The Sharp Side

Yesterday there was a brilliant deconstruction of the language of representation over on Charlotte Street: ‘Easter 1916; or, the politics of weather erosion.’ But what belatedly caught my eye was the post of January 21, in which Mark Kaplan wrote (before also quoting from a poem by Keats, which I’m missing out):

Over at ReadySteadyBook, a review of a new Memoir of Samuel Beckett. It mentions in passing that Beckett considered writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnet 71:


No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

But “Shakespeare's sonnet 71” isn’t a stable entity. Mark Kaplan quotes a sanitised modern text. (I wonder which edition Beckett owned?)

This gets closer to the sonnet that Shakespeare wrote:

NOe Longer mourne for me when I am dead,
Then you fhall heare the furly fullen bell
Giue warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vildeft wormes to dwell:
Nay if you read this line, remember not,
The hand that writ it, for I loue you fo,
That I in your fweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then fhould make you woe.
O if (I fay) you looke vpon this verfe,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not fo much as my poore name reherfe;
But let your loue euen with my life decay.
Leaft the wife world fhould looke into your mone,
And mocke you with me after I am gon.

This is my (imperfect) version of the text of the original 1609 Quarto – the only edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets published in the author’s lifetime.

In the fifth line of the 1609 text there’s no space after the comma before “remember”. Nor is there a space after the comma before “for” in the following line. Everyone who reproduces the text quite reasonably inserts a space there. The typesetter slipped up. There was no compelling technical need to omit the space; it was just carelessness.

The two striking differences between all modern adaptations of the 1609 text and the original are language and syntax. Modernising the spelling is perhaps inevitable, but it comes at a price.

The other difficulty is the question of syntax. It’s a reasonable assumption that the sonnets were arranged by typesetters who had access to Shakespeare’s original manuscript. What we don’t know is if the punctuation of the first edition was Shakespeare’s or that of the typesetter(s). The scholarly concensus is that in Tudor and Jacobean times the typesetter usually decided these matters, not the author. But we can’t be absolutely certain since it’s known that some writers did turn up at the printers and correct errors.

The moment you start changing the punctuation – as every editor does – you begin to impose your own interpretation of the text on the reader. Every editor rewrites each sonnet to give you a text which matches their own view of what it means. But since punctuation can determine emphasis and meaning it becomes a circular process. What an editor believes a sonnet is about is reinforced by the ways in which they rewrite it. But these imaginative editorial decisions are never discussed or justified. And so it goes on, line after line, sonnet after sonnet. No two modern editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets are the same.

For example, many editors get rid of the brackets in lines 9-10. But Helen Vendler (The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1997) doesn’t. However, she deletes the comma at the end of the first line, changes the colon at the end of line 4 to a semi-colon, gets rid of the comma at the end of line 5, changes the semi-colon at the end of line 11 to a comma and changes the full stop at the end of line 12 to a comma. Vendler hears in this poem “an imagined desired dialogue” which she then reconstructs, between a ‘Beloved’ determined to remember the poet after death and a dismissive suicidal poet determined not to be remembered.

In The Complete Sonnets and Poems (2002), Colin Burrow, unlike Vendler, changes “vildest” in line 4 to “vilest” but supplies a note acknowledging that the older spelling “has greater phonic weight than its modernized equivalent”. He retains the brackets but makes other changes equally as extensive as Vendler’s. Burrow asserts that there is a paradox in the poem: “The intensity of self-denial (No…Nay…O if) in fact makes strong claims to be remembered.” A good point, I think. As an interpreter of meaning I find him more persuasive than Vendler. But some of that intensity is lost in Burrow’s modernized version, which supplies “No” as the first word of the sonnet instead of “NOe.”

Ultimately, what the reader of a modern edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets encounters is a version of a manuscript mediated by one or more Tudor compositors who on occasions seem to have misread Shakespeare’s handwriting, and on others not to have been concentrating – though even this interpretation rests on assumptions about meaning. The 1609 text has then been further mediated by editors adapting three centuries or more of existing textual practice and commentary. During which time language has changed and words have often changed their meaning or the way in which they are pronounced.

Few editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets supply the text of the original 1609 Quarto alongside the modernized version. The two main ones that do are those of Helen Vendler and Stephen Booth.

What intrigues me is whether or not in the sonnets Shakespeare saw the possibility of visual puns in the way a word was typeset. I’ve never come across any discussion of this idea (though it’s hard to keep up with the flood of books about Shakespeare which continue to pour from the presses). But it seems to me that Tudor spelling carries its own charge: “gon”, the final word of Sonnet 71, is more emphatic than the modernised “gone”. The word “gon” is balanced; the first and last letter bracket the second letter. They enclose an absence. The word “gon” has a zero at its heart; a nothing, a blank, a void.

And when the speaker anticipates that his memory will be mocked after his death by “the wife world” – inevitably modernised into “the wise world” - could there also, perhaps, be a visual pun on a subsidiary source of mockery? There is a world of wisdom and wise people; but there is also a world (a more familiar world?) of wives and marriage: “the wife world”. Do widows mock the memory of their husbands? Surely not! The very idea is (in the wise world) offensive. I am being over-ingenious. And yet… I can find the possibility of visual punning elsewhere. Consider this:

Sonnet 46

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie –
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes;
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To ’cide this title is impannellèd
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determinèd
The clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part:
As thus – mine eye’s due is thy outward part,
And my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.

If we go back to the 1609 edition it appears (more or less) like this:

Mine eye and heart are at a mortall warre,
How to deuide the conqueft of thy fight,
Mine eye, my heart their pictures fight would barre,
My heart, mine eye the freedome of that right,
My heart doth plead that thou in him dooft lye,
(A clofet neuer pearft with chriftall eyes)
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And fayes in him their faire appearance lyes.
To fide this title is impannelled
A queft of thoughts, all tennants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The cleere eyes moyitie, and the deare hearts part,
As thus, mine eyes due is their outward part,
And my hearts right, their inward loue of heart.

In sonnet 46, about conflict and perception, it seems to me apt that the Tudor spelling of “sight” is no different to “fight”. There’s a resonance there; an echo.

As for other changes in sonnet 46: at the end of the second line the 1609 Quarto prints a comma. Booth changes this to a semi-colon. Vendler prefers a colon. Collin Burrow changes it, radically, to a full stop. Katherine Duncan-Jones opts for a semi-colon. Martin Seymouth-Smith follows the 1609 text and uses a comma.

And so it goes on.

Like that demented character in Dickens, I’ve always been fond of facts. Facts can bring realities home. Here are the figures for the number of Sonderkommando (special prisoners) employed in burning bodies in the crematoria at Auschwitz for a single day: 30 August 1944:

Kommando 57-B crematorium II – day shift – 111 prisoners
Kommando 57-B crematorium II – night shift – 104 prisoners
Kommando 58-B crematorium III - day shift – 110 prisoners
Kommando 58-B crematorium III – night shift – 110 prisoners
Kommando 59-B crematorium IV - day shift – 110 prisoners
Kommando 59-B crematorium IV – night shift – 109 prisoners
Kommando 60-B crematorium V - day shift – 110 prisoners
Kommando 60-B crematorium V – night shift – 110 prisoners

That makes a total of 874 prisoners employed in burning bodies in a single twenty-four period; a further 400 prisoners were deployed burning bodies in trenches.

Figures from Jozef Garlinski, Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp (Fontana paperback, 1976), p. 236.

As the above figures indicate, the Nazi genocide of European Jews was a unique atrocity in that it applied the methods of an advanced industrial state to the single goal of extermination motivated by sectarian hatred. The German state and German businesses were fully implicated in the project. As we now know, even IBM was happy to assist by supplying the technology to speed up and simplify the identification of Jews in the German population.

Imperialism has, at different times, killed greater numbers than the six million who died in the Holocaust, but those deaths were not primarily an attempt to exterminate; they were the incidental price of the terror, racism and pitiless indifference to captive populations at the heart of colonial exploitation. The Belgian state killed ten million Africans, simply to extract rubber from the Congo. That massive killing has so far inspired just one modern history book.

In 2001 the Blair government introduced Holocaust Day as a national day of remembrance. But do we need a Holocaust Day? Last Friday on Channel 4’s ‘Thirty Minutes’ Hardeep Singh Kohlif questioned the need for one:

Commemorating an atrocity which was neither inflicted on us nor carried out by us distracts us from facing up to the things we have done… Should we remember? Yes. But should we have a special Holocaust memorial day? No.

George Monbiot made a brief appearance, arguing that an ‘s’ should be added to the word Holocaust, broadening it out to become a day of remembrance which would acknowledge “all the colonial holocausts which prefigured it and which in many ways became the template for it.” Monbiot reprised an argument which he made at greater length in the Guardian on 27 December 2005:

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.

It is a reasonable assumption that most people in Britain know something of the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews. The study of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum in British schools. But how many people in Britain know about atrocities and mass killings perpetrated against colonized peoples by our country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? I would guess only a tiny fraction of the population.

History is a highly politicized subject. So, too, is national remembering. In Britain the only national day of remembering throughout the twentieth century was Remembrance Day on 11 November. The origins of that are not hard to understand. The scale of the casualties in the Great War was such that few families in the land were unaffected.

The same cannot be said of the Holocaust. The vast majority of British families were not personally affected by it. Why, then, have a Holocaust Day? As Monbiot rightly observed, it makes no sense to remember a German atrocity while being in a state of denial about British atrocities which, numerically, had a greater number of victims. In the nineteenth century, at least 12 million Indians died as a consequence of the conscious, planned actions of past British governments.

But Hardeep Singh Kohlif’s programme was ultimately a deeply dishonest one because it steered clear of the real reason why Tony Blair introduced a Holocaust Day. It can be summed up in a single word: Zionism. The exploitation of the Holocaust as a tool both for the promotion of national historical denial and also to muffle criticism of Israeli racism, sectarianism and human rights abuses was first outlined in its American form by Norman G. Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2001).

Britain’s Holocaust Day is simply an extension of that same process. And the Tony Blair who appeared on the brink of tears at a Holocaust memorial service in 2001 is the same man who just two years later enthusiastically sponsored a war which brought about the deaths of massive numbers of Iraqi civilians, as well as being the same man who sponsors sectarian land acquisition in Israel; in short, a man who has learned absolutely nothing from the Holocaust.

Sorry. This is turning into Steven Spielberg week. Once I've got Munich out of my system I'll get back to literature. Promise.

Last night on BBC2 there was a 50 minute documentary in the ‘This World’ series entitled ‘Munich: Operation Bayonet’. It was presumably made to connect with Munich. My weekly TV guide described it as “examining Israel’s response to the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis”.

Which needless to say is precisely what the programme didn’t do. It didn’t scrutinise that response in any objective sense. Instead it justified and celebrated one small aspect of it.

Israel’s response took three forms:

Firstly, the indiscriminate killing of Arab civilians, none of whom had anything to do with what happened at Munich. This began almost immediately, with the bombing of refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. It continued with the killing of Lebanese civilians who happened to be in the way when Israeli special forces went on the rampage in Beirut.

Secondly, an assassination campaign against leading Palestinian intellectuals and political figures, none of whom had anything to do with what happened at Munich. This campaign had actually started BEFORE the Munich Olympics and was all about the repression of the Palestinian intelligentsia. In other words, first physically expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Then suppress Palestinian nationalism by terrorising and killing intellectuals and political organisers.

Thirdly, the killing of Palestinians who were involved in what happened at Munich. The numbers in the last category amounted to two or three individuals, none of whom feature in the Spielberg movie, which deals with individuals in group two.

The numbers in the first category are not known, because dead Arab civilians are of no interest to the Western news media and its dominant socio-political culture. Perhaps 300 died, including women and children.

In other words, an apt parallel with Israel’s response to what happened at Munich would be the kind of disproportionate reprisals taken against civilian populations by the Nazis in revenge for the killing of Germans. For every single Israeli athlete who died, probably around 30 innocent Palestinians or Lebanese died. The number may be higher. These deaths have been written out of history.

