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| Nien Cheng obituary Chinese writer scarred by the Cultural RevolutionSeveral years before Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) proved a sensation in the west, the work of another Chinese woman who suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution's years of turbulence had become the first bestseller in English about this period. Life and Death in Shanghai (1987) is a memoir of huge sorrow and triumph by Nien Cheng, who has died aged 94; it could be read as symbolic of the story of modern China itself.She was born Yao Nien Yuan into a rich landowning family in Beijing and was studying at the London School of Economics in 1935 when she met her future husband, Kang-chi Cheng. A supporter of the Nationalists, on the couple's return to wartorn China in the 1940s he joined the ministry of foreign affairs, and they lived in Australia briefly, setting up an embassy there. The foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 meant that Kang-chi's political affiliations were potentially a problem. But he was to die, of cancer, in 1957, while serving as a general manager for Shell, one of the few foreign companies that maintained a presence in Mao's China.After his death, Nien took up the position of political adviser to Shell and lived with their daughter, Meiping, a successful actor, in a large house in Shanghai, with antique furniture, servants and a good standard of living. But as Nien was to explain vividly in Life and Death in Shanghai, all that was brutally ended one day in 1967 when a visit by one of the newly created Red Guard rebellion groups heralded her own initiation into the terrifying world of the Cultural Revolution, which had started formally months earlier in Beijing.Her memoir documents her house arrest and the many hours of interrogations, in which she used Mao's words and slogans back at her own captors, and showed a proud, unbreakable spirit. She was placed in solitary confinement for more than six years, and was released in 1973, as the Cultural Revolution was winding down. She was told almost immediately that Meiping had committed suicide in 1967. Nien did not believe this and was to find subsequently that she had been murdered by Red Guards. This shattering revelation, and further attacks from leftist activists, meant that, in 1980, she applied to leave China, and went to Ottawa, Canada, and then, in 1983, to Washington. She was to be based there for the rest of her long life.With the publication of her memoir she received acclaim. The book was reviewed warmly, partly because it told the inhuman and incomprehensible story of the Cultural Revolution in a human, comprehensible voice. But the trauma that the events in the late 1960s had left on Nien were not so easily erased. She told Time magazine in 2007: "In Washington, I live a full and busy life. Only sometimes I feel a haunting sadness. At dusk, when the day is fading away and my physical energy is at a low ebb, I may find myself depressed and nostalgic. But next morning I invariably wake up with renewed optimism to welcome the day as another God-given opportunity for enlightenment and experience. My only regret is that Meiping is not here with me.''• Nien Cheng, author, born 28 January 1915; died 2 November 2009ChinaUnited StatesCanadaKerry Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Woman in White's 150 years of sensation Wilkie Collins's novel caused unprecedented excitement when it appeared in 1859, and has not lost its capacity to thrillOne hundred and fifty years ago this week, Victorian readers opened Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round to find the concluding instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, and, immediately following it, the opening instalment of a new novel with no author ascribed. They joined a new protagonist, "Walter Hartright, by name," on a night-time walk over Hampstead Heath, winding on moonlit paths until they reached the intersection of the Hampstead, Finchley, West End, and London roads – somewhere in the area of where the Finchley Road tube station now stands. There they were stopped, every drop of blood in their bodies frozen still by "the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly" upon Walter's shoulder. And there, for the first time, they met the mysterious Anne Catherick –better known as The Woman in White.Often singled out as the foundation text of "sensation fiction" – a genre distinguished by its electrifying, suspenseful, and sometimes horrific plots, as well as its unsavoury themes of intrigue, jealousy, murder, adultery, and the like – The Woman in White was an immediate sensation in its own right. (In honour of its 150th anniversary, you can currently sign up to read the story as it was originally published, in weekly parts. There are tweets, too.) Margaret Oliphant hailed it as "a new beginning in fiction", while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as "great trash". And while Henry James disliked the "ponderosity" of The Woman in White (calling it "a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe"), he acknowledged that the book had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors".Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr Collins had invented – mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel "masterly", and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.During its serialisation in All the Year Round (from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860), and upon its publication in book form, The Woman in White inspired not only a series of imitators (chief among them Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne [1861] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret [1862]), but also what John Sutherland has described as a "sales mania and a franchise boom." Manufacturers produced Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The poet Edward FitzGerald named his herring-lugger "Marian Halcombe"; cats were named Fosco and thought to look more sinister; and Walter became a fashionable name for babies. As Kenneth Robinson, one of Collins's earliest biographers, pointed out, "even Dickens had not known such incidental publicity".While Collins was no stranger to the literary scene at the time of The Woman in White's appearance (by 1859 he had published four novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous other books and essays), he had not yet become an author of completely independent means. Unlike Dickens (his friend, boss, and mentor) he had not been catapulted to international fame by his early novels, and thus still retained his day job as a journalist. But The Woman in White changed all that. As a serial, the novel lifted the circulation of All the Year Round to even higher levels than had Dickens, and Sampson Low's first printing of 1,000 copies of the three-volume edition in August of 1860 sold out on publication day. When Smith and Elder made a £5,000 bid for Collins's next novel the following summer, Collins knew that he had made it. "FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS!!!!!!" he wrote to his mother in July of 1861. "Ha! ha! ha! Five thousand pounds, for nine months or, at most a year's work – nobody but Dickens has made as much."Collins's storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers – and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the "cliff-hanger", and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it's not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us. Our flesh creeps when Anne Catherick places her hand on Walter's shoulder; our hearts ache when Marian Halcombe falls ill and Count Fosco violates her diary; our blood curdles when Walter Hartright stands next to his beloved's tombstone, only to look up and find her standing there. The apparitions that Collins conjures are the ghosts that ensured not just his success but his longevity. They are what have kept readers going back for more during the last 150 years, and they bear testament to the value of Collins's self-professed, "old-fashioned" opinion that "the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story ..."Wilkie CollinsClassical musicFictionJon Michael Vareseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Guardian book club: Terry Pratchett on Unseen Academicals The most recent Discworld novel comes close to magic realism, says Terry PratchettIn the nature of things, readers are often moved to suggest "topics" for my Discword books. This is somewhat depressing, because most people who are not writers fail to understand how writers think, and if it comes to that, so do I.Regrettably, football is often on the metaphorical wish list. People don't always realise that a plot is only one of the things that a book needs, and one of the other things is a point. I couldn't see the point of writing a novel about football, a game I have never watched and, when at school, avoided like the plague; I was generally last to be picked before the fat kid. (We came into our own one year however, when we did hockey. That meant I had a stick and lots of advice from my father, who had learned how to cheat at hockey in India, and even the fat kid found a new, well-padded role as a goalie.)But, like many authors, I research serendipitously, and I enjoy reading about the social history of Victorian England. I came across a little anecdote about the man who invented the pneumatic football, without which the modern game could not possibly exist. I was sufficiently intrigued to look a bit further, and into my head came the phrase "two supporters' clubs, alike in villainy". And within half an hour, four major characters were alive in my head and down on the page. The speed at which the rest of the book was created around them was some kind of tribute, I suppose, to a lifetime's writing.Generally speaking, if you get your characters right, they will in some way "speak for themselves". In Unseen Academicals, the prime example of this is Glenda.Initially, I had seen Glenda as playing the nurse role in this football-flavoured version of Romeo and Juliet. In a way, of course, she does, flapping around after her young friend, as my father would put it, like an old hen. But the book really began to take shape for me when she began to think outside the little box of her life. I have known many women like her; they mucked around at school, got married and had some kids, and then realised that they had a fully functional brain, often fearsomely so. They usually find a voice then, as well. Glenda does so, to the extent of barging in to Lord Vetinari's office like an angry mum besieging the headmaster after her little boy has had a telling off. I rather like her, ever since I realised that she didn't know the meaning of some of the more worrying words in the cheap romantic novels she bought, and was ashamed at her lack of knowledge.Mr Nutt was in a way the seed of the book. Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn't flat.I have waited decades to write about Nutt; I can remember the excesses of football hooliganism that began in the 1960s and have only recently been cleaned up. It was a world of scaffolding-pole clubs and Stanley knives slashing railway seats and faces. The orcs, with a scarf or two, would have fitted right in in those days. More recently, an inflatable banana is the worst thing that's brandished; it would appear that the leopard can change his shorts.And, of course, as this is a Discworld book, it means that the wizards have to find something to squabble about. Mr Dibbler must try a new scam, Lord Vetinari must plot, in his Machiavellian way, towards a better world, and boy must meet girl or at least drift gently towards her.Over the years I have endeavoured to keep the Discworld series fresh for the long-time fans as well as for the newcomers. I believe that an Unseen Academicals must be among the more accessible. Indeed, it contains so little of what is popularly thought of as fantasy that in some places it comes close to that strange creature known as magical realism. Various factors made it somewhat difficult to write, and like every book I have ever written, I wish I could have given it a fortnight of extra time, but the editor's whistle was about to blow, so I had to take the shot.Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses.Terry Pratchettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Generosity by Richard Powers Christopher Tayler weighs up Richard Powers's new novel of ideasEarly in Richard Powers's new novel comes a rundown of creative writing student types: "the classicist, the prince of the streets, the brainy one, the buckshot comic, the lyric queen of dialogue". There's no mystery about which of these roles would fit Powers, an American "brainiac novelist", in one interviewer's words, who bursts with citations from peer-reviewed papers and has recently started dictating his books to a tablet PC using voice recognition software. Powers specialises in ambitious, intensively researched fictions built around conjunctions of big ideas: artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, genetics, the impact of information technology. He made a splash early on with The Gold Bug Variations (1991), which was finished with the aid of a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation; his last novel, 2006's The Echo Maker, won the US National Book award.In addition to science, Powers knows about music, literature and history, and his novels typically stage scenarios in which scientism and humanism glower at one another while circling a large question raised by the plot. (Does a computer program that can pass the Turing test have consciousness? What do such disorders as Capgras syndrome tell us about the nature of cognition?) Powers, in other words, aims to bridge the two cultures – a good thing to want to do, but one that also leaves him vulnerable to anti-intellectualism from both sides of the gap. And not just anti-intellectualism: a scientist might legitimately be turned off by his repertoire of postmodernist gestures, a humanist by his techno-enthusiasm, and both by his limited character-making skills. That might not be fair to such widely praised novels as Galatea 2.2 (1995), but in the case of Generosity, unfortunately, they'd have a point.Generosity – is there a play on "gene" in there? – takes its title from a nickname bestowed in the novel on Thassadit Amzwar, a radiantly exuberant young Algerian woman who shows up at a "creative nonfiction" class in Chicago. Even when she's describing Algeria's frequent massacres, Thassa's mere presence lifts everyone's mood, and the teacher, Russell Stone, a conscience-stricken failed writer, immediately becomes obsessed by her capacity for happiness. He responds by hitting the library and the internet and diagnoses hyperthymia: a preternaturally joyful temperament. Candace Weld, a college shrink, is wary at first but thinks there might be something in it; under Thassa's happy influence, romance begins to bloom between Stone and Weld.The novel's other main strand concerns Thomas Kurton, a Craig Venter-like genomics entrepreneur. Kurton believes that humanity's ills are about to be solved by genetic manipulation, and that the market is an appropriate mechanism for distributing the goodies. It so happens that his current project is an attempt to find the chromosomes associated with happiness; as you'd expect, Thassa soon blips up on his radar – or, rather, on the "visual concept mapper" he uses to analyse his personal news aggregator (the five paragraphs detailing this aren't atypical). A media feeding-frenzy breaks out around Thassa, the supposed possessor of the "happiness gene", and after some big thematic set-pieces – a debate between Kurton and a pessimistic, JM Coetzee-like writer, and an appearance by Thassa on an Oprah-like chat show – the plot starts teaching the characters to moderate their more extreme positions.Powers is careful not to