Jazz to a higher power

Jazz to a higher power

John Coltrane, 1962

Book Details

Tony Whyton

BEYOND 'A LOVE SUPREME'

John Coltrane and the legacy of an album

160pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £11.99.

978 0 19 973324 8

Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, editors

PEOPLE GET READY

The future of jazz is now!

312pp. Duke University Press. Paperback, £16.99 (US $25.95).

978 0 8223 5425 3

On John Coltrane's A Love Supreme and the dogma of improvisation

ERIC J. IANNELLI

On December 9, 1964, the saxophonist John Coltrane entered the Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to record A Love Supreme, his now legendary thirty-two-minute jazz suite, in a single session. In addition to Coltrane as bandleader, the line-up consisted of his Classic Quartet: Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano, all of whom would later individually recall the subdued atmosphere and the uniquely "telepathic" (as Jones put it) improvisational nature of the recording. Before that date, Coltrane had emerged after five days in isolation – "like Moses coming down from the mountain", according to his wife Alice – with the complete composition in hand, an offering to and ostensible gift from the God he had discovered following a near-fatal overdose some seven years earlier. Indeed, "Psalm", the suite's fourth and final movement, is a musical interpretation of Coltrane's poem to his higher power printed in the album's liner notes.

A Love Supreme was and continues to be exalted for its authenticity and immediacy, for its abjuration of commercial considerations, and for its bold new musical direction not just in Coltrane's own discography but in the entire jazz catalogue. There are, however, a number of paradoxes at play that have supported the mythification of the album and the consecration of its creator. We are to understand that the suite arrived (or was received) fully formed, and yet, improvisation being one of the cherished cornerstones of jazz, we are also invited to believe that it evolved dynamically through a group effort around the barest of motifs. The performance is universally regarded as direct, unadulterated, in line with its spiritual conceit, obscuring the fact that, as a recording, it is mediated by its very nature, and that, to give but one example, Coltrane's infectious chant of the suite's title was achieved using overdub techniques. And though A Love Supreme is still considered an uncurated, air-tight masterpiece, there was indeed a second recording session on December 10 when a second bassist, Art Davis, and the saxophonist Archie Shepp played on alternate sextet takes of "Acknowledgement", as the album's double-disc reissue from 2002 makes clear. Those important, if uneven takes were set aside by the bandleader in favour of the quartet version with the vocal chant, and remained vaulted or lost for several decades.

In Beyond 'A Love Supreme', Tony Whyton neatly identifies the "established dualisms" of which these are a part. He comes not to unseat Coltrane or to repeat the detailed history already laid out by Ashley Kahn in A Love Supreme: The story of John Coltrane's signature album (2002), but to determine why these dualisms exist in the first place, so as to "develop an awareness of our own mythmaking tendencies and the way in which we project desires and imagined narratives onto our listening experiences". The author's broad conclusion is that these dualisms function "mainly as constructs that preserve an idealized view of jazz history that is devoid of complexity and contradiction". They allow us as listeners to indulge in a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, whereby an album that sold half a million copies in its first five years alone remains untainted by the whiff of the commercial, and that same album can simultaneously be lauded as the result of the visionary composition of one man as well as the dynamic and spontaneous creation of an ensemble. It is Whyton's opinion that, by encapsulating so many of these "mythic binaries", A Love Supreme can help us recognize them and take discourse about jazz music – and one is tempted to add, music discourse on the whole, given the parallels that can be drawn between Coltrane's landmark album and one such as Radiohead's Kid A – beyond its customary assortment of taboos, dogmas and idols.

As noted above, one such dogma concerns improvisation, often advanced as one of the "key tenets of great jazz performance that serve to separate the music both from the calculated, rational, and, by implication, sterile and contrived world of western classical music, and from the overproduced, predictable and formulaic sounds of popular music", as Whyton explains with characteristic concision. The belief in the unassailable superiority of improvisation pervades People Get Ready, a collection of essays on the state of free, experimental and avant jazz inspired in part by the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium. "Improvisation", Julie Dawn Smith writes in "Listening Trust", an essay on the trombonist George Lewis's quartet, "generates a creative, interactive dimension through sound: a boundless engagement with our own revolutions and the revolutions of the other." In his own contribution on the similarities between punk and free jazz, the volume's editor Rob Wallace argues that the "insidious, racialized fear regarding jazz's collective improvisation" is nothing less than "the fear of a black planet". The closing essay, "People, Don't Get Ready" by the saxophonist and scholar Tracy McMullen, takes a more cosmic view of improvisation, linking the spontaneous, in-the-moment act to Derridean and Buddhist concepts, though it does little to expand on these associations, ending abruptly on a rhetorical, inspirational note. And in a transcribed conversation with Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) called "Improvising Digital Culture", the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer maintains that "there is . . . no difference between human and experience and the act of improvisation. [T]his insight about improvisation makes it so primal, as a concept, that it becomes almost impossible to place value on it". Improvisation is therefore so valuable that it moves beyond value. Or is perhaps so saddled with meaning that it becomes meaningless.

Somewhat more vexed is the way in which culture, and by association race, is bound up in many of these authors' notions of improvisation. That improvisation has deep roots in African musical traditions is beyond question; likewise, the political dimension of free jazz, which was informed by the social activism and identity politics of the 1960s. But the way the two are repeatedly conflated throughout People Get Ready often makes the practice of boundary-expanding improvisational music appear more like an act of reclamation than a progressively post-racial, pan-cultural art. Greg Tate's essay, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age", acknowledges that "the episteme we know as 'race' in America . . . is not so surgical a tool to use when holding forth on creativity" after seven dazzling, digressive pages of nostalgia that limit jazz to a "black art form" and "a black music". John Szwed, in his piece on Duke Ellington's unaffected avant-gardism, plays up white interest in black artists as a type of cultural voyeurism, "an alien code to be used in order to reject and contradict their own tradition". While not wholly inaccurate, this broad-brushed dismissiveness is disappointing, especially coming from the sedulous biographer of Sun Ra, a founding father of free and fusion jazz who famously shrugged off black/white binaries for the mystical angel race of Saturn. To return briefly to Whyton and his thoughts on that same binary: "[T]he continuation of African American exceptionalist readings of the music today often leads to jazz being represented in essentialist terms" and inevitably "serves to exclude people from accessing an 'authentic' culture".

Some frustrating aspects of People Get Ready are typified in the penultimate contribution, a self-congratulatory panel discussion among members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians during the 2005 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium. Here concerns about younger generations' lack of interest in experimental music are addressed by reminiscences about the halcyon days of the 1960s, the popularity of hip-hop is summarily explained by "how much money it makes . . . for a few people in suits", and an audience member's question about the "political and social implications" of the AACM's music is spurned with an unnecessarily confrontational retort. Some of this collection's head-scratching over the inability of contemporary improvised jazz to attract a wider audience might be alleviated were this discussion to be reread with an outsider's eye. Still more might be alleviated by careful consideration of the points raised in Beyond 'A Love Supreme'.

From Calcutta to Kolkata

From Calcutta to Kolkata

Kolkata, 2011

Book Details

Amit Chaudhuri

CALCUTTA

Two years in the city

307pp. Union Books. £16.99.

978 1 908526 17 5

Decay, disrepair and other forms of dying that stand between an old city and its future

SIDDHARTHA DEB

It is quite possible these days, while travelling along the back streets of the capital city of West Bengal, to hear a succession of political speakers, each addressing a small audience from a small podium, referring to "Didi", or "Big Sister" . Omnipresent, perhaps even omnipotent, Big Sister appears on billboards all along the roads connecting the new airport to the city, wearing glasses and looking nerdy when she's promoting information technology, displaying a soft smile and holding a flower when referring to the environment and, in a gesture copied from the quasi-leftist government she dethroned in 2011, pointing sternly at the sky when inviting people to join her at a political rally.

This is Mamata Banerjee, the current chief minister of West Bengal, though the city she is presiding over seems to have almost no antecedents in what existed before. When she took over from the Left Front government (which had until then won every election in the state for thirty-three years), Calcutta had already, in the kind of blowback chauvinism common in globalized India, been renamed Kolkata. But Banerjee's rise confirmed not only the arrival of the new urban space called Kolkata, but also a definitive end to the city that had existed prior to it. As Amit Chaudhuri writes in his first fully fledged work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two years in the city: "This city – Kolkata – is neither a shadow of Calcutta, nor a reinvention of it, nor even the same city",

Nor does it bear anything more than an outward resemblance to its namesake, Kolkata: the city as it's always been referred to in Bengali. I myself can't stand calling it any other name but "Calcutta" when speaking in English; just as I'll always call it "Kolkata" in Bengali conversation.

Chaudhuri's reservations about the new city might seem surprising. Growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spending much of his youth in England, he moved to West Bengal only in the late 1990s, when the transformation of Calcutta into Kolkata was already under way. Yet it is his refusal to embrace the change as well as his considered nostalgia for aspects of the old city that gives his book its subject as well as its particular shape and texture. Initially unwilling to write about Kolkata, especially since he has captured the old Calcutta – or its genteel, upper-class environments – in his fiction, Chaudhuri conducts an elliptical investigation of the city's transformation through a series of loosely linked essays. The earlier essays in the book are narratives, or reportage, as Chaudhuri sets out to learn how the other half – actually, the vast majority – lives. By the end, this journalistic impulse has given way to the anecdotal, memoiristic mode that Chaudhuri prefers. The strongest moments in the book are when his eclectic, free-ranging critical sensibility and taste for personal reflection meet elements in the city that reward the oblique approach rather than a direct inquiry.

