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Book review

Notorious for being described by one of the 1994 panel of Booker judges* as “crap”, How Late is Was, How Late is a stream of consciousness novel written in ‘Glaswegian demotic’. It spans a week in the life of Sammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict, who gets drunk, fights with the police, and is beaten by them so badly that he is blinded. The assault happens in the opening weekend leaving the bulk of the novel to relate his clumsy and sometimes tragi-comic attempts to come to terms with his condition, to navigate the streets of Glasgow, and make a half-hearted claim for disability benefit. He refuses almost all help despite desperately needing it, and slowly reveals a small amount about his past, including two long spells in prison.

The language of the novel will be a challenge for many readers. Here’s a short extract by way of illustration:

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can’t ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck…”

You will note how the narrative point of view and tense wanders. Initially the narrative is in the first person, but then the text starts referring to Sammy as “he” – illustrating, I suppose, his sense of alienation – he sees himself as a secondary character. If you read that and thought it was relatively easy to follow, just think of the cumulative impact of nearly 400 pages of its unrelenting incoherence. The 4000 “fucks” weren’t really a problem for me – people do speak that way – but the question was do I want to listen to them? Did Sammy have anything interesting to say, or is he just a confused incompetent?

How Late sat on my bookshelves unread for what was probably decades. I was put off by the extraordinarily dull cover (see above) and more seriously by the ferocious dialect. In truth it really only takes a few pages to understand the conventions Kelman uses, such as “the gether” for “together”, “sodjers” for police, and so on, and to get into the rhythm of the Glaswegian voice.

I was hoping some coherence would be brought to the narrative – that we would find out more about why his girlfriend has disappeared for example. But we never do, and puzzlingly Sammy never makes any attempt to find out. He is anxious to ensure that family and friends don’t find out about his blindness, and even when he eventually consults a doctor there is no serious discussion on whether the condition is temporary or permanent, possible referral to a specialist, or any treatment. Earlier the police arrest Sammy for reasons that are never explained but may be something to do with an associate who has a more substantial criminal record. Any hope that these threads will combine or end up making any sense are left unfulfilled. 

I kept waiting for the book I hoped Kelman was writing to emerge from the shadows, but to my huge disappointment it never did. There is clearly a lot Sammy decides not to tell us – although why he would conceal it from himself is not obvious – and while we do find more out about him over the course of the novel, much is left unsaid. What I expected to happen is that the slow reveal would finally piece together, and that pieces would fall into place, revealing the explanation for the randomness of Sammy’s life, why he refuses to seek help for his blindness, where his girlfriend has gone and why he doesn’t seem that interested in finding out. Late in the novel his teenage son Peter is introduced. He obviously cares for his father and is anxious to help him, but Sammy rejects his offers of help (apart from his money) and lies comprehensively to him, swearing him to secrecy about his sight loss for reasons which seem more to do with pride than anything else. Perhaps it is just middle-class of me to expect Sammy’s like to have some structure or reason, rather than just being the one big mess it is.

Overall this was hard work. Sammy is profoundly unlikeable, showing occasional glimpses of intelligence which are misleading – he quickly reverts to a bovine refusal to accept any assistance or attempt to improve his desperate situation. I appreciate that in creating Sammy Kelman wanted to give a voice to the oppressed working class, and Sammy’s independent streak and refusal to accept assistance is in some ways admirable, but in fact the novel does the working class a disservice. Most working people simply would not behave in the irrational way Sammy does throughout the novel. They accept help when needed, and their relationships are important enough for them to ask after their partner when they disappear. Their lives may be chaotic and disorderly, but they are not without reason.

 

*Julia Neuberger. In a later, generally positive review, the Guardian called the novel “a miserable slog” and in a masterly understatement “unlikely to improve anyone’s beach holiday”!

