All posts by Bruce Johns

The Headless Woman

What influence does the time have on our response to cinema? I ask because the strangeness of A Headless Woman was compounded by seeing it at midday, when the mind feels at its most woken and conventional. A later viewing might have helped me to feel less prosaic. Darkness outside. The subconscious clocking in for its shift. These conditions are better suited to Lucrecia Martel’s artful, involving yet ultimately elusive film.

Set in Salta, her native province of Argentina, it concerns a middle-aged woman, Veronica, who hits something while driving along a deserted road. In stopping suddenly she bumps her head and enters a curiously disassociated state, cut adrift from memory, attachments, even sense of self. Or at least she thinks she has hit something. And the bump may be responsible for those symptoms, which anyway are increasingly open to doubt. Veronica, played by Maria Onetto with a dignified kind of bewilderment, struggles to cope with these uncertainties; has personal, professional and sexual contact with people without appearing to know why; then slips back into the stream of life, as if what had briefly felt strange were in fact normal. Which perhaps it is.

There are two mysteries here: (a) what happened on the road and (b) the film-maker’s intentions, both puzzles being illustrated by one particular image, emotive and teasingly deployed. After the incident a dog is shown lying in the road, although it is not clear if Veronica has noticed. Previously seen in the company of some boys, the dog appears to confirm and explain the collision, for our benefit at least. But as Veronica sits behind the wheel, dazed and unsure of what to do, one notices a child’s handprint on the glass beside her. Was it there before or is this the first time have we been shown the window from that angle? Not for the last time I doubted my powers of observation. Then, as Veronica sets off again, the first handprint is joined by a second. Is the director playing games with us or has some change in the light taken place, developing the prints like a photograph? Either way, there is an innocent explanation, given that she has just said goodbye to friends and their children outside a swimming pool, the little crowd milling round her car. Except that one of the boys seen playing with the dog is later found to be missing, in which case the prints might be his, a poignant trace of the impact, a different order of culpability. But would such perfect contact have been made by a glancing blow, palms pressed flat against the glass? And why does Veronica, and everyone else who examines the car, fail to notice them?

That is not a plot spoiler – there is little in the way of plot to spoil.  And nothing is really clarified or resolved. Seizing on this, the critics, largely enthusiastic about the film, have had fun trying to work out what it signifies. Being dentists, Veronica and her husband are well off by local standards, part of a middle class set with comfortable lives. As a result, her apparent ability to shrug off the accident has been interpreted as bourgeois indifference, even callousness, towards the poor, the boy having been an urchin, we understand, foul-mouthed and streetwise. In support of this view, her apparent recovery is triggered or signalled by the simple expedient of dying her hair, one’s conscience cosmetic like a facial or perm. ‘Is that your natural colour?’ someone asks, one of those throw-away remarks freighted with subtext, with connotation. What is more, the absence of a corpse, together with a police contact’s ignorance of the missing boy, takes us back to The Disappeared, who perished in their thousands under the former military regime, a reign of terror colluded in by ‘the haves’. From this angle, Martel is pursuing a political agenda, one that is coded to make it hard for us, or in fear of reprisals.

But this is a work of art, not propaganda, and a single reading of its complexities feels reductive, one-dimensional. Veronica’s dilemma following the accident might be anyone’s, irrespective of class. Guilt, wishful thinking, a willingness to be reassured: these are human attributes that comment on our shared condition. Likewise her disassociated state after the accident, which says something about identity. It is striking, almost comical, how her loss of memory goes unnoticed by the people she knows. They finish her sentences; anticipate what she is going to do; explain relationships by acting them out. Being close to others is to be created by them. We are what they take us to be, the self socially construed.

Coincidentally, or by a cute piece of programming, the Borderline Festival is also screening Blow Up, Antonioni’s head-scratcher from 1966 which features a body, and by implication a murder, that might or might not have been. The parallels are obvious, but not to be overdone. The context for that earlier exercise in bemusement was the vogue, new to popular culture, for taking drugs which questioned the nature of perception. The Headless Woman, a more oblique if less ground-breaking film, confronts a deeper unease and ambiguity. Sober or high, how do we know that what we experience is real? Through a chance event Veronica is gifted a vision of her life shorn of its surface meaning so that nothing about the world and one’s place in it seems straightforward or secure. In token of this, the diminutive by which everyone knows her is Vero. Nearly two thirds of Argentinians have some degree of Italian descent and ‘vero’ can be translated from that language as ‘true’. The name, once affirming the fact of herself, becomes ironic, in other words, the nature of who we are revealed to be fluid, contingent, unknowable. Yet Martel’s female protagonist, like some everywoman suffering on our behalf, reverts to being a mannequin or avatar, the role created for her by the world. Class loyalty or existential bind, what else can she do? When hair has been dyed so often, who knows what is natural.