show the reader too much of Thassa doing her happiness thing directly. Even so, he doesn't altogether solve what might be termed the Amélie problem: that of creating a joyful, empathetic and whimsically creative yet non-annoying figure. It doesn't help that she's given a fair amount of "In my country we have a saying"-type dialogue, while the other characters are lumbered with much chirpy exposition ("Have you come across Norman Schwarz's work? It's classic"). Stone and Weld, in particular, have to carry a lot of trait-speak and social psychology in their lovers' banter, even reinforcing points by playfully drawing graphs.At the same time, in keeping with Stone's anguish about the ethics of fixing people on the page, the novel is extremely self-conscious about the business of telling a story. Pynchon is mentioned, Nabokov alluded to; there are numerous meditations on plot construction, and in general there's a sense that predigital narrative conventions are hopelessly outmoded. The narrator's strange position with regard to the story turns out to be a feint, however, and in the end the reader senses, as expected, that Powers is a liberal humanist at heart. But while there's something impressive and admirable about his appetite for ideas and information, Generosity mostly comes across as a William Gibson novel in which the thriller plot has been replaced by wooden debate.FictionChristopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Colossus of odes: Philip Gross wins TS Eliot poetry prize for The Water Table Collection of poems on the Severn estuary lands top award after beating tough opposition, including two former winnersA university professor's detailed and lyrical meditations on the ever-changing waters of the Severn estuary tonight won him the UK's most lucrative poetry prize against tough opposition.Philip Gross is a well established poet but far from being a household name. He was named winner of the 2009 TS Eliot prize at a ceremony in London, beating competition from his better-known peers such as Alice Oswald, Sharon Olds and Christopher Reid.Gross, professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan, won the prize for The Water Table – a themed collection that is metaphysical and political and religious, but has at its heart the subject of water.Simon Armitage, who chaired the panel of three poets – the others were Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle – that chose the winner, said he hoped the win would introduce people to a new voice in contemporary poetry.He said The Water Table stood out because it was not merely a collection of poems but also "so obviously a book".Armitage added: "It is so concentrated and keen-eyed and patient. The poems have a beauty and a craft to the writing and it's hard to imagine how he kept it up over 64 pages."Gross's collection had an unintended topicality to it when it was published last November, with news headlines telling stories of flooding in Cumbria. The dangers of water are explored in the collection but his poems also address subjects such as climate change, the environment, the human race's fragile place in the planet and also what constitutes art.There are also poems about the more mundane human experience, such as arguing in an Ikea car park."There are big concerns throughout the book and he writes with real lyrical confidence," said Armitage.He said the judging had been hard work, almost bewildering when they were going through the original 98 collections submitted for the prize. It was, he said, a strong, wider-ranging shortlist which reminded you "what an extraordinary thing the English language is".The TS Eliot prize is, according to Armitage, the major poetry prize recognising an art form that does not usually make people fortunes. The organisers have now made it the most lucrative poetry prize by raising the winner's pot to £15,000, from £10,000. That money is donated by TS Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot, who presented the prize .The Water Table is Gross's sixth book of poems published by the Northumberland-based publisher Bloodaxe and he has also written 10 novels for young people. While well established, it is fair to say that Gross is not well known generally and the win, at a stroke, substantially raises his profile.He follows in the footsteps of former winners such as Ted Hughes for Love Letters, Carol Ann Duffy for Rapture and Seamus Heaney for District and Circle.This year's 10-strong shortlist probably raised more eyebrows because of the poets not on it – there was no Andrew Motion or Peter Porter, nor Don Paterson, who won the 2009 Forward prize.There were, though, three former TS Eliot winners in the shape of George Szirtes, for The Burning of the Books and Other Poems; Hugo Williams, nominated for West End Final; and Alice Oswald, for Dart. The other shortlisted poets were Christopher Reid – winner of the Costa poetry prize and a strong contender, in many eyes, for the overall Costa prize – Sharon Olds, Jayne Draycott, Fred D'Aguiar, Sinéad Morrissey, and Eiléan Nà Chuilleanáin.• This article was amended on Tuesday 19 January 2010. We omitted Alice Oswald from the list of this year's TS Eliot nominees who have previously won the prize. This has been corrected.TS Eliot prize for poetryPoetryMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |