The real Jane Austen

HarperCollins is commissioning six contemporary authors to write modern versions of Austen's six novels. The first is Joanna Trollope, who will rewrite Sense and Sensibility.

Most Austen fans will be apprehensive, or at least sceptical, myself among them. I'd like to think it's not just my inner pedant, that there are reasons such a project might at least run into difficulties. With all due respect to Trollope and her fellow imitators, here are several:

1. Austen's characters are judged according to their breeding, their education and information, their adherence to subtle civil codes. Part of the exercise of reading the novels is in projecting oneself into a social millieu in which manners count in a way they no longer do. Do the modern mores of social media or cafe-haunting present the same possibilities of complexity and climax?


2. Austen's plots all turn on social, moral, and economic circumstances that mostly no longer exist. What is the modern moral equivalent of Lydia Bennet's elopement or of Mr Willoughby's fickleness? What's the modern equivalent of the impropriety of Frank Churchill's secrecy, or of Mary Crawford's sentiments, or of the Musgrove sisters' inferiority?


3. Austen's prose is pretty close to perfection. Without being lyrical or even very descriptive, her prose is inimitably beautiful, and constitutes perhaps the greatest of all the pleasures of reading her. Though we wouldn't expect a contemporary novel to sound like her, it's hard to imagine how even a great contemporary author could approach that facility, that felicity of syntax and delicate balancing of phrase and cadence that make her so deeply satisfying to read.


4. Austen's wit is disarmingly sharp, sheathed as it so often is in gentility. Her singular ability to skewer insipidity, vulgarity, complacency, or dishonesty with the thrust of a few demure lines is a mastery against which few would be willing to pit their own weapons.


5. Austen's world of tea and cambric, empire lines and lavender water is no inconsiderable element of her popularity. Many of her readers take up her works precisely for the genteel joys of this quiet, indoor elegance, with its bonnets and dresses and silk shoes and shawls, its china and lacework and likenesses, all afloat a soft continuous billow of solo piano. How is this world, now synonymous with Austen, to be recreated?

There might be reasonable answers to all of these objections, and the new books themselves might prove my apprehensions groundless. However if the best these writers can do is find modern correlates for the plots or characters, correlates which naturally preclude the very Jane Austen-ness of her own period that so delights modern readers, I find it hard to see how they could be entertaining either in their own right or for her sake. I must hope, therefore, to be surprised.

Search, and ye shall find

So Google is turning 13 today. It's hard to imagine how we found anything without it, or where we searched. Yet - old though this makes me feel - I remember when it was born. I was already at university; I learned about this extraordinary new search engine in a class on research methods. And now it's all grown up! 

Actually not quite. Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self, reminds us that the digital world is in its infancy. We've only begun to explore its possibilities and assimilate its modes into our own forms of consciousness and ways of being. Her book Alone Together skirts the risks of technology's dehumanising, isolating propensities, but argues finally that the device-driven life can still be an examined one. When used responsibly and within certain limits, it can facilitate rather than inhibit our deep needs for communion and presence. (I enjoyed her conversation about it with Krista Tippett on Public Radio, which I found using Google.)

However, while Google is immeasurably useful, much of the digital is mostly distraction. Johann Hari calls ours “the age of distraction” and says “there's a reason why that word – ‘wired’ – means both ‘connected to the internet’ and ‘high, frantic, unable to concentrate’.”  Books, he writes, are the remedy. “A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now.” He also quotes David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time: “Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time.”  And TS Eliot, who called books “the still point of the turning world.” (H/T Google.)

I'm always happy to join a chorus praising books, but I don't see any essential conflict between books and the turn of the digital world. Nor between technology and the solacing of human needs. Those who read will read, in whatever format books are found. Those who don't read will be distracted, in any age, by anything that moves. Those who feel no need for communion will not seek it. Those who seek, now as then, shall find.

A tale of crime and cooking

A glance around most bookshops would suggest what Elizabeth Farrelly's publishing friend says more bluntly: not much sells besides cookery and crime.

This had me wondering what lies behind the appeal of both, and if there's a connection between them. If there is, I think it might have something to do with the satisfaction of appetites. An appetite, on the one hand, for adventure, justice, revelation, restoration, above all, perhaps, for story; and on the other, not simply for food, but for creativity, community, husbandry, bounty. Perhaps they offer simpler satisfactions than the more intellectually challenging works that languish on the shelves, but the appetites they satisfy are not in themselves unhealthy or untoward.