How Late it Was, How Late, by James Kelman, 1994

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Book review

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, 1948

This was an umpteenth re-read – I revisit The Loved One (subtitled An Anglo-American Tragedy) for a chuckle every now and again. It’s not a novel (Waugh called it a novelette) that takes itself very seriously, but it is all the better for that. It also has a lot of fun at the expense of both Americans and English ex-pats in America, so what’s not to like?Image result for loved ones waugh

Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, august representative of the British community of ex-pats in Los Angeles, descends upon Dennis Barlow, a minor poet brought to Hollywood to write the script for a film biography of Shelley, to express his concern about Barlow’s new job and how it reflects on the British community in Hollywood. Barlow has abandoned his script writing for something much more valuable to society – he works at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery.

Barlow, tasked with the funeral arrangements of his ‘housemate’ who has killed himself having been dismissed from his job in one of the studios, “developing scripts”, (there are a lot of euphemisms and avoidances such as this in this novel) visits Hollywood’s famous funeral grounds, Whispering Glades. There he quickly falls for cosmetician (she puts make-up on corpses) Aimée Thanatogenos. He woos her with quotations from the British classics, passing them off as his own. But he has a rival, the senior mortician Mr Joyboy. Aimee is torn between her feelings for Barlow and Joyboy, but despite the helpful advice columnist of local agony aunt “Guru Brahmin” she gets engaged to Barlow. Subsequently, when she finds out his poems are plagiarised, she dumps him (in fact, she ghosts him!) and returns to Joyboy. The coffin is nailed firmly shut when she attends the funeral of Mr Joyboy’s mother’s parrot at the Happier Hunting Ground, where Barlow is in attendance. The scene is set for a macabre, blackly comic finale.

Waugh was at his comic best when he gave his satirical targets both barrels, holding nothing back. Here his contempt for Hollywood, Americans, ex-pats, you name it, is out in the open and given full rein. This is more a sketch than a fully developed novel, lacking the depth of Waugh’s other work, but it is fun despite the darkness.

 

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Book review

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, 1984

I am sure there are exceptions, but most great novels have great opening lines. “It was the best of times”, “All happy families”, “It was a bright cold morning” and so on. Anita Brookner by contrast chose to open Hotel du Lac with the following:

“From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.”

Which won’t be going into any collections of great opening lines any time soon. This self-consciously down-beat opening sets the tone of the novel – this is going to be a mono-chromatic sketch where the reader is going to have to do a lot of the work.Image result for Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, 198

Edith Hope, author of romantic novels such as Beneath the Visiting Moon and The Stone and the Star, has fled from London to the Hotel du Lac in disgrace. Initially we are not told the reasons for this flight – some sort of scandal is hinted at. It emerges she has been having an affair with a married man, to whom she pens forlorn love-letters. We are initially led to believe that this is the cause of her exile, although it later emerges that it is her decision to leave her groom (another man entirely, naturally) at the altar that has outraged her friends and led to her banishment. Why deciding not to go through with an ill-advised wedding is considered such a cause of outrage is never made clear.

The hotel is a suitable location for Edith’s contemplation of her future:“

“The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era.”

“As far as guests were concerned, it (the hotel) took a perverse pride in its very absence of attractions, so that any visitor mildly looking for a room would be puzzled and deflected by the sparseness of the terrace, the muted hush of the lobby … There was no sauna, no hairdresser and certainly no glass cases displaying items of jewellery; the bar was small and dark and its austerity did not encourage people to linger.”

The portraits of the other guests at the hotel provide Edith with illustrations of the choices before her (and, we might reasonably extrapolate, many women in her position) as she considers her next steps. They are all lonely in their different ways. There is the overbearing widow Mrs Pusey, who has made a vocation out of shopping, so empty is her life; her devoted daughter Jennifer, secretly far less docile than her mother believes her to be (the novel hints at sexual liaisons between Jennifer and Alain, the hotel’s waiter, and later Mr Neville); Mme de Bonneuil, who lives in isolation at the hotel, expelled from her chateau, now inhabited by her son and his wife, and Monica, living alone the hotel on the instructions of her husband to fix her “eating disorder” and become fertile enough to bear him an heir.

“She (Monica) hates and fears her husband, but only because he has not protected her, and she sees herself condemned to loneliness and exile. In this she is prescient. I see her, some years hence, a remittance woman, paid to live abroad, in such an hotel, in various Hotels du Lac, her beautiful face grown gaunt and scornful, her dog permanently under her arm. ”

Edith also has a friend back in London, Penelope – “a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years” (one of the novel’s better lines).

