A Penguin Paragraph: The Apocryphal Gospels.

Books  More orthodox than expected.  Until now, these books seemed the stuff of sensationalist imported documentaries broadcast on Channel 5 around Easter time, featuring fringe talking heads spliced with trailer footage from a Dan Brown adaptation.  Instead, as the introduction explains, these are rarely "subversive texts” offering a dramatically different account to the sacred gospels.  If anything they evoke modern web culture with most of the writing so reliant on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John they’re practically fan fiction and in the likes of The Questions of Bartholomew, with a Mary Sue figure.  The ancient church leaders were literal gatekeepers, choosing how God should be worshipped.  The aphorisms in the Lots of Mary read like an inspirational Instagram account.  The so-called Jewish Anti-Gospel is essentially a Cinema Sins for the Bible.  Oh and yes, there is pr0n, Epiphanius’ quotation from the Questions in the Greater Questions of Mary sees to that.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Henry James Daisy Miller and An International Episode

Books Having recently enjoyed Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation with Cybill Shepherd’s peerless central performance, it’s surprising to find the judgemental mood with which Henry James characterises Daisy Miller in his original story, albeit through the eyes of a potential suitor (though his preface extract agrees). Yet despite the implications of his original sub-heading “a study”, I think he knows that she’s an extraordinary creation, strong and independent minded at pushing against the expectations of her times. An International Episode builds on those themes, sending two British blokes into the social environment of New Port, which is looser than they’re used to then brings the two sisters that they meet back to London to be greeted by our social strictures. The conclusion is subtle and took me a second reading to understand why a match isn’t made for reasons which haven’t much changed. The cultural clashes in both these stories still, sadly, occur.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Mary Shelley Frankenstein 1818 text

Books  As John Sutherland notices, a century of inaccurate, sensationalist film adaptations of Frankenstein have obscured Mary Shelley’s masterstroke: it isn’t explained how the creature comes into being.  As narrator, Victor Frankenstein describes the process of gathering the bones and whatnot, there are references to labs, but when his creation winks into life, there’s no lightning or slabs, with the Doctor obfuscating so that his experiment cannot be repeated.  The other surprise is the intellectual prowess of the beast.  Shelley’s monster is entirely sentient making his tragedy all the more compelling.  Unlike most screen versions he’s all too aware of his horrific frame and so when the humanity he’s so attracted to ultimately rejects him and he sets about reaping his revenge on his creator, it’s his civilisation that motivates him rather than some animalist brutality.  Even in this earlier, apparently coarser version, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read.

The Oxford Paragraphs Edgar Allan Poe Selected Tales

Books As the introduction to this selection of tales acknowledges, Edgar Allan Poe’s female "characters" are absent. Even in those stories which have a woman’s name as the title, they’re simply part of a metaphysical structure and barely given individual personality traits before quickly finding tragic death in a number of ways. His anonymous narrators instead enjoy the company of a string of psychologically damaged men often because they are seeking a kindred spirit. But at his best, Poe is thrilling. The Pit and the Pendulum and The Man of the Crowd are utterly absorbing their ability to place the reader at the centre of oblique, surreal environments and with the three C. Auguste Dupin he inadvertently creates the entire detective fiction genre albeit with slightly more static storytelling structure than Conan Doyle or Christie. If nothing else, I've learnt that you can’t judge a book by its Hammer Horror adaptations.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto

Books Even at school, because it was that kind of school, I remember agreeing with friends during free period discussions that Communism sounded like a good idea in theory but unworkable in practice. Having finally read Engel and Marx’s work I’ve a better idea of the why. Removing social distinctions, handing power from the bourgeois to the proletarians only has the effect of shifting the class structure. There always has to be rulers, and damagingly for the philosophy, those rulers have to have a totalitarian element in order to keep the workers in line, to stop them from taking advantage of potential capitalist opportunities, which inevitably leads to rebellion, which inevitably leads to more control. The half dozen subsequent prefaces to later editions included here, filled with qualifications, corrections and clarifications to the main text also demonstrate that this was a manifesto and political philosophy which was built on shifting sands.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Robert Louise Stevenson Treasure Island