"The Calcutta I'd encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity", Chaudhuri writes, contrasting the city favourably with the Bombay he grew up in, and finding in Calcutta "whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful". The green slatted French windows to be seen in old buildings in the city, a design imported in the late seventeenth century when the French were as much a contending colonial power in the region as the British, are emblematic for Chaudhuri of Calcutta's modernity. They became widespread over the centuries, he tells us, appearing as backdrops in oil paintings and to the urban life of the modern Bengali bourgeois, the bhadralok. It was the bhadralok too, with their absorption of different, oppositional cultures – the Indic and the Western as well as the Bengali and the English – who helped create the distinctive urban texture that made Calcutta feel both immensely Bengali and incredibly cosmopolitan.

Still, the rise of the bhadralok did not mean that the process of amalgamating Eastern and Western ways was without friction. At one end of the spectrum, just before the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, there is the poet Ishwar Gupta writing about the imported ritual of the English New Year. Gupta's verse ("Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté . . . ), with its freely borrowed English words, can't be compared, Chaudhuri writes, to "the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class". It has an edge to it, a ribald mocking tone. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Ingabanga, the tennis-playing, knife-and-fork wielding aspirants to Englishness such as the Mukherjees, an elderly couple to whom Chaudhuri devotes a chapter, in which he describes their ritual of high tea as they and most of their kind decline in a city that seems to care nothing for their imported, outdated refinements.

By the end, the Mukherjees, described with nuance and empathy by Chaudhuri, are seen selling off their jewellery and furniture. They belong to the past, much like the pair of green French windows Chaudhuri purchases from an old building about to be demolished. When he can find no place for the windows in his modern flat, they end up on a wall, windows leading nowhere. And as go the Ingabanga and green French windows, so does Calcutta, its project of modernity turning out to be a dead-end, displaced by this new thing called Kolkata, a city without a past and, perhaps, without even a future, uninterested in the promise of modernity and settling instead for its position as an outpost of provincializing globalization, a waystation between Dubai and Bangkok.

Chaudhuri is keenly aware that part of the promise of modernity in Calcutta was that it allowed you to walk down the city's streets aware of the overlapping of the past and present and to be invigorated by their different vantage points. "By the early eighties", however, "the death knell of modernity was being sounded everywhere. Calcutta was one of the great casualties of that passing . . . . Without the transformative effect of the imagination, decay is just decay, disrepair plain disrepair." It is a kind of dying that Chaudhuri observed in England of the 1980s and 90s, where "the idea of the town, village, and city had become anachronistic", and that, with globalization, would become a phenomenon all over the world, the sheen of glass replacing the light and shade of shuttered windows.

But it was not just the co-existence of past and present that gave the modern city that alluring, quickening quality observed by thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Marshall Berman. The appeal was in past and present in conjunction with the future, which involved politics and was always potentially (and sometimes actually) transformative. It is no accident that the most appreciative interpreters of modernity in the Western world have tended to be heterodox Jewish Marxists. It was this presence of politics, Benjamin reminded us, that produced, along with the poet and the flâneur, the detective, the police spy and the revolutionary in the city streets.

Chaudhuri makes an effort to engage with politics early on in the book, noting Calcutta's origins in colonial plunder as well as the postcolonial turmoil that gave birth, in the late 1960s, to the ultra-left movement called Naxalism. But this engagement is scattered and uneasy, manifesting itself most strongly in attempts to understand the electoral defeat of the Left Front by Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool ("Grassroots") Congress. His visits to far-flung electoral stations or his interview with a Left Front minister on the eve of elections don't develop into an understanding of what these things might have to do with modernity, unless it is in the idea that the betterment of the rural poor was by its very nature antithetical to modernity, and that the Left Front, in its half-hearted commitment to the villages, destroyed Calcutta and, eventually, itself. Writing of Jyoti Basu, the Left Front Chief Minister from 1977 to 2000, Chaudhuri seems to reiterate precisely such an idea, noting that under Basu, "agrarian, rural Bengal finally, and astonishingly, received justice in the late seventies and early eighties, as peasants and sharecroppers were empowered . . . under him, Calcutta became an abandoned and unimportant city".

The idea that Calcutta's decline is to be blamed on the empowerment of the rural poor and militant unionization among the urban working classes had become widespread among the city's bhadralok even in the late 80s, a time when the Left Front appeared to be unassailably in power. More than two decades later, this interpretation has been absorbed into the larger narrative of neoliberalism popular among both Indian and Western elites, resulting in a kind of rote repetition of how communism in West Bengal – and socialism in India – known for nothing but violence, inefficiency and corruption, were replaced by the liberating power of the free market.

But this simple before-and-after narrative obscures many facts. Although the Left Front was indeed thuggish, especially in its later years, this is true of the Congress government that preceded it and of the Trinamool Congress one that has taken its place. Violence has been endemic in Calcutta from the time of its foundation, when the fiat of the East India Company empowered loutish young men from Britain to go about forcibly collecting taxes from the peasantry, all the way to the twentieth century, when the famine of the 1940s killed between 3 and 4 million people, followed by the upheavals of Partition, Naxalism and the liberation war in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Given this catalogue of violence, it is not surprising that the shape of Calcutta's evolution was always a highly contested matter. For a while, it was known (and indeed, admired around India, if not among the elites) for its culture of public protest, which included arson as well as demonstrations, and which expressed, along with the disturbing propensity for violence, a demand from the streets to be taken seriously by the exploitative, predatory hierarchy being nurtured in the city and in the nation at large. This dual characteristic, the easy recourse to violence but also the emancipatory energy of radical politics, especially Naxalism, was clearly visible to those writing about the city into the 90s. It is strongly discernible in Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta: The city revealed, 1971 (surprisingly, the last major work of non-fiction in English on the city until Chaudhuri's book). Even V. S. Naipaul, far less sympathetic to popular movements, shows a degree of engagement with the idealism of radical Calcutta in his chapter on a former Naxalite in India: A million mutinies now (1990).

Many of the reviews of Chaudhuri's book have taken him to task for not making more of a point about the depredations of the Left Front and the wonders of the new Kolkata, where housing developments and malls sited on old factories indicate the final liberation of the city from the barbarians formerly at its gates. But the idea that Calcutta failed because of the prevalence of leftist politics in the city ignores how inbred and insular the bhadralok had become, and how, like the larger Indian elite to which it belonged, it had begun to turn its back on questions of social justice. By the 80s, its ideas of modernity had become a pallid mimicry of Western consumerism, in sharp contrast to the multitudes swirling in and around the city, many of whom came from the same rural areas and provincial towns in which Naxalism had grown up.

We can see the lingering traces of that transformative potential in the encounters Chaudhuri has with marginal figures, especially at the beginning of the book, where his own privilege and their precariousness collide. The people he meets are mostly migrant workers, some of them children, many of whom sleep on the city's broken pavements. Others live on its outskirts, like Baby Misra, whom Chaudhuri meets begging with her son Jitender and whom he takes to a pharmacy to buy medicine and to treat Jitender to a meal. In allowing himself to engage with these characters, and in acknowledging that they are characters, Chaudhuri unleashes a process that he cannot entirely control and that contrasts powerfully with later sections where, when discussing domestic help, itinerant hostesses and sushi chefs, he appears too comfortably settled for his social critique to have any bite.

In restaurants, or in his home, or even in his car, Chaudhuri is hemmed in by his bourgeois status, caught up in the logic of a transaction. But when meeting the migrants on the street, on his own, open to the chance encounter, he becomes the flâneur, both powerful and vulnerable, subject to the modernity that he loves so much. The process forces on Chaudhuri a sudden reconfiguration, where instead of the wife and daughter he usually lives with, he has acquired quite a different family, as do Baby and Jitender, whose labourer husband and father is back in his village, a place whose name Chaudhuri confesses he cannot quite make out.

A moment of promise and heartbreak, this encounter is of course made possible by the remnants of the old city in the new, by the presence of its narrow streets and footpaths and its still unregulated flow of people. The dominant fantasy of Kolkata, however, is to be more like Dubai or New York or New Delhi, the underclass pushed to faraway, isolated clusters, from where they will come in to work on buses and on the subway. Old buildings and neighbourhoods will have to be torn down, the streets widened into multi-lane roads no human being can cross on foot, while the middle class will retreat into apartment complexes and the rich to villas patrolled by armed security guards. But it may be that this fantasy, too, has run its course, especially in a world caught up in one financial crisis after another. Kolkata, whose awful tropical weather is being given a new dimension by the vagaries of climate change, may never become a favoured urban centre for world oligarchs. It may be condemned to remain a second-rate provincial city, populated by a parvenu bhadralok class and some version or other of Didi. Yet it is also possible that some other constellation of urbanity and modernity may emerge there, drawing from its emancipatory, radical past as well as from its uncertain future.

Myths of the Kremlin

Myths of the Kremlin

"Red Square" (1998) by Masabikh Akhunov

Book Details

Catherine Merridale

RED FORTRESS

The secret heart of Russia's history

528pp. Allen Lane. £30.

978 1 84614 037 2

A country in need of strong leadership, and a leader in need of a fortress

MARSHALL POE

Old Russian proverbs almost never mention the Moscow Kremlin. Russian poets and writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries pay it greater attention, but it is scarcely a principal preoccupation. According to at least one poll, even modern Russians don't find the fortress very impressive. What examination of the proverbs, poets and polls do reveal, however, is that Russians care a lot about the city of Moscow itself. For Russians, then, Moscow is the nation's symbolic centre, not the massive citadel at its heart. Interestingly, for Westerners it is the other way around: Moscow is just a city, while the Kremlin is an obsession.

The man most responsible for turning the Moscow Kremlin into a synonym for the Russian political elite and a symbol of Russian tyranny was Walter Duranty, the controversial Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. Beginning in 1927, he began to use "the Kremlin" as a stand-in for the Bolshevik leadership in his numerous and widely read articles. Duranty's invention quickly gained a life of its own in the Stalin era. A fortress seemed like a perfect metaphor for the belligerent, secretive Soviet regime. A Times article of 1929 informed its readers that "Secrecy Surrounds Red Rulers in Kremlin; Publicity Stops at the Walls of the Fortress". Even after Stalin died, the Western press routinely described the Kremlin as inscrutable, ominous, enigmatic, mysterious, impenetrable and unpredictable. During the Cold War, there was even a science of "Kremlinology". Those times have passed, but Western interest in – and fear of – the Kremlin lives on in the Putin era. It's easy to see why. The despotic tsars ruled from the Kremlin (or most of them did). The ruthless Bolsheviks ruled from the Kremlin (some of the time). And now Vladimir Putin rules from the Kremlin. Must it always hold Russia in thrall?

