Knowledge – For its Own Sake

May 31, 2025 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Bristol Temple Meads, 9.02am.

The May half term is drawing to a close. I’ve stayed put for a change, using the time to mentally decompress after another very busy term. Four weeks remain of the school year, and while there’s not as much teaching going on, it’s still going to be an intense gauntlet of exams, reports, events and rehearsals. I’ve done a lot of much-needed spring cleaning, idle Camino planning, bouncing ideas off ChatGPT and now, a little stir crazy, I fancy a day out. So I’ve grabbed some Y8 marking and a few books (Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters is my current obsession) and I am now on the train bound for Oxford.

Why Oxford? Partly because I haven’t really been to Oxford before. I was there two months ago for the Oxford Schools Finals Day, but as I was leading a school trip I didn’t really have any time to appreciate the city for itself. It’s also partly for the Museum of Natural History, which is supposed to be exceptional (I never did grow out of the dinosaur phase). But it’s also because over the last few days I have started to flirt with the idea of a possible career change: setting my teaching and boarding duties aside to pursue a Master’s degree in Medieval Studies.

There’s a couple of travelers next to me on the train having a very interesting conversation. They are a curiously paired ensemble: one, with a patchy beard, AirPods in and his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, talks in a streetwise drawl about how he stole a few cans of Red Bull from Tescos once, and how the worst thing in the world is that parents don’t discipline their kids right anymore – if he’d disrespected his dad, he’d have “had a black eye”. He drops his T’s in the words right and football and drops F bombs in the gaps. The man next to him, a young Asian in a smart shirt with his sleeves rolled up nearly to his elbows, calmly (and without a hint of profanity) explains the difference between Asia’s bullet trains and the UK’s privatised public transport system (which he calls the public torture system), the importance of location when investing in property and celebrates a model aircraft he recently won at an auction. That seems to be their connection – they’re model plane collectors. I was beginning to wonder what could possibly tie these two together.

Why a Master’s degree? Why Medieval Studies? And why has the idea only come to me now, eight years after graduating with a BA in Modern Languages and Cultures? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. A number of reasons come to mind. Citing my Y9 class seems churlish, but it’s probably part of the bigger picture of just how much of a gear change this year has been. Challenging and engaging, but occasionally uncomfortable. I suppose that’s only natural when you up sticks completely and change schools. Perhaps that’s why some teachers never leave.

It’s a little deeper than that. I do miss academia. I have always loved the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and just occasionally, I find that hard to square with a job where success is so often scored against a mark scheme that shifts according to the national skill level.

I’ve just started to sink my teeth into A Level teaching, but I’m both disappointed and mildly alarmed by the lack of general knowledge of my students. Only one of mine could tell me what Scylla and Charybdis were, and that was a child in Year 10. I’ve had sixth formers before to whom I’ve had to spell out the story of Adam and Eve – we’re talking Catholic Europeans here, too – and mine was the only hand to go up in chapel two weeks ago when we were asked if we knew the parable of the man who built his house on the rock.

You could chalk that last one up to nobody wanting to look foolish putting their hand up in church on a Tuesday morning, but classical (and even general) knowledge of even the most basic sort seems to have fallen away by the time our kids reach sexual maturity. They all seem to know who Mr Beast is, though.

Something I wasn’t expecting in Oxford was the Pottermania. I deliberately haven’t waded in with an opinion on J.K. on here because, as with a number of topics, my thoughts are not in line with those of the rest of my generation. But one thing that is really quite depressing is that I ran into no fewer than five Harry Potter themed tours, pointing out turrets, windows and other locations used during the filming of the saga back in the early 2000s. It seems a little trite that tourists flock to a city that harbours one of the oldest universities in the world just to snap a selfie in the style of a still from a movie… I took a cohort of summer school kids on one of those trips once and they were deeply disappointed (I think they were expecting Harry Potter studios, not a Chinese woman with a ring bound pad of stills).

It’s times like this that I need a good kick in the shins – somebody (besides myself) to call me out for being so judgmental. Maybe that’s something I miss about university, too.

Before checking out the museum, I explored Blackwells, Oxford’s famous bookstore. The shop is particularly well-known for its Norrington Room, a literary Aladdin’s cave beneath the city that seems to have everything. I made a beeline for the Mythology and Folklore section and looked for anything Iberian.

Nothing. Tome upon tome on Norse mythology, endless volumes of British folktales, a beautiful gold-bound compilation of the tales of Anansi the Trickster and no fewer than five collections of Queer Fairytales – whatever those are – but nothing on Spain or Portugal. Nothing at all. Even Google didn’t seem to have anything.

Spain isn’t lacking in colourful folklore of its own. From my reading, it’s apparent that the combined efforts of the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Spanish Inquisition and Franco’s regime weren’t able to snuff it all out. But the literature simply doesn’t appear to exist.

I think somebody should write about it. And I’m starting to think that somebody should be me. Oxford University has a Masters course on Medieval Studies that occasionally covers Iberian founding mythology – the subject I chose for my undergraduate dissertation – and that just might be the way in… if I can get in.

I’m not really Oxbridge material. I got as far as an interview at Cambridge, but my meekness was torn to pieces in the French interview – and I really haven’t read enough of the classics. But I have read a lot of books.

I grew up on a privileged diet of literature. We had more books than anything else at home, largely on account of the fact that my mother rips through books in a single night and was thus always on the hunt for a replacement. The bookshelves in my bedroom were (and still are) crammed full of colourful dinosaurica, but sandwiched in among them was a mountain of mythology and a feast of fantasy. My mother may not have been an outspoken supporter of “fantasy shite” but she did encourage my voracious reading habits. And I know my Dad used to read to me a lot – he even read the Harry Potter books to me when they first came out.

Neil Philip’s Illustrated Book of Myths played an especially large role in all of this. Atticus the Storyteller had a similar hand (and, to a lesser extent, the Age of Mythology games), but the colourful illustrations in the Dorking Kindersley compilation made it especially impactful. I must have spent literal days poring over the pictures in that book, cramming my childish head with stories of Athena and Anansi, Izanagi and Izanami, Glooscap and Gilgamesh. All tremendously important things to know – and none of it serving any practical purpose beyond the pages of the book where they were written. I haven’t even been able to use much of it in the odd pub quiz, which seem to rely on a more grounded understanding of Emmerdale and the last FA cup final than the exploits of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

If I’m lucky enough to have children of my own someday, I will read to them from that book – even though I know most of the stories by heart. The pictures are so beautifully illustrated that I can see most of them still when I close my eyes, though it may be over twenty years since I last saw them.

Stories are how I make sense of the world. I’ve been writing stories for as long as I could write my own name. There’s not an awful lot of call for storytelling at work, but I do my best to share them with my students when the curriculum allows.

And it’s taken me a long time to realise that, after Spanish interest and natural history, the third largest collection of books in my library is all folklore and mythology – the oldest stories in the world.

Maybe – just maybe – I’m scratching the surface of the real me. I did always want to be a writer. I just didn’t ever think I could do it.

I’m still unsure. So much of my identity has been built upon the rock of being a teacher, and casting off those robes to dive into the world of myths and legends seems… well, childish at best, selfish and reckless at worst. And there’s the question of stability, job security, money and the fact that all I really want to do is find the One, raise a family and tell stories. But the void in all those bookshops is tremendously loud. Stories that aren’t told will eventually disappear, taking their worlds and their characters with them. It would be a terrible shame if the generations of the future looked back on our time and accused us of letting the ancient wisdom of the past slip through our fingers while we were so violently hypnotised by the bewitching glare of this or that Pied Piper of Instagram.

Who will remember Mr Beast five hundred years from now? What stories will they tell of him? Will his legend amaze and inspire, or will it push more and more children toward the worship of Mammon? I worry about that. I worry about that quite a lot.

I’ll give it some more thought. These are not decisions made lightly. The Camino will provide. It always does. BB x

Something Old, Something New

January 24, 2022January 24, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / 2 Comments

There’s a day in the second or third week of January that, at least in these cloud-ridden islands, marks the turning of the year. Not the first day of spring exactly, but an early harbinger that the dark days of winter are finally on the retreat. For me, it’s always marked by the first real blast of birdsong, and it usually goes hand in hand with a generous glow of sunlight after many days of cloud, or that infinite whitening of the sky that is so very well-known to those of us native to this rock. There’s no calling when exactly that day will fall, but when it does, it’s nothing more or less than exactly what the doctor ordered, as far as I’m concerned. I grab my journal and keys, leave the flat, walk up to the office and – boom. There it is. The dawn chorus is already in its final movement, but still going strong. The voices of robin and blackbird and woodpigeon and sparrow lift my heart skywards. I’m then in an irrepressible good mood for weeks which neither marking nor duty nights nor even thunder, rain and storm can stamp out.

