A Considerable Speck

Life is Elsewhere

2007-05-19T09:03:00.000-04:00

(sticky post)

Okay. It's official now. Starting a week ago, I'm switching my posts on books, movies and music to Momus. Same reviews, different place.

Those of you who read Considerable Speck regularly (aka index finger, middle finger and ring finger) please do switch to reading Momus, if you haven't already. There are already three reviews up there that don't feature here. And if you've been kind enough to add this site to your blogroll, you may want to update that as well.

I shall miss blogging here - it's been great fun. But never fear. There is some corner of Momus that will always be...errr...a Considerable Speck?

The Blog is dead. Long live the Blog.

Raymond Chandler High

2006-05-13T00:22:00.000-04:00

Brick

We all know the story. Sociopathic tough-guy loner finds himself involved in inexplicable mystery. Someone has disappeared. The only clues are the words from a garbled phone call. Our hero taps into his connections on the street, kicks a few butts, and discovers that he's onto something bigger than he suspected. But that doesn't faze him. He's determined to get to the bottom of it all.

What follows is a descent into a seedy underworld of crime, complete with gorgeous women (who come onto our hero), diabolical but half-crazed villains, muscle-bound thugs, corrupt and clueless authorities and a brainy sidekick. It's a tough crowd to be playing games with, but our hero is more than up to the challenge. Along the way a few other side characters get killed, a lot of other people get beaten up or hurt, but through it all our hero never loses his cool, eventually proving himself smarter, tougher and more ruthless than everyone else. By the time the movie ends, all the bad guys are either dead or in prison while our hero has come out of it scot free, and can go back to his miserable meaningless life. No one's particularly happy, but at least justice has been done.

The fact that all this action takes place not in the gritty alleys of John Huston's suffocating cityscape, but in and around a high school, and that the hero in question is not a snarling private eye but an over-intense school kid bunking class, makes little difference. You would have to be blind and deaf not to see the film noir influences here - Brick is a straight up Humphrey Bogart flick, and the ghost of The Maltese Falcon haunts this movie all the way through, even down to the tacky little bird statuette on the villain's mail box.

To say that Brick leaves you unmoved, that its plot is full of holes and its acting has a plastic, hammy quality about it, is to miss the point entirely. Great film noir is entirely about the formula - no one got emotionally involved with character of Sam Spade, or watched The Maltese Falcon for the intricacies of the plot - the whole point of that movie was the attitude. It's the uber-coolness that we craved, the smooth-talking tough guy-ness, the aura of casual menace. We knew the good guy was going to win out, despite the odds; what's more, we knew he was going to pull it off without getting even slightly flustered or putting in more effort than it takes to have a drink. The thrill was seeing how. And if the intensity seemed over-the-top in a comic book kind of way, so much the better. We weren't looking for realism, we were looking for the vibe.

And for all of Brick's many flaws (the street-slang is distracting, the violence seems a little overdone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good, but he's no Bogart) that vibe is the one thing it gets mostly right [1]. There are a lot of ways in which the movie is (I suspect unintentionally) funny - you have only to step back from the action and remind yourself that these are high school kids we're talking about and the whole thing begins to look like caricature, despite its frenetic attempts to take itself seriously (and there are a lot of those). But the genius of Rian Johnson's script and direction is that it keeps you involved enough so that you don't notice the preposterousness of it all until you step out of the theatre. And that's really impressive.

If there's one thing that doesn't transfer well, it's the main character. Sam Spade was anti-social and screwed up, but he was never needy, never vulnerable. Brendan, the hero of Brick, is frequently both, and the result is that he comes across as more creepy than cool, more desperate than dapper. You very rarely get the sense that Brendan is in control of anything, and the few times that he does come through the effect is more of someone who's a tad psychotic rather than a hard-nosed professional trying to get the job done. It's a weakness in the script that seems unavoidable, given the high school staging, but it's a serious weakness none the less.

Bottomline: Brick is a fascinating tribute to the genre of film noir, and a truly delightful conceit that's well executed and interesting to watch. If you're the kind of person who never saw the point of those old Bogart films, then this is certainly not the movie for you. If on the other hand, you're someone who can mouth along to the dialogue of the Maltese Falcon, you probably should watch this movie. It won't blow you away. But it'll entertain you.

Notes

[1] Right down to the old-fashioned misogynism that is so central to the Bogart myth. Men, it seems, are always fine, upstanding chaps - even when they're trying to kill you. They're the kind of guys who read Tolkien and fall helplessly in love, and when they hurt someone it's only because they're confused and don't know what to do with their emotions. Women, on the other hand, are all scheming vixens who use their sex to get men to do exactly what they want. The fact that our hero is able to resist these sirens is the real proof of his supremacy.

(cross posted from Momus)

United we fall

2006-05-03T00:53:00.000-04:00

United 93

Imagine that it's a calm, clear Tuesday morning in the fall. You have an early morning flight to catch. You yawn your way to Newark airport in a taxi, plod your way through security, go sit in the waiting area outside your boarding gate. There's the usual crowd of people around you - a few businessmen in suits, a couple of elderly people, some young people who are probably students. You pull out your cellphone, make a few calls. The pilots pass by and go into the plane, then the airhostesses . Eventually boarding is announced and you make your way to your seat in the plane, dump your stuff in the overhead luggage compartment, settle in for a long flight. It's a pretty empty flight so you've got plenty of space. At first it seems like you're taking off on time, the plane pushes back from the gate on schedule, then your captain announces that you're stuck in a long queue of planes waiting to depart. It's going to be an extra half hour. You groan inwardly. You promise yourself never to fly from Newark / on United again. When the flight finally does take off you breathe a sigh of relief, pull out your crossword, wonder how long breakfast will be. It's just another early morning commuter flight.

Except maybe it's not. Maybe the date is the 11th of september 2001 and you're two minutes away from being thrust into the impossible situation of being a hostage on a suicide mission intending to ram this plane you're on into a building somewhere. How would you know? And more importantly, how would you respond? What would you do if it were you?

That's exactly the question that the new film United 93 leaves you asking. The real genius of this film is the way it makes that flight and the crisis that hits it (and more generally, hits America) seem so frighteningly real. Director Paul Greengrass achieves that effect by breaking away from the standard process of disaster film making, and refusing to give you any background on the people involved. The first time you see the people on United Flight 93 is when they show up in the security lounge. There is no back story on any of them. You are not shown them leaving their homes, or told who they are or what they do. You are not even told their names. All you know about them is what the other passengers in the plane know about them - they are the guy in the sports jacket, the guy in the baseball hat - and if you trust them or watch them in the moment of crisis it is because of the courage and resourcefulness that they show, not because you have been primed to watch them beforehand. And it's this anonymity that gives the movie its flavour of authenticity, that insists that this is a movie about an event, about something that happened to us collectively - it is the story of what happened to people, not the story of what happened to one person.

People have pointed out that this anonymity is Greengrass's way of getting over the knotty problem of how to celebrate the heroism of one or the other person, without dishonouring others who lost their lives, and who, for all we know, may have showed equal, if not greater bravery. But I think there is a deeper reason for this anonymity.Greengrass 's biggest problem here, it seems to me, is hindsight. We all know what happened that fateful day, we've all seen the news coverage, the images are burned permanently into our memories. It would be easy for us to 'know' what was coming in this movie, easy to anticipate every response of the people involved. Yet were we to do this, there would be no emotional impact in the movie left. By denying us any knowledge of who the people involved are before they so dramatically enter our lives, by insisting that we experience the events on the plane (and on the ground) as if we were really there and it were happening to us, Greengrass draws a veil over our foreknowledge, and allows us to experience the shock of the terrible events of that day as though they were happening in real time. And that is the only thing that makes the movie a success.

There is much not to like in this movie, and it would be easy to dismiss it (as Manohla Dargis, being her usual obtuse self, does in the New York Times) as being unnecessary (as though everything else we watched were absolutely essential), but you have to see the movie in context. Or rather, it's because you can't see it out of context, because it is entirely impossible to separate your response to the movie as a work of cinematic art, from your response to the events that it describes, that you have to admire Greengrass 's achievement. There are many, many ways in which this could have been a really bad movie - overly sentimental, overly cliched, overly exploitative. Greengrass is walking an extraordinarily thin line here - a step wrong one way and he would be accused of using the suffering of others for his own ends, a step wrong the other way and he would be pilloried for downplaying the courage of the passengers on United 93. That he comes through without doing either is a minor miracle by itself - one that is achieved through a combination of overwhelming empathy (Greengrass even manages to find pity in his heart for the terrorists) and absolute honesty. This is not a dramatic film - it is a viscerally undramatic film - and that's why it works.

Perhaps the finest bits of the movie come in the first half, and are not necessarily centred in the flight itself. For me, the most compelling and moving parts of the film were the ones that showed the people on the ground - the FAA, the ATC, the military - all struggling to come to grips with what was happening. If United 93 succeeds it is because it takes one so convincingly back to the bewilderment of those initial moments, showing you the ways in which ordinary men and women struggled to come to terms with this new reality that had dropped in on them literally out of their blue. There is a moment in the film where the people on the ground, who are still trying to figure out what exactly is going on, watch the second plane ram into the World Trade Centre, live on CNN. Greengrass captures perfectly the shock of that event, the feeling of being struck by an almost physical blow, the head-shaking instant as you try to convince yourself to believe, against every instinct of self-preservation, that this could really be happening, that the world could really have shattered this completely. It is the inevitability of that confusion, of that struggle to comprehend, that is this movie's main emotional takeaway.

Once the action switches almost entirely to the plane (Greengrass having established that nothing the people on the ground can do is going to save the people on United 93) the movie, in my view, loses its authentic feel. The problem is twofold. First, no doubt because it would be an issue for the families of the passengers,Greengrass is reluctant to show any dissent with the idea of storming the cabin and bringing down the terrorists. This seems incredibly hard to believe. Sure, the passengers have found out (through telephone calls home) that the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon have been hit, but these are garbled accounts heard from friends and family - can we really believe that in thepre -9/11 world, when such an attack was unthinkable and conventional wisdom was always to offer no resistance to hijackers, that the passengers would, almost without exception have agreed to the almost certainly suicidal storming of the cockpit in the face of four armed men, one of whom as in possession of what may or not have been a bomb. Surely there would have been more resistance to the idea, surely someone would have objected more strongly, argued that they should sit tight and not provoke the terrorists.Greengrass has the passengers make a few token comments to this effect, but in general, the speed at which this group of total strangers get their heads around the idea that they are doomed and arrive at a consensus about what should be done about it is uncanny, and a little too quick to seem true.

The second false note that Greengrass introduces is the idea that the passengers were actually trying to take back the controls of the plane and have a pilot among them fly them to safety. Again, this seems unlikely - you would have to be really credulous to believe that you could wrest the controls of a plane from four armed terrorists bent on self-destruction without them finding some way of taking you out with them. And to assume that the passengers of United 93 had any real hope of this seems to me to be detracting needlessly from their actions. The least we can do is do them the honour of believing that they knew they had no hope of survival, that they were going to die, and the only thing they could really achieve by attacking the cockpit was to ensure that they didn't end up taking many, many other people with them.

There are many other things I could quibble with in the movie. Greengrass, it seems to me, goes out of his way to build parallels between the terrorists and the passengers, showing the more human side of the hijackers, but it should be obvious to everyone that this is a false analogy. The hijackers are there because they chose to be, the passengers are not.Greengrass also spends considerable time detailing the inadequate response by the higher powers (the President, for instance, is conspicuously missing throughout the movie) and this again seems besides the point - not to mention a little unfair. There are a lot of reasons to criticise Bush & co., but their failure to respond in a timely and adequate manner to a crisis quite unprecedented in scale and unimaginable in horror is surely the least of them.

As I said, I could quibble with much in this film, but it wouldn't change the fact that I can't begin to imagine a movie that could do a better job of telling the story that it tells. United 93 is one of the most stunninglyimpactful and unbelievably authentic films I have ever watched - a movie that for its sympathy, for its humanity and for its honesty seems almost unsurpassable , and that should be roundly celebrated if only for its rigorous commitment to not turning the very real horrors of 9/11 into melodrama. Whether this movie should have been made at all is a question of personal preference. That it could have been made better if it was going to be made at all is hard to argue.

(cross-posted from Momus)

Hostage to Momus

2006-05-02T00:05:00.000-04:00

(cross-posted from 2x3x7)

Those of you who are the anal detail-oriented type may have noticed that as of today this site has a new link on the sidebar - a link to a site called Momus.

Here's the thing. I'm starting to get a little tired of Blogger. I seem to have difficulties with it at least twice a week and despite the fact that I've now got categories working fairly well - they're still a pain. So I've decided to try out Wordpress instead.

As a first step towards that, I've created a new blog (titled Momus, see Wikipedia for why) and shifted all my posts from here to Momus. My plan is to maintain both blogs for this month, and then, assuming that Momus works out, move permanently to Wordpress (I'm also considering shifting 2x3x7 to Wordpress [1], but I'm going to see how this Momus thing works and then decide).

This also means, btw, that you can check out an alternate template on the Wordpress site and tell me if you like that better.

[1] Actually, 2x3x7 has already been shifted to Wordpress, I'm just not updating it for now.

That death had undone so many

2006-05-01T17:13:00.000-04:00

Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"

- T. S. Eliot The Waste Land

It does not pay to disturb the dead. Because the dead are not simply a collection of loose bones that can be thrust into a body bag. The dead are memory. They are tiny worlds of feeling that have been lulled very gently to sleep and must not be woken again. When you open a grave, when you violate a tomb, you disturb the spirit - not the spirit of ectoplasmic beings that keep watch over us, but the spirit that lurks in the hearts of men. And therein lies a great risk.

This is the central idea of Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army. The plot of the novel is simple - 20 years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover the bodies of the Italian soldiers who lie buried there. On the surface, this is a petty, administrative task, but it is one charged with great emotional significance, and the difficulties attendant upon it, both physical and psychological prove to be different from and more taxing than the General had first expected.

To begin with, simply retrieving the bodies themselves is no easy matter. The mountain terrain is inhospitable, the bodies have been buried for years and are often hard to locate, there is the risk of infection, and the people of the country are naturally hostile and suspicious. The Italians are the enemy, after all, twenty years of peace have not dulled the local population's memory of that, and the General himself is acutely aware of being in a foreign land, among a different people. Fortunately, the General and his party come well-equipped with lists and maps, so that their task goes on apace, though it still proves less tractable than they had anticipated.

The larger difficulty is emotional. From the day he is first given the task of bringing these bodies back, the General finds himself drawn into the world of the dead. Relatives and friends of those who lie buried in Albania show up at the General's doorstep, punctual as ghosts. He is made witness to their loss, forced to share in their memories of that bygone time. As his work in Albania progresses, moreover, the General uncovers not only the corpses of the dead, but also their stories. The story of the whores brought into a small Albanian town to service the soldiers (as told by a local), the story of a young deserter set down in his diary, the story of a group of soldiers guarding a bridge. Spending night after night under canvas with only a gloomy priest for company, the General ends up dwelling almost exclusively on the dead, until he finds himself using their very words in the letters he writes home to his wife. As he relates more and more to the men whose bodies he is recovering, the illusion slowly grows in him that he is in fact the General of an army of dead men, that these corpses in their body bags are his ghost troops. The General's mission becomes, for him, a way of reliving history. He makes grandoise plans for how he would have won the battles that other generals lost, he finds himself sharing the shame of his army's defeat all those decades ago, feels the loss of his country's youth, of all those young men so needlessly wasted, is exposed again to the enmity of the people, to their bitterness, their accusations. All the weight of the terrible history of War lights upon his back.

There is a scene in the novel where the General is holding the remains of a dead soldier in a bag and thinks: "There is nothing in the world as light as you are now. Six or seven pounds at the most. And yet you are breaking my back!". It is this other, more spiritual weight that weighs heavy upon the General.

Ultimately, The General of the Dead Army is a novel about guilt. The guilt of having sent so many young men to war and not having been able to protect them. The guilt of coming by now, so many years later, to disturb their silence, to take them from the land where they lie sleeping and cart them back to their homelands whether they like it or not. The guilt of all the atrocities committed against the civilian population in the name of the war effort, and of knowing that to those who suffered all those in uniform are the same. The guilt of not having been part of the war effort yourself, not having run the same risks that you exposed others to.

All this guilt, all this emotion, accumulating over two years of work, becomes too much for the General. He ends up a broken man, oppressed by memories and shadows, feeling himself constantly accused, constantly found wanting. He grows supersititous, incoherent; and Kadare, with exquisite skill, follows him into his increasingly disjointed and hallucinatory world, so that the clean narrative of the early part of the novel slowly gives way to a more frantic, more fractured style, where impressions dominate ideas and shadows become living ghosts. The final chapters of the novel are a spectacular read, because they recreate so perfectly the dissonant, panicked state of mind that the General finds himself in.

But if The General of the Dead Army is a fascinating psychological exploration, it is also a deeply metaphoric novel, a lovely meditation on the nature of history and of war. As the General relives the experiences of soldiers and civilians from twenty years ago, Kadare explores the ways in which we come to terms with the past, the wounds it leaves us with. The General's guilt, his shame, his fear, his anger - these are all emotions we all have towards our own past, except where we are content to leave them buried, the General is forcing himself to dig them up.

The General of the Dead Army is also, of course, a book about the Albanian people, albeit one told from an outsider's perspective. Again and again, Kadare emphasizes the resilience of the Albanian people, the way that the harshness of both their geography and their history has forged a national character of hardihood, of simple yet stubborn pride.

Comparisons with Gogol, given the book's plot, are of course, inescapable. But the writer I was often reminded of was Hemingway. That may have a lot to do with the fact that the Albania that Kadare describes feels like a close country cousin of Hemingway's Spain, but there are other similarities in style and tone - a matter of fact brutality, the lack of overt sentiment, a combination of an appreciation of the great pity of war with a taste for the violent and the macabre. Towards the latter half of the book Kadare's style changes, becomes more experimental than anything Hemingway ever wrote, more like Kundera without the philosophical digressions, but early on in the book there were entire sections where I found myself remembering For Whom the Bell Tolls.

At any rate, The General of the Dead Army is a fine book - one that leaves you with a deep sense of disquiet and a sadness in your heart that is like music. After I was done with the book I sat and listened to the second movement of Beethoven's Eroica. It seemed the right thing to do.

Unamazing Grace

2006-04-21T05:52:00.000-04:00

Claudia Emerson's Late Wife

One of the chief benefits of keeping track of all the important literary prizes, is that it introduces you to many new writers / poets. I'd never heard of Claudia Emerson till she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry five days ago, and on the whole am grateful to the Pulitzer for introducing me to her work.

Emerson's Late Wife is a collection in three parts - the first part describes the sadness and eventual break-up of a marriage, the second (somewhat less focussed) handles getting over that break-up, and the third is an exploration of being in a second marriage and dealing with the memory of her new husband's late wife (hence the title). It's a short collection - each section has maybe a dozen poems, the entire book is only a little over 50 pages long.

But Emerson manages to pack a lot into those pages. Late Wife is a study in quiet elegance; Emerson's poems here have a dignified, almost formal beauty that modulates and enhances the grief she is writing about, making it almost elegaic. Her descriptions are exact and lucid, and she has the true poet's knack for bringing her poems to a close with that one glowing line that makes the entire poem come alive. Consider:

"The waxwing
accepted us as given, and with us
our seized, repressed sky, glassed light,

narrow stairway. So when we let it go,
when it refused that atavistic
sky, remained instead for a full

month in the hickory tree that loomed
over the house, I asked you why
we'd fed it. What had we saved

for a world so alien, the waxwing
must have believed it had died in those rooms
where for a while we went on living?"

- from 'Waxwing'

Much of the book reads like this - verse after careful verse revealing, gradually, the shape of the poet's conceit, the single metaphor often stretching across the whole poem.

And that, I think, was the problem I had with the book. Adept as she is, Emerson is also, I feel, unsurprising. Emerson does vary form and metre a little, but the overall tone of her poetry never changes, so that the poems blur together and you have the impression of reading one long-ish poem rather than several. And even within that poem, even within the 20 pages of each section, there's a sense of predictability. The ideas / metaphors themselves are not strikingly brilliant, and there are few startling images. If these poems are compelling at all, it is because they have a classical aestheticism to them, not because they are particularly moving. There are some marvellous poems here, but on the whole it seems to me that Emerson is more a highly accomplished poet than a breathtaking one.

Among the sections, I liked the third one (late wife) the best, with its mournful but consoling sonnets exploring the memory of a husband's former wife (dead of cancer). There are some lovely poems here, and the overall effect is sharpened, I think, by the fact that the reasons for the sadness are so much more specific. In a poem about finding a glove of the ex-wife, Emerson writes:

"It still remembered
her hand, the creases where her fingers

had bent to hold the wheel, the turn
of her palm, smaller than mine. There was
nothing else to do but return it -
let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water
to rest on the bottom where I have not
forgotten it remains - persistent in its loss."

- from 'Driving Glove'.

At one level, this section is a fascinating study in the transference of grief, an exploration of the idea that loving someone means mourning for their losses. As the new wife, the 'I' of these poems can have no real memory of the person whose loss grieves her - this is a second-hand mourning and Emerson's calm, almost bloodless style seems particularly appropriate.

The same can't be said for the first section. On the whole the poems here are as good, but the section overall strikes me as unconvincing, simply because it seems too detached in its sadness. Perhaps it's just that in the world after Plath and Sexton, we've come to expect poetry to be rawer and more personal. With many of the poems in the first section of Late Wife (divorce epistles), one feels that they could just as easily have been written in third person.

This is not really an argument against the poems themselves, of course - it is an argument against the larger structure of the book. It seems to me that by framing the book so explicitly into three stages, Emerson does her own poetry a disservice. The poems work well enough by themselves, but when you start thinking of them as being poems written by someone in a particular frame of mind / at a particular stage in her life, they begin to disappoint. Take the third section. Is all Emerson can find to say about her new marriage that she mourns the loss of her husband's former wife?

Overall, then, it seems to me that Late Wife is a niche book. Emerson takes two basic poem ideas - a bitter-sweet look back at a failed marriage, and an elegy for a loved one's former wife (who is also, of course, a stand-in for the poet's own former self, the fact that this self died of cancer only makes that idea more complicated and interesting) - and spins them out into a series of variations. There is little range here, but a great deal of formal depth.

An Unnatural Act

2006-04-15T23:09:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box

"Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet's energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he's up to and what he's saying is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances"

- Elizabeth Bishop [1]

As those of you who read my other blog know, I've had fairly mixed feelings about Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, a collection of unpublished (and often unfinished) work by Elizabeth Bishop that was released this month. It seemed to me that Bishop should have the right to decide what among her writing she wanted to publish and what she wanted to suppress, and to try and second guess her now, more than a quarter century after her death, is not simply to invade her privacy, it is also to insult her astuteness as a judge of good poetry. This is especially true for Bishop (in a way that it would not be true, should the question ever arise, for someone like Bukowski) because the whole point of Bishop's oeuvre is that she writes slow but very, very fine. Intense, almost obsessive quality is a hallmark of Bishop's poems as it is of few other voices in our century. So that to publish, in her name, a collection of poems that she never got to polish to that kind of perfection would seem to be entirely contrary to her artistic principles.

Having managed to get my hands on the book [2], and read it through, I can't help feeling that I was right. There are some real gems in this collection, but they are few and far between. Most of the poems here are too crude, too raw to be properly considered Bishop's poems. Oh, there are sparks of brilliance a plenty, glimpses of the greatness that these poems could have achieved if Bishop had only found the time and patience to work on them ("crab-apples/ ripen to rubies / cranberries / to drops of blood"), but there are also lines that make you wince (' "Tweet". Loud and coarse / the equivalent of "Dry Up!"') and a lot of stuff that seems pleasant enough, but has that rough-edged artificiality of first drafts. Many of these poems would be really good poems if they were submitted to a college magazine, but as pieces by so careful and preeminent a poet as Bishop they are a disappointment.

Should you even bother reading this book then? Once you come to terms with the fact that you're not going to be getting truly Elizabeth Bishop quality, there are a number of reasons why the collection may still be worth it. First, while consistently great poems are rare here, there are a number of poems that have stanzas of incredible power, which the rest of the poem is unable to live up to. This, for instance:

"The walls went on for years & years.
The walls went on to meet more walls
& travelled through night & day.
Sometimes they went fast, sometimes slow;
sometimes the progress was oblique,
always they slid away."

(and later, in the same poem)

"the floorboards had a nice perspective.
They rose a little here, sagged there
but went off alas under the wall.
Did they flow smooth on or meet
in the next room in a crash of splinters."

- 'The walls went on for years and years...'

or this, from the poem that gives the collection it's title:

"As easily as the music falls,
the nickels fall into the slots,
the drinks like lonely water-falls
in night descend the seperate throats"

or this, from a poem called 'The moon burgled the house - ', a delicate vision of the world going out with a whimper instead of a bang:

"the whole world turned like a
fading violet, turned in its death
gently, curled up but didn't stink at
all but gave off a long sigh - sweet sigh -"

The other exciting thing about the collection, is the glimpse it gives you into another side of Bishop, into poems that sound accomplished, but strangely unlike her. I'd posted an example of one such poem on 2x3x7 earlier, but here are some others:

"Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes."

and this:

"Don't you call me that word, honey,
Don't you call me that word.
You know it ain't very kind & it's also undeserved.

I could take that to court, honey,
I could certainly take that to court,
But maybe I misunderstood you, and besides life is much too short."

and this:

"I see a postman everywhere
Vanishing in thin blue air,
A mammoth letter in his hand,
Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman's uniform is blue.
The letter is of course from you
And I'd be able to read, I hope,
My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter
Which constantly grows bigger & bigger
And over and over with a stare,
He vanishes in blue, blue air."

Finally, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box is worth reading for the insight it gives into the process by which Bishop wrote. Copious notes aside, the book includes images of a number of actual drafts, complete with scribbles in the margins, corrections, crossed out stanzas. It's a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the black-box of poetry. And while Alice Quinn tries to make as much sense of Bishop's scribbles as she can, she chooses (wisely enough) not to edit things that Bishop has not explicitly edited herself [3], so that every now and then, you can see Bishop trying out alternate phrasings. Consider this example:

"We all need the horizon, so it hardens
in its definition: the horizon,
(if it hadn't, as they say, we would imagine it;
rather, my dear, you, being practical, would have.)

Other things that you & I imagined
were not often so obliging.
Still the horizon is unbroken.

We needed the horizon, so it hardened
to horizon, into faultless definition.
(If it hadn't

imagination.)

Other spoken
were not often so obliging.
Still, the horizon is unbroken."

- 'Crossing the Equator'

It seems obvious to me that this fragment is really two alternate startings to the same poem (the verse itself, ironically enough, hardening into 'faultless definition') , even though Quinn includes it as the continuation of a single poem. It's watching this process of the poem being born that makes much of this book so fascinating. Though it's not clear to me that someone as fastidious as Bishop would have appreciated us all crowding around to watch.

Notes

[1] The source of this quotation is a delightful fragment of an essay on poetry which is one of the most pleasurable finds of the book. Bishop discusses (in a sort of verbal shorthand) her views on what makes a good poem, quoting (from memory) copious amounts of Herbert, Hopkins and Auden. Great stuff.

[2] A freak chance that. I was in the library and decided to check out the new arrivals section (a weekly habit) and found it just lying there. So maybe there's something to this Early Birds and Worms thing.

[3]As a matter of fact, Quinn seems to include words / phrases that Bishop has crossed out in her drafts, but not really replaced - Quinn puts these in square brackets.

A few petty squabbles

2006-04-14T01:32:00.000-04:00

Rachel Cusk's In the Fold

Let me put it this way. If you're the kind of person who has a happy family life - a healthy relationship with normal parents, a happy marriage, promising children - and you feel that you're missing out on all this domestic strife you keep hearing about, read Rachel Cusk's In the Fold. This is a book that delivers perfectly that sense of tiresome pointlessness, of misery celebrated for its own sake, that comes with true domestic unhappiness. There's the same sense of cliche, the same atmosphere of petty concerns and directionless repetition.

Nominally, In the Fold is a novel about the fading of youthful dreams, of a young man's belief in the adult world. The narrator, Michael, is invited to his flatmate's family farm / house for a party while at college. Here, he is introduced to the Hanbury's (his flatmate's family) who impress him with their sophistication and give him an 'intimation', a vision of what adulthood will look like. This is the youthful dream part. And it all happens in Chapter 1.

All the rest of the book is dedicated to the slow curdling of this vision, to the souring of everything Michael once dreamed of. Michael is older now, in a loveless marriage with a neurotic wife who feels stifled by the ordinariness of her existence [1] and blames Michael for it, and a son who doesn't speak. As a way of getting away from the trauma of his own life Michael goes to spend a week with his old college mate Adam, whom he hasn't seen in ages, drawn (it doesn't take much to figure out) by the unspoken lure of that vision from his youth.

Predictably enough, the vision proves to be a mirage. Things at Egypt (the Hansbury family home) are not as they seem, all the prosperity and happiness of the Hansbury's is an illusion, and as the novel progresses Michael finds himself in the middle of an anxious, squabbling family drawn together by greed and recrimination, returning from this delightful set-up to his beloved wife thoroughly disillusioned, only to continue the arguments with her. (Oh, there's also some stuff about lambing ewes in between, though I never quite figured out where Cusk was going with that).

You probably think I'm being needlessly nasty. I assure you I'm not. Or not very much. The truth is that reading In the Fold is like watching someone pick at their own scabs - because that's exactly what most of the characters in this mercifully short novel are doing most of the time. Cusk, I suspect (though it may be my own bias) would like to be Iris Murdoch. The house in the novel, Egypt, bears a strange country resemblance to the house in The Good Apprentice and the general direction of her plotting - the complicated pairings, the action consisting of conversations about life and philosophy between unhappy people - suggests more than a passing familiarity with Murdoch's work. Unfortunately, Cusk does not seem to have either the facility of Murdoch's inventiveness nor the depth and intelligence of her conversations. Many of the conversations in the book seem contrived and obvious. For instance:

"Something happened to me almost as soon as I got there", I said. "I had an ...intimation"

Of what?" said Charlie.

"That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful."

A silence followed this disclosure. The gaze of the two women grew so discomfiting that I added, "It was a quality they had. The Hanburys."

"And what was this magic quality?" said Charlie.

"They made it seem as though all you had to do was something other than what you thought you should do."

See what I mean? As conversations go, this is about as eloquent and profound as Cusk gets.

The problem, I think, is that the whole novel seems too artificial, too desperately contrived. Cusk seems to believe that a dozen unhappy relationships are better than one, so that in the bleak world of her novel, all marriages are bitter and almost certain to fail, all children are ungrateful and a disappointment to their parents (if not subject to serious disorders), even all friendships are slowly drifting apart. Ok, so most people live lives of quiet desperation, but do all of them have to? Would it have killed Cusk to include at least one happy person in the whole set-up? Or at least one relationship that wasn't acrimonious?

Nor does Cusk use a more sparing hand when doling out symbolism. Metaphor is spread thick all over this novel. Michael's collapsing home life is conveniently and faithfully mirrored by the collapse of a part of his house. The contrast between Egypt and the small suburban house in which Adam now lives (without a view of the sea even) becomes a metaphor for the stifling nature of the world, the way it closes in on us. Even Paul the great patriarch is kind enough to have an operation for prostate cancer as a symbolic gesture of his failing sexual potence and gender dominance. Cusk's characters aren't exactly startlingly original (unless you've managed to avoid stories about unhappy spouses your entire life - in which case, why start now?), so you would think that we could figure out what motivates them, but Cusk is taking no such chances. One character has issues because of her deeprooted Catholicism, we are told. Another character might as well have the words Electra Complex written above her in neon letters.

The trouble with all this is that it's really hard to feel an emotional connection to any of Cusk's characters - they seem less like real people and more like puppets Cusk made up so she can be clever about them. But the artifice is so transparent, the cleverness so trite, and the overall effect so profoundly unmoving, that when the novel ends you just shrug your shoulders and move on.

To be fair, Cusk does have some gift for detail. Some of her descriptions are exceedingly well-written, and the dialogue between the characters (except where she's trying to drive home her 'message', as above) seems authentic enough, if only because, like most people, most of the time they don't say anything significant or interesting.

That said, In the Fold is a disappointing novel, one that, like many of its characters, seems to exult in its own unhappiness, insisting on its own unhappiness and that of its readers. Avoidable.

[1] I don't blame her - if I were a character in this novel I would feel stifled and frustrated too.

Inheriting the World

2006-04-13T01:07:00.000-04:00

James Meek's The People's Act of Love

There is a sense in which the history of the last century is the history of, well, History. Never before has History been so self-conscious, so active a presence on its own stage. As Camus argues in The Rebel, when God died it was History who stood up to take his place, it was the historical imperative that we made our master, it was in History's name that thousands were sacrificed. The idea that present suffering could be justified in the name of the future persisted - only the location of that future shifted from some mythic Otherworld to an equally mythic Future. This is not an idea that has left us: when supporters of the war in Iraq speak of the 'verdict of history' it is this deified version of history that they are speaking of.