My objection to Spielberg’s Munich and the vast structure of commentary it has already generated is that it turns history on its head. The entire Zionist project was about dispossessing an indigenous Arab population by violently deporting it. This was the only significant difference, apart from the obvious one of scale, between Zionism and Nazism: Zionism has never had genocide written into its aspirations. It has, however, always been a racist and sectarian project which, historically, has been prepared to use extreme violence to achieve its ends. And the violence and barbarism of Zionism has always, on any historical reckoning, vastly exceeded the retaliatory violence and barbarism of the Arabs whose land it stole. However, contrary to what is apparently the liberal humanist message of Munich, violence is not the problem at the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. Neither is intransigeance. The problem is Zionism, which is inherently racist and sectarian and pitilessly unjust. Until the sectarianism of the Israeli state is dismantled and replaced by a state where all citizens possess equal rights there is unlikely ever to be an end to the conflict.

‘Munich: Operation Bayonet’ gave all the signs of being made by Zionists. The programme told two whoppers. Ankie Spitzer, widow of one of the dead athletes, referred to the room “where they castrated one of the members of the team”. Really? If the Palestinian kidnappers had actually committed an atrocity like that, don’t you think Israel would have squeezed every last drop of propaganda juice out of it? It’s an allegation which has never been made before, by a woman who wasn’t there, 34 years after the event.

It was also claimed that the killing of Ali Hassan Salameh, who had been cultivated by the US government as an important and influential Palestinian spokesman, was done in defiance of the Americans. This is quite untrue. In Chapter Eleven of One Day in September, Simon Reeve even names the US official who gave the Israelis the green light to assassinate him. It was Robert Ames.

Even by the mediocre standards of the BBC it was not remotely “even-handed”. A single Palestinian was permitted 60 seconds of commentary. The other 49 minutes were from the perspective of Zionists, in the form of Israeli journalists and Israeli secret agents. Palestinians were represented as a people devoid of history; they had no existence other than as terrorists. Israelis were represented exclusively as innocent victims or as reluctant, pure-minded avengers.

The programme’s contempt both for truth and for Arabs was summarised in the flip reference to the assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh: “The Bayonet unit had finally got their man”.

And how did they get their man? With a car bomb detonated in a Beirut street as he drove past. The bomb killed eight innocent Lebanese civilians who were nearby. The programme didn’t bother mentioning this aspect of the assassination. Apparently neither does Spielberg. And who were these 8 passers-by? Were they all men? Some women? Some children? Did they have names? Who cares? The lives and identity and grief of Arabs is of no interest to the West. They are not human. They are nothing.

And what were these Israeli car bombers and assassins? According to this BBC programme “they were all idealists”. And the killing of Arab intellectuals by shooting them dead or blowing them up in their homes, what’s the word for that? Answer: “audacious”.

In his classic book Orientalism, Edward Said identified one of the dogmas of Orientalism as the construction of difference; of two opposed sets of values – those of the Arab world (“aberrant, undeveloped, inferior”) and those of Western imperialism (“rational, developed, humane, superior”). This programme was the perfect expression of Orientalism in its coarsest, crudest and most offensive form. It says a great deal about our culture that a programme like this can be transmitted on BBC TV, and that having been shown it has attracted not a whisper of adverse comment or protest.

On Thursday at 10 pm Channel 4 has its own equivalent programme, ‘Munich: Mossad’s Revenge’. It’s hard to believe it can possibly be any worse than ‘Munich: Operation Bayonet’ – but I’m not holding my breath.

“The kidnap and murder of 12 Israeli athletes at games representing global unity appalled the world,” said ‘entertainments reporter’ Emma Jones, introducing a plug for the new Spielberg movie Munich on this morning’s BBC Breakfast TV show.

Ah, where to begin?

The slovenly BBC can’t even get basic facts right. It was 11 athletes who died, not 12. One of the eleven died from smoke inhalation. Two of the others may have been shot dead by the notoriously trigger-happy (and on this occasion stupendously incompetent) Munich police force. After the disastrous outcome at Furstunfeldbruck airport there was a massive cover-up by the German authorities, who were keen to play down their own culpability for the catastrophic outcome. This cover-up is described in some detail in Simon Reeve’s One Day in September. At the time of publication of Reeve’s book in 2000, the full record of what happened still hadn’t yet seen the light of day.

During the hostage crisis the Olympic Organising Committee (OOC) released a statement stating, “The whole civilized world condemns this barbaric crime, this horror.” The civilized world, ah yes. At that time it included China (a massive totalitarian police state), the USSR (a massive totalitarian police state) and the USA (then busy murdering several million Vietnamese). Not to mention Britain, which had recently deported the entire population of the Chagos islands to make way for a US air base – an act worthy of Stalin. In fact far from the whole world being appalled, the abduction of the Israelis was regarded with delight across the Middle East. Arabs felt that at last the Israelis were getting a taste of their own medicine. The Palestinian hostage-takers who were shot dead by German police were given heroes’ burials.

The Israeli reprisals after the Olympics have become known as ‘Operation Wrath of God’. Much less well known is the Palestinian code-name for the Munich attack. It was called ‘Operation Iqrit and Biri’m’ after two ancient Arab Christian villages in northern Israel. The inhabitants were ordered out by the Israeli army in 1948 because of “security concerns”. The families had lived their for generations. They were told they would be allowed back in two weeks. Decades later they were still waiting. This kind of situation, an exact microcosm of a much larger dispossession, was the breeding ground for events like Munich. The leader of the Palestinian kidnappers had a Christian father and a Jewish mother; what motivated him against the Israeli state was not sectarianism but injustice. “Two of his brothers were in Israeli jails, he said. They lived in appalling conditions and had nothing to do all day but play chess in their minds. He wanted them released and was prepared to kill to achieve this aim.” (One Day in September, p. 73)

As for that Olympic spirit… Palestinian requests to be represented at the games were regarded with total contempt by the OOC, who didn’t even bother replying. The Israeli prime minister, a vicious bigot named Golda Meir (or, if you prefer the George Jonas version, a sweet, kind, little old lady) notoriously said that Palestinians “did not exist” as a people. To the Palestinian kidnappers, the Israeli athletes were not innocent civilians but the representatives of the military occupiers of their country.

The kidnappers demanded the release of 234 prisoners held in Israeli jails, together with Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof from German prisons. Any history book will tell you who Baader and Meinhof were – but what of those 234 prisoners in Israel? Political prisoners? Killers? Even Simon Reeve, whose effort to establish the truth of what happened strikes me as being essentially fair, doesn’t consider it a subject worth exploring.

