Six disheveled characters drift into a blank white space. They do not know exactly where they are, they do not know exactly where they are going and if they are looking for anything, it is for an author.
No, this isn’t another interminable minimalist production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; it is instead the emotive scene with which Fjona’s Uu’s great modern novel Lava in a Cold Climate opens. The blank white space is not a theatre; it is the icy landscape near Murmansk in Northern Russia. And the characters, for all their confusion, do at least know their names. They are Matthew, Cedric, Bertie, Madeleine, Celia and Eddy.
Such names invoke not only a distinct geographical location, but also an erstwhile epoch. What are people with such quaint monikers doing tramping along the shores of the Artic Ocean in the twenty-first century? They are indubitably displaced, wrenched from their familiar surroundings; not only to our, but also to their, surprise.
The truth is this: in a move not unknown in the history of European Literature, Fjona Uu has declined to personally concoct the characters with which she populates her narrative. Either she draws them directly from life, or she pulls them (kicking and screaming in this case) out of other books. In this case, she has stolen characters from three other writers: Nancy Mitford (to whom, of course, the title refers), P G Wodehouse and Philip Walford-Steak.[1]
Having pilfered these six characters, Uu shows little reluctance in using them for her own means. Though she is knowledgeable as to their heritage, she has seemingly little respect for their origins. Indeed, it is this attitude that has allowed her to relocate them in the first place. She throws her cast of well-bred Englishmen and woman into a remote Russian town, where their upbringing and personal wealth means nothing and where they cannot rely on those that they are accustomed to turn to in the hours of their need. To separate Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster from his ‘mentor’ Jeeves may be a crime in itself: to extend this separation beyond a hundred miles and almost as many years is surely a major breach of the ‘rules’. That is, depending on what your opinion of the aforementioned fictional ‘hero’ is (personally, this spineless snake-in-the-grass – i.e. Wooster – offers few if any attractions).
It does not take a fervent Marxist to recognise that Wodehouse’s novels are mythic statements; notions of reality that attempt to actualise an image of upper class life that will amuse into submission those who can never obtain it. Wooster as a character is a distortion of reality: a ‘dreamwork’ of the bourgeoisie.[2] His apparent shortage of natural intellect blinds us to the fact that, though he conforms to a certain sense of gentlemanly ‘decency’, he is nonetheless an individual of exceptional indolence. Much the same applies to the other characters that Uu has appropriated, with only the merest differences. On the whole, her selection corresponds to a type – the so-called ‘upper class twit’ – though there are variations on this type, from the not entirely brainless, but most certainly snooty homosexual Cedric to the curious character of Sergeant Eddy Pteurd, an undoubted member of the superior class who has nevertheless made an attempt at becoming a ‘worker’; a function which in the end he fulfils with all the grace expected of someone with aristocratic French ancestry.[3] The character that represents the greatest deviation from this type is that of Uncle Matthew, the grouchy Mitford creation; a man that appears much more down-to-earth than his companions and is thus seemingly undeserving of the company he finds himself. Uu’s inclusion of Uncle Matthew is at first perplexing, though eventually her reasoning reveals itself. A brief detour via the stratagems of modern popular culture highlights Uu’s scheme.[4] Seen through the tawdry prism of reality television culture, Uncle Matthew is the so-called ‘fly in the ointment’ – a member of a group that is guaranteed to start arguments at regular intervals. Without an Uncle Matthew figure, we can surely envisage how the aforementioned company might well adhere to the repugnant mode of simply ‘getting along’, which would invariably deny the readers an involving plotline. Further to this, Mitford aficionados may well recall that there are few people Uncle Matthew would prefer to avoid than Cedric. The same applies to the relationship between Wooster and Madeleine Basset, though the situation is in case more complex, the former having managed, despite his lack of fondness for the latter, to have nonetheless found himself on occasion engaged to her.[5]
The aforesaid political deficiencies of these six characters can be extracted without too much difficulty from the original texts in which they were found. However, considering the fresh context in which Uu plants them, the reader need no longer waste seconds on these extractions: under the sharp Russian sky the underlying feebleness of the Wooster soul is laid frighteningly bare. As a group, however, I will not begrudge them the fact that they start well enough. Dumped in a foreign landscape, they have just enough brains between them to cope for several pages or so. But no sooner has Uu set them about their task and their soft skins begin to peel.
