The Sharp Side

What’s missing from the BBC TV adaptation of Bleak House:

Coal fires in domestic interiors.

The Dedlock dust quenched in delicate perfumes.

Dickens’ explicit anger at the “barbarism” of English society.

Dickens’ idiosyncratic and omnipresent sense of humour.

A candle draped in a winding sheet.

Mr Snagsby, “greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing.”

Chambers where “lawyers lie like maggots in nuts.”

“London ivy.” Which isn’t green and isn’t a plant.

Esther’s winsome chit-chat with herself.

Esther’s strange, intense feelings for her “darling” Ada, her “pet”, and her thought of Ada posed as if attempting to kiss her from a distance.

Mrs Rouncewell’s troublesome son.

Mrs Rouncewell’s troublesome son’s obsession with hydraulic pressure.

The ideas held by rabbits.

Stomachers.

A little noise in a place of echoes.

Mr Krook’s cat upon his shoulder, her tail erect.

Mr Krook’s yellow hand.

Mr Krook’s collection of cat skins.

What’s the point of adapting Dickens? There is so much in the novel that simply can’t be translated into cinema (including the smell of dust obscured by perfume, and the thought processes of rabbits). What the adaptation does is strip the novel down to its basic characters and story lines (a secret scandalous past, which leads to a murder). But Dickens wasn’t a genre writer, even though he was keen on writing page turners. If you watch the BBC version and it sends you off to read the novel, fine. But if you don’t bother to read the novel don’t think you’ve learned anything about the book or about Dickens from watching the TV version. It’s slick, glossy drama but its representation of the period in which it is set is a travesty. As for Jo! Jo should be a skinny malnourished wretch not a strapping nicely spoken lad with cosmetic mud smeared prettily on his cheeks.

On the plus side, Charles Dance is excellent as Mr Tulkinghorn. Spot on. Very reptilian and predatory. The actress who plays Lady Dedlock is also wonderful. As for the rest… So many familiar faces (including Harry Potter’s ’orrible uncle reincarnated as a genial bumbler).

Charles Dance was on BBC breakfast TV the other morning, plugging the show. He said Dickens used more adjectives than any other writer. I wonder if that’s true? My wild guess would be that D. H. Lawrence used as many adjectives in his books as Dickens, but I can’t say that in the days I read Lawrence I was keeping a list. What sane person bothers to count up the adjectives when they read a novel?

Pas au-delà should probably turn away now. I’ve spotted two more allusions in a Bob Dylan song. (Pas au-delà regards it as of no consequence “whether Dylan was right or wrong about Hurricane Carter, or whether ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is a racist song or not, or whether he's read Edna St. Vincent Millay. The philosophy of pop is finally something other than this.” More on this below.)

The song is “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, from the album Blood on the Tracks. The second stanza begins “Dragon clouds so high above / I’ve only known careless love, / It’s always hit me from below.” The first line is unmistakeably an allusion to that moment in Antony and Cleopatra when Antony begins a short monologue with the words, “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish” (IV, xiv. 2).

Of course, it is of no real consequence whether the listener spots the allusion or not. The song succeeds as a song irrespective of its musical or literary echoes (just as “Neighborhood Bully” fails as a song irrespective of its politics). But I think once you’ve spotted the allusion two things happen. The first is that you learn something about Bob Dylan. He’s literate and witty in a way that most songwriters aren’t. The breadth of his knowledge and the diverse materials he absorbs are part of what make him the greatest American songwriter of the second half of the twentieth century. There’s a richness and fertility there which makes the loose analogy with Shakespeare valid: both men are creative plagiarists, making the stuff of their art out of innumerable sources, both high and low, then playing it back to make something which is both direct and simple yet complex and multi-levelled. Dylan’s “careless love” which has “always hit me from below” includes the kind of innuendo familiar from Shakespeare’s writing.

The point of the allusion, I think, is that Dylan would like the listener to spot it. It’s not there because he couldn’t think of something better and decided to copy from someone else, who happened to be Shakespeare. Secondly, once you get the allusion, the texture of the song is made richer. It’s a playful allusion because the situation in the song is not tragic, not despairing. The speaker will be made lonesome when his lover departs but it’s clear he’ll get over it. He claims grandeur for his heart and his relationships – parallels with Verlaine and Rimbaud, Antony and Cleopatra – but there’s a cheeky, chirpy acknowledgement that he’ll not be pulled down by it (“Yer gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to” is a sardonically lightweight response to a broken heart. It’s the antithesis of “The long day’s task is done, / And we must sleep.”) It’s Dylan’s version of “I Will Survive”.

The context of the Shakespearean echo also seems relevant. Antony’s short speech beginning “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish” is about perception, imagination and performance. Clouds can take on many forms – dragons, bears, lions – and “mock our eyes with air”. They are “signs” – “black vesper’s pageants”, which my Signet edition reasonably glosses as “evening’s brightly colored but unreal scenery”. The key word being pageants. Lurking at the back of the speech is the old theme of the theatricality of human life, and its temporary, insubstantial qualities. Scenery shifts; people die. Antony complains that “here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape.” (IV. xiv. 13-14) The speech is about death. Evening is on its way. Antony will die, and so too will his lover. But Antony is also the actor playing Antony who, after dying in his part, will change his clothes and go home. In an afternoon performance, in an open-air theatre, the situation would also have been literal: the day would have been drawing to a close in parallel to the play. And Antony and Cleopatra is also one of Shakespeare’s later plays, when his career was winding down. Pageants – amateur open air performances in town streets or open spaces - were the form of entertainment he’d known in his childhood and youth, before the sophistication of commercial theatre at a fixed site. It is not just Antony’s work that is coming to an end.

Dylan invokes Mark Antony’s speech but he does it with a wink. The dragon clouds are so high above – in other words, so very far away. I’m not there yet, he’s saying. It would be another quarter century before he arrived at “Not Dark Yet”.

Cut to the last stanza, which begins:

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.

Why Ashtabula? It doesn’t rhyme with Honolulu. Was it the only place with four syllables ending in a vowel that Dylan could think of? Maybe. But it was important enough for him, in performance, to twist the final vowel of Honolulu and force it to rhyme with Ashtabula, rather than the other way round.

Here’s my suggestion where Dylan found “Ashtabula”. It’s a lot more tentative than the Shakespeare echo and I shall cheerfully concede I might be wrong with this one (unlike the Antony and Cleopatra allusion, which I shall defend down to my last bullet). In Chapter Nine of The Adventures of Augie March, “a place near Ashtabula, Ohio” is where Augie, on the run from the cops after splitting up with Joe Gorman, jumps on board a freight train going towards Cleveland. It’s a parallel of sorts. Could just be a coincidence I suppose. But I can kinda see Dylan soaking himself in this picaresque tale of a Jewish boy made good, written in a clotted, pacy style that yokes high culture and the language and realities life at the top, and on the fringes, and amid the lower depths of American society. Ashtabula is where two destinies separate for good, and Augie goes on to a new life, leaving Joe Gorman far behind him. He will never meet him again, in Ashtabula or anywhere else.

So. Does it matter “whether Dylan was right or wrong about Hurricane Carter, or whether ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is a racist song or not, or whether he’s read Edna St. Vincent Millay”? I think it does. 'Hurricane' is another of Dylan’s great songs about racism and corruption in the US police force and judiciary. It’s a stunningly powerful, full-blooded song that arises from and is propelled by Dylan’s fury at the injustice of Hurricane Carter’s imprisonment. In this song Dylan embodied Marx’s desire that you should not only try to understand your world, you should also set out to change it. It’s a campaigning song, set in the real world. If you say that it doesn’t matter what the song is about, or whether it’s true or not, and that it’s just great music, then I think you’ve missed a lot of the point of the song. You aestheticise it. You turn it into an artefact detached from real life. That impulse reminds me very much of the American ‘New Criticism’ of the 1950s. The New Critics wanted to remove literature from life and history and regard writing as exclusively a formal structure – a well-wrought urn, an organic artefact, where all you discussed was language. The New Critics rubbished biography. The writer’s life, the writer’s intentions, were an irrelevance. Out with society and history, just stick to the words! But theory is never innocent, and the New Criticism slotted in nicely with the quietism of the age. If you don’t want to talk about history or society, you threaten nothing.

