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12zoewilliams
| 4Books
| DBC Pierre, Booker Prize-winner and author of Vernon God Little, has moved to Ireland. The first rule of interviewing people in Ireland, before "Wear thermal pants" and "Remember some euros", is this: if they're a writer, an artist or a composer, they're there for the tax break. It irks me when these literary bad boys (especially Michel Houellebecq, who used to call himself a sodding communist) uproot themselves just, it seems fair to assume, to avoid a basic system of sharing stuff that your average apolitical cabbie seems able to manage. It irks me still further when they won't admit it. "No, no, no," says Dirty But Clean (that's what his initials stand for). "No. In the first instance, it was because I was in south London, and with the advance from Vernon I thought I should make something of it. I did, slowly, pay back my creditors. But I had to move somewhere I could afford to buy a place, and not fritter the rest of it in Soho." Not tax-related at all? "No. Also, in Balham, the property boom spread from Clapham, and people started getting really uptight. The neighbours started getting really antsy." Apparently, they complained when he shuffled about in the night. But did you have any friends in Ireland? "Well, no." The day he was leaving London was the first day they had parking restrictions on his street. "I'd left the car with the front wheels over the line, and went off to sleep. I woke up, and of course the car was gone. They'd towed it and given it to the mafia that runs that car-towing scam, and I had to go down and pay a fuckload of money. So I got the car, and said, 'I'm out of here.' Got to the place where I now live, put the car maybe half a kilometre up the road, and took a photograph of it, intending to send it to the car parking mafia, with a letter saying, 'Come and get it now, you cunts.' Until finally I thought, 'This is silly. Why am I being like this?' I really had city fever. I needed to get to the countryside. It's odd, because I was raised in the city, but I needed to get out of it." I still don't buy it, not a word, and I can't bear the Tory implications of having a go at a car pound, but I'm really having to force myself to bring it up, because the truth is DBC Pierre is the most ludicrously charming individual. He is exactly as charming as you'd have to be to do people out of tens of thousands of pounds (as he once did) without recourse to a shotgun. He reminds me of that speech in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L Jackson explains why pigs are filthy and dogs aren't. "I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they are definitely dirty. But a dog's got personality; personality goes a long way." "So, by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?" "Well, we'd have to be talking one charming motherfucking pig." DBC might be dirty, in other words, but he's too charming to be filthy. I know this isn't brain fever brought on by the landscape (which, in Leitrim, where he now lives for un-tax-related reasons, is daunting and lovely): people like this guy. He's sitting outside a shabby little bar with an unopened bottle of Martel. His face is pink with cold (you have to smoke outdoors in Ireland). I can't work out whether this is his weekly shop, and it includes only brandy. Or whether he's done the maths and figured that, for the amount of brandy he intends to drink right now, he might as well buy a whole bottle. Or whether it's brandy from home, and he couldn't leave it unattended because he had a delinquent staying with him. So it seems reasonable enough to ask, "Why have you got that?" "They gave it to me." "Why?" "It's a present." "For what?" "For Christmas." Never mind that it's January - they must love him. When DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize in 2003, there was something dodgy about him on every conceivable level. The Daily Telegraph headlined his victory, "Reformed cocaine addict is £50,000 Booker winner." The Guardian reported, "Repentant rogue wins over Booker Prize judges" (more old-world charm to that, I feel). You can't throw a stick without hitting an ex-junkie in the literary world, but Pierre was much more than just a former cocaine addict: a con artist and fraudster, he'd appeared in court in Australia charged with almost every minor felony connected with cash scams. Besides all that, the book had come out of nowhere, the guy had no literary credentials - even that felt like a bit of a scam. He wasn't British, and wangled eligibility for the Booker on a technicality (he was born in Australia, in 1961, and grew up in Mexico). His name wasn't even Pierre; his real name is Peter Finlay. Even his author photograph lies: in it, he looks round and red and slightly distant, like a city boy who already knows you don't have enough money to be useful to him; in the flesh, he looks lean and enigmatic. Vernon God Little, Finlay/Pierre said at the time, and he confirms it now, was in many ways autobiographical. "Erm ... Vernon was a lot about me," he says with a friendly smirk. "It was a very easy sail to put up. I had lots of wind behind me." The story, naturally, wasn't his story: his teen protagonist is best friend to a kid who goes loopy and kills his classmates, then himself. Vernon, scapegoat for a host of adult idiocies in the aftermath of the crime, copes with stuff and amuses himself by making things up. He lies, in the most abundant and devil-may-care manner, and ultimately gets himself into trouble as serious as, possibly even more serious than, if he'd been the killer himself. It's a combination of his own mendacity and other people's stupidity that finally does for Vernon, and I suppose that this is how Finlay sees his own life. "Fact and fiction are a real problem for me. They've been a problem in my life, and they remain a problem still, in the way that we receive supposed facts, and the way that we distinguish them from fiction. You can watch whatever - pick any sitcom - one minute, and then the news, and then some bollocks, and then a documentary, and it's an act of concentration to distinguish them. What obsessed me is that novelists spend a lot of time trying to make their fiction resonate and sound real - to give it gravity, to give it a sense of reality. And that really interested me, because I find reality as it moves very whimsical and puerile and very simplistic. I wanted to spend no time at all on issues like plausibility. It's pointless to think, as you write, 'Nobody's going to believe that.' I watch the news and I don't believe that. It's horseshit. That's so obviously a con or a lie." In conversation, and in his work, Finlay operates best when you don't try to pin him down. In the past, as he says, he famously had a problem telling the truth. Now it's more a problem for his audience - he's put his fraudulent days behind him, paid back everyone to whom he owed money (with the exception of two people he can't find), turned over a new leaf. Still, though, he's slippery: when you try to unpick the narrative of his life, it is full of missing years, missing details, curious omissions. We know, for instance, that he grew up in Mexico City, where his parents' substantial wealth was magnified to a point of hyper-reality by the poverty of their environs. His father was a scientist, working on genetically modified crops, until he was diagnosed with a brain tumour; Finlay was 16. Both parents went to New York for his father's treatment, leaving their son technically in the care of servants, but more accurately making 10 kinds of mayhem with his friends. He started taking drugs. When he was 19, his father died, bringing to a close his insane upbringing, which accounts for so much. It accounts for his crazy accent, which is totally consistent and totally impossible to locate in time and space - it's more English than American, like a public schoolboy with a slight mid-European drawl. It accounts for his freakish relationship with money. "Where I grew up, money came into the house in envelopes. You never went to the bank. The maids would get paid, I'd get my pocket money, that would be it. I came out of there with no sense of civic duty. In Mexico, you dealt with things as they came to your face. There was no law, and there was nothing you couldn't get away with." In his early 20s, Finlay had his residency withdrawn (for bringing a foreign car over the border) and went first to Europe, then to Australia. "So I came to Australia and Britain, which actually had laws and statutes and shit, and that's what fucked me up. I came out of a melting pot into a bunch of cubicles. And it dismayed me. So you bank the cheque the day before the money's in the account. How can that be a crime? Then the money doesn't show up, so that becomes a crime. I spent a lot of my Australian visit in court. Literally every week." Whatever his creditors say, I believe him. I believe him when he says he never intended to scam anyone; most of his court appearances were for bank offences and bad cheques. I believe him when he says that he was constantly being offered personal bankruptcy and he never took it, because that would have been an admission that he'd never intended to pay these people back in the first place. Rackety characters such as Finlay, with his scrapes and his debts and his near-misses with incarceration, often sound rather romantic, and I assumed he might have some kind of attachment to this period of his life, but of course he doesn't. "It was a very painful time, incredibly painful. It kept me down for more than a decade." By the time he got to England in the early 1990s, he had been through the mill, and worked his only nine-to-five job, in an advertising agency. "It didn't last long. It was in the Caribbean. It was great, but then I would have had to live in the Caribbean for ever. You miss England, because it has a proper grounded feeling ... the smell of diesel in the air." Sure, I would miss England, but why would he, when, if he were to call anywhere home, it would be Mexico or Australia? (This is a tiny point, but it does crop up regularly, the sense that he's describing himself in terms of the person he's speaking to, using whatever information about them he has, however scant. That's probably what it means to be a charmer, I suppose.) In London, Finlay started work on Vernon God Little (before that, the only thing he'd tried to write was a radio play). The fact that his adolescence was interrupted by his father's death accounts, I think, for his very close rendition in Vernon God Little of how a teenager might think, and speak, and see things. I think it self-evident that the bereavement halted some part of his development, but he heads this off, rather gently. "There's a romantic answer to everything, where we're prey to these energies, and there's a psychological answer - you haven't moved past this or that. And both have validity. But it's not worth doing the chase. I've had therapy in the past, mainly because it was a requirement of court, and in the end I figured it was better not to understand, because that's the engine that drives you." This mysterious engine has now driven him to write his second novel, Ludmila's Broken English, which is about ... oh, it would be daft to tell you what it's about. It does conjoined twins, and terrorism, and the sad, postwar limbo of the formerly Soviet Caucasus; it does sex and the absence of sex; it touches briefly on music and silence and short bursts of structurally incomprehensible violence - and it is great, and rollicking, and mischievously disrespectful to the literary establishment. Finlay has said before how charmed he always is by vernacular twists of speech. In Ludmila's Broken English, this is more evident than ever: in the conjoined twins, separated at the start of the book, you can hear his fondness for English verbal quirks - "You silly sausage", "bloody 'ell". But none of it sounds quite right, in so far as it doesn't really sound English. Finlay doesn't sound as if he's closely observed or rendered this language, but as if he's pinched what isn't his, and now he's bloody well going to enjoy it. When it comes to the Caucasians, he concocts the most explosively intricate and vivid register of scatological insult and imaginative excursions on the theme of brutality, most of it sexual. "I'm really keen to be a good writer," he says. "I thought I'd come away from the comfort zone of the first person, come away from the comfort zone of it being anything to do with me, write something that could have been written at any point over the past 100 years, just in terms of its structure, stand back and not get so emotionally involved with it." It's true that the narrative engagement is less feverish than in Vernon, but one thing that strikes me is that, in deciding to move away from his own experience, Finlay produces something closer to himself. It's great fun to read because he understands so instinctively what carries you from one page to the next; but what makes it so much more than just a page-turner is the force of his anti-authoritarianism. There's no way this book could have been written "at any point in the past 100 years": structurally, it is crazily ill-disciplined, and takes a very modern delight in that. Using twins as his protagonists allows Finlay to have everything both ways: the two of them have all kinds of debates - on terrorism, on society - and Finlay never has to pin himself down. It often feels as if he is trying to decipher his own views through the conduit of twins, identical in every way, except that one is liberal, the other illiberal. "Personally, on terrorism, as everything else, I'm probably very liberal at heart, but it's unresolved. But I say this to you as a liar - I can tell better lies than any of these fuckers who get up on television and say they're going to do this or that because of terrorism. They're such flimsy and transparent people, they're much greater psychotics than me." (To clarify, I had called his self-confidence psychotic a minute earlier. I didn't mean to hurt his feelings, but think I may have done.) "Greater in that they're successful with it, we buy it - and that is the thing that has probably changed in me." He means his own life as a fantasist has made him more sceptical. "Terrorism in itself, I feel the same about. I feel we've largely invited it. But I grew up in violence; I saw a lot of death and guns when I was growing up, and that kind of thing isn't such a big deal. What I fear are the societal changes that will happen around it, rather than being blown up by anyone. I'll be pissed off if I do get blown up, though, obviously. I won't take kindly to that. At all." From Ludmila's Broken English, I get the sense that Finlay has a very idiosyncratic idea of sex. To go back to his twins, the chief respect in which they are opposite is that one has a consuming sex drive and the other has none at all. The one with none is by far the more intelligent, the more clear-sighted, the less confused, but also totally without hope. It is as though sex is this chimera that stands between all of us and despair. Is that really how he sees it? "I don't know. Probably not. You're only the second or third person I've heard from that's read it." Don't you show it to your friends? "I don't know anyone who would like it. When I finished Vernon, in the mental journal we all have of peers and friends, I couldn't think of a single person that would like it. Plus, I don't print them till they're finished. I just have them on screen. So nobody can see it." You could invite somebody over. "But who?" On the matter of relationships, it strikes me as deeply curious, for a person well into adulthood, that he is able to uproot himself to a place where he knows no one, and be content. "Well, I've had long relationships. I'm not that much of an enigma, really. I'm a bit of a loner, but I'm very gregarious. I don't have any conviction or opinion that will stand above my ability to chuck them out and have a good yarn and a beer with somebody. Because I've been so wrong. You have to understand, I've been shown in my life that I've been so wrong. Everyone tells you to trust your instincts, and to big yourself up, and go for it, and I did that and I was wrong." There's something about his delivery, something distant and playful, that makes you constantly wonder whether he's telling you the truth. I don't know if his penitence is real. I don't even know if it's true that he got into all this debt. His most famous debt, the one that attracted all the attention when he won the Booker, was to the American painter Robert Lenton. Finlay faked a letter in Spanish, which Lenton didn't understand, in order to finagle some money out of him for a property Finlay didn't possess. But the letters Lenton's family subsequently sent to the papers, I wouldn't put it past this Dirty Pierre to have written them himself, and somehow got them posted in Newfoundland as a jape. (Lenton's daughter-in-law wrote, "Sheathed in his tuxedo of humility and self-awareness, Finlay still refuses to acknowledge what he did", although Lenton himself said he had no axe to grind and had forgiven him.) Finlay says his third novel is seriously depraved, and he's just trying to finish it before the new atmosphere of moral rectitude starts making demands on the literary establishment - that, I believe. But when he tells me he's writing a children's book with animals in it, I can't ever see that appearing in print, and I couldn't say whether it's because I think he's joking, or lying. I do believe the great big scar on his head came from a car accident, but he says somebody told him it looked like a bullfighting wound, and if he'd told me that, I would have believed it, too. "This is all reconstructed, this side of my face. If you look really close, my eye has been out. The skin is discoloured. It's off my back or my arse or something. I can get people to kiss me there, and they will never know they're kissing my arse." He could tell me the Pope had kissed his arse, and I wouldn't know if he meant his regular arse, the arse-section of his face, the regular pope, a person called Pope he'd met on his many travels, or whether he was making the whole thing up. Reading his books, it is obvious that there is an honesty and authenticity in the way Finlay writes, and in the way he relates to the world, that renders his reliability when it comes to real events more or less irrelevant. Still, I wouldn't lend him any money. |
12zoewilliams
| 4Books
| Okay, here's the story - there's a widow, a very pretty widow, with four very pretty children. She locks said children in an attic. They grow up, and the oldest two do the nasty, even though they are siblings. Well, come on, they're in an attic! What would you do for fun, teach yourself Latin? The reason they're in the attic is because the house belongs to their grandfather, who won't acknowledge the existence of the children because of their shameful beginnings - they were sired, you see, by the late half-uncle of the pretty widow. As it turns out, though, their father was both their mother's half-uncle and her half-brother, the product of a brutal rape (by the grandfather, of his step-mother), which wasn't strictly speaking incestuous (the rape, that is), and certainly wasn't incest compared with what happened later, but was still very wrong. So, back to the attic children who have just had sex - they are both the spawn of sibling incest and engaged in sibling incest. Oh, and the widow has decided to poison them with arsenic, which makes them very pale, but still extremely attractive to one another. They realise their peril and escape, with one younger sibling (the other has died). They lead a full and unhappy life of mistreatment and suchlike. A rogue doctor has an affair with the girl sibling - it results in a pregnancy, he performs a quick DIY abortion and keeps the foetus in a jar on his desk for a laugh. In the end, the siblings marry at the age of about 50 - they pretend they are unrelated, of course. No good comes of it. I'd estimate that anyone born after 1970, who ever came into possession of breasts or a sister, will know what I'm talking about. We are in the land of Virginia Andrews (originally known as VC Andrews) and her Flowers In The Attic quintet (aka, The Dollanganger Series). She completed three other books besides this series - My Sweet Audrina, and the opening two of the Casteel quintet - before her death from breast cancer in 1986. She is still making the bestseller lists in 2001, with new novels, which is not as spooky as it sounds. Shortly before she died, Andrews mentioned, in the one interview she gave, that she had the plots in place for 63 further novels. It was no great surprise, therefore, when Garden Of Shadows, the prequel to Flowers In The Attic, was published posthumously. Then came the third book in the Casteel series, which is again attributed to Andrews. At this point, briefly, the Andrews estate claimed that there were many more completed manuscripts, so readers could look forward to a steady stream of fresh gems from the dead writer. This was not the case - in fact, it had brought in a ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman, who shared an agent with Virginia Andrews and furthermore had taught in high school for 23 years, so had a good idea of her teenage-girl constituency. The estate came clean about the existence of a ghostwriter in an open letter in 1987, explaining that it had chosen a gifted author to "organise and complete Virginia's stories and to expand upon them by creating additional novels inspired by her wonderful storytelling genius". It did not mention him by name, and it was six years before anyone discovered Neiderman's identity (he also writes under his own name - most famously, Devil's Advocate, which was turned into a lame film in 1997). Since 1986, Neiderman has completed the Casteel series, and written six more - The Logan Family, The Cutler Family, The Hudson Family, Landry Family, Orphans and Wildflowers - most of them containing five individual novels. Readers are undeterred by the change in author - judging from the web fanzine, they generally can't tell the difference (or, as one joyfully put it, "I can't believe these books! Every one is so good, you think it's better than the one you just read! I'm going to collect them all, so that when I have children I can present them with the full set!"). Kate Lyall-Grant, from the English arm of publisher Simon & Schuster, says, "As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much an open secret that the real Virginia is no longer with us." The dust-jacket biography, however, says, "Virginia Andrews is a worldwide bestselling author. Her novels have sold more than 80 million copies and have been translated into 22 languages." It makes no mention of her productivity being in any way muted by death. Virginia's "storytelling genius" rarely detours from the incest theme. Indeed, her first published work was a short story entitled I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night. (There were, apparently, decades' worth of short stories, which were never unearthed. If only those secret texts were found - you could probably discover a whole series, comprising I Slept With My Father On Prom Night, and I Jerked Off My Brother Just Before I Had A Bath). What makes her books so strange, however, is not the incest itself but Andrews's oddly wholesome, home-baked way of writing about it. Don't get her wrong - she never comes out in favour of incest, but she does tend to present it as human error, rather than, say, grotesque trauma. Her writing is, frankly, bizarre - if you had to read a sentence out loud, you'd choke on the words ("Golly-gee, but it was a beautiful day! If only we were allowed out, rather than having to sit in this musty old attic and starve to death!"). Paragraphs about the complexities of adolescent sexuality and brother-love might start with the phrase "Dolly-day!" ("However shall we erase the stain of our evil behaviour? Oh, but it seemed so right!"). It's like reading a court transcript of the Brady Bunch describing a decade of orgiastic abuse. This led to a ban on Andrews's books in many American schools, which still applies in some of them to this day. One critic at the Washington Post said Flowers In The Attic was the worst book he had ever read. The sales, though, were extraordinary - the unknown author made the bestseller lists within two weeks of publication. Petals On The Wind, the second in the series, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks. My Sweet Audrina trumped them all, making number one on the New York Times list just three days after its publication. By the time of her death, Andrews had combined sales of 24m, and had been named Number One Bestselling Author of popular horror and occult paperbacks by the American Booksellers Association, beating Stephen King. Neiderman is a different kind of creature altogether, although he is manifestly keeping within Virginia's girls' own fiction remit - if the heroines are not ballerinas, they're actresses, and they usually have a pony to turn to. They have frequently been orphaned tragically young. His style, though, is storytelling at its most functional - no "Golly-lolly, did it steal my breath away!" here. Packed, in the traditional way, with terrible events and curiously bad behaviour, his books nevertheless have none of the odd crepuscular feel of the real Virginia, whose determined clinging to the bright details of childhood - dolls' houses, matching tutus and slippers - felt unwitting rather than deliberate. Neiderman does not have Andrews's unfailing best-seller record, either, but he has shifted 50m books over his lifetime, so could hardly be called a dud. His 30th novel as Virginia, Eye Of The Storm, came out last month. There is no doubt that he still works from the novel plans left by Andrews, but that he has leeway to insert modern details, such as the internet. This latest trilogy features a heroine named Rain - there she is, happy-ish in her deprived Brooklyn home, when she discovers she was adopted. "I always knew there had to be a reason why I felt what I felt for you," says her brother (I paraphrased slightly), who turned out not to be her brother. "Let's get married!" But no, that can't be, not until Rain's real brother, who doesn't yet know of the blood connection, has also proposed. Then he dies and Rain becomes disabled by a horse incident - incest, or even the thought of it, exacts a heavy price, as ever. And yet you can't blame the kids - the Virginia world is not one in which regular people who don't share your blood ever just tip up and see if there are any other bodily fluids you fancy sharing. Apart from a mini-series about some unrelated girls (Jade, Misty, Star and Cat), every group of books features at least one incestuous couple, and usually there are two. Where this fixation comes from is unclear. Virginia Andrews did have a pretty rotten life - in 1939, at the age of 16, she was paralysed in a freak stairs accident, and lived with her mother for the rest of her life. She started writing at 25, after the death of her father. However, there's no evidence of incest within her family, although there are rumours of one finished novel that she wouldn't publish because it was too autobiographical and was, she thought, too damaging to her relatives. Considering that even small sneezes she did during her lifetime seem to have found their way, via Neiderman, into print, that's somewhat unusual. What her books suggest more strongly is not that she encountered incestuous relationships, but rather that she suffered from an arrested development, which bound her for ever into the concerns of the early adolescent. The novels have the core ingredients of a Judy annual, which give them the safe glow of childhood - an orphan wants to be a ballerina; adults around her behave outlandishly badly; she, nevertheless, keeps her beauty; a peer sustains her spirit throughout the maltreatment, and, presto, 15 years of untold abuse later, there she is on stage with a tutu on her trunk and a song in her heart. Small moments from the tail-end of childhood - the breakage of a favourite musical box, the pleasure of eating a doughnut - have peculiar prominence. And yet, at the same time, she delves into the deepest reaches of adult depravity and societal aberration. You couldn't find a more exact formula for teens if it were done by computer, with a built-in Teetering On The Brink Of Womanhood template. Even if you couldn't feel in your gut that these books are aimed at a specific readership window (11-15, I'd say), you could tell from the reader reviews. There are thousands pasted on the net, and, generally speaking, they take a book-critic cliché and give it a charming angst-wracked spin. "I just couldn't put this down. Not that I had a reason to. I didn't have anything else to do." The reviews are a million times more touching, and more speechful, than the books have ever been. "Normally, I can't wait for books to end. I didn't feel like that at all," said one homework-beset individual. "I would hate to be locked in an attic," said another, evoking that terrible blurry time when everything you see or read or hear seems as real as everything else. A child's desire to apply real solutions to fictional scenarios sneaks into the quasi-adult chat - "Well, if I was the grandmother, I would never have allowed Corrine to come back to Foxworth Hall. Instead I would have paid off all her bills, and made her and the children live in a small apartment while she trained to be a secretary." The readers rarely mention the incest, which is odd, considering it's the sine qua non of the oeuvre. When they do, they are very forgiving - "I know that the incest parts are kind of weird but in a way it's interesting, even though it would be very sick in everyday life. But I could not blame Cathy and Chris for doing what they did." If people rarely mention the dirty stuff, there is a reason for that - these books share with fairy tales the role of addressing the most absurdly transgressive notions, in order that the more subtle psychological nasties giving rise to them needn't be scrutinised. It's classic pre-Freudian feverishness, coming out a good half-century after Freud. Virginia Andrews is basically a Gothic novelist, and much closer to her 19th-century forebears than a self-aware, exploratory, progressive Goth-merchant such as Angela Carter. Andrews's tools are the old classics - secret rooms within the larger castle to equate with the danger of the "inner space" within the body; characters who basically seek a pre-adolescent love along brother-sister lines (as they do in Frankenstein and, oh, loads of others), only to find that they've accidentally slipped into the realms of untold depravity. The feminist critic Edith Birkhead maintains that as fairy tales are necessary for children, so Gothic novels should be the next stage in our development as adolescents. This was said in reference to 19th-century fiction, when no one ever expected to deal with their sexuality beyond actually having sex now and again, when taboos were everywhere and when more prosaic teen fiction such as Judy Blume, which gave you the nuts and bolts of making out with boys, had not yet been invented. As it turns out, even now, with the broad array of frank and open discussion aimed at the inchoate sexual soul, people still have a yen to see the business rendered as a truly disastrous, irredeemable, abhorrent act. It's hard to say how much longer the current Virginia Andrews can keep it up - and what will happen when he tires of his ludicrous contortions to find new ambitions for the quintessential girl (ice-skater? Tennis ace? Model? How many opportunities can a girl find for a short skirt fashioned of net?). There are another 30 plots left of the first Virginia's literary estate. Can he face it? If not, can a new head grow out of the bloodied stump of his literary career? How much almost-but-not-quite incest can the next generation take before they go back to Wuthering Heights? Will anyone ever match up to the quagmire that was the original Virginia's imagination? And if they can, won't they want to do it under their own name (it would seem a waste not to)? Well, obviously there will always be a Virginia - there's been a Virginia-shaped hole in the market since about 1890, when people started uncovering their table legs and everyone thought the great repression was over. And it was - but this incest business runs deeper than we thought everyone thought the great repression was over. And it was - but this incest business runs deeper than we thought. |
12zoewilliams
| 4Books
| A Complicated Kindness is the story of Nomi, a brilliantly acute, confused, generous-spirited 16-year-old growing up in a Mennonite community some miles from Winnipeg. Its author, Miriam Toews, was raised in just such a place, and got out as fast as she humanly could (the day after graduating from high school). The narrative voice is so strong, it could carry the least eventful, least weird adolescence in the world and still be as transfixing, but the fact is, this community is compellingly strange. The shorthand for Mennonite is "like Amish, only in Canada" (there's a large Mennonite community in the US, too, but that rather spoils the analogy) - Nomi gives the terse specifics in the opening pages of the book: "We're Mennonites. As far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager ... A Mennonite telephone survey might consist of questions like, would you prefer to live or die a cruel death, and if you answer 'live' the Menno doing the survey hangs up on you. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock'n'roll, having sex for fun, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o'clock. That was Menno all over." Mennonite diktats express a deeply-held horror of almost all aspects of modern life. Emphasis on "plain" dress means that, in some households, even buttons and zips are a sign of inadequate faith. Ownership of a Janis Joplin record is the most direct known route to hell, apart from all those millions of other routes. Literature is an irreligious diversion; indeed, the life of the mind outside worship is utterly abrogated. Toews's experience was by no means the full Mennonite monty. "My parents both had masters degrees, they were educated, so it was a very tolerant, liberal family within the grander scheme of things. We were allowed to read." Yet she recalls, in all the time she grew up, going to see only one film (Tom Sawyer): "I remember us all sitting there, sitting up really straight. And nearly fainting when the lights went down." This faith sprang up as a frond of the Europe-wide radical religious ferment of the 16th century. In tenets, it is closest to Anabaptism, though there is also a Calvinistic tang to its competitive holiness. (Calvin believed that ascension to heaven was predetermined - your actions made no difference: you were either part of the elect or you weren't. And yet, a good sign that you were a member of the elect was the righteousness of your behaviour. So, unlike traditional Christianity, where there is a set of rules and you strive to live by them, this thinking compelled followers constantly to be finding new rules, the better to emphasise that they were inexorably heaven-bound.) Menno differed from the Anabaptists in his belief in law and order (Anabaptists loved to riot). This didn't stop him being persecuted, or his followers fleeing all over Europe (mainly to Russia), but it did mean that once they found a place where they could be tolerated (Canada, and parts of central America), their societies remained curiously static, since they posed no structural threat to mainstream society and were therefore never forced by clash or friction to adapt to new times. Toews's novel is a wonderfully acute, moving, warm, sceptical, frustrated portrait of fundamentalist religion. Besides the fervent sanctimony, Mennonite communities are wilfully antique and retrogressive - they have lifestyle museums where regular Canadians and Americans turn up to point at the teenagers churning milk while trussed up in elaborately drab bonnetry. It sounds weird and rather sinister, like a petting zoo where the animals have opposable thumbs. Nothing expresses the falsity of the olde worlde parade better than an episode in the book where Nomi sets fire to her bonnet while having a sneaky fag and has to be dunked in some kind of rainwater barrel by a tourist. It's hilarious. The relationship between mainstream Canadians and the Mennonite communities is skewed - Toews says, "We were this quaint little society, charming, fun, kids go there for field trips the whole time. My own kids have been there. It's all very picturesque and simple. But it is a way of dehumanising Mennonites. It's not serious evil. But you'll hear people sitting at a table talking about Mennonites, 'Yeah, I was doing business with one of them', and others going, 'Really? They do business?' There is that level of patronisation - is that a word? - that Mennonites experience all the time. But then they set up these museums to make money. They give people the horse and buggy because it's a money-spinner." Toews grew up in just such a town herself - the events described in the book, she says wryly, are entirely fictitious, but much of the texture is located in her own early life. "I was very conscious of making sure that my character's relationships with the community were authentic. Mine were something else entirely. Obviously. But the emphasis in the town on punishment and shame, and joylessness, that degree of severity and intolerance - all those aspects I certainly experienced." I get the impression that Toews's actual response to the absurd and abundant strictures was pretty close to her heroine's, but the defining events of the work, the desertion of Nomi's mother and older sister, are very clearly fictional. Toews was the first in her own family to quit the town of Steinbach, on which the fictional East Village is kind-of-yet-not-exactly based. (Toews says vaguely that the places have similarities. Though when I met her friend Reverend Moon (not the Moonies one), who thought - mistakenly, it turned out - that he would be passing through Steinbach on his way to pick up his son from Bible camp the next day, he said, "Why don't you come along? You can see all the places from the book!") Her older sister left two years after her, and her mother remained there until the suicide of her father six years ago. And there are elements of the protagonist's character - an immensely strong bond of care and duty to her father, her terminally ill friend, the needy next-door child, above all a precocious and touching selflessness - that Toews herself is far too humble to appropriate. Toews realised she had to leave with a certainty and urgency that surprises me, because she doesn't seem anything like strident or abrasive enough to alienate anyone, not even religious nut-nuts. She reminds me a bit of Mia Farrow in Hannah And Her Sisters: laconic, fine-boned, slightly undefended, wearing her perspicacity and intelligence very discreetly. Upon leaving Steinbach, she travelled all over the place: to Montreal, to London on an exchange programme, working her way round to Europe on wages from a job in a bakery in Finsbury Park, north London. She took a film studies degree at the University of Manitoba, then moved to Halifax to study journalism, before settling in Winnipeg 12 years ago, when she was 28. It's a city of bafflingly broad streets and meticulous town planning. It used to be called the Chicago of the north, though isn't any more; it seems faded and contradictory. Most of the time, it feels like a warm, leftie, Bohemian utopia (that's a figurative "warm"; it's bloody freezing most of the year). Unfailingly, wherever you go with Toews (it's pronounced "taves"), she meets people she knows, whose habits and interests she also knows, who congratulate her on the book, which, besides being so good, has also made a big noise. And she says, "Oh, well, you know ... How's Emerice?" trying to deflect the flattery, for sure, but also far more interested in people's daughters and aunts and such than in her own success. Winnipeg's the kind of place where it's very easy to find a vegan meal and very hard to get tickets to see Fahrenheit 9/11 unless you book a long time in advance. But, at the same time, there are more bridal shops than bars, which must be the best index of borderline depression a place could give you (you know, 18-year-olds feverishly trying to hold on to each other, rather than just getting drunk and seeing what happens). And the liberal pleasantries coexist with a disturbingly quiet racial tension, where all the tramps are Native Canadians, and Toews's neighbour's foster son was recently beaten to death in a car park. (Mind you, while I was marvelling at Canada's rotten underbelly, someone was shot in the face outside my local, so I'm not one to cast the first stone.) The point is, though, while Winnipeg in no way approximates the isolation and rigidity of a Mennonite town, neither is it the farthest away from one you could possibly travel. It's only about 70 miles away, to start with, and shares the spookily uniform terrain. This area is -40C in winter, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer. Actually, the bugs probably aren't so bad, and cold you can protect yourself against, but the landscape is vastly, oppressively flat. You can fly from Minnesota to Winnipeg without seeing a single geographical feature, just endless, even fields, riven by the occasional correction line where the horizon interferes with the 90-degree arrangement of the boundaries. If you weren't used to it, it would drive you loopy. It is a characteristic of Mennonite communities that they congregate in places no one else would want to live; hard-core followers have formed enclaves in the most inhospitable bits of Paraguay. Geography aside, Winnipeg is urban enough to be a breeze - albeit quite a strong one - compared with the farther outreaches of Manitoba (the state of which it is capital). Toews lives around the corner from her mother and sister, and there is a constant traffic of family members through her house. She still calls herself a Mennonite, yet calls herself agnostic at the same time. Alongside the Mennonite intolerance and peculiarity, the book draws a community of, well, enormous community spirit. "I remember a very nurturing, safe environment, everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides. So people who leave, people like me - and there are lots of us, especially in this town - have very complicated relationships with the places we grew up. We want to love them, and we do love them, but there's so much of it that's so harsh, so unforgiving." Her life is shot through with this ambivalence. Many of her decisions have been taken along traditional Mennonite lines - she had children young (she was 22 when she had Owen; now she's 40, and her youngest, Georgia, is 14). She loves being a mother and has a fierce sense of family. "You know, these sacrifices you make of time and energy to raise your children properly, I wouldn't spend it any other way." And yet, to a religion run along patriarchal lines, where "a 15-year-old boy can stand up and preach, but a 75-year-old woman who's borne 13 children can't", the very fact of her assuming any kind of right to artistic self-expression, before you even consider how critical the book is of Mennonite ways, would have been enough, had she stayed in the fold, to spark one of those bizarre public shunnings where some or other miscreant is ejected from the church. This is substantially more life-changing than being barred from your local pub, say. While you could remain in town, it would be very difficult to make a living. It would be unlikely for anyone to talk to you. It sounds extremely Breaking The Waves. In other ways, though, Toews's agnostic side shows itself in her pretty regular family set-up, which she describes in an endearingly abashed tone of voice. "I had my first kid as I was completing my BA. And, well, no, I wasn't married, see. I've only just recently got married, four years ago, in Vegas, because Georgia thought it would be a good idea. So I had Owen with this one guy, who has just disappeared - apparently he lives in Tokyo now. So I have to deal with this whole men-disappearing syndrome. But then I hooked up with another guy - oh, this sounds bad - but we're very happily together, we've been together for 16 years, and he adopted Owen and then we had Georgia together." It's funny, because Toews has a rounded, self-critical, open-minded, human kind of morality that amounts to what the best of people live by; and yet, at the same time, you get a whiff of the strictness of her upbringing, an intimation that the spectre of Menno once in a blue moon intercedes and chews her out. She maintains that, had she been writing a factual essay about the Mennonites, she would have been far more critical and damning than her protagonist ever is. But it's ambiguous: there's a lot of complicated fondness there. Which isn't to say that she hasn't, ultimately, come down on the side of Winnipeg liberalism. Her children weren't raised as semi-Mennonites ("Kind of Menno-lite?" she says. "No. Not at all. My mum would take them to church on the sly. It was like, 'Quick, your parents are hungover, let's go'.") "There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in heaven and hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to heaven." The complexity of distancing oneself from one's formative faith is redoubled when the community is comically inbred (as Nomi remarks wryly, "Our gene pool has no deep end"). Doctrines can be rejected in a way that genetic legacy can't. Well, up to a point - if you all share the same chin, that's something you could handle, but there seems to be a melancholic streak running through this faith that can neither be ignored, nor wholly distinguished from the faith itself. While she was at the University of Manitoba, her philosophy tutor was discussing a young Mennonite who'd gone to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. "It turns out he was a cousin of mine. Of course. Right. He came from a very strict family and just couldn't handle the sudden freedom, the drugs, the sex, the total openness, the anything-goes attitude. And it's suspected that he killed himself, or that he overdosed on drugs. It doesn't matter how intelligent or academically inclined he was, the culture shock was still too huge." This is instructive not just in the sense that you can't mention a Mennonite to any other without it transpiring they're related. Toews's family is scarred by suicide. She lost her father when, having suffered from manic depression since he was 17, he threw himself in front of a train. She wrote Swing Low, a factual account of his life and illness, in 2001, to great acclaim. Another, much closer cousin also killed herself. Perhaps all families, were they to stay close enough to track each other, would find a pattern this brutal, but I doubt it - besides, most families simply aren't inbred to this degree and never have to consider that the isolated temperament of their forefather might be echoing down through centuries. That gives an impression of what it's like to be an ex-Mennonite, or a semi-Mennonite, or a "liberal" Mennonite that is way too bleak properly to describe Toews or her family. Her husband, Neil, was also raised a Mennonite, though not in the most rigid, conventional way. Neil's relationship with his branch of the Menno clan (the two families' names are Harder and Dix. Well, it made us laugh, and they must have been laughing over it for years) is distinctly different from Miriam's - they go to family reunions and such, but he has no nostalgia for the religion itself. He laughingly says they were nasty, money-grubbing people (certain Mennonites, this is, not his family), with a verifiable record of peddling drugs to the faithless as a business venture. This does sound unpleasant - even though the net result is the same, it's way more cynical when people spin cash out of a vice that they specifically disavow. But this has to be set against a long record of humanitarian aid - many of the families who sponsored immigrants, notably Vietnamese boat people, were Mennonites, and the religion has a tradition of supporting foreign communities with money and medicine. It's not all peaches, in other words, but peaches exist, within reason. And Miriam's mother, Elvira, has a different perspective still. (She's a brilliant raconteur, and extremely supportive of the book, especially considering that its central event is the mother's desertion and she's had people ask if it's a true story. When she lives round the corner from both her daughters!) Having left Steinbach, Elvira is still a Mennonite and attends their church in Winnipeg. She gets the magazine, which has headlines such as Your Only Way To Heaven Is To Understand And Admit That You Are A Complete Failure. And yet, again, she is ambivalent about the community in which she spent her adult life. Or, rather, she is bemused at how little she misses it. She never visits; she finds this perplexing but not distressing. But then, of course there would be multiple perspectives. Toews's work never claimed to be a definitive portrait of the right-thinking response to anything. It is a work of fiction and, while the peculiarities of the environment give it its flesh and structure, the beauty of it is all in the prose, which is so sensitively and delicately balanced that the most caustic humour and poignant act of love can coexist in the same line. It reminds me a bit of George Saunders's Pastoralia, to which Toews replied very warmly, "Oh, he's brilliant. And very nice." "Is he a friend of yours?" "No, but he returned an email my friend sent him. Which I thought was really nice of him." The impossibility of writing without humour consigned Toews for a long time to the comedy circuit. She won countless humorist prizes for her first two novels, which she's keen to point out she was very grateful for, before adding, "The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter." Her favourite authors are "British men, mainly - Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Patrick McCabe". There's a lot of courtesy here, though; I wouldn't put it past her to be just saying that to make me feel welcome, or so that I would have read them and so not feel stupid. I mean, I'm sure she does like them, I just bet there are some Americans or Canadians or, who knows, a whole host of other nationals whom she likes as well. Toews's next book is currently just a series of impressions, nowhere near finished, lacking a basic structure of any kind, she says, frowningly, as if she'd forgotten for a while that there was something she really ought to be getting on with and had suddenly remembered. "I have a problem with beginnings ... and endings ... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything, it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog." It never shows, the exhaustion. The book is fascinating, and resonant, and inexorable - but then, it's like trapeze, isn't it? That's the way this stuff is supposed to work |