I guess I can only apologise to my colleagues for the nauseous wave of positivity that nature washes over me. It’s almost first-year-of-university-level enthusiasm (which, for those of you who knew me then, you know…).

Perhaps spurred on by that wintry magic, I made two random throws this weekend. I bought a kite, and I decided to re-read one of my favourite childhood stories. The kite is easy enough to explain. I had a kite once, when I was a lot younger, which has Jeremy Fisher emblazoned on its face. If I remember correctly, it didn’t fly very well. I guess we never tried it out on a day when the winds were good. It just seemed to gather dust in one of the cupboards until, one day, it disappeared. Anyway, I’ve got the whimsically romantic notion in my head that kite-flying is one of those things I’d love to do with my kids someday, so I ordered one on that whim. It arrived yesterday, and if I get a moment’s peace this week, I’ll put it through its paces out on the South Downs.

As for the reading – alright, I confess, I didn’t do any reading per se. I had a fair amount of spring cleaning to do, but I wanted a soundtrack while I worked and I figured an audiobook would be just the ticket. I’d had Michelle Paver on my mind after dipping my toes back into her ghost stories a few days ago, which naturally conjured up memories of reading her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series when I was at secondary school. I remember absolutely adoring the first in the series, Wolf Brother, and motoring through at least the first sequel through my school library. I cannot remember exactly whether I made it as far as Soul Eater, the third in the saga – if I did, I forgot the plot more completely than that of the second – but I remember the books rising out of a videogame-clogged adolescence like icebergs, one of precious few literary stepping stones across a goggle-eyed, pixelated river that ran at full strength for far too many years. Was it Paver’s intense attention to the natural world in her writing that hooked me? Probably. She is one of my favourite authors for precisely that reason: she knows her settings as though she has lived within them her whole life through.

Wolf Brother had a lasting impact on me as a writer, more than I had previously suspected, and it took listening to the masterful narration of Sir Ian McKellen over the weekend to realise just how deep the roots of her magical storytelling stretched into my own creations. Naturally, my own stories have changed a great deal since I started writing them over twenty years ago, but if you look closely, you can see the tell-tale brush strokes of the authors who showed me the way. I could fire up my hard-drive right now, pull up a folder, pull out a chapter and point out the guiding hand of this or that storyteller. Here is some of Paver’s naturalism, and there’s some Rider Haggard gung-ho. Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell had no small part to play in the healthy dose of tragedy, and I’d wager a fair amount that there are traces of Michael Morpurgo spread throughout like watercolour, since at a certain point in my childhood I pretty much read nothing else. There was just something about his writing that spoke to me like no other writer could. He had me hooked on all his animal-centred storylines, his Scilly Isle adventures, and his occasional reference to something on my wavelength (like namedropping The Corrs in Arthur, High King of Britain). Kensuke’s Kingdom and Why the Whales Came rank near the top, and sit in pride of place by my desk alongside the other books that mark certain turning points in my life: Day of the Triffids for traveling solo, King Solomon’s Mines for going mad in Amman, The Arabian Nights from my university days and The Outrun for a dose of reality when I left that world behind… and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny… just because.

What were the stories that had the biggest impact on you as a child? Which authors colour your writing? I’ve ended the last couple of posts with a question, which is a) repetitive and b) pedantic and c) a sign of how much I’ve been teaching and how little I’ve been writing these past three years. But it’s something I love to ask people, when I get the chance. The power of storytelling has been precious to me since I was a bratty kid insisting on the fifteen-minute bedtime stories and not the three-minute tales (I swear I wasn’t just looking for an excuse to stay up late…!), and I hope it’s a joy I can share with my children someday.

When you come back to a book you enjoyed as a child, you see it through two pairs of eyes and two hearts: the eyes of a child embarking on a journey as though for the first time, and the eyes of a parent who knows the dangers ahead but cannot help hoping things turn out for the best. It’s incredible how the magic contained within the pages of those stories never fades, no matter how many times you come back to it. I make a point of re-reading Triffids every time I travel alone, but I’ve neglected the stories of my childhood for too long.

Once I’m done with the rest of Torak’s adventures, you’re next, Morpurgo!

BB x

The Power of Words

February 2, 2020 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Working life in a boarding school doesn’t exactly give me the time to write I crave. It hardly offers much time for reading, for that matter. But, when a moment comes along when I don’t have lessons to plan, PDPs to fill out, reports to write or duties to carry out, I grab a book and my quote diary and escape for as long as my tired brain allows. I’ve kept a quote diary since 2015, charting my progress through the books I’ve been reading and jotting down any particularly wonderful words or beautiful descriptions – writing that stays with you long after you close the book, like the smoke in the night sky left by a magnificent firework. It’s not the most labour-intensive of blog posts, and yet it is the work of five years of reading. Here’s a selection of my favourite lines from the books I’ve read in that time.

Oh, and if looks as though there’s a lot of H.R. Haggard and M.M. Kaye in there… it’s because there is. Together with Bryce Courtenay, Michael Morpurgo and John Wyndham, they’re my all-time favourite authors.

The Garden of Eden, no doubt, looked fair before man was, but I always think that it must have been fairer when Eve adorned it.
Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

Her father was a man “led by a star”, as the natives say, and would follow it over the edge of the world and be no nearer.
Henry Rider Haggard, The Ghost Kings

It is certain that few build up the temple of their lives upon some firm foundation of hope or hate, of desire or despair… but rather take chance for their architect – and indeed, whether they take him or no, he is still the master builder.
Henry Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter

Almost every flock of vultures has its king.
Henry Rider Haggard, Marie

“Duty is a fool-word that makes bones of a man before his time and leaves his girl to others.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Marie

“There’s so much human suffering that the whole world should be wailing.”
Joy Chambers, My Zulu, Myself

“A man’s half licked when he says he is.”
Jack London, White Fang

For most of the years of my life I have handled human nature in its raw material, the virgin ore, not the finished ornament that is smelted out of it – if, indeed, it is finished yet, which I greatly doubt.
Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm

There is nothing more uninteresting than to listen to other people’s love affairs.
Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm

“He who walks into a storm must put up with the hailstones.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm

“First serve, then ask for wages.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife

“What is life but loss, loss upon loss, til life itself be lost? But in death we may find all the things that we have lost.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife

Complete happiness in this world is not allowed for even an hour.
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife

“Music is a living art, ambassador. It’s meant to illuminate the emotions of the one who gives it life. How can written music have any feeling?”
Thomas Hoover, Moghul

“The Infinite will of God is always mysterious, mercifully granting us what we need more often than what we want.”
Thomas Hoover, Moghul

“We are all searching for our own self. But the self is not easy to find, so we travel afar, hoping it lies elsewhere. Searching inward is a much more difficult journey.
Thomas Hoover, Moghul

Kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

There was something in Johnny’s character that was pure gold without a trace of alloy.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“No man goes so far as he who knows not where he is going.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

Conway Barton possessed a love of two things that have never yet failed to ruin those devotees who have worshiped them to excess: Drink and Women.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous, spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading empire. Of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

It is darkest under the lamp.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

Ten men with one heart are equal to a hundred men with different hearts.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“No sport is worthy of the name that does not include an element of risk.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“Though I can feel the wind and hear the thunder, I do not yet despair of avoiding the storm.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“I put my hand upon my knife and walked as a cat walks in an alley full of dogs.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“I have yet to learn that cure is preferable to prevention.”
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

Dasim Ali was a placid and pleasant person who harboured no bitterness towards anyone – except on occasion towards God, who had granted him no sons.
M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“Fire is a good friend when men are few and foes are many.”
Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist

What a vast gulf there is between love and loved! It is measureless.
Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist

The devil – a very convenient word at that – is a good fisherman. He has a large book full of flies of different sizes and colours and well he knows how to suit them to each particular fish. But white or black, every fish takes one fly or the other, and then comes the question – is the fish that has swallowed the big, gaudy lure so much worse or more foolish than that which has fallen to the delicate white moth with the same sharp barb in its tail?
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