This task which they are required to perform is that of a polar expedition, starting on a boat leaving from Murmansk and continuing across the ice floes to the North Pole – the ultimate destination left unknown. To ensure that they do not die immediately, Uu builds up their personalities slightly; though she resists the temptation to make them invincible, despite the continuing presence of elements that belie the fictional status of the assembled party, such as Sergeant Pteurd’s bicycle (which he somehow manages to ride across a glacier with).[6] For the first few chapters, then, the characters rarely deviate from the form with which we are familiar, though they are passing through unfamiliar territory. At the start I almost found Wooster likeable – his reaction to losing the ‘old toes’ is admirably unlikely of a man of his station – though I must admit that this effect was to dissipate soon enough when the real suffering began. From the moment that Cedric passes out for the fourteenth time, the reader suspects that Uu does not intend to cotton wool her cast for too long. Fictional though they may be, Uu is not about to let them pass through blizzards without losing a limb or two, nor entering into the odd vicious argument or impulsive fit of passion (see Wooster’s ‘assualt’ on Celia Manthorpe). And, as I may have already intimated, the point of the blizzard context is that it allows readers to witness previously repressed aspects of formerly beloved figures.
There is, yet, more to Lava in a Cold Climate than the unsteady procession of six second-hand characters across the Artic wastelands. Cut into this story is another: the story of the story. Whilst the description of Wooster and co in the snow is written in the third person, these alternative sections are told by a first person narrator, the indiscreetly named Oona Fjo, a character who is surely nothing more than a fictional version of the author herself. Indeed, the similarity between Oona Fjo’s life and Fjona Uu’s denies any other conclusion. Let us begin by dealing with the latter, at which point we shall no doubt discover that we have also covered the former, so rarely do their experiences deviate from one another’s.
Having been brought up in Iceland and London, Fjona Uu studied English Literature at Oxford University in the early 90s. She was smitten by the subject and the place; her special interest being – need I say it – the work of Mitford, Wodehouse and Walford-Steak. She began a thesis comparing the work of these three in 1995, earnestly desiring that she might be able to devote the rest of life to the theme.[7] The seduction of myth threatened to corrupt this previously class-conscious individual: though she beckoned from the lower eschelons of the class scale, it seemed as though she was growing into a woman willing to propagate the myths with which those of this status were controlled. A Marxist at that time might have labelled her an ‘intentionally unsighted social climber’ or better still a ‘careless snob’. Uu’s subsequent betrothal to James Lapperton seemed to set a seal on the unfortunate predicament. Following her marriage to said Lapperton (known to his enemies as ‘Lappers’) she would now be a formal member of the upper class; a bottomless pit of funds at hand to support all of her literary dreams. Maybe this is what Uu had hoped for. Certainly this is what she suggests through her retelling of the story (albeit through the eyes of Oona Fjo). Nevertheless, regardless of whether it is what she had desired or not, she was still to get a nasty, if not well deserved, shock.
In early 1996 Lapperton, a previously tentative geologist, announced his intentions to join a polar research centre in Murmansk (principally dedicated to research on global warming). His wife, with all the worldly innocence of a true Wodehouse fan, nodded her head in submission, announcing forthwith her intention to ‘follow him to the ends of the earth’ and giving up her thesis on his behalf. They moved to Murmansk shortly afterwards, where Lapperton began work immediately, leaving his shivering wife to twiddle her frozen thumbs in their shockingly small hut of a house. Uu used the spare time to explore the area, but found it disappointing in comparison to Oxford, finding far more fish-processing factories than dreaming spires. Though her life in Iceland had been far from cosy, she was somehow stunned by the living conditions in Murmansk.
After a restless month exploring her new habitat, Uu found herself returning to her books – which she was now able to see in a literally different light. Images of men in spats strolling down Piccadilly on fresh spring mornings had lost their ability to warm her heart. Indeed, she found the whole experience rather sickening. And here the seeds of ‘Lava in a Cold Climate’ were sown.
What drives the character of Oona Fjo/Fjona Uu to exact such terrific revenge on her stolen characters is not merely hatred. People may be changeable in their wills, but rarely do they love a thing one day and then hate it the next. Emotions are slightly more complex than that. This novel is not about universal truths, but about how truth changes according to changes of context and perspective. Indeed, the book is in itself subject to the context in which it is read. Take it with you on your criminally expensive and self-indulgent weekend break to Monte Carlo and you may find yourself feeling sorry for Bertie and Cedric’s toe-less feet; read a chapter on two whilst sitting on an uncomfortable bench in the middle of a war-torn council estate and you will discover that you couldn’t care less whether Madeleine Basset’s pretty little ankles are dissolved by a trail of molten lava. Of course, I will not claim here that one perspective is more valid than another: I doubt that this is Fjona Uu’s intention. She is merely intrigued by this new perspective – it does not necessarily follow that she thinks it any more worthy than that which came before.