12zoewilliams
| 4Books
| Jonathan Franzen is what you might call a tricky bugger. He is very hard to read. He can be puckish, but you can't rely on the mischief. He looks a bit like Monty out of Withnail and I must have, before fat got him. Now 47, he dresses like a trendy don. Loud noises pain him absurdly. He is all rufty-tufty in conversation but socially incredibly thoughtful and worried about causing offence. When he refuses a coffee from a waitress, he follows up frantically with about 17 different reasons: I've already had one. Your coffee's delicious! I'm allergic to coffee. I am already taking coffee intravenously, under the table I have a coffee drip ... The Corrections, the book that won Franzen America's National Book Award in 2001, put him immediately on to the global authorial A-list. A couple of notable things surround it, besides the great worth of the book itself, which has already been remarked upon by everyone - certainly that I have ever heard - who has read it. He refused to endorse his book's appearance on Oprah Winfrey's book club, a very public spat at the time, which gave him a reputation for wanting to be highbrow, possibly for wanting to be more highbrow than he was. It was a notion compounded by the fact that The Corrections was his third novel, his first success after two works - Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion - whose reach perhaps exceeds their grasp. And now he has written a memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, an extract of which appears in Review tomorrow. I suppose the danger is that it might be taken as an appendix to The Corrections, broadly, as a portrait of family dynamics, and more intricately about a father's Parkinson's disease and old age, and duty and recklessness, and was taken to be, if not autobiographical, nevertheless pretty close to home. The Discomfort Zone does nothing so obvious as sift out the fact from the artistic licence. He picks up episodes of his 1960s childhood - the time he spent loving Snoopy; the spelling bee he almost won but in the end drew, the semi-but-not-exactly Christian youth group that shaped his social persona - and buffs them to a high shine, refracts the rest of his life through them, realises their importance but also presents them as curiosities and doesn't make a great self-aggrandising deal out of them. I say I think memoir was an interesting genre to choose when he was at the crest of a fiction wave. "But that's why I chose it," he says, laconically. "I was on the crest of the fiction wave." But he also says: "I think one reason this book felt alive in the last few years is that I was extremely disoriented by my change in fortune, and it is a book about a feeling that I've lost the values of my youth. What I discovered in the process of writing it is that those values are not as clear-cut as I initially supposed. But still, it was elegiac in conception if not in final form." Generally speaking, its reception has been warm, though, of course, those aren't the reviews that have stuck with him. Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times's chief reviewer, absolutely hated it. "In the US," says Franzen, neutrally, "I seem to have tapped into a certain amount of hostility to me personally, so in hindsight it seems riskier than it actually felt when I was writing. In the hands of a particularly tone deaf and humourless reviewer [he is talking about Kakutani], my humble or self-satirising admissions come across as the declarations of a depraved person. I believe I was called a jackass. And the word self-absorbed was used as a pejorative. Unlike all those other, unself-absorbed writers." He is smiling his way through this, but it has definitely pissed him off. "I didn't see any of that coming, and it seemed to me that if you good-humouredly relate the story of your various failures, who could be mean about that? I've already been mean about myself." "It's a strategy," I say. "Yes." There is a long pause. I believe what he is about to extract is bathos. "But it turned out not to be very successful." I am amazed that he should be piqued by the review, even though I know nobody is immune to criticism - in his writing, he is prepared to leave himself totally vulnerable, in a way that you could only do if you were really self-aware. I still think he is self-aware, but I was wrong to think that makes him bulletproof. That morning, before I met him, Franzen was on Radio 4's Start the Week (with Craig Brown - there was a funny mix) and he said he had a love-hate relationship with America. I ask him to expand on that a little. "Expand how?" he says. Well, what does he love about it? "Why are you interested in knowing that?" Christ, I don't know . . . in the long run, I want to know where he stands politically. There is a section in The Discomfort Zone about Hurricane Katrina in which he allies himself unambiguously with the US left-wing and yet I don't think that allegiance could be taken as a given from the rest of the book, particularly his heartfelt and voluble affection for Webster Groves, the suburb of St Louis, Missouri, in which he grew up, the third son of a railroad manager and a homemaker. America seems very polarised, politically, and it would be interesting to hear whether that is true, or just seems like it from the outside, and if it is true, how he has managed to avoid it. All that doesn't come out in a neat nugget, though, not from me, anyway. Conversely, ideas issue from him in a complete and stylish state. He has a disconcerting habit of thinking before he speaks, and I suppose that is what comes of it. We get to politics eventually, when I posit that he is insufficiently liberal for the liberals and insufficiently reactionary for the conservatives. "That's the story of my life. I'm insufficiently elitist for the self-important, and I'm insufficiently populist for the Oprah-philes. I'm not bad enough to be bad and I'm not good enough to be good. I wasn't east enough to be east, I wasn't west enough to be west. That really is the story of my life. And when I was young, it all made sense because the middle seemed like a good place to be. That's the point of the book. The happy time when I didn't have to choose sides. Politically in particular, but culturally as well, you have to choose sides in the United States. It's a rabidly divided country, and it makes me miserable because both sides are wrong. Don't they know it? You don't make many friends that way, though. What you end up with for friends are the people who enjoy reading books. Which is fine - that's what I want. But it's not a very large group." I don't know about east and west, but I have always thought that Franzen fell between two stools in terms of the American literary scene, which consists on one side of very traditional storytellers, with a possibly highly complicated but nevertheless old-fashioned sense of narrative (John Irving, Anne Tyler, Garrison Keillor); and on the other side, the experimental writers (David Means, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Chris Bachelder), who are avant-garde, not as a pose, but because the innovation is the engine of the whole train. Franzen simply doesn't fit into either group - he is not defined by being experimental, I doubt you would even describe him as such at all. But nor is he a John Irving for our times. "I'm very flattered. Can you enrich the compliment by unpacking it a little?" (He does this a few times, assumes a compliment where there wasn't necessarily one. Distracted by something earlier, he returns to the conversation with "Sorry, you were just about to say something nice about me . . ." when I really wasn't. I still don't know if this is a mind game, or whether he just has rose-tinted hearing.) Let's clear this up, he says, George Saunders is not heavy-handed, he would be so amused to think that was how he was described. Oh, Philip Roth is, why didn't you just say that in the first place? Those two writers are nothing like each other! John Irving wrote the most political novel - The Cider House Rules is really the most intensely political novel, Garrison Keillor is a liberal spokesperson now, he hasn't been neutral since he was on the radio . . . I didn't really mean political, I mean concerned with formal experimentation. "I have no interest in avant-garde pretensions. Which is very, very different from saying I have no interest in serious literature. Pretension is the word - simply because I declare myself to be difficult, I am therefore worthy of extraordinary status and attention. "That would have been a strange concept to Kafka, I think. His methods were not a style, they were not an attitude. They were written in his own blood. It's very easy to pick up an avant-garde attitude - it's very hard to write anything that's good, anything that really matters. And I think a lot of the most intensely emotional stuff, the most deeply engaged stuff being produced in the United States is writing you would consider avant-garde or experimental. They are all formally wacky." Does he feel a part of that? Socially, yes. David Foster Wallace and David Means are his best friends. In terms of his work, I still don't know. He got pretty aerated without actually telling me. "I don't mean to be sounding defensive. I fear that I've already laid down on magnetic tape some quite defensive statements." "You do sound a bit defensive," I say. "I'm not. I'm just asking you to help me to understand . . . We've gotten off on to nomenclatorial issues. We should get back to something having to do, perhaps, with the book in question." He has quite a lot of verbal flourish - I wouldn't call him mannered but I can imagine, when the time comes for Philip Seymour Hoffman to play him in the biopic, that his friends will be lining up with funny (affectionate, experimental) impressions. I think the book is a bit self-flagellating - charmingly so, but all the same. As he describes his broken marriage, for instance, something that in reality he must have some grievances about, it sounds like yet another instance of a rather sticky situation coming about through his loveable wrongness. Well, you can kind of see why he would be sensitive to the feelings of his ex-wife, Valerie Cornell, a novelist herself (yet when you look her up on a search engine, the first thing that comes up is a footnote on Franzen's college alumni profile. Infuriating.). Sorry, back to the flagellation. "I felt like I was making fun of myself. But that feels like a different thing to flagellating myself. Perhaps in England those two things are indistinguishable. A lot of what I'm writing about, if not important, is at least painful. Early on, I got a very anguished letter from the mother of the little boy who dies in chapter two. Not complaining, simply reporting that it was extraordinarily painful to see her story - which was the story of a mother losing two sons in the space of two years; another son of hers died of cancer, I believe - become a small part of my story. "When you do non-fiction, you have to be aware of that. I'm joking about stuff that was painful to me and painful to them. I managed to make a comedy of errors out of a marriage that was extremely important and also extremely painful ultimately. Again, a memoirist would be well-advised to tread carefully, don't you think?" His parents are no longer living but don't his brothers mind all this revelation? "One of them does. This other brother said, several times, I hope you're not going to do too much more of this. But they are good brothers. There was never any likelihood that I was going to be excommunicated by the family. They're grown up, their lives don't revolve around me." He thinks for a minute. "I present evidence of their lack of rage as a form of character witness on my behalf. If I were a jerk, they would be mad at me". |
3jonathanfreedland
| 4Books
| We have Lord Hutton, the Americans have Bob Woodward. Both get the people who count to talk. While his lordship used the power of judicial summons, Woodward offers a deal. If you talk, he will faithfully present your side of the story. If you do not, your rivals will - and they'll end up looking good, often at your expense. That threat has persuaded Washington power brokers to cooperate on a series of bestselling Woodward books - and now it has worked its magic again to produce Plan of Attack, the inside story of the war against Iraq. Thanks to interviews with 75 key players, including on-the-record sessions with President Bush, as well as access to memos, transcripts of phone calls on secure lines (including those to Tony Blair), even Power Point presentations from military computers, this book is packed with the kind of high-grade information that traditionally stays hidden until the publication of memoirs years after the event. Here is the inside track on a crisis that is barely a year old and still unfolding. Woodward's style is not to present an overall analysis, still less a polemic, but simply to lay out the facts and viewpoints of the main actors. He rarely joins the dots, as those in the Bush administration might say. But it hardly matters: the dots themselves are compelling enough. What emerges is not only a fast-moving narrative of the build-up to war, but also a valuable resource - whatever your stance. If you reckon Bush is an intellectual featherweight barely up to the job, there is ammunition here - such as the January 2001 briefing at the Pentagon when the new president, not yet sworn in, struggles to pay attention to his generals: he is too distracted by the little peppermint at each place around the table. He gobbles up his own, then eyes those of the outgoing defence secretary and chief of staff until he has scoffed theirs too. On the other hand, there is rather more evidence leaning the other way - of a man fully in control. Those who believe Dick Cheney is the ventriloquist and Bush the dummy will be disappointed to read how hard Cheney pushed for the UN to be bypassed - and how Bush overruled him and went to the UN anyway (under pressure from Colin Powell and Blair). Indeed, the Bush that emerges on these pages is strikingly aware of his own role and status, constantly referring to himself by his title and emphasising the final power of his own decision. His closest aides seem intoxicated by that, too, as if playing out all the Oval Office movies they have ever seen: the grandeur of the office is almost sacral, to the extent that it can overwhelm them and cloud their judgment. Thus we learn not only that Bush never asked Powell whether he thought it was right to go to war with Iraq, but also that Powell never offered his opinion. "He would not intrude on that most private of presidential spaces - where a president made decisions of war and peace - unless he was invited." Even if he had, it's not likely he would have made much difference. For the theme that emerges most powerfully from this book is that this war was all but pre-ordained. Even before Bush was inaugurated, Cheney decided that "topic A" of the new president's first national security briefing should be Iraq. On Day 17 of the new administration, the "principals" met to discuss ... Iraq. The "axis of evil", we discover, was always about Iraq: North Korea and Iran were padding to make it look less obvious. When General Tommy Franks was charged with preparing a war plan, he was told that money was no object: he could spend whatever millions he wanted. Crucially, any countervailing evidence was ignored. Defectors told the CIA that the Iraqi military was so ragged that "Iraqi pilots were inventing illnesses on the days they were supposed to fly because they were terrified [their] inadequately maintained planes would crash". Yet Bush continued to tell the world that Saddam posed a military threat to the United States. In September 2002, during a meeting about possible targets, Franks gave it to Bush straight: "Mr President, we've been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and haven't found any yet." On every page comes evidence that Washington's mind was made up. No wonder Powell was "in the fridge," cold-shouldered by the inner circle. The rest of them were set on this course early, Bush taking Donald Rumsfeld aside and asking him to work on an Iraq war plan as early as November 2001. Powell is surely right to tell Woodward that Cheney was "terrified" of the UN route - lest it actually work and prevent war. This large theme carries others with it. One is the role of Tony Blair. Apart from reinforcing Powell on the UN, Woodward's account shows him to have secured little - save a delay here and there to help him win his vote in parliament. Woodward's picture of Blair is not flattering (next time he should make sure he's interviewed). In September 2002 he vowed to Bush that "I'm with you", pledging British military help even as he was telling close colleagues that no decisions had yet been taken. Publicly Blair insisted he was so passionate about ousting Saddam that he would have pushed for it even if Bush was not keen; yet Woodward quotes a Blair adviser admitting that of the three "axis" powers, the PM regarded Iran and North Korea as the greater threats. Most damaging of all - and a revelation that would surely have helped Lord Hutton in his inquiries - we discover that the head of the CIA regarded the notorious 45-minute claim as "shit" and had warned the British to that effect. Yet Downing Street went ahead and put the claim in the September dossier. In Woodward's account, the true special relationship is not with Britain but with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, is in and out of the Oval Office, granted extraordinary and constant access. Tellingly, he is the only person in the entire volume who talks back to Bush, interrupting him and even taunting him. That Bush takes it, and that Bandar is formally notified of the start of the war before Powell (or Blair), will have many wondering what exactly is the nature of the Saudi hold on the Bush administration. Woodward offers a tantalising clue: "The Saudis hoped to fine-tune oil prices ... to prime the economy for 2004. What was key, Bandar knew, were the economic conditions before a presidential election, not at the moment of the election." In other words, the Saudis were favoured because they were going to rig the global economy to ensure Bush a second term. Woodward's book has some heroes, too, in the form of the handful of Democratic senators who saw through the guff about WMD early. It has some splashes of colour, including the derring-do of a CIA team handing out wads of $100 bills in northern Iraq, and plenty to confirm that the Washington power bubble is one of the most dysfunctional places on earth. Bush goes to bed at 8.45pm; General Franks is at work by 3am; everyone phones every one else at 6am and Colin Powell takes a call from the French foreign minister to discuss the wording of a UN resolution 20 minutes before he is due to walk his daughter down the aisle. It all adds up to a volume as gripping as a bumper episode of The West Wing, with the added advantage that it's all true. Make that a disadvantage: for this book also confirms our worst fears, that the world's hyperpower is in the hands of a dangerous gang - and our own PM is with them every step of the way. |
3jonathanfreedland
| 4Books
| Bill Clinton had barely been unleashed upon America, when the mythology started to grow. In 1992 the Republicans insisted he was nothing more than the "failed governor of a small southern state", but Americans had a feeling he would soon be running their country so they wanted to know more. They gobbled up every morsel, from the story of Gennifer with a G to the legend that the young governor could eat an apple in a single bite. On the press bus we were no different. We heard that the candidate didn't snooze during the long-haul flights or late-night drives through the rural heartland. We heard he stayed awake, gulping coffee or Diet Coke, playing cards - or simply talking. Talking, talking, talking. We heard that one journalist, a young reporter from Newsweek who had been with the campaign since the very start in Little Rock in 1991, had become part of the family: he would sit up at the front of the lead bus, playing hearts with the man who would be president. They may not have admitted it, but every journalist who heard that felt a stab of envy. Everyone wanted to sit, hang out and shoot the breeze with Bill Clinton. Now comes a surrogate for that experience. My Life is not a great book, in places it's not even that good - but when you read it, you can't help but feel you're in the company, one on one, of the man himself. It's his voice you hear on the page, for good and sometimes ill. The fact that it's 957 pages long only adds to the effect: it's as if you've been caught on a train from Boston to San Francisco and ended up sitting opposite the last president of the United States. He's got all the time in the world and he's in the mood to talk. It helps that the style is folksy and conversational. The prologue sets the tone when Clinton reveals that, fresh out of law school, he bought a self-help book that encouraged the reader to list his chief life goals. "I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life, and write a great book." Clinton then ticks off how he did and how he "kept score". Finally he writes: "As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story." That's the style throughout, warm and approachable - just like the Clinton persona itself. And it is quite true that the book resembles both the man and his presidency. There are flashes of brilliance, just as there were some dazzling fireworks in the Clinton years: from the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn to the beating back and outsmarting of Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution of 1994. Clinton the author shows off his talent best when he summarises the political dilemmas of rivals, foreign leaders or himself with concise acuity. (This was always a great Clinton skill: low-level congressmen would come away from an encounter with the president impressed and ever so slightly humiliated, as he would rattle off the latest polling data from, or political strife in, their district in distant Indiana or faraway Maine.) The narrative is engaging, too, just as the rollercoaster ride of those eight Clinton years in the White House was compelling. The accounts of high-wire diplomacy in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, the eyeball-to-eyeball brinkmanship against Gingrich, the entire Monica episode - they are all riveting. As long as you train your eye to skim over the paragraphs on the minutiae of US domestic policy, your interest will be held. But there are deep flaws, just as there were in his presidency. The first is common to both: indiscipline. His administration was often faulted for failing to focus on one or two large goals, pursuing them vigorously. Instead, especially after the congressional defeat of his plan for comprehensive healthcare in 1994 and the Republican ascendancy, Clinton chased a host of small-bore issues - what one commentator at the time mocked as "teeny, tiny politics". My Life can be like that, too. It does not structure itself around one or two all-encompassing themes. It is instead doggedly chronological. The US critics who have mocked the book as a "diary dump" are right: whole sections seem to have been written by a man flicking through past appointment books, jotting down whatever he can remember. The unhappy results are pages consisting of non-sequiturs: I vetoed a bill on seat belts; later I met the prime minister of Latvia; that evening I apologised to Hillary. I parody, but only slightly. The other structural problem also mirrors a Clinton trait. This fat tome could easily have been split into two books. The first is a rather charming recollection of an Arkansas boyhood, filled with choice southern characters such as Vernon the science teacher or Uncle Buddy the storyteller. The quality of the writing is better here - helped, perhaps, by the absence of appointment diaries to dump on the page. The second book within is the presidential memoir. It begins late: Clinton is not even elected until page 444. Yet it's fitting that these two books go together. For one thing, so much of Clinton's later actions is explained by the nature of his upbringing. (The child in an alcoholic household with an abusive stepfather, constantly playing peacemaker, constantly craving affection. It doesn't take Freud ...) But housing two radically different lives between one set of covers makes a deeper sense. For, as Clinton himself writes often, he learned early to lead "parallel lives", one tormented by "demons" on the inside, the other marked by great success on the outside. That's the nature of the man and it was the nature of his presidency. It's only right that the book should follow the same pattern. Where an editor might have helped is in curbing the habits of the politician. Too much space is wasted in tributes to colleagues or thanks to foreign counterparts; at its worst, My Life can read like the longest Oscar speech in history. It's hardly a surprise: patting backs is a campaigner's reflex. But there is a more interesting explanation. For My Life is not only a bid to restore Clinton's own reputation - chiefly by pointing up his achievement in securing a decade of relative peace and prosperity - but also the second wave of a double literary offensive aimed at propelling Hillary Clinton to the White House. The first wave was Hillary's own memoir, Living History, but this picks up where that left off. The former president exonerates his wife for the healthcare debacle, blaming himself, and never misses an opportunity to praise her skills as an advocate for children, a strategist or judge of character. On these pages, she is not the "feminazi" imagined by the US right. She is Saint Hillary. This might be the simple, political calculation that explains why My Life lacks large quantities of the basic staple of most political memoir: revelations of behind-the-scenes powerplays. He tells us that his staff were split on the 1994 granting of a US visa to Gerry Adams, for example, but reveals nothing that we didn't already know - even at the time. He gives little colour, describes no rows. It's as if Clinton, a politician to his marrow, just cannot bear to offend anyone too badly. He needs to stay friendly with folks, just in case. The exception is his excoriation of Kenneth Starr, the witchfinder-general who, Clinton writes, was determined to drive him from office. The case against Starr is powerful - though it may be too complex, too legalistic, to be clear to the non-anorak reader - yet it somehow undermines My Life. The book strives to show how Clinton has battled his demons, learning forgiveness from some of the greatest men in the world (starting with Nelson Mandela). But the Starr passages reveal that Clinton is still angry and determined to get even - via the political career of his wife if necessary. Once the train has pulled into San Francisco, and the 957th page has been read, what do you think of this man? That he was surely the most intellectually well-equipped occupant of the Oval Office since Thomas Jefferson; that he was a master politician, even if he could not be a great president; and that he had an intense lust for life. And you realise, just from hearing about it afterwards, that it must have been a hell of a ride. |
4martinkettle
| 4Books
| That Christopher Meyer's memoirs have been as controversial as their subtitle confidently asserts them to be is already a matter of record. But, read in the round, how does the book as a whole actually emerge? My answer is that Meyer's book is both better and worse than the headline-generating extracts suggest. It is better because, contrary to the implication of its subtitle, this is not only a book about 9/11 and the Iraq war, crucially important though these subjects are. Meyer's account of these events is painted on a wider canvas. His Washington years stretched from autumn 1997 to the start of 2003, so he was gone by the time the war began. The majority of his time in DC fell within the Clinton presidency, not the Bush one. Indeed Bush barely makes an appearance in this memoir until around half way through. Seen in that light, this is an important book about what it was like to be Britain's most senior and lustrous ambassador at a time when the prime minister enjoyed a direct line to the White House for which there are few precedents. The strength of the Blair-Clinton and the Blair-Bush relationships was of vast advantage to Meyer, as he acknowledges. It meant that long before 9/11, though certainly in its aftermath, he was able to bathe in reflected glory. It was, as he rightly says, a good time to be British in America. That was just as true in the Clinton as in the Blair years; there were "Blair for President" chants in Chicago as early as 1999, Meyer recalls. But the Downing Street-White House relationship was always the worm in the bud for the embassy, and by the time of Iraq it became both pettily and substantively intolerable to an ambassador who had an unusual taste for the limelight. Even before Bush, a lot of British discourse about America was mere caricature: under every president since JFK, too many British commentators have succumbed to the lazy temptation to regard the United States as a country of mad people governed by buffoons. Under Bush that tendency has become much more extreme. So it is useful to be reminded by Meyer that Bush is a more substantial figure than most here have come to regard him. And it is gratifying to read Meyer expounding wisdoms about America that can only come from experience. Every September, Meyer recalls, he would gather new arrivals to the embassy together and give them a little pep talk. The core of that message was always the same: "Think of the US as a foreign country, then you will be pleasantly surprised by the many things you find in common with this most generous and hospitable of people. Think of America as Britain writ large and you risk coming to grief; American attitudes to patriotism, religion, crime and punishment, schooling, sex, the outside world, can be very different from those of Europeans, including the British." Anyone who has spent time in America will recognise the accuracy of that. Meyer is wisely unsentimental, too, about the so-called "special relationship". The phrase was banned from use while he was ambassador, quite rightly, and he smartly observes that the only countries that can truly lay claim to such a status in Washington - in the sense of being able to have significant influence on US politics and policy - are Ireland, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, and certainly not Britain, even under Blair or Thatcher. My dissatisfaction with Meyer's book is not that he has written it. It is that his indiscretion is selective and even calculated. As the now celebrated extracts showed, Meyer has little compunction about putting the stiletto into politicians - and into Cherie Blair, who did the Meyers many kindnesses in her time, for which she is meanly rewarded here. Meyer is also more generous to Gordon Brown in these pages - I wonder why that could be? - than he was in private, when he regularly complained about the chancellor's repeated and childish snubs. He is also protective towards fellow diplomats, officials and mandarins. Meyer's relationship with the former diplomat Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief-of-staff, was pivotal to his Washington years. So were his connections to John Sawers and Matthew Rycroft, both of them senior ex-Washington embassy figures who worked for Blair in vital periods. Crucial players all, yet they move as silently through Meyer's account as Inspector Bucket does through much of Bleak House Then there is the Catherine question. Christopher Meyer was an ambassadorial moderniser - nice, approachable, sociable and very comfortable with the media. He and Catherine were high-profile Washingtonians, and there was much talk towards the end of his term that they would decamp to New York on his retirement to become a Manhattan power couple to rival Harry and Tina themselves. It sometimes seemed to me that they risked overstepping the mark in this networking, and Meyer's account of Catherine's eurosceptic conversations with Rupert Murdoch and Richard Perle rather confirms that. Running through this book there is not just a mandarin's frustration with ministers but a radical Conservative's disdain towards Labour, even though I firmly believe that Meyer mostly did an exceptional job on Blair's behalf. In the end, though, it all comes inescapably back to Iraq. Iraq is inevitably both the pivotal subject in Meyer's account and the one on which he allows himself the most sustained exposition of his own views. Meyer makes a powerful case for the view that Britain could have caused the Bush administration to delay the invasion until late 2003, giving time to bring France and Russia onside for a second UN resolution, perhaps even forcing Saddam to quit, but certainly enabling proper attention to be given to a UN-centred plan for the post-Saddam Iraq. Would it have worked? Who can now say? But Meyer and many others of us have every right to be extremely angry that it was never given a chance. Martin Kettle was the Guardian's Washington bureau chief from 1997 to 2001. |
4martinkettle
| 4Books
| It would be a dreadful mistake to suppose that George W Bush was the first American president who has failed to capture the hearts and minds of liberal-left British opinion. In fact, over the past half century, such disrespect towards the man in the White House has been far more the norm than the exception. We may think we love Bill Clinton now, and we may yearn for him to be miraculously - and unconstitutionally - restored to the presidency, but my God, we patronised him something rotten when he was actually there. Our appetite for tittle-tattle about Clinton's sex life and speculation about his marriage was endless, but too many of us glazed over when it came to the boring old political strategies and policies that were at the real heart of his heroic - yes, heroic - attempt to pick progressive politics up off the mat in the wake of the new right's transatlantic counter-revolution in the 1980s. This failure to take Clinton seriously was characteristic of too much of the liberal left's trivialised disdain towards real politics. It was not much different from our attitude towards most of his immediate predecessors: we were sniffy towards the elder Bush, we never got it about Reagan, we mocked Carter, laughed at Ford, despised Nixon (sometimes even we get something right) and saw only the bad side of Lyndon Johnson, arguably the greatest American politician of the past half century. We see America as a country inhabited by mad people and ruled by buffoons. Our default position was and is condescension, and it says far more about us than it does about them. John F Kennedy was the last American president who was respected by the British liberal left while he was actually in office. Even as an 11-year-old in 1961, I can still very clearly remember the sheer excitement that swept across the Atlantic as Kennedy took his place in the White House. What a speech he gave at that inaugural back in January 1961! What a model of political oratory it still remains. And it wasn't just impressionable Yorkshire schoolboys who were caught up by the heady sense that Kennedy projected of politics as the noblest of all human callings. In the Kennedy years Washington itself was seized with an enthusiasm for public service of which neither America nor Britain has ever since seen the like, which one still lives in the hope of one day seeing again, and which brought the pudgy 16-year-old William Jefferson Clinton to Washington for a handshake and a justly poignant photograph with Kennedy in the Rose Garden in the president's last summer. All of this stemmed directly from Kennedy himself, and later from his brother Bobby too, and it is this idealism - not the glamour and Camelot and Marilyn Monroe and the rest of it - that remains at the heart of the legend. Yet, 40 years to the day since he was gunned down in Dallas, a date which for some of us can never pass without the tears that well again as I write these words, we have managed to turn even Kennedy into just another celeb with feet of clay. Today it is the philandering, the mafia connections and all the other hypocrisies of what Seymour Hersh called the dark side of Camelot that too many of us think of first. Barely pausing after completing an admirable two-volume biography of LBJ, Robert Dallek has now turned to the man who put Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1960. There must be more books about the Kennedys than about any other family in American history, and many people will wonder whether there is anything new to say. The good news is that there is, and while nothing will quite supersede the reverential tomes written by people such as Schlesinger and Sorensen who were actually there, Dallek has produced easily the best and most objective modern account of JFK. Dallek's unique selling point is that he has had access to previously unreleased records in the Kennedy Library in Boston which detail the full misery of the president's health problems - as well as the immense efforts to which he went to conceal them. How one responds to the mass of detail about Kennedy's ailments, operations, hospitalisations and medications will depend in part on whether one sees Kennedy more as a scoundrel who lied to the voters about ailments that would make him unelectable today, or more as a dreadfully afflicted man who overcame his indignities to rise to the highest seat of power. On November 22, though, it is appropriate to record that were it not for a back brace, which held him erect, his head would not have provided such a clear target for the third shot that ended his life. If Dallek perhaps goes out of his way to underplay the genuine sense of newness and excitement that Kennedy ignited in so many countries as well as his own, he nevertheless provides a very balanced account of the famous Thousand Days, stressing the very limited domestic achievements of the presidency and the distinctly mixed record in foreign affairs. What would have happened had Kennedy lived is, of course, both a fascinating and pointless topic for discussion. That he would have comfortably defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 seems likely, in which case he would have brought many liberals to the Senate and Congress on his coat-tails, and might have pushed through the same kind of civil rights reforms that Johnson, elected on a landslide in the wake of the assassination, was able to achieve. On Cuba, suggests Dallek, Kennedy was on a radical learning curve. The Bay of Pigs was a disgraceful episode, urged on - topically, in the post-Iraq context - by advisers and exiles who exaggerated the readiness of Cubans to rise up against Castro and in support of a US invasion. At the time of his death, Dallek suggests, Kennedy could have been moving towards a rapprochement with Cuba that might have had major long-term consequences for US foreign and domestic policy alike. The great unknowable, of course, is how Kennedy might have handled Vietnam, which was the defining political experience of Bill Clinton's generation and which therefore forms the backdrop to a large section of Nigel Hamilton's biography. Hamilton's is an ambitious undertaking, as it takes Clinton only to the threshold of the presidency that will form the subject matter of volume two (and who knows what a future volume three may yet contain?). Even so, this first volume is in sensitive territory throughout, since Clinton's background and early career were and perhaps still are a political battlefield, largely because conservatives chose to take their stand against his challenge on the man himself rather than on what he stood for. No other presidential candidate in history has had to fight such a cultural war about the kind of person he is. His contemporary, George W Bush, has had an unbelievably easy ride over his own early career (including his avoidance of the Vietnam draft) by comparison. But Hamilton, who has also written a successful book on the young JFK, is right to give a very prominent place to the Arkansas issue in the Clinton story. When conservatives rage against "that man" it is not just the libertinism or even the liberalism that provokes them. It is the fact that he comes from a small, poor state that almost the entire political establishment looks down on. It would be wonderfully ironic if Wesley Clark were to unseat Bush next November, since Arkansas would then have provided two of the last three presidents. Clinton is a man of paradoxes, and Hamilton delves deep into all of them. To some, Clinton is a serious and brilliant figure who understands the transformational character of modern times better than almost any other world leader of his era. To others, he is a man without principle or scruple whose primary and perhaps only importance is as a figure of gossip and entertainment. On the one hand, there are those who see Clinton as he sees himself, as a moderniser who reshaped his party and the role of government in changed times, and whose pivotal importance will only grow with time. On the other, there are those who see him as an emblematic politician of an essentially depoliticised era, in which the presidency is of diminished and diminishing importance. Perhaps the single most difficult question facing all those who try to sum up the Clinton years is the one that Hamilton will reach only at the end of his next volume. Did he reinvent and thus save the American progressive political tradition which he inherited from Bobby Kennedy, among others? Or is his achievement essentially opportunist, sacrificing progressive ideas and aspirations in favour of the desire to stay in office at any cost in a generally conservative country? The conventional view of Clinton is that he is a bad man but was a good president. Rather similar to the general verdict these days on John Kennedy, in fact. In both cases there are few who can agree on exactly how these two contrasting judgments can be meshed together, even now. |
6nickcohen
| 4Books
| The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki<br />Marcel Reich-Ranicki<br />Weidenfeld & Nicholson 25, pp405<br />Buy it at a
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6nickcohen
| 4Books
| The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne Simon & Schuster 18.99, pp390 During an interview in 2003, Gordon Brown took the trouble to argue with a long-dead academic, all but unknown outside conservative intellectual circles. 'There is a Namier school of history, which suggests that everything is less to do with ideas and popular concerns than with the manoeuvrings of elites,' he told the Times. 'I do not accept that ... politics is about ideas and ideals and is about the policies that reflect the concerns of people.' Lewis Namier (1888-1960) argued in his masterwork The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III that talk of great battles of principle between the Whigs and Tories of Hanoverian England was nonsense. Ministers were in politics for the money and to advance the interests of their cliques. MPs who boasted of their independence were forever seeking favours from the public purse. Ideology mattered so little that 'the political life of the period could be fully described without ever using a party denomination'. You can do the same today, argues Peter Oborne in this thought-provoking polemic. Members of the 21st-century 'political class' are as isolated and self-interested as their Georgian predecessors and Brown's outburst against the realism of Namier was nothing more than the rage of Caliban at seeing his face in the glass. Oborne is a muscular writer who values intellectual clarity and he works hard to explain that he does not regard the political class as a continuation of the old establishment. On the contrary, it despises the values of traditional institutions that once acted as restraints on the power of the state - the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the Civil Service and the accountability of ministers to the Commons. It takes a while to be convinced because, like the Prime Minister, the British tend to think of political parties, in a watered-down Marxist way, as manifestations of class interests fighting for different visions of how society should be run. Oborne neatly turns conventional wisdom on its head and argues that the modern elite is contemptuous of traditional constraints precisely because it has been taught by Marxist academics that the rule of law or the personal responsibility of politicians are just fictions that hide the power of the privileged. The modern political class thinks it can override these discreditable constitutional conventions because it has been elected, albeit by an ever-diminishing proportion of eligible voters. If you are young and ambitious and want to join, Oborne sketches out a career path. First, you must set yourself apart from your contemporaries at university by taking an interest in politics. You must join a think-tank or become researcher to an upwardly mobile MP on graduation. Before getting to the top, you will have eaten with, drunk with and slept with people exactly like you, not only in politics but in the media, PR and advertising, trades the old establishment despised, but you admire for their ability to manipulate the masses. You will talk a language the vast majority of your fellow citizens can't understand and be obsessed with the marketing of politics rather than its content. You will notice that once in power, you can get away with behaviour that would have stunned your predecessors. You can use your position to profit from lecture tours and negotiate discounts, as Cherie Blair did. You can try to find your mistress a job in the Civil Service, as Robin Cook did, or make love to your mistress in government offices on government time, as John Prescott did. When challenged, you will say that 'everyone in business behaves like this' when, in fact, they don't. Politics will be your career. You will have no experience of other trades and, paradoxically, be a worse politician for it. Because you've never managed a budget or a large institution or served in the armed forces, the likelihood is that you will waste vast amounts of public money and send British troops into battle unprepared. Oborne marshals his facts impressively. As a political commentator first on the Spectator and then on the Daily Mail, he has seen at first hand the subservience of lobby correspondents to New Labour and presents the reader with gruesome scenes of Alastair Campbell being cheered on by sycophants at lobby briefings. But although Oborne loathes the Westminster beat where he has spent his adult life, he can't escape from the narrow-mindedness of Westminster journalism and see the wider world beyond. He denounces politicians for their soundbites, but fails to mention that television news will broadcast only those politicians who deliver soundbites. He deplores ministers' criticisms of judges, but fails to understand how the Human Rights Act has given judges political power. And having condemned the effects of Marxist teaching on today's politicians, Oborne metamorphoses into a Tory version of Noam Chomsky as he wails that democracy is a facade and media independence a myth. Hysteria inevitably follows such a descent and he concludes by muttering that England is on the edge of fascism. Such blemishes detract from but do not destroy a powerful and troubling study. At his best, Oborne is a patriot who wants to protect the best of his country from smarmy men and women who know everything about power except how to use it wisely. |
6nickcohen
| 4Books