“If the snake had the strength and brain of the elephant, and the fierce courage of the buffalo, soon there would be only one creature left in this world.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

“You don’t understand. If only you understood, you would understand.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

“You white men are very clever and think that you know everything, but it is not so, for in learning so much that is new, you have forgotten much that is old.”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

The night is dying, the day is not yet born.
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

“New journey, new stick, Baas!”
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

Love is the best of medicines – if it be returned.
Henry Rider Haggard, Allan and the Holy Flower

“I am a cosmopolitan. But then the gods of nationalism rose up.”
C.J. Sansom, Dominion

In the summer of 1929 he left for England for a year at Oxford; he felt alone and out of place the whole time there, surrounded by people who mostly seemed either to be decadent aristocrats or pretending to be.
C.J. Sansom, Dominion

“This view reminds me of a story I learned at school: He took Jesus to a high place, and showed all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and said, ‘All these things I will give thee, to have dominion over, if you will fall down and worship me’.” He frowned. “That is not quite right. Was it ‘dominion’ or ‘power’? Anyway, it was something like that.”
“Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? Who was it who took Jesus to the high place?”
Gunther shrugged. Then he remembered, with a superstitious shiver, that it had been the Devil.
C.J. Sansom, Dominion

“You don’t see it, do you, people like you? That all you’re doing is standing against the tide of historical destiny. Which, by the way, is about to drown you.”
C.J. Sansom, Dominion

“Love’s a game for the young and lovely, and the mirror, my dear, never lies.”
Aimee Liu, Cloud Mountain

One hundred wireless networks password protected; one thousand humans in an acre holding their wallets close to their genitals.
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

I heard it said that in London you’re always looking for either a job, a house or a lover.
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

I wonder if it’s possible to really come back once you’ve lived away for a while, or if it’s called coming ‘home’ when you never belonged.
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

One day you’ll boast of coming here, but realise you remember nothing about it.
Jane Johnson, Court of Lions

Like eyes they were, and seemed to watch him. The few cliff-dwellings he had seen – all ruins – had left him with haunting memory of age and solitude and something past.
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

“Proselyter, I reckon you’d better call quick on that God who reveals Himself to you on earth, because He won’t be visiting the place you’re going to.”
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

European women are so cold they give you a chance to say no at every turn, and you feel good about it, too.
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy

He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

If he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he wasn’t a real woodsman.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

A salesman in America is naked without his smile.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

That is the tale; the rest is detail.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“The Americas just swapped Liberty for sugar.”
Thomas Hoover, Caribee

“What can a man know of wine if he samples only one vineyard?”
“A woman might say it depends on whether you prefer flowers or wine.”
Thomas Hoover, Caribee

“You are hungry and honest, and that is very rare in this country.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

When he was younger he had admired people with moneyed childhoods and foreign accents, but he had come to sense an unvoiced yearning in them, a sad search for something they could never find.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“My name is Gabriel Oak.”
“And mine isn’t. You seem fond of speaking it so decisively, Gabriel Oak.”
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Poets must first be hanged, then mourned at the gallows.
Orhan Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman

My empire is of the imagination.
Henry Rider Haggard, She

“Swift – be swift- death is in the air we breathe.”
Henry Rider Haggard, She

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“My mouth tastes like the splash-board of an Indian lavatory in the mango season.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

I imaged hundreds of eyes hungrily devouring my freedom as they watched from the prison darkness.
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“Animals, that’s my speciality. You can ask me anything about animals. You name it,” – he brought his hands up as though he were squinting down the barrel of a rifle, pulled an imaginary trigger and made a small explosive sound – “I’ve shot it.” He lowered the imaginary rifle and grinned at me. “I love wild animals.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

The concept of a white man coming along and forgiving everyone’s sins and then getting nailed to a post for his trouble seemed a highly unlikely story. As Dum pointed out, white men never forgive sins, they only punish you for them, especially if you are black.
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life.
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes, there’s trouble.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

A natural leader, I have found, need never explain. In fact, they less they explain the more desirable they are as leaders.
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“To play black, the music must come from your soul and not from your head.”
Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

Once a man has lived long enough, every moment is a reflection of some other moment.
Naomi Alderman, The Liar’s Gospel

The name of God is now in the water.
Naomi Alderman, The Liar’s Gospel

Every person wants to feel that some other man can guide them back into the light.
Naomi Alderman, The Liar’s Gospel

Storytellers know that every story is at least partly a lie.
Naomi Alderman, The Liar’s Gospel

“Put your God away. You have one too many loyalties.”
James Clavell, Shogun

“Endeavour” is an abstract word, and unsatisfactory.
James Clavell, Shogun

“Love is a Christian word.”
James Clavell, Shogun

Mutiny breeds in idleness, not in hardship or hard work.
C.S. Forester, The Gun

“The hand of God is at work in León.”
C.S. Forester, The Gun

He had seen for himself, on a brief visit to the interior, one of the slave routes that wound across Africa. A trail that had been clearly marked by hordes of vultures that perched among the flat-topped thorn trees, and the bleached bones and rotting corpses of the innumerable captives who had been unable to go any further, and been left to die where they fell.
M.M. Kaye, Trade Wind

Men were covetous, and the world no longer wide enough.
M.M. Kaye, Trade Wind

“If it is a traveller’s tale, where then are the travellers?”
M.M. Kaye, Trade Wind

One day the old cities, if they were not destroyed by war, would be pulled down and swept away, and in their place would arise a flavourless uniformity of brick and mortar, populated by once-colourful people aping the white men’s dress and speech, so that all cities would in time become identical masses of houses and factories, shops, boulevards, and hotels, linked by trains and steam-ships, and filled with imitation westerners imitating western ways.
M.M. Kaye, Trade Wind

The pinkness overwhelmed a person, as an aphid might feel suddenly thrust into the petals of an overblown rose.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

If you went indoors for a moment, you’d sense from the change of light that something had happened and then, when minutes later you came out again, there were the towering castles of grey tinged with white, real estate for gods and frightening giants.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

“Altruism costs a great deal.”
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

Suspicion feeds upon itself like a cancer.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

People are people through people.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

The law cannot stop a man and a woman.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

Doris with the wonderful tits was about as subtle as a meat-axe.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

“My people [the Jews] have an instinct for knowing when to move. The only we denied that instinct we paid too big a price.”
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

“I do not suffer from the affliction of being white.”
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

Together since the world began, the madman and the lover.
Bryce Courtenay, Tandia

God allows no fragmen tof our souls, no atom of our dust to be lost from his universe.
John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta

“The usual trouble with liberal-minded men is that they think others are, too.”
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

A city is a desert of bricks and stones.
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

“There are times when one fails to see why God invented the ostrich.”
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

The Bomb appears to have no other destiny but to be held up and shaken threateningly.
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

Listener, the joy of a story is in its telling.
Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account

Quote Unquote: STREET OF THIEVES

October 2, 2019 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

This week’s read is a work in translation: Mathias Enard’s Street of Thieves (Rue des voleurs in the original French). As a former student of languages, I have a somewhat conflicted view on reading works in translation. Part of me has always been a bit of a purist on the subject: if you can read a book in the language in which the author intended it to be read, why not do so? There are so many details and nuances that can be lost in the tricky process of translation – the author’s voice, for one. However, what you read impacts on what you write, and since I write predominantly in English, it always made far more sense to me to read works intended to be read in English, with the effect that I eschewed works in translation altogether. I grew up with English, therefore I must write in English. That at least was the argument I cleaved to for most of my time at university. A colleague once said to me he could destroy that argument in three words: Waiting for Godot. Unfortunately, uncultured pleb as I am, Samuel Beckett has yet to feature on my reading list – nor will he for some time, theatrical scripts not being my preferred reading material of an evening. However, I concede it a point well made, and in the years since I have relaxed my approach a little and tried dipping my toes in the water.

Street of Thieves tells the tale of Lakhdar, a young, idealistic Moroccan whose boyish desire to seek his fortune across the Strait is realised after a series of stark, harrowing underworld adventures that make Enard’s text a bildungsroman of the darker variety. There is enough of the everyman in Lakhdar to make him an instantly sympathetic protagonist, and no matter how you look at it, the sequence of events that set his journey in motion would humble even the strongest of wills.

