Richard’s Literary Byways: Pavane, by Keith Roberts

[RichardB]

It has occurred to me that this occasional series is incomplete without the piece that started it all off, which was posted back in the old days on the Word Cloud. Some may remember it; some may not. And in one case I know I’m preaching to the converted…

In 1983, on a commission from a Japanese publisher, the novelist and critic Anthony (A Clockwork Orange) Burgess wrote a book called Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice. Why he chose 1939 as his starting point I don’t know, but what emerged was a list of the seminal novels of the mid-twentieth century. Catch-22 is in there. So are A Farewell to Arms, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Catcher in the Rye, Brideshead Revisited. Just about every mid-twentieth century author of any reputation puts in an appearance.

But there is one entry which must sorely puzzle many, even most, of the people who see that list. Pavane, by Keith Roberts. What book is this? Who is Keith Roberts? And if his book is so good, why is it so little-known?

A clue to one possible reason is that prominent among those who have praised it are Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and George R R Martin. Roberts wrote mainly various forms of speculative fiction and, though attitudes have thawed a bit in recent times, science-fiction has always been a bit of a poor relation. People don’t take it seriously. It’s the trainspotting of fiction genres. You probably don’t need me to tell you that SF is about the commonest no-no on agents’ lists of types of MS they won’t consider.

Even so, there are one or two other works of SF on Burgess’ list, but they are all better known than Pavane.

But not to me. I bought and read Pavane when it first came out in paperback. I fell in love straight away, and over half a century (My God!) later it remains one of my favourite novels. I still have that first-ever paperback edition, yellowed with years, softened and worn by many re-readings, but still just about holding together in one piece.

So what is this overlooked gem?

First off, it’s what is known in SF circles as a fix-up, a series of separate episodes linked together by characters and setting. And Pavane isn’t quite science-fiction as the term is usually understood. Like Robert Harris’ more recent bestseller Fatherland (which, however, has not been pigeonholed as SF), it is a tale of alternative history, a big what if…?

Taking advantage of a nation riven by Catholic-Protestant civil war following the assassination of Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada successfully invaded England, setting off a chain reaction in which Protestantism was wiped out all over Europe and the whole continent came under the domination of the Catholic Church. Over the centuries since, it has kept its grip on the minds and souls of the people by suppressing or even reversing progress, both technological and social, and so as the story opens in 1968 (which at the time the book was written was present day) we are presented with a twentieth century England in which something close to the feudal system has been reimposed, and where technology has not advanced beyond the steam age. Road haulage is by traction engine, castles and monasteries are still thriving, and communication is by semaphores on tall towers (the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s clacks: I’d lay money on it). There are still large tracts of wilderness, where wolves and wild cats survive. People still believe in the Old Ones, the Fairies, the People of the Heath. And with good reason.

Roberts’ world building is a bit of a Marmite thing. Some readers find his loving detailing of obsolete and imaginary technologies tedious and complain that it gets in the way of the story; others, myself included, find the very same thing captivating, bringing the imagined world vividly to life, because he doesn’t describe those technologies in a cold mechanical way but brings them alive by putting the reader right into the heads of those who use them – for example, writing of the screaming muscles of a trainee semaphore signaller after a hard test at the signal levers.

(There is one detail that I particularly like. The internal combustion engine has been invented, but the Church has slapped a veto on it restricting it to such a tiny size as to rule it out as a practical means of transport. There are steam cars, but only the very rich can afford them. One of these is driven about at breakneck speed by a young blood of an aristocrat, and it’s a Bentley. This rings nicely true, for Bentleys were always expensive right from the off, and in the brief decade or so of the firm’s independent existence – as in ‘vintage Bentley’ – had a decidedly sporting image, but that’s not all. I wonder if Roberts knew that W O Bentley served his engineering apprenticeship in the steam locomotive works of the Great Northern Railway at Doncaster? Probably.)

But Pavane isn’t just about technology, the strangeness of a re-imagined England or the politics of repression and rebellion. What it’s really about, like any good novel in any genre, is people: their dreams, fears, passions, and tragedies. Its real strength is in the characters who step, living and breathing, off the page and into your heart: the road haulier whose heart is broken in love and by the inadvertent killing of his friend; the young man who achieves his childhood dream of becoming a signaller on the semaphore stations; the monk who, his mind turned by witnessing the horrors of the Inquisition, foments unrest by his heretical preaching; the young noblewoman who provokes the first armed insurrection against Papal rule by refusing to pay an unfairly levied tax to the Church because it will cause hardship and starvation in her lands.

Its other strength is the power and grace of its prose. There are books, not many of them, that I will read and re-read for the sheer pleasure I get from the quality of the writing, and Pavane is one of that select few. And Roberts deploys the power of his prose and of his fertile imagination in creating dramatic and moving scenes that stay with you long after you’ve closed the book. For my money, this is not just a great writer of science-fiction: this as a great writer, full stop. So why is Keith Roberts so obscure?

