Down the Rabbit Hole - Alice's First Adventure in Wonderland

Stories that I read early in life have walked me through thick and thin. Providing many useful messages to future selves. One of those tales is called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

I hope to walk you through the story from my perspective. We begin by going Down the Rabbit Hole

A little girl sitting beside her sister on a river bank sees a white rabbit hurrying past. That sounds quite natural but the rabbit has a waistcoat and is consulting his watch!

Illustration by John Tenniel

Alice follows the rabbit and falls down a rabbit hole. The fall seems to last forever - the feeling we have when we are about to drop off to sleep. In fact, I suppose we are to assume that little Alice has drowsed off in the pleasant heat of the day. And all that follows is but a dream. This is a good tactic to draw us into the story, to make us suspend belief so that we can expect almost anything. 

And the adventures that Alice has when she falls down the rabbit hole are absurd and beyond all belief. 

Before she reaches the bottom, she sees things on either side of the tunnel she's tumbling down: maps and bottles and bookshelves too. Though the fall is long, Alice talks to herself - a habit I'm sure many of us do to while away the time. Or has the habit gone since we talk on the phone to others all day long?

Upon landing she is faced with many passages and many doors. Which to choose? Is this not what we perpetually face?

Of course, in the marvellous insanity of the story, she finds a key! And so do we though there are few humble enough to confess to that serendipity in life.

Sure enough, Alice also finds a hidden door that the key opens. 

AnnaliseArt

Inside, she finds a Drink Me bottle. 

Illustration by John Tenniel

And that makes her very small. Which makes her rather sad as she can't reach things. But then she also finds an Eat Me cake - what will it do?

To find out, wait for my take on Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears ...

  

James Hadley Chase - Hardly Chased Today

 I cannot remember which I first read: a Raymond Chandler or a James Hadley Chase. Both write racy thrillers. However, while Chandler has received significant literary attention, posterity has not pursued Chase.  All I can proffer from memory is that, while Raymond Chandler had exquisite constructions which live on in the mind, the James Hadley Chase novels have not left much lingering.

Except for one story. It was in my early undergraduate years that I finally found my sort of friend. I lost touch with her after she left town to pursue studies in a big city. And I never quite found that kind of friendship later. But it was she who told me about Miss Shumway Waves Her Wand.

Naturally, a story about a bandit who becomes a sausage because of a curse and who is then eaten by a dog which then turns into a talking pooch is bound to fascinate. Well, let's admit that I have a taste for humour, for one thing. And, for another, whacky wit is irresistible to me. But it's not really everyone's cup of tea.  Most prefer the sensational tales of money hungry men and women and the bitter ends they meet.

That is what Chase basically offers (aside from the abovementioned sausage story). 

But who is Chase, you ask. Now, that is a charming story!

Like today's Lee Child, Chase was British. Like Child, Chase wrote about American gangsters. But how he came to do it is yet another fascinating tale. A salesman for books, Chase discovered that a particular novel was so well borrowed at the local library that it was always off the shelves. This gem was The Postman Always Rings Twice.

So Chase decided to pen some purple prose on his own and thus was born No Orchids for Miss Blandish. 

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (film) poster - Fair Use

And then he churned out one pot boiler after the other. Some were made into films but no one seems to rave about those. 

His novels were devoured around the world - India had or still has faithful fans. However, the Americans were not at all amused that a Brit made money out of their lurid lives. Oddly, the French have a fancy for Chase, it is reported. Which brings us to the similar phenomena with Harlan Coben. Whatever the je-ne-sais-quoi of a Hadley Chase, we must admit that the French have good taste.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. So why not nibble at a James Hadley Chase today? I bet you won't be able to stop till you devour the book and that you might not stop till you've munched through any Chase that you can find. 

Doctor in the House - Prescribed Reading

 There was a time when novels about doctors were popular. There were moving tales and funny stories. Somewhere along the way the stories grew dark and most medical fiction became scary. But, once upon a time, there was the Doctor series by Richard Gordon.

