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Henry Rider Haggard

28/9/2014

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Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925) was one of the most succesful adventure story writers of the late nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. He is credited as being the founder of the Lost World literary genre, and I suppose today he’d be classified as a writer of popular or commercial fiction. He certainly belongs to the breed of author who writes to make his way and earn his keep rather than one who sees profit as beneath them and seeks only to attain literary greatness. However, Rider Haggard wrote skilfully without obfuscation and possessed an ability to make his readers picture the setting he wished to communicate to them clearly. He spent a few years as a young man in southern Africa and this appears to have furnished him with ample material for his subsequent literary career. He was quite prolific, and appears to have produced at least one book a year (often more) over the span of his writing career.

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My maternal grandfather, born in 1891, and a lifelong avid reader, had a large selection of Rider Haggard’s novels on his bookshelves. He loved a thrilling tale, and I daresay as a youngster he would have adored the hugely exciting ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ with its boys’ own adventure story. The book’s description of a vast civil war battle between Haggard’s invented Kukuanas (clearly modelled with some respect on the Zulu culture) with the corpses of many thousands of their courageous warriors littering a plain stained red with their blood is still very affecting, and somehow, sadly presaged for me the terrible slaughter my grandfather and his generation would meet and know all too well as young men on the Western Front. A fact about Rider Haggard that I find of particular personal interest is that he spent his winters in Hastings. In 1917 he bought the North Lodge on Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea, and apparently used the room sited just above its archway for writing until 1923. I think I’d have to put this location forward on a list of most coveted workrooms, although I confess that I haven’t seen inside. He was chums with fellow author Rudyard Kipling, another East Sussex resident who lived in the village of Burwash at a house called Batemans. Kipling also had a pretty nice writing room - one that I have seen, as Batemans is a National Trust property and is definitely worth visiting. 

King Solomon’s Mines is a well written, highly thrilling adventure. However, the modern reader has to take into consideration when it was written before approaching it. Rider Haggard was a conservative Victorian and held Imperialist ideals consistent with the times in which he lived - views that most of us, I am pleased to say, find utterly repellent today. Most modern readers will I imagine also be horrified, as I was, when they read the chapter where the book’s narrator and main protagonist Alan Quatermain leads his white companions and their native bearers on an elephant hunt - the ensuing slaughter of ‘the brutes’ is quite shocking, and clearly shows the terrible disregard for the natural world prevalent amongst Europeans as they settled new territories. Having said this, and if you are able to get beyond these lamentable truths and see the book within its time frame and take along with it a large pinch of salt, then it is, I think, a very good read and a wholly ripping yarn.  

Rider Haggard’s novel ‘She’ is reckoned to be one of the most widely read books ever written, and fifty years ago was estimated to have sold over eighty million copies. It has been translated into numerous languages and made into several film versions. I recall getting a little hot under the collar myself when as a lad I saw Ursula Andress in the titular role. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is difficult for the modern reader to encounter views that are now considered to be quite unequivocally racist. The European world powers at the end of the nineteenth century were obsessed by the fearful idea of racial degeneration; Rider Haggard may have been influenced by this concept after witnessing the ruins of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ which were explored and excavated in the 1870s; they may have been, at least in part, responsible for the ancient lost city in She and his imagined native Armahagger people who live amongst the ruins and have, it must be said, very little to recommend themselves (incidentally, the white ruled Rhodesian Government for many years put political pressure on archaeologists to deny that such a city as ‘Great Zimbabwe’ could have been built by any black races). The book also touched on the rapidly changing role of women in the industrialised world. It was a hugely influential book in its day; its female protagonist Ayesha - the She of the title - has been cited as a female prototype in the works of Freud and Jung; the White Queen, Jadis, in C.S Lewis’s Narnia books owes a debt to her; as too does the character of Shelob in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is without any shadow of doubt a very good example of the lost world literary genre, however its often racist and Imperialist ideals are sometimes quite unpalateable - and any modern reader has to bear this fact in mind before proceeding.


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Medea

10/9/2014

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Last week we went to see Medea in the NT Live series at our local Odeon Cinema. This was a new translation of the Euripides play by Ben Power, with Helen McCrory playing the title role. She is a fabulous actress and this, I thought, was an excellent production directed by Carrie Cracknell. It’s a play I happen to know well, having played the part of Jason myself in a production about twenty years back. However, taking part isn’t the same as watching - it was wonderful to actually be seeing the play for the first time! It is still, even after two and a half thousand years, deeply involving as a piece of theatre, and it is hard to believe that Euripides only took third place for penning it at the Dionysia Festival of 431 BC. The supporting cast, choreography, movement, set design and presentation in this production are all excellent.

Many things about this production were very similar to the one I was involved in: both adopted a modern setting; both came down firmly on the side of Medea and the injustice of being cast aside by Jason. I discussed some of these concepts with an octogenarian actor at the time of my production, who didn’t find the updating of the play wholly to his taste,”Where were the robes?” he complained. And it’s only years later, after witnessing the play from an audience’s perspective, that I understand what he meant - he wasn’t simply complaining about the costumes! Last Thursday, Judith and I left the auditorium in total agreement that we had just seen a first class piece of theatre. However, later on we found that neither of us was somehow as deeply affected as we might have expected to have been after witnessing the atrocious act of filicide commited by Medea in her terrifying revenge upon Jason for his cowardly betrayal of her love. Why, we had to ask ourselves, were we not as moved as we have often been after watching many other tragic dramas?

I feel many of our theatre productions strive too hard to give plays from an earlier age a contemporary ‘feel’. Personally, I think we are wrong to take Euripides’ universality as a writer as unshakeable proof that he was some kind of proto-feminist. He definitely sympathised, I think, with the plight of women in Greek society; as well, I suspect as understanding Medea’s vulnerability as an immigrant living in what was to her a foreign land; we can appreciate her pain at being suddenly cast aside, despite her love and devotion, by an ambitious self-serving husband. Let’s face it, Jason is a rat and Euripides makes this very plain for us to see. But something I think we must also bear in mind is that Euripides’ audience was entirely male - no women were present at the Dionysia Festival - so perhaps he is making them look at their responsibilities. Maybe this didn’t go down too well, which is why he only came third?

However, we are in great danger I think when we attempt to turn a classical text into kitchen sink drama. We should not forget that in the original Euripides play, Medea, after witnessing the devastation she has wrought upon her faithless husband by murdering their children, not to mention Jason’s bride-to-be Glauce and Creon the king, exits the stage bearing the dead bodies of her sons in a fiery chariot belonging to the sun God Helios. She is an accomplished practitioner of the dark arts; Medea isn’t new to atrocity, she has already killed her own brother and betrayed her own people to help Jason steal the Golden Fleece. Let’s not forget either that these ancient ‘myths’, as they are to us, were a religion to the Greeks; they are their Bible stories if you will. Medea has always struck me as an archetype, the goddess Kali perhaps comes close; Ayesha in Rider Haggard’s She strikes a similar note. The female archetype is creative, loving and devoted, yet once forsaken by him she once loved with a devotion verging on the fanatical, can become as equally terrifying and unforgiving in her malevolence and hatred; by poisoning Jason’s new wife and destroying his royal aspirations, then murdering their children, Medea has, by the end of the play, utterly obliterated any possible future he may have aspired to; it is an unimaginably terrible revenge.

Anyway, just my thoughts. This is a great production and it is well worth seeing.


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