Books Never having been a fan of the pirate genre I entered communication with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one of its pillars, with some trepidation especially since as the author’s biographer Claire Harmon notes like his Jekyl and Hyde, it’s so well known that it hardly requires being read at all, “Long John Silver is more real to most people than any historical buccaneer.” I’d like to offer a narrative of rediscovering the genre, but young Jim Hawkins is such a greedy, repellent narrator and the various pirates so difficult to understand and the story points so subtly telegraphed, I was less thrilled than appalled. That Silver and Gunn are the most entertaining figures it does go without saying, but as Harmon hints because their old bones have been resurrected so many times since, the original now seems prosaic and slothful. But such things are not Stevenson’s fault, of course.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Rudyard Kipling The Man who would be King and Other Stories

Books  Not having visited a newsroom yet myself, I don’t know how accurate Kipling’s description of the Bombay Mail at the opening of The Man who would be King is, but it’s exactly how I’ve always imagined, understandable given the author was working as a journalist in India when writing these stories.  Evocatively expressed between semi-colons, this is  a disorganised chaos of humanity working against the odds in a barely comfortable, stiflingly humid atmosphere, to produce a coherent message or at the very least fill a newspaper's columns with informative content from some mostly reputable sources.  Kipling’s style is an acquired taste, as messy but flavoursome as the cuisine of the country he’s evoking, only really gaining momentum in those stories with a vivid, psychologically challenging idea like The Haunted Rickshaw or At Twenty-Two, in which a mining disaster inspired by Emile Zola’s Germinal is transposed to Kipling's country of origin.

The Oxford Paragraphs: The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet

Books Imagine my surprise when browsing through Kernaghan Books in the Wayfarers Shopping Arcade in Southport for these editions when I stumbled across Hamlet somewhat working against the purpose of me utilising these Oxfords to discover literature. Edition editor G.R. Hibbard chooses the First Folio as the basis for his text on the assumption that it was produced from a clean, revised manuscript of the play by Shakespeare himself, a final revision of the material that increases the pace but also clarifies the story in other places. His argument is sound, but I do much prefer the much later Arden 3’s approach of suggesting that all the close textual analysis in the world won’t definitively confirm which of the versions is definitive, so it’s best just to present all three (unless like the RSC edition, the mission is to reproduce an edition of the folio in particular). More inevitably posted here.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier

Books  Writing in the literary appropriation of impressionism pioneered by his erstwhile friend Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford’s modernist narrative is an enemy of structure and coherence as it mimics his American narrator Dowell’s memory of his obsessive psycho-sexual relationships with his suicidal wife Florence, British stick Edward and his wife Leonora, chronology rolling in on itself over and again. When, at beginning of its fourth part, Dowell apologises for having told the story “in a very rambling way” because “it may be difficult for anyone to find their way through what may be a sort of maze”, well, reader, I sighed. Yet this is still engrossing thanks to its thick atmosphere steeped in turn of the last century continental privilege, and some beautifully rendered characterisation, especially Leonora, a passive aggressive viper who can ruin a man by simply giving him some of her attention. And knows it. And does.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights

Books Piecing my way through the narrative fog of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights with its many layers of narrators, I was reminded of the found footage genre of films, in which the viewer’s entire understanding of the story is whatever is visually made apparent to them through the first person gaze of the whoever’s holding the camera in the fictional world and then the film’s editor, a figure who sits between that world and our reality. Everything we know about the love story is filtered through the recollections of Lockwood and Nelly and others, characters who Bronte employs to imply that Heathcliffe and Cathy and their decedents exist in a subjectively cruel, sadistic place cut off from a more benign reality. All are apparently reliable narrators, but throughout I couldn’t help a nagging suspicion, and that like The Blair Witch Project et al, there are multiple layers of fiction at play.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows

Books As the introduction (written back in the 80s by Grahame biographer Peter Green) rightly identifies, although Mr. Toad made The Wind in the Willows famous, his action packed adventures are the least evocative and I’d go further to say he’s the least interesting of the characters. The best chapter, Dulce Domum, in which Mole desperately seeks to return to his own home despite its humbleness is an intoxicatingly emotional description of the inescapable connection most of us have to our own familiar four walls however else we might imagine they seem to others (and nearly had me in tears by the time the carol singers arrived). The loyalty between Ratty and Mole is also especially touching, not unlike that between Sherlock and Watson, the former often riding roughshod of the latter’s feelings until he realises he’s gone too far, guilt sets in and he shambles about making amends.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Books With just a vague memory of the film adaptation starring Bing Crosby, some notion of the influences it has had on Doctor Who, and the cover illustration as a guide, I approached A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court expecting a typically structured but entertaining story of a man out of time and although Twain/Clemens’s tale begins in that mode, it quickly tips over into a far darker meandering satire on Western imperialism and industrialisation. The protagonist Hank Martin is a loathsome figure and even though the story’s told from his POV, I slowly became more and more protective of the Arthurian characters who barely seem to deserve the treatment the Yankee gives them. But that’s Twain/Clemens’s point I think; how the modern versions of us, apparently so sophisticated, are desperate to sap the magic from the world, be it in nature or man itself. A difficult read but a transportative one.  This is psychogeographical literature.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