The greatest strength of Street of Thieves is in its flawless realism. Every single event is wholly and utterly believable; some magic in Enard’s emplotment almost strips the story of its “story”, as though you are watching Lakhdar’s life in real time. Tragic events happen and caricatures come and go, but they are so very real, so human, they might as well be people picked off the street at random and given parts to play. Where there is grief, there is no melodrama; where there is rage, there are no histrionics; just the restless drone of everyday life, weaved seamlessly into the fabric of fiction.

The book’s title refers to a street in Barcelona’s Raval district, one of the seedier quarters of the coastal metropolis. Enard lived in Barcelona for a time and his knowledge of the comings and goings within the depths of the city paint a convincing picture, though even if he had no experience of his own, he could hardly have chosen a more fitting counterweight to the city in which Lakhdar’s story begins: Tangier, by many accounts one of Morocco’s seedier locales. There is a magic to both cities that draws tourists in every year – the ever lucrative vein of “pink gold” Enard so evocatively describes – but we don’t see much of it from Lakhdar’s perspective. Everything is huge, dark and dirty, as though we are seeing both cities through the eyes of a cockroach, scuttling from corner to darker corner. It is certainly an easier book to write about than it was to read.

I may not have read Waiting for Godot, but I have had the good fortune to explore both Barcelona and Tangier. I went to Barcelona earlier this year in the hope of finding material for my own writing. It was a wistful fantasy, to which I am often prone; I found little of any real value in my wanderings around the city, my interests being so far removed from the modern metropolis – say, by about four hundred years. I wandered around the Raval district a lot, carrying with me only my notebook and the card key to my hostel room, and found the place shadowy, dusty and surprisingly Arabic-speaking, but not as menacing as I had heard tell. Then again, I limited my explorations to the daylight hours: I believe Raval puts on a very different mask by night, if the stories are to be believed. All I really remember about Raval was a chance encounter at the end of a street with a flock of monk parakeets drinking from a puddle in the road, illegal immigrants of a different colour, but illegal immigrants all the same.

Having traveled a good deal in Morocco previously, I found in Tangier a curious melange of the other cities I had seen, as though it were a human imitation of the work of Gods elsewhere. Here were echoes of Fes’ labyrinthine medina, without the medieval charm; echoes too of Marrakesh’s charming cafes, without the charm, Taroudant’s city walls, without the beauty of the desert, and the blinding white of Casablanca, stained brown and grey with age. All the same, Tangier had a far greater effect on me than Casablanca or Marrakesh, knocking both cities down in strength of character, showing that hybrid vigour that sometimes allows a mongrel dog to triumph over a prize-fighter.

I met a Lakhdar, once. Not in name, but almost identical in nature. He was friendly and sincere, with that almost too sincere character common to the folk of many African countries that puts a lot of Europeans on their guard. Had I been traveling alone, I would have undoubtedly abandoned my plans and gone with him to meet his family at his invitation. As it was, I did not, and I have never felt entirely happy with myself for how the ensuing drama played out. Lakhdar, too, is frustrated by visiting Europeans who, one way or another, lead him on only to let him down, concerned or agitated by his desire for friendship. That the story takes place in the turbulent months of the Arab spring gives more than a little credence to their caution, and yet… if you were in Lakhdar’s shoes, would you see things so clearly? The gulf between Africa and Europe is only nine miles wide at its narrowest point, and yet it yawns like Mariana.

Favourite Scene:

Tough call. Street of Thieves is not a book of standout scenes so much as it is an exploration of the difficulties experienced by a young Moroccan crossing over. Maybe his lengthy descriptions of the sordid Raval district? Enard painted the side of Raval I wanted to see but was too cautious to venture out at night in search of – the Raval one sees through the slits in the blinds. A quarter inhabited by fleshy prostitutes, circling drug addicts and lecherous men who ogle the women one day and turn a blind eye the next on their way to Friday prayers. Like Goya, the Romantics and all the Victorians before me, I am drawn to the dark, if only to better understand the light.

Favourite Character:

Another coin toss, though this time, it’s between two men: Sheikh Nureddin and Marcelo Cruz. The coin analogy is not a bad way to start, for in a way they are two sides of the same coin, just as Tangier and Raval mirror each other. Sheikh Nureddin is the more sinister of the two: calm and comforting, fatherly and always dressed to the nines, he exudes moral strength and commands confidence, and yet all the while he drives honest men to commit brutal acts in his name. Scarier still, even after the illusion flickers and you see the demon beneath the dress-suit, Enard has you seeing his humanity when he walks back into Lakhdar’s life, like Lucifer with his wings restored. Marcelo Cruz, by contrast, is a grotesque caricature of corruption. A twenty-first century undertaker who races to be the first on the scene whenever the bodies of the unfortunate wash up on the shores of the Spanish Mediterranean, Cruz takes an almost inhuman delight in his profession. Death has lost its meaning to him; he has become corrupted by the stink of corruption, and only the endless spiral of ever-darkening videos on the internet keep him entertained as he waits for the bloody tide. Both men are avatars of fear; one wields it, one is possessed by it, and it is hard to say which is the more fearful of the two. The devil you know, and the devil you worship. It is a wonder that Lakhdar is as sane as he is at the end of the narrative – though perhaps you might come to your own conclusions.

Favourite Quotes:

He spread a terrible sadness; the rotten smell of a lonely soul.

Cities can be tamed, or rather they tame us; they teach us how to behave, they make us lose, little by little, our foreign surface; they tear our outer shells from us, melt us into themselves, shape us in their image – very quickly, we abandon our way of walking; we stop looking at buildings, we no longer hesitate when we enter a metro station, we have the right rhythm, we move around at the right pace; and wherever you come from, in the end they train you like dogs.

You try acting funny or charming in literary Arabic, it’s no piece of cake, believe me; people will always think you’re about to announce another catastrophe in Palestine or comment on a verse of the Koran.

Quote Unquote: THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUÍN MURIETA by John Rollin Ridge

August 20, 2019August 21, 2019 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

This week I’m looking into a rather different kind of novel, albeit one much more in line with my usual taste. Often considered the first novel by a Native American writer, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Times of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated Californian Bandit is a remarkable account of the life of one of America’s most infamous outlaws. I have no misgivings in making such a claim: Joaquín Murieta may not be a household name like Butch Cassidy or Billy the Kid, but as the primary inspiration for Zorro, and by proxy Batman, the Californian bandit’s legacy is alive and kicking.

As might be expected of a bandit narrative, Joaquín’s tale is a tragic one. Ridge paints a picture of a man who set out with honest intentions but turned to villainy after being wronged once too often on account of his being a Mexican in an increasingly intolerant America (a situation that still resonates painfully across the ages). Finding himself on the wrong side of the law, Joaquín sets out on a career of vengeance against the nation that would not let a man like him earn an honest living. Along the way he gathers about him a colourful cast of characters, including his sweetheart Rosita, his brother-in-law Reyes Feliz, his nemesis Captain Love, and his bloodthirsty second-in-command, the unforgettable Three-Fingered Jack. The end is never in question – millions before and after Murieta have paid the price for defying the might of the United States – but such is the degree of Joaquín’s panache and gallantry that you might be forgiven for willing him to succeed, no matter how many bloody crimes are committed in his name.

To the modern eye, Ridge’s account comes across as half-story, half-history. This is not altogether untrue: the events within the narrative have been, to a greater or lesser extent, subjected to a fair degree of fictionalisation. An overarching narration of events takes precedence over dialogue and character development, and though Joaquín is very much the star of the show, this is as much the tale of his friends and foes as it is his alone. There are elements of the story that make for some hard reading in the twenty-first century – namely, the casual racism employed towards the Chinese, who fall before Joaquín’s men like wheat in the wind. Where Mexicans and Americans stand their ground and fight to the death, all of Ridge’s “Celestials” (an outdated slur used frequently in the narrative) are cowardly weaklings who habitually grovel and flee at the first sign of danger. They feature as a nameless swarm, fodder for Three-Fingered Jack’s bloodlust and a lawless whetting stone for the sorties of Joaquín‘s gang, since their slaughter rarely if ever provokes any reaction from the Americans. Ridge is, of course, speaking with the voice of his time, but given how evergreen the anti-Mexican sentiment of the narrative remains a century and a half later, it is hard not to draw comparisons to the present. Joaquín’s vendetta is in many respects a racial one, but it is rationalised through his personal tragedy. The xenophobia of his enemies cannot be so easily waived, and the indifference of the Americans upon his slaughtering of the Chinese miners speaks volumes.

