of truce

The ‘war’ was periodic, blowing hot and cold, with long periods of peace or truce – for example, there was peace between the Treaty of Brétigny of October 1360 and a new outbreak of hostilities in June 1369, and an even longer lull between 1389 – when Richard II signed a peace treaty with Charles VI of France – and the renewal of hostilities by Henry V and continued by his successors from 1415 until the final collapse of English possessions in 1453. Modern accounts divide the war into three distinct periods of conflict:

Edwardian phase (named for English King Edward III) 1337-1360
Caroline phase (named for French King Charles V) 1369-89
Lancastrian phase (named for the House of Lancaster which came to the throne with Henry IV, and renewed the war at the wish of his son Henry V) 1415-53

What gives the long sequence of battles and campaigns a conceptual unity is that between 1337 and 1453 the King of England made a formal, legal claim to the crown of France. For much of that period successive English kings styled themselves King of England and of France.

Historical origins of the war

The deep background to the war is of course the fact that William of Normandy invaded and conquered England in 1066, and his successors ruled not only England but Normandy and an ever-changing constellation of states, duchies and princedoms scattered round northern France.

It was Henry II who, by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine, expanded the northern realm by bringing this huge area of south-west France under ‘English’ rule, thus expanding the so-called Plantagenet Empire to its fullest extent. In this map everything in pink was controlled by the Plantagenet king and amounted to just over half the nominal territory of France.

Plantagenet possessions in France in 1154 (source: Wikipedia)

Alas, Henry’s second son, King John, managed to throw away almost all this territory, through mismanagement, bad alliances and military defeats, and his successors – notably Henry III (1216-72), Edward I (1272-1307), and Edward II (1307-27) – lived in the shadow of the loss of the empire’s once-huge extent in France, and made spasmodic attempts to revive it.

Edward III’s claim to the throne of France

It was King Edward III, who ascended the throne as a boy in 1327 but then seized power from his guardians in 1330, who took the bull by the horns.

When the French king Charles IV died in 1328 without a son and heir the nobles of France had to decide who to succeed him. Edward’s claim was that he was the son of Isabella, sister to Charles IV. However, the French nobles, understandably, did not want to hand the crown to the English and chose to emphasise that the French crown could not be handed down through the female line – so they chose instead Philip VI, a cousin of the recently dead Charles IV.

Philip’s father had been a younger brother of a previous king, Philip IV, and had had the title Charles of Valois. Thus the throne of France passed to the House of Valois (having previously been the House of Capet).

Edward, only 16 when all this happened, was under the complete control of his mother and her lover, Roger Mortimer, who were allies with the French crown, who had indeed needed the support of the French king to overthrow Edward’s ill-fated father, Edward II, and so who made no protest and didn’t promote boy Edward’s claim.

It was only once he had himself overthrown Mortimer and banished his mother, and securely taken the reins of power, only in the 1330s, that Edward III got his lawyers to brush up his claim to the French throne and make a formal appeal for it. But it was, of course, too late by then.

Relations between the two kings deteriorated, and the road to war was marked by numerous provocations, not least when Edward happily greeted the French noble Robert of Artois who had, at one point been a trusted adviser of Philip VI, but then was involved in forgeries to secure the duchy of Artois, and forced to flee for his life.

This offensive gesture led King Philip to declare that Guyenne (another name for Aquitaine, which the English had held on and off ever since Henry II married Eleanor) was now forfeit to Edward i.e. no longer his. This triggered a formal letter from Edward III objecting to the forfeiture of Guyenne, and in which Edward formally lay claim to the throne of France.

A maze of powers and alliances

Almost any summary of the war is likely to be too simplistic for two reasons. One, it went on for a very long time with hundreds of battles, sieges, campaigns, on land and sea, each of which deserves a detailed account.

But – two – I was also struck by how many kingdoms, dukes and princes and whatnot got involved. Just in the early stages in the 1330s and 1340s, you need to know that Edward sought alliances with the Count of Flanders up in the north-east of France, and also tried to ally with the dukes of Burgundy on the eastern border. He also tried to get on his side the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. Early on (1341) there was a civil war in Brittany between two claims to the title of Duke of Brittany, one backed by Edward, one by the French, and this degenerated into a civil war which went on for decades. Normandy – once the base of the Plantagenet empire – was, and then was not, allied with Edward.

In other words, France was far more fragmented an entity than the England of the day, and this made for a very complex kaleidoscope of shifting alliances. It’s broadly correct to speak of the king of England trying to secure the crown of France but that doesn’t begin to convey the complexity of the situation.

And that’s without Scotland. The king of England was always worried about what the Scots were doing behind his back which was, basically, to invade the north of England whenever the king of England was busy in France. It didn’t take much brains for the French to renew a sequence of pacts and alliances with Scotland to provide men and munitions to encourage their repeated invasions, renewing the ‘Auld Alliance’ which had first been made during the time of the aggressive ‘Hammer of the Scots’, Edward I, in 1295.

The same goes, to a lesser extent, for Wales and Ireland, which periodically rebelled against English rule, and which required armed expeditions, for example the large army which Richard II led in person to put down Irish rebellion and force Irish chieftains to submit to English overlordship in 1394.

And Spain. Spain also was divided into warring kingdoms and these, too, got drawn into the complex alliances north of the Pyrenees, which explains why, at various moments, the kingdoms of Castile or Navarre became involved in the fighting. Castile, in particular, allied with the French king and provided ships to the French fleets which repeatedly harried and raided ports on the south coast and attacked English merchant shipping going back and forth from Flanders (wool) or Guyenne (wine).

Famous highpoints

For the English the high points are the early, Edwardian phase of the war, featuring the two great battles of Crécy (26 August 1346) and Poitiers (19 September 1356) where we heartily defeated the French, plus the sea battle of Sluys (24 June 1340) where we destroyed an invasion fleet anchored off modern-day Holland, and the Battle of Winchelsea (29 August 1350) where a British fleet just about defeated a Castilian fleet commanded by Charles de La Cerda.

The Caroline phase 1369-89 marked the slow disintegration of the English position in France, latterly under the unpopular King Richard who, in 1389, signed a long-term peace.

Then, after a very long lull, Englishmen like to remember the Battle of Agincourt in 25 October 1415, fought as part of a prolonged raid of northern France undertaken by King Henry V, but this was just part of Henry V’s sustained campaign to conquer France, which was continued after his early death in 1422 by his brother John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, and others, until England had complete control of all Normandy and even Paris.

But this is, of course, is to forget the various achievements of successive French kings during this period, and to underestimate the importance of the fact that France descended into civil war (the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War) from 1407 to 1435, partly because it was ruled by a completely ineffectual king, Charles VI, also known as ‘the Mad’ (1388-1422). It was only because France was completely divided and that we allied with the powerful Burgundians, that we managed to seize and control so much of northern France.

As soon as Philip of Burgundy defected from the English cause by signing the Treaty of Arras with Charles VII and recognising him (and not the English Henry VI) as king of France, the rot set in and the period from 1435 to 1450 marks to steady decline of English landholdings and influence in France, ‘a protracted rearguard action by the English in France’ (p.235).

Famous characters

The protagonists of the Hundred Years War are among the most colourful in European history: King Edward III who inaugurated the Order of the Garter, his son the swashbuckling Black Prince, and Henry V, who was later immortalized in the play by Shakespeare. In the later, Lancastrian phase, I was impressed by Henry V’s brother, John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, who took over control of the war and acted as regent to the baby Henry VI, and to the great commander of the day, Sir John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, known as ‘Old Talbot’, ‘the English Achilles’ and ‘the Terror of the French’.

On the French side there were the splendid but inept King John II who was taken prisoner at Poitiers and died a prisoner in London; Charles V, who very nearly overcame England; Charles VI who went spectacularly mad; and the enigmatic Charles VII, who at last drove the English out – not to mention Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, who died aged just 19 but whose legend was to grow enormous.

The war also features walk-on parts from King David II of Scotland, who was captured when the Scots army was defeated at the Battle of Neville’s Cross on 17 October 1346, and spent the next 11 years in captivity in England. And Peter the Cruel, king of Castile and León from 1350 to 1369 who lived up to his nickname, and whose daughter married Edward’s son, John of Gaunt, who thus became heir to the crown of Castile.

And Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, who proved a thorn in the side of the French crown because of ancestral lands he owned near Paris. The deeper you read, the more complex the web of personalities and players becomes.

Seward’s account

Seward’s book is a good, popular account, which includes family trees explaining the complex genealogical aspects of the war and is dotted with black and white reproductions of paintings, tomb effigies and brass rubbings of the main protagonists.

He describes all the military campaigns and diplomatic manoeuvrings behind them. The book includes interesting sections about the arms and ammunition of the day (English longbows versus French crossbows) and brings out the uniqueness of the English tactics which lay behind our early victories, namely the tactic of having mounted archers who were able to ride into position, dismount, and then release volleys of arrows at such a rate (ten per minute!) that the sky turned dark and the attacking French was slaughtered.

But I just happen to have read Dan Jones’s account of the Plantagenet kings and, although Jones’s book is also popular in intent, I felt it gave me a much clearer sense of the machinations going on in English politics at the time. Take the reign of Richard II (1377-99). Once you start looking into this 22 year period, it reveals a wealth of issues which lay behind the two big political crises of 1386–88 and 1397–99. Only by reading the 40 or so pages that Jones devotes to it did I develop a feel not only for why Richard was against war with France and signed the peace treaty of 1389 and married his child bride (Isabella of Valois, aged just seven when she married Richard), but why there continued to be a powerful War Party among the top aristocracy, which continued to promote raids and attacks on France.

Seward conveys some of this, but his account of Richard’s period of the war lacks the depth and detail of Jones’s account – he skims over the first crisis in Richard’s rule without even mentioning the so-called ‘Merciless Parliament’, which seized control from the king and oversaw the systematic arraignment for treason and execution of most of his council.

This, I suppose, is reasonable enough if we grant that Seward’s account is focused on the war and deliberately gives no more about the domestic situation of the English (or French) kings than is strictly necessary. But comparison with the Jones brought out the way that it is not a full or adequate account of the period as a whole, and begs the question: how much of the domestic political, economic and social situations in England, France (and the numerous other countries involved, from Scotland and Burgundy to Castile) do you need to understand, to fully understand the Hundred Years War?

What is a full understanding of a historical event or era? Is such a thing even possible?

From what I can see, the fullest possible account of not only the war but all the domestic politics behind it in both England and France and further afield, is Jonathan Sumption’s epic, multi-volume account:

The Hundred Years War Vol. 1: Trial by Battle

**The chevauchée – d**eath and destruction

Instead the main thing that came over for me was the scale of the destruction involved in the war.

Obviously war is destructive but I hadn’t quite grasped the extent to which the English pursued a deliberate scorched earth policy, a conscious policy of systematically devastating all the land they passed through, as their main military strategy, sustained for over one hundred years.

Some campaigns the English launched had little or no strategic value, their purpose was solely to destroy as many French towns and villages as possible, to loots and burn, to rape and pillage, to steal everything worth stealing and to murder all the inhabitants over really significant areas of France – from Gascony and Aquitaine in the south-west, up through the Loire valley, in Brittany, in Normandy and right up to the walls of Paris itself.

What makes the 1339 campaign of particular interest is the misery inflicted on French non-combatants. It was the custom of medieval warfare to wreak as much damage as possible on both towns and country in order to weaken the enemy government. The English had acquired nasty habits in their Scottish wars and during this campaign Edward wrote to the young Prince of Wales how his men had burnt and plundered ‘so that the country is quite laid waste of cattle and of any other goods.’ Every little hamlet went up in flames, each house being looted and then put to the torch. Neither abbeys and churches nor hospitals were spared. Hundreds of civilians – men, women and children, priests, bourgeois and peasants – were killed while thousands fled to fortified towns. The English king saw the effectiveness of ‘total war’ in such a rich and thickly populated land; henceforth the chevauchée, a raid which systematically devastated enemy territory, was used as much as possible in the hope of making the French sick of war… (p.38)

Thus:

in autumn 1339 English ships raided Boulogne burning thirty French ships, hanging their captains and leaving the lower town in flames
in September 1339 Edward invaded into France from the Low Countries, ‘he advanced slowly into Picardy, deliberately destroying the entire countryside of the Thiérache and besieging Cambrai’
in 1339 the pope was so appalled by the ruin the English were inflicting that he sent money to Paris for the relief of the poor, and the envoy who distributed it wrote back a report describing the 8,000 utterly destitute peasants forced to flee their land, and of 174 parishes which had been utterly laid waste, including their parish churches
in 1340 Philip’s army invaded Aquitaine and ‘laid waste the vineyard country of Entre-Deux-Mers and Saint-Emilion’

In 1346 Edward landed with a huge force in Normandy and proceeded to rampage through the countryside.

The following day the king launched a chevauchée through the Cotentin, deliberately devastating the rich countryside, his men burning mills and barns, orchards. haystacks and cornricks, smashing wine vats, tearing down and setting fire to the thatched cottages of the villagers, whose throats they cut together with those of their livestock. One may presume that the usual atrocities were perpetrated on the peasants – the men were tortured to reveal hidden valuables, the women suffering multiple rape and sexual mutilation, those who were pregnant being disembowelled. Terror was an indispensable accompaniment to every chevauchée and Edward obviously intended to wreak the maximum ‘dampnum‘ – the medieval term for that total war which struck at an enemy king through his subjects. (p.58)

On this campaign the English burnt Cherbourg and Montebourg and Caen. In Caen, after the garrison surrendered, the English started to plunder, rape and kill. The desperate townsfolk retaliated by taking to the rooves throwing down bricks and tiles onto the English soldiers, killing several hundred at which Edward went into a rage and ordered the massacre of the entire population, men, women and children. Later persuaded to rescind the order, but the sack lasted three days and some 3,000 townsfolk were murdered. Nuns were raped, religious houses looted, the priory of Gerin was burned to the ground, and so on.

This chevauchée took the army right to the walls of Paris where they burnt the suburbs of Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain before retreating northwards and burning the town of Mareuil, along with its fortress and priory.

After the famous victory at Crécy, the English went on to besiege the port of Calais for over a year, which involved the systematic destruction of the entire countryside for thirty miles around.

In 1355 the Black Prince rode out of Bordeaux with a force of 2,600 and carried out a 600-mile chevauchée across Languedoc to Montpelier and almost to the Mediterranean burning as many villages and hemlet as they could, burning mills, chateaux and churches. His forces took by storm and then burned to the ground Narbonne, Carcassone, Castlenaudry, Limousin and many other settlements large and small.

When war broke out in 1369 John of Gaunt led a chevauchée through Normandy, employing mercenaries and criminals. In 1370 the mercenary leader Sir Robert Knolly led a chevauchée through the Ile de Paris, burning and looting villages and towns right up to the walls of Paris, so that the king of France could look out over the burning and devastated landscape surrounding the capital.

In 1373 John of Gaunt led 11,000 men out of Calais on a chevauchée through Picardy, Champagne, Burguny, the Bourbonnais, the Auvergne and the Limousin, ‘cutting a hideous swathe of fire and destruction down central France’ (p.114).

During such a chevauchée the English killed every human being they could catch (p.85)

It is shocking to read that even the ‘great’ Henry V pursued exactly the same policy. The Agincourt campaign was in fact an attempt to take the walled city of Harfleur and then march up to the Seine to capture Paris. This completely failed because Harfleur held out for over a month during which a third of Henry’s expensively assembled army died of disease. Once the town was finally taken he decided to retreat north towards Calais, burning and laying waste to everything in sight, in the by-now traditional English way. Henry is quoted as saying that was without fire was like sausages without mustard.

Indeed Seward is at pains to deconstruct the image of the Shakespearian hero. Seward emphasises the ruthlessness of the young king – a man of ‘ruthless authority and cold cruelty’ (p.154) – and compares him, somewhat shockingly, to Napoleon and Hitler, in his single-minded self-belief, religious fanatacism and obsession with war and conquest. The account of his short reign is quite harrowing, involving the massacre of the entire population of Caen after it fell to an English siege in 1417, and the deliberate starving of the besieged population of Rouen later that year. All his sieges are marked by brutal treatment of the losers.

As late as 1435, when the English began to slowly lose control of their territory, an experienced soldier like Sir John Fastolf suggested that two small forces of 750 men be created who, twice a year, in June and November, would invade a different part of France and burn and destroy all the land they passed through, burning down all houses, corn fields, vineyards, all fruit and all livestock. The aim? To create famine. To starve the French unto submission.

Loot

Throughout this period the main motivation for ordinary soldiers to go and fight was loot. Everything of value in enemy territory was stolen. The English confiscated all the food and drink from every farm they despoiled and then burnt.

In the towns they stole gold, silver, jewels, fur coats. The king took possession of the best spoils and from each chevauchée sent convoys of carts bearing clothes, jewels, gold and silver plate and cutlery and much else lumbering back to the coast and to ships which bore it all back to England.

The English now regarded France as a kind of El Dorado. The whole of England was flooded with French plunder (p.81)

In the countryside they took all the livestock and stole all the grain then burned everything else. Many areas took decades to recover. Seward quotes contemporary chroniclers describing mile upon mile of devastated landscape, every building, cottage, manor house and church gutted and burnt to the ground, with no survivors to prune the vines or plough and sow the land, the sheep and cattle all killed and eaten by the English, the roads empty in every direction.

No wonder the English came to be hated like the Devil, like the Nazis were 600 years later.

Mercenaries

A crucial aspect of the war was the employment of mercenaries. Warriors for hire had, of course, existed through the ages. In post-Conquest England they flourished during the Anarchy i.e. the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda from 1135-1153. Later, King John used mercenaries in his wars against the barons in the early 1200s, leading to the hiring of foreign mercenaries being specifically banned by Magna Carta.

But not abroad. The reappearance and flourishing of mercenaries was particularly associated with the Hundred Years War. By the 1340s the English king was finding it difficult to pay his own or foreign troops and license was given to soldiers to ‘live off the land’.

This opened the road to hell, for soldiers, English and foreign, quickly took advantage of the new liberty to a) take all the food and drink from every farm or village they passed b) terrorise and torture the natives to hand over not just foodstuffs but anything of value c) to create protection rackets: pay us a regular fee or the boys will come round and burn everything to the ground. This became known as the pâtis, or ‘ransoms of the country’.

For example, in 1346 the Earl of Lancaster captured Lusignan, a fortress near Poitier. When he moved on he left a garrison under the command of Bertrand de Montferrand. Many of his troops were criminals and misfits. Despite a truce between 1346-1350, the garrison laid waste to over fifty parishes, ten monasteries, and destroyed towns and castles throughout southern Poitou. One story among thousands.

It is easy, reading the countless examples of blackmail, threat, looting, ravaging, burning, stealing and extorting, to see the entire era as one in which the English and their mercenaries mercilessly terrorised, attacked and looted the French people for over a hundred years. The Hundred Years Extortion.

After the Treaty of Brétigny, signed between England and France in October 1360, which brought the first phase of the war to an end, thousands of mercenaries and low-born vassals, serfs and miscellaneous crooks from a number of nations, were left jobless. They didn’t want to go back to slaving on the land, so they set up their own mercenary groups.

In French these groups became known as routes and so the mercenaries acquired the general name of routiers (pronounced by the barbarian English ‘rutters’).

But in English they came to be referred to as the Free Companies, ‘free’ because they owed allegiance to no king. The Free Companies included all nationalities including Spaniards, Germans, Flemings, Gascons, Bretons and so on, but collectively the French chroniclers refer to them as ‘English’ because of the terrors the English chevauchées caused throughout the period (p.135).

Many of the routier groups were well organised, with administrative staff, quartermasters, and army discipline. They continued to be available for hire to the highest bidder. One scholar has identified 166 captains of mercenary groups during the period. The largest bands became notorious along with their leaders, such as the notorious Bandes Blanches of the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole. Some routier groups even defeated the national armies sent to suppress them.

Many of the leaders became very rich. In an intensely hierarchical society, one of the chief motivations for fighting, for joining up with an army, was the incentive to make money. Really successful mercs were extremely useful to the sovereigns who paid them, and quite a few were given knighthoods and ‘respectability’, allowing them to retire back to England where they built mansions and castles, many of which survive to this day.

For example, plain Edward Dalyngrigge enlisted in the Free Company of Sir Robert Knolles in 1367 and over the next ten years accumulated a fortune in loot and plunder, returning to Sussex in 1377, marrying an heiress and building the splendid Bodiam Castle in Sussex, which is today a peaceful National Trust property. Built with money looted and extorted abroad by a mercenary soldier. Possibly a fitting symbol of this nation, certainly a classic example of the money, power and rise in social status which was possible during the Hundred Years War.

Other examples include Ampthill Castle built by Sir John Cornwall with loot from Agincourt, and Bolton and Cooling castles, as well as Rye House near Ware, built with French money by the Danish mercenary Anders Pedersen, who rose through the ranks of the English army and found respectability as Sir Andrew Ogard MP.

This helps explain the unpopularity of Richard II’s policy of peace with France.

[The English] had been fighting France for over half a century; almost every summer ships filled with eager young soldiers had sailed from Sandwich to Calais or from Southampton to Bordeaux. War was still the nobility’s ideal profession; the English aristocracy saw a command in France much as their successors regarded an embassy or a seat in the cabinet. Moreover, men of all classes from [the Duke of] Gloucester to the humblest bondman, regarded service in France as a potential source of income; if the war had cost the English monarchy ruinous sums, it had made a great deal of money for the English people… (p.141)

Why are there wars? At the top level, because of the strategic and territorial greed or nationalistic fervour, or simple mistakes, of dim leaders. But if you ask, why do men fight wars, this sociological explanation must be taken into account. It’s because wars are a way of escaping from poverty and being trapped in the lower levels of society and offer the opportunity of escape, foreign travel, adventure, testing yourself as a man, and 1. raising your social status and 2. making money – in the case of the Free Companies of the Hundred Years War, lots of money.

The war was long remembered as a time to rise in the world. The fifteenth-century herald, Nicholas Upton, wrote that ‘in those days we saw many poor men serving in the wars in France ennobled.’ (p.119)

Conclusion

Looking beyond the boys’ adventure aspects of the great military victories, and the supposedly dashing figures of the Black Prince or Henry V, the distraction of the girl saint Joan of Arc (who was burned to death by the English aged just 19), mad King Charles who thought he was made of glass, or the long rearguard action by John Duke of Bedford – it is, I think, difficult for a modern reader not to feel oppressed by the sheer scale of the deliberate wanton destruction the English visited across huge areas of rural France and the ultimate futility of all those lives wasted, all that treasure expended, all that land and buildings and carefully built farms, manors, churches, priories and so on burnt to the ground. Human folly.

By 1453 all the English had to show for over a century of oppressive taxation, countless deaths and the expenditure of vast fortunes paying for weapons and mercenaries, was to end up pathetically clinging on to tiny little Calais. Meanwhile, France had become unified as a nation and emerged as the strongest state in Europe. And a long legacy of mutual mistrust which, arguably, lasts right up to the present day, as Seward points out in the very last sentences of his book.

France suffered horribly when England escaped unharmed – every local historian in northern and western France will show the tourist a château or a church which was sacked by the English. There is a strong case for maintaining that the origin of the uneasy relationship between the two peoples can be found in the battles, sieges and the chevauchées, the ransoming and the looting, the pâtis, the burning and the killing by the English in France during the Hundred Years War. (p.265)

Other medieval reviews

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)

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by Simon on July 8, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, France, History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged Agincourt, Ampthill Castle, Aquitaine, Arnaud de Cervole, Bandes Blanches, Battle of Crecy, Battle of Neville's Cross, battle of Poitier, battle of Sluys, battle of Winchelsea, Bodiam Castle, Bolton castle, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Calais, Castile, Charles IV, Charles the Bad, Charles the Mad, Charles V, Charles VI, chevauchée, Constantinople, Cooling castle, Count of Flanders, dampnum, Dan Jones, David II, Desmond Seward, duchy of Artois, Duke of Bedford, Duke of Brittany, Earl of Shrewsbury, Edward Dalyngrigge, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Empress Matilda, England, Flanders, France, Free Company, Geoffrey Chaucer, Guyenne, Hammer of the Scots, Harfleur, Henry II Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry III, Henry V, Henry VI, history, Holy Roman Emperor, House of Capet, House of Lancaster, House of Valois, Isabella, Isabella of Valois, Joan of Arc, John of Gaunt, John of Lancaster, King John, King of England, King of France, King of Navarre, King Stephen, loot, Magna Carta, medieval history, mercenary, Middle Ages, Navarre, Nicholas Upton, Normandy, Old Talbot, Order of the Garter, Ottoman Turks, Peter the Cruel, Philip VI, Plantagenet Empire, Plantagenet kings, Richard II, Robert of Artois, routiers, rutters, Rye House, Sandwich, Scotland, Shakespeare, Sir Andrew Ogard, Sir John Cornwall, Sir John Fastolf, Sir John Talbot, Sir Robert Knolles, Sir Robert Knolly, Spain, The Anarchy, the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War, the Auld Alliance, the Black Prince, the Cotentin, the Hundred Years War, The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453, the Maid of Orleans, the Merciless Parliament, the pâtis, the Treaty of Brétigny, Treaty of Brétigny, war, William of Normandy

Posted by Simon on July 8, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/the-hundred-years-war-desmond-seward/

Medieval English lyrics 1200 to 1400 edited by Thomas G. Duncan (1995) Notes on the Introduction

This handy Penguin paperback contains 132 medieval lyrics selected by medieval scholar Thomas G. Duncan. He converted each of them into the south-east England dialect of Chaucer (in my opinion, a highly questionable thing to do), printing them in a format designed to help the reader with pronunciation, giving line-by-line glosses to the meaning of tough words or phrases, with extensive notes on the meaning and imagery of each poem at the back of the book.

Duncan makes a number of interesting points in the introduction, which I wanted to note and remember:

The twelfth century

The twelfth century was the watershed between the heroic warrior code of the Anglo-Saxon world and the chivalrous knightly code of the later Middle Ages

The twelfth century saw the rise of pilgrimages and crusades (First Crusade 1095-99), commercial expansion, ecclesiastical change and revival of the church, flourishing of cathedral schools and the emergence of universities (Bologna 1088, Oxford 1096, Salamanca 1134, Cambridge 1209, Padua 1222, Naples 1224, Toulouse 1229, Siena 1240) Gothic architecture (pioneered at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, near Paris, whose choir was reconstructed with Gothic rib vaults and large stained glass windows between 1140 and 1144).

1. Courtly love and love lyrics

The twelfth century also saw the flourishing and spread of the poetry of courtly love pioneered by the troubadors in the south of France in the period from about 1100 to 1150. The feudal concept of service to a male lord was converted into the idea of service to a lady in the name of love. The troubadors took the idea to extremes, claiming in their poems that service to the Lady was the only thing that made life worth living, while her disdain and scorn made a man want to die.

Most of the love lyrics before Chaucer (active 1360-1400) survive in just one manuscript – MS. Harley 2253 in the British Library. Duncan repeats this fact in another form at the end of the introduction, namely, that if this one manuscript had not survived, then we would have lost half the lyrics – and often the best ones – from the entire Middle Ages before Chaucer. The contingency, the slenderness of fate by which these beautiful things happen to have survived… we live in a world of accidental survivals, chance remnants…

The thirty-five love lyrics in his selection use many of the tropes of courtly love but are distinct from real troubador poetry for the following reason: troubador poetry was often intensely intellectual, its poets developing highly sophisticated philosophical concepts of different types of ‘love’. The English lyrics Duncan includes are much less demanding, much more formulaic, because made for public declamation or performance.

