Freedom is the Freedom to Enjoy Pornography

Do you think the world has gone mad?  I don’t.  I know it’s gone mad.  More and more the human race resembles a heard of lemmings, rushing towards that final precipice.  I am the little girl looking at life’s absurdities, shouting, as the parade passes by, that the emperor is naked.  Nonsense, the mass response comes: he is just beautifully dressed!

Speaking of nakedness, I have porn on my mind at the moment, specifically the dire Fifty Shades of Grey by the talentless E. L. James.  Who buys this appalling rubbish, I wonder?  What purpose does it serve?  Is its bewildering success a measure of just how empty the emotional and sexual life of middle aged women has become?  Is it an indictment of middle-aged men?  Alas, I fear it must be.  More than that, I fear its commercial success shows just how stupidly gullible a great many people are, how stupidly gullible most women are, particularly women of a certain age.  These are the people who look before and after and pine for what is not.  Actually they pine for what has never been, for what they have never had, true erotic fulfilment.  All they can do is feast on it vicariously, dining on fifty shades of boredom. 

E. L James is really Julia come to life.  Surely you remember Julia?  A pledged member of the Anti-Sex League, she is Winston Smith’s lover in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  When she’s not having extra Anti-Sex League sex she works in Pornosec, Muck House, as it’s colloquially known, a sub-section of the Ministry of Truth, which produces erotica for the masses.  Specifically she works on the novel writing machines, turning out boring, ghastly rubbish, as she puts it. 

Still, it’s important to recognise that rubbish, particularly pornography, serves a purpose.  It’s often a way of mopping up all sorts of residuals energies and frustrated libidos.  How prescient Orwell was to make an outwardly orthodox member of the Anti-Sex League a functionary in the manufacturing of muck!  For porn, it might be said, is really just a form of anti-sex, judging real sex to be contact between real people, people who are emotionally and physically engaged with one another.  Who knows?  Without porn to compensate for vacuous sterility hordes of frustrated and under-fulfilled proles might cause social chaos.  “The people have such empty lives”, the queen is told.  “Let them read Fifty Shades of Grey”, she responds.

The underemployed members of the European Parliament really should be told that they close down Muck House at their own peril.  This week, you see, they will be voting to ‘ban all forms of pornography.’  This will include yet more censorship of the internet in an attempt to “eliminate gender stereotypes” that demean women. 

Our MEPs, the dear old things, are also proposing the establishment of an Anti-Sex League.  No; what they actually want is for governments to set up state sex censors with “a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls.”  Would that include girls, I wonder, promoting their own sexualisation? 

The charge is being led by Kartika Liotard, a left-wing Dutch feminist MEP, bedecked with the characteristic red sash of the Anti-Sex League, who wants "statutory measures to prevent any form of pornography in the media and in advertising and for a ban on advertising for pornographic products and sex tourism.”  So, Amsterdam’s red light specials can - excuse the profanity - get fucked! 

There are of course unenlightened people (aren’t there always?) who see this as just another erosion of free speech.  The accusation has been given added weight by the fact that the parliament has blocked the orgasmic rush of protest emails that followed when news of the measure emerged.  Criticism in any form, the vox populi itself, is being treated like so much rubbish, dumped straight into the Memory Hole by the spam filters. 

Yes, indeed, we move ever forward into a modern version of Orwell’s super state.  It is not governed by malign forces, though, just those who act for our own good; those who know what is best for us in their magnificent condescension.  The anti-porn drive comes soon after a report urging tighter press regulations, including the right of Brussels officials to control and supervise national media, with powers to enforce fines or sack journalists.  Censorship is clearly the wave of the future in our brave new – sexless - Europe that has such people in it.

I have little or no interest in porn.  I agree with Julia - though not E. L. James - that commercial erotica is boring and predictable.  I do not want to read about sex, still less watch other people having sex.  I’m far too hands-on for that.  No empty and unfulfilling fantasies for me, thanks ever so much; I leave that for the mummies and all others who are past it, assuming that they ever drew alongside it in the first place.  No, I could not care less about porn, but I do care more about freedom. I will speak as often and as loudly as I can against Big Brother, or Sister, in Brussels, whose creeping tyranny does not creep any more.  Freedom is the freedom to enjoy pornography, even if it is something as banal and lifeless as Fifty Shades of Grey.  

Remembering George Orwell

George Orwell was born in June, 1903. No, he wasn’t. George Orwell was born in January, 1933. Actually, both are true. What; is there something Orwellian here; are we to entertain contradictory statements without being aware of the contradiction? Are we in the foothills of double-think? 

OK, then, let me clarify: Eric Arthur Blair, who was to become George Orwell, was indeed born in June, 1903. Although he had previously published some minor articles with the by-line E. A. Blair, the pen name by which he is best known comes with the publication in January, 1933 of Down and Out in Paris and London, his George Gissing-like odyssey into the nether world.

So this year is an anniversary in two senses – the one hundred and tenth of his birth and the eightieth of his first reasonably successful literary endeavour, the kind of perceptive, unadorned and matter-of-fact sociological analysis that he was to make a unique feature of his writing.

Orwell - like Charles Dickens a social analyst as well as a novelist - is one of my favourite writers. Like him, my own ambition is to make political writing into an art, an aim he set out in Why I Write, one of his most brilliant essays. Like him, I discovered the sheer joy of words when I was in my mid-teens. I first readAnimal Farm, his exposé of the fraudulent character of Soviet Communism, when I was fourteen. I have been reading his work on and off ever since, his novels, his reportage, his criticism, his occasional pieces and his journalism. 

This anniversary year I’ve been re-tracing my steps, overwhelmed by the sheer brilliance and insight in the likes ofCharles Dickens, a critical essay of outstanding ability. As with so much of his work there is a slight element of biography. I give you, from the conclusion, how Orwell saw Dickens and how I see Orwell:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

I’ve been looking for this face also in biography. I looked for it in George Orwell by Gordon Bowker. This is not the first account of Orwell’s life that I’ve tackled. I read Bernard Crick’s study while I was still at school, though I remember little of it now. What can I say about Bowker? He has given us an honest and decent account of honesty and decency, the major themes, if you like, of Orwell’s literary career. What I do remember about Crick is that his book was primarily political in purpose. Bowker, I suppose, is more classic biography, a warts and all portrait. It’s a good workman-like effort, though I have to say I could have done without the occasional ‘he would have thought’, the kind of tiresome and speculative formula used to fill gaps in the narrative. This sort of thing simply will not do! 

I think I probably know as much about Orwell about as anyone, which is to say I’m not sure how much I really know. He certainly left traces, including Such, Such Were the Joys, his posthumous exposé of life at Saint Cyprian’s, his prep school, where he says that he does not want to make it sound like Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall and then makes it sound remarkably like, well, Dotheboys Hall! At other times he can be quite guarded, saying very little about his five years as an imperial policeman in Burma, his version, I think of Gorky’s ‘university.’ It left him with an abiding hatred of imperialism and left us with two superlative essays – A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, but not much more besides. It also gave us Burmese Days, his first novel and, in my estimation, his best. 

That’s the other thing about Orwell – he was an artist first and foremost, not beyond a certain amount of embellishment and poetic licence. Did he really shoot an elephant? Yes, it seems he did, but perhaps not in the way he suggested. I imagine the political symbolism was just a brilliant afterthought. 