Doctor in the House is his first:

This first book opens with an exam situation. 

Every six months this orderly quiet is broken up like a road under a pneumatic drill. Three or four hundred students arrive from every hospital in London and from every medical school in the United Kingdom. Any country that accepts a British qualification is represented. There are brown, bespectacled Indians, invariably swotting until the last minute from Sir Leatherby Tidy's fat and invaluable _Synopsis of Medicine;_ jet-black gentlemen from West Africa standing in nervous groups and testing their new fountain-pens; fat, coffee-coloured Egyptians discussing earnestly in their own language fine points of erudite medicine; hearty Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans showing no more, anxiety than if they were waiting for a pub to open; the whole diluted thoroughly by a mob of pale, fairly indifferent, untidy-looking British students conversing in accents from the Welsh valleys to Stirlingshire.

Richard Gordon's books have left me memorable giggles and I hope you too will enjoy the amusing stories of life as a doctor. 

Sacks' Migraine - no headache to read

We tend to assume that good literature is fiction and poetry and drama. However, there are works of nonfiction that are gems of good writing and reading them gives as much pleasure as would any novel.

Books by Oliver Sacks cover a variety of areas, all more or less related to his field - medicine, in general, and neurology, in particular. He writes about medical conditions in an engaging style.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival. © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons

His books are, basically, case histories. It is the way he narrates things that takes what might be dry-as-dust and makes it fascinating to read. Migraine, 1970, is his first book but rather hefty in size. 

I've suffered from bad headaches for years and a lot of folks I know, especially women, endure terrible migraines. Sacks had his first one when he was just three or four years old!

“I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left—dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then, behind the brightness, came a blindness, an emptiness in my field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified—what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but those were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.“

A Perspective on the Migraine Mind 

 “My firstborn, written in a burst (nine days!) in 1967, stimulated in part by working in a migraine clinic and in part by a wonderful book (Liveing’s On Megrim) written a century earlier.”

oliversacks.com

 

It would do anybody great good to have several Oliver Sacks books at home but those who suffer migraines would be especially grateful to get to read it.

Infinite Vision

Today it is hard not to have contempt for the medical profession, hard not to mistrust doctors and hospitals. On the one hand, there is amazing progress in medical research. But, on the other, all one sees when accessing medical help is greed.

For me, it is especially painful to see how things are for patients. My father was a doctor and he even resigned his job at the top of his career because he could not live with the fact that his bread and butter depended on the misery of others. He continued to practice but not for money. 

So, naturally, when growing up, stories of doctors formed core reading for me. The Reader's Digest fed me a satisfactory supply of the lives and adventures of doctors. There was Lloyd C Douglas with his syrupy doses of the spiritual and the professional. There was The Dear and Glorious Physician, a historical account. And there was Richard Gordon with his hilarious Doctor series. 

Somewhere along the way books about doctors and medicine dwindled. And even writings from earlier times fell out of sight. Meanwhile, medical dramas sprouted on TV. Most of these are quite ridiculous and only add to the growing divide between the world of medicine and that of patients.

It is in such a setting that I found myself blessed with Infinite Vision. The book burst into my world bringing a bright gleam of hope. Infinite Vision speaks of a flourishing initiative that allows patients to pay or not and offers quality care either way. It is, basically, the saga of the Aravind Eye Care System, a set of eye hospitals and ophthalmological initiatives that is now spread around the world.

Have a look at what Aravind is basically about:

Today, in this terrible time, such a book can offer hope - what we need to do at this juncture is to look at how we can offer almost cost-free medical service to populations. Alas, that seems to be last on the list of anyone's concerns. The contemporary doctor has to whip up enough money to pay various EMIs - rent for the clinic, for equipment, for staff. And for family needs which rise with status. In this book you can find strategies which might provide some solutions. 

Coasting Masters' Savages - The Roots

A savage is a person whose way of life is at a very early stage of development. John Masters, a twentieth century English novelist, wrote a series of novels set in India at various historical times. The novels' protagonists, the Savages, all come from the same family. In this case, Savage is just a surname.  