There’s a similar aestheticising impulse at work in the moment in Vladimir Nabokov’s essay on Bleak House where he quotes from the scene where Jo dies:

“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order, Dead, men and women born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”

Nabokov comments: “This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion.” Nabokov is wrong. It’s a lesson in style AND emotion. Bleak House is not simply a literary artefact. It powerfully expresses Dickens’s own seething rage and contempt for a supposedly Christian society where children died openly in the London streets. Bleak House projects Dickens’s vision of England as a rotten and corrupt society. (Where are the modern English novelists who possess Dickens’s range, artistry, and most of all, his fury? Dreaming of winning prizes, tailoring their writing for a mass market, and not wanting to upset anyone who might further their career, perhaps.)

Similarly, to say that it doesn’t matter whether ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is a racist song or not, or whether he's read Edna St. Vincent Millay, is to remove significant dimensions of meaning from Dylan’s music. If Dylan really is alluding to a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay in an album title, it signifies he wants us to share in the identification he himself is making as an artist. And if we want to understand the meaning of ‘Neighborhood Bully’ we need to look at the sub-text as well as what the song is ostensibly about. It might even help us to understand why it’s a bad song musically. (That it is a bad song is, I think, confirmed by the way no Dylan commentator, whatever angle they are approaching his work from, shows anything more than a perfunctory interest in it. And anyone who thinks that ‘Neighborhood Bully’ is up there with ‘Tears of Rage’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is, to my mind, crackers.)

Pas au-delà approvingly cites Mark Greif, writing in n+1 magazine:

"All of us lovers of music, with ears tuned precisely to a certain kind of sublimity in pop, are quick to detect pretension, overstatement and cant about pop–in any attempt at a wider criticism–precisely because we feel the gap between the effectiveness of the music and impotence and superfluity of analysis. This means we don't know about our major art form what we ought to know. We don't even agree about how the interconnection of pop music and lyrics, rather than the words spoken alone, accomplishes an utterly different task of representation, more scattershot and overwhelming and much less careful and dignified than poetry–and bad critics show their ignorance when they persist in treating pop like poetry, as in the still-growing effluence around Bob Dylan..."

I think we can take it that Mark Greif hasn’t read Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin. But in opposition to Ricks’s exuberant, imaginative engagement with Dylan’s songs what are we offered? The “impotence and superfluity of analysis”. Well, sorry guys, but I prefer some form of analysis to none at all. As for pop music being “much less careful and dignified than poetry”. Here’s a poem:

On Cary Frazier

Her father gave her dildoes six;
Her mother made ’em up a score;
But she loves nought but living pricks,
And swears by God she’ll frig no more.

Careful? Dignified? The reality is that poetry is just as diverse in its varieties as pop music. (Cary Frazier was a Maid of Honour at the court of Charles II. The poem is attributed to the Earl of Rochester, and I found it in a collection which would upset readers of the Daily Mail - Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse, edited by Alan Bold.) What the two art forms have in common is a desire to communicate something, usually an experience, through words. It might be communicated according to prevailing ideas of realism, or through fantasy, or through some hybrid of existing forms. Pop music self-evidently has dimensions that poetry lacks (the human voice, the backing music, the individuality of every performance, its immediate visceral impact) but I don’t see why that should prevent us discussing that aspect which they both share: words. In fact when I hear the words “philosophy of pop” I reach for my revolver.

Bah!

So, the National Portrait Gallery has decided that the so-called Grafton Portrait of Shakespeare (in the collection of the John Rylands Library at Manchester University) isn’t Shakespeare after all. This conclusion is based on the hugely expensive clothes which the young man in the painting, dated 1588, is wearing. Shakespeare at 24 couldn’t have afforded clothes like that. It’s a perfectly sound conclusion. In reality there was never anything to connect the painting to Shakespeare, apart from wishful thinking and the letters “WS” on the back. These turned out to have been put there in the nineteenth century.

The Gallery is still researching the so-called Chandos Portrait “under the microscope”. “While we haven’t found any evidence that this is Shakespeare, we haven’t found any evidence that it isn’t,” says Dr Tanya Cooper, the Gallery’s sixteenth century curator. How true! And while I haven’t found any evidence that Shakespeare ever pissed in my garden I haven’t found any evidence that he didn’t, so let’s face it – he might have done.

The Grafton Portrait and the Chandos Portrait and the theory that at age seventeen Shakespeare joined the household of Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire all have one thing in common – a snobbish desire to link Shakespeare to the aristocracy or the landed gentry. The same goes for all the crackpot authors who assert that Shakespeare’s works were secretly written by someone else – someone of greater social status and learning. They also express a desire to fill in a blank that can’t ever be filled in. In a visual age we demand to know what Shakespeare looked like, as if it would help in some way in understanding his writing. Today’s Guardian refers to “the Martin Droeshout engraving, authenticated by Ben Jonson”.

Jonson’s ten line poem about the engraving is a double-edged thing, however. On the one hand he implies that the engraving brilliantly reproduces what Shakespeare really looked like and admires the way Droeshout “hath hit / His face”. But Jonson also says that the engraver “had a strife / with Nature, to out doo the life”. The poem could, in fact, be a piss-take (“oooh – it looks SO like him” – meaning “what a crap portrait!”). When Jonson concludes with the words “Reader, looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke” he might be making the straightforward point that it’s the writings that matter, not the man. Or he could be saying: ignore this truly awful author pic and get stuck into the plays.

How’s this for chutzpah?

In today’s Guardian film and music supplement Jonathan Freedland waxes lyrical about the state of the Israeli film industry. At the end of his article he refers to Israel as “a young society thrown up in fraught circumstances”. Ah, what a pleasantly sugar-coated way of referring to ethnic cleansing of the vilest sort.

His final two sentences are: “What it [the movie Live and Become] and all these films show is a society not of devils or saints but of human beings. Recognition of that is all the saner advocates of Israel have ever wanted.”

Oh yeah? Well if these wonderful human beings want to be treated as such all they have to do is treat other human beings as equals and stop discriminating against them on the grounds of religion and race. But most Israelis don’t want that. They want a sectarian Jewish state, which puts Jews first and treats non-Jews like scum. And people like that don’t deserve to be regarded as human beings - any more than Nazis or South African white supremacists deserved recognition as civilised humans. And the Third Reich and apartheid South Africa are the two states which Israel has most in common with – institutionally. Although a vast apparatus of corporate media smoothtalk and Freedland-style obfuscation exists to obscure that raw reality.

Here’s a couple of suggestions for Quiz Night.

Which Bruce Willis thriller begins with film of Lenin?

Which western begins with the words: THE REVOLUTION IS NOT A SOCIAL DINNER, A LITERARY EVENT, A DRAWING OR AN EMBROIDERY; IT CANNOT BE DONE WITH ELEGANCE AND COURTESY. THE REVOLUTION IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.

And you might like to add: what do these two movies have in common?

The answers are The Jackal (1997) and A Fistful of Dynamite (1972).

What the two films have in common is that they each glorify terrorism.

Of course the concept of “glorifying terrorism” is a very dodgy one, because as even the Liberal Democrats have grasped, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Still, no one can say that Charles Clarke is being in any way bashful about what the Terrorism Bill is all about. He is quoted in today’s Independent as explaining how the act will be used: “Those who argue that committing violent acts to promote the cause of animal rights and justify it with phrases such as ‘violence begets violence’ would be covered by this act.”

But of course the act won’t just be used against animal rights activists – it can be used against anyone who argues that the violence of British or American foreign policy begets violence by its victims. It will be used not against people using bombs but against people using words. And of course it will be used to legitimise the terrorism and violence of the British state. For example, if I was to argue that any Palestinian was perfectly entitled to assassinate Jack Straw for his crimes I would no doubt be committing an offence under the Terrorism Act. I could be fined or imprisoned simply for my point of view. But of course the State protects Jack Straw, even though he is complict in acts of violence against civilians, and deserves to be tried by a Nuremberg-style Tribunal for crimes against humanity. (In July 2002 Jack Straw authorised the sale of British display systems for use in F-16 fighter bombers for sale to Israel. One of these F-16 planes subsequently dropped a one-ton bomb on to an apartment block in Gaza City, killing 15 people including nine children. Ariel Sharon declared the bombing “a success” because it killed a single Hamas leader. Jack Straw made that atrocity possible.)

Back to the movies. They were both on TV recently and I watched them because (i) I’ll watch anything with Bruce Willis in it (ii) I like spaghetti westerns. What interested me about these movies was their politics, as both were made for the mass American market. The Jackal is basically a remake of Day of the Jackal, shifting the action to the USA and updating it. It’s not a patch on the original movie but as thrillers go it’s watchable. Bruce Willis plays the part of a mysterious top international assassin who has to be taken out before he succeeds in carrying out his deadly mission in the USA. Lined up to catch Bruce are the FBI, Russian state security and an IRA man.