Events at Munich unfolded not with sombre dignity but like a grotesque farce. The Palestinian leader, who had worked in France, negotiated with German police with occasional cries of ‘oh la la!’ Around 75-80,000 spectators turned up to watch the kidnap crisis unfold, enjoying the entertainment, chomping on frankfurters and sauerkraut. Some of the Palestinian kidnappers waved to the excited crowd as if they were pop stars. Many athletes regarded the crisis as nothing more than a nuisance and held the Israelis responsible. “Golda Meir holding the fucking world to ransome again!” screamed an Irish athlete. All the evidence indicates that the kidnappers genuinely wanted to do a swap, but the Israeli government refused to agree. They were prepared to see their athletes die rather than give in. Simon Reeve concludes that “In their own way the Israeli government had proved just as fanatical as the terrorists.” (p. 93)

In a bizarre development the crowd started shouting tactical advice to the almost comically incompetent German police. A plan to storm the building was aborted at the last moment when somebody realised the kidnappers were watching the police on live TV. People sunbathed and athletes continued with their training in view of the building where the Israelis were held, completely indifferent to the fate of the hostages. The notion that the world was gripped with horror didn’t even hold true at the Olympics, let alone internationally.

As the kidnappers and hostages departed the crowd went wild, and hundreds of cameras flashed.

The Israeli sprinter Esther Roth was disgusted by the voyeuristic crowd. “It’s not a movie!” she said.

But now it is.

THE WORLD WAS WATCHING IN 1972
AS 11 ISRAELI ATHLETES WERE
MURDERED AT THE MUNICH OLYMPICS.
THIS IS THE STORY OF
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.

That’s what the ubiquitous ads for Steven Spielberg’s Munich promise. It opens in British cinemas next Friday.

I wonder if that’s really true. Somehow I have my doubts.

The eleven Israeli athletes were killed on 5 and 6 September 1972.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS THIS:

8 September 1972: the Israeli air force launched a massive assault on Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. “Many innocent people were killed, among them women and children. There were few complaints from the Western world. Few outside the Middle East seemed to care about the children killed by Israeli bombs as they played on the edge of one of the refugee camps.”
One estimate suggests 200 people died. None of them had anything whatever to do with what happened at Munich.

16 September 1972: three Israeli armoured columns invaded Lebanon, attacking and destroying 130 homes where Palestinians lived: “the Israelis eventually withdrew, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake.” The number of deaths and injuries is not recorded.

October 1972: the Israeli government sent letter bombs and booby trapped parcels to Palestinian intellectuals and officials across the Middle East. The number of deaths and injuries is not recorded.

An assassination squad was set up by the Israeli government, consisting of 15 agents. Their goal was to murder prominent Palestinian spokesmen and intellectuals. “Israeli secret agents hunted and killed junior Palestinian officials across Europe.” However, the Israeli government also decreed that “No senior Palestinian was to escape retribution.” Contrary to popular mythology and Spielberg's movie, none of these individuals had anything to do with planning what happened at Munich. They were punished for being Palestinian nationalists.

21 February 1973: a Libyan civilian airliner containing 106 passengers was shot down by Israeli fighters over the Sinai desert, killing all on board. There was international condemnation of the attack.

April 1973: an estimated 100 Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered by Israeli commandos in Beirut. A 70 year old Italian woman was also shot dead by the Israelis. “Western newspapers reported the killings with some degree of admiration. All were agreed that the attack was conducted with typical Israeli flair and military ingenuity.”

21 July 1973: the Israeli assassination squad murdered Ahmed Bouchiki in Norway. It turned out he was not a top Palestinian but a Moroccan waiter who was walking home with his pregnant wife. In the face of adverse publicity the Israeli government put the assassination project on hold.

This is the true story of where the Israeli government's assassinations programme was suspended but Spielberg in fact omits it from his movie, which is an adaptation of the book Vengeance by George Jonas. Vengeance is based on the memoirs of a man claiming to have been the leader of the assassination squad. However, the book’s veracity has been widely questioned and retired Mossad officers have poured scorn on the notion that the Israeli prime minister would be personally involved in recruiting agents, or that the squad would ever have operated in private with no regular links to the Israeli state. The author, George Jonas, has conceded that the man who supplied him with the material for his book “could offer no documentary, pictorial or testimonial evidence of his involvement in a mission of this type” (Harper Perennial edition, 2006, p. 348).

The policy of assassination was revived in January 1979 when Ali Hassan Salameh, who Yasser Arafat regarded as his heir, was murdered in Beirut. Spielberg’s movie apparently ends with an on-screen statement to the effect that Salameh was killed, but evades mentioning how: a car bomb which killed 8 passers by.

All quotes are from Simon Reeve’s book One Day in September: The Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre (Faber paperback, 2001).

The Sharp Side has a hot tip for the 2006 Booker Prize longlist. Watch out for Londonstani and The Killing Jar. One of these two novels stands a good chance of being on the list. Perhaps both of them will make it. Who knows, one of them might even make the final shortlist.

I say this with some confidence, having read neither novel.

I haven’t even seen copies.

These two novels aren’t yet published.

And when they are I shan’t read either of them.

Though I’m confident they will be widely and favourably reviewed and be prominently on display in bookshops.

So what makes me so confident about their prize-winning potential?

This:

Belatedly catching up with the Independent Arts & Books Review supplement, 6 January, I reached page 25, where Boyd Tonkin and Christina Patterson look ahead to the new non-fiction and fiction book titles of 2006.

Christina Patterson – doing the fiction - notes that we live “in a time of literary glut”. Margaret Atwood (“so huge”) has a new book out. So does that other leviathan, Peter Carey (“a riotous romp that flits between New South Wales, Manhattan and Tokyo”).

In fact flitting seems to be the fashionable narrative mode for 2006: Kate Grenville’s new novel flits “between the slums of 18th century London and the convict colonies of Western Australia”.

James Lasdun’s new novel is “a brilliant and darkly funny tale of politics and paranoia” which flits “between Communist Berlin and contemporary New York”. And Romesh Gunesekera’s new novel also sounds like a bit of a flitter: it’s a tale of “cross-cultural connection and cricket”.

The only person who isn’t really up to scratch amidst the array of mega-talent, apparently, is DBC Pierre, whose forthcoming novel is chastized for being “seedily wacky to the point of puerile”.

But there’s another problem. In a time of giants, how do new writers get noticed? Or as Patterson puts it, “how, in a market of monster fish, do the minnows get noticed?”

