Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

Dreams From My Father is Barack Obama’s early autobiography, written before he went to law school. It details his early years and basically presents his pre-lawyer years in three phases, each of which he clearly considered formative, in its own different way.

The book is arranged chronologically, so we start with a birth and infancy. We learn something about his parents, his mother from up close but always from afar in relation to his father. ‘Old Man’ Obama, as we soon learned to call him, was clearly something of a character. We know details of President Obama’s life, so this review will not list unnecessary detail. From Hawaii to Indonesia and eventually to the United States we follow this young life, qt every page turn more mystified at how such a disparate set of experiences could have eventually formed such a rounded individual.

One thing the book does not stress which this review cannot overlook, is the use of the term ‘Old Man’ to label his father. Obama the elder was originally from Kenya and had studied for a doctorate in US colleges. He hailed from western Kenya, a Luo from the Lake Victoria region, where he had received an education that would still have been sympathetic to British traditions and cultures. He was still an African, however, and though not his own language, he would have learned Swahili and would have been fluent in the language. Mzee in Swahili means old man, but it signifies much more than age. It’s a label that would attach to anyone of status or deemed worthy of respect. It was the nickname, for instance, of President Jomo Kenyatta. Indeed, it was his title to such an extent that the use of Mzee with a capital letter would signify the president, himself, to anyone in the country. It is a title that in Kenya would carry no negative connotations whatsoever.

Reading Dreams From My Father I found myself regularly confronted with the title Old Man Obama without being reminded of how positive and respectful the label might be. Perhaps this was an oversight, an assumption that the young Barack Obama did not think necessary to restate. On the other hand, it might indicate an ambivalence towards the father who was not only a great man and a higher achiever, but also something of a chancer who could not be described as reliable. Other readers must make their own minds up, but for me personally the continued use of ‘Old

Man’ rather than ‘mzee’ provided an added layer of complication in this parentage that was already somewhat special. Perhaps the capital letters convey an ultimate respect.

 

Barack Obama Junior, often called Barry, describes much of his early life, especially his years in Indonesia, with affection. The absent father is, however, always absent. What was rather strange was the fact that Barry’s mother is always there, but we hardly get to know her via these pages. If anything, the grandparents figure more in the story, certainly, it seems, in the boy’s personal formation.

 

In the United States, we follow Barry into maturity and, by the time we reach Chicago, he is determined to play an active role in the society where he lives, choosing the route of community organizing to make his mark. It proves to be a hit and miss activity, as it always must be. We who are not generally involved in politics need reminding that it’s an activity where minuscule gains have to be savoured through a general mist of frustration. It’s a quality that clearly makes presidents.

 

Dreams From My Father really comes alive in the third section, when Barry visit Kenya for the first time. Potentially, this is a Roots-like odyssey, but for this particular young man it soon becomes impossible to romanticize about a past that has so many complicated loose ends. Though the family is clearly not poor, the country is, and the young visitor is confronted with many images that confuse or shock. I used to live in Kenya, so it may have been a personal familiarity that brought this section alive. I feel, however, that the young Barack Obama began to understand more about his father during that visit, enough at least to suggest a reality and that reality persuaded him to stay with the dreams.

Surprise, surprise - ADDA with Christian Lindberg and Roland Pontinen

Concert programmes can often appear rather conventional at first sight. A well-known Romantic symphony in the second half, preceded by an equally well-known piano concerto, and, to start, a nod towards the contemporary. It all seems like it might be predictable, even though the first work might be a world premiere. But live music is never predictable. More often, it is surprising, and this concert was one of those, but the surprise itself was surprising.

The world premiere in this concert was Macabre Dances by Jan Sandstrom. The program notes explained that after the composer had suffered a stroke, he experienced a series of strange visions and dreams, apparently caused by his condition. This these gave titles to the movements, Horses in the sea, Stolen signature, Suburb in the east, Crawl in the Mona Lisa, and, finally, Finally. Throughout, there was a sense that the music was familiar, but it was accompanied by, overlaid with, stretched between or compressed within other unique and different elements in the way that made the entire experience unfamiliar, even strange. It was like seeing something you know well, and then realising that you don’t, in fact, know it at all. But the effect was not surreal: on the contrary, given the composer’s own program note, the work vividly portrayed the perceptual experience of a physical condition that none of us wants to have. The Mona Lisa movement was even given an encore at the end of the concert and, even on second hearing, its strangeness proved enduring. Its musical worth was only enhanced.