They make use of stock ideas: the lover sighs, lies awake at night, feels condemned to death, and pleads for mercy. The lady shines, her hair is golden, her neck is long, her waist slender.

These ideas are expressed in stock phrases, often alliterative indicating their deepness in the language and tradition: the lady is a ‘byrde in a bower’, ‘brightest under bis’, ‘geynest under gore’ and ‘beste among the bolde’. Ladies are sometimes described through elaborate comparisons, often with flowers or precious stones.

Heo is coral of godnesse;
Heo is rubie of ryhtfulnesse;
Heo is cristal of clannesse;
Ant baner of bealte.
Heo is lilie of largesse;
Heo is paruenke of prouesse;
Heo is solsecle of suetnesse,
Ant ledy of lealte.

She is coral of goodness;
She is ruby of uprightness;
She is crystal of chastity;
And banner of beauty.
She is lily of generosity;
She is periwinkle of excellence;
She is marigold of sweetness,
And lady of loyalty.

They do not philosophise or argue. Because they are songs meant to be sung to an audience, the pleasure derives not from the novelty of the thought, but from the familiarity of the tropes and similes

Some of the love poems are in a genre pioneered by trouvère poets of northern France, the chanson d’aventure which opens with the narrator out riding when he comes across… something or more usually someone, most often a pretty young maiden.

Als I me rode this endre dai
O my pleyinge,
Seih icche hwar a littel mai
Bigan to singe

As I went riding the other day
for my pleasure
I saw where a little maiden
Began to sing.

Or:

Ase y me rod this ender day
By grene wod to seche play
mid herte y thoghte al on a may
surest of all thinge…

As I rode out the other day
By a green wood to seek pleasure
with my heart I was thinking about a maid
sweetest of all things…

The pastourelle is sub-set of the chanson d’aventure in which the poet encounters a maiden who is sad or pining for love or loss, and proceeds to offer her ‘comfort’. Duncan points out that, in all forms of the chanson d’aventure, the fact that the poet is riding a horse emphasises his knightly or noble status, and also confers a social – and physical – advantage over the poor helpless maiden that he meets.

The reverdie is an old French poetic genre, which celebrates the arrival of spring. Literally, it means ‘re-greening’. Often the poet will encounter Spring, symbolized by a beautiful woman. Originating in the troubadour ballads of the early Middle Ages, reverdies were very popular during the time of Chaucer. they occur in numerous poems, both as a central conceit or metaphor or as preparatory description leading into the main poem. For example, the extended description of the joys of spring in ‘Lenten is come with love to toun’.

Lenten ys come with loue to toune,
With blosmen ant with briddes roune,
That al this blisse bryngeth.
Dayeseyes in this dales,
Notes suete of nyhtegales,
Vch foul song singeth.
The threstelcoc him threteth oo;
Away is huere wynter wo
When woderoue springeth.
This foules singeth ferly fele
Ant wlyteth on huere [wynne] wele
That al the wode ryngeth.

Translation

Spring has arrived, with love,
With flowers, and with birdsong,
Bringing all this joy.
Daisies in the valleys,
The sweet notes of nightingales,
Every bird sings a song.
The thrush is constantly wrangling;
Their winter misery is gone
When the woodruff flowers.
These birds sing in great numbers,
And chirp about their wealth of joys,
So that all the wood rings.

In fact it’s important to realise that the poets of the day intensively categorised and formalised all the types and subject matters of their poems, gave them names, and then did their best to excel each other at a particular type, or to ring changes on it. Duncan mentions other genres such as:

the chanson de mal-mariée, a song expressing the grievances of an unhappy wife, traditional in northern and southern France and Italy, reflecting the social reality of customary male dominance
the song of the betrayed maiden, who has been made pregnant and abandoned
the chanson des transformations in which the wooed lady imagines transforming into all sort of animals and birds to escape her lover (who often imagines changing into the predator of each of her imagined animals, in order to capture her)

Duncan’s selection of love lyrics ends with half a dozen poems by Chaucer or in his style. There is an immediate change in tone, style and form from what went before. Chaucer was a highly sophisticated poet, attendant on the court of Richard II, who had travelled to Italy and knew the leading poets of Italy and France.

Instead of anonymous and stock situations, Chaucer names specific individuals. Whereas the earlier lyrics were made to be sung and so use stock phrases and familiar ideas, Chaucer’s poems were meant to be recited to a courtly audience which delighted in picking up personal and learned references. Whereas the earlier lyrics are often simple in form, Chaucer’s tend to be far more wordy, and composed in complex rhyme schemes copied from his French contemporaries e.g. so-called rhyme royal in which each stanza consists of seven lines rhyming ababbcc. Chaucer’s poetry is far more wordy, learned and urbane than anything which went before.

2. Penitential and moral lyrics

Duncan contrasts lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer with some of the medieval penitential poems. In the former the sense of desolation is complete. The great hall, the brave warriors, the fire and the feasting have all completely disappeared and the poet is left embattled and alone in a friendless world.

Gemon he selesecgas ond sincþege,
hu hine on geoguðe his goldwine
wenede to wiste wyn eal gedreas!

He remembers hall-warriors and the giving of treasure
How in youth his lord (gold-friend) accustomed him
to the feasting – All the joy has died!

Later the Wanderer speaks a famous lament which gave its name to the whole genre, ‘Where are…?’ he asks about the trappings of lordship and power, which came to be known as the ‘ubi sunt?’ the Latin phrase for ‘where are the…?’

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat, genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære…

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the mailed warrior! Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been…

As you can see, it is an apocalyptic vision of the complete destruction of a society.

By contrast the medieval lyrics are much more sophisticated and often much more personal. The whole world hasn’t been destroyed, it lives on but – for the purposes of his lament – the poet may point to the fall of powerful kings, the downfall of the rich and mighty, or his own calamities, or just a general sense that, no matter how bright and shiny, all life ends with death. This is embodied in the ubiquitous image of Fortune’s Wheel, ever turning, ever raising up the hopeful and bringing down the mighty.

Duncan points to a poem from his period which literally uses the ubi sunt formula, but manages – paradoxically – to convey a sense of the wonderful wealth and courtliness of the world the poet is describing.

Where ben they bifore us were,
Houndës ladde and hawkës bere,
And haddë feld and wode?
The richë ladies in here bour
That wered gold in here tressour
With here brighte rode?

The second really big difference is that, although the Anglo-Saxon poems make reference to God and the Almighty, they don’t really give much sense of Christian theology, of a Christian worldview. By contrast the medieval poems have fully incorporated Christian theology and terminology and so the standard lament for falls, declines and ageing, are confidently and beautifully mingled with references to death, judgement, sin and punishment, hell and damnation and so on.

Once again, as in the love lyrics section, the final poems are by Chaucer and of an altogether different level of sophistication, as befits one writing for the court, for the most learned and sophisticated audience in the country. The poems themselves are much chunkier, fuller, the lines are longer and there are more of them. Here’s the opening stanza of The Balade de Bon Conseyl in rhyme royal (ababbcc).

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothefastness;
Suffyse unto thy thing though it be smal,
For hord hath hate and clymbyng tykelness,
Prees hath envye and wele blent overal.
Savour no more thanne thee byhove shal,
Ruele wel thiself that other folk canst rede,
And trouth thee shall delyvere, it is no drede.

Chaucer’s tone is immensely urbane and worldly wise. He is never hectoring or angst-ridden as some of medieval penitential writing is.

3. Devotional lyrics

Duncan explains that the eleventh century saw a revolution in Christian theology and sensibility. Previous theories of the atonement focused on the notion that God and the Devil were like two feudal lords fighting over the world. Man had mistakenly given his allegiance to the Devil who therefore acquired the rights of a medieval lord over his vassal. God couldn’t abrogate those rights and so resorted to a cunning plan. He sent his son down to earth as a man. The agents of the Devil, denying his divinity, crucified him, but this was a mistake because based on a wrong conception of Christ’s nature and his legal rights. The Devil, in effect, got his law wrong, and this enabled God to reclaim man as his vassal.

You can see how extraordinarily legalistic this conception is. According to Duncan, during the 11th century the theologian Saint Anselm presented a completely new theology of the atonement. In this view Man, by disobeying God, incurred the penalty of Death. Christ volunteered to become a man and pay the penalty in Man’s place.

Thus the story changes from a rather dry and legalistic story to become one which emphasises the humanity of Christ, and which dwells not on legalistic terminology, but instead on the blood, sweat and tears, the suffering and agony of the man Jesus. It is this tremendous humanising of the Jesus story which comes to dominate later medieval sensibility. Duncan quotes the great medievalist R.W. Southern for the Cistercian monks for spreading what became a great flood of sensibility and tenderness.

The tenderness is reflected in a host of topoi or standard subjects, for example the sweetness of knowing Jesus and loving him, and the devotion and motherly love of Mary, a figure which also came to dominate later medieval religiosity. Many of the poems describe the sweetness of the love between mother and child, several of them in the form of lullabies, but lullabies touched with the infinite sadness that we know what the fate of the sweet little babe will be.

Lullay, lullay, little grom [lad, boy]
King of allë thingë,
When I think of thee mischief
Me list wel litel sing [I have very little wish to sing]

Another standard topos was to consider Mary standing at the foot of the cross looking up at her dying son. Sometime in the 13th century a Latin poem, the Stabat Mater, was written on this subject and would go on to be set to music by numerous composers. A number of poems in this selection depict this scene, but Duncan singles out the extraordinary ‘Why have ye no routhe’ because in it Mary appears to turn on her son’s persecutors with real anger.

Why have ye no routhe on my child? [pity]
Have routhe on me ful of mourning;
Tak doun o rode my derworth child [rode = cross]
Or prik me o rode with my derling! [nail me up]

More pine ne may me ben y-don [more hurt cannot be done me]
Than lete me live in sorwe and shame;
As love me bindëth to my sone,
So let us deyen bothe y-same. [both die together]

Many poems use sophisticated techniques to achieve deceptively simple effects and Duncan points to the common use of anaphora i.e. the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. But in among the longer, more calculating poems, you keep coming across short ones which possess a proverbial, primeval power.

Now goth sonne under wode,
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
Now goth sonne under tre,
Me reweth, Marie, thi sone and thee.

Now goes the sun behind the wood
I grieve, Mary, for your fair face.
Now goes the sun behind the tree.
I grieve, Mary, thy son and thee.

4. Miscellaneous lyrics

These are the most ‘Chaucerian’ of the four categories because the least to do with elaborate courtliness or Christian worship, and instead describe more everyday subjects such as imprisonment, poverty, exploitation, bribery and corruption as well as wit and humour. They also tend to be the longest and most rambling. Duncan singles out ‘Ich herde men upon mold’, a long lament by a farmer oppressed by the endless taxes of the mighty, and describes the harsh taxes, the cruel weather and the petty officials of the manor including the ‘hayward’ (who was responsible for maintaining the fences which separated the common land from enclosed land), the ’bailiff’ (who administered the lord’s land and upheld his rights in law), the ‘woodward’ (who was in charge of forests and forest timber) and the ‘beadle’ (who worked under the authority of the bailiff, here acting as a tax-collector.

The previous three sections – the love poetry and the devotional verse – tend to focus on the individual and his laments over Fortune’s Wheel or his emotional response to Jesus and Mary. In these longer ballads and poems we re-encounter the broader social world in which those feelings took place. Here are the first two stanzas:

Ich herde men upon mold
make muche mon
Hou he ben y-tened
of here tilyinge
Gode yeres and corn
bothe ben a-gon
Ne kepen here no sawe
ne no song singe.

Now we mote werche
nis ther non other won
May ich no lengere
live with my lesinge
Yet ther is a bitterer
bit to the bon
For ever the ferthe peni
mot to the kinge.

Translated:

I hear men upon earth
make much moan
how they are harassed
in their farming
good years and corn-crops
both have gone
they care to hear no tales
nor no song sing.

Now we must work
there is no other choice
may I no longer
live with my losses
Yet there is a bitterer
cut to the bone
for every fourth penny
must go to the king.

This is poignant to read in the context of Dan Jones’s history of the Plantagenet kings which I’ve just finished. Jones shows all the rulers of England, without exception, repeatedly, year after year, mulcting and taxing, fleecing and extorting money from their entire kingdoms, again and again imposing draconian taxes, to fund their violent and generally futile foreign wars.

It’s easy to get blasé about this history and to concentrate solely on the political consequences of monarchs overtaxing their realms. A poem like this redresses the balance and, in the absence of so much information about people’s ordinary lives and livelihoods, amounts to important – and baleful – social history.

Luminarium

If you want to browse further, check out the Luminarium website which has a selection of about 40 medieval poems, giving the original text alongside a translation, almost all of them accompanied by a snippet of the poem in a musical setting, some by modern composers, some reconstructions of medieval tunes.

Middle English Lyrics on the Luminarium website

There’s also a PDF of medieval lyrics, carols and ballads, which Duncan seems to have been involved in publishing and translating.

Medieval lyrics, carols and ballads

Other medieval reviews

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)

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by Simon on July 1, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, English literature, literature, Poetry

Posted by Simon on July 1, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/01/medieval-english-lyrics-1200-to-1400-thomas-duncan-introduction/

Medieval English lyrics 1200 to 1400 edited by Thomas G. Duncan (1995)

This handy Penguin paperback contains 132 medieval lyrics along with an extensive introduction explaining their historical and cultural context and explaining the rhyme scheme, scansion and pronunciation of the poems. Each work benefits from a ‘crib’ or translation of obscure phrases which is on the same page as the text, and extensive notes on each poem at the back of the book.

The pronunciation

First the pronunciation. In the following short poem ‘i’ is pronounced like a long ‘e’ as in leave so ‘miri’ is pronounced like mini except with an r in the middle and ‘while’ is pronounced weelë. ‘Sumer’ is soomer, the ‘i’ in ‘i-last’ is ee. The extra ‘e’ on the end of many words is generally voiced which is why Duncan prints it as ‘ë’ to remind the reader to pronounce it. ‘Ou’ is pronounced oo, so ‘foulës’ is pronounced foolës. Gh is like loch in Scottish. So ‘night’ is pronounced with an ‘i’ as in lit or sin and the ‘gh’ sounding as in loch, to make it sound like the German word nicht. ‘Ich’ is pronounced itch, ‘michel’ sounds like mitchell. A’s are short as in cat.

Miri it is while sumer i-last
With foulës song;
Oc now neghëth windës blast
And weder strong.
Ei, ei, what this night is long,
And Ich with wel michel wrong
Sorwe and murne and fast.

So a phonetic version would go something like this:

Mirry it is weel soomer eelast
with foolës song
oc noo neiyeth windës blast
and weder strong.
Ei, ei, wat this nicht is long,
and ich with wel mitchell wrong
sorwe and mourne and fast.

You can make out the pronunciation in this medieval setting of the poem.

‘Mirie it is’ on the Luminarium website

Read out loud

As to the meaning, well, when I studied Middle English (and Anglo-Saxon) at university I found it was best to read the poetry aloud, over and over again, to get the pronunciation and rhythms and sounds into your mouth and mind for some time before worrying about the ‘meaning’.

The kind of crib Duncan provides – i.e. not a full translation into modern English, but just picking the hardest words or phrases and suggesting a meaning – helps because it is fragmentary and doesn’t swamp the poem with a full modern version but just guides you in interpreting some of the original medieval words.

This is one of the appeals of medieval poetry, that it speaks to us before we completely understand what it means and, even after we’ve read modern translations and ‘cribs’, it still says something more than a literal translation into modern English can do.

Thus Duncan helps by pointing out in his glosses that ‘i-last’ means lasts, ‘foulës song’ means birds’ song, ‘oc’ means ‘but’, ‘neigheth’ means ‘draws near’, ‘wat’ means ‘how’ (so the line means ‘how this night is long’), and – most suggestively – that ‘with wel michel wrong’ means ‘for very great wrong doing’…

Given these clues, the reader is forced to reread the poem and assimilate these new meanings to the lines. In effect, to begin to learn Middle English. Compare and contrast the effort required and the reward of trying to understand a different language, with simply swamping your mind with a brisk modern translation:

Merry it is while summer lasts with the song of birds;
but now draws near the wind’s blast and harsh weather.
Alas, Alas! How long this night is! And I, most unjustly,
sorrow and mourn and fast.

In my opinion all the power and mystery is lost in this or any modern translation. How much more powerful, mysterious and interesting (and difficult to scan) it is to say:

and ich with wel mickle wrong

than it is to say:

And I, most unjustly

If one of the purposes of poetry is to refresh the language, or our understanding and use of language, this can be done far more quickly and deeply by learning just one medieval lyric which transports you to a different universe, than by listening to a hundred rap songs which merely entrench you deeper and deeper into the baleful, violent present.

Scansion

Another cause of uncertainty, mystery and pleasure is the odd scansion of most of the lines. Some of them fall right into our modern-day feel for iambic pentameters and regular rhythms. But others just don’t. Duncan has a long essay explaining the scansion i.e. how the rhythm of the poems is made up of the emphases which should – in theory – be given to different vowels, consonants, or words which start lines or words which end them.

For example, it’s important to realise that Middle English had far more words ending in ‘e’ than we do and that sometimes the ‘e’ was voiced but sometimes it wasn’t. It is generally voiced before a consonant but if a vowel begins the next word, elided into that vowel and so not distinctly sounded.

This is why Duncan sometimes prints ‘e’ with a diaeresis over it – ë – when it is to be pronounced – as in ‘foolës song’ – but otherwise leaves the e plain, when it is to be elided into the following vowel to create just one syllable instead of two – ‘Sorwe and murne and fast’ where the e’s on the end of sorwe and murne blend into the a of the following and.

But – in practice – as Duncan admits, many of the poems seem to ignore these rules or to only obey them erratically. No manual or criticism or explanation survives by contemporaries to explain the thinking behind rhythm and syllables and beats, so scholars have had to reconstruct ‘the rules’ six or seven hundred years after the poems were written and there is still a lot of debate because whichever rules you devise, you can immediately find examples which seem to break them.

All this adds to the sense of mild challenge about the poems and forces you to read and reread each one until you think you’ve got the correct rhythm.

Music

And finally, all the poems were in fact lyrics, designed to be set to music and this music – genuinely medieval music – worked according to rules and values most of us find strange, lacking the basic ideas of a dominant key and a structured progression through related chords with the voice picking out melodies from the chord progressions. Instead, in medieval music, the voice was its own master, far less constrained by ideas of harmony and chord progression.

This is particularly true of a solo vocal rendition, as of ‘Wynter wakeneth’ which I quote below. In this instrumental version of ‘Miri it is’, there is a strong sense of rhythm which rides over the doubts and uncertainties you get from just reading the words.

For example, they sing just one ‘ei’ whereas the presence of two ‘eis’ in the original is one of the complicating factors in trying to scan that line. As so often in musical settings of a poem, the composer / performer just ignores the problems of scansion in order to produce a smooth product.

Amended spelling

I am intrigued that the singers in this performance pronounce the word Duncan has given as ‘sorwe’ as ‘sorrich’. This is because they have spelt it ‘soregh’ and not ‘sorwe’ which brings us to a big point.

In this edition Duncan has made the big editorial decision to change the spelling of all the poems in his collection to ‘bring them into conformity’ with the dialect of south-east England. During this period – 1200 to 1400 – there were many distinct regional variations of English, complete with different grammar, spelling and vocabulary. Duncan says he has brought all the spellings into line with the dialect of south-east England – or London – because that is the Middle English of Chaucer and so the version which most of his readers are likely to be familiar with.

I think this is a controversial decision. On the whole I think I would like to be in possession of what the medieval scribes actually wrote than a cleaned-up version which Duncan thinks will be easier for me to read and understand. I don’t want it to be easy. I want it to be accurate and faithful.

There’s a fascinating article devoted to this very song:

Decoding the earliest surviving secular song in English

which contains a photo of the one and only surviving manuscript of the song (complete with stave lines indicating the note to be sung over each word).

Manuscript of Miri it is

Immediately you can see that the first word is a) missing the initial M b) is written [M]irie, not ‘miri as Duncan gives us. This is a vast difference. The article suggests it should be pronounced with three syllables: mi-ree-e (the last e pronounced as in web). That’s a hell of a difference from the two syllables of Duncan’s ‘miri’.

Similarly, on the second line you can quite clearly see that what Duncan has given as ‘foulës song’ is in fact written ‘fugheles song’. They both mean birds’ song, but Duncan has changed the northern dialect word fughel to the word Chaucer would use, ‘fowl or foul’.

I don’t want to be churlish, but I object to this. 1. I prefer to know what the scribe actually wrote and 2. fugheles quite obviously has three syllables unlike ‘foulës’. Or at least there is a flicker of hesitation over the ‘ughe’ which has been removed by turning it onto ‘ou’.

(Also, as explained, none of the originals have the diaeresis over the e – ë – because that is an entirely Duncan invention, put in hte poems to help the reader with the correct pronunciation.)

In other words, any effort made trying to scan Duncan’s version is effort wasted, or led astray, by the fact that he doesn’t print the words of the actual poem! The online article I’ve referred to gives this as the poem’s correct, unexpurgated text:

[M]Irie it is while sumer ilast
with fugheles song
oc nu necheth windes blast
and weder strong.
Ei ei what this nicht is long
And ich with wel michel wrong.
Soregh and murne and [fast].

(Note that the final word, ‘fast’, is not included in the text as we have it, but is a guess by all succeeding editors.)

Conclusion

Study of this one short poem suggests an approach to Duncan’s entire book which is:- to use it to ramble and surf and browse through the wonderful world of medieval lyrics, to let yourself be caught and captivated by individual poems and work with Duncan’s cribs and read up his notes on each one…

But then to use the wonders of the internet to search for the actual original text of each poem, and to get to know that and not the bowdlerised version Duncan has confected for us.

I sing of a mayden

One hundred and thirty-two is a lot of poems and they range from short seven-liners like the above, to the five short stanzas of a classic like ‘I sing of a mayden’, to much longer, wordier, and more complex poems, poems with elaborate refrains such as ‘Alysoun’, or even dialogue poems where alternate verses are spoken by characters.

‘I sing of a mayden’ is a favourite among fans of this period and has been set to music by many modern composers. Duncan’s version is:

I syng of a mayden
that is makëles:
King of alle kingës
to her sone she chees.

He cam also styllë
ther his moder was
As dewe in Aprylle
that fallëth on the gras.

He cam also styllë
to his moderës bowr
As dew in Aprille
that falleth on the flour.

He cam also stillë
ther his moder lay
As dewe in Aprille
that fallëth on the spray.

Moder and mayden
was never non but she:
Wel may swych a lady
Godës moder be!

It appeals:

because of the short simplicity of the lines
because of the repetition of the three central verses which vary only the rhyme words was/gras, bowr/flowr, lay/spray
because of the sweet innocent purity of the floral imagery
and because of the way the simplicity, repetition and natural imagery convey an immensely gentle, sweet and loving relationship between Mary and her beloved son

Does it need translating? As mentioned, Duncan has already bowdlerised it a little, converting the original ‘þ’ into modern ‘th’, and adding his diaeresis e’s to clarify pronunciation and emphasis. The original version of the first two verses reads:

I syng of a mayden
þat is makeles,
kyng of alle kynges
to here sone che ches.

He came also stylle
þer his moder was
as dew in aprylle,
þat fallyt on þe gras.

You can feel the rhythm and the meaning, cant you, but your mind just needs guiding and supporting at a few of the more obscure moments, and this is the merit of Duncan’s ‘cribs’ i.e. printing the meaning of some of the more obscure terms on the same page as the poem. Thus you need to know that ‘makeles’ means ‘matchless’, ‘ches’ means ‘chose’ and that ‘þ’ is pronounced as ‘th’ as in this or that. Once you know that you’re away!

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless,
King of all kings
For her son she chose.

He came as still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falls on the grass.

He came as still
To his mother’s bower
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.

He came as still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falls on the spray.

Mother and maiden
There was never, ever one but she;
Well may such a lady
God’s mother be.

As to pronunciation, key points would be that ‘makeles’ is not pronounced like modern ‘make’, but mack-e-less, and that maiden is pronounced my-den. Again, once you’ve grasped its meaning and a feel for the pronunciation, how much cooler and slicker it is to say:

Moder and maiden
Was neverë noon but she

Than:

Mother and maiden
There was never, ever one but she;

Just as it is cooler and slicker to refer to someone’s savoir faire than to their ‘knowledge of how to do things properly’. Learning Middle English is like learning another language which 1. is not, at the end of the day, that difficult because so much of it is similar, sometimes identical, to modern English, and 2. you don’t have to learn well enough to have conversations in it, just well enough to begin to have a feel for the words and phrases, enough of a feel to bring these magical poems to life.

Rhythm and repetition

These two poems epitomise one aspect of Middle English, its ability to make brief, punchy phrases pregnant with meaning:

[M]irie it is while sumer ilast

I syng of a mayden
þat is makeles,

But ‘mayden’ also highlights the ability of what are, for the most part, songs made to be sung, to use repetition with variation to create beautiful rhythms. (In this example remember ‘bounden’ is pronounced ‘boonden’.)

Adam lay ybounden
bounden in a bond,
fowre thousand winter
thoughte he not too long;

And al was for an appil
an appil that he took,
As clerkes finden writen
writen in hire book.

Ne hadde the apple taken ben
the apple taken ben,
Ne hadde nevere Oure Lady
ybeen hevene Quen.

Blessed be the time
that appil taken was:
Therfore we mown singen
Deo Gratias.

Even if you’re not sure what ‘Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond’ exactly means, it’s not hard to 1. get a feel for the nice rhythm of the thing and 2. get the gist of the meaning – that Adam paid dearly for his original sin of eating the forbidden appil, and defying God’s ordinance, and triggering the Fall of Man.

But all’s well that ends well, because if that appil had never been taken, there would have been no need for Christ to have been conceived and born and crucified to redeem us all, in which case there would have been no Virgin Mary, and imagine the world without the Virgin Mary! No, it can’t be done!

And therefore Adam lying bounden in a bond is a small price to pay for having the Mother of God reigning in heaven to guard over us poor sinners and hear our prayers.

(Duncan’s note explains that in medieval theology, Adam was supposed to have remained in bonds with the other patriarchs in the limbus patrum from the time of his death until the crucifixion of Christ, and that this was estimated to have lasted four thousand winters.)

There’s something immensely powerful in the way the entire theology of the Christian religion, with its vast holy books and thousands of theologians, can all be compressed down into this simple carol, whose well-chosen repetitions can all be sung in less than a minute, and bring great spiritual and psychological reassurance.

The literary critic John Spiers makes the acute point that part of the poem’s appeal is the way the idea flows so naturally. ‘The doctrine of the song is perfectly orthodox… but here is expressed very individually and humanly. The movement of the song reproduces very surely the movements of a human mind.’

I think of Shakespeare with his colourful conceits, of John Donne with his far-fetched similes or John Milton with his heavy Latinate tread. Compared to all those later poets, this poem flows as simply but as profoundly as a fairy tale.

Four categories

Duncan divides his book up into four categories:

Love Lyrics
Penitential and Moral Lyrics
Devotional Lyrics
Miscellaneous Lyrics

In the modern, post-romantic world almost all the poetry and certainly all the songs we are subjected to are about worldly love. Another appeal of medieval poetry is the way it transports you beyond the limits and clichés of modern poetry to an entirely different world, which had different priorities and perspectives.

Some of the love poetry has a familiar feel, and Duncan makes the point that it was during this period that the notion of courtly love, of romantic love for a powerful and demanding mistress which originated among the troubadours of the South of France, first entered English culture. He goes on to make fine distinctions between the highly sophisticated and deliberately intellectual poetry of the troubadours and the more relaxed, more sensuous love poems to be found in medieval England.