I have been passionate about bandits since university. I am not entirely sure why. There is something raw about the idea of banditry that appeals to me, as it must have appealed to the Romantics of the nineteenth century. I chose to study Spanish bandit legends for a research project in my third year at university and I have been hooked ever since. I suppose it could be summed up as follows: the further removed one is from violence, the more exciting that violence appears. Some travellers in the 1800s came to Spain with the express purpose of seeking out an encounter with the bandit chiefs they had read about, leaving bitterly disappointed when they returned home unharmed. As I sit down to write of the legend of Joaquín in the comfort of my study, with the faces of surly Andalusian highwaymen staring down at me from the framed Doré prints on the walls, I am no less afflicted than my predecessors. Joaquín Murieta joins their ranks as a fearsome commander, standing tall alongside other such legends: Serrallonga and Roque Guinart; Diego Pernales and El Barquero de Cantillana; Tragabuches, Pasos Largos and El Tempranillo.

It is easy enough to conjure up a fantasy in one’s mind of the lawless world of Gold Rush-era California, but to do so with any degree of accuracy from the niceties of the present day would be no small feat. To write convincingly about the past, one must ignore the attitudes of the present and fully espouse the zeitgeist of the era in question. Therein lies the pitfall, for where is the storyteller who writes for an audience long since dead? And where is the book that is totally free of the truths and prejudices of the day? The very act of putting work into the public domain is to subject it to the scrutiny of the present-day readership, and it is upon this anvil that a story’s success may be made or unmade. To tell Joaquín’s story with more than a kernel of truth today would be to wind the clock back beyond one hundred and fifty years of social change, to a time when it was not essential to take into account the sensibilities of every featured demographic. Ridge’s account sounds so very believable because it was written not long after the events in question occurred, but even then his account is not unbiased: the author’s sympathy for Joaquín bleeds through his writing, for Ridge, a Cherokee, had plenty of reasons of his own to hate the Americans, having lost his father at an early age at the beginning of the events which would lead to the infamous Trail of Tears. History is warped by the age in which it is scrutinised, like a kaleidoscope that twists with each passing year.

August 3rd, 2019. A lone gunman walks into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and shoots twenty-two people dead, supposedly in retaliation for the Hispanic invasion of Texas. Within forty-eight hours, a Mexican spokesperson calls the attack “an act of terrorism” against Mexicans living in the US. The men who assaulted the young Joaquín Murieta and raped his wife got the sticky end they richly deserved in Ridge’s account, but in reality they were merely the heads of a greater hydra; the intolerance and hatred they represent is with us to this day. The story of Joaquín Murieta is all the more important now than it ever was. Here is the legend of an ordinary Mexican who was made into a monster by the land of opportunity, but who, like countless bandit heroes before him, rose above the darkness in the hearts of his people to become something eternal: a folk hero.

Favourite Scene:

The parallels between Joaquín Murieta and his illustrious descendants, Zorro and Batman, are mostly subtle ones, drawing largely on the bandit’s sense of nobility and his fight for justice. But there is one scene in particular that is especially poignant in its cultural impact. Having met with an old acquaintance on the road, Joaquín warns him to tell nobody of his presence in the state. The traveller swears he will be true to his word and goes on his way, but upon arrival at the nearest town, he hears talk of the bandit chief and talks of his recent encounter. Unbeknownst to him, Joaquín has friends up and down the country and, hearing of this betrayal from one of his spies, takes the matter personally. He comes to town in disguise, seeks out his old friend and, before dispatching him with a single shot, removes his disguise and declares the immortal line “I am Joaquín!”. It becomes a recurring staple of the legend of Joaquín that he fearlessly reveals himself before making a kill, and it would not surprise me in the slightest if Batman passed over Zorro and got his line directly from the Ridge’s book.

Favourite Character:

Murieta is a man worthy of three legends in one lifetime, but there’s another man in his saga who towers above the rest, and that’s Manuel García, more commonly known as Three-Fingered Jack. Next to Joaquín, Jack is easily the most memorable character, serving as a gruesome foil to Joaquín’s nobility and a grim reminder of the reality of the nature of banditry. Three-Fingered Jack’s unfettered violence is truly galling whenever and wherever it occurs and casts a long shadow over the villainies of his compadres, whose handiwork seems almost gentlemanly in comparison. There seems to be nothing at all redeeming in his character, and yet there is something immensely appealing about the monster – I honestly expected more of the wolverine in his last stand than he actually got.

Favourite Quotes:

They might as well have attempted to catch the red-winged spirit of a storm.

“If you betray me, I will scatter to the winds all that you have and all that you love.”

That terrible, three-fingered hand, which had dyed itself in many a quivering heart, had torn with its ruthless talons the throats of many an agonised victim, and had shadowed itself forth upon the horrified imagination of thousands who only knew that it existed.

Quote Unquote: BLINDNESS by José Saramago

August 5, 2019August 5, 2019 / Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

**Quote Unquote is a new series of review-style posts geared towards mining my way through the mountain of books I have managed to accrue over the last few years**

Tonight I’m going to be looking at Blindness by Portuguese writer José Saramago, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gospel according to Jesus Christ. I’ve had the book for the best part of a year, having borrowed it from my mother’s collection, and I took it with me on the Camino two weeks ago. I thought it would do me good to get some cultural reading under my belt, and Blindness looked like a light read… at the time. But that’s exactly what you get for not reading the blurb thoroughly, though the title alone should have given me an idea of what I was in for!

In his ensaio, Saramago weaves a monstrous tale centred on, above all else, the darkness in the human heart. It is not so much a cautionary tale as a dreadful reminder that we are only one small stage removed from savagery: one small push is all it takes. In this grim tale, that small push is the loss of sight. Starting with a man who goes suddenly and inexplicably blind whilst waiting at the traffic lights, the blindness spreads like a plague, spreading out from the source and driving panic in its wake. As the authorities race to take action, the affected are quarantined within an asylum, where things deteriorate with terrifying speed, culminating in the rule of force of a bunch of blind thugs who seize the food supply and extort their fellow inmates, first demanding their possessions, then the women. When a timely fire drives the blind out of the asylum and into the world, they find things are not all that much better on the outside. Throughout, Saramago conjures up a bleak world of stumbling and tripping, of unimaginable filth and miserable humanity and the depths to which the world can sink. We see it all through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, the one character miraculously spared the “white evil”, whose ability to see all that transpires becomes something of a curse as she alone is forced to bear witness to the breakdown of the world around her. She, and those within her halo of morality, somehow make it through their terrible ordeal until, just as quickly and inexplicably as it began, the blind have their sight restored.

Saramago’s writing style is hard going, to say the least. Even in translation, Saramago opts for chunky, seemingly endless paragraphs with no markers to indicate who is talking to whom. Like the Nadsat employed in A Clockwork Orange, one adapts to this style of narrative after a while, but it does make for difficult reading at times, especially when multiple characters are in conversation.

I’m not entirely sure what it is about blindness that makes for such a powerful plot device. I often come back to Triffids between books, and there are obvious parallels between the two books, though when rested against Saramago’s version of events, Wyndham’s vision of a world populated by the blind seems remarkably clean. Compared to the latter’s apocalyptic London of shattered windows and irregularly parked cars, the streets of the mental asylum and the unnamed city in Saramago’s work are rancid, litter-strewn and splattered with so much human sewage that one wonders whether the triffids operated a waste disposal service as part of their world domination bid. Wyndham’s world is also laced with an unmistakeable air of Middle England decorum: even after the total breakdown of society, the old laws still apply and sex is as invisible in Triffid-infested England as it is in Middle Earth. Not so with Saramago. There is one scene in particular in Blindness that will probably haunt me to the end of my days, not least of all for having seen it acted out with remarkably human depravity by Gael García Bernal in the 2008 film version (not how I imagined the character, but no less menacing a presence).