Roland Pontinen was soloist in the Liszt Piano Concerto No.1. Now this is a work that is both succinct and expansive. It’s succinct because it’s all over in under twenty minutes. It’s expansive because of the way musical ideas are shared across the solo part and the orchestra. The model, until then, had very much been rather formulaic, an opportunity for the soloist to show off with an accompaniment from a larger sound. But this concerto tried to create a tone poem where the soloist and the orchestra truly shared material. Guest conductor of the ADDA orchestra, Christian Lindberg, ensured that the elements all hung together. Roland Pontinen’s encore was a Chopin mazurka, a quiet, unspectacular way to underline his control and virtuosity. The ADDA audience listened with great intensity.

And then, surprisingly, there was a second encore of a quite different character. It may have been a set piece, but its comedy was born of musical virtuosity, and the audience lapped it up. Roland Pontinen and Christian Lindberg offered a Hungarian Dance of Brahms arranged, if that be the word, for piano and trombone. It was a farce, and all the jokes came off.

In the second half, this particular listener experienced an even greater surprise. Schumann’s fourth symphony, at least in the usual numbering, is a familiar work, whose twists and turns I thought were completely familiar. I was wrong. Played almost without a pause between the movements, the piece and phrasing told a linear, novel-like story. This surely was musical interpretation of the highest standard, and it is Christian Lindberg who takes the credit for the direction, but it was also the wonderful ADDA orchestra that performed perfectly.

ADDA hosts Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations in Elements and Furies

Sometimes a program does not seem attractive. Since I generally prefer more modern sounds, particularly contemporary music, a program that lives in the first half of the eighteenth century is not likely to attract, let alone promise something memorable.

I doubt that my tastes are not the norm amongst most concert audiences who tend to recoil at the thought of contemporary music being played. “Where are the tunes?” they ask.” Do you call that harmony?” I think, but never actually say in response, just listen. Just open up and hear if the composer has anything to say! And never mind the quality, just feel the width. There are textures and sounds that tunes would hide! Can't you feel it? It’s not a question I tend to ask of the eighteenth century, however, since to me so much of the music is all gloss, all decoration. At least that’s the stereotype I often think. And then there was Rebel, and Handel, and Gluck, and finally a clapping Rameau. And so the evening did turn out to be musically memorable.

The pedigree of the performers was beyond doubt. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations are superstars in their field and a considerable way beyond that as well. They certainly pulled in the crowds, despite their sound being, perhaps, potentially a little small for this auditorium. By the evening’s end, however, one would not have noticed any shortfall.

Jordi Savall has spent a lifetime rediscovering anew old music and establishing a tradition for its performance. He and the orchestra played this program as if they were walking through familiar terrain, but of course the repertoire is vast, and the styles are widely varied. It takes real musicianship, vision, and imagination to bring a program like this to life and these expert performers, did exactly that.

The opening piece was Rebel’s Les Elements. Now this probably surprised anyone expecting wall-to-wall tunes, wrapped in conventional harmony. Written in 1737 and 1738, Rebel’s work was intended to portray the elements of the ancient world, air, fire, earth, and water, or at least their characters and properties in sound. But at the start, the composer wanted to convey Chaos, the disorderly universe as it existed in his imagination before a divine hand had imposed order. With this orchestra, a small band by modern standards, Rebel wanted to convey what a modern mind might hear as a big bang, but he chose to do it subtly, rather than with force. The musical shock of atonal music written early in the eighteenth century is profound. The work progressed, both dramatically and playfully, if not always coherently. The playing was perfect, the overall design somewhat opaque.

Then, we heard music by a German written in Italian style, conceived for a German monarch in England. The first suite of Handel’s Water Music is well known, but deservedly so. Again the opening is a real surprise, with Handel’s melodic and harmonic invention to the fore throughout the piece, which, despite its familiarity, is full of surprises.

Finally, we heard the ballet suite Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre (Don Juan, or the Stone Guest's Banquet) by Gluck. The work was listed almost as co-written by Gasparo Angiolini, Gluck’s choreographic collaborator. The work was first performed in 1761 and in it we could hear musical classicism alongside more decorative elements. It was always surprising. The music was vivid, and culminated in Don Juan’s descent into hell with a piece subtitled The Furies. It seemed we had come full circle in that musically we were almost back to the opening of Rebel's The Elements in places. Except that now, it was the power of the musical forces that was being unleashed.

An encore from Rameau was pure romp. In a short introduction, Jordi Savall coached the audience in a five beat twice-given clap to pick out a repeated rhythmic pattern in the work, and the ADDA audience starred by taking the cues in perfect unison. And everyone went home very happy.