The frailty of man’s estate

But personally, I never get tired of the central medieval theme of the decline and fall, the turn of Fortune’s wheel, the inevitable decay of all earthly success, wealth and love, the frailty of man’s estate, and so liked the section of Penitential and Moral Lyrics most. Take ‘Wynter wakeneth’. Here’s Duncan’s made-easy version.

Wynter wakenëth al my care,
Nou this levës waxeth bare.
Ofte I sike and mournë sare
When hit comth in my thought
Of this worldës joie hou hit goth al to nought.

Here’s the original text:

Wynter wakeneth al my care,
Nou this leves waxeth bare.
Ofte y sike ant mourne sare
When hit cometh in my thoht
Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht.

Remembering medieval pronunciation, here’s my phonetic interpretation:

Winter whackeneth Al me ca [a as in car]-rë
Noo this lay-vës waxeth ba[a as in bar]rë
Ofte ee sick ant mournë sa[a as in saab]re
When hit comëth in mee thocht
Of this worldës joy, hoo hit goth Al to noght.

Once you’ve got the pronunciation right and rolled it round your mouth a few times, it shouldn’t take much translating; you just need to know that that ‘leves’ means leaves, ‘waxeth’ means grow, ‘y’ means I, ‘sike’ (pronounced sick, the final e elided into the a of ant) means sigh, ‘sare’ means sore or sorely or bitterly, ‘goth’ means goeth i.e. goes. Thus a modernisation would read:

Winter wakens all my grief,
Now these leaves grow bare.
Often I sigh and sorely mourn,
When it enters my thoughts,
Regarding this world’s joy,
how it all comes to nothing.

But once you’ve really processed and absorbed the meaning, how much smoother and more musical it is to say:

Wynter wakëneth al me care

which is strange and far more invigorating, than:

Winter wakens all my grief

Which is boring.

Wele and wo

The poems describing spring and maidens and love and flowers and bowers contain sweet simple imagery, dance along with gladsome rhythms, and have been turned into songs of striking happiness and joy.

Lenten ys come with love to toune,
With blosmen & with briddes roune,
That al this blisse bryngeth;
Dayes eyes in this dales,
Notes suete of nyhtegales;
Uch foul song singeth.

Translated:

Spring has come with love to town,
With blossoms and with birds’ song
Which all that this bliss bringeth;
Daisies in these dales,
Notes sweet of nightingales;
Each bird his song singeth.

‘Lenten is come with love to toune’ (pronounced toon’), isn’t that a great opening line? In fact it’s a noticeable characteristic that many of the poems, short or long, announce their presence with a striking first line.

But by the same token, the poems lamenting man’s brikkelness and the unpredictable turns of destiny also have just such a primitive, almost primeval force, reeking of a society with no safety nets, where most people were close to famine and disease all their lives, where average life expectancy was around the mid-30s.

This rendition of ‘Wynter wakeneth’ captures perfectly the sound of a lone survivor of the Black Death or one of the period’s endless wars, sitting in the pew of a burnt-out church, sole survivor of his family and his community, lamenting his fate as the cold snow falls endlessly all around, smothering the land.

Luminarium

Middle English Lyrics on the Luminarium website

Other medieval reviews

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)

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by Simon on June 30, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Poetry

Posted by Simon on June 30, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/medieval-english-lyrics-thomas-duncan/

The Plantagenets (2) by Dan Jones (2012)

Part two of my summary of Dan Jones’s rip-roaring, boys-own-adventure, 600-page-long account of the history of the Plantagenet kings and queens (1154-1400).

Episodes

It becomes clearer in the second half of the book that each of the book’s short chapters (average length 9 pages) begins with a dramatic moment or colourful scene which grabs our attention. And then Jones goes back a bit to explain how it came about, what led up to it and what it meant.

This helps explain why the book feels so popular and gripping, because, on one level, it supplies a steady sequence of 85 (there are 85 chapters) dramatic, exciting or colourful moments. This became particularly obvious in a sequence of chapters about the early reign of Edward III:

When Parliament met in March 1337, a hum of excitement and agitation settled over Westminster… (New Earls, New Enemies)

On 26 January 1340, Edward III entered the Flemish city of Ghent, with his entire household accompanying him, including his heavily pregnant queen, who was carrying the couple’s sixth child in ten years… (The Hundred Years War Begins)

As dusk approached on the evening of 24 June 1340, six months after he had declared himself king of the best part of western Europe, Edward stood aboard his flagship, the cog Thomas… and watched the sea offshore from Sluys, in Flanders, churn with the blood of tens of thousands of Frenchmen… (Edward at Sea)

Violent seas threw the king’s boat about for three days as it stuttered from the coast of Flanders to the mouth of the Thames. It was the very end of November 1340, and with winter approaching it was more dangerous than usual to venture a Channel crossing… (The Crisis of 1341)

In the heat of July 1346 the English army marched through a broken, hell-bright landscape of coastal Normandy. All around them fields were lit up in ghastly orange by marauding bands of arsonists… (Dominance)

The English summer of 1348 was wet, but in defiance of the weather the country fairly blazed with glory. The king had returned to England in October the previous month in triumph… (The Death of a Princess)

You get the idea. The way the chapters don’t have numbers but snappy or sensational titles also helps give you the impression that what you’re reading is less like a traditional history and more like a poolside thriller.

Henry III and Prince Edward

We left our heroes in the last days of the weak and malleable king, Henry III – years which saw the rise of his tough, warrior son, Prince Edward (b.1239).

Prince Edward led the Royalist army at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, the first set piece battle on English soil in a century. The rebels won, capturing the King, Lord Edward, and Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother and the titular King of Germany. This led to the Great Parliament of 1265 (also known as Montfort’s Parliament). For the first time representatives were invited from all the counties and selected boroughs of England. Voting rights were discussed. All this was the seeds of modern democracy, more accurately part of the ongoing detailed process whereby successive Plantagenet kings found themselves forced to consult, first with the barons and nobles and then, by the reign of Richard II (1377-99) with the ‘commons’, the knights and justices of the shires.

But Prince Edward managed to escape from captivity and rallied royalist nobles as well as Welsh rebels and this led to a pitched battle with de Montfort’s forces at Evesham, which was a decisive royalist victory. Jones describes how a 12-man hit squad was commissioned to roam the battlefield, ignoring everything, with the sole task of finding and killing de Montfort. They succeeded. His body was mutilated, his testicles, hands and feet cut off. To later generations he became a sort of patron saint of representative government. Today De Montfort University in Leicester is named after him.

Henry III was once again titular king but he was a broken, dithering old man. The real power in the land was his forceful and energetic son, Edward (named after Henry’s icon, Edward the Confessor) who turned out to be a very different character from the saintly Saxon.

Edward I (1272-1307) ‘a great and terrible king’

Edward’s career divides into roughly four parts:

1. Growth to maturity under his father Henry (1239-1272). This involved him in the complex problems caused by his father’s weakness and the malign influence of his mother’s foreign relations, the de Lusignan family, all of which climaxed in the Barons Wars, in which rebels against royal authority were led by Simon de Montfort. These forces won the battle of Lewes in 1264 and de Montfort was for a few years effectively ruler of England, but were then comprehensively crushed and de Montfort killed at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. The civil war dragged on for a few more years, with individual rebels being picked off or offered concessions and peace.

2. Crusade (1270-74). Edward mulcted the country to raise the money to go on the Ninth Crusade and, unlike his immediate forebears, actually managed to leave, but the crusade proved to be a fiasco in several ways. For a start the leader, French King Louis IX of France allowed himself to be persuaded by his brother, Charles of Anjou, who had made himself King of Sicily, to sail not to Palestine but to attack his enemies in the coast of Tunisia, who were harrying Sicily. By the time Edward arrived Louis had signed a peace with the emir leaving Edward and his army with nothing to do. Undeterred they sailed for the Holy Land.

Here the situation was poor. Jerusalem had fallen 50 years earlier leaving Acre the centre of the diminished Crusader state and this was menaced by the overwhelming force of Baibars, leader of the Mamluks. After a few feeble sorties Edward had to stand by while Hugh III king of Jerusalem made a treaty with the Mamluks, who were themselves menaced by the encroaching Mongols in the north. The only notable event of Edward’s crusade is when an assassin was allowed into his private chambers and stabbed him. Edward managed to kill the attacker but was seriously wounded and took months to recover.

With the signing of the peace treaty there was little more to do, so he reluctantly packed up and headed back to England. En route he learned that his father had died but instead of rushing back took nearly a year to return, attending to business in his province of Gascony, then having an audience with the French king at which he renewed his vows of fealty i.e. that he held Gascony as a servant of the French King.

Wales Edward is famous for his wars of conquest in Wales and Scotland. Wales came first. It was ruled by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd who had benefited from the Barons Wars and slowly intimidated his way to rule over more and more of the other Welsh princes from his base in the northern province of Gwynned. Eventually, Llywelyn’s aggressive policies triggered a response from Edward who invaded with an overwhelming force in a carefully calculated campaign. In less than a year he had forced Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to retreat. Edward built enormous castles to act as permanent English powerbases as he and his army progressed through north Wales. After Llywelyn sued for peace he was made to perform fealty to Edward, hand over hostages, pay fines, and then travel to Westminster to perform submission, again.

In 1284 Edward issued the Statute of Rhuddlan that annexed Wales and made it a province of England. The title Prince of Wales was handed to Edward’s eldest son, Prince Edward (later Edward II) – a tradition that continues to this day.

Scotland Edward was so relentless in his attacks against the Scots that after his death he became known as ‘Scottorum malleus’ – the Hammer of the Scots. In 1287 Alexander III, King of Scots, died suddenly after falling from his horse. The succession crisis that followed presented Edward with a golden opportunity to expand on his conquest of Wales. In the absence of an obvious heir, the Scottish crown looked set to pass to Alexander’s infant grand-daughter, Margaret, the daughter of the King of Norway, hence the folk name she acquired, the ‘Maid of Norway’. But all elaborate plans centring on her collapsed when she died en route to Scotland.

With rival claimants vying for the crown Edward was invited by the senior nobles of Scotland to judge the claims and make the choice. This was a golden opportunity and Edward exploited it insisting that he be recognised as feudal overlord of the Scots before a new Scots king be appointed. The two strongest claimants were Robert Bruce and John Balliol. After much machination Balliol was appointed king, but on the understanding that he did so as vassal to Edward.

Edward rode Scotland hard, demanding high taxes and soldiers for his wars in Wales and Gascony. In 1295 the Scots signed a mutual aid treaty with France, an alliance which was to last centuries and come to be known as ‘the Auld Alliance’.

Edward launched a brutal attack, taking Berwick, which the Scots had occupied, slaughtering the inhabitants before pushing on into Scotland and decisively defeating the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar 1296. Balliol was captured, stripped of his ceremonial trappings, and sent to prison in England, while Edward’s army returned south laden with loot including the legendary stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, which was placed under the throne in Westminster Abbey.

However the Scots, like the Welsh, refused to accept defeat, and rebellions broke out in the highlands and lowlands, the latter led by William Wallace who managed to defeat the army Edward sent against him at the Battle of Stirling Bridge 11 September 1297. At which point Edward marched north with another army and defeated Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk. Wallace was later captured and sent south to London where he was brutally tortured and executed.

However Robert Bruce, who lost the contest for the crown in 1295, won support among the Scots nobles and had himself crowned King of Scotland in 1306. As he hadn’t asked permission of Edward, the English king once again marched north, defeated the Scots in a series of battles and forced Robert to flee. However, the Bruce refused to admit defeat, gathered his forces, and made renewed attacks on isolated English garrisons in 1307. Not even the capture and execution of key Bruce supporters (including members of Bruce’s own family) could reverse the tide.

Yet again Edward marched north but on 7 July 1307, within sight of Scotland in sight, the 68-year-old king died at Burgh-on-Sands. The campaign for the conquest of Scotland passed on to his son, Edward II who was, to the Scots’ relief, and shadow of his brutal and implacable father. In 1314 Bruce was to rout a larger English force at Bannockburn. Recognition of Scotland’s sovereignty came at the start of the reign of Edward’s grandson, Edward III, in 1328.

The Jews Usury i.e. lending money out at interest, was banned to Christians, but kings and merchants needed funds so money-lending tended to be a specialist activity of England’s small Jewish community of maybe 2,000. This activity and their status as outsiders to the laws of the land made them vulnerable to victimisation. In 1275 Edward issued the Statute of Jewry that imposed severe taxation on the Jewish population of England. The Statute proved both lucrative and popular, so Edward extended the policy and in 1290 expelled the entire Jewish community from England – minus their money and property. The money raised went directly into his expensive campaigns in Scotland and Wales.

Edward II (1307-27)

The revelation for me was how unpopular Edward II was even before he became king. Edward I fathered no fewer than 14 children but with the deaths of most of the older ones, young prince Edward of Carnarfon emerged as the heir and favourite. But even by the time he was a teenager he was already proving a disappointment. There are records of numerous violent arguments between father and son, not least as Edward fell under the hypnotic spell of the charismatic Piers Gaveston.

It is difficult to establish at a distance of eight hundred years just what their relationship really amounted to but Jones points out that the accusations of homosexuality which later gathered round the relationship only really appear in the chronicles after Edward’s death in 1327. From Edward’s recorded words and writings during his reign, it seems that he regarded Gaveston more as a beloved adopted brother, who he blindly hero worshipped. Gaveston joined Edward’s household in 1300 and was tried and executed in 1312 and during this time caused havoc. He was dilettantish and rapacious, greedy for titles.

Gaveston stage-managed Edward II’s coronation, shocking the assembled nobility of England by rudely sidelining Edward’s queen, Isabella, daughter of the powerful King Philip IV of France. His behaviour alienated numerous groups and noble families who first protested and forced the king to send him into exile, then, when Gaveston returned, and then rose against the king. Edward II’s reign comes to its first climax with the seizure and execution of Gaveston by a kangaroo court led by the Earl of Lancaster, in 1312. The polarisation of the aristocracy led to several years of confrontation between the armed camps and it was during this period that the Scots won their great victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314.

The sense of ill omen about Edward’s reign was compounded by the Great Famine of 1315-17. For three years in a row there was unusual amounts of rainfall in the spring and summer which ruined crops. There was widespread famine and reports of cannibalism. It is thought that population had been rising since the time of the Norman Conquest but now it came to a dead halt and declined. The famine undermined belief in the church and the efficacy of prayer, and also in the secular authorities who proved hopeless at alleviating starvation.

But having eliminated Gaveston did not change Edward II’s dependence and he switched his allegiance to the Despenser family, in particular Hugh Despenser the Younger with whom he became close friends. The same problems arose again, which is that the king gave disproportionate amounts of land and favours and honours to the Despensers and their extended family, perpetuating the party opposed to Edward.

In 1321, once again led by the Earl of Lancaster, the rebellious barons seized the Despensers’ lands and forced the king to exile them. Edward led a short military campaign, capturing and executing Lancaster and restoring Despensers grip on power. The cabal set about executing their enemies and confiscating their estates, particularly of the Mortimer family who had become one of the leading opponents and now fled to France.

The French king took advantage of the turmoil in England to make attacks on Plantagenet territory in France, particularly Aquitaine. Lacking the money or support from his nobles to launch any kind of military campaign, in 1325 Edward sent his queen, Isabella, to negotiate a peace treaty but by now she had had quite enough of a king who did nothing but snub her and load his favourites with wealth and honour. Isabella not only refused to return but quickly fell into league with the exiled noble Roger Mortimer and scandalised opinion by taking him as her lover.

In 1326 they landed with a small army in East Anglia and, as they marched across the country, more and more local nobles rallied to the cause. As his regime collapsed around him, Edward was forced to flee to Wales where he was captured in November. The king was forced to relinquish his crown in January 1327 in favour of his 14-year-old son, Edward III, and he died in Berkeley Castle on 21 September, probably murdered on the orders of the new regime.

Edward III (1327-77)

In Jones’s account Edward’s reign falls into roughly three periods. For the first three years, as a boy, he was under the guardianship of his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, who proved every bit as rapacious as the former king had been. As soon as he was old enough, in 1330 Edward launched a coup against them. Isabella was exiled to a provincial castle but Mortimer was formally tried for arrogating royal power, found guilty and hanged at Tyburn.

Part two of his life is the central period from 1330 to 1360, during which Edward emerged as possibly the greatest of all the Plantaganet kings. He:

conducted successful campaigns to restore or establish English control of Wales, Scotland and key territories in mainland France, namely Aquitaine
fathered a huge brood of children (ten), with three or four of the sons growing up to become powerful and successful soldiers, political figures and leaders in their own right, namely Edward the Black Prince b.1330
realising the English aristocracy had been depleted by deaths in battle and also what had been in effect the civil war of Edward II’s reign, Edward cannily set about creating new earls and awarding them land around the kingdom, along with a new order of ‘dukes’, this creating a special bond between himself and the nobles of England
Edward was fascinated by the legend of King Arthur and spent a fortune commissioning a room to hold a Round Table at Windsor, as well as instituting the noble Order of the Garter, as another way of binding together the English aristocracy

Edward was determined to seize back the territories in continental France which had been held by Henry II at the peak of the Plantagenet Empire. Over the next thirty years he launched a series of campaigns which led to the two ‘famous’ victories over French armies, at Crecy on 26 August 1346 and Poitiers on 19 September 1356. The latter battle was so decisive the English captured the French King John II and took him, and numerous other nobles, back to England to be ransomed.

Jones explains how Edward set about carefully allotting each of his adult sons a territory within his ’empire’ to manage, with the Black Prince being awarded Aquitaine, the duchy belonging to his great grandfather Richard the Lionheart. However, the Prince’s rule was troubled by three factors. He chose to get dragged into the affairs of Spain, taking the side of Don Pedro of Castile against his half-brother Henry of Trastámara. The Prince defeated Henry only to discover that Pedro was completely broke and couldn’t pay anything towards the huge loans the Prince had taken out to pay his mercenaries. This led directly to the second bad decision which was that the Prince was forced to impose onerous taxes on the nobles and people of Aquitaine, managing to alienate all of them. When the king of France came probing around the border of Aquitaine, towns opened their gates to him without a fight.

The third piece of bad luck was that during the campaign against Henry of Trastámara, the Prince picked up a recurrent fever, maybe malaria, which undermined the physical energy which had made him such a legend at Crecy and Poitiers. Increasingly enfeebled – having to be carried around in a sedan chair – he reacted savagely to his mounting problems. After the town of Limoges capitulated to the French king without a struggle, but was then retaken by English forces, the Prince ordered an indiscriminate slaughter of the civilian population in 1370. The Black Prince returned to England in 1371 and the next year resigned the principality of Aquitaine and Gascony. He lingered on, increasingly infirm, for five more years and died in 1376, the year before his father.

As the 1360s progressed, King Edward himself grew more infirm. Many of the close knit circle of contemporaries passed away. In 1364 King John II of France passed away and was succeeded by the vigorous and aggressive Charles V. Edward sent his son John of Gaunt with an army against Charles but the campaign was a failure. With the Treaty of Bruges in 1375, the once-great English possessions in France were reduced to the coastal towns of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne.

Edward’s beloved wife Philippa of Hainault died in 1369. Grief-stricken, Edward took comfort in a long-running affair with a mistress, Alice Perrers. Discontent at home led to the convocation of the so-called Good Parliament in 1376, which was the longest parliament up to that time. As so often it was called to raise taxes for the crown, but was an opportunity for critics to vent their grievances and in particular gave voice to the so-called commons more than any previous meeting.

But the real power in the land at the end of Edward’s reign was his son John of Gaunt.

The Black Death

Plague came to England in 1348, arriving at Weymouth in Dorset, from Gascony in June 1348. By autumn, the plague had reached London, and by summer 1349 it covered the entire country, before dying down by December. The best current estimate is that, depending on region, between 40 and 60 percent of the population perished. Not so well known is that the plague returned in 1361–62 this time causing the death of around 20 percent of the population.

Leaving aside the horror and the despair the surprising thing, in Jones’s account at any rate, is how little impact this astonishing holocaust had on the economic, political, military or social structures of the day. The best known is that is resulted in a shortage of labour which lasted generations and, in effect, led to the end of feudal servitude.

Because he is interested in political history and, more precisely, in the stories of the kings conceived as Hollywood blockbusters, the plague makes remarkably little difference to Jones’s narrative. In 1356 England and France are back at war as if nothing had happened.

Richard II (1377-1399)

Richard was the second ill-fated king of the 14th century, destined, like Edward II, to be overthrown and, oddly, after nearly the same length of reign, 20 years for Edward II, 22 years for Richard II.

Richard was the son of Edward III’s oldest surviving son, Edward the Black Prince and so heir to the throne even though his father died before his grandfather. Having been born in 1367 he was only ten when he came to the throne and Jones gives a vivid description of his coronation and the surrounding festivities which – he speculates – deeply marked the boy, convincing him of his divine right to rule.

The common people, and the nobles, all hoped the arrival of a new young king would mark a turnaround from the sombre final years of Edward III’s reign. They also crowned him in a hurry because many feared that the mature and forceful John of Gaunt was himself scheming to seize the throne.

Early on he was controlled by a series of Regency Councils dominated by his uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, though their influence was contested. The ruling classes imposed a series of three poll taxes to raise money for continuing the war with France, and this was one of the spurs which led to a sudden outbreak of violence among serfs in Essex and Kent which quickly escalated into the Peasants’ Revolt. The revolt was a really serious violent revolution. The rebels took London, burning and looting, seized the Tower of London and murdered many leading notables including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was also Lord Chancellor, and the king’s Lord High Treasurer, Robert Hales.

Richard played an astonishingly central role in quelling the revolt, personally intervening to meet the rebel leaders and organise an ambush whereby the main leader Wat Tyler was pulled from his horse and stabbed. When the mob surged forward Richard rode among them and shouted ‘I am your leader, follow me’, and they did follow him away from the scene of the murder and Richard’s militia was then able to disperse them.

Richard married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, on 20 January 1382, the empire being seen as potential allies against France in the ongoing Hundred Years’ War, but the marriage was unpopular, the alliance didn’t lead to a single military victory, and the marriage was childless. Anne died from plague in 1394, greatly mourned by her husband.

Richard’s reign was marked by two political crises, in 1386-88 and the final one in 1397-9.

First crisis 1386-88

Favourites Very like Edward II, Richard appointed a handful of devoted favourites who he lavished with honours and lands and positions. The fact that they came from merchant families without true aristocratic forebears, created great resentment among the rest of the nobility. There were Michael de la Pole, created chancellor in 1383 and Earl of Suffolk two years later. Worse was Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who Richard raised to the new title of Duke of Ireland in 1386. Their relationship was so close that later chroniclers speculated it was homosexual.

Failure in France and Scotland An expedition to France to protect English possessions was a failure. Richard decided to lead an expedition against Scotland but this also was a miserable failure as the Scots evaded a set-piece battle. Rumblings against the king was led by the Duke of Gloucester and Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel.

The Wonderful Parliament (November 1386) Parliament was called in November 1386 and the unpopular chancellor, Michael de la Pole, asked for an unprecedented level for taxation to cover these military expeditions. The parliament blamed Richard for the military failures and said it couldn’t consider the issue till de la Pole was removed. The king dismissed their threat but was in the end forced to sack de la Pole. Parliament appointed a ‘continual council’ to supervise the king’s rule, a direct and humiliating attack on Richard’s royal prerogative.

As soon as the parliament had closed, Richard denounced all its actions and in the new year went on a prolonged tour of the country to drum up support and appointed de Vere Justice of Chester to build up a powerbase in Cheshire. Here he put great pressure on seven senior judges to annul the decisions of Parliament and denounce its leaders as traitors.

Radcot bridge 19 December 1387 On his return to London, the king was confronted by the Duke of Gloucester, Arundel and Thomas de Beauchamp, 12th Earl of Warwick, who brought an appeal of treason against de la Pole, de Vere, Tresilian, and two other loyalists, the mayor of London, Nicholas Brembre, and Alexander Neville, the Archbishop of York. Richard played for time and ordered de la Pole to bring loyalist forces from Chester.

Jones opens the relevant chapter with a wonderfully atmospheric account of the loyalist forces advancing under cover of fog towards the Thames but being confronted at Radcot Bridge by overwhelming rebel forces and being forced to swim his horse out into the Thames and escape downstream, ultimately fleeing to France.

The Merciless Parliament (February to June 1388) Parallel to his efforts to raise loyalist forces and seize back London, Richard had been involved in lengthy negotiations with the king of France whereby he would relinquish all England’s territory in France except for Aquitaine, for which he would proclaim himself the French king’s vassal. Rumours of these negotiations leaked out and led to fears that Richard might be prepared to countenance a French invasion of England, so long as he was returned to the throne.

Richard’s original opponents were now joined by John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, and Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham and the group became known as the Lords Appellant because, with de Vere out of the way, they now made legal demands (or appeals) designed to dismantle the apparatus of Richard’s rule. Having dispersed the loyalist army at Radcot, the rebels now marched back to London where they found the king barricaded in the Tower of London which, however, they entered and confronted the king in person with accusations of treason. Apparently the Lords debated executing the king there and then – it came that close, executing their liege king to whom they were all related and who they were negotiating with – but decided against it and called another parliament.

The parliament convened in February 1388 and became known as the Merciless Parliament because the Lords revealed Richard’s treacherous plans with France, won over the Houses of Lords and the Commons and pushed ahead with legal actions to have almost all of Richard’s advisers convicted of treason. Two key figures in the administration, Brembre and Tresilian, were condemned and executed, while de Vere and de la Pole – who had both fled the country – were tried for treason and sentenced to death, then the Appellants went on to arraign, try and execute most of the rest of Richard’s inner circle.

It reads like something from the Terror of the French Revolution. Not only the leading nobles but retainers, clerks, chaplains, and secretaries to Richard were summarily condemned and executed. The seven judges who had been terrorised into denouncing the Lords Appellent, the year before in Chester, were all arrested, tried and executed. Richard’s chamber knights were tried and executed. Richard’s intermediaries who had been negotiating with France, were discovered and executed. No wonder it ended up being called the Merciless Parliament.

Restoration Amazingly, given that their power had been so absolute and the terror so thorough and Richard’s humiliation so complete, Richard returned to personal rule in 1389 and ruled more or less successfully for the next eight years. He was helped by the fact that, once the Lords Appellant had liquidated so many of their enemies, as a group they fell apart, reverting to their individual interests. One of the things which united them had been opposition to Richard’s peace policy with France but when they requested another round of taxation to further their war policy, Parliament baulked and the tide of opinion turned against them.

France and Ireland Richard therefore spent the next few years trying to finalise a peace treaty with France. Meanwhile the Anglo-Irish lords were begging for help against the insurgent Irish and in the autumn of 1394, Richard left for Ireland, where he remained until May 1395. His army of more than 8,000 men was the largest force brought to the island during the late Middle Age, the invasion was a success, and a number of Irish chieftains submitted to English overlordship.

Second crisis 1397-99

The last few years of Richard’s rule are referred to as the ‘tyranny’. The king had Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick arrested in July 1397. After years or reasonably peaceful rule, and bolstered by success in Ireland, Richard felt strong enough to safely retaliate against these three men for their role in events of 1386–88 and eliminate them as threats to his power. Arundel’s brother Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was exiled for life. Richard then set about persecuting his enemies around the regions of England. All the allies of the former Lords Apellant were arrested, tried and released only on payment of enormous fines.