But, to the Europeans who sailed forth to other continents at a certain point in history, the scantily-clad peoples of some warmer lands appeared as savages as they did not display much pride in their culture. Apart from a fanatic set of taboos and elaborate ritualistic behaviours. 

So, it is perhaps natural that the Europeans then regarded themselves as masters. And, perhaps, we can see that such an attitude would be fairly normal in anyone. However, why was there such a lacuna in the first place?  

For one thing, most of these lands had not passed through the then modern trend of revolutions. In many of the regions that the Europeans of that time encountered there was already a steep unchallenged hierarchy where cultural worth was forever out of the reach of most.  This rather savage view has coloured narratives from the colonial times. 

To counter the trend, some decided that the way out was to put these accounts out of sight and mind. Unfortunately, as with all such initiatives, it has not only not been too helpful in eradicating certain behaviours but it has helped create generations of real savages - people deprived of any thought of any cultural worth. 

Creators of cultural worth are rarely anything but extremely free in thought - which is anathema to those who hold morals above culture. Morals are unreliable artefacts of humanity's struggle towards humanism. Many a moral value has had to be challenged by cultural representations until some barbaric moral behaviour was forced to change. Social change has often had to tussle with existing moral bias to establish more humane principles. It is only when we examine world classics of cultural worth to help us process the past, voraciously, and without prior moral bias, that we can begin to evolve humane principles. 

Now, John Masters is not a writer of great literary merit but, because most of his novels focussed on India across history, they ought to be of interest to us. Given that most of us in India have a less than basic idea of our own history, it becomes more vital to set off in search of our past with whatever exists. Of course there are better books for the purpose but Masters is quite juicy and, once the novice mind is engaged, we can look more deeply, on our own, at the times of which he writes. Today, as we read on various apps, it is easy to quickly dive into the Net in search of further information.  Revisiting this novel that I read in my early youth, I had a delightful time exploring India in the seventeenth century via the Web.  

For me, John Masters was a reading hand me down. My father regaled us with snippets from Masters' Nightrunners of Bengal and The Deceivers. His words served to fill the rustling night outside with delicious dreadfulness. Along with Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham and others, the novels of John Masters brought to life the Western concept of an exotic Orient. Once we accept them as fantasy, such exotic writings can be entertaining.

Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) - The Fort of Vellore in the Carnatic, India - 732241 - National Trust, public domain

Though I began with family recommendations, I soon homed in on the first in the series and the fifth in order of publishing. In Coromandel! we enter the Savage saga in the 1620's with young and illiterate Jason Savage. In the general savagery of the times, his life takes an unforeseen turn when he has to flee for his life, boarding a ship that is off to the Orient. After onboard adventures, he's washed ashore with a map that claims to show where treasure is buried. 

Hand-coloured aquatint engraving of the "A picturesque voyage to India, by the way of China" / by Thomas Daniell, R.A., and William Daniell, A.R.A. Wikimedia Commons

The tale will ring many bells to those who have read Robert Louis Stevenson and Lobsang Rampa and, of course, the others we've mentioned above. And there will be love and passion and beautiful 'native' women and magic. Enough adventure and action to prove the right read for the indoor season when endless rain imprisons us.

It is a ridiculous novel but might trigger a hunger in the reader to know about the area, once called the Coromandel Coast, in the seventeenth century. For those who already consider themselves masters of the history of the region it could help more reasonably savage Masters' Savage accounts.

So, why not try Coromandel! with hot chai and snacks!

The Overloaded Ark - Cameroon's Birds and Beasts

Gerald Durrell is a childhood favourite. I've enjoyed many of his books on animals and you will too. When trapped indoors for ages, what can be better than going on a six-month journey to Cameroon to get some animals for a zoo? Begin with Durrell's first book, The Overloaded Ark. 