This is the idea that James Meek's superb novel The People's Act of Love sets out to explore. At the heart of the novel is the contradiction between acts done for other people and acts done for the People, the interests of Man vs. the interests of men. Meek's point seems to be that at the heart of every revolution is this fundamentally self-destructive urge, this almost cannibalistic urge to be cleansed through one's own destruction. "How couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes?", Nietzsche writes. But can we justify arson on those grounds? Is crime justified if it is committed with good intentions - for love, perhaps, or out of nobility, or revolutionary zeal? How does ideology come to overwhelm common sense, common decency? What does it mean that rules and beliefs can almost take our humanity away from us? Is it just that we are malleable? Or is there, hidden deep within us, this urge to destroy what we most cherish, consume what we would most want to keep?

Meek's answer in the book is an optimistic one. "Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself" is the quotation the book opens with. And that, in a nutshell, is Meeks' point - that you can't take the human out of people, that our attempts at renouncing the self and becoming purely a part of the People will always fail, because we are not strong enough for so total a surrender. And that this is a good thing, because without it life would become unlivable and we would all end up destroying each other. Old affections will always have a hold on us, old loyalties will always reassert themselves, old habits of thought and action will never quite die. The killer will never completely abandon compassion, the coward will find his courage again. And that is what will save us, that is why the ending will be a happy ending, whatever price may be paid on the way.

If all this makes the book sound distressingly serious - I assure you it's not. People's Act of Love is a gut-spilling, heart-pounding romp of a novel, that reads like a cross between Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky and Alistair MacLean. The book I was most reminded of, reading it, was Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian [1]. Like McCarthy, Meek has a taste for the macabre: blood is an almost constant presence in the book and descriptions of wounds are delivered with relish ("Strnad took so many bullets in the neck that his head popped back like the stopper on a beer bottle"; "another horseman leaned over and with the sharp tip of the sabre drew a line from the man's forehead to his waist, the line thickened in a second and he fell down with the two sides of the line not together"; "The human talon closed around the food and snatched, severing an artery in the arm as it pulled back through the jagged hole in the window"). And in its clever use of suspense, its unflagging and hot-blooded action, in the very roughness of the Siberian life that it portrays The People's Act of Love is a superb adventure story. Some of Meek's characters seem stereotypical, but the interaction between them is brought about with great imagination and sensitivity, and there's a constant sense of revolution being in the air, of dramatic violent changes taking place all around.

What makes The People's Act of Love an exceptional novel is the way Meek connects and merges these two very different books - the Siberian crime / action thriller and the novel of ideas. It's not just that the two are juxtaposed. It's that the two are necessary to each other, that in many ways they mirror each other, reinforce each other. The desperation of the people of the town of Yazyk, who struggle to survive even as their world is torn asunder by the competing claims of religion and state and land and ideology and History and plain old human decency, becomes a microcosm for the forces tearing Russia apart at the inception of the Soviet Union. Here again, in the end, it is personalities that will matter, it is the interpersonal dynamics between the characters that will save the day, not the labels they give to themselves.

Bottomline: Reading The People's Act of Love is a bit like riding a wild stallion. All the time you're actually on the ride, you're just holding on breathlessly, letting the story carry your forward at breakneck speed (and enjoying every minute of it). It's only when you've got off the horse and stop to think do you realise how amazing the view has been all through, how incredible the trail that has led you, twisting and turning, to this point. Either way, it's an experience you're not likely to forget in a hurry.

Second thoughts: "Some of Meek's characters seem stereotypical", I said. I take that back. It's not so much that they're stereotypes as that they're archetypes - ideas and ideologies masquerading as human beings. It's a tribute to Meek's talent that he makes these characters engaging at all, but eventually their role as ciphers shows through.

[1] And that, coming from me, is high praise.

Insecurity and Punishment

2006-04-09T10:54:00.000-04:00

Graham Swift's Shuttlecock

"Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"

- Psalms 139: 5-7

The first thing you should know is this: I have nothing but the sincerest admiration for Graham Swift. Of all the novelists in that first Granta list, he remains one of my favourites (I would have said favourite, but this is a list that included Salman Rushdie. And Martin Amis). Other people can have their Barnes, their Barkers, their Ishiguros. I pick Swift [1].

I first read Swift in 1996, when Last Orders won the Booker. Impressive as Last Orders was, my personal favourite remains Ever After, a brooding adagio of a novel, a slow, sublime exploration of the thoughts of a man living with that most hopeless of all defeats - a failed suicide attempt. But I also loved The Sweet-Shop Owner, and enjoyed Waterland and Out of this World. And while I think The Light of Day was a slighter book than some of the others, there are sections of it that are sheer poetry, entire chapters so achingly beautiful that you have to shut your eyes half way through so as not to be overwhelmed by the writing.

What I love about Swift is the elegance of his writing - the calm, almost elegaic tone that echoes through much of his work. His prose has a rich, cello like quality - at its best it would make Forster nod in approval. Even when violent things happen in his novels (and they happen often enough) they happen quietly, so that you experience them not as acts blazing and outlined, but as echoes reverberating in the caverns of the soul, disturbances stirring the deepest, most secret waters of the heart. Swift's is an underwater world, the world of emotions where everything slows down and becomes more graceful, and where the living world exists only as a reflection dimly seen on some distant surface. Every now and then his novels will break through that surface, gasp down a lungful of action, just to keep going. But action is not their natural habitat, feeling is.

Shuttlecock, Swift's second novel, is an unusual read therefore. It's a more self-conscious novel than anything else that Swift has written - more contrived, but also starker, more abrupt. Swift is more forceful here, more intent on telling a story rather than just letting his characters evolve, harsher with them than he is elsewhere. It is, perhaps, a necessary harshness, because by inflicting the rigours of the plot upon them, Swift manages both to convey the essential suffocation of their situation, and to set the stage for the denouement that is to follow - their escape back into simplicity. On the second page of the novel, Swift's narrator remembers his pet hamster:

"You see, I used to torment my hamster. I was cruel to Sammy. It wasn't a case of wanting to play with him, or train him, or study how he behaved. I tortured him. Not at the very beginning. I loved the tiny thing that the man at the pet shop took from a warm heap of its fellows and installed in an aluminium cage for us. I wondered anxiously over the pale huddle of fur which for several days did nothing but whimper, cower and coyly excrete in its new home. But at some time after Sammy's arrival I made the discovery that this creature whom I loved and pitied was also at my mercy.

When did the torturing begin? I used to turn my hamster on its back and pin it down with a finger across the belly while it made frantic wriggles to be free. I simulated a bird of prey, holding my hand two feet above it like a claw while it crouched, mesmerized, in a corner. I cupped it inside my closed hands with scarcely space for air to enter, and then, slowly, made a gap between my thumb and finger - not enough for it to extricate itself, but enough for it to squeeze its head through in straining, strangulated efforts. Once, I opened our oven door...

And what was all this for? Will you believe me if I say it was all, still, out of love and pity? For love and pity hadn't disappeared. I needed only a new means of eliciting them. Love ought to be simple, straightforward, but it isn't. All these cruelties were no more than a way of making remorse possible, of making my heart melt, of earning the doubtful luxury of putting my hamster away at the end of the day, a nervous jelly in its cage, and saying, my voice tight with contrition: "I didn't mean it, Sammy. I didn't mean it. I love you, Sammy. Really..."

This then, is the central theme of the book. That it's not power that corrupts us - we seek power because we're already corrupted. Threatened and insecure, we crave control, if not over our own lives than at least over those of others. Love and power are merely the means by which we establish our ascendancy over those around us, this heirarchy of cages that we use to disprove the allegations of inadequacy that we feel are being made against us. This is not unfamiliar territory for Swift - guilt and inadequacy are constant presences in his work. What is new is the calculating, almost sadistic nature of the response, the way the tortured soul makes amends for his own failures by making other people suffer rather than himself.

The narrator of the novel is a man more sinning than sinned against. An average, no account government employee, working in an obscure department that maintains historical police records, living in his ordinary suburban home with his ordinary wife and ordinary kids, the narrator is tortured by the phantom of his father - a World War II hero, a daring secret agent whose exploits against Nazi Germany have been published in a best-selling memoir (gripping 'extracts' from which are contained in the novel), a book that the narrator reads over and over , as if revelling in his own mediocrity. Haunted by the image of this father at home and dominated by an overbearing boss at work, the narrator becomes a despot to his own family, punishing them as a means of proving his own strength.

As the story progresses, the novel evolves into something like a pyschological thriller, with the narrator being drawn into a Le Carre like web of mystery and intrigue, ending in a showdown that will change the narrator's entire view of his life [2]. But this detective work is merely a byplay [3], the real agenda of the novel is the exploration of the links between insecurity and power - how we punish others in order to overcome our own guilt, our own mediocrity, but this only serves to make us feel more guilty, more inadequate. Swift does an incredible job of laying out this pathology.

Perhaps too good a job. The trouble with the novel is that it seems, overall, too clinical, to contrived. Almost like a bare bones sketch of a novel, rather than a novel itself. It's as though Swift were so afraid that his audience wouldn't understand him that he feels the need to spell everything out, lay on the metaphors with a shovel, just so that there's no possibility that you might miss something. So just in case we didn't get that the narrator's father was a silent, judging presence in his life, Swift has the narrator physically visit his father in a nursing home (where he's been put after some sort of mental episode robbed him, conveniently, of the power of speech) twice a week and actually say things to him like "Why don't you tell me? Why don't you speak?" and later, "I hate you"!

The book is full of such ridiculously literal contrivances. Not that any of them are poorly imagined, or badly described - they are woven into the novel with consummate skill - but after a point such insistent obviousness begins to feel ham-handed. A little more subtlety would have gone a long way. And the worst part about all this is that the narrator actually understands it all, can actually verbalise his own predicament. He's not unconsciously channeling his awe of his father into his sadism towards his own children - he's doing it consciously! He can actually come up with a conscious statement saying, effectively, that if he didn't have to live in his father's shadow he wouldn't have to be nasty to his children. This is what makes the book so chilling, but it also makes it more awkward.

In the end, Shuttlecock may not be Graham Swift's finest work, but it is still a splendid novel by a young writer struggling to trust both his own abilities and those of his audience. As an almost Dostoyevskian study of the ways in which our own insecurities and weaknesses can make us act in ways that are exacty opposite to our intent, it is a compelling read, as well as being a textbook example of tightly controlled plot development and the way that a myriad little incidents and details can all reflect and reinforce each other. If this stunning story is told too directly, is spelled out too much, we must forgive Swift for being young, and rest easy in the certain knowledge that true mastery lies ahead for him.

Notes:

[1] Which is not to say, of course, that I don't enjoy all these other authors. Just that in my opinion Swift is in every way their equal, if not their better.

[2] Though here again, Swift's sense of British decorum reasserts itself. The final confrontation to this 'thriller' occurs between two middle aged bureaucrats sitting on a summer lawn, sipping gin and tonic. No weapons of any kind are involved, the cut and thrust, the parry and counter are all accomplished with words, with logic.

[3] Part of the problem may be that Shuttlecock is a really short novel. This works well overall, I think, but it keeps the 'mystery' from becoming too intriguing - by the time we begin to be involved it's almost over.

Across Generations

2006-03-26T13:03:00.000-05:00

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

One of the perils of being an opinionated so-and-so is that every now and then reality comes along and delivers a swift kick in the pants. When Kiran Desai's first novel came out, I didn't bother reading it. Instead, I spent my time bemoaning the fall of this last bastion to the forces of parochialism. Wasn't it bad enough that the Nehru-Gandhi family seemed to have a stranglehold on Congress leadership. Wasn't it troubling enough that an entire generation of young 'actors' (and I use the term loosely) in Indian movies seemed to have the same last names as the actors who graced the screen 20 years ago? Hadn't we been tortured enough by the likes of Anoushka Shankar and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Indian Classical Music - Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash? Did we now have to be subjected to the grotesque spectacle of Indian writing being taken over by the daughter of one of our foremost novelists?

If Kiran Desai's second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, is anything to go by, I got this completely, absolutely WRONG. (Note to self: remember Martin Amis?). I have a very high regard for Anita Desai's writing - I consider her one of India's finest novelists, miles better than the upstart Arundhati Roy's of the world, for instance - so it means a lot when I say that Kiran Desai may well be more than the equal of her mother [1]. Not that their writing styles, beyond certain surface similarities, are alike. Kiran's writing is far less poetic than that of her mother's, and she has nowhere near her mother's Chekhovian elegance. But if her writing is busier and less intense, it is also, perhaps, more sharply observed, more thorougly grounded. Kiran delights with details, and The Inheritance of Loss has moments of sparkling humour, of naughty playfulness, that her mother often seems too serious for.

The story of The Inheritance of Loss is far from extraordinary. The novel juxtaposes two narratives - one focussing on the lives of the old world inhabitants of remote Kalimpong, their genteel existence threatened and partly destroyed by a local insurgency; the other tracing the trials of Biju, who having left his father (an impoverished cook) behind in Kalimpong is now trying to make a living as an illegal immigrant in New York City. Couple that with the story (told through flashback) of a young man joining the ICS back in the Raj Days, and an account of the doubts and frustrations of a young man drawn into the Gurkha 'revolution' and you have an intricate enough plot, one that gives Desai ample opportunity to explore a number of interesting themes around (to name but a few): identity, inequality, opportunity, justice, the generation gap, the schizophrenia of the immigrant, Anglophilia, culture, the difficulty of spanning differences between people across time and space simultaneously, etc. This is less a story than a buzzing hornet's nest of metaphor and allegory, a spider-web of counterpoint and opposition plotted out with almost mathematical accuracy. There are many fine points made in the book, and many delicious ironies, but is all seems very obvious, almost predictable. If there is one failing of the book, it is in Desai's determination to leave no issue untouched, no point of view unrepresented (even bringing in, in a hideously ham-handed last minute inclusion, the father of a passing traveller to represent the Indian who is Not Fascinated with the West). It almost feels, at times, as if Desai is concerned that someone might accuse of her misrepresenting / under-representing one side or the other, so that she goes on adding alternate points of view, like a tyro cook adding first too much salt and then too much water to what would otherwise have been perfectly good soup.

This is, in my view, unfortunate, but it's a testament to Desai's talent that it doesn't keep the book from being spectacular. What saves the book, what, in fact, elevates it beyond all this dialectic, is the fact that Desai has a rare eye for detail. It's the small, but finely observed minutiae that make The Inheritance of Loss a superb book: the pitch perfect tone, the acuteness of observation, the psychological accuracy. Page after page, paragraph after paragraph, Desai dazzles with the exactness of her descriptions, with the shock of recognition she is able to achieve so casually. Consider the following paragraph, a minor aside to the plot, where Biju, working as a delivery guy, ends up at the house of some desi women:

'They had a self-righteousness common to many Indian women of the English-speaking upper-educated, went out to mimosa brunches, ate their Dadi's roti with adept fingers, donned a sari or smacked on elastic shorts for aerobics, could say "Namaste, Kusum Auntie, aayiye, baethiye, khayiye!" as easily as "Shit!". They took to short hair quickly, were eager for Western-style romance, and happy for a traditional ceremony with lots of jewelry: green set (meaning emerald), red set (meaning ruby), white set (meaning diamond). They considered themselves uniquely positioned to lecture on a variety of topics: accounting professors on accounting, Vermonters on the fall foliage, Indians on America, Americans on India, Indians on India, Americans on America. They were poised; they were impressive; in the United States, where luckily it was still assumed that Indian women were downtrodden, they were lauded as extraordinary - which the unfortunate result of making them even more of what they already were.'

There's more insight, and more humour, in that one paragraph, than in all of (to take but an example) Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake.

In the end, then The Inheritance of Loss is not so much a story as a description of a state of being. A description that is compelling for being both expansive and accurate in ways that English writing about India's love-hate relationship with the West has rarely been. The last time I read something that felt this precise about India, this true, was reading Rushdie. Not that Desai writes anything like Rushdie, or has anywhere near his gift for allegory, or for magic - at heart, she is a far more prosaic and unsubtle writer - but the way the throwaway details seem to fit is the same. The Inheritance of Loss is a novel worth reading not because it says anything brilliantly new - there are parts of the plot that are almost unbearably cliched - but because it says the old things that we've alway known so incredibly well.

What Desai gets right, I think, is the fundamental nature of infatuation - whether it be the mutual attraction of a young schoolgirl and her twenty-year old tutor, or the fascination of nations and cultures for each other. How obsession can be both unhealthy and necessary. How we can despise it, despise ourselves and others for it, but not be able to do without. How it's about identity and greed, about duty and desire. How the damage it does is often collateral, the cracks of its engagement swallowing up those who have no part in it. How we choose to cloak our suffering and our actions in grandoise principles, in the disguise of ideology, when what really drives us is something more instinctive, more contingent. And how, in the end, what matters is not these larger landscapes of right and wrong, old and new, own and other, what counts is the human cost of all this to and fro, the possibility of losing those that we care for, or, alternatively, the slim chance that our loves might endure.

Towards the end of the book, Desai writes: "All night it would rain. It would continue, off and on, on and off, with a savagery matched only the ferocity with which the earth responded to the onslaught. Uncivilised voluptuous gree would be unleased, the town would slide down the hill. Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away"

This, then, is the point. We survive the frustration and defeat and humiliation not by rising above it, or by giving in to it, but by carrying on inspite of it. Sentimentality is a defense mechanism - we are sustained, not by ideas or status or position, but by the connections we form, inspite of ourselves, by being human. The only way to keep the sense of loss from crushing us is to find someone to share it with, someone to pass it on to.

Bottomline: Read this novel. And while you're doing that, I will go find Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. And read it as apologetically as I possibly can.

[1] Okay, so that's an exaggeration, but it's not fair to compare; and anyway, if we are comparing, we should be comparing Anita Desai's early novels - and I might well pick The Inheritance of Loss over, say, Cry, the Peacock.

The Language of Giants

2006-03-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

Jean Luc Godard's For Ever Mozart

There is a scene in Godard's For Ever Mozart (1996) where a wizened old director, in answer to the question "Why is the night dark?" remarks that when he looks through the stars at the night behind, he thinks of all that no longer exists. It is this combination of nostalgia and insight that is central to Godard's late films. In For Ever Mozart, in Elogie de l'amour, Godard's method is founded on the principle that a few scattered points of brilliant light are enough to illuminate the most universal of darknesses. Nietzsche writes:

"Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.
He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks and those spoken to should be big and tall.
The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: thus are things well matched"

Blood and proverbs is exactly what these late films of Godard are all about.

This kind of peak-hopping can be both rewarding and annoying. When we say that an artist is 'uncompromising' we usually mean that he spares no effort to bring out the truth of what he is trying to depict. But Godard is uncompromising in another way - he is completely unwilling to make any concessions whatsoever to his audience, allowing them little or nothing by way of coherent narrative, pushing them to be as well-read, as visually sensitive and as mentally agile as Godard is himself. If anything, his tone towards the audience in these movies is one of brusque disdain: like the fictional director in For Ever Mozart who rejects auditioning actors the second they open their mouths, Godard seems entirely dismissive of his audience, so that the difficulty of these movies seems almost like a deliberate screen to take out all but the most devoted and intelligent of viewers.

One result of this is that these last films may be largely inaccessible and unintelligible to the average viewer, which is a shame because they are films with so much to say. The other result is that this sort of sustained elision allows Godard to create a cinematic idiom that is truly unparalleled elsewhere, a sort of intense visual-cum-verbal poetry, the ultimate avatar of the film as art. If Bergman makes one think of Kafka, Kubrick of Burgess and Pynchon, Allen of Roth, then Godard's late films are essentially Rimbaud-esque - breathlessly beautiful meditations on the world that manage to be surreal, symbolic and natural at the same time (though, of course, significantly more political).

The plot (if one can call it that) of For Ever Mozart is simple enough. Three idealistic young people (including a girl who is supposedly the granddaughter of Camus, her cousin and his girlfriend) have decided to go to war-torn Sarajevo to put up a performance of a play. On the way (they are walking) they are apprehended by some local militia, and after a short period of being held hostage and abused (under the noses of a more or less disinterested Red Cross) are brutally killed. Meanwhile an elderly director (clearly a stand-in for Godard himself) is struggling to complete work on a film called the Fatal Bolero which attempts to explore the slow destruction of Europe by a series of historical patterns that evolve in what can only be compared to a bolero form. This is a difficult task because the director no longer gets the respect he deserves, neither from the producers whose only concerns are about money and who have no real interest in the artistic merits of the script, and an audience who, once they realise that there is no nudity involved, wander off to watch the Terminator films instead.

The symbolism of all this is embarassingly, heavy-handedly clear. Europe, Godard literally tells us, is in the midst of a crisis that parallels the crisis of the 1930s in magnitude, but is really far worse, for where earlier crises were marked by the clash of ideologies and therefore ended up being an exalting experience, the current crises is about nothing more noble than power, and therefore, far from exalting us, can only make us more indifferent to the world. Philosophy, in the form of Camus' clear-eyed and lucid grand-daughter has no place in this world, does not belong in it. Philosophy is now "nothing, or something you don't understand", ideology may be important to maintaining a consistent personal dignity, but it provides no protection in the confused gunfire of war. The age of Camus' rebels is over, the true rebellion, the philosophical rebellion has ended up dead in a common, unmarked grave.

Meanwhile art too is being destroyed by the twin assaults of commerce and popular culture. The instinct of the modern producer is essentially pornographic - entertainment is driven by efficiency, the phenomenal erudition of Europe has become irrelevant to cinema in particular and art in general. The great artists of a prior age can do little by swallow the gall of the treatment they are being given, and try to do the best they can.

There is a scene towards the end of the film where the director makes an actress repeat the single word 'yes' over and over again, because he isn't satisfied by the way it is being said. It's this search for affirmation that the film is really about, this task of trying to find the one positive we can put our faith in, the one positive we can trust.

The answer Godard gives us, is, of course, Mozart. Now that all the meanings have failed us, he seems to say, what is there left for us to fall back on but the purity of beauty devoid of meaning, the innocence and power of absolute music? After all the death and loss and despair, after all the humiliation and the frustration, if there is one thing that will console us, one thing that will bring us peace, it is music.That is why the movie finally ends not with words but with music. That is all that Godard can offer us, that is all, in the end, that he has to give.

I have three quibbles with the movie. First, that in choosing the characters the way he does, Godard does a considerable disservice to philosophy, making too weak a case for it. Making the 'philosophers' in the script out to be hyper-intelligent yet childishly naive and, conversely, making the soldiers all be uncultured brutes may be very romantic but it is also reductive. Ideology / philosophy is far from dead in our age, though particular strands of thought (such as those Godard holds dear) may well be out of fashion. By equating the philosophers to the impossible dreamers, Godard makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that philosophy is no longer the force it used to be, but that's a debatable conclusion.

Second, some of Godard's intense contempt for modern cinema seems jarring. While there is much to be said against commercial cinema, Godard's insistence on cinema being a dream permanently destroyed seems a little over the top, and because his frustration here is personal and self-interested, it throws much of the other socio-political commentary in the film open to suspicion.

Finally, whatever happened to subtlety? Or a sense of humour? In his best work, Godard is the consummate master of suggestion and implication - endlessly inventive, infinitely tacit, dizzyingly whimsical. Compared to these polished masterworks, these last films seem more like the snarls of an aging and somewhat frustrated old man. There is a baldness here, a sense of haste. These movies are so raw that they would barely qualify as art at all, if the sheer immensity of Godard's talent - his energy, his vision, his sheer panache - did not more than make up for the lack of finesse. Giants, after all, do not need to walk gracefully.

That said, For Ever Mozart is a spectacular and sublime film, one of the truest examples of film as poetry that I have ever seen. Scene after scene in this movie sparkles with a dream-like brilliance, its impact both immediate and unforgettable. This is a movie that pushes the envelope of what cinema can be, what the true artist can achieve in that medium. This is a movie that deserves to be learnt by heart.

Rhapsody a little too blue

2006-03-11T11:41:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen's Manhattan

To be a lifelong devotee of Woody Allen and not be enthralled by Manhattan, is like being a fan of Shakespeare who doesn't like Hamlet. It's sacrilege. It's simply not done.

And yet I've never managed to be more than ambivalent about this most touted of Allen films. It's not that I don't like it, of course - there are parts of it which I simply adore (that opening sequence, the alternate startings to the book followed by Gershwin, has to be one of the greatest starts to a movie ever), but it's never quite had, for me, the stature of Annie Hall or Hannah and her Sisters or Love and Death.

Watching Manhattan again this week, for the third, and fourth, time, I think I begin to see what the problem is. If I enjoyed the movie a lot more this time around, it's because I was paying a lot less attention to the plot and focussing a lot more on the individual scenes. And that helped to bring out all there is to love about the film - the laugh out loud dialogue, the endlessly inventive satire, the hilarious self-deprecation (what other film maker would shoot a scene where the hero starts running across town, driven by a desperate, overwhelming desire to see the love of his life - and runs out of breath in two blocks), the incredible amount of self-reference, the sublime Jazz and the most glorious, loving testament to a city ever put on film.

Why then do I not love this movie with every morsel of my being? Could it be because it seems too serious, too sentimental? That moral self-righteousness sounds wrong coming from a man who put the absurd back in absurdism, whose great cinematic insight is that the absolute meaningless of everything is actually the biggest joke of all? That it's harder to laugh at the comic situations that Allen's characters put themselves in when you can actually apprehend them as vulnerable, and see the pain that those situations must cause them? Or is it just that the optimism seems misplaced? Annie Hall, is not, after all an unsentimental film, but could it be that its lack of a happy ending lends it a credibility in my eyes that the sugary conclusion to Manhattan doesn't?

Perhaps the reason I don't like Manhattan is, ironically enough, that it's the only truly credible love story Allen has been able to tell, and without the half-mocking tone that relationships in Allen's movies tend to have, the jokes leave me feeling a lot queasier. Manhattan is a movie that more than deserves to be taken seriously - and that may be precisely the problem I have with it.

Brave old world

2006-02-22T22:02:00.000-05:00

Amitav Ghosh's Incendiary Circumstances

"Let your words speak not through their meanings
But through them against whom they are used."

"The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history"

- Czeslaw Milosz, 'Child of Europe'

"In this mosaic-world of silent
graveyards the difference lies between
death and dying."

- Agha Shahid Ali, 'Bones'

Speaking of the ideology of Gandhi and Saad Zaghloul in an essay on fundamentalism, Amitav Ghosh speaks of "a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations". Nothing embodies such inclusiveness, such an embracing of diversity, as well as Ghosh's new book Incendiary Circumstances. A collection of essays written over some twenty years, this is a book that covers a lot of ground - literally. Short pieces dealing with 9/11 and American neo-imperalism rub shoulders with deeper explorations of some of the most tortured lands in the world - Burma, Cambodia. Essays dealing with literature and writing are interspersed between articles that talk of cataclysmic events in Indian history such as the Pokhran tests and the 1984 riots. Bittersweet sketches of colourful characters from Ghosh's stay in Egypt go hand in hand with reports from the Tsunami devastated Nicobar islands, or from a gala dinner (for a good cause) in an upscale restaurant in New York.

And yet all the disparate parts of this book are joined together by a single perspective, a theme that is not so much an idea as an attitude, a belief in the importance of bearing witness, of acknowledging, as carefully and objectively as possible, the faultlines of violence that lie hidden under the surface of our everyday world. Incendiary Circumstances is a hallway of mirrors, an attempt to capture, through a triangulation of glimpses, the face of a beast that lives among us, but that we cannot bring ourselves to look at directly. Ghosh is a writer of quiet strength, and his careful, lucid prose conveys perfectly the solemnity of what he is describing. "Is it possible to write about situations of violence without allowing your work to become complicit with the subject?", Ghosh asks in the book's preface. The answer, in his case, is a resounding yes - there is no violence in the tone of the book (though there is plenty in what it has to report), and it is a more powerful book for it.

My favourite essay in the book is a piece called 'The Greatest Sorrow', where Ghosh, looking at immigrant writing in recent times, argues that such writing is increasingly becoming more about departures than arrivals. As a generation of writers have been driven not so much towards new lands as away from old ones, as the homelands they loved have been consumed by violence, holding on to the past has become, for these writers, more important than laying claim to the future. This is a fascinating point, and one that Ghosh develops, in my opinion, extremely well (the fact that he uses quotes from Ondaatje and Shahid to make the point stick means I'm entirely biased, of course) so that by the end of the essay one is left with an aching sense of loss, a kind of contagious nostalgia.

The other 'literary' pieces in Ghosh's book don't quite match up to this standard. The article on Shahid's death (which is the chief reason I issued the book out of the library in the first place) is well-written indeed, but my own memories of Shahid are too distinct and personal for Ghosh's perspective to seem right, and I found myself wondering how much of Shahid's work Ghosh had actually read. Which is not to say that Ghosh doesn't do an exquisite job, it's just that his article doesn't capture, for me, the essence of who Shahid was - as as a poet or as a person. The other pieces on writing - an essay on Mahfouz, another on novels in general and Bankim Chandra in particular, a critique of Jordanian writer Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt novels - are all exceedingly well written (everything in this book is), but you could probably do just as well, for instance, reading the New York Review of Books.

The other essays I really loved in the book were an essay on Fundamentalism, and one that deals with the riots that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 ('The ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi'). The latter is really a spectacular work, combining socio-political comment with a deeply heartfelt personal account. My own memories of that day in Delhi are sketchy at best, but if I remember few details the general feel of that horrific day has always stayed with me, the sense of helpless terror so thick in the air that it managed to convey itself even to a five year old who had little idea what was going on. Ghosh captures that sense of horror exceedingly well, twenty years later you can still hear the shock and fear of that day in his writing, but he manages to underlay it with an affirmation - more than anything else in this book, his account of that day is a testament to both the intense brutality of human beings towards each other, and the almost limitless compassion and humanity that they are capable of.

And that, I think, is the true genius of this book, overall. Whether he's writing of dancers in Cambodia or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma or of rescue workers in Nicobar, Ghosh manages to walk the thin line between optimism and despair. There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a bitter battle against the forces of fundamentalism and intolerance, Ghosh tells us, everywhere you look the forces of what he calls supremacism are gaining ground. And yet the battle is not lost - for there are also those who have refused to be cowed down or surrender; ordinary people like you and I who have become, through their exemplary dedication and the quietness of their dignity, true champions of the right. It is time that we acknowledged the struggle that these brave men and women are engaged in, Ghosh's book suggests, it is time that we, having understood exactly what is at stake, took our own stand against the violence.

Grave Matters

2006-02-18T01:54:00.000-05:00

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Llegó con tres heridas
la del amor,
la de la muerte,
la de la vida.

Con tres heridas viene
la de la vida,
la del amor,
la de la muerte.

Con tres heridas yo:
la de la vida,
la de la muerte,
la del amor.

- M. Hernandez (arranged and sung by Joan Baez)

There's a scene in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada where the young woman who's tending Mike Norton's (Barry Pepper) wounds comes up to him smiling, checks to make sure he's healing all right, hands him his medicine to drink, and then, still smiling, takes a pot of scalding hot coffee and pours it into his lap before hitting him full in the face with the emptied kettle.

It's a scene that beautifully captures the spirit of the movie - its unexpectedness, its humour, its raging sense of injustice, its violence. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones (in a stunning directorial debut) Three Burials is that rarity in recent cinema, a serious, thoughtful and exquisitely beautiful film that manages to not take itself too seriously.

Three Burials is the story of the killing of Melquiades Estrada, an illegal Mexican immigrant working as a cowboy in Southern Texas, and the retribution that his friend (Jones) extracts from the border policeman (Pepper) who casually, if accidentally killed him. This is a gloriously shot movie - scene after scene captures the stark beauty of the Texan wilderness, doing for it what Ang Lee did for Wyoming in Brokeback Mountain. And the performances are superb - Pepper does a sterling job, and Dwight Yoakam as the pragmatic, reluctant sherrif is wonderful. As for Jones - his performance is a landscape in itself, every crag of expression in it first sharpened and then smoothed to weathered perfection.

But the real joy of the movie is its spirit - part McCarthy, part Llosa, with a smidgin of Ford thrown in for good measure. This is a delightful movie because of the way it alternates between whimsical farce, socio-political drama, and stark human poetry. Jones displays considerable mastery of his craft, blending the comic with the macabre, the tragic with the ordinary, blurring the line between justice, compassion and mania. It's a movie that constantly surprises you, keeps you off balance and manages to be neither happy nor sad, but both at once. There is a great deal of brutality here, a great deal of almost casual violence, but it becomes, in the movie little more than a part of the scenery, against which the main characters play out their impassioned, desperate and at the same time deeply deluded lives.