The policy was made possible by the support of old John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and a suite of powerful magnates who Richard awarded with new titles and lands including the former Appellants Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, who was made Duke of Hereford, and Thomas de Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, who was created Duke of Norfolk, John and Thomas Holland, the king’s half-brother and nephew, who were promoted from earls of Huntingdon and Kent to dukes of Exeter and Surrey respectively, the King’s cousin Edward, Earl of Rutland, who received Gloucester’s French title of Duke of Aumale, Gaunt’s son John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, who was made Marquess of Somerset and Marquess of Dorset and so on.

The Shrewsbury parliament In 1398 Richard summoned a packed Parliament to Shrewsbury – known as the Parliament of Shrewsbury – which declared all the acts of the Merciless Parliament to be null and void, and announced that no restraint could legally be put on the king. It delegated all parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners chosen from the king’s friends, making Richard an absolute ruler unbound by the necessity of gathering a Parliament again.

The house of Lancaster John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, brother of Richard’s father the Black Prince, and so Richard’s uncle, had cast a long shadow over Richard’s reign. In the 1390s he had gone to Spain to pursue claims, through his wife, Constance of Castile, to the titles of King of Castile and León, but had returned in 1397. Next to the king he was the largest, richest landowner in the country and had a virile, aggressive son, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford.

Bolingbroke versus Mowbray In December 1397 a bitter quarrel broke out at the core of the courtly circle when Bolingbroke accused Thomas Mowbray of saying that, as former Lords Appellant, they were next in line for royal retribution. Mowbray denied the claim and it was decided the quarrel should be settled the old fashioned way through a joust. Jones vividly paints the scene as the setting for a mounted joust was assembled and the two warriors arrived on horseback in full knightly array.

Bolingbroke exiled However, just as they were gearing themselves to ride at each other Richard intervened and cancelled the joust, deciding that Mowbray should be exiled for life, Bolingbroke for ten years. Aristocratic and public opinion was dismayed, John of Gaunt complained but was by now very ill. When Gaunt died in February 1399 Bolingbroke should have succeeded to his father’s vast lands and wealth. However, Richard extended his exile to life and proceeded to sequester the Lancaster estate, parcelling it out to loyal followers.

Bolingbroke’s return Amazingly, Richard chose this moment to lead an army back to Ireland in May 1399. Bolingbroke saw his opportunity and landed with a small force at Ravenspur in Yorkshire at the end of June 1399. What follows reads almost as a fairy story as men of all ranks rallied to Bolingbroke’s flag, because they thought he had been treated badly, because they were sick of the king’s erratic and tyrannical behaviour, because they thought it was time for a change.

Also Richard had taken most of his household knights and the loyal members of his nobility with him to Ireland so there was no-one to organise opposition. Bolingbroke met with the powerful Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and persuaded him that he didn’t seek the crown, merely the rightful return of his patrimony and Percy decided to support him.

By the time Richard returned from Ireland, landing in Wales on 24 July, it was all over. Bolingbroke had conquered England without a battle. He was astounded to realise that all the leading men of the realm had gone over to Bolingbroke without a struggle. On 19 August Richard II surrendered to Henry at Flint Castle, promising to abdicate if his life were spared. Richard was taken back to London and imprisoned in the Tower of London on 1 September.

Deposing Richard Henry had by now realised he could become the next king, but exactly how to manage it presented problems. Henry wasn’t even the next in line to the throne: the most direct heir was Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, great-grandson of Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel. Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, had been Edward’s third son to survive to adulthood. The problem was solved by emphasising Henry’s descent in a direct male line, whereas March’s descent was through his grandmother, Philippa.

Psychodrama These final chapters of Jones’s history overshadow all the preceding adventures because what happened to Richard is so weird that the modern reader can’t help envisioning it as a play or movie. Henry and Richard were related. They had a common history having, for example, both survived the Peasants revolt back in 1381, and the rights and wrongs of the king’s policies vis-a-vis the House of Lancaster were both intimately personal and of national political importance. And then, how did Henry square the age’s religious-ideological belief in the divinity of the king, with the reality of leading a broken, tearful young man (Richard was just 32) to the Tower and locking him up while powerful barons decided just how to get rid of him and whether or not to execute him.

Parliament decides In the end, tellingly, Henry worked through parliament. The Archbishop of Canterbury read out to an assembly of lords and commons at Westminster Hall on Tuesday 30 September that Richard willingly renounced his crown. A few days later parliament met to discuss Richard’s fate and the Bishop of St Asaph read thirty-three articles of deposition that were unanimously accepted by lords and commons. On 1 October 1399, Richard II was formally deposed and on 13 October, the feast day of Edward the Confessor, Henry Bolingbroke was crowned king.

Starved to death Richard was imprisoned but, as you would expect, his continued existence proved the focal point of various plots to release and restore him to the throne. Bolingbroke realise he had to be liquidated and – although no definitive account survives – it is thought he was starved to death in Pontefract castle and was dead by Valentine’s day 1400. In order to dispel rumours that he was still alive, Henry had Richard’s emaciated body carried on open display from Pontefract and put on show in the old St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 February before burial in King’s Langley Priory on 6 March.

The Plantagenet Legacy

Jones has a ten-page epilogue where he trots through the legacies of the Plantagenet kings who reigned from 1154 to 1400, in the arts, economy, culture, in military terms especially vis-a-vis the endless wars with France, and in terms of the steady growth of parliamentary democracy. These are fine but a bit throwaway, analysis not being his thing, dramatic scenes, conflict, battles and the endless scheming of medieval politics being his strong point.

What came over to me from this 600-page book was the extraordinary violence of it all. Almost none of the 250 or so years in the book are not marked by conflict at home or abroad or both. England, like just about every ‘nation’ in Europe, seems to be involved in more or less non-stop conflict. War was a way of life for kings and princes, wars of conquest to expand their empires, or to maintain them, or to retrieve lost land, make up the dominant theme of this book.

And the extreme fragility of the political realm. This is a vast subject, covered by thousands of historians but it all tends to remind me of Karl Popper’s great insight into the nature of ‘democracy’. Popper said democracy is not about voting for this or that politician or political party on the basis of their manifesto (well, it is, a bit) – far more importantly, democracy exists so we can throw out politicians we are fed up with. It is mechanism to prevent tyranny by regularly getting rid of rulers.

That seems to me the nub of so many of the issues described in this big gripping book. The nobles couldn’t get rid of the king and the king couldn’t get rid of the nobles – at least not without commencing the machinations, the arraignments for treason and beheadings etc which tended to kick off cycles of violence which soon escalated out of control.

Now we have mechanisms to vote for our equivalent of local ‘nobles’ – MPs – and for our ruler – the Prime Minister – on a fairly regular basis, and all parties concerned can appeal to this validation or mandate for their behaviour which, if it is queried seriously enough, will prompt another election.

God knows modern ‘democratic’ societies still experience extremes of social tension and conflict – having lived through Mrs Thatcher’s premiership and its polarising Miners Strike and then the Poll Tax riots – but there are mechanisms for just about managing them by changing rulers and ruling parties: it was the widespread unpopularity of the poll tax which led to the overthrow of Mrs Thatcher and the election of her anodyne successor John Major.

So all this just makes me imagine what it must have been like living in a world where this kind of peaceful changeover of ruler, and of ruling class (which, in a sense, modern MPs are) is impossible. Both the king and his barons find themselves trapped for all eternity with each other. Their conflicts have nowhere to go. The king cannot resign after a military failure. The barons cannot quit public life in disgust, as modern politicians can.

Both were trapped in their positions, forced by notions of nobility and duty to act out roles which time and again led to armed conflict, to the collapse of dialogue and civil wars. One of the surprising aspects of Jones’s book is the number of occasions on which the nobility took up arms against their kings, not just overthrowing Edward II and Richard II, but taking up arms against King John and, repeatedly against Henry III, and even against tough King Edward I.

Jones’s book is a gripping, hugely readable account of this big chunk of English history, but it also prompts all kinds of thoughts about the nature of power and politics, about the nature of what is possible in politics has changed and evolved, which shed light on the political struggles which are going on right now.

The Wilton Diptych

The Wilton Diptych is thought to have been a portable altarpiece made for the private devotion of King Richard II by an artist now unknown. On the left Richard is kneeling in the foreground and being presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and a company of eleven angels on the right. Nearest to Richard is his patron saint John the Baptist, to the left are Saint Edward the Confessor and Saint Edmund, earlier English kings who had come, by Richard’s time, to be venerated as saints.

The Wilton Diptych, artist unknown, so-called because it was discovered in Wilton House

This wonderful work can be seen FOR FREE in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London.

Other medieval reviews

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)

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by Simon on June 29, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Crusades, European History, History, Middle Ages, War

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Posted by Simon on June 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/the-plantagenets-2-dan-jones/

Quentin Blake: From the Studio @ the House of Illustration

Sir Quentin Blake is arguably the UK’s most famous book illustrator, as well as a fine artist, designer and writer in his own right. He was a leading spirit behind the establishment of the House of Illustration, the only gallery in the UK devoted entirely to the work of illustrators, which opened in 2014, and is housed in a restored Victorian building spitting distance from King’s Cross station.

The House has three galleries. In the main one (three rooms and a small video room) at the moment is a retrospective of work by cartoonist and graphic novelist Posy Simmonds. In the second gallery (one biggish room) is an exhibition of works by the Taiwanese artist YiMiao Shih. In between these two is a really small, L-shaped room. This is the permanent Quentin Blake gallery, tribute to the nation’s most popular illustrator and a pay-off we presume for leading the campaign to set up the gallery.

The Quentin Blake gallery hosts a changing display of works by the great man on different themes, for example last Valentine’s Day it featured a set of twenty or so very funny cartoons on the theme of love and cupid’s arrow.

The current exhibition is titled ‘From the studio’ which allows Blake to tell us a little about his working practices. He tells us that for the past forty years most of his works have been produced in a room overlooking a tree-lined London square. He stands with his back to the French windows and balcony, pen in hand. The room contains four ‘plan chests’ and two tables and a litter of drawings.

The exhibition allows him to share with us some works in progress, first drafts of illustrations which he is currently working on.

Sheffield Children’s Hospital

Sheffield Children’s Hospital opened a new wing opened last year, containing has four wards which, alongside beds also offers therapy and treatment rooms, a patient dining room, a parents’ relaxation room, a social room for teenagers, and a ‘play tower’ installation, for younger children.

Blake was commissioned to create artworks for the walls of corridors in three of the wing’s wards, and as larger-scale murals in communal areas. The designs were drawn on paper, then scanned, enlarged and printed in large scale onto washable wall coverings.

Mural by Quentin Blake at Sheffield Children’s Hospital

The King of the Golden River

In 1841 the critic John Ruskin published this children’s story as a parable about the impact of human actions on the environment. This year the book was republished by Thames and Hudson with illustrations by Blake. Blake tells us that he went about illustrating it ‘the old-fashioned way’, cutting up the text to stick it into position, then drawing in rough illustrations around it.

From The King of the Golden River © Quentin Blake

Moonlight travellers

Blake’s series of paintings of people travelling through bleak moonlit landscapes began as a personal project in 2017, as an experiment in pure imagination. Later this year they will be published alongside a ‘response’ by author Will Self. He is quoted as saying ‘made them up as I went along, almost like a performance’.

Moonlight Travellers © Quentin Blake

Mouse on a Tricycle

This wordless book opens with a tiny picture of a mouse on a tricycle. It imagines the public’s response to the fact of a cycling rodent. Some cheer it on, some are outraged, some are scared, some deliver hectoring sermons. I loved this picture. It says so much about human nature.

Mouse on a Tricycle © Quentin Blake

It is incredible how just a handful of drawings and paintings can fill your heart with happiness and delight!

Reviews of other House of Illustration exhibitions

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by Simon on June 23, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, illustration

Posted by Simon on June 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/23/quentin-blake-from-the-studio-house-of-illustration/

Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds (2018)

Cassandra Darke is 71 years old, which is an immediate change and relief from the protagonists of Posy Simmonds’s two previous graphic novels, Gemma Bovery and Tamara Darke, who were both nubile, lithe, sexy, twenty-something, young women whose lives revolved around a series of romantic ‘liaisons’.

By complete contrast, right from the start of this book we are in the company of, and listening to the narrating voice of, plump and bustling, grumpy old misanthrope Cassandrara who is more than usually bad-tempered because it is Christmas-time and we know from her previous cartoon strip that Posy Simmonds particularly dislikes Christmas, as does her Scrooge-like creation.

However, if the reader thinks they’ve escaped from ‘Simmonds World’, a smug, self-centred world of upper-middle-class, white London professionals, where all the women are obsessed by men and define themselves by their sexual relations (or lack of) with men – they would be wrong.

The character of Cassandra is great – she doesn’t give a stuff about anything, swears freely and has a bad word for everyone, but, barely had I started enjoying her rude obnoxious character than – like all Simmonds’s women – she began to define herself, and her life and career, in terms of men, starting with her husband, Freddie.

Thus it was forty years earlier that Freddie and Cassandra set up a swish art gallery together. However, some time later Freddie ran off with Cassandra’s half-sister, Margot, and the pair got divorced. Cassandra was able to carry on earning a living by dealing art from home, and from writing. Then, decades later, Cassandra bumped into Freddie at an art fair and he told her he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and asked if she like to take over the old gallery from him. She agreed to.

Anyway, this is all background to the issue which dominates the opening pages, which is that Cassandra has been caught dealing fake copies of valuable sculptures. She has charged a rich American collector £400,000 for an illegal copy of a limited edition modern piece of sculpture and he has found this out and sent her a letter threatening to take her to court.

Thus the book opens on a note of unease as Cassandra, although in posh Burlington Arcade surrounded by happy Christmas shoppers, is show trying to avoid the widow of the sculptor in question, and delays going back to the gallery, strongly suspecting that bad news is waiting for her. As it is.

In a sequence which is now shown but briefly referred to, Cassandra is duly tried and convicted of fraud, her case being reported in sundry newspapers. She might well have gone to prison but – being posh – is let off by the (woman) judge with a hefty fine and told to do community service.

Nonetheless, she still has to sell off her private art collection and the house in Brittany (I know: imagine the heartbreak of having to sell your house in Brittany!) to pay the fine.

Here is the first page of the book, establishing Cassandra’s look and character, and the central London setting of most of the story, and straightaway the sense that something is wrong. Cassandra is trying to avoid Jane McMullen, wife of the sculptor whose work she has fraudulently sold, and who – it turns out – is looking for her in order to deliver the letter which accuses her of dealing in fakes.

First page showing Cassandra emerging from Burlington Arcade and spotting an old acquaintance she wants to avoid © Posy Simmonds

December 2017

The accusations, her arrest, and trial and conviction and sentence are all dealt with very quickly, and the narrative jumps to a year later, December 2017, as Cassandra is nearing the end of her community service.

We now find Cassandra without work but still living in her nice house in ‘Osmington Square, SW3’ i.e. Chelsea, nowadays populated by rich Chinese and Russian billionaires and their wives and nannies.

Osmington Square, where Cassandra lives, mostly empty apart from a few Russian or Chinese nannies and their charges © Posy Simmonds

Cassandra gets home to find an invitation to Freddie’s memorial service – the Alzheimer’s has finally killed him. She takes a taxi to the service and hides up in the gallery of the Mayfair church, making acerbic comments about all the other attendees, including her half-sister Margot (who Freddie ran off with all those years ago) and Margot and Freddie’s grown-up daughter, Nicki, who Cassandra cheerfully refers to as a ‘shit’.

Then Cassandra sneaks out and walks through the dark Christmas London streets, morbidly reflecting on Freddie’s sad decline into senility, thinking how she would prefer to commit suicide than end up like that, and then weighing the different methods of killing yourself. Cheerful stuff!

Cassandra ponders different ways to kill herself © Posy Simmonds

Once home, Cassandra finds gravel in her kitchen which looks like it must have come from her small back garden, and at first panics and thinks someone has broken in. But she discovers nothing has been stolen, calms down, and then decides it must be Freddie and Margot’s grown-up daughter Nicki, who she let stay in the downstairs flat the previous year, and for some reason has come into the main house.

Cassandra goes down to the basement flat to explore, and finds some dirty clothes and then, rummaging in the linen basket – finds A GUN, a pistol! Christ!

A gun and a peculiar pink glove with kind of raised blotches on it, and a little make-up bag, all bundled up in dirty linen and stuffed at the bottom of the bin! What is Nicki involved in?

Cassandra goes back to the house and sits obsessively running through all the other people who have had access to the flat, for example the two different cleaners she’s used, any other friends or relations… but keeps coming back to Nicki, bloody Nicki. A GUN! What the hell is she doing leaving a GUN in her flat?

The events of 2016

In order to discover how we got here the narrative undergoes a big flashback, going back in time a year to the middle of 2016. It was then that Nicki Boult, Freddie and Margot’s daughter, turned up out of the blue at Cassandra’s gallery, saying that she was broke, had lost her studio in Deptford and her share of a flat, and asking Cassandra if she can stay?

After initially saying No, Cassandra relents and says Nicki can stay in the basement flat providing she earns her keep by doing regular chores for Cassandra.

Nicki Boult arrives, asking Cassandra for a job or a place to stay © Posy Simmonds

(As a side note, Cassandra tells us about Nicki’s art, which is a kind of performance art. Nicki goes to galleries and stands in front of paintings of women being harassed, attacked or raped, copies their poses or has written on her body or clothes the message RAPE IS NOT ART and has a friend video it all. Radical, eh? As Cassandra sourly points out: ‘And you think that people can’t work that out for themselves?’)

Anyway, Nicki moves in and is soon helping Cassandra with all sorts of chores from walking her repellent little pug, Corker, to helping with prints and such. We see Cassandra going about her usual day, being rude to everyone she can – telling kids cycling on the pavement to get off, calling a jogger a ‘prancing ponce’, insisting a woman pick up the poo her dog has just deposited, and so on. She’s a great stroppy old woman.

Cassandra being fabulously rude to everyday people in the street (French translation) © Posy Simmonds

So the pair’s daily routine is established and settled by the time of the first big important sequence in the plot, which is the hen party of Nicki’s friend, Mia. Nicki doesn’t really want to go, not least because Mia’s booked a burlesque session to kick-start the evening, but reluctantly she dresses up as a cowgirl, wearing kinky boots, a pink tutu, a pink bra and pink cowboy hat. She looks like a strippagram.

She is, in fact, another one of Posy Simmonds’s nubile, leggy, twenty-something, single women who look so sexy in a bra and panties (cf all the pics of Gemma Bovery stripped naked or in black stockings and suspenders.)

Nicki at Mia’s hen night, in her pink tutu and bra, and drinking too much © Posy Simmonds

Nicki goes to the party but is ill at ease and drinks too much. The girls play a game of Dare and Nicki’s dare is to get a phone number off a complete stranger, so she is egged on to go up to the bar and approach a rough but handsome dude for his number. Drunkenly, Nicki gives him Cassandra’s name and phone number, but when it’s his turn to give his, as the dare demands, the guy refuses. He and his mates are moving on so he asks if she wants to come? But Nicki realises she’s drunk too much, is going to be sick, and stumbles downstairs to the loo.

Suddenly the stubbly guy from the bar appears behind her, puts his hand over her mouth and pushes her into a side room, presumably intending to rape her. Nicki bites the hand over her mouth drawing blood. The guy slaps her and grabs her again but she reaches down and back to grab his balls and squeezes. The guy loses his hold and staggers backwards, allowing Nicki to escape into the girls toilet. Here she waits and waits until the coast is clear, stumbles back upstairs to her friends, half explains what happened, wraps her coat around her, they’ve called an Uber for her. But!! The guy and his mates are still hanging round outside, so she dodges into an alleyway.

Here Nicki is terrified to discover another young man lurking in the shadows (men! they’re everywhere!) but this one is friendly and guesses she’s hiding from the three bad guys. He tells her when they’ve gone and she stumbles back into the street, orders another Uber, staggers out of it up to Cassandra’s front door because she realises she’s lost her keys… incoherent.. Cassandra looks at the state she’s in with disgust.

Next morning Cassandra is going about her business when she is surprised to get a text on her phone: ‘Big mistake Cassandra!! Break yr fucking legs thats a promise cunt’. It’s from the would-be rapist – remember, Nicki gave him Cassandra’s name and phone number. Amusingly, Cassandra thinks this txt might be from a rival art collector and sends a rude text back, only to receive another: ‘ur dead meat whore’.

Much puzzled, Cassandra returns from a little walk to find a young man on her doorstep, very polite, looking for ‘the young lady’. Cassandra guesses he means Nicki and explains that Nicki lives in the basement flat.

Cassandra gets on with her day. It’s a Sunday and since her ‘lady who does’, Elsa, doesn’t come at the weekend, Cassandra has to fix her own lunch (fix her own lunch! I know, how dreadful! Personally, I am continually brought up dead by the little details in all Posy Simmonds’s graphic novels which indicate just how posh and privileged her character are: not actual aristocracy, just used to a certain level of culture and education and savoir vivre – fine food, fine wine, fine art, fine writing.)

Cassandra phones the rival art dealer and quickly discovers it’s not him sending the texts. In fact, while they’re talking, another abusive txt arrives, plus a photo of whoever it is’s dick. Cassandra is too mature to be offended, just startled and puzzled.

Later Nicki surfaces. She has been for a walk and a chat with that bloke she met briefly in the alleyway, now we learn he’s called Billy. How did he find her? Last night, drunk, she dropped her keys in the alley, which had her address on them. Now Billy tells us more about the would-be rapist and txt abuser. He’s Dean Hart, a nasty piece of work. Billy gives her a full profile: he and Deano grew up together, they used to hang out and do graffiti together, then Deano went a bit mental, took to snorting coke and gambling, supported by his family who are East End crooks.

Later, we see Billy on his way home, back to his mum’s flat in a tower block. He is waylaid by some of Deano’s sidekicks who tell him Deano wants to see him. (This and the subsequent conversation Billy has with his plump, working class mum are a welcome change from the bourgeois writer-and-art-dealer class Simmonds usually deals with.) Billy’s mum said someone called round asking for him, a Dean something. Billy says, ‘Next time tell him I don’t live here any more, I’ve moved out.’ He packs his things and leaves, walking away from the East End council flats…

Simmonds and her young women: love love love is still on Nicki’s mind. It is, after all, weeks since Nicki’s last relationship, weeks, people! So she obviously needs a new man in her life asap. All Simmonds’s heroines can’t function without a man (Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and now Nicki). Thus she goes out for a drink with Billy, their eyes meet, she wonders whether he fancies her? Ooh-er, it’s so exciting! They leave the pub, snog, walk, then run back to the basement flat for a shag.

Trouble is, Billy’s in a fix. Not only has he not gone to meet Deano as his minders told him to – he’s got something that belongs to Deano – a GUN!

Down in the basement, after the shag, Billy tells her more. A while ago Deano bumped into him in some pub and persuaded him to go with his minder – his uncle ironically nicknamed ‘Nanny’ – to Newbury races. They gambled and made money, get bored, drive home in gathering mist, get lost looking for some country pub and pick up a girl hitch-hiker.

Billy falls asleep, wakes up as they arrive back in London, turning into Billy’s family’s scrap metal yard. Deano gets out with the girl and heads into the house, ignoring Billy, telling Nanny to bring his fags and the tripod. (Tripod? Maybe to film him and the girl having sex.) Billy is rooting around for the fags when he finds some odd kind of pink glove, and a little make-up bag, and a jacket, heavy, with something bulky in it. It’s A GUN! What the…?

Billy suddenly wonders what he’s doing hanging round with these people and… here’s the crux and the slightly implausible thing about the entire plot — he pockets the gun and the glove and the make-up bag. Nanny doesn’t notice, he’s busy in the boot getting the tripod out, now he locks the car with a remote and walks off across the yard ignoring Billy and Billy thinks… screw it! and runs off in the other direction. With the gun and the glove and the make-up bag.

Now he’s on the run from Deano and his mob, with a gun of theirs. He tells Nicki all this, says he’s moved out of his mum’s place, is kipping on a mate’s floor. And so Nicki asks him to move into the basement flat.

Back to Cassandra’s narration. Cassandra spends the day visiting three old ‘friends’ who might possibly be behind the mystery texts, but they are all quite frank and friendly, it’s obviously none of them. Mystery.

Nicki explains her next art project, making objects out of the cardboard boxes the homeless sleep in on the streets of London. Nicki on the phone describing how wonderful Billy is to a friend. Then Nicki has a call with Billy while he’s at work on set. Via basic electrics and wiring he’s got himself a career as an electrician on TV productions.

Cassandra hosts a dinner for gay Teddy Wood and his partner Yves – wonderful food and wine ruined by the very loud love-making of Nicki and Billy downstairs. Amusing pictures of a furry of bodies and limbs – Cassandra envisions two pigs rutting and is furious the evening is spoiled.

Next day, walking in the square, Billy admits to Nicki that he lied about his family situation. In fact he was once married and has a son, Jack. Nicki berates him for lying, and asks if he’s telling the truth now? Of course, he smiles at her. OK, she says.

Cassandra books her regular Christmas trip to a five star hotel in Biarritz – she usually loves the bracing winds and isolation, but this time has bad dreams, cuts the trip short and returns to London.

Cassandra watching Billy and Nicki snogging in the park – and then on holiday in out-of-season Biarritz © Posy Simmonds

Arriving home in Osmington Square earlier than anticipated, Cassandra is horrified to find her house festooned in fairy lights and illuminated Father Christmases and a crowd gathered outside. A friend of Nicki’s is collecting donations in a bucket because they are putting on a show in support of the homeless and the show is… Nicki doing a striptease in the window! At the show’s climax Nicki removes the big feathery fans to reveal her bare breasts each adorned with a shiny star over the nipple! Posy Simmonds does love drawing naked foxy babes.

Cassandra doing a burlesque strip tease in the window of Cassandra’s house to raise money for the homeless © Posy Simmonds

Furious, Cassandra storms inside, turns off the power and the lights and gives Cassandra a good talking to, accusing her of caring bugger-all for the homeless but putting on the show to promote herself, her brand, on social media.

She also makes the fairly obvious point that how can doing a strip-tease be considered an act of the ‘feminism’ that Nicki is always going on about? Surely she is ‘playing out male fantasies’, ‘objectifying the female body’ and all the other things she claims to be vehemently against?

Anyway. Cassandra gives her till Saturday to clear out.

December 20 17.15 One of Deano’s associates, Pete, tracks down Billy’s ex, Dee, and tells her that Billy won a packet on a long-term bet on the horses, and he and Deano want to give him his winnings. Naively, Dee tells Pete that Billy said something about a party in a pub in Soho tomorrow.

December 21 20.15 Pete waits at the Jutland pub, in phone contact with Nanny in a waiting Range Rover. He spots Billy, then follows him through the West End to catch a bus west, phoning his movements through to Nanny who follows.

Meanwhile, this is the same December 21st that the novel opened with, the one where Cassandra is in Burlington Arcade, avoiding Jane McMullen because she knows she is going to hand her a letter telling her her fraud has been discovered and her wronged client is going to sue.

Now, having arrived late at the gallery and been handed the letter and reading it and realising her world is about to come tumbling down, Cassandra arrives back at her house same time as Nicki, disgruntled and worried. She, absent-mindedly asks Nicki to take her ugly little pug Corker to ‘do his thing’ in the square.

Nicki does so but at that moment her mum (Margot, Cassandra’s step-sister who stole her husband Freddie off her 40 years ago) rings on her mobile, to tell her the news about Cassandra i.e that she’s been caught out in her fraudulent dealings. Distracted, Nicki lets the little dog, Corker, wander off.

Meanwhile, Billy has got off the bus from the West End and walks through the snow and darkness towards Osmington Square, followed by Pete, who is giving directions to Nanny who is following in the Range Rover. They pull up in the square and the next thing Billy knows he’s confronted by Pete and Nanny, who punches him in the face, knocks him down and kicks him in the ribs. The dog barks so Pete kicks it in the head. The thugs wander off as Nicki comes running up. She calls an ambulance. She realises Corker is dead.