 

My Life as a Courgette

The first great age of animation was associated with comic violence, talking animals and other effects that were impossible to achieve with actors, however feudal their contracts. In front of a camera is where the dramas that reflected our lives took place, whether epic or small scale. Latterly, however, cinema has fallen under the spell of computer games and developments in CGI are blurring the dividing line between what is real and what is digital. Sensing an opportunity, animators are moving onto ground vacated by the mainstream to bring us visions of ourselves that are no less playful and visually inventive than before but deal with subjects that are more directly and intensely human.

These thoughts are inspired by My Life as a Courgette, an honest, poignant, funny exploration of childhood under pressure in the modern age. The film centres around Icare, a nine-year-old boy who goes by the pet name of the film’s title. The only child of a one-parent family, he accidentally causes the death of his alcoholic mother and is taken by Raymond, the policeman in charge of his case, to a children’s home in the country. There he encounters bullying at first, but stands up for himself and before long is accepted into this dysfunctional but quaintly idyllic society. A new girl arrives, Camille, with whom Courgette falls sweetly, abjectly in love. Her aunt (the only villain in the piece, a chavvy update of Cruella De Vil) wants to foster her for the money, and a battle of wits ensues between the children and this two-faced trollop. The ending is happy, of course, but far from rose-tinted. Not everyone gets a new home. And when the lucky ones find they have rooms of their own any pleasure on their behalf is tinged with regret. The dormitory they have left behind was a little commune, what it lacked in privacy being made up for in closeness and common cause. The good fortune we seek for ourselves always seems to involve separation. It was also a place where girls and boys had less need to be kept apart. In entering their single rooms, the two friends rehearse the great schism of puberty, with no guarantee their attachment will survive.

Swiss director Claude Barras uses the technique known as stop-motion to animate his little people, each only ten inches tall. The buildings and scenery resemble a picture book, while Raymond’s car is a box you can imagine his feet propelling. This is a child’s view of the world that connects with our innocence – not entirely lost, whatever we may feel. The horrors that have been experienced by Courgette and his friends and the behavioural issues they suffer from are sensitively dealt with, the film celebrating the group’s resilience, concern for each other and ability to adjust. Their rib-digging worldliness as well, sex a comic and subversive fascination. As for the adults, Camille’s aunt aside, their characters are sympathetic without being idealised – Raymond in particular, whose sorrow is visible in his resin face before, tenderly, we learn of its cause.

One experiences any work of art in a context which influences the view that is taken. In the current climate, I am given to wonder about the world unfolding in front of my eyes. An orphanage with fewer than ten kids; authority figures who can be trusted; outcomes that promise happiness for some, if not all: this version of life is hard to recognise. Perhaps such places exist in France, its public provision more resilient than ours, albeit at issue in the current election. In austerity Britain, with children’s services in crisis and abuse scandals mounting, such institutional kindness stretches belief. Is the film true-to-life, then, a heart-warming report from a gentler jurisdiction; is it intended to make us feel good about something most people find difficult to contemplate; or should it be seen as a political message, a call to cherish our humanity, embattled as it is on every side?

As a postscript, not unconnected with these musings, I wonder about the title. This suggests a cutesy tale of anthropomorphic vegetables, which inclined me to give the film a miss at first. It might help if the original, Ma Vie de Courgette, was translated into English without the ‘a’. Perhaps then the version issued in the United States would have been spared being called My Life as a Zucchini. But I doubt it, given that the voices have also been dubbed. Why do that? The French children bring their characters to life and sound loyal to the setting of the story, subtitles being a small price to pay for access to a different take on the world. But American audiences are assumed to want only what is familiar and easily digestible. As Donald Trump, the spokesman for that insularity, would say, or rather tweet: How sad!

 

 

 

 

Half Marx

Recently I came across the following words by Karl Marx, quoted in a local campaign against the bigoted, insular spirit of our age:

“This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit,  the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.  This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.”

In the interests of relevance, ‘this antagonism’ is glossed as hostility towards immigrants and refugees. So far so good. However, being unfamiliar with the passage, I carry out an internet search and find the source to be a letter written in April 1870 whose context and purpose do not translate so neatly to the present day.

To begin with, the antagonism referred to by Marx was directed not towards immigration in general or other races per se, but quite specifically at the Irish. The difference may appear small but it troubles me. Regarding accuracy as optional or inconvenient is a slippery slope. Putting words into someone’s mouth invites the charge of deceit, diverting attention from the argument being made. Of course, there are similarities between the two cases. The Irish had been driven from their homes by poverty and famine, both consequences of British rule, enabling parallels to be drawn with some forms of modern immigration. But only some. Lumping together refugees, economic migrants and targeted recruitment is a tactic of the Right designed to replace analysis with antipathy. Fudging those distinctions helps no one, even with a better end in view.

Secondly, the encouragement of hostility to which Marx refers had a no less particular motive. The ruling class derived much of its wealth, and therefore power, from estates in Ireland and feared being dispossessed by a nationalist government in Dublin, thereby losing their hold on England as well. By rousing popular opinion against the Fenians, landlords contrived to make the proletariat complicit in its own oppression.

Or so Marx contended. I am neither equipped nor inclined to argue the point, although his apparent conflation of aristocrats and capitalists makes for good polemic and bad history. No, what concerns me here is its application to the present day, when the forces ranged against social democracy look somewhat less monolithic. The pulpit, in the form of organised religion, is at worst timidly conformist while many voices, ranging from Pope Francis to individuals in the Church of England, cry out against the injustices being perpetrated in the name of patriotism and self-interest. Meanwhile the modern equivalent of ‘the comic papers’ are generally progressive in their attitudes, and liable to be lambasted for it by the Daily Mail. In fact, the cultural establishment is mostly at odds with modern populism, whose cheerleaders claim the status of insurgents against an out-of-touch elite. In other words, the picture is more complex than in Marx’s time and the Left has no monopoly on claims to victimhood.

Nonetheless, large sections of the print media do incite hostility towards ‘the other’ just as they have always done, to sell papers and advance their interests more generally. But here, too, a change has taken place since Marx’s time, when their aim was to defend an entrenched position. Now their project is to bring about a re-ordering of the world, overturning the gains that have been made in tax-funded public provision. Once again, the Left is forced into the unaccustomed position of defending aspects of the status quo while its opponents don the mantle of insurgency that appeals to the discontented. Historical analogy is all well and good, but luxuriating in the certainties of the past is seldom a recipe for clear thinking.

Perhaps I am making too much of this, the differences between then and now only of academic interest. But we live in febrile times when fake news, post-truth politics and Twitter blurts are threatening to swamp mature, fact-based deliberation. All of this has been widely lamented, but with little sense of how the tide can be stemmed. And because it is hard not to become infected, with social media appealing to our worst instincts in this regard, there is a danger that discourse on the democratic left (which has form of its own when it comes to loose talk and conspiracy theories) will slip into the same bad habits, taking things out of context, fighting liar with liar. The best riposte to the forces of Trumpery is being more accurate, thoughtful and precise than before, even at the expense of rhetorical effect. Better to err on the side of pedantry than be dragged down to their level.

[Note: see here for the full text of Marx’s letter.]

John Berger

The death of John Berger has robbed us of a serious, penetrating and original intelligence, at a time when such qualities are sorely needed. The range of his work, as revealed by obituaries and other articles celebrating his life, came as a surprise to me, a reflection on my own laziness, no doubt, but also on our culture’s antipathy to the intellectual, which was the reason he took himself off to France. The piece I know best, because it was personally useful, is A Fortunate Man, the study he wrote of his doctor in the Forest of Dean. I started reading this in connection with the family history I have been writing, in the first volume of which our GP has a walk-on part. I was looking for perspective on that first generation of NHS doctors: what they made of their new status and of the ordinary people now entitled to call on their services. But Berger’s account steadfastly refused to be what I expected, going its own way with a doggedness that seemed ideological yet responsive to the subject. One passage comes to mind, where he takes apart the notion of common sense on which the doctor’s patients (I almost said parishioners) based their view of the world. It made me think of my father, of whom the same might be said, and of how I could make that point without coming across as superior or judgemental. Berger avoids those twin perils by dint of a head-scratching kind of honesty one can imagine being turned on himself. There is no room in this aesthetic for special effects which is why I never entirely warmed to his style. Its brow is always furrowed. There seems little evidence of delight in language. But that is because the purpose is always paramount: thinking one’s way behind the surface of things and challenging others to follow. It is our loss if we only look at the sky when there are fireworks.

Reading A Fortunate Man made me see that my treatment of our family doctor had been superficial, his reappearance in the second volume capable of something more interesting and significant. In the process, it may not be an exaggeration to say that Berger changed my ideas about what it means to write. Having always thought about this in terms of self-exposure – how much to reveal, what distance to keep from the subject and from the reader – I now see it as a means of self-realisation, an opportunity to make a statement about who one is that rarely occurs outside the realm of artistic expression. Secondly, but tied up with this, I had been struggling with a definition for the path my own work had taken, away from fiction, which I expected to be my trade, and towards something more fact-based, if still hopefully creative. Unwilling to privilege either of these directions, still less to let one of them go, I seized on Berger’s notion of storytelling as a means of bringing them together.  Storytelling has become very fashionable recently, with cafés devoted to the craft and open mic slots at festivals. Unkindly, I think of it as the literary equivalent of Morris dancing, a slight embarrassment however ancient its roots. Needless to say, however, the author of G and The Seventh Man had a more serious object in view: storytelling as praxis, as a means of making us engage more deeply with the world and what it means to be human. That my projects, ostensibly so unrelated as to seem haphazard, might follow his example by sharing a principled approach or concern has had a profound effect, altering the way I view every word as it appears on the page or screen. It may even qualify as inspiration, although, in keeping with the spirit of the man, I am still thinking about that.

Radical genealogy

In a recent article in the Guardian on the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Paul Mason reflected on his family history. Before him it featured an unbroken sequence of hatters and miners to whom his education and career path would have seemed inconceivable, an improvement in life chances beyond their dreams. Inspired by this thought, and fearing, like many of us, that those advances are in the process of being reversed, he scribbled a sign in a bus stop on the way to the announcement of Corbyn’s confirmation in office. It read: This is for all our ancestors.

It so happens that similar thoughts have been passing through my mind in the course of writing a family history. For most of us, the experience of searching for one’s roots prompts sobering reflections on the various forms of misery that blighted our forebears’ lives. Poverty. Disease. An almost complete lack of education (deleting ‘almost’ in the case of women). A punitive legal system backed up by dragoons in cases where the desperate were driven to crime or protest against the system. The Johns were luckier than many but still knew all of these things, which makes my own charmed existence a thing of wonder. How fortunate has my generation been and the few that came after. How hard those gains had to be fought for. And how easily they are being lost under the guise of austerity.

Yet there is a disconnect between the injustices of the past and attitudes to the politics of the present. This has many causes, no doubt: the blandness of the school curriculum, media bias or pusillanimity, the co-opting of history as a form of entertainment with no sense of relevance to the present – I could go on. But I sense it in the current mania for researching one’s ancestors as well, a place where the personal relevance of past suffering ought to be most keenly felt. How can we know what conditions were like and not feel angry? Why is knowledge so divorced from action and understanding? Why aren’t more people, myself included, writing banners like Paul’s?

It is this that leads me to propose a new approach to the subject. Let us call it radical genealogy. Immediately it sounds like an oxymoron, such is the aura surrounding family history, something safe and slightly obsessive like trainspotting. Nor do I intend a dogmatic imposition of political theory or a revisioning of the past through the lens of current concerns. But a more critical, contextualised and purposeful form of engagement should be possible, as suggested by my book The Dancer and the Drum. For example, the roots of one’s own character and links these might forge with aspects of psychology. Male domination of the family tree as an example of the treatment of women. Where our predecessors lived and what that tells us about the housing market then – and now. What access they had to medicine and education, and not just as an exercise in nostalgia for midwives in wimples or ‘the Victorian classroom’. The energy, resourcefulness and creativity of the poor as a challenge to notions of victimhood and passivity. Even the motives and means by which records of the past are made available and whether the current, privatised model is best.

Others will have their own angles – the past experience of immigrants, for example, which could hardly be more relevant to today, or a view from the opposite side of the class divide. Nor will we always, perhaps ever, agree regarding a particular take on someone’s background or what lessons are to be drawn. Ideally not, indeed, the point being to make the past – our pasts – an area of contention, of theorising sometimes, but above all of relevance to present lives. That is what history should be, after all. Not a pageant of canonical figures and events, still less a celebration of something loaded yet vacuous like British values, but a lively, disputatious conversation whose terms of reference are changing all the time. Genealogy has a place at that table. Our families should be part of the debate. What better tribute could we pay to their memory?

 

Their Glowing Faces

The American novelist James Salter was a man after my own heart. He took his time when writing, a perfectionist possibly, and it shows in the cool precision of his prose. There are not many words in a Salter story that do not pay their own way. Every effect is intended. Which is why I was struck by a paragraph about half way through his last book, All That Is. At first I thought he had slipped up, when really all that had happened was a reminder of a law that not even he was immune to – in writing or in life.

In my Picador edition of 2013 the passage occurs on page 184. We are being told about the latest stage in the life and career of Philip Bowman, comfortably employed as an editor in a small firm of rather literary publishers. He does the round of work-related parties which are attended by, among others, ‘young women who long to make a life of it in their black dresses and glowing faces’. I doubt if Bowman himself would have approved of that preposition being elided: they might have been ‘in’ black dresses, but are we ever ‘in’ our faces? It doesn’t matter how long Salter slaved over his text, it seems, he was fallible like the rest of us. But that is not my point. What this long subordinate clause lodges in the reader’s mind is the question of how much these anxious-to-please office juniors wanted to get on and what they were prepared to do for it. The world of publishing, we have already learned, was given to casual affairs and slightly mannered adultery. That Bowman, a senior figure with some patronage to dispense, would be a ‘catch’ to someone on the make seems obvious.

This idea enjoys a brief, possibly subliminal existence in the mind of the reader, one of those impressions constantly rising, like scent, from the page before being confirmed, contradicted or simply replaced by the one that follows. The sentence continues: ‘. . . girls who lived in small apartments with clothes piled near the bed and the photos from the summer curling.’ The notion that Bowman sometimes, even routinely, went home with these acolytes gains strength. How else would he, and therefore we, eavesdropping on his existence, know what their rooms were like? How subtle it all is, with nothing having to be said outright (in a book startling for its sudden explicitness and obscenity). Our imaginations, if so minded, linger on the scenes that were acted out. The older man, empowered by gender and seniority but with the curtesy and sometimes awkwardness of a guest having to find where things are; the women sexually obliging but ambivalent or disgusted with themselves; the sense, available to both parties perhaps, of life calling time on their desires, those curling photographs a stroke of genius, a killer.

But this reading depends on one particular assumption: that we are in the territory of free indirect style in which the all-seeing eye of an omniscient narrator has access to the character’s subjectivity, third and first persons somehow combined. That requires a fairly strict adherence to point of view: for the trick to work, the protagonist cannot know something they/we have not experienced or been told. It is, of course, legitimate to play with that convention, to flout it as a matter of style; but not to lapse when in all other respects the rules of the game are upheld.

I cannot speak for the rest of Salter’s work, but All That Is tears up that rule book right from the start. It is part of the expansiveness and humanity that critics have praised. The novel shoots (no, wanders) off at a tangent to follow the lives of secondary and even minor characters, telling us things about them which Bowman could not possibly know. Not because the plot has multiple strands, each consistent with the practice just described, their subjectivity honoured and self-contained, but as what might be called a more democratic, even devolved aesthetic. It takes some getting used to, and each time the narrative’s attention strays from Bowman I find myself having consciously to adjust. But it is a consistent, serious device which is part of the novel’s challenge and charm.

However, the paragraph parsed a short while ago concerning the hopeful girls in their black dresses now takes on a different aspect. The habits of free indirect style being deeply ingrained, I gave it the reading outlined above. But on reflection, our access to the secrets of the girls’ apartments is explicable, not in terms of our leading man’s having been there, but as yet another of the author’s detours into his supporting cast. In other words, the method adopted for the book sacrifices the subtlety that first appeared to be achieved. A discreet, almost averted glance at a series of couplings, with so much implied about everyone involved, is ousted by a generous but passing interest in some walk-on parts’ lives.