Which is not to say that the movie gets everything right. There are too many sub-plots for my liking, too many little tangential stories, and while these are handled extremely well, they rob the movie of some of its momentum, muddy the cleanness of it, its essential clarity. And while some of the shifting back and forth in time (and scenes showing you the same event from multiple perspectives) is interesting, much of it seems contrived and self-indulgent, so that you can't help wishing (as Anthony Lane does in his characteristically brilliant review) that they'd stuck to a more conventional narrative.

On the whole though, this is a superb film, one that celebrates the art of film-making and story-telling alike, and that serves as a perhaps timely reminder that you don't have to have some deep political message to make a good movie - all you need is a good story and an instinct for the poetic in all of us.

The Never-beginning story

2006-02-11T07:49:00.000-05:00

Michael Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

- Louis MacNeice, 'Prayer before Birth'.

"If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows - perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places"

- Carlo Levi, in an introduction to Tristram Shandy (quoted by Italo Calvino)

How do you make a movie out of a book that goes nowhere because it is about a life that goes nowhere? Simple. You make a movie that goes nowhere.

Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a book of (literally) unspeakable brilliance. A book that explores the way our lives get swallowed up by digression and triviality, so that in the end we have barely got started on what we had planned to make our central purpose, and our lives turn out to look very different from the way we had imagined them. A book that does this by being a book that get swallowed up in digression and triviality, a delightful romp of a book that finds, when the last volume is finished, that far from being an account of the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, it has barely managed to be an account of the narrator's birth. A book that is, by any sane account, unfilmable.

Winterbottom's great insight in Tristram Shandy: A cock and bull story is that he never even tries to film the book. Instead he films the making of a film that is trying to film the book, which turns out to be a film about how the film about the book that finally emerges turns out to be very different from the film about the book that the characters, in the film you're actually watching, expected. Sound complicated? One of the chief delights of this glorious movie is the way, with true post-modernist aplomb, it blurs the line between narrator and narrative, creating a palimpsest of mirrors, and taking the idea of a film within a film (so wonderfully explored in Truffaut's La nuit americaine) to a whole new level.

The other chief delight is simply how unbelievably funny the movie is, how willing to satirise itself. Steve Coogan plays Steve Coogan, an up and coming British actor playing what he constantly needs to be assured is the lead role in a film version of Tristram Shandy, a novel that he's never read but gives confident interviews about, loudly extolling its virtues as being eighth on the Guardian's list of great books of all times ("Wasn't that a chronological list?" the interviewer asks.). Rob Brydon plays Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson (the one from X-files, NOT the one from Baywatch) is called at the last minute and agrees (miraculously) to play Gillian Anderson and Stephen Fry puts in a cameo as a bemused and erudite professor. This is the making of a film at its chaotic best - budgets have to be balanced (how are we ever going to afford that final battle scene at the end?), producers impressed (even if this means putting a hot chestnut down your trousers), costumes made suitably authentic (no, Steve, that is exactly how low coat pockets were in those days), egos massaged, giant plastic wombs tried out (no, Steve, you have to climb in head first and naked - we want it to look realistic), script ideas tossed around and rewritten ("I still think we should have the part about the Widow Wadman"), girlfriends kept happy, affairs flirted with, newspaper men appeased and people who wax eloquent about German cinema listened to with due reverence, even though you have no clue what they're blathering on about. And in the midst of all this, Rob Brydon will need to have his ego constantly massaged as he goes on about his bald spot, the colour of his teeth ("they're not quite white, are they?") his inability to act with Anderson, who has a huge sexual thing for. This is comedy at its British, tongue-and-cheek best, and a movie more shockingly true to Sterne's book is hard to imagine.

Watch this film. If Seinfeld was a TV show about nothing, this is a movie about nothing too, except that it comes to that conclusion reluctantly, starting out with the intention of being about something (realising it can't be about everything) and ending up wanting to be about anything, anything at all. Sterne would have laughed himself silly.

P.S. Oh, and don't leave before the credits are done. You'll miss the most hilarious exchange of Al Pacino impersonations ever. One minute you're walking down the aisle on your way out. The next minute you're rolling in it.

Flights of Aborted Fancy

2006-02-08T20:00:00.000-05:00

Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled

Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled came to me highly recommended. A friend whose taste in books I have the greatest faith in sent me desperate mails begging me to read it, and another friend gave me pitying looks when I told her I'd never heard of it.

Thinking about it, that might be one of the reasons I found the book underwhelming. Because the truth is, there's much to like about this book. The opening gambit - a group of travellers, stranded for the night, telling each other stories - is interesting, if unoriginal (forget the Canterbury Tales, for the most sublime use of that device EVER read Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies) and certainly no one can fault Dasgupta for insufficient appetite. The 13 stories in this book cover the widest possible range, spanning multiple geographies and genres, defying classification. They are tales of the wildest invention, heady concoctions of magic and street-smartness, mixing fantasy with a delicately comic humaneness. There are some real gems of ideas here, and there are moments when the Dasgupta's sheer inventiveness leaves you breathless.

What the book lacks, I think, is purpose. Structure. A sense of inevitability. Truly fantastic writing is not just about being imaginative, it is about a constrained optimisation of the imagination, about the tension between the writer's manic inventiveness and the bounds that he chooses to impose upon himself. Like Houdini escaping from his chains, the truly great writer thrills us by making the impossible come alive within the confines of the everyday. This is what gives Calvino and Marquez and Kundera their magic - that fact that all that overwhelming invention is tightly bound to a superstructure of political reality, narrative device, or philosophical perspective. Great writing is about creating variety through variation.

Dasgupta lacks any such anchor, so that his stories, both internally and across the book, seem drifting and directionless. There is a great deal of fervid imagining here, but the stories seem less assembled than carelessly stapled together, a collection of brilliant tangents, of loose threads that Dasgupta dishes out with dizzying facility, but never quite manages to reel back in. It's precisely this sense of potential that makes the stories ultimately disappointing. Again and again I found myself let down, puzzled, when I looked back on the story, by why Dasgupta had not made more out of it, surprised to find that some of the best advances in the plot turned out to be little more than digressions, put in for no other reason than to give Dasgupta the chance to show off his undeniable talent.

Overall, my sense is that Dasgupta is trying too hard. The opening gambit turns out to add little value to the story, the constant change in settings is gratuitious, and many of the side stories are, in the end, more distracting than anything else. Again and again, Dasgupta sacrifices the larger intensity of his story for the sake of a quick witticism, a clever observation, a well written line. This would have a been a much finer book if Dasgupta had pared such digressions out.

What Dasgupta needs, I think, is a much better editor. Someone who will question the relevance, the necessity of much of the flab in the book. Someone who will take Dasgupta to task for the frequent laziness of his writing (he's capable of really good prose, but much of the book is filled with lines that seem awkward and with dialogue so clunky it makes you wince). Give this man an editor like that and his next book could be a truly brilliant one.

Bottomline: Tokyo Cancelled is a book of considerable but frustrating promise. A collection of short stories that seduces you with how good it could have been, then fails to deliver on all but the most average of its promises. A book that, in the end, never manages to match up to the appetite it creates in you. It's a cancelled flight of a book, one that is just good enough to make you hang around in the airport, waiting for Rana Dasgupta to finally take off.

Fate, Chance and Desperate Men

2006-01-22T10:59:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen's Match Point

(WARNING: SOME SPOILERS)

If I had to pick one word to describe Woody Allen's new movie, Match Point, that word would be self-indulgent. Imagine that you're one of the world's most respected and acclaimed directors. Imagine that because of this you can get away with making a movie that celebrates all of your favourite obsessions - that allows you to combine the flamboyance of Italian opera with the angst of Russian literature, that lets you take a plot that is a neat inversion of Dostoyevsky, set it to a score that consists mainly of the immortal Caruso, and throw in some of the hottest people on the planet (and some of the most gorgeous real estate in England) for good measure. Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't it be exactly what you've always dreamed of doing? Because it's not really a bad notion and because you are, after all, a fundamentally sound film maker, the audience won't totally hate it, but that's besides the point. The point is that you owe it to yourself to try.

For years now Allen has been trying to make 'serious' dramatic cinema. The results, thus far, have not been pretty. The movies that have emerged from this reimagining of himself as a cross between Strindberg and Bergman have been awkward, stilted works like September, Another Woman and Interiors (more on my thoughts on these movies here). Match Point may be the first of the movies in this mode of his - movies where Allen is almost entirely absent, movies that deal with identity and relationships and the meaning of life - that actually works.

The central premise of Match Point comes straight out of Crime and Punishment (a point that Allen impresses upon you by making his central character read the book early on and then referring to it a number of times afterwards, just in case you missed it). What if there is no God, no justice in the world? What if our lives are driven purely by chance and accident, so that who succeeds and who fails is merely a matter of luck? In Dostoyevsky's novel, Raskolnikov's purpose is essentially to test this hypothesis. The experiment is simple enough: Raskolnikov will commit a henious crime. If there is meaning and justice in the world, he will be punished for it, if there is none, then he will get away scot free. What contaminates the experiment in the book is the fact that Raskolnikov (and through him Dostoyevsky) is terrified by the thought of what his escape would imply, and so is driven to put himself at greater and greater risk of arrest, simply because he would rather suffer punishment than be proved right in his hypothesis. The conclusion of Crime and Punishment is thus a capitulation both on Raskolnikov's part and on Dostoyevsky's.

But that fact that the ending is a cop-out raises some interesting questions. What if things had gone the other way? What if Raskolnikov (or his modern-day equivalent) were to truly want to escape, what if his crime was motivated by genuine self-interest, what if he didn't try to get caught? And what if the author had decided, despite everything to let Raskolnikov escape - what if Dostoyevsky had had the courage to stick with what he intuitively knew to be true - to state the bald truth that life is meaningless? These are not, of course, new questions - they are questions that are implicit in Crime and Punishment - the reason the novel works is because you cannot come away from it without seeing how seemingly arbitrary Raskolnikov's punishment really is, how easily things could have turned out differently. Dostoyevsky's great achievement is that he manages to suggest that there may be no meaning to the universe, manages to plant the seed of that doubt deep within you, without proving or disproving the point either way. The closing note of Crime and Punishment is, despite everything, a note of doubt.

Allen, by contrast, has no doubts. To him, it is clear that the world truly is about chance and that it is, in fact, better to be lucky than to be good. Match Point is an exploration of this alternate path, this road not taken from Crime and Punishment - Raskolnikov's escape or punishment has nothing to do with the justice of his case, it is simply a matter of chance. This makes the last half an hour of the movie rich with meaning, loaded with ethical and philosophical ideas, and altogether an engrossing watch. And despite a few missteps in between (one execrable scene involving the return of the dead, for instance) Allen delivers a taut, gripping narrative here - combining a swift, nervous energy, with moments of awkward, almost neurotic suspense. The last half hour of Match Point is a mesmerising watch, and easily one of the best things Allen has done for a long time. Hitchcock would have been proud of him.

Unfortunately the first half of the movie doesn't match up to the dramatic tension of the second. Allen has many skills, but portraying sexual tension on screen is not one of them, and his dialogue writing, while unexceptionable otherwise, is incapable of delivering passionate intensity. As the two central characters of the plot (played competently by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers [1] and Scarlett Johansson) enter a downward spiral of illicit lust, what comes through on screen feels more contrived than spontaneous, like a grotesque caricature of the overwhelming desire we are supposed to be seeing. Like some fifteen year old's cliched version of sexual heat. Perhaps it's because it's a Woody Allen movie, but the inherent silliness of human passion is never very far from the surface here, and there are scenes in the early part of the movie (including one horrendous love-making in a field in the rain - shudder!) that feel almost like parodies of the real thing.

The result of this is that the first half of the movie seems to go on for too long, and never seems entirely credible. One would, of course, need to have anti-freeze in one's veins not to be able to see how Scarlett Johansson could be a serious temptation for any man, but the grand passion between these two never comes completely alive and so it's only when their relationship starts to fall apart that your interest in the happenings on screen begins to revive. Allen draws out some fairly ham-handed ironies contrasting the position of Rhys-Meyers with his wife (played ably by Emily Mortimer) and his mistress, but these are amusing more than funny, and there is very little else in the movie to interest one.

Oh, and that's the other thing - this is an almost entirely humourless movie. There are a few neat moments, and one obligatory line about compatible neuroses, but that's about it. And while many of Allen's familiar vices are back - a fascination with expensive interiors; lots of sparkling little dinner conversations, effortlessly mingling the trivial with the profound; gorgeous music playing in the background (Caruso replaces Billy Holiday here, but the scratchy sound of the LP is still the same) - this doesn't really feel like a Woody Allen film. If it weren't for the familiar white on black credits mentioning Juliet Taylor, Charles H Joffe and Jack Rollins, I would have said this was more likely to be something made by Christopher Nolan than by Allen.

Bottomline: Match Point is, undoubtably, a great personal triumph for Allen - the first time that he's made a 'serious' movie that is not entirely still-born. It's not by any stretch of imagination a great film, but it's an above average film, gripping in parts, and if there is any film-maker who has earned the right to indulge his little fancies, surely Allen has. One can only hope, however, that the success of Match Point helps to exorcise the demon rather than encourage it and we can go back to the Allen who makes the brilliantly funny films only he can make. Match Point is a good enough movie - but we don't need Woody Allen to make it.

[1] Also known, to my female acquaintances, as that dreamy coach from Bend it like Beckham

Trial and Error

2006-01-21T14:47:00.000-05:00

Julian Barnes' Arthur and George

The first Julian Barnes book I ever read was Flaubert's Parrot. At the time, I'd never heard of Barnes, but the title of the book intrigued me, and I was going through an intense Flaubert reading phase, so it was book I couldn't possibly ignore.

It remains my favourite among Barnes' books. While I have nothing but admiration for the rest of Barnes' work, I've always found him to be more impressive than exceptional - reading his other novels was a pleasure, but Flaubert's Parrot is the only one that I found truly exciting, the only one I could consider reading again.

So when I first heard that Barnes was writing a book where Arthur Conan Doyle would be a character, I had high hopes. In the final analysis, Barnes contributed considerably to my fascination with Flaubert (a fascination that began, strangely enough, with a single line from Robert Lowell where he calls Flaubert the supreme artist) and I suppose I vaguely hoped that he would do something similar with Doyle.

That may be one reason why, in the end, Arthur and George left me disappointed. No, that's not fair. It wasn't really Arthur and George that left me disappointed, it was Barnes himself - Arthur and George is in every way an irreproachable book, but it is a book that could have been so much more.

Statutory plot summary: Arthur and George is, as the name suggests, the story of two people - a young half-Parsee lawyer named George Edalji who is wrongfully accused of maiming cattle, and of Arthur Conan Doyle, writer, doctor, sportsman, 'unofficial Englishman' who comes to his defense. The story opens with these two as children, and tracks their careers as adults until they finally come together in appealing George's case before the Home Office. Along the way Barnes manages, with his usual understated skill, to show us the differences in temperament between these two men - George is cautious, introverted, logical, precise; but also myopic and a snob. Arthur is driven, restless, outgoing - a dreamer driven by arcane ideas of chivalry and honour who finds solace for his failure of faith in spiritism. The ironies inherent in this contrast are too numerous to go into, but each represents, in his own way, a side of British culture without being, in either case, a typical Englishman. The novel thus becomes a fascinating exploration of the schizophrenia at the heart of British culture, and Barnes' greatest achievement for much of the book is the way he makes us feel sympathetic towards both of his characters, even when their points of view are diametrically opposed.

So far so good. The trouble is, I think, that Arthur and George is not really one book but a number of different books, and the juxtaposition of them seems as unlikely and circumstantial as the coming together of its two main protagonists. Just as one could ask what Arthur and George have to do with each other, one could also ask what the different parts of the book have to do with each other, and it's hard to come up with a truly satisfying reply. Which is not to say that the parts don't fit in a loose way, only that they don't really seem necessary to each other, and I can't help thinking that by juxtaposing them Barnes adds little value.

The parts of the book I thoroughly enjoyed were the parts that dealt with George. In portraying George's trial and the events leading up to it, Barnes affords us a fascinating glimpse of an interesting and unusual character, a glimpse that reminded me, quite forcibly, of Camus' L'Etranger. in his own way, Edalji is an outsider too, set apart from society not only by his racial status (though he himself is quick to argue that his conviction had nothing to do with race, a little too quick perhaps) but also, and perhaps more importantly by his own nature. The fact that George is highly myopic may be part of the reason he grows up to be the person he becomes, but it is also the most telling metaphor in the book - this is a man who sees the world as being complete in himself, and whose ability to understand the real world is therefore critically impaired. George is a blind man of Hindustan, a man who can only apprehend the world by bumping into it, and his story here is the story of how such a series of collisions adds up to a life. Race, Barnes suggests, is at least partly a red herring here - the jury is certainly prejudiced against George, but you can't help feeling that the prejudice comes less from racial bigotry and more from an inability to understand a 27 year old man who sleeps in the same room as his father and never goes out at night. At any rate, George's trial remains for me, the high point of the book - like a version of the L'Etranger which is deeper and more human for being less existential.

The rest of the book does not, in my opinion, quite match up to this standard. The contrast between Arthur and George is interesting, but feels at least somewhat contrived. Barnes speaks of Arthur Conan Doyle's life at great length, but offers few or no insights into Conan Doyle as a writer, and large parts of the Arthur sections seemed irrelevant to the narrative. I mean, okay, so we understand that Doyle only took up the Edalji case because he was at a difficult point in his life, but did we really need a forty page description of Doyle's fairly quotidian love life to understand this? This is not to say that the forty pages aren't well written, but they seem like a tangent to the rest of the book, and compared to the seriousness of Edalji's case, you can't help seeing them as frivolous. The book picks up a little as Doyle begins to investigate the Edalji case, but the overall effect is faux-fiction [1] - it's hard to take Doyle seriously here, he's charming, but you can't help feeling that he has no perspective. As for the last section, with its description of the seance following Doyle's death, that too feels interesting but a little besides the point, like watching a man run a fast action race, then stop to dawdle in a field picking flowers.

It's this lack of consistent rhythm that made Arthur and George a difficult book to read - again and again I felt Barnes lose momentum, slip back and forth between gears for no apparent reason. Almost as though her were afraid of writing too fluid, too single-purposed a book. The whole thing felt like a collection of exquisite diversions, and while the quality of writing was impeccable throughout, and each individual piece was engaging, the lack of overall direction irritated me, and I found myself wishing that Barnes had chosen a tighter structure.

Bottomline: Arthur and George has all the makings of a truly great novel - part L'Etranger, part In Cold Blood, part Perry Mason, part The Ambassadors. The coming together of these different strains is an awkward one, though, and in trying to combine them Barnes ends up writing a book that though interesting, reads more like an average Atwood novel, than a true classic.

[1] In the interests of full disclosure, and at the risk of being pilloried, I should say that I've never much cared for Arthur Conan Doyle's writing in general - the Sherlock Holmes stories in general leave me cold, in much the same way as Superman comics, because I don't see the point of watching someone with virtually superhuman powers of detection solve cases. My definition of good detective fiction is more Agatha Christie - I like stories where the author plays fair and all the clues necessary to solve the mystery are included in the story, so you can either figure out who the murderer is or kick yourself afterwards for not having seen it. With Holmes you almost never get that - no one but Holmes could solve the mysteries he solves (usually because no one else can tell with a glance which of the 400 different varieties of top-soil found in Northern Ireland can be seen on the culprits boots), whereas in theory, everyone could have figured out what Miss Marple figured out, if only they'd thought about it the right way. The fact that I've never been impressed with Doyle much may be one of the reasons the book doesn't enchant me enough.

Entrans-ed

2006-01-20T20:22:00.000-05:00

Transamerica

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be
Oh I hate you some, I hate you some
I love you some
Oh I love you when I forget about me
I want to be strong I want to laugh along
I want to belong to the living
Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive
Do you want - do you want - do you want
To dance with me baby
Do you want to take a chance
On maybe finding some sweet romance with me baby
Well, come on

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Looking for the key to set me free
Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
It’s the unraveling
And it undoes all the joy that could be
I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun
I want to be the one that you want to see
I want to knit you a sweater
Want to write you a love letter
I want to make you feel better
I want to make you feel free
Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm,
Want to make you feel free
I want to make you feel free

- Joni Mitchell, 'All I Want'

Let me put it this way. If come Oscar night Felicity Huffman does not walk away with that little gold statue for her performance in Transamerica, then one can safely conclude that every single member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is as blind as a bat.

Not that Transamerica is by any means a profound or great film - it's a simple, lightweight movie about parents and children and the forging of new relationships - in many ways a bitter-sweet standard - a film much closer in spirit to, say, Mrs. Doubtfire than to Boys Don't Cry.

And that is precisely the point. As a movie about gender identity, Transamerica is the precise antidote to Brokeback Mountain (see my review here), the comic foil to that movie's tragic angst. Director and Screenwriter Duncan Tucker's contribution here is that he does not shy away from making his main character, a transexual named Bree Osbourne as confused, as ridiculous as incapable of dealing with life's great challenges as the rest of us, and in doing so makes here lovably, endearingly human. Transamerica is not a film about gender identity - it is a film about an amusingly uptight and somewhat ditsy woman who just happens to be, technically, a man. As Bree struggles to cope with the disapproval of her mother and tries desperately to establish a meaningful relationship with her newfound son, her nervousness and vulnerability is no different from that of any grown up woman in crisis.

The real marvel of the movie, though, is clearly Huffman herself. Huffman doesn't just pull off a man's role here, she pulls off the role of a man who wants to be (and is, in all ways except biologically) a woman. And then she makes you fall half in love with that woman. This is mesmerising to watch, a performance of genius - one that combines tenacity and deep emotional courage (unlike the heroes in Brokeback Mountain, Bree is not conflicted about her identity - she is very clear that she is a woman, her only regret is that other people seem to have a problem understanding this) with silliness, finicky-ness and fallability. It's a raw-edged performance, delivered at a shrill pitch of near hysteria through which darker pools of quiet desperation show through. When she lets her guard down, and you see the roughness hidden behind the make up, Bree Osbourne is convincing as neither a man nor a woman - but it is precisely in those moments that she is must deeply, unutterably convincing as a person.

Howard's New Beginning

2006-01-16T06:46:00.000-05:00

Zadie Smith's On Beauty

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."

- E.M. Forster, Howard's End

I hate Zadie Smith. It just isn't fair that any one person can be that young, that talented, that succesful AND that good-looking. She could at least have had the decency to be a suitably struggling writer, one that you have to 'discover' and try and convince your friends to read, instead of being someone the whole world and their multi-cultural step-aunt has already read.

So. In the true Howard Belsey spirit, let me say that On Beauty is not a work of genius. It is a very good book, and a thoroughly enjoyable one, but it falls just a little short of greatness, largely, I suspect, because I can't help comparing it to Howard's End, and it suffers in the comparison. Many of the more peripheral characters here seem incompletely worked out, so that their motives and personalities remain obscure and under-articulated. And for all the hype about how the book is a brilliant take on academic life, many of the gags about academia seemed too easy. Certainly, Smith is gloriously funny and spot-on accurate in parts, but her overall view of academia seems a little over-the-top to me, a little too other-worldly. Surely academics are capable of being a little more practical, a little more self-searching than Smith makes them out to be. (In all fairness, I have to say that I'm at least a little in denial here - novels about uptight academics who disapprove of everything on general principle hit a little too close to home for comfort).

Very briefly, On Beauty is a novel about Howard Belsey, a middle-aged academic whose life work is to demythologise Rembrandt, and whose guiding tenet in life is that nothing is great or sacred, his warm and loving wife, Kiki and their three children - Jerome, a sensitive and artistic young man, a born again Christian; Zora, an ambitious and driven young woman and Levi, a teenager stifled by his priviliged background and trying to find a new identity for himself by tapping into ghetto culture. Search for identity, is, in fact, the central theme of the novel - as each of the key protagonists try to define who they are and what they believe in / stand for. In one particularly brilliant moment of the book, Kiki Belsey's new friend remarks: "I don't ask myself what did I live for...that is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for." It's this search for what / who one lives for that is at the heart of the book, much as it was in Howard's End.

Smith tries to take the implications of this search up a notch by making the bulk of her characters African-American, thus bringing the question of racial identity into the forefront of the novel. It's not clear to me that this adds much to the plot though, except that it serves to emphasise that people are pretty much the same whatever the pigmentation of their skin, and that to think racially is to miss an infinity of finer nuances hidden beneath the broad brush of colour. If there is a larger or more precise message about racial identity in the book, it is one that is lost on me.

Where Smith really comes into her own here is in portraying the interactions among the Belsey family. The dynamic between Kiki and Howard (who is cheating on her), the interaction between Kiki and her children, the one brilliant scene between Howard and his dad - these are for me, the best parts of the book, brimming with both a precision of expression and a profound intution about human relationships, creating scenes that are truly bitter-sweet in their comic intimacy. It is in these little tete-a-tetes that Smith really shines as a writer, and it's this that makes On Beauty a book well worth reading.

The other big achievement of the book is one that Smith frankly borrows from Forster, though doing it full justice. Howard's End is a book about the ways in which people cut themselves off from the reality of their feelings, using intellectual pursuits and social conventions to insulate themselves from the raw business of living, and ending up trapped in a growing sense of isolation. In Forster's novel, the first glimmerings of this trend are only just beginning to being seen, in Smith these tendencies have ossified and isolation, rather than being a growing threat is now a reality to be taken for granted. Belsey's tragedy is not that he chooses to use his intellectual pretensions to cover up his own insecurities, ridiculing the truths it would destroy him to acknowledge, Belsey's tragedy is that he is almost smart enough to pull this off. Belsey's way of asserting his own self is to deny everyone else's, and as the novel progresses these defenses of his are proven weak, and he is forced to admit that there is, in fact, beauty in the world that cannot be rationalised or explained away. Cut through all the symbolism, all the academic commentary, all the critical clutter, and what you are left with is the pure, undeniable beauty of Rembrandt, and it is these deep truths that we must base our lives on. We do not have to invent being human, we have only to celebrate it.

This recognition is also Forster's, except that Forster is careful to join the prose and the passion, the sense and the sensibility. The flip-side of Howard's hyper-intellectualism is the unexamined life, a life where feeling becomes opinion, emotion becomes moral imperative and self-interest can always be justified. This is where the Kipps family should have come in - with Monty Kipps, Belsey's opponent in all things becoming the embodiment of the man who is closed to reason except as a tool to justify his own acts - but Smith never quite manages to give the Kipps family the emphasis it deserves. Carlene Kipps puts in a brief but glorious cameo, but the other members of the Kipps family - Monty, Victoria - while playing a critical role in the plot, never quite come alive as characters in their own right, remaining mere agents in the Belsey's journey to self-discovery. This leaves the book feeling fairly lop-sided. The fact that the Belsey's are so overwhelmingly the focus of the book may reflect Smith's own natural biases, as well as those of her readers, but it would be too easy, if one were to step outside the finely nuanced web that Smith weaves, to see this as the story of the come-uppance awaiting liberal intellectuals, and that, one hopes, is entirely not the point.

Bottomline: There is a point in On Beauty where Kiki observes that as the years pass their family stories become more stylised, more beautiful, but less true. As a re-telling of Howard's End, On Beauty is elaborate and finely worked, rich in detail, much funnier and considerably more up-to-date. But it lacks, for me, the urgency of the original, the directness of its engagement, the classical elegance of its prose (just compare the description of Mozart's Requiem in On Beauty to the corresponding concert scene in Howard's End - Chapter 5 - and you'll see what I mean). If you haven't read Howard's End, go read that first - it's a much sublimer book; if you have read it, On Beauty is about the most pleasurable ways of re-discovering it that I can think of.

P.S. I should say that it's been a while since I read Howard's End - so that my memory of it is a little hazy, and much of what I say here may be little more than nostalgia.

Two Ordinary Lives

2006-01-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Vikram Seth's Two Lives

"A narcissism of small differences"

- Sigmund Freud

I've never been able to make up my mind about Seth. On the one hand, The Golden Gate remains one of the most stunning books I've ever read, and there were passages in An Equal Music that moved me almost to tears. On the other hand, I've never really been able to whip up much enthusiasm for his poetry (with the exception of a few notable poems) and I found A Suitable Boy fairly average. So that when someone asks me if I like Seth, I find myself hesitating, wanting to say yes but not quite sure how I really feel.

His latest book, Two Lives, only serves to deepen that ambivalence. If this had been a great book, I could finally have cast off my doubts about Seth; instead, it is a deeply disappointing work, one that I hesitate to criticise only because this is Seth, and I am reluctant to trade betrayal for betrayal.

Two Lives is non-fiction - it is the true story of Seth's grand-uncle Shanti Seth and his German wife Henny. While the book is ostensibly the story of their lives, the bulk of it is concerned with the period between 1935 and 1950, when the two young people, forced to leave Germany because of Nazi oppression, find their lives shattered by the engines of history - Henny losing her family to the Holocaust, Shanti losing his right arm to a german shell. Using interviews with Shanti and Henny's old correspondence, Seth skilfully re-imagines their lives in these troubled years, going on to explore the relationship that developed between these two people, both in their own way survivors. This story, which takes up Sections 2,3 and 4 of the book is inserted between the parentheses of Sections 1 and 5, which deal with Seth's own relationship with these two relatives, and especially with the last years of Shanti Seth.

It must be said that the middle sections at least, make for an interesting read. Seth is a talented writer, a skilled story teller, and in his capable hands the characters of the two main protagonists come vividly alive, taking on a kind of familiarity - as though Henny and Shanti were people we ourselves knew, albeit in different avatars. The third section in particular, with Henny's recovered correspondence as its key source, offers a fascinating look into a relatively less explored aspect of the Holocaust - the plight of the survivors, who having lost family and homes to the Nazi oppression, must now try to re-establish ties with their old friends (some of whom, they suspect, may have been supportive of the Nazis) and re-invent their own identities. This was easily my favourite section of the book.

Yet even here Seth does not get it quite right. For one thing, he spends, in my opinion, entirely too much time talking about the Holocaust in general. While parts of this are arguably critical if the book is not to seem incomplete - yet there is very little that Seth says that is new or insightful here (or at least so it seemed to me) . That the Holocaust must be remembered if it is not to be relived is a tenet that I entirely support, but there are times when Seth writes as though he were the first writer to even think about describing the horrors of this period, whereas the truth is that there are many, many books that do a far better job (either through fiction or through biographical accounts) of bringing the abominations of the Nazi regime to life (just read Maus for instance).

A second problem in this section is with the source material. While Seth is lucky to have found, after Henny's death, a whole stack of her correspondence, thus making an account of her life possible, he is clearly handicapped by not being able to interview her or get a more targeted or nuanced understanding of her life. This means that the account that finally emerges feels haphazard and incomplete - and you are left with the sense that Henny ultimately eludes Seth, so that her letters, though certainly contextually relevant, are only peripheral to who she really is.

A third problem is with the fact that Seth seems too close to the material. This means that he often sounds less than objective, heaping praise upon praise on his beloved relatives. Such devotion is touching in a grand-nephew, but suspicious in a researcher. It also means that Seth feels justified in playing a large role in the book, so that in the middle of what is purportedly Shanti and Henny's story, we have long excursions that deal with Seth himself - his trip to Jerusalem, his sudden aversion to the German language - all of which strike a false note.

Despite these failings, and a more general tendency to ramble on Seth's part, the middle section manages to hold one's interest, showing us, through the lives of these two fairly ordinary people, the fate of millions just like them, and the larger political, economic and social context of their time. These sections are by no means brilliant, but as Seth himself puts it, "What is perfect? In a world with so much suffering, isolation and indifference, it is cause for gratitude if something is sufficiently good". And sufficiently good these sections undoubtably are.

Beyond a point however (somewhere around the beginning of the fifth section) Seth's book slips from being plain yet elegant to being frankly tedious. Perhaps Seth is trying to mirror the disillusionment he finally felt with his Uncle Shanti in his last years, but if so, he is doing too good a job. The trouble is that by this stage Seth's novel has become entirely self-obsessed - there are no broader themes to be explored here, instead we are plunged into a protracted nostalgia trip, spiced with liberal doses of increasingly petty family politics. Why did Uncle Shanti become a bitter recluse as the years passed? The answer that Seth provides is cogent and I'm certain will be of considerable interest to the Seth family, but it is entirely presumptuous to think that anyone else shall care. In fact, it is my opinion that this would have been a much better book if Seth had completely erased his own presence from it, and allowed the two lives of the title to speak for themselves, instead of constantly insisting on his own relationship with them.

Bottomline: Two Lives is a mildly pleasant read about two mildly pleasant people leading their mildly pleasant lives in some wildly unpleasant times. It is a book that is almost certainly worth reading, but may not, in fact, be worth finishing. And coming from Seth, who we know is capable of much greater, it is, undoubtably, a let-down.

Overdose

2006-01-02T04:42:00.000-05:00

Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

You can't have too much of a good thing, the adage goes. Rushdie's latest novel, Shalimar the Clown [1] is strong evidence that maybe, just maybe, you can.

