Edwin Drood and the Magician's Hand

 Dickens knew that you would know exactly who killed Edwin Drood, and that doesn't matter, because the magician has already told you you're about to witness a trick, but you can't look away from the hand anyway, even as the other hand steals your watch and conceals the ace.

So forget that The Mystery of Edwin Drood isn't finished—deep down, you know what happens anyway—and remember that Dickens isn't there to found the long line of detective puzzles games, meant to snap together in an instant only when the reading is done, because Drood has already drawn you into a maze of illusions, and the reversal is that the thing you thought you had to figure out is not the mystery before you.

Perhaps no one is what they seem: the genteel choir-master is an opium addict, but that's just the first card. The confident young gentleman-protagonist is a victim, gone with all his flaws. The childish, pretty girl is sensible and compassionate. The staid boarding school mistress is a social butterfly. The dusty lawyer is a closet romantic (of course he was in love with Rosa's mother). The exotic orphans, brother and sister, will swap roles and identities. They're all masters of disguise, except the one person who really is in disguise, right Dick Datchery?

And Cloisterham, the staid, quiet, dusty cathedral town? Well, most of that dust is from monuments and corpses. Seen through Durdles' eyes, Cloisterham is a sepulcher, concealing death as much as the cathedral elevates solid English Christianity. And remote? Perhaps, but the toxic traces of empire are everywhere—tea, china, spices, exotic preserves, opium itself are products of imperial trade. The predictable, conventional racism that Jasper leverages to land suspicion on Neville Landless is itself just a thin cover, a pretext, to deflect from how deeply every part of of old England, the nostalgic version that Cloisterham would seem to celebrate, is compromised and transformed by (and complicit in) Victoria's sprawling empire, from Sri Lanka to Egypt.

Dickens never made it back to London and never finished the manuscript, but every time you go back to it, you're struck by how the structure of the murder is already there; it's the world itself that's a labyrinth of images, every character a mystery.

Our American Podsnap

Since Trump captured the presidency of the United States (you could not say he won by any merit of his own, and in fact Hilary Clinton has now a significant lead in the popular vote), I've been wondering if there was a literary clue to the reasons for this mess.

Well, Dickens has a word for part of it: Podsnappery.

There are, of course, many reasons for this distressing loss, many of them deplorable: resurgent white nationalism, racism, misogyny, and plain bigotry, the failure of neoliberalism on the political left and right, and these things are deeply enmeshed. But given that the US electoral system gives undue weight to votes in certain states, we must surely look to the edge cases, the margins, to detect the reasons for the swings on both sides, and here Dickens presents us with Podsnappery.

I have wondered why voters in a democracy, furnished not just with the facts and opinion of the media, but with the candidate's own words, could make a decision so fatal to the interests of the nation, not to mention the world. Some of them, poor, white, not college educated and rural, mired in the slow decay of their living standards and education, weary of false hope, were yet grasping at political straws. But a good many were neither poor nor disadvantaged, and the question is how against all good reason they could vote for a less than competent property speculator, TV star, and populist, with a taste for commercial fraud, insults, sexual assault, and unrepentant lying. The answer is: Podsnappery.

Merriam-Webster helpfully defines Podsnappery as: "an attitude toward life marked by complacency and a refusal to recognize unpleasant facts."

So Dickens describes Mr. Podsnap, the namesake of this attitude:

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness--not to add a grand convenience--in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction. 'I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss it; I don't admit it!' Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him.

Here we have, I think, the refusal to recognize Trump for what he is, a serial liar, a privileged set of failures in search of validation. In the fortress of his (and her) satisfaction, the American Podsnap can safely ignore inconvenient facts, like Trump's contempt for facts, his shady dealings, his praise for tyrants, his promotion of cronies and bigots, the advantages his schemes will confer on the already wealthy, while forcing the nation further into debt. The American Podsnap can ignore sexism and racism. The American Podsnap can ignore the harms that Trump's position on taxes and healthcare will inflict on the poor.

Many have sought change in the American political system, but many of those in positions of privilege who nevertheless choose Trump are content to invoke change for it's own sake, with no thought of the consequences to the world, or others. The issues are swept behind them, so many exaggerations, mean words and tweets, the inconvenience of human rights, inequality and globalization, climate change, mere unpleasantries.

Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, 'Not English!' when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away.

It remains to be seen what else may be swept away in the wake of a Trump administration -- and what may be recovered afterwards. The last thing to do now is lose faith in democracy or the virtues of the republic. But what Dickens returned to, from Bleak House to Our Mutual Friend, is that society is not singular, and that the Podsnaps cannot isolate themselves in their small worlds from injustice or folly. Perhaps now we need the novelist's satire to pierce their complacency, before that reckoning is due.

We need to talk about Conrad

Clive James's recent essay on re-reading Joseph Conrad reminds me of a writer I have not read consistently for over a decade, but whose work, like Dickens', has a persistent influence. I have on my shelves a rather fine hard-bound collection of Conrad's major works: the best of which, not counting the superb Heart of Darkness, are Lord Jim and Nostromo.

As James points out, Conrad's work anticipates with startling clarity the grand terrors of the modern world: revolution and totalitarianism, political violence, terrorism, and the disorder we see presently from Africa to the Middle-east and beyond. Whereas Dickens turned his fiercest satire on his contemporaries, Conrad focused his irony on colonialism and what we might class as issues of globalization, the open, shifting world of the seafarer.

It strikes me that Conrad anticipated so much: in Nostromo the "material interest" in the great silver mine that dominates the novel and drives the central conflict could stand as a precursor to our  corrupting material interest in fossil fuels, the toxic treasure trove of the Middle-east. As Mrs. Gould realizes at the end of the novel,  the colonial intervention, even when idealistic and successful, is also a form of oppression: "She saw the San Tome mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than any government; ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness." This is a strange prescience into Western interventions: as these material interests bring both wealth and "development", they also corrupt the best moral intentions, sowing the seeds of resistance and revolution, and pitiless conflict, in return.

Conrad's ability to wed the action and danger of a thriller to substantial moral scope and purpose, to show without judging, to examine evil as well as good without flinching or hedging, is a heavy challenge for any writer. In his characters we often see how idealism, the illusion which we create to sustain our sense of self, also leaves us blind to the fatal realities of ourselves and others. It's certainly time to revisit Conrad and remind ourselves just how precise his insights were.

Leafing through Nostromo, I realized that several characters in A Hangman for Ghosts share names with characters in that novel. This was entirely unconscious, but the background to this murder mystery is a colonial venture, and the protagonist is a fallen idealist. I hope the reader will of course see one or two Dickensian ghosts in the story, but I wonder now how the spirit of Conrad inhabits the novel as well.

What would Dickens do?

Dickens was a great popular writer, but he was also, in a way rarely seen today, a political writer, and his social criticism should not be buried in the convenient backwater of Victoriana.

Dickens was a social conservative with the imagination of a radical. That is, while he accepted implicitly the middle-class assumptions of the Victorian patriarchy — hard work, the nuclear family, sensible commercial ambition — his sympathies were with the weak, the exploited, the strange and the fanciful, the dispossessed and struggling. And he was far too aware of the power and richness of language to be impressed by pettifoggery, hypocrisy, complacency and indifference, which he attacked at every turn with greater and greater sophistication.

Do you want to imagine what privatised education and charter-schools can devolve into? Reread Nicholas Nickelby. Do you think that corporate interests in collusion with state power always supports innovation? Then read Little Dorrit and take the Circumlocation Office as a warning. Do you think that rationalist economics based on metrics can conjure up human happiness? Check your copy of Hard Times again. Do you dream that the revolution and the apotheosis of state power will be the path to universal freedom? Read A Tale of Two Cities.

So, what would Dickens do in response to the plainly inequitable, the profoundly Scrooge-ish and strangely regressive budget recently produced by the Australian Federal Government under Tony Abbott? Dickens was instrumental in projecting the idea in the English public that the Australian colony could be a nation of opportunity rather than a place of incarceration and punishment. Whatever his reaction, the sheer hypocrisy and political malfeasance of claiming equal sacrifice while rewarding the wealthy and attacking the weakest would surely have attracted his most ferocious attention.

