Tuesday 2 August 2011

Enough Already

There has been something of a hiatus here on the Almanac as the One Eye has been focussed upon other matters.  An unseasonal bout of man-flu sees me unexpectedly at home and, with no cricket to listen to after England demolished India on the fourth day of the second Test, it seems like a good time to offer a personal cultural update, albeit one punctuated by a succession of fruity coughs and explosive sneezes.

It often seems to me that the Booker Prize reinforces stereotypes of literary fiction – joyless, earnest, wilfully ‘difficult’ and with oblique endings, as if wrapping everything tidily up is somehow wrong.  When I picked up Howard Jacobson’s 2010 winner, The Finkler Question, I began to think that my ignorant prejudices were just that – ignorant and prejudiced – until, that is, it became clear that the gentile character’s obsession with Jews and Judaism was going to be What The Book Was About.  ‘Enough, already,’ I thought.  And this was only at the halfway point.  When I set out on this blog I did aim to avoid gratuitous crudity but in this case I will break my own rule.  What a load of old shit this book was.

By contrast Martin Amis’s last book, The Pregnant Widow, proved a pleasant surprise.  Unburdened by much of the eye-rolling Wank that he’s always seemed compelled to introduce into even his best books, cf London Fields, this was a joy and a laugh to read, which may say more about me than the Booker Prize judges, who didn’t even elevate it to the 2010 shortlist.

I’d never read any of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books before seeing the film The Talented Mr Ripley a few years ago and subsequently getting hold of a copy of the book of the film, as it were.  I recently chanced upon a copy of Ripley Under Water, the last of the sequence.   The anally-retentive part of me rails against reading books out of order but I’d read several hefty volumes recently and this seemed just the sort of light offering that I was in the mood for.  As before, I was struck with Highsmith’s craftsmanship such that the reader engages with this amoral snobbish anti-hero and wills him to emerge unscathed.  That said, and without having read the intervening books in the Ripliad, it did strike me a little as Ripley-by-numbers and rather implausible
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A re-read of Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, about the Algerian war of independence, confirmed my thoughts that first time around that all of our politicians and top-brass should have been issued with copies of it before embarking on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Apparently he tried to press a copy on Rumsfeld, who didn’t want to know.  You can’t read this book, or The Last Valley, about Dien Bien Phu, without gaining some understanding of why France acts in the frequently obstreperous way that it does.  In retrospect it seems amazing that in the early sixties there was a genuine possibility of a military coup and civil war in France. 
 
More history: Dominic Sandbrook has now brought out three books charting the history of modern Britain from Suez onwards that are strike as lighter and less dry than the parallel marathon being run by David Kynaston.  State of Emergency covers 1970-1974, the bookends being the surprise electoral success and failure of Edward Heath’s Conservative government.  It’s interesting to note from this book how the, then powerful, Unions’ leaders recognised that Heath genuinely wanted to get on with them, even though they wouldn’t publically admit it.  There is a nice little vignette of a few of them visiting Downing Street, being entertained by Heath on the piano and him, on request, giving a rendition of the Red Flag.  From a personal point of view, it’s slightly disturbing to find the time of your own life beginning to become ‘history’.  There is more of this to come, of course.  And it’ll really be when the histories of the eighties and the nineties appear that I’ll be able to snort and say it wasn’t like that all.  But State of Emergency did bring back a couple of memories: sitting with candles in the dark during one of the power cuts – 1972, it must have been.  And, very vaguely, the furore over England failing to beat Poland and so missing out on the 1974 World Cup in one of the most one sided matches ever.

A recent shoe-shopping expedition to Oxford Street saw me emerging from John Lewis, successful but exhausted and in need of restorative Drink.  In the pub, I fell to talking with a Venezuelan academic.  We had a good old wide-ranging pub chat over a couple of hours and several pints and, grasping at straws for things-Latin-American to talk about, I seized upon the themes of Conrad’s Nostromo, another recent and well worthwhile re-read that gets better and richer each time.

I was reading Nostromo as the whole News of the World scandal broke and a page caught my eye that seemed to strike a parallel between the influence of the San Tome mine (the Gould Concession) over the Republic of Costaguana and the seemingly unbreakable grip that News International exercised over our politicians.
“‘You call these men Government officials?  They?  Never! They are officials of the mine – officials of the Concession – I tell you.’
The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a lemon-coloured face and a very short and curly, not to say woolly, head of hair) went so far in his temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under the nose of his interlocutor, and shriek:
‘Yes!  All!  Silence! All! I tell you!  The political jefe, the chief of police, the chief of the customs, the general, all, all are the officials of that Gould.’”
Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow on for a space in the ministerial cabinet, and the prominent man’s passion would end in a cynical shrug of the shoulders.  After all, he seemed to say, what did it matter as long as the minister himself was not forgotten during his brief day of authority.  (p. 102)

Incidentally, it was only on this third or fourth reading of the book that it dimly struck me that Costaguana means Shit Coast.

Making my, slightly unsteady, way back from the pub to the railway station, I popped into the British Library.  This was mainly in order to avail myself of the gents but I took the opportunity to have a quick look around the Out of this World exhibition.  In truth, an exhibition of books of any sort isn’t especially exciting, although if it had been a little less busy I might have lingered longer and played about with some of the audio-visual props that they had.  I did, however, buy a copy of a book that had been (low) on my Amazon wish list for a while: Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore.  I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for alternate history novels, even though most of them aren’t any good.  This is no exception: time traveller from an alternate 1930s, where the South won at Gettysburg and hence won the Civil War, intervenes accidentally to ensure that the Union wins.  It’s 1950s Sci-fi and reads like it.  An interesting curiosity, though.

It was with high hopes that I bought a copy of the Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross, only to find that they amounted to two hundred pages of ‘lend us a quid’.  Much more fun was had on a recent literary jaunt to Fitzrovia with William Gazy and the Prof which was posited on being an X Trapnel* night but cast its net much more widely in terms of civilised and humorous book talk that ended in a late night amble along Percy Street, deep in discussion of the Battle of Waterloo.
*X Trapnel being Anthony Powell’s rendering of Maclaren-Ross in A Dance to the Music of Time.

I took for my recitation the following from Books Do Furnish a Room (pp 144-145):

“Aiming at many roles, he was always playing one or other of them for all her was worth.  To do justice to their number requires – in the manner of Burton – an interminable catalogue of types.  No brief definition is adequate.  Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur ;  to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age.  Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with possible exception of being poor – the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery…”

I popped into the National Portrait Gallery last Saturday morning, to take a look at the Hollywood exhibition.  Why don’t they ever show Laurel and Hardy on TV anymore, especially with all the channels that now exist?  I gave the 1961-2000 gallery a miss, as it would be sure to include portraits that would make me cross, but took another look around the familiar 1900-1960 displays.  

There is Still No Orwell.