The IRA man is played by sexy Richard Gere. His Irish accent sounded okay to me. This IRA character is let out of an American prison where he is serving a life sentence because he is the only person who knows what the jackal looks like. Gere is the hero of the movie – a man who is even smarter than the cops and the spooks. But how do you make an IRA man a hero? The accusation is levelled at Gere that he is “a terrorist”, a man who blows up women and children. “I was never a bomber”, Gere angrily retorts. No! He was an “IRA sharpshooter”. Apparently a sniper is on an altogether higher moral plane than someone who lets off bombs. Good on yer, Lee Harvey Oswald!

But, one character protests, Gere was still a bad man – “a known killer of British government personnel”. A bit of a weird formulation that, eh? What the script means is that Gere has killed British soldiers but the focus is softened to make it almost sound like he was dealing with civil servants. The sharpshooter shit doesn’t fool our ally from Putin land. “I don’t see the distinction. You still took human lives,” persists the Russian heroine. “The distinction is I killed in a war,” Gere retorts. And the dialogue ends there. If you kill in a war it’s okay.

Later on we find out that Gere once had a relationship with a beautiful Spanish woman, a hunted Basque terrorist who has gone into hiding and reinvented herself by marrying a clean cut white American male. She now has a big detached American home by a lake and two lovely kiddies. But despite the marriage and the new identity she still loves Gere, and Gere still loves her. At the end of the movie she saves Gere’s life. But (sob) they both know that what was once between them can never be renewed. Though she still loves Gere her future lies with her husband and kids. Dooty has to take precedence over lurve. And since between them they’ve eliminated the jackal, the US government obligingly lets the Basque terrorist continue as a homely American housewife, and Gere is allowed to slip back to the land of Flann O’Brien. Sweet.

A Fistful of Dynamite registers the tail end of sixties radicalism. The quotation at the beginning ends with the name of the author: Mao Tse-Tung (as his name used to be spelt). My guess is it comes from the Little Red Book. It strikes me as a fairly wonderful quote, though I have a sneaky suspicion Mao was perhaps a trifle over-enthusiastic about the violence part. The use of this quotation registers that cultural moment when Maoism was flavour of the month among sections of the Western European left intelligentsia. Since A Fistful of Dynamite strikes me as being influenced by Peckinpah’s work the Mao quote may even have been a lefty retort to the nihilistic Chinese proverb which prefaced some cuts of Straw Dogs, released the year before.

A Fistful of Dynamite is a much better and much more interesting movie than The Jackal, though its shares its orientalist tendencies (just as an Irishman is played by an American in The Jackal, the two leads in A Fistful of Dynamite – a Mexican and an Irishman – are both played by Americans: Rod Steiger and James Coburn). The movie is set in Mexico in 1913, against the background of revolutionary upheavals and military repression. The opening sequence is the best cinematic representation of the bourgeois world turned upside down I’ve ever seen (sort of Eisenstein by way of Bunuel by way of Ken Russell at his more exuberant).

Later on there are some extraordinary scenes of military repression and massacre. I can’t off-hand think of any movies I’ve seen in which you see troops massacring civilians in a big, remorseless way. But what’s interesting watching the movie from the perspective of the year 2005 is its representation of the Irishman. He is portrayed as an Irish revolutionary, who has fled into exile after killing British troops. There’s even a flashback in which we see James Coburn gunning down the soldiers. And we, as the audience, are not meant to feel this is a bad thing. It doesn’t make us dislike our hero. Heck, it was them or him. What choice did he have? And anyway, he was fastest off the draw. It was one man against at least two British troops. Well done James for blowing them away! This is a movie which I think might well prove popular in Basra.

More interesting still is the way Coburn is represented as a man with expertise in explosives and blowing things up. He does so with great panache and humour. He’s the bomber as a loveable, folksy Irishman. At the end – if I’ve understood it correctly – he blows himself up rather than die a slow agonising death. A suicide bomber, in short. But a great guy.

I suppose these genial representations of Irish killers have a lot to do with the size of the Irish American community and the fact that the American take on the Troubles was always very different to that of the British media (it’s the American war of independence, see – they don’t have a problem with perceiving the Brits as enemy occupiers in that context). And most important of all, I suppose, is that the Irish are not from the Middle East. Now that really is important in representing violence in popular entertainment.

The first sentence of John Updike’s story ‘Ethiopia’ runs as follows: “The Addis Ababa Hilton has a lobby of cool and lustrous stone and a giant, heated, cruciform swimming pool.”

As a first sentence it signals many things. It tells us we are entering a fictional world which has solidity and style, mediated by a narrator in possession of authoritative and exotic knowledge. The reader is expected to acquiesce in the narrator’s power and fluency. The title of the story carries equal authority: it is astoundingly inclusive (particularly for a story of some seven pages).

A young American couple are on holiday in Africa. The tone is relaxed, ironic, lightly comic. The couple are gently satirised but treated affectionately by their narrator.

‘Ethiopia’ was written in the same year that Ann Quin died (now there’s an interesting contrast – Updike/Quin - in terms of commercial value, narrative form and critical reputation). It was subsequently published in Updike’s collection Problems (1979). It’s a very interesting narrative for its hegemonic literary and ideological properties. It perfectly embodies the continuing dominant contemporary narrative form of non-genre fiction in the English-speaking capitalist countries – a kind of glossy realism which largely focuses on the concerns of the affluent bourgeoisie (usually heterosexual). The narrative flows smoothly to its end, often with a pleasant froth of style, a little dusting of irony.

In Updike’s fiction there is no danger of the reader being taxed with any kind of difficulty, either in narrative terms or in the representation of the world at large. Characters are solidly drawn; we know what they wear and what they think. The medium of the fictive reality is as transparent as its processed meaning. A soothingly complete conclusion is reached at journey’s end. The dominant ideology and narrative form is confirmed, not challenged or disturbed. When the narrator relates that in Ethiopia “the poverty is acute despite massive infusions of American aid” the reader is not encouraged to ask questions but simply to accept this melancholy fact.

One thing that does puzzle me about this story is the moment when we are taken inside the consciousness of the American husband: “God, I love this country. The jewels. The arid height. The Holton corridors of greenish stone. The tiny dried-up Emperor. The bracing sense of never having been colonized by any European power.”

Eh? Although I could be wrong about this, I don’t get the impression that Updike is making an ironic point about the historical illiteracy of his character. I think Updike is displaying his own ignorance and is blissfully unaware that Ethiopia was formerly called Abyssinia and was colonized by fascist Italy in the period 1936-1941.

Channel Five is running a weekly documentary series on Friday nights entitled “Great British Commanders”. It is fronted by Major Gordon Corrigan, who is straight out of central casting (toothbrush moustache, leathery battered face, a few teeth missing; this is a man who’s clearly been in a scrap or two over the years). My antennae quivered at the realisation that last Friday’s episode was on Douglas Haig, commander of the British Army on the western front in the First World War. I have minimal interest in Henry V, the Duke of Wellington or Lord Nelson, but I am interested in a man who played a large role in a war which left some of my ancestors listed on memorials to the dead of the Great War. So I taped the programme and have now got round to watching it.

Major Corrigan turned out to be Douglas Haig’s number one fan. “Haig was a brilliant soldier. He was a master of organisation and planning and a visionary champion of new technology…Right from the beginning of his military career, when he went to Sandhurst, his natural ability shone through. It was clear he was destined for high command… Haig was a fine man, not only brave and humane but also modest.”

Of course there was that spot of bother known as the Battle of the Somme - 60,000 casualties in a single day, not good. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault”, Corrigan explained. The British army was largely an army of civilians and “heavy casualties are inevitable while that army learns its trade”. What’s more “Haig learned from his mistakes and that’s the making of a great commander.” (Eh? What mistakes? I thought he didn’t make any.)

In support of his thesis the Major gazed at some pages of Haig’s diary, in the company of Colm McLaughlin, curator of the National Library of Scotland. He also talked to an English woman who runs a bed and breakfast near the Somme, a French bloke who’d excavated the remains of a tank, and Earl Haig (born 1918), who remembers his dad as a lovely man.

“It was Haig who spearheaded the introduction of technology to the western front. He integrated tanks and aircraft with the troops on the ground to eventually drive through the German defences. By November 1918 the Germans had had enough. Faced with defeat on the battlefield and revolution at home, they pleaded for peace… It was Haig’s victory.”