How indeed? But Patterson bravely puts in a good word for four new writers, including Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani - “a punchy portrayal of the hinterland of Hounslow, Hindi and gangsta rap” and Nicola Monaghan’s The Killing Jar – “a shocking glimpse of Nottingham gangland.”

The funny thing is even though these two novels – “minnows” - have not yet been published I had already heard of them.

By an extraordinary coincidence just a week earlier both books got a plug in the Independent Magazine, 31 December 2005 (Talent Special – The Faces to Watch in 2006).

Here, Boyd Tonkin, the Independent’s literary editor, picked out two novels to watch out for in the months ahead.. The first was Londonstani (“unmissable…created a huge buzz at the Frankfurt Book Fair, with publishers jostling to bid for the next big voice of contemporary London life”). The second was The Killing Jar (“from the drug-ridden estates of Nottingham…another exuberant debut…a thrillingly fresh, vital style”).

And who publishes these poor little minnows? Well, big corporate publishing houses, actually. And who spends lots of lovely lolly advertising in the books pages of The Independent? ("It is. Are you?") The big corporate publishing houses! And who is responsible for publishing and promoting all the glittering titles plugged by the fiercely independent Boyd Tonkin and Christina Patterson?

You guessed!

Listening to the ‘PM’ Programme on Radio 4 last night I learned that British troops are to be sent to Afghanistan in a combat capacity “to bring security and stability”. Which reminded me that if you take a stroll around Horseguards Parade, just off Whitehall, you come across various statues to long-forgotten Victorian generals. They commemorate their military activities in Afghanistan.

No one can say we Brits don’t try. We’re now into our third century of bringing security and stability to Afghanistan and those ungrateful natives are still causing trouble. I think we shall just have to go on killing them. We have no choice, really, do we? It’s our duty. We’re doing it for them.

Then, later in the evening, reading Simon Reeve’s book One Day in September: The Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre (Faber paperback, 2001) I read how “The massacre at Lod Airport sent shockwaves around the world” (p. 46). It refers to what happened on 30 May 1972 when three members of the so-called ‘Japanese Red Army’ who had been “indoctrinated in Japan with tales of the Palestinian struggle” arrived on a flight which landed at Lod Airport in Israel. They opened fire with sub-machine guns and threw grenades. “The carnage was appalling”. 24 people died and 78 were injured.

But, remarkably, some massacres don’t send shockwaves around the world. It’s all to do with the delicate seismology of news reporting. For example, on 3 January 2006, terrorists bombed a house in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji, killing eight civilians, including two children. The terrorists were from a notorious paramilitary group with a long history of bloody atrocity, known as the US Air Force. And just the other day the same terrorist group struck again, this time in Pakistan, bombing a village and killing 18 innocent people.

No shockwaves. And, hey, let’s get this straight. What happened in Iraq and Pakistan wasn’t “carnage”, or “cold-blooded murder”, or done by people who had been “indoctrinated”. Gosh, no. It was simply (in the blandly neutral words of the news reader on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme yesterday morning), “an American air strike”. Strictly in the name of security and stability, you see. With freedom and democracy bobbing along behind (except in Pakistan, of course. We definitely don’t want any voting there.)

That makes a grand total of 26 dead civilians – men, women and children. None of them armed. None of them “insurgents”. None of them doing anything but quietly live their lives. But you can be quietly confident that Steven Spielberg has no plans to make a major Hollywood movie about the tragedy of their deaths.

That’s where perspective comes in.

What happened at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when 11 Israeli athletes were killed, was, in the words of the publishers of the latest book on the subject, “a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror and remains a scar on the collective conscience of the world.”

There you are you see. Decades of peace and tranquillity and then some evil Arabs came along and inaugurated the modern age of terror. In an incident which remains a scar on the collective conscience of the world.

Ah, “the collective conscience of the world.” It’s so wonderfully flexible and agile it always reminds me of Macavity in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T S Eliot. For example, where was Macavity – sorry, the collective conscience of the world – when it came to literally millions of killings resulting from American or British foreign policy?

At the end of his book Unpeople (Vintage paperback, 2004), Mark Curtis tots up the number of violent deaths for which, he argues, Britain bears direct responsibility in pursuing its foreign policy objectives since the end of the Second World War.

The total he arrives at is 4.03 million - 5.71 million deaths. Britain is also implicated in a further 3.32 – 6.2 million deaths.

Which makes successive British governments collectively responsible for a minimum of 7.35 million deaths and a maximum of 11.91 million deaths. Killing on an industrial scale. Not quite up there with Hitler and Stalin but still impressive for a tiny island nation off the coast of north-west Europe.

And where was the collective conscience of the world?

Not there!

And where was BBC News when, for example, Britain covertly assisted the killing of 200,000 people in Yemen?

Not there! (Where is Yemen, anyway?)

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s.
And when the foreign state is looted, or the oil reserves are rifled,
Or when trade unionists go missing, or a radical is stifled,
Or when civilians are bombed, and the homes are past repair –
Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!

Déjà vu. I lap up the hype – Stephen Poliakoff, “Britain’s greatest TV dramatist” – and then I eagerly watch the play. And it’s crap.

I have hazy memories of watching his incest drama years ago. A brother and sister hopelessly infatuated with each other. Lots of sex and running around naked in bright sunshine in lovely rural scenery. Utterly implausible characters. An unengaging and preposterous story. As glossy and slick as a shampoo commercial. Inside its flashy surface style, a drama that was completely empty.

I even fell for the hype about The Lost Prince. Like a sucker, I watched it. A rather dreary fact-based yarn about a sweet little prince with learning difficulties who the royal family hid from public view. (Gosh, the royal family. I mean everything about them is just so fascinating, don’t you find?) My hanky remained dry.

And now, last night on BBC TV, Poliakoff’s brand new drama Friends and Crocodiles.

Once again, I didn’t for a moment believe in the two main characters. The hero was a handsome, super-rich, fabulously clever entrepreneur. He always knew where the future lay, capitalistically-speaking. But he never actually seemed to do much apart from have sex and party. Even when he lost all his money his two beautiful women stuck by him in a menage a trois which lasted over decades. Two gorgeous women and a gorgeous man and no personal tensions between them at all! And the hero always bounced back from adversity to make a success of something new. He was a business genius. He saw everything coming, long before it succeeded – wind turbines, chain bookstores, you name it. But we never saw him translate his great ideas into successful businesses. Yet the money was always there when he needed it. Even when he became a hippy he seemed to own a farm.