As a title, All That Is makes serious claims. All life is here, it seems to say, regarding not just the central character but everyone you are going to meet. And there are benefits to this ambition which the book gracefully, magnanimously exploits. It could even be that Salter wanted it both ways, the more literal inclusiveness of his approach and the interpretative riches of a narrower perspective, presiding like a deity over my weighing of the two. But I prefer to think that in the passage discussed here a basic principle is at work, namely that you must make your stylistic bed and lie in it. Tell me everything about everyone and I have fewer occasions to read between the lines; to indulge in some imaginative empathy; to individualise my response to the book by relating it to my own experience of the world; to work things out for myself.

Virgin territory

I read in the Guardian that a potential asset swap between Vodofone and Liberty Global, the owners of Virgin Media, has been shelved. Their failure to agree has caused Vodofone’s share price to fall although some kind of merger is still on the cards. This item of news appears in the business pages, a section of the paper I usually skip; but the article is accompanied by a picture of Usain Bolt who never fails to catch the eye. It comes from the Virgin Media advertisements in which he appears wearing football kit and twirling a ball on his finger. Some of the television commercials feature walk-on parts for Richard Branson from which it seemed reasonable to assume that he still owned the company. Now I discover that it has been bought by a multinational.

Does this matter? After all, what they are getting for their money has always been more important to consumers than the technicality of who owns the brand. Takeovers and mergers are defended as a sign of the market rationalising production and supply. So what if the new proprietors of Virgin Media bought rights to the original merchandising – and Branson’s continued endorsement? They are ensuring access to customer loyalty and offering a better service in return.

This kind of argument is beloved of business schools, stock exchanges and management consultants. But I speak as someone who likes his money to follow his conscience. My pound is red, green and grey, a colour scheme ill-served by the present dispensation – likewise democracy, the environment and other absentees from the bottom line.

Globalisation, the predominance of finance capital and the latest surge towards concentration of ownership have created a layer of corporate reality more removed from the everyday experience, let alone control, of ordinary people than ever before. I might disapprove of a company’s activities – selling formula milk to African mothers, for example – but if its involvement with other products is concealed how can I exercise my right to boycott its goods? What guarantee do I have that the profits earned on my purchases are not finding their way through the labyrinth of corporate ownership to a mogul who finances climate change denial, for example, or backs a political party I disagree with? Perhaps, coming back to Virgin Media, I have bought into the mystique of Richard Branson as a free-wheeling Everyman who stands up for the little guy against the business establishment and believe that buying my internet connection or TV channels from him is a vote for home-grown talent and the spirit of free enterprise, when in reality he has sold out to a vast holding company whose controlling interest seems to be American.

Of course there is usually something in small print on the contract or tin. And it is possible to research online although in my experience only Wikipedia provides an objective (but not necessarily accurate) account of a company’s background and structure. But all of this is hard work: who has the time? It is far easier not to worry; to gratify what the adverts say are my needs and desires without reference to where the money is going; to get the best deal and treat the consequences as something beyond anyone’s control, like the weather or fate. Why bother about accountability when you can have a few pounds off your wifi connection? Let the planet go hang: I can watch X Factor on my phone.

A bas le petit mort

The trouble with Michel Houellebecq, apart from his transfer to Arsenal, is never knowing whether to play him out wide or centrally as a striker. No, wait a minute, that’s Danny Wellbeck. Forgive me, I’ll start again.

The trouble with Michel Houellebecq is summed up by the cover of Atomised, the English translation of his second novel Les Particules élémentaires. It features a young woman wearing only a pair of briefs, the book’s title acting as a bikini top. One imagines the designer fiddling with the letters until any trace of nipple is obscured, a perfect example of the mismatch between hardware and software, of technology wasted on culture. Compare this with the cover of the French edition which depicts two half-seen men sitting on either side of a lit but empty space. Very philosophical. Perhaps the trouble lies not with the author but with us, the British, and our Page Three approach to novels of ideas.

