Maps of a Curious Sort: Landscape in the Fiction of Keith Roberts

pp189-195

paper delivered at A Celebration of British SF, 2001; published in Foundation 93, Spring 2005

The Hill is chalk and flint, the Hill is sure.
Tradition should be made of sterner stuff.

So Keith Roberts ends his poem ‘Sham Hill’. In Roberts’s novels the weight of the past is heavy, and is contained within the chalk and flint hills, the very land of England. In Pavane, Jesse Strange takes Margaret up into the hills where he:

dug a fossil out of the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free.

The English landscape, buzzing with tradition, is a place that embodies the deeply conservative (though not necessarily Conservative) tone of Roberts’s work. Though practically all of his fiction was set in the future, it evokes the past (Brian Aldiss coined the term ‘future historic’ to describe this peculiar feel in Roberts’s stories). And it is the landscape — almost invariably carrying the marks of human history: standing stones, old houses, rural pubs and, especially, ruined castles — which represents the past made solid. Throughout the stories, the most successful characters are those who clearly see from whence they come, their awareness of the land, in the most significant cases their marriage to the land, shapes their beliefs, their morality, even the stories they enact.

The tradition inherent in the landscape is, of course, English: though Roberts did very occasionally, venture outside these islands, he did so by my count in no more than 9 short stories out of his 120-plus stories and 10 novels. Other than those few examples, practically everything Roberts ever wrote was set in England, or a very clearly recognisable avatar of England, such as the Realm in Kiteworld and Drek Yarman. In particular, in the three books which are central to any appreciation of his work, the mosaic novels Pavane and The Chalk Giants, and the quasi-autobiographical Gráinne, it is a very distinct area of southern England, around Purbeck and Corfe Castle, which takes centre stage. Corfe Castle, which is described in Pavane as seeming  ‘to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun’ is thus the perfect place from which to explore the shattered histories of Roberts’s most famous novels.

Appropriately, given how landscape plays a sacred role in shaping character throughout Roberts’s fiction, these three books evoke an almost mystical connection with this area. In The Chalk Giants he says: ‘Driving through it was like driving through clouds, and the sun on top made it look like fairyland.’ And when Margaret Strange, in Pavane, considers looking for other gods she thinks: ‘Perhaps they’re still there in the wind, on the heaths and the old grey hills.’ For Roberts, a country is its traditions, its mythology, and there is a strong link between landscape and mythology. The old myths of Britain arose from the countryside and are inseparable from it, touching it with magic as they touch it with the physical signs of burial mounds, chalk figures, stone circles, all the scenic devices that recur like a Greek chorus throughout Roberts’s work.

Rafe the Signaller, for instance, will have a direct experience of the old magic still inherent in the land when he meets a fairy. Fairies are not fey, ethereal, insect-like beings, the sanitised supernatural creatures of childhood, but a survival of the old beliefs. They are a survival that in our world endured until the Reformation, which, Roberts implies, was not just the sequence of religious upheavals initiated by Henry VIII, but also the loss of old country ways and beliefs which are echoed in the bucolic whimsy in Roberts’s sequence of ‘Anita’ stories. As Rudyard Kipling explained in his recounting of the ‘Dymchurch Flit’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill:

This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, ‘Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the images.’

To judge from the number of times Roberts refers to Kipling it is easy to see the survival of fairies in Pavane as a way of illustrating the nature of the change in history while also paying homage to Kipling himself.

In another early story also set around this familiar southern England, ‘The Big Fans’, the narrator must also quit the country at the end for ‘There’s no place in it now … for people like me.’ In the light of the mystical union with the land that is such a part of Roberts’s fiction, this divorce has a cataclysmic finality unusual in his work.

But the fairies are not the only way that old beliefs are alive in the land. Even before Rafe meets the fairy he experiences the antiquity of the land, an antiquity from which traditions and beliefs must be born.

Their ploughs gnawed the bases of the markers, they broke the megaliths with water and fire and used the bits for patching dry stone walls; they’d been doing it for centuries now, and the rings were depleted and showing gaps, but there were many stones; and the circles remained, and barrows crowning the windy tops of hills, hows where the old dead lay patient with their broken bones. The child would climb the mounds, and dream of kings in fur and jewels.

This is the same sense of the life of a people being necessarily and intimately connected with their land that we get when Marck, in The Chalk Giants, describes his dream:

‘This was my dream,’ he said. ‘That I was the grain, and earth, and creeping things upon it. And mist and sky, the stones the Giants placed between the hills. I was the land, Miri, and the land was me. In the dream I found a woman, who was also the land; and we made children who would … know the land, and live out golden times. And … this too was the dream. That we died, returning to earth; but we were our children, and their children’s children, and the golden grain again. It seemed a … Mystery, a worthy thing.’