The heroine was just a lowly clerk in an estate agency until he took her on as his secretary. She destroyed his success but remained haunted by his brilliance. In some strange way she needed him. He was a guy who was always right, whatever his defects. And as he went down in the world, she went up. She became a top executive at a top company, only to see it go bust when it put all its assets into telecommunications instead of maintaining a broad spread of investments. If only she’d listened to her hero!

The corporate media hype projects Poliakoff as a radical both in the form and content of his drama. A bit of a rebel and an innovator. Which is just PR froth. His style is glossy and visually sumptuous but underneath it’s as dead as a car commercial. Poliakoff’s fleeting, subliminal invocation of Last Year at Marienbad was wearisome in its smugness.

Poliakoff was clearly trying to make a condition-of-Britain play, covering the past 25 years. How things have changed! Now we have bookshops where you can relax with a decent cup of coffee! Just as the hero predicted!

There were a couple of artists who I suppose were intended to be Gilbert and George. The 1981 riots appeared briefly on the telly in the background. (It’s a sure sign of a crap director when big news events appear on the TV while a character is doing something in the foreground.) And at the end the haggard heroine blubbed that thousands of people employed by her company had lost their jobs! This would have been more plausible had she previously shown the slightest interest in anything outside her private bubble of affluence, but she hadn’t. Oh, and there was a token person-in-a-wheelchair character. She was young and beautiful, of course.

I’m sure there’s great TV drama to be made about the Thatcher-Major-Blair years but this wasn’t it. Poliakoff is entranced by wealth and power and beautiful stately homes and gorgeous gardens in the sunshine. He postures as a radical director but is actually a very conventional and conservative one. He can reproduce the surface gloss of affluence and power but he has nothing meaningful to say about them. To coin a phrase, deep down Poliakoff is very shallow.

“There is no doubting the special treatment he’s given by the BBC,” gushed Gerard Gilbert in a lengthy, admiring profile of Poliakoff in the Independent, 6 January 2006. Well, I can believe that.

Poliakoff strikes me as being the perfect embodiment of BBC cultural and political values. There’s nothing remotely challenging about his drama. You can consume the play and forget it in the same evening. In the morning it’s vanished, leaving nothing worth remembering. It’s a bright, shiny, superficial cultural package which is not essentially any different to an episode of EastEnders (except it’s vastly more long-winded; EastEnders is strictly for those with very short attention spans). Friends and Crocodiles is the TV drama equivalent of one of those novels that get massive attention in the culture pages, win prizes, are found on prominent display in corporate bookshops, and are ultimately all about lifestyle and fashion rather than literature and writing. Five years later nobody is reading them and they’ve long since been displaced by new prize-winning commodities.

“I’ve always wanted to write about work, because we think about work most of the time and yet there is virtually nothing written about it,” Poliakoff told Gilbert. But in what sense is Friends and Crocodiles about work? We see the heroine briefly behind a typewriter. Later on we see her in smart offices, at a computer. But what work is she doing? We never find out. Because the play isn’t about work. It’s about the hero’s genius for anticipating future business success – but a genius which is lazily viewed retrospectively from the point of view of what we now know succeeded, not innovative ideas that failed (like Clive Sinclair’s one-person self-propelling car). And in the real business world it’s not just about having great ideas. It’s how you finance and implement and market those ideas. And it’s also about the ruthless profit-driven irrationality of capitalism and how great ideas can be made to fail (Betamax video, for example).

When you look at Poliakoff’s background and career it’s not a surprise that he’s the kind of dramatist he is:

His first play, ‘Granny’, was written when he was just 15 and a pupil at Westminster School, and was put on as the school producton. ‘Granny’ was reviewed by 'The Times', whose correspondent wrote that it was better than much of the work being produced at the Royal Court.

Poliakoff’s first professional play was put on while he was a Cambridge undergraduate and in no time at all he’d become both writer-in-residence at the National Theatre and was pumping out plays for BBC TV. Perhaps Poliakoff was thinking of himself when he remarked how work relationships can lead to ordinary little people suddenly shooting to the top of their profession:

I’m always intrigued when I hear someone say of somebody else that ‘she used to be my secretary and now she’s really powerful’. David Cameron is a brilliant example. He was quite a lowly person at Carlton Television not long ago, and now he could be Prime Minister.

Gosh, that’s so true. Television companies are so marvellously typical of the average British workplace and David Cameron is the perfect example of someone from a plain and simple background who got to the top through hard work and the inspiring people he met in his employment. Just as any 15 year old can get the Times to come along and review their school play.

By the way, the moral of Friends and Crocodiles seemed to be: when investing your wealth, be sure to diversify your portfolio.

Samuel Beckett never gives you useful tips like that.

The story ‘Death of a Comrade’ begins:

One of the boys in our battalion died the other day. He got drowned.

It ends four pages later with an inventory of personal effects:

One black leather diary dated 1941.
One piece of broken mirror.
One comb.
One bronze medallion.
One key.
5s. 1d. in cash.

This is Julian Maclaren-Ross territory. Army life at its most banal. People die, but not in battle. The narrator knows the name of the dead soldier – Lennox – but can’t place him. He learns that the dead man was fair-haired. But he still can’t place him. Lennox went for a swim in a local river and vanished. The death is mysterious but explicable: “Weeds, the current, cramp; might have been any of them. Down he went, not a trace. Gone.” The dead man’s father turns up. The narrator assures him of his son’s popularity; that he himself was a good friend. But these are consoling lies. And the list of personal effects is incomplete. Some of the dead man’s property is deliberately witheld.

Julian Maclaren-Ross writes a spare, lucid prose, to great effect. ‘Death of a Comrade’ is from his Selected Stories, selected and introduced by Paul Willetts, published in paperback by Dewi Lewis Publishing (2004), £9.99.

With the exception of a few miscellaneous ones, the stories in this 249pp collection break down into three groups: stories about childhood, stories about life in the British army, and love stories. Maclaren-Ross writes about drab, ordinary lives and the frustrations, deceptions and disappointments which frame them. One story ends, aptly, with the poignant comment: “I’m fed-up.” Another, ‘The Oxford Manner’, is about taking a girl for a night in Oxford in wartime, only to find on getting there that there are no taxis, all the hotels and boarding houses are full, the pubs have run out of booze and the roast duck on the restaurant menu turns out to be beans on toast.