As I say, Bowker gives us a decent warts and all portrait, not avoiding some of the less savoury aspects of the writer’s character, including his apparent homophobia, his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. Sex for Orwell seems to have been something of an imperial experience, picked up clearly during his formative years in Burma, quick possession and rapid fulfillment being the only aims! Ah, but he was man of his times, for all of his progressive attitudes, replete with the residual prejudices of his time and his class, things which have become rather amusing with the passage of time. His fulminations against fruit juice (fruit juice!) and nudism in The Road to Wigan Pier are a joy to behold. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, was in the habit of pulling his leg over some of his more outrageous statements, which he took in good humour. 

When I think of Orwell I also think of Jonathan Swift, who just so happens to have been one of his favourite authors. Orwell was the Swift of the Age of Ideology, exposing in the most biting satire the lies and deceptions that had become part of contemporary political discourse. If Swift was a frustrated Tory, Orwell was a frustrated Socialist, more critical of his own side than the enemy. It was in Stalinism that he saw the greatest evil, particularly after his experiences in Spain, recorded so memorably in Homage to Catalonia Here, with language abused for political ends, with the truth turned inside out, with today’s orthodoxy becoming tomorrow’s heterodoxy, the foundations were laid for the Nineteen Eighty Four, the ultimate nightmare of the age.

I believe that Orwell is best approached through his work. But if you are coming to him for the first time, or if you are looking for a thread through the labyrinth, then George Orwell is a useful companion. It’s well-situated, well-structured and well-written without a superabundance of detail. It’s a little lacking, perhaps, in critical analysis, but I do not believe that to be a great fault. 

For so many years success and recognition had eluded Orwell, often reduced to the same tenuous straights as Edwin Reardon in George Gissing’s New Grub Street. It came eventually, particularly after the publication of Animal Farm, but by now the author was approaching a premature death, carried away eventually by the lung aliment that had troubled him for most of his life. 

Just before Orwell’s death at the tragically early age of forty-six in January, 1950 Desmond MacCarthy, a distinguished editor and literary critic, wrote saying that he considered him “among the few memorable writers of your generation”, one who had left “an indelible mark on English literature.” It serves, I think, as an abiding epitaph. Bowker has done good service in reminding us just how memorable he was. 

Daft Dominion

Here are the facts. The year is 1952. In the east the German war with Russia, now eleven years old, shows no sign of ending. On a line roughly extending from Lake Ladoga in the north-west to the Caspian Sea in the south-east, the struggle is in stalemate, a contest punctuated by blows and counter blows which settle nothing.


In the west Britain, having made peace with Germany after the brief war of 1939-40, is governed by a crypto-fascist regime headed by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party made substantial gains in the rigged parliamentary election of 1950, is Home Secretary, in charge of the normal police and black-shirt recruited auxiliaries. Enoch Powell is Secretary of State for India, where Britain is still fighting a rearguard action to retain the Jewel in the tawdry Crown. Under the Treaty of Berlin, which ended the western war, the Isle of Wight has been turned over to Germany as a base.

In Berlin, Hitler, suffering from increasingly acute Parkinson’s disease, is nearing the end. The future is uncertain, with no clear succession. There are those who want to end the hopeless war in the east; there are those, chiefly in the SS, who want to carry on the struggle against the Slav ‘sub-humans’ until that elusive final victory.

We are, of course, in past futures, a foreign country which did things differently; we are in the country of C. J. Sansom’s Dominion, a ‘what if’ novel along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, Len Deighton’s SS GB and Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

The premise is a plausible one. The novel opens with a real historical scene, the meeting in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street on 9 May, 1940. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, has announced his intention to resign, discredited by Britain’s disastrous campaign against the Germans in Norway. The contenders are Halifax and Churchill. Halifax, the Foreign Minister and a noted appeaser, is favoured by Chamberlain, the King and most of the Tory Party. In real history he demurs. In this history he does not. After the German invasion of the West, and the disaster of Dunkirk, Halifax makes peace, entering into a treaty of friendship with Britain’s former enemy. Churchill withdraws, eventually to lead a Resistance movement against the new Vichy-style regime, headed in succession by Halifax, David Lloyd George and finally Beaverbrook.

Dominion is the first book that I’ve read by C. J. Sansom, though I’m told that he is well-respected for his Shardlake series, historical novels set in Tudor England. He has a doctorate in history; so, if that’s any measure, he is qualified enough to treat the subject with imaginative insight and a high degree of verisimilitude and empathy. Does he? Well, now, that’s the key question. At the risk of trying your patience I’m going to begin this review by looking at the justification for the premises contained in the novel, set out in a Historical Note at the very end.

Actually, if you are at all interested in the context, I would suggest that you begin at the end. It’s the key to all that goes before. It shows the author as a man with a mission. He has, in other words, a political intent; his novel is not merely for shallow entertainment. Rather it has a didactic purpose, namely to warn you against the dangers of nationalism and fascism in the real historical present by showing you nationalism and fascism in a fictitious historical past.

I suppose that this book might be compared, at least superficially, with It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel warning of the dangers of fascism in America. It could have happened here, that’s Sansom’s point. But could it have happened in the way he describes in Dominion?

You see, what he gives us is an Anglo-Saxon version of Petain and Laval’s Vichy state. It’s really all based on a shallow idiocy of perspective, if I can put it like that. George Orwell, who also feared a form of fascism in England, was altogether more subtle than the inept Mister Sansom, at pains to advance his left-wing credentials. “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially left wing intellectuals”, Orwell wrote, “is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

My own doubts were raised early. Beaverbrook, in real history, was a close friend of Churchill and an effective minister in his wartime cabinet. In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. In justifying his portrayal, Samson quotes Clement Atlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, who said that the press baron was the most evil person he had ever met. Really? Is this the same Beaverbrook that Michael Foot, a former Labour leader and respected leftwing journalist, describes with such warmth and affection in his essay collection Debts of Honour?

Then there is Enoch Powell, the bête noir of Samson and his kind. His real credentials were impeccably anti-fascist, an opponent of appeasement and a man who returned to England from a comfortable academic position in Australia specifically to fight against the Nazis. The idea of him collaborating with Oswald Mosley is laughably absurd. Samson has simply advanced beyond his fictitious present to a real future, to Powell’s 1960s warning over the possible effects of mass immigration. He has then projected back again; for, as we all know, concerns about immigration equals fascism.

Powell, who only entered Parliament in 1950, was an admirer of British rule in India, that much is true, but by the early 1950s his imperial convictions were weakening. The depiction of him in Dominion is, quite frankly, childishly inexact. By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India.

So, what is there to say about Samson’s imagined Britain? It’s a drab place, economically depressed, a country in debt, a country that is no more than a satellite of a Continental superpower, a country where independence is all but a fiction, a country with an uncertain future. This is Vichy Britain, the only model the author seems to understand, a country whose cowardly leaders are prepared to hand over some of its citizens to an uncertain fate.

But Vichy was not the only model to hand. In real history there was Finland, an ally of Germany in the war against Russia, but one that preserved its democratic polity and refused to play any part in the Holocaust. Then there is Denmark, the ‘model’ protectorate, a country occupied by the Germans but one that still managed to undermine Nazi policy towards the Jews.

It’s perfectly true, in a world of limitless possibilities, that Samson’s alternate is just as valid as any other alternate, but does it stand up to scrutiny? My alternate is that if Britain had exited the war in 1940, instead of 1945, it would not have accumulated the massive debts, particularly to America, that so crippled its post-war economic performance.

