Morning has broken, like Cat Stephens’s first morning. I sit on the green bench in the back
garden. The wind howls in the
trees. Alfred Noyes’s remark: ‘The wind was a
torrent of darkness in the gusty trees’ comes to mind. It’s surprisingly cold
for the time of year. However, the ground awakens with the spring. New growth appears everywhere. The sun flits
in and out as clouds drift across the empty morning sky.
I read. The novel is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
who, for some reason, I get mixed up with Kyu Sakomoto, who sang Sukiyaki some 55 years ago. The book concerns a stiff-upper-lipped butler
named Stevens, an anachronism even in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. He is
an anally retentive automaton who continues to serve his master, Lord
Darlington of Darlington Hall, even as his father lies dying upstairs. He
refers to his father in the third person even when addressing him directly,
saying things like: ‘I hope Father is feeling better today.’ The novel takes place over just a few days,
and consists mainly in Stevens’s journey from Darlington Hall to the West
Country to find his old housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who has written to him
stating that her marriage is now over and hinting that she might want to take
up a position again at Darlington Hall, where she last worked several years
ago. Stevens is telling the story twenty years on, and his mind constantly
wanders back in time to give fragments of his backstory. The novel is a trifle
slow, but fascinating for all that. I
recall a film of the book in the 1990s with the splendid Anthony Hopkins as
Stevens and the delightful Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton. I haven’t read to the
end of the novel, but I do recall from the film that Stevens is so hidebound by
convention and the strictures of his profession, that, when he meets Miss
Kenton at last, he cannot bring himself to declare his true feelings for her,
thus his last opportunity for romance and fulfilment is lost. He doesn’t even realise his total inadequacy
as a rounded human being, as he is so blinkered in his thinking, mainly due to
his upbringing and the ridiculous class system that existed in Great Britain
between the wars.
I put the book down. I have read enough and my fingers are
numb with the cold. The pale blue
flowers of the vinca are pretty in the sunshine. The pink blossom of the ribes shrubs offers a
neat contrast. The garden looks at its
best at this time of year. The horse chestnut is the first to show its leaves,
then the two maple trees, finally the oak. The maple trees show their blossom
before their leaves and it ends up all over the patio and the artificial
lawn. I spend hours sweeping it up.
Apropos of Anthony Hopkins, I have the final episode of
series one of Westworld to watch on Catch-Up TV. I have seen nine hours of it so far, and I
cannot make head or tail of it, except I’m enthralled, especially by Mr
Hopkins’s portrayal of Ford, the manager of Westworld. This is a theme park in which people pay a
fortune to be entertained by hosts (robots) in a Wild West setting. I seem to remember going to the cinema in the
early 1970s to see the follicly challenged Mr Yul Brynner play the original man
in black, here portrayed by the equally follicly challenged Mr Ed Harris. I still have no real idea from the television
series who are the humans and who are the robots. Miss Thandie Newton, a British actress of
note, quite definitely plays a robot, but one who is developing distinct human
tendencies, having had her source code rewritten by a Chinese fellow and a man
with an unfortunate ginger beard. Miss Newton goes round slitting people’s
throats and committing other atrocities completely at random and the whole show
is so gratuitously violent and the language is of the lowest bar-room order that
you cannot fail to be simultaneously impressed and outraged. The Americans seem to do this class of thing very well. It appears that, in series two, which has
just started on Sky Atlantic, that the lunatics are about to take over the
asylum. They presumably follow the mantra of Thomas Jefferson that ‘a little
rebellion now and then is a good thing’. However, as the late, great, Ken Dodd
might have said – ‘There aren’t many laughs in it.’