| Three Victories and a Defeat<br />by Brendan Simms<br />Allen Lane, 30, pp800 British Eurosceptics live with a paradox as close to tragedy as anything can be in high politics. A determination to disentangle Britain from Europe drives them into public life. To their delight they find the overwhelming majority of public opinion agrees with them. Passion, flair and the best democratic arguments are on the Eurosceptic side. Yet parties that oppose Europe always lose elections. However much they agree with them, voters sense a danger and turn away. Bennite isolationism wrecked Labour in the Eighties. Harder to explain is the failure of the modern Tories. In an age of globalisation, their policy of putting clear blue water between Britain and Europe and looking across the oceans to the trading stations of the old empire sounds practical, but a sympathetic public can never be persuaded to vote in large enough numbers to implement it. Brendan Simms is too good a historian to exploit the past to score a point about the present. Rather, Three Victories and a Defeat is an argument about the constants of foreign policy; about how in the 18th century the knowledge that Britain wasn't 'an island entire of itself' made it a superpower, and how the American colonies were lost when the British tried to manage on their own. Like everyone else who tosses the quotation around, I'd assumed John Donne was talking about the human condition not the balance of power. But, as Simms points out on his first page, Donne was writing when James I had outraged respectable opinion by failing to help European Protestants. 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...' was written at a time of fear that Catholic Spain would overwhelm the Low Countries and seize the ports it needed for an invasion. From 1688 through to 1763 statesmen sought to prevent a 'universal monarchy', whether Hapsburg or Bourbon, dominating the continent and thus threatening Britain. With great skill and a light touch, Simms tells the complicated story of how a country that under Charles II and James II was little more than a French satellite searched for security by becoming involved in the politics of every country from the Ottoman Empire to Sweden, built alliances, switched sides, paid bribes, sent off armies and developed the navy. As now, resentment at involvement in Europe was always present. Patriotic and often xenophobic opinion loathed the Whig oligarchs for their willingness to spend blood and treasure on the wars of the Dutch William and German Hanoverians. In 1711, Swift asked in his great polemic, The Conduct of the Allies, why the English should support the cause of the hated Dutch, fight their battles and pick up their bills? Why bother when the only part of England to benefit was the City - 'that set of people who are called the moneyed men... whose perpetual harvest is war, and whose beneficial way of traffic must very much decline by a peace'? To my mind Simms doesn't acknowledge the force of Swift's questions or the Tory and radical criticisms of the wars and corruption of the Whigs. But then I suppose he feels he doesn't have to, because after winning the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War, Britain turned her back on Europe as the Tories had always wanted and the result was catastrophe. Simms, a Peterhouse don, has become the most formidable modern enemy of the Conservative tradition in foreign policy. His last book, Unfinest Hour, so excoriated the Major government's behaviour during the Bosnian crisis that I know people who have refused to shake the hand of Douglas Hurd or Malcolm Rifkind after reading it. Three Victories and a Defeat does the same to their predecessors. The Tories assumed that Britain could forget about Europe and hide behind the Royal Navy. But because the British stopped diverting France and Spain with alliances in Europe, their enemies could build up their navies and combine to challenge Britain when the American War of Independence began. Simms is refreshingly unsentimental about the revolution, seeing it, quite rightly, as a clash of imperialisms. Benjamin Franklin and many others had been empire loyalists. When they realised that the Tory policy of avoiding conflict would stop the 13 colonies expanding across the continent, they revolted. Britain was never as alone as it was in the American War of Independence. Even in 1940, Greece was still an ally. In 1776, there was no one. Prescient men of the day realised the scale of the rout. Horace Walpole predicted that one day Europeans would take instructions from Americans, while the American delegation in Paris told the French that a great empire would emerge from the scattered settlements on the Atlantic seaboard, 'and they will all speak English, every one of 'em'. This book is a strong riposte to Linda Colley's argument that the British defined themselves against the European 'other'. Not so, Simms replies, 'Britain's fate' is decided in Europe 'always has been and always would be'. History doesn't repeat itself, but geography doesn't change. We do not live on 'an island entire of itself' but in a European country. Unless Eurosceptics can find continental allies against Brussels, they are as certain to fail as their ancestors. |
6nickcohen
| 4Books
| Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles<br />by Dominic Sandbrook<br />Little, Brown 20, pp823 At the Queen's coronation in June 1953, Dutch historian JH Huizinga looked at the happy crowds greeting the new monarch and 'grieved' for the British. They thought that 'history would not deal with them as it had dealt with other nations which had strutted their brief moment of power on the world stage ... the more sympathetic comprehension one had for the high hopes with which they embarked on the second Elizabethan era, the more acutely one realised what a painful era it would be, how rich in disillusionment, frustration and humiliation'. The first volume of Dominic Sandbrook's spectacular history of the Sixties is a chronicle of how the realisation of irreversible national decline hit the British after the Suez crisis. Alert readers will have noticed that Suez was in 1956, but Sandbrook breaks with precedent and yanks the Sixties out of the culture wars in which, according to taste, it was either the devil's decade or a time of liberation for the oppressed, and seeing it as a part of long, slow changes in British society. A second novelty, and for baby boomers an ominous one, is that he can't remember the Sixties. He wasn't born until 1974. Never Had It So Good is a sign that the period is slipping from memory into history, and young Sandbrook's great advantage is that he can see how the similarities between people who then saw each other as enemies were as striking as the differences. The supposedly socialist film director Lindsay Anderson sounded like Colonel Blimp reviewing a shabby working-class regiment when he lamented the backwardness of British proletarian life. Every return from sophisticated Europe was 'an ordeal. It isn't just the food, the sauce bottle on the cafe tables, and the chips with everything. It isn't even saying goodbye to wine, goodbye to restaurants. For coming back to Britain is like coming back to the nursery'. The middle-class leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were as convinced that the British could continue to lead the lesser breeds as the most diehard empire loyalists. 'We thought that Great Britain was still a great power whose example [of unilaterally renouncing nuclear weapons] would affect the rest of the world,' wrote AJP Taylor when he looked back. 'Ironically, we were the last imperialists.' Sandbrook is as at ease discussing the treacherous way Harold Macmillan dealt with his colleagues as the passion for apocalyptic science fiction when the Cold War threatened to turn hot. He explains the vicious misogyny of the 'new wave' working-class films by pointing to how the consumer boom encouraged domesticity and the power of women, and shows how that consumerism meant most people didn't give a damn about the loss of empire. There are hundreds of killer quotes and anecdotes. Colin Wilson whose demented claims to be the 'major literary genius of our century' were taken seriously by literary London for a year or so, fell from grace when the father of his girlfriend burst into his flat with a horsewhip crying: 'Aha, Wilson, the game is up! We know what's in your filthy diary!' and forced Wilson to hand his mucky and grandiose ramblings to the Daily Mail. When Selwyn Lloyd was offered a post at the Foreign Office by Churchill, he replied: 'But, sir, there must be some mistake. Except in war, I have never visited any foreign country. I do not like foreigners. I have never spoken in any foreign-affairs debate in the House. I have never listened to one.' 'Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages,' growled Churchill in return. Sandbrook covers a vast amount of ground. But he does have a theme: 'The yearning for an alternative to the old-fashioned, complacent Conservatives who were thought to be running the country into the ground.' The revolt of the early Sixties against the old Tory order was social rather than political. The mood articulated by the casts of Beyond the Fringe and That Was the Week That Was or the staff of Private Eye wasn't a desire to change the system but to open it up. It takes a very closed ruling class to turn such natural Conservatives as Richard Ingrams into rebels. So tight and secretive was it that a journalist didn't realise that Sir William Haley was the editor of the Times and a former BBC director general, and went through a whole interview thinking he was Bill Haley, the rock'n'roll pioneer. As a scrupulous historian, Sandbrook avoids drawing modern parallels, but the reader can't avoid being struck by the cunning of history. With the old Tories gone, the Sixties were meant to end elitism and bring a meritocracy. Instead they cleared the road for a new elite which sustains itself in power by insisting it is against the establishment and an education system which makes it all but impossible for bright working-class children to get on. The book begins with the failure of Sir Anthony Eden's Suez adventure, which allowed all the tyrants in the Middle East to buttress their power by posing as anti-imperialists. Today, Tony Blair is accused of being the new Eden, although his Iraq adventure has shaken the foundations of Middle Eastern tyranny. It is a tribute to Sandbrook's literary skill that his scholarship is never oppressive. Alternately delightful and enlightening, he has produced a book which must have been an enormous labour to write but is a treat to read. |
6nickcohen
| 4Books
| You can never predict which writers will survive, but tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of readers believe that Stieg Larsson's Millennium series places him in that small group of thriller writers whose books future generations will enjoy long after many "serious" producers of literary fiction have been forgotten. An unsympathetic critic might look at The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the final volume of the 2,100-page trilogy, and wonder why. Unlike Raymond Chandler or John le Carr, Larsson cannot take you to another place with a few strokes of the pen. The novel opens with Lisbeth Salander lying in a remote homestead with a bullet in her head. She has just taken an axe to her father, Alexander Zalachenko, a KGB defector whose sex trafficking business is protected by a corrupt sect in the Swedish intelligence service. She was provoked: Zalachenko had tried to bury her alive. Somewhere in the woods, the hero, Mikael Blomkvist, has confronted Zalachenko's hit man, a giant with a taste for snapping necks. Yet Larsson cannot conjure up a menacing atmosphere in a remote Scandinavian forest and does not try. The action takes places in a "white farmhouse somewhere near Nossebro", he says, and leaves it at that. The rest of the book is set in the police stations and newspaper offices of Stockholm, as the secret police try to protect themselves by rigging the trial of Salander, who was badly injured but not killed by the bullet. For all the local detail Larsson offers, a foreigner cannot get a sense of the city from reading the Millennium trilogy, whereas people who have never been to Edinburgh feel they know it from reading Ian Rankin. Salander herself is a magnificent creation: a feminist avenging angel. But elsewhere Larsson's characterisation is perfunctory. All the decent journalists, police officers and secret servicemen who help Blomkvist bust open the conspiracy are essentially the same: good Swedish social democrats, sexually liberated and tolerant of everything except the abuse of human rights. Quite rightly, Larsson's admirers do not care. His phenomenal, if sadly posthumous, success comes from a combination of moral clarity and narrative skill rather than descriptive ability. In the second volume, The Girl Who Played With Fire, he announces his creed when he has a reporter tell Blomkvist he wants to go after the men shipping Russian girls into Sweden: "Blomkvist smiled. He had never met Svensson before, but he felt at once that he was the kind of journalist he liked, someone who got right to the heart of the story. For Blomkvist the golden rule in journalism was that there were always people who were responsible. The bad guys." As a left-wing reporter who had investigated neo-Nazi gangs, and lived in fear of murderous reprisals, Larsson had learned to mistrust non-judgmental pieties about there being "good and bad in all of us". Hard-won experience taught him to avoid the shades of grey, which reduce so much contemporary fiction and political thought to a formless blur. Specifically, Larsson believed misogyny to be an unpardonable evil, and wove a feminist argument through the trilogy with enormous skill. All thriller plots are ludicrous when you to stop to think about them, but Larsson uses male hatred of women to make his uncomfortably plausible. Without giving too much about the final volume away, it turns on a secret police plot to keep Salander quiet by duping a pompous prosecutor into seeking a court order to confine her to an asylum. The prosecutor isn't part of the conspiracy. But he has already confidently if falsely accused her of three murders and fed the press with stories that she was a member of a satanic lesbian cult. He does not repent his mistake but turns on his victim: "Everything had gone haywire, and he had found himself with a completely different murderer and a chaos that seemed to have no end in sight. That bitch Salander." When the crooked psychiatrist who had tried to drive the young Salander mad by keeping her tied to a hospital bed prepares to take her back under his control, he gloats that he "had not become an internationally respected psychiatrist for nothing. He could sense a cold shadow passing through the room, and interpreted this as a sign that the patient felt fear and shame beneath her imperturbable exterior. He was pleased that her attitude to him had not changed over the years. She's going to hang herself in the district court." I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting reaching the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a master storyteller just as he was entering his prime. |
10simonhoggart
| 4Books
| We buzzed at the door of the magnificent htel particulier in Gaillac, just facing the abbey, and few yards from the River Tarn. Madame Pinon, the patronne, came down to welcome us and guided us up the massive winding staircase, along stone-flagged corridors, past trompe d'oeil marble alcoves, by tantalising glimpses of large cool sitting rooms, the kind where Madame Bovary wished she had spent her days, up to our own rooms, which were filled with antique furniture and big, comfortable beds. Our room had a view of the river; the children's overlooked the square. We'd just flown in to Toulouse from London after an early start at home, so I left the family to nap while I explored the town, much of which consists of similarly superb htels particuliers. These were huge private houses in which several generations of one wealthy family might have lived on the separate floors: grandparents, two brothers and a nephew, say, all with their own wives and children. I popped into the wine museum (Gaillac wines are good, and better value than the more famous names in the rest of France, if not perhaps quite as wonderful as the publicity suggests: "Gaillac, enchanter of palates since the year 1000," they say.) Among the very best we found was made by a Scotsman, Alan Geddes, whose dessert wine is not only much better than a cheap Sauternes, but at Fr55 for a 50cl bottle, cheaper than a cheap Sauternes as well.) There is a tasting booth in the main place , where willing helpers offered samples of any wine you choose. Mme Pinon had recommended two restaurants and I made reservations at the Relais de la Portanelle, which was five minutes' walk from the B&B, and looked slightly more child-friendly than the competition. Indeed our first-rate dinner, including drinks, service and two menus enfants, was excellent and came to 490 francs, around 50 all in. Breakfast next day was on a terrace overlooking the abbey and the Place St Michel - fresh bread, hot flaky croissants, yoghurt, fruit, and plenty of excellent coffee (why are some French hotels so mean with coffee, quite as miserly as they would be with 60-year-old armagnac?) The whole visit was a delight, and since Madame charges a mere 25 for two people, including breakfast, a very affordable delight. Next day, we took the motorway south for a short distance back towards Toulouse, then headed off onto D roads and finally bumpy lanes without any numbers at all, until we reached la France profonde, that mysterious, sun-baked, sleepy place which exists everywhere and yet remains frustratingly elusive. Just when you imagine you've found la France profonde, you hear the noise from a cement plant, or sniff a municipal tip, or spot the preliminary levelling for a new autoroute. But Madame Fieux's place in the tiny hamlet of Montpitol is as close as you're likely to get. A lake in the distance; a stand of oak trees; cool, shaded walks, the silence shattered only by the occasional bee - it would be hard to find a more peaceful place. She showed us outside and we exclaimed at the superb panoramic view and the pretty garden. "Not a garden," she said firmly, "un parc." "Comme Versailles," I said merrily, a compliment which she took as no more than the garden's due. Moments later, we were lying on loungers, gazing out at what we could see of the view through the heat haze, and Mme Fieux arrived with a tray loaded with ice-cold beer, tonic, orange juice and Coke. Again, dinner was a short distance away - a 10-minute drive - and again the full meal for four, including one of the best Gaillac wines on the list, was just a fraction over 50. Breakfast was, if anything, even finer than the day before, and taken on the terrace in front of the house. Mme Fieux could not have been friendly. She charges a little more: 400 francs for a double room and breakfast. We had found both places in Alastair Sawday's Special Places to Stay in France, one of a series which includes volumes covering Britain, plus Spain & Portugal. These guides are quite open about charging for inclusion on the grounds that the books would be prohibitively expensive if they didn't. On the other hand, Sawday says, nowhere gets in if it isn't up to his standards, though presumably the most idyllic place in the world would be excluded if the owners didn't cough up. I have to say that we have never had a failure. Looking through the guide is like reading the leaflet which comes with a particularly nice box of chocolates - you want to experience the lot. In France, there are converted castles, ancient farmhouses, mills, cottages, a bishop's house, townhouses, forges, bastides, hunting lodges. Some are luxurious, stuffed with antique furniture, surrounded by fine formal gardens. Others are much simpler, and the prices can be as low as 18 for two people. We stayed at three Sawdays in Britain, though it's a measure of the turnover in the B&B trade that two of them have now stopped taking in visitors. A lot of people offer B&B because they imagine it's a simple means of making extra money out of rooms they don't use, and an agreeable way to meet interesting folk. Which it is, up to a point, though after a while the sheer labour of making half a dozen cooked breakfasts in the morning while the children need to be taken to school, followed by heavy-duty skivvying in the bedrooms, plus a daily linen wash (or the cost of a professional laundry) and the many extra expenses, put a considerable dent in that money supply. People who find that a year's hard work has netted them only around 3,000 may wonder whether it's worth going on. Those who've done it tend to say that yes, most of the guests are agreeable, and some are a joy to welcome back, but it only takes one miserable couple who wake up the house coming home at 3am, or treat you like a particularly stupid chambermaid, or leave their room looking like a pigsty, to make you feel that your home has been unpleasantly invaded. One of our best experiences was two years ago, in Wiltshire. Our room had a balcony overlooking the owners' great pride: a lovely flower and herb garden, with a lawn stretching down to a stream and a mill race. It was early summer, and we spent the day stretched out on the lawn, wrapped in the warm scent from the vegetation, listening to the water trickle by. Friends came to join us later and we sipped gin-and-tonics on the balcony while watching the sun go down. Dinner was at a perfectly decent pub a half mile walk away and, no, I won't tell you where this Elysium is because they don't do B&B any more. Luckily there are plenty of other, similarly nice, places which do. This summer, I went to Adlestrop in Oxfordshire to write about the 85th anniversary of Edward Thomas's famous poem. (Incidentally, Anne Harvey's gorgeous book, Adlestrop Revisited, packed with essays, pictures, research about the poem - and poems that pay tribute to the poem - is just published by Sutton Publishing at 12.99.) We had arranged to stay with John and Camilla Playfair at their Sawday-listed house in Aston Magna, just north of Morton-in-Marsh. John welcomed us as if we were his oldest friends down for the weekend. We were shown to our suite, overlooking the swimming pool and the tennis courts, and my son and I settled down to watch the Cup Final. Meanwhile my wife and daughter took tea in the lounge and were given the guided tour, including the Japanese water garden the Playfairs made themselves. Again friends joined us, and large gins were pressed on everyone. The Playfairs' daughter, an ex-student of Pru Leith, had cooked supper: a mountain of local asparagus, bought that morning and topped with balsamic vinegar and parmesan; chicken in honey with more local vegetables, then homemade praline and hazelnut icecream with a vast bowl of strawberries. And a superb cheese board. We had brought our own wine, but the Playfairs, who'd spent the evening at a charity ball, returned in time to press port, brandy and stickies on us. Next day, we couldn't face a full cooked breakfast, though it was willingly offered, and somehow made do with cereal, breads, toast, fresh fruit, and yoghurt. Before we left another cafetiere of coffee arrived and we were sent on our way to an excellent lunch at the Fox in Lower Oddington, a famous local pub where you need to arrive early, even on weekdays, because they don't take bookings. The Playfairs charge 35 for a double room, which is slightly more than most B&B's, but around half what you'd pay for a hotel room less than half as pleasant. For dinner they charged 48 for the six of us, but asked us to make the cheque out to the charity. It was quite the nicest, as well as the grandest B&B we've ever stayed in. The practicals<br /> Alastair Sawday's Special Places to Stay series comprises: British Bed & Breakfast, 4th edition (12.95); British Hotels & Inns (10.95); French Bed & Breakfast, 5th edition (13.95); Paris Hotels (8.95); Special Places to Stay in Ireland (10.95), and Special Places to Stay in Spain & Portugal (11.95). A new title, Special Places to Stay in Italy (10.95), is due out in Spring 2000. All the guides are available in major bookshops, or by credit card order from Alastair Sawday Publishing on; 0117 929 9921. For more information, visit: . |
10simonhoggart
| 4Books
| Chance Witness<br />by Matthew Parris<br />528pp, Viking, 18.99 I've known Matthew Parris pretty well for nearly 10 years, and he has always been kind and helpful and thoughtful, with only the occasional whiff of cattiness carried faintly on the breeze. He is also very kind about me in this alarmingly good book, so you might want to discount what follows. The cover shows Matthew with his hand over his mouth, as if he had just let slip a dangerous indiscretion. Yet I've read few autobiographies that are so carefully considered, so empty of anything glib or cheap. The only damaging material is about people who are already dead, or who are big enough to take it. (Among the many wonderful vignettes of Margaret Thatcher is one illustrating her reliance on the Sun, and in particular the two-bullet-point editorials that used to appear opposite page three. "One day she plonked the paper down in front of the assembled male company, open at this spread, and said 'what do you think of those two, eh?' No man present dared catch another's eye.") The book also made me laugh out loud several times. Parris is savage about the late and little lamented Dr Sir Alan Glyn, a Tory bore whom even the bores avoided. The descriptions of him eating langoustines, shell and all ("I remember especially the feelers poking through his moustache and waving wildly as his yellowed teeth chomped the heads"), and of the time the wardrobe fell over door side down with Dr Glyn inside are alone almost worth the price of the book. If the unexamined life is not worth living, then Matthew's life has paid for itself several times. He learns from almost everything - his boyhood in Africa, his homosexuality, his work with Mrs Thatcher, his time as an MP, his disastrous stint on Weekend World, subsequent huge success as a journalist, and the inexplicable decision to spend four winter months on an almost uninhabited island near the Antarctic circle. There is the occasional infelicity, such as his description of the one time he had sex with a woman ("it could have been a goat as far as I was concerned") but far more perfectly expressed truths that illuminate and inform. My favourite is this: "Being an MP feeds your vanity and starves your self-respect." This is a book full of wisdom and if we are invited along the way to share Matthew's many triumphs, why not? Is he expected to leave them out? I had vaguely thought of writing my own autobiography at some stage, though my plan was to exclude myself almost entirely, since readers might be entertained by some of the events and people I have encountered, even if they had no interest in me. Having read this book I realise what a silly idea that is. Matthew has done much more than me, and thought about it all much more deeply. I was reminded of the Peanuts cartoon in which Linus and Charlie Brown are lying down looking at clouds. Charlie Brown asks Linus what he can see, and he replies (something like), "I see a map of Prince Edward Island and a profile of the composer Aaron Copland. What do you see, Charlie Brown?" "I was going to say a horsey and a cat, but I don't think I'll bother now." Nor me. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Penguin 25, pp560 Naomi Klein is confused. She has written a tough attack on capitalism's capacity to insist that public policy be run wholly in its own interests and its conspiratorial capacity to capitalise on all forms of disaster and social distress to get its way. Fine. 'Disaster capitalism' is an insightful way of looking at how the free marketeers have spread the gospel. Sometimes you cheer her on, but nowhere does she concede that markets can have good results as well as bad. Nowhere does she explore what those circumstances may be and why economic freedom is so appealing to so many. And nowhere does she set out an alternative manifesto for running economies and societies. In her delusional, Manichaean world view, privatisation, free markets, private property, consumer freedom, the profit motive and economic freedom are just other terms for corporate self-enrichment, denial of voice, limitation of citizenship, inequality and, sometimes, even torture. The discredited electro-shock psychological treatment of the Fifties, we learn, informed the thought system of the free marketeers; it is guilt by association and assertion rather than proof, a weaknesses of too much of the book. Nothing good can ever come from globalisation, which is just more capitalism. Democracy, however, is a halcyon world of political and economic co-operation, citizen voice and engagement, with a freely arrived- at assertion of the common interest in which most think along the same lines as, say, Naomi Klein. She and free-market economist Milton Friedman, whom she has in her sights, are mirror images of each other in the absolutist categories in which they think. So she is unlikely to convince anybody new, which is a pity, because she does hit some bull's eyes. Her description of the way corporate America has exploited the disasters of hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Iraq war and even the 2005 tsunami is devastating. The natural disaster that destroyed tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans was seen as an 'opportunity' to put the city's schooling and public housing in private hands. 9/11 became the excuse for the creation of a vast, private-security industry. And the Iraq war was organised around the idea that following the shock and awe military strategy, the country could be organised as a pure, free-market paradise, partly because country and people alike were so traumatised that they would offer no opposition and partly because of the ideological belief that only unalloyed markets could deliver results. It was in Iraq that disaster capitalism had its purest, most self-destructive impact. Her account of the ideological zealotry, stupidity and greed that informed how Iraqi reconstruction was handled is among the most original and revealing in the book. The ambition to have low taxes, minimal regulation, no state, free markets, low tariffs and maximum corporate involvement because they conformed to the free-market blueprint distorted economic priorities and generated huge opportunities for waste and racketeering. Worse, they involved a scorched-earth policy towards Iraqi institutions that created the vacuum occupied by the sectarian, murderous militias. It was the true denouement of disaster capitalism. There are many lessons from Iraq, but they elude Klein. The fact that the neocons were wedded to an economistic and wrong view of democracy does not mean that the left should be automatically against all forms of market and conceive of democracy as a surrogate for socialism. Rather, democracy is shorthand for a network of painfully constructed institutions: a free press, free unions, an independent legal and judicial system, the rule of law, the capacity to whistleblow, audit trails, transparency of decision taking, political parties, constitutional checks and balances to hold executive government to account, local power and free elections. When capitalism works well, these institutions are well-functioning. But they are more important than even that. Paradoxically, successful capitalism depends on the integrity it brings to the operation of markets and the organisation of corporations. What was wrong about so much shock therapy and the brutal introduction of markets that Klein describes was not that societies should have cleaved to a quasi-socialist alternative under the rubric of democracy. It was that they should have paid infinitely more attention to the building of the 'soft' institutions of democracy, including universal education and health care, as the vital precondition for successful markets. She does not recognise it, but the debate has moved on since the bad old days of the 'Washington consensus'. Some of the economists she eviscerates, such as Harvard's Dani Rodrik, have become leaders in building a new consensus that acknowledges the importance of such institutions and are no less tough on how the reconstruction of Iraq neglected them. It does not suit her case, hence no mention. Klein is so anxious to prove that all capitalism is bad, even, on occasion, relying on torture to get its way, that she never allows for the possibility that markets can deliver beneficial results. Or that the demand for markets comes from the bottom up, as it did in China between 1980 and 1983. Nor, in her account of the shock treatment of the former communist Eastern Europe, does she explain why some countries - the Baltic republics and the Czech Republic - have done so much better than others. So The Shock Doctrine is a lost opportunity. It is hardly new that disasters and shocks are often triggers of change; her insight is to apply the thesis to turbo-capitalism and its ideologues. If Klein had been fairer, she would have had a smarter thesis that could genuinely have changed the intellectual climate. As it is, she will be dismissed by her critics as a confused ranter. We need critics of free-market fundamentalism to do better than that. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| High Society<br />by Ben Elton<br />Bantam Press 16.99, pp352 Ben Elton is not a neutral in the debate about drugs. Not for him the compromises of the current Home Secretary (curiously similar to those of the imaginary Home Secretary in his book) or, for that matter, The Observer. He wants complete legalisation of all drug use - from heroin and crack cocaine to cannabis. Anything else is deceitful and purposeless because, as the central character in High Society - campaigning Labour MP Peter Paget - puts it, either we are or have been users ourselves or know someone who is or has been a user; we are thus law-breakers or condone law breaking and so undermine the cornerstone of social order. If the law does not go with the grain of social reality, then it is an ass. Drug use is now so extensive that trying to draw boundaries between class A and class C drugs is futile - and what results is the devastation and hypocrisy portrayed here. Better legalisation of all drugs, opening up the possibility of their proper regulation and of honestly confronting what they do to people. Elton's book in many ways should not succeed. His characters are one-dimensional and when he uses them to deploy the arguments for legalisation the results are gawky; a very good comedian abandoning his craft and instead lumbering into the pulpit to preach. The main plot is predictable; we know from the moment Paget's assistant admires her boss that the subsequent affair and its denouement are inevitable. The drug-saturated rock star Tommy Hanson is a cartoon cut-out and his adventures stretch credulity to the limits. Elton should take a self-denying ordinance and be more sparing in delivering sex scenes; despite his best efforts they do not work. And yet. The book is saved by its pace and verve and the author's passion for his subject. Involvement with Britain's drug laws has laid all of his characters low and Elton's portrait of Jessie, the Scottish prostitute kept in thrall to her minders by their making her dependent on heroin, shows how it is on the streets and how illegality, expense and heroin's cruel addictive quality make the bonds close to impossible for her to break. For vast swathes of the British, experimenters with illegal drugs perhaps in their youth but now lapsed into alcohol and tobacco, the current evolving compromises seem a reasonable halfway house - recognising reality but also cautious about signalling that heroin is no more problematic than coffee. This is the overstated premise at the heart of the book. There is certainly a very strong British drug economy and drug subculture but, unlike alcohol, it remains a subculture - so the comparison made with Prohibition by Peter Paget does not stand. The book would have had more tension if Elton had allowed the anti-legalisation arguments to be marshalled by someone more sympathetic than an unsatisfactory Tory Shadow Home Secretary and in the end his hero undoes himself by lying to a mendacious press about his affair rather than losing the argument on drugs. Yet as I raced to the end, I found myself applauding Elton. This is a tough subject tackled with courage and commitment. The great Victorian novelists managed to crusade and to entertain. Elton's book, despite its weaknesses, is cast in that tradition. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| The Great Unravelling: From Boom to Bust in Three Short Years<br /> by Paul Krugman<br /> 464pp, Allen Lane, 18.99 The Roaring Nineties<br /> by Joseph Stiglitz<br /> 432pp, Allen Lane, 18.99 Britain's political class and commentariat just don't get contemporary America. They don't understand the revolutionary nature of US conservatism and the profundity of its ambitions. They don't understand the extraordinary self-serving venality of corporate America and its Republican allies. They don't understand the ruthless pursuit of radical conservative interests and disregard for all others. They think, like Tony Blair, that America is having an eccentric wobble - and that if George Bush is engaged with, it will sooner or later be business as usual. They should read these two books, by two of America's best economists and most forensic critics, and be disabused. I should declare an interest; I have long regarded the Nobel prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz and Princeton University's Paul Krugman as two of the best around. And so it proves. Stiglitz's careful dissection of the follies of the "Roaring Nineties" and the conservative thinking that produced them - penetrating the Clinton administration - is as good as it gets, and while I am wary of collections of columns as dull retreads (I plead guilty to having inflicted one upon the reading public myself), Krugman gets away with it on two counts. First, I only read a few of them in the original; and second, he begins his book with an introduction of such power that it is worth the price alone. Krugman states quite baldly a truth from which many still shrink: today's conservatives are radical revolutionaries who do not accept the legitimacy of America's current political system and aim to subvert it. Their goals are the establishment of an American military imperium abroad, under American rather than international law, and to minimise the responsibilities of the rich and corporate America to the common weal at home. This is so breathtaking, says Krugman, that to say it risks being condemned as alarmist. Indeed, quoting Henry Kissinger, he argues it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary power that it draws just this response; it is those who "counsel adaptation to circumstances who are considered balanced and sane". Consensual mainstream opinion cannot come to terms with the radicalism of the revolutionaries - it is too far outside its ambit. It seems delusional, almost hysterical, to acknowledge what is really happening. Krugman sets out the five maxims that must govern reporting in such a context: don't assume any policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals; do some homework to discover the real goals; don't assume the normal rules of politics apply; expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking; and don't think there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives. His columns set out how he follows his own maxims in explaining the range of Bush's policies since he took office - from the conduct of economic policy, to how Bush and his political adviser, Karl Rove, shamelessly exploited September 11 for partisan ends. It is a revelatory picture, and it will leave those who don't know America well shaking their heads in disbelief. Can it really be true that the regulators of the media and the securities industry are so completely compromised by their association with their Republican bosses and the industries they regulate? How is it possible that any government at any time could organise tax cuts to the rich on Bush's scale and present them as a patriotic economic stimulus that only traitors disagree with? Is it possible that any group of men and women could reward themselves as extravagantly as contemporary American chief executive officers, claiming enormous benefits for the companies they run, when in fact the benefits are paltry? How do people become this self-serving? And perhaps most worrying of all, Krugman shows how the American media have given up on active scrutiny - partly because the truth seems so incredible and partly because a sizeable proportion is owned by Republican interests. Why has this happened? Stiglitz's answer is that the American centre and left have allowed the right to win the economic argument with a set of market fundamentalist propositions that are downright wrong - but which have the pleasing consequence for conservatives of validating their every prejudice and allowing them to dress up serving their own interests as promoting the common good. It was the confluence of this thinking with the unique circumstances of the post-cold war 1990s that led to the extraordinary and unsustainable boom. As chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers for four years and chief economist of the World Bank for three, Stiglitz had a bird's eye view of how the contagion infected the Democrats - and made them collaborators with the trends they deplored. There is an element of confessional breast-beating in Stiglitz's book - and occasionally the overlap with his previous work, Globalisation and Its Discontents , gives you a sense of dj vu. Some of this Stiglitz has said before. None the less his account of how a group of smart economists and policy thinkers with impeccable liberal credentials found themselves zealously cutting public spending, deregulating, privatising and even cutting capital gains tax, is important and well-marshalled. Time and again the combination of powerful corporate lobbies and appeals to the "rightness" of the new conservative economic consensus made it impossible for the Clinton administration to make progress, or even to shape deregulation in a less damaging way. Stiglitz is a stout defender of the role of government, basing his view on the economics of information for which he won a Nobel prize. Of course markets don't work perfectly; they are structured so that insiders have more information than outsiders - so that prices don't reflect costs and excess profits and rents abound. Unless government is on hand to correct the imbalance with regulation, promoting competition and acting itself, markets will produce all kinds of follies - of which the 90s boom was the quintessential expression. The hangover of debt and bankruptcy is costing the US economy hundreds of billions in lost output; and all because the insiders - CEOs, investment bankers, corporate lobbyists - went on the rampage, aided and abetted by Republicans. Stiglitz's account of how the lobbyists shaped the 1996 Telecoms Act, opening up telecommunications to new entrants with minimal regulation in the name of "competition", is an eye-opener. In effect, despite self-serving talk of competition, they were giving a licence for an orgy of bids and deals as the industry jostled for what it knew were captive franchises (mobile and cable networks). The strength of the two books is their authors' deployment of economic analysis to expose the duplicity, wrong-headedness and costs of conservative economic policies - and their streetwise awareness of who benefits and why. The weakness is that, while both deplore what is happening, neither offers a satisfactory explanation of quite why conservative America has the grip it has. Krugman at one juncture throws his hands up in the air: "I should admit," he writes, "that I am not entirely sure why this is happening." It's just clear that "the right want to do all these things" (abolish tax on capital, strip away all regulation, even of the environment, and invade foreign countries). For Stigtlitz it is about intellectual argument; if the Clinton people had been more convinced they were on the right side of the argument, they would not have cut the budget deficit so aggressively - and the US would now have more research and a better public infrastructure. Maybe so, but Clinton was governing within a conservative maelstrom. My own view is that market fundamentalism has been shaped by the American conservative think tanks to dovetail so neatly with great American myths - individualism, the frontier, self-reliance, redemption through hard work, from log cabin to White House - that it has become a self-reinforcing ideological thought system that is impervious to rational argument of the type Krugman and Stiglitz marshall. Appeals to liberty overwhelm arguments for government and fairness, because they appeal to the gut of middle America and the raw prejudices of working-class America. I've been told of country clubs still operating informal bans on membership of Jews and black people; and in the south and west of the country - the core of which is the old Confederacy - deplorable attitudes towards women, black people and even Darwinian accounts of human evolution lurk just below the surface. Market fundamentalism, coupled with calls for liberty, legitimise this cocktail of prejudice - and the fall of the Soviet Union gave the whole story renewed and urgent legitimacy which has not burnt out yet. The US is a very foreign country; and Stiglitz and Krugman, both East Coast intellectuals who think like Europeans, have yet to come to terms with just how foreign it is. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| How to Be Idle <br /> by Tom Hodgkinson<br /> 288pp, Hamish Hamilton, 12.99 In Praise of Slow<br /> by Carl Honore<br /> 310pp, Orion, 16.99 The Play Ethic <br /> by Pat Kane<br /> 458pp, Macmillan, 12.99 Soft Power <br />by Joseph Nye <br />208pp, Public Affairs, 18.99 Status Syndrome<br /> by Michael Marmot <br />320pp, Bloomsbury, 12.99 It's that time of year. The children have started a new school year, and their parents are beginning a new work year. It's a fresh term; the transition from the holiday to the work season is upon us. And every year there is the same cancerous question: why is the acceleration in tempo and pressure as we leave those restorative holidays behind not a source of well-being and happiness? There must surely be ways of marrying work and life that are more accommodating to our humanity. Are holidays really the only time when we can find time for living at a human pace? The quest for happiness is starting to preoccupy the national conversation more and more. The work-life balance movement, at first derided as the obsession of New Labour ministers and some trendy employers, is coming of age; more and more companies want to offer their workforces some autonomy over how they use their time and are finding that if they don't, they lose their best and brightest. Workers will go on strike to insist that they have more control over their time. A new generation of economists is inquiring into whether the century-long assumption of economics - that economic man and woman have an inbuilt motivation to want more profit, more wages and more material goods and that monetary motivation is always a reliable compass to action - is still correct. If money doesn't reliably make us happy, then economics had better remodel how it conceives of human behaviour. We might be less self-interested; maybe even concerned about our happiness in the round. And then what happens to the profit motive? A growing number of men and women in mid-career seem ready to abandon the prospect of material wealth for a downsized life in which they are in control of how they spend their time. The interest in alternative medicine, therapies and diets mushrooms; pharmaceutical companies offer us lifestyle drugs that keep depression at bay. We want well-being. And now comes a rash of books from some accomplished journalist/commentators (Tom Hodgkinson, Carl Honore and Pat Kane), all of whom seem to be practising what they preach (damn them), urging us variously to take play seriously, to go slower and to celebrate idleness. On top there is an American academic - Joseph Nye - arguing that how the west lives can be a source of compelling "soft power" to the rest of the world, persuading it voluntarily that because it wants to be like us it will be readier to do our bidding; and a British academic (Michael Marmot), who shows how good health, an essential component of happiness, is crucially determined by the higher your standing in the organisation for which you work and society at large, rather than the amount of money you earn. Taken as a whole, these books at the very least suggest that something is going on. If Nye is right, could the idler (Hodgkinson), the player (Kane) and the slowcoach (Honore) offer a better response to terrorism than shocking and awing cowed Muslim populations? Their preoccupation, freely expressed in a typical western society, is how to live well free from the injunctions of the state, church or social compulsions - more appealing that we might guess to populations in thrall to the unrelenting rhythms of religion. Of the three invocations to live differently, Kane's is the most arresting, with its appeal to celebration of a play ethic; Hodgkinson and Honore are treading well-worn paths in their appeal to be idle and slow respectively, although they do it well. Hodgkinson, in particular, glories in reminding us that idleness has a long tradition. But taking play seriously? Kane is certainly on to something fresh and insightful. He rebels against the notion that purpose can be achieved only by the disciplines of work, and against those who argue that work is what gives meaning to our lives because it is via work that we act on the world, via work that we interact socially and via work that we achieve status. He chides the Calvinistic Gordon Brown for his view that work is the salve for every economic and social problem. For Kane the point of life is not to work and be a worker; it is to play and be a player - and thus be both a better worker and solve that happiness riddle alike. What we want is less work-life balance, more a recognition that the alpha and omega of good living is to know how to play - and to insert the play ethic into everything we do. Play is about imagination, experimentation and being confident enough to take a chance, all in a context in which, because it's a game, nothing vital attaches to the outcome; and if we start with the notion that we are "players" and that the world will not come to an end if what we plan doesn't come off, there is much more chance of living edgily, of finding time, of building rewarding relationships and of being genuinely creative in how we live and work. Kane argues that our language subliminally recognises the role of play: we talk about putting an idea or concept in play; a company that is the object of takeover speculation is "in play"; a politician on the up is a "player". Yet we never stop to think about why we use play in contexts that the wider work ethic would insist are the ultimate in seriousness. Kane insists that the language is pointing us in the right direction, if only we recognised it. Of course all the world's a stage, and we are merely players with our exits and entrances; the trick is to lighten up and recognise that all aspects of life are more about gaming than working. There's fun to be had in taking over a company or challenging for the leadership of a political party - and once you locate what you are doing in those terms you are readier to experiment with the unexpected or devise a winning stratagem. Moreover, our language - talking about play and players - recognises that this is what is going on. It's a nice thesis, except that Kane doesn't know whether he is inventing a universal theory of life or merely saying play is valuable, even for those in work. He is not sure whether he wants us just to play at everything, or that to play is a better way of achieving the outcomes that we normally look to work to provide. Every trendy button is pressed, whether the role of hackers in spreading the IT gospel (particularly in Finland) to, inevitably, St Luke's advertising agency - with lots of indulgent meanderings about his own life. It's very easy to get lost. Nor does he recognise the way in which work confers status, and thus wellbeing. Michael Marmot's important study Status Syndrome shows that - in every culture - our happiness and health are closely related to the place we occupy in the status hierarchy, and that that the key to status is our occupation. Happy, healthy, long-lived civil servants don't play more than their peers; they just need to be one rung above them in career grades. Kane, enjoying his status as writer, thinker and provocateur, has lost sight of the fact that what motivates everyone else is just the same - and climbing up an organisation's grades or doing enviable, well-regarded work is fundamental to most people's sense of themselves. Work is where it's ultimately at. None the less you can't read his book without accepting that we all could play more while we do it. The question is whether we could also go slower and find more time for idleness. I found Honore's and Hodgkinson's books not only entertaining, but getting under my skin. Reaching middle life - or even late middle life - with a growing sense that I need to reorder my priorities made me a receptive reader. Honore's hymn to the pleasure of allowing everything its proper time - from eating and cooking to just moving around - is well executed and persuasive; and you learn about a worldwide "Slow Movement" that seems to be gaining ground everywhere. There are slow food groups, slow sex therapists (tantrists), slow doctors, slow sports experts - and so it goes on until finally you wonder how you ever could have mixed with all those fasties. I'm not sure, however, whether he concedes sufficiently the pleasures of doing things fast. At one stage he acknowledges wryly how quickly he was driving to make an appointment to enjoy a meal of ritualised slowness in Italy - and reproaches himself. But the paradox is that Honore could never have accumulated the impressive evidence for the case he makes without the whole fast infrastructure of modern life, from the internet to air travel. Like Kane, he falls into the trap of trying to turn an important corrective to too much speed into a philosophy of life. I enjoy the (too few) occasions when I chop vegetables, linger over a meal or just hang out; but I enjoy speed, too. There is pleasure in crossing the Atlantic in a cruise ship; but most of us opt for the 747 not from perversity, but because we value our time. Life is finite. Most of us want to die with a sense of a life well lived rather than the satisfaction that we took our time. That said, there is no doubt that we overdo speed. And we overdo being busy. Tom Hodgkinson, founder of the Idler magazine, takes us on an indulgent (but that's his mission) tour of the satisfactions of being idle. Indeed I was so impressed by his chapter on the virtues of the nap that one sunny lunchtime I headed for the park to fall asleep in the sun - which I did, feeling gloriously guiltless and assertive about it. The directionless ramble; the joy of inhaling cigarette smoke; the pleasure of sleeping in; the anticipation of the first drink of the day - Hodgkinson knows where pleasure is to be found. The more I read, however, the more I felt that he protested too much; that we don't need citations from long-dead poets and scribes to justify napping in the sun. The point about being idle is not to work at it, surely; indeed one of the virtues of work is that it offers us something to be idle from - as well as offering us a sense of purpose. To make idleness our central purpose is to turn it into work - and then even idleness becomes infected by the work ethic. It's all, as with Kane and Honore, about proportion. The debate about idleness, play and speed would strike any one of the billions of workers in the third world who earn no more than a couple of dollars a day as something from another planet - but one none the less to which they aspire. Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government, has built upon one of the themes in an earlier book - The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Superpower Can't Go it Alone - arguing that what he calls "soft power" is an indispensable element in contemporary diplomacy. Hard power is the coercive military strength of the 19th century; but it doesn't work in the 21st. Threats come less from competing nation states than from terrorist sub-groups; and most diplomacy these days is about persuading states voluntarily to sign a treaty or join an alliance to help us in some endeavour - to fight terrorism, say - for which they in turn have to win domestic support. And that can best be won, certainly in relations with the less developed world, if their elites and citizens alike want to join the alliance because they like their ally's values and the lifestyles it boasts. Nye cites the BBC World Service as a key element in Britain's soft power; it is a window on a universe that its listeners worldwide respect and want to emulate. Thus, if you agree with Nye's thesis, the other authors under review are not just advocates for seeking wellbeing; they are advertisements for the way the British are trying to live, part of our soft power. Nye is excoriating about the way Bush - and by implication Blair - has undermined the west's soft power in the Middle East by their invasion of Iraq. I know the British Council, for example, feels profoundly compromised by Britain's close association with American foreign policy, and many CEOs of FTSE 100 companies are uneasy about how British companies are seen as American surrogates and fear for their long-term prospects in some key Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Soft power - and the values and lifestyles behind it - may be invisible, but it is nevertheless potent, and we sacrificed a lot of it to make common cause with US neo-conservatives who want to make America feared for its uncontestable military might. But we can relax a little. Kane, Honore and Hodgkinson are doing their small part to help our image and limit the appeal of al-Qaida. It's a far-fetched thesis, but not so far-fetched that it can be rejected out of hand. The happier we are, the better - not just for ourselves, but as a reason to be copied rather than opposed. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| Globalisation and Its Discontents<br />by Joseph Stiglitz<br />304pp, Allen Lane, 16.99 Up the Down Escalator: Why the Global Pessimists Are Wrong<br />by Charles Leadbeater<br />384pp, Viking, 17.99 The rise and fall of Joseph Stiglitz is one of the telling parables of our age. One of the world's great economists - he won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his elegant demonstrations that markets necessarily work imperfectly, on any reasonable assumption that market participants are not all knowledgeable - he is also not afraid to get his hands dirty in the world of policy-making. President Clinton made him chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, but not before he had given some wise advice to the Chinese about how to go about liberalising their economy. China, unlike Russia which took a more overtly free-market path, has been chalking up double-digit growth rates ever since. The development of the world's poorest countries was always closest to Stiglitz's heart, so when James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, offered him the job as its chief economist in 1997 - as part of an attempt to carve out a different approach to third-world development - he jumped at the chance. Wolfensohn wanted to create a more rounded approach - stressing the role of education (particularly of women), disease prevention and good governance in the development process - rather than the so-called Washington consensus of simply privatising, deregulating and instantaneously opening up fragile economies to free trade and free finance. Stiglitz seemed to be the man with the intellectual authority and connections within the Clinton administration to help him. But it didn't work out like that. Stiglitz arrived at the bank as the US was moving into what we now know was a phoney boom, but which had made the conservative economic intellectuals, who claimed authorship of it, extraordinarily hubristic. Their market-fundamentalist ideas, they supposed, were wholly right, and they insisted on them being implemented internationally, through what had become an arm of the US treasury - the IMF. Stiglitz vainly campaigned against what he saw as ridiculous, self-defeating and enormously damaging policies - allowing his feelings to surface too openly in public. Stiglitz was acknowledged, even by his critics, as one of the world's best economists. But he dared to cross the high priests of conservative international finance in their pomp. He was marginalised and briefed against, and his position was made insupportable. Finally, three years later, he resigned. Stiglitz's return to the groves of academia is a salutary lesson about where power lies in today's world. The kernel of Globalisation and Its Discontents is his account of those years at the World Bank and his arguments with the IMF and US Treasury, and as such is a massively important political as well as economic document. That Joseph Stiglitz could not survive - even before the arrival of the Bush administration - tells you all you need to know about the chances of a more sane economics re-entering the American discourse. It is also a sharp reproach to the boyish, almost glib optimism of Charles Leadbeater's Up the Down Escalator - an account of globalisation as naive as Stiglitz's is sophisticated. In a sense, Leadbeater epitomises the scale of the opposition that a rational economist like Stiglitz confronts. He is not a man of the right, and for all his neglect of economics, political economy and the realities of international finance and realpolitik that Stiglitz describes, he is a well-intentioned and skilled cultural commentator. I found the first 100 pages of his book, in which he reframes all the current political and cultural arguments as one - at heart - between pessimists and optimists, original and entertaining. Cultural pessimism does unite, say, a Daily Mail worldview and anti-globalisers alike. And while the rest turns into a relentless, rather dull Panglossian account of why globalisation, technology and science are all good for us, so that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds - even the anti-globalisation movement, you see, is part of the debate that will make globalisation still better - it is useful to have our very own Pangloss in our midst. It shows the limitations of the creed, while offering a useful counterweight to too much gloom. Doubtless Leadbeater would categorise Stiglitz as a pessimist - but a useful pessimist, in that his contributions to the debate will only make the world, already very good, even better. Globalisation is creating so much opportunity and wealth, and we are already so far advanced in the creation of an environment that reflects our own wishes and aspirations, that everyone is welcome to take part in the tumultuous exchange of ideas. Leadbeater, a former Marxist, sees everything as part of a benign, Hegelian dialectic in which any contribution only serves the general march of progress. Yet as Stiglitz would reply, the world is not so benign, nor the march of progress so inevitable. It has to be fought for - with weapons more powerful and fundamental than optimism alone. He watched, largely helpless, as the IMF and US treasury, in a kind of institutional and intellectual lockstep, imposed needless suffering on millions of ordinary people in East Asia and Russia through free-market "shock" programmes, forcing massive economic adjustment, centring on making countries keep their financial systems as open as possible to inflows and outflows of private capital. This was the result not just of bad economics but, as Stiglitz tells it, a redefinition of the IMF's role. Its intellectual father was Keynes, who argued for the creation of a global institution that could take global collective action because markets can fail. Its role was to ensure that, unlike in the 1930s when global demand fell away disastrously, there would be a global mechanism to keep demand up by allowing countries an orderly framework in which they could maintain full employment. They could borrow from the IMF when they needed to, rather than resorting to crash programmes of deflation or beggaring their neighbour through trade protection. The view of international finance - that its interests should come first - was firmly refuted. Instead it had to play by the rules of the game set up to establish a global interest. But now a new doctrine holds: what the financial community views as good for the global economy is good for the global economy and should be done. The IMF has become the servant of the financial system it used to shape. Stiglitz explains this change as having essentially three causes. First there is no longer an intellectual belief that markets fail. Secondly, the IMF has been allowed to become poorer as faith in government nationally and internationally has dwindled, so it has had to enlist the support of the great international banks when it lends to countries in trouble - and they have very particular interests. They want to get their money into and out of all countries as freely as possible, and are thus always advocates of "financial deregulation" - so that this always plays an overwhelming part in any support the IMF provides. And because countries have to borrow in dollars, the interests and preoccupations of American banks and the US Treasury have become paramount - reinforcing the bias to make countries bend the knee to the interests of Wall Street rather than full employment, growth and the maintenance of their social contracts. There has never been official recognition of this fundamental change of policy, but Stiglitz draws attention to how key personnel switch from Wall Street to the IMF and back again - having served the financial community's interests well. Stan Fischer, for example, deputy managing director of the IMF, went directly to become a vice-chairman of the vast international bank Citigroup. "One could only ask," writes Stiglitz, "Was Fischer being richly rewarded for having faithfully executed what he was told to do?" It's a pertinent question. If the 1930s were characterised by beggar-my-neighbour policies, the 1990s have been characterised by what Stiglitz describes as beggar-myself policies - all to promote Wall Street and the US Treasury's aim of creating one single global financial market in which the over-riding concern of every government is to keep its financial system open to international finance, whatever the domestic cost. Those at the top have benefited hugely, while creating a system that is massively unfair - not to mention its volatility and extraordinary capacity to transmit economic shocks simultaneously across the globe without any check. Stiglitz finishes his book with seven action points for change. He is not a global pessimist, but a realist - and instead of placing him in a neat box labelled "important contribution to the debate", we should listen to him urgently. The biggest indictment of Leadbeater, and those like him, is that they make it harder for us to hear, and to act, on what Stiglitz is saying. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| Vision: The Lessons of the 20th Century for the 21st<br />by Bill Emmott<br />336pp, Allen Lane, 20 The editor of the Economist has been wrestling with what the future holds - on all our behalves. We can rest easy. There will, of course, be setbacks and alarms but essentially the future is good. America, which of course has its problems and difficulties, will underwrite and protect the advance of capitalism, which of course has its ups and downs too, but that twin combination of American hegemony and liberal capitalism that has served us well up to now (with, of course, some exceptions) will serve us well in the future - with possibly some downward interruptions to the upward march of progress. We can be paranoidly optimistic. Bill Emmott's crystal-ball gazing suffers from all the deformations of books of this type. He has no better idea of what the future holds than Gypsy Nell, and sometimes his honest recognition that the evidence which allows him to be sanguine could just as well work out very differently leaves the reader with an unsatisfactory sense of wading through acres of well-intentioned bullshit. On the one hand there are all these things that could go wrong; on the other hand they might not - usually because America and capitalism always win out in the end - so everything is ultimately for the best in this curate's egg of a world. Emmott might have written a more illuminating book if he had asked more interesting questions and applied more rigour in answering them. As he declares at the outset of his enterprise, he believes the two questions anybody curious about the world's future has to ask and answer are whether America will maintain the military and economic strength to champion peace and progress globally, through which capitalism flourishes; and whether capitalism itself is going to continue to deliver the goods. Anybody familiar with Emmott's leaders in the Economist will guess the conclusion to his questions - so this is a detective story with zero tension. Even those sympathetic to Emmott's case (and he will be surprised that I include myself, given his Manichean view of the universe about which, as a critic of present America and defender and advocate of contemporary Europe I plainly have little understanding) will feel very uncomfortable about his intellectual method. It is little more than a cook's tour of the world according to Emmott; the reader has little sense that the relevant literature has been surveyed or many primary sources talked to. In a typical passage he opines that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are no more than representatives of a long tradition of terror (albeit on a more extensive scale) with no chance of capturing a state from which to operate. Confronted by focused American leadership they will finally be bested, although, to protect his flank, he adds that there must be no complacency. He may be right, but his judgment would have been a great deal more impressive had it been informed by an attempt to get behind what drives Islamist terrorism, some insight into the possible secret relationships between the terror networks and some Arab states and a recognition that American leadership by itself does not guarantee the outcome we all want - a lot depends on how legitimately and skilfully that leadership is exercised. Western security forces, to the extent we know much at all about what they think, seem much less optimistic than Emmott, and some scholars of Islam worry that its cultural predisposition towards jihad and terrorism is so embedded that not even liberal democracy - again a fanciful notion in some Arab states - could remove it. In any case 21st- century terrorism, based on networks without centres and on new technologies, may not need a state base from which to exercise enormous leverage. Emmott's opinion would have much more force were it backed by more substance than musings conceived in his Wiltshire study. On one aspect of this debate, though, he is wrong. The success of the US's confrontation with terrorism depends on the framework in which it is conducted. For Emmott, however, the crucial and over-riding question, given the way he frames his book, is simply whether America will engage and sustain its engagement. The hows of the engagement are second-order issues. Emmott thinks that multilateralism would be better than unilateralism, but that while the trend in the Bush administration towards unilateralism will create "frictions" it will not upset the ultimate prospects of success. This, a judgment also made by the American right, is woefully inadequate. The war in Iraq, if not triggered by a second UN resolution and with unambiguous evidence of a material Iraqi breach in its obligations, will not be legitimate - and will thus make any subsequent peace settlement difficult, if not impossible. Without international legitimacy, a successor Iraqi regime - the country is barely governable even by Saddam - will have little or no chance of long-term survival. The world's stock markets are correctly apprehensive that we are entering a new era of possibly prolonged instability, but the banal way Emmott casts his two questions and conducts his analysis throws little light on why this should be so. The right question is not whether America will engage with the world (that is inevitable), but rather what the balance of forces is within America that will determine the character of that engagement. Emmott, a largely uncritical British proselytiser of American conservatism, is indifferent to the way America is changing under the influence of the American right. It is not a drift to unilateralism; it is a headlong charge. At one point he acknowledges and regrets that America's insistence that it will not join the international criminal court undermines the international fight against terrorism. Yet he does not think to examine why such opposition is so deeply rooted - and, if anything, growing. Nor does it create "frictions"; it undermines, as wise American commentators and analysts recognise if Emmott does not, the basis on which America can legitimately promote the peace and progress on which globalisation depends. There are two Americas: the liberal, internationalist one whose engagement with the world both Emmott and I regard as an imperative; and a highly conservative, nationalist and atavistic one that is insular, unilateralist and culturally xenophobic. That this is so, and the influence it has on the US's relationship with the rest of the world, does not change his conclusions; his ideological prism is such that America is in favour of free markets and democracy, and that is all that counts. By not marking or even understanding the fundamental divisions that are emerging in contemporary America, or acknowledging the debates about how capitalism can be configured, Emmott's analysis is rendered threadbare. He may, fair-mindedly, recognise that capitalism generates instability and inequality, but he has little time for alternative philosophies to the pure milk of free market economics that offer national communities social contracts and insist that enterprise be fairly run to embed countervailing forces. Essentially he buys the American conservative view that enterprise is about buying cheap and selling dear, motivated by a quest for lucre that should be uninhibited by regulatory constraint. Yet the building block of capitalism is the firm - a business organisation - and building and leading organisations that survive and prosper is much more sophisticated than the economics of the street market. As business leaders know, you need the active participation and support of a committed workforce to create a great business, and that in turn needs a sense of economic and social purpose other than simple profit maximisation; but the system built in America, in which workers are disposable commodities consecrated to the growth of shareholder value, makes that task harder rather than easier. The answer to the second question Emmott poses - about the sustainability of capitalism - would have been much more subtle had he thought to explore such notions, even if he disagrees with them. The American economic and social model has strengths, but to regard it as the model for the world to emulate, and all other models (notably those in Europe) as weaker because they deviate from the American model, is a grievous mistake. We need capitalism and globalisation to advance and prosper; and we need American participation in any global form of governance. To get there we will need better analysis and guidance than that offered by Gypsy Bill. |
11willhutton
| 4Books
| The first problem with this book is its title. There is no prospect of China ruling the world. This is a country whose uncertainties of identity and economic frailties prevent it from ever projecting hegemonic hard and soft power. Its authoritarian institutions, far from being a source of strength, are a source of weakness. China is simultaneously big but poor, powerful but weak. And there, until wholesale political change occurs, it will stay, notwithstanding its considerable growth rates and economic achievement. Indeed, its current economic model, dependent on high exports and mountainous savings, is disintegrating, as both insiders and close observers recognise. |
8pollytoynbee
| 4Books
| Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich (256pp, Granta, £9.99)<br /> Rich Britain: The Rise and Rise of the New Super-wealthy, by Stewart Lansley (265pp, Politico's, £18.99) How extraordinarily misleading economic statistics can be. Talk of "average" earnings or "per capita" wealth is virtually meaningless as a true description of a nation: if Bill Gates moved to Albania it would soar up the league tables without a single Albanian being a penny better off. This mendacity has never been more grotesque than in the US right now. The myth of America the thriving, booming, prospering envy of the world is most chillingly exposed in the writings of Barbara Ehrenreich. How she strips away the varnish to reveal the lives of the slaves toiling beneath the surface to prop up a curiously hollowed-out empire. In her most celebrated book, Nickel and Dimed, she took jobs among minimum wage workers, living in a caravan and a motel, failing to survive on $7 an hour. It left the British reader aghast at a far more brutal capitalism, redder in tooth and claw with no safety nets, no health care, no social security. Only charity food parcels stave off starvation for people doing America's essential work, sometimes two or three jobs at once in the richest nation the world has ever known. Now, Ehrenreich turns her razor-sharp reporting skills on the corporate world. She sets out with suit and briefcase to join business America, the offices of middle management to which most graduates aspire. Unfortunately she doesn't make the grade in the white collar world. As a reporter, this might have been a failed enterprise, a dead story. After all, she is not a good prospect. She is in her 50s, has never worked in business before and aspires to become a PR in the pharmaceutical sector. Even with a good deal of lying and friends to proffer references, frankly, it looks from the start like a doomed enterprise. By the end she concludes the only way she will get near the management suites is pushing a catering trolley. But Ehrenreich is the kind of reporter who could be put down just about anywhere and always come up with revelations and perceptions of the society around her, its people, their hopes and fears. So as she surfs the job boards on the net, rewrites her CV over and over, networks her way to follow every improbable lead towards the chance of a job, she finds herself down among the many fallers from corporate America. It is not just those who start out poor and uneducated who are destined to plunge into the abyss: it could be almost anyone. Downsizing after mergers, the arrival of a new manager or the constant cult of cuts keep managers on their toes. If they are "let go" and don't find another job fast, many, maybe most, are doomed to tumble down the social ladder. She meets them at expensive and futile networking conferences and motivational job search events. But a gap on a resumé - never called unemployed but "in transition" or "consulting" - is CV death. Most job applications receive no acknowledgment. From outside the office citadels become increasingly impregnable. Once hot personal contacts go cold, these fallers have no chance. But America the entrepreneurial has spotted a market here. These desperate people are preyed on by a whole industry of obnoxious (and themselves pretty desperate) career-coaches, "professional mentors" and trainers offering excruciating pop-psychology: reinvent yourself; smile. The psycho-babble of business spills into a kind of bullying, yet these frantic job-seekers shell out a fortune to receive it: it's their fault, their future is in their hands, there is nothing wrong the system, the only failings are all their own. Tragically, most sink into exactly the despair the career coaches say makes them unemployable. Many end up taking minimum wage jobs. Europe could do that tomorrow, if we abandoned social security to starve people into sub-subsistence jobs. The American dream is so powerful that even those living the nightmare still believe it. Ehrenreich often uncovers this depressing phenomenon in her rich portfolio of reporting America. She picks away at a brain-washed multitude clinging to a false idol. Without political leadership to suggest that the dream is all but dead and aspirational social mobility stuck in cement, the millions at the sharp end ignore the evidence of their own experience to believe still that anyone can make it. Those who don't are just failures. Only Ehrenreich's acid wit and caustic political intelligence makes this an enjoyable as well as a horrible read. But if you are in the mood for dark humourless mirth, then Rich Britain makes a good accompaniment. Stewart Lansley charts the progress of inequality at the top. The super rich are a new phenomenon whose fortunes took off in the 1980s and kept soaring. The late 70s were the most equal period Britain has ever known, a time when the onward march of social progress and fairer shares was taught in every classroom as if it were historical inevitability, from factory acts and boys up chimneys to universal education and health. What went wrong? This is a journalistic book, with more cuttings than original research, but it does the business. Well written and well analysed, it revolts and disgusts with tales of squalid greed at the top. All the statistics and the hard facts are there - how it happened, why it happened and how we are destined, unless someone stops it, to watch the pigs in the farmhouse continue to wallow in excess beyond the dreams of a Nero. The stratosphere of the boardrooms, where the likes of Lord Browne of BP now earn £6.5m a year, has moved as far from the life of the average citizen as the addict in a blanket under Waterloo bridge. They no longer inhabit the same planet as the rest of us, hermetically sealed in smoke-windowed limo, private jet, private island, private everything. Yet they are more driven by the politics of envy than any mere socialist. They are driven on and on by that gross desire to be top dog, with top dollar, bigger bonuses than the boardroom next door, fatter jet and more richly bejewelled arm candy. Read this, keep it, store up some of its more pungent statistics and keep asking Labour what it's there for, if never to say enough is enough? |
8pollytoynbee
| 4Books
| All through her life Agatha Christie avoided the press, a secretive writer who hated interviews and never once agreed to appear on television. She saw no good reason why an inquisitive public should expect more from her than her books. Born in Torquay in 1880, she lived until 1976, and died the best selling author in the English language, her sales still on the increase even now, standing at somewhere above four hundred million copies world-wide. She came, as any reader of hers would guess, from a conventional middle class provincial background - that world or tea-parties, servants, tennis clubs, rectories, manor houses and public schools that dominates her books. During the First World War she was a pharmacist in a local chemists, which gave her a working knowledge of poisons, but that hardly seems an explanation. All her life she had strong and powerful dreams, which Janet Morgan tentatively suggests may indicate the rich vein of fantasy in her character. There were plenty of predecessors to her type of detective story writing - but after a few tentative beginnings, with fantasies and sentimental short stores, it was not long before she settled into this genre, for no apparent reason. She used to read her grandmother the crime stories out of the local paper, which may have aroused her interest. Certainly the morbid pre-occupations of her books seem to have had very little effect on the rest of her social life, for she was determined that her writing would always be of secondary importance to the living of her life, and the carrying out of her social wifely, and motherly duties. She rapidly became highly professional in her approach mechanical in the working out of her plots and the manipulation of her characters, and dependent all her life on the money the books brought in. The only really exciting event in her life was that astonishing disappearance, when half the Surrey countryside was scoured for her dead body after her car was found abandoned. The press were filled with reports of the hunt; some said it was a publicity-stunt (hardly likely in one who hated the press with such violence), others that she must suffer from amnesia, most that she had committed suicide. The author gives a plausible account of a woman suffering a severe mental breakdown, partly amnesiac, due to her husband's announcement that he was leaving her for another woman. It was an episode that dogged the rest of her life. The prolix 378 pages of this tome leave, not a stone unturned in the day to day doings of Mrs Christie; eighty-six years of bric-a-brac, people incidents houses, places, bills and interminable contract and copyright deals; and yet, oddly, the old lady herself has slipped away, vanished like Miss Marples. Janet Morgan treats her subject with the kind of reverent academic respect that might be appropriate if Christie were a great simpler and not a much simpler phenomenon. When the book needs is a dash of her own racy appeal, and a leap from fact into speculation about the nature of her astounding success, her readers, her world, and the attraction of her crime fantasies that have so little to do with real crime. It is, however, an official biography, and at every page the heavy breath of a most protective family can be felt blowing upon Miss Morgan's neck as she writes, keeping her to a plethora of facts which sink the book like a tombstone. |
8pollytoynbee
| 4Books
| Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy <br />edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild <br /> 336pp, Granta, 8.99 This is western feminism's dirty little secret. Behind the glorious image of the have-it-all woman in the Armani suit, with a Gucci briefcase on one arm and a baby tucked under the other, too often lies a tale of the oppression of another woman. Domestic servitude has only been escaped by passing it down to another cadre of oppressed women. Battalions of low-paid women - in America most of them foreign - have taken up the domestic duties, along with the dirty washing, discarded by professional women who have fled the home. Liberation for high-fliers breaking through glass ceilings is only possible because of a flotilla of unseen, unheard women who care for their children, clean their homes and cook their meals while they live liberated like men. This is a book to tear at the heart and wrench with guilt many women who already feel they are juggling their lives on a knife-edge. Their own deep anxieties about their children and their high-pressured lives are all too often passed on to the women who work for them, making them exceptionally bad employers. In America this is a story of the mass importation of a precious new raw material - care and love - from the third world. Take one typical case: Rowena Bautista left a village in the Philippines to work as a domestic in Washington DC - one of about 800,000 legal household workers (plus armies of illegals). In her basement room she has photos of four children, two of her own whom she has left behind and two of her American charges to whom she has to some extent transferred her love and care. She left her own children in the care of their grandmother five years ago when the youngest, Clinton, was only three: she could find no work to provide for them. The children's grandmother is herself so hard-pressed that she works as a teacher from 7am to 9pm each day, so Rowena has hired a local woman to cook, clean and care for the family in her long absence. (In her turn, that woman leaves her own child in the care of a very elderly grandmother.) Rowena hasn't managed to get home to the Philippines for the last two Christmases, but the family relies on the money she sends. Rowena calls the American child she tends "my baby". She says: "I give Noa what I can't give my own children." Last time she saw her own son, he turned away from her, asking resentfully: "Why did you come back?" The distress and damage done to such abandoned children is well-documented in this collection of research. A series of essays edited by two of the great American writers on work, it exposes a deeply shocking underworld of globally exploited women. This is one of those moments when things that are known but unspoken are dragged out into the light of day. Chapter after chapter reveals how women's traditional roles, rejected by western women, are now being filled by wickedly treated other mothers. Their love is bought, they give everything to their charges and yet they are often sacked on a whim, never to see their child charges again. Imported cleaners, cooks, old-age carers, nannies and housemaids are joined by mail-order brides for men who like the submissive "old-fashioned" values from the east. (That chapter is aptly called "Highly Educated Overseas Brides and Low-Wage US Husbands".) And there are the sex-workers and sex-slaves, some who knew what they were in for, others who were tricked or kidnapped. Horror stories abound, including child sex tourism. Countries such as the Philippines have become economically dependent on the remittances women domestic workers send home. They may leave behind men whose skills are in less demand in the west: demoralised by unemployment, some husbands turn to drink and gambling, wasting all the hard-earned money their wives send, leaving the children worse off than if their mothers had stayed home. This is a most brutal example of the force of globalisation, draining even love away from poor countries. It is the final depredation, exploiting the last resources the third world has left to sell - motherhood and sex. Since this is an American book, I checked the official number of domestic workers in Britain: it is 154,000 and not rising, though a great many more certainly work in the black economy. There have been enough cases of diplomats bringing in visa-slaves as domestics to make it clear that many of the same abuses happen here. In the UK the social injustice is mainly indigenous: professional women pass their un-wanted domestic work on to poorer British women at pitiful rates of pay. Only the richest 20% of working women can afford to buy childcare, paying very low wages to minders or nursery assistants. Well-paid nannies are confined to the topmost echelons. What is to be done? Barbara Ehrenreich's ground-breaking book Nickel and Dimed exposed the impossibility of living on the minimum wage in the US: one of her most memorable jobs was working for The Maids, a domestic cleaning service. Here, recalling that starvation drudgery, she offers a ferociously forensic dissection of everything wrong with a corrupted capitalism that has led to this exploitation of third-world women. Hers is a devastating feminist critique, almost as savage about high-earning women who pass on their domestic duties as she is about the sexist world in which all domestic work is consigned to women in the first place. In the "chore wars" of 1970s feminism, she says, men won. They took on almost no extra housework or childcare. "Enter then the cleaning lady as dea ex machina, restoring tranquility as well as order to the home," she writes. Marriage-guidance counsellors now recommend them as an alternative to squabbling. In the US, this is a race as well as a class issue: maids are mainly black, reinforcing rich kids' views that black means servant: a little white girl in a supermarket trolley passing a little black girl exclaims: "Oh, look Mommy, a baby maid!" The mistress-maid relationship is fraught, and Ehrenreich describes how an "overclass" has become deskilled in any domestic knowledge, unable to cook or clean, with children who would "suffocate in their own detritus" without someone to pick up after them. She twists the knife in overprivileged women who have "something better" to do with their time in a society where the rich get richer and the poor poorer. In Britain, this debate revolves around the state's failure to provide universal childcare with well-paid nursery assistants: there's nothing wrong with equal women working for good pay as respected childcare professionals. In the US, state provision is not even worth talking about. But Ehrenreich's eloquent moral fury is primarily directed at a capitalism that exploits every last drop of blood of the weak, wherever they are in the world, whatever they have to sell, even a mother's love. Unregulated, out-of-control capitalism creates a long-hours culture in which women cannot compete and still be mothers. Above all, the fault is with men who still refuse to take an equal share in everything domestic - thinking, planning and doing. If they did, the nature of work would change. This deeply disturbing book reaches right to the dark heart of society's worst dysfunctions, with stories to make you weep with outrage. If postfeminism means that it's all right for some other woman to be exploited instead of you, this should fire up some of that good old-time passion. Feminism always was a revolutionary project, and Ehrenreich bemoans a project left uncompleted: "Sooner or later someone else will have to finish the job. |
8pollytoynbee
| 4Books
| Climbing the Bookshelves: The Autobiography by Shirley Williams 432pp, Virago, 20 Few politicians are loved or even liked, and even fewer of those are women, who are subjected to quite disproportionate venom. Shirley Williams was and is an exception. The warmth of her mellifluous voice can unfreeze the frostiest public meeting. Rumpled, unbrushed and late, she brings intensity and informality into any room. In TV studios or on conference platforms, she speaks human, which is a surprisingly rare political talent. Ken Clarke has it, Tony Blair and David Cameron have it, Denis Healey has it, but not many others. Likability, affability, apparent normality, sounding as if they mean what they say this is political gold dust. Politics is littered with might-have-beens, victims of the multiple accidents and upsets that set unlikely winners on the throne and trip up an army of better prospects. In the late 1970s and 80s, Williams was seen as the mirror image of Margaret Thatcher, women being always set against one another. Thatcher once watched Williams as a minister under fire at the dispatch box. Afterwards, in the Lady Members Room, ironing a dress, she (Thatcher of course, Williams never looked ironed) said: "You did well. After all, we can't let them get the better of us." Sisterliness was not in Thatcher but she understood women had to be 10 times better to survive. Comparing the two makes it easy to see why Williams was never quite a contender: she was too nice. Unlike Thatcher, she always backed other women and feminist causes, but as Harriet Harman or Hillary Clinton can attest, it doesn't make you popular. Williams's mother, the writer Vera Brittain, was remote and busy, so encouragement came from her father, the university lecturer and failed Labour candidate George Catlin. Winifred Holtby beloved Auntie Winifred great chronicler of Yorkshire municipal life, lived with them during Williams's Chelsea and New Forest childhood. The two Catlin children were shipped away for the war years to Minnesota, a long separation during which she thrived against the odds. Returning in time for the Attlee election, while still at school she plunged into the Labour League of Youth and was sent as a representative to the first postwar conference with German SPD youth. At Oxford she fell in love with Peter Parker (later to run British Rail), playing Cordelia to his Lear on an American tour directed by Tony Richardson. Many thought she might take the theatrical path: she could have been a Judi Dench with that voice. But forced to choose, she stuck with her politics, philosophy and economics open scholarship. Her Oxford Labour life coincided with those of Tony Benn, Tony Crosland and Bill Rodgers, the war having mixed generations. Then came a Fulbright year in America and a brief, disastrous stint at the Daily Mirror. After fighting a no-hope seat in 1954, she married Bernard Williams, the philosopher, whom she describes as "in perpetual intellectual motion, like a dragonfly hovering above a sea of ideas". But "he was not easygoing. Nor was he faithful." They had a child but divorced in 1970, which meant she lost government and husband in one bad year. "I took my husband for granted", she writes, but recalling how she dashed home for her daughter's supper and bedtime, then back to the Commons for late votes, as one of just 29 women MPs adds: "There is no satisfactory solution until men share domestic burdens." She had won Hitchin with Labour's victory in 1964 and lost her seat at the dismal end of Labour's era in 1979. Worst of her jobs was "Canute's chair", as secretary for prices and consumer protection with inflation at over 13%. First as junior to Crosland and later as education secretary, she was in the thick of Labour's rapid comprehensivisation of schools, for which she became notorious. Though she was not the originator of the policy, her passionate opposition to the grammars, which selected fewer than 25% of pupils and rejected the rest, made her an eternal hate figure of the Spectator right. Auberon Waugh was ceaseless in abuse and mockery of her as emblem of the "nanny state", which Labour women always are to men who had nannies. In 1981 came the great rift when she, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Bill Rodgers and others finally broke with a Labour party staggering under Michael Foot's leadership and in thrall to Militant. "For me leaving the Labour party was like pulling my own teeth one by one." What if they hadn't left? In Labour circles the old debate still rages. She gives a crisp reminder of the destruction the now cuddly Benn wrought on Labour back then. When she won the Crosby byelection, upsetting a huge Tory majority, the new SDP went over 50% in national polls, but the bubble burst with Thatcher's Falklands recovery. Her descriptions of those tempestuous times are characteristically honest: this is not the usual self-serving, self-justifiying version of events. Don't expect the spicy one-sided malice of a Richard Crossman or an Alan Clark. What you get is what you might expect a straight narrative, few secrets, no bitching but clear-eyed political analysis. "Like many women of my generation, I thought of myself as not quite good enough for the very highest positions in politics," she writes at the end with some ruefulness. Compared with whom? But she is by nature not much given to self-revelation or introspection: mysteries remain, such as her barely explained Catholicism. You know her not much better, but you like her to the end. Polly Toynbee is co-author of Unjust Rewards: Ending the Greed That is Bankrupting Britain (Granta). |
5maryriddell
| 4Books