Yet if these appetites are perennial, why do they drive the book market now in a way they haven't before? Perhaps because we live in an age of satisfaction. If the Rolling Stones couldn't get none, we can get plenty, usually at the swipe of a card or the click of a button. And if the Stones' idea of satisfaction was too lofty (which seems doubtful), ours is simple enough. In an age where our wealth lets us gratify our wishes more readily than ever, our wishes are more than ever commensurate to what money can buy.

That's the cynical view I suppose. We like crime novels and cookbooks because they meet most simply our simplest needs. The other view might be that our simplest needs tell us more about ourselves than our more complex needs. That if the alternative to crime and cooking is smudgy, plotless literary fiction that matters terribly in some way we don't quite understand, or literary non-fiction that rambles over wide terrain without arriving anywhere, then maybe crime and cooking offer more genuine assistance with our project of human being.

To support such a view, Toni Morrison might be summoned. “For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sorts of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.”

Saying what needs to be said

Robert Frost said a liberal is a man too broad minded to take his own side in a quarrel. Last Thursday night President Obama (finally) took his own side and gave the speech many have been waiting to hear. Still bending toward compromise, it was punchy, simple, and stirring. He stood up for ordinary America against the interests of the rich and influential, and argued (finally) from America's history against the anti-government feeling that has only swelled since the mid-terms. Simplifying pro-government reasoning, he argued that while individualism has its strengths, there are some things we can only do together. It was a breath of air for anyone who's been watching the GOP suck the oxygen out of US politics.

Unavoidably, the speech participates in the very politics it was trying to circumvent, and doubtless the pundits of both sides will have their way with it. One of the criticisms already levelled, by Maureen Dowd, is that talking doesn't solve anything. She wrote in the NY Times that Obama is suffering from the “speech illusion”: the idea that he can come down from the mountaintop, read the teleprompter, cast his magic spell, and ascend the mountain while everyone scurries to do his bidding. I think in the case of Obama, coming down from the mountaintop to deliver a fiery speech is exactly what he can do, exactly what he should do.

While generally all talk and no action is political failure, sometimes there is virtue in simply saying what needs to be said. Saying what those who have no voice have been saying unheard, and saying it loud. Obama's jobs bill has yet to go through, but his words mattered. Words can restore dignity, sometimes via indignation. They can break rhetorical cycles, gauge or change the public mood, set people on a fresh course. Obama has a unique capacity to do just that. Kevin Rudd (an infinitely less gifted speaker) was blistered by those who thought his apology to the stolen generations was a meaningless gesture, adrift from action. Watching the faces of the Indigenous people massed outside Parliament House that day, I couldn't believe the words weren't important in themselves. Words that acknowledged the past, made a space for grief to be aired, made real the sufferings that had for so long lain unsung. Words reify experience; they set it down indelibly in the long records of human life. As Shakespeare knew, and Obama trusts, words can make and unmake worlds.

This inconstant stay

I rejoice immoderately in the coming of Spring. A change that is also a return; what CS Lewis describes as “that union of change and permanence that we call rhythm.”

I also notice my astonishment at the passage of time, at the turn of seasons that seems swifter every year.  Human being is being in time; we know no other. Yet we are also innately at odds with time.  The poets are full of this anomaly. Marvell’s rueful ‘Had we but world enough and time...’ Shakespeare’s sense of time’s inexorable march, its bending sickle, its fell hand, its war with us. Moses, a man who lived one hundred and twenty years, forty of them tending sheep in Midian, another forty wandering, still found life bafflingly brief. In spite of long years of exile and futility, he could write that human life is “like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew; Toward evening it fades and withers away [...] soon it is gone and we fly away.”

If the arc of time is short, the character of time is blessed. Time is part of the created order: there was evening and morning, the first day. At the third hour, the sixth, the ninth. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. Eugene Peterson says he grew up thinking end time was the only sacred time. He learned later that all time is sacred, is created. The encompassing rhythms of weeks, lunar months, years “call forth regularities of spring births, summer growth, autumn harvest, winter sleep. Creation time is rhythmic. We are immersed in rhythms.” Hearing the beat and cadence of these rhythms makes us “internalise orderliness and connectedness and resonance.”

So the passage of time, if quick, is also life and breath to us. We know no other. Galileo found it lovely: “It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable, by reason of so many and so different alterations, mutations, generations &c which are incessantly made therein; and if without being subject to any alteration, it had been all one vast heap of sand, a mass of Jasper...wherein nothing had ever grown, altered, or changed, I should have esteemed it a lump...full of idleness...superfluous, and as if it had never been in nature...a dead creature.”

So time that makes us mutable makes us beautiful. It is time that brings spring at the death of winter, that marries change and permanence. Time that carries us round the sun, more swiftly every year. Time, which takes and kills all we know as life, is life as we know it.