Summer – Arthur Hofn

That Feeling When You Realise You Might Well Be A Character In A Novel

And suddenly we’re in November and 2023 has, for the most part, passed by. It’s true I’ve written fewer blogs this year. In fact after a several solid years of writing, (2018 Framed of Rathgar, 2019 Indoldrum, 2020 – 2022 all three Series of Beck’s Game,) 2023 was a year where I’ve slowed down a bit. Nothing wrong with this, I believe writing shouldn’t be forced if it doesn’t have to be. Having said that I have written a few short plays and I’m working out what to do with a new full length script. I’m also in the very early days of a new project. As such blogging is a bit lower on my list of things to do.

Regardless as I come to the last few weeks of 2023, in the dark and the cold, I find myself wishing I was still back in the summer. This year I spent some time swanning around Europe and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Part of this was spent on the Dalmatian coast in Croatia, Split in specific. I’ve been here before, but I still love this place, as a city it’s built around Diocletian’s palace, but as he’s not using it so much at the moment it’s become the heart of this Balkan city.

Summer is a funny thing, the ideals we have of what a summer should be invariably won’t turn out to be the reality of the season. Life still needs to be lived, work still needs to be attended and the great loitering and we envisioned ends up being a week, or if we are lucky two, somewhere where we’re spending our time worrying if we’ve brought too much luggage and so incur a large fine trying to get it on the plane home; or is that just me?

As mentioned I was a little bit fortunate as I fitted in a great trip exploring the Netherlands and Milan as well as some of Croatia, so I guess I have nothing to complain about.

The whole point of my above boasting about, and pinning for, the hotter days of 2023 is because I had a literary epiphany one morning whilst I was away. It’s hard to get a cup of tea in Split, trust me I’ve tried. As an Englishman this is an essential part of waking up and in my search for anywhere I could purchase a proper black tea, not some fruit infusion nonsense (which is NOT tea), I ended up on the Riva, the paved waterfront. Having eventually got my drink from a cafe by the harbour, I found a seat looking out to sea and paused for a moment to take in not only the hot morning sunshine but also the whole scene. In front of me yachts and tourist boats slowly came and went, whilst locals and holiday makers from all over the globe made there way in either direction along the Riva. It was very civilised. I’d been over specifically for a wedding a few days previous in another part of the Balkans, yet whilst I sat watching life go by some parties of the other guests strolled passed. They stopped and we chatted for a while, what were our plans for the day? Where had we eaten? We suggested meeting up again if we were able and with that they continued.

It was sat there on the bright sunny morning that I suddenly remembered a trope for early 20^th Century literature, one which always appealed to me, and now I felt I was actually part of.

Mainly in American novels from the late 19^th or early 20^th Century it’s common for the action to take an interlude while the characters go to Europe for a summer season. Examples are The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920) where a couple go on honeymoon to the fashionable parts of Europe, and in Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott (1869 – a sequel to Little Women), one of the daughters is taken with an Aunt on her European tour and writes home about it.

HEIDELBERG
My dear Mamma,
Having a quiet hour before we leave for Berne, I’ll try to tell you what has happened, for some of it is very important, as you will see.
The sail up the Rhine was perfect, and I just sat and enjoyed it with all my might. Get Father’s old guidebooks and read about it. I haven’t words beautiful enough to describe it. At Coblentz we had a lovely time, for some students from Bonn, with whom Fred got acquainted on the boat, gave us a serenade. It was a moonlight night, and about one o’clock Flo and I were waked by the most delicious music under our windows. We flew up, and hid behind the curtains, but sly peeps showed us Fred and the students singing away down below. It was the most romantic thing I ever saw—the river, the bridge of boats, the great fortress opposite, moonlight everywhere, and music fit to melt a heart of stone.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Good Wives

This idea of the socialites from the higher classes spending the season in the Mediterranean, meeting with old friends or acquaintances from previous events and just generally taking it easy in gentrified society has always appealed to me (ok, judge me). I mean I would always take on the role of the eccentric loner on the margins of the plot as it’s more the idea of the atmosphere that attracts me rather than any desire for etiquette bound interaction with my fellows, however there is something very intriguing about this concept.

The reality is, way back when, this did happen each year. The apparent great and the good made their way to the coasts of Europe to be seen and form important connections for their lives back home in not quite the same way we do today. Whilst these were not my motives, as I sat on that bench watching the boats, the city centre and the people going about their business, and chatting to friends or acquaintances I knew from other places, or had just met, I really felt like I was experiencing this literary genre come to life.