So why do some base personages still persist in regarding Haig as a less than superb military leader?

Denis Winter’s ground-breaking book Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (1991) supplies the reasons. (Winter’s book, by the way, has made him many enemies, not least by exposing the complacency and inaccuracy of standard histories of the war and its battles. Winter discovered that the Public Record Office was useless - if you want the truth, go to archives in Australia.)

Haig did not have natural ability as a soldier. He failed the entrance exam to Camberley Staff College. Luckily his sister was married to the Keeper of the Prince of Wales’s racing yachts; with the help of influence at Court, Haig was admitted. His early military performance was undistinguished. His rapid promotion almost certainly owed something to him lending (actually giving) £2,000 to his senior officer, Sir John French. Winter concludes that Haig’s rise through the ranks “had always owed more to intrigue and patronage than to any evidence of talent as a soldier.” (p. 41, Penguin edition)

Haig’s mediocrity and incompetence as a military commander was evident from his very earliest involvement in the Great War. In 1914, at Mons, Le Cateau and Landrecies, he repeatedly bungled his command in the face of the enemy. At the battle of 1st Ypres, Haig claimed he had bravely ridden into the heart of the danger zone to rally his men; the episode turned out not to have existed, and was characteristic of his tendency retrospectively to fabricate accounts of his bravery and shrewdness which had no basis in historical fact. (Haig’s much-quoted diary is an unreliable document because it was doctored after the war.)

In March 1915 Haig took charge of the first major British offensive, at Neuve Chapelle. The British force outnumbered the Germans three to one, with a field gun each five yards and heavy artillery every nineteen yards. Haig was confident of a great victory, asserting that “We are entering on a serious offensive with the object of breaking the German line. It is very likely than an operation of considerable magnitude may result.” But the attack went horribly wrong. The British force advanced 1,000 yards, but at the cost of 12,000 casualties.

From this Haig went on to another splendid victory at Loos in September 1915, when he had the bright idea of sending his troops across a thousand yards of open downland at 11 in the morning, in full view of the German machine gunners. “The result of all this was that the two divisions lost 8,000 men in the first hour.” (p. 41)

As for Haig the “master of organisation and planning”. In 1915 Haig had calculated that to fight a major battle you needed twenty-nine supply roads and seven broad-gauge railway lines. But at the Battle of the Somme he had neither. Both the road and railway supply lines were grossly inadequate. Haig planned for a battle which would last 14 days. In the event it lasted from July 1 1916 through to November. During that time the British and German armies suffered one million casualties, fighting over an area of land just seven miles square. Contrary to the popular “attrition” argument put forward by some Haig apologists, British casualties were twice those of the Germans.

On 1 July 1916 the French army at the Somme achieved all its objectives at a cost of 7,000 casualties. British troops failed to make any significant advance, at a cost of 60,000 casualties. [The supposedly “humane” Haig, incidentally, remarked “We almost seem to be fighting against the laws of nature in trying to keep alive races who are obviously of an inferior kind” – by which he was referring to Italians (“a wretched people, useless as fighting men but greedy for money”) and the French (“Few realize the difference between right and wrong, between honest, straightforward dealing and low cunning”).]

So why did the shifty, slippery French succeed where the honest and decent British failed? Because the French army took its artillery seriously, whereas British gunners were poorly trained and had no experience of night-firing, counter-battery work or long range indirect fire. When Noel Birch was appointed Haig’s chief artillery officer he was stunned to discover that there was a complete organisational shambles. There wasn’t even a list available of the artillery then in France. In Winter’s words, “The great weakness was an utter lack of concern with accuracy.” (p. 60) That’s a point worth bearing in mind the next time you see old movie footage from the Great War. The British army not only lacked the ability accurately to neutralise the enemy’s front line, it was also incapable of precision creeping barrages. The impact of shelling was often merely to plough up the ground that the attacking troops had to cross, slowing them down and making them even easier to pick off. These crucial failures in British army strategy are rarely acknowledged in accounts of the First World War. By contrast, French artillery barrages possessed great tactical sophistication.

Passchendaele was the next catastrophe. By 1917 both French and German strategists appreciated the importance of flexible barrages, infiltration and attack in small groups. Haig remained wedded to the disastrously stupid tactic of massed linear advance. British casualties at Passchendaele were around 350,000 – German losses were about two thirds of that figure. In Winter’s words, “Haig’s unerring instinct for choosing the worst place to launch an attack is a matter of record.” (p. 151)

In fact far from being a superb organiser and brilliant strategist Haig’s mind was of a rigidly conservative cast. He knew nothing about infantry, engineers or artillery – and made no effort to find out. In late 1917 he still believed that you could punch a hole in the enemy’s front line and send in the cavalry. But what do trifles like strategy and supply lines matter when you have God on your side? Haig wrote: “I know quite well that I am being used as a tool in the hands of the Divine Power and that my strength is not my own.”

As for Corrigan’s claim that Haig was “a visionary champion of new technology”. That is a truly preposterous assertion. Haig is on record as complacently telling senior staff, “I hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance in the air. There is only one way for a commander to get information by reconnaissance and that is by the use of cavalry.” Haig was a cavalry man, with a mindset still firmly lodged in the nineteenth century. Far from regarding planes and tanks as cutting edge machines for winning a war, as late as 1918 Haig remained firmly convinced that they were still less valuable than cavalry, to which they should always be subordinate.

In March 1918 the German army launched an attack which drove the British back forty miles. The British lost 600 guns, suffered 40,000 casualties and 25 of Haig’s 60 divisions were reduced to little more than skeletons. It was the greatest defeat suffered by any army on the Western front up to that time. Haig in fact almost lost the war. By June 1918 the German army seemed poised on the brink of victory. But German commanders, disastrously, failed to follow up their advantage. By August the German army was in retreat. This owed nothing to Douglas Haig and everything to the strategy of the French commander, Foch, who had obtained precise foreknowledge (through intelligence) of German military intentions. But the German army was far from a spent force. Less than a month before the end of the war, Haig gloomily acknowledged the strength of the German army and thought that two more years of war would be necessary: “In 1920, the real crushing of Germany will be possible, always provided that the British Army is kept up to its present strength.”

The sudden, wholly unexpected collapse of Germany had nothing at all to do with military defeat, because the German army was never defeated. Germany collapsed because a revolution broke out. Britain did not win through military superiority, and its victory was in spite of Douglas Haig, not because of his leadership. As a military commander he was an unimaginative mediocrity.

If others in the British army share Major Corrigan’s belief that Haig sets a marvellous example of military leadership and strategy, I guess this goes some way to explaining why things are going so splendidly in Iraq.

For the benefit of anyone who didn’t see the Independent last Friday and Saturday: on Friday, Professor John Sutherland, responded on the letters page to Boyd Tonkin’s fury, sardonically pointing out that the Independent had carried two glowing reviews of John Banville’s The Sea, one by Peter J Conradi on 3 June, and another by John Tague on 4 September (“unlikely to be bettered by any other novel published this year”” said Tague). But in the same day’s Arts and Books Review, Boyd Tonkin used his regular weekly column to reiterate his rage: “the panel of judges, after surveying the treasure-laden mountain of this year’s finest fiction, brought forth the prissy little mouse of John Banville’s The Sea. That miracle of misjudgement will damage the standing of the award.”

I’m often days, weeks or months behind in catching up with the newspapers and magazines I accumulate, so it seems apt that I’ve only just got round to reading the 4 August 2005 issue of the London Review of Books, which turns out to contain a lengthy review of The Sea, by Adam Phillips. Phillips gives the novel a rave review, calling Banville “an extraordinary stylist [who] has always had an ear for the strange equivocations that language is riddled with, and an obsessive interest in men who are unable to sustain their ‘identities’, who are haunted and nearly broken by their own theatricality…” He compares Banville to Dostoevsky.

I shall certainly buy The Sea when it comes out in paperback. There will be the added frisson of knowing that this will annoy Boyd Tonkin. I must admit I chuckled over Boyd Tonkin’s nutty notion that the Booker Prize has an awesome reputation which is henceforth seriously damaged. The high profile of the Booker has nothing to do with the integrity and soundness of its annual judgements and everything to do with the fact that it’s televised, shown in a prime time slot, and that the panel is usually made up of “celebrities”. It has little to do with lasting literary merit and a lot to do with prevailing literary fashion and, like a lot of literary prizes, the populist values, connections and friendships of the high profile judges. The choice of past winning titles has frequently seemed peculiar. Ian McEwan won it for Amsterdam, which I imagine even his most fervent admirers would surely agree was one of his lesser masterpieces.