We are told specifically: the king must marry his land. This uniting of person and landscape is more than simply primitive ritual (and Roberts, I am sure, would have said there is nothing simple about primitive ritual), it is a fundamental part of Roberts’s view of the world. The land is where the past resides, and in the past is strength and purity while in the future is only mystery and terror. And when the marriage fails, it is reflected in the emptiness of the land. As Marck puts it: ‘I rode to the beach. But it was empty. The hills were empty, and the sea. You emptied them’

It is, incidentally, this holy marriage, the unity of people and land throughout the fiction of Keith Roberts, which illuminates the tragedy that is the end of The Chalk Giants. The whole book is the fever dream of Stan Potts, a fat, awkward failure trapped in his attempts to escape the bomb. His visions, inspired, as so much else in Roberts’s work, by the paintings of Paul Nash,  see the country gradually raise itself up from the nuclear aftermath to barbarism and the beginnings of a new civilisation. Each vision, each piece in this mosaic novel, is a tragedy ending in death or apparent death, an echo of the fate awaiting Potts himself. But the final section, ‘Usk the Jokeman’, ends differently: from out of the blue rides an overking coming to unite the land under one rule and one religion, which is cognate with Christianity. It looks, perversely, like a happy ending. It is not: for the religion stems from a martyred man, not from the land, and the new king is not married to his land; the hills and the sea will be empty. Ahead lie the same patterns that have led Potts to this impasse in the first place. Time and again, Roberts tells us that history is cyclic, that we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, commit the same horrors.

That the marriage with the land is so important in Roberts’s iconography is shown by how frequently it recurs in his work. In Pavane, Lady Eleanor:

felt an odd sympathy with the fabric of the land itself; once she took a flake of shale and pressed it to her throat and cried, and said that day she was made right through of stone, dark and stern as the Kimmeridge cliffs and as indomitable.

Mata, the multi-girl of The Chalk Giants, experiences it during her first, orgasmic period:

In time the endless, luminous-green vistas, the feathery grass-heads arching above her, worked in her a curious mood. She seemed poised on the edge of some critical experience; almost it was as if some Presence, vast yet nearly tangible, pervaded the hot, unaware afternoon.

Gráinne also – whose name ‘meant the Sun; though in the Munster dialect it meant grain’ – ‘needed to lie on earth’, which is described, as Marck described it, as ‘a Mystery’. Curiously, Mata’s experience is repeated again in Gráinne, and in much the same language, when Roberts’s alter ego Alistair Bevan (a pseudonym Roberts had frequently used early in his career) visits Ireland. On a similarly hot afternoon, after exploring a ruined castle in the far west of the country that is described in a way that makes it almost indistinguishable from the ruined Corfe Castle, Bevan reports (speaking of himself in the third person as he does throughout this novel):

He knew himself to be at rest; future and past in gentle, perfect balance… and yet his eyes were open. They marked the moving grass, dark waves that ran across; in time its rustling returned. Yet now there seemed something more; a Presence, in the brilliant afternoon. As if the stones themselves were focus for some force.

I note, in passing, that this Irish castle seems to occupy the same ‘node of quiet’, the same ‘flaw in the timestream’, that was ascribed to Corfe in Pavane. This sense of Presence, an immanence or force emerging from the stones of the landscape and the stones of man’s ancient structures, is not just religious imagery, it is vitally important to any understanding of Roberts’s characters, especially the women. Over and over again, people are described in terms of the land and their relationship to it. In his first novel, The Furies, we learn most about the character of the guerilla leader, Greg, after the destruction of the Chill Leer community when he addresses the survivors huddling in the darkness deep underground:

What mattered to me was that this was England, this was happening in England. Maybe there wasn’t much of it left to be proud of. Not so many green fields to babble over... We’d developed it, raped it, built it damn near out of existence. But it was still our own place, it was all we had...

People and place are consistently tied together, it is all that either ever has; so that, for instance, the effect of death upon Eli Strange in Pavane has: ‘ravaged the face but left it strong, like the side of a quarried hill.’ Even when characters recognise themselves, it is as part of the landscape. Monkey’s dawning self-awareness in The Chalk Giants positions him within the scene:

Ahead the road stretched away, its surface cracked and broken, bristling with weeds. Across it lay the angular shadow of Truck, topped by the small protuberance that was Monkey’s head. Beyond, and far into the distance, the land seemed to swell, ridge after ridge pausing and gathering itself to swoop saw-edged to the vagueness of the sea.

Nowhere is this identification more clearly visible than in the case of Becky in ‘The White Boat’ who dreamed she ‘saw the villagers, her parents, all the people she knew, melt chaotically into the landscape till the cliffs were bodies and bones and old beseeching hands, teeth and eyes and crumbling ancient foreheads.’

Becky, herself slight and dark, lives in a village blackened by the coal that is in the rocks they live on. The village is black, the church is black, ‘the people too had taken the colour of the place: an airborne, invisible smut had changed them all’. Amid all this black, the White Boat itself is not just a vivid contrast, it provides a moral opposite. Here is freedom as opposed to the repression of her life, it is foreign to her mundane reality, it is dream to her waking, it is male to her female. When she swims out to the boat at night there is a sexual charge:

She nuzzled at the water, drowsily; but the first bayonet stab in her lungs started something that was nearly an orgasm, she shouted and retched and kicked.

