Nicholas Royle (1)

I've no idea how to describe this utterly unique book but I absolutely loved it and will be one of my favourite reads of this year.

Nicholas Royle was a professor of English at the University of Sussex, and during the crazy times of the pandemic he decides to accept voluntary redundancy. This book is his swan-song, a collection of lectures delivered to an audience of no one except us readers, blending aspects of memoir, creative non-fiction (although he hates that phrase), essay, music, art and literary criticism and philosophy.

The basis of the book (although I use that word loosely, as it disappears off in many tangents) draws parallels between the tour de force creativity of Enid Blyton and David Bowie. Whilst they worked in different mediums, both brought unrivalled imagination and unique perspective to their art, a luminosity that needs balanced by the dark in order to work. The sun machine referred to in the title is an odd concept to grasp, but my take on it is the ability of a piece of amazing art or something which pervades the senses to have such an effect on you that it lifts the soul and makes the world that much brighter, whilst also acting as a kind of time-travelling device which can transport you in an instant back to a stored memory from the path, or propel you forward with a hunger and ambition for the future.

It's bizarre, it's amusing, it's thought-provoking and it's a rally cry for the importance of keeping literature and the arts alive in this modern world where the arts and creativity are increasingly viewed as something fanciful and irrelevant.

4.5 stars - it's niche and utterly up my alley as Enid Blyton was the hallmark of my childhood reading days and David Bowie is my favourite musician, so I can't say with any confidence that this book will speak to many others in the same way it did to me, but if you have a general appreciation of both and a love of literature and ideas I can highly recommend it.

Punctuated with requests to go off and listen to certain pieces of music (often Bowie songs, but not always), this would be a tremendous book to listen to on audio (if publishing licences permit the songs to be included).

Such a smart book. I feel a bit bereft now. Nicholas Royle taught me a lot between these pages.… (more)

Mother: A Memoir is a book that immediately intrigued me. I love to read stories of 'ordinary' people, who often have lived the most interesting of lives.

Nicholas Royle writes of his mother primarily. It is around her that most of his narrative revolves. But he also writes of family life, both immediate (his parents, himself and his younger brother) and a little wider (aunts, cousins, grandparents and so on). It is the devastating 'loss of her marbles' that starts Nicholas's remembrances of his mother, and from there we hear about her younger life, working life, married life, and family life.

Royle himself says that the memoir 'makes no pretence at being comprehensive, chronological or orderly' and it definitely is a series of random snapshots and memories of his mother at various times. This works fine for me as I rather enjoy reading in a non-linear fashion but it won't suit readers who like to read in chronological order. Royle's writing style is very poetic in style, maybe a little too much for my personal tastes. He's a Professor of English so way above my intellectual level, but I cannot deny that his writing is graceful and sensitive.

What shines through is his immense love for his mother, the way she cared for him, indulged him and his brother in whatever they wanted to do. Alzheimer's robbed not only Kathleen of her marbles but also Royle of the mother he knew and the reader cannot help but empathise. I very much enjoyed the photographs interspersed throughout the book which, although the narrative would have managed fine without them, did complement the author's account perfectly.

Mother: A Memoir is a moving and thoughtful read of the love of a son for his mother and his lifelong respect for her.… (more)

Lily Lynch and Stephen Osmer are your archetypical fashionable couple; she is an artist and he is a journalist and critic and they are heavily involved with the glamorous arty people of London. Osmer likes to write confrontational stuff about all sorts of subjects, including about an author and critic both called Nicholas Royle. Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired to the Sussex coast to spend their final years near the sea, but what they had not taken into account is how much noise and distress the gulls would cause them. At a loss for things to do in retirement, Silas takes up creative writing and starts to think that he might have found something that he could enjoy.

When he finds his first short story ‘Gulls’ in a book called Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, he is not very happy. In fact, he is livid, absolutely livid, because the story has been attributed to an author called Nicholas Royle. Woodlock knows it is not Royle’s as it is the same as the manuscript that was left in a pub several months earlier after he had passed it to Ethel to read. Woodlock finds out where Nicolas Royle lives and in a moment of fury, decides that he needs to go and talk to him about this. He arrives mid-way through a party and lets rip at Royle before events take a much sinister turn.

There were parts of this novel that I liked; the way that the Woodlock’s fitted each other well, but were unsettled by the move to a new area. In real life, there are two authors called Nicholas Royle, who are frequently muddled and I liked the way that he has picked up on this and made it an integral part of the book. I liked the short essays called Hides, but it really jarred as it didn’t fit in with the novel and I am not quite sure why the conclusion of the novel is in the final essay. It is ok, but not fantastic.… (more)

It has all the virtues of Culler's Very Short Introduction except extreme brevity. By far the best introduction I've read so far that breaks 120 pages. Not useful only for classes that require students to know a particular set of data at the end; for those, a more 'traditional' approach, one divided by critical schools rather than by topics, would be most useful. Unfortunately.

Like the Klages and Lynn and Culler, B and R are clear as heck; unlike the Klages, B and R always come back around to reading particular texts (even some Chaucer! in Middle English!); unlike the Lynn, B and R never dumb things down.

Highly, highly recommended to all readers who read more than how-to manuals, and even, perhaps, for them.

UPDATE, Nov. 2008: Now that I've taught this, I'm much more aware of its limitations. 100 pages in my students groaned every time some version of the suspended law of non-contradiction showed up. "Let me guess, this is both X and not-X? How astonishing!" By the end of a month or so with them, they became a cautionary tale about biases: what would they have emphasized had they not been doctrinaire poststructuralists but instead Marxists? Feminist? Postcolonialists? Phenomenologists and Ethicists?… (more)