 

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

Douglas Stewart won the Booker Prize for Fiction with Shuggie Bain, an autobiographical novel about a child coping with an alcoholic parent. Shuggie is a wee lad - the novel is set largely in Glasgow - who becomes noted for his la-di-dah speech and his apparent desire to be different. Agnes, his mother, is an alcoholic. She does not try to hide the fact. Anything will do, but cans of Special Brew figure large and often. She earns whatever she can in whatever way she can to fund her habit and pools the family’s benefits to the cause. She obviously does not seek employment, because she could never be sufficiently dependable to be relied upon. And she knows it.

Shuggie and his much older brother Leek often go hungry. They are often cold, not only because there is usually not a fifty pence piece to feed the meter, but also because what was put into the meter has been recycled to buy more booze. The television often does not work either, because it’s a pay-slot type and it too has been emptied. The mother Agnes has a relationship with Shuggie’s father, who happens to be called Shug. She has another relationship with Eugene. Both men are taxi drivers, and both have increased in girth after years of sedentary labor. The action, if that be the right word, takes place in Glasgow and then in Pithead, a rundown and already depressed mining community, if that be a relevant label for the place described. It is in these two working-class communities that Shuggie and his brother grow up, mature before their years and cope, for that is the best thing they can achieve with so much stacked against them.

Shuggie Bain is a story of survival. It is, in its own way, a story of dignity and human perseverance in the face of adversity. It is, however, very one-dimensional. I persevered with the book more out of duty, more out of a desire to support it than a true interest in what might happen to his characters. Well before the end, I was not only rather tired of repeating the same scenario, but I had also lost interest in the outcomes. Perhaps that was the point. If so, it became laboured.

There is always a dilemma for a writer when characters speak in dialect or with an accent. How much of the sound of the speech should be written? Is it wise to change the spelling of common words to indicate a different pronunciation from standard English? A problem with much nineteenth century fiction is that the middle classes seem to talk proper, but as soon as the working-class character appears, then the apostrophes suddenly appear to obliterate all the aitches. Personally, I prefer writers not to write in accents. The problem is that often it doesn’t work. In Yorkshire, one might ask, “Wots tha doin’ wi’ thy pen?” and the answer might be “Raaatin”. I come from a place where the word bus is pronounced bus, not bas or even bis. With an upper-class character, would I ever write “Air hair lair, Ha-aa-yo?” “Em fen, thiyank yo.” to indicate privilege, except when I might want to humiliate them and their class?

In Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart chooses to write much of the quoted speech in a version of Glaswegian dialect, complete with alternative spellings to indicate the uniqueness of the sound. It does not work. It renders these characters sometimes unintelligible, sometimes comic. An example will illustrate. Precisely why “fitba” should be used instead of football, I have no idea. Would a novel set in London use a line like “Wew, vez an awfuw lo’ o’ wewwintns in vat sho”? Perhaps not, even if it were a gumboot shop.

I was genuinely willing the book to succeed. And it did, in its own way. It is worth reading and the progression of the characters does become interesting, if never truly engaging. Maybe that is its point. But there always seems to be a lot of wood to clear to get to the trees.

It’s all in the detail – Madama Butterfly in Valencia, December 2021

Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is a very well-known, much loved, and indeed popular opera. The genre is replete with femmes fatales, Butterfly, Tosca, Manon, Carmen, Lucía, Violetta and Katya, just for example, who get it in the end, so one might think there is nothing much to see in terms of new perspectives when such a familiar work with such a well-worked theme is staged. Opera lovers, however, will confirm that there most definitely is!

Audiences tend to fall into two distinct groups, those for whom any diversion from their own preconceptions signifies the end of civilization, and those for whom radical interpretation is a welcome challenge to the establishment. There is another perspective, however, in which directors, via minor changes to staging, can completely transform the way we understand these often rigidly interpreted stories. Such was the success of Emilio Lopez, the director of the recent production in Valencia. His 2021 staging of Butterfly will be broadcast on Opera Vision on Sunday 19 December and will be available through that website for some weeks. It is successful on several levels, one of which is revelatory.

Let’s start with the term verismo. That certainly applied to the way Puccini approached his work and it implies that the setting should not be palatial and that characters might be depicted as everyday folk. We may assume that the composer never experienced the mid-19 century Japan of the opera’s setting, so if verismo applies to Butterfly, then it applies principally on an ideological level. That said, the opera’s potential for costume drama usually so overcomes designers and directors that even recognition of verismo in the result is obscured. In other words, everything gets pretty before it can become credible. And it is verismo that suffers.