We all know Rushdie is a writer of prodigious talent. His gifts are many: an incredible ear for dialogue, an unequalled talent for allegory, a fertile and dramatic imagination, a keen, living wit, a mastery of magic realism and an uncanny ability to write deft, sizzling, over-the-top prose. Where these gifts come together (as they did in Midnight's Children, as they did in Shame) the effect is, for want of a better word, devastating. It's like being strapped to giant firecracker and sent whooshing into a stratosphere of delight to explode in a million pieces. No other writer still living can write the way Rushdie, at his best, does.

These unique gifts of his are all on display in Shalimar the Clown and there are many, many parts of the book where Rushdie is at his familiar best - exhilarating descriptions of the characters that make up the tiny Kashmiri hamlet of Pachigam; the introduction of an iron mullah, a religious zealot made up of spare parts; the story of Max Ophuls, the young French Resistance fighter - all this is vintage Rushdie. That Shalimar the Clown is in many ways a return to form following the indifferent Ground Beneath her Feet and the disastrous Fury is undeniable, but it's far from being a complete return to form. Shalimar the Clown reads like the work of a man possessed by the demons of his own talent, a man trying simply to dump all his inspiration straight on to the page, without taking the trouble to fit it together - as though Rushdie had simply opened up his bag of goodies and dumped them carelessly at our feet. There is a sloppiness here, a sense of neglect, and it makes Shalimar the Clown an ultimately unconvincing book.

Take an example - early on in the book, as Boonyi, a young village girl, plans a midnight tryst with her to be lover, Noman, she thinks about the story of Sita being abducted by Ravana. Her interpretation of this episode from the Ramayana is that Sita went out to meet Ravana because she recognised that desire, in the shape of Ravana, would always be out there waiting, and it was better to face him and get it over with than to try to hide from him in vain. This is a fascinating take on the old story, but in the context of the larger plot at this point it feels phony, tacked on, as if Rushdie had put the thought into Boonyi's head more because he wanted to say it himself, even though it didn't really belong there.

This is not to say that Shalimar the Clown is not a good book. Rushdie, even when disappointing, is a better than average writer, and Shalimar the Clown is one of those books that, if it had been written by pretty much anyone else, would have been hailed as a major achievement - it's only in comparison to Rushdie himself that it suffers. The example above notwithstanding, most of the 'Boonyi' section of the book is superbly written, as is the first half of the 'Max' section. Rushdie's greatest gift - his talent as a myth maker - is alive and well, and the stories in these sections with their quirky, nuanced characters, their evocation of place and time, their almost poetic mixing of personal made allegorical, hums with the feel of legend.

It's only as the story continues, grows darker, that the internal contradictions of the book (which in some sense are metaphors for the contradictions of the world Rushdie is trying to describe) begin to tear Rushdie's genius apart. Much of the latter half of the book seems too heavily laid on - the seriousness of the plot and the characters weighing down the lightness of Rushdie's style. At their best, Rushdie's novels are fantasies - works of desperate lightness where the deftness of Rushdie's writing lifts even the seriousness of the events he describes into a magical twilight where they become reflections of reality without becoming reality themselves (remember the mercurochrome of Jallianwala Bagh?) . In Shalimar the Clown the weight of his story proves too much for Rushdie, and the fact that he situates his characters in the specific, in the here and now, makes his subsequent fantasies about them seem foolish and false. The second half of this book deserves a starker realism - one that Rushdie does not manage to provide.

Two things keep Shalimar the Clown from being as good a book as it could be. First, it is a desperately self-conscious novel. This is not entirely a bad thing. Perhaps the neatest trick in the whole book is the central conceit: the fact that killing of Max Ophuls (the event that the book starts with) which may initially seem like a political matter is actually driven by a personal vendetta, though of course, the personal vendetta itself is an allegory for a larger political message. Only Rushdie could pull off so elaborate and ironic a switchback.

The trouble is that again and again in the book you have the sense of Rushdie trying to be, well, Rushdie - metaphors and connections forced onto the plot even though they don't really seem to fit; long, glowing descriptions given where a few simple words would have been so much more effective. The end result is a novel that is a stunning read from page to page, but that comes across as being ultimately overdone. It's all very well for one or two characters in a book to be possessed of the gift of second sight, for example, but when every major character in the book seems capable of prophecy, you start to wonder if Rushdie isn't trying too hard.

The second, though related, problem with the book is that Rushdie is trying to say a little too much with it. One of his recurrent themes through the book is that 'everywhere has become like everywhere else'. This feels more like a cheap PR trick than a serious point of view - and it leads Rushdie down some ludicrously wrong paths. At one point in the book he actually compares the rioting in LA to the problem in Kashmir, a comparison entirely unworthy of someone who, if the rest of the book is to be taken as evidence, has a fairly nuanced and objective understanding of the Kashmir issue. Decades of foreign-sponsored militant activity and state-backed military atrocity is hardly the same thing as a one-off bout of rioting. This central claim of Rushdie's novel - that acts of violence in one place are mirrors of acts of violence in another - is, in my opinion, a misleading and dangerous one. Certainly there are similarities between terrorists groups across the world, but it is the differences that I feel we need to pay attention to. To assume that we can understand the terrorist 'psyche' by understanding the story of one terrorist movement in one place is to lose sight of the specificity of the issues underlying each militant organisation, and the history of support and opposition that have gone to the making of such violence. To capture them all in one broad stroke may be a legitimate tactic for the kind of expressionist fiction that Rushdie is writing, but it is hardly good politics.

Bottomline: Shalimar the Clown is a highly rewarding read, if in many ways a flawed one. It is a disappointing book simply because there is so much in it that is superb, so much in it that is classic Rushdie. If one of the goals of literature is to be a mirror to the times it is written in, then this is a service Rushdie is performing admirably, because the crisis in his writing so perfectly reflects the crisis of the world's conscience, of the world's understanding of itself. In Fury, this crisis manifested itself in an almost uncompromising darkness, an overwhelming sense of disquiet. In Shalimar the Clown, we see the weight lifting, we see the struggle of a writer trying to regain the voice he once had, but the darkness is still present and co-exists awkwardly with the magic.

Towards the end of the novel, Max Ophuls' daughter, India, finds love in an unexpected place, is shown an Eden that she may have a chance to return to. Before she makes the journey back, however, she must slay her father's killer, the demon who continues to torment her. It is only when the past has been laid to rest that the future can begin. We can only hope that Rushdie can find the means and the strength to kill his own demons, so that he may return to us the writer we remember and love, and the world may be whole again.

[1] Yes, I finally read it.

The Revenge of the Cliche

2005-12-25T08:21:00.000-05:00

Steven Spielberg's Munich

How the mighty have fallen. Ten years ago if you'd told me that the day would come when I would be encouraging people to avoid watching a Spielberg film, more, that I would be actively warning them against watching it, I would have laughed. Yet avoidable may be the kindest thing I can bring myself to say about his new film, Munich.

Manohla Dargis over at the New York Times calls Munich the toughest, most anguished film of Spielberg's career [1]. This is true - but the anguish belongs entirely to the audience. This is the toughest film of Spielberg's career only if by tough we mean flat, incoherent, rambling and predictable. Understand that I haven't been particularly impressed with anything Spielberg's done in the last five years or so: AI was tepid, Minority Report was trenchant but fast paced, Catch me if you can was pleasant but unexciting and War of the Worlds didn't quite make up in vision what it lacked in intelligence. These were all good, average films, mediocre only in that they came from Spielberg. Munich, on the other hand, is a truly BAD film, anyway you cut it (cutting it, unfortunately, is something Spielberg clearly never thought to try;. the film is over two and a half hours long, a good third of it barely sentient)

Not that the movie doesn't seem promising to start with. The film opens with a quick montage of the events at Munich - and this is easily the best part of the film, the scenes shot with the kind of fast paced panache that we remember from the old Spielberg (comparisons with the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan are inescapable). It's when these scenes are over that we're introduced to the central plot of the film - a covert operation, sponsored by the Israeli state, to assassinate those behind the Munich killings. A young Mossad officer, Avner (Eric Bana) is summoned, given a list of eleven Palestinian names, made head of a five member task force and sent off to Europe to kill as many of the people on his list as he can, whatever the expense (though it would be good if he brought back receipts).

This is a storyline full of fascinating promise. There are so many things this movie could be: a fast-paced assassination thriller, a gritty exploration of the reality of political terrorism, an insightful and moving story about conscience and hatred, an astute commentary on the politics of revenge. In Spielberg's hands it is none of these (though there are times when it seems to try to be all of them) - what comes out is a schoolboy's fantasy of a serious political film, a sort of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less in a minor key, with some solemn bits added in the hope of making it 'thought-provoking'.

To begin with, there's the sheer idiocy of the plot. In trying to strike this all important blow against Black September, who do the Israelis turn to? One soulful but otherwise unimpressive young officer who would seem to have little to recommend him except that his father was some kind of war hero, and who has no training as a field operative. Oh, and four other such amateurs drawn from all over Europe including a bombmaker who, it turns out, can't actually make bombs, and a blonde-haired thug, who it seems can't do much except drive and act macho. This is the DIY version of political assassination - a light-hearted coming together of novices reminiscent of Harry and Walter go to New York - hardly the appropriate tone, you would think, for the enterprise they're engaged in. Worse, not only are these novices sent into the field by themselves, they are given no help by the Israelis, except for a steady supply of money. Israeli intelligence, which knows enough about the 11 people on the list to know that they helped plan Munich as well as what they're planning next, can't find out for our intrepid adventurers where their quarries are hiding, so that these five men, with no leads to work of and no contacts in the field are now expected to find out what the presumably dozens of trained Israeli agents in the field have been unable to.

No problem, their leader says. All he has to do is call up an old school friend and before you know it his friend has put him in touch with someone who's led him straight to the one person in all of Europe who knows where all his targets can be found. Just another day's work for Avner and his merry band.

This contact (who Mossad has never heard of so far, btw), it turns out, is a family operation that is like Thomas Cook for assassins - it provides explosives, sets up safe houses, basically does all the things that our five heroes would be incapable of doing on their own. There's just one catch - the family won't work with governments. They've very strict about it. So strict in fact, that when Avner and his buddies violate that agreement and pass on the whereabouts of Palestinian terrorists in Beirut to Mossad commandos, the family deals out the terrible retribution of inviting Avner over for a lazy countryside luncheon, making him pick berries with the patriarch of the family, and then, because Avner is such a clean cut young man and loves his Daddy so much, forgiving him for lying to them about his involvement with Israel and even giving him some cheese and blood sausage to take home with him.

The movie is full of such non sequiturs, the worst of which, ironically, come out of half-hearted attempts to make all this lunacy sound credible. Avner cannot be associated with Mossad because the Israeli government cannot be seen to participate in such terrorist activity, we are told. That's good reason why there can't be an official link between him and the Israeli state, of course, but this is the secret service, for God's sake, passing on information without leaving any way for it to be traced back to them is what they do for a living. And I mean 11 Palestinians are going to die violent deaths in the span of a few months - how long do you think Israel's involvement in that is going to stay secret?

But wait, it gets worse. Once they start making progress on their list, Avner and co. suddenly discover that they have become targets themselves. This apparently comes as a complete surprise to them (imagine that! all we're doing is going around killing people because they killed our people. Who would think that someone would want to try to kill us for that?) - our heroes suddenly realise that what they're doing might actually be dangerous! They have crises of conscience, crises of nerve. Avner in particular becomes a man haunted by nightmares, fearful of his own shadow. So afraid does he become, in fact, that he chooses to go live in Brooklyn, because clearly Brooklyn in the mid-70s is the safest place on earth to be. The movie is riddled with this sort of incoherence - it's as though the script-writers were so caught up in spinning their little Peter Pan fantasy that they didn't feel the need to bother with things like logic or common sense. It made you feel as though the kindest thing someone could do for them would be to lend them a copy of Le Carre.

All right, you say, so the plot is ridiculous. But what about the action? Is that at least exciting? Not really. To begin with there isn't that much of it. Or rather there is a lot of it, but it's all interspersed with scenes of Avner cooking, Avner crying on the phone because he hears his baby daughter's voice for the first time, Avner joking about with his buddies, so that there's no real tempo to the film. The bigger problem with the action sequences, though, is that they're entirely unsurprising, entirely predictable. Watching them, you have the sense of having watched the same thing happen at least a dozen times before in at least a dozen movies. It's like you've already read the script - you know that something will go wrong with the plan at the last minute, there'll be some running about, some panic, some desperation, then someone will be a hero, or the 'good' guys will get lucky and things will all work out fine in the end. The only cliche from the genre that Spielberg leaves out is the one that could actually have contributed to the excitement of the film, the classic 'planning' scene where you learn what the difficulties are and how they are to be overcome. None of that happens in this movie, nor is there ever any resistance from, or thought given to, local law-enforcement. If anything, assassinations in this movie, are almost shockingly easy - a fact that Spielberg tries to obscure by having his assassins come up with elaborately bomb devices when a simple shooting would have done quite easily, thank you.

Right, well. But what about emotion? What about the anguished inner struggle of the main characters. Well, for starters, what main characters - Avner himself is pretty much the only character that the movie actually sketches out - all the others are caricatures, little more than mouthpieces for some hackneyed point of view that Spielberg wants to represent. As for the anguish - suprisingly, Spielberg never really explores it, or rather, doesn't explore it at the points when you think it should be explored. The decision to undertake these killings itself is made in a swiftly shot meeting where Spielberg seems more interested in conveying the general sense of discussion than in exploring any particular points of view. At some point Golda Meir (played admirably by Lynn Cohen) says that they need to go ahead with the plot and that's that. End of discussion. Again, Avner's decision to take up the mission consists of little more than his saying he can't bring himself to give this up, accompanied by some psycho-babble from his wife about how he thinks of Israel as his mother - we're never really shown the conflict Avner must have faced between going on the mission and staying with his family. Or later, there's a point when the assassins go after someone who wasn't on their original list but who is active in Black September, and this taking on of additional targets, which you would think would be a big deal, is never even discussed.

The end result is that the characters on screen never come alive as human beings, never really establish any connection with you, so that the disquiet of the last half an hour seems contrived, fake. Avner is now a tortured man, yes, but what exactly is he tortured by? Even he doesn't really seem to know. Certainly he is frightened for his family, certainly he has nightmares and has become paranoid - but this is neither unexpected nor particularly moving (are we seriously supposed to feel sorry for the man? Poor little terrorist had a bad dream - aaawwww!!). Avner is a man with a troubled conscience we are told - but it's not clear why his conscience took so long to kick in (except that it's consisten with the general speed of what one could fondly call his thought processes).

Perhaps the greatest achievement of this film, though, is that Spielberg manages to go on for close to three hours without saying a single new or insightful thing about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is not a thoughtful film because there is no thought in it, all we get are a lot of cliches. There's a conversation that Avner has with a young PLO fighter, for instance, where the PLO fighter talks lovingly of his desire for a homeland - does Spielberg seriously believe that this is news? Are there actually people out there who haven't realised yet that the PLO are fighting because they want to have a country of their own and not because they just like killing people? And what's with all the tortured conversations about Israel in the end. The problem with the movie is that Spielberg sets it up to deliver some sweeping, profound message, but it's never quite clear what that message is. Instead, Spielberg just lets the movie go on and on, piling closing scene upon closing scene in search of that elusive take-away, leaving it finally in the hope that anyone who sits through 45 minutes of protracted soul-searching will have at least one original thought of his / her own, and will hopefully take that away as the key message of the film.

Bottomline: Munich is a ludicrous and abject failure. It's a film that has a lot to say but never says it, a fim populated by wooden characters playing out a non-sensical plot through a series of predictable action sequences, a rambling, directionless film that confuses gloom with profundity. Munich may well be the most boring film I've seen all year, and it's a movie I'd strongly urge you to avoid.

[1] Yet another instance of Ms. Dargis getting it, IMHO, completely wrong. When am I ever going to learn to stop reading her reviews and stick to Anthony Lane, who's review, while not scathing enough of the movie, comes so much closer to my perception of it.

New Beginnings

2005-12-23T19:07:00.000-05:00

Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

- Ezra Pound

"Not an epiphany, life moves more slowly and inexorably than any belief in that"

- Nadine Gordimer

Political is an adjective I've always been hesitant to use, especially when applied to fiction. Not that I think writers should be apolitical (I LOVED Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, for instance) but that I believe the claims of politics to be distinct from the claims of fiction, so that the combination of the two often leads to results that do justice to neither. That's why I'm usually wary of novels with a 'message' - too often I find the existence of that message used as an excuse for mediocre writing.

The most glorious exception to that rule that I can think of is Gordimer [1]. Perhaps because Gordimer's work is not political in the sense of being about politics, it is political in the sense of being deeply embedded in the politics of her time and country. To read Gordimer is to be offered a unique window into the recent history of the South African people, an intimate and personal history, in which Africa is not so much a topic as a presence, a character who stands quietly by, watching the plot unfold, a silent narrator. So rich is Gordimer's sensibility as a writer that the light of her understanding transcends the narrow circles of family and relationships that she so skilfully draws, shining out, like the beam of a lighthouse, upon an entire nation. This is not a point that Gordimer belabours - she does not need to - to read Burger's Daughter or July's People or The Conservationist is to be plunged so entirely into the immediacy of South African life that to explicitly acknowledge it would be like pointing out the water while one was scuba diving.

In recent years, though, whether as a consequence of the changing political realities of South Africa or because of her own advancement as a writer, it seems to me that Africa has leached out of Gordimer's voice, leaving behind it what we always knew existed, but can now see in sharper contrast - the incredible beauty of her writing. Gordimer is a writer of quiet, heartbreaking prose, her writing has a gentle dignity that blends clarity with generosity, and like some winter afternoon's quiet sunlight, makes everything clear and forgiven. There is a sense of peace here that does not pass understanding but is founded upon it. Life is a simple thing, Gordimer seems to say, if we would only look within our hearts to understand it, only find the courage to be honest - to ourselves and to those we care for - about the truth of our feelings, acknowledging the pain that would bring for what it is. It is in trying to avoid this denouement, in trying to imagine ourselves to be other than we are, in trying to explain or make excuses, that we complicate our relationships with each other, make it more difficult to connect as human beings. Gordimer's great gift is to make this idea come alive by putting down on paper what is so familiar as to be intimate. Yes, that's exactly right, you think to yourself, but how does she know that? Writing about family, about marriage, Gordimer is so exact that her dialogues and descriptions touch something deep inside you, so that you find yourself in tears not in the parts that talk of death or loss or despair, but in the parts that talk about love.

Gordimer's new novel, Get a Life, is a return of sorts to the notion of the personal as a way of understanding the political, the notion of using a deeply personal account to explore the same emotional pathways where the political has led. Except that in the post 9/11 world Gordimer has expanded her canvas, gone international. South Africa is still a presence in this novel - white people are seen in the process of establishing new ties with their black neighbours, forging new friendships - but it is a benign presence, a supporting actor, almost an extra. At one point in the novel, at a party where both colored and white people meet, Gordimer makes the simple observation that to the children at the party this was nothing special - they all went to school together, they were used to it.

No, the real (though almost unmentioned, but for a single line about hubris) star here is 9/11 - the shock of that event, the way it has reshaped the very meaning of what we call reality. Never one afraid of the emotional, Gordimer attacks this issue with a directness that manages to be concerned without being sentimental, her's is the efficiency of a grandmother who gives your wounds the attention they deserve without fussing over them. To acknowledge is not to commemorate. It happens, she seems to say (it's the title of one of the book's sections), get over it, get a life! Her essential message in the book is that no matter how unexpected or painful the suffering, no matter how deep the wound, Nature is a survivor. Life will go on whether we want it to or not, we can only choose to accept or deny it, and that acceptance is not betrayal - we do not cheapen the loss by living through it, that it is possible to suffer and accept that one has suffered without giving into that suffering or dwelling on it. This is an audacious premise, one that, coming from a writer with less empathy than Gordimer would seem trite, almost insulting - in her patient, skilful hands, it feels like wisdom.

The story, in brief is this: Paul, a thirty-five year old environmental conservationist married to an advertising executive, and the father of a three year old son, discovers that he has thyroid cancer. Treated (the doctors hope successfully) for the disease, the patient represents a health risk to those around him, because the iodine treatment he has received has made him radioactive. Forced to avoid physical contact with his wife and son, Paul returns from hospital to spend his quarantine with his parents, his radioactive condition fast becoming a metaphor for for the impossibility, when faced with the fact of one's own mortality, of connecting to another human being. As Paul spends long hours in the garden of his parent's house, dwelling, often gloomily, on his isolation, there is a keen sense of the disconnection the world has suffered.

This, for me, is the finest part of the book - ninety pages that make up an intense exploration of the many ways in which we relate to ourselves and to others, and the way circumstances beyond our control can change those relationships and our understanding of them. Love, in Gordimer means "commitment to the fulfillment of the loved one". It is the way that we protect and betray and forgive those we care for, the way we both desire them and take them for granted, the way we both rescue them or do them harm.

By the second half of the book Gordimer loses her way, her tone becoming a little too strident, a little too deliberate [2]. Paul recovers, but remains plagued by doubts about his own health, throwing himself passionately back into his work, into caring for his son, to avoid the apprehension of a new gulf between himself and his wife. Paul's parents take a long-delayed vacation to Mexico, which ends badly, and Paul's mother, bewildered and wounded, falls back first to her son, with whom the days of his quarantine have forged a warmer bond, and then to an adopted child of her own. These events are skilfully portrayed - the scenes between the various actors are constructed with exquisite tenderness, the writing is powerful - but the plot rings false, and the book has lost the breathless authenticity of its first half. It's as though Gordimer were trying too hard to be cheerful, trying to thrust an almost clichedly happy ending upon her characters, so as to force us to have hope as well. That this works at all is a testament to Gordimer's power as a writer. But it does not work entirely.

One problem, I think, is that Gordimer is trying to cram too much into the story. While 9/11 would seem to be the immediate context, the more explicit threat in the novel is nuclear power - nuclear capability is the evil that literally radiates through all our lives, becoming a metaphor for all that is destructive in man's greed for power, his lust for domination. Ecological conservation is another big theme, with Paul's work taking centre-stage in the latter half of the novel, and long pages being devoted to the importance of eco-systems and the way that modern industry threatens them. There is also the undercurrent of race relationships in the new South Africa, as well as some passing meditation on gender roles. It's too much to pack into a book this small.

In one way the eco-system point is a powerful metaphor - the irrepressibility of life, its incredible ability to adapt, to survive. Nature goes on, Gordimer tells us, finds ways to adjust to man's intrusions, ways to continue, ways to grow. This principal of survival, first outlined as a property of eco-systems, is then played out in the lives of the chief characters - as each comes face to face with some climactic realisation and finds in it a source of renewal, of rededication to new ends, new pursuits, new people. The correct response to loss is a frenzy for life, a desperate grasping for new connections, new reasons to live. Get a Life is a call to arms, a rededication to living in the face of a more evident mortality. When Paul finally gets back to his wife, she finds that he makes love to her as though each time were his last. That is the path Gordimer would have us all choose.

The trouble with so strident an affirmation is that it quickly becomes heavy-handed. Perhaps the wisest thing that Gordimer says in the whole book is: "Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold". If only she'd stuck to that message. Instead, she insists on cramming the last forty pages with hopefulness, with awe, with rejuvenation, so that the overall effect is of someone talking too loudly and too fast. Someone who hopes that by convincing others she will convince herself. As an exhortation, this is a powerful book, but Gordimer has no real argument to offer except one based in a magical faith in the healing powers of time and nature. This is a powerful belief, one that, like the words of a loving grandmother offers much consolation when you first hear it, but it is an argument that will prove cold comfort on maturer, more rational reflection.

Bottomline: Get a life is a moving exploration of the nature of loss, of the ways in which families and individuals deal with the unexpected. It is also a proud affirmation of the primacy of life, its fecundity, its survival, but in making so strident an affirmation, Gordimer oversteps the authenticity of her genius, so that the second half of this book feels like it claims much but says little. Get a life is still a book that cries out to be read, however, if only for the glorious first half, which is as good a demonstration as any of Gordimer at her best.

Notes

[1] Okay, that's an overstatement. What about Orwell? And Koestler wrote a couple of good books. And what about Didion. Oh damn.

[2] It's interesting, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, that that's exactly how I felt about The House Gun, as well - another novel about parents and children where the first half left me shocked with how word perfect is was, but the second part tailed off into something much less compelling.

Still crazy after all these years

2005-12-18T15:25:00.000-05:00

Brokeback Mountain

Return to their natural courses
To resume old acquaintances
Step out occasionally
And speculate who had been damaged the most
Easy time will determine if these consolations
Will be their reward
The arc of a love affair
Waiting to be restored
You take two bodies and you twirl them into one
Their hearts and their bones
And they won't come undone

- Paul Simon 'Hearts and Bones'

Every now and then, Hollywood gets it right. Every now and then someone manages to make a movie that actually lives up to its hype, a movie that manages, despite your worst intentions, to get past your defenses and touch you, move you. The kind of movie where you're grateful when the lights don't go on at the end of the screening so no one can see the tears in your eyes.

Brokeback Mountain is one of those movies. Okay, so it's a little too long, a little too protracted and there are parts in the middle where you're not sure Ang Lee knows what he's doing. And yes, it's obvious and simplistic and possibly, just possibly, a little overdone in bits - which is all to say it's Hollywood. But it's also an achingly beautiful love story, an exploration of desire and loss, of passion and duty like nothing I've seen made this decade.

The first thing you notice about the movie, ironically enough, is the landscapes, the stunning clarity of Ang Lee's vision as he creates a world of breathless stills. Frame after frame of this movie looks like it could come out of an art collection - Lee captures the timelessness of Americana here - recalling (and brilliantly subverting) both the Marlboro commercials and the urban portraits of American photographers like William Eggleston and William Christenberry. If it were nothing else, Brokeback Mountain would still be a thrilling visual treat, a joy to watch simply for its cinematography.

Except, of course, that there's much, much more to this film. As everyone presumably knows by now, Brokeback Mountain is the story of two young men who spend a summer tending sheep up in the mountains of Wyoming and end up falling in love with each other. Unable to accept or even acknowledge the depth of their feelings for each other, the two separate once their brief interlude is over, and go back to living their 'normal' lives in the world. Or try to. The central theme of much of the movie is that love is not a beast so easily tamed. These two are necessary to each other, as only lovers can be, and the secret compromise of a relationship that they finally arrive at - an occassional week of vacation stolen away from home and family, wandering the great Wyoming outdoors which is the only land where they are safe, the only place they dare call home - becomes both their most lasting sorrow and the only meaningful thing they have left to live for.

Written out in words this way the story seems trite, even farcical. It is anything but. Brokeback Mountain is a compelling and honest portrait of two people struggling to invent themselves, struggling to recognise the truth of their own feelings, struggling to wrest a little breathing space from a too crowded world. It is a movie about men trapped in the bodies of cowboys, about two people struggling to break free of the social stereotypes that define what it means to be a 'man'. At the heart of the violence with which these lovers collide, at the core of the trembling mix of savagery and tenderness that is the closest thing they have to intimacy, lies the soul's struggle to be free of its own self image. These are men wrestling with angels.

They are also, in the truest and most glorious sense of the word, lovers. In the early parts of the film, Lee captures with glowing delicacy the joy, the helplessness, the very silliness of falling in love, so that the spartan Wyoming landscape is transformed into a second Eden, to which the knowledge of the world comes like a serpent, poisoning the love that these two feel for each other, forcing it into a pretend nonchalance. Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in the film is where the two men, their summer job done, part. The wordlessness of that moment is so poignant, so manifestly unfair, that it makes you want to cry out with the certain knowledge of everything these two have left unsaid.

What follows is a long and tortured denouement that is like a slow, sad adagio, a tone perfect movement of memory and loss. This could easily have slipped into bathos - that it does not is due largely to the talents of Heath Ledger, who delivers an intense and towering performance as a quiet, conflicted Ennis Del Mar, a man who, unable to trust his feelings, takes sides against them, falling back onto the very conventions that stifle him, hold him hostage. Ledger is the very incarnation of unspoken longing - to watch him act is to see the dumb pain that love can be, is to see a man punish himself for his own happiness. Shakespeare writes: "A blank, my lord. She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?" To see Ledger in Brokeback Mountain is to see these words brought passionately to life.

In the end, Brokeback mountain itself represents many things. On the one hand it is the landscape of human emotions, its empty, stretching vistas eloquent with the infinite possibilities of love, with the myriad different ways in which we connect to each other, find ecstacy and consolation in each other's souls and bodies. In this sense it is also represents freedom - as the movie shifts back and forth between the dismal, cramped realities of the two men's everyday lives and the soaring natural beauty of the land that lies around them, so small a distance away from the cities they live in - the land around Brokeback mountain comes to represent the secret wildnernesses where we are all free to be ourselves, away from society's judgements. But Brokeback mountain is also a metaphor for loneliness, for the hard, shelterless land that those of us who leave society behind in search of love must choose to ride. This is a harsh and unremitting land, a land where even mountains can get their backs broken, a land that few of the emotions that go by the name of love among us could hope to survive in for very long. This movie is a tribute to precisely the kind of weather-beaten taciturn love that can survive being out in the cold, a tribute to the brave, soft-spoken men who will risk everything, leave all that they have behind, just to ride the heart's high countries for as long as they possibly can.

I would sum up my thoughts on the movie if I could, but I don't have the words. Best to use Ginsberg then:

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love--
cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy--

must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's whatI wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

- Allen Ginsberg 'Song'

Song of the bleeding throat

2005-12-14T08:18:00.000-05:00

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

The point of all magic, of all ceremony, is control. By turning our fear and grief to ritual we reestablish our dominion over the world, regain the illusion, so important to us, of being able to cope. This is all faith amounts to - a willing suspension of disbelief, a renewal of the idea that the world is somehow for us, about us. The christian tradition emphasises guilt because guilt implies agency, implies the possibility of choice. We are mistaken, we have sinned, we have not simply been overtaken by circumstance. This is both fiction and the opposite of fiction. Tennessee Williams writes: "I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." This is the logic of the voodoo doll - by replicating the truth as a work of art we impose our will upon it, or imagine that we could so impose our will if we chose to. This does not make the truth any easier to understand - it is not about trying to 'make sense of what happened' - but it may make it easier to accept.

It is in this sense that Joan Didion's touching, exquisite new book is truly magical. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's account of a year in her life following the death of her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, on December 30, 2003. It is a moving chronicle of grief [2], loss and memory, an unparalleled portrait of a mind in anguish, struggling to adjust to the violence of the truth, struggling not so much to heal as to survive, to protect itself from its own worst demons. Didion writes: "This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." It is a moving book because of the intense honesty that Didion brings to this enterprise, her unwillingness to stylise, to fictionalise. This is the non-fiction book of the year because of the way it manages to impose a clarity of treatment without ever deteriorating into fiction. Berryman writes: "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back." It's the image that best sums up this book.

Three things make The Year of Magical Thinking the marvellous book it is. First, there's the writing itself. Didion is a master of clear, eloquent prose; her sentences have a formal, almost incantatory precision that bursts upon you like the freshness of newly laundered sheets. She is a writer who can be both grand and exact at the same time, her language at once careful and breathtaking. Her writing is a mesmerising mirror to stare into at any time, but when the face it shows you is so haunting, the effect is only enhanced.

The second thing that makes this book so effective is, of course, the fact that it is non-fiction. If Didion (or any other writer) had written a book of fiction where the narrator undergoes exactly the same experiences, we might have dismissed it as improbable, unrealistic, overdone. The fact that the events she writes about actually happened makes the book darker, more frightening. The way no amount of fancy special effects can ever replicate the horror of actual war footage. This apprehension of the overwhelming consequence of reality is itself a magical, or at least a superstitous one. It's as though we genuinely believed that those who had died had somehow been sacrificed for the making of what we were seeing or reading. As if this book, this image, this newsreel was the purpose of their deaths.

What makes the eerie closeness of this reality even scarier in this case is the epilogue that we know will follow, though Didion herself is yet to discover - the death of her only daughter, Quintana (who is greviously ill for large parts of the book, but recovers by the end of it), in August this year. There is a vicarious element to this horror, an almost voyeuristic interest in another person's tragedy, but there is also a deep well-spring of empathy. We have all known or imagined the death of a loved one; we all live, every day of our lives, with the knowledge, not of our own mortality, but of the mortality of those we care for. It could happen to me, you think, reading the book, in fact, it almost certainly will. That is why it is so easy to imagine yourself in Didion's position, and while you may at first dislike her for raising such ghosts, you will come, by the end of the book, to be grateful for her courage, her clear-headedness, in confronting them.