Let me put this in another way. Lava in a Cold Climate is in many ways a supremely harsh novel. You only have to look at the fuss kicked up by P G Wodehouse societies and fanclubs across the world to get a sense of its shock value.[8] You cannot get away with torturing people, even if they are fictional (in some cases especially if they are fictional: one suspects that the torture of Bertie Wooster would bother many more people than the torture of a hundred or so real people). However, despite the horrific nature of the polar bear and lava episodes, I still retain the irksome suspicion that Fjona Uu is still in love with all of these characters. A masochistic kind of love, certainly, but love all the same. The progressively cartoonish nature of the punishments she meters out supports this theory. Is it scientifically possible to find a volcano in the middle of a snow-covered landscape? (remember that Uu’s husband is a geologist). The answer is no, of course not: the volcano is an unfeasible entity. And though it is no less horrific for its being impossible, the ever more heightened nature of the violence towards the end of the novel seems to me to constantly hint at its fictional quality, as if Uu is saying – in case we had temporarily forgotten – ‘Don’t worry – it’s not real. They aren’t really dying’. This concept is curious, suggesting as it does that Uu is creating a fictional world for characters who were fictional to start off with, but the ambiguity is essential, reflecting as it does the eternal tension between the author/narrator/reader and fictional worlds as a whole. Of course, for all of those readers who would have liked to see Bertie Wooster really hung, drawn and quartered, this is a disappointing conclusion. Yet I am happy to withdraw such quibbles when I consider the novel in its entirety.
The aforementioned love that Uu still harbours for the work of Mitford, Wodehouse and Walford-Steak plays a major role in the denouement of Lava in a Cold Climate at which point it cannot be denied that she has failed to entirely cast off her devotion to Wooster and co. This is a shame, but it is not surprising. Many an ardent Marxist is a Capitalist at heart. Humans find it hard to shake off influences, especially those to which we were introduced in the impressionable ages: the teens and early twenties. It takes a particularly strong personality to fully disengage with things that might have previously given one pleasure. Therefore I ought not to criticise Fjona Uu for her inability to seize the opportunity to literally, rather than merely figuratively destroy this early twentieth brand of mythologizing literature. Myth is engineered to attract, after all. At the very least she considered it. And with any luck some of her more discerning readers might go a step further. Until then, we may read Lava in a Cold Climate to remind ourselves of how context reveals new perspectives, if not to instruct ourselves as to how to react to such perspectives.
[1] Many readers may not be acquainted with this last writer. It is indeed a sad fact that Philip Walford-Steak (1873 – 1956) is rarely read these days, though in his day he was considered one of the funniest writers around (George Bernard Shaw described him as ‘the most humorous person I know other than myself’). There are many theories as to why Walford-Steak has been so rapidly obscured by the mists of time, though it must be said that none of them are especially convincing. The most likely wisdom is that he has suffered through the countless comparisons between himself and Wodehouse – now generally recognised as a master of his genre. Indeed, the similarity of many of his plots to those of Wodehouse has led many scholars to erroneously believe that he was some sort of Wodehouse imitator. Near the end of his career this may well be the case, but at the start nothing could have been further from the truth. If anything, Wodehouse lifted plots from Walford-Steak. It is particularly worth noting that Walford-Steak’s series of clever manservant/intellectually challenged master stories (which started with Good Egg Boscroft! in 1912) were published several years before Wodehouse’s (which first appeared in 1917). However, the enduring success of a certain Jeeves and Wooster has tended to obfuscate the qualities of the former. In truth, it is not only modern readers who have characterised Walford-Steak as a Wodehouse impersonator; such a malicious idea was rife at the time. In a review of Walford-Steak’s 1924 novel ‘Mayfair Joe’ an anonymous Times critic claimed that the author had produced nothing more than ‘recycled Wodehouse; as flavoursome as the latter as ones excrement is to its forbearer’. Unsurprisingly, comments like this aggravated jealousy within Walford-Steak, who is said in the 1930s to have frequently considered going public and calling Wodehouse a ‘cheat’ and a ‘traitor’. In the end, he managed to hold in these zealous feelings until after the Second World War, at which point he held nothing back, calling his fellow writer a ‘cheat’, a ‘traitor’ and a ‘wet fish’. Despite this, his accusations were at this point entirely misconstrued, for it was supposed that the charge of treachery related not to Wodehouse’s theft of literary motifs but to the matter of Wodehouse’s infamous German radio broadcasts of 1941, about which Walford-Steak really knew nothing (he had stopped reading newspapers after the aforementioned Times review). Walford-Steak thus achieved nothing as regards elevating his own profile: he succeeded merely in stoking the anti-Wodehouse fire (which, it seems, has long since been extinguished). It was only a year before his death that Walford-Steak realised the manner in which his comments had been misinterpreted, at which point he is said to have suffered from an extreme case of remorse (though some say it might have been lung cancer). Around this time he sent Wodehouse a cigar in the post. On receipt of this gift, Wodehouse is said to have said to his wife: ‘This is not a cigar, it is an apology’. Whether or not this observation was accurate, it is very difficult for us to say for sure, for Walford-Steak did not send any sort of letter with the gift. One commentator has since put forward the suggestion that the cigar was in fact poisonous and therefore constituted an assassination attempt, though it seems that if this theory is correct, we must then suppose that Wodehouse never smoked the cigar, which is in itself unlikely. The end result of all of this confusion remains the fact that no one today – other than Fjona Uu – reads any books by Philip Walford-Steak, which is a pity, for at his best, he was really rather good. Indeed, as Uu’s appropriation of two of his characters proves, he created several individuals of remarkable warmth, wit and a modicum of class consciousness
[2] Various quotations from Wodehouse would serve to prove my point. On such occasions, I am continuously drawn to a passage from Right Ho Jeeves! where Wooster talks of a ‘perfect harmony’ that has prevailed following a conversation between himself and his manservant Jeeves. This utopian evocation of class concord seems to be a prime example of bourgeois mythologizing. Elsewhere in the same text we come across the following conversation:
“ ‘…Life is full of sadness, Jeeves’
‘Yes, sir’
‘Still, there it is’
‘Undoubtedly, sir’
‘Right ho, then. Switch on the bath’
‘Very good sir’”
Need I say more? The blatant Wooster disregard for the complexities of class struggle has rarely been so clearly demonstrated.