Even in Sansom’s world the country would surely have done much better. There is no objective reason why it should have been so poor. Although allied to Germany, it was not involved in the war with Russia. Why on earth would the Germans have erected tariff barriers against British produce when such produce, particularly in armaments, would have been vital for the continuing campaign in the east? Sansom’s model makes no logical sense.

The truth is that Sansom’s depiction of a sad, indebted, economically and politically dependant nation is far closer to our contemporary political realities; a grubby Britain, a country increasingly uncertain of itself, a country falling to bits, a country tied to the European Union, an organisation the author clearly approves of.

The Historical Note, incidentally, which starts off objectively enough, ends up as a carpet-chewing rant against nationalism in general and – would you believe it? – Scottish nationalism in particular! Nationalism and patriotism, in Sansom’s view, are close kin to fascism. We are back in the mental world of those 1930s intellectuals who, when it came to understanding fascism, understood exactly nothing

I’ve tried your patience too far. The historical stuff may be of no interest at all to you. You have one question only: what of the novel, what of the story; is it any good? Yes, well, it is in part, now and again a bit of a page turner. Ignore the political manipulation – unfortunately I can’t - and you might actually enjoy it. The problem is that it is overlong and repetitive. More than that, the whole superstructure rests on an astonishingly weak base. The core plot device, the heart of the story, is as weak as marshmallow.

It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. I’m not going to tell you what the ‘dreadful secret’ is, simply that the Germans are anxious to find out, though what earthly good it could have done them is anybody’s guess. Muncaster learns his ‘dreadful secret’ from his physicist brother, who happens to be working with the Americans. In the contretemps that follows, the said brother is pushed out of the window of Muncaster’s flat, while he proceeds to wreck the place (why?), all the time shouting about the end of the world.

It turns out that Muncaster is the sort of fellow that a goose would say boo to, so his actions, to say the least, are just a tad out of character. But on his hissy fit all else follows; the Gestapo follow, the British fascist police follow, the British resistance follow; Churchill himself follows. Quick, let’s find Frank; our war in Russia depends on his ‘dreadful secret.’ Quick, let’s find Frank; let’s discover the ‘dreadful secret’ or get him away safely to America.

I’m really trying not to laugh as I write this, but there is so much in Dominion that is laughable; the lost and found chase through a thick London fog, Keystone Cops-style, is particularly funny. Poor Muncaster, freed from a loony bin, is aided by an assortment of individuals – David Fitzgerald, a civil servant and member of the resistance who befriended the forlorn chap (oh, just how many times do we heed to be reminded of his rictus smile?!) while they were at Oxford together. He is aided by Ben, a nurse at a lunatic asylum and a homosexual Scottish communist, also a member of the resistance, ye ken. He is aided by, of all organisations, the Fire Brigade, an organisation with impeccable left-wing credentials, which rides to the rescue through the fog!

And so it goes on, from high tension to low comedy, a series of increasingly implausible encounters. The scene on the beach below Rottingdean on the Suffolk coast takes verisimilitude to the Senate House, the SS headquarters in London, and tortures it out of existence. In the end Frank takes himself and the ‘dreadful secret’ into oblivion, an action, if taken earlier, that would have saved several hundred wearisome pages.

As a novel Dominion is real boys’ own stuff, difficult even for boys to swallow. In almost 570 pages of text the only believable character, the only character with any real human depth, is the world-weary Gunther Hoth, the Gestapo agent on Muncaster’s tail. There would seem to me to be a spot of plagiarism here, for he is simply a more ideologically committed dimension of Xavier March, the detective from Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

Dominion is based on a bogus historical premise; it’s based on the character assassination of real people. As a novel it’s too long, it’s repetitive, the characterisations are weak, the encounters unbelievable, the narrative plodding, as thick at point as the London fog and the fog in the author’s mind.

Samson does not write badly; he just doesn’t write very well. If he were not already Mister Shardlake I am convinced that this book would have gathered rejection slips rather than accolades from the likes of the Guardian and the Independent. Quite frankly, it’s a shallow and immature book, no more than a vehicle for the writer’s political prejudices. If you like alternate history and political thrillers go to Fatherland instead. It’s infinitely superior.

Brave New America

Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World is, depending on your point of view, a description of a soulless technocratic nightmare or a prescription for a far more rational society.  Personally I’m inclined to the latter.  What a good idea it would be to control the world’s population.  What a good idea genetic engineering would be.  How much happier we would all be as citizens of the World State.  The lower castes, the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons, all created in decanting bottles to be of lower intelligence, would be content in their modest and mediocre lives.

It’s just a beautiful dream.  We could not possible create such a rational world, a world devoid of thought, reflection and insight; a world devoid of such unsettling things as freedom.  Or could we?  I was delighted to read that educators in the United States have taken a major step forward in creating a more streamlined society. 

Apparently such unnecessary and inharmonious modern classics such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are to be dropped from the school curriculum by 2014.  Instead the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons will be able thrill to Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency or, if that’s too exciting, Invasive Plant Inventory by California's Invasive Plant Council.  Yes, I know, not much in the way of plot or human interest but – ask yourself – do the lower orders really need these things?  They are just so unsettling for the humdrum, for those who aimed low in life and missed.

The new school curriculum for this brave new American world will come into force in 46 of the 50 states, making it compulsory that at least seventy per cent of the texts studied should be non-fiction.  A new generation is to be raised on informational handbooks.  It’s all part of a scheme to ensure that Americans are ready for the workplace, assuming the workplace ever comes. 

The new standards are apparently backed by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  It’s also backed by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Apparently it’s intended to help pupils develop the capacity to write factually and accurately, far more useful in the workplace than Shakespeare.

That’s it; that’s the key.  Employment in Obamaland has been so high because people are wrongly adapted.  Think how frustrated employers must be, think how frustrated Bill and Melinda must be, when job applicants come along reciting Whitman or Longfellow but know nothing at all about invasive plants or insulation. 

Plato and Aristotle and the rest of those all Greek fossils got it completely wrong.  Education should not be about encouraging curiosity or developing fully rounded human beings.  It should be about indoctrination, streamlining and targeting.  The aim should be to ensure that the clones are undifferentiated, all fit for purpose.  It’s about ensuring that the ordinary remain ordinary, sub all expectations.

Meanwhile the Alphas for wholly unexplained reasons send their offspring in ever increasing numbers to private schools, those insulation and invasive plant free zones.  There they can continue to wile their time away uselessly musing on Shakespeare.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

The Hand of History

There are not many jokes in communism. Actually that’s not quite true. A case could be made that communism itself was a massive joke, except those living under it dared not laugh, or laugh only at their personal peril. All humour in what used to be called the Eastern Bloc was inevitably of a subversive nature. For as George Orwell wrote, a thing is funny when it upsets the established order; that every joke is a tiny revolution. The revolutionaries did not want revolution; they wanted total conformity.

Have you ever been in a situation, or a place, say a church or a library, where something struck you as funny? It may not be all that funny on later reflection but just try to contain a laugh when it wants to explode!

I’ve been reading Anne Applebaum’s masterly Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, a follow up to her equally masterly Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. There are not many laughs in that, you may think. But you are wrong. I’m not at all sure I could have survived the dull curtain of monotony that descended on Eastern Europe after 1945 for one simple reason – I have an acute sense of humour.