By Source, Fair use 

The Overloaded Ark is rich with descriptions of the country's landscapes and people. The book may be hard to find but if you take the trouble you will not regret your embarkation:

The ship nosed its way through the morning mist, across a sea as smooth as milk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist- looking nimbus of light seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays penetrated and loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea. Slowly it was drawn up towards the sky in long lethargically coiling columns, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.

Wonderful illustrations enrich the book. So do try to find and read it. Also, it has a lot of humour - something that is good for us now more than ever. One of the most memorable characters in the book is a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee. 

I know that I visualized an ape about three years old, standing about three feet high. I got a rude shock when Chumley moved in.

He arrived in the back of a small van, seated in a huge crate. When the doors of his crate were opened and Chumley stepped out with all the ease and self-confidence of a film star, I was considerably shaken. Standing on his bowlegs in a normal slouching chimp position, he came up to my waist.He stood on the ground and surveyed his surroundings with a shrewd glance, and then he turned to me and held out one of his soft, pink-palmed hands to be shaken, with exactly that bored expression that one sees on the faces of professional hand shakers.

He seated himself in a chair, dropped his chain on the floor, and then looked hopefully at me. It was quite obvious that he expected some sort of refreshment after his tiring journey. I roared out to the kitchen for someone to make a cup of tea, for I had been warned that Chumley had a great liking for the cup that cheers.

As I poured the tea and milk into Chumeley’s mug and added three tablespoons of sugar, he watched me with a glittering eye and made soft “ ooing” noises to himself. I handed him the mug and he took it carefully in both hands. He tested the tea carefully with one lip stuck out, to see if it was too hot. As it was, he sat there and blew on it until it was the right temperature and then he drank it down.

Chumley’s crate was placed about fifty yards from the hut (next to a great gnarled tree stump to which I attached his chain) From there he could get a good view of everything that went on in and around the hut, and as we were working he would shout comments to me and I would reply.That night, when I carried Chumley’s food and drink of tea out to him, he greeted me with loud “ hoo hoos” of delight, and jogged up and down, beating his knuckles on the ground. Before he touched his dinner, however, he seized one of my hands in his and carried it to his mouth.

With some trepidation I waited as he carefully put one of my fingers between his great teeth and very gently bit it. Then I understood: in the chimpanzee world, to place your finger between another ape’s teeth is a greeting and a sign of trust. To place a finger in such a vulnerable position shows your confidence in the other’s friendliness.

His manners were perfect. He would never grab his food and start guzzling, as the other monkeys did, without first giving you a greeting, and thanking you with a series of his most expressive “ hoo hoos.” Then he would eat delicately and slowly, pushing those pieces he did not want to the side of his plate with his fingers. His only breach of table manners came at the end of a meal, for then he would seize his empty mug and plate and hurl them as far as possible.

Mo's Monkey King - Timothy's Take Tickles

At a time when some find relief in making China a scapegoat, Timothy Mo's The Monkey King might hit the right spot. Timothy treads the traditional trajectory of seeing the Chinese through the lens of the colonising Europeans. 

From Somerset Maugham and his literary like, we 'learned' that the Chinese are filthy in their personal habits, are liars and quite crooked in their dealings. And Maugham can rest easy in his grave as such caricatures continue to infuse our view of the other. 

Half-white Mo's novel, like a cartoon show, is filled with rude and ready humour. Timothy was only in his twenties when he wrote the book and the tone of the tale is probably due to chips on his shoulder.

The very first chapter of The Monkey King plunges you into a dizzying spiral of insane characters and situations. Very quickly you're stuck in a large old house - almost a vertical fortress. And up and down its entrails you go, meeting all sorts of spurious specimens. 

By Source, Fair use 

Before I read Mo's novel, the Monkey King, for me, was the impish simian disciple of a mythical Buddhist monk. Says Wikipedia:

... he is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices. After rebelling against heaven and being imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, he later accompanies the monk Tang Sanzang on a journey to retrieve Buddhist sutras from the West (India) where Buddha and his followers reside.

