Saxophone Dreams by Nicholas Royle

Saxophone Dreams by Nicholas Royle is a remarkably ambitious project. It also presents an immense challenge for the reader. At the end of the process, and from all points of view, I am not convinced that the journey is worth the effort. A list of themes alone is of epic length. We have jazz throughout. There’s Hašek and Ankers, both sax players. They are based in different countries, but manage to collaborate musically via an exchange of tapes. At least the postal system seems to be something less than surreal.

As ever with jazz buffs, there seems to be much name dropping and a lot less musical idea. Then there’s the surrealism of Paul Delvaux. The characters find themselves appearing involuntarily or via dreams in the artist’s paintings, the descriptions of which never really offer any stylistic devices that might convey their content, let alone extend their scenes. The images themselves often involve naked ladies wandering wide-eyed through the night. And it is this image of sleep-walking that underpins much of the book. Apparently in dreams - or perhaps not – these jazz types wander through Europe and witness the fall of Communism whilst encountering one another along the way.

And so we visit Albania, a disintegrating Yugoslavia, a changing Czechoslovakia and a rumbling Rumania. We seem to have hot-lines direct to national leaders who themselves wander in and out of the narrative, some dead, some alive. The book’s narrative becomes unnecessarily didactic rather than dream-like as the text lists strings of facts, Wikipedia-like.

Ian, a black hospital worker from Brighton who always carries drumsticks in his jeans is more of a character than most of the others. He sets off across Europe with a theme of his own to identify the source of illegally trafficked human organs that are feeding business into the pocket of his surgeon boss back home. Ian traces the source of the organs to Kosovo, where ethnic tensions between Albanians and Serbs become part of the story.

Yet another theme… Still with me? Overall, Saxophone Dreams is a well-written and often engaging novel. These people drink a lot, travel quite a bit, perhaps without ever leaving their beds, and seem to enjoy unwittingly acting out stills from paintings. They are into jazz, but play little between the name dropping. They are into politics, but apparently cannot do without a couple of paragraphs with historical background to justify what they think. And they seem surprisingly unaware of the world around them. They are all too busy dreaming, perhaps. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Saxophone Dreams is a pot pourri of ideas, locations, themes and characters that occasionally, just occasionally, delights. But it can be something of a long trip…

My Brother, My Executioner by F Sionil José

F Sionil José’s novel, My Brother, My Executioner, is set in a period of Philippine history whose international significance is worthy of wider knowledge. The author’s Rosales novels describe the life of a Filipino family over several generations. Rosales is a fictitious town, but its location is quite real, as is the history that unfolds around it. Rosales is in Ilocos, in northern Luzon, whose people are seen by many Filipinos as a race apart. The events that form the backdrop to My Brother, My Executioner are the Huk rebellion.

It’s the 1950s. Don Vicente is a Rosales landowner and he is ill, close to the end of his life. He reminisces, recalling the immense suffering of his wife who presented him with multiple miscarriages. But he did have a son, Luis, born of a poor woman is a small village called Sipnget. So, unlike others from that poor place, Luis received an education courtesy of the fees his rich father could pay. He became a writer and moved to Manila to pursue a self-contained,and ultimately selfish life.

Luis writes for a magazine owned by Dantes, a rich businessman with a reputation for ruthlessness. Esther, the boss’s daughter, fancies Luis, but her advances are not reciprocated, except intellectually. Personal tragedy threatens.

Luis is also worshipped by Trining, a teenage cousin who shares some of his roots. When Luis’s father notes their affinity and also identifies the convenience that their marriage would facilitate. Luis seems quite happy to do the right thing. Trining has her way with him and promises to bear him a dozen children. The first is soon conceived.

But it is when Luis makes a visit to his father’s house, a rare excursion beyond Manila’s city limits, that he also decides to look up his estranged mother. He visits Sipnget to find his home village levelled and burnt, its inhabitants ‘disappeared’, its crops destroyed. The Huk guerrillas have been there and the military, amply aided by local militias have cleansed the area. The militias, of course, are controlled by Luis’s father and they have driven his mother from her home.