In act one, Cio-Cio-san describes how she is from a poor home and became a geisha because of lack of opportunity. The ceremonial dagger which she eventually uses to take her own life was presented to her father by the Mikado with request that he use it on himself. We must assume that Butterfly’s family were thus already in disgrace. She then compounds this disgrace by rejecting her cultural and religious traditions, an act that uncle Bonze condemns, prompting her friends and community to reject her, all except Suzuki of course. The fact that Puccini then takes us into the love scene of the wedding night often obscures this rejection. In the Valencia production, a backdrop that had featured cherry blossom becomes the starry night of the couple’s ecstasy, but it does so by melting like celluloid in an overheated projector, implying that the comforting blossoms of the past have been destroyed. The starry night persists into acts two and three, but thus becomes a symbol of continued isolation and of Butterfly’s insistence, nay imperative to live in the past.

Cio-Cio-san often comes across as a meek and thus stereotypical Asian woman, who has never even practiced the word “boo” with geese nearby. As a result, she often becomes the single-, even simple-minded naïve devotee of Pinkerton, despite the fact that, as a geisha, she must have had experience of the fly-by-night sailor. The supplicant image endears her to audiences, perhaps, but strips her of the identity and individuality she certainly has, otherwise she would never have pursued her own, private wishes so single-mindedly.

The point is she does not have a great deal of choice. She is poor. She is a geisha. She has done her job. Pinkerton offers her a way out, which she, perhaps naïvely accepts. But once she has made the commitment, she cannot go back. She wants to please him, but by doing so she suffers the rejection of her own community. But she has to go through with the risk.

In Valencia, Emilio Lopez recognizes that Cio-Cio-san is living in poverty. Ignored by Pinkerton for three years and still rejected by her own community, she and Suzuki live amidst decay and grime. The temptation to portray Butterfly still in full, opulent geisha regalia makes no sense and is avoided convincingly in this production. Suzuki confirms this poverty in the libretto. What too often comes across as blind faith on Butterfly’s part now becomes necessity, imposed by her community because of her rejection by and of them. She can’t go back. She has no other option. This is an element of verismo in the opera which directors often tend to overlook.

But in this Valencia production, the real surprise comes at the end. Pinkerton has returned but has refused to see Butterfly. He storms off because he cannot take it anymore... He does want the child, however. His new American wife and Sharpless are told by Butterfly to come back in half an hour to take the child. Note that Pinkerton has not heard her request.

Butterfly has her own plans, however, plans that involve using that ceremonial weapon her father used to kill himself. The elements are clear. Butterfly kills herself, the voice of Pinkerton returning is heard. Or perhaps not…

The usual way to treat this is to have Butterfly stab herself on the orchestral tutti and then for the sound of Pinkerton’s voice to be heard as she dies. If Pinkerton is not seen, it could be argued that he really was nasty all along and that Cio-Cio-san is imagining the voice, still therefore deceiving herself. If he does appear, then his character is rather let off the hook. If only Butterfly had delayed, then the ecstasy of the starry night might just have returned. But then she had already waited three years…

Sometimes Cio-Cio-san hears the voice and then stabs herself. Again, we have her imagining the sound as a possibility, but we then also have the possibility that she is suffering a form of self-loathing the result of the rejection. Again, this approach internalizes Butterfly’s suffering.

In the Valencia production, the orchestral tutti arrives with dagger drawn, but Butterfly turns to face the entrance to her house when she hears Pinkerton’s call. She waits for him to appear and recognize her and then she kills herself.

The effect is to transform her suicide into an act of defiance. She knows the child will be cared for. She has been rejected by her society and by Pinkerton. She is alone and has no future. But she is now also determined that he will not possess her, and she wants to demonstrate her contempt. You will not possess me as chattel, she thinks. And thus, her character is transformed from the meek and mild recipient of tragedy into a defiant individualist, albeit a dead one. At least she has asserted her own position. It’s different and surprising, which illustrates beautifully that sometimes the most radical transformations are achieved via detail.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a much-reviewed and well-known classic novel. So can a novel that is a hundred and fiftyyears old still have anything to say about life that is relevant, let alone original? The answer to this obviously rhetorical question is obviously ‘yes’, hence this review.

Though it bears the same initials as her sister’s Wuthering Heights, Wildfell Hall is certainly a very different territory, albeit in a similar landscape. If you are the kind of reader that gets tired of nineteenth century matchmaking parading as literature then you share my impatience. How many times must we live through the apparent mental torment of a heroine wondering incessantly whether this gentleman or that might or might not be the right moral or social class, might or might not possess sufficient property, might or might not be acceptable to one’s family? The process, surely, is memorable. Whether it is worth recording repeatedly is open to question.