Next day we see events from Cassandra’s point of view. Nicki’s mother (Margot) turns up to collect Nicki and drive her to their home in the country. With Billy in hospital, Nicki had gone through his rucksack and found the gun and a weird pink glove. She wraps it all up in an old sheet and shoves it in the bathroom bin of the basement flat and gets in the car with her mum. On the drive west she finds herself telling her mum about Billy and his, er, ‘involvements’, triggering a lecture about getting mixed up with the criminal classes.

December 2017

So this brings us back to where we started – to a full year later, and to Christmas 2017 (all the previous section happened in the run-up to Christmas 2016). (Does that mean the gun and the glove have lain hidden in the downstairs flat for a whole year? I am slight confused by this or, if I’ve understood it correctly, slightly incredulous.)

So here we are right back at the scene from near the start of the book where Cassandra has just found the gun and glove and make-up bag in Nicki’s bin and is wondering how the hell it got there. On impulse – and a bit drunk from drinking most of a bottle of claret – Cassandra brings the gun and glove and the clip of bullets up from Nicki’s flat, handles it drunkenly, before stashing it in her own washing machine.

Next day (the day after Freddie’s memorial service which we saw at the start of the book) Cassandra phones Margot, Freddie’s widow, to find out where Nicki is so she can question her. She finds out that Nicki is now living in a shared house in Tooting and working at a swanky art dealers in Dover Street. Cassandra goes to the dealers and confronts Nicki about the gun. Nicki bombards her with explanations, about it being Billy’s, well, not Billy’s it really belongs to Deano who she’s never met, and Billy took it and she was etc etc. Cassandra becomes very confused and threatens to call the police. Nicki say that’s rich, coming from a convicted fraudster.

Cassandra turns away in fury. Too angry to catch a bus home, she pads the streets of London at Christmas-time – thus allowing Simmonds to give vent to one of the most consistent of her themes – something which appears throughout the Posy comic strips – a really jaundiced venomous hatred of Christmas. ‘I pad past Christmas windows, their sterile perfection contrasting with the scrum of shoppers inside, racking up debt, sharing their seasonal bugs – norovirus, coughs, colds, flu.’

Illustration from Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds © Posy Simmonds

Back home in bed, Cassandra has a nightmare in which she is back in court and the judge accuses her of pandering to rich art collectors, price fixing, knowingly taken part in the laundering of money by criminals until the judge finds her… ‘a waste of space’. Reflecting that maybe her whole life has been a waste.

Cut to Billy at MacDonalds with his mum and son Jack. He’s surfing through the news on his phone, as you do, when he stumbles across a news item about a woman’s remains recently found in a wood, with a quilted coat and a distinctive pink glove! Same as the one he took from the car! Same as the one belonging to that hitch-hiker! God, is the body hers?

Billy is stunned. He immediately leaps to the conclusion that Deano and his lot must have murdered and dumped the hitch-hiker.

He texts Nicki and they meet on the Embankment. Now it is that we learn for the first time that, after he got beaten up and hospitalised, it was Billy who suggested they break off the relationship. If it was a relationship. As usual for a Simmonds heroine, Nicki is confused about her emotions and her feelings etc.

Sometimes Nicki wondered if all that stuff hadn’t happened, would she and Billy still be an item?They’d never examined their relationship at the time, had left their feelings for each other unspoken. It wasn’t just sex, there were feelings, Nicki knew. Quite strong feelings. (p.76)

(Maybe this is what helps the book feel like ‘chick lit’ – the heroine’s endless agonising about whether she has feelings and what kind of feelings and whether he shares her feelings and, you know, they need to talk about their feelings and their relationship, we need to talk, I need to talk, are we an item, do you have feelings, is this just about sex or about something more…? Repeat ad infinitum without ever getting anywhere, as the Bridget Jones’ column and books and movies amply demonstrate.)

Back to the plot: Now, at their rendezvous on the Embankment, Billy tells Nicki that Nanny and Pete have been keeping tabs on him, sending him photos of places he’s been to. They’ve turned over his flat twice and demanded to know where the gun is. But he just keeps lying and saying he never took it. (I find it a little hard to believe this has been going on for a year: if I was them I am sure I could hurt him until he admitted nicking the gun and… simply handed it back over. Wouldn’t that be the simple thing to do?)

Like a good middle-class young lady, Nicki tells him he should go to the police. Like the working class boy he is, Billy says no, it’ll be Deano and Nanny’s word against his, and whatever happens, sooner or later they’d get their revenge.

Cut back to Cassandra and some tiresome feminism is injected into the story. She is sitting at home at Christmas feeling sorry for herself, feeling that the world finds her a ‘failure as a woman’ because she hasn’t lived as ‘a woman ought to live’ i.e. got married, had children, grandchildren. I’ve news for her: the world doesn’t give a toss what she does with her life. Only in her head does this self-condemning monologue grumble on. Meanwhile she has led a pampered, privileged life most of us could only fantasise about: she’s had more than enough money, a good education, choice, freedom, travel, comfort, art, opera, theatre, films, books… Ah yes, but ‘society’ (whatever that is) considers her ‘a failure as a woman’ (whatever that means). This is what my daughter (the 17-year-old feminist) calls ‘white feminism’ i.e. the self-centred grumbling of privileged, white, middle-class women. Get over yourself.

There’s a knock at the door and Cassandra opens it to find Nicki with Billy. Nicki admits the truth, about giving Deano Cassandra’s phone number at the hen night (thus explaining Deano as the source of the violent threats and the dick pic), explains how Billy is involved, swears he fled the scene with the gun, brought it with him in his backpack when he moved in with Nicki (which explains the existence of the gun), how they’ve come to the decision to tell the police, but they need the gun. Where is it?

Furious, Cassandra kicks them out, and then – Billy having told her that the body and suspected murder were reported on ‘Crimefile’ – she looks up and watches it on the BBC iPlayer. Through her eyes we watch as the programme interviews the couple out walking their dog who found the corpse.

Cassandra finds herself wondering who the poor woman was. She gets out the gun and glove and the little make-up bag from the washing machine where she’d stashed it. Rummaging through it she comes upon a pack of paracetamol with the label of a pharmacy still attached. She looks it up and discovers this pharmacy is way out East, so Cassandra catches the tube out there to go and investigate.

Cassandra on the tube © Posy Simmonds

Cassandra wanders round the scuzzy district of Lowbridge Road looking for the pharmacy. The Asian couple who run it can’t remember any particular young woman buying it (and, anyway, wasn’t it bought over a year ago?) and neither can any of the other shopkeepers she tries, though she does pick up the knowledge that some of the houses in the area are packed with sex workers, foreign mostly.

Cassandra asks the pharmacy in Lowbridge Road whether they remember who bought the bottle of paracatemol © Posy Simmonds

In fact ill luck befalls her and Cassandra manages to lose her wallet, containing her cash and bank cards. Thus she experiences a whole 90 minutes of feeling poor and abandoned. It starts to rain. She begins to panic. No Oyster card, no money for a taxi. Finally she realises she can pawn her gold necklace, and makes enough money from it to buy a tube fare back to Knightsbridge, where she is once again safely among her people.

Back in her house, Cassandra gets the gun and glove out and ponders her next move. Thinking about the slimeball who sent her those vitriolic texts, she takes a photo of the gun and texts it back to him, a year after the original exchange: ‘Hi, remember me? Keeping your gun safe. And the left hand glove too. Vital evidence I’d say. What’s it worth to you, Deano? You tell me. Cassandra’

Cut to the office of Deano’s scrap metal yard where we learn that i) prolonged taking of drugs has half-unhinged Deano and ii) when the text arrives, it prompts another outpouring of regret, with Deano saying he never meant to kill that girl.

Soon afterwards, Deano goes for a drink and (incredibly fortuitously) sees Billy. Deano follows Billy to a bar where he’s meeting Nicki. Nicki tells Billy what Cassandra’s done i.e. only gone and texted a photo of the bloody gun to Deano, the silly so-and-so. Billy says he’ll go mental! Outside, Deano sees Billy and Nicki smooching and recognises her from that nightclub a year earlier, the infamous hen party evening when Nicki told him her name was Cassandra, and then bit him and squashed his balls.

When Nicki and Billy part, Deano follows Nicki down into the Tube, gets out at Knightsbridge stop with her, follows her along into Osmington Square. Simmonds does that thing where she uses just pictures, with no words, to rack up the tension, in this instance to portray the nagging anxiety of a woman walking on her own in the dark.

Now Deano makes his move, accosting Nicki in the street brandishing a knife, demands the gun, demands to know where she lives. Nicki starts screaming HELP! At that moment, Cassandra, who – as we have seen – had been playing with the gun, emerges from her front door holding it like an American cop, pointing at Deano.

Momentarily confused, Deano loosens his grip on Nicki who runs off. Deano recovers his nerve and crosses the road to Cassandra, who says, ‘Drop it, I’ll shot’, but he knows she won’t. Instead she throws it over the railings into the basement area, but Deano attacks her anyway and, after a tussle, stabs her in the stomach. ‘Stupid arse… what have you done?’ she gasps as she clutches the wound and falls to the pavement. Deano panics and flees. Nicki calls an ambulance and gives a statement to the police.

A wordless page follows which shows Cassandra in bed in hospital, sleeping, on a drip. Waking and talking to the police. Back to sleep. And then:

January Cassandra recovers and winds up the story, tying up all the loose ends.

She’s come to stay with her half-sister Margot in the country (a very idealised super-rural country, a country of postcards very like the perfect countryside around Stonefield in Tamar Drewe). She’s learned not to despise Margot so much, realising she has a lot in common with Margot and that what Margot calls ‘healing’ and ‘closure’ are actually quite enjoyable.

Dean Hart was arrested and confessed to the stabbing which, along with the bloody knife and the photos Nicki took of the fight, convicted him. He also confessed to strangling the girl during sex play a year before. Nanny and Pete were also arrested.

Best of all, Cassandra’s enquiries about the dead girl were followed up by the police who went to Lowbridge Road and on to a squalid flat inhabited by five other girls. Her name was Anca Radu, she was 23, grew up in a Romanian orphanage, was groomed and trafficked to the UK as a prostitute, escaped from the flat, hitched a lift, but was dropped in the middle of nowhere, which is where she had the bad luck to be picked up by Deano, taken to London and then killed, accidentally or not.

Lastly, in hospital the doctors discovered that Cassandra has pancreatic cancer. Given the gloomy thread running throughout the book in which Cassandra periodically worried about becoming senile like her poor husband, and pondered different ways of killing herself to avoid that fate, the reader understands when Cassandra says this diagnosis is a perfect solution. It comes as no surprise that she has chosen not to receive treatment.

She is selling the house in Osmington Square and will give the proceeds to charities, including refuges for women.

Thoughts

Issues

One of the pleasures of the book is the way that various contemporary ‘issues’ familiar to Londoners are dramatised via the characters.

Off the top of my head I remember the several places where Nicki and Cassandra discuss or argue about the purpose and merits of ‘feminist’ art.

Similarly, the ‘issue’ of homelessness is raised via Nicki’s burlesque strip tease fund raiser, but also in the paired moments when Cassandra refuses to give change to a beggar (at the start) and does (after herself being briefly moneyless in the East End).

And the entire plot rotates, to some extent, about sex trafficking from eastern Europe. Other thoughts – about art and class are snagged, or rise briefly to the surface of situations or conversations then disappear again. Taken together, these issues, large or trivial, and other references (to Uber taxis) make the book feel surprisingly contemporary. Gives the reader the simple pleasure of recognition, of recognising the rather mundane world around us transformed into art, well, comic strip cartoons.

White collar versus gangland crime

Implicit in the whole story is the contrast between Cassandra and her smart, Mayfair form of white-collar crime, and the much more brutal, unhinged crime of Deano and his family out in the East End. Two wrongs, two types of wrong, and prompts broader comparisons between life in Chelsea and life out East in the endless tower blocks of east London.

Cassandra’s redemption

Obviously the narrative arc as a whole depicts Cassandra’s ‘redemption i.e. by doing one brave act she stops being such a grumpy so-and-so and sheds her grumpy, sourpuss persona. No more fretting about how ‘society’ sees her. No more dismissing Margot who, at the start of the book, she had found unbearably pompous and touchy-feelie. Instead, acceptance of her own mortality, acceptance of emotions and emotional intelligence.

It is a timeless stereotype that urban characters have to go to the countryside to be ‘complete’, to achieve ‘authenticity’.

Most of all, maybe, it wasn’t the act of bravery – pointing the gun at Deano and saving Nicki so much as the sympathy Cassandra showed for the once-unnamed and now identified person of the murdered woman. It was discovering her identity more than anything that happens to wretched Deano, which matters most. Giving her a name, an identity, and so some respect.

Loose ends and problems

But many things are left unresolved and unredeemed. Cassandra is still a convicted criminal. We have no sense whether Billy and Nicki are going to live happily ever after, or even whether Deano will go to prison. Presumably…

In terms of plot there is a glaring hole which is the improbability of Billy nicking Deano’s gun in the first place. Even he can’t explain why he did it and it is left to the reader to conclude that he did it because otherwise there would be no story.

And the flashback structure – which worked so well in Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe – left me a bit confused. The mapping of two Christmases onto each other, the year long gap, forced me to go back and reread bits to understand the precise sequence of events. And also the way Billy split up with Nicki after he’d been hospitalised wasn’t told at the time, but reported a year later, in retrospect, so it took me a moment to fit that into the timeline.

Art

The use of colour makes for a deep and rewarding visual experience. But to be honest, although some pictures seemed to me to perfectly convey the intended atmosphere – especially lots of the scenery, of London or the countryside – there is an obstinate ungainliness or scrappiness about almost all of the frames which nagged at me, which held me back from going over the top and declaring it a masterpiece etc.

For example, here is Cassandra in a shop near Burlington Arcade, presumably Fortnum and Masons. The top picture of her mooching across a snowy road with her snub nose, pince-nez, slice of lipstick along her thin lips, and characteristic trapper’s fur hat, are all immediately grabby and evocative.

But in the pic below it, look at the girl standing on the right. She just feels to me anatomically incorrect and, stylistically, a throwback to the Posy strip of the 1980s. If Cassandra is fully imagined and drawn, many of the peripheral characters feel less so.

Cassandra in Fortnum and Masons © Posy Simmonds

Here is Cassandra arriving late at her gallery to find the gallery assistant furious that she’s been delayed getting away and organising her own Christmas. Look at the assistant’s face. It is oddly unstable, in the first picture she is characterised by enormous shark’s teeth and big angry eyes – throughout the sequence she has lizard eyes i.e. not with a circular human black pupil, but with vertical slits of pupils. But then in the right-hand picture she suddenly has much softer features and just dots for eyes, a reversion to the Posy strip style, which suddenly makes her seem much less offensive, much less real. In the bottom row second from the left, something odd has happened to her left eye. It’s an example of the way many of the faces in Simmonds are unstable and undergo sometimes striking variations.

Cassandra and her gallery assistant © Posy Simmonds

I know I’m nit-picking but you will read articles claiming Simmonds is the pre-eminent graphic novelist in Britain and I’m not entirely sure. Although I liked the scenery and many of the settings, I still didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy her depiction of faces which too often seemed odd, inconsistent and sometimes positively cack-handed.

Still, that reservation apart, it’s a very enjoyable graphic novel and a very skillful weaving of so many contemporary ‘issues’ into what is, in the end, an extended cartoon strip. And the real point is Cassandra’s journey to redemption, to a form of happiness and closure. If you focus on that, on the skill with which she imagines, describes and draws the central figure – then nitpicking about details tends to fade away.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 20, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, cartoon, graphic novel

Posted by Simon on June 20, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/cassandra-darke-posy-simmonds/

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds (2005)

Tamara Drewe was a weekly comic strip serial by Posy Simmonds, which ran for 13 months in The Guardian newspaper from 24 September 2005. At the end of the run it was published as a stand-alone graphic novel in November 2007.

The strip is based on a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth century novel Far from the Madding Crowd, in that it focuses on a very attractive young woman who is pursued by three very different lovers – Nick Hardiman the successful novelist, Andy Cobb the local handyman, and Ben Sergeant the former rock star.

There’s not much subtlety about the reference since the frontispiece to the entire book features an ad torn from a fictional newspaper’s small ads column advertising the writers’ retreat at the centre of the novel, and given a big bold capitalised title – FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

In its deep structure Tamara is not that different from its predecessor, Gemma Bovery, which was also about a very attractive, sexy young woman and her three lovers (Patrick the restaurant critic, Charlie the furniture restorer and Hervé the aristocratic law student).

Two books in a row about impossibly foxy babes who surround themselves with male lovers. Hmmm.

The picture on the front cover of Tamara immediately conveys the stereotypical babeliciousness of the central figure – a tall, leggy, lithe, sexy fox, with massive come-hither eyes and pert red lips, a babe who likes to flirt with all the men in range, gives men the eye, likes to draw attention by dressing provocatively (in shorts so tight the other women characters comment on them), who likes being eyed and ogled in shops and to walk arm-in-arm with a rock star down the local high street, drawing everyone’s eyes.

Here’s the impression she makes on American novelist and critic Glen Larson:

Of course I fall in love with Tamara, along with everyone else… As she moves round the gathering I watch people succumb. It’s as if she’s picking us off one by one, each of us receiving the full force of her radiance, her smile, her warmth, her interest, all of it seemingly genuine and unforced. She’s Princess Charming…

And here is Tamara’s first appearance as she wanders into a gaggle of writers at a writers’ retreat in the country, instantly drawing all eyes. She is wearing the crotch-displaying shorts which – in case we hadn’t noticed them ourselves – Nick the writer will later fantasise about, and his long-suffering wife, Beth, will disapprove of, at length.

Tamara makes an entrance, joining the group of writers enjoying a pre-dinner drink

The setting

The story is set in Stonefield, a writer’s retreat run by Beth and Nicholas Hardiman, where the American novelist Glen Larson is staying to find inspiration for his latest novel. All the gardening and maintenance around Stonefield is done by Andy Cobb.

Andy’s family used to own a nearby farm, Winnards Farmhouse, but his Dad ran into financial difficulties, as small dairy farmers will, and it was sold to the Drewe family. They had two posh daughters, now grown up, one is a successful lawyer (natch), while the younger, Tamara, has gone to London and become a fashionable gossip columnist.

Tamara makes her first appearance when she sets off the burglar alarm at her family farm by accident and tough, man-of-the-soil Andy goes to investigate, eventually finding her, long-limbed and oblivious of his presence, astride a rocking horse in the old nursery on the phone to her mum.

Andy the handyman discovers leggy Tamara astride a rocking horse in the attic

It is later that day that she makes her casual appearance among the gaggle of writers gathered for pre-dinner drinks in the garden of Stonefield. Wherever she goes she draws all eyes towards her, towards her and her own enormous doe-like eyes, looking up flirtatiously from under her fringe.

Writers writing about writing

Having waded through Literary Life, the volume collecting Simmonds’s cartoons and strips about all aspects of the writers’ life (sitting alone in a room with a computer, sad book-signings, packed paranoid literary parties, jealousy envy and back-stabbing abounding) I was initially down-hearted to confront yet another seventy pages chronicling the comfortable, secure and bourgeois lifestyles, smug cultural superiority and attitudes of yet another bunch of middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow white writers. And I’m not alone. Most of the writers are ambivalent about their trade, and Beth describes literary festivals as:

rutting grounds of viciousness, jealousy, vanity, disgusting displays of male ego – well, and female – ‘My queue’s longer than your queue’, etc. Loathsome.

So the setting – writers writing about writing, and snoopily watching each other out of jealousy or in order to pinch pieces of each other’s lives for their books – tired and repelled me. But I forced myself to persevere and quickly came to appreciate that the complexity of the intertwining relationships among all the characters in the book soon builds up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Although I cordially despised the clichéd setting and bourgeois self-centredness of the characters, their interplay soon becomes absorbing.

Colour

The book is immediately more interesting than Gemma Bovery because it is in colour. Sounds trivial but colour adds a whole new dimension of interest for the reader, and of expressive possibility for the artist.

Maybe it’s because the use of colour gives the pictures more depth, but there are a number of pages in this book which are almost wordless, which allow a sequence of pictures to tell the story without text – like the succession of frames in a movie. This is particularly true of the climax of the novel, which features the death of one of the main characters, a fact introduced wordlessly, solely by means of changing visual framing.

Saturday 6.30 pm

Wordiness

But the complete absence of words on some pages contrasts with the extreme wordiness of others.

Some pages consist are more than half made up of densely-printed text. The page below portrays the American Glen Larson remembering back to an argument he had with his lover Maggie, who has abruptly told him their relationship is over and that she wants him to leave.

Note how the two time zones are indicated by colouring (and maybe, more subtly, by positioning) – the present day where Glen is doing the remembering, is coloured brown, while his memory of the scene is coloured blue and white, a form of grisaille. Note how neatly the past is sandwiched between the ‘present’ scenes at the top and bottom. Note how the text – and there is a lot of text – still feels neatly balanced by the pictures, elegantly integrated into the overall design.

Glen Larson remembers arguing with his partner, Maggie, back in London

Arguably the quality of the drawing has not progressed that much since the end of her Posy strip days in 1987 (look at the face of tearful Maggie in the centre of the page, many of the faces, particularly in group scenes, are surprisingly rough).

What feel so much more mature and powerful in this book are:

the use of colour to indicate mood and situation
the subtle placing of the pictures around the page, to the same effect and
the interaction between pictures and the really extensive text, which gives the reader huge amounts of information about the characters and their backstories.

The overall design and layout feel more mature and integrated than Bovery.

Narrators

Tamara is also more interesting because it has a number of narrators who all interweave their perspectives and stories.

Gemma Bovery‘s narrator was a middle-aged man, Raymond Joubert, who overlooked – or overheard – key bits of plot, and pieced the story together from what he’d seen and heard, combined with what he read in Gemma’s posthumous diaries – and he was also in love with the central figure – which made for a complex stew of perspectives and feelings.

Tamara also features a fat, middle-aged man who lusts after the babelicious doll at the centre of the story, but doesn’t stand a chance – the observant, self-aware, overweight American critic and novelist Glen Larson. (In case you think I’m being fattist, Larson makes a point of telling us that he is so overweight he [and the retreat’s owner, Beth] are worried he might break the designer toilet in his writer’s apartment – so he’s allowed to come down into the main farmhouse and use the more robust toilets there – which is also how, rather neatly, Glen gets to overhear various revealing conversations.)

But Glen is joined by a number of other voices telling their version of events, notably Beth, the middle-aged and plump wife of philandering Nick the novelist. Her suspicions of Nick, her dislike of his roving eye, is combined with her sense of the endless duties and work required to keep the writers’ retreat going (she does all the cooking, for example), as well as the way she slavishly manages all his business matters for him – taking his hand-written manuscripts at the end of the day and typing them up, liaising with his publishers and PR people, arranging his social calendar and so on.

I found Beth’s character immediately attractive, in the sense of believable and sympathetic. I’ve met lots of capable, bustling, large-sized mums – and also a number who were caught in the bind of loving, serving and acting as doormats for men they know aren’t worth it.

I also strongly like her for the way she wasn’t a babelicious sexpot like Tamara or Gemma Bovery.

Tamara herself is sort of another narrator, because the text is punctuated by examples of her ‘column’, like so many thousands of columns in popular newspapers and magazines, an only lightly touched-up version of her own life and experiences. Thus it is that we see her newspaper column, reporting the latest exciting developments in her life, inserted into the text, providing another – highly stylised – perspective on events.

And there are also newspaper cuttings and clips from the celebrity mags Casey and Jody read. I think this type of multi-textuality is not uncommon in graphic novels, which often include newspaper headlines or clips from letters or diaries – but nonetheless, it gives variety and interest to Tamara Drewe.

Affair world

As with my initial dismay at realising we are in the world of writerly writers writing about writing, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu and claustrophobia when I also realised we are back in middle-class Affair World, a world where everyone is having affairs, or struggling with ‘relationships’ which snap like twigs at the first pressure, and where everyone is spying on everyone else’s affairs, sneaking and eavesdropping on their illicit goings on. On one level it felt as cloying and claustrophobic as the supermarket magazines which obsess about the love affairs of the rich and glamorous.

God, do these people really have nothing better to do? Short answer: No. They’re ‘writers’. Their first duty appears to be to snoop on everyone around them, while themselves trying to sneak off unseen to clandestine shags. Thus:

Glen is splitting up with his lover Maggie who, at 36, tearfully insists the clock is ticking and she needs to find a man to have babies with
Nick was having an affair with a pretty young Asian babe up in London (Nadia Patel), until his wife Beth twigs to it – and also the ungrateful little thing dumps Nick
later Nick has a fling with Tamara
Tamara has a prolonged relationship with Ben Sergeant, but he has only recently broken up with his girlfriend, Fran, and not got over it
while man-of-the-soil Andy carries a torch for Tamara throughout the novel, repeatedly asking her out or trying to help, only to be snubbed
the dads of both the working class girls in the story had affairs and abandoned their mothers, to their abiding bitterness
and both the girls obsessively read celebrity gossip mags and use the rhetoric and clichés of that world to describe their own activities and situations

This girly obsession with relationships at the expense of anything else in the world prompted me to look up chick lit, which is defined as ‘heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists’. Sounds about right.

At its onset, chick lit’s protagonists tended to be ‘single, white, heterosexual, British and American women in their late twenties and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas’. (Wikipedia)

Well, that describes Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe to a t. Apparently American critic Alex Kuczynski criticised Helen Fielding’s character Bridget Jones as ‘a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness.’ That’s a handy description to bear in mind as we follow Tamara’s adventures.

Working class

Another element which makes Tamara more interesting than it might initially seem is the presence in the background of the disaffected, bored teenage yobs from the nearby village, Ewedown. These lads liven up their boring existences by nicking stuff from Stonefield and throwing eggs at the swanky cars of the writers on their way to and from the retreat.

It’s sooo boring, this village. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Nothing happening, except when Gary Pound and his mates nearly set fire to the Coronation Tree on the green. (Casey)

They provide a pleasing background hum of disaffection and revolt, I say ‘pleasing’ because that’s my class, the youths who hung around vandalising bus shelters and throwing supermarket trolleys in lakes because there was nothing else to do – and chucking things at the passing cars of the posh, white, affluent, middle-classes who liked to isolate themselves in ‘writers’ retreats’ so they can cultivate their oh-so-finer feelings while, in reality, ceaselessly leching and snooping on each other.

The working class girls Casey and Jody get off the local bus and discover some of their male mates kicking and vandalising Nick the writer’s car

Anyway, it soon becomes more than a background hum because two figures who slowly emerge to play a central role in events are the teenage schoolgirls and best mates, Judy and Casey. Casey emerges as the third of the novel’s narrators, her version of events written in a different typeface from the other two narrators (Beth and Glen).

Through Casey’s eyes we enter the world of teenage girls in a remote provincial village, Ewedown, who read gossip magazines, fantasise about their pop star heroes, and try to avoid the greasy clutches of the local boys their own age. Here they are hanging out in one of the village’s few public spaces, the much-vandalised village bus stop.

Casey and Jody, the two working class teenage girls who lust after rock star Ben Sergeant

The plot

August

Beth collects American author Glen Larson from the station and drives him to Stonefield, the writers’ retreat which she runs. We learn her husband, Nick, the successful crime writer, is having an affair with an Indian girl up in London. Nick tries to deter Beth from coming with him to attend a writer’s party in London but she smells a rat and gets Nick to admit he’s having an affair. The argument spills out into the courtyard of the retreat where she tells Nick to fuck off loud enough for all the writers to hear.