The humanities "crisis" - a perspective

This piece in The New York Times on 'The Real Humanities Crisis' lays out the case pretty clearly. As a writer and a scholar in the humanities (first English Literature, now Creative Writing) this concerns me closely.

As the article notes, and I've mentioned before, talented writer, musicians and artists cannot make a practical living by their craft, and must pursue secondary, less fulfilling jobs as though they were careers. Even so, these Arts graduates earn less over time. And in universities (as at the University of Canterbury, as reported here), the corporatist pressure to profit and commercialise means that the Arts are steadily dismissed, devalued and defunded.

There are many reasons for this decline, and the causes differ in different contexts. But at all levels, managerial and corporatist thinking, an emphasis on economic rationales and benefits, have pushed humanities to the periphery.

I also believe that the humanities sometimes failed to push back, and the discipline compromised itself at many points. In English Literature, the rush towards theory, particularly deconstruction, which began (tardily) in the late eighties in New Zealand, opened the door to willed obtuseness of language and impenetrable thinking, rejecting imagination, memory and experience in favour of abstraction and the mechanical moves of deconstructive reading. The discourse of theory presented itself temptingly as a technology, a paradigm and a technical language, which in the fervour of post-modernism and post-humanism distanced criticism from writing and human creativity. This is not to reject theory, because it was necessary and useful to set aside preconceptions and to reconsider language and meaning in the literary text, but to say that literary theory and the denial of meaning and authorial agency it implied to many people led the study of literature into its own backwater. Literary theory, embedded in its own technical jargon, could not mount an effective defence against the ideology of the management technocracy.

Is there a way out? For starters, the skills that the humanities prefer — critical thinking, writing, knowledge of the genealogies and trends of human culture — are required universally, and urgently. I've argued elsewhere that we are drowning in 'word junk', that fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thinking, particularly in management culture, which has certainly brought us few real rewards outside of the constant process of rising inequalities and aimless restructuring. Having worked in the corporate sector for many years, I can say that there are no skills here that a degree in commerce or business management would have provided that cannot be acquired with ease in the course of the job, or by the simple application of order and good sense, whereas skills in research, thinking and design, as well as clear communications, are all grounded in my university studies. But there is a danger in pursuing this too far and packaging graduate skills as if they were a commodity. Selling education for its commercial utility alone lends too much credence to the notion of learning as a product that has led the humanities to this pass.

In Hard Times, Dickens was well aware of the dangers of this rigidly utilitarian way of thinking. The people need education, no doubt, but human beings also need to dream, to imagine and to be entertained. We still need to escape the dominant perspective, the market, the office, the ideology, the industrial complex that confines thought and creativity. Over the years, new ideas have emerged to 'save' the humanities: data-mining and digital humanities, Darwinist criticism, neurocriticism, but all of these offer another technology, another narrow approach. What will rescue the humanities is the practice of the humanities: writing and reading and an opening of critical perspectives. Theory can formalise and encourage insight into literature, but only more reading, more writing, more stories and more human experience will bring us back to literature. The humanities, after all, represent the study of human creativity, the one field that can always surprise and escape us. The humanist goal is to aspire to our fullest potential, our fullest awareness of ourselves. There can be no humanism if we cannot consider, articulate and study what it means to be human. We need universities, artists, Arts and Arts graduates to do that.

Resolve, write, revise

A particularly interesting piece (for the practising writer as well as reader) in the Boston Globe on how technology and our ideas about writing and expression have changed writers' approach to the business of drafting and revision.

I draft, I revise, I revise again. To my mind, the process is like transforming a sketch into a painting: laying down rough marks, and redrawing and colouring until the final work emerges.

Dickens, writing from number to number in serialisation, had an opportunity to correct the page-proofs based on his hand-written pages but could never return to drafting and reviewing his work. Although later in his career he relied on more notes and memoranda to plan, there remains a directness and unrehearsed liveliness about his writing that our careful processes of word-processing and editing cannot capture.

This may be what we lose by revision, but for the mystery writer, revision is also the power to refine the mystery even as the first draft becomes a rougher series of notes and approximations, an exploration of the idea rather than its final expression.