What makes The Year of Magical Thinking so special to me, though, is the way in which Didion copes with her loss. Confronted with disaster, Didion retreats into a world of ideas, of detail and language, of poetry and information. ("In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control"). Memory is the enemy here, because it brings on a rawness of feeling that is not to be tolerated. If we can only analyse the situation, if we can only verbalise it, explain it to ourselves, categorise and cross-reference it in some frame of thought, we will be able to deal with it. This is the pathology of the hyper-intellectual, the reaction of those who, though they may appreciate the solicitude of other people, can never find true solace in it, and whose last refuge must always be in their own minds. Didion uses facts to understand her loss - reading reference books, downloading data from the Internet - she uses poetry (in the course of the book she quotes cummings, Auden, Eliot, Hopkins, Schwartz and Shakespeare). This is a reaction I recognise, because it is my own. I do not turn to people in search of solace. If it is comfort I need, I turn to Shelley and Donne, to Eliot and Browning and Shakespeare; I turn to Schubert and Mozart. That is why Didion's nightmare seems so authentic, so compelling - as I sat reading the book with tears rolling down my face it occured to me it was not her grief I was crying for, it was my own. Plath writes "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions./ Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. /I am not cruel, only truthful". Didion's book has the same quality.

In the end, Didion's discovery is that this retreat into the facts does not help. Or rather, that it helps, but not in the way that one supposes. It helps in that it sustains us, keeps us alive; but it does not make the truth any easier to confront when we finally get around to confronting it. The magic that Didion is seeking to deploy through this book is only that - a trick, a sleight of hand - important to our sanity, but ultimately little more than a diversion. The reality of emotion cannot be conjured away by the wave of a magic wand, or the chanting of sentences, no matter how beautiful. The journey to recovery is hard fought and never complete. "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it", Didion writes. And it is watching the aching steadfastness of the way that Didion explores this new place that makes this book both immediate and timeless.

As I finished the book, that thought that occured to me (so morbid, yet so realistic) was that I needed to own a copy of this book. No, I needed to own several. Because the time might come when I too may have to deal with such grief, such calamity. And if or when that time comes, this is the book I want to have with me. This is the book that might just see me through.

Notes

[1] The title of this post comes from Whitman - When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd:
"Song of the bleeding throat!/Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know/If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)"

[2] Grief, not mourning. It is characteristic of Didion that she draws the important distinction between the two.

Onward Union Soldiers

2005-12-13T10:19:00.000-05:00

E L Doctorow's The March

The first thing you notice about Doctorow's The March is the momentum. Like the great military march that it seeks to describe, Doctorow's new novel is a relentless procession, driven, energetic, overwhelming. Characters drop in and out of the book, joining the forward drive of the plot, staying with The March for a while, and then dropping out. But the key protagonist of the book is the march itself - an entity that Doctorow himself compares to a long, hungry organism, scrounging its way through the country in search of victory.

The March is Doctorow's novel about the sweeping advance of Sherman's army through the states of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina - a march that was, arguably, critical to the eventual defeat of the confederate forces in the Civil war (for more on this, see the current issue of the New York Review of Books, which has an article by James M McPherson on the partnership between Grant and Sherman - unfortunately available only to subscribers). Doctorow's perspective on the march is intensely personal though, and the book populates the march with a cast of varied characters - including a white-skinned African American girl, a ruthlessly professional doctor, a young Southern woman who joins the Union army as a nurse, a Confederate soldier turned spy with delusions of grandeur and many others. The key point about the book though is that through it all Doctorow sticks faithfully to the march - the point where the characters leave the march is also the point where they leave the book.

It's this that makes the book as compelling as it is - the stories themselves are intelligent but unremarkable (they have a strangely ubiquitous quality, as though you'd read the same thing somewhere before) but it's the breathlessness with which the action speeds past, the blending of some achingly lovely and telling scenes with this almost unswerving pace, that makes this book (or at least the first two sections of it) an exciting read. Doctorow conveys the propulsive genius of the march beautifully, and his vignettes blend tender irony with honest heartbreak.

If only he'd kept it up. Where the novel begins to let one down is in the third section, where the action flags and then dies away. In part, I suspect, this is deliberate, and reflects the tiredness of these men who have marched so far and so long to arrive finally at a victory that they are too weary to even exult in. As the joy at the Confederate surrender is tempered by the bitter news about Lincoln's assassination, the sombre note that the book ends on seems justified, even exact. The real trouble, though, is that by the end of the book Doctorow abandons many of his more interesting characters and instead focuses much of the action on the historical figures themselves - on Sherman, on Lincoln. This, I think, is a mistake, not only because it severely limits the imagination that Doctorow is able to bring to bear on the plot, but also because it means that Doctorow begins to take the whole thing very seriously, so that the balance between the light-hearted and the tragic is destroyed and the novel descends into a sort of brooding melancholy from which Doctorow is never quite able to recover it. Besides, by this point Doctorow's piling of coincidence upon coincidence to make the stories of the different characters tie together has become cloying. It's a huge march, after all, there are literally tens of thousands of men on the move, yet somehow the paths of the various characters go on intersecting. It's not that this is hard to believe (though it does strain the credulity at times) it's also that it's unnecessary - Doctorow could just as easily have kept the characters apart and it would have been a better book for it.

As it is, The March is, for the large part, a powerful, driven book, not perhaps so moving as simply full of movement, a stream of wonderful images that will hold you in rapt attention and convey both the urgency and the despair of a crucial time in American history.

The Chronic Ills of Narnia

2005-12-12T11:20:00.000-05:00

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

As someone who enjoys both writers, the key point to me about C.S. Lewis has always been precisely that he's not Tolkien. Narnia and Middle Earth represent two fundamentally opposite ways of approaching the fantasy genre - one linguistic-historical, the other theological. Tolkien's world is richly-imagined, almost baroque; Middle Earth is a true cornucopia of detail, an alternate universe of culture and myth and history and language so compelling, that in it's greater context the characters themselves seem almost like afterthoughts, as though Tolkien was simply using them to explore his larger fantasy. Narnia, by contrast, is a much flatter country, more idea than place, a flawed, inconsistent world (how, for example, can you go hunting in a world where the animals are your subjects) whose very thinness makes it magical. Lewis, it seems to me, spares the bare minimum amount of effort into making Narnia credible - his concern is primarily with larger questions of faith and morality, not with the details of some mythic world that is, to him, little more than a convenient setting for his moralistic story. What makes Narnia compelling, if at all, is not the wealth of detail, but their very sparseness, so that the few details that Lewis does put in (that glorious lamppost growing out of the earth, for example) shine out in all their sublime glory.

In the end, though, the magic of the Narnia Chronicles is less about Narnia and more about the key characters - about Lucy and Aslan and Edmund and Peter. It is Tolkien who is interested in the grand sweep of events, Tolkien who is trying to create a new epic; Lewis's book is little more than a simple fable, a book for that ephemeral quality of mind that we call childhood, and the difference between the two is the difference between myth and religion. That Tolkien's is the grander work, that Tolkien himself is the more compelling, more talented writer, is, to me unquestionable - but comparing Lewis to Tolkien is like comparing some pristine country inn to the Ritz-Carlton; if there's a book that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe should be compared to, I would think it's Peter Pan, not Lord of the Rings.

This is a point that's completely wasted on the makers of the new movie version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In their telling of it, Lewis's story looks and sounds exactly like the Lord of the Rings, and suffers terribly in the comparison. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not a long book, and is more aptly described as achingly simple than grand, but the makers of the movie have stretched it out into a two and a half hour melodrama, and the result is a movie that grows exceedingly long and incredibly thin. Mere lines in the book take up five to ten minutes on the screen, so that the momentum of Lewis's imagination lags badly, and the worst things about the book - it's sentimentalism, it's lack of coherent logic, things that are easily glossed over in the simplicity and understatement of Lewis's writing - get blown out of proportion here.

The result is a film that can only be described as dreary. The battle scenes seem fake, the heroism of the children is undermined, and Aslan converted into a tangible lion rather than a sort of overarching presence, is diminished. Part of the problem is that the book is more verbal than visual - Lewis has a great gift for conveying things to your imagination that cannot be expressed visually. In the book, for instance, the retreat of winter from Narnia is an event of absolute ecstasy, to read the description of it is to experience a quickening of the pulse, a lightening of the heart. In the movie it's just a lot of silly special effects.

Not that the movie is a complete failure. The parts that still work are the parts where the special effects are laid aside and the characters become the focus. Georgie Henley does a wonderful job as Lucy Pevensie, and her simple, feeling nature is even more the centre of the film that it was of the book. In general, the performances here are good (Jim Broadbent puts in a wonderful cameo as the professor) and if the film makers had just not tried to put in so many special effects, had only managed to shake off the ghost of LOTR, this could have been a good, if not great, movie.

As it is, it's one long yawn of a film, best avoided, or (if, like me, you have to see it because it's Narnia - no matter how crummy) then fitfully slept through. There is a deep magic in Narnia, but you won't find it in this film.

The power of fragility

2005-12-04T18:14:00.000-05:00

Yasunari Kawabata's Thousand Cranes

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

- e e cummings

Among all the great writers of the last century, there is no one quite like Kawabata. No other writer combines such a glorious sparseness of line with so exquisite a delicacy of tone. No other writer can write prose that is at once so simple, so unadorned, and yet so aching. Kawabata is at once the most poetic of writers and the least lyrical - no other author could write novels hundreds of pages long, and still have them deliver the emotional and aesthetic impact of a fine haiku. Kawabata's novels take your breath away with the very fragility of their persistence, the very thinness of their translucence. The beauty of his novels is that they are at once timeless and tremblingly alive, so that reading them, it is difficult to believe that they will survive, let alone conquer. Kawabata's prose is like fine, ancient porcelain, it is not simply the aching skill of his craftsmanship, it is the miracle that something so easily broken could have lasted through the centuries.

Thousand Cranes, Kawabata's passionate, moving novel about young love tainted by old ghosts is a good example of this. The novel centres around a young bachelor, whose search for love is haunted by the memory of his father's infidelity, and the suffering and guilt that lingers on in the young man's heart from those days. As the novel progresses, this young man comes into contact with two of his father's former mistresses, one of whom he ends up having an affair with (and who helps him to achieve a better understanding of the happiness and passion that his father sought), the other who repeatedly insinuates himself into her life, trying to take control of it, and poisoning his young life by becoming the embodiment of his own tortured conscience. At the heart of the novel, though, is the relationship between this young man and a young woman who he comes to fall in love with, the daughter of one of his wife's mistresses, and the struggle of these two young people to break free of their common past, of the ghosts of their parents, that threaten to stifle them with shame and disgust.

In many ways, then, Thousand Cranes is a ghost story. It is a novel about the permanence of the past, about the insistent gravity that it exercises on us, of how we, struggling to be our own selves, slip inevitably back into the old disguises, the old forms, the old conceits. History, in Kawabata, has the inevitably of ritual; ghosts are not things we remember but things we inherit, ceremonies of longing and desire that even the strongest among us may prove too weak to escape. As the novel flows inexorably towards its conclusion, you come to slowly appreciate the patience, the infinite delicacy with which Kawabata has laid his snares. Behind the cunning simplicity of his plot lies a great depth of psychological determinism. Things turn out the way they do in Thousand Cranes because that is the way they must, yet this is far from being a predictable novel - rather the inevitably of what happens is only obvious after the fact; the novel constantly surprises you, but after you get over your surprise you can see why things had to be that way.

What makes Thousand Cranes such an exquisite read is that it is virtual palimpsest of metaphor and symbolism. Like a great miniaturist, Kawabata is a master of implicit meanings, capable of imbuing the most mundane objects with infinite consequence. Thus the novel turns the pristine simplicity of the tea ceremony into both a metaphor for the delicate maneouverings of desire and a symbol of the past that the two young people are trying to escape from, trying not to relive - a contradiction that is not restricted only to the tea ceremony, but lies at the very centre of the book's dramatic tension. Again and again, these young people deny their interest in the ceremony, again and again they claim to have given it up, yet their own emotions prove this a false denial, and the power of the ceremony proves too much for them to escape. The utensils used for the ceremony are also metaphors - passed down from generation to generation, they are symbols of the timelessness of the human versus the mortality of man, of the way the universal survives and repeats itself in the specific. In this sense, the tea ceremony is a symbolic mirror for the situation of the two young people, but this situation itself is an allegory for the larger relationship between the individual and the timeless, between the ubiquity of desire and the specificity of each man's love. What ultimately taints and destroys the young lovers is their knowledge of this contradiction - that the things we own and consider special to us, may be little more than keepsakes bequeathed to us by time, magical forms that will survive beyond us, continuing their endless journey with other masters when we have turned to dust. In Thousand Cranes, the lovers try to break away from this cycle, and end up being destroyed by it.

What's amazing about all this is that Thousand Cranes is not even Kawabata's finest book. Of the ones I have read, I would place both Snow Country and Beauty and Sadness above it, and I have a special fondness for the Master of Go. Thousand Cranes may be the most expressive and impassioned of Kawabata's work, but for that reason it seems to me to lack the almost zen-like calmness of some of his other work. For all that, this is an astonishingly graceful, almost pristine novel. Kawabata is a line-artist, his novels are not great baroque paintings adorned with passionate colours, but rather sketches of hypnotic power, drawings where the simple accuracy of the line makes the figures come alive, so that the merest hint is enough for you to imagine the rest.

Bottomline: Read Kawabata. If you haven't read him already, then Thousand Cranes is as good a place as any to start (better perhaps, given that it's shorter and perhaps a little more accessible). If you have read some of his other work but haven't got around to Thousand Cranes, then you already know what I'm talking about and I can only say that Thousand Cranes won't disappoint you. All this is not important though. What's important is only that you read this man, because he is one of the greatest artists of the last century, a true master of his form, and a writer your life will be poorer for for not having read.

A fine imbalance

2005-12-01T14:03:00.000-05:00

William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

"there is so great a fever on goodness, that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in request; and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst: much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news."

- William Shakespeare

Three things amaze me each time I watch a Shakespeare play performed:

First, I am always stunned by how well the humour comes across. That Shakespeare's great poetry still works is hardly surprising - it's not just that the words are timeless and the ideas universal, it's also that long years of use has made Shakespeare's fine phrases an inherent part of the language, so that to hear the great monologues delivered is to revisit the English tongue in its essence. It's the jokes that surprise me, the silly little puns, many of them employing meanings no longer familiar to modern ears; the sly little witticisms that on the page seem dull and cloying, but erupt on the stage in cheerful spontaneity. Every time I hear an audience laughing at Shakespeare's jokes, every time the genius of his comedy forces a loud chuckle from my throat, I wonder at the greatness of the gift that can still connect to its audience four hundred years after the lines were written.

Second, and this is particularly true of the 'lesser' comedies, I'm always amazed by the sheer baroque richness of Shakespeare - the way that, even though you may have read the play half a dozen times before, some phrase or speech that had escaped your attention thus far will ambush you, catch you by the ear. How lines that you may have glanced over without really paying attention to, will suddenly take on a new significance. The quote above is a good example - it's a line spoken by the Duke in Act 3 Scene 2 of the play, a line that I, for one, had no memory of, until the performance I attended last night (it's coming, it's coming) brought it alive for me. It's such an apt comment about the times we live in, yet it's a throwaway line in the play, one of the thousands of mini-speeches that Shakespeare intersperses his dialogue with.

The third thing that always impresses me about Shakespeare is how flexible his plays are, how open to interpretation. It's not just the psychological richness of his characters allows for wider exploration, it's also the magical way in which the words themselves manage to be interpretable without being ambiguous or indecipherable. This is one of the reasons that I'm so wary of 'experimental' Shakespeare - it's no so much that I'm a purist (though there's that too) it's more that I fundamentally believe that Shakespeare is protean enough so that every performance of his plays is an experiment in itself. You don't need to change settings or alter dialogues, even if you stuck rigidly to the text there are a myriad different interpretations you could try out.

And so to last night's performance. The Globe Theatre Company is down in Philadelphia, and performed Measure for Measure at the Annenberg Centre last night. It was a very 'proper', traditional performance - complete with live music from authentic 16th century instruments (jew's harps, bagpipes, dulcimers, hautboys), all male performers, and Elizabethan dancing. And yet, it managed, despite sticking strictly to the text, to make me see the play in a way I never had before.

But first, the play itself. Measure for Measure has always been, and continues to be, one of the least impressive of Shakespeare's plays. I've always thought of it as half a good play - the first two acts are exceedingly well done, and the third has promise, but by the fourth act it feels like the play is already over, and the finale goes on and on beyond the point of tedium. This is extraordinarily uncharacteristic for Shakespeare - it's possibly the only play of his where the dramatic intensity peters out so swiftly, leaving you impatient for the play to end. The problem is, I think, that Measure for Measure is a play stuck in limbo between the serious and the comic. It's not really light-hearted enough to sparkle as a comedy and carry you along in the sheer exuberance of its prose, nor is it grim or threatening enough to be taken seriously. There is no real tension in the end of the play, you know already what is going to happen, and so the drawn out machinations by which the Duke finally brings the play to its final (inevitable) close seem contrived and overdone, like the ending to a Brahms symphony. It's nice enough, but you wish he'd get on with it.

Much has been said about the themes of sexuality that the play explores. Personally, I find this the least interesting part of the play. For one, the exploration of sexuality here seems too explicit, too overblown. Admittedly, Shakespeare lays out the central issues well, and much of the speech making on either side has the shock of the familiar. But that's precisely the trouble - it's all speech making - this is the kind of preachiness one expects from Marlowe, not from Shakespeare. The other problem, of course, is that in many ways the 'debate' itself seems dated, almost irrelevant. Granted there are still people around in our world who cling to the ridiculous idea of chastity, but how many of them spend their free time reading Shakespeare? My other, larger point, however, is that in my own reading of the play the issue is not so much sex as justice. Shakespeare makes no real claims for either repression or liberation, his key point is simply the problem of consistency, the great battle between justice and mercy, between compassion and logic. In many ways, the bulk of the second Act of Measure for Measure feels like a dress rehearsal for the courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice, except that Portia and Shylock are much richer characters than Isabella and Angelo, and the language in Merchant of Venice is sharper, more acute.

This, I think, is the more interesting theme of Measure for Measure - this principle of things balancing, things cancelling out (it's ironic that the play that tries to lay this out is dramatically the most unbalanced of Shakespeare's plays - with an exciting opening and a tedious end). A large part of the action in the play is motivated by the Duke's desire to given Angelo every benefit of doubt, so that the entire play becomes, in some sense, a thrilling exercise in falsification, a study of analytics and evidence unparalleled in Shakespeare's other work. That the Duke goes to such lengths to allow Angelo leniency is, of course, the key contrast of the play, and becomes the cornerstone of a deeper meditation on government, authority and the use of power. Shakespeare's great insight in Measure for Measure is that the use of power is best ceded to those who do not desire it, and it is this that lies at the heart of the play - the sexuality is just a red herring.

The Duke himself is, by far, the most interesting character in the play, the most difficult to get a hold of. The reason for this, I think, is that at there is a flaw in the heart of the Duke's character, whether placed there intentionally or otherwise I would not presume to say. The flaw is this - in a play that claims to set tyranny against compassion, the Duke is, in some sense, the coldest and least humane of all the characters. Even Angelo, for all his barbarism, is motivated by his own weaknesses, his own appetites. But what is it that motivates the duke, other than a whimsical self-absorption? This is a man who subjects all the others in the play (not to mention the audience) to protracted sequence of accusation and suffering, merely so he can, in the end, make it all come out 'right' with the glee of a schoolyard conjuror. The Duke's own explanation for this is that he is testing the others, but that in itself is hardly the picture of compassion we would like to believe in, and besides it is a hard explanation to swallow. The truth, I think, is that the Duke is entirely self-obssessed, and shows mercy to others only as a way of glorifying himself, of creating an effect (it is instructive that the one man the Duke finds himself unable to forgive is the one man he claims slanders him - yet is this really slander? Is it not likely that Lucio is telling the truth, and it is the Duke who is not willing to hear this of himself). The Duke would like us to believe, no doubt, that in sparing Angelo's life he is being merciful, yet did not he almost knowingly set up Angelo for the fall that Angelo takes. Did he not, in fact, select Angelo to replace him for a while, precisely so that Angelo would take the letter of the law too literally and allow the Duke to return to show off his 'wisdom'. The best that can be said of the Duke, I think, is that he has no truly malafide intent. He does not mean to actively harm anyone, would prefer to leave others better off if he can, but is primarily concerned only with himself.

What was Shakespeare trying to suggest here? At one level, the Duke is a stand-in for the writer himself - certainly he shares with many of Shakespeare's great characters a considerable level of self-awareness. And equally he is very much the orchestrator of the whole play, the others being little more than puppets who he shamelessly manipulates into the contrived 'glory' of his self-celebrating ending. At another level, it has always seemed to me (though this might be more my own perspective than anything else) that the Duke exemplifies a vision of God as a self-important though ultimately well-meaning overlord. Religion is a constant presence in the play - from Isabella's incipient sisterhood, to Angelo's soliloquy about prayer, to the notion of Claudio as a sort of inverted Christ figure (it is hardly coincidence that two men - a murderer and a man who most believe to be innocent are to be executed on the same day; and that Angelo - as Pilate - makes the choice that Claudio be executed first; only this time the Duke intervenes - giving us Shakespeare's version of how the Passion of Christ should have played out if God were truly merciful). Reading the play with this lens makes for a fascinating interpretation - the idea of a dispossessed God, ineffectual and pompous, roaming the world trying to set things right, but jealous of his own reputation, and concerned more with the impression he makes than with the people he is trying to help.

(This is not, of course, the only such figure that Shakespeare created. Again, there is much about the Duke that seems like a preliminary sketch of that greatest of all God-figures - Prospero; the key differences are that Prospero is both sterner in execution and less selfish in design - if that last Act of the Tempest is one of the finest things Shakespeare ever wrote, it is because Prospero himself is sacrificed, foresworn, forced to give up his powers in order to make the happy ending come truly alive. As a metaphor for what it takes out of a writer to write a really good play I can think of nothing better. It is a lesson Shakespeare clearly hadn't learnt in Measure for Measure)

Yesterday's performance did an excellent job of exploring the Duke's character. As played by Mark Rylance, the Duke is an ineffectual, petty and fumbling man, his greatest speeches turned to the ramblings of a self-important yet nervous pedant. That such a man, so clearly opposed to our idea of a great leader, should turn out to be the one to make the things come out right, is a wonderful insight - and an interpretation of the Duke that I'd honestly never considered before.

The other character in the play who didn't agree with my own image of her was Isabella. In my mind, Isabella has always been a meek, shy and withdrawn person, an innocent and pure being who is plunged into the intrigues of Angelo's lust and the politics of the time by the need to rescue her brother. As such she is a fragile, grieving figure, eminently sensible and strong in virtue, but with nowhere near the liveliness or confidence of Shakespeare's great heroines - Viola, Rosalind, Portia, Katherine. That's not how Edward Hogg played her though. In the performance last night, Isabella was haughty and proud, a puritan in the truest sense of the word. If anything troubles this Isabella, it is not so much grief as frustration at her own powerlessness. This is not an interpretation of Isabella I agree with. It seems to me to fit fairly dubiously with either Isabella's own lines in the play or the action surrounding her, and it further sterilises a play that is already fairly hollow emotionally. It would have been better, I think, if Isabella had been a gentler, more waif-like creature.

Overall, it was a wonderful performance of the play though - one that supplied new insight while still managing to satisfy the purist in me. Measure for Measure is still not a play I care for much (at least as Shakespeare plays go) but yesterday's performance made me appreciate it more than I had before.

The soul selects her own society

2005-11-30T17:34:00.000-05:00

Raymond Carver's Call if you need me

"Nobody can write so simply about ordinary things as you can."

- Gorky (in a letter to Chekhov)

Maybe not, but they can come pretty damn close. And that's exactly what Raymond Carver's short stories (collected in What we talk about when we talk about love, Cathedral and Where I'm calling from) manage to do. These are short stories of breathtaking simplicity, narratives stripped to so bare an essence that they seem to exist in an atmosphere all their own, a thinner, clearer light that magnifies the most human of gestures into something stark and universal. There is little drama in these stories - they seem unplanned, almost candid - yet it is precisely this lack of frenzy that makes them deeply meaningful, as though Carver had succeeded in capturing the fundamental Ordnariness of our lives. It's as if someone had picked up a camera and just filmed a few random scenes from your everyday existence, only it turned out that the scenes he picked were scenes from everyone else's existence as well as your own. Comparisons to Hemingway are inevitable I suppose (and personally, I've always thought Hemingway's shorter work his best) but for me Carver is the finer writer, because his prose is less posturing and more amenable to emotion than Hemingway's.

Call if you need me is a collection of five posthumous short stories coupled with a body of Carver's unpublished work including essays, introductions and some early stories. While the other stuff is interesting enough (and some of the early stories are fascinating - particularly one called Hair where a hair stuck between the protagonist's teeth becomes a metaphor for doubt and the nagging sense of a life gone wrong) the highlight of the book is undoubtably the five unpublished stories. These showcase Carver at his finest. There is that same sense of calm suspense, a dull yearning ache of supressed anguish that informs the narrative like a cloud soundlessly gathering; and then the ending breaks through the inertia to shed the trembling light of its understanding on all that has passed before.

There is nothing particularly exceptional about the plots of these stories. Rather, they are, in strict adherence to a creed laid down by Chekhov and cited by Carver at the start of the book, ordinary stories about ordinary people. A homeless and recovering alcoholic spends a few days as a paying guest in a new city, trying to discover some meaning to his life; a couple enjoy a final meal with their landlords before going their seperate ways for the winter; a husband and wife watch as their neighbour is struck by tragedy, and wonder what they can do for her; a man meets his wife's old friends and silently confronts the ghosts of his and his wife's past; a middle-aged couple try, and fail, to keep their marriage together. These are sad, lonely stories - portraits of quiet desperation, of lives made fragile by time and emotion. Yet Carver, with his simple, straightforward prose manages to discover in them a timeless beauty, manages to find, with clinical accuracy, the pulse of the poetry that they beat with.

One of Carver's key insights is that the heart's fences are not easily patrolled, that the landscape of emotion gives way reluctantly, if at all, to boundaries of action. We are who we are, Carver seems to say, and while a combination of personality and circumstance may make it inevitable that we make certain decisions, act in certain ways, these cannot change what we feel for each other. The habits of the heart die hard.

It is this recognition that lends Carver's characters a certain tenderness, a reluctant grace. When the couple in the story that gives the book its title finally decide that their marriage is over they do not separate with bitter curses or barely repressed anger. Instead, the decision to part becomes, for them, a kind of release - so that they linger in the dying twilight of their togetherness, sharing the small intimacies of being together for the last time. Carver's great gift is that he understands that there is no contradiction here - that it is possible to both deeply care for someone without actually wanting to be with them. This is not duplicity, it is the reality of human desire. We do what we must, but we feel what we can. [1]

My own introduction to Carver came primarily through his poems, which share with his fiction both a simplicity of wording and the ability to leave you breathless with insight. Since then I have come to read and re-read his writing, until my admiration for his work has come to express itself in attempts (both conscious and unconscious) to emulate his style. Call if you need me is a small yet important step in that journey, a loose clutch of scattered little gems that is a must read for Carver fans everywhere.

Links:

a. Talk about coincidences - I sit down to write this and discover that Karthik has a post on Carver's Where I'm calling from. Go read.

b. For more on Carver's poetry, see Minstrels - particularly this submission, that says everything I wanted to say about Carver's poems better than I could myself.

Notes:

[1] In one of Carver's early stories (included in this collection) a young man who is to be publicly sacrificed and the woman who is to be his executioner fall in love. Carver describes beautifully how they spend their last day together, ending up on an altar in the stadium where they lovingly bid farewell to each other before she cuts his heart out.

With malice towards none, with charity for all

2005-11-20T17:40:00.000-05:00

Carson McCuller's Clock Without Hands

There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous

- Eccl. 8:14

Before there was Marilynne Robinson, before there was Harper Lee, there was Carson McCullers. McCullers is one of the great unsung geniuses of American Literature - a writer who combines exquisite prose with a quick eye and a lyrical sensibility. Graham Greene once compared her, favourably, to Faulkner; Tennessee Williams applauds her work for possessing "an understanding beyond knowledge, a compassion beyond sentiment". McCullers' literary output is not large - three novels, a handful of luminous short stories, a play - but every piece is a miracle of aching precision, of gentle and heartbreaking beauty.

Clock without Hands, McCuller's last novel, is no exception. Set in the town of Milan, Georgia, the novel is an exploration of the American South on the brink of desegregation - a book about the difficult and lonely ways that the Old South comes to deal (and not deal) with its ghosts. The story is told from the perspective of four characters: Malone, a storekeeper who has been diagnosed with leukemia and is trying to make sense of the "tedious labyrinth of his life" in the last summer that is left to him; Judge Clane, a bigoted ex-congressmen, a senile and powerless man trying to fill the lonely days of his dotage with the memories of past glory; Jester Clane, his grandson, a sensitive young adolescent trying to find an identity for himself in the cross-fire of ideas that his world has become; and Sherman Pew, an angry, aggressive black man, seeking desperately for acknowledgement from the world around him. Together, these characters make up a powerful allegory of the South in the days when the civil rights movement was still nascent; in the microcosm of their Georgian hometown they are like stage hands, setting the scene for the greater drama that is inevitably to follow. The novel does not actually take us into this drama - the book ends at the point when the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools is announced, but the certainty of that revolution is a living presence in the story, making this McCullers most overtly political novel.

And yet a political novel is precisely what Clock Without Hands is not. McCullers greatest gift as a writer is her almost boundless capacity for empathy - her ability to not only see things from the point of view of each one of her characters, but to show these points of view directly and simply to the reader, so that you are able to find understanding in your heart for every one of her many players. McCullers' insight is that it is possible to be kind without being partial, to judge without condemning, to be sympathetic without being forgiving. There is no false sentiment here - not for a moment does McCullers waver in her vision of right and wrong - there is only the recognition that to disagree with someone does not mean that you cannot feel sorry for them, cannot see where they are coming from. In a sense, this is what makes McCullers the most American of writers - the spirit of her books is the spirit of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address - "let us judge not, that we be not judged", Lincoln said, and that is, I think, McCullers' greatest, most generous recognition.

And it is in that recognition that McCullers true genius is born. More than any other writer since Chekhov, McCullers understands that the idea of 'character' is a myth. Very few of us are truly good or evil, very few of us have any real talent for either heroism or villainy. These are things that are thrust upon us, not things we are born with. Behind the masks of champion and bigot, of saint and murderer, lie the same tired and intensely human faces, the same confused, tentative and inconsistent souls. There is no reason, in McCullers' book, that a bigoted and corrupt judge cannot also be a senile and laughable old fool who quotes Shakespeare and believes he could have written Gone with the Wind (only better); and no reason why both these people cannot also be an estranged and dying old man struggling to come to terms with the deaths of his beloved wife and son, desperate for love, for admiration. Acts of great horror and acts of great nobility are not committed by men of exceptional parts, but by people like you and me - the Nanny is also Tybalt, Caliban is also Ferdinand. For any other writer managing this duality would be a challenging, even impossible task - McCullers not only manages it effortlessly, she makes these different parts of the character's personality feed upon each other, so that they combine to form a incredibly life-like whole. Her characters are created from the inside, sketched out for us with such crystal clear precision that recognition is immediate and unavoidable. Moreover, McCullers has Shakespeare's facility for combining the tragic and the comic - even at their most tortured her characters are ridiculous, even at their most joking there are serious emotions at play. Laughter and tears are deeply intertwined in McCullers, they are the two sides that make up the coin of every situation.

Add to this the sheer thrill of McCullers sublime prose [1]. Consider the following: "Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order. A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small grey honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallelogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of sward. One this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole."

Bottomline: Clock without Hands is a powerful and sublime book - a novel of delicious humour and tender irony, a book that combines searing, passionate outrage with a deep well-spring of compassion. If sympathy is a virtue, McCullers seems to say, then it is inevitable that the good will suffer unkindness while the evil will seem to prosper; but to deny the enemy his humanity will make us the very thing we oppose. Our only hope is to find a way to love our opponents without agreeing with them, to forgive the lapses of others without losing our own integrity. This is a hard road, and it is the ease with which McCullers helps us to travel it that makes her one of the purest, most moving writers in the language.

[1] The title of the book is a reference to a passage where Malone examines the "alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart." Faced with the certainty of his own death, but uncertain as to its exact timing, Malone is gripped by a feeling of dread and despair that he cannot quite understand or explain. He feels like a man watching a clock without hands. Soch a glorious line, and such a telling allegory for the larger political climate.

The Fondest Heart

2005-11-15T16:58:00.000-05:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores

I can give not what men call love
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not:
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

- P.B. Shelley

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies

- William Shakespeare, 'King Lear' V.3

There was a time, not so long ago, when a new Marquez novel was as exciting as an exotic stranger, a woman so full-bodied, so wholly carnal, that just to glance at her was to become her slave forever, just to be shown that tantalising first line was to be irrevocably seduced. All you had to do was catch one whiff of the book's rich, animal language and you were lost, surrendered to an overwhelming passion, given utterly and hopelessly to the chapters of her caresses, to the sheer lustiness of her characters, to the baroque and endless pleasures of her prose; the sheer energy of her engagement would keep you up through the night, leaving you spent and dizzy until the dawn found you, a broken figure staggering slowly back to the world, sinking into a dream from which you would only emerge in the evening when you went to a bar and drank tequila and bragged to your friends about what you had just experienced. To read Marquez was to know the madness of a love affair, that breathless, headlong rush into a world whose beauty was not meant to be so much admired as embraced.