This year’s supposedly controversial choice resulted in an utterly brilliant little essay by Howard Jacobson in Saturday’s Independent. I always have a problem with Jacobson’s weekly piece in the Indie. Whenever he sounds off about social or political issues he’s just another narrow, monotonous right-winger. But when he sticks to writing about literature I find myself nodding in enthusiastic agreement.

His essay was an implicit attack on the Boyd Tonkins of this world. Jacobson insists that a novel is under no obligation to make us feel good and a novel does not automatically require a gripping page-turning plot. “That a murder must be committed, that a love affair must be undertaken, that a wizard must descend before we are prepared to entrust the novel with our interest is utter philistinism... Though Dickens plotted like a dervish, I would swap every coincidence and denoument he contrived for a single passage of description of the torpor of a Victorian Sunday in London, or the rains coming out again in Lincolnshire.” Unfortunately it’s that utter philistinism which literary agents, publishers and bookshops regard as necessary for their existence, and it impacts on sales and readers. My local big chain bookstore, for example, has not a single book by Thomas Bernhard, Saul Bellow or even Jim Crace – but it has acres devoted to the latest chick lit ’n lifestyle fiction. It’s a Rod Liddle world of shelving. The store pitches itself at consumers who might buy a paperback novel once in a blue moon or after watching Richard and Judy – not at spendthrift compulsive serious book addicts like me. This, I think, is bad economics. Ottakars is a particularly bad offender when it comes to populism edging out more demanding writing, and I’m not surprised the chain is in trouble. In the past week I’ve been in an Ottakars twice, buying nothing, but elsewhere have bought 6 new books. I’m prepared to support high street bookshops but when they make no effort to stock any of the authors I’m interested in buying I end up stomping home and ordering the titles from Amazon.co.uk. And saving myself money into the bargain.

“In feeling made sensuous,” writes Jacobson, “there is narrative enough for any reader; and all the story you want in the progress of a sentence or a thought. You crave excitement? Engross yourself in syntax. What is the adjective doing to the noun, and does the noun deserve it? – there’s a question to keep you on the edge of your seat.”

Brilliant.

And while on the subject of prizes, my ‘Prize Idiots’ post of Monday October 10 has drawn two responses. One delightful suggestion is that my list of past prize winners is a Nabokovian jest. Sorry, Steve, but they really are all genuine. And none more so than Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1959. This has upset a Leigh Fermor fan, who protests that he is “considered the greatest travel writer of the 20th century” and concludes: “Anyone who values good writing will stop sniggering and allow himself to read Fermor, and then wonder if he should try reading the other authors on Sharp's list too.”

My point is a simple one. The Duff Cooper Memorial Prize is “awarded annually for an important literary work published in English or French during the previous two years.” Patrick Leigh Fermor is essentially a journalist, who writes racy, vivid purple prose about foreign landscapes, quaint native traditions and the colourful characters who occupy remoter parts of Europe. Example of the Leigh Fermor style: “The liner followed the same path as many a Phoenician galley and many a quinquereme; heading northward in the invisible groove of Harald Hardraada’s ships, sailing shield-hung and dragon-prowed from the Byzantine splendour of Mickelgaard for grey northern fjords.” His book Mani, which that sentence is from, won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1959. Which means that Alain Robbe-Grillet didn’t win it for La Jalousie and Samuel Beckett didn’t win it for Tous ceux qui tombent, or its English translation of the same year, or Endgame or Krapp’s Last Tape or The Unnamable, each one of which was eligible for the 1959 Duff Cooper prize.

You see, it all depends what you mean by “good writing” and “an important literary work”.

Incidentally, the Robbe-Grillet title and the first two Beckett titles were also eligible for the previous year’s Duff Cooper Prize.

That was won by John Betjeman.

Pinter has suggested that the real reason he was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was political – a signal was being sent that the committee approved of his outspoken attacks on US foreign policy.

It’s possible that he’s right, since literary prizes often seem to be awarded for reasons which have nothing to do with literary merit. But as Book World dryly notes, the prize identified his plays as the reason for the award, not Pinter’s godawful agit prop doggerel (sorry – “poetry”).

Although the Nobel committee has often got it wrong – notoriously, some of the world’s greatest modern writers never won the prize – its record has been improving over the past quarter of a century or so. Saul Bellow deserved it for The Adventures of Augie March alone. Samuel Beckett was the perfect choice. And Harold Pinter’s reputation as a dramatist is likely to endure.

There was a dazzling Pinter work, tucked away late at night on BBC2 three or four weeks ago. A repeat from 1978, starring Judy Dench and Jeremy Irons, it was a movie adaptation of Aidan Higgins’s novel Langrishe, Go Down. Pinter wrote the screenplay and also starred in it. It was a beautifully muted, melancholy film set in the 1930s and centered around three sisters who live in a big house in rural Ireland. The estate is in decay, the money is running out, and their lives have narrowed and dried up. Death, money problems, and memory oppress their day to day existence. The dominant mood of the film is sadness.

Judy Dench plays the part of the sister who begins a relationship with a German student, Otto Beck, who is renting a cottage in the grounds. I’ve always thought Jeremy Irons comes across as a bit of a creepy, reptilian personality and he’s perfectly cast as Beck, who is cold, calculating and predatory. I’ve seen Irons in lots of movies but I’ve never seen him quite as good as this. I reckon it’s his finest performance.

I’ve no idea how good an adaptation it is as I’ve never read the Higgins novel but the power of the movie makes me want to get hold of the book. The highlight of the film is the episode where Beck and the heroine go to the nearest town, and end up in a small flat owned by a friend of his. The friend (played by Pinter) and his lover turn up and there’s a stunning scene for which the only adjective is Pinteresque – full of menace, aggression and bleak humour.

I read in the Independent that the BBC apparently wants to release Langrishe, Go Down as a DVD but that Judy Dench was trying to prevent it. She has three brief nude scenes in the film. By contemporary standards they are very tame, but like a candidate for the Tory leadership, Dame Judy now regrets some of the things she did in her younger days and would like to move on (to playing big demanding Shakespearean roles like, er, the head of MI5 in James Bond movies). Evidently she can’t prevent the BBC from showing it on TV, so if it comes round again it’s worth looking out for (more for the Pinter than the bit where the gorgeous Ms Dench attempts to arouse Jeremy Irons by plopping cream on her nipples).

Incidentally, Saturday contains two gibes at Harold Pinter, though he’s not mentioned by name. According to press reports, back in the 1980s Pinter and Lady Antonia used to host dinner parties for London’s liberal literary elite in order to discuss what could be done about that ghastly Thatcher woman. (This was in the days when Tony Blair found it opportune to strut around wearing a CND badge.) McEwan and Penny Allen, his first wife, were part of the set. Then McEwan and Penny separated, acrimoniously. And now, it would appear, McEwan and Pinter are no longer chums either.

In Amsterdam McEwan settled his score with Penny by making “Allen Crags” the place where the hero’s creativity and life begins to unravel. In Saturday, McEwan hints that a lefty like Pinter is a materialist hypocrite, and obliquely mocks his anti-war speech in Hyde Park on February 15 2003.

Don’t be surprised if about three McEwan novels in the future its narrative involves a sensitive cultured hero who is coshed from behind in Dublin and robbed of 100,000 euros by a dishevelled drunken hammer-wielding Irish mugger named Banville. (Hopefully not with the assistance of an accomplice who is a deformed, diseased malevolent dwarf named Sharp.)

I bought the Independent today (look, I’m a sucker for free gifts and I only bought it for the fabulous poster size world map, which is not only very interesting – it charts languages, religions, human rights etcetera – but will come in handy for concealing that big crack in the wall). On page three Boyd Tonkin rages and froths furiously about the Booker Prize being awarded to John Banville for his novel The Sea.

I didn’t bother watching the Booker, in part because I couldn’t care less who won. I have no idea whether or not The Sea is a great novel or not, but Boyd Tonkin’s anger certainly made it sound interesting. Giving the Booker Prize to The Sea was, he fizzed, “the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest.” Apparently The Sea is “an icy and over-controlled exercise in coterie aestheticism…[its] prose exhibits all the chilly perfection of a waxwork model”. That sounds to me like the kind of thing the Boyd Tonkins of this world would say about Samuel Beckett’s writing; it almost makes me want to rush out and buy the book.