You see, I would have been overcome with explosive fits of laughter over the shear earnest pettiness of it all. Imagine going in to a bookshop and seeing children’s titles like Six-Year-Old Bronek and the Six Year Plan. You leave quickly, only to have your senses assaulted by a propaganda hoarding. There it is, just across the street, boldly announcing “Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to capitalist imperialism!” Your lips are tightly closed; the laughter is escaping like steam under pressure. You don’t want to be seen so you turn away to look at the latest civic art, only to be confronted by a painting entitled “The technology and organisation of cattle slaughter.” Was the Berlin Wall really brought down, I wonder, by a great outburst of laughter? Sorry, I should write the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, to give its official title.

Yes, there is humour in the story but the bigger picture is altogether bleak. In picturing the history of communism in Eastern Europe I see a façade, eaten hollow from within by termites. In the end the whole thing simply collapsed under its inherent contradictions, to borrow a piece of cherished Marxist terminology.

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: for people in places like Poland, particularly Poland, the Second World War did not end in 1945. The immediate joy of ‘liberation’ simply gave way to an understanding that a new occupation had taken hold, one that was to last for decades.

The expression ‘Iron Curtain’ did not originate with Winston Churchill but it was he who was to give it greatest resonance in speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in March, 1946;

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. 

Applebaum sets out her stall quickly. She refuses to entertain the revisionist view that the imposition of communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 was a countermove to American policy at the start of what was to become the Cold War. No, the importation of a Soviet-style system was a deliberate ideological move, all part of the greater revolutionary good. As she quite rightly says, there was a template already in place for this in the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, states that had been consigned to Stalin under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

So far as Stalin was concerned there were also foreign policy advantages. The new communist satrapies acted as a buffer zone in a period of growing East West tension. More specifically, an independent Poland would clearly have been a major political embarrassment to the Soviets, doubtless demanding the return of those territories in the east of the country seized by Stalin in 1939 as part of his satanic bargain with Hitler. For Poland it was a bleak choice between extinction and communism.

As always the road to hell begins with noble intentions. Alongside the cynical little Stalins, who had spent years licking the boots of their Master in Moscow, there were genuine idealists, people who believed in the lie. They came as self-perceived liberators, ready to free the working classes from capitalist exploitation. They expected to be welcomed in their establishment of a brave new world. Unfortunately for them it had real people in it.

The truth came quickly; the truth came in Poland. In 1946 the people decisively rejected a communist-backed referendum. Perplexed, the government rejected the people, concluding that they had acted in “some kind of incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance.”

Here I immediately fast forwarded to the events of June, 1953 in East Berlin, the first serious uprising against imposed communist rule. Bertolt Brecht, the playwright, had hitherto served as the German Democratic Republic’s tame intellectual and court poet. But even he had enough, offering comment on the worker state’s suppression of the workers in his poem The Solution;

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

That would seem to serve as the very definition of the so-called People’s Democracies. In the place of real people came a hollow cardboard illusion.

Applebaum is splendid in her treatment of the high politics, in her description of the appalling stooges who reproduced the bleak apparatus of Stalinism in their respective spheres of influence: personality cults, purges, camps, bogus trials, the whole depressing paraphernalia. She also offers a description of the corrosive effects of communism on everyday life. Any kind of personal or free expression, even in the most minor forms of liberty, was excised. Popular consciousness was filled with the state and nothing but the state. One small example serves here. The scout movement was banned as were all other private societies. In 1950 in Poland a seventeen-year-old girl met with friends from a former troop. All were arrested and given jail sentences of two to five years.

Iron Curtain is a splendid piece of work, witty, perceptive, thoroughly researched and superbly written. I was impressed enough to consider it the most important book I’ve read this year, one that will make a lasting contribution to our understanding of this period in history, a tragedy on which the final curtain has thankfully fallen. My main criticism concerns the title. It’s not a comprehensive history of Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1956, as the title misleadingly suggests, but principally a history of three countries behind the Curtain – Poland, East Germany and Hungary. There is next to nothing on places like Romania, where the whole communist experiment eventually descended to the most degenerate form.

Don’t let that bother you. The history we are given is first class, a journey into a heart of darkness. Iron Curtain is a book that is scholarly and accessible, free of all condescension while losing nothing in the telling. It’s a commendable achievement. I felt both exhilarated at deflated at the end, especially after reading about the brutal suppression of the 1956 anti-communist rising in Hungary, which proved to all who were not blind that the liberation of 1945 was nothing but a lie. I was exhilarated by the narrative and deflated by the fate of some of our fellow Europeans, to whom history had dealt such a poor hand.

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On

There are stories and experiences from childhood that we all recall with some fondness.  Even if we do not bring them to mind they are in our hearts, a warm glow that never dies.  It is the things we learn and love in innocence that have the greatest resonance.

I was reminded recently of Heidi, a book for children and those who love children by the Swiss author Johanna Spyri.  I was particularly fond of the story of Heidi and her grandfather because I had a very close relationship with my own grandfather, my father’s father, with whom I used to stay when my parents were away on lengthy business trips.  It was my grandfather who introduced me to the Snowman.

I don’t remember when exactly.  I must have been, oh, about four years old.  It was before I went to school anyway.  It was near Christmas, that much I do remember.  The Snowman in question is a story book, pictures without words by Raymond Briggs, another book for children and those who love children.  Like Heidi it tells of a bond, this time between a little boy and the snowman he builds one wintry afternoon in his garden.  By magic it comes to life; by magic the boy and the snowman fly.

It was made into an animated film by Channel 4, one of our terrestrial television companies, with a sublime score by Howard Blake.  When I was growing up it was broadcast every Christmas; perhaps it still is.  With us watching it became an annual event.  The holiday simply would not have been the same without it, as if there was no Christmas tree, no lights and no watch night service in church. 

By far the best bit is the flying sequence.  In the animation it is accompanied by Walking in the Air, a song that still makes me teary with nostalgia;

We're walking in the air
We're floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below are sleeping as we fly

I'm holding very tight
I'm riding in the midnight blue
I'm finding I can fly so high above with you

Far across the world
The villages go by like dreams
The rivers and the hills, the forests and the streams

Children gaze open mouthed
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below believes their eyes

We're surfing in the air
We're swimming in the frozen sky
We're drifting over icy mountains floating by

Suddenly swooping low
On an ocean deep
Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep

And walking in the air
We're dancing in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly

We're walking in the air
We're walking in the air.

There was one Christmas – I was now about six I think – we spent in our family cottage in the north of Scotland, a really remote spot in Easter Ross.  It snowed, heavily.  I built my own snowman in the garden with a little help from father.  It was as big as me, that I remember clearly, with an old hat on his head and a scarf around his neck. 

I waited and waited for him to come to life.  I so wanted to fly like the boy, to go to the North Pole and dance with Father Christmas and all of the other snowmen.  I didn’t and I did.  My snowman remained frozen in the garden, mute and unmoved.  But he came alive in my dreams that night.  And – who knows? –maybe dreams are just a gate to another reality, a world where everything is possible and nothing denied.  It was for me.  The Snowman was the gateway.  

Papal Bull

The Pope has written a book.  There is probably nothing unusual in that.  I feel sure lots of past popes have written books, and the present pontiff is noted for his love of the pen, along with just a soupcon of theological controversy.