Memories of my melancholy whores, Marquez's new novel, is not that kind of book. Thinner, less voluptuous; this is a delicate waif of a novel, a story of fragile bones and almost pre-pubescent beauty, a book so supremely unconscious that to even touch it seems like sacrilege.

Not that Marquez stints on local colour here - there is the same tropical sense of place, the raw jungle smell of the writing, and every now and then we get flashes of the old Marquez ("In the afternoons of my final old age no one remembered the immortal Castorina, dead for who knows how long, who had risen from the miserable corners of the river docks to the sacred throne of elder madam, wearing a pirate's patch over the eye she lost in a tavern brawl. Her last steady stud, a fortunate black from Camaguey called Jonas the Galley Slave, had been one of the great trumpet players in Havana until he lost his entire smile in a catastrophic train collision"), but it seems to me that this one of Marquez's quietest, most poetic works, a tender-hearted meditation on the power of love and the perils of old age.

The narrator of Memories of my melancholy whores is a ninety year old man who finds himself strangely drawn to a teenage virgin whom he watches sleeping night after night, never managing to bring himself to consummate with her the night of passion he has paid for. As the book progresses, the narrator finds himself finally experiencing, so late in the course of a life filled with meaningless sexual triumphs, the sublime joy of falling in love - and the glow of that emotion becomes the light by which he defines a new life for himself. The teenage girl (who he names Delgadina, not knowing her real name) and he exchange no words - she is almost always asleep when they are together - but his imagination conjures her into a presence, a ghostly spirit who teaches him how to see the world in an entirely different way. "Love is not a condition of the spirit", Marquez writes, "it is a sign of the zodiac." It is these constellations of feeling that the narrator is learning to read for the first time, and in them he begins to see, dimly, a future he could never before have imagined. The story of Memories of my melancholy whores is the story of the slow, prickly flowering of an old man's passion, a story as gentle and bitter-sweet and reluctant as the love it seeks to describe.

Not that the idea of an old man's lust for a young girl is a new theme for Marquez. Updike, in his review of the book in the New Yorker details the many different avatars of young girls sold into prostitution in Marquez's novels, a list to which I can only add the insistent memory of an episode in Autumn of the Patriarch (my favourite Marquez, btw) where the Patriarch develops a fondness for young schoolgirls, watching them walk by his palace - an appetite that his courtiers sate by arranging for whores dressed in school uniforms. That the new novel is a sadder, more melancholy exploration of this idea is undeniable, though, and Marquez adds an intriguing twist to the plot by ensuring that the girl is always asleep when the narrator is with her, so that her very unconsciousness becomes at once a form of innocence and a metaphor for disdain.

Given the story of the book, the comparison with Lolita is inevitable, but also, I think, misleading. It's not just that Marquez's style and sensibility are very unlike Nabokov's, it's also that his whole endeavour is entirely different. Memories of my melancholy whores is only tangentially a novel about an old man's fascination for a teenage girl, it is more a story of an old man's reflection on his own life and the reality of his old age. The right comparison for Delgadina is not Lolita, but Dulcinea - like Quixote, the narrator of Marquez's novel is a man driven by an impossible quest, and despite her undeniable physical presence in the bed next to him, the object of his affections is more fiction than fact.

All in all, Memories of my melancholy whores is a calm yet lyrical portrait of the grandeur and pettiness of old age that is pure Marquez for its genuiness, its richness of observation and detail. Reading the book, the writer I was most reminded of (perhaps because of the quotation from his work at the front of the novel) was Kawabata. There are points in this novel where Marquez achieves the calm, translucent humanity of the great Japanese master, points where the silences are as aching, as relentlessly sincere, and the minimalism of detail creates a scene that is both timeless and universal in its message.

But if Memories of my melancholy whores is a deeply realist book it is also bravely, magically allegorical. In a sense, Delgadina is life, and the narrator's discovery of her is nothing more than an old man's realisation of an entire existence spent too busy living to ever be truly alive. As the narrator descends slowly into make-believe, drawing consolation from the small re-arrangements of a room that can only be thought of as memory, we find ourselves asking the question - is it too late? Should the narrator embrace life even now, at this late hour? Or must he content himself with a brittle and tearful contemplation of a life that he can never really share in, a life that pays him no attention and that he dare not disturb? Even the messages that the narrator finds scribbled on the mirror are symbolic ("The tiger does not eat far away"). If the metaphors here are more direct, more blatant, they are also more passionate - it is as though Marquez, tired of his own skill as artificer extraordinaire had chosen to write more directly from the heart, so that the book feels rawer, more fragmented, but also, perhaps, more true.

If there is one problem I had with the book, it was with the way it concludes. The end, when it comes, is both a surprise and a disappointment. (As a madwoman says to the narrator at some point in his lovesick wanderings "I'm the one you're not looking for"). Marquez, speaking through his narrator, writes "I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.". It is an observation that he would have done well to keep sight of.

Nevertheless, Memories of my melancholy whores is a beautiful, evocative and deeply satisfying read. And if Marquez, having brought us so far, allows himself to be optimistic, allows his concern for his characters to get the better of his judgement, this is only an old man's fooling, the harmless little joke of a world weary writer that we can only smile at sadly, because we bear him too much affection to scorn him something so small. There's a point in Memories of my melancholy whores where the narrator's old maid, tired of his ceaseless importuning says "Have you thought about what you'll do if I say yes?". It's this generosity of spirit, this sort of genial and kindly magic, that makes Marquez a writer you can't help being touched by.

Human, all too human

2005-11-14T15:34:00.000-05:00

The Squid and the Whale

Okay, for starters, whoever came up with the title for this movie deserves to be shot. Why in god's name would they give a perfectly articulate, intelligent movie about family and relationships a name that comes straight off the menu in a Japanese seafood place? What were they thinking?

Just to set the record straight then - The Squid and the Whale is an articulate and engaging film that gives new life to the Tolstoy saw about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. Jeff Daniels plays Bernard Berkman, an author and a teacher of creative writing in the midst of a full-blown mid-life crisis. Bernard is a Narcissus in denial, a petulant and self-obsessed man who is slowly being forced to face his own failures. As the chasms of his own inadequacy open under Bernard's feet, he reacts by turning his family into his own personal fiefdom, the world according to Bernard, a land where his judgements and opinions are unquestioned, his authority absolute. As a father and husband, Bernard is a pitiful and troubled tyrant, a mass of overblown ego, a man who can find no way to connect to those whose love he desperately seeks, except through bombast.

What makes Bernard's insecurities worse is the fact that his wife, Joan, (played to perfection by Laura Linney) is blossoming into her own - while Bernard collects rejection after rejection, his wife has a new book deal and is being published in the New Yorker. Not that Joan is a paragon of any kind - she too is a troubled person, a woman struggling to find the right line between independence and love, between caring and self-assertion. Unlike Bernard, for whom the family is merely a prop for his own ego, Joan is considerate and caring about her family, but as her marriage falls apart (and it is a slow, steady decline - an erosion, rather than a collapse) she cannot resist throwing herself into affair after affair in search of happiness. If Bernard is the embodiment of wounded pride, Joan is a character trembling to be her own person.

Given these differences, a separation between these two seems inevitable, yet the fall-out of that separation is felt most keenly by the couple's two sons - Walt and Frank. These two are the emotional centre of the film - indeed, what the film is about (to the extent that it is 'about' anything) is the way Walt and Frank chart the difficult terrain of their parents separation to become adults in their own right. Adolescence, the movie seems to suggest, is a difficult time at best, but to try to grow into an adult in a divided house is an adventure more than usually fraught with peril. The children emphatically do not cope with this (no one in this film does) - Frank retreats into a murky exploration of his own pubescent sexuality, Walt starts by emulating the glibness of his father, only to discover that facile sophistication is no substitute for good old fashioned genuineness. That the children take sides in the battle between their parents (Walt his father's, Frank his mother's) is incidental - the real challenge here is for them to renounce both so as to have some real chance of accepting either. The Whale and the Squid is a fascinating look at how that liberation is achieved.

As such, The Whale and The Squid is a classic example of that now familiar genre - the 'intelligent' independent film, where serious performances by skilled actors struggle to both depict life as it actually is and say something coherent about it in the process. It is also, a wry and subtle comedy - a film that makes you laugh at the idiocy of its characters while feeling a great deal of sympathy for them. Featuring superb performances by both Daniels and Linney, the movie's chief virtue is the exactness of its characters - the confused and uncertainness humanness of their predicament that makes them so easy to relate to. If Bernard outrages us with his opinions (Tender is the Night, it seems, is minor Fitzgerald) it is only because we understand better than we would want to where his pomposity comes from, because we are aware that in our worst moments we too are as petty, as mean spirited.

Bottomline: The Whale and The Squid is a rewarding enough movie to watch - not a great movie, but a clever, thoughtful film that manages to be tender without being sentimental, that manages to be funny without being laughable.

A Dream Betrayed

2005-11-06T15:46:00.000-05:00

George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia

"There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all."

- George Orwell

In every generation, in every age, there are a handful of writers, a few only, whose voices are the voices of moral authority. Whose writing, authentic and exact as the needle of a compass, helps us to decipher the murkiest of our ethical questions. We may not always agree with their positions, but we cannot help respecting them for their stand, and in either supporting or attacking them we find ourself forced to clarify not only our own thoughts but also, and more importantly, our own feelings. We may disagree with their politics, but we cannot dismiss the people.

It would be hard to find an English writer of the last century who better exemplifies this type (I hesitate to say ideal, though some would argue the word is apt) than George Orwell. Orwell's unadorned and unassuming prose has the honesty of a spotlight, it has only to be focussed on a subject for all the dross of obfuscation and propaganda to be shorn away, and the cold, hard logic of the argument to show through in all its dire, unflinching majesty. In an age when capitalist democracy would seem to have won an overwhelming victory over both fascist dictatorships and communist authoritarianism, Orwell's writings may seem to have little but historical interest, but even so the uncompromising authority of his vision has to be read to be believed. Taken as a whole Orwell's books may mark the most complete and compelling attack ever mounted against the forces of propaganda, of ideological misdirection via the media. Orwell's disdain for journalists in general is profound and (probably) excessive, but the key message of his writing - that history falls to easily into the hands of those who wish to reshape it, and that in an age of propaganda the chief duty of the intelligent man is to establish and defend the truth at all costs - is arguably more relevant today than it has been at any point since the close of the Vietnam War.

Homage to Catalonia is a proud and important affirmation of that message. Lionel Trilling, in his 1950 introduction to the book, calls it quite simply "one of the important documents of our time." That claim is, if possible, an understatement. Homage to Catalonia is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read, an indignant and heartfelt book that manages, at the same time, to be deeply insightful. The book is an account of a period of roughly half a year that Orwell spent in Spain, fighting with the Spanish militia (or, more specifically, with the militia organised by the Marxist P.O.U.M party) against the forces of General Franco. This is an interesting time, not only because it is 1937 and the forces of Fascism and Communism are preparing themselves for what will eventually become World War II, but also because it is both an exciting and somewhat confused period in Spanish history - a period on which Orwell's book casts important light. Orwell's status as a participant in the action - he fought for four months on the front, receiving a bullet wound to the throat that left him literally speechless and led to his eventual discharge - is one of the key sources of his authority here. It is hard to argue with someone who can offer a compelling eye-witness account of events, who can describe, in such exquisite detail, both the inglorious realities of life at the front and the charged political atmosphere prevailing in Barcelona. George Packer, in a recent New Yorker article about the relationship between Hemingway and Dos Passos at the same time, writes: "Almost seventy years after its publication, his “Homage to Catalonia” holds up against all the recent revelations and controversies about the Spanish Civil War". To see how deep and important a book it is, you have only to compare it to the romantic monstrosity that Hemingway produced about essentially the same conflict.

At the heart of Orwell's book is the vision of a revolution betrayed. The story of Homage to Catalonia is the story of a true working-class revolution, an uprising, in 1936, of the common people of Spain against not only the Fascist forces of Franco, but also against the bourgeois democratic institutions that had held them so long in their neo-feudal grip. Thus, in the aftermath of the people's uprising, farms and factories are collectivised, shadow local governments of workers put in place and the army that marches out to fight Franco is an army of comrades, of equals - there are no formal ranks, no pay differentials. A socialistic ideal has been established. It is Orwell's contention in the book that this revolution was systematically undermined and then destroyed by the Communist Party itself, whose interest (or rather Stalin's interest - which at this point was the same thing) lay simply in protecting the USSR. This meant that the capitalist republics that were Russia's key strategic allies had to be appeased, and made the success of a worker's revolution in Spain a political inconvenience. So important was this political objective for the Communist Party, Orwell argues, that they were willing to not only betray the Spanish working class, but even to indulge in petty infighting and reprisals against loyal anti-fascists, even at the cost of weakening the offensive against Franco. As the book progresses, we see the factions that Orwell supports, and who have been waging a long, hard battle against the Fascist forces, being accused first of jeopardising the defense against the Fascists, and later of outright treason. Orwell presents, in the second half of his book, a fairly detailed account of how this terrible betrayal was accomplished, along with a scathing indictment of the way that journalists, particularly the foreign press, played along with the Communist Party line, without any respect for truth, reason or fairness.

At this point one cannot help but question Orwell's objectivity - he questions it himself. That Orwell's sympathies are clearly with the P.O.U.M. (which was branded as a Trotsky-ite organ of the Fascists themselves and brutally suppressed in mid 1937) is both evident and admitted, and certainly much of his anger against the Communist betrayal derives from his personal loyalties. Despite this, Orwell is hard to disbelieve. In part this is because he is, after all, Orwell. In part, it is because his writing is a model of clear organisation and detached, clinical prose (it is hard to accuse a man who can write "The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail" of not being dispassionate). But mostly it's because, despite his partisan perspective, he brings a great deal of logic and factual accuracy to bear on his conclusions. Leaving all his wonderful analysis of the inconsistencies in the Communist (and popular) interpretation of the events of that time aside (though these are extremely sharp and to the point) Orwell's main argument is a simple one: If the militia was truly pro-Fascist how does one explain the fact that thousands of militia fighters held critical fronts against Franco's forces through a long, hard winter with pitiful weapons and supplies, while Communist aid was slow to come and more regular government forces were yet to make their presence felt? To the extent that it is true that in late 1936 and late 1937 Anarchist forces were the key reason that the Spanish government was able to hold out against the Fascists, it hardly seems logical to claim that these forces were the very ones that were planning to betray the Spanish government after it was better prepared to take on Franco. There are many other impressive arguments that Orwell makes, describing in detail the things he saw and experienced, many of which seem inexplicable except as proof of Communist treachery - and too many of his facts are too easily refutable for him to be lying - but this, to me, seemed the most positive and convincing of his arguments.

Why is this interesting? First, because it sheds a new light, not only on the Spanish history of that period (and it is hard to argue with Orwell's version of it) but also on the implications this has for the period immediately to follow. All through the book there is the idea, sometimes stated, sometimes implied, that the infighting between the various political interest groups in Europe severely hampered these early efforts by Spanish fighters to defeat the fascist powers. This is interesting because it makes the rapid advances of Fascist forces in Europe that much more explicable - it's not just that the Axis powers were formidably well-organised, it's also that their opponents were too caught up in their own petty power struggles to successfully oppose their common foe. At one point, writing about the British destroyers that were sent to help the Spanish Government quell an 'uprising' by the Anarchists in Barcelona (a historical event which Orwell examines in great detail) Orwell writes that "the British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish Government from Franco, would quickly intervene to save it from its own working class". In another part of the book he argues that the Communist Party did immeasurable harm to the anti-fascist struggle by not allowing the war in Spain to be seen as a battle of the working class against the fascists. Had they acknowledged the reality of the revolution in Spain, he argues, international support for the Spanish fighters would have been much greater. This sense of disillusionment, of outrage, is ever present in the Homage to Catalonia - Orwell, tries to maintain a balanced and impartial (if unobjective) point of view, but the depth of his indigation comes through clearly. Strangely, this does not hurt the credibility of the book, rather it lends it a sort of moral force, so that what could easily have been a sterile exploration of civil war politics becomes an emotional and personal journey.

The larger reason I think Homage to Catalonia is important, though, is that in a world grown too dismissive of Socialist ideals, it offers an insightful view of two very different faces of the Socialist vision. In what remains, for me, the most important passage of the book, Orwell writes:

"However much one cursed at the time, one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all."

In our own time, this alternate vision of Socialism has long died out. The verdict of history is against Socialism now, or rather against the kind of communism that Stalin and Mao developed, which was, if truth be told, a travesty of every socialist ideal, a cruel despotism masquerading as historic inevitability. It may no longer be possible to think of Socialism, as a practical political force, with anything but nostalgia. That Socialism is dead is more or less unquestionable - but there are those of us who continue to believe that its death represents a great and grievous failure, the betrayal of the greatest dream that mankind ever had the courage to dream, however difficult and improbable it may have been. Orwell, in writing about the P.O.U.M militia is not simply paying homage to Catalonia, or to the terrible fate of those brave men who fought against the forces of fascism with everything they had only to be denounced as traitors by their own country. He is composing an important and touching elegy to an idyll of human brotherhood that was never to be.

The last line of Homage to Catalonia reads "... the deep deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs." It is this sort of clarity, this level of insight, this incredible and prescient understanding, that makes Orwell one of the truest and most important voices of his time.

A brush with death

2005-11-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position;

- W. H. Auden

There is a scene in Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red, where the Sultan orders the three great miniaturists of his court to each paint a horse. As they compete, one master says that when he paints a horse he becomes a horse; a second says that when he paints a horse he becomes one of the Great Masters painting a horse, the third affirms that when he paints a horse he remains himself.

It is this multiplicity of perspectives, of approaches to art, that My Name is Red is a celebration of. The setting is Istanbul, the world of the Turkish miniaturists, who sit in their workshops decorating great and holy books for the pleasure and prestige of their rulers. Faithful imitation is the creed of these painters, their greatest joy is to render each image in a way that makes it indistinguishable from all other similar illustrations, so that the image itself becomes absolute, timeless. For these painters, individuality, or ‘style’, is error.

Into the rigidity of this world comes a vision of painting, imported from the West, where the great Italian painters are discovering depth and light and perspective, and are beginning to paint portraits of shocking and lifelike glory. Such a technique is not simply antithetical to the art of the Turks, it is also potentially blasphemous, since the creation of idols or portraits is forbidden by Islam. Nevertheless, the Sultan orders the creation of a secret and glorious book that endeavours to adopt this new form of painting – a project that causes grave rifts in the fraternity of the miniaturists and ultimately ends in a series of gruesome murders.

Pamuk uses this setting to indulge in a long and insightful meditation on the nature of art and through it, the deeper meaning of existence. At the heart of the questions that the book raises is the debate between the universal and the particular, and their respective places in the creative arts. If Art is not to be universal, the old Masters ask, if it is to celebrate nothing more magical than the ordinary and the human, if it is not to improve on reality in any way, then what is the point of it? But what does Art mean if it is completely divorced from the real world, the supporters of the new style respond, how can a man who has never seen a battle paint one? As a discussion about realism vs idealism in art this is an interesting discussion by itself, but in Pamuk’s hand it becomes an allegory for an even deeper question – what is the meaning of the self? Does virtue lie in celebrating the self or effacing it? Does greatness consist of losing oneself in the infinite, or in setting one’s self apart from it? This is not simply a clash of two artistic traditions, it is the fundamental battle of generations, the eternal conflict between new ideas and the old traditions.

Pamuk’s answer to this debate, which he places, subtly and ironically, in the mouth of the Master of the Miniaturists himself, is that both sides of the debate are right. Virtue and greatness consist not in stagnating in the name of the old but in drawing on what one can learn from the old masters to create a new tradition of one’s own. This is the true challenge for the artist. It is, moreover, a difficult challenge – one that can easily destroy even the most talented of creative spirits, one that must not be undertaken lightly.

But there is much more to My Name is Red than this. As these ideas play themselves out in the background, the foreground is taken up by one of the more exciting murder mysteries I have read this year. As the novel opens, a miniaturist has been murdered, done in by one of his brethren, and the plot of the novel is essentially a breathless race to find and apprehend this murderer. At the centre of this investigation is Black, a young man who returns to Istanbul after an exile of 12 years, only to find himself plunged into a world of art and intrigue. As a character, Black in the quintessential Hitchcock hero – a well-meaning but unimpressive young man, who finds himself trapped in a ruthless endgame where he must solve a terrible mystery while also somehow managing to secure the hand of his beloved. Blending suspense and romance, the plot of My Name is Red is as engaging as it is dramatic, filled with colourful characters, humorous asides and some truly enchanting story-telling. As the novel builds towards its climax, the tension is almost nerve-wrenching and you can feel yourself almost screaming at Pamuk to get on with it.

This is both one of the glories of the book and one of its deepest failures. On the one hand, by interspersing long, sombre meditations on art with some fast-paced action, Pamuk brilliantly counterpoints the universal with the human, embellishing the point of his book, and considerably enriching it as a novel. On the other hand, large parts of the novel seem to go on for too long, with Pamuk making the same point again and again, long after one has already understood what he is trying to say. I suspect the repetition is part of Pamuk’s design – his attempt to demonstrate why the slower, more meandering ways of the old ones would be difficult to accept for those of us who live in this more impatient, urgent age, but it gets to the point where it’s almost wearying, so that you’re tempted to simply skip ahead a few pages and get on with the action. It may well be the fault of the translation that Pamuk is unable to maintain the pace of the book, but it is undeniable that there are points where this book flags.

That said, this is still a wickedly intelligent book. It’s not just that the plot sets up the universal debate about art versus the deeply human concerns of Black and his beloved, it’s also the way Pamuk uses the central idea of miniaturist art, the denial of personal style, as the key to his murder mystery. Even though all three suspects take on the role of narrator at different points in the novel, their identities remain distinguished in only the most subtle ways – given how Pamuk portrays them, they are hard to tell apart. It is this that makes it difficult to identify the murderer among them, not only for Black but for the reader as well. Thus Pamuk manages to use a way of looking at art as the tool by which he creates suspense in his novel – a truly brilliant achievement.

My Name is Red is a fascinating read – not least because of Pamuk’s clever, innovative style. Pamuk reads like a combination of Rushdie and Mahfouz - a restless inventor joined to a writer of melancholy and thoughtful prose. The novel shifts perspective endlessly - it is told through the eyes of each one of the key characters, as well as from the perspectives of various paintings and objects, and a few corpses along the way. Fables, legends and myths adorn the writing at every turn, there are numerous short stories sprinkled through the book that would do Borges proud. In the final analysis, if you come away less stunned by the brilliance of the writing than you should be, it could only be because of the baroque nature of Pamuk’s ornamentation, the sheer denseness of his work that sits heavy on the mind, like a rich halva.

Bottomline: My Name is Red is that rare thing: a novel that manages to be both thought-provoking and entertaining, a deeply allegorical murder mystery. If it feels a trifle long and stifling at times, it is only because our palates are not used to prose that is so densely, richly beautiful.

P.S. The two paintings in the middle: the one on the left is a painting of a musician by the great Persian miniaturist Behzad, the one on the right is a painting of Orpheus (modelled on one of the Medicis) by Bronzino. You can see the difference.

Rabbit, Rabbit, Were-fore art thou Rabid?

2005-11-03T10:18:00.000-05:00

Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were Rabbit

Back when I was six years old, someone presented me with a plasticine set - you know, the kind where you get this whole bunch of dough and an assortment of strange hats and pipes and shoes, and you're supposed to put together vaguely potato-head type creatures. I had an amazing amount of fun with that set, coming up with a varied assortment of vague figures that won, at the time, considerable acclaim from my mother and other such doting, if somewhat unobjective critics.

Nothing I came up with in those days, however, could even begin to approach the (literally) phenomenal work of two-time Oscar winner Nick Park, whose incredible cast of plasticine models make him perhaps the most engaging, most creative and most down-right entertaining animator in the world today. Wallace and Gromit may be the most ingenious comic pairing to come out of the UK since Wooster and Jeeves (forgive me, I swore I wouldn't make this comparison, but it's just too obvious not to be made).

They aren't much to look at, of course. Just two pasty-faced characters, a middle-aged balding man with a paunch and his long-suffering dog, inhabiting a world that is almost deliberately ersatz. Park's world is very far from the breezy sophistication of Pixar - there are no dazzling visuals here, no stunning visual effects. Like a true puppet master, Park knows that what the audience really connects to, what the audience really craves, is a story - get them involved in the action and they won't even notice the fine artwork. How many people watched Finding Nemo for the glorious visuals of underwater life, how many people (viewers, not critics) even noticed them? Right, exactly. Not that there isn't a great deal of painstaking animation here - it took five years to make this movie - it's just that Park is not trying to make his animation look as though it could have been shot in the real world with a camera, he's trying to make it look as cartoon like as possible. The visual clunkiness of Wallace and Gromit is entirely deliberate.

And it's not just the visuals where Park is not trying to be unique. The real genius of Park is that he understands the fundamental creed of good light-hearted comedy - don't show them something they haven't seen before. Good comedy doesn't need to be unpredictable or profound, on the contrary, it's precisely the silliness, the total obviousness of the plot that allows the audience to relax and thoroughly enjoy themselves. To watch Wallace and Gromit is to be bathed in a glow of happy and warm nostalgia, to be allowed to laugh yourself silly at all its corny jokes, to be permitted to admire the sly wit (both verbal and visual) that Park brings to the movie, safe in the knowledge that what will eventually happen is entirely inevitable. Anthony Lane, in his review of the movie in the New Yorker (a review that I entirely endorse and urge you to read, if only for the cracks about Jessica Alba) compares Park to Chaplin and Keaton - the comparison is entirely apt.

This movie, the duo's full length feature, opens in the sleepy village of Tottington, where a plague of rabbits threatens the beloved veg of the local populace. As the annual Tottington vegetable fair (with its coveted prize of the Golden Carrot) nears, Wallace and Gromit (who run a 'humane' pest control agency called, inevitably, Anti-pesto) are entrusted with the important responsibility of keeping the village produce safe from these pests. This leaves them however, with a problem of surplus rabbits (they can't kill them, you see, that would be too cruel a bunny-shment) which Wallace, with an inspiration unequalled since Frankenstein, proposes to dispose off through proper rehabilitation of the rabbits using a machine (of his invention, naturally) to brainwash their impressionable bunny minds. In the time-honoured tradition of all experiments conducted under a ghostly moon and involving electricity and brains in the same sentence, things go horribly wrong, and soon a fabled monster from the depths of Hell, a were-rabbit, is terrorising the local population, crunching away at their cabbage, destroying whole swathes of pumpkins, leaving the shattered bodies of young carrots in its ravaging wake. How will our heroes deal with so hare-raising a calamity? Will they be able to save the village, or is the entire situation completely hop-less?

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a hilarious, action-packed romp of a comedy, at once a lovable modern fairy tale and a wickedly clever spoof of a whole range of cinematic genres. The snide spoofs of horror movies I was expecting, but King Kong? Batman? Jaws? It says a lot for the cleverness and subtlely of the movie that the movie I feel it spoofs the most is that World War II classic - Mrs. Minniver. Park's attention to detail is simply mind-blowing - just check out the sequence of framed pictures that make up the opening scene of the film - that alone tells you you're in the presence of genius. Plus there's the endless supply of atrocious puns (a sample: How do you kill a were-rabbit? With a golden bullet, of course, it's 24 carrots you see) and the tireless little visual jokes. Don't get me wrong, much of the humour here is distinctly, well, cheesy (heh), but it's cheesiness done exceptionally well, and that's what makes it so delightful. For sheer gags - puns, clever little asides, manic retakes of famous scenes - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is fully the equal of Shrek. Only faster.

It's also a warmer, more insistently real film. Part of what makes Wallace and Gromit so lovable, is that their ingenuity is the ingenuity of children. Who but a child would rig up a complicated alarm system that would end in a massive finger poking you in bed. Who but a child would imagine putting in an automated system that dropped you into your chair for breakfast, and then dressed you while you were sitting there? Wallace and Gromit aren't just funny - they're also lovable and that's a rare combination.

Bottomline: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is one of the most deliciously, inspiredly silly films I've seen in a long time. Watch it. It'll remind you of just how much fun true silliness can be.

Making your blood run cold

2005-10-30T18:27:00.000-05:00

Capote

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

- Mark, 8:36

Most wretched men are cradled into poetry by wrong
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Julian and Maddalo'

There comes a point, I think, in every artist's life, where he / she must ask the question: Would I rather be a better artist, or a better human being? This is the essence of the Faustian bargain, the idea that the creation of a truly great work of art may often require the opening of one's heart to all sorts of daemons, all forms of evil and misery. Plath, Lowell, Van Gogh - the list of tortured geniuses, of men and women whose creations derive their unique and burning power from the heart's blood of their creator's misery, is virtually endless. Is the suffering worth it? That is a question no one, not even the artist, can ever truly hope to answer.

But what if the suffering is not one's own? What if the artist were to use the suffering of others, were to exploit the misery he sees around him to create a touching and wonderful masterpiece? Is this exploitation? Or merely opportunism? Or perhaps even a sacrifice worth making? If we are willing to let millions of people die and suffer every year in the name of religion and politics and nationhood, surely a few additional sacrifices for the sake of art cannot be baulked at?

This is the ethical dilemma that lies at the heart of the new film, Capote. The movie opens in 1959 when Capote, having published Breakfast at Tiffany's a year ago, was the darling of Manhattan's social world, the ultimate literary insider. What follows is an intense and faithful [1] portrayal of the five years that followed, in which Capote wrote the book that made him a legend - In Cold Blood.

What has always puzzled me about the Capote legend is why he chose to do it. Why would a man like Capote, a New York socialite, a writer of delightful, twinkling prose about the Manhattan social scene, suddenly decide to write a 'non-fiction' novel about a bloody homicide that takes place in the middle of Kansas? How does Holly Golightly lead to Perry Smith?

This is a question the movie highlights, but never really answers. Watching Capote first arrive in Kansas, observing his obvious alienation from everything around him, you cannot help wonder about his motivation - but the closest the movie comes to providing a clue to his reasons is in a scene where he and Harper Lee are interviewing a young girl about the murder and Capote suddenly starts to talk about how all his life people have thought they'd got him figured out because of the way he is and the way he talks - and that they've always got him wrong. Is the writing of In Cold Blood a reassertion of independence for Capote, a refusal to be classified, to be taken for granted? Has Capote been so successful in making himself an insider to the Manhattan cocktail circuit that he now feels the need to set himself apart from it, become an outsider again, assert the difference between himself and everyone else? Or is it just the whim of a talented writer, who, bored with the track he has been following so far, now wants to branch out into something completely different?

The movie never really attempts to answer any of these questions. What it does do, admirably, is explore the ethical choices Capote made in writing In Cold Blood, and, to a lesser extent, the implications these had for his future life. What emerges most strongly from the movie is a portrait of a deeply flawed human being, a writer so completely engrossed in his art, so entirely self-obsessed, as to be almost inhuman. Subtly at first, and then explicitly, Capote is ruthless and self-serving, a master of emotional blackmail who uses the power of his words and his willingness to flaunt his own vulnerability to manipulate other people into giving him what he wants. There is something almost admirable about the way Capote does this - his instinct for the right levers, his impeccable timing, his bloodhound-like nose for a story - all these are what, in the final analysis make In Cold Blood possible (along, of course, with Capote's undeniable talent as a writer). But the movie is quick to highlight that there is a darker side to his skill - in getting people to trust him, to think of him as their friend, their confidante, Capote is ultimately setting them up for betrayal. Throughout the movie, there is a sense of Capote's sensitivity being mostly crocodile tears - the Capote who emerges is petty and almost completely devoid of sympathy, a man who can't wait for two men to be executed so he can finally finish the book he's been writing about them. In one particularly ironic scene, Perry Smith's sister tells Capote not to trust her brother - he will show you his sensitive side, she says, but he would as soon kill you as shake your hand. The same words could be said of the Capote that the movie portrays.

It would be easy, given this, to turn Capote into a monster. A few facts must be kept in mind though. First, the men Capote is so callously using, are, in the end, convicted killers, sociopaths responsible for the cold-blooded murder of an innocent family of four. It is not, in the final analysis, Capote who sends them to their death, it is the justice system. Capote's only crime, if it can be called that, is to first give them hope, and then use that hope to ingratiate himself with them so he can extract the secret stories that will help him become the most famous and admired writer of his generation. This is cold and ruthless, yes, but it is also, in the end, pragmatic (in one luminous scene, Capote, in a burst of sternness tells Smith: "I am working, Perry. This is my work.").