“To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved.”

The boorish Mr Neville presents Edith with a final choice: a marriage without love or respect, No matter that he has only known her for a matter of days. Neville is looking for a “safe” wife who will maintain his home and offers to turn a blind eye to any lovers she might take. Possibly the absurdity of this proposal is intentional, although Edith seems close to accepting despite her disastrous engagement itself only weeks earlier.

There is something quite circular about romantic novels about romantic novelists. At several points it is not clear whether Brookner is writing about her character, or about the novel itself. When Mr Neville, in an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at seduction, insults her, Edith

“to contain her anger…tried various distancing procedures..the most productive of which was to convert the incident into a scene from one of her novels”.

In her sad letters to her silent lover Edith adopts the role of narrator of the novel, recounting various scenes of minimal activity by the other guests (indeed this is a novel where so very little happens other than walks being taken and coffee drunk that we might almost be in a Virginia Woolf novel, whom we are constantly told Edith looks like). Later Edith consoles herself with the thought that

“Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid.”

Is this what we are reading – simply an act of consolation, a distraction for the ill-at-ease? Intended or not I can’t think of a way in which Brookner could have more clearly reminded the reader that this is just a novel, her characters are not real, and all this never really happened, something that other novelists are at pains to conceal. This is not some Brechtian ultra-realistic narrative however, but a story about a woman thinking about her life.

The tone and pace of the novel are consistently grey and slow, but there was one scene towards the end of the novel which jarred acutely. Mr Neville is proposing marriage to Edith. He is essentially a well-groomed thug, and manages to insult her throughout the proposal. (If this is intended to remind readers of the clumsy first proposal in Pride and Prejudice, it doesn’t). Upset, Edith starts to weep, and his response is startling:

“Edith, said Mr Neville. Please don’t cry. I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her. “

If that wasn’t bad enough, and it is, a few moments later, while she sobs on his shoulder, he muses:

“You are very thin…I am afraid that I might break you in half”.

It is possible Brookner did not intend the threat of sexual violence explicit in this line, but it is hard to imagine otherwise. Most women would I suspect want to get as far away as possible from this man, but Edith meekly accepts his proposal.

Brookner is not a bad novelist. Her use of language is controlled and precise. The Penguin edition of the novel mentions that Brookner “is the author of 24 novels, many of which are available in Penguin” – that “many” is quite poignant. It is however a puzzle why this novel was considered the best written or published in 1984. It’s not the first unusual decision by the Booker panel, but it is one of the strangest.

 

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Book review

Dark Tales, by Shirley Jackson, 2017

Shirley Jackson established a reputation as a horror writer with the publication of her haunting short story ‘The Lottery‘ in the New Yorker in 1948. This anthology of stories drawn from across her writing career includes a wide variety of gothic tales. The publishers describe them as “deliciously dark stories” which I think both doesn’t do them justice and at the same time over-states their value. Which I know is contradictory, but I’ll try and explain what I mean.

When the stories are effective – principally when they do not rely on the supernatural – then they are far more than “deliciously dark”, which is more suited as a description for chocolate than a short story. The opening tale, for example, The Possibility of Evil, is a portrait of an old lady who writes poison-pen letters to her fellow townsfolk, mainly out of boredom and a sense of her own superiority. This story contains not a hint of the supernatural, but is very effective, with a wonderful, punchy ending. Louisa, Please Come Home was another story that made an impact on me. In it a teenager runs away from home – why it is not clear – and when she is found after living in a nearby town for several years, only to be rejected by her family as not their real daughter.

Other stories in the collection are not as strong. They often lean too heavily on the supernatural to provide the surprise element of the story. In The Bus is a good example of this weaker category. A stranded woman gets a lift to a familiar house that turns out to be her childhood home and she can’t escape it. Home boils down to a pair of ghosts who like to sit in cars. 

Jackson’s style can come over as formulaic when the stories are read in a single volume of this kind. She opens with mundane, everyday settings, then slowly introduces the creepier elements, usually without announcement, blurring the lines between the supernatural and the real world. The first person narrative helps to confuse the reader – is this “really” happening or is the narrator having a dream or vision? The menace of small town America is a common theme throughout this volume but overall it doesn’t bear comparison to Jackson at her best.

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Book review

The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, 1955

KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT.

What did novelists do for their plots and settings before the Cold War and the possibility of a post-apocalyptic primitive society? Although writers have always speculated about the end of the world, it was only really once the apocalypse became a practical, foreseeable possibility that science fiction kicked into gear and began imagining how the survivors might live.

In Wyndham’s post-apocalypse Canada, set many years after “the tribulation” which has destroyed most of humanity and caused serious problems with birth deformities, society is slowly recovering, in part by following a strict system of genetic purity. Their form of fundamentalist Christianity (they wear a cross on the front of all clothing) believes that to avoid another Tribulation they must enforce a rigid definition of normality. This inevitably forces them to practice eugenics in which any minor mutation or difference is considered blasphemous. Aberrant crops are destroyed, babies are euthanized if they display the slightest variation and failed to pass inspection. Other human mutations not apparent at birth are subsequently sterilized and banished.

We learn about this society through the narration of David Strorm, a young man from the rural community of Waknuk. David dreams of cities, planes and horseless carts, but he keeps these dreams secret to avoid suspicion – difference even of the imagination is feared. He befriends Sophie, a girl who hides the fact she has six toes on her feet. Sophie’s mutation is discovered and her family are forced to flee. This is how David and the reader learn how difference is treated in Waknuk. But David has another darker secret – he and other local children are telepaths, able to communicate in thought pictures across distance. They are the Chrysalids of the novel’s title, a new advanced form of humanity, a larval form of something more than homo-sapiens, and therefore taboo in their society.

The group keep their powers hidden with the help of David’s sympathetic uncle, Axel, who goes to the extreme of killing the husband of one of the group’s members who was planning to blackmail them. David’s younger sister Petra develops telepathic powers as she grows, and it becomes clear that these are of a different order from the others – when her horse is attacked by a predator she calls telepathically for help across the entire region, stunning those closest to her. This arouses suspicions. Two members of the group are tortured for information, causing David, his cousin Rosalind and Petra to run for their lives.

The future following a nuclear holocaust was never going to be much fun. Wyndham shows humanity slowly recovering, and exercising genetic purity as a difficult but necessary discipline. Any discussion of eugenics only a decade after the Second World War and the holocaust was always going to be difficult topic, but Wyndham doesn’t blink from the upsetting issues it presents. Good science fiction is about more than just technology, but uses the scenario as a springboard for a discussion of moral and philosophical issues. Here Wyndham uses the tribulation as an allegory for the tensions between change and conservatism in post-war 1950’s Britain and a meditation on difference, both visible and hidden.

Is this a novel for young adults? Definitely. It may not have been written as such, but most teens will enjoy the growing awareness of David’s special abilities, the knowledge that he is not alone, and the exciting pursuit of the young telepaths across a landscape peopled by mutants. The novel’s conclusion however is its weak point. Wyndham wraps things up with a brisk deployment of deus ex machina as a rescue party of scientifically advanced telepathic New Zealanders contacted by Petra arrive in the midst of a battle between the Waknuk settlers and their genetically challenged enemies. It’s not quite a happy-ever-after ending – the New Zealanders are in some ways as brutal eugenicists as the Waknuk fundamentalists. But any doubts about the wisdom of their approach are waved aside as David and friends are whisked away to New Zealand where their technological society is presented as a utopia. This is fundamentally an optimistic novel – nuclear war can be survived, and a better world will emerge despite the forces of reaction.

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Book review

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, 1987

Penelope Lively won the 1987 Booker Prize for this interesting, eminently readable but ultimately unsatisfying novel. It tells the story of Claudia Hampton, a 76-year-old historian. As Claudia lays dying in hospital she narrates the story of her life in an internal monologue. The narrative is complex, with the point of view changing constantly, and with time and place jumping across the decades and across the continents.

The novel’s title is romantic and mysterious, but the explanation when it comes – a moon tiger is a rather absurd name for an anti-mosquito candle (see picture) which burns slowly through the night – is disappointingly prosaic, involving neither moons nor tigers. The moon tiger is co-opted as a rather heavy handed symbol for the human experience – we all glow brightly and then end up as ashes – but I was still disappointed that something so romantic-sounding could be such an everyday utilitarian object.

Lively creates some vivid characters in this narrative. Claudia’s brother Gordon is for a while her incestuous lover – this is their closely-held for the rest of their lives, but is not portrayed as a damaging or harmful experience.  At the outbreak of the second world war Claudia becomes a war correspondent (as one does) and travels to Cairo, where she meets and begins an intense relationship with Tom Southern, captain of an English armoured tank division. This, we know from the comments of contemporary Claudia looking back on their time together, (although it is narrated in real time) is a doomed war-time affair, and inevitably Tom is killed at El Alamein. 

After the war Claudia meets Jasper, an artistic aristocrat with whom she goes on to have a long-term but sporadic relationship from which she has her only child, Lisa. Lisa is not the free spirit her mother considers herself to be, and their relationship is strained. Later a gay Hungarian student, Lazlo, has a walk-on part in the narrative, although one has the impression that all of life’s events for Claudia after the loss of Tom are an afterthought. This is reinforced by the novel’s finale, when Claudia is sent Tom’s wartime diary which re-emphasises the intensity of his feelings for her. Regret for what might have been her life had he survived is one of her last thoughts before the novel closes.

Despite its innovative structure, this is a very traditional novel. It is a romance, albeit an exceptionally well-written one. There’s nothing wrong with that – Pride and Prejudice is a romance, and it is one of the best novels of all time. But has Moon Tiger got anything interesting to say about human relationships? I’m not sure. Do the characters come alive at all; do they ever go beyond being characters in a novel about whom one never really cares? At one point Claudia reminisces about Lazlo going for a walk in London, and bringing home a nice bunch of flowers, which, it later transpires, he unwittingly picked from a public park. At a dinner party this might be a short, not particularly funny about how foreigners don’t understand English social conventions. But here it is an awkward anecdote, intended to illustrate  Lazlo’s naivety, but never escaping the sense that it is a made-up story intended to play a role in a narrative, rather than something that genuinely happened to someone.

The death-bed format plays a factor here, depriving the narrative of any true surprises. It is probably my failure to engage with the text fully that stopped me caring about Gordon, Lazlo, or Jasper – they felt like background characters in the play of Claudia’s life – and it was only really Claudia and Tom, in the vivid chapters telling the story of their brief moments together, where the story truly felt real. It’s worth reading for that story alone.

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Book review

A Brief History of Everyone who ever lived, by Alex Rutherford, 2016

Genetics is science still in its infancy. The structure of DNA was only identified in the 1950’s, and the human genome was mapped in 2003. Compare that to the study of physics or chemistry where the key building blocks of our understanding have been in place much longer. A lot of what we thought we knew about genetics ten years ago now is considered out of date and inaccurate; what we think in 20 years of what we think we know now, who can say? As such this is more a progress report on genetics in 2016 than a definitive survey of the science, comprehensive though it is.

I have always been fascinated by the puzzle that we all have increasing numbers of great grand parents as you go back each generation, but that the total human population in much higher now than it has ever been. Rutherford calculates that it you go back to the eighth century we will each have required 137,438,953,472 people in our family tree. I make that about 33 generations, but of course many times more than the number of people who have ever lived. It follows that family trees are a misleading presentation of our genealogy. There must be many points across our family history were the lines cross and blend. “What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more mesh or web-like”. Rutherford expresses this point by looking at the genealogy of some of the Royal families of Europe. Charles 2nd of Spain should have had 62 ancestors in his preceding six generations, (2 parents + 4 grandparents + 8 great grand parents and so on). In fact he had only 32 – many of his great aunts were also his great grandmothers, for example. Go back another two generations and instead of over 250 ancestors he had 82. This is obviously an extreme example caused by the shallow gene pool from which the royal families chose their partners, but go back far enough and the same pattern would be seen in all our families.