I rather thought Catholicism was all dogma.  “Oh, don’t be so dogmatic”, I can hear Pope Benedict say in my mind’s ear, “there is always room for a little flexibility in faith.”  There seems to be more than a little room when it comes to aspects of the Nativity. 

Christmas approaches with alarming speed.  But Christmas may not be Christmas at all, at least according to Jesus of Nazareth: the Infancy Narratives, a new addition to the Papal back catalogue published last week.  Never mind the season, never mind the month, never mind the day: Jesus was born years earlier than is commonly supposed.  The accepted date was based on a miscalculation by Dionysus Exiguus – also known as Dennis the Small –, a sixth century Eastern European monk. 

Dionysus is now best known for the concept of Anno Domini (AD) – in the year of our Lord.  I remember once in a religious studies class, after we had already established what BC meant, we were asked if any of us would care to hazard a guess at AD.  Without pause for thought I replied “After Death.”  “I’ll give you after death”, the teacher said.  I was a bit of a minx, you see. 

According to Benny, Dennis was a bit of a menace when it came to dating. We do not know how he calculated the year of Christ’s birth but he got it wrong, perhaps by as many as several years.  Jesus, you see, was born BC; born, in other words, before Christ!  The contention isn’t new; other scholars have made such a claim, now weighted with a papal imprimatur. 

My goodness, here is the head of the Catholic Church dealing in doubt.  What next, I wonder?  I’ll tell you what next: the Infancy Narratives has no room in the inn for cattle and donkeys.  The ox and ass did not keep time as the drummer boy played because they were not there.  It’s all a myth, the Pope says.  “There is no mention of animals in the Gospels”, he writes, in what is the third and last part of his biography of Jesus.  The inclusion of domestic animals in the Nativity scene was most likely inspired by pre-Christian traditions. 

Not to worry, boys and girls; there will be no Papal Bull ejecting the menagerie, even that set up every year in Saint Peter’s Square.  Even so, it’s as well to remember that it’s just a lot of bull.  So, too, apparently is the singing heavenly host greeting the birth of Christ.  His Holiness writes that the angels did not sing Hark!; they only spoke the words.  Maybe they were crooning. 

But when it comes to the really important stuff, when it comes to the Virgin Birth, there is no room for doubt or papal equivocation: this is the literal truth, the dogma upon which the faith stands or falls.  The Pope is insisting on the word of the Gospels and only the Gospels, which ironically aligns him with seventeenth century English Puritans, who, in their own literal way, literally dispensed with Christmas altogether, a pagan festival unsanctioned by scripture.

It seems to me that there is a kind of naïve purity or theological blindness here in an argument that is too subtle by half, and that half concerns the element of myth from which all belief takes succour.  When one removes the myth one removes the magic.  It is the need for this sort of primitive reassurance that moves mountains, not Papal monographs.  

Lawrence and Lovers

I was asked recently for my view on the writer D. H. Lawrence, particularly in reference to his perception of women.  This is my view, uncompromising in my inimitable, no prisoners fashion.  If you admire Lawrence and his writing what follows comes with an apoplexy warning! 

Sons and Lovers was one of the set texts in my English Lit class at high school, really my first acquaintance with Lawrence. I didn't like it at all. More than that - I hated it. But, since it's wrong to judge a writer on the basis of one book, I persevered, reading Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as some of his shorter fiction.

Evelyn Waugh said that Lawrence could not write for toffee, which is far too mild a criticism; he could not write for anything. As far as I am concerned he is a complete literary fraud, one who managed to achieve a fashionable notoriety. His prose is cloying, indulgent and wholly inauthentic. I've likened it to wading through treacle. I particularly despise his bogus metaphysics, his soft-soap spirituality. I remember in Sons and Lovers stumbling over 'soul' in every other sentence, as if using the word ad nauseum somehow gave his writing soul. It most assuredly did not.

I'm getting away from the point, which is his perception of women. He knew absolutely nothing about women. His understanding of feminine psychology is impoverished in the extreme, rather odd in that he gave women a leading part in a number of his books. But these are not women as women; these are not people as people. They are manikins; women reflected through a particular set of male attitudes; women there, if you like, not in their own right but to affirm and reassure men. They are objects, not subjects.

Let's look specifically at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Poor Connie; a sexually impotent husband and a brutish lover like Mellors the gamekeeper, a sort of avatar of Lawrence himself. For all its explicit sexuality it's a completely unerotic book, as lifeless as the products of modern day pornography. Women only exist as submissive chattels. If they are in any way sexually assertive, well, then, they must be lesbians. Otherwise it's lie back and think of England; no love, no passion, no intimacy, no tenderness; just pointless animalistic thrusting.

Is it really a surprise that the only intimacy Mellors is able to achieve is when he is sodomising Connie? And as far as Connie's own attitude towards sex is concerned you have the Mellors/Lawrence commandeering her point of view: "And how, in fear, she had hated it! But how she had really wanted it." There you are - the literary justification for rape. No really does mean yes.

Then there is Mellors wife, who can only get sexual satisfaction through masturbation. He, in his disgust, "took her by the neck and squeezed the life out of her." You see the only women who get satisfaction out of sex, according to Mellors and Lawrence, are black - more like animals -, but they are a turn off for white men because they "look like mud." Quite frankly there is more sexual sadism than love in Lawrence's oeuvre. He knew nothing of women and less of love. He is the last person I would trust to say anything meaningful about real women and real love.

I hope in time more and more people will understand just what a phoney he was, just how worthless most of his writing is insofar as it touches on genuine human feelings and emotions. There is a lot of soul, though.

I wrote about him here a couple of years ago, a piece I headed A Load of Balls (November 4, 2010), which really sums up my view. And here is my summing up -

The thing is I think Lawrence is a grossly overrated writer. I’ve read his main novels, beginning with Sons and Lovers, and I’ve hated them all; hated his overripe metaphysics, his bogus and insincere spirituality, his inflated and unlikable characters and his florid use of language. There is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that could possibly ‘deprave and corrupt’…it’s just an overblown mess, a bad book by a second rate writer. All the naughty words, all the ‘arse’, ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ will never make up for the fact that Lady Chatterley, like the rest of this unpleasant man’s canon, is, well, a load of balls.

The prosecution rests.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The Times reported last week that Mein Kampf is shortly to be reprinted in Germany, the first time since 1945.  The article itself was accompanied by a wholly gratuitous commentary from one Ben Macintyre, headed Illogical and evil nonsense – read, gasp at it and bin it.   That just about sums up the content of the piece.  Macintyre is not opposed to publication; he just blows a rather hysterical fanfare – ‘badly written’, ‘turgid’, ‘illogical’, ‘boring’, ‘evil nonsense’ and on and on.  Why bother reading it at all?  Macintyre has read it for you!    

Time, I think, for me to revive an earlier comment I made welcoming the prospect of the first new German edition since the fall of the Third Reich.  I knew the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria, which for long refused requests for republication, was scheduled to run out next year, a fact that I found quite pleasing.

Why was I pleased? To begin with I should say that, so far as I am concerned, the banning of books, books with a political message, no matter how repellent, is always wrong. But more to the point, Mein Kampf is an honest political statement, perhaps the most honest ever written by a politician. One only wishes that it had been taken more seriously at the time. It certainly was during the early days of the Cold War, when Western writers scoured the speeches of communist leaders, gathered and published with such dubious titles as Khrushchev’s Mein Kampf.