Luis resolves to publicise the injustice. He researches the events, writes an article and publishes. But when vested interests question his facts, his motives and allegiances, he finds himself challenged on many fronts.

In another twist in the scenario we meet Vic, Luis’s half-brother. He was a freedom fighter during the Japanese occupation. While collaborators made money, he fought with the resistance that sought liberation from foreign rule. Now he is the commander of a Huk unit, a leader of a communist insurgency, if I might use a word that would be employed today to describe indigenous resistance. Vic operates near Rosales.

The Huk rebellion is an era of Philippine history that surely deserves wider analysis and discussion. It became a hotspot of the early Cold War. Events in Korea occupy the 1950s limelight, of course, but the Philippine rural guerrilla war was perhaps a precursor of what we now call Vietnam. The United States was involved, of course, and when the rebellion against the landowners was defeated under President Magsaysay’s leadership, he became an internationally-renowned champion of the North-American brand of freedom. In 1980, F Sionil José received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and creative Communication Arts.

Given this history, a history that is incidentally wonderfully described by Benedict Kerkvliet in his book The Huk rebellion, there ought to be more than ample scope for the novelist to create tension, conflict and surprise. Unfortunately, the denouement of My Brother, My Executioner is a tad predictable. The tragedy is eventually too personal, its obvious metaphor becoming a punch pulled. Little is made of the potential conflict between the inheriting Luis and Vic, his guerrilla-commander brother. The book remains an engaging and enjoyable read, but the drama of its setting seemed to promise much more.

Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky

It is almost twenty years since Noam Chomsky published Deterring Democracy. Its contemporary context is an important starting point in the understanding of its position since most of the material seeks to analyse and contextualise United States foreign policy in the post-War years to the early nineties. In 1991 the United States under George Bush was embroiled in the First Gulf War. I must stress the word “first”, since this gives a clue to the book’s eventual prescience.

Also in 1991, a dim and distant past when the new millennium was not yet a talking point, a bi-polar world, whose permanence and assumed conflict provided the framework for all political analysis, was already being transformed. The Soviet Union had already ceased to be, but the years of Yeltsin’s IMF poverty lay ahead, as did those of Putin’s new pragmatic if demagogic prosperity.

Regimes of all political stances came and went in Central and South America. But all of them were classified as good or evil by the Manichean filter of the age. Occasionally, a convenience of political pragmatism offered re-branding, as in the case of Jamaica, where Michael Manley, a leader once undermined as a leftist was reinstated with eternal backing after Edward Seaga’s neo-liberal experiment predictably burnt out. Chomsky’s record of Manley’s second era being that of his violin phase is extremely succinct. He was put up by the left, but played by the right.

Descriptions of prevailing issues in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala figure large, of course. But Chomsky also visits the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Europe to illustrate his central point. And it is a point that he makes and re-makes, a point that he still makes today. His analysis, simply put, is that an alliance of elite interests involving legislators, the powerful and those who own and control big business drives the US foreign policy agenda. The elite’s sole aim is to preserve and further its own power, influence and prosperity. The fact that it does not always speak with a consistent voice is merely evidence that within the group there remains competition. Indeed, the group is neither particularly stable nor permanent. It is rather a loose alliance of interest, perhaps heavily reliant on birthright, but not determined by it. Notions of freedom, democracy, individual or collective rights and even development are peddled, attached like advertisers’ catchlines to the same product every time it is recommended. To maintain its ascendancy, this ideology that fosters profit via power needs an enemy to provide a shield behind which it can hide its pursuit of self-advancement. The Soviet Union sufficed for most of the second half of the last century, but since then others have had to be identified to fulfil this essential role. It will not require much imagination to identify the current dark threats.

The population at large, meanwhile, has to be sold these ideas. When threat of nuclear war between super-powers loomed large, it was not difficult to fix the framework. How much easier is it now, when the current all-powerful, all-pervading enemy might just be within and among us? This low-intensity, back-burner threat continues to mask the activity that fuels an ever-increasing concentration of power and wealth. The people of the democratic, individualistic West are perfectly willing to stand by as recession bites, banks declare deposits worthless, pension funds dwindle, retirements recede and wages stagnate while those who perhaps cause these strictures luxuriate in ever-increasing, often self-granted rewards.