Andy the handyman comes into the kitchen to comfort Beth, ‘he’s not worth it’ etc. Meanwhile, Glen remembers the tearful argument he had with his lover in London (as show above).

Later Glen is using the main house loo when he overhears Nick returning, telling Beth a pack of lies about how he’s dumped Nadia, then giving Beth a big hug. She goes to recycle some bottles and Glen hears Nick on his mobile phone extremely cross with Nadia for dumping him. Glen is resentful of Nick for his easy success, and how he always mockingly refers to him at dinner or in the garden as ‘our resident academic.’

That night, in bed, Beth quizzes Nick about Nadia but he reassures her it meant nothing and it’s all over and she lets him shag her, but then lies awake feeling used and wondering why she is so good to him.

Next morning Andy and Beth are out in the vegetable garden when the alarm goes off from the nearby Winnards Farm, which used to belong to Andy’s parents till his dad went bankrupt and was forced to sell it to rich Londoners. Glen accompanies Andy over to the farm to see why the alarm is ringing, but leaves Andy to go into the building, wander round then go upstairs, where he discovers leggy Tamara on a rocking horse phoning her mum about the alarm. Andy tiptoes back out.

Walking the long way back to Stonefield through the village, Andy tells Glen about the Drewe family, the two sisters, how Tamara has a newspaper column for which she write a piece about having a nose job to reduce her big hooter to the pert little nosette it subsequently became.

At drinks in the garden that evening Tamara makes an entrance wearing only tight denim shorts and a white vest. All eyes are on her. Tamara works her way round each of the writers and Beth, casting her spell, batting those wonderful eyes. People drift off for dinner and Glen volunteers to walk Tamara back to her farm, but on the way makes a pass at her, for a blissful moment touching her wonderful body till she shrieks and tells him to piss off.

Next morning Beth is cooking and chatting to Nick, who wanders into a reverie, remembering five years previously when he met Tamara when she was assigned to him by his publishers as the publicity girl for a tour of bookshops and festivals he was doing. He made a pass (what else do male writers do in Simmonds World except make passes at every pretty girl who crosses their path) but she irritatedly told him to get lost. We see all this in grisaille flashback.

Sunday evening and Glen strolls past Andy’s cottage and stops for a chat which turns to the subject of Tamara. Glen tells Andy that a young fit man like him, he should make a pass at her.

Glen telling Andy to try his luck with Tamara

Later Andy is working in the garden remembering Tamara, remembering how he knew her before the nose job – sweet girl – and met her subsequently and disapproved of her new glamorous identity – as the girl herself walks in, and asks if he would kindly come and help her set up a vegetable garden at Winnard’s Farm. Well, OK, I suppose so, he says, noticing her laying her hands on his shoulders.

Autumn

Out walking, Glen reflects on Tamara and her ‘charm’. Having tried it on and been rejected, he is biased, but he thinks he sees through her now.

It’s weird talking to her. You think she’s coming on to you: she aims this scorching look and you’re transfixed with lust, I’m not kidding. But she’s kidding. It’s as if she has an erotic stun gun and you’re just target practice. Just her bit of fun…

Glen also gives a jaundiced description of Nick during the retreat’s evening meals, holding court while he brandishes an electric carving knife, gently deprecating his own (sizeable) success, a gaggle of female writers hanging on his every word.

Beth thinks the nanny goat Astrid is in heat and looks everywhere for Andy, looking after situations like this is his job. She discovers him giving Tamara’s garden a major overhaul and gets cross. Beth pays his wages: if he’s going to do all this work for Tamara, she’ll let him go and get another handyman. Beth knows Andy can’t afford that.

Later that day Tamara persuades Andy to let him accompany her to a nearby farm so the nanny goat can be mounted by a billy goat. She learns all about it, films it on her phone and then writes a sarcastic metropolitan magazine column about it. On the way back Andy blurts out his feelings for her. Tamara takes it as her due – isn’t every man in love with her? Lets him down gently and asks if he’ll still do her garden. Then gives him one of those infuriatingly chaste pecks on the cheek which pretty girls use to control foolish men. Cut to Andy standing on a hillside looking moonily into the distance…

Cut to Tamara a few days later in a stylish London cocktail bar, noticing a celebrity at the bar, Ben Sergeant, ex-drummer of rock group, Swipe. She approaches him, gets chatting, says she’s a journalist but only for a silly gossip column, everything will be off the record, shall they go somewhere more intimate and… they end up snogging then shagging.

Tamara approaches Ben Sergeant at a swanky London club

Cut to Andy telling Glen he’s just going over to Winnards’ Farm to pick up some kit he left there, but as he approaches he sees a yellow Porsche parked outside, and an unknown dog, a boxer left outside and then, the ground floor window opens and a hairy bloke, bollock naked, asks if he’s Andy and would he kindly let the dog in. So. Tamara’s got a boyfriend. And walks away unhappy.

Next thing Beth gets a text telling her a strange dog is running wild and scaring the cows in a field they own but rent to a neighbour. The neighbour, Penny is livid, the dog might have frightened her pregnant cows into miscarrying. Beth apologises (even though it’s not her dog) and phones Tamara – is this bloody boxer dog here? Tamara, naked in bed with Ben, picks up and apologises profusely.

Ben turns up half an hour later roaring his yellow Porsche into the forecourt and disturbing all the writers. Beth shows him round but he is surly and then gets angry at the fact his boxer is chained up. When Nick says he ought to be grateful, next time he worries livestock a farmer might shoot him, Ben sinisterly replies well, then, he’d shoot the shooter.

Ben drives off with his dog but not before dropping a broad hint that Tamara’s told him all about Nick – as if they have a past. Beth confronts Nick about it. Nick furiously denies it. Beth laments to the reader:

We’ve always had an open sort of marriage. Affairs are OK, up to a point. Lying about them is not. Which sounds sensible and realistic, but in practice Nick needs the flings and I don’t. He always admits them – in so many words – and I absolve them. I just hate it.

Back at Winnards’ Farm Ben paws Tamara and says he hated the retreat, bunch of self-satisfied wankers. A few days later Beth sees Tamara in the local town, Hadditon, arm in arm with leather-jacketed Ben, both looking like movie stars and turning heads.

Ben and Tamara putting on the style in Hadditon High Street

Tamara announces she’s going to marry Ben. They have regular weekends for all their posh thirty-something London friends, staying up all night and throwing frisbees around next day. The teenagers from the village hang around hoping to catch a sight of the Londoners, especially Ben who the teenage girls fancy.

Ben gives Tamara an expensive ring which a chance remark reveals he actually bought for his former lover, Fran, but Ben hastens to reassure Tamara that it’s her he loves now.

A week in the life of Tamara as the deadline for her weekly piece hangs over her and saps all pleasures (going for drinks, socialising).

Tamara stresses over the deadline for her next column

Contrasted with Nick working away in his writing shed, at the end of the day loyal Beth collecting his papers to type and telling him about invitations and work.

Nick benefiting from Beth’s care and concern as she collects up his manuscript and informs him of the week’s messages

A two-page spread devoted to a book-signing Nick does at the Hadditon bookshop. Having read Simmonds’s collection Literary Life I feel I’ve read and seen enough cartoons about dismal book-signings to last me a lifetime.

Next day Andy overhears Ben arguing with Tamara. He’s sick of living in the farm and the nearby village, it’s all so boring, why not sell it go to LA or France? But Tamara refuses to think of leaving. This is where she grew up. Ben then collects the Christmas goose from Andy who explains how they’re shot and gutted which revolts Ben, who is also antsy with Andy because the latter so obviously hangs around the place solely to get a look at Tamara.

Winter

Introducing the two pissed-off local teenage girls, Casey Shaw and Jody Long. Casey narrates their adventures, Jody is the more rebellious, experimental, out-there of the two. Jody’s got a mega crush on Ben so they spend a lot of time huddling in the village bus shelter on the off-chance of seeing him drive by.

Simmonds builds up a very persuasive picture of how awful and stifling the two girls home lives are, with Jody’s mum working long shifts at Tesco, and Casey hating being at home because of her step-father.

It’s Jody who persuades Casey to break in to Winnards farm when Tamara and Ben are away – more precisely, she knows where the latchkey is hidden for Andy. Thus they let themselves in and wander round the bedroom where Jody fantasises about Ben being naked and ‘doing it’. Second time they go back (Boxing Day) Jody nicks one of Ben’s t-shirts and forces Casey to take away Tamara’s Chloë bag. Their parents don’t notice. The local lads on their BMX bikes yell rude things at them.

Jody is determined, She scores blow and E in the local town and smokes dope. She describes in great detail losing her virginity (‘losing her V plates’) to Ben and how romantic it will be. On Valentine’s Day Casey chat to local youth Ryan (19, drives a Vauxhall Nova) who she really fancies but knows he’s only talking to her because he wants to get to Jody.

Casey meets Jody at the farmhouse and discovers she’s dressed entirely in Tamara’s clothes, including a dazzling leopard-skin coat. And she’s pissed. She’s found Tamara’s laptop and hacked straight into it without needing a password. She’s discovered that Tamara’s writing a novel (titled Tick Tock – a title which reminds us of a cartoon strip from back in Simmonds’s ‘Posy’ strip period [1977-87] featuring Stanhope Wright and his wife Trisha).

Jody opens up Tamara’s email and – drunk – addresses an email to Ben, Nick and Andy, subject: ‘Love’, text: ‘I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life’. And before petrified Casey can stop her, Jody presses send. Because she cc-ed the others, all three can see the message was sent to the other two as well as themselves.

Andy receives the email and is understandably confused. He’s having a drink down the local pub (The Rick) and asks the barmaid what she thinks the email means. Barmaid says it sounds like they’re kinky. Or Tamara was pissed. Yes, probably pissed.

Arriving on Ben’s laptop in London, the email prompts a fight between Tamara and Ben, she accusing him of always having his ex, Fran, in the back of his mind, he saying she’s going to leave sooner or later.

Meanwhile Beth tells us she read and deleted the email, puzzled by it but doesn’t want to cloud Nick’s concentration as he heads towards completion of his current novel. Doesn’t stop Andy bumping into Nick in the snow-covered fields and asking Nick what he made of it. Nick, accurately, says he knows nothing.

Tamara writes a column about it, gets a call from Andy and says the email was nothing to do with her, and asks Andy to go and have a snoop round the farmhouse, see if anyone’s broken in. At which point Ben staggers into their stylish London loft, badly beaten up and bleeding.

Casey and Jody are in the bus stop, reading gossip mags while Jody explains why and what it’s like to have most your pubic hair shaved off, when they see a paparazzi photo of Ben beaten up and gripped by bouncers, after a fracas with his ex-girlfriend Fran. It’s clever of Simmonds to set up Ben coming through the door bleeding on one page, and then have the explanation given a hundred miles away in the countryside, and via the medium of a cheap gossip mag.

As you might expect, the evidence that he’s prepared to fight for his ex, leads Tamara to have a furious row with Ben, pack her bags and return to Winnards’ Farm.

At the end of another day, Beth picks up the papers from Nicks’ desk and, back in her study, starts to go through them sorting out which ones to type up and sometimes having ideas of her own. Till she comes to a scrap of paper which isn’t part of the novel and not for her eyes, which describes in graphic detail how bored he is, how flat and dull and empty his life seems. How he hurts her!

Casey fields loads of calls from Jody who is gutted that Tamara and Ben have broken up because now he won’t be coming down to Winnards. Part of the pleasure of reading Casey’s narrative is how everything is expressed in teenage girl magazines: thus Casey thinks Ben has been a Total Love Rat. When they spy Tamara walking round she has the look of someone who has been Betrayed. When they feel sorry for Beth they related it to Brad and Angelina breaking up.

Nick lies his head off on his mobile phone to Beth, telling her he’s at the London Library whereas in fact he drives (in his swank Range Rover) round to Tamara’s house where he finds her sitting in the gloom, alone and depressed. He is tall and successful. She can’t exist without a man in her life. She takes his glasses off. They snog.

Nick pays a visit on Tamara. Note the look in her eyes

They go to bed. There’s realistic lovers’ chat, him saying he’s not just a rebound shag, is he, her saying no, no she likes him, both telling each other to be careful.

Nick arrives home, some hours later, into Beth’s waiting arms and gives her a gift of tea from Fortnum and Mason’s. She falls for it, thinks he is much invigorated after his trip to London, he should go more often, and Nick heartily agrees!

Spring

The American novelist Glen is back at Stonefield after a break in Paris (hard life, eh?). He tells us he’s ripping through his novel, and how cosy and companionable he finds Beth. Beth for her part feels in her bones that Nick is having an affair but can’t prove it. She hates getting into this mood where she ends up checking every aspect of his life for tell-tale signs: such a waste of effort. Glen is helping a lot round the kitchen and she finds his company soothing. (Hmmm so is a Beth-and-Glen thing on the cards?)

Casey is pissed off with Jody who’s bored and drinking a lot. They see Andy’s car pull up outside Winnards and watch him go to the door, ring the bell, and wait for Tamara. She opens up a little sheepishly, Andy asks if she fancies a drink and she says no, and he walks off cursing his stupidity. Only minutes later the same door opens and Tamara lets Nick out with a kiss.

The girls see this and spend days reflecting on it, Jody in particular grossed out that Nick is so old. It also reflects on their own lives, in which both their dads ran off with younger women, so they feel badly for Nick’s wife, Beth. When Beth walks through the village Casey and Jody can’t bring themselves to look at her or reply to her ‘Hi’.

In bed Beth reads one of Nick’s old novels to about adultery to remind herself of all the tricks the male character uses. But when she phones up the friends Nick says he’s going for a drink with, dammit! He actually is going from a drink with them. Try as she might, she can’t catch him out.

Tamara goes for a walk with a girlfriend through the countryside and tells her all about her affair with Nick. Note: Tamara avoids the field with the big cows in it, they scare her. Reminds me that Glen, at an earlier stage, refused to go through the cow field, insisted on going the long way round.

The girls get the bus back from Hadditon, though it’s a pain because the bus no longer goes all the way to Ewedown and it’s full of teenage boys i.e. vandals with spray paint. They come across Nick Hardiman’s car, empty, and the lads let the tyres down.

Jody and Casey hang around, hiding in the bushes, waiting for Nick to come back to his car. When he does and discovers the tyres have been let down, he angrily phones Tamara asking if she’s got a foot pump and if so can she bring it out to meet him at his car. Ten minutes later she turns up and they pump up the tyres. Then they have a great snog. And Casey takes a great close-up photo of it on her new mobile phone.

On another day, Casey and Jody break into Winnards Farm, again, Jody wandering round touching everything as if it will put her in touch with Ben. She picks up various bottles of booze and then a tin of compressed computer cleaner gas, Does Casey know it gives you a nice little buzz? Casey say. Don’t be so silly, she knows Casey has asthma and can’t even smoke.

They break into Tamara’s laptop again, and read emails from Ben asking them to meet again and, when Tamara says No she needs her space, asking if she would babysit the boxer dog (Boss), while Ben goes to LA for three months, but again Tamara replies No. Now Casey sends an email claiming to be from Tamara saying she knows a good dog-sitter in the village, and giving her – Jody’s – mobile phone number!

Cut to Beth walking through the village, stared at by all the kids as if they know something, herself deeply suspicious of Nick but unable to prove anything. He is off to a literary festival. Beth organises his travel, accommodation and timings of his interviews, and he gives her a big hug and pats her on the head like a good dog, before leaving Beth, fuming. It’s at that moment that her phone chirps and she receives the mobile phone photo Casey took of Nick and Tamara having a snog!

She is gutted. Later Tamara drops round to Andy’s to pick up some fresh eggs and he quizzes her about her affair with Nick, she says it’s none of his business, he says he hates to see Beth getting hurt and goes on to mock how cheap and easy and convenient it is for old Nick. Tamara phones Nick (in London en route to the literary festival) as she trudges along a country lane in her wellies and tells him Andy Cobb knows about them. Nick curses but then says maybe it’s for the best, this means she and he can start making plans for their life together. ‘What?’ Tamara exclaims – ‘You’d leave your wife for me’ – but at that moment Nick’s daughter (who he’s staying with) comes in and he has to ring off.

Meanwhile Beth is still furious. She quizzes the local girls she sees hanging round the bus stop if it was they who sent her the photo and they of course deny it. Now Beth realises why all the youths look at her. It’s pity. She decides not to make a scene with Nick, let him tell her in his own sweet time. But later on, she passes Tamara’s car in town and on impulse crumbles a fish stock cube into the air intake. And she can’t help replying to some innocent letters sent to Nick in a fiery rage.

Nick is with Tamara at the Monksted Literary Festival – but she is not happy. Nick tells her he is sick with his cosy life and the cosy farm and his cosy wife and churning out a book a year like clockwork – he wants to drop all that and live, feel again, be with Tamara and be young again. She can’t hide her dismay; this is not at all what she planned.

But Beth has followed him to the festival and sees him hanging round smooching with Tamara before his on-stage interviews. At one of these he announces he’ll never write another Dr Inchcombe novel, to general gasps, since that is the character which made his fortune. The fact that he does so without even consulting Beth makes her see red and determine to go straight home and find a good divorce lawyer.

Cut to Casey who is well pissed-off with her friend Jody. 1. Ben rang, Ben phoned her, right in the middle of helping Casey with her maths revision, and Jody told all kinds of lies about having dog baskets and bowls and so on when she has none! 2. That night at a party, Casey was chatting to Ryan, who she fancies, when Jody came along in a flimsy stop ‘flashing her teapot lids’ with the result that it’s Jody who ends up snogging Ryan later. God! She hates Jody!

Next day the sheepdip hits the fan when Jody tells her mum she’s agreed to babysit someone else’s dog. Her mum flat out refuses. And Ben’s driving all the way down just to hand Boss over. She gets all stressed and tries on different outfits and perfumes but in the event Ben doesn’t show up and she is gutted. Nothing ever happens in their crap village and she storms off.

Jody breaks into Winnards farm again and starts to try on some of Tamara’s clothes in the bedroom when she hears a voice. It is Ben!

Jody sneaks into Winnards Farm and tries on a dress of Tamara’s

When he asked Tamara about the message Tamara had supposedly sent, giving Jody’s name and number as a dog minder, and Tamara denied it, Ben realised it was a con. But Jody is so pathetic, so apologetic, tells Ben she loves him. She at least gets him to listen to her when she says she’s always loved him, ever since she saw him drumming in the band on Top of the Pops. ‘How old are you?’ Ben asks her. ’16’, she says. ‘Liar’, he replies.

At this moment Casey rings up and says Ben’s dog is running around outside her house. Yes, can she catch it for him, Jody replies. Ben’s really come down just to collect some of his stuff and he’s just kissed me!!! and given her an early Swipe CD and agreed to give them advance notice of gigs etc.

Saturday Cut to Tamara parked by the side of a road and on her mobile to her friend Cate. She brings us up to date with events at the literary festival, namely that Beth was there and texted him the photos of Nick and Tamara snogging. Nick was in Tamara’s bedroom and appalled at his own behaviour and decides there and then to tell Beth the truth when he gets home, split up with Beth and move in with Tamara. Who, we know, is terrified at the thought.

‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

He tells her he’ll come to her house tomorrow evening.

Saturday afternoon in Beth’s kitchen and plump, amiable Glen Larson is there. Glen has done all the menial chores and is now telling Beth how well his book is going, while she chops vegetables. Beth isn’t hearing a word because she is seething inside and speculating what will happen if Nick wants a child with Tamara. Then the little so-and-so will find out what a selfish brute he is! (This reminds me of the Posy cartoon strip which radiated the Anger of the Mothers against their lazy do-nothing husbands.)

Glen notices Ben’s dog, the boxer named Boss, crapping on Beth’s lawn. Beth says that’s Ben’s dog, he’s probably come her to beat up Nick. Glen is puzzled, so Beth explains that Nick is having an affair with Tamara, so she’s going to divorce him and sell Stonefield. Glen is appalled – what about his book!? He needs the peace and quiet of Stonefield to finish it. He tries to calm Beth down and assure her they can get back together, and before he knows it spills the beans that Nick’s last lover, Nadia, chucked Nick, not the other way round as Nick told Beth. In other words Nick only went back to Beth once he’d been jilted. This makes Beth insensate with anger, not only against Nick but against Glen who’s know all this time and not told her.

Saturday afternoon 5.30pm The change of font alone tells us that this is now being narrated by Casey. She sees some mindless teenagers chucking clods at the big cows. She also hears Ben’s dog barking. She sees that Beth’s caught it and tethered it to a post. At this moment Nick appears up from his writing shed in the field and begins to apologise to Beth but she’s had it up to hear and roars her grief and anger at him. ‘Go. Go away. Go now. Go to her,’ she shouts.

Casey had started to take long distance pap shots of this funny couple but it became too upsetting and she goes off in tears. The bloody dog is still yapping so Beth lets it off its leash and tell it to bugger off, too.

6.30pm This is the famous page with no text on it, just seven colour panes, which I included earlier int he review. Successive frames show Tamara at her window waiting for Nick, the cows around the water trough, then they walk past the trough, it gets darker, we see a body lying by the trough, close up on the body, then a big wide shot of the sun setting over the distant hills.

10pm Tamara on the phone to her friend Cate. She’s furious because Nick stood her up, obviously gone back to his wife BLOODY MEN!!! Tamara goes down the pub where she sharply rebuffs Andy’s offer of a drink.

10pm Casey is at a loud house party. She lost her phone in the woods so can’t ring Jody to ask why she’s not there. Last thing she heard was Jody talking to her all loved-up, insisting talking to Ben was the best thing ever. (Simmonds drops in some frames parodying love-bird, valentine’s day scenes amid flowery bowers and swags of love hearts – something she’s amused herself parodying from at least as long ago as 1981’s True Love.)

Now Ryan comes up to her and, mirabile dictu, actually wants to talk to her. They go outside and start having a snog when an ambulance screams by. An ambulance! In Ewedown! That never happens. Then she realises it’s stopped outside number six – Jody’s house!

Cut to another silent wordless page, with panels showing the rain pouring down on Stonefield, Beth looking out her bedroom window, Beth in the big double bed looking at the empty space where Nick should be, and cutting to a light on in one of the writer’s flats, and then a close-up of Glen Larson looking out the window into the rain looking worried.

Sunday morning Casey is the narrator and tells us that the night before, her mum took her back to her house and explained that Jody had been found dead! Her mum went upstairs wondering why she wasn’t going to the party and found her in a pretty party dress, dead on the floor holding in her hand an aerosol spray of Air Dust, a kind of computer cleaner. Casey knew that Jody sucked up lungfuls of the stuff from time to get a little buzz. This time it simply stopped her heart.

Now the change of typeface tells us we are reading Beth’s narration. Some of her writers found Nick’s body the next morning. He had been trampled to death by the cows (remember all those little references to the cows being scary and people going out of their way to avoid them which have been threaded through the book?).

Beth calls the police. When they start questioning her she immediately blurts out that she must have killed him by letting the bloody dog loose which stampeded the cows. The detective is certainly suspicious why she didn’t report it when Nick didn’t come back last night. Beth is forced to admit that they’d had a row and she expected he was sleeping at a neighbour’s. The police motor over and tell Tamara. She is in floods of tears.

Another font tells us we are now reading Glen’s narration. He tells the police a sanitised version of the events (leaving out the fact that Beth and Nick had rowed).He timidly goes down to the kitchen to find Beth and begins to apologise but she poo-poos that and asks if he will stay, to lend a hand, there are some things she and her daughter (who’s come straight down from London) can’t face. Like the reporters at the gate.

Through Casey’s eyes we read all the reports in the papers. Mum finds girl dead. Dr Inchcombe author Found Dead in Field Author’s Sex Tryst Led To Tragedy. Pop Star Ben last To see Tragic Jody. Nothing like this has ever happened in Ewedown before: two tragic deaths on the same night!

Casey explains how she kept schtum about their breaking into the farm, but it was Jody’s mum found a post-it note from Ben, and Ben’s number was on her mobile, and the media quickly put two and two together and joined Ben to Jody and Tamara and Nick! A festival of sex and death, ‘telly crews everywhere!’

Andy walks past the press camped out at Tamara’s drive and asks if there’s anything he can do for her. Tamara’s quite rude, telling him he’s always Mr bloody perfect, but then relents, says thanks but no thanks.

Andy calls on Tamara to see if she’s alright

Glen watches the comings and goings, describes how the finger pointed at Ben, the jealous rival for a while till CCTV footage showed he was a service station miles away. Forensics say cause of death was being trampled by cows after a collision with the water trough.

And only now does he reveal what really happened. After telling Beth about Nadia he didn’t go to his apartment but went for a walk through the fields. It was here that Nick spotted him and called him over, called him a fucking bastard for telling Beth all about Nadia, accuses him of trying to suck up to Beth and take his (Nick’s) place. On and on Nick goes, telling him he’ll never have the income or success he (Nick) enjoys, capping it all with ‘Mine’s bigger than yours!’

Right. That was it. Glen snaps and punches Nick. Nick stumbles backwards and hits his head against one of the concrete pillars of the cattle trough. He gets up again, groggy and dazed, Glen goes to help but Nick tells him to fuck off and, at that moment, the famous herd of big pregnant cows comes barging into the field running after that bloody boxer dog, Boss. Terrified of animals, Glen runs off as fast as he can, not looking back, assuming Nick, younger and fitter than him, can look after himself. But turns out he couldn’t. Somehow he got stuck against the trough and trampled.

Glen is sitting on the trough weeping for what happened when Tamara comes up and gently puts her hand on his shoulder and tries to reassure him but suddenly… it feels like an interview and Glen – who has babbled too many times in the story – gets to his feet without telling the truth, and sets off back to Stonefield.

Here he finds Beth in the garden drinking tea and reading the paper. She looks happy and relieved as she tells him the police have closed the investigation and now officially consider it an accident. Glen looks at her and considers telling her the truth about what happened i.e. his responsibility in punching Nick, making him hit his head against the trough, making him too dazed to escape the rampaging cows — but she has found closure, why ruin it?

Cut to Casey’s point of view. Ryan, the boy she fancies, has spent a lot of time with her, talking things through. Casey tells Ryan everything, about breaking into Winnards, hacking Tamara’s computer, sending the shag email, Jody’s obsession with Ben, her taking the pap shots of Nick snogging Tamara then sending them to Beth. What should she do? ‘Keep quiet’, advises Ryan. After all, what would their sort do for her if she was in trouble? Nothing.

Beth’s narrative. She cuts Tamara when they bump into her. But then she receives an email from Casey explaining that it was her and Jody who sent the shag email, for a joke, and she who texted Beth the photos of Tamara and Nick snogging. She’s really sorry for all the hurt she’s caused. This prompts Beth to make a pilgrimage over to Winnards to confront Tamara, where she’s surprised to discover Casey is present, having also gone to apologise to Tamara.

The other two stand in the kitchen while Beth gives them a bollocking but then explains life’s too short, she might as well forgive them, we’ve all got to live here together etc. Beth realises she feels like a cigarette, Tamara too, but they’ve both given up. Luckily Casey has one and the three women, now reconciled, pass a fag of closure among themselves.

The cigarette of closure

Late that night Tamara is mooning over her laptop. Suddenly she shuts it, leaves the farm, sets off at a run across the fields, arrives at Andy’s cottage, knocks, looks stunning and helpless – Help me, I’m a poor helpless vulnerable woman! – And Andy takes her in his arms – big stwong man pwotect helpless woman!!! They kiss.