As if the handicap of working in a marginalised genre weren’t enough, he was his own worst enemy, the archetypical difficult author. Sooner or later he’d pick a quarrel with everyone who published him, usually over royalties, and shower them with vitriolic, abusive letters, until no one would touch him except small presses run by enthusiasts of the genre and his writing. Even these ventures usually ended in tears. Until the advent of digital publishing, nearly everything he wrote was out of print and unobtainable except by scouring second-hand bookshops.

His private life seems to have followed a similar pattern. He lived alone (‘in some squalor,’ as someone who knew him once wrote) in a small rented flat, apparently unable to sustain lasting relationships of any kind. Particularly with women. Barmaids keep cropping up in his fiction, not only, I suspect, because he liked his beer but because the casual cameraderie of the bar-room and an arms-length chat with a girl over a bar counter were all that he could handle: friendship and romance from a safe distance. And no story of his is quite complete without a young, feisty heroine, a dream-girl conjured up from his imagination (inspired by some barmaid he’d encountered?) as a substitute for the real thing. It’s a measure of Roberts’ talent that he gets away with it: the results are not mawkish self-indulgence but vivid, breathing, believable characters.

And that’s not all he got away with. In one of his other novels, Molly Zero, he took the huge risk of writing in present tense second person (It begins ‘You’re shivering inside your coat.’). I was doubtful until I started reading, when I was hooked instantly and stopped noticing within half-a-dozen pages. He even set two related short stories in a public toilet. In Kaeti and Company, a set of linked short stories, he subverts the relationship between writer and characters, engaging in conversations with Kaeti, his heroine, between the stories, and recycling the same characters as if he were casting actors in a series of plays (hence the title).

Everything I’ve heard about Roberts points to him being a troubled, unhappy man (his fellow SF writer Michael Moorcock described him as ‘the most miserable bastard I ever met’), but from that torment (if that’s not too strong a word) emerged some wonderful writing. At least I think so. He never quite regained the heights of Pavane, which was his second published novel, but there are enough gems scattered through his works to make me more than willing to read anything he wrote.

Keith Roberts was also a talented illustrator, who designed covers for SF magazines and novels by other authors. He died in 2000 at the comparatively early age of 65, a victim of complications of MS.

Indulge me with a few minutes of your time while I leave you with a taster from Pavane. The scene is at the lowered portcullis of Corfe Castle, which in Roberts’ alternative England is still a powerful stronghold, seat of the Lords of Purbeck – or in this case, the Lady. The time is the beginning of the afore-mentioned insurrection. ‘This Isle’ is the Isle of Purbeck.

 

She halted by the breach of the great gun, one hand resting on the iron. ‘Well, My Lord,’ she said in a low, clear voice. ‘What will you have of us?’

Henry’s rages were famous and spectacular; spittle flecked his beard, the standers-by heard him grind his teeth. ‘Deliver me this place,’ he shouted finally. And your ordnance, and yourselves. In the name of your ruler Pope John, through the authority vested in me as his lieutenant in these islands.’

She straightened her back, staring up at him through the gate. ‘And in the name of Charles?’ she asked cuttingly. ‘For my liege ruler is my King. So it was with my father and so with me, My Lord; I took no vows before a foreign priest.’

He drew his sword, and pointed through the bars. ‘That gun,’ was all he could speak.

She still remained standing by the greatgun, fingers touching its breech and the wind moving in her hair. ‘And if I refuse?’

He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward, lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. ‘Then your liege-folk in this Isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,’ panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. ‘It’ll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron…’ The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry’s soldiers.

There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor’s face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. ‘Why then,’ she said, ‘you must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?’ And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills.

[Athelstone]

It was, and still is, a very good blog indeed. I remember it well, and on the strength of your recommendation I bought Pavane. It is a unique book, with an extraordinary atmosphere. Since reading it I’ve returned many times to check on parts and to reread. It really is remarkable that it isn’t better known. It’s somewhat depressing that a book so well crafted, so literate, so engaging never became a worldwide best seller. It inspires thoughts of the kind that begin, ‘If this didn’t make it…’

Edit: a small edit. I suppose Keith Roberts and Pavane did make it, in the sense that it is a lasting influence on so many other writers, and, at least in some circles, is so well known and admired. But it probably will never reach the dizzy heights of success of works such as David Walliams’ Robodog.

[RichardB]

You’re not actually the person I was referring to when I said I knew I was preaching to the converted. Quite often people reply to these Literary Byways blogs saying they’re going to read the book concerned on my recommendation, but this is the first time I’ve had feedback on that, and I’m delighted that you share my enthusiasm for Pavane.

As for ‘a book so well crafted, so literate,’ we all know, don’t we, that the quality of the writing has precious little to do with commercial success. The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey… I could go on, but it’d be, as you say, too depressing.

[Author]

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