Blindness as a theme holds a morbid fascination for me, as sight is the one sense of the five I could not live without – and I can speak with a little experience on this count, as an especially fierce migraine temporarily robbed me of mine when I was eleven years old. It was only for few minutes – it might have been three or it might have been five – but I remember the terror as the world faded into darkness in the middle of a Biology lesson one morning. When my sight returned a few minutes later, I cannot even begin to describe my relief. It was an incident I never got any stick for – which is surprising, given how much of a commotion I must have made, flailing about on my stool and crying out that I could not see – but perhaps that stands testament to the shared understanding seated deep within all of us of the terror of a world without sight; an inheritance from our ancestors of a time before fire and the electric light, when the starless night was inky black and full of danger. That primordial sense of fear is never far away in Saramago’s writing. Stripped of any kind of logic or explanation, the plague of blindness reduces humanity to its very worst, reminding us all that, without sight, our mastery of this world is finished and we are cast back to a primal state which, in all likelihood, will kill us all eventually.

In short, I’m glad I read Blindness, but boy, did Saramago have some demons… I am learning to bleed a little more darkness and despair into my own writing, which is and always has been so thoroughly oversaturated with hope, but I sincerely hope I am never driven to conjure up such a hellish place as Saramago’s asylum for the blind.

Favourite Scene:

The blinded icons in the church. You’ll find a lot of the same images in Triffids – the lines of blind people staggering down a street, people clawing hopefully at tins in supermarkets that don’t contain food, the silence of a world where all the cars have suddenly stopped – but there is nothing quite as harrowing in Wyndham’s world as the church of the blinded icons. It’s one of those truly original scenes that one encounters every so often in a good book that stay with you forever. The idea of a vengeful priest scratching out the eyes of the painted saints and blindfolding the statues is monstrously chilling; a vision of lost hope in a figurehead normally associated with being the last bastion of faith in a darkening world. The absence of said priest in the scene, leaving the reasoning to conjecture, only adds to the haunting effect. It is a scene I almost feel moved to paint. Perhaps someday I will give it a try.

Favourite Character:

The girl with the dark glasses. Cool, independent and frequently insightful, the girl with the dark glasses puts up with a lot in the narrative – in Saramago’s world, a physically attractive woman is no safer in a blind world. She adjusts to her predicament with remarkable speed, adopts an orphaned child and provides an iron support to the women of the asylum through her cool head and determination. The circumstances surrounding her affliction also make for a curious and delightfully awkward plot point – a rare moment of humour in the tale.

Favourite Quotes:

It is necessary to kill when what is still alive is already dead.

I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil.

Panic is much faster than the legs that carry it.

I Need A Hero: My Favourite Fictional Leads

March 28, 2019March 28, 2019 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m off on another adventure in a couple of days. A fortnight in Catalunya awaits – because where better to spend the fallout from all this Brexit madness than with a people who have tussled with independence for centuries? I doubt the Catalans will be all that interested in the petty squabbles of a rather recalcitrant Guirilandia – and anyway, I’m a good deal more interested in their own history – but with another adventure looming, my mind turns back to the world of fiction. I always take a book with me when I travel, as it’s pretty much the one time in the year I can guarantee I’ll get some serious reading done. Frankly, given how important fiction is to me, I’m surprised I haven’t turned my hand to it as a topic more often. So tonight’s post is about putting that to rights. And I thought I’d start with an illustrated list of my favourite storybook heroes.

Perhaps the collection below says a lot more about me than I at first thought possible…

8. El Cid (Cantar del Mio Cid, Anonymous)

Kicking off the top ten with a bit of a controversial one, as this particular hero was a man of flesh and blood before he was a fictional character. Whether or not you choose to see him as a hero rather depends on whose account you choose to follow. Certainly, the Muslim chroniclers of the day didn’t exactly paint a very pretty picture of him. All the same, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar is a larger-than-life character in his epics, and the seesaw story of his rise and fall and rise again is – for want of a better word – one of my favourite tales. And now that I’m not at university anymore and don’t have to analyse him as a masculine image, or a symbol of religious fervour, or any of that academic nonsense, and can instead indulge in boyhood fantasies once again, he’s a damned impressive hero who is good to his men, be they Christian or Moor, loyal to his wife and king, protective of his daughters and a generally wise arbiter. It’s just a shame about the episode involving the Jews Raquel and Vidas, or he might have placed higher on this list. For some reason they didn’t include that little episode in the 1961 film…

H_Cid

7. Rat (The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame)

I think one of the things that shocked me most when compiling this list is how quintessentially British most of my favourite heroes are. Come to think of it, there are only really two characters on this list who are not Englishmen by birth or blood. I’d pretty much given up on my homeland for the beauty of foreign lands during my teens. Rediscovering the joy of reading in my early twenties completely turned that around, and made me appreciate on a deeper level characters from my childhood that I’d perhaps not understood fully until that moment. Rat is definitely one of them. An English county gentleman, who balances his seasonal desire to travel and see the world (depicted as a sudden madness) with his unshakeable attachment to his riverside home and his often poetic delight in the countryside around him. Rat always made me think of an England long since gone, albeit much beloved and not entirely forgotten. I could always empathise with Mole stumbling blindly around the new world and Toad still makes me laugh (especially voiced by Rik Mayall), but I think my heart always did and always will go out to courageous, country-loving Rat.

H_Rat (2)

6. Bill Masen (Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham)

There’s something about the quiet, reflective protagonist of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids that has always drawn me in. Another Englishman, and in many ways as much a caricature as Rat, Bill Masen takes the apocalypse with just the right amount of melancholic reflection and stiff upper lip that you might expect. For a sci-fi book – and a thumping good one, if I might say so – there’s a refreshing absence of the brash, gun-toting, “gotta save the world” Americanisms of your average apocalypse narrative. When he’s not dodging paramilitary groups or sinister man-eating plants, Bill spends most of the book musing on the state of the world after man, the foolishness of man and the loneliness of the human spirit. Triffids will be one of those books I treasure when I grow old, as it was Bill Masen’s thoughts on loneliness that gave me solace when I travelled solo across Spain.

H_Masen

5. Ashton Hilary Akbar Pelham-Martyn (The Far Pavilions, M.M. Kaye)

Let’s be perfectly honest here, to write a list of my favourite fictional heroes and not include the central character of what has always been my favourite book of all time would be nothing short of criminal. Orphaned shortly after birth in an opening that never ceases to chill me, Ashton (Ash) is raised by his father’s syce and spends his childhood under the impression that he’s Indian, before being rudely awakened to his English heritage after a series of adventures. He spends most of the book dealing with the fallout from that revelation, never entirely sure where his loyalties lie, and consequently never truly fitting in anywhere. The only trouble with Ash is he’s just too perfect. He slips up and gets hurt, and you can really feel his pain and his anger when he does, but even as a naïve young man he comes across as just a little bit too good to be true: fluent in more than five languages, an extremely talented sportsman, a natural with the ladies from his first experience and frustratingly good-looking, so much so that he spends most of the book being able to pass for Englishman, Afghan, Nepali or just about anything the plot requires, without having a drop of Pathan blood in him at all. Even so, I confess myself charmed by his tenacity from the beginning and have rarely felt so strongly about a protagonist as I have for Ashton Pelham-Martyn.

H_Ash

4. Hazel (Watership Down, Richard Adams)

The second anthropomorphic hero on this list is a rabbit, and this one doesn’t even dress like a hero. He’s just a rabbit, and neither the strongest nor the fastest of the rabbits of the Sandleford Warren, but in many ways he’s a greater hero than many of the characters on this list. John Hurt’s voiceover in the 1978 film only sealed the deal. I admit that I saw the animated movie before I read the book, but it evidently didn’t scar me for life as it did to many others as I did go on to read the book (though whoever decided that a visual representation of rabbits being gassed en masse was deserving of a U-rating obviously had some demons). Hazel is wise, caring and self-sacrificing; a true leader, equipped with all the merits of El-Ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits (a sort of lapine Anansi/Coyote). I know Bigwig has always been the traditional fan favourite, but for me, it’s got to be Hazel, because he’s the kind of leader I could believe in. A hero with no pretensions to glory or leadership, but who looks out for every single member of his clan, and who becomes a leader quite organically as the story develops.

H_Hazel (2)

3. Tintin

Probably the most well-known character on this list, Tintin has been in my heart since I was a lad. His agelessness, his never-ending sense of adventure, the fact that you could essentially paint yourself into his shoes wherever he went… and the fact that I’ve been compared to him in every single line of work I’ve ever had, due in part to my round face and strange quiff-thing going on with my crowns. If we forget his earlier iterations (Tintin au Congo was written by a Belgian in a very different age), Tintin is a young man with a heart of gold. Tintin in Tibet is probably his finest hour, showcasing the Belgian reporter’s winsome determination and hope to find his lost friend, who pretty much everybody else has given up for dead. I had every Tintin book bar one as a kid (Dead Sea Sharks), and he’s one of those rare heroes whom I value above the supporting cast, no matter how colourful and memorable they may be (here’s looking at you Captain Haddock, Cuthbert Calculus and, of course, Thompson and Thomson).