| Blair Unbound<br />by Anthony Seldon with Peter Snowdon and Daniel Collings<br />(Simon & Schuster) 25, pp704 He's back. Just when Tony Blair has disappeared, as if vaporised, from the domestic political stage, here is the reminder of how completely he once filled it. The second volume of Anthony Seldon's biography is unstinting in its detail of the Blair tenure in the years after the Twin Towers fell. This is an account in which no banana goes uneaten (Blair makes 'short work' of a piece of fruit while watching the first footage of 9/11), nor any night's sleep disturbed ('absolutely diabolical' turbulence on the way to Japan) without the scrupulous attention of Seldon and his hundreds of sources. It is also, as we are reminded often, a tale of love. Tony loves Cherie. As one friend remarks: 'They are as much in love, and their relationship is as fresh, as the day they met.' And that's despite the Bristol flats imbroglio, the 'stresses' on the marriage and Leo, aged four, waking his exhausted father by creeping into the parental bed. Tony also loves Gordon, which is much more curious. As someone says: 'Underpinning all the noise about Gordon is Tony's highly complicated love for him.' It seems little short of miraculous that this bond survived Blair's ordeal of being roughed up by a brace of Eds (Balls and Miliband) and yelled at by Brown: 'When are you going to F off and give me a date? I want your job now.' The Downing Street genre of love story, as full of romance as a feuding chimpanzee colony, could be termed Mills & Baboon. If affection seems in short supply, then the style is oddly reminiscent of a bodice ripper. Partly that is down to the daunting task of marshalling such a wealth of information. Three hundred interviews, comprising well over a million transcribed words, suggest a formidable exercise in production line efficiency and packaging. In less skilful hands than Seldon's, this could have been Tescolit. Blair's fondness for banal dialogue does not help. 'God, it is awful, this war business,' he remarks at one point. None the less, the result is a fascinating overview, not least for its even-handedness. This is as fair a judgment on a Prime Minister as you are going to get, especially so soon after his departure. Seldon, unlike his subject, has no wish to pre-empt or dictate history. His mission is to record events, not to assess how they will come to be seen. Inevitably, much familiar ground gets retrodden, but Seldon has also uncovered good stories. Even allowing for the axe-grinders settling old scores, there is convincing new material, especially on the Blair/Brown feud. In one set of meetings, convened to smooth out feuds, the Eds 'began to be astonishingly rude to the Prime Minister'. Miliband, once the 'white hope' of No 10, began to be written off, according to one source, as 'irretrievably lost to the forces of darkness and anti-reform'. In the face of such quasi-satanic opposition from his foes, Blair complained: 'I feel like an abused and bullied wife.' This culture of institutional thuggery at the heart of government casts, the reader might think, a whole new light on Blair's anti-yob crusade. The 'Respect' agenda, far from being a device for criminalising Britain's youth, might simply have been a battered PM's coded cry for help. The highlights of Seldon's book are often the cameo parts. Robin Cook, told to vacate the Foreign Office, sits with his head in hands and a brandy at his side, repeating to himself: 'What shall I do? What shall I do? Tony has sacked me.' Jack Straw goes 'quite white' at the first suggestions by British diplomats that America was ready to go to war on Iraq. Tony hosts a 'girls' night' in the flat at No 10, during which Tessa Jowell and Margaret McDonagh deplore his pretence not to know how to work the dishwasher. 'More seriously, they chided him over Lebanon.' Often, the Whitehall-speak of Seldon's sources, coupled with the strangeness of Westminster life, blurs the trivial and the world-changing: a Gleneagles banquet menu (lamb, aubergine caviar and parmesan polenta) seems hardly less dramatic than the evidence from Abu Ghraib. British reaction to the images of torture should not, Blair warns, 'go over the top'. Strip away the meticulous detail and this biography has two subjects: Blair and Brown. Their long and almost unrelenting battle for primacy is played out along the lines of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Brown glowers, rages, sulks, plots and devises every scheme imaginable to hasten the end of Blair, an adversary who frequently seems cornered and defeated but who bounces rubberishly back from each new blow. Neither character quite transcends stereotype. There is little evidence of the 'love' that binds them and even less of the more affable face of Brown. Yet Blair seems far from the hero of a story that lays out all the flawed thinking that led to the Iraq catastrophe. Having backed to the hilt a disastrous conflict, he never pushed George W Bush hard enough on postwar planning. The notion that a better strategy would have guaranteed a good ending is a fantasy indulged in by the war's supporters. Even so, there was a possibility, never taken, of mitigating some of the grimmest consequences. If Blair felt pain or remorse over Iraq, there is little sign of it, beyond the sub-Shakespearean soliloquy in which he declares himself ready to 'meet his maker', at a time when many British service personnel, not to mention Iraqi citizens, were meeting theirs. As the cares of Downing Street finally bear down on him, he cries: 'Am I ever going to be free of all this stuff?' Now he is. This account of the Blair era, so soon after its end, is likely to be the fullest for many years. It is a solid foundation stone for history. Even so, it does not quite answer the question: who is Tony Blair? No one could have cast a wider net than Seldon and yet his subject, elusive as ever, somehow slithers through its mesh. |
5maryriddell
| 4Books
| In a Paris courtroom, art has gone on trial. Novelist Michel Houellebecq, who stands accused by Muslim groups of inciting racial hatred, is defending his right to call Islam a 'stupid' religion. The rowdy hearing has so far been disrupted by invasions of free-speech protesters and far-Right activists. The intellectual and political classes are divided. It is all very French. Technically, M. Houellebecq's own work is not in the frame, since the incendiary remarks attributed to him were part of an interview in the literary magazine, Lire. However, contempt for monotheistic religions in general, and Islam in particular, is a spinal theme of his new novel, Platform, which has just entered the British bestseller lists. The Paris mosque is arguing that 'freedom of expression stops at the point at which it does damage'. If that view prevails, M. Houellebecq may be looking at a year in jail and his book, which deals with love, sex tourism and terror, could face the shredder. The broader danger is that no fiction, The Famous Five apart, may be safe from the censors' scissors. Enter the directors of three of France's major publishers, warning of mounting suppression. 'Literature's calling is not to appease but to worry and offend,' they tell Le Monde. 'Nothing human, or inhuman for that matter, is off limits to literature.' This view, so robustly challenged by Ayatollah Khomeini in the case of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is being eroded in France. Earlier this month, the publisher Gallimard bowed to legal threats and decided not to resupply bookshops with Rose Bonbon by Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, the story of a murderous paedophile. A similar novel by Louis Skorecki also faces a mauling from children's rights defenders. Disgraceful, say the three publishing directors. Nabokov, Genet, Roth and Burroughs would have never made it to the bookstands if the Mary Whitehouse tendency had been allowed to thrive. True, but the directors are also being disingenuous. Censorship sells. Penguin's triumph in the Lady Chatterley prosecution shifted 200,000 copies in a day. Censorship glorifies. No one would otherwise be mentioning M. Jones-Gorlin in the same breath as Dostoevsky. In English chattering circles, where Michel Houellebecq is already lionised, anyone lacking a copy of Platform (ideally well-thumbed and in French) will be galloping to Waterstone's. M. Houellebecq, like Piat d'Or wine and golden delicious apples, is an exporter's dream. But is he any more palatable? Atomised, his last novel, was quoted at a million scrubbed-pine dinner tables as the authority on everything from why we have children to the fragmented society. Unless it was just about sex. Platform, though received less rapturously, is admired for its analysis of globalisation and its prescience in forecasting 11 September. Unless it's just about Islam-bashing. And sex. The British don't quite get M. Houellebecq. Is he a Camus for our times or the Peter Stringfellow of belles-lettres? There are signs, in publishers' minds, of a preference for the latter. The French paperback of Atomised has a head-and-shoulders portrait of a greasy haired male smoker, while the British cover shows a woman wearing only knickers. Flammarion's Platform is bound in plain buttermilk card: Heinemann's version, imaginatively, shows a woman wearing only knickers. Such packaging is a metaphor for vacuity. Britain has not much to add to the French debate on blasphemy and the polemical novel. Our cause clbre, The Satanic Verses, is so elderly that the rancour between Salman Rushdie and his media critics long ago eclipsed a dead ayatollah's wrath. In the realm of fiction and politics, the only story of last week was David Willetts claiming Bridget Jones was a Tory. The bestseller lists, despite exceptions like Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith, reflect none of the broad overview of society provided, in North America, by DeLillo, Franzen and a swathe of women, including Jane Smiley, Carol Shields, Anne Tyler and Alison Lurie. For textbooks on how we live now, we are stuck with Trollope and Trainspotting, plus chick lit and some edgy crime fiction. M. Houellebecq is keen to expose the supposed phoniness of the modern novelists, in particular, John Grisham and Frederick Forsyth, both more popular with browsers in French provincial bookshops than the offerings of the great controversialist. Neither M. Houellebecq, in his slating of Islam, nor the authors involved in the paedophile scandal have touched any national pulse. What they have done, successfully, is to pick at society's scabs. The real scandal is not the offensiveness of modern fiction but its lack of controversy and bite. How weird, for example, that paedophilia, a subject that paralyses and obsesses British society, has received no particular fictional analysis since Lolita. M. Houellebecq's stance on Islam is different. The repugnant views of a novelist pitched somewhere between a communist past and the politics of Pim Fortuyn may whip up trouble as well as outrage. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the moderate Muslim Council of Great Britain, has been warning the Government of a rise in irrational hatred and fear. In that climate, Platform, certain to sell widely here, may be seen by some as offensive, even incendiary. Others will take the correct view that novelists are always entitled to their views, however shocking, and that suppression is the greater evil. There is a place for regulation in the arts; in TV programmes seen by children, for example. There is, occasionally, an argument for banning books. The withdrawal of Michael Barrymore's biography seemed reasonable, since he would have profited from events he described unsatisfactorily to an inquest. But the point about fiction is that it contains, by definition, no objective reality. Censorship, insidious and arbitrary, implies that people who read novels are too stupid to make up their own minds. Should Goethe's work have been shredded on the grounds that reading about the travails of the young Werther drove impressionable citizens to suicide? Should Agatha Christie have been pulped lest old ladies slipped cyanide capsules in one another's Harveys Bristol Cream? To deny the novelist absolute freedom of speech would be mad. Equally, it would be folly to imagine that liberty equals power. The prejudices aired in Platform may be noisome, but they are unlikely to constitute any threat to public order. The Home Secretary's loose talk of Bradford rioters as 'maniacs' and of communities being 'swamped' by asylum-seekers will do more to offend those of other races and religions than anything produced by M. Houellebecq. Even in France, the novelist has limited influence. In Britain, politics and fiction have never seemed so disconnected. Society's shifts, for good or bad, are rarely incubated in a Booker short list. Once novels mapped society. Interpretations of 1984 and Brave New World remain the Ikea of political thought, quickly assembled to furnish any empty space, from a Francis Fukuyama thesis on genetics to a commentator's anti-Bush tirade. Where are the new gurus? M. Houellebecq's critique of clashing of civilisations, however misguided and banal, is a reminder of how wide the gulf between literature and politics has become. For that, at least, he should be thanked. |
5maryriddell
| 4Books
| God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion by Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Books 17.99, pp320 For such a rabid God-hater, Christopher Hitchens has a very pious background. If not a binge-worshipper, he was a serial congregant, grazing on a buffet of faiths. Hitchens has been 'an Anglican, educated at a Methodist school, converted by marriage to Greek Orthodoxy ... and remarried by a rabbi'. Unlike one of his rationalist heroes, John Stuart Mill, who wrote of his rare status as someone 'who has not thrown off religious belief but never had it', Hitchens has had to jettison a jumble bag of faiths. He does so with relish. Religion, in God Is Not Great, is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry'. Guilty of misogyny, child abuse and fraud on a monumental scale, it is 'a plagiarism of a plagiarism, of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion'. On this foundation, an anti-God industry has set out its groaning bookstall. After Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, Hitchens is the latest fire-and-brimstone atheist. Having sharpened his ire on targets such as Mother Teresa, whom he once denounced as a fanatic, he now takes on an opponent he may consider to be more his own size. Even the most diehard non-believer may balk slightly at the notion of Hitchens as an alternative deity. Not that he sets himself up as such. But even his title, the negative of Allahuh Akhbar, the legend Saddam inscribed on the Iraqi flag, implies a certain greatness in the author. This is Hitch versus God, slugged out to the bloody death. Hitchens's opponents have applied to him the blanket criticism levelled at the anti-theist genre: these people are theological ignoramuses who know and understand nothing of the religions they mock and seek to destroy. This seems a lazy criticism of Hitchens. In addition to dabbling in many faiths, he bases his arguments on a sometimes forensic analysis of the Koran, which he dismisses as borrowed from 'both Jewish and Christian myths' and the Old and New Testaments. (The latter, in his irrefutable analysis, is full of contradictions, illiteracies and late addenda which undermine all literal credibility.) On the evidence of this book, Hitchens has spent too much time around religion, not too little. Like an ex-smoker who grows to loathe the habit more than those who have not tasted nicotine, he abominates God with the zealotry implicit in dictatorial faith. Anyone who has grown up in the shadow of hellfire evangelism will recognise some answering echo here. This is a papal bull for the non-believer. How, Hitchens wonders, can people be so solipsistic, so selfish and so credulous? The early fathers of faith were living in a time of 'human pre-history', when no one had any idea of what was going on and God provided as good a backstory as any. Now that Darwin has explained our origins and Einstein has charted the beginnings of the cosmos, the excuses for blind faith have evaporated. Yet the intelligent and thoughtful remain unshaken in their credo and creationism seems a rising influence on both sides of the Atlantic. Why this paradox has arisen remains largely unaddressed. Hitchens is right in much of what he says. Religion is a charter for war and human suffering. It is enmeshed with child abuse and massacre. From the abortion-clinic picketer to the suicide bomber, its disciples are the deadly and the deluded. They include the bishops preaching wickedly that the Aids virus can leak through microscopic holes in condoms and the Muslim conservatives who, in Hitchens's reportage of Calcutta, denounced polio droplets as a Western plot to induce impotence and diarrhoea. Why would any wise and rational human build his or her life round such mad cults? This question is never really answered. Hitchens does not get to grips with the power of a blind trust that, far from being snuffed out, seems more unquenchable than ever now that all the lies and deceptions of organised religion have been exposed by science. Nor does he examine what, beyond rank stupidity, drives communities and states back to primitive belief. The enlightenment left many gaps. Church attendance might be dwindling, but its art, music and architecture still make many ungodly Britons cultural Christians. Secular society has still not devised rites of passage to welcome people in to the world and usher them out of it. Like Hitchens, people still get their marriages honoured and their children baptised in the name of a hollow God. Science and reason have all the answers, but the spiritual solace they lack is also missing in an encyclical whose many qualities include no shred of tolerance or doubt. Hitchens's book will be manna to the converted, but his explicit aim is to win believers to his cause. I doubt that he will reclaim a single soul. |
5maryriddell
| 4Books
| Flat Earth News by Nick Davies Chatto & Windus 17.99, pp320 Dog does not eat dog. This, as Nick Davies says, is an old Fleet Street convention. His latest book is 'a brazen attempt to break that rule'. It is a task that Davies more than fulfils, swallowing the leash and kennel for good measure. His diet sheet includes the British newspaper industry, its regulators and the PR machine that supplies it. Davies's title defines what he sees as lies, distortions and propaganda, all accepted without question. High-minded journalists tend to dislike their grubby trade much more than bankers hate banking, say, or teachers teaching. They also have better platforms. Davies is an award-winning Guardian reporter with a distinguished record in investigative journalism. There are few more qualified dog-eaters around. Davies unmuzzled deplores the rise of 'churnalism'; the quick-turnover dross peddled by hacks less scrupulous or fortunate than him. Costs are being cut and standards eroded by greedy proprietors. Hidden persuaders are manipulating truth. At its worst, the modern newsroom is a place of bungs and bribes, whose occupants forage illicitly for scoops in databases and dustbins. Newspapers hold others to account while hushing up their own unsavoury methods. Self-regulation does not always offer fair (or any) redress to citizens who have had lies written about them. Stories are often pompous, biased or plain wrong. Some close scrutiny is not only legitimate: it is overdue. Much of Davies's analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating, if gloomy. Contrary to what he implies, though at least some regional papers are excellent at fostering young talent. Nor is his paean to 'old-style reporting' convincing to anyone recalling how traditional Fleet Street hands were frequently befuddled by incompetence or drink or both. It seems elitist, too, that Davies has chiefly confined his study to upmarket papers because 'nobody needs a book to tell them that tabloids are an unreliable source of information about the world'. Why then, one wonders, do newspapers like Davies's borrow so many of their stories from the red-top press? Still, these are minor worries. The main obstacle Davies faces is that any self-appointed guardian of truth must be above reproach. Of course, as he allows, he will make some errors, especially in a book as ambitious as this. But any occupant of the moral ground must meet his own high standards. Does Davies? The test lies in his three concluding chapters on specific newspapers. The first concerns the Sunday Times and the lapses of its Insight team under Andrew Neil. The third, entitled 'Mail Aggression', asserts that the paper scaremongers on immigration and that the editor, Paul Dacre, is prone to shout rude words at his staff. The first charge is correct, in my view, and the second so much-repeated that it is probably true. Davies is wrong, however, to suggest that the Mail's investigation of Stephen Lawrence's murder, a campaign of courage and commitment, was purely based on the rumour that Stephen's father had once done some work on Dacre's house. In the section analysing Dacre's character, an unnamed employee alleges that he has 'the biggest office in the universe; you sink into the shagpile; he's got a desk like Napoleon'. I am no expert on Napoleonic workstations, but I can confirm that Dacre's desk appears normal and his carpet, last time I looked, had cropped tufts. These are tiny quibbles, but such misleading details convey a false impression of vulgar opulence. The most controversial chapter, however, is devoted to this newspaper. Davies focuses chiefly on the run-up to the Iraq war, which The Observer supported, so enraging many liberal readers as well, no doubt, as staff on its sister title and Davies's employer, the Guardian. He is especially scathing of the former editor, Roger Alton, and its executive news editor, Kamal Ahmed. Both recently left the paper, as did I. I agree with Davies that The Observer should not have backed the war and that it took its views too often and too unquestioningly from Downing Street. But other accusations are, at the least, debatable and in some cases wrong. To imply that Alton tried to delay or block a story that the US had planned to bug UN Security Council members is simply untrue. The leak, supplied by whistleblower Katharine Gunn, was one of the paper's finest scoops and the senior executives most involved in the story say that Alton 'behaved impeccably'. Nor is it true that six executives blew their chance, at a leader conference held in Alton's absence, to swing the paper away from backing war. Several of the group, of whom I was one, had tried for many weeks to do exactly that. We had not persuaded Alton that Blair's adventure had no basis in justice, nor cover in law. No doubt that was our collective failure. But editorial lines are decided by the editor, not by committee. There was not a hope in hell that The Observer's position could have been reversed that day against Alton's wish. The more disturbing aspects of his attack revolve round human detail. Ahmed, for example, is damned for uttering several remarks that, if he ever made them, were offered in jest. The starker criticism is reserved for Alton, who is painted as a blunderer, too naive or airheaded to grasp politics. Almost all of Alton's staff would attest to his sly, dry wit, his acute political sense, his humour and his ability to sustain the pretence that he understood less than everyone else in the room while actually knowing much more. Balance is always difficult in such a passionately argued book as this. Thus, while Davies is careful to point out that not all journalists are lazy, credulous or bent, the exceptions go largely unexplored. The Observer, he concedes, was not subject to 'Stalinist censorship', but there is scant mention of the myriad anti-war news stories or the columns, of which, in my experience, Alton never sought to change a word or soften an attack on his editorial line. The many voices of protest included Observer columnists Henry Porter, Avi Shlaim and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, whose contributions ensured that readers were not, as Davies says, 'soaked in disinformation'. Which is presumably why, livid as many were, they kept on reading. Many of Davies's arguments are powerful and timely, if unduly pessimistic. British papers, for all their faults, have much left to commend them. But yes, their grasp on truth and honesty is sometimes frail, which makes Davies's exposure of murky practices both welcome and important. The puzzle is why a dispassionate investigation of a flawed trade gets so personal. It is a pity, because the sound that lingers is not a call for truth. It is the bone-crunch of dog devouring dog. |
2hugoyoung
| 4Books
| Step Across this Line<br />by Salman Rushdie<br />Jonathan Cape 20, pp468 In a sense, we have forgotten Salman Rushdie. What happened to him takes a receding place in history. Long before the 9/11 terrorist onslaught against America, he was putting his own experience of Imam Khomeini's terrorist fatwa against himself into perspective. 'One small, intellectually impoverished, pathetically violent assault on the values of [European] civilisation,' he called it in 1997, on the eighth anniversary of its being proclaimed. That solitary hell through which Rushdie lived has perhaps been burned out of popular memory by the vastly greater holocaust of 2001. Yet there is every reason to remember it as a facet - a foretaste, a warning - of the totalitarian Islamic fundamentalism now on the screen of political leaders throughout the free and not-so-free world. If the fatwa had to happen, it couldn't have been issued against a more desirable writer than Rushdie: desirable, that is, in his resilience, enviable in his mordant resistance, admirable in his courage, unquenchable in the eloquence of his defence of values the mullahs thought they had God's blessing to extinguish. Khomeini, for his own purposes, chose the wrong man. And besides, the fatwa remained unfulfilled. Rushdie lived. He was terrified at first, being suddenly forced to lead a life of uncommon furtiveness and fear. But he seized the moment to show what had happened was not, at any rate, small. At the core of this collection of a decade's essays and journalism, quite rightly, are pieces recalling the events and insisting on the issues that transformed him from quite famous author into global celebrity. This is why Rushdie should never be forgotten. Freedom of speech, seamless and untrammelled, is what he fought for, beyond himself. And it was a hard fight, especially in Britain, his adopted country, where The Satanic Verses, the casus belli for Iran's theological thugs, was written. Britain was better at protecting Rushdie than valuing him. Our security services and Special Branch are often called unsurpassed in the secret tasks they undertake, and their beneficiary, a writer not a royal, was unstinting in his gratitude. But other arms of the British state could not get to grips with what was really at stake. Ministers shrank from meetings, still less any kind of emotional engagement. Diplomats were regularly instructed not to consort with this Typhoid Mary of the diplomatic dance. John Major suddenly cancelled a long worked-for encounter in case it put an Iranian trade deal in jeopardy. This is the British political temperament: pragmatic, cautious, occupationally suspicious of intellectuals. When Tony Blair took a high moral tone in defence of Kosovo Albanians, and did actually go to their military rescue, Rushdie scorned him for his British inability to reach beyond 'decency' into an imaginative involvement with the Serbian massacres. A tough judgment. Political leaders sometimes deserve credit for acting well, even behind unpoetic words. But it's shaming to remember that it was the provincial premier of Ontario, not the Prime Minister of Britain, who first jumped on to a platform in solidarity with the beleaguered author, and Nordic, Czech and Portuguese leaders who showed the deepest European commitment to the axioms of John Stuart Mill. Like all collections of journalism, the Rushdie volume contains some material that doesn't quite justify being preserved in this way. There are some pretty minor pieces and what seem to me some rather strained excursions into soccer and rock music. Inevitably, too, with his unique personal story having worked its deforming effect on his reputation, a hostile critic might take issue with Rushdie's love of fame. He adores being received by mass audiences. He is worshipped wherever he goes. His ambivalence while being photographed by Richard Avedon seems a shade unconvincing. But what else to expect? As the antidote to unusual punishment suffered for a decade, celebrity is a justifiable reward for exile. What's striking, in the end, is not Rushdie's egotism but the lack of it. This, we remember, is a writer not a politician. He is the most assiduous reader of other people's work, a true and tireless man of literature paying close attention to the output of his international contemporaries. He tells us why he loved the work of Angela Carter, finely takes issue with JM Coetzee's Disgrace, and, in one of his more important pieces, takes apart George Steiner's pessimism about the future of the novel. He's a total believer in the power of the word. Another curse of the fatwa was to define him as a man of anger. To many people, that may be all there is to him. But what emerges from reading him in the round are sincerity and generosity, virtues seldom found in modern literary journalism. The other message, however, cannot be repeated too often. There were those, especially in Britain, who regarded what happened in 1989 as somehow being his fault. He, not his would-be assassins, became the villain, soaking up taxpayer's money - a charge he knocks down, pound by pound, in a useful footnote - and declining to show adequate admiration for the Conservative government of the time. Islamic fundamentalism was assaulting one author, but also every other author who might dare show contempt for that kind of Islam. The attack was on civilisation itself. As Rushdie is brave enough to assert, trying to disengage the events of 9/11 from Islam is an exercise in fanciful dishonesty. He takes that timid conceit apart. He is a calm, meditative and unswerving liberal on all important matters, whose own uncomfortable fate pre-figured the worse to come, and now illuminates it. |
2hugoyoung
| 4Books
| Founding Brothers Joseph J Ellis 299pp, Faber, 12.99 <br /> Englishness took time to drain from the generation that made the United States of America. One of the most radical of those men, John Adams, wanted President George Washington to be addressed as "His Majesty" or "His Highness". Though Adams was ridiculed in turn as "His Rotundity", early Americans remained infused with British cultural habits even as they fought to shed British political control. This was the earliest version of the special relationship. We now think of American independence as foreordained, but its makers were not sure they could achieve it. There had never in the history of the world been a republic that encompassed territory so large as the quarter-continent the US aspired to be in 1787. Rome and Sparta, yes; America, surely not. Achieving it required a combination of remarkable men, poised between their ambition for independence, their uncertainty about what that might mean, and their constant, swirling debate, in the 13 separate colonies in which they lived, about how it might be done. This argument, about the power of the centre as against the rights of regions, has never ended. "The debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity," Joseph Ellis writes. One might extend that to the world at large. A kind of modernity is always to be found in the history of the American revolution, and certainly in this short, engrossing, brilliantly coloured account of the men who made it. Ellis chooses the eight whom he regards as the most remarkable, asserting with old-fashioned clarity, against the grain of modern historians' prejudices, that here was an event that depended on great men rather than on social forces or the life of the street. Four of the central players, Washington and Adams, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, were rivals and yet collaborators; sometimes soldiers, sometimes intellectuals, who shaped the political institutions that, more than 200 years later, remain the basis of the country that became the most powerful on earth. We meet these characters through a series of stories that weave, from anecdotal beginnings, a diverse account of the theory and practice of nation-building. The famous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr becomes a set piece not only of forensic professorial inquiry but of the argument at the heart of all constitution-making. The feelings as well as the ideologies of very serious men - and women, through the spikily candid presence of Abigail Adams - in dispute and yet in fraternity, present a complex tableau. I had not previously understood the case for saying that Washington was perhaps the wisest of them: the one who had never been to Europe, yet counselled most firmly for European peace; the one who crucially insisted on retiring after his second term. "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world," a disbelieving George III is credited with saying. This was a decisive moment. The US proved that it would indeed be different from the Great Britain whose vanities and corruptions it sought to avoid, and hence build a new world. For all their flirtation with majesty, these men were essentially anti-British; that was the point of what they did. Their story reminds one of what recent vintage is the intimacy that has brought our two countries together on the killing fields of Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson, a loather of the class system, was consumed by Anglophobia. "I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull." "Britain will never be our friend, till we are her master," Adams opined, with prophetic insight into future cohorts of poodle prime ministers. The cultural connection, of course, remained. In the early days of America, there was no other inheritance to draw on. The genealogical lines were also copiously linked, though it is worth remembering that by 1900 there were reckoned to be about the same number of Americans of German origin as of English: 18m against 20m. But few will read this history of the founding fathers without being reminded how much of myth is invested in the notion that the English-speaking peoples are especially and uniquely Anglo-American. A different kind of myth connects the founding of America with the supposed impossibility of creating an integrated Europa. To suggest that Jacques Delors is no James Madison is entirely to miss the point. For in the obvious sense, the virgin lands of Tennessee and points west offered a possibility of federation that cannot conceivably apply to the gnarled old nation-states of a continent populated and civilised for two millennia. Washington and his heroic generation engaged on a task that is simply not available for Paris and London and Berlin. On the other hand, its experimental nature - the fact that many believed it could not be done - re-echoes today. The experiment is different, and the outcome will not be a new country. But the challenge is as formidable, and the debates of the 18th century have their application in the 21st. There has never been a more enduring constitutional work, composed by men of business not academe, than The Federalist Papers, written by Madison, Hamilton and John Jay. Ellis's account is rich in knowledge lightly worn, a work of deep scholarship successfully masquerading as popular history. It penetrates many questions that resound today, from America's origins as a nation bent on having "no entangling alliances" to the insidious devices by which even this generation of leaders, unique in their creativity and endurance, for the most part avoided addressing the corrosive issue of slavery -which, within a few decades, almost blew their creation apart. The book speaks to a nation that is becoming ever more absorbed by its own history, even as its solitary reach extends around the world. One could speculate on the connection between the afterburn of 9/11 and America's new absorption with the heroic past. David McCullough's recent biography of John Adams sold 1m hardback copies. Ellis's has done almost as well, and won the Pulitzer Prize. In these days of trouble, it speaks to Europe with the same compelling interest. |
2hugoyoung
| 4Books
| Maggie<br />by Brenda Maddox<br />Hodder & Stoughton 20, pp288 The personality of Margaret Thatcher is one of the best-known artefacts in the whole of recent British political history. It's years since there was any mystery about either her formation or her private character or, for that matter, about her marriage to the saintly Denis. Her ambition as a child, her priggishness as a teenager, her funless life in the chemistry labs at Oxford, her solemn declaration from an early age that she would become an MP, her earnest tooling round the Home Counties for a safe seat: all this is well known, as, even more so, is the impact her character had on her public life. What was long ago interesting has become, by reverent repetition, a deeply wearisome story. So, why another biography by a well-respected author, offering 'the personal story of a public figure and a marriage at the heart of it'? The answer is a television series and the commercial explanation is therefore not to be ridiculed. The hard heads at ITV would not be giving four prime-time hours to films about Maggie that go over the familiar ground unless they believed there was one more tranche of box-office millions to be squeezed out. Perhaps I am over-estimating the boredom threshold of the British public. To judge from Thursday's opener, the films, elegantly made, will have their interest. Some prodigious research has found bits and pieces of footage from the Grantham school-days. Familiar contemporaries have once again done a turn for the questing cameras, which dredge them dry of little insights. The object of Maddox's book seems to be to ensure that none of these is left on the cutting-room floor, even though they change absolutely nothing in the old picture. Her broader technique, honestly and thoroughly documented, is to drain dry the published works of every other biographer and witness, beginning with the Lady herself, to build a picture of the personality as described therein. Naturally, therefore, there is nothing significant we did not know, though some cameos break through, of which my favourite pictures her on a skiing holiday with her young children, when she preferred the aprs-ski and assumed the all too credible role of club bore. 'Her favourite occupation was sitting at the bar after dinner with a liqueur and debating with anybody who would sit with her,' says a rare new witness. The drinking, indeed, becomes a cumulative feature. As Prime Minister, she always insisted on mixing the cocktails herself, and preferred whisky to gin through the night. And then there's the hair, my dear. An unceasing preoccupation that Maddox returns to again and again, to emphasise, not incorrectly, Thatcher's intense self-consciousness as a woman. But here, I think, in her determination to press a feminine rationale for the book, Maddox overlooks a crucial layer of the meaning of Maggie. It is true enough that this leader wanted to deploy every female quality at its most alluring. It is even truer that the Tory men who served close to her did not get over the culture shock of this woman supplanting them. The jokes about Hilda, like the resentment at the virago, never stopped coming out. But the great British public, I believe, was different. Sure, they saw her as a woman, and many admired her for that. The larger political fact was genderless. Her severity, her refusal to ingratiate, her lack of empathy, her sometimes terrible decisions, soon transcended everything. After the first few years, her politics, not her sex, were what entirely mattered. The overstretched thesis appears in another way, in Maddox's apparent insistence that MT could not abide other women taking the limelight; a jealousy, she implies, that reached up to the Queen herself. I do not think this is so. She may have resented things she heard the Queen had been saying about the rigours of Thatcherism, but her awe before monarchy was inextinguishable. A minor royal once told me of increasingly mirthful scenes after the annual ritual at the Cenotaph, when she could be relied on to curtsey ever lower as the years went by, not only to the Queen but to many of her relations. Maddox sketches in the big stories of the prime ministerial life, but essentially the book, like the ITV commitment to a four-part series, is tribute to a tendency that should be regretted. The obsession with the Thatcher personality has become a national disorder. While exposing nothing, it reflects once more the British disease of preoccupation with the past. Thatcher has joined the Tower of London and the roast beef of old England as a piece of the heritage industry, to be granted iconic inspection from time to time and even sanctified, as if we could never see her like again. There is, I fear, more to come. Somewhere, her official biographer, Charles Moore, is finding time and researchers to labour over the formal record of the life, even after John Campbell has produced his own two meticulous volumes. Moore's work, written by an unflinching admirer, will be a book nobody needs. There will doubtless be papers and documents augmenting the already valuable quarrying material to be found in the Thatcher memoirs. But the stance, one may fairly predict, will be just this side of sycophancy.The icon will be immortalised, the character revered. As in life, so in death, Thatcher will not be granted the verdict of detached evaluation. It is remarkable that, 12 years after she left power, no such work exists. There is no comprehensive account, historical and analytical, of what the Thatcher years did to Britain and the world. Where are the professors, where the large academic minds, doing justice to what can fairly be called an age? Or are they, too, mesmerised by a mere personality we need to get away from? |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing <br />by Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman <br />292pp, Profile, 20 When Margaret Thatcher was in power, her ability to get by on four hours' sleep was widely taken, even by those who didn't much care for her, to be illustrative of the woman's prodigious determination to stay in charge. So much so that there remains the faintest suspicion that any leaders, such as Bush and Blair, who like a good eight hours, are slacking in their duty to stay up, watching over us. Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman's illuminating study of biological clocks suggests that in Thatcher's case, we should have been more alarmed than impressed by her working hours, because "our cognitive abilities change rythmically over a 24-hour period". Even the intensity of toothache, the probability of an asthma or gout attack, and the strength of a handshake will fluctuate according to the time of day. The variations are not insignificant. Poor visibility is not the only reason why so many catastrophic accidents, including Chernobyl, Bhopal and the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, have occurred at night. For workers on the night shift, the authors point out, the risk of injury is "over 20% higher than on the day shift". "Depending on the task," they report, "the performance change between the daily high point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol. The best time for doing a given task depends on the nature of the task." It is not entirely surprising to discover that the best time for complex problem solving and logical reasoning is around noon. On the other hand: "Tasks that rely more on physical coordination, such as athletic events, are performed best in the early evening." What is the best time for working out the poll tax? Or deciding whether or not to privatise the railways? Even in the absence of extensive research, one feels fairly confident that the answer to both questions is not two o'clock in the morning. Such extreme defiance of the night is the more perverse when you consider that most of us already live in a world where, as the authors baldly put it, the imposed 24/7 structure "is in conflict with our basic biology". We are "beset with all manner of artificial timing cues". Such as alarm clocks. Or, going back a bit, sundials. Until these were invented in brainy Mesopotamia (now Iraq), 5,000 years ago, men and women lived by what the authors call "natural time". (Up to a point, surely: didn't cavemen ever stay up late, finishing off their paintings?) The old day/ night routine may have been a bit restrictive, but it was obviously much more relaxed. Half a century after sundials had been introduced in Greece, the Roman playwright Plautus had a character grumbling about the tyranny of time-keeping - "the town's so full of these confounded dials". What annoyed this character, in the second century BC, was having the dial, rather than his own, fluctuating appetite, dictate mealtimes. Today, the tension between internal and external clocks, the consequences of living - in the west, at any rate - in a relentlessly illuminated world in which the body's own circadian rhythms (which still respond to natural changes in day length) conflict with the requirements of an imposed, arbitrarily scheduled working day or night, is yet more pronounced. It is making us ill. About 3% of people in the UK, for example, are thought to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a depressive illness brought on by reduced daylight, or by having to keep on going in reduced daylight. But anyone who has suffered from jetlag has experienced the jangling consequences of this conflict between internal and external clocks for themselves. British Airways warns sufferers that their "decision-making ability" may be downgraded by as much as 50%, and attention by 75% - which is something to think about the next time Mr Blair flies off on one of his rounds of non-stop international statesmanship. If the lessons of chronobiology - the study of biological rhythms - are disregarded in the planning of almost all human activities except war and manned space missions, it is possibly because, as the authors relate, rival scientists have been unable to agree whether this subject is a branch of evolutionary biology, or a separate discipline with implications for the study of growth, ageing and medicine. The first group's unworldly preoccupation with the mechanics of the subject has even earned them the disparaging nickname "clockwatchers". Although Foster and Kreitzman are thought-provoking and occasionally droll on the human determination to outwit or ignore the endogenous clock, their anecdotes about jetlag and supersoldiers, owls and larks, are primarily there, you suspect, to sugar the pill for lay readers. The bulk of Rhythms of Life is a serious and at times austere summary of the clockwatchers' research into the origins of rhythmic behaviour, right down to the recent discovery that even bacteria possess their own biological clocks. It is courtesy of these clockwatchers that we now know the location of a central mammalian clock, which drives an individual creature's daily rhythms. In the middle of the last century, an obsessive physiologist, Curtis Richter, decided it must be in there somewhere, and tracked it down through an awesomely gruesome process of elimination: "Richter removed adrenals, gonads, pituitary, thyroid, pineal, pancreas. He gave his rats electroshock therapy, induced convulsions and prolonged anaesthesia, and... even got them blind drunk. Still they were rhythmic." Eventually, he got to the brain, and - eureka! - the rhythms went wonky. The clock was finally located in a cluster of cells towards the front of the brain. The interaction of day length and this internal biological clock tells creatures when to migrate, spawn, mate and hiber nate. And the evolutionary selection pressure to get this timing right - if, for example, deer are born too early they will die - has resulted in some extraordinarily precise responses. "At higher latitudes, a difference in day length of only eight to 10 minutes will trigger in many species the reproductive, migratory and hibernatory processes." The authors anticipate that parts of their summary will delight only those to whom phrases such as "dPER in its free form is phosphorylated by DBT but not when it is bound to dTIM" are as clear as day (they recommend skipping rather than giving up when the going gets really tough). But much of their book is lucid enough to leave one in no doubt that the advance of the 24/7 society is something to be resisted very vigorously. Rather oddly, after all their tales of disaster and depression, Foster and Kreitzman seem more inclined to capitulate, suggesting that a handy pill might help us, in the manner of Mrs Thatcher, to "gain time by reducing the amount we sleep". And maybe they're right: there will be plenty of time for sleeping later. The Grim Reaper, incidentally, turns out to be a lark: you are most likely to die in the early morning. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown 496pp, Century, £18.99 Luckily, perhaps, Princes William and Harry appear to have inherited their family's ancestral indifference to books. It is on the press and television that they focus, writing recently to Channel 4 to complain about the documentary Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel: "a gross disrespect to their mother's memory". Memories of Andrew Morton, with whom their mother had colluded, may also explain why similarly pained - if futile - rebukes are rarely levelled at literary scavengers. Asked by the princes' secretary "if it were your or my mother dying in that tunnel, would we want the scene broadcast to the nation?", a Channel 4 executive might reasonably have replied that his intrusions were as nothing compared with the rogue psychiatry and whiffy speculation that has become almost standard in books about Diana, including such classy additions to the genre as Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. In which we find the outgoing prime minister's exclusive reassessment (she taught us "a new way to be British") sharing the same capacious bucket as Brown's relentlessly smutty guesswork. "To keep her company," Brown leers, "there was always what she called 'Le Gaget', the tiny vibrator one of the staff bought for her in Paris as a joke." Like most of the Chronicles, the existence of "Le Gaget" was previously advertised in a first-generation Diana book (Ken Wharfe, 2003), already rifled by Sarah Bradford for her authoritative 2006 biography, Diana. Contrary to the claims of novelty circulating before publication, Brown's solitary contribution to the archives appears to be the disclosure that the teenage Diana once behaved like a carnivorous Goldilocks, picking all the meat out of her employer's stew. For the rest, Brown's novelties are confined to changes of emphasis, and to speculation, none of it enough to modify Bradford's compassionate portrait of a dreadfully isolated young woman, whose problems - once you appreciated the misery caused by her mother's exit and her stepmother's equally sudden arrival, the ghastliness of her entire family, and the fact that she was only 20 when Charles and his fellow conspirators started telling her she was mad - seem far from being of her own making. Then why - if it wasn't for the £1m reason - did Brown volunteer for this massive anniversary cuts job? She has nothing illuminating to add, and seems neither to have liked Diana nor to have found her all that interesting. At Tatler magazine, edited by Brown at the time of the royal engagement, the uneducated princess was apparently considered a pitifully naive "sociological throwback", impressing Tatlerites only with the "tameness of her set". There was "no sign of Lady Diana Spencer or her ilk", Brown emphasises, at a party once attended by her own, much faster circle. "The definitive end-of-decade social event of the 70s was the riotously eclectic fancy dress party in Hampshire to celebrate the 40th birthday of Nicky Haslam, the fashionable decorator ... 