And, in a truly prescient passage, Chomsky describes this submissive, passive mentality perfectly. “For submissiveness to become a reliable trait,” he writes, “it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that ‘the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and power to the weak.’ Nothing less will do.” In this context, is it any surprise that the average contemporary consumer knows more of celebrity gossip than political option?

Deterring Democracy is packed – perhaps over-packed – with detailed evidence. Chomsky makes his point repeatedly and forcefully. I was once privileged to co-host the author as chair of a London conference. At first hand I can vouch for the sincerity and passion that underpins these views. I can also vouch for the solidity of the evidence upon which they are based.

Noam Chomsky is not anti-American. It is the exploiters of self-seeking power and self-deferential influence who deserve that label. Noam Chomsky is a man of the people, intensely humanistic and fundamentally democratic. He seems to maintain that if people turn their backs and refuse to acknowledge the obvious, they will have foregone a real opportunity to realise something more sustainable than the current illusion. And, along the way, they will probably have said goodbye to their principles, along with their bank deposits, pensions, retirement and freedom. At least they can talk about their woes on their latest-model mobiles, if, that is, they can still pay the bill. When you read Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy, give its arguments a chance to register. Then see if they ring true.

Restless by William Boyd - A review by Philip Spires

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of contemporary or historical events which themselves become re-interpreted by the fiction. 

In Restless, Boyd’s latest novel, he has re-stated this ability and, if anything, written it larger via a smaller form. The historical element in Restless is supplied by the activities of an offshoot of World War Two intelligence. Ostensibly a private, dis-ownable initiative of a particular group, Boyd suggests that it formed an integral part of the British strategy, during the early part of the war, to force the United States to join the Allied effort. The fact, therefore, that it was undermined and subverted so that it perhaps aimed to achieve the opposite of its brief was probably par for the course when espionage meets its freelance counter, but the denouement is surprising and wholly credible. 

 In front of this backdrop of fact meeting fiction, we have a landscape of human relationships. Ruth is a single mother in Oxford. She, herself, has had certain German connections, nay relations, hence the motherhood. She makes a living teaching English to foreign tutees, has several dubious visitors, dreams about completing an aging PhD and generally spends much of her time looking after a precocious five-year-old. And then her mother becomes someone quite unknown to her. The widow in the Oxfordshire retreat suddenly becomes part Russian, part English, with a French step-mother. She possessed several different identities before she became Mrs Gilmartin and most of these were fiction to provide cover for the others. How many of us, after all, can claim to have known our parents before they were parents?

So, as Mrs Gilmartin the mother reveals to her daughter via instalments of an autobiography that she is really Eva Delectorskaya, recruited in Paris to conduct a campaign of wartime disinformation in the United States, the complications of life gradually attain the status of the mundane. Recruited, perhaps, because she was rootless and thus expendable, Eva proved herself intellectually and operationally superior to her manipulative managers and survived the posting that was supposed to achieve their subverted ends and, at the same time, erase her potential to supply evidence. 

Many years later, Eva, now Mrs Gilmartin, feels the need to get even, to expose the double or triple-cross for what it was and deliver at least a prod to the comfortable, self-congratulatory but traitorous British establishment that ran her. Daughter Ruth becomes the means. So one messy life tries to tie up its soggy ends via the actions of another who is apparently yet to attain the same depths of complication. And she succeeds. The fright is delivered. The memory that Eva, the mother, was fundamentally brighter than the upper class Brits who were trying to manipulate her is rekindled. Her training was perfect, but she went beyond it and the plan backfired, irrelevantly as it turned out because greater events intervened. 

But years later, Eva, Mrs Gilmartin, is still brighter than her boss and, through her daughter’s efforts, she brings a special kind of justice to bear on the double-dealer who ruined, but also perhaps made her life. In characteristically humble terms, William Boyd reminds us at the end that we are all watched, all awaiting the cupboard to reveal its skeleton, but in our more mundane lives, it is unlikely to be as colourful an event as that which Eva Delectorskaya, Mrs Gilmartin, and her daughter Ruth uncover. View this book on amazon Restless