And it is on board the boat that she has her first period. Roberts, with his love of what he would call the ‘P.H.’, the Primitive Heroine, the sexual but somehow still innocent child-woman who received so much attention in his work from Pete in The Furies to Kaeti, is fond of making the first period a moment of direct connection with the Mystery. For Mata it is the moment that turns her into the Goddess, the strange, often malevolent influence which hangs over the three central stories of The Chalk Giants. For Molly, in Molly Zero, it is the moment she asserts her freedom from all the restrictions that had been placed upon her. For Becky it is the moment that sows the seed of her betrayal of the White Boat, when ‘White Boat had been a dream; reality was killing it’. Even so, she springs the trap that has been laid for the boat, allowing it to escape. This is a rare happy ending in Roberts’s work: she has not escaped the blackness of her life, but the whiteness of the dream is somehow preserved.

Becky, incidentally, did exist. In an article in Vector, Roberts explained:

She was a barmaid at a Dorset pub I frequented. She later became what another friend called the ‘multi-girl’ of Chalk Giants.

And with this identification, she is further identified with the land. Of Martine, the Dorset barmaid in The Chalk Giants who will become, in Potts’s turbid imagining, Mata and Miri, he will say:

Every fact that touched upon the place touched, it seemed, on her, made him feel fractionally less alone. So, increasingly, she towered in his consciousness; her face glowed above the hills, her slender hands cupped bays and sea.

Or as the multi-girl puts it herself when she appears in a vision to Marck:

I am the land and sea, snow on far hills; summer mist, the hot bright grain. I am the reed-pool woman, sun on green water…

But if Roberts identifies the land so closely with his characters, if he finds in it a reflection of the roles they must play (as Marck finds in The Chalk Giants), an echo of the moral choices they must make (as Becky finds in Pavane), a statement of who they are (as Gráinne finds) and what they stand for (as Greg finds in The Furies), why, then, does he cause so much damage to the land?

Roberts certainly makes his characters suffer. Death is common and usually cruel, from the bodily disintegration that Monkey suffers in The Chalk Giants to the long, drawn-out death of the central character that encompasses the whole of Drek Yarman. Throughout his work, as John Clute has remarked, ‘a clear hatred of violence and savagery sometimes emerges uncomfortably in images of pain and mutilation.’ This horrified fascination with suffering is perhaps best expressed by Brother John in Pavane. After feverishly drawing the workings of the Inquisition, the ‘bodies that distended and heaved in ecstasies of pain’, he retreats to his Dorset monastery where, in a fever of his own, he speaks only once: ‘“I enjoyed it, Brother,” he whispered. “God and the Saints preserve me, I enjoyed my work…”’ And this horrified fascination applies particularly to the landscape, for his beloved country is repeatedly racked and shattered as cruelly as any of the victims of Brother John’s Inquisition.

In The Furies, ‘the Great Glen was convulsed along its entire course from Inverness to Fort William; Loch Lomond vanished overnight, and most of Herefordshire became an inland sea.’ In The Chalk Giants, when Martine heard the bombs, ‘It sounded as if the country was breaking in halves.’  When Monkey, learning to read the maps in his Truck, finds the way blocked by sea far too soon, ‘His bright new world was shattered. He felt himself losing control. His hands and limbs, wobbly at the best, refused to obey him.’

This loss of the body as the land is lost gives us a clue as to what is going on here. Nuclear war is always the most potent horror in Roberts’s  books, from The Furies written not long after the Cuba Missile Crisis, to Kiteworld and Gráinne and ‘Kaeti and the Shadows’ when the shadows of the Hiroshima victims reassure Kaeti: ‘“You are not to blame, for us …” “I am, I am,” sobbed Kaeti. “We all are …”’ These last were written long after we might have thought the threat of the Bomb had been superseded by other equally blood-curdling horrors, but what the bomb represents is a tearing apart of the land, and since we are so closely identified with the land it is a tearing apart of us as well. Thus our suffering and the breaking apart of the familiar landscape which contains our history, our identity, our original source of belief, is the same thing: Roberts’s protest against the bomb.

Identifying with the landscape is a sign of wholeness, of intelligence. When Monkey learns to read maps it is the dawning of a much greater sensibility that will see him teach himself to read the books he also carries, ‘maps of a curious sort’. When he loses his identification with the rural landscape by venturing into a town – one of the black wastelands which even much later we are told ‘cut the sky like an edge of night’ – it brings about his own physical disintegration.

The moral is simple and obvious: in terms of ethics, beliefs, self-identity, the more closely we identify with the land the better. Roberts rarely makes this explicit. The closest he comes is probably at the end of Gráinne, the novel which comes nearest to being a spiritual and imaginative autobiography, when the communities that Gráinne’s supporters have created bury themselves under the hills and rocks. The impression is rather that of King Arthur sleeping under the hill. In contrast, at the end of Pavane, he writes: ‘Feel sorrow for the passing of old things, but cleave to and build for the new. Do not fall into heresy; do not grieve, for the deaths of stones.’ This is a curious sentiment with which to end a book about the way things move in an endless circle rather than moving on into the future. And Roberts’s fiction is all about the deaths of stones, for it is all about the deaths of people.