'You can always tell a gentleman by the quality of his drugs,' an exuberant Lord Hesketh told me as we stood in line for the buffet." Regrettably, Tina must break off here from her own, very promising, memoirs and return to translating Morton/Burrell/Jephson/Bradford into a racier dialect that renders lovers "shag mates" ("today's terminology", she assures us), has Dodi's driver putting "the pedal to the metal", Charles preferring "gags over shags", and the effect of Diana's glamour on "cafe society" being to "turbo charge" it. Even the tragedy of Diana's later years evidently looks a little parochial, from Brown's demanding, transatlantic perspective. Maybe a sprinkle of Hollywood glamour? "While the world was thrilling to the spectacle of Diana's life as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical," she writes about Highgrove, "her home life was becoming more like something out of Hitchcock. Under a King and I façade lurked a Rebecca-like sinister melodrama ... the shadow of Rebecca is never far away." Just outside Chippenham, to be precise. For the benefit of American readers Brown includes a variety of topographical notes, possibly based on memory. "Gloucestershire", they learn, "has a very wet climate." For their part, English readers of this simultaneous translation are schooled in the significance of Diana's disco dance with John Travolta. Her arrival in Brown's world was "an iconic moment ... There was a Hollywood dimension now to Diana's glittering fable of the shy girl who married a dashing prince." Not for the first time, an iconic photograph would be a bonus. But there are no pictures in the Chronicles, even though images of the acutely self-conscious Diana are, as Brown affirms, key elements in her story: "In an iconic photograph," she writes of the Diana-Hewitt polo trophy presentation, "their eyes meet ..." Presumably Brown requires this austere, picture-free eminence from which to pour scorn on lowlier chroniclers - "the paps waited like hyenas" - without being labelled a flesh-eater herself. As for Diana's wretched complicity with her snappers, Brown explains that her father's fondness for amateur photography meant that "Diana grew up associating the camera with love". At the same time, the girl was reading too much Barbara Cartland, "leaving her spiritual bloodstream permanently polluted with saccharine". A diagnosis that may be as accurate as any of Brown's other aperçus: "Gloucestershire people have to be one of two things - hunters or gardeners." Perhaps she was away for Fred West. Largely on the basis of his charming appearance, our expert concludes that in William, Diana's "legacy is in good hands". Really? Even though William's father is a helpless whiner, his grandmother a grimly repressed survivor and his Windsor grandfather a bully? His mother was abandoned, for life, by her own, twice-divorced mother (who finally turned to the bottle), humiliated by the palace post-divorce, after which she endured only romantic disappointment before being violently killed, whereupon 15-year-old William's uncle provoked a blood feud with his grandmother, and his father resumed, with indecent haste, his courtship of the woman who had haunted and tormented Diana all her adult life - and has since made this shameless creature into William's stepmother. Interviewed last week, Prince William said he thought about his mother's death every day. It would be like something out of Philip Larkin, if only it wasn't true. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| The Autobiography of the Queen<br />by Emma Tennant <br />222pp, Bliss Books, £9.99 The Uncommon Reader<br />by Alan Bennett <br />124pp, Profile, £10.99 Even for the Queen, who is used to compliments, this has been a marvellous year for tributes. Vogue puts her in its list of the top 50 glamorous women. The Archbishop of Canterbury admires her "creative faithfulness to a task" (60 years of marriage). So does the poet laureate: "the years stacked up". Dame Helen Mirren professes herself "a queenist". And from the world of letters: two new royal fantasies, published within months of each other. Admittedly, she is made to look rather a fool in both; Bennett depicts the Queen as ignorant and thick-skinned (until she is redeemed by reading), and Tennant strips her of all dignity, but it seems unlikely either author would have gone to the trouble if the Queen did not continue, in reality, as unknowable and as uncontaminated by the world outside the palace as she was on the day of her coronation. Many less awe-inspiring, constitutionally marginalised monarchs probably dream of being lampooned by such high-class satirists. Like the Stephen Frears film in which the Queen is seen, with the help of Tony Blair and a passing stag, to surrender to the emotional literacy of the crowd, the novels show, in their way, that we care. Who would bother to show the Dutch royals learning to feel? They probably do little else. The Queen, Tennant has noticed, really does inhabit a world so remote that her sudden exposure to our own would lead to many a fascinating contrast. "The Queen had never been shut out of a place before," she points out, after her version of the monarch is excluded from somewhere. "Had she wished it, she could visit every stately home in Great Britain and be accorded the most rapturous and respectful welcome. High-security prisons, the inner enclosures at the most exclusive race courses, four-star restaurants with waiting lists of several years would all fling open their doors for her." Wisely, perhaps, she makes no mention of Harrods. But Tennant could be right in thinking that the Queen does not know how to work anything, other than horses. And cars, perhaps, since she trained as mechanic in the war. We duly witness the Queen's struggle with her first-ever suitcase on wheels: plainly, Tennant believes her seclusion from the world to have been long enough to have rendered her a halfwit. "'Does one simply pull it down the stairs?' she asked - but for once, there was no one there to reply." The suitcase is needed because, for reasons too silly to go into, Tennant's Queen has decided to run away, secretly, to St Lucia, where she has bought a villa, off plan. It has not, oh dear, been built, allowing Tennant to devise all kinds of humiliations for an unappealing simpleton who has never learned to lock doors, look after her own things, or take any of the protective measures that would be adopted by the most insignificant of her millions of subjects. If this fable demonstrates, with relentless clarity, that the effect of a privileged royal life can be every bit as damaging, where life-skills are concerned, as a poor one, the glee with which Tennant swiftly reduces the Queen to a batty old fool in flip-flops is mystifying. Perhaps it is meant to be funny. One might well, if one were the Queen, prefer Bennett's fantasy, which features many welcome, courteously signposted jokes about Queens and queens, queens and smut, queens and class: "good novels seldom came as well-connected as this", his Queen concedes, confronted with a copy of Love in a Cold Climate. She is not just repressed and snobbish; Bennett's comedy also requires her to be so untutored, prior to befriending a well-read gay servant called Norman, that she can embark, with impartial interest, on biographies of Lauren Bacall and of Sylvia Plath - the first wife of her late poet laureate. "That the Queen could readily switch from showbiz autobiography to the last days of a suicidal poet might seem both incongruous and wanting in perception," writes the kindly Bennett. "But, certainly in her early days, to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice." This simplicity enables the Queen, even after she finds "a truly human side" through her reading, to remain a useful idiot savant. All through, it is easier to imagine her talking in Bennett's Piglet voice, than in authentic Mirren. "Books are wonderful, aren't they?" she tells a lunch companion, let us call him Pooh. He agrees. "At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak," she says, "they tenderise one." If this were true, literary people would surely be the wisest, loveliest people around. If only. Because the Queen is the Queen, no one in Bennett's story has the authority to challenge her epigrams about the transformative power of books with evidence of their regrettable limitations in this respect. If books stop a person being snobbish, for instance, what does one make of Virginia Woolf? And what is her position on bad books? We might know, if young Norman had recommended Mein Kampf, by a family friend. Or, for that matter, Emma Tennant's latest. Bennett's is such a divine little book, with its patterned end-papers and gold coronet, that it is sure to find its way, this Christmas, into the stockings of many reluctant readers, who may even, festive telly being what it is, discover that the intellectual's contempt for the non-reader has rarely been so seductively expressed. But they have only to emulate the Queen's evolution, following Norman/Bennett's course-work, into a lovely person and proficient literary tease to realise that The Uncommon Reader doubles as a charming, extended compliment to anyone with the same hobby. Aren't we great! · To order The Autobiography of the Queen for £9.99 or The Uncommon Reader for £9.99, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body<br /> by Desmond Morris<br /> 400pp, Cape, 17.99<br /> I wonder how many specimens Desmond Morris inspected before deciding that "every woman has a beautiful body", the statement which launches this book. Not enough, anyway, or he would surely have come across at least one that had gone wonky or started falling apart. He says our bodies are beautiful because they are "the brilliant end-point of millions of years of evolution". But you could say that about a slug. Still, the admiration evinced throughout Morris's "guided tour of the female body" will make a nice change for women who have come to detest their unwieldy carcasses for not resembling the bodies of unusually thin pubescent girls, and fear the consequences should they ever stop attempting to disguise the general wear and tear that men find so nauseating in our sex. With a lack of restraint that verges, occasionally, on the reckless, Morris rhapsodises everything that takes his fancy. Most memorably, hair, which stirs reflections on men's "quest for the softly flowing locks they dream of caressing". Even a woman whose hair or face is nothing to boast about may well be in possession of a working back, highly commended as "a brilliantly assembled set of muscle and bones with the twin functions of body support and spinal-cord protection". Other humdrum body parts are special, he points out, in being superior to the male equivalent. Female hands are singled out for praise, having "far greater finesse when it comes to the delicate handling of small objects". And, on looking down, one finds that one's hands are, in fact, rather nicely designed. Thank you Desmond. If only more men had your respect for the precision grip. It may seem a poor return for all these nice compliments, but beyond sharing his affection for body parts with which many of us are wearily familiar, it is not clear what Morris wants to say. Even his ardour occasionally grates. He does not consider the diseases that are apt to afflict the most brilliant end-point of evolution, nor does he notice the tedious, commonplace complaints that can leave the female body something less than beautiful. Feet, for instance, are all very well on the ends of our legs, but it seems pushing it, rather, to go on about how "wonderfully they perform", how uncomplainingly they "effortlessly serve us and steer us through our changing environment". Plainly, the man has never seen a bunion. But perhaps seen-it-all adult women are not the ideal tourists for this particular trip. Perhaps, as with Morris's celebrated The Naked Ape (1967), The Naked Woman's natural audience is composed of inquisitive adolescent boys. It certainly has a very promising bottom on the cover; though even the most eager schoolboy may be disappointed by the amount of space devoted to things like ears, noses and cheeks - and all the other bits of standard female equipment that are not, give or take a few hairs, really so different from his own. With breasts, bottoms and so forth, Morris is obviously on safer ground. If British sex education is in the sorry state indicated by our teenage pregnancy figures, then the more boys who learn the whereabouts of the U-spot and the elusive Anterior Fornix Erogenous Zone the better (a map or diagram would have been a bonus). The boys will also be intrigued - supposing it does not have a Ruskin-like effect on more delicate students - to discover the international variations in women's pubic hair. In the Far East, Morris discloses, "the straight black head-hair is matched by pubic hair that has been described as 'black, short, straight and not thick but rather sparse ... forming a somewhat narrow triangle with apex upwards.'" Young admirers of the Guinness Book of Records may also relish the many curious facts Morris has crammed into his appreciation. The merkin (pubic wig), inevitably, gets a look in. But did you know that there was once a French woman with "no fewer than five pairs of fully lactating breasts"? Or that in 15th-century Venice a law was passed requiring prostitutes to expose their breasts? No notes substantiate such easily forgotten asides, but nonetheless: just fancy. The Naked Woman abounds in these factoids; some interesting, some freakish, some dubious - many most amazing for the importance Morris attaches to them. We are familiar, of course, with the idea of cabinets of curiosities, collections of shells, bone, fossils. But one pictures this eminent zoologist with his Kinsey Report and Guinness Book of Records conveniently to hand, poring over sheafs of yellowed cuttings gathered over the years, carefully recording the fact that, in 2003, a woman with a tongue stud was struck by lightning in Corfu; or alighting on the story of another woman, in Connecticut, who attacked her unfaithful husband with her nails: "The injured man required 24 stitches to close the wound in his scrotum." Not all Morris's anecdotes have been so laboriously collated. Once he has dealt, briskly enough, with the adaptive significance, physiology and function of a body part, most of his chapters rapidly decline into pages of loosely themed remarks that might look feeble if you found them in a child's project. Hairstyles, he notes, are not permanent."When the hair grows out, new styles can be tried." When it has grown, "a ponytail can be a useful device to control untidy hair, both in the workplace and in the home." Musing on breasts, he notes that "the combination of 'bra and panties' remains with us to this day as the favoured form of female underwear". A lined forehead is "a telltale sign that its owner is no longer young". And so, some might say, is a book like this. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Snowdon: The Biography by Anne De Courcy 456pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 What has worked for Lord Snowdon all his life almost works in this hagiography. In a little world populated by England's most ghastly and dim, he again appears to enormous advantage; abrim with style (of a sort), charm (if you like that kind of thing) and energy (mainly for sex). It is worth remembering, of course, that in this context, the same would apply to the average tomcat. When, to his enormous satisfaction, the priapic photographer (then called Antony Armstrong-Jones) made it into the royal family, it was easy for this spoiled little pixie, with his extra-tight drainpipes and mesmerising bouffant, to be mistaken for a much-needed corrective to the snobbery, stupidity, and stolid sybaritism of the nation's top inbreds. Simply by being a society photographer, as opposed to a titled nothing, Snowdon was able to portray himself as an arty free spirit, almost an intellectual, under whose tonic tutelage, it was imagined, the Windsor troupe might evolve into a more acceptable, near-human subspecies. The success of this experiment can be quickly judged simply by looking at recent pictures of Prince Harry and his girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. One of the most interesting facts in Anne De Courcy's book is that Snowdon never reads. Another is that the most iconoclastic thing he ever did, as a royal, was to wear polo necks instead of ties; a level of democratic endeavour that proved eminently acceptable to his in-laws, who soon discovered that they preferred the dashing, yet reliably subservient, Tony to foul-tempered Princess Margaret. It helped that in all the key matters relating to status, the exploitation of servants, and unembarrassed grovelling, arty Armstrong-Jones was everything they might have hoped from the son of Lady Anne Rosse, or "Tugboat Annie" - so called "because she goes from peer to peer". Tugboat Jr quite eclipsed her, as he pranced between Queen and Queen Mother, enchanting both ladies to the point that, even after the divorce from Margaret, whom he treated abominably, they pined for his company at Balmoral. But, as De Courcy stresses, the decades of marital feuding and hate notes ("you look like a Jewish manicurist") had started as a genuine romance. Meaning that Snowdon, who liked to keep several women on the go, may have confined himself to no more than one simultaneous affair, or at most, two, while he was courting the unsuspecting Margaret. Let us hope this provides some consolation to the British servicemen whose pay was docked by sixpence apiece in 1960 in order to provide the pair with a wedding present: "a small marble-topped commode", De Courcy reports. The exact nature of the qualities that captivated Princess Margaret, her family, Snowdon's legions of ill-treated lovers and, most recently, the author of this dazzled tribute, remains, even after 400 pages, obscure. Loyal De Courcy passes on reports of an extremely large penis, but that can hardly account for Snowdon's effect on Prince Philip. Or, later, on Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, who said Snowdon was "the best provost we ever had". Was it wit? None is recorded here. Young Snowdon's speciality was nasty practical jokes, such as putting dead fish in girls' beds. It was the grown-up Snowdon's, too: "they would sortie out to the houses of neighbours they knew to be out or away", De Courcy hilariously reports, of the earl and his chums, "and rearrange all the furniture". Looks, then? As irresistible as Snowdon may have been in the 50s and 60s, and even the 70s and 80s, it hardly accounts for the posh old shagger's continuing appeal, not only to the author of this homage, but, incredibly, to an attractive young journalist, Melanie Cable-Alexander (by whom he fathered a child), and, more recently, to Marjorie Wallace, the mental health campaigner who may now be remembered, above all, for her ungovernable passion for a past-it prankster. What do they talk about, over lunch at the Caprice? Much as one would like to imagine the lovebirds exchanging insights on photography, ornithological matters or disabled access, there is little evidence, from the taped conversations that became this book, that the activities which have given substance to his reputation actually interest the earl anything like as much as gossip, sexual intercourse and money. Even quite small amounts of money. There is mention, at one point, of "postage". A section about Snowdon's child by Cable-Alexander (one of two children whose paternity he at first questioned) specifies the fearful sums demanded by the little chap's prep school, "from £2,375 a term". And that comes on top, Snowdon emphasises, presumably in a bid for sympathy, of "gas, electricity and telephone services, bills from Berry Bros, council tax of £1,377 ... " Although De Courcy tries valiantly to generate admiration for various artistic and charitable triumphs, for Snowdon's photographs of "slum children", and his campaigns on behalf of disabled people, her efforts are continually nullified; not by her obvious partiality, but by yet more evidence of Snowdon's awfulness, as volunteered to her, exclusively, by himself. There are reasons, De Courcy shows, why Snowdon should have emerged so deceitful, manipulative and cruel; so mean, boastful and silly. His father sounds silly too. His mother, Tugboat, once she'd divorced and remarried, more or less ignored him until he bagged Margaret. He had polio as a child, leaving him with a dodgy leg. Then again, you'd think that half a century of adulation, plus a family, experience and a bit of maturity would eventually even things out. On the contrary. It is only, one suspects, because he is using a wheelchair that Snowdon does not, even now, creep out of a night to plant dead fish or rearrange people's furniture. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Mary Archer: For Richer, For Poorer<br /> by Margaret Crick<br /> 352pp, Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster, £17.99<br /> For some time now, Mary Archer's reputation has been on the whiffy side. If there was once, in the era of her fragrance, a possibility that this sanctimonious academic was quite as much a victim of her husband Jeffrey Archer's misdeeds as the prostitute Monica Coghlan and the many other people he has deceived, threatened or paid off, it has since been thoroughly extinguished by her subsequent adventures as an Anglia director, Lloyd's council member, merciless litigant and, above all, as champion of the Old Vicarage One. Anyone who can insist, as Mary Archer still does, that her husband did not deserve his prison sentence for the "trivial" crime of perverting justice is either dim or morally flawed, or, I suppose, in the pay of Jeffrey Archer. And the choirmistress Mary Archer is certainly not dim. Whiffiness, as Jeffrey Archer demonstrated for very many years, is no barrier to preferment, and his wife continues to prosper in public life. Although her work in solar energy is not, one gathers from Margaret Crick's biography, of a quality to put her in the first rank of scientists, Mrs Archer has nonetheless collected a number of prominent positions on boards and bodies, trusts and charities that would be quite amazing, were it not in the nature of such activities to be insupportably boring. Although it may be disagreeable for fellow worthies on, for instance, the board of Addenbrooke's NHS Trust, to endure sustained contact with a person who must be irreparably grubbied by her years as Jeffrey Archer's helpmeet, there is no evidence from Crick (who certainly looked hard for it) that the female Archer has been anything other than efficient and diligent in her public duties. And for all one knows, Lady Archer, who was heard not long ago hissing "bitch" at her former secretary in the high court, may, in this world of status-seeking busybodies, pass for a person of untrammelled integrity. What preoccupies Crick is her clever subject's loyalty to that buffoon, philanderer and fraud, Jeffrey. "Does she know about everything and simply accept it? Does she excuse Jeffrey's unacceptable behaviour because she feels he has many redeeming features?" Crick asks. "Or is she a very strong wife who values loyalty and her marriage vows very highly?" Would it really add to the sum of human knowledge if Mary told us the answer? Of course, Crick thinks so, worrying away at the question for well over 300 well-upholstered pages, until she is forced, in the final chapter, to admit that Mary remains "an enigma ... largely because she stays married to Jeffrey". In putting such emphasis on this mystery, Crick does herself a disservice, for her main achievement is to highlight, as never before, the similarities between the Archers. Mary may be a mistress of the periodic table who reeks of moral certitude, but she is also a flagrant exhibitionist who will grab any opportunity to warble and prance in front of an audience and who takes obvious delight in the attention and wealth, property and parties, geegaws and dressing-up opportunities that have been conferred on her through her husband's efforts. A career in solar energy does not buy country vicarages, penthouses and art collections. As with Cherie Blair, with whom she also has quite a bit in common, it is a habit of Archer's to alternate between showing off and asserting her right to privacy, and she seems to have gone to some trouble to thwart Crick in her research. While one fully understands Crick's irritation, Archer's resistance is also comprehensible. For there is, obviously, a good deal of difference between offering your own, disingenuous confessions and having them extracted from you willy-nilly by a third, probably unsympathetic party. Coming from the wife of Michael Crick, the author of a brilliant and brave exposé of Lord Archer's deceptions, Stranger than Fiction, this proposal for a companion volume was never likely to appeal to Mary Archer. Whichever came first, Margaret's antipathy, or Mary's obstructiveness, the result is a study in hostility. For example, Mary is semi-ridiculed for appearing in a new "eyecatching designer outfit", and then twitted for greeting Jeffrey, on his return from prison, in a dress "at least six years old". She is charged with having a face lift, then rebuked for wanting to keep it a secret. She is chastised for occasionally lashing out, and then criticised for not doing so more often. The snitty asides, sustained over so many pages, are not just monotonous, they also have the occasional, quite unintended effect of evoking sympathy. Whatever the couple's private sexual arrangements, for example, it seems unlikely that Jeffrey Archer's many infidelities were painless for his wife. Crick, perhaps working on the assumption that anyone married to Jeffrey Archer cannot have feelings, introduces the subject as follows: "Unfortunately for Mary, one person certainly finding time to squeeze in a few extramarital affairs was the husband she liked so much." With this level of disaffection, it must have been hell for Crick to complete what reads, for all her obvious research, like a protracted cuts job, supplemented with great chunks of Jeffreyana and lacings of Christmas round-robin detail ("guests enjoyed a menu of 'ham mousse and Newnham soufflé'"). Actually, the great enigma of this book is not the mysterious bond between Archer and Archer, but what, exactly, Crick ever thought she saw in Mary. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling 608pp, Bloomsbury, £17.99 There are still one or two questions left unanswered at the end of Harry Potter's last adventure. It cannot be giving anything away to reveal that we never discover how Eloise Midgen can be a martyr to acne at Hogwarts, a place where bones can be grown back and complex orthodontics effected with the wave of a wand. With JK Rowling it has generally been niggling little questions of internal logic that give the reader pause, rather than the mysteries of her grander scheme in which that prime specimen of embodied evil, Lord Voldemort, slowly acquires the power he needs to defeat Harry Potter, his only adequately qualified adversary. By book seven, if you are familiar with Rowling's vast, ever-expanding parallel universe, it seems only to be expected that this wizarding terrorist should, by now, be close to completing a fascist-style takeover of the UK (both material and magical sections), in the course of which non-wizards and half-wizards are being rounded up for questioning by "pure bloods" and sent off - if they survive their show trials - to a wizard-run concentration camp. Now that the 17-year-old Harry has abandoned school for his dreadful, extramural quest, only he can determine whether the lights will go out all over the democratic wizarding world. To anyone unacquainted with the epic so far, the latest tale will be incomprehensible. In earlier volumes, Rowling made heroic efforts to initiate new readers, but since this process would now require, at a minimum, a glossary, rule book and catalogue of magical objects, she seems to have given up the task as hopeless. But some regular readers may also be disconcerted by a tranche of Hogwarts in which there is neither Quidditch nor lessons. All the familiar Harry scenes have gone missing, from the inaugural, always comforting comedy inside No 4 Privet Drive and the annual bullying bout on the Hogwarts Express, to Mrs Weasley's Christmas jumpers and - more mercifully - Hagrid's inevitable adoption of some tiresome magical creature whose assistance will later prove critical. There was a time when you could set your clock by it. To go into detail about the questing and battles that have replaced the usual timetable would probably be unfair: even a week after publication there may still be one or two children as innocent of Harry's fate as the American crowds who gathered at the New York harbourfront in 1841 to ask disembarking passengers from England, "Is Little Nell dead?" But only Quidditch fans could complain about the outcome: Rowling has woven together clues, hints and characters from previous books into a prodigiously rewarding, suspenseful conclusion in which all the important questions, including the true nature of Severus Snape, the fates of Crabbe and Goyle, and the presence of the dark wizard Grindelwald on a Chocolate Frog card in book one, are punctiliously resolved. The author was surely right, on the eve of publication, to implore journalists not to spoil the surprise for a generation who have enjoyed something unique in children's literature (where the characters tend to stay the same age, like William Brown, or, if they do mature, to do so as hobbits, Romans or Aslan worshippers): a chance to grow up, in real time, with their heroes. But Rowling was duly accused of colluding with a ruthless marketing operation, which led to 2m copies of her book being sold within 24 hours of publication. Although her sales techniques do contrast sharply with arrangements in Harry Potter's Nintendo-free world, it is curious that Rowling should be so harshly judged for her engagement with the book trade. Didn't most eminent Victorian novelists fight just as greedily for their profits, become, in several cases, international celebrities, and see their better cliffhangers and denouements stimulate the nation into moments of collective delirium? But as her critics point out, Rowling is no Dickens. That the welfare of Harry Potter should, each year, become a question of national importance has only deepened a suspicion, in some quarters, that Rowling's writing is not merely mediocre but contaminated by her participation in a crass celebrity culture. In 2000, Harold Bloom despaired for her readers. "In an arbitrarily chosen single page - page 4 - of the first Harry Potter book", he objected, "I count seven clichés, all of the 'stretch his legs' variety". If his computations had continued, Professor Bloom's cliché tally might by now have run into the thousands; the books have got so long and Rowling's style has remained unsophisticated, with an irrepressible tendency to show and tell. You feel that simply by cutting intra-paragraph repetition and the number of times she describes an angry Harry saying something angry angrily, Rowling and her editors might have saved 10,000 trees. But colossal energy and wit have gone into other things: writing at speed, almost before her readers' eyes, Rowling has willed into fictional being, in every book, legions of new characters, places, spells, rules and scores of unimagined twists and subplots. This is altogether a towering fictional edifice whose vividness and sheer scale are enough to compensate, for many of us, for any deficiencies in design. Anyone who, as a child, never wanted a favourite book to end, must envy the Potter cohort a magical world that has grown by hundreds of pages a year; a world whose arrangements Rowling has depicted in such sublime, almost manically generous detail, that for 10 years her readers could more or less live inside it. Equally enchanting for younger readers, Rowling appears genuinely to like and respect children, to cherish them, almost, for their moods, faltering courtships, naive political ideas, mistrust of adults and, in the new book, a vocabulary that includes the word "toerag". Only her teenagers can save their parents' generation from Voldemart's schemes for a master-race - in itself the consequence of the older wizards' conceit and their cruelty to supposedly inferior beings, the gnomes and house-elves. As well as saving adults, Harry the freedom fighter subjects them to homilies, in which he urges remorse, courage, good parenting: "Parents", Harry tells an errant father, "shouldn't leave their kids unless - unless they've got to." His, then, is a most instructive mission that might be as nauseating as anything in Heidi, were Rowling not free with deflating asides from various members of the Weasley family. "Overkill, mate", remarks Ron, just as Harry's bonding session with a mistreated elf teeters on the brink of mawk. It is a key element in Rowling's own myth that she plotted the entire Potter series before she started, and on its completion, you can see that the protagonists, the principal families and their allegiances, the design of Hogwarts public school, and the grand plan for a final confrontation between goodness and badness were, as alleged, always in place. But since book three there has been more and more evidence of (occasionally helpless) ad hoc-ery. Everything must have changed once it became clear to Rowling and her publishers that her readers - adults as well as children - would gobble up as much Potter as she could bear to produce. Hence such things as the tri-wizard tournament and an excursion to Downing Street to meet a Muggle prime minister whose original has also disappeared without trace. Even the newly arrived Hallows, some nifty plot accessories that allow for all kinds of crises, personal challenges and protracted revelations, point at a desperate struggle, once Rowling had arrived at the middle of the last book, to hold off the final act. By itself, the cheeky Hogwarts motto (Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus) that ornamented the title page of The Philosopher's Stone is enough to suggest that Rowling did not, back in 1997, plan to end her series with a protracted meditation on death, prefaced by a few lines from Aeschylus: "Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death." The Potterati, scanning the text for learned allusions (and there are plenty, from Dante and Orwell to Jesus Christ and Tinky Winky), may well see in its genocidal, dystopic shadows the intrusion of a real world that became, not long after Harry Potter arrived in it, a far more frightening place. But the book's resounding melancholy may derive from something simpler. Whatever happens in the last of these brilliant adventures may matter less, for the millions of children who grew up with Harry Potter, than the end of his companionship and with it, the end of their childhood. Which is a much more wholesome story than Peter Pan's, but sad, all the same. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour<br />by Kate Fox <br />424pp, Hodder, 20<br /> It was quite a consolation to finish Kate Fox's analysis of Englishness in the departure lounge of Heraklion airport, where, in what resembled some mass audition for Wifeswap, a few hundred English people were unselfconsciously squabbling and cursing and barging into one another. For Fox says we are not like that at all. "Social dis-ease", she decides, is the "central core of Englishness". She holds this congenital awkwardness responsible for everything from our "obsession with privacy" to our celebrated courtesy, famous reserve and infinite capacity for embarrassment. "We do everything in moderation," she believes. Fox's curiosity about English behaviour, which she attempts to reduce, in this prodigously long investigation, into key constituent parts, is matched only by her regret that we are not a more free and easy nationality. You gather that Fox and her fianc Henry (both prominent figures in her research findings) prefer the dashing and riotous to the stilted and cautious behaviour which, her report claims, continues to dominate English social proceedings. For instance, we say "sorry" when someone else bumps into us, and take too much notice of queueing while pretending not to. But then, as well as being almost deranged with embarrassment, we are also "hypocrites". We are, in fact, "the most repressed and inhibited people on earth". Which must make us even more repressed and inhibited than the Japanese royal family and the monks of Mount Athos. Since Fox is a leading social anthropologist, we must believe her when she tells us that our rites of passage also leave a good deal to be desired. It "seems a shame", she says, "that there is no special ritual to mark the completion of secondary education". Maybe we're too mean to pay for them. Contemplating the cautious attitudes of young English people towards work and money, Fox professes herself "disappointed" to find them planning for the future and "not much cheered" to discover an early aversion to being in debt. This is not, you take it, Fox's recommended approach to being young, English and affluent. Where will it end, she frets, this "worrying trend" of "risk aversion and obsession with safety"? I don't know. Hull? Somewhere in the opposite direction from that other English trend of remortgaging and devil-may-care credit-card spending? If Fox's casual flourishes - "but, hey ...", girlish hyperbole, and reliance on the word "umpteen" - are unlikely to do much for her academic reputation, the chicklittish attempts to ingratiate suggest that it is not Bronislaw Malinowksi she wants to be, but the next Peter York (who did, at least, introduce us to the Sloane Ranger). Fox, on the other hand, is happy to expose the working-class habit of saying things like "nuffink" and "serviette" along with other mannerisms more succinctly summarised in Betjeman's "How to Get on in Society": "Phone for the fishknives Norman ... " Still, one day her exhaustive observations on these "hidden" rules may prove invaluable to visitors from another planet. They may not know that "M&S is a sort of department store", or realise that "some working class people ... still believe in starting the day with a 'cooked breakfast' ... this feast may often be eaten in a 'caff' rather than at home ..." Fox has worked so hard to be charming and fun that she seems to lack the energy, or invention, that would be required to reconcile her theory of an inhibited and "dis-eased" nation with the evidence of increasingly unbuttoned, culturally diverse and unpredictable forms of Englishness. Or Europeanness. A good many of Fox's selected "English" traits - love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather - seem remarkably similar to the French or German love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather. But, as the author often reminds us, it's her book, and what interests her are "the causes of good behaviour". So what are these causes? "To be honest, I don't know why the English are the way we are - and nor, if they are being honest, does anyone else." Fanks for nuffink, as working-class people sometimes say, on finishing a generous but far from nutritious feast of "social anthropology". |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Snobs: A Novel <br />by Julian Fellowes <br />320pp, Weidenfeld, 12.99 Edith Lavery, the heroine of Snobs, has, like Thackeray's Becky Sharp, but one ambition: to find a wealthy husband who will give her a position in society. "How else was she to enjoy the good things in life if she did not marry them?" And even though her search for greatness is conducted during the 1990s, as opposed to the Napoleonic wars, in the world according to Julian Fellowes Edith's appraisal of her prospects makes perfect sense. Unearned greatness, to the snobs he fondly describes, is the very nicest kind of greatness, and it belongs exclusively to the aristocracy. Entry to the aristocracy can be achieved only through marriage. So, unlike Becky Sharp, Edith is something of a role model. Fellowes is married to a niece of Earl Kitchener. After they are introduced by their mutual friend, the actor/ upper-class person who is the narrator of Snobs, Edith - daughter of a Jewish accountant - sets her sights on the heir to Broughton Hall. Lord Charles Broughton is so grand that even his hair is upper class: "... that fair Rupert Brooke hair, crinkly curls at the nape of his neck, that is so characteristic of the English aristocrat". To the acute annoyance of Lord Charles's mother, Edith gets her man. "Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisified?", writes Thackeray, after Becky Sharp has plummeted to earth. Not the new Lady Broughton. Her husband is afflicted by three disabilities which, no less than his hair, are so characteristic of the English aristocrat. He is dim, dull and comically hopeless at sexual intercourse. "Charles, like all men of his type, had the greatest possible distaste for any of the mechanics of womanhood." Edith is bored. Not even the prospect of rewriting the guidebook can cheer her up. Before you can say serviette she has fallen for an actor in a costume drama and started out on her return journey to social oblivion. The exalted group that Fellowes likes to capitalise as the Gang, the Inner Circle or Society instantly cuts her dead. Edith discovers the agony of being denied entry to Annabel's. She is obliged to buy chain-store clothes, which cruelly expose the housemaid genes that made her marriage an unfortunate experiment in what the narrator terms "miscegenation". If there are few surprises among the humiliations subsequently meted out to this "child of an arriviste" - snubbed by those who sometime did suck up to her, stuck in a poky flat, tortured by the longing for the splendour she so lightly discarded - Edith's cautionary tale provides a serviceable pretext for what is really a doting guide to the English aristocracy. For the novice climber, Fellowes's guide to the basics of social mountaineering should prove a godsend. It is illustrated with some cherishably nasty, Gosford Park-style scenes of aristocratic point-scoring, and is far more illuminating than a copy of Correct Form on the customs and affectations designed to ensure that Gang members can always be distinguished from everybody else. Snobs is not too grand to answer the most basic questions. How should I word it? "The upper classes only ever address an envelope to the female part of a couple." How should I arrange a "really smart" wedding? "It is out of the question that the company should do anything as middle class or sensible as sit down to eat." And a smart case of depression? "The very word counsellor sends a shudder of disgust down any truly well-bred spine." There is just one important omission. Nowhere does Fellowes say what these truly well-bred people call the toilet. Maybe because he is not just the husband of Lord Kitchener's niece but an actor as well, Fellowes is engagingly acute on "the aristocracy's consciously created image" - ie, its absolute reliance on the correct sets, props, costumes and audience. "The English upper classes", he says, "have a deep, subconscious need to read their difference in the artefacts about them." Lord Charles, when we first spot him busily owning his estate on a hot summer day, is wearing "tweeds and corduroys despite the weather and one of those tiresome brown felt derbies that Englishmen in the country imagine to be dashing". The "tiresome" is one of many reminders that, even if the narrator is enough of an outsider to see the absurdities of his friends, posh will always be his first language. So much so, that if well-bred Fellowes doesn't do something such as invent a plausible sequence of events, it is probably because making things up is common. Smart fiction does not go in for ostentatious plotting: the climactic scene in Snobs depends on Lord Charles not ever being available on the telephone. Smart fiction has no need for show-offy characterisation: Lord Charles is "like all his breed", he has "one of those English bodies" and his sister is "one of those children of the purple". Similarly for the proles: Edith is "one of those flawlessly dressed women", her actor is "one of those actors", appearing in "one of those made-for-television pieces". Foreigners are simply "this Levantine", "some dusky premier", "northerners". As for Snobs, it is one of those books one imagines being sent up to Balmoral, come September, where it will be proclaimed divinely funny and quite amazingly true to life. |
0catherinebennett
| 4Books
| Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Autobiography by William Shawcross 1,000pp, Macmillan, 25 For the Queen Mother, writes William Shawcross, as he trudges through the second half of her life, "one decade glided into another, with the basic pattern of her days, weeks, months and years being fairly constant". For much of his biography he is remarkably persuasive on this point. Chapter after chapter of his interminable chronicle glides, or rather drags, repetitively past, allowing the few things that did change to stand out in lurid contrast. One year, for instance, she acquired a stairlift. But there must have been more to it than that. The Queen Mother was deeply in debt most of the time. And the arrival on the public stage of Prince Charles's mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, for example, must have caused a temporary wrinkle in the serene old lady's gin, nags'n'picnics routine. For grandmother and grandson were close. And considering her feelings about Wallis Simpson, who went to her grave unforgiven, and later about Peter Townsend, the Queen Mother must have had some views on the divorcee who saw off Diana. Concerning Wallis, she wrote at the height of the abdication crisis: "If Mrs Simpson is not fit to be Queen, she is not fit to be the King's morganatic wife." What, then, did she make of Charles's ambitious mistress? The woman features here only once, on page 795, identified as the wife of a royal guest, Andrew Parker Bowles: theirs is a joint entry in a 1970s Castle of Mey visitors' book. The author devotes far more space to the Queen Mother's lunches, to the decorations on her millions of hats, to her horses, to the various inert objects he spots then solemnly itemises, as if in training for the world championships of the tray game. Among the ornaments arranged on a Castle of Mey desk, he doggedly reports, is "a little corgi from the Buckingham Palace gift shop". It sits there now. The Queen Mother's house, Shawcross assures us, "is preserved as it was in her lifetime". He has chosen to do the same thing for her reputation. If it's hard to respect a biographer capable of an omission on the Camilla scale, it is impossible to trust him. What else has he left out? Shawcross records Princess Margaret's vandal decision to destroy letters from Diana to the Queen Mother because, she said, they were "so private". Given his determination to empathise, at all times, with the royal point of view, his comment on this affair may be read as savagely critical: "It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint." From that perspective, this biographer appears to be at his most usefully unguarded in the first fifth of the Queen's 101 years. Possibly because it was long ago, Shawcross is willing to depict his heroine, during the first world war, as a giddy airhead gripped by her prodigious appetites for food, clubs, clothes, cocktails, dancing, chocs, actors, shopping and men in uniform, including chauffeurs. The nautical look had a particularly stimulating effect. Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was only 15 when she wrote a characteristically coarse letter to her governess: the Firth of Forth was heaving, she reported, with "simply hundreds of beautiful brown lieutenants, subs, snotties (midshipmen), Admirals and sailors. Oh my! They were all most amorous!" Not that she was unaware there was a war on. "I feel as if I never want to go to a dance again," she wrote in 1918. "One only makes friends and then they are killed." Long before she would express her thankfulness at having been bombed, so as to look the East End in the face, the ill-educated Elizabeth complained bitterly at having had to travel to the same area, where she failed her school certificate. "What was the use of toiling down to that er place Hackney?" she demanded. But no sooner had this droll but frightful-sounding young woman accepted a proposal from the stammering Duke of York (having strung him along for a year or two), than such disagreeable sentiments were never heard again. Like her personality, the Queen Mother's epistolary style appears to have been transformed, on the instant of betrothal, into everything that is pious and dignified, sympathetic and charming. Unless we have Shawcross to thank for this unblemished characterisation of a boozy actress who more recently, according to the journalist Edward Stourton, said the EU would never work, because of "all those Huns, wops and dagos". In his diaries, her loyal friend the late Woodrow Wyatt recorded, with more tact "She clearly has some reservations about Jews in her old-fashioned way". "I'm not as nice as you think," she used to tell him. Eleanor Roosevelt suspected something of the sort, noting Elizabeth's gift for "turning on graciousness like water". Shawcross, who is probably more queen motherly than the Queen Mother, will have none of it. "She may have been a brilliant actress," he allows, "but her feelings were genuine." Really? It comes to something when a biographer's partiality is repeatedly exposed by the testimony of his own subject. Why can't poor women live on tea and "some buns", wondered this legendary trencherwoman, during the depression. In another letter, written after a bomb hit Buckingham Palace, we find her moved by a visit to the East End, where 200 people had died under a school. PS, she writes: "Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing". So we learned something, after all. |