Tamara must have gone all of two, maybe three days, without a man in her life! Is she, to quote American critic Alex Kuczynski, ‘a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness’? Tempting to think so…

A few days later Beth describes her trip to the local church for the funeral of Jody Long. She realises it’s an event for the real locals – in other words, the working class inhabitants of Ewedown, not the posh, down-from-London writers and second home-owners. But there’s Tamara on Andy’s arm – she is, after all, always on some man’s arm, not complete unless she has a man to cling onto – then hugging Casey, and working the crowd.

Then Tamara spots Beth and makes an operatic gesture to do a Big Hug of Closure, but Beth turns and melts away. Not ready to forgive, not yet.

One year later

Beth gives a summing up. She’s still at Stonefield. They launched a young writers’ prize in Nick’s honour. Beth handed over Nick’s shed to Casey and the other yoof as a meeting place. Andy moved in with Tamara and she had a baby in January. And her novel comes out in September.

The last page has a couple of images of Glen Larson. Beth has written him a letter congratulating him on the success of his novel, Excess, and telling him that Tamara’s novel is due out in September. But when Glen reads that it is about a writer’s retreat, he clutches his head, ‘Oh no!’

All in all, Tamara may be the titular centre of the story, but I think Beth is the heroine.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, cartoon, graphic novel

Posted by Simon on June 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/tamara-drewe-posy-simmonds/

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds (1999)

‘Affairs are absolutely OK as long as you don’t get involved and you’re really discreet.’
Gemma Bovery’s diary (p.63)

Gemma Bovery

True Love which Posy Simmonds published in 1981 was, apparently, the first graphic novel in English, although it is more like a set of loosely connected sketches (see my review). Eighteen years later she published Gemma Bovery, a much longer, much more wordy, and infinitely more sophisticated graphic novel.

As the title immediately indicates, the book is a modern take on Flaubert’s classic novel of 1857, Madame Bovary, whose ill-fated heroine was named Emma. In the original novel, Emma marries boring and incompetent provincial doctor Charles Bovary and, to escape the drudgery and boredom of her life, has a series of increasingly ill-fated affairs, and borrows money recklessly, until her world collapses and she commits suicide. I happened to write a detailed synopsis and review of the Flaubert novel a few years ago.

Review of Madame Bovary

The obvious difference with the Simmonds is that whereas the Flaubert novel is about a cabined and trapped Frenchwoman, Simmonds’s graphic novel is about a free-spirited young Englishwoman from the cultured middle classes who takes it for granted that she’ll always have a job and can shift homes easily from England to France.

The plot 1

Gemma is the twenty-something, middle-class daughter of a comfortably-off dentist based in Reading. She has moved to London and made a career as a magazine illustrator who can turn her hand to interior designing and decorating. We meet her as she is having an affair with older, high-status male, Patrick Large, who is the suave, confident food critic for a Time Out-type London magazine. She resents the way he patronises her, and is always on the lookout for other pretty young things, but nonetheless she stays with him for in his company she gets kudos, the best tables at restaurants, invites to good parties, and so on.

Until one day she sees him coming out of his flat snogging some other pretty young thing. She is distraught. That night she is at a party and bursts into tears and flings herself into the arms of the innocent chap chatting to her, an older man named Charlie Bovery. Charlie is divorced, lives in rented digs in Hackney while paying alimony to his ghastly wife (Judi) who is bringing up their two kids (Justin and Delia) in Islington. Judi is always on the phone nagging for the alimony and telling him what a bad father he is.

One thing leads to another and Gemma goes to bed with Charlie and moves in with him. (It seems she can’t live without at least one man in her life.) Charlie’s wife gets even angrier when she learns her ex is living with a pretty dolly bird, can’t he think of the kids etc.

Then she and Charlie get married – an event accompanied by a drone of criticism from Gemma’s mum when she and Charlie turn down the all-expenses-paid bash her mum and dad offer. Even at the wedding her mum is sniping. Everyone snipes. All Gemma’s family, and Charlie’s wife. Snipe snipe snipe.

Gemma’s mum and dad trying to bully her into a full monty wedding (left) and Charlie’s ex, Judi, being bitchy (bottom right)

Eventually, the ex and the constant visits of the pesky kids and the crappy location of his flat in Hackney starts to really get Gemma down and she fantasises about moving away from all of it. Which is when her father drops dead of a heart attack and leaves her fifty-five grand. So Gemma persuades Charlie to buy an old country house in rural Normandy and move to France.

They do so and are, at first, enchanted. Surrounded by countryside, with a sweet little village nearby, Bailleville, all of whose shops are ‘authentic’ and locally owned. Mmmm smell the freshly baked French bread!

However, the book then reveals all the negatives about living in a plain old peasant house in rural France. It smells; there’s only a septic tank, not proper sewerage, so in the summer the whole place reeks of shit. The windows are small, making being inside dingy and depressing. After a couple of months Gemma is bored of the same old ten or so shops in the crappy little ‘one-eyed’ village, and prefers motoring to the nearest supermarket – cheaper, more convenient, and people aren’t watching you all the time. Charlie’s kids, Justin and Delia, hate coming to stay, there’s nothing to do, they hate the French food Gemma prepares, and the telly doesn’t work.

Worst of all is all the other bloody Brit ex-pats, especially the ones who don’t live there but have bought up all the surrounding pretty rural houses, and only turn up at half-term and the other school holidays, bringing along their yapping ‘Brit brats’. Suddenly the quiet village is infested with the sound of braying upper-middle-class voices – ‘Mark, daahhhhling, better get twice as many baguettes, Sam and Polly may pop in on their way back from Périgeux.’

These posh Brits are exemplified by Mark and Wizzy Rankin who have bought a large manor house near the village, which they’ve done up within an inch of its life. They’re always having loads of friends to stay – fellow corporate financiers chatting about their skiing holidays, bond traders, financial journalists and the like – piles of empty bottles of fine wine, posh guffawing late into the night. Their wealth and their effortless success (this year Mark’s bonus was £2 million – p.65) oppress Gemma (as they did this reader) and highlight the dingy poverty of the half-repaired house she’s stuck in with Charlie.

And Charlie irritates the hell out of Gemma. He’s taken to rural French life, padding round in a vest, Gauloise fag permanently hanging off his lip (as far as I can tell all the adult characters smoke incessantly), fixing up antique furniture in his workshop, not really bothered about the damp and the small and the thousand and one little tasks which need doing round the house.

Late at night Gemma lies in bed next to him consumed with anger and frustration and has half-asleep fantasies of getting back with her tall, handsome, successful London lover, Patrick Large.

Gemma lies in bed with poor, honest Charlie Bovery but fantasises about getting back together with glamorous successful Patrick Large

Until one day Gemma reads in one of the Sunday supplements that Patrick has gone and married the dolly bird she saw him snogging (Pandora) and had a baby! The supplement shows photos of his perfect wife and perfect baby and perfect up-market London flat and something in Gemma snaps. She is consumed with frustration and envy, beside herself with frustration.

She goes into the village by herself in a very short skirt and her long legs catch the eye of local aristocratic layabout Hervé de Bressigny whose family own a rundown chateau near the Bovary’s house. They chat a bit, then part.

A few days later Charlie organises a dinner party for some of the French neighbours. Gemma goes into town to do the shopping and bumps into Hervé in the supermarket where they chat a bit more. A few hours later, driving home, on impulse, and even though she’s meant to be cooking for the dinner party that very evening, Gemma swings left through the gates of the old chateau (for she’s found out this is where Hervé lives), and as a storm gathers, knocks and young Hervé comes to open the door.

Hervé, we learn, has failed his law exams in Paris and his stern mother, Madame de Bressigny, has told him to stay at the rotting family mansion and work hard for the resits. He was hard at it when Gemma knocked on the door and he is irritated by her visit. But out of politeness shows her round – and Gemma, being into interior decoration, marvels at the decaying mansion’s original features.

Suddenly there is a tremendous crack of thunder which makes Gemma start backwards… into the arms of the dapper young man and… well… they kiss, they snog, they embrace, they fumble and grope and fall to the floor and…

Then we cut away to the dinner party she and Charlie have arranged with the Rankins and two local French couples, where she arrives late, claiming to have been delayed in the storms, looking flustered, and then whizzes up a tremendous dinner (although various bits of it puzzle the French – sushi?).

Gemma serves at her dinner party (left) while thinking back to meeting Hervé in the supermarket (top right) and then going round to his gloomy old chateau and knocking on the front door (bottom right)

She is closely watched he shows her round – he is supposed to be revising for a retake of the law exam he failed. there’s a crash of thunder, she steps back startled into his arms and… snog, embrace, strip off, sex. We learn she is 30 years old.

Raymond Joubert

At this point I should explain that the entire narrative is told in flashbacks by the village baker, Raymond Joubert.

Joubert is a bearded middle-aged man who was once himself something of an intellectual, having written and taught in Paris, and occasionally still contributing to an old intellectual quarterly. But his career was going nowhere so when his parents passed away he decided to return to the village of his birth (along with his Parisian wife and two children) and take over the family bakery. In time he realised he had a real feel for making bread, and found it deeply satisfying.

Joubert noticed Gemma from the moment she arrived, and watches her changing shape and happiness and manner like a hawk. He, too, is in love with her.

And so it is Joubert who sees the first encounter of Gemma and Hervé at the market, happens to be driving in front of her on the road home when she sees Gemma turn into the chateau for that first meeting with Hervé. And who attends the dinner party a few hours later, scrutinising her for signs of post-coital passion.

And then watches her like a hawk over the ensuing weeks as her affair with Hervé deepens, notices her working hard, earning more money, and comprehensively redecorating her and Charlie’s house, chucking out the rural wood furniture and installing 18th century period pieces.

Prolepsis and the sense of doom

More than that, the narrative begins after Gemma has died. Gemma is dead and a grief-stricken Joubert is moping and reflecting on everything which led up to her tragic death. Therefore his narrative lends every detail of her life a morbid and gloomy sense of tragic foreboding.

In the first few pages Joubert pays a visit to a heart-broken Charlie Bovery and, as Charlie pours him a drink, notices Gemma’s belongings strewn about the old farmhouse – Charlie is having a clear-out – and spots some of Gemma’s diaries lying around. While Charlie’s back is turned Joubert steals as many of her diaries as he can hide and, when he gets back to his house, a short walk from the Bovery’s, starts to read them (translating with the help of his son’s English-French dictionary).

Joubert visits Charlie in his grief over Gemma’s death, and learns of the existence of Gemma’s

Thus the entire narrative is one giant flashback, heading inexorably towards the moment of Gemma’s death – and it is told via two voices, in a kind of textual split-screen effect – because the main narrative, in printed text, gives Joubert’s account of what he saw, from the moment the Boverys arrived at the old farmhouse, but this is counterpointed with the handwritten entries in Gemma’s diary – which Joubert is reading and which helps shed light on little mysteries he had observed.

The narrative is thus a journey of discovery for both Joubert and the reader.

An additional weight or significance is given to everything because Joubert has an increasingly doom-laden feeling that Gemma is fated to re-enact the destiny of her famous namesake, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, who has ill-fated love affairs with a local aristocrat, with a playboy in the local town, Rouen, runs up huge debts before killing herself with arsenic.

So, arguably, the narrative contains at least three levels – Joubert’s eye-witness account of events – Gemma’s diary giving her view of things – and the heavy hand of destiny in Joubert’s increasingly hectic concern that Gemma is unconsciously treading in Emma Bovary’s footsteps and that the same awful fate awaits her.

It’s a sophisticated narrative structure and it builds up a sense of genuine tension because we want to know how Gemma died. As events speed up and the sense of inevitable doom darkens, the reader becomes more and more absorbed until – on the last few pages – I was gripped, really gripped, couldn’t put it down and had to find out what happens.

Joubert as compromised narrator

Joubert starts to follow Gemma around. He thinks he is in love with her, concerned for her and so on, poo-poos the notion that he is a creepy pervert and voyeur, although Simmonds includes plenty of examples of how he notices Gemma’s long legs, her love bite, how he imagines her lying in bed, frustrated, finds this or that notion about her ‘erotic’ – in other words how he has all sorts of pervey thoughts about her. Plus we are given several asides in Gemma’s diary about how she has noticed that Joubert is always watching her, she finds him creepy.

So Joubert is far from being an objective narrator, he is himself implicated in the story’s passion plays. By the middle of the story he is actively stalking and following her to her secret rendezvous with young Hervé, not least because Joubert’s house lies off the path from the Bovery’s house to Hervé’s mansion, so it’s easy for him to keep tabs on her (there’s even a map showing the relative location of the three houses – the Boveries’, Hervé’s and Jouberts, along with the public footpaths, to help us visualise it all.)

I went after Gemma, and if this sounds criminal – stalking a young woman – I can only protest that at the time it seemed quite legitimate… (p.55)

I told myself the only reason I was following Mrs Bovery was to confirm my speculations about her and Hervé… (p.56)

This stalking continues up to and including the scene where Joubert delivers some croissants to the Bovary house, knocks on the door a few times then goes round the side and, through a window, sees Gemma and Hervé making love.

A few days later, Joubert sneaks through the grounds of Hervé’s mansion in order to peer through the windows and catch them at it, again. But is he a pervert, a voyeur? Not in his own mind. “Moi?? Non, non monsieur, I was simply concerned for ‘er well-being” etc.

Joubert ‘accidentally’ bumping into Gemma on one of her walks along the path past his house

Joubert also has a comic side, playing to broad stereotypes of the Frenchman: his erotic fantasies are rather quirky, he fetishises French bread and food and is appalled at English gastronomy (Pimms! Porky scratchings!!) and doesn’t disapprove of Gemma taking a lover – what could be more French – but is scandalised at what how she goes to her assignations – chewing gum! wearing a tracksuit!!

Joubert (in the small pictures in the middle of the page, watches through the chateau windows as Gemma disrobes to her sexy underwear for the gaze of her lover

In his curious mix of Frenchness, middle-aged lust, voyeurism, and in his over-heated comparisons between Gemma and her ill-fated Victorian forebear, Joubert is in many ways the central, certainly the most memorable, character in the plot.

The plot 2

Back to the main narrative.

Through Joubert’s eyes – and through his reading of Gemma’s diary – we watch Gemma continue the affair and blossom with happiness. She goes on a spending spree, redoing the interior furnishings of the farmhouse, chucking out the heavy rural furniture and splashing out on new furniture, wallpapers, carpets etc. In other words, running up a stack of debts, just like Madame Bovary. She also spends a lot on expensive sexy lingerie.

Gemma Bovery fait le shopping

Joubert, reading her diary, disapproves of how Gemma buys the lingerie to turn herself into a sex object for her lover’s pleasure, and of the stunning, leggy blonde bombshell she has turned herself into, on the rare occasions when she comes shopping in his boulangerie (both scenes appearing in the page below).

Gemma shops, practices sexily stripping to her lingerie for Hervé, and turns up in Joubert’s boulangerie looking like a model

All this during half-term while Charlie is back in England. Returning, he is impressed by the change in the farmhouse, but appalled at how much it must have cost…

But Joubert guesses correctly that something is on Hervé’s mind, namely that he has a full-time lover back in Paris and must return to his studies there. Thus we the reader see them in bed together, but only we know why Hervé has such a distracted look on his face. He wants to end the affair. He wants to be shot of Gemma.

Hervé is soon back in Paris telling his mate Arnaud about his entanglement with Gemma (we learn that she is 30 years old, on page 61), tying to persuade his mum to let him stay part of the new academic term down in the country, and to square his suspicious girlfriend, Delphine.

Joubert is now following her all the opportunities he gets and so overhears the couple have an argument in the big park of Hervé’s house, during which the latter curses her for still sleeping with Charlie and then comes out with a passionate declaration of love. Joubert himself is torn apart and realises he is stricken with jealousy, while Gemma goes home transported. She is on cloud nine. She insists they go for lunches, admittedly at remote villages. All the time Charlie seems oblivious, not least because he receives a letter from HMRC saying they’re going to do a check of his revenue and taxes, a check he knows he will fail, and Charlie is convinced it’s his malicious ex, Judi, who has shopped him.

According to the diaries, their love-making takes on a new intensity, which is how they come to break a precious Sevres porcelain statuette at the chateau.

Gemma’s fantasies get the better of her. She stops returning business calls and emails, spends even more money on Hervé, and starts fantasising about getting a commission from his mother to redecorate the entire chateau (never going to happen) and then commissions from her friends (cloud cuckoo land). Meanwhile Hervé’s girlfriend in Paris realises he’s got another woman and confronts him, in floods of tears.

Joubert learns that Gemma is going for a long weekend in London and has made elaborate plans for Hervé to come too, but the confrontation with his girlfriend, Delphine has crystallised his doubts.

Meanwhile, Joubert, consumed with jealousy, has decided to sabotage the lovers’ relationship and so he cuts and pastes from the English Penguin translation of Madame Bovary, excerpts from the letter Emma’s lover sends her on the day of their planned elopement, to say he is pulling out, their love cannot be etc. it is hand delivered to Gemma by a village boy and when she opens and reads it she really thinks it’s from Hervé and that he’s dumping her.

Gemma, already worrying whether a long weekend in London with Hervé will really work out, receives Joubert’s letter containing the quote from Madame Bovary as if a rejection letter from Hervé

But in fact the real Hervé is having second thoughts and, egged on by his Paris friend Arnaud who tells him to think of his future, his career and of Delphine, Hervé faxes Gemma a short note saying he can’t come with her to London. Gemma is distraught but Charlie is expecting her to go, everyone is, and so she leaves.

Five days later she is back, her hair cut short and a lost look in her eyes, as Joubert, inevitably, notices.

Cut to Hervé struggling to write Gemma a letter. Seems his mother is going to visit and will notice the absence of that pesky statuette which they broke. Gemma said she’s give it to Charlie to fix, that’s the kind of thing he’s good at – but Hervé must get it back and into the chateau before his mother’s visit.

The business with the statuette gets complicated. Hervé tells his mother he gave it to a woman who said she’s give it to her husband to fix, a Monsieur Tate (Gemma always told Hervé her maiden name, Tate – he thinks that’s her married name). So out of the blue Hervé’s mother turns up at Charlie Bovery’s house (Gemma is out) and first of all calls him Monsieur Tate and then asks for a statuette he’s never heard of.

Two things result: 1. when Gemma returns, Charlie confronts her about the statuette which she remembers she’s put in a cupboard and she decides it’s the moment to tell Charlie all about her affair but – he doesn’t want to know, he refuses to listen to her and announces he has to go to London to sort out his tax affairs.

And 2. Hervé’s mother confronts him with her interview with Charlie, gets Hervé to cobble together more and more complex lies, before revealing that she found plenty of evidence of his affair with Gemma down at the chateau. She is disgusted that he is having an affair with a married woman, has steadily lied to her, and has lost the statuette into the bargain. She instructs her lawyers to write Gemma a stiff letter demanding the return of the statuette or their will be legal ramifications.

Gemma wakes up to her situation and realises she is drowning in official letters, claims for all her bills, not least from the maxed-out credit cards as well as all the utilities for the farmhouse. She asks Joubert in to write formal French replies to them, but he is so stunned to be in the same room where he was watched Hervé undress Gemma, that he cannot think straight and says he’ll take the bills and write out French replies that evening. Meet her in Rouen tomorrow, the day of the Saturday market, where he can hand them over.

Gemma’s financial mess deepens. The check she wrote to the electricity company bounced. Her electrics are about to be cut off and the bank has withdrawn her check facility. She has to get cash for doing a decorating job for posh Englishwoman, Wizzy. It’s while at their place that Patrick Large, her old beau, steps into the room. His wife, the perfect wife of the colour supplement, Pandora, has kicked him out and refuses to let him see their son. All this he tells quickly, and the fact that he knew Mark and Wizzy back in London and they’ve given him shelter in the storm.

Meanwhile we cut back to Joubert the next day, Saturday, in Rouen, all a-flutter waiting to meet Gemma to hand over the letters he’s typed for her. In his self-deluded way he imagines himself becoming her aid and helper, even imagines them in bed, naked, together and feels his heart racing. But she is late for their rendezvous. Eventually he hears the growl of her VW camper van and goes outside to see her climb out of it but then… a man also exit the van, who comes up besides Gemma and… they embrace!… they kiss!!! Once again Joubert’s hopes are dashed.

In an odd sequence, Joubert hears the van start up and drive round Rouen town centre – and is able (improbably) to give its itinerary. This is odd until you realise it is a parody of the scene in Madame Bovary where Emma takes a ride in a hansom cab with a handsome man and during the ride becomes his lover i.e. they have sex. In its modern-day reincarnation, Joubert follows them down to an underground car park, locates the van and is about to stuff the letters he so carefully composed for her under its windscreen wipers when he realises it is rocking back and forth. Gemma and Patrick are shagging. Disgusted, Joubert walks away wishing them dead, wishing Gemma DEAD!

But that night, out to dinner with suave Patrick, Gemma realises she he hasn’t changed at all, still treats her like a trophy girlfriends, swanks with the waiters, talks at her. She realises she doesn’t even like him any more and that the afternoon shag was a one-off. That night she fends off his advances, drops him at the Rankins and goes home alone, feeling proud of herself. She decides to sort her life out, sell the farmhouse, clear her debts, move back to London and revive her career, live simply and avoid entanglements.

Then she sees the statuette. Charlie must have repaired it. He is such a good man, he deserves better of her.

Next day she’s in the garden when Joubert passes by walking his dog. Gemma politely explains that she doesn’t need those letters she asked him to compose, she’s found the statuette, all she needs is him to write a letter in French replying to the stern missive from Madame de Bressigny’s lawyers. She talks him into going into the farmhouse and there, accidentally, he sees a Penguin translation of Madame Bovary, He starts back, knocks over a stool. Surprised, Gemma looks from him to the book, from the book to him and… rumbles him. It was he who sent her that letter, quoting the lover’s rejection from the novel.

‘You sod! How dare you interfere in my life?’

Pathetically, Joubert tries to defend himself, says he is worried for her, worried she is re-enacting the fate of Flaubert’s heroine. She replies: ‘What! Commit suicide over a few debts? Don’t be ridiculous!’

Gemma kicks him out but Joubert continues to feel hysterically frightened for her and that night has intense and ominous dreams, imagines the black figure of death closing in on her house. In the morning, unable to leave the thing alone, Joubert photocopies the pages from Madame Bovary where she takes the arsenic, and anonymously sends a copy each to Charlie (in London), Patrick and the Rankins.

Wizzy Rankin is predictably robust. She is in the mddle of frenzied preparations for her fortieth brithday party and thinks the letter a stupid plea for help and that Gemma’s brought it all on herself. But what if it’s a real cry for help and she’s about to take arsenic like Madame Bovary? To which posh wife Wizzy replies, in one of the best jokes in Simmonds’s entire oeuvre:

‘What? Take arsenic? She’d better not – she’s doing my table decorations!’ (p.91)

Mark (the rich banker) drives round to make sure Emma’s alright and she dismisses the letter as further machinations by the bonkers baker, Joubert. Mark quizzes her about her debts and when he learns they’re a measly 25 grand offers to pay them if she… if she, you know, made it nice for him.. But Gemma robustly tells him to piss off, which, shamefacedly, he does.

Then Joubert comes to discuss with us the final entries in Gemma’s diary, which describe Patrick coming round to see her in response to the silly letter Joubert sent him. When Gemma explains that Joubert was behind it, Patrick suggests she sue him. He’s not worth it, she replies. Anyway she’ll be going back to London soon. Patrick asks if she’ll consider moving in with him. But she says no. it wouldn’t work out. She has changed. She wants to be a new person.

Next morning Joubert awakens in panic and guilt. tries to write a letter of apology to Gemma. Goes to the bakery and starts kneading the dough way before sunrise. Once the shop is opened and staffed, decides to go and deliver her a fresh-baked baguette and the note. Walking through her gate he hears the sound of whale music coming from the shade of a tree. She is practicing yoga positions to whale song, with her back to him. Unwilling to disturb her, Joubert tiptoes into the open house and leaves the baguette on the kitchen table with the letter propped up against it.

At lunchtime Joubert and Martine settle down for a light lunch with cheese. they hear a van draw up and park. it is Charlie, back from England at long last, and parking this far from the farmhouse, maybe to surprise Gemma. He walks down the track. Joubert settles for his post-prandial snooze.

Next thing he knows Charlie is running over the field his glasses knocked off, blood on his face and shirt, bellowing the GEMMA IS DEAD! Joubert babbles that he knew it, he knew it, was it arsenic?? Charlie doesn’t know what he’s saying and begs to use the phone. Martine takes over from her babbling husband and calls the emergency services, as Charlie runs back to the farmhouse.

Joubert and his wife begin to walk to the farmhouse, but a car pulls up and it is Madame de Bressigny, of all people, come for her statuette. When Joubert babbles to her arsenic and Flaubert she stares at him but when the ambulance arrives, she departs. The Jouberts continue into the kitchen of the farmhouse where they find Charlie on his knees beside the body of Gemma, lying peacefully on the floor and quite quite dead.

Moments later the Rankins drive up with a doctor friend who’d come for Wizzy’s party. He checks the body, Wizzy takes control as these sturdy upper middle-class women often do, dispensing whisky to Charlie and lending him her mobile phone so he can start making formal calls to England.

The doctor and then the ambulanceman pronounce the cause of death: she choked on a piece of the bread Joubert baked and brought for her that morning. They try to to reassure him it was an accident but Joubert – who all the way through had been obsessed with a brooding sense of doom and death – who felt as if he had himself kick-started the affair between Hervé and Gemma and then supervised every step of its progression – it was Joubert himself who was the cause (at some remove) of poor Gemma’s death.

Charlie’s account

A few weeks later Joubert is in his boulangerie, inconsolable. Gemma has been buried. The Rankins paid for the small service and wake. Now, Joubert feels guilty and takes the short walk across the fields to the Boverys’ farmhouse. He’s been popping in on Charlie now and then to check he’s alright.

Now he feels guilty and starts to confess, telling Charle that a) he stole Gemma’s diaries and b) he is responsible for her death – and is about to vent a long soliloquy about how he magically created the love affair between Gemma and Hervé, all the self-centred twaddle we’ve read him gushing throughout the text – when Charlie cuts across him and says, no, he killed Emma.

He knew she was having an affair but when it did finally blow over Gemma remained distant so he thought, blow it, and went back to London. It was there that he got a phone call from a regretful Gemma, followed up by a long letter in which she said she still loved him.

But in the same post someone had sent him photocopies of pages from Madame Bovary describing Emma’s agonising death from arsenic (that being Joubert, of course). This worried Charlie so he caught the next ferry and drove to the farmhouse, parking a little way away so as to walk (as observed by Joubert and his wife).

But when he walked into the open front door it was to find Patrick Large standing behind Gemma with his arms around her. Finally, after all these months, Charlie snapped and saw red and attacked the guy, knocking him to the floor where they rolled around fighting. Only after a few minutes does Patrick make Charlie realise they weren’t snogging – Gemma was choking and he was trying to do the Heimlich manoeuvre as Charlie walked in. Those precious few minutes while they fought were enough for Gemma to choke and die.

He ran to Joubert’s they called the ambulance, Patrick ran off and fetched the Rankins (which explains their sudden arrival) – all too late. Later that night Patrick came back and he and Charlie got drunk. Patrick explained that Gemma choked because she got cross with him trying to persuade her to get back with him.

So did Patrick kill her, from provoking the choking? Or Charlie for stopping Patrick help her in the vital minute? Or Joubert for sending the photocopied pages to Charlie to make him come back? Or for breaking the baguette a fragment of which choked her?

Did all these men kill her? Or was it her own nature, unable to settle, to make her mind up, to form a fixed relationship?

Or was it a pointless stupid accident?