The other riddle that Rutherford answers definitively here is whether, as is often suggested, we are all eventually related to Attila the Hun. The short answer is if you go back around ten centuries or so then we all share some genetic material from everyone who lived at that point. This is obviously highly counter-intuitive, but Rutherford demonstrates it with precision and statistics. I would struggle to repeat the analysis for myself – it’s complicated – but I take some comfort from knowing where to find it if I need it!

This is an eclectic look at the state of genetics today, including issues as diverse as why the distribution of wet and dry ear wax in humans suggests that the people of South Korea might be the least smelly on earth; why the idea of a Danish Viking conquest of the British Isles involving rape and pillage is not borne out by a genetic legacy; and why monoamine oxidase A, the so-called “warrior gene”, ought not to be a valid defence in criminal trials. Rutherford charts our progression as a species from out of Africa, using evidence provided by ancient DNA. A toe bone of a Neanderthal who died 50,000 years ago in the Siberian reveals our ancestors appetite to mate with other humanoids now extinct, explaining why we all have a little caveman DNA in our genome.

Genetics is complex, and there were pages in the book were my non-scientific eyes glazed over, there’s no point in denying otherwise, however accessible this book was intended to be. The analysis of whether race is a genetic characteristic, or whether it actually exists or not, was a case in point. I think Rutherford concludes that it both does and does not, but I would need to check. The relationship of disease to genetic is equally complex. You start out by looking at the more obvious inherited illnesses such as Tay-Sachs disease or sickle cell anemia, and think yep, that makes sense. But once you start looking at more complex conditions and characteristics, even those most obviously inherited such as height, tracing the precise role our genes play in this process has proven elusive. Or that was what I understood Rutherford to be saying anyway!

I know a little more about genetics than I knew last week, which has got to be a good thing. But I must admit I will return to the comfort of fiction in the coming days with a small sense of relief.

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Book review

A Walk-on Part, Diaries 1995-1999 by Chris Mullin, 2011

Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South for 23 years, had a lot more than a walk-on part (a minor role, a metaphor drawn from the theatre) in the New Labour years. These can be dated from the death of John Smith in 1994, and the ascendancy of Tony Blair from that date, which is where this, his third volume of diaries, starts.

Mullin first entered Parliament in 1987, and at the time was widely perceived as a Bennite, that is to say on the hard left of the party. This was a misconception that slowly changed and he would now more typically attract the label “soft-left”, generally supporting the Labour Government but occasionally rebelling on points of principle. His description of himself as having a walk-on part in the political affairs of these years is undermined by the fact that he was appointed (admittedly to the lowest rung of Government) as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment, Transport, and the Regions in July 1999, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for International Development in 2001, and lastly in June 2003, as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. In addition he chaired the Home Office Select Committee for several years, all of which gave him a ring-side seat for the roller-coaster ride that was New Labour.

Mullin identifies very early on the “fault lines which would come to haunt New Labour in the years ahead – control freakery, a soft spot for rich men, the obsession with spin”. Although astute he is probably being too kind here on New Labour – there was more than a soft spot for rich men for example. He deflects a lot of his concern about the political direction of New Labour on to Peter Mandelson, for whom he has a particular aversion. Like many others in the party at the time Mullin was charmed by Blair and time after time gives him the benefit of the doubt on the basis of his personal persuasion.

Another early entry in January 1997 records Blair addressing the Parliamentary party:

“On top form. Passionate, witty, positive…We had plenty to offer…He listed commitments – work, education or training for 250,000 young people; an end to the internal market in the NHS; reduced class sizes; and end to nursery vouchers; an extension of protection in the workplace; we will sign up to the EU Social Chapter; the right to join and be represented by a union; a minimum wage; a Freedom of Information Act; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into law.”

This is a useful summary of the relatively modest aspirations of new Labour in opposition. By my count most if not all of those commitments were met, and more, even if there were some major compromises along the way. The events of these years are sufficiently fresh in my memory, and the editing is sufficiently ruthless to make the pages zip past quite quickly. One minor point of interest is to spot early appearance of characters who were to go on and play a much larger role in politics in years to come appear briefly – he meets David Cameron for example, a smooth-skinned self confident advisor to Michael Green at Carlton Communications.