Some of the suitors, it has to be acknowledged, might turn out to be rather caddish, but too often this might imply he whips his horse rather too ferociously, or treats the lower classes too harshly. All too often, the family concerned lives in middle-class comfort as a result of their investments in the colonies. That means slavery, or the profits thereof. And it is usually the case that no one ever admits they are on the side of the abolitionists. Usually, the moral dilemma is not even recognised, let alone considered. As readers, and even film-goers, we have all been there and probably wished that an occasional non-matrimonial issue might have arisen.

None of this analysis applies to the Wildfell Hall of Anne Brontë‘s novel, however. In her book, this particular Brontë sister offers a tale in which no holds are barred. Her style often seems rather detached, perhaps taking even an alienated view of the society with which she is familiar. She mentions some things that mid-nineteenth century England regarded as unmentionable, especially amongst the middle classes. She also, for much of the book, convincingly presents a narrative from a male perspective that confronts and reacts to, for its time, the unlikely and novel image of female independence. In doing so, she confronts male attitudes that still today may block these concerns from a man’s understanding.

Gilbert Markham becomes infatuated with Helen Graham, the young widow who has moved in with her son into Wildfell Hall. She seems to be a propertied, but also determined to make her own way in life by selling her artworks to achieve financial independence.

In the second section, we learned of Helen Graham’s background. She had been married to an alcoholic and abusive husband and had stood up to him. Her demands that her rights be respected were not commonly expressed in the society, let alone observed. They are still to be fully realize the century and a half later. Drug abuse, alcoholism and extramarital sex, not to mention conspiratorial behaviour among a masculine clique are all addressed. The hypocrisy of middle-class male attitudes is drawn with considerable skill, rather than overstatement.

In the final section, Gilbert appears to absorb these issues and accommodate them. The scarring is permanent, however, and thus this is no simple happy-ever-after tale.

So what might The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have to say to contemporary audiences? Well, these issues of women’s rights, drug abuse, alcoholism and sexual exploitation are still being discussed a century and a half later. These issues were being discussed a century and a half ago. They are still in some places contentious. Need one say more? Read the book.

Snow by John Banville

John Banville’s Snow was resplendent at number one best seller in the airport bookstore. At the time, I hardly noticed, since I was immediately and irresistibly attracted to the author’s name, knowing that whatever the subject, the writing would be exquisite. It is. 

Snow is a novel that initially reminded me of a Gothic fantasy such as Gormenghast. Larger than life, or perhaps smaller than reality characters wander in and out of a plot, each displaying their own brand of quirkiness, their own brand of learned psychological deformity that in everyday circumstances we might consider normality. But under the soft-focus gaze of inspector Strafford - that’s Strafford with an ‘r’, by the way, not Stafford - they each seem to magnify into the unwanted status of potential suspect.

By now you will have gathered that Snow is a whodunit, or a murder mystery, as they are sometimes called. The book opens with Strafford’s arrival at a Protestant, somewhat less than stately home in county Wexford, Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been murdered. The circumstances are particularly gruesome.

No one, it has to be said, seems particularly surprised or even bothered, until surfaces are scratched. And so, Strafford sets about solving the crime. We are in the 1950s and religious divisions still characterize the culture and politics of life in this young republic. It’s Christmas or thereabouts and it’s snowing. Hence the title. The snow does contribute to the plot, by the way.

Strafford’s style is laid-back in the extreme. He tends to offer a little, waiting for those he questions to hang themselves on the rope he figuratively offers. Some do, some don’t, all non-definitively. To John Banville’s credit, it was sometime before I realized that I was reading what amounted to genre fiction. So beautiful was the style, so poignant were the observations of character and particularly of place that I began to drift with the snow, only gently realizing that these characters gradually were morphing into the stereotypes needed to feed the plot.

As with any whodunit, the plot is probably everything, though I must admit when I read such work, I really could not care less who might have done it because, as Tom Stoppard pointed out in The Real Inspector Hound, or the stage adaptation of the Mousetrap repeated, it could have been any of them. We know it will be one of the assembled characters, because for a writer to introduce a stranger at the end of a tale as the culprit might just get too close to reality to be called the make-believe of genre, despite its often-overdone realism.

What constitutes plot will not be revealed here. Neither will this review describe characters because, as is so often the case with genre fiction, quirks of character or behaviour feed the all-important plot. Suffice it to say that Strafford solves the mystery and identifies a culprit who, as it turns out, probably wasn’t the murderer.