There’s one last thing. Joubert is still fussing and fretting about Charlie, irrationally concerned the he will meet the same fate as Charles Bovary (who is found dead in the garden, in Flaubert’s novel). And here there is the second good joke of the book, for Charlie dismisses Joubert’s concerns as nonsense – everyone calls him Charlie but his actual name – he was named after his grandfather – his actual name is CYRIL – and Joubert kisses him with relief and delight!

Epilogue

It’s Spring. Charlie sold the farmhouse and made enough to pay off his and Gemma’s debts. He’s gone back to London and picked up a new girlfriend. Joubert has inherited Gemma’s dog. As to Hervé, Joubert hears he passed his law exams but his long-standing girlfriend gave him the push.

There’s a removal van outside the Boverys’ farmhouse. New owners are moving in. Joubert’s wife met them walking in the lane. The wife is called Eyre. Jane Eyre!

The triumph of Thatcherite values

Simmonds ended the Posy strip in 1987. Twelve years later, Gemma Bovery exists in a completely different universe, a post-Thatcherite Britain, among a well-heeled, well-educated, comfortable urban bourgeoisie.

What surprised me – astonished me, really – is that sex and adultery seem to have won. In the Weber strips a powerful recurring character was Stanhope Wright, tall, blonde advertising executive who propositioned every pretty young woman he met and generally had several affairs on the go at once, but always returned to his long-suffering wife Trish. In the Weber strip-world it was understood that Stanhope was a philandering swine, while the heart of the strips rotated around the home life of nerdy lecturer George Weber and his ironic, feminist, vegetarian, Guardian-reading wife, Wendy.

They’ve disappeared. Their whole world of values to do with respect and concern for right-on political values – has ceased to exist. Instead we are in a dog-eat-dog world of late twentieth century London, where private wealth contrasts with public squalor and homelessness, where rural France is infested with shouty, posh, banker Brits.

Affair World

And where almost every character seems to be having an affair. Charlie and Judi’s marriage broke up, Patrick is unfaithful to Gemma with Pandora, but goes on to have an affair, be discovered and kicked out. Gemma is unfaithful to Charlie with not one but two lovers and Hervé cheats on his Paris girlfriend. Given half a chance Joubert would cheat on his wife, Martine. Even Gemma’s father, Michael Tate the dentist, had an affair with his receptionist while his wife was dying.

In other words, are in Middle-Class Affair World. We are in a world where almost everyone is being unfaithful to their spouses and partners, a world stiflingly familiar to me from all the other middle-class novels of our time about adultery and affairs, particularly those of Kingsley Amis or David Lodge, which I have reviewed elsewhere.

And a world I have never encountered except in books. I live in London and have brought up two children all the way through school. In those 18 years I only know of four couples who have got divorced, and am not aware of any long-running affairs. Certainly not aware of either men or women who have a new affair each year or are notorious for their philandering. I suppose it must happen, but not nearly as much as it happens in this kind of middle-class, middle-brow fiction. In the kind of genre Gemma Bovery belongs to, where it happens all the time.

Feminism

And I am a little staggered that the strongest thread in the 488 pages of the Weber comic omnibus is Simmonds’s persistent hectoring feminism, in strip after strip going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about the wickedness of the sexual stereotyping of women, the objectification of women, the leery association of women with sex and boobs and bras and kinky outfits…

She drew a memorable cartoon on the subject which, she explained, was a protest against the way Women in Cartoons were only treated as nymphets and sex objects by a sexist world which ignored all their other attributes and achievements…

The Seven Ages of Woman by Posy Simmonds

And yet… the central character of this book is a stunningly good-looking, gorgeous, pouting model, who makes men stop and stare when she walks by, who spends a fortune on sexy lingerie so she can drop her overcoat and reveal herself in all her splendour as an erotic pinup, and whose central activity is snaring and sleeping with men.

The story makes occasional mention of Gemma’s talent for painting and decorating, but hurries on to focus on what really matters – her relationships with men and, in particular, which one she is taking her clothes off and revealing her gorgeous, lithe, leggy nymphet body for.

Gemma stripping to her sexy underwear for Hervé (and for the reader)

Boobs. Gemma has great trim, shapely boobs and Simmonds draws them for our delectation, again and again.

Bare-naked Gemma in bed with her lover, Hervé (who is, however, distracted and worried)

Obviously Gemma keeps her clothes on most of the time but, if you flick through the book, the visual impression is of a streamlined, lithe and sexy babe, just hitting her physical and sexual prime, who loves dressing like a Victoria’s Secret sex model, and strips off and has sex again and again.

Maybe this is all some subtle way of subverting the male gaze, but it felt very much to me like encouraging the male gaze, and encouraging just about every sexist stereotype you can conceive about lithe, young, shapely women.

It is all a million miles away from downtrodden Wendy Weber and her big glasses and sensible dungarees and knitted pullovers and concern about poor people and immigrants and the environment, or the angry feminism of plain-jane art student Jocasta Wright, which dominated the Posy strip.

Who worries about the worriers? by Posy Simmonds (1986)

So it seemed to me that not only does Gemma Bovery depict the victory of Thatcherite values (the unabashed making and spending of money, basically) but also describes the triumph of a kind of post-feminist visual values of sexual fantasy and adultery. This kind of thing was consistently disapproved of in the Posy strip. In Gemma Bovery it is celebrated.

Coming to the book after experiencing the rigorous political correctness of the Posy strip makes it feel like the enemy has won, both thematically and visually.

Here’s a page of preparatory sketches Simmonds made for the character, showing Gemma about her favourite activities – shopping and wearing sexy underwear for her man.

If they’d been done by a man wouldn’t you say they were patronising, sexist and stereotyped, the kind of mindless shopper/sex doll clichés women have been fighting for centuries?

Joubert

In my reviews of the Posy cartoon collections I pointed out how frequently Simmonds used parody to make a point, copying classic paintings or putting satirical new words to well-loved carols and tunes.

Insofar as it is an extended modern take on Flaubert’s classic novel, Gemma Bovery seemed to me a triumph. It is a masterpiece of storytelling. The first time I read it I found myself seriously gripped by the book’s final pages, feverishly reading them faster and faster to discover the long-anticipated cause of Gemma’s death.

Presumably there will be millions of women readers who identify to a greater or lesser extent with Gemma’s well-meaning but confused inability to make up her mind about her men, with her ‘weakness’ in falling from one lover to another – but that part didn’t interest me so much.

By the end it was the figure of Joubert I found fascinating. In many respects a joke – without doubt a fantasist, a lecherous old man and a voyeur – he is also given the genuine imaginative power of making you believe there really is a malign destiny at work in the story. His obsession with the fictional Emma Bovary really does come to infuse the modern real-life story of Gemma.

Without Joubert Gemma Bovery would have simply been the story of a young woman who had a fling in France and died an accidental death. With him – stealing her diaries and filtering Gemma’s consciousness through his own morbid and lustful obsessions and suffusing everything with his over-awareness of the Flaubert novel – the narrative becomes something altogether richer, more complex and stranger.

The attention to detail paid to all the characters throughout Gemma Bovery is impressive and persuasive, creating a totally real world. But the invention of Joubert was a masterstroke.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 18, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, cartoon, Feminism, graphic novel, illustration

Posted by Simon on June 18, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/gemma-bovery-posy-simmonds/

Literary Life by Posy Simmonds (2003)

Front cover of Literary Life by Posy Simmonds (2003)

I’ve noticed that many of Simmonds’s books are not numbered. This slender hardback contains sixty-four pages of cartoons satirising all aspects of the literary life, from the panic of sitting in an empty room staring at a computer with writer’s block, to the backstabbing and paranoia of literary parties, to the loneliness of book signings, to the plight of small independent bookshops, and so on.

The obvious thing about this subject is its extreme obviousness. They say write about what you know, well what could be more familiar, and more hackneyed, clichéd and done to death, than the subject of a writer writing about writing – about the petty discomforts, the irritations, the niggling jealousy and petty rivalries and bitching and in-fighting and gossiping of the literary world.

What ‘serious’ novelist hasn’t written a book about a novelist writing a book or how tough it is being a writer or how hard it is coming up with new stuff, and so on and self-pityingly, narcissistically on…

Literary Life

Writer’s block Six frames showing a woman writer alone in her kitchen (apart from her cat, natch) struggling from 9.05 am to 12.30 pm to produce just one sentence and that one, in the end, one of venom and violence expressing her suppressed frustration.
Wintergreenes An independent bookshop which is being threatened because a vast branch of ‘Boulders’ has just opened down the road. Three characters, the plump middle-aged owner, Penny, a skinny girl assistant Zoe, and a stubbly angry young man who swears so much abuse at the new Boulders that Penny calls him in because he’s putting off the customers.
Wintergreenes Colin is still moaning about the new branch of Boulders up the road to which optimistic Penny replies that it’s a muzak-filled hypermarket whereas what their little shop offers is intimacy and personal service. Colin jaundicedly replies that what their shop offers is shelter from the rain for a couple of alcoholics and a mum with her shopping.
Time goes by… At a book launch a middle aged man tells his companion that when he was young, he used to get turned on by leggy young things dressed in short black skirts but nowadays he remembers they’re just from the publicity department and fantasises about… them selling more copies of his novel.
Panel A Q&A session at a literary festival. the joke is the panel consists of a kindly old buffer, a smart young woman, a stubbly dud smoking a fag and a broad serious-looking man, so that when a guy in the audience asks a question about so-and-so’s work being all about extreme violence and sadism and coprophilia and so on, we’re expecting him to be addressing stubbly bloke or broad serious bloke, but it turns out he’s talking about the works of the harmless looking old buffer in the half-rim glasses.

Q&A by Posy Simmonds (2002)

The same character in the right of the strip above (Owen), appears at home in a book-lined study reading a newspaper review to his wife and rejoicing because it slaughters the new book of a rival, right up till the moment that his wife points out that the only reason he hates his rival (Denton) is because he slept with her (the wife) at Oxford.
One big picture showing four adults on a long train journey trying to read their own books while an enthusiastic schoolgirl gives them a long, detailed explanation of the latest Harry Potter book. (The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published on 26 June 1997.)
Wintergreene The rep of a publishers makes his monthly visit and tries to interest Penny in their latest publication. She insists it is garbage, rubbish, with zero cultural value until the rep mentions that the same author’s last book sold 400,000… at which Penny swiftly changes her tune and says, Put me down for six.
A man’s soliloquy about moving to the country and joining the village reading group which gives an accurate and withering portrayal of all the petty jealousies and rivalries and irritations it causes.
Owen’s booksigning We learn that the rugged-face author we first met in the Q&A panel is named Owen Lloyd and we see him at a booksigning in a bookshop where no one at all stops by to buy a copy of his book. There is some bitter Simmonds satire because what we read is Lloyd’s maundering self pity about nobody coming up, the pity in the eyes of the booksellers and his PR agent, and how nobody, oh nobody, knows what it is like to be ignored, he thinks as… he and the pretty young publishers assistant walk right by a homeless man on the street begging for some change.
A teenage couple are in bed asleep when there’s a knocking at the door and they realise her parents have come home early. She opens the door an fraction to the suspicious parents but then completely diverts their attention by assuring them she is doing her revision and quoting from Keats. Mollified, they go away.
Enemies of promise A woman writer is trying to write in the stylish open plan house but is completely put off by the sound of her husband upstairs trying to give a bottle to their toddler, with accompanying commentary and chatter. Pity the poor woman writer in her luxury house!
Big single cartoon of a drinks party in a big bookshop and a middle-aged writer chatting up one of the short-skirted waitresses with the immortal line: ‘You know, you’re really beautiful… Have you ever thought of being a novelist?’
A cool, stubbly author in shades spends ten picture of the strip complaining like mad about how awful it is to be so successful and rich and be recognised everywhere and be bothered by fans all the time – his doleful friend uttering agreement – saying they just won’t leave him alone, take that couple of young women over there, they… they… but in fact the two women get up and simply walk out the bar… at which point the ‘successful’ author says ‘Bitches’.
Same young male author who we now learn is named Sean Poker and is ringing his agent because he’s been offered the opportunity to model for a new set of designer pants.
A woman writer in a nice Pringle sweater is sitting in a front room festooned with Christmas tree and cards (and accompanied by her cat, natch) as she reads through several paragraphs she’s written about the First World War till she comes to the word stuffing (‘kicked the battered armchair whose stuffing…) at which point she leaps up and runs outside to catch her husband who’s just getting into the car to go shopping, and tells him not to forget the stuffing.
At a literary party attended by Owen Lloyd a woman is explaining how she organised a petition to complain about some political cause. ‘And has there been a reaction?’ asks Owen. ‘You know, the usual predictable stuff,’ she replies, and what she means is there’s been a jealous outcry from all the authors who weren’t invited to join the petition.
Wintergreene In the local independent bookshop one customer is giving bother, dripping rainwater and coughing and sneezing over the books.

Wintergreene by Posy Simmonds

One big illustration showing a confident man leading his reluctant wife and friends on a big walk through the woods and pontificating: ‘… and when, you know, any minute we could all die of smallpox, or anthrax… you think “Why? Why does one write? What a futile occupation! What difference could a bloody book make to anything!?… and then you think, “No, come on… isn’t that something rather magnificent – sitting at one’s PC in the face of Armageddon?” And, that in a nutshell, is the theme of…’
Wintergreene Penny the owner tells skinny Zoe to be more polite so the next customer who comes in get the full ingratiating service and Zoe agrees to order three copies of a book which, it turns out, the lady ordering wrote herself and is published by a vanity press – at which pint Penny explodes with swearing and angriness, contradicting her own earlier strictures for Zoe to be polite, at which point… they both realise that trying to give up cigarettes is HELL, so that’s what the strip is really about.
Full page cartoon showing a big tall paunchy man in a suit on the phone in an open plan office complaining, at length, about the shoddy production values on a recent book…
Ecstasy Featuring the thickset author Owen Lloyd, he is surfing the internet looking to see how much copies of his novels are fetching on ebay and is gratified that first editions are fetching up to $790 until he comes across a copy which bears a personal inscription, which he remembers writing to the love of his life, and so is FURIOUS with her.
A big one-page cartoon showing various children’s characters (bears, giraffes, Alice in Wonderland I think) all drinking and smoking in a book-lined room, obviously at a sort of party for children’s book characters and one rabbit is asking another: ‘So how did you get into children’s publishing?’ and the other is replying, ‘Oh, it’s in the family… my father was a Flopsy Bunny’. As so often with Simmonds, you feel it’s clever without being actually funny.
A big, page-sized cartoon spoofing magazines aimed at women and their babies: this is called Your new Baby but ‘baby; is metaphor’ for book.
The Literary Three Three parody schoolgirls from a 1950s private school receive a book from their time-travelling Uncle Bill. It is a book about schoolgirls in 2003, for some reasons schoolgirls in New York whose parents are frightfully rich if divorced, and she and her friends play truant, nick things from shops, smoke joints and go all the way with boys.
A writer sits in a book-lined room with his laptop open, unable to write while he flips through TV channels, which are showing: 10 worst motorway pile-ups, Killer mud-slides, Killer bees, Hitler’s torturers, until he finally comes upon a channel showing Noddy, cheers up, and starts tapping away at his book.
A strip satirising a woman writer writing a sex scene who, the more feverish the scene becomes, the more intensely she focuses and writes. More to the point, the more brutal and primal the cartoon becomes, until drawn in wide, thick, primal lines. The couple she’s describing climax, and the writer leans back and lights herself a cigarette.

Writer’s orgasm by Posy Simmonds

Wintergreene Zoe is off to the local supermarket. The ‘joke’ is that she can buy books from the supermarket to stock their little independent bookshop cheaper than they can buy them from the publishers.
One large cartoon showing a tearful woman walking out on a bespectacled writer sitting in front of his computer, and saying: ‘Wait, Charlotte!.. You can’t leave me now, I haven’t finished my novel – I need your misery!’
A young woman tells her frumpy middle-aged mother that she’s packing in writing a book, and even being a reviewer, because she wants to be a full-time, stay-at-home mum. The mum gives a whole list of how horrible it will be to be so isolated and patronised and then cheerfully concludes, there’ll be a good polemical feminist book in it!
The national character Successive hikers come across a stand of daffodils and, in succession, fumble to quote the famous Wordsworth poem.
Dr Derek’s casebook Spoof advice column in which the twist is that Dr Derek gives ‘literary’ advice to struggling writers. Suzie X spends sits for hours and hours in her little room and nothing comes out. Yes, she has writer’s block!
Dr Derek’s casebook Vicki X comes about her husband, who’s developed a swollen head ever since he won the Booker Prize. Yes, he’s suffering from ‘swollen head’.
One big cartoon in which a couple well into middle-age are sitting in their book-littered front room and, to his great irritation, his wife is reading some of the old love letters he sent her.
Facts and fallacies No.6 Children’s picture books An extended satire on common misconceptions about children’s books i.e. they are written by women in Suffolk cottages, only take five minutes to think of the story, 98% of people who work in children’s publishing are called Emma, everyone who works in picture books are held in the highest esteem. — Reading a strip like this you get the impression that there is no aspect of her life which Posy Simmonds can not feel aggrieved about. It doesn’t strike me as at all funny, but a moan from someone who feels that their own picture books aren’t taken seriously enough.

Facts and Fallacies No. 6 by Posy Simmonds

Spot the differences Two large cartoons of a dad in his dressing gown in the family kitchen reading review of his new book in the paper watched by his wife and two little girls (and the cat). We are invited to ‘spot the difference’ between one picture in which ‘They rate it’ and the other picture in which ‘they hate it.’ I looked quite carefully and decided there are no differences except that in the ‘rate’ it one, the author, the wife and daughters and the cat are smiling. At about this point I wondered why I was bothering to read this book.
Pride and prejudice Jane Austen is invited to return from the Great Beyond and be given the full media treatment of an author i.e. rude and probing questions and decides, er, no thanks.
Facts and fallacies No.11: Publishers’ readers i.e. it is not a cushy little job, 97% of publishers’ readers are not multi-tasking home-makers, there is not a cabal of London writers who reject possible rivals, and so on.
A big, single cartoon satirising the vast multi-story, department store-style bookshop.

Department store bookshop by Posy Simmonds

Dr Derek’s casebook James X turns up at Dr Derek’s surgery bleeding, it’s one of the worst cases of ‘a critical mauling’ that he’s ever seen.
A modern woman is at home on the sofa watching the tennis, for nine frames. On the ninth she hears the front door opening, turns the telly off, and sneaks back into her study, which is where her husband, returning from taking the kids out for a walk, finds her pretending to be hard at work.
Dr Derek’s casebook Quite a humorous strip in which Dr Derek counsels novelist Colin X about how to do sex in novels properly i.e. cut the purple passages, don’t feel shy about using a rubber (to rub out embarrassing passages) and… once a chapter is quite normal!

Dr Derek’s casebook by Posy Simmonds

Le Déjeuner sur le Sable One big cartoon parodying Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe adapted to show three posy Brits sunning themselves in the South of France, with the main male figure reading Proust. — Simmonds has parodied this painting in at least two previous strips.

Le Déjeuner sur le Sable by Posy Simmonds

Dynaglobe’s summer party Once again we are with author Owen Lloyd as he attends the annual party given by publishing congolomerate, Dynaglobe. How he hates it, getting trapped with some stupendously successful airport novelist, who patronises him on his minuscule sales, the coven of women writers, either trying to rope him into discussion groups, or who you shagged last year and can’t remember their names, or a new young nymphet who you just start chatting up when you notice the gaggle of middle-aged women opposite all watching and tittering. He only goes so people know he’s still alive. — Having been to similar London parties of the well-heeled and successful I find this totally accurate and grimly depressing.
Nurse Tozer Quite a funny strip which extends the idea of Dr Derek, the literary doctor, over-wrought and on holiday he overhears some bronzed bimbo dismissing a book by Victor Hugo as ‘junk’ and explodes, explaining who Victor Hugo was and calling the woman a moron, until he is hustled away by ever-watchful Nurse Tozer, who then gives quite an interesting speech to the holiday woman about how popular literature comes in bite-sized chunks which wear down your brain. — This was a good strip because it felt like the comedy premise really bore up all the way through the strip.
Writer’s problems No.4 How to create a buzz An unnamed male author complains that, although he has written three successful crime novels, he has never created a buzz, his real-life persona is too boring, he doesn’t take drugs or have affairs, he loved his parents etc. The strip then ironically recommends that next time he’s at a literary party he takes a pair of rubber gloves, blows one up, places it over his head, then lets it go and it will blow round the room creating… a tremendous buzz!
seasonal traditions in the book trade No.2 Spotting the Christmas turkeys The three staff at the independent bookshop, Wintergreene, which we’ve come to know through several strips – owner Penny, slender sprite Zoe and stubbly earnest young man Colin – are depicted reading the publishers’ catalogues for the upcoming Christmas period and taking the mickey out of the synopses of the direst-sounding books – ‘lifts the lid off media-folk in Alderley Edge…’, ‘… an epistolary novel done in text messages…’, ‘… another bloody book about moving to a Provençal village…’
One enormous cartoon showing a disgruntled author (Nat Tarby) in a vast modern bookstore all set and ready to do a book-signing with piles of his books on the table in front of him and… not a customer in sight. — I feel like Simmonds has depicted this scene of the disappointing book-signing at least 3 or 4 times already. She may think it’s endlessly funny, but once was sort of enough.

Murder at Matabele Mansions: A Christmas Mystery

A six-page graphic short story, a murder mystery in which woman Detective Sergeant Stoker phones Detective Inspector Collar from a crime scene at the back of a mansion block. The body of unpopular second-hand book-seller Godfrey Fibone, 58, is found round the back of Matabele Mansions, apparently in the act of carrying a black bin liner out to the dustbins he slipped and cracked his head.

However, Stoker and Collar notice that the contents of the bin-liner are strangely inappropriate for a man who lived alone, including dirty nappies (he had no children), tea bags, a curry TV dinner, and cat food tins (he didn’t own a cat).

So they set about interviewing all the inhabitants of the mansions – which gives Simmonds an opportunity to display here gift for characterisation, not only in drawing but in the very dense text which describes each of the dead man’s neighbours, being:

Viv and Chris Collins-Smith, website designers
June Tozer, divorcee and masseuse
Gavin Boyce, novelist
rude Dennis Buttril
Mrs Kowalski, entertaining her daughter and son-in-law to dinner
Tim Makepeace, a research chemist
Ian MacDire, worked for British Telecom

Next day forensics confirm Fibone was murdered, then carried out to where he was arranged as if he’d slipped and had an accident. The detritus n the bin bag, combined with what the two police learned in their interviews, should be enough for the reader to work out who the murderer was. Can you work it out?

Cinderella

Another six-page graphic short story, starts with Desmond Duff, 85, inhabitant of an old people’s home (alert readers will remember that Desmond featured as the man of the month for April in the calendar for 1988 which Simmonds drew for the Spectator).

He and his fellow inhabitant, Joan, learn the owners are throwing a lavish Christmas party to which residents are not invited. As they hear the first sounds of music a fairy god-daughter appears and gives them their wish, giving them back their youths, making Desmond a very smart, svelte 20-something, and Joan a stylish young lady in a ball gown and fur. But they must be back in the home by midnight.

They set off to the party and make quite a splash, Desmond impressing with his suavity, Joan being immediately chatted up by a lothario who invites her out to his car for a bit of slap and tickle. Several guests trigger Desmond into giving a blistering lecture about how miserable it is living in their hosts’ old people’s home, how they’re treated like crap, the accommodation is rotting, the food is dismal, and is in mid-flow when he hears the clock ringing midnight and so runs out into the snow where he transforms back into his 85-year-old body…

Finds himself in the car park where the young Lothario emerges partly unbuttoned and holding a slipper, describes how he was in a passionate clinch with the ravishing young beauty who suddenly wriggled out of his grasp and ran off, leaving only a slipper behind. Clutching the slipper, he stumbles back into the party and old Joan comes out of her hiding place behind a car, embraces Desmond, says ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ and they potter slowly back towards the home.

But there is a happy end note. Desmond’s rant in the party, in front of lots of influential guests, has spurred the owners to make improvements, sort out the smell on the stairs and fix Desmond’s radiator etc, and generally fuss over Desmond and Joan. So it’s a happy ending! Cheers!

Thoughts

The subject of writers, authors, novelists agonising, writer’s block, book-signings and endless literary parties – I don’t think any subject could bore me more. A few of the strips or cartoons are amusing, but most are wearing, or positively depressing.

The interest, such as it is, comes from the extraordinary variety of cartooning styles which Simmonds deploys. There’s:

the spoof true romance style of the Dr Derek strip, where the characters all have the same kind of chiselled angular outlines
the freestanding humorous cartoon of the department story-style book warehouse, where all the figures have softened rounded outlines
the facts and fallacies strip which, along with the Owen Lloyd cartoons, has a looser drawing style and is meant to create a much wider variety of faces and characters
the sketchy loose, unfinished lines of the Writer’s orgasm strip, which starts loose and then deliberately becomes bold and fragmented to visually make the point
the ‘cartoon realism’ of the Wintergreene strips – in the one above look at the tremendous attention to detail paid in the opening picture which depicts the shop frontage in the rain, or the third picture which shows the geography of the shop’s interior, dominated by a stand of books in the foreground which divides the disapproving owner on the left and browsing punter on the right
the Le Déjeuner sur le Sable style, which is so loose and scratchy that bits of it could almost be by Quentin Blake
and the Writers’ panel at the top of this review which has realism of a sort – witness the microphones in front of the speakers – but a sort of wobbly or wonky realism – the microphones aren’t drawn with the same razor sharp precision as the exterior of the Wintergreene shop – instead it is a realism softened or mollified in order to bring out the variety of human faces in the audience and on the panel – it is just enough realism to create a space in which comic types can exist

These are all distinct drawing or cartooning styles (plus some others I haven’t mentioned) which Simmonds has mastered and can deploy at will. It’s an impressive display of versatility and virtuosity.

So for me, there are half a dozen funny strips in the book (if their aim is to be funny or entertaining) but the real pleasure to be had derives from Simmond’s impressive mastery of the craft of drawing, her fluency and versatility.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 17, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, cartoon, Feminism, literature

Posted by Simon on June 17, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/literary-life-posy-simmonds/

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Frank Bowling

Nine rooms

Room 1 Early work

Room 2 Photographs into paintings

Room 3 The map paintings

Room 4 The poured paintings

Room 5 – Cosmic Space

Three D

Room 7 – Water and Light

Room 8 – Layering and stitching

Room 9 Explosive experimentation

Summary

Demographics

Curators

The promotional video

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The hundred years war lasted more than a hundred years

It see-sawed between prolonged periods of war, and long periods of truce

Historical origins of the war

Edward III’s claim to the throne of France

A maze of powers and alliances

Famous highpoints

Famous characters

Seward’s account

The chevauchée – death and destruction

Loot

Mercenaries

Conclusion

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The twelfth century

1. Courtly love and love lyrics

2. Penitential and moral lyrics

3. Devotional lyrics

4. Miscellaneous lyrics

Luminarium

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The pronunciation

Read out loud

Scansion

Music

Amended spelling

Conclusion

I sing of a mayden

Rhythm and repetition

Four categories

The frailty of man’s estate

Wele and wo

Luminarium

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Episodes

Henry III and Prince Edward

Edward I (1272-1307) ‘a great and terrible king’

Edward II (1307-27)

Edward III (1327-77)

The Black Death

Richard II (1377-1399)

First crisis 1386-88

Second crisis 1397-99

The Plantagenet Legacy

The Wilton Diptych

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Sheffield Children’s Hospital

The King of the Golden River

Moonlight travellers

Mouse on a Tricycle

**The chevauchée – d**eath and destruction