What annoys Tonkins also annoyed the Sunday Times reviewer, who grumbled that “Banville has a talent for sensuous phrasing and pungent observation of human frailty, but in other areas important for fiction – plot, character, pacing, suspense – The Sea is a crashing disappointment.” But Banville evidently intends to disappoint those readers who think that serious fiction should aspire to the condition of genre fiction, where suspense and characterisation in primary colours is everything. He recently remarked (see below): “Yes, human beings have an unflagging desire for stories, it is one of our more endearing traits. The great Modernists, with eminent exceptions, disdained this desire, as they disdained our longing for a recognizable tune, a pretty landscape, a poem that rhymes.”

Boyd Tonkin’s literary values are hinted at by his reference to “a perfect, enduring gem of a First World War story by Sebastian Barry”. A gem of a story. The formulation makes me wince. But what really causes Tonkin to burst a blood vessel is that the final shortlist of six titles “unaccountably omitted Ian McEwan’s Saturday – a novel that fell victim to a staggeringly vicious and inept review in the New York Review of Books by none other than John Banville.”

Inept? What Tonkins is objecting to is not, I think, Banville’s ineptitude, but his set of fictional values. The Banville review is I think no longer available on the NYRB website, so as a public service the Sharp Side recycles it here, complete. Read it and judge for yourself whether or not it is “staggeringly vicious”.

A Day in the Life

By John Banville


"Most novel readers," the critic John Bayley observes, "are less interested in life itself than in its happenings, money-making, love-making, committee-sitting, being young, growing old"—in other words, stories. In all of us there persists the child who longs to snuggle down and draw the covers close and hear a fairy tale, the scarier the better, so long as it ends with the promise that the good people in it will live happily ever after while the bad perish in misery and in pain. In a fine essay printed in these pages in 1989, Bayley noted how during the Second World War "bus drivers and brigadiers" rediscovered the pleasures of reading Anthony Trollope. "The atmosphere of crisis and boredom in the Battle of Britain made a red-letter day for the classic novelists, offering the comfort and relaxation of a complete and credible alternative world."

Among contemporary novelists, Ian McEwan would have seemed the unlikeliest to take on the role of bedtime storyteller to our own time of "crisis and boredom." Since the marvelous stories in his early books, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, he has been the least consoling chronicler of life's perils and difficulties. A master of the ironic title, he offered us, in novels such as The Comfort of Strangers and The Innocent, precious little comfort and no innocence at all. Even in the superb pastoral idyll which is the first half of Atonement we are constantly aware of the glint of the knife blade partway out of its sheath.

If we all have a novel in us, nowadays it is likely to be a September 11 novel. It would have seemed that McEwan was one of the few who might profitably bring his out. Surely he would find a form in which to express the lingering horror of that sunlit morning when mass murder came winging out of the blue upon an unsuspecting city. He is a connoisseur of catastrophe, of the sudden irruption of violence and bloodletting into the drawing room or the shopping mall. Indeed, the destruction of the Twin Towers is just the kind of enormity McEwan might have invented as an opening to one of his more chilling tales, although even an imagination as dark as his might have balked at the murderous scale of the attacks.

In fact, McEwan in his recent work has shown a disturbing tendency toward mellowness. It would seem that, like one of the characters in Atonement, he has been "thinking of the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously warm heart and cool judgment...." This is a fairly accurate description of the methods and aims of his latest novel, Saturday, an account of one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a London neurosurgeon and quintessential homme moyen sensuel, decent, hard-working, moderately and at a distance engagé in the politicsof his, and our, time, a fine physician, a uxorious husband, an ideal father. Henry has everything, and as in all good fairy tales, he gets to keep it, after getting rid of the troll who had sought to challenge his right of ownership.

Owning things is important to Perowne, an unashamed beneficiary of the fruits of late capitalism. Few passages catch the flavor of this extraordinary book as well as the one in which, apparently without a trace of authorial irony, Perowne is made to recall an epiphanic moment on a fishing trip when his eye lit on his beloved car, a "Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery":
Glancing over his shoulder while casting, Henry saw his car a hundred yards away, parked at an angle on a rise of the track, picked out in soft light against a backdrop of birch, flowering heather and thunderous black sky—the realisation of an ad man's vision—and felt for the first time a gentle, swooning joy of possession. It is, of course, possible, permissible, to love an inanimate object. But this moment was the peak of the affair; since then his feelings have settled into mild, occasional pleasure. The car gives him vague satisfaction when he's driving it; the rest of the time it rarely crosses his mind. As its makers intended and promised, it's become part of him.

The novel is set on a specific and momentous day, February 15, 2003, the day when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of London to protest the imminent war on Iraq. Perowne wakes early, some hours before dawn. Standing at the window in his bedroom, he sees an airliner with an engine on fire streaking through the night sky in the direction of Heathrow. Although his mood is euphoric—he is at the top of his career, he loves his wife and still finds her desirable, his house is handsome and secure, and that night there is to be a loving family reunion—Perowne's thoughts, like the thoughts of all of us in these days and nights, have been straying over the millenarian threats that have arisen against the soft target which is the developed West. But surely, the reader thinks, this potential missile flying over the city is too clumsily obvious a memento mori for a novelist as subtle as McEwan to introduce in his opening pages. In the end, the threat the plane seemed to represent turns out to have been nonexistent: as the day goes on Perowne learns that the aircraft was a Russian cargo plane with only a pilot and copilot aboard, and that it landed safely and the fire was doused. It is briefly suggested that the two men may have been terrorists —there are reports that a copy of the Koran was found in the cockpit—but by midday they are on their way home, innocent of all ill intent.

Going down to the kitchen, Perowne encounters his eighteen-year-old son Theo, a rising blues guitarist, who has come in from a late-night gig. The two are at ease with each other, with no trace of Oedipal or any other kind of conflict between them, a happy circumstance which any father of a teenage son will hardly credit and certainly envy. As so often throughout the book, McEwan seems uneasily to feel the need to justify such familial harmony: "Where's the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that's supposed to be Theo's rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues?" Perowne tells of sighting the flaming aircraft, and Theo comes up with an aphorism: "The bigger you think, the crappier it looks," and follows it with an apologia pro vita sua which we assume, mistakenly, as it turns out, Perowne, or McEwan, will challenge as vapid and self-serving:

When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're doing with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto— think small.

It might also be, amazingly, the motto of McEwan's book.

Perowne's early-morning wakefulness ends in gentle lovemaking with his wife, who by day is a high-powered libel lawyer working for a liberal London newspaper. Throughout their marriage he has never strayed once, nor has he wished to—"What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife"—and why would he, since she is a paragon, beautiful, clever, sympathetic, and wise. She is also unfailingly fragrant:

Perowne shifts position and nuzzles the back of Rosalind's head, inhaling the faint tang of perfumed soap mingled with the scent of warm skin and shampooed hair.

Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan's fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex—as the book ends, no one will be surprised to learn, there is another amatory encounter between husband and wife.

Presently Perowne sets off for his weekly game of squash with his anesthetist and friend, Jay Strauss. The streets are clogged with antiwar protesters, some with placards declaring "Not in My Name," the "cloying self-regard" of which suggests to a skeptical Perowne "a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice," unlike, we are to suppose, Perowne in his cream-upholstered Merc, and fair Rosalind of the shampooed hair.

We accept Perowne's "cloying self-regard" in these opening pages on the assumption that something nasty is going to rise up and put a dent in it. And sure enough, as he drives down a deserted street he collides with a car containing his almost-nemesis, one Baxter, and his two henchmen. This encounter, as one might expect, is beautifully described, and is the best thing in the book. Baxter, a small-time crook, is the only rounded character among a cast of pasteboard cutouts, including Perowne himself, and the moment when he gets out of his wounded car and approaches Perowne and instead of attacking him offers him a cigarette is masterful.
The encounter rapidly descends into menace and the possibility of serious violence. However, Perowne has recognized that Baxter is displaying the early symptoms of Huntington's chorea, a dreadful inherited genetic disorder which will eventually destroy its victim's mind, and he uses the diagnosis to stay Baxter's well-practiced fists. Lying, he assures Baxter he can help him with new treatments that have just become available, and while Baxter, who knows how ill he is, considers this straw of hope, Perowne makes his getaway. We know full well, of course, that we have not seen the last of Baxter.