Catherine Merridale tells us that she wrote Red Fortress: The secret heart of Russia's history with just this question in mind. Her book is, first and foremost, a history of the Moscow Kremlin. But it is also, she tells us at the start, "very much about the Kremlin now". The Kremlin now, she says, is peddling a self-serving line about Russian history, namely that Russia needs a strong leader and always has. In historical circles, this theory is called the "statist interpretation", and Merridale doesn't buy it. According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory – in various guises, at various times – simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their autocratic power. Ivan the Terrible did it, Nicholas I did it, Stalin did it, and now, she claims, Putin is doing it.

This premiss is the weakest part of what is otherwise one of the best popular histories of Russia in any language. Not only is it unnecessary but it causes Merridale to make a promise she cannot keep. Nowhere do we find a sustained argument against the statist interpretation of Russian history. Merridale does indeed point out that successive tsars, general secretaries, and now a couple of presidents have made the case that Russia needs and has always needed a strong hand to prosper. The trouble is that these statements, as self-serving as they might seem, in no way invalidate the statist interpretation. Like many Western scholars, Merridale never seems to consider the possibility that these successive tsars and presidents might just be right. We in the West have no trouble speaking about "democratic cultures" that resist authoritarianism, yet we cannot seem to bring ourselves to accept that there are "authoritarian cultures" that resist democratization.

"As the rotten Soviet empire fell apart in the autumn of 1991, there was no reason to accept that Russians were in some way doomed to perpetual tyranny", Merridale writes. In fact, there are two very good reasons why Russia should have ended up with some version of Putinist authoritarianism: 500 years of almost unbroken autocracy and a marked popular preference for the strong hand. And there is a certain irony in using a book about the Kremlin to argue against the statist interpretation. Part of the reason Duranty (who shared Russians' popular preference) began calling the Bolshevik leadership "the Kremlin" is that he wanted to suggest continuity across the revolutionary divide.

Happily, Merridale confines her half-hearted attempts to overthrow the statist interpretation mainly to the first and last chapters of the book. For the rest, she shows not that the Kremlin has always been a great symbol, but rather that the Kremlin has always been a great fact. Ever present, it becomes in her hands the narrative thread that knits together the disjointed story of Russia and the Russians. As a literary device, this works marvellously. The reader is always reading about the Kremlin – the central character – and at the same time learning about Russia. Merridale's stories flow naturally, she has a superb eye for detail and the telling fact, and she is not afraid to tell us just what she thinks. She scoffs, rejoices, derides, ridicules, raises up and dresses down. She can be harsh, as when she calls the landmark Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in 1997, a "vast, expensive fake", but her sharp opinions are part of what makes Red Fortress so entertaining. She does not hesitate to fill in the blanks if the blanks need filling. In setting scenes, she describes sights, smells and sounds that are recorded in no source. But her inventions – really, inferences – are plausible and cause no harm to the basic truths she is trying to relate.

Merridale is also a good historian. She has read much of the literature on the lengthy stretches of time the book covers, and she seems to have read most of it carefully. Russian history is full of myths, and Merridale avoids almost all of them. She tells the improbable story of how an impoverished, isolated and backward principality – Moscow – came to rule much of Eurasia. This is not the story the mythmakers want told. Their tale is one of predestination and heroic deeds: the Muscovites are the heirs to Kieven Rus'; the Muscovites defeat the Golden Horde; the Muscovites "gather the Russian lands"; Moscow emerges as the "Third Rome". That's all nonsense, more or less, and Merridale knows it. Her story is the story of Russia, not the story Russian nationalists want to imagine is the story of Russia.

She does not, of course, get everything just right. In describing the seventeenth century, she writes "Once the new tsar had been named [Mikhail Romanov], setting a reactionary seal on the Russian nation's fate, the system in the Kremlin became rigid to the point of near-paralysis". Any historian of seventeenth-century Russia would confirm that this is at the very least an exaggeration. The reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in particular saw reforms that anticipated those of his son Peter the Great. Interestingly, Merridale quotes just such a historian: "The seventeenth century was an epoch marked by changes so radical that the very principles by which Russian culture defined itself were transformed". This, too, strikes me as an exaggeration, but the main point remains: the system of the Kremlin was not rigid to the point of near-paralysis in the decades preceding the reign of Peter the Great.

Peter's reign presents Merridale with a serious challenge. Recall that she wants to argue that Russian rulers were forever inventing pedigrees that proved Russia needed a strong hand. Peter didn't do that. Instead, he skewered all the old Muscovite pedigrees and adopted a new, supposedly timeless classical iconography. More importantly, he moved Russia's capital from the Moscow Kremlin to St Petersburg. Merridale acknowledges these discontinuities, but still tries – in vain, I think – to argue that the Kremlin and the old ways remained important as legitimizing devices during the two centuries in which the capital was in the north. Her primary evidence for this argument seems to be that Peter and his successors always held coronations in the Moscow Kremlin rather than in St Petersburg. True, but the character of those coronations belies her point. The first of them involved Peter capriciously picking and installing a Lithuanian laundress christened Marta Skavronka as his replacement on the Russian throne – so clearly, he was not too concerned about legitimizing his actions with reference to an imagined past.

And he may not even have cared all that much for the Kremlin. As Merridale shows in one of her most fascinating sections, it was Peter who started the long process of turning the Kremlin into a semi-museum. He threw many of the residents of the Kremlin out and ordered his lackeys to inventory the fortress's treasures. In 1718, he put some of the imperial goodies on display. Later he ordered that an entrance fee be levied. Evidently, it wasn't high enough, because the Kremlin fell into disrepair. By the time Catherine the Great came to the throne, it was disintegrating. She disliked Moscow, but still tried to repair the fortress, to no effect. The near complete destruction of Moscow in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion presented an opportunity for a near fresh start. The centre of Moscow was given the Haussmann treatment before Haussmann, and the Kremlin was cleaned up as well. The Kremlin Grand Palace (1849) was built inside, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (1883) outside. Thousands of people visited the Kremlin Armoury Museum and the State Historical Museum each year. The Kremlin remained a tsarist residence, though it was well on its way to becoming a site of national memory and ceremony, a Louvre with high walls.

After the Provisional Government took power in early 1917, Moscow's artistic community sought to complete the process of Louvre-ization. They proposed turning the Kremlin into "the heart of a vast super-museum", which might well have happened if the Bolsheviks hadn't seized control in November 1917. Merridale's account of the Revolution begins badly: we read, alas, about the "storming" of the Winter Palace when in fact there was no storming at all. But it ends very well: with a vivid description of the fighting in Moscow and the shelling of the Kremlin by the Bolsheviks.

Merridale knows, of course, that the key moment for all that followed was Lenin's decision in February 1918, to move the Soviet government from Petrograd to the Moscow Kremlin. Had he not taken that decision, the Kremlin might have ended up as a historical-artistic theme park rather than a frightening symbol of Soviet power. It is odd, then, that Merridale gets the reasons for Lenin's decision wrong. She says that in the midst of the Civil War he needed a "secure stronghold", a "more centrally located capital", and a place "lively with historic resonance". It is well established that Lenin relocated because the rapidly advancing German forces were a mere 100 miles from Petrograd and the Bolsheviks had no way of stopping them. Moscow was the obvious place to go.

Lenin was utterly indifferent to "historic resonance", as Merridale herself shows. Once he and his henchmen moved into the Kremlin, they launched a campaign that ejected or shot its clergy, looted or destroyed much of its art, and razed many of its buildings. This part of Red Fortress makes for gripping but sad reading. Merridale skilfully takes us through the process by which the Bolsheviks destroyed one sacred building after another. The Kremlin's architecture suffered, but so did its people: the Kremlin staff were purged in 1935.

Just as the process of Bolshevization was complete, the Bolsheviks moved out. In 1920 there had been 2,000 people living in the Kremlin; by the outbreak of the Second World War, only a skeleton guard remained. Stalin preferred his dacha, the party leaders had apartments in new buildings, and only the caretakers remained. The state offices, of course, were still within the Kremlin walls. But, after Stalin died, the party leadership soured on the place: too many bodies, too many ghosts. Khrushchev considered moving the government to another part of Moscow. Brezhnev actually quit the Kremlin altogether, moving his offices to the Central Committee building on Old Square. With the bigwigs gone, the Kremlin's "magic scent of power . . . evaporated".

It came back, first under Gorbachev and then under Yeltsin, both of whom set themselves up in the Kremlin. That Gorbachev would do this is no surprise; he saw himself as the man who would not only save the Soviet Union, but help it realize its true socialist potential. That man could only rule from the USSR's historic power-centre, the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin is another matter. Why would Russia's first President enter the heart of (now discredited) Soviet authority? He did, after all, have other options. Merridale's answer is subtle and compelling. Yeltsin knew that the Kremlin was the symbol of political power in the USSR, and that he needed it to legitimize his tenuous hold on "Russia", whatever that was. More practically, he knew that the Kremlin was a very defensible fortress. His enemies were still out there, and they were well armed. Those sturdy walls might save him.

Catherine Merridale closes by explaining how the Putin regime "set out to harness the aura of the red fortress" in order to legitimize its authoritarian rule. The examples she gives show no such thing. Rather, they show that the Putin regime wants Russians to be proud of their past. There is no doubt, however, that Vladimir Putin believes Russia needs a strong hand. "For Russians," Putin once wrote, "a strong state is not an anomaly . . . but the source and guarantor of order." He does not need to "harness the aura of the red fortress" to convince Russians that a strong state is needed. Most of them already believe it.