However, that does not get Houellebecq entirely off the hook. Atomised is full of the most explicit, if clinical sex and although all that fucking and sucking serves a purpose it seems to have more than one eye on titillation for its own sake, on notoriety – and who knows, on sales. It is one reason why the book is likely to alienate women, reading at times like the seamiest of male fantasies with lovers improbably compliant while apologising for their inadequacies. True, the couplings are joyless and unerotic like most pornography and this supports Houellebecq’s more serious design, to nail the libido as humanity’s big distraction, the cause of our discontent, a literally fatal flaw. And yes, I do mean literally. He is the most mordant of moralists, filled with loathing for his species and civilization. But still the rutting continues, long after any point about its aridity has been proved; and I cannot help but feel he is trying to have it both ways, like a tabloid editor printing filth in order to appear scandalised.

The structure of the novel also rankles. We get a detailed insight into its protagonists’ lives, including a blow job by blow job account of their dealings with women, while the final section has more in common with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Yet the narrative voice is undifferentiated even though the types of knowledge and perspective required in each case are poles apart. At this point the escape clause of post-modernism will no doubt be invoked. Rule-breaking and playfulness make anything permissible and who cares about point of view any more? Sadly, perhaps, I do – less on any technical or stylistic grounds than because a lack of attendance to such things undermines the other claims a writer might have to seriousness.

And Houellebecq has plenty. He is angry, uncompromising, original and most creditably of all ambitious. Taking as one’s subject the final crisis of mankind and the next stage in our evolution puts most modern fiction to shame not only with how far it is prepared to reach but also with its claims for the form. There is almost as much science as sex, my ignorance so profound I do not know if it is genuine or made up. And for all my quibbles about its narrator, that final section changes entirely one’s reading of what came before . I do not need to share the author’s apparent misanthropy. I might question or even pity his state of mind. But the fact remains I have rarely finished a book so invigorated by the novel’s capacity to reflect – no, remake the world.

Amiss Family Robinson

People read, not only in real life but in novels too. What does their choice of reading tell us about a character and about the writer who put that book in their hands?

This question occurred to me as I made my way through Of the Farm, an early and lesser known work by John Updike. Discovered in a second-hand shop, my copy is from an American paperback edition whose trashy cover mis-sells – or debunks – the urbane prose within. Updike’s narrator is Joey Robinson, a divorced, thirty-something advertising executive visiting his widowed mother on the family farm. His purpose is partly to see how she is managing on her own and partly to introduce her to his new wife, Peggy, and stepson Richard. Over the weekend of their stay a number of tensions reveal themselves: the mutual resentment between the two women; Joey’s guilt regarding his own children and doubts concerning his change of spouse; the burden to him and his father of the farm, whose purchase was Mrs Robinson’s idea; the old lady’s ill-health and what will happen to the property when she dies; Joey’s attempts to bond with Richard: the list is not exhaustive, but indicates the complexity of the psychological landscape which Updike unfolds.

As is often the case, however, these figures struggle to escape from their creator’s wordy and encyclopaedic shadow. Scribblers beware: that is the risk of a first-person narrative. Joey is as a know-all, a one-man factory of metaphor and so comically pompous about sex we are inclined to deride or disbelieve his character. But the same is true of the supporting cast. Joey’s mother cites Plato and knows her theology. Even the minister at their local church sermonises like a Harvard professor. And Richard is a kind of mini-me, improbably knowing and mature. Only Peggy stays close to, if not precisely within, the borders of the role allotted to her, which given the over-endowment of the others is hardly a compliment. At one point Joey and his mother discuss whether she is stupid. I have seen, and often been, stupid and believe me when I say Peggy does not even come close. But then Updike’s women tend to be defined less by their temperament or intellect than by their biology. The eyes through which we see them being male, her physical attributes (including, in this case, bleeding and cramps) are pored over with an attention to detail intended to suggest fascination but bordering on prurience.

How odd, then that into this over-powered ménage with its New World geography and neuroses should stumble the unlikely figure of P. G. Wodehouse. Well, not Plum himself but one of his novels. Joey, looking on Richard’s behalf for the science fiction of his youth, finds some old Thorne Smiths and Wodehouses. This moment stands out as one of the most truthful in the book, the incident, allowed to speak for itself, allowing us to imagine an entire history for the Robinsons in their ill-chosen retreat. The library composed of two authors suggests limited resources and tastes, the consolations of literature needing the extra spice of a collecting bug to justify the house room and expense. Perhaps, like an encyclopaedia paid for in instalments, they were bought from a travelling salesman pandering to the cultural shame of the poorly-read. As objects the books exude a kind of radium, taking Joey back to the long, uneventful summers of his youth before a driving licence provided the means of escape. And the fact that as many of them are lying down as standing up alludes to the passing of that dutiful interest in the written word and to a decline in standards of an old woman growing old alone. This depth-from-simplicity contributes more to our understanding than all of Joey’s Updikean musings. As William Carlos Williams said: no ideas but in things.