Perowne goes on to his squash game, which he manages to win despite the fright he has endured and the punch in the sternum that Baxter delivered him as preliminary to a serious roughing-up. The game is one in the series of discrete set pieces out of which the book is assembled. The hard-fought match between Perowne and his American-born rival is meant, we assume, to illustrate the competitive, indeed warlike, nature of the human male, and to show us that McEwan is not entirely Mr. Nice Guy. Here, as elsewhere, the author is wearyingly insistent on displaying his technical knowledge and his ability to put that knowledge into good, clean prose. This is the case especially in the medical scenes, of which there are many, too many. In a note of acknowledgment at the end of the book McEwan names the various doctors who shared their expertise with him, including Neil Kitchen, MD, FRCS (SN), whose operating room the author frequented over a period of two years, and the Nabokovianly named Frank T. Vertosick Jr., to whom he is indebted for an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy—yes, there are many big words in this book.

Having thrashed his squash opponent, Perowne returns to the arts of peace, and goes to the market to purchase the ingredients for the fish stew he will cook that evening for the family reunion—the stew, the recipe for which is given, is the most pungent thing in the book—when his daughter Daisy, a poet, will return from a sojourn in Paris to be reconciled with her grandfather, another and very famous poet, rejoicing in the unlikely name of John Grammaticus. This latter personage, with his flowing gray hair and gin dependency, is an unintentionally risible caricature of the Great Man. Some years previously, at his home in France, he had in a drunken fit of temper severely criticized a poem of Daisy's which had just been awarded the coveted Newdigate Prize, awarded by Oxford University and won by, among others, Matthew Arnold, and grandfather and granddaughter have been estranged ever since.

Daisy arrives with Parisian airs still in her sails, and immediately father and daughter fall into an argument over the coming Iraq war, which Daisy vehemently opposes and which Perowne sort of approves of. This fight seems meant to be a further display of McEwan's tough-mindedness, but is merely as tedious as any other overheard squabble between youth and age.

For years Daisy has been trying to educate her father in matters literary, but to no avail. His ignorance of literature is frankly incredible. Are we really to believe that an intelligent and attentive man such as Henry Perowne, no matter how keen his scientific bent, would have passed through the English education system without ever having heard of Matthew Arnold, or that any Englishman over fifty would have no acquaintance with the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, if only through Laurence Olivier's ranting of it in the wartime propaganda film of the play? The awful possibility arises that Perowne's ignorance may be intended as a running gag; if so, it is the only instance of humor in the book, if humor is the word.

Now Grammaticus appears—"with long belted woollen coat, fedora and cane, head tipped back, his features in profile caught in the cool white light from the lamps in the square"—and the evening can begin. At first the strained relations between Grammaticus and Daisy persist, despite the fact that she has brought with her a proof copy of her first book of poems, squirm-makingly entitled My Saucy Bark, which is dedicated to the old man. The last two family members awaited are Rosalind and Theo. The latter's arrival is used by McEwan to work one of his storyteller's tricks. Since by now we are sure that Baxter will again burst on to the scene—his red BMW has been spotted a couple of times shadowing Perowne's S500—we are on edge to hear him crashing through the undergrowth. Perowne is reaching for the bottle and checking his father-in-law's drink when they hear a loud metallic jiggling from the hall, a scream from Daisy, a baritone shout of "Yo!" followed by the thunderous slam of the front door which sends concentric ripples through the poet's gin; then a soft thud and grunt of bodies colliding.
But it is only Theo arriving home and greeting his sister, for naturally the siblings bear an unblemished love for each other. We must wait a little while longer for Baxter to make his entrance, which he does along with Rosalind.

She meets her husband's eye. "Knife," she says as though to him alone. "He's got a knife."

Baxter and his sidekick, the horse-faced Nigel, come swaggering in, and for a while things look very bad indeed. The knife is held to Rosalind's throat, Grammaticus's nose is broken —which gives the old buzzard a chance to redeem himself with a show of debonair sang-froid: "'It's all right,' he's saying in a muffled voice. 'I've broken it before. On some bloody library steps'"—and Daisy is forced by the intruders to strip herself naked, which conveniently reveals to us and to her family the fact that she is "surely almost beginning her second trimester," as Dad the doctor calmly notes to himself. Baxter and Nigel are duly put off their evil designs, not only by the fact of their intended victim's pregnancy, but...

At this point the novel descends to a level of bathos that is hard to credit. Baxter, seizing on the proof copy of My Saucy Bark, demands that Daisy read aloud one of her poems. At her grandfather's urging, however, she merely pretends to read, and instead recites from memory Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," the poem which ends with the famous image of a world "where ignorant armies clash by night." Baxter is so taken with this late-Victorian lament for civilized values, which he believes is Daisy's own composition, that he forgets all thoughts of rapine and plunder:

...Baxter has broken his silence and is saying excitedly, "You wrote that. You wrote that."

It's a statement, not a question. Daisy stares at him, waiting.

He says again, "You wrote that." And then, hurriedly, "It's beautiful. You know that, don't you. It's beautiful. And you wrote it."

Even allowing for the fact that Baxter is suffering from a debilitating neural disorder, this is a remarkable response from the kind of thug he is portrayed as being, and it is not meliorated by Perowne's wondering who this Arnold chap is, and what his second name might be. And still we are far from done. Perowne again manages to pull a fast one on Baxter, convincing him that he has some offprints from medical journals in his study upstairs detailing the new treatments for Huntington's that he had spoken of in their morning confrontation. Baxter drives Perowne up the stairs at knifepoint, leaving Nigel to watch the others. Nigel, however, has had enough, and flees through the front door, whereupon young Theo charges upstairs; he and Perowne disarm Baxter and throw him headlong down the stairs, at the foot of which he cracks his skull. At this point, with a sinking heart, one knows for certain that the final set piece of the book is going to take place in an operating room:

Baxter's unmendable brain, exposed under the bright theatre lights, has remained stainless for several minutes—there's no sign of any bleeding from the arachnoid granulation.

Perowne nods at Rodney [his assistant]. "It's looking fine. You can close up."

After that there is one final, heart-warming twist: Perowne, feeling pangs of guilt for having used his professional knowledge to escape the morning encounter with Baxter, determines to persuade his family, even Rosalind, who had thought her throat would surely be cut, that they should not bring charges against Baxter, but should let him go free to sicken and die, if not in peace, at least not in prison, either. Then it is time for the Perownes, man and wife, to slip back into connubial coziness:

As the sweet sensation spreads through him he hears her say, "Tell me that you're mine."

"I'm yours. Entirely yours."

"Touch my breasts. With your tongue."

"Rosalind. I want you."

It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art—no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong—the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right—but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.

Something of the kind seems to have happened here. Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair—who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity—were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.

It affords no pleasure to say these things. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. In this new book, however, he has stumbled badly. This would be of little consequence outside the book-chat columns were it not for the arrogance which Saturday displays. Perowne's literally unbelievable ignorance of literature allows McEwan to indulge in outbursts of philistinism which, whatever his own opinions, may well be enthusiastically endorsed by large sections of his readership. From Tolstoy and Flaubert to the magic realists—there is no direct mention of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, to which Saturday is an obvious hommage—all the writers he mentions get it in the neck. Consider this passage in which Perowne broods on Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which Daisy had forced him to read:

What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so. If, as Daisy said, the genius was in the detail, then he was unmoved. The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down. These books were the products of steady, workmanlike accumulation.

Is this the higher irony, a little joke against himself and his craft by a contemporary master? Tell that to the readers of The Da Vinci Code. Whatever the passage may be meant to signify, one hopes it is not a claim by the workmanlike McEwan that Saturday can hold a place beside those nineteenth-century masterpieces which Perowne finds so dully prosaic.

Another source of dismay, one for which, admittedly, Ian McEwan cannot be held wholly accountable, is the ecstatic reception which Saturday has received from reviewers and book buyers alike. Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this? Yes, human beings have an unflagging desire for stories, it is one of our more endearing traits. The great Modernists, with eminent exceptions, disdained this desire, as they disdained our longing for a recognizable tune, a pretty landscape, a poem that rhymes. These are legitimate if not particularly noble demands; it is the artist's duty and task both to respect and to overfulfill them by giving far more than his audience asked for. The post-millennium world is baffling and dangerous, and we are all eager for re-assurance. As T.S. Eliot has it in Gerontion,

Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"

Saturday is certainly a sign of the times; it is no wonder.

Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell describes the response to Life Studies in Britain. Nowadays it is regarded as one of the key American poetry collections of the twentieth century but in Britain the response was, as Hamilton says, “fairly tepid”. One reviewer, Peter Dickinson, crushingly concluded that “few of the poems are in themselves memorable”. The English edition was submitted to the Poetry Book Society. Life Studies failed even to make the recommended list, let alone the quarterly choice – which went to The Wreck of the Magyar by Patricia Beer. Beer’s voume, aptly, seems to have vanished into the sand.

On the night of the Booker Prize, it’s worth reflecting on the great tradition of British prizegiving. Past winners of the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize (“awarded annually for memorable work by a British writer under the age of thirty”) include The Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond, Voices Under the Window by John Hearne, The Moon to Play With by John Wiles, The Hostile Sun by Tom Stacey and numerous other modern classics. Past winners of the Frederick Niven Literary Award include N. Brysson Morrison’s The Winnowing Years and Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers. The Somerset Maugham Award was good news for Nigel Kneale (Tomato Cain and Other Stories) and Roland Camberton (Scamp). The Heinemann Award for Literature has been given to such classics as Peter Green’s Sword of Pleasure, The Chequer’d Shade by John Press and C.A. Trypanis for The Cocks of Hades. Whose bookshelf does not lack a copy of Pentheperson by Christopher Hassall, which scooped the Hawthornden Prize, or Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a past winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize? The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the Novel has unerringly gone for greatness: past winners include Emma Smith, for The Far Cry, and Father Goose, by W.C. Chapman-Mortimer. Other winners include Mary Lavin, L.A.G. Strong and Oliver Onions.

Who can doubt that Britain is a place with a magnificent record of recognising and rewarding outstanding writing and outstanding writers?

Nobody knows what day Shakespeare was born on.

Shakespeare’s preferred spelling of his name was ‘Shakspere’.

In Tudor printing the ‘k’ and the ‘s’ overlapped, tending to cause part of one letter to snap off. A hyphen was substituted to prevent this. An ‘e’ was subsequently substituted for the hyphen and an ‘a’ added after the second ‘e’ to make the name appear more ‘natural’. Hence Shakespeare.

Nobody knows what made a glover’s son from a Warwickshire market town want to become an actor and nobody knows how he became an actor and playwright in London.

Shakespeare was not interested in projecting himself as a fascinating personality whose life and activities would be of inherent interest to other people.

Nor did he regard the writing of plays as an activity of enduring cultural interest and importance.

In his lifetime he was not regarded as a particularly interesting or unusual individual. His plays were not regarded as the greatest drama of the age.

The First Folio was slow to sell.

Nobody knows what the significance was of Shakespeare bequeathing his wife the second best bed.

These are just a few of the truths I’ve learned from the saner books about Shakespeare. Book World wonders how many books I have on my shelves about the bard. Well, I have eleven volumes of what I’d call conventional literary criticism, plus 3 books from the perspective of actors or directors (James Earl Jones’ monograph on Othello, Tirzah Lowen’s book Peter Hall Directs ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington’s The English Shakespeare Company). I have 3 biographies – S. Schoenbaum’s admirably factual and non-speculative William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life, Park Honan’s authoritative Shakespeare: A Life and Katherine Duncan-Jones’s provocative and intelligent Ungentle Shakespeare. I also possess a copy of E.A. J. Honigman’s controversial Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’. I used to be a true Honigman believer but, influenced by the arguments of Schoenbaum and Duncan-Jones, I have now lost my faith – though I see that from time to time the debate still acrimoniously rumbles on between splenetic academics in the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. I also have a copy of Anthony Burgess’s large format Penguin coffee table book on the bard (it’s a potboiler job like the new Ackroyd biography and I’ve only ever looked at the pictures). Add to this Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy plus the more scholarly and comprehensive The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare by E.A.M. Colman.

And now we come on to my favourite books. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Anne Righter’s low-key study Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, with its central emphasis on Shakespeare’s attitude to theatre and theatricality. She analyzes the way in which acting and illusion are prized in the plays up to about 1600 and then “underwent a strange and precipitous reversal. At that point, the theatre and even the idea of imitation inexplicably went dark for Shakespeare, and the actor, all his splendour gone, became a symbol of disorder, of futility and pride.”

In a remainder shop I snapped up the handsome American hardback edition of Berryman’s Shakespeare, edited by John Haffenden. This is a fabulously stimulating, ramshackle collection of essays by the poet John Berryman – the ruins of a full-length study which he never completed because of his alcoholism and because his poetry came first. It’s a dipping-into book, rather than a read-in-one-go study.

I also have volume one of a vast Shakespeare lexicon, originally published in Berlin in 1902. I am still searching secondhand shops for volume two. If you want to know how often Shakespeare used a particular word, where he used it, and what its meanings were in the sixteenth century, this is a very valuable compilation. The lexicon was clearly produced by a madman and was written for those of us who have, like that character in The Adventures of Augie March, “a weakness for complete information”.

And while on the topic of derangement, I forgot to say in my last post that I also own an edition of the sonnets produced by a crazy Baconian named Alfred Dodd. I came across it in a second hand bookshop and bought it for a laugh. Bacon conspiracy theorists are basically snobs who combine their paranoid delusions with a crass ignorance of sixteenth century society and culture, and assert that no-one from a backward market town like Stratford could possibly have produced those wonderful plays, least of all a mere tradesman’s son. No, it takes fine breeding and class to write stuff like Hamlet. And whereas you and I might think the sonnets are about love, death, sex, yearning, anger, jealousy, sadness and the stuff of human lives, Baconians know otherwise. The Dodd edition hilariously claims that the sonnets were just coded messages, in which Sir Francis Bacon was attempting to get the truth out to a wider world. The basic message being I-am-bastard-son-of-Queen-Elizabeth-Please-help! Among Dodd’s many wacky proofs of his theory is that the ruff in the famous engraving of Shakespeare is deliberately shaped to look like a ‘B’. (Look closely. It isn’t.)

“Ideology works to efface contradiction”, remarks Terence Hawkes in That Shakespeherian Rag, and goes on to observe that “The ideological mode of the Shakespeare industry can be said to be centripetal, integrating.” In this book, and its sequel Meaning by Shakespeare, Hawkes develops these insights in relation both to the cult of Shakespeare and to the plays. Hawkes is a hugely provocative and interesting cultural critic. I think he’s right about the cultural uses to which Shakespeare has been put but often wrong about the drama. Reducing any art form to “specific ideological strategies” is not in my view very helpful in determining why a particular play or a novel or a song is more compelling than another.

Lastly what to my mind is one of the best books ever written about the man from Stratford. Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present is massive in its range and packed with interesting information and insights. But by the end of the book Taylor’s lifelong marriage to Shakespeare is under severe strain, and he ends up explaining why he thinks Shakespeare isn’t up there with the truly great writers. Taylor, though ending in weary disillusionment, certainly makes you think.

That makes a grand total of 89 books by or about Shakespeare. (Time to chuck some out, I think. Those 11 volumes of academic lit crit can go for a start.)

But I’m also interested in the society in which Shakespeare lived. So for £1.80 in a charity shop I recently snapped up John Dover Wilson’s Life in Shakespeare’s England, a miscellany of writing from the age on topics as various as drunkenness, bear gardens, furniture and health. One of the best books I’ve ever come across in understanding Elizabethan England is Elizabethan Life: Disorder by F.G. Emmison, which is a record of trials and punishments in Essex in the second half of the sixteenth century (arson, riot, murder, “immorality”, “assaults on officers” – it’s very comprehensive). In the basement of Stamfords map shop in Covent Garden I bought their last copy of The A-Z of Elizabethan London, an obscure but lavish publication (£23) which presents an enlarged and annotated reproduction of the so-called ‘Agas’ map, chopping it up and turning it into the equivalent of the modern A-Z of London. This enables me to pour over the buildings and streets of Shakespeare’s London in glorious close-up (okay, so it adds nothing to my understanding of Hamlet, but as a Shakespeare groupie I shall indulge in whatever dark and deviant practises I want to). And right now I’m slowly working my way through Peter Edwards’s The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England. Compulsive reading it isn’t, but as a study of one aspect of the material conditions of the age it’s interesting. I’ve learned that horse dealers were regarded as subversive and a threat to the stability of the Tudor state. Why? Because they were highly mobile, and moved around the country to do their business, spending time in inns and alehouses, “spreading news and perhaps unorthodox views as they went”. To those in authority there was a conventional assumption that people who travelled around spread sedition. Hence the need to control and licence common players.