Three quarters of the way in and still engaged with the scenario in the 1950s, however, John Banville jumps back ten years and introduces a section in a completely new style, written from a very point of view, a perspective that has not been suggested previously. When completed, it is immediately obvious that all of this could have been accomplished via allusions in the dialogue. The problem for genre is that the message conveyed would have to be suggested or implied and the form required something more explicit. For this reader, the section destroyed the flow of the book and was just too obvious to need stating at all. It dealt with the past of the priest victim, and, by the end, all the reader could ask was “Is the Pope Catholic”?

But then we then return to the 1957 of the principal story and realise that perhaps in that decade, the answer to the question might just have been debatable. The interlude, however, prepares the reader for a particular turn of events which, when it happens, is rendered a tad predictable.

Then, having identified the principal culprit, John Banville takes us forward ten years to re-encounter a character from that Protestant family in Wexford, who then offers a different story that has remained hidden for a decade. Strafford, of course, knew all along, though he never bothered to tell anyone. And as far as the current reader is concerned, this sudden drift towards the explicit and the truth seems to present a trait that, for the character concerned, might have appeared out of character. And what could possibly be gained by such a change of heart?

I was reminded I was in the realm of genre fiction, where the plot is all and ends have to be tied up. The overall effect was still satisfying, but for this reader the problems always associated with genre fiction had again become apparent, though still bearable. I could, however, always be wrong! I refer back to the start of this review. Had John Banville produced another literary work, it might not of been in the place where I found it, under the title No1 in an airport bookstall. At least it was worth reading.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

 

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life. But unlike Alan Sillitoe, John Braine or Stan Bairstow, Billy Liar lives almost entirely in the comic. Until, that is, when it doesn’t.

A problem with nostalgia is that it tends to induce blindness. Shortcomings and limitations disappear when the warm glow of familiarity obscures everything but the positive. Perhaps I became infected with this unmentionable N word when I decided to re-read this book that I doubt I have touched in over fifty years. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. Perhaps not…

I had expected Billy Liar to have aged, perhaps grown stale now that its setting would no longer be ideologically either working class or Labour voting. But has anything changed? And if so, has it been for the better?  Might it be that the community in which Billy lived had convinced itself of its status and indispensability only to have come down to earth with a bump when reality intervened?

Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness.

Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself.

He and a workmate converse in what sounds like a double act. It’s supposed to be funny – and is. But before long, we are laughing at the two of them, not with them. It’s not original. Billy’s talent, it seems like that of everyone else, is mimicry., a cliched copying of what the mass media are feeding him.

Though he does tell fibs to all, the person he is really lying to is himself., since he has never stepped back from his surroundings to reflect how narrow and confined is his reality. He is not alone. Bad jokes are repeated. Multiple girlfriends believe they too are unique in his life. He is engaged to two of them – or so he thinks. Perhaps they do too.

After fifty years of separation, Billy Liar now seems more significant that it did first time round. Billy is convinced he is about to break out of his small-town straitjacket. He is convinced he is something special because he can mimic the received messages with which he has been fed. His self-delusion seems complete. He thus now becomes a metaphor for the continued subservience and indeed marginalisation of the way of life he represents. It’s comic, but in the end it’s a tragedy.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to do you down. Factories and labor exchanges and insurance officers keep us alive and kicking – so they say -but they’re booby traps and will suck you under like sinking sands, I you aren’t careful. Factors sweat you to death, labor exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax officers milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you are still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the Army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you’re clever enough to stay out of the Army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the mock, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow the four-eyed clocks to bits.”

Just spoke Arthur Seaton, twenty-one when we first meet him and twenty-four by the time we leave his life. He turns a lathe in a bicycle factory in Nottinghamshire in England’s Midlands. He makes good money – as much as 14 quid a week on piecework. He could work harder to produce more, but if he did the time and motion man would penalize him, lower his piece rate and he would work harder for the same money. Mug’s game. So, despite the above rant about his status in life, he has already learned to do as he’s told, not stick his neck out and collect his pay on a Friday. At least that’s his technique at work. In private, he has less time for convention.

He lives with his mother and pays her rent, or board as we in the north of England call it. It’s a terraced house, in streets that hang around the factory like piglets being suckled by a sow, as he puts it. Much of his spare time is spent in the pub, where he drinks paint after pint of beer and often chases it down with a spirit or two.

Arthur is a big lad. He’s tall, fair, well-built and can look after himself, so he thinks. He’s already seeing Brenda, a woman older than himself and married to a senior colleague at work. She enjoys him and he enjoys her. He often has to leave her house by the front door when her husband comes home from the night shift. He is two-timing Brenda, seeing another married woman called Winnie, when he meets Doreen quite by chance in a pub. Doreen is single.