The movie's own justification for Capote's ruthlessness seems to be more Faustian. By focussing on Capote's increasing alcoholism towards the end of the five year period, and by pointing out that Capote never finished another novel, the movie seems to imply that Capote paid the cost of writing In Cold Blood by losing his powers as a writer, entering upon a long spiral of drunkenness and lethargy that ended with his death of alcoholic complications in 1984. Could it be that in writing In Cold Blood Capote pushed himself too far, that in trying to prove that he was more than just a Manhattan socialite, Capote truly destroyed himself? This is certainly a romantic notion; whether or not it is true, however, is a different question.

It is another question that the movie does not really attempt to answer. The movie's true genius lies (and genius it is) in crafting a riveting and intense portrayal of one of the most fascinating literary figures of our time, at one of his most critical moments. Shot in stark, uncompromising colour (which adds to the sense of moral drama) Capote is one of the most thought-provoking films I've seen this year - a moral fable that refuses to moralise, a fascinating exploration of the artist's psyche with all the subtlety and depth of a Greek tragedy. Perhaps its greatest achievement as a film is that it makes it impossible to take sides, so that you are left floating in a sort of ethical limbo, unwilling to judge Capote or any of the others too severely.

It is also, in a sense, one of the most chilling horror films I have ever seen - the tale of an effeminate, harmless seeming writer who turns out to be a creature of terrible and ruthless power. There are scenes in this movie where the ease with which Capote lies and manipulates, the seeming innocence of his darkest, most horrifying betrayals, will make your blood run cold.

That despite these moments you emerge from the movie with mixed feelings about Capote is due entirely to the brilliance of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman delivers an acute and finely balanced performance of Capote - vividly showing you both Capote's vulnerable charm and his self-serving calculativeness. It would have been easy to make Capote either a suffering martyr or a callous demon here, Hoffman does neither - his Capote is intensely human, with all the weaknesses and flaws that that entails. More importantly, it is a Capote who proves impossible to pin down, so that in his finer moments you are never sure how much of what you see is genuine and how much an act. This is a fine line to walk, and Hoffman does it wonderfully.

Bottomline: This is a must watch - an intense and chilling film, that draws you deep into its murky depths and leaves you, in the end with the same troubled queasiness, the same sense of unease, that makes In Cold Blood such a wonderful book.

Notes

[1] Not, of course, that I know enough about Capote's life to judge. But an excellent review of the movie by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books seems to suggest that the movie is reasonably historically accurate.

Sweet though in sadness

2005-10-28T21:02:00.000-04:00

J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

"My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

- Tennyson, 'Mariana in the Moated Grange'

In his review of Coetzee's new novel Slow Man in the New York Review of Books John Lanchester writes: "It is hard to find an admirer of J.M. Coetzee's work who does not think that his best book is Disgrace". He just found one. Not that I don't think Disgrace is a truly fascinating novel. But the Coetzee novels I admire, no, the Coetzee novels I worship, came earlier - Waiting for the Barbarians, The Master of Petersburg, In the Heart of the Country, The Life and Times of Michael K. Not since Dostoyevsky and Conrad has the novel been so relentless, so unmercifully intense. There is a gravity to Coetzee - his writing mesmerises you, draws you in, swallows you whole like some slow, sleek python. In their density, his novels are as cosmic and universal as black holes, gulping down the self like light. There is no escaping them. Other writers overwhelm you, Coetzee leaves you empty.

As Coetzee has grown older, though, his novels have aged with him (some would say matured, but the distinction, as applied to Coetzee, is meaningless). Not that they have become lighter or less implosive - if anything, the years have caused Coetzee to turn more firmly inward, so that the glimpses of the external world you once saw in his work have more or less vanished and the hinterlands of the soul have become, increasingly, the territory of his exploration. It is more that his novels have grown more meditative, more brooding. Where once there was the sparse sharpness of nightmare, the clear, burning lines of image, there is now the more blurred quietness of recollection, of nostalgia. It's as though, in turning more firmly inward, Coetzee has come to recognise the fundamental incoherence of the self. If we are unable to see ourselves in black and white, Coetzee seems to be saying (as doubtless we are) then why should he, the writer, presume to provide anything less ambigious in his novels.

It is this search for ambiguity that Disgrace is a prime example of. Lanchester calls it misdirection, but in my mind it is rather indirection, the realisation, so central to the human experience, that if one is trying to describe motion, it is unnecessary (and may in fact be misleading) to specify where the movement is headed. To he who writes of journeys, destinations must be irrelevant.

In taking on this challenge, and doing justice to it, Coetzee has become, I think, the greatest, most faithful chronicler of human inwardness. In Slow Man, the main protagonist, Paul Rayment, is accused of always speaking like a book. The truth (ironically) is the opposite - Coetzee writes the way we think, more, the way we are. To read his exact and finely polished prose (In Disgrace, in Youth) is to listen to a voice in your own head. It is difficult to engage with Coetzee because it would mean engaging with yourself. It is not possible to question the veracity of what he is saying because in your heart you know it is true almost before he has said it. Like the image of yourself in a mirror, Coetzee cannot, should not be judged, he simply is.

His new novel, Slow Man, starts off very much in this inward vein. An aging and childless bachelor is struck by a car, his leg is amputated, he finds himself crippled, helpless; as Coetzee puts it (beautifully invoking Homer) he is unstrung. This in itself is not unique or interesting, it is almost (Coetzee's word) frivolous. Suddenly aware of his loneliness, of the unfillable emptiness of his life, the old man, Paul Rayment, then proceeds to fall impractically and indiscreetly in love with the nurse who comes to care for him, a married Croatian woman with three children, named Marijana. As he struggles to understand and define his own feelings for Marijana (and to make his way deeper into the affections of her children), Rayment's story becomes an intense and brooding meditation on the meaning of love and the fine distinctions between love and desire, love and sex, love and caring.

It is also a thoughtful and searching meditation on how we deal with Time, or rather, of how Time deals with us. In reply to a question from Marijana's son, Drago, asking him if he hates things that are new, Rayment says, "I'll give you a straight answer, Drago, but not at the cost of being laughed at. I have been overtaken by time, by history. This flat, and everything in it, has been overtaken. There is nothing strange in that - in being overtaken by time. It will happen to you too, if you live long enough." As the novel progresses, Rayment's lost leg becomes a metaphor for a deeper, more fundamental handicap (Coetzee writes: "after a certain age we have all lost a leg, more or less") - of being old and jaded, of no longer having the appetite or the energy to believe or hope; of being incapable, in the end, of any form of love that is more than a longing for a lost and impossible past. Slow Man is Coetzee at his most allegorical, it is in many ways the most poetic book he has written in a long while. Speaking of Rayment, he writes at one point: "He himself has never been at ease with mirrors. Long ago he draped a cloth over the mirror in the bathroom and taught himself to shave blind." It is small delights like this that make Slow Man such an intensely rewarding read.

Coetzee's key insight in his recent work (most notably perhaps, in Disgrace) is that to live in a world without God is not to live in a world without fate. For the ancient Greeks, fate was an equalising force, inevitability was derived from a sense of what could only be called, if not justice, than balance. In Coetzee's world, fate is a sort of potential energy, a force at once comforting and smothering, a power that you cannot escape from. In Greek theatre, destiny was the string on which human puppets danced, obedient to the hands of whimsical gods, the eloquence with which they met their fate being the chief point of the whole enterprise. In Coetzee's novels there is no god, but human beings are still puppets, still obedient, except that now the inertia of their destiny has taken the forefront and there is no air left to scream with. In Slow Man, Coetzee writes:

"How quaint, how positively antique, to believe one will be advised, when the time comes, to put one's soul in order. What beings could possibly be left, in what corner of the universe, interested in checking all the deathbed accountings that ascend the skies, debits in the one column, credits in the other?"

In some sense, then, Coetzee's is a gentler, more sombre meditation on the existential problem of Sartre, of Camus. In a world where the Gods (if they still exist at all) have ceased to interfere, it remains to man to not only make his own destiny, but also to pass judgement upon it, and it is this knowledge that paralyses us, leaves us to drift without direction. Yet not to have direction is not to be inert - we may no longer inherit or deserve our fates, but we end up entangled in them anyway. Marijana's daughter calls Rayment the Slow Man (hence the title of the book) but what seems like his sluggishness is merely the slowing down of our perceptions in the instant before a great and terrible accident. Like travelers who know that nothing we can do will change what is bound to happen, we watch in slow horror (and almost clinical detachment) as the inevitable collision draws nearer. It is a testament to the power of Coetzee's prose that he can slow time down this way, make it stand still. That, in the end, is all Slow Man is - 260 pages of held breath, of falling body.

All this by itself would be enough to make this a great book, but Coetzee is not finished yet. Just as you are settling down into the hypnotic embrace of his writing, comes a blow, a shock, that leaves you dizzy with wonder. For all the things that Coetzee has been he has never been the most experimental of novelists [2]. Yet here it is - a twist in the plot worthy of Calvino. Without wanting to give too much away (you HAVE to read this book) let me say that Coetzee resurrects Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of his last novel (and what must be, in my opinion, the weakest book he has ever written) and introduces her into the story as a deus ex machina in reverse, a sort of demonic godmother. What follows is one of the most mind-altering and deeply thoughtful explorations into the nature of fiction, its conventions, and the implications of these for the way in which we live our lives [3]. As the line between fiction and reality blurs, so that it is no longer possible to tell what is 'fact' and what hallucination, one is left with the deep suspicion that in the end we are all little more than figments of each other's imagination. It's almost as though, Coetzee, no longer satisfied with being one of the greatest novelists of his generation had decided to both write his exceptional prose and simultaneously deconstruct it. The result is dizzying, like being plunged into the middle of a hectic whirlwind of a mystery story where the clues all lead back to yourself. Imagine a combination of Chekhov and Borges and you'll get the picture.

In some ways, this detracts from the emotional power of Slow Man. There is a deep (and exceedingly dry) sense of playfulness here; at one level, Coetzee has made it much harder for you to take him seriously. Yet the fact that Coetzee can do this and still have Slow Man be an insightful and moving novel, is a tribute to how great a writer he truly is. To build up a plot the way Coetzee does, to leave the reader with the one single message, the one set of ideas, would be amazing enough. To constantly dismantle this structure and then put it back again, without ever letting the intensity of the plot flag - to reinvent a novel midway and open up a whole range of different, often opposed ideas - is beyond belief. If you are left with the impression of being toyed with, it is because that is exactly what has been done to you. You have been manipulated, with exquisite skill, by a man who is an undeniable master of his craft, and the most you can do (much as all Rayment can do is be manipulated by the fate he has become involved in) is see it through "to the bitter end".

Except that the end is not bitter. Or is it? Coetzee's sense of balance sustains him all the way through to the close of this novel - the ending is both wildly improbably, anticlimactically hilarious, deeply heartwarming and predictably hopeless. Coetzee is too ruthless, too grown up a writer to bother with happy endings. There are no illusions here, all the happy pipe dreams that you may want to sustain about how this novel ends are systematically destroyed. Things are almost sure to turn out badly - Coetzee will not, cannot, lie to you about this. But in sticking this closely to the truth, Coetzee is forced to acknowledge that in the end, life is neither tragic nor comic, and that there is a thin, sickly triumph in continuing to live, however pointlessly or poignantly. It is this recognition, this pale winter sunlight warming the bones of his aged protagonists, that makes this one of Coetzee's most optimistic, most forgiving, most (his word again) humane books.

Coetzee writes: "What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection."

Slow Man is a deeply affectionate book from an author who has come to recognise, after years of uncompromising sternness, that only in showing kindness to others can we hope to receive some ourselves.

Notes

[1] The title of this post, comes, of course, from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind: "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: / What if my leaves are falling like its own? / The tumult of thy mighty harmonies / Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone / Sweet though in sadness"

[2] This is not entirely true, of course. There's the interesting experiment of Foe, plus the superb Nobel Prize Speech.

[3] In particular, don't miss the scene where Rayment, urged by Costello and himself blindfolded, makes love to a young woman who is blind. A scene worthy of Plato.

The Verse part

2005-10-21T13:46:00.000-04:00

Harold Pinter's poetry

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.

- Harold Pinter.

Now that Pinter's finally won the Nobel, I figured I may as well get around to reading his poetry. While I've read a fair amount of Pinter's plays (most of them so long ago that the memory of them is fairly blurred, though) I've never really read much of his poetry - the little of it there seems to be. So I figured I'd get a book out of the library and start plugging away.

I was disappointed. I suppose it's because I was extrapolating from his prose style, but I expected something dry and quiet and exact, like a cross between R.S. Thomas and Philip Larkin. One of the Pinter's greatest gifts, in his plays, is his ability to use silence, to write lines that can be read between. It's a gift that would serve him extremely well as a poet.

So it's a pity that he doesn't use that gift more. Oh, these are not bad poems, exactly - there is some fine wordplay here, an exquisite feel for language, phrases of polished obsidian ("So grows in stream of planetary tides / The sun abundant in hanging sands"; "Suggested lines my body / consume, in the day's graph") and the heady confidence of a writer who, unable to find the exact word he wants, is not afraid to make it up (eskimostars, tickshop). The problem is that there is little more to these poems than this fine parade of phrases, so that the final effect, when you step back, is of something unanchored, almost incoherent. The writing is brilliant, but it fails to become anything more than clever words on a page, so that unlike with his plays (which move the imagination to fill in what the author has not supplied) there is almost no emotional content to these poems - they feel like warm-up exercises, the shavings of a great writer sharpening his wit before putting it to use.

Nor does Pinter have a particularly keen ear for the sound of his poems. His poems, though technically competent enough, don't always read well, and in the absence of any overarching image or idea, the sheer density of words (Pinter seems to delight in complex syllables) seems redundant, artificial. Overall, the poems sound and feel strained - as though they were unwieldy concentrations of larger prose pieces that didn't quite work.

This is not true of all the poems though. In the three dozen or so poems I read, there were three or four where Pinter did manage to focus and discipline his muse - and the structure this provided gave rise to some truly exceptional poetry. The short piece on top is a good example of this, as is:

I have thrown a handful of petals on your breasts.
Scarred by this daylight you lie petalstruck.
So the skin imitates the flush, your head
Turning all ways, bearing a havoc of flowers over you.

Now I bring you from dark into daytime,
Laying petal on petal.

What makes this poem work, makes the use of petalstruck and havoc seem right and beautiful is the consistency of the overall image - by showing us the one single vision that underlies the poem, Pinter makes it come alive for us. Unfortunately, only a few of his poems are able to do this.

Bottomline - I think I'm going to stick to reading Pinter's plays from now on.

Death be not proud

2005-10-19T21:29:00.000-04:00

Mozart's Requiem

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.

- John Donne

If there is a single reason to believe in God, it is Mozart. It's not just that it's hard to imagine that even an infinity of evolution could produce a single being so wondrous; it's that Mozart's music is so overpowering, so unimaginably beautiful that it demands an audience greater than the merely mortal. The human soul is too small and weak a container for the great flood of Mozart's genius, to even attempt to hold on to the essence of his music is to try to contain the sea in a transparent flask. Humankind was not made to bear so much beauty.

The Requiem in D minor (K.626) is Mozart's swan song, and one of the most glorious and heartbreaking pieces of music ever written. There are a few pieces, very few, that move me to tears each time I hear them - Mozart's Requiem does more, it reduces me to a blubbering, bawling mass of pure emotion (if you don't believe me, just read the rest of this post). If there is truly a music of the spheres, this is what it must sound like.

The Requiem opens quietly, drawing you slowly into a world of dark foreboding, the voices of the choir lingering like dark clouds on the horizon of the music. Then a soprano breaks through, pure as a sunbeam, and as the music soars you realise that this is no earthly endeavour, that the music you are about to hear belongs in some higher, more ethereal plane. There is a dark sense of peace here, a sort of fragile and restless stillness.

Into this calm the Kyrie arrives like a sudden quickening of the wind. This is an urgent and dramatic plea for God's mercy, (so different, for instance, from the Kyrie in the C minor mass, K 427) but it is also a proud one. Mozart marries desperation to power here, laying open the beating heart of the life force, as if to say: Here is all our strength. Here is all our pride, all our youth, all that we are capable of. Take it, but grant us your mercy.

And then, just as you are beginning to feel the blood pounding in your veins, just as your body is beginning to throb with the music and you are starting to feel the exhileration pulsing through you, the gauntlet Mozart has thrown down is accepted and the Dies Irae comes crashing through the world. Here is an unleashing of all the savage power that Mozart can muster, an explosion of pure wrath (uncharacteristic for Mozart) that puts Beethoven to shame. As the great drums of Mozart's anger blaze forth, you can literally feel the walls shattering around you, the chains breaking, the great engines of doom erupting in all their horrifying majesty. Forget Handel's trumpets, forget odes to joy, if the day of judgement ever arrives, this is what it will sound like.

Who shall stand beside on this day? Who shall plead for us, and with what voice? In the resounding silence that the Dies Irae leaves in its wake, a lone trumpet swells in aching, lonely cadence, joined slowly by the frail, anxious voices of those who have survived the cataclysm. The Requiem is so beautiful that it is difficult to pick a favourite part of it, but if I had to pick one it would be this - the Tuba Mirum. This is the saddest, most lovely thing that Mozart ever wrote (well, okay, that's an exaggeration, but not too much of one), a trembling paean, pregnant with memory and sorrow, that speaks forever for all our dead, all our injured, all our dispossessed and violated. All the world's suffering is in those notes, all the helplessness of man faced with the indifference of nature and the cruelty of his fellow beings. The Tuba Mirum is the voice of eternal mourning, the immutable memory of those we have lost.

Safe in the knowledge of such prayer, the Rex Tremendae rises in glory again, but it is a softer, warmer glory, a sound made mellow by the absence of pride, a more humble rejoicing. That it should gently fade into a series of solo voices soaring in prayer seems natural - all is yearning and sweetness here, all is pleading and beautiful.

But mercy is not so easily gained. As the Confutatis arrives, the darker note of wrath returns, the strings are stern again, and the voices of the choir tumble into the darkness. But from the ashes of this sound a new note arises - cleaner, purer, paler - a quivering flame searching for the light. For a moment the confusion of the opening notes threatens to engulf it, but it gutters through, and as the music grows still again, begins to burn brighter.

It is now that we arrive, finally, at despair. As the Lachrimosa swells, I am reminded of Shakespeare - "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now". Here is pain made liquid, here is a desolation that would make the heavens weep. Listening to the choir sing, I can feel something screaming inside me, and I have to hold on to the music, to the purity of its sound, to keep from giving in.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?". As the Offertorium opens, you can feel the music, having been humbled and reduced to its lowest point, beginning to gather strength again. This builds slowly, lingering lovingly over the voices of the soloists bathed in sudden hope, climaxing in a mighty prayer, a Hostias of sublime power.

From here on, everything is praise. The Sanctus fills the room with new promise, the sweetly singing Benedictus celebrates this frail sense of hope and the Agnus Dei is a final, almost triumphant prayer for peace, made in the virtual surety of deliverance, of gentleness.

In the end, the thin sunbeam of the contralto's voice returns, its quavering song still bathed in sorrow; only the choir is no longer a cloudbank, but a wall of shining mirrors, reflecting and celebrating the human soul.

It is here, in this triumphant finale, that Mozart finally pours out his heart's blood, finally gives us the true fire that he and he alone is capable of. Here is Mozart's own plea for immortality, the sound of genius standing up to be counted. This is who I am, Mozart seems to say, this is what I can do. Here I come towards you, riding on wings of angels. How could you deny me a place in heaven? How can you deny me a place in your heart?

Let me put it another way. When I die, I don't want any elaborate rituals, any fancy prayers, any mournful eulogies. I don't want ceremonies or speeches. All I ask is that someone play Mozart's Requiem over my dead body. It will be enough. It will be more than I deserve.

Notes:

1. Post inspired by performance of Mozart's Requiem I attended tonight. Not a very great performance, but with the Requiem even ordinary performances are immeasurably moving. It's quite embarassing, sitting in the third row and trying not to let anyone know that you're crying. My only consolation is that the soloists were crying too - it's the first time I've seen someone cry through their own performance.

2. It's interesting how Mozart's incredible talent as an Opera composer serves him so well in the Requiem. The intertwining of the voices is flawless and fascinating here - the sheer unobtrusive richness of the multiple voices all joining into a single overwhelming sound. Brilliant.

Write on

2005-10-13T10:01:00.000-04:00

"I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting; you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically seperated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor."

- Joan Didion, The White Album

A glowing article in the New York Review of Books about Joan Didion set me off on a spree of reading her early work - which has turned out to be the high point of my reading for the month. In the article, John Leonard writes: "I've been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours...something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves." I couldn't agree more. Didion is one of those rare writers whose style feels so balanced, so clean, that you enjoy reading them even when they write about virtually nothing (remember Hemingway in A Moveable Feast?). There's something about her writing that escapes definition but is undeniable - her lines have a gravity all their own.

The White Album is a brilliant example of this. The title piece, with its flawless evocation of the paranoia and restlessness of the 60's (complete with college protests, Black Panthers and a dream-like evening with the Doors), is exciting enough, but the really stand-out piece for me was an essay on the feminist movement. Didion starts by celebrating the feminist movement as the ultimate class struggle, but soon falls to critiquing it on grounds that I've always strongly agreed with [1]. The problem with the way the feminist movement has evolved, Didion suggests, is that it has placed the Everywoman over every woman, so that rather than allowing women to be who they are, it has created this vision of who they need to be. This is not real freedom, it is merely a submission to a self-created icon - an exercise more in tribal religion that in socio-political ideology. Didion writes: "All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it - that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death - could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all."(italics in the original). Or elsewhere: "The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words....These are converts who want not a revolution but 'romance', who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life exactly in the mold of their old life. In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom." Simply brilliant.

There are many other interesting essays here, and the writing is uniformly excellent, so that reading The White Album is a real treat. Don't miss it.

To close, one last quote that I can't resist posting:

"I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse, a "house blessing' which hung in a hallway of her house in West Hartford, Connecticut.

God bless the corners of this house,
And be the lintel blest -
And bless the hearth and bless the board
And bless each place of rest -
And bless the crystal windowpane that lets the starlight in
And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.

This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill, so insistently did it seem the kind of 'ironic' detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found."

Wow!

[1] In the interest of fending off indignant comments, let me say that I freely admit to not being an expert on the movement, and am aware that there are many ways in which Didion's critique is invalid in the 21st century. I still think, however, that for all the wealth of opportunities the movement has created for women, it has not managed to rid itself (and them) of the pressure to utilise and conform to these opportunities. The need to match up to some predefined ideal hasn't gone away; it's just that that image has changed and become harder to live up to.

Not so Good

2005-10-13T09:08:00.000-04:00

Eve Ensler's The Good Body

Question: What is the worst thing that can happen to an artist?
Answer: Celebrity Status.

If you don't believe me, just go watch Eve Ensler's new play, The Good Body. You'll be treated to the fairly grotesque spectacle of a woman trying, and failing, to crawl out of her own artistic vagina.

Ensler, as everyone in the English speaking world knows by now, is the author of The Vagina Monologues, a hard-hitting and brilliant gem of a play about vaginas and the women that go with them. With its compelling and focussed exploration of an issue (and a part of the body) that no one ever talks about, The Vagina Monologues is one long, blustering statement of woman power, that has achieved that holiest of cultural epithets - Cult Status.

But where The Vagina Monologues is forceful and outspoken, The Good Body is predictable and trite (you can almost tell from the names, can't you?). The truth is that even The Vagina Monologues isn't a particularly well-written play - it succeeds by being constantly surprising, almost shocking, combining a witty risqueness with some deeply emotional content. Ensler's writing is often shrill and a little forced, like the writing of someone trying too hard to impress, but the sheer impact of The Vagina Monologues means that you don't notice this.

You do notice it in The Good Body. The Good Body is a play where Ensler tries to take on the issue of physical beauty, of the tortures women will endure in order to fit some conventional standard of good looks. This is a valid issue (though Ensler seems to assume that the only people who care about losing weight are women trying to look more beautiful; that men might want / need to look good, or that people might actually want to lose weight in order to be healthy, seems not to have occured to her) but it's hardly uncharted territory. The Good Body is little more than a marginally clever amalgam of all the standard jokes / rants / discussions about the need to conform to some socially defined image of beauty, strung together by the whinings of a woman who (sadly) can no longer see beyond her own neuroses. The big message of the play (just to give you a sense of how banal it is) is that women don't need to conform to some stereotypical image, that they must celebrate their own bodies and enjoy being who they are. For people who call themselves feminists, Ensler and her fans must be the last people on the planet to realise this.

And it's not just the content of the play that seems formulaic. Ensler has clearly decided that the monologue form works for her, so that once again, the 'play' (if one can call a collection of haphazardly thrown together scenes that) consists of monologues by a dozen women from all across the world strung together by Ensler's narration. Ensler (who performs the play herself) does a creditable job of reproducing the speech patterns of women from different parts of the world, but the very fact that she has to resort to so cheap a trick to keep her audience's interest, tells you how little she has to say. Even where Ensler tries to be serious and touching the sentiment rings false, almost put on. It's the sort of cheap 'feminism' one finds in low-brow chick flicks.

Don't get me wrong. There are some wonderfully sharp and eminently quotable one-liners here [1]. It's just that that's all there is to the play - it's just a lot of clever observations strung together, as though someone had decided to read out some of the better posts from their blog. The Good Body is entertaining enough - in a slap-dash, preppy sort of way - but it's a play that says nothing new. When Vagina Monologues came out and made Ensler famous, one wondered how she was ever going to top it. Now we know she isn't going to.

Notes:

[1] There are some glimpses of the old Ensler here, mostly in the parts where she manages to step out of herself and make ironic points about the ridiculousness of her own situation - one relates to the last few scenes because they express what one has been feeling all along, that this is a play about a silly American woman who should grow up and realise that there are bigger problems in the world than having the perfect stomach.

Not Henry James

2005-10-10T20:33:00.000-04:00

Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty

There's a scene halfway through Alan Hollinghursts's The Line of Beauty, where a young, talented pianist is giving a concert in the a private home, and keeps coming back for encore after encore, long after the people in the audience have got bored and are only applauding to be polite. That's pretty much how I felt reading Hollinghurst's novels - a vague sense of appreciation coupled with a strong anxiety for it to get over so I could move on to more interesting things.

It's not that The Line of Beauty is a bad novel, exactly. It's just whimsical and rambling - pleasant enough to skim through, but ultimately unengaging. Hollinghurst tries to channel James (the main protagonist, Nick Guest, is doing his doctoral thesis on the Master) but manages neither the great man's psychological acuity, nor his facility with language, nor his deeply engrossing plot development. The end result is a novel that reads more like one of D. H. Lawrence's lesser work (with sexual explicitness adjusted for our more permissive times) than like anything resembling the Golden Bowl.

The plot is classic James. A young man enters an alien world as a guest, a long-term visitor. Gradually, through a series of social interactions played out in loving detail, he makes a place for himself in this new culture, accepting and being accepted. Yet despite his success in this world he remains, at heart, an outsider, and as the novel approaches its denouement the delicate balance of his existence in this world is brought dramatically and violently to a close. Decisions are taken, conclusions reached, the world moves on a different place. Hollinghurst manages this surface similarity well - and the idea of using a Jamesian lens to explore class and sexuality differences in 80's England is a fascinating one.

Where Hollinghurst fails is in reproducing the depth of the James experience. Too many of the scenes here seem repetitive, too much of the action seems contrived, and, ultimately, pointless(some of this, is true of James as well, of course, but the point of James' genius is that he never lets you feel this the way Hollinghurst does; you're never driven to question why you should even care what happens to the main characters in a J ames novel in the way I found myself doing here). Hollinghurst completely fails to explore any point of view except for his main protagonists, with the result that the other characters in the novel remain caricatures, ideal types playing out a role. Nor is his Hollinghurst's writing particulary exceptional. His prose is adequate, but far from impressive.

Of course, The Line of Beauty is also a novel about being forthrightly, gloriously gay. Here Hollinghurst is on surer footing, I feel - he writes about being gay in a marvellously un-selfconscious manner, and his love scenes join beauty to energy in a superb way. The first section of this book, with its glorious depiction of a young man falling madly yet shyly in love with his first real boyfriend remains my favourite part of the book. As the novel progresses, however, the weight of the rest of the plot causes the love scenes to drag. What began as a zestful exploration of homosexuality becomes a case of special pleading - as if the fact that he was writing about being gay meant that Hollinghurst was interesting by default and deserved special latitude. None of the writing in the long second section matches that in the first, and while the third section manages a more authentic tone of sadness, it still makes too much of the main protagonist being gay. This is disingenuous because it achieves precisely what the first part of the novel was working against - the alienation of the reader from the protagonist's plight. It's hard to come away from this novel with the feeling that Nick Guest's sexual preferences are irrelevant to the story [1] - and that, to me, makes it a weaker and less interesting novel.

Bottomline: The Line of Beauty is a pleasant but unexceptional read, a novel that has some wonderful scenes, but that could have greatly benefited from tighter editing and a greater sense of drive. Overall, another addition to my list of surprising choices that the Booker committee has made over the years.

Notes:

[1] One could argue, of course, that this is almost certainly not Hollinghurst's point in the first place. This is valid, but it leaves me wondering, what, if anything Hollinghurst's point is. Certainly as an exploration of being gay in England in the 80's, the novel falls woefully short, and I can't think of anything else that really stands out here.

The making of an orphan

2005-10-03T20:35:00.000-04:00

Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist

A question of the soul.
And the injured
losing their injury
in their innocence
--a cock, a cross,
an excellence of love.

- Allen Ginsberg 'Wild Orphan'

To say that Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist does justice to the Dickens' novel it is based on would be an overstatement. It is inconceivable that any film should. For how could one possibly capture, on celluloid, the richness and balance of Dickens' writing? How could one possibly be loyal to his gentleness, his wit, his precision? It is a task no director is equal to.

Given that limit, however, Polanski does a really good job. Oliver Twist is as faithful to the tone and spirit of Dickens' book as anything could be. The start of the movie is weak - Polanski is not at his best with humour, and the delicious ironies of Oliver's early existence are treated ham-handedly - there's a sense of predictability, of cliche. The only redeeming thing about this part of the movie is the landscapes - these are done with a painter's loving eye, so that to watch the movie is to be transported back to the land of Gainsborough and Constable.

Where the movie really picks up is when Oliver gets to London. Polanski's achievement, through most of the film, is to deliver scene after scene that looks exactly as you would have imagined it when you read the book, so that you experience an eerie sense of deja vu, the feeling that you've seen this exact picture as an illustration in some book or the other. Unlike so many film makers who base their movies on great novels, Polanski is too smart to try to control or interpret Dickens. His entire endeavour seems to be to make sure that the film doesn't come in the way of the book, so that the experience of watching the film is brought as close to the experience of reading the book as possible.

The end result is a movie that does a wonderful job of evoking memories of Dickens' novel. Perhaps the most compelling character here is Sykes (played by Jamie Foreman). In the movie, Sykes is a brooding, palpable menace, perhaps more so than he ever was in the book. You can literally feel the atmosphere in the room change each time he enters it. It says a lot for the power of Foreman's performance that he (ably assisted by Leanne Rowe as Nancy) rapidly becomes the emotional centre of the film, so that it almost feels as much a movie about Sykes as it is about Oliver.

And then, of course, there's Ben Kingsley. This is not Kingsley's greatest performance - his acting here is a little too theatrical for my taste - but there are glimpses of sheer genius in the way he plays the part of Fagin. For me, Oliver Twist has always been more about Fagin and the Artful Dodger than about Oliver (just as The Merchant of Venice has always been more about Shylock, than about Bassanio) - so it's saying quite a lot to say that Kingsley does not disappoint me. His performance captures beautifully the ambiguity of Fagin, his tender and reluctant villainy. Fagin is the most human of Dickens' creations here, because unlike most of the other characters he is neither good nor evil (and therefore not the embodiment of some idea of good and evil) - he is kind when he can be, heartless when he must. Fagin is generous to the point of sacrifice, but no further - he will help as much as he can, provided his own interests are not threatened in the slightest. In that sense, Fagin is the embodiment of Pareto optimality - he is happy to make someone better off, as long as it does not involve himself being made even slightly worse off. It is this struggle between kindness and cruelty that the movie brings out superbly - we are never quite sure how we feel about Fagin - whether we trust him or hate him, whether his eventual death is tragedy or justice.

At its human heart, Oliver Twist is a novel about leaving one's parents behind. The fact that Oliver starts as an orphan is incidental (and sweetly ironic), the story of the novel is the story of how he struggles to become one. In that sense, Fagin is the ultimate abusive parent, loving and kindhearted one minute, brutal and self-serving the next; alternating between threats of physical violence and pleas for gratitude. What Oliver (and therefore the reader) must come to terms with is the fact that gratitude is not a claim, that those who are kind to us or love us, often demand to be repaid for their love and that we must have the courage to deny them this sacrifice. That it is the nature of the world that parents must be revolted against, even destroyed, if we are ever to be more than mere replicas in their image, if we are ever to be truly ourselves. Isaac must kill Abraham, not the other way around. While the movie may seem to obscure this, the real threat to Oliver is not Sykes, it is his bond to Fagin, to the other boys. How can Oliver turn against them, when they are the only real family he has ever had? How can he denounce them to the police, and thus escape from their persecution forever? It is the seductive call of this attachment that threatens to ruin Oliver, to keep him from the opportunities that lie waiting for him so near at hand.