H_Tintin

2. Peekay

The top two spaces go to two heroes who share the same country: South Africa. British by blood, Peter Philip Kenneth Keith – unfortunately named by his parents, more fortunately shortened to Peekay by the author – has a hard lot growing up as a little boy in an adult world. You hardly even notice him age as he often seems mature beyond his years, the result of being forced to land on his feet by his born-again mother and his tormentors, including the Judge and the vile Sergeant Bormann. The way Courtenay has him describe loneliness is every bit as powerful as Wyndham, if not doubly so in that it comes from the voice of a child. And Peekay’s fierce sense of justice and morality – a common feature in Courtenay’s heroes – is exactly the kind of thing I could go for. Throw antiheroes and bad-guys-gone-good at me all day, but I love a hero with a strong moral compass. I wanted to learn to box when I read the book and watched the film, so greatly did I fall under the spell of this particular fighter. All the same, when it comes to the title bout for my favourite fictional hero, there’s one man who just beats Peekay to the punch…

H_Peekay

1. Allan Quatermain

If you’ve read my writing before, this will be no surprise. Allan Quatermain is my favourite fictional character, hands down, no contest. Not the version you might have seen in League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie (though the graphic novel is close enough), I’m talking about the original. Humble. Wise. Melancholic. Cynical, but not unadventurous. And, though modern readers might find his language more than a little antiquated and even offensive, rather advanced and liberal-minded for his day. Allan Quatermain was the inspiration for such legendary figures as Indiana Jones, but I’ve always found the source material a good deal more inspiring. Maybe it’s his undaunting appearance – a wiry old man with bristly hair, a short stature and a shrinking habit – that makes him so likeable. He lives alone, but keeps good company and is a ceaseless fountain of wisdom, whether that wisdom comes from his own mouth or the mouths of his sage companions like Hans, or Umslopogaas, or Indaba-zimbi. Perhaps, above all else, the true quality of Allan Quatermain is the quality of his writer. The old adage, write about what you know, can be a little restrictive for those who enjoy historical fiction. Henry Rider Haggard, however, was at the very heart of the world about which he wrote, seeing the Boer Wars at first hand and even taking an active role in them himself. Quatermain taught me a lot about the world when I started reading again, but most importantly of all, he gave me a reason to embrace my homeland once again. It will be a while before any hero, great or small, topples the great Macumazahn from his seat at the top of this list.

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Special mention: Quint & Maris (The Edge Chronicles, Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell), Harry Flashman (Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser), Richard Sharpe (Sharpe’s Tiger, Bernard Cornwell) and Tommo (Private Peaceful – but just about every protagonist from Michael Morpurgo’s books would do)

Did you like this list? Feel free to copy the idea for posts of your own. BB x

The Quote Hunter

May 6, 2016May 12, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Two things first.

One. I can’t stand quotes. Seeing one in the introduction or conclusion of a piece of writing is an immediate turn-off for me. I think they’re entirely unoriginal and univentive when used incorrectly, and they all too often are. But more than that, it’s plain lazy. We’re such wonderful, creative beings. What’s stopping you from weaving word-magic of your own?

Two. I absolutely love quotes. The more original, the better. Especially ones that carry weight, and doubly so if they’re off the radar. The more you find, the more you can relate to, and in so doing, learn to spin your very own. At least, that’s the way I see it.

I’m a filthy hypocrite on so many levels.

The truth is that one of my favourite reading habits is to underline standout writing as I go, bookmarking entire pages if there’s too much to admire. In the olden days that would have meant defacing my library with pencil scratches and sticky-notes all over the place. Not to mention the dog-eared, ever-thumbed pages. There’s something genuine about that, but I’ve never been able to shake the idea that scribbling in a book is something close to sacrilege. With iBooks it’s a simple matter of tapping, swiping and tapping again if needs be. I’m doubly indebted to Durham’s International Office for their generosity on that front; why, if it weren’t for the iPad, I might never have got back into serious reading. Fancy that: technology leading me back to the old ways. It’s funny how the world works, sometimes.

Since this quote-farming business has only been in operation since July 2015, it’ll take me years to build up the bank to the size it should be. However, in the meantime, I’ve been keeping a quote journal in one of my (far too) many Paperblanks notebooks, which is already one sixth full – and a third of that is from a single book (M.M. Kaye, you are a literary goddess). I try to keep a balance between meaningful quotes and pure nuggets of gold writing, so it makes for good reading on its own.

Why am I wasting time explaining all of this? You know what’s coming! Here are twenty-five of my favourite quotes to date, taken from the various books I’ve been reading over the last year.

The Garden of Eden, no doubt, looked fair before man was, but I always think it must have been fairer when Eve adorned it. (Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines)

By the afternoon of that day […] at least six or seven drums were throbbing from various points. Sometimes they beat quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in obvious question and answer, one far to the east breaking out in a high staccato rattle, and being followed after a pause by a deep roll from the north. There was something indescribably nerve-shaking and menacing in that constant mutter, which seemed to shape itself into the very syllables of the half-breed, endlessly repeated, “We will kill you if we can. We will kill you if we can.” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World)

Her father was a man ‘led by a star’, as the natives say, and would follow it over the edge of the world and be no nearer. (Henry Rider Haggard, The Ghost Kings)

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative — an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary… That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly — that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do... (John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids)

It is certain that few build up the temples of their lives upon some firm foundation of hope or hate, of desire or despair […] but rather take chance for their architect – and indeed, whether they take him or no, he is still the master builder. (Henry Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter)

“You are going to spend a strange honeymoon, baas,” said Hans […] “Now, if I was to be married tomorrow, I should stop with my pretty for a few days and only ride off somewhere else when I was tired of her, especially if that somewhere chanced to be Zululand, where they are so fond of killing people.” (Henry Rider Haggard, Marie)

“There is so much human suffering that the whole world should be wailing.” (Joy Chambers, My Zulu, Myself)

“There’s no law in the Sahara” (Mayne Reid, The Boy Slaves)

I must not go on writing like this or I shall throw down my pen and book a passage for Africa. (Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm)

“If a man feeds only upon honour, he will grow thin.” (Henry Rider Haggard, Child of Storm)

“First serve, then ask for wages.” (Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife)

“What is life but loss, loss upon loss, until life itself be lost? But in death we may find all the things that we have lost.” (Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife)

Complete happiness is not allowed in this world even for an hour. (Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife)

I have always avoided baboons, feeling more afraid of them than any beast. (Henry Rider Haggard, Allan’s Wife)

“The Infinite will of God is always mysterious, mercifully granting us what we need more often than what we want.” (Thomas Hoover, Moghul)

It was a fear of India. Of the savage lands that lay all about her, stretching for thousands of miles and yet hemming her in. Of the dark, secretive, sideways-looking eyes; the tortuous unreadable minds behind those expressionless faces. (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

Conway Barton possessed a love of two things that have never yet failed to ruin those devotees who have worshipped them to excess: Drink and Women. (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

Common sense will nearly always stand you in better sense than a slavish adherence to the conventions. (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“If you saw a lunatic in possession of a lighted brand and knew that he intended to set fire to a building containing a hundred helpless women and children, all of whom would inevitably be burnt to death; and if the only possible method of preventing it was to kill the lunatic, would you consider that murder or humanity?”

“You cannot justify murder.”