Myths of the Kremlin

Myths of the Kremlin

"Red Square" (1998) by Masabikh Akhunov

Book Details

Catherine Merridale

RED FORTRESS

The secret heart of Russia's history

528pp. Allen Lane. £30.

978 1 84614 037 2

A country in need of strong leadership, and a leader in need of a fortress

MARSHALL POE

Old Russian proverbs almost never mention the Moscow Kremlin. Russian poets and writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries pay it greater attention, but it is scarcely a principal preoccupation. According to at least one poll, even modern Russians don't find the fortress very impressive. What examination of the proverbs, poets and polls do reveal, however, is that Russians care a lot about the city of Moscow itself. For Russians, then, Moscow is the nation's symbolic centre, not the massive citadel at its heart. Interestingly, for Westerners it is the other way around: Moscow is just a city, while the Kremlin is an obsession.

The man most responsible for turning the Moscow Kremlin into a synonym for the Russian political elite and a symbol of Russian tyranny was Walter Duranty, the controversial Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. Beginning in 1927, he began to use "the Kremlin" as a stand-in for the Bolshevik leadership in his numerous and widely read articles. Duranty's invention quickly gained a life of its own in the Stalin era. A fortress seemed like a perfect metaphor for the belligerent, secretive Soviet regime. A Times article of 1929 informed its readers that "Secrecy Surrounds Red Rulers in Kremlin; Publicity Stops at the Walls of the Fortress". Even after Stalin died, the Western press routinely described the Kremlin as inscrutable, ominous, enigmatic, mysterious, impenetrable and unpredictable. During the Cold War, there was even a science of "Kremlinology". Those times have passed, but Western interest in – and fear of – the Kremlin lives on in the Putin era. It's easy to see why. The despotic tsars ruled from the Kremlin (or most of them did). The ruthless Bolsheviks ruled from the Kremlin (some of the time). And now Vladimir Putin rules from the Kremlin. Must it always hold Russia in thrall?

Catherine Merridale tells us that she wrote Red Fortress: The secret heart of Russia's history with just this question in mind. Her book is, first and foremost, a history of the Moscow Kremlin. But it is also, she tells us at the start, "very much about the Kremlin now". The Kremlin now, she says, is peddling a self-serving line about Russian history, namely that Russia needs a strong leader and always has. In historical circles, this theory is called the "statist interpretation", and Merridale doesn't buy it. According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory – in various guises, at various times – simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their autocratic power. Ivan the Terrible did it, Nicholas I did it, Stalin did it, and now, she claims, Putin is doing it.

This premiss is the weakest part of what is otherwise one of the best popular histories of Russia in any language. Not only is it unnecessary but it causes Merridale to make a promise she cannot keep. Nowhere do we find a sustained argument against the statist interpretation of Russian history. Merridale does indeed point out that successive tsars, general secretaries, and now a couple of presidents have made the case that Russia needs and has always needed a strong hand to prosper. The trouble is that these statements, as self-serving as they might seem, in no way invalidate the statist interpretation. Like many Western scholars, Merridale never seems to consider the possibility that these successive tsars and presidents might just be right. We in the West have no trouble speaking about "democratic cultures" that resist authoritarianism, yet we cannot seem to bring ourselves to accept that there are "authoritarian cultures" that resist democratization.

"As the rotten Soviet empire fell apart in the autumn of 1991, there was no reason to accept that Russians were in some way doomed to perpetual tyranny", Merridale writes. In fact, there are two very good reasons why Russia should have ended up with some version of Putinist authoritarianism: 500 years of almost unbroken autocracy and a marked popular preference for the strong hand. And there is a certain irony in using a book about the Kremlin to argue against the statist interpretation. Part of the reason Duranty (who shared Russians' popular preference) began calling the Bolshevik leadership "the Kremlin" is that he wanted to suggest continuity across the revolutionary divide.

Happily, Merridale confines her half-hearted attempts to overthrow the statist interpretation mainly to the first and last chapters of the book. For the rest, she shows not that the Kremlin has always been a great symbol, but rather that the Kremlin has always been a great fact. Ever present, it becomes in her hands the narrative thread that knits together the disjointed story of Russia and the Russians. As a literary device, this works marvellously. The reader is always reading about the Kremlin – the central character – and at the same time learning about Russia. Merridale's stories flow naturally, she has a superb eye for detail and the telling fact, and she is not afraid to tell us just what she thinks. She scoffs, rejoices, derides, ridicules, raises up and dresses down. She can be harsh, as when she calls the landmark Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt in 1997, a "vast, expensive fake", but her sharp opinions are part of what makes Red Fortress so entertaining. She does not hesitate to fill in the blanks if the blanks need filling. In setting scenes, she describes sights, smells and sounds that are recorded in no source. But her inventions – really, inferences – are plausible and cause no harm to the basic truths she is trying to relate.

Merridale is also a good historian. She has read much of the literature on the lengthy stretches of time the book covers, and she seems to have read most of it carefully. Russian history is full of myths, and Merridale avoids almost all of them. She tells the improbable story of how an impoverished, isolated and backward principality – Moscow – came to rule much of Eurasia. This is not the story the mythmakers want told. Their tale is one of predestination and heroic deeds: the Muscovites are the heirs to Kieven Rus'; the Muscovites defeat the Golden Horde; the Muscovites "gather the Russian lands"; Moscow emerges as the "Third Rome". That's all nonsense, more or less, and Merridale knows it. Her story is the story of Russia, not the story Russian nationalists want to imagine is the story of Russia.

She does not, of course, get everything just right. In describing the seventeenth century, she writes "Once the new tsar had been named [Mikhail Romanov], setting a reactionary seal on the Russian nation's fate, the system in the Kremlin became rigid to the point of near-paralysis". Any historian of seventeenth-century Russia would confirm that this is at the very least an exaggeration. The reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in particular saw reforms that anticipated those of his son Peter the Great. Interestingly, Merridale quotes just such a historian: "The seventeenth century was an epoch marked by changes so radical that the very principles by which Russian culture defined itself were transformed". This, too, strikes me as an exaggeration, but the main point remains: the system of the Kremlin was not rigid to the point of near-paralysis in the decades preceding the reign of Peter the Great.

Peter's reign presents Merridale with a serious challenge. Recall that she wants to argue that Russian rulers were forever inventing pedigrees that proved Russia needed a strong hand. Peter didn't do that. Instead, he skewered all the old Muscovite pedigrees and adopted a new, supposedly timeless classical iconography. More importantly, he moved Russia's capital from the Moscow Kremlin to St Petersburg. Merridale acknowledges these discontinuities, but still tries – in vain, I think – to argue that the Kremlin and the old ways remained important as legitimizing devices during the two centuries in which the capital was in the north. Her primary evidence for this argument seems to be that Peter and his successors always held coronations in the Moscow Kremlin rather than in St Petersburg. True, but the character of those coronations belies her point. The first of them involved Peter capriciously picking and installing a Lithuanian laundress christened Marta Skavronka as his replacement on the Russian throne – so clearly, he was not too concerned about legitimizing his actions with reference to an imagined past.

And he may not even have cared all that much for the Kremlin. As Merridale shows in one of her most fascinating sections, it was Peter who started the long process of turning the Kremlin into a semi-museum. He threw many of the residents of the Kremlin out and ordered his lackeys to inventory the fortress's treasures. In 1718, he put some of the imperial goodies on display. Later he ordered that an entrance fee be levied. Evidently, it wasn't high enough, because the Kremlin fell into disrepair. By the time Catherine the Great came to the throne, it was disintegrating. She disliked Moscow, but still tried to repair the fortress, to no effect. The near complete destruction of Moscow in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion presented an opportunity for a near fresh start. The centre of Moscow was given the Haussmann treatment before Haussmann, and the Kremlin was cleaned up as well. The Kremlin Grand Palace (1849) was built inside, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (1883) outside. Thousands of people visited the Kremlin Armoury Museum and the State Historical Museum each year. The Kremlin remained a tsarist residence, though it was well on its way to becoming a site of national memory and ceremony, a Louvre with high walls.

After the Provisional Government took power in early 1917, Moscow's artistic community sought to complete the process of Louvre-ization. They proposed turning the Kremlin into "the heart of a vast super-museum", which might well have happened if the Bolsheviks hadn't seized control in November 1917. Merridale's account of the Revolution begins badly: we read, alas, about the "storming" of the Winter Palace when in fact there was no storming at all. But it ends very well: with a vivid description of the fighting in Moscow and the shelling of the Kremlin by the Bolsheviks.

Merridale knows, of course, that the key moment for all that followed was Lenin's decision in February 1918, to move the Soviet government from Petrograd to the Moscow Kremlin. Had he not taken that decision, the Kremlin might have ended up as a historical-artistic theme park rather than a frightening symbol of Soviet power. It is odd, then, that Merridale gets the reasons for Lenin's decision wrong. She says that in the midst of the Civil War he needed a "secure stronghold", a "more centrally located capital", and a place "lively with historic resonance". It is well established that Lenin relocated because the rapidly advancing German forces were a mere 100 miles from Petrograd and the Bolsheviks had no way of stopping them. Moscow was the obvious place to go.

Lenin was utterly indifferent to "historic resonance", as Merridale herself shows. Once he and his henchmen moved into the Kremlin, they launched a campaign that ejected or shot its clergy, looted or destroyed much of its art, and razed many of its buildings. This part of Red Fortress makes for gripping but sad reading. Merridale skilfully takes us through the process by which the Bolsheviks destroyed one sacred building after another. The Kremlin's architecture suffered, but so did its people: the Kremlin staff were purged in 1935.