Although not set in Croatia, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) deals more specifically with a couple who at the the start of the book are in the French Riviera. There then follows events which strain their relationship. This is a novel that takes the veneer of a culture and explores just exactly what it’s covering up and how easily it is for us to fall apart. I’m not going to give anything more away than just say that as it’s worth reading and add that the tragedy here is not what I had in mind when I decided at that moment I knew what it was like to be one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters. When I say I’d be on the margins of this type of story, it’s often this is the safest place to be.

“Noon dominated sea and sky—even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.}
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.
She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella.”

“Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

For the rest of the trip I felt I had a new spring in my step and maybe, for just a short time, I’d travelled not just through Europe to the Adriatic, but also a little bit into the past.

Buy Good Wives – by Louisa May Alcott
Buy Tender Is The Night – by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I Wonder If Anyone Else Will Go To Portugal With The Same Selection As Me

Last week I went to Portugal! I blogged about a previous trip I made to Albania and that was in January 2020, the last before travel became difficult; if I had only known… However Portugal was full of heat, sun, port and reading. Faro is a lovely place, although it’s small. The local towns are also well regarded and I’m sure to explore them would have been nice; but I had only booked a few days and to do it all it wasn’t enough.

The result was once I had discovered the main part of the town, I was able to just bask in the heat. I’m not by nature a sit on a beach type person, I always need to know what’s around that corner or over the horizon wherever I am. However due to a long story that results in me hurting my feet (I actually did write it but deleted it as I realised no one was going to be interested – oh the importance of being able to cut things from your work!) I ended up not being able to explore as much as I wanted to. Fine, I had books, and cafes and beaches and cheap beer!

I normally just take hand luggage, hey I’m an impoverished writer, and so with the even tighter sizes allowed I realised I had to take smaller books, which rather limited my choice (no I do not like to read e-books if I can help it). First up was a 1973 copy of Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

This is one of those stories within stories. Starting on a boat ready to leave the Thames the crew are waiting for the time to depart. The narrator tells us that one of his colleagues decides to entertain them with a story of his trip to Africa. The novel has a reputation of being a bit grim, I would say I’ve read worse and then I realise most things that happen in the fiction probably mirror the way things were in the real world back then. First published in 1899 as a serial (that’s a good idea) this deals with issues of colonialism and as such reading from the perspective of 2022 it raises probably more questions than the author intended. Although not directly stated Conrad uses the Belgian colony of Congo as his backdrop and it becomes clear that the title of the book isn’t so much to do with the dark heart or the interior of the continent, but that of the men that reigned misery upon it. It’s interesting that as a novel it rarely makes a judgement as explicitly as might be done these days, instead it records opinions and attitudes that at time of writing would have opened the eyes of the reader and these days which we already know about and find unacceptable; even the “good” guys use words within the text that are uncomfortable reading. It occurred to me that whilst my paperback came from the 1970s it’s strange to realise even not so long ago attitudes to such expressions of even concepts weren’t as they are now.

This isn’t in anyway a blame on just the other European nation’s attempts at Empire, it’s clear that although using a foreign power Conrad has the same ideas over what Britain was doing at the time. There is a very interesting correlation in the way that people of his days viewed Africa and how the Romans viewed Britain. To make the comparison between now and Conrad’s time, in many ways we are more enlightened and educated today, it’s just a shame that doesn’t go for everybody. I do wonder if holiday reading should be quite so… dark?

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out”.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Heart Of Darkness is actually a short book (although in my copy the text had been formatted in such as way to make the pages dense with print) and so I moved on to my second smaller sized novel.

I’ve talked about Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories before and I will probably blog about them specifically at some point, but being the perfect size I grabbed one I hadn’t read before and packed it.

The Ark by Paul Erickson was first published by Target in 1986 in hardback and 1987 in paperback and is based on a televised story from 1996 (I had the 1993 reprint). I have seen the TV serial many times and the novel expands on a lot of the story but I’m glad it retains the classic line ‘take these strangers to the Security Kitchen’. Basically set way way into the future with Earth about to be destroyed the entire population create an Ark and travel to a new planet, unfortunately when the TARDIS turns up one of the companions has a cold for which the humans this far into the future are unconditioned and it becomes a major pandemic – hmm.

As I sat in a cafe reading this it struck me I was probably the only person in the Iberian peninsula reading a Target novelisation at that moment in time, a thought that amused me. I’m sure as summer continues Faro will see many many books being read by locals and tourist alike. Holidays are great for reading.

Buy Heart Of Darkness – by Joseph Conrad