Hitler was eventually to recognise how unnecessary, how dangerously unnecessary the book had been as power became a realistic possibility, distancing himself from parts of the message in the early ‘moderate’ days of the Third Reich. He wrote a second book in 1928, this time focusing more directly on his foreign policy aims, which was buried during his days of power, only published after the war with the English title of Hitler’s Secret Book. 

You see, for Hitler the spoken was always more important than the written word. It’s virtually impossible to quantify but I would hazard that that while Mein Kampf may have converted thousands- and I do stress may - the speeches converted tens of thousands. Indeed, Mein Kampf is more likely to have discouraged any potential convert by its convoluted and rambling message. If racist and fascist groups promote it today it’s because it’s Hitler’s ‘book’, a kind of icon, not because it has any real political power, any proselytising power.

Publication was banned in this country for more than twenty years after the Second World War. Republication in 1969, in an edition edited by D. C. Watt, was opposed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It was opposed, I believe, by some Jewish groups. I can understand this. At the time the crimes of the Nazis must still have been raw in a lot of minds. Yes, it was understandable but misguided. Father bought Watt’s edition while he was still at school.  He told me that it was the dullest thing he had ever read, duller even than Cicero!

“Oh, that my enemy would write a book”, really is the guiding thread here. Well, he did, and it reveals much more about him than he ever intended, much more about his inner psychosis; reveals more about his intellectual and mental confusion than he could ever have imagined. That is the crucial thing. Publication in England was opposed by Jewish leaders. It’s a sign of how things have moved on, how understanding has grown, that publication in Germany has been backed by Jewish leaders.

Oh, I should also say that, contrary to Macintyre’s view and contrary to what you might have heard, Mein Kampf is actually quite readable if clumsy and ill-organised, the meanderings of a semi-educated high-school drop out.  You might very well read it; I doubt very much if you will gasp at it.  It’s unlikely to give you any greater insight than you already possess.  

Downfall

I cast my eye recently over a review of A. N. Wilson’s newly published Hitler: A Short Biography. Now, A. N Wilson, if you’ve never heard of him, is an omnivorous writer, moving with apparent ease from fiction to non-fiction. His Hitler book, intended for a general audience, is the latest addition to the other critical biographies he has penned.

However, before I read a word of the review, I already concluded that this was pointless book. My first thought was who the hell needs yet another biography of Hitler? My second was it’s only just over two hundred pages long; how on earth could all of that history and drama be crushed into such limited space?

Actually, I’m being slightly disingenuous here. I did not, on first glance, read the review – by Bernard Sims in Prospect -, or, rather, I did not read beyond the words Hitler: A Short Biography. By A. N. Wilson. Harper Press, 208pp, £14.99. That was enough for me. But I came back to it; I read it in full, because the book has occasioned a bit of a spat, a hissy fit fought out on the pages of the New Statesman, a perfect cat fight by two old toms!

It began last month when Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and a specialist in the Third Reich (his three volume history is commendable), wrote not so much a review as an assassination of Wilson’s book, concluding that “It’s hard to think why a publishing house that once had a respected history list agreed to produce this travesty of a biography.” The answer is simple, prof; it’s by A. N. Wilson, who sells, and it’s about Hitler, who sells!

That might have been that. After all, most of the people likely to buy this book probably don’t read the New Statesman; they may not even read reviews at all. But dear old A. N would not let matters rest; he took up the gauntlet so freely thrown, thus starting a new blitzkrieg, spread over several issues of the NS, a withering barrage of words!

I rather think Evans was a bit miffed that an outsider had intruded into his own lebensraum; he certainly chews the carpet, Hitler-style, in his review. ‘Banal’, ‘stale’ ‘cliché ridden’, ‘unoriginal’, ‘lame’, ‘tired narrative’, came his verbal panzer shells. Wilson counter-attacked on the magazine’s letters page: “All is joy. The war is over. Hitler is dead. Get a life, poor Evans. There is no need to be so cross.”

Evans did not rest; his Stukas screamed down from the sky the following week – “I am cross with him not because I think only specialists should write about Hitler - I explicitly noted the contributions made by novelists and literary scholars - but because he has simply ignored 99.9 per cent of the work on the subject done by historians, and as a result has written a book that is absolutely valueless as well as full of errors, many of them not minor at all.”

I read in the Telegraph that this is not the first war in a tea-cup that Wilson has been involved in. In 2002 he wrote a review of Bevis Hiller’s biography of the poet John Betjeman, calling it a ‘hopeless mishmash.’ Four years later he produced his own biography of Betjeman, citing a passionate love letter written by the poet’s mistress. It was hoax. The ‘mistress’ was Hiller, a lover scorned, coldly calculating his revenge, waiting for just the right moment, penning and planting the said epistle. The first letter of each sentence spelled out “A N Wilson is a shit.”

So there!

Anyway, back to Hitler, back to Simms’ Prospect review, hopefully for a less impassioned view. It was. My initial judgement was right: this is a book not worth reading. Wilson apparently tries to draw some parallels between the 1929 crash in the world economy, which gave Hitler his big opportunity, and that of 2008. He is looking, in other words for a second coming, a new beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

That’s reasonable enough, I suppose; these are uncertain times; people are insecure, fodder, one might think, for demagogues. What do we get? Why, such illuminating insights as a comparison between Hitler’s demand for typewriting lessons for children and Tony Blair’s call for a laptop in every British primary school! Ah, yes, a sign of a Reich to come. I have no idea or not if A N Wilson is a shit but he’s clearly had a bit of a downfall.

Happy Easter, guys. :-)

The Perils of Finn

Here I am at the top of another mountain, having climbed Phineas Redux, the forth in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series. It’s really the sequel to Phineas Finn, the second in the set, though it follows on from The Eustace Diamonds, its immediate predecessor.

It was suggested that I read the Phineas novels back to back. But, closely related as they are, I preferred to follow the author’s own footsteps. I’m glad that I did because there is a reasonably important overlap with The Eustace Diamonds, one arising from the disreputable love life of Lizzie Eustace, which has a fairly significant impact on the fate of Finn!

The further I travel the more I warm to Trollope. I’ve come quite a way now from Can You Forgive Her?, the first in the set, where the author came across to me as something of an obsessive eccentric, particularly concerning the question of electoral reform. The ballot, oh the ballot, how tired I was of the ballot! With each step he seems to me to have become progressively more relaxed, less intrusive, more inclined to allow his characters to work out their own destiny in their own way, characters that have become ever more fully rounded.

And what characters they are. What a wonderful schemer Glencora Palliser is, generous to her friends but cat-like in the defence of her own interests, in the interests of her family and the inheritance rights of her son. Yes, Phineas Redux is a political novel, far more so than its predecessor, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that the politics of power and the politics of property, essentially the main theme of The Eustace Diamonds, are intimately related in Trollope’s mind, as they were intimately related in the mind of the Victorian upper classes. Wealth, political power, love, marriage, property and ambition are all dimensions of a complicated game of social advancement.

So, act two: enter Phineas, stage left. That is to say he has returned from Ireland, where his inconvenient wife has conveniently died. Sorry, that sounds a little more cynical than I had intended. ‘Our hero’, as the author refers somewhat irritatingly to his character, though not as much as the first time around, is suitably sobered, and matured, by the experience. The young man in a hurry is no longer in quite such a hurry.