Just as the process of Bolshevization was complete, the Bolsheviks moved out. In 1920 there had been 2,000 people living in the Kremlin; by the outbreak of the Second World War, only a skeleton guard remained. Stalin preferred his dacha, the party leaders had apartments in new buildings, and only the caretakers remained. The state offices, of course, were still within the Kremlin walls. But, after Stalin died, the party leadership soured on the place: too many bodies, too many ghosts. Khrushchev considered moving the government to another part of Moscow. Brezhnev actually quit the Kremlin altogether, moving his offices to the Central Committee building on Old Square. With the bigwigs gone, the Kremlin's "magic scent of power . . . evaporated".

It came back, first under Gorbachev and then under Yeltsin, both of whom set themselves up in the Kremlin. That Gorbachev would do this is no surprise; he saw himself as the man who would not only save the Soviet Union, but help it realize its true socialist potential. That man could only rule from the USSR's historic power-centre, the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin is another matter. Why would Russia's first President enter the heart of (now discredited) Soviet authority? He did, after all, have other options. Merridale's answer is subtle and compelling. Yeltsin knew that the Kremlin was the symbol of political power in the USSR, and that he needed it to legitimize his tenuous hold on "Russia", whatever that was. More practically, he knew that the Kremlin was a very defensible fortress. His enemies were still out there, and they were well armed. Those sturdy walls might save him.

Catherine Merridale closes by explaining how the Putin regime "set out to harness the aura of the red fortress" in order to legitimize its authoritarian rule. The examples she gives show no such thing. Rather, they show that the Putin regime wants Russians to be proud of their past. There is no doubt, however, that Vladimir Putin believes Russia needs a strong hand. "For Russians," Putin once wrote, "a strong state is not an anomaly . . . but the source and guarantor of order." He does not need to "harness the aura of the red fortress" to convince Russians that a strong state is needed. Most of them already believe it.

From Calcutta to Kolkata

From Calcutta to Kolkata

Kolkata, 2011

Book Details

Amit Chaudhuri

CALCUTTA

Two years in the city

307pp. Union Books. £16.99.

978 1 908526 17 5

Decay, disrepair and other forms of dying that stand between an old city and its future

SIDDHARTHA DEB

It is quite possible these days, while travelling along the back streets of the capital city of West Bengal, to hear a succession of political speakers, each addressing a small audience from a small podium, referring to "Didi", or "Big Sister" . Omnipresent, perhaps even omnipotent, Big Sister appears on billboards all along the roads connecting the new airport to the city, wearing glasses and looking nerdy when she's promoting information technology, displaying a soft smile and holding a flower when referring to the environment and, in a gesture copied from the quasi-leftist government she dethroned in 2011, pointing sternly at the sky when inviting people to join her at a political rally.

This is Mamata Banerjee, the current chief minister of West Bengal, though the city she is presiding over seems to have almost no antecedents in what existed before. When she took over from the Left Front government (which had until then won every election in the state for thirty-three years), Calcutta had already, in the kind of blowback chauvinism common in globalized India, been renamed Kolkata. But Banerjee's rise confirmed not only the arrival of the new urban space called Kolkata, but also a definitive end to the city that had existed prior to it. As Amit Chaudhuri writes in his first fully fledged work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two years in the city: "This city – Kolkata – is neither a shadow of Calcutta, nor a reinvention of it, nor even the same city",

Nor does it bear anything more than an outward resemblance to its namesake, Kolkata: the city as it's always been referred to in Bengali. I myself can't stand calling it any other name but "Calcutta" when speaking in English; just as I'll always call it "Kolkata" in Bengali conversation.

Chaudhuri's reservations about the new city might seem surprising. Growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spending much of his youth in England, he moved to West Bengal only in the late 1990s, when the transformation of Calcutta into Kolkata was already under way. Yet it is his refusal to embrace the change as well as his considered nostalgia for aspects of the old city that gives his book its subject as well as its particular shape and texture. Initially unwilling to write about Kolkata, especially since he has captured the old Calcutta – or its genteel, upper-class environments – in his fiction, Chaudhuri conducts an elliptical investigation of the city's transformation through a series of loosely linked essays. The earlier essays in the book are narratives, or reportage, as Chaudhuri sets out to learn how the other half – actually, the vast majority – lives. By the end, this journalistic impulse has given way to the anecdotal, memoiristic mode that Chaudhuri prefers. The strongest moments in the book are when his eclectic, free-ranging critical sensibility and taste for personal reflection meet elements in the city that reward the oblique approach rather than a direct inquiry.

"The Calcutta I'd encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity", Chaudhuri writes, contrasting the city favourably with the Bombay he grew up in, and finding in Calcutta "whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful". The green slatted French windows to be seen in old buildings in the city, a design imported in the late seventeenth century when the French were as much a contending colonial power in the region as the British, are emblematic for Chaudhuri of Calcutta's modernity. They became widespread over the centuries, he tells us, appearing as backdrops in oil paintings and to the urban life of the modern Bengali bourgeois, the bhadralok. It was the bhadralok too, with their absorption of different, oppositional cultures – the Indic and the Western as well as the Bengali and the English – who helped create the distinctive urban texture that made Calcutta feel both immensely Bengali and incredibly cosmopolitan.

Still, the rise of the bhadralok did not mean that the process of amalgamating Eastern and Western ways was without friction. At one end of the spectrum, just before the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, there is the poet Ishwar Gupta writing about the imported ritual of the English New Year. Gupta's verse ("Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté . . . ), with its freely borrowed English words, can't be compared, Chaudhuri writes, to "the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class". It has an edge to it, a ribald mocking tone. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Ingabanga, the tennis-playing, knife-and-fork wielding aspirants to Englishness such as the Mukherjees, an elderly couple to whom Chaudhuri devotes a chapter, in which he describes their ritual of high tea as they and most of their kind decline in a city that seems to care nothing for their imported, outdated refinements.

By the end, the Mukherjees, described with nuance and empathy by Chaudhuri, are seen selling off their jewellery and furniture. They belong to the past, much like the pair of green French windows Chaudhuri purchases from an old building about to be demolished. When he can find no place for the windows in his modern flat, they end up on a wall, windows leading nowhere. And as go the Ingabanga and green French windows, so does Calcutta, its project of modernity turning out to be a dead-end, displaced by this new thing called Kolkata, a city without a past and, perhaps, without even a future, uninterested in the promise of modernity and settling instead for its position as an outpost of provincializing globalization, a waystation between Dubai and Bangkok.

Chaudhuri is keenly aware that part of the promise of modernity in Calcutta was that it allowed you to walk down the city's streets aware of the overlapping of the past and present and to be invigorated by their different vantage points. "By the early eighties", however, "the death knell of modernity was being sounded everywhere. Calcutta was one of the great casualties of that passing . . . . Without the transformative effect of the imagination, decay is just decay, disrepair plain disrepair." It is a kind of dying that Chaudhuri observed in England of the 1980s and 90s, where "the idea of the town, village, and city had become anachronistic", and that, with globalization, would become a phenomenon all over the world, the sheen of glass replacing the light and shade of shuttered windows.

But it was not just the co-existence of past and present that gave the modern city that alluring, quickening quality observed by thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Marshall Berman. The appeal was in past and present in conjunction with the future, which involved politics and was always potentially (and sometimes actually) transformative. It is no accident that the most appreciative interpreters of modernity in the Western world have tended to be heterodox Jewish Marxists. It was this presence of politics, Benjamin reminded us, that produced, along with the poet and the flâneur, the detective, the police spy and the revolutionary in the city streets.

Chaudhuri makes an effort to engage with politics early on in the book, noting Calcutta's origins in colonial plunder as well as the postcolonial turmoil that gave birth, in the late 1960s, to the ultra-left movement called Naxalism. But this engagement is scattered and uneasy, manifesting itself most strongly in attempts to understand the electoral defeat of the Left Front by Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool ("Grassroots") Congress. His visits to far-flung electoral stations or his interview with a Left Front minister on the eve of elections don't develop into an understanding of what these things might have to do with modernity, unless it is in the idea that the betterment of the rural poor was by its very nature antithetical to modernity, and that the Left Front, in its half-hearted commitment to the villages, destroyed Calcutta and, eventually, itself. Writing of Jyoti Basu, the Left Front Chief Minister from 1977 to 2000, Chaudhuri seems to reiterate precisely such an idea, noting that under Basu, "agrarian, rural Bengal finally, and astonishingly, received justice in the late seventies and early eighties, as peasants and sharecroppers were empowered . . . under him, Calcutta became an abandoned and unimportant city".

The idea that Calcutta's decline is to be blamed on the empowerment of the rural poor and militant unionization among the urban working classes had become widespread among the city's bhadralok even in the late 80s, a time when the Left Front appeared to be unassailably in power. More than two decades later, this interpretation has been absorbed into the larger narrative of neoliberalism popular among both Indian and Western elites, resulting in a kind of rote repetition of how communism in West Bengal – and socialism in India – known for nothing but violence, inefficiency and corruption, were replaced by the liberating power of the free market.

But this simple before-and-after narrative obscures many facts. Although the Left Front was indeed thuggish, especially in its later years, this is true of the Congress government that preceded it and of the Trinamool Congress one that has taken its place. Violence has been endemic in Calcutta from the time of its foundation, when the fiat of the East India Company empowered loutish young men from Britain to go about forcibly collecting taxes from the peasantry, all the way to the twentieth century, when the famine of the 1940s killed between 3 and 4 million people, followed by the upheavals of Partition, Naxalism and the liberation war in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Given this catalogue of violence, it is not surprising that the shape of Calcutta's evolution was always a highly contested matter. For a while, it was known (and indeed, admired around India, if not among the elites) for its culture of public protest, which included arson as well as demonstrations, and which expressed, along with the disturbing propensity for violence, a demand from the streets to be taken seriously by the exploitative, predatory hierarchy being nurtured in the city and in the nation at large. This dual characteristic, the easy recourse to violence but also the emancipatory energy of radical politics, especially Naxalism, was clearly visible to those writing about the city into the 90s. It is strongly discernible in Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta: The city revealed, 1971 (surprisingly, the last major work of non-fiction in English on the city until Chaudhuri's book). Even V. S. Naipaul, far less sympathetic to popular movements, shows a degree of engagement with the idealism of radical Calcutta in his chapter on a former Naxalite in India: A million mutinies now (1990).