Mullin is relatively astute, but he doesn’t always accurately foresee what way the wind is blowing. Some of the clumsier judgments were no doubt edited out, but his editor Ruth Winstone, who also edited Tony Benn’s diaries, left in his comment “We are going to lose. Blair knows it too, I can see it in his eyes” written just two weeks before Labour’s landslide in 1997.

The control-freakery that Mullin diagnoses is evident throughout these years, not least in the ruthless control of candidate selection. A good example appears on late April 1997 with the last minute parachuting-in of a candidate in Dudley where the incumbent was persuaded to take a job in the House of Lords (p271). The machismo atmosphere of New Labour is also apparent. Early on in the first Blair administration a decision was made to restrict single parent benefits. It is interesting to look back on how single parents were demonised at the time and regularly identified as a particular source of society’s ills – now they are almost forgotten as a group. Blair forced through this cut even though there was no evidence it would deliver any savings and possibly ended up keeping this group on benefits longer. Mullin resignedly notes “It is no longer a question of resources, but of virility”. (282). The absence of Cabinet Government is another criticism of Blairism that is fully evidenced here – “Tony has practically abandoned cabinet government. All key decisions are taken by the small cabal around his – Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson, and (sometimes) Gordon Brown.” (282/3)

Mullin regularly agonises about the pointlessness of his role as a backbench MP. Factories are closed down in his constituency and all he can do is lobby Government for support. Constituents come to him with intractable personal and social problems – anti-social behaviour and the welfare culture of his area stand out in particular – which he can do little about. The war in Kosovo kicks off and all he can do is vote in favour of the NATO bombing campaign which sparks a refugee crisis. His personal crusades against Freemasonry in public office (especially the police and the judiciary) and for scrutiny of the work of the Security Services are both kicked into the long grass and effectively abandoned by the time he is elevated into junior office.

This is a fascinating inside look at the early Blair years from someone who was very close to the action. It confirms the popular consensus judgment on New Labour, but is no less valuable for that.

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Book review

Hogfather (Discworld 20) by Terry Pratchett, 1996

In any long running series, especially where the author produces books with the regularity that Terry Pratchett achieved, one looks out for repetition – recycled material, sometimes ironically self-referential, sometimes disguised. So when I tell you that Hogfather features Death leaving his day job and assuming the role of the missing, presumed dead Hogfather, the Father Christmas of Discworld, it will ring some bells. Didn’t that happen before, in Reaper Man and before that in Mort? (It did). To be fair, that’s a minor quibble, because as I am sure I have said before, with Pratchett it is never about the plot.

Here, Death is not taking a holiday, but covering for the Hogfather, who despite being the titled character makes only the briefest of appearances. Death is driven to do this on the basis that the Hogfather is responsible for the sun rising each morning, and for this to happen children have to believe in him. It’s not as awkward and contrived as it sounds.

Having failed to force Death to retire in Reaper Man, the grim Auditors of Reality, “celestial bureaucrats”, hire an assassin from the Assassin’s Guild to kill the Hogfather, symbol of all that is creative and joyful in the Discworld. A particularly psychopathic assassin, Mr. Teatime, is assigned the job.

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”

He recruits a gang of Ankh-Morpork’s more unpleasant thugs (and that’s saying something) to capture the Tooth Fairy’s kingdom, steal all the collected teeth, and use them to control the children of Discworld, commanding them to no longer believe in the Hogfather. Again, still not awkward, contrived, or even twee. Honestly. Pratchett gets away with this because the narrative doesn’t give us this summary – the reader is left to work most of this out themselves, and the immediacy of the action – we are just shown what is happening in the moment – is realistically portrayed. There’s a darker element to the novel as well – when Mr Teatime kills people they stay killed.

Death, becoming aware (somehow) of the Hogfather’s absence, decides to fill in for him. Along the way he visits his granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit, tricking her into investigating the Hogfather’s disappearance. This is not the first time Susan has been called upon to help Death, although at least this time she is not collecting souls for him. She tracks a missing tooth fairy to the Hogfather’s Castle of Bones, on the way meeting Bilious, the “Oh God” of hangovers (one of Pratchett’s better throw away jokes). I am not going to spoil for you what happens there, but I bet you can work it out!