Altogether he is more sober, more reflective, than he was in Phineas Finn, though to begin with no less ambitious. In the course of the novel he is destined to become more reflective still, being caught up in a personal crisis that bring a significant shift in his perceptions of political advancement.

I’m being cryptic but I think the point of a review is to whet the appetite of a potential reader rather than précis the plot! Let me just say that ‘our hero’ finds a way back into political life at a time when politics was money. Finn has no money but he has charm, he has good looks, he has intelligence and, most important of all, he has connections, particularly with the most politically influential people in the novel – the women! Most important of all there is Lady Glencora, now the Duchess of Omnium, and her circle, which includes the talented and enigmatic Madame Max Goesler.

In climbing the greasy pole one can scarcely avoid attracting enemies along the way, those who wish to climb faster. Finn’s enemy, and his potential nemesis, is Mister Bonteen, notwithstanding the fact that they both belong to the Liberal Party. Actually I think that it’s a general truism in politics: one’s opponents are on the other side; one’s enemies are on the same side. Rivalry, after all, rather than principle, makes for a deadlier hatred. Finn’s rivalry with Bonteen has the effect of frustrating his desire for office, undermined by a whispering campaign over his ‘soundness’. It was to be potentially even more deadly when Bonteen is found murdered and Finn finds himself in the dock of the Old Bailey on trial for his life.

It is not just ‘our hero’ who is brought back in Phineas Redux; all of the characters familiar from Phineas Finn are there. Apart from Glencora and Madame Max there is the Lord Chiltern, now married to Violet Effingham, once the subject of Finn’s own amorous interest; Lady Laura Kennedy, living apart from Robert, her morbidly religious husband, an archetype dour Scot, who descends steadily into madness and death as the novel proceeds; and Quintus Slide, the slimy editor of The People’s Banner, who attempts to destroy Finn with a series of insinuations about his relationship with Lady Laura.

The bond between Laura and Phineas, strong and stronger, on the one side, weak and weakening on the other, is one of the central tensions of the novel. He once loved her; he once proposed to her, a proposal that was rejected, though she loved him, in favour of wealth, wealth that was to be accompanied by misery. But just as Finn has outgrown her she has not outgrown him, descending into morbid forms of attraction, a contrast in every way with the practical Madame Max, who performs an invaluable service for him in his hour of greatest need.

I enjoyed this novel tremendously; I enjoyed the political and personal nuances and the interplay between them both. Trollope is a master of words, of character, of simple descriptive power, which shows in all sorts of ways, even so far as his treatment of the hunting themes, in which he excels. Come to think of it that’s another way of reading this book, as kind of fox hunt, with Phineas Finn at one point as the bigger quarry. He makes it safely to the covert - I don’t think I’m giving too much away in saying that - safe in the arms, and the wealth, of Madame Max.

So, yes, another literary Munro bagged; two more to go – The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. Beyond that range I can detect The Chronicles of Barsetshire in the distance, another dimension of Trollope’s oeuvre and another dimension of Victorian politics.

But I’m going to take time out. I have a trip to Egypt coming up, so all of my extra mural reading is shifting in that direction. From a serial by Anthony Trollope I’m now beginning a serial by Naguib Mahfouz, taking me from nineteenth century England to twentieth century Egypt in one swift step. The road goes ever on. :-)

The Manufacturer, his Wife, her Angel, and his Whore

I’m about to write a review of a novel I finished at the weekend. First I want to say a word or two about book reviewers, or rather about the Grub Street hacks that George Orwell conjured up in his essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer. I’ve no idea if this is an accurate portrait or not, but the brush strokes are bold and the colours vivid.

There he is, that poor debased soul, paid by the word, sent a package of books, some of impossible length, all to be dissected within the tightest possible deadline. It’s important not to be too negative because the reviewer’s income, and part of the income of the paper or journal he writes for, depends on the goodwill of publishers and the indulgence of readers. So, out come the clichés, all marching to order:

Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases — ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. etc.’ — will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go. Meanwhile another wad of ill-assorted, unappetizing books will have arrived by post. So it goes on. And yet with what high hopes this downtrodden, nerve-racked creature started his career, only a few years ago.

I rarely come to books on fist publication. By the time I buy my copy - most often in paperback - they have been gutted and filleted, with the choicest cuts laid out, as on a fishmonger’s slab, across the outside and inside covers. Nothing negative, you understand; no, it’s hyperbole here, superlative there, all slightly hysterical stuff about the best book ever written.

Sometimes it becomes laughable in the weight of sheer absurdity. A year or so ago I read The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell’s Second World War epic, a grossly overrated novel which one reviewer, in a transport of banal stupidity, compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Now I hold another in my hand, Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the book I've finished, a novel of Victorian times, which might conceivably have appeared under the title The Manufacturer, his Wife, her Angel, and his Whore. The reference here is, of course to The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, a movie directed by Peter Greenaway.

The praise is lavish, all the best fillets from the most glowing reviews. It’s ‘a cracking read’, ‘wildly entertaining’, ‘unbelievably pleasurable’, ‘a masterpiece’, ‘an epic’, ‘extremely sophisticated’, ‘alluringly readable’, and so on and so blah and so blah. Some of the reviewers are named, not all Orwell’s literary proletariat by any means.

Yes, I came late, and I confess a certain weary cynicism has set in, a strong temptation to shout “Look, see; the emperor has no clothes; he’s naked”, all in my childish naïveté. No, what I will say is that this is an indifferent big book, over eight hundred pages, with a good small book struggling to get out.

So, there you have it, the little girl’s view: The Crimson Petal and the White is overlong and overwritten, a simple theme that carries far too much weight, a Gothic cathedral without the flying buttresses. Careful; it might just collapse in on itself. Once the critical adulation and the hype have finally passed away I’m convinced that it will pass into the literary canon as just another good bad book.

I came to it lately, as I have said, and via a BBC adaptation shown earlier this year, which I enjoyed immensely. A reading of the novel managed to tell me little more than the Beeb dramatisation did in four hours, which might tell you something about self-indulgent writers and lazy editors!

My goodness, here I am, a few hundred words later and I’ve yet to say anything about the contents or the style of Faber’s magnum opus! It’s a Victorian novel; that is to say it is Victorian in style as well as in theme and content, the sort of leisurely exploration that might have been written in that age, though with forms of language and licence allowed by our less censorious times.

The author is present himself as a sort of tour guide, holding high his umbrella for the sheep, sorry, readers to follow on – “If you are bored beyond endurance, I can only offer my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death." Now, who could resist that? Actually, it isn’t really a ‘dirty book’, Bleak House free from Victorian forms of restraint. In some ways it’s quite coy, fucking quickly fucked, with none of the excess of the actual underground literature of the time.

For a big book there is surprisingly small cast. There is William Rackham and his wife, Agnes, mad, morbid and neurotic; Mrs. Rochester not dangerous enough to be confined in the attic. There is Sugar, the prostitute who becomes his mistress and then, with an abrupt fracture in verisimilitude, the governess of Sophie, his neglected daughter. There is morbidly religious Henry, William’s older brother, and Emmeline Fox, the widow on a mission, whom Henry wants to join in spiritual or carnal union, though he has difficulty in making up his mind which. Then there are the incidentals, like the rather sinister Doctor Curlew, Emmeline’s father, Mrs. Castaway, Sugar’s heartless mother, and Bodley and Ashwell, William’s disreputable friends, a sort of Mutt and Jeff act joined, seemingly, at the hip, the one as absurd as the other.

