Bookish-Dreaming

Dreams of Pasts

by

Gillian Polack

One of my favorite Medieval poems is a Middle English version of “Ubi sunt,” written down in the thirteenth century (the manuscript is Digby 86). Let me give you my slightly modernised version of the opening:

Where beth they biforen us weren,
Houndes laden and hauekes beren
And hadden feld and ewode?
The riche leuedies in hoere bour,
That wereden gold in hoere tressour
With hoere brightte rode;

Eten and drounken and maden hem glad;
Hoere lif was al with gamen I-lad

It asks us where they were who went before, with all their wonder and the richness of their lives, but it’s a piece with a moral. The key is religion, as it so often is in the Middle Ages. What sticks in my mind, always, isn’t the religious aspect, however: it’s the nostalgic. My favourite lines (adapted a bit) start “Where is that laughing and that song” and move to “All that joy has gone away, that wellness is turned to wellaway.”

The memory is important. It’s a memory with a moral, but still, it’s the hounds and the hawks and the ladies in their bower that linger, long. It’s better in Middle English and in Latin, but it’s strong in any language. This is because nostalgia has powerful roots in English-speaking culture. Fond pasts speak to all of us.

What’s gone is emotionally satisfying when the memory of it is expressed in precisely the right way. It’s one of the reasons the Middle Ages is so popular and why Arthur and Robin Hood and other heroes appear over and over in our anecdotes. Themes and tropes and snippets of history trigger echoes of ideas and concepts and make us feel a kind of wistful memory. Nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one of my favourite aspects of fantasy writing. I’m taking notes for this piece while sitting in a critiquing circle and the draft novel we’re discussing is stuffed full of memories and links and hearkening to times past and novels once read. This element of fantasy novels goes back—not to Tolkien—but to Tolkien’s sources, to Middle English and Old English and Latin and Old French poems. Our written culture has been imbued with these ideas since the day that written culture began.

When I’m asked to explain why I love particular books, I have to say that memories for a past we’re supposed to share can be very, very important. It’s that sense of “Ubi sunt.” Of “Where are…” I'm not the only reader to love Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising for the crisp snow of an early winter and the smell of fresh bread broken and the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer and the hissing of the water as the horseshoe is cooled. It’s an echo of a Christmas card, the ‘home’ of the Norah of Billabong novels, a home that many Australians still treasure even though we left it a hundred years ago and more.

Nostalgia plays a key part in a whole range of fantasy novels. Not full memories and a complete past—that’s the province of historical fiction—but a half-remembered history, fading and elusive and evocative. Our memories build it up into something different and more romantic. Our tales explore the elusive and the romantic and our imaginations spin with the excitement of a past that is more half-memory than reality.

Steampunk is the ultimate sub-genre of nostalgia. It takes wisps of a tangle of the nineteenth century and it weaves whole fabric from the nostalgia. It’s that half-memory that makes it so strong and so appealing.

There’s also a perceived past of Britain that has spun into many books which derive much strength from what we think we have forgotten and what might be true. I wanted to explore these two different facets of nostalgia in fiction, but I wanted to do it in a lazy manner (because, let’s face it, I’m a lazy person) so rather than go a-hunting, I looked at my review shelf and wondered if there was anything there that maybe, possibly had those elements. Or perhaps I was waxing nostalgic myself and inventing literary stories that don’t exist, in which case I would write about something else.

Fortunately, I was right. Almost all the books on the shelf where I keep books I’m thinking of writing about had key elements of nostalgia. I do like being right. (I need to remind my family that I was right, while I’m at it, it’s always annoying when one reminds one’s family one is right.)

You will recognise the books: they last appeared on this page when I grabbed a bunch of friends and made them look at the covers. They’re five of the books from Pyr: Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule series (which appeared in the discussion of covers with comments on its Green Man, which alone makes my case), the retro Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann and the time-jumping quantum adventure End of the Century by Chris Roberson (which turned out to be adult SF, despite my friend’s assumptions from the cover). One of the reasons these covers elicited the comments they did was that element of retro, of hearkening back, of nostalgia.

Chadbourn’s books fit nicely with a range of other British books. They play with the dark side of British nostalgia. Phil Rickman and Graham Joyce are the masters of taking legends and stories and places and times and twisting them until they hurt almost past bearing. Nostalgia is warped to create dangerous realities. Memories aren’t always safe places to live. Mark Chadbourn pushes this and brings the British landscape to life with the half-memories we treasure in our fiction. It’s not just the Green Man and the sidhe who appear, there’s also the Norse-origin fimbulwinter and the long dark war between those who came before.

Even in children’s books safety isn’t always a consequence of fond memory. My favourite scene in Greenwitch (one of the books in Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence) is where the sailor comes home from the sea. The town has a black night and we know that the children watching that night will be changed forever. It’s not what is said about the town’s black night that counts: it’s the implied consequences of memory come to life. Dark visions. Deadly visions. The other side of nostalgia.

I really liked George Mann’s approach to the past. He tumbles together a bunch of things we enjoy, many of them from the interwar twentieth century. Ghosts of Manhattan has many echoes of The Great Gatsby and the sort of cliffhanger adventure element of the Dick Tracy and Phantom movie serials. A friend asked me “Is it as much cheesy fun as it looks?” My answer was “Oh yes.” And the reason for the fun is the way it plays with our dream pasts. Superhero equipment and dark personal histories, amazing villains and museum-laden secrets. Mann has unerringly written the derring-do hard-boiled romantic past we’re very pleased not to live in.

Roberson’s use of nostalgia is quite different. In a way, it’s also literature based. This is because our memories are trained to recall the written word, so in many ways literature mediates the past far better than our own minds do. There are some figures connected to the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century and Roberson combines hints and shadows of them to create a complex pattern that only becomes clear when the endgame is near. He links to writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll. His London is the London of our literary memory. In some exciting ways it overlaps the equally nostalgic London of Lavie Tidhar’s Bookman or Read or Die—The TV (my favourite anime series of all time), making our half-recollection of things read come to life and inhabit the streets.

Where Roberson is particularly interesting in his use of nostalgia is the layering effect he employs. He has a character called Artor and many, many references to other Arthurs. Each of them leads down another path of memory, from the music written by Sir Arthur Sullivan through many others. He even has a character make a joke about it. It’s a clever technique, allowing him to carry his other themes back and forward in time and build up the brickwork he needs for the final construction. It’s sleight of hand—taking the reader’s eye away from the build-up so that the conclusion isn’t a foregone one. In distracting us by using the recollection of things past, that remembrance builds up the world of the novel and brings it to life.

Direct nostalgia is the Middle English poem. It’s the sense of missing the past. It’s not the only kind of nostalgia, however. There is the nostalgia of good historical fiction, where the feel of a period becomes a character in the novel and the nostalgia of entertainment past such as those movie serials. I haven’t even scraped the surface of this iceberg. I may have to return to the subject again one day. The different paths nostalgia takes and the different aspects it wears fascinates me.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (Puffin, 1986)
Greenwitch by Susan Cooper (The Bodley Head, 1984)
Norah of Billabong by Mary Grant Bruce (Ward, Lock, 1913)
Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann (Pyr, 2010)
End of the Century by Chris Roberson (Pyr, 2009)
Darkest Hour by Mark Chadbourn (Pyr, 2009)
World’s End by Mark Chadbourn (Pyr, 2009)
Always Forever by Mark Chadbourn (Pyr, 2009)
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin, 1950)
The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot, 2009)

 

Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.

 


 

 
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