Guest review by C J Driver: THE MOTH AND THE MOUNTAIN by Ed Caesar

"This is a man who can't turn back, won't turn back, doesn't turn back ..."

Jonty Driver has kept himself busy in lockdown working with a local firm, Artwrite of Rye, to produce four booklets of his poems, some illustrated by himself, and a card, The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek, a poem and a painting. The booklets are: Image & Image, some old photographs & a dozen unrhymed sonnets; The Journey Back; The Chinese Poems, 1979-2020; and A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt & other poems. All are available from Artwrite. See more on Jonty's website.

I’d better start by mentioning that, though I didn’t teach him, Ed Caesar was a pupil at Wellington College when I was Master there. I admitted him to the school in 1993 as a non-fee-paying Foundationer because his father had been killed on active service with the Royal Navy in 1982. After taking a degree from Edinburgh, Ed has made a successful career for himself as a journalist and is now writing books too: the first, Two Hours, was about the marathon and the chances of someone’s breaking two hours to run it. This one is about an attempt in 1934 by a brave but largely deluded Englishman to be the first to climb to the top of Everest. 

“By any rational measure, he (Maurice Wilson) had not the tiniest chance of reaching the summit.” The third son of a Yorkshire family, he had fought through  the First World War, joining as a private and then being commissioned, and winning a Military Cross for his bravery. Recovered from his wounds, but still mentally damaged, he had left Bradford and emigrated to New Zealand. After various mishaps, marital and otherwise, he returned to the UK and then settled on a scheme to buy an aeroplane to fly, solo, to the lower slopes of Mount Everest, and then to climb the mountain, on his own. He didn’t know how to fly, and he had never climbed a mountain. But he does fly solo all the way to India in his Moth, and evades all efforts to stop him getting to the mountain. And he does set off to climb what no one has climbed before.

It is an extraordinary story, garnered from a variety of sources, including Wilson’s own diary and letters he wrote to a woman he was in love with (she was married to someone else). Ed Caesar is, I think, meticulously truthful; he doesn’t pretend to know what he can’t know and, when he guesses, he makes it clear that he is guessing. In the end, the story becomes somehow close to tragic: this is a man who can’t turn back, who won’t turn back, who doesn’t turn back, even when any rational being would realise he can’t survive. I found the book utterly absorbing, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Moth and the Mountain is published by Viking

See also: Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

Guest review by C J Driver: ITALIAN LIFE by Tim Parks

 

"I wondered, as I read on, often amused by the wit and sometimes horrified by the satire, just how Italian readers would react. Accurate depiction? Wild exaggeration?"

Jonty Driver has kept himself busy in lockdown working with a local firm, Artwrite of Rye, to produce four booklets of his poems, some illustrated by himself, and a card, The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek, a poem and a painting. The booklets are: Image & Image, some old photographs & a dozen unrhymed sonnets; The Journey Back; The Chinese Poems, 1979-2020; and A Winter’s Day at Westonbirt & other poems. All are available from Artwrite. See more on Jonty's website.

Because I had enjoyed Tim Parks’s Italian Neighbours (1992) and An Italian Education (1996), when I saw Italian Life advertised I wanted to read that too. I am under a marital embargo to buy no more books unless I get rid of a similar number to the Amnesty bookshop, so I had to read it on my wife’s Kindle. I found the book so entertaining, sometimes savagely satirical, often wise, I read it in only a couple of days; but of course now I can’t rely on my usual habit of paging back to find names and stunning quotations. I’ve never been able to rely too much on memory and have needed slips of paper posted at the relevant pages. There is I know some way of highlighting passages when one reads a Kindle, but every time I have tried that I’ve lost my place.

Italian Life is, I think, best described as a novel, and one might narrow that definition down to a “campus novel”, though I suspect it could well come into that increasingly common category, a memoir purporting to be a novel. Tim Parks obviously knows about Italian universities, as he taught at one in Milan from 1993-2019. One of the two central characters is called James, a middle-aged English expatriate teaching in a northern Italian university; the other is Valeria, a post-graduate working on a doctoral thesis. Around them are family and friends, and above them some monsters, especially the Vice Chancellor of the university, Rector Ottone, and his sycophantic side-kick, Professoressa Modesto.

The book is about much more than campus politics: the discussions of Italian clannishness, which might be called just as easily tribalism, the contrast of north and south, the cross-referencing to classics of Italian literature, the details of Italian food and drink, the details of family loyalties and obligations, all more than justify the title: this is genuinely Italian LIFE, not just Italian higher education. I wondered, as I read on, often amused by the wit and sometimes horrified by the satire, just how Italian readers would react. Accurate depiction? Wild exaggeration?