7peterpreston
| 4Books
| The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President by Jacob Weisberg Bloomsbury 16.99, pp271 It is irresistible to think of Hollywood turning this scintillating thesis of book into a big-screen epic a few years down the road and watching the notional credits roll. Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, Eugene O'Neill and Edna Ferber. Additional dialogue by Churchill and Arthur Miller, based on an unoriginal idea by Sophocles and Shakespeare. Starring Sean Penn as George W Bush, Clint Eastwood as Poppy Bush, Meryl Streep as Barbara and Russell Crowe as Karl Rove. Running time: roughly 57 years, from the day Prescott Bush became a US senator to the day next February when grandson George leaves the White House for ever. And there is an almost cinematic plot here, one that seeks to bathe modern politics in history and psychology. Here's Prescott, an uptight bear of an East Coast merchant banker, married to Dorothy from the Midwest Walker family. Her dad is a banker, too, but a reckless, carousing adventurer from the other end of the Bush moon. Prescott and Dorothy have five kids and a rigid family philosophy. Boys don't get spoonfed riches or favours. They go far away and try to make their own fortunes. Second son George Herbert Walker Bush does precisely that. He goes to war and becomes a real hero; then he goes to Texas and finds oil. But this temporarily exiled Kennebunkport Yankee wants to turn politician, just like dad. The family Bush has loads of clout. Poppy Bush becomes director of the CIA, ambassador to China, veep of the USA and then commander-in-chief from the Oval Office, hailing triumph in the Cold War before starting a hot one in Iraq. But Poppy and Barbie's eldest son George has a lot of the Walker in him. Dad and Mum give his boozing and lowbrow high jinks pretty short shrift. They think their second son Jeb, down there in Florida, will be the true standard-bearer of family values. Thus they piss off George W. He stops boozing, finds God and Laura - and also finds Rove, one of Poppy's unregarded backroom boys. Together they win Texas and then the White House, whereupon young George embarks on a determined programme of self-destruction - not seeking, as previously supposed, to honour his father and mother, completing their work, confirming their legacy. No way. Young George is going to stick it to old, quavering, thoughtful George. He's going to have clear, triumphal policies. He's going to blast that bastard Saddam, who once tried to blow up the Bushes, right off the face of the earth. Which is where tragedy enfolds Texas and the world. Books about George W have moved over the years from hagiography to mere slaghimoffgraphy, chronicling the supposed transition from titan to figure of fun. Weisberg, the editor of Slate magazine online, is a scholar, wit and acute observer. He's made a living out of several collections of Bushisms, volumes of dunderheaded verbal bloopers. Now he tries serious and is seriously brilliant. This portrait of a senior son scorned and utterly pig-headed arrives supported by many telling quotations from inside the family and solves otherwise baffling mysteries. Why invite Baker-Hamilton, that committee of wise, grey men, to tell you how to get out of Iraq, then tell them to take a running jump? Because Jim Baker was Poppy's fixer, doing Poppy's business. Because any surge is better than dripping around like Dad. You can explain a great deal in this fashion, via the passion of hearth and home. Add disaffected or disgruntled courtiers - Rove, with his master strategy for picking the Democratic party apart like a butterfly, wing from wing; Dick Cheney, with his growing obsession that executive action trumps constitutional balances every time - and there's a rational, truly tragic explanation of why the 43rd President has been such a bust, why Rove and George W leave nothing behind them but an electoral stink and snarl. Too easy, too pat? Sometimes. The Poppy Bush I once traipsed round Alabama with on the campaign trail is wry and surprisingly witty, but also unimposing: he waves limp hands and fluffs his perorations; audiences chatter and shuffle when he speaks. Can this flappy chappy really have ruled with a rod of (at least psychological) iron? He's an amiable cypher, the creation of others, not some dominant dynast. And once you loosen the ties that bind his sons to him, even by a half-turn, the plot itself comes to seem a trifle mechanistic. Was it, as Weisberg claims, a huge snub to Poppy when he wasn't invited on stage at the Philadelphia convention which anointed young George? Not at all, if you sat in the hall and watched: Dad and Mum and their two granddaughters had seats in the gallery everyone could see. They were a constant, proud reference point for the cameras. But, observed from a distance, they also set George W free. There is a feeling, from time to time, that Weisberg is whittling his theory down to too honed and simple a size. (It's strange for instance, how neither the weight of Saudi advice nor the depth of duff Mossad intelligence that preceded Iraqi invasion rates a mention). There are also a few literary bridges to Henry V (and Randolph and Winston Churchill ) too far. But none of that drains the fizz from a truly fizzy, original work of exploration. Weisberg can be cruel, giving young George too little credit for conviction under fire. (Choosing the surge doesn't look quite so idiotic now, as McCain surges in behind). Weisberg doesn't make much sense, too, quoting policy options and dense political texts you can't believe that the fount of all Bushisms could possibly read or register. But, overall, this tale of filial pain and revenge offers wince-making insights from page to page - plus the great boon of common sense. Bush's mob - Cheney, Rumsfeld et al - didn't lie about WMD, Weisberg concludes. They did think Saddam could destroy them. 'They tried to frame a man they thought was guilty - which is not quite the same thing as framing someone you know to be innocent.' So is George W guilty as charged? No: read this amateur psychiatrist's report. But don't pronounce him quite innocent, either. |
7peterpreston
| 4Books
| Cecil B DeMille and the Golden Calf<br />by Simon Louvish<br />(Faber) 25, pp400 It is November 1954 and Colonel Nasser has just seized power. So what, pray, are substantial sections of the Egyptian army doing now? Limbering up for Suez defensive duty? No, they're out in the Sinai desert driving chariots, the Pharaoh's faithful minions waiting for the Red Sea to part. Cecil B DeMille is here filming The Ten Commandments. Torrents of dollars flow into the colonel's new socialist coffers (though special marine effects are reserved for a Paramount studio tank back in LA). Maybe 30,000 extras fill the screen as Moses Heston, all jutting jaw and rippling pecs, leads the Exodus. If this is the great Cecil's last movie, then it's a masterpiece of hokum. And the master himself is out and about preaching most of those commandments from the heart (except the one about not committing adultery). You couldn't make it up. Indeed, only DeMille and assorted scriptwriters, some of them part of his honorary harem, would think of making it up. We do not, perhaps, manufacture moguls such as Cecil Blount DeMille any more. Only Spielberg, directing, producing, running his own little empire, comes close. Almost half a century after his death, DeMille's name is shorthand for spectacle, heaving bosoms and epic excess. He made more than 80 movies, start to finish, and almost all of them coined a profit. What more could anyone ask? Surely, a little shrewd critical assessment to mix with the hype, and Simon Louvish supplies exactly that, playing scholar as diligently as he tours the gossip circuit. He hasn't seen everything DeMille churned out after The Squaw Man in 1914, because too much of that is lost and probably gone forever, but he's seen everything there is left to see, especially from the early days when he directed 11 pictures in 1914 plus 14 in 1915, and he knows the artistry as well as the effort involved. There were only three directors who mattered in those early, tumultuous days - DW Griffith, Erich von Stroheim and DeMille - and DeMille wholly earned his place up there with the other legends. He might have come from a family of playwrights - dad, mum, brother William - but he didn't have their talent for the theatre. What he did have was a sense of adventure and inexhaustible energy. He went west to Hollywood almost by accident with his friend, Jesse Lasky. He stayed to dominate it with cowboys and Indians, worlds at war, biblical excursions, even social comedy. He might have helped shape the stereotype of a movie tycoon, but he was not stereotypical. He was a snarler, a driver, a monstrous ego, but he looked after a devoted repertory company of collaborators and mistresses until the day he died. He was a family man in thrall to his wife Constance and children both conceived and adopted, but he might have invented Californication inside his Culver City redoubt. He certainly invented celebrity chat shows (on radio). There's a lot to dislike about DeMille. His rages could part the Red Sea. As he aged, he drifted further and further right, laying out the red carpet for Joe McCarthy. He made film after film about early Judaism, but never seemed to cast an actual Jew in any of them. Sometimes, the sanctimony of his sub-biblical neoconservatism is choking. But he is also the embodiment of early Hollywood: daring, ambitious, crude and cultured, part monster, part commercial genius. Louvish does him proud and, in particular, rediscovers him as a giant of the silent era. Adding words couldn't kill his talent while he remembered how to fill a screen. How would he fare today as epic supplants epic? Probably not as well as he fared in the years before computers took over the action. DeMille didn't like fakery. His kitchen sinks were real. He believed in delivering the ultimate goods. But his stunning spectacles are still the ones we remember. Perhaps we should have let him invade Suez for us. |
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| Flat Earth News by Nick Davies<br />
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| More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 by Tony Benn Hutchinson 20, pp400 It's a Saturday morning in 2002 and Tony Benn's phone rings. Michael Foot is hacked off because Benn's sold his last volume of diaries to the Mail. 'Well, at least I didn't go to Australia at the expense of Rupert Murdoch,' our hero rasps back. 'Boy, was he angry! And I thought, bloody hell, that man joined in the witch-hunt of the left with the full support of all the right-wing papers ...' When, months later, Benn goes to Foot's big birthday party, he marks his old leader's encroaching age with something near relish. 'He was sitting all the time. His head was shaking about, as it does. He highlighted his support for the war in Yugoslavia, which I thought strange. But still, he is 90.' All of which serves as a useful reminder of bad times a quarter of a century past when brotherhood in the Labour party seemed best defined as a pilot episode for The Sopranos and the man formerly known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn was hate-figure-in-chief, reviled for shredding the last vestiges of unity before Mrs Thatcher swept them away. He's morphed into something quite different now: he gives 'big hugs' to Natasha Kaplinsky, Saffron Burrows and sundry visitors who become friends. He's chummy with Cherie. He's full of the ailments and snoozes of incipient exhaustion, but these make him appear a softer, more vulnerable fellow: earnest, eloquent, principled because these days he never need compromise. He grieves most movingly for the love of his life who died before him. The widower stays in the same big Notting Hill house, surrounded by the clobber of a long, happy marriage and struggling with a leaking roof. But he still sets himself an infernal pace: four books a year, newspaper columns, TV shows, platform speech after speech. He does rehearsed impromptu on nightly demand, long before David Cameron thought of it. He travels Britain relentlessly, a driven man who fears that the music might stop. You may glimpse Benn with puffing pipe hanging out of train windows from Crewe to Cornwall. And if there's nothing much doing on the travel front, then his chum Speaker Martin has given him a free pass to the Palace of Westminster, so he can sit in the Peers' Gallery or the Commons tea room and feel that, after 50 years, the most wonderful working men's club in London still looks after honorary life members. Are these diaries, like the six books before them, entirely honest? Of course not or, at least, not exactly. His loathing for Tony Blair fills page after page. Blair's a dictator, an autocrat. He reduced national executive meetings to farce and cabinet meetings to 20 minutes. Yet when the hated one offers Benn's son, Hilary, repeated promotions, there's scant hint of gratitude or reappraisal. Indeed, Hilary is given an easy ride on the principles front. He's allowed to say what he likes about Iraq or anything else without a word of paternal remonstration, because he's doing what's necessary and Dad is touchingly proud of his achievements. But such understanding never extends beyond the family circle. It is almost as though winning elections time after time were some mortal sin, as though the compromises needed for any change stick in a gullet of unrelenting hostility. It is a compelling, often rollicking read. And some of the points, like his passionate fears for the carnage of war in Iraq, are savagely well-argued. He didn't waft off to see Saddam on some kind of ego trip. He went because he thought he might help stop something terrible and when Saddam told him that there were no weapons of mass destruction, who now can say that he lied? Events and amazing energy have kept him going beyond the point 'where your main function is to do obituaries of people you know'. Against all odds, he's the nearest thing British politics has to a national treasure. But always keep your defences handy when he ventures too near. Most of the hostility of 25 years ago is clearly pointless and gone. His affection for his family - and theirs for him - speaks of a humanity his old enemies never acknowledged. Yet you can't fill a year's diary entries, let alone 50 years' worth, by just being 'nice'. Tony Benn was a player; he remains a player; and if you saw him popping up on TV the other day, wondering if he could stand for Parliament again at 82, you know he'll carry on playing until the day somebody else has to write the obituaries. Big hugs, but eyes wide open, too. |
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| Who Runs Britain? by Robert Peston Hodder & Stoughton 20, pp360 The title question is rhetorical, without a definitive answer. Apparently, Gordon Brown doesn't run Britain. Like Tony Blair before him, he truckles to the global super-rich. His bizarre New Labour rule is 'that if you don't want to pay tax, be impoverished or obscenely wealthy,' Peston notes sourly. But do a few globetrotting billionaires really make us, and our elected leaders, dance like puppets on some golden string? Not in ways you can quite pin down. Their main threat, the one that gets Downing Street oddly anxious, is that they'll push off to some other fiscal heaven and leave us in the lurch, which would be unpleasant if they paid their full tax whack in the first place. But they don't. Peston doesn't do angry. His BBC business editor berth, not to mention all those calm years on the Financial Times, keeps wrath well under wraps. But as he surveys a City landscape of hedge funds, private-equity capitalists and cheap cash stacked tower-block high, he wonders whatever became of the dour son of the manse who frowned over greed and railed against avarice. Under 10 years of Brown's stewardship, 'the maximum spoils have gone to those at the very apex of the income and wealth league tables; a new plutocracy has been born'. Why? Heaven alone knows. And now, as the rivers of cash start to run dry, that mystery will surely be probed time and again. The best sections in this fluent, incredibly up-to-the-minute look at Britain in the first months of 2008, don't explore theories of extremes and extremely depressing consequences, though. Peston, in relaxed, conversational style, is a great teaching and travelling companion along the highways of finance. Can't tell your private-equity gambit from your hedge-fund finagle? Unsure what happened to the pension upon which you were relying? Here's the clearest, most erudite explanation around. And it's all so damned easy to pull off, money for jam when the banks take the strain, because they're too dumb to do due risk diligence, and when the Treasury gets every intervention wrong, because it seems to have become terminally stupid. Want to build more hospitals and schools? No: we taxpayers effectively subsidise Debenhams or the AA as they jump through private equity's hoops to the tune of many lost tax millions, then, for years, reward the suits who put the deals together with a 10 per cent capital gains windfall. But, in its middle reaches, you can feel Peston's loyalties wandering. He ought to be putting the boot into Damon Buffini, the chairman of Permira, Britain's only 'world-class' private-equity company, but Buffini is black, with a single mum, born on a Midlands council estate, an Arsenal fan and he's too interesting to be a cypher for hate. Like Ronnie Cohen, founder of Apax and creator of businesses in Palestinian territories, he is a three-dimensional character. Whereupon, in the constant company of Philip Green, Stuart Rose of M&S and Allan Leighton, we move into chapters full of pulsating tales in which the super-rich earn their corn by being smarter, shrewder and quicker off the mark than the rest of us. In short, Peston finds himself beached somewhere between condemnation and admiration. If Philip Green of BHS and Topshop ran Britain, we'd have some fabulous parties and great tales to tell. At which point you begin to ask the next, more intriguing question: how much does super wealth matter? Peston believes that a Britain divided between hugely rich and pretty poor, between equity-intensive London and public-service North, is a country that may come apart at the seams. The bingeing of the hedge-fund few brings us 'overpriced art and control of a football club' - but nothing of worth or cohesion. New Labour's legacy may be a land where billions in lost taxes also means lost hope and opportunity. Yet - golly! - it's all very fascinating while it lasts, he seems to mutter round the side. And where, politically, is the resentment of fantastic riches dubiously accumulated? Do Chelsea fans wave their fists at Abramovich - or Ashley Cole (netting more in a week than Derek Conway's expenses for a year)? Does anyone but the Daily Mail care how much Jonathan Ross takes home? Is anybody but Amanda Platell volunteering to knit cashmere socks by the guillotine? No. Like America, we seem to have bought the whole celebrity culture package. We gawp admiringly at the rich and famous. We switch on TV lists of 'the world's top billionaire heiresses'. We aren't into rage or envy. We inhabit a landscape where income gaps don't seem to matter any more. We are almost certainly wrong, fuelling our own demise. But the case for truly caring - for concern about who should run Britain - needs to be made afresh, with passion. Peston has only begun a great, engaging job here. He's started; now he must finish. |
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| Borrowed Time<br/>by Roy Hattersley<br/>Little, Brown 20, pp454 Draw up a list of the best 20th-century Prime Ministers we never had and Roy Hattersley is bound to be somewhere near the top. He was - and remains - a political heavyweight. Three years in some long-ago cabinet looking after prices and consumer protection seems poor reward for such talent. But Hattersley has made a far better rewarded second career for himself as writer. Borrowed Time is his 19th appearance between hard covers. This companion to his earlier book, The Edwardians, is a series of essays on the major events and social changes in Britain between the wars. It begins with the unfair peace of 1918, enforced by squabbling, short-term leaders; it ends with an inevitable lurch back into global conflict 21 years later. We had just two decades without carnage. How did we use them? We founded the BBC, placed the cinema above even football as our favourite entertainment. We watched Beaverbrook and Rothermere compete for power in ways that would leave Rupert Murdoch gasping. We heard a gentleman English cricket captain order his players to bowl high at Aussie bodies. Here are some of the many things that didn't reach a full stop in 1939; trends, innovations and rivalries that touch us still. Hattersley loves all sport and most art just as much as he loves social justice. He writes about them with the bounce of true enthusiasm. Maybe you remember Gordon Richards and Gracie Fields? They're here, along with Amy Johnson and JB Priestley. Their comings and goings are, in a way, the staff and stuff of life. Part-nostalgia, part-primer for new generations, they're the heart of this book. But a politician has to write about politics, too, and here the essay technique is rather less helpful. It worked well enough for The Edwardians because, in a way, nothing much happened through an era when Balfour could take extended Highland holidays away from Number 10 in houses without a phone. But the churn of Lloyd George, Baldwin, Bonar Law and Ramsay MacDonald is too confusing to serve out separately, especially jogging back and forth in time from chapter to chapter. A light reader won't follow the plot, a heavy student will want much more and too few connections are made. Hattersley is wonderfully placed to make those connections. He could, implicitly and explicitly, link the general strike to the miners' strike, set AJ Cook alongside Arthur Scargill. ('Cook was an orator, not a negotiator: nor was he a realist'). He could take the abdication crisis and run it through the wringer of our modern monarchy. (The Prince of Wales thought his father 'stuffy, boring and impossible to please'). He could give us more Attlee plus continuing Labour tradition and rather less of Herbert Morrison's squirmings. He could find a little John Major in Neville Chamberlain and entertain by illumination. But, rather disappointingly, he attempts no such adventures within a formula. Borrowed Time is also frozen in time so far as political resonances go. Perhaps Hattersley feels that compare and contrast isn't quite proper history; perhaps he would need a theme too broad for essay bites. Or perhaps his politics, like our politics, exists in a different time capsule of experiences. The names of many of the more minor ministers who pass through these pages seem deeply lost in irrelevance now. Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection? Roy Sydney George Hattersley. You mean that compulsive, prolific, exceptional chronicler of time when the Westminster music stopped? You mean you remember what he did next? |
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| The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford Harvard University Press 18.95, pp342 It was a small, West Coast magazine and a very big scoop. Much of American public life, Ramparts reported some 41 years ago, had become a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States and the world beyond it were littered with subsidised, sham organisations that all played the same mighty anthem when Frank Wisner and his successors at the Office for Policy Co-Ordination pressed a button. Trade unions, campuses, artists, Catholics, women, Hollywood tycoons, journalists ... they all danced to a spymaster's tune. Whereupon the New York Times and other mainstream papers joined in the exposé and the Wurlitzer short-circuited. Within a few months, the entire apparatus of propaganda deception had imploded. Two deep questions - one explicit, the other elusively implicit - arise from Hugh Wilford's elegantly written, diligently researched examination of the CIA's glory days. First, and quite unexpectedly: how did Allen Dulles's 'company' control the instruments of deception it had built? Second, and still more unexpectedly: did any of it add up to more than a little penny whistling? Readers of Wilford's first essay in this area (The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War) will know that the history professor from Long Beach University trades in cool judgment, not tub thumping. He's a master of context and nuance. He finds no house room for overarching theories. Thus, the luminaries who did the agency's bidding did not, for the most part, have to be browbeaten into collaboration. Like Joe Alsop, the syndicated newspaper columnist, and his brother Stewart, they were true believers to begin with. They bought the thesis first eloquently outlined by the great guru of postwar diplomacy, George Kennan. They saw the USSR as a dangerous adversary steeped in dirty trickery and phoney associations designed to delude gullible liberals. They didn't get mad, though; they just played the same game. They were joiners and participants by natural inclination; they thought it their duty to chip in and help Uncle Sam (which also meant helping many of their old university and country club pals). This wasn't, in short, some close-knit, top-down conspiracy, but rather positive patriotism as practised by concerned citizens. It concealed no guilty secrets nor, in their eyes, amounted to doing anything wrong. Gloria Steinem, for one, never thought about apologising when her membership came to light. 'In my experience, the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, non-violent and honourable,' she said. And, since that was the case, there was scant inclination to treat orders as orders. If you were a bigwig in the unions who didn't like being told what to do, you damned well argued back. Front organisations for democratic dialogue and disjointed debate? Not exactly, but there was nothing subservient or overtly sinister here. And then Ramparts changed everything or, perhaps, picked up on the changes that the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam had brought. Suddenly, it was rather harder to sort the good guys from the bad guys and reverence for the CIA had turned to edgy anxiety. The fronts began to seethe with the debate that had once been their recruiting strength. Wisner's successor at the OPC, Tom Braden, who had by this point left the CIA, blew much of the gaffe himself with an astonishing series of revelations in the Saturday Evening Post. Perhaps the agency had seen the writing on the wall and was engineering its own destruction? In any case, the Wurlitzer was turned into scrap metal within months of what one official historian described as 'one of the worst operational catastrophes in CIA history'. At this point, many of the witting cowered in chastened wrath and most of the unwitting who had worked alongside them wallowed in furious denunciation. Right-wing organisations railed at the CIA for funding left-wing fronts, not them. Newspapers like the New York Times, even though it had had a secret agreement with the agency to employ at least 10 agents as reporters or clerks in its foreign bureaux, assumed irate attack mode. Shame and loathing replaced patriotic pride in a trice. The whole enterprise folded back to front and those elusive questions of power and reality became inescapable. The trouble with secret agencies is that they're never open to evaluation. We're stuck with taking them - and paying for them - on terms they dictate. The Wurlitzer must be mighty because they tell us so. But then it's spook nonsense as usual. Plant a man in Paramount Studios and get him to censor a gag about manhandling Muslim women from a Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin farce because it threatened 'potentially disastrous results in the Muslim world'. Back an unwitting Halas and Batchelor to make Animal Farm because Orwell really socks it to the Reds, doesn't he? Write a memo noting that 'women are now a very important factor in nation-building' and fund a committee of women to plan over coffee mornings. Fund directors who want more money and artists who'll do anything for money. Burn fingers time and again on the Partisan Review, then do the same on Encounter, The evidence covers a swirl of constant, exhausting activity, but, significantly when you look hard, it does not demonstrate much in the way of hearts and minds massively moved. To the contrary, as Kennan wanly concluded at the end, stuff of this kind 'is not in the nature' of America. The fronts that Wisner built were more errors than terrors, shrill tunes on that tin whistle - which Hugh Wilford plays with sentient skill. |
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| The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune by Steve Coll Allen Lane 25, pp671 There is a contradiction here. Without Osama, and what he did, this family history would surely never have been written. What western publishing house cares about the growing pains of a Middle East civil engineering corporation? Yet the story of Mohamed bin Laden, his heirs and successors, is enthralling. It does not explain 9/11, nor al-Qaeda, but it explains a great deal about the tentacles that run from Riyadh to touch a wider world, tentacles of corruption, ambition, hedonism and dislocation. In a curious way, it is essentially American. A century ago, a Yemeni peasant farmer borrowed an ox to plough his patch. But the ox died and its owner wanted restitution, so the farmer had to flee miles from his homeland. He married, began to raise a family, then died, leaving two sons, Mohamed and Abdullah. Mohamed, the elder, found work on building sites. He was skilled, organised, meticulous. People trusted and promoted him; in the Thirties, he founded his own company, where one thing went with another. One thing was the house of Saud and its ruler, Abdul Aziz. The other was oil. Great gushers of cash poured from beneath the desert. Abdul Aziz was an absolute monarch determined to build temples, roads, palaces. So he called for Mohamed bin Laden, the master builder. It was a classic saga in the American style, of impoverished immigrants turned into millionaires. At the end of this tale it's 13 September 2001. America is stunned and vengeful. The name Bin Laden seems like a curse. Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, hires a Boeing 727 to thread its way across the States, picking up the Bin Laden family - students, entrepreneurs, lawyers, wives, kids - to get them to Saudi before they come to harm. Osama may have declared war on the States, but his kith and kin love the place. They don't want to go. The US is their home. In between the death of the ox and the death of belief in a peaceful, post-communist world, the royal family and the family that does its building move in parallel. Abdul Aziz is a holy man and unholy fornicator. By 1930, he claimed 235 or so wives, married and divorced four at a time. He aimed to extend his power by procreation and thus keep it in the family. Mohamed bin Laden was the same. He managed 22 wives and 53 children. In 1957 alone, the year Osama was born, by way of a fleeting marriage to a 15-year-old Syrian girl, he was the father of six other children, two daughters and four more sons. So pause here for a moment: what kind of true 'family life' does such compulsive copulation produce? It may be habit-forming from generation to generation: Osama has racked up at least five wives and 22 kids. But what does it do to the psyche? Dynastically, more means more - more chance that one out of scores of sons will be capable of carrying the business forward. Thus, when Mohamed dies in a plane crash, his son Salem has been educated well enough at a minor English boarding school to take charge. He 'believes in his Learjet, his MU-2 and his jeans and guitar and harmonica,' says a Lebanese chum. The empire grows, the routes to homes in Florida are open wide. The Bin Ladens are global before Salem dies young, in another plane crash. But here's brother Bakr, more prudent, more concerned about image, a talent to take the helm. For as long as the House of Saud survives, there is money and booze and a wife in every port, with the American ambassador dancing attendance and the Bush family laying out a Kennebunkport welcome mat. It's a heady ride and a racy read in Harold Robbins mode. This is how Saudi Arabia was built and these are the foundations it rests on. No wonder Salem began to move millions overseas when the House of Saud rocked. No wonder that today, under Bakr's stewardship, the Bin Laden brand has a global reach, into jeans as well as bricks and mortar. But does even Steve Coll, a shrewd Washington Post journalist, understand how Osama bin Laden emerged from this brew? Only mistily, perhaps. Osama was part of the family business, too. Salem left him $9m or so. He was family bagman and House of Saud middle man in Peshawar as the Afghan war against the Soviets gathered momentum. He was a good fundraiser with charisma and contacts. Yet how did that relatively minor family apparatchik turn into a monster of destruction? You can trace his zealotry back to the gym master from the Muslim Brotherhood who taught him in Jeddah. You can sense the alienation of the excluded. You can also discern the restlessness of midlife crisis as he develops his creed and targets the Americans who underpin his family and wealth. But he's not much of an intellectual; he's not a guerrilla fighter in the badlands of west Pakistan now; he seems lonely and somewhat bemused. Osama bin Laden is the cuckoo who fell out of a nest of gold lined with mink. If you want to know what comes next, look back to Saudi Arabia and ask yourself how long can this state endure? The enemies of our enemy can be intrinsic enemies, too. |
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| Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush by Robert Draper. Simon & Schuster 18.99, pp480 Giving by Bill Clinton. Hutchinson 20, pp256 There are four standard phases to the chronicling of an American presidency. One, the glad-confident-morning phase perfected by Theodore H White, dishes up hope and expectation, dew-fresh. The second, around four years later, habitually trades in polemic, defensive or disillusioned. (Robert Draper counted at least 100 books in that category when he sat down to write.) Then, at the close, there's the final verdict, the valedictory, the stab at instant history (Draper's stock in trade), plus a postscript phase that might be called 'What Bill and George did next'. Dead Certain, Washington's hottest dinner-party book this autumn, is a turbocharged phase-three project. How do you sum up a President who'll sit in the Oval Office for 16 more months? Get him to do it for himself. Leaven your judgment through six hours of face-to-face interviews, then top them off with a couple of hundred of chats with his political nearest and dearest. In particular, get him to speculate what he'll do when nobody hails this particular chief any longer. 'I'm gonna build a fantastic Freedom Institute ... I want a place where young leaders: you know, the former Prime Minister of Mongolia, it'd be cool to pay him a stipend, have him come to live in Dallas and write and lecture.' Anything else, sir? 'Well, replenish the ol' coffers ... Clinton's making a lot of money'. (He is indeed, but that's a different story.) Robert Draper is the Washington correspondent of GQ magazine and might thus have been more naturally employed covering the last Clinton years. But he worked in Texas a decade ago, made friends with George W and Karl Rove and was obviously seen as a suitable scribe around court. And he got enough chat room with the men at the top to turn Bob Woodward green with envy. This isn't a particularly well-written account. ('His unmade bed of a life was starting to achieve coherence, thanks to a brunette librarian with catlike eyes named Laura Welch'). Nor is it well-constructed: one thing tends to plonk along after another, already made stale by repetition. But there are fresh facts and insights here and they do carry a punch. The Bush we meet in these pages is not the George W of parody. We see him make his own way, and fortune, in Texas oils, scant thanks to Poppy (Dad's more of rival than a spur). We see him fight hard for the nomination, win by a dubious whisker and become his own man, choosing Dick Cheney for Vice-President, not having him chosen for him. We watch him get into the office by 7.30am sharp and work like a beaver (with two hours' mandatory running or cycling factored in). We hear him take charge of meetings starting smack on time, dressing down a late Colin Powell, chewing off his Iraq lieutenants when they can't get the electricity back on, delivering erudite little lectures on Muslim extremism. He makes decent jokes, plenty of them, but this alternative Bush is no joke himself. He can even seem formidable. But his progress, like his tragedy, comes back to front. The first years in Washington are the good years, listening, careful years (with his vital aide Karen Hughes close by). He's personally staunch after 9/11. He's decisive and passably eloquent. And then it all goes wrong (after Ms Hughes goes back to Texas). There's his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. There's also an increasing refusal to pause, ponder and adjust. This later Bush is a conviction politician who lacks real convictions, a cock-eyed, stubborn optimist. 'Are you an eight-year man?' he asked his staff after four years were gone, but his own sixth and seventh years have been cruelly revealing. Draper can't hide the mistakes of a rigid mindset, but at least he sets this President in a different context: as a substantial politician and operator and nobody's pawn. Don't blame somebody else for the blunders. Bush doesn't. He was responsible, he ruled this roost. But, equally, don't write him off too glibly as a bit of clown. There's nothing buffoonish about the way he shuffles his administration pack (goodbye Andy Card, with a successor already in waiting). And he doesn't blink easily. 'Mr President,' says his National Security Adviser, Steve Hadley, despondent over the latest Iraq policy review, 'you've got to run it.' To which Bush snaps back: 'I am running it.' Whatever the legacy 16 months hence, it will be his legacy. So to phase four and that 'Freedom Institute'. Old Presidents don't fade away. Jimmy Carter still stirs the Jewish lobby with a will. Poppy Bush was there at Bill Clinton's side in New Orleans. And Clinton himself toils in the gardens of redemption and calculation. Giving is a buy-one-thick-autobiography-and-get-a-slim-one-free sort of non-book, a series of homilies on charity and service (often by the Clinton Foundation, battling Aids and African ills) that often seems little more than a list of worthy causes. If you can't give money, give time. If you can't give a lot, like Bill Gates, give a little. This is 'how each of us can change the world' and scepticism inevitably arrives as part of the package. How long before the next election? Count the glowing tributes to Hillary and look for the games hubby's playing now. But don't let the cynicism grow too corrosive, either. Bill Clinton's call to linked arms silences most doubters with its weight of detail, especially when he talks about the 10.2 million Americans now working for a million charitable organisations in the United States. He is putting in the time and effort. He is replenishing the 'ol' coffers' and giving something back, too. Last year, Bush and Clinton bumped into each other by accident at the United Nations. 'Six years from now, you're not gonna see me hanging out in the UN lobby,' George tells Draper, 'with a semi-smirk.' But stranger things have happened. Sometimes - a Jimmy Carter memorial lecture - you can like your Presidents most when they're done and dusted and the best of phase four is still to come. |
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| The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon Little, Brown 12.99, pp457 Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, this rich slice of investigative journalism turns into something still more substantial. We've got the headline points easily enough. We know that the Kean/Hamilton Commission, examining America's response to 9/11, was supposedly nobbled by an executive director in league with the White House. We know that Professor Philip Zelikow, the nobbler in question, had actually been part of the Republican transition team and a close collaborator of Condoleezza Rice. Worse, we know he's risen to bureaucratic glory since as State Department counsellor at Ms Rice's right hand. 'Independent' congressional inquiries don't come any dodgier than this. But that, as Shenon's account of the committee's turbulent history races along, also comes to seem a pretty constrained sensation. What's much more fascinating is his dissection of the politicking that dogged this commission and which will surely dog any heirs and successors when they try to take on associated debacles like Iraq. Indeed, from the Warren Commission (which investigated the killing of President Kennedy) to pallid British parallels, the lessons are eerily similar. First, in Capitol Hill terms, choose your chairman. Dr Kissinger, we presume? But he ducks out because his company has too many Saudi clients, and in comes Tom Kean, a courtly Republican former New Jersey governor turned university vice-chancellor. And a balancing Democratic deputy chairman? George Mitchell, of Belfast fame? But he's too busy. Enter ex-congressman Lee Hamilton from Indiana, a mild, consensual chap. Already the shape of things to come is predestined. If the big names won't play, the lesser names had best stick together as co-chairmen and make as few waves as possible. They pick Zelikow as staff supremo because, though choleric, he seems strong and persuasive. They are warned of their mistake. They press on. The Democrats on the commission reckon that the administration will be unhelpful going on hostile and want to subpoena their evidence from day one. The co-chairs don't agree. Delays and frustration ensue. Neither the funding nor the time is sufficient. Even getting security clearance for commission staff takes months. Writing any sort of report, let alone a wise one, becomes a formidable challenge. At which point, frankly, the alleged importance of Philip Zelikow begins to recede a little. He clearly doesn't want Rice involved. He clearly thinks that the CIA, led by a charming director with a shocking memory, should take most stick. Others, Shenon included, are inclined to dump more opprobrium on the FBI's doorstep. They knew about some of the skyjackers. They had them on a plate. But they were too lumpenly bureaucratic, too administratively arthritic, to get such news from bottom to top. Their old director didn't even have a computer in his office. But at least his replacement, as acting chief, co-operates fully and effusively, unlike George Tenet at the CIA. And thus the sheer pressure of a publication deadline turns the commission's fire away from the bureau. It's the agency that loses autonomy in the final report (as Messrs Bush, Rove and Rice duck for cover). Did Kean/Hamilton do a decent job? Not too bad, in the circumstances, but the huge virtue of Philip Shenon's study is to lay out those circumstances in full. Discover a problem, call for a commission - and this is probably what you get. This, also, may be as good as it gets. We're invited to side with Richard Clarke, the director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, who Zelikow in transitional mode tried to demote. We're supposed to fit that into a pattern of Bush culpability and (proven) Cheney lies. And it's absolutely true that the Bush team, full of evasions and blanknesses, let 9/11 happen on their watch and could conceivably have prevented it. The difficulty (for us, as for Shenon, a fine, fair-minded New York Times reporter) is being quite certain how to find your own way through this Parkinsonian maze in which everybody, Clarke included, plays an expected role. His job is combating terrorism. He warns his masters about terrorist threats day after day. But he would, wouldn't he? Without such warnings, he wouldn't exist. And somewhere in the melee of messages from every delegated side, you glimpse the essential failure of 9/11. Not that nobody told Bush and Rice what might happen, but that everyone set them different priorities, some muttered, some shouted, and that they chose the wrong basket. Osama bin Laden is the greatest creator of jobs worldwide in the 21st century - wander into any airport and see - but the jobsworths couldn't catch him and haven't caught him yet. The might of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency equalled incompetence. So, on this evidence, did al-Qaeda's blunderings. Human and organisational weakness ties hunters and hunted together. It's Shenon's great virtue that The Commission is a masters' thesis in human frailty, an open door to deeper understanding of threats so complex that one man and one answer can never be enough. |
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| Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist <br />by Peter Clarke<br />224pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99 Keynes: The Return of the Master <br />by Robert Skidelsky<br />214pp, Allen Lane, £20 Keynes would not have been surprised. The errors of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which led to runaway growth and unbounded market euphoria, were essentially intellectual. Britain and America had the misfortune to be led by two supremely clever men who were not interested in ideas. "Globalisation, free markets and light-touch regulation" became the slogans of an era which president and prime minister accepted as the sovereign prescription for prosperity. Neither Robert Skidelsky nor Peter Clarke leaves much doubt that the proponents of the "Anglo-American consensus" based their economic policies on the prejudices of private enterprise which they chose not to challenge - partly because their own inclination led them in the same direction and partly because the better option did not possess the virtue of simplicity. Both books - despite the inevitable compression, wonderfully lucid expositions of complicated ideas - remark on the significance of the contrast between Keynes's reception on either side of the Atlantic and in continental Europe. Clarke explains that "France, with its tradition of l'état tutélaire rather than principled laissez-faire, did not need to be disabused of these classical fallacies". Antagonism to the state is an Anglo-Saxon syndrome. The cultural differences persist and are reflected in disagreements over the importance of an unregulated labour market and the government's role in regulating hedge funds and off-shore banking. It is worth noting that "dirigiste" France and Germany began to move out of recession earlier than Britain. Clarke and Skidelsky will claim, with absolute justification, that their books have a more fundamental purpose than explaining the causes of today's recession. But Skidelsky takes what he calls "another Great Depression" as his starting point, and Clarke begins with the assertion that talk of a "slowdown now seems risible" since we are in "the worst [economic] scenario ... since the 1930s". Without the slump and the increasing rejection of the notion that "markets are automatically self-correcting" - a heresy which Keynes abandoned in the early 1930s - neither book would have been written. The message is that Keynes is back, not just as a name to be invoked when convenient, but as a guide through the perilous years that lie ahead. It is with considerable trepidation that I take issue with a central point in Skidelsky's analysis, though I am comforted by the thought that my disagreement may concern politics rather than economics. There are still many opponents of economic regulation who insist that the "market is self-correcting". Indeed, I was on Any Questions when one of their number said that the banking collapse was the necessary antidote to the inflation in house prices that profligate lending had brought about. In a sense, that is right. But the market "corrects itself" at a price which is paid by the homeless, the unemployed and the low paid. It is the free-marketeer's economic equivalent of the Carthaginian peace. They make a wilderness and call it equilibrium. The rich - often the rich whose greed and incompetence has brought the crisis about - generally escape the worst consequences of collapse. Keynes wrote that "the sound banker ... is one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one really can blame him". There have not been many of those paragons about during the last couple of years. Keynes was a meritocrat, not an egalitarian. But he would not have regarded a "correction" which basically spared the rich but penalised the poor as worth the name. As both Clarke and Skidelsky make clear, he was not just a mathematician turned economist. He was a philosopher. Despite his early insistence that personal morality was a question for individual conscience, not general agreement, he had a clear view of the good society. Much of the attraction of both books lies in their exposition of the ideas which are overshadowed by the importance of his work on managing the economic cycle. What Gordon Brown called "the crude Keynesianism of the 70s" was the acceptance that economic activity could be stimulated by increasing "effective demand", that the increase could be promoted by "deficit financing", and that austerity - the "remedy" of the 1930s - increased rather than reduced the depression. Those fundamental truths, now accepted and acted upon by the prime minister and the president of the United States, are enough to explain Keynes's return to political acceptability. But he was the originator of other ideas that possessed greater sophistication, if less immediate application to public policy. Not all of them made as big a contribution to the management of a civilised society as The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money In his Treatise on Probability, Keynes concludes that "probability cannot simply be measured by observed frequency". No matter how often a coin is tossed, the chances of it coming down tails are always 50-50. That assertion - true if the calculation is made immediately before the coin is tossed, but dubious if the assessment is made several tosses earlier - relates to his most famous aphorism. "In the long run we are all dead" is a dangerous truth on which to construct public policy, and Keynes's judgment on the rise of the prewar dictators proves it to be so. "If we are at peace in the short run, that is something. The best we can do is put off disaster, if only in the hope ... that something will turn up." Keynes as Mr Micawber is a new gloss on a complicated personality. Keynes, Clarke tells us, was said by a colleague to have "a wonderful memory for arguments, but no memory for their authors". That selective myopia led to suggestions that he had "appropriated" the theory of effective demand from James Meade. Apparently he also "borrowed without generating any ill feeling" the concept of the "multiplier", one of those ideas which seem obvious after they have been expounded by a person of genius. The true origins of what we now call "Keynesianism" barely matter. His name has come to embody a prescription which politicians ignored at an immense cost to the people whom they represent. Skidelsky and Clarke have written books - each barely 200 pages - which ought to be required reading for every prospective minister. |