Although set in a vanished world, these stories don’t date. ‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’ is, in part, about the price of colonial occupation. Set in India when it was still run as part of the British Empire, the story is narrated by a hearty, blustering soldier who has drunkenly run down some natives and driven off without stopping. The law eventually catches up with him, but he gets off lightly. It becomes apparent that the narrator is both a liar and an alcoholic.

My favourite story is ‘Welsh Rabbit of Soap: A Romance’, set in wartime, about a man who becomes engaged to a maddeningly unreliable girl who, having entranced him, then eludes him as he pursues her, day after day, through the pubs of central London. She was just one more in “a succession of psychopathic girls”, the narrator ruefully concludes.

Maclaren-Ross conjures up a vanished Britain of rationing and austerity. He observes the human comedy in a tone which is faintly whimsical, edged with melancholy. Alcohol and a brittle chirpiness keep more serious matters at bay. As well as self-mockery.

Cora said, ‘I suppose you must have a sense of humour. I can’t see it myself.’

‘Neither can I,’ I said. ‘You see I’m a humorous writer. We humorous writers seldom have a sense of humour.’

Irving Layton was a towering figure in twentieth century Canadian literature. He was born into a Jewish family in Rumania in 1912, shortly before they immigrated to Canada the following year. He was a prolific writer, publishing over 40 books during half a century of writing. Layton was best known for his poetry, much of which was written in a loose, confessional mode. In the mid-century he helped lead the rebellion against a stuffy, genteel Canadian poetic tradition which aped British verse.

Irving Layton never exactly went out of his way to cultivate a British readership, remarking in his poem ‘The Baroness’ - in a characteristically confrontational manner - “Take it from me, English poetry when it isn’t the death wish / is voyeurism and cuntsniffing / but done with so much aplomb you take it / for spirituality or a concern with art and the good life”. Discuss. One hour. (Well, as a point of view it certainly makes a refreshing change from the tepid stuff you read in the Guardian Saturday book section.)

My memory of Layton is of a big man, tanned, who was wearing a cool safari outfit with epaulettes on the shoulder. I’m shocked to realise how old he was: when I met him he seemed so much younger than he really was. Layton was an energetic larger-than-life character with a very combative personality - though to a young fan like me he was extremely genial and not at all abrasive. Somewhere I have a record of our conversation; if I ever find it I’ll post it.

Once a fiery young socialist who was banned from entering the USA for 15 years, Layton became an outspoken right-winger in later years. He liked to provoke. Lines like “not being handicapped in the least by vision or creativity, women are by far the stronger sex” were not designed to endear him to a female readership. But the laconic tongue-in-cheek bellicosity sometimes, alas, shaded over into sheer nastiness. At his best, Layton joyously celebrated sex, love, travel, life, people; at his worst, he gave way to a sour malice, occasionally expressed in intemperate and unpleasant language. His great friend Leonard Cohen once aptly compared him to Timon of Athens.

Yet sometimes Layton’s ferocity and anger hit the spot. At a time when Maoism was flavour of the month among some gullible European intellectuals, Layton came up with this withering, and to my mind very effective expression of his contempt:


To Maoists

From my heart I rooted out Jehovah;
I spurned Moses and his Tables of Law
And tore up my father’s phylacteries.
I did not turn from dragons to live with fleas.


Layton was acutely aware of his identity as a Jew and one of my favourite poems of his is ‘The Final Solution’, about a visit to Germany in the 1970s. It powerfully expresses his appalled horror at the normality of modern German life. After the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust, life goes on. The ordinary supplants the tragic monstrosity of the past. The speaker feels himself surrounded by the ghosts of dead Jews and contrasts the lost vitality of Europe before the Third Reich with bland, banal colourless modern Germany. This is the poem I prefer to remember Layton by: there is sourness here but also sadness. His characteristic sense of disgust and anger is muted and shaped into a fine, wistful poem. In the last line there is, I think, a humane acceptance of the inevitability of this social condition, no matter how revolting its context.



The Final Solution

It’s all been cleared away, not a trace:
laughter keeps the ghosts in the cold ovens
and who can hear the whimpering of small children
or of beaten men and women, the hovering echoes,
when the nickelodeons play all day the latest Berliner
love ballads, not too loudly, just right?
Taste the blood in the perfect Rhenish wine
or smell the odour of fear when such lovely
well-scented frauleins are fiddling with the knobs
and smiling at the open-faced soldier in the corner?

History was having one if its fits – so what?
What does one do with a mad dog? One shoots it
finally and returns armless and bemedalled
to wife and children or goes to a Chaplin film
where in the accomodating dark the girlfriend
unzips your fly to warm her hands on your scrotum.
Heroes and villains, goodies and baddies, what
will you have to drink with the goulash? In art museums
together they’re shown the mad beast wagging its tail
at a double-hooked nose that dissolves into ash

And appraised by gentlemen with clean fingernails
who admire a well-executed composition or pointed to
in hushed tones so that nothing of the novel frisson
be lost. Europe blew out its brains
for that frisson: gone forever are the poets and actors
the audacious comics that made Vienna and Warsaw
hold their sides with laughter. Gone, gone forever.
They will never return, these wild extravagant souls:
mediocrity stopped up their witty mouths,
envy salted the ground with their own sweet blood

Sealed up their light in the lightless halls of death.
Alas, the world cannot endure too much poetry:
a single cracked syllable – with a cognac – suffices.
I have seen the children of reingemacht Europe, their
queer incurious dead eyes and handsome blank faces,
leather straps and long matted hair their sole madness.
They have no need of wit or extravagance, they have
their knapsacks, their colourful all-purpose knapsacks.
The nickelodeon grinds on like fate, six fatties play cards:
the day is too ordinary for ghosts or griefs

Whereas the Independent offers its readers Robert Fisk on the crimes of Ariel Sharon, the Guardian supplies more from the slippery pen of Israeli novelist and so-called ‘Left Zionist’, Amos Oz.