Mo's novel, however, has little to do with apes or Buddhism. Says Wikipedia:

The Monkey King follows the humorous exploits of protagonist Wallace Nolasco, who finds himself in financial straits after being denied his dowry in hectic post-war Hong Kong, and must by guile better both himself and the moribund reputation of the Chinese house he has married into. The plot of The Monkey King, which is a family saga, divided into three sections, is driven by the tensions between Wallace and his father-in-law, the patriarchal Mr Poon.

It is sometime in the 1950s. Wallace Nolasco is a Macanese, of Portuguese descent. He is in his mid-twenties and has returned to Macau from the mainland where he was studying engineering:

On the whole Wallace avoided intimate dealings with the Chinese. Despite a childhood spent cheek by jaundiced jowl with the Cantonese in Macau, he still found the race arrogant and devious. Worse, they revelled in the confusion of the foreigner: turning blank faces to the barbarian and sneering behind his back. Like his fellow Portuguese, Wallace made the best of the situation. In fanciful moments, he saw the Chinese and himself as prisoners together in a long chain gang, the descendants of the original convicts.

Wallace is not well-off and nor is his family. So he is advised to marry a girl from a Cantonese family - rumour has it that the Poons are rich. Alas, May Ling is but the child of a concubine! 

Our hero is mercilessly mistreated by one and all or almost at his in-laws'. But the joint family hell is not only why you should dive into the world of The Monkey King.

It's not likely that we'll be able to travel around much for, perhaps, months to come. Why not visit the Macau and Hong Kong of the fifties then? Mo's story is often like some Hong Kong slapstick comedy.  

    

The closing page leaves you with something that echoes many prejudices - a monkey brain as food scene. Exotic enough? Dip into the novel and relish the unusual!    

Spring Cleaning - Sundry Samples from Literature

For many the recent changes have spelt bouts of spring cleaning. In fact, given the nature of the thing, cleanliness is encouraged. It is in that spirit that I recently chose Spring Cleaning as theme for Writer Rites. These days deep cleaning your living spaces has almost reached a philosophy of life. People scramble to declutter and to adopt minimalist lifestyles. But what was it like in earlier times? 

Imagining the Bounds of History gives us a glimpse of Spring Cleaning in the 19th Century.

A manual for young housekeepers provided these instructions for spring cleaning in 1869.

Were you, reader, some day in spring, generally in the week before Easter, to take a walk through villages which we know, you might be ready to suppose that a general emigration was contemplated. You would see chairs and tables, kneading-toughs and cradles, bedsteads and bedding, all put out for an airing, while the busy cottagers are scrubbing and whitewashing, and perhaps painting and papering within doors. Neither is the practice confined to the poorer class only….

Things have indeed changed over time. Even in my own lifetime. From brooms to microfibre mops we've come a long way, baby! Of course, spring cleaning is never meant to be Bean's way:

 

But, jokes apart, spring cleaning has generated fiction. Here is a short story about what happens when a daughter and granddaughter try to give an older lady’s home a makeover while she’s in hospital. 

“Right,” says my mother, as we drive out of the hospital car park. “Now’s our chance to get to work on that bungalow.”

Even with both eyes fixed on the road, she must notice my alarm, because she takes her left hand off the wheel and places it on my knee and says, in that wheedling what-do-I-ever-ask-of-you tone, “Come on, Emma. If we do it together we’ll have that place bottomed in no time.”

Home from Uni for the Easter holidays, I’m supposed to be churning out an essay on the English civil war. I’m supposed to be searching for a McJob to tame my overdraft, or hanging out in the pub with friends I haven’t seen since Christmas. Unfortunately, what I’m supposed to be doing is of no consequence to my mother. Set against one of her projects, any plans of mine turn out to be as flimsy as cobwebs.

 Spring Cleaning

 

However dull it may seem to spend time brushing away cobwebs, spring cleaning can also be poetic. Marilyn Nelson's poem Dusting says 

Thank you for these tiny 

particles of ocean salt, 

pearl-necklace viruses,

winged protozoans: 

for the infinite, 

intricate shapes 

of submicroscopic 

living things.