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| b>The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday October 22 2006</b><br><br> In the review below, we suggested that Zac Goldsmith had lied to friends and guests to raise money for the Conservative party. This was completely false. We accept that money raised by the recent charity poker event will go towards work on environmental causes and the Shane Warne Foundation. We apologise unreservedly to Mr Goldsmith. <br><br> <hr size="1"> <br><b>The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit</b><br> by David Blunkett <br> Bloomsbury 25, pp872What follows is a prejudiced review - prejudiced not against the author of The Blunkett Tapes but against the genre of which the book is a salutary example. Published diaries are usually a betrayal, since they reveal the contents of conversations which were thought to be confidential. And they are almost invariably attempts either to enhance - or, in the case of fallen idols, rehabilitate - the reputation of the diarist. On the first charge, David Blunkett must be found not guilty. The diaries contain a couple of sideswipes at Jack Straw and John Prescott for daring, in what they believed to be private discussions, to question Blunkett's conduct. But apart from an unlikely story about the Prime Minister seriously considering sacking Gordon Brown, there are virtually no indiscretions which can be regarded as a breach of trust - though Dawn Primarolo may not be happy to know that Blunkett incorrectly anticipated her sacking. The absence of damaging indiscretions is to be applauded. But it is less the result of proper reticence than a consequence of his diaries' character. They are essentially personal rather than political. Their clear purpose, money aside, is to explain and therefore excuse. It is difficult to believe that they will have that result.Every public mistake, no matter how trivial, is painfully regurgitated, and the descriptions are invariably preludes to confessions and pleas for absolution. An appearance on Celebrity Mastermind, which would have been best forgotten, is glorified with the question: 'If I make a fool of myself, what does it matter? The most important thing is that it means a £2,500 donation to the Sheffield Hospice.' The result of Blunkett's self-absorption is therefore both a disappointment and a relief. The only damage the diaries will do the government is the creation of the impression that ministers are far more vainglorious than is, in most instances, the case. But the reader learns little or nothing about 'what really went on' when great issues were at stake.Diaries which are advertised as laying political life bare are almost always a confidence trick played on the gullible public. The implication of their publication, stated overtly when they are serialised in newspapers, is that they reveal the raw, red meat of immediate emotion, the feelings which, for better or for worse, architects of vital decisions experience in moments of triumph and disaster. Even if the authors make what, at the time of writing, they believed to be honest entries, careful editing always follows. The Blunkett text leaves little doubt the original material has been 'improved'.Bunkett's second resignation from the cabinet followed allegations that he had not declared, in exactly the manner required, his financial interest in DNA Bioscience, a company with which the government did business. The story broke in October 2005 and Blunkett resigned on 2 November. His diary entry for 18 May that year, immediately after he rejoined the government and six months before he was again forced out, reads: 'I did the normal declaration of interest with Sir Richard Mottram (the permanent secretary). I have already made the basic declaration on the evening of May 6 including the trust for the shareholding in DNA Bioscience.' To me that reads like a retrospective explanation of the error which he claimed, probably correctly, was an honest mistake. Why on earth should he have chosen to remind his diary of what he had done 12 days earlier? And why, if the entries recorded events as they happened is so much described in the past tense?It would be quite extraordinary if a man, contemplating the wreckage of a once great career, did not try to put the best possible gloss on the years of glory behind him. So perhaps we should not complain that Blunkett is the hero of the political entries in his diary. He is wise. As early as 7 October 2001 he warned that the Afghan intervention would drag on 'because there was (sic) no coordinated strategy between the United States and Britain'. He is loyal. Despite his doubts about the Afghan campaign he urged colleagues to support Tony Blair's 'clear vision of the way ahead'. He is brave. On 7 March 2002 he asked the Prime Minister: 'Why aren't you doing something about the Middle East and the Palestine-Israel conflict? Why are you backing the Americans?' And he is influential. By 13 March, 'Tony's work on Palestine yielded fruit. This does make a difference to Tony's position which looked disastrous at the beginning of the week. Now we must all strengthen his arm.' David Blunkett was always on the side of political virtue.All that being said, it has to be admitted that when the Blunkett tapes turn to private matters the author spares himself very little embarrassing exposure. Indeed, fastidious people will argue that he spares neither himself - nor the reader who is not motivated by prurience - anything like enough. Having made the wholly legitimate claim that he is entitled to keep his private life private, he goes into detail after uninhibited detail about those parts of his personal conduct which he wants to be better understood. Excursions to Annabelle's nightclub, like his apparently platonic liaison with Sally Anderson, would not be worth a mention had Blunkett not chosen to deal with them himself. As it is, the only necessary comment is that his treatment of his private life confirms that he has never been held back by emotional inhibitions.We learn that, under pressure of work and the strain imposed by a tempestuous personal life, he felt 'the world opening up' beneath him. It would be a harder heart than mine which did not feel pity for the pathetic figure that the diary so graphically described. But is pity what he wants? Should not pride alone - putting aside ambition - have encouraged him to keep the moments of black despair to himself? Blunkett is what is called a 'modern man'. That is clear from the frequency with which he hugs those around him. He is not embarrassed about describing his innermost feelings. There will be many previously sympathetic people who are embarrassed by reading about them.However, the diaries suggest that David Blunkett believes that by confessing and accepting his mistakes, he will be exculpated - most of his sins being more venial than mortal, so that forgiveness is hardly necessary. He certainly has a nice line in the apology which is, in reality, a plea for sympathy and understanding. On9 October 2005 he wrote: 'If I could turn the clock back ... I would run a mile from DNA Bioscience and suppers with Sally Anderson. How can so small a mistake have led to so much?' One of the reasons that he paid so heavy a price was the penalty of hubris. He did not grasp the fact that his comparatively trivial mistakes were compounded by his self-righteous attitude. Not surprisingly, his fall from grace produced the greatest outburst of cabinet Schadenfreude in modern times. On the evidence of The Blunkett Tapes he has still not got the message.The only justification for the publication of political diaries is the power which they might possess to instruct the general public about the way in which government works. That was the avowed intention of Dick Crossman who began the fashion, and it has been echoed by the other diarists who have followed in his footsteps. No doubt Blunkett will claim the same. But the tapes tell us little we did not know: Gordon Brown is a tough and sometimes cantankerous Chancellor of the Exchequer; most of the Cabinet would have dumped the Millennium Dome but the Prime Minister insisted that it go ahead; Alastair Campbell leaks convenient news to favoured newspapers in the hope of deflecting them from publishing damaging revelations. The Blunkett Tapes are not about government. They are about David Blunkett.<b>One man and his dogs</b><b>Born:</b> 6 June 1947, Sheffield.<b>Education:</b> Schools for the blind in Sheffield and Shrewsbury, and the University of Sheffield.<b>Political career: </b>Elected to Sheffield City Council in 1970 at the age of 22, becoming the youngest ever councillor. <b>1987</b> Elected Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside. <b>1997-2001</b> Education Secretary. <b>2001-2004</b> Home Secretary (resigned). <b>2005</b> Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (resigned).<b>Hounded:</b> Blunkett's guide dogs have been frequent sources of humour in Westminster. Perhaps the most memorable occasion was when Lucy vomited in Parliament during a speech by her master's Conservative opposite number, David Willetts.<b>Infamy:</b> Blunkett's private life has provided material for one play (Who's the Daddy?), one TV film (A Very Social Secretary) and two musicals (Blunkett - The Musical and the first episode of Radio 4's A 15-Minute Musical). |
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| Walking Ollie <br />by Stephen Foster <br />224pp, Short Books, £9.99 Dog owners are born, not made. Or, if dog-owning is not a genetically induced passion, the need to possess one is likely to have been made irresistible by early environment. When I was six weeks old, Mick - my mother's fox terrier and the best rat catcher in the north Nottinghamshire coalfield - was found standing menacingly astride me in my pram. Long after Mick was dead, my parents argued about his motives. The disagreements always ended, after a long period of brainwashing, with my father agreeing that the dog's intentions had been benign. I listened to those disputes throughout my childhood, youth and early manhood. During that time we owned Teddy and Dinah and encouraged Bessie, from up the road, to spend her time with us. As a result of both the company and conversation I never doubted that I was for dogs and dogs were for me. Stephen Foster, on the other hand, had to acquire the feeling that he needed a canine companion. If Walking Ollie is to be believed, he acquired the lurcher as an act of kindness (to the dog and to his human partner) after examination of a dog book. No wonder that he found the early months of ownership heavy going. Owning a dog is not social work. It is a compulsion. It is because Foster failed to become obsessive that he turned all fastidious at the idea of "picking up" - the euphemism for removing dogs' excrement from public places. To avoid performing this essential task, he "does not walk on pavements with narrow green sward alongside" or cross the road at traffic lights. My dog, Buster - being trained in that respect if few others - defecates at regular times of day at easily anticipated locations. But retrieving, in a plastic bag, what he leaves behind never bothers me. How could I be repelled by anything that is associated with Buster? When Foster finally decides to share his life with a lurcher, he seems surprised that he has to prove that he is worthy of owning a dog. A similar cross-examination, when he thought of acquiring a vizsla, appears to have caused him less concern. Perhaps he thought that thoroughbreds should be treated with more consideration than crossbreeds. There is only one distinction between mongrels and dogs with pedigrees. Mongrels are brighter. Even that does not matter. Dogs are intrinsically endearing. Walking Ollie, being about a dog, is endearing too. It did not take long for Ollie - the eventual name of the lurcher that Foster acquired - to win over his new owner. And Foster quickly acquired some of the characteristics of the true canine devotee. It is dogs, not girls, that he looks at as they pass him in the street, and he is already worrying about how he will survive without Ollie. He has not quite reached the stage of absolute infatuation. I do not agonise about how to deal with Buster's death. I do not allow myself to think about it. When the prospect forces its way into my mind, it confirms my atheism. If there were a God, He would make dogs live as long as humans. Part of my obsession with dogs has an unhealthy connection with my mother's constant (and genuine, if embarrassingly misguided) conviction that every animal not under her care or supervision was lost, neglected or cruelly treated. I must, therefore, not overstate my anxiety about Ollie's prospects. But integrity requires me to report that he was once run over - sign of a careless owner or lack of training - and was also taken on a walk when the temperature was "heading up to 100F". Foster even went on holiday to Greece without him. In his diaries, Buster explains how I solved the dilemma about my regular summer excursions to Tuscany. I do not go to Tuscany any more. Part of Walking Ollie's charm is the problem that Foster faces in his attempts to establish a modus vivendi between man and dog. Ollie is enuretic. More disturbing, at least to me, he fails to recognise rabbits as things that must be pursued. My mother used to say: "There are no bad dogs, only bad owners." On the same principle, I believe that canine neurosis is a transmittable disease, caught from human beings. Foster's difficulties can be explained by reference to the first six words on page 117, "As a break from university stress . . ." His problem is not the stress. It is the university. He over-intellectualises what should be an emotional relationship. Owning a dog is not easy - particularly a dog of character. Friends of mine occasionally look after a greyhound which was rescued by their daughter. When I first saw it, I was astonished (since they are persons of discretion) by what I believed to be a huge pottery dog in the living room. It did not move for an hour. Better by far to have such a dog than no dog at all. But better still to have a dog like Ollie. He is trouble. But he is also a joy. So is reading about him. Walking Ollie is the best book about a dog for . . . let us say eight years. |
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| Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount 384pp, Bloomsbury, £20 Long ago, when Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister, I was often distracted from even her strident performances in the House of Commons by a sight which illustrated the complicated social structure of England. Two men sat side by side in the front row of the press gallery, possessed of equally scarlet faces. But Bernard Ingham (the Downing Street press secretary) radiated the brick-red complexion of the northern working classes, while Ferdinand Mount (the head of the policy unit) glowed with the hunting-pink patina of a country gentleman. I now discover that Mount was brought up among a particular branch of the rural gentry - louche, point-to-point competitors who never worked for a living but "had a good war". Mount, plagiarising Lorenz Hart, calls them the "hobohemia". They are not the sort of people it would be a pleasure to meet. But Mount makes reading about them pure joy. It will be the story of Mount's life as acolyte to Margaret Thatcher - about a third of the book - which attracts most attention, and he provides such a vivid picture of life under her thumb that he may have made an important contribution to the history of her premiership. But what sets his account apart from other "insider" descriptions of the long-running drama is not the portrait of the star - simultaneously affectionate, critical, admiring and exasperated - but the sketches of the full supporting cast. The rightwing ideologist Alfred Sherman - "his reputation as Svengali to Margaret's Trilby already in place" - is awarded a page and a half of biography, including a mention of his service as "consultant to Radovan Karadzic of Serbia, an indicted war criminal". Then his character and role within the Conservative party is summed up in a single sentence: "The whole point of Alfred was that he was horrible and licensed to be horrible." Admiration of the style almost makes the reader forget that it was Sherman who - with the approval of Ferdinand Mount - argued that, whatever the merits of their cause, "the miners had to be beaten". Mount progressed, almost absent-mindedly, into politics via journalism. At the Daily Mail he seems to have been accepted at once - as an Old Etonian would expect - into the inner circle. So he can describe, with authority, weekends at the Rothermere country house watching films - "more likely to be The Yellow Rolls-Royce than Last Year in Marienbad". Therein lies the one real weakness of Cold Cream. Mount patronises the people about whom he writes without detaching himself from the life and values which he so succesfully satirises. His invention of the "upper class chat" in the front row of the Rothermere cinema - "Sheemie says he's not speaking to Boofy after what happened at Chatsworth" - is different in style, but not in spirit from some of the passages in the text which the reader is supposed to take seriously. "Diana, as befitted her name, was a superb steeplechase rider and dedicated to foxhunting as to any dangerous sport that came her way." It is not always easy to tell when the faint echoes of Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse are intentional and when they are a reflection of Mount's character. But either way, they are great fun. Some readers will be irritated by the succession of famous and once-fashionable names that litter Cold Cream's early pages - Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony Powell, Guy Burgess, Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Blunt, Barbara Pym, the Pakenhams, to whom he is related, and Lady Pamela Berry. Writing about them comes absolutely naturally to Mount and adds to the book's slightly antediluvian charm. They were part of his boyhood and adolescence in the way that Councillor George Buttery and Alderman Albert Ballard were part of mine. It is a matter for neither praise nor blame. But the way in which he writes about them - often in a manner they would find disobliging - is unequivocally a cause for congratulation. The class warrior in me raises the suspicion that Cold Cream is a triumph of style over content. Apart, that is, from the chapters devoted to assorted Tory grandees and functionaries. I am not usually attracted by tittle-tattle about the private lives of the famous. But occasionally it reveals something important about their characters. Mount tells us that while working for the Conservative Research Department - and courting the secretary who became his wife - Enoch Powell could only bring himself to embrace her when they were both inside a stationery cupboard. I find great consolation in the confirmation that Powell - as well as holding detestable views - was slightly barmy. Mount's judgment of Powell's mentality - as revealed by the cupboard episode - is barely more charitable than mine. He attributes the pantomime to "Enoch's taste for melodrama, his determination to inject drama into the commonplace". To my astonishment, Mount actually makes me feel sorry for Selwyn Lloyd. In the account of his last years in party politics, the Suez errand boy is a desperately sad figure, neither at ease with himself nor with the political world he chose to inhabit. Even Keith Joseph, the All Souls' intellectual who laid claim to inventing Thatcherism, is portrayed as uncertain. Mount, on the other hand, exudes the pleasure he feels at being Mount. Joseph and poor Selwyn apart, Cold Cream is a book about people with immense self-confidence - some justifying it, some not. It contains wonderful vignettes and the writing makes the inconsequential stories worth reading. But I shall cherish it for more than its elegance. If I ever need to be reminded that the class war still rages - and which side I am on - I shall read Cold Cream again. |
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| A Very British Strike by Anne Perkins 356pp, Macmillan, £20 Challenge to Democracy<br/> by Ronald McIntosh 400pp, Politico's, £25 Miners and those who support their causes have always had long, but selective, memories. It has helped to create the esprit de corps which, combined with a courage that their trade demanded, made them fight on long after their industrial battles had been lost. In A Very British Strike, Anne Perkins writes of Black Friday, April 15 1921. On that day, the leaders of the transport and rail unions refused to strike in support of their allies, the miners. This "was branded on the souls of all good trade unionists as the moment when the timid leadership sacrificed the miners". In my experience the resentment was more specific. When, in 1950, I canvassed in a general election for the first time, one of my companions was Les Higgins, a railway guard. When I got home the account of my activities was interrupted by my mother, as soon as Higgins was mentioned. "The railwaymen deserted us in 1921." Black Friday was redeemed. On May 1 1925, the miners - having swallowed their pride and allowed the TUC to join in the negotiations - won a spectacular victory. Within days of the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announcing that "all workers ... have to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet", he capitulated with the announcement that the government would pay the difference between the owners' offer and the miners' demands until the commission of inquiry into the industry reported. The union celebrated Red Friday in the belief that, as long as the workers were united, they were invincible. That notion comes in the category of romantic but wrong. Nine months later, the subsidy ended, and it is clear from Perkins's incisive analysis how the general strike came about. Her comprehensive account of how it progressed shows that the miners' cause was doomed from the start. Much blame was heaped on those trade unionists who either fought with the miners half-heartedly or refused to fight at all. But the real problem was the state of the industry. Thanks to the debilitated condition of the economy - exacerbated by Winston Churchill's decision to return to the gold standard - many pits were near to bankruptcy. Greedy owners combined with fearful miners to oppose closures. That meant that a national settlement with "not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day" was a heroic but unattainable aspiration. The claim that the miners could win was a cruel deception. I was brought up in the belief that AJ Cook, the secretary of the Miners' Federation, was the hero of 1926. As Perkins makes clear, without resorting to the crude device of actually saying so, Cook - all rhetoric and no strategy - undermined the prospects of the claim which he supported at least as effectively as did Jimmy Thomas, the NUR general secretary who was officially designated a traitor. Ramsay Macdonald feared that "there will be a general strike to save Arthur Cook's face". That is only one of the parallels between 1926 and 1984 which the perceptive Perkins identifies. Arthur Scargill remembered Cook's rhetoric but forgot his tactical ineptitude. Although I was wrong about the hero of the general strike, I always correctly identified the slightly comic villain. It was Churchill, a man who in Perkins's memorable phrase "thought consensus was for the common people". The obsession with the communist conspiracy to conquer the world - which had made him the chief advocate of a British expedition to support the White Russian rearguard - convinced him that the general strike was a prelude to a Bolshevik revolution. Throughout, his behaviour was almost as intolerable to his colleagues in government as it was intentionally provocative to his enemies in the TUC. He insisted that "food convoys" were accompanied by totally unnecessary armoured cars in order to increase public apprehension about the prospects of an armed insurrection and he was encouraged by the prime minister to edit the British Gazette - a propaganda news sheet - because it diverted him from attempts to take over the BBC. Churchill's responsibility for the deteriorating terms of trade, which made the price of British coal uncompetitive, is slightly mitigated by an incident which Perkins reports with admirable understatement. Immediately after Baldwin made him chancellor of the exchequer - more to entice him back into the Tory party than in the hope of rescuing the economy - Churchill was advised by Treasury civil servants to return to the gold standard, thus overvaluing the pound. "He arranged a dinner party to hear the arguments on both sides. Keynes under-performed and Churchill decided to take the advice of his official." That made British coal even more uncompetitive. The general strike was the inevitable consequence. The general strike lasted for nine days. The miners remained proud, poor and in dispute for another eight months. They were driven back to work by hunger, with the bitter conviction that if the other unions had been equally brave, justice would have prevailed. Almost 50 years later they squared up to the owners and government. "Almost certainly in explicit recognition of the 'betrayal' of 1926, the NUM refused to solicit support from the TUC." In every other particular, history repeated itself. After 1926, the miners have been the regular scapegoats for government failures to manage the economy successfully, and the NUM has taken a special pride in fighting to the last ditch. The union created the conditions that encouraged Ted Heath to commit political suicide and, according to Challenge to Democracy, the diaries of Sir Ronald McIntosh, it continued to menace the nation. On November 22 1974, McIntosh - director general of the National Economic Development Council (Neddy) - was told by the permanent secretary at the Department of Employment "that the NUM militants would force through a high settlement ... and that there would be a balance of payments collapse". And so it, more or less, turned out. The modern equivalent of Red Friday was followed 10 years later by the blackest days in the coal industry's history. The badly led union chose the wrong moment to strike and was beaten. Margaret Thatcher's scheme to destroy the industry proceeded according to plan. McIntosh's diary - published a respectable 30 years after the events which it records took place - relates to an age and economic attitude which now seem almost as distant as the general strike. The author himself - dapper, supremely self-confident and immensely able - was typical of an earlier type of civil servant. It was a time when officials, no less than ministers, believed in the power of the government in a way which is certainly out of fashion today. McIntosh describes a statement made by the prime minister at a press conference as "good and very helpful". Not surprisingly. The operative paragraph began: "Neddy is to mastermind the whole programme." It is inconceivable that a prime minister of any party would say that today. Diaries of the McIntosh sort leave readers with the impression that the author spent most of his time in restaurants. And there is no doubt that McIntosh took lunch very seriously. Some of the reports of his assignations are instructive. On October 5 1976 he lunched with his old friend Roy Jenkins at Brooks's Club. Jenkins, on his way to become president of the European Communities Commission, thought that an economic crisis was "calculated to produce a political change" and said "a little wistfully" that he wondered if he had been right to leave British politics at this time. So the idea of a new centre party had begun to germinate in Jenkins's head three years before the idea became public. But the diaries' importance is the record which they provide of a dead civilisation. McIntosh was one of the gentleman in Whitehall who knew best. |
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| A Question of Honour by Lord Michael Levy Simon & Schuster 18.99, pp320 A long life in politics is, inevitably, punctuated with regrets. I now must add to my failure to lead the Labour party or hold one of the great offices of state the comforting words which I spoke to Lord Levy during an afternoon at the height of the 'honours for sale' controversy. No doubt the Metropolitan Police were right to conclude, as I thought at the time, that Tony Blair's fund-raiser-in-chief had no case to answer. But if disloyalty was an indictable offence, he would spend the rest of his life in Wormwood Scrubs - convicted of writing a deplorable autobiography. The only possible plea in mitigation is that Levy damages himself more than he damages others. For the rest of his life he will be the man who whined that at 'his farewell gala dinner ... although Tony publicly praised and thanked a number of people who had helped him become Prime Minister and govern Britain, he made no mention of me.' In his own defence, Levy would no doubt say that confidences are no longer kept and that we live in an age of self-serving and highly remunerative revelations. But other autobiographies, reprehensible though they may be, can at least claim that they teach us something about the business of government or the pressures at the top of politics. All we learn from what is billed as 'the truth about the cash for peerage scandal' is tittle tattle. Everything of significance in the chapter on Labour party loans and gifts has already been published, in one form or another - except for the insistence that the 'decision to take loans was made by the Prime Minister in his capacity as leader of the Labour party', not by his above-reproach tennis partner. Had it not been for Blair, Levy would never have been much more than the man who managed Alvin Stardust. He has repaid his benefactor for all those photographs with the great and good - no doubt, even now, displayed on a grand piano - with a series of nasty, niggling little anecdotes. Levy tells us that, having promised Robin Cook that he would remain Foreign Secretary for a year after the 2001 general election, the Prime Minister changed his mind and replaced him with Jack Straw at the beginning of the new parliament. The story is true and Robin was certainly both disappointed and distressed by the decision. But what is to be gained by regurgitating the details now - except the possibility that the account of how Levy was employed to persuade Cook to accept demotion demonstrates that, for a moment, he was on the inside track? The story only illustrates how foolish Blair was to take Levy into his confidence. Indeed the most interesting question provoked by the whole 300 pages is why the Prime Minister became involved with such a person. What a relief to read that Murray Elder, John Smith's confidant and Gordon Brown's long-time friend, was not as susceptible to Levy's charms as Blair became. The most unpleasant passages of the book were, naturally, highlighted in the recent serialisation. But the nonsense about Levy - in the capacity of candid friend - warning Blair about his long massage sessions with Carole Caplin and the absurd account of Cherie Blair asking for advice about her husband's reliance on Anji Hunter, his long-time 'gate keeper' (with a side swipe at Fiona Millar, Alastair Campbell's partner), are not the quintessential passages of this farrago of innuendo and smear. That accolade goes to the passage describing the decision to transfer the Labour party's public-relations account from Hobsbawm Macaulay to another company. Gordon Brown's wife was a partner in the rejected firm. But Brown 'never raised the issue at the time and (Levy had) no reason to believe that he harboured any lasting resentment'. So why put the possibility in the reader's mind? As an attempt to wound without striking, or being seen to strike, it takes some beating, Tony Blair receives similar treatment. 'What is T.B. in it for? What does T.B. want out of it? Is T.B. just in it for himself?' Of course Levy never asks such questions. He just warns that they are being asked by others. Indeed he regards Blair as a 'really good man, trying to do really good things for the country'. But he chooses to embarrass and damage him with the revelation of attitudes and events that a real friend would regard as confidential. He remains devoted to the Labour party. But he harms its chances of re-election with assertions that Blair does not believe that Brown can beat David Cameron. It all adds up to a book which has only one merit. Its author has a sense of humour. Levy calls his memoir A Question of Honour. |
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| The Barretts of Wimpole Street has a lot to answer for. It is by no means the worst play to be broadcast on Radio 4 on a Saturday afternoon. But, together with that extraordinary first letter from Robert Browning - "I love your poetry Miss Barret and I think I love you too" - it has created the legend of the frail young woman with heavy hair who eloped to Italy with the muscular Christian poet and, 15 years later, died in his arms. The facts on which the legends are built are true. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning was much more than the subservient invalid which so many of the comments that surrounded the bicentenary of her birth have made her out to be. The room with a view, from which the young EM Forster looked out across the Arno, is in a direct line of sight to Casa Guidi, in which the Brownings made their Florentine home. The plaque on the wall sets out Elizabeth's achievements - patriot, scholar and poet of the Risorgimento. It mentions, as an afterthought, that Robert Browning also lived there. I doubt if he resented the Italian precedence that his wife enjoyed. He believed that she had written "the finest love sonnets in the English language since William Shakespeare", and, by accident or design, she certainly followed where Shakespeare led. "If thou must love me, let it be for nought" is an echo of Sonnet 116: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds". Both proclaim that "love for her smile, her look, her way" is not an "ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken". How many other poets' work can be combined with Shakespeare's in a single sentence without seeming embarrassingly inferior? Yet, Sonnets from the Portuguese were the lighter side of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry. Her more serious work was very serious indeed. Every three or four years, I determine to write her biography. So every three or four years I read Aurora Leigh, according to its author a "novel in verse". Its 1,100 lines explore the position of women - thinking women such as Elizabeth - in Victorian society. It could not have been written by a woman who had grown up as one of nature's willing victims, waiting on her chaise longue to be rescued from her tyrannical father by the poet as hero. In fact, malicious rivals whispered that Robert Browning only cultivated Elizabeth Barrett because, thanks to her superior reputation as a poet, she provided him with an easy entree into literary society. It was Elizabeth, not Robert, who - according to the gossip - was considered for nomination as poet laureate. Nineteenth-century England was not ready for the laurels to crown a woman. Nor was the establishment in tune with her politics. Elizabeth became the poet of Italian unity and liberation. Her epitaph ought to be the poems Casa Guidi Windows and Garibaldi, not "What was he doing the great God Pan, down in the reeds by the river?". Robert Browning, to his credit, rarely missed an opportunity to reinforce his wife's reputation. In May 1880, 19 years after she died, he wrote to the Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis with a gentle rebuke. "You are misled about the poetry of EBB being almost forgotten ... The almost yearly new edition of her five volumes is out ... The demand for my own work is nothing like so large." The letter also complained of a misprint in one of his own articles - "human hair" for "human air" and "fair, like my peers" instead of "fare like my peers". But the real message was that "Elizabeth is more remembered than she ever was". By then, Browning had achieved both critical and commercial success. But it is one of his "difficult" poems that provides the best, if an unintended, tribute to his wife. It is not one of the love poems from Men and Women but the much earlier Andrea del Sarto, subtitled The Faultless Painter. Andrea - said, in his time, to be a better draughtsman than Raphael - lacked the genius that produced "ardour and admiration". Elizabeth was exactly the opposite. There are rough passages in her poetry but the quality is beyond serious dispute. The disturbingly named Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford's first professor of English literature, compared her to Christina Rossetti. Elizabeth, he said, often lost her footing, but - unlike Christina - never feared to leap. That is the poet whose work we ought to remember this year.<br /> |
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| Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty by Catherine Bailey 544pp, Viking, £20 If books had human characteristics, Black Diamonds would suffer from a severe identity crisis. It begins with the mystery - written in the high romantic style of Baroness Orczy - of the seventh Earl Fitzwilliam's origins and the allegation that he was a changeling, smuggled into a Canadian log cabin to provide the heir that Lavinia, Lady Middleton, could not produce. It ends with the tragedy - written in the breathless prose of Elinor Glyn - of Katherine "Kick" Kennedy (JFK's sister), who married the Marquis of Hartington and, after his death in the war, became entangled with the disreputable eighth Earl Fitzwilliam and died with him in an air crash. In between the extracts from the social register, Black Diamonds contains a great deal of worthwhile information and interesting analysis about the state of affairs in and about Wentworth House and its estate. Catherine Bailey contrasts the lavish lifestyle of the Fitzwilliam-Wentworths with the grinding poverty of the miners whose sweat paid for the aristocratic extravagance. But not even the worthy meat in the sandwich is left unblemished by the book's regularly recurring flaw. The language in which some of the serious passages are written reduces its best parts to the level of society gossip. It is bad enough that the chapter on the doomed affair between Kennedy and the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam Wentworth is heralded by the single sentence, "The affair seemed madness from the start." But the real offence is the "bogus reporting" which peppers the chapters on important social questions. The visit of George V to Wentworth - meant to heal some of the wounds of the industrial upheavals of 1911 by producing newspaper pictures of the king with miners - was an important indication of the establishment's anxiety about the prospects of a general strike or worse. Black Diamonds deals with it adequately. But it is preceded by a description of the king's arrival which would be more appropriate to the beginning of a short story in Lady's Home Journal. "Walking briskly through the corridors, the housekeeper missed nothing. From time to time she stopped to adjust the arrangements in the vases of flowers or to knead the bowls of potpourri to release their aroma into the air." The irritation caused by such flaws is increased by the way in which they diminish the chapters of Black Diamonds that have something sensible, and sometimes important, to say. The verbatim accounts of the miners' attitude to what south Yorkshire called "graft" - not corruption but back-breaking labour - has an air of absolute authenticity. Walter Brierley, a miner from a pit 40 miles from Wentworth who was unemployed for four years, longed to be back hewing coal. "The dependence on the state for money without having honestly earned it has made me creep within myself." Arthur Eaglestone remembered: "The most heinous of accusations lay in the terrible phrase 'He doesn't like work'." When Bailey stops writing like a romantic novelist, Black Diamonds admirably reflects both the true nobility of the inter-war miners and the undoubted degradation of the aristocracy who exploited them. |
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| Michael Foot: A Life by Kenneth O Morgan HarperPress 25, pp568 The official biography is a dangerous book to write, especially if the subject is still alive and has made a personal choice of the author. Criticism reads like ingratitude and compliments are dismissed as obligations that were accepted with the contract. Fortunately, Kenneth O Morgan's record as both an academic and popular historian protects him from suspicion that he wrote Michael Foot: A Life without observing the rules of objectivity that a serious work on the career of a major politician requires. For most of the 494 pages of main text, Morgan's judgments of Foot are elegantly balanced. In the Fifties, he became 'an icon of the left, a star of pamphlet, platform and now television', but also ' ... an agitator of protest, not a politician of power'. Yet in the midst of the accurate narrative and careful analysis, there is one extraordinary lapse of memory or error of judgment. On page 436 (as incredulous readers can confirm for themselves), Morgan examines why and how Michael Foot became leader of the Labour party and concludes, with masterly understatement, that it was not 'in order to win an election'. He was elected 'to keep the party together'. But, dubious though that contention is, it cannot compete for improbability with what Morgan goes on to claim about the way in which Foot discharged that duty: 'This he did with patent sincerity and literary flair.' In fact, he did not do it at all. He certainly tried. But during the first year of his leadership, Labour suffered a split that was worse than anything in its history except possibly the schism led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1931; and the number of defections from both the parliamentary party and the party in the country were far greater than those that followed the creation of the National Government. And, unpleasant though the fact may be, it was all precipitated by the choice of Foot as leader. A couple of weeks before Jim Callaghan's resignation, I discussed the party's future with David Owen as we walked from the TUC to the House of Commons. Owen told me: 'It looks as if Denis [Healey] will get it and we'll be all right for another three years.' Last week, to confirm what I remembered, I asked Lord Owen if he would have left a Labour party that was led by Healey. He replied that the thought would not have entered his head. Nobody doubts that Healey would have produced a better election result than Michael Foot managed in 1983. We must not create the myth that Healey's defeat in the leadership election was necessary for the party's welfare. The crucial votes that guaranteed Healey's defeat came from craven members of the parliamentary Labour party who mistakenly believed that troublemakers in their constituencies would quieten down if an old left-winger became leader. They preferred the certainty of Labour losing the next general election to the risk of being ejected from their safe seats. Their cowardice was compounded by the treachery of a group of Social Democrat defectors who postponed their resignation from Labour until they had voted for the party leader who in their estimation was most likely to guarantee electoral disaster. Morgan identifies three of them. They did not think that Healey was the wrong choice to lead a revival. To describe the Eighties as they really were is not to diminish Michael Foot, particularly since some of the problems arose from his natural inclination towards tolerance and understanding. Foot was, and still is, a great man who deservedly inspires affection as well as admiration. But greatness comes in different shapes and sizes. Foot's gifts are not of the sort that make a successful party leader. Morgan is right to quote me, among others, in applauding the brilliance with which Foot led the House of Commons and kept the Lib-Lab Pact alive for the last two years of the Callaghan government. He was an equally adept Secretary of State for Employment who won the continued, if grudging, support of the TUC for the incomes policy, which was essential to the survival of the administration. But although, as this biography makes clear, Foot was a very good minister, Morgan's analysis always leaves the impression that he was, or would have been, even better at something else. And that, I suspect, is true. He was for the pen, not the sword, and believed that words spoke louder than actions. Foot was the greatest polemicist of his day, whose speeches and pamphlets - denouncing both the Tory government and the Labour governments of which he disapproved - no other controversialist could match. He is blessed with the supreme virtue of loyalty to such doomed causes as Plymouth Argyle's promotion into the Premiership and Barbara Castle's survival in the cabinet after Jim Callaghan replaced Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. And, almost half a century after his death, Aneurin Bevan remains a crucial influence on Foot's view of politics. When I invited him to take part in a television programme that I was narrating to mark the centenary of Clement Attlee's birth, he immediately told me: 'He should have made Nye Foreign Secretary.' But Foot also possesses an attribute which, while attractive in a normal human being, is a disastrous quality in a modern politician. He is an incurable romantic, hence his admiration for the Disraeli of his imagination. The real thing, the opportunist who destroyed his leader by supporting the Corn Laws (which he knew to be wrong) and then renewed his opposition when it was necessary for his own promotion, would have only excited Foot's contempt. Morgan makes clear that despite all the tribulations - the ill health, the uncertainties of youth and early manhood and the high propensity to suffer minor accidents - Michael Foot is blessed with an advantage that has seen him through life's vicissitudes inside and outside politics. He is, above all else, a rounded personality with the hinterland that Denis Healey, his vanquished opponent, rightly identified as essential to the civilised man. That made it a pleasure to work with him and serve under him, whatever the political prospect. |
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| There is much to like about Vince Cable and much to admire. But nothing reveals the secret of his success as graphically as his persona. While Nick Clegg, his party leader, subscribes to the David Cameron theory that successful politicians ought to look and sound like Rolls-Royce salesmen, Cable has the demeanour of a Yorkshire undertaker on a day trip to Bridlington. His willingness to answer to the name of "Vince" is more proof of disdain for fashion. He is the politics of substance made flesh. His popularity is a vindication of those of us who argue that ideas are more important than image. If he had not stooped to make that Cambridge Union joke about the prime minister evolving from Stalin into Mr Bean, he might have achieved parliamentary sanctification ahead of Frank Field. As it is, he will have to be satisfied with his memoirs being received with applause that few other politicians, writing in such an inhibited style, could expect. "Vince" can describe personal tragedy without being mawkish and revisit party rivalries without being suspected of repaying old debts because he is "genuine" not bogus genuine, but genuine genuine. |