Adding layers to our engagement with the text, the question of how the Robinsons came by their modest library is matched by quizzing Updike’s own acquaintance with the books. Thorne Smith was an American who wrote comical ghost stories. He died in 1934, two years after our author was born. Things had a longer shelf-life in those days and Topper or The Jovial Ghosts may have been all the rage in the Updike family home. My father owned some so they must have crossed the Atlantic – as Wodehouse certainly did in the other direction. Were they next to the Smiths and devoured in the same precociously bookish childhood, a memory drawn on for Of the Farm; or did Updike encounter them while he studied in Oxford? And which book is it that Joey picks up and starts reading? Allusion is made to the stealing of a pig and this suggests one of the Blandings stories, in which the Earl’s beloved Empress is always being coveted by some felonious bounder. To his surprise Joey finds himself laughing, another moment of insight in which, their choices and mannerisms having always been derided, some merit is glimpsed in a parent’s tastes. Later Richard picks up the Wodehouse and starts reading, the whole cycle beginning again, his adoption of Joey as a father deftly implied.

Physical description. Intensity of feeling. The world-shattering importance of ordinary lives. Updike could be so good at these things that when the intellectuallism intrudes it feels like an insult to his subject and his audience, like an operatic voice drowning a popular song. In this case, however, a certain amount of redemption is at hand. The prose of the last few pages, as the visit nears its end and the tensions that separate the protagonists come to a head, is more in scale with their humanity and achieves what all great fiction is able to do, establish a connection with people far removed from the reader’s own experience. He had that gift, Updike, to which his other talents were not always conducive or kind.

Hero

After a first relationship which may or may not have been formalised but produced three children, my great-aunt Ethel married a widower called Thomas Claffey. The date was 1926, the place Tooting in South London. All I knew about this man was his occupation given on the marriage certificate: gas stoker. But something told me there was more to his story, although I had no idea where my searches would take me: a relative I did not know about and a tale of courage in battle.

The first breakthrough came with the discovery of Thomas’s enlistment papers online. The picture they painted was humdrum, to put it mildly. In 1909, giving his occupation as ‘labourer’, he had become a reservist in his native Dublin and been assigned to the catering branch of the Royal Army Medical Corps. They called him up at the outbreak of hostilities and he was sent to France but saw no action, being categorised as Bii, or fit for labour duties overseas: an Irish navvy, even in war.
The next breakthrough came with the discovery that Ethel and Thomas had a daughter called Margaret. Not only that but she was very much alive. I made contact and we spent a very enjoyable day exchanging news about our respective families. Margaret remembered her parents fondly but my interest in the past dislodged some additional memories, among them one of Thomas saying he had served with the Inniskilling Dragoons and fought in South Africa. Checking his enlistment papers I found something missed first time round, a reference to his previous military service which bore out Margaret’s recollection.

Records dating from the Boer War are harder to come by and nothing relating to Thomas was found. But the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons were involved in the conflict and an account of their campaign was published by Lt. Col. Watkins Yardley. Among the adventures it describes is a skirmish which took place in November 1901 around a ridge near Spytfontein. In the confusion of combat Privates Bates and Claffey were brought down by their horses falling and separated from their troop, which had withdrawn. They hid in long grass close to the enemy and managed to shoot two of them. Claffey had the chance to retire but stayed with his comrade, engaging over fifty Boers. Finally Claffey remounted his horse and recaptured Bates’s under heavy fire, the two men making off with bullets flying round their ears.

No medals were awarded for this escapade, the army’s definition of gallantry being stricter than mine. But Margaret was delighted to read an account of her father in action and dug out some photographs, two fragments of him as a young man in uniform and a holiday snapshot including Ethel and Thomas. He cuts a fine figure with his strapping physique, dashing moustache and habit of standing at ease. After so many years the hero of Spytfontein still had a military bearing.