Books One of the benefits of finally reading a book of which I’ve seen numerous screen versions is in increasing my understanding of the art of the adaptation which in Austen’s case requires much more than transcribing quotes and turning prose into stage directions. Although there is some conversation, most of the action in Pride and Prejudice occurs in reported speech leading to much invented dialogue, the screenwriter also having to make sense of rapid scene changes, days often passing in a matter of words. It’s a charming book, rightly loved, but a slow read. The writer often pastiches other contemporary novelistic styles making some sections oddly incomprehensible to my untrained eyes, which are also replaying versions of scenes from those adaptations and forever comparing them to their literary origin.  My favourite character after Lizzy is still her father, an inspiring symbol of tolerance searching for peace within the domestic chaos of his surroundings.

The Oxford Paragraphs: The Bible Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha

Books Of all the Christmas presents I knew I would be receiving this year, I hadn't thought it likely that the King James Bible would be the book which would capture so much of my attention. Yet, here I am on New Year's Day having completed the introduction, notes and extended extracts of this noticeably academic approach (text originally edited in the 1966) along the way experiencing solace, marvel, frustration, anger and fury (Leviticus) but ultimately surprise at how this book could be the cause of so much love and inspiration, death and destruction in a way that only goes to underscore the inconsistency of human beings. By treating it as literature, the editors are able to dispassionately review the quality of the words and investigate the dating of the books and authorship, underscoring that even the original scrolls are an interpretation of earlier stories and "manuscripts", never mind the bias later inserted through translation.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Robert Browning The Major Works

Books As the cover explains, at the back of this formidable collection of Robert Browning’s major works is a selection of “courtship correspondence”, beginning with the giddy fan letter Browning wrote to fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and the communications the couple shared right up to the moment she became his wife. They’re dense, poetic but intensely reassuring things that demonstrate how even great writers are wracked by self-doubt, low self esteem and grumpy about the critical reaction to their work.  In other words, entirely human. The couple are also touchingly incapable of explaining exactly how they feel for fear of ruining their friendship, codifying their fondness until, presumably after having met, they’re finally capable of putting them into words.  And such words.  When a single noun “friend” is dropped from its usual prefixing adjective “dearest” as happens between 30th August 1845 and the 12th September, something has irrecoverably changed.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Charlotte Brontë The Professor

Books In The Professor, one of Charlotte Bronte’s earliest novels, which despite many revisions wasn’t published until two years after her death, a Yorkshire mill clerk describes fleeing to Brussels where he takes up employment as an English teacher. He falls briefly under the spell of the older Directoress but ultimately builds a fruitful marriage with one of his pupils. The density of descriptive passages make this a difficult but rewarding read, its loose structure pre-figuring the post-modern. Bronte had in mind the buck the trends of that era’s novelists by providing a realistic approach to characterisation and narrative, which was too new for potential publishers who all rejected it outright. What they missed is how the novel captures the sheer fecklessness of the male heart, seeking acres of meaning in a girl’s otherwise innocuous glances and how we might think we’re in control, but we’re really not.

The Oxford Paragraphs: Introduction.

Books In an effort to widen my exposure to literature beyond Elizabethan and Jacobian classical drama I’ve begun collecting the Oxford World's Classics, picking up copies in used bookstores, charity shops and ebay with the plan to read them in the order of purchase and utilising an Amazon wish list to keep track of the books I'm still looking for (or in case anyone is in a benevolent mood). With almost all of literature available, and me being the king of indecision, I wanted to introduce a random element, so I’m only buying the very latest edition both because I like the simplicity of the cover design and because they’re relatively new and so rarer and more of a challenge to find.  After completing each, I'll create a virtual milestone by posting a short review here, of about a hundred and fifty words.  A single, totemic paragraph.  Like this one.