“I’m not. But whose murder are you talking about?” (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“I told you so” is a cheap form of satisfaction at the best of times. (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“Though I can feel the wind and hear the thunder, I do not yet despair of avoiding the storm.” (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“The Lord helps those who help themselves.” (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“That bloody goat! I can only hope that some wet and hungry tiger has made good use of it. It will be a richly deserved end.” (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

“As a nation we cannot resist moving in and showing someone how to run his affairs when we see them being run damned badly.” (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

They had escaped from violent death by the narrowest of margins; they had lived as hunted animals and now they were herded together as captives; their countrymen everywhere were being pursued and slaughtered and defeated, and the Empire of John Company was crumbling into ruin. They had seen sights that would haunt their sleep for as long as they lived and they did not know if they might live as long as another day, or another hour. But for a moment they could forget it all and stare at each other with antipathy and cold anger; the greater issues giving place to an instinct as elementary and as animal as that which drives rival stages to fight in the spring. (M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon)

Do you have any particular favourite literary quotes? I have my preferences as regards genre (historical epics and romantic adventures tend to take priority), but I’m always on the hunt for a good read! x

Shakespeare and a Pigeon with a Death Wish

April 26, 2016April 26, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Summer has arrived in Spain. It’s been pleasantly cool up until now, but yesterday somebody upstairs decided to crank up the thermostat. Two months ago it was finally warm enough to ditch the thermals by night, and now it’s shirt season. Which, for anyone who knows me, suits me just fine.

I haven’t done a random regular update in a while. I guess that with all of the to-and-froing after Semana Santa I’ve hardly had the time: in less than a month I’ve been to El Rocio, Sevilla, Cordoba, Barcelona, Andorra, Calatayud, Monfrague and Jerez de los Caballeros, not to mention taken part in a Romanian art school exchange and worked a weekend at an English immersion event. It’s been pretty non-stop since the 23rd of March. But life goes on, and as I try to make clear on this blog, life is not one massive series of amazing year abroad adventures – unless you count the everyday as an adventure in itself, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did. It’s full of trials and tribulations of its own.

Well, what’s to say? Here I am in the staffroom at my afternoon private school, waiting for my Upper Sixth class to arrive for a catch-up class (I’m still making up for those hours I lost by being in Barcelona, one month later – take note, future me!). It’s hard work but rewarding, teaching Upper Sixth… They don’t all take part as they should, but those that do do so with a spectacularly high level of English. The others are just as good, if only they’d speak more (an eternal problem with teenagers). I look back to the honeymoon period when I’d first arrived and it was a barrage of questions from all sides… but even if they aren’t as proactive with familiarity, at least being settled pays off. And at least I know their names. It hardly needs saying, but that’s crucial to good relations.

Teaching at the public school this morning was uncharacteristically problematic. For the first time this year I forgot to set my alarm, with the result that I only woke up at the sound of my flatmate leaving, some fifteen minutes before my first class. In my haste to leave I startled a recently fledged pigeon that had been sitting on the doorstep of the block of flats which, as Fate would have it, flew straight under the wheels of a car. In that dark mood I went on to teach two Lower Sixth classes about the End of the World, painfully aware that the biggest challenge – trying to teach Shakespeare – was still around the corner. Even so, I’d prepared a nifty presentation for the job, which would do the trick.

Provided the computers were working. Which they weren’t.

For the second week in a row my premier class had to suffer an off-the-cuff lesson where all the visual prompts and gags had to be done manually. I’ve got to say it; if my mother hadn’t gotten me into drawing, I don’t know what I’d do in such situations. Drawing skills are a genuine lifesaver in teaching. No PowerPoint? Whip out the chalk. Trouble explaining a word? Draw it. Need to motivate the kids? Get scribbling. It’s a defibrillator that never runs out of juice. I owe my parents, my friends and my art teachers so very much for encouraging me on that front. I don’t know where I’d be without a pencil in my hand and an image in my head.

It’s 15.30. My Upper Sixth class should be here in a couple of minutes, but if they play their usual ‘I went home for lunch’ card, I’ve got at least another twenty minutes until they turn up. In the meantime, I’ll get prepping their mock exam. Let it never be said that a language assistant is a cushy job. You land a job as good as this, you’d better earn it. BB x

Diamond in the Rough

November 3, 2015November 3, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

This week started just about the same way as every week begins, with me waking up to the sound of my seven o’clock alarm, with the morning’s first class just an hour and a quarter away, and finding myself struck with the weekly conundrum that is ‘now, what am I going to teach today?’.

For the first three weeks I had some stellar lesson plans, but we’re filing into my fifth working week here now (I told you before, my observation week became my first teaching week) and my tried-and-true classes have come and gone. Four down, twenty-seven to go. Since in school I teach across the age-groups, from six to twenty-two, I have to split my material in half depending on their ability, which requires two new lesson plans each week. Not exactly a challenge, per se, especially when several of those are shared between groups, meaning it’s possible (and highly recommended) to recycle material; but it’s a weekly problem, after a weekend spent traveling, partying or what have you, that on Sunday night the question is always there on the tip of my tongue as I bed down for the night. What am I going to teach them today?

Today I thought I’d brave it and try literature on the kids. Foolhardy, I know, especially after my last attempt at sparking some creativity amongst the would-be dullards, but I’m not about to give up on them yet. To spark their interest – and since I’ve just spent most of the weekend reading the tale – I kicked things off by drawing a blackboard-sized Moby Dick on the board, complete with scars, harpoons and rigging. Most of them had heard of it, but understandably, none of them had actually read it.

Well, not quite. One of them had.

I did a little double-take at this and made him explain the plot to the class. The way he put it, in English, a language that is not his own, told the tale better than Herman Manville (personally, I found the text hard-going, turgid even, though the story itself was impeccable). Better yet, he beat me to it and cited Manville as the author. I thought I’d let him sit on his laurels for a while and ask the others for any books they’d read recently, but they just stared blankly at me, as though I’d asked them if they’d like to spend the rest of the day doing quadratics. Moby – the pseudonym I shall forthwith use for this very literate kid – had his hand up the whole time and went on to tell me about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. That he had read them in translation is beside the point. This is a boy of fifteen who’s busy working his way through the classics.

As I was struggling to elicit some kind of interest from the rest of the class – who, as you might expect, were getting visibly bothered by Moby’s contributions – my colleague spent the hour taking notes of other writers that he might enjoy, amongst them Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. One of Moby’s companions lost it and complained loudly that it was unfair that only Moby was talking. My colleague and I soundly brought him down a size by repeating that all I was asking for was a story any of them had read, and that as Moby was the only one who was willing to talk, they only had themselves to blame for their silence. I opened the floodgates a little by allowing them to tell me about a film or television series they might have seen, but on that inch they took a mile and missed the point completely; three accounts down the line I had to remind them that match reports, game shows and reality TV are not stories, and consequently didn’t count.

Pushed into a corner, one kid looked very chuffed to say he thought his favourite TV show, a Spanish version of Match of the Day, was far better entertainment than any book he’d ever read. Granted, he probably hasn’t read very widely – I hadn’t at his age – but for good measure I told him that a show where two obnoxious early retirees discuss what happened, what might have happened, what should have happened and what might happen next time in a football match for an entire hour could hardly be as entertaining as a decent read. I could have done worse, of course, but I held back. Most of it went over his head anyway, as it was supposed to. I’m not foolhardy enough to let my personal prejudices against the tedium that is the world of football discussion ruin my relationship with my students, who already know I’m none too keen on it.

As you might have guessed, I was getting pretty frustrated by this point. I’ve learned to mask it after a month of teaching these kids, but it’s still pretty galling when you ask a simple question and all you get in return is twenty-three gormless expressions. But Moby came back with the goods, stating that he hadn’t read any books in English yet, but that over Christmas he was going to try with Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. You’ve got to hand it to the kid; starting to read in a foreign language with Tolkein…? That takes guts. My parents are prolific readers and they can’t stand his writing, and sadly they’re not alone (though I, for one, can’t get enough of the stuff).

In the other establishment I work at there are several kids like Moby in every class; students who are well-read, well-cultured and whose English is streets ahead of their companions. It’s the norm in a private school. And teaching in both private and state has its merits. But kids like Moby make the state school experience so much more worthwhile, for all the challenges. Here is a boy who, despite everything, is working his way through the literary greats for the pure pleasure of it, with his mind bent on attending university in Toronto of all places. It’s kids like Moby who remind me just why it is that I love teaching. Because for all the sour looks, disinterest and gossipping that goes on, when there’s at least one kid who’s shining with promise there’s a reason to go on. Obviously you can’t cater to that one child alone – if it were that simple, everyone would want to be a teacher, I think – but as long as you know that what you’re dealing is going towards somebody’s personal development, that’s reward enough for all your travails.

As for me, I’ve got a fair amount of catching up to do. Moby Dick was this weekend’s read; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe await, along with Allan Quatermain (after a two-month hiatus). Maybe I’ll recommend King Solomon’s Mines to Moby when I next get the chance. It’s certainly one of my favourites. BB x