As well as spending time with Death and his assistants the Death of Rats and the ever-hopeful raven, exploring the Hogswatchnight traditions of Discworld and gently satirising the commercialism of Christmas along the way, we also follow the wizards of the Unseen University as they get ready for their great midnight feast, at the same time try to understand why new minor magical creatures keep popping into existence, such as the hair-loss fairy:

“No sense in being bashful about goin’ bald,” said Ridcully evenly. “Anyway, you know what they say about bald men, Dean.”

“Yes, they say, ‘Look at him, he’s got no hair,’” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

Susan and the Oh God try to work out what has happened to the missing tooth fairy, and why Death is substituting for the Hogfather, while Mr Teatime and his gang ransack the Tower of Bones. It’s all handled flawlessly by Pratchett, and the reader happily suspends disbelief for the duration, not least because all the characters themselves are constantly telling one another how unlikely everything is.

The Discworld version of Christmas is inevitably a much earthier version of our own Dickensian yuletide. The Hogfather’s sleigh is pulled by four fearsome wild boars, Gouger, Rooter, Tusker and Snouter. But even in Discworld traditions are being slowly sanitised. In earlier times the Hogfather gave households pork products, and naughty children a bag of bloody bones; now all the Hogfather brings is soldiers, dolls and noisy toys for that 4.30 am start.

Pratchett as ever is a great moral philosopher, with Death as his most articulate spokesperson:

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

How’s that for poetry – “where the falling angel meets the rising ape”? I rarely feel the need to justify reading what some people (entirely wrongly) consider children’s books, but here Pratchett provides the answer himself in one elegant, poetic and profound phrase.

 

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Book review

Play review: Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, by Terry Johnson, 1998

I rarely review plays, but this is after all a reading diary, and I did read this play recently, so I am including it here for completeness. Plays should be seen, not read. Of course read them as well, but the text will only come to life once it is staged, blocked, and performed, when you work out what people are doing while other actors are saying their lines, where people are on the stage, and so on. You can do all that from a read through, but it is a very different experience from reading a novel. I didn’t read Cleo, etc that way – I just read the lines. Which probably took two hours, at most, and may well explain why I was underwhelmed by the experience.

Cleo, etc is a behind the scenes look at the lives and romances of the central characters of the Carry On films – Sid James, Kenneth Williams, and Barbara Williams. Imogen Hassall, who appeared in only one of the Carry On movies, also has a brief appearance intended to bring some pathos to the slapstick and show that all the rampant sexism is not without a price. The play spans a decade or more from when the movies were first popular – Cleo in 1964, the tenth film in the series, regarded sometimes as the best, to Emmanuelle (30) in 1978 in which the already well-scraped barrel was given a final going over.

If you are fan of the Carry On movies, or feel a sense of nostalgia for their amateurish slapstick and smuttiness, this play will act as a reminder of all that was awful about them, as well as their darker side – they seem to have been a bleak experience to make. It is not a coincidence that Johnson has Kenneth Williams sign-off with the line that was to be the last sentence in his diary – “Oh, what’s the bloody point” – before his suicide. There is also a passing reference to murder suicide of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in 1967.

I can imagine that in performance this play would have its amusing and touching moments, although the central figure, Sid James, is the least likeable of the cast. But on the page it fails to take off. The challenges of staging this play must be considerable. Most of the action takes place inside the caravan that Sid uses as his dressing room. At one point it rocks side to side as he has sex; on another occasion as a scene climax it collapses. It can imagine this would appear cramped on a large stage with most of the space unused.

Johnson is covering some very familiar territory here – few will be surprised that the clowns of the films had a melancholic side, or that extra-marital affairs and other misdemeanours were commonplace. The point that the smuttiness of the films covered an unhealthy attitude towards sex is hardly a revelation. So ultimately I am not sure there’s much more to say than to echo Kenny’s question – “what’s the bloody point?”

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