What I hadn’t realised, until I did a bit more research on Tim Parks’ literary career, was just how much he had written other than the three books mentioned here. My next step is going to be to read more by him. I don’t think I’ll bother with the books about football; I’ve always preferred the eccentric bounce of the rugby ball to the predictable flight of the soccer ball - but the book about Italian railways looks interesting, and then there are novels galore. The question is: can I somehow get around the wife’s embargo without giving away too many of the books I want to keep?

Italian Life is published by Harvill Secker.

See also Jonty Driver's post on A Book of Friends: in honour of J M Coetaee on his 80th birthday

Lockdown Sunday extra: C J Driver on A BOOK OF FRIENDS In Honour of J.M.Coetzee on his 80th Birthday

"An absorbing corollary to the work of a great writer."

C J Driver in 1963

C.J. (“Jonty”) Driver was for many years a teacher – in Africa, Hong Kong and England - and latterly a headmaster, now living in East Sussex, he travels regularly to his country of birth, South Africa. Elected President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students, he was held in solitary confinement by the South African police in 1964 on suspicion of involvement in the African Resistance Movement. While a postgraduate at Trinity College, Oxford, he was refused renewal of his passport and was stateless until he became a British citizen. He remained in effect a prohibited immigrant in South Africa until 1992. He has been honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia since 2007, a judge of the Caine Prize for African Writing and more recently has had residencies at the Liguria Study Centre in Bogliasco, at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and at the Hawthornden Writers’ Retreat. He has published five novels (the first four of which have recently been re-issued by Faber Finds), two biographies, two memoirs, and seven books of poetry, the most recent Before, published in 2019 by Crane River in association with the African Sun Press. The Uhlanga Press will publish, later this year or early in 2021, Still Further, New Poems 2000-2019.

I need to be utterly upfront about what follows, because it clearly teeters on the edge of nepotism. I want to recommend a book mainly commissioned and entirely edited by my sister, Professor Dorothy Driver, as a way of honouring on his 80th birthday someone she calls her "life-companion", whom it happens I've known since 1958 (actually longer than she and he have been together): J.M.Coetzee, novelist, autobiographer, academic, twice Booker Prize winner, Nobel Prize winner, and so on.

A Book of Friends was published earlier this year. There is a preface by my sister, a foreword by Professor Jonathan Lear; and a range of contributions by some 35 other writers, including a poem by me. The range is wide: for obvious reasons, I'm not a person who could review the book objectively, but there are bits and pieces there which I think deserve reading and re-reading – or looking at more than once. For instance, reproduced as "Images". there are (among others) reproductions of two paintings by David Coetzee, John's brother; some photos by Kai Easton of John's cycling trips in France; Adam Chang's portrait of John; and a double-page "picture-plus" by William Kentridge.

Some of the entries were written specially for this festschrift; other are extracts from works in progress. It's not a great surprise that not every piece is as riveting as every other. I found myself especially interested in Nicholas Jose's story, Evvy After, which includes James Joyce's story Eveline, Dubliners 1914, as an intertext. I loved Peter Goldsworthy's very funny piece which begins when he is asked at a literary conference if he has ever met the "great Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello". There are interesting poems by Marlene van Niekerk, Antjie Krog, Akwe Amosu and others. I enjoyed what I think is an extract from a memoir by Siri Hustvedt.

Unsurprisingly, this is an international collection. Partly as a result, some of the writers included were entirely new to me, and I was glad to have a fairly extensive description of the contributors to help me place them. Although John is South African by birth, upbringing, education and most of his years, he has now emigrated to Australia; he has taught in the Americas, north and south, and his polymathic brilliance means that he is regularly invited to literary festivals and conferences in countries beyond the English-speaking world. I don’t know how widely available the book is going to be even within the continents of its publication, Australia and South Africa, but I would nevertheless recommend it heartily. For those who can’t get a physical copy of the book, there is an ebook available.

I have never not enjoyed reading what John Coetzee now calls simply “writings”, because he wants to blur the boundaries of genre. I would recommend as specially memorable and likely to become classics what I would still call novels: Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and Disgrace. I won't be around to have my judgement vindicated, but those are the three “writings” I would start with if I had never come across his work before. When you have read them, perhaps even before you get to them, I think you would find A Book of Friends an absorbing corollary to the work of a great writer.

A Book of Friends, In Honour of J.M.Coetzee on his 80th Birthday, is published in Australia (by Text Publishing) and in South Africa (by Amazwi Museum of South African Literature) 

J M Coetzee