In the end, Oliver's choice is a cruel, even heartless one. It needs to be so. Oliver's rescue, his glorious new life, is achieved at the cost of two deaths, two great sacrifices. That of Nancy, who in giving up her life to save Oliver, becomes the only mother he'll ever really have; and that of Fagin, who Oliver destroys as surely as though he had pressed a gun to his head and pulled a trigger, but who Oliver, in a gesture of characteristic meaninglessness, cannot bring himself to abandon. That last scene where Oliver goes to meet Fagin in jail the night before his execution is the classic allegory of the rebellious son trying (and failing, except perhaps in his heart) to make peace with his father. Oliver, with a callousness characteristic of youth, is unapologetic but merciful, except Fagin does not seem to accept his compassion, and Oliver leaves in a flurry of panic, unable to stay another minute with this man he truly loves. In all of literature, there are few more touching and authentic scenes between a father and his son.

In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie wrote "children are gay and innocent and heartless". For me, Oliver Twist is a testament to that idea. To read its ending is to experience that same sense of injustice, of bitter and faux happiness that one encounters in the last chapter of Mansfield Park. Except where Mansfield Park is a surrender, Oliver Twist is a realisation. Dickens' great insight here is that all happy endings are also tragedies, that to rejoice in the future is to be almost cruelly indifferent to the past that we once inhabited and swore to keep faith with. Whether such indifference is necessary or a cause for sorrow depends on how young you are at heart.

But to return to the movie. There is a lot that Polanski misses here. Much of Dickens' larger involvement with questions of class and status are absent, with the result that the movie sorely lacks the irony and wit of the novel. In many ways, Dickens' point is that Oliver's story is shockingly unnatural, that for every one boy who is 'saved' the way Oliver is, there are thousands, perhaps millions, who suffer and die without ever having an opportunity to escape their lot. Oliver is exceptional only in his luck, not in his person. This never comes out in the film. Nor does the film quite manage to capture the deep sense of belonging, of family, that Fagin and his band of pickpockets give Oliver.

In the end, then, Polanski's Oliver Twist is not a substitute for the book - it could never have been. There is a great deal missing here, a great deal that does not come across. What Polanski has managed to do is to make a movie that is a sincere and touching exploration of the personal side of Dickens' great novel, of the terrors of growing up, of how the world mistreats us and how its cruelty goes largely unpunished, of how, in the end, we must always betray those who have been kind to us.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

2005-10-03T15:28:00.000-04:00

Song list
1. Fight Test
2. One More Robot-Sympathy 3000-21
3. Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots, Pt. 1
4. Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots, Pt. 2
5. In the Morning of the Magicians
6. Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
7. Are You a Hypnotist
8. It's Summertime
9. Do You Realize
10. All We Have Is Now
11. Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)

The Flaming Lips use a faux Japanese import CD insert for this album, in keeping with its theme of Japanese anime themed lyrics in its first half, which tells the story of Yoshimi, who must battle pink robots to save the world.

The music in this album is a haunting combo of screaming guitar work and (moog?) synthesizers, and many of the lyrics are startlingly weird (but patchy), making for a lovely combination overall. The 'Lips do an excellent job of telling a story which spans tracks 2-4, and on that front rival Pink Floyd (of the Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here era). Approaching Pavonis Mons is possibly the best one to sample purely for their abilities at orchestrating what could be a finale for a movie made on the subject of Yoshimi.

The album begins with Fight Test, which is mostly an unremarkable love song about how some guy stole the singer's girlfriend, but does make for a decent introduction to their musical style. The real pyrotechnics begin with the second track, One More Robot, with the refrain "One more robot learns to feel/Something more than a machine".

Tracks 3 and 4, which form parts 1 and 2 of 'Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots' continue on the theme of robots, but now switch to evil robots, possibly pink (as seen on the album cover and as mentioned in the album title), which Yoshimi decides to fight. Track 3 is instrumental, depicting the invasion of the robots. The meat of the lyrics in track 4 describe how Yoshimi takes on the robots. Track 4 begins by introducing Yoshimi, who is "a black-belt in karate". Chorus "Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat those evil machines/I know she can defeat them/Oh Yoshimi! They don't believe me/But you won't let those robots defeat/eat me" ("eat me" in the second repetition of the chorus). The loveliest lines: "Those evil natured robots/They're programmed to destroy us/She's gotta be strong to fight them/So she's taking lots of vitamins."

By track 5, the robots have presumably been defeated (or maybe have taken over the world) because the lyricist goes back to familiar themes of love, life, and death, continuing to make skilful use of synthesizers and continuing the musical (if not the lyrical) theme. Although the break in lyrical continuity is frustrating, the music itself makes up for it quite well.

This album grows on you with each listen, and is highly recommended -- forms an excellent antidote to mainstream rock.

Family Values are for the Birds / Where's Batman when you need him?

2005-10-02T19:50:00.000-04:00

March of the Penguins

The first thing that hits you about March of the Penguins is how unimaginably beautiful a film it is. It starts with the landscapes - waters aquamarine and turquoise, ice caps neon white - breathtaking vistas of wind-swept barrenness. And in the midst of all this, the penguins - shot with infinite delicacy and trembling closeness, so that you can sense the very sleekness of their flesh, see the glittering reflection of their eye, admire the vividness of their colour, of their presence. Luc Jacquet's camera follows the penguins everywhere: through sun and darkness, through wind and snow, on land and under water (the underwater shots are particularly beautiful - like watching an exquisite ballet). Watching the film, it is easy to forget that these are wild creatures - not human actors or trained stunt animals or (indeed) computer images - so perfect is the footage. I'm not a big fan of wildlife photography in general, but the footage that goes into the March of the Penguins has to be seen to be believed.

The second thing that hits you about the March of the Penguins is how it's an unabashed and tedious exercise in the most frightful sentimentality and blatant anthropomorphism. Just because the penguins look vaguely human waddling about on their claws is no reason to attribute a whole range of human emotions, values and ideas to them. I mean, look, they're birds, for god's sake - they don't reason and make decisions, they do what they do based on instinct - to measure their actions against the standards of human society, even to ascribe to them anything resembling rational choice is a gross trivialisation unworthy of intelligent cinema [1]. In spending all its time projecting human behaviour on to the penguins, the movie does them a grave disservice, by denying them their essential animal identity, and trying to make us all join in the pretense that they're something more than functioning organisms designed to survive and procreate. If there is one value that does shine through in the movie, it's the incredible resilience of Life itself - the way it survives in the harshest of all environments, using the bodies it inhabits as brutally as it needs to to survive. Everything else is just the overheated imagination of studio executives searching for the next Bambi. The entire narration of this film sounds like it was put together by someone whose sole objective was to revel in the kind of soppiness that makes people go "Awwww! So sweet!".

I might as well say it - March of the Penguins is a movie for little children. It consistently either skips over the brutal facts of life (there are no shots of the penguins mating, for instance; and no discussion of what happens to penguins who die of the cold - do other penguins eat them? You'd think they would, given that they're all starving, but the movie doesn't tell us) or mentions them grudgingly, and then quickly moves on to something more positive. The result is eerily Disney-esque. For all the care, patience and skill that went into the making of this film, they might as well just have done it in animation.

You could argue, of course, that there's nothing wrong with combining a wildlife documentary with a family potboiler - and certainly the movie does a good job of this. The trouble is that weepy family movies are precisely the kind of films that bore me and that I avoid, so personally I was annoyed that some perfectly good footage was being used in that way. More importantly though, I feel the narration is too obtrusive, too heavy-handed. Subtlety is not a strength of this film, the general idea seems to be to spell everything out in as much detail as possible, lest the viewer miss the slightest nuance of similarity between penguin and human. Had we been left to draw our own parallels, this may have been a far more touching film (remember Born Free?). As it is the entire film seems excessively stage managed, and all the really moving sequences have been narrated within an inch of their life. What makes this particularly irritating is that the footage is actually extraordinarily eloquent, and could easily speak for itself, without Morgan Freeman's able assistance.

Bottomline: March of the Penguins could have been one of the most incredible and touching wildlife documentaries ever made if it had just been allowed the space to breathe. As it is, it's a combination of spectacular camerawork and soppy writing. If you're the kind of person who loves babies and teddy bears and enjoys watching Full House, you'll probably love it. Otherwise just focus on the visuals and enjoy the film for the visual spectacle it is. And never mind the propaganda.

[1] In many ways Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is the perfect antidote to this movie - Herzog explicitly makes the point that the animals are simply animals, and one cannot ascribe human emotions to them. I wish he'd told the makers of this fil that.

Where the rainbow shone

2005-09-30T22:18:00.000-04:00

Kusangala in concert

"Where the years have gone where the years have flown
Where the rainbow shone
We vanish, and we make no moan."

- Allen Ginsberg

Attended a concert by this local jazz ensemble called Kusangala (which means 'rejoice' I'm told) - which turned out to be way more brilliant than I'd expected.

The great thing about the ensemble is that it brings together a range of very disparate talents. For starters there's Tyrone Brown - a hypnotic bass player and the composer of much of the group's music. His bass solo was easily the highlight of the concert for me - a dark, driven piece, magically overlaying the most delicate of melodies on a full-throated and proud rhythm beat, the sheer throb of the music in the small auditorium making the cymbals rattle as if the ghosts of the ancients were keeping time on the drums.

The other highlight for me was Gloria Galante who plays (hold your breath) the harp. I must confess I've never thought of the harp as a jazz instrument (though apparently it's not that uncommon), even though it's an instrument I really love (remember Mozart's incredible flute and harp concerto). Now that I come to think of it though, it's a really good sound for jazz - part piano, part guitar - a marvellously clean, glistening sound, and a beautiful instrument to meditate and improvise on. The combination of Brown's bass rhythm and Galante's crystal clear melodies was perfection itself. Galante also played a couple of pieces with tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and again the combination was impressive, if only for being such an unusual sound - elegaic, almost classical (one of the pieces they were doing was originally scored for piano and cello). Pope (who I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard before - I really must get more into the Philly jazz scene) has a nice throaty sound and his slow movements have that dreamy midnight quality that one (or at least I) associates with classic jazz.

The rest of the ensemble brought their own talents to bear on the music as well. Duke Wilson's percussion had this earthy, almost tribal feel, and some of the effects he pulled off were truly mind-blowing. You could just shut your eyes and swing along to the music. And Rosella Washington sang very movingly. Overall, I thought the combination worked very nicely, producing a sound that was refreshing and authentic, if not excessively brilliant. One of my favourite pieces - this thing called the Somewhere over the Rainbow Samba - exemplifies this perfectly. It's a rendition of Somewhere over the rainbow played with superb delicacy on the harp, accompanied by a rich bass line and a catchy samba beat.

Not all was sweetness and light at the concert. There was also this annoying woman (I didn't get her name) who was brought onto stage to read her 'poetry' along with the music. This would have been an interesting improvisation if the woman could write, but as it was her clunky uninspired verses left me cringing in my chair and wishing she would shut up so I could listen to the music (she was the sort of poet who believes the fact that 'soaring' rhymes with 'roaring' is so important a discovery that she simply must include it in her poem at least four times. Aarrghh!).

Trashy doggerel aside, this was a really beautiful concert.

P.S. Plus, with my usual look, I ended up sitting next to this really dumb woman whose idea of enjoying the music was to take photographs of it. So every time one of the artists would branch off into an intense solo or improvisation, she would eagerly pull out her camera, spend two minutes squirming about in her chair trying to find the perfect angle and then take a picture (which meant that there would be a bright flash exploding in your face and blinding you). Someone should have explained to her that you can't actually hear the music in the photographs. And this was inspite of clear announcements at the start of the program informing us that photography was not permitted. How annoying can people be? Sometimes you wonder whether it wouldn't be a better world if you could go around slapping people.

Difficult Love

2005-09-29T20:34:00.000-04:00

E M Forster's Maurice

"IN paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto publish’d—from the pleasures, profits, eruditions, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul;
Clear to me, now, standards not yet publish’d—clear to me that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for, feeds, rejoices most in comrades;
Here, by myself, away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash’d—for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere,
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest,
Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic love,
Afternoon, this delicious Ninth-month, in my forty-first year,
I proceed, for all who are, or have been, young men,
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades."

- Walt Whitman

It's banned book week, so I thought I would do my bit by finally reading E M Forster's Maurice. Not that Maurice was ever technically banned. It was merely suppressed for some 60 years by the author himself (he wrote it in 1914, it was published in 1972) who chose not to publish it during his lifetime because of the nature of its content.

Maurice is a book about homosexuality. Or rather, it is the story of a young man (named Maurice) falling in love and coming to acknowledge and accept his own desires and wants the way any young man has to - except that this young man is homosexual. There are serious moral questions here, and a great deal of social satire, but Forster's ultimate point is, I think, an aesthetic one. Forster is not arguing that homosexuality is right - that for him is besides the point - he is trying to make you see how love just is: is true because it is beautiful, is beautiful because it is true. All through his life, Forster's great endeavour was to use the tact and intelligence of his writing to take us past the polite categories of social interaction into the trembling realities of the soul, to make us see, connect and feel what it meant to be both human and spirit.

If Maurice remains an enchanting read, it is for that reason. Unlike Gide, Forster is not making a philosophical argument for homosexuality[1] . Unlike Lawrence, Forster is not celebrating the physical. Forster sings of instinct, yes, but it is the instinct of the soul, in which the call of sex is but a distant flute [2] - his message, to the extent he has one, is simply that what is deeply felt cannot be ignoble and must be celebrated. Nothing else should matter - for who are we, after all, to legislate a young man's heart.

At one level, Maurice is a string of exquisitely written cliches (though it is difficult, of course, to tell what is cliche when one is reading something written a hundred years ago). All the standard elements of the romance novel are here. The uncertain and shy young man, the stranger he first admires then falls in love with, that clumsy first courtship, that overwhelming joy of first discovery, the gradual fading of the light, heartbreak, loss, despair, renewal - right down to the final scene where our hero rushes to the docks (airport) to bid his beloved a tearful farewell. This is plebian fare, you might think - except that by introducing the element of homosexuality in it, Forster both raises it above cliche and makes the point that it really is that essentially human. Just given the sheer skill that Forster brings to his prose - the delicate crispness of the writing, the psychological acuity, the detailed precision of his visual imagination, his sense of quiet drama - this would be a brilliant book even if it was about two heterosexual lovers. By framing it as homosexual love Forster forces us to abandon cliche entirely. Maurice's central difficulty in the book is also Forster's (and by extension, the readers) - it is the problem of forging a new idiom, of going beyond the conventional of finding new ways to express, in action, in word, in thought, a love that does not conform to all the usual stereotypes. There's a palpable sense of something fresh and raw and very beautiful being created in this book, the feeling of having put together something very fragile and of having to hold your breath so as not to break it.

This is part of the reason that Maurice is one of the most moving love stories of our time. As a celebration of love - not homosexual love, mind, but love generally - it is an intense and exquisite sonata, a paean of attic beauty. Early on in the novel, there is talk of the love of the Greeks, and that is precisely the sort of Platonic ideal that Forster is true to here.

Whether or not the book is an accurate description of the thoughts and emotions of a young man coming to terms with his own homosexuality in early 20th century England (or indeed at any other time) I am, of course, not competent to judge. But to think of Maurice as a book about homosexuality is to miss the point entirely. There is much here that seems outdated (though it is a sad reflection on the world we live in that too much of the prejudice levelled against Maurice, too much of the incomprehension, too many of the trials seem real enough even today), but Forster's novel is not about the mores or conventions of his time. If Forster waited 60 years to publish Maurice it was only because he trusted the power of his writing, and understood that what he had to say was universal enough to resonate with audiences a hundred years from now. Because what he was writing about was not England or 1914 but about things far more fundamental to the human condition: youth, desire, lust, despair, hope, beauty and yes, Love.

It is a testament to how right he was that this is still a beautiful book to read.

Notes:

[1] See Corydon
[2] Of course, any half-decent Freudian would argue that all this spirituality is ultimately driven by sex - but there are times when it's better to just let a cigar be a cigar.

C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog)

2005-09-29T14:37:00.000-04:00

Starring: Benoît Poelvoorde

Before there was 'Natural Born Killers' there was the Belgian movie, 'Man Bites Dog'. This movie was made by Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, andAndré Bonzel as a student project. The actors playing Ben's immediate family are his family in real life, and his grandparents manage a grocery store in the town where this was shot, as they do in the movie. (According to IMDB, they were unwitting participants in the movie.) Remy and Andre both feature in the movie as the journalist and cameraman who follow Ben around town as he rapes, maims, and kills people.

Ben is a serial killer who Remy and Andre are conducting a documentary on. The film is shot in black-and-white, which may be to make it look artistic, but is probably more because of the low budget - it is also mixed in mono. Some scenes are funny, but most are horrific in their depiction of graphic violence. The US version of this movie is missing a rather graphic scene involving a pregnant woman (so I'm told by a Belgian friend who loves this movie), which is probably a good thing, because the movie is stomach-churning as-is.

The violence in this movie is mind-numbing and it is worth watching purely because of the detachment one feels from Ben's victims (or one is forced to feel to avoid getting sick all over the carpet). Induces watching-oneself -from-above moments. The movie also puts forth the question of journalistic responsibility for the events they are filming, since Remy and Andre do nothing to stop Ben, and even participate in his crimes as the movie progresses. Given that many blame violence in the media for violent crime in society, I must say that I did not kill anyone after watching this movie.

Garden State

2005-09-29T01:06:00.000-04:00

Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman

Garden State is a pleasant, quirky movie, with (surprisingly) a formulaic ending. Better movies than this have been made and will continue to be made, and better actresses than Natalie Portman (or at least those with less distracting teeth) may have converted this into a greater movie, but that does not detract from Braff and Portman's reasonable chemistry, and the overall pleasantness of the movie (which I mentioned before).

(Warning: spoilers below.)

GS follows Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff), an actor-waiter with an iffy career in both acting and waiting, whose only big role was playing a retarded quarterback, as he goes back home to SmallTown, New Jersey. GS isn't sure he likes his family or if he wants to be back, but he learns to overcome past problems.

Samantha (Natalie Portman), whom he meets in a neurologist's waiting room while being dry humped by a dog, is the obligatory love interest who teaches him to live life. Then Zach has to go back home to California. And there follows a formulaic ending, which those of you who watched the Friends finale will doubtless be able to guess.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

2005-09-29T00:38:00.000-04:00

Starring: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum

TLAWSZ is a contrived soap opera about a washed-up marine biologist (Steve Zissou, played by Bill Murray) in the Jacques Cousteau mould, looking to revive his career with one last adventure to kill the jaguar shark, which may or may not exist.

Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) thinks he may be Steve Zissou's son. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. To begin with, Steve acceptance of this without any real emotion stretches credulity. Steve renames Ned (demonstrating his arrogance just in case you didn't get it), and appoints him to his crew, and they are joined on their voyage by a reporter, Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett). Steve's wife leaves him for his rival, Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum). Ned finances Steve's adventure. Steve wants Jane, Jane doesn't want Steve, so Jane and Ned jump into bed. They meet pirates. Steve saves them all. Ned dies. Jane cries. They find the jaguar shark. The movie of the last adventure is a hit. Steve Zissou is the world's greatest marine biologist. The End.

Bill Murray and Owen Wilson turn in uncharacteristic insipid, uninspiring performances, clearly banking on their fan base to see them through to success in this movie. Jeff Goldblum is sadly wasted in this movie, playing Jeff Goldblum from any movie, but with greased hair. Jeff Goldblum's best role was in Annie Hall, where he had one dialog, but he delivered it beautifully (but wasn't credited in the end-credits). Cate Blanchett provides the only spark in her brief role in this movie, but it may be because of her accent (I like British accents).

Go watch Pulp Fiction instead.

Shaun of the Dead

2005-09-29T00:34:00.000-04:00

Starring: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, et al.

Shaun of the Dead is a hilarious spoof of horror movies (the title kinda gives that away … sigh). Shaun is an easygoing chap whose idea of a good time is a few beers at the Winchester with his best bud Ed, but his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend wants romance, and doesn’t particularly fancy the Winchester. (Now how many male readers can identify with this (substitute beer with your favorite beer substitute)? Let me rephrase keeping political sensibilities in mind -- how many readers, gender neutral, can identify with this example of a person whose partner-in-crime wants to do nothing while they want to do something?)

Things start going horribly wrong when everybody everywhere starts turning into zombies. And Shaun has a plan involving a cricket bat and the Winchester ... (I wish I could give away the whole darn movie -- brilliant, I thought.)

Note: The subtitles say “female voice singing in Arabic” or words to that effect for an otherwise dialog-free interlude, but the female voice, while definitely singing, is singing in Hindi.

[Posted by speckone for speck 42.]

The terrible doubt of appearances

2005-09-25T19:43:00.000-04:00

John Banville's The Shroud

Someone lives in my house

At night he opens the refrigerator
inhaling the summer's coriander

On Radio Kashmir he hears announced
all search has been abandoned
for last year's climbers
on Nanga Parbat

My house breaks
with the sympathy of neighbours

This is his moment

In my room
he sits at the table
practices my signature answers my mail

He wears the cardigan
my mother knit for my return

The mirror gives up
my face to him

He calls to my mother in my voice

She turns

He is breathless to tell her tales
in which I was never found.

- Agha Shahid Ali, 'Survivor'

What do we mean when we say I? When we speak so glibly of the self, of identity, what exactly is it that we are referring to? How do we tell where our 'self' ends and someone else, a stranger who we are trying to be (a la Sartre), takes over?

These are the questions that John Banville's 2002 novel, The Shroud, is founded on. The Shroud is the story of Alex Vander, an aging scholar of great repute, a native of Belgium who escaped from that country during the persecutions of the Second World War. Or so the world believes. At the heart of Vander's identity is a terrible secret, one that effectively makes his whole life a lie. Or does it? Who is the real Alex Vander? Or, rather who, is this person who serves us as a narrator and calls himself that? And if Vander is not his real name, what is it then, and why has he assumed the identity of another? Or is it that he has given his own identity to another's name? As doppelganger novel goes, this is a fascinating example of the genre, a novel of powerful and ironic subtleties, of deep and incisive questions about the nature of the self. A sample:

"I think of an actor in the ancient world. He is a veratan of the Attic drama, a spear-carrier, an old trouper. The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name. He is never Oedipus, but once he has played Creon. He has his mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman. The white clay from which it is fashioned has turned to the shade and texture of bone. The rough felt lining has been softened by years of sweat and friction so that it fits smoothly upon the contours of his face. Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is. At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front, like the old statue of Silenus in the marketplace the features of which the weather has entirely worn away. He takes to wearing the mask at home, when no one is there. It is a comfort, it sustains him; he finds it wonderfully restful, it is like being asleep and yet conscious. The one day he comes to the table wearing it. His wife makes no remark, his children stare for a moment, then shrug and go back to their accustomed bickering. He has achieved his apotheosis. Man and mask are one." [1]

If the entire novel had been an exploration of this sort, this would have been a great book. But there is more - Vander's secret has now been found out by a young woman who comes to Turin to confront him with what she has learnt. What follows is a fascinating portrait of the relationship that evolves between two people - a dangerously ill and troubled young woman and an arrogant and merciless old man, struggling desperately to come to terms with his own death.

The writing is superb throughout the book - Banville's prose is sharp and clean and a little tart, almost sour in places, like the taste of a plum that is not fully ripened. The character sketches are excellent, the evocation of scenes outstanding. In many ways, Banville seems to have been influenced by Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The Shroud explores many of the same themes: an aging and cynical academic, shown disappointed and suffocating at home, travels to a romantic Italian city, falls in love with a beautiful and doomed young creature, who becomes for him a way of coming to terms with his own mortality; of finding a lasting, if not untroubled, peace.

The difficulty I had with the book was its lack of drive. What little actual plot / action there is in the book seems involuntary and unconvincing, the connections between the different parts of the book are flimsy, the story seems contrived and inconclusive - a way of bringing the characters together so they can interact and show themselves to us. Banville is like a reluctant swimmer who stands on the edge of the water, feeling it tentatively with his feet, before jumping far too quickly (and somewhat ungraciously) into the deep end. For the first half of the novel, the plot of his story almost doesn't take off, which would be fine, except once it does, it proceeds with reckless abandon and goes overboard very quickly. The individual sections and characters of this novel are well written, but the story itself seems hastily tacked on, and doesn't really work.

Bottomline: The Shroud is an interesting read - an engagingly written book that won't sweep you off your feet, but may impress you in parts with the spareness and beauty of its prose. If you like Banville this is definitely worth reading. If you don't, this book probably won't change your mind.

[1] This passage reminds me strongly of the chapter in Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where he speaks of how people wear faces the way they wear gloves or some other article of clothing.

All these albums that you mention

2005-09-24T00:21:00.000-04:00

My Top Ten Dylan Albums

A link from Jabberwock to an article by Roger Ebert (kind of) talking about Bob Dylan's life and work prompted an evening of obsessive listening to Dylan songs, so figured I might as well top it off by posting a list of my ten favourite Dylan albums. This proved to be a harder task than I'd imagined, but here goes:

1. Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

I know, I know, pretty much every Dylan fan out there is going to scream blue murder about this one - but Highway 61 Revisited is, without doubt, my favourite Dylan album. Admittedly, it's far from being the most musical of his albums, but for my money it's the one that best showcases his talents as a songwriter. There's more genuine poetry in this one than there is in pretty much anything else that Dylan put together. Starting with the incredible Like a Rolling Stone, the album goes on to include such classics as the Ballad of a Thin Man (" You've been with the professors / And they've all liked your looks / With great lawyers you have / discussed lepers and crooks / You've been through all of / F Scott Fitzgerald's books / You're very well read / It's well known // But something is happening here / And you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones?"), Tombstone Blues, Highway 61 Revisited and that greatest of all epic Dylan songs - Desolation Row. Just the names of the songs on this album are magic: It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry, Queen Jane Approximately, Just like Tom Thumb's Blues. A truly amazing album.

2. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

In the beginning, there was The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. In many ways, this is Dylan's first real album - the 1962 Bob Dylan album is mostly covers of other people's songs. This is Dylan in full acoustic / folk mode, and the album includes some of his finest songs within that genre. The result is a collection of songs from a young new artist that would put to shame the 'Best of" collections of most musicians. The album starts with my favourite Dylan song of all time - Blowin' in the wind - and then goes through such wonders as Girl of the North Country, A Hard Rain's a-gonna fall and Don't think twice it's all right; as well as the delightfully whimsical Talking World War III blues and Dylan's rendition of Corrina, Corrina. Free-wheeling is the word.

3. The Times they are a-changin' (1964)

You knew this was coming, didn't you? If I had to pick one album that said why Dylan was so important to 60's music, this would be it. But the songs I really love here are not the overtly political ones (with the exception of With God on our side which has to be the most stunning, most whimsical and most ironic history lesson ever sung) - Only a pawn in their game, The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll - these are songs I like well enough. But the songs I really love here are the incredibly gentle One too many mornings, the sparkling When the ship comes in and the achingly sad Restless Farewell. Plus, of course, there's the title track, which is too magical a song for me to even start to speak of. The Times they are a-changin' may well be Dylan's most important album, and the one he'll be the most remembered for.

4. Blood on the tracks (1975)

The early 1970's were not the best time for Dylan. While he continued to release an album every year, his output from this period is, frankly, better measured out in songs than in albums. So we have New Morning (If Not for you), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Knockin' on heaven's door) and Planet Waves (Forever Young). With the exception of these songs, though, it feels like Dylan has slipped into auto pilot, either feeding off himself (as in the 1971 Greatest Hits or the 1974 Before the Flood) or just going through the motions.

Blood on the Tracks represents an incredible return to form. Some of my favourite songs from the 70's are here, including Tangled up in Blue, Simple Twist of Fate, Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Shelter from the Storm and (the highly underrated) You're going to make me lonesome when you go. Blood on the Tracks is easily Dylan's finest album from the 70's (though some parts of the Basement Tapes are spectacular, and the live performance At Budokan has to be heard to be believed) and marked an upsurge of talent that saw him through Desire (1976), Street Legal (1978) and Slow Train Coming (1979) before he petered out into the idiocy that was Dylan in the 80's.

5. Blonde on Blonde (1966)

If Blood on the Tracks was a start of a new era for Dylan, Blonde on Blonde was the end of one. Blonde on Blonde is, in many ways, the culmination of the Dylan's best years; it is the last of his great albums. There are those who would argue that as such it deserves to be ranked higher in this list, and I don't necessarily disagree - it's just that for me Blonde on Blonde is an unbelievable album with no (or few) outstanding songs. My favourite songs here are Rainy Day Woman, Visions of Johannah and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, but the real point of this album, I think, is that every song on it is memorable (the list includes Stuck inside of Mobile, I want you, Most likely you go your way and I'll go mine, Temporary like Achilles, Absolutely Sweet Marie and One of must know) - if anything, I suspect it's the fact that every song is so wonderful that keeps the brilliance of any one song from shining out.

There's a scene in the movie version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, where Barry, the music store attendant (played by Jack Black) discovers that a customer has never heard Blonde on Blonde. In a sudden panic, Barry rushes over to a stack of records, pulls out the album and hands it over to the customer saying "Don't worry, it'll be okay now." I know exactly how he feels.

6. Bringing it all back home (1965)

Another of the great albums from the early to mid 60's. Dylan breaks away from the politics of his earlier songs here, recording three of my all time Dylan favourites: Tambourine Man, Love minus Zero and It's all over now, Baby Blue. The album also includes one of the few Dylan songs I can't stand - Maggie's farm - plus the wonderful It's all right, Ma, I'm only bleeding and the glorious She belongs to me. The reason it's not higher up in this list is only that the other songs are far less impressive than in the earlier albums. In Blood on the Tracks, in Blonde on Blonde, in Highway 61 Revisited it's hard to pick a song that you don't care for, but all the other songs here (with the possible exception of Subterranean Homesick Blues) are, frankly, eminently forgettable.

7. Another side of Bob Dylan (1964)

It's pure whim that Another Side of Bob Dylan turns out to be the last of Dylan's great albums on this list. This is a gentle, poetic and startlingly quiet album - including such often overlooked beauties as Ramona, I don't believe you and All I really want to do. There's also My Back Pages (which isn't that great a song, frankly, it's just that that one line - "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" is inescapable) and what must be my favourite Dylan love song - It ain't me, babe. Oh, and then there's the hilarious Motorpsycho Nightmare and I shall be free No. 10. This is a wonderful album, and has a quaint, simple quality to it that is hard to find in much of Dylan (at least in so concentrated a form).

8. Desire (1976)

Desire is a difficult Dylan album to pin down. In many ways it represents a very different sound for Dylan - songs like Mozambique, Joey and Oh, Sister, with the chorus backing up Dylan's voice seem strangely un-Dylanesque (if there's such a word). The echo of the chorus is irritating, and it obscures that flat, matter-of-fact voice that is so quintessentially Dylan.

Despite that, Desire is a marvellous album. Dylan returns to politics for a moment, giving us Hurricane, then branches off through Isis and Mozambique to the glorious One more cup of coffee, before making his way through Oh, Sister and Romance in Durango to the soaring sentimentality of Sara. This is not a great album for Dylan qua Dylan - it's place in his overall canon is problematic, I think - but if you manage to keep the Dylan of the 60's out of your head for a little while, this is a glorious album.

9. John Wesley Harding

No listing of Dylan's best albums would be complete without this gem. There is a lot in John Wesley Harding that is mediocre, but hold it at the right angle and you can see the full lustre of Dylan's music shining through. By far the best song here is All along the Watchtower (one of my all time favourites), but there's also the Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest and I'll be your baby tonight, and all the other songs are eminently worth a listen (Dear Landlord, John Wesley Harding, Drifter's Escape) even if they do fall short of being outstanding.

10. Slow Train Coming

This was a tough one. Because putting Slow Train Coming at number 10 means I had to leave out Nashville Skyline (Lay Lady Lay, Tonight I'll be staying here with you), Time out of Mind (Not dark yet, Standing in the doorway) and Street Legal (Changing of the Guards, Is your love in vain). But Slow Train Coming deserves it. Starting with Gotta Serve Somebody and making its way through Precious Angel, Slow Train and When you gonna wake up? this is a kinder, more inward looking album than much of Dylan's other work. But what makes it special for me is I believe in you - a song that highlights, more than anything else I can think of, the haunting, vulnerable quality of Dylan's voice.

Note: I should mention that I'm not including some of the live performances here - notable among them being Dylan at Budokan (an absolute miracle of an album, all your favourite Dylan songs as you've never heard them sung before), The Rolling Thunder Revue tapes and the Live 1966 album (which features, as a friend once pointed out to me - a wonderful exchange between Dylan and irate fans denouncing him for switching to his more big band avatar - if you listen very carefully you can make out the f word).