The End of Dickens's 200th

It's now the end of the bicentennial year of Dickens's birth: a great year for Dickens scholars and writers. As the next year starts, I can only speculate about how strangely Dickens's concerns come back to us in new forms, how poverty and need and the intransigence and short-sightedness of power - frequent themes and tensions in his work - recur with equal urgency two-hundred and one years later.

This year, I'm encouraged by the generous reviewers on Goodreads and the support of my readers to begin a new mystery. There will be a Dickensian link (perhaps subtly so), and a thematic connection to The Raven's Seal, but I am also inspired by some other favourite authors (Conrad in particular) and new experiences to move in an interesting direction.

Literary names and updates

I was thinking recently that someone ought to, if there wasn't already, make a study of the function of names in literature. In an odd instance of synchronicity, it seems that that book is here: Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature by Alastair Fowler, reviewed in the London Review of Books (linked).

Several readers have noticed that I take a suggestive or descriptive approach to names in The Raven's Seal. This is not just a Dickensian technique, though Dickens was a master namer, but a way to tag or expose something about a character that can be wonderfully evocative. In fact, there are several buried clues to character in The Raven's Seal that I'm waiting for an astute reader to notice, but even if they remain unseen, they add something to the texture and sense of a character.

There is a very warm review of The Raven's Seal on the historical novels society site, and in this guest post for the Historical Fiction Society I write a little about composing The Raven's Seal and the way historical details were brought into and shaped the story.

Dickens and his 'mysteries'

I'm back from travelling in the USA, stopping in Nashville and San Francisco. San Francisco, wonderful city that it is, puts me in mind of Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon.

I admire the classics of American 'hard-boiled' mystery, particularly Hammett and Chandler, because these mysteries, with their intense action and dynamic interaction between the detective and the crime, are so different from the detached English style of detective fiction. It reminds me that there really is no one kind of mystery, and that a mystery plot is not necessarily confined to an intricate, logical puzzle with a definable solution, conducted solely as a game between author and reader.

Dickens, for instance, was drawn to mysteries and mystery plots. He dropped a murder into Bleak House, and we can be pretty sure that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was going to be the portrait of a murderer, but he resisted the idea that he would use mystery to baffle, trick or even fool the reader. The guilty figure in a Dickensian mystery is usually pretty clear (see 'Hunted Down', for example). Dickens used mystery to create suspense, to draw us into stories, to make the reader wonder, and also to illuminate the darker recesses of the human mind. Dickens did not want his reader to solve a mystery, but to experience many mysteries. His detectives could show a sharp light on certain events, but the light also made the shadows dance.

The ‘Dickensian’ and The Raven’s Seal

Novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in the Chicago Tribune, acknowledges a Dickensian influence on his new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England.

Amis says Dickens ‘isn't really a realist. Accurate social criticism is not his great strength; his great strengths are exaggeration and melodrama and comedy. It's a melodramatic form, the Dickensian novel — a magical transformation, with a sort of fairy-tale vocabulary or furniture behind this amazingly vivid picture of London....’

Amis’s comment had me thinking again about the Dickensian. To me, this word summons up not just the rich texturing of character and place and fairy-tale plots, but an extraordinary imaginative density and energy of style. Accuracy is not the point; the range of his sympathies, his irony, anger and penetrating humour are what makes Dickens' social criticism not only pointed but universal. 

This is what inspired me about using Dickens as a source for The Raven’s Seal. I aimed for a richness, and sometimes a complexity, of language that could create a lively sense of scene, which could be comic or melodramatic but never static. I wanted vivid characters rather than psychological portraits (although I hope that many of the characters are psychologically interesting). The prison was not only a Dickensian motif but an ideal setting for social criticism, still relevant because so much hinges on wealth and poverty, crime and punishment, the law and injustice, prisons and policing. And The Raven’s Seal is structured by at least a couple of Dickensian reversals of fortune which have that fairy-tale Romance flair about them. One of them, of course, is Grainger’s fall into the prison. The mystery hinges on the other. And the last thing I took from Dickens was a conviction that mystery need not just be a puzzle but the thematic core of a novel.