Many of the reviews of Chaudhuri's book have taken him to task for not making more of a point about the depredations of the Left Front and the wonders of the new Kolkata, where housing developments and malls sited on old factories indicate the final liberation of the city from the barbarians formerly at its gates. But the idea that Calcutta failed because of the prevalence of leftist politics in the city ignores how inbred and insular the bhadralok had become, and how, like the larger Indian elite to which it belonged, it had begun to turn its back on questions of social justice. By the 80s, its ideas of modernity had become a pallid mimicry of Western consumerism, in sharp contrast to the multitudes swirling in and around the city, many of whom came from the same rural areas and provincial towns in which Naxalism had grown up.

We can see the lingering traces of that transformative potential in the encounters Chaudhuri has with marginal figures, especially at the beginning of the book, where his own privilege and their precariousness collide. The people he meets are mostly migrant workers, some of them children, many of whom sleep on the city's broken pavements. Others live on its outskirts, like Baby Misra, whom Chaudhuri meets begging with her son Jitender and whom he takes to a pharmacy to buy medicine and to treat Jitender to a meal. In allowing himself to engage with these characters, and in acknowledging that they are characters, Chaudhuri unleashes a process that he cannot entirely control and that contrasts powerfully with later sections where, when discussing domestic help, itinerant hostesses and sushi chefs, he appears too comfortably settled for his social critique to have any bite.

In restaurants, or in his home, or even in his car, Chaudhuri is hemmed in by his bourgeois status, caught up in the logic of a transaction. But when meeting the migrants on the street, on his own, open to the chance encounter, he becomes the flâneur, both powerful and vulnerable, subject to the modernity that he loves so much. The process forces on Chaudhuri a sudden reconfiguration, where instead of the wife and daughter he usually lives with, he has acquired quite a different family, as do Baby and Jitender, whose labourer husband and father is back in his village, a place whose name Chaudhuri confesses he cannot quite make out.

A moment of promise and heartbreak, this encounter is of course made possible by the remnants of the old city in the new, by the presence of its narrow streets and footpaths and its still unregulated flow of people. The dominant fantasy of Kolkata, however, is to be more like Dubai or New York or New Delhi, the underclass pushed to faraway, isolated clusters, from where they will come in to work on buses and on the subway. Old buildings and neighbourhoods will have to be torn down, the streets widened into multi-lane roads no human being can cross on foot, while the middle class will retreat into apartment complexes and the rich to villas patrolled by armed security guards. But it may be that this fantasy, too, has run its course, especially in a world caught up in one financial crisis after another. Kolkata, whose awful tropical weather is being given a new dimension by the vagaries of climate change, may never become a favoured urban centre for world oligarchs. It may be condemned to remain a second-rate provincial city, populated by a parvenu bhadralok class and some version or other of Didi. Yet it is also possible that some other constellation of urbanity and modernity may emerge there, drawing from its emancipatory, radical past as well as from its uncertain future.

The story of the Med

The story of the Med

Detail from a Ptolemaic atlas, Ulm, 1486

Book Details

Cyprian Broodbank

THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE SEA

A history of the Mediterranean from the beginning to the emergence of the classical world
672pp. Thames and Hudson. £34.95.
978 0 500 05176 4

The middle sea, from prehistoric times to the ancient world

COLIN RENFREW

Cyprian Broodbank's imposing and engaging work, The Making of the Middle Sea, approaches the prehistory and ancient history of the Mediterranean with high ambition and with a thoroughness never before attempted. Its territorial scope takes in the entire Mediterranean basin – Southern Europe, the Levant, North Africa – with abundant reference to Egypt and the early civilizations of the Near East. Its temporal span is vast, ranging from the period before the first human population, with our Neanderthal predecessors and their successors, through the Ice Age and the coming of the first farmers, discussing the civilizations of the Bronze Age in some detail, and continuing to the development of the archaic age of Greece and the Classical world. To cover so much ground – the early origins of Western civilization – with clarity and authority is a notable achievement.

Such an approach was not possible until the radiocarbon revolution of half a century ago. But no one since has taken on the formidable task of shaping a historical narrative out of the abundant prehistoric data now available for the Mediterranean. Gordon Childe attempted that task in 1925 with his pioneering The Dawn of European Civilisation, but the lack of a secure chronological framework led him to a diffusionist position which exaggerated the role of the early Near Eastern civilizations, and he did not have the data to go back before the first farmers. Nor did he attempt to cover the difficult transition from the Bronze Age (which for most of the area is literally prehistoric, lacking the narratives which only writing make possible) to the first millennium BC, when the literate Greeks and their Levantine contemporaries provided the first readable contemporary accounts. To shape a coherent story out of the abundant yet much dispersed archaeological data, as Broodbank has done, is a major intellectual feat, not attempted before over this time range and area.

In his introductory chapter, "A Barbarian History", Broodbank asserts: "This is an emphatically polyglot history", that is to say one in which the peoples of the Aegean possess "no privileged position of manifest destiny". He rightly pays his respects to Fernand Braudel, whose The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972) was perhaps the first book successfully to explore the Mediterranean's unity and distinctiveness as a field of study, as well as to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, authors of The Corrupting Sea: A study of Mediterranean history (2000), which does not, however, seek to integrate the long millennia of prehistory into the Mediterranean story. Here Broodbank introduces the dating frameworks, climatic data and other applications of archaeological science that underpin his synthesis. The second chapter, "Provocative places", is an interpretive description of the physical land- and seascapes of the Mediterranean, reviewing its geological history and natural resources.

The narrative begins with "The speciating sea", in which the first hominins reach the Mediterranean coast of Africa around 1.8 million years ago. Here Broodbank deals with the Old Stone Age period up to 50,000 years ago and the first peopling of the northern Mediterranean. His discussion of the Neanderthals is particularly readable. Their story continues in a chapter entitled, "A cold coming we had of it", where "we" refers to our own species, Homo sapiens. The arrival of our species 50,000 years ago is discussed, along with our experiences during the cold of the Last Glacial Maximum. Broodbank evokes well the passing of the last Neanderthals: "It is a thought-provoking geographical coincidence, or no coincidence at all, that Iberia was both a focus for the earliest hominins in Mediterranean Europe, and the place from which the last who were not us walked out forever into the night".

Seafaring is naturally one of the key themes of the book. From around 8500 BC came what the author terms "the nuclear explosion of the Levantine Neolithic" and the subsequent neolithization of Mediterranean Europe. Not until the widespread development of metallurgy, the use of the donkey and above all the development of the sail do we see the rise of state societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Boats with sails are documented on the Nile from around 3000 BC, with seagoing sailing ships from around 2500 BC. Broodbank deals first with North Africa, where climate change led to the return of the Sahara. He then considers the first superpowers, Egypt and Mesopotamia, before turning to the Levant, where the evidence from Ebla (in Syria) "blazes across our horizons like a comet". He then surveys the north coasts of the Mediterranean, starting from the west with Iberia and France and reaching the Aegean and Troy, concluding with "Calypso's isles": Malta and Cyprus. This chapter gives a lively and readable account of a crucial period of change, from 3500 to 2200 BC.

"Pomp and circumstance", the longest chapter in the book, covers in 100 pages the period from 2200 to 1300 BC, including the "Palace of Minos" at Knossos, the treasures of Mycenae, and the frescoed interiors of Akrotiri, buried by the Thera volcano. Further east lie the city of Ugarit, the time capsule of the Uluburun shipwreck, and the urban giant of Tell el-Daba'a in the Nile Delta – and that is just the first half of the chapter. Broodbank then doubles back to the west and central Mediterranean in the mid-second millennium BC, a time when sailing ships were commonplace in the east, incipient as visitors in the centre, and effectively unknown in the west. The communities centring on El Argar in southern Spain in the earlier second millennium are fascinating for the detailed picture they provide of a rising elite of powerful families. Sardinia and Italy at this time show contacts with the Aegean which herald closer ties between the Mediterranean and temperate Europe.

Between 1300 and 800 BC there was certainly a time of transition, with political collapse in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, and the Mycenaean world – a "horizon of turbulence", as Broodbank puts it. "From our perspective the real victor to emerge from the changes on either side of 1200 BC was the Mediterranean, or more accurately, the hugely dynamic, volatile and potentially destabilising, power- diffusing cultural and economic practices that people living around and in it were able to promote." It is now that the "centre becomes central", and Sardinia and the nascent states of Etruria in central Italy are accorded a leading place. In the west, Tartessos near Huelva in southern Spain was now in direct touch with the Phoenician traders of the east, and Carthage comes into prominence. In this chapter Broodbank relegates the Nile Delta and Greece to "the rest of the Mediterranean". But their day will come again.

Broodbank's narrative concludes with "The end of the beginning", a "Greek Renaissance" in the Aegean, and a Neo-Assyrian dominance in Mesopotamia and the Levant. He starts his survey with the emerging trading centre of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, where "almost every theme worth exploring in the eighth and seventh centuries BC can be introduced". Shipping and trade expanded, purple dye industries and wine and oil production developed, and traded elite goods came from the Levant, Cyprus, Egypt and Anatolia, as so abundantly seen in the cemeteries of Etruria. With the goods (and the accompanying myths) came alphabetic writing. Broodbank stresses that this was a time of the rise of sanctuaries and of ethnicity. It saw also the burgeoning of towns and of civic life: "the urban explosion around the Mediterranean's perimeter and right through its heart". The last great intakes brought some areas, including southern France, until then backwaters, into the mainstream of Mediterranean life and trade. By the "end of the beginning" there were three major powers in the central Mediterranean: Syracuse, Carthage and Rome. Athens was to dominate in the Aegean. Yet, as Broodbank remarks, "what went wrong in 500–499 BC in the east Aegean . . . is veiled in obscurity". Just fourteen years later the Persian Empire met its nemesis in the naval battle at Salamis.