She likes to go to the pictures, wants to get married and feels on the shelf at nineteen. We are, by the way, at the end of the 1950s in working class England.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe was one of a series of books in that era that dealt with working class life, in all of its brash and uncultured detail. At the time, these works shocked people. They were repeatedly describing life as it was, without the patronizing lens of middle-class judgment or standards, so commonly applied in English writing. Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving and then Alan Sillitoe’s novel stand out because they became famous films. Albert Finney, the actor, made his name playing Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, albeit in monochrome, a quality that might just also have added comment to the one-dimensionality of the lives depicted. He played the part of the over-the-top, heavy-drinking, devil-may-care antihero of Alan Sillitoe’s novel, but he did not overplay it. The character in print is probably brasher, more uncouth than the screenplay might suggest. By the end, Doreen may just have reformed him, at least rendered him conventional, but only after he has been beaten up at the behest of the husbands he was cheating. What happened to the women involved, we are not told. We surely can guess.

The book is written in northern English dialect, not that far north, but certainly working class. For the record, the quote at the start of this review includes the term four-eyed clocks near the end. For the record, in that particular dialect, this means bespectacled faces. The implication, clear to anyone with the right background, is that the people are bookish, middle-class, grammar school types. In some ways, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is like D H Lawrence a few decades on. But where Lawrence claims a certain dignity for the poverty of working-class life, Alain Sillitoe merely lists its characteristics, being primarily consumerism, one-up-manship and materialism. There seems to be no community here, but much competition.

Some seventy years on, the text has dated. The racist assumptions of these people would not be publishable today but may still be prevalent. But, when all is said and done, they welcome Sam, a Ghanaian-origin sergeant in the British army, with open arms, perhaps because he has achieved a rank to which they aspire, or possible they simply dare not oppose him. And he sounds more civilized than his hosts.

But, as with many iconic works that summed up a bygone age and its assumptions, there remains a sense that, almost three quarters of a century after it was written, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still resonates today. The material goods may have changed, along with the sums of money needed to acquire them. But the conflict of interests, the class and wealth divisions and the underlying assumptions that characterize antagonism are pretty much unchanged, though today they may appear in changed garb.

 

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

 Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It deals with territory that is rarely successful for the writer, that of music and musicians. They have surely been many successful books about writers, painters, even sculptures. But novels where the composition and performance of music figure large are often rather less than significant and are often, frankly, unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract and utterly personal nature of the effects of sound and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid cliché when words have to describe music. Time, surely, also plays its part, since for the listener music exists within its own time that can neither be controlled or compressed into a phrase.

After such a preamble, the congratulations to Esi Edugyan for her convincing portrayal of jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. We are in the late 1930s, long before free expression or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still cool and Louis Armstrong was the hot thing, but these characters assembled in prewar Berlin do form a convincing band. In the novel’s pages, we do feel what it might be like to play bass, horn, trumpet or bass. Drummers, perhaps, like guitarists have always been a race apart.

Half Blood Blues focuses on the life of Hiero, a German who happens to be both a jazz musician and black. With his fellow band members, Chip and Sid, he ekes out a living playing clubs in a city where the expression they choose is now seen as degenerate. Just a few years before, American music, even jazz played by black people, had been popular, but times have changed. The musicians sense that change, but Hiero feels it more deeply, because now he is doubly estranged from the country he must call home. Changing times, the onset of war and the threat of violence forces the band to flee to Paris, in the hope they can escape across the Atlantic.

Like stereotypical performers, the bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, seek casual sex, use drugs and eat sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. She presents a different approach to life, and almost surreal vision of what the men assume to constitute a woman and she thus seems to possess influence over these men’s lives as they pursue their expression, albeit personal, via the ensemble and its public sound.

The book opens in Paris in 1940 and revisits later. The band of had to flee their home in Germany. It also inhabits Berlin in 1939 to trace the origins of the band’s flight from Nazism and then it revisits the same city in 1992, as a couple of characters trace what might have this might’ve happened as a consequence of actions over 50 years earlier.

By the time they reach Poland in 1992 in an attempt to trace one of their number, they are thoroughly surprised, exonerated, if not actually forgiven. At the heart of the tale the influence of the music, especially the improvisation, is paramount. It’s what you do now at this instant that matters. You might plan, you can reflect, you might even rehearse. But the now is all that matters. Just play on.