Instead of acknowledging the truth that the withdrawal from Gaza was a retreat motivated by economic and military considerations, not by the slightest wisp of concern for the Palestinians, Oz arrives at the preposterous conclusion that Ariel Sharon was no longer the old brute of yesteryear but a changed man and a gutsy proponent of peace. Perhaps unsurprising, since Oz’s Zionist apologia Help Us To Divorce (Vintage paperback, 2004) ends with the bizarre vision of Sharon as a man who can solve the conflict, “And though Sharon is, as everyone knows, a hefty figure of a man, we will carry him shoulder-high, my friends and I.”

What he did in 35 years he only had two years to begin to undo. All the settlements in the West Bank and on the Golan Heights still stand as monuments to the old Sharon. He is leaving us taking with him the answers to two great mysteries: why in the autumn of his life had he suddenly converted so radically; and what else was he going to do in the direction of peace and reconciliation?

One thing, however, Sharon never succeeded in doing, not even when he evacuated Gaza to the last inch. He never really sat down with the Palestinians to try to talk with them the way one neighbour speaks to the other neighbour. Not even the way one godfather sits down with another godfather after a long feud. Ariel Sharon is leaving us even as he is signalling to us - I understand my mistakes. I finally tried to mend them, but life was just too short.

But before you reach for your hanky, pause to consider what the exciting radical new Ariel Sharon achieved in the year 2005 – something which the caring liberal Amos Oz maintained an absolute silence about (along with the compliant mass media of the USA and Britain):

(i) Israel extra-judicially murdered 286 Palestinians (more than the number of state executions in Saudi Arabia). A statistic worth remembering when you see Spielberg’s Munich and its sanctimonious line about Israel not having the death penalty. That figure includes 68 children murdered by the Israeli army.

(ii) 4000 Palestinians were arrested.

(iii) 1700 Palestinians were wounded by the Israeli army.

(iv) Israeli occupation forces razed 2,115 dunums of land, uprooted some 58,700 trees and destroyed 52 wells.

(v) Israeli occupation forces confiscated 29,713 dunums of land for the separation barrier.

(vi) Israeli occupation forces destroyed 1,692 Palestinian homes.

(vii) Occupation forces established 877 military checkpoints, obliging Palestinians to queue, sometimes waiting for hours, sometimes being turned back at the whim of Jewish racists.

Today I finished reading The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton. This novel, initially published in 1930, is the first part of a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, which was recently dramatized on BBC TV. (I taped it but haven’t yet watched it. I prefer to read the trilogy before watching the adaptation.)

Set in the late 1920s, the novel tells the story of Bob, the barman at a pub on the Euston Road named The Midnight Bell. He falls in love with Jenny, a 21-year-old prostitute who works the streets of the West End. Ella, the barmaid at The Midnight Bell, is in love with Bob, but he’s not interested. She has every virtue except beauty. Spurning Ella, Bob becomes increasingly infatuated with Jenny, even though she reveals herself to be utterly unreliable and only casually interested in him. His infatuation has an intense, adolescent quality. Jenny haunts his every waking moment. But, oddly, he doesn’t sleep with her. His romantic evenings with her end with her going off into the night to have casual sex with punters she meets in the street. Only at the end of the book does the prospect of a weekend with Jenny indicate that their relationship may at last become sexual.

Patrick Hamilton is sometimes compared to Dickens. Hamilton himself invites the comparison by having Jenny live on Doughty Street, close to the Charles Dickens museum. (I once went round the museum. All I remember about it is the display of fancy cutlery used by the great man to eat fish.) There are also a couple of regulars at The Midnight Bell who are Dickensian comic grotesques. And, like Dickens, Hamilton plunges into the lower depths of London, and sets his fiction in real or thinly disguised locations. I assume that the 20,000 streets of the trilogy’s title loosely allude to the streets of London, apart from punning on the title of the Jules Verne adventure thriller. Verne’s story is set under the sea; Hamilton’s also involves a descent involving liquid. But the adventures of Hamilton’s hero are lacklustre and uneventful. The interior world of emotion and obsession is far richer than what’s happening on the surface.

The comparison with Dickens isn’t really all that illuminating. Hamilton writes a fairly basic, easy-flowing naturalistic prose, of limited stylistic range. It is superficial but oddly compelling. Another analogy which is sometimes made – with the drama of Harold Pinter – seems more apt. Hamilton’s dialogue is often mundane, repetitious and evasive. The subject of Jenny’s prostitution is never openly discussed. Bob is a man consumed by obsession, trapped in recurring situations, never learning from experience, doomed to go on making the same mistakes. The London he inhabits has a grey, impoverished, hellish quality. Language is used to dull reality. The dialogue is often banal and empty, concealing Bob’s raging infatuation and Jenny’s emotional emptiness and equivocal spirit. The book builds to a terrific climax – but in case you haven’t read it and want to I won’t spoil it for you by saying what happens.

Alcohol supplies a substitute for unconsummated romantic obsession on Bob’s part and Jenny’s emotional emptiness. Patrick Hamilton became one of the great writers about drinking, and drinking forms a central part of the action in The Midnight Bell. And the best parts are, of course, where drinking becomes excessive, resulting in what Hamilton magnificently calls “the ranting ebullition of intoxication”. (I expect you won’t need me to tell you that ‘ebullition’ means ‘boiling’ or ‘sudden outburst’.) As Hamilton confides towards the end of the novel, “The age of necromancy has surely not expired, for in whisky there are possessing devils such as the Middle Ages might not have conceived…” How true! (Mine’s a Laphroaig, since you ask. Or, when I’m not in the mood for imbibing disinfectant, a flavoursome tumbler of Aberlour.)

But the word which interest me most there is “ranting”. Derived from a radical fringe group thrown up by the English revolution of the seventeenth century, The Ranters. Just as the Bolshevik revolution gave rise to the bourgeois English adjective ‘Bolshie’, meaning a wilfully difficult person – it seems to have faded from our language now that Leninism no longer threatens all that we hold most sacred - so The Ranters were marginalized and devalued by the verb “to rant”, meaning to talk wild nonsense. And what did The Ranters believe? Why, that the Bible was not the direct word of God but produced by people. Scripture was an empty fiction, riddled with contradictions. God does not exist. There is no hell. There is no day of judgement. These are fictions designed to frighten the gullible. And monogamy is a curse.

I raise my tumbler to The Ranters – and begin the next novel in the trilogy: The Siege of Pleasure.