The final chapter, "De Profundis", summarizes and draws together the principal strands that contributed to the emergence of the Middle Sea. The expansion in the zones of active seafaring across the Mediterranean from 6000 BC to 1300 BC was accompanied by the perennial factors of diversity, connectivity and uncertainty. The author poses four questions for the later Mediterranean, and reflects briefly on the later dominance of Greek cultural traits which came to be adopted as a common vocabulary across the Mediterranean basin.

So scanty an outline summary of the book as this can certainly not do justice to the quality of the discussion that accompanies Broodbank's narrative, nor to the richness of the details he adduces, abundantly illustrated in the drawings and plates. Central to his achievement is his close study of the development of seafaring; a main theme underlying the book is the increasing length and reliability of sea voyages and the consequent transformation of the Middle Sea from a diverse bundle of terrestrial enclaves separated by unnavigable waters into a single unit linked by efficient and low-cost maritime trade.

This allows him to avoid the "migrations of peoples" as a key explanatory device, much favoured by an earlier generation of writers. Here, though, the ongoing advances of molecular genetics may yet hold a few surprises. Broodbank, perhaps wisely, makes little reference to current DNA studies, since the systematic analysis of ancient DNA is only now beginning to supplement the rather simple picture derived over the past twenty years from the study of the mitochondrial DNA (and increasingly the Y-chromosome DNA) of living populations. It is too early, perhaps, to draw firm conclusions, but ancient DNA will soon be making a significant contribution to the understanding of Mediterranean population history.

It is a strength of his narrative that he situates the rise of "ethnicity" in the first millennium BC. That can only be a matter of speculation, but earlier authors, including Childe, all too often ascribed significant changes in material and spiritual culture to the inherent qualities of different "peoples". Students of ethnicity are now aware that the self-recognition of a social group or "people" is a complex issue, and that, as Broodbank rightly states, it is not a matter automatically to be assumed. In particular it is a poor explanation for cultural change.

Perhaps it is a little unfair to criticize the author of a book on the Mediterranean region for laying emphasis on precisely that area. Yet the striking originality and high antiquity of the great "megalithic" monuments of northern Europe is passed over rather lightly, even when their southernmost developments do feature here, as in the splendid Cueva del Romeral at Antequera in southern Spain. The precocity of the Balkan Copper Age, whence metallurgy first reached the Aegean, and the riches of the cemetery at Varna in Bulgaria, are largely overlooked.

The tradition in Mediterranean studies, since the time of Oscar Montelius, has been to maintain the thesis of ex oriente lux – light from the east – which Childe later sought, not entirely successfully, to modify. Broodbank has worked manfully to right the balance. His approach, refreshingly, is both "barbarian" and "polyglot", in that he does not unduly privilege the Greeks. But perhaps he is still a little bedazzled by that Oriental light. The extraordinary "temples" of Malta are, for instance, discussed in the same chapter as the metallurgy of the early Bronze Age of Italy and the Aegean, but their origins lie deeper in a truly neolithic tradition, which could further illuminate their alterity.

In such a compendious work there will always be much to debate, and there are times when one might wish to hear more: for example, the origins of the Indo-European languages, already dominant on the northern shores of the Mediterranean in the Classical period, are dealt with rather briefly. Yet overall there is much to wonder at here. The theoretical disputes that loom so large in much current archaeological writing are almost absent. Marxist theory is not debated; there is not much allusion to world systems; the term "post-processual" is, I think, entirely avoided. Concerns with phenomenology or ontology are not explicitly expressed. Cyprian Broodbank wears his scholarship lightly, and the book is all the more readable for that.

This is one of the rare books – I can think of no other – in which the treatment of prehistoric times (lacking any access to ancient written sources) moves seamlessly into the historic period of the ancient world. It is to be applauded as a major work which sets new standards in scholarship, coherence and readability.

Elgar out of pocket

Elgar out of pocket

J. P. E. HARPER-SCOTT

John Drysdale

ELGAR'S EARNINGS

254pp. Boydell Press. £50 (US $90).

978 1 84383 741 1

On the basis of what he earned from royalties and copyrights, it would seem that if Elgar had stuck to his class origins and become a pipe fitter rather than a composer of symphonies and concertos, he would have made a better and more reliable living. John Drysdale's scrupulous research, based largely on previously unexamined archives of the music publishers Novello, and Boosey and Hawkes, shows that in an exceptionally good year, such as 1904, Elgar earned the equivalent of £71,600 in today's money from Novello. The average royalty cheque over his forty-two years with the firm, however, was worth only £23,904 in the handy contemporary equivalents given throughout this book. The pipefitter's average earnings in 2011, according to HMRC figures, were £37,978.

The abuses heaped on Elgar by his devious and unscrupulous publishers – Novello in particular – are familiar from existing biographies and published letters. But Drysdale's book is the first (to my knowledge) to scrutinize a major composer's full range of earnings. Elgar's Earnings bursts with figures, which in fact spill out from the book into online income tables, but the figures themselves are supported only by a skeletal interpretation. Elgar earned very well, spent more than he could afford, and felt aggrieved that others earned more; insofar as this grievance was justified, it is accounted for by the fact that he made some bad bargaining decisions with his publishers, and had to do without income from an academic position. This is all stated in the first few pages, and in the remainder of the book we simply read the figures that support it. Disappointingly, Drysdale assumes that earnings are everything, and leaves the question of differences in class and inherited wealth between figures such as the squirish Hubert Parry and the unprivileged Elgar completely unexamined. This could have been an interesting study of much bigger economic questions, and it is a matter of great regret that it attempts so little contextualization of Elgar's income.

There is, however, enough in the detail to sustain the interest of anyone who enjoys peering into other people's financial secrets. Drysdale's narrative of Novello's exploitative relationship with their most important composer is the central focus, but there are glimpses here and there of how his marriage influenced his spending. Alice Elgar, by far his social superior, made it her business both to drive Elgar to earn enough to raise her to where she felt she belonged, and – when prevailing economic conditions ensured his failure – to spend anyway, with ostentatious and wilful disregard of reality: they bought an unaffordable mansion in Highgate and went on long foreign holidays at a time when few even among the established middle classes did so. These glimpses aside, the general absence of information as to how Elgar spent the money he earned is frustrating. It cannot all have been on the horses, even if Drysdale's list of eight noms de plume that Elgar gave to nine bookmakers in the first eleven days of May 1933 gives an indication of his readiness for a flutter.

Through performance fees, recording, broadcasting and conducting, Elgar could significantly supplement his income, although – and this is one of Drysdale's often-repeated points – not by nearly as much as was possible for contemporary painters and authors. (Composers like Parry who held university appointments earned more than Elgar, though his £100 salary as Professor of Music at Oxford was worth only around £9,000 in today's money.) Drysdale's examination of G. B. Shaw's tax returns from 1900 to 1950 is illuminating since, being close to Shaw for many years, Elgar must have been at least generally aware of the gulf between their incomes. Drysdale provides estimates of Elgar's total income over twenty years, which comes out at an average of about £130,000 per annum in 2011 terms. This represents an extremely good income, putting him in the top 1 per cent of earners by contemporary standards. But Shaw's average over the same period was more than ten times higher; today it would translate into £1.5 million a year. Invidious comparisons such as these led Elgar, who had an accurately high estimate of his artistic significance, to feel distinctly unrewarded for his labours. Like the contemporary financier who finds his £500,000 salary paltry next to his friend's £12 million, Elgar perhaps made the error of comparing his earnings with the freakish riches above rather than the great mass below. He left his understanding of humanity for his music.

The fact that Novello so slyly minimized his earnings from his publications with them encouraged him to think that he was being robbed; perhaps fixation on income from publishing blinded him to his earnings from other sources. Once he was an established figure, Novello paid Elgar a sum for the copyright and a percentage of royalties on full scores or vocal scores (for choral works). The individual parts that instrumentalists place on their music stands were excluded from these terms, however, and Novello sold them in direct competition to the vocal scores which were a principal source of his income. Their worst trick came in 1904, with Elgar on the verge of what should have been his most profitable decade, when they persuaded him to sign an exclusive agreement with them. Its 25 per cent royalty offer was superficially attractive, but signing the contract was a disastrous decision. Novello's chairman had offered the vague assurance that Elgar would continue to receive copyright payments for each new work (something other publishers were willing to offer), but this was never honoured, as Elgar noted with creditable equanimity when he terminated the contract. They were no more generous with fees from performances. The Performing Rights Society, which facilitated the collection of fees for performances, was founded in 1914, but Novello refused to join till 1936, two years after Elgar's death. On an ad hoc basis they arranged for him to receive income from the symphonies, the Violin Concerto and Falstaff, but nothing else that he published with them. Their reasoning, like Boosey's, was that collecting the performing fee might discourage amateur musicians in particular from buying their scores, particularly of vocal works. While noting that the composer's interests seem never to have been considered, Drysdale observes that "from Novello's point of view, the decision . . . made good economic sense and is understandable".