Esi Edugyan uses a certain style of language here and there to characterize the protagonists as jazz musicians and in some cases foreigners and in others black. It is not overused and so achieves its intention, so it rarely intrudes between the character and the reader. The intention, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and it’s never over-used.

At the heart of this novel, whose plot is significant and so will not be described here, is an act of betrayal, selfishness and duplicity that lays on the conscience for decades. The victim, once traced, indicates that life went on and reasserts the importance of engaging with the here and now. Which all goes to show, you can contemplate to your heart’s content and even analyse endlessly, but the only real advice is to get on with it and life will create itself. Improvise.

Scriabin’s Divine Poem and Manuel de Falla played by Judith Jauregui is a revelation

Josep Vicent, artistic director, and conductor at ADDA, Alicante, decided to entitle the whole season of concerts ‘Divine Poem’. One must conclude that he really wanted to build this particular work into the orchestra’s repertoire. In last night’s concert, he and the ADDA Orchestra played the Divine Poem, effectively the Symphony No. 3 of Alexander Scriabin and it proved to be nothing less than a triumph.

This is very much a transitional work, or so we are told. Scriabin’s early work was heavily influenced by Chopin and Liszt. Then he discovered Wagner and other extra-musical influences, including Indian mythology, pantheism and the stimulus provided by an ego the size of a universe, and so his style changed, as we are told. The expressive, apparently unpredictable and vivid symbolism of the late piano sonatas seems not to relate to the early works, but a keen listener will, however, find progression, not change.

The Poem of Ecstasy and the Poem of Fire, orchestral works that followed the Divine Poem, were single movement pieces, more like the tone poems than symphonies. The Poem of Fire reflected the composer’s increasing tendency towards the grandiose in that it involves a large orchestra, a piano soloist, a full chorus, an organ, and, if it is done as the composer wished, an auditorium-wide light show and perfumes wafted in using wind machines. Personally, I have attended one such a performance, in London’s Royal Albert Hall in the 1970s. The program notes made Pseud’s Corner in Private Eye.

The projected work to follow these, a work that the composer promised to write but only had time to sketch was his Mysterium, a giant ego-trip in three movements that would have involved building a new concert hall in the Himalayas and mounting a week-long festival whose finale, so the composer thought, would be the end of the world. Death at forty-three from blood-poisoning prevented Alexander Scriabin from completing the project.

In 1972, the year of the centenary of Scriabin’s birth, his music was for a while in the spotlight. I bought John Ogden’s Sonata cycle, a disc of the two late poems and Svetlanov’s Melodiya, recording of the Divine Poem. I now have at least one recording of every work the composer wrote. But the Svetlanov Divine Poem is the only recording I have of this work. It’s not played very often.

Which is a surprise, because on the face of it, it’s a conventional symphony. It sounds like Rachmaninov in places and is very much in a nineteenth century idiom. It’s not as challenging at first hearing as a Mahler symphony, or a Strauss tone poem, for that matter. It’s quite melodic and reaches some amazing dynamic heights. It is certainly memorable.

But on this hearing, I found much more in the Divine Poem, a work I have been listening to for fifty years. Embedded in the second and third movements of the three movement  symphony are all the musical elements, the themes, the harmonies, and the orchestral juxtapositions, that would reappear in Ecstasy and Fire. They are all there! It became nothing less than revelatory to realize that there is nothing new in those later, often described as revolutionary works. It’s all there in the Divine Poem.

Josep Vicent’s reading of the score was, as ever, superb. The rich textures of Scriabin’s orchestration were all interpreted and played to perfection, and one thinks that the trombones and tuba have never worked so hard for a living! The performance was a total success, and I await the other works’ inclusion in future programs. ADDA’s habit of projecting images onto the back of the stage would work well for the Poem of Fire. The orchestra’s encore of the Prelude to act three of Lohengrin was an informed choice, since various passages in the Divine Poem clearly owed much to Wagner, not least the birdsong section in the first movement, we seemed to have flown in directly from Siegfried.

The Divine Poem came after a first half of music by Manuel de Falla. We began the evening with the Jota from El Sombrero de Tres Picos, and then we heard a stunningly beautiful performance of Noches en los Jardines de España, Nights In The Gardens Of Spain with Judith Juregui a soloist. Some of Manuel de Falla’s orchestral textures in the third movement were distinctly Scriabin-esque. Judith Jauregui’s playing of this work, which is a piano concerto in all but name, was exquisite and her encore of music by Mompou was an inspired choice.

Josep Vicent and ADDA keep on presenting concerts which transcend my abilities to write reviews. They are nothing less than memorable, every time!