Thanks, Casdon. Writing in 1909, health and fitness, as a leisure pursuit would have been the preserve of the Edwardian upper and middle classes. Charles Atlas marketed his first bodybuilding course in 1922.
The working classes kept physically fit through labour. Most worked in physically demanding jobs and walked. In the book, Kuno effectively had to go into training to prepare for his ascent to the Earth’s surface. People had lost their sense of space. He even had to rediscover the difference between what was Near and what was Far and visited all the different levels of platform to develop his sense of space and his muscles. Nowadays, unless you are someone doing a physically demanding job, life can be sedentary. The book’s opening page describes Vashti as swaddled lump of flesh with a face as white as fungus. Not a healthy image at all.
Yes, lockdown has made many of us realise how important real social contact is although some have decided they prefer the solitude or just being more selective about who they see.
Vashti is a very interesting character, absolutely immured in and conditioned by the Machine life but I sensed someone, at times, having to convince herself e.g. the second hand sighting of the sea there were ideas to be got from the sea and the deliberate shuttering out of the views from the airship, thinking over and over, No ideas here. She is interested but it has to come second, third or tenth hand. But then, is it necessary to experience things first hand? I’m thinking of Stef Penny's 2006 Costa winning novel The Tenderness of Wolves set in the Canadian wilderness. Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time of writing and did all her research in London libraries and never visited Canada
Quoting Nicholas Lezard's Guardian review:
The novel is set in 1867, about a century before her birth, and how she's going to get back to that time without a time machine escapes me. Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit. Actually, you can easily tell, for slightly differing reasons, that neither author visited the scenes they wrote about. But Penney's evocation of the frozen lands of northern Canada couldn't ring truer if she'd spent months wandering through the land with nothing but a pack of huskies and a native tracker for company … I have a small amount of first-hand knowledge of the cold bits of the North American continent, and there isn't a syllable of her evocation that seems forced …
This is doubtless mostly due to her skill as a writer; but I wonder if her agoraphobia didn't play a useful part as well. It might be bad manners, both literary and personal, to bring this up as a means of evaluating the novel, but I can't help thinking that it is the affliction itself that makes her so very attentive to the desolate landscape. I'd imagine that all that wide open space is exactly what an agoraphobic fears most; in which case it is an act of bravery, and indeed of artistic honesty and good faith, which has made her confront and make use of her deepest fears.
There’s something to think on and I have posted far too much again but half of it is Lezard’s!
. I don’t seem to be able to read myself to sleep the way that I used to so listen to BBC Sounds most nights. I sometimes listen to Book at Bedtime but that’s only on for 15 minutes.