Drysdale is also sympathetic to the person Elgar described, in Woosterish tones, as one of his wife's "awful aunts", Emma Raikes. Biographers have tended to report that in a codicil to her will, written a week after Elgar's marriage to Alice Roberts, she disinherited her niece for marrying into the lower classes. Drysdale insists, however, that "she was not quite so dreadful". The codicil actually left Alice the originally intended estate in trust, which yielded around £6,000 a year (in 2011 terms) for Alice's own use. The catch was that on Alice's death, the money would go to another of Alice's aunts, never to any of Elgar's children with her. Although it is right to be accurate about the details, far from sparing Raikes any opprobrium, Drysdale's account actually makes her appear worse. This morganatic codicil was intended to save the family the ignominy of passing any scrap of its wealth on to the tainted litter of the lower orders, while granting the pure-blood last of the line the use of the money while she lived. An outright disinheritance would have been a single blow that might have been borne, but the slow drip of contempt, each payment announcing Elgar's unworthiness to consort with his betters, harassed him from 1889 to 1920: he was still protesting about it after Alice's death. Alice drew on that income to cover the costs of underwriting King Olaf and The Light of Life, in what Drysdale, ever sympathetic to her, calls "a display of selfless devotion". When Elgar received his knighthood, the years of private muttering were revealed by the words of their fourteen-year-old daughter: "I am so glad for Mother's sake that Father has been knighted. You see – it puts her back where she was".

Drysdale's own findings challenge the romantic myth that Elgar was unable to compose without Alice (what about the Third Symphony?), and retreated from the public eye. The fact is that, through musical activity such as conducting and recording, which required both undimmed vigour and an appreciative public response, his income remained at more or less its former level right up till his death. He was certainly not a spent force, and if this book puts that myth finally to rest, it will have done a great service.

Wilkie Collins at the double

Wilkie Collins at the double

From The Woman in White directed by Trevor Nunn, Palace Theatre, London, 2004

Book Details

Andrew Lycett

WILKIE COLLINS

A life of sensation

525pp. Hutchinson. £20.

978 0 09 193709 6

A workmanlike biography of the very Victorian creator of sensation fiction

JOHN STOKES

Since so many Victorian novels include the presence of a double it is tempting to assume that the figure reflects the historical circumstances of authors who are torn between maintaining a public face and protecting a private – or "secret" – life. Revelations about Charles Dickens's longtime mistress, Ellen Ternan, present a particularly inviting instance. In the case of Wilkie Collins the possibility seems equally attractive because his relationships with women were unorthodox and, to an extent that is still unclear, had to be kept under wraps.

From 1859 onward Collins lived with a young widow, Caroline Graves. In 1868 Graves married another man, but the relationship didn't last and Collins continued to be closely involved with her until his own death in 1889. Graves was subject to what Collins himself described as "nervous-hysterical" attacks which, again not surprisingly, has led some to see her as a model for his more troubled fictional heroines, especially Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (1859–60). In the mid-1860s, however, Collins had begun another liaison, this time with Martha Rudd, the daughter of an agricultural labourer, with whom he was to have three children. For quite considerable periods he ran two separate London households with two different women – and was married to neither.

Andrew Lycett's new biography takes Victorian doubleness for granted, finding a predictable irony in the relation between Collins's "compromised" domestic situation and novels that were "based on exposing the double standards and hypocrisy beneath the surface of Victorian society". This is hard to deny, unless the facts of Collins's sexual life, so far as they are known, prompt one – as they well might – to reconsider received ideas of Victorian "hypocrisy" altogether. In any case, double standards are only half the story. A literary double is neither a falsehood nor a copy; it's a reversed reflection, a replication that is also an alternative. In a classic work of generic criticism, entitled Doubles (1985), Karl Miller, without mentioning Collins, explained modern duality as a mode of imaginative escape to be associated with the liberating uncertainties built into the act of writing itself. Collins's protagonists are sometimes naive, or blind to their situation, in a way that their authorial creator could not have been. As more recent academic critics such as Jenny Bourne Taylor have shown, Collins's sense of human psychology had a great deal in common with contemporary scientific enquiry into the workings of the mind. The interest was far from secret and the phenomenon of double consciousness was widely demonstrated and discussed.

This may account for the fact that Collins regularly invented characters who encounter their own emotional or psychological opposites in terms of sexual or moral temperament. These pairings can be female (Clara and Margaret in Basil, Rosanna and Rachel in The Moonstone, Carmina and Miss Minerva in Heart and Science, the sisters Norah and Magdalen in No Name, Mercy Merrick and Grace Roseberry in The New Magdalen), or male (Basil and Mannion in Basil, even – in the novel of that name – two men both called "Armadale"), or across gender (Marian Halcombe and Count Fosco in The Woman in White). In addition, Collins, routinely credited with mixing the sensation novel with the detective story, constructs frames within frames, deploys multiple narrators, composes implausibly detailed letters and devises plots involving mesmerism. Cumulatively all these techniques seem designed to reflect a world in which it is virtually impossible to know anything or anyone for sure.

Sometimes literary biographers put the doubling process into reverse, employing imaginative fictions as a means of tracking back to actual occurrence. This is not primarily Lycett's way. In a substantial book he is not particularly generous with quotation and readers may feel the need to fill in the imaginative evidence for themselves. So, for instance, we learn in some detail about the sequence of north London addresses, from Marylebone to Avenue Road, north of Regent's Park, in which Collins lived for most of his life, but to appreciate the strangely provisional quality of Collins's home ground one has to turn to passages like this one from Basil (1852): " . . . a suburb of new houses, intermingled with wretched patches of waste land, half built over. Unfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens, surrounded us".

The London the author knew best was in the throes of being created – a margin between the town, invariably described as hot, dirty, and crowded – and a frequently desolate countryside, a developing suburbia that could look permanently incomplete. Collins's cityscapes are both hallucinatory and topographically exact. The Woman in White provides a famously creepy instance. The narrator has arrived at the point "where four roads met – the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London". Looking towards the city, he is accosted by what seems to be an apparition:

There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave enquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

Brought together in this way the vision of the woman and the vista of the city are both subject to curious meteorological conditions governing the contrast of light. It's an extreme example of a repeated effect. Basil again: "The fair summer evening was tending towards twilight; the sun stood fiery and low in the cloudless horizon; the last loveliness of the last quietest daylight hour was fading on the violet sky, as I entered the square".

At such transitional moments the possibilities are palpable, but as yet unknown. Collins's unusual sensitivity to light is, perhaps, to be connected with the near-psychedelic experiences that opium, to which he became profoundly addicted as a result of medical prescriptions, might have offered him. Lycett believes that, as time went on, opiate addiction lessened rather than deepened Collins's ability to convey perceptual disorientation, but something other than pure imagination seems to be powerfully at work in The Moonstone. The bewitching jewel gives off a glow like that of "a harvest moon":

When you looked down into the stone, you looked into yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.

Moments like these can be as erotic as they are elusive. They bear comparison with the "unfathomable" depths glimpsed within the highly intelligent yet oppressed heroines of the novels and they encourage speculation about the appeal of the actual women in the author's life – not that, even in Lycett's biography, we ever really come to know them. Collins described his relationship with Martha Rudd as "morganatic". It's a tell-tale choice of word that implies a lasting awareness of class difference between partners, and unresolved chafing against hierarchies is common in novels such as Man and Wife (1870). Yet the way in which Collins treated his two mistresses remains a largely hidden part of a life in which, according to external testimony, physical illness played a more dominant, and certainly a more discussed role, than moral disquiet – gout more significant than guilt.

The man who once described the English winter as "the season of Cant and Christmas" did, it is true, have an ear for the hypocrisy of others, including religious fudge. In The Moonstone the servant Betteridge, for the most part a deferential old buffer, overhears the smooth and sanctimonious ladies' man Godfrey Ablewhite express his ideas about morality to the woman he has his eye on:

Religion . . . meant love. And love meant religion. And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. Earth had some very objectionable people in it; but to make amends for that, all the women in heaven would be members of a prodigious committee that never quarrelled, with all the men in attendance on them as ministering angels. Beautiful! Beautiful!

But why, wonders Betteridge, half-perceptively, does Mr Godfrey "keep it all to the lady and himself?" Religion for Collins, especially when organized, is usually a mode of manipulation. In the later novels his subversive attitudes to public life are even more on the surface: The New Magdalen (1873) takes on the divorce laws; Heart and Science (1883) treats the horrors of vivisection. Yet although pernicious practices are exposed, they tend to remain in place. There's a bitterly ironic instance at the very end of Heart and Science, when the funeral of the misguided vivisectionist Dr Nathan Benjulia is attended in large numbers by "his brethren of the torture-table", who honour him as a martyr to their sinister cause.

Some 3,000 of Collins's letters have survived, and they are largely available in good modern collected editions. It may seem fitting that this master of the epistolary form should have left so much correspondence, but it's more revealing about business matters than about the affairs of a divided heart. Lycett is strong on this important aspect of Collins's career, tracing his relationship with a series of publishers and his impatience with Charles Mudie, the puritanical owner of the country's largest lending library. Having flourished in the era of the three-decker, Collins remained tied to the form even when it was under threat. He knew very well that commercial arrangements between author and publisher were continually changing, but despite becoming the first well-known client of A. P. Watt, the literary agent, professionally he remained a mid-Victorian, endlessly worried about copyright and wrangling over editions.

Since the groundbreaking biographies of Collins by William M. Clarke in 1988 and Catherine Peters in 1991, academic studies, spurred by a feminist interest in the Gothic and the melodramatic, have proliferated. By contrast with this critical engagement, Andrew Lycett has given the creator of sensation fiction a workmanlike but distanced treatment. His approach has the virtue of providing what documentary evidence exists, yet the biography of a writer like Collins doesn't have to be confined to prosaic detail. In 2012, Peter Ackroyd published his own shorter Life of Collins, a work that was particularly appreciative, as one might have anticipated from this author, of the layered mysteries of London buildings but, more unexpectedly, managed to exploit afresh the long-established criticism that Collins is better on plot than on character. Ackroyd turns the complaint around by explicating the literary achievement while detailing Collins's career, showing how structural mechanisms and stylistic devices create unique moments of suspense out of a series of incidents. Ackroyd features the fictive; Lycett fixes on the factual. Given the perennial choice that faces the literary biographer – whether to foreground the life or the work – you might even say that the one doubles the other.