[3] For those unfamiliar with Philip Walford-Steak’s work (see note above) Sergeant Eddy Pteurd was the village policeman who regularly appeared in his comic novels (see On-the-Plate-Two-Eggs and Further Tales of the Excessively Loud American in Plymouth). Though he gave the impression of being a simple man, Pteurd was in fact of royal ancestry and owned both a large house in the country and an extravagant collection of antique bicycles. For all his worthiness in seeking a job which he didn’t need, Pteurd was rarely seen doing that job; yet he wore the clothes with pride (it is frequently joked about that the only person he was said to have arrested was himself). I have not chosen to expand upon the links between Sergeant Pteurd and Fjona Uu in this review, but this would be a fascinating topic to pursue, Uu being somewhat of a complex social pretender herself.
[4] It is worth noting at this late juncture that this is by no means the first time that a novelist has recycled characters from a Nancy Mitford novel. Not only did the author do it herself, but more recently a young American woman called Carol Artemi constructed a so-called ‘futuristic sequel’ to Love in a Cold Climate, set in the Caribbean in the twenty-second century. The novel, which despite shoddy prose revealed to many readers an intriguing and hitherto unseen side of the West Indian reggae industry, was called Hate in Jamaica (Shaggy-Dawg-Stories 1996)
[5] At the risk of needlessly expanding this region of my critique to the detriment of my readers’ attention spans, a brief discussion of the relationship between the two Walford-Steak characters must be relegated to this footnote. In this instance, it is the female of the species who has an aversion to the male (Madeleine Basset has no lack of fondness, though possibly no real love, for Wooster, whereas Cedric – who for the sake of this study we may consider to be female – is of the kind that tends not to hold grudges). Seargeant Pteurd and Celia Manthorpe are of the same social class, but have responded to their station in different ways. Pteurd, as mentioned in footnote 3), has lower class pretensions, but is essentially your typical affluent idler. Celia Manthorpe is similarly lazy; she merely makes no effort to disguise this – and does not look kindly upon Pteurd’s attempts to do so, though she pretends in public to support him. Pteurd, meanwhile, simulates distaste for Manthorpe’s lifestyle, whilst harbouring dangerous lust for her body.
[6] The improbability of riding a bicycle through the Artic is of course countered later on when Pteurd is forced by the other members of the group to give up his bicycle, resulting in one of the most moving scenes in the novel. (p.204, 2001 edition). An American scholar called Arnold F O Biffwright has made an interesting comparison between this scene and one occurring in J R R Tolkein’s little-known adventure storyThe Lord of the Rings in which a character called Sam Gangee is forced to leave behind his pony (see ‘Encountering the Metaphysical Loss of Objects and Entities in Modern Literature’, Arizona Arts Vol XXXIII, Oct 2003)
[7] The intended title of her thesis was to be ‘Themes of Self and Selfhood in the novels of Nancy Mitford, P G Wodehouse and Philip Walford-Steak’. According to Uu herself, she had only reached the end of the opening paragraph before abandoning the project, though other sources claim that she had moved onto the second paragraph, if not even the third
[8] Interestingly, the most vehement reaction to the novel came from none other than the Swedish P G Wodehouse Society who ran a full page advertisement on the day of its publication in all their national newspapers warning fellow countrymen not to read the work. Within a week, Lava in a Cold Climate was the best-selling book in Sweden, though only available in English, German or Spanish translations.
Review by Johannes Möeping
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