I persevered right to the end; I always persevere unless a book is truly dire. The Crimson Petal and the White is far from that; it’s just overblown and overhyped. Agnes is mad, though why she is mad, or the source of her mania, is never revealed. I actually lost all interest in her quite early on, and why Sugar felt compelled to read her tiresomely dull diaries quite escaped me.

It was on page 657 of the book where everything seemed to fall into place. Sugar, the Crimson Petal, is working her way through the said diaries, dairies that Agnes, the White Petal, has buried in the garden of the Rackham house –“She reads a page, two pages, two and a half pages, but the Agnes Rackham revealed in them is an intolerable irritation, a vain and useless creature whom the world would not miss for an instant if she were removed.” In my only marginalia I note that that would seem to be the key to the whole novel!

The more I write the more negative this is becoming, which wasn't really my intention when I started. Now I was tempted to write that The Crimson Petal and the White is a vain and rather silly book, but it’s not; it’s actually quite good in parts, rich in period detail, a tribute to better writers, better books and a better age. Faber is a good writer, just not a very good one, a good story teller, just not a very good one. To me his Victorian-tribute novel reads like the work of a kind of Daisy Ashford, trying to imitate an adult world with results that are both amusing and ever so slightly ridiculous. I agree with one of the reviewers on Amazon. I, too, would rather have Dickens, even without the swearing…and the fucking.

Don’t expect to see any of this across the dust jacket of a future edition!

The power of the word

I was taught to read by my mother before I started school at the age of five. All my life I’ve been a passionate reader, moving from one thing to another, one genre to another. With reading I came to writing, something I’ve also been doing since an early age. Blogging for me is simply an extension of the dairies and journals I have been keeping since I was six years old.

From time to time I look back on some of these, a funny and heart-warming experience. It’s easy to see that the quality of my writing is closely related to the course of my reading. In other words, I was learning by example, learning that there is no mystery to good prose – it’s a craft, that’s all, a craft perfected as one comes to understand words and how words are best used.

Now I come to tackle one key question, put in discussion quite recently: is it possible to be a writer and not a reader? Is it possible, to put it another way, to produce decent prose by learning from media other than the published word? Do things like audio books or watching news channels help in producing a good writer?

For me the answer is simple; no, of course they can’t. Audio media and personal interactions might help improve skills in conversation and communication but they cannot, by their own, help a person to become a good writer. Only an understanding of the forms of language, how language is structured and how words are used can do that; only reading can do that. Any fool can write; it takes discipline to write well. The more one reads the better one writes, not just learning how it is done well, but seeing how it is done badly.

I’ve had so many influences, so many writers I have learned from when it comes to good English usage and points of style. I have particular admiration for Jonathan Swift and George Orwell, the best essayists and satirists in the English language. Orwell’s Why I Write and Politics and the English Language deserve special mention for their clarity and example. The latter, in particular, should be compulsory reading for all those in public life, a suggestion I have made on previous occasions.

When I’m writing I have Orwell’s admonitions at the front of my mind, his warnings against the use of stale phrases, ugly compound words and dead metaphors. If one begins writing simply by listening, listening to news media or information channels, one is liable to pick up every sin against language that Orwell identifies, with some contemporary horrors added for good effect!

There us another thing here. The best writers, the greatest writers, are also psychologists, reading the character of others through the written word alone. I’m thinking of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, specifically the section headed Oxen of the Sun, where he moves seamlessly through the various styles of other authors, recreating them in words, dipping from his own personality into the personality of Charles Dickens, to take but one example, so different in every conceivable way. It’s impressive, a tour de force in imagination and art, clearly based on a perfect love and understanding of prose, the inner mysteries of the word.

I’m not going to touch on the technical aspects of writing, notably parsing and good grammar, other than to say that these cannot be picked up other than through reading, understanding what is right and what is wrong, where a comma comes and where it does not. But if you want to follow this route I would suggest starting with Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which provides no better illustration of the power of punctuation!

So, if anyone says that they have seen good writing produced by somebody who is not a reader ask to see the writing and judge for yourself. If it is good I can guarantee you that the writer in question is almost certainly a liar.

In the name of the books

I hugely enjoyed Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a medieval mystery set around a hidden monastic library, a treasure house of knowledge; but it was not knowledge accessible to everyone, not even to Brother William of Baskerville (no need to guess the inspiration for that particular name!), the novel’s oh so rational Franciscan sleuth. It was him I thought of in reading recently about John Leland, a real-life bibliophile who saved so much that might otherwise have been lost.

We are used to libraries as public institutions. This is a relatively modern development, though. For hundreds of years books – aside from a few in private hands – were kept in religious institutions, not always readily accessible to other clerics let alone members of the wider community.

John Leland, who was born in London in the early years of the sixteenth century, came at just the right time, a crucial turning point in England’s history just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, when so many libraries were destroyed, their contents lost. Originally a protégé of Cardinal Wolsey, he was given the task by Thomas Cromwell of touring England’s monastic libraries, with the aim of obtaining documentary evidence that would support the king in his desire to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled.

So, off he went, this book hunter, on a journey that took him to places as far away as Tynemouth Priory in the north-east to Glastonbury Abbey in the south-west. Some of the monks were welcoming, others less so, though none were in a position to deny the king’s commission, or to object when Leland ‘borrowed’ some of their collection.

Just as Brother William was gripped by a childlike sense of wonder when he finally penetrated the maze-library of the Italian monastery so, too, was Leland at Glastonbury;

I immediately went to the library, which is not open to all, in order to examine most diligently the relics of sacred antiquity, of which there is so great a number that is not easily paralleled anywhere else in Britain. Scarcely had I crossed the threshold when the mere sight of the ancient books struck my mind with an awe or amazement of some kind, and for that reason I stopped in my tracks for a while. Then, having saluted the genius loci, I spent some days searching through the bookshelves with the greatest curiosity.

His recording and borrowing, which allowed some priceless manuscripts to pass into posterity, came not a moment too soon. Henry’s quarrel with Rome descended ever deeper into acrimony and bitterness. In 1536 an act was passed allowing for the dissolution of many of the country’s religious houses. The business was handed to men like Richard Layton, who carried out the task with all the subtlety of the Vandals descending on Rome. Even a radical Protestant like John Bale, a friend of Leland’s, was moved to condemn the actions of men who used the leaves of irreplaceable manuscripts as lavatory paper or to clean their boots.

With the disappearance of the monasteries ancient libraries disappeared also. In the end there was nothing left, an act of greed, short-sightedness and stupidity than comes close to breaking the heart of all those who love books and revere the past. As I type I feel –what do I feel? – a sense of sorrow and anger, as if the great library of Alexandria had been wilfully destroyed for a second time, on this occasion in my own land. The fact that this happened over half a millennium ago seems to make no difference.

Thanks to Leland something emerged phoenix-like from the ashes – De Viris Illustribus, an invaluable bibliography, a record of what was and what remained. A huge enterprise, he set out to describe every writer and every book he had come across in his travels. James P Carley, editing a new edition of this work, quite rightly says that it is a unique witness to pre-Dissolution England. Or loss was great but without Leland our loss would have been greater still.