I usually think that certain novels or songs could only be created in the era that such genres thrived in. Jazz music is from the Jazz Age (ie the roaring 20s), and Disco is very 1970s. Regency novels are very, well, Regency. And can you imagine Dickens in any time and place but the Industrial Revolution grime of Victorian London?
There are exceptions. The late 1990s movie Velvet Goldmine, which was a tribute to the early 1970s era when David Bowie and Iggy Pop were at their best created new music which sounded like authentic Bowie.
How do you do this? I think you need to be entirely immersed in the sights and sounds and language and way of life of a particular place in time to be able to create art that is archetypical of that genre.
Time does not stop, even for the jilted Miss Haversham forever attired in her wedding dress.
To reach into the past and create a credible mimicry of a genre takes genius.
For a quick example, I should mention the semi-retired jazz/blues musician CW Stoneking. From what I gather, he was born to American parents somewhere in northern Australia and raised in an aboriginal settlement, remote from outside contact.
Exposed from an early age to a steady musical diet of jazz and blues, he has done far more than become a jazz guitarist. He has written several concept albums which feature music that sounds like it is from a particular era – whether it is the 1920s, the 1930s or the 1940s – but which is his own original music.
Jaw droppingly original talent, especially as it is as if he can reach us from 90 years in the past with new music from that time.
I have seen him live twice (most recently in a beer garden in Castlemaine), and he is bloody good. If he comes out of retirement again, he is well worth going and listening to perform.
So too is the novel I finished reading yesterday, ‘The Gentleman’ by Forrest Leo.
This novel is narrated in the first person present tense by Lionel Lupus Savage, a fopish and somewhat pretentious poet, one of the deadbeats of the Victorian Era Gentry whom many writers of that era (including but not exclusively Anthony Trollope and Oscar Wilde, and, a few decades later, Evelyn Waugh) would use for comic relief in their stories.
It is annotated by Savage’s cousin in law Hubert Lancaster Esq (who introduces us to the text with the passage: I have been charged with editing these pages and seeing them through to publication, but I do not like the task. I wish it on record that I think it better they had been burned.).
In short, our narrator Savage, having been profligate with his inheritance, has caused a young and wealthy aristocratic lady to fall in love with him so that he can continue to live the life of the idle rich. He is not in love with her, and when, at a party at their home, a ‘Gentleman’ appears who gives the impression that he is the Devil, he laments to this chap about his marriage and wishing his wife gone.
The next morning she is in fact nowhere to be seen, and Savage concludes (which obviously is the most simple and logical explanation) that his wife has been taken away to Hell by the Devil.
He comes to repent his indifference, and then, aided by his liberated sister, his aristocratic brother in law, and (of course) his butler, he starts to plan how to travel to Hell and win his wife back.
I won’t spoil the rest for you, except that there is a steam powered flying machine invented by a member of an exclusive inventor’s club located in the centre of London.
Reading through the rich and witty language, the story is one which has so many elements of the Jeeves and Wooster stories of PG Wodehouse (although Wooster was even more commitment phobic) and the Faustian tones of Oscar Wilde.
The author, Forrest Leo, has created a very original work which is extremely reminiscent of those English writers of a century or more before today. How has he done this?
What is most astonishing is that he is actually American.
Although this might explain it, as his biography reads: ‘Forrest Leo was born in 1990 on a homestead in remote Alaska, where he grew up without running water and took a dogsled to school.‘
Images of an isolated log cabin insulated in part at least with bookshelves filled with the writings of PG Wodehouse, Oliver Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Hector Munro (aka ‘Saki’) and similarly witty ironic Englishmen come to mind. It is totally conceivable to me that someone living in the Alaskan wilderness could immerse themselves in the language and thinking of that time so as to give us a book which fits so well with what you